A Matter of Interpretation

A Matter of Interpretation

By Bobby Neal Winters

Interpretation is a craft that mostly goes unnoticed, but if there is no interpretation, art can’t be art.

Recently Jean and I went out to a production of Fiddler on the Roof put on by a Broadway touring company.  I’ve seen the movie before, but this was the first time I’d seen it on stage. If there was one word different between the movie and the stage play, I didn’t notice it.  All the songs were there; all of the dialog was there.

But the two productions were different.  It wasn’t just the difference between a movie and a play.  It was bigger than that. The actors interpreted the characters differently.  

In the movie, Topol interprets Tevye as being someone who is very intelligent, but simply uneducated but who desires learning above all else. The Tevye in this stage production took it a different way.  Tevye is not an idiot, but he’s not as smart as the one portrayed by Topol in the movie. This is not due to one actor being better than the other; it’s simply a choice.

A play is just words on a page.  To have meaning, it must be interpreted.  In something like a play, the actors, possibly with the help of a director, do the interpretation.  It goes in through the eyes, is processed in the soul, and comes out on the stage.

I am listening to an audiobook with the title “The Philosophy of Modern Song.”  Don’t let the word “philosophy” in the title turn you off.  The book is written by Bob Dylan and is a collection of essays each of which focuses on a particular song by a particular artist. (If you do a search for the book title on YouTube, you will find a list of the songs.)  I am about a third of the way through now, and I’ve found no particular order, grouping, or commonality among the songs.  Perhaps there will be a summary at the end.

What we do get, however, is Dylan’s interpretation of these songs.  Dylan provides a lens with which we can examine this art.  I say lens, but as a whole, it is a telescope.  There is the lens of the songwriter who looks at reality and interprets; then there is the singer who interprets the words on the page; then there is Dylan interpreting the singer.

The abstract mathematical model for communication has three parts. The first part is the sender who sends the message. The final part is the receiver who receives the message.  That is straightforward and self-explanatory. Between them is the channel.

Mathematically we often talk about a noiseless channel or a noisy channel, but when we bring in an interpreter it is something different.

The interpreter fits where the channel does, between the sender and the receiver.  Technically speaking, the interpreter does add noise, but depending upon the skill of the interpreter, the so-called noise might be added-value.

In reference to “Fiddler on the Roof,” the interpretation of the actors can either amplify or mute.  In the flat words on the page, the conflict between Tevye and Golde is there.  In the movie we see that somewhat, but it is muted to a certain extent.  In the stage production, we see Tevye and Golde are in fact at war.  Ironically, this is made most clear in the song “Do you love me?” at the very climax of the song. 

Tevye: Do you love me?

Golde: I suppose I do.

Tevye: Then I suppose I love you too.

One might not realize the infinity of ways “suppose” can be pronounced nor the effect on the meaning until one hears the actors say the word.  They love each other, but they are at war.

There is the interpretation of the writer, the interpretation of the actor, the interpretation of the painter, but there is also the interpretation of the critic.

Each of these is a lens and the quality they bring to the coloring of the lens might be given the name “Soul.” Soul is the cumulative effect of the miles one has walked, the shoes worn, and the quality of the road.

A book like “The Philosophy of Modern Song” written by someone like Dylan has a whole different weight and quality than one written by someone without his experience, without his point of view. He’s a poet, a songwriter, and a singer who is acting in the capacity of a critic.  He’s been an interpreter in multiple capacities (remember, he’s been an actor too) who is now sitting in a critic’s chair.  He brings with him credibility in interpreting these songs to us; he brings weight with his point of view.

He’s got enough city-miles on him to make us think he knows what he’s talking about.

The actors in “Fiddler” doubtless have their own preparation in terms of their lives, their experiences, their history, and their beliefs. They bring that in with them, and they offer us the results.

Blessings to them.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 Learning to Write Like a First Grade Teacher

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve always been a clutz.  I’ve had poor hand eye coordination. My handwriting is horrible and my printing is hardly  better. Over the last year, however, I’ve made a discovery: I can put a Phillips screwdriver into the top of a screw without thinking about it.

That last prepositional phrase, “without thinking about it,” is a necessary part of the sentence.  If I think about it too much, my conscious mind gets in the way, and I miss.  My hands have an intelligence guiding them that is separate from my conscious mind.

When I first noticed this, my mind popped to a phrase from the 137th Psalm: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”

The Psalmist recognized the hands as having a separate intelligence of their own.

I’ve also discovered that I can print like a first grade teacher if I take my time. That’s what my teachers always told me: I should take my time.  

I think this is all happening now--long after it would have helped any of the teachers who’ve suffered through my handwriting--because I’ve taken up woodworking.

In learning, I’ve always been an adventurer, from the very beginning.  I didn’t listen to my teachers when they told me there was a right way to form my letters.  I figured out how to do it on my own and did it my way. (Queue up Sinatra on the background music.)  My way “worked” but there were better ways that I didn’t even look at because I already “knew” how to do it.

I’ve been a fool.

By the Grace of God, I am what I am, and by His Grace, I’ve lived long enough to see it.

I started woodworking almost exactly one year ago.  I’d found my father-in-law’s old, old Harbor Freight table saw.  By old, old I mean pre-OSHA.  It terrified me.

It terrified me, but I set myself to learn how to use it.  In doing so, I began the habit of study.  YouTube, which I’d found to be useful in other learning endeavors, became my best friend.  In learning how to use this table saw, I became hooked on woodworking.

I’ve learned the skills that my Kindergarten teachers, my grade school teachers, and all the rest had tried in vain to teach me: Take your time; follow the steps; don’t work ahead of the class.

If you want to make a groove in a board, you can do it.  There are a lot of ways to do it, but most of them will put you at risk of getting your fingers cut off, so maybe use the method you are being taught, at least until you know what you are doing.

When you build things with wood, you start with basic shapes, basic joints then you build up from there.  The short way of saying this is that everything is a box.  In this way, woodworking is very mathematical.  The difference between woodworking and mathematics is that in math, when you make a mistake, you can just erase it.  

In woodworking, there are things you can do to fix it, but it’s more expensive than an eraser. You learn to think further ahead; to take care; to take time.

You slow down.

I can now print like a first grade teacher, but I do it very slowly.  I suppose that I would learn to be faster if I practiced at it more.  Maybe I will, because it calms me.  I slow down and think about each word, each letter, breaking the letters into their pieces. 

Letters can be broken into separate pieces just like chairs and cabinets. It only took me sixty years to learn this.

While I don’t use my new skill in printing much, I am using my ability to “stab a screw” because I’ve been transforming my garage into a workshop.  As I write this, I’ve almost finished installing sheetrock onto the ceiling.  I’ve got chalk dust in my hair to prove it. I’ve gained a respect for another line of work and have no regret for missing out on that particular career.

If I were to die today, there would be people who would look at my age in the obituary and say, “Well, he had a good run.”

I would refute that with a line from Tennyson: “Life piled on life \ Were all too little, and of one to me \ Little remains: but every hour is saved \ From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things...”

If God, in His Grace, gives me the time, I will build my shop.  My hands will learn their cunning.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 Some meandering thoughts on the passage of time and getting older

By Bobby Neal Winters

If the time of year made a sound, right now it would be making the sound of a spinning quarter on a table top. The quarter would be about to tip over and do its final flops before coming to a rest.

We still have the month of December ahead.  On one hand, that is one-twelfth of the year; on the other hand, it disappears like a snowflake in an October snow.  Soon we will find it is New Year’s Eve and we will be wondering where the Old Year went.

Even though I draw the bulk of my pay for the service of administration, I still teach a class.  This is in part because of the advice the academic vice president who originally hired me gave when he learned I was interested in administration. “Never stop teaching,” he said.

And I haven’t.  It was good advice. Rest in peace, Dr. Ratzalf.

I am teaching a small, upper-division class this semester.  The students in it are younger than my youngest child, the daughter we had when we were pushing forty. Time passes differently for them than it does for me.  To me, this semester has disappeared, well, like a snowflake in an October snow. 

In my mind, we’ve just started.  Today, I met them and gave them their last lecture before their last regular exam.  I taught the material, and my feeling was that they couldn’t’ve had the time to absorb the material that led up to this point.

But they seem okay about it.  To them, this semester has lasted months and not just moments.

If only they knew how quickly they would be sixty.

As this is an upper division class, some of them are going to graduate this semester, and some of them are going to graduate school to work on their masters degree.  I still have dreams of that time in my life.  My professors and my fellow students are still a part of my unconscious mind.

They are still with me, but, as I said, it was just an eyeblink ago.  That is, if it takes 40 years to blink an eye.

I spend more time trying to remember words and names than I used to.  It used to be “pop,” and there it was.  Now it sometimes takes seconds, minutes, or even weeks.  I suppose that I should feel good that I remember for weeks that I’d forgotten a word a few weeks ago, but it doesn’t really work like that.

Today, I was telling my students something that had happened in 1995, and it occurred to me to ask, “Were you even born then?”

No. No they were not.

Never ask a question you don’t want to hear the answer to.

My hair is almost totally white now.  I put that word almost in there just in case someone with a magnifying glass calls me on it.

As those of you who follow this space or who are acquainted with me in real life know, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently.  This is good; I feel better than I have in years.  Those who watch me walk by now as I walk downtown will see that I go at quite a bit faster clip than I did even a year ago.

There is a down side though.  Whereas the subcutaneous fat used to push my skin with enough tension to make it smooth, this is no longer the case.  I have wrinkles where they didn’t used to be. And worse, I have waddles in diverse places.

What’s more, these waddles are larger than they might otherwise be because I’ve lost so much weight.

I wonder if I would look younger if I got my waddles pierced and put earrings through them.

Probably not.

I am not as worried about getting old as I may have made it sound.  I had a friend who died of cancer in his forties who was denied this experience.  I think I should choose to glory in it as much as possible.

I’ve never been vain about my appearance--you only need to look at me to know--so the white hair, the wrinkles, and the waddles don’t bother me.

No, if I were to worry, it would be about taking so long to remember words, to remember names.  As my mother had dementia, that might be actually a legitimate thing to worry about.  But I don’t think it’s that.

I think that once you reach a certain age you’ve had so many experiences, have met so many people, have learned so many things, that it just takes time to pick your way through all of them.

I still remember the things I need to know: the number of the director of HR, the number of the University Attorney, and the number of the Title IX office.  Anything beside that, you can take the time to look up.

And I can still solve more problems with one two-minute phone call than most junior faculty could in a month of Sundays.  And NO, I have not retired. Not hardly.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 Mortise and Tenon, Blood and Sweat

By Bobby Neal Winters

Thanksgiving Day is coming soon.  The blood of the turkey has no doubt already been shed.  The cans of cranberry sauce are sitting in the pantry waiting for their contents to be shaken free.  French onion, mushroom soup, and green beans wait to be combined into a casserole.

This is the nearest thing the increasingly secular culture of the United States has that corresponds to the ancient practice of blood sacrifice. Please bear with me as I expand on this.

Right now as I type this, I have a scab that is a 16th of an inch wide and one-and-a-quarter inches long on the index finger of my left hand. With any luck, it will make a nice scar to remind me how I got it.

I’d been cutting a tenon because I wanted to learn how to cut a mortise and tenon.  I’d done the mortise first, because that’s how you do it, and I was cutting my tenon to fit it.  I’d had my tenon in the vise as I’d cut it, but I’d taken it out to have a look at it.  I noticed that it needed to be trimmed a little along the edge.  Rather than put it back in the vise, a lazy voice in my brain told me I could just hold it with my hand as I trimmed it.

It was a lazy and not too smart voice.

My Japanese pull-saw slipped, and its cutting edge slipped along the top of my knuckle. There was a lot of blood, but I managed to staunch it with some paper towels. I went into the house with a bloody paper towel wrapped around my finger.  My wife looked at my finger and then looked at me with that expression she has when she questions her life-choices.

No stitches were required, but I will, as I said, have a nice scar, a memorial to my stupidity. 

You might well wonder what a mortise and tenon is.  It is a joint for holding two pieces of wood together.  These are words from Old French. A mortise is a hole that you cut into one piece of wood and a tenon is a peg that you carve from the other piece that goes into that hole.

Given that description and the fact that the words come from Old French, anyone who has ever been a 14-year-old boy might be forgiven for having certain hypotheses about what the words mean in the original French, but no, get that right out of your head.  Tenon actually came into French from the Latin tenere, which means to hold.  The origins of mortise are more mysterious, but some believe it came into Old French from an Arabic word that means to hold as well.

Those meanings work well with the application because this is a joint that does hold.

The fact that I cut myself and drew quite a bit of blood while learning who to make this joint works well with the idea that one must suffer to learn one’s art.  Though I will be the first to say that calling what I do art is to stretch that small word beyond all recognition.  I probably should have used the word craft instead, but there is some stretching going on there too.

In any case, it ties into that ancient idea of the blood sacrifice.  If we get something, we must give something.  The better the thing we are asking for, the higher the price we pay.  Something really good requires blood because blood is the stuff of life itself, and life is the most precious thing.

To give blood in exchange for knowledge and skill is appropriate.  Knowledge and skill are some of the most precious assets we can possess. They are more portable than diamonds; they can be stolen; and you keep them even if you give them.

As we come into Thanksgiving, we are participating in another sort of sacrifice.  I was reminded of this by one of my pastor’s sermons the other day on tithing. (It’s that time of year, folks.) While some tithes were to be given to the priests of the temple, others were given as feasts to be shared with one’s fellows.  God directed his people to take some of their “increase” and share it with their neighbors and family.

This sounds a great deal like Thanksgiving to me.  We offer the food as an offering in thanks to God and this is done in exchange for greater fellowship with our friends and family.

This fellowship joins us more tightly with each other.  We sacrifice food, time, a bit of conversation, and a bit of ourselves in exchange for bonds that will connect one to the other like mortise and tenon.

As you sit around the table on Thanksgiving, join hands and pray--if you do--and deepen than bond.  Join to your loved ones and hold on to them as tightly as you can.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 On Darkness, Death, and other Parts of Life

By Bobby Neal Winters

With the passing of Halloween, autumn is fully upon us.  There is no denying it now. My morning alarm goes off in the pitch black of night; we sit down to supper in darkness.  Leaves have fallen to cover the sidewalk and whatever dog poop that might be there.

Time to shift gears.

Death is a part of life.

The trees spent the summer growing their leaves out toward the sun, making them out of air, water, and a few other ingredients taken from the soil.  

The leaves have now fallen and will spend the winter in decay.  By decay, I mean they are themselves food for bacteria and various other microorganisms.

The poop under the leaves will decay as well.

It all goes back into the system of life.

The Indians, the indigenous peoples, understood.  They believed everything was living. They believed even the rocks were alive. And consider this: rocks are broken down by lichen and other organisms.  Their components are released into the soil and into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The rocks themselves are a part of the system.

The Indigenous Peoples thought the earth itself was alive. Some of them found the notion of plowing the earth to be as offensive as cutting a woman’s breast.  The earth was their Mother.

The Earth is our Mother. We--Life--springs forth from it.  Life on Earth is made from it just as each of us is made from our mother’s body.

That is a good paragraph.  Reread it. It will do you good.

But I digress.

We who live in the northern hemisphere are now going into our time of darkness; our time of death. We mark this with Halloween; with All Saint’s Day’; with El Dia de Los Muertos.

We think about those we love who have died. We think about our own death.  We think about the day when we ourselves will fall like leaves onto the Earth to be taken apart and put back into the system.  Even dead we are part of life; like the soil; like the rocks that become the soil.

But that is just a part of it.  There is a layer of human life that is above just eating and drinking; urinating and defecating. 

Satan tempted Jesus to turn the stones to bread. Jesus replied that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

When we die, our lives are broken down by those who are left much like microorganisms break down the leaves.  By our lives, I mean our actions, the way we conducted ourselves, the way we treated others. This can begin at our funeral in the pastor’s homily as he lays our life out as an offering. That casts the pastor doing something analogous to what a vulture does to a fallen wildebeest, so I think I will not press that analogy too far.

In any case, our deeds become a part of others' lives as they choose to repeat them.

Talking about death, talking about the dead is a necessary and good part of life.  We honor them and we serve ourselves by emulating what was worthy in them.

They live again to the extent their lives were words from the mouth of God.

During the summer, we are turned outward into the world.  The World of Light and the World of Life is all around us. When the light recedes, we turn inward.  We examine ourselves.  We assess who we are, and we plan who we would like to be.

We sit in front of the hearth (usually tuned to Netflix or Amazon Prime) to contemplate who we are, to plan who we would like to be.  Can we make the actions of our lives to be words coming from the mouth of God?

We think such things when the darkness and cold are at our door like a pair of starving wolves.

The sun will come again. Life will begin anew.

Until then we wait.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )