forioscribe

In the desert far outside Tucson you might be lucky enough to spot a Kangaroo Rat. It’s a cute little thing that looks more like a mouse than a rat, but it’s neither. He belongs to a different order of the rodent family and has twenty teeth, whereas mice and rats have sixteen. But he has the same soft brown fur, beady little eyes. At the end of his tail, there’s a dark tuft of hair, like a lion’s.

His most interesting feature, though, is that he never drinks water. He instead eats seeds that provide starch, a hydrocarbon containing hydrogen. Oxygen is abundant in the atmosphere. This resourceful animal puts them together. Aitch two oh. The tuft on his tail serves as a rudder, helps him to make quick movements to avoid capture by hawks or other predators. If you’d clip off the end of his tail, he wouldn’t be as evasive.



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Ophelia by Alexandre Cabanel


Joan was opaque. I couldn’t possibly know her, as I later came to know other girls, because she rarely revealed anything about herself. She enjoyed listening to me holding forth on this or that, largely because it meant she didn’t have to say anything herself.

Absent much personal information, I was left with contemplating her physical being. She wasn’t ugly, but then she wasn’t a drop-dead gorgeous like Gladys in typing class, who told me if I didn’t ask Joan to the prom, well, she’d never speak to me ever again! Anyway, Joan’s breasts—at least the upper portion of them she permitted me to see above her scoop-necked blouse—were her very best feature. Full, firm, wonderful. I loved to press my face into them, to kiss them repeatedly.

There was an aspect of her that reminded me of Hamlet’s Ophelia. Oh so vulnerable, fragile, tentative. But then Ophelia was capable of expressing her deepest emotions to Hamlet before she drowned herself in the river.


John William Waterhouse's painting Ophelia (1894)

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Her elbow jabbed into my ribs, and I was again fully conscious. "Tell me something," she said.

"What?"

"The exact truth about what you were thinking while you were making love to me this time."

"Oh, no. Here we go again."

"Come on. You've got the gift of gab. So speak to me."

"All right. When I saw your panties they seemed to me like the inside of a seashell. Which in turn reminded me of the famous Botticelli painting of Venus, the Greek goddess who brought love to the world."

"Oh, come on. How do I resemble Venus?"

"Long legs, long hair. A somewhat imperious look."

"You're kidding me, right?"

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Our first serious disagreement came during dinner at an Italian restaurant in Narberth, right across from the theater where we’d just seen "Ransom." Dr. Joan was rattling on about the increase in violence in movies these days, as we had just witnessed, and also on MTV. All that brutality and bloodshed, she said, was doing tremendous damage to people, don't you think?

I repeated what I'd learned in a mass communications course at college, which is that over the decades, after countless commissioned governmental studies, the conclusion has always been totally counterintuitive, and that is that violence--or virtually anything else that is negative in the media--either has no effect on people, or it has an effect that is too small to be measured.

Dr. Joan frowned, shook her head. "That's just not true. There IS an effect, a most powerful one. Besides, constantly showing violence is colluding with the evil part of society that initiates it. It's an endorsement, an affirmation."

I replied that what she just said seems very much to be self-evidently true, but nevertheless no one--I repeat no one--has been able to demonstrate that any such effect exists.

"No, no, no," she said. "That just isn't so."

And I said, "Well, since you made the assertion you have the burden of proof, and I don't see any proof, merely an unsupported claim. Actually, it sounds to me more like an uninformed opinion."

"I don't have to prove a damned thing to you!" she said, a flush spreading on her neck and cheeks.

Somehow, thank God, we eventually managed to change the subject. I really didn't want to argue with her. What difference did it make, anyway? Maybe my professor was mistaken. Or maybe I misheard him.



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