95th Anniversary

The Most Great Sojourn, and More Truthiness

By John Taylor; 2007 Apr 17

Ninety-five years ago last week, the Master set foot on the shores of this continent. I was reminded of this by the coincidence that I happened to just get in the mail my order for the relatively new book, "Abdu'l-Baha in New York." This book is unique in the Baha'i literature that I have seen in that it features photographs of buildings in which the Master either stayed or visited, as well as Riverside Park, known to the Baha'is at the time as "The Master's Garden," He spent so much time there in solitude, relaxing from His demanding schedule.

I could not fail to do something to commemorate this memorable anniversary. So yesterday I recorded my reading of a talk the Master gave in England, not long before coming to America. I hope to read as many talks as I can, and catch up to Him where He was 95 years ago this very date, if I can. So far I am far, far behind. I have read only His first five talks, all in London. He really picked up the pace in New York, and gave many, many addresses, sometimes several long ones in a single day. So unfortunately it may be the hundredth anniversary of his travels before I have caught up and read aloud every one of them. But it is a worthy goal.

I must say that I have the same starry-eyed infatuation with His talks that I do with my own writing. Each essay I write I think just afterwards, surely this is my best effort ever. I feel that way until I write the next one, and that becomes the best. Same way, each talk of the Master that I read aloud I think, "This surely is the best public address ever given." Take yesterday's talk, given at St. Johns, Westminster.

I was fooling around juggling the technical parameters of digital recording (the complexity of this software and equipment is one reason I am so behind in this project), reading the talk for practice, seeing if I had the right format and compression ratio and the sound was coming through. In the early stages of rehearsals I was thinking, "This talk is nothing but hard-core metaphysics, how boring it must have sounded to his listeners!" But then when I had it all rehearsed and read it for real, then listened to my reading over several times again, I finally got it.

The Master had put His finger on the pulse of humanity and was giving his diagnosis of the heart of all our misunderstandings. He was explaining exactly why the vitality of the belief in God is dying out in every land. Why? Because we conceive of God as, well, a conception. No way, He says, "Divinity cannot be comprehended because it is comprehending." Yeah, you can look really deep into somebody's eyes but you will never see what the eyes are seeing. That is impossible. Yet we make that very blunder when we think of the Supreme Being.

Actually, maybe my analogy does not hold completely. With digital techniques some observant photographers have figured out how to see what the subjects in old portraits must have seen. Thus they squeeze extra data out of the historical record by zooming in and looking in fine detail at the tiny reflections in the eyeballs of the subjects in old photographs. That way they sometimes get a little fish-eye portrait of the room in which the subject was standing when the photograph was taken.

But is that trick the same as seeing what that person saw? Unlikely.

Even if we see just what others see, we do not perceive what they perceive. What we see is always colored by our previous knowledge and experience. For example, let us say the subject of an old portrait happens to be a surgeon performing an operation. In order to see anything like what she sees we would have to gain the identical level of medical knowledge as she does, no more and no less. We would have to remember her past, know her prejudices as well as her peculiarities of perception. And even then, would we be sure that we have seen her identical vision? She is always changing, and she herself is not cognizant of her changes. So she might well respond to her observer, who thinks he knows all of her knowledge that is possible,

"The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more: thine eyes are upon me, and I am not." (Job 7:7-8, KJV)

This speech of Abdu'l-Baha is surely the greatest He or anyone ever gave. How could He, or anyone, have gone beyond it? But we know He did. In fact when he was not long in America He commented to friends that He had hardly begun to cover the ground that he was planning on covering over here. And the story has a climax, too. It came in November. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Westminster speech that I read yesterday I put into Ogg Vorbis format, which is not only smaller than MP3's, it is also an open standard product, free to use and adapt, which is closer to our cooperative philosophic values. I will try to upload it, or a link to it, on this Badi' blog somehow. If I succeed, I will give details as to how to listen to it. The JetAudio and WinAmp players, both free and easily found if you Google them, should have no problems playing Ogg Vorbis sound files.

For a long time I delighted in the forward section of Harper's Magazine, which highlights a miscellany of weird and wonderful short documents, poems, letters and strange ideas that the human mind at its best and worst produces. When we had satellite and cable television a few years ago I was addicted (like many men) to the remote control, flipping the dial every few seconds. For me lately I get the same random browsing pleasure from my Web browser's "Stumbleupon" button. It is more literary reading than television, but more multimedia than Harper's Magazine. But as with the clicker, now that my Stumbleupon button has taken the place of channel surfing I have to be very careful to watch myself or I will waste hours pushing it, as I did last night.

Some Websites, I notice, now have little popup definitions set up over the new, difficult or obscure terms in the text. Usually the definition comes from the incomparable Wikipedia. For example, this is the Wikipedia's explanation that popped up over that new word whose meaning I still tend to forget whenever I see it, "truthiness:"

"Truthiness is a satirical term coined by television comedian Stephen Colbert to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively, instinctively, or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts (similar to the meaning of "bellyfeel", a Newspeak term from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four)."

Although I do not have television I do follow some of the best of Stephen Colbert's performances in Web videos. I love how he pretends to be a typical right wing commentator, full of his own truthiness, and carries the act to an extreme that is absurd. His performance in excoriating George Bush to his face ought to have won an Academy Award, or a Nobel Prize, or something.

The reference to the Newspeak terms "bellyfeel" is telling, since it really is tyranny that gives rise to mass imitation, the real product of mass media. Soon arrogant rationalization takes the place of truth. I feel it really strongly, so it must be so. I feel, therefore I am.

That ancient tyranny, the Roman Empire, had the same syndrome, with over-centralization corrupting its heart. On one side was a small but powerful elite, the Roman citizenry, and on the other were everybody else, plebeians, non-citizens and slaves. The "right wing" Roman citizens came up with their own newspeak language to justify their tyranny not to slaves (who are estimated to have outnumbered them four to one), but to themselves and those in power. When I hear the American airwaves full of "doubt is my product" commentators casting doubt on global warming, I shudder. I long to watch Colbert once again send their truthiness up; that gives me a catharsis from the lying and duplicity. I long for hope, for real answers.

Real answers do not come of taking a bath in truthiness. That will not clean our hearts. Now the West is like Rome, a small but powerful elite, the American Empire, ruling the mass media. The tyranny justifies itself to the elite who own or control the lion's share of the world's resources. Which is why these absurd fellows get so much air time, in spite of the utter nonsense they spout. And now it is no longer Rome's four to one but hundreds and thousands to one. Such is the benefit of money, technology and -- never forget it -- appropriation of the world's lingua franca, the English language. This gives them a strangle hold on the crucial, strategic and hugely wealthy information, culture and entertainment industries. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said,

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."