I've four sisters Alison, three older, one younger, and the only boy whose childhood was spent in silence listening to their waffle, being blackmailed by my eldest Mary Desmond, a painter in Rome married to an Italian patent lawyer and ex-comedian, with two girls, Lucia and Luna, and one lad, Nico, all three born and reared in Spain.

http://www.marydesmond.net/

Our house backed onto the Ormisrk to Liverpool railway line, a few hundred yards from Ormskirk Station, and one day, aged about eight or so, me and a pal from across the road in the cul-de sac where we grew up, got over the back-fence and crossed the electric line, making sure to jump over the main current metal line in the middle of the tracks.

For the next seven years our Mary would force me to go the shops for her and get sweets, Rollos and Cadburys chocolate bars. Any hint of resistance would be met with Mary going into blackmailing sister theatrical mode, saying

'Muuum, you know one day..'

and then a cleverly unflinching look in my direction, and any further non-co-operation

'Kevin got over the fen..'

And I would be fuming inside, but to stop my mum finding out, would always capitulate to the diabolical torment from my five year elder, oldest sister; until one day, aged fifteen, I stood my ground and when, for the first time Mary said in full the dark and terrible transgression I had committed as an eight year old, by this time, after years of it being her sole method of extorting her own way, it had lost its original power, and most creully of all, my mum saying, yes, she knew I had gone across the railway lines and what was mary doing telling tales on me.

At that moment, an act of poetic completion as Mary was laid low and the underhandedness written on her gob. Ah, sibling politics.

From Helen, my immediate elder sister, 18 months older, I learnt the routine that seems to be a modus operandi in writing since I got active on the blogs.

Helen, out of all of us, was the one most lacking in fear, who would (and still does) have a ferocious temper, and many's the stories in the Ormskirk branch of the Desmond family, of Helen squaring up to thugs and bullies from the earliest age.

Naturally, being the youngest of three girls, basking in the attention, when I came along, this put her nose out of joint, and my overiding memory in childhood was Helen could not be approached because she just exploded and beat me up, obviously originating out from the earliest times of my first appearance as a baby supplanting her spot as youngest.

But she taught me how to double one's time onstage in the theatre of life, because her usual method was to kick off a big drama buy losing her temper, shouting, raging and keeping the spotlight firmly on her, and then get the same amount as time again centre-stage, by swinging to the opposite extreme with the tearful apologies. The comnsumate luvvie's trick of hogging centre-court by dragging out the drama for twice as long.

~

They were all mad, led by Mary, the clever eldest who was mad into reading books, university at 18, fulfilling her Irish working class parents dream of seeing their first born make it like they never did, and she studied architecture in Liverpool uni when Echo and the Bunnymen, Teardrop Explodes and Wah! The Art of Noise - whose leaders started out in one band, The Crucial Three: Pete Wiley, Ian McCullough and Julian Cope - were the cutprice John Paul and Ringo of a new romantic scouse culture, immediate post Toxteth riots when Maggie T was queen of westminster.

Mary was mad into fortune tellers, psychics and all manner of supernatural beings with prophetic power; dragging along the others and then spending hours inquesting what had been said in the twenty minute tart, palm, tealeaf or crytal ball scrying. I would sit there, silent, listening to all there talk, and really, at some level, must be a big girl myself.

I know I am the biggest physical coward out fo all of us, and this place, has been great for me. I was getting sick of the sexist swagger, the big alpha male poet act, mask, and it was reading Lumsden and O'Brien that I saw how I was unconsciously perhaps, just being a courtier british poet manque, playing the role done to death and which is based on the earliest Tudor poets all jockeying for preferment and power by flattering the one most important person, the poet society mirroring, still, the 'democratic' monarchy in which it grew out from.

It was good while it lasted, but it was only a role, and my own intellectual development over the last few years, has sincerely been about fidning a way out of the dichotomy and cliche of man-woman poet. It all led instinctively to using the word s/he, this chiming in with sidhe (shee) who are the Tuatha De Danann, who are the faeries, who are the supernatural force I hold in my mind when trying to be poetic.

And it was coming across Torah scholar, the New York rabbi Mark Sameth's article two years ago

http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1433

... that represents the distillation of his 25 year bible study of the first five books in the old testament, that s/he was externally validated. This is because Sameth concluded that the orginal ineffable name of God in the orignal Hebrew, the Tetragrammaton יהוה‎ that in Latin letters is rendered YHWH, from which Yaweh and Jehova come from; is a bardic like trick common to the ones used in druidic Ogham, whereby words are written backwards, and when read backwards:

"But what if Yud–Hay–Vov–Hay has long been unpronounceable for the simple reason that it is written in reverse?

Reversed, the Name of God becomes Hay Vov Hay Yud. And these two syllables, Hay Vov and Hay Yud, can be vocalized as the sound equivalents of the Hebrew pronouns hu and hi, which are rendered in English as he and she respectively. Combining them together, Hay Vov and Hay Yud become He-She.

He-She, I believe, is the long-unpronounceable Name of God! This secret has been hiding in plain sight for all these years, for it explicitly states in the Torah: God created the earth-creature in God’s own image, male and female." 

This sounds about right, especially when factored into the earliest, pre Iron Age myth from the Minoan age, that was more equal gender wise than the Mycenaean age that came after it from 1600 BC on, when the Iron age dick wavers supplanted the stable Bronze age trading cultures by using classic short term machoistic reason, of why bother trading when you can just use the new iron technolgies to clobber the soft peace lovers over the head and rob their gear for nowt?

Works in the short term, but in the long term, you end up with male war cultures like Sparta, and is what happend with the implosion of the Levante once iron age technology prolifirated and everywhere was razed bcuz of stupid blokes thinking if you fear ppl into silence that silence must mean they love you.

It was reading the earliest transacations of Letters between the then alpha males here ten years back when it first started, some poetic dissolving of the previous act/mask occured and then the construction of you I had created in my mind, the femnistazi make-believe that evolved out of transferring all my thoughts about Jane Holland, who is the orginal femistazi foe I had runs ins with, onto you - disappeared as it became clear that you are in a different league than her.

Yeah, could rant on more, but thanks, it's great to be a normal person again.