1
Ideas of Gatheress, a son of David - King in Jerusalem
2
Fractal of fractals says Gatheress, fractal of
fractals - the whole fractal.
3
What is added to a human in the struggles they will
struggle under the sun?
4 A generation walks and a generation arrives and the earth iterates to
infinity.
The words above are the opening words
from Ecclesiastes. Or rather they are a slightly cheeky translation of those
first three verses. I have only translated the first four verses in this way so
far, and I did it to see if it would work. But I think I need to
explain why and in what ways this might hold up as a
translation.
Ecclesiastes is peppered with the Hebrew word
hevel (הֶבֶל),
which is translated in different versions of the Bible as absurd, breath,
bubble, enigmatic, fleeting, futility, meaningless, mist, nonsense, nothing,
pointless, smoke, transient, useless, vanity and vapour. There may be more translations, but
those are all I know. The reason for so many different translations is not because these are bad or confused translators,
but because it's a really difficult word to pin down. Perhaps all together
these words give a feel for the word hevel, but none quite get it right on their own. My take on hevel it is that the word refers to the
fleeting transient nature of things. In this, the KJV and NRSV are technically
fairly accurate when they use the word vanity, but whilst the KJV can be excused
for its rather archaic take on the word vanity which now means something quite different, the NRSV has no such excuse and
ends up being quite misleading in its choice.
Hevel is not about being absorbed by one's
own beauty or the lack of it; it is not about extravagance or self indulgence. It is much gentler than that. The NIV's 'meaningless' does a quite a good job
of updating 'vanity' to modern English, but like vanity, remains too harsh.
Ironically, The Message translation offers us 'smoke', which is technically wrong; there is no
suggestion of smoke in the original word, and yet it does the job it needs to
do better than pretty much all the other translations of the word in modern English.
Hevel, like smoke, is that which is here and then gone in a moment; ungraspable, uncatchable, gone!
In the Book of Ecclesiastes, the
teacher is in some ways painting a bleak picture of a life without purpose, of
a world where nothing we do has any lasting value. He, or perhaps she[1],
delivers a damming blow to anyone who thinks that what they do, or who they are
is significant, important or better than anything or anyone else. The teacher
takes all of our works and achievements and grinds them to dust.
It is all too easy to see Ecclesiastes
as a negative book, but it is honest and it creates a level (or hevel) playing
field, it makes us equal in our insignificance, which is a great starting place
from which to do all our theology. It also teaches us to enjoy and appreciate
what we have, while we have it. I was recently talking to a friend who errs on
the atheist side of agnostic. She talked to me about the self indulgence, the
dissatisfaction and the angst she felt in searching for God and needing for a God
to be there to validate her. There was for her a simple joy in letting that go,
in enjoying who she is in this moment, in doing her best for others and not
worrying about where it's all leading and what it all means. I think that to a
great extent the writer of Ecclesiastes would commend her for her honesty and
celebrate her capacity to enjoy what is good, and allow all that which is hevel
to be hevel.
But the teacher does not let us go so
easily. God is there in the text and meaning and purpose are present. They are
all there gently and subtly, lurking beneath the surface. Above all the teacher
doesn't remain with the tiny picture, the islands of happiness within an ocean
of meaninglessness. Throughout the text there is a sense of the big picture,
because there is a time for every purpose and because someday our islands of joy will be lost to that ocean. The teacher maintains that we don't
know God's will, we don't know what happens to us when we die, but that God has
a will is implicitly there within the text, there is a time for everything
under the sun. A chosen time, a right time.
Like smoke, 'fractal' is the wrong
word, but it does a particular and helpful job. To start with, it works grammatically in the proper context of the Hebrew sentence, allowing itself to be 'of' itself in a way that 'meaningless' can't and it can be 'whole' in a way that vanity can't; 'fractal of fractals - the whole fractal'. It calls to mind the other side of the
teacher's narrative, the bigger picture. Fractals, like hevel are the same at
every scale, they repeat to infinity and in spite of all manner of work done
upon them and their displays of diverse beauty, their outcome and their origin remains the same. Under their complex and busy working
surface, they are at heart simple in their essence, they reduce in concept to
something with no substance at all, just an idea, a thought, an equation.
But unlike the meaningless, fleeting,
vain, smoke of the usual translations, a fractal hevel is one that acknowledges
the eternal interconnectedness of creation; an eternal nature that is there to
be seen in the teacher's writings, if only we are sufficiently tuned in to see
it. Generations come and go, but the entirety of creation remains, stays as it
was and as it will be, ever changing, but unmoved.
Ecclesiastes 9:15 (NIV) says;
Everything that happens has happened before,
and all that will be has already been
God does everything over and over again.
and all that will be has already been
God does everything over and over again.
This theology of eternal return, as
echoed in some far eastern religions, can be seen as a lifeless loop of unending
purgatory, or if we are prepared to go where God is taking us, it can be a
spiral, a helix, forever moving forward as on each turn of the circle we
build in what was before, going somewhere new. Actually if we see the teacher's
message in a fractal light it ceases to be about futility and becomes about the
fact that you can't have the eternal without the fleeting moment and you can't be truly
in the moment unless you embrace the eternal.
Fractal of fractals says Gatheress, fractal of fractals - the whole fractal.
[1] The
word often translated as teacher (Ecclesiastes in the Greek - hence the name of
the book) comes from the Hebrew word Qohelet, which is a feminine noun construct
from the verb Qahal, which means to call. So Qohelet is a feminine noun for
someone who calls or gathers people, for teaching or preaching. The word
Qohelet is normally used in the Ecclesiastes in a male context, i.e. 'he said'
etc, but there is one stray 'she said' in 7:27. On this basis I invented the
word 'Gatheress' as an English equivalent of Qohelet.
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