Fictioneering #1: It Looked Like Spilt Milk

This is the book that made me a reader and a writer. Long before I learned to read, this was my favorite book and I knew it by heart. I'm going to spoil the shit out of it, so if you want to experience the finest picture book in the English language as it was meant to be experienced, hie thee to eBay, and don't read the rest of this post until you've enjoyed It Looked Like Spilt Milk in a pure, unsullied state.

So, let's talk spilt milk. The book, which I will describe in detail for those of you too Philistine or cash-strapped to follow my advice from the previous paragraph, is magnificent in its simplicity. On a uniform background of rich cyan blue appear white figures, alongside text that both identifies and unidentifies them: “Sometimes it looked like spilt milk. But it wasn't spilt milk.”

That's some proto-Magritte shit right there. If it looked like spilt milk, but it wasn't spilt milk, what the hell was it? A picture on the page, a shadow on the wall of the cave; ceci n'est pas un pipe (and, bearing in mind Freud's considerably greater credibility in literary theory than in psychoanalysis, does spilt milk not share the Freudian connotations of pipe?).

As the book progresses, the disorienting sense of deconstruction intensifies. The forms on the page shift – it looked like a rabbit, an ice cream cone, a great horned owl (my favorite, and my father still delights in mimicking my toddler's rendition of the words “great horned owl”) – but the unidentification remains constant: it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, and before long the repetition, both verbal and visual, reduces all the forms to the abstract interplay of white on blue. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (Following Iser's concept of blanks in the text allowing for reader-author interplay, it's particularly significant that it's the changing forms that are the white of the blank page whereas the unchanging background is inked-in blue.)

The book also provides an excellent introduction to the Derridean concept of différance (sorry, this is just getting Frencher and Frencher). In Derridean semiotics, to oversimplify appallingly, meaning lies in the relationship between signifier and signified; just so, in It Looked Like Spilt Milk, the story lies in the relationship between the signified (whatever it is that is the subject of the book, the repeatedly un-/misidentified “it”) and the assorted signifiers that are applied and then immediately disavowed.

In fact, as well as demonstrating the gulf between signifier and signified – between language and reality – the book can also be read as an affirmation of larger ineffables. What is “like” many things, but is not actually any of those things? Why, any great indescribable of human existence. Pictures, texts, music, art, creativity, love, very God.

In this instance, “It” is revealed as – have you guessed it? (if so, you're not a toddler) – “just a cloud in the sky”. From such mundanities comes the sublime: from words come texts, from ink come pictures, from a cloud come all the forms in this book. Free association with other things “in the sky” (pie, castles, Lucy) causes me to read the cloud as a symbol for the human imagination, and so to see the story as open-ended, inviting the reader to keep mutating the cloud, and thence the story, into every form ey can think of.

Furthermore, the book's title offers another affirmation of the human power of imagination. “Spilt Milk”, as well as being titular, is the only form to be repeated in the book, appearing both times in places of prominence as the first and last incarnations of the cloud. The trite lesson of “things aren't always what they seem” is deepened by the proverbial implications of “spilt milk”: what may initially appear disastrous may, with imagination, be construed as any number of exciting possibilities, and thus shouldn't be cried over. This story affirms not only the power of creativity but also the uniquely human concept of crisitunity.

“Amusing intellecrobatics,” you are perhaps thinking, “but it's still just a frickin' PICTURE BOOK.” Not so: it's a text that has been imprinted in my mind since before my skull was fully formed, and you can't carry that around without powerful ramifications. This, I insist with my tongue still half-out my cheek, is the book that first made me a fictioneer.

Slow Down Your Neighbors: Universalism, Semiotics, and Rob Bell

The semiotics of sitcoms - there's a blog post there.

This one pastor chappie, Rob Bell, has been causing a ruckus in the Christian blogosphere with his new book, Love Wins. In it, I'm told, he argues that there is no such thing as eternal damnation, but after death non-Christians will still have the opportunity to repent, and, faced with direct and immediate evidence of eternal life in ever-loving God, they all will. It's a position known as universalism: everyone gets saved. And it's a position excoriated by conservative evangelicals, among whose numbers Rob Bell has been pleased to rank for the duration of his career.

Now the evangelicals are not happy with Mr. Bell. In this 10,000-word takedown, one such Christian calls the book inaccurate, indefensible, naive, muddled, blasphemous, and – horror of horrors! - liberal. In many mainstream Christian circles, it seems, there is no greater insult than the l-word. (No, the other one.) (No, the other one.) (No, the other other one.) Dearly beloved leader of the free peoples of Shorelandia John Shore has written several articles in response to readers asking questions like “Is the Devil Making Me Believe in a 'Liberal' God Who Isn't the True God?”, “Does the Holy Spirit Vote Republican?”, and, in 2008, “Will God Forgive Me if I Don't Vote for McCain?”.

The assumption that Christianity and conservatism go together like Charlie Sheen and incoherent bragging has always baffled me. To me it's self-evident that, in the words of another dearly beloved leader of the free peoples, Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias”. And maybe my third-world upbringing gave me too much of an affinity with Liberation Theology, the Latin American Christian movement of the 1970s that condemned oppression and gave a theological voice to the poor, but it's equally self-evident that God has a liberal bias.

I could proof-text this. I could point to Old Testament passages that demand welfare provision for poor and vulnerable groups in society; to the Psalms' many strong words about God's hatred of injustice and concern for the oppressed; to the way Jesus hung out with people on the lowest social rung, and told people to pay their taxes and keep church and state separate; even to the passage in Acts where the early Christians practiced – yes, they did – communism. But proof-texting is a peculiarly evangelical tactic, and so, having availed myself of a rhetorical device of which Cicero would be proud, I will move on.

The problem with proof-texting – the problem with conservative and evangelical Christianity as a whole, really – is that it privileges one's own reading of the text, to the exclusion of all others. To return to that gargantuan panning of Love Wins, you'll notice a severe insistence that “[b]oth sides [of the universalism debate] cannot be right”, and a constant appeal to both traditional Christian orthodoxy and what the Bible “clearly” says. If you can't understand why “it's tradition, so it must be right” is a specious argument, you're clearly not cut out for critical thinking; but it's the appeal to Biblical authority that bothers me more.

I know that I have been steeped in semiotics for some months now, and that it is a difficult and obscure field, but I really think more conservatives need to engage with it on a fundamental level. I've talked before about my uncertainty as to whether any text, the Bible included, has meaning independent of what we read into it; in fact, I'm rather hoping to make this the topic of my prospective post-graduate studies; and I believe that all interpretive truth-claims need to be approached with a healthy barrel of skepticism. A poem doesn't 'mean' one single thing; its meaning lies in the tension and harmony of all the different interpretations that can possibly be laid on it by its readers. The same is true of all writing. Even something most people would consider should be unambiguous, such as a legal document, bears this multitude of meaning – that's what lawyers do all day. When I consider the interpretive ambiguity of a sign that reads

SLOW DOWN

YOUR NEIGHBORS

it seems completely absurd to claim any single “correct” interpretation of a text as dense, complex, even perhaps self-contradictory as the Bible.

Whether that leaves us in a chaotic, Crowleyesque free-for-all of wanton eisegesis, I'm neither sufficiently advanced in my hermeneutic studies nor intellectually arrogant enough to judge. However, in the absence of external referents, I maintain my skepticism toward interpretive absolutism; and I ask, along with arguably the world's first semiotician, “What is truth?”