I’ll bet you can’t talk and keep your hands perfectly still.  Maybe you can for a minute or so, while you really make an effort.  But I bet you can’t decide, in the middle of a conversation to put your hands on your knees, or fold them in your lap and continue to participate, with your hands motionless.  Even if you more or less succeed, your fingers will be twitching in protest, your shoulders might make little movements to coax your hands free. Maybe you’ll even wiggle your toes.

Gesture.  Those fleeting and spontaneous movements we make with our hands when we talk.  Not body language, not the stances and motions we make that are social and relational, like showing dominance or openness.  Gesture.  The hand-dance that always accompanies our speech when we’re in conversation.

People have made whole lifetimes and careers studying gesture.  They film people communicating—in labs and in the wild—and break it down frame by frame to analyze the relationships between gesticulation and speech.

You don’t need professional credentials or recording equipment to study gesture yourself.  You just have to notice what people do with their hands when they talk.  It’s a fine thing to study at parties.  Makes the most boring conversation fascinating.

First you notice whether the person is making gestures, and of course they are.  Then you notice that the gestures never stop, they just keep coming, one gesture after another.  Notice the rhythm of them.  Are they all the same length, coming along with an even beat, or do the gestures come out like Morse Code in shorts and longs?

Gesture mutates the way spoken language does—we copy one another, we have favorite ones.  Gestures go in and out of fashion.  We modify our gestures for various social situations. And if we’re conversing, we never quit making them.  Most everyone uses hand-flicks.  You might ask yourself what kinds of things the person signals or announces with a quick flip or twist of the hand.  In conversation, you might notice whether a person draws shapes with their hands—like squares or circles.  At other times a person will mime—pouring, maybe, or running, or bringing the hands together in prayer.  Does the person do something special for phrases like eradicate… calming effect… lock the car.  Watch the way someone moves a hand horizontally through space in front of them—does the hand move in a straight line, a curve?  Maybe it spirals from the wrist.  Does the finger point?  Is the palm up or down?   Is the hand open or closed?  You begin noticing things like that, and soon you are making connections.

Of course you can notice all these things about yourself, which I do recommend.  It keeps you from getting all smug and drawing too many conclusions about other people from their involuntary gestures.

Scholars have analyzed data from filmed speech and integrated it with models of the brain and imaging records of people’s neural activity and found that words arise neurologically from areas of the brain that make us precise and analytical.  Gesture, on the other hand, arises from places that produce drawing, dance and first impressions.  In the split second timing of it all, both inside the brain and in the physical world, conversational speech and gesture arise so much in tandem that they seem to be aspects of a single, prior impulse.  And just what would that impulse be?

I’ve been thinking about such things because I’ve been reading a book called Becoming Beside Ourselves by Brian Rotman.  It’s a book about the ways that using the alphabet has shaped our brains and thought.

 

The first time I went to Haiti, I organized myself into a situation in the countryside where nobody spoke English.  It seemed straightforward enough.  Somehow I must have been thinking that after a week or two of immersion, I would turn into a chatterbox.

I remember sitting with a pen and a notebook at the table in my tiny room at night, and trying not to write the same pouty sentence again in the candlelight, “I see what they mean when they say that when you travel what you really learn about is yourself.” I was pouting because the only thing I seemed to be learning was that I was weak and small.

I didn’t like finding out that my primary tool for making sense of the world was talking about it.  A lot.  And I didn’t like finding that out by being stripped of language in a strange place.  By the time I went home, I wasn’t sure there was anything inside myself at all.

I think I kept going back to prove to myself that wasn’t true.

I didn’t have an easy time learning to talk.  Because I never knew what to say.  No matter what group of people I was in, it wasn’t long before I’d hear the dreaded accusation: “Ou pa pale.”  You’re not talking.  With all eyes upon me, I really don’t know what to say. I hated being put on the spot like that so much, I started avoiding situations where it might happen.  That got me a reputation.  “Nancy pa renmen chita kay moun.”  Nancy doesn’t like sitting around at people’s houses.

Sitting around with people.   Take that as lesson #1.  Your presence is a gift that you can offer or withhold.  Drain the ego from that statement, and you realize that the presence of others is a gift you can accept or reject.  Withdrawing because you are confused and uncomfortable is stingy, being confused and uncomfortable in front of everyone is generous.

Then I figured out lesson #2:  You do so have something to say in every conversation.  State the obvious.  The sun is hot.  School’s out.  Everybody is sitting around.  Restate the obvious.  The sun is hot.  School’s out.  Everybody is sitting around.  You don’t have to be a chatterbox to give what you have, and that’s what makes you belong.

Once I could say more things, I had to learn what not to say, how to talk without divulging any information that is not my own.  Where are you headed?  Up the road a piece.  Who gave you that hat?  A friend.  Once, when I told a funny story about how someone tried to fleece me in the market, I knew better than to say who the person was.  What were they selling? my friend asked.  I checked myself just before the word “magoes” came out, “Oh, something.”  She caught the hesitation, and praised me, “You’re turning Haitian,” she said.

I learned to get a fix of my chatterbox self by going out on the road on market day.  Heading towards the market, I’d greet every woman who passed me going the other way and say, “Oh, are you leaving the market?”  They would smile, surprised that a white stranger, who might as well be extra-terrestrial knew how to talk.  Yes, they’d answer, and ask me if I was headed to the market.  Yes, I would say, and then we’d be past each other.  20 more steps and a new person to greet.  All the way there.  All the way home. It’s that easy to be a bird who can chirp with everyone.

 

 

One day in Atlanta there were thunderstorms that organized themselves in such a way that it was safe for planes to land, but unsafe for them to take off.  Atlanta is a hub airport for Delta Airlines, and by nightfall, all of Delta’s planes were there, grounded.  I was in one of them.

All around me, people tapped and swiped at their devices.  There are no hotel rooms in Atlanta.  I think I can get us on that flight to Washington.  See if you can get a room there.  I don’t have a device, so I looked out the window, and what I saw was magnificent.  All the airplanes aren’t supposed to be in one airport.  It was like a praying mantis convention out there.  We were pretty far from the terminal and the runways were all clogged with enormous, ungainly airplanes, teetering on their tiny feet.

A couple hours later, the pilot chuckled when he told us.  The weather was okay for planes to take off, but crews were timing out and couldn’t work any more hours without sleep.  The replacement crews for the planes at the gates were stuck in planes out on the runways. So they emptied the planes that had no crews and hooked their noses to small boxy tractors that pushed them backwards through the tangle, the scene now a praying mantis convention after its been set upon by ants, all with pink and yellow lights glinting on the tarmac.

Late the next morning, after a few bleary hours of sleep in a free room, I walked into the breakfast buffet behind a large man with a bulky swagger wearing a PETA t-shirt.  I wouldn’t have thought he looked the PETA type.  People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.  Then I wondered, so what is the PETA type.  Then I read the fine print on the t-shirt, and while I shuffled my tray next to his down the line, I made up this poem.

Denatured PETA Man Goes Through the Buffet

People for the Eating of Tasty Animals

believe in a place for all god’s creatures

right next to the mashed potatoes.

 

The meat beneath the shirt is a slump

of gluteus juice, flaccid on the belt

marbled, tender, and pinkly white

 

like veal, fattened on sugars reduced

from corn bioplastic and balanced

on pharmaceuticals.  Hogs

 

grey kidney and lung slime liver

plop! in the bin with the tumors we’ll dice

your starved heart for organ niblets.

 

I crane to see the tender creatures

piled on your plate:  rhesus

monkeys? little owls? ravens,

 

roadkill, puppies and a brushy

squirrel, tail curled round

a mound of mashed potatoes.

Mathematicians will sometimes tell you that their discipline is akin to art and poetry.  Like artists and poets, mathematicians have a hard time saying what it is they do, but they sure do know it when they see it.  One thing that sets math apart is that you can get actual jobs doing it.

One of the peculiar things about math is that it lives in the imagination and has tentacles in the here and now.  The tangible, visible things one might do while doing math—writing stuff down, drawing pictures, assembling objects—all that supports a mental activity.   An activity involving patterns and the laws of physics.  Or would it be the laws of the universe?  Or the laws of the mind?  It’s hard to get a mathematician to tell you.  They’d usually rather do math that talk about it to people who don’t do it.

There is general agreement on where math came from and how it progressed.

First counting got started:  1, 2, 3…, leaving its early evidence in notched bones and Sumerian tablets.

The Greeks experimented with geometry.

Thinking about proportion put numbers in relation to one another:  9/10, 2/3 and that’s how we got fractions.

Someone had to invent negative numbers to deal with certain commercial transactions and gambling debts.

The Arabs invented zero to keep the positives and negatives from crashing into each other.

Somebody worked out how to translate numbers into geometry and geometry into numbers.

Somebody looked for the square root of negative one and couldn’t find it, so they invented the imaginary numbers so the square root of negative one could exist.

Then somebody worked out how to turn logic into numbers and numbers into logic.  That made it possible to use and numbers and logic to prove that there will always be reasonable questions numbers and logic can’t answer.

Then came the machines, lightspeed jungle-gyms of numbers and logic so fast that they seem more capable than us.

How much does it matter that we insert these machines between ourselves and the rest of the world?

Let’s back up to the beginning. To when counting got started.  Somewhere, sometime, for some folks.  But not for everyone.  Counting doesn’t seem to come with being human, the way language does.  Every human society uses language and everybody’s language is equally complex.  Some societies, however, do not count, never figured out how, never learned it from someone else.

Doesn’t that make you want to know about the intellectual life of these non-counting cultures, what it’s like when mindpower isn’t fettered to the rhythms and structures that grow out of counting?  You’ll get laughed off the stage with that question.  What’s to learn from a few island pockets of loser cultures where life is brutish and short?

Yet there is the possibility of a shimmering net, a sort of mycelium spreading out over our collective minds from a spore called counting.  It would be tricky to see out from under that.

 

 

It really seems like some humans are organizing a disaster on the planet.  Could it be that we’re a species that can’t survive our own intelligence?  We’ve got oil spills and chemical plumes, gas explosions, radioactive contamination, heavy metals in all the wrong places.  Dying oceans, altered climate.  Looks like the plug’s getting pulled on the money.  All these wars over resources, destroying communities and livelihoods, producing whole generations of brutalized survivors.  We’ve got the war on drugs, the militarization of policing, the criminalization of poverty, the phrase, “the survival of the fittest.”   People clamor for safe spots—economically, geographically, architecturally.  As the whole thing crumbles, there’ll be no niche that’s guaranteed safe, no matter what your plans were.  It’s not going to get better before it gets better.

People don’t like to think about that stuff.  It seems too much like it might already be happening, but the causes are so distant, it makes you feel powerless.  So you don’t think about it.  Which is what allows it to happen.  Which is why everybody is always kind of depressed.  Which makes it that much harder to find a way out of it all.  Still, there are some things that you can do.  And one of them is to bark at nonsense.  Yes.  Bark.  Just do it.  Everybody can bark. You just gotta get over the hump.  Once you start barking it gets to be as natural as laughing.

So, practice barking at nonsense.    Cows are purple.  (You should bark, and not just listen to me bark.)  Down is up and up is down.   Don’t go thinking it’s something deep, poetic, probably true that you can’t understand.  And don’t say arf-arf.  That’s not barking, that’s talking about barking.  Did you know that ater runs uphill.  How could barking be less appropriate than nonsense?  Bark from the belly and don’t let it scratch your throat.  Did you see the fish with six toes?

Think about all the ways dogs can be friendly, the way a dog barks in greeting—alert, tail up, announcing that someone is here.  **  Hello nonsense, come on in.  If you start a bark-a-thon, or growl first and threaten to escalate, you’ll get put outside.  Bark quick, so they’ll say Hey, she only barks at nonsense.  What did she bark at?  And then people are thinking more and listening better.  Bark at nonsense and you’ll think more and listen better.  Because you have to know when to bark.

So here’s some more practice.  Some real practice, not just barking on cue.  Listen along, and when you hear nonsense, bark.

Zero population growth.  Economic development.  If we zapped all the mosquitoes from the planetary ecosystem, it probably wouldn’t be a disaster of the same scale as zapping the ants…  The family of Man…  Reduce, reuse, recycle…   An unborn, unconceived child has the right not to be genetically engineered…  Organic farming methods could provide a nourishing diet for everyone on the planet…  We are the result of an experiment being performed by a superior intergalactic society…  We are DNA trying to replicate itself…  Bigfoot…  A laptop in the hands of every child…   If you bark at nonsense, you can do a world of good.

A number of scholars—Dean Hamer, Rodney Stark, and Andrew Greeley to name a few–argue strongly that the presence of religion and religious faith are inevitable in healthy human societies.  They say a predisposition to religious belief is part of human nature.  They argue that the mystery of death creates deep needs that only religion can meet.  Sociologist Paul Zuckerman suggests this notion comes not from essential knowledge of human nature, but a projection of the writers’ own fears about death onto the rest of humanity.

Upon arriving in Denmark for a 14 month stay, Zuckerman was immediately struck by the absence of religion as he had grown accustomed to it in the United States.  There was no televangelism.  Sporting events did not begin with prayers to Jesus.   Political ideas based in religious beliefs were considered unsound. There was no push to teach creationism in school, and no nationalized movements against homosexuality or abortion.  So he set out to interview as many Danes as possible to understand their ideas about God, religion, death and the meaning of life and reports his results in a book entitled Society Without God.

You might think that Denmark has achieved a complete separation of church and state.  Quite the contrary.  Lutheranism is the national religion of Denmark.  The state maintains churches and pays pastors with taxes that Danish citizens can choose to pay or not.  Most do.  Danes don’t attend church regularly, but consider churches peaceful, contemplative places and like having them around.  People say they go to church mostly for the social engagement, that church events on religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter bring families together.  Many people baptize their children, not for spiritual reasons, but because it’s an occasion to introduce the new family member to the community.  Confirmation, for adolescents, is an occasion for lots of presents.  People get married in churches because they say it provides the right atmosphere.

In his interviews, Zuckerman covered a wide range of topics with his subjects, establishing rapport with questions about work, family and community.  While this portion of the conversation was often lively, when the topic switched to religion, things often went flat, as if, he said,  “the topic of conversation had suddenly switched to the price of cardboard.”   People weren’t against religion, they were indifferent to it.  Sometimes he asked people if they believed in God and they answered, “I’ve never really given it much thought.”

Zuckerman was surprised by the level of cognitive dissonance Danes seemed to have in matters of religion.  It wasn’t unusual for people who didn’t believe that Jesus was God, or didn’t believe in God at all, to call themselves Christians and agree that Denmark was a Christian country.  When asked to elaborate, they equated Christianity with being kind, doing good, and helping people, and were often perplexed that should require a belief in God.

In the US, one of the arguments you hear for the mixing of religion and politics is that a society not tempered by religion will descend into strife, and suffering.  That’s hardly the case in Denmark, which regularly scores at or near the top in international surveys that measure people’s happiness and security.  Education and health care.  Danes count on a social safety net that prevents them from becoming homeless and will care for them in old age.    It’s as though Denmark went straight to the heart of how it perceived the Christian message—be kind, do good, help people—without having to arrive at it by way of religion.

Once when I was visiting the island of LaGonave in Haiti, I taught an informal class for a group of teachers trying to advance their careers with a knowledge of English.  As an exercise, we translated a short article entitled, “Why Save Seeds.”

I chose the selection because there is a strong grassroots movement on LaGonave to raise food locally instead of importing it.  Churches, schools, and community groups were hungry for seeds and technical advice for vegetable gardening and improved yields of local crops like corn, beans, manioc, and sorghum.  So everyone, I figured, would have ideas already about seed saving, food independence, and the preservation of diversity talked about in the article.

Each session we did a paragraph.  I helped them identify the major vocabulary words, and guided them in puzzling out a Creole translation. We got bogged down with genetically modified organisms.

We were okay with organism.  We were okay with modification.  But genetically… genetic material…genes.  I could see from their faces that they weren’t so sure about this.  The Creole-English dictionary entry for gene is jenn.  OK, so what’s a jenn? Blank looks.  Someone volunteers, Do you mean the jèm?  Nods of understanding all around.  I’m suspicious of how the word jèm sounds like germ, as in wheat germ.  I dunno, I say.  This jèm, can you see it?  Someone nods confidently and explains where, exactly, you find the the jèm in a grain of corn.  Nope, I said, if you can see it, that’s not it.

How many movies and filmstrips of cell mitosis did I see during my education?  Chromosomes, wandering randomly around inside the nucleus suddenly pair up like contra dancers.  Each pair makes a copy of itself and two identical groups march to opposite sides of the nucleus, which then splits in half like a soap bubble.

These teachers didn’t have movies, filmstrips and discussion groups in their education.  They had recitation and memorization.  They didn’t necessarily have text books.  They didn’t have the mental images of cell division that were second nature to me.

DNA, I ventured, do you know about that?  Together they came up with the syllables of deoxyribonucleic acid.  I was in grade school when the tinkertoy helix of DNA was on the cover of Life magazine.  When they were in grade school, anybody who wanted to be somebody got on a leaky boat aimed for Miami, Cuba, or Venezuela.

I dropped back closer to what I figured could be the beginning.  Inside of every seed is all the information necessary to make the whole and entire plant correctly.  That’s the DNA.  The genetic material.   Inside a carrot seed is all the genetic material for making a carrot.  A cabbage seed, with its genetic material for making cabbage, would never grow leaves that looked like a carrot.

I had truly lost them.  They were giving me that look you sometimes get in a conversation where someone started out thinking you had something useful to offer them, but it turned out you were so stupid they could hardly be polite about it.  Why would anyone think you might plant a row of cabbage seeds and have carrots come up instead?

Before the next session, I downloaded simulations of cell activities from youtube.  Mitosis, the DNA helix unzipping itself.  Of course they were fascinated.  These things are really going on all the time inside your body?  How did they take these videos?

How do I say that they’re simulations, but they should take them as evidence anyway?  I thought we were going to review some elementary science.  Instead, I found out that I had a theory of the invisible that I couldn’t communicate.

I have enough life experience to know for a fact that the words most often spoken in hippie construction are, Hey, that’s really cool.  We should put a foundation under it.  Old homesteads.  Experimental housing.  Barns and sheds.  Makeshift housing.  All that originality.  All that grace and character.  So much history in that structure.    Composting as we speak.

A lot of structures have been rescued by foundations, while some remain standing by the force of their own internal miracle.  Other structures, you should just go ahead and let them fall down.

The biggest problem with foundations, with making it solid at the very bottom of things, is that they are a fiction.  You can think you have made one, but geology will always have its way with it.

The turn of the 20^th century saw a major mathematical program in academia called foundations—the search for a few self-evident concepts—definitions or principles—out of which you could derive all of mathematical truth.  The idea was to articulate the basic stuff, like maybe what a number is, and the bare-bones logical rules, like something can’t be true and not-true at the same time.  Get those basics together.  And show that you could build all of mathematics out of it.  Foundations.  Part of the march towards the digital age.

The program was a complete failure.  It seemed straightforward enough.  2 + 2 = 4.  That’s so cool we should put a foundation under it. Turns out, somebody proved that you can’t.  There’s just no way you can come up with a basic set of foundational statements to hold up math.  And even when you try, somebody can take the opposite statements and use them for a foundation to make a math that’s completely different.

Probably the best known example of this happened in geometry.  Regular old Euclidean geometry—the geometry for building houses—has, as one of its foundational statements parallel lines don’t meet.  But if you ask, What if they do meet? you could invent a whole different kind of geometry.  People have.  Geometries of warped spaces in many dimensions that some people dream will be useful for building spaceships.

The upshot is, even when the foundation seems pretty solid, it can be interesting to check it out.

Consider, for example, the many distinguished careers and contracts related to the breeding and carving up of living creatures to see what they’re like inside, or injecting chemicals into their brains to see what they’ll do.  This is all founded on standards, regulations, and complexities of ethics and belief that make these practices good for us, because the creatures are so much like us, except for in the kinds of things that can hurt them.

To perpetrate a genocide, you have to work into the foundation of your world that some humans are sub-human.  Savages.  Cockroaches.   With those kinds of ideas you can enslave people.  Even people you can’t see.  They’ve gotten used to living like that.  It’s a higher wage than they could get anywhere else.

A lot of people think it’s fun to start fires and blow things up.   Something in the power of that energy release.  A bunch of them have gotten together and invented a version of peace and prosperity that’s got a foundation cobbled from mutually assured destruction.

So you can put a foundation under just about anything.  Although no foundation is going to last—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

A lot of people don’t realize when they are contemplating a structure, that 75% of the work is in the foundation.  And the other 75% is the finish work.

Who made you?  God made me.  Why did God make you?  God made me to know, love, and serve him in this world.

Our dad was the head of our house.  He didn’t say much unless he was needed to make important corrections.  After dinner, he would drill us on our catechism questions.  What are the fruits of the holy spirit?  Charity, joy, peace, patience…

When we finished, he would read the newspaper.  On Tuesdays he watched Combat!  and on Wednesdays, The Gallant Men.

Our dad fought in the War.  Like everyone’s dad, it seemed.  They fought in the War, came home, married moms, and now they go to work.

Our dad had glasses, blue eyes, smoked Taryton cigarettes and wrote with his left hand.  Every Sunday after church, we pulled into the Sunoco station and he said Fill ‘er up to the attendant whose coveralls said, Larry, in red stitches above the pocket.  I thought Sunoco was Catholic gas.  Perhaps we could have been a family that was a lot richer, but our dad never, ever, did anything that wasn’t perfectly honest.

He didn’t shoot anyone in the War.  He was a navigator.  It was after we all grew up and moved away that he got that POW license plate holder.  Our mother roller her eyes.  Not that he ever talked about it.  He said there was nothing to say.

Did you try to escape?  No, it wasn’t anything like that.  Everybody knew the War was ending.

Did they kill anybody?  Only once.  A guy who went outside during an air raid.  We understood that he should have known better.  Tell us about the time the guy got killed.  I already told you.  Tell us about the stew with worms.  We were glad to get it.

I had a flash once, when we were watching Citizen Kane together, how deeply he believed that if you were diligent, respectful of authority and of your elders, things would always be okay.

Towards the end of his life, some of the fellas he flew with and who were imprisoned together tracked each other down.   They were all in their 80s so there was no question of a reunion.  But I suppose that getting in touch made them remember more clearly who they were then.  Our dad was drop- dead handsome in his uniform, perfectly pressed, a movie star, stretched asleep with his head in the crook of his arm on the couch.  Our grandmother took the photo because all he did after he came home from the War was sleep.

I remember the way he sneered down to the roots of his nicotine-yellow teeth and proclaimed Saddam Hussein a Hitler.

The last time I visited him we sat at the kitchen table.  He was on the phone with the social security administration, straining with his hard-of-hearing to navigate the automated system.  He just wanted to tell someone why he was calling, and they were asking for zipcodes and dates of birth.  He mumbled and was told they didn’t recognize his response and he shouted and told them they were stupid, which only brought more of the same.  He was trying to call them and tell them that our mom was dead.  He got angrier and angrier, swore at ‘em, slammed the phone down, and I sat there and let him do it, because he just wasn’t the kind of person who’d put down his head and cry.

 

 

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.   That sentence was penned by a young Noam Chomsky in his doctoral dissertation in linguistics as an example of a sentence which is grammatical, but meaningless.  Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

Problem is, no sooner do we hear something like that than we start to conjure a hue which is colorless green—listless, drab and unremarkable.  Sleeping ideas, they could be anywhere.  A furious sleep isn’t hard to imagine.   Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.  Maybe, when the ideas open their eyes, the greens will be colored with fury from the sleep.

That’s why Plato banned poets from his utopian republic.  He envisioned a society in which everybody knows what’s what because words are well-defined and the allowable sentences can be identified.  How can you be grounded in the rational, reason and the real with poets skulking around, striking random words against each other like rocks, making sparks.

I’m thinking about that because I’ve been carrying around 100 Selected Poems by e.e. cummings.  No colorless green ideas, per se, but you do find leaping greenly spirits of trees/and a blue tree dream of sky.

e.e. cummings is probably best known for his lack of capitalization and oddball punctuation, or maybe for writing eddieandbill as a single schoolchild word, but his poems also have roamingly stern bright faeries…  the whyless soul…  and children building this rainman out of snow.

sweet morons gather round, he calls and words bump into each other all over the place.  silent certainly mountains. … my sweet old etcetera/aunt lucy…  raving city screamingly street wonderful…

I turn the page and he says, my father walked through dooms of love.  Another page and he says, whenever men are right they are not young.  On another, freedom is a breakfastfood.

On the back cover, Marianne Moore says that e.e. cummings “does not make aesthetic mistakes.”  I don’t know about that, but I do know that if Plato had met Mary Daly, he’d have banned Elemental Feminist Philosophers from his republic as well.  Daly’s method is to use language as a double edged tool which at once unweaves the lies of stag-nation and restores the elemental feminine.

We are immersed in a necrophilic society, she says, surrounded by necrophiles and necrocrats, lovers and dealers of death, we are bored to death, anesthetized with boracracy whose borocratic institutions rule the mis-begotten state of boredom.

Boredom is a clockocracy, a jockocracy, a foolocratic junkocracy, where you get up every morning and listen to the olds, the same old necrological news, the patriarchal prattle.

Mary Daly would replace mister-hood with sisterhood, give the whole staledom of maledom a misterectomy, rout out the strange deadfellows, the toms, the dicks, the harrys, the butchers, the bullies, the hacks and the fops.  Down with academentia.  Derision for fembots, presbots, popbots, numbots, foolosphers, and psycho-ologists.  Calling all revolting hags, all cosmic crones in tidal time for contrary ways and counterclock whys, foxy foresight, glamor and grace.  Spinsters, weavers, wickeds, weirds, come out and dis-close, dis-order, dis-cover the words that will awaken the feminine wild.

Nope, Mary Daly would not have made it into Plato’s utopian republic.  She’d be in exile with e.e. cummings, who said, humanity i love you because you/are perpetually putting the secret of/life in your pants and forgetting/its there and sitting down on it