On the first day of class, Kirk told a story about young Buddhist boys and their playful games. When the boys would discover they
had an attachment to a misconception, instead of anger or frustration which a western youth might exhibit, the children would clap
away the attachment and bow in thanks towards the peer who helped them discern the unfounded bias. One of my
accomplishments this quarter was to clap away a number of misconceptions other materials had imparted towards the texts we
read. I learned to reclaim the texts and their significance for myself, interpreting these for what was found in them and not what I
knew about them. This happened to be one of the more difficult tasks for me, as I registered for this class due to my interests in
Comparative Religion. Kirk from the outset discussed the need for both disciplines in the context of the work we were to do;
he said that the work was incomplete if we only looked at one side of the course title. Concentrating on the task and texts at
hand insured that we were not interpreting cultures or religious institutions for what they contained in their histories, but what
their texts said about their creators' lives, their desires, and their spiritual goals. As one of my notes from the discussion on
Milton's Paradise Lost reads, "we are cursed by a world where our individuality [i.e. individual interpretation] is
compromised by the institution, where objects tend to turn into subjects."
This class was, in my opinion, the best introduction to what academic life is supposed to be like at Evergreen. In the
interpretation of our syllabus, two phrases stood out as the foundation of what we were to do for the next ten weeks.
Attentive civility and the interpretive community became, as Geertz posits, "a model of, and a model for", what I perceived an
education at Evergreen would be. In fact it worked so well that at the end of the quarter, I was more shocked by the reaction
to the dissolution of this community, then I at first thought was possible; which meant it worked. The structure of this community
made it uncomfortable for bias to find a foothold in conversation, especially when the bias was not represented in the texts. We
stayed so close to the texts that discussion of my own pet theories and observations was not impossible, they often shed little
light on what the text was about, thus forcing me again and again to take another look at what was being said by the texts, and
to listen to what the texts had suggested to my peers. This required me to clap my hands, bow to my community peers, and shut
out the cacophony of misconceived meanings in my mind, and pay attention to the metaphor.
The primary shape of the story of the divine in our readings, is one of love and obedience, and the configuration of the form,
although primarily masculine, was one of a parental role. My best paper detailed my interpretation of Genesis and the
Book of J on the subject of Yahweh and his fatherly relationship with the patriarchs of Israel. My final presentation
briefly encountered the question of what meaning is conveyed by a polytheistic or monotheistic faith. The Greek model of
polytheism seems to mirror modern day psychoanalysis, in that the Gods, masculine and feminine represent human emotions,
drives, and phobias. Even though the feminine is regarded as divine, her role in general is of a lesser importance than the
ordering beneficence of King Zeus; or as my notes quote, "the hub of their deistic wheel." This secondary role of the feminine
aspect of divinity is more overt in the Judaeo-Christian, even though Jesus shows a marked evolution, in his treatment of women
from the patriarchy of the Old Testament. The texts which required the greatest amount of work, in terms of concentration and
interpretation, were Paradise Lost, which best illustrated what a 'thick description' is, and the Geertz text on
interpretation. Few books in my readings, spanning nearly twenty years, have given me such a struggle. The importance of
The Interpretation of Culture is such that I will be spending many more hours on the techniques of thick description,
which Geertz suggests in regarding both cultures and literature.