October 13, 2007
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Happy Birthday, Paul Simon:
Simon’s Shema“When times are mysterious Serious numbers will always be heard
And after all is said and done
And the numbers all come home
The four rolls into three
The three turns into two
And the two becomes a
One”
Related material:
Simon’s theology here, though radically reductive, is
at least consistent with traditional Jewish thought. It may help
counteract the thoughtless drift to the left of academic writing in
recent decades. Another weapon against leftist nonsense appears,
surprisingly, on the op-ed page of today’s New York Times:“There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few
people in Europe have not joked in their time about ‘concrete steps,’
‘contradictions,’ ‘the interpenetration of opposites,’ and the rest.”– Doris Lessing, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature
The Times offers Lessing’s essay to counter Harold Bloom’s remark
that this year’s award of a Nobel Prize to Lessing is “pure political
correctness.” The following may serve as a further antidote to Bloom.The Communist use of “interpenetration,” a term long used to describe
the Holy Trinity, suggests– along with Simon’s hymn to the Unity, and
the rhetorical advice of Norman Mailer quoted here yesterday– a
search for the full phrase “interpenetration of opposites” in the
context* of theology. Such a search yields a rhetorical gem from New
Zealand:
* See the final footnote on the final page (249) of Brimblecombe’s thesis:3 The Latin word contexo means to interweave, join, or braid together.
A check of the Online Eymology Dictionary supports this assertion:
See also Wittgenstein on “theology as grammar” and “context-sensitive”
grammars as (unlike Simon’s reductive process) “noncontracting”– Log24,
April 16, 2007: Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI.
