Blowing it Up--A New Life Motto

In the Bourne Ultimatum there is a scene in which CIA agency heads are vainly trying to track down Jason Bourne, an agent who has "gone astray." They suspect that one of their agents, Madrid station chief Neil Daniel, has given classified information to a reporter from an English newspaper (Simon Ross, now dead) about the CIA's secret undercover operation Blackbriar and Bourne's role in it. They finally learn that Daniel is in Tangier, Morocco. Then, we see a computer screen. The first screen is just a general map of the Mediterranean. Then comes the next screen--a map of Tangier; then a map of the old city; then a map of the particular hotel where Daniel is staying. This series of four "blow-up" maps, as we would call them, are sophisticated "Google Maps" or "Mapquest" results to bring us from the most general to the most specific. By blowing up the maps, so to speak, we get right to the heart of our effort, right to our target. The computer "blows up" maps, and we get to the heart of the matter.

But then, once the computer "blows up" the maps, we encounter another kind of "blowing up." The CIA tracks down Daniel. Since he has betrayed the agency, he must be taken out. In order to do this, the CIA operation head contacts one of the waiting assassins (called "The Asset") in Casablanca, who comes up to finish off Daniel. This asset is an explosives expert named Desh, and Desh is sent to intercept Daniels as he drives to the bank to pick up a wad of cash. Desh leaves a bag containing a bomb in the street and, as Daniel's car passes, the bomb goes off, incinerating the car and killing Daniels. This, then, is a second meaning of "blowing it up." The nineteenth century invented a word to describe one who spends his time blowing things up--he is a dynamitard. From the Pall Mall Gazette in 1882: "'Red Spectre in France.' The public confession that the 'dynamitards' had paralyzed the administration of justice..."

Jason Bourne and My Life

There is very little connection between the "Bourne trilogy" and my life (even though I have written two humorous essays describing how I think a fourth Bourne movie should unfold). But these two nearly successive scenes in the Bourne Ultimatum encourage me to think of the way that my life is, in a way, committed to "blowing things up," in both senses of the term. On the one hand, I want to "blow things up" by moving from the most general to the most specific pieces of knowledge in the universe, burnishing them as if they were the most precious things known to humanity, spending all my time just trying to coax all the meaning I can out of some small thing. On the other hand, I want to "blow things up," figuratively speaking, by being a "dynamitard of the soul." I want to look at inherited conceptions, in medicine, theology, law, education and our conceptions of life generally, and blow them to smithereens. I don't want to do so because I just have an anti-authoritarian streak--a streak that only can be satiated by seeing flying glass or shards of shrapnel. I want to do so because I think that we often inherit conceptions much like we inherit physical traits, real estate or personal property from earlier generations but we never really examine what we inherit to see if how conceptions still control us, how they define the way we articulate our own concerns and whether, in fact, these conceptions are worth anything for us today.

Looking More Closely at What I Mean

Thus, as I understand and live my life today, I want to do two things--interrelated as I see them. I want, on the one hand, to examine things closely. This may relate to texts, words, beliefs, facts of legal cases, names of trees or great felines, or what have you. I want to trace the sometimes labyrinthine journey of a word, from first conception and appearance in English to our use of it today. I want to understand each verse of the Bible, of Shakespeare, of Milton's PL, and be able to have a multi-lingual understanding that is so detailed that each sentence of value in numerous classic works is so deeply imprinted on my mind that it sings for me. I want to "blow up" each line of Homer so that we can hear the sea wash in on the beach, so that we can feel the pain of loss that the warriors feel. I want to do the same for Shakespeare, so that every human inclination that is possibly suggested by a word or phrase becomes "blown up" on the "big screen" of my interpretive comments. This takes work--lots of it--and it is that task to which I really would love to dedicate the rest of my life (if finances allow). I haven't really found much interest "out there" in general for a person who can "blow things up" like I do it (or, another way of saying this is that I haven't found a way to make people pay for the ways that I dig deeply into texts and knowledge), but somehow I keep entertaining the notion that someday my efforts will have a reward that "matches" my effort. This, then, is the first way that I "blow things up."

But I also am playing for higher stakes as I "blow things up." I want to examine conceptions, words, ways people describe things, ways they speak and write, and try to determine if these things are actually useful for our day. In most instances, I will probably conclude that they are not. For example, I spend a good deal of my time expositing the Revised Common Lectionary. As I study the Bible more and more I not only see how certain doctrinal formulations are based on what is written there (such as justification by faith, from Paul's Epistle to the Romans), but how these doctrinal affirmations rest sometimes on a pretty flimsy conceptual foundation. Thus, as I write on Paul, for example, I am gradually trying to erode some of his "specialness" as Apostle by showing that the development of his ideas arose out of a necessity where he frequently painted himself into intellectual corners because of the point he wanted to make. Thus, Biblical concepts need to be re-examined today.

Educational concepts need to be re-examined today. Schools should be for learning, but in general they are not--principally because the people who conduct them aren't themselves committed to learning. Thus, the conceptions we have about how to learn, how to study, what is important to learn, etc. will need to be revamped. The basic observation I have made is that there needs to be an IEP for each student. Period. That is the basis of a "blown up" educational system. Once I get the other explosives "in place" there can be a lot more "damage."

Conclusion

So, that is my "take" on life today. I spent the first 30 years of life getting the conceptual, textual linguistic and historical underpinnings to do the task. I spent the next 23 or so raising a family and letting my life experience "catch up" with my conceptual, linguistic and historical understanding. For the past two or three years I have been trying to put it together. Now it is coming together. I blow things up. Simple as that.

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