Clarissa's Blog

I thought I should do something special for my birthday tomorrow , something that I don’t normally do.

But then I realized that I really like everything I do every day. I like my life. So I’ll just do what I always do.

Ahatanhel Krymsky was a famous Ukrainian linguist who reputedly spoke 60 languages. I don’t know about 60 but he did teach every Middle Eastern language, translated from every major European language, and spoke Turkish so well that he translated Ukrainian poetry into it.

Ahatanhel was born to a Crimean Tatar family. He also had Belarusian and Polish ancestors. Krymsky had zero Ukrainian ancestors but he was completely Ukrainian not by “blood” (which isn’t a real thing anyway) but by language, culture, and worldview. It’s not my conclusion. It’s what Ahatanhel Krymsky said about himself. In today’s parlance, he “identified as” a Ukrainian.

Krymsky was born in 1871 and murdered by Stalin in the 1940s for “bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism.” The accusation wasn’t untrue. Ahatanhel was both bourgeois and a Ukrainian nationalist in the best sense of these words.

Throughout his career as a linguist, Krymsky published over 500 scholarly books and articles. He was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and worked as a director of the Ukrainian Scientific Language Institute. His family had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and before the USSR came, Krymsky was very active in the church.

But wait, there’s more. Besides being a college professor and publishing like crazy, Ahatanhel Krymsky was a prolific literary translator. And he wrote poetry and novels – really good ones. He was also a friend and correspondent of every major Ukrainian writer of the time.

How is it possible to squeeze all this into a single life? Well, Krymsky didn’t have much of a personal life. He was rumored to have been madly in love with Lesia Ukrainka, a famous poet. (She was my father’s favorite writer, by the way). Ukrainka didn’t return Ahatanhel’s feelings, and they remained friends but he never found anybody else, giving rise to rumors that he was gay. In reality, there’s no evidence he ever had any sexual relationship with a woman or a man.

Krymsky did have an adoptive son but the young man was arrested and murdered by Stalin’s regime, leaving behind a pregnant widow. Krymsky contracted a fake marriage with her to spare the baby the danger of having the same last name as an executed “enemy of the people.” Which didn’t help much because 15 years later, Krymsky himself was killed by Stalin.

A fascinating life, an incredible talent. It’s particularly curious that Ahatanhel was always physically very weak and suffered from a variety of health conditions since childhood (which might explain his lack of a personal life). But still, look how much he achieved. It would be a full-time job just to compile his list of publications. And he lived through terrible historic events. World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the destruction of the Ukrainian Republic, the USSR, Stalinism, purges, terror, World War II.

Krymsky was the epitome of a scholar, a man of letters, and an academic in the best possible meaning of the word.

It’s impossible to explain to the non-Orthodox what Easter means to the Orthodox people. We had services every day this week, twice yesterday and today. These are very long, grueling services. Really beautiful but physically taxing. I have no idea how our 72-year-old priest with a pacemaker is managing to do it. Even I’m exhausted, and I just stand there while he has to sing for hours every day. And carry a heavy wooden cross on his back on Thursday among other things. You can only do this out of a profound religious feeling, is what I’m saying.

The Russians, in the meantime, have gone completely rabid. They’ve been bombing residential areas like crazy. Bombing churches on Easter night. They’ve posted horrific videos of raping their own soldiers in ways I won’t describe to spare your feelings. During Holy Week! I accidentally came across one of such videos that Twitter decided not to blank, and now I’ll never be able to get out of my head. I will never understand how anybody can support something like that. I will never understand how it’s humanly possible to root for these people.

Americans are expiating their racial guilt by falsifying other people’s history:

The thought that Egyptians and Greeks aren’t an empty screen onto which Americans can project their extremely boring hangups never occurs.

This is like bringing a toddler to a birthday party and then having to explain that “You aren’t getting any gifts because it’s not your birthday. This isn’t about you.” Toddlers, however, figure it out soon enough and stop throwing tantrums at the idea that not everything is about them.

Americans, I love you, but please grow up. It’s not about you, nobody cares, get over yourselves.

One of the readers asked recently why, if austerity measures are not that profitable, they are still implemented. We can find an answer in the phenomenon of Dylan Mulvaney.

Men dressing as women for comedic effect are not new. Remember Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire? Those are excellent movies because the actors are talented and their performances are both funny and touching.

In Ukraine there’s a male actor, Andriy Danylko, whose entire career is performing a female character on stage. He sings, does standup comedy, and is very famous. Obviously, he doesn’t claim actually to be a woman. Danylko is an actor, playing a role, and he’s been very famous in Ukraine for over a quarter of a century. Brands have put him on products because he made himself famous with his talented acting.

It goes in the opposite direction, too. In The L Word, Katherine Moennig gives an outstanding performance as a butch lesbian who moves, gesticulates and talks like a man. This is not a comedic role but it’s the best cross-gender performance I have seen in my life. Like Lemmon, Hoffman and Danylko, Moennig is very talented.

Dylan Mulvaney is not. His performance is bad. He’s not funny like Danylko, touching like Williams, or convincing like Moennig. He isn’t trying to write interesting texts to accompany his role or create some sort of a variety within his act. It’s all extremely repetitive and, frankly, tedious. People have been watching Danylko’s performance for 25 years. Imagine the effort that goes into keeping an act interesting and relevant for that long. Is anybody likely to watch Mulvaney for over 2 minutes? It’s not about ideology of any sort but simply that his spiel is very boring. Mulvaney isn’t trying. He’s not working hard.

Then why choose Mulvaney to promote and put on brand-name products? Some people would say his attraction is that he pretends actually to believe he’s a woman. But there are many guys who do that and are better actors with funnier or more convincing routines.

The answer is the same as what concerns the unprofitable and counterproductive austerity measures.

It’s all about randomness.

If Mulvaney had earned his contracts with Nike and whomever else through hard work, that would have made sense. If the budget cuts actually helped the budget and made things better, that would have also made sense.

This approach makes the world more understandable and less confusing. But people who aren’t confused and disoriented are harder to rob. Put them in a situation where logic and reason are suspended and nothing makes any sense anymore, and you can do what you want to them.

It’s not supposed to make sense. These budget adventures at my school, Mulvaney’s boring videos, and other disorienting things that are mushrooming everywhere exist precisely in order not to make sense.

It’s all about randomness.

The words “transition” and “detransition” are very misleading. I just saw posts on Twitter by a young man who had his penis removed. Willingly and past the age of 18 but still, it’s impossible not to feel sad for him. He didn’t transition into anything. He simply became a guy without a penis.

Now he realized it was a terrible mistake and wants to “detransition.” But it’s impossible. He will now forever remain a guy without a penis.

We don’t have to speak the tortured language of people who refuse to accept material reality. It becomes so much clearer when you describe exactly what happened without meaningless terminology. A man had his penis and testicles cut off. Let’s not play language games.

Even Russians aren’t stupid enough to buy this propaganda:

Neither is Tucker but he knows that his audience will eat it up.

A first-grade teacher in Montreal: “You must speak French, not English.”

My 7-year-old nephew: “But how about my freedom of speech?”

The way things are, kids need to learn the words “freedom of speech” before they learn to walk.

We talked recently about how a disruption in bonding with the mother in infancy/early childhood results in people who can’t bond with places and other humans. These individuals won’t form families easily and will always be on the move. The perfect neoliberal workforce.

Obviously, mothers incapable of bonding with their infants always existed. But what if they became mass-produced? What if something happened to make the mother who is capable of bonding an exception and the one who can’t the norm?

A child is formed by the mother’s gaze. A new mother always keeps the child in her line of vision. Their communication is very intense. At every moment, the mother soothes, reassures, and nourishes physically, emotionally and intellectually without needing to say anything. Even when she sleeps, the mother keeps the infant within the focus of her attention. If you are a mother, you know exactly what I mean.

The attention, the focus, the sustained, unbroken concentration – this is what’s needed to make the bonding happen. (And a functioning endocrine system to start it all up, obviously).

OK, so how’s your focus been lately? Honestly? In all likelihood, as shit as everybody else’s. There’s now an obstacle between mother and child. Look around, it’s everywhere. Child stares at mom, mom stares at a screen. I know it’s a huge taboo topic because mothers can do no wrong but seriously, when’s the bonding supposed to happen?

But hey, it’s all good. It’s better to be lonely, isolated, easily transportable, and drugged to the gills anyway, right?