“You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.”
Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1998 VI
Hello Dear Friends,
I won’t say much about how long I’ve been away from writing. Suffice it to say, it has not been my preference. Life and my many wonderful projects keep me moving day to day, and so I must take my opportunities when they come. Here is an essay I’ve been thinking about writing for at least 9 months now:
We are currently rewatching the very funny, goofy mockumentary Parks and Rec. The themes explored through the ridiculous caricatures are almost a kind of case study of various personality types that is cathartic to experience and surprisingly insightful, even as it makes me repeatedly guffaw. One character that I love is Chris Traeger, played by Rob Lowe. Traeger initially comes to Pawnee with his friend Ben Wyatt to address the city’s financial insolvency. Chris is impossibly upbeat and positive, while Ben delivers all the bad news, a classic good cop/bad cop partnership that is simultaneously effective and hilarious. Chris is a fitness junkie, running miles and miles every day and taking every health supplement known to humankind. He never stops smiling and charming and is relentlessly optimistic. Some of the funniest episodes involving Chris have him coming undone when he is forced to confront a situation that he can’t spin in a positive light. When Chris faces the specter of his own mortality by simply contracting a cold, he spins out into a depression that leads him to (obsessively) start seeing a therapist. Chris is fragile, even while vigorously projecting an unceasing upbeat pollyanna vibe that would seem entirely insincere if you didn’t feel that Chris himself is the one that most needs it to be true. He is a control freak and “spin jockey” par excellence.
I see some kind of genius in whomever dreamed up this character, because he strikes me as emblematic of our fundamentalist modern ways of living, speaking and thinking. Chris has a funny habitual figure of speech that he uses on the show, and this is why I bring him up. Whenever Chris is trying to project his ever-positive world view onto someone in conversation, he uses the word “literally”, as in “I am literally the happiest I have ever been to see you right now,” or “You literally did the absolute best job I’ve ever experienced.” If you care to get a taste of this funniness, check out this video montage.
This use of the word “literally,” literally makes me laugh every time I think about it! This word is overripe in our culture today. It is used in so many contexts and conversations.
Some folks say things like “We believe that everything in the Bible is literally true.” Others might say “You can’t argue with facts and it is literally true that the world is millions of years old from the fossil record.” In casual conversation, I often hear people telling a story what someone literally said or did. In these cases, I’ve noticed this is often meant to build a sense of indignation about something; as in: “She literally said that to me, can you believe it?”. But what do we mean in each of these cases? These examples, and the funny amplified example of the character Chris Traeger are the stimulus for me to write this essay, to have some fun and playfully explore “the L word,” and its facets of meaning.
When Chris says he is “literally the happiest”, I think what he really means is “really really really happy,” or “supremely happy”. Chris doesn’t mean “literally”... he means “hyperbolically”… and everything about him is hyperbolic. He is exerting incredible energy to spin everything in his life, and the word “literally” is a vehicle for this effort.
What about claims that the Bible is “literally” true? Well, here the reference seems to be to the actual words of the Bible in their plain meaning today, usually in an English translation. I am here trying to represent a viewpoint that I don’t personally hold, so if anyone feels I am being unfair in this portrayal, I welcome corrections. But Biblical literalists as best I understand them are saying that one must read the words of the Bible as they stand, without interpretation or correction. The words and the words alone are one’s direction and orientation.
I will leave aside the fact that the Bible was written in a wide array of styles, in several different ancient and classical Mediterranean languages across many cultures and centuries. Biblical literalists might respond that this does not matter since they are the direct words of God anyway. But I will briefly mention the immediate question that must come to such a viewpoint: given a literal reading in the sense described above, what is to be done when one part of the Bible directly contradicts another part? To take one of a legion of examples, and one which I teach in one of my college courses these days: it says in chapter 1 of Genesis that God created human beings on the Sixth Day, after the plants and trees (they came on the Third Day). It also says that that male and female humans were created together.
Gen 1:27: “And God created the human being in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”
(I am using the Alter translation of Genesis, the one that is assigned reading in my college course. Robert Alter is a true philologist, a lover of words, and his careful translation of the original Hebrew into English, along with the copious notes he provides to accompany them, make the multilayered meaning of the Bible come alive).
Then in chapter 2 it just as clearly states that God created Adam before any grasses or trees, and then only later created Eve
Gen 2:5-8 “On the day the LORD God made earth and heavens, no shrub of the field being yet on the earth, and no plant of the field yet sprouted…then the LORD God fashioned the human, humus from the soil…” .
So, a clear contradiction. Yet, experience has taught me that such arguments do not serve to move the conversation forward with anyone. For those motivated by Biblical literalism, such contradictions can always be explained away. The usual tack in this case is to invent plausible plot-smoothing hypotheticals, like the second story fits perfectly into the first as a detailed montage of the happenings on the 6th day when humans were created. The motivation is to cleave to the notion that the plain words of God are right there to be read and the Bible tells one continuous non-contradictory story. It’s quite difficult for me to resist playfully interjecting in these moments that, in order to defend this kind of literality, one has invented quite a bit of additional meaning; but let’s move on.
Despite the very different context, in biblical literalism I see the mood and motive as much the same as that of Chris Traeger. That mood is fragility, and the motive is protection from that which one rejects or fears. One wants to look at the world through one, unshakeable lens, one solid point of view, and ultimately, one wants to predetermine what one will see whenever one looks. There is a myopic conviction that one must look at the words on the page as having no depth, no fuzzy edges, no history, no connection to prior generations, and absolutely no changeability. I confess I struggle to understand this point of view, although I accept that many hold it. In fact, my curiosity about the true motivations for those that hold this view is part of my reason for writing this essay. But, the words I am writing at this moment already have so many levels of meaning, so many nuances, that I find it impossibly restricting to accept a unidimensional literal reading of any text, let alone something as richly adorned as the Bible.
Lest you think I am only picking on Biblical literalists, let me hasten to add that, as I have written previously and recently, science as it is popularly represented, usually taught (and, more and more, practiced) in the last 75 years or so does a remarkably similar dance. In science, if one does not or will not speak the language of reductionist particle-based thinking in tandem with empirical repeatable measurable results, one is simply speaking of conjecture or superstition. But if one keeps one’s language to the level of the “literal,” which in this third case means “represented by mathematical equations and physically measurable in SI units,” then one is on solid ground, safe from any scary interference from those parts of the world that do not submit to such a scientifically literal interpretation.
So, each one in their own way: Chris Traeger; religious literalists (and even some religious scholars); and science teachers and populists (and even some scientists) are using this word, “literally”, to mean something that is much less about fact and much more about deep emotional attachment to a certain way of looking at the world.
What I find comic-tragically funny, as portrayed in Chris Traeger, is that the word “literally” itself is multilayered..it is not literal! The word literal comes from roots that mean “by the letter”. One thinks in this context of the saying “following the letter of the law” (This, of course, is not a literal phrase!). The opposite of “literal” in today’s parlance is “metaphorical”. The word metaphorical means something like “to carry beyond” and we understand that when one is speaking through metaphor, one is invoking something known, often physically experience-able, in order to evoke understanding of something one wants to know, something else that is usually deeper and less tangible. One is speaking about one thing to try to describe something else that is unreachable through direct speech.
But literality denies the validity of this carrying, this reaching beyond. One must focus on only the plain meaning. The “letter of it” alone.
OK, fine, we can try to do this. But when one does, things get immediately topsy turvy. One asks, “But what do the individual letters signify, and where does the meaning of the word really (literally) reside?” It’s clearly not in the letters themselves, but somehow in the combination of the letters, the sounds those letters make, and the meaning they signify. But if words are signifying something other than the letters, then words are…metaphorical by design! A moment’s thought about any word at all (but let’s take the word “literally” as our nexus of paradoxical inquiry) leaves us to realize that, dictionaries notwithstanding, we cannot literally point to the exact meaning of any word. And even entire paragraphs do not provide sufficient context to fully flesh out all the nuances of the meaning of the single word: “literally”.
The scientist, “Tom”, with whom I shared a panel discussion last spring, and with whom I’ve had several stimulating follow-up discussions, told me that one takeaway from our interactions was that in his teaching, he was going to try speak even less metaphorically and stick to “literal” scientific evidence and findings. And this is exactly what materialistic science continues to strive for: scientific “literality.” Never mind that science today does not ultimately deal with words at all, but only numerical quantities. Alongside those numbers, science has invented a number of specialized jargons that are supposedly clearer and less metaphor-infected than the plain ones we’ve been using for millennia. But this obfuscation with coded language simply hides the metaphorical meaning under the rug.
My response to biblical literalists and science teachers alike that wish to cleave to literality, with lots of warmth and hopefully some disarming humor, is “good luck with that”.
If even the literal meaning of the word “literally” cannot be found, perhaps we, like Chris Traeger, have painted ourselves into a very fragile corner. We might want to ask ourselves whether this kind of myopia can be sustained, and at what cost. I believe in and have experienced in both scientific and theological/biblical literature rich veins of meaning and authentic exploration, but the current popular contests between who is most “literally true”--which I take to mean most really-really-rock-solid-we’ve-nailed-it-down-and-nothing-not-God-nor-humanity-nor-experience-can-ever-change-it-forevermore)--such contests truly bore me to tears!
I am not trying to fight the current obsession with literality, not really. I’m simply trying to bring it into the light. I can see it as the next step in a progression we’ve been on for a long time. I see prior steps, for example, in the Christian Reformation when Jan Hus and Martin Luther and John Calvin and others began to insist that sola scriptura was the new gold standard for faith, and rejected the apostolic succession of human beings as represented in the Roman Catholic Church. And, going further back in time, I see this same trend in the insistence that true Muslims must learn and recite the Quran only in the original Arabic, because each word was chosen divinely and exactly. If God spoke words directly to Muhammad, then it is entirely reasonable to treat such a gift as a most precious pearl of great price. Similarly, if the mathematics of atomic theory have proven so powerful in certain realms, it is understandable why someone would want to revere that mathematics and bask in that power, even invent new technical languages to reify and codify it.
But, “literally” has us terribly stuck these days. Most human beings still use words, and they use them best when they use them flexibly and with at least some consciousness of various levels of literal and metaphorical meanings. Even children with limited maturity and vocabulary can infer various levels of meaning from our words, often with charming effect. This is a big reason why they often say the darndest things, because their word usage is so fresh and flexible that it takes unexpected turns. The false power of “literality” is the imagination of “fixing something for all time”… but as soon as we think or speak that phrase…we must inquire into the metaphorical nature of “fixing”, and the metaphorical nature of “time”, and there goes that apparently solid foothold as well.
Owen Barfield spent a lot of his life writing about the progressive perpetual transmogrification and inescapable metaphorical nature (non-literality) of words, and so I don’t feel that I need to treat this subject with a rigorous debate, as he’s already done such a thorough job. I can just point you to read Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry to get you going. Then read Poetic Diction, and you will have a grasp of the evolutionary and always elsewhere-pointing nature of words.
Literality, the belief that the words, or the equations, or the feelings alone carry all of the meaning, is an idol, and I recall idols being prohibited in quite a few religious traditions. Idols make you fragile in your thinking. Idols can make you sick; they make you fearful that your house of cards may fall. Because of these effects, idols that you carry subconsciously can make you a menace, especially to those over whom you hold power.
I want to make clear that I am not in any way speaking against deeply held conviction. The feeling that lies behind the word “literally” is very real, and is perhaps better described as “what I’ll go to the mat for,” “what I stand on,” or even “what I would die for”. Such convictions, when they are grounded in affection, one’s neighbors and true experience, are the stuff of humanity itself. But “literally” is a kind of scapegoating of your deepest held convictions. It’s saying “It’s not me that’s making this true, it’s that book/formula/mathematical law.” It is obscuring your active role in manifesting truth.
I’m not really trying to make any ironclad case here, I’m just playing with wonderful mysterious words. Like the funny character Chris Traeger, I am playing, prodding and poking at a few obvious chinks in the dam, because I would like to see words and their meanings flow again. I’d like to see the high walls of specialized, flat and encoded language come down from their roosts and commune again with regular speech and regular folks. Like the flow of thought and the flow of water, new meanings within languages (as long as humans actively use and speak and embody language and resist delegating the task to human or AI overlords) will continue to appear at the cracks and margins. Idols have been around for a long time and so, naturally, God has been warning and instructing us as to how to avoid this pitfall. Extreme precision, fundamentalism and literality are a bubble just waiting to burst. The waters truly can only be held back for so long. Rivers of real words continuously form new tributaries and, over time, entirely new oceans of meaning. The depths will never get any shallower except in our idolatrous imaginations; but we can loosen our grip on any particular meaning and learn to swim in the ocean of meaning itself. And this, of course, is what true literacy is: An increasingly facile ability to swim with confidence in the ocean of meaning that comprises our human and divine worlds of words.
These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
-Rumi, 1207-1273, Sufi Muslim mystic and poet.
Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash