The Abridgment of Hope
Part I: Framework
From Log24,
Here’s Your Sign,
Aug. 8, 2002–
“Paz also mentions the Christian concept of eternity as a realm outside time, and discusses what happened to modern thought after it abandoned the concept of eternity.
Naturally, many writers have dealt with the subject of time, but it seems particularly part of the Zeitgeist now, with a new Spielberg film about precognition. My own small experience, from last night until today, may or may not have been precognitive. I suspect it’s the sort of thing that many people often experience, a sort of ‘So that’s what that was about’ feeling. Traditionally, such experience has been expressed in terms of a theological framework.”
Part II: Context
From Ann Copeland,
“Faith and Fiction-Making:
The Catholic Context“–
“Each of us is living out a once-only story which, unlike those mentioned here, has yet to reveal its ending. We live that story largely in the dark. From time to time we may try to plumb its implications, to decipher its latent design, or at least get a glimmer of how parts go together. Occasionally, a backward glance may suddenly reveal implications, an evolving pattern we had not discerned, couldn’t have when we were ‘in’ it. Ah, now I see what I was about, what I was after.”
Part III: Context Sensitivity
Language Game,
Jan. 14, 2004–
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations:
373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)
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Another definition of context-sensitive grammars defines them as formal grammars where all productions are of the form
Such a grammar is also called a monotonic or noncontracting grammar because none of the rules decreases the size of the string that is being rewritten. If the possibility of adding the empty string to a language is added to the strings recognized by the noncontracting grammars (which can never include the empty string) then the languages in these two definitions are identical. |
Part IV: Abridgment
“Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?”
— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439
Also from Stone’s novel, quoted by Ann Copeland in the above essay:
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You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where? But why always so far? “Por qué?” she asked. There was a guy yelling. Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau. Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed. So she said to Campos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” (416) |