Title: The Jewish Annotated New Testament: New Revised Standard Version
Editors: Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Scripture
Year Published: 2011
Number of Pages: 637
Binding: Hardbound in signatures
ISBN13: 978-0-19-529770-6
Price: $35

In II Nephi 29 Nephi pauses in the midst of an apostrophe to future readers who will reject his words to remind them of their debt to the Jews.

4 But thus saith the Lord God: O fools, they shall have a Bible; and it shall proceed forth from the Jews, mine ancient covenant people. And what thank they the Jews for the Bible which they receive from them? Yea, what do the Gentiles mean? Do they remember the travails, and the labors, and the pains of the Jews, and their diligence unto me, in bringing forth salvation unto the Gentiles?
5 O ye Gentiles, have ye remembered the Jews, mine ancient covenant people? Nay; but ye have cursed them, and have hated them, and have not sought to recover them. But behold, I will return all these things upon your own heads; for I the Lord have not forgotten my people.
6 Thou fool, that shall say: A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible. Have ye obtained a Bible save it were by the Jews?

(2 Nephi 29:4 – 6)

Nephi’s connection between hating the Jews and closing the canon is deeply intriguing, especially since Nephi speaks harshly of the Jews, of their refusal to accept his father’s revelations, of their attempts to kill his father, so harshly that he refuses to teach his people “many things concerning the manner of the Jews; for their works were works of darkness, and their doings were doings of abominations” (II Nephi 25:2).

Perhaps Nephi wrote his words to the gentiles partly to remind himself–and maybe to remind Jacob, who had said the Savior would come to the Jews because he had to die and there was “none other nation on earth [so wicked] that [they] would crucify their God” (2 Nephi 10:3)–to tone down his rhetoric, to remind his people of the Lord’s covenant with the House of Israel, which is one thing Nephi means when he uses the term Jew: “I say Jew, because I mean them from whence I came” (2 Nephi 33:8).

(Taken together with I Nephi 5:14, where Lehi tells the family he has examined the brass plates and learned they are descendants of Joseph, this passage suggests Nephi came from a culture that didn’t distinguish between the tribes. Everyone is called Judah, the largest tribe that came back from Babylon. (Not every member of the 10 tribes was lost. See Philippians 3:5, Romans 11:1, and Acts 13:21). So when Nephi uses the term Jew he means the whole House of of Israel, everyone at Jerusalem.)

Browsing the remainder table at the BYU Bookstore one day I came across a book that helped fill in the picture of how developing and setting boundaries to the Christian canon was related to forgetting who preserved the word of God in the first place. The footnotes and commentary for Willis Barnstone’s translation The New Covenant, Vol I, The Gospels and Apocalypse, read like a guided tour of the rift that developed between Jews who accepted Yeshua as Mashiach and those who didn’t, a tour of how Christians forgot their Jewish roots as Yeshua ha maschiach became Iesous the Christos.

Barnstone is very careful to identify what he calls “the voice of Rome,” passages he believes came from a desire to de-emphasize Rome’s part in Yeshua’s execution. You can see clues of the threat the Romans felt from Yeshua in passages like Loukas 23:12, where Pilate and Herod find a common enemy in Yeshua, “Herod and Pilatus became friends on that same day, though earlier they had been enemies.” Maybe the clues are vestiges of things cut from the text, but Barnstone focuses more on things like the phrase “the Jews,” which along with the Greek _Iesous_ imply that Yeshua was not a Jew.

The Prushim and all the Jews will not eat unless they wash, hand against fist, so keeping the tradition of the elders, and eat nothing from the markets unless they wash. And they keep many other traditions about washing cups and pots and copper cauldrons.
(Markos 7:3)

His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed that Yeshua was the mashiah would be barred from the synagogue.
(Yohanan 9:22)

Or at least the passages distance us from Yeshua’s Jewishness. In the first passage the Jews are _they_, and in the second people to be afraid of. One of Barnstone’s projects with the translation is to restore Yeshua’s Jewish/Aramaic voice by using the Hebrew character and place names rather than Greek transl(iter)ations. That’s a valuable service, maybe as valuable as recovering the poetry. He says at one point that Yeshua as recorded by Mattai is one of the great world poets.

I think he overstates his argument at times. Consider this comment on Yohanan 9:28, the Prushim’s words to the man born blind:

And they reviled him and said, “You are his student, but we are Mosheh’s students.

“A reference to the superiority of Yeshua’s teaching over that of Moses and, by extension, of the New Covenant over the Jewish Bible” (340).

Or his comment on Apocalypse 3:9:

I know the blasphemy
of those who say they are Jews and are not
but come out of a synagogue of Satan.

“The demonization of the Jews in the gospels persists in Apocalypse” (317).

To me the passage is about hypocrisy, just as if you said, “those who say they are Mormons and are not, but do their sealings in the temple of Satan.” But the three words synagogue of Satan are so powerful that perhaps they overshadow the rest of the verse, which may be why the editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament address it in their preface, saying the notes propose that the phrase “is not against Jews at all, but is against Gentile followers of Jesus who promote Jewish practices” (xii).

Their note for John 9:28 reads:

This passage sets up a contrast between the disciples of Jesus and the disciples of Moses. There is no evidence, however, that Jews referred to themselves as disciples of Moses (178).

Generally, from what I’ve read so far, the commentary in The Jewish Annotated New Testament is milder than Barnstone’s, and perhaps a bit more cautious. I particularly like the editor’s comments about how the commentators contextualize some of the more volatile statements “by showing how they are part of the exaggerated language of debate during the first century” (xi). There are a lot of passages like Yohanan 9:28 where Barnstone attributes an intent to the text that I don’t see there. And that’s the value of Barnstone’s commentary, not in giving us insight into the original intent of the gospel writers, but as a guide to how the early Christians, the people who didn’t think of themselves as Jews, reinterpreted the incidents in Iesous-nee-Yeshua’s life to blame and villify the tradition the early Christians had sprang from, far from.

One of my projects during the next few years will be to trace the passages I think were reinterpreted, and it looks like The Jewish Annotated New Testament will be invaluable in giving a sense of what the text might have meant to those first messianic Jews before or maybe after they were first called Christians at Antioch (see Acts 11:26).

The two books are valuable correctives to each other. Barnstone works a lot with the idea that the texts of the New Covenant were altered to amplify “the voice of Rome.” He seeks to diminish that voice. His work with resonate with Latter-day Saints who want to think about what Joseph Smith might have meant with his comment about corrupt and designing priests altering the scriptures.

The Jewish Annotated New Testament approaches the matter somewhat differently. My oldest son said, “Oh, giving cultural context?” when I mentioned the book to him, but others have given a puzzled or apprehensive look that says, ‘Jews don’t believe in Jesus. Is this a book that challenges our belief in his divinity and miracles?’

One can imagine the editors getting the same kinds of quizzical looks. “Many Jews are unfamiliar with, or even afraid of reading, the New Testament” (xii).

When I introduced the book to my Gospel Doctrine class at the nursing home I told the story of Chaim Potok coming to BYU in the early 1980s. Someone asked him the ritual question, “Have you read the Book of Mormon?” (He had been discussing his concept of the core-to-core culture confrontation, and the Book of Mormon is the core of our culture.)

He said he had a copy but hadn’t read it, because Jews read with a commentary and there wasn’t a commentary to guide his reading. The editors of The Jewish Annotated New Testament confirm that practice. The next sentence after the one I quoted above says, “Its content and genres are foreign, and they need notes to guide their reading.”

So the book gives Jews the tools to understand the New Testament and Christians the tools to understand the care and scholarship Jews bring to their study of scripture, including maps, charts, sidebar essays, diagrams, tables, glossary, cross references to Talmudic and other sources, index and nearly 200 pages of essays, starting with “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made About Early Judaism,” and including “Paul and Judaism,” “Food and Fellowship,” and “Josephus.”

The editors assure us they are not trying to convert Christians to Judaism, or Jews to Christianity–”It is very possible for the non-Christian to respect a great deal of the (very Jewish) message of much of the New Testament, without worshipping the messenger.”

That word respect is important to the editors: “As professional scholars, the authors of the annotations and essays approach the text with the respect that all religious texts deserve” (xii).

I’ll close with just two insights here. We all realize that John quotes the opening of Genesis in his gospel, but listen to the comment about Matthew’s opening: “Genealogy, Gk ‘geneseos,’ perhaps an allusion to the book of Genesis” (3).

And Luke 2:7 (since I got the book just before Christmas): “_Manger_ feeding trough; the symbolism anticipates the Last Supper (22.19). _Inn_, Luke gives no indication residents rejected the family; there may have been no room for the privacy needed for the birth” (101).

If Barnstone’s translation is the work of a scholar/poet thinking to thank the Jews, to calculate the debt we gentiles owe in gratitude, Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler and their editors’ work is thinking to thank the Jews for.

If that’s his question, I think it’s a good one.

Tyler quotes the following from Casualene’s editor’s policy (as published in 2009—perhaps she’s somewhere else in her thinking now):

The task, then, of the poetry editor for BYU Studies is to try to discern among all the poems received which are the stronger, and even the strongest, and recommend them for prizes and publication.

During my hot-dogging days as a novice poet, a contestant for poetry’s laurels, a poetry editor and a managing and then founding editor of a literary journal, I cherished similar ideas about my roles.  Nowadays, however, I hear disquieting undertones in the close parallels Casualene draws between judging whether or not a poem is publishable and the ranking of strength and intelligences.

For one thing, applying a strength-and-intelligence quality scale to poetry (or any language) runs risks of reducing it to another consumer product—a thing—whose quality is judged by how effectively (”strongly,” “intelligently”) it meets my consuming needs (“healing,” “nourishment,” “pleasure,” etc.). Some poetry is only or mostly a consumer product (“Ach der lieber! Sick you are? Hope you soon feel wunderbar!”), and some language does abide in the get-it-done, “thing to use,” tool or product marketplace of communication (“I’d like two, chocolate Oreo shakes, please,” “Somebody call 911!”).  But much of human expression is a relational act (i.e. an act of reaching for relation, of forging relation) in the unbounded exchange of connection.  Usefulness scales don’t work in this highly charged and often unmanageable flow of energetic “getting across to”—or if I do apply valuation scales there, they whittle relation down to the means by which I get what I want, and only that. I may be more or less well intentioned in using a poem’s language to get what I think I want and need.  But instead of being caught up in encounter with another and with the world as expressed in what might possibly be the writer’s very best language, instead I’m beating the poem into a tool or assortment of instruments to use to my liking or advantage. In the strength-and-intelligence scale of poetic quality, the strongest poetry becomes the “most effective thing I use” to get nourishment, healing, or whatever I crave.  Bad poetry is poetry that doesn’t do anything for me or doesn’t do what I insist it should.  It doesn’t support me.

For another thing, the strong-stronger-strongest valuation scale casually orders the strength or intelligence of poetry readers, too.  If I, as a reader, like and seek out “middlebrow” verse like that of Longfellow and Benet, but not Milton or Goethe, whom some might consider “highbrow,” then may I be presumed less strong or less intelligent?

Younger poet-and-editor me used to think so. It took my becoming the mother of a child whose brain a clever virus rendered “severely disabled” to shed excesses of luxury living from my beliefs about what made for strength and intelligence.  And speaking of discerning, I began also to discern shadows in my valuations of others’ words—specifically, my indulgence in valuation’s dark, down-scale side, devaluation.  Yes, I, too, admired poems on the basis of how well they supported my needs and positions—whether or not they provided me “a portion of their power and virtue,” gave me healing, nourishment, or pleasure, as Casualene’s essay says they ought to do. I ignored or cast them aside if they didn’t tickle my strength-and-intelligence fancy. And there also lurked in my thinking the jaundiced implication that what I valued as strong and intelligent was strong and intelligent by virtue of my thinking it so.  Education failed to take the edge off that particular old circular saw.

But since those early, high-minded days, and in the wake of my daughter’s birth and nearly two decades of caring for and seeking to get across to her, my editorial stance has shifted. Certainly I see the historical and cultural importance of the diversity of artistic language that literary journals provide for. And I get that a wide variety of lit journals come and go, and that while they’re around, I can choose as I see fit and avoid contact with verse that doesn’t do it for me.  And yes, I believe that some language is more fertile and recombinant than other language is. In fact, some poetry knocks me silly with desire: Oh oh oh, I want to have your poetical baby! But, nowadays, I accept a lot more responsibility for my depth of response to poetry of all rhetorical walks of life rather than place the whole burden for proof of fitness squarely on the work at hand as if I were a football coach assembling a winning team: “You, you and you—you’re strong and intelligent, you make the editorial cut.  The rest of you—consider taking vows of silence.”

In his book, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature, John D. Niles quotes Walter Ong’s observation that calling people “illiterate” “… suggests that persons belonging to the class it designates are deviants, defined by something they lack” (Niles, 1999:23).  Ong and Niles’ interest in the use of the term “illiterate” relates to their studies of oral literature, where historical and modern populations not considered educated have developed sophisticated performance (oral) literature.  Of course, Casualene’s 2009 BYU Studies essay doesn’t call anybody illiterate.  But can we discern in a critical position that assesses poetry and its readers according to a value scale tied to “intelligence” and “strength” a similar, lower-down-on-the-yardstick marking out of writers and readers on the basis of what they’re thought to be lacking or unable to serve up? If so, this is, perhaps, an haute monde position, one that elevates itself at the expense of other meaningful narrative strains. In the past, as an editor, I was complicit in this stratification of language.  As a mother, I’ve faced off against strength and intelligence models applied against any idea of my daughter’s being a viable expression of human potential.  But wow!  How that severely developmentally delayed child, as the cognoscenti pronounced her, has rocked my world.

Nowadays, I consider language more than an instrument shaped for getting yummy ant-crunch out of a log, or a hem out of which I may absorb healing, or a commodity suited to sorting based upon its perceived value, usefulness, or ability (or inability) to meet my needs.  Language can be and do those things (or fail to do them), but it’s also up to so much more.  And no, I don’t think that language is inherently ineffectual.  And I no longer believe language a broken artifact of our fallen state.

In Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans, Derek Bickerton reflects upon Darwin’s intuition about how people got smart.

Darwin knew a century and a half ago that the Encyclopaedia had it backward—that it wasn’t a “highly developed brain” that gave us language …  and abstract thought, but language that gave us abstract thought and a highly developed brain.  “If it be maintained that certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction etc., are peculiar to man, it may well be that these are incidental results of other highly advanced intellectual faculties, and these again are mainly the result of the continued use of a highly developed language” (Bickerton, 2009:5).

Setting aside the valuation phrases in the last sentence (“Highly advanced,” “highly developed”—yeah, compared to what? At this stage, we may be two-left-footed novices in the unfolding dance of brain and words), I find Bickerton’s point that language gives rise to what we call intelligence compelling.  And I’m also thinking that being too choosy about which language rates as artistically strong or intelligent or nourishing could well create and perpetuate poverties of expression.  And yes, I’m beginning to think the word “intelligent” in such qualitative and/or quantitative statements problematic, believing language that gives rise to connection and relationship more creative at its soul and less self-congratulatory.

So circumscribing the scope of what’s artistically viable—designating exclusively what’s “strong” or “intelligent”—might therefore be pretty risky business and result in all kinds of unintentional effects, including the snubbing of undiscerned beauty, the nailing shut of doors opening upon the possible, or the dousing of never-before-seen creative fire.  Rhetorical diversity could turn out to be as important as bio-diversity; perhaps it is a form of bio-diversity.  Human language might just be taking the human brain with it as it trips along to its next best expression, and the transforming human brain in turn might be giving rise to new movements in language.  As I hazard to say in my essay “Embrace the Pure Life” (Parts one, two, three, and four), in a dance of symbiosis, human “intelligence”—however it expresses in the diversity of minds on this planet—in turn dips and spins language, creating newer and more intimate and daring steps.

So increasingly, I’m thinking that, rather than imposing my pet valuation scale on the developing and actually quite sensitive realm of human expression, as an editor (of an admittedly marginal publication venue), I ought to be at least as creative and attentive in my response to the language others bring to me as I try to be to the world when I write poetry about it, or even as engaged as I am in my care-giving to my special needs daughter.  Rather than deciding this poem or that one worthy of continued life through publication and these ones non-viable, I’ve found myself leaning more toward a questioning stance in my editing: “What is going on in this person’s language?  What does he/she mean when he/she uses this word this way?  What does this person’s way of wording him- or herself tell me about language’s nature in general?  Is there something I can do, as an editor, to help this poem speak?”  “Is there something I’m not seeing?”

Increasingly, editing, for me, has become an act of engagement and exchange rather than a culling of the herd to advance my latest idea of what defines its fittest—i.e., its most utile—members. I’m glad that the internet provides boundless space so that I can experiment with breadth of inclusiveness.  Arguably, print journals face greater restrictions.

But, hm, even were I editor of a print journal, nowadays, I’d shuffle to find a way to discern and then publish something of the spectrum of language rising in a culture striving for words to get itself across—its wild blue asters, its violets, even its yellow dandelions, as well as its black orchids, blue roses, and Pot of Gold lilies.  A spectrum, rather than the upper quarter or third of a scale.  I keep sayin’, language is trying to do stuff to and with us, folks. If we can resist the urge, let’s try not to be too hasty to fix in mind what we suppose to be its most valuable assets. We people—Mormons included—are just beginning to find our tongues. I’m very interested in hearing what questions roll off those tongues.  And if we could possibly scroll back on treating language as if words are only a set of instruments that we use to reach the loftiest heights of what we want or need, that might just open us up to greater depths of real connection. The wowza of losing myself in the not-me, be that not-me God, the extraordinary soul of a fellow human, another creature, or spiritual or natural environs—that moment of becoming and becoming bound up in “being with” that in acts of cosmic anarchy blows up dams containing my notions of what I think is or what I think I want and need—that power flashfloods and dissolves, in sudden and unlooked-for moments, the bounds of the heavens.  As perhaps the Tower of Babel story illustrates for us rather strikingly, those heavens are unreachable through even the most determined and elaborate tooling.

Our same, instrumentality-based relationship with the physical environment bought us a load of trouble. Why do we imagine that it’ll work any better in the equally sensitive realm of human expression?

Oh, and, if this is just another Zeppelin of pretension, roll out the dogfighters and shoot me down—please.
_____________________________________________________________________

Notes

1.    Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How
Language Made Humans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009).
2.    John D. Niles, Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

Mormon Artist Magazine Literature editor and fellow AMVer Katherine Morris suggested I post here at AMV questions and answers cut from the interview.   So, for your reading pleasure:

There also seems to be an underlying theme of agency in your writing: “[I]t enables those who read or hear it to create choices for themselves”. How does the concept of agency inform your writing?

The “It” here refers to “sustainable language.”  Sustainable language is creative, proactive, productive language that effectively sparks others to create their own risk-choice spectrums and generate possibilities for themselves.  It’s the language of life. Sustainable language goes out on its faith in others’ creativity, creative drive being a far more commonplace phenomenon in all levels of society than is popularly supposed. Good language—sustainable language—allows for that creativity and invigorates human agency.

Bad language runs the other way.  Through fear, guilt, shame, and other devices of control it prods people in the direction it wants them to go, dismissing agency as counterproductive and undependable.

I believe language and human agency to be intimately bound up together. I depend on readers’ native creativity and tendency to exercise choice to make something meaningful for themselves (within reason) of the words I put out there.  The question of language—what it is and what it does to and for us—lies at the heart of my novel The Pictograph Murders.  At a critical moment the protagonist catches wind of a key element of the villain’s philosophy—he “perceived himself as having the power, and so he could make things mean what he wanted them to”—a version of the might makes right stance, which shows as clearly in rhetorical acts as it does in physical ones.

What role does religious symbolism play in The Pictograph Murders?

I think what symbolism comes across depends on what symbolism readers bring to the story.  Since The Pictograph Murders seems to sell in a steady trickle in non-LDS bookstores on the tourist circuit here in southeastern Utah, like the local museum gift shop where people visit from all over the world, readers may well find a wider range of symbolic elements in the book than I can anticipate. To my thinking, that’s perfect.  My hope is that even readers who distrust religious symbolism will find archetypal appeal in the story’s spiritual elements.

When I read your essays/posts on language, I feel your gentle urging for awareness and watchfulness in the use of language.  In “The Downstream Principle” your concern is with the rhetoric of those with two different perspectives on the use of a canyon. “But given the weighty importance of what I don’t know about this place, I’m cleaning up my language”. Could people be substituted for place and what suggestions do you have for cleaning up language?

“Could ‘people’ be substituted for ‘place’?”  Yes.  Practices that result in exploitation and manipulation of or damage to the natural environment or that display carelessness or unawareness are only extensions of our behavior in the human environment. In other words, if I’m doing it to nature, I’m doing it to people, too, at one level or another.  I don’t think we can improve our behavior in the natural sector without improving behavior in the human one. I said earlier that spirituality is a quality of character, not of place, and so carries across in person from home to church to field to canyon.  Furthermore, human language now exerts tremendous influence upon the world. It creates experience for others and can affect them powerfully, for good or for ill, with some effects extending beyond sight. That suggests that how I behave in language is a deeply spiritual concern.

Characteristics of human language make it a wilderness in its own right, chock full of wild beauty and miraculous realms where fabulous adventures unfold and heroes and villains choose their parts.  It contains a wealth of cultural and natural resources. Whenever I act to clean up my language, I examine it for unfortunate or wrongful intent, looking for evidence that I’ve relied on anger, fear, guilt, etc. to assert myself.  I also look for shortsightedness.  To me, the question of bad language reaches beyond what’s commonly considered off-colored or offensive—it goes to usual words thought clean as a whistle that are spoken in common conversations but carry the interest to control, exploit, or harm.

But really, my hope for my language is not just to clean it up but to find ways to apply the common dictum many outdoor websites and camping brochures contain: Leave the environment better than it was when you found it.

What do you listen for when you listen to Conference?

A couple of years ago I started looking for book references and quotations in Conference talks, and I’ve compiled lists after each General Conference. I also started looking for new terms used, trying to catch the next Standing for Something or Lengthen Your Stride. I try to incorporate the terms I find in the Mormon Terms project.

Of course, there is also a lot to look at in the content of Conference addresses. I know that they are indexed and organized by subject, and General Authorities each have their own styles, but I’d be interested to know if the addresses could also be categorized by some kind of sub-genres. I may try to look for that this time.

So, What things do you listen for when you listen to Conference?

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This is not my review of Elna Baker’s new book. This is an accident. I read her first chapter then nine minutes later gave birth to a healthy essay. This sort of thing can happen, even with virginal New York Mormons like Elna. I promise I will do whatever it takes — count to 100 by sevens, whatever — to keep from conceiving an essay per chapter. If all goes well, you will not hear from us again until her book’s estimated due date, October 15.

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The first “chapter” (it’s not called a chapter, yet that’s what I’m calling it) of The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance is stage-setting, it’s an introduction — she hasn’t brought out the funny yet (though it’s funny), she hasn’t brought out the memoir yet (though it’s memoiric) — she’s setting the stage, she’s introducing us to her life’s dramatic conventions. She’s world-building.

Yet in these first 22 pages of her new memoir, Elna Baker carves out a rhetorical space for herself by discussing how she has carved space for herself in the real world. She is ”A Mormon in New York.”

Imagine a Venn diagram — but not one of those boring static ones we see all the time. This one’s different. At first, the circles nearly overlap, but slowly slowly they move apart until they meet at one point only, the point on which Elna stands. From the title of the “chapter” you may imagine I’m about to have you label the circles “New Yorker” and “Mormon” (as if they were two separate worlds). But don’t imagine that because that would be wrong. Although don’t feel bad! Because, you see, we have two separate Venn diagrams, one for New Yorkers and one for Mormons (as if those two groups were so absolutely separate) (though some might think so).

The two circles in each moving diagram represent “unlimited possibility” and “reality,” and the shift from being nearly overlapping to nearly separate represents the process we go through of moving from one to the other. That state in-between, which the Germans, (joke ahead), call Weltinnerschnitzelrealititz.

(Although the dynamic Venn diagram is mine, you should know that I’m taking most of this stuff [including the German] straight from page seven, when Elna first arrives in New York. She knows nothing and no one: “For another twenty minutes . . . anything was possible: my dorm room and my roommate could be anyone and anything I imagined. But twenty minutes later they’d be whatever they were.” That moment before reality, before, for instance, we read chapter one of a new book, the spine cracking as we open the pages for the first time, the moment of unlimited possibility.)

You can stop imaging now because I’m going to show you my diagram. It’s labeled using terminology that clearly demonstrates what side of the NY/M divide I’m on. (Hint: I’ve never been to the largest city on the east coast.) Behold! how the Gentile Reader and the Saint Reader move from unlimited possibility (which, let’s be honest, means “just like me”) to a single possible person: Elna.

Because you are wise, you will notice that the Saints are the first to be disabused of the notion of “I am just like Elna.”

She begins with talking about her doubts and uncertainties and her dislikes of Mormonism. And not until those are well established does she return to issues of faith and believing and liking, where she is firm but succinct.

So, question begged, why does she structure her opening this way?

A few of her possible thought processes:

1. Crassly commercial. I can sell a lot more copies to America than to Mormon America. Count and you’ll see. They outnumber us 60 to 1.
2. Nose thumbery. Screw you crummy Mormons for giving up halfway through the first chapter! I don’t need you anyway!
3. Saints will be saintly. I can trust my fellow Saints to stick with me through the wobbling, but if I don’t wobble first, other readers will write me off as a wacko and never listen to what I have to say.
4. Redefinition route. C’mon, people. There must needs opposition in all things. Without doubt there cannot be faith! Mortality’s a process for heaven’s sake! Or, more accurately, for my sake, your sake, our sakes. Let’s not fear doubt. It’s part of our whole religious package!
5. Religious people aren’t crazy. Well, some are. But not me. Because I see that religion is crazy. Crazy! But it’s like in Catch-22: if you think you’re crazy, you aren’t. Ergo, because I recognize that religion’s crazy, I must not be crazy. QED. Read my book knowing you are in the hands of a sane person.

And it’ll be nice to know she’s sane, because Elna doesn’t skimp on crazy doctrines (becoming a god will have to wait for a later chapter, but here’s an early taste):

. . . having a strong connection with God did not stop me from questioning my faith every ten seconds. Mormonism can sound pretty far-fetched: Joseph Smith digs up golden plates and translates them into a book, The Book of Mormon. This book ends up being a history of the ancestors of the Native Americans, who originated in Jerusalem and believed in Jesus.

When you write it all out like that you can’t help but reconsider. (9)

But when you Elna read closer, you’ll notice that for all her seeming apologies, she never candy coats Mormon doctrine with some tasty intellectualism. She doesn’t follow the above with Welllll, but they were probably only one source of Native American ancestry or Welllll, but you know the Aztecs were looking for a white god so obviously or anything else as apologetic as an apologist. She just says what we think and leaves it alone. She’s inviting the uninitiated to raise their eyebrows and walk away.

My defenses are up because I want her to be like ME I want her to be MY kind of Mormon. And most Mormons will feel the same. But that’s not a reasonable thing for us to feel, and no one will argue that more strenuously than myself. One of the paradoxes of Mormonism is that while we may be rigid and hierarchical, we have exquisite leeway in how we are allowed interpret what it is to be Mormon, what it means to lead a Mormon life. So it’s okay that it’s not possible for Elna to make all of us (or even most of us) happy. (It just feels like she should because she’s doing it on a stage. A literal stage.)

But Elna’s savvy. She recognizes the paradoxes working within her and she’s creating a framework the rest of the book can fit into. If her rhetorical posturing is successful now, she’ll never need to explain the big issues that inform every scene and every line of dialogue through the rest of the book. Because now the reader is Mormon. (Or at least an Elna Mormon.) Now the reader is a New Yorker. (Or at least an Elnayorker.) Because no matter our New Yorker / Mormon / Neither status, we do share something called humanity.

But while, for centuries, nonNew Yorkers have been trained in feeling New Yorkish, nonMormons have very little experience in feeling Mormonish. And so when you meet one, “every question is about whether [Mormons are] polygamist[s].”

Mormons are known for saying no. No sex, no drugs, no alcohol, and no caffeine. NO.

And this whole “saying no” philosophy makes me seem like a very boring person. But I’m not boring because while I say no to certain things (sex, drugs, alcohol), I try to say yes to everything else. I honestly believe there’s a certain power behind the word YES. (18)

Demonstration of YES is where we are now taken and what the themes of this “chapter” is ultimately proven to be. Elna demonstrates through joyous actions the pleasure and happiness to be found in living a life of YES and she makes us want to say YES as well. Her enthusiasm is infectious and whether you are a New Yorker who snorts at Jesus or a Mormon who squeals at dildoes (you’ll have to read the book), by the end of page 22, as you stand in the corner of the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance with Elna and her “too many cookies and a notebook” watching “a thirty-five-year-old man — definitely a virgin — dressed in a duck costume doing the electric slide” you will pray, with her, “God, there has to be another way.”

YES.

Author(s): Melissa G. Moore with M. Bridget Cook
Publisher: Self-published through Cedar Fort, Inc. (Springville, UT)
Release date: 8 September 2009

I. Speaking the Truth

I must begin this review essay, which I had great difficulty writing (for reasons that I hope become clear in my rhetorical wanderings), with a series of caveats, beginning here: I make no claims to represent the literary conscience of America or, for that matter, of Mormo-America—neither do I feel the need to make such claims, simply because I don’t believe I represent the mainstream American/Mormo-American literary consciousness or even, perhaps, that there is such a mainstream way of reading and thinking about the world. As a poet first, I’m attracted to language that, among other things, is lyrical, visceral, and deeply honest to human experience; that draws me toward deeper connection with my inner self/ves, with others, and with God. In short, I like words and combinations of words that cut to the quick, that don’t simply affirm my version of reality (though sometimes that’s nice, too), but that disrupt it, that persuade me to reevaluate what I know—or think I know—about myself and the moral universe I inhabit.

While this union of disruption and connection might seem contradictory, I believe that connecting with our deepest selves and with others, including God, requires a constant reappraisal of where we stand in relation to them. And that’s one thing literature does: in the words of Mormon poet-critic Karl Keller, as an “essentially anarchic, rebellious, shocking, analytical, critical, deviant, absurd, subversive, destructive” rhetorical force, literature “attempts to destroy institutions; it challenges individual settled faith; it will disrupt all life.” For this reason, Keller continues (and I echo his confession), “I have to admit that I hate starting the study of a new novel, a new poem, or a new play, because I know that one or another of my religious/moral/intellectual assumptions may be questioned, challenged, disproved, destroyed. To read sensitively is to come under serious attack. In wrestling with each new work of literature […], I have to shift the grounds of my belief, and I find this painful but productive” because, though it’s essentially “faith-destroying, not faith-promoting, […] the destruction of flabby assumptions is nonetheless a strengthening process” (20). Disruption, then, can ultimately lead to a more grounded, though paradoxically dynamic, sense of self and to deeper connection with and understanding of the universe.

And that’s one reason I keep reading and one reason, I think, why writing this review has proved more difficult than I anticipated when I first found a review copy of Melissa G. Moore’s memoir Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter in my inbox—because writing, a sister process to reading, is just as disruptive a force. Like reading, to borrow from Keller, it prompts “self-examination/world-examination/existence-examination, the search for self, the persistence amid discovered meaninglessness, a ‘destructive’ reexamination of the grounds of one’s own belief.” And like the reader, the writer should be “constantly reexamining his [or her] faith and learning where it is insubstantial and superficial” in order to create a properly disruptive, compelling, and spiritually real experience for readers (21). The specific challenge for writers in this arises in the notion that to speak the truth of experience—and to speak it well, as readers expect them to—requires more than mere self- or world- or existence-examination. It takes real rhetorical effort, including responsibility to the truth of one’s experience, to one’s audience, and to language itself.

In terms of my experience with Shattered Silence, I’ve tried to hold myself accountable to these rhetorical principles by keeping myself open to the truth of Moore’s experience as daughter of Keith Jesperson, a.k.a. the Happy Face Killer; to find or create spaces where shared language (or the approximation thereof) might open opportunities for me to connect to and reconcile my words with the realities of her sometimes grisly world. This has been no easy prospect since, first, I’m not female and I’ll never really know what it’s like to be one (though that doesn’t keep me from trying to understand); and second, the only experience I’ve had with serial killers has come through the movies or episodes of CSI and Criminal Minds. Nonetheless, I consider myself a willing learner and I’ve hoped I could meet Moore on some common rhetorical ground so she could show me, in a manner of speaking, how the other side lives.

Through this process, I’ve also thought a great deal about the desires, needs, and intellectual/rhetorical demands of my audience here at AMV and, by extension, Moore’s potential readers, wondering with what critical/rhetorical focus and what language I might best honor Moore’s intent (she is, after all, part of my audience and I feel some responsibility to her and her words); the complexity of her psychological landscape; and the intellectual, psychological, and rhetorical demands her narrative might make (or fail to make, as the case may be) on that audience.

Now, caveats (perhaps too) thoroughly expressed, time to dive into Moore’s text.

II. Living Unpleasant Realities

In the opening scene of Shattered Silence, Moore describes a moment of violence from her childhood that characterizes the “unpleasant realities” of her life as daughter of an abused and emotionally abusive father turned serial killer (231). Narrating for her younger self, Moore begins, “August of 1983: I squinted into the bright blue morning sky and couldn’t help the shudder that rippled through my little body” (1). But at just five-years-old, she’d shrugged off this foreboding sense that danger was on the horizon (Moore’s older self calls these impressions “knowings”) because, in her words, “It was a lovely day, and I had a secret” (1): a barnyard home built on respect and compassion in which she was partnered with a stray mother cat in the nurturing of four kittens to independence.

But her secret was shattered when one kitten was drawn from her small circle of security by her father’s taunting call: “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty! […] I won’t hurt you. I promise.” Moore reflects, “At that moment, I wanted desperately to believe that promise. But I had heard it before. It was not a real promise, it was a lie. It was a lie every single time” (3). As the child begged for her kittens’ release, her father gathered them from her helpless grasp, took them to the clothesline, and, in a moment of appalling cruelty, hung each body, biting and scratching, with a clothespin fixed to the scruff of each neck. Running for her mother’s help, little Melissa replayed memories of her father’s violence toward cats—memories that recalled the deep hurt and pain afresh. But she found no willing partner in her mother, who simply pulled from her daughter’s grip, and, blank-eyed, “turned back to folding the laundry into neat little piles and neat little rows” (5), a manifestation of her efforts to create some order in her otherwise unstable existence as an emotionally and mentally battered wife.

Moore returns to and analogizes this moment later in her memoir when she relates how, as a teenager, after being raped by her boyfriend and realizing she was pregnant, she wondered whether abortion was the answer. Her boyfriend’s family, she says, would have paid for the procedure. But she was looking for support beyond financial, for some human connection that could whisk her away from past abuses and mistakes—a relationship that could save her from herself and her father’s crippling influence. In short, she confesses, she wanted “a knight in shining armor—someone to slay my dragons and allay my fears. Someone to fix everything and make it all right” (155). Yet, she continues, in Sean (her boyfriend’s pseudonym) “[n]o knight had come. There was no soldier to fight my battles, slay my dragons, kiss away my fears, and chase the demons away from inside my mind” (155-6). She was alone, in her words, “[l]ike my baby kittens on the clothesline, […] suspended in mid-air, beaten back by life” (156).

So drawing this connection between her father’s violence, the deformative power it had over her development, and the string of unpleasant realities from which her life was hung—broken familial bonds, neglect, abuse, rape, teenage pregnancy, and more—Moore points to her own perpetuation of the attitude of non-action, fear, bitterness, and blame that enabled her passive engagement in the intergenerational cycle of abuse. And as becomes clear in her memoir: it took many years, much grief and pain, and maturity born of deep introspection before she could bear this cross, which had somehow fallen to her, in hope.

III. To Pretend Someone Else Did It; or Giving the Devil His Due¹

I trace strains of the helpless and blame-riddled attitude Moore had developed and the rhetoric derived from it directly through her father’s pointing finger. In his own voyeuristic engagement with his past, as found in Jack Olsen’s journalistic and disturbingly vivid “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer,² Jesperson repeatedly casts himself in the “self-designated role as habitual victim” (124), passing the buck for his violence to his father, an alcoholic who verbally and physically abused his kids and who in turn blamed his behavior on the “might makes right” culture of his upbringing (Moore 224); the women he killed, who had just used him, he says, for sex or drugs, a ride across country or money; his ex-wife, because he hadn’t been ready to marry, but did anyway and thus, in a sense, gave up his freedom and his personal potential; his peers, siblings included, who brutalized and taunted him throughout his troubled youth; also his ex-girlfriend, the justice system, his penis, the devil—any person (or part thereof), social system, or religious idea that he feels slighted his good-natured soul. Yet, he even denies himself the prospect of this essentially pure nature when he comments that, from an early age, he was possessed of two selves: “Mr. Nice Guy and the demon” (Olsen 26), the one to whom he attributes (or on whom he blames, as the case may be) his essentially human acts of kindness, the other on whom he blames his grotesque acts of violence.

In his more honest moments he does come close to shouldering the blame for murdering eight women—close, but not quite. Discussing his first kill, he admits that the act “had come straight from my fantasies” (17), a near confession that, in the end, only buffers him from the weight of conscience because the moments surrounding the murder were essentially like moving through a fantasy, an elaborate dream: the place where the subconscious subverts the conscious mind, where we can’t really be held responsible for what we think or do. He further justifies this blame-bending charade by observing that “I tried to forget the details of what I’d done, to pretend someone else did it” (17). Just as we often forget the details of dreams, painting them in broad strokes on the walls of memory as we move beyond the pretense of fantasy into and through consciousness, here Jesperson works to slough off his reality for a more favorable lie, one that he rationalized further when he learned that two drifters had claimed responsibility for his crime, which, in his words, thus “wasn’t my problem anymore” (18). He’d found a pair of willing scapegoats and absolved himself of guilt as he watched them bear his wrongdoing across the public stage into prison.

When he finally began taking responsibility for the murders, it was in taunting jabs leveled at law enforcement officials in graffiti penned on public restroom walls and in letters to newspapers he felt needed to be corrected because they had some details of the killings wrong. His words were thus meant more to stroke his own ego than to actually bear responsibility for his actions and their influence on the world, including on those he claims he cared for most: his children. Indeed, in his imitation and escalation of the violence of his past—developing from an abused boy and young man to an arsonist and a torturer of animals to a defiler and serial killer of women³—he propagated the culture of bitterness, blame, and brutality he had once despised, passing a ruinous and soul-numbing legacy to his posterity because he continually gave control of his life to forces of fear, manipulation, and blame. His choices thus precluded the possibility of influencing his family line for good.

And while I’m perfectly willing to admit that Jesperson’s brutalized past, punctuated with some degree of mental illness, may have severely restricted his freedom to choose, each matter of abuse and murder ultimately hinged on his decisions. In other words, as much as trouble came rushing to meet him as a result of his past, he ultimately chose to tackle it headlong in the middle, fists of desire ablaze.

IV. Metabolizing Blame, Shattering Silence

Born into such a caustic family culture and conditioned early on with and into its finger-pointing and violence-enabling mentality, Moore was destined to fill her parents’ roles as enablers and “habitual victim[s],” to pass this destructive legacy on to the next generation in her family line. That is, she likely would have fulfilled such a role if she hadn’t listened to the series of preternatural “knowings” (1)—still small promptings—that led her away from her father’s influence, that inspired her to reach for something more, and that helped her mature into a woman with strength enough to metabolize this culture of violence and blame by: 1) establishing a support system for herself outside the home, including the building of positive friendships (one of which led to a healthy marriage) and religious affiliation (she joined the LDS Church in her early twenties, though she seems to have been spiritually sensitive from childhood and had fellowshipped with other faiths through her teens); 2) by educating herself in ways to overcome the negative influence of her past; and 3) by choosing to educate others in these possibilities for encouragement and developing the will to overcome.

Moore’s actions in this regard—from heeding the nudges of conscience and instinct despite not understanding why, to forging new friendships and institutional affiliations meant to facilitate sustainable personal and cultural change—illustrate the moral courage required to stand against and ultimately to absorb injustice at any level, including the familial: the relational space we are most intimately acquainted with and thus most vulnerable in. Of those who exercise such courage, the late Carlfred Broderick, renowned Mormon psychologist, family therapist, and marriage and family scholar, observes, “Although [… some] children may suffer innocently as victims of violence, neglect, and exploitation, through the grace of God some find the strength to ‘metabolize’ the poison within themselves, refusing to pass it on to future generations” (38). Elsewhere he calls these individuals “transitional character[s]” because they change “the entire course of a lineage” “in a single generation, […] filter[ing] the destructiveness out” of the family line “so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives” (qtd. in Tanner).

Moore observes of this metabolizing process, especially as it relates to the transitional work she’s undertaken in her life and which she means to represent rhetorically in her memoir, that “[i]n order to keep atrocities from happening [at any level], we must learn” from the violence of our collective past; and such personal and cultural education begins, she suggests, with individuals who have “enough courage to shatter the silence” of injustice and violence and to share with others what they’ve learned in their confrontations with “the darkest side” of humanity. Only then, she concludes, “[o]nce we acknowledge [… this darkness] and refuse to sweep it under the carpet,” can we fully overcome our personal and cultural victimhood and live fully in the light (223-4).

V. Having Survived To Tell the Story

Despite these heady claims for shattering the silence imposed on her as a victim of intergenerational violence and her life as daughter of a serial killer—perhaps, even, because of them and the challenge of negotiating complex psychological terrain in a vehicle of words—Moore’s memoir suffers from a tragic rhetorical flaw: while the writing is earnest and offered to readers over the altar of good intentions, there are times when it barely manages to convey more than the tone of a personal diary. The text is very loosely-written (to the point that it could use an extra series of revisions), riddled with grammar, usage, and unjustified time-jumping issues and inconsistent analogies that ultimately undermine her attempts to craft a more affective, universally compelling, and silence shattering narrative, something I believe her unique experience demands, especially when coupled with the generic standards of the memoir itself and of affective language use in general.

Speaking generally to how the memoir’s standards for content, tone, and propriety have developed and expanded over time, William Zinsser comments that “[u]ntil the 1990s, memoir writers drew a veil of modesty over what they wrote. There was an agreed-upon code that you didn’t reveal the most squalid details of your life.” However, with the advent of tabloid TV, “shame went out the window,” Zinsser observes. “No family was too dysfunctional for people to talk about and write a memoir about,” though these memoirists simply “took pleasure in playing the victim,” in heaping personal failures and perceived wrongs on “parents, siblings, and coaches” in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for personal choices gone awry.

Yet, Zinsser continues, a few great writers “turned things around” with psychologically and rhetorically demanding memoirs that “dealt with childhoods every bit as terrible as those written by the whiners and the bashers,” but that were instead “written with love and forgiveness.” These writers didn’t pass the buck for personal weaknesses or present failures; in fact, Zinsser asserts, they “were as hard on their younger selves as they were on their elders.” And with this acknowledgment of their own accountability, they refused to engage in and thus absorbed the prevailing rhetoric of blame, saying, in effect, that, yes, “we come from a tribe of fallible people and we have survived to tell the story.”

Though I’m fairly certain Moore is unaware of this movement of memoirs written with an eye toward the fallibility of one’s elders and one’s younger self yet all the while grounded in the virtues of courage, love, and forgiveness (an unfortunate lack on her part, which, if filled, could have infused her narrative with greater rhetorical stature and influence), she does acknowledge, however unconsciously, the space created by such writers when she claims that she lives “in the perfect place at the perfect time” to tell her own story of survival (xv). And that, I believe, is the singular merit of Moore’s book, formal inconsistencies and weaknesses notwithstanding: having survived her childhood amidst a tribe of fallible, bitter, and violent people, she’s found a way to metabolize the rhetoric of blame and to ground herself and her story in the possibilities of personal and rhetorical growth and change, of forgiveness, and of a world that yearns together for a way out of violence into “[h]ealing, temperance, tolerance, charity, love, and joy” (224).

Notes:

1. Since Moore is enrapt in her own psychological journey here, she doesn’t spend much time discussing her father’s. In fact, unless the two treks unavoidably cross paths, i.e., when Jesperson’s cruelty immediately affects his daughter, she sidesteps any discussion of his past and the impact it may have had on his choices and his psychopathological development, though she does hint at the complex relationship he had with his own father. However, because I felt that confronting Jesperson’s language would provide insight into his violent behavior, I turned to his biography (which Moore admits she “didn’t want anything to do with” [208]), written by Jack Olsen and smothered with Jesperson’s words, as a means to this end. (See my longer, though still quite brief, take on “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer, in this post on my personal blog.)

As regards this confrontation, I must confess some debt to Patricia, who commented in a brief discussion we had elsewhere on Moore’s book that “[s]omehow, the killing act takes shape first in killing language. I want to understand what killing language is and how it works, if I can.” As I read Shattered Silence with Patricia’s words in mind and noticed how Moore refers to “[b]lame [… as] a language [… she] heard all the time” in her home (12), I began to consider how blame turns language violent and how this rhetorical violence escalates into and is often used to justify violent behavior, including killing. This section is my effort to situate Moore’s text, her psychological development, and her freedom to choose in relation to the rhetoric of blame embedded in her family line.

2. Warning: this book is not for sensitive readers.

3. While I’m loathe to claim a causal link between Jesperson’s ascent up each tier of violence, I’m convinced his expansive pursuit of increased risk and passion was one factor feeding his psychopathology.

* * * *

Works Cited

Broderick, Carlfred. “I Have a Question.” Ensign (Aug. 1986), 38-41.

Keller, Karl. “On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature.” Tending the Garden. Ed. by Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1996. 13-22.

Moore, Melissa G. and M. Bridget Cook. Shattered Silence. Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2009.

Olsen, Jack. “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Tanner, Kristi. “Becoming a Transitional Character: Changing Your Family Culture.” Forever Families. Aug. 2002. 8 Aug. 2009.

Zinsser, William. “How McCourt Rescued Memoir.” “Memoirs and McCourt.” The New York Times. 24 Jul. 2009. 8 Aug. 2009.

Today, I’m taking on the faulty analogies often used to convince people away from movies or books that may be good, “except for one little part.” Notice, first off, that I don’t intend to deal with the idea of keeping our entertainment clean or with the varying degrees of readerly sensitivity, i.e., individuals’ varying capacities to endure evil in the fictions they frequent. (So keep that in mind in the comments, if you will.) Rather, I’m approaching the language itself and intend to judge its merits in purely rhetorical terms—that is, I’m more concerned with what work the language is actually doing than with what it’s intended to do* or with whether or not we should watch this movie or read that book because of this steamy scene or that profane word.

Now for the analogies (the first two come from the same paragraph of the same source):

Faulty Analogy #1: Of Mice and Pizza

“Suppose the hot pizza you ordered arrived with all your favorite toppings- plus a tiny little mouse that had crawled onto it before being popped in the oven. Would you eat this pizza that was perfect except for one little mouse? […] Few people would choose to eat something that contained a small dead mouse […]. Yet many choose to fill their heads, often repeatedly, with movies that have ‘one little part’ that’s disgusting and possibly dangerous” (ref).

Faulty Analogy #2: Of Narcotics and Yogurt

“[W]hat if someone put just a little date-rape drug into a serving of fat-free frozen yogurt? It doesn’t matter that this would otherwise have been a healthy dessert if “one little part” was not a scary drug that could fog a person’s brain and wipe out control. Few people would choose to eat something that contained {…] a little date-rape drug. Yet many choose to fill their heads, often repeatedly, with movies that have ‘one little part’ that’s disgusting and possibly dangerous” (ref).

Faulty Analogy #3: Of Toilet Water and Orange Juice

One Sunday afternoon we were just finishing our family dinner when somehow the conversation turned to popular movies. One of my daughters mentioned a very popular movie that had one of those very objectionable scenes in it. And she said something like this, “Dad, what’s so wrong with that movie? I’d really like to see it. We can always fast forward that two minute part.” Now, she knew about the bad part in that movie. She knew it was wrong, but the rest of the movie had captured her imagination and she wanted to see it.

[…]

Well, instead of arguing with my daughter, I remembered something a friend of mine had done in a class. Sitting on the table was a pitcher of orange juice with just one cup left in the bottom. I poured that last cup, held it up, and asked her if she wanted it. Now, my children love O. J., and of course she wanted it.

Okay then I said, follow me. With most of my children curiously following, I took the glass of orange juice and walked into the bathroom. I reached into the toilet with another cup and dipped out some toilet water. Ever so carefully, I poured just one tiny drop of toilet water into the orange juice. I held it out to her. “Here you go,” I said.

She screamed ­and ran out of the bathroom. “But, honey,” I said as I held it out to her. “It’s only one little drop.” “I don’t care!” she yelled. “It’s yucky!” You know, I could not get her to come within ten feet of that glass of orange juice. I finally had to pour it out […] you know where. (ref).

Again, my problem with each of these isn’t mainly the message they convey (though I have my quibbles there, too), but that each analogy is overdrawn, something the authors—supposedly expert teachers—ultimately fail to acknowledge. While to some they may seem ingenious teaching aids, in my book they suffer a tragic rhetorical flaw: You see (or I do anyway), entertainment does not have the same molecular framework or effect on the human body as food. Sure, I know we’re talking different bodies here—the physical used to analogize the spiritual—but there are some telling differences that essentially make the analogies moot.

As Bruce Jorgensen puts it in his case for a Mormon erotica, “We are frequently, duly, and properly warned, over the pulpit in general conference, against the evil of pornography—an attitude […] I share, though [… I] also value and wish to allow a place for the erotic. But all too often, that evil is referred to in terms of poison, disease, or wounds,” as we have, in part, happening here. He continues, “I will call this the fallacy of overextended or overcredited metaphor. Yes, pornography is dangerous, as are poison, disease, and wounds. But right where we most need clarity for any genuinely moral discussion of the problem, the metaphors cloud the issue” (italics mine). Indeed, such reckless rhetoric, as I’ll call it, makes it difficult to engage in dialogue over this important issue, which falls into the “as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books” category (ref).

And while, as Jorgensen comments, “reading a Silhouette Special Edition romance or watching bare bodies simulate copulation on a screen is a kind of taking-in, […] it is not the same thing as ingesting botulism toxin from a can of vegetables or catching a cold by a kiss or breaking skin on sharp glass” or eating pizza tainted by mice or eating yogurt laced with narcotics or drinking a toilet water/OJ screwdriver. As Jorgensen concludes, “Each of these events begins a biochemical or physiological process that, unless decisively interfered with by other such processes [i.e., some degree of medical care], will proceed inexorably to its end: illness, bodily damage, death. But reading [or viewing a film] is an act of consciousness, a work of the spirit, a free act of a free agent; its consequences are not deterministically predictable, as far as my experience has shown” (italics mine). That is, reading a book or watching a movie, as opposed to ingesting poison, etc., will not follow the same course for each individual, especially according to that individual’s development of their agency. Indeed, in Jorgensen’s words, “I may ‘ingest,’ by reading, a false analogy like the ones I am talking about; I may ‘eat’ error. Yet I do not necessarily become erroneous; I can analyze and judge and even use the error to get nearer to the truth” (italics mine).

So how to break through the reckless rhetoric? What language, what analogies (if any) might best offer the clarity needed for us (meaning, Mormon culture generally) to engage in a genuinely moral discussion of the issue? Rhetoricians of the radical middle, what do you think?

* * * *

*Though the distinction here is subtle and intentions often can’t or shouldn’t be divorced from the words themselves, especially in real-life rhetorical situations, there is a difference between what words were intended to do and what they actually do (responsible rhetoric, I think, implies making every effort to wed the two aspects in our attempts to persuade others) and I’m drawing that line for my purposes here.

It’s that reach, and the administrative rhetoric derived from and meant to support it (i.e. the language used by teachers and leaders—however [in]effectively—to motivate those they lead), that I’m primarily concerned with at the moment.

In the past couple of months, the EQ presidency in my ward has turned up the heat as regards the quorum’s pretty poor home teaching record (which, I think, is quite standard throughout the Church) and the tune of “Get your butts out the door and visit your families, people” has been sung in most of our meetings lately, though in a softer, more dancing-through-the-daisies tone. The presidency (of which I am a secretarial part) seems honestly concerned more about the people than the numbers (although I don’t know what pressure, if any, is coming from the higher-ups), so their honesty comes through somewhat in the constant reminders to “get out and get it done, brethren” and in the recent need they’ve felt to implement home teaching interviews for each companionship.

As a relative newcomer in the quorum and as an acute observer of and in the presidency, I’ve watched this movement with some interest and my line of thinking in this motivational regard has started to take a different shape, directed, I think, by my rhetorical focus lately. More specifically, this teaching opportunity (which comes around once every quarter or so) has me pondering how I might best facilitate changes in my own—and even the presidency’s and quorum instructors’—administrative rhetoric such that those on the receiving end are led toward sustainable change in their lives.

In other words, I’m wondering how I can begin to best facilitate the deeper work of conversion I lamented for in yesterday’s post in my fellow laborers, how I can use the fruits of my language to care for and to be with and strengthen them in their continued efforts to know God such that they’re inspired (beyond bribery, manipulation, and the need for constant reminding and admonition—some of the fruits, I think, of administrative rhetoric) to help others know Him, too.

What say you rhetorician Saints of the radical middle? I’m interested in your thoughts as I gather mine in preparation in teach the elders this Sunday.

* * * *

I just finished a delightful (yes, I said “delightful”) little essay in the Spring 2006 issue of Dialogue: “Mormon Laundry List” by Julianna Gardner Berry.* Berry speaks about what I’ve come to call the Mormon Rhetorical Problem**: Despite our expansive theological witness that “the glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” and that humans are beings of eternal intelligence, co-existent with God and heirs to eternal glory, much of our language seems to betray a lack of faith in that ideal.

In rhetorical terms, this manifests itself in a surprising lack of faith in audience, which further manifests itself in the fact that, as Berry observes, “Mormons love telling each other what to do more than any group I know.” Unqualified and subjective as this observation may be, I sense strands of its proof in the cultural pudding: the hundredth sacrament meeting talk in a row that lays out exactly how (“In just nine easy steps…”) I should exercise my faith or serve my neighbor or become self-reliant; the marriage and family relations class that tells my wife and me we should teach our kids faith by teaching them faith, repentance (in just six alliterative steps!***), baptism, reception of the gift of the Holy Ghost, and keeping the commandments (family scripture study, family prayer, family service, and family home evening—on Monday nights only, please–included); the Elders’ Quorum lesson—no class participation included—that emphasizes reaching our full potential by setting personal goals, which we can effectively set and keep track of and report on by following “this ten-step process I got on my mission.” And on. And on.

And on.

Don’t get me wrong, I realize the value of sticking to the small and simple things we’re taught, of learning to do them well so we can draw closer to God—I’ve still got a long way to go before I get these first principles down pat. And sometimes admonition comes along that isn’t cliché or trite or patronizing (like, for example, Luisa’s recent advice for developing a Christ-like attitude). And sure, drawing up lists of these small and simple things is easy, especially because seeing all the bulleted points in white and green (on a chalkboard, see; or in my ward, on a piece of paper printed out in a font that’s much too small for those on the back row to read when the teacher magnets the papers to the chalkboard—I say, just let them use chalk!) makes the gospel seem so functional and pragmatic. And if Mormon culture is anything, it’s become increasingly pragmatic, almost business-like.

But at what cost does dumbing down or pragmatizing or business-meeting-izing eternity come?

As Berry asks,

Do we need a weekly flogging with instructions? Will those who falter be buoyed up by a roster of requirements? God evidently trusts us more than we trust each other to “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling” (Morm. 9:27). Is our prevailing sense of one another that we’re all so wayward we can’t get past the remedial course? (Emphasis mine.)

Then this:

Lest I be misunderstood, I feel the tedious need to explain that I’m a card-carrying, calling-filling, sacrament-taking, choir-singing member of the Church, one who is more or less up-to-date with her laundry.

Though Mormons have always loved to admonish, I sense that the [Mormon] Laundry List has become more entrenched in the last decade, as talks are prepared in Microsoft Word, with the benefit of bulleted lists. Our many MBAs, trained in presentation skills, believe that all knowledge can be conveyed through PowerPoint. I cringe when sacrament meeting speakers emphasize their “takeaway message” or when missionary-themed conversations include the word “branding.”

In a larger cultural context, the impact of technology on language is partly to blame. Mass communication that isn’t pure tabloid has become technical writing, a slick how-to manual. Estate planning, quality parenting, weight loss, and cholesterol reduction can all be achieved in three easy steps. Why not, then, our eternal salvation?

While I must confess that I prepared my last sacrament meeting talk in Microsoft Word and that I used PowerPoint in a Gospel Doctrine lesson once to illustrate chiasmus in the Book of Mormon to a group of sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds (in which class, I assure you, the doctrines of Christ took precedence over the PPP), I must also confess that I fear we’ve lost something of the gaze-into-heaven-for-five-minutes rhetorical tradition of our forebears, that we’ve lost faith in the power of the word, of true doctrine, of pure testimony to literally change lives.

Perhaps I’m being naïve or too idealistic to believe that more responsible use of language can really change us. But as a believing Mormon who tries to keep up on his laundry, I’d like something a bit deeper every now and then, like, for instance, a little bit more faith in the Mormon audience and the rhetorical principles that can be derived from Mormon theology—in the power of human language (which is, after all, good enough for God—at least for now), for as Berry concludes, “Our scriptural canon is so broad and our theology so lofty that we should have no shortage of pure doctrine for an eternity of talks and lessons, with exhortation trimmed to a minimum.”

And all I can say to that is amen, Sister. Amen.

Now off to do the laundry.

No. Really. I need some clean socks.

—–

*The link is to the web page for the electronic offerings from that volume; both PDF and HTML versions of the article are available, though you’ll have to link to the full text and scroll down after linking through to find Berry.

**By no means are such questions of oration and audience entirely unique to Mormon culture, though they do bear specific implications for Latter-day Saints in terms of Mormon eternalism, as I discuss it here.

***I’m indebted to Brillig whose comment reminded me of this one. How could I forget?

Part Two: Little Happy Secrets: A Milestone in Mormon Drama

This piece will discuss on the significance of Melissa Leilani Larson’s groundbreaking play, which artistically put New Play Project on the map unlike anything else they had done previously.

Part Three: Prodigal Son: The Association of Mormon Letters Honors New Play Project

This piece will discuss James Goldberg’s short play “Prodigal Son” and the significance of it winning the AML’s 2008 Award for best play.

Part Four: Swallow the Sun and The Fading Flower: A personal perspective

In this piece I will discuss my own collaboration with New Play Project in producing my full length works.

Part Five: New Play Project: Here To Stay?

In the conclusion of the series, I’ll take a look at what I think it will take for New Play Project to survive.

Now onto Part One:

I’ll be honest, the first time I saw a show put on by New Play Project, I wasn’t particularly impressed. They were performing a set of short plays in a back room of the Provo library. Some of the writing was true quality, while other pieces were lackluster. The acting  and directing were uneven as well. And they were performing on wooden planks placed upon cinder blocks with little or no budget. There were real nuggets of promise in the set of plays I saw, but it was all still very unrefined.

However, even back then they had two things that have shaped them into the robust organization they are today: passion and organization. Those involved in the Project were a group of volunteers who were doing it for no other apparent reason than that they loved both theater and the Gospel and were intent on building “values driven theater.” This passion was evident from their earnestness, their valiant effort and their intent to improve.  As I became more acquainted with the group, I started to realize that these were people with a mission, ready to overcome the obstacles, discouragement and reckless criticism that comes against the birthing of any such group. Many of its leaders, such as the eloquent James Goldberg, the energetic Arisael Rivera and the sophisticated Bianca Dillard were ensuring the survival of the group through sheer belief, will power and work ethic.

The organizational aspect of their group was no less important than their passion. They were organized properly as a non-profit group, had specified leadership positions and had a very strong, consistent approach to every aspect of their organization. For a grass roots, volunteer organization, they were remarkably put together. They also made sure that the organization didn’t die when its founders oft times went onto other things. A training was in place, as one wave of people replaced the last.

And the workshops. Oh, the workshops! Inconsistently I started attending some of their playwriting workshops where they would discuss, criticize and refine each other’s work. These organized sessions, led by NPP’s incisive and astute dramaturg Bianca Dillard, were exceptional.  Rarely have I seen such good feedback (which my own plays would eventually benefit from). With specific goals and approaches to their critiques, I noticed as time went on the plays were becoming more and more quality as these workshops did their work. Each set of new plays performed became better than the last until the last several sets of short play festivals have all boasted high quality writing. And with that quality writing has also come improved acting and directing, as the organization’s improved reputation attracted better actors, writers and directors, as well as the faithful stalwarts from previous shows having improved in their craft through their involvement with NPP. And it wasn’t just actors and writers, either. People like Adam Stallard and Ben Crowder not only brought their writing pens and acting voices to the scene, but became instrumental in the inner core of the group, bringing fresh ideas, organizational insight and new blood. It is a good sign as NPP keeps bringing on new people to contribute to the organization, strengthening where they were once weak, fastening where they were once loose.

Also vital to NPP was moving out of the Provo Library and spare rooms on BYU campus and moving into a space they could in essence call their own. Renting Provo Theater Company’s intimate and beautiful space on 100 North and 105 East in Provo was a perfect fit for both NPP and the theater’s owners who had made little use of the space since PTC’s apparent demise a few years ago. Having a consistent and quality space brought just that much more credibility to the group and set them on the road to be taken seriously as they realized ambiance is almost as important as performance.

Another important step that NPP has taken recently is a stronger commitment to full length works. I know there was a philosophy floating around in the group for a while that if a play couldn’t be condensed into 10 to 30 minutes, it wasn’t worth telling. I’m glad that they dispensed with this MTV, short  attention span philosophy and are now diverting some efforts from their short play festivals to also include full lengths in their seasons. The works of Melissa Larson, Arisael Rivera, Katherine Gee, and myself have been successful and have brought in a more varied audience than the nearly strictly BYU students that the short plays draw in.  I think the short play festivals are extremely important in developing the young, budding talent of its student writers, but I’m glad that NPP has now shown commitment to work that can take its time to unfold.

From its little acorn, NPP is slowly growing into a great oak. If it can protect its beautiful organization, and survive the many forces that try to tear apart the success of the Arts, then I believe they have the ability to have a lasting influence on the Mormon Drama and the larger Mormon Arts.

Check out New Play Project’s website: www.newplayproject.org

Also,  for those who are in the Utah Valley area, New Play Project is still running my play The Fading Flower, with its final performances being tonight, June at 7:30pm, with additional extensions for Saturday, June 13, at 7:30 pm and Monday, tJune 15, at 7:30 pm. For additional information about the show, go to http://newplayproject.org/season/2009/fading-flower/ . For those not in the area, a DVD 2 pack selling recordings of both The Fading Flower and last year’s Swallow The Sun will be coming soon. The two pack will sell for $15.