Welcome
I just now (+2021.09.28 ca. 05:00 ET) read about Marshall McLuhan saying something about the alphabet and nudity. I am not much interested in what MM really said (see here), although the interaction did apparently arouse the indignation of an academic dwarf, whom McLuhan's words aroused to indignation. I loathe dwarfs. They try to bring down their betters by calling them to account for saying things which are not denotatively precisely 100% correct, i.e., for not dotting their "i"s and/or not crossing their "t"s. Since they cannot create value, they can pick nits. The dwarfs are small and they make everything small.
Alphabet and nudity got me thinking anew about my handwriting (example above). Quick review: I was elementary schooled back in the 1050's, in Richmond Virginia, before they accepted that The South had lost the Civil War. In third grade we sang about the darkies weepin' for massa' being in the cold, cold ground, and so forth. One thing that was absolutely mandatory in elementary schooling, both North and South of the Mason-Dixon line, was penmanship: kids wrote and practiced writing longhand cursive letters, and the result often looked like what the Declaration of Independence would, if Thomas Jefferson had been a semi-literate spastic. I was not enthralled with mine.
I have completely forgotten or repressed how it happened, but one fine day in 1958 or 1959, I must have decided to stop doing it: I started writing all block uppercase letters ("ABCDE...") with "caps" (such as the first letter in the first word in a sentence) just BIGGER. I can find no precedent or motivation for this. My father wrote "print" but he deployed normative upper and lowercase letters. My achievement seems to have been a small-time stroke of genius, a miracle, or, as my dolt teach at the time, Mr. Mike Rentko, threatened me because he probably dared not flunk me because I was an "A" student:
"You might be able to get away with this in school, but you will never keep up in college."
His prophesy seems to have been proven wrong ("Yale College, 1968, Summa cum Laude" me; Him, 'what?'). But I have remembered his threat; I remember bad things people do to me. Now, to the present:
Thinking about the alphabet and nudity, isn't cursive script sort of like ante-bellumSouthern belles' long dresses with a zillion petticoats underneath, "modestly", demurely, hiding their crotches? Isn't all uppercase writing, metaphorically, naked, even: "IN YOUR FACE"? I herewith retroactively reclaim my handwriting for nakedness: what you see is what you get, no politeness, no sugarcoating (or very little: the lower case letter "y" has always been a problem for me...)?
I herewith retroactively assert that my change in handwriting style was telling my teaches: "Shove it up your ass, stupids! (turnaround is fair play: my parents subjected me to enemas when my fecal production did not satisfy them). And I am claiming this as a kind of Freudian repression: I meant it even though I didn't recognize I did, all the better to be able to get away with it. They were always stuffing stuff down my throat, like I was a goose for foie gras, and I could not do anything about them. But here was one occasion where I was able to express what I thought of them and what they were doing to me, like the downed U.S. pilot whom the North Vietnamese dragged before TV cameras for a photo op and he communicated his plight by blinking his eyes in morse code and somebody in the CIA figured it out – but his captors never had a clue.
I hated my parents, especially my mother. Their flesh was repusive.I hated [almost all] my teachers in "prep" school. I hated where I was stuck less-than-living. I hated my cursive handwriting which was like the trail of a garden slug. Did I aver and feel these things at the time? Not much: They had largely destroyed my growing soul, expecting to fill the thus vacated space with the semiotic virus thst infected them. But it was like when a person has cancer and the surgeon is able to get "most" of the tumor: the intervention has failed, even though the results take some time to fully come to fruition. At age 4 or 5 years, I called my mother: "mud". In probably 8th grade, I wrote "Fuck you" in winter's condensation on a window of a school transportation vehicle (even though I did not know what the word meant, just that the adults did not like kids using it). In high school, one of the things I read that I liked the most was the ending of Italo Svevo's novel "Confessions of Zeno": A man burrows to the center of the earth and sets off a huge bomb there to cleanse the universe of all the filth on the planet's surface. Might those things count as evidence that I was not a "happy camper"? Now I see my handwriting was another statement that I did not like "it" or "them".
My handwriting is nakedness, which, in public, is always "in your face". Not nudity. Nudity exists in relation to being clothed (and in moderation it ttlillates the prudentariat, like men showing off their nipples on public beaches, etc); it's part of the games people play who can't create anything to keep them from thinking that they are bored to death with themselves and that their ives not satisfying to them: porn for prudes. Nakedness is when you are vulnerable, hopefully for caring sex, but more likely stripped for police search or Waffen SS[S] ("Selective Service System") classification (right). I have always disliked my flesh being exposed to "people" (πολλοι). My handwriting is the nakedness I serve up to them, until I shall be dead, and then I invite them to come one and al, to enjoy my flesh either raw or cooked perhaps on their backyard barbecue grills, as they may want to eat it. HIC EST CORPUS.
.I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) marvel, in looking back on 1958/59, that I could have completely reconstellated my handwriting, to date still without being able to construct an audit trail of origination. Respectfully, I define a creative act as a production of the human spirit which cannot be "explained" by existing environmental factors; those who do this habitually as called: "geniuses"; I here refer to the one oher case of a creative act of which I know, albeit a far more historically important one but also another for which its creator received no credit, and in his case, none of the honor he deserved, either: here.
I also note that from at least my first iteration of the first half of 7th grade in Richmond, Virginia, before I was put in St. Paul's School for Boys, Brooklandville, Maryland, and put back half a grade for my "social development" by Headmaster S. Atherton Middleton, I did my math course assignments in permanent ink, not as was normal if not required for pupils, in erasable pencil. Again, I cannot find any "explanation" for this personal initiative on my part, in a social surround which did not seem to be aware of anything more culturally substantive than counting No. 2 pencil marks correctly deposited in provided little circles on multiple choice test forms. They were members of the ETS(501)(c)(3) religion.
I was not properly respected and honored for my individuality by the relevant adults who I believe showed massive lack of competence to have had control of my young, fragile life. (They could have learned from Luke 2:41-52). I was naked before people whose objectives, as far as they had objectives, and who, whatever semiotic processes may have worked themselves out in their heads (to what extent were they Mr./Mrs. Dialtones ☏?) – I think these things are beneath thought and speech. So, today, I think every character I write on a piece of paper speaks for itself, including my European style sevens ("7") and, when I am really being myself, computer -programming style slashed zeros, too ("∅"). "∅123456789".
I also ever since I saw one, use less irrational European dates (e.g.: "23 November 1946") and military time, e.g.: "23:59", not "11:59PM". Now I like Robbie McClintock time, which is computer sortable on a single sort field: +1946.11.23.01:03.00.000. (I never wanted to be a tacky "American", Ick!)
They wanted 2-legged sheep – rams for their headbutting lacrosse and football teams (or maybe they didn't want anything except to not have their unthinking be undisturbed?). My parents were lost souls whose social surrounds of origin failed them. As for St. Paul's Day Carcel for Pubescent Males except for don't-ask-don't-tell-sex-for-jocks, from which I would have expected better but I should not have, in 2001 they r[e]aped what they sowed: here. I was, to modify a phrase from Marcel Duchamp: The student stripped bare by his childreaders even. I wrote the truth, even though, or perhaps even better: fortunately, because I did not know I was doing so.
 Invenit et fecit |
|
