Jan 292016
 

Thanatos, Thanatos wherefore art thou Thanatos? And for that matter WHO are you? Are you the unregenerate savagery that is always waiting to burst forth? 

Yesterday I went to the movies! I saw The Danish Girl: a further adventure into gender and sexual identity. A moving account of one man/woman’s story set in the 1920/30s and presumably what were the early attempts to treat with surgery. I think I must make the assumption that transgender issues have always been with us since the dawn of time, perhaps until the advent of settled existence, agriculture and the growth of urban living with a pattern of a brutal patriarchy to give order, to keep order once the group size went beyond what could be managed through mere cooperative practices, they became shamans, seers much as the figure of Tiresius suggests, a being who has experienced being both man and woman. And now we are interested in looking at each other, looking within ourselves to see what is there. What is us? What isn’t us?

And looking before death takes away the capacity to see: increasingly an issue that accompanies us as we age. With some trepidation, but also with great interest, I approach my 70th birthday. A process which seems to demand more and more letting go. What do I have to keep hold of? All this stuff that I have accumulated!