There was a video floating around the internet a while back of a child hearing for the first time. He’d just had a cochlear implant and had never heard anything before. After the operation, they filmed him as they activated the implant. He hears his mother’s voice for the first time. It’s an image of wonder. The child responds with delight. It’s like we get to watch a kid’s world expand exponentially in an instant. We watch him enter a whole new world and it is glorious.
There are stories, though, of adults who have had this surgery and upon hearing the world for the first time, are completely overwhelmed by it. Their brains have no way of making sense of all that they hear so that they cannot distinguish the hum of the machine from the hum of a friend. It all sounds like an extraordinary wave of noise and it cannot be turned off. I think at least one person reversed the surgery, preferring the silence to the constant roar of unintelligible sound.

He’s not wrong, on one level.
This is not good writing.
But

a) I’m not sure it’s actually VILE, vile is a bit of a leap. Unless vile didn’t mean anything disgusting or hateful back in the day but something like cliché or corny.

b) He seems to be objecting to “beautified” which is not a phrase, but a word, unless by phrase he means word. Or his objecting to the whole phrase – polluted by “beautified.”

But all that aside, it’s just not good form to do literary analysis on people’s loves notes – especially in front of their mothers.

It’s not so much that it’s vile but beautified seems to imply something entirely different from either Beautiful or Beatified. Beautified has the quality of beauty being done to you. Like – the classic make-over show- a plain, unhappy, shlubby girl is kidnapped by the Beauty Team and they take over, ignore her will and transform her, they beautify her, she’s the new woman! Beautified! And as much as I have fantasized about this sort of kidnapping (Won’t someone please just tell me what to wear! Could someone else please take responsibility for this hair?) I feel in this moment that this kind of beautification has nothing to do with the person it gets done to. She is the canvas and the beauty is the paint. Once she is beautified, people just look at the painting.

The problem I have been talking about has been addressed by a group, gathered together via social media. They have had brunches and meetings. They have sat together and cast about for solutions to the problem. On social media, I am a part of this group. I get the messages, see the pictures, read the links – but it is ultimately the gathering, in person, of these people that will accomplish something. And not simply the gathering. It is also the surmising, the guessing about what to do. A gathering could be just a party, just folks hanging out making small talk – but this crucial step of creating an hypothesis and testing it? That can vault a group into action.

Ophelia’s obedience feels like a currency
That Polonius is flashing at the King –
Like her devotion to her father could be
Stacked into a collection of bills, all crisply folded,
Face up and secured with a silver clip.
Polonius rolls up, pulls out his wad
Of filial fidelity and starts handing it around,
Greasing palms, building up his own reputation.

Yes, yes, yours til you walk her down the aisle. You’ll give her away along with a few of your chickens and a box full of jewelry. Yours for now. Then, someone else’s. Never hers. Never her own self, poor Ophelia.

Born to Polonius and his wife (I’ll call her Moira because I’m tired of all the mothers not having names) his daughter is tiny, red and screaming like many daughters. She is the second child, (probably) and her parents one exhausted and proud to see her tiny scrunched up face. They fall in love with her instantly. Polonius goes around handing out cigars, beaming with delight at this new development in their lives – a daughter, a daughter. His son is toddling around, delighted to see someone smaller than himself and Proud Papa Polonius can not stop beaming. Even when the little girl screams and screams, he smiles and makes funny faces at her. He is an expert coo-er. He sings all the old songs from his university when he runs out of lullabies. He is an expert at peek-a-boo.

Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat Beat
What’s he doing here? Unfolding the letter? Untying ribbons? Searching his pockets for the evidence he is about to produce? Putting on his reading glasses? Searching for just the right passage? If we take the verse seriously here – this is a long damn pause after a whole lotta talking.

After the losses, the storm-battered shores, the hours in the dark, the confidence shaken, there is a glimpse of what remains – a flash, really – but the kind that gets in and makes a difference. What is left is concern, is human empathy, is love, really. And how terrible the cliché that love sits at the center, drawing love around love, making circles both smaller and larger at once. Me? I got magnetized, feeling the presence and the absence of all the people I love, no matter how far – and my family – miles and miles away, felt closer somehow and I wanted to gather them to me – the friends, the family, tie them all up in a mesh-bag, like the kind you put your delicates in, in the wash. . .and protect them somehow – that as the world spins them around, they will roll, safely together in their delicate bag, untorn by the outside world. Then, too, I became more concerned with strangers. How did that clerk in that luxury goods store get to work? Do they have power at home? Was it 3 hours of waiting to get out of Brooklyn to get there? If I were to go into that store, I can almost guarantee that this same clerk I am worried about would, look me up and down with a withering, “You don’t belong here” stare. But I’m worried about her anyway.
When the losses tip back toward gains, we might all forget this little cone of kindness but it remains in there. It remains.

Rap this one, or sing it. It is a delight for the mind attracted to sound, to repetition, to a sort of sestina in a sentence sensibility. Gallop apace you rhyming metered words! Ba dum bad um your way to the next line!