‘*Technically God isn’t a “him.” But the English language doesn’t provide a suitable singular, non-gender term for us to use (“it” implies an object or non-sentient being).’
Mitch Teemley’s observation touches usefully upon the volatile topic of “they” third persons and “he/she” third persons. English has ready at hand singular “it,” as he notes, but referring to a sentient being as “it” violates the innately sensed contrast between persons-and-pets versus clams-and-thumbtacks. Singularized “they” is the lesser evil.
How to pronominalize the divine (the “all-sentient”?) invites meditation. Cult moves slowly. In another few centuries “He” might become “They.” Meanwhile, believers commanded to preach as well as pray must talk of God in the grammatical third person, if at all. Recast the first line of the Lord’s Prayer as a sermon, replacing “Father” with “God.”
Our God, Who is in heaven, hallowed be <His/Her/Its/Their> name.
Talk of God in any person at all may argue with the literal grain of Wittgenstein’s tart dictum:
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Or with Arthur Eddington’s:
The universe is not just queerer than we suppose; it’s queerer than we CAN suppose.”
How to speak of what purportedly outstrips our puny faculties by infinitudes? (What do fish say about ocean?) If God’s anything they’re all of it, outside of which and whom or what is inconceivable nonbeing. I’d include in my devotions a line of Elaine Kahn’s poetry which she quotes in her essay “On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe” (Poetry, June 2025):
What drives me / is baseless / and therefore / indisputable.
There’s an axiom of — is it logic? — which says, approximately, What needs no proof needs no rebuttal.
“… When I don’t know what to do next, I tend to throw everything at it, be as expressive or as minimalist or as detailed as I can, reach for bright colours or keep it monochrome, look intensely or scribble vaguely. It’s a way I can find out what I like and what may work.”
Doff of cap to the art blog of Outside Authority for comments I find helpful in my efforts to draw and paint. I’m learning that I have do it even worse in order possibly to do it better.
“Flowers, Mosses and Lichens,” conceived 1919–20; artist’s copy completed by 1926. Notebook with watercolor, metallic paint, pencil and ink. Credit… via Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Walker Mimms’s treatment of Hilma af Klint is elegant, lyrical, explicit.
Alongside the careful realism of her herbal specimens, af Klint inscribed diagrams explaining their spiritual lives. For the European thimbleweed, a hot-and-cold Star of David; for the goat willow, a broken hexagram; for the black poplar, a yin-yang bullseye representing its “resistance to unite the astral and the mental.” Credit… Committee on Drawings and Prints Fund and gift of Jack Shear, via Museum of Modern Art, New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Ebullient, rigorous and boastfully esoteric, these “Nature Studies,” as she called them, reveal the didactic side of a pioneer in nonliteral art. This is an economical show of some beautiful field exercises, and it suggests the spiritual extremes to which the honorable but often tedious tradition of botanical illustration might be taken.
“Birch” from the series “On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees,” 1922, watercolor on paper. Credit… The Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm. [New York Times caption and illustration]
At MoMA, a wall of bright and hasty energy paintings from 1922 wraps the show — wet-on-wet watercolors with only vague kinships to their herbal titles: “Oak,” “Pansy,” “Birch.” After her years transcribing tendrils and anthers, they are sloppy and fun, like cannonball dives into the placid surface of a lake. They are also less interesting. But they are edgy in their way…
(Walker Mimms, “In Her Botanical Paintings Hilma af Klint Hurtles Back to Earth,” 5-15-25)
A The scene is festive. Where the flames are fed B Tainted choirs croon, “More and more is less.” c Spuds fried in tallow — gag me with a spoon! A The scene is festive where the flames are fed. a In the eyes, it’s interesting: They’re dead. b Festooned sockets orbed with emptiness. A The scene is festive where the flames are. Fed B Tainted choirs croon more. And more is less.
Never explain your doggerel. So here’s explaining: I want to dramatize anguish over corrupted discourse foisted upon the polity which programmatically asserts that facts are fake, truth is its opposite, bad is good, down is up, and hot is cold. It was convenient to turn the much-parroted Zen truism “Less is more” upside down to serve as a sacrificial cliché. The president absolutely <fill in blank>. What a stupid question! is the signature clarifying summation of the reality takedown’s mouthpiece.
Here’s something called a triolet from Poetry, May 2025. The form is new to me and strikes a chord: concision, repetition, the discipline imposed.
Triolet with a Line by Sylvia Plath by Brittany Perham
We take the N out to the turnaround. The only thing to come now is the sea. The ice plants make the pink world loud. We take the N out to the turnaround. The fog fades in with its foggy sound. The end is here. Everyone can see. We take the N out to the turnaround. The only thing to come now is the sea.
Quoted whole because how do you vivisect a poem consisting of 8 tightly wound lines without wounding it? Also, what’s to say, above and beyond, that doesn’t murder with a grave truth?
If you want to see a tedious triolet explicated to death, glance here. I favor one that makes the pink world loud. Chow, bébé.
They say: A man who can’t tell shoe polish from shinola is fit to be tied by time and the tide. It’s one of those old sayings they say is never insufficient to the day thereof.
They say: A stitch in time is a penny earned. Penny for your thoughts. Pennies from Heaven. Common sense.
Many timeless zingers they say come from faith baseness: Trespass not, brethren, lest ye commit foulness one upon the other. This is the core takeaway of a legendary decalogue. Two other takeaways are the ones that go don’t steal and don’t adulterate.
A florilegium of eternal verities they say blooms as well from the Great Reading Lists: They also serve who only stand and deliver. There’s scads of these things they say. A horde of populous wisdom, believe you me, as true now as it more than ever was.
Make American English Great Again Now — MAEGAN — is a sweet hotrod of a movement, a screaming dragster with four-barrel carburetor smoking the shithole competition wherever jalopies duke it out. The Nineteen-Fifties burn rubber in the Twenty-Twenties like there’s no tomorrow. The Eighteen-Fifties bray:
Go West, inseminating Dude, East, North and South, mad Monoglot! From Greenland to the Doomsday Floe, Yours is the Earth and all that can be got, And — which is more — you’ll be a ‘Garch, my bro!*
*Sloganeering assembled from aftermarket Kipling and busted jingo blab. Don’t knock it, old son. It runs.
Where the living language is concerned, which let’s face it. So.
Can you spot the tuber posing as a goober? What about a dangled thought left to? Hip to messaging that carries false report? Words happening metaphorically, knot in real time? Factitious takeaways?
Can you tell a genuine non sequitur from a contrived segue? Objurgation that minces?
Pinpoint aggrieved pseudo-nostalgia that feels achingly autonomic and you’re dialed in. Possibly over your head, but respect. Heads up in the ensuing fog:
Lie with darkness, wake with fleece. You been served. Got damn! You got to know when to fold. So what? is the question. Some words are spelled with different letters. Fake it ‘til you fyck it. The party is pooped, my peeps. Denizenship is a privilege, not a right. If you’re bitching, you’re bombing. Back to your beginnings. Return to where you lost — this space is taken, pardner. In the name of God, make yourself scarce.
EthicalDative 
‘Technically God Isn’t a “Him”’
Mitch Teemley’s observation touches usefully upon the volatile topic of “they” third persons and “he/she” third persons. English has ready at hand singular “it,” as he notes, but referring to a sentient being as “it” violates the innately sensed contrast between persons-and-pets versus clams-and-thumbtacks. Singularized “they” is the lesser evil.
How to pronominalize the divine (the “all-sentient”?) invites meditation. Cult moves slowly. In another few centuries “He” might become “They.” Meanwhile, believers commanded to preach as well as pray must talk of God in the grammatical third person, if at all. Recast the first line of the Lord’s Prayer as a sermon, replacing “Father” with “God.”
Our God, Who is in heaven, hallowed be <His/Her/Its/Their> name.
Talk of God in any person at all may argue with the literal grain of Wittgenstein’s tart dictum:
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Or with Arthur Eddington’s:
The universe is not just queerer than we suppose; it’s queerer than we CAN suppose.”
How to speak of what purportedly outstrips our puny faculties by infinitudes? (What do fish say about ocean?) If God’s anything they’re all of it, outside of which and whom or what is inconceivable nonbeing. I’d include in my devotions a line of Elaine Kahn’s poetry which she quotes in her essay “On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe” (Poetry, June 2025):
What drives me / is baseless / and therefore / indisputable.
There’s an axiom of — is it logic? — which says, approximately, What needs no proof needs no rebuttal.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved