Miss Subways

Dickinson had no voice in her own time, as a woman, so she stuffed her silent screams, more than eight hundred of them, in a drawer and waited for eternity hear. And eternity did hear.

Emer was troubled at how all interpretation now devolved in matters of race or gender or religion. There was no art anymore, even in children's stories. Why wasn't the crow female? Why was The Creator a He? Wasn't Bald Eagle insensitive to men with hair loss? This is how we spend our time now.

As John Milton put it centuries ago in Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.” Ideas should be engaged in the same Darwinian struggle as all the rest of life.

Why? Why me? Why am I getting this deal?” “Because your love is lukewarm and your wish is half-assed and prideful. I’m from another time and place, my dear, when love made the cup run over and love killed. That’s what I stand for. When gods and men wrestled, fought, and fucked; and the offspring of their union was sometimes hideous, sometimes wondrous. Sometimes the Minotaur, sometimes Hercules. Win some, lose some, get mauled, raped, and eaten by some. Your love is the holding of hands, the peck on the cheek, the Cialis couple in matching tubs. Your love is the tepid treacle left on Oprah’s hanky.

What is the moral reason to do anything? Is it my pleasure? Or is it simply some imprecise calculus of figuring out the greatest good for the greatest number? Or is there a hard and fast thing called the right thing?