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The Penis Tree

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The ongoing discussion about the cartoon I posted yesterday reminded me of a Latin American literature course I took as an undergrad. We read a short story where there was a description of a tree growing in main character’s garden. The professor told us the tree symbolized a penis and went on and on and on about that imaginary penis. I tried very hard to see where she was finding a penis in the description of the tree but failed completely.

When I complained to another student (the burly Mexican dude I wrote about previously), he had an explanation.

“The prof is a lesbian,” he said. “Just let it go, you are too young to get this stuff.”

3 responses to “The Penis Tree”

  1. Nonna Maus Avatar
    Nonna Maus

    Blessed are the literal minded because they cannot see what Freud is putting down. The imaginary penis tree cannot be insulted the invisible hand of the market cannot grasp it.

    OT: I think the CEO of Duolingo communicates primarily with machines:

    https://fortune.com/2025/05/20/duolingo-ai-teacher-schools-childcare/

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Duolingo is great. I use it daily. However, I achieve the results they have with me in 1/3 of the time on first-time learners. On life-long multilinguals, I’d do even better. So not very worried about the competition.

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  2. mosckerr Avatar
    mosckerr

    Here let me give you a “Penis Tree”. Fritz Veigel, born on May 4, 1908, in Heilbronn, passed the first theological service examination in Tübingen in the spring of 1931. As a city vicar in Blaubeuren, he was involved with the German Christians, also with propaganda writings. In 1935, Veigel moved to Thuringia. A return to the Württemberg pastoral service was denied to him due to his beliefs. He died as a soldier on March 7, 1942, at the Eastern Front.

    Source: Fritz Veigel, The Brown Church, Stuttgart-Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, n.d. (1934).

    “If one asks us: Is Hitler a Christian? we confidently say: Yes! For neither does saying “Lord, Lord” make one a Christian, nor have the speakers of the Christian churches outside their professional sermons used a more pious language than he. Moreover, it is nonsense to ask such a question. Have we not been tormented long enough with such trivialities or pieties as: Is Goethe a Christian? Is Emperor Wilhelm a Christian? If such questions must be asked, then was Christ a Christian? We are not a) humans, b) Christians, and it is not our Christianity that makes us just, but how we are human is what is measured—if at all measured by human standards. Truly, Christ did not come into the world as a foreign addition, but ‘he came into his own,’ and his dominion and glory do not stop at the church boundaries!

    To us, Hitler is the German man of God, who lives prayers in incomprehensibly great brotherly love and has affixed his will to God’s wonderful omnipotence. Just as Luther once fought the struggles and victories of an entire era in his breast, so Hitler is for us the dawn of a new millennium—the German history and church history. Just as Luther gave a great emphasis and a unified face to a fragmented, multi-voiced, noisy time through his faith and his deeds, so Hitler is for us the norm of the present and the guarantor of the future, and therefore all our pious insights, plans, and hopes also originate from this name.

    Luther took the leap out of the deepest, most pronounced piety of his time, went out of the monastery in faith into the world because he no longer wanted to fill God’s ears with his vain and arbitrary piety—and he believed.

    Hitler endured in the starkest reality and worldliness of the world, although and because it seemed completely abandoned by God, and did not want to suffer the divine blessing to leave this world—and he believed.

    And in both cases, the faith of a new century began with their deeds. And in both cases, armies of evil spirits were swept away as if by a blow. Mammonism, pacifism, materialism—the idols of the most recent past. Before the new faith, they become small wretchednesses.”

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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