No Permission Required: A Sea Change into Something Rich and Strange
At first, I was going to use the idiomatic expression “sea-change”. Then I double checked its present meaning, which gave me pause.
The expression goes back to William Shakespeare in ‘The Tempest’ ; specifically in the song ‘Full Fathom Five’. A supernatural spirit, Ariel, is singing to Ferdinand, the Prince of Naples, describing his father’s drowning.¹ In this context, a sea-change denotes a metamorphosis or a profound alteration:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding Dong Bell
Now, however, the expression has been hijacked by corporate-speak and no longer precisely refers to anything transformative in a profound sense.
It is the profound and transformative that I was trying to express.
Returning to the first part of the title of this piece, I wanted to discuss the concept of a lack of permission in expressing views which might be considered vile.
I was recently walking my dog and was greeted by a neighbour. I had wanted to keep the conversation as brief as possible, but he managed to cover the following (unsolicited) topics in very short order: immigration, welfare recipients, what recipients of charitable funds spend their money on, why head lice are making a come-back in schools. male homosexuals, and transgender pronouns. Need I add that he was filled with hatred?
Perhaps we’ve always been xenophobic, homophobic, prejudiced, ignorant (in the dictionary sense of the word), close-minded, intolerant and prone to “othering”. And, perhaps, for a brief period in our recent history we had begun to move away from this mindset. But that seems no longer to be the case.
Perhaps we’ve always harboured these notions. Perhaps it is hardwired into our psyche.
What I do know is that — for a very brief period in my lifetime — if someone had what we might generously term “socially unpalatable” beliefs, that person would be reticent to express them openly. They would pick their audience. Now, sheltering under the notion of being “authentic”, or some twisted interpretation of “freedom of expression”, so many have been emboldened to spew hateful rhetoric.
And, I believe, the more these views are openly expressed, the more they become “acceptable”; they become normalized.
Compounding the horrific hatred, permission is no longer required.
¹ An interesting side note: Engraved on the gravestone of Percy Bysshe Shelley is “Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” The day Shelley drowned, he was sailing on an open craft called the ‘Ariel’.
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