The Native Cry of the Mockingbird

I was up late, and I dreamed, for reasons that are unclear, about a so-so sit-com, “How I Met Your Mother.”  (I’ve seen one episode.  I have a limited appreciation for hook-up humor these days.  Been there, done that.  Evidently it made more of an impact than I thought, though, as it showed up deep in sleep, where the dreamer is a god.  Shame.  Shame for dreaming in re-runs.)

After three hours of sleep I woke up in the dark to the sound of a mockingbird imitating sparrows and jays in rapid succession. 

Last Friday I swear I heard one imitating a car-alarm.

Strange bird, but not rara avis (the rare bird, which, by the way, is the term Juvenal uses to describe the black swan).  

The Mayans tell a tale in which the poor mockingbird hides in a hollow tree and sings for the rich cardinal’s daughter to justify her singing lessons taken from the blackbird.  It’s Cyrano de Bergerac.  It’s Singing in the Rain.

But the mockingbird as I know her really doesn’t work that way: the mockingbird steals a voice instead of giving a voice.  This fascinates me: now the big question is, what is the mockingbird’s native cry like?

She’s common, is the mockingbird, but wonderful, knowing the songs of all the birds in her zip-code.  A mimic.  Evolutionary biologists tell us that mimicry is a survival technique, masking one from predators, giving the illusion that one is part of a larger, more stable group.  

But this morning I woke from “How I Met Your Mother” dreams, and read until just before dawn, listening to Cyrano de Birdgerac speaking for the jays, wondering what the mockingbird says when the mockingbird is alone and has no-one to mimic and nobody there to listen.   I have sometimes wondered whether the mockingbird isn’t sure if it’s imitating itself or not.

I’m not sure I’d know the mockingbird’s native cry when I heard it: some truths you have to live with a while to recognize.

A bird has to keep some secrets for herself, no doubt.

"Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence"

Carl Sagan: The Spokesmodel For The Scientific MethodCarl Sagan is sometimes credited with coining the term.  He certainly deserves the credit for putting it on television and making it part of the American conversation about religion, aliens, Resurrections, Nostradamus, elves, and so on.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” saith the prophet.  ECREE, for short, in Internet debate.

Briefly, the idea here is that the way we sort out what is “real” and “true” is by experience.  Our experience (codified formally by science, but also privately in each human brain) arranges the world so that we know what is possible and probable and unlikely and impossible based on experience.

It is surely the case that we can make mistakes in determining the likelihood of a truth-claim. 

But in the human community, there are things that we agree upon: the habits of gravity and the properties of hydrogen, for instance, and the inadvisability of putting your cat in the microwave.

When someone makes a truth-claim that’s out of the ordinary, naturally, you can adapt it without critical comment.  The farther outside of the fields of what seems possible a thing is, the more difficult it is to reprogram our mental conceptions of the world.

A man who lives forever, or Fairy Giraffes With Butterly Wings, might well exist.  But it would take a considerable readjustment of what we mean by “reality” and “normal.”  And to adapt belief in such a thing represents therefore a tremendous intellectual commitment.

The concept has tremendous importance for Christian apologetics as well as other attempts to persuade people of things that leave slender or no traces in the material world. 

Story-Truth and Happening-Truth

One of the fun things about writing Riparian Church is that people who tend to read it are interested in keeping the “story-ness” of their lives while still trying to handle the “fact-ness” of life. 

That is, they want the structure and meaning that a life of faith in God (variously defined) gives, and the moral, ethical, psychological, and emotional benefits thereof; but they want to also be true to the-world-as-it-is and be as free as possible from the charge of having An Imaginary Friend.

I think therefore that many readers might be interested in the collision of discourses represented in Dan Kois’ review in Slate of John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s Lifespan of a Fact, a book that (Kois makes me think) I’d rather think about than read.  

It’s a book that doesn’t look like it would look well in the Kindle.  It reminds me a bit of Jacques Derrida’s Circumfession, in which the philosopher wrote his own memoir wreathed around by philosophical notes by a student collaborator.  It’s semi-fiction as dialogue, and, like so many dialogues today, it bears marks of self-hatred as well as hatred of the interlocutor.

Ah, well.  Maybe I can get it from the library: it’s more than I care to pay for.  But when story crashes into fact, I’m tensely and intensely interested.

Lee Strobel Fouls Out

I took an hour or two today to watch Lee Strobel’s “The Case For Faith.”

The Amazon reviews are typically full-throated exultations of the video’s power. 

I found it weirdly lacking in substance.

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Truth and Language

A poetic statement is designed to offer an invitation into, not a statement about, the writer’s internal state.

And in that sense it’s more like a religion or myth than it is like an “opinion.”

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Truthiness and Factiness and How We Speak

Some truths cannot be expressed in factual language without loss.

For example, if somebody tells you “My love is a red, red rose,” he is speaking of an unverifiable emotional experience and inviting you to share it through the power of evocative imagery, and of course faith.

When we use simile, we do the same thing: “Reading your blog is like sliding naked down a razor blade into a pool of lemon juice,” a comment that shows up in my mailbag with startling regularity.

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Truth & Experience: With A Name Like "McGurk," It's Got To Be Good

It's worth noting the enormous degree to which the mind makes the world, I think.   If one test-subject hears the word "Bah" in the McGurk test even when he sees a distinct dental action, he is running against the consensus of perceivers: but if all but one test-subject perceive the syllable as "Fah," who is "insane," or "delusional," or "hallucinating"?

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Knowing Things Are True: A Community Sport

So. “Truth” is the thing to which our statements about and perceptions of the world either do correspond or do not. They are rarely perfect, these statements of ours. But I would argue that what’s really interesting is what happens before we talk about truth when we are restlessly looking for the thing(s) in which we shall put our faith. If we are narrow (“senses, reason”), we will see only those things in the universe (and in ourselves) that are opaque to the senses and reason: if we are a little broader, we’ll be thinking about things like love,  and how what we really do know fits together and situates us in relation to other things.  No sense can teach you that.

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Untangling Cliche: "In Spirit & In Truth": The Samaritan Woman's Dialogue

I suppose it’s possible from all this to derive some sort of general statement about North Point Church and its practices, but I think that’s forcing scripture to grab its ankles.

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Fact & Truth

From The Mailbag:

What is the difference between “fact” and “truth”?

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