Interpretation

I can’t precisely remember when I first heard Pink Floyd’s album The Wall.  I do know that the first time I heard it in its entirety was with a friend of mine named Bishop.  He and I listened to the tape late one night in his room.  The songs were obviously a narrative, but a narrative of what exactly we couldn’t tell.  And with much rewinding and turning the volume as high as we could to hear what strange things were being said in the background hiss between songs, we created a story to match the music. 
 
It was, of course, completely wrong. 

But the effort was one that prompted me to think of music as narrative – as having meaning beyond the straight lyrics and finding influence in guitar riffs and bass lines, syncopation and even volume. 

And I found out that our story was wrong when I saw the movie version of the Wall.  Three friends and I watched it one Saturday night.  By the time the first fifteen minutes had passed, two of my friends were fast asleep.  The other two of us were draw into the movie, which was like nothing I had ever seen before.  Suddenly the story of the music and the lyrics were vividly brought to life.  I was profoundly shaken by the visuals of the movie, but I was also inspired.  What inspired me was the recognition that the work from the depths of someone’s soul could produce wondrous creations, and they could speak to the depths of someone else’s soul. 

After the movie was over, the tape ran out, rewound itself and the television sat with a blue screen.  My friend and I sat transfixed, consumed by the movie and lost in thought. 

I have often wondered, though, if the story that Bishop and I came up with wasn’t also right.  I said we were completely wrong, but that was only after we saw the movie.  While the movie was unbelievable, what if what he and I came up with that night was also somehow legitimate?  Having nothing to go on but the music, what he and I heard had perhaps as much validity as anything else.

What a dangerous idea!

In his book The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs talks about trying to come to terms with what the Bible means.  His plan was to try and follow the laws of the Bible as literally as possible.  To do that, he opened up the Bible and started reading and trying to see where it would lead him.  What is so telling is what happens when he explains his project to people.  After telling his aunt (who is an Orthodox Jew) what he was intending to do, he writes the following:

“It’s misguided.  You need the oral law.  You can’t just obey the written law.  It doesn’t make sense without the oral law.”  By this, his aunt means that he can’t understand the written law in the Hebrew Scriptures without the oral law (compiled by Rabbis in works like the Talmud).  So for the scriptures to make sense, you have to have an interpretive lens.  Likewise, when Jacobs talked to Christians, “They said I couldn’t truly understand the Bible without accepting the divinity of Christ.  They said that many of these laws – like the ones about animal sacrifice – were nullified by Jesus’ death.”[1] 

In other words, you can’t make sense of it until someone makes sense of it for you.  So did I not understand Pink Floyd’s album The Wall until I saw the movie (which is a pretty questionable thing as the movie is pretty wild)?  Or did I have an interpretation of the album and the movie is also an interpretation?  Is the movie the only understanding?

Like the Bible, do I need an interpretation before the music has meaning, or do we have to have a proper understanding first?  I wonder.  Because in the case of the Bible, is there no possibility that it can be read by someone who finds meaning in it without the church, the rabbis, or some set of interpretive lenses? 

Food for thought, I suppose. 
So let me end with this.

Several years after hearing The Wall, I purchased the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon.  Still one of my favorites, I was (and still find myself) caught up in its music. 

On an airplane flight, I read an article that ‘interpreted’ the album.  I remember that the article said that the whole album was about the music industry and the machine that can so bog down artists.  Now, if this article had been about the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here, I would have agreed.  But Dark Side of the Moon?  No way.  It is about death, dying, and the human condition of mortality.  Perhaps it is even about going crazy.[2] 

Of course, I could be wrong. 


[1]  Both of these quotes are found in A.J. Jacob’s book The Year of Living Biblically on page 12.  The version I cite is the paperback edition published by Simon and Shuster Paperbacks in 2008.   
[2]  There is some bizarre connection to the movie The Wizard of Oz, too, but I won’t get into that right now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Defenders

Let's change gears for a post. Let's talk about comics. I just finished watching the Netflix series "The Defenders" based on the Marvel Comic series (that should be plural, I suppose!).  It wasn't bad.  It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. Here's why it wasn't bad.  It did a good job at pulling the characters together in a short amount of time and resolving the story line in a short amount of time as well.  In some respects, the series was the vehicle for the next seasons of Daredevil, Luke Cage, and Jessica Jones (and probably Iron Fist, but I will get to that in a minute).  It pulled the stories of these heroes together and provided them with direct knowledge of each other and a (mostly) willingness to work together. The Defenders is a tough comic to bring to the screen, large or small.  That's because the more recent iterations of The Defenders focuses on the idea that it is a non-team, but a name that applies to a particular group who...
Read more

Thoughts on Pastoral Authority

A friend of mine and I were speaking in general terms about the authority of the pastor within the context of the local church.  As I wrote in my post a few weeks ago, sometimes the authority of the church subverts itself, as in the case of stigmatics, by proclaiming them to be persons with a special revelation, but then have to backpedal when or if that revelation runs counter to the accepted and orthodox traditions. On the other hand, as my friend and I were saying, the Protestant church itself is struggling with the issue of pastoral authority.  Not because we have stigmatics running around proclaiming against us, but because we have congregations in which the pastor is not viewed as the theological authority.  Let me explain how that happens. In many cases, the authority of the pastor is only granted so long as the pastor preaches or teaches that which is already accepted as 'true.'  In other words, the pastor has authority if what they say matches with wh...
Read more

Noah

As the gopher wood bandwagon is being built for the movie “Noah,” I thought I might take a few minutes to offer a few observations about this mostly well-known story from the book of Genesis.   The first observation is that the character of Noah has more lines in the movie trailer than he does in the actual Biblical text.     Not that that’s a problem, but it is something to keep in mind.   Of course, Noah in the movie “The Bible” (1966 – and played by John Huston) also had a few more lines, though not as many as are likely in the upcoming movie version.   And there was the John Voigt “Noah’s Ark” movie in 1999 that had Noah’s Ark come under attack by pirates .     Anyway… Whenever a Biblical story gets adapted into a movie (for good or for ill), inevitably it will garner some discussion from church-goers.   Usually the discussion centers around authenticity, but sometimes it pushes us to deeper theological questions.   Mel Gibs...
Read more