My father was a Yiddish literary star, writing short stories, essays, and novels. He lectured in Canada, the U.S., Argentina, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union, and more.  He was a Scholar-in-Residence at Oxford University.  Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel said he was “the novelist of the Warsaw Ghetto,” whose book “Ship of the Hunted” was “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth.”

Yehuda Elberg was a member of the Jewish Underground during the Holocaust.  Captured three times by the Nazis, he saw friends and most of his family brutally murdered.  There is no darker view of the cloth of truth. Yet he retained a keen sense of optimism, and a drive to rebuild his family and his people after the war.

Combine Words

I’ve inherited some of his ability to combine words into a story. Thankfully, my life has been much less eventful than his.  Most of my interesting experiences were by choice, rather than life-or-death situations. Although it was exciting, marching in protest at the Pentagon is not the same as Nazi storm-troopers coming down your street to kill you. Isolating (during Covid) in an apartment with a big-screen TV and high-speed internet is not the same as hiding inside a dark cellar, where making a sound could cost the life of your family.

I want my fiction to be “…cut from the cloth of truth- of creative truth,” like my dad’s.  I want it to be exciting, and get the reader to consider some relevant truth or issue.  For example, as an anthropologist, I learned about transgender shamanism.  It’s nothing like the phenomenon in contemporary popular culture. The transgender shaman in Quantum Cannibals is a complex, conflicted, frightening person, reflecting indigenous shamanism rather than contemporary Western ideology.  Quantum Cannibal’s fictional shaman is an elucidation, rather than a lecture.

The novel The Red Badge of Courage is known for its realistic depictions of the Civil War, even though the author Stephen Crane was born after it ended.  Hans Ruesch never met an Inuk (Eskimo) in his life, but his novel Top of The World is an accurate depiction of traditional Inuit life and culture.  These writers didn’t experience the lives or events they portrayed.  They didn’t have access to Google to do research.  Nonetheless, their fictional portrayals were accurate and their stories moving.

Dangerous Truth

Creative truth can be dangerous when it crosses the floor from literature to journalism. A documentary by a “journalist” won several prestigious American journalism awards. This journalist is a member of a terrorist organization that participated in the mass slaughter in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Worse than that, the terrorists who participated in the kidnap, rape, and butchering of women and infants were honored for photographs of their barbarism.

In snuff porn films, men actually murder the women they have sex with, and sick viewers get off watching what they believe to be the truth. Some question whether the filmed murders happened, whether they emphasized ‘creative’ rather than ‘truth.’ The barbarism that the Hamas photographers documented was a reality. These were snuff films and photos in their worst sense, and it definitely happened. The creativity was in the mental gymnastics that allowed Western media to ignore the savagery in front of their eyes. The ‘cloth of creative truth’ can be used to enlighten or conceal.

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It’s time to modify Descartes’s famous line I think therefore I am.  It should now read I think I am, therefore I am.  The original is no longer relevant, because if thinking was a condition of existence, there would not be many people left in our part of the world.

Proof can be found on the front page of the National Post of October 24^th, 2017.  “Women’s prison left to cope after getting male inmate who identifies as female.”  A fully functional, unaltered male, in a living unit with eleven (other) women.  She thinks she is a woman, therefore she is a woman.

Another story on the same page of the newspaper discusses an acupuncturist who posed as a neurosurgeon.  The article is vague on whether he actually thought he was a neurosurgeon, or was just pretending, like a cross-dressing man pretending to be a woman.  One of the “doctor’s” victims reported him to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. “The (regulators) knew about it and did nothing,” he said.  Perhaps the College felt it would be offensive to challenge the acupuncturist/ neurosurgeon’s identity.

Comparing the two articles it seems that the newspaper accepts the prisoner’s identity as a woman, but refuses the “doctor’s.”  This is inconsistent, probably hypocritical.  Gender is much more innate, more immutable than profession.  If someone identifies as a surgeon, a lawyer, an accountant, why do they have less rights than someone who, through no fault of his/her own, was born with male DNA?

I Think Therefore I’m Not

It’s true that an untrained neurosurgeon can cause grievous harm.  The article about the acupuncturist who worked as a surgeon discusses a three-hundred thousand dollar payment awarded to a victim.  But is harm just a matter of scale?  Is there harm in letting transgender men, “transitioning” women, into a ladies’ locker room?  What about a white civil rights activist who thinks she’s black?  Fake Indians?  Or even smaller in scale, what happens when a former man takes part in a women’s athletic competition, overwhelming the competition with size, strength and speed?  Women (from birth), who could be athletic stars lose out to the (former) men.  Or what about women who just don’t like men gawking at them in the ladies’ room?

I Think Therefore I Clean

A man becoming a women isn’t limited to post-modern industrialized civilization.  Among hunter-gatherer cultures, at the behest of the spirits a man could undergo a shamanic transformation and become a woman.  Most often though, all this meant was wearing a woman’s hairstyle, sometimes even donning women’s clothes.  Rarely, there were men who were considered fully transformed.  These latter kept their male names and their male physique as they tended house, cleaning, carrying out all the domestic duties of a wife.  In the novel Quantum Cannibals (remember, this website is about the novel ), a bellicose man is a rapist and a loving mother.

I Think Therefore I’m Silent

One had to be a powerful shaman to fully (so to speak) change gender, so the ongoing ridicule was done in whispers.  The threat of harm was too strong.  If one wants to go against a transformed man in a contemporary post-modern high-tech Western society, it’s also best to speak in whispers, or not say anything at all.  If word gets out that you think a man becoming a woman (or woman becoming a man) is perverse, that such transformations are absurd, you will be scorned as trans-phobic, perhaps as a racist or Nazi (though none of those appellations make sense).  The spirits will apply their power through social media to attack you.

In California you can be prosecuted for using a male pronoun for someone who thinks they are female.  “I think I am, therefore…” you better accept it, no matter how ludicrous it may be.  The spirits, perhaps demons have subjugated reality.  An acupuncturist does surgery.  A computer scientist is an influential health and nutrition author, though her information is all wrong.  A billionaire drama teacher is Prime Minister of Canada.  A man walks into the women’s bathroom, and nobody says a word.

I Think Therefore I Speak

If we want reality to prevail over the spirits, maybe it’s time we start thinking.

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