Picturing Xenophanes
--for Keren

Xenophanes said the simplest things--with the most surprising tension.

Let these things be believed as resembling the truth (7.20).

Things are just things. Stuff. Tables, chairs, trees, mountains, stars--but also ideas, theologies, gods.

And the truth is what you tell when you are 5. "Tommy, did you brush your teeth?"

"Yes, mom."

And you either did or you didn't. You are either lying or telling the 'truth.'

But in so few words, Xenophanes brings these simple entities into surprising conflict. The distance we would like to collapse between 'things' and the 'truth' is exacerbated by 'belief' and 'semblance.' In another key fragment Xenophanes says:

No man has seen nor will anyone know the truth about the gods and all the things I speak of. For even if a person should in fact say what is actually the case, nevertheless he himself does not know, but belief is fashioned over all things (7.19).

This is not subjectivism, as is sometimes thought. Xenophanes is not teaching that opinion is the last authority. He has strong convictions for which he is willing to take a stand. But there is a difference between commitment and certitude. And what Xenophanes insists on is the lapse between what-is and what can be known.

A former student wrote a paper on this fragment, but struggled to see its practical implications. I encouraged her to take a camera and shoot pictures of instances where the lapse between representation and reality is empirical. These pictures are not necessarily award-winning photography, but they have generated excellent discussion in many classes now since they were submitted.

1. Details

'The devil is in the details.' But McDonald's remains a fantasy world for children. Built on notoriously unhealthy food and patently plastic advertising, the face of Ronald McDonald remains iconic.

Somehow, clowns, who frighten many children, come to symbolize childhood--a kind of universal nostalgia for a fantasy world no one would want.

2. Fruit of the Vine

Bought, no doubt, in a department store--this decoration brings a little 'nature,' a little 'outdoors' inside.

Every piece of fruit is miraculous--a shock of color and heft on a stem too thin, too dull, seemingly, to account for its progeny. Decoration exacerbates the natural gap between nature and its surprising fruition.

3. Have your Cake

Cuisine is more than nutrition, and taste is more than gustation. The framing, placement and garnishing have as much to do with the cost/satisfaction ratio here as any particular baking expertise.

The expansive plate and caramel swirl portrays an infinity that is immediately belied by the extravagant calories of cheese cake.

4. Who's Inside?

If you have been to a Filipino jail, you know that this picture could have been taken from either side of the bars. The seemingly easy concourse between 'inmates' and 'visitors' could easily put the observer's camera either inside or outside of the locked cage. Further, the beaming smiles could just as easily belong to the resignedly condemned as to the privileged free.

Do we lock up the 'bad guys' to keep us safe, or do we imprison ourselves by locking away what is undesirable to face about ourselves?

5. Pure Gold

In a plastic bag that someone else threw away, this woman keeps what is likely her every worldly possession.

Scraps I wouldn't even keep are the treasures that make her life worth living. In the same way, the church doors remain closed against the very ones her Savior died to save.

6. Miracle Cure

The many- turnings of irony have this man, more needful of the talisman he pedals than anyone who is likely to buy it from him, selling not only religious paraphernalia--but the broadest smile you're likely to see in church.

As often happens, only those most needful of salvation are destined to be saved.

7. Who Touched Me?

When we touch a religious statue we are not groping. We want to be touched, to encounter something holy, something beyond. The physical, empirical limit is patent--but we thrust ourselves on it with the naivete of childhood we have long since left behind.

To paraphrase Xenophanes--Let this thing, this stump of wood, be for me the true body and presence of God.

8. Black Nazarene

Xenophanes quips:

If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had (7.6).

But Filipinos are not black. Or, there are Filipinos who are black--tribals, but they are looked down on popularly--because they are black.

It is as though we overcome the Caucasian, foreigner prejudice by reversing one of our own. The 'Filipino Christ' becomes blacker, despicable to the Filipino, in order to redeem the portrayal of the Filipino.

9. Poor Saint

The depiction of St. Francis of Assisi represents simplicity and joy in poverty, a fabled communion with nature that comes from internal peaceableness.

But I've been in a lot of poor homes, and I've never seen a shrine to the poor saint there. It is in the homes of the rich and busy that we display pastoral peace and idyllic simplicity--things neither aspired to (at least not practically) nor respected.

In what way, then, venerated?

10. Leaving Dodge

We have all been in situations--sanctuaries, stadiums, shopping malls--where the enthusiasm is no less authentic for being intentional.

Does this man leave in disgust and incredulity, or because nature calls? Either way, his point of view is 180 degrees different from those closest to him.


11. Free Press

The Gutenberg press brought enlighten- ment to the European mind--through a process that is messy, mechanical and mindlessly reproducible.

The way culture--spirit--is produced by exclusion and oppression, the truth that sets you free is read through constraint and almost arbitrary rigor.

12. Plugged In

An emergency light has to be unplugged to turn on. You have to deliberately disconnect from the immediately available power supply for the light to come on.

There is the same necessity for 'arbitrarity' in a sign that will represent more than it is. Ironically, it is because the word 'tree' is so entirely unlike the real thing that it works so well to represent it. The success of every representation is based explicitly on the exacerbation of the lapse between the 'truth' of what is said and the 'thing' about which it is said.

* * * * *
There is one final irony here that I want to point out. When Keren turned in these photographs, she did so without an accompanying reflection. A big risk, to be sure. I have no idea what she thought about when she (?) took these pictures--but I do know that for hundreds of students since, discussing them has produced great insights into Xenophanes' thinking and our own thinking about God. I am writing this paper, but these are not my own thoughts--they have been shaped in discussion with other learners.

Xenophanes describes his philosophy as being "tossed about" Greece (7.1). And his text is literally dialectical in a way that most texts cannot claim to be. He didn't write it down, but people who heard it repeated it to others, debated it and made it their own. Only what became insightful to others came to be set down as 'Xenophanes'.'

Philosophy is not a content, but the pursuit of wisdom. Philosophy is not what appears in black and white on the page, but what happens in you when you read it.