A blog about anything that interests me. So mainly Doctor Who, rhetoric, composition, metaphor and symbol, Mormonism, family, books, and random geeky things. Not necessarily in that order.
It should go without saying that the views I express here are my own, and do not represent those of my employer, church, etc.
Yes, I'm aware of the irony. I EAT IRONY FOR BREAKFAST (it helps with my mild anemia).
I'm a linguistic descriptivist and not a prescriptivist, which means that I'm more interested in studying and describing how language is used by various groups and how it changes over time than I am in enforcing language "rules." However, there is one linguistic development that especially saddens me, and it is the narrowing of the usage of the word "meme" to almost exclusively mean "image macro." It's as if people had started using "technology" to only mean "smartphone" (please nobody point out to me that some people already do that).
According to those who coined the word and further developed the concept, a meme is, very simply put, an idea that acts like a virus, getting stuck in your head and spreading from person to person. Some ideas are more contagious than others.
Religions are memes. So are fashion trends, manners, jokes, selfies, mass shootings, genres, and linguistic innovations. An image macro is a picture with text superimposed on it. As a genre, the image macro is an extremely effective meme. It has nearly taken over Tumblr, for instance, and every six months Mormons on social media are subjected to a massive outbreak of the image macro meme, largely via the #LDSconf hashtag (hashtags are also a meme, btw).
Why does it matter that people call "image macros" simply "memes," when they are really a kind of meme? Because the concept of memes, properly understood, is so useful, and it's useful to have a word we can use to discuss it. If, when I say "meme," all you think of is a picture of a grumpy cat with the word "NO" on it in impact font, it makes it harder to have a conversation about why some ideas are stickier than others.
Alas, the idea of ideas as viruses is apparently less sticky than the idea of pictures with pithy phrases on them. I have little hope that the original meaning of "meme" can be reclaimed.
With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I present to you:
Latter-day Saint readers will recognize this immediately. For the rest of you, this probably looks a bit weird. Basically, for the past couple of decades LDS students have been taught the "plan of salvation" (a set of fundamental LDS doctrines concerning our origin, purpose, and destiny) using what one of my Institute teachers cheekily refers to as "those hop-scotch diagrams." When teaching about the plan of salvation, Brother Richardson encourages his own students to re-create their own visual representation of the plan, using symbols that are personally meaningful to them. The second he mentioned it, this image sprang nearly full-formed into my mind. So I sketched a draft in class on Thursday, and today I took myself over to easel.ly to create the glorious infographic you see above.
Of course this representation is the thinnest of analogies, and it only works when held extremely lightly. For instance, I'm not sure what in a PhD program would be analogous to the atonement of Jesus Christ; I don't know that I even dare play with such a comparison. And it is absolutely not true that job outcomes reflect the "righteousness" of the PhD-holder, or that alt-academic jobs are less worthy than faculty jobs--in this case, my diagram reflects perceptions which I regard as rather unfortunate, not reality.
But from an affective point of view, the analogy does kind of work, and it was pretty fun to think about. Beyond that, I will leave it to you to explore the scriptures to see how each stage of the plan corresponds to a stage of the PhD process. If you think different scriptures make a better fit, please do suggest them in the comments--there's no reason I couldn't revise my little diagram. Here they all are in linky form:
The Premortal Spirit World: "First Lessons" D&C 138:56
Birth: "The Veil of Forgetfulness" Encyclopedia of Mormonism (this phrase is not used in the scriptures but is very common in LDS parlance; hence I link to the releveant entry in the EoM instead of the standard works)
Last night's premiere of season 8 of Doctor Who was good. It was far from being among the best the series has offered, but it did what a regeneration story needs to do: it breathed new life into the series. I'm especially delighted with the dynamics between Capaldi's Doctor and his current companion, Clara--a character who until now seemed destined never to live up to her original promise. The monsters were creepy and the callbacks to prior series were nice touches without being overbearing; plot inconsistencies were few. I also like the new title sequence a great deal, though I'm not too keen on the remixed theme song. Better still, the episode bugged me--in the good way that fiction sometimes does, entertaining you while you're consuming it but not leaving you when you close the book or turn off the television. Good fiction keeps working its way into your brain and shuffling things around. It changes you.
I don't want to overstate this. Doctor Who is a very silly show. That's one reason I love it. It's also a deeply thoughtful show, which is another reason I love it. It's not Great Art (or at least, not usually) but it often does for me what the greatest art does: it shines a revelatory light on some corner on the universe, allowing me to glimpse a truth. For now it's still just a notion, but I'm going to try to tease it out. There's lots more I could write about the good and bad of this episode, but that's not what I want to talk about. The review is up there in that first paragraph. What follows is less about Doctor Who than it is about me using Doctor Who as a mirror.
There's been something itching my brain since last night. The series has from time to time drawn symbolic parallels between the Doctor and God (or a god). It's sometimes ham-fisted and occasionally really interesting. As a believer and as a fan, I've got to stress that such symbolism, interesting as it can be, shouldn't be carried too far. Doctor Who isn't at all allegorical. Anyway, this isn't one of those episodes--that is, as far as I can tell, that subtext wasn't intentionally written into this episode. And yet I think this episode is teaching me something about my relationship to God.
The rest of this post contains SPOILERS for Doctor Who season 8 episode 1, "Deep Breath."
"Deep Breath" is a regeneration story; it's about the Doctor and his companion coming to terms with this profound change. He's got a different face, a different voice (new and yet old), new personality quirks have surfaced and old ones have subsumed. He is the same man at his core--we know this because it is the twelfth time we (or rather, I; for you, maybe it's the third, or the first) have seen him go through this process. This episode deftly handles questions about the continuity of self, but I'm getting off track. I want to talk about Clara. I'll work my way back to her from here.
Like his companions of the moment, usually I'm quite skeptical of the new Doctor, but it rarely takes long for him to win me over. This time, for me, things were a bit complicated because I've been totally excited for Capaldi's take on the part since the casting was revealed, and it seems like Moffat was aware of that feeling among many of the audience because the story actually takes some pains to alienate us. Regeneration is always difficult for the Doctor; he's always disoriented for a while, or unconscious, and his companions are always weirded out and upset that the man they trusted with their lives suddenly seems to be someone else--someone far more alien than he seemed--someone they're not sure they know at all. But this time the new Doctor isn't just addled, not just unruly. He is dangerous. At a critical moment when it seems he and Clara have at last been reunited, when they're finally starting to reconnect, they're attacked by the creepy robots who've been harvesting human body parts to repair themselves for millennia...and he abandons her. As the metal door slams shut between them, she begs him to at least leave her the sonic screwdriver, but he won't even do that much. Sitting safely (as I thought) in my comfy chair, I felt like I'd been slapped hard.
Left all alone, Clara has to save herself but she can't. She does her best, she doesn't give up though she's running out of options and she believes--she really believes the Doctor would not abandon her, but she isn't sure and she's terrified she's wrong, that he's not the person she thought he was. And she reaches out behind her because she needs him to be there to rescue her. And at what seems like the very last moment he does; he's been there all along, hiding behind a mask made of human flesh. The fight is far from over but her struggle to survive alone has given them the information they need to ultimately defeat the enemy.
It's a triumphant moment for Clara, and a simultaneously reassuring but still unsettling one for the audience. I'm kind of furious at him for putting her through that. But it's not like it's the first time he's done that sort of thing, and like Clara, I still love him in the end and believe that even though he's scarier now than he seemed before, he's still him; that though he isn't safe (he never was really), he's still good. He did save her, like he always does--or almost always. He couldn't save Katarina, Adric, Astrid, Donna, or Adelaide. For that matter, he failed to save Clara not once but twice already. The Doctor isn't God. He's not even a god. He's a mad man with a box.
That's where the metaphor breaks down (we mustn't try to stretch it too far). God always saves us (He just doesn't always save us alive). For now though, I'm just identifying with Clara's terrified tears and shaking hand, outstretched to someone she must trust absolutely but whom she can't see and isn't entirely sure she really knows.
Tonight I had the privilege of hearing Howard Lyon speak about his art. Lyon's commercial work has been primarily in the world of fantasy illustrations, RPGs, and video game art direction. He is also, like me, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he has painted a number of religious works, including the portrait of Christ above, titled "Light of the World."
Brother Lyon spoke about how important it is to him that his portraits be as accurate as possible--he uses friends and family members as models in much of his work. When painting the Savior, however, verisimilitude presents a challenge because no one really knows what Jesus looked like, and there are so many different representations of him already, in an incredible range of styles. If he were to ask a chapel full of people which painting of Christ was their favorite, he said, he would likely get at least twenty different answers. Because of these things, it's very difficult to create a portrait of Christ that will feel "accurate" to everyone. In painting "Light of the World," then, Brother Lyon decided that he would focus on accurately representing the way the Savior made him feel.
That got me thinking about my own favorite portrait of Jesus, and by extension, those of others. I wondered what our favorite representations of Jesus might say about the Savior makes us feel, how we feel about the Savior. It has struck me in the past how within the LDS church (and probably in cultures generally) over time different paintings of Jesus seem to go in and out of popularity, and how that might reflect or influence on a cultural level what our personal preferences might reflect on an individual level. That might be an interesting research project for another time, but for now I just want to share a few of my favorite pictures of Jesus and meditate a little bit, and ask my readers to meditate, on how these representations of Christ reflect aspects of our relationship with Christ.
"Christ and the Rich Young Ruler" by Heinrich Hoffman.
The image above isHeinrich Hoffman’s “Christ and the Rich Young Ruler”. It's been my favorite portrait of Jesus for many years, and a copy of it hangs on my bedroom wall. The story comes from Mark 10:17–25, in which an earnest young man asks Christ what he must do to inherit eternal life. In the discourse that follows, we learn that this young man has scrupulously kept all the commandments throughout his life. Jesus tells him that the only thing he still needs to do is to give all his worldly possessions to the poor, and "take up the cross, and follow me." The young man leaves sorrowfully, and passes out of the record--we never learn whether or not he was ultimately willing to follow Christ.
Whenever I hear this story or see this painting, I'm reminded of another story, from the Book of Mormon. In Alma chapter 22, we read of a missionary named Aaron, who went to preach among the Lamanites, his hereditary enemies. In the course of time he meets with the king of the Lamanites, who, after being taught about Christ, asks Aaron, just as the rich young man asked Jesus, what he must do to inherit eternal life. When Aaron tells him that he must repent and call upon God in faith, the king offers this prayer:
"O God, Aaron hath told me that there is a God; and if there is a God, and if thou art God, wilt thou make thyself known unto me, and I will give away all my sins to know thee."
My love for Hoffman's portrait is partly aesthetic. Though he wasn't a Pre-Raphaelite, it bears a similarity of style, and that style has always appealed to me. I love the warmth of the colors, the way the lines suggest gentle movement, as Christ beckons the youth to follow him. Christ's expression is one of profound compassion. Perhaps, also, I love it because it represents a powerful teaching moment. When I see it, I'm moved to ask myself what I wouldn't give to know God.
Another favorite is "Christ in Red Robe" by Minerva Teichert. Teichert is among my favorite LDS artists. Her style is rather unlike that of most other LDS painters, who tend more toward realism. She's also the only really prominent woman artist in the church that I know of, and her subjects often feature women, as in this painting of Christ, in which you can see two women reaching toward Christ at his second coming.
Walter Rane is another of my favorite LDS artists. His painting, "Jehovah Creates the Earth," really moves me in its depiction of Christ's majesty and power.
"Jesus the Christ" by Del Parson
Owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
This last painting, by Del Parson, isn't really one of my favorites (though I do like it), but I feel I should include it because it is arguably the portrait of Christ most commonly associated with the LDS church since 1983, which is about as far back as my memory can stretch. It's certainly the picture of Jesus I recall seeing the most as a child. There's even a Mormon urban legend about it, but I won't go into that (except to say that, not surprisingly, it isn't true). This painting is definitely part of my instinctive image of the Savior.
Do a Google image search of "Christ" and you will see an enormous range of images; from downright kitschy to some of the greatest works in the history of art; you will see Him depicted in attitudes of torment, sublimity, serenity, and even mirth; in periods of His life from infancy to the cross; and while most portraits of Christ look distinctly European, if you dig a little further you will see a wider range of ethnicity represented. Ultimately, however, it matters much less how we represent Jesus in our art than how we come to reflect His image in our own countenance.
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