A blog is an imaginary conversation, & for this reclusive librarian such conversations are important. I like to imagine a bunch of Russians with nothing much to do sitting around a cramped apartment building, doing what they do best, talking. This is not that. My "Jesus thoughts", in comparison to more formal kinds of rhetoric (speeches, articles, academic papers), may be just a jumble of meandering undigested opinion-babble... but it's not formal in those professional ways, and isn't meant to be : it's just me talking, relating what's crossed my mind as I walked in to work this morning. Just keep visualizing that kitchen table, all right?
The brilliant pre-Renaissance thinker Nicolas Cusanus outlined how we inhabit a "conjectural world" - a human world constructed out of our conjectures about the truth. So I'm just sharing my own conjectures. I'd like to emulate that street vendor, the "carver of spoons", in one of Cusanus's dialogues, who reveals more wisdom than do his interlocutors, trained academicians.
In a NY Times article today (11.2.12), Alan Cowell reports the discovery of the bones of an heroic WW 2 "special agent" carrier pigeon, found in a chimney near Bletchley Park (site of British secret code-breaking during the war). The coded message, folded into a tiny red capsule attached to the pigeon's leg, has been sent to Britain's top-secret GCHQ intelligence office, for de-coding.
Thinking about this on the way to work, I received a slightly different signal from Pigeon 40TW194. The pigeon with the coded message, lost during the war after dying in a chimney, reminded me of the Logos (the word, the meaning, the order, the code) descending from heaven "in the form of a dove", and resting on the Messiah, the "Anointed", as he was baptized by John in the river Jordan. Consider a structuring code, a pre-existing Logos, framing the cosmos, delivered to Jesus, and through Jesus, absorbed into the Pentecostal "body of Christ" - the church : represented in the NT as the day of Pentecost, when the disciples, gathered in a "high room" in Antioch after Jesus's ascension, are suddenly filled with the fire of the Holy Ghost, and begin speaking and understanding each other multi-lingually, in a host of different languages. Here is the narrative representation of a prime moment - the global "decoding" of the signal.
I'm well aware that the message I'm delivering is just a far-fetched metaphor (Pigeon 40TW194 to Holy Ghost) - a symbol, a conjecture. But I like it.
p.s. In truth, my own poetry is heavily filtered through bird-signals. The entire plot of the massive long poem Forth of July is triggered by a mysterious Bluejay, yodeling in a backyard dogwood tree.
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