All right, all right, this is a page that dare not speak its name. I won’t even put that last sentence into bold face, I’m so ashamed to talk about it. Love reign o’er me, as some golden-headed boy once said. Who he, I hear you ask? Well, just don’t. It’s very rude. Like having a spider called Boris. A very public-school sort of name. OMG, I’ve started so I’ll finish, as some quiz-meister once used to say. Which one, though, which one? Uhhh …
Still, every cloud has a silver lining, as the Sacred Feminine, otherwise known as Our Kate, might once have said – and probably did …
And in addition to silver, which is a very sexy colour of sorts, there are real colours – the chromatic sort.
Any philosopher of colour knows the difference, and I am not talking about her ethnicity.
And people who talk about EDI (that stands for Ecstatic Declaration of Independence, I think) should think more carefully about what they are really on about.
So what do they mean by a rainbow coalition? I sometimes ask, and am told by people who ought to know about such things that it’s all about LGBT (cough, cough). The coughing, I gather after repeated polite inquiries, stands for QQ+, and then some alphabetic sequence that sounds to my regrettably tin ear as something like lemony pee.
I am then told that I am a cissy male, or something rather like that, and that I need to tread very, very carefully in the area that I am now apparently treading in, so I shall tread carefully despite having absolutely no idea where the landmines are. I leave that sort of thing to the late Princess of Wales – Diana to you. (No pics available any more, it seems, so you will just have to go without.)
Well, lemony pee sounds a bit unpalatable, but I can at least start at the beginning, and everybody knows what the L in LGBT stands for. It’s possible that even lower-case-named singers know it also, although it apparently took some time for the message to sink in.
Anyway, some music would be nice, as my voice seems to have gone a bit croaky …
Well, that was nice wasn’t it? Three-part harmony always sounds good with girlie voices, and I could never understand why men are supposed to find lesbians hard to deal with. I mean, logically speaking, they should find them even more agreeable than the cis-kind of women, since they share the same tastes in sexual partners.
After all, who on Earth (or Mars or Venus, for that matter) would want to sleep with someone with a moustache, for example?
And who is the most interesting character: Julian, Dick, George or Timmy (Anne is too boringly cis-feminine to worthy of consideration at all, in case you were wondering)? The less said about the house-bound scientist Uncle Quentin and his wife Aunt Fanny (George‘s mother) the better, I think.
Enid Blyton‘s preoccupation with (geographically impossible) secret passages that lead to dangerous labyrinths is a little too close to Borges and Eco to be entirely suitable for children, I have always felt. I just thought I’d mention this.
And the black-haired character Pierre Lenoir (‘Sooty‘), with his irascible, ear-waggling, hyper-blonde stepfather (also called Lenoir?!), is too edgy for my taste. As is the vapid stepsister, Marybelle.
The John Lennon version of the Famous Five, in In His Own Write, is far superior to the original, by the way, if only because there were a lot more than five of them (though all suspiciously male) …
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/aug/07/john-lennon-books-review
OMG, I’ve done it again, and this time there really is going to be hell to pay from you-know-who. One should not speak ill of the dead, and Macca was, by all accounts, pretty difficult to deal with at the best of times – and we won’t talk about illicit relations with Brian Epstein (no, we won’t).
So what alternative does that leave us with?
Well, according to the Fifth Complex Indemonstrable Syllogism (about which more later, if I live to tell the tale), we have to consider the unexpected alternative, what is called (in the music business) a cover version.
Yes, really.
And to change the subject entirely, as they say …
… aren’t the colours of the Rainbow pretty, even to those with pseudonormal vision? (Don’t ask – it means the right colours, but in the wrong order, roughly speaking.)
As I say, I can cope with all sorts of women, even those who don’t seem to fancy me. However, I cannot help but remember one girl (she was very young, a mere fruit-seller at Bolton Market back in 1981) whom I shall never forget.
No, she was never horrid to me, and nor were her friends who could obviously see more clearly than I what I was really capable of.
She said, on one occasion, in a delightfully self-confident voice to her friends, ‘Do Zvidanya – which is German (or something) for “goodbye”!!!’
Well, I knew better than to inform her that she was confusing German with Russian. But I did learn her name, which was Catherine, since that is what the other girls called her. This puts me ahead of Umberto Eco by some distance,by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah …
However, the song I always associate with Catherine is one where I also imagine myself to look and dress a bit like her. I dare say that clinical psychologists have a name for this phenomenon, but never mind.
By the way, I was living in a part of Bolton then called The Haulgh (nobody can pronounce it, so don’t bother trying). I had recently moved there from a two-year stint at the University of Essex (I’ll tell you about Essex girls later, if I have the energy), and quite enjoyed living in my own attic flat with a poster on the wall of our Kate (no, not Catherine, Kate – do keep up!) This is Catherine’s song …
Okay, so Where’s The Philosophy? – I hear some of my increasingly nervous Lancaster colleagues asking me in that sort of strained, hushed tone of voice that usually worries me – acutely.
But I am on confident form at the moment, since, as the House Logician, I feel that I know more about the theory of reference than they do …
… at least, even logicians are allowed to have feelings, whatever Star Trek’s Mr Spock might lead you to think. And remember also that, at least, Mr Spock is a Vulcan, a creature of flesh and blood, unlike Lt. Commander Data, his next-generation successor, who isn’t.
Ah, yes, the theory of reference. Well, what does it take to tell you how to locate the elusive Catherine for me? A web of descriptions? Or something more like a harpoon than a net, as the adherents of direct reference would have you to suppose?
No doubt, you think this an unreasonable task, and a thoroughly unfair question, and I dare say it is. It is also probably useless, since she will have aged considerably in the last 40 years. People do.
Moving hastily on from this, I invite you instead to ask what it would take from me to explain clearly the type of beauty that the person-stage which timelessly is Catherine-in-1981 possesses (there are, after all, many tokens of the same type, as a certain kind of logician knows all too well).
Perhaps you expect me to give away my private psychosexual secrets, oblivious to the fact that nobody, but nobody can discover those sorts of thing. Like private diaries, and the private languages in which they are written, they are simply incommunicable. So there.
Still, I shall give you some harmless, negative clues. Despite her superior name, the same as that possessed by the Duchess of Cambridge, I gather, and despite what you think you might be able to deduce about Kate (an entirely different person: she never sold fruit in Bolton, as far as I have been able to ascertain, despite her weird warbling noises), and despite anything else you think you might be able to deduce about any of my deepest and most unattainable fantasy-women, la belle Catherine is not a brunette. She is, or was, a sort of dirty-blonde type, though her hair looked like pure gold when I accidentally saw her at the Octagon Theatre one night with what I assumed to be her parents.
Does that help? No, I thought not. So how come I can picture her very clearly, and you cannot? Is telepathy essentially limited, in some weirdly indescribable way? If so, why?
And, incidentally, what has this to do with LGBT+, you might ask, remembering vaguely my own preoccupation with many-coloured images?
Well … some of this is pure drama for its own sake, I do confess, but it is worth remembering that men can still care deeply about women and girls who are not heterosexual, and who would not be available even if they were.
Indeed, we just do – don’t ask why. It just is …
Still, LBGT+ does consist of more than the first letter, and perhaps the gentlemen ought likewise to contribute more to the discussion, you might think.
However, here you may find that I personally am unable to help you, given the nature of my upbringing. I mean, how could anyone feel for anyone who is statistically more likely to be Prime Minister than would be had had he been schooled at a less prestigious academy of learning? Just think about this carefully, please, before rushing to judgement.
Incidentally, when I was at this particular Academy of Learning (whose name really should be redacted to protect the innocent – and most teenage boys are pretty innocent), we still had the institution called fagging. No, it does not mean what you think it means, as I keep having to remind my North American friends …
… and while we’re at it, the phrase pretty innocent does not mean the same as pretty and innocent, for reasons which, admittedly, are hard to explain. (I am told that Plato tried to do this sort of thing in The Sophist, and made a rather poor job of it).
Anyway, after this Academy came an equally distinguished University, though most of the Colleges (including my own) were still single-sex then. I remember sharing an interest in David Bowie with some of my friends there, but nothing happened from that that would interest you, amice lector – as far as I can remember, that is.
No, I think that if we are to pursue EDI seriously, and distinguish it adequately from LGBT+ and any other bureaucratically inspired acronym, we need to consider a broader range of disadvantages. I have at least one humble suggestion to make, and that is that …
… talent is not much use to you if you are vertically challenged, as some professorial types are. (Some virtues are more trouble than they are worth, as far as I can see.)
So, let’s go straight to music on that one, before something backfires, horribly …
I think I said I would also tell you a bit about my time as a temporary (but full-time) lecturer at the University of Essex.
Well, it was fun and it was different, and it gave me a bit of preparation for dealing with the appalling Rita-types I was to meet in droves at Bolton, though the esteemed Catherine remained infuriatingly hard to get – perhaps because she never went anywhere near a classroom.
Or, then again, perhaps not. Still, as they say … (and this song will forever remind me of 1979, for some unfathomable reason) …
Let’s just hope that (the insanely jealous) She Who Must Not Be Named never hears of this. Not to mention Her Little Sister …
… oh, and the Philippic? More disinformation, I’m afraid, but their music remains good …
Ye-es …
Philosophy and telepathy: an open discussion 