“The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”
— Father Origen (via Bart Ehrman)
“The human mind leaves no memory unturned.”
— anon
Mojibake.
The word literally means: “unintelligible sequence of characters” as derived from the Japanese æ–‡å— (moji) “character” + 化㑠(bake) “change.” Now, rather than getting into the esoterica of practical usage, I’ll bend this word for a new purpose.
The Holy Bible tells a story rich in metaphor which marks the tendency for information to change as it passes through and between human minds. The story I’m thinking of is The Tower of Babel, of course. And it may be that the most common interpretation-that God created the many languages of the world as punishment and means of defense against human meddling-is far from the point. Might this muddled interpretation itself be an irony and mojibake? For the human mind, with its many tools and a sharp proficiency for building and maintaining collections of individual characters in good and meaningful order, is never so efficient as when it is dissecting, rearranging, re-combining and dressing-up even the most vital memories into useful confabulation.
So, when it comes to seeking the origin and meaning of holy writ … when it comes time to assemble the disparate and convoluted pieces of god’s story into something whole, what is your story?
And if the sum of all our stories were likened unto a tower, might one cry, Babel!?
Yet I prefer the sound of Mojibake!
— —
Update:
Bad Relgion’s Skyscraper as tangential entertainment (h/t: Derek):
Come let us make bricks and burn them hard,
We’ll build a city with a tower for the world
and climb so we can reach anything we may propose,
anything at all
Build me up, tear me down
like a skyscraper
Build me up, then tear down
These joining walls
So they can’t climb at all
I know why you tore it down that day
You thought, that if you got caught we’d all go away,
Like a spoiled little baby who can’t come out to play,
You had your revenge
Build me up, tear me down
like a skyscraper
Build me up, then tear down
these joining walls
So they can’t climb at all
Well madness reigned and paradise drowned
When Babel’s walls came crashing down
Now the echoes roar for a story writ [“for a story told” is the live version]
that was hardly understood
and never any good
Build me up, tear me down
like a skyscraper
Build me up, then tear down
these joining walls
So they can’t climb at all
Build me up [x2]
I was talking to a young teacher last night. Or at least I was trying to communicate with her. I thought I was doing a good job and we should have a lot in common, teaching at the same school in the primary grades. I think somewhere in the conversation I mentioned when I graduated from high school and she said, “I wasn’t born yet”. Then I tried to get her to show me something on my new iphone. She looked at me with this pitiful stare that said – you are so old and lame. In a couple of decades – the communication distant between individuals can be so distant. If you don’t believe me, try out http://www.urbandictionary.com/
Using this experience and recognizing the huge communication gap that can exist in a few decades, how much more can this affect scripture?
Adding to this: Scripture has been repeatedly translated over several generals for thousands of years across cultures and continents. To summarize — translation errors, cultural errors, thousands of years worth of errors compounding each decade. I live a different life in a country that was invented fairly recently comparatively, on a different continent with a totally different culture, thousands of years later. Talk about babel or mojibake. I’m just trying to talk to the person I work next to everyday and having a problem.
The tower of Babel story is ancient, occurs far away from me, and actually is supposed to have two parts. The Biblical part and the Book of Mormon piece (Brother of Jared’s story). Even the Brother of Jared story seems to add to or clarify the Biblical piece.
Maybe the point of this story was to warn us – some things are everlasting, like a belief in a Supreme Being. But much of what is read and listened to everyday is mojibake, isn’t it? Life and communication is continuously changing urbandictionary, to be used right now but really just a distraction compared to the larger picture. It’s so easy to get caught up in the semantics, which is silly – because language already changed in just the time it took me to write this comment.
Love it, Angie! Thank you. Your example of a disconnect in a single generation is right-on. I’ll occasionally check-out Urban Dictionary to see what some word means to my kids — just so I can cut through some of the mojibacke. Typically the response I get still is “no, Dad. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Heh.
And it occurs to me that with so many things we very often don’t know what we’re talking about.
I don’t think the unintelligible is something bad, as (perhaps) the Bible or Book of Mormon accounts of the Tower of Babel story might suggest. What would you classify as ‘mojibake’? It seems to me that as soon as you did, someone could come along and make/invent sense of it, as you say: the human mind is proficient at this.
So, for me, ‘mojibake’ is the only hope in the world. It’s the proof that our wretched attempts at ‘wholeness’ haven’t conquered the world and turned it all into the intelligible. I rely on that unexplored space – those gaps in the map – in order to feel alive.
However, I’m sure there are lots of people out there that feel the opposite. I draw strength from that, too.
I agree.. the unexplained or unintelligible is what life interesting.. it’s just a shame for those who do think the opposite to you you.. as they probably don’t draw any strength from your view of things, although maybe I’m wrong.
Mojibake – kids are great at it aren’t they. aslkdjhskldbvb masdb shjfvj gasfddfdfffff lol
LOL, kids are very good at it! And yet we still love ’em.
First, I just like the general sound of the word. Admittedly, I’ve twisted it a bit from its common meaning but that’s just a demonstration of the point, really. So often we use words in ways that are somewhat private. I think of the word “spirituality,” for example, I strongly suspect from conversational experience that nearly everyone has a different, private understanding of this word. This is what I mean by mojibacke.
Now compound this across generations, and cultures, and copy iterations and you have … the pure, unaltered word of God?
To this question I’d been taught (and for a time believed) that God uses his power to preserve his word through all of this. But what this does is force me to accept mojibacke as the most true thing on earth — a form of mojibacke worship. Holy crap!
But as you say, and I said as well, the human mind has an amazing ability to “make sense” or find meaning even in what at first is apparent nonsense. It is a hopeful thing. Also a dangerous thing for all the times when we are wrong.
Hopeful and good so long as we never assume the position that our particular views are holy — are “God’s views.”
I have to admit, it was hard to see exactly what you were saying when I looked at the definition. But after thinking about it some more today, here’s my own interpretation (my own mojibake?)
I think this is what I’ve often come up against in exploring Hebrew and different interpretations of biblical scripture. Even with the JST, there is so much that we have wrong, not just in the actual transcriptions or translations, but in the very concepts that we claim to understand based on words that we give false importance to, or not enough weight to in other cases.
Regardless of what one believes, it’s shocking to see how much has been taken out of context, not once, but in a repeated line of reasoning, as if we’re making a homeopathic dilution. Do our beliefs based on these stories and records contain real truth or just the essence of truth? And is the essence truly enough, maybe even more powerful in how it affects us? Hmm…
Corktree, truly shocking. Especially if you, like me, have been operating under the assumption that scripture is simple and straight forward in origin and understanding. And what you say here about “essence of truth” is, I think, very interesting. I think there is a very broad band, or spectrum of truth that we tend to recognize as human beings. We can be manipulated and deceived by this tendency. It may be nothing more than our ability to see patterns within chaos. Sometime those patterns are real and sometimes they are illusions. Either way, we find profound affinity in such recognition and are strongly affected. The experience of the response itself can be true while simultaneously arising in response to an illusion — a false positive.
Richard Dawkins suggests in his writings that religion on the whole may just be one of these true experiences triggered by an illusion. He calls it a “misfiring.”
Have you seen him read his hate mail? :)
I’ve been thinking about the nature of deception and how much we are responsible for. I’ve always wondered how much I force myself to believe in the responses I have to my experiences. I don’t know how to clear my mind very well, so it’s not hard to imagine that I am influencing my own responses, at least some of the time; I can’t seem to stop the inner narration and it gets in the way ;) There are still responses that I wasn’t looking for though that come from outside myself that I don’t understand. I guess I still hold out hope for truly authentic spirituality.
Have you heard anything by Alan Watts?
Mojibake is a good word to popularize. It fits the bill quite well.
If I were to add just one thing, I would mention that ‘化ã‘'(bake) has an even more interesting connotation than just ‘change’.
It is just like how we got ‘chemistry’ from the word ‘al-chem-y,’ the ‘chem’ part correlates with ‘bake.’
It is what transforms when the witch casts her spell. The ‘O-bake’ (honorific ‘bake’–the honor comes from fear of the inexplicable) is one of any number of ghosty gobliny beings; river sprites and trolls. (of which the newly sentient, freshly animated household object is often the scariest to the Japanese) Imagine flying umbrellas, or yards of fabric that wrap you in a cocoon of helplessness.
Pots and pans walk away, or turn into raccoons. A wallet thick with money will contain nothing but dried leaves in a wink, and you know you’ve been tricked by a foxy raccoon.
‘Bake’ isn’t just about changing, its about the charm that transforms everyday innocuous items into unrecognizable, uncooperative objects through unknown mischief. When we find ourselves stupefied by keys that should work, or items that have inexplicably disappeared, it has ‘bake-ru.’
There is the knowledge that through some incantation, some proper sequence, (reading the instruction manual!) the spell will be broken, and order will be returned.
The left half of 化 represents a person, the right half (if memory serves) is either a knife, or a sacrificial animal.
The idea is that when a person presents a sacrifice for the gods, it mystically transforms from a simple animal into the thing that will pacify the gods. From this idea of mystical transformation, comes the meaning for ‘bake.’ (Though inappropriate word use for a sacred setting, I can’t help but associate this with what is supposed to occur to the Host during a Catholic trans-substantiation.)
Bitherwack, I totally love what you’ve added here. I really get a sense for the nuance and richer meanings in the word and in the Japanese. “Unknown mischief …” That’s what it is. The human mind is black magic. LOL at the “reading the instruction manual” bit.
And even though Protestants don’t fully subscribe to trans-substantiation, the notion is still there in every sacrament … every offering. That by this incantation something real will change … some Mojibake will occur and with some grace will favor us. Mormons even bring this into the man-god notion. How will god glorify us? Transform us? Save us? … by his power, which is incomprehensible.
We are the mojibake of the gods, apparently. At least in our own minds. :D
Matt, I especially liked what you had to say at the end of your post…
“We are the mojibake of the gods, apparently…”
That may be true more literally than you think!
In light of, “In the beginning was the Word…” perhaps we, in our imperfect, yet aspiring state
are the literal mojibake of The Word… yearning to make sense of ourselves.