VAGINA
Women with complete absence of the vagina and with rudimentary internal genital organs may otherwise be perfectly developed, and, since the uterus is fuctionless, may not suffer from retained secretions. The majority of the cases of apparent absence of the vagina who do have symptoms are due to inflammatory processes acquired after birth.
Physical Diagnosis 1929
PENIS
As congenital deformities the penis may be absent, double, concealed, twisted, adherent, or cleft. A double penis (sometimes two perfect organs, sometimes two fused together, sometimes a penis with one shaft and two glans) is usually associated with other deformities, such as double bladder, hernia, extrophy of the bladder, cleft scrotum, imperforate anus, and hypospadias. A cleft penis superficially suggests one with two glans. A concealed penis is one which is very small and hidden beneath the skin of the scrotum or perineum. An adherent penis is one attached by a web to the scrotum. If the penis is quite absent the urethra opens onto the perineum or through the anterior wall of the rectum, and the other external genitalia are usually normal.
Physical Diagnosis 1929
No Capes!
EDNA MODE
No capes!
BOB PARR
Isn’t that my decision?
EDNA MODE
Do you remember Thunderhead? Tall. Storm powers. Nice man. Good with kids.
BOB PARR
Listen, E…
EDNA MODE
November 15th of ’58. All was well, another day saved, when his cape snagged on a missile fin.
BOB PARR
Thunderhead was not the brightest bulb.
EDNA MODE
Stratogale! April 23rd. ’57. Cape caught in a jet turbine.
BOB PARR
E., you can’t generalize about these things.
EDNA MODE
Meta-Man. Express elevator. Dynaguy. Snag on takeoff. Splashdown. Sucked into a vortex. No capes!
Two Opposing Viewpoints
While minors sexually abused by females are repeatedly described as lover or young lover and the allegedly illicit relationship between abused and female abuser is described as love, the persons abused by males are described as victims or sexual playthings.
Propensity
To be abusive, curse, swear. To be aimlessly busy. To be carried. To be cruel, violent, inhuman. To be destructive, bite, strike, tear clothes. To be dirty, untidy, filthy. To be magnetized. To be obscene. To commit suicide. To dance. To do absurd things. To eat greedily. To handle organs. To hurry. To hurry others. To kill beloved ones. To laugh immoderately at trifles. To lie. To mutilate body. To perform great things. To pray, beseech, entreat. To repeat everything. To scold. To sing. To slide down in bed. To stretch and yawn incessantly. To talk in rhymes, repeat verses, prophecy. To tear things. To tease, laugh at reproofs. To theorize or meditate. To touch different things. To wander from home. To work.
Hypermnesia
Victims of persecution try, usually in vain and at great expense of energy, to banish what has happened to them from their minds. Unlike the agents of terror, they obviously no longer have reliable mechanisms of repression at their command. Islands of amnesia do develop in them, but that is not at all the same as being genuinely able to forget. Rather, it is as if a diffuse ability to forget goes hand in hand with the recurrent resurgence of images that cannot be banished from the memory, and that remain effective as agencies of an almost pathological hypermnesia in a past otherwise emptied of content.
from W.G. Sebald’s Against The Irreversible
Three Circles
Sifting through the discarded boxes. Maybe a part I never knew about. Stuck unnoticed in a corner. Its bag wrapped up in a ball of tape. It’s Christmas everyday. If you give all your expectations away. Adrift with a swollen rudder. Pieces torn from different maps. My place has become fixed, but I’ve been walking so long I don’t know where I am. The yellow payphone on the corner rings. People aren’t answering phones these days. I have three circles I like to get stuck in. Their circumferences overlap. And the air can get close at times. Your glands are leaving residue on the pavement. It sticks to people’s shoes and makes it into the evening salad. I grow hungry in your absence. Lose my appetite when the curtains go down. Our eyes each have their own name. The only time they hear it is when they talk to each other. More and more glowing orbs are noticed at the periphery of embarrassing private gatherings. We can say it’s a speck on the lens. The inversion layer flipping its switch. When the sun has abandoned the smoldering outskirts of town empty spaces between the floorboards will realign themselves to the chagrin of your personal gravity.
Takuboku Ishikawa – Saturday, April 10
Nowadays, it’s only on streetcars to and from my office that my mind is most at ease. When I’m at home, I feel, for no reason at all, that I must be doing something. That something is what bothers me. Is it reading? Is it writing? It seems to be neither. No, reading and writing seem to be only a part of that something.
Is there anything I can do besides read and write? I don’t know. At any rate, I do feel as if I must always be doing something. Even when I’m indulging in idle carefree thought, I always feel as if I am being dogged by that something. Yet I can’t concentrate on anything.
When I’m at the office, I keep hoping time will pass as quickly as possible. It’s not that I particularly dislike my work or that I feel my surroundings are unpleasant. It’s that I’m pursued by the feeling I must get home as soon as possible and do something. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do; and still, from somewhere behind me I feel myself pursued by that something I must do.
I am keenly sensitive to changes in nature in terms of season. When I look at a flower, I feel “Good Heavens, that flower’s come out!” That simple experience stabs me as sharply as an arrow.
I feel, furthermore, as if that flower will open in an instant and its petals will fall as I’m looking at it. Whatever I see or hear, I feel as if I’m standing on the brink of a surging stream. I’m not at all calm. I’m not composed, for some reason or other, my mind can’t stand still, as if it were being pushed from behind or being pulled forward, and I feel as if I must start running.
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