Goya knew the score: Third of May 1808

Have My Cake

Have My Cake

By Vajra Koan

(Respectfully dedicated to my wonderful wife)

I want to have my cake and eat it,

And I want icing on it, too.

I want to have my cake and eat it.

Don’t you?

They told me I can’t have it.

That just makes me want it more.

They told me I can’t have it, well -

I’m gonna get it, for sure.

I want the best of both worlds

And everything that’s in between.

Better than the best of both worlds, baby,

Better than the best there’s been.

I want to have my cake and eat it,

And I want icing on it, too.

I want to have my cake and eat it:

Babe, I want you.

Everything Has Always Been All Right

(Everything Has Always Been) All Right
by Vajra Koan

Respectfully dedicated to Mike Scott, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler, and Phil Ward

Well, you know me; I’m just a foolish man;

So many things that I just don’t understand;

The way I lie to all you people! It’s a crime,

But someone’s got to be here in this space and time.

And every last thing -

I tell you everything.

Every last thing, yes, every tiny detail,

Everything has always been all right.

Yes, everything has always been all right.

I’ve seen a man with a gun, out shooting children for fun,

He said it wasn’t his fault, they wouldn’t let him be a boy scout,

And all the common people might not understand why,

But every living entity was surely born to die,

And every last thing

I tell you everything.

Every last thing, yes, every tiny detail,

Everything has always been all right.

Yes, everything has always been all right.

And now the Christians are here; they preach a Gospel of fear -

They say that guilt is great, and their God wants you to hate -

And all the common people might not understand why,

But they know that everything that they’ve been taught is a lie,

And every last thing,

I tell you everything.

Every last thing, yes, every tiny detail,

Everything has always been all right.

Yes, everything has always been all right.

Now we’re dancing on into a New Age Dawn;

Here comes the Goddess blowing on a mystical Horn;

The Great God Pan knows there’s no evil to fight,

He knows that everything has always been all right.

Every last thing,

I tell you everything.

Every last thing, yes, every tiny detail,

Everything has always been all right.

Yes, everything has always been all right.

Well, you know me; I’m just a foolish man;

So many things that I just don’t understand;

The way I lie to all you people! It’s a crime,

But someone’s got to be here in this space and time.

And every last thing -

I tell you everything.

Every last thing, yes, every tiny detail,

Everything has always been all right.

Yes, everything has always been all right.

Greenham Common

Greenham Common  by Vajra Koan
Respectfully dedicated to all the victorious heroes who took part in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, which forced the US military to take their nuclear missiles out of England and back to America; and dedicated also, with equal respect, to all the battered, defeated, bedraggled heroes who will never forget sacrificing themselves to the police violence at Stonehenge, and becoming, as a result, (as Obi Wan would say) a force more powerful than any policeman can possibly imagine.

Just outside Greenham Common, some women once won a fight

Against military policemen, who thought that might was always right.

While the newspapers insulted them, and the Government ignored,

The women there just soldiered on until the missiles left our shores.

And the protest march kept growing, day and night,

In the darkest darkness there still burned a light

In the eyes of those few brave enough

To stand up for what they believed in

And join the protests on the barricades

Confronting might with right.

You have a right called Freedom of Worship, so the United Nations say,

But every year, at Stonehenge, your rights are stolen away.

Some pilgrims get a good kicking, and no-one seems to give much of a damn

About the human sacrifices going on in the back of the police van.

But the protest march keeps growing, day and night,

In the heart of darkness there still burns a light

In the eyes of those few brave enough

To stand up for what they believe in

And join the protests on the barricades

Confronting might with right.

At nine o’clock each morning, the slaves oil their machine;

It keeps us locked in servitude; it keeps us all so squeaky clean;

And as we sell our lives away, so very sadly cheap,

We try hard not to feel too much, and not to think too deep,

But still the protest march keeps growing, day and night,

In the darkest prison cell still burns a light

In the hearts of those few brave enough

To give their lives for peace and justice,

And join the protests on the barricades

Confronting might with right.

And in our squalid little living rooms, we, the guilty, sit and chat

Of mindless trivialities, we pretend that’s where it’s at,

And we don’t blame our government, our church or our TV,

We just live lives of hopeless ignorance and bland complacency.

But the protest march keeps growing, day and night,

In the hearts of darkness set the fires alight,

Until everyone is brave enough

To go to Greenham Common

And join the protest on the barricades

Confronting might with right.

Let's All Go (Together)

Let’s All Go, Together

By Vajra Koan
(Respectfully dedicated to Aldous Huxley)

Let’s all go, together,

And play upon the hill.

Let’s all go, together, my friends,

And play upon the hill.

We can dance in the early morning sun,

Sing all afternoon,

Hold hands as the Sun goes down,

And make love under the Moon,

Yeah,

Make love under the Moon.

Let’s all go, together,

And leave no-one behind,

Let’s all go, together, my friends:

Learn to become kinder,

Learn to become kinder,

Learn to become kinder:

Learn to be more kind.

Well, it was there they crucified him,

On a hill called Calvary.

They hammered nails into the hands

Held out to you and me,

Yeah,

Held out to you and me.

So let’s all go, together,

And leave no-one behind,

Let’s all go, together, my friends:

Learn to become kinder,

Learn to become kinder,

Learn to become kinder:

Let’s learn to be more kind.

We can dance in the early morning sun,

Sing all afternoon,

Hold hands as the Sun goes down,

And make love under the Moon,

Yeah,

Make love under the Moon.

The Elven Queen

The Elven Queen

(Respectfully dedicated to Terry Pratchett, to the British class system, and to the icy clarity of stars on a bitter mountain night)

She rides upon a snow-white swan And stars shine in her eyes. Upon her head a silver crown, The elven-queen goes by. All gold is her possession, And all the lust of men. But love she can not know, until The world is whole again. Beneath her gaze, all mortal men Fall trembling to their knees; All women pale with secret dread Lest they should fail to please. Ice-cold, her laughter, breaking glass, Contempt for those beneath her class, So noble in her viciousness, It’s more than eyes can see - Run fast, my friend! Find shelter! When She whispers, “Come with me…” Your doors and windows, bolt them tight, Bank up the fire against the night, Take shield in left hand, sword in right, Against Her Majesty to fight. And know yourself already lost, The moment that your paths have crossed: Nor self nor kin can any save, Though he be bravest of the brave. And when She taps upon your door Will you rush out with wordless roar Like fish that bite upon the lure? And see your children never more? She rides upon a snow-white swan And stars shine in her eyes. Upon her head a silver crown, The elven-queen goes by.

Above these Mortal Hills

Above These Mortal Hills

By Vajra Koan

(Respectfully dedicated to the teachings of Jiddu Krishnamurti)

Can I sit by your fire, to rest my aching back?

I’ve walked all the way from Hell to Heaven and back.

Where my eyesight meets the moonlight, I can still see through the black

That lies above these dying hills,

Beyond these living hills,

Above these mortal hills.

Every sunset’s a warning to all those who still feel fear,

“There is no truth,” it says, “there’s nothing quite so clear,”

“And there’s no reason for reason, if your heart is here,”

Above these dying hills,

Beyond these living hills,

Above these mortal hills.

Yet we feel so much anger, there’s still too much hate;

No-one knows the time, but we suspect that it’s too late,

We have no faith in God and no belief in fate,

Above these dying hills,

Beyond these living hills,

Above these mortal hills.

Still we can only stride forwards, for there is no turning back,

No deviation from the one straight track,

Like the rain down to the sea, our minds are floating back,

Above these dying hills,

Beyond these living hills,

Above these mortal hills.

I was the shining sun, I was an old oak tree.

I was a fool to the fools around me,

Seems my body’s a slave, but my mind can be

A place where I am free.

A place where I can see

A place where I can be:

Above these dying hills,

Beyond these living hills,

Above these mortal hills.

So: Can I sit by your fire, and rest my aching back?

I’ve walked all the way from Hell to Heaven and back.

Where my eyesight meets the moonlight, I can still see through the black

That lies above these dying hills,

Beyond these living hills,

Above these mortal hills.

(c) Vajra Koan 1992

After the End of Colonialism

As to what postcolonial culture might be like, postcolonial art, postcolonial music, postcolonial politics (if such a term makes sense) or postcolonial literature; these are notions which may one day have meaning; but only when people have forgotten that their ancestors ever farmed each other.

In the Koran, it is said that to kill a person is to destroy an entire Universe. This is quite literally true; the Universe in my mind is not anywhere else, and when it is ended by my death, that Universe dies with me. It is in this sense that I say that to be an abused child is not something that ends when the child leaves the abusive home; nor does it end when the abusive father dies, or when the abusive mother apologizes, or even when the child grows into a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, and fulfils a life’s mission by passing on love and trust to the children, the grandchildren, by teaching them and showing them what love is, that love is not abuse and abuse is not love, teaching them to love, not to abuse, seeing that they love, that they are loved, that they are not abused and that they do not abuse. Even after that – a valid life’s work, my life’s work, the only work I can conceive of, is done; even then, I am still a person who was abused as a child; the abuse still defines me, and cannot fail to define me, even as I reject it. My mind, though a many-flowered tree of miracles and home to a thousand flocks of roosting birds of paradise, is still rooted in the filthy stinking pit of abuse, and the abuse is still there. The echoes are not silent. The new implications continue to arise; the abuse has still not finished, can not finish, until the final perfect bliss that comes from the death of the Universe itself.

And so it is with the colonies – with the farms, the factories, the systems of slavery and abuse which mean that an innocent girl must work eight-hour days of hard labour for 200 baht a day while her cynical, corrupt boss sleeps in his bed for 200,000 baht a day. These abusive systems can be ended, and must be ended. It is even possible that we, you and I, might one day summon the courage to end them.

But to really finish with colonies, to end colonialism as a mindset, as a cultural determinant? As long as there is a cultural record of the history of the last ten thousand years – as long as there is a memory of a story about the Pyramids, built over countless generations by hundreds of thousands of slaves to serve the lunacy of Pharaohs who wanted their insane wealth to continue into the afterlife, and didn't mind destroying countless real lives for the remotest possibility of achieving that grotesque objective - as long as we remember the madness of the British markets that made a tasty profit by keeping food prices at a level where millions of Indians and Irish starved; as long as we remember the genocidal farm Pol Pot built; as long as there are people who tell their children, with the same tears in their eyes that I have as I write this, of the holocaust that Hitler ordered; as long as we remember these and a thousand stories all too like them, colonialism will not be entirely dead, its implications and echoes will continue to arise anew, in different forms, and the best we will be able to do, the best any of us will be able to do, is to stand and squat together, holding hands on hearts, looking with honesty and kindness and love deep into each others' gentle eyes, and laugh as we piss on the meaningful and contested symbols that will long continue to mark colonialism's unquiet grave.

Wallowing in Filth

This sty in which we find ourselves has one more problem, a problem for which sties have always been renowned: it is very dirty. Not merely in the usual way. The farms have grown so large, so productive, so destructive, that they have covered, or are swiftly covering, the entire planet with their filth. Whether we speak of our “spent” radioactive fuel rods which will require artificial cooling for the next ten thousand years to prevent them exploding, or of carbon dioxide levels which have already begun to trigger a pan-species genocide deadlier than that which exterminated the dinosaurs, or any of a dozen other impending catastrophes, it is easy to see that our shit, the farms’ shit, the combined national shit from every nation, stinks worse than any dungheap we’ve ever made before.

We have created a vast amount of filth in which we will not be allowed to wallow indefinitely. Our time is limited; but then, our time has always been limited. We are only animals, after all, mere beasts of burden, who exist only on the whim of our betters, and only so that they may profit from our labors. It is only our time, the time of the animals, which is limited; not their time, the time of the farmers. 

Wealth can, of course, contrary to the repeated claims of the celebrities on television, buy a palace on a mountain, far from the effects of climate change or the nuclear fuel dumps – just as wealth can buy more safety, better food, better health care, a longer life, a more beautiful face. You cannot have these things; your children, your friends, your lovers cannot have these things; but your owners can.

Wealth cannot buy happiness, our owners have taught us to mindlessly repeat. We all know, however, exactly how happy we are when we have no wealth - no food, nowhere to sleep, no clean water to drink, no clothes. Happiness without a bare minimum of wealth is possible only through insanity. 

And we all know that there are those who have so much wealth that they are quite literally unable to count it, and yet whose only occupation is amassing more of it by stealing food from the mouths of our children. These are our owners, our betters, the success stories, the billionaires and trillionaires, those whose advice we listen to, whose interviews we attend closely, and whose books we buy; these are the farmers who we long to become, and for whose pleasure alone we toil as our parents toiled and as our children will toil.

Wealth can ensure that while we, mere beasts of burden, suffer from climate change, from pollution, from recession, from financially broken families, homelessness, famine, drought, diseases which we cannot afford to treat, there will be a few who continue to be above such dreary concerns, whose access to luxury and pleasure will continue to be almost without limit, indeed will continue to grow, day by day, as the billions starve, even as we gasp our last; and we should be grateful, to know this as we die, for it is, after all, their comfort, after all, their benefit, their profit, their joy, that is the one and only purpose of our every animal breath – at least, that is, until we have succeeded in defining, not just in words but in a solid reality, a useful and worthy meaning for that elusive little word, “postcolonial”; a word which can be defined simply enough in words, yet has proved rather harder, thus far, to construct in experience.

"Postcolonial" means “after we have all had enough of farming people and enough of being farmed.”

Postcolonial means what happens next.

Welcome Home: Postcolonialism in the Context of the Modern Sty

This sty, then, is where we find ourselves, whether as pig-lord or as mere pig, or perhaps merely as a louse feeding on the pig, as we attempt to define this word “postcolonial” in a way that might give it, and even, perhaps, us, some kind of useful meaning. This sty is where we must begin. And it is not such a bad sty, relative to those that have gone before. It has electric light, and mobile phones, and video games; encyclopedias, antibiotics, stem cell therapy and global human rights organizations (think of Julian Assange as a defenselessly promiscuous dormouse smuggling messages from one sty to the next through the farmhouse skirting-boards, while Bradley Manning screams from the mousetrap in the corner of the kitchen). This sty is, in some respects, as far as we know (and our historical knowledge is certainly incomplete, the gaps far vaster than we are led to believe) the best we – the human race - have ever had.

Of course, we have to work long hours (longer than ever before, with fewer holidays; stone age people had ten times more free time than we do, and spent vastly more time talking to their families) and we have to live in a world defined by discourses delimited more intelligently and one-sidedly and misleadingly than ever by the farmers’ propagandists, whose skills and techniques are developing at a remarkable rate, even as their ethical standards and end goals remain identical to those of a thousand years ago, that is, entirely lacking on both counts.

Orwell and Ambition

Eric Blair’s postcolonial fairytale, Animal Farm, was written, like most of his work, under the pseudonym George Orwell. The book is a classic, not only of propaganda, but also, well beyond propaganda, of all-too-human tragedy, portrayed with intelligence, insight, and shame. It is instructive and memorable. After every revolution, thus far, some have indeed proved more equal than others. Beyond the tragedy is an elusive hope, almost beyond Orwell's vision: the idea of a revolution that might not be betrayed, an animal farm which might cease to be a farm, which might, in fact, become something altogether more interesting and egalitarian. What it might be, Orwell never suggested; yet the hope of it, never defined, is implied throughout all his work, with an unexpressed poignancy that is perhaps his most profound legacy.

In 1984, written in 1948, Blair predicted that the Government would install “telescreens” in all homes, with no off switch; in reality, most of us, human animals that we are, aspire to little more than to earn enough to buy a television for ourselves, the larger the better, and seldom see a need to turn it off. We believe ourselves immune to the propaganda which we know full well is in the movies, the adverts, the news, the game shows; we claim we are unaffected by the advertising, even as we purchase the products we are told to buy and vote for the lying, smirking, abusive politician we are told to vote for. Those few among us who find the propaganda distasteful are to be found most often in the homeless shelters, in the prisons, the mental hospitals, or – scarcely different – inhabiting the universities, paid to teach uninterested students who are there simply to gain a more financially advantageous place at the trough. 

The very highest aspiration our farms permit – and it is a ludicrously improbable ambition for the vast majority – is to climb the farmyard ladder, rung by rung, until we attain to the lofty rank of farmer-king, capitalist-baron, slave-owner, master, his virtue and good intentions lauded daily by all his eager servants, crowed of by all his cocks, the pig-lord controller of his very own sty. 

This, we say, is our greatest hope, our highest wish, and it is entirely appropriate that we have given it the name of our greatest nation, our most profitable farm, the farm with the largest prison population per capita in the world, yet also - is there a paradox? - the farm which most prides itself on the freedom it offers to its inmates: we call this great, white hope the American Dream. 

Brothers, sisters, together, let us piss.

A New Coat of Paint on the Slaughterhouse

The postcolonial period, the golden age, the new dawn, the Kingdom of Heaven – these times are not yet upon us, alas. Revolutions, coups, constitutions, reforms, bills of rights, guarantees, contracts – each of these has, as a matter of undeniable historical fact, simply represented a change in the farm’s ownership; perhaps a new name for the farmer, perhaps a change in his skin colour or a minor shift in the gendered expectations he enforces upon his wife, his son or his daughter. 

At best, our political changes have offered a new and more attractive coat of paint on the slaughterhouse; and at worst, our newest managers have taken the opportunity of the revolutionary moment to devise and implement whole new techniques whereby slaughterhouses may be mass-produced and made more efficient, helpfully eliminating wasteful self-motivated activities such as love, friendship, compassion, generosity, pity, all seen as obsolescent remnants of the ancien regime, unnecessary after Year Zero, sentimental masks of the fundamental enemy of management everywhere, namely, inefficiency in the obeying of the farmer’s oft-repeated orders to maximize the burden on his beasts and, thereby, to maximize his profits.

Behold the Eschaton

The term “postcolonial”, then, is a term of eschatology rather than one of political realism. It expresses the basic, instinctive, definitive human dream – the dream that truly defines each of us as human, and that, when we lose it, defines us as inhuman: that one day, we will all be free of the slave farms, no longer belong to a slave farm, no longer work on a slave farm, no longer be subject to a slave farmer or his family of slavers. 

The dream that one day we will ALL be free defines who I am, who I choose to be. I choose to believe that this dream identifies me as a fully human being, by consciously rejecting processes of abuse in which my role is either as victim, as abuser, as appeaser or as enabler; rejecting slavery either as owner, as trader, or as slave; rejecting all of the possible identities offered on the farm. 

This dream can be given the name of “postcolonialism”.

Of saints in the pustulence of nationalism: Postcolonialism defined

And yet, when we look at the social structures of these human beings, this species which has evolved love, which has evolved kindness, which has evolved pity, what do we see?

We see that these saints have managed to somehow organize each other into these vast, brutal, dreary, and competitive farms, to each of which we have given the name of nation, homeland, motherland, fatherland; to which, teary-eyed, without irony, we pledge our lives and allegiances, teaching our children to believe in their superiority over those other children born on the other side of the all-too-literal fence; to which, in all seriousness, we dedicate songs and poems; for which, and for the self-appointed owners of which, we kill and abuse and rape and torture and, most of all, every day of our lives, work.

We see that, in each of these nations, these farms, indeed often traveling between them, there is a tiny minority, characterized by their guilt, fear, greed, insecurity, arrogance, and hypocrisy, holding such power over their vast, helpless, mindless human herds that they quite simply have no idea what to do with it, except to use their power to protect their position, to gain even more power, in a self-inflating cycle until, in a grimly unpredictable rattling rhythm of a few years, decades, or centuries, each nation-farm-empire bubble bloodily bursts of its own self-inflated and heartless pustulence, as the farmer’s fences come down and the new farmer moves in.

Ah, humanity! The Owner is dead; long live the Owner. Today, together, without boundaries, let us piss on his future grave. This, as I understand it, as I use it, is the meaning of the word “postcolonial”.

The wretched of the Earth

            So here is the present state of the wretched of the Earth: We have some seven billion human individuals, a group which we can, if we wish, try to subdivide into disparate groups along what are the quite clearly discredited and discreditable lines of ethnicities, cultures, genders, classes, languages, races, literatures, good and bad, right and wrong, us and them; and indeed, when we try to do that, as our farmers have instructed us we must, we speedily discover that each of these groupings is impossible, at the boundaries, to define. What, then, is there left to say, when we stand outside these false, artificial fences of prejudice, and look at humanity as a whole? Is there anything we can say?

I would argue that there is. To be human is, at least some of the time, to act instinctively for kindness, equality, justice, freedom, and universal love. These ideas are, of course, culturally dependent, at least in terms of the words I have used here. Yet is there not something beneath the words, beyond them? Something limited neither by language, nor any of the other false boundaries we have discussed? Surely there is.

Another world is - we all feel - possible

It is from this profound awareness of potential – the analysis, not of our narrow, trained, conscious minds, but of our deepest unconscious dreams -  that we experience the feeling that “another world is possible”; this is, in a sense, humanity’s deepest urge, the very atom that defines us, uniting all cultures, defying all cultures, as being, though farmed, yet still human: our will to freedom, to brotherly and sisterly love of all human beings without exclusion, and to equality and justice, in spite of the obscene slaveries of the farms in which we have been bred; the feelings, in fact, which are such a fundamental part of almost every healthy human being’s instinctive thoughts, actions, and self-awareness that to give them names is to belittle them.

Is it “kind” to give food to a hungry child? Is it “activism” to feel that a prince who murders a pauper should be held to account? Is it “rebellious” for an abused child to refuse to smile on his father’s command? Whatever names we try to assign to such basic human drives, our labels fail to adequately encompass the complexity of these human minds which express, embody, and empower these drives, in a way no formal system yet defined can remotely aspire to, and from which the drives are born, whole, nameless, yet very real, as emergent properties, whose past is quite well known, yet whose futures will need to be experienced before they can be described.

“Postcolonial” – Forwards! Forwards! Towards a definition!

In discussing the meaning of the term “postcolonial”, as we will here, we first need to examine the root term, “colony”. A colony, etymologically speaking, is a farm. Several near-cognates are well-defined in Greek and Latin, with undercurrents of cherishing, cultivating, looking after, honouring, helping to prosper. And so it is that, when we speak of a “colony” in the political, imperial sense, there is a clear implication that some, at least, of the human beings involved in a colony are in no way different from any other farmed animals, their lives, families, and futures fenced and fattened for the benefit of others. In speaking, then, of a “colony”, we speak of a social order in which there is a class of human beings who are used as a crop, bought, sold, bred, fattened up, and slaughtered for the profit and amusement of another class of human beings.

Such social orders are neither rare, nor universal. It deserves to be said, quite clearly, that while all of the large countries of the world are presently organized into precisely such farms, some offering their human beasts better conditions than others, there are, even now, and have, in the past, probably always been some groups of people, either within or outside those farms, who have devoted great effort and ingenuity to attempts to organize themselves in a less brutally hierarchical way – a fact of which every human being is, I believe, deeply emotionally aware. Every prisoner - and every prison guard - instinctively knows that there is, that there must be, a place beyond the walls. Culturally, such a space can only exist within a zone in which hierarchy and abuse in all their forms have been somehow excluded or neutralized; a task which is neither simple, nor impossible.

Each farm, each colony, each nation, each empire, defines itself primarily by the barbed wire fences around it. These fences represent the fear of the unknown, of the outside, but even more, they express the fear that the beasts - the population - might escape. To create a zone without fences, without guards - a place where the population might wish to escape to - becomes, then, a natural and noble intermediate goal of any heartful student of colonial situations.

In speaking, however, of a "post" colonial situation, we imply a future world in which all these colonial fences have been taken down - both the physical fences of national boundary, and the deeper fences, such as prejudice, social exclusion, and fear of others, of which the physical fences were symbolic; a world in which the hierarchies have been somehow flattened, and a global space created and maintained in which the human animals are left free to roam as they will, yet with a freedom that is structured or educated sufficiently to prevent the blind recreation of the same prisons of prejudice and ignorance which were so recently demolished.

Introduction: What are "postcolonial studies"? What are words?

         Etymology - the study of the history of words - is a useful place to begin a discussion on literature, because literature is, after all, composed of written words, and these words have meaning only insofar as their writer, at least, has an understanding of the history of their definitions. Ideally, to state the obvious, both writer and reader should have in mind clear, yet flexible, definitions for the key terms they use, and these clear and agreed definitions should be available in an independently-consultable form such as a dictionary or encyclopedia for the benefit of readers who lack them; thus equipped, the readers’ mental forms should be sufficiently close to those of the writer to enable them to evolve in some useful way during the course of the reading.

That this obvious desideratum of written communication has become routinely controversial in the abstract academic field known as “postcolonial studies” should in itself alert the interested reader to the fact that many texts which are highly regarded in this field are open to fantastically wide and varied interpretation, as well as prewarning her that no reliable mechanisms presently exist – save, perhaps, for her own mind - for winnowing these wildly different, yet equally valid, interpretations from the willful, occasionally extreme and even obscene misinterpretations to which the texts have also, sometimes quite deliberately, been left entirely exposed by their authors and professional critics.