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Seven-Sided Gem
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In the book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, Phillip Yancey helps draw out stories and insights from Paul Brand, the doctor who discovered that leprosy ravages the body by destroying the sense of touch, and with it the ability to feel pain. In one of these stories, Dr. Brand tells how he left a speaking engagement sick, sat hunched in the corner of a train car, wishing the interminable train ride would be over, and finally staggered to his hotel room. He began to undress, and realized to his horror that there was no feeling in his left heel.
He pricked himself with a pin and felt nothing. He jabbed himself harder, watched a drop of blood form, and moaned for the pain that would not come. That night, he lay dressed on his bed. He knew that sulfone drugs would probably stop the spread of the disease quite quickly, but he still could not help imagine it spreading to his hands, his feet. As a doctor who worked with patients who'd lost their sense of touch, he cherished the feel of earth in his fingers, the feel of a puppy's fur, the affection of a friend. His career as a surgeon would soon end. What's more, what would become of his movement? He, their leader, had assured others that leprosy was the least contagious of all communicable diseases, and careful hygeine could almost ensure that they would not get it. What would it mean if he, their leader, was a leper? That ugly word he'd banished from his vocabulary rose like a monster with new strength.
After a long and sleepless night, Dr. Brand got up, and took a pin to face the gristly task of mapping out the affected area. He took a breath, jabbed himself--and roared in pain. Nothing had ever felt so delicious to him as that one electric jolt of pain.
He realized what had happened. He was sick, with something mundane, and as a sick traveller had forgone his usual motion. His foot had fallen asleep. Dr. Brand was for a time too ashamed to recount that dismal experience, but I'm glad he did. The experience changed his life, and the story has impacted me.
As far as perception goes, I'm not sure if my sense of touch is more perceptive than most people's. Probably a little bit. I can say that it is integrated with other senses. There was one time I was at the supermarket, and the woman in front of me in the checkout line dropped a soda bottle a short distance. Being bored, I gently pinched the bottle, and then made a comment that seemed to me almost too obvious to be worth saying: if you pinch a soda bottle, you can tell if it's safe to open. A bottle that can be safely opened will give slightly to moderate pressure; a bottle that's shaken up is firm as a rock. Her reply, "Oh, is that the trick that you use?" caught me off guard. Feeling a shaken soda bottle like that is no more a trick to me than looking at the stove for dancing orange spots is a trick to see if I've started a grease fire.
As an American who's lived in France, I like to give my friends hugs and kisses. I'm careful how and when I ask, particularly about a kiss on the cheek, and I listen to people with my intuition before asking those questions... but that invitation (accepted or not) is usually tied to when I pull someone inside the glass wall.
What about a musing life? Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business talks about the dark side of television's effects on culture. Without going into a full analysis of Plato's Allegory of the Television, I will say that television blinds the inner eye by stimulating the surface and starving the depths. A home without a television is like a slice of chocolate cake without tartar sauce.
Without television, what happens? At times, you get bored, and then more bored, and then you come to a place on the other side of boredom with renewed creativity, sensitivity, and insight. I try to live there; like my time sense and the presence learned through wine, it gives focus to musings, such as this talk was woven from. It is a sort of fast for the mind, and makes room for a considerable degree of depth.
What is my interest in thinking inside the box? There's been a lot of homage paid to the many virtues of thinking outside the box. Perhaps many of you have stories to tell of a time when someone was extolling the many virtues of thinking outside the box, but that's not where I'm going. The praises of thinking outside the box are sung because thinking inside and outside the box complement each other, and most people are so often inside the box that it's hard for them to step out. With severely gifted individuals, the real challenge is not thinking outside the box, but thinking inside the box.
There are many times that it's better to think inside the box. Driving to work, for instance. More deeply, communicating and negotiating requires one to understand and think like the other person, and for many people, this means thinking inside the box. I'd also like to give one very concrete example of where it's important to think inside the box: manners.
Manners are an arbitrary collection of rules, and there is no unifying principle that everything else flows from. Respecting and valuing the person will not tell you why you should hold a fork like a pen instead of how a little boy wants to hold a knife. Something that meaningless may be very difficult for you and me to learn, but it is important. Why? To many people, manners are the very foundation of civilized interaction, and it presents them with a needless and pointless obstacle if you say, "I respect you and I do not feel the need to observe manners in your presence." It's been said, "Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance;" if people are going to walk away from you offended, let them be offended by something of substance, not by crude manners.
And lastly: mystic, artist, Christian. Why do I group these together? Does being a mystic make one an artist and a Christian? No; nothing like that holds directly, but there is a common thread. It's illuminated by a conversation I had with one friend, where I said that pragmatism was a philosophical disease. I learned shortly thereafter that pragmatism was quite important to her.
Why would I say something like that? In one conversation a few years earlier, at Calvin College, one of my friends asked me why I wanted something, and didn't like my response. A little probing, and I knew why: while the words he used were, "Why do you want it?", what he meant by it, the only thing he could mean at that time, was, "What do you find it useful for?" The item, whatever it was (I don't remember), was not something I wanted for its usefulness in letting me get something else; it was something I valued in itself. He couldn't see that.
So I asked him, "Do you value having that arm on your body?" "Uh, yes..." "Why?" "Because if I have an arm, I can grab an apple." "Why do you want that?" "Because if I grab an apple, I can eat an apple." "Why do you want that?" "Because if I eat an apple, I can live and not die!" "Why do you want that?" At that point, he gave the response I'd been waiting for: an impassioned explanation that living and not dying was not simply valued as a means to something else, but something he wanted for itself.
Pragmatism and utilitarianism have a very small circle of things that are valued outside of their usefulness to something else: the Oxford Companion to Philosophy lists only pleasure, which seems a dismally small selection to me. Franky Schaeffer's Addicted to Mediocrity: 20th Century Christians and the Arts talks about the insipid banality in the Christian art tradition: the tradition that once produced Dante and Bach has now produced John's Christian Stores, and a large part of that is because Christians sold their birthright to embrace pragmatism. Where pragmatism draws a small circle of things that are embraced, Christianity, mysticism, and art draw a much larger circle: there's something there that isn't in Dewey and Mill's practical world.
Madeleine l'Engle, in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, tells of a time in college when her professor asked on a test how Chaucer chose a particular literary device in a passage, and she wrote in a white heat of fury that Chaucer did not "choose a literary device;" that's not how an artist works at all! I had a loosely similar experience, if not involving anger; I was sharing something I was writing with a new acquaintance, and she complimented my use of personification at a specific point. I had to reread the passage more than once to see what she meant; she made a straightforward statement, but I had not thought in those terms. A good artist may have excellent technique, but the technique is there because the art is good; the art is not good just because of the technique. Good art comes through something much more, and much more interesting, than technique: listening to the work, serving it, cooperating with it, helping an unformed idea have a shape that others can see.
What about mysticism? There is a problem here; you might say that insofar as mysticism can be explained, it is not mysticism. I will say that the characters I identify with most in literature have been characters who've had a foot in another world. Charles Wallace from Madeleine l'Engle's A Wind in the Door is not the boy genius, Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory, an abstract personification of intelligence; he is a very real and believable person. He is open to another world, not surprised to think he's seen dragons in the twins' vegetable garden, and he kythes; that is, he has a real and present communication, something beyond communication, with others. You can read about kything in the 100 ways of kything on my webpage.
In Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael Valentine Smith is born as a baby boy on Mars, orphaned by all human travellers, raised on Mars by Martians in Martian culture, and brought to earth as a young man. Let's talk about culture shock for a moment. Smith causes and receives quite a lot of it, as the story narrates his progression from a Martian with the genes and ancestry of a man to a character who is both human and Martian. There are quite a few stumbling points along the way to this. At one point, early in the story, someone asks Michael what is intended to be a very routine question, but Michael doesn't get it. He has heard the words before, but he's a bit like a top-notch English professor trying to decipher a math paper: even with a glossary to all the symbol, there's a whole way of thinking that goes with the strange words, and Michael doesn't understand it. Heinlein says that half a million years' wildly alien abstractions raced through his mind. I don't have half a million years' worth of much of anything, but I do have wildly alien abstractions. I first became a philosopher as a boy, too young to touch any of my thoughts in language; one of the questions I thought of was, "Am I human?", or, "Am I a being of the same class as those I observe around me?" I observed that my parents were linguistic creatures who moved naturally in language, that I was not linguistic in any comparable way, and concluded that I was not human. Another question I pondered was a short, simple question that could be rendered, "Can there be a perpetual motion machine, and if so, how can it be started?" The second part of the question was tied to the first; the best way I can explain it is that, given time-symmetric laws of physics, if there's a machine that will keep on going forever, then the other side of the coin is that it has been going on forever, and there's no way to start it. In middle school, I started French at about the age of ten, and in a few years was able to think more fluently in French than in English. My accent sounded more typical of a native Parisian French speaker than a Midwestern American English speaker. Why? There are a couple of reasons, differences in how the two languages were taught, but one of the basic ones is that English was here, French was there, and my way of thinking was way out there, and happened to be closer to French than English.
Blajeny, also from A Wind in the Door, is a Teacher from another galaxy, and the lessons he brings are sometimes difficult: not as, "Face your worst fear ever," but as different from what they'd expect. He tells the children they will be in his class, and Meg is elated that her brother Charles will never have to go to the red schoolhouse again; then he says something that leaves her wondering where his classroom is. Blajeny retreats inside himself, and when she's decided he won't answer, he says, "Here, there, everywhere. In the schoolyard in first-grade recess. With the cherubim and seraphim. Among the farandolae." I am wearing the costume you see me in because of how I identify with Blajeny, because there's something of me that shines through him.
Last, what about being a Christian? There's one music professor who said that, rather than thinking that we sing a song one and then it's over, and we sing it later, and so on, we should rather thing that as long as there have been created beings, there is an eternal song rising before God, a song rising as incense that will never go out, and that when we sing we step into that song. Christianity is the foundation this whole edifice of thought is built upon, and its crowning jewel. It is the soil in which other things grow, and the thoughts I have given are an example of how Christians may think.
So now in this brief time I have shared a little bit about myself; I have answered a few questions and raised many more. Come visit my website, at ; it's in your program. Of course I'd like to hear from an editor who'd like me to write something, or would like an existing manuscript, or someone who'd like to hear me speak, or someone who'd like a website built, but more than any of that I have given this talk for the same reason I've built my website: to connect. What have I left you wondering about?
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Seven-Sided Gem
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