#i apparently write in a state of delirium sometimes

[brasideios]

The Good Spartan, the Poem Version?

While I’m at it… back in April of last year, I wrote a kind of poem version of The Good Spartan? Kind of from Alexios’ POV?

I don’t know why, I don’t remember doing it, but here it is anyway.

[I was probably just needing to let some things go while writing TGS - It was challenging not being able to express Alexios’ POV at times.]

In Every Life

In every life, I would let you live. I would meet you again In wreaths of smoke, Fight beside you, Our fluid dance of death And smile when at last You turned those warm brown eyes To survey me. The world you carry Behind those eyes; The heartbreak and the suffering But then no one knew Perhaps not even you If you felt anything at all.

How else could you survive? How else could you continue?

Those warm brown eyes And voice like honey Melted in the sun… Even then Not knowing what might be Our eyes danced to meet As we danced in combat.

What else might be? What else might be?

In every life I would steal again into that tower Watch over you as you slept, pretend to myself I waited For you to wake but content To listen to your breathing To know I wasn’t alone anymore. And from the first, I had this urge: to guard you, watch over you To keep you safe As ribs protect the heart.

In every life I would find you Browned by sun and salty With the brine of the sea Aching to kiss the salt from your lips Aching to touch you To know you To find my way Like water through a faultline To the place where you were

I never wanted the surface But the deep water The strange fish that swim Through the places where no light shone. I had no fear of your darkness I had no fear of pain I wanted to see the places Even you didn’t know were there.

In every life For you and you alone I would dare to step Where everyone cursed me. Hated me for what I’d done As a small boy, unknowing. You led me there and for you I went. Still I guarded you, even where we were safest. For you I’d fight anyone Even Hades himself.

In every life, I’d press myself to you Soul to soul, mouth to mouth, Skin to skin, pain to pain And panting my love Hear it echo back to me, In your inarticulate murmurs Against my lips, against my ear

Each to each we are redeemed. Each to each we are alive.

In every life I would follow you into darkness. From Temple to battlefield Battlefield to death, Death to underworld. That we should end As two souls, shapeless, formless. Yet even there, We would know each other.

… yet.

That choice was not mine to make. And there is only one life. I must live mine and yours… Yours must be enough. It must be enough.

[yoongsgguktae]

honey, i’m home 01 | pjm

summary; you come home to your empty apartment, or so you thought pairing; jimin x reader genre; stranger!au | s2l | fluff rating; pg15 word count; 1.3k warnings; cussing, intruder (lock your windows and doors kids)

a/n; such big thank yous to @starlightseoks​ for beta reading this with such short notice, ily. @dollwithluv​ for always encouraging me to keep writing, you have my heart forever, ilysm. and @kaylakori​ for being my cheerleader!! ily pumpkin!

MASTERLIST [PART 01] | PART 02 | PART 03

—

You throw your keys on the counter while you struggle to hold your groceries up in your arms, and close your apartment door with the back of your foot. The keys slide off and fall with a thud on the floor. Of course, you drop them, you can’t remember the last time you exerted just the right amount of force to get them to land properly, it’s become routine at this point. You’ll just pick them off the floor on your way out the door tomorrow morning, not bothering to get it now, too tired to care. 

You set your heavy bag of food down on the kitchen counter. “Honey, I’m home,” you yell aloud into your empty apartment. “Oh wait, that’s right, I live alone.” In an exhausted state of delirium, you laugh in self-pity, just like you do every evening you get home from work. 

You’ve made it a habit to remind yourself of how single you are, coming home from a debilitating day at work to an empty place. You are so single, so painfully single. But at least you are able to joke about it, knowing full well that it’s your own fault for having a terrible dating life. With a soul-sucking job, you have no enthusiasm to go out looking for a relationship, let alone have time for one. 

“I picked up some pizza.”

Your hand freezes mid-air as you reach into the contents of your grocery bag. 

What the fuck was that? More like who the fuck was that? You drop the sack of tomatoes on the floor, rooted in shock when you hear a foreign voice in your place, where only you live, alone, by yourself. Who is in your apartment? 

You hear soft footsteps rounding the corner from your living room. Your eyes quickly scan your kitchen for a weapon, grabbing the first thing you see, a spatula, still dirty from this morning’s breakfast. You whirl around, holding it out in front of you, remnants of scrambled eggs falling to the ground, your eyes trained on your hallway entrance. With your heart rate picking up, you’re ready to swing it at a moment’s notice as you wait for the mystery intruder to reveal themselves. 

“Who are you and what are you doing in my apartment?” you scream as the figure appears in your line of sight.

“Woah.” Hands raised up in defense, a man’s voice responds, “It’s me, Jimin. Park Jimin.”

In your state of hysteria, you rack your brain for any clues that would help you connect the dots of his name to who he is. His black hair sticks out from underneath his beanie, dainty earrings dangling on either side of his handsome face. He’s dressed casually in a white t-shirt with loose sweatpants sitting comfortably around his waist, his feet adorn in black slippers. You can’t put your finger on where you recognize him from. 

“Who?” you ask, still very much in a cloud of confusion. Your eyebrows furrow in question, you can’t place where you’ve seen his face before. 

“Your neighbor to your left, you know, the guy with three cats,” he replies with his hands still in mid-air. His features are frozen in shock at your outburst.

Oh right, that’s why he seems so familiar. You two have shared the elevator a few times, had small conversations as you two grab your mail down in the lobby, and when you pass each other on your way in or out of your apartment units. He moved in only a few months ago, still very new to the building. You relax for a fraction of a second before you’re on guard again, still holding the greasy spatula in his direction. “How did you get into my home?”

He motions behind him, pointing back to your living room. “Ah, you left your window out by the fire escape wide open,” he explains as if it’s a casual occurrence. “You have a terrible habit of doing that. It’s really not safe to leave your windows unlocked when you’re not home, especially out here in this part of the city.”

Shocked at his statement, you scoff out loud. You didn’t ask to be lectured.

He smiles at your response. “I just heard you get home while I was out there getting fresh air.” 

Does he think that means he can just waltz in your apartment? Before you can reply with a mouth full of sass, he continues, “I typically close it for you when I see it open. I know I would want someone to do the same for me, so I like to pay it forward.”

At that, you lower your poor excuse of a weapon, you guess he must be harmless if he’s been unknowingly acting as your guardian angel. He exhales a long breath and lowers his arms to his side in response to your retreating attack position. His smile remains on his face as he watches you relax.

“Oh, well, thanks I guess,” you stammer as you throw the spatula in the sink with the rest of your ignored unwashed dishes. Unlike with your keys, you make this shot perfectly, the spatula landing in a dirty pan. “But that still doesn’t explain why you are in my house without my consent.” Your eyes move back to him, holding his gaze as you wait for an explanation. Your hands unknowingly placed at your hips, your defensive posture lets him know he’s not off the hook yet.

He tears his eyes from yours and looks at his feet as he sheepishly scratches the back of his head, playing with the short hairs at his neck left exposed under the beanie. “Every evening I hear you say the same thing, so I thought it’s about time I responded.” He shrugs, looking back to you.

“Wait, what do I say?”

“The whole ‘honey I’m home’ thing,” he laughs shyly. “I know what it’s like to come home to an empty house too, it’s lonely sometimes.”

You flush with embarrassment, that must make you seem pathetic. He thinks you’re pathetic, most definitely he thinks you’re pathetic. What sane person talks to themselves like that? It just became second nature to you. “Ah, right.“ 

You try to deflect the attention of your apparent loneliness, your lack of romantic relationships clearly out in the open. “You at least have cats to keep you company, maybe I should get one.” You reach down to grab the tomatoes you dropped on the floor, needing to move and break eye contact due to your humiliation. You exhale as you set it back on the counter before setting your eyes back to him. He continues to stand in your hallway, not moving, probably not wanting to invade your space more than he already has.

A smile etches across his face “I thought it would be nice to surprise you with some food, disrupt your evening routine, maybe make a new friend or something.” He holds your gaze, you feel the pit of your stomach fluttering. You haven’t gotten attention from a man like this in a long while. You can’t remember the last time a guy approached you, let alone a handsome one like him.

Your facade finally breaks, you smile gently in his direction as you lean against your counter with your hip. “So breaking into my house with food is your idea of a surprise? Is this how you always make friends?” As weird as this situation is, his kind gesture flatters you. 

Now it’s his turn to flush in mortification. “Well, when you say it like that it sounds awful.” Again, he unconsciously grabs at the back of his neck, a nervous habit you assume. “I guess I didn’t really think this one through,” he chuckles.

You hum in agreement, push yourself off the counter and make your way to him. “So tell me Jimin, what toppings did you get?”

His face lights up as you approach him. You walk past him heading to your living room. He follows right behind you. You’re not so mad at him anymore. He’s thoughtful, he just executed it in an unconventional way, but it’s sweet nonetheless. You’ll definitely have to talk to him about your windows though.

—

PART 02 >

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—

reviews are always welcomed :)

MASTERLIST

[calleo-bricriu]

Finally finished that awful book.

Go back and look at the rest of it if you want to make yourself hate the fact that anyone is able to publish their terrible, talentless fiction writing.

All right, Chapter 27, extra fun doing this with my parents here.

The faces dad's been making are kind of worth it though; mum just sort of looks up from what she's doing now and again, shakes her head--at the story, not me--and goes back to it.

I'm finishing this horrorshow of a book off tonight so I never have to look at it again unless it's to shove it at someone who hasn't read it but deserves to.

So, we're away from the, "I copied this straight from a newspaper article, look it up!" chapter (which, if you recall, I did look up, and it doesn't exist, he made it up) and on to Obera asking Leigh out of the blue if he'll ever regret having married her.

His answer is less a yes or no and more, "Did I do something to make you mad?"

Her response is even more inexplicable; she tells him he hasn't then adds on, "But you know how a divorced woman is treated by the world."

Not--strictly the right set of priorities here but, all right.

She mentions something about "the money" and I'm not sure if that means we're just skipping the entire part where Mizpra got power of attorney from her addled mother and Leigh--I don't know, physically fought her over or if we're still getting to that and the author forgot and this bit was meant to be closer to the end of the actual story.

Given all of the man's other writing, I think he just forgot.

"You were a child, Obera, when I first met you." Yikes.

And she found that somehow a really romantic way to start things because, "she clung closer to him, and her little body vibrated with thrilling emotions." Is it not possible for this guy to not write like a creep you'd find in the bushes outside a kid's bedroom window?

Obera has a bit of sense at some point and suggest maybe trying to mess with Mizpra, who has already proven herself to be pretty unstable or at least willing to murder a child, might not be the best idea but Leigh is the genius of the story and ignores her.

Sorry, I mean explains why he's right and she's just a silly little girl-woman.

Anyway, Leigh's plan is to have Mizpra shipped off to a mental institution; tells Obera she wouldn't understand that because she wouldn't understand the "diabolical nature of her (Mizpra's) insane passions" and neither would the courts.

So far, we haven't seen much of those though, apart from her getting off on stabbing her sleeping husband with a hat pin and trying to murder a toddler via sending diphtheria tainted toys; the first thing isn't that abnormal, there are whole scenes around--not with hat pins, though, with sharp, single use piercing needles.

The second one is probably a crime, however and I'm still not entirely sure why nobody had her arrested for it since they knew exactly who sent it and how it was tainted.

Whatever.

He then offers to take her to Hawaii, which is where she's from, being a Tahitian princess, after all.

Again, her reaction is described as very child-like. Ew.

He then mentions he heard Mops crying, she says he was because he didn't want to wear shoes, then threw the shoes at her--fairly typical behaviour for a four year old kid but Leigh the Genius Doctor starts telling her that means they need to watch his mental health because he's showing signs of "uncontrolled impulses" and might end up neurotic and insane and probably an alcoholic and a criminal.

Man, he's four.

That's just how four year olds act sometimes.

Even I know that.

They go off for a few pages discussing "training" their four year old and it's all kind of terrible and advocates stopping just short of what you could get arrested for in terms of beating them.

(( Stuff inside gets into--not graphic, but still BDSM which is the ‘shocking’ and ‘perverted’ parts of The Perverts, more casual racism common for the time, and the most disappointing ending to a book I’ve read in ages.))

That somehow goes in to him saying he thinks the states should regulate marriage by law so the "unfit" can't get married; unfit meaning criminals, mental illness, tuberculosis, and "the physically weak and diseased" as well as "the insane".

Then he spins off into how shameful it is the crime rate in the United States is increasing at a "fearful rate".

Obera cuts in saying she think shaving laws regulating marriage sounded terrible to her until her Genius Husband Leigh explained why she was a wrong, silly woman, trying to have thoughts of her own.

That all gets interrupted by a letter from Rev. Bald who brings up some comment he made on the "matter of modern flagellation from a psychologic point of view" on the train, he found a bunch of books on the topic, he's pretty sure you can blame Catholics for it, and that's what makes them insane. Catholics, I mean.

Next is a newspaper article about Mizpra's school for "little half-breeds and Indian girls" which doesn't sound suspicious or weird at all--I mean, in fairness, for the time it was written that was pretty normal language, it just didn't age well at all.

So that article makes Leigh mad, her sister being apparently successful because that's half the problem with Mizpra: She does things women shouldn't be doing, like, not having children, getting an education, not caring if she looks fashionable, not wearing corsets, doing her own legal and financial work--you know, like the horrid witch she is or something.

I mean, honestly by this point in the story I'd team up with Mizpra so one of us could hold Leigh down while the other one just kicked him in the ribs until the noise stopped, he's that insufferable and obnoxiously wrong about everything.

Where was I?

Don't care, the last ten pages were Leigh whining about Catholics.

Chapter 28.

This one starts with a letter, "Los Angeles, -----, 189--" What? Los Angeles is in California, and why are you censoring the year?

Whatever.

It's a letter from Dr. Bell to open this time.

Bunch of stuff about The Spanish, most of it not flattering and about how they make great servants.

Everyone likes Mizpra there, so that's gonig ot make things more difficult.

Lots of paragraphs about how well liked Mizpra is.

No men allowed in the all girls' school, which is framed to be a bad thing but seems pretty reasonable to me.

There's also a little old lady called Penitente that will kill on sight if you're trespassing. She sounds fun.

And, for no reason whatsoever and with no proof, Dr. Bell concludes the whole school is a front for a sex dungeon of Mizpra's that she operates under the guise of "religious ceremony".

I mean obviously, that's where the author is going with it but he really should have spent some time laying down clues that that might be what's happening instead of having no mention or even hint of it then having one main character just randomly know that's what's happening.

So, Leigh decides, this evening, he's going to go and confront Mizpra. I mean, he did some waxing philosophical for a few pages until getting to that point but it was just him thining out loud about how amazing he is; great businessman, great doctor, great author, all around god tier person--we get it, Dr. Howard, Leigh is literally your power fantasy character.

They head off to try and bust Mizpra in the middle of some kind of weird--I don't know what, "active criminal act" prove her insane, or something.  And even if they find her in the place doing what everyone thinks she does: Being a decent, regular person, they'll all be fucked because then they'll look like trespassing, stalker weirdos--which is kind of what they are anyway.

They decide it'd be best to "pounce upon her in the height of oe of her deliriums" which, I think, means they want to bust her mid-orgy in the church basement. Fair enough, I guess; that's probably not the best place to have those anyway.

15 pages of explaining the plan where nothing is actually explained beyond describing the building's exterior.

10 more pages complaining about Catholics, particularly Spanish Catholics.

GET BACK TO THE MAIN PLOT. This is pointless filler.

Leigh eventually calls this all an "errand of mercy" like--just--no. It's not. You've been harassing Mizpra for about ten years in story time here, going out of your way to make fun of her looks, her life choices, her career, her education, her clothes, etc...she's not the bad guy here, Leigh.

Also, you named your kid Mops. Why would you do that to a child?

Chapter 24.

Two pages describing irrelvant scenery.

Look, even Tolkein would read this guy's book and tell him he's too long winded with unnecessary description.

Oh of course it's storming, why wouldn't it be storming? Convenient weather to bust the Bad Character.

So Leigh, being the genius at everything he is (including tracking now) hears a false owl call and knows someone is waiting for them.

Oh, it's the poor "Indian boy" from a few chapters back. "Indian boy here. Bad night, climb. Good night corral bad he squaw." I got nothing here--author didn't even bother giving that character a name.

"Indian boy" leads them to the building because he doesn't like Mizpra, I think. I'm pretty sure she's the "bad squaw". Or the "bad he squaw" except I'm  not sure what a "he squaw" is.

Leigh, of course, has to describe the kid in a creepy way: "Leigh looked at the sweet-voiced lad who stood under the partial roof. His long black hair shining from the rain drops which trickled from it, fell on his bronze, bare shoulders."  Leigh, please calm down.

And finally, after the third time in a couple hundred pages this kid appears, someone addresses him by name, which is Luis, which is definitely not his real name and likely one assigned to him by the church. Still, it's a step above calling him "Indian boy", I guess.

They plan a bit more and sit around smoking while waiting for the right time to go in and get by that Penitente woman who will shoot on sight.

Back to discussing the building layout and occasionally giving Luis many other slightly derogatory nicknames like "brave little Indian boy" and "our little black-haired friend".

He has a sister (re)named Angelia in the school, which is why he's helping them. One of the most reasonable people with a proper reason to want to break in.

He also calls the lady that will shoot on site "old hag squaw".

Chapter 25, finally after two chapters of pointless, repetitive planning, they're going to break into the damn place and of course now it's storming rather a lot.

SO! They get in and all three are immediately horrified by the first glimpse of the chapel. Red is, evidently, a colour they don't like.

Walls and ceiling blood-red, carpet of "funereal" black--just say black, and spell funeral correctly.

Big chandelier with candles that wer elit in a way that made the walls look as though they were on fire. Big ebony cross with a wax woman pawing at it--the sort of thing you see in religious art now and again, and under the chandelier there was pink and white silk for more lighting effects.

Onyx pedestal, golden crucifix, black and gold latticed confessional areas, gold curtains,"many signs of Mizpra's mania" on the walls: Haircloths, wreaths and belts of thorns, steel hooks, rods of iron, leather whips, knotted rope whips, iron and steel instruments of torture that are never described beyond that, a brilliantly coloured and painted altar that was "poisoned, destroyed by the lecherous and realistic painting which hung over it".

The painting is by, "the carnal and lewd Father Gerard", whoever that is.

This honestly sounds like a pretty cool looking room; if I'm meant to be shocked or horrified it's had the opposite effect. Mizpra has an eye for design.

"[...] the whole ch amber swam before his eyes as one flaming pornographic panorama" and that was enough that Leigh was just, "Nope, I've had enough of this, we're leaving," while everyone else went with--I mean they tried to be nice about it but the underlying tone is, "This was YOUR idea, asshole, you're not backing out now."

Noise is heard from the library, that gets drown out by the actual bells of the place going off with the time. Midnight, of course. It's always midnight for these types of scenes.

Nun comes in, they all sort of hide, Nun does regular Nun things and Leigh mutters something about death being marked on her face despite the fact that she's doing nothing out of the ordinary for a Nun but, she's thin, so he thinks she's gross.

Okay, finally something else is happening. Mizpra shows up, the Nun from before--I mean, Leigh, this is just someone's private life you're intruding on here but anyway, this is definitely a BDSM scene with religious overtones and nobody involved is objecting (and definitely didn't consdent to have these three fucking weirdos watch them).

I know this is meant to be shocking but, again, this is not an uncommon thing; Mizpra is being written as a pretty run of the mill Dominatrix, she's not forcing the other girl to do anything she does't want to do, and what's happening is clearly a planned out, scripted scene.

Apart from the three weirdos watching from the shadows.

More descriptions of Mizpra being "manly", of course, and suddenly the Peeping Tom Party decides to burst in and break up the scene.

"Sister, you are not well."

She was fine until you interrupted her, Leigh.

He very politely asks her to accompany him to the asylum which is not really a reasonable thing to ask someone, especially if you already think they're out of their mind and don't realise it.

Her respose was "vulgar voicing with which the vilest curses were mingled". Not an entirely unfair response to, "Please allow me to have you locked up in an insane asylum, thank you."

Luis very neatly bashes the head of the guard lady in with a crucifix, so that wraps up that loose thread but also seems to have angered Mizpra.

You know, because they broke in and murdered someone.

She flips it around and says she lured them all there and now they've all been caught murdering some old lady.

She makes fun of Bald for awhile, so he rushes her and tries to strangle her, and she doesn't appear to care in the slightest. She pulls him out to the cliff edge balcony, pulls a rope that apparently makes the balcony fold down for some reason, and they both fall off of the cliff.

And that's...it.

"A brilliant flash of lightning shot out from the heavens, and the white face of Mizpra, defiant as ever, was lighted up as she and Bald turned over in the emptiness of the abyss----THE END."

[chrismerle]

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

yeah I finished the game

and for all of my mockery, I did like it! a bit railroad-y for an RPG, but eh, that’s not necessarily a bad thing

what I mean by that is, you could make your own choices (within reason) when it came to who lived or died, but that was basically it. for plot-related decisions, you could ask all the questions in the world but there was only one option to actually proceed. even your Mesmerize level only went up at specific points, to make sure you couldn’t mesmerize and ~embrace~ a plot-critical character too soon. but that’s all okay! none of that is actually a complaint.

it’s a very talky game. which is also not a complaint. I liked the characters, I liked the hint system, I liked the fact that Jonny Boy could just barge up to people and they’d think nothing of it, and I liked the fact that you had to talk to people in order to have the broadest amount of options. however, cinematically, it sort of...lacked. most cutscenes in this game are just Jonny Boy standing and talking to someone. cutscenes feel almost entirely static. no one walks around. no one really talks with their hands. no one fidgets. even in plot-related cutscenes, it still usually just the camera focusing on someone from just behind Jonny Boy’s ear. it’s a very talky game, and no one moves when they’re talking.

the map’s a little ‘eh.’ the markers on it were huge, which made it a little hard to tell where you were, and instead of a proper minimap there was a little compass thing that was bloody fucking awful.

gameplay itself was actually pretty good, though. moving around was easy, combat was pretty intuitive, and you could pick and choose your blood abilities (personally, I had spring, claws, shadow veil, autophagy, and blood cauldron). it’s also pretty adaptable. if you want to brute force your way through, you can do that. if you want to dance in circles around your enemies and paper cut them to death, you can do that, too.

while I loved the teleportation in concept, in practice it was a little, um...overly convenient? or overly inconvenient, I guess. Jonathan Reid, powerful vampire of a near ageless lineage, is frequently stopped by locked doors, locked gates, and three foot high barriers. like, I get it, it’s not actual teleportation, he’s just moving really fast, but if Jonny Boy had bodychecked a gate at that speed, I’m willing to bet it would open. but whatever, that’s just standard invisible wall stuff. a little eye roll-worthy and a little annoying, but pretty standard.

I liked the...for lack of a better phrase, day/night cycle. nights could go one for as long as you wanted so you never had to break off halfway through a quest to avoid dawn, but you were still encouraged to actually proceed to the next night because that’s how you level up.

the writing is...clumsy. except for the really important ones, boss fights come out of nowhere with no warning, no build up, no excitement, and no real conclusion; you just walk into a room, and whoops, that’s a boss. vulkods exist just to exist, and have no purpose in the story, unlike the skals and ekons. there are werewolves wandering around and no one ever says a word about them. no one acknowledges when your appearance changes after you kill people. King Arthur was an ekon and drinking an ekon’s blood makes another vampire, but McCullum spends his boss fight drinking King Arthur’s blood and he’s fine. nothing really has an consequences after you make a decision. most important information is just dumped on you in conversations that can sometimes go on for too long. the dialogue wheel is pretty inelegant and it’s generally apparent your stitching a conversation together from other pieces. while I thought it was cute because I liked both characters, the romance was still pretty hamfisted. and even as the credits were rolling, I had no real clue what the Morrigan, Myrrdin, and the blood of hate were.

don’t get me wrong, part of it is probably my fault because I got almost none of the collectibles, but if your lore isn’t at least intelligible without dozens of side articles, then you need to do some pruning.

and let’s just acknowledge it: Mary’s plot detour is straight up a plot hole. when she first showed up after the funeral, I assumed she was a chatty skal, like Sean or Old Bridget, but then she was explicitly stated to be an ekon. and then I kinda figured ‘well, okay, maybe she was only mostly dead and another vampire conveniently found her,’ but then she was explicitly stated to be Reid’s progeny. and it was also explicitly stated that the way to make an ekon is to drink another ekon’s blood. you cannot accidentally make an ekon. Jonny Boy drained her dry in a ravening delirium and then fled. he did not her give her any blood. I’m calling bullshit on that one.

(and this is more just a ‘personal preference’ sort of gripe, but there was sort of a to-do about how it was cruel that Jonny Boy’s maker fucked off without teaching him how to be a proper vampire, but you’re free to up and fuck off into the aether on two progeny, if that’s how you play your cards, like two days after you make them. [not counting Dawson because Redgrave can deal with him.])

but it was still fun to play, which is arguably the most important thing, and you know what? I’m perfectly willing to look past the writing stumbles just for Jonny Boy. he’s a genuinely likable character and I kind of adore him. equal parts exasperated and resignedly morbidly amused, like he can’t quite decide if he’d rather go ‘fuck my life’ or ‘this may as well be my life,’ so he took both options. blunt as a sledgehammer and actively annoyed by people talking in circles. generally pretty clever and quick on the uptake. and yet, somehow, still kind of lovably blockheaded.

(and his voice is very soothing. like, I didn’t have a ‘I’m gay but I’d make an exception’ moment, but I had a ‘I’d listen to him read the phone book as ASMR’ moment.)

the rest of the cast is nothing to sneeze at either. they’re all a little stock (you have the vampire hunter, you have the nightmare fetishist, you have the noblewoman, you have dracula lite...), but they serve the plot well and none of them grated on my nerves unless they were supposed to.

and this is like eight pages long now, so I’m gonna assume I’ve made my point pretty well and be done with this.

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[goblincas]

Edith Bostwick, Human Woman

Okay, so there’s some ~fun~ context behind this short story, hehe: It was written as a final paper for one of my upperclassman English seminars this past semester, where everyone else in my class was writing a research paper. :’D Basically, my professor had loosely opened up the possibility that, with her approval, we could do a creative writing project for our final paper~ I later learned that I was the only one to do this lol. So yeah that’s the story of how I managed to get out of writing a research paper!

(To be fair, the version I submitted to my prof had a ton of footnotes and also a decent amount of outside sources, although none of it is really necessary to understand the story itself)

This is basically fanfic. I wrote fanfic for class. It’s based around the novel Stoner by John Williams, which was one of the works we read for class. This one footnote basically sums up my motivation:

“Ultimately, my goal is to examine and humanize Edith Bostwick’s character, more effectively than is done within John Williams’ Stoner. As her in-text perspective is nearly non-existent, all of her questionable or malicious actions go unexplained, causing her to appear purely sadistic or villainous. Whether Edith is a “good” person is an entirely different question, and not what I’d like to examine here. Rather, I’d like to present the possibility that she might not be an outright monster, whose actions are performed solely in groundless delight toward others’ suffering. It is likely that Edith has greater motivation behind her actions— which may or may not truly justify any of her behavior.”

I.

Sometimes, whenever she felt her eyes begin to glaze over at the sight of her eternally unmade bed, Edith wished that she could just knock her father’s drawl out of her ear. For a day, she could be spared the words of degradation that always seemed to be drumming on the inner walls of her skull: Edith, you can’t expect to please your husband if you keep on dressing yourself so carelessly— is it really so difficult for you to put consideration into your looks? You lazy girl. Edith, if your brain were working as it should, I assure you it wouldn’t be so difficult to keep yourself on task during simple chores. Edith, Edith, Edith—

It would have been deafening, if she weren’t already so familiar with it. There was a disturbing degree of ambience to it all. 

Stupid. Lazy. Undesirable. Talentless. Non-maternal.

Worthless woman. 

The unwanted daughter; a luckless burden of a child.

Almost immediately after entering the bedroom, Edith found herself turning on her heels. She wandered, empty-handed and foggy-minded, back toward the kitchen. Then to the living area. Then back toward the bedroom, yet again. Wandering, too absorbed in her own head to steer her body with any amount of precision or focus toward a particular task. 

Edith could practically feel contempt and shame clashing within herself, as they expanded in tandem and began to pulse throughout her bones. Not for the first time, her apparent failings as a wife were haunting her; what right did she have to deny her husband marital intimacy? Really, why did she have to be so resistant toward such an incredibly simple wifely duty? Edith knew, without a doubt, that her father’s perpetual disgust toward herself would only swell if he could see her current behaviour. Still, he may as well have emerged from the walls— a malevolent spirit magnetized by her soul, no home apart from Edith— to continue jabbering into her ear. As it had already been, his voice was a permanent narrator in the swamps of her mind. Would this have been less agonizing if he had a physical presence in her day-to-day life? 

Would she finally be able to hide?

Without too much awareness of her movement, Edith pressed her feet into the dining room floor, nearly to the point of strain. She sat at a stiff chair, forearms lazing against the tabletop, spine wilting. The previous evening had been like so many others— Lord, too many others. William had arrived home from the university, nodding toward her tight-lipped smile of greeting, before offering Edith some form of generic, half-hearted appraisal. Edith would nod back in response, leading to a silence that seemed to grow hollower by the second. William would eventually amble off. 

Then came Edith’s first wash of guilt for the evening, surging through her flesh and leaving her increasingly bitter. That night, as Edith swaddled herself in too-cold sheets, she repeatedly caught herself jerking away from William’s limp-wristed attempts at touch. She continuously pulled the sheets tighter and tighter, as if Edith would eventually collapse in on herself, crumbling into a low-density rubble. She could then be blown from the bed with a short breath, like a piece of stray lint.

So, come the following day, Edith was locked again in her molten cage— there, in her place of security, she could tend to herself while the heated steel consumed her mind. There, she could remain snugly contained within the tender chokehold of her own rage.

Her anger first focused toward the base of her awareness, where Edith truly believed that her father was steering her every action, forever spying on his circus of savage amusement. Had she been spared her father’s upbringing, would she still be so prone to distress? Possibly, there was a sick irony to her situation; maybe it was the insensitivity of her father that was leading her to behave how she was toward William. Had she not been broken down in the name of conditioning, would she have known her own strength?

William. Oh, William. Edith’s anger seemed only to inflate with age, and it could no longer gorge itself on her father’s visage, alone. This seemed to have become William’s position in Edith’s life: a fresh conduit for her ever-expanding rage. He deserved this fate, after all. Had William not approached her at that party, had they never met, then Edith may have been allowed more time to pursue her freedom— and that extra time might have provided her a chance to escape. It was all a hypothetical, of course, although Edith liked to believe that she might have been just a few steps away from finding her courage— perhaps in Europe, had William not ruthlessly tore that potentially life-altering trip from her. Of course, upon meeting William, Edith’s soles were forever cemented to the floors of Hell, where they’d always been. She knew then that she was stuck in place, without hope of freedom or mercy in her forever-darkening future.

William’s advances had only been the prologue to their shared fate of lifelong domestic doom. They would continue to suffer, while Edith continued to ensure that this suffering was rationed fairly. 

As her awareness seemed to solidify and return to the kitchen, Edith stood slowly. Her thin skirt fell limply around her equally thin legs— on the topic of insecurities. There were several dishes that still needed washing, left over from the breakfast that Edith had prepared while locked in a state of near-total dissociation— William had been surprised by the gesture, although her motivation was far less benevolent than he had assumed. Often, Edith just needed a task to anchor herself; a connection to the material world, before her consciousness loosened to a point of delirium. Similarly, hours later, she hoped that scrubbing those same dishes would stall her total dislocation from reality. As a strategy, it seemed to work fair enough; it was as if Edith were weighing her perception and mind down with an assortment of age-beaten tchotchkes. 

Around the point at which the pads of her fingertips were beginning to prune, Edith hesitated. She held the old rag, motionless, against a china serving bowl she’d recently received as a belated wedding gift. (From whom, Edith honestly couldn’t recall— it had been handed off to William, then propped in the center of the dining room table for her to discover.) 

Faintly, the too-familiar droning forced itself onto her:

Edith, truly, are you capable of anything? Even such a simple task, and you continue to dawdle, only because you’re so lost in such narcissistic musings? Useless girl. How pitiful, not even able to wash dishes, not even able to—

Enough.

Shucking the still-damp dish rag onto the counter, Edith stomped toward the nearest couch. In contrast to her previously aggressive movements, she laid herself down with care, as if to prevent her body from shattering onto the offending furniture. Then, countering the premature rigor mortis in her limbs, she curled in on herself. Edith’s fists continued to clench in a rhythm of short pulses. She surrendered and napped.

II.

At the groan of the front door, Edith shuttered and sat up.

Noticing first the now-dark room, she rose and trudged over to a nearby lamp. Edith chose to ignore her sore spine and prickling right arm. The room was soon drenched in an eerie, almost foreboding glow. As the Draconian scene continued to unfold, she could hear her husband shuffling closer, and closer, and…

“Edith? Are you in here?”

William appeared beneath the living room’s entrance. His gaze focused on Edith from across the space, while she was once more consumed by her woebegone persona. Edith stared vacantly back. 

William appeared almost bashful— as if he had any right to discomfort. He ran a palm down the front of his shirt, before stalking closer. “Well, anyway. How was your day?” he questioned, his tone light and controlled. His words were sterile, as if he’d deliberately cleansed his voice of anything that could instigate a disagreement. William also looked tired, but Edith supposed that was fair enough. No matter how badly he’d damaged her, she could at least acknowledge how much of himself he poured into his work; certainly, it was more attention than Edith would ever allow William to give to herself. 

Edith remained silent. She could see her husband beginning to assess her carefully, his gaze dragging over the vessel she felt so detached from. At that point, Edith cringed; it appeared as if she’d been suddenly wounded, unprovoked by herself as she stood bare and defenseless. 

William was… looking at her. No, he thought that he was looking at her. He was mistaken, of course; no matter how passive his stare, there was an undeniable overtone of arrogance to the act. He was so sure, clearly, that he was seeing Edith. Which, was entirely absurd— or, even worse, it was pure malice, an attempt to remind Edith that he was capable of something she would seemingly never be. Edith would never see herself; she was so dissociated from her body and mind. She had no constant sense of personhood, instead existing as a hazy, shapeless specter. She was no one. 

There was no one to see. 

As Edith’s vacant stare began to harden, introducing a vague challenge that even she didn’t understand the conditions of, William shifted uncomfortably. “Okay, well… yes. Anyway, I’ll… just leave you be, then,” he said, voice growing progressively more faint, beginning to drift outside the bubble of their conversation. As a closing acknowledgment, William flashed a stiff smile before shuffling toward the bedroom, work belongings in tow.

Again, Edith was struck by how incredibly exhausted she felt.

III.

Edith was just fourteen when she realized: she was an accessory, a good-luck charm with little value outside what she could provide to her handlers. If they could not make use of her to their own benefit, if she was not accessible and mild, then she had failed in her purpose. Edith knew that she would never understand who she truly was, separate from this fundamental, predetermined assignment. A clear sense-of-self would only add weight and distract her from her duties. 

So, one morning at the age of fourteen, Edith had sat stiff-backed at the edge of the piano bench. A lone, narrow window hung on the wall ahead of her, as the pale orange sky was gradually dusted with sunlight. Her slender fingers hovered just above the keys, drumming on air. Edith could sense an indeterminate nervousness begin to creep up on her, although its form was too hazy to wrangle and observe more closely.

It was a Saturday; a quiet morning, where Edith saw a rare opportunity to escape her father’s omnipresent eye. Her movements felt just a bit less manufactured, seeing no incentive to act gracefully.

Mr. Bostwick slept.

Edith felt more awake than ever— to her own distress. 

As a younger child, Edith had seen her father as a godlike figure, which seemed to justify the power he had over her thoughts and behaviors. Edith had known only timid respect, whenever she encountered her father; he was the rightful monarch to Edith’s childish reality, this reign hallmarked by his strict authoritarian policy. 

From birth and onward, Edith was an obedient citizen.

The young girl lowered her trembling fingers down to her sides, gripping into the bench as a means to calm them. She was yet to figure out the cause of her panic, as its onset was abrupt, while nothing in her surroundings seemed to have triggered it. Later, however, Edith would come to recognize how tantamount that quiet morning at the piano was to her life’s course; it was a moment of bitter revelation, where an understanding of the desires of her father and teachers seemed to finally penetrate her delusions of independence. Where she was mature enough for the truth of her situation to sink in, free will quietly slipping away.

She was a freshly-lacquered prop. An attractive, practical object.

Hardly any different in value from the glossy piano that sat in front of her.

Later that same morning, shortly after Edith had shifted from the piano bench to a plush chair, Mr. Bostwick’s powerful footfalls could be heard from the nearby staircase. Edith winced, dreading the prospect of company; all she wanted was time alone to flounder and inevitably drown in her own head. The waters continued to rise as her father approached, undisturbed by the invader at shore.

Mr. Bostwick cleared his throat. “Good morning,” he greeted, his gruff tone grating at Edith like sandpaper. “You’re certainly up early, aren’t you?”

Edith turned her neck, gazing absently at her father as he entered the room. “I suppose I am,” she responded, her tone remaining dry. She hesitated before continuing, the words escaping before she could corral them back: “Daddy, what would you think if I never became a wife?”

Before responding, Mr. Bostwick dropped into the seat across from Edith, eyeing his daughter intently. (On impulse, Edith straightened her spine, exiting her previously lax position.) He furrowed his brow. “Now, why are you asking this, Edith?” Although her father sounded controlled in his speech, Edith knew not to be deceived by such superficial impressions.

Once more, Edith paused, chewing on her words before retching the sour remains. “I was… thinking. About purpose, and what mine might be. Everyone has a big purpose to their life, right? Surely, that would only make sense, or else why would we even live?” She took in a sharp breath, before continuing in haste, “I mean, I was wondering if being a wife is that purpose for myself… if it's my only possible future, or if deciding upon something different would be wrong and would upset you.”

The silence that followed was short, yet crushing.

“I would certainly be… upset,” Mr. Bostwick muttered, the gravel in his voice only growing more prominent. “However, I don’t understand why you would ever consider such a prospect. Edith, you have already spent years of your young life in preparation to become a successful wife and home-maker. I don’t understand why you would ever show such disrespect toward your schooling, both formal and the time that I have sacrificed for you. Would you truly want to waste your own time— my time, the time of your instructors? It would be both foolish and pointlessly scornful.”

That too-heavy moment was Edith’s first memory of her mind seizing, before floating off to flee her situation; it was her earliest out-of-body retreat, in the name of self-preservation. It was then that Edith understood: She would never take ownership over her own fate; it simply wasn’t a reasonable expectation, nor was it within her rights. This was her sole reality, and her only means of comfort would be to contort her perspective and come to terms with her inevitable condition. 

That brief conversation with her father also seemed to ignite something within him, a cool aggression that Edith had rarely seen prior. It wasn’t immediate; however, Edith couldn’t help but draw the connection. From then, Mr. Bostwick began to offhandedly degrade Edith, chipping away at any confidence she might have had in her capabilities. He reminded her, regularly, that she was incompetent and in sure need of guidance. Mr. Bostwick reminded his daughter that she was inelegant, unintelligent, naive. Slowly, he robbed Edith of her own self-possession, claiming ownership over the malleable mind of an adolescent girl.

Edith tended to believe that that was her entrance to womanhood; that quiet Saturday morning, seemingly unlike any before, marked the scathing end of Edith’s girlhood. Her childhood was left in the seat of that deceptively plush chair, drenched in flames that were only apparent to her own senses. And oh, where they apparent. 

That was the morning that Edith, as she had known herself, was killed.

[lunaschild2016]

Take Your Time - Part 2

Take Your Time - Part 2

Rating: M (Swearing, smut, suggested violence and abuse)

Family isn’t always defined by blood and the strongest of ties can come from the most unexpected places. But could you risk losing that family when the love changes? What do you do when you find your soulmate at the age of sixteen? What if that soulmate is only nine? Sometimes all you can do…is take your time. Eric/OC AU No War, No Divergents

@jojuarez26 @kenzieam @jaihardy @iammarylastar @badassbaker @dani5102

A/N: This entire thing was literally written in a fever delirium and on strong cold meds. Apparently my smut levels rise when I am delirious.

Achievement unlocked: Smut

Level Advanced to: A Little Less Of A Rank Novice from Rank Novice

Perk Gained: Only 75% Chance of head exploding when reading or writing smut.

*************************************************************************************************

ERIC - Continued

Somewhere over the last few years someone had come up with the brilliant idea to reinstate some of the pre-war celebrations. Each faction took part. Sometimes it was inter-faction. Other times it was kept inside the faction.

Some brilliant leader had decided that Dauntless should take up the holiday of Halloween.

Costumes and all.

Eric had originally been against it. He was Senior Leader now but Max had passed the holiday as a parting gift to Eric just before he retired and there was no going back. Much to Max’s annoyingly grinning amusement.

For three years he has had to put up with this damn headache. Like Dauntless really needed another reason to act like a bunch of asses or a night of drunken debauchery. This time everyone got to dress up in costumes.

Oh joy!

The only good part of the holiday was that Candor and Amity decided to take it on as well. While they would all keep to their own faction for celebrations, thank fuck, Dauntless surprisingly became the producer and manufacturer of most the decorations or costumes in use. It became a surprising source of revenue for the faction.

The costumes for Amity and Candor were a bit less scandalous then what Dauntless, or the female portion, leaned towards. There was a variety of ‘sexy’ everything. The kids got into the action during the day but at night it was all the adults. No dependents allowed.

Eric was in no way about to dress up in a fucking costume. No one expected him to either. Wade had managed to talk him into going with him around the compound for the dependent portion. It was his last year before his choosing and he had been excited.

There were some games for the kids, rock wall climbing and other activities. It was finished off by the dining hall being flooded with dependents along with the normal crowd for dinner and treats.

He was in a foul mood but trying not to be. For the first year since this shit started Lacey had bailed on him in taking her brother around. She hadn’t said it but Eric suspected she had a date. The thought had him drinking more than he should and his blood boiling. Wade had shrugged it off and said he would enjoy some ‘guy’ time. He had tried to put Lacey not being there out of his mind but it just wouldn't leave him alone.

He had been so sure he and Four had taken care of the last punk that had tried to move in on her. That had been two weeks ago when they had sat with him at the table during lunch. Four had suggested they try dropping a hint or two instead of the straight beating Eric wanted to dish out.

The only reason Four agreed to do that much was because he heard Aaron talking about how he was going to take on ‘Goliath’. Aaron had a reputation for being a charmer. He wasn’t a player exactly. Instead he went after the hard to get women. The ones that might not give him the time of day, were already involved, or in Lacey’s case...a well known virgin. It was also known she was a bit of a social hermit, didn’t go out and party much but preferred to stay home or with family.

Four was always going on about how Eric needed to back off and let Lacey make her own decisions about who to date. That she was twenty and could make her own mind up. So he had. He had listened to the asshole and that resulted in Aaron worming his way in. It had killed him, sure, but he knew he needed to let her go.

It could never happen between them no matter how much he could admit he wants it.

Despite knowing this he couldn’t just let her be a conquest and neither could Four. So there they sat at lunch. Eric across from Aaron, his eyes cold and piercing. Four right beside the guy. After a few minutes of uncomfortable quiet while eating, Eric never letting up on his glare, Four starts things off.

“Isn’t it about time to add fresh blood to the fence rotation?” Four asks offhandedly, as if it just occurred to him.

Eric couldn’t the smirk that crossed his face. “Yep. Should be easy to fill in this year.”

Four smirked a little too. “Oh yeah? So we have a few victims...errr...I mean volunteers?”

Eric shrugged. “There are a few. There are always those guys that find themselves on the fence after deciding it would be a good idea to go somewhere with someone they shouldn’t. Guys that like to mess around with girls in ways that, should someone important to them find out, would think fence duty is getting off lightly.”

He had started out in a casual tone but continued in a quiet menacing tone. Aaron got the point. Eric could tell by the subtle swallow and tense shifting. He had to give it to the punk that he didn’t up and run away immediately. Aaron sat there for a few ticks before standing, and with a respectful nod walked away; leaving his still full tray on the table.

That had been that. He never heard about Aaron and Lacey again and hadn’t seen them together either. So where the fuck was she at tonight?

He roams around the Pit. Making his rounds between people he knows until he makes his way into his favorite club and to the bar. There is a special brew for the night fresh from Amity and it has been a hit. A boozy spiced apple cider that is like a beer. Eric orders a glass of it, admitting that it is damn good.

He also knows that it is going to hit some people hard when they drink more than they should. It is too easy to not realize the brew has more of a punch than you think because of the taste. He knows he is going to have to go easy as well, especially given the buzzing in his blood.

Then he realizes that isn't all the alcohol. Lacey is near. She had that effect on him, just being nearby and his body came alive. It was like his blood became thick and heavy; pulsing with liquid fire and metal. Metal because like a magnet she pulled him towards her every time.

His eyes searched for her, at first not seeing her; at least not registering what he was seeing.

She was standing just across the room from him by a high top bar table, a glass of something in her hand. If he didn't have the awareness he did of her and the instincts he did when it came to her, he wouldn't recognize her.

She was in costume, one of the almost obscenely skimpy ones. It was a crop top corset with a cap sleeved crop peasant shirt underneath and way too fucking short skirt combo. She had paired it with black thigh highs that had intricate lace bands at the top and same colored ankle high heeled boots.

She was goddamn mouthwatering. Her already long legs were showcased by the bare skin and sheer black hose.

It was all in the theme of little red riding hood, complete with a small deep red cape with a hood. All of it was this red color that just highlighted her perfect skin tone. She also furthered the costume by wearing a wig to cover her deep brown waterfall curl hair. Replacing it with some red color that he could admit complemented her creamy skin. He still preferred her own hair.

There was a mask covering her face, made of black lace in intricate swirl designs.

Lacey was apparently dead set against being recognized at all. Even going so far as being nowhere near or with her normal crowd of friends. In fact she was currently being chatted up by some punk Eric couldn't recognize in his own costume.

His fists clenched and he cracked his neck at the obvious flirting going on.

What the fuck is she doing? This isn't Lacey.

His eyes narrow as the punk gestures to her cup and says something. He must be asking if she wants a refill. She pauses for a moment, biting her lower lip in thought before she hands him the cup with a nod. Eric zeroes in on the punk as he walks to the bar with a smile. Watches him get two refills and then, because he is so laser focused on everything the guy is doing, barely catches the fast motion of him dropping something in one of the cups as he turns back to go to Lacey.

He sees red and acts quickly. A tap on the bar along with a pointed glare signals the bartender who recognizes it for what it means. Then Eric is flanked by the bartender as he makes his way over to Lacey before he waits a little ways away.

By the time Eric makes it over there she is barely lifting the cup to her mouth. He reaches out and snatches it from her hands with a snarled ‘Beat it’ to the guy.

He didn't expect any back talk and he didn't get any. The guy even gave a slight squeak as he backed up and into the waiting hands of the bar staff. After handing the glass off and taking a breath, Eric whips back towards Lacey.

“Do you always accept drinks from random men?” He growled out angrily.

Her eyes widen and he notices now that he is up close she also added colored contacts. They are a solid bright green.

Why is she going to such lengths to cloak herself?

“I...I don't normally do any of this.” Her tone changed from the first gasped word. She changed the inflection to be deeper, husky...seductive.

It had his jaw clenching and his nostrils flaring. Being this close to her in that state is wreaking havoc on his body and control.

“Little tip for you then, Red; never accept open container drinks and never leave your drink unattended. Not from some random person.” He moved closer as he spoke and smirked a little when Lacey unconsciously moved back. She had already been practically against the wall and now her back brushed up against it.

Her pull was too strong and he was too worked up to resist when his body crowded her in. An arm going to the side of her head, their bodies brushing against each other.

Lacey took a shallow breath after swallowing. “Mary.” She said hesitantly, as if she didn't know if she should continue with her charade. “My name’s Mary.” She gave a small crooked smile and her tone was one he recognized as when she was being self-deprecating.

His eyebrows went up into his hairline. Surprised at the choice of alias but also that she thought there was any way he could ever not recognize her. He let his eyes move over her, not bothering to hide the appreciative way he took her in for once.

She was tall even without the heeled boots, but they put her at almost exactly the same height as him. Her lips were touched with the most wicked and tempting shade of red, making the natural pout and thickness even more pronounced. The swell of her breasts and the milky skin there were purposely pushed up by the corset top and left him salivating. She had gotten curves over the last few years to balance out the height she always had. Taunting and dick hardening curves she normally tried to mask. Not in this getup though. The bare midriff had the biggest identifier still visible.

In all her efforts Lacey had forgotten the distinctive birthmark on her right side of her abs. A rust brown colored scorpion with the tail and stinger curving to the left. It was a clear enough shape that there was no mistaking it for anything other than a wicked looking scorpion. Maybe she thought it would look just like a tattoo? Not many people had seen the thing or knew about it. He only glimpsed it a few times and knew about it from Henley. It was apparently another one of those genetic things passed on from her dad's side of the family. Seeing it now had him licking his lips with longing to kiss and lick his way over her entire body.

“Mary?” He finally said in amusement when he looked back into her eyes. She gave a small shrug and smile. “What are you doing here?” His eyes narrowed as he searched for the answers there, but she had walled that off when she put in the contacts.

Lacey licked her lips as her breathing picked up. Her chest heaved a little as she slowly reached out and put a long delicate looking hand on his arm. Right at the bulge of his bicep and where the skin was bare there.

The simple touch had the blood pounding in his ears and his nostrils to flare.

“It seemed like a good night to lose myself. Maybe become someone else. Someone that takes what she wants.” Her answer was a breathy whisper.

It sent shivers through him but at the same time anger coursing through him. Was losing her innocence to some random shit head what she wanted?

“And what exactly is it that you want, Red?” He growled out as he used his other hand to grip her waist and jerk her against him.

She gasped and gripped him tighter. “Well, I'm Red Riding hood, right? I wanted to find my wolf.” She replied after a few seconds pause, her voice dropped to that husky seductive one again.

“Just any wolf would do, huh?” His jaw was clenched as he asked it, anger still coursing through him.

For a moment, even through the contacts that concealed her normally expressive eyes, he saw sadness flash. “No, I was hoping to catch my big bad wolf.” She replied in a tremulous whisper but her eyes held his meaningfully.

Eric's breath caught in his chest as he realized what her words meant. She did this, all of this, hoping to find him. She wanted him just as much as he wanted her. All those looks over the years he dismissed as a crush she would grow out of, his imagination or him reading into it too much because of what he desperately wanted; they were all real.

But he needed to be sure.

“Did you find him?” He purred out as he ghosted his lips near her ear.

She shivered in his embrace and dug her nails into his arms. “I have. Unless he is all bark and no bite.” She taunted playfully.

Eric pulled back with a smirk on his lips and desire in his eyes. There was still the small part holding him back. Part of him chose his next words to make things clear but also scare her off. If she backed down now, they could possibly pretend this night never happened and carry on as normal.

“Let's cut the shit, Red. I want you but I'm not some little boy that will be nice, sweet and gentle. Do you know what that means? The things I am going to do to you?”

Even as he got the words out he knew that even though they were true, he wanted to take them back. He didn't want to scare her off, he wanted this. One night they both wanted and needed. They could never have more but they could always have this.

“Tell me. What are you going to do to me?” She replied with no fear and no hesitation. Only a slight tremble in her voice with desire.

Eric paused to gather himself and moved the arm that rested on the wall by her head to cup the back of her neck possessively.

He leaned in so their bodies were pressed tightly together, letting her feel the clear evidence of his arousal. “I'm going to fuck you, baby. No, I’m not just going to fuck you actually. I am going to make you come undone so many times you will remember nothing but my name as you scream it over and over. I am going to ruin you for anyone else so that you will lay awake at night remembering and craving me.” He rasped, his forehead pressed against hers.

He felt the gasped breath and the trembling in her body. He pulled back to see if he had scared her off with the rawness of his words. He saw only desire in her eyes. She shifted and tried to clench her thighs together.

It filled him with relief and resolve.

With a smirk he lifted his chin towards her to indicate it was her turn to answer. “Do you want that?”

She gave a small nod. He shook his head, needing her to say the words.

“Say it. Tell me what you want, baby.” He commanded her.

She took a big breath and lifted her chin. “I want you, Eric. I want you to take me. To...to fuck me until I can't see straight, think straight. Until there is only you….nothing else.”

He groaned and buried his head in the exposed crook of her neck, tasting the flesh there. She tasted of the scent she always left in her wake when she was near. Citrus and honeysuckle. He pulled himself away after eliciting whimpered moans from her.

He stepped back and took a breath. “Last chance to run home to grandma, Red. Are you sure?”

He knew that would have her back going straight and it did. She stepped forward her eyes narrowed and chin squared in determination. “I'm sure, Wolf.” Then her eyes softened a little. “No regrets.” She said as a whispered promise.

Eric nodded and took her hand. “No regrets” His reply was a internal hopeful prayer that he could keep.

He pulled her close to his side then without another word they made their way out of the bar together to his apartment.

[moneypedia]

Explain this: To excel man in that which man excells all other animals?

Man a Machine, Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748) 

It is not enough for a wise man to study nature and truth; he should dare state truth for the benefit of the few who are willing and able to think. As for the rest, who are voluntarily slaves of prejudice, they can no more attain truth, than frogs can fly. I reduce to two the systems of philosophy which deal with man's soul. The first and older system is materialism; the second is spiritualism. The metaphysicians who have hinted that matter may well be endowed with the faculty of thought have perhaps not reasoned ill. For there is in this case a certain advantage in their inadequate way of expressing their meaning. In truth, to ask whether matter can think, without considering it otherwise than in itself, is like asking whether matter can tell time. It may be foreseen that we shall avoid this reef upon which Locke had the bad luck to shipwreck. The Leibnizians with their monads have set up an unintelligible hypothesis. They have rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul. How can we define a being whose nature is absolutely unknown to us? Descartes and all the Cartesians, among whom the followers of Malebranche have long been numbered, have made the same mistake. They have taken for granted two distinct substances in man, as if they had seen them, and positively counted them. The wisest men have declared that the soul can not know itself save by the light of faith. However, as reasonable beings they have thought that they could reserve for themselves the right of examining what the Bible means by the word ``spirit,'' which it uses in speaking of the human soul. And if in their investigation, they do not agree with the theologians on this point, are the theologians more in agreement among themselves on all other points? Here is the result in a few words of all their reflections. If there is a God, he is the Author of nature was well as of revelation. He has given us the one to explain the other, and reason to make them agree. To distrust the knowledge that can be drawn from the study of animated bodies, is to regard nature and revelation as two contraries which destroy each other, and consequently to dare uphold the absurd doctrine, that God contradicts Himself in His various works and deceives us. If there is a revelation, it can not then contradict nature. By nature only can we understand the meaning of the words of the Gospel, of which experience is the only truly interpreter. In fact, the commentators before our time have only obscured the truth. We can judged of this by the author of the Spectacle of Nature. ``It is astonishing,'' he says concerning Locke, ``that a man who degrades our soul far enough to consider it a soul of clay should dare set up reason as judge and sovereign arbiter of the mysteries of faith, for,'' he adds, ``what an astonishing idea of Christianity one would have, if one were to follow reason.'' Not only do these reflections fail to elucidate faith, but they also constitute such frivolous objections to the method of those who undertake to interpret the Scripture, that I am almost ashamed to waste time in refuting them. The excellence of reason does not depend on a big word devoid of meaning (immateriality), but on the force, extent, and perspicuity of reason itself. Thus a ``soul of clay'' which should discover, at one glance, as it were, the relations and the consequences of an infinite number of ideas hard to understand, would evidently be preferable to a foolish and stupid soul, though that were composed of the most precious elements. A man is not a philosopher because, with Pliny, he blushes over the wretchedness of our origin. What seems vile is here the most precious of things, and seems to be the object of nature's highest art and most elaborate care. But as man, even though he should come from an apparently still more lowly source, would yet be the most perfect of all beings, so whatever the origin of his soul, if it is pure, noble, and lofty, it is a beautiful soul which dignifies the man endowed with it. Pluche's second way of reasoning seems vicious to me, even in his system, which smacks a little of fanaticism; for [on his view] if we have an idea of faith as being contrary to the clearest principles, to the most incontestable truths, we must yet conclude, out of respect for revelation and its author, that this conception is false, and that we do not yet understand the meaning of the words of the Gospel. Of the two alternatives, only one is possible: either everything is illusion, nature as well as revelation, or experience alone can explain faith. But what can be more ridiculous than the position of our author! Can one imagine hearing a Peripatetic say, ``We ought not to accept the experiments of Torricelli, for if we should accept them, if we should rid ourselves of the horror of the void, what an astonishing philosophy we should have!'' I have shown how vicious the reasoning of Pluche is in order to prove, in the first place, that if there is a revelation, it is not sufficiently demonstrated by the mere authority of the Church, and without any appeal to reason, as all those who fear reason claim: and in the second place, to protect against all assault the method of those who would wish to follow the path that I open to them, of interpreting supernatural things, incomprehensible in themselves, in the light of those ideas with which nature has endowed us. Experience and observation should therefore be our only guides here. Both are to be found throughout the records of the physicians who were philosophers, and not in the works of the philosophers who were not physicians. The former have traveled through and illuminated the labyrinth of man; they alone have laid bare those springs [of life] hidden under the external integument which conceals so many wonders from our eyes. They alone, tranquilly contemplating our soul, have surprised it, a thousand times, both in its wretchedness and in its glory, and they have no more despised it in the first estate, than they have admired it in the second. Thus, to repeat, only the physicians have a right to speak on this subject. What could the others, especially the theologians, have to say? Is it not ridiculous to hear them shamelessly coming to conclusions about a subject concerning which they have had no means of knowing anything, and from which on the contrary they have been completely turned aside by obscure studies that have led them to a thousand prejudiced opinions, - in a word, to fanaticism, which adds yet more to their ignorance of the mechanism of the body? But even though we have chosen the best guides, we shall still find many thorns and stumbling blocks in the way. Man is so complicated a machine that it is impossible to get a clear idea of the machine beforehand, and hence impossible to define it. For this reason, all the investigations have been vain, which the greatest philosophers have made à priori, that is to to say, in so far as they use, as it were, the wings of the spirit. Thus it is only à posteriori or by trying to disentangle the soul from the organs of the body, so to speak, that one can reach the highest probability concerning man's own nature, even though one can not discover with certainty what his nature is. Let us then take in our hands the staff of experience, paying no heed to the accounts of all the idle theories of the philosophers. TO be blind and to think one can do without this staff if the worst kind of blindness. How truly a contemporary writer says that the only vanity fails to gather from secondary causes the same lessons as from primary causes! One can and one even ought to admire all these fine geniuses in their most useless works, such men as Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Wolff and the rest, but what profit, I ask, has any one gained from their profound meditations, and from all their works? Let us start out then to discover not what has been thought, but what must be thought for the sake of repose in life. There are as many different minds, different characters, and different customs, as there are different temperaments. Even Galen knew this truth which Descartes carried so far as to claim that medicine alone can change minds and morals, along with bodies. (By the write of L'historie de l'âme, this teaching is incorrectly attributed to Hippocrates.) It is true that melancholy, bile, phlegm, blood etc., - according to the nature, the abundance, and the different combination of these humors - make each man different from another. In disease the soul is sometimes hidden, showing no sign of life; sometimes it is so inflamed by fury that it seems to be doubled; sometimes, imbecility vanishes and the convalescence of an idiot produces a wise man. Sometimes, again, the greatest genius becomes imbecile and looses the sense of self. Adieu then to all that fine knowledge, acquired at so high a price, and with so much trouble! Here is a paralytic who asks is his leg is in bed with him; there is a soldier who thinks that he still has the arm which has been cut off. The memory of his old sensations, and of the place to which they were referred by his soul, is the cause of this illusion, and of this kind of delirium. The mere mention of the member which he has lost is enough to recall it to his mind, and to make him feel all its motions; and this causes him an indefinable and inexpressible kind of imaginary suffering. This man cries like a child at death's approach, while this other jests. What was needed to change the bravery of Caius Julius, Seneca, or Petronius into cowardice or faintheartedness? Merely an obstruction in the spleen, in the liver, an impediment in the portal vein. Why? Because the imagination is obstructed along with the viscera, and this gives rise to all the singular phenomena of hysteria and hypochondria. What can I add to the stories already told of those who imagine themselves transformed into wolf-men, cocks or vampires, or of those who think that the dead feed upon them? Why should I stop to speak of the man who imagines that his nose or some other member is of glass? The way to help this man to regain his faculties and his own flesh-and-blood nose is to advise him to sleep on hay, lest he beak the fragile organ, and then to set fire to the hay that he may be afraid of being burned - a far which has sometimes cured paralysis. But I must touch lightly on facts which everybody knows. Neither shall I dwell long on the details of the effects of sleep. Here a tired soldier snores in a trench, in the middle of the thunder of hundreds of cannon. His soul hears nothing; his sleep is as deep as apoplexy. A bomb is on the point of crushing him. He will feel this less perhaps than he feels an insect which is under his foot. On the other hand, this man who is devoured by jealousy, hatred, avarice, or ambition, can never find any rest. The most peaceful spot, the freshest and most calming drinks are alike useless to one who has not freed his heart from the torment of passion. The soul and the body fall asleep together. As the motion of the blood is calmed, a sweet feeling of peace and quiet spreads through the whole mechanism. The soul feels itself little by little growing heavy as the eyelids droop, and loses its tenseness, as the fibres of the brain relax; thus little by little it becomes as if paralyzed and with it all the muscles of the body. These can no longer sustain the weight of the head, and the soul can no longer bear the burden of thought; it is in sleep as if it were not. Is the circulation too quick? the soul cannot sleep. Is the soul too much excited? the blood cannot be quieted: it gallops through the veins with an audible murmur/ Such are the two opposite causes of insomnia. A single fright in the midst of our dreams makes the heart beat at double speed and snatches us from needed and delicious repose, as a real grief or an urgent need would do. Lastly as the mere cessation of the functions of the soul produces sleep, there are, even when we are awake (or at least when we are half awake), kinds of very frequent short naps of the mind, vergers' dreams, which show that the soul does not always wait for the body to sleep. For if the soul is not fast asleep, it surely is not far from sleep, since it cannot point out a single object to which it has attended, among the uncounted number of confused ideas which, so to speak, fill the atmosphere of our brains like clouds. Opium is too closely related to the sleep it produces, to be left out of consideration here. This drug intoxicates, like wine, coffee, etc., each in its own measure and according to the dose. It makes a man happy in a state which would seemingly be the tomb of feeling, as it is the image of death. How sweet is this lethargy! The soul would long never to emerge from it. For the soul has been a prey to the most intense sorrow, but now feels only the joy of suffering past, and of sweetest peace. Opium alters even the will, forcing the soul which wished to wake and to enjoy life, to sleep in spite of itself. I shall omit any reference to the effect of poisons. Coffee, the well-known antidote for wine, by scourging the imagination, cures our headaches and scatters our cares without laying up for us, as wine does, other headaches for the morrow. But let us contemplate the soul in its other needs. The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement. Nourishment keeps up the movement which fever excites. Without food, the soul pines away, goes mad, and dies exhausted. The soul is a taper whose light flares up the moment before it goes out. But nourish the body, pour into its veins life-giving juices and strong liquors, and then the soul grows strong like them, as if arming itself with a proud courage, and the soldier whom water would have made to flee, grows bold and runs joyously to death to the sound of drums. Thus a hot drink sets into stormy movement the blood which a cold drink would have calmed. What power there is in a meal! Joy revives in a sad heart, and infects the souls of comrades, who express their delight in the friendly songs in which the Frenchman excels. The melancholy man alone is dejected, and the studious man is equally out of place [in such company]. Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it would have the same effect on man. This is so true that the English who eat meat red and bloody, and not as well done as ours, seem to share more or less in the savagery due to this kind of food, and to other causes which can be rendered ineffective by education only. This savagery creates in the soul, pride, hatred, scorn of other nations, indocility and other sentiments which degrade the character, just as heavy food makes a dull and heavy mind whose usual traits are laziness and indolence. Pope understood well the full power of greediness when he said: Catius is ever moral, ever grave Thinks who endures a knave is next a knave, Save just at dinner - then prefers no doubt A rogue with ven'son to a saint without. Elsewhere he says: See the same man in vigor, in the gout, Alone, in company, in place or out, Early at business and at hazard late, Mad at a fox chase, wise at a debate, Drunk at a borough, civil at a ball, Friendly at Hackney, faithless at White Hall. In Switzerland we had a bailiff by the name of M. Steigner de Wittghofen. When he fasted he was a most upright and even a most indulgent judge, but woe to the unfortunate man whom he found on the culprit's bench after he had had a large dinner! He was capable of sending the innocent like the guilty to the gallows. We think we are, and in fact we are, good men, only as we are gay or brave; everything depends on the way our machine is running. One is sometimes inclined to say that the soul is situated in the stomach, and that Van Helmont, who said that the seat of the soul was in the pylorus, made only the mistake of taking the part for the whole. To what excesses cruel hunger can bring us! We no longer regard even our own parents and children. We tear them to pieces eagerly and make horrible banquets of them; and in the fury with which we are carried away, the weakest is always the prey of the strongest. La grossesse, cette émule désirée des pâles couleurs, ne se contente pas d'amener le plus souvent à sa suites le goûts dépravés qui accompagnent ces deux états: elle a quelquefois fait exécuter à l'âme les plus affreux complots; effets d'une maine subite, qui étouffe jusqu'à la loi naturelle. Ce'st ainsi que le cerveau, cette matrice de l'esprit, se pervertit à sa manière, avec celle du corps. Quelle autre fureur d'homme ou de femme, dans ceux que la continence et la santé poursuivent! C'est peu pour cette fille timide et modeste d'avoir perdu toute honte et toute pudeur; elle ne regarde plus l'inceste, que comme une femme galante regarde l'adultère. Si ses besoins ne trouvent pas de prompts soulagements, ils ne se borneront point aux simples accidents d'une passion utérine, à la manie, etc.; cette malheureuse mourra d'un mal, dont il y a tant de médecins. One needs only eyes to see the necessary influence of old age on reason. The soul follows the progress of the body, as it does the progress of education. In the weaker sex, the soul accords also with delicacy of temperament, and from this delicacy follow tenderness, affection, quick feelings due more to passion than to reason, prejudices, and superstitions, whose strong impress can hardly be effaced. Man, on the other hand, whose brain and nerves partake of the firmness of all solids, has not only stronger features but also a more vigorous mind. Education, which women lack, strengthens his mind still more. Thus with such help of nature and art, why should not a man be more grateful, more generous, more constant in friendship, stronger in adversity? But, to follow almost exactly the thought of the author of the Lettres sur la Physiognomie, the sex which unites the charms of the mind and of the body with almost all the tenderest and most delicate feelings of the heart, should not envy us the two capacities which seem to have been given to man, the one merely to enable him better to fathom the allurements of beauty, and the other merely to enable him to minister better to its pleasure. It is no more necessary to be just as great a physiognomist as this author, in order to guess the quality of the mind from the countenance or the shape of the features, provided these are sufficiently marked, than it is necessary to be a great doctor to recognize a disease accompanied by all it marked symptoms. Look at the portraits of Locke, of Steele, of Boerhaave, of Maupertuis, and the rest, and you will not be surprised to find strong faces and eagle eyes. Look over a multitude of others, and you can always distinguish the man of talent from the man of genius, and often even an honest man from a scoundrel. For example it has been noticed that a celebrated poet combines (in his portrait) the look of a pickpocket with the fire of Prometheus. History provides us with a noteworthy example of the power of temperature. The famous Duke of Guise was so strongly convinced that Henry the Third, in whose power he had so often been, would never dare assassinate him, that he went to Blois. When the Chancellor Chiverny learned of the duke's departure, he cried, ``He is lost.'' After this fatal prediction had been fulfilled by the event, Chiverny was asked why he made it. ``I have known the king for twenty years,'' said he; ``he is naturally kind and even weakly indulgent, but I have noticed that when it is cold, it takes nothing at all to provoke him and send him into a passion.'' One nation is of heavy and stupid wit, and another quick, light and penetrating. Whence comes this difference, if not in part from the difference in foods, and difference in inheritance, and in part from the mixture of the diverse elements which float around in the immensity of the void? The mind, like the body, has its contagious diseases and its scurvy. Such is the influence of climate, that a man who goes from one climate to another, feels the change, in spite of himself. He is a walking plant which has transplanted itself; if the climate is not the same, it will surely either degenerate or improve. Furthermore, we catch everything from those with whom we come in contact; their gestures, their accent, etc.; just as the eyelid is instinctively lowered when a blow is foreseen, or (as for the same reason) the body of the spectator mechanically imitates, in spite of himself, all the motions of a good mimic. From what I have just said, it follows that a brilliant man is his own best company, unless he can find others of the same sort. In the society of the unintelligent, the mind grows rusty for lack of exercise, as at tennis a ball that is served badly is badly returned. I should prefer an intelligent man without an education, if he were still young enough, to a man badly educated. A badly trained mind is like an actor whom the provinces have spoiled. Thus, the diverse states of the soul are always correlative with those of the body. But the better to show this dependence, in its completeness and its causes, let us here make use of comparative anatomy; let us lay bare the organs of man and of animals. How can human nature be known, if we may not derive any light from an exact comparison of the structure of man and of animals? In general, the form and the structure of the brains of quadrupeds are almost the same as those of the brain of man; the same shape, the same arrangement everywhere, with this essential difference, that of all the animals man is the one whose brain is largest, and, in proportion to its mass, more convoluted than the brain of any other animal; then come the monkey, the beaver, the elephant, the dog, the fox, the cat. These animals are most like man, for among them, too, one notes the same progressive analogy in relation to the corpus callosum in which Lancisi - anticipating the late M. de la Peyronie - established the seat of the soul. The latter, however, illustrated the theory by innumerable experiments. Next after all the quadrupeds, birds have the largest brains. Fish have large heads, but these are void of sense, like the heads of many men. Fish have no corpus callosum, and very little brain, while insects entirely lack brain. I shall not launch out into any more detail about the varieties of nature, nor into conjectures concerning them, for there is an infinite number of both, as any one can see by reading no further than the treatises of Willis De Cerebro and De Anima Brutorum. I shall draw the conclusions which follow clearly from these incontestable observations: 1st, that the fiercer animals are, the less brain they have; 2d, that this organ seems to increase in size in proportion to the gentleness of the animal; 3d, that nature seems here eternally to impose a singular condition, that the more one gains in intelligence the more one loses in instinct. Does this bring gain or loss? Do not think, however, that I wish to infer by that, that the size alone of the brain, is enough to indicate the degree of tameness in animals: the quality must correspond to the quantity, and the solids and liquids must be in that due equilibrium which constitutes health. If, as is ordinarily observed, the imbecile does not lack brain, his brain will be deficient in its consistency - for instance, in being too soft. The same thing is true of the insane, and the defects of their brains do not always escape our investigation. But if the causes of imbecility, insanity, etc., are not obvious, where shall we look for the causes of the diversity of all minds? They would escape the eyes of a lynx and of an argus. A mere nothing, a tiny fiber, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues. Willis has noticed in addition to the softness of the brain-substance in children, puppies and birds, that the corpora striata are obliterated and discolored in all these animals, and that the striations are as imperfectly formed as in paralytics. Il ajoute, ce qui est vrai, que l'homme a la protubérance annulaire fort grosse; et ensuite toujours diminutivement par dégrés, le singe et les autres animaux nommés ci-devant, tandis que le veau, le boeuf, le loup, la brebis, le cochon, etc. qui ont cette partie d'un tès petit volume, ont les nattes et testes fort gros. However cautious and reserved one may be about the consequences that can be deduced from these observations, and from many others concerning the kind of variation in the organs, nerves, etc., [one must admit that] so many different varieties cannot be the gratuitous play of nature. They prove at least the necessity for a good and vigorous physical organization, since throughout the animal kingdom the soul gains force with the body and acquires keenness, as the body gains strength. Let us pause to contemplate the varying capacities of animals to learn. Doubtless the analogy best framed leads the mind to think that the causes we have mentioned produce all the difference that is found between animals and men, although we must confess that our weak understanding, limited to the coarsest observations, cannot see the bonds that exist between cause and effect. This is a kind of harmony that philosophers will never know. Among animals, some learn to speak and sing; they remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician. Others, for instance the ape, show more intelligence, and yet cannot learn music. What is the reason for this, except some defect in the organs of speech? But is this defect so essential to the structure that it could never be remedied? In a word, would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so. I should choose a large ape in preference to any other, until by some good fortune another kind should be discovered, more like us, for nothing prevents there being such a one in regions unknown to us. The ape resembles us so strongly that naturalists have called it ``wild man'' or ``man of the woods.'' I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old; for apes that are brought to Europe are usually too old. I would choose the one with the most intelligent face, and the one which, in a thousand little ways, best lived up to its look of intelligence. Finally not considering myself worthy to be his master, I should put him in the school of that excellent teacher whom I have just named, or with another teacher equally skillful, if there is one. You know by Amman's work, and by all those who have interpreted his method, all the wonders he has been able to accomplish for those born deaf. In their eyes he discovered ears, as he himself explained, and in how short a time! In short he taught them to hear, speak, read, and write. I grant that a deaf person's eyes see more clearly and are keener than if he were not deaf, for the loss of one member or sense can increase the strength or acuteness of another, but apes see and hear, they understand what they hear and see, and grasp so perfectly the signs that are made to them, that I doubt not that they would surpass the pupils of Amman in any other game or exercise. Why then should the education of monkeys be impossible? Why might not the monkey, by dint of great pains, at last imitate after the manner of deaf mutes, the motions necessary for pronunciation. I do not dare decide whether the monkey's organs of speech, however trained, would be incapable of articulation. But, because of the great analogy between ape and man and because there is no known animal whose external and internal organs so strikingly resemble man's, it would surprise me if speech were absolutely impossible to the ape. Locke, who was certainly never suspected of credulity, found no difficulty in believing the story told by Sir William Temple in his memoirs, about a parrot which could answer rationally, and which had learned to carry on a kind of connected conversation, as we do. I know that people have ridiculed this great metaphysician; but suppose some one should have announced that reproduction sometimes take place without eggs or a female, would he have found many partisans? Yet M. Trembley has found cases where reproduction takes place without copulation and by fission. Would not Amman too have passed for mad if he had boasted that he could instruct scholars like his in so short a time, before he had happily accomplished the feat? His successes, have, however, astonished the world; and he, like the author of The History of the Polyps, has risen to immortality at one bound. Whoever owes the miracles that he works to his own genius surpasses, in my opinion, the man who owes his to chance. He who has discovered the art of adorning the most beautiful of kingdoms [of nature], and of giving it perfections that it did not have, should be ranked above an idle creator of frivolous systems, or a painstaking author of sterile discoveries. Amman's discoveries are certainly of a much greater value; he has freed men from the instinct to which they seemed to be condemned, and has given them ideas, intelligence, or in a word, a soul which they would never have had. What greater power than this! Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art. Could not the device which opens the Eustachian canal of the deaf, open that of apes? Might not a happy desire to imitate the master's pronunciation, liberate the organs of speech in animals that imitate so many other signs with such skill and intelligence? Not only do I defy any one to name any really conclusive experiment which proves my view impossible and absurd; but such is the likeness of the structure and functions of the ape to ours that I have very little doubt that if this animal were properly trained he might at last be taught to pronounce, and consequently to know, a language. Then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman, with as much matter or muscle as we have, for thinking and profiting by his education. The transition from animals to man is not violent, as true philosophers will admit. What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal of his own species with much less instinct than the others. In those days, he did not consider himself king over the other animals, nor was he distinguished from the ape, and from the rest, except as the ape itself differs from the other animals, i.e., by a more intelligent face. Reduced to the bare intuitive knowledge of the Leibnizians he saw only shapes and colors, without being able to distinguish between them: the same, old as young, child at all ages, he lisped out his sensations and his needs, as a god that is hungry or tired of sleeping, asks for something to eat, or for a walk. Words, languages, laws, sciences, and the fine arts have come, and by them finally the rough diamond of our mind has been polished. Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they have become beasts of burden. A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on, and to mount his tame dog. All has been accomplished through signs, every species has learned what it could understand, and in this way men have acquired symbolic knowledge, still so called by our German philosophers. Nothing, as any one can see, is so simple as the mechanism of our education. Everything may be reduced to sounds or words that pass from the mouth of one through the ears of another into his brain. At the same moment, he perceives through his eyes the shape of the bodies of which these words are the arbitrary signs. But who was the first to speak? Who was the first teacher of the human race? Who invented the means of utilizing the plasticity of our organism? I cannot answer: the names of these first splendid geniuses have been lost in the night of time. But art is the child of nature, so nature must have long preceded it. We must think that the men who were the most highly organized, those on whom nature has lavished her richest gifts, taught the others. They could not have heard a new sound for instance, nor experienced new sensations, nor been struck by all the varied and beautiful objects that compose the ravishing spectacle of nature without finding themselves in the state of mind of the deaf man of Chartres, whose experience was first related by the great Fontenelle, when, at forty years, he heard for the first time, the astonishing sound of bells. Would it be absurd to conclude from this that the first mortals tried after the manner of this deaf man, or like animals and like mutes (another kind of animals), to express their new feeling by motions depending on the nature of their imagination, and therefore afterwards by spontaneous sounds, distinctive of each animal, as the natural expression of their surprise, their joy, their ecstasies and their needs? For doubtless those whom nature endowed with finer feeling had also greater facility in expression. That is the way in which, I think, men have used their feeling and their instinct to gain intelligence and then have employed their intelligence to gain knowledge. Those are the ways, so far as I can understand them, in which men have filled the brain with the ideas, for the reception of which nature made it. Nature and man have helped each other; and the smallest beginnings have, little by little, increased, until everything in the universe could be as easily described as a circle. As a violin string or a harpsichord key vibrates and gives forth sound, so the cerebral fibers, struck by waves of sound, are stimulated to render or repeat the words that strike them. And as the structure of the brain is such that when eyes well formed for seeing, have once perceived the image of objects, the brain can not help seeing their images and their differences, so when the signs of these differences have been traced or imprinted in the brain, the soul necessarily examines their relations - an examination that would have been impossible without the discovery of signs or the invention of language. At the time when the universe was almost dumb, the soul's attitude toward all objects was that of a man without any idea of proportion toward a picture or a piece of sculpture, in which he could distinguish nothing; or the soul was like a little child (for the soul was then in its infancy) who, holding in his hand small bits of straw or wood, sees them in a vague and superficial way without being able to count or distinguish them. But let some one attach a kind of banner, or standard, to this bit of wood (which perhaps is called a mast), and another banner to another similar object; let the first be known by the symbol 1, and the second by the symbol or number 2, then the child will be able to count the objects, and in this way he will learn all of arithmetic. As soon as one figure seems equal to another in its numerical sing, he will decide without difficulty that they are two different bodies, that 1+1 make 2, and 2+2 make 4, etc. This real or apparent likeness of figures is the fundamental basis of all truths and of all we know. Among these sciences, evidently those whose signs are less simple and less sensible are harder to understand than the others, because more talent is required to comprehend and combine the immense number of words by which such sciences express the truths in their province. On the other hand, the sciences that are expressed by the numbers or by other small signs, are easily learned; and without doubt this facility rather than its demonstrability is what has made the fortune of algebra. All this knowledge, with which vanity fills the balloon-like brains of our proud pedants, is therefore but a huge mass of words and figures, which form in the brain all the marks by which we distinguish and recall objects. All our ideas are awakened after the fashion in which the gardener who knows plants recalls all stages of their growth at sight of them. These words and the objects designated by them are so connected in the brain that it is comparatively rare to imagine a thing without the name or sign that is attached to it. I always use the word ``imagine,'' because I think that everything is the work of imagination, and that all the faculties of the soul can be correctly reduced to pure imagination in which they all consist. Thus judgment, reason, and memory are not absolute parts of the soul, but merely modifications of this kind of medullary screen upon which images of the objects painted in the eye are projected as by a magic lantern. But if such is the marvelous and incomprehensible result of the structure of the brain, if everything is perceived and explained by imagination, why should we divide the sensitive principle which thinks in man? Is not this a clear inconsistency in the partisans of the simplicity of the mind? For a thing that is divided can no longer without absurdity be regarded as indivisible. See to what one is brought by the abuse of language and by those fine words (spirituality, immateriality, etc.) used haphazard and not understood even by the most brilliant. Nothing is easier than to prove a system based, as this one is, on the intimate feeling and personal experience of each individual. If the imagination, or let us say, that fantastic part of the brain whose nature is as unknown to us as its way of acting, be naturally small or weak, it will hardly be able to compare the analogy or the resemblance of its ideas, it will be able to see only what is face to face with it, or what affects it very strongly; and how will it see all this! Yet it is always imagination which apperceives, and imagination which represents to itself all objects along with their names and symbols; and thus, once again, imagination is the soul, since it plays all the roles of the soul. By the imagination, by its flattering brush, the cold skeleton of reason takes on living and ruddy flesh, by the imagination the sciences flourish, the arts are adorned, the wood speaks, the echoes sigh, the rocks weep, marble breathes, and all inanimate objects gain life. It is imagination again which adds the piquant charm of voluptuousness to the tenderness of an amorous heart; which makes tenderness bud in the study of the philosopher and of the dusty pedant, which, in a word, creates scholars as well as orators and poets. Foolishly decried by some, vainly praised by others, and misunderstood by all; it follows not only in the train of the graces and of the fine arts, it not only describes but can also measure nature. It reasons, judges, analyzes, compares, and investigates. Could it feel so keenly the beauties of the pictures drawn for it, unless it discovered their relations? No, just as it cannot turn its thoughts on the pleasures of the senses, without enjoying their perfection or their voluptuousness, it cannot reflect on what it has mechanically conceived, without thus being judgment itself. The more the imagination or the poorest talent is exercised, the more it gains in embonpoint, so to speak, and the larger it grows. It becomes sensitive, robust, broad, and capable of thinking. The best of organisms has need of this exercise. Man's preeminent advantage is his organism. In vain all writers of books on morals fail to regard as praiseworthy those qualities that come by nature, esteeming only the talents gained by dint of reflection and industry. For whence come, I ask, skill, learning, and virtue, if not from a disposition that makes us fit to become skillful, wise, and virtuous? And whence again, comes this disposition, if not from nature? Only though nature do we have any good qualities; to her we owe all that we are. Why then should I not esteem men with good natural qualities as much as men who shine by acquired and as it were borrowed virtues? Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem; the only question is, how to estimate it. Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue all have theirs. Those upon whom nature has heaped her most costly gifts should pity those to whom these gifts have been refused; but, in their character of experts, they may feel their superiority without pride. A beautiful woman would be as foolish to think herself ugly, as an intelligent man to think himself a fool. An exaggerated modesty (a rare fault, to be sure) is a kind of ingratitude towards nature. An honest pride, on the contrary, is the mark of a strong and beautiful soul, revealed by manly features moulded by feeling. If one's organism is an advantage, and the preeminent advantage, and the source of all others, education is the second. The best made brain would be a total loss without it, just as the best constituted man would be but a common peasant, without knowledge of the ways of the world. But, on the other hand, what would be the use of the most excellent school, without a matrix perfectly open to the entrance and conception of ideas? Il est aussi impossible de donner une seule idée à un homme privé de tous les sens, que de faire un enfant à une femme à laquelle la nature aurait poussé la distraction jusqu'à oublier de faire une vulve, comme je l'ai vu dans une, qui n'avait ni fente, ni vagin, ni matrice, et qui pour cette raison fut démariée après dix ans de mariage. But if the brain is at the same time well organized and well educated, it is a fertile soil, well sown, that brings forth a hundredfold what it has received: or (to leave the figures of speech often needed to express what one means, and to add grace to truth itself) the imagination, raised by art to the rare and beautiful dignity of genius, apprehends exactly all the relations of the ideas it has conceived, and takes in easily an astounding number of objects, in order to deduce from them a long chain of consequences, which are again but new relations, produced by a comparison with the first, to which the soul finds a perfect resemblance. Such is, I think, the generation of intelligence. I say ``finds'' as I before gave the epithet ``apparent'' to the likeness of objects, not because I think that our senses are always deceivers, as Father Malebranche has claimed, or that our eyes, naturally a little unsteady, fail to see objects as they are in themselves (though microscopes prove this to us every day) but in order to avoid any dispute with the Pyrrhonians, among whom Bayle is well known. I say of truth in general what M. de Fontenelle says of certain truths in particular, that we must sacrifice it in order to remain on good terms with society. And it accords with the gentleness of my character, to a void all disputes unless to what conversation [!]. The Cartesians would here in vain make an onset upon me with their innate ideas. I certainly would not give myself a quarter of the trouble that M. Locke took, to attack such chimeras. In truth, what is the use of writing a ponderous volume to prove a doctrine which became an axiom three thousand years ago? According to the principles which we have laid down, and which we consider true; he who has the most imagination should be regarded as having the most intelligence or genius, for all these words are synonymous; and again, only by a shameful abuse [of terms] do we think that we are saying different things, when we are merely using different words, different sounds, to which no idea or real distinction is attached. The finest, greatest or strongest imagination is then the one most suited to the sciences as well as to the arts. I do not pretend to say whether more intellect is necessary to excel in the art of Aristotle or of Descartes than to excel in that of Euripides or of Sophocles, and whether nature has taken more trouble to make Newton than to make Corneille, though I doubt this. But it is certain that imagination alone, differently applied, has produced their diverse triumphs and their immortal glory. If one is known as having little judgment and much imagination, this means that the imagination has been left too much alone, has, as it were, occupied most of the time in looking at itself in the mirror of its sensations, has not sufficiently formed the habit of examining the sensations themselves attentively. [It means that the imagination] has been more impressed by images than by their truth or the likeness. Truly, so quick are the responses of the imagination that if attention, that key or mother of the sciences, does not do its part, imagination can do little more than run over and skim its objects. See that bird on the bough: it seems always ready to fly away. Imagination is like the bird, always carried onward by the turmoil of the blood and the animal spirits. One wave leaves a mark, effaced by the one that follows; the soul pursues it, often in vain: it must expect to regret the loss of that which it has not quickly enough seized and fixed. Thus, imagination, the true image of time, is being ceaselessly destroyed and renewed. Such is the chaos and the continuous quick succession of our ideas: they drive each other away even as one wave yields to another. Therefore, if imagination does not, as it were, use one set of its muscles to maintain a kind of equilibrium with the fibers of the brain, to keep its attention for a while upon an object that is on the point of disappearing, and to prevent itself from contemplating prematurely another object - [unless the imagination does all this], it will never be worthy of the fine name of judgment. It will express vividly what it has perceived in the same fashion: it will create orators, musicians, painters, poets, but never a single philosopher. On the contrary, if the imagination be trained from childhood to bridle itself and to keep from being carried away by its own impetuosity - an impetuosity which creates only brilliant enthusiasts - and to check, to restrain, its ideas, to examine them in all their aspects in order to see all sides of an object, then the imagination, ready in judgment, will comprehend the greatest possible sphere of objects, through reasoning; and its vivacity (always so good a sign in children, and only needing to be regulated by study and training) will be only a far-seeing insight without which little progress can be made in the sciences. Such are the simple foundations upon which the edifice of logic has been reared. Nature has built these foundations for the whole human race, but some have used them, while others have abused them. In spite of all these advantages of man over animals, it is doing him honor to place him in the same class. For, truly, up to a certain age, he is more of an animal than they, since at birth he has less instinct. What animal would die of hunger in the midst of a river of milk? Man alone. Like that child of olden time whom a modern writer refers, following Arnobius, he knows neither the foods suitable for him, nor the water that can drown him, nor the fire that can reduce him to ashes. Light a wax candle for the first time under a child's eyes, and he will mechanically put his fingers in the flame as if to find out what is the new thing that he sees. It is at his own cost that he will learn of the danger, but he will not be caught again. Or, put the child with an animal on a precipice, the child alone falls off; he drowns where the animal would save itself by swimming. At fourteen or fifteen years the child knows hardly anything of the great pleasures in store for him, in the reproduction of his species; when he is a youth, he does not know exactly how to behave in a game which nature teaches animals so quickly. He hides himself as if he were ashamed of taking pleasure, and of having been made to be happy, while animals frankly glory in being Cynics. Without education, they are without prejudices. For one more example, let us observe a dog and a child who have lost their master on a highway: the child cries and does not know to what saint to pray, while the dog, better helped by his sense of smell than the child by his reason, soon finds his master. Thus nature made us to be lower than animals or at least to exhibit all the more, because of that native inferiority, the wonderful efficacy of education which alone raises us from the level of the animals and lifts us above them. But shall we grant this same distinction to the deaf and to the blind, to imbeciles, madmen, or savages, or to those who have been brought up in the woods with animals; to those who have lost their imagination through melancholia, or in short to all those animals in human form who give evidence of only the rudest instinct? No, all these, men of body but not of mind, do not deserve to be classed by themselves. We do not intend to hide from ourselves the arguments that can be brought forward against our belief and in favor of a primitive distinction between men and animals. Some say that there is in man a natural law, a knowledge of good and evil, which has never been imprinted on the heart of animals. But is this objection, or rather this assertion, based on observation? An assertion unfounded on observation may be rejected by a philosopher. Have we ever had a single experience which convinces us that man alone has been enlightened by a ray denied all other animals? If there is no such experience, we can no more know what goes on in animals' minds or even in the minds of other men, than we can help feeling what affects the inner part of our own being. We know that we think, and we feel remorse - an intimate feeling forces us to recognize this only too well; but this feeling in us is insufficient to enable us to judge the remorse of others. That is why we have to take others at their words, or judge them by the sensible and external signs we have noticed in ourselves when we experienced the same accusations of conscience and the same torments. In order to decide whether animals which do not talk have received the natural law, we must, therefore, have recourse to those signs to which I have just referred, if any such exist. The facts seem to prove it. A dog that bit the master who was teasing it, seemed to repent a minute afterwards; it looked sad, ashamed, afraid to show itself, and seemed to confess its guilt by a crouching and downcast air. History offers us a famous example of a lion which would not devour a man abandoned to its fury, because it recognized him as its benefactor. How much might it be wished that man himself always showed the same gratitude for kindnesses, and the same respect for humanity! Then we should no longer fear either ungrateful wretches, or wars which are the plague of the human race and the real executioners of the natural law. But a being to which nature has given such a precocious and enlightened instinct, which judges, combines, reasons, and deliberates as far as the sphere of its activity extends and permits, a being which feels attachment because of benefits received, and which leaving a master who treats it badly goes to seek a better one, a being with a structure like ours, which performs the same acts, has the same passions, the same griefs, the same pleasures, more or less intense according to the sway of the imagination and the delicacy of the nervous organization - does not such a being show clearly that it knows its faults and ours, understands good and evil, and in a word, has consciousness of what it does? Would its soul, which feels the same joys, the same mortification and the same discomfiture which we feel, remain utterly unmoved by disgust when it saw a fellow-creature torn to bits, or when it had itself pitilessly dismembered this fellow-creature? If this be granted, it follows that the precious gift now in question would not have been denied to animals: for since they show us sure signs of repentance, as well as of intelligence, what is there absurd in thinking that beings, almost as perfect machines as ourselves, are, like us, made to understand and to feel nature? Let no one object that animals, for the most part, are savage beasts, incapable of realizing the evil that they do; for do all men discriminate better between vice and virtue? There is ferocity in our species as well as in theirs. Men who are in the barbarous habit of breaking the natural law are not tormented as much by it, as those who transgress for the first time, and who have not been hardened by the force of habit. The same thing is true of animals as of men - both may be more or less ferocious in temperament, and both become more so by living with others like themselves. But a gentle and peaceful animal which lives among other animals of the same disposition and of gentle nurture, will be an enemy of blood and carnage; it will blush internally at having shed blood. There is perhaps this difference, that since among animals everything is sacrificed to their needs, to their pleasures, to the necessities of life, which they enjoy more than we, their remorse apparently should not be as keen as ours, because we are not in the same state of necessity as they. Custom perhaps dulls and perhaps stifles remorse as well as pleasures. But I will for a moment suppose that I am utterly mistaken in concluding that almost all the world holds a wrong opinion on this subject, while I alone am right. I will grant that animals, even the best of them, do not know the difference between moral good and evil, that they have no recollection of the trouble taken for them, of the kindness done them, no realization of their own virtues. [I will suppose], for instance, that this lion, to which I, like so many others, have referred, does not remember at all that it refused to kill the man, abandoned to its fury, in a combat more inhuman than one could find among lions, tigers and bears, put together. For our compatriots fight, Swiss against Swiss, brother against brother, recognize each other, and yet capture and kill each other without remorse, because a prince pays for the murder. I suppose in shot that the natural law has not been given to animals. What will be the consequences of this supposition? Man is not moulded from a costlier clay; nature has used but one dough, and has merely varied the leaven. Therefore if animals do not repent for having violated this inmost feeling which I am discussing, or rather if they absolutely lack it, man must necessarily be in the same condition. Farewell then to the natural law and all the fine treatises published about it! The whole animal kingdom in general would be deprived of it. But, conversely, if man cannot dispense with the belief that when health permits him to be himself, he always distinguishes the upright, humane, and virtuous, from those who are not human, virtuous, nor honorable: that it is easy to tell vice from virtue, by the unique pleasure and the peculiar repugnance that seems to be their natural effects, it follows that animals, composed of the same matter, lacking perhaps only one degree of fermentation to make it exactly like man's, must share the same prerogatives of animal nature, and that thus there exists no soul or sensitive substance without remorse. The following considerations will reinforce these observations. It is impossible to destroy the natural law. The impress of it on all animals is so strong, that I have no doubt that the wildest and most savage have some moments of repentance. I believe that that cruel maid of Chalons in Champagne must have sorrowed for her crime, if she really ate her sister. I think that the sam thing is true of all those who commit crimes, even involuntary or temperamental crimes: true of Gaston of Orleans who could not help stealing; of a certain woman who was subject to the same crime when pregnant, and whose children inherited it; of the woman who, in the same condition, ate her husband; of that other women who killed her children, salted their bodies, and ate a piece of them every day, as a little relish; of that daughter of a thief and cannibal who at twelve years followed in his steps, although she had been orphaned when she was a year old, and had been brought up by honest people; to say nothing of many other examples of which the records of our observers are full, all of them proving that there are a thousand hereditary vices and virtues which are transmitted from parents to children as those of the foster mother pass to the children she nurses. Now, I believe and admit that these wretches do not for the most part feel at the time the enormity of their actions. Bulimia, or canine hunger, for example, can stifle all feeling; it is a mania of the stomach that one is compelled to satisfy, but what remorse must be in store for those women, when the come to themselves and grow sober, and remember the crimes they have committed against those they held most dear! What a punishment for an involuntary crime which they could not resist, of which they had no consciousness whatever! However, this is apparently not enough for the judges. For of these women, of whom I tell, one was cruelly beaten and burned, and another was buried alive. I realize that all this is demanded by the interest of society. But doubtless it is much to be wished that excellent physicians might be the only judges. They alone could tell the innocent criminal from the guilty. If reason is the slave of a depraved or mad desire, how can it control the desire? But if crime carries with it its own more or less cruel punishment, if the most continued and most barbarous habit cannot entirely blot out repentance in the cruelest hearts, if criminals are lacerated by the very memory of their deeds, why should we frighten the imagination of weak minds, by a hell, by specters, and by precipices of fire even less real than those of Pascal? Why must we have recourse to fables, as an honest pope once said himself, to torment even the unhappy wretches who are executed, because we do not think that they are sufficiently punished by their own conscience, their first executioner? I do not mean to say that all criminals are unjustly punished; I only maintain that those whose will is depraved, and whose conscience is extinguished, are punished enough by their remorse when they come to themselves, a remorse, I venture to assert, from which nature should in this case have delivered unhappy souls dragged on by a fatal necessity. Criminals, scoundrels, ingrates, those in short without natural feelings, unhappy tyrants who are unworthy of life, in vain take a cruel pleasure in their barbarity, for there are calm moments of reflection in which the avenging conscience arises, testifies against them, and condemns them to be almost ceaselessly torn to pieces at their own hands. Whoever torments men is tormented by himself; and the sufferings that he will experience will be the just measure of those that he has inflicted. On the other hand, there is so much pleasure in doing good, in recognizing and appreciating what one receives, so much satisfaction in practising virtue, in being gentle, humane, kind, charitable, compassionate and generous (for this one word includes all the virtues), that I consider as sufficiently punished any one who is unfortunate enough not to have been born virtuous. We were not originally made to be learned; we have become so perhaps by a sort of abuse of our organic faculties, and at the expense of the State which nourishes a host of sluggards whom vanity has adorned with the name of philosophers. Nature has created us all solely to be happy - yes, all of us from the crawling worm to the eagle lost in the clouds. For this cause she has given all animals some share of natural law, a share greater or less according to the needs of each animal's organs when in normal condition. Now how shall we define natural law? It is a feeling that teaches us what we should not do, because we would not wish it to be done to us. Should I dare add to this common idea, that this feeling seems to me but a kind of fear or dread, as salutary to the race as to the individual; for may it not be true that we respect the purse and life of others, only to save our own possessions, our honor, and ourselves; like those Ixions of Christianity who love God and embrace so many fantastic virtues, merely because they are afraid of hell! You see that natural law is but an intimate feeling that, like all other feelings (thought included) belongs also to imagination. Evidently, therefore, natural law does not presuppose education, revelation, nor legislator, - provided one does not propose to confuse natural law with civil laws, in the ridiculous fashion of the theologians. The arms of fanaticism may destroy those who support these truths, but they will never destroy the truths themselves. I do not mean to call in question the existence of a supreme being; on the contrary it seems to me that the greatest degree of probability is in favor of this belief. But since the existence of this being goes no further than that of any other toward proving the need of worship, it is a theoretic truth with very little practical value. Therefore, since we may say, after such long experience, that religion does not imply exact honesty, we are authorized by the same reasons to think that atheism does not exclude it. Furthermore, who can be sure that the reason for man's existence is not simply the fact that he exists? Perhaps he was thrown by chance on some spot on the earth's surface, nobody knows how nor why, but simply that he must live and die, like the mushrooms which appear from day to day, or like those flowers which border the ditches and cover the walls. Let us not lose ourselves in the infinite, for we are not made to have the least idea thereof, and are absolutely unable to get back to the origin of things. Besides it does not matter for our peace of mind, whether matter be eternal or have been created, whether there be or be not a God. How foolish to torment ourselves so much about things which we can not know, and which would not make us any happier even were we to gain knowledge about them! But, some will say, read all such works as those of Fénelon, of Nieuwentyt, of Abadie, of Berham, of Rais, and the rest. Well! what will they teach me or rather what have they taught me? They are only tiresome repetitions of zealous writers, one of whom adds to the other only verbiage, more likely to strengthen than to undermine the foundations of atheism. The number of evidences drawn from the spectacle of nature does not give these evidences any more force. Either the mere structure of a finger, of an ear, of an eye, a single observation of Malpighi proves all, and doubtless much better than Descartes and Malebranche proved it, or all the other evidences prove nothing. Deists, and even Christians, should therefore be content to point out that throughout the animal kingdom the same aims are pursued and accomplished by an infinite number of different mechanisms, all of them however exactly geometrical. For what stronger weapons could there be with which to overthrow atheists? It is true that if my reason does not deceive me, man and the whole universe seem to have been designed for this unity of aim. The sun, air, water, the organism, the shape of bodies, - everything is brought to a focus in the eye as in a mirror that faithfully presents to the imagination all the objects reflected in it, in accordance with the laws required by the infinite variety of bodies which take part in vision. In ears we find everywhere a striking variety, and yet the difference of structure in men, animals, birds, and fishes, does not produce different uses. All ears are so mathematically made, that they tend equally to one and the same end, namely hearing. But would Chance, the deist asks, be a great enough geometrician to vary thus, at pleasure, the works of which she is supposed to be the author, without being hindered by so great a diversity from gaining the same end? Again, the deist will bring forward as a difficulty those parts of the animal that are clearly contained in it for future use, the butterfly in the caterpillar, man in the sperm, a whole polyp in each of its parts, the valvule in the oval orifice, the lungs in the foetus, the teeth in their sockets, the bones in the fluid from which they detach themselves and (in an incomprehensible manner) harden. And since the partisans of this theory, far from neglecting anything that would strengthen proof, never tire of piling up proof upon proof, they are willing to avail themselves of everything, even of the weakness of the mind in certain cases. Look, they say, at men like Spinoza, Vanini, Desbarreau, and Boindin, apostles who honor deism more than they harm it. The duration of their health was the measure of their unbelief, and one rarely fails, they add, to renounce atheism when the passions, with their instrument, the body, have grown weak. That is certainly the most that can be said in favor of the existence of God: although the last argument is frivolous in that these conversions are short, and the mind almost always regains its former opinions and acts accordingly, as soon as it has regained or rather rediscovered its strength in that of the body. That is, at least, much more than was said by the physician Diderot, in his Pensées Philosophiques, a sublime work that will not convince a single atheist. What reply can, in truth, be made to a man who says, ``We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that nothing which happens, could have failed to happen, - causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God - I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can only make unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this.'' The weight of the universe therefore far from crushing a real atheist does not even shake him. All these evidences of a creator, repeated thousands and thousands of times, evidence that are placed far above the comprehension of men like us, are self-evident (however far one push the argument) only to the anti-Pyrrhonians, or to those who have enough confidence in their reason top believe themselves capable of judging on the basis of certain phenomena, against which, as you see, the atheist can urge others perhaps equally strong and absolutely opposed. For if we listen to the naturalists again, they will tell us that the very causes which, in a chemist's hands, by a chance combination, made the first mirror, in the hands of nature made the pure water, the mirror of the simple shepherdess; that the motion which keeps the world going could have created it, that each body has taken the place assigned to it by its own nature, that the air must have surrounded the earth, and that iron and the other metals are produced by the internal motions of the earth, for one and the same reason; that the sun is as much a natural product as electricity, that it was not made to warm the earth and its inhabitants, whom it sometimes burns, any more than the rain was made to make the seeds grow, which it often spoils; that the mirror and the water were no more made for people to see themselves in, than were all other polished bodies with this same property; that the eye is in truth a kind of glass in which the soul can contemplate the image of objects as they are presented to it by these bodies, but that it is not proved that this organ was really made expressly for this contemplation, nor purposely placed in its socket, and in short it may well be that Lucretius, the physician Lamy, and all Epicureans both ancient and modern were right when they suggested that the eye sees only because it is formed and placed as it is, and that, given once for all, the same rules of motion followed by nature in the generation and development of bodies, this marvelous organ could not have been formed and placed differently. Such is the pro and the con, and the summary of those fine arguments that will eternally divide the philosophers. I do not take either side. ``Non nostrum inter vos tantas compenere lites.'' This is what I said to one of my friends, a Frenchman, as frank a Pyrrhonian as I, a man of much merit, and worthy of a better fate. He gave me a very singular answer in regard to the matter. ``It is true,'' he told me, ``that the pro and con should not disturb at all the soul of a philosopher, who sees that nothing is proved with clearness enough to force his consent, and that the arguments offered on one side are neutralized by those of the other. However,'' he continued, ``the universe will never be happy, unless it is atheistic.'' Here are this wretch's reasons. If atheism, said he, were generally accepted, all the forms of religion would then be destroyed and cut off at the roots. No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religion - such terrible soldiers! Nature infected with a sacred poison, would regain its rights and its purity. Deaf to all other voices, tranquil mortals would follow on the spontaneous dictates of their own being, the only commands which can never be despised with impunity and which alone can lead us to happiness through the pleasant paths of virtue. Such is natural law: whoever rigidly observes it is a good man and deserves the confidence of all the human race. Whoever fails to follow it scrupulously affects, in vain, the specious exterior of another religion; he is a scamp or a hypocrite whom I distrust. After this, let a vain people think otherwise, let them dare affirm that even probity is at stake in not believing in revelation, in a word that another religion than that of nature is necessary, whatever it may be. Such an assertion is wretched and pitiable; and so is the good opinion which each one gives us of the religion he has embraced! We do not seek here the votes of the crowd. Whoever raises in his heart altars to superstition, is bound to worship idols and not to thrill to virtue. But since all the faculties of the soul depend to such a degree on the proper organization of the brain and of the whole body, that apparently they are but this organization itself, the soul is clearly an enlightened machine. For finally, even if man alone had received a share of natural law, would he be any less a machine for that? A few more wheels, a few more springs than in the most perfect animals, the brain proportionally nearer the heart and for this very reason receiving more blood - any one of a number of unknown causes might always produce this delicate conscience so easily wounded, this remorse which is no more foreign to matter than to thought, and in a word all the differences that are supposed to exist here. Could the organism then suffice for everything? Once more, yes; since thought visibly develops with our organs, why should not the matter of which they are composed be susceptible of remorse also, when once it has acquired, with time, the faculty of feeling? The soul is therefore but an empty word, of which no one has any idea, and which an enlightened man should only use to signify the part in us that thinks. Given the least principle of motion, animated bodies will have all that is necessary for moving, feeling, thinking, repenting, or in a word for conducting themselves in the physical realm, and in the moral realm which depends upon it. Yet we take nothing for granted; those who perhaps think that all the difficulties have not yet been removed shall now read of experiments that will completely satisfy them. The flesh of all animals palpitates after death. This palpitation continues longer, the more cold blooded the animal is and the less it perspires. Tortoises, lizards, serpents, etc. are evidence of this. Muscles separated from the body contract when they are stimulated. The intestines keep up their peristaltic or vermicular motion for a long time. According to Cowper, a simple injection of hot water reanimates the heart and the muscles. A frog's heart moves for an hour or more after it has been removed from the body, especially when exposed to the sun or better still when placed on a hot table or chair. If this movement seem totally lost, one has only to stimulate the heart, and that hollow muscle beats again. Harvey made this same observation on toads. Bacon of Verulam in his treatise Sylva Sylvarum cites the case of a man convicted of treason, who was opened alive, and whose heart thrown into hot water leaped several times, each time less high, to the perpendicular height of two feet. Take a tiny chicken still in the egg, cut out the heart and you will observe the same phenomena as before, under almost the same conditions. The warmth of the breath alone reanimates an animal about to perish in the air pump. The same experiments, which we owe to Boyle and to Stenon, are made on pigeons, dogs, and rabbits. Pieces of their hearts beat as their whole hearts would. The same movements can be seen in paws that have been cut off from moles. The caterpillar, the worm, the spider, the fly, the eel - all exhibit the same phenomena; and in hot water, because of the fire it contains, the movement of the detached parts increases. A drunken soldier cut off with one stroke of his sabre an Indian rooster's head. The animal remained standing, then walked, and ran: happening to run against a wall, it turned around, beats its wings still running, and finally fell down. As it lay on the ground, all the muscles of this rooster kept on moving. That is what I saw myself, and almost the same phenomena can easily be observed in kittens or puppies with their heads cut off. Polyps do more than move after they have been cut in pieces. In a week they regenerate to form as many animals as there are pieces. I am sorry that these facts speak against the naturalists' system of generation; or rather I am very glad of it, for let this discovery teach us never to reach a general conclusion even on the ground of all known (and most decisive) experiments. Here we have many more facts than are needed to prove, in an incontestable way, that each tiny fiber or part of an organized body moves by a principle which belongs to it. Its activity, unlike voluntary motions, does not depend in any way on the nerves, since the movements in question occur in parts of the body which have no connection with the circulation. But if this force is manifested even in sections of fibers the heart, which is a composite of peculiarly connected fibers, must possess the same property. I did not need Bacon's story to persuade me of this. It was easy for me to come to this conclusion, both from the perfect analogy of the structure of the human heart with that of animals, and also from the very bulk of the human heart, in which this movement escapes our eyes only because it is smothered, and finally because in corpses all the organs are cold and lifeless. If executed criminals were dissected while their bodies are still warm, we should probably see in their hearts the same movements that are observed in the face-muscles of those that have been beheaded. The motive principle of the whole body, and even of its parts cut in pieces, is such that it produces not irregular movements, as some have thought, but very regular ones, in warm blooded and perfect animals as well as in cold and imperfect ones. No resource therefore remains open to our adversaries but to deny thousands and thousands of facts which every man can easily verify. If now any one ask me where is this innate force in our bodies, I answer that it very clearly resides in what the ancients called the parenchyma, that is to say, in the very substance of the organs not including the veins, the arteries, the nerves, in a word, that it resides in the organization of the whole body, and that consequently each organ contains within itself forces more or less active according to the need of them. Let us now go into some detail concerning these springs of the human machine. All the vital, animal, natural, and automatic motions are carried on by their action. Is it not in a purely mechanical way that the body shrinks back when it is struck with terror at the sight of an unforeseen precipice, that the eyelids are lowered at the menace of a blow, as some have remarked, and that the pupil contracts in broad daylight to save the retina, and dilates to see objects in darkness? Is it not by mechanical means that the pores of the skin close in winter so that the cold cannot penetrate to the interior of the blood vessels, and that the stomach vomits when it is irritated by poison, by a certain quantity of opium and by all emetics, etc.? that the heart, the arteries and the muscles contract in sleep as well as in waking hours, that the lungs serve as bellows continually in exercise, n'est-ce pas machinalement qu'agissent tous les sphincters de la vessie, du rectum, etc.? that the heart contracts more strongly than any other muscle? que les muscles érecteurs font dresser la verge dans l'homme, comme dans les animaux qui s'en battent le ventre, et même dans l'enfant, capable d'érection, pour peu que cette partie soit irritée? Ce qui prouve, pour le dire en passant, qu'il est un ressort singulier dans ce membre, encore peu connu, et qui produit des effets qu'on n'a point encoure bien expliqués, malgré toutes les lumières de l'anatomie. I shall not go into any more detail concerning all these little subordinate forces, well known to all. But there is another more subtle and marvelous force, which animates them all; it is the source of all our feelings, of all our pleasures, of all our passions, and of all our thoughts: for the brain has its muscles for thinking, as the legs have muscles for walking. I wish to speak of this impetuous principle that Hippocrates calls enormon (soul). This principle exists and has its seat in the brain at the origin of the nerves, by which it exercises its control over all the rest of the body. By this fact is explained all that can be explained, even to the surprising effect of maladies of the imagination. Mais, pour ne pas languir dans une richesse et un fécondité mal entendue, il faut se borner à un petit nombre de questions et de réflexions. Pourquoi la vue ou la simple idée d'une belle femme nous cause-t-elle des mouvements et des désirs singuliers? Ce qui se passe alors dans certains organes, vient-il de la nature même de ces organes? Point du toutl mais du commerce et de l'espèce de sympathie de ces muscles avec l'imagination. Il n'y a ici qu'un premier ressort excité par le bene placitum des anciens, ou par l'image de la beauté, qui en excite un autre, lequel était fort assoupi, quand l'imagination l'a éveillé: et comment cela, si ce n'est par le désordre et le tumulte du sang et des esprits, qui galopent avec une promptitude extraordinaire, et vont gonfler les corps caverneux? Puisqu'il est des commincations évidents entre la mère et l'enfant, et qu'il est dur de nier des fair rapportés par Tulpius et par d'autres écrivains aussi dignes de foi (il n'y en a point qui le soient plus), nous croirons que c'est par la même voie que le foetus ressent l'impétuoisité de l'imagination maternelle, comme une cire molle reçe;oit toutes sortes d'impressions; et que les mêmes traces, ou envies de la mère, peuvent s'imprimer sur le foetus, sans que cela puisse se comprendre, quoiqu'en disent Blondel et tous ses adhérenets. Ainsi nous faisons réparation d'honneur au P. Malebranche, beaucoup trop raillé de sa crédulité par les auteurs qui n'ont point observé d'assex près la nature et ont voulu l'assujettir à leur idées. Look at the portrait of the famous Pope who is, to say the least, the Voltaire of the English. The effort, the energy of his genius are imprinted upon his countenance. It is convulsed. His eyes protrude from their sockets, the eyebrows are raised with the muscles of the forehead. Why? Because the brain is in travail and all the body must share in such a laborious deliverance. If there were not an internal cord which pulled the external ones, whence would come all these phenomena? To admit a soul as explanation of them, is to be reduced to [explaining phenomena by] the operations of the Holy Spirit. In fact, if what thinks in my brain is not a part of this organ and therefore of the whole body, why does my blood boil, and the fever of my mind pass into my veins, when lying quietly in bed, I am forming the plan of some work or carrying on an abstract calculation? Put this question to men of imagination, to great poets, to men who are enraptured by the felicitous expression of sentiment, and transported by an exquisite fancy or by the charms of nature, of truth, or of virtue! By their enthusiasm, by what they will tell you they have experienced, you will judge the cause by its effects; by that harmony which Borelli, a mere anatomist, understood better than all the Leibnizians, you will comprehend the material unity of man. In short, if the nerve-tension which causes pain occasions also the fever by which the distracted mind looses its will-power, and if, conversely, the mind too much excited, disturbs the body (and kindles that inner fire which killed Bayle while he was still so young)l if an agitation rouses my desire and my ardent wish for what, a moment ago, I cared nothing about, and if in their turn certain brain impressions excite the same longing and the same desires, then why should we regard as double what is manifestly one being? In vain you fall back on the power of the will, since for one order that the will gives, it bows a hundred times to the yoke, And what wonder that in health the body obeys, since a torrent of blood and of animal spirits forces its obedience, and since the will has as ministers an invisible legion of fluids swifter than lightning and ever ready to do its bidding! But as the power of the will is exercised by means of the nerves, it is likewise limited by them. La meilleure volonté d'un amant épuisé, les plus violent desires lui rendront-ils sa vigueur perdue? Hélas! non; et elle en sera la première punie, parce-que, posées certaines circonstances, il n'est pas dans sa puissance de ne pas vouloir du plaisir. Ce que j'ai dit de la paralysie, etc. revient ici. Does the result of jaundice surprise you? Do you not know that the color of bodies depends on the color of the glasses through which we look at them, and that whatever is the color of the humors, such is the color of objects, at least for us, vain playthings of a thousand illusions? But remove this color from the aqueous humor of the eye, let the bile flow through its natural filter, then the soul having new eyes, will no longer see yellow. Again,. is it not thus, by removing cataract, or by injecting the Eustachian canal, that sight is restored to the blind, or hearing to the deaf? How many people, who were perhaps only clever charlatans, passed for miracle workers in the dark ages! Beautiful the soul, and powerful the will which can not act save by permission of the bodily conditions, and whose tastes change with age and fever! Should we, then, be astonished that philosophers have always had in mind the health of the body, to preserve the health of the soul, that Pythagoras gave rules for the diet as carefully as Plato forbade wine? The regime suited to the body is always the one with which sane physicians think they must begin, when it is a question of forming the mind, and of instructing it in the knowledge of truth and virtue; but these are vain words in the disorder of illness, and in the tumult of the senses. Without the precepts of hygiene, Epictetus, Socrates, Plato, and the rest preach in vain: all ethics is fruitless for one who lacks his share of temperance; it is the source of all virtues, as intemperance is the source of all vices. Is more needed, (for why lose myself in discussion of the passions which are all explained by the term, enormon, of Hippocrates) to prove that man is but an animal, or a collection of springs which wind each other up, without or being able to tell at what point in this human circle, nature has begun? If these springs differ among themselves, these differences consist only in their position and in their degrees of strength, and never in their nature; wherefore the soul is but a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of the brain, which can be regarded, without fear of error, as the mainspring of the whole machine, having a visible influence on all the parts. The soul seems even to have been made for the brain, so that all other parts of the system are but a kind of emanation from the brain. This will appear from certain observations, made on different embryos, which I shall now enumerate. This oscillation, which is natural or suited to our machine, and with which each fibre and even each fibrous element, so to speak, seems to be endowed, like that of a pendulum, cannot keep up forever. It must be renewed, as it loses strength, invigorated when it is tired, and weakened when it is disturbed by an excess of strength and vigor. In this alone, true medicine consists. The body is but a watch, whose watchmaker is the new chyle. Nature's first care, when the chyle enters the blood, is to excite in it a kind of fever which the chemists, who dream only of retorts, must have taken for fermentation. This fever produces a greater filtration of spirits, which mechanically animate the muscles and the heart, as if they had been sent there by order of the will. These then are the causes or forces of life which thus sustain for a hundred years that perpetual movement of the solids and liquids which is as necessary to the first as to the second. But who can say whether the solids contribute more than the fluids to this movement or vice versa? All that we know is that the action of the former would soon cease without the help of the latter, that is, without the help of the fluids which by their onset rouse and maintain the elasticity of the blood vessels on which their own circulation depends. From this it follows that after death the natural resilience of each substance is still more or less strong according to the remnants of life which it outlives, being the last to perish. So true is it that this force of the animal parts can be preserved and strengthened by that of the circulation, but that it does not depend on the strength of the circulation, since, as we have seen, it can dispense with even the integrity of each member or organ. I am aware that this opinion has not been relished by all scholars, and that Stahl especially had much scorn for it. This great chemist had wished to persuade us that the soul is the sole cause of all our movements. But this is to speak as a fanatic and not as a philosopher. To destroy the hypothesis of Stahl, we need not make as great an effort as I find that others have done before me. We need only glance at a violinist. What flexibility, what lightness in his fingers! The movements are so quick, that it seems almost as if there were no succession. But I pray, or rather I challenge, the followers of Stahl who understand so perfectly all that our soul can do, to tell me how it could possibly execute so many motions so quickly, motions, moreover, which take place so far from the soul, and in so many different places. That is to suppose that a flute player could play brilliant cadences on an infinite number of holes that he could not know, and on which he could not even put his finger! But let us say with M. Hecquet that all men may not go to Corinth. Why should not Stahl have been even more favored by nature as a man than as a chemist and a practioner? Happy mortal, he must have received a soul different from the rest of mankind, --- a sovereign soul, which, not content with having some control over the voluntary muscles, easily held the reins of all the movements of the body, and could suspend them, calm them, or excite them at its pleasure! With so despotic a mistress, in whose hands were, in a sense, the beating of the heart, and the laws of circulation, there could certainly be no fever, no pain, no weariness, ni honteuse impuissance, ni facheux priapisme! The soul wills, and the springs play, contract or relax. But how did the springs of Stahl's machine get out of order so soon? He who has in himself so great a doctor, should be immortal. Moreover, Stahl is not the only one who has rejected the principle of the vibration of organic bodies. Greater minds have not used the principle when they wished to explain the actions of the heart, l'érection du penis, etc. One need only read the Institutions of Medicine by Boerhaave to see what laborious and enticing systems this great man was obliged to invent, by the labor of his mighty genius, through failure to admit that there is so wonderful a force in all bodies. Willis and Perrault, minds of a more feeble stamp, but careful observers of nature (whereas nature was known to the famous Leyden professor only through others and second hand, so to speak) seem to have preferred to suppose a soul generally extended over the whole body, instead of the principle which we are describing. But according to this hypothesis (which was the hypothesis of Vergil and of all Epicureans, an hypothesis which the history of the polyp might seem at first sight to favor) the movements which go on after the death of the subject in which they inhere are due to a remnant of soul still maintained by the parts that contract, though, from the moment of death, these are not excited by the blood and spirits. Whence it may be seen that these writers, whose solid works easily eclipse all philosophic fables, are deceived only in the manner of those who have endowed matter with the faculty of thinking. I mean to say, by having expressed themselves badly in obscure and meaningless terms. In truth, what is this remnant of a soul, if it is not the ``moving force'' of the Leibnizians (badly rendered by such an expression), which however Perrault in particular has really foreseen. See his Treatise on the Mechanism of Animals. Now that it is clearly proved against the Cartesians, the followers of Stahl, the Malebranchists, and the theologians who little deserve to be mentioned here, that matter is self-moved, not only when organized, as in a whole heart, for example, but even when this organization has been destroyed, human curiosity would like to discover how a body, by the fact that it is originally endowed with the breath of life, finds itself adorned in consequence with the faculty of feeling, and thus with that of thought. And, heavens, what efforts have not been made by certain philosophers to manage to prove this! and what nonsense of this subject I have had the patience to read! All that experience teaches us is that while movement persists, however slight it may be, in one or more fibres, we need only stimulate them to re-excite and animate this movement almost extinguished. This has been shown in the host of experiments with which I have undertaken to crush the systems. It is therefore certain that motion and feeling excite each other in turn, both in a whole body and in the same body when its structure is destroyed, to say nothing of certain plants which seem to exhibit the same phenomena of the union of feeling and motion. But furthermore, how many excellent philosophers have shown that thought is but a faculty of feeling, and that the reasonable soul is but the feeling soul engaged in contemplating its ideas and in reasoning! This would be proved by the fact alone that when feeling is stifled, thought also is checked, for instance in apoplexy, in lethargy, in catalepsis, etc. For it is ridiculous to suggest that, during these stupors, the soul keeps on thinking, even though it does not remember the ideas that it has had. As to the development of feeling and motion, it is absurd to waste time seeking for its mechanism. The nature of motion is as unknown to us as that of matter. How can we discover how it is produced unless, like the author of The History of the Soul, we resuscitate the old and unintelligible doctrine of substantial forms? I am then quite as content not to know how inert and simple matter becomes active and highly organized, as not to be able to look at the sun without red glasses; and I am as little disquieted concerning the other incomprehensible wonders of nature, the production of feeling and of thought in a being which earlier appeared to our limited eyes as a mere clod of clay. Grant only that organized matter is endowed with a principle of motion, which alone differentiates it from the inorganic (and can one deny this in the face of the most incontestable observation?) and that among animals, as I have sufficiently proved, everything depends upon the diversity of this organization: these admissions suffice for guessing the riddle of substances and of man. It thus appears that there is but one type of organization in the universe, and that man is the most perfect example. He is to the ape, and to the most intelligent animals, as the planetary pendulum of Huyghens is to a watch of Julien Leroy. More instruments, more wheels and more springs were necessary to mark the movements of the planets than to mark or strike the hours; and Vaucanson, who needed more skill for making his flute player than for making his duck, would have needed still more to make a talking man, a mechanism no longer to be regarded as impossible, especially in the hands of another Prometheus. In like fashion, it was necessary that nature should use more elaborate art in making and sustaining a machine which for a whole century could mark all motions of the heart and of the mind; for though one does not tell time by the pulse, it is at least the barometer of the warmth and the vivacity by which one may estimate the nature of the soul. I am right! The human body is a watch, a large watch constructed with such skill and ingenuity, that if the wheel which marks the second happens to stop, the minute wheel turns and keeps on going its round, and in the same way the quarter-hour wheel, and all the others go on running when the first wheels have stopped because rusty or, for any reason, out of order. Is it not for a similar reason that the stoppage of a few blood vessels is not enough to destroy or suspend the strength of the movement which is in the heart as in the mainspring of the machine; since, on the contrary, the fluids whose volume is diminished, having a shorter road to travel, cover the ground more quickly, borne on as by a fresh current which the energy of the heart increases in proportion to the resistance it encounters at the ends of the blood-vessels? And is not this the reason why the loss of sight (caused by the compression of the optic nerve and its ceasing to convey the images of objects) no more hinders hearing, than the loss of hearing (caused by the obstruction of the functions of the auditory nerve) implies the loss of sight? In the same way, finally, does not one man hear (except immediately after his attack) without being able to say what he hears, while another who hears nothing, but whose lingual nerves are uninjured in the brain, mechanically tells of all the dreams which pass through his mind? These phenomena do not surprise enlightened physicians at all. They know what to think about man's nature (and more accurately to express myself in passing) of two physicians, the better one and the one who deserves more confidence is always, in my opinion, the one who is more versed in the physique or mechanism of the human body, and who, leaving aside the soul and all the anxieties which this chimera gives to fools and to ignorant men, is seriously occupied only in pure naturalism. Therefore let the pretended M. Charp deride philosophers who have regarded animals as machines. How different is my view! I believe that Descartes would be a man in every way worthy of respect, if, born in a century that he had not been obliged to enlighten, he had known the value of experiment and observation, and the danger of cutting loose from them. But it is none the less just for me to make an authentic reparation to this great man for all the insignificant philosophers --- poor jesters, and poor imitators of Locke --- who instead of laughing impudently at Descartes, might better realize that without him the field of philosophy, like the field of science without Newton, might perhaps be still uncultivated. This celebrated philosopher, it is true, was much deceived, and no one denies that. But at any rate he understood animal nature, he was the first to prove completely that animals are pure machines. And after a discovery of this importance demanding so much sagacity, how can we without ingratitude fail to pardon all his errors! In my eyes, they are all atoned for by that great confession. For after all, although he extols the distinctness of the two substances, this is plainly but a trick of skill, a ruse of style, to make theologians swallow a poison, hidden in the shade of an analogy which strikes everybody else and which they alone fail to notice. For it is this, this strong analogy, which forces all scholars and wise judges to confess that these proud and vain beings, more distinguished by their pride than by the name of men however much they may wish to exalt themselves, are at bottom only animals and machines which, though upright, go on all fours. They all have this marvelous instinct, which is developed by education into mind, and which always has its seat in the brain (or for want of that when it is lacking or hardened, in the medulla oblongata) and never in the cerebellum; for I have often seen the cerebellum injured, and other observers have found it hardened, when the soul has not ceased to fulfil its functions. To be a machine, to feel, to think, to know how to distinguish good from bad, as well as blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with an intelligence and a sure moral instinct, and to be but an animal, are therefore characters which are no more contradictory, than to be an ape or a parrot and to be able to give oneself pleasure. Car, puisque l'occasion se présente de le dire, qui eut jamais deviné à priori qu'une goutte de la liqeur qui se lance dans l'accouplement fit ressentir des plaisirs divins, et qu'il en naîtrait une petite créature, qui pourrait un jour, posées certaines lois, jouir des même délices? I believe that thought is so little incompatible with organized matter, that it seems to be one of its properties on a par with electricity, the faculty of motion, impenetrability, extension, etc. Do you ask for further observations? Here are some which are incontestable and which all prove that man resembles animals perfectly, in his origin as well as in all the points in which we have thought it essential to make the comparison. J'en appale à la bonne foi de nos observateurs. Qu'ils nous disent s'il ne'st pas vrai que l'homme dans son principe n'est qu'un ver, qui devient homme, comme la chenille paillon. Les plus graves auteurs [Boerhaave, Inst. Med. et tant d'autres] nous ont appris comment il faut s'y prendre pour voir cet animalcule. Tous les curieux l'ont vu, comme Hartsoeker, dans la semence de l'homme, et non dans celle de la femme; il n'y a que le plus adroit, ou le plus vigoreux qui ait la force de s'insinuer et de s'implanter dans l'oeuf que fournit la femme, et qui lui donne sa première nourriture. Cet oeuf, quelquefois surpris dans les trompes de Fallope, est porté par ces canaux à la matrice, où il prend racine, comme un grain de blé dans la terre. Mais quoiqu'il y devienne monstru-eux par sa croissance de 9 mois, il ne diffère point des oeufs des autres femelles, si ce n'est que sa peau (l'amnios) ne se durcit jamais, et se dilate prodigeusement, comme on en peut juger en comparant les foetus trovés en situation et près d'éclore (ce que j'ai eu le plaisir d'observer dans une femme morte un moment avant l'accouchement), avec d'autres petits embryons très proches de leur origine: car alors c'est toujours l'oeuf dans sa coque, et l'animal dans l'oeuf, qui, gêné dans ses mouvements, cherche machinalement à voir le jour; et pour y réussir, il commence par rompre avec la tête cette membrance, d'oû il sort, comme le pulet, l'oiseau, etc., de la leur. J'ajouterai une observation que je ne trouve nulle part; c'est que l'amnios n'en est pas plus mince, pour s'être prodigieusement étendu; semblable en cela à la matrice dont la substance même se gonfle de sucs infiltrés, indépendamment de la réplétion et du déploiement de tous ses coudes vasculeux. Let us observe man both in and out of his shell, let us examine young embryos of four, six, eight or fifteen days with a microscope; after that time our eyes are sufficient. What do we see? The head alone; a little round egg with two black points which mark the eyes. Before that, everything is formless, and one sees only a medullary pulp, which is the brain, in which are formed first the roots of the nerves, that is, the principle of feeling, and the heart, which already within this substance has the power of beating of itself; it is the punctum saliens of Malpighi, which perhaps already owes a part of its excitability to the influence of the nerves. Then little by little, one sees the head lengthen from the neck, which, in dilating, forms first the thorax inside which the heart has already sunk, there to become stationary; below that is the abdomen which is divided by a partition (the diaphragm). One of these enlargements of the body forms the arms, the hands, the fingers, the nails, and the hair; the other forms the thighs, the legs, the feet, etc., which differ only in their observed situation, and which constitute the support and the balancing pole of the body. The whole process is a strange sort of growth, like that of plants. On the tops of our heads is hair in place of which the plants have leaves and flowers; everywhere is shown the same luxury of nature, and finally the directing principle of plants is placed where we have our soul, that other quintessence of man. Such is the uniformity of nature, which we are beginning to realize; and the analogy of the animal with the vegetable kingdom, of man with the plant. Perhaps there even are animal plants, which in vegetating, either fight as polyps do, or perform other functions characteristic of animals. Voilà à peu près tout ce qu'on sait de la génération. Que les parties qui s'attirent, qui sont faites pur s'unir ensemble et pour occuper telle ou telle place, se réunissent toutes suivant leur nature; et qu'ainsi se forment les yeux, le coeur, l'estomac et enfin tout le corps, comme de grans hommes l'ont écrit, cela est possible. Mais, comme l'expérience nous abandonne au milieu des ces subtilités, je ne supposerai rien, regardant tout ce qui ne frappe pas mes sens comme un mystère impénetrable. Il est si rare que les deux emences se rencontrent dans le congrès, que je serais tenté de croire que la semence de la femme est inutile à la génération. Mais comment en expliquer les phénomènes, sans ce commode rapport de parties, qui rend si bien raison des ressemblances des enfants, tantôt au père, et tantôt à la mère? D'un autre côté, l'embarras d'une explication doit-elle contrebalancer un fait? Il me parait que c'est le mâle qui fait tout, dans une femme qui dorrt, comme dans la plus lubrique. L'arrangement des parties serait done fait de toute éternité dans le germe, ou dans le ver même de l'homme. Mais tout ceci est fourt au-dessus de la portée des plus excellents observateurs. Comme ils n'y peuvent rien saisir, ils ne peuvent pas plus juger de la mécanique de la formation et du développment des corps, qu'une taupe du chemin qu'un cerf peut parcourir. We are veritable moles in the field of nature; we achieve little more than the mole's journey and it si our pride which prescribes limits to the limitless. We are in the position of a watch that should say (a writer of fables would make the watch a hero in a silly tale): ``I was never made by that fool of a workman, I who divide time, who mark so exactly the course of the sun, who repeat aloud the hours which I mark! No! that is impossible!'' In the same way, we disdain, ungrateful wretches that we are, this common mother of all kingdoms, as the chemists say. We imagine, or rather we infer, a cause superior to that which we owe all, and which truly has wrought all things in an inconceivable fashion. No; matter contains nothing base, except to the vulgar eyes which do not recognize her in her most splendid works; and nature is no stupid workman. She creates millions of men, with a facility and a pleasure more intense than the effort of a watchmaker in making the most complicated watch. Her power shines forth equally in creating the lowliest insect and in creating the most highly developed man; the animal kingdom costs her no more than the vegetable, and the most splendid genius no more than a blade of wheat. Let us then judge by what we see of that which is hidden from the curiosity of our eyes and of our investigations, and let us not imagine anything beyond. Let us observe the ape, the beaver, the elephant, etc., in their operations. If it is clear that these activities cannot be performed without intelligence, why refuse intelligence to these animals? And if you grant them a soul our are lost, you fanatics! You will in vain say that you assert nothing about the nature of the animal soul and that you deny its immortality. Who does not see that this is a gratuitous assertion; who does not see that the soul of an animal must be either mortal or immortal, whichever ours is, and that it must therefore undergo the same fate as ours, whatever that may be, and that thus in admitting that animals have souls, you fall into Scylla in an effort to avoid Charybdis? Break the chain of your prejudices, arm yourselves with the torch of experience, and you will render nature the honor she deserves, instead of inferring anything to her disadvantage, from the ignorance in which she has left you. Only open wide your eyes, only disregard what you cannot understand, and you will see that the ploughman whose intelligence and ideas extend no further than the bounds of his furrow, does not differ essentially from the greatest genius, --- a truth which the dissection of Descartes's and of Newton's brains would have proved; you will be persuaded that the imbecile and the fool are animals with human faces, as the intelligent ape is a little man in another shape; in short, you will learn that since everything depends absolutely on difference of organization , a well constructed animal which has studied astronomy, can predict an eclipse, as it can predict recovery or death when it has used its genius and its clearness of vision, for a time, in the school of Hippocrates and at the bedside of the sick. By this line of observations and truths, we come to connect the admirable power of thought with matter, without being able to see the links, because the subject of this attribute is essentially unknown to us. Let us not say that every machine or every animal perishes altogether or assumes another form after death, for we know absolutely nothing about the subject. On the other hand, to assert that an immortal machine is a chimera or a logical fiction, is to reason as absurdly as caterpillars would reason if, seeing the cast-off skins of their fellow caterpillars, they should bitterly deplore the fate of their species, which to them would seem to come to nothing. The soul of these insects (for each animal has its own) is too limited to comprehend the metamorphoses of nature. Never one of the most skillful among them could have imagined that it was destined to become a butterfly. It is the same way with us. What more do we know of our destiny than of our origin? Let us then submit to an invincible ignorance on which our happiness depends. He who so thinks will be wise, just, tranquil about his fate, and therefore happy. He will await death without either fear or desire, and will cherish life (hardly understanding how disgust can corrupt a heart in this place of many delights); he will be filled with reverence, gratitude, affection, and tenderness for nature, in proportion to his feeling of the benefits he has received from nature; he will be happy, in short, in feeling nature, and in being present at the enchanting spectacle of the universe, and we will surely never destroy nature either in himself or in others. More than that! Full of humanity, this man will love human character even in his enemies. Judge how he will treat others. He will pity the wicked without hating them; in his eyes, they will be but mis-made men. But in pardoning the faults of the structure of mind and body, he will none the less admire the beauties and the virtues of both. Those whom nature shall have favored will seem to him to deserve more respect than those whom she has treated in step-motherly fashion. Thus, as we have seen, natural gifts, the source of all acquirements, gain from the lips and heart of the materialist, the homage which every other thinker unjustly refuses them. In short, the materialist, convinced, in spite of the protests of his vanity, that is he but a machine or an animal, will not maltreat his kind, for he will know too well the nature of those actions, whose humanity is always in proportion to the degree of analogy proved above [between human beings and animals]; and following the natural law given to all animals, he will not wish to do to others what he would not wish them to do to him. Let us then conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified. This is no hypothesis set forth by dint of a number of postulates and assumptions; it is not the work of prejudice, nor even of my reason alone; I should have disdained a guide which I think to be so untrustworthy, had not my senses, bearing a torch, so to speak, induced me to follow reason by lighting the way themselves. Experience has thus spoken to me in behalf of reason; and in this way I have combined the two. But it must have been noticed that I have not allowed myself even the most vigorous and immediately deduced reasoning, except as a result of a multitude of observations which no scholar will contest; and furthermore, I recognize only scholars as judges of the conclusions which I draw from the observations; and I hereby challenge every prejudiced man who is neither anatomist, nor acquainted with the only philosophy which can here be considered, that of the human body. Against so strong and solid an oak, what could the weak reeds of theology, of metaphysics, and of the schools, avail, ---- childish arms, like our parlor foils, that may well afford the pleasure of fencing, but can never wound an adversary. Need I say that I refer to the empty and trivial notions, to the pitiable and trite arguments that will be urged (as long as the shadow of prejudice or of superstition remains on earth for the suppose incompatibility of two substances which meet and move each other unceasingly? Such is my system, or rather the truth, unless I am much deceived. It is short and simple. Dispute it now who will.

C.J. W · 1 decade ago  

[emlydunstan]

Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake���s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://www.thefix.com/radical-sobriety-getting-and-staying-clean-and-sober-subversive-activity

[alexdmorgan30]

Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 http://bit.ly/2GesUce

[pitz182]

Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

[psychanalyse-et-psychopatho-blog]

Psychotic elementary phenomena and ordinary psychosis.

François Sauvagnat (Paru en danois: Sauvagnat F: Psykotiske elementær- fænomener og ordinær psykose. Drift; Tidsskrift for psykoanalyse, 1-2, 2013, p 27-44.)

Introduction

The phrase" ordinary psychosis" is currently extremely popular in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in spite of the translation problems that have occured: in South American Spanish, "ordinario" is frankly derogatory, to such an extent that some colleagues have preferred "psychosis actuales", on the basis of the Freudian idea of "actual neuroses" (neuroses in which no symptom formation is obvious). In the following lines, we will discuss three points. 1) The difference between "ordinary/extraordinary" psychoses 2)The relationship between "ordinary psychoses" and elementary phenomena 3) The advantages and limitations of the notion. From extraordinary psychoses... The phrase “ordinary psychosis” was coined around 1997-2000 (Conversation d'Arcachon and Conciliabule d’Antibes) to designate forms of psychosis that did not have the “extraordinary” quality of cases like Pierre Rivière, DP Schreber, Georg Cantor, Otto Gross, V Kandinsky, Attila Jozsef, Ernst Wagner, John Nash or Aimée, which have to some extent become "classical" cases. If we try to specify what has made them such, we find that they: 1) Displayed unequivocally and publicly psychotic pathology 2) Were able to bear witness of their mental functioning, most of the time by writing their memoirs and sometimes with such precisions that they were able to criticize the accuracy of psychiatric knowledge of their time. Most of them have been the starting-point or have been paradigmatic of psychopathological and/or psychoanalytic elaborations: Pierre Rivière has represented an extreme case of monomania, by his capacity to dispaly alternatively common sense, full-blown delusions, and lies; DP Schreber , in his memoir, writes a full blown critique of Kraepelin’s theory and demonstrates his capacities to stabilize his psychotic experiences by transforming them into a religion; Georg Cantor has not only magistrally contributed to set theory, but made it plain that his pathology played a major role in that; Otto Gross has been a major contributor to the concept of schizophrenia; V Kandinsky, thanks to his auto-observations, has been at the origin of the Kandinsky-Clérambault syndrome;Attila Jozsef has personally contributed to psychoanalytic theory, Ernst Wagner has described at length his delusions of relation, written theatre plays, and been cited as a living example of paranoia, John Nash has claimed that his delusions appeared to have the same accuracy as the probabilistic formulas he has created and Aimée has contributed ample documentation, not only of the various moments of her delusional experiences, but also of her poetic talents. 3) They caused to a large extent some stirring or even scandal by exposing their pathology, mainly because their mental abilities did not allow to think of them in terms of mental deficit as they showed exceptional creativity. 4) All of them have been considered as exemplarily demonstrative cases and used as such by prominent clinicians, who were able to underscore the unique qualities of these individuals. In other words, the reception of their subjective experiences was not less important in making them look “extraordinary”, than their own message. Pierre Riviere‘s case was discussed by alienists of the 1830ies long before Michel Foucault exhumed it; DP Schreber has been a major occasion of psychopathological debates, not only by his own psychiatrists, but also by S Freud and a whole array of major psychoanalysts including J Lacan; Georg Cantor’s case has allowed Imre Hermann to elaborate his mathematical phenomenological and psychoanalytic theory of manic-depressive states, and J Lacan to complete his theory of object a as a “frame”; Attila Jozsef’s case has been used as an argument in the discussions on psychotic transference, schizophrenia and psychotic borderline states; Ernst Wagner’s testimony has been used by Gaupp and Kretschmer to implement their idea that paranoia could be curable, and he was presented in several psychiatric congresses as the living proof of the existence of paranoia as a discrete entity; Aimée’s case has been amply used by J Lacan to justify his psychoanalytic and kretschmerian theory of personality. Although psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have not been very prolific on John Nash's case, a few remarkable publications have nevertheless underlined the specificities of his delusional style (Sergio Laia; Alain Cochet's doctoral dissertation). ...to low-profile "ordinary psychoses" Whereas these cases can be said to be exemplary in all these respects and in some way, heroic, there is little doubt that the great majority of persons with psychotic symptoms present a much lower profile. They are bound to appear much more “normal” to the man in the street, even if that term traditionally inspires some diffidence in Lacanian psychoanalysts; they would not elicit much more than a highly ambiguous diagnosis of “borderline personality” from psychiatrists and mental health personnel;to the outside observer, they would not show a clear-cut “triggering” or breakdown from a previous "apparently normal" state. In other words, they are not bound to inspire special interest, sympathy or passion to clinicians; and they are also bound to be misunderstood as neurotic or even perverse cases. In spite of all that, whenever they have the opportunity - or the willingness - to express what’s really on their mind, they would mention psychotic elementary phenomena. These cases have been termed, since the publication of the volume entitled “La psychose ordinaire”, ordinary psychotics. They are currently considered much more difficult to diagnose than “triggered psychosis”, and of course they also have opened a wide field of interrogations about what we really know concerning the mechanisms of stabilization or defences a psychotic subject is able to display. Among these interrogations: 1) Is this really a new paradigm, ie are these cases different from “classical psychoses”? 2) To what extent does the classical lacanian theory remain appropriate to understand such cases? 3) Should the theory of elementary phenomena be modified? Insomuch as the Lacanian theory of psychoses rests mainly on the notion of elementary phenomena, we will start with the 3rd question , and then try to answer the two others. What are psychotic elementary phenomena? The phrase “psychotic elementary phenomena” is still not familiar to clinicians belonging to the Anglo-saxon cultural domain, in spite of several publications that attempted to clarify what was at stakes. It is essential to the Lacanian diagnosis of psychosis, but has been widely misunderstood even in some French-speaking circles. As I have devoted a number of papers to this theme, I will try to summarize the main features of this notion. Its origin can be traced back to German and French psychiatry at the end of the XIXth century – mainly in the circles that tried to make the best of the new neurological knowledge gained in the study of aphasic syndromes after 1870. The general idea was of course that if neurological lesions could be proven in the various forms of aphasia, the same was likely to be found in psychotic symptoms since language pathology was conspicuous in them. In fact, although the phrase “elementary symptoms” is to be found in Kraepelin or Wernicke, "basic phenomena" in Clerambault, “elementary phenomenon” proper is much more characteristic of Lacan himself, and as we shall see, he gave it a special quality which was hardly to be found before him. To make a long story short, the failure to find neurological lesions univocally responsible for psychotic symptoms had lead most French clinicians to fall back on the notion of “psychological mechanisms” constituent of delusional states. The notion supposed that in a given clinical case, what the French called a "tableau clinique", by tactfully questioning the patient, you could trace out the different layers of the delirium, constituted by the action of these mechanisms; sometimes, these mechanisms appeared to function in a pure manner, other times they were mixted, some of them appearing more "primary" and others more "secundary". For instance, a psychotic individual attempting to murder a political leader could have experienced verbal hallucinations, and secondarily tried to explain them as the result of the evil deeds from the politician’s party, to finally arrive at the conclusion that he had to destroy this man in order to restore the laws of the universe. This was for instance the kind of explanation favoured by the followers of Magnan. However, Régis, who studied at length this sort of case (which he termed “regicides”) found that in a majority of cases, the primal phenomenon was delusional interpretation, ie a delusional insight, a sort of revelation in which the person found that he had a mission to save humankind, and from which he gradually deduced the necessity to uproot the current sovereign. Another example: in their classical description of the "illusion des Sosies" (what is currently called "Capgras syndrome"),Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux expose the case of a female patient who showed a combination of hallucinatory, interpretive and imaginary mechanisms; while some of the imaginary phenomena (she feels that she should save detained babies) represented on one side an attempt to explain auditory hallucinations, some others (the belief that her relatives were being modified) were influenced by interpretive mechanisms. In fact, the examination of the various kinds of elementary components of madness and their combinations became characteristic of French – and to some extent of German psychiatry (especially Carl Wernicke’s Breslau school) at the turn of the XXth century. By then, a number of mechanisms had been differenciated: - various forms of verbal hallucinations, ranging from very sensorialized to “silent hallucinations” that were practically indistinguishable from delusional interpretations, - delusional interpretations, ranging from mere intuitions to highly rationalized explanations - imaginary mechanisms, believed by some clinicians followers of Dupré to be at the root of psychotic mythomania and megalomania - discordance, a mechanism described by Philippe Chaslin as being fundamental in schizophrenia - delusional negation, a mechanism proposed by Cottard as being at the root of psychotic forms of depression (“mélancolie délirante”). Whereas these mechanisms enjoyed overall consensual recognition, other mechanisms remained more controversial, like “pathological passion”, a mechanism Clérambault presented as constituent of “pure erotomania” and other “psychoses passionnelles” ; and there was some uncertainty over the mechanisms underlying manic-depressive disorders. Besides, if these mechanisms appeared as mainly intellectual, they were understood as being paralleled by corresponding bodily experiences. For instance a persecutive idea determined by a delusional interpretation could, at times, be replaced by delusional hypochondria; mental or verbal discordance could also be expressed by bizarre motor antics and/or by disorders in body structuration; delusional negation was described by Cottard as a discreet state of mind, a sort of constant pessimism which could convert itself into the idea that the environment did not really exist anymore, and that the patient's own body was rotten, destroyed and immortal. Nevertheless, it was understood that in paranoia, the subjective experience of body structure remained relatively intact, whereas the distortions were maximal in schizophrenia. It was clear to everybody was that these mechanisms were intimate, “primary”, and that they usually were not easy to express. Most of the time, patients displayed secondary symptoms, some of them direct defences against the mechanisms, some of them negotiated with the environment, as Arnaud and Clérambault had demonstrated in some cases of délire à deux, called délires imposés where a frankly delusional patient practically negotiated the recognition and justification of some aspects of his delusional experiences with a significant other, this latter person being a neurotic ready to admit a banal and readily understandable persecutory claim, but nothing more. Now what were the main changes brought about by Lacan? To make a long story short once again, at least three things. Lacan seems to have, from the start, considered that the basic phenomena (as Clerambault for instance called them) should be called “phénomènes élémentaires” and considered as constituents of what he called “personnalité”. He did not deny that some biological causality might be involved to some extent, but considered that the Freudian “psychogénèse”, the “causalité psychique” had a crucial importance in the shaping of elementary phenomena, because elementary phenomena appeared as extreme forms of meaning. He subsequently described it as an imaginary phenomenon of defence (mirror stage), but later (in his “return to Freud”) portrayed it as directly related to the intimate structure of subjectivity. Another essential aspect is the relationship between transference and elementary phenomena. I have shown that in his seminal description of the “primary symptom” of paranoia, August Neisser claimed that these patients constantly insisted that their interlocutor "would know" why they were besieged by feelings of relation – Neisser was Serieux & Capgras’ main inspiration to describe the délire d’interprétation, a crucial reference in Lacan’s theory of paranoia. In other words, elementary phenomena implied a "subject supposed to know." A third point concerns the analogy between elementary phenomena and the structure of neurotic fundamental fantasy. There is at least one common point, the designation of the subject, obvious in the case of paranoia. Paranoiacs are beset by the feeling that they are being designated, looked at, spied on. Now what Freud has shown about neurotic fantasy in “A child is being beaten", is that in his most repressed fantasy, the neurotic represents himself as an object. This implied that there is a clear continuum from paranoia to neurosis. Schizophrenia might seem to be excluded from this, but in fact, most of them can be shown to be oscillating between moments when they are “bodyless”, “nameless”, and disorganized, etc, and moments when they manage to build up some paranoiac traits, for instance some delusional vocation. This is crucial for what follows. In fact, one can find in Lacan two streams that present a certain antagonism: 1) On one side, there is the idea that elementary phenomena are embedded in or even constituent of personality, ie, as I have written, that elementary phenomena are analogous to the neurotic fundamental fantasy; that is, neurosis should be considered as an -- extreme -- variety of psychosis. This notion is frankly expressed in the 1970ies with the RSI model, but it was also there previously, as we shall see. 2) On the other side, the idea, initially influenced by Edouard Pichon, that the difference between neurosis and psychosis rests on the fact that a certain loss has been accepted in neurosis, which has been denied in psychosis; this supposes a sort of a qualitative difference between neurosis and psychosis. One of the main reasons why the notion of "ordinary psychosis" was promoted is because some clinicians have tended to believe that the second aspect, ie, maximizing the differences between neuroses and psychoses, was the most important part of Lacan's teaching on the subject. I will contend that the notion of “ordinary psychosis” is important because it corrects several imprudent assumption: that Lacan’s concept of psychosis implied that psychosis had practically nothing in common with neurosis; or that elementary phenomena appeared exclusively a short time before the triggering of manifest psychotic disorders, and should be considered as belonging to an outdated part of Lacan's teaching. In fact, it is this viewpoint that should be seen as outdated, as it mainly rests on the notion that Lacan's concept of psychosis was processual, that is, followed a regular course. Here, I must quote a previous text, in which I tried to delineate what was at stakes with elementary phenomena : "Lacan has given to the expression ‘elementary phenomenon’ at least four sorts of meanings: 1. The possibility to isolate discrete pathognomonic symptoms. 2. The possibility to sort out in non-triggered psychotic cases minimal symptoms which can sum up most of the following delusional developments, in a way quite similar to the ‘fundamental fantasy’ in the neurotic cases. 3. The possibility to find hints of the modes of stabilisation’s that can be foreseen in a given patient. 4. Most of the elementary phenomena imply some sort of a ‘subject supposed to know’, which characterise the structure of the Other." Now it is quite clear that elementary phenomena are excellent candidates to account for discreet “ordinary psychoses”. Advantages and limits of the notion of "ordinary psychosis In non-Lacanian environments, cases that would currently be termed "ordinary pschosis" are usually diagnosed “borderline”. But of course, the problem is that “borderline” designates at least five different clinical issues (Sauvagnat 2004): - non-discernible psychoses - sexual orientation issues - “attachment problems” - acting out problems - character defense problems (what North Americans call “personality disorders”) To put it roughly, ordinary psychoses could roughly correspond to the first, ie the “psychotic borderline”; but the problem is that when one says “borderline”, one tends to think of the fifth, the Kernbergian “borderline personality syndrome”, which is an attempt to group these five distinct issues under the heading of personality disorders. In spite of that, one can consider that ordinary psychoses do correspond to pseudoneurotic schizophrenia cases, ambulatory schizophrenia, monomanias (XIXth century), abortive paranoias, psychotic as if personalities, and also of course the (true) bipolar before they are diagnosed as such. But it also invites us to think of the many other cases that have not been coined yet… because they are so ordinary. One thing is certain: "ordinary psychoses" cannot be considered as a specific or new entity; the phrase designates above all a clinical issue: the difference between what we know about psychoses and the quasi infinite variety of mental mechanisms a psychotic person can exert. Although one of the most frequently cited clinical examples given at the Conversation d'Arcachon concerned a schizophrenic subject whose functioning remained a mystery to his analyst (the patient felt "misty", in his own terms and finally displayed a full-blown negative therapeutic reaction), it is clear that one of the most inspiring cases was probably the one presented by JP Deffieux. This patient, who would in other times have been depicted as having an "as if" personality, was able to exert the most disparate callings, ranging from monk to prostitute, without ever seeming to be anchored to a minimally stable fundamental fantasy. But it is clear what is required here is to take seriously the last model Lacan has left us, the model of knotting, which implies that we should take as a starting point the type of difficult relationship schizophrenics have with their body - to them, "having", "possessing" a body is not an obvious phenomenon - but also the construction of the symptom. Many cases presented as exhibiting "ordinary psychosis" do not complain about a precise symptom, and obviously find it difficult to suppose a knowledge of the analyst concerning their difficulties; this makes them all the more ordinary, as ordinary citizens do not (or at least pretend not to) take their symptoms seriously. In this respect, they can be opposed to artists, of whom Aristotle claimed that their genius is always accompanied by "melancholia". If there is something the catch-phrase "ordinary psychosis" should invite us to do, it is certainly to study how these patients can, in effect, become more artistic. ------------------------------- References:

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Sauvagnat F (1991b)"Phénomènes élémentaires psychotiques et manoeuvres thérapeutiques", (en collaboration), in Revue française de psychiatrie, décembre 1991. Sauvagnat F (1991c)"Crise d'adolescence ou entrée dans la psychose? La critique du cas Renée de M. Séchehaye par H.C. Rümke et K. Conrad dans les années cinquante", (en collaboration), Informations psychiatrique, Déc 1991. Sauvagnat F (1992a)"La liberté du psychotique. Automatisme et libération",  actes du colloque Autonomie et   automatisme  dans les psychoses , sous la direction de   H. Grivois, Masson, Paris. Sauvagnat F (1992b)Bedeutungseffekte in den Psychosen, in Hofmann, W. & Schmitt, W. Hrsgb. : Phänomen, Struktur, Psychose, S. Roderer Verlag, Regensburg . Sauvagnat F (1994a)Los psicoanalistas y la cuestion de la comprensibilidad de los trastornos psicoticos, Revista de la Asociacion Espanola de Neuropsiquiatria, Vol. XIV, n°51,  p. 653-676 Sauvagnat F (1994b)"Du regard à l'invocation. Un cas de dysmorphophobie délirante". Quarto, Revue de l'Ecole de la Cause freudienne en Belgique, n° 54. Sauvagnat F (1995a)"Le déjà vu comme surgissement du savoir supposé", in Cahier de l'ACF-VLB, n° 4, printemps 1995, p. 24-34. Sauvagnat F (1995b) "Une passion psychotique du vrai: ironie et déréliction chez Attila Jozsef, La Cause Freudienne, Revue de psychanalyse, n°31, octobre 1995, p. 141-152. Sauvagnat F (1997a) «Phénomènes élémentaires psychotiques et travail institutionnel«, in Cahier de l'ACF-VLB, n°8, été 1997, p. 101-117. Sauvagnat F (1997b)"Conrad Ferdinand Meyer ou le dévoilement mélancolique", post-face à Conrad-Ferdinand Meyer: Les souffrances d'un enfant, Editions Anthropos, 1997, p. 55-110. Sauvagnat F (1997c) La "désensorialisation" des hallucinations acoustico-verbales: quelques résultats actuels d'un débat centenaire, in Polyphonie pour Ivan Fonagy,  ouvrage collectif, L'Harmattan, Paris, p.165-182 Sauvagnat F (1997d) La question de la temporalité dans les psychoses maniaco-dépressives, in L'inconscient ignore-t-il le temps, ouvrage collectif, Presses Universitaires de Rennes,  p. 173-190. Sauvagnat F (1997e)Cuestiones actuales en las psicoterapias de las psicosis, in La Salud mental en los noventa. Clinica, pràcticas, organizacion. IV Jornadas de la Asociacion Castellano-Leonesa de Salud Mental, ed. por La Asociacion Castellano-Leonesa de Salud Mental, p. 13-43. Sauvagnat F (1999a)"Phénomènes corporels chez des patients masculins" in Institut du Champ Freudien: La psychose ordinaire, p.p. 103-122 (en collaboration). Sauvagnat F (1999b)La question de la réaction thérapeutique négative, in Psychologie clinique, n°6, p. 125-150. Sauvagnat F (1999c)"La forclusion du nom-du-père est-elle inséparable du "pousse à la femme""? in Destins sexués du sujet, Section Clinique de Rennes, ouvrage collectif, p. 105-130. Sauvagnat F (1999d)"A propos des conceptions déficitaristes des troubles schizophréniques",  in  Sciences et fictions, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, p. 167-188. Sauvagnat F (1999e)"Secrétaire de l'aliéné aujourd'hui" in Ornicar?-Digital n°77, 78, 79, 80, 81. Sauvagnat F (1999f)"L'écholalie: un symptôme cardinal des psychoses infantiles", in L'Envers de Paris, Revue de l'Association Psychanalytique L'Envers de Paris, n° 21, octobre, p. 10-13. Sauvagnat F (1999g)"Phénomènes élémentaires et fonction de l'écrit", in Quarto, Revue Freudienne de Belgique n°68, Octobre 1999, p. 39-44. Sauvagnat F (2000a)"On thespecificity of psychotic elementary phenomena", Psychoanalytic Notebooks of the European School of Psychoanalysis, August 2000, p. 95-110. Sauvagnat F (2000b)"L'autisme à la lettre: quels types de changements sont proposés aux sujets autistes aujourd'hui?», in  Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, Gand, 2000, n°39, p. 113-149. Sauvagnat F (2001)"La question  de la division subjective psychotique chez V Kh Kandinsky et GG de Clérambault" (en collaboration avec A. Chojnowska), in Sauvagnat .F (Dir) Divisions subjectives et personnalités multiples, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001, p. 173-192. Sauvagnat F (2002)"Position actuelle de la question des hallucinations chez les enfants psychotiques", in Les enjeux de la voix en psychanalyse, dans et hors la cure,ouvrage collectif, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble,  p. 59-84.   Sauvagnat F (2003a)"Fatherhood and naming in J Lacan’s works«, in The symptom, Online Journal for Lacan.com. http://lacan.com/fathernamef.htm, 2003. Sauvagnat F (2003b) «Drives, demand and desire: on the clinique of anorexia nervosa«, Anamorphosis, Journal of the San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies, n°5,  p. 3-22. Sauvagnat F (2003c)"La systématisation paranoiaque en question«, in Pensée psychotique et création de systèmes. La machine mise à nu» sous la direction de F.Hulak, ed. Erès, p 141-175. Sauvagnat F (2003d) «On the Lacanian Treatment of Psychotics: Historical Background and Future Prospects«, Psychoanalytic Review (New York), 90 (3), October 2003: 303-328. Sauvagnat F (2003e)"Réflexions sur le statut de la mythomanie délirante», L’Evolution Psychiatrique, 68  p. 73-96. Sauvagnat F (2004a)Competing models in the psychoanalytic treatment of the Borderline syndrome: a few historical landmarks, in Ormosko Srecanje 4: Nedokoncna zgodba 2: shizoidna in borderline osebnostna motnja, Ormoz-Ptuj, Slovenija, junij 2004, p 92-108. Sauvagnat F (2004b) «Diabolus in psychopathologia, ou crime, perversité et folie, in Recherches en psychanalyse, n°2,Décembre 2004, p 73-95. Sauvagnat F (2004c)La psychopathologie saisie par les mythes, in Zafiropoulos M et Boccara M: Le mythe: pratique, récit, théorie. Volume IV. Anthropologie et psychanalyse. Paris, Anthropos , p 113-156. Sauvagnat F (2004d) (in collaboration with Alvarez, J.M»  & Esteban, R). Fundamentos de psicopatologia psicoanalitica, Madrid,  ed. Sintesis,  (790 pages). Sauvagnat F (2005a) Body structure in autistic and psychotic children, in Helena de Preester & Veroniek Knockaert (eds)Body image and body schema, John Benjamin Publishing Co, Advances in Consciousness research 62, p 153-172. Sauvagnat F (2005b) Psychotic Anxiety and its Correlates in Bodily Experiences: Some Remarks on ‘New Symptoms’, psychoanalytical notebooks, N°14. Sauvagnat F (2005c) Hallucinations psychotiques et énonciation, in   La voix, dans et hors la cure, N°thématique, revue Psychologie clinique,  n°19, p93-125. Sauvagnat F (2006)-elementary phenomena, in Skeldon, R(ed.): The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis, Edinburgh University Press, p140. Sauvagnat F (2006)-The issue of suitability in Lacanian Psychoanalysis, in Greenspan S, McWilliams N, Wallerstein R (eds) Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, Alliance of Psychodynamic Organisations, Silver Spring, Maryland  p 417-422. Sauvagnat F (2007) Remarques sur les rapports entre J Lacan et  N Chomsky[Remarks on the relationship betweenJ Lacan & N Chomsky], in Revue Internationale Langage et Inconscient, N°3, Janvier 2007, p. 102-120.

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Preventing violence against women essay

Essay Topic:\n\nThe rating of e truly(prenominal) the authorization possibilities to interrupt r historic period against wowork force.\n\nEssay Questions:\n\nHow is soulfulnessnel pay offd and what relation does K-12 training has to abandon?\n\nwhy is instruction non- red port eventful?\n\nWhy does young-be wee-weeting(prenominal) force against wo considers exit in the long graze?\n\nThesis State handst:\n\nAs boorren check off every function connected with assault and emphasis and how to volume with it they produce armed and do non get bewildered in attitudes that require industrious actions in order to larn hold cho accustom or respond to to each one vitrine of rage against wowork force be it a somatogenic, communicatory, sexual, or wound up sheath of ab utilise.\n\n \nPr withalting strength against women Essay\n\n \n\n disconcert of contents:\n\no gatemodal value\n\no Violence rendering and K-12 program line\n\no article of belief non - untamed mien\n\no antheral force start against women\n\no Violence- keep openion by dint of tuition\n\no decision\n\nDuring her disembodied spirit age atomic number 53 extinct of both women exit be beaten by a man who relishs her!\n\nLeonore Loeb Adler\n\n1.Introduction\n\nEducation has eer played an integral procedure in the lives of every champion sister in the rude and in the world. This is non affect as it is development that gives chel atomic number 18n the friendship to think, evaluate and be fitting to order a problem and solve it. Social skills, calvelyicular thinking skills, problem solvent skills, empathy training whole told of these ar obtained by means of the action of instruction and ar an essential part of a becoming a multi-sided developed record. One of the major(ip) characteristics of much(prenominal) a per countersignality is the aptitude to solve all the conflicts without every infringement and specially without abando n. The process of socialization of chel arn by with(predicate) age appropriate K-12 in all the skills listed above enthr atomic number 53 trainhouse- boys in the group that argon slight likely to be scarlet to women and minimize the determine and beliefs that boys form according to their male entitlement. As boorren checker everything connected with attack and force out and how to deal with it they get armed and do non get lost in situations that require active actions in order to recognize or respond to each type of hysteria against women be it a somatogenic, verbal, sexual, or delirious type of abuse. Boys acquire the cleverness to react and recognize vehemence against women owing to the shallowing and familiarity they get they and it is a hygienic presupposition to non being war-ridden. stock-still school is just one of the pointors influencing boys and the different one is family. If the familys inter soulal dealing ar characterized by high calc ulate of force-out, school non- reddened education may fail to succeed.\n\n2. Violence interpretation and K-12 education\n\nIf we take delirium against women and chel atomic number 18n as the criterion to identify squirtren from adverse families and as something school-education tries to tame such look to its minimum, it is demand to identify the term force-out itself. The term military force is everydayly utilize to define aggression and acts of abuse that eventually bowel movement damage to private plaza, animals and even people. Violence is a reflectivity of a appearance with a destructive orientation. Random municipal abandon, the one that is very commonalty present tense causes a push-down list of troubles immediately for too umpteen people and in particular women get serious, irretrievable injuries that changes do suffering to their physical possibilities in fooling vital activities. Violence to women does really damage the partnerships morality and i s the example of a primitive sex ground conflict based on the impression that women ar mens private property.Violence against women is a synonymy of any act of discrimination and physical abuse aimed to hurt a girl or a charwoman. One of the closely(prenominal) get around acts of violence against women is domestic violence, attack and others.\n\nAs all the children, including boys, melt down to counterpart the demeanour of adults and their bring up in the first place, they create very sensitive to violence in footing of write it, too. Sometimes school-education flexs the plainly kickoff of exhibit children the commissions of recognizing the responding to violence and if the process of education is pure and professionally then it empowers all children and extraly boys to start active participants and not just observers of violence-prevention.\n\nThe abridgment K-12 is used for the designation for the primary(a) and secondary education in North America. K-12, or Kay by with(predicate) twelve is a trim for lovableergarten through twelfth mannikin education. This education implies working with children from tailfin to 18 classs old, and this is the whole period when the children learn all the values and believes that forget define their upcoming sustenance. The K-12 education if conducted powerful is an excellent pre crack to set grow boys not to be passive in the women-oriented red acts exclusively to endure enough belief in order to remain them. The age from 5 to 18 is an exceptional period for education, as it becomes a filter for violence in general and violence against women in particular. At the age of 18 young men move their proceeding life. They sire looking for a bracing and thinking closely their future wives, so it is essential to make sure they do sincerely know how to manage their kindle and not let it turn into untrained behavior against women. The K-12 education is based on the notion that every child is uncomparable and needs a identify set out. Besides the feature that K-12 classroom instruction works to set up individual students needs as the classrooms practically include children with different take aim of abilities, it too provides skills that argon knowing to find out the student to be successful in his environment. As children spend most of their time in school it become the very place to fountain them not to be self-assertive and reddish against girls and women.\n\n \n\n3. Teaching non-violent behavior\n\nThe K-12 education in terms of preventing violence against women is very very much demand by the society because the contemporary exposure of children to violence id immense and construct neer been as available as now. Television, video and computer games, films everlastingly give the weak childs mind tonic patterns of obstreperousness and violence. Sometimes children do experience violence themselves or grow up in the atmosp present of threa t or in a contiguity that constantly provides examples of inability to stubbornness and to stop the conflict peacefully. Children start taking all of these as a normal incident and see nothing worse in behaving in the comparable delegacy for the only thing they do is the simply copy what they see.\n\nThe reason that the personality of the teachers nowadays is valued more than their cognition in the course they teaching is because the values and behavior examples delivered to children in the sensitive period preponderate some gaps in the course. comfortably teachers protect children from violence and make sure their development is sizable and they learn what sure bang and virtue is.\n\nThe basic reasons children in general and boys in particular cornerstone be so considerably influenced by violent behavior is because such behavior as it has been mentioned before is rattling learned. The brain starts making tiny connections in the period of puerility hardly in pragma tism these connections argon not sincerely yours critical as they ar taken a priori. At the beginning the childs mind is a Tabula Rasa, a clean board, on which teachers and family with their hand draw the picture of the childs future behavior and personality. So basically saying, the violent behavior against women performed by men is simply an imprint that a man got when he was a boy. While thinking only some the fact that exposure to violence causes boys to be violent in future, teachers and pargonnt should not forget that love is the tool to teach the child to be sympathizeing and patient, to be pleasing and non-aggressive. Mutual understanding makes the child learn constructive way of conflict closure and also learn how to promise himself and not to express his irritation in any destructive way. The education from Kindergarten through the twelfth arrange that is based on acceptance, love and true devotion to children is a contract of preventing violent observations i n the lives of these children. If children olfaction that they are needed and expected at school, if they sprightliness safe expressing their thoughts and know that they are respected and never spite they will never hurt anybody themselves and will have less problems dealing with a striving (Mullender, 2004). It is common knowledge that aggression is a protection and violence is a strong, fixed aggressive behavior (Kimmel & Michael, 1989). And there is no secret in the fact that the majority of teachers are women. If a boy learns to be aggressive from Kindergarten till his senior year in High inform the probability that he will not be violent to women is very low. So here it is necessary to face two major facts: the two most important factors influencing the boys violent orientation are school and family. The majority of teachers are women and the most important person for a child catch, belong to the distaff sexual urge, too. In graphic symbol mother fails to teach her son solve the conflicts constructively and the teacher fails to develop his problem solving skills aggression against women is very apparent to occur. K-12 education with its ability to teach children to cope with detrimental tactile sensations in non-destructive positive ways nowadays has turned to the key share in teaching non-violent behavior against women. This is true for very oftentimes parents are very in use(p) working and have no time to open their child the door to the arable, non-aggressive life.\n\n \n\n4. Male violence against women\n\nViolence in its very essence is a manifestation of the destructive desire to control and have power everywhere another human being. concord to Bancroft there nine types of inglorious men which can use different styles starting with a strictly verbal abuser and ending with a physical batterer (Bancroft, 2003). Male violence against women is a desire to aspect fetch up control over a human being that for ages has been seen as a weak gender. Therefore violence becomes the way of proving that a man or a boy really belongs to a male gender and therefore women have to knuckle joint under him. In other words male violence against women is a characteristic of men, who were handle or neglected in their childhood (Bancroft, 2003).\n\nAccording to the selective information not known at wide public but collected by the federal bureau of investigation out of all the domestic violence acts 95 percent are violent behavior manifestations against women. So this is all basically about(predicate) the gender violence and in the beginning violence over women attached by men. The men who were step in their childhood or were victims of family and school neglect most commonly commit violent criminal behavior. If a trivial boy is constantly undefendable to his father beating his mother he is a potential abuser for every woman in his life (Widom & Maxfield, 2001). The situation becomes even worse if a bantam boy is treat himself, too. The main problem concerning children and boys that are being abused is that cannot learn what is empathy for other people and for the perturb they are experiencing. They treat other people the same as they were treated themselves. So, if a child that is abused or watches his family members or neighbors abuse their relatives get not proper attention at school the boy easily converts into a criminal and his life will be downhearted because of his broken childs heart. Violence against women is not the wrongdoing of men but their misfortune. The true reason is that men used to be boys and these little boys did not have anybody to love and understand them neither at radix nor at school. They did not have anybody to teach him or her how to control their anger, for anger is the major feeling such abusive children experience. They are angry with the people who are so indifferent to them and they become sure nobody is honestly able to understand them and become and violent (Bancroft, 2003).\n\nThis issue is not even about women permit men abuse them and spell them to police and not about men believing that the penalty will not hard. This is about the possibility to prevent violence against women when men are little boys are seek for love just as any girl does (Kimmel & Michael, 1989). Male violence against women has different various forms: verbal violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, buffet women and others. All of these are expiration to the inability to build normal dealingships. As it has been mentioned before school is the second most important element in livery up successful and psychologically healthy men. The aim of K-12 education is to fill in the blanks of impaired relationships within the family of the boy and especially in terms of relations with women. An attentive female teacher, poseing respect and love for a little boy shows him that he is worth of love the way he is and does not have to use his male advantages such as strength to show his dominance over women. As the majority of men are heterosexuals, their female companions are the one that experience violence the most.\n\n \n\n5. Violence-prevention through education\n\nK-12 education can be rather rough-and-ready in term of ontogenesis up non-violent males. Under the condition of an individual differentiated come along to the each boy the process education can guarantee several ways of preventing violence against women. This can happen through the establishment of positive interactions mingled with the teachers and the male-student, learning how to build productive relationships, taking into account the person interest of the child. As the K-12 education implies a lot of delight activities, which take away the fall by the wayside energy that a increase body has and can use in the direction of violent acts. The K-12 education provides the attention to a large variety of aspects concerning the childs life that could provide him t o aggression and afterwards violence. This is achieved through the development of different kind of skills such as physical, social, cognitive and emotional aspects. If a boy gets the required attention if not at home, but at least at school in terms of emotional adhesion and psychical exercises he is not in the seek group for becoming violent towards women.\n\nContemporary schools provide a counselor to every child and this person is responsible for observe the child behavior. In cases the behavior becomes not adaptive and insane the counselor may feel free to turn for a psychological assistance or deal with the childs parents. The professionalism of teachers should primary reveal the ability to teach the boy to modulate his emotional conditions. K-12 through teaches boys how to speak off their thoughts and emotional conditions. This tout ensemble coincides with one of the best go in the prevention of violence against women. The K-12 education teaches makes boys learn that it is fine to be angry and that each person sometimes does feel angry but the biggest release is how a person reveals his anger to others. A boy, being in class learns that there are inappropriate ways of covering his anger and the most productive way to do it is to state what he is feeling and not physically hurt a human being. Such an approach implies that a boy will never hit a woman though in the first place women are believed to be weaker than men are.\n\n6. Conclusion\n\nBoys learn violence by watching big ups. Not depending on the fact whether the boys family is or is not healthy in term of violence school takes the most part of the responsibility of teaching boys how to be not violent. The K-12 education can prevent boys and eventually men form being violent towards women by teaching them to solve their problems utilise word of respect and a wide range of non-violent actions. The female teachers become an essential part of K-12 stopping violence against woman. If a boy established relations that are full of reciprocal respect and emotional attachment with a female teacher he will learn how to control and monitor his negative feelings and therefore will take this pattern for the rest of his life!If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Custom essay writing service. Free essay/order revisions. Essays of any complexity! Courseworks, term papers, research papers. 100% confidential!Homework live help. Custom Essay Order is available 24/7!

[lunaschild2016]

Take Your Time Part - 5

Rating: M (Swearing, smut, suggested violence and abuse)

Family isn’t always defined by blood and the strongest of ties can come from the most unexpected places. But could you risk losing that family when the love changes? What do you do when you find your soulmate at the age of sixteen? What if that soulmate is only nine? Sometimes all you can do…is take your time. Eric/OC AU No War, No Divergents

@kenzieam @jaihardy @jojuarez26 @iammarylastar @beautifulramblingbrains @badassbaker @meganbee15

A/N: This entire thing was literally written in a fever delirium and on strong cold meds. Apparently my smut levels rise when I am delirious.

Achievement unlocked: Smut

Level Advanced to: A Little Less Of A Rank Novice from Rank Novice

Perk Gained: Only 75% Chance of head exploding when reading or writing smut.

Anything ITALIC will be a flashback, memory or internal conversation.

********************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Lacey

She was in a fog of jumbled thoughts and memories. Sounds came from around her but felt like they were filtering from so far away.

At first she had fought away from it all. It only kept the pain and cold too near. It was like the deeper she dove, the further from that she got, and it was so inviting. She heard his voice calling her back. She tried hard the first few times, she tried so hard for him. She couldn’t stand to hear the pain his voice.

She didn’t understand his words, just that he was in pain. She got so tired though and it became harder to fight. She was failing and all she could do was hope he understood when she tried to tell him how sorry she was.

The thought was circling that she was happy.

Should she be happy? She is dying, she knows that. It isn’t that she is dying that she is happy about.

No that isn’t what has her feeling at peace right now. It is knowing that she could have died alone. If she hadn’t insisted on going with Eric to make the call for help, then he would have gone one and she would have been there alone when the pain hit.

She wouldn’t have been held in his arms and looking into those blue eyes that have always been able to see straight into her soul. That was the last clear thing she could focus on. Then this deep black bliss descended over her and she didn’t care about much anymore.

Now that bliss was gone. Fading away with the darkness.

The bits of memories were like rocks being thrown through blacked out glass panes. Little beams of awareness and light breaking through. Painful at first, but easier as time went on.

______________________________________________________________

Lacey huddled in the corner of her blackened room holding her brother close to her. The shouts and crashes seemed to be dulling but it was hard to tell for sure. She continued to stroke through Wade’s hair and crooned song after song to him as she rocked them both.

She was exhausted and they both needed to go to bed for the night but until the fighting of her parent’s ended, she couldn’t stop. It helped his fear and kept him from hearing the clear words of hate that poured through the walls. Once her big sister Henley did this for her and then when Wade came along, for them both.

It never really completely helped but Lacey liked to think she could save Wade from knowing certain things about their parents. Knowing just how toxic their relationship was to each other. Knowing how little care and regard they had for their children. Knowing some of the ideas or plans they had bandied about their daughters that had made Henley and Lacey tremble in fear.

At times Lacey found herself being grateful that her parents seemed content to keep their physical assaults to each other. It was a bitter thought that seemed like a shitty thing to be grateful for.

Yes, they never hit their kids, normally. But they didn’t do anything to help them either. While Henley was still around, her sister had somehow managed to be able keep food in the apartment. It was never much but enough to keep them fed when school was out and they couldn’t eat meals there.

Henley was in training now and Lacey was already failing miserably. Just that morning she had went to the store to get food from the commissary and was told that all point transactions not done by either adult could not be processed. She had at first tried to plead with the clerk but it had drawn too much attention and the clerk wasn’t looking to be swayed.

In anger she had stormed back to the apartment. When she got there she hadn’t thought beyond trying to plead and reason with her mother. She should have known better, there was no way her mom would go against her father.

He had stumbled into room in the middle of Lacey trying to convince her mother to go with her to the commissary, she was backhanded roughly instead.

“All you do is steal from me. You and the other little ungrateful shits.” Her father had drunkenly snarled at her. Wade had started to cry and he rounded on him. “Shut up! Just shut up!”

Lacey had darted forward and threw herself in front of him, getting another slap. Wade started crying behind her but Lacey still stood her ground in front of her brother. Her glare at her father earned another slap.

From somewhere deep inside of her boozed out state, Lacey’s mother managed to pull out some concern for her kids.

“Oh leave them alone. Let’s go hit up Terri’s and see what action they have going on.” Her mother coaxed her father, barely sparing a glance at the sight of her two kids huddled together.

He paused as he continued to glare at them. “I better not hear of or catch you two trying to take anything from me ever again. Or I might just go ahead and sell your ass to the nice man that offered to pay for a pretty young girl.” His grin was a leer but his tone let Lacey know he was serious this time.

When they had gone and Lacey had gotten Wade calmed down; she had gotten them both dressed. Today was visiting day and they would need to make their way to the Pit to wait for Henley.

Wade sniffled a little as she combed out his hair and made sure his shoes were all tied up. “I’m hungry, Lacey.”

Lacey felt the guilt stab through her but she smiled at Wade with a reassuring smile. “I know buddy. We get to go see Henley then we can get some food and cake from the dining hall. Won’t that be nice to eat with her?”

Wade looked down and nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess.” He mumbled.

Lacey sighed as she moved to get dressed herself and tried to figure out a way to hide the bruising on her face. Knowing there was nothing she could do for it she thought quickly as she pulled her hair back.

Instead of trying to hide it she would show it proudly. She just had to get Wade to go along with the story she was going to tell.

She bent down in front of Wade who was still looking upset and sullen. “Buddy, I need you to do me a big favor. One for Henley too. Do you think you can help me out with something?”

Wade loved being helpful and it was rare that Lacey ever asked him to do anything really big. So when she approached it in this manner, she saw his eyes lighting up and his back straightening.

“I can help, Lacey. I am big enough now. Right?”

“Yeah buddy, you sure are.” She affirmed with a nod and smile. “Ok. So you know how Henley is training right?”

Wade nodded solemnly. “It’s very important.”

“It is and we don’t want her to worry about anything do we?” Lacey said just as seriously.

Wade shook his head vigorously. “Nuh uh.”

“Exactly. So that is why we are taking care of ourselves right? We need her to do her best and we can’t let her think anything is wrong. So...I am going to tell her I got into a fight with another kid.” Lacey said firmly.

Wade frowned deeply and shook his head. “But Lace...that would be a lie. We always say we don’t lie to each other.”

Lacey chewed on her lip and she nodded. “I know Wade and I don’t like it either. But it is more important that Henley not worry about us. If she worried she might not do well in fights or other things and that would be worse, right?”

She paused and let Wade make up his mind with this information.

Wade was smart. Really intelligent and sensitive.

He had been doing so well at school, eating up learning like a starved child. Then their father’s taunts and snide comments when he did bother to come around had begun to weigh on him and wear him down.

Henley and Lacey were working hard to motivate and encourage him again. Part of that was letting him make decisions and process things on his own. By supplying him information in the manner you would an adult almost and letting him know she had confidence in him to make a decision.

It didn’t take long for him to come to his conclusion. He nodded to her with an air of gravity. “We need to make sure Henley doesn’t worry.”

Lacey beamed at him. “Thank you for helping me make this decision, buddy. I knew you would be able to help me figure things out.”

Wade smiled at her proudly. “I want to help out now too, sis”

She knew that she would let him take on the small things but she would always take the burden of the rest on. Just like her big sister before her.

“Thank you, Wade. Now let’s go see Henley.”

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Lacey hated the stares she got as Wade and she stood waiting for Henley in the Pit. Some of them were filled with pity, others were filled with disdain. It had her glaring people down and her back snapping into rigid straightness.

Wade was oblivious to it for which she was thankful.

She finally saw Henley, all but dragging two young men she had never seen before along with her.

They must be transfers then.

One hung back a little ways while the other firmly kept her sister’s hand in his. He had a wide smile as he looked to her and Lacey guessed that her sister had found someone she liked. Even more reason to make sure her sister didn’t worry.

Henley deserved to be able to have friends. To enjoy herself. She never got to do that before choosing because she was always busy taking care of them.

So when Henley’s face had fallen before getting angry at the sight of her bruise, Lacey prepared to give her best performance.

Then the tall boy with the curly dark blonde hair and all too knowing blue eyes had spoken up and almost ruined her lie.

She had glared right back at him but inside she was shifting uncomfortably. It felt like the longer he looked at her the more he saw of everything she kept hidden inside. She didn’t like it one damn bit.

How dare he try and see inside her hidden places!

But at lunch the feeling of his stare had changed. It had felt almost comforting. She could tell he guessed what might have happened. She expected the looks of pity or disgust to be there in his eyes but it never came.

Instead he talked to Wade about school and for the first time in a while she saw the spark her brother had for learning coming back. As the lunch passed and they got cake, Eric had looked at her then winked before turning back to her sister and his friend.

It had made her feel warm and safe. Like he was telling her knew, and he had her back. It made her feel stronger in a way.

That was the first step for Lacey in falling for Eric Coulter at the age of nine.