A friend recently suggested that I write down my longing wishes-- and then experience some of them after I finish my comprehensive exams. I was at a loss. Life has recently been so much about deadlines, projects, and service that I have completely forgotten what it means to wish for something, to plan for things which give me pleasure.

I can however, say what I miss:

• Musical performance
• Athletics
• Blogging

I can't wait to be able to sit down in two months' time, relax in a nice chair, think for myself, and write a blog post.

Pure luxury.

Until then, I expect to be mostly inaccessible.

In an interesting blog post interview, Maggi Dawn, the Chaplain at Robinson College, discusses this week's visits to Cambridge by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Rowan Williams and John Sentamu. She interviews three people: Duncan Dormor (Dean of St John's College), John Binns, Vicar of Great St Mary's (the University Church) and James Gardom (Dean of Pembroke College).

When Maggi asked if this was similar to a Mission, Duncan noted that it was more in the order of lectures on faith and society rather than a presentation of Christian teaching which invites any kind of conversion. Binns pointed out that Christianity concerns the shape of all society, and that the (or one) ultimate end of Christianity is "what kind of communities we create" and "how we shape social policy." Gardom had this to say:

As someone who is currently participating in the Cambridge Christian Union's ongoing annual Mission (www.life08.org), I was interested in their comments. While I am excited about this lecture series at the university, I wish to respectfully disagree with Gardom on University Missions.

Gardom suggests that public events which present Christian teachings and invite personal change may once have been viable, but that something has changed to make this approach less effective. Things are certainly different-- I have heard of lectures in St. John's thirty years ago where up to 60 students would gather at once to consider the claims of Christianity. That is not the case today, but I do believe that the University Mission is still a powerful community expression of faith and a viable invitation to divine transformation.

Especially at a university, especially at Cambridge, a Mission is structurally the best way to get information about Christian teaching to the greatest number of people. Contemporary missions provide:

• A simple solution to the logistical problem of expertise distribution. The annual student-run mission is organised, well, by students, with the moral support and prayer of the religious establishment. As students, we attempt to love like Christ in relational communities of faith and nonfaith, but there are some areas where love means telling the truth about God, and in some of these areas, our expertise varies. By inviting speakers, we are able provide Christian teaching at a level of scholarship and clarity which exceeds our own and which reaches all parts of the university. This is the same philosophy behind this week's lectures--inviting archbishops and not undergraduates to speak.
• A hub for a variety of initiatives designed to be appropriate for the needs and interests of individuals. Print and web marketing, word-of-mouth, film nights, discussions at the debating society, discussion dinners, coffeehouse evenings. In our time, Missions are not designed to move people to a decision within the lectures; they are designed to open discussion. Most of the talks in the CICCU mission set out philosophical and methodological grounds for enquiry into Christianity and faith, alongside an articulation of that faith; only one talk included a strong personal appeal.
• A training ground for Christian community action. Since the CICCU is student-organised, it provides hundreds of students each year with practical experience in organisation, but also in how to integrate organisational efficiency with Christlike love.
• An occasion for remarkable Christian unity. While it is true that some people disagree with the ideological core of the Christian Union, it is perhaps the largest-scale non-denominational Christian activity in Cambridge and provides an occasion for students to consider their own approach to unity. This year's mission was held in three Cambridge churches of different denominations.

Is this model "broken" and ineffective? While it is true that larger venues might have been selected, each lecture was given to what seemed to me a nearly-packed venue. This visible attendance is just one manifestation of the sum spiritual and informational effect.

What about these other claims, that Christians must also be interested in questions of social and community interest?

As a student at St. John's, I have been excited about Duncan and Grant's Chapel's series on Christianity and social engagement, even if my own participation at Eden Chapel and work on the World University Documentary have stretched me too thin to attend very often.

I am also excited about this week's lectures, but I would hesitate to call them more or less "broken" than the Mission model. The lectures deliver ideas which were not included in our Mission, on topics of great importance. But structurally, they are less efficient. The lecture series is not designed to be sustainable in the same way as a Mission. CICCU and other initiatives (including Chapel!) are better designed to cultivate relationships and incubate long-term discussion focused toward active faith.

Other long-term initiatives in Cambridge would be the Faraday Institute (science), the Jubilee Centre (public policy), the Veritas Forum (an exciting new program of seminars and discussions), and the Christian Graduate Society (which has a strong International Development contingent), and Christian Heritage, which probably reaches more people with a broader international spread than all of these combined.

Thanks for blogging the lectures, Maggi!

I have noticed a dichotomy between the general and the particular. I declare this defunct; it makes too many assumptions about measurement and similarity.

Consider, for example, the idea of "metaphor". Statements about metaphor may be said to be general statements, abstractions which draw from particular examples of metaphor and which perhaps approximate some kind of truth about metaphor.

This dichotomy may work for things which are actually particular in nature. But metaphors are not discrete objects. Consider the following example by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke:

This stanza turns upon the ambiguity of "Gulfs" as a deep inlet of sea and also as a deep ravine. One word repeated is used to access ideas both of overflow and of ravenous peril. The "gulfs" have a certain potential by merit of their traditional use which is activated, or interanimated by further contact with the stream of language above (and here, I almost wrote "interanimated by other parts of the particular case").

Pebbles may have a general and a particular, but geometric lines do not. Yet we can still speak of "lines" in general. When we point to a "particular" line, we actually point to that "instance" of a line, something which only takes on the quality of particularity when a particular measurement is applied to it (c.f. Xeno).

Particularity is a term of measurement; generality is a term of abstraction. "Homogeneous" and "heterogeneous" describe finite sets, not universals or sets which approximate universals. A homogeneous set may be generalised, but its constituents may or may not be particular. A heterogeneous set by definition resists generalisation, but this says nothing about the particularity of its constituents.

Particularity has no relation with the creation or application of generalisations, which are concerned with "instances" or "examples". Particularity is instead related to continuity. But particularity and continuty are just two tools for observering instances.

Consider light. Light may be both described as particles and continuities. Language is similar, but different in important ways. When read in print, and often when spoken, language is comprised of units. But an individual's language also seems to be structured in ways which are consonant with tendencies of the brain and realised in what we describe to be an instance of a language. Languages are therefore both particular and continuous in internal structure.

Because language, like light, is also cumulative-- we perceive few instances of language simultaneously-- "metaphor" is a generalisation which is at best problematic and at worst useful only as the doorkeeper to a complex world of language's operations in different instances which may (possibly) be grouped in more fruitful ways.

[....] This will have to end unsatisfactorily, because I need to actually write about metaphor now. But I will try, as much as possible, to build better generalisations, and even more importantly, to avoid any assumptions about the composition of different generalisations' instances by a false dichotomy with "particularity".

One final statement: education seems to favor the general over the instance. Many educated follow this tendency. This is why the "futurist" is valued in ways which the engineer is not. But generalisations are merely ways to concentrate tools of analysis and pair them with interesting instances which generalisations help us find.

This lecture site was available to students over a WIFI connection during the lecture. They could use it to look at the examples more closely, read supplementary material, and view the slides. The WIFI network was limited solely to the material I provided, since I didn't want attention to wander. I was very, very pleased when student questions combined material from the lecture notes/site with things I had said in the lecture. The site was built in Tinderbox, published with the Spatial Hypertext Publisher I recently built.

In the lecture space, I also set up several computers with examples, so people could try them out, but students were far more interested in talking than looking. Professor Poole and I were a bit disappointed at this, but in retrospect, it's nothing to be disappointed about. We can hardly complain that a cluster of students stayed to talk afterward until the building closed.

I owe thanks to many of people for this:

• Adrian Poole sponsored and supervised the lecture. His own interesting lectures and our consequent discussion on tragedy have been fascinating. His encouragement and confidence have been inspiring.
• Mark Bernstein first encouraged me to organise a panel at Hypertext 07 on Tragedy and Hypertext. He has, in general, been a great encourager over the years.
• Nick Lowe, Kieron O'Hara, David Millard, and Emily Short, who spoke at the conference panel. I owe a lot of ideas to this discussion.
• I am particularly indebted to Nick Lowe for his interesting book The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, and to Emily, for her thorough review and fascinating description of tragedy-related Interactive Fictions.
• Clare Hooper, who got me to think about literary hypertext in the first place, whose enthusiasm refuses to be blunted, and who co-organised the ACM panel.
• Sarah Smith, who shared examples and ideas about tragic hypertext .oO(and for the unforgettable line: how many female Shakespeares does your play have? Ours has two)

I am now working on a related issue: moral dilemmas in interactive fiction, which is proving to be very interesting.

a new poem, written indoors on a frosty night...

"The Blanket-man Surveys"

A. Bottles, broken.
B. Stubs, spent.
C. Shoe shops, open.
D. Breadcrumbs, shredded- scattered on a patchy glove.
E. This testament.
F. All of the above.