WickedEye's Quotient

Moving Party

2016-11-13T21:32:00.004-08:00

Greetings, all. I have decided to move WickedEye's Quotient to WordPress, in large part because Blogger decided to make it impossible to keep my blog looking as it did at its inception. Struggling with formatting, etc. has not been worth the candle, so I've been posting mainly on Facebook.

You can find the new version of the blog here: https://wequotient.wordpress.com/

Cheers. I hope to see you there.

Hope & Grief (or, Thank you, Mr. Nimoy.)

2015-03-26T23:50:00.001-07:00

When Leonard Nimoy died, I could not comment...could not write at all. The loss went too deep; the space he left was so full of things I had never examined. Having now gazed into that space, I think that the very last of my childhood may have gone with him.

I am 40 years old. In some way or another, Star Trek has shaped my thinking since I was a child.

And it was Spock—of course it was—who caught my attention. I was painfully shy, awkward, ignorant of much of the cultural idiom; highly intelligent, an academic achiever who never understood the jokes or references my classmates made; always too serious.

Always too literal. Too logical.

Of course I identified with the half-Vulcan aboard the Enterprise. I too struggled with my humanity, with my day-to-day existence in an environment both bewildering and full of threats, amongst rules I could not control and barely understood. Spock's camaraderie with his companions in the face of all these things, their sense of shared danger and adventure and goals, was as mysterious and dazzling to me as an oasis amidst their planet's bare rock and sand would be to a Vulcan.

Spock represented something better than the flawed, violent, alienating world around me. And as I grew, all of Starfleet came to represent that alternative as well, far more so than Star Wars' urgings toward self-awareness (self-awareness had never been my problem).

Starfleet's quest to discover, to understand, to explore without destroying, resonated deep within my 12-year-old soul. Here were people who did not think all difference was dangerous. Here were people who were strong, and instead of belittling or mocking or trying to destroy those who looked and behaved differently, they used their strength to learn from and benefit those they encountered.

Star Trek TNG accompanied me throughout my teens and early twenties, a font of intelligent, actively curious benevolence of a kind that was seldom found in the increasingly adult world I was trying to occupy. I had figured out the jokes, developed a sense of humor, become fluent in the cultural idiom, but still it was Spock to whom I turned—though it was his Vulcan traits which now fascinated me.

He bent emotion to serve reason, a still point in the churning frenzy of the Enterprise's ventures—at rest, yet never inert. Complex, responsive, rational. The best kind of human...and it was being half-Vulcan that made him so. The message was clear: We can evolve into beings greater than the sum of our parts. Feeling, or even being, alienated matters less than determination, than intelligence, than logic, than compassion.

I filled my 30s with a mix of Trekker and Trekkie movies, as well as TNG and TOS. Unquestionably the Federation shaped, and continues to shape, my ideals of a world(s) that is just, equitable, humane—of a society benevolent to all its inhabitants, both old and new.

I watched Abrams' new Trek films as I neared 40, eager to embrace the newest iteration of a world and character that shaped my youth; there was much in them to enjoy. But, with the exception of Zach Quinto's acting (though of course I miss the original Spock), most of what I like about the new films has little to do with what I love about Star Trek.

Abrams' Trek is space opera in the tradition of Star Wars: Most aliens not aboard the Enterprise are enemies or hostile; running, fighting, and overt emotion rule the day. The only characters who fully embrace rules and logic are scolding teachers who are disregarded, or villains who are later annihilated.

This is not surprising. Abrams has said, more than once, that he'd never before watched Star Trek—and didn't 'get' it once he had.

The intelligence, the wonder, the curiosity and reasoning—and the human emotions which drive these things, including fear—are largely missing from the brave new world. The things which gave me hope that the adult world could be more than what I experienced as a child, that helped me navigate it as I grew, that gave me hope and faith that we, that humans, could be better—could meet without disguise, and know each other, and come away wiser and more fully ourselves from the experience—these are missing.

The new Star Trek has great production values, fight scenes, backstory—but for me, much of the warmth and wonder are gone from the adventure.

It may not matter. I am no longer a child. I have not been for a long time—since long before I knew what Star Trek was. My youth was not a place which forgave innocence. But this kind of realization—this loss of warmth and wonder—is a cold greeting even for middle age. I wonder if I am not letting Spock down by it.

For I know that for all the reasoning underpinning my grief, Mr. Spock would indeed most likely say that I am being illogical. That all things change, including ourselves. That wisdom lies in learning continually, in shaping and choosing our own changes as we grow. That those things cannot happen in the absence of hope.

And perhaps it says more than anything I've written above that knowing what Spock would say is enough to square my shoulders and turn my gaze forward to the next 30 years.

(Thank you, Mr. Nimoy. For all of this, for hope and grief alike—because for me the Trek wears your face, and always will.)

Psychopath-Blindness

2015-03-26T23:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Drew commented on the "Sodomite Suppression Act" ballot initiative, which proposes to legalize the murder of LGBT people in California—how terrifying the detached rhetoric surrounding it was; how people were ignoring its violent insanity. This was my response.

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I really do get how you feel about this, Drew, because I lived through 9/11 in the South looking as I do, and at the time was married to a dark-skinned 'furriner' with a perceptible accent on top of it. The idea that people all around you hate you and want to kill you for something you can't help—hearing, for example, a whole grocery store go quiet as you and your husband walk in, and talk restart in whispers all around you, and enduring this again and again and again, everywhere—the idea that the people around you are only barely restrained from violence by the law, is terrifying on a visceral level. It was also inescapable. There was no getting around it, day or night, and nowhere safe to go.

In the face of that kind of hatred, the "let cooler heads prevail" attitude gets me hot under the collar too. "Cooler heads"? Is this some kind of 21st-century idiom for "sane people"?

After having read the proposal, I used the word 'psychotic' advisedly—this homicidal cretin is a full-bore, rubber-room-renting, delusional psychopath, and he and his psychotic Sodom and Gomorrah fantasies belong in an institution which also houses people who (to quote Lewis Black) are crocheting something that isn't there.

We as a society are lucky he raised red flags with this paperwork, instead of simply (!) turning into a serial killer.

And to be clear, I think the same thing of all of the people you just described who stopped and thought about this before deciding it "went too far." They may not be actively psychotic, but they are delusional or stupid or unbalanced or (probably) all three. Countenancing, even for an instant, the idea of serial murder of people because you don't like them makes you creepy and not fit for decent society and not sharing the same reality as the rest of us...and that's not really a hard diagnosis to make.

What concerns me is that, because this man expressed his sociopathy through a religious ballot proposal, people fail to see how terrifyingly insane it is. Then again, people with a milder flavor of the same sociopathy are now protected in Indiana; instead of being barred from behavior that is antisocial and irrational, their antisocial, delusional behavior is being actively encouraged.

It's all part of the same mindset—and it's terrifying that sane people across the country are failing so utterly to see insanity when it's shrieking, spittle flying, into their faces.

Play Spent

2014-12-10T06:16:00.001-08:00

Today my class has to take the bus, or walk, from the clinic to the pharmacy to the grocery store, then plan a grocery list for a family of 3 for a week with $128.00. It’s an assignment designed to allow physicians-in-training to understand a little of what many of their patients have to cope with.

The alarm, dismay, and consternation displayed by some of my classmates when we were given the details of this assignment were a revelation. It’s no secret that I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks—which, not coincidentally, is where I live now (on which more in a moment). Public bus systems just aren’t that scary to me; I walked, or took the bus home from school, on and off from ages 12 to 16.

I came to medical school with a car that might or might not last, so my house is 9 blocks from school, and only 1 block and 6 blocks from St. John’s and Memorial hospitals (hence the high-risk location), with a grocery store 4 blocks away. I don’t expect grocery planning to be terribly challenging, either: Eating nutritiously (if uninterestingly) on the cheap is another ongoing hobby of mine.

All of which is to say that when I got the assignment, I wasn’t anticipating trouble completing it—unless I got really unlucky crossing the road.

But it turns out that there was another component to the assignment: Spent.

And that feeling smug goeth before a fall, and complacency before a kick in the rear.

I thought I understood some of my patients’ challenges. Turns out I don’t. No matter where I grew up, or where I live now, or what my intimacy with public transport, I’m not an adult with a family trying to survive at the federal poverty line.

Play ‘Spent’ in the next week, even if you do nothing else to understand those outside your circle and circumstances. Because no matter what you think you know about what it takes to survive on a low income…you don’t. You really, really don’t.

Go play. Have a good week. And share the game, where and as you can.

We’re all in this together. Pass it on.

Theobroma cacao (Greek “food of the gods” + Nahuatl “bean/berry”), Take 2

2014-10-28T18:36:00.001-07:00

In honor of National Chocolate Day, I give you a (substantially rewritten) essay on the "food of the gods," originally from 2007.

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Ah, chocolate. (Onomatopoeically rendered, that should read: Aaaaaahhhh,chooooocoolaaate…)

But moaning in pleasure doesn’t come close to conveying the gratification of this ecstatically wonderful confection.

Cocoa, the essence of chocolate, is named from the Spanish cacao, which in turn came from the Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan) cacaua, root form of cacahuatl, “bean of the cocoa-tree.” The confection we call chocolate is a combination of solids from the seeds of the tropical cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, with sugar, cacao fat, and other additions. It’s been made, in some form, since at least 1100 BC.

From the time of its earliest making, it was associated with the goddess Xochiqetzal, bringer of fertility; it came to the Western world through the offices of Cortés, who brought the cocoa bean back to Spain. Thanks to the industrious Spanish monks—and the Duke of Savoy, Emanuele Filiberto, who brought cocoa beans back to Turin, Italy in 1559—cocoa-based confections were a luxury item to European nobility by the end of the 17^th century. By the end of the 18^th century, the Turinese confettiere Doret perfected the modern method of producing the solid candy we now think of as chocolate.

Its base, cacao, is as unique chemically as chocolate is historically, containing theobromine, a potent stimulant, as well as flavonoids and antioxidants. Humans also absorb a family of chemicals known as anandamides (named from the Sanskrit for “joy”), endogenous cannabinoids which—with chocolate’s tryptophan, phenethylamine, and ethanolamine content—give rise to mild neurosynaptic stimulation…and the legends of chocolate’s aphrodisiac qualities.

Making good chocolate is a long, intricate, and cash-intensive process whose subtlety and complexity resembles that of winemaking—with the added step of confection-making after the growth, fermentation, roasting, and grinding processes. The most expensive cacao varietals are the Criollos grown in Central America and the Caribbean. Beans sell for an average of $20.00 a pound raw and peeled, and the added costs of chocolate production bring the cost of a well-crafted 3-ounce single-origin Criollo bar to between $12-$22. The two best Criollo bars produced, the Château d’Yquems of chocolate, are the Chuao and Porcelana bars by Domori and Amedei: 70% cocoa bars that steal the breath and leave the skin prickling in delight at the sensual, velvety heaven they produce on the tongue.

The rougher, spicier bliss of the blunt and artless Forastero, the bean from which most of the world’s chocolate is made, has its appeal as well. As a chocolate gourmet who’s explored Southeast Europe on a budget, and its chocolate in small pieces, I’ve stumbled across some melting Forastero raptures on the way. One that stands out is Lindt’s Edelbitter Mousse Sauerkirsch-Chili 70% Cacaogehalt.

Lindt, whose founder invented the conching process that gives modern chocolate its smooth texture, is the finest mass-producer of chocolates in the world. Its exquisite 85% bar gives even the ‘grand-cru’ producers a run for their money; and its Mousse Sauerkirsch-Chili is a triumph of both confiserie and chocolatiering. Hearkening back to the very beginning of xocolatl (in which cacao was blended with chili and drunk), 70% cocoa solids encase a 70% mousse, which in turn envelops sour cherry extract, which enwraps a small core of chili extract. The distinct beginning, middle, and end notes deliquesce across the tastebuds; first the round, dark cacao, the barest trace of bittersweet coffee underpinning it, melting imperceptibly into the sourness of the cherry, finishing creamy on the tongue as the spice of the chili warms through the fruit until your tongue is left tingling and sated.

Ah, chocolate.

Read that last onomatopoeically. Better yet, read the words of Baron Justus von Liebig, a 19^th- century German chemist who wrote that “Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power…the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.”

I’m helpless but to agree. Voraciously.

The Unexpected Journey (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb)

2014-10-24T20:44:00.001-07:00

Peter Jackson’s first “Hobbit” film, “An Unexpected Journey,” was a terrible letdown.

I’ve been reading Tolkien since I was 9 years old (and rereading him every decade since). I’m still in awe of Jackson, Walsh and Boyens’ monumental, staggeringly beautiful “Lord of the Rings” films. But that very first Tolkien book, when I was 9, was The Hobbit—a very different tale, in style and content, than his epic The Lord of the Rings.

The Hobbit is Tolkien’s come-hither. It is the lure,the bait that leads the enthralled reader on a romp along the paths of Middle-earth until she never wants to leave; and it is a brilliantly effective seduction, precisely because it is so very different from The Lord of the Rings.

Where The Lord of the Rings is a somber and epic tale of struggling races and their defiance of grim, looming fate, The Hobbit is a simple adventure story—one of the best ever written. Merrily plotted, tightly staged, it moves at a cracking pace from start to finish, sketching Middle-earth in sparkling tones touched with only the barest hint of the shadows to come.

So Jackson’s self-indulgent, lumbering, ungainly rewrite—his incorporation of huge amounts of material extraneous to the original plot, most prominently Azog the orc, who is mentioned in a single sentence in The Hobbit (and only in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings)—is appalling. Mutilating the seamless scintillation of The Hobbit’s storyline by splicing it with The Lord of the Rings’ appendices and The Silmarillion shows unparalleled arrogance and presumption.

Jackson’s vanity in rewriting chunks of Tolkien’s legendarium and storyline around his filmmaking is all the more appalling because it’s completely unnecessary: Thorin Oakenshield needs no extraneous super-orcs to render him heroic. His prowess as a warrior could have been portrayed by other, less intrusive means—an extended sequence of the dwarves facing the goblins, or the trolls, or even Smaug, for instance.

Jackson is a director, not a writer—and certainly not a writer of Tolkien’s caliber (so very few are). His egotistical disservice to both Tolkien and Middle-earth has lost him, permanently, the ‘Poet-laureate of Middle-earth’ crown won by his “Lord of the Rings.”

But he’s still a very good director. And nowhere is that so evident as in his casting, and especially in his casting of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. Jackson’s ham-fisted egotism has ruined the storyline of which Bilbo is the star; but he nonetheless chose his Bilbo supremely well.

Martin Freeman expresses the duality of hobbits in a way no other actor yet has—in a way even his far more distinguished counterpart, Ian Holm, fell short of. Freeman nails every insular, disgruntled nuance of the staid and respectable Bilbo’s rejection of Dwarves and their irritating foreign ways, of Baggins’ distaste and dismay for the messiness and voraciousness and uproar and plumbing-dismantling carousing they bring to Bag End.

Freeman’s Bilbo reflects perfectly, in fact, the traditional British intolerance of ‘foreign’ habits, or indeed of anything which disturbs the mannerly, ordered rhythm of everyday life.

But Freeman also gives us the very best of hobbits/the British (there is no meaningful distinction), the qualities which shone with world-illumining heroism in the War of the Ring and in World War II. Freeman inhabits, without a second’s missed inflection, Bilbo’s willingness to brave great danger in the face of danger and discomfort and the terror of the unknown—for the sake of the irritating ‘foreigners.’

And his courage is devoid of any of the traditional trappings of heroism. Bilbo Baggins shares with Samwise Gamgee a quality which might be termed ‘heroic decency.’

Bilbo is no woodsman, no warrior. Unpracticed with weapons,clumsy on rough terrain—his chief talent, even before his acquisition of the One Ring, is the ability to go unnoticed. And to Freeman’s very great credit, his Bilbo—unlike Sean Astin’s wonderfully unselfconscious Samwise—makes sure we see that Bilbo knows that he is clumsy and unpracticed.

We see Bilbo’s knowledge of his unfitness for battle, for the company of the heroes with whom he travels. We see too that his knowledge of his deficiencies increases his fear of the journey. And we see Bilbo choosing to ignore his fear—his well-justified, entirely-founded fear.

Freeman’s Bilbo goes onward in the face of terror from the simple conviction that those whose homes were taken from them have been wronged. From the profound decency of a clumsy, unfit man who nonetheless knows he is in a position to help, and will not refuse to do so despite having opportunity to turn away—and despite knowing that it may cost him everything he loves.

This is Bilbo’s heroism, and Samwise’s…and Frodo’s, and Merry’s, and Pippin’s. A hobbit’s courage is the decency of a simple man faced with overwhelming evil—a man who knows that he is at best a farmer and not a warrior, knows that he cannot possibly win against so titanic a foe, and knows that even so he will not surrender.

A hobbit’s courage is that of small, solitary Britain, naked sword in fist, crying defiance at the gigantic Nazi war machine rolling toward it.

In this, Jackson’s hobbit’s-eye-view remains immaculate.

Congratulations, Ms. Page. Now, about your next role...?

2014-02-15T02:06:00.001-08:00

The appropriate response—for everyone barring LGBT teens and their teachers/counselors—to Ellen Page's coming-out:
1) Congratulations on being so comfortable with that.
2) So, your next role...?

For those reflexively outraged that I should do less than rave with joy: Ms. Page's journey is relevant to a segment of the public—LGBT kids—as well as to her own private life; but the latter is what precludes the idea that anyone should ever stay closeted.

It's not that Ms. Page's journey shouldn't be honored...by those whom it affects: Her romantic partners, the LGBT kids she's trying to help, her friends and family, and possibly others who've endured the same struggle.

Others who comment on Ms. Page's sexuality have:
A) the manners of barnyard animals (just because it's common doesn't mean it's polite, ya'll), and/or
B) a supreme indifference to the distinction between public and private, and/or
C) pretensions towards being artistic or cultural analysts of some kind, and/or
D) a severe excess of free time/no social life of their own.
A, B, and D are the choices that apply to everyone who isn't a film critic, a Ph.D. in some branch of social science, or a fellow artist.

Ms. Page's sexuality is her own business. Full stop.

I know about this sort of barnyard nosiness because I've been asked, in both law and medical school, if I'm lesbian or bisexual—I headed the group for LGBT law students and their supporters for a time, and was bluntly unconcerned with dating. I don't decline to answer because I have something to hide; those I love will love me no matter what my answer.

I decline to answer questions about my sexuality because answering them means that the person asking has a right to ask.

If a public figure chooses to generously disregard her own privacy in order to help others suffering from the incredible bigotry and ignorance that afflict our society, it is an act of generosity. No one has a right to that information but her lover(s). Making revealed information about someone's sexuality—rather than that person's compassion and concern for others—into a huge news story does nothing but reinforce all the barnyard-mannered impertinence of the general public who think questions about sexuality are appropriate.

And as an added disadvantage, it perpetuates the idea that when thinking of someone who's LGBT, the very first thing that should leap to mind is her sexuality...in Ms. Page's case, bypassing the incredible talent that gave us Hayley Stark, Juno, and Ariadne.

The Most Glittering Kind of Poetry

2014-02-10T20:08:00.000-08:00

How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry?
-Pau [Pablo] Casals
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{Written September 19, 2012—for Bea and Omy, with much love.}
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No composer will ever surpass Bach in my mind and heart; and few of his works have touched both so deeply as his Cello Suites.

I love most stringed instruments, but the cello has a special place in that pantheon. Its tones combine warmth and plangence, caress and demand, in a way I've never experienced with any other sound.

So of course I would love Bach's treatment of the cello best…of course I would; I love his treatment of everything best. And if I think his primary preoccupation—breaking the world into chords, then reordering it to refract shadow and light and fear and beauty, as it should—is particularly well-suited to the Scheherazadic strains of the cello, then perhaps that’s to be expected.

There is all this at the back when I listen to Bach’s Cello Suites. Yet even so, his first, in G minor, moves me as little else can. Its Prelude is certainly well-known for good reason; in no other music is the sumptuous timbre of the cello so well mated with the lucent, nuanced use of metal, wood, horsehair, and air at which Bach excels.

Pau Casals and Yo-Yo Ma are sublime envoys of that sound. In Yo-Yo Ma's hands, Bach is pellucid, serene, transcendent—the composer I fell in love with at 17. But Casals…in Pau Casals’ hands, the cello is ardent—fervent and earnest in a way I have heard nowhere else.

It is near-miraculous to me that the Suites can be played with such overwhelming feeling, plaint and paean and passion thrumming through the sound in a way that might startle the Kapellmeister himself. Perhaps that feeling rings so clearly because when I was last in Puerto Rico I saw an exhibit on Casals—Casals whose first cello was made from a gourd; Casals who found a copy of the Cello Suites in a thrift shop when he was 13, spent the next decade of his life learning them…and then the following six decades mastering them.

No-one has ever played Bach on the cello as Casals does. Perhaps that is because no other cellist has ever spent so much of his life consumed—and transported—by both the instrument, and the man who mastered its song.
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Pau Casals playing Bach's Cello Suite No.1, Prelude; performed 1954, at Abbaye Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa.

Olympics-Sponsored State + State-Sponsored Violence = Olympics-Sponsored Violence

2014-02-07T08:30:00.000-08:00

Russian art, literary and otherwise, is a vast vein of platinum-webbed gold--but the coal-mine poverty of Russian human-rights practices seems eternal.

Russia's treatment of LGBT people isn't merely hostile: Its 'propaganda' ban is the glossier side of a state-condoned lynch-mob mentality that smiles at indiscriminate violence against LGBT human beings...and human dignity as a whole.

The Olympic coming-together of the world to celebrate human potential is a high point of living in the modern age. But by that very fact, holding the Olympics in Sochi, Russia--flying the Olympian banner, however temporarily, over the kind of oppression that the Olympic Games are supposed, by their very existence, to oppose--makes a mockery of the Olympic ideal.

Hosting the Olympics is enormously politically profitable for the host country's ruling regime (see this article in The Economist on why countries undertake such massive expenditures). Hosting the Olympics constitutes, in fact, an endorsement from the International Olympic Committee of the host country's ruling regime. (It's also an Olympic sponsorship of the money-stripping apparatus through which athletic organizations and tourists are fed at each Olympic Games.)

Did the International Olympic Committee permit the Winter Olympics to be held in a country with such appalling ongoing human-rights violations because of Russia's economic and political clout? It's certainly possible. The IOC has denied lesser powers--Istanbul's Olympic bids have failed for more than a decade because of Turkey's state-sponsored violence against dissidents. Certainly the Committee is politically savvy enough to have recognized that Russia's 'propaganda ban' is merely boilerplate--palliating language that allows the Russian government to at best turn a blind eye, and at worst contribute, to a culture of horrific violence against LGBT people.

Why else, other than state sponsorship, would perpetrators of such violence feel free to post, en masse, tens of videos of organized assaults? (Be warned: Some of this video content is graphic, and unsuitable for minors or the workplace.)

Russia's 'official treatment' of LGBT citizens is detailed in this Human Rights Watch report: Government officials--including Putin--publicly term LGBT people “perverts” and “abnormal,” while equating homosexuality with pedophilia. A director of a government-controlled TV-and-radio outlet goes so far as proposing to “burn or bury” the hearts of LGBT organ donors rather than use them for transplants because they are “unfit to continue anyone’s life.”

This is the regime that the IOC chose to host the Olympic ideal--the Games that celebrate humanity's potential.

Whatever regrets the IOC may have about their decision--and IOC President Thomas Bach's statement that he's willing to consider including language on sexual orientation in the Olympic Charter's ban on discrimination does read, at least partly, as a statement of regret--cannot change my refusal to support that decision.

I wouldn't patronize a company that lent its prestige or contributed money, directly or indirectly, to the Klu Klux Klan or the Aryan Nations, or any other sponsor of violent bigotry.

I fail to see why flying an Olympic flag over a place that does the same is any different.

Subcontinental Gang-rape & Gay Rights

2014-01-26T01:04:00.001-08:00

In 2002 Mukhtaran Bibi was gang-raped on the orders of her village council in rural Pakistan, in retaliation for her brother's association with a woman from another tribal group.

My 2007 essay on her can be found here. I wrote not about the problem of sexual violence against women in India & Pakistan, which I'd addressed the year before (my 12-year-old-girl learning curve is detailed here), but about Bibi's heroically humanitarian response to the verdict against her rapists: She used the money to open a school in her village...a school in which she first enrolled her rapists' children.

I bring up Bibi's case, and her extraordinary selflessness, not only because her 'crime' and 'punishment' parallel those of the Indian woman who was gang-raped on the orders of her village council last week, but because of Bibi's wise and apposite response.

Mukhtaran Bibi opened a school. She did that because the real problem with the treatment of women and non-straight-male persons on the Indian subcontinent isn't just--or even mostly--a lack of statutory protection. The reason women and other "minorities" are mistreated on the subcontinent is the rampant bigotry, born of insular and determined ignorance, that pervades the culture there.

That bigotry--against women, against homosexuals, against anyone who transgresses sectarian boundaries or other cultural taboos--is a Stone-Age norm across India (and, one can conclude from Bibi's ordeal, Pakistan).

Yes, Stone-Age. A woman from the most recent gang-rape-victim's village (I hope every human reading is cringing at the words 'most recent') justified the council's punishment by stating that the woman is "a bad character" who "was going around with this non-tribal man." This, in Stone-Age logic, justifies gang-rape: People from other tribes are, just as they were 10,000 years ago, threats to the village's food supply and lands and survival as a tribe. By that logic, fraternization should indeed be punished extremely--by gang-rape, at least; and stoning might not be out of the question either...

But civilized people don't act this way.

And that's the problem with the Indian subcontinent. That's the reason why women, Indian or not, aren't safe in India, and neither is anyone transgressing those Stone-Age norms: Vast swathes of the Indian subcontinent aren't civilized.

And contrary to the shrieks of outraged Indians at home and abroad, those vast uncivilized swathes aren't just located in West Bengal, or in backwards villages. (Or in Pakistan.)

No, many of those swathes of bigoted, backward, uncivilized, determinedly ignorant, Stone-Age thinking cut straight through the likes of Mumbai and Delhi, where Indian women are--less than their South Asian peers, but still increasingly--choosing to delay marriage because it spells unremitting, full-time child-rearing and the end of their careers, no matter how educated or successful a woman may be.

That bigoted, backward, uncivilized, determinedly ignorant, Stone-Age thinking also cuts straight through the Lok and Rajya Sabhas, the two houses of the Indian Parliament, who are consistently embroiled in sectarian bigotry of the most pernicious, and often fatal, kind--see Narendra Modi, leader of the minority BJP party, for just how deeply involved in this sort of bloodthirsty thuggery Indian politicians can get (apparently without repercussion).

And then there is the institution re-conceived in the Enlightenment, the common man's last defense against bigoted, backward, uncivilized, determinedly ignorant, Stone-Age thinking: the high courts. In this case, the Supreme Court of India.

Which means that that Court's re-criminalization of homosexuality last month was not only a blow against the human rights and civil liberties of a large portion (approximately 20%) of the world's LGBT population, but also a complete failure of the SCI's mandate as an institution.

As of December 2013, any homosexual sexual activity in India is once again punishable by a 10-year prison term. That's right, it's again punishable...because the Supreme Court of India, in order to purvey its own bigoted, backward, uncivilized, determinedly ignorant thinking, had to overturn a High Court ruling and uphold a law from the 1870 British Penal Code.

That's 1870 AD, ladies and gentlemen. A law imposed by India's British colonizers 143 years ago is once again the law of the land.

Not quite Stone-Age. But in this day and age, quite definitely uncivilized.

Personally, my view of the bigotry of Indian culture has been jaundiced in the extreme since I was 11 years old--when my mother, brothers and I were reviled for more than a decade by the Indian community in Nashville (while they welcomed my 'respectable' surgeon father) because my parents had divorced.

I learned first-hand about the hypocritical blindness of which the Indian community is capable when protecting its cultural norms, and in that awareness I chose to be American by acculturation as well as by birth. Only later, because my extended family--and living rough in India for a year--showed me the positive side of Indian familial culture, did I choose to adopt some of it (if in a decidedly piecemeal fashion).

So I'm biased both for and against, now. All of which allows me to see bigotry on the subcontinent with a clearer eye than most.

Indian technology has evolved over the past three decades, and via India's youth has begun to drag the culture (inch by inch) with it. And India's children are, just like India's geography is, a patchwork of truly high-minded, humanistic thinking scattered throughout the bigoted, backward, insular traditional gender and community roles--roles enforced by family 'elders' as well as by many of the younger Indians (largely male) whom those traditions benefit.

My cousins--from India to Australia to Singapore to Montreal--are excellent examples of India's evolution. They are, very nearly entirely, caring and high-minded human beings, and they're a large part of the reason I came to value being part of a wider Indian family. Many work for justice and equality in their day-to-day lives; most exemplify it to some degree or another.

Not everyone from an Indian family is so lucky. But lucky or not, those of Indian origin with high ideals and open hearts need to speak up against the bigots, both in India and abroad. Here's the key--an idea that, despite its logic, most of India wholly rejects (and America struggles with, especially post-Bush and post-Ed-Snowden): Being anti-bigoted, backward, uncivilized, determinedly ignorant, Stone-Age thinking doesn't mean being anti-Indian.

And if it does mean that to you, consider seriously what that means about your idea of being Indian.

Indians of conscience and humanism and goodwill need to speak up in the face of oppression instead of simply ignoring it (or even opposing it quietly) lest they offend their elders and those who raised them--who, in India, are nearly universally less open-minded, less humanitarian, and less conscience-driven than those who grew up with a wider view of the world and of themselves.

Respect for our elders is a worthy tenet--but as with any worthy tenet, when embraced unthinkingly it can be carried too far.

Back to the 1870s, for example. Or the Stone Age.

*Commotio cordis

2012-09-02T19:01:00.003-07:00

{Written last year.}
____________________________________________________
Life has effaced you. The wind and tide have swept you away.

Does it matter that you wanted them, waited for them? Watching you being carried away from me still feels like drowning.

Being in this place without you feels like trying to breathe water: Burning. Agonizing. Frustrating. There is oxygen in water; but I cannot use it.

I am not equipped for this kind of life.

When you were here the water never burned in my lungs. How did I never notice that you were breathing for me all this time?

And what if it is not only the water? Land or sea—wake or wave or footprint marking your departure—would I still be gasping? Still be drowning?

So perhaps drowning is worth us having left the shore—left light and air behind—to traverse murkier depths together: You are gone. I am drowning. That would be the same, land or sea.

But I would feel self-betrayed, self-forsaken, had I drowned in air rather than water.

This way I can tell myself that it is the medium, and not me.

I do not know your destination. I know what you want, what you wish, what you journey toward—but for the first time since we set out I cannot tell you if it will be the shape you desire upon your arrival.

I can only hope that that arrival will be welcome to you. That your own hopes do not betray you.

This is a path you were always walking.

You were always leaving, even at my side. The fact of your distance now leaves me in a atmosphere that was always alien. You have never pretended otherwise.

Your departure has always been waiting—like a another, stronger tide—to tug me away from you.

That breach is not disgrace.

Your disregard is not betrayal.

You were always already gone.

__________________________________
*Commotio cordis: concussion of the heart, caused by a blow to the chest over the region of the heart by a blunt object which does not penetrate the body.

мужчины не горы: Men are not mountains.

2012-04-06T00:36:00.001-07:00

Men are not mountains.

It is a farewell in Russia. Because mountains, once parted, never meet again. Humans might.

But…

Mountains do not die. Humans do.

And in the long, long dance of the continents—in the rise and fall of aeons of stone and flame—it is possible for mountains to meet again. Possible. Perhaps. Someday. There is a chance.

And at this moment I wish…oh, how I wish…that men were mountains.

I would stand unmoving, heart untouchable, roots unreachable, ancient and lonely through all my days. I would.

I would give up the motion of heart and breath and limb for the chance—the chance of a chance—that I had not lost forever the ones I love.

DO NOT USE THESE WORDS IN FRONT OF ME

2012-03-31T22:35:00.002-07:00

Greetings, my comfits. Since I have no available mental resources for coherent commentary (meaning essays) and yet have large amounts of stress/spleen to vent, I’m up to my oldest tricks—Smartassery and the English Language. In my search for new ways to combine the two, I bring you:
The Inigo Montoya Take on Ten Words Sumi Hates
Disclaimers:
1. Private writing is one thing—published writing, whether web or print, another.
2. Corollary: Email/private correspondence is your own business. Unless, of course, it’s with me.
3. If English is your second-or-onward language, none of this applies to you.
4. No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.

Alright: Because putting in the extra ‘l’ and a space makes you sound like one of those overeducated, stuck-up snobs who passed third-grade English.

Attitude: Because there’s nothing more descriptive of someone’s mental position, demeanor or emotion than the word used to describe those categories of description.

Guesstimate: Because using a word that means ‘approximate’ doesn’t begin to cover the depths of your inattention.

Ironic: Because it takes work to come up with an adjective that actually fits (paradoxical, acidic, tragic, oxymoronic, bitter) rather than abusing a word of whose primary meaning 90% of people are ignorant. (As opposed to the meaning listed dead last—the dictionary slot that’s all but labeled ‘ignorant slang’. Morissette, you’re a twit.)

Irregardless: Because there’s no better way to show off your verbal sophistication than through use of a word which, through being a double negative, invalidates the rest of your sentence.

*Metrosexual: Because normal straight men are schlubs who wear sweatpants to social events and think Armani makes reciprocating saws.

Orientate: Because adding a superfluous suffix to a useful verb (orient) somehow placates your sensibilities at the vaguely colonial flavor of the term. (And allows you to tack on more spurious syllables later—see 'disorientated'.)

Parameter: Because (mis)using a mathematical term to denote a set of criteria for your Google+ Circle (Facebook group, Halo Chart board) makes it sound important.

Quadrilogy: Because reviving a word for a group of four dramatic works that was marginal in the 19th century, rather than using current words (quartet, tetralogy), sells more X-Men & Saw DVDs.

Quantum: Because using a word for a miniscule quantity of a thing (energy, state…idea) is the best way to denote an enormous or unusual action. (Belisarius, your ass is mine.)

*This word isn’t misused or a mutant. Its existence is merely insulting and pointless.

Ignore me.

2012-02-20T19:53:00.001-08:00

The fact that I haven’t written anything in a long time hasn’t been because I don’t have anything to say.

It’s because I have far too much to say, and most of it will offend most of the people around me.

From living in Carbondale—the smallest place I’ve ever lived—for five years, I moved to Springfield. The overall culture in both places is, to put it mildly, Midwestern to a fault. One of the more lamentable results is that I'm in daily contact with several intelligent people—colleagues, professors, mentors—who routinely make me either intended audience or bystander to statements which result in a loss of mental capacity on my part. Albeit indirectly, my professional education may be making me dumber.

The main source of destruction of my brain parenchyma is the dismaying number of people who feel the need to discuss subjects on which they’ve formed opinions without subjecting themselves to the tedious business of acquiring relevant facts. (In medical school, ipso facto, subjects other than medicine.) This tendency springs, I think, from a very basic lack: These people, despite their pursuit/achievement of terminal degrees, seem to be deplorably undereducated.

I say this because the fundamental component of any advanced education is a respect for knowledge. This includes a dedication to defining it precisely in order to delineate clearly what one does and does not know—and thus, to recognizing which problems one's knowledge is fitted to address.

This system of organizing the known and not-known comprises a large part of the validity, and value, of science. Those who (like me) believe in science believe in the importance of knowledge. This means that they notice when people—including many who should know better—talk a great deal about things of which they know very little.

Unless it’s your area of specialty, being a lawyer or legislator or physician or professor doesn’t mean you know politics. Or government. Or finance. Or climate change. Or oil spill remediation. Or evolutionary biology.

Being intelligent doesn’t mean your opinion holds water—unless that opinion is based on germane information. Being educated (or rather, degreed, since I’m drawing a distinction here) doesn’t automatically make you informed. Being informed requires that you bother to inform yourself about the subject under discussion.

And here’s perhaps the crucial point: Mere observation of a given phenomenon's existence does not provide enough knowledge to form an opinion of it.

Watching BP's efforts to extinguish the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico, in the absence of information on oil rig engineering and marine biology and petrochemistry, will not yield useful theories on oil spill remediation. Watching an electrical storm, in the absence of any information on electromagnetism and thermodynamics, will yield theories very different from those of someone with a scientific education.

You’ll get Zeus. She’ll get a Tesla coil.

Being intelligent enough to draw inferences won’t help you if you don’t have any relevant facts.

Put simply: Being highly educated/degreed doesn’t mean you know everything. No matter your formal IQ, making a habit of forming opinions without getting relevant, topical facts pushes you well past ignorance and into stupidity.

And I’m tired of stupid people.

There are a great many things I don’t know. In fact, I don’t know most things: It is virtually guaranteed that I will die knowing only the minutest fraction of the facts humans are capable of knowing. I hate it, but I resigned myself to it a long time ago.

What I’ve failed to resign myself to (despite a 6-year-long attempt) is a regular diet of dumbfounding proclamations from people who feel compelled to offer opinions on everything because—because—

Well, apparently because there are plenty of other ignorami out there who are part of the ‘discussion.’ And because the only criterion for entry into the ‘discussion’ seems to be the ability to form a sentence (and in the case of certain political figures, even that is suspended).

I give. Uncle. I’m tapping out.

Save me the aggravation. Save us both the time.

Ignore me.

Stranger Depths (Story Excerpt)

2011-12-04T07:52:00.000-08:00

She loves to swim.

No-one knows this. Why should they? The only place to swim back in base camp is the lake, and it’s unappealing if not hostile. And—black. Dark and cold, the hesitant lines of sunlight that shift through the water reaching no more than 20 feet down.

Not like the cold green waters off the coast of her home. Or the warm, liquid azure surrounding the island she’d visited with her parents when she was small. Waters that cradled and embraced her, that showed themselves to her as she moved through them.

She misses the sea. Misses it with an ache that sinks through to her bones sometimes. Freak, they said in camp, at school, ignorant of her heritage.

Not that it would matter. If they knew, she’d simply have been treated like the prisoners in camp. As half-human, rather than just a freak.

After she’d left school, come to camp, she’d found that twisting ache actually inflicting physical pain. Wondered what the combination of knowledge and her mother’s blood might have wakened in her had she stayed a civilian.

Dangerous, yes. But then all things were dangerous when you dove deep.

And now she swims in knowledge.

Knowledge is power. She’s known it from a young age, though she loved it for itself and not what it could bring her. Like the sea.

She marvels at knowing things, exults in it, as surely as in the sea. Loves the feel, the glide of facts as they weave the world around her. Loves breathing them in and exhaling them in strings of syllables and inscriptions and equations as fluid as the knowledge which forms them. It is the only thing she could have dreamt, could have imagined, that is better than diving into the cradling embrace of the sea: Knowledge, a force that flows like water and lets her breathe it like air.

And as with the sea, the riptides of knowledge she rides—with inscription or equation—can tear apart the unwary.

She wonders at the fact that the thrashing currents left the students at school, the warriors at camp, so untouched. So unmoved. At the fact that her teachers never mentioned that the things they teach are dangerous regardless of whether or not they’re used for dark purposes. It’s only in the last year, while watching soldiers and sybils and sycophants come and go around her, that she’s realized that they don’t know. That several of her teachers didn’t know.

How can people’s bodies be battered by the things that knowledge creates while they remain unaware of the power flowing about them?

But perhaps that’s why. Perhaps having a physical reason to which they can pin the pain means that they’re less aware of other tides.

But her favorite teacher had been aware of the slow maelstrom of knowledge. It was there in the intensity of her gaze at an erring student, the sternness of her demeanor as she controlled her classes—in her ruthless, constant scrutiny of the power being channeled through the words of those she taught.

She understood all that her teacher saw only after she left school. Just before she left camp.

Much too late.

So now she kneels in a forest—outlaw, outcast, betrayer, betrayed—and thinks of the sea. Thinks of bright lines of light in green depths while gazing into the orange heart of a tiny fire with the child she stole asleep in the tent behind her and everyone she loves somewhere that isn’t here. That will never be here, because thanks to the knowledge she channels they can’t find her now.

She and her ward are alone.

Maybe it’s because of her mother. Maybe it’s because she wasn’t meant to know so much. (Was she a freak? Had they been right?) Maybe it’s taken for granted by everyone else, and it’s only she who fears the depths and the inexorable tug of the knowledge she now treads like water.

It’s definitely only she who feels the bottom sinking away beneath she and the boy as the war churns deeper and darker around them. She that the dimming world presses in upon, blacker and colder and closer, stealing the air. There are times now when she thinks that the effort leaves her gasping for breath. (Perhaps that had always been their plan.)

She closes her eyes, shivering in the faint warmth of the fire, and tilts her head back to feel the cold against her face. Pictures the green depths of the sea about her, shoals sinking to black in the looming dark, and feels the chill, heavy swirl of currents which press fierce and heavy on her skin. Which seek she and her ward with a weight and pressure and limb-rending force that she fears her frame can withstand for only a little longer.

(Let it be enough. Let me save him.)

She kneels, blind in the surge of a shadowy riptide, and wonders what it will feel like to drown.

[It hasn't been my habit to post my fiction here; this is something of a test run. An excerpt, in abstract form, from a medium-length story that's been shaping itself v e r y s l o w l y.]

Following Phobos

2011-10-25T22:03:00.001-07:00

I am done with hiding.

You’ve not had the chance to read my writing lately. Or to debate my politics either—the latter for longer than the former. There are a lot of reasons: I’m tired. I’m scared of failing at school. I miss my family. I’ve lost friends to death and disseverment. There are a host more. None of them matter.

Because even though I’ve bent and not broken, I’ve also curled in on myself. Hidden away in a cave in the safety of my chosen scholarship. Left most of the mad, beautiful world to rage outside. Until tonight.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Lecia Brooks spoke at the med school. Listening to this plain-spoken, intelligent, compassionate woman talk unflinchingly of her convictions and questions and dismay stirred me: Recognition. Fear.

I used to do that, Recognition said. I used to say what I believed to be right. I used to protect those who were weaker than I. I used to speak for those who had no voice. And Fear said: Someday you will no longer recognize yourself in her. Keep hiding, it said, and one day not even she will be able to stir the memory of your strength from its tomb.

And then Fear said into the faces of Neo-Nazis and Imperial Klansmen and James Anderson’s murderer: I know you.

I sat next to you as a child riding the city bus home from school. Stopped you from screaming at a stranger. Comforted friends who’d been abraded by you. Argued against you on Legislative Plaza, in my high school, in churches and malls and diners.

I studied you for a decade. Majored in atrocity. When humanitarian law had shown me the worst excesses of hatred and fear, I turned to evolutionary biology because still I did not understand enough. I learned you beyond school, beyond academic disciplines, beyond any border of faith, to the very edge of hope. I know you, Fear murmured as Ms. Brooks showed us a man being murdered, deliberately and viciously, for the color of his skin.

When the newsclip was done I heard my friends crying for the brutality, the vileness, the terrible futile tragedy of what we’d seen. I sat dry-eyed, fists clenched, and Fear whispered at last: You are strong enough.

To face this. To bend medicine and psychiatry and law and politics and evolutionary biology to your purpose. To study, and stand against, violence and ignorance and hatred.

Strong enough to be the stone over which they break and ebb at last. Strong enough to find the ways in which those drowning in it might be revived.

My lack of published papers has always reflected my simple lack of an original take on a meaningful idea. But now—now I have one. My effort, my questions, have a form that matters. An anvil on which my knowledge and talents can be wrought to good purpose.

All it requires is that I immerse myself in a world containing those who relish hatred and harbor a wanton joy in destruction. All it requires is that I obey my Fear.

So I will. Because I live in that world already. Because my Fear is prompted primarily by knowledge of pain.

And because without my full attention, I cannot help that pain to heal.

OUTWARD: SUMMER [Lake, Galaxy, & I]

2011-06-10T00:58:00.001-07:00

At 2:30 am on the morning of my birthday, I went for a drive

[the dam at Devil’s Kitchen].

2 am on a small lake in the middle-of-almost-nowhere is many things.

Uncluttered

[insects and frogs and me]

soothing

[sigh of wind and susurrus of water flowing]

dark

[no lights for miles].

Starry.

I saw the Milky Way for the first time in a decade.

Stood on black asphalt, leaning on the white concrete of a small dam

[dark shallow waters below and behind me]

looking up at the stars

[scent of honeysuckle weaving together sound of water & brush of blown hair]

while mind gave body a surfeit of summer night

[wind on water on skin].

Stood on the inside of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Γαλαξιαζ (Galaxias)

[standing in and looking out]

moving at approximately 0.07c (the speed of light)

[eyes ears tongue funneling the world backward into my skull]

looking outward at its edge

[neurons firing the reality of night & lake & galaxy].

Visual cortex filled to overflowing

[band of horizon skyglow rising 15° above black-spiked trees]

with a near-hemisphere of starry night

[dark pastel fade of cerulean to sapphire]

the attenuated night deepening quickly

[to silky midnight with diamond-bright flecks of fire].

And stretched behind that fire

[compressed by an angle 60° off the galactic plane]

the milky, rippling ribbon of paler flame

[stippled with staccato darkness: nebulae known but unseen].

Now the Milky Way hangs above the roof of my study

[shimmering as it spins through 600km/s]

but it is time and past time for me to go to bed.

So I will fall asleep on damasked sheets

[inside a minor arm of a barred spiral galaxy]

on a small side street in Carbondale, Illinois

[quietly merging with the Virgo stellar stream].

At home

[I will not need sweet dreams].

And I Fell for Him Like My Heart Was a Mob Informant and He Was the East River.*

2011-06-10T00:49:00.000-07:00

or, Aquarium-based Fishboyfriend Schematics and Other Implausibly Romantic Musings: A Meditation In Ten Parts. With Subheadings. And Sharks.

___________________________________

I. In which I preface the long-awaited description of my decision with a few disclaimers.

1. This post is visible only to those tagged to it. (With few exceptions, that means those who took part in the original boyfriend v. aquarium debate on Facebook. Based on past conversations about romance/acknowledged attractions/romantic involvements, a few other interested parties may have found their way into the tag list as well.) For that reason, it’s quite a bit more candid than most of my other posts—even some of those which give the reader interesting close-ups of various scars. It is, in other words, not meant for general consumption. Thus, if I find people recopying bits of it—other than into correspondence with me—they will be hunted down like a dog in…er, a place where people hunt dogs.

2. As you may have deduced from the (sub)title(s), some of the thoughts here will be serious; others…not. Forgive me the more outrageous cracks; I can’t really help the way my weird sense of humor overpowers me. (And my romantic escapades have been more than outrageous enough to justify almost any crack I make about them.)

3. If you have absolutely no interest in reading about this stuff—for the love of Pete, let me know! I have no desire to bother people with tags to pieces they don’t find interesting, and in fact have stopped tagging several friends because they told me they only occasionally read things I write.

4. Comments, as with the original fishboyfriend debate, are welcomed. However, a little of my heart is out in the open here. Whatever your thoughts, please at least try to be tactful in expressing them.

______________________________

II. In which I describe an 18-way conversation.

The original question: Aquarium or boyfriend?

The discussion went on for 95 comments, with 18+ participants. It was revealing on several different planes. Many people came out of the woodwork to participate. And the level of concern expressed—especially by my guy friends, and especially by those privy to the magnitude of the disaster that was my last ex—gave me all kindas warms n’fuzzies.

On the other hand, the unparalleled amount of cynicism displayed by my male friends—gay and straight—about the possibilities of finding a man who’d be able to treat me well was disturbing. When challenged, they bluntly stated that they didn’t think I realized what guys were like (!), and then gave me a rendition of the male psyche that forced me to apologize to female friends whom I’d accused of sexism when they said the same things.

Not very encouraging…but not totally discouraging either. And more importantly, the process of engaging in the debate clarified some things that I’d (carefully) avoided realizing.

III. In which I begin my blatant Abuse Of Capitalization.

When I posted the question (no, it wasn’t a joke), I was under the impression that I wasn’t dating because I had Other Schtuff To Do than search for that One Special Person I wanted to annoy. (Not for the Rest Of My Life, but On An Exclusive Basis.)

And perhaps secondarily because I was in An Awkward Position when it came to finding Men Of A Suitable Age. (As in, they’re probably my professors. Eeeek.)

And possibly tertiarily because I am Unfortunately Incompatible With The Majority Of Straight Men. (No, really.)

Like so much else in life, the truth was both simpler and more complex than that. And realizing it made me take a long look at that list of six men I was attracted to and considering asking out.

And shred it.

I still find them attractive. But the thing that made it impossible for me to ask any of them out was realizing (finally!) the way attraction works for me.

IV. In which I (re)discover that my brain Controls My Emotions to an Often Unsavory Extent.

It’s long been a truism amongst me and my friends that the only way to my heart is through my brain.

The only way. There may be a few bypasses to other things (most of them via a dance floor), but for my heart that’s the only way. (Though artists and musicians have a bypass too, of sorts—I find certain forms of artistic talent as intriguing as I find certain forms of intellect.)

This has a number of unfortunate side-effects. In the past I’ve been blind to other considerations when caught in the thrall of a truly unique intellect—other considerations that have a tendency to come whiplashing back later on, sometimes traumatically. Witness my panicked call to Dave two years ago when I realized I was attracted to a man 11 years younger than I. My side of it began with: “Oh my god, Dave, I’m a perv!” (To Dave’s everlasting credit, his responding “What?” was laced with laughter rather than wariness. There are very good reasons he & I are friends.)

Other considerations had (thankfully) supervened at the time, preventing me from acting on the attraction, but I hadn’t even thought about the man’s age until almost two days later…when I was appalled.

It took Dave a while to convince me I wasn’t a perv. And I still have problems with the idea of dating a person substantially younger than I am—hence the Men Of A Suitable Age dilemma: I have no wish to hurt or take advantage of a person less romantically experienced than I. (Many of my male friends have told me emphatically that this concern is nonsensical. However, a fair bit of my moral code is considered nonsense in this day and age; that doesn’t stop me from formulating or adhering to it.) My friends did, however, manage to convince me that age is not the primary quality that must be considered when weighing romantic experience.

Fine. Good. Great. But that’s not the only problem. In fact, it’s not even the main problem.

V. In which I realize that Heterosexuality is the Least Of My Problems.

Nor is the Unfortunately Incompatible With The Majority Of Straight Men issue.

Which is surprising. Because since I’m straight (“intractably straight,” as I generally say, which to those paying attention implies—correctly—that I’ve attempted to rectify the matter often enough to realize that such attempts are doomed to failure), you’d think Incompatibility With The Majority Of Straight Men would be a rather large stumbling block.

Nah.

See, that one faded into insignificance when I realized that I’m incompatible with the majority of people. Neat solution, right? [Insert violent interaction of my head with my desk here.]

Once again, it comes down to the way attraction works for me. And since I haven’t clarified that, let me do so now: In order to make me want a man enough to ask him out, he has to fascinate me.

VI. In which I rediscover Fascination as both Vice And Privilege.

There are several layers to that—including all the layers that make me want to be friends with a person: High intelligence, ethical code, verbal wit, humor, interest in the world, a sense of adventure.

But it’s something more as well. An added spice. A twist to the language or ideas or playing field. A level of contest in the decoding. An impression that this man may be playing chess while everyone else at the table is playing checkers.

A provocation.

A sense that he might just be playing a few levels above me, and would I like to step to the table to find out? A sense that I’m dealing with a man whose mind has many levels, and that he’s capable of operating on more than one at a time. A sense that I have to actively try to keep up.

A sense that he’s an equal—who can challenge me.

And it’s not the traditional bad-boy fixation (though I admit to one in terms of fictional characters, both written and read): I’m not challenged by emotional disturbances. All mature adults carry some emotional baggage, and I don’t discriminate on that basis; but anger issues or mommy issues or daddy issues, or many of the varied flavors of emotional incapacitation are, at this point in my life, easily identifiable. They may not prevent me from being interested by a man’s mind, but they’ll back me from romantic to friendly interest faster than you can say “chess.”

And please don’t think that all of this has to be in play for me to say yes if I’m being asked out, rather than asking a man out. To say yes, I have to be interested and entertained; I have to enjoy his company. Most of my friends meet those criteria—they’re not terribly demanding. All that’s necessary past that baseline is the potential for fascination. I’ve had fulfilling relationships with men with whom, before we dated, it would never’ve occurred to me I was compatible. (I am, as several of you reading this know—yes, Joanna, I’m talking to you—rather slow on the uptake in that and several other regards.)

Which brings me to the matter of physical attraction.

VII. In which I address a topic that is Generally Awkward with my Usual Tact And Grace.

There’s a reason I left this till last, or almost-last. And that’s that to me, until that fascination is in place, the physical stuff’s irrelevant. (There’ve been exceptions to that; but I was younger and dumber—and, sad to say, so were the exceptions.) I’ve heard many women say that the physical characteristics come second, but on exploring further I’ve found that this isn’t true for them in the same sense that it is for me. Female friends whose judgment I trust (Marie being the most recent) have also told me that I’m the exception to the rule when it comes to my responses in this area.

Most women have physical characteristics that they prefer, and I’m no exception: Men who catch my eye in a “Wow, check him out” sense tend to be tall, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, with wide shoulders.

But I don’t really look at men on the street in terms of attraction. I look at them as aesthetic specimens—the way I’d look at a piece of sculpture. I look at women the same way; if you’re good-looking, graceful, exceptional in some way, you’ll catch my eye. I’ll appreciate you. But I won’t be attracted to you.

Attraction takes something else. It takes knowledge of the brain behind the mouth, eyes, smile, jawline, shoulders. And once I’m attracted to that, everything else about you will be attractive to me as well.

Which is why the list of men I’ve dated includes tall green-eyed blond reprobates and short half-Korean honors students, Italian-American basketball players and African-American chemistry nerds, blue-eyed saxophonists and brown-eyed business majors, redheaded models and brown-haired poets. All brilliant. All men I was desperately attracted to, both body and mind.

The former is impossible for me without the latter.

And that’s the problem.

VIII. In which I describe the Method by which I normally Proposition A Man.

I can’t ask out any of the men I had on that list—because if I were attracted enough to them to ask them out, I would’ve done it already.

When I’m attracted enough to a man to ask him out—or rather, to make my interest clear, which as often involves me asking to kiss someone as it does me asking him out—if there’re no intervening factors (significant others, sexual preference, age, etc.), I’ll do it as soon as possible.

As in, “You know, I find you really attractive. Would you like to have dinner/coffee/a drink tonight/right now?” Or, “I’d really like to kiss you. Would you mind?” (Several of the people tagged to this Note have experienced some version of this from me. I don’t expect you to attest to it—in fact I’d prefer you didn’t—but the rest of you should bear in mind that most of the people with whom I’ve done this aren’t one-offs. This is how I’ve started several relationships.)

And in the absence of that kind of attraction, I don’t want to pursue anybody.

IX. In which Sublimation collides with the Reason Why I’m Single.

I don’t want to date someone just because I’m single, or because I’m lonely. I’m single because I haven’t yet met anyone eligible whom I truly wanted to date. (As implied above, if I had and he hadn’t made a move, I would’ve.)

And everyone gets lonely. There are several answers to the physical side of that—if you, like me, aren’t into casual sex—and one of them is sublimation. Weightlifting, swimming, a heavy bag…yeah, you get the idea. The emotional side—well, I have wonderful friends; it’s not often I feel lonely. And dealing with the occasional bout of loneliness is part of being a grownup—and sadly, not exclusive to being single.

So the limiting factor isn’t compatibility, or age, or any of those things. The thing lacking for me to take the initiative is, quite simply, interest.

As someone else recently pointed out to me, I clearly need to meet more people I find intriguing.

X. In which lurk possible Members Of Class Chondrichthyes, with no other End In Sight.

I agreed with him. Clearly I do. But neither of us had any idea of how to resolve the problem. After all, twisty, multilayered, perpendicular thinking isn’t a characteristic of a whole lot of people in medical school—or, surprisingly, law school (at least not the one I attended). And medical school—and residency—is where I’ll be for quite some time.

Which is why, all things considered—and absent any serendipitous dropping of intriguing available males in my lap—I’ll be going with the aquarium.

So Stacy, I hope you’re still working on that aquarium-based fishboyfriend schematic.

Maybe eventually I’ll upgrade to a shark tank.

_____________________________________________

*This phrase is not original. To see a long list including that and other utterly delicious analogies, see “It’s Like This” in Style Invitational, a Washington Post contest which has been endlessly pirated (including here, although unlike the others I at least had the decency to attribute the source correctly).

Black Irises

2011-06-10T00:37:00.000-07:00

They sit at my eye level at the last stop sign but one before the parking lot: black irises.

Two of them, grown on the same stem, swaying against a field of lighter purple-and-yellow cousins.

They are not truly black, of course. The slant of the 7:45am sun burnishes their darkness, pulling their true tint—a plangent shade of abyssal sanguine-purple—to the surface of the rumpled petals. Caressing from them a gleam too subtle to be satiny, too tender to be silken.

They should seem out of place. It is a lovely spring morning, sun already coaxing cerulean from the sky; the all-but-black flowers shimmering slowly, entrancingly, in front of their more vivacious cousins should tarnish that liveliness.

They do not.

They make everything, everything—the other flowers, even the sky—more vivid.

Their pale cousins are more luminous in the black blooms’ shadow. And if the cheerful, slender purple prettiness seems shallower than the sinuous elegance of the dusky blossoms swaying (slower, more…deliberate) in the same breeze as they… Still, that prettiness is blazoned more brilliantly on the morning for the presence of those inky crimson-purple petals.

The cant of the morning light itself is sharper, its angle more acute, for the deep heartsblood stain it strikes from the soft weaving of the two entwined stems.

They are arresting. Enthralling. Heartbreaking. Resplendent.

And I will stare at them a few seconds too long before snapping to myself. Before making myself leave. Before parking and walking slowly towards the rest of a day that’s been rearranged by a lustrous dark beauty.

Before wondering what it is in contrast, chiaroscuro—darker shades of shadow—that lets me see more clearly.

______________________________________________

[For my friend Andrea, a woman who brightens all around her.]

Thank you, Mom.

2011-06-10T00:35:00.000-07:00

[Below is the present I gave my mother for this Mother's Day. She gave me her permission to republish it.]

___________________

My mother made me who I am.

She knows that, of course. But in everyone's heart there lie things which we think and know about those we love—think and know and never utter. And all too often, those things are the qualities we think best. The things we hold closest and tightest, and therefore most secret.

We know that we should tell the ones we love. And we will—someday.

But we remain silent until someday is past, and we are left with a pale cold recounting to those who will never be able to experience the things we treasure.

It is not given to any of us to know whether or not we will be here tomorrow, or the next day, or the next—or whether our loved ones will be. And so on this Mother's Day I wish to tell my mother what I really and truly think of her. How I would describe her to someone who lived on the moon, or one of the planets which circle the star Gliese—someone who could never meet her.

I would tell the strangers that she is flawed, and human. That her failings aggravate and frustrate and occasionally anger me.

And that even in that she is exceptional. Exceptional, unique, singular—for the fact that she can have such flaws and failings and yet manifest virtues that eclipse them as surely and vividly as the sun would the moon. In terms of luminosity, in absolute magnitude, she shines so very brightly.

And that her virtues—those of selflessness and humor and compassion and fierce protectiveness—are acted out on a plane that removes them from the ordinary human sphere. Enacted in ways large and small during every minute of every day.

I would tell them that it is easy to be dazzled by large, florid gestures; by conspicuously manifested intellect; by words prettily and loudly spoken. That it is easy to overlook the stunning, overwhelming sum of luminance shed by a person whose every simple gesture, whose enormous intellect, whose softly spoken words, are directed almost totally towards the betterment of those overlooked or shunned or scorned or forgotten.

That such lights shine in dark and light; but their absolute magnitude is misjudged by those blinded by brief flamboyant things.

That she taught me that we are responsible for each other by being responsible for those around her to a depth and extent that still confound me. That when others, even others whose beliefs I share, speak disparagingly of goodwill, of the power of small individual actions to shift the levers of the earth, she is at the forefront of my empirical evidence to the contrary.

I would tell the strangers that she is astonishing not only for the incredible consistency of her compassion, but for the fact that she has maintained it through enormous personal cost. That her kindness and empathy and idealism have survived intact through pain and despair and the kind of vicious, staggering blows that fate seems to strike against only the most shining of talents and spirits.

That when I think of her, and of her life, I am awed.

And humbled. And moved almost beyond bearing.

And proud—so very proud—to be her daughter.

And so afraid that I will never—can never—live up to all she has given me and all that she is.

And convinced that it is worth everything in me—every good thing she saw and named and nurtured through the long, long years in which she raised me—to try.

Thank you, Mom.

Happy Mother's Day.

Unvergänglich Geliebten [Immortal Beloved]

2011-06-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

[Notes made on the program during intermissions in Herr Professor Stephan Möller’s concert this past Tuesday night.]

______________________________________________________________________

Over & under Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor, for Piano—called 'Moonlight'

I don't know why they chose to say “Moonlight” of this single one. All his work is moonlight; moonlight over dark, swift water.

Did the girl with whom he was in love hear this? Did her bones melt for him, liquefy and weave with the music he called forth and threaded with his longing, with her beauty? Or did she listen, and smile, and leave the tempest as untouched as she'd come?

Through Sonata No. 31 in A flat major, for Piano

Why is this not named?

Then again, what does one call a cry of pain and despair that holds radiance as a blackened chalice holds pure water?

Ad astra per aspera indeed, Herr Professor; through the thorns to the stars. But light cannot be unwoven from darkness. And some thorns leave wounds that can bloody even the light of the stars.

And after what star would one name this? No Latin, English, Greek word shines warmly enough, though the Persians have a name which might not disgrace such luminous suffering: Anwar i-Suhaili, Light of the Brightest of Stars.

How does a man craft such music from a ringing prison of silence?

How does he mix with a cry from the abyss the incandescence he can no longer see?

Fire Next Time

2011-06-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

Note: This is another one of those "intensely personal" posts; only those tagged to it can see it.

____________________________________________________________________

Extreme physical sensation has a useful side effect: it is very difficult to feel intense emotion whilst experiencing/enduring it. (Difficult, but not impossible. It generally takes effort and practice, however.) Usually emotions come before and after the physical sensation—hurt, longing, fear, attachment. (Which is why some very odd emotional phenomena can occur at extremes of sensation. Given an overload of the occurrence with the right personality and circumstance, both orgasm and torture can scramble emotional circuitry—a bit of advanced Abnormal Psych for your delectation.)

I know all this because I think. A lot.

The very first person who ever told me I thought too much was Mrs. Ralston. She was my 3rd-grade teacher. I've been hearing a Greek bloody chorus of the same refrain ever since.

To no avail. I like thinking. There are certain things about myself that I can't change, but I don't think that's one of them. If it were, I wouldn't know such a myriad of ways to turn my brain off. I also wouldn't avoid the more common means of doing so (TV, computer games) so devotedly.

My disclaimers having been issued, there are times that thinking grows too painful—even for me.

This weekend is one of them. And this weekend wouldn't be so bad if the 365 days that preceded it hadn't been... somewhat stressful.

(Those who don't wish to read a canticle—literally—of my woes in the past year should avert your eyes now.)

So I heard the searing crash outside my window just as I finished typing my last Note, with all its reflection on a set of vulnerabilities I can no longer display.

I needed to feel something on my skin. Something shocking. Something overwhelming.

A thunderstorm would do the trick nicely.

So I walked out into one.

Stood in the darkness of the drive, at the blind side of the building (so as not to disturb my neighbors' sleep or sensibilities). Turned my face up to the sky.

Let the noise and darkness and the rush of cold—water and wind and thunder that sounded both threatening and forlorn, lonely somehow—wash me.

Rain is primal, rainstorms more so: power that cannot be leashed or governed or lessened by any human agency imagined or contrived.

It is important to remember the existence of such. Humbling. And...reassuring.

Storms put things like suffering, grief, anxiety, loneliness, despair, back into their very small, very human places against the larger span of the earth.

So I stood and breathed in cold and a little water. Felt it sheeting liquid down my skin.

Tasted it—slightly sour, slightly metallic—on my tongue and lips every now and again.

Felt it sting my eyes, gather against my lashes. Blinked it away to be able to see—to keep looking at the sky.

Didn't move or make any sound—why try to form words when they were what I was trying to forget? (Ideas, images, memories—almost all ride a tide of words for me, sooner or later.)

Eventually the storm did too.

A tide I didn't summon. A tide I was trying to forget. Words that tied themselves to others I've known, others I've sung.

A tide made of song and suffering and James Baldwin and lightning and

[It's gonna rain]

sicksicksick

[It's gonna rain]

repeatyouryear

[You better get ready]

can'tfightlikethis

[And bear this in mind]

don'twantaheart

[God showed Noah]

can'tcan'tcan'tbegone

[By the rainbow sign]

don'ttrustyou

[No more water—]

passthisorelse

[Fire next time.]

Vulnerability: Freedom, Friendship, Fred Phelps, & Me

2011-03-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

For two very different reasons, freedom of speech has been on my mind a lot lately.

The first is that my only study break between Monday and yesterday was to read the Court's Snyder v. Phelps opinions (and bang out an abstract so I could write an essay after the SSB final) over a 20-minute dinner break (before returning to drilling cord lesions—woohoo!).

The second is that yesterday night I got my feelings hurt—really, really hurt—by a comment about me that a friend posted (without my name) on FB.

Here's the abstract:

________________________

I am a terrible, terrible person.

Because I hate—really and actively hate—Fred Phelps, one of the most viciously inhumane, destructively cruel human beings I’ve come across in years of studying torture and genocide. The fact that his methods are verbal doesn’t make the atrocities he commits any less atrocious.

And because, even though I hate Fred Phelps, I agree with the Court’s decision.

What kind of person does that make me? To put human feelings and suffering aside for an abstract principle embodied in a case which almost certainly, in this case, violated at least some of the boundaries established by precedent?

I feel guilty. As though I should apologize to Mr. Snyder. Maybe I should.

I can’t stand myself right now. To stand on the same side of a line with Fred Phelps and Westboro Baptist? I despise them and everything they represent. If tomorrow I read that Phelps had died, it’d make my entire day.

But I still agree with the Court.

There are times I find it hard to reconcile my sense of integrity with my humanity. This is one of them.

____________________________

Ironic, in light of what's happened.

Because last night for several reasons I was—as Alito described in the dissent with which I disagree—in “a time of acute emotional vulnerability.” And because of that vulnerability, I got upset enough by my friend's public statement to have to leave a restaurant at which I was dining with several people (an event unprecedented in the past 10-15 years; melodramatically as I may converse, I loathe even the vaguest hint of actual public histrionics) lest I start bawling over the entire matter (crying in public—“death of Bambi's mother” movie moments aside—being the single thing I detest more than public drama).

My friend and I discussed the matter briefly before I left, and I told him—probably prompted in part by the abstract I'd written just the day before—that he shouldn't have to apologize for expressing his opinion, that that wasn't what friendship was supposed to be about.

I came home and slept. Woke late this morning. Didn't get on FB till early evening.

Found that the words which had upset me so badly last night were still posted.

Felt as though I'd been kicked in the stomach.

(Yes, I actually do know how that feels.)

So on top of being inhumane, I'm now a hypocrite.

Because if I'd meant the words I said to my friend last night—and I really and truly did think I meant them when I said them—I wouldn't now be convinced, against my own logic, that my feelings aren't as important to my friend as his opinion of them. Instead I would see that he chose to let his opinion stand, as is his right. That he was merely taking me at my word—as I fully intended him to do when I spoke those words to him. That he shouldn't have to choose between my feelings and his opinion of me.

How tangled up in her ethics does a person have to be in order for her own hurt feelings to offend them?

Whatever level of twistedness is required, I've reached it. (No wonder my other hobbies include quantum chromodynamics. That stuff is so much simpler.)

“...Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech...to ensure that we do not stifle public debate...”

Chief Justice Roberts, delivering the opinion of the Court: Snyder v. Phelps, 580 F. 3d 206, affirmed.

Ton Amour et Ta Revanche

2011-03-04T22:08:00.000-08:00

Written Monday, February 21, 2011.

________________________

It's strange to start an essay on Madonna and Lady Gaga with Christina Aguilera, yes?

But watching “I'm Not Myself Tonight” on YouTube (and seeing inane commentary to the effect that she's “wack fr tryin 2 b Gaga”) finally pushed me into writing something that's been simmering in my brain since the day I saw Gaga's “Bad Romance” video for the first time.

Xtina was merely showing the most sense God's given a diva in a long damn time. (Not to mention great taste in bondage gear—black and white rhinestone chains, no less. Very “Azzaro's Spring Collection Meets Coco de Mer's Paul Seville Collection”...but don't those chafe?) The entire video is a tribute to video vixedivas of yore—and Gaga and Madonna are unmistakably, god-how-dumb-are-you-not-to-see-this, front and center (filtered through Xtina's adorably skanky performance, of course).

As well they should be. Between the two of them Gaga and Madonna have designed some of the best music videos ever created, and between their deeply differing aesthetics and remarkable musical talents they've managed to push three generations far past their visual and psychological comfort zones while staying smack in the center of the musical mainstream. Not bad for two bleach-blonde pop stars.

Gaga is indeed the Heir Apparent to Our Lady (rarely has a baptismal name been so appropriate). Madonna, being the most successful female recording artist of all time, is the standard by which success is measured for all female pop artists, and so Gaga’s been compared to Madonna for several years now.

There've been others who aspired to the title of Heir to Our Lady of the Garter (Britney most openly, or perhaps only most pathetically). But two things have always stopped the starlets: the first is the nature of their attempts at heirdom (imitation does not, after all, a Blazing Original make), the second their exclusionary approach to visual and musical artistry.

That kind of exclusion is utterly incompatible with either the personas or the music of Gaga and Madonna. A hallmark of both women’s performances is that it's impossible to draw a meaningful distinction between visual presentation and musical substance when watching them—and it’s that lack of boundary between the auditory and visual aspects of their art that helps set both women apart from those aspiring to heirdom. The marriage of visual to auditory art is at the center of both Madonna’s and Gaga’s musicality.

Hollywood’s never been known for economy of scale; its record companies know how to put on a show on behalf of any number of stars. But Gaga and Madonna have something different than the general run of flash and spark that passes for “image-building” amongst musical stars: a unique and constant self-reinvention resulting not only from their incredibly strong grasp of the word spectacle (and hence spectacular), but more importantly from genuine and highly individualistic visual aesthetics.

Madonna modeled for Basquiat at the start of her career; Gaga created her own production company from the band of visual artists and designers she befriended while living in New York. Because both are musicians, their personal visual aesthetics are filtered through the lens of their music...but neither woman relies on her music to justify her aesthetic. Visual and auditory aesthetics are, for both, part of a larger identity as an artist—a whole which neither feels a need to define or divide.

Because of that holistic approach—and their enormous talent as visual as well as musical artists—both Madonna and Gaga have created visual art (spectacle) which can stand independently of their music, art that is both visually overwhelming while remaining (you'll pardon the pun) in concert with the feel of the song for which it's created. Other musicians pawn off this aspect of their image or artform onto producers and stage directors; their visual and musical representations aren’t different faces of the same polished structure but a piecemeal, jagged collage. The difference, literally, shows.

Madonna's Fritz-Lang-inspired “Express Yourself” video is a case in point. No-one else would have conceived the visual interpretation of a song about female empowerment in sex and romance as an erotic reinterpretation of 1920's German expressionist anti-capitalism cinema. With a cat.

She wrote the script. Chose the costumes. Chose the cat. Oversaw the set. In other words, Madonna ran the show—the director took her lead on nearly everything, wise man that he is. (His name? David Fincher. Yeah—that Fincher.)

Gaga's artistic vision is, if possible, even more exacting. Her “Haus of Gaga” is a group of artists she chose and nurtured herself; her creative control over every aspect of her production is as near absolute as a group of artists working collaboratively allows. Her visuals are both rendered and timed with enviable rigor—her most distinctive video, “Bad Romance” (a tale of kidnapping and prostitution at the hands of the Russian mob) contains sequences designed to be spliced to millisecond precision (the less-than-a-second series of gestures she makes about 2 ½ minutes into the song is both meticulous and potent).

So. Visual artistry and creative control are the first area in which Gaga—and no other female pop artist—is Madonna's equal.

The second thing, the one that makes Gaga the true Heir to Our Lady, is the (pardon the buzzword) transgressiveness of her persona.

Many, many female artists transgress boundaries. (Most good art, in fact, does.) But all the Heir-Aspirants to Madonna attempted to transgress the same boundaries that Madonna did—boundaries she'd already trampled so thoroughly that her followers' attempts were meaningless.

Madonna's persona was original in the world of pop music. One does not become heir to the truly original—whether persona or idea—by imitation.

And Madonna personified Sex.

Sex in all its forms. Open, covert, digressive, transgressive—Madonna was the first female pop artist who flaunted her sexuality openly regardless of criticism or consequence. Desire, power, the language of deviance—she took them all on, subverted both the imago and imagery of sex for nearly three decades. (It still astonishes me that anyone mentions Britney or Xtina in the same breath as Madonna. “I'm a Slave 4 U” or “Dirrty” versus “Justify My Love”: the latter visually and lyrically redefining gender roles and acceptable sexual norms; both of the former individual statements of sexuality. Not transgressive—or even relevant on a larger scale.)

So. Madonna = Sex.

And in a time where openness about one's sexuality adulterated that which made one a desirable woman—violated the idea of female sexuality—being openly sexually desirable and openly sexually voracious made Madonna the Transgressor.

And now? Post-Madonna? In a world where female pop stars appear sexually voracious as a baseline—in an attempt to establish sexuality? Now we have Gaga.

And Gaga = Fear.

Oh, the sex is in there. No question. Gaga is as or more sexually brash than other Heirs-Aspirant (check the bench scenario in the “Lovegame” video in the unlikely event that you need confirmation of this). But the thing which sets her apart is a sensibility that is both obvious and coequal to sex in her visuals: a fascination with the grim and grotesque. That fascination lends a razor edge, a subtle and vicious backhand, to most of her sexuality. Her sex appeal almost always contains a taunt, a threat, a grimace.

Gaga's persona, and her biggest transgression, is based on fear—of the threat of violence, of the grotesque, of the monstrous—and its disturbing mixture with sex.

“Paparazzi”, “Telephone”, and “Bad Romance” are the videos which display her fascination with fear most clearly. It's a toss-up as to whether her Mickey-Mouse makeup as she murders her boyfriend, her dance in the middle of a diner full of corpses, or the hat fashioned from a dead, fanged piglet is the most telling of her visual grotequeries thus far; but the touches are there in nearly everything she's done. The performance of "Paparazzi" in which she ended up on a meathook. The Grammy performance of “Born This Way” in which she's visibly deformed (this is actually a theme in several of her videos, including “Bad Romance”).

Madonna transgressed societal boundaries with sex. Gaga transgresses psychological boundaries with the interplay between sex and fear. (Or sex and death.)

Madonna and Lady Gaga. Both mega-stars. Both brilliant visual and musical artists. Both transgressive.

One aggressively sexual. The other sexually grotesque.

Both captivating. Both seductive.

Like Love. Like Revenge.

[Who looks inside, awakens:] Wind and Rain

2011-03-04T22:04:00.000-08:00

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.

-Carl Jung

_____________________________________

My dreams this morning were--perhaps predictably--horrific.

The one-month anniversary, added to a late-night notice of my sibling having had a car wreck, combined with the upcoming neurology exam to produce a long dream about me having developed a (hopefully imaginary) form of cancer that caused systemic arteriovenous fistulas. Despite me waking myself from it several times, the dream--set in the grim green basement corridor of some dark, dreary building in which I was administered bouts of radiation therapy which left me writhing in pain and vomiting behind the rusting metal fire doors on the climb out, while my stricken mother looked on helplessly--would not let me escape. I endured it until I staggered shaking into my kitchen this morning.

Time was when I'd have set the whole thing to paper. Time was, not so very long ago. But time moves on, and people go to medical school, and nowadays my dreams stay in my head.

But I was reading through my dream journal with this morning's coffee, trying for perspective, and came across one that I set to paper three or four years ago. One that was somewhat frightening in the beginning, but gentled towards the end, and beautiful, start to finish. Its memory gave me comfort.

So I decided to share it. I hope that it adds something good to your day. (Note that the "you" I address is a person years in my past, with whom I'm not even "friends" on Facebook.)

_______________________________________

Wind and Rain

I kneel in the middle of a wide lawn stretching to the edges of the marble paths which enclose it on all four sides, a square of living green bounded by the still cold white of the stones.

I am in the center alone, my hair unbound, falling down my back and across my white shift, blowing across my face in the rising wind. Above me the sky seethes, the roiling, predacious darkened grey moving swiftly over my head in a flight from the larger teeth of the storm stalking behind it.

The wind quickens, and now the paths are crowded with people, speaking to each other as they walk two by two along the dully glinting marble. None look at each other, none raise their voices above a murmur. None tread on even a single inch of the greensward.

I watch them, their measured steps and mellifluous murmurs forming a soothing pattern which underpins the thrumming rush of the wind, rising now as if in counterpoint to the rich susurrus beneath. The gale is whistling now: a high, rising whine which whips my hair aloft like a banner, stinging my eyes and flailing my skin, though the perfect silken green beneath my knees bends not so much as a single blade. The clothing of those on the paths around me is untouched.

I look up at the sky, and the black, ravening mouth of the storm is raging down upon me, the roar of the water growing as the drops fall nearer and nearer.

And then it is upon me, and as the raindrops hit the people on the paths they waver, like a refraction when some shadow passes through it, each globe interrupting my line of vision until the people still walking along the paths are nothing more than a flickering suggestion, flashing hints glimmering above the white marble like errant rainbows and nothing more.

When first it comes it is as though I have never seen lightening before, a tearing stutter of light that seems to have ripped through into some radiantly pitiless sun, and in a white-blind world I hear the pursuing thunder, howling into the backflash: a deafening, abyssal scream that shakes my body from top to bottom.

When I can see again, you are there.

My ears still resounding to the knell of the thunder, I blink across at you standing on the far side of the path, facing me. The faint, iridescent glint of the others on the walkway fade as they pass before you, and resume on the other side; the rain still falls in a shrieking torrent. I can see you, can see your lips moving.

But I can’t hear you.

You step onto the path, easily, as though it were no barrier, and instantly the glints of movement on it fade to stillness. You and I and the storm are abruptly alone.

Then you step onto the grass of the square. You stand there, on the near edge of the virid green, and the raindrops threshing against me lighten, strumming more kindly on my scoured skin.

You walk towards me, and at your every step the rain lightens, dropping with an ever-gentling touch until, when you stand five paces away, it is the merest suggestion of a fine mist clinging to my lashes. I look up at you in the increasing light, and my ears pick up a scant whisper of human tones as you smile at me.

It might be my name.