Journal articles on the topic 'Moses (Biblical leader)'

The essay analyzes the influence of the book of the Exodus on the representation of political relations between the Christian army and its captain, Godfrey of Bouillon, in Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. The research will show how Tasso’s poem imitates the events of Moses in the government of the chosen people and reads the character of the prophet as a political leader who exercises sovereign power. This reading of Moses will be compared with the innovative one present in Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince: the Machiavellian treatise presents the biblical prophet as a perfect example of a new prince who imposes his will even using weapons. The essay will highlight how the Machiavellian characterization of Moses influences the character of Tasso’s poem. These considerations will highlight the political use of one of the major biblical characters within the most important poetic work of the Counter-Reformation period and the role of the most controversial political treatise of the time in this new reading.

As every epoch there are there a transition time, on Old Testament like Moses with Joshua, Joshua selected by God an supported fully by Moses, Conversely Moses have liberally to be changed. Like Elijah to Elisha too.Pattern on New Testament there are an examples of transition time too, like Jesus Christ to His Disciples, an transition from Paul to his successor Timothy. This is a heart and soul a big leader, and shall all leadership owners shepherd in church, Christian institution, etc.Which most be remembered in transition of leadership, that people of God leadership, about who will lead, who continue leadership, like a principle in biblical, hence a role of God, is determinant an anoint man which be selected the absolute God choice and constitute all other, but a succession router leader is which have been selected His own. An can be anointed in front of believers.

AbstractThe quest for the historical Moses has to start from two motifs in the biblical account, which are not deducible from the interests of later times, i.e., the Egyptian name of Moses and his non-Israelite wife. Concerning the latter motif the Old Testament account includes three versions about the origin of the woman (Midianite, Cushite, Qenite). The paper wants to show, how these differences could be explained as variations of an originally unique information, so that they can be taken as an indication of the long tradition the motif has undergone. The two non-deducible motifs indicate that the historical Moses was indeed the leader of the Exodus as well as the mediator of the revelation of Yahweh.

Servant leadership is a holistic style of leadership where the leader engages with followers in a relational, ethical, emotional, and spiritual manner. The leader empowers the followers and allows them to grow into what they can become. The leader develops the followers because of his or her altruistic and ethical orientation. The aim of the study was to understand the biblical foundation of servant leadership by analyzing Mark 10:41-45. Through the study of the text, it is reported that Jesus urged his disciples to be servants and to provide for the needs and well-being of their followers. The Gospel of Mark was set in a time when the Jews were under tremendous political and social upheaval. Like any people in the same predicaments, they began to yearn for a strong, political leader to save them from the tyranny of the Roman Empire, and the scripture had foretold of his coming. Instead, Jesus, a humble leader, came as a servant and a shepherd for all. The disciples did not understand the Messianic mission of Jesus. Mark used James and John to show how the struggle for earthly power is dominant in the world. In contrast, Jesus rejected the type of leadership because it is toxic. He rebuked the Pharisees and the Scribes for having seated themselves on the throne of Moses but failed to care for their people

The growing church is determined by the quality of spiritual leaders. However, nowadays there are spiritual leaders whose ministry focus is themselves, with the aim of gaining name and popularity. Apart from that, there are spiritual leaders who leave the ministry because they feel they have no more calling to lead the congregation, there are also spiritual leaders who leave the ministry because they feel they have no more calling to lead the congregation. There are also spiritual leaders who carry out their duties and ministry in the church no longer based on Biblical leadership. Therefore, this research will explore the leadership of Moses which is a guide for spiritual leaders in the church today. The research method used is literature research. This method collects data and information in the form of documents, data archives and other literature information. The writer will do a descriptive approach. The process of analysis carried out is to use reliable sources of literature journals, books and articles such as to support the analysis of the research topic. Based on the results of the research, guided by Musa's leadership, a spiritual leader in the church today includes the following: A spiritual leader in the church must have a calling from God, have a vision that comes from God, be able to build a relationship with God, have good character. patient, humble and gentle. In addition, must be able to form a new leader.

By the beginning of the 20th century a unique collection of Hebrew manuscripts (more than 20000 units) and first printed books was formed in the capital of the Russian Empire. These books ended up in St.Petersburg as part of several private collections, such as the collection of a Protestant paleographer and Biblical scholar Konstantin von Tischendorf, of the Karaite leader Avraam Firkovich, of the Archimandrite Antonin Kapustin, of the Barons Gnzburg, of a First Guild merchant Moses Aryeh Leib Friedland and of an Orientalist Professor Daniel Chwolson. The history of these collections and the motives of the collecting activity of their owners are the subject of this article.

Abstract This article analyzes the famous Biblical account of a group sent by Moses to scout the Holy Land in anticipation of its conquest (Num. 13-14) and focuses on the unhappy ending of the story. It examines three explanations for why the scouts were punished: (a) for adding their opinions to the facts they were supposed to report (editorializing), (b) for insinuating their opinions into the report itself (bias), and (c) for releasing the report to the public rather than funneling it through the leader. The article analyzes not only the story itself but also the story of the story to reveal the narrator's ideological position. (Mass Communication)

Relevance of the study. Myroslav Skorykʼs opera “Moses” is a landmark work in both the composer’s heritage and the modern Ukrainian musical theater. Inheriting the multilevel concept of the literary source of the libretto — the poem of the same name by Ivan Franko — the work causes interpretive discrepancies. In the I. Frankoʼs formulation the main theme of the work is connected with the tragedy of the personality, the leader and the biblical prophet Moses, who was called to lead the Jewish people out of Egyptian slavery. The analysis of the musical means of expressing the tragic constituent of the concept has not yet become the subject of a separate study, remaining in the shadow of the socio-political topics that are more relevant for the Ukrainian society. This determines the novelty and relevance of the study. Main objective of the study is to identify the signs of the musical embodiment of the philosophical and I. Francoʼs tragic plan of at the genre-dramatic and intonation-thematic levels of realization of the artistic concept of the M. Skorykʼs opera “Moses”. Methodology. The article uses the methods of system, genre-dramatic and intonationalsemantic analysis of musical work. Scientific novelty. For the first time the philosophical-tragic aspect of the concept of opera is specially considered, its priority is proved, the signs of intonational unity of the opera are revealed, the features of monotheism are indicated. Main results and findings of the study as well as a conclusion. The artistic concept of the opera “Moses” is read on the textual (reinterpreted b y I. Franco biblical history) and four contextual levels (allegories of Ukrainian history, religious and general philosophical, autobiographical). Disclosure of the multilevel concept is carried out by means of musical-intonational drama, built by M. Skoryk on the principle of hierarchically and logically organized spiritual-musical universe. By musical means the composer builds a system of biblical prototypes (Moses — Christ), correspondences (rebels Aviron and Dathan — evil spirits Azazel and Johavedda), symbols and subtexts (Poet and Moses in the opera as the Ivan Francoʼs alter ego) of poetic origin, spiritual and moral meanings. The intonational unity of the opera is based on the orchestral theme-epigraph from the Prologue. The main leitmotifs and characteristics of the actors are based on its modified elements. Careful elaboration of details, ingenuity of thematic work, appeal to baroque methods of revealing the sacred in the text are designed to express the concept of ontological unity of the world, genetically linked to the biblical worldview. The predominance of tragic signs on the plot (death of Moses and the rebels), dramaturgy (passion), intonation-thematic levels (catabasis, symbol of the cross) allows us to conclude about the philosophical tragedy of the genre of opera. In the aspect of revealing the tragedy of the personality M. Skoryk’s opera resonates with similar works by M. Mussorgsky, P. Tchaikovsky, D. Shostakovich, A. Schnittke, R. Shchedrin and others. The methodological paths outlined in this article allow us to further reveal new and new hidden meanings and subtexts of the opera.

What was the biblical interpretation of the Jews’ conduct in the final stage of the history of Israel in the context of the Law of Moses right before the times of the New Testament? The proposed exegesis of 1 Macc 8:17–20, which describes the covenant between Judas Maccabeus and the Roman republic, strives to discover the theological evaluation of the behavior of the revolt’s leader conducted by the author of the book. The intertextual method is particularly helpful in discovering the right understanding of the text. This method enables one to purposefully combine the expressions found in the consecutive verses with the same expressions found in the earlier biblical books. The theology that underlies these books will reveal the right sense of the studied passage of 1 Macc. It turns out that the theological evaluation is totally different than the political evaluation, the latter being solely taken into consideration in historical-literary analyses and commentaries. The biblical author has a restrained stance toward the political success of the Maccabees. He wants to reveal their conduct in the context of the Lord’s Law, which strongly proves that the First Book of Maccabees should belong to the canon of the inspired texts.

As one deeply involved in the politics of his day, whether in Palestine or in Rome, and as a student of Thucydides and of Plato (particularly of the latter'sRepublic), Josephus was much concerned with examining the qualities of the ideal leader of the state, convinced as he was, with Plato, that the wrong kind of leadership could and did bring about its downfall. Since one of the most important qualities of a great leader is to be able to discern the qualities of people and, above all, to select a worthy successor, the fact that Moses, the greatest leader that the Israelites had ever had, chose as his successor Joshua led Josephus to the conclusion that Joshua possessed the qualities of an ideal statesman. As Josephus puts itin an editorial comment (Ant. 3.49) which has no biblical basis, Joshua possessed five crucial qualities: he was extremely courageous, valiant in endurance of toil, highly gifted in intellect, highly gifted in speech, and distinguished for piety in worshiping God. Again, when summarizing his qualities upon Joshua's death (5.188), Josephus singles out four qualities—his supreme intelligence, his supreme skill in speaking lucidly (σαφώς) to the multitude, his stout-heartedness and great daring, and his utmost dexterity in directing affairs (Πρνλανεσαι) in peacetime and his adaptabilityto every occasion. If we combine these two accounts we see that Josephus stressed in Joshua the qualities of wisdom, eloquence, courage, endurance, flexibility, and piety.

Abstract:The purpose of this research is to describe that leadership in an institution continues to be sustainable, and a leader must also be ready to be replaced and prepare a substitute for the continuity of the institution being led. However, the fact is that there are many leaders who are not willing to leave their chairmanship and do not prepare a replacement leader. A leader must realize that the age and age factor cannot be denied and inevitably must be ready to be replaced and appoint a substitute. Two Old Testament Bible characters who can serve as models for God's servants in leadership succession. Joshua's point of departure and model provides the reason that Joshua has had a high attitude and character and integrity as a leader and is ready to accept the leadership relay as a substitute for Moses. So that in this work the author focuses on Joshua, as a substitute for the qualitative description method used. focuses on the object of research on the book of Joshua and supporting literature review. To get good results the researcher used descriptive qualitative methods by examining literature research with the main source of the Book of Joshua and supported by the biblical text which is very close to the discussion by describing Joshua as a model of God's servant in leadership succession. The results found from this research are that Moses and Joshua as God's servants have carried out a succession of leadership for the sake of the people who are led in achieving their goals. Abstrak:Tujuan penelitihan ini untuk mendikripsikan bahwa Kepemimpinan dalam sebuah embaga terus berkelanjutan, dan seorang pemimpin juga harus siap untuk digantikan dan mempersiapkan penganti demi kelangsungan lembaga yang dipimpin. Namun fakta yang terjadi tidak sedikit pemimpin yang tidak rela meninggalkan kursi kepemimpinanya dan tidak mempersiapkan seseorang pemimpin pengganti, Seorang pemimpin harus menyadari akan dirinya bahwa masa dan faktor usia tidak dapat dipungkiri dan mau tidak mau harus siap digantikan dan menunjuk penggati. Dua tokoh Alkitab Perjanjian Lama yang dapat diteladani sebagai model bagi hamba Tuhan dalam suksesi kepemimpinan. Titik tolak dan model pada diri Yosua memberikan alasan bahwa Yosua telah memilki sikap dan karakter dan intergitas yang tinggi sebagai seorang pemimpin dan siap menerima estafet kepemimpinan sebagai penggati Musa. sehingga dalam karya ini penulis terfokus pada diri Yosua,sebagai pengganti.dengan metode diskripsi kualitatif yang berfokus pada obyek penelitian kitab Yosua dan kajian pustaka yang mendukung. Untuk mendapatkan hasil yang baik peneliti mengunakan metode kualitatif diskriptif dengan meneliti penelitihan literatur dengan sumber utama KitabYosua dan ditunjang dengan teks Alkitab yang erat sekali dengan pembahasan dengan cara mendiskripsikan Yosua sebagai Model hamba Tuhan dalam suksesi kepemimpinan. Hasil yang ditemukan dari peneliti ini Musa dan Yosua sebagai hamba Tuhan telah melaksanakan suksesi kepemimpinan demi umat yang dipimpin dalam mencapai tujuan.

In this day and age, societies are disrupted and their order is unraveled at an unprecedented pace due to accelerating technological and societal change. Millions of people and countless communities are faced with hitherto unknown and complex conditions, on a breathtaking scale. This reality requires creating more societal knowledge, faster than ever before. Such knowledge-creation will be significantly enhanced if it relies on civilizational dialogue and shared wisdom across religious, national, ethnic, and political lines. This article points to a surprisingly inspiring story in contending with such challenges – which is the biblical story about the gladiatorial clash in ancient Egypt between Pharaoh, the demi-god representing polytheism and ancient Egypt’s caste-based society; and Moses, the teacher-leader of the enslaved Hebrews, representing monotheism and the ethos of natural universal human rights. That clash was a turning point in human history because the victory of monotheism over idolatry allowed for the inception and evolution of constitutional and legal systems that were based on the notion of fundamental equality among all humans. Moses is one of the most influential historical figures in human history, whose legacy continues to inspire billions of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and others. The issues that underlie his bout with Pharaoh – justice vs. idolatry, equality vs. privilege, and freedom vs. bondage – continue to challenge and shape our modern societies. Therefore, Moses’s outlook remains the cornerstone of any modern worldview that embraces diversity and advances tolerance.

“Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad the son of Hepher, son of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh from the families of Manasseh the son of Joseph. The names of his daughters were: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. And they stood before Moses, and before Eleazar the priest, and before the leaders and all the congregation, at the door of the tent of meeting, saying, ‘Our father died in the wilderness; he was not among the company of those who gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company in Korah, but died for his own sin; and he had no sons. Why should the name of our father be taken away from his family, because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father's brethren.’ Moses brought their case before the Lord. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘The daughters of Zelophehad are right; you shall give them possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren and cause the inheritance of their father to pass to them. And you shall say to the people of Israel, ‘If a man dies, and has no son, then you shall cause his inheritance to pass to his daughter.”’ (Numbers 27:1–8; cf. also chap. 36.)

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw a resurgence of interest in critical biblical studies in the United States. Though many colonial religious leaders were well trained in the area of biblical studies because of their European educations, this field of study declined to a very low state in America in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth-century revival of biblical studies in America, led by scholars such as Edward Robinson, William E. Channing, Andrews Norton, and Moses Stuart, was a homegrown, broad-based movement that ran the gamut of theological positions from conservative Calvinist to Unitarian. One unique feature of this movement was its interest in the biblical criticism of German writers; indeed, many works of German scholarship were translated into English by these American writers long before they achieved circulation in England. The resulting American biblical scholarship flourished not only at seminaries and divinity schools, but also on more practical levels. Edward Robinson, for example, led an expedition to the Middle East to study the geography and antiquities of the Holy Land. This scholarship was also tied to the prevalent missionary impulse, resulting in the translation of the Bible into many additional languages, especially those of the Middle and Far Eastern missionary fields.

Abstract This paper shows that the account of Moses’ brazen serpent as taught by the Nephite leaders presents parallels to the symbol and name of the Mesoamerican god, "Quetzalcoatl." It further shows that the term flying, used in the Nephite but not in the biblical account of the fiery serpent, has parallels in the Old and New Worlds.

This scientific work discusses, how can today's leaders understand the importance of regeneration of leadership. In this thesis will see various views associated with leadership and regeneration, which have an impact on issues of Theology and praxis related to problems of regeneration of leadership. Then from the various views, will be compared with the results of the study of regeneration of the historical leadership of Moses to Joshua, which is contained in the book of Pentateuch. The author gives some examples of patterns of regeneration. The results of this research are the leaders can understand the importance of leadership regeneration, as well as a biblical basis with regard to the regeneration of leadership. The leaders are expected to be: first, aware of the urgency of making the regeneration of leadership. Second, immediately perform the regeneration of leadership, to begin looking for the people who have competence in leadership, rig up to hand over the relay baton of leadership to the new leaders.

AbstractThis article studies the dance poetics and politics of Christians in contemporary Kinshasa. For Kinois (inhabitants of Kinshasa), dance is one of the most important technologies to get in touch with an invisible Other, the divine or the occult. In sermons, and other modes of instruction, spiritual leaders inform their followers about the morality of songs and dances. These discourses reflect pentecostal thought, and trace back the purity of specific body movements to the choreography's source of inspiration. As the specific movements of so-called sacred dances borrow from a wide array of cultural worlds, ranging from traditional ritual dances and popular urban dance to biblical tales, the religious leaders state that not just the body movements, but also the space where people dance and the accompanying songs, define the Christian or pagan identity of the dancer. Therefore, both the reflections upon dance movements and the dance events within these churches will be discussed as moments in the construction of a Christian community.

Hundreds of poems, novels, plays, and films have been devoted to Shaka, the king of the Zulu. His life story has been created anew each generation, and his image has changed over the years. For many whites he represents barbarism; for many blacks both within and outside South Africa, he has become a symbol of power. The ways in which Shaka has been portrayed reveal trends of thought and ideological influences prevailing in each period. They record the shifts in white conceptions of blacks in South Africa, and some of the developments in black consciousness.In this study I suggest that the core of the king's biography, the very basic life story which most historians accept, is but an invention. Shaka's biography closely resembles that of other African leaders such as Sundiata and Mbegha, and of biblical heroes, such as Joseph or Moses. These similarities to stories about other heroes point to the mythic character of the narrative and raise the possibility of investigating the various Shaka stories as symbolic representations of alternative world views, rather than as records of past times.

Introduction: The paper seeks to give a coherent outline of the biblical worldview. The basic questions that underlie the formation of such a worldview are examined in the areas of ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Method: The historical-grammatical approach to biblical understanding was adopted. Questions on ontology, epistemology, and axiology were explored by examining Bible writer records. Four major historical periods, from around 1500 BCE to 100 CE, were examined. The concepts highlighted were compared with corrective statements made by Christ on views expressed in His day. Result: Moses and other prophets spoke with a singular voice regarding a controversy worldview between good and evil, which also is mirrored by New Testament writers. They corporately also identified the principal elements of philosophy underpinning this theme that should guide Christians in the areas of reality, knowing, and acting. There is a striking commonality of information across the four historical periods examined, but we do not assert that believers at the time necessarily held views identical to those held today. Anciently, philosophers, scholars and leaders studied and admired other belief and worship systems. This led to disastrous consequences on account of syncretism. Christ corrected the principal misunderstandings for hearers of His day. Discussion: Our Lord spoke against many worldview perversions. The instruction comes to us, through these examples, to make sola Scriptura its own interpreter, to reverence God’s revelations through His prophets, and to seek to understand God’s beautiful character as the guide to our worship and ethical behavior. Further research might be conducted on the origin of changes seen in today’s major Christian churches that are exerting a contrary impact.

The article draws a parallel between P. Kulish’s and I. Franko’s disposition to the age-related ideological autorevision. It is argued that, experiencing evolution of the worldview and creative work, revising his own early radical social impulses caused by the ‘national radical stage’ (Franko’s definition) of liberation movement in Halychyna, mature Franko in 1896 – 1907 got closer to the views of P. Kulish, especially those of the late period of his life (1874 – 1897). Like the latter, Franko defended the right to worldview evolution and changing views. These typological coincidences consisted also in the movement from the center-left forces to the right-centered ones; the transition to the primacy of the national idea over the social one; the drastic national self-criticism and simultaneous emphasis on the nation-building and state-building; gradual reorientation from the idea of social revolutionary development of society to evolutionary progress and moderate “means and ways of acting and speaking” (as Franko called it); the warnings against admiring communist illusion, against ochlocracy; and, finally, in the focus on the leading role of the nationally conscious Ukrainian intellectuals in the liberation struggle. Ideological and formal parallels between Franko and Kulish were revealed not only in the letters and journalism, but also in Franko’s practice of grounding his works on the materials of the national, biblical and Christian history and mythology (i. e. literary historicism and mythologism, focused on the present, the future and the author’s personality; symbolic autobiography). From this point of view it is worth to compare: “Pisnia Budushchyny” (“Song of Future”) – “Try Braty” (“Three Brothers”); “Pokhoron” (“Funeral”), “Ivan Vyshenskyi” – “Velyki Provody” (“Great Farewell Procession”), “Marusia Bohuslavka”, “Dramovana Trylohiia” (“Drama-like Trilogy”); “Moisei” (“Moses”) – “Mahomet i Khadyza” (“Muhammad and Hadiza”), “Duma-Perestoroha, Velmy na Potomni Chasy Potribna” (“Warning Refl ections that will be Needed in Future”); “Strashnyi Sud” (“The Last Judgement”) – “Kulish u Pekli” (“Kulish in Hell”); “Slavianska Oda” (“Slavic Ode”) – “Tsarski Slova” (“Royal Words”).

Careful readers often become confused when trying to follow the graphic account of Korah’s rebellion against Moses recorded in Numbers 16:1–40. Bible commentators do not help very much because either they avoid discussing the apparent narrative inconsistencies, or they are divided on how to construe the Hebrew text. Furthermore, Korah is not the only rebel involved, and his dramatic downfall is just one of two uprisings that are reported, which subsequently spark an even greater insurrection that involves all the people (16:41–50). One also wonders: is this the main message of the chapter — namely, that the Lord will punish, most severely, all those who rise with impunity against his authority and the leaders whom he has chosen as well as the religious rules that he has instituted? This study reflects upon certain aspects of the elaborate structural organisation that characterises the book of Numbers as a whole in order to suggest a way of explaining the intricate arrangement that we find in the text of Chapter 16, one which serves to highlight important themes that constitute its main paraenetic message for the people of God. After an overview of some pertinent background information that provides a frame of reference for understanding this pivotal chapter, the pericope covering verses 1–40 is outlined and explained in sections, including several important intertextual references to Korah. Finally, the significance of this investigation for interpreting as well as formatting the biblical text is summarised and illustrated.

For the first time in Russian art history, the article attempts to show the integrity of the art of the Russian-Argentine sculptor S. Erzya on the basis of an art history analysis of his most famous works created in Italy, Russia and Argentina. The features of his personal and creative development are revealed in the context of socio-cultural events, which were distinguished by a stormy, sometimes catastrophic nature. The youthful ideals of Tolstoyism in the mind of a mature master acquire the features of a worldview that asserts the priority of the ideals of moral and spiritual perfection, the devotion to which was almost invariably paid with the price of life. A documentary confirmation of Erziʼs words is given in the entry of his secretary, L. Orsetti. People who knew Erza intimately in Italy, Russia, and Argentina also wrote about their commitment to these ideals. The theme of sacrifice, the suffering path unites both his biblical works and things of revolutionary themes. Their success is described in the article not only on the basis of periodicals, but also for the first time with the involvement of exhibition catalogues. In Argentina, Erzya created monumental portraits of the spiritual leaders of mankind - these portraits by the sculptor himself were collected in a special exhibition in his house: Moses, Beethoven, Tolstoy, N. Gogol. The motives of beauty and birth, the continuation of the human race are embodied by Erzya in the famous female images «Nude», «Eve», «Motherhood», «Dance». The plastic beauty and the mystery of the transformation of the female body fascinated the audience at the exhibitions of the sculptor's works and were evidence of the change in his somatic perception in Argentina. Thus, in the art of Erzi in Argentina, the intuition and emotional supernormality inherent in the cultural consciousness of Latin Americans are manifested. The sculptor's attitude to the material he chose for a particular work was dictated by the concept. His rare ability to work in any material - cement, marble, bronze, wood-makes him stand out among modern sculptors. He followed the Michelangelo tradition in the processing of the marble block and became the only master to conquer the hard species of tropical trees. Today it is obvious that the legacy of the sculptor-thinker Erzya is not fully appreciated.

The Black Summer of 2019/2020 saw the forests of southeast Australia go up in flames. The fire season started early, in September 2019, and by March 2020 fires had burned over 12.6 million hectares (Werner and Lyons). The scale and severity of the fires was quickly confirmed by scientists to be “unprecedented globally” (Boer et al.) and attributable to climate change (Nolan et al.).The fires were also a media spectacle, generating months of apocalyptic front-page images and harrowing broadcast footage. Media coverage was particularly preoccupied by the cause of the fires. Media framing of disasters often seeks to attribute blame (Anderson et al.; Ewart and McLean) and, over the course of the fire period, blame for the fires was attributed to climate change in much media coverage. However, as the disaster unfolded, denialist discourses in some media outlets sought to veil this revelation by providing alternative explanations for the fires. Misinformation originating from social media also contributed to this obscuration.In this article, we investigate the extent to which media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires functioned both to precipitate a climate change epiphany and also to support refutation of the connection between catastrophic fires and the climate crisis.Environmental Communication and RevelationIn its biblical sense, revelation is both an ending and an opening: it is the apocalyptic end-time and also the “revealing” of this time through stories and images. Environmental communication has always been revelatory, in these dual senses of the word – it is a mode of communication that is tightly bound to crisis; that has long grappled with obfuscation and misinformation; and that disrupts power structures and notions of the status quo as it seeks to reveal what is hidden. Climate change in particular is associated in the popular imagination with apocalypse, and is also a reality that is constantly being “revealed”. Indeed, the narrative of climate change has been “animated by the revelations of science” (McNeish 1045) and presented to the public through “key moments of disclosure and revelation”, or “signal moments”, such as scientist James Hansen’s 1988 US Senate testimony on global warming (Hamblyn 224).Journalism is “at the frontline of environmental communication” (Parham 96) and environmental news, too, is often revelatory in nature – it exposes the problems inherent in the human relationship with the natural world, and it reveals the scientific evidence behind contentious issues such as climate change. Like other environmental communicators, environmental journalists seek to “break through the perceptual paralysis” (Nisbet 44) surrounding climate change, with the dual aim of better informing the public and instigating policy change. Yet leading environmental commentators continually call for “better media coverage” of the planetary crisis (Suzuki), as climate change is repeatedly bumped off the news agenda by stories and events deemed more newsworthy.News coverage of climate-related disasters is often revelatory both in tone and in cultural function. The disasters themselves and the news narratives which communicate them become processes that make visible what is hidden. Because environmental news is “event driven” (Hansen 95), disasters receive far more news coverage than ongoing problems and trends such as climate change itself, or more quietly devastating issues such as species extinction or climate migration. Disasters are also highly visual in nature. Trumbo (269) describes climate change as an issue that is urgent, global in scale, and yet “practically invisible”; in this sense, climate-related disasters become a means of visualising and realising what is otherwise a complex, difficult, abstract, and un-seeable concept.Unsurprisingly, natural disasters are often presented to the public through a film of apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery. Yet natural disasters can be also “revelatory” moments: instances of awakening in which suppressed truths come spectacularly and devastatingly to the surface. Matthewman (9–10) argues that “disasters afford us insights into social reality that ordinarily pass unnoticed. As such, they can be read as modes of disclosure, forms of communication”. Disasters, he continues, can reveal both “our new normal” and “our general existential condition”, bringing “the underbelly of progress into sharp relief”. Similarly, Lukes (1) states that disasters “lift veils”, revealing “what is hidden from view in normal times”. Yet for Lukes, “the revelation tells us nothing new, nothing that we did not already know”, and is instead a forced confronting of that which is known yet difficult to engage with. Lukes’ concern is the “revealing” of poverty and inequality in New Orleans following the impact of Hurricane Katrina, yet climate-related disasters can also make visible what McNeish terms “the dark side effects of industrial civilisation” (1047). The Australian bushfires of 2019/2020 can be read in these terms, primarily because they unveiled the connection between climate change and extreme events. Scorching millions of hectares, with a devastating impact on human and non-human communities, the fires revealed climate change as a physical reality, and—for Australians—as a local issue as well as a global one. As media coverage of the fires unfolded and smoke settled on half the country, the impact of climate change on individual lives, communities, landscapes, native animal and plant species, and well-established cultural practices (such as the summer camping holiday) could be fully and dramatically realised. Even for those Australians not immediately impacted, the effects were lived and felt: in our lungs, and on our skin, a physical revelation that the impacts of climate change are not limited to geographically distant people or as-yet-unborn future generations. For many of us, the summer of fire was a realisation that climate change can no longer be held at arm’s length.“Revelation” also involves a temporal collapse whereby the future is dragged into the present. A revelatory streak of this nature has always existed at the heart of environmental communication and can be traced back at least as far as the environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring revealed a bleak, apocalyptic future devoid of wildlife and birdsong. In other words, environmental communication can inspire action for change by exposing the ways in which the comforts and securities of the present are built upon a refusal to engage with the future. This temporal rupture where the future meets the present is particularly characteristic of climate change narratives. It is not surprising, then, that media coverage of the 2019/2020 bushfires addressed not just the immediate loss and devastation but also dread of the future, and the understanding that summer will increasingly hold such threats. Bushfires, Climate Change and the MediaThe link between bushfire risk and climate change generated a flurry of coverage in the Australian media well before the fires started in the spring of 2019. In April that year, a coalition of 23 former fire and emergency services leaders warned that Australia was “unprepared for an escalating climate threat” (Cox). They requested a meeting with the new government, to be elected in May, and better funding for firefighting to face the coming bushfire season. When that meeting was granted, at the end of Australia’s hottest and driest year on record (Doyle) in November 2019, bushfires had already been burning for two months. As the fires burned, the emergency leaders expressed frustration that their warnings had been ignored, claiming they had been “gagged” because “you are not allowed to talk about climate change”. They cited climate change as the key reason why the fire season was lengthening and fires were harder to fight. "If it's not time now to speak about climate and what's driving these events”, they asked, “– when?" (McCubbing).The mediatised uncovering of a bushfire/climate change connection was not strictly a revelation. Recent fires in California, Russia, the Amazon, Greece, and Sweden have all been reported in the media as having been exacerbated by climate change. Australia, however, has long regarded itself as a “fire continent”: a place adapted to fire, whose landscapes invite fire and can recover from it. Bushfires had therefore been considered part of the Australian “normal”. But in the Australian spring of 2019, with fires having started earlier than ever and charring rainforests that did not usually burn, the fire chiefs’ warning of a climate change-induced catastrophic bushfire season seemed prescient. As the fires spread and merged, taking homes, lives, landscapes, and driving people towards the water, revelatory images emerged in the media. Pictures of fire refugees fleeing under dystopian crimson skies, masked against the smoke, were accompanied by headlines like “Apocalypse Now” (Fife-Yeomans) and “Escaping Hell” (The Independent). Reports used words like “terror”, “nightmare” (Smee), “mayhem”, and “Armageddon” (Davidson).In the Australian media, the fire/climate change connection quickly became politicised. The Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack interviewed by the ABC, responding to a comment by Greens leader Adam Bandt, said connecting bushfire and climate while the fires raged was “disgraceful” and “disgusting”. People needed help, he said, not “the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital city greenies” (Goloubeva and Haydar). Gladys Berejiklian the NSW Premier also described it as “inappropriate” (Baker) and “disappointing” (Fox and Higgins) to talk about climate change at this time. However Carol Sparks, Mayor of bushfire-ravaged Glen Innes in rural NSW, contradicted this stance, telling the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) “Michael McCormack needs to read the science”. Climate change, she said, was “not a political thing” but “scientific fact” (Goloubeva and Haydar).As the fires merged and intensified, so did the media firestorm. Key Australian media became a sparring ground for issue definition, with media predictably split down ideological lines. Public broadcasters the ABC and SBS (Special Broadcasting Service), along with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian Australia, predominantly framed the catastrophe as wrought by climate change. The Guardian, in an in-depth investigation of climate science and bushfire risk, stated that “despite the political smokescreen” the connection between the fires and global warming was “unequivocal” (Redfearn). The ABC characterised the fires as “a glimpse of the horrors of climate change’s crescendoing impact” (Rose). News outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia, however, actively sought to play down the fires’ seriousness. On 2 January, as front pages of newspapers across the world revealed horrifying fiery images, Murdoch’s Australian ran an upbeat shot of New Year’s Day picnic races as its lead, relegating discussion of the fires to page 4 (Meade). More than simply obscuring the fires’ significance, News Corp media actively sought to convince readers that the fires were not out of the ordinary. For example, as the fires’ magnitude was becoming clear on the last day of 2019, The Australian ran a piece comparing the fires with previous conflagrations, claiming such conditions were “not unprecedented” and the fires were “nothing new” (Johnstone). News Corp’s Sky News also used this frame: “climate alarmists”, “catastrophise”, and “don’t want to look at history”, it stated in a segment comparing the event to past major bushfires (Kenny).As the fires continued into January and February 2020, the refutation of the climate change frame solidified around several themes. Conservative media continued to insist the fires were “normal” for Australia and attributed their severity to a lack of hazard reduction burning, which they blamed on “Greens policies” (Brown and Caisley). They also promoted the argument, espoused by Energy Minister Angus Taylor, that with only “1.3% of global emissions” Australia “could not have meaningful impact” on global warming through emissions reductions, and that top-down climate mitigation pressure from the UN was “doomed to fail” (Lloyd). Foreign media saw the fires in quite different terms. From the outside looking in, the Australian fires were clearly revealed as fuelled by global heating and exacerbated by the Australian government’s climate denialism. Australia was framed as a “notorious climate offender” (Shield) that was—as The New York Times put it—“committing climate suicide” (Flanagan) with its lack of coherent climate policy and its predilection for mining coal. Ouest-France ran a headline reading “High on carbon, rich Australia denies global warming” in which it called Scott Morrison’s position on climate change “incomprehensible” (Guibert). The LA Times called the Australian fires “a climate change warning to its leaders—and ours”, noting how “fossil fuel friendly Morrison” had “gleefully wielded a fist-sized chunk of coal on the floor of parliament in 2017” (Karlik). In the UK, the Independent online ran a front page spread of the fires’ vast smoke plume, with the headline “This is what a climate crisis looks like” (Independent Online), while Australian MP Craig Kelly was called “disgraceful” by an interviewer on Good Morning Britain for denying the fires’ link to climate change (Good Morning Britain).Both in Australia and internationally, deliberate misinformation spread by social media additionally shaped media discourse on the fires. The false revelation that the fires had predominantly been started by arson spread on Twitter under the hashtag #ArsonEmergency. While research has been quick to show that this hashtag was artificially promoted by bots (Weber et al.), this and misinformation like it was also shared and amplified by real Twitter users, and quickly spread into mainstream media in Australia—including Murdoch’s Australian (Ross and Reid)—and internationally. Such misinformation was used to shore up denialist discourses about the fires, and to obscure revelation of the fire/climate change connection. Blame Framing, Public Opinion and the Extent of the Climate Change RevelationAs studies of media coverage of environmental disasters show us, media seek to apportion blame. This blame framing is “accountability work”, undertaken to explain how and why a disaster occurred, with the aim of “scrutinizing the actions of crisis actors, and holding responsible authorities to account” (Anderson et al. 930). In moments of disaster and in their aftermath, “framing contests” (Benford and Snow) can emerge in which some actors, regarding the crisis as an opportunity for change, highlight the systemic issues that have led to the crisis. Other actors, experiencing the crisis as a threat to the status quo, try to attribute the blame to others, and deny the need for policy change. As the Black Summer unfolded, just such a contest took place in Australian media discourse. While Murdoch’s dominant News Corp media sought to protect the status quo, promote conservative politicians’ views, and divert attention from the climate crisis, other Australian and overseas media outlets revealed the fires’ link to climate change and intransigent emissions policy. However, cracks did begin to show in the News Corp stance on climate change during the fires: an internal whistleblower publicly resigned over the media company’s fires coverage, calling it a “misinformation campaign”, and James Murdoch also spoke out about being “disappointed with the ongoing denial of the role of climate change” in reporting the fires (ABC/Reuters).Although media reporting on the environment has long been at the forefront of shaping social understanding of environmental issues, and news maintains a central role in both revealing environmental threats and shaping environmental politics (Lester), during Australia’s Black Summer people were also learning about the fires from lived experience. Polls show that the fires affected 57% of Australians. Even those distant from the catastrophe were, for some time, breathing the most toxic air in the world. This personal experience of disaster revealed a bushfire season that was far outside the normal, and public opinion reflected this. A YouGov Australia Institute poll in January 2020 found that 79% of Australians were concerned about climate change—an increase of 5% from July 2019—and 67% believed climate change was making the bushfires worse (Australia Institute). However, a January 2020 Ipsos poll also found that polarisation along political lines on whether climate change was indeed occurring had increased since 2018, and was at its highest levels since 2014 (Crowe). This may reflect the kind of polarised media landscape that was evident during the fires. A thorough dissection in public discourse of Australia’s unprecedented fire season has been largely eclipsed by the vast coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that so quickly followed it. In May 2020, however, the fires were back in the media, when the Bushfires Royal Commission found that the Black Summer “played out exactly as scientists predicted it would” and that more seasons like it were now “locked in” because of carbon emissions (Hitch). It now remains to be seen whether the revelatory extent of the climate change blame frame that played out in media discourse on the fires will be sufficient to garner meaningful action and policy change—or whether denialist discourses will again obscure climate change revelation and seek to maintain the status quo. References Anderson, Deb, et al. "Fanning the Blame: Media Accountability, Climate and Crisis on the Australian ‘Fire Continent’." 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"Ducking for Cover in the ‘Blame Game’: News Framing of the Findings of Two Reports into the 2010–11 Queensland floods." Disasters 39.1 (2015): 166-84.Fife-Yeomans, Janet. “Apocalypse Now.” Herald Sun 1 Jan. 2020. 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In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.