These Essays: Two Wrong Answers

" Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man." - The Dude 

          So there are at least two wrong answers to the question of interpretive validity - on what makes an understanding valid. And they are both common in America today. The first is that, whatever one’s opinion, a text can have only one true meaning, usually what the author intended, and it is our job to sort through all the fuss and figure out what that is. The second wrong answer is that, whatever the facts, all interpretations are equally valid because we all come to a text from various limited perspectives. So, everyone has an equal right to his or her own point of view, and the best we can do is quiet down and listen respectfully.

          Now anyone who has tried to communicate a complex message can see that the first answer is too narrow. What one writes can and will be taken in various ways by diverse persons. And not all of these will be incorrect simply because they differ, especially as one cannot even convey the entirety of one’s own intention. Language is both limited and limiting. 

         More, though we certainly should listen respectfully to one another, the mistake of the second answer is even easier to see. What one writes can clearly be misread, interpretations can go egregiously wrong, and readers of a text can miss the point entirely. Such readers can have little basis for their misunderstanding – or worse, no basis at all other than their own iniquity, greed, or contempt. So a right answer to the question of interpretive validity may well lie in some uneasy tension between these two errors: more than one, but hardly all, interpretations must necessarily be valid.

          So: what are be the rules? What are the criteria? What makes some interpretations more valid, and others less so, or not at all? Christians, as it happens, have a long tradition of developing interpretive criteria. They were developed for reading Scripture. So if Christians are good Biblical readers, they will try to reach certain benchmarks with their interpretations:  appropriateness, fecundity, consistency, comprehensiveness, and responsibility of methodology, among many others. And those criteria are not wrong. 

         But they may not be sufficient. You see, these “first-tier” criteria are mostly of a kind. They are technical, procedural, secular criteria that consider the production of some form of the “best possible” interpretation. Now such a goal can hardly be ignored, but for Christians it has not always been sufficient.

         Rather, those who believe in God have often considered what the interpretation of Scripture must itself be for. And the various religious traditions have arrived at many different answers: Scripture is for determining God’s regenerative will (Calvin), for building up the love of God and neighbor (Roman Catholic), for hearing the Word of God spoken through Jesus Christ (Lutheran), for bringing about the reconciliation of God and humankind (Orthodox). 

        But through all of these we can see that throughout the bulk of Christian history, Scriptural interpretation has not been an end in and of itself. That is actually a recent invention of modernity and the Enlightenment, which assumed that we ourselves deserve to know the truth and that knowledge is as high a concern as anyone need have. But the words of Scripture and of Christ  encourage us to look beyond the processes of interpretation to include, even as we interpret, the purposes and ends of our interpretation.

         The problem with these second-tier criteria is that they are, by their very nature, quite broad. They try to comprehend the whole of Scripture rather than those particular texts to which an interpreter might be attending. So it has not always been clear how one’s interpretation might build up the love of God and neighbor, discern God’s will, or bring about reconciliation. 

          In fact, Christians interpreting Scripture have quite often produced understandings that had precisely the opposite effect. They have condoned slavery, supported the subjugation of women and foreign and domestic peoples, legitimized horrific and brutal wars, and aided many other evils. Such outcomes cannot reasonably have been part of any of the good purposes toward which Christian traditions have pointed interpretation in the first place.

         So we have something of a problem. The technical considerations of the first tier can only tell us whether or not such interpretations have been correct, and not whether they have been wrong. Remembering the second tier of criteria long proposed by Christian tradition, this seems insufficient. Yet, at the same time, history would indicate that the dogmatic criteria of the Christians traditions have been too broad, or at least too easily forgotten, to have been authoritatively persuasive among interpreters of Scripture. What we need is a criterion that rises above technical considerations but does not escape the rigors of confronting actual Scriptural texts. 

Two Pages a Day: One Hundered Six

            Nogilian shook his head “The jewel city of Kasora possesses relics called the Golden Arcs. They were great weapons, but have not awoken in centuries. They never left the earth. ”       

            “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought.”  

            If he said any more I did not hear it. Eventually, he left. I watched the waves far beneath me, churning in the storm. I felt longings I had not since Redmarak. It would be so easy, a hundred meters down. One more added to the rolls. Nightwind wouldn’t get me. Augers wouldn’t get me. Just the waves. The men would rally behind another person, one more suited to the task. He always had been.

            Suriel came back. I glanced up once and saw him, sitting there beside me. Maybe he wasn’t going to try to stop me, either. He wasn’t the hue that would be inclined to do so. He was matte black and red, now, and cloaked utterly in what seemed like nightwind.                         

            “You look too damned much like the other side,” I said.

            He peered at me with all the sadness of the universe. And I cursed that Niskivim trait that makes you feel whatever they are feeling, and sometimes to feel it more. I choked on the intensity of grief. I couldn’t breathe.

            “Let/oceans/enfold/you,” he said, amidst about a million other things. He said it like it was the last thing he would ever be able to. I looked away. I considered the stormy sea.  

            “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe this isn’t the best time for that. I know it’s not about us. It’s never about us. This is about that other war. Your war against them.”

            I looked back. He was gone, of course. Maybe I’d scared him. Neither are the Niskivim the only non-human sentience in the universe. Though I wish they were. There are beings much darker and more ominous. 

            I sat there until Ash approached. There’d been a messenger, he said. “Jerem Cozak has landed early. Everything has changed. There is less time. You will plan the rest of the conquest together. He says to listen to your dreams tonight.” 

            I never turned from looking out upon the waves. I noticed I had started learning forward.     “No,” I said. 

            I almost felt the interruption of his departing bow. “Our Guardian?”

            “Dammit, Ash, there are too many voices in my head!”

            He waited.

            “Do you know what they have me wanting to do? Drive my valkyrie over  the cliff, lead all of you with me. Have you ever seen one of them explode? I’m not doing any of it. The other continent, his dreams, Nogilian’s battles, none of it. I’m done. I’m out. Tell Nogilian the army’s his.”

            I could hear him swallow. “Part of the scenario he wishes to convey is that in the south they have found artifacts of great importance. Their strength is gathered there. We’ve been fighting remnants only.”

            If you could measure despair, I ask myself, how deep could it go? How many thousands of meters beneath those waves? I know the ladder I would make, the rungs the names of the truly dead. “That’s Nogilian’s job. It always has been. He’s so much better at it. I’m communications.”

            “But the men revere you. They formed around you. They will not leave without you.”

            “Then tell everyone I’m sorry. But I never wanted this. I never asked for this. And I’m telling you I’m done. I won’t move a muscle. If they won’t go without me, then no one’s going anywhere at all.”

Two Pages a Day: One Hundred Four

            Then we went, chameleonic. We avoided collisions because one night in Nogilia the White Swarm did something to each of us. When we woke, we saw each other as the White Swarm saw us: as clusters of machines. The Swarm was always visible to itself. Only our flesh and armor and riding machines could disappear from their sight. As we rode to war we saw each other only as white and spectral forms, intensifications of machine-made mist. No one else saw us at all.

            I sent Nogilian with thirty-five thousand men to wait deployment in the valley behind us. The rest I took ahead to my previous post upon the ridge.
            We brought artillery. We’d only found twenty pieces scattered throughout Nogilia, a few at each of the most prominent cities we had taken. I hoped it would be enough. The sea breeze whipped our faces as we rode out on the open. Smell of salt air. Good.  The delta spread below us. Flocks of white egrets sailed for the horizon. Three hundred meters away the city squatted like a tick at the waist of the world.

            I ordered the officers to fire. Suns arced across the sky, landing mostly on the wall. The thing about conducting such a siege is that it takes patience. You’re not blasting away with shells. You’re confusing trillions of nanites with blasts energy, until a wall loses its cohesion. It took till noon for the Profusionist metal to break. I poured down the hills with my ten thousand to deal with the landing craft that had come from the docks southwest of the city. Nogilian streamed down behind me, kept on going toward the falling wall, and roared across the bridge of the White Swarm, which unchameleoned itself as he neared, and which had been in a day in undiscovered growing. Afterward, he went on the city square to face a force of ten thousand Augers standing armed and waiting over the cache that we had come for.  

            Not that I would know. I wasn’t there. Me and my ten thousand were off guiding five thousand converted Augers along a silty beach. By the time I got to the city square, all I could do was watch the corpses. 

            And those were dead in truth. No one got up again. I’d waited, in Nogilia, too. Watched to see it happen. Kissed more than I would care to count. I’d inquired to Ash about it. I’d certainly asked Nogilian.

            “Why can’t you do it?” I asked the Swarm now. “Why won’t you bring them back?”  

            Silence reigns on Thaeron. Time to call the roll, and add new names. I don’t remember how long I stood there with them. Even at the time it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing much did. I know that by the time we formed up to encamp outside the city, the sun was fading from the sky.

            Not that it had shown up much that day. Sepira is known for frequent storms. By the time darkness fell and I was sitting beneath my awning, the downpour had come again. I sat and watched the waves. The despair that haunts commanders would not depart.  

            Nogilian came to see me. “The caches were nearly full. Five thousand artillery disks, fully operational. We cannot use them, but they will make a mighty gift for Jerem Cozak. There will be nothing else like them on this world.”

            I shrugged. Messengers had given me that news thirty times over.

            He went on. “Tomorrow we can begin herding the mastodons. I do not know how many there will be, but this is their land. We will have them all for Jerem Cozak.”

            I scowled. “What’s across the sea, Nogilian? Our warlord never said.”

            He winced as the wind brought a wash of rain beneath the awning. “Three lands: Kasora, Nesechia, and the Shuni Plateau. Kasora, a mountain valley holding the oldest and strongest city in the world. Nesechia, a series of broad peninsulas reaching out into the ocean. The plateau, arid and flat and high, another land for valkyries.”

            “Any place you’d look for interstellar ships?”

Two Pages a Day: One Hundred Two

           By noon, command drew up before it, chameleonic. We arranged two thousand riders on the top of the brief ridgeline that here separated mainland Sepiran from its shores. The silty islands and braided currents stretched from horizon to horizon to horizon, sheet-flat and green from marsh grasses. In the center of it all the port city sat, walls of silver gleaming in the sun, extending some places into the brackish water. The Profusionists who colonized this world had not left any island outside their city.

            It was, of course, utterly surrounded by channels dredged deep enough for barges and ships of every kind. And was, therefore, utterly immune to assault by valkyrie, which cannot cross anything a man can swim.  

            Nogilian and I had, of course, talked about this extensively. It was just a depressing thing to see. That was why Ki had led the rest to encamp on a series of seaside cliffs about sixty kilometers east. She had not liked even that location. She said it exposed us unnecessarily for a visual advantage we truly did not need.  

            She went anyway. I needed to see the waves. And we’d attack at dawn regardless. Besides, Nogilian liked my plan.

            That night went the way all nights before battles go. Back at the encampment I tinkered on paper, sending squads here and there throughout the columns. I changed the sequence of commands. I swapped the vanguard with the reserve. Better to have Nogilian go where intelligence was needed. I sent messengers everywhere.

            Finally, Nogilian came to see me. “Stop,” he said. “It is a good plan. We will not fail to execute. But frequent changes before a battle make everyone nervous.”

            I raised my eyebrow. I could not imagine Nogilian anxious even as a child. But he was right. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been getting the feeling I haven’t been doing much good. But it’s a lot of city down there.”

            Three-quarters of a million souls, if the records could be believed. We could be trying to break into a city that outnumbered us thirty times over.

            “The scouts report little activity. The Augers did not leave many people on this world.”

            We listened together to the rain outside. “I’ll try to ease off a notch,” I said. Nogilian nodded his assent and left. After had he had gone, I stepped outside to watch the breakers beat against the cliff. I’d had Ash throw my tent up on the very brink, and facing toward the ocean. There was an awning there to guard against the rain, when it wasn’t being lashed by oceanic wind.

            Surprise, surprise, this stuff was. I got soaked. I did not immediately depart. It seemed fitting somehow. Finally exhausted, I went back in to lay staring at the canvas until Ash came and got me.

            “It’s time,” he said, his hand on my shoulder. Huh? I had not even known I’d popped off. Muzzily, I stood up and got equipped. Then I went over to the corner bucket and threw up.

            “Nerves,” I told him. “We could all die today.” He did not look encouraged by my speech.

            I tried to do better outside. I stood there and looked upon forty-five thousand faces. The acoustics of the area were such that not quite all would hear me. I’d had Ash put the most reliably verbal where they would. It’s always good, Elmy, when they can spur each other on.

            “Your kin are captive in that city,” I said, “held prisoner by machines controlled by men they cannot see or feel or touch, men not on this world. I say we set them free! We have come so far. You have done so much, whether you came to me in Ariel or Redmarak or Nogilia itself. You are one. You have not been defeated. You are the dead! I say so are they. I say they just don’t know it yet!”

Two Pages a Day: One Hundred

 The dead said it would have scared them. They claimed fewer casualties resulted from such raids. Since most of them had once been Augers themselves, I did not attempt to disabuse them of the notion.

            None of us got much sleep.

            Nogilian knew enough not to develop any clear pattern. We did not always swarm from four sides. Sometimes we used cavalry to taunt the defenders into chase. Other times we dribbled over the walls by squads and cracked the nightwind’s relics open. Three times we split our forces to take cities within eyeshot of each other. Twice we actually undermined the nightwind’s wall. Once, we drew up outside the watchtowers, clearly visible, and challenged everyone to formal combat – while some artillery we’d happened upon began pounding the city gate from the opposite direction.

            Always, Nogilian chose the most effective and efficient plan for each situation. Always the chamelonic abilities of the White Swarm helped. Never were the Augers ready for whatever threat we presented. And never did they respond with profound organization. I mentioned as much to Nogilian. 

            Nogilian grunted. “It is true that they have exhausted the fields around these cities. They do not think strategically, or they would have replanted. It is good that we will move on soon. This valley is nearly spent.”

            I reminded him about the garrisons.

            He shook his head. “They will move the cities.”

            I pulled out my poker face again.

            He shrugged. “The White Swarm has already asked where it could move them to. The cities will dissolve and move as part of the swarm. The authorities of each will tell it where to go. When it arrives, the city will reform in any way the authority intends. Formation and dissolution each require a day.”     

            Amazing. “And to think you used to rely on tents.”

            He shrugged again. “It was no bad thing, hearing the fabric in the wind. But this will save these people a great deal of bother, and better protect them from the storms.”

            Not his people, Elmy. This will save these people. I made a few promises to myself. I stepped outside, ending the nightly conversation. I needed my thoughts to be my own.  

            Toward midnight, and the wind still blew. The plains around Cibola did not have so much breeze. Ash had suggested it was the difference in temperature between the sea we were coming to and the mountains we’d left so far behind.

            Regardless, it rippled the cloth of the tents we’d liberated from Ariel. And we were using fabric in very large amounts. The garrison we had defeated to take the first city had manned an outpost only. There were greater numbers south and west. Often, the garrisons of the cities had outnumbered us. 

            In each case, we’d liberated sufficient valkyries to provide for new recruits.

            So I looked upon the cooking fires of more than forty-five thousand men. My riding dead. My cavalry of corpses, or those who believed they once had been. Killed by weapon or infection, it mattered little to them. You came back changed regardless. I went inside and caught a few hours.

            Or tried to. I was unaccountably glum.

            The next day we saw the ocean. That was when I learned that the boundaries of Nogilia are not definite. It bleeds down into Sepira mostly by means of a steeper gradient. The grasses get longer and greener and mingle with more shrubs. The wind, no longer warmed by a journey across the sunny plain, cools down. It rains more often in Sepira, the hug the oceans give this northern continent. The shore itself consists of gentle beaches cut by steep draws and, where the Profuse River enters the ocean, a vast and silty delta that marks the middle of the province. On one of the alluvial islands sits the city named Sepira, the largest port city on this world.