Posts Tagged criticism
The Gospel of Mark: A Masterpiece Misunderstood, Part 4 – Silence and Power
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Christianity on July 30, 2025
Silence and Prohibition as Rhetorical Trapdoor
For Mark, silence is a form of structure. His most famous silence comes at the end of the gospel, in 16:8, where the women flee the empty tomb and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Here we have silence at the characters’ level and at the narrative level.
Mark uses silence like a line break. It isolates, heightens, and forces attention. His scenes close with hesitation. The fig tree withers, Jesus gives no explanation. Jesus heals by touch, the narrator doesn’t comment. At his trial, Jesus is silent when questioned (14:61).
In Mark 1:40–45, Jesus heals a leper and sternly warns him to tell no one. The man spreads the news widely. Jesus then retreats into desolate places. The rest is silence. There is no commentary on the man’s disobedience, no indication that Jesus is angry, no explanation of what Jesus’s withdrawal means.
These silences create enough interpretive space to lure a thoughtful reader. A key moment comes in the boat immediately after the second feeding miracle. The disciples are worried they’ve forgotten to bring bread. Jesus asks:
Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (8:17–18 ESV)
He’s just fed thousands–twice, and they’re panicking about lunch. The moment seems to glance past the disciples and land somewhere else. The burden of understanding has been handed to the reader
The Messianic Secret: Command as Rhetoric
Repeatedly, Mark’s Jesus performs a miracle, then demands the characters to be silent. He heals a leper, then says: “See that you say nothing to anyone” (1:44). He raises Jairus’s daughter, then “strictly charged them that no one should know” (5:43). He opens a deaf man’s ears and “charged them to tell no one” (7:36). After Peter confesses him as the Christ, Jesus “strictly charged them to tell no one about him” (8:30). The Messianic Secret refers to these repeated instructions to demons and healed individuals, prominent only in Mark’s Gospel, to keep his identity as the Messiah hidden.
Scholars offer various explanations, reflecting different approaches to the text. Some give a historical explanation. Jesus commanded secrecy to avoid arrest by Roman authorities, protecting his ministry. A theological alternative postulates that Jesus kept his identity secret to challenge Jewish expectations of a political Messiah, not the role the suffering Jesus plays in the gospels. Some see it as purely practical – a way to manage crowds to avoid interference with his teaching. This theory fits well with the healing the leper (1:45) and the blind man at Bethsaida (8:22) but poorly with the recognition by Jesus of demons (1:23, 1:34, 3:11) and after Peter’s confession (8:30).
I see it, especially in its repetition, like William Wrede did in the 1800s, as a literary device. Unlike Wrede, I am not concerned with the theological question of whether Jesus was the Messiah from the start, preordained since the beginning of time, as in John 1:1, or whether he became the Messiah at the point of crucifixion, as Phillipians 2:6 can be read. Wrede’s argument for the messianic secret being a literary device hinged on this distinction, along with the question of Markan priority. Mine does not. Wrede and many other explanations of the messianic secret miss the point that is obvious in a reader-response analysis of Mark.
Mark is delaying public understanding to increase private responsibility. If the characters can’t see what happened, then the reader has to see it for them. The messianic identity remains hidden inside the story. It becomes visible to those who can read the signs.
Those reading Mark only for its theology or to judge its historicity miss the continuity between the silence and Jesus’s explanation of the parables: “…but for those outside everything is in parables…” This is blatant. Jesus isn’t hiding from everyone;he’s only hiding within the story. But Jesus, through the narrator, reveals himself directly, to the reader. And Mark rewards the reader for not needing to be told.
It’s the Reader Who Sees the Pattern
Mark’s combination of rhetorical choices – the silence, the repetition, the warnings not to tell anyone – shape an experience that forces the reader to see what the disciples do not, and to do so without the narrator confirming it. It’s why no one inside the story “gets it.” The entire gospel is a structure of discovery, designed not for the narratee, but for you, the reader.
You understand the feeding miracles. You understand the anointing. You suspect, if your rhetorical skills are sharp, that the fig tree is about the temple. You hear the Roman centurion’s words – “Truly this man was the Son of God” – and realize no one else has said anything like that through the entire gospel.
Mark’s narrator doesn’t hand insight to you. You earn it. But on another level, Mark the author, one level up, did hand it to you. Isolating the reader is Mark’s deepest rhetorical move. It’s not that he just delays meaning; he narrows its access. This narrative isolation creates a private moment of insight for the reader alone.
Mark’s positioning of the reader as sole witness is seen in the transfiguration’s muffled epiphany (9:2). Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain. They see him transfigured, his clothes radiant white, flanked by Moses and Elijah (echoing Malachi 4:5-6). Considered “the greatest miracle” by Aquinas, we might expect it to be the clearest scene in the gospel.
But what happens in Mark’s telling? Peter blurts out something foolish. A voice from heaven addresses an unspecified listener: “This is my beloved Son: hear ye him.” Then, “suddenly looking round about, they saw no one any more.” Jesus tells the disciples “tell no man what things they had seen” (ASV).
The moment has closed on itself, the vision collapsed to silence. The disciples are clueless and are told to be silent. Who’s left to interpret Jesus’s miracle? Only, you, the reader. Hear ye him.
In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus undergoes his moment of greatest anguish. He tells his disciples to watch and pray, but they fall asleep. Three times. You, the reader, are fully awake. You are present for every word of his prayer. You see his sorrow. You watch the drops of isolation gather around him. This scene, as Mark paints it, isn’t about the disciples’ inattention; it’s about your attention.
Mark’s structure puts you in a lonely place. You are the only one who sees the pattern. You are the only one who notices the parallels, the ironies, the betrayals. You’re the only one who sees what kind of Messiah this is. Mark doesn’t want you to pity the disciples. He wants you to step over the blocks on which they’ve stumbledand keep on going.
Silence Plus Inversion
Throughout Mark, people are constantly told to be silent – and they rarely obey. The leper in chapter 1 is told to “say nothing to anyone.” He spreads the news. After Jairus’s daughter is raised, Jesus instructs them to keep quiet. They are “immediately overcome with amazement” and, presumably, do not obey. The deaf man in chapter 7 is healed. Jesus charges them to tell no one. “But the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.”
It’s a pattern: commanded silence, followed by disobedient speech. But at the tomb, the pattern is reversed. The women are not told to be silent. In fact, they are given a clear message to deliver:
Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee (Mark 16:7 ESV)
But this time, they say nothing.
And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:8 ESV)
It’s the only moment in the gospel when someone actually complies with silence – despite being told not to.
This reversal is Mark’s final irony. He has trained us to expect speech after commands for silence. But now, when the resurrection itself is announced, when the story should break open, the characters fall silent.
The women are continuing the pattern of misunderstanding and fear that runs through the entire narrative. Even here, at the resurrection, Mark offers no closure. The characters don’t overcome their limitations; they give in to them. And the reader is drawn in.
Mark’s Redefinition of Power
From the midpoint of Mark onward, the tone darkens. Jesus has healed the sick, fed the hungry, walked on water, and rebuked storms. He has astonished crowds, exorcised demons, and taught in riddles that burn their way into the mind. But once Peter names him the Messiah in Mark 8, things shift.
And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things… (Mark 8:31 ESV)
This is the pivot. From here on, Jesus repeats the same strange message: he won’t rule as a king but will be rejected. He won’t be crowned; he’ll suffer and dieand rise again. Each time he says it, the disciples, on cue, fail to understand. Mark builds his second half on this theme.
In Mark 8:29, Peter finally names Jesus as the Christ. In a rhetorically less shrewd telling, this would be framed as the breakthrough. In cinema it would be the classic zoom-out, where we are invited to consider the character Jesus and his state of mind before understanding the context around him. But here, Mark’s Jesus story tracks in rather than zooming out. Jesus, in a full-screen close-up, tells the disciples to tell no one and then says “the Son of Man must suffer.”
Peter pulls him aside and says that can’t be right. Jesus responds with the harshest tone, unparalleled in the other gospels:
Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God’s purposes, but on man’s. (8:33)
This is a clash between two visions of power. Peter gets the title right but fills it with the wrong content. He imagines a crowned victor; Jesus offers a condemned servant. It’s both rebuke and reversal.
In 8:33, Mark shows us something else: Peter is not the intended reader. This isn’t a Vaudeville wink or Groucho’s fourth-wall smirk. It isn’t postmodern self-reference either. It’s something subtler – a direct address the narrator doesn’t acknowledge, but the reader feels. The Greeks called it metalepsis.
In this metalepsis Mark sets up the Christ-confession not as insight but as a foil for the insight that hasn’t happened yet. The reader is meant to notice the disjunction. The narrator doesn’t explain it. But, like a theatrically and rhetorically literate ancient Greek, you’re supposed to feel it.
Mark has three predictions of the Passion (8:31, 9:31, 10:33). In the first we learn that the Son of Man must suffer many things, in the second that he will be delivered. The third has specificity:
The Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests… They will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. (10:33–34 NASB)
Mark uses a clear escalation in both content and tone. Each is followed by the disciples’ embarrassing descent into misapprehension. By the third, the reader is actively frustrated when James and John ask for seats of glory. They’re imagining Jesus enthroned in messianic splendor, and they want the top cabinet posts – prime minister and chief of staff. Their political expectation shows the disciples’ continued misunderstanding of what Jesus’s “kingdom” is. Mark uses their request to stage one of the gospel’s key reversals. Jesus responds (10:42–45) by redefining power entirely.
This is one of the more elegant places where inherited harmonization dulls Mark’s edge. Readers come to the scene already believing that Jesus is a spiritual king. But Mark wants us to see the disciples as tragically, almost comically mistaken. If you read Mark with fresh eyes – no John 18:36, no Pauline theology, no Sunday school overlays – it hits different. Jesus has predicted torture and death. James and John are jostling for promotions.
As a reader, you wince, like Mark intended. How can they be this obtuse? How can they hear “mocked, spat upon, killed” and respond with “Can we sit at your right and left hand?” The scene mirrors the ironic humor of Jason’s naive optimism in Euripides’ Medea, which similarly served to deepen the audience’s engagement.
Then there’s the final irony. The two men who are actually at Jesus’s right and left when he “comes into his glory” are mocking, low-life thieves, nailed up beside him. Mark explicitly states that one is on his right and one on the left. The seats coveted by James and John are occupied by the damned. Mark makes that detail land like a death knell to any political or triumphalist reading of Jesus’s kingship. Luke seems to want one last flicker of hope; one of his thieves repents and is saved. Mark leaves it dark, no repentance. Readers’ background knowledge of Luke contaminates Mark’s narrative. Harmonized memory, doctrinal catechesis, and liturgical exposure overwrite Mark’s internal logic and makes readers miss Mark’s brutal wit.
Mark’s storytelling shares much with Greek tragic form, but he uses its elements with new intent. Critics have written detailed comparisons between ancient Greek literature and the books of the New Testament. Like the protagonists of Sophocles’ Oedipus or Euripides’ Hippolytus, Jesus is a noble figure with a divine mission, yet he faces suffering and betrayal. The centurion’s declaration at Jesus’ death is a standard Greek anagnorisis, a moment of recognition where a character realizes the true identity of the protagonist. Many more examples appear in Mark.
I’m not pursuing an analysis of parallels here, particularly because I’m not portraying Mark as a standard Greek author but as an innovative one. His tools clearly emerge from that tradition, but he combines them in uncommon ways to push the artform into the future, as befits the explosion of a new form of religion.
Like Euripides in Medea and in Alcestis, Mark has introduced mildly comic elements into what is nominally a tragedy. These comic elements aren’t there to lighten the mood but to embarrass you on behalf of dimwitted characters in the story. Mark, in service of Jesus’s redefinition of power, has put this device to novel use.
Mark is teaching the reader not just to reject the disciples’ response, but to reject the assumption behind it: that power is triumph, authority is dominance, and victory means avoidance of pain.
For Mark, power is something else entirely. To the disciples’ disbelief, power points downward. When James and John make their request, Jesus answers:
You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink…? (10:38 NASB)
They say yes, because they still don’t get it. And then Jesus delivers what may be the clearest statement of power redefinition in the New Testament:
…whoever wants to be first among you shall be slave of all… For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (10:43–45 NASB)
Jesus is not telling them to act humble while being powerful. He’s telling them that the act of humiliation – the path downward,through rejection, suffering, and death– is the power.
As expected, Mark does not explain this principle, he dramatizes it. The ostensibly powerful figures in Mark – Herod, Pilate, the Sanhedrin (high priests, elders, and scribes) – are all shown to be weak. They fear crowds and make cowardly decisions. The disciples, given the chance to stand with Jesus, scatter.
Jesus remains steady and silent. When accused, he does not defend himself. When struck, he doesn’t retaliate. When mocked, he gives no response. The reader is left with the realization: this is what power looks like. It doesn’t come with thunder or reach for titles. It’s patient and does not boast. It walks through pain, fearing no evil, knowing what lies beyond.
Jesus’s redefinition of power is for the reader. The disciples aren’t punished for their dullness. The story moves forward without them. They do not greet the resurrection.
But you do. You’re taken through all of it, with increasing quiet. Mark’s tone descends lower still, until finally, in the silence of the tomb, you are the only one left. Mark doesn’t conclude with a lesson, but an echo. And in the subsequent hush, the story belongs to you, the reader.
Next: Mark’s Interpreter Speaks
The Gospel of Mark: A Masterpiece Misunderstood, Part 2 – Reader-Response Criticism
Posted by Bill Storage in History of Christianity on July 29, 2025
See Part 1
What Is Reader-Response Criticism?
Reader-response criticism posits that a text’s meaning is not solely determined by the author’s words or its historical context but is actively constructed through the reader’s engagement with it. This approach views a text as an experiential framework shaped by the reader’s imagination, emotions, and interpretive choices. As Marcel Proust articulates in Time Regained (1927), “The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book.” In this perspective, the author functions as a rhetorician, deliberately crafting the text to guide the reader’s experience through structure, omission, and suggestion, eliciting specific responses in the act of reading.
Some versions of reader-response criticism wander into social constructivism and weird academic territory. I won’t follow them. All I mean here is that reading is a two-way act. Writers don’t just write; they anticipate, provoke, and reward certain kinds of readers. This doesn’t mean “the reader makes the meaning,” and it shouldn’t be confused with the more radical forms of reader-response criticism found in modern legal theory or postmodern academia.
In the Gospel of Mark, this rhetorical artistry is particularly evident. Unlike a text that explicitly states its conclusions, Mark subtly invites readers to participate actively in constructing meaning – meaning he points to but leaves you to claim. He arranges, but makes you assemble. The Gospel’s narrative is marked by ambiguity and restraint, leaving gaps that prompt reflection, questioning, or wonder. For instance, Mark’s portrayal of the disciples as persistently misunderstanding Jesus’ identity and mission (e.g., Mark 8:17–21) challenges readers to discern truths that the characters fail to grasp. Rather than providing overt explanations, Mark guides readers toward insights through understated cues, such as the abrupt ending at Mark 16:8, where the women’s fear and silence invite contemplation of the resurrection’s mystery. This approach contrasts with the more explicit narratives of Matthew, Luke, and John, which offer detailed resolutions. Mark’s unique strategy engages readers by trusting their interpretive faculties, fostering a profound and personal encounter with the text’s theological implications. He points you toward conclusions – without ever letting on that he knows them too.
Four Roles in the Story
To see this clearly, I need to distinguish four roles at work in Mark: the author, the narrator, the narratee, and the reader.
These aren’t my invention. They come from literary theory, but I’m streamlining them. Theorists (e.g., Seymour Chatman, Wayne Booth, and Robert Fowler, separately) propose more roles, or define them differently, but these four suffice for our purposes:
- Author
The historical person(s) who composed the text. In our case, this is Mark – whoever he was. Despite some signs of redaction, Mark’s syntax, style, and rhetorical unity suggest a single, coherent, literary mind. The author controls everything but may choose to hide his hand. - Narrator
The voice telling the story inside the text. Mark’s narrator sees all but does not explain all. I differ from the above theorists by arguing that Mark’s narrator is not omniscient in the theological sense. He presents events plainly, sometimes cryptically, and lets the reader draw connections. In literary terms, the author engages in discourse; the narrator engages in storytelling. - Narratee
The implied audience within the story – the fictional listener to whom the narrative is directed. In Huck Finn, it’s a culturally naive frontier audience. In Mark, it is someone sympathetic to Jesus and familiar with Jewish customs, but still needing to be brought along. The narratee doesn’t grasp everything – and isn’t meant to. - Reader
That’s us. Real readers, both ancient and modern, who internalize the story and bring their own beliefs, doubts, and histories. Ideally, the real reader becomes the reader Mark hoped for – someone who can notice more than the narrator says and more than the narratee understands.
My position diverges from some common critical accounts. In popular analyses of the gospels, the difference between narratee and reader is often collapsed or ignored. But in Mark, I believe that distinction is crucial. Mark’s narratee is being led, sometimes gently, sometimes ironically, through the text, while the real reader is being asked to go further. His craft lies in how he engineers that difference.
Scholars like Fowler and Chapman have nearly said as much. They open the door – brilliantly – but seem unwilling to walk through it. In Fowler’s case, the hesitation feels less like a lack of insight than a reluctance to name what he clearly sees.
Seymour Chatman, in Story and Discourse (1978), distinguishes between author (implied author, the text’s constructed persona, in Chatman’s model) and the narrator (the voice telling the story). He argues that in most narratives, the narrator serves as a vehicle for the author’s perspective, but they are analytically separable. In texts with an unreliable narrator, the gap between narrator and implied author becomes evident.
Chatman’s framework, as applied by scholars like Stephen Moore, suggests a reliable, omniscient narrator who conveys the implied author’s theological perspective. The narrator’s omniscience aligns with the author’s intent to present Jesus as the Messiah, with no significant interpretive gap between them. In contrast, I argue that Mark’s narrator is not omniscient – not as the term is usually understood – as is apparent from his failure to notice and report the disciples’ cluelessness. Chapman’s narrator embodies the author’s interpretive stance, where I limit the narrator’s role to showing, not telling.
Wayne Booth’s framework (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961), as applied by David Rhoads and Donald Michie in Mark as Story, sees Mark’s narrator as reliable and aligned with the author’s goal of persuading the reader of Jesus’ divine identity. By positing a narrator who sees all but does not explain all, and who avoids theological interpretation, I challenge the Booth-inspired view that Mark’s narrator is a direct extension of the author’s rhetorical agenda.
Robert Fowler, in Let the Reader Understand (1991), applies reader-response criticism to Mark, focusing on how the text manipulates the reader’s experience. He views Mark’s narrator as reliable and omniscient. He distinguishes between the narrator’s voice and the author’s design but sees them as working in tandem. Fowler sees the narrator as omniscient in all senses and actively shaping the reader’s interpretation under the author’s direction. I argue that the narrator is deliberately non-interpretive, presenting the gospel events without theological commentary. Mark’s narrator doesn’t interpret or even comment on the disciples’ inability to interpret.
By separating the narrator and author more sharply than Chatman, Booth, or Fowler, we can use a fresh lens for reader-response analysis. There is a fine line here, but it is distinct. Mark’s narrator calls Jesus “the Son of Man” (8:31, 10:45) providing clear interpretive cues, but he does not state any interpretation in his text. Matthew and Luke sometimes avoid stating an interpretation in text (e.g., Matthew 13:44), but often supply it directly, as in his description of fulfilling prophecies (Matthew 1:22-23): “to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet.” Matthew uses this formula at least ten times, often explicitly and mechanically (e.g., 2:17, 2:23, 4:14, 8:17, 12:17, 13:18–23, 13:35, 21:4, 27:9). But Mark’s restraint is nearly absolute.
Cases where Mark might be said to be interpreting are nuanced. In the Parable of the Sower (4:13-20) it is Jesus who gives an allegorical interpretation, not Mark. The same applies to the Passion Predictions (8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34). In each, Jesus explicitly interprets what will happen to him: betrayal, death, resurrection. Mark 2:27 (Sabbath was made for man) similarly puts the interpretation in the mouth of Jesus. The only clear editorial comment in Mark is in 7:19: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”
The fact that Mark’s rare interpretive moments come only from the mouth of Jesus, with the lone exception of 7:19, is one of the strongest rhetorical signals that Mark is consciously avoiding interpretation at the level of the narrator. When the narrator steps in to say “this was to fulfill what the prophet said” (as Matthew does), it guides the reader’s understanding. It’s a cue: Here’s how to read this. For Mark, interpretation, when it occurs, is located within the dramatic world, not outside it. That preserves the narrative distance between story and reader – an open space for interpretation to arise through structure and implication.
Further, even when Jesus interprets, it creates tension. Jesus’s interpretive moments in Mark often fall flat within the story (e.g., the passion predictions), because not only do the characters themselves fail to interpret, they fail to understand an interpretation handed to them by Jesus. This creates a second-order irony that intensifies Mark’s rhetorical strategy.
What Mark is doing is common in modern fiction. There, narrators, unlike their authors, often have limited knowledge.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain writes in the voice of a semi-literate boy who often reports impossible events. Twain doesn’t expect you to believe that Huck is telling the truth. He expects you to get inside Huck’s head. You suspend disbelief, not to believe nonsense, but to experience the story’s reasoning. Twain’s narrator doesn’t speak to the reader; he speaks to a fictional version of the reader, the narratee – one who suspends disbelief and allows himself to be lead by Twain’s narrator. Twain’s narrator is confident that he can pull the wool over the narratee’s eyes, not those of the reader.
In most nonfiction, the author and narrator are the same entity, though not always.
Joan Didion’s “I” is quite distinct from Didion the person. The “I” on the page is meticulously crafted – not fictional, but filtered, curated, and stylized. The opening line of The Moment of Death, where she describes her husband’s heart attack, reads:
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The Didion “I” narrator is restrained. It watches itself grieve from a distance.
I remember the EMT asking if he had a history of heart disease. Had he had a heart attack before. I remember saying only once, a mild one.
Note Didion’s repetition of “I remember.” Instead of giving us unmediated access to her emotions, she’s documenting memory fragments. The narrator is observing events but is disoriented.
That line also dramatizes the narrator’s confusion and emotional dissociation without explicitly naming it. The phrase “only once, a mild one” is haunting because it reveals a failure to register the gravity of the moment, a subconscious downplaying of trauma, and an inner voice that hasn’t caught up to reality.
This flawed cognition is uncommented upon by the narrator. Didion the author is entirely in control; she sees the disjunction and weakness of that statement, but Didion the narrator doesn’t pause to flag it. She lets the poor thinking stand, preserved in the amber of memory.
I could not give away the rest of his shoes. I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return.
Didion the author shows that that Didion the narrator is delusional.
Historians like Shelby Foote and Barbara Tuchman similarly adopt narrative voices shaped by genre and tone.
I’m not saying that the Gospel of Mark’s author-narrator distinction is the same as Didion’s split-self, or that Twain’s Huck is a rhetorical twin to Jesus in Mark. The textures and aims are different. But Huckleberry Finn and Mark are both anti-epic moral quests, shaped by radical irony, and are built to leave the reader suspended between understanding and action, between knowledge and responsibility.
What Twain and Mark share with Didion is this: in each case, a sophisticated author creates distance between author and narrator, not to obscure meaning, not the deliberate opacity sometimes prized in postmodern literature, but to invite the reader into it. The withholding is structural. The narrator holds back so the reader can move forward.
I’ll compare Mark to other modern writers later in this series. Next I’ll explore Mark’s rhetorical strategies. I won’t be interpreting Mark doctrinally, historically, or devotionally. I’ll be reading it as a work of literature that hides its method so the reader can have an epiphany.
Recent Comments
Bill Storage on Lawlessness Is a Choice, Bugli… 
Anonymous on Lawlessness Is a Choice, Bugli…
The Multidisciplinarian 
I’m Only Neurotic When – Engineering Edition
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, Engineering & Applied Physics on October 7, 2025
The USB Standard of Suffering
The USB standard was born in the mid-1990s from a consortium of Intel, Microsoft, IBM, DEC, NEC, Nortel, and Compaq. They formed the USB Implementers Forum to create a universal connector. The four pins for power and data were arranged asymmetrically to prevent reverse polarity damage. But the mighty consortium gave us no way to know which side was up.
The Nielsen Norman Group found that users waste ten seconds per insertion. Billions of plugs times thirty years. We could have paved Egypt with pyramids. I’m not neurotic. I just hate death by a thousand USB cuts.
The Dyson Principle
I admire good engineering. I also admire honesty in materials. So naturally, I can’t walk past a Dyson vacuum without gasping. The thing looks like it was styled by H. R. Giger after a head injury. Every surface is ribbed, scooped, or extruded as if someone bred Google Gemini with CAD software, provided the prompt “manifold mania,” and left it running overnight. Its transparent canister resembles an alien lung. There are ducts that lead nowhere, fins that cool nothing, and bright colors that imply importance. It’s all ornamental load path.
To what end? Twice the size and weight of a sensible vacuum, with eight times the polar moment of inertia. (You get the math – of course you do.) You can feel it fighting your every turn, not from friction, but from ego. Every attempt at steering carries the mass distribution of a helicopter rotor. I’m not cleaning a rug, I’m executing a ground test of a manic gyroscope.
Dyson claims it never loses suction. Fine, but I lose patience. It’s a machine designed for showroom admiration, not torque economy. Its real vacuum is philosophical: the absence of restraint. I’m not neurotic. I just believe a vacuum should obey the same physical laws as everything else in my house. I’m told design is where art meets engineering. That may be true, but in Dyson’s case, it’s also where geometry goes to die. There’s form, there’s function, and then there’s what happens when you hire a stylist who dreams in centrifugal-manifold Borg envy.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Physics
No one but Frank Lloyd Wright could have designed these cantilevered concrete roof supports, the tour guide at the Robie House intoned reverently, as though he were describing Moses with a T-square. True – and Mr. Wright couldn’t have either. The man drew poetry in concrete, but concrete does not care for poetry. It likes compression. It hates tension and bending. It’s like trying to make a violin out of breadsticks.
They say Wright’s genius was in making buildings that defied gravity. True in a sense – but only because later generations spent fifty times his budget figuring ways to install steel inside the concrete so gravity and the admirers of his genius wouldn’t notice. We have preserved his vision, yes, but only through subterfuge and eternal rebar vigilance.
Considered the “greatest American architect of all time” by people who can name but one architect, Wright made it culturally acceptable for architects to design expressive, intensely personal museums. The Guggenheim continues to thrill visitors with a unique forum for contemporary art. Until they need the bathroom – a feature more of an afterthought for Frank. Try closing the door in there without standing on the toilet. Paris hotels took a cue.
The Interface Formerly Known as Knob
Somewhere, deep in a design studio with too much brushed aluminum and not enough common sense, a committee decided that what drivers really needed was a touch screen for everything. Because nothing says safety like forcing the operator of a two-ton vehicle to navigate a software menu to adjust the defroster.
My car had a knob once. It stuck out. I could find it. I could turn it without looking. It was a miracle of tactile feedback and simple geometry. Then someone decided that physical controls were “clutter.” Now I have a 12-inch mirror that reflects my fingerprints and shame. To change the volume, I have to tap a glowing icon the size of an aspirin, located precisely where sunlight can erase it. The radio tuner is buried three screens deep, right beside the legal disclaimer that won’t go away until I hit Accept. Every time I start the thing. And the Bluetooth? It won’t connect while the car is moving, as if I might suddenly swerve off the road in a frenzy of unauthorized pairing. Design meets an army of failure-to-warn attorneys.
Human factors used to mean designing for humans. Now it means designing obstacles that test our compliance. I get neurotic when I recall a world where you could change the volume by touch instead of prayer.
Automation Anxiety
But the horror of car automation goes deeper, far beyond its entertainment center. The modern car no longer trusts me. I used to drive. Now I negotiate. Everything’s “smart” except the decisions. I rented one recently – some kind of half-electric pseudopod that smelled of despair and fresh software – and tried to execute a simple three-point turn on a dark mountain road. Halfway through, the dashboard blinked, the transmission clunked, and without warning the thing threw itself into Park and set the emergency brake.
I sat there in the dark, headlamps cutting into trees, wondering what invisible crime I’d committed. No warning lights, no chime, no message – just mutiny. When I pressed the accelerator, nothing. Had it died of fright? Then I remembered: modern problems require modern superstitions. I turned it off and back on again. Reboot – the digital age’s holy rite of exorcism. It worked.
Only later did I learn, through the owner’s manual’s runic footnotes, that the car had seen “an obstacle” in the rear camera and interpreted it as a cliff. In reality it was a clump of weeds. The AI mistook grass for death.
So now, in 2025, the same species that landed on the Moon has produced a vehicle that prevents a three-point turn for my own good. Not progress, merely the illusion of it – technology that promises safety by eliminating the user. I’m not neurotic. I just prefer my machines to ask before saving my life by freezing in place as headlights come around the bend.
The Illusion of Progress
There’s a reason I carry a torque wrench. It’s not to maintain preload. It’s to maintain standards. Torque is truth, expressed in foot-pounds. The world runs on it.
Somewhere along the way, design stopped being about function and started being about feelings. You can’t torque a feeling. You can only overdo it. Hence the rise of things that are technically advanced but spiritually stupid. Faucets that require a firmware update, refrigerators with Twitter accounts. Cars that disable half their features because you didn’t read the EULA while merging onto the interstate.
I’m told this is innovation. No, it’s entropy with a bottomless budget. After the collapse, I expect future archaeologists to find me in a fossilized Subaru, finger frozen an inch from the touchscreen that controlled the wipers.
Until then, I’ll keep my torque wrench, thank you. And I’ll keep muting TikTok’s #lifehacks tag, before another self-certified engineer shows me how to remove stripped screws with a banana. I’m not neurotic. I’ve learned to live with people who do it wrong.
art, criticism, engineering, humor, travel
4 Comments