1)THE ORDERING AND ORIENTATION OF SPACE:
That's another post (for another time.
This one's about it's space-orientation in Fresno.
First, an excerpt below from my blog post" sideways city-texts and my whenabouts in a spacetime drive and dérive.". :
On drives, and walks.
My sense of direction sucks.
As does my direction of sense.
On the topic of direction..
I think spiritual direction might sometimes consists of literally losing/finding one's literal direction.
To be literally lost, and then literally found is a-mazing, ex-hilirating and re-demptive ...as lost sheep and sons know from experience and Amazing Graceness.
Lost coins miss out on the feeling of being refound.
I love Paul Hiebert's diagram (below) of our fair city, Fresno, in "Transforming Worldviews."
(full text here)
So downtown streets literally follow and parallel the tracks...which run northeast-southwest.. and are not tied/tethered to a traditional (whose tradition was it, anyway?) north/south, west/east grid.
But the rest of the city follows a traditional north-south, west-east pattern.
There was less attitude and latitude for straying from literal latitude by the time the city expanded beyond downtown.
So, in some circles, we are famous/infamous for two things: introducing the credit card, and being laid out sideways.
Bruggemann offers a taxonomy of the psalms: psalms of orientation, disorientation and reorientation
Sometimes we must lose orientation to find disorientation to find reorientation. In fact, such may be the only way to grow. It's more than a Hegelian synthesis. It's holy liminality and liminal space where holy shift happens. So it could be what happens to a driver's/walker's orientation is a microcosm and metaphor of what happens as we pilgrimage from "glory to glory"...even if transversing through Fowler's stages of faith or Kubler-Ross's stages of grief.
I find spiritual direction by losing my direction.
I find my life by losing it, a Rabbi once prophesied.
Re-pent and be re-oriented for the forgiveness of sins.
Oh, and on the sixth floor of that straightcrooked skyscraper, our church met for a year, Looking down and out the window at Blackstone was radically reorienting. Maybe it did is some spiritual good.
Derrida suggests
DeCerteau ( see Mashup: "Walking in the City"/"Moment of Surrender") has reminded us that the city is a text.
So as I force myself to walk or drive in our lopsided city, more than intertextuality is born; a new text is created: a tertium textual quid, larger than the sum of the parts and streets. Theologians have described the Third Member of the Trinity (fight over thefilioque sometime) as in a sense,the overflow from the union of the First and Second Persons.
Thus any third way is holy and Holy Spirited.
--
THEN:
here's the section of Paul Hiebert's Transforming Worldview that inspired it: "Worldviews and The Ordering of Space" (click, and click again to enlarge and read)
The question aises:
Do we navigate by an
exocentric (oustside ourselves)
or endocentric (from inside us)
source?
Or is it "both"...as in God in/through us.
Isn't that the message of Acts? The "Acts of the Holy Spirit through the apostles"?
Does it all depend on God? or us?
Is God outside of us, or inside us?
It seems the whole point of the Holy Spirit is that God comes to live IN, not just alongside us.
Why did Jesus say it was better if he went away, and we lived in the era of the Holy Spirit?
Jeius is Immaniel/God with us/Holy Spirit as God in us.
---------------------------------------
Guy Deutscher,:
The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: “After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then you’ll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right.” But in theory, you could also say: “After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.
We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don’t say: “When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.” The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where “behind” or “in front of” us is. We don’t need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields.
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply “natural.” In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.”...
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction..They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions. -Guy Deutscher, ‘Through the Language Glass’---
2)DIMENSIONS OF CULTURE (Chart on p. 376):
Paul G. Hiebert Cultural Differences and the Communication of the Gospel
3)SPIRITUAL WARFARE AND WORLDVIEWS:
Hiebert Spiritual Warfare and Worldviews
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