Enjoyed a fun conversation about Bible Babel with radio host Faith Ranoli yesterday. Listen live in a week or so.
We talked for about an hour about all things Bible -- where it came from, what's the best translation, how people use the Bible to argue different sides of the same issue, why the Bible says people lived for centuries, and what's with all those names for God. I'm afraid I rambled an awful lot but it sure was fun.
I'm really excited about my new project, which has me thinking about all things paranormal. Turns out, they're all around us -- almost, well, normal. The Bible is one source for images and ideas, but the appeal (some would say awareness) seems basic to our humanity. If we don't believe, exactly, we are nevertheless captivated and strangely affected by the supernatural. There's the vampire craze, of course; but angels and demons (thank you, Dan Brown, we cannot use that phrase in exactly the same way ever again), hybrid beings, and mysterious doings are part of the warp and woof of our lives.
Some weeks ago, when the summer ahead seemed endless, I opened a hulking book that has been quite a ride -- Galilee, by Clive Barker. Immortal beings intersecting with extraordinary human beings in ordinary settings. It's wild, not least because the narrator is a curious being and so self-aware of telling the story (another layer that's intriguing). Besides that, I've been watching old episodes of Saving Grace, True Blood, and the pilot of Neighbors from Hell (didn't do it for me), Supernatural, and the Gates. So many more! -- and I'm open to suggestions. Hope you enjoyed a magical Fourth~
If most people don't get the biblical references, why do the creators of popular tv, movies, music and lit still use them so much? Pondering this question over iced tea with a novelist, Ph.D.-candidate friend, we decided: it's tough to say. Here are a couple of ideas that we bounced around:
1) Audiences do recognize the biblical language, themes or characters and that's enough because the Bible continues to resonate or at least suggest something greater than what immediatley meets the eye.
2) The creators know that only a few people are going to know the reference but think, "Who cares? We know it's in there. It's cool and adds levels of meaning that are super-rich. The minority who pick up on it are going to love it."
3) It keeps people like me in business. Ok, no. That's definitely not their reason... and it's hardly a business for me. But I do love catching those biblical references, contemplating how the creators integrated and interpreted them, and what that means for the greater story or art.
What do you think is the explanation?
There's Twilight of course, and True Blood, and going back in time a little, there was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all those Anne Rice novels. I shouldn't have been surprised to stumble on two more that feature vampires front and center -- Moonlight and The Gates. You'd have to live under a rock in the wilderness to be ignorant of the vampire craze. They're everywhere these days. But did you know there are biblical tie-ins, too? Take this, for example: The Greek word that denotes the evil serpent figure in the Christian book of Revelation is drakon (yes, like "dragon").
A variation of it became the Romanian word for "devil" -- dracul. You can probably see where I'm going with this. Dracul became the nickname of a fifteenth century Transylvanian gent, who belonged to the fraternal society "Order of the Dragon." His son Vlad Tepes grew up to be the cruel count "Vlad the Impaler," also known as Dracul, Jr., "the little devil" dracula (being the diminutive form of dracul). Centuries later Bram Stoker came along, and the rest is history. More to come on the blood, the sex, and those ultra long lives... Wha ha-ha ha-ha.
Great day in Chicago, starting at 0'awfully-early with a TV interview at ABC-7. Nice folks there, a fun chat about "Lost," among other things, then hello black coffee! Took the metro ez-pz up to Lincoln Square where I stopped in at the Book Cellar. That is one very cool indie bookstore! Back to the hotel to drop off... er... the shoes I bought. And not just one pair. But never mind that. Back to work: cab through a sudden rain that ended just as soon. Caught the commuter train down to Hyde Park, home of the brick and ivy University of Chicago. And home to co-op bookstores. The rain had quit, sun was out, so I donned my hat and set out. Visited with Javier, a manager at the 57th Street Books and then found my way into the caverns of its partner store -- the Seminary Bookstore on campus. Both of them are funky yet cozy, with amazing inventory (including Bible Babel - yay!). Awesome that they're essentially owned by the customers.
I still had a couple of hours to hop across the street to the Oriental Institute Museum before it closed. A place I've been wanting to visit for quite some time, they've got an incredible collection of artifacts from the ancient Near East excavated and analyzed by some of the world's leaders in the field (so to speak - hah). Spent some time taking in the truly colossal (about 40 tons, over 16 feet tall) lamassu -massive winged bulls with beneficent human faces. A pair once flanked the entrance to Sargon II's throne room in Khorsabad at the end of the 8th century BCE (721-705 BCE). A final stop: Powell's, specializing "in quality used, rare, and discounted books, especially academic and scholarly." Hopped the number 6 bus back north and had the happy luck to visit with a couple of women interested in Bible Babel. Charlene bought the last copy I was toting and helped me figure out how to get back to the hotel. whew! Off to dinner and home to Virginia tomorrow ~
Must something be situated in time and space to be true? Must one believe that somewhere on Earth there's an old boat that survived a flood sent by God in order to accept that the biblical story is, well, true? Some say yes. Absolutely yes. And so they search for the ark's remains... and search and search. Most recently, evangelical Christian explorers from China and Turkey who belong to an organization called Noah's Ark Ministries International claim to have found the boat's remains on a Turkish mountain called Ararat. Previous claims haven't held up to scientific scrutiny, as I note briefly in Bible Babel. It all leaves me feeling a bit melancholic. The people involved in such quests are passionate, determined believers whose confidence in their understanding of the Bible -- what and especially how it means -- is commendable in its way. But the faith of these good people is based on a way of reading the Bible that excludes the rich possibilities of poetry, metaphor, and the great deep truths that exist in the most powerful fiction. Yes, I said "fiction." Stories are a timeless human vehicle for expressing what defies the limits of language. Stories make room for God. I write this knowing that many readers will now assume that I dismiss the Bible as a collection of silly fairy tales with no enduring significance. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Atheist students at a Texas university are offering porn in exchange for Bibles arguing, "same diff." Inflammatory, to be sure, but are they right? The Bible is indeed full of racy material, from its very first book on. Robert Crumb's Genesis in graphic novel form warns on the cover that adult supervision is recommended. The Song of Solomon's highly suggestive erotic poetry is inspiration for a line of Christian sex toys that you can buy at Book22.com (in one Christian ordering of the books, it is the 22nd). In the New Testament, Paul explicitly lists some of the ways that people "got off" in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Revelation, the final book of Christian canon, describes in gory (albeit symbolic) detail the whoring of Babylon. And that's just a wee sampling of the sex. But pornography isn't just about sex, is it? There's something more that makes it what it is... and so difficult to define. There's something of the forbidden and shameful about it. There's the debasing and humiliating, the using and abusing of others for a temporary pleasure that drives porn. Violence and the horrors that lay a person out raw, which we watch hungrily, disaffected and complicit. Isn't that combination -- the repulsive and our inability to tear our eyes away from it -- porn, too?
Wouldn't it be nice to say that the Bible includes no such narratives, images, and invitations? But it does. Saul is castigated for showing mercy to a vanquished king, so we watch smugly as he carries out the righteous act of butchering Agag. We watch as a nameless woman, gang-raped and left for dead, is cut into eleven pieces to rally the Israelite tribes against their own. The prophet Ezekiel likens the capital cities of Samaria and Jerusalem to two young women and proceeds to subject them to graphic humiliations and abuse. We watch comfortably even titillated, knowing that "they deserved it." Doesn't Jesus's crucifixion -- an innocent submitting to a twisted power of the state, of hatred and fear, brutally humiliated and strung up in bloody torture... and accepted as somehow right and good -- meet the criteria for porn? Paul's stern rebukes (whether they came from him or became attributed to him) of women thinking, acting, and speaking with equal humanity as men, and the ways in which those texts have denied women their fullest expressions of humanity... is that porn? Or when biblical texts serve the purposes of the powerful to circumscribe individual growth and even to dehumanize the other... well, a case could be made.
Finally, though, the Bible is isn't the same as the porn those university students are handing out. It is far more rich and nuanced. It is also full of the very things that lead us to push back against the arrogance of brutality and to cringe and to cry out in sympathy and compassion for the oppressed and abused. Even while it throws into our faces the ugliness of hatred and fear, violence and humiliation, it invites us to challenge (demands that we do!) whatever is life-denying to the least of these, the poorest, and most vulnerable. For that's finally what each of us is, what we all are. Hannah's song becomes Mary's Magnificat. Power is overturned and the weak become the strong. Expectations and assumptions are derailed and reborn in compassion and joy.
If we loose our grip on what the Bible can and cannot do, on what we allow that the Bible says and doesn't say, then maybe we'll witness the Bible embrace what seems pornographic only to assimilate and transform it into a mandate for the fully realized life for all beings in a family at home on this breathing earth.
I was delighted to read Pulitzer-prize winner Michael Dirda's review of Bible Babel in the Washington Post last week. He clearly read the book carefully through, and "got" it. That he liked it, too -- how sweet! Meanwhile, check out some of Dirda's own books, if you haven't had the pleasure already. As an avid collector of quotes -- inspiring, intriguing, comforting, and unsettling -- I especially love Dirda's Book by Book, containing such gems gleaned from Dirda's wide-ranging reading and organized with a bit of engaging commentary by the author himself.
