Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie. (Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884,” via the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection/The Art Institute of Chicago). [New York Times caption and illustration]
“But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.”
Here are excerpts from the article by Ross Douthat, conservative Catholic opinion writer for the New York Times.
Some of these choices will be especially difficult for liberals, since they will often smack of chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction. Family lines will survive only because of a clear preference for one’s own kith and kin as opposed to just some general affection for humanity. Important art forms will survive only because of a frank elitism, an insistence on distinction, a contempt for mediocrity. [… My bolding.]
Douthat’s phrase “as opposed to just some general affection for humanity” is dissonant to my ear. I would rather it read, “… in addition to general affection for humanity.” Also, is it settled wisdom that “insistence on distinction” and “contempt for mediocrity” shall forever be deemed to appertain to an “elite” and not to the generality of humankind?
“[Being pulled back into the virtual, the performative, the fundamentally unreal] is one temptation I’m very familiar with, as someone whose professional life is a mostly digital existence, where together with others who share my concerns I am perpetually talking, talking, talking … when the necessary thing is to go out into reality and do.”
Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read. […]
(Ross Douthat, “Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction,” New York Times, 4-19-25)
“Outcast” (1974) was one of many images of Richard M. Nixon that Mr. Holland created for The Times. Credit… Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The larger, more established studios, he later recalled, did not take to his eccentric work, responding with blank stares and, in one instance, suggesting religious counseling.
My title is illustrator Brad Holland’s comment in turning down an assignment offered by Playboy in 1967. The magazine hired him anyway, and he worked there for a quarter century.
“In conventional professional terms, everything I said and did during those three days was wrong,” Mr. Holland wrote on his blog in 2018. “But God bless Art Paul [Playboy’s art director], I had done them with the right guy. I had stumbled up the stairs in the dark, and when the lights came on, there I was.”
When Time magazine declared the Ayatollah Khomeini “Man of the Year” in January 1980, it was Mr. Holland’s stern portrait that glared from the cover. Credit… Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Holland’s remark later in life about stumbling up the stairs in the dark stayed with me. It reminds me of the reliable saying, “When you reach your destination, there you are.”
He worked constantly on his own ideas, which he said sprang from his unconscious, or from characters he saw on the street, or from some philosophical concept he was trying to puzzle through.
(Penelope Green, “Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81,” New York Times, 4-13-25)
If the unitary executive wants to go all binary, then Him and Her it is. God knows, She has had her problems, starting with the Adam’s rib hack. Did Maker say, Oops, shall I just take a bone from Him and put a Her at His disposal?
It’s taken until January, 2025, to relieve Her of afterthought status. She’s a fully enfranchised second sex as of… wait for it… now!
If the unitary executive wants to go all binary, then let there be Us. What’s nuclear is that We are made in God’s image. The data are from Genesis, and it’s a superpositive predicament in which ourselves We find. The Boson-Maker is the ultimate multi-state Being. The Supreme Particle rocks deity-grade simultaneity: Nor One nor Zero but Both; nor White nor Black, but Gray; nor Him nor Her, but They. We walk in Their likeness, so confessing in our most self-aware, sustaining Me discoveries.
A-busting out in song — Ta Ra! — We the People go:
We inhabit in our mortal rind Plus-one psychic moral states In optimal examples of our kind.
When I call her sister, I am sisterly to her, To me she is a brother.
Cross-commingled woman-man Is how we roll; exemplars of an amplitude Greater than our single span;
A bond which knits, not sunders; Repels buzzing poseurs, gnats, Stinging theocrats, boy wonders.
Beloved proud sister, citizen, patriot, cat lady. (Pencil on paper, April seventh, two thousand twenty-five, Common Era)
I asked azurea20 if I could post an English reading of her poem “Cuerpo” on EthicalDative, and she said yes. Below is the original Spanish text of her lyric published on her website, La Bancarrota del Circo, followed by my rendition, which I hope does no violence to the original. My thanks to azurea20 for her kind permission.
CUERPO Cuerpo, arsenal de miedos, al sur del alma. Mudanza de un mundo disperso en su propia extrañeza. Borrador de alfabetos, naufragio que la espesura traga sin atragantarse. Cuerpo, ¿dónde fuiste a buscar tu lugar? Y – qué – dirá ese – dios, cansado – de – ser – dios. Y tú, cansado de ser cuerpo.
BODY Body, arsenal of fears south of the soul. Mutation of a world scattered in its own estrangement. Eraser of alphabets, shipwreck which the breakers gargle without gagging. Body, where did you go looking for your place? And what will that tired-of-being-god god say. And you, tired of being body.
Note Azurea20’s poem says this: shipwreck which the thickness swallows [traga] without choking [atragantarse] I made a perilous decision: To substitute an obvious water analog for “thickness” in order to approximate the alliterative play of “tragar” with “atragantarse” adroitly exploited in the Spanish. I’ve violated a standing oath not to take liberties in translating which smack of showboating. To be honest, my solution makes me uneasy. Can wreckage wallowing off a rocky coastline survive scrutiny as the sea “gargling” wrack? Were I to do a revision, I would as soon stay faithful to the strong model of the original. Sackcloth poised for donning.
Wehr lists anatomical English equivalents for Arabic noun ṣadr, plural ṣudūr, as: chest, bust, breast, bosom. (Heart is an outlier, clearly metaphorical.) At a tender age I heard my grandmother refer to ladies’ “bosoms.” Context nudged me to associate “bosom” with “chest.” In time I internalized bosoms as equivalent to “breasts.” (“Bust” had to wait til college.) There are male corollaries. We don’t think of ourselves as sporting breasts or bosoms, yet when a man gets something off his chest, he also unburdens his breast, unbosoms himself,* and spills his heart. Here goes:
I tend to enthuse (perhaps too readily) over verse in which I divine the rudiments of cohesion without speculative leaps. It’s the reflexive act of intuiting discernible relationships obtaining among the nouns, verbs and particles of communicative discourse that draws me in. Nothing need “make sense” in any familiar way — poetry cohabits with strategic ambiguity. I don’t clamor for facile accommodation. Be novel! Be spicy! Be intricate! Be arbitrary? The words must somehow cohere.
A percentage of contemporary verse comes across, for me, as stunted by opacity. A poem’s first impression is a singular gateway for engagement. Make it count, Poet. I know a poem worth its salt benefits from more than one reading. Let it be motivated, not desperate.
The Poet may fall back on loftiness: Frankly, JMN, I don’t give a damn what you “divine” in my writings. I’m an artist. I write and publish poems in order to express myself, not titillate you.
It’s a viewpoint, and I respect it. You can see the challenge it affords the uncompromising reader.
The writer who wrote the line in my title is ire’ne lara silva. Here it is in context:
… they will make us all into virgin madonnas protecting mexicanidad but our red red blood spilt on the ground does not know how to be silent we did what we had to do to survive then and later in this life in the afterlife or the life before the stories are not dead stories never die we will speak our piece the living can be silenced the dead cannot (“what the ghosts of las adelitas say in the afterlife part 1”)
I’ve given the line prominence because it gives me an escalofrío and makes me whisper así es.
This and other poems in the portfolio of Poetry, April 2025, exalt a form of demanding, ceremonial horsemanship practiced by women in traditional female attire riding side saddles. The Mexican art form is known as escaramuza, and has its male counterpart in charrería. The poems make clear that the women of escaramuza have to put up with a ration of jeering from the males. Perhaps it’s no accident that escaramuza means “skirmish.”
… they say but what if a man wanted to wear a dress expecting me to shrink back in horror but i say the world will not end if a man wears a dress the world will not end if i love who i love the world will not end if i say this place belongs to me too the world will not end if i live as i say i must live (“machetona”)
Where style is concerned, I generally feel my gorge rising when confronting verse which dispenses with textual boundary markers. Formlessness can trigger freefall in which reading devolves into a construing chore. I discovered, however, that reading lara silva’s poems in the run-on fashion that such texts impose did not subtract impact from them. This is refreshing, and I think it’s so because her sentences are crafted with sufficient solidity so as to survive the rush. When I reached the end, I didn’t feel as if I had missed message. The lack of punctuation engenders a momentum of assertion that lends poetic force.
Postscript: My grandmother, a ranchwoman, had a side saddle. She was beyond her riding days when I knew her, but as a kid it perplexed me no end, when viewing the odd-looking rig, how she had managed to stay on a galloping horse when seated on it. My answer came with maturity: She didn’t gallop. But the escaramucistas do!
In the languages I can navigate, here are various translations. All but “Cortés” are from here:
English settle your affairs (Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran) and set your relations right (T. Usmani) and make things right between you (M.A.S. Abdel Haleem) and set things right between you (A. Maududi (Tafhim commentary)) and adjust the matter of your difference (M. Pickthall) and keep straight the relations between yourselves (A. Yusuf Ali) and adjust all matters of difference among you (Al-Hilali & Khan) and amend that which is between you (Saheeh International)
Spanish ¡Manteneos en paz! (Cortés) solucionad vuestros conflictos (Sheikh Isa Garcia [sic]) y arreglen las diferencias entre ustedes (Noor International Center) y arreglad las diferencias entre vosotros (Montada Islamic Foundation)
French Mettez un terme à vos différends (Rashid Maash) arrangez-vous à l’amiable dans vos rapports (Montada Islamic Foundation) Maintenez la concorde entre vous (Muhammad Hamidullah)
For the casual reader keen on registering a quick “like”: “Work things out between yourselves.” Or: “Stop your squabbling.” The translations agree more or less that this is the message. It’s a wonderful admonition for constructive disagreement converging on concerted, positive action. Democrats traditionally never learn the lesson. Politically, they’re a flotilla of sloops tacking to shifting winds as the Republican dreadnaught steams past them into elected office. But I’ve other fish to fry.
For the committed reader in for the long haul: What do the words wa-‘aṣliḥū ḏāt(a) bain(i)-kum actually say? As a reader of poetry and translator, I tread the contentious knife edge of a notional distinction between what words “say” and what they “mean.” I dwell continually on the saying side, where intimate grammatical relationships unfold, wagering that therein may lie less obvious, more revelatory meaning.
To grasp the passage fully, I thought I had to better understand how ḏū (pronounced THOO with the voiced “th” of “that”) works. It’s a species of particle that acts as a noun, declined for case, number and gender, but which is always paired with a following word in genitive case to create a descriptive compound. Wehr lists the meanings of ḏū as: possessor, owner, holder or master of, endowed or provided with, embodying or comprising something. Example: ḏū māl(in) (possessor of goods = wealthy)…
But wait! The feminine form of ḏū is ḏāt, also subject of a lengthy Wehr entry. Clearly, ḏāt (pronounced THAHT) has staked out its own lexical terrain. The meanings listed include: being, essence, nature; self; person, personality; the same, the selfsame; -self. Lo and behold, the first example of a ḏāt construction that Wehr cites is the one we’re examining: ḏāt al-bain. Meanings listed for the phrase are: disagreement, dissension, disunion, discord, enmity; friendship [!]. So the phrase means what the translations have captured in various wordings: Put paid to your discord. Case closed? Nope.
The words wa-‘aṣliḥū ḏāt(a) bain(i)-kum don’t actually say what any of the above translations register. The phrase’s approximate grammatical description is conjunction+imperative verb+direct object+genitive noun+possessive pronoun. What its words might say is: Put in order the essence of your difference. Or perhaps: Repair the nature of your separation.
In many respects we’re in the realm of idiom, a cousin of metaphor. The languages I know are riddled with idiomatic expressions whose purport is other than the literal sense of their wording. “To get a leg up” on someone is to gain advantage over him — nothing to do (now) with wrestling.
I want to keep chasing what the words say, not mean, because it leads to my title.
What induced me to dive into the ḏū lagoon was partly a misreading: I mistook the noun bain (separation, interval, difference) for the preposition baina (between, among). It made me think I was seeing a novel pairing of ḏū, which is usually annexed to a substantive. This is plumb loco! I said to myself. As it happened, the loco one was me.
I can’t conclude without sharing what I learned from Lane. The Lexicon’s article on ḏū contains the following statement and examples: … In these instances… that which is contained is made to be as though it were the possessor (ṣāḥib) of that which contains. (I think of this as akin to quantum matter existing in multiple states.) Examples:
waḍa^at(i)-l-mar’aẗ(u) ḏā baṭn(i)-hā. The words say: “The woman dropped the possessor of her belly.” Lane’s translation: The woman brought forth [her child]. ‘alqat(i)-d-dujājaẗ(u) ḏā baṭn(i)-hā. The words say: “The hen dropped the possessor of her belly.” Lane’s translation: The hen laid her egg, or eggs. ‘alqā-r-rajul(u) ḏā baṭn(i)-hi. The words say: “The man dropped the possessor of his belly.” Lane’s translation: The man ejected his excrement, or ordure.
In each case, that which is contained — child, egg, excrement — is conceived as being possessor (owner, holder, etc.) of what contains it (belly).
Committed reader, you’ve weathered a grueling dilation. Thank you, and happy trails until we meet again.
Really, I should draw, paint and read more, write less. It’s a constant struggle to pipe down.
Poetry, for one thing, triggers me. Intending to read a bait of versifying, before I know it I’m a keyboard Roman candle ejaculating dubious sparkle. Spurious expatiation is my calling card, if not what I was minted for. Meanwhile, the unconsumed verses lie belly up like stranded beetles flailing to be righted. (I’m testing the simile aloud, wondering if it should see service.)
Blessedly, most of my spew goes unmissed and unmourned to a delete-marked grave. What survives the cull undergoes savage trimming. Self-reference goes packing — a ragout of moi has a pitiable shelf life. If I can’t see past the white of my eyes, where are we? Indeed, you’re entitled to marvel why this selfsame sad-sack sally isn’t slumbering on Boot Hill. (Does this need an exclamation point?)
EthicalDative 
Descending to the Heights!