Early records

Today I got the strong impression J has really consciously grasped symbolic activity. We were reading the Biblical story of Joseph in comic-book format on the ipad. The dream of the sheaves was represented visually, and then several pages later the same visual rhetoric was used for the scene where Joseph’s brothers surround and bow down to him in Egypt. When he saw the second image and I pointed out to him that it was just like Joseph’s dream, Jamie erupted with a laugh of enlightenment (reminding me just now of the Laughing Buddha I had pointed out to him at Peking last night). Then, he was very interested in the Pharaoh’s dream of the cows, so I explained at some length how the cows were of course real cows, but that they also meant something else, namely years, and that sometimes words could mean more than one thing. I also emphasized how cool it was that Joseph could understand what dreams meant and that this was not something that everybody could do. I explained that God wanted to send Pharaoh a message, but Pharaoh couldn’t understand it and that Joseph was the only one who knew what that message meant because of his special skills. Then Jamie said that God had told Joseph. Then he said something very insightful: When I was talking about the cow-dream and telling Jamie that “die sieben schlimmen Jahre den sieben guten Jahren folgen (follow),” Jamie said: “Besser gesagt, Papa: die sieben schlimmen Jahre verfolgen (pursue, persecute) die sieben guten Jahre.” We had been working on the folgen/verfolgen distinction several months ago. I thought this was a very apt application of verfolgen, in light of how in the dream the famished cows leap out of the river and devour the fat cows.