Did he have the thousand-yard I’ve-seen-things-you-people-wouldn’t-believe cat stare?

Did he bear the fresh scars of the battles in which he had finally proven himself worthy of the name…Cat?

Did he have a new collar on, from which dangled a shiny brass tag inscribed with a new name and an address in Canada, indicating that he’d had an adventure for the whole family coming to theaters this summer in 3-D?

A notched ear?

Blind in one eye?

Tail two inches shorter?

No.

No, he was just thin. And filthy. And dehydrated, and probably infected with all of the things he’s never had shots for because he’s an indoor cat, doubtless flea-ridden and, I’m sure, worth hundreds of dollars in forthcoming vet bills because he was a 14-year-old, hyperthyroidic, intestinally-malabsorbing, skin-tumor-sprouting little derpcat slinking his funny-shaped way towards death when he took off two weeks ago, and I’m sure he left to die but managed to screw that up in some thoroughly dingbattish way that required him to come back here and siphon food and money off of us before croaking in a spectacularly feline way that will involve projectile vomiting and loss of bowel control throughout the entire house.

And, because this is my mother’s cat, and because she’s the one who named him, for the past two weeks I have had to cringe inside the house every night as she called hopefully out into the evening: “John Denver! Kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty-kitty! John Deeenveer!”

Welcome home, shit head.

Different venues require different voices. Here's an example of one that I use on tumblr when I've become upset by the Intarwebz and am awake at five in the morning. My portion is the one that starts with the SHOUTING.

confidence-in-confusion:

keelyisanobody:

I absolutely love this.

ACTUALLY. This myth gets more interesting. These original “double humans” were comprised of two parts—either both parts male, one part male and one female, or both female. This myth is used to explain why some people are homosexual and why some are straight. Yay Classics. I’M LEARNING SO MUCH IN COLLEGE GUYS

This gets better each time it scrolls through my dash.

GODDAMMIT this is NOT a quote from Symposium. It’s barely even a paraphrase, and it is not a Greek myth about the origin of gay people. If you “absolutely love” this, then go here, read the actual text, and do your part in the fight against pseudointellectual internet bullshit. Better yet, go read the whole dialogue. It’s free and it’s available in half a dozen formats. You’ve got no excuse.

Got it? Good. Now then.

First things first. This is not a Greek Myth™, like Prometheus stealing fire, Hercules shoveling godlike quantities of horse shit out of the Augean stables, or Perseus cutting off Medusa’s snaky head. This is Plato making fun of Greek origin myths. It’s satire. And blah blah blah, scholarly opinion is divided, insert academic disclaimer here, but I am fucking right about this, so pay attention.

Symposium is a dialogue in which seven men, including Socrates, attend a symposium to discuss the nature and purpose of love, or, more precisely, Eros. In 4th-century Greece, symposia were structured drinking parties where the wine-to-water ratio was changed depending on the purpose of the evening. Getting the servant girls and boys blow more than flutes was a 1:1 kind of night. The delivery of speeches about Eros required three parts water to one part wine, and that night it was the famous Greek playwright Aristophanes who told the story about Zeus splitting people in half.

At the beginning of the dialogue, Aristophanes basically says he got really trashed the night before, and is hung over.¹ Then, when it’s his turn to give his speech, he begs off at first because he has an attack of the hiccoughs.² Other quips about hiccoughs and sneezing follow,³ and by the time the man is finally ready to deliver his remarks, he’s been set up as the ancient Greek equivalent of Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel.

Then he rattles off this bizarre description of the first creatures the gods created, before there were humans:

…the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and the same number of feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.

Did you catch the part about having two dicks? Yeah.Aristophanes is being a bit freaky here. Also—and this is the important bit—he describes these tumbling protohumans as having three sexes: male, female, and “man-woman.”

Unfortunately, these four-armed, double-dicked (and, presumably, twin-twatted) quadruped monstrosities were a bit uppity: “terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods.” So, to calm them down, Zeus did what any reasonable god would do: he cut them in half. And if they didn’t behave, he threatened to cut them in half again, so they’d all hop around on one leg. It’s difficult to overthrow Olympus when you’ve only got one leg.

This is where the idea that this tale was intended to explain the origin of homosexuals comes from: Aristophanes tells us that the now-bipedal men who had originally been one half of a “man-woman” creature were stricken with loneliness, and now sought their other half, a woman. Likewise, the former female halves of such creatures sought men. But the freshly-hewn halves of males and the halves of females were drawn to, you guessed it, other men and other women. 

This ancient Athenian Clive Barker movie is Aristophanes’ attempt to explain what love is and why we seek it. At this point, English fails us. The subject of the evening’s discussion was what the Greeks called Eros, which is not the same as sexual desire or romantic love. Plato uses Aristophanes as the mouthpiece for a popular or “common” understanding of love. He has to account for het sex and homo sex, because no matter how philosophical we peasants try to get about it, Eros is mostly about fucking. Hence all of that high-sounding “you complete me” business, which is all very nice and romantic except for the fact that it’s creepy adolescent nonsense.

Four of the seven guys at the table end up telling Aristophanes he’s full of crap, and Socrates unfurls some lovely words about how Eros is actually about our reaction to the “beauty of the soul,” rather than a borderline narcissistic quest for some missing part of ourselves. Then a bunch of drunk people crash the symposium and everyone gets shitfaced.⁴

Anyway, all I really wanted to do here is get these points across: that the supposed quote from “Plato’s The Symposium”⁵ isn’t even in the dialogue, and that it isn’t some kind of mythological origin story about gay folks, and that people should take some time to actually explore what they claim to love instead of just pasting it on their tumblrs like monkeys flinging shit onto a wall.

The actual material is so much richer, deeper, and more beautiful, and it will reward the effort you make to dig into it. It’s also much weirder. Seriously, there is some demented stuff there. Go find it.

That is all.

NOTES

---

¹ “…I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.”

² “…Aristophanes was next, but either he had eaten too much, or from some other cause he had the hiccough, and was obliged to change turns with Eryximachus the physician…”

³ “…the hiccough is gone; not, however, until I applied the sneezing; and I wonder whether the harmony of the body has a love of such noises and ticklings, for I no sooner applied the sneezing than I was cured.”

⁴ “…suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Some one who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and every one was compelled to drink large quantities of wine.”

⁵ There’s no “The” in the title. I hate that. It’s just “Symposium.”

Finally: if you’re really interested in some deep interpretations of Aristophanes’ wacky tale, you can read K.J. Dover’s paper, Aristophanes’ Speech in Plato’s Symposium, right here (which is cool because it’s supposed to be locked behind Harvard’s pay wall, but isn’t).

 

February 15, 1895

On November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died of cerebral meningitis in Paris at the age of 46. His doctors reported that the fatal condition had resulted from an old abscess in his right ear and not, as might be assumed, from aesthetically-induced syphilis. That abscess, in turn, was caused by a ruptured eardrum. Wilde had popped his tympanum five years earlier when, weakened by illness, hunger, and uncivilized conditions, he collapsed in the chapel of London's Wandsworth Prison. He was serving a two year sentence in Wandsworth because he had been convicted on charges of gross indecency, which was the Victorian way of publicly phrasing the scandalous felony charge of "homosexual behavior." The Crown brought those charges against Wilde following his ill-advised attempt to sue John Douglas — 9th Marquess of Queensberry, loud atheist, and patron of the rules that led to modern boxing — for criminal libel. The best way to defend against such a charge was to demonstrate that the libelous statement was in fact true, which the impending testimony of several male prostitutes would almost certainly have done had not Wilde dropped the case. The libel in question is pictured above, marked as exhibit "A:" the Marquess wrote something along the lines of “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite” on the card, and left it for Wilde at the Club Albermarle. This was tantamount to publicly accusing Wilde of a felony, and the Marquess did so because the poet was conducting an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquess’ son.

The Marquess had been feuding with Wilde over that affair for quite some time. As Wilde’s proclivities were readily demonstrable, he lost both his criminal libel case and the subsequent countersuit the Marquess filed against him. His assets were seized to pay the damages awarded to the Marquess, and he was left bankrupt. The Marquess then sent the evidence he had gathered against Wilde to Scotland Yard, which obliged him by charging the aesthete with gross indecency. He was convicted, sent to a wretched, damp, disease-ridden prison with no room service, fell ill, and never quite recovered.

Five years after receiving that card, Oscar Wilde was dead, the victim of an unfortunate convergence between his pride, his society, and a man who could not spell "sodomite."

This is a lesson for us all: don't feed the trolls.

The word "psychedelic" dates from the 1950s and is a neologism derived from Greek, an ancient and supple language from which much of the subtlety has been stripped by modern usage. Psyche (ψυχή) in the Huxleyan sense is often translated as "mind," an anachronistic simplification of its original meaning which was closer kin to "soul" or "life," and when used as a philosophical term of art referred to the animating force of humans, animals, and the universe itself. Delos (δήλος) in its simplest sense means "visible," and in common ancient usage bore with it the additional context of clearing the mind, or something that was made manifest.

So the lysergic-dropping crowd were referring to the effects of their favorite drug as "mind revealing," which suggests that the chemicals were exposing the ingredients of their own neuronal soup. Digging deeper into the word's past reveals another possibility, which is that the substance brought about the manifestation of qualities possessed by the world outside their skulls. Exogenous chemicals aren't necessary: trees at a distance can look like close moss, given a willingness to reframe your view.

Language now appears to me as a clumsy and imprecise tottering structure of wildly disparate meaning and flawed understanding, built with badly forged and poorly wielded tools. More to the point, my increasing sense that language is an artificial construct that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality has made me question the possibility of any genuine communication whatsoever. I even question the point of making the attempt. Considered together, all of this feels like a loss of faith.

There's a lot of talk about "platforms" among people who talk about that sort of thing. When I was younger, I understood the term "platform" in the context of technology: a combined hardware architecture and software framework, used to run applications. IBM, DEC, and then Windows or Mac. Now it's evolved to the point where multiple technological platforms form the basis of an author's overall platform, which is supposed to be the stage from which his or her books are hawked to readers.

So I've got this blog here, and I'm also on Twitter, tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook. There've been pithy 140-character bursts of nonsense, photography and graphics, videos, and socially-networked post-style things. I often cross-post my videos from YouTube to the other venues, but each place has unique content that you can find there and nowhere else. In fact, at the moment I'm making more regular use of those four venues than I am of this site, which is odd, because this place is supposed to be the nexus of the whole Ian Wood universe, wretched place that it is.

After working with those venues for awhile, the unique characteristics of each became more apparent. YouTube is of course all about the videos, but there is some opportunity for building a following by creating a Channel. Every video is tagged with a URL that leads back here (which is only good when there's actual content here). Twitter is what you make of it, so I follow writers and journals and people who amuse or otherwise entertain me, and my output there is divided between weirdness, links to other stuff of mine, and interaction with my followers. Over the past couple of weeks I've decided to treat tumblr like a image-enhanced long form version of Twitter. And Facebook...well, Facebook remains something of an irritation, as Zuckerberg seeks to justify its IPO and share price with various opaque and alienating monetization schemes. Of all of the venues, Facebook seems the least useful.

In the midst of all of those other outlets, this humble blog seems limited in its utility. I could just blog entirely on tumblr. However: this is my domain, here, and the server space I rent is entirely under my control. Committing to tumblr, even redirecting it to this URL, means that I'd be dependent upon another company for data integrity and backup, and dependent upon a software company (like Facebook) that could make any changes it wanted, at any time, to its platform. As much as I enjoy tumblr's functionality, I don't want to give my material over to a third party that has no particular motivation to do well by me. So tumblr is mostly about my photography, brief commentary on other peoples' material, and the occasional link to my own material elsewhere.

This place was originally conceived as a "live without a net" account of writing my novel, with the brash and entirely unrealistic goal of getting the thing done and out the door in a year. That was almost five years ago, and obviously reality has intervened. Then it was going to be about various writing-related things, but I suffered a crisis of expertise due to the fact that, well, I hadn't actually done much in the way of writing in the professional sense. I'm not a big fan of the whole "fake it 'till you make it" ethos, so that intention collapsed under the weight of my neuroticism. Eventually, Writebastard came to resemble my prior blog, Astonished Head: just a bunch of weird stuff, no real theme, irregularly updated. I lost interest in it.

Now, though: I have several other outlets for the weird stuff, the random stuff, venues that are more suited to it. Which suggests to me that this place ought to become a place, once more, for writing-focused material, and for my writing itself: longer pieces, essays, and the like.

So. Here we are! Writebastard.com is one of five places where you can get all the me you need (if that is in fact a need of yours; stranger things have happened). With some effort, I hope it will become more useful than it has been, and in conjunction with my other outlets, maybe I'll actually end up with one of those platform things that all the kids these days are into.

Thanks for reading.