My dear boy,
In one of the letters I wrote to you, I established that autobiographies can sometimes feel fantastical because yesterday’s stories are being told using today’s words. The sublime thing about this is that certain experiences from the past, which didn’t have words to express them, neither had any definitions for them, find expression today. Hence, these experiences, sometimes, can be assumed to be new, whereas they had always existed.
In a previous letter, I talked about John, the Baptist. We examined human needs and product creation with John the Baptist as a case study. Now, whilst John- not John the Baptist, but John the Beloved- was on the Island of Patmos, his visions open up a conversation about the interpretation of prophecies, in that we have no words for some of the things that we see in the now about tomorrow.
As such, when we take the prophecies of a 1st-century man and cast them against the backdrop of the 21st century, we can say that this man was talking about airplanes, jet fighters, and the like. More importantly, Revelation furnishes us with evidence that John is struggling to represent visions through comparisons: “like a trumpet,” “like a son of man,” and other similes which appear throughout the opening vision.
Now, looking across history, you’ll find that Merlin also suffered the same limitations. The words of his time could not animate his visions; he saw people picking up stones and putting them against their ears for communication. When we cast that prophecy against the backdrop of the 21st-century, we can find that what he had seen was technological innovation as it pertains to communications. It therefore begs the question: What happens when later generations reinterpret an old symbolic statement through the technology they now possess?
Now in the book of Acts, we see the Greeks; they say, “This is the temple erected for the God that we do not know.” This suggests something profound about the culture of the Greeks: a culture that leaves room for new experiences. Captured in their language, this language is not set in stone, in that the meanings are not finite. In other words, the language is almost fluid, such that multiple meanings can be found nesting in a word. As such, a word can carry multiple meanings. So when you look at a word in Greek, it can mean so much more than the experiences it describes in the present. As such, that word can conveniently carry the experiences of today and the experiences yet to come. Worthy of note, however, is that polysemy is a feature of language generally, not unique to Greek.
Anyway, Greek prophets can be likened to being accurate in the sense that they are supplied with vocabulary that allows them to convey these meanings. In other words, as we somewhat celebrate the ability of the Greeks to understand the necessity of the duplicity of meaning attached to a word, it raises a question, which is, how do we interrogate the idea of vagueness? Should we strive to be vague in order to short-circuit the limitations that the present-day words may carry, in that they may not be able to afford us the ability to express the depth and height of all the experiences that we have been made aware of?
It begs the question: what does it mean to be vague? To applaud vagueness, what yardstick qualifies applauding vagueness? Is it the intent or the context? Does the context wherein we are vague erase the intent? Or does the intent define, to a very large degree, the context?
So, my dear boy, as we examine vagueness as a remedy to the challenge posed by the limitation of today’s vocabulary in the expression of the realities that have been made known to us, what are the pitfalls that we ought to expect? Of course, bearing in mind, as I observed in the last letter, that the basic difference between a human solution and the Divine is that the Divine proffers solutions that are finite in themselves, requiring no addition nor subtraction, whereas the human solutions bring about or necessitate further solutions to problems created by that very solution.
Love,
Dad.
