WHAT MOVES AND WHAT DOESN’T.

NOMEN EST OMEN!

NOMINATIVE DETERMINISM

—Naming is Destiny!

THE CARDINAL

“Consider the cardinal as I once did when viewing this video for the first time a few years ago. I had the sense that existence is familiar and yet inherently strange.

I later learned why the bird is called a cardinal. The name comes from the color. In the Church, red marks authority, sacrifice, blood—meant to be seen, not hidden. The bird didn’t feel religious to me at the time, but its redness does seem to demand attention, and perhaps that was enough.

Now what could be more numinous than the sight of this cardinal, if you really look at it?

This is not to mention that the lyrics to Paul McCartney’s “I Will” can be read as a patient search for the higher power that is behind it all—a willingness to wait, to remain open, to offer oneself without certainty of return.

As an adjective, cardinal means ‘of the greatest importance; fundamental.’ As a noun, it refers to a dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church.

I can honestly say that, in the first encounter with the song and the video, I did not consciously make the connection to priests. Perhaps on some subconscious level I did, though.

Only afterward did the nominative determinism surface. Cardinal is not merely a bird’s name. It is an adjective meaning ‘fundamental.’ It is a clerical title. The language had already embedded the metaphysics. All that was required was attention.

“I kept wondering what lies behind everything—the force that seems to make things move at all. People sometimes call it God. I only felt it as whatever makes things turn. I was amused, later on, to learn that cardinal once meant hinge. From the Latin, cardo: that on which a door turns. It felt briefly explanatory, which made me suspicious. I don’t think I found anything. But for a moment, the word seemed to know more than I did.”

What complicated things was realizing that a hinge doesn’t simply move. Part of it is fixed. Part of it swings. One side stays put so the other can open. I noticed the resemblance and then tried to forget it. It felt uncomfortably close to something theological—an unmoving source and a point of contact where motion enters the world. I didn’t pursue it. Still, it was hard not to notice that the hinge manages both without announcing either.

I wonder if I can apply this newfound insight toward my Master of the Obvious degree.”

— The Accidental Initiate

Filed Under:

*Naming is Destiny

*SONIC CONNECTIONS