update from sparkleup
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<p>There must be some way of debriding that scuffed and stripped self-stuff, I thought, so that what you’re left with is some purer version of yourself, something all the more whole for what was there now being gone. There must be some way to pare that cruft away. There had to be, right? If one was to live happily, there had to be.</p>
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<p>An aside: Years later, one job and one house and one more dog and one more self later, I called him to ask if he would be willing to write a WPATH letter for me so that I could start HRT, and he said, “I don’t think I can. I don’t know enough about it, and you don’t want to know how I feel about it.”<sup id="fnref:younes-interpolation2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:younes-interpolation2">5</a></sup></p>
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<p>I never talked to him again.</p>
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<p>All the same, I was young, I was dumb, and I was flaking away at the edges of that more fundamental identity. I was making use of the space I had to explore in clumsy, gangly ways. I was building up new versions of myself, one after another, to search for the smallest bit of relief from that friction.</p>
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<p>An aside: ((furry as a queer space))<sup id="fnref:younes-translation"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:younes-translation">9</a></sup></p>
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<p>All the same, I was young, I was dumb, and I was flaking away at the edges of that more fundamental identity. I was making use of the space I had to explore in clumsy, gangly ways. I was building up new versions of myself, one after another, to search for the smallest bit of relief[^youness-unknown] from that friction.</p>
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<p>An aside: furry is a notably queer space. It’s a subculture in which you present to others a new version of yourself; not always better, but almost always more earnest. You provide an avatar, a front-stage persona, that everyone simply takes at face value. There is no unwinding, no translation<sup id="fnref:younes-translation"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:younes-translation">9</a></sup> of the front- to the backstage version of you. We commission art and ignore the names on the PayPal invoices. We meet each other at conventions, share rooms with each other, and still never learn each other’s real names. We refer to each other by species, a cute way to reinforce the idea the ostensibly human being in front of us is not what we’re seeing.</p>
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<p>There’s no reason that such a space would not attract a queer crowd, yes? Some of it is doubtless the sense of safety that fandom has always provided to gay and lesbian people as well as a place where gender-bending is welcome. Still, in a place where our own original characters are normal (as opposed to a fandom centered on canon, where canonical characters are the norm), where we become those characters </p>
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<hr />
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<p><em>We</em> know that it’s much more complex. We have the benefit of the framing device to keep in mind. Elihu speaks of wisdom yet lacks the knowledge. He can claim to have one and yet still not know that he lacks the other.</p>
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<div class="footnote">
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<hr />
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<ol>
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@ -67,16 +69,39 @@
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<p>Weinberger continues to be relevant: “[…] translation is more than a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem.” \parencite[46]{wangwei}</p>
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<p>This is where we leave off, and then this youngster, this whippersnapper, this upstart Elihu picks up.</p>
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<p>“I am young in years, and you are aged. Therefore I was awed and feared to speak my mind with you,” (Job 32:6, Alter) he begins, and we are off to the races, or at least some brash exhortations to wisdom. Job’s friends may have left off on their attempts to convince him of some perhaps-guilt, but Elihu does not: “And I attended to you, and, look, Job has no refuter, none to answer his talk among you.” (Job 32:12, Alter) Were it not for the (admittedly quite beautiful) poetic form of Elihu’s speeches, he would be beyond tiresome. He goes on for more than a chapter simply talking about how he is going to answer Job before he actually does so. He is going to talk. He is going to get there eventually. He will speak.<sup id="fnref:younes-alien"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:younes-alien">10</a></sup> Verse after verse of promises.</p>
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<p>Tiresome as he is, and despite the non-sequitur nature of his speeches, his language remains beautiful, and he does at points reinforce the point mentioned in the epigraph: Job questions God as to why it is that his world has become so miserable, and God cannot but reply with an exclamation that this world is far stranger, far worse and far better, than any man, no matter how righteous could hope to understand. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-translation" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>Tiresome as he is, and despite the non-sequitur nature of his speeches, his language remains beautiful, and he does at points reinforce the point mentioned in the epigraph: Job questions God as to why it is that his world has become so miserable, and God cannot but reply with an exclamation that this world is far stranger, far worse and far better, than any man, no matter how righteous could hope to understand:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Why do you contend with Him,<br />
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\vin if He answers not all of man’s words?<br />
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For God speaks in one way<br />
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\vin or in two, and no one perceives Him:<br />
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In a dream, a night’s vision,<br />
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\vin when slumber falls upon men,<br />
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\vin \vin in sleep upon their couch<br />
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Then He lays bare the ear of men,<br />
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\vin and terrifies them with reproof,<br />
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to make humankind swerve from its acts</p>
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<p>(Job 33:13–17, Alter)</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-translation" title="Jump back to footnote 9 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:younes-alien">
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<p>The NRSV has the unique wording “See, I open my mouth; the tongue in my mouth speaks.” (Job 33:2, NRSV) In a post-<em>Alien</em> world, this brings to mind some smaller mouth rebuking him. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-alien" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
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<p>The NRSV has the unique wording “See, I open my mouth; the tongue in my mouth speaks.” (Job 33:2, NRSV) In a post-<em>Alien</em> world, this brings to mind some smaller mouth<sup id="fnref:younes-shallower"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:younes-shallower">11</a></sup> rebuking him. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-alien" title="Jump back to footnote 10 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:younes-shallower">
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<p>Or, to look at it more seriously, a shallower voice. Perhaps that internal Elihu we all have within us doing its best to convince us that we have, at some point, lacked the wisdom required to have kept us from our current predicament. Perhaps I’m taking up too much space here, though. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-shallower" title="Jump back to footnote 11 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:younes-unknown">
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<p>This unspoken and unspeakable, unknown and unknowable language is the only way we can possibly move within the world under the guidance of God. Here, however, he falls back into the common theme of Job’s reprovers, that he surely must have done something wrong that he feels the need to call for an advocate before God — an ally rather than an adversary, perhaps — “For a man’s acts He pays him back, and by a person’s path He provides him,” Elihu reasons. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-unknown" title="Jump back to footnote 12 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn:younes-wisdom">
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<p>Strangely, Elihu, for all his talk on wisdom, seems to lack the wisdom required to understand the first part of his proposition, that the workings of God are so far beyond human understanding that we cannot know them well enough to call Him to account for his actions. He immediately falls back on the comforting assertion that cause must precede effect. Of <em>course</em> Job is experiencing such hardships! If he is experiencing such effects, then there must be a cause, and that cause must be the most rational one: an offense against God. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:younes-wisdom" title="Jump back to footnote 13 in the text">↩</a></p>
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</li>
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</ol>
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</div>
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</article>
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<footer>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-03-17</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2023-03-29</p>
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</footer>
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</main>
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