I want to tell you about a really powerful experience I had yesterday. I won’t be making an argument of any kind. I am going to be relying on a series of analogies that came to me all in the same moment. I will be trying here to separate them and share them at the same time.
Everyone who composes music has some notion of how it ought to sound. The conventions of scoring [1] give us not only pitches and rhythms, but also tempoes and even moods. You write them all down on the paper and hope good musicians will see them and know what to do with them.
I am thinking of religious texts the same way. Any kind of instruction, really. If you have ever written instructions that are, in your view, pellucidly clear, only to have them muddied by people who want to misunderstand them, then you
know the experience. So here we have Moses anticipating the 613 mitzvot by starting off with a very general 10. Good luck, Moses.
One of the really good things about singing in a choir with gifted musicians is that you sometimes get to sing compositions by one of the members. Some years ago, we had a chance to sing Aaron’s Benediction composed by Benjamin Kinkley. It’s a really lovely piece, but it was special for us because Ben was singing in the bass section at the time and our choir director asked Ben to teach the piece to us.
A score has all the instructions anyone would want on it, but these are instructions in general. Ben told us how he wanted our choir in particular to sing it. He told us what effect he was hoping for and what we could do individually and as sections to try to produce that effect. He simply ignored some of the instructions on the page either because they didn’t matter for the use he had in mind or because they were there to keep choirs from making a kind of mistake we weren’t likely to make. [2]
So we got instruction from a man who was in a position to be dogmatic about “the composer’s intent” because he was, in fact, the composer. And he was also one of us and also knew the acoustical properties of the space where his work would be performed. That’s a lot more information than you usually get.
Similarly, I have gotten a lot of good instruction about how to live a really good life. I have had some very wise friends and a gifted counselor and have been taught by some amazingly good preachers. And, like everyone else, I have benefitted from reading excellent authors, some theoretical and some “oriented toward practice.” [3]
But yesterday, I got closer. Yesterday we sang Amen of Hope by Brandon Stewart and I sang it standing next to Brandon Stewart. It is the best sense of “the intention of the composer” I have ever had. We had the markings on the music to rely on, like those we get from Handel or Brahms. We had a little bit of instruction about what he would like, what he had in mind, but not very much and most of what we got came in response to questions from our choir director.
So I had the two indicators of the intention of the composer that I have had before, but this time I had a third. As we practiced it yesterday, for instance, I noticed that he—as a singer, but knowing what he knows about the piece—treated rests of identical length differently. We are considering a measure with four beats, the last of which is half a beat—an eighth rest.
As a general matter, every eighth rest in 4/4 time ought to be treated the same and my first reaction was to elbow Brandon and tell him he was doing it wrong. I managed to stop myself from doing that. I noticed, for instance, that he chopped the first eighth rest in the piece back to nearly nothing. He meant something by doing that, although I didn’t know what it was. But he did it every time in that particular measure, so I followed him and did what he did. In a later measure, he consistently gave the rest more time that he “should have;” again because he had a reason.
What I would really like to do here is skip to the “happily ever after” ending in which, by mimicking the performance of the composer, I was able to see what these different values of the eighth rest contributed to the piece and I became—so long as I was standing right next to him—part of the solution and not part of the problem. [4] In fact, I never did understand why he treated those rests the way he did. Or why he delayed the crescendo at the bottom of page one as long as he did or why he pushed a few phrases as aggressively as he did.
So those things didn’t happen for me, but what did happen is that I got the very practical demonstration of what composer’s intent was and I was led to compare it to my experiences with Benjamin Kinkley and Johannes Brahms. That’s comparing, if you are following this account, level three with level two with level one.
Here’s what I found. The printed score is good if that is all you have. Instructions about 
how to treat the printed score are better if they are available. Best is standing next to someone who is singing it the way it ought to be sung. It amounts to an inversion of authorities. Ordinarily, I sing next to my friend Jim, and we have an active and friendly relationship as colleagues. If I hold the note over into the rest or don’t quite get up to the G# or get confused at where I go after the first ending, Jim feels free to help me get it right and I do the same for him. But in those cases, each of us is relying on the music—on how it is written [5]—and judging our performance by our fidelity to it.
Singing next to Brandon inverts the authorities. If he wants it to sound a certain way and sings so as to make it sound that way, I am not going to elbow him and tell him he is doing it wrong. I am going to emulate him and try to see what effect he had in mind. It is a reflection on the written text based on an intimate—I heard it myself—experience of the performance.
As a Christian, the analogous experience would be “singing”—taking repeated practical actions—next to Jesus. There isn’t any way to do that. [6] There are a few approximations, like paying particular attention to the lives of Christians you admire, but they are very rough approximations. I think what is going to stay with me from the experiences of rehearsal and performance this last week is that if you can experience what the composer does—what he DOES—you are in a much better position to evaluate the relatively cruder information you get when you are told what to do (as Ben Kinkley did) or when you read what the score says.
If, in other words, you could experience what the Creator is doing, you would have good grounds for taking some liberties with what the preachers say and what the scriptures teach. Intriguing, isn’t it?
[1] Not that kind. I’m thinking of musical scores
[2] And even at his relatively young age, Ben understood that every new instruction you give a choir divides their attention one more time.
[3] Ordinarily, I would just say “practical” there, but the very popular contrast between “theoretical” and “practical” is just too much for me sometimes.
[4] Or, as a chemist friend of mine likes to say, “part of the solution and not part of the precipitate.”
[5] And every now and then, there are typos in the score, especially a sharp or a flat that shouldn’t be there. In those cases, there is an even higher authority called “music theory” which tells us that whatever it says on the page, that was not the composer’s intention.
[6] Given the focus of this essay, you can see why I don’t want to take living by the “recorded words of Jesus” as the ultimate standard (like Brahms) or the reports of the experiences of mystics, or the “schools of practical theology” which set some words of Jesus over against other words of Jesus. None of those is like listening to when the composer breathes or how he stresses the phrase.
(see pod with inhabitants) what he means by “food” is “something with ingredients your grandmother could pronounce.” He is opposing every instance of synthetically “enhanced” foods, foods that are stuffed with flavor enhancers and preservatives. It’s a readily identifiable meaning of “natural,” of course, the the prominence of the notion, the jihad-like dimensions [1] of the “natural food” movement are a reaction to the overwhelming artificiality of the American diet.
Tantrums are natural. Tit for tat is natural. Holding grievances is natural. Lashing out in anger is natural. Doing loving things at the time you feel loving is natural. None of those things builds the kind of marriage Johansson might have wanted and that Bette and I most certainly want. We don’t want a marriage that is “natural.” We want a marriage that goes way beyond natural and heads in the direction of wonderful and satisfying and nourishing to the soul. “Natural” pales by comparison to what you can have if you are willing to put in the work.
I’m not really sure we can say, as a matter of careful secular [3] observation that humans “have” a nature at all. This whole matter of Hobbes v. Rousseau is replayed on a much smaller stage by psychologists. On the one side, we have psychologists who describe people as having stable “traits;” and on the other hand, psychologists who think that other things, things outside us, determine what we think and how we feel and what we do.
And, finally, “the carnal [of the flesh] mind is an enemy of God and cannot please God; the spiritual mind, on the other hand, is “life and peace.”
Let me just give one example of demonization. The first paragraph of the declaration gives us this gem: “the god [small g-] of Donald Trump’s [ not President Trump’s] “America first” nationalism is not the God [capital G-] revealed in our scriptures.”
The first is just exegetical. There are no biblical texts anywhere that deal with how a wealthy national economy should handle the hordes of people who can improve their lives by moving there. None. “The stranger” presupposes an agricultural context in small villages in the highlands of Palestine. It isn’t Ellis Island; it isn’t the Rio Grande. Those scriptures need to be reconsidered in a modern context if they are to be used as first principles. Does “immigrant” really equal “stranger” in the biblical sense? Does even “illegal workers” (as in the angry poster above) equal “the stranger?” Of course not.
earlier, but I will have to admit to an exception here. The “empowerment of women” has often meant the demand for the professionalization of women—whether any particular woman is attracted to that style of life or not—and the blanket condemnation of women who choose other kinds of life. If these women don’t want what we (liberal Democrats) think they ought to want, then clearly, they have been brainwashed and we are here to set them straight. I reject that view.
It can be a personal disease; I do know that. People can strip their lives of virtually everything worthwhile just to get more things. But I don’t think I want to say that it is a fault in an economic system based on consumer spending. No recent Democratic president has taken a stand against “extreme materialism.” Some—President Obama is a good example—have preached and modeled the value of other kinds of goals, but the Federal Reserve System has not been given any guidance about how to reduce the materialism of the American consumer; nor has the Department of the Treasury, nor Commerce, nor Labor.
I want to argue that the second interpretation is better. Improving something about the game of one player is a good thing, of course, but improving something about the team is a great deal better. And it sometimes happens, in the world created and sustained by sports analysts, that that loss in the conference finals was a blessing in disguise. “There is no way,” the analyst might say, “that this team wins the NCAA tournament without having suffered that crucial loss and learning how to put it behind them.”
Marilyn was not at her all-forgiving best. She had been in an automobile accident just a few days before we left; she was still badly bruised and was sitting “on the wrong side of the car,” as one does in the UK, and watching cars driving in unfamiliar patterns and heading straight at her door. It was a tough first day. She proposed that we turn the car in and find another way of getting around. I agreed that I would, should it come to that, but I asked if we could try something else first.
When, some years later, when she was diagnosed with cancer, we had the roundabout process to fall back on. We called our negotiation of the diagnostic marathon, “doing the roundabouts,” and we knew exactly what that meant. It meant an intimate and joint understanding of what we were doing and the full engagement of each of us in some necessary part of the task. And, best of all, we did it on purpose and we knew we were doing it on purpose.
that lost in the conference finals and met in the locker room to look each other in the eye and vow to trust each other more, the couple that treats a defeat like that has laid the foundation for a successful season. Or a successful program. Or a tradition of winning. Years down the road, some new player will start blaming another for “having lost us the game.” And an older player—ANY older player in that program—will take him aside and say, “That’s not how we do it here.”
, it functions to protect the staff and it protects the residents and that is why it is good.
That is, the residents are treated alike because they all share they same status. They are “residents,” the status I stumbled into when I moved here. They are not treated differently because they are so different as persons. And this formal equality is played out as the staff [1] refers to each resident formally as Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. and we refer to them by their first names. There is a status asymmetry, in other words, that is presupposed by the culture and practiced by the staff.
It’s really just the no tipping rule played out in most forms of face-to-face interaction. Tipping is a great idea in a restaurant because rewarding the staff for extraordinary service is built into the model and works to reward be best servers. There is a very good restaurant within a few blocks of Holladay Park Plaza where there is a superb waitress; I conspire to be seated at one of her tables. She is good at her job and has a great deal of fun in the process and I tip substantially to reflect how well pleased I am. That works just fine in the restaurant setting. It would be just awful at the retirement center.
within the system, just as the occasional filching of towels from motels is not likely to cause the motel owners to hide all the towels. The behavior of these older residents is, in a sense, the cost of doing business. It is allowable so long as it doesn’t become common.
The first question we might ask is, “Do you know how you feel?” You wouldn’t know it from reading introductory psychology texts, but emotions don’t come with discrete labels. You feel what you feel, of course, but when you get around to calling it something, you are in the same mess anyone else is. It isn’t quite like the Snickers ad that assures us the we aren’t quite ourselves when we are hungry, but I think the truth is off somewhere in that direction.
furiously deny that it is true, we are left to our own incomprehensible, unsharable grief. I was told by someone I asked about it yesterday that it was “an arrogant thing to say to another.” [2]
Here’s the argument. Trump has his heart set on authoritarian control of all the major institutions in the country, not just the political and economic ones. If we just sit back and let him do it, as some self-styled “voices of reason” counsel, we will lose our democratic system and may never get it back. [1]
reading I have done, memories are not “accessed” in the way a filed document is; it is “recreated” each time. One thing that means is that although pulling a document out of a folder—either the paper kind or the electronic kind—doesn’t alter the document at all, recreating a “document” out of the elements of memory most certainly alters it.
I describe it as a vision so that I can say what the vision was like. All of this is pure invention (except for the obvious debt it owes to Peter’s vision in Acts 10) but it enables me to say that something happened first and something after that, and so on. I say that I saw a great grey filing cabinet [1] coming down from the sky and a voice speaking to me. It might have begun, “Listen up, dummy.” Or not.
And so on. 2a might be further divided into 2a-1 and 2a-2 by horizontal lines, but that is seldom needed and never very useful. There are, as you can easily see, four major parts to this “chapter;” the introduction and four substantive sections. The first section has seven subsections. The second section has 12, and so on. A, B, C, D provides the “outline” of the “chapter.” Subsections 1—7 provide the “outline” of Section A.
There is a story I attach to Julian Bond’s first experiences in the Georgia State Legislature. The way the story goes, Rep. Bond was the first black State Representative in Georgia and he wondered whether he would continue to be treated as a pariah when his vote made the difference between a bill passing or failing. He was not. When he carried the passage of a bill in his hand, he was treated the way the bearer of any other irreplaceable resource was treated. He was actively courted.
use it to draw the threads of this argument together. There is an approach to sociology called “symbolic interactionism.” I got deeply into it in grad school and have profited from it ever since. Here is a line I would like to share from the abstract of a paper presented at the American Society of Criminology. It comes from a paper, the short title of which (the part before the colon) is “Labelling the Labelers,” by Jeffrey Ward. The question is, “What happens to the individual after being labeled?” [2]
the legislators begin by recognizing that he often voted in a particular way, but they did that for two reasons. The first is that it left them free to argue that he and they had the same goal. Those other votes had to do, according to this strategy, with disagreements about means to achieve that goal, which of course “we all share.” The second is that it frees them to grant that those other votes might have been appropriate, but “this situation is different from those.”
On the other hand, I live with some people and am related to some others, who think that Trump’s approach is the right way to go. Privately, I call those “misguided hopes.” I assume these people can be talked to if someone on the other side is willing to grant them good motives and to work at showing them that the collateral damage of the movement they are supporting will be unacceptably costly to other things they hold dear. I think I owe them the Julian Bond treatment if there is going to be a time on down the road when we can work together. Besides, they are family and friends, not just fellow citizens.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 