Very Elemental

When asked to describe "Waiting for Godot" the playwright answered that it was very "elemental". There have been a multitude of diverse interpretations of the playing including a historical parable of the second world war, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian psychoanalysis, Catholic purgatory, generic Christian, homeerotic, late modernist, posmodernist etc etc. It seems like Becket was correct, it is very elemental as shown by the diverse interpretations, readings and understandings of it.

I have decided instead of having an over-arching thesis to the play I will rather analyze a series of quotations taken from the second act alone and extrapolate some of the 'elemental' themes, images and ideas that float around the play. Part of the reason I have decided to this is that it seems that the text really does not allowed for any final or definite meaning, if there was a final and definite meaning Godot would have arrived. Instead since Godot does not, in the end, arrive no major discourse or idea can really capture the play. It is uncapturable, just as Estrangon and Vladimir can not capture Godot's arrival.

"What do we do now, now that we are happy? Wait for Godot." - I choose this first quotation because it seems to me trying to express a base dissatisfaction with satisfaction itself. Somehow, whether it is universally human or culturally constructed, happiness is utterly ellusive and when it comes there seems to be a deep, unconquerable sense of moreness. A sense that people, even after being happy "still haven't found what they've been looking for."

It seems also that the waiting, the waiting for the more and the waiting for something which or someone who never comes, saves us from the incompleteness of happiness. Sure this being happy comes, but it's elusive and vagrant character is always terribly surprising and unsatisfying. It is almost as if we need salvation from the normal and everyday, and we receive that through waiting.

"He's forgotten everything!" - Like happiness memories are also dangerously elusive. The second act begins in the same place but a day after. Despite being the next day the characters can not really remember what happen and whether what they though happened could quite possibly be a dream. This strange relationship with memories, and thus the past, brings out frustration and deferrals but can express something quite profound. Something extremely important we can forget, something tedious and meaningless can stick in our minds. Thus is memory.

Memory is not something we can control. It is a force. It is a strong power that gives and takes away from us in our day to day lives. The nature of memory is that of happiness, we can not control it's comings or going, it's here and theres. It's presence, like happiness, is elusive.

" It's better if we parted.
You always say that and you always come crawling back." - This expresses the very fundamentally human relationality. Many a times, whether for good reasons or bad, we have the small or large temptation just to END a relationship. Whether that is with a friend, significant other, family member, someone in the same association as you there is almost always a trace, a small trace, a whisper of leaving. But almost always there is a return. A return to the relationship. A return to liking the relationship. A return from the world of fantasy where you leave to reality where you stay. It's a return.

Once again the elusiveness of something is challenged, or at least wrestled with. First it was happiness, then memory and now relationships. It seems like all human experience is overshadowed by a threat of absence or leaving. Absence of happiness, memory and friendship. A leaving of satisfaction, an always returning memory and a friendship that sometimes desires being alone.

"I've puked my puke of a life here, I tell you!" - Here is an excellent feeling of disgust with one's own existence. It is likened to puke, to a sickness which rejects whatever you take in. This has a tragic element to it. The idea that one's who existence was not made or influenced by rational, moral or spiritual decisions but rather just came out. The sense that one's growing up, ones adulthood and one's old age can simply come out without any control.

Again the substance of the elements of life being operated by a distant, elusive force is present. Puke is not something one decides, it just happens and it is uncontrollable. It is a disgusting mess and undefeatable.

"To have lived is not enough for them." - Once again the frustration that simple existence is not enough is expressed in despair. In the particular context of the quotation Estragon and Vladmir poetically consider the ways of nature, which insatiable. Just like happiness, it is not enought. Not enough. To simply exist is not enough there needs to be more.

"Say something! (in anguish) Say anything at all!" - The fear of silence, of no communication, no connections with the outside is utter terror. It is ultimately like the fear of death, for in death it seems like there will be only silence. Silence eternally. And in that silence being completely and utterly alone.

"Let's go.
We can't.
Why not?
We're waiting for Godot." - The elemental frustration desire of movement. There seems to be no movement. Why? Perhaps in waiting, perhaps in patience, one can really understand why. Or maybe patience is not the answer why but is still required anyway.

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed... To all mankind they are addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not." - Besides the elements of human life such as happiness, memory, relationships and waiting there is also this deep impulse to do good and not waste. You can not really separate wanting to listen to the cries and wanting not to waste. Again just like with the other elements this sense of responsibility is so utterly human, and yet elusive as the quotation suggests. Often times we consider the cries are directed towards others OR we waste time with 'idle discourse' when can be doing Good.



"We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?"

Already I have discussed five elements found in waiting for Godot that are both essentially human and, due to their nature, essentially alienating. Happiness, memory, friendship and morality are all things in human life that are beyond humans, beyond their control. I would also add waste into that mix. They come and go almost as they please, leaving us frustrated. So where do Saints come in?

I would suggest that all people have saints. Saints are not simply a specifically Catholic religious phenomenon but are found wherever humans accidently construct a civilization. What are saints? Saints, using what I already have written, can really be those who can flow, flux and be with the forces of happiness, memory, friendship, morality and waste with ease. The rest of us non-saints can not so we look to the saints in order to be like them. We want to flow with those forces and not against them and this seems almost impossible.

Thankfully we are waiting for the impossible. Or Godot. Or God. And while waiting we have that ability to be, to both strive and give up on being like the saints. It is an endless dialogue and dialect.

SPOILER ALERT:

At the end of the play Godot never arrives, and the two characters really do not change. Primarily "Waiting for Godot" is not a play or a story but Beckett's attempt at putting humanity on the page. That sounds like a bit much and it is. Pay careful attention I did not say Beckett succeeded only attempted.

And would Beckett even want to succeed/ believe he can succeed. For success would mean Godot has arrived, and he doesn't. Happiness never arrives, memory never stays, relationships are constantly in the process of leaving, waiting is endless, so is waster and no one is ever canonized.

The fact that the characters are still waiting for Godot is then the defeat of Nihilism, or at least the postponement of nihilism. In my last post I suggested that the play seems to oddly reject Nihilism in favour of waiting. I really do not comprehend what I meant but I think basically Nihilism is not allowed a victory. The waiting is an endless hope that Godot may arrive. There is a fear of nothingness, loneliness and all else but never do the characters doubt Godot will arrive. There's is a "hope against hope".

Happiness will go, memory will fade, life will morph into death, goodness will be delayed and relationships will falter. But Godot will come. Perhaps suicide, but not yet because Godot will come. The forces will remain forces, saints will be saints and sinners, but at the very least you have kept your appointment.

CHAOTIC CONCLUSIVE REMARKS:

I honestly loved this play. I think the simple scenes, lack of plot and yet pervading sense there is something going on behind the scenes drew me towards what the play was about(or not about). I found humour in some parts and oddly placed biblical references and others, and it was this interplay that drew me. I thought: is Godot a typological representative of God? What does it mean that he never comes, or at least what does it mean for someone who has lost faith in God coming as a late modernist like Beckett likely did?

I also loved Beckett's narrative treatment of nihilism: he does not answer it he simply ignores and defers it. It got me thinking about how people in general attempt to counter the threat of nihilism. It also made me consider what a 'hope against hope' and an eternal patience could really answer to nihilism. Can such a thing actually counter nihilism?

I also considered my faith: how would I place in relation to the faith of this book? I think I could only do this by writting the play backwards if you will. What I mean is that I would need to right the play in a sense where Godot has come, but will come again. This is the essence of Christianity: God has come AND will also come again. This is unique to Christianity and is found nowhere else. How will this re-writting of the story change it's themes, characters and purpose?

In previous posts I commented that we read all literature, in some sense, historically and we also read history through the eyes of literature. So how does "Waiting for Godot" correlate with this? Perhaps we can read "Waiting for Godot" up against both Fukuyama's 'End of History' and Lyotard's Collapse on Metanarratives. It can also help understand the social and psychological conditions of those who have lost their faith, whether in Marxism, Christianity, nationalism or some other religious ideals.

Co-operatives

I am always perpetually in thought about how to organize societies better. All I have really been able to come up with is oranizing the economy along the lines of worker's and consumer co-operatives.


These thoughts come from a reality I perceive: that the distinction between left and right economically and politically is false. Historically they both arise out of the enlightenment era and the french revolution. The right at that time did not want to seriously change societal structures (the monarchy) but agreed with the basic philosophies of the Enlightenment (first classical liberalism). The left tried to match philosophy with policy by having a revolutionary policy (but moved, unlike the right, to embrace the succesor of liberalism in the various forms of socialism).

Not much has changed.

The left was seriously set back by the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet and Maoist regimes, thankfully, as some have already said, the end of the cold war was a sort of victory for the left.

Unfortunately the left has been degraded in the generic keynesian strategies and has a lost what once their attempt at creative and revolutionary policy. Not to say the revolutionary policy is inherently good, it was this thrust of revolution that caused the Reign of Terror in post-revolutionary france and some of the dictatoral tyranny in marxist lands.

The left (and by that I mean a specific organizational politics, where philosophy meets policy) must rejuivante itself. The right has never really existed as distinct from the left, and as the left was co-opted by a beuarocratic keynesian ethos the right has been co-opted by the interests of a very specific group of businesses, specifically certain financial institutions, oil companies and large scale manufacturers.

So let us move in the direction of co-operatives. Where we own what we produce and consume, or at least have a say in how it is produced and consumed. This can severely break-down financial class positions and increase production and equity in our societies.

Facebanking??

Occasionally I like to take two concepts and, for a lack of a better word, breed them. Thus this little thought, this small theoretical experiment.

Social networking (Facebook etc) meets finances (banking).

Imagine:

- If you join a cause on facebook, you could also donate to it there and then
- you could, out of the joy of your heart, give all your friends on facebook .50 cents each
- on 'marketplace' type apps you could order things
- you could update your status: need 20$ for concert this saturday... and maybe might lend you or give you money
- perhaps some sort of application where you can also invest in businesses or even friends ideas
- perhaps create between a group of people a 'war chest' type of thing

WHY?

- easy way for charities, grass roots politicians and other causes to raise money
- great way to be a support/ find support from friends
- finances beginning looking more like Village Banking and other microfinancial institutions.. which would be an interesting experience in the west
- finances are based more and more on friends and community then on big banks and credit institutions

OF COURSE it might be difficult to set up but I think if it was it would be a pretty interesting and very experimental as well as fruitful ground for building relationships and practicing generosity and experiencing creativity.

Waiting for Godot - Part I

"Nothing to be done." pg 2

"Nothing to be done." pg 4

"There's nothing to show." pg 4

"Suppose we repented.
Repented what?
Oh...
Our being born?" pg 5

"It's not the same thing. Nothing to be done." pg 5

"Yes, but while waiting.
What about hanging ourselves?" pg 12

"One is what one is.
No use wriggling.
The essential doesn't change.
Nothing to be done." pg 17

"I don't like talking in a vacuum." pg 29

"Let us not speak ill of our generation, it is not not any unhappier than it's predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all." pg 32

"Will night never come?" pg 33

"He can't bear it. Any longer." pg 34

"He subsides. Indeed all subsides" pg 36

"Time has stopped." pg 37

"Finished! it comes to rest. But - but behind this veil of gentleness and peace night is charging and will burst upon us - pop! Like that! Just when we least expect it." pg 39

"In the meantime nothing happens.
You find it tedious?
Somewhat." pg 40

"But is it enough, that's what tortures me, is it enough?" pg 40

"Do you know what he calls it?...
The Net. He thinks he's entangled in a net." pg 42

"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" pg 43

"who from the heights...loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers" pg 45

"I hear something.
Where?
It's the heart.
Damnation!
Silence!" pg 49

"I don't seem to be able.. to depart.
Such is life." pg 50

"That passed the time.
It would have passed in any case.
Yes, but not so rapidly." pg 51

"Let's go.
We can't.
Why not?
We're waiting for Godot." pg 51

"I'm unhappy.
Not really? Since when?
I'd forgotten." pg 54

"You don't know if your unhappy or not?
No sir." pg 56

I choose the above quotations to illustrate the general mood which pervades "Waiting for Godot" a play I picked up written by Samuel Becket. The play is completely dialogue and the action, if anything that happens can be considered action, is only built as a deferral to more conversation. The whole premise of the play, of two men waiting for someone who never arrives, seems to point to the absence of action in the play.

Let me go further to explain. But I cannot. Why not? (see above quotation, pg 51) The structure of the dialogue does not allow for an interpretation of a mood. I want to call it despair, but it is not quite that. I also want to call it lost, but it is not that either. When reading the play whenever something is about to be decided or stated they do not. Take for example the quotation above (pg 54) where one of the characters states he is unhappy, the other asks him to clarify by telling him when to which he respond that he has forgotten.

Or take the quotation (pg 56) when one of the characters asks another one "You don't know if your unhappy or not?" to which the other character responds in the negative.

Near the start of the play the phrase "Nothing to be done" repeats itself several times. It seems that from the very beginning Becket is refusing to allow us to say what this play is about. The characters express a frustration at this pervading absence and one of the suggests that they repent, but neither of them can really express what they should repent off (quotation pg 5) except perhaps of being born, or existing, which itself makes no sense.

Now I would not necessarily call this position nihilistic, for even that is a decision on it's final meaning. In a sense it goes beyond nihilism, beyond nothing (or maybe before it??) into undecidability. What I mean by this is that the characters themselves can not really decide on the meaning of their own times, histories, societies, generations and even there own lives. Take (quotation pg 32) the monologue from Pozzo, one of the characters. First he says we can not speak badly about our generation, then he says we can not speak good about it. He pauses and then decides that he can not really decide whether to say anything good or bad and therefore chooses to say nothing.

The threat of having to decide and to live with that decision pervades the text. Although in context Pozzo refers to leaving the countryside in order to go to the market "I don't seem able... to depart." (pg 50) is an expression at the frustration not to be able to decide to go either way. Pertinent to this statement; (pg 43) "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" which helps to enlightenment Pozzo's later quotation.

This determinancy of indeterminancy is found elsewhere in the play. While describing the favourite dance of his slave, Pozzo says (pg 42) "Do you know what he calls it?... The Net. He thinks he's entangled in a net." That perfectly sums up the themes I see in the play.

It is not nothingness but the inability to choose and decide meaning which the play's dialogue centres upon. It is 'waiting' and not 'dying' (or perhaps 'waiting to die' and not 'dying') that seems to be the main preoccupation of the plays two main characters, Estrangon and Vladimir, who even contemplate hanging themselves out of sheer frustration about waiting.

"Will night never come?" pg 33

"Time has stopped." pg 37

"In the meantime nothing happens." pg 40

Just some research I did

Here is the end-product of some research I did on Yahoo Finance regarding who owns what...

It's interesting, somewhat frightening and disillusioning, all at the same time.

UPDATE: The six also have major holdings in all Canadian banks

SOCIAL INNOVATION IDEAS

Here are two ideas I came up with today:

THE GIFT ECONOMY - For lack of a better name this idea involves having a regular space and time for a neighborhood to give away things. It's the same idea as a farmers market but instead it is a kind of freecycle. You bring furniture, food, electronics or whatever to give away for FREE. Also you can come and receive for FREE.

VIDEO CO-OP - This probably exists already but what I'm thinking is a co-op where you would pay an initial 200$ membership fee and then be able to take out whatever you want, whenever, for FREE since you are an owner of the store. This can create serious competition for Blockbuster but it would be an interesting experiment.

Histories and Literature

Recently I have begun reading "Jesus and Marx" by Jacques Ellul. The book promises to be an interesting reading although this is completely in my own bias since Ellul is one of my favourite writers and has been for a few years.

The beginning of the book discusses four issues where marxism challenges the complacent situation of Christianity. Specifically what I picked up on was the Marxian (which he picked up from Hegel) emphasis on history. Not "the history of historians" but history as "we find it in the Bible: history filled with meaning, moving in a revealed direction, and culminating in a 'apotheosis' but with everything situated in history."

This intrigued me. Ellul continues,

"Christians had completely forgotten that the bible relates events, not reasoning; they had become immersed in metaphysics." Ellul expands on this by saying: "God enters the concrete life of his people and does not withdraw them from the world. He participates in history."

And again, this time more powerfully:

"Thus Christianity has utterly betrayed the very essence of revelation by transforming it into a religious spirituality."

Using Marxist theory he criticizes Christianity for loosing historical memory; for reducing the essence of faith and revelation to 'metaphysics' and 'religious spirituality'. The two things are connected: Christians loose a sense of history and thus become hyper-spiritualized (which makes them forget about real issues, how the real God lives and acts in history).

This is a forceful criticism and valuable insight; surely the neo-gnostic tendencies to make Christianity into a feeling and a knowing rather than a group of people called by God through Christ who act in real history has been influential. Ellul himself points to the marxist critique that "This unjust society results from twenty centuries of Christianity."

What does this have to do with literature?

Ellul shows that Marx (and Hegel) restored the idea of meaningful history, the type of history that the bible records and contrains, into popular consciousness. He further shows that it is this meaningful history that has been lost by Christianity and needs to be recovered.

What is this meaningful history?

Literary history. Or rather history written as literature, as a story. History that has a beginning and an ending, it has conflict and consummation, it has events and peoples that are meaningful to end result. It is not a chaotic dance of meaningless facts, records of horrific suffering and utterly pointless death. Rather it has a point.

This literary history has nothing essentially in common with "the history of historians". This history is a story. Up till now I have used arguments from Ellul to set up my introductory point: that Christianity is historical in nature, and that history is primarily literary.

BUT what does this mean for literature;what does this mean for the way we teach, learn, understand, use, theorize and speak about literature? Specifically how do we teach, learn, understand, use, theorize and speak as Christians who know about the history?

I have a few suggestions:

First it means that the we will be inevitable be reading the bible into whatever text we read. We can be reading Marquis de Sade (please do not, but that's my suggestion) and somehow read the Bible into it. It also means that unconsciously we will likely pick up on allegories and allusions within various texts, both classical and popular, that relate to Christianity. Whether this be Faust with the spectre of Solomon haunting your reading or R.A. Salvatore with possible memories of the more mythic-like Biblical stories.

I do not believe Christians can read a text without reading it WITH the bible. If they do not admit this, they must read both unconsciously.

Secondly, if we recover historical consciousness, we can begin seeing a literary text both within it's historical period as well as somehow being placed in the larger metanarrative of Christianity. Reading Tolkien for example one can (as the makers of the film series do) draws parrellels between Sarumans destructions and mechanization with the current ecological crisis as well as the effects of industrializations.

Primarily my thesis is this: Literature is not read alone. It is read with something. As Christians naturally we read it with the scriptures, and as theologically minded Christians (who know that God acts IN history) we can also see literature in the terms of a historical meaning.

The ideas in the post were various: I explored the Marxist critique of Christianity slightly, the importance of history in the sense of literary history, and the impact of being Christian readers: both in using the bible and and realizes that God is in history.

Some of the ideas I did not explore in this post were: the full extent history can play in literary studies, how the role of Scripture in reading literature can be inverted so that we read Scripture through other literature, how both of these things can lead to a fresher understanding of literary textuality.

My question to you would be: what ideas did you see in my post? What ideas do you want to explore through it?

A different way to look at the same thing

Recently I began discussing how the ethical impulse towards the Other, towards the person who is different, is something completely lost in democracy. I examined some of what Levinas, the Jewish talmudic commentator, had to say about such an issue and used the follow quotation:

"Modern philosophy viewed subjectivity as a clash of egos, in which competing drives ultimately find themselves at war... [and because they are at war they] are together. And this view understood peace as that condition in which reason reigns. Thus, modern philosophers believed reason [would stop the war]." and because of this "Rather than maintaining the alterity of the other, [that] peace assimilates the stranger into the Same." And another quotation:"This pursuit [of peace] violates the alterity of the other, in the name of the needs of the community".

I got this as a response to my discussion:

"You do a good job of identifying a specific point to discuss, but you could discuss this quotation a little more closely. Get in there and talk about the words and the ideas that the quotation raises as specifically as possible."

I began to wonder if I could discuss this quotation "more closely" and "as specifically as possible". I commenced in trying to work through what that might mean in a blog post, or in a piece of writting in general. How can we get more specific? What does that mean? How does that look like?

It reminded me of two things:

First on the blog planet Dave Humphrey posted a piece of "reading up against a text" rather than "reading against a text". Perhaps I have actually "read up against" and not "read against" his post enough to understand what he means but it seems to me to be pertinent to what I am discussing here. Reading "up against" is a method which is "less decided" and "more tennative". The meaning, and the role that we as readers have in sharing in the construction of such meaning, has the presence of uncertainity with in it. It is unlike reading against which "forces" the reader to come at the text from a fixed position, a solid way to understand what is being said which lacks being able to be "circuitous instead of straight", it lacks the ability to be close by but not there.

That idea of "reading up" has a strangle correlation to something in Katz' book about the Jewish midrash. The jewish practice of retelling and reframing epic biblical stories is explained. Exhorted if you will.

"But the midrash is not simply rabbinic commentary on the Torah.. not simply a tool for reading a story. The Bible is a holy text, and the rabbis believe that through midrash - that is, through their interpretive process- the holy voice of God as alterity open itself up to us... Midrash opens up the voices in the Torah that are muted in the text.. Midrash lifts these voices out of the text and then brigns them to bear on the narrative. By enabling our access to these others, midrash brings us closer to the ethical and, thus, closer to God." (pg 18)

So not only is reading up against a text something which is possible but the Jewish rabbis bring this further by saying that through reading it differently, in a variety of ways, you open up the possibility of hearing the marginalized and the different. You are listening to the voice of the other. And this practice is so good, so saturated in ethics, so close to love that we are, in some way, close to God. Closer to God. Simply by reading differently, reading "up against" rather than "reading against" we open the possibility of hearing other voices that we never heard before. Voices of the other. Voices, maybe of God.

This brings up something neither the academy (by that I mean all the university institutions, guilds, guidelines, journal editors and anyone in the industry of making knowledge) nor the church (by this I mean something which is individual congregations, theologies, pastors... not an 'industry' as such though occasionally acting as one through publishing houses, seminaries etc) want to admit. The interpretation and understanding of a work of fiction or non-fiction, literature or trash, novel or shortstory, philosophy or fantasy, pop stuff and scripture is not controlled by one source.

Usually what is objected is that such a thing will take away from the "real meaning" of text (whether that be the Bible, Lord of the Rings, Lewis' books, Shakespeares plays). This critique leads me to add to my argument using (pay attention to that word) an unconventional source: a work of old french sociology from the sixties I found in a friends cultural studies text book.

The work is called "The Practice of Everyday Life" by Michel de Certeau, a jesuit and sociologist who shows a fascinating prejudice in the way we talk about things economically, culturally and even historically. He says his study intends to examine 'users' "whose status.. in society is concealed by the euphemistic term 'consumer' ". What he is proposing is that economically and culturally we look at two classes: the producers and the consumers. The producers make the product (be it a car, a television ad or a book) and the consumers, well, consume it. They eat it (not literally), they take it all in. In thus model "they are assumed to be passive and guided by established rules". Not true says Michel. Instead we are users, we do not just take in but we fiddle and manipulate (as users) what is given to us (by producers). Like the indigenous peoples using the catholic rituals for their pagan beliefs after that Spanish conquerors tried to force them to convert. They did, outwardly, but used Christian objects and texts in a very non Christian way.

Michel brings his ideas of users (not consumers) and producers back towards literature and reading.

"In reality, that activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of silent production... he insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it.. A different world (the reader's) slips into the authors place. This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's property into a space borrowed for a moment of transient."

I am pulling on three quotations together now. In order to read and discuss "a lot more closely" I would have to give up reading "up against". And in doing so I claim, in some ways, to be a producer and not a user. I am a user of the text I am reading, not a consumer and certainly not a producers. The thing is not mine, yet I can use it in away that is in some sense uniquely mine. And If it is some how unique to me, perhaps I can practice some sort of Midrash. The book I am reading is no sacred text. Therefore the best I can hope for in practicing midrash is an interesting idea, a different reading of that text, maybe hearing the voice of a marginalized, a specific group, or the marginalized in general. In that way I am doing the ethical, or at least searching for that.

Now returning to the original quotation, the one about clasing egos. It seems to me through reflection that perhaps this clash, resulting in difference, is not solved by trying to eliminate difference. Rather perhaps we can apply harmony and not discord between the differences. Harmonious difference.

How?

Perhaps by reading "up against" a text. Maybe by using, not consuming or producing, what is there. Possibly by practicing midrash. Perhaps we can get closer to responding to the other. Closer to harmonious difference.

I say this very tongue-in-cheek but maybe reading and discussing "as specifically as possible" is not the only right way to write and think.