Writes Molly Roberts in "Opinion: Quidditch’s new name might teach J.K. Rowling a surprising lesson" (WaPo).
The boldfaced sentence is the last line of the column, and it's awfully hard to understand. Or it's very easy to read as the complete opposite of what Roberts is — I think — trying to say. Roberts seems to be making a strong — and questionable assertion — that the words we use to refer to things or to people don't change what they are. But many — most? — transgender people seem to care deeply about the words used to refer to them. And I find it hard to believe that the sport of quidditch would have become anything at all if people weren't calling it quidditch.
But the worst thing about that last sentence is that Roberts is accusing Rowling of trying to change transgender people into non-transgender people, but she has not done that! How can Roberts be so ill-informed?! Rowling has expressed support for transgender people but has worried that some of the people who identify as transgender are making a mistake — going along with a social trend and misidentifying the reasons why they feel troubled by puberty.
ADDED: Let me be more explicit about why I said it's very easy to read what Roberts wrote as the complete opposite of what she intended. If "refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else," then we may rightly ask who are they? It wouldn't be enough to say they are transgender because they say they are transgender. "Transgender" is just a word, and whether we use it or not, people are whatever they actually are. But I would expect Roberts to respond to my challenge by insisting that any person's invocation of the word makes the phenomenon true — and you're a hateful transphobe if you even entertain the notion that this person is mistaken.
पोस्ट्स
९० टिप्पण्या:
Is it COVID that's filling up the hospitals now, or is it the aging victims of Toxic Deconstruction finally succumbing to the devastating social disease they contracted years ago?
...the result of pouring random nonsense sounds..." - spot-on description of your typical WaPo column.
In the Leftist world view, anyone who deviates in any detail from the ever-shifting narrative must be denounced. If useful to the denunciations, their positions may be deceptively described,all in the interests of the people's truth, which is more profound than mere factual truth.
"that refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else, either."
The post pretty much covered it, but: opponents of transgenderism acknowledge trans people exactly for who they are, reject the notion that their subjective claims can magick them into something else, and resist the general idea that a particular political movement gets to decide what people "are" and how this essence must be "acknowledged" by the culture at large.
I've already used "Seriously?" in a previous comment. My goal is to not repeat myself.
Didn't she also say something about trans women in sports? A man can grow out his hair and wear women's cloths, even go through sex re-assignment surgery with hormone treatments but most of the physical advantages of being born male remain. BIgger lungs, more upper body muscle, different angle of the hips more suited for running fast, etc.
If anything, Rowling is resisting the argument that people refer to Quidditch as Lacrosse, when one is Quidditch and the other Lacrosse.
This is merely a loose presentation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that language shapes reality (see link below). Post-WW2 postmodernists ran with this and related concepts to play fuzzy debate games, but the present discussion misses Rowling's point.
Other animal species do not have language akin to human language, just grunts, growls, barks, and roars. Take language away from humans and one is still left with reproductive reality: males have penises and impregnate females with uteruses. Transgendered individuals are either functionally male or female, or evolutionary dead ends that will never reproduce.
Human language about sex, gender, and romantic relationships pertains to political order, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance. These are laudable and valuable but irrelevant to the functional non-linguistic reproductive realities that can't be debated.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis
Wishing doesn't make it so. And there is no such thing as magick. The problem the trans-activists have with Rowling isn't her opinions, it is her failure to conform to theirs. This spat isn't about quidditch or transphobia or men with vaginas or women with penises. This is about power, pure and simple power, power to force compliance no matter how insane the demand.
To hell with that, and to hell with them.
If WaPo doesn't lie five times a day, their reputation is tarnished.
A lot of people (e.g. Molly Roberts) are trying to prevent or at least to shout down critical discussions of transgender issues.
the same lesson:
refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they say they are will not magick them into something
If you call a dog's penis a leg, how many legs does he have? (don't use magick)
If it makes more sense to you to call them a woman, then call them a woman. If not, not. Your language is about what you see, not them.
Dogmatism is a political position today.
I was in a conversation once in which several of us agreed that if Hobbes is not a modern, no one is; he regards nature as something real, more or less hostile, something we can overcome in the sense of making life better for human beings. Let us say negative teleology--moving away from nature, not toward it. A very bright fellow student argued that if Hobbes is not a post-modern, no one is; he says words have no meaning except what we arbitrarily assign to them. He seems to mean human passions are what they are, and do what they do, the names we apply are arbitrary. But he seems confident that progress in building a peaceful society is real, not just a set of arbitrary words. I guess he would say learning to distinguish what can be changed in nature from what cannot is in a way the replacement of more or less meaningless words with meaningful ones.
But trans activists go back and forth between saying we must all acknowledge something that is objectively real (natural, of all things?), and we must let trans people become something simply by assertion, by using arbitrary words. I guess both letting them be, when they are not necessarily affecting others, might be old-fashioned liberal justice, and letting them assert in a way that affects others is an example of woke justice.
I am increasingly convinced that a hefty percentage of trnsgenders have some form of autism, and respond to people using the wrong words about them the same way that some others respond to having uncomfortable shirts with tags they can feel. It's just wrong, wrong, wrong! Why can't you people see that?
Question for trans women. What was it like the first time you had a period?
My point is that trans women are not women. They are, at best, what a man thinks it is like to be a woman. The actual experience of going through puberty as a female is denied to them.
First rule of rabbit holes: Don't go down one.
will not magick them into something else
That's of course the same thing people on the other side of these issues say. We're all essentialists -- one side about biological sex, the other about ineffable gender identity.
I suspect that Rowling is part of the great middle: We'll generally acknowledge you socially the way you want, but don't try to force us to believe as you do.
“How can Roberts be so ill-informed?!”
Well she writes for the WaPo where, apparently, being ill-informed is a job requirement.
I had assumed she based the name after a blending of "kid" and "witch" then moved the sounds around a bit and changed spelling just to make it sound a little more magical.
it's very easy to read as the complete opposite of what Roberts is — I think — trying to say
In fact, the complete opposite of what she is trying to argue is the most straightforward reading of her argument. Changing the reference does not change the referent? (That’s not always true, but that’s her argument.) Well, who is trying to change the reference? It’s not Rowling.
So, is this piece by Roberts another offering from the language-police or from the language-anarchists? She seems to want to be both. Words don't matter (the referent doesn't change!) except that they do (using the wrong word is an intentional "refus[al] to acknowledge transgender people for who that they are"!). AA concludes that, for Roberts, it's "just a word ... [but] any person's invocation of the word makes the phenomenon true." I think AA gets Roberts' incoherence basically right.
The deep irony here is that it is "trans" people and their enablers that are trying to "magick them into something" they are not. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man and all of the wishes, feelings, hormones, surgery, made up pronouns, or gaslighting in the world cannot change these fundamental biological facts.
Rowling is not trying to "magick" "trans" people into something they're not. She's recognizing them for exactly what they are: deeply disturbed people who deserve our pity and love, and not our compliance with their delusions.
And may these Quidditch leagues should call their sports TransQuidditch. It isn't real Quidditch, but it pretends it is.
I remember,as a kid, my mum went on all the marches and even had a 'lesbo' relation (I don't think she liked it - but I remember, as a four year kid 'discovering' them and being very confused)(can I tell you what Ute Lemper said about Marlene and..) just to do it to the Man. What was the point? Now the Man is in your toilet!
How can Roberts be so ill-informed?!
She gets all her news from the Washington Post?
Her rant about the word 'Quidditch' does bring to mind that the name and concept of Quidditch is JK Rowling's intellectual property and I hope she will sue the living shit out of these clowns since they really have no right to dictate what it's called or who gets to play it.
The idea that words and belief do not alter reality is most definitely inconsistent with the broader transgender position that people can define their own reality and belong to any one of several dozen genders simply by deciding and announcing it. There is a much narrower transgender position that some men are mistakenly born with women parts and vice versa, and recognizing their actual persona is simply a proper reflection of reality. But AFAICT that narrow proposition was abandoned my most activists long ago, except when they want to play motte and bailey.
"But I would expect Roberts to respond to my challenge by insisting that any person's invocation of the word makes the phenomenon true — and you're a hateful transphobe if you even entertain the notion that this person is mistaken."
Which is the exact opposite of what the author stated at the end of the article, a statement I agree with. Calling something something else doesn't make it that something else. A man who calls himself a woman doesn't magically become a woman. A woman who calls herself a man doesn't magically become a man. You can yell at the clouds all day long, but reality doesn't care about your feelings.
What we should be ruled by is 'good faith scepticism', ie no one is trying to con you, no one is trying to poison you, there is no 'great conspiracy' to make YOU ill. It's a confederacy of dunces, at best, at worst no one knows what the f is going on. But you know what, that's effing normal. Grow up.
Transgendered men aren't women or even the logical, biological, or sociological equivalent of women (or human females, if you insist). They are medically mutilated men, who through a perverted surgery or perverted medicine. Primum non nocere. The amputation of healthy flesh is medically unethical. The fact this is often done and taxpayers foot the bill is prima facie evidence we have tolerated the corruption of a fundamental institution of our civilization.
Men who want their junk excised are mentally diseased. Indulging their disease helps no one, least of all gender dysphoric men, and harms women. Women who want their vaginas transformed into dick-like appendages are likewise afflicted.
Three cardinal evils are at work here, envy, pride, and greed. For reasons that are both complex and immaterial, gender dysphoric men envy women. Those that insist they are actually women somehow bone into male bodies and not mentally ill do so out of pride. Physical illness is not typically perceived as shameful. In fact, the prevalence of hypochondria suggests some people regard ill health as some sort of accomplishment. However, hypochondriacs rarely if ever claim to be mentally afflicted, presumably because they desire sympathy and attention but wish to avoid shame.
Either we preexist as human souls, or we do not. Metaphysicians have never provided a convincing argument in favor of preexistence, and by the principle of parsimony we must conclude that we do not preexist our conception or birth. However, if we choose as a society to function as if we do (I'm a girl born mistakenly as a boy, therefore cut off my dick.) then certain corollaries follow.
(1) An agency exists that assigns male souls to male bodies which is both purposeful and fallible. (If the soul/body assignment was random, then about half would be incorrect. Most boys are happy to be boys, therefore the agency is purposeful.)
(2) Preexistence implies that abortion is murder.
The third and most perverse evil is greed, the greed of physicians and health care providers for those sweet, sweet checks.
Check all the "women" for penises and help them transition by cutting off all that are found. Problem solved !
"Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll 'know' tomorrow." -- Agent K, 'Men in Black'
Rowling is not only concerned about those who are mistaken and following a trend, although that is a very serious concern, especially re minors; she is also concerned about the actual physical danger posed to women in the name of trans rights. Another very serious concern.
Her opponents are unbelievably hateful. And dishonest.
That's not my understanding of how trademark/copyright work.
The whole affair is so rich, luscious and savory, I'm going to get sick consuming every bite. I've actually, really read JKR's thoughts on this trans-insanity. I agree with her 100%. And she's about as "transphobic" or TERF-y as Dave Chappelle, which is not at all. The article yesterday about the trademark issues was also wonderful. The Trans Lobby honestly surprises me with how utterly inflexible, screechy and unreasonable they are about any conversation regarding some of the more out there parts of their agenda. I believe 1,000,000 out of 1,000,000 sane, reasonable people just want them to STFU.
I think a smarter person nailed this a while ago:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Which we can abuse horribly to render the following:
What's in a gender? She who has not junk
By any other name would still be a woman.
Roberts' statement is almost Orwellian in its reversal of reality. It's not Rowling who's doing the magicking, it's the poor self-disaffected transgenders who think they can save themselves with surgery and hormones. Magick, indeed. The secret to happiness begins with self love. Not the sort of self love that says I'll make myself happy by getting my dick cut off. The sort of self love that tells you, I'm a man who is more like a woman in many ways and I'm OK with that. Rowling's reality, and mine, is that surgery and hormones can't turn a man into a woman or vice versa no matter how much magick your pained psyche confers on it.
This segment of your quotation of Roberts seems odd: “[W]ords only mean something in relation to the world they describe and more than that, the way they’re understood.”
She seems to be trying to walk down two different paths at the same time: First words “only' mean something as referents to the world, but then “more than that” their meaning is subject to interpretive use.
Perhaps she’s trying both to confirm the ontological fact of transgender people, while maintaining the authority to police language. But, the bases for those two purposes appear contradictory.
Abraham Lincoln's saying about a dog and his tail is the appropriate response. I understand that psychologically there are some real transgender people but biologically there are no transgender people. The article you linked yesterday in NY magazine was an insight to what transgender people go through. Once can sympathize to what to those people must be a hellish existence. All the same, it is not something that should be overblown. Not something parents and educators should pushing on children. In light of the high level of suicides amongst trans people and the irreversibility of the surgical procedures and that the human brain doesn't reach adulthood until age 25 it would be to make 30 the minimum age to start the transition.
"Perhaps they will accidentally teach her the same lesson: that refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else, either."
"Transgender" people are mentally ill people whose sex is what biology says, not what they desire.
So Molly Roberts is the one who has the problem, not Rowling
ADDED: Let me be more explicit about why I said it's very easy to read what Roberts wrote as the complete opposite of what she intended. If "refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else," then we may rightly ask who are they? It wouldn't be enough to say they are transgender because they say they are transgender. "Transgender" is just a word, and whether we use it or not, people are whatever they actually are. But I would expect Roberts to respond to my challenge by insisting that any person's invocation of the word makes the phenomenon true — and you're a hateful transphobe if you even entertain the notion that this person is mistaken.
Yep, they are indeed mentally ill. What they are not is the "gender" that they want to be.
Because so long as he has a penis, and more than 1/2 his cells have Y chromosomes in them, he's male
Oxford Trans definition
Adjective:
denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth.
It is not JKR who is trying to change a damned thing.
It seems there are 2types of people- those who wish to abide by original definitions to create stability in society and those who wish to worship self. And force others to worship them, as well. What else can u call laws that fine or jail citizens for misgenderization other than kneeling at the clay feet of a new religion?
PS I still can’t get over the pic of the chick w/the dick. Maybe even sick chick… it’s an unease I feel deep w/in my skin. It’s enough to make Angels cry
Men pretending to be women.
A friend just sent this to me-
https://apple.news/A3Scdr3snRby_7d0OCrly-w
I’m sorry it’s not a live link
You may say people are who they are. That’s true.
This is a woman. No amount of bearded hormonal therapy can change that.
It's encouraging that the Most Liked comment at WaPo is a vigorous defense of JKR against the libelous screed that AA links to.
Words indeed do mean something, and removing body parts changes a person's shape, and perhaps his or her disposition, but he or she is still the same person (possibly with a higher or lower voice pitch and different body hair).
Perhaps they will accidentally teach her the same lesson: that refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else, either.
When somebody appropriates almost word for word what people on the other side of an argument have been saying for years is it a cleverly subversive win, or indicative of some inner conflict and ambivalence, or is it just obtuse or weird?
So they want to change the name of the imaginary sport because they think Rowling is anti trans?
What happens when men start entering the women's [whatever it is they decide to call the imaginary sport] league?
Rollo asked...
Is it COVID that's filling up the hospitals now?
Heck NO! it's the lack of nursing staff
You remember the nursing staff? The ones that quit in mass because of the Vaccine Mandates?
I'm reminded of the famous New Yorker cartoon:
Drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E. B. White, the cartoon shows a mother at table trying to convince her young daughter to eat her vegetable.
Mother: "It's broccoli, dear."
Daughter: "I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."
Sex: male or female. Gender is sex-correlated attributes: physical and mental (e.g. sexual orientation). Trans- refers to a state or process of divergence from normal. Transgender is an exclusive spectrum ("Rainbow") condition. Normalize, tolerate, or reject? The Pro-Choice religion only serves to delay or defer reconciliation with Nature and social constructs (e.g. "="). That said, #HateLovesAbortion.
What next, 43-Person Squamish?
I'm really intransitive on this one.
Greg The Class Traitor said...
"Because so long as he has a penis, and more than 1/2 his cells have Y chromosomes in them, he's male"
**************
Aside from sperm cells, which are haploid and contain only one set of chromosomes from each parent, diploid body/somatic cells contain two sets, from both parents. XY for males, XX for females.
So a male's body cells all contain XY chromosomes, while his sperm cells can contain either an X or a Y. Those containing X are called androsperm, and those with Y are called gymnosperm.
Natural women only have XX somatic cells, so their ova contain only X as well. Trans (XY) "women" who have sex with a biological (XX) woman could conceive males, which is not how "nature" works, and further gives the lie that they are just as female as biological females.
Even the idea of "virgin birth" ---parthenogenesis---only results in female births.
So it's pure insanity, all the way down.
And if simply believing something is sufficient to make it so, I'm the Queen of England and that Elizabeth imposter better get outta my way!
Nicely said and summed up, Sebastian
Sports Controlling Bodies [of bodies of men and women] went to great lengths to prohibit performance enhancing chemical that were artifice-d
trans=ing men in clever way went around it all by utilizing natural performance enhancers
so now Sports Controlling Bodies [of bodies of men and women] now insist on suppressing these natural chemicals
This is a woman. No amount of bearded hormonal therapy can change that.
------------
by getting rid of her breasts she has denied her child milk of motherly love
The problem isn't changing the name of the sport. The problem would be changing the name of the sport to football or cricket, when it is not. Or playing tennis and calling it quidditch. I mean, how dumb is the article that it doesn't understand what Rowling is complaining about? If the trans persons were calling themselves ANYTHING other than woman, I don't think Rowling would be quite so outspoken about it. But I might be wrong (it has been noticed that I am, on occasion, usually with commentary by my wife).
There are people who hijack these 'moments of freedom', of 'good heartedness', of bonna voluntas, for there own ends, often evil, often violent and nihilistic but it doesn't mean those initial good feelings were wrong. You might take the bible, for instance, the New Testament and turn the other cheek or 'suffer the little children come unto me'. And, yet, how many children have died because someone 'believed' it meant killing. So many children, so many.It isn't the person, the argument, it is you.
Some years ago I read the first three or four Harry Potter books, because my granddaughters were reading them, and I wanted to understand what they was all about. I had been a big SiFi/Fantasy fan when I was their age. Rowling's books were pretty good, although not in the same class as Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury, and certainly not Tolkien. In particular I was annoyed by Quidditch. The way the game was described, the actions of all the players except the "Seeker" were essetially irrelevant, because no matter how many points they scored, once the Seeker got the "Golden Snitch" and scored, that ended the game. Imagine a football game in which a field goal is worth 150 points and ends the game.
But I give Rowling credit for insisting on some recognition of reality in the "real world". I hope she's rich enough to get away with it and tell her critics to fuck off.
I'm sorry for bombarding you with my poetry nonsense - I'm not excusing it, but I sometimes you will understand were others don't - you do but it's to much! As Blake once said.
This a tribute to George Harrison (the cute one!) - all things must pass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6iaSWSB7rE
And, you know, when I watch that video I think of my boy - he's exactly like Harrison's - troubled, beautiful, stupid, good. I think of him all the time.
There he is, back of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SFNW5F8K9Y
You love him - so do I - it's funny, from a British point of view, how staid we were, if you look at the vt - and yet we produced music that meant something - how is that? I can only think, like the film 'Control', that to be 'controlled' means something weird must happen? Quaeretur?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrTMc2i6Lzc
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
The Beatles
I look at you all
See the lover that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don't know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you
I look at the world
And I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake
We must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you
I look from the wings
At the play you are staging
While my guitar gently weeps
'Cause I'm sitting here
Doing nothing but aging
Still my guitar gently weeps
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: John Lennon / George Harrison / Paul James Mccartney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnjLlDY_xww
One problem with magical thinking (the primary m.o. of the Left) is that since magical thinking is largely arbitrary, somebody else can wish into existence an equally valid magical realm. The Left simply made up the idea that gender is fluid without bothering to check in with reality. They can enforce their magical view as long as they hold the levers of power. But if someone else with a different taste in magical thinking gets the power at some point things could get very ugly for the current crop of Progressives. And for the rest of us as well.
Reality is not always fun and it can be very harsh, but it is not totally arbitrary and it does not actively hate you.
I loved Harry Potter books - for what they did for reading skills for a generation. My kid was in maybe 2nd grade when the first book came out, and graduating from HS by the time the last one came out. During that time, they quickly went from a mediocre reader to a great reader. My mother had done that for me by sitting and reading with me every day during the summer between 1st and 2nd grade. The funny thing was that as my kid got older, the books got progressively longer and more difficult to read (and darker), but after the first one, they consistently finished them in two days. And a decade later, they had a (very useful) PhD. That would have been problematic, without the ability to read well.
I too read science fiction, and then fantasy, voraciously growing up. And I will put my collection up against that of almost anyone here. Clarke, Heinlein, etc. plus Andre Norton for more of a fantasy bent. But it was rare that those authors engaged both boys and girls equally. Harry Potter does. Enough adventure for the boys, but enough social action for the girls. Those books had a more universal appeal than the science fiction I grew up on. Half the school would be competing every year to get that year’s Potter book first, and then read first. We might not have been quite as well connected as some of the other parents at school, but with their reading skill, my kid was always competitive there - always one of the first to have completed the year’s Harry Potter book.
I actually enjoyed the books, at least up until the last one, which may have been too dark for me. It was a guilty little pleasure reading them. By then, I was a patent attorney, with three college degrees, and thousands of science fiction/fantasy books read. Yet, in my guise as a concerned parent, I got the books a day or two after my kid finished them (and that a couple days after general release). It was one of those things that we shared.
I'm sorry, I was a bit distracted, I meant this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgcxd9wtXUE
How staid and stupid we look!
About the OP - I think this is a madness that we will get through - you know history, you know that these are a kind of 'mania''s only last for a second - they're immaterial to who we are and what I'm fighting against - nihilism of which this is mearly a symptom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RPvfJXh-n0
I read a few of the novels, and saw a few of the movies, but as cleverly-rendered as that world is, I didn't find them worth following to the end(?)
But I'm all for things that get kids to read. My sci-fi/fantasy stage was brief but intense;
when I read them I have in the back of my mind, "History is sci-fi's greatest secret." It's less true of fantasy, but not even Middle Earth's past is as rich, complex, and fascinating as reality. YMMV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB6nIzPf9r8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Urqg0Krm0A
It's all about me and my son.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnSzpIJBd18
The Godfather,
Actually, Rowling gives us a huge example of how catching the Snitch doesn't guarantee a win. It's at the beginning of Book 4, where in the Quidditch World Cup (Ireland v. Bulgaria), Krum (Bulgarian Seeker) gets the Snitch, but meanwhile the Irish Chasers have been racking up points with the Quaffle. The Weasley twins made a bet to that effect with Ludo Bagman, and won it -- only were cheated by him, and spend most of the rest of the book trying to regain their money. It's not the usual outcome -- generally if you get the Snitch, the 150 points puts you over the top -- but it's certainly not impossible.
Incidentally, where does whats-her-name get the word "magick"? It's nowhere in Rowling.
Child At The Window.
Raining again among the ash pots
And hardened flies of a garden.
And the expected face at the window
Seemingly wet, staring at the one broken tree
Toppled on the late roots of a burning.
Eyes amongst clogged weeds
Tossed through the sly greys of morn
The reception he demanded:
Blank and called at dawn
To witness the first vision
Of a broken, scattered soul
Ever to stay hidden
In destined torment
Of childish pains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoJQAyrUHhA
Epithalamium
(For Oliver and Barbara)
The rails of fate which run assuredly on
You think mechanical until, rusty turns
Of metal, they suddenly end, the grass
Stands tall, the flowers are indifferent
And what’s left of a forest creeps up:
But, no, you’re not alone, the main station
Ushered you to a seat and a stranger
Who became a friend. And now, as the driver
Has nothing to do and cannot turn back,
Beneath all your discomfort, you find
You’re holding her hand. A miracle!
Was it you who unconsciously fumbled for safety,
Unsure of direction and afraid of derailment
(yet you knew you would end here, were happy
And loved it) or was it an accident of grace,
Perhaps that bit of sunlight deifying
An ugly day, suddenly some word (which you later
Realise you misunderstood) made the Other not so far
Or you were just thinking of your mother?
Never mind how or why, it became
And now lasting for ever – and who knows whether
She be that especially designed one or is it
Only the forced meeting that makes us dear,
That all of us (not being lunatic or bad)
Could love all of us of which marriage is a token?
Such questions we leave to philosophers,
Analysts and other buffoons – for us the effort
And the pleasure of a good deed done, of a
Love and a fidelity that makes us happy,
Of that constant light we can steer by,
Turn to and call a home. And if scoffers
Insolently shout that fidelity and all good things
Are dead, that childhood is hell, that mother
Is always beating us and daddy always
Turning away, that the one you love always
Loves another and will leave you for him and that,
Anyway, life ‘ain’t perfect’, it would be silly
To disturb them by a reply. A happy smile,
Maybe, and, long after one has stopped listening,
The thought recurring of the love and the marriage,
Wholesome, good, that’s Barbara and Oliver.
Morecambe
Precise terms, correctly said
Might point a moral to be had:
The eviscerate beast will be fed
With the inane, the hapless or the sad,
The little joke become universal
Till cosmic gizzards grin,
A gods fading, pathetic appal
Irking some tummy ache of sin,
But we, who ‘know’ exactly when
The anti-Christ and Christ shall meet,
Bitterly say ‘I love’, again,
Hanker for the canker of defeat,
Leathery, inept, miss hued,
Burnt, blathered but staring at the sun
Our being brave merely crude,
Our families broken before they’ve begun:
A wino whine like Ovid-On-The-Sea,
We must be exiles, perpetually.
Morecambe
Precise terms, correctly said
Might point a moral to be had:
The eviscerate beast will be fed
With the inane, the hapless or the sad,
The little joke become universal
Till cosmic gizzards grin,
A gods fading, pathetic appal
Irking some tummy ache of sin,
But we, who ‘know’ exactly when
The anti-Christ and Christ shall meet,
Bitterly say ‘I love’, again,
Hanker for the canker of defeat,
Leathery, inept, miss hued,
Burnt, blathered but staring at the sun
Our being brave merely crude,
Our families broken before they’ve begun:
A wino whine like Ovid-On-The-Sea,
We must be exiles, perpetually.
Morecambe
Precise terms, correctly said
Might point a moral to be had:
The eviscerate beast will be fed
With the inane, the hapless or the sad,
The little joke become universal
Till cosmic gizzards grin,
A gods fading, pathetic appal
Irking some tummy ache of sin,
But we, who ‘know’ exactly when
The anti-Christ and Christ shall meet,
Bitterly say ‘I love’, again,
Hanker for the canker of defeat,
Leathery, inept, miss hued,
Burnt, blathered but staring at the sun
Our being brave merely crude,
Our families broken before they’ve begun:
A wino whine like Ovid-On-The-Sea,
We must be exiles, perpetually.
Sorry, my brain went haywire. Sorry. Eliminate them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehYU6p3aIZQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmopROxBnBU
Nativity
“Notre crime est del’homme” Lamartine. ‘L’homme.’
Everything stained: The tea stains the cup,
The cup stains the counter, the foot stains the snow,
The moon stains the air. Everything said.
I am told this is not an original thought.
Below, what was forgotten and cold,
As if it were not merely, actually true,
There was a birth, the unthinking was done
And this messy mix of snow and blood
Produced a word that meant ‘goodbye’ or ‘hello’,
Unsorting a chaos into ‘this one and that’
And saying “Insofar as I am here, that is there.”
Or if they are ‘mad’, we are ‘mad’, since
Neither they nor we can prove the obvious:
That Johnson kicked a stone but Berkeley
Was already dead, that the delusion suffices
To make a few words bring a cup of tea
And that, without God, preserving the hollow
Takes so long to say, everyman
Could seek to find
Putrefaction of his mother,
Of his brother, of his kind.
Everything assumed they 'knew' the fututure but David Sylvian did
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=632sF6bBbzI
Most trans activism I encounter online seems deeply disturbed and detached from reality. They say they believe everyone hates them as people who doesn't appease every demand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ZtmBAA_NE
Three poems by Iya Kiva (b. 1984)
This coffin’s for you, little boy, don’t be afraid, lie down,
A bullet called life clutched tight in your fist,
We didn’t believe in death, look – the crosses are tinfoil.
Do you hear – all the bell towers tore out their tongues?
We won’t forget you, believe it, believe it, be …
Belief bleeds down the seam inside your sleeve,
Chants, prayers, psalms swell up in a lump in your throat
In the middle of this damned winter all dressed in khaki,
And February, getting the ink, is sobbing.
And the candle drips on the table, burning and burning…
Translated from the Russian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, 2014
*
and when it came my turn to be killed
everyone started to speak Lithuanian
everyone started to call me Yanukas
summoned me hither to their native land
my god I said I am not Lithuanian
my god I told them I said it in Yiddish
my god I told them I said it in Russian
my god I said to them in Ukrainian
there where the Kalmius flows into the Neman
a child is crying in a church
Translated from the Russian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, 2016
*
to hold a needle of silence in your mouth
to stitch your words in white thread
to whimper while drowning in spit
to keep from screaming spitting blood
to hold the water of a language on your tongue
which leaks like a rusty bucket
to mend things that are still useful
to sew crosses on the really weak spots
like bandages on the wounded in a hospital
to learn to search for the roots of a life
that has yet to learn its name
Translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk, 2019
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