A Rambling Hypothesis on the Origin of Sacrifice: Bullying, Money, and Words

All over the world communities of people fight over scarce resources. It has always been so. Before there was law or money, victors of these conflicts had to ensure, at the least cost to themselves, the fruits of their victory: access to the resources. The victor’s solution to the problem was to make as high as possible the price of renewing the conflict. The most effective way to accomplish this would be to wipe out the entire vanquished community, and when feasible this is in fact the solution. We see this in First Samuel, where God punishes his people for failing to wipe out the vanquished. But the problem of this approach is also revealed in this account. Like two animals fighting over the privilege of mating, the fight stops when the winner is established, not when the vanquished is killed. If my community wants to ensure the vanquished remains so, the price I exact will be something from you that you value highly but that will not be a threat to me. It will be a person among you. It could be anyone as long as you will feel the weight of that loss. Sometimes it is a wise old man or woman. Sometimes it is the king. Sometimes it is a virgin or child. There are no rules; there is a logic to it, one we can see repeated in the informal tribal structures of gangs, cartels, or high schools.

                As tends to happen, what starts as spontaneous and immediate becomes codified. So in various places around the world different systems that we will call sacrifice emerge. One place it is kings, another it is virgins.

                A virgin is a likely choice because she will represent the future for the vanquished. Taking her is a severe blow. We can take her for breeding stock. Or we can take her just to humiliate you. We can take your beautiful young woman and kill her before your eyes. What is valuable to you is meaningless to us. Ha ha. Now stay away from our prey animals and our foraging sites.

But a problem arises: the theft of the king or virgin is as likely to elicit violence as it is appeasement. Everything depends on the real threat dynamic between the communities. We can miscalculate in killing your virgin and bring a delayed reacting, regrouping. Now we’re fighting not for forage and prey but for revenge.

Now we have to invent or invoke God. Now we have to formalize the system of exchange that brings peace. Maybe.

More likely we reimagine the event of the price of the virgin or the king. The meaning develops and transmutes the way that the meaning of words develops and transmutes. Our community is not threatened by the neighboring community for resources. It’s threatened instead by deluge or drought or earthquake or some other natural phenomenon. This beating is so much like the beating of the neighboring community, we say that we are under attack, and the attacker is the community of invisible beings. Call them gods. We invent the idea of the sacred—which is just another word for “valuable”—to increase the value of the sacrifice and therefore its effectiveness. We now give one of our own to the gods to stop the attack. Sometimes it works. When it does we thank the gods. When it does not, we blame ourselves and try again.

It’s very expensive to sacrifice virgins or kings. We decide as we do with words—so that humor (liquid) can come to mean funny with time—that what mattered was not the value of the virgin but her innocence. Or what made her valuable was her innocence. We can say it either way. What else is innocent? Animals. Animals are more innocent even than virgins. And according to the principle of greatest value for least cost, we choose to sacrifice an animal instead. Only the best animals because they are closest to the virgin of course.

The system is developed and also copied. We can institute sacrifice in our community too because we learned that the neighboring community does it and it works great for them. We don’t necessarily understand it as they do, but we do it because we’re desperate and it works. We do it to show them we respect them. We do it for any reason people do things with partial or different understandings or just in pure imitation with no understanding at all. Understanding develops later as necessary.

Again in the Old Testament, in the story of Lot and his daughters, Lot offers his daughters to the violent crowds to save as much of his household as he can. It’s a sacrifice before the name.

Sacrifice doesn’t start as a religious practice. It doesn’t even start as an economic practice. It starts as bullying.

Hammurabi’s code is a way of getting a handle on the system. Sacrifice may develop a religious sheen that is intended to strip from it the threat of revenge. But violence is violence. And it doesn’t always work. Moreover the conditions that lead to the development of a system of sacrifice never go away. Murder, revenge, bullying, humiliation—they all continue outside the sacrificial system. Hammurabi codifies the economic principle of equal cost to quell the violence. You can have your revenge, but you can’t elevate. We develop the concept of justice.

Five-word poem

 Stories end.

Life just

Bridge Out

 Bridge Out is a story in the online literary journal,  Half and One. 

Running Out

Warm, bright, beautiful spring and then you hear

a sound. A crack you’d call it.

The sound so loud you wonder that your ears still work.

And then you wonder if your ears still work.

The recoil in your body. And then a rumbling roaring.

Behind you, above the treeline, the mountain

the sunlight bounces off has shed its skin,

rumbling, roaring liquid wave of rock and dirt and gravel churning down.

 

When that enormous noise erupted you were contemplating coffee

admiring the morning, trying to decide between toast and a doughnut.

It took so long to reach you, you’d almost decided on the doughnut.

 

Young, healthy, perfectly safe for several minutes yet

you stare at the beloved mountain racing to devour you.

You have time. You still have time.

 

What will you do with your last five minutes? Run?

Buy yourself seconds to regret everything

you never got to do? Lament your failures?

Try to console yourself?

Pray?

I wonder if you’ll pray.

I believe you’ll run in blind panic aware, if the part of you

that is is still alive, you cannot get away in time.

You are perfectly safe. But still

the ever loudening roar is telling you in what might as well be words you can’t.

It happened already. It happened long ago.

It happened for you.

Holiday Showcase Live Broadcast Featuring Alan Lindsay

More on Tragedy

 It should not have to have been. 

It should not have to have happened.

You could have prevented, fixed, settled it if you could have known ahead of time what you could not have known.

The knowledge of the truth emerges with the knowledge that it is too late to do anything about it.

It had to be.

It had to happen. 

You couldn't do anything to stop it. 

You know that now.

To the Disbeliever in Reality

The corollary that if there is anything God can do that 
would reduce suffering without reducing the benefits of 
suffering he is bound to do it.  

 Once death was admitted

               every horror was allowed

You cannot believe one moment

               this was just

               an inconsequential slip

There is no other universe

               could sustain you

               so desperately wanted

               so monstrously loved

Forgive the giver

And all will be forgiven 

                on the other side

               of the shredded curtain. 

The Problem with Poems

 

The problem with poems

if you’re the kind of person who’s always anxious

until he pulls into the driveway

turns off the light locks the door

replaces the toothbrush in the toothbrush

holder, feeds the dog, kisses the wife

switches out the burned out bulb

greets the morning with a smile

opens the file

pulls the lever

lets out a singular sigh

 

The problem in short if you’re a person whose heart

cannot rest

until you are safely there

the problem with poems is not that you never arrive.

The problem is

 

you never arrive.

For the love of poetry in all people

 

 It sounds as though you're not particularly interested in exploring the experience a poem wants to give you. Some people are not interested in what poems do. Some people are not interested in baseball, some are not interested in poems. If we go to a baseball game for the final score, there's no point in arriving before the ninth inning. And if we go to a poem just for the meaning, we can search the internet for a convenient paraphrase--which may or may not be there or accurate, but which is not the poem anymore than the box score is the baseball game. We have to learn to enjoy baseball or we can't enjoy it. The same again is true of poetry. I'm always concerned about the fact that we encounter poetry most often in school. School is where we learn about poems because we're not yet at the place where we can experience the poetry of poems in the way a baseball fan experiences the poetry of baseball.

Because it's the poetry in baseball that makes it fun. And it's a lack of sensitivity to that poetry that makes it boring to the uninitiated. Learning what poems do is something that happens all in the head, in the same part of the brain that does math. (There's also a poetry to math that you can't experience until you're pretty good at it. Mathematicians and physicists, echoing Keats without knowing it, will tell you that a beautiful equation is most likely to be true.) That part of your brain where you learn without experiencing is always boring. With all these things: math, baseball, poems (also grammar, cars, sewing, pottery, cooking, rearing children or raising bees or chickens--even in computers, I suppose) there is the poetry--where a part of your brain explodes with fireworks and orgasms--and there's the "what the hell does that mean? How on earth does that work?" “What in God’s name just happened?” part. Boring, frustrating. I hold out the hope that everyone loves poetry. But some people never experience it. And some people never experience it in poems. 

Weird

I think I must be odd.

Not odd, weird.

I think my friends think I am weird.

I think when I am not there they tell each other how weird I am.

I think they tell each other this, that I am weird, even when I am there, among them.

They look at each other and nod and roll their eyes, and their heads say, “That’s just Alan. He’s weird.”

I think they think they tell me I am weird.

I think they think if I would just stop doing these weird things and saying these weird things I wouldn’t be weird anymore. I think they would like it if I wasn’t weird.

I think they tell me directly and clearly right to my face in no uncertain terms that I am weird and also what it is that if I stopped doing it I would stop being weird, instantly. I think they think that that would be better. 

That would, of course, be better.

I think they think I hear them, they are so clear and so direct and so unequivocal.

The Line that Makes the Face

  

 

The line that makes the face

old is easily traced, but the one

that isn’t there, isn’t there

to be erased, that one’s, that one’s

 

Why do I feel the need to wear a hat

when I go outside? I’m not that bald

yet. Yet, voila, old man,

a hat.

 

Talk, make a numbly sound at least

when there’s clearly nothing to say

nothing you could say; the word that startles

the spring that releases

the drawer that hides the clue

doesn’t exist, has never existed

for you. 

The Fishes

penetrated

impenetrable

jade, seed through

utterly inky black

ness. Order fell past

injury

to tatters, re

ordered, scar

red rein

jured.

 

Go fish

in the heap of

letters

scattered and

piled at the bottom

of the page.

How to Catch a God

The key to catching a god,

sprinkle little salt onto its tail.

But you gotta to be fast.

You have to drop the cage before it flies.

 

Soon’s you got it locked away,

you can carry it wherever it’s needed,

threaten to pull back the covercloth,

tell everyone what it would have said if would’ve talked

to them. But then

it only talks to you

of course.

 

Just don’t let it sing. Jesus

 

like a million years ago

got hold of a cage like that,

let one go.

Yanked away the covercloth, smashed open the door.

 

Couldn’t wait to get shed of these crazy salt

people.

 

               But we caught it again—caught it right way.

Stuffed it in a bright new cage. Kept a steady rain

of salt upon that ragged tail.

 

Hasn’t hardly sung once since.

 

 

A Note on Girard and the Desire that Generates Mimesis

 

I don’t think Girard fully explains how desire functions as language. Not all desire is mimetic. Some desire originates in an attempt to be imitated. If I want to be what we may call the alpha male, I may want to win the mimetic war by achieving the alpha female whom everyone desires. Or I may want to create desire in others by my desire for the woman not yet on anyone’s radar, the woman whose eyes are nothing like the sun. In this case I create her as an object of desire for others only after I have won her, my Helen. And this speaks of a desire deeper than the desire that is manufactured by mimesis. It is the desire that generates mimesis. My desire to be the king at the risk of losing the object my my desire to Paris, at the risk of becoming the sacrifice.

Brian Cox and the Insignificance of Earth

The folly of glibness and of bumper-sticker sized statements came home again to me when I wrote for Facebook this:

On earth when something is rare we call it precious. In the universe when something is rare we call it insignificant.

It was in response to a short video I’d just watched in which respected, in fact brilliant, physicist Brian Cox made a statement (which I quote from memory) to the effect that this is undeniable that the earth is insignificant in the vastness of the universe.

It wondered as soon as I heard it why he would call this rarity undeniably insignificant, given that on earth rarity has the opposite meaning in most instances. Gold is rare, precious gems are rare, love is rare. To make things more valuable, we limit with availability, diamonds and art prints. Rare means precious.

Of course that’s not always true on earth. But is it obviously false in the universe? Could earth not be insignificant but all the more significant because it’s rare. Could it be precious?

If I can say of the same thing with equal logic that it is “precious” and “insignificant,” at the very least I can deny that the earth is “undeniably” insignificant.

But can I arbitrate between the two? Can I look at the universe and say with any authority that it is precious or that it is insignificant?

I cannot. As soon as I say “in itself” precious or “in itself” insignificant, I run into the old nominalist/realist problem that things don’t exist in themselves. These concepts have to be put into a context to give them meaning. Precious or insignificant—compared to what? For what purpose? What makes something one or the other.

Take of loaf of bread. In it put a single molecule of some radioactive material. Is the molecule in that rising loaf precious or insignificant? Well, if I want to eat the bread, it is insignificant. One molecule of this radioactive substance will not harm me. But what if I need a molecule of this substance for some experiment or just to test my Geiger counter? If I can find no other molecule but I know this one is in there, it now becomes precious.

This is how the concepts of precious and insignificant work.

But Brian Cox will insist that life is insignificant in the vastness of the universe. And he will use this as evidence that human life is existentially meaningless and that God does not exist. He may well be right. These are not points I care to argue. But I must also observe that he is using a circular logic. The cart is pulling the horse. It’s not the insignificance of life in the universe that produces logical godlessness. It is godlessness that produces the insignificance of life in the universe. This discussion highlights the difference, the nonparallel difference, between the position of a theist and an atheist. The theist can rightly claim that life is precious because God made it. The atheist cannot make a claim one way or the other. The words “precious” and “insignificant” in this context are both theological. They invoke the meaning of a universe in reference to something, and that something can only be God. It’s true that God may not exist and that that nonexistence renders the universe itself and everything in it without “in-itself” significance. But you can’t logically argue from insignificance to the nonexistence of God. You can’t establish the insignificance without first positing the nonexistence. While the theist believes he has a standard against which to declare life in the universe precious, the atheist has no standard against which to proclaim anything in the universe insignificant. A subatomic particle in a radioactive molecule in a rising loaf of bread cannot declare the loaf insignificant.

But let me be clear: nothing I’ve said bears any relevance to the question of whether God exists or does not exist, whether life is precious or insignificant. The only point that can be made by this analysis is that a scientist, however brilliant, cannot meaningfully declare anything in the universe insignificant without first declaring the context in which that judgment is made. And it cannot be made is evidence for or against the reality of anything outside of or apart from the physical universe. 

ABC

 

If A is B then C.

But A is never B.

A is always A

if names mean anything.

The morning star is the

evening star is

Venus. No.

The morning star is the morning star

The evening star the evening

Venus Venus.

If words mean anything.

If A were B

and A and B were C

they would earn only one

name. And nothing earns

only one name.

Limerick LXXII

 Given all the times he tried

To laugh when he should have cried

(And all that he did

Not to show what he hid)

Are you really that surprised to hear that he died?

The Incautious Goat

Once upon a time there was a goat

Who spied delicious tin down in a moat.

He jumped right in.

He could not swim.

And even worse for him, he could not float.

 

And then there was the time another goat 

Got pearls of wisdom stuck inside her throat. 

She baaaa’d and brayed 

But there they stayed. 

She never should have dinnered on a quote. 

 

                              

And then there was the time the hungry goat

Expounded on a soapbox, and I quote:

“Oh you dear friends of mine,

I thank you for your time.

Now, please ignore the sign and feed the goat!”

 

Grammar Lesson

Noun is a noun

and verb is a noun.

Verb is a noun till you verb it.

Verbing a word makes it a verb.

Verb is a verb when you verb it.

The question of ontological status

Stone

Constellation

Money

Carnation

Poem

Fear