Yet another Reason why the Catholic Church should go down in Flames

The BBC World website reported today that the Archbishop of the Catholic Church in Olinda and Recife (Brazil), Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, has excommunicated those involved in giving a nine-year old rape victim an abortion. The nine-year old child became pregnant with twins after being repeatedly raped by her step-father. Her mother helped her find a hospital and doctors who would give the poor girl an abortion. In Brazil, the law only allows for abortion in cases of incest, rape or considerable risk to the mother’s health. All three of these conditions applied to this little nine-year old girl. The Archbishop condemned the abortion and all those that were involved in arranging it, save for the little girl, who the church agreed not to hold responsible for the abortion because of her young age.

Now think about this. If the girl is to young to be held responsible for undergoing an abortion in the church’s eyes, then how could she possible have been able to go through with the pregnancy and be responsible for two infants when they would have come to term?? After the holocaust denier caused the Catholic church to come under fire just a while ago, all of the members of the Catholic church should take the hint, and shut their self-righteous and misguided traps once and for all. Or at least untill the outrage over their last debacle has died down.

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I dare say that, yes, this world was once mine, My roots burrowed through this soil and bore life through like blue veins. I once sat in a green field as if it were my bedding, and watched the stars as if the sky were a mirror. I was connected to it viscerally. It was me and I it. It shone with prismatic clarity. I spoke in unison with all the chirping of the crickets. I had no idea that I was yet the primordial fool. I was ripped from it with anything but surgical precision. No anesthesia. It still hurts. Now, like Freud’s men-babes, I want to be granted re-entry to its cosmic, loving, outraged comfort. But it does not yield.

i missed the colours of that world, that unity and identity. But, like tinted flowers in fresh water, the coulour has drained out and I see what others had told me I ought to see for so long. The world has become a painting with its colour sucked out. Pigment resting on grey and off-white, and nearly-carbon-black. I thought it would never happen. I’m like the Little Prince who has lost his first sketch, and now cannot test if the adults around me understand where I’m coming from.

However, I can assure you that it’s not novelty I crave – getting swamped by critiques of modernity has made sure of that. Perhaps I crave simplicity and virtue. I crave Socratic discussions on right and wrong modes of being, and return to a time when they actually meant something. I want to whole-heartedly denounce the stoics, the sophists and the cynics. But somehow, I can’t coherently summon the words, the argument, the care, the belief that they’re not altogether correct.

I wish i could still rely on partial information, and tout or denounce this or that from a glimpse of it. I wish I got angry at the news like I used to. And that injustice was still outrageous and not a just another matter of course. I wish I could stop having discussions about ideas in terms of the authors that first wrote them down. At least I’d have real avenues for discussion, instead of bobbing lackadaisically on this oceanic body of partial certainties, and monochromatic opinion. I’m tired of simulacrum. I want the real thing back.

Who’s with me?

*crickets chirping in the distance*

On the Thermodynamics of Hellfire

Some say we, the people, are rational little beings walking around on two legs, unmoved like boulders. If that’s true, I’m the most ridiculous of boulders, because everything moves; it’s like I’m molten. There are no guidelines to follow. No street signs, no traffic code, not even the laws of thermodynamics apply here. This is lawlessness made rock. Made frog in my throat. Choking up the passageways like too many words in mid tumble. Makes me cry like an elephant at a roadside funeral. I should soak myself in iodine and jump into a pool of cotton balls. I should get healed. (As if someone, something could do it for me). I should climb into an industrial sized garbage bag (perforated) filled with echinecea leaves (dried) and then jump into a vat of hot water (boiled). I should practice cynicism, and be stoic. I should leave Dionysus alone, relegate him back to lonely mount Olympus where he belongs; leave him to his soiled libations undisturbed.

But I want to make sense of this. I want to squeeze it between my fingers like crushed grapes, or ground slugs. I want it to speak to me, and tell me where I’ve gone wrong. I want it to jangle around and make noise like a mariachi band. I want it to sing ballads in the name of lost heroes. I want it to tell me all the alternate endings for stories that were never begun. I want it to teach me something. But instead, I’m Tantalus, wading through swamps of meaning, as dream interpretation books float by. If I were a butterfly, i’d crawl back into the genie’s lamp. (He’s got a hookah in there somewhere.)  I’d fly into the flame, preferring brilliance to whatever this is.

I stopped in the fire the other day
Watched the snow fall like parachuting marines
And thought about my uterus
I’ve carried it around all my life,
Barely recognizing it was there
Until it started giving me trouble
First it was the right to own property
Then the vote, of course
And now. It hurts.
It does unruly things
Keeps me worried and awake
It used to be so neutral, so nonchalant.
So non-confrontational,
Like a lone hippie in a head shop
Simply content, unassuming.
But now, it’s always lurking around.
Making rude comments and watching for my reaction
Like a brat testing the boundaries
A visceral gadfly

A blood-and-guts terrorist

A cantankerous Cunt

If this is a gift, as the propaganda proclaims
Then where’s my gift receipt?

The values of higher education

Scene: Discrimination and the Law in Canada. Course given at unammed University in Montreal.

Prof: Quebec Canadian Judge, presiding.

Subject matter: Harassment/discrimination.

Prof: I had one case come before me, in which a woman filed a complaint against a mechanic because he had put up a poster of a woman in a tiny little bikini on his office wall.

random bursts of giggling swirl like wind through tall grass throughout the class.

Prof: (smiling) “Well, you know, some poeple feel uncomfortable with things like that, it’s important not only to be objective, but subjective too.”

(Girl raises hand) Prof, pointing to girl, “Yes”

Girl: “If it were a picture of George Clooney, would it be the same if the situation was reversed? If it were a picture of George Clooney, on a woman’s office wall ?”

Prof: “every situation is different, you see.”

My hand shoots up, Prof looks over, nods.

Me: “IT’s not just that it’s a picture of someone. If it were a picture of a fully clad Julia Roberts, it probably wouldn’t be offensive. If it were a picture of a sharp-looking George Clooney looking good in a suit, that would also not be offensive.” (white guy behind me pipes up, speaking over me, challenging: “that would make me uncomfortable!”) Now if it were a picture of a chippendale, nude on a sandy beach but for a barely-there g-string it would be different.

White guy behind me, gelled hair, tight black t-shirt: “Whatever, so what if it’s a girl in a bikini?! It’s not like she’d totally naked, and what would it matter anyway?”

First speaking girl looks perplexed, intemittently nodding and shaking her head.

The whole class bursts into sharp snippets of speech. People’s heads nodding, shaking uncontrollably.

Prof: “We must always provide for the region in which a complaint is made. This is from Saskatchewan, even a big bikini has a different effect than it would here. Maybe if it were here,, in Montreal, even a g-string would not…. Oh, I don’t know, actually… Anyway, let’s move on to pay equity. Which is that a job mostly performed by women should not be paid less than a job mostly performed by men if it is of equal value.”

Snickering spreads through the class, dying quickly.

Me: (screaming silently inside my head, eyes wide; disbelieving. Checking watch: one more hour of this…)

-Fin-

If you can’t join them, beat them…. I mean, if you can’t beat them….

Btw: finding pictures of lewd male models on beaches is actually surprisingly difficult.  I’m so tired of this society.

Pachabell

Juxtaposed

On Tuesday, December 9th, the Toronto Star ran a story about the aniversary of the Universal declaration of Human Rights, which was signed on Dec. 10th, 1948. The writer, Olivia Ward, interviewed various intellectuals and human rights organization representatives, all of whom agreed that the declaration would most likely not pass if it were introduced to the UN now. No one would back the lofty ideals put forward by the declaration.

Meanwhile, on the facing page, a tiny little clip of a story reported that a dog in Chile risked its own life to save its hurt friend. The dog dragged the seriously injured dog from where it was lying unconscious in the middle of the freeway, to the safety of the road’s shoulder. It all got caught on a security tape.

Maybe the cynics were right. The only right way to live is to live like a dog. It’s unfortunate that we humans so often fall short.

Dubber Rucky: Notes from a Bathtub

Green syrup runs through the cascade,
Crashing, exploding into foam, foam everywhere
Runs up round my belly, peninsular anatomy,
Surrounded by water on all sides but one
And groping hands (mine, no less)
Blindly find their way to the dimpled skin
Just bellow the small and above the in-between
undulating like a fat baby’s inner thighs
Pimpled and follickled, and inspiring to the touch
The foam laps up to the venus mound,
(but be not fooled, the gods have nothing to do with it)
The pubic hairs stand tall, like turrets,
A castle on the pebbled shore
And the waves wheel and deal on all sides
An island, unconnected to anywhere or anyone
Nipples like lighthouses, jutting out of the water
up top cresting the soft fleshy mountains,
The groundskeeper has not been by recently,
The long fine hairs around the ruby red buildings
Waver in the wind like long grass
Wrinkled skin puckers on my fingertips
Osmosis has called the skin juice out to play,
To gather with its brethren on the other side
Of the cellular barricade, as envy creeps through me
For I wish I too could release my water
Right then, right there
And feel the heat swirl along my skin,
A gulf stream jetting across and beside,
So hot against the rest of the gone-cold-ocean
But I don’t because that would be disgusting
And other people have to bathe here too
But, God, it would be nice.

However, one must always remember Pathagoras’ wise words: “Don’t eat your heart”

the windows are low down by the park

by the bench that has no seat

right next to where the people leave their cars to pasture

while someone’s standing bass is letting out

tones so low that they fill the street

And never have I seen animals so skittish

as the lurking Portuguese cats

that run low to the ground

as women wrapped up in old scarves

ride by on rusty cruiser bikes that were manufactured and sold

brand new and shiny in the early nineteen forties

Passers-by screech “Good day, good day”

and I mutter my regards to their mothers

The fashion is bright and the colors are few

but the houses make up for the darkness

And the only light that filters through

is that which comes from my monitor.

That old World

Being back in Portugal is a strange little experience. I call it a strange little experience because everything is strange and little. This is a small nation, and concerns itself with small things. The houses are small, the cars are small, the people are small. Even the minds are small (for the most part that is, I know there must be lots of big thinking, open minds; but they are hidden elsewhere; in the big cities most likely). This week, the papers reported that one of the politicians made a gaffe about the need to suspend democracy for 6 months in order to reform the bureaucratic apparatuses.

But on to other matters…

Next door lives a heartbreaking story. A girl I used to play with in my childhood lives with her grandmother in a tiny little house right beside me. I used to play with her for countless hours when I came to live here. I was six, she was eleven or so at the time. I remember that I shat my pants one day because I just couldn’t tear myself away from whatever game we had devised. (I was 6 for god’s sake!) The only time I got really angry at her was when she threw my favorite dolls into the mean old lady’s yard, which was right next to ours. That mean old lady’s damn yippy dogs would save me the trouble of ripping the dolls’ heads off by doing the work for me.

My friend was born with a mental disability, and her mother left her under the care of her grandmother because for whatever reason, she couldn’t give her the care she needed. The ‘girl’ is now twenty eight, and her grandmother is well into her eighties. The grandmother has some health problems, and so now the girl does her best to take care of her. The two of them live there in almost complete isolation. One day, the ‘girl’, named Ceu, came over to hang out with me for a little while. I took out some pencils and paper, and we sat at the kitchen table drawing together. I walked her home after nightfall. As we walked into her dark kitchen, we found her grandmother sitting in her wheelchair by the table. She was angry because she was left to sit in the dark and cold while Ceu was out at my house. She couldn’t light a fire in the hearth by herself, nor could she reach the light switch from her wheelchair. I apologized profusely for having kept Ceu with me longer than I should have.

My heart broke in that cold dark kitchen.

Ceu makes no bones about the fact that her mother does not care about her. She lives in the same small town, but rarely comes to see her. She told me that sometimes she can’t keep herself from crying when she passes by my house and finds that we’re not there. There is no subterfuge with her. None at all. Some would call her behaviour child-like. I call it unvarnished honesty. There is something about her that allows her to surpass the shame of taboo and simply tell it like it is. I wonder what will happen to her after her grandmother passes away. Who will she live with? I hope to goddess that she will be treated well, but there is no guarantee that anyone will even offer to live with her.

She can boil potatoes with the best of them, she can wash and clean and cook and work just like anyone else, but what she tells me that hurts her most is the loneliness. The only remedy for that is unconditional love from someone who has their company to offer. Meanwhile, I’m going back to Canada to continue with my life. It will be up to luck and fate to take care of her. I’ll only know about how she is when I come back to visit the next time because Ceu is illiterate, and so is her grandmother.

Ceu makes me realize just how I get so caught up with my own life that I completely forget about those who are left behind. When it comes down to it, I succumb to powerlessness much too easily. Sending a postcard is so facile, so meaningless, but it seems like it’s the only thing I can really do.