This past September, in response to Ken’s post about mashing up Mormon literature and the purposes behind the repurposing of language and literature, in general, Ardis asked a question that turned my wheels a-spinnin’. Asked she, “[W]hat’s the point of being deliberately, unrelentingly unoriginal” by taking others’ work, repurposing it, and sending it out into the world? “Why is suppressing the urge toward originality,” as she assumes mash-up arists do, “more conducive to self-expression than the effort to, you know, actually be self-expressive?”

Seuss-style, I respond to Ardis’ question with three things (I was going to add my comment to the post itself, but my response grew beyond comment-length; hence, this):

Thing One: I don’t think it’s productive to argue that all mash-ups or remixes suppress the urge toward originality and self-expression. I’m thinking here of seven instances—four specific and three more general, though even as I think I stir up more instances—in which artists/creators have, to various degrees, remixed different aspects of culture or other preexisting materials in order to create something new:

a. God, who didn’t create anything ex nihilo, but who remixed extant materials in order to build universes, galaxies, worlds, us. And who’s going to call God unoriginal?

b. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (among other works) in which he’s “borrowed” compositional elements, plot lines, bits of dialogue, costumes, etc., from a range of films to “piece” together his own story. Here’s a video that details some of these “borrowings.” (Caution: contains some graphic scenes).

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

c. Greg Michael Gillis (aka Girl Talk), a musician who specializes in mashups and digital sampling. Here’s a video that illustrates his creative process, wherein he “borrows” a small bit of music (in this case a second or so of an Elvis Costello song) and manipulates it in various ways in order to construct a new, shall we call it, original song:

Girl Talk Creates a Mashup from OpenSourceCinema on YouTube.

Girl Talk has a huge following and is the subject of a really interesting documentary called RiP: A Remix Manifesto. For anyone interested, the film’s available in parts on YouTube and in full on Hulu. It’s a really interesting exploration of the issues surrounding mashups, including copyright laws and creativity. I especially like its opening line: “Today we’re going to create a mashup, a fun and adventurous way to create something fresh out of something stale.”

d. Mister Tim, who in his live-looping act not only mashes himself up against himself, but who also “covers” and mashes up songs from other arists as well in order to entertain audiences. I’ve embedded an example below. Mister Tim has appeared on AMV before, courtesy of mash-up lover Laura.

Mister Tim Live-Looping SWEET DREAMS (medley): 2009 Las Vegas A Cappella Summit from MisterTimVids on YouTube.

e. Found poems, which “take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” This poetic form became prominent in the twentieth-century, in the shadow of Pop Art (think Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp) (ref).

In 1995, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard published a collection of found poems called Mornings Like This. In the Author’s Note, she suggests, as I have here, that found poems are “the literary equivalents of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and Duchamp’s bicycle,” then she offers up something about what a poet does when s/he remixes existing texts into poetry: “By entering a found text as a poem, the poet doubles its context. The original meaning remains intact, but now it swings between two poles,” between it’s non-remixed function and it’s remixed function, wherein “[t]he poet adds,” she continues, “or at any rate increases, the element of delight. This is an urban, youthful, ironic, cruising kind of poetry. It serves up whole texts [to readers], or uninterrupted fragments of texts,” in the form and language of poetry (ix). So found poetry is ironic poetry, poetry conceived of and meant to critique, even overturn, the ironies of an ironic age. Dillard’s conclusion to her Note is telling in this regard, “This [book] is [the result of] editing at its extreme: writing without composing. Half the poems seek to serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims”—to create an aesthetic experience of human life and to give readers pleasure in language being perhaps two of them—”with one of its newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. The other half” of the poems, she says, “are just jokes” (x).

One of Dillard’s poems, “The Sign of Your Father,” seems apropos to our current context: discussing the artistic uses, reuses, and recycling of religious texts; the religious uses of art and culture. Here’s the poem (the epigraph cites its original context):

(From Mornings Like This, p. 8-9.)

In her Author’s Note, Dillard comments briefly on one function of this remixed text (the religious nature and implications of which she seems especially critical):

The New Testament Apocrypha is a loose collection of written legends and, chiefly, torn and damaged fragments. Scholar-editors print such texts carefully to show—using ellipses and question marks—where fragments break off and which translations are guesses. An edition of the New Testament Apocrypha yields a poem ["The Sign of Your Father"] about the baffling quality of Christ’s utterances and the absurdly fragmentary nature of spiritual knowledge. Like many of these poems, it looks surprisingly sober on the page. (x)

f. The oral-formulaic composition of epic poetry, wherein (the theory goes) poets like Homer and contemporary Serbo-Croatian poets drew/draw from a stockpile of formulas (including phrases and symbols) as aids to help them compose (”mash-up”) poems “on-the-fly,” in the act of performance. This theory was first posited and explored in depth by Albert Lord in his book Singer of Tales (from which I’ve only read a page or two). It continues to be explored and developed by oral performance scholars, including John Miles Foley, who offers an excellent introduction to the topic in his book How To Read an Oral Poem.

g. Language itself, which thrives because humans continually mash-up “stale” letters and words in different combinations in order to create “fresh” and mind-expanding combinations.

Which leads me, somewhat indirectly, to

Thing Two: Everything is a remix. Languages, cultures, literatures (including scripture, as Ken suggests), music, films. Nothing can be created ex nihilo. No act of self-expression ever arises independently of other expressive acts and materials. The link in my first statement leads to an excellent series of videos produced and distributed by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson and titled, of course, “Everything is a Remix.” These videos explore the idea of mash-ups and remix culture in ways that question a) our general take on creativity as making something wholly original and b) a lot of the premises of copyright laws, which leads me, again, to

Thing Three: In light of the explosion of creativity, knowledge-sharing, and user-generated content made possible in the digital age, I wonder how we might reconsider our deep-seated and fundamental reliance on copyright and intellectual property laws as means to control access to and distribution of information. I’m not saying everything needs to be distributed free-of-charge or that creators should surrender all rights to their creations. Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer, professor, political activist, and authority on issues of copyright, speaks convincingly to the idea that many of our laws may just be choking creativity. Many others (including Lessig and, to make the connection to some aspect of Mormon culture, BYU professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology David Wiley) are building a Creative Commons and working to instill open values and to implement the open sharing of knowledge in culture and education, among other things.

With our current, perhaps overly-strict conception of intellectual property and the policing strategies that accompany this strictness—especially in academia, though academia’s concerns over plagiarism often make their way into the broader culture—the knee jerk reaction many people have to issues of plagiarism might just create more problems than it pretends to solve. I think, for instance, of one of my wife’s former professors who wanted her students to cite every claim they make in their papers—every claim. She wanted to know where all of their ideas originated. Not only does this approach to writing and scholarship create a very prohibitive reading experience—who wants to read something with a citation, or often, multiple citations, after every sentence?—it’s unrealistic, especially since (per Thing Two) every idea is derivative and who keeps track of the source behind every idea they’ve ever had? Wiley shares a similar experience in this video on open education and the future (at about the 11 minute mark). Again, I’m not arguing that we allow students, scholars, writers, artists, etc., to draw wholesale from others’ work without giving credit where credit should be given. But I am suggesting that it’s probably time to think about and approach our discussions regarding plagiarism differently, including by exploring the places where the assumptions of a wholly print culture stand in opposition to the radical openness made possible by the digital age. This openness mirrors in some fundamental ways the openness of primarily oral cultures (as suggested in 1f) where language and its public performance are viewed as aggregative and communal because they build quite explicitly and openly upon what’s come before. And, shocker: performers in these cultures don’t cite their predecessors’ work.

As regards the mashing of Mormon literature, I think Gideon Burton has done something interesting and important with his Open Source Sonnets project, which he’s published under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. What that means is simply that others are free to copy, adapt, distribute, transmit, and make commercial use of Gideon’s work, as long as they give proper attribution. Many of his sonnets are imitations (of Shakespeare, Milton, traditional carols, hymns, etc.) and several remix elements of scripture, generally, and Mormon culture, specifically. These include, to name only several, “Shakespeares of Our Own”, “Seeking the Good”, “Thy Mind, Oh Man”, “We Will Cross the River” (which was further remixed by Kathy Cowley), “The Shining One”, “Kingdoms Many”, “The Lord’s Prayer”, “His Yoke is Easy”, and “Unto the Least”. I think the openness with which Gideon has offered these poems and the remix-methods by which he composed them and with which others have responded creates a precedent that other Mormon writers might follow, in one way or another. It further presents an interesting test case of what Ken points to in terms of the possibilities of Mormon literary mash-ups and Mormon remix culture in general. But I’m not prepared to fully explore that case today. However, it’s in the works.

So let’s ruminate away for a minute on the creative possibilities of repurposed culture. And if you have additional examples of mashed-up artistry, share away…

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).

Of course those who have purchased an AMV T-shirt know that the alphabet on the second set of lines in the title is the Deseret Alphabet, the 1860s-era attempt to make it easier for immigrants to learn English. While that misguided effort failed, the alphabet has recently seen a bit of a comeback, both because of its role in the development of unicode, and because of its hobbyist and design uses.

It was the hobbyist community that led me to this book.

I’ve been following the Deseret Alphabet hobbyist community for a while, and when the author, Josep Carles Laínez, announced this book, I contacted him and asked for a copy. His book is written in Asturian, a language spoken principally in portions of Spain and Portugal by some 125,000 people.

What is particularly fascinating about this edition is that it represents a first: the first published use of the Deseret Alphabet with a language other than English. Laínez adapted the alphabet for use with Spanish and similar languages, such as Asturian, Catalan and Galician.

Laínez is from Valencia, and grew up speaking another language similar to Spanish, Catalan. He learned Asturian in 1991 and has written and published extensively in Asturian since. His works include 4 other books of his own poetry, several translations and several plays, two of which have won the Theater prize from the Asturian Language Academy (the Asturian equivalent of the Académie Française). He holds degrees in Catalan and Hispanic Philology from the University of Valencia, and has been a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Hofstra university and Komazawa University (Tokyo). He is currently managing editor of the magazine Debats.

Since Asturian is just 80% intelligible to Spanish speakers, I can’t really give an assessment of the quality of Laínez’ poetry — I have to work at even understanding it. But I think I can give readers an rough idea of what it is like.

The poetry in this volume is clearly and unabashedly Mormon. La Piedra Ente La Ñeve (The Stone in the Snow) refers to Tom Lovell’s well-known painting of Moroni burying the plates in the Hill Cumorah, which Lovell depicts as happening in winter. Laínez draws on this image to evoke Moroni’s alienation and loneliness.

The 24 poems in this small volume are grouped into three sections, each preceded by a quotation from the written words of Moroni as found in the Book of Mormon. [Since the Book of Mormon is currently not available in Asturian, these are apparently Laínez' own translations.] Each poem is presented in both the Deseret Alphabet and in traditional Roman script, on facing pages. Most of the poems are short (just 3 are more than 20 lines and only one is longer than a page).

When Laínez announced this book to the Deseret Alphabet group, he wrote, speaking of his home:

There is no cultural LDS background here; there is no writers, artists or composers devoted to LDS themes in European languages or art. We only have “future”, and a past shared with all of you, on the other side of the Atlantic.

That does indeed describe the difficulty faced by Church members who don’t speak English. At a minimum, Laínez is to be congratulated for making the effort that few others have made in languages with larger populations. And, in my opinion, his work is likely more important than this minimum, because his poetry demonstrates the sophistication of an experienced poet.

The murder of Joseph Smith and subsequent emigration of LDS Church members to Utah interrupted efforts to proselyte in most areas outside of the United States. Prior to the martyrdom, the Church had made some additional attempts to proselyte in other languages. Speakers of several other languages had joined the Church, many of whom were an important part of later missionary efforts, such as Dan Jones (Welsh), Peter O. Hansen (Danish), and  Daniel Carn (German). Enough German language speakers joined the saints in Nauvoo that a German-speaking congregation was established there^[1].

The first missionary to work in a non-English land was probably Orson Hyde, who, on his trip to the Holy Land in 1842, stopped first in Holland, and then in Germany, publishing tracts in each language and endeavoring to start missionary work there^[2]. While those efforts didn’t bear fruit, other missionaries were soon sent out, and the first non-English-speaking mission was opened in what is now French Polynesia (including Tahiti) in 1844^[3]. A second non-English-speaking mission was then opened in Wales the following year, after several years of effort under the British mission^[4]. Despite the interruption, the burgeoning mission in Great Britain (established in 1837) was also preserved, probably because it was producing enough members to sustain the missionary efforts there and in Wales, and still send converts to the United States.

In 1850 the Church was finally able to expand into non-English areas in a significant way. By the end of that year missions had been established in Scandinavia, France, Italy, Germany and Hawaii, and publishing efforts began in all those areas^[5]. Publishing a few tracts for missionary use was usually the first priority, followed by the Book of Mormon, a hymnal and a mission periodical. Translations of other tracts, books and scriptures then followed^[6].

Those staring these new missions and beginning to publish there faced many challenges. Since missionaries at this time traveled without purse or scrip, financing publications was always an issue. Orson Hyde taught English when he was in Germany to support himself and finance the publication of his tract in Germany^[7]. Elsewhere new converts and local members helped pay for publications. Once enough converts had been made, tithing, subscription prices and sales of books financed new publications.

Language barriers also affected the ability of new missions to proselyte and publish. While where possible, those called to open missions in non-English-speaking countries already knew the language, which allowed them to begin work immediately, that wasn’t always possible. Both John Taylor (in France) and Lorenzo Snow (in Italy) reported that they struggled to learn the language, even with help from other missionaries who did speak the language. During the mid 1850s and 1860s, the first LDS missionaries in New Zealand were forced to confine their efforts to the Anglo population because they could not speak the Maori language. When this difficulty was finally overcome in the 1880s, the number of Maori members soon rose to more than 80% of the members in New Zealand^[8].

Even with native speakers among the first missionaries in many countries, additional help from non-LDS native speakers was often sought. Danish native Peter O. Hansen, who joined the LDS Church prior to the exodus to Utah, completed his translation of the Book of Mormon into Danish before he left to help Erastus Snow open the Scandinavian Mission in 1849, but still spent the last 8 months of 1850 working with others in Compenhagen to improve his translation, which was finally published in 1851^[9]. John Taylor’s companions, Curtis E. Bolton and William Howells, apparently also spoke French, but their translation of the Book of Mormon into French was improved after they were joined by Louis A. Bertrand, a well-educated French native who soon joined the LDS Church and later became the French Mission President^[10]. The extra attention provided by non-LDS Church members was especially sought when the translation was from the Book of Mormon.

Local laws and customs also frequently got in the way of LDS publishing efforts. In France, permission from the government was required to publish, and when John Taylor published his pamphlet The Kingdom of God in 1851 anyway, after permission was denied, he was expelled from the country^[11]. The French mission also tried to get around these restrictions by publishing a bi-lingual French-German edition of the Book of Mormon in 1852 in Hamburg and importing copies  into France, but in the end wasn’t able to make that plan work either^[12]. A French Book of Mormon was eventually published in 1854.

Logistical problems also occasionally impeded LDS publishing efforts in these new missions. While the first German-language Book of Mormon was published in 1852 in Hamburg, the first successful German-language proselyting happened among the German speakers in Switzerland half a decade later^[13]. And while the French LDS periodical Étoile du Deséret (Star of Deseret) was published in Paris for a year, the Swiss mission launched its own periodical, Le Réflecteur (The Reflector), in part because of the distance^[14]. And, just like happened in England, the economics of printing pushed missions to print more copies than were immediately, or influenced them to put off printing until they were sure of demand. Logistics were also behind errors made, since some items translated from English were later re-translated when previous translations couldn’t be located.

The effect of all these challenges varied widely by mission, depending on the relative success of the mission. The Italian mission, which closed after a few years of effort, published a handful of items, including the Book of Mormon, but not including a hymnal, periodical or other scriptures^[15]. The Welsh mission, on the other hand, published all of these, along with several books, including a collection of tracts and a book of poetry^[16].

The Scandinavian mission, headquartered in Denmark and initially preaching in Danish, was the most successful of these early non-English-speaking missions. The mission published the first Danish hymnal in March of 1851, and by October of 1851 had started publishing a periodical, Skandinaviens Stjerne (Scandinavian Star, published continually through 1956 and then continued by Der Dansk Stjerne, The Danish Star, which was finally succeeded by the Liahona in 1984). By the end of 1852 it had in place all the principle publications later produced by any mission; Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, a periodical, a hymnal, the Pearl of Great Price, and many tracts for missionary use^[17].

But the Scandinavian mission also managed to go beyond this minimal standards. Like many missions, it published additional works useful for missionary work (such as Parley P. Pratt’s A Voice of Warning, which was translated into 6 different languages by 1900). Missions also translated materials useful for members, such as John Jacques’ Catechism for Children (in 5 different languages by 1900) and Pratt’s Key to the Science of Theology (in German and Dutch by the end of the century)^[18]. The Scandinavian mission was unusual because it went even further, adding a youth periodical in 1880 and translating many additional works into Danish, which ended the century as the non-English language with the most publications^[19].

Beyond these translations and basic works, some missions managed to produce a number of original works, beyond missionary tracts, in their languages. As mentioned above, the Welsh mission produced a book of poetry, a Mexican member produced his own doctrinal thesis, and, perhaps most interesting, the French mission president, Louis Bertrand, wrote and published Mémoires d’un Mormon (Memoirs of a Mormon) in 1862, a couple years before he closed the mission and emigrated to Utah^[20].

[2] Scharffs, Gilbert. Mormonism in Germany. 1970, pp. 3-4.

[3] “French Polynesia” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, p. 352.

[4] “Wales” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, p. 472.

[5] “Full-time Missions” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, p. 484-85.

[6] This is from my own analysis of titles published in each area, drawn principally from Flake, Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930, online at (http://lib.byu.edu/dlib/mormon_bib/).

[7] Scharffs, Gilbert. Mormonism in Germany. 1970, pp. 3-4.

[8] “New Zealand” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, p. 409.

[9] Jenson, Andrew. “Scandinavian Latter-day Saint Literature.” Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine, 1922

[10] “France” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, pp. 349-350.

[11] “France” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, pp. 349-350.

[12] Flake, Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930, entry 718. Can be found online at (http://lib.byu.edu/dlib/mormon_bib/).

[13] Scharffs, Gilbert. Mormonism in Germany. 1970, pp. 9-25;”Switzerland” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, pp. 453-54.

[14] Flake, Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930, entries 3185 and 6842. Can be found online at (http://lib.byu.edu/dlib/mormon_bib/).

[15] “Italy” in Deseret News 2006 Church Almanac, p. 376.

[16]My own analysis of data drawn from Flake, Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930. Can be found online at (http://lib.byu.edu/dlib/mormon_bib/); See also Davies, Mormon Spirituality: Latter Day Saints in Wales and Zion, 1987, pp. 8, 15.

[17] Jenson, Andrew. “Scandinavian Latter-day Saint Literature.” Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine, 1922.

[18] 50 Important Mormon Books, found online at http://www.mormontranslation.com/en/index.php?title=50_Important_Mormon_Books (requires free registration to view).

[19] Jenson, Andrew. “Scandinavian Latter-day Saint Literature.” Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine, 1922; and my own analysis of data drawn from Flake, Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930. Can be found online at (http://lib.byu.edu/dlib/mormon_bib/)

[20] Flake, Mormon Bibliography, 1830-1930. Can be found online at (http://lib.byu.edu/dlib/mormon_bib/).

My American Heritage Dictionary tells me that “haiku” comes from Japanese hai, “amusement” (from a middle Chinese word) and ku, “sentence” (also from middle Chinese).   For such small parcels of language, they pack tightly, which makes them them linguistic jacks-in-the-boxes, bursting out big to surprise and delight.

Also, haiku can be restorative, in the way that concentration on small things, like a spider’s web or light on snow, can cool the mind with beauty or open it up in connexion.

But haiku is especially well suited for social mingling.  The subjects at WIZ include wintertide, the happy lengthening of the day that follows the solstice, Christmas, the beauty of the moment, the turn of the weather–anything related to winterality.  So if ye have a mind to, come over and toss in your 17-syllables’ worth.

Happy Solar New Year! Hurrah for the lengthening of the light!

I’m looking for a few good voices.

For the rest of August, A Motley Vision’s companion blog Wilderness Interface Zone is hosting “Vox Humana Week” as part of its “People Month.”  For an explanation of what “People Month” is, you can go here:

If you have a podcast or mp3 you’ve made where you’re reading your own work–poetry, blog posts, or essay or fiction excerpts–and if you feel inclined to share, please email me at pk.wizadmin@gmail.com. Your reading doesn’t have to be “nature-oriented”–it is ”People Month,” afterall–but if it is, that would be cool.  Also, I’ll be putting up podcasts of my own readings.  I have barely adequate recording equipment, but everybody will get the idea.

If you do come by WIZ, you might like to read some of the wonderful guest posts published over the last two weeks, including a poem by Tyler Chadwick and an essay about flying from a 12-yr-old reader. 

I hope some of you will feel moved upon to contribute to “Vox Humana Week.”  It could be fun. 

In Part III I mentioned Joseph Smith’s discourse of Sunday October 15, 1843 which starts with a comment on his love for the Constitution and its guarantees of religious freedom, then moves on to a comment about textual corruption in the Bible, “I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors.” (Documentary History of the Church VI:56-57)

The quote, though not the rest of the discourse, is well-known to seminary students and missionaries, and a young missionary might mention it to a woman who asks why we need additional revelation, hardly expecting her to say, “Do you really believe Jehovah God Almighty would allow errors to get into His scriptures?”

Her tone clearly says she will not accept the yes answer the missionary accepts. Her tone gives him a glimpse of how different other religions’ assumptions are, and he drops the matter.

He’ll spend some time thinking about the different assumptions and embody them in a question, “If I refuse to believe in God, can he force me to believe? Not, would he force me to believe, but does he have the physical ability?” (”Yes,” his brother-in-law will say, “The Bible says, ‘Every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord,’ and the Bible doesn’t lie.”) Adapt the question, “How would God have prevented John H. Gilbert from dropping those last two letters on page 317, line 43, so that Alma 33:14 reads ‘have ye not read the scriptures,’ instead of ‘these scriptures’? Could he have reset the page, or taken control of Gilbert’s body?”

Given God’s power over matter he or an angel probably could have reset the page, but Mormons are likely to say he could not have possessed Gilbert’s body, since he didn’t create Gilbert’s intelligence and the intelligence is what controls the spirit body that controls the physical body.

Or maybe we wouldn’t analyze it that way, maybe we would just remember that passage in “Tragedy or Destiny” where Spencer W. Kimball says, “And God will sometimes use his power over death to protect us.” He tells how Heber C. Kimball went to Joseph Smith in “great perplexity” during a sore trial and Joseph asked the Lord what to do. “Tell him to go and do as he has been commanded, and if I see that there is any danger of his apostatizing I will take him to myself” (From Orson Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, quoted without page number in Faith Precedes The Miracle, page 105).

It is reasonable to assume that if God could not control Heber C. Kimball’s mind and body he could not control the minds or bodies of scribes, whether careless or bent on changing scripture.

It is important, though, to emphasize that “the purposes of God cannot be frustrated, neither can they come to naught” (D&C 3:1). Whether the Jehovah’s Witness woman would have found that soft answer satisfying, I don’t know. Nor do I know if I could have turned away her wrath by saying that God works with imperfect people, but if they misunderstand the revelation or record it incorrectly God can send a corrective revelation to someone else.

I wasn’t particularly thinking about soft answers at the time–missionaries often don’t–and I didn’t understand until years later that people sometimes need reassurance that someone is not putting forth an unusual idea as an attack on other peoples’ beliefs or culture. (I still don’t understand very well when I need to pause and offer some reassurance, just use a common trope and ask my wife.)

The idea that God can use imperfect people’s imperfect words to correct other imperfect people’s imperfect words is implicit in the idea of continuing revelation, and in my approach to textual criticism, but it’s still important to remind ourselves and others that our belief in an open canon implies no disrespect either to God or earlier prophets.

We’ll talk more about why that reminder is important in part V.

First, kiddo, disperse that obvious shadow:
To read is not to know.  To read
Is to listen from your quiet place
To the teasing laughter of some new voice.
Listening requires aptitude for not knowing.

If you read a poem, yourself, alone,
Watch for those sudden synchronizations of,
You know, pulses, which, happening, don’t prove
Knowing, only meeting: two languaged souls
Adrift on unfolding sea, converging at crosscurrent
Symbols, flowing together then pulling past.
Isn’t that romantic, toots?

When you read a poem, imagine words
Anticipating arrival, turned voice-
Toward you already.  Step up to what song’s
Piping hot to be heard.  But don’t try to know.
Meaninglessness is that blue butterfly
On the diamond-stud pin.  Such a waste!
Something in person-reading-poem-
Reading-person ever escapes, like light,
Into the wink of the abyss.  If in reading
A poem you don’t turn at the crack
Of a wall yielding, that creaking noise
As the universe — all them stars — buckles,
You ain’t listening, dearie, only knowing.

Even when, after chasing flights of laughter,
You find in the boonies some poem in its skin,
Remember: to see is not to know,
But rather to come upon as if in a forest
Meaning playing naked in a stream. 
That’s where it lives, love.
Get grabby, you break its green embrace
With the current’s deepening hold.

To read a poem is to stand with it
And to move, to change
In ardor of exchange, to wind with words
Into a nerve bundle of world’s desire.
It isn’t to know, sweetie, it’s never to know,
But only ever to follow what calls.

Page from Genesis

The LDS Church formally announced yesterday that it is publishing an LDS version of the Bible in Spanish. Formally called the Reina-Valera 2009 edition, this version not only brings the footnotes, chapter headings, cross-references and other material that English-speaking members take for granted, it also provides a “conservative” LDS-oriented update to the well-regarded 1909 version of the Reina-Valera translation of the Bible first published in 1602.

The LDS version will be available in September, 2009, and will also appear on the Church’s website at the same time.

Readers of A Motley Vision learned of this forthcoming translation nearly a year ago, in a comments to the post Why Not an LDS Bible in Spanish. This edition solves some of the problems noted in that post — specifically the use if the 1960 Reina-Valera edition, which is under copyright and required purchasing copies published by the Protestant church that created the 1960 version. Not only does this edition eliminate purchasing from and paying royalties to others, it also results in very inexpensive pricing – $3 a copy in the US for the basic paperback version. Currently the least expensive version available from the LDS Church distribution center in Salt Lake is a hardcover version for $9.

Apparently the Church took great care in preparing this edition, and the comment mentioned above indicates that it has been in preparation for at least 5 years. The Church’s press release indicates:

Church leaders, teams of translators, professional linguists and qualified lay Church members reviewed the 1909 Reina-Valera edition of the Bible.  Reading committees were organized throughout the world and extensive field testing was completed to ensure accuracy.  The 2009 Latter-day Saint edition modernizes some of the outdated grammatical constructions and vocabulary that have shifted in meaning and acceptability.

“As we embarked on this project, we were sensitive to the sacred nature of this work.   We tried to preserve the 1909 text making very conservative changes to ensure accuracy, understandability and faithfulness to the source texts,” says director of the Church’s Translation Division, Jeffrey C. Bateson. “The spiritual nature of this work was a humbling and uplifting experience for all those involved.”

Analysis:

Now I wonder what this implies for other languages! Will Portuguese be next? It would seem to be the logical choice, given the number of Church members who speak Portuguese, and Portuguese-speakers face similar problems with the João Ferreira de Almeida translation that the Church uses — a 1909 version is in the public domain, but it uses language that is hard for many members to understand, while the more recent versions are under copyright and require the church to purchase copies from other religions.

This does have one, albeit small, downside — it could make it a little harder for any LDS publisher working in Spanish, because in order to quote liberally (beyond fair use) that publisher will have to seek permission from the Church. Of course, as it stands now, an LDS publisher has to go to another, protestant religious organization to get permission to quote from the Bible or use the harder-to-understand public domain version of this translation.

So, all in all, this is better.

* * * *

“To Know the Names of All the Vital Things”: On the Virtue of Words and the Word of God

And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just—yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened unto them—therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God. (Alma 31:5)

On June 16, 1844 at a meeting assembled in the grove just east of the Nauvoo Temple, the Prophet Joseph Smith stood to deliver one of his final sermons. Wet with rain, surrounded by apostates, many of whom wanted him dead, and sustained by the saints, he spoke plainly and courageously of the Christian Godhead and “the plurality of Gods,” truths that would in part lead to his martyrdom almost two weeks later.

Yet, his message was no different than anything he’d previously taught: “I wish to declare,” he said, that “in all congregations when I have preached on the subject of Deity, it has been the plurality of Gods.”¹ Using ancient and modern scripture to support his reasoning, he took the assembly back to the beginning, showing them the unbroken chain of exalted Beings that extends, Parent to child, across the thresholds of eternity. Pointing to the relationship between Christ and Elohim as his example, he asked, “Where was there ever a son without a father? and where was there ever a father without first being a son? […] [I]f Jesus had a Father, can we not believe that He [Christ’s Father] had a Father also?”²

Just over two months before preaching this sermon in the temple grove, the Prophet had stood before a vast congregation of similar make-up at a Church conference combined with the funeral service for Elder King Follett. During this climactic moment of his career, he taught, “If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves.”³ In one sense, then, only as we come to understand God and his eternal pedigree can we really understand our place, as his offspring and heirs, in the universe and beyond. In this knowledge, the Prophet said, we find eternal life, a dynamic condition we “have got to learn […] the same as all Gods have done before [us] […], namely by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation.”⁴

Through these revelations the Prophet not only outlines the eternal nature and development of God’s race and the breadth and depth of God’s experience and understanding, he also unveils the depth and breadth of God’s love. By “lift[ing] a corner of the veil and giv[ing] [us] […] a […] glance into eternity,”⁵ he reveals the eternal bonds of kinship that unite God’s children to him and to one another through Christ, showing us, as Parley P. Pratt commented after a temple ceremony, “how to prize the endearing relationships of father and mother, husband and wife; of brother and sister, son and daughter.” From the Prophet, said Parley, we learn “that the refined sympathies and affections which endear[…] us to each other emanate[…] from the foundation of divine eternal love” and “that we might cultivate these affections, and grow and increase in the same to all eternity.”⁶

Firm in this knowledge of who God is—and by extension who we are—and that his defining characteristic is love, we must move to become like him. We must “pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that [we] […] may be filled with this love” (Moroni 7:48) because, of all things, it will never fail. In a world of constantly shifting morals and circumstances, charity, the pure love Christ and the Father have for us and that we can have for Them, can be our constant. It can steady our relationships; it can heal our deepest wounds and help us to heal others’ wounds; and it can tie us to our potential as children of an Infinite Being whose touch extends into the most intimate depths of every human soul.

*

In her 2008 novel, Bound on Earth,⁷ Angela Hallstrom approaches and explores this intimacy by giving us the Palmer’s, a tight-knit, Latter-day Saint family whose interconnected narratives provide the structure for and the tension binding the relationships of Hallstrom’s fictional world. The first story, “Thanksgiving,” presents us with the book’s cast of flawed-enough-to-be-human characters. Tess, the family matriarch, who has presided at this holiday gathering in the absence of her long-passed husband, Joel, stands at the door of her son’s Salt Lake home, saying goodbye to her granddaughter, Beth, Nathan and Alicia’s youngest child. “Take care,” she says, her hands wrapped around Beth’s, their final touch before Tess leaves to make the journey north, to Logan and home.⁸ This simple, sincere directive and the moment of physical contact between Tess and Beth becomes all the more poignant as Hallstrom points us down the street where, just out of view of the Palmer house, Kyle, Beth’s estranged and bi-polar husband, sits in his car, waiting outside because Beth had told him not to come. So, seeking communion in another way, he “imagine[s] the family inside […], laughing, eating, Beth and her sisters [Marnie and Tina] teasing each other and telling their inside jokes. […] Nathan, in his chair at the head of the table, […] Alicia, sitting […] on the edge of her seat, […] ready to jump up and get somebody butter or salt or more ice. All of them,” Kyle thinks, “pretending they don’t miss him, that he never existed, that they’re better off now without him.”⁹

And yet, inside, his absence hovers in the space just beyond words. His name is the unspoken assumption behind every gesture, behind every attempt to connect, to bridge the distance between bodies, between selves. This is especially true from Beth’s point-of-view. “Today,” she reflects, “no one has said Kyle’s name aloud. [… But] my sisters keep sliding the conversation around, trying to avoid topics like love and marriage, mental health and single motherhood. My dad keeps coming up behind me and putting his hands on my shoulders. Really, they may as well all just be saying, ‘Kyle, Kyle, Kyle.’ A big family chant”¹⁰ meant less to remind them of who’s missing and what’s wrong than as a communal prayer for one of their own whose struggle with mental illness has ripped through the family’s bonds, making them each less certain of their commitment to each other, to God, and to the prospect of eternal lives.

This struggle to make sense of life’s uncertainties, to muster the will to press on in spite of challenges and losses we wouldn’t wish upon our enemies, let alone take upon ourselves, is central to much literature. Bound on Earth is no different. It presents us with characters that stand in the midst of transformative experiences through which each must pass in order to maintain or increase their integrity—to be true to themselves, to their communities, and, ultimately, to their personal conceptions of God. Sometimes, as with Beth, this may mean separating oneself and one’s child from potential sources of harm, even if that source is familial and even if that separation is only for a time, until strength and the will to understand and to honor one’s covenants returns. And sometimes, as with Marnie or Tess, this may mean taking the reins of family circumstances that have edged slowly or veered suddenly out of control whether due to a vital decision made and almost carried out, even though it never felt quite right, or to a spouse’s sudden inability (whether physical or otherwise) to share the inherent burdens of family life. And sometimes, as with Nathan and Alicia, this may mean supporting a child’s decision to begin or to continue a relationship that’s bound to cause great anxiety and pain for either party or for the entire family and that doesn’t seem in keeping with that child’s potential.

But always, I’m convinced, it means cultivating an awareness of how our presence, our compassion can influence the world, of how we can fully occupy the space where our lives touch other lives, where a look or a touch of the hand or the simple act of listening or a string of carefully chosen or inspired words can spark new associations within and between selves. It means knowing, among other things, that we can create new intra- and interpersonal worlds based on the responsible and responsive use of language.

*

This virtue of words is something I’ve become increasingly interested and invested in as I get older and seek new ways to break bread with others across the table of humanity. And I find this same concern with language at the center of Bound on Earth as at the center of Mormon theology. Tess, for example, approaches the creative potential of words as she watches Joel, a once successful attorney, battle the speech-paralyzing effects of a stroke. Night after night, she listens to him recite Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, waiting in bed for him “as he sits straight-backed in his office, struggling through poetry, molding his sliding mouth around the consonants”¹¹ until the syllables finally “came out of his mouth in an acceptable fashion.” At one point, she wants to ask him what they need “with all those words. The children don’t need them,” she says; then, “I don’t need them. There are ways to go on without them.”¹² But after years of watching him struggle to regain the virtue of his own words and after returning to school herself as a step toward providing for her family while Joel tried to recover his ability to work, she realizes that, even though there are ways of communicating beyond language and even though silence can sometimes be “full enough”¹³ to bind us together in deeply fulfilling relationships, as social beings, we have certain needs that can only be met through the sacramental power of words.

This moment of recognition comes for Tess after she’s returned home from her first day as a forty-something nursing student. As the day’s uncertainties burden her shoulders, she stands at the kitchen sink before an open window, her back to Joel, who stands at “the living room window, his hands in his pockets, watching his boys play catch on the lawn.” Their physical and emotional detachment begins to soften as an autumn breeze moves between the rooms and Joel speaks. Remembering how he’d promised his wife the world when they married, he says, “This wasn’t how…,” and stops mid-sentence. Moving from the kitchen to meet her companion in the living room, Tess wraps her arms around him and says, “It will be all right […]. No matter what.” In the silence that follows, “[s]he can feel him trembling beneath her cheek. During all this time of disappointment and trial, she has never seen him cry. She waits, holding him, until she feels his breathing steady and his heart beat slow. Then he turns to face her.

“’I’m trying,’ he says. ‘Every day.’

“She looks into his face. ‘I believe you. So am I.’”

Although this short conversation, this brief moment of communion between souls who had been yearning for connection but the words just wouldn’t come, still leaves many things unsaid, it represents a turning point for Tess. As Joel “turns [from the room] and heads up the stairs to his office” to exercise his voice, she “leans out the open window and calls [her boys’] […] names. ‘Come on home,’ she says, and her voice is loud and strong, riding on the air.” Then she turns to “her canvas [school] bag,” determined to glean all she can from her new books, to “remember the organs she studied so many years ago—what they do and why” because, she confesses, “It will be comforting to know the names of all the vital things; she will memorize everything the body uses and needs, and never forget it.”¹⁴ Here she acknowledges that language is as vital to the human organism as is the heart or the liver or the skin. Here she begins to understand that the process of calling another’s name, as a very specifically directed word, is a way for us to connect with those we’ve learned to call our own.

*

In the literary realm, often more so than in flesh and blood reality, names are given to reflect a certain aspect of a person’s character. Hence the very deliberate way in which Marnie proceeds to name her third son, the one she’d hoped and planned would be a girl—even down to the name she chose. After a brief period during which she mourned this lost hope, she folded her new son beneath the blanket of her expanding love and called him “Daniel. […] After the Old Testament prophet. The strong one, the one who faced the lions, the one who wouldn’t back down.”¹⁵

In few places, however, is this naming process more deliberate than in the case of God, whose many names are given to teach us of his character. When Moses—the once adopted Hebrew son of Pharaoh’s daughter, the man who ultimately refused to take part in the king’s oppression of the children of Israel by running into the wilderness—ascended Mount Horeb for the first time after his flight, he received at least three things in the revelatory moment that followed: First, he obtained a burning witness of the Divine presence; second, he was commissioned to lead God’s people out of their Egyptian captivity; and third, he was given a token with which Israel would know that their Deliverer had come.

After accepting the call to lead captive Israel to freedom, Moses needed a way to show them he wasn’t just some lunatic leader seeking followers in the name of a false god, but that he was sent by their God to set them free. So he “said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?” (Exodus 3:13). God replied that he should give Israel this name as a token that he had come bearing the proper authority: “I AM THAT I AM;” that is, Moses was to tell them that “I AM hath sent me unto you.” (3:14.) This title, God continued, would show Israel that “The Lord God of [their] fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (3:15) had sent Moses to deliver them, just as he had delivered his people from captivity and oppression from the beginning. God further declared: “This is my name for ever, and this shall be my memorial unto all generations” (3:15; emphasis mine.); in other words, by the name I AM or “JEHOVAH” (6:3) is God to be remembered throughout eternity.

Without a doubt, this name serves a significant function in revealing God to his people, not only in Moses’ time, but in all generations. As Joseph Fielding McConkie observes: “To declare one’s name [in ancient times] was to reveal one’s self.”¹⁶ Thus, by understanding the meanings behind God’s many names, we can better understand a particular aspect of God’s Selfhood—his eternal personality and nature. The name Jehovah, McConkie relates,

is derived from the verb ‘to be,’ which implies [God’s] eternal nature. I AM is the first person singular form of the verb ‘to be.’ In the name Jehovah, or I AM, God manifests Himself as a personal living being who labors in behalf of Israel and who will fulfill the promises made to the fathers. All of this conveys the idea of an unchanging, ever-living God, who through all generations is true to his word.¹⁷

I take this statement to mean that, when the Lord reminds us that he is the I AM, he is testifying, first, that he exists and is an ever-living, embodied Being; second, that he is unchangeable; and third, that he not just knows the word and keeps his word, but that he is the Word, the embodiment of the Father’s eternal Promise to His children.

The more I study the Gospel and become acquainted with God through his own words, given to us in our weakness, through human language, the more I realize the power and virtue of words and the Word of God, as conveyed in this slight paraphrase of God’s words as given to Joseph Smith when the Prophet was in Liberty Jail:

No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the [acts of language], only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, which shall greatly enlarge the soul without hypocrisy, and without guile—reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy; that he may know that thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death. (D&C 121:41-44).

I’m increasingly convinced that in this way, through our responsible and responsive use of language, we can cultivate our divine potential and bind ourselves to one another and to God here on Earth and for eternity.

* * * *

Footnotes:

1. “Gods Many and Lords Many.” God the Father. Ed. by Gordon Allred. Salt Lake: Deseret Book, 1979. 245.

2. 248-9.

3. “The King Follett Discourse.” God the Father. 224.

4. 228.

5. Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt. 3^rd ed. Ed. by Parley P. Pratt, Jr. Salt Lake: Deseret Book, 1970. 298

6. 297.

7. Woodsboro, MD: Parables, 2008.

8. 1.

9. 2.

10. 2.

11. 33.

12. 34.

13. 38.

14. 38-9.

15. 166.

16.Gospel Symbolism. Salt Lake: Deseret Book, 1985. 176.

17. 177; emphasis mine.