The Next Beast Over

"Ape" from a Bestiary. Bodleian Library, MS. Bodley 764, fol. 16v

We know what to do with the beast within.  Our poets and psychologists expose it and soothe it, let us see it and understand it and, all told, pretty much control it.  It's the next beast over that is truly terrifying.  The one that is so close that we see ourselves, but outside of ourselves. The one called "simian," the medieval bestiary ventured, because it is so "similar" to us. The one that apes us.  And so it is that 48 years after the wild success of the novel surprised even the author, Pierre Boulle's 1963 book La Planète des Singes can still be made into a kickass movie.   It being the end of summer, we decided to make an event out of it. In honor of its author, we had a fully French meal (crème d'asperges soup, poulet rôti, pommes de terres, salade de tomates, fromages, tartes aux fruits, and fine wines).  In connection with this summer's fellowship, we had the wonderful student who worked with me over and, because he'll be visiting Paris while he's studying in Rome this fall, we also had the wonderful student who'd lived in Paris at the table.  We were a jolly company, trying to understand the hold that Boulle's book continues to have on the imagination.

Mac is sitting here at the breakfast table right now reading the original French version. He picked it up the minute he found out that Boulle also wrote The Bridge Over the River Kwai in 1952.  Pierre Boulle turns out to be a really interesting guy: an engineer who worked on French rubber plantations in Malaysia; a member of the Resistance in its Indochine theater of war captured by Vichy France forces in 1943 and award the Legion d'Honneur for the hardships endured; an author of 24 novels and several short story collections.  His career explains the wincing colonial content of the book, and its first movie's continued emphasis on race-and-class warfare.  Mac reports that the book has Betelgeuse (the planet of the apes) as a much more European place, where the hunters stop at an "auberge" after capturing their human trophies. The apes in the book live in multi-storied buildings within industrialized cities and drive cars.  The American film version from 1968 was not willing to give them that, instead creating the nightmarish quasi-medieval, quasi-19th century landscape (villages! science labs!) that kids of my generation grew to know so well from the endless Sunday afternoon screening of the Planet of the Apes movies (five) and spin-offs (countless) and parodies (always funny).

Until this latest film, Planet of the Apes had really always been about the struggle between oppressor and oppressed.  The human race behaved badly and got its comeuppance.  But now, and this is where I can't help but pay attention in connection with this summer's reading, there's a new player: a virus.  Humans behave no better and no worse than they usually do, but the amorality of the virus completely changes the game.  There's some weird science in there: the cure to Alzheimer's (vast improvements to brain function first tested out on apes) is delivered by a virus in mist form that has one effect on the apes and another on the humans (trying not to spoil it for you here, as, clearly, you must see this movie).  But the weird science works to awaken what we might fear even more than intelligent apes: intelligent apes in a network established by a virus.  Our fear of the closeness of apes is totalized by the inscrutable distance of viruses. The fear of apes, first, in the form of a naïve question: why are dogs domesticated but apes not? There are many ways to ask this question: why were humans able to domesticate dogs, who are genetically and in many other wises quite different from us, and domesticate them to such a degree that "having a dog" is a sought-after commonplace of millions and millions of people? Why were we unable to domesticate, on any kind of large scale, apes, who are so similar to us, who understand our ways (social, behavioral) so much more?  The proximity issue (that apes are too much like us to domesticate) doesn't answer it.  Human beings have, at different periods in history, enslaved more other human beings than they've ever enslaves apes (despite the contention to the latter of the utterly lame 1972 prequel, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes). Or, as Adam Gopnik would have us ask in a recent marvelous essay in The New Yorker, why have dogs chosen us for cohabitation, while apes have not?  The reason that I chose the medieval image above is because it represents humans hunting a female ape (who, according to Pliny, will hold her preferred child against her chest, and let her less loved child ride on her back), in the company of dogs.  The dogs assist the human endeavor which places the apes oppositionally.  Medieval bestiaries are a fascinating world of human and animal intersection and difference unto themselves.  Animals here exist to reveal something about creation, and possibly, in those moments of intersection and difference, about humans themselves.  Or they just exist. Apes are deemed able to live only in Ethiopia, their place of origin, not next door.

We have one strange commonality with medieval attitudes to apes: humor. I could show you many more naughty marginal images of apes (and the fine mind at gotmedieval has plenty).  There are entire sub-genres (the ape as physician, the ape as knight, the ape as lover); so commonplace are ape parodies that one begins to wonder who is laughing at whom.  Parody is an enormous part of the entire Planet of the Apes sub-culture as well. I don't think that Pierre Boulle meant to be funny, but there is a long, rich strain of (nervous?) laughter from Charton Heston's clenched-teeth "Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape" to its repetition in this latest film.  For us moderns, apes are funny, and then quickly, really really not funny.  They may have been just funny in the Middle Ages, living all the way far away in Ethiopia the way they did.

A final comment here might be about what makes the film so fantastically creepy: it's the motion-capture film technology that allows Andy Serkis to play the lead role of the ape Caesar wearing a computerized suit which captures his motions and then digitally dresses them in the body of an ape.  It makes me realize how much of our identity as humans (which may or may not be the same as our humanity) lies in how we move.  It's when the birds gather as hundreds of sentinels that Hitchcock can freak us out; it's when the apes start to walk on just two legs that we shudder.  There are grand motions like walking that make us human, but one thinks also of the famed uniquely opposable thumb, as a gesture wherein our humanity may lie.

Mercy

Transylvania University

It's been a soberingly long time since we've been back from vacation, and this needs to be mercifully short as we enter the melancholy, going to furtive, going to panicked, transitional time before school begins again.  My mind is on many returns, most notably the one from France a year ago this week.  Every step new again, every memory vivid, every event strange in its familiarity. I miss France and Brittany and Josselin and that walk and that turn and that view so much.  As you can see, I am in the melancholy phase.  Furtive escapes here about mundane points should follow, then the final flurry before that breathless moment when students pull their chairs up and I dim the lights for the first image of the course.  This fall it's a First Year Seminar on Jerusalem (can't wait to write about that), and that old chestnut, Gothic Art (1200-1500).  But to the title of this post.

Mercy was a concept that I would not allow myself to articulate to my colleagues at a seminar on "The Liberal Arts Education: A Contested Concept," that I attended at Transylvania University over the week-end.  It seemed too sentimental, too tiny in the face of the grand pronouncements being made about what education might do.  There were two basic schools of thought: 1) education should elevate the mind (and soul) by exposing both only to texts of intrinsic value, and all else (all good) will follow; 2) education should expose its students to the world in all of its relativism, as that is the only way that society will be transformed for the better.  The first school produces thinkers of beauty and truth, the second of critique and politics.  We had all been chosen, we decided over what was for many of us our first glasses of truly fine bourbon ever, much like the cast of a reality TV show: with purposefully oppositional views.  There were a few die-hards (mostly in the beauty and truth camp), but the truth is that most of us want beauty and critique, truth and politics.  These should not be oppositional terms. Dewey is the big educational thinker that promoted the idea that a free and just society had to be an educated one (and his ideals of just how many people should be fully educated remain radical - everyone), and that it was not anathema to teach Accounting alongside Aristotle.  If we want our NGOs whose beautiful principles are nurtured by truths of human dignity to not flounder and fail, then maybe their members should take an accounting class. Pragmatism does not tarnish the liberal arts.

You can start to see why "mercy"as a motivation for teaching seemed out of place in the midst of this debate. And truth be told, it is not a pedagogical ideology that I would ever elaborate upon in public. But out here, whispering in the reeds as I can, mercy seems like one of those fundamental ideas that, if I stop and think, keeps me going. Perhaps it's being a medievalist, or perhaps it's having accumulated just enough experiences, but I cannot escape the idea that the human condition is fraught.  That there is no perfect state, no equilibrium, no stasis.  There is great joy and happiness, but it is the contingencies and fragilities of that joy that I have come to appreciate and treasure, not just the blazing happiness itself.   And so yes, to me, education is merciful, education offers mercy to aching questions and deep desires - sometimes by shifting the horizon line (by altering your perspective), other times by distracting you (by showing you something, anything, else).  Embedded in its definition and operation are the ideas of compassion and thankfulness, and my aren't those good things to include in an education?

Ruins of a portico of an antebellum house

"Mercy" is also something that Southern women say when it is unbelievably hot and they wish to signal their gracious coping with said heat.  I absolutely love the way that "Mercy" is used as an expression in the South: most of the time, it would have to be short for "Give me mercy," which is always a humble thing to ask for.  But it can also be a sharp rebuke, as in "God have mercy on your soul for whatever horrid thing you've done that I'm sitting here rebuking."  Would you be surprised to learn that "mercy" first comes into usage in the Old French of the 13th century? Goodness, no.

Away

And so we're in North Carolina.






These are the days that i really relish being unable not to wake up early. A novel awaits and all is quiet. Water that is not the ocean (a sound?) is beyond those trees and in a few hours, an enormous group of us will go to the beach. Last night gathered everyone and two of my cousins brought a Southern feast (yes, crab quiche is delicious). The Cleveland crowd (my brother's in-laws) were happy. There is a very particular rush of gladness in the realization that your brother, whom you love dearly, is dearly loved. And so vacation begins, our 7th here in 8 years - what now we might well consider a tradition that began with that first wild trip in 2004, when we brought my dad, thinking that being here, where he grew up, would bring him back to us. It didn't, of course, but it's brought us back here, and now the children take us to their favorite places, and the air is sweet with the promise of the sea.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone (first time!)

Having Kippled

Just a short post in some vain attempt to exorcise Kipling from my mind. I know that there are good reasons why this author has a hold on me (memorable phrases, vivid diction, intense narrative, and oh yes, all that time in India and all of that other time wondering about Afghanistan), but I don't know why I can't shake him. (I think that this is related to my fascination with Jean de Meun: language whose meaning relies upon the reader's tone and setting (subjectivity) as much as upon its own words, and therefore language that provokes wildly opposing interpretations). I was up at 4:30 this morning thinking about his short story "The Man Who Would be King" which I'd read before seeing the (incredible, wonderful) film by John Huston from 1975 with friends last night - the story is from 1888, shortly before the people in the Hindu Kush of which he writes about were "explored" by George Scott Robertson in 1890-91 and converted to Islam by the Emir of Afghanistan in 1896, and writhes within the recollections of Peachey Carnehan as he tells of his and Daniel Dravot's adventures in Kafiristan to a stunned narrator, a journalist who must have walked in Kipling's shoes. Kipling is so difficult because interpretations (and emotions, people tend to feel strongly about Kipling) oscillate wildly between a triumphalist strain of colonialism (in which the colonized's wildness brings on the colonizer's own) and an unnerving critique of colonialism's operations on the mind (Kipling's characters tend to unravel when they start believing the ideology of the colonialism that, in saner situations, is but a pretense for the exploitation of the colonized - which is itself nuts, of course). When Orwell dubbed him the "prophet of imperialism" was that to spell out its triumph or its doom? I sit uncomfortably in the latter camp, unable to read anything but dripping, sometimes caustic but then world-weary, irony in Kipling's slightest phrase. Tone is everything with Kipling: how do you read "The White Man's Burden" from 1899? Does knowing that it was written in response to / as a critique of the American invasion of the Phillipines help determine the tone? Read it earnestly, with the fervor of hope and change. Read it ironically, with the world-weariness of fundamental misconceptions and wrongs. Try reading "The Young British Soldier" and see how you feel about wars far away. My position (or what I think I understand about Kipling) is best taken up by a line from his poem "If-": "If you can dream, and not make dreams your master." Dravot's dreams of being a king, indeed the descendant of Alexander the Great himself, master him and all falls away into madness and it's poor Peachey who is cruelly left to live to tell the tale. But it was actually Billy Fish who had me up this morning. He is full of Homi Bhabha's "sly civility" (which I understand best through Jeffrey Cohen's use of the term in considering the grass-eating Welshman in his Postcolonial Middle Ages essay), a Kafiristani who had served in the British Army and translates for Danny and Peachey throughout their exploits to become king. But then his end is so unnerving: he refuses to mount a horse to escape, as Danny and Peachey are attempting to do, because, you see, he was a foot soldier in her Majesty's army - and rushes into the crowd of vengeful Kafiristanis with the joy, almost glee, of someone fulfilling a lifelong promise: that he would be true to the impossible identity put upon him by the British Army, thereby somehow making it true and not impossible after all? The mind reels.

Peacocks on Power Lines

Wonder is relative.  It's prized as a universal human value, but it's really quite relative. It can form groups, identities even (those who wonder, those who wonder at). It self-propagates linguistically (how would you define the fine line between wonder and wonderment?) which is, of course, wonderful.  Mac's return was filled with wonder: the kids' glee, the (it's all true!) wondrous textiles of the Orient, the pictures (which are emerging slowly, each one its own incredible universe), the stories the stories the stories. We heard most of them around a campfire and in the woods, as we gathered in a state park for two nights of camping with Chicago friends. There, all of the ecocritical readings I've been doing were treated to delicious (and sometimes deliciously ironic) applications (let us just say that whatever the hell was sniffing around our tent that first night fulfilled every fear of every medieval monster ever).  Camping is its own strange co-existence with nature, and camping with kids blurs even more boundaries. Oliver's instant happy bond with one of (it turned out) multiple frogs hopping all around was deep, and the frog's final leap into the void out of his hands was heartbreaking to him.  The other, many other, frogs that would experience his joyous possession over the course of the two days were never quite the same - but they were plentiful.  When Tiny took leave of Oliver for good, Oliver spoke of the event as Tiny's "return" to nature - even though we were all in the same forest-y midst, all absolutely surrounded by the same green and sounds and breezes, Tiny was returning somewhere, I think to Oliver's unknowing of him.  Whereas, when Oliver held him, and felt him breathing and wriggling, knowledge (deeply satisfying knowledge, the knowledge of possession) was there.  We discount children (and children's books and children's movies and children's imagination) because they make the mute world speak, they give it intention and agency. But, to quote Graham Harman's prescient line from his review of Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, "anthropomorphism may be needed to in order to counter anthropocentrism."  Oliver's wonder of frogs was complicated and all-consuming, actually: thrill, possession, focus, understanding, emotion, loss.  Since coming home, he has stopped speaking of frogs. Iris, on the other hand, doggedly typed in "frog" and (to my consternation) "pet" at the library yesterday and wouldn't you know it, there's a book on the topic. I don't yet know what we're in for, but we've been promised a "convincing presentation."  The boundaries between human and non-human that I seek to critique in my classroom may yet break down in my home.

Peacock from a Medieval Bestiary

Of all the images that Mac has given us to wonder at, consider, turn over in our minds and ask each other about, the one of a peacock flying up to sit on power lines on the highway between New Delhi and Agra has gripped me completely. It's the incongruity at first, and makes me realize that much of wonder is embedded in the incongruous, and that much of the relativity of wonder is caught up in the relativity of incongruity (what doesn't fit for me, may have always fit for you).  A peacock on a power line may well be mundane, if not downright annoying, to the inhabitants of New Delhi. It elicited little wonder within medieval bestiaries, where it is cited for its tough meat and horrific and disconcerting shriek. But, God, is it ever wondrous to me.  A jewel of a bird, whose magical sighting is prized and kept in zoos in my experience, perching atop what I have to realize is actually another kind of wonder: a power line that feeds an electrical grid that services the nearly 20 million people living in New Delhi (that's half the population of France if you want a relative scale). That kind of population creates some very slow traffic and it took them about two hours to get out of the city - plenty of time for Mac to see the peacock's wanderings, its graceful swoops and moves in establishing its bird's eye view of the traffic river below. Is it wondrous because it shouldn't be possible but it is? Because the two parts don't fit yet co-exist? There are opportunities for (big? political? symbolic?) statements to be made within wonder sparked by incongruity. Is that peacock on a power line wondrous because it's unexpected yet absolute? Because it provides that veristic detail (think of the uses of animals in Alexander's letter to Aristotle) that reminds me with renewed wonder each time that my dear Mac was really, truly in India? Because it defies expectation? I can't discount the possibility that it's the alliteration, too.

Wonder

Diamond power. Livre des Merveilles. BN ms. fr. 2810, f. 182

I've been thinking about the multiplicity and double-edged sword of wonder.  It is, like so many words that hold my fascination these days, not Latinate in origin, but rather from the Old English, etymollgically dubbed "of unknown origin."  I love how it works: even saying the word - you purse your lips for the "w" (which gives your face that look of surprise that, yes, wonder first brings), and your lips part to end the word with the full syllable of "er" (leaving you, as wonder so often does, open-mouthed).  The word "wonder" is a close cousin to "marvel," a word which, aside from being thoroughly, beautifully, and, sure, wondrously explored by Stephen Greenblatt, comes from the Latin mirabilia, and so will not hold us here. (But isn't it interesting that already here, at the etymological level, there are two families for this sensation?) It is a sensation (an event? an emotion? an experience?) that at once propels intimacy and distance.  When I read of a land of Ind so fecund that its diamonds are male and female and procreate to have little diamond babies in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, I am completely captivated: I stop at this idea, I think on it, I am there in this fantasy: I turn it over in my mind, my hand can imagine this land.

And they grow together, male and female.  And they be nourished with the dew of heaven.  And they engender commonly and bring forth small children, that multiply and grow all the year. (Chapter 17)

Such vital diamonds have the power to repel wild beasts, and this is the virtue that is illuminated in the wondrous Livre des merveilles manuscript made for the Duc de Berry in the early 15th century and given over and over again until it reached François Ier in the early 16th century. Procreating diamonds are easy to imagine (easy to picture), but hard to represent. At the same time, a distance is created - how far away, how far beyond the reach of my mind, can this land be, that it produces such wonder?  The dynamic of wonder (and here it is not that different from the marvelous) is the dynamic of colonialism: objects of wonder, become objects of desire, become objects of possession.  Speed up wonder, and it becomes rapacious taking. I have students agonize about feeling wonder for distant or other cultures; I have seen them try to normalize or demystify the most wondrous things so as to not feel wonder.  And I have not quite known what to tell them. For me, without wonder (without surprise, without open-endedness), there is no change, no expansion (and I mean of the mind, but boy, what a colonizing word!).  At the same time, in taking your breath away, wonder prompts your hand to take. Or so goes much of Western Europe's relationship with the world since the 1770s.

Tourists at the Buddha's Tree

But wonder has something else up its sleeve.  In its multiplicity, it also has the idea of wondering, a more critical mode than marveling.  Marvel and marveling are closely related in experience; but a critical space creates a difference between wonder and wondering.  I sit in Indiana full of wonder for all of the imagined Indias that I have been reading about, while Mac walks in India, wondering in more precise ways, already bringing back scenarios to leave me wondering: the tourist culture that he shared with Hindu travelers at the site of the tree where the Buddha received Enlightenment. This is the more complicated wondering which the bold, broad strokes of wonder seek to efface, but which, when taken apart (examined critically), will start to speak volumes about a contemporary India, perhaps more free of the wondrous mists with which colonialism (and the proto-colonialism of Mandeville?) (and the post-colonialism of globalization?) enshrouds it.  I can think of many wrong ways to approach India, but no right way.  One could talk about the ethics of wonder, and the ethics of wondering, couldn't one?

From the Hindustan Times

In the absence of the time to do so, I can only appreciate the fashion advice provided here for the monsoon season rapidly swooping into India.  Is the difference for me that wonder is more archaic a sensation somehow? That wondering is a more modern, critical mode? This seems self-serving: I can wonder with impunity, as long as I follow it up with a good dose of wondering?  Hmmm.  I am on this edge: I love the sensation of wonder: it's immediate and thus honest. I fear the sensation of wonder: even though it's immediate, it cannot exist without preconceptions (one of the qualifications of the wondrous is the new - thus the worthy phrase "child-like wonder").

But I'm going to end with the possibility of repeated wonder. Of something - my children playing with friends on a summer evening - that though it is very preconceived (it's downright sentimental), and has been experienced many times, never ceases to fill me with wonder.  I wonder (I do!) about Mac coming back to this place, to these sensations, after what he has experienced.  I am wondering how we will all have been changed by this trip. Mac has gone before us into India, and our imaginations have followed: me in Mandeville, Oliver through an obsession with his Oriental Expedition Lego set, Iris through her questions to my student Vishal about the Red Fort, and Eleanor in her inexplicable use of the word "Maharajah" last night (where did she learn it???).   Wonder is wayward: it is here, there, and maybe even everywhere.

Children, Nature, Selves

The return from Atlanta has been a deep nesting experience (the exact opposite of Mac's days in India which have been unfurling in more and more extraordinary ways).  The fifteen (!) boxes of glorious books from my beloved Donna have emerged, categorized in perhaps new ways, finding new alphabetical companions as they meet books already on my bookshelves.  There are many memories of her fantastic classes in these books, a kind of long look at the love and thinking that go into teaching and research - the spines of these books are worn with consultation, and I think of myself as a 17 year old on the other end of that book-professor relationship, taking notes, thinking on art history all the time, now making my own consultations.  There is a seamlessness in Donna meeting the kids that is wonderfully untrue, considering all of the radical changes that have occurred over the past 20 years - yet, there we were: one art historian passing her books on to another art historian, Donna's lovely daughter meeting my eager kids.  They knew that they were in the midst of something special, the kids, they savored the seamlessness - to them it had to be inevitable that things turned out this way. In the way that photos of loved ones allow us to over-interpret them, the three outlines of Oliver, Iris and Eleanor at the mind-blowing Georgia Aquarium say it all: Oliver, relaxed, with his hands in his pockets, sighting enormous beluga whales; Iris reaching up to touch the glass to verify or count something, to keep track and annotate as she goes; and Eleanor, little pixie, twirling about, engaged in some imaginary dance with the belugas, which she adores.

No need to over-interpret this one: Eleanor is registering everyone's reaction beneath this phenomenal tunnel where whale sharks (which are huge!) and enormous manta rays and dozens of other sea life swim above our heads.  It took our breath away: the gentle beauty, the ease, the enormity, the flow, the quiet purpose, yes, the seamlessness of it all. Which brings me to a realization: that aquaria are starting to be our image of the ocean - that we see more of them than of the actual ocean; that while these gorgeous environments entreat us to do all we can to preserve the ocean, they also allow us to forget its actual demise a little. Reading Bennett and LaTour has made me increasingly excruciatingly aware of the categories and boundaries that have been set up and (more importantly) of the work that these do to perpetuate our primacy (which is not (always) a good thing - wait, is it ever a good thing?).  We categorize nature As Such and make it a place apart, while in lived reality, we are utterly enmeshed in it. To quote Graham Harman on Tim Morton's blog: "Nature is not natural and can never be naturalized."  At the same time, there is an aesthetic (oh no, not that word again!) to Nature As A Place Apart, that of natural history (there's a great term) museums, and museums in general (perhaps Art "in general" is the entire idea of "a place apart) that I wouldn't want to give up. I don't think that any of the people I'm reading for the ecocriticism class are calling for the end of aquaria or museums, but they have become increasingly strange places to me, symptomatic of our will to make nature an aesthetic rather than, say, a politics, or even at times, a reality.  The challenge is to understand all of this within living my life; the other is to make this gripping for students. In the absence of subjectivity, they have a really hard time staying interested. And I know that one of the aims of ecocriticism is to provide nature with a subjectivity (that is not anthropomorphic) that we can all more interactively engage in - but it's still a challenge.

All of this is somehow related in my mind to the latest development here at home. Two days ago, Iris announced that she wanted to be a boy. She came downstairs, having raided Oliver's closet, wearing a shirt and tie, dress pants, and "boy shoes."  When that is too formal, she has taken to wearing the clip-on tie with a t-shirt. She has asked that we now call her "Edgar." I dug a little, and it turns out that these biographies that she's been reading have had a powerful effect on her. Iris has discovered three things this summer: the parenthesis, the phrase "physically impossible," and biographies.  She absolutely adores this genre - gripping narrative, but all facts (she resisted my attempts to get her hooked on historical fiction because she couldn't tell "where the facts end and the fiction begins" - !!!).  BUT, the genre of biography, I now realize, is all about people who break the mold, who change things, who rethink categories.  So in reading a lot of women's biographies (Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart), she has been reading a lot about the historical expectations of women (to stay home, squelch intellectual ambition, and (and I can't believe that this is the phrase seared in my little girl's mind), "worry about their complexion.") And she is balking.  My entreaties that today, women have more agency in defining what it means to be a woman aren't convincing her, although she concedes the point that there are women engineers and women doctors.  Oliver and Eleanor have offered the greatest resistance to Iris's project - they miss her as a girl, they've said, and want her back (remember, it's only been two days). Nothing doing.  Eleanor was the first one to give in, and I took this picture of she and "Edgar" getting married. Yes, it gets weird. And it also makes me wonder if this isn't about Iris missing her dad.  One could over-interpret.  I'll confess to missing Iris as a girl as well. She has been clear, though, that this is a project - she knows that she will have to use the girls' bathroom come the fall (interesting sex-gender realization there), and she has said that her attempt to play with cars "proved embarrassing" (I'm quoting her precisely because these comments have been so vivid to me).  She will try again today.  What is she playing with, my darling girl? My dear child.  I could say that she is testing the boundaries of her gender, but in some ways, with the tie and all, it seems as though she is reifying them. Perhaps it happens simultaneously, or in some kind of continuum of testing and reification, as she makes sense of her self, her "nature."  Or maybe this is about her thinking ahead: yesterday in the car, as Oliver and Eleanor were begging her to go back to being a girl (and their trust in the absolute nature of her decision is dear to me, too) and using the "girls only having babies was a long time ago" argument, Iris said "Well, just in case things go back to the way they were, I'll be ready if I'm a boy."  Progressives, take note: keep the wheels of social progress turning!