associations, bisociations, coincidences...

It has always intrigued me that when you've been following one train of thought for a few days little pieces of relevant information appear, unbidden.  Coincidence, because you have become sensitised in a particular corner of your thinking?  Divine intervention?  

Arthur Koestler coined the term 'bisociation' (The Act of Creation, 1964) to offer a theory of the creative act (which at its simplest informs something as ubiquitous as the joke), and his ideas have indirectly led to a more general theory of  'conceptual blending', where disparate ideas come together and generate creative thought.

But this curious process of unbidden relevance is an associative (and accretive) process, not a bisociative one: it is the connections between ideas, not their differences, that seem to be at work.

This was the sequence of associations this week:

1.  Translation (literature)

2.  Hildegard of Bingen

3.  Mothering Sunday

4.  Church Times today, 27 March, letters page

Translation 

One of the week's possible blog posts was to be called In Praise of Translators.  There were three obvious ones - translators of Dostoyevsky (David Magarshack), Eco (William Weaver), and Borges (Norman Thomas di Giovanni).  Halfway through the article, I suddenly remembered another - Christa Weisman, who prepared an 'unrhymed, unscanned literal' translation of Goethe's Faust for Howard Brenton's 1995 play.  The final words of the Chorus Mysticus in Part II of Faust, well known for its magical appearance at the end of Mahler's 8th Symphony, in German begins Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, which Brenton gives as  

All that passes

Is merely a symbol;

Here the unwinnable

                 Is won:

The impossible

                 Is done;

The eternally feminine

Pulls us up to heaven.

Hildegard of Bingen

The Oxford Book of Flexible Anthems arrived yesterday.  Flicking through it at random, I came across Hildegard's Laus Trinitati, in English, but with an editorial footnote:

The composer uses the word 'creatrix', ie a female creator, in the second line

as indeed she does/did - 

Laus Trinitati, que sonus

et vita ac creatrix omnium...

Mothering Sunday

Every Sunday at St Oswald's the congregation is given an A4 sheet with bits and bobs of information about events in the three Waterside parishes, the day's readings and Gospel, and so on.  That's on the back (or front) of a preprinted "bulletin" for the day, called Sunday Link, which always features a short prayer to help the congregation get in the mood, sorry, to assist meditation and contemplation.  Last Sunday, Mothering Sunday, the prayer read:

God, you love us as a caring mother, and we 

inherit our gifts from you.

Help us to recognise them, nurture them

and use them, whatever our age or gender,

so that we may share your mothering love

with others...

Church Times, 27 March 2009

A letter to drag us back to the real world:

Sir: You say, with qualification, that

those who "refer to God as 'she' are 

perfectly at liberty to do so" 

(Leader, 20 March.)  But biblical

usage includes contrast: our God and King

is neither "the Queen of Heaven"

(Jeremiah 44.17) nor "the great goddess"

(Acts 19.27).  So male titles for

God require non-use of feminine ones.

It doesn't automatically follow, of course,

but the letter was from a male member

of the clergy.

On the other hand, the cartoon was as splendid as usual.