Welcome"Ask permission before approaching me. If I wish, I will come to you." (BMcC[18-11-46-503])
I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) am increasingly taking what the Bible says seriously. This includes interpreting at least some of The Gospels in immanence, i.e., as applying to myself in this world. This is especially the case with Luke 2:41-52, which describes how my parents and teache[r]s should have behaved toward myself as a child. But now I see it applies also to "Noli me tangere."
I had an intrusive mother. She permitted me no private space outside reach of her surveillance and control. No, that is not true: she never stuck a protoscope up my anus to look and poke around inside; anal enemas were as far as she went. I have no clue what was her aim or if she had any. She was a worm that burrows into an apple. Nobody told her: "Lay off the child, woman! You will never do this again. Repeat after me: 'I will keep my distance and never intrude on Bradford again. His father and I will find him better parents, I promise.' Do it, now, woman!"As a child, I did not want my parents to touch me. I found their bodies physically repulsive, but not extremely so like maybe a garden slug. They usually did it to intrude upon me in some way and do to me something I did not want but I could not prevent them. And I had been wounded by them, even if I do not remember the trauma of being circumcised as a helpless newborn. But I do remember the trauma of having been haircutted, at age 3 or 4 years. No barberian should ever have been permitted to come near my fragile body![1] If they could not gently pet me like I today pet my pet cats, they should have kept their oafish mitts off my fragile body. Once I could speak and answer questions, they should never have done anything vis-à-vis myself without express and freely given permission, i.e., with no "consequences" for choosing: "No." (obvious exceptions, of course, for situations such house on fire and fireman needs to get me along with everybody else out).
In a cynical/ironic way, I have even seen a kind of negative miracle of "loaves and fishes", in the sign my computer programming manager, Harold Jones (1977), at Maryland National Bank which "does so much for so many people" had on his desk:
We the unwilling, led by the unknowing,
Have done so much with so little for so long,
That now we are qualified to do everything with nothing.
The set of negative miracles is infinite.
+2023.02.15. I hav ebeen thinking more about what I did, I know not how or why, in 7th grade wher I stopped wrig=ting cursive script (as students were supposed to back then) and changed to all upper case block letters. I always valued this, bu now I think it wa and remains far more inmportant than I imagined.
When the 7th grade English teach, Mr. Mike Rentko threatened me that while I might get away with it in school I would never be able to keep up in college, I previously focused on the second part of his threate: "not be able to keep up". But now I think the first part is the more important: "I might get away with it".
The structure of education is simple and linear: The educators do what they will: define it all, and the educatees have to do as they are told ("instructed"). Period. Here I was a student rejecting part of the curriculum. Like Vietnam: "Hell no, I won't go." Or, as an employment recruitor once told me: "If your boss says 'Jump!', you ask: 'How high?'". I got away with a blatant rejection of part of their system. It is not part of the system for a student to reject (or even just modify...) any part of it. The ony choices student get are the ones the adults offer them: You can take Spanish or French; you can mark answer 'a', 'b', or 'c' on a multiple chioce test. I was saying: "No! I am not obeying." Oh dear! Will the sky fall?
Mr. Rentko was right to try to threaten me into submission: He was God's representative on earth and I wa a heretic. He failed in his mission. Of course it was not as important as that: They still coreced me in everything else, so in the end it did not threaten revolutionary overthrow of their regime. But on my side, I think this victory over "them" did give me some notion that I could beat them, which I continually tried to do. Had they coerced me to go back to obedient cursive script writing – passum sub iugum –, I wouldn't have liked them any more but I might well have not even tried to work their system: Instead of staring at them I might have had a "thousand y=ard stare". Kick me! a whipped dog, not just a highly trainable one. Yezza massa yazza massa yezza massa.
Instead, albeit with no effective force, every word they read of my sub—missions(sic) to their ass—ignments(sic) was also a rejection of it all. The recruit obeys every order but "there's something about the way he does it" that he hopes doesn't make the drill sargeant feel comfortable.
I've always liked stories like the one about tbe man who exited the factory each night with a wheelbarrow. The guard asked if he was concealing any contrband. No, Sir! WMay the guard search him?? Yes, Sir. The guard finds nothing, and then he inspects toe wheelbarros. Finding it empty, he tells the man he can go.The man leaves with his wheelbarrow. Each night the same, until the guard stopped checking. The man was stealing wheelbarows.
Noli me tangere. My repulsion anent my surround of origin also at leat partly explains my liking my fingernails long: It protects the ends of my fingers from touching [fill in the blank]. This also explains why them having circumcised me may have been far more harmful than when they did it to young minotaurs-to-be who would only need sanitary services and to be able to do things that cause calluses on one's hands, not want to sensitively feel erotic and other connoisseurship. Noli me tangere!
Invenit et fecit |  |
