Illustration: Story & Game

Here is about the simplest game you can imagine.  A team is divided into two even halves and they are positioned in squares facing each other, with one empty square between them.  Each member can step ahead into an empty square, or jump a player from the other team into an empty square. They can only move forward.  The game is cooperative - the teams can talk and agree how to handle the situation.

This setup means that at each turn, there are only two possibilities: red or blue can move to occupy the space, creating a space where they were before.  Our group of ten solved this on the third attempt, but some groups never solve it. The 'choice map' is my attempt to show these potential paths - but almost all of them will end up in blockage on the next move or two.

The thing that is like Story (as McKee describes it) is that interest arises from high-stakes choices between apparently equal 'goods'. Dramatica assumes that the point of a 'grand argument' narrative is to teach a lesson, to illuminate a world in a fruitful way.  The best stories furnish us with the moves and types and experiences that make us a little more awake, a little wiser, a little lighter in the step, by illustration.

Our group solved the problem when, on the third iteration, we had learned something about which choices not to make.  No one of us remembered the map of the whole field, but each of us remembered the particular mistakes near us, or involving us, which caused a breakdown in the earlier attempt.  The difficulty for a story-teller is to present regular, realistic challenges that offer this sort of dilemma - things that rather than build character, reveal it.  The story-teller too has a choice, but with this illustration, the better choice may come a little easier.

Regrets

I have sometimes, thinking of how much I regret, thought that it might be a rule for life. To regret is to be willing and perhaps able to do better - might it then be a rule that you are at your best when you regret everything you've done? If, by regretting the chaos and mediiocrity of this blog, i show myself better than it, perhaps i can improve it. If i regret all my scrapes and mistakes in a serious way, i am no longer that foolishyouth. Perhaps so, but won't I be terrible company?

I think it might be apt for everything you've done deliberately. But to try to regret Everything is a bit foolish. It denies how circumstances shaped me, how things outside control were important. So I regret my decisions while also remembering how little choice they were, and celebrate delightedly the times things went well.

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Post-modernism as Repentance

Modernism's "Jacob's Ladder" promise of a golden future of technology-enabled man, of an endless treading of unknown into known, subduing the earth and heaven alike, has faded from the minds of most people. Scientists and engineers, medical people and economists who believe their abstractions increase the truth of their models are good candidates to believe in this - to see themselves as part of rationality increasing itself, and bringing more and more of the found world to heel.

Post-modernism is no single thing, but arises from several critiques of individuals within modernism, to wit:
- a 'so what' / 'why should i?' existential critique. Hume says it is no irrational thing to prefer 'the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my little finger' (meaning that desire is independent from reason and cannot be argued with). Similarly, loathsome teenagers prefer stupid films to growing up and appreciating great art, and you can't convince them they're wrong. Given that Nazism and Stalinism (and even arch-boob Mussolini) saw themselves as modernising powers, modernism can't simply be ultimate human good.

- a power critique, that points out that power will be unequally distributed, and that the great stair to heaven is made at the expense of those who will never walk it, that those with power are telling each other a pleasing story and ignoring out of existence the less capable, instrumentalised humans who fail to raise themselves over the threshold usefulness.

- an epistemic critique, which asks for a basis for the articles of modernist faith: all men are created equal (not true). Anything not proved by science is hokum - commit it to the flames (this statement cannot be proved by science). (I am lumping in the linguistic critique - that systems of knowledge expressed symbolically are only systems of symbols and maintain only internal coherence with no necessary reliability in the world. This is not a great critique, and to the extent it is just, Wittgenstein and Heidegger have made it and answered it.)

All of these are calls to repentance. Be better, much better for people, or stop pretending to be the full flourishing of humanity. Satisfy real hungers, not just hunger. Justice for some is no justice. Don't pretend it's grounded in absolute reality when its grounded in a local pocket of some behavior that has proved functional so far.

Repentance means that something which seemed it would be your pride and joy must die. Modernising brings many goods, but they aren't the Good.

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The Desktertainment Unit Takes (some) Shape

The Desktertainment Unit is coming together very nicely.  Here we see the fixed frame.  Things measured up OK, but I was a little optimistic in predrilling too many of the holes in the end pieces.  It was helpful to have one drilled each end, but unhelpful to have the rest drilled, because they were imperfectly aligned.  Fortunately  pine is forgiving and soft.  The little workbench in this photo cost just $25 at Bunnings.  Crazy talk.

Here's the lid on, and the shelves in.  Resting on our Klippan.

Here, the lower desktop is slid out to show it off.

No shelf.

Shelf.

 Lid closed.
The observant will not that this is not quite according to plan yet.  The lid needs to be cut down by about 10cm and a front-piece attached.  It requires a ~1.760m straight line cut.  That's a long way, even for a man of science*

Lid open, keyboard in place.  Keyboard only just fits below shelf. One centimeter in it! Less than I expected.

Wife acceptance factor quite low.  The desktertainment unit displaces cookbooks and DVDs, and we have a baby due veeeery soon, so this further messing for no immediate benefit is a nightmare. But my wife is awesome, and has tolerated my descent into bespoke-furniture-madness with remarkable, more than remarkable, calm.

* Honey I Shrunk the Kids reference.

True Grit

Last night we watched the Coen Brothers' True Grit. It was something like True Romance, and something like a Miyazaki film. Like True Romance in that it seemed quite self-consciously to be revelling in the milieu, creating characters that verged on cariacature, somewhat self-aware and vulnerable, but even more aware of each other's comical image-making. Like a Miyazaki film in that the girl at the heart of it is brave and shrewd, but also protected by many characters, even some of the wicked.

Very enjoyable, if not as profound as some of their work.

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The Partially Examined Life Podcast

I am a big user of free audio sources on the internets. ITunesU and Librivox and other things represent the best opportunity to redeem otherwise useless time (chores, commuting). You can listen to an Oxford don explain Kant, and then listen to the Critique of Pure Reason read by volunteers.

And then, you can listen to The Partially Examined Life podcast (snappy title guys). Three friends from the US who studied philosophy but didn't find an academic career get together and discuss their reading of a text. I find it very enjoyable and interesting. They are knowledgeable and smart, but not so smart they don't get into confusion.

My favourite moment so far has been their uncontrollable gut-shaking laughter at Nietzsche saying:

Kant asked himself: How are synthetic judgements a priori possible? - and what really did he answer? By means of a faculty: but unfortunately not in a few words, but so circumspectly, venerably, and with such an expenditure of German profundity and flourishes that the comical naiserie allemande ['German silliness' -VP] involved in such an answer was overlooked.

Beyond Good and Evil - S11.  Hysterical.

( 'There is no a priori. Kant's answer to the question of how we know the world was 'by means of a faculty' but unfortunately he could not bring himself to say it in five words.'*

*My recollection originally posted here, retained for comparison.)

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Jesus, Nietzsche and the Promised Land

Jesus says things that are obviously not true in his time. 'Blessed are the poor.' 'Blessed are the meek.' Nietzsche sees this elevation of feebleness as sick, sick, sick, but part of being oppressed, which is part of becoming a self-conscious, interesting set of people. Hideously psychologically damaged, but interesting.

Nietzsche seems to wish for a self-aware liberty, for people that accept the expressions of will-to-power in themselves, who have no resentment because they are fierce living creaturs asking no quarter and expecting none. Noble, exalted creatures who don't take a step back. But he doesn't have much to say about the problem of the social world. It is all very well to approach life in a lordly fashion, but you're going to be in conflict and have to fear and show respect. There's no going back to that unreflective instinctive life, but (per the dudes on the Partially Examined Life podcast) Nietzsche doesn't have advice, or not very coherent advice, on how to be.

Jesus' solution is the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Heaven. He posits a deep background in which the meek inherit the earth, those who sorrow are comforted, the poor are blessed. He invites hearers to step aside, out of plane and occupy a new position. Nietzsche says the place he invites people to is merely imaginary. I'm not sure yet whether to respond that it has made for a pretty real, successful civilisation; or that 'imaginary' is the proper description for this sort of 'spiritual' shaping of intentional content.

Either way, Jesus actually passes Nietzsche's tests for life. He lives assuming he has the backing of almighty God, but more - that he is that same God. He treats his friends as if they are at his level: his first response to the 5000 hungry folk is a casual / preremptory 'you give them something to eat!' This is both casually aggressive, as from a noble nature, and generously ennobling by expecting no less of them than that they should be his equals. He does all this with a will-to-power aimed at claiming the whole world, saying before his crucifixion 'now is the time for the ruler of this world to be driven out.' His suffering and death are too small to stop his purpose.

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Men and Women II

Following from earlier posts (the difference, Nietzsche), I have some more experimental ideas on sameness and difference.

First, there is always a distribution, but our brains stereotype so that we can retain our sanity in the presence of people we have not previously met. Sometimes this sanity means caution, sometimes friendliness, sometimes offers of help, sometimes requests for help. The stereotype ('das man') even affects assembly of prefab furnniture. I (and many peers according to my wife's antenatal circle) see inconsistencies between what i want to do and the parts i have as evidence that ikea (or whoever) have screwed up. I improvise and 19/20 times, prove only that they were right all along. So stereotypes with the diversity eliminated are never going away.

Second, small differences get big, or perhaps, there are no small differences in society. There is a lot of feedback in the social system, a lot of space for prejudice/stereotype confirming events to be created by the stereotype. One notable experience of difference goes into the stereotype. One notable feature of the stereotype then causes changes in a lot of behaviour, expectation. If Hegel (and Dennett, and Vygotsky) are right, we depend on others for our first self-concept. How others see us becomes how we see ourselves.

Third, there are at least small differences physical and mental, between men and women. Men are, on average, larger and disproportionately strong / hardy. Women have superior peripheral vision and a better sense of smell. (These differences too fit a type - which is that men look like predators and women look like prey. The hideous pregnancy of live caterpillars with wasp larvae is not so far from human pregnancy after rape.)

Amanda Marcotte on Slate's DoubleX Blog spends a lot of energy pointing out the insidious prevalence of this stereotyping. She is right to be suspicious that this traps us in inauthentic behaviour, blindness to the reality of men and women. But the stereotype is psychologically vital - it is a basis of life. Perhaps trying to direct one's stereotypes toward the finding women and men in our time 'fascinating' or 'surprising.' That might be a step forward.

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An actually existing Desktertainment unit?

Yes, the time has come for the Desktertainment unit to move out of the world of ideal forms and condense into crude perishable matter.

Measuring up:

 Cut parts, with primer coat:


So far, I have learned it is best to steer your jigsaw, rather than attempt to push it on track with a guide - the blades cut straight ahead vastly better than they do sideways, and so the end result of using a guide is that the blade bends and cuts at an angle to the wood instead of straight through, so that the saw body can track along the guide while the blade cuts straight ahead.  Steering means you can end up with a somewhat wiggly vertical cut through your panel, but it's much better than putting a twist from vertical to 45 degree chamfered.  Probably not safe either, running the blade so distorted.

Reflections II

In this post, I labeled a box, for want of better - 'Analysis.'  This is the mysterious place of consciousness in an individual.  It is functionally equivalent to the function of the command - to invent or find ways to handle what can't be handled out of experience*.  I want to try thinking of it as 'reflection.'

A reflection is a wholly derivative being, all about some real object.  And reflection is a process through which a reflection is produced.  The problem I had with 'Analysis' is that my experience of analysing is that you try this and that, thinking about this end and that end of the problem until, by nibbling with argument or by crushing in the jaws of some powerful instrument such as mathematics, the problem is 100% handle-able.

Reflection is emptier and simpler. What we call psychological reflection is turning objects of attention over, abstracting them by reading them into different backgrounds - in engineering, we might look at the same problem for computer modeling, for mathematical analysis, for analysis by analogy, for argument from physical experimentation, for argument from experience.  In thinking about a political issue, we might think of individual needs, societal needs, party-strategy needs, press responses, or even ethics.  As we do so, applying familiar practices and treating the problem as if it were familiar, different parts of the picture come into focus.

Hopefully, one familiar frame turns out to render the problem case recognizable.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a reflecting telescope.  When it's mirror was inaccurately shaped, the telescope couldn't focus.  The images lacked the necessary resolution.  Resolution emerges from nothing more than reflection.

* I think I will change 'recognizing' to 'handling'.  It is more Heideggerian, and also more true - there is always some level of recognition which can have a handle put on it, which can be classified.  So the elements of experience are between 0% and 100% handled, and the handle is present to consciousness. 100% handled is the default behaviour.

Reflections I

Gene Wolfe creates a most interesting character in Father Inire, a cacogen (alien) who has devoted himself to furthering human destiny.  He is an adviser to the Autarch, and a keeper of mirrors.

How foolish to call them mirrors.  They are to mirrors as the enveloping firmament  is to a child's balloon. They reflect light indeed; but that, I think, is no part of their true function.  They reflect reality, the metaphysical substance that underlies the material world.

The mirrors are transport, communication and more.  As conventional mirrors can reflect each other indefinitely, perfectly aligned these mirrors access the infinite.

We'll get a new dog, one with an untwistable stomach...

Homer's solution to Santa's Little Helper having a bowel torsion.

Meanwhile, my unpuncturable tyre:

Picked up a nasty puncture from a quite mild piece of wire.

Scalable Society

The Onion has some great headlines: US Economy Failing because US built on Ancient Indian Burial Ground is a corker.  (The video itself is less brilliant than the title.)  Australia too, is built on bones of former occupants.  I have sometimes thought that a land really takes on a new people as they plant their bodies in it. In general though, lands are won and held in less romantic ways.

As society advances its store of techniques and tools (technology), the individual members gain powers.  At any time I wish, I can strap myself into 400 1250kg of steel and throw myself across the land at speeds that no human two hundred years ago had ever reached and survived.  (This, I think, is a pattern likely to be repeated: 'personal' powers spread widely and quickly.  Common powers (big power stations, hospitals, education systems) are slow and difficult, dependent on a lot of common understanding and compromises.)  The growth of ease of being  is not uniform.  I have the ability to trade my intellect (yes, absurdly, this same one writing this hotch-potch for you now) for money, actual money, that can pay for that car.  But I don't have the power of car: I can't get a car without recourse to a large industrial system.  That system needs a lot of people with skills I don't have.  It uses a lot of non-sustainable energy. It probably uses a lot of people without skills I don't have, as raw labour power.

Because of this technological economic base, and because of the social values that make 'personal' technology common, more people are a threat to our way of life.  It is not a sustainable way of life - it is not a scalable way of life.  More people are not going to be able to instantiate and extend our way of life.

If we had a sustainable technological economy in which the powers of production could be bestowed on people freely, there would be less need for anxiety about the strangers.

(This is a little like the mid-tech solutions in Anathem.  There is something to think about here, but I have a couple of threads and they're in some confusion.  At least one of the threads is probably better expressed in Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher, an appeal for a human-scale socio-technical base - economics as if people mattered. You can read a little about him here.)

Education is Reproduction

The interesting course 'evolution, ecology and behaviour' by stephen stearns @ yale included the fact that it is not enough to measure the offspring produced from a pair to compute their success. Total lifetime offspring can be high, but those offspring sickly, weak and frail, incapable of producing many offspring of their own.

One of the anxieties of university staff and other educated people is a fear of the loss of respect for education leading to die-backs of human knowledge. The fear is grounded in the fact that reproduction in our society is not complete until everything has been passed down and the new generations are as equipped or more to reproduce themselves in turn. It is true that engineering and medicine are the only disciplines we materially depend on, and that some (marketing, my old nemesis) are really injurious, but reality is a divergent field - the future contains much more than the past and any of the whole of human knowledge may prove central.

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Please welcome to the Blog Roll...

Professor Tim Morton, of UCLA Davis, Professor of English (Literature and the Environment).  I highly recommend his course on Romanticism (available in iTunes).  I have already posted a discussion of this course here.

Farewell Tom Scocca, following appointment as managing editor at Deadspin, what I suppose must be or become the sharpest-written sports web-site in the world.

Nothingness

The hardest part of Metanoetics (Tanabe) is his use of 'nothingness'. The thinker and his thought must be reduced to nothingness by other power acting through absolute critique. This 'absolute critique' is like the judgment of God, and repentance is submitting to it 'now'. But in the place of God, Tanabe talks about Nothingness, and Absolute Nothingness.

Andrew at Divine Trauma has posted about specifity of absence - black coffee without cream, vs black coffee without milk. Injuries without care vs injuries without malice. One thinks of the atheist in Catch-22 who doesn't believe in a god of Love, and is appalled by the idea that the God she doesn't believe in might just be a spiteful sadist. I can't take this absence non-being very seriously. It seems like it is very apparent in jokes.

The nothingness I can conceptualise is 'being' with dimensions that no one can relate to - overwhelming infinities of infinities, something that has to be invisible and unthought for the mind to hold onto itself. Mathematically, these invisible monsters are the high cardinals, used, I believe in resolving Fermat's last theorem. But higher maths is very far country, and this news was translated before it reached me.

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The Ideal Consumer Journey

Chatting with a woman at a party, my wife's research on the mission stations set up for aboriginal people came up. 'Oh' she said, 'I think that's terrible.' 'What?' 'The work missionaries do.' Certainly there are some terrible accounts of missionary behaviour and principles, but she objected to the very idea of going to another people with the intention of introducing them to Christianity.

What did she do? She worked in marketing for supermarkets - specifically designing the 'ideal consumer journey'. She or someone like her puts the milk in the corner diagonally opposite the entrance, puts the displays of kids treats at kids eye level, and ranges all the other attacks on the subconscious motivation system that can be discovered, with the goal of turning us into ideal consumers. We begin the journey as human beings, but finish as ideal consumers.

Is there a difference? The missionaries aim to share the best thing they have for free. The marketer gets paid a lot to lead the consumer cattle right up to the stun-bolt unafraid, even eager.

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Why am I so excited about resolution?

Basically, because I have always been the most irresolute person you can imagine:

• I misapprehend things in real life.  I accidentally bought a two-door car two years ago and didn't realise it was two-door until a friend asked 'Oh, I thought you weren't going to get a two-door car.'  Also I am always misreading situations as the perfect opportunity to trot out some philosophical wisdom.  Very often, I do this conscious that it is discontinuous with the conversation and will be difficult for people to relate to. (challenges to recognition)
• I refuse to recognize that things are as good as they are going to get, and be happy and knuckle down and rock on.  I spend a lot of my day looking for something even more interesting than what I'm doing now, or more enjoyable than what I should be doing.  (challenges to courage)
• I refuse to resolve tensions.  Since my post 'Belly' some months ago, I've been doing a lot of exercise and wishing I weren't so fat.  Yet faced with biscuits, or, as I was on Thursday night, 3/4 of a brie, I treat them as food, not as treats with a big downside.  Then I sit around thinking 'I can't  believe I ate the whole thing.'  Existing trapped between two conflicting desires is burdensome.  (problem solving)

I remember reading a lot of books as a teenager about lone-wolf assassins living by the creed from Heat 'Have nothing in your life you can't walk away from in 30 seconds.' They often did immoral things, but they were always on the side of the angels in the end (and very often they died of doing right).  Honestly, I would have been better to read Ayn Rand - at least her sociopaths are socially useful constructors who enjoy life.  What I took was the conviction that a sort of Nietzschean 'brief habit' - identity of convenience - would be all the resoluteness I would muster, and that faced with danger or opposition I would fold my principles away into those invisible dimensions and do what I needed to to survive. Given the extremely mild moral challenges I confronted myself with, this boiled down to resisting 'everything, except temptation' - being lazy, timid, distant in relation to social life and work, while being floridly self-indulgent in private.  

The problem I have now is how to develop a power of resolution - by making a resolution?

What do I mean by Resolution?

My idea of 'resolution' is a corruption of some words of Heidegger's.  The kind of being that we are, dasein, being-in-the-world, is always already in a world.  It has its features because they fit the world - and given the fact that the world too, has virtually 'always' had our presence, it is fitted to us.  Heidegger expresses this inextricable intimacy most quickly when he says 'we are our world existingly.' (He get's it so short by cramming a lot into world, and existing.)  Heidegger describes dasein as 'a being for which being is an issue.'  We humans don't just exist - we know we exist, and we can make it mean something.  Heidegger suggests that we can be 'resolute' - always taking a stand on our being which fits us to the actually existing world authentically. There is something of consistency in this idea, something of authenticity.  'Resolute' dasein sees the present situation including who it is, the stands it takes, and takes them again in the new situation creatively, courageously.  Best of all is to take a stand that is solid enough to answer your 'who am I?' until death.  This is 'anticipatory resoluteness' and to live in anticipatory resoluteness is something he describes as 'dying.'  You arrive at each day, each hour, freighted with history and obligations and experiences and are faced with circumstances you never asked for and problems you can only nudge, not solve, and to go forward, being who you will be, involves resignation or faith, because it is dying.  This is your life, and its ending one minute at a time.

Resolution in my thinking is like this, only for a simpler brain like mine.  Resolution is a great word, because its picked up a few meanings:

• Sharpness of image, clarity of perception.
• Firmness of purpose.
• Peacemaking, removal of tension, satisfaction.

The world challenges us with:

• confusing, unrecognisable situations, or situations that seem familiar but are hiding depths and dangers.
• difficult, frightening situations.
• problems, gaps between how the world is and who we want to be in it.

At the moment, I am thinking of the human being as predominantly living by recognising and responding automatically, and then consciousness rationalising behavior afterward.  Resolution is your chance to be free.  It is your chance to tinker with your recognition/automaticity patterns. It is your chance to take a stand on your being that will bring the world into focus, you into focus, and help you act in a way that has a future.

Resolution is about consciousness doing what it is responsible for: preventing the human being from getting stuck in confusion, fear and trouble, by articulating ways through.  The resolutions are in the form of declarations: this is that.  But they're thoughts.  Decisions, except decisions often work by lopping off important reality to enable some action, any action - some self, any self. Resolution makes the world, existingly, come to peace.

This is ideal resolution: rarely do we take our positions firmly enough that we don't relapse into older patterns;   even when we take a position, it is seldom right enough to do us for life.

State of Repentance

You will recall Gen Liu Yuan's statement (surely picking up some top-spin in translation) that 'a nation-state is a power machine, made of violence.' And von Clausewitz's 'War is a continuation of policy by other means' is quoted so often it has almost lost its impact. The two are not so far apart.

A nation is 'an imagined community' in the words of ... Benedict Anderson. It is a group of people holding together by a mental image of what 'we' are like, an imagining that is more for our own comfort than a way of truly recognising / handling the multitude. In the hayday (heighday? Hey?) of the Labour Movement, this thin social fabric was challenged: 'workers of the world , unite!'


A state is the institution a nation clothes / shapes itself with - a manifold of laws, customs, authorities, disciplines - all the institutions.


All the foregoing applies pretty well regardless of the national character or the type of state instituted. I am interested, though, in the chafing I and many others feel in applying these definitions to western democracies. All nation-states, of course, evidently possess these attributes, and have picked up a good deal of speed and power, often through violence. The chafing is that, at heart, we think the nation-states we're part of aim to embiggen the smallest man, that they (the states) have been humbled again and again since magna carter, cromwell and restoration, glorious revolution until stable constitutional democracy is left.


Liberal means not putting too much weight on our personal definition of nation - in fact, being so sceptical that everyone in your land is a neighbour, however different.  Democracy means not putting too much weight on the state - in fact throwing the bums out regularly. Australia, as a liberal democracy, is a repentant state, the best kind.

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This is that too

What was the point of all that in my last post? I finishes a little lamely because I wasn't sure where to go.

Resolutions should (ideally) change how you see. A lot of the Proverbs are directed to getting young men to see that not investing chastely in their marriage, work and wisdom was not a short road to delight, but rather a short road to ignominy and death. The wise are those with the larger scope, the wider, higher-definition vision. (A digression on the lameness of big tvs wants to come here, but I will hold it off.)

What brings people into church is the unrecognisable or unresolvable, thick and dreadful darkness. What keeps them there is the light of truth. Preaching and teaching should offer solid resolutions to problems. I am relatively 'pro' positive-thinking, which often mimics christian teaching without offering any validation or limitation, or even any motivation. I think what we now see as 'positive thinking', worldly, selfish and flawed, is really much of what Christianity used to (and still does in some communities) offer. It is one part of the way preaching, teaching and communicating the faith is essentially aimed at helping people. I am impatient with churches that aren't willing to say they have answers for living.

There are two reasons this is out of fashion with the more thoughtful christians of today. First, the problems faced in daily life are complex, and a finite list of answers will be exhausted by the manifold of reality. Second, the examples of people giving terrible answers that satisfy the base passions but do nothing to solve real problems: scientific racism, militant creationism, biblical literalism, bad fundamentalism.

The reason Christians follow Jesus is that he declares resolutions that work better than our own. To accept them changes who you are, indeed it involves giving up on the dream of who you are and swallowing the ugly truth.

The christian community, like the christian, needs to hear declarations that make experience intelligible. But the gospel teaches that the hearing requires transformation, the opening up of new intentional territory and a new place to stand.

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