God shattering star.

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macbeth related posts/articles/essays masterlist

hi! here's a list of almost every single anaysis Thing I've come across in like two months of being insane about the scottish play. Most are about lady macbeth/the gender theme btw.

‘He has no children’: The centring of grief in The Show Must Go Online’s Macbeth - Gemma Allred: on the misogyny that frequently surrounds conversations around Lady Macbeth

this post by @amillionmillionvoices: Same topic as the previous one, but goes more in depth, explains ladymac’s motivations as mostly coming from love not self-serving ambition.

this post by @dukeofbookingham: also explains the prior point very prettily— that ladymac is (mostly) motivated by love, but also makes the case that many of it is guilt born from not fulfilling societal expectations

On the character of Lady Macbeth - Dr. Emil Pfundheler: paper that explains the same point made in the previous post, using the text to explain. Written in 1873 so explains gender as a dichotomy, but once you take that out, its points are very good.

Characteristics of women: moral, political, and historical - Anna Jameson: aka Why Lady Macbeth is not inherently evil— same topic and the other two, but focuses a bit on the fact that she is A Woman. Not my favorite, but worth reading I suppose. Also includes analyses of many female Shakespeare characters. It does include some very bad history in the beginning— Gruoch did not orchestrate Duncan’s murder. That’s something Hector Boece made up.

Lady Macbeth: “Infirm of purpose” (from The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare) - Joan Larsen Klein: on how she both fits and doesn’t fit the idea of a reinassance wife— doesn’t fit because she isn’t aligned to god (this read more like a Christian analysis than a feminist one if I’m being honest), but fits them because she behaves like one, only subverts them because she’s like, the evil murder girl version of the Wife. The essay right after this one is also very good.

The Hysteria of Lady Macbeth: required reading if you wanna play her Btw not kidding. Analyzes her character thru the lens of freudian psychology. Screws up the text of the play a bit but provides an actual in-depth explanation of how sonnambulism works. Note that "hysteria" is not a current psychological diagnosis, but a symptom of other conditions. Still extremely interesting.

The Macbeths - G. K. Chesterton: analysis of their relationship, makes some interesting point on the differences of the nature of their ambition and desire to kill the king

Shakespeare’s tragic frontier; the world of his final tragedies - Willard Farnham: this one is long but oh boy does it go deep. Talks about the lore of the witches, explains historical context to find out how the real events were so screwed up, makes an interesting point about Macbeth’s conscience against Lady Macbeth’s, and lastly talks about the tragic world of Macbeth compared to other tragedies.

Women’s fantasy of manhood: a Shakespearean theme - D. W. Harding: exactly what it says on the tin, using ladymac and her skewed (and I’d call romanticized) idea of what a man is that she pushes on Macbeth. So yeah, talks about the gender theme. Also talks about Goneril from Lear, Cleopatra, and Volumnia from Coriolanus and how they fit the theme— although ladymac is the only one who goes downhill from it.

Unnatural women in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth - Elizabeth Klett: I’ll be honest I didn’t love this one a lot. Basically talks about how every woman in Macbeth defies gender roles. Doesn’t go too deep however. But the book has a ton of essays analyzing female characters in classic lit.

A serious post,

Today is the fifth anniversary of my son's death. His name was Wilson, after my favorite character on House M.D. He was only three years old, and had just recently celebrated his birthday. I will not disclose his cause of death, as the memories are much too painful. The grief doula I visit is helping me to unpack them, as I have locked many of the memories behind painful walls. Kinning Lee, and moderating this blog, brings me comfort. I know that if my son were to have lived longer than those short, few, precious years, he, too, would have become a blogger, just like his father. Maybe he would have taken over this blog as I became older and infirm. I would appreciate kindness, patience, and messages of love at this time. I miss Wilson every day of my life, and gravely regret all of the ways in which I failed him as a parent. Thank you, - Mod Lee “Man always thinks about the past before he dies, as if he were frantically searching for proof that he truly lived.” – Cowboy Bebop

excised from year-end post for reasons of: incorrect tone

damn, I am... surprised and dismayed at how much I miss my grandmother.

I knew I would never see her again, probably never hear from her again. I spent the past few years writing letters that I was told she enjoyed reading; she was too ill to write back. it was difficult to know what to write about; work, and carefully edited book reviews, and small anecdotes that required no context.

still miss her.

it's been seven years since I moved down south. it's been longer than that since I last was at her house. it's been a decade or more since I last felt that her house was a safe still point in the world, a point that would welcome me no matter what. (how spoilt, to have had that in the first place, to act like losing it was anything more than returning to most people's baseline.)

still miss her.

she was ninety-one. she never had time for weakness or infirmity. she was tired and old and missing her husband of sixty-plus years. her death was a relief for everyone, giving them a much more complicated grief experience than I could ever claim to have.

still--

two of my younger cousins wrote to me - we were supposed to be like siblings, I was supposed to look after them, and instead I left - to tell me that she was proud of me, and it made me so angry that it took me weeks longer to write back. not at them - how kind of them; they shouldn't have had to take up my slack - but at - I don't know. at the universe. at myself. what would she be proud of? this strange grandchild who left? maybe one day I will build a self I can be proud of, but she will never see it.

it's not grief like a seven-year-old crying for their other grandmother. I don't cry much anymore, and I'm too tired to consistently have emotions much of the time. everyone else who grieves her has much sharper edges of grief, much more of a tangle of memory and experience. I just have a directionless ache flavoured with anger. it's nothing. we move on. it's nothing.

I went back for her funeral and, film-like, the vicar's beard was greying. his youngest son is my age; we grew up in parallel. I walked past her house, sold now to other people. this is not my grief. this is not my grief. I left over a decade ago. I have no claim to this. there was never any way back for me.

her birthday was the day before mine. the digits of our ages always added up to the same total. she called her study her scriptorium. she went to morning prayer at the church every morning - just her and the vicar - and when I was there I would go too. she drank tea constantly; I remember the precise amount of sugar. there were raspberry canes at the bottom of her garden; in good years she'd pick over a hundred pounds and make jam with them. you count them as you pick: 28 to an ounce; they weigh about a gram each.

I've been thinking about context recently. when I left part of what scared me is that all of my eighteen years of life were now mostly irrelevant. no one could know me as well as everyone I'd left behind. eighteen years of context! contrasted to this flat, one-dimensional new person I was building as I went.

but these days it's less oppressive. I have a decade or more of context with some friends; talking and talking and experiencing. some friends come into my life and reawaken bits of my past: an old songwriter duo whose lyrics I memorised long ago, the right way to make gravy or store eggs. old knowledge becomes relevant again. old jokes become relevant again.

one day, perhaps, I'll make raspberry jam with raspberries I've grown. one day I'll be around cats more regularly - she always had cats; I miss them. context is lost and reborn and cyclical. she always hosted Christmas meals for as many people as possible; this year her table sat in my flat with eight people gathered round it. it goes around.

I posted 1,560 times in 2022

74 posts created (5%)

1,486 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@themojaveexpress

@evacuate-the-mojave

@rocket-69

@calder

@thespiral

I tagged 1,559 of my posts in 2022

#queue - 1,526 posts

#fallout new vegas - 852 posts

#fallout 4 - 337 posts

#courier 6 - 205 posts

#fallout 3 - 122 posts

#benny gecko - 115 posts

#fallout - 89 posts

#fallout 76 - 78 posts

#wasteland fauna - 74 posts

#arcade gannon - 73 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#its bc they see benny as an impediment to them taking over nv themselves or letting house/caesar do it. he doesn't factor into their plans a

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how cruel the depiction of the Sanctuary survivors is, in it’s incredible shallowness. They’re little more than caricatures, and what they reveal about the devs is ugly and mean.

Take the Longs, a grieving couple who recently lost a kid (I don’t know if there’s an exact date given, but it happens within the calendar year and is implied to have happened a month beforehand). They are heartbroken, and in turn, Jun retreats and becomes melancholy and Marcy hardens and becomes bitter. That is … pretty much the extent of their emotional journey. The most emotionally complex moment they share is when Marcy snaps at Jun and apologizes, but that’s it. They can find no solace in the community, or each other. There is no option to empathize with them after the loss of your own child, aside from a “hey, I’m looking for my kid, hope I find him.” There only respite is based on you, the player, improving the settlement they live in, and even then, it only slightly improves their mood. What does that say about grief, loss, parenthood? What does that say about people who have lost everything?

Mama Murphy is the closet thing Sanctuary has to an elder, a mystic, someone with a powerful gift. In a cruel twist, however, the Sight can only be unlocked through the use of Psycho, a powerful drug implied to be similar to heroin, and as a result, most of her visions are dismissed as the ravings of a lunatic - even as she is proven to be correct. She is old and frail, and thus not much help doing manual labor, but if you allow her to do the thing she is good at, she will inevitably die as a result. What does this say about the infirm and disabled, about spirituality, about drug users and addicts? What does this say about people who cannot give their bodies?

Preston led the survivors from Quincy to Sanctuary, and suffers intense depression and survivor’s guilt as a result. He admits to the sole survivor that he is depressed, and often hoped that something would take him out and give him peace. The only way to “cure” him of this is to tear him away from the community he has built and take him on further escapades around the Commonwealth, putting him in further harms way while he leaves behind the very people he pledged to protect. What does this say about depression, suicidal ideation, and the strength of community? What does this say about a person who believes he does not deserve to survive?

466 notes - Posted April 5, 2022

#4

Fallout DLCs love when something is fucked up and wrong about the air, and also perhaps when there is a toxic slutch

504 notes - Posted October 26, 2022

#3

In my mind the Followers/Khans split has to be more complex than just “they literally would not stop making drugs so we skedaddled” I refuse to believe that

522 notes - Posted February 10, 2022

#2

558 notes - Posted November 14, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I am of the belief that vault dwellers should be just a little fucked up. You simply cannot grow up not knowing about the sky and be otherwise indistinguishable from a normal person

2,298 notes - Posted January 26, 2022

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Crush These 5 Demonic Lies that Sabotage Your Healing!

You might be thinking to yourself, I agree that with God all things are possible, but I’m not there.

And the way things are going, I don’t know if I ever will arrive to that level of faith. It’s been one attack after another, and I can’t seem to rise above it all. If this is you, it could be that your body is being buffeted by demons as the apostle Paul was, but you have not activated your faith for supernatural healing that flows from the throne of grace. You may be confused by false doctrine from the religious sector that accuses God of putting sickness on Paul, such as blindness, and that he endured with joy over this God-given thorn in the flesh against his body. Let’s bring correction to this false teaching so that you can be free from the ill effects of it.

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong (2 Corinthians 12:7-10 KJV).

This portion of Scripture is talking about protecting Paul from becoming prideful and is not about God plaguing him with sickness or withholding healing from him as he begs God to take the thorn away from him. The “thorn in the flesh” is not sickness and disease such as blindness or any other type of eye disease, but a demon who buffets him—attacks Paul with one attack after another.

Many of God’s people believe that He has given them a thorn in the flesh—by which they mean an illness intended to teach them a spiritual lesson in patience and endurance and to draw them closer to God. This is a lie from the devil himself. And this type of belief turns many away from God. They blame Him for the devil’s work. It misconstrues their conception of Almighty God as one who does not care but is cruel and harsh and on the lookout for an opportunity to punish His people. In fact, with the payment of His blood Jesus purchased our healing for us at the whipping post.

But [in fact] He has borne our griefs, and He has carried our sorrows and pains; yet we [ignorantly] assumed that He was stricken, struck down by God and degraded and humiliated [by Him]. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was crushed for our wickedness [our sin, our injustice, our wrongdoing]; the punishment [required] for our well-being fell on Him, and by His stripes (wounds) we are healed (Isaiah 53:4-5 AMP).

Biblical Facts from Isaiah 53:4-5

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Jesus bore our griefs. This word griefs means sickness (Strong’s H2483). And what did He do with our sicknesses at Calvary? He bore them. This means our Lord carried them for us (Strong’s H5375).

This foundational portion of Scripture continues to explain what the Lord did for us. It says that He carried our sorrows, or He bore them for us on His back. And just what are those sorrows? Physical and mental pain (Strong’s H4341).

It goes on to say that we esteem or judge Him (Strong’s H2803) stricken, plagued (Strong’s H5060), smitten, slaughtered (Strong’s H5221) by God. Because Jesus was wounded, defiled (Strong’s H2490) for our transgressions—our rebellion (Strong’s H6588). He was bruised, crushed (Strong’s H1792) for our iniquities, our perversity, our sin (Strong’s H5771).

The chastisement, discipline, or correction (Strong’s H4148) for our peace, our welfare, health, and prosperity (Strong’s H7965) was upon Him. And by His stripes, bruises, and wounds (Strong’s H2250) we are healed, cured, and made whole (Strong’s H7495).

(These definitions are taken from the chart on pages 37-38 in Chapter 3, “The Power of the Blood,” from my book The Healing Creed. We will refer to this chart and the meaning of these powerful verses throughout this work.)

He Understands the Frailty of Humanness

Our Lord understands the frailty of our humanness. Remember, He chose to leave His God-powers in heaven and walk this earth in human form and, like us, face the same temptations and hardships and make the same type of daily decisions we face today: “Do I believe that with God this seemingly impossible situation can turn around? Do I deny this great healing power and cling to my human reasoning of unbelief?” Thanks be to God, He did not dwell on the impossibility of the situation but moved forward with great faith in a great God who empowers all who believe with healing power.

For we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize and understand our weaknesses and temptations, but One who has been tempted [knowing exactly how it feels to be human] in every respect as we are, yet without [committing any] sin (Hebrews 4:15 AMP).

What a privilege it is to serve the living God who has experiential knowledge of the weakness that we face at times. The apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:10 (NKJV), “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” While this man of faith was under great tribulation in his new life in Christ, he still was able to remain strong in the faith knowing no matter how the enemy came after him, his faith was not in himself but in Christ. This is where our strength to overcome the tribulations of this life comes from—even the power to walk in victory over that temptation of doubt and unbelief concerning healing of that disease.

Urgent Plea for Help to Believe

The people of this earth are in turmoil; so much has happened and continues to happen around us. It’s been one crisis after another with- out time to process, rest, and regain their strength. People are crying, weeping for the loss of what once was, what they once had, and more importantly, for the people they have lost. The pileup of grievous events has caused many to grow too weak in the faith to believe the promises found in God’s Word.

I receive many prayer requests, and this one arrives today: “Please pray that I may have the strength to believe God’s Word once again. I’m tired of wallowing in unbelief and doubt, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to believe what I read.” As I read this, I can’t help but think this is someone who has been beaten down by the enemy, the devil, and they are worn down and need a refreshing. This plea for spiritual help is not rare, but now common. If you are in this situation, I want to share with you what I share with this individual.

I’m not sure all that has happened to you, nor do I need to know, but I do know this: that the Lord will hear when you cry out to Him. He loves you with an everlasting love, and when you feel weak, He remains strong. I pray for you, for a renewal in your relationship with Jesus—that you will hunger and thirst for righteousness. As you read the Bible again, you will remember to ask Holy Spirit to lead you through the Scriptures, and you will learn to allow Him to speak to you, teach you, lead you and guide you, and comfort you. Knowing that you are unique (Psalm 139:13), you are precious (1 Corinthians 6:20), you are lovely (Daniel 12:3), and you are special to Him too (Ephesians 2:10). With a sincere heart, ask Him right now to help you through this dry season in your life, and for Holy Spirit to refresh you and bring joy back between the two of you.

Let’s pray about this right now. Father God,

In the name of Your precious Son, Jesus, I ask for Your forgiveness for waiting so long before reaching out for help. I don’t know exactly when things started to go sour between us, but I know that our relationship is not what it once was. I desire our relationship to be healed and strengthened. Holy Spirit, lead me back to my Lord. Help me to fall back into love with You.

Holy Spirit, lead me and guide me as I read the Word. Help me to see the truth and the reality that is penned within the pages of the Holy Bible. I long to see and to understand and to walk in the power of Your Word, in Your most holy name, I pray, amen.

I believe as you continue to call out to the Lord with an honest plea about what’s going on inside your soul, that barrier between you and God will start to come down, and that urgent cry for help to believe again will be answered. With time spent in prayer and in the Word, your faith will be strengthened once again.

Taste the Goodness of the Lord

You may have had a taste of religion, which has a foul flavor mixed with a bit of spiritual sugar, such as, “God is good, He loves you, but He’s testing your faithfulness with that cancerous tumor.” You see what I mean? It leaves a bitter aftertaste in the mouth. It’s time to spit that out and get a real taste of the goodness of God, who has good things in store for you and truly desires to fellowship with you.

David prays this encouraging verse found in Psalm 34:8 (AMP), “O taste and see that the Lord [our God] is good; how blessed [fortunate, prosperous, and favored by God] is the man who takes refuge in Him.” We are to perceive—become aware of by personal experience—the goodness of God so that we can come to believe that His nature is good, and He only has our best interests in mind.

The prophet Nahum, in the book named after him found in the Old Testament, writes this about God’s character during a time of great tribulation for his nation, while they were being ruled by an evil king: “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows those who take refuge in Him” (Nahum 1:7 NASB). This word stronghold in Strong’s Concordance means a place of safety, protection and refuge (Strong’s H4581). The goodness of God provides these things for us, and in His presence is where we find His protection.

Psalm 84 is a beautiful psalm about the goodness and faithfulness of God. In verse 11 it says, “For the Lord God is our sun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory. The Lord will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right” (Psalm 84:11 NLT). The author of this psalm speaks of the good things, the blessings of God that He gifts to those who enter the presence of God. He knows them, and He showers them with the necessities of life. Perhaps as you read this, you yourself are in great need for healing. Enter His presence with a heart of worship, be thankful for who He is, and allow Him to supply the need that you have.

Five Dangerous Lies People Are Taught to Believe

As you can tell, I am not a fan of religion, and quite frankly neither was Jesus. I have heard people share the most devastating lies that they were told by people who claim to be Christians and say they know the Word of God but spread the most outlandish lies to hurt people. I’m going to share a list of common lies that I hear from people needing a healing touch from the Lord.

Because you are sick, you must have done something wicked.

Just because someone is very sick does not mean they have done something wicked. Yes, sin does open the door to the enemy’s attack, but oftentimes these attacks of sickness come because we live in a fallen world. Jesus lets us know in John 16:33 (NKJV), “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” When He says that you will have tribulation, He means you will have difficult times. Not because God has designed your journey on this earth to be filled with bad things, but because you have an enemy, satan, who is bent upon your destruction. Jesus says this about the devil in John 10:10 (NKJV), “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”

Supernatural healing is not for today.

This is an especially dangerous lie to spread. I wonder just how many people have died needlessly because of it. God says of Himself, “I am the Lord who heals you” (Exodus 15:26 NKJV). Matthew 8:17 states this biblical fact, “He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.” We can rest assured that He has not removed supernatural healing from His list of goodness toward us, as it says in Hebrews 13:8 (NKJV), “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” And again, in Malachi 3:6 (NKJV) we read, “For I am the Lord, I do not change.” Simply put, healing is for today. God has not removed His healing promises from the New Covenant.

My needs are trivial and unimportant to God.

You are important to God, and He cares about every detail in your life. Here’s a verse about how deeply He cares about the little details concerning you: “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore, you are of more value than many sparrows” (Luke 12:7 NKJV). “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26 NKJV). And here is another portion of Scripture to help you know God considers you very valuable to Him: “How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand; when I awake, I am still with You” (Psalm 139:17-18 NKJV).

It’s God’s will that you are sick.

This is not what my Bible says! John writes in 3 John 1:2 (NKJV), “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” So the next time someone says this to you, you rebuke them and say, “No, it’s not! With the shed blood of Jesus at the whipping post, and throughout the entire atoning process, I have been redeemed, my sins are forgiven, and my body has been healed too” (see Isaiah 53:4-5).

Prayer doesn’t change much.

Let me be clear—not all communication with God is prayer. A lot of what is said is whining and complaining, and you’re right—that doesn’t move God. Only faith moves God. So when we pray, we are to pray in faith, without whining, complaining, blaming Him for evil, and without doubt and unbelief. This is what faith-filled prayers accomplish, “And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven” (James 5:15 NKJV). Now, this verse alone undoes all the lies mentioned under this subtitle.

Have you been taught a dangerous lie that is preventing you from receiving your supernatural healing? Take some time to pray about this question, write it down, and look up one to three verses from the Bible to undo the lie that was planted within your mind and emotions.

If God says it, that settles it! He declares that by His stripes you are healed and that this healing power is for anyone who chooses to believe in it. Don’t allow anyone to talk you out of your right to be healed in Jesus’ name.

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За течією

За течією https://ift.tt/BhcQrsw by Miss_Dementor Життя б’є ключем, а Драко Мелфой потопає в очікуваннях. Щось має відбутися. Випадкова зустріч із Герміоною Ґрейнджер наповнює його життя чимось новим… але дівчина навіть не пам’ятає свого імені. Words: 2126, Chapters: 1/45, Language: Українська Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: F/M, M/M Characters: Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Theodore Nott, Narcissa Black Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy, Gawain Robards, Andromeda Black Tonks, Teddy Lupin, George Weasley, Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Original Characters Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Theodore Nott/Harry Potter Additional Tags: Minor Character Death, Memory Loss, Infirm, Grief/Mourning, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Moral Ambiguity, Misinformation, Miscommunication, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drama, Romance, Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Language, Enthusiastic Consent, Draco's POV, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Auror Draco Malfoy, Auror Harry Potter, Rolled Sleeves Agenda, Muggle Life, Yoga, Sex Positive Hermione Granger, Ukrainian, Ukrainian | Українською, Translation in Ukrainian | Переклад українською via AO3 works tagged 'Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy' https://ift.tt/l3x9gNy November 30, 2022 at 11:56AM

What Emily Dickinson taught me in 2021

I am ashamed to say that despite having an English degree and having been born with a permanent sad girl vibe - I only came to discover the work of Emily Dickinson in 2021.

I am even more ashamed to say that I discovered it - not while thumbing the pages of my Norton Anthology, or even whilst scrolling through tumblr (do sad girls still do that?) but through that most basic of platforms - a TV show.

More shameful still than either of these truths is the fact that I didn’t sit down to watch said show because I was keen to learn more about a great female poet of the nineteenth century, but because it was advertised as an historical lesbian drama. (Although I hope for this one you will cut me some slack. It’s a limited genre and a girl has to take what she can get…)

In this most modern mode of discovery, I was delighted to find much more than just a period drama with a same-sex romantic plotline. I found a thoroughly modern poet, thinker, lover and someone who was as boldly herself as anyone I have encountered, even in 2021.

In his play The History Boys, Alan Bennett described the power of poetry thus:

‘When you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you... And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.’

This is what it has felt like discovering Emily Dickinson for me. In a year when I so often felt broken and lost and alone - she reminded me that I am exactly who I am supposed to be.

There are about as many interpretations of each of Emily’s poems as there are readers. Here - if it means anything to you - are some of mine.

I felt a funeral in my brain

Most of Emily’s poems were left untitled (a defiance of convention that I adore) but for practical purposes many of them are referred to by their opening lines. In my opinion the most powerful of all these is the one in which Emily tells us that she ‘felt a funeral in her brain’.

Not a funeral in her heart - the usual centre of feeling in literature, but her brain - the centre of thought, logic, rationality, cognition.

This image has rattled itself around my own brain for many months since I first read it, the way a gong sound reverberates against your eardrums long after it is struck, because it was a feeling that I recognised.

I don’t know if you’ve ever pictured your own funeral. I hope for your sake that you have not. You have to get a good way down the rabbit hole of melancholy before the thoughts of your own death start marching into your brain uninvited. Until they ‘creak across my Soul / With those same Boots of Lead.’

This year I have felt that leaden creak more times than I care to remember. This year, I have had moments when my own rationality and will to keep going through all this strangeness and grief were threatened by an overwhelming hopelessness.

...a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down -

And hit a World, at every plunge.

I don’t know if this was the meaning Emily intended, but I think it must be something like it. It brings me comfort to know that somebody, somewhere felt this way once too. Somebody else was once ‘Wrecked, solitary, here’ - but she kept going. She kept doing. And how grateful I am that she did.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant -

The notion of truth is an odd thing in 2021.

So much so that we’ve started referring to this time in history as the ‘Post Truth Era’.

Truth once meant something absolute and solid to us. Now, in a world where facebook has more influence over election results and vaccine uptake than verified data and scientific research, it seems that ‘truth’ has become something elastic. Something you can bend or stretch to your own convenience. Something liquid that can run away from you if you’re not careful.

So what did I learn about the truth from Emily Dickinson in 2021?

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The truth’s superb surprise

When I read this it occurred to me that I had been naive in my assumption that this era was the only one in which truth was a relative concept. People have always been afraid of truth, Emily tells us, until somebody explains it to them in a way that they can understand.

As Lightning to the children eased

With explanation kind

The notion of some unseen scientists developing a vaccine in a lab and then pumping it into our blood streams does on the face of it sound threatening. Most of us don’t have enough scientific knowledge to be able to really say for sure how it actually works on a molecular level - I know I don’t. So we have to be able to trust one another. And pulling up graphs and statistics from google is often not enough to inspire trust because we aren’t used to learning through data. We’re used to learning through stories. We’ve passed down knowledge through stories for many thousands of years before science was ever conceived of. It’s still how we explain the world to our children, and how we like to express and process our emotions. And most of the time, it’s what we need to wrap our minds around the abstract.

Reading them now, at the end of 2021 as Omicron fills the hospitals with droves of the unvaccinated, the closing lines of the poem seem almost prophetic. Long before the phrase ‘fake news’ was ever coined, Emily warned us:

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind -

All the letters I can write

I came to Emily Dickinson looking for an historical lesbian plotline, and while I found much more besides, I was not disappointed on that front. Despite the censorship of her editors, Emily’s love for Susan shines through in her poetry.

I’ve read enough erotic verses written by men about women. The winking coyness of John Donne’s ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed.’ Shakespeare’s back-handed Sonnet 130. Even ee cumming’s ‘lady I will touch you with my mind.’

There is something so uniquely feminine, not only in the ‘fair’ subject of this poem, but moreover in its telling, that makes it an unmistakable work of sapphic eroticism.

All the letters I can write -

Are not as fair as this -

Emily, despite holding herself in great esteem as a writer, concedes from the very beginning that even her powerful imagination and command of the English language are humbled by her subject.

Syllables of Velvet

Sentences of Plush -

Even if she wanted to, she could not conjure anything so sumptuous with her words.

She also plays a clever game with the conventions of gender in love poetry. Ordinarily the subject - the woman in the poem - is compared to a flower for her beauty and fertility. Here Emily - being herself a woman - imagines herself as the flower, and her lover as something else entirely:

Play it were a Humming Bird

And just sipped - me -

ee cummings could never.

Diverting a bit from my approach to the writings of the Philokalia, I wish to put forward a few thoughts about how we often think about illness in our lives and how the Holy Fathers offer us fresh insight into the mystery of evil, sin, illness and their place in our struggle for holiness.

Often, when we are young, we do not think much about physical illness and the spiritual life. Life passes quickly as we are fully engaged in our work, studies and ministry and many of us rarely struggle with ill health except for the occasional flu or cold. But when illness does strike, in one form or another, suddenly our busy and “productive” lives can be disrupted and we are forced, as it were, to reconsider a great deal of things; not merely the meaning of health, that we have perhaps taken for granted, but the nature of our relationship with God, the depth of our faith or lack thereof, the meaning of suffering and how to engage it and not to become discourage even when we have been completely humbled by the burden of our physical and emotional vulnerabilities. When such circumstances arise, we are often unprepared for the trial - never imagining or wanting to think about the possibility of such a cross - a cross the comes to most all of us at some point. When illness plunges us into unfamiliar territory, even to the point of death, what place does it have within our struggle toward holiness? How do we pray when prayer seems impossible and when it feels as though our heart has been turned to stone? Where do we find our hope and with what faith must we enter the mystery of illness and suffering in order to know the healing touch of Christ, the Physician of our souls and bodies?

I offer for your consideration today brief excerpts from “The Holy Fathers on Illness” compiled by Bishop Alexander Mileant; in particular those thoughts from the Fathers on “Illness and Work of Perfection”. Their words offer some perspective on sickness and redemptive suffering as a means of glorifying God. There is much to say certainly about the meaning and origins of illness well beyond the purview of a simple post, but the Fathers show us in word and deed that it can be and often is a privileged way of holiness. Through thankfulness, endurance, and patience one can realize the highest form of ascetic practice and follow a spiritual path to intimacy with God. At such moments, one may exhibit no extraordinary virtue other than to suffer illness and its poverty with patience and so have this as one’s path to salvation. Thus, the Fathers’ words are full of hope and challenge:

“The desert ascetic Father, St. Abba Dorotheus, exhorts his disciples to "take the trouble to find out where you are: whether you have left your own town but remain just outside the gates, by the garbage dump, or whether you have gone ahead little or much, or whether you are half way on your journey, or whether you have gone two miles, then come back two miles, or perhaps even five miles, or whether you have journeyed as far as the Holy City and entered into Jerusalem itself, or whether you have remained outside and are unable to enter" (On Vigilance and Sobriety).

Illness helps us to see "where we are" on life's road: "sickness is a lesson from God and serves to help us in our progress if we give thanks to Him" (Sts. Barsanuphius and John, Philokalia).

No one may use illness as an excuse for resting from the labor of spiritual living. "Perhaps some might think that illness and bodily weakness hinder the work of perfection since the works and accomplishments of one's hands cannot continue. But it is not a hindrance" (St. Ambrose, Jacob and the Happy Life).

In the life of Riassophore-monk John, latter-day disciple of St. Nilus of Sora, we see how bodily infirmity is not allowed to interrupt the struggle for salvation. Riassophore-monk John was a cripple; because of this he had been compelled to leave the Monastery of St. Cyril of New Lake. Feeling sorry for himself, he shortly afterwards was standing for an all-night vigil in the deep of winter. "Suddenly he saw an unknown Elder in schema come out of the altar to him and say: 'Well, apparently you do not wish to serve me. If so, return to St. Cyril.

"At these words, the Elder struck him with his right hand quite strongly on the shoulder. Noting that the Elder exactly resembled St. Nilus as he is depicted on the icon over his relics, John was filled with great joy, all his grief disappeared, and he firmly resolved to spend the rest of his life in the Saint's skete" (The Northern Thebaid).

Even if we are bedridden, we are to continue the struggle against the passions, producing fruits worthy of repentance. This work of perfection demands that we acquire patience and longsuffering. What better way to do this than when we lie on a bed of infirmity? St. Tikhon of Zadonsk says that in suffering we can find out whether our faith is living or just "theoretical." The test of true faith is patience in the midst of sufferings, for "patience is the Christian's coat of arms." "What is it to follow Christ?" he asks. It is "to endure all things, looking upon Christ Who suffered. Many wish to be glorified with Christ, but few seek to remain with the suffering Christ. Yet not merely by tribulation, but even in much tribulation does one enter the Kingdom of God."

To those who suppose that they can only progress in the spiritual life when all else is "well," St. John Cassian replies, "You should not think that you can find virtue when you are not irritated — for it is not in your power to prevent troubles from happening. Rather, you should look for patience as the result of your own humility and longsuffering, for patience does depend upon your own will" {Institutes). Towards the end of his life, St. Seraphim of Sarov suffered from open ulcers on his legs. "Yet," as his Life tells us, "in appearance he was always bright and cheerful, for in spirit he felt that heavenly peace and joy which are the riches of the glorious inheritance of the saints."

"You are stricken by this sickness," the Holy Fathers say, "so that you will not depart barren to God. If you can endure, and give thanks to God, this sickness will be accounted to you as a spiritual work" (Sts. Barsanouphius and John, Philokalia).

Bishop Theophan the Recluse explains: "Enduring unpleasant things cheerfully, you approach a little to the martyrs. But if you complain, you will not only lose your share with the martyrs, but will be responsible for complaining besides. Therefore, be cheerful!"

In order not to lose heart when we fall sick we are to think about and mentally "kiss the sufferings of our Savior just as though we were with Him while He suffers abuses, wounds, humiliations...shame, the pain of the nails, the piercing with the lance, the flow of water and blood. From this we will receive consolation in our sickness. Our Lord will not let these efforts go unrewarded " (St. Tikhon of Zadonsk).

The patience we can learn on a sickbed cannot be overemphasized. Elder Macarius of Optina wrote about this to one who was ill:

"I was much pleased to hear from your relation how bravely you are bearing the cruel scourge of your heavy sickness. Verily, as the man of the flesh perishes, so is the spiritual man renewed."

And to another he wrote: "Praised be the Lord that you accept your illness so meekly! The bearing of sickness with patience and gratitude is reckoned highly by Him Who often rewards sufferers with His imperishable gifts.

"Ponder these words: Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed."

St. Ambrose of Milan compared an infirm body to a broken musical instrument. He explained how the "musician" can still produce God-pleasing "music" without his instrument:

"If a man used to singing to the accompaniment of a harp finds the harp broken, and its strings undone...he puts it aside and instead of calling for its notes he delights himself with his own voice.

"In the same way, a sick man allows the harp of his body to lie unused. He finds delight within his heart and comfort in the knowledge that his conscience is clear. He sustains himself with God's words and the prophetic writings and, holding these sweet and pleasant in his soul, he embraces them with his mind. Nothing can happen to him because God's graceful presence breathes favor upon him....He is filled with spiritual tranquility" (Jacob and the Happy Life).

Quite often the most God-pleasing spiritual "music" of all is produced in anonymity, by unknown or nearly-unknown saints. But such holy "melodies" are all the more sweet because they are heard by God alone. One such modern sufferer who lived an angel-like life in spite of advanced and terrible sickness was the holy New Russian Martyr, Mother Maria of Gatchina. Her story is known to us only because it pleased God to providentially arrange for one of her visitors, Professor I. M. Andreyev, to record his memories of her.

Mother Maria suffered from encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and Parkinson's disease. "Her whole body became as it were chained and immovable, her face anemic and like a mask; she could speak, but she began to talk with half-closed mouth, through her teeth, pronouncing slowly and in a monotone. She was a total invalid and was in constant need of help and careful looking after. Usually this disease proceeds with sharp psychological changes, as a result of which such patients often ended up in psychiatric hospitals. But Mother Maria, being a total physical invalid, not only did not degenerate psychically, but revealed completely extraordinary features of personality and character not characteristic of such patients: she became extremely meek, humble, submissive, undemanding, concentrated in herself; she became engrossed in constant prayer, bearing her difficult condition without the least murmuring.

"As if as a reward for this humility and patience, the Lord sent her a gift: consolation of the sorrowing. Completely strange and unknown people, finding themselves in sorrows, grief, depression, and despondency, began to visit her and converse with her. And everyone who came to her left consoled, feeling an illumination of their grief, a pacifying of sorrow, a calming of fears, a taking away of depression and despondency" (The Orthodox Word, vol. 13, no. 3).

"Thus God has acted. Like a provident Father and not like a kidnapper has He first involved us in grievous things, giving us over to tribulation as it were to schoolmasters and teachers, so that being chastened and sobered by these things we may, after showing forth all patience and learning, all right discipline, inherit the Kingdom of Heaven" (St. John Chrysostom, Homily 18, On the Statues).”

Excerpts taken from:

Missionary Leaflet # EA30

466 Foothill Blvd, Box 397, La Canada, Ca 91011

Editor: Bishop Alexander (Mileant)

Long Black Cloud

I posted this text on my blog twelve years ago with the title ‘Long Black Cloud’:

Some days it feels like I’ll never get there, wherever there is. Wherever I’m trying to get to. Shangri-La? I stop and wonder, have I always felt like this? I can’t remember a time without crushing pessimism, but I don’t remember much today. There might be giddy optimism on the other side, like sun on the horizon. I’m waiting for the dawn.

I often wonder what it is I want to achieve in life. It’s not that I lack answers to that question, I just can’t seem to find one that is viable. I want to be okay! But what does that mean? I want to achieve a state of perpetual happiness, security… serenity? I want Nirvana. Not content with surviving the perpetual battles with anxiety, infirmity, guilt, grief and depression, society, religion, family and the economy, I wish to do away with them all. No more battles.

I remember days when there is nothing better than just being alive. Nothing special about those days. Yellow sun, blue sky. If I try hard I can remember. Those days are on the horizon, if I ride this wave. If I survive this battle. But it’s hard to remember and I really have to try. And sometimes trying is the hardest thing to do.

I feel like, twelve years on, I’m still under that same black cloud. I’ve gotten a lot better at riding out waves of despair. I’ve gotten better at trying. But a part of me still wishes I could throw in the towel, abandon my research and my family and go live in the woods.

Biding time.

Brick Club 1.2.7 “Profoundest Despair” - Valjean vs. the Lower Mines of Society

I know I already posted a thing for 1.2.7, but I just cannot stop thinking about Hugo’s portrayal of Valjean and his discussion of Patron Minette and/or the “lowest mine” of society described in 3.7.2.

Just, I keep thinking, what makes Valjean redeemable and others, like Patron Minette and those in that lowest mine, not redeemable?

Valjean is poor, uneducated, and--for lack of a better word--“empty” when he is a pruner, before he goes to prison. He doesn’t think, he doesn’t stop and contemplate society or life or love or the people around him or beauty or whatever. He just unconsciously goes through life, one foot in front of the other, surviving. He checks the marks that Hugo lists when describing that lowest rung of society.

Hugo says:

“Jean Valjean was not, as we have seen, born evil. He was good when he arrived at the prison. There, he condemned society and felt himself becoming wicked; he condemned Providence and felt himself becoming impious.”

But he also says:

“Can human nature be so entirely transformed inside and out? Can man, created good by God, be made wicked by man? Can the soul be completely changed by its destiny, and turn evil when its fate is evil? Can the heart become distorted, contract deformities and incurable infirmities, under the pressure of disproportionate grief, like the spinal column under a low ceiling? Is there not in every human soul--was there not particularly in Jean Valjean’s soul--a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish.”

What makes Valjean so different, that the goodness in him can be kindled and relit, while those in that lowest mine, those like Patron Minette, cannot?

When talking about the lowest mine, Hugo repeatedly points out that ignorance and lack of education is a huge factor. Why, then, is M. Thenardier--who is mildly educated--not redeemable, while Valjean is? Claquesous lives a double life, so we can presume he’s mildly educated at least as well.

Not to mention, Valjean educates himself for a similar reason that Thenardier is educated. Valjean doesn’t decide to learn to read etc because he wants to better himself--he learns because he “felt that to increase his knowledge was to strengthen his hatred.” Thenardier uses his education and skills for “swindling.”

Now, Hugo does seem to imply that the reason for this “lower mine” to be so irredeemable is because it deliberately does not seek an education and deliberately attempts to undermine all other levels of society above it. But this doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. Of course those in these lower depths won’t seek an education; they have no way to access it. Of course they’ll turn to crime first before anything else; they live in a state of desperation and society isn’t about to help them. “This incurable ignorance possesses the heart of man, and there becomes Evil” Hugo says in the last line of 3.7.2, but he doesn’t seem to take into consideration why it’s incurable at this point.

It’s just fascinates me because in 1.2.8, we have a whole lot of Valjean thinking about his choices, about how he can either work to become the “best of men,” or ignore that and return to his old, comfortable state of hatred and become “a monster” and someone “lower than a convict.” So it’s not as though Valjean was someone inherently better than any of those in the lowest mines of society. I mean, maybe the fields of Waterloo were a similar test for Thenardier, but he already seems irredeemable even by then.

I just have questions for Hugo about what makes someone redeemable or not. Because he says it’s education, but then the two “lower class” main characters who are educated (Valjean, Thenardier) both educate themselves explicitly for “bad” reasons. And the ones who are pretty much uneducated (Eponine, Gavroche, Fantine) are framed in a more positive light, even in their misery. For a moment I thought the formal education part was important, as opposed to autodidactism, but Valjean becomes good by educating himself, so that doesn’t make sense.

Perhaps at least some of it is about religion. I mean, a lot of everything in this book is about religion, so it would make sense. Valjean doesn’t get to start redeeming himself until he starts to believe in and rely on god, instead of rejecting god or “judging providence.” I don’t remember if we ever hear Thenardier’s opinions on religion or the existence of god, so I’m not sure whether this is an accurate theory or not. Oddly, in 3.7.2, Hugo never mentions rejection of religion, only lack of education. So I’m not really sure what to do with this, because it seems a little inconsistent.

I don’t know, Hugo just sends some mixed signals about how to and who can be redeemed, who gets to have that “primitive spark” rekindled and restored to goodness. And I just don’t know what to make of these opinions, especially considering the utter lack of resources for people in those “lower mines” whether they might want to be educated or not.

She died at the Jewish New Year, and my family is not religious. But I had been so happy, in this time of being far from our loved ones, to be eating a Friday-night dinner next to my father, until the news came and the food that had been delicious suddenly tasted like ashes. As we quietly finished the meal, our phones buzzing with grief and shock, my father showed me the messages he was already receiving from fellow liberals and leftists, describing in vivid terms how angry they were at her.

As many mourn, others are already raging. Their fury will be loud and resonant in these next few days and weeks, a mad howling as the nation absorbs what’s to come now. Ire at this 87-year-old woman, a Supreme Court justice who had repeatedly survived cancer but did not this time, will carry many Americans through their periods of shock and despair. Scared and livid, many will rail at her: for not retiring years ago, during the administration of a president they imagine (had he not been blocked by a racist and obstructionist Senate) would have replaced her with someone qualified and just, someone who would not be eager to slam the final nail in the coffin of civil liberties, reproductive health care, LGBTQ rights, labor, voting, the climate … all of it. They will blame her, and they will blame those who created a cult of admiration around this remarkable, imperfect woman, because they will want to have people to shake their fist at, because the world is shattered and chilling and is about to get even more difficult than it already is.

This rage toward a beloved, history-making woman who just died will feel — and will be — profane and grotesque. It will be more than a little sexist, because blaming every bad outcome on an old woman you deem selfish in her professional self-determination, and on the Resistance Moms who “Yas Queen” her, is an endlessly gratifying strain of liberal misogyny.

It will also, to some degree, be fair.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg made a choice that turned out wrong. She wanted to keep doing the work she loved and was good at and that mattered; she didn’t want to stop before she was ready. Like so many others, she believed Hillary Clinton would likely win in 2016. And like so many others, she was wrong about that. Now there is a good chance that her replacement will be chosen by Donald Trump, a president who came to power on malignant racism and sexism and who will gain, in her death, the ability to offer America’s right wing what they have worked toward for 60 years: nearly full power to roll back, via the court, the disruptive gains made by the social movements of the 20th century on behalf of marginalized people.

So I understand why people will be furious at Ruth Bader Ginsburg and why they will say so loudly, in raised tones that convey their own assurance that they would have made the right choice, had they been her. Though those who are mad will not want to hear it, their reaction is made of precisely the same stuff that led people to lionize her as an outsize savior: because in the absence of structural security it is far easier to home in on individuals — as both our heroes and our villains — than it is to reckon with the enormity of what’s wrong and what needs to be righted.

These past months could not have made this dynamic any clearer: the reflexive turn to blame individuals for how they choose to behave when left adrift in the sucking, soulless chasm created by large-scale institutional infirmity.

Among the grim ironies of Ginsburg’s death is that, as Irin Carmon wrote in her beautiful obituary, Ginsburg’s obsessions with process and order stemmed from “a general belief, shared by the postwar liberalism that shaped her, that functioning institutions could provide a neutral bulwark to the excesses of the past.”

But one of the reasons her death will be as explosive and consequential as it is sure to be is that so many of our institutions are failing us, and have been purposefully perverted or used to serve regressive purpose: a Senate that broke the nation’s rules by refusing to confirm the Supreme Court pick of a sitting Democratic president; an Electoral College that served its original purpose of overturning the will of an American majority to deliver the White House to a leader committed to white supremacy; a political system that doesn’t inspire its populace to vote in critical midterm elections; a Republican Party willing to spend decades doing whatever it took to reverse legal and legislative victories that redistributed a little bit of power out of the hands of white patriarchal capitalist-fueled corporations; and a Democratic Party that did not have the will or foresight to fight as fiercely or as cannily on behalf of rights, protections, and dignity as their obstructionist opposition fought against.

Where it landed us was with a nation looking to one octogenarian to make the exact right set of decisions to make everything turn out okay. You can feel the anguished search to fill the void created by structural collapse in the words of a lawyer who told the Washington Post on Friday night, as she paid tribute to Ginsburg by coming to the Supreme Court’s plaza, “The question that keeps popping up in my head is, ‘Who is going to take care of us?’”

It was an elocution that betrayed the hunger for protections we have not been getting from our government, but Ginsburg herself was never actually in a position to take care of us. After all, she came to be widely adulated only in the period in which she was in the Court’s minority; she was issuing dissents — brilliantly lacerating, yes, but still dissents — from decisions that imperiled and weakened us.

The Voting Rights Act has already been disemboweled, reproductive health care already made inaccessible to millions, all while Ruth Bader Ginsburg sat on the Court. This does not mean that those battles are lost — they cannot be; they will not be — but it was never going to be this one woman who won them for us.The notion that our survival depended on her survival was always flawed, and betrayed how ravenous many were for any thread of hope for quiet and functional institutional correction, rather than for the mass uprising and furious battle this moment calls for. Part of the fantasy was that if she could hang on we could get back to “normal,” but normal is long past broken.

It should never have come down to her, even in our collective imagination, and whether you are absolutely sure that that’s right it shouldn’t; she was selfish and stupid for not having retired or that that’s right it shouldn’t; she was a brilliant justice who had every right to keep her job and the pushback she received for it was terribly unfair … they actually come down to the same thing: The fate of American democracy and the planet should never have rested on this one woman’s small, old shoulders.

This is what happens when the government fails, when the safety nets that have been slashed for years are gone, when there is no oversight, no one in power with the drive or backbone to fight back or organize effectively or exert authority or offer real structural support or direction. In an absence of leadership, of functional guidance, we’re all left to imagine that the decisions of other individuals are what is going to save or damn us.

This has also been the story of these last six months, as local and state and federal leadership has offered weak to nonexistent economic and medical support or assurance. A nation of unmoored people has been left to run our own risk analyses — about masks, surfaces, schools; about personal and familial safety, civic responsibility, and economic security — all based on incomplete or often purposely misleading information. The choices we individuals have made have carried their own costs and benefits, have had their own surprising and sometimes lethal consequences, and in the vacuum created by the absence of structures that were supposed to protect and support us, we have turned on each other, becoming angry at those who chose differently, poorly, who made bad bets, rather than directing our outrage at the institutions that abandoned us.

This is what I will think of when I hear the coming fury toward Ginsburg. Because the fault here was not one person. More importantly: The fix here is not one person, and it never has been. It’s not one justice, though one justice — in concert with the other two Trump has appointed, with the hundreds of federal judges a McConnell-led Senate has confirmed to lifetime appointments — will matter. It’s not even one president, though that president — in concert with the Senate and the House and the state legislatures — will matter.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg matters, now as much as she ever has, but her survival alone couldn’t have saved us, any more than getting rid of Donald Trump will save us. We are facing something far larger: a desperate, life-or-death fight to rebuild, reimagine, reform (and in some cases raze) enormous apparatuses, including our criminal justice, electoral, health-care, and education systems, labor and capitalism, education, housing, the courts themselves, and, most urgently, the health of our planet. It will call on us to fight as fiercely and with as much determination as Ginsburg herself fought, through her life and career.

That’s daunting and hard. And for some, in the face of all this, it will undoubtedly feel good and perhaps even righteous to voice frustration at the decisions made by one woman — extraordinary, ordinary, important, and now sadly gone. But that’s not the work, and it’s not going to work to get us anywhere in the perilous days to come. Instead, we have to address what is really broken, which is not just our hearts and our spirits: It’s the frail systems in which Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted so badly to believe. She’s gone and it is up to us to undertake the demanding revolutionary work of remaking them, this time stronger and more just.

Shakespearean Stabbings, How to Feed a Dictator and Other New Books to Read

https://sciencespies.com/nature/shakespearean-stabbings-how-to-feed-a-dictator-and-other-new-books-to-read/

Shakespearean Stabbings, How to Feed a Dictator and Other New Books to Read

An estimated 74 heroes, villains and sidekicks featured in William Shakespeare’s writings meet unsavory onstage ends. Thirty of these men and women succumb to stabbing, according to a 2015 analysis by the Telegraph, while five die by beheading, four by poison, and three by both stabbing and poison. At the more unconventional end of the spectrum, causes of death range from grief to insomnia, indigestion, smothering, shame and being baked into a pie.

Kathryn Harkup’s Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts adopts a scientific approach to the Bard’s many methods of killing off characters. As the chemist-by-training writes in the book’s prologue, Shakespeare may not have understood the science behind the process of dying, but as a someone who lived at a time when death—in the form of public executions, pestilence, accidents and widespread violence—was an accepted aspect of everyday life, he certainly knew “what it looked, sounded and smelled like.”

The latest installment in our “Books of the Week” series, which launched in late March to support authors whose works have been overshadowed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, details the science behind Shakespeare, the golden age of aviation, women doctors of World War I, the meals enjoyed by five modern dictators and the history of the controversial Shroud of Turin.

Representing the fields of history, science, arts and culture, innovation, and travel, selections represent texts that piqued our curiosity with their new approaches to oft-discussed topics, elevation of overlooked stories and artful prose. We’ve linked to Amazon for your convenience, but be sure to check with your local bookstore to see if it supports social distancing-appropriate delivery or pickup measures, too.

Death By Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts by Kathryn Harkup

The author of A Is for Arsenic and Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein continues her macabre cultural musings with an immensely readable roundup of Shakespearean death. Looking beyond the literary implications of characters’ untimely passing, she explores the forces that shaped the Bard’s world and, subsequently, his writing.

Sixteenth-century London was a hotbed of disease, unsanitary living conditions, violence, political unrest and impoverishment. People of the period witnessed death firsthand, providing palliative care in sick friends’ and family members’ last moments, attending strangers’ public executions, or falling prey to misfortune themselves. Writes Harkup, “With limited effective medical treatments available, the grim reality of death, from even the most trivial of illnesses and infections, was well known, up close and in detail.” It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that all of Shakespeare’s plays reference disease in some capacity.

After establishing this sociopolitical context, Harkup delves into chapter-by-chapter analysis of specific characters’ causes of death, including infirmity, murder, war, plague, poison, emotion and bear attack. The author’s scholarly expertise (she completed two doctorate degrees in chemistry before shifting focus to science communication) is apparent in these chapters, which are peppered with rather clinical descriptions: In a section on King Lear, for instance, she mentions—and outlines in great detail—the “clear post-mortem differences between strangulation, suffocation and hanging.”

Death By Shakespeare is centrally concerned with how its eponymous subject’s environment influenced the fictional worlds he created. Combining historical events, scientific knowledge and theatrical carnage, the work is at its best when determining the accuracy of various killing methods: In other words, Harkup asks, how exactly did Juliet appear dead for 72 hours, and is death by snakebite as peaceful as Cleopatra claimed?

Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World by Alexander Rose

Today, most people’s knowledge of the zeppelin is limited to the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. But as historian Alexander Rose writes in Empires of the Sky, the German airship—invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin at the turn of the 20th century—was once the world’s premiere form of air travel, easily outpacing its contemporary, the airplane.

The airship and airplane’s fight for dominance peaked in the 1920s and ’30s, when Zeppelin’s handpicked successor, Hugo Eckener, faced off with both the Wright Brothers and Pan American Airlines executive Juan Trippe. Per the book’s description, “At a time when America’s airplanes—rickety deathtraps held together by glue, screws, and luck—could barely make it from New York to Washington, Eckener’s airships serenely traversed oceans without a single crash, fatality, or injury.”

Though the zeppelin held the advantage in terms of safety, passenger satisfaction and reliability over long distances, the airplane enjoyed the benefit of sheer quantity, with the United States producing 3,010 civilian aircraft in 1936 alone. The Hindenburg, a state-of-the-art vessel poised to shift the debate in airships’ favor, ironically proved to be its downfall.

Detailing the aftermath of an October 9, 1936, meeting between American and German aviation executives, Rose writes, “Trippe … suspects the deal is done: America will soon be in the airship business and Zeppelin will duel with Pan American for mastery of the coming air empire.” Eckener, meanwhile, flew home on the Hindenburg in triumph, never guessing that his airship had “exactly seven months left to live.”

No Man’s Land: The Trailblazing Women Who Ran Britain’s Most Extraordinary Military Hospital During World War I by Wendy Moore

At the turn of the 20th century, the few female doctors active in Great Britain were largely limited to treating women and children. But when war broke out in 1914, surgeon Louisa Garrett Anderson and anesthesiologist Flora Murray flouted this convention, establishing a military hospital of their own in Paris and paving the way for other women doctors to similarly start treating male patients.

Housed in a repurposed hotel and funded by donations from friends, family and fellow suffragists, the pair’s hospital soon drew the attention of the British War Office, which asked Anderson and Murray to run a military hospital in London. As author Wendy Moore points out, this venue “was, and would remain, the only military hospital under the auspices of the British Army to be staffed solely by women doctors and run entirely by women.”

Tens of thousands of patients arrived at the hospital over the next four-and-a-half years, according to Kirkus’ review of No Man’s Land. Staff performed more than 7,000 surgeries, treating previously unseen ailments including the aftereffects of chlorine gas attacks and injuries inflicted by artillery and high-explosive shells. Though initially met with distaste by men who dismissed a hospital run by “mere women,” Anderson and Murray’s steadfast commitment to care managed to convince even their critics of women’s value as physicians.

In 1918, the flu pandemic arrived in London, overwhelming the pair’s Endell Street Military Hospital just as the war reached its final stages. Writes Moore, “Now that they found themselves fighting an invisible enemy, to no apparent purpose, they had reached the breaking point.”

The pandemic eventually passed, and as life returned to a semblance of normality, women doctors were once again relegated to the sidelines. Still, Sarah Lyall points out in the New York Times’ review of the book, the “tide had started to turn” in these medical professionals’ favor—in no small part due to the perseverance of Anderson and Murray.

How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks by Witold Szablowski

The favorite meals of five 20th-century dictators are more mundane than one might think. As Rose Prince writes in the Spectator’s review of Polish journalist Witold Szablowski’s How to Feed a Dictator, Saddam Hussein’s cuisine of choice was lentil soup and grilled fish. Idi Amin opted for steak-and-kidney pie complemented by a dessert of chocolate pudding, while Fidel Castro enjoyed “a simple dish of chicken and mango.” And though popular lore suggests Pol Pot dined on the hearts of cobras, the Cambodian dictator’s chef revealed that he actually preferred chicken and fish.

According to Szablowski, How to Feed a Dictator strives to present “a panorama of big social and political problems seen through the kitchen door.” But tracking down the personal chefs who kept these despots—Hussein, Amin, Castro, Pot and former Albanian prime minister Enver Hoxha—well-fed proved to be an understandably difficult task. Not only did Szablowski have to find men and women who didn’t particularly want to be found, but he also had to earn their trust and convince them to discuss traumatic chapters in their lives. Speaking with Publishers Weekly’s Louisa Ermelino, Szablowski notes that Amin’s, Hoxha’s and Hussein’s chefs were simply culinary professionals; Castro’s and Pot’s, on the other hand, started off as partisans.

Ultimately, the author tells NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, “Sometimes they are very easy to like, but sometimes they are very easy to hate. Like, they are not easy characters, because it wasn’t an easy job.”

The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death by Gary Vikan

Gary Vikan has spent some 35 years tracking down evidence refuting the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity. In The Holy Shroud, Vikan—former director of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum and a respected art historian—outlines his findings, arguing that the controversial burial cloth belonged not to Jesus, but to a medieval artist employed by French monarch John II at the height of the Black Death.

“I knew right away that the Holy Shroud was the fake, for the simple reason that it does not fit into the chronology of Christian relics or iconography, and because it appears for the first time in the historical record in 14th century France,” wrote Vikan in a blog post earlier this year. “ … [W]ith the help of a brilliant scientist, I am [now] able to answer the questions of when, why, by whom, and how the Shroud was made.”

Per the book’s description, John II gifted the “photograph-like body print” to his friend Geoffroi de Charny shortly before the latter’s death at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Originally meant as an “innocuous devotional image” for the knight’s newly-built church, the cloth was soon reinvented as one of Christianity’s most significant relics.

“Miracles were faked,” says Vikan, “and money was made.”

#Nature

Midsommar spoilers ahead – read at yer own risk.

This post contains discussions of suicide, murder-suicide, graphic ritualistic violence, dissociation and mental illness. These are triggers that also apply to the film, so please be careful if you decide to go and see this film.

I went to see Midsommar last night. I thought it was a fantastic film, that raised a lot of interesting themes about gaslighting, dissociation, belonging, fascism and free will.

I’ll start with the cinematography. This film is gorgeous. The scenery is so beautiful it’s almost unbelievable – rolling greens and constant blue skies. Probably not the normal setting for a horror film, right? Compare this to the cinematography of Aster’s other film, Hereditary, with its bleak, oppressive constant grey-tone, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that Midsommar was a departure from the horror genre all together. This works in Midsommar’s favour, though. It’s horror in broad daylight, constant daylight. I think it’s important to remember that the horror genre is not, and should not, be limited to just gruesome torture porn, or an endless assault of blood, gore and guts. I mean, I like bloody horror as much as the next person, but that is not where the genre should begin and end. Of course, Midsommar has some incredibly gruesome aspects (meaning that in Britain, the film has received a rating of ‘18’). The suicide of the two elderly members of the Hårga is played on screen with an unflinching gaze, and it is about as shocking as shocking gets. Especially when the elderly man jumps in such a way that he doesn’t immediately die, and instead shatters his legs. The other Hårga members caving in his skull with a large wooden mallet elicited pained gasps from many of the people sat in the cinema with me. It was brutal. But the main thing I took away from the film was an unrelenting reminder that grief is a transformative experience – not always for the better – and that vulnerable people can be drawn to bad people, bad organizations, or to make bad decisions, and we must question whether this means they are irredeemable.  

This is actually where I started thinking about free will. The Hårga are a community bound by tradition. Their lives are to be a predetermined length, and within this, their lives are divided up into four ‘seasons’ of equal length. At the end of the winter of their lives, the period spanning 54 years old to 72 years old, you are expected to walk (literally) willingly, and freely, to your death. This is exactly what the two elderly members I just mentioned do. They are carried on sedan chairs to the top of a cliff, and then throw themselves to their deaths. Whilst I must be careful of cultural imperialism, I couldn’t help but wonder how much agency the Hårga have. Is this suicide an expression of free-will or an example of coercion driven by traditional practice? We can only speculate, but I wonder what would happen if someone refused to die at the predetermined age. This really cemented to me that the Hårga are not a peaceful community living in a psychedelic Swedish plane, but are in actuality, uncomfortably close to eco-fascism.

According to eco-fascist ideology, you’re expected to sacrifice your life in order that the group more generally can protect the interests of nature more broadly. This goes some way as to explain why the elderly members of the community, who are statistically more likely to be suffering from disease, ill-health or infirmity, are coerced to take their own lives. They have fulfilled their purpose, and they are invited? forced? to remove themselves from society. This is, of course, a society that is absolutely, entirely white. The only non-white bodies in the community are those of Josh, Simon and Connie – and these people end up dead, murdered in increasingly disturbing ways. Josh is killed whilst trying to take pictures of the Rubi Radr (the sacred text of the Hårga) – something he was explicitly forbidden to do – and his body is dragged away by a member of the Hårga who is wearing Mark’s skinned face as a mask. Connie and Simon both disappear at different points in the story, and both turn up dead. Simon is executed in a particularly graphic way – he is suspended in the chicken coop, as a blood eagle. The blood eagle is a form of ritualistic murder detailed in the Germanic and Nordic sagas, wherein the ribs are broken and the lungs are pulled out of the body, in such a way so that they look like ‘wings’. Simon’s lungs seem to inflate and deflate, as if they were breathing, but we cannot be sure whether he is still alive, or whether this is caused by Christian’s drug-addled brain.

This is where the film becomes uncomfortable for me. Connie and Simon are … very minor characters in this film. They don’t really serve any purpose other than to be tormented, murdered, sacrificed. They do not really interact with the main protagonists (Christian, Dani, Josh, Mark), other than a few pleasantries at the beginning, a shared horror at the suicide of the elders, and a very brief interaction between Connie and Dani when Connie discovers that Simon has ‘left the commune without her’. I am uncomfortable with calling Midsommar an explicitly feminist film as I believe the treatment of Connie, a sidelined, innocent, brown woman, who is brutally killed for no apparent reason other than her status as Other violates any claim the film might otherwise have as being explicitly feminist. But maybe this isn’t the point. I don’t think Midsommar has to be ‘explicitly feminist’ in order to make very valid points about how a very specific kind of female pain, grief and trauma is often ignored and overlooked. Connie’s body violates the very specific white ableness championed by the Hårga, and her experience as Other legitimizes her death. Dani’s body, a white body that does not violate any of their traditions, is permitted to live. She is permitted to access the underbelly of the commune, but this comes at a price, and I believe that price is a combination of her sanity, her sense of self, and any remaining link she had to her past.

That’s what I think Florence Pugh was so unbelievably good at depicting. I was absolutely blown away by her ability to howl like that. That sort of primal, unabashed screaming. I think the two times she -really- cries set up a really interesting dichotomy between female pain and male reactions to female pain. The first time that Dani really howls is when her parents and sister have died. It is dark, she starts this sort of crying whilst alone over the phone, and then Christian is with her but he feels entirely distant from her. The room is dark, he is rubbing her back and she is draped over him, but he feels entirely emotionally removed from the situation - he is not participating in her grief, he doesn’t look that affected by it. His presence makes the scene feel just that little bit more jarring. Actually, does he even say anything to her? As far as I remember, no he does not. She tells him they’ve died, we see a shot of him walking through the snow to her apartment, and then they’re in the apartment. He says nothing. The only noise is Dani’s screams. He is entirely silent. Compare this to the second time she howls, when she’s surrounded by the female members of the Hårga. This scene is entirely different. It’s light, and she’s surrounded by women who are touching her, caressing her, but most importantly, screaming with her. They howl and cry and scream with her. They are her perfect mirrors. They are ACTIVELY PARTICIPATING in her grief, they share in her trauma. This was probably the most harrowing shot of the entire film for me. Not the gore, not the mutilated bodies – but a woman, screaming and howling like a wounded animal, and having a horde of sympathetic women scream back at her. It’s hard to not feel drawn into this community. It’s hard to not forget the evil things they have done, or are willing to do. That is precisely what is so dangerous about the Hårga, or more generally, this very specific brand of eco-fascism.  

Some quick fire symbolism stuff that I picked up on:

the symbolism of Christian wearing dark clothing and standing away from the rest of the group when they were celebrating Dani becoming the May Queen. The way he lurches around, looking entirely out of place - she is sat at the head of the table - dressed as they are, crowned with flowers, nature moves with her - she has basically entirely assimilated - he is still outcast.

I thought it was really interesting that the group of women during the dub-con Christian/Maya sex scene mirrored how Maya was feeling. I think the focus on women mirroring each other, appropriating and absorbing how each other is feeling is a fascinating detail.  Christian, on the other hand, looks out of place in that room, a male body who only has one purpose and then is entirely redundant. This is reinforced by the bit where the girl he is sleeping with holds her hand out and he tries to grab it but instead one of the women grabs it. He basically serves no purpose beyond impregnating her - and even then he isn’t even that good at it, because one of the other women has to push on his butt to push him along in the process. Women as being the most active and present in sex, men just … seed? Is this a subversion of how sex is usually seen?

The disabled boy seems to serve no purpose in society other than being the oracle - he does not participate in the banquet or any of the celebrations. He is almost never on screen, apart from a few very close up shots of his face, and one occasion where the camera shifts to him from the sex scene  -  a very jarring decision, in my opinion. Panning to him during the sex scene was super interesting and really not expected. It was an interesting visual choice, and it made me think about whether the point was to emphasise how he will presumably never participate in sexual acts etc. because of the eugenics practiced by the Hårga. This was a pretty damning condemnation of the Hårga as an eco-fascist group who actively engages in eugenics/”selective breeding”. You can definitely see links here between the growth of fascism and eugenics in the early 20th century and the practices of the Hårga.

I really liked how the entire time they were at the commune almost felt like … a fever dream in a distant fairytale land. Walking through the large sun at the beginning, having to trek through the fields to get there, everything looking very idyllic and exactly how a young child would imagine a Swedish landscape to look. The perfect environment to discuss dissociation, in my opinion.

These are some scattered thoughts I had after viewing the film!!

Overall, I really enjoyed it, despite some of the troubling social themes, and it’s another absolute win for Aster in my book.

À Deriva

À Deriva https://ift.tt/wXqpdvb by Pixys_Malfoy A vida está fechando por todos os lados e Draco Malfoy está se afogando em expectativas. Algo tem que dar certo. Um encontro casual com Hermione Granger infunde algo novo em sua vida, mas ela nem se lembra do próprio nome Words: 2532, Chapters: 1/45, Language: Português brasileiro Fandoms: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Categories: F/M, M/M Characters: Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, Harry Potter, Theodore Nott, Narcissa Black Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy, Gawain Robards, Andromeda Black Tonks, Teddy Lupin, George Weasley, Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Original Characters Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy, Theodore Nott/Harry Potter Additional Tags: Minor Character Death, Memory Loss, Infirm, Grief/Mourning, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Panic Attacks, Moral Ambiguity, Misinformation, Miscommunication, Angst with a Happy Ending, Drama, Romance, Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Language, Enthusiastic Consent, Draco's POV, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Auror Draco Malfoy, Auror Harry Potter, Rolled Sleeves Agenda, Muggle Life, Yoga, Sex Positive Hermione Granger via AO3 works tagged 'Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy' https://ift.tt/wupnqMP November 26, 2022 at 03:16AM