Shakespeare's Beam

Follow-up to: Afflatus

Over the past two years I have undergone a paradigm shift in re my understanding of writing and the creative process. Or perhaps I have not had a shift of paradigm so much as I have gotten a paradigm: Whence creativity came from, I did not much consider in the past.

Faith's Responsibility

The LDS bible dictionary tells us that 'faith is a principle of action and of power." Faith possesses an active, not a passive, quality. It is for this reason that we are told "faith without works is dead. "

There are many spheres of action in which faith may (and must) make itself manifest, but there is one that I want to mention in particular today: the overt declaration of itself through words or deeds. You see, faith may be utilized in many covert fashions, acted upon in such a way that onlookers don't perceive the mechanisms operating inside. One's faith can hardly be inspiring if it is not recognized.

Once had, faith is responsible for declaring itself, for being a witness- and not a witness in the closet. A city on a hill cannot- and should not- be hid. In the same way, we should make no bones about what we have conviction of (and, for that matter, what we may be struggling with). The bearing of your testimony can be an important part of letting others know that it gets better, or that there is something more than what they have encountered.

"So let it be written..."

There is very little post-publication editing that goes on in this blog. Hyperlinks will be added, as will other references if relevant, and minor fixes and grammar or spelling (although I would hope to be able to catch these mistakes before publishing). If I turn out to be wrong, if I later decide that what I said was abysmally stupid- I need to keep the post as it is. I can admit that I no longer support that post, or wish that something about it had been done differently, but I don't feel comfortable with outright deleting or changing posts.

For many, this blog gives more information about what's happening to me and who I am than anything else, and to the extent that this is true, to remove content denies the existence of that particular episode. This is what I thought at this time, in this place, and so you see what I was then. Whether I was stupid, lazy, or misinformed, it nevertheless happened, and it would be a lie to pretend otherwise. It smacks of rewriting history and makes me feel like I'm living in my own personal corner of 1984, and that's not an idea that I'm comfortable with.

Fiction: Afflatus

The scarecrow looked behind him. As far as he could see there was the desert. Somewhere out there was the train that had taken him as far as the rails of the Bad Road would go. After he had disembarked, he had rented a horse and gone many days further, until he had reached the small shack that now sat before him in the distance.

Identity Agreement

Follow-up to: Four Snapshots of Eternity

The thread that runs through Four Snapshots is centered on identity. Names tell us who we are, and the knowledge of our identity empowers us. The matter of who we are is truth, and the truth shall make us free.

A little bit of progress, at least

Sometimes people wonder about who I was before I went on a mission and why I went. There was a time when I would smooth over some ruffly parts in my backstory and sweep some dust under the carpets of history. Meditations on truth and honesty led me to change this and be more forthright about some things whenever the topic came up.

The part that I had the most hesitancy about discussing was that, prior to my mission, I was on the track to inactivity in the Church. The reasons for that are better-suited for another post. For my present purpose it is enough to be clear that, though I didn't know it at the time, I was slipping off a mountain.

One thing that I did know wasn't as sure about the Gospel as I should have been. Too many questions and not enough answers, to summarize it briefly, and after much searching without success I decided that the thing to do was to go on a mission. That, at least, should have answered the questions that I had.

To make a long story short, it did (a good thing, too, because they were a bigger concern than i was realizing at the time and, as mentioned before, i wasn't staying active indefinitely with those concerns in my mind)- and in under six months to boot!

What still boggles my mind when I think about it is the response of one member who heard my story, who promptly asked, "but you had a testimony before you left on your mission, right?" I didn't in this explanation, but when I was talking with her I had clearly stated that my intent on going on a mission was to gain one, so I was very confused to be asked if I had had, before going on my mission, something that I was going in order to obtain.

This does leave me in a curious position, however, which I realized after that exchange. I recognize very well the danger of not having testimony before leaving for your mission, and I don't believe that everyone lacking will get one if they go. In such a circumstance I must paraphrase the late and great Hunter S. Thompson: I can't very well advocate it with a good conscience, but I have to admit that it's worked with me.

Where I'd be today without my mission, I don't know for sure, but I do know that it wouldn't be good.

The other lesson of Bethlehem

Consider the wise men of the Nativity story: They were obviously men of some spiritual stature, though we know not exactly how great. They recognized the Star of Bethlehem and what it meant, and answered its call. But while they were witnesses to a miracle, they made a grave error and failed to distinguish between who should and should not be told. By relating their knowledge of the Star to Herod, they inadvertently caused the massacre at Bethlehem.

Scripturally, a "type" is not quite a symbol. It is a representation of something in particular, and a representation that naturally belongs to the same class as the thing to which it points. The setting and rising of the sun can be symbolic of the Resurrection, but the resurrection of Lazarus is a type of the Resurrection. The massacre at Bethlehem is a type that teaches us that that spiritual things should not be handed out lightly. President Boyd K. Packer taught that "strong, impressive spiritual experiences do not come to us very frequently. And when they do, they are generally for our own edification, instruction, or correction[...] I have come to believe also that it is not wise to continually talk of unusual spiritual experiences. They are to be guarded with care and shared only when the Spirit itself prompts you to use them to the blessing of others [emphasis added]."

We are counseled to not cast pearls before swine, for our sake and theirs both. As the massacre at Bethlehem or the planned executions at Zarahemla show, being careless about these things can lead to bad circumstances for us personally (even if nothing more results than mockery). What is often worse than what we personally suffer, however, is what may come down on those whom we have told, for "where there is no law given there is no punishment," but "wo unto him that has the law given, [...] and that transgresseth them." In other words, we are putting increased accountability on their shoulders, and if we are not careful we may make them accountable for things that they are not ready for. By being the party at fault for doing so, moreover, we are in a way made responsible for them and some of what is put on their shoulders is likewise put on ours.

Fiction: Four Snapshots of Eternity

"Yesterday's rose endures in its name." -Eco

One.

She thinks that she is going mad. She writes but without direction; her hand has a mind of its own. She writes memories. Her memories, but they are new to her as they form in black ink beneath her fingers and spread across each page with lightning speed.

Blink and you miss it!

Once upon a time I am walking through the doors of the Missionary Training Center for the first time. Once upon a time I am being transferred to West Valley City. Once upon a time I am eight years old, and I am being baptized, and I have never heard of a small town named Magna.

I speak in the present tense because these events are still very tangible to me. My memories, or my reconstructions of them, are not less tangible than the present moment but are differently tangible. There are times when I think back on them and almost feel whiplash from the recognition that these moments, real though they may be, are no longer my present place of habitation (but then there are times when this moment seems almost like a vivid hallucination, and the past no longer so much like a soap bubble universe).

Once upon a time I realize that I have only three months left on my mission, and I feel like it really is the end of my life. The Fifth of November hurtles toward me like a train, and I can't move away.

I don't have much time left, and that disturbs me. It reinforces the need to make every minute count, but even when I do so the strain is only barely lightened. On November 6th there will be something that I could do, but cannot, because I will be in a new life, and no matter how much I do now, there will still be something to do then.

Once upon a time I am dead, and the night is come, wherein no man can work.

Honesty over knowledge

Of what value am I, without my mind? Whether my value is great or small, it exists solely because of the things that I know and how I use them.

Or so was my thinking for most of my life until recently. I recognized that tying my value to my intelligence was not going to be good for me in the long run. There were too many opportunities to be "proven" unintelligent (I use quotation marks because what was necessary was not for my lack of intelligence to actually be proven but only for me to convinced that it was, which is rather different) for me to ever have something stable to stand on.

Worse, what was tied to my self-worth shaped my concerns over my reputation. Did I care whether someone thought that I was too concerned with money? No. I was thrifty, and if it looked differently to someone else then that was their issue. But I did care if I said something- or didn't say something- that led them to judge me as unintelligent. Which led me to behaviors that I didn't approve of, such as sometimes holding back from speaking because I was afraid of being wrong (or of them thinking that I was wrong and never being convinced otherwise).

I finally made a concerted effort to change when I noticed that it was also affecting my ability to change my views, admit defeat, etc. Curiously enough, while this shows to me that even then I placed a higher priority on having beliefs that corresponded with reality, it still took time before I was able to settle on something else to tie my self-worth to.

Thus far (and it's been a couple of months), basing it on honesty hasn't had any bad side effects. Even reputation-based concerns are more helpful than not, because it encourages me to change my views as swiftly as possible when presented with evidence of sufficient quality and quantity, and to speak my mind and volunteer answers readily when questions are asked. I may be wrong, I may look stupid, but no-one can doubt that, if I don't agree with you, it's genuinely because I don't see the evidence for your point of view, not because I'm too prideful to admit a mistake.

Fiction: The Restoration of the Nerf

A legend of our fathers:

In the days before God organized the West Mission, and divided it from the Mission from which it had been organized, there was but one Mission, that was the Utah Salt Lake City Mission. And there were many Mission Presidents that were called to it, and many elders that were called to it, and also many sisters.

Partnership with God

Follow-up to: Absent: One Lion

Brother Yudkowsky has discussed at length a number of rules for designing good utopian fiction (and, indeed, good fiction at all). One of the points that he made was that people need to be capable of being protagonists in their own life stories rather. If, if your own life, you have been reduced to the role of supporting cast because you can exert no appreciable influence on the outcome of events, well, then, something is wrong. To put it in Mormon terms, we are supposed to be agents that act out our wills, rather than objects to be acted upon.

To illustrate this idea he brought up several stories, among which was The Chronicles of Narnia. He felt that Aslan made the Pevensies superfluous and that, because Narnia would have been saved with or without them (indeed, with or without anyone but Aslan), they were made supporting cast and had suffered, so to speak, an "amputation of destiny."

While I do support his general idea, I don't agree that the Pevensies got nothing out of the deal. The key is in looking at the Chronicles as a bildungsroman (indeed, in looking at our own lives as each a bildungsroman). The conflicts are not important. What is important is how each child reacts to the conflicts that they encounter: Edmund, for example, turns traitor then repents himself, and seems to keep this episode in mind from then on and give second chances to others. Perhaps Susan's desire to grow up so quickly stemmed from those years in Narnia when she was no slip of a girl but a royal queen.

The point is that the story isn't what Aslan could or couldn't do without the Pevensies- or what God can or can't do without us. The entire history of the world is full of God working with men and women to accomplish His purposes, not so much because He cannot do it alone but because, by becoming co-creators and participants in the drama, we are afforded an opportunity for growth that we would otherwise not receive.

Absent: One Lion quite clearly states that Narnia was saved without the intervention of the Pevensies. Narnia did not need them. But the Pevensies needed Narnia, and we need God, to develop fully.

Intertextuality

If you look at older posts you will see that the number of hyperlinks in them is increasing as time goes on. Eventually there will be some posts that will have very little that is not hypertext. The first reason for doing so, as pertains to hyperlinks that lead to other posts of mine, is to make this blog like Wikipedia insofar as you go from one post to another and keep finding new posts to click on and read.

The other reason for doing this is to illustrate intertextuality, or "the interrelationship between texts [and] the way that similar or related texts influence, reflect, or differ from each other." As the stories that I have told thus far are meant to point forth certain ideas, so to is this blog also meant to illustrate the idea that all books are really one book, and everything (not just in literature, by the way) is connected. These blog posts do not exist independently of each other, nor did they spring from my head without deeper origin like Athena, but they are all part of a single blog, and are drawn from everything else that has so far come out of the world.

The Golden Rule and charity

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets." Matthew 7:12

More than any other law, I think that the Golden Rule is very relevant to emulating God's selfless love for ourselves and others. The glory of God is intelligence, and His supreme understanding leads him to have selfless love for every existing thing. Together these are His chief attributes, but just how often do we take for granted His love for us?

We are commanded to treat others as we would like to be treated; does this not include how we would like to be treated by God? As one prophet put it, "You should forgive and overlook: Do you not like God to forgive you?" We are all beggars, but if we squabble between each other for scraps how is it that we will be looked kindly upon by our Lord?

God exercised tyrannical dominion, if He exploited our flaws, if He removed Himself from us forevermore after impatiently counting out the four hundred and ninetieth time, how few of us would remain alive in the furnace of His wrath? And yet how quick are we to abuse our power, and how slow to forgive?

If we want others to love us- if we want, at least, for God to love us- then truly we should have love for others. God's love is not conditional upon it, but that is the only kind of love that we would want above all others, and we should act accordingly.

Fiction: Absent: One Lion

Elsewhere, a kingdom is still saved. Elsewhere, a war is waged and peace is won. A table is still broken, and four chairs filled. But for others, and by others.