Interpretation of text, especially so-called "sacred" text is not science, but art. On the other hand, it's not an arbitrary free-for all either. It can be taught and learned. It is not like arguing about a unicorn's horn color unless that color has symbolic or metaphoric significance in some text in which the writer has used the unicorn to some legitimately mythic purpose.
Even though it is an art and not a science, however, it is not a waste of time. What useful purpose learning this art might serve us between the maternity ward and the funeral parlor is a good question. More of that when I respond to whoever said he was a lit major and considers interpretive art to be a very low thing. Meanwhile, consider this. In Genesis 11 we read about the tower of Babel, which most folks interpret to mean that this is the Biblical account of how we got different languages. We hear, for example, that the people who eventually built that tower traveled. Some translations say they traveled in the East. Some say they traveled to the East, and some say they traveled from the East. What difference does it make after all these years? Not much, unless there is some symbolic significance to the direction of travel. And, as it happens, there may well be. If so, it would have to be consistent with the rest of the passage. In other words, it would have to fit. Since God appears not to like the tower they built and comes down to destroy it, we can assume that there was something wrong with it. He also confuses their languages. In my view the "correct" translation would be that they traveled "from the East." They traveled away from the light of the rising sun. They traveled in the direction of ignorance instead of the direction of enlightenment. To defend this interpretation would take a whole essay, which I don't mind writing if anyone's actually interested. Now the other question, what use is the ability to interpret sacred text? The skills learned in "reading" literature allow us to "read" life better. If we want meaningful lives, we have to learn to see meaning everywhere we look. We do not learn this in our schools exactly. Even in grad school lit programs, we do not learn this. This, after all, is a fundamentalist age. The failure to read and interpret literature intelligently and deeply, especially so called "sacred" texts is called fundamentalism. If you want a fundamentalist population, all you really have to do is fail to teach what a metaphor is. All this, however, may be much like telling a blind man what the uses of vision might be. Perhaps we should remember that a scientific model is a metaphor. Top level scientists know the value of metaphoric thinking. a ----- Original Message ---- From: Stu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 3:47:19 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Description of mantra?? : D --- In FairfieldLife@ yahoogroups. com, Angela Mailander <mailander111@ ...> wrote: > > there can be variety of interpretation, but it's not a free-for-all. I don't > think Wikipedia's opinion is as valuable as, say, Blake's or Eckhart's. Doesn't any interpretation necessarily fall flat? After all its a little like arguing whether the unicorn's horn is yellow or purple. Given that it is all a lot of hooey, mistranslated, miscopied, and poorly documented - it will not provide any insight into what happens between the maternity ward and the funeral home for any of us. Why waste your time? s. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
