john, revelator or sorehead, oh and that poet fella

You know I am no bible scholar, but I do pick up stuff here and there, and one thing I have picked up is that many scholars don't think that John the revelator and John the disciple are the same guy.  I believe they have traced him down to some sorehead somewhere in the eastern hinterlands who had a thing against Rome and the whole thing is a screed against the empire.  All those arcane numbers and animals are believed to be things that would have a meaning for people living at the time, but are now lost to us.

And I think the book of revelations barely made it into the bible.  There were all these other books, like Judah and Jubilee that got tossed on the scrap heap, and Revelations just barely snuck in.  Well of course that doesn't matter because God was overseeing the whole deal and He made sure it got in.

Are you saying that the fact that nowhere in the bible does it say that we rise up from the grave and go up or down soon afterwards, was responsible for you drifting from your faith.  So what, you were only in the game because you wanted to go to heaven, and then when somebody pointed out that that wasn't guaranteed in the bible you decided to quit the game?   I don't get it.  If faith is the name of the game than why did Rev Anderson need to learn more in divinity school?


I don't think I understand your distinction between meaning of life and meaning in life.  Maybe you are talking about the meaning of life or all humankind, and I guess the meaning in life for Joe Sixpack which might be different from Joe Eightpack's.  Or maybe you mean the difference between short term and long term goals.  It seems to me that a cruiser would find meaning in life in an Italian beef sandwich, where the climber would find it in owning the Italian beef store, and the warrior would be happy if Italian beefs were handed out equitably to everybody, and the quester might find it in a map of all the Italian beef shops.

Well I have been thinking about the meaning of life lately.  I am a big fan of Lucinda Williams, and one day I was researching her on the web and I learned that her song Pineola, was based on the funeral of this poet guy who Lucinda had a fling with, and who committed suicide at age  and I looked up the guy, Frank Stanford, and it turned out that he had written, among other things, a poem, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You which is 542 pages of line after line with no breaks and no punctuation.  I read a couple pages at random and it was pretty good, but really, am I going to read 542 pages of that?

Well you know I go on about how art has nothing to do with the truth, that in fact it is the enemy of the truth, making up things so that there is an illusion of truth (or meaning, these words can be used interchangeably because we are not sure exactly what we are talking about at this point), so that nobody has to face the hard fact that nothing means shit.

But it's kind of like you and the bible, I sort of believe that, and I sort of don't.  I kind of like that illusion of meaning.  There is Lucinda with her angry/sad voice singing about tossing a handful of dirt on his grave, and there is the music, the composition that she wrote, there is that whole human thing about death and burial, there is their fling, there is the poet himself, from the size of his output he must have been scribbling away most of his waking hours, and why put that bullet into his heart?

See there is all that, all rolled up into some big messy ball, and quite a sight it is, but if you begin to pull at its strings, well burial is burial, Lucinda is Lucinda, none of these things mean much in themselves, but when you put them altogether, well it feels like meaning, it feels like some deep current is going through you. 

So that's what I think of meaning in art.  It's nothing I can prove or anything like that, and it's just meaning in art, which is maybe not the same thing as meaning in general, but that's just the path I wandered down this morning.