Category Archives: Allegory

Headline of the Day: Are 200 million years of celibacy over?

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It feels like that sometimes, doesn't it?

Sploid has reported on a crustacean species which has kept its legs together for the past 200,000,000 years, and when you see its face, you'll know why. Well, it musta won the lottery or sumpin', cuz all of a sudden the males have started crawling out of the driftwoodwork.

For the last several ages of the planet, these freshwater crustaceans (hence the Squid tag; I do not use the Squid tag lightly, and if you'd ever tagged a Squid you'd feel the same) have reproduced asexually. Hey, they've got to be the official mascot of radical feminism.  

Should I capitalize that? bell hooks sez no.

Three males of the species have been discovered, no doubt hanging around the bar at the Roxy, doing Jager shots and buying RedBull and vodka for any female who looks like she's game. Now if we could only figure out a use for them.

Darwinluids

A face only a golddigger could love.

 

B-lot

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Ink BlotSo there are several things you don't know about me. If you don't want to know, I'd suggest passing this entry by and moving along to the nice Squiddy goodness in the lower entries. If you'd like to know where the hell the Squid fixation came from (and so would I) then this might provide some answers.

I am the subject of one woman's thesis for her doctorate. Yes indeed, I and I alone am the subject of that thesis; every Wednesday (although I remember they switched the day halfway through the year, no doubt when the semesters changed and her classes got moved around, but I'm damned if I can remember if Wednesday was what they switched it from or to but one of those for sure) this woman would take me out of class and into a pleasant, sunny office with a big old grownup wooden table instead of a wee preformed formica desk and plastic chair set. The office smelled of warm dust, all year round, and in Winnipeg this was quite a feat.

She would give me tests, and I would do the tests, and she'd write things down in a notebook and I think once taperecorded it, although being a typical child of the late Twentieth Century, when I saw a taperecorder I tended to think it was Karaoke time and start singing, although that word hadn't been invented yet unless it was in Japan and got hung up in Customs, which I don't rule out. And I suppose at least some of that ended up in the thesis she was writing about me.

The psych thesis.

Psych ad

Somewhere in the bowels of the University of Manitoba lies the most detailed recording of my mind ever made. Whoa! I just thought of something! I bet I can get the University to give me a free copy; if they won't just out with it (and Universities can be like that) I could always wrench it from their feeble grasp via a Freedom of Information request, or threaten them with Privacy laws. I don't think the Privacy laws would force them to give it up, but then nobody knows what the hell these new laws do, they're all just scared to death and probably by the time they found out I wasn't entitled to my mind in written form, I'd be out the door with the tome under my arm.

God, I hope it is a tome! How embarassing if it were only a novella or even a chapbook!

This is not the time or place to discuss why she was studying me, nor even how they could tell I was…me…even at that early age. No, certainly not. For if I did, you'd have no suspense dragging you back here to troll helplessly through the Squid, poetry, jingoistic Canadianisms, and cheap cracks about curling. I may be crazy, but I'm not crazy! No, you'll just have to wait for that gumboot to drop.

Meantime, modern psychi- and psycho-s have a hell of a time dealing with me. It's critical in the mind sciences to be working from a state of beginner's mind, ie the state of having no preconceptions. And after a solid year of one test after another, even if it was back in …

Let's just skip that part, okay?

After a solid year of one test after another, I've done pretty much every test there is. And the problem is, they don't really update these things either. I was out at UBC taking part in some psych study on computer use and personality, a one-off afternoon thing, and in the debriefing they gave me a couple of standard tests. As soon as I saw the picture of the cocker spaniel in the bathroom, I asked, "So do you want me to make up a NEW story, or just tell you the one I told back when I was seven?" Turns out I knew too much, and was disqualified. I still got the pizza and the fifty bucks though.

So I've done pretty much all the tests, at least the classics, the golden oldies. And among them is this one. The one, the only, the high, the mighty:

The Rorschach Test Online

http://www.stupidstuff.org/main/rorschach.htm

Take it yourself, particularly if you never want to have to take it again. This isn't exactly the real thing, but it's pretty damn close.

Most people have heard of the Rorschach inkblot test, but not many people get to actually see the inkblots themselves because they're kept secret. StupidStuff.org has developed an inkblot test based closely on the Rorschach test protocol and materials. You can take this test yourself online and see more or less what your results would have been on a real test. Sometimes the results aren't pretty; people who take the test can find out some extremely unsettling things about themselves. When you're ready, click on the link above.

I will tell you this; in the Real Rorschach Test http://www.deltabravo.net/custody/rorschach.php, seeing an heraldic (note pedantic use of word "an;" I don't know what it signifies, but I do know enough about psych to know that it signifies something, and I know enough about psycho-s and psychi-s to know it's probably something bad) symbol in figure VIII is a good thing. Well, that's good, because…

In figure VIII I see an heraldic crest with wolverines rampant, at base the map-shape of the actual country represented (which I don't know, but if you gimme a minute I'll probably say Archenland), surmounted by a book listing the natural resources of the land with illustrations, topped by a crest which is a portrait of the group of people who liberated and, thus, founded the country. The wolverines represent the populace at large, and it is critical to note that they alone connect each of the various parts of the crest. In a break with heraldic tradition, there is neither crown nor coronet, simply an upraised torch in the hand of one of the people.

At this point the doctor usually starts wrapping things up, and writing really, really fast.

The Banality of Evil vs The Inevitability of the Acceptance of Evil

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re-posted from the old blog, but well worth looking over again.

Excerpted from Vanity Fair, March 1991

The Years of Living Dangerously
a profile of Ryszard Kapuscinski by Stephen Schiff

"I want to tell you now something," he says quietly. "You know, like
every Polish writer I was censored, for forty years. The most
difficult result of censorship is self-censorship, because it changes
your way of thinking, and it's completely unconscious after a time.
All of us after the Communists, we all have to fight this, and I am
fighting all the time. But the reason I am saying this here, in this
place [the former Warsaw Ghetto]: you know, Hannah Arendt in her book
about Eichmann trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was unable to
understand why the Jews were going so passively to their death – why
the Holocaust was possible, why there was no resistance. But I
understand it, because I was there and I saw the thing. And I have an
answer that I would say to Hannah Arendt.

"There was nothing strange in the behaviour of those people. It was
natural. Because if you don't see any hope, you are very passive. I'm
not speaking of individuals. You always find a hero willing to fight
against everybody. But the masses, if you put them in a situation of
extreme hardship, they beome very passive. Lack of hope paralyzes
their will, paralyzes their brain, paralyzes their movement. That's
why people who are really in a famine, who have real hunger, do
nothing. They are waiting for death, unable to move. If you went to
the market in Ethiopia during the famine, you would see that the
market is full of food. And around the market, you have people dying
of hunger. So your first reaction is to ask yourself why these people
don't just attack the market dealers – the food is right there. Plenty
of food. Their lives are at stake. But if you ask that, you are like
Hannah Arendt and you don't understand what it means to be in a
situation of complete desperation with no way out. It makes you
paralyzed."

But wait a minute, I say. You of all people have witnessed the
opposite. You've been there when a change, a revolution, becomes
possible. He smiles. "Yes, you're right," he says. "When a revolution
comes, it is at the very moment when there is some improvement. But
improvement is too slow, too limited – that's when people revolt. But
first they have to be set in some motion. If you are in a motionless
situation, you will never revolt."

He seems to be formulating a kind of Newtonian physics of revolution.
Laws of political inertia, political velocity. The very thing that
happened in Eastern Europe in 1989, that happened in South Africa in
1990, that continues in the Soviet Union even now. A body at rest will
remain at rest. And a body in motion…

"It's true," he says. "I was not in Pinsk at the time, but I know
people who witnessed the liquidation of the ghetto in Pinsk. At that
time there were some 30,000 people in the ghetto of Pinsk. And when
the moment of the Final Solution came, they were sent through the
town, in columns. Rabbis marched at the head of each column. And in
columns – one huge, huge column – they walked to the place which is
about ten kilometers outside of town, in a small forest. There were
mass graves dug there, long graves, and on the opposite side of every
grave was a Nazi soldier with a machine gun. And the Jewish people of
Pinsk were taken to the verge of the grave and were shot. One row fell
in the grave, and the next row came, was shot, fell down, and the next
row, shot, fell down – in silence. All in silence.

"The machine gun in World War II was still a very heavy instrument,
and those soldiers became, after some minutes, very tired. So they
asked the Jews to stop so the soldiers could rest and smoke a
cigarette. Then the soldiers would be sitting on the dirt piles of the
gave, smoking cigarettes and taking a rest. After resting for some
time, they picked up their machine guns, and they asked the rabbis to
walk again, and again they continued to shoot. There were eyewitnesses
to this, because some people survived. So Hannah Arendt couldn't
understand it, but it is understandable. If you are in Pinsk, and you
are already so desperately run-down – no food, sick, hopeless, no way
to escape – you will just follow the orders of your religious leaders.
You will march in columns. You will wait while they smoke. You will go
to your death."

Fun With Giant Squid! Squashed Crab Palette Squid Art

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The medium truly IS the message here, as we learn to create artwork out of that most mundane, most repulsive, yet perversely most magnetic material: the squashed crab.

Squid in Squashed Crabs

Poignant, oui? Truly it would be a heart of stone which would not be wrung almost to the point of sundering by this quiescent yet wrenching portrait of silent, inescapable doom.

 From Rathergood’s astute artistic analysis:

Sick Squid
Grinfish

   Mr Grinfish of Grincity has submitted this particularly dramatic and emotive action piece. In his words:

“It is a piece created to evoke emotion for the plight of that most peaceful and lovable of creatures, the Giant Squid. Here we see our betentacled friend just moments before he meets his untimely demise from collision with a Russian nuclear submarine. See the sadness is his crab-like eyes, that this cruel world that made the giant squid [cap. sic] so famous for it’s[sic] roles in movies like 20.000 Leagues Under The Sea, could so carelessly do away with it in an underwater impact. Hopefully, this work will bring home the truth of the damage we are doing to such invertebrates by existing upon this planet, and will convince us all to shoot ourselves until dead.”

Quite. Not merely wonderful artwork, but also an ecological call to arms. Squddy magic, I’m sure you will agree.

And be sure to scroll down and see the Crap Balette, which they describe as:

We are now entering the realm of art as Metaphysics– in this extremely accomplished piece Mr Duncan has obviously laid open his psyche in an attempt to translate the Dostoevskian Maelstrom of post-millenial existence into a visual experience through the medium of squashed crabs.

Bravo!

Crediting Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Lecture

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Seamus HeaneyFrom NobelPrize.org. See link for full text and Realplayer recording.

Here is a snippet:

*

One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.

*

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about [a] friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way – which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.