This "spatial syntax" is my current poetic diamond that I'm turning and turning and beholding and learning from! I'm trying to let these symbolic clues (is that what you would call them?) breathe into my poetry, and prepare my heart, as I travel through the OT, to receive something fresh from the incarnation (God come down!) when I finally make it to the Gospels. Thank you for what you've highlighted here, Kelly. I hadn't considered enough the light and dark word-usage, and their relation to geography and race, but I appreciate you naming Abraham's clear call to bless ALL the nations of the earth. Yes and amen.
"I HAVE actually read the New Testament. It reminds me of the Old Testament."
Symbolism is near-universal, the closest thing to Esperanto, because it's based on human experience.
We moderns have difficulty learning it, however, because we spend almost all day, every day, inside cuboid structures, reading textual symbols, or looking at glowing cuboid palantirs, building cuboid products of one kind or another. Interpreting an enormous amount of information through lenses provided by the scientific revolution and technology of various kinds.
(And here am I!)
But the breakthrough, for me, came sitting on a beach, and looking at water, waves, land rising, erosion, buildings, sky, sun.
And me there, between heaven and earth.
It is NOT romanticism. It ABSOLUTELY requires the interpretation of divine revelation, to get it right. But it is post-literate, in an important respect.
That's why my posts now almost always end with some practical connection with the physical world, asking people to DO something I think they might actually agree to. And why I'll be moving more and more into other media, including recordings.
This "spatial syntax" is my current poetic diamond that I'm turning and turning and beholding and learning from! I'm trying to let these symbolic clues (is that what you would call them?) breathe into my poetry, and prepare my heart, as I travel through the OT, to receive something fresh from the incarnation (God come down!) when I finally make it to the Gospels. Thank you for what you've highlighted here, Kelly. I hadn't considered enough the light and dark word-usage, and their relation to geography and race, but I appreciate you naming Abraham's clear call to bless ALL the nations of the earth. Yes and amen.
OT scholar Walt Kaiser likes to joke:
"I HAVE actually read the New Testament. It reminds me of the Old Testament."
Symbolism is near-universal, the closest thing to Esperanto, because it's based on human experience.
We moderns have difficulty learning it, however, because we spend almost all day, every day, inside cuboid structures, reading textual symbols, or looking at glowing cuboid palantirs, building cuboid products of one kind or another. Interpreting an enormous amount of information through lenses provided by the scientific revolution and technology of various kinds.
(And here am I!)
But the breakthrough, for me, came sitting on a beach, and looking at water, waves, land rising, erosion, buildings, sky, sun.
And me there, between heaven and earth.
It is NOT romanticism. It ABSOLUTELY requires the interpretation of divine revelation, to get it right. But it is post-literate, in an important respect.
That's why my posts now almost always end with some practical connection with the physical world, asking people to DO something I think they might actually agree to. And why I'll be moving more and more into other media, including recordings.