An Elephant of One's Own

Back in January I rejoined Twitter after several blissful years of absence. Damn fool notion: it's like that thing they do here in the Andes, getting yourself whipped with nettles by village elders to "purify" yourself. Don't know if I want to be limpiado that much, not at my age, or at least, not by anyone who doesn't look good in stilettos. Still, if there's one thing you can say for the platform, it provides you with a daily dripfeed of gratuitous controversy: National pride has evil consequences. Prefer pride in humanity. German pride gave us Hitler, American pride gave us Trump, British pride gave us Brexit. If you must have pride, be proud that Homo sapiens could produce a Darwin, Shakespeare, Mandela, Einstein, Beethoven. — Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 30, 2019 Thus Dawkins. The popular response to the tweet was, as far as I cared to read, "how can you mention Brexit in the same breath as Hitler": fair enough, but let's be...

Onomatoplop! Picking yourself up and looking around, you notice immediately that the coconut hairs, here in the shade of the letterbox, form thickets around you. Houses always look like that, purifying and punifying and much too big, when you've just been posted into them: thing is to get off the welcome mat, always a dead giveaway. People are standing around, there down the hall. Finding yourself to be much, much smaller than any of them feels like nakedness: but hastily hitching your shame onto your shoulder, for a makeshift parrot, you mingle anyway, all foot of you. "Sorry, that was my makeshift parrot interrumping. You were saying?" You had just attempted a joke. It would have gurgled down well enough out there, in the street, among accustomed slops: but a moment ago's cool rebuffeting, now five fathoms deep beneath the rim of a wineglass, reveals you are no longer among slops, which is sort of what you wanted. Isn't it? You who sort-of would not be amo...