On the sweetness of Mormon life.

Your daughter comes to you. She says, I read your post on how I’m spoiled rotten. (She never reads your posts.) She says, it was funny. You’re funny, daddy. Will you play with me?

You play with her.

Time is a flood.  Who can tell where we flotsam are going?

Who can say what day when you or I will be washed up on some bank while the flood goes furiously on.

Sunrise over the Marriott pool,

the commercial strip, and the warehouse zone

–God’s promise that even man’s rule

He’ll one day turn to loveliness.

Time is a wave of experience that moves through the water of eternity but the water remains.

The wave here is fleeting–mortal–and then it rolls on.

Behind it are great depths of love.  Before it are great depths of love.

C.S. Lewis once said something like the essence of myth is that the person who makes it doesn’t see it as an allegory, but the hearer keeps seeing hints of allegories in it.

He is technically wrong, but substantially right.  A mythmaker can have an allegorical meaning in mind.  But the myth has to be stronger than their allegory for it to work.

Take Mr. Lewis’ own allegory, Pilgrim’s Regress.  Its nothing but allegory and pleasant enough in its way.  I can speak, though, of three different passages which I keep coming back to.   They have that kind of force.  For some of them, I don’t even remember what the original allegorical meaning was supposed to be.

The first is the giant whose sight turns people transparent so that you can see their bowels and their bones.

The second is the parable of the man closely pursued by enemies.  His wife sees him coming and is perplexed.  If she cuts down the bridge that leads to their home, he will be stranded on the other side with his enemies.  If she doesn’t, his enemies will cross with him.

Those two I don’t really recall the allegorical point Lewis was making, at least not off the top of my head.

The third passage proves my point the best, since it is the most clearly allegorical but is also a passage that I have *felt* many times.  It’s about the home of Mr. Wisdom.  He and his children live a quiet, sober life there.  They dine on plain fare and are content.  But at night, his children in a trance fly off to participate in witches sabbaths and bloody melees and the like.

The point is that a myth, to really work, has to have some weight to it apart from the message its supposed to be teaching.  Which is why Mr. Wisdom and his children have come to my mind at times that had nothing to do with the message that rationalists subconsciously derive their emotional satisfaction from elsewhere.

My best parables can sometimes have a very clear message, but they have a power beyond the message.

Poet Head, for instance, is so self-consciously message fiction that I literally call the head poet heads and sober heads.  But it still works.

I dreamed of defeat and I dreamed of victory.

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We have been entrusted before with the true story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and true story of the Good Samaritan (Not just one true Good Samaritan story, but lots of them!  All of them true, true, true, and true.) Now we bring you the true story of the Grasshoppers and the Ants Bees.

Why bees, you ask?  Hmm. Hard to say.

In the original story, the grasshopper fiddled and laughed, the ant worked and saved, and when winter came the ant thrived while the grasshopper starved.

The reality is more complicated.

With no further ado, my honies, the true story of the Grasshoppers and the Bees:

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There is a book review on how humans evolved to speak.  I can take or leave the theory.  So can the reviewer.

What really got to me was the section on cradling.  I think that got to the reviewer too.

Only humans cradle. Cradling means the mother and her child’s eyes are close together—they share each other’s gaze, called “intersubjectivity.” From immediately after birth, mother and child engage in a complex interaction, in which the child imitates the mother, and vice versa, sharing affect. This leads to “joint attention,” where they share perceptions of objects in the world other than mother or child, with their intersubjectivity making it possible for them to communicate they are seeing the same object. (This is different from “gaze following,” which does happen in other species.) This leads to the ability to “share intentionality,” that is, to cooperate. (Apes cannot cooperate or share to achieve joint objectives.) From this flow words,

If words don’t come from cradling, I bet sociality does.  That is just as important.  It’s amazing to me how important God made men and women and fathers and mothers.

There was a rich kid sitting by the side of a stream flipping gold and silver coins into the water.   (more…)

I’ve been working to reconcile these two perspectives:

90% of mothering is showing up–getting married and having the kids and not getting divorced–everything else is gravy and probably only makes a difference at the margins.

vs.

The mother’s influence makes a tremendous difference in the life of each child.

Both of which I hold.  At first glance, being able to believe both is an amazing intellectual feat.  The contradiction doesn’t bother me that much–I am large, I contain multitudes–but it bothers me enough I’ve been thinking about it.

First, the reasons I believe each one.   We are pretty relaxed about our parenting (except for media) and its worked great.  We don’t let our children read until they are five, minimum, no early interventions.  They have quite a bit of free time.  There’s twin studies and a lot of other evidence saying that within the same broad social context (very broad, like the same country and the same decade), how you raise kids doesn’t seem to make much difference absent abuse, malnutrition, or divorce.  Except possibly in their level of religious commitment when they are grown.  (I made a big hit with the school board when I spoke against some proposed program on the grounds that probably nothing the school was doing made any difference).

G raising his kids —

But in a lot of ways when it comes to media and discipline and manners and dress and, I don’t know, gardening and stuff, we are that family.  Again, as far as I can tell, its working out great.  Everyone comments on how well mannered and happy our kids are, and our kids love being our kids, knock on wood.

Also G raising his kids–

Here are some possibilities. (more…)

Over the weekend, notorious social conservative firebrand Mitch McConnell raised the possibility of a national abortion ban.

Roe v. Wade is terrible.  Making evils invented parts of the Constitution is wrong in every way.

McConnell’s comments make it less likely to be overruled.

If overruled, his comments galvanize the opposition and make it more likely they will do extreme, dangerous things.

They also put off ordinary people and make it harder to make real progress on protecting the unborn when the issue is returned to the states.

Add to that Blackburn and others shooting off their mouths about how Griswold was wrongly decided.  It was, but it shows the political savvy of a drunk kindergarten teacher to highlight that particular abstract claim right now.

I am struggling to fight off the conspiracy-minded voice that says there is something more at play than world-historic incompetence.

Because I am a gape-jawed lackwit, I just now realized that all the fancy clothes in the Book of Mormon are priestly clothes.

Exodus 30-40: Fine-twined linen, scarlet, jewels, gold, and silver.

1 Nephi 13:

Behold the gold, and the silver, and the silks, and the scarlets, and the fine-twined linen, and the precious clothing, and the harlots, are the desires of this great and abominable church.

A lot of the stuff I have been reading in the Book of Mormon as a simple critique of the rich is more precisely a critique of the priestly castes, or of false priestly castes.  It’s pretty blatant.

The great and spacious building isn’t simply  high status, its specifically high-status in a priestly, temple way.  We should think of the GSB as a coterie of folks offering a gnosis, a body of knowledge that you have to go through their programs to acquire, that is then supposed to fit you for wealth and prestige.  Read your Nibley, I guess.

The one aspect of the tabernacle that is presented positively in the Book of Mormon is the curious workmanship.

Notice also that Nephi says the clothes and ornaments of priestliness are what they desire.  These are people who exchange the reality of power and authority for playing power and authority dress-up.  They will be ok being powerless functionaries if they get a corner office and  a car with a driver.

P.S. The notable differences between the tabernacle and the GSB are (1) silks and (2) harlots.  The harlots I get.  The silks, dunno.  Secular historians will say that silk didn’t hit the Middle East until after the Nephite Exodus, so I am not clear on what ‘silk’ even means in the Book of Mormon.  Curiously, if you search for ‘silk’ on the church website, it returns you a pile of hits for ‘linen’.

P.P.S. –sotto voce– doesn’t the tabernacle in Exodus seem kinda . . . garish  –sotto voce–

The Lord speaking to each people in their own tongue has *way* more implications than we think it does.

I dreamed that there were these woodland spirits of great beauty.  They did not have children in the normal way.  Instead out of the banks of the rivers they dug the shapes of rough beings of clay.

Animated, these crude creatures stumbled through the forests breaking things.  They shambled.

The spirits them subjected them to great force and pressure.  If they did not shatter altogether, they condensed and purified, more and more, until they were as the woodland spirits.

Some AI prompts for futuristic space temples. The pictures are rough and the details are off, but they are not without glory.

The heating and cooling would be a cast iron son of a gun.  But beautiful.

I love the lower left just because of how strange it is.  The lower right one is different, but really works.

The implementation of the top isn’t quite right, but the lower right one has real potential.

Alien but familiar.

Note: these are not real.

I have a new take on the nameless virtue. (First nameless virtue post here).

Let’s look at something President Nelson said.

Discover the joy of daily repentance. Cut short your misery. He loves us especially when we repent.
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