Remarks

This is a spot to leave any comment that seems good to you.

Sort of like "Open Thread" on blogs with a lot of posting. :-)

Thank you Mr. Durrell

Lawrence Durrell is one of those few poets whose gifts migrate well to prose.

In my Favorite Books in the profile, I have listed The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell's enduring masterpiece. It is four books: Justine, Baltahzar, Mountolive, and Clea.

I have spent most of my life under the complete spell of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Couldn't really say why, but not because it's unclear to me; it's not unclear at all. I couldn't say simply because it's axiomatic to my mind and heart. How could I not? More on that in another post perhaps.

But The Alexandria Quartet is by no means SF, nor Fantasy. Why and how it gives me what I need, that usually I only find in stories of elsewhen, I can't say either. This really is a mystery, and it pleases me to be mystified and gratified all at once.

I'll let the author help explain, if explanations are called for. This is the beginning: the opening of Justine.

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes...

I have escaped to this island with a few books and the child—Melissa's child. I do not know why I use the word "escape". The villagers say jokingly that only a sick man would choose such a remote place to rebuild. Well, then, I have come here to heal myself, if you like to put it that way...

At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light a lamp and limp about, thinking of my friends—of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora—precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!

I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all! Living on this bare promontory, snatched every night from darkness by Arcturus, far from the lime-laden dust of those summer afternoons, I see at last that none of us is properly to be judged for what happened in the past. It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.

I should stop there. But because I'm self-indulgent and this blog, as Red Green would say, "is mine, and I can do what I want with it", more from a few pages on:

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential—the imagination. Otherwise why should we hurt one another?

And:

Today the child and I finished the hearth-stone of the house together, quietly talking as we worked. I talk to her as I would talk to myself if I were alone; she answers in an heroic language of her own invention. We buried the rings Cohen had bought for Melissa under the hearth-stone, according to the custom of this island. This will ensure good luck to the inmates of the house.

N-Word

The always interesting tidalgrrrl has just posted John Lennon's Woman Is The Nigger Of The World as the first installment of Friday Feminism. She also posted the lyrics, but bowdlerized "nigger" to read "n****r" because she dislikes the word, and then wondered about the nature and implications of this self-censorship.

"Nigger" is a word I've thought about a lot. Setting aside its earlier usage by the British (who seemed to apply it, not just to Africans or their descendants, but to dark-skinned peoples generally), its primary existence in this world has been American. In America, Nigger has always been used as a peculiar kind of word: derogatory slang whose purpose is to scornfully disempower a particular segment of society. Americans of African descent have been systematically and unrelentingly disadvantaged since the first slaves were brought across the Atlantic, and that evil tradition continues. America is a profoundly racist society.

(Some years back, I worked in a shipyard. The level of dumbfuck blue-collar racism was pretty high, and I couldn't resist schooling my coworkers from time to time. At one point they were dumbfounded when I said patiently that really there were hardly any "Niggers" in Africa. "'Nigger' is a putdown used on a group of Americans. A Nigger is an American. By definition," I explained. For a while after that I would catch a few of them staring off into space, frowning and moving their lips a little.)

When society decides to squash a group of people, a simple well-known derogatory term is enormously effective and efficient. It's code for "You have no hope of fully belonging, no hope of fair treatment. We will arbitrarily attack or imprison or impoverish you, and there is no recourse. The worst of us will be given preference over the best of you. You're not really fully human, and you have a place among us -- you have a life -- by our sufferance only."

That's what Nigger means. Fantastic semantic compression, really, when you think about it: the great big poison grenade of sneering arrogant disdain, and even really stupid and inarticulate people Get It.

When there's a word like that, one of the most effective and indispensable strategies for the oppressed is to take it as your own, own it proudly, own it defiantly, shove it in their face, so it means something you want it to mean; until one day that entire freight of compressed hatred is just so last year.

Those of us who are dykes, fags, queers, nerds, geeks, freaks, bitches and even Liberals have all benefited from such reclamations (I leave speculation about my membership in those individual categories as an exercise for the reader; on the Internets nobody knows you're a ________). But Nigger, despite a lot of smart, sincere effort by a lot of smart, sincere people over the years, still resists efforts to make it all right. No less stalwart a personage than Richard Pryor publicly renounced the use of Nigger in his stand-up routines, saying (IIRC, ain't got no citation handy) that "yeah, you tell yourself a lot of lies" -- lies about how "Nigger" was an empowering, rather than hurtful, word.

Nigger is an ugly word with an ugly history, and apparently lots of ugly staying power. It's both sad and fascinating that tidalgrrrl is so repulsed and conflicted by it that she first censors herself, then calls attention to the censorship. This from a forthright and expressive woman who doesn't flinch from fuckshitpisscuntcocksuckermotherfuckerandtits when they are called for.

I don't censor my writing, except for concern about whether a term or concept will work for specific audiences. When I'm writing analytically, or when I'm expressing an imagined rightwing opinion (e.g., "Yeah Earl, I know, the war on drugs is a pain in the ass, but it helps keep the niggers down so that's good") I won't hold back.

But I do not and will not use Nigger as a pejorative. And I don't trust it as irony, because there is too much chance of perpetuating memes that I want to see extinguished, or else behaving like a fucking idiot (no, Jonah didn't say that. Tbogg put those words in his mouth, but damn how plausible).

I sincerely hope that one day Nigger will be reclaimed for real. That one day everybody will snort with amused derision whenever someone tries to resurrect the old meanhearted power of Nigger as a putdown, kind of the way people today stare in puzzled semi-bafflement when someone tries to use "fairy" as a homophobic insult.

But I think that day is a long way off. As long as African Americans are singled out, with unrelenting stupid persistence, as permanent inferiors, and as long as there are strident Confederate motherfuckers out there with a desperate need to know they can reliably look down on somebody no matter what, Nigger will remain a cruel word.

Loaded words are like loaded guns. Don't play with them in the livingroom.

No, it's not Freudian

One of my favorite books is The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddison. It's a glorious early 20th-century fantasy, in which the dialogue is Elizabethan and the narrative prose a modified Jacobean. Some of the best English outside of Shakespeare, if you have the patience for it; which I sadly observe hardly anyone does these days.

In the chapter Conjuring in the Iron Tower, Eddison paints a climactic scene of alchemical sorcery:

Therewith the King unlocked the greatest of those books that lay by on the massive table, saying in Gro's ear, as one who would not be overheard, "This is that awful book of grammarie wherewith in this same chamber, on such a night, Gorice VII. stirred the vasty deep. And know that from this circumstance alone ensued the ruin of King Gorice VII., in that, having by his hellish science conjured up somewhat from the primaeval dark, and being utterly fordone with the sweat and stress of his conjuring, his mind was clouded for a moment, in such sort that either he forgot the words writ in this grammarie, or the page whereon they were writ, or speech failed him to speak those words that must be spoken, or might to do those things which must be done to complete the charm. Wherefore he kept not his power over that which he had called out of the deep, but it turned upon him and tare him limb from limb. Such like doom will I avoid, renewing in these latter days those self-same spells, if thou durst stand by me undismayed the while I utter my incantations. And shouldst thou mark me fail or waver ere all be accomplished, then shalt thyself lay hand on book and crucible and fulfill whatsoever is needful, as I shall first show thee.

The scene is grim and scary and beautifully described: nuts-and-bolts sorcery, played for keeps.

And now through every window came a light into the chamber as of skies paling to the dawn. Yet not wholly so; for never yet came dawn at midnight, nor from all four quarters of the sky at once, nor with such swift strides of increasing light, nor with a light so ghastly. The candle flames burned filmy as the glare waxed strong from without: an evil pallid light of bale and corruption, wherein the hands and faces of King Gorice and his disciple showed death-pale, and their lips black as the dark skin of a grape where the bloom has been rubbed off from it.

And matters go badly. The King does summon the demonic presence, and assigns it a task...

But now was the King's endurance clean spent, so that his knees failed him and he sank like a sick man into his mighty chair. But the room was filled with a tumult as of rushing waters, and a laughter above the tumult like to the laughter of souls condemned. And the King was reminded that he had left unspoken that word which should dismiss his sending.

...

Yet was Gro mindful, even in that hideous storm of terror, of the ninety-seventh page whereon the King had shown him the word of dismissal, and he wrenched the book from the king's palsied grasp and turned to the page. Scarce had his eye found the word, when a whirlwind of hail and sleet swept into the chamber, and the candles were blown out and the tables overset. And in the plunging darkness beneath the crashing of the thunder Gro pitching headlong felt claws clasp his head and body. He cried in his agony the word, that was the word TRIPSARECOPSEM, and so fell a-swooning.

Damn kids nowadays, with their World Of Warcraft and their Hogwarts Academy, they just don't understand good old-fashined magic, dammnit.