Claudia and Duffy

The Two Collars

The grave-digging instinct kicks in, and I find myself holing up in the bathroom reading books I haven't touched since I was ten in order to avoid doing things that will enable me to graduate. Lovely, lovely; finding things in there that I never knew were written in it, stuff a fifth-grader wouldn't notice, stuff about life and pain and adult perspective. I'm going to put these same books away and read them again when I'm thirty-five and so on every few years, to see if it keeps happening. I am convinced that a well-written work of children's fiction is automatically in the 98th percentile of the world's best books.

Children traditionally resent the idea that "you'll understand better when you're older." It's becoming a delightful thought to me, as I hope it still holds true.

Also I am thinking about John Donne, and poems about God raping us.

Some people find this imagery extremely offensive, and I can see why. But what is more offensive than the idea of someone directly influencing your will against every inclination of your being? God did that to me several times this month that I was aware of. I didn't want my mind to be changed and then suddenly I knew it was about to be changed for me and there wasn't a thing I could do about it. The weird part is the moment when the will says "okay" to this as it is happening. As if, in the ravishment, the victim consents and becomes the beloved in his own eyes, which he was in the eyes of the lover all along.

Heh, heh. In looking up information on an author, I somehow stumbled across this blog. It's well-written reflections of a middle-aged mother about the Fundy Baptist College she went to - the messes there, her wacked-out roommates, hypocrisy and true grace. Listen to this.

"That day, after Mack hit the wimmins libbers so hard, Lilly started a new comic named Femm-Bomm, menopausal mistress of mayhem and carnage. Femm-Bomm attacked Christian womanhood by going around blowing up Bible believing churches and could only be stopped by taking away her IUD."

I haven't read very far, but this is enjoyable - cynicism and forgiveness, both.

Posted by tuggy at 01.30.04 21:32