#and we should be expressing this through various long form essays

[pinkcadillaccas]

We need to stop making up random one sentence definitions for sexualities which always end up being wrong, exclusionary and transphobic. We have to return to manifestos.

[aksarabumilangit]

About Denny Ja Essay Poetry and Indonesia’s journey since the colonial period

In this article, we will explore why Denny Ja’s essay poetry is so important in understanding Indonesia’s journey since the colonial period. Denny JA, a famous writer, poet, and culturalist in Indonesia, has written a number of essay poems that describe the social and political conditions of this nation. His works provide in-depth insights about the history, culture, and change of Indonesian society from the past until now.    Essay poetry is a unique literary genre because it combines elements of poetry and essays. In his essay poetry, Denny JA uses the beauty of the language of poetry to convey ideas and critical reflections on various aspects of life in Indonesia. His works highlighted social, political, and cultural issues that were an important part of Indonesia’s journey.    One of the reasons why Denny JA’s essay poetry is so important is because it gives a different perspective on the history of colonialism in Indonesia. Through his poetry, Denny Ja was able to describe the experience and pain experienced by the Indonesian people during the colonial period. He invited us to reflect on the resistance and struggle carried out by the Indonesian heroes in achieving independence.    In addition, Denny Ja’s essay poetry also shows the social and political changes that occurred in Indonesia since the colonial period. His works reflect the struggle of the people in achieving independence, as well as describing the diversity of Indonesian culture and identity. Denny Ja’s essay poetry is a reflection of the long journey of the Indonesian people in achieving freedom and building a better country.    Denny Ja’s essay poetry also has an important role in reminding us of the values that must be upheld in developing a better Indonesia. His works raise issues such as justice, equality, and freedom, which are the main principles in achieving the ideals of the nation. Through his essay poetry, Denny Ja invites all of us to think, reflect, and act in order to realize positive changes.    Not only that, Denny Ja’s essay poetry also has a strong expression in conveying meaningful messages. The language of poetry used by Denny Ja is able to touch the heart and mind of the reader, arouse emotions, and inspire to think more deeply about social and political conditions in Indonesia. Essay poetry is an effective means to raise social awareness and change.    In appreciating Denny Ja’s essay poetry, we also should not forget the important role of language and literature in strengthening the identity of Indonesian culture. Essay poetry is a form of art that celebrates our language and cultural wealth. Through essay poetry, we can maintain and appreciate Indonesian cultural heritage, and develop awareness of the importance of maintaining and preserving cultural diversity in this country.    Finally, Denny Ja’s essay poetry plays an important role in inspiring the younger generation to care for history and understand Indonesia’s journey. His works can be a source of inspiration for those who want to contribute to advancing this nation. Denny Ja’s essay poetry teaches us to respect and appreciate the struggle of our predecessors, as well as becoming a positive agent of change in society.    In conclusion, Denny Ja’s essay poetry has a significant impact in understanding Indonesia’s journey since the colonial period.

Check more: Why is Denny Ja’s essay poetry so important to understand Indonesia’s journey since the colonial period?

[leonalfari]

Denny JA Builds Inner Depth Through Religion as Cultural Heritage

Denny Ja, a well-known intellectual and educator in Indonesia, has long been a public concern because of his extraordinary contribution in building the inner depth through religions as cultural heritage. Through his thoughts and works, he has succeeded in inspiring many people to explore religion and spirituality in everyday life. In many of his writings, Denny JA highlighted the importance of religion as a source of valuable moral values and teachings. He believes that religions have great potential to help individuals understand themselves, develop deeper minds, and establish stronger connections with fellow human beings. In developing his thoughts, Denny JA often highlights the concepts of religions as cultural heritage. He views religion as a form of cultural expression that reflects the identity and local wisdom of a society. According to him, maintaining and understanding religion as a cultural heritage is an important step to build the inner depth of individuals and strengthen social services in the midst of the diversity of Indonesian society. Denny JA also stressed the importance of interfaith dialogue as a means to enrich understanding and tolerance between religious believers. He realized that Indonesian society consisted of various different religions and beliefs. Therefore, he encourages individuals to listen to and understand each other's trust in the hope of building harmony and unity in the midst of differences. One important work of Denny Ja who described his thoughts was his famous essay poetry, "Culture, Religion, and Spirituality: Deepening a sense of humanity." In the essay poetry, he explores in depth how culture, religion, and spirituality are interrelated and contribute to forming the identity of individuals and society. Through his essay poetry, Denny Ja invites the reader to reflect on the universal values contained in religions and how we can apply them in everyday life. He stressed the importance of carrying out religious teachings with understanding and affection, and sharing these values with others to create positive changes in society. In addition, Denny Ja is also active in holding seminars, discussions, and workshops that raise religious and spiritual issues. He is committed to providing platforms for individuals from various backgrounds to share their views and experiences, as well as enrich collective understanding of religion and spirituality. Denny Ja's works and thoughts have made a significant contribution to the development of the inner depth of the Indonesian people. Through an inclusive and open approach, he encourages each individual to explore and reflect on spiritual values through existing religions. Denny Ja believes that by understanding and respecting religion as a cultural heritage, we can strengthen social ties and build a more harmonious society. In an era where differences are often a source of conflict, the views and efforts of Denny Ja provide inspiration and hope. By inviting individuals to carry out religious teachings meaningfully and tolerantly, and encourage inter -religious dialogue, he opens the way to build inner depth and unity in the midst of diversity of Indonesian culture. Thus, Denny Ja's contribution in building inner depth through religions as cultural heritage should be appreciated.

Check in full: Denny Ja: Building inner depth through religions as cultural heritage

[arisawati]

Understanding the meaning: Diving Denny JA's elected work 35

Introduction In the world of Indonesian literature, the name Denny JA is certainly not a foreign name. Denny Ja or Denny Januar Ali, a well -known author who has produced a lot of stunning literary work. In 2021, Denny JA commemorates his 35th birthday and in commemoration of the moment, a collection of selected works from Denny JA 35 has been published. In this article, we will explore the meaning contained in the selected work. 1. Dive into the 35th selected work of Denny JA In this 35th Denny JA selected collection, there are various types of writings that include literary genres such as prose, poetry, and essays. Denny Ja is known as a good writer in processing words and producing memorable works. In exploring this chosen work, we will understand more deeply the meaning of hidden in it. 2. meaning in prose Prose is one of the literary genres that is often used by Denny JA in expressing his idea. In this 35th selected collection of works, there are several prose that should be analyzed. For example, a short story titled "Rain on the edge of the window" which illustrates loneliness and longing. The meaning contained in this short story can arouse the emotions of the reader and make them reflect. In addition, there is also a prose entitled "Love in the sentence" which explores the meaning of love through the use of beautiful language. In this prose, Denny JA succeeded in describing how strong the power of words in conveying feelings of love. 3. Meaning in Poetry Poetry is also an important part of this 35th Denny Ja's chosen work. Poetry is often used as a means to express deep feelings and convey meaningful messages. In this selected collection of works, there are several poems that should be analyzed. One of the poems that attract attention is "longing wrapped in color". In this poem, Denny JA uses a blend of beautiful and colorful words to describe the feeling of deep longing. This poem is not just a collection of beautiful words, but also contains a deep meaning about the longing for something or someone. 4. The meaning in the essay In addition to prose and poetry, the 35th selected Denny Ja work also includes the genre of essay. Essays are one form of writing that allows the writer to convey their thoughts, opinions, and personal experiences. In this selected collection of works, there are several essays that should be analyzed. One of the interesting essays to be analyzed in terms of meaning is "journey to maturity". In this essay, Denny Ja tells his personal experience in achieving maturity and describing the meaning of the trip. Through this essay, readers can learn new lessons and understanding of the meaning of maturity in life. Conclusion In this 35th Denny JA selected collection, there are various meanings hidden in it. Through prose, poetry, and essay, Denny JA succeeded in conveying meaningful messages and arouse the emotions of readers. This chosen work is clear evidence of Denny JA's expertise in processing words and producing memorable works. In understanding the meaning of the 35th selected work of Denny Ja, we can reflect on life, love, loneliness, and various other themes raised by Denny JA in his writings. This selected collection of works is a beautiful offering from an author who has inspired many people for 35 years. The 35th chosen work of Denny JA JA must be appreciated as a valuable Indonesian literary heritage and deserves to be dumped.

Check more: Understanding meaning: Diving Denny JA's chosen work 35

[essayduniya]

HOW TO WRITE AN ESSAY?

Writing your mental feelings or thoughts in a concise and controlled manner is called 'essay'.

In other words, writing your feelings on a topic in complete sequence is called 'essay'.

The word 'essay' is made up of two words - Ni + Bandha. It means well bound creation. That is, a composition that is written thoughtfully, sequentially.

On the basis of this, we can say in simple words - 'Essay is that prose composition, which is written sequentially on a topic.'

Essay topics in Hindi

Generally, the topics of the essay are familiar topics, that is, about which we hear, see and read; Such as – religious festivals, national festivals, different types of problems, weather etc.

For successful discussion in all areas of life, we need the best essay writing. essay can be written on any topic. Today essays are being written on social, economic, political and scientific subjects. Every subject, every object, person in the world can be the center of an essay.

Defining the essay, Acharya Ramchandra Shukla, the leading litterateur of Hindi, has said-

“In essay writing, the author walks on the broken thread branches here and there at a free pace according to the tendency of his mind.”

The above definition means that the essay should be according to the tendency of the writer's mind and the writing of the essay should be based on free movement, that is, the essay should be written in such a way that the author's thinking, ideological level, his own ideology on the subject should become clear.

Moreover, the author should flow like a river, without being influenced by the opinion of others. It is very important that the personal identity or selfishness of the author should not affect the subject matter.

It is not necessary that whatever you write is acceptable to everyone, it is important that you write objectively because objectivity is the first and last criterion of an essay.

Parts of an Essay

Four parts of the essay were fixed-

 (1) Title –

The title should be catchy, so that people are eager to read the essay. But if you are appearing for the exam, you must have already been given the title.

(2) Preamble—

This is the foundation of the excellence of the essay. It is also called role. It should be very interesting and engaging but it should not be too long. The role should be such that it can give a glimpse of the subject matter. Which can motivate the reader to read the essay.

The essay should begin with an aphorism, a verse or an example. Use of good effective lines will make a good impression on the examiner, which will help the student to score good marks. Attractive opening creates curiosity in the mind of the reader or examiner to read the essay further. In the essay, a brief introduction of the topic and its present form should also be given to the student in the role section. While writing a role, it is very important to keep in mind that the role should be directly related to the subject.

(3) Subject-Detail -

In this, in three to four paragraphs, their views are expressed on various aspects of the subject. In each paragraph, ideas are written on one aspect. This is the main part of the essay. It is very important for them to be balanced. Here the essayist expresses his point of view. When writing an essay, it should be written rough, what to tell first, then make points, after that write them in paragraphs.

(4) Epilogue –

It is written at the end of the essay. In this part, the things written in the essay are written in a paragraph in the form of a summary. A message can also be written in it. Essays can be ended with exhortation, quoting (writing) the thoughts of others or through a line of poetry.

[imagineddworld]

Favorite victim

Pairing: Fred Weasley x Reader

Summary: You are Fred’s favorite prank victim, which creates a lot of hatred towards one another. Until a mistletoe proofs you both wrong.

Word count: 2 k (2000) 

Author’s note: I am so sorry for being this unactive. Also sorry for the lack of quality. University is taking up all my time and has given me a headache that lasts for a week already. Thanks for understanding. I hope you enjoy this shorter fic.x

You and Fred had a complex friendship, if it even could be considered that. He always seemed to take the piss with you. For some unknown reason you were his favorite pranking victim. It all had started innocent. Hiding your ties, placing your books at the highest shelves that were impossible to reach, and switching your ropes with one of the other houses. Putting potions in your food that made it taste odd, made you sneeze, and made your voice a high pitched squeak. But over time they became more evil. The potions no longer got their innocence. They coloured your hair in plenty vibrant colours, made your nose bleed, and made you cough up feathers. The twins put traps everywhere, so you would trip and get covered in a thick, stinky liquid. In class they made your books explode, messed up your potions so you would end up with a loud explosion to the face and getting covered with whatever concoction was in the cauldron. 

It was getting out of hand. Last week they had replaced your soap with one of their own brewed ones. It was supposed to make your head purple, but instead you had started to swell up. Your face felt as if it was about to pop. You angrily approached them during breakfast. “Thanks a lot mate. Good luck explaining to McGonagall why I can’t attend her class”, you threw the soap at them, shaking your head in disappointment. “This hurts a lot”, you said through gritted teeth, before leaving them. You quickly headed over to the hospital wing for the umpteenth time. Later on you found out that you had a bad allergic reaction to one of the oils the twins had put in their soap. Your swelling first got worse, before it vanished. You barely could open your eyes and breathing had became difficult too, but luckily it faded soon enough. Their stupid little prank had resulted in you spending a good few days in the hospital wing. As soon as you were released form your bedrest, you gave the twins a lecture about the dangers of their pranks. Luckily for you they never used that oil ever again. But they managed to cross the line many more times in various other ways. You started to grow more hatred towards the beloved twins. One day they would actually kill you. 

Today they had stolen your alarm clock. You were woken up by annoyingly loud ticking noises coming from your closet. Over time it grew louder and more unbearable. As if being late wasn’t bad enough, they also had to steal all your clothes and replace them by those idiotic toys. They didn’t even had any specific shape, just odd metal forms. As if a robot and car got merged together but had melted during the process. After you finally found some clothes, hidden somewhere safe, you stormed out in search for the redheads. They were sat in the common room, happily chatting with some other students. “Weasley!”, you slammed the door shut behind you, angrily stumping your feet on the ground as you made your way over to him.  “I swear to Merlin, If i find another of your stupid little - toys- I will personally stick all of them up your throat till you choke to death”. As you were yelling at Fred, you had earned the attention of the whole common room. Even if the constant bickering had become a daily routine, they still waited impatiently for the scene in front of them to unravel into your usual fights. “Wow (Y/n), relax”, Fred showed his famous smirk. He stood up, meeting you halfway of the common room. He towered over your small frame, looking challenging into your eyes. But two could play his game, you didn’t budged as you gave him your darkest, murderous glare. You raised your eyebrow as a signal for him to explain himself, already knowing that only nonsense would be spewing from his mouth. “It was just a joke. Not even a dangerous one-”, the last part of his sentence got cut off by a loud exploding sound coming from the girls sleeping room. Or more specific, your closet. At the same time, the toy in your hand had exploded as well. You let out a scream of shock, while throwing the lightly smoking object to where Fred’s feet were. He jumped as a reflex. His face turned angry for a slight moment, but you could care less. You were beyond furious. The day were he would succeed in killing you, would came sooner than you had thought. “Not dangerous?! Not da-dan- Are you joking me?!”, you stuttered due to your overwhelming emotions, mostly furiousness and hatred. “Well, that’s kind of the point”, he cocked as if nothing had happened. As if he didn’t just could have injured someone really badly with his stupid prank. “I still could have been in there”, you said, hitting him on the chest to have more impact on him. “Someone could have gotten hurt, or worse -” Which each word that left your mouth, you hit him a bit harder. But he didn’t moved at all, he just grinned down at you. As a foolish idiot, loving the sight of your angered state. His smug face only made your anger worse. Nothing would ever sink in his brain, he just brushed it off. You wanted to comment on it, but found yourself unable to. You were just going to waste your time, so you decided to storm off to somewhere you wouldn’t need to see his face again. Somewhere you could calm down. 

Once you vanished out of the room and the watching crowd returned back to their daily routines, George stepped up to his brother. “Well well, Freddy. You know we are meant to play nice”, he smiled with a hint of a smirk hiding in the corner of his lip. “Shut it. I’ll play nice when she does”, He glowered, looking like a grumpy little child. “Oooh, so you want her to play nice with you”, George teased, as he wiggled his eyebrows at his twin. “Shut up”, Fred responded again, leaving his twin alone. George just smiled and shook his head at the foolishness of his brother. 

Luckily for you, you didn’t saw Fred’s face until your study session. You were nearly done with your potions essay, when a huge amount of ink fell out of the sky. Your clothes were soaked by the black liquid. As you looked down to your desk, you saw your essay covered in huge spots. “Noo”, you said a bit too loud, voice lightly cracking from your exhaustion. Your head shot towards the chuckling sound. “You”, you spat out, as if he were a poison in your mouth. You murderously glared at Fred while approaching him. “What have I done”, he smiled innocent. You bit down on your teeth, clenching your jaw. It was hard not to slap him across the face right now. You dug your fingernails into your palm, while deeply breathing in. “Do I really need to explain it?!”, you grumbled through gritted teeth. “Be my guest”, he smiled, beaming with excitement and mischief. His hands rested on his hips with much attitude. “You- Ruined - My- Essay”, with each word you stepped forwards, closing the gap between the two of you. You slapped your essay onto his chest, staining his clothes with the black ink. “I’ve spent days on it. And you know for a fact that Snape won’t care”, you pushed him away from you, making him stumble the slightest bit. “Ruin your own essay for once”, you said in a small voice, as the previous event slowly started to sink in. You were devastated, all your hard work was for nothing. Your eyes started to water a little. You were exhausted, not only from the long nights you had spend on the now ruined essay; but also because of how draining these pranks had gotten. Ever one of them gave you more reasons to hate these beloved twins.

As you looked up from your ink-covered hands, you saw Fred with a dumbfounded look on his face. Only seconds ago, he was beaming with joy. “What?”, you asked harsh, but nowhere near the intensity it usual would have. He gave no response, so you sighed and tried to walk off. But you found yourself unable to do so. A force kept you in place. “What do you want?”, you muttered in a mix of anger and despair. You were too exhausted and too distressed to have a fight. “Just let me go”, you said with a much softer voice. You were still turned away from him, as you were trying to hold in your tears. “I don’t have a hold of you... I thought you had a hold on me”, he said slow, confusion knitting his eyebrows together. “What? Why would I-”, you started, turning your head back in his direction. As you eyes trailed to his face, you caught sight of something green above Fred’s head. You let out a frustrated sight as you realized what it was. Stupid mistletoe and its bright green leaves.

You pinched the bridge of your nose, totally over this whole situation. You desperately tried to free yourself with some spells. But the mistletoe wouldn’t move, neither could any of you. “(Y/n), you know that won’t work. You should know that. You are lots better at charms than me”, Fred said, sounding sincere. A unexpected heat raised to your face. Fred Weasley just had given you a compliment, what a rarity. “But we need a way to get out of here before any teacher catches us out past curfew”. You used the lame excuse. You truly didn’t care if you were out past curfew or even got caught. You just wanted to get away from Fred before he could pick up on your emotions. Not that he would care. Everything just seemed to be a joke to him, surely when it included you. “I know a way”, he responded casually. But you were unimpressed, showing it clearly with your facial expressions. “Trust me, okay?”, he muttered softly, his voice almost coming out as a whisper. His big hand cupped your cheek, leaving a warmth at the place where your skins touched. “Just this once”, you replied, before his sweet lips pressed against yours. His other hand went to the small of your back, pulling your body tighter to his chest. Your hands lightly tugged on the fabric his shirt, staining it even more with the black liquid. Neither of you caring how big of a mess it would be. 

The kiss lasted longer than you had expected. You melted in his touch, losing yourself in the heavenly kiss. Your hands found their way to his jaw and the back of his neck, leaving a trail of blackness everywhere you had touched his soft skin. Only when you broke apart to breath, you realized what had happened. Your eyes slowly fluttered open. You were met with a grinning Fred, who now also was covered in the black liquid. But you weren’t going to give him the satisfaction he wanted. He was not going to get you that easily. “This changes nothing, Weasley”, you suppressed the smile that desperately wanted to curl your lips upwards. You turned away from him, relieved that you finally could move again. You were about to head over to your belongings, when he pulled you back by your arm. “Well, I think it does, (Y/l/n)”, he grinned the biggest smile he had ever had, “Mistletoe only sticks to people who have feelings for each other”. The smug bastard. Of course he would know such a thing. As he pulled you in for a second kiss, you couldn’t help but smile against his lips.

[221castiel]

Schooled

Destiel Teen AU // read on Ao3 here!

“I would like for you all to read chapter three over the weekend,” the teacher, Rowena calls as she hands out the marked assignments. “And do read over the notes I've left on your essays-” 

Dean looks up as she pauses next to him, her gaze staying locked on his own as she places his essay face down onto his desk. Her expression sat somewhere between annoyed and concerned, with her lips pressed in a tight line but eyes wide.

Frankly Dean wasn’t sure which he would prefer. 

“Are you able to talk after class Dear?” She asks softly, Dean only managing to give a small nod of his head before she walks off again. “And have a good weekend everyone,” Rowena calls just as the bell rings.

As the rest of the class begins getting up, collecting their bags, and sorting through papers Dean doesn't move his gaze instead resting on the paper. Slowly he flips the page over, his heart seeming to stop as his eyes land on the 8.5/20 written in the top corner; a circle had been drawn around it as if the bright red wasn’t enough to get his attention. The text that covered the page had been marked with corrections, pointing out various grammar mistakes, and other errors. 

Fuck. 

That’s all Dean can think as Rowena walks back to his side and crouches next to his desk.

“Dean,” she begins softly, her tone gentle, too gentle. Why couldn't she just yell at him, it'd be easier. It wouldn’t bring the weight to his stomach, or the burning to the tip of his nose. “I asked you to write a five paragraph essay on how war affects humanity using the texts we’ve been reading over the past month.” She pauses, “you gave me a paragraph.” 

He clenches his jaw, forcing a small nod, “you chose three texts, each of those should have had their own paragraph where you explained why you chose them. We talked about this together, do you remember?” 

Another nod of his head. His lips part, a shaken breath filling his lungs, then exiting, staying that way until he’s sure he won’t cry. “I didn’t have enough time,” Dean whispers 

“I gave you an extra week to finish this.” 

Finally he looks up away from his essay and to his teacher's wide eyed gaze. “I think you need to begin focusing more in class and less on your friends.” 

Dean doesn’t reply, he doesn’t think he can. 

“There’s only so much I can help you with. You need to start trying yourself.”

“I am trying.”

“Have you been meeting with your tutor? writing the notes? Reading the practise I give you?” He looks back to his essay, the paper shaking slightly in his hands. “Dean, I know you struggle with english but unless you put the effort in it isn’t going to be easier.” Rowena pauses. “You aren’t even showing up half the time.”

Why would he? 

So he could feel stupid?

So he could sit numb in his spot pretending to understand the blur of words in front of him. Be asked questions he didn’t know the words to, and get yelled at for interrupting again. Every ticking second burning against his skin, the boredom dragging on, mixed with the drowning feeling of not understanding. 

Why the fuck would he come. 

“Dean-”

“I need to go.”

“Can we please finish talking, we need to find a solution.”

Dean doesn't listen, instead grabbing his backpack from the floor, throwing it over his shoulder as he stomps out of the classroom. He makes his way through the school and to the parking lot, pulling open the driver door of Baby and practically falling in. 

Fuckin’ english. 

He throws his backpack to the back seats before crumbling his essay into a tight ball and throwing it onto the ground of the passenger seat. “Fuck!” He screams burying his face into his hands, palms of his hands bruising into his skin causing a dull pain across his face. 

Fuck.

Fuck.

The thought continues to spiral as he sits with his hands covering his face, staying that way until the passenger door is pulled open.

Immediately his hands jolt away, head darting up to meet Cas as the other gets in. “My apologies,” Cas says, pulling the passenger door closed. He turns his head just in time for Dean to plaster a grin across his face, one that Cas returns with a small smile. “Meg had needed help with cleaning up her art project.” 

“It’s all good,” Dean hums. He keeps the smile across his face as with shaking hands he pulls out the car keys and starts the engine. He glances over his shoulders, eyes meeting Cas’s for a moment before he turns back to the road, and begins driving out of the mostly empty parking lot. 

From his right he can hear Cas shifting through his binder, papers flipping slowly, then the soft scratching of a pencil. It’s the only sound that fills the car, Dean’s own mind spinning too much to talk, stomach heavy at the very thought of his essay.

With his left hand still around the wheel Dean reaches his right out, eyes darting to the side just long enough to allow him to lace his finger through Cas’s. The other’s hand’s warm in his own, soft, though not giving the comfort he’d wanted. 

Dean clears his throat his. “Did ya get your chem test back?” 

A small hum comes from his right. “It went well, I got ninety seven percent.”

“Well?” Dean asks, forcing his voice to sound lighter, more teasing then pained. Not wanting the other know the way his heart tugs at the disappointment Cas has for anything less than perfect. “Angel that’s fuckin’ awesome.”

“It would have been better but the teacher had decided the indicator would have become a redy orange, not red.”

Dean clenches his jaw, trying hard to avoid the annoyance that was clear in Cas’s voice. Cas didn’t take ninety sevens, he didn’t nineties, and definitely didn’t take forty twos. He didn’t take less than perfect.

Dean’s less than perfect. 

The small sound of pencil against paper continues as Cas works on whatever homework he has. The small scratching barely audible over his hammering heart, mixed with his spinning thoughts. 

His essay.

Cas.

The math test he has on monday.

Cas.

The science test he’d had the day before.

Cas.

Work

Cas.

Failing. 

Cas. 

Cas. 

“I think we should break up,” Dean suddenly says, the words coming without a second thought. 

“Pardon?”

Before he can stop himself Dean glances to his right, getting a glimpse of Cas’s wide eyed expression, lips pressed in a tight line. His dark hair ruffled and adorable. “I think we should break up,” Dean forces himself to repeat, looking back to the road that spreads out in front of them. 

A sharp inhale comes from his right, causing Dean’s grip around the steering wheel to only tighten, his other hand pulling away from Cas’s and going back to his side. “You think we should break up?” Cas finally says, sounding ust as breathless as Dean feels. “Why?”

Dean’s lips part. Why? Because Dean’s stupid, becasue he takes the easiest math class their school offered and still barely manges to get a high C, because he’s stupid. Because he can barely understand the words he reads. Because he’s stupid. 

Because Cas’s absolutely brilliant, and athletic and perfect.

And because Dean’ss stupid.

“Because,” Dean finally whispers, taking a slow breath. Despite that the air barely fills his lungs, when did it become so hard to breathe? 

“Because- you know,” Dean glances at the other, the words stuck in his throat as his gaze darts across Cas’s face then down his body, before looking back to the road.

He takes the turn out of town and in the direction of Cas’s house, his heart hammering in his chest, grip tight around the steering wheel. “You wear button ups,” Dean finally says, “and I wear t-shirts.”

From the corner of his eye Dean can see Cas’s hurt expression drop, his head tilting to the side as a crease forms between his eyebrows. “You’re breaking up with me because we wear different shirts?”

Dean hesitates before nodding.

“Dean,” Cas says, “are you alright?” 

“Yah.”

“Dean-”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t se-”

“I said i’m fuckin fine,” Dean snaps no longer carring to keep his voice steady, he just needs to scream, to cry, for Cas to leave “I just don’t think things a fuckin workin’ anymore! Don’t you get it, I-” Before he can continue his angered rant, a low groan comes from Baby's engines as the car begins slowing down. 

Shit.

Dean steers the car to the side of the road, jaw clenched as Baby comes to a stop. His foot is pressed to the gas, teeth grinding as that doesn't work, the keys are then twisted off and on, twice without any success. The whole time Cas’s stare burns against the side of Dean’s head only making the fire in his chest hotter.

“Fuck,” Dean screams, slaming his fists against the steering wheel.

“Should I call a mechanic?” Cas suggests softly. 

Dean gives a harsh shake of his head and pushes his door open. “It’s fine,” he mumbles, “I can fix it.”

Much to Dean’s relief Cas doesn’t follow him out of the car and let’s him walk to the impalas hood alone. They were only a few miles out of town yet it was quiet, the only sign of life being a distant house that stood a few yards away, and even that, with its lights flicked off, seemed empty. The sky above a dull grey leaving a chill in the air. 

He can still feel the spiral of emotion coursing through him as he opens the hood and begins working on the engine. A feeling Dean no longer would call anger, he didn’t so much as burn from the inside out, but felt as if he was being torn apart, dull pain piercing every inch of him. Stabbing at his heart and tearing the air from his lungs as his thoughts continue to spiral. 

He doesn’t make an attempt to wipe his eyes as his vision becomes blurry -he doesn’t think it would do any good- and instead keeps his head down. Even as the passenger door opened and closed, and crunching of Cas’s shoes followed. 

“Dean,”Cas whispers, stopping at Dean’s side. Dean clenches his jaw, gaze staying down, he doesn’t think he can look up without crying, he can barely breathe without crying, each breath coming out more shaken, more forced than the last. 

“Dean,” Cas repeats, though Dean doesn’t look up. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d gotten your essay back?”

“Does it matter?” Dean mumbles. He tightens his grip around a piece of the engine, the metal causing a dull pain across the palm of his hand. It doesn’t help, and Dean has to let go to wipe away forming tears. “Not like it’s anything to fuckin celebrate over.”

Cas steps closer and takes Dean’s hand in his own causing Dean to look up, his eyes meeting Cas’s. “You’re still able to tell me,” Cas insists.

“Why?” Dean laughs bitterly, “so you can fuckin’ laugh at me?’.

“Why would I laugh?” A bubble of emotion burns in Dean’s chest as Cas’s gaze darts over his face. He wants to cry, so bad. His failed essay. Driving Sam to soccer practise. The new book they were beginning. His two jobs. His science test on monday. It was all spiralling, crumbling no matter how much he tried to keep it together. 

“Because I’m fuckin’ stupid,” Dean snaps, voice shaking as he speaks, “I’m stupid Cas, I can’t even get a fuckin fifty precent on an essay.”

“I’m- i’m-” Dean gasps, the first tear falls and he doesn’t have the energy to stop the next, a third soon following until his whole body’s shaking with each sob. The pain stabbing through him, burning with each gasped breath. “Cas.”

Cas let’s go of Dean’s hand and instead pulls him into a tight hug, his warmth bringing no comfort as the tears continue to roll down Dean’s face no matter how much he wishes they'd stop. “Cas,” Dean sobs, the pounding of his heart almost louder than his own voice, “I’m try- i’m- I’m trying. I swear.”

He tries to speak more but the words won’t come as sobs rake his throat, tears and snot staining his face. He can barely feel Cas’s arms around him, his own grip around Cas tight as if he was the only thing keeping Dean standing, and maybe he was. 

“I’m trying,” Dean whispers once he has no tears left to cry. “I really am.”

“this is why you wanted us to break up?” Dean doesn’t reply, he doesn’t need to, Cas already knows the answer and the way Cas’s arms tighten around him only further confirms that. “Dean you are absolutely brilliant” Cas says, “one essay doesn’t change that.”

“You know it’s more than one.”

Dean takes a slow breath, an action that seems more forced than it should have. His throat is raw and his eyes feel itchy and dry, yet the pain persists, just as consuming and raw as before. He doesn’t even want to cry anymore, he doesn’t want to scream or throw something, he just wants the pain to end. 

“I am also aware that most mechanics require schooling to know at least half of what you do,” Cas whispers as Dean rests his chin against Cas’s shoulder. Squeezing his eyes shut he takes another forced breath, his hand clenching the fabric of Cas’s trench coat. “Or that no one is as charismatic as you, or kind, or selfless.”

“None of that,” Dean whispers, his voice raw and throat burning as he speaks, “means jack shit.” 

Cas pulls away, letting their eyes meet. Cas’s eyes are wide, the concern in them clear rimmed with the faintest shade of pink that twists Dean's stomach, under Cas’s intense gaze breathing’s hard, standing’s hard, being alive’s hard.

“Dean,” Cas says, he raises a hand and rests it gently against the side of Dean’s jaw, the touch barely ghosting his skin. “You are raising your brother,” he hates himself, “you’re working two jobs,” he hates Cas’s gentle tone, “you can’t blame yourself for your struggles with school,” he hates himself.

He hates himself. 

He hates himself. 

Dean steps away, avoiding Cas’s gaze as he slams the impalas hood shut, “can we just get goin’” Dean says, walking back to the driver’s door. He can feel Cas’s gaze following him, though Dean refuses to meet it, he doesn’t think he could keep breathing if he did. “I’ve gotta get to work.”

Cas doesn’t make an argument much to Dean’s relief and instead takes his seat on the passenger's side without another word. Letting the silence hang, Dean starts the car. He keeps his hands on the wheel, even when all he wants is to reach out for Cas, the pain teetering on the edge of unmanageable. He keeps his eyes on the road even when he gets a glimpse of Cas leaning to the back seat, and he keeps his mouth shut when Cas sits properly in his seat, a book now in hand. 

“Your class started reading this yesterday, correct?”

Dean glances to his side, eyeing the book Cas held out for him to see. Frankenstein, he’d barely made it past the first paragraph before giving up. The story, being written in the 1800’s, was long with a blur of unnessaccary descriptions and words Dean could barely pronounce, never mind understand. Even if he could read it, he doubt it was interesting enough to keep his attention. 

“Yah,” Dean replies looking back to the road. 

The sound of flipping pages comes, then Cas clearing his throat. “To Mrs. Saville, England. St. Petersburgh, December eleventh,” Cas begins, voice steady filling the car as he reads the first line. “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”

Dean doesn’t stop Cas as the other continues reading through the first chapter, only pausing after each paragraph to explain what was happening or add his own opinions. Once or twice Dean manages to choke out a few words, thoughts -analysis as Rowena would call them- about the story that has a smile tugging at Cas’s lips. They continue that way until Dean pulls up to Cas’s house, his hand finally letting go of the steering wheel to put the car in park. 

He looks to his right, unable to stop a smile as he watches Cas finish reading, the sunlight that fell through the window warming his tanned skin. Beautiful. Add that to the list of Cas’s perfections. Kind. Thoughtful How did Dean get so lucky?

“I am required not only to raise the spirits of others, but sometimes to sustain my own, when theirs are failing,” Cas finishes reading as he folds the corner of the page then slowly closes the book. He doesn’t look up, his expression sat in a way that causes Dean’s stomach to drop. He doesn’t think he can handle another conversation, he’s tired from crying, and the pain had only just become manageable. 

Despite what Dean wants, Cas begins talking. “Dean you are brilliant, and I’m aware that me saying that doesn’t make you believe it,” Cas pauses and takes a slow breath. “But please don’t let that determine your worth, or at least determine whether you are good enough for me or not. You are more than good enough.”

“Cas-”

“Dean, I am capable of making my own decisions and I choose you and I would choose you everyday of my life,” Cas says. “If you can’t realize your own brilliance at least let me.”

Dean opens his mouth, trying to find some argument, some sarcastic comment that would lighten the mood, but nothing comes and instead he’s left to stare, Cas’s eyes locked on his own. Emotion bubbling through his chest. A warmth that makes him want to cry all over again. He can feel the electricity like fire through his veins and for once he welcomes the spiral of emotion.

“Thank you,” Dean manages to whisper, though that doesn’t even begin to cover everything he wants to say, how much he loves the other. How he can barely breathe. How he feels as if he’s melting under Cas’s gentle look. “I love you.”

A smile spreads across Cas’s face and he slowly leans in allowing Dean to meet him halfway for a soft kiss and when they pull away, lips barely grazing, Cas replies; “I love you too.”

[everything-laito]

Might be my longest Laito analysis yet... and it’s about Hilde. Buckle up fellas, this is a ride.

I’m gonna get straight to the point:

who is Hilde? 

For those of you who don’t know, Hilde is a maid that shows up in Laito’s past in his More Blood route. I’m not sure if she pops up in any future games (I’m saving dark fate later this year), so correct me if I’m wrong. (And if she does show up, I will add to this when I have experienced the other scenarios. I know I can read translations but that’s just half of the fun and the game haha) 

Full essay analysis under the cut!

Hilde is not just Laito’s maid. She’s one of his various yet early (I would say she’s his first) “victims,” after his experiences with his mother. This was also during the whole Cordelia situation when she was “giving him her ‘Love’” anyways.

Let’s start off with an excerpt of Laito’s beautiful yet tragic monologue from MB Dark Prologue; which is from a flashback of his. Thanks to @/akuichansera for the translations! (I want to do an entire analysis on this monologue alone but that is for another time!) 

However, it’s cliché Why am I forcing love? This certain feeling calls out to me, Does that mean I’m satisfied? If that’s the case, then that’s very degrading. Only to fall silent when given a kiss. Ahh, because the words were forced out My chest burns. I wonder what this bad feeling could be. Perhaps, should I be Expecting this sort of thing? There’s no medicine that can cure this, I can’t help saying that it’s foolish.

Where this falls in the timeline is mere speculation, but I believe it is a bit after when Laito and Cordelia’s “”“relationship””” was in full swing, once he was out of the dungeon (from HDB). Throughout this whole prologue, Laito feels immensely confused. It’s definitely apparent in his monologue and the tone of his inner thoughts. They’re soft, pretty much apprehensive too; nothing like his excited, flirtatious lilts. 

Initially, I was gonna go off a lot more. I deleted a huge chunk here because I believe it was more than enough to have a separate tangent. So I’m gonna get right to the point: Laito has so maaaaany issues because of Cordelia and his upbringing. I almost went into depth with them and got ahead of myself, but that’s digressing a ton. Anyways. Hilde.

Basically what I was going to explain in depth (and will another time) can be summed up by: 

Cordelia has power over Laito (which is something all abusive relationships have in common)

Laito feels powerless (implied by his tones and his general thinking and monologue)

Laito needs to fill in that power gap (this is why some people who have been victims of abuse end up being the abuser in another relationship) 

Then Hilde just falls into Laito’s lap (more like trap) at just the time he’s feeling that powerlessness. Laito wants to “regain” power, or feel in a powerful position, so he starts to take it out on Hilde. He uses the same techniques that Cordelia uses, but on Hilde; saying that he “loves her.” It’s kinda implied that Hilde was Laito’s first ‘victim’ through this quote when he first meets Hilde: 

Laito: (It’s convenient to say the words I love you. It has a lot of power) Hey, what about you? Do you love me… …?

Hilde: T-this is… …awkward… …

Laito: I see… …Well… …being in the same bed as me… …must feel good to you.

This shows Laito’s hesitance towards this, and the whole scene in his Dark Prologue feels like him experimenting with this whole power complex giving his inner monologue. He’s rationalizing his feelings in his head in these monologues too:

――Since it feels pleasant, does that mean it’s good? The expression of love in this form, Is extremely trivial. These words are full of lies.

He knows he’s lying, he knows the power words hold; Laito’s still very perceptive, he’s just a bit messed up in his noggin. On top of that, there’s even more juicy details about the inner workings of this man in the Dark Epilogue. This is also why I believe that Hilde was Laito’s first ‘victim.’ Mainly because of this line: 

Laito: (… … I don’t like this for some reason) (I can’t get used to “loving” another person’s body)

Laito initially hates what he’s doing. I honestly never expected to read a line confirming that, but they really did. It also further supports my claim of Laito using Hilde as more of an “experiment.” He saw and experienced how happy his mom gets by doing this, he’s seen her do this with Richter and multiple other men too. He wants to feel that too, not because he enjoys it but because he wants to heal himself, whether it’s conscious or subconscious. 

I believe I’ve discussed how much Laito projects onto Yui like Cordelia did to him, and this happens with Hilde too. Here’s another excerpt: 

Laito: (Ahh ahh, how boring… … It’s less fun when she doesn’t resist) Sigh… …

Hilde: Laito-sama?

Laito: That’s enough.

Hilde: Laito-sama!!

Laito: I’m going to bed soon. Will you leave?

Hilde: Gah… …!? We always sleep together though… …why?

Laito: Be quiet… …

Hilde: Eh… …?

Laito: Fufu… …quickly now. If you don’t… … I’ll kick you out.

Hilde: Laito-sama… …Aah!?

*Laito Takes Hilde Out/ Hilde Pounds on Door*

Hilde: Agha… …Laito-sama! Laito-sama!!

This concludes the Dark epilogue. We don’t see any more of Hilde afterwards to my knowledge. Despite her showing up in two scenes, we get so much out of Laito than Yui’s scenarios combined. That’s why she’s so immensely important to Laito’s character. In addition, this also starts Laito’s obsession with ‘liking it when his victims resist’. Since there’s already so much evidence of Laito mimicking Cordelia’s tactics, it can be heavily deducted that Cordelia also liked it when Laito resisted. Which god, that’s so freakin tragic. Adding onto that, Laito gets bored with Hilde once, and then Laito just brushes her aside. This would most likely parallel what Cordelia did to Laito with Richter and other men. It’s sick. It’s twisted. And it’s just like how you would expect Dialovers to be. And that’s why you shouldn’t overlook Hilde’s character. 

I think this might be my longest rant yet, so thanks for sticking out this long if you did. I have more analysis on the #analysis tag on this blog, whether it be from me or other people I reblogged. But thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts you’d like to add, feel free to go in the DMs, ask box, or simply reblog! 

Ciao! -Corn

[wellingtongoose]

Unravelling the Obscurus

Why do some magical children become Obscurials and others don’t?

Why are Harry Potter and Tom Riddle not Obscurials?

Why does Credence survive when most children die from the condition?

The brief explanation Newt gives to Jacob in the first Fantastics Beasts film is that when magical children are persecuted and try to hide their powers, their magic develops into a powerful, negative parasitic entity that eventually kills them.

However if we apply the litmus test of persecution to other characters in Harry Potter, including Harry himself, we are left wondering why there aren’t more Obscurials.  Evidently becoming and Obscurial requires more than just being abused by muggles because of your magic. 

I believe becoming an obscurial requires a triad of genetic predisposition, environmental triggers, and learned psychological responses. Obscurials are rare within the wizarding world because it takes a rare trio of conditions coalescing to create one.

These prerequisite conditions also explain why not all magical children who are abused by muggles for their magical outbursts (Harry Potter and Tom Riddle) turn into obscurials.

This essays explains:

1.      Why Harry Potter and Tom Riddle did not become Obscurials.

2.      Why Credence did become an Obscurial

3.      Why Credence survived, and how he can get rid of the Obscurus

Nature vs Nurture

  From my perspective as doctor, obscurials are clearly children who developed a psychological disorder that also manifests physically in response to trauma. If we treat the obscurus for what it is: a symptoms of an underlying severe psychological disorder, we can finally explain the phenomenon. 

We know from Newt’s brief explanation that Obscurials develop in children and very few survive beyond the age of ten. Newt’s reason for why obscurials occurs is purely environmental, and we know from extensive scientific studies that very few psychiatric disorders especially those that manifest in childhood are purely environmental.

In reality psychological/psychiatric disorders in children often have a significant genetic component, but it takes a specific environmental trigger to bring out the pathos. The contribution of genes to the development of psychiatric disorders can be extremely high, as evidence with studies in identical twins raised apart. Disorders that first appear in early childhood are more likely to have a stronger genetic contribution simply because disorders that have a higher environmental contribution require prolonged exposure to a specific environment.

Therefore, in terms of the obscurial as a psychological disorder, it is likely heavily influenced by the genetic make up of the child. This has nothing to do with race, sex etc, but rather a specific set of genes that together produce the potential to become an obscurial given the right stimulus. The is known as genetic predisposition and occurs in many different disorders both psychiatric and physical. Without these genes the likelihood of developing into an obscurial is very, very low even if all the prerequisite environmental triggers occur.  

This would explain why obscurials are relatively rare despite there being a common thread of abuse toward magical children growing up in non-magical environments.

Having discussed genetic predisposition, I would like to state that genes are not the be all and end all when it comes to causing psychiatric disorders. We must also take in the complexities of the human mind, and how humans psychological cope with severely detrimental environments. The obscurus is not a passive by-product of abuse like a scar but an active response to it. Therefore, the child’s psychological method of coping with abuse is a very important prerequisite to becoming an obscurial.

  Thinkers vs Feelers

  Many people have speculated that its takes severe extreme abuse to create an obscurial. I don’t dispute this, but I do not believe there is a specific type or length of abuse that creates an obscurial. Child abuse is severely damaging in all its different forms. I would not say that what Harry suffered is somehow less horrific than what Credence went through. I find the comparison of various abuse types useless when it comes to explaining why an obscurial develops.

The environmental trigger for an obscurial is childhood abuse leading to trauma likely by people close to them who should have been their protectors/caretakers. However what people fail to realize is that children, and by extension adults, have different methods of coping with abuse, and the different coping strategies dictate which psychiatric disorders they may go onto develop in later life.

The method by which a child deals with abuse and by extension severe negative emotions it brings determines whether they become an obscurial.

All humans learn coping strategies to deal with negative and positive emotions generated by our environment. We all learn to some extent how to control our emotions to our best advantage. This is not a conscious learning curve, but rather something we instinctive develop from the moment we are born.

There are two board methods young infants use to deal with their negative emotions and attract the presence of soothing caregivers. These board methods are refined with time, but the strategy an infant develops has a long-lasting effect on the person’s emotional and psychologic state well into adulthood. I have discussed this psychological theory in more detail in other metas: Loki and Thor a psychoanalysis, The Holmes Brothers, a psychoanalysis.

The broad categories are: Thinkers and Feelers.

Thinkers contain and analyse their emotions. They only express emotions that they feel are best suited to the situation to get attention. Thinkers tend to develop due to caregivers who are consistent in their approach to giving attention.

Feelers express all their emotions, often in exaggerate or amplified ways to get attention. Feelers develop in response to caregivers who are inconsistent in their attentions. Therefore, repeated amplification of emotions is the best way to get the caregivers to arrive promptly when needed.

What I have not previously discussed in other metas is what happens to the psychological coping strategies of infants who never get attention no matter what they do or who get attention only for it to lead to abuse. This is where deep psychopathologies develop.

Human children are mostly helpless for a substantial proportion of their most formative years. Therefore, most of our emotional coping strategies revolve around gaining attention from caregivers. This need for attention and comfort stretches far into adulthood. It may be the foundation for our strong social bonds.

We know from unfortunate data generated in the orphanages of Eastern Europe that when infants never receive the attention they need, their entire emotional development stalls and certain parts of their brains required for processing emotion never fully develop. In effect infants whose coping strategies failed to get any attention at all simply switch off the emotional processing part of their brain. They never learned to control their emotions, but they also stopped generating appropriate emotions. One orphan described his life as black and white, whilst everyone else lived in colour. It gives us a small glimpse into the poor emotional lives these children led. Additionally when nutrition is taken into account, these children are still more physically underdeveloped than they should be, showing that psychological problems often have severe physical manifestations.

However, the nature of the obscurus is a dangerous, active and uncontrolled. The psychological pathos related to it is also active and violent. This does not fit with what happened to Eastern European orphans. Obscurials do not have underdeveloped emotional centres, they are not children who are to some extent numb to the world. Credence does not have a problem generating emotion, he has a problem with control. He is not numb to the world but rather has an insatiable hunger for love and belonging.

Therefore, infants who become obscurials did not suffer from predominantly severe neglect, which is what happened to Harry Potter and Tom Riddle. Harry escaped the most severe consequences of his emotional neglect because he had 15 months of love from his parents to hold onto. This was crucial to his emotional development. Tom Riddle was not so lucky and his pathos is a clear reflection of the orphans of Eastern Europe.

Obscurial children do get attention, just not the right kind of attention.

  A Spiral into Hell

  For infants their entire survival depends on gaining the caregivers attention, but when the ultimate emotional reward - attention, turns into the ultimate generator of negative emotions – abuse, the infant is unable to cope with the spiral of negative emotions. The caregiver is supposed to take away the negative emotions but instead exacerbates the problem.

I believe that Obscurials including Credence developed primarily as Feelers. As infants they learned to amplify all their emotions, all the time, to get attention. As magical outbursts are closely linked to strong emotions, infants who are Feelers would have correspondingly more magical outburst likely at an earlier age compared to Thinkers. When the abuse then starts – likely during early childhood with increasing magical outbursts, the child is unable to understand why its coping strategy is producing cycles of more pain rather comfort.

Having developed the Feelers strategy already, the child is not able to modulate their emotions like Thinkers can. They are not able to contain, analyse and then express appropriate emotions for the situation. Therefore, they cannot suppress their own magic into a dormant state and act like a muggle as Neville Longbottom managed to do as a child. This leads to a cycle of escalating abuse, and then need for attention to heal the negative emotions it generates.

However eventually these Feelers who become Obscurials do manage to suppress their emotions and their magic but not in the psychologically healthy manner of a Thinker. Instead the negative emotions and by extension the magic associated with it is displaced, rather than suppressed or contained. They alienate their own feelings in an attempt to not experience them and therefore not express them. The resulting obscurus is the consequence of this displacement and alienation, a dark extension of the child that ultimately destroys them.

 Adapting to Survive

  How is Credence able to survive beyond childhood?

In the films it is suggested that he may be an extremely powerful wizard. I don’t dispute this, but control of magic is not just about power, it is intrinsically linked one’s control of emotions. Children generally experience far more extreme emotions and changes of emotions compared to adults. As we psychologically mature our emotions do not become less strong, but we have better control of how we experience that emotion and how it affects us. If the obscurus is a physical manifestation of a dysfunctional emotions, then it is likely something that becomes easier to control as one emotionally matures. However, it often causes death before puberty which means that children never get to emotionally develop to a point where it is controllable.

I believe that Credence unlikely that other Obscurial children, successfully learned a new emotional coping strategy early in life that enable him to control his emotions to a certain extent. I am not saying he went to therapy and read some self-help books. Changing one’s emotional coping strategy is very difficult and not entirely conscious act. I believe at various critical points in his life Credence was helped by other people who provided him the much-needed emotional support. They helped to drive his desire to live, give him hope and purpose. More uniquely to Credence I believe he learned from them new emotional coping strategies and subconsciously put this into practice.

Most well-adjusted adults have a mixture of different coping strategies when it comes to emotions. Very few people are purely Feelers or Thinkers beyond childhood. We all exist on a spectrum between these extremes and use of blend of different strategies that we tailor to the environment. However, our original coping strategy is often remains dominant and underscores all other later strategies. Credence was a very dysfunctional Feeler as a young child, but he learned through positive interactions with Thinkers around him how to become a Thinker instead.

Credence has done something very rare for children which is completely switch his emotional coping strategy from one extreme to another. Being a Feeler caused him to become an Obscurial but becoming a Thinker allowed him a measure of control over his emotions and thus his obscurus. The more he pursued the Thinker route, the more control he eventually gained over his obscurus. I believe that Credence developed this strategy early on in childhood, which is a remarkable feat, and therefore the obscurus never came close to being lethal.

When we meet him, Credence is the typical dysfunctional Thinker: a person who controls all emotional expression only displays the correct emotions for the situation. This is his survival strategy and though it is not psychologically healthy, it keeps him alive.

I would not be able to hazard a guess as to who or what prompted him to become a thinker. It might have been his younger siblings and their emotional support for him. It might have been a specific adult who helped him through a very difficult time.

There is no doubt that acts of kindness and love, sustained Credence through his horrific childhood. He does not shy away from love, he actively seeks it even in people who are looking to exploit him. This is not a person who has given up on the world, but someone who desperately wants to live and be loved. People like Tina and Newt are going to be the key to his salvation and may finally help him psychological heal. Once he does, I wonder if the Obscurus will simply cease to exist.

[alyy0808]

English-APP Record Reading sept. 27 - oct. 8

Unit 1: The Nature of Academic Texts

In the lesson 1 titled Structure of Academic Texts I learned that Structure of Academic Texts is all about Structuring Paragraphs, Structuring the Three-Part Essay and Structuring IMRaD. First, I learned about  Structuring Paragraphs which is one of the essential features of academic writing, and we all know that a paragraph is a group of sentences that deal mostly with one topic or idea at a time. There are also three parts of a paragraph which are, first, is the Topic  Sentence. The Topic  Sentence is the main point of the paragraph while Supporting Sentences supports the main idea of the paragraph, and Transitional Sentences is used to end a paragraph and prepare the next paragraph for the introduction of the next concept. Illustration, definition, classification, comparison and contrast, and process  is the different kinds of patterns of development found in a paragraph. Also, In Structuring the Three-part Essay there are the 3 parts of an essay which are the Introduction, body, and conclusion. Structuring IMRaD or also known as  Structuring Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion, with a Conclusion. The context of the study and what the study will entail are typically included in the Introduction, while the Methods are part of this particular structure  that explain how the research questions and objective were met and answered. The results section presents the results  and how they were collected in the methods, It is also recommended to use graphs and charts to present data for a better understanding. Captions are also essential in presenting data because the readers may not read the entire text. Furthermore, the data or figures should not be repeated in the text.

 In the lesson 2 I learned about Academic Texts across the Disciplines and it explains about The Academic Disciplines, Connections across Disciplines, and Articulating Different Positions in Academic Writing. In The Academic Disciplines I learned that the academic disciplines has various branches under them which are the accounting, economics, finance and management marketing for Business.  Art, creative writing, languages, literature, etc. for Humanities. Natural and applied sciences also have biology, chemistery,  computer science, engineering, etc. and anthropology. education, geograpy, history, and law for the Social sciences.  Each discipline and its branches have its own communities with their own languages, communication styles, and ways of communication. Connection across Disciplines is all about the disciplines that are not so different in development and purpose. Disciplines are developed and designed to help us make sense of our world and phenomena. We can also gain more knowledge about the world when a practitioner can build on a perviously established body of work from his or her discipline. research are often used on this cause discipline requires you to make use of sources in form of past papers, journal entries and experiments. This helps not only your own research but also the discipline itself, as you are helping expan and add to the previous studies in your choosen discipline. Furthermore, With more knowledge in different disciplines, you will become better at knowing how your own specialization can fit with the rest of the world.

 Lastly, on the lesson 3 titled Articulating Different Positions in Academic Writing talks about that any discipline you to choose to enter already has a number of debates, studies,  controversies, and expirements that have been going on for years, if not decades or centuries. There are long-standing binary oppositions in each discipline that can help you make more sense of the different issues, themes, and topics you might encounter when reading academic texts and conducting your own research in the future. Production-consumption and labor capital are the binary oppositions of Business, while Humanities have artist-culture and text-context, Natural and applied sciences also have empiricism-rationalism and observer-subject, and nature-nurture and free will-determinism for Social sciences. These are just a few examples of the many binaries found in each discipline. with time and effort you’ll be able to pinpoint these binaries in the academic texts you read as well as determine other binaries within the disciplines.

 Unit 2: Thesis Statement and Outlining

In this topic I learned that in a academic paper Thesis Statement is very important because it is the main idea that will dictate the purpose and flow of your arguments in the rest of your paper. There are some characteristics in thesis statement and one of them is that, it shows where you stand regarding the subject matter you are discussing. Your academic paper should be persuasive  because in writing academic paper or research our goal is is primarily convince our readers to consider our stand, and by that to convince them, the rest of our paper should contain evidence that will help back up you thesis statement in order to pursuade others to take your stand. Furthermore, the body of your paper should then support and defend your thesis.

In Outlining Academic Texts I learned that creating an outline is one of the last steps of the prewriting stage, it helps the writer to categorize the main point of the topic, organize the paragraphs and to make sure that the paragraphs are fully developed.  An outline acts ultimately helps the writer to not get stuck while he or she is writing an essay. When writing a topic outline only phrases or main ideas are needed. There is no need to write the full sentences it also utilizes wording that is parallel to one another which is means that the same format is used for headings and subheading for organization. Sentence outline makes use of sentences, that means all headings and subheadings must be in sentences form.

 Unit 3: Writing a Summary

I learned that a summary is a brief statement or the main points of a paragraph or in research. Summarizing should reproduce the key ideas and points of a text, identifying the general concepts that prevail throughout the entire piece, and to express these concepts and ideas with precise and specific language. There are two techniques in writing a summary which are the previewing, skimming and scanning. In writing a summary it is essential to add the title and the author’s name in the first sentence and the author’s thesis too, so that it is easy to recall what the key points are, it also makes it easier to navigate through your summary. We should also avoid opinions or personal responses in our summary and be more mindful to avoid plagiarism. Furthermore, a proper summary can be used to help you to relevant information you might need for your academic writing.

The aims of summarizing texts are to reproduce the overarching ideas in order to identify the general concepts and to express the overarching ideas using precise and specific language. There are steps in summarizing texts and one of them is, the author’s thesis statement should be indicated in the first two sentences. It also should be break down the text or research into the main ideas before summarizing the whole texts and leave out the ideas that are not relevant to the whole text.

 Unit 4: Writing from Sources

I learned that in paraphrasing it doesn’t require you to quote from the source text, paraphrasing is a restatement of a text, passage, or work to express the meaning in another form. A good paraphrase shows how the writer understand what he or she reading. There are different kinds of paraphrasing which are the change of parts of speech, change of structure, clause reduction,and synonym replacement and there are also kinds of plagiarism which are, first, the verbatim plagiarism, word order plagiarism, and the idea plagiarism.

In techniques in paraphrasing I learned that there are several techniques that can be used to paraphrase effectively, which are the change of words and the change of sentence structure. In change of words we can change the part of speech, use synonyms, and change numbers and percentages to different forms. While changing the sentence structure we can change the word order, use different definition structures, use different attribution signals, and change the sentence structure and use different conjunctions. In paraphrasing we should not change the proper nouns and technical terms and we should maintain the meaning of the text when we’re paraphrasing a texts.

Lastly, paraphrasing vs. quoting, I learned that Quoting includes taking what the writer stated and repeating it word-for-word. This method is commonly used for terms or quick sentences. As mentioned in preceding lessons, copying an author’s phrases verbatim is typically categorized as plagiarism. To keep away from this, it's far critical to enclose the copied textual content in citation marks (“ “) whilst quoting and characteristic the phrases to the authentic author. When we are going to use quotation in our writing we should first introduce, cite, and explain (ICE method) the quotation we will be using.

 Unit 5:  Citing Sources of Information

In citation styles I learned that a citation is manner to offer credit score to the authors, scientists, researchers, and so forth whose innovative and intellectual work you used to guide or supplement your very own research and A citation style dictates what data is important to include in a citation, how that data have to be organized, what punctuations are used, and different formatting concerns. There are three different citation styles which are the American Psychological Association (APA) which is often used in education, psychology, and the social sciences and Modern Language Association (MLA) is normally used in the humanities while Chicago/Turabian style is often used in business, history and fine arts.  In writing in-text citations, endnotes, and footnotes I learned the format for in-text citations in APA uses the author-date-page number(s) while the format for in-text citations in MLA uses the author-page number(s) and the format for AD for CMOS ises author-date-page number(s), however CMOS also allows writers to utilize NB, where all references are found in either the footnotes or endnotes. Furthermore,  Footnotes and endnotes for APA and MLA should be limited and are usually used for additional content for other references. Lastly,  In writing a bibliography I learned that a bibliography lists all of the sources you used for your research and additional background reading. This includes even works that you did not end up referencing in your paper and a reference list or a works cited page is similar to a bibliography, but it only contains the sources you explicitly cited in your paper. Furthermore, The three citation styles organize and format their bibliographies and their bibliographic entries differently.

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[ill-will-editions]

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CURRENT PANDEMIC FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF IVAN ILLICH

David Cayley

Last week I began an essay on the current pandemic in which I tried to address what I take to be the central question that it raises:  Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have?  Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable?  Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?  I hadn’t been writing for long before I began to realize that many of the assumptions I was making were quite remote from those being expressed all around me.  These assumptions had mainly come, I reflected, from my prolonged conversation with the work of Ivan Illich.  What this suggested was that, before I could speak intelligibly about our present circumstances, I would first have to sketch the attitude towards health, medicine and well-being that Illich developed over a lifetime of reflection on these themes.  Accordingly, in what follows, I will start with a brief account of the evolution of Illich’s critique of bio-medicine and then try to answer the questions I just posed in this light..

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example.  Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.”  The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms.  For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop.  This was not the case for Illich.  He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being  crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.  Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good.  This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much.  Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does.  He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc.  He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.  But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed.  He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural.  The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc.  This collateral damage is not trivial.  An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000.  This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.  What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes.  An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case.  And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis.  This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether.  These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.  The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage.   And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said.  Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude.  He affirmed that suffering and  death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition.  And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness.  To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said.  To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health.  According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care.  In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough.  But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.”  This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.”  He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency.  He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.

In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation.  The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.”  There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”  Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception - and rule in its place as the very source of law.   This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.”  Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates.  But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich.  Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.”  Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.  

Ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, Illich revisited and revised his argument.  He did not, by any means, renounce what he had written earlier, but he did add to it quite dramatically.  In his book, he now said, he had been “blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself.”  He had “overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and cares.”  In other words he had written, in Medical Nemesis, as if there were a natural body, standing outside the web of techniques by which its self-awareness is constructed, and now he could see that there is no such standpoint.  “Each historical moment,” he wrote, “is incarnated in an epoch-specific body.”  Medicine doesn’t just act on a preexisting state – rather it participates in creating this state.

This recognition was just the beginning of a new stance on Illich’s part.  Medical Nemesis had addressed a citizenry that was imagined as capable of acting to limit the scope of medical intervention.  Now he spoke of people whose very self-image was being generated by bio-medicine.  Medical Nemesis had claimed, in its opening sentence, that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”  Now he judged that that the major threat to health was the pursuit of health itself.   Behind this change of mind lay his sense that the world, in the meanwhile, had undergone an epochal change.  “I believe,” he told me in 1988, “that…there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live.  Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things.  The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed.  I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.”  Illich characterized “the new way of seeing things” as the advent of what he called “the age of systems” or “an ontology of systems.”  The age that he saw as ending had been dominated by the idea of instrumentality – of using instrumental means, like medicine, to achieve some end or good, like health.  Characteristic of this age was a clear distinction between subjects and objects, means and ends, tools and their users etc.  In the age of systems, he said, these distinctions have collapsed.  A system, conceived cybernetically, is all encompassing – it has no outside.  The user of a tool takes up the tool to accomplish some end.  Users of systems are inside the system, constantly adjusting their state to the system, as the system adjusts its state to them.  A bounded individual pursuing personal well-being gives way to an immune system which constantly recalibrates its porous boundary with the surrounding system.

Within this new “system analytic discourse,” as Illich named it, the characteristic state of people is disembodiment.  This is a paradox, obviously, since what Illich called “the pathogenic pursuit of health” may involve an intense, unremitting and virtually narcissistic preoccupation with one’s bodily state.  Why Illich conceived it as disembodying can best be understood by the example of “risk awareness” which he called “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  Risk was disembodying, he said, because “it is a strictly mathematical concept.”  It does not pertain to persons but to populations – no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability.  To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage, Illich said, in “intensive self-algorithmization.”  

His most distressing encounter with this “religiously celebrated ideology” occurred in the field of genetic testing during pregnancy.  He was introduced to it by his friend and colleague Silja Samerski who was studying the genetic counselling that is mandatory for pregnant women considering genetic testing in Germany – a subject she would later write about in a book called The Decision Trap (Imprint-Academic, 2015).  Genetic testing in pregnancy does not reveal anything definite about the child which the woman being tested is expecting.  All it detects are markers whose uncertain meaning can be expressed in probabilities – a likelihood calculated across the entire population to which the one being tested belongs, by her age, family history, ethnicity etc.  When she is told, for example, that there is a 30% chance that her baby will have this or that syndrome, she is told nothing about herself or the fruit of her womb – she is told only what might happen to someone like her.  She knows nothing more about her actual circumstances than what her hopes, dreams and intuitions reveal, but the risk profile that has been ascertained for her statistical doppelganger demands a decision.  The choice is existential; the information on which it is based is the probability curve on which the chooser has been inscribed.  Illich found this to be a perfect horror.  It was not that he could not recognize that all human action is a shot in the dark – a prudential calculation in the face of the unknown.  His horror was at seeing people reconceive themselves in the image of a statistical construct.  For him, this was an eclipse of persons by populations; an effort to prevent the future from disclosing anything unforeseen; and a substitution of scientific models for sensed experience. And this was happening, Illich realized, not just with regard to genetic testing in pregnancy but more or less across the board in health care.  Increasingly people were acting prospectively, probabilistically, according to their risk.  They were becoming, as Canadian health researcher Allan Cassels once joked, “pre-diseased” – vigilant and active against illnesses that someone like them might get.  Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings.  This was what Illich meant by “self-algorithmization” or disembodiment.

One way of getting at the iatrogenic body that Illich saw as the primary effect of contemporary biomedicine is by going back to an essay that was widely read and discussed in his milieu in the early 1990’s.  Called “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” it was written by historian and philosopher of science Donna Haraway and appears in her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  This essay is interesting not just because I think it influenced Illich’s sense of how bio-medical discourse was shifting, but also because Haraway, seeing – I would claim – almost exactly the same things as Illich, draws conclusions that are, point-for-point, diametrically opposite.  In this article, for example, she says, with reference to what she calls “the post-modern body,” that “human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.”  “In a sense,” she continues, “organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components.”  This leads to a situation in which “no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; and components can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”  In a world of interfaces, where boundaries regulate “rates of flow” rather than marking real differences, “the integrity of natural objects” is no longer a concern.  “The ‘integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self,” she writes, “gives way to decision procedures, expert systems, and resource investment strategies.”

In other words, Haraway, like Illich understands that persons, as unique, stable and hallowed beings, have dissolved into provisionally self-regulating sub-systems in constant interchange with the larger systems in which they are enmeshed.  In her words, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the cyborg is our ontology.”  The difference between them lies in their reactions.  Haraway, elsewhere in the volume from which the essay I have been quoting comes, issues what she calls her “Cyborg Manifesto.”  It calls on people to recognize and accept this new situation but to “read it” with a view to liberation.  In a patriarchal society, there is no acceptable condition to which one could hope to return, so she offers “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”  For Illich, on the other hand, the “cyborg ontology,” as Haraway calls it, was not an option.  For him what was at stake was the very character of human persons as ensouled beings with a divine origin and a divine destiny.  As the last vestiges of sense washed out of the bodily self-perception of his contemporaries, he saw a world that had become “immune to its own salvation.”  “I have come to the conclusion,” he told me plaintively, “that when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth in Galilee that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”

The “new way of seeing things” which was reflected in the orientation of bio-medicine amounted, according to Illich, to “a new stage of religiosity.” He used the word religiosity in a broad sense to refer to something deeper and more pervasive than formal or institutional religion.  Religiosity is the ground on which we stand, our feeling about how and why things are as they are, the very horizon within which meaning takes shape.  For Illich, the createdness, or given-ness of the world was the foundation of his entire sensibility.  What he saw coming was a religiosity of total immanence in which the world is its own cause and there is no source of meaning or order outside of it – “a cosmos,” as he said, “in the hands of man.”  The highest good in such a world is life, and the primary duty of people is to conserve and foster life.  But this is not the life which is spoken of in the Bible – the life which comes from God – it is a rather a resource which people possess and ought to manage responsibly.  Its peculiar property is to be at the same time an object of reverence and of manipulation.  This naturalized life, divorced from its source, is the new god.  Health and safety are its adjutants.  Its enemy is death.   Death still imposes a final defeat but has no other personal meaning.  There is no proper time to die – death ensues when treatment fails or is terminated.  

Illich refused to “interiorize systems into the self.”  He would give up neither human nature nor natural law. “I just cannot shed the certainty,” he said in an interview with his friend Douglas Lummis, “that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”  This led him to reject “responsibility for health,” conceived as a management of intermeshed systems.  How can one be responsible, he asked, for what has neither sense, boundary nor ground?  Better to give up such comforting illusions and to live instead in a spirit of self-limitation which he defined as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”  

To summarize: Illich, in his later years, concluded that humanity, at least in his vicinity, had taken leave of its senses and moved lock, stock and barrel into a system construct lacking any ground whatsoever for ethical decision.  The bodies in which people lived and walked around had become synthetic constructs woven out of CAT-scans and risk curves.  Life had become a quasi-religious idol, presiding over an “ontology of systems.” Death had become a meaningless obscenity rather than an intelligible companion.  All this was expressed forcefully and unequivocally.  He did not attempt to soften it or offer a comforting “on the other hand…”. What he attended to was what he sensed was happening around him, and all his care was to try to register it as sensitively as he could and address it as truthfully as he could.  The world, in his view, was not in his hands, but in the hands of God.                    

By the time he died, in 2002, Illich stood far outside the new “way of seeing things” that he felt had established itself during the second half his life.  He felt that in this new “age of systems” the primary unit of creation, the human person, had begun to lose its boundary, its distinction and its dignity.  He thought that the revelation in which he was rooted had been corrupted – the “life more abundant” that had been promised in the New Testament transformed into a human hegemony so total and so claustrophobic that no intimation from outside the system could disturb it.  He believed that medicine had so far exceeded the threshold at which it might have eased and complemented the human condition that it was now threatening to abolish this condition altogether.  And he had concluded that much of humanity is no longer willing to “bear…[its] rebellious, torn and disoriented flesh” and has instead traded its art of suffering and its art of dying for a few years of life expectancy and the comforts of life in an “artificial creation.”  Can any sense be made of the current “crisis” from this point of view?  I would say yes, but only insofar as we can step back from the urgencies of the moment and take time to consider what is being revealed about our underlying dispositions – our “certainties,” as Illich called them.  

First of all, Illich’s perspective indicates that for some time now we’ve been practicing the attitudes that have characterized the response to the current pandemic.  It’s a striking thing about events which are perceived to have changed history, or “changed everything,” as one sometimes hears, that people often seem to be somehow ready for them or even unconsciously or semi-consciously expecting them.  Recalling the beginning of the First World War, economic historian Karl Polanyi used the image of sleep-walking to characterize the way in which the countries of Europe shuffled to their doom – automatons blindly accepting the fate they had unknowingly projected.   The events of Sept. 11, 2001 – 9/11 as we now know it – seemed to be instantly interpreted and understood, as if everyone had just been waiting to declare the patent meaning of what had occurred – the end of the Age of Irony, the beginning of the War on Terror, whatever it might be.  Some of this is surely a trick of perspective by which hindsight instantly turns contingency into necessity – since something did happen, we assume that it was bound to happen all along.  But I don’t think this can be the whole story.  

At the heart of the coronavirus response has been the claim that we must act prospectively to prevent what has not yet occurred: an exponential growth in infections, an overwhelming of the resources of the medical system, which will put medical personnel in the invidious position of performing triage, etc.  Otherwise, it is said, by the time we find out what we’re dealing with, it will be too late.  (It’s worth pointing out, in passing, that this is unverifiable idea: if we succeed, and what we fear does not take place, then we will be able to say that our actions prevented it, but we will never actually know whether this was the case.). This idea that prospective action is crucial has been readily accepted, and people have even vied with one in another in denouncing the laggards who have shown resistance to it.  But to act like this requires experience in living in a hypothetical space where prevention outranks cure, and this is exactly what Illich describes when he speaks of risk as “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  An expression like “flattening the curve” can become overnight common sense only in a society practiced in “staying ahead of the curve” and in thinking in terms of population dynamics rather than actual cases.

Risk has a history.  One of the first to identify it as the preoccupation of a new form of society was German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his 1986 book Risk Society, published in English in 1992.  In this book, Beck portrayed late modernity as an uncontrolled science experiment.  By uncontrolled he meant that we have no spare planet on which we can conduct a nuclear war to see how it goes, no second atmosphere which we can heat and observe the results.  This means that techno-scientific society is, on the one hand, hyper-scientific and, on the other, radically unscientific insofar as it has no standard against which it can measure or assess what it has done.  There are endless examples of this sort of uncontrolled experiment – from transgenic sheep to mass international tourism to the transformation of persons into communications relays.  All these, insofar as they have unforeseeable and unpredictable consequences, already constitute a kind of living in the future.  And just because we are citizens of risk society, and therefore participants by definition, in an uncontrolled science experiment, we have become – paradoxically or not – preoccupied with controlling risk.  As I pointed out above, we are treated and screened for diseases we do not yet have, on the basis of our probability of getting them.  Pregnant couples make life and death decisions based on probabilistic risk profiles.  Safety becomes a mantra – “farewell” becomes “be safe” – health becomes a god.  

Equally important in the current atmosphere has been the idolization of life, and aversion from its obscene other, death.  That we must at all costs “save lives” is not questioned.  This makes it very easy to start a stampede.  Making an entire country “go home and stay home,” as our prime minister said not long ago, has immense and incalculable costs.  No one knows how many businesses will fail, how many jobs will be lost, how many will sicken from loneliness, how many will resume addictions or beat each other up in their isolation.  But these costs seem bearable as soon the spectre of lives lost is brought on the scene.  Again, we have been practicing counting lives for a long time. The obsession with the “death toll” from the latest catastrophe is simply the other side of the coin.  Life becomes an abstraction – a number without a story.  

Illich claimed in the mid-1980’s that he was beginning to meet people whose “very selves” were a product of “medical concepts and cares.”  I think this helps to explain why the Canadian state, and its component provincial and municipal governments, have largely failed to acknowledge what is currently at stake in our “war” on “the virus.”  Sheltering behind the skirts of science – even where there is no science – and deferring to the gods of health and safety has appeared to them as political necessity.  Those who have been acclaimed for their leadership, like Quebec premier François Legault, have been those who have distinguished themselves by their single-minded consistency in applying the conventional wisdom.  Few have yet dared to question the cost – and, when those few include Donald Trump, the prevailing complacency is only fortified – who would dare agree with him?  In this respect insistent repetition of the metaphor of war has been influential – in a war no one counts costs or reckons who is actually paying them.  First, we must win the war.  Wars create social solidarity and discourage dissent – those not showing the flag are apt to be shown the equivalent of the white feather with which non-combatants were shamed during World War One.  

At the date at which I am writing – early April – no one really knows what is going on.  Since no one knows how many have the disease, nobody knows what the death rate is – Italy’s is currently listed at over 10%, which puts it in the range of the catastrophic influenza at the end of World War I, while Germany’s is at .8%, which is more in line with what happens unremarked every year – some very old people, and a few younger ones, catch the flu and die.  What does seem clear, here in Canada, is that, with the exception of a few local sites of true emergency, the pervasive sense of panic and crisis is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.  Here the word itself has played an important role – the declaration by the World Health Organization that a pandemic was now officially in progress didn’t change anyone’s health status but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere.  It was the signal the media had been waiting for to introduce a regime in which nothing else but the virus could be discussed.  By now a story in the newspaper not concerned with coronavirus is actually shocking.  This cannot help but give the impression of a world on fire.  If you talk about nothing else, it will soon come to seem as if there is nothing else.  A bird, a crocus, a spring breeze can begin to seem almost irresponsible – “don’t they know it’s the end of the world?” as an old country music classic asks.  The virus acquires extraordinary agency – it is said to have depressed the stock market, shuttered businesses, and generated panic fear, as if these were not the actions of responsible people but of the illness itself.  Emblematic for me, here in Toronto, was a headline in The National Post.  In a font that occupied much of the top half of the front page, it said simply PANIC.   Nothing indicated whether the word was to be read as a description or an instruction.  This ambiguity is constitutive of all media, and disregarding it is the characteristic déformation professionelle of the journalist, but it becomes particularly easy to ignore in a certified crisis.  It is not the obsessive reporting or the egging on of authorities to do more that has turned the world upside down – it is the virus that has done it.  Don’t blame the messenger.  A headline on the web-site STAT on April 1, and I don’t think it was a joke, even claimed that “Covid-19 has sunk the ship of state.”  It is interesting, in this respect, to perform a thought experiment.  How much of an emergency would we feel ourselves to be in if this had never been called a pandemic and such stringent measures taken against it?  Plenty of troubles escape the notice of the media.  How much do we know or care about the catastrophic political disintegration of South Sudan in recent years, or about the millions who died in the Democratic Republic of Congo after civil war broke out there in 2004?  It is our attention that constitutes what we take to be the relevant world at any given moment.  The media do not act alone – people must be disposed to attend where the media directs their attention – but I don’t think it can be denied that the pandemic is a constructed object that might have been constructed differently.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked on March 25th that we are facing “the greatest health care crisis in our history.”  If he is understood to be referring to a health crisis, this seems to me a grotesque exaggeration.  Think of the disastrous effect of smallpox on indigenous communities, or of a score of other catastrophic epidemics from cholera and yellow fever to diphtheria and polio.  Can you then really say that a flu epidemic which appears mainly to kill the old or those made susceptible by some other condition is even comparable to the ravaging of whole peoples, let alone worse?    And yet, unprecedented, like the Prime Minister’s “greatest ever,” seems to be the word on everyone’s lips.  However, if we take the Prime Minister’s words by the letter, as referring to health care, and not just health, the case changes.   From the beginning the public health measures taken in Canada have been explicitly aimed at protecting the health care system from any overload.  To me this points to an extraordinary dependence on hospitals and an extraordinary lack of confidence in our ability to care for one another.  Whether Canadian hospitals are ever flooded or not, a strange and fearful mystique seems to be involved – the hospital and its cadres are felt to be indispensable, even when things could be more easily and safely dealt with at home. Again Illich was prescient in his claim, in his essay “Disabling Professions,” that overextended professional hegemonies sap popular capacities and make people doubt their own resources.  

The measures mandated by “the greatest health care crisis in our history” have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty.  This has been done, it is said, to protect life and, by the same token, to avoid death.  Death is not only to be averted but also kept hidden and unconsidered.  Years ago I heard a story about a bemused listener at one of Illich’s lectures on Medical Nemesis who afterwards turned to his companion and asked, “What does he want, let people die?”  Perhaps some of my readers would like to ask me the same question.  Well, I’m sure there are many other old people who would join me in saying that they don’t want to see young lives ruined in order that they can live a year or two longer.  But, beyond that, “let people die” is a very funny formulation because it implies that the power to determine who lives or dies is in the hands of the one to whom the question is addressed.  The we who are imagined as having the power to “let die” exist in an ideal world of perfect information and perfect technical mastery.  In this world nothing occurs which has not been chosen.  If someone dies, it will be because they have been “let…die.”  The state must, at all costs, foster, regulate and protect life – this is the essence of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the regime that now unquestionably rules us.  Death must be kept out of sight and out of mind.  It must be denied meaning.  No one’s time ever comes – they are let go.  The grim reaper may survive as a comic figure in New Yorker cartoons, but he has no place in public discussion.  This makes it difficult even to talk about death as something other than someone’s negligence or, at the least, a final exhaustion of treatment options.  To accept death is to accept defeat.

The events of recent weeks reveal how totally we live inside systems, how much we have become populations rather than associated citizens, how much we are governed by the need to continually outsmart the future we ourselves have prepared.  When Illich wrote books like Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis, he still hoped that life within limits was possible.  He tried to identify the thresholds at which technology must be restrained in order to keep the world at the local, sensible, conversable scale on which human beings could remain the political animals that Aristotle thought we were meant to be.  Many others saw the same vision, and many have tried over the last fifty years to keep it alive.  But there is no doubt that the world Illich warned of has come to pass.  It is a world which lives primarily in disembodied states and hypothetical spaces, a world of permanent emergency in which the next crisis is always right around the corner, a world in which the ceaseless babble of communication has stretched language past its breaking point, a world in which overstretched science has become indistinguishable from superstition.  How then can Illich’s ideas possibly gain any purchase in a world that seems to have moved out of reach of his concepts of scale, balance, and personal meaning?  Shouldn’t one just accept that the degree of social control that has recently been exerted is proportionate and necessary in the global immune system of which we are, in Haraway’s expression, “biotic components?”

Perhaps, but it’s an old political axiom which can be found in Plato, Thomas More, and, more recently, Canadian philosopher George Grant that if you can’t achieve the best, at least prevent the worst.  And things can certainly get worse as a result of this pandemic.  It has already become a somewhat ominous commonplace that the world will not be the same once it is over.  Some see it as a rehearsal and admit frankly that, though this particular plague may not fully justify the measures being taken against it, these measures still constitute a valuable rehearsal for future and potentially worse plagues.  Others view it as a “wake-up call” and hope that, when it’s all over, a chastened humanity will begin to edge its way back from the lip of catastrophe.  My fear, and one that I think is shared by many, is that it will leave behind a disposition to accept much increased surveillance and social control, more telescreens and telepresencing, and heightened mistrust.  At the moment, everyone is optimistically describing physical distancing as a form of solidarity, but it’s also practice in regarding one another, and even ourselves – “don’t touch your face” – as potential disease vectors.  

I have said already that one of the certainties that the pandemic is driving deeper into the popular mind is risk.  But this is easy to overlook since risk is so easily conflated with real danger. The difference, I would say, is that danger is identified by a practical judgment resting on experience, whereas risk is a statistical construct pertaining to a population.  Risk has no room for individual experience or for practical judgment.  It tells you only what will happen in general.  It is an abstract of a population, not a picture of any person, or a guide to that person’s destiny.  Destiny is a concept that simply dissolves in the face of risk, where all are arrayed, uncertainly, on the same curve.  What Illich calls “the mysterious historicity” of each existence – or, more simply, its meaning – is annulled.  During this pandemic, risk society has come of age.  This is evident, for example, in the tremendous authority that has been accorded to models – even when everyone knows that they are informed by little more than what one hopes are educated guesses.  Another illustration is the familiarity with which people speak of “flattening the curve,” as if this were an everyday object – I have even recently heard songs about it.  When it becomes an object of public policy to operate on a purely imaginary, mathematical object, like a risk curve, it is certain that risk society has taken a great leap forward.   This, I think, is what Illich meant about disembodiment – the impalpable become palpable, the hypothetical becomes actual, and the realm of everyday experience becomes indistinguishable from its representation in newsrooms, laboratories and statistical models.  Humans have lived, at all times, in imagined worlds, but this, I think, is different.  In the sphere of religion, for example, even the most naïve believers have the sense that the beings they summon and address in their gatherings are not everyday objects.  In the discourse of the pandemic, everyone consorts familiarly with scientific phantoms as if there were as real as rocks and trees.  

Another related feature of the current landscape is government-by-science and its necessary complement - the abdication of political leadership resting on any other grounds.   This too is a field long-tilled and prepared for planting.  Illich wrote nearly fifty years ago in Tools for Conviviality that contemporary society is “stunned by a delusion about science.”  This delusion takes many forms, but its essence is to construct out of the messy, contingent practices of a myriad of sciences a single golden calf before which all must bow.  It is this giant mirage that is usually invoked when we are instructed to “listen to the science” or told what “studies show” or “science says.” But there is no such thing as science, only sciences, each one with its unique uses and unique limitations.   When “science” is abstracted from all the vicissitudes and shadows of knowledge production, and elevated into an omniscient oracle whose priests can be identified by their outfits, their solemn postures and their impressive credentials, what suffers, in Illich’s view, is political judgment.  We do not do what appears good to our rough and ready sense of how things are down here on the ground but only what can be dressed up as science says.   In a book called Rationality and Ritual, British sociologist of science Brian Wynne studied a public inquiry carried out by a British High Court Judge in 1977 on the question of whether a new plant should be added to the British nuclear energy complex at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast.   Wynne shows how the judge approached the question as one which “science” would answer – is it safe? – without any need to consult moral or political principles.  This is a classic case of the displacement of political judgment onto the shoulders of Science, conceived along the mythical lines I sketched above.  This displacement is now evident in many fields.  One of its hallmarks is that people, thinking that “science” knows more than it does, imagine that they know more than they do.  No actual knowledge need support this confidence.  Epidemiologists may say frankly, as many have, that, in the present case, there is very little sturdy evidence to go on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if they were merely the executive arm of Science.  In my opinion, the adoption of a policy of semi-quarantining those who are not sick – a policy apt to have disastrous consequences down the road in lost jobs, failed businesses, distressed people, and debt-suffocated governments – is a political decision and ought to be discussed as such.  But, at the moment, the ample skirts of Science shelter all politicians from view.  Nor does anyone speak of impending moral decisions.  Science will decide.

In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on.  His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.”  In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example.  “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre.  Illich calls this  epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.”  In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.  These noble objects enable a gush of sentiment which is very hard to resist.  For me it is summed up in the almost unbearably unctuous tone in which our Prime Minister now addresses us daily.  But who is not in an agony of solicitude?  Who has not said that we are avoiding each other because of the depth of our care for one another?  This is epistemic sentimentality not just because it solaces us and makes a ghostly reality seem humane but also because it hides the other things that are going on – like the mass experiment in social control and social compliance, the legitimation of tele-presence as a mode of sociability and of instruction, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics, and the reinforcement of risk awareness as a foundation of social life.  

Another concept that I believe Illich has to contribute to current discussion is the idea of “dynamic balances” that he develops in Tools for Conviviality.  This thought came to me recently while reading, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a refutation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s dissident position on the pandemic.  Agamben had written earlier against the inhumanity of a policy that lets people die alone and then outlaws funerals, arguing that a society which sets “bare life” higher than the preservation of its own way of life has embraced what amounts to a fate worse than death.  Fellow philosopher Anastasia Berg, in her response, expresses respect for Agamben, but then claims that he has missed the boat.  People are cancelling funerals, isolating the sick and avoiding one another not because mere survival has become the be-all and end-all of public policy, as Agamben claims, but in a spirit of loving sacrifice which Agamben is too obtuse and theory- besotted to notice.  The two positions appear starkly opposed, and the choice an either/or.  One either views social distancing, with Anastasia Berg, as a paradoxical and sacrificial form of solidarity, or one views it with Agamben as a fateful step into a world where inherited ways of life dissolve in an ethos of survival at all costs.  What Illich tried to argue in Tools for Conviviality is that public policy must always strike a balance between opposed domains, opposed rationalities, opposed virtues.  The whole book is an attempt to discern the point at which serviceable tools – tools for conviviality – turn into tools which become ends in themselves and begin to dictate to their users.  In the same way he tried to distinguish practical political judgment from expert opinion, home-made speech from the coinages of mass media, vernacular practices from institutional norms.  Many of these attempted distinctions have since drowned in the monochrome of “the system,” but the idea can still be helpful I think.  It encourages us to ask the question, what is enough? where is the point of balance?  Right now this question is not asked because the goods we pursue are generally taken to be unlimited – we cannot, by assumption, have too much education, too much health, too much law, or too much of any of the other institutional staples on which we lavish our hope and our substance.  But what if the question were revived?  This would require us to ask in what way Agamben might be right, while still allowing Berg’s point.  Perhaps a point of balance could be found. But this would require some ability to sustain a divided mind – the very hallmark of thinking, according to Hannah Arendt – as well as the resuscitation of political judgment.   Such an exercise of political judgment would involve a discussion of what is being lost in the present crisis as well as what is being gained.  But who deliberates in an emergency?    Total mobilization – total preoccupation – the feeling that everything has changed – the certainty of living in a state of exception rather than in ordinary time – all these things militate against political deliberation.  This is a vicious circle: we can’t deliberate because we’re in an emergency, and we’re in an emergency because we can’t deliberate.  The only way out of the circle is by the way in – the way created by assumptions that have become so ingrained as to seem obvious.  

Illich had a sense, during the last twenty years of his life, of a world immured in “an ontology of systems,” a world immune to grace, alienated from death, and totally convinced of its duty to manage every eventuality – a world, as he once put it, in which “exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”  Such a view does not readily lend itself to policy prescriptions.  Policy is made in the moment according to the exigencies of the moment.  Illich was talking about modes of sensing, of thinking, and of feeling that had crept into people at a much deeper level.  Accordingly, I hope that no one who has read this far thinks that I have been making facile policy proposals rather than trying to describe a fate that all share.  Still my view of the situation is probably clear enough from what I have written.  I think this tunnel we have entered – of physical distancing, flattening the curve etc. – will be very hard to get out of – either we call it off soon and face the possibility that it was all for naught, or we extend it and create harms that may be worse than the casualties we have averted.  This is not to say we should do nothing.  It is a pandemic.  But it would have been better, in my view, to try and keep going and used targeted quarantine for the demonstrably ill and their contacts.  Close baseball stadiums and large hockey arenas, by all means, but keep small businesses open and attempt to space the customers in the same way as the stores that have stayed open are doing.  Would more then die?  Perhaps, but this is far from clear.  And that’s exactly my point: no one knows.  Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, made the same point recently in defence of Sweden’s current policy of precaution without shut-down. “The theory of lockdown,” he says, is “untested” – which is true – and, consequently, “It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”  

But, to say it again, my intention here is not to contest policy but to bring to light the practiced certainties that make our current policy seem incontestable.  Let me take a final example.  Recently a Toronto newspaper columnist suggested that the current emergency can be construed as a choice between “saving the economy” or “saving granny.”  In this figure two prime certainties are pitted against one another.  If we take these phantoms as real things rather than as questionable constructions, we can only end up by setting a price on granny’s head.   Better, I want to argue, to try to think and speak in a different way.  Perhaps the impossible choices thrown up by the world of modelling and management are a sign that things are being framed in the wrong way.  Is there a way to move from granny as a “demographic” to a person who can be nursed and comforted and accompanied to the end of her road; from The Economy as the ultimate abstraction to the shop down the street in which someone has invested all they have and which they may now lose.   At present, “the crisis” holds reality hostage, captive in its enclosed and airless system.  It’s very difficult to find a way of speaking in which life is something other and more than a resource which each of us must responsibly manage, conserve, and, finally, save.   But I think it important to take a careful look at what has come into the light in recent weeks: medical science’s ability to “decide on the exception” and then take power; the media’s power to remake what is sensed as reality, while disowning its own agency;  the abdication of politics before Science, even when there is no science; the disabling of practical judgment; the enhanced power of risk awareness; and the emergence of Life as the new sovereign.   Crises change history but not necessarily for the better.  A lot will depend on what the event is understood to have meant. If, in the aftermath, the certainties I have sketched here are not brought into question, then the only possible outcome I can see is that they will fasten themselves all the more securely on our minds and become obvious, invisible, and unquestionable.

FURTHER READING

Here some links to articles which I have cited above or which have influenced my thinking:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/why-draconian-measures-may-not-work-two-experts-say-we-should-prioritize-those-at-risk-from-covid-19-than-to-try-to-contain

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/17/listen-cbc-radio-cuts-off-expert-when-he-questions-covid19-narrative/  (This story is misheaded – Duncan McCue doesn’t cut off Dr. Kettner – it’s because Kettner gets to make so many strong points that the item is valuable.)

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (Agamben’s view can be found here along with a lot of other interesting material.)

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness  (Anastasia Berg’s critique of Agamben)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-lockdown-please-w-re-swedish  (Frederik Erixon)

[impressivepress]

The Striking Absence in the Detroit Institute of Arts’s Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Blockbuster

“The number of reverberations between then and now becomes horrible, and frightening, and amazing.” So said Detroit Institute of Arts curator Mark Rosenthal last week, at a preview of “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit.” He’s right, possibly more so than even he knows.

During the Great Depression, the museum almost went under; the storm of publicity surrounding its commission of Diego Rivera’s epic Detroit Industry frescoes in 1932 saved it, inspiring the city to step in to fund DIA. Having just suffered another near-death experience amid Detroit’s recent bankruptcy, DIA is clearly hoping this show focusing on the art-history power couple’s year in Motor City can serve as a symbolic comeback. It will certainly bring crowds. (The show runs through July 12.)

Of course, by now it is Frida, not Diego, who is the main attraction (see Frida Fever: Iconic Photos of Frida Kahlo by Edward Weston and Others at Throckmorton). The Detroit Institute of Arts’s new crowd-pleaser is unlikely to change that gospel; her mordant self-examination just feels more contemporary than his grandiose political allegory.

And yet “Diego and Frida in Detroit” shows the Rivera/Kahlo pairing in a new light for me. There’s a story to be told—and since we are talking about parallels to the present, that should be told—about their art’s relative merits that is less about our changing tastes, and more about the tangled relationship of art and money, art and power.

The show features work from “Before,” “After,” and “During” their sojourn in Detroit in 1932.

In the first category are examples of Rivera’s stately images of flower sellers, as well as Kahlo’s double wedding portrait of the two—he a giant, she tiny—painted while they were visiting San Francisco in 1931 (this picture represents the first time her self-conscious costuming makes an appearance in her art).

“After” features a focused but wide-ranging gathering of canvasses that give a sense of where they each wound up, aesthetically: Rivera’s stylish, willowy Portrait of Ruth Rivera (1949), his daughter from an earlier marriage; Kahlo’s gory true-crime painting A Few Small Nips (1935), showing a man having just butchered his wife.

But the heart of the show clearly resides in the galleries that chronicle the crucial year of 1932: the large-scale cartoons Rivera made to plan Detroit Industry, his meticulous 27-panel cycle depicting scenes from Ford’s River Rouge plant, which surround the DIA’s Rivera Court, and which are widely considered Rivera’s most important mural work in the United States. Also in these galleries are Kahlo’s series of canvasses and drawings showing her sharp turn towards Surrealism.

Detroit’s Agony

When they arrived in Detroit, the 44-year-old Rivera was one of the most celebrated artists in the world. As the key exponent of “Mexican Muralism,” he had built up a level of art fame that is now probably unthinkable. His retrospective at the young Museum of Modern Art was only the institution’s second devoted to a single figure. The first was Matisse.

His wife, 25, was a brash near-unknown. The two had ejected themselves from the Mexican Communist Party in 1929, but were still celebrity radicals, given to blustery anti-capitalist talk and mercurial symbolic gestures. The commission for Detroit Industrywas $20,000 at the height of the Great Depression, more than $300,000 today. It would be paid for by Edsel Ford, the son of Henry and the chief of the Ford Motor Company, the era’s single most emblematic capitalist name.

Detroit, meanwhile, was deep in the throes of the Depression, swollen with the homeless and unemployed. Ford’s River Rouge plant, which Rivera would depict with such muscular bravado in Detroit Industry, had laid off thousands of workers and was operating at reduced capacity. Pay had been slashed for the remaining workers—River Rouge paid more than $181 million in wages in 1929; two years later, just $76 million. Two months before the couple arrived, workers had marched on that very plant, demanding higher pay. Company security and police reacted with violence, killing six. The result came to be known as the “Ford Massacre.”

Rivera’s Compromise

As he had been everywhere he went on his US tour, Rivera was wined and dined in Detroit. He would remember that Henry Ford was a “true poet and artist” and that Edsel had the “simplicity and directness of a workman in his own factories.” Kahlo seems to have been less enthused, resorting to impotent needling of their hosts, asking Henry, a well-known anti-Semite responsible for injecting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into the public mind, whether he himself was Jewish.

How did Rivera square the circle of his revolutionary beliefs and his arch-capitalist patron in his head? A book could be written about the combination of industrial romanticization (he claimed that during his visit to Russia in 1927-28, he had seen Ford’s image revered alongside Marx and Lenin) and artistic self-delusion (he believed that if he won the Yankee masses to his mural style, he had secured a public for revolutionary art) at play, but there is no doubt that it deeply compromised him, politically and artistically.

Detroit Industry is a heroic and memorable depiction of factory labor, which is not nothing. It has passed deep into Detroit’s civic symbolism. But the striving enfilade of auto workers who form its central image are stolid, impassive—it is a picture of labor peace painted at a time of labor strife. They are also pointedly multiracial, when in fact the Fords kept their plants segregated.

Most importantly, it is, ultimately, a celebration of the boss: Edsel Ford, inserted in a panel at the corner in the manner of Renaissance paintings of patrons, gazes out benignly. It is a bravura work, but it is also an image that could serve in any PR pamphlet emphasizing Ford’s “progressive” corporate values—which is how it has often functioned.

As his final act in Detroit, Rivera wrote to Edsel Ford, asking him to rehire one W.J. Settler, a photographer with whom the artist had worked. In the words of Rosenthal’s catalogue essay, Settler “had been fired from his job with the Ford Company for smoking in his own home, thus violating one of the rules for employees.”

Edsel Ford did not rehire Settler. On some level, Rivera must have known that he had let himself be used.

Indeed, with some of this in mind, the most famous controversy of Rivera’s career—when, in the ensuing months of 1933, he inserted an image of Lenin (and what Rivera would describe as “a night-club scene of the debauched rich” featuring John D. Rockefeller, Sr.) into his Rockefeller Center mural commission in New York, provoking its destruction—appears to be a desperate grab at socialist credibility after a very public cop-out in Detroit.

Kahlo’s Breakthrough

In the lead up to Rivera commencing Detroit Industry, Kahlo became pregnant. On July 4, 1932, she lost the child. (The DIA show’s public text and audio indicate a miscarriage; the catalogue authors suggest that it was a self-induced abortion; I gather the truth is not known.) The emotion of this event, all the more focused as Kahlo felt stranded in a hostile city, knocked her art in a new direction, with lasting effects.

The painting that compresses all this is the compact, devastating Henry Ford Hospital. A bed floats in a barren plane. On it, Kahlo has painted herself, blood staining the sheets. Red threads branch from her abdomen connecting to various floating objects, hieroglyphic representations of trauma: an anatomical model; a crumpled orchid, inspired by the ones that Rivera had brought her in the hospital; a fractured pelvic bone; and so on.

Rivera’s art was seemingly affected by the loss of the child as well, possibly accounting for the most idiosyncratic element of Detroit Industry. He had been planning a tableau of agricultural labor for the main East Panel. Now this section was taken over by an image of an unborn child, cradled in the bulb of a plant, a bit of personal mythology embedded in this very public statement.

But most importantly to me is how Kahlo’s laceratingly personal Henry Ford Hospital can be read as a kind of rebuttal to Rivera’s mythologization of Detroit. On the side of the blood-soaked bed, Kahlo has stamped the title, “Henry Ford Hospital.” Yet she has placed herself not in the interior of the hospital, but outdoors, exposed in public; on the horizon in the background, Detroit’s industrial architecture is arrayed like a collection of castoff toys—the very structures that her husband was researching with a view to glorify. It is as if the painting were saying, “All is not right in the world of Henry Ford.”

Here, then, is an aesthetic hypothesis: If Kahlo’s work strikes us today as more alive, this is not only because social realism has gone out of vogue in favor of the intimate and the psychological. It’s almost the opposite, I think: Because Rivera became trapped in celebrating his host, he had to step back from the painful reality of the world he was depicting; Kahlo’s art, unencumbered by this burden and focusing on her own experience, actually does express some of that missing reality.

In this case, because Kahlo’s work is more personal, it is also more political.

Ford’s Gamble

There’s one final, long footnote on a part of the story of Diego and Frida in Detroit that doesn’t get told correctly.

Part of the legend of Rivera’s Detroit Industry, cementing its reputation as an enduringly subversive work, is the uproar surrounding its opening. Upon its unveiling in early 1933, conservatives protested the murals as atheistic, communist, dangerous. The debate in the press attracted hoards to the opening. There was even a bloc of workers who organized to defend Rivera’s opus.

Edsel Ford is given credit for having put a lid on the fracas by issuing a statement to those alarmed at the specter of the Mexican artist’s socialist politics that declared, “I admire Rivera’s spirit.” A key detail, however, is that this controversy was very possibly trumped up by Edsel Ford in the first place by planting incendiary stories in the papers. According to current DIA director Graham Beal, when Ford’s assistant showed him the attacks on the murals in the papers, the industrialist is said to have told him that “we’d accomplished what he wanted.”

Why? Ford had been personally bankrolling the museum through the Depression. The Rivera controversy attracted popular attention; the popular attention brought in big crowds; and the big crowds convinced the city to raise the museum’s budget, thereby taking a money-suck off his hands.

But there is another, much more important piece of context that doesn’t get nearly enough attention in telling the tale of Detroit Industry: the Detroit Banking Crisis of 1933, a disaster in which Edsel and Henry Ford played a very, very prominent role. To escape his father’s long shadow, Edsel had moved into banking in the 1920s, heading up the Guardian Trust Company. It expanded rapidly and unwisely, gobbling up smaller banks with real estate holdings that went dramatically sour after the stock market crash of 1929.

Throughout the entire period of the commission, creation, and unveiling of Detroit Industry, Edsel Ford would have been principally consumed with the intensifying crisis. He personally had to inject money into Guardian to backstop its escalating losses. Looking over its books, the national bank examiner would describe its operations as “the worst I’d ever seen.” In February, the government desperately tried to broker a rescue—but the deal would have involved Henry Ford freezing his massive deposits. Instead, the elder Ford threatened to remove them, ensuring disaster. “Let the crash come,” said the man Rivera remembered as a poet.

On February 14, 1933 after Ford refused the Feds’ rescue plan, all banks in the state of Michigan were shuttered. Five days later, on February 19, the first cartoons for Detroit Industry were shown at DIA.

This Lehmann Brothers moment—touching off a cascade of panic—was the immediate context of the unveiling of the work. Banks would not open again until March 24; and the Rivera Court, transformed with Rivera’s murals, debuted on March 21.

Perhaps the controversy that roared up around the DIA murals was fueled by their association with Edsel Ford. Indeed, the same right-wing radio preacher who attacked Rivera’s Vaccination panel as sacrilegious had been inveighing relentlessly against “banksters,” provoking alarming deposit withdrawals from his followers on Mondays after his sermons.

Yet one can also imagine that Edsel Ford might actually prefer, at such a moment, having a spotlight on his support of a left-wing artist’s depiction of labor instead of his role as figurehead of a failed company that was unleashing nationwide economic chaos.

Indeed, Ford’s support of Rivera continues to play that role to this day. Consider the catalogue for the present show, which contains an essay by John Dean titled, “‘He’s the Artist in the Family’: The Life, Times and Character of Edsel Ford,” extolling his “love of place, family, hard work, self-reliance, community, capitalism, and competition.” Dean argues that Edsel Ford’s partnership with Rivera makes him an example of the “businessman as artist.” He does not mention his role in one of the most catastrophic incidents of the Great Depression, despite its proximity to the Rivera event.

A little radical art patronage, it seems, buys you a lot of good PR, and for eternity. But it would be a shame to let the allure of art celebrity occlude what should be the larger moral of this show’s story, one that seems very relevant for the present indeed: Ford giveth, and Ford taketh away.

~ Ben Davis · March 16, 2015.

[artificialqueens]

papillionlisse 1/? [gigi x nicky / jan x jackie] - pinkgrapefruit

[ chapter one ]

Fast forward to the middle of sixth year and she’s signing up for the Beauxbaton exchange program, egged on by Jan who’s bouncing on her toes, the tote bag slung over her shoulder almost overflowing as Crystal explains the significance of her One Direction stick’n’poke to Jackie who still only has a limited knowledge of muggle music but bless her, she’s trying.

[harry potter hogwarts/beauxbaton au]

A/N - hey! there was a prompt on aq that i was IN LOVE WITH because I’ve wanted to venture into my second favourite fanfic fandom for months but haven’t seen the need. but hey - this should be fun. Thanks to Meggie for betaing, this should be about 6 chapters but don’t hold me to that <3

*

Ever since she was seven, in the aftermath of one of the greatest wizarding wars in British history, Gigi has longed to go to Hogwarts. Her uncle (on her magical mother’s side) would tell her stories of his youth running through ever changing corridors - challenging ghosts and stealing food from the kitchens. Her mother would scoff, nose up high as Gigi and her father would lean into the fantastical tales. Her dad was a muggle but he was fascinated nonetheless, one of the few that would lean into the wizarding world as far as he could rather than run screaming. Their family had hidden during the war - Gigi’s mother a part of one of the highest orders of pure blood family that still accepted the marrying of muggles (and hadn’t affiliated themselves with Death Eaters) - and Gigi had been immersed in the Pure Blood culture for a few months. She was tended to by house elves and taught to fly on a broom by her grandpapa who regaled her with his time playing as keeper for Hufflepuff.

When she got her letter she cried. And then she sent a letter to her grandpapa with her old owl Fluffy and a chocolate frog.

She’d sat on that train, knees bouncing the cage that held her new tawny owl Snitch at a rate that had agitated the poor bird so much he was flapping at the top of the cage. A small girl with insane dark curls entered the carriage and immediately removed the cage from her legs.

“You doin’ okay there?” the girl asked with a peppy voice and wide eyes. “I’m Crystal.”

“I’m Gigi,” she responded quietly, overwhelmed with excitement. “Do you want a crisp?”

“Are they salt and vinegar?” Crystal asked and Gigi nodded. “Awesome! Yeah!”

It was the start of a very firm friendship.

*

Gigi and Crystal entered the great hall with mouths agape. They were funneled in by Hagrid, grouped together with the first years to be sorted and their eyes flitted between the ornate decorations and the hall full of students in black house robes - seated at long tables decorated with banners and flags of the houses; Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin.

“What do you want to be?” whispered Crystal eagerly as she vibrated next to Gigi.

“I don’t mind,” Gigi mused. “None of them are bad.”

“I want to be a Hufflepuff,” Crystal enthused and it made Gigi giggle at her new best friend.

“GOODE, GIGI,” Headmistress McGonagall called from the front of the hall and Gigi skittered up to the front of the room nervously, passing students both older and taller than she. She sat on the stool carefully as the Sorting Hat was placed onto her head. It wriggled uncomfortably for a few seconds, mumbling things Gigi couldn’t quite make out before screeching ‘SLYTHERIN’ at the top of its nonexistent lungs. The green table erupted into cheers as she ran to take a seat on the end, the badge on her uniform transforming into a snake in front of her eyes.

She sat patiently for a few moments as various other girls were called - a Mateo going to Gryffindor and a Liason going to Hufflepuff before Crystal’s name was called.

The young girl sat for only a second before the hat called Hufflepuff and the house cheered in triumph, Crystal giving Gigi a little wave before running to join the sunny yellows of her house.

Once everyone had been sorted, McGonagall tapped her glass to silence the room. “Welcome first years! As you may know,  since the Battle of Hogwarts we have taken house unity very seriously. This means that although you are governed by your house’s prefects, earn points for your house and play quidditch in your colours, you will live, work, and eat with whomever you choose. Aside from special occasions - you will function as a unit, not separate groups. Common rooms, while house specific, are open to everyone and your dorms could be anywhere so it’s important that you respect all house prefects because you don’t know whose rule you’ll live under. Be kind to one another - it matters more than you know, and let the feast begin!”

With a final flourish of her wand, the empty tables were full of platters and the once plain ceiling looked to be full of stars.

*

Gigi’s dorm ended up being in the old Hufflepuff quarters, ever filled with a glowing warmth. She was thrilled to find Crystal lounging on a bed when she entered, two more girls also already having claimed beds - Jan Sport and Jackie Cox. She’d discerned from conversation that Jan was a half-blood like herself and Jackie appeared to be a very clueless Canadian Pure-blood which only made Gigi chuckle as she thought of the confusion on two sides the girl would be facing.

As she lay in bed that night - the room a perfect temperature and the bedspread an emerald green, she’d never felt so at home.

*

Fast forward to the middle of sixth year and she’s signing up for the Beauxbaton exchange program, egged on by Jan who’s bouncing on her toes, the tote bag slung over her shoulder almost overflowing as Crystal explains the significance of her One Direction stick’n’poke to Jackie who still only has a limited knowledge of muggle music but bless her, she’s trying. Jan smiles to herself as she watches her girlfriend try to understand how the ink is staying under the skin. “C’mon Gigi, write quicker!” Jan whines, “I want to go get waffles before the guys eat them all.” Gigi stifles a laugh knowing that’s the only reason Jan got up before seven today before scribbling her signature at the bottom of the form and transfiguring it into a paper butterfly to be sent up to Headmistress McGonagall’s office without hassle.

They all enter the hall, finding four seats together on the end of an old Gryffindor table - the hall only really sticking to the tables on Quidditch game days and special feasts where house unity can be thrown out of the window and no one wants Slytherin to win another house cup (Gigi doesn’t blame them - she’s the captain and they’ve been damn fantastic these past few years).

Jan’s shovelling waffles into her mouth as Jackie mutters for her to breathe when McGonagal clears her throat and taps her glass bringing the hall to silence.

“As you all might have heard, the Sixth Year Beauxbaton Exchange starts after the holidays. For all who have not heard - today is the last day of sign up. Sixth years who choose to participate will be assigned a partner from Beauxbaton. The partner will come here for our summer term - partaking in their normal NEWT subjects and sharing dorms and generally experiencing life here at Hogwarts. They will take on their partner’s house for all house related activities and will not be eligible for quidditch teams before any of you ask.” She pauses, eyes directed towards Gigi with a smirk making the brunette blush in her seat. “Then, in the winter term our students will visit there - the same rules will apply - before all returning here for our famous Yule Ball just prior to Christmas. This is not a graded event but it will do well for anyone wanting international experience or those considering a mastery at Beauxbaton after their NEWTs. With that, it’s almost nine so you have a few more minutes to devour your eggs before I expect you all in your classes - promptly.” She ends with a smile and a wave indicating the hall can get back to its usual chatter and it does with some immediacy.

“Are you sure you don’t want to do it, Crys?” Gigi asks, pushing a final toast crust around her plate with her fork as the girl opposite her gets crumbs all over the transfiguration essay she’s frantically finishing.

Crystal looks up at Gigi with a raised eyebrow, her unruly curls falling over her face (although they’re quickly fixed back by Jackie who’s particularly proficient at beauty charms). “Baby, if I tried to speak French I’d insult them all.” Crystal chuckles. “I failed year six french, thank god I didn’t have to do high school.” Jan and Gigi chuckle in agreement as Jackie sticks her tongue out, insulting them all in french. She drops a kiss on Jan’s head before leaving for her Ancient Runes class.

“You both in transfiguration next?” Jan asks with mouth full of eggs. Gigi and Crystal nod - Gigi looking much more excited as it’s her favourite subject. Crystal sighs - she wants to be a healer so she’s got a full board of classes from Charms and Transfiguration, which she cannot do to save her life, and Potions and Herbology which are much more her speed. Needless to say she’s grateful for Gigi in spellwork classes.

Jan brushes a few lone crumbs off her robes, grabbing her Beatles themed tote bag and rushing off to Care of Magical Creatures, leaving Crystal and Gigi to walk to Transfiguration together.

“What do you think your girl will be like?” Crystal muses, a finger fiddling with one of her loose ringlets.

“I hope she’s nice…” Gigi replies as if she hasn’t put a lot of thought into it (she has but she’ll deny it to her grave).

“Yeah, and respectful. It takes a lot of respect not to throw a pillow at Janet and Jaqueline some nights,” Crystal jokes and Gigi snorts out a laugh as they arrive at the classroom.

“Alright bitch, are we hoping for an E?”

“If I exceed expectations I will be very happy,” Crystal agrees and they take their seats.

*

Gigi normally finds the Hogwarts Express relaxing. She’s usually soothed by the feeling of the old steam engine chugging away under her feet. Crystal stuffs as many pumpkin pasties as she can into her trunk and Jan spends the whole ride with her head in Jackie’s lap which would definitely be a hazard if the train happened to brake (it doesn’t, it’s a magic train, but it could).

She’s normally relaxed about now, but she’s going to meet her exchange partner and honestly she’s finding it very hard to be relaxed. Not to mention she has a very new cat (Quaffle) that is currently unimpressed with being in a train carriage and has found a home on Crystal’s lap, begging for attention.

“You doing okay there Gi?” Jackie asks, worried as always. “You’re looking a little pale.” This is a joke of course, Gigi’s pretty sure she’s never been more tanned than alabaster but if her reflection is anything to go by, she’s not looking particularly calm.

“Just nervous,” she admits, batting away the stick of Droobles Bubblegum Crystal tries to offer her - branching out from her usual snack trolley order.

“Big day!” Jan enthuses from her reclined position, Jackie’s fingers tangled in her hair.

“Big day,” Gigi repeats under her breath, trying to channel some of her roommate/best friend’s energy. “Big fucking day.”

*

“Honestly Crys I’m pretty sure you’re more excited than I am.” Gigi chuckles as they all walk up to the castle together, Jan holding the squirming cat carrier as she’s the only one not phased by the movements.

“If you think about it,” Crystal starts, adjusting her robes as she walks a way akin to a confused badger, “She’s kind of like a family pet. If you get her - we all kinda’ have her. Like a dog.”

Gigi and Jan burst out laughing while Jackie gives a snort that she stifles into an exasperated sigh. “I swear to god Crystal if you refer to the poor woman as a pet while she is here I will disown you.”

Crystal hums nonchalantly at the threat but all of their attention is drawn away by the faint sound of twinkling in the air. They look up out of instinct and coming out of the clouds is a giant, powder blue carriage drawn by Abraxans (large horses with wings). It floats as if weightless and the entire student body stops in awe just to watch it descend onto one of the large fields by Hagrid’s hut.

No doubt they’d all stare for much longer but Professor McGonagall calls from the entrance, requesting them to hurry and put their things away before dinner.

They all enter the dorm with a hubub and Gigi calls the bathroom first, forcing Jackie to charm her hair into one long brown braid that falls over her shoulder. She applies the minimal makeup she knows how to - feeling an urge to impress the girl she is yet to meet before being hurried out of the bathroom by Crystal who is insisting she needs the mirror to do something (none of them are quite sure what).

An additional bed has been added to the dorm between Gigi’s and Crystal’s. While Jan and Crystal’s beds have yellow covers and trimmings, Gigi’s is green and Jackie’s a deep blue - this new bed has a deep purple cover with delicate silver trimmings down the side and Jan appears to be examining it curiously as she braids her silver blonde hair into a messy french plait. They all bide their time, as they wait for Crystal, and once Jackie has rescued whatever hairstyle the dark haired girl was attempting, they head down to the hall.

Despite this being a start-of-term feast, the house restrictions have been lifted for the school so they all find themselves sat in their usual seats at the Gryffindor table, idly waiting for the process to begin. As far as Gigi knows, the Beauxbaton will sit on the same stool they all sat on as first years and the hat will call out the name of their partner - to get a feel for Hogwarts, or so Professor McGonagall said. Then Gigi will have to stand and the girl will join them at the table.

She plays footsie with Crystal under the table through McGonagall’s speech - too nervous to pay much attention (and knowing Jackie will let her know anything important) and then the sorting starts.

The room goes deathly silent except for the sound of the rain on the enchanted ceiling as the first girl is called up. Violet Chachki is paired with Pearl and Gigi finds herself glad as the girl seems intimidating - her dark hair a stark difference from the rest of the blonde, porcelain skinned, part veela girls.

The part-Veela doesn’t worry her. For one she’s not a desperate straight boy clamouring after a perfect French girl and two - she doesn’t really care but she does feel oddly drawn to the girls in blue and she takes a brief second to wonder what would happen if she did get a Veela more interested in women. A smile flits across her face and Jackie rubs a warm hand on her leg.

The next girl - Nicky Doll - is called. She’s blonde, like the rest, and lithe - gorgeous really - and even from where Gigi’s sat, she can tell her eyes are a pearlescent blue. She sits carefully on the stool - managing to make it look like a Vogue shoot rather than a school ceremony. The hat is placed on her head and it dwarfs her petite features - her button nose and her shining eyes and it makes her look almost childlike. Gigi is so focused on this she barely registers the way the hat screams ‘GIGI GOODE’. She’s sure she wouldn’t have if Jackie hadn’t jabbed her wand straight up into her ribs to jumpstart her again.

She stands inelegantly, smiling at the French girl who bounds towards her like Bambi but much more gracefully. It’s like she’s floating along the old cobble floors and then slides into the seat next to Gigi, breathless.

“Nicky Doll, enchanté,” she offers sweetly with her gloved hand outstretched. Gigi takes it gladly and is pleasantly surprised by how warm it is given the general coolness of the castle - even in April. Her shock must show on her face because Nicky gives a soft chuckle “Warming spell.” She shrugs.

“I’m Gigi Goode.” Gigi remembers to introduce herself. “This is Crystal.” The brunette waves jovially while her eyes stay fixed on the continuing ceremony. “Jan.” She waves too. “And Jackie.” Jackie turns for a split second to shake hands before she goes back to watching a girl named Brooke be paired with Vanessa Mateo - the feisty Gryffindor from their potions class.

“Do you know when there will be food?” Nicky asks rather brashly for her demeanor. “I’m starved.”

Gigi laughs softly. “Give it another five minutes and we’ll have a feast,” she jokes quietly and they turn their attention back to the end of McGonagall’s speech - Gigi unable to help getting caught on the feeling of a warm thigh pressed on her own.

*

Gigi doesn’t think to ask about the bedsheets until they’re getting ready for bed. Jan’s already tucked into Jackie’s bed in her girlfriend’s oversized Holyhead Harpies shirt attempting to read the astrology book that’s peaked the Persian’s fancy.

“I’m surprised you can read, Jan,” muses Crystal while cradling the, now much calmer cat, like a baby. “You’re such a cutie, Quaffle, aren’t you,” she coos at the kitty as Jan pounds the shade button they’d found in the Weasley’s joke shop on Diagon. The snake that comes out makes the cat squirm out of Crystal’s arms onto Nicky’s bed where the blonde picks it up gently. Out of nowhere it calms and curls up on her lap.

“He likes you,” Gigi states plainly and Nicky chuckles, running her fingers through the longhaired tabby’s fur,

“Most cats do I suppose.” Her hair is in loose blonde curls and she’s dressed in a satin blue babydoll which only makes Gigi self conscious about the loose sports bra and shorts she prefers. The dorms are always warm thanks to the old Hufflepuff wards so she’d rather go light than overheat.

Gigi settles herself in her bed, the green covers resting just under her grey bra. She bundles her hair up on top of her head and pulls out the glasses she only wears in the comfort of the dorms. “So tell us about yourself,” she asks as all the girls look to the purple bed. Everyone keeps their curtains open most nights so you can see round the curve of their dorm room through each of the poster beds.

Nicky hums as she thinks, tilting her head to the side in a way that makes her curls spill over her shoulder. “Well, in Beauxbaton I’m in Papillionlisse - and, uh consequently my colours are purple and silver. We are not like any of your houses. Ombrelune is probable to be Slytherin and I would say Bellefeuille is maybe Gryffindor but Papillionlisse is not. We are kind and artististic and idealistic at times.” She smiles softly as if remembering something nice and in the soft dorm lighting Gigi can see freckles on her cheeks.

“Oooh, we’ll have to see what houses we would be sometime!” Jan decides from where she has tucked herself under Jackie’s arm.

Nicky giggles and nods. “Absolutely Janet. Um what else? I do - what are yours called? NEWTS?” Crystal nods and she carries on. “Well I do astronomy, potions, transfiguration, charms, and divination.”

Gigi thinks for a second before she responds, brow furrowed as she mentally figures out logistics. “So you’ll be with me and Crys for transfiguration and charms - although Jackie comes to transfiguration too sometimes. We all do potions together and then astronomy you’ll be with Jackie and divination you’ll be with Jan.” She looks around to check that’s right even though she knows it is.

Between them they cover every subject with Jackie in arithmancy, ancient runes, astronomy, herbology, potions, history of magic, and transfiguration, Jan in care of magical creatures, potions, herbology, and divination, Crystal in potions, herbology, charms, and transfiguration, and Gigi in charms, transfiguration, potions, astronomy, and defence against the dark arts. Muggle studies is mandatory once a fortnight since the wizarding war and they all sit through it for the sake of their academic careers rather than for the joy of it.

“I have a feeling I shall enjoy it here,” Nicky contemplates as she moves Quaffle so that she can lay on her side under the covers.

“I hope so,” Gigi smiles. They fall asleep facing each other.

[iobjectfa20]

Print: ‘Imposed migration’ by Pudlo Pudlat.

1986. Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Buffin Island, Canada.

British Museum

Explanation

This image appears in the current exhibit at the British Museum, “Arctic: Culture and Climate.” The exhibit was prompted by some recent archaeological discoveries in the Arctic, but contains a variety of artifacts and art pieces through a range of eras. Not all the objects in the exhibit are accessible online, but some interesting items I found were an intricately-beaded woman’s coat from 1898, an engraved walrus tusk from 1954, and a snowmobile from 1986. Interestingly, none of the objects from the exhibit featured on the website or in downloadable educational materials featured any of the ancient, recently-discovered artifacts; all appeared to be from the 19th century and later. In addition to the various artifacts displayed, the exhibit also features art from contemporary Native artists. These art pieces came from a partnership with the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, also called the Kinngait Cooperative.

The Kinngait Cooperative was founded in 1959 by a white Canadian settler who has been credited with “discovering” Inuit art and a local Inuit artist. There had been a longstanding culture of sculpting in the area, but as the cooperative developed, printmaking, drawing, and painting became more popular. Similarly, Pudlat had begun his artistic career as a sculptor but after suffering an injury that made continuing to sculpt difficult, he turned to printmaking, drawing, and painting as his primary forms of expression. He ultimately created over 4000 drawings and 200 prints. Pudlat’s work has been honored and recognized in a variety of ways. He has been featured on UNICEF greeting cards and on Canadian postage stamps, as well as in a variety exhibits. Two years before his death, the National Gallery of Canada opened a retrospective of 30 years of his drawings, the museum’s the first solo show of an Inuit artist.

I chose this exhibit and this particular piece for a variety of reasons. What initially interested me in the exhibit was the murky moral quandary surrounding the newly-discovered ancient artifacts. They had been trapped in ice in the Arctic circle, and if not for Global Warming, would not have become accessible to archaeologists. I find it interesting that none of these artifacts were pictured on the British Museum exhibit page. Furthermore, to include the work of contemporary Native artists in an exhibit centered on cultural artifacts does not do justice to the value of the artistry itself. Pudlat’s drawing powerfully captures the impact of industrialization and militarization on the environment, and through the environment, on Native communities. The other drawings and prints from Native artist in the accessible materials for the exhibit did not offer such a jarring statement; instead they highlighted the aspects of Native life that many often romanticize. I do not know who chose Pudlat’s drawing, but I think it was a brave choice. I hope that soon, more museums will lift up Native artistry and resistance, rather than exoticize it as an anthropological artifact.

Reimagining and Reframing

The image is a simple one. A military-style helicopter appears suspended against a blank background. From the helicopter hang three animals: a walrus on the left, a polar bear in the middle, and a musk ox on the right. The walrus is hung from its head, the polar bear from its neck, and the musk ox from its belly. I find the polar bear in the center to be the most disturbing. It is emaciated, echoing the photographs of polar bears we see increasingly frequently, who due to climate change lose their homes and sources of food. Its coat is yellowed, another sign of ill health. But most notable is that the rope attaching it to the helicopter looks exactly like a noose. The title of the piece is “Imposed migration,” and the image offers the illusion that perhaps the helicopter is simply relocating the animals. We know, however, that this is not really migration, but extermination. The animals will not survive human expansion and the climate change that accompanies our consumerism and greed. The title of the work also echoes the history of forced relocation of Native people – a governmental policy that did not only result in displacement, but also untold death.

This exhibit serves as an example of the British Museum benefiting from climate change. They can attract crowds (putting the pandemic aside for a moment) with the promise of newly-discovered archaeological findings, without grappling with the reality that those items only became recoverable because of a catastrophic loss of Arctic ice. Native populations are among those most effected by climate change; for example, many still rely on hunting and subsistence activities for their livelihoods, and animals are becoming increasingly sparse, and no longer migrate as far south because of rising temperatures. Exhibiting these new archaeological discoveries in a museum provides no benefit or relief to Native individuals suffering from climate-induced food or housing insecurity. In a telling move, the British Museum intentionally kept the BP logo away from promotional materials about this particular exhibit, although BP is a major funding source for the museum. That the museum simply removed the logo, but changed nothing about the policy of accepting BP’s sponsorship and promoting the company, highlighted that this exhibit was constructed to skirt its moral murkiness, not engage in what could be a groundbreaking discussion of ethics.

Referring to the opening up of the new archaeological site as both a tragedy and a treasure trove, a curator at the British Museum continued, “It’s like the library of Alexandria being on fire ... You’re plucking out these books which are coming out … it’s a remarkable window into life, all coming out of the ground in one go.” It’s not like the library of Alexandria being on fire, unless that fire were in fact an arson set by an invading army who then tries to paint themselves as the heroes in the narrative.

There have been some interesting cases and discussions in recent years of museums returning items obtained through various forms of theft, including colonial force, to the original countries or peoples. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City returned a coffin to Egypt that was determined to have been smuggled out of Egypt by a multinational art trafficking ring. Benin City in Nigeria hopes to open a museum in 2023 to display Benin Bronzes in their city of origin, but has experienced difficulty in getting other countries and museums, including the British Museum, to return them. The blockbuster movie Black Panther featured a scene at the fictional “Museum of Great Britain” in which the lead villain comments on how the items were looted from Africa before stealing them himself. The director wanted to shoot the scene at the British Museum itself, and use the real museum’s name, but the museum did not consent. That the British Museum comes up again and again in examples of pleas to repatriate stolen cultural artifacts speaks to how much of its collection was obtained illicitly. I believe that the objects obtained from these archaeological sites made accessible through climate change should be treated the same way as the Benin Bronzes and should be repatriated.

Reading this account by the curator alongside the belief of James Houston, one of the cofounders of the Kinngait Cooperative, that he had “discovered” Inuit art, reminded me of many of the points Gayatri Spivak made in her groundbreaking essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Although she did not use this terminology, she issued a powerful indictment of the white savior complex, famously identifying a dynamic of “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Colonizers give themselves credit for saving Native peoples without taking accountability for or even recognizing the compounded oppression that they inflict on those they colonize. Houston, for example, felt proud of introducing the Native people he encountered in Kinngait to art forms that they could profit from, taking public credit without also publicly acknowledging the role that the Canadian government and the industrialization and capitalism it introduced played in destroying Native economies.

I read that archaeologists felt rushed to excavate the Arctic sites because looters were pillaging them as the melting ice made them accessible. How do we know that these “looters” were not simply Native people looking to hang on to remnants of their culture? I think of the disparity in newspaper captions after Hurricane Katrina, in which White survivors who took food from abandoned stores were termed “resourceful” and Black survivors doing the same thing were portrayed as looters and criminals. What separates the archaeologists themselves from the title of looters? My reimagined exhibit would address these questions head-on. Who can claim ownership to an ancient item? What constitutes theft? How should such an artifact be displayed? If that artifact or piece of art is obtained through some form of violence, how should that violence be acknowledged? What is a just reparation?

There is a long history of museums degrading Native art. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City for example, which primarily features dinosaur bones, animal panoramas, and other exhibits on the natural (non-human) world, has a wing on Native American art and culture. The inclusion of Native Americans in the AMNH is, to say the least, dehumanizing. Native Americans are not Neanderthals. They are alive and could be thriving if not for European settler colonialism. The myth and romanticization of Native ways of living as an older and purer but unrealistic way of life does violence to all the Native people incorporating centuries of ritual into their 21st-century existence. For this reason, I believe that Native art should no longer be featured in exhibits that also contain archaeology; nobody would put an Andy Warhol painting in an exhibit with colonial-era embroidery. Native people deserve the same degree of attention and distinction.

—Mira R

[writing-prompts-for-friends]

Notes from Stephen King’s “On Writing” 02: Unpacking the Writer’s Toolbox

King begins the second half of his book with a story about his uncle’s toolbox, which had been built by his grandfather. It was so heavy that he couldn’t lift it as a boy, and when you opened it there were three tiers of tools, with the most commonly used tools on the top tier, and the least common at the bottom. 

King says:

“I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.”

Tool 1: Vocabulary

“Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.”

What are writers without words? King cautions us that a writer’s vocabulary size does not equal the size of their talent. He shows us some godawful prose from various books, so chock-full of verbiage that they are hard to get through. Then he shows us the opposite: several examples of prose that are bare-bone yet beautiful. 

King says, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”

Obviously, if you are writing a Sherlock Holmes-like character, you will have to have a wide vocabulary on hand to match his character, but there is no point in dressing things up just for the sake of dress-up. After a certain point it feels artificial and forced. 

King also recommends the use of phonetically rendered street vocabulary in dialogue, like “gonna,” for example. In using these strategically, you paint a better picture of the characters.

Tool 2: Grammar

“Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.”

How many of you heaved a sigh at seeing the word “grammar” just now? lol

I actually didn’t take many notes about this section because I used to be an English teacher before I became a translator. Grammar is what my life has revolved around for the past decade or so now. 

To broadly summarize, King says:

Learn the basics of grammar, please oh please.

You can use sentence fragments for impact. These can be one of your tools, but be careful not to overuse them. 

Avoid the passive voice at all costs.It distances the reader from what is happening. 

Limit the use of adverbs. In his words, “With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.” 

In particular, King says that we should never use adverbs when describing dialogue. Just stick to verbs like “said,” “shouted,” “asked,” and let the scene and the characters (literally) speak for themselves. King also makes it clear that his favorite form of dialogue attribution is “said.” You should try to use it as much as possible. 

Tool 3: Elements of Style

“Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.”

Grab a novel off your shelf--preferably one you haven’t read--flip to a random page, and take a look at the pattern. The lines of text, the margins, and most particularly the blocks of white space where paragraphs begin or leave off. 

You can tell how easy or hard the text is by that alone, right? 

King says, “Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.”

Regarding the construction of a paragraph, King says that they should be neat and utilitarian. In expository paragraphs, we start with a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify this. This is how we are taught to write those awful essays from elementary school, after all.

However, in fiction, the paragraph isn’t as structured. Your words should flow like music on the page, having their own distinct rhythms and pauses that are natural within the melody you create. The more you read and write, the better you will get at finding this melody. 

King believes that “the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing--the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words.”

I think most writers think of the sentence as the basic unit of writing, so this was a new way to look at things for me. I like it, though. I have always paid attention to how the words look on the pages in the books I read and write. This is the extent of my visual artistry, but just as varying sentence length can add variety and spice to your writing, so too can paragraph length. 

Source: King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Hodder, 2012.