Chloe Thurlow's Blog, page 21

Wired For Sex

Promiscuous? Wanton? Sex mad? Man hungry? Woman Hungry? Just plain starving? Stop beating yourself up about it. It’s not because you’re immoral, licentious, a slut. It’s genetic. You have a right-brain poetic soul. You’re wired for sex.

That’s the result of research carried out at the University of California by a team studying sex drive, where it comes from and where it leads (although the last bit seems pretty obvious). They began by asking volunteers to list the number of partners they’d had over the past year. They then wired them up to an EEG, an electroencephalographic monitor, and showed them more than 200 images including portraits, neutral shots, like skydiving, sensual scenes and porn.

What they discovered and published in the current issue of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience is that those volunteers whose brains bounced highest up the graph when shown explicit images were those who tended to wind up in the sack more often and with more partners.

Nicole Prause, a PhD assistant research scientist at UCLA, one of the authors of the study, says the research suggests that those with the greatest sex drive were those most sensitive to the x-rated imagery. ‘If your brain responds strongly even to tame pictures of sex, then you seem to be easily sexually excited in the real world, too.’ She adds. ‘If we show explicit sex pictures, eventually everyone’s brain responds strongly. It is those weaker images, just hinting at sex, that show the difference.’

So, there you have it, show people wired for sex a picture of a pomegranate and they’ll go screaming up the stairs to the bedroom. The team also discovered, that those who had more sex, and with more partners, ‘may increase a person’s sensitivity to sexual stimuli,’ says Prause, a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy.

Does that mean sex is all in the mind? That’s what the nuns at school used to say, But, then, what did they know? They were all celibate. Or were supposed to be.

Is the model in the illustration wired for sex? Leave a comment – you don’t have to join the mailing list and, if you do, you can download Flight 69, totally free and totally wired.

 

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Porn v Erotica: Is There A Difference?

I bought a new pair of shoes with pink insoles and lofty heels. When I wear them, my shoulders straighten and my chest pushes out. I feel sensuous; elegant. The shoes are aesthetically pleasing. I could wear them at a garden party with Kate Middleton. If you were to put the shoes in a glass case in a museum with the word: Erotic, everyone would understand. If Porn were the single world caption, it would make no sense.

porn-v-erotic

Porn is not erotica. Porn is dull. Porn is repetitive. Good sex like good art never repeats itself. Porn is not sex. Porn is simulated sex. A rubber doll with a microchip can imitate human flesh without human feeling. Porn leaves an emptiness inside. Erotica sets up a vibration in the mind that sends pulsing waves through the body. Porn is about orgasm. Erotica is about suspending orgasm.

Images of girls with pert butts and melon breasts, the type that figure on calendars in auto-shops, are pornographic, poses that make the guys go oorah like Marines before battle. An erotic photograph is like a still from an unfolding story that makes you wonder what might already have happened and what is going to happen next. Porn exposes genitalia, male and female. Erotica prefers costume, veils, shadows, masks. Nudity is selective, subtle, understated.

Erotic fiction is literate, a search for meaning and self; a psychological exploration into the hidden parts of our nature. Porn is pulp, endless descriptions of naked entanglements peppered with obscenities and short on story. Porn is a quick fix. Addictive. Unsatisfying.

An experiment at Cambridge University showed that when numerous metronomes were placed on a stage and set off at different times, after a short period, they start to beat together. They are not individuals, but members of the herd connected by the rhythms and thoughts of those around them. We all have a dark side, mysterious places hidden even from ourselves. Once you allow the erotic to sweep away the conditioning you stop ticking along with all the other metronomes. Erotica is a journey to self-knowledge and sexual pleasure.

My blog Let’s Talk About Sex warned of the harmful effects pornography has on children. I will end by quoting a comment on the blog from writer Sarah Daltry: “Porn often perpetuates violence, thus perpetuating sexual slavery, rape, and abuse. Does all porn do that? No. Do all men and women who watch porn believe those things are acceptable? No. Does the discussion need to take place regardless? Yes. Thanks for attempting to guide it.”

The gorgeous shoes in the illustration are by Lolita Abraham. Do they make you think of all things porn? Or are they just a little bit erotic? You can leave comments without number puzzles or joining my mailing list  – and if you do join the list, I am not the Air Force, so no bombardments.

 

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What Are You Writing?

When someone says: what are you writing? It sounds in my ears like they’re saying: I’m going to set fire to your hair. Or I’m going to kill your children. And I don’t even have any children. It’s like asking a man: are you still beating your wife? He is condemned by the question before he has a chance to answer.

 Asking a writer what are you writing is like asking a philosopher what are you thinking? Or a firefighter what fires have you been fighting? But, then, you wouldn’t ask a firefighter that. You’d ask: put out any interesting fires lately? To which he replies: Yes, I just carried a little girl and her puppy out of a blazing apartment building. That’s heroic. That’s awesome. You ask the writer: what are you writing, and its like asking a fish in which direction he’s swimming?

Writers don’t immediately know what they are writing. The meaning evolves in the writing. They sense more than see that there’s a crack in the universe and feel a need to fill the vacuum. Rightly or naively, writers see themselves as society’s conscience; a safety valve.

From this perspective, all writing is political: a mother murdering a child abuser; a mean boss sacking a pregnant employee; a group of wheelchair vets occupying a recruitment office. The drama will be layered in social comment. We laugh our heads off at the antics of Peter Griffin in Family Guy, but underpinning the humour is an intricate substructure of ideas, opinions: of politics.

Newspapers and broadcasters dip their bowls in the great soup of concepts writers put into the public arena through surveys, reviews, blogs, tweets, Facebook posts. Writers are worker ants, always labouring, often without pay, for the good of the nest: the planet we all share.

From now on, when friends ask: what are you writing, I’ll tell them I’m creating a story about how the people woke up one morning and discovered when they came together to save the last of the orang-utans, the last Indian tigers, they lost their feelings of apathy and boredom. They looked into each others eyes and began to see a way to bring about a fairer, better, more equitable future for the entire planet.

 

 

 

 

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Let’s Talk About Sex

Mothers, stop dressing your 8 year old girls in crop tops, pencil skirts, ankle boots. They are not French models, celebrities, hookers. They are children. Sexualised children are made aware of sex. They are drawn to sex. Sex + children = crime, abuse, porn.

Like drinking and drugs, pornography is appealing to children because it is adult, rebellious, forbidden, because children want to grow up fast and the corporations want them to grow up even faster so they can pester their mothers to buy stuff.

Marketing turns children into consumers. To flog products, marketing uses beauty, celebrity and sex. From sex to porn is a short step and those children who take the step will probably never know the difference. What is the difference? Porn is dull. Porn is repetitive. Porn is simulated sex.

Minority interests and all knowledge is available on our smart devices. As an adult you can consume sex any way you want. The downside is the Biblical-sized plague of easy-to-access hardcore imagery being streamed by children as young as 8; the age when mum’s start buying those crop tops. According to Safety Net,  studies show that porn damages children, creates premature sexualisation, negative body image and unhealthy ideas about relationships.

Internet porn largely shows the same recurring scenario. Girls, presumably 18 and looking 14, are shot with men old enough to be their fathers drilling every orifice, often violently. The girls, always shaved, presumably to emphasise that they are virtually children, grunt and grimace through lengthy bouts of oral, vaginal and anal sex typically culminating in a ‘cream pie’ – the girl on her knees, tongue out like a cocker spaniel waiting for the burst of male semen to splash across her face.

Boys on a regular porn diet come to believe what they are viewing is regular sex. It influences them to make demands on girls they may believe is normal, but is far from normal for teenagers making their first steps into the adult world. There is nothing soft, silky or sensuous about porn. Like watching violence, simulated or otherwise, porn is absorbing because it touches the brutal, extremes men are capable of and normal men don’t go there.

Where does porn start? Often in the classroom. Girls are pressured by boys into sending selfies of their breasts that get shared around the school. Why do the girls agree? Because girls are agreeable. They want to be liked. It’s just a bit of fun. Breasts decorate every commercial, every celebrity interview. Sex is in the air like oxygen. Like the sea to the fish. From sharing a half nude selfie to watching porn is the beginning of the slippery slope to replicating those scenes.

This is not what young girls dream of. Girls dream of romance, love, tenderness. Sex is like a clean clear pane of glass. Pornography is that pane of glass shattered into a million pieces. Porn is the antithesis of love. Boys addicted to porn never have a normal relationship and for girls drawn into this world, their dreams will never come true.

Why is there so much porn out there? Porn is big business, a money machine, according to Made Man, bigger than Hollywood.  Don’t feed the machine. Leave your comments and links. Keep the debate going. And mums, talk about sex with your children, and think before you say ‘yes’ next time you go shopping. Innocence lost is never completely recovered.

 

 

 

 

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World Wide Web of Lies

Gemma asked me to help her fill out an application for a dating site. We got through the first question – NAME? Then ran into a brick wall – AGE? “I’m not going to tell everyone I’m 28, that’s practically antique,” she said. “I like guys who are about 24. They’re more fun.”

We hovered over the second box and she finally typed: 23. “Gemma, you can’t lie,” I said, and she threw up her shoulders: “Chloe, the point is to sound interesting. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.”

Is Gemma right? Has lying become normal, acceptable – like twerking, selling debt, Father Christmas? George Washington famously couldn’t tell a lie. Richard Nixon famously couldn’t tell the truth – and paid the price. Dial forward two decades and we have Bill Clinton fudging over his sexual peccadilloes, followed by the Bush-Blair duo sexing up dodgy documents to falsely show that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad carpet bombed; 200,000 dead. These things happen.

In George Washington’s age, telling the truth was normal and expected. Now, it isn’t. And the problem in a society where people sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth is that we never know if it is truth or lies coming out of people’s mouths at any given moment. When a politician tells us that growth is up and unemployment is down it has the same ring about it as being told Elvis is alive and living in Kansas.

Watch the next A-list star promoting his or her (lying is not gender specific) latest movie. They will say: When I got the script I couldn’t stop reading it. It was the best script I’d seen in ten years. I knew I had to get this film made. La dee dah. Every writer with a 99 cents book on Amazon is a best-selling author. Every toothpaste brand will give you the same Hollywood smile as the stars flogging their movies on chat shows. Every bank commercial is likely to cause severe vomiting.

When the politicians, bankers, pharmaceutical companies and broadcasters accused of phone hacking do on rare occasions get called up over supersize-lies, the fashion is to say: I’m sorry, a momentary lapse of reason and, no, I will not resign. I have a duty to remain in my (multi-million dollar) post and put things right. So common is this new lie on top of the old lies we don’t even give an existential shrug.

Like a fantasy novelist, Gemma completed the dating application and the last I heard she’s going out with a racing car driver aged 24, or so he says, or so she says he says. Not that I’m jealous with my model looks, best-selling novels and a blog described by Tony Blair as the best he’s read on the world wide web.

 

 

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A Short History of Breasts

Breasts were first sighted in the 1950s with exponents such as Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot bringing them under the public gaze. Their prominence reached its peak with the DD revelations of the English actress Diana Dors, placing breasts at the heart of the culture ever since.

Breasts had been a closely guarded secret during the Victorian era, the Depression of the 1930s and the war that followed in the coming decade. Their appearance was more a revelation than a discovery and the exposure in newsreels and photographs was widely welcomed.

Breasts have become the staple of TV commercials, newspapers, magazine covers and can be observed larger-than-life-size on the sides of London buses. Breasts are everywhere, so many pert breasts I imagine the marketing men like Oedipus must be tempted to pull their own eyes out with sheer overload. If there is another image to call upon to shift toothpaste, cars, breakfast cereal, earth-diggers, holidays in Dubai, well, they haven’t found it yet.

Breasts have been popular all through history. Depictions of Aphrodite, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and the divine maidens adorning Hindu shrines and Greek temples have all been provided with eye-catching breasts by artists in paint, clay and marble. The Madonna, not to be confused with our very own Madge, is not averse in icons to exposing a flash of milky white breast as she nurses the infant Jesus.

When the peasants cried out in the French Revolution that they had no bread, Marie Antoinette famously said: Let them eat cake. She was found guilty in 1793 of ‘incest and organizing orgies at Versailles.’ She stood corsets tightened in the dock, breasts shiny as two buttery brioche. I’m certain the judge would have enjoyed burying his head in those downy mounds, but he sent her to the guillotine because beautiful breasts are a joy and an affront to those who would like to get their hands on them and can’t.

Men love breasts. They suckle on them as babies They breathe in the scent of lactating females and the fragrance is an addiction that lasts until they are decrepit old men still lusting after virgins; see Death and the Maiden http://chloethurlow.com/2014/05/death-and-the-maiden-2/

Girls become fascinated by their breasts as they rise like cup cakes from flat chests. You feel pins and needles, twitches and tingles. You stare into the mirror and can almost see this butterfly change taking place. As your breasts push out, your hips become rounded. Your tummy flattens. Your legs grow longer and you suddenly don’t want to climb trees anymore.

Like Marie Antoinette, Marilyn and Brigitte, as soon as you have breasts, you feel a furtive inclination to display them. Birds fan out their feathers. Chimpanzees wiggle their bums. Female fish shoot out clouds of eggs in random places hoping a passing stranger fish will come and fertilize them. Girls’ fingers as if with minds of their own can’t resist unsnapping a few extra buttons.

There was a moment in the 1960s when the models Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton flew the flag against bounteous breasts. But the fad passed and girls are now less likely to be burning bras than stretching into a Wonderbra. Corsets are back in style, and for girls who believe size matters, there is always the surgeon’s knife – not that I am advocating implants.

Breasts confirm that a girl is ready for mating, ripe as fruit eager to be plucked, as Shakespeare probably said. Since the beginning of time, Homo sapiens have pondered the meaning of life. If we are here at the will of a Divine Creator, that Creator wants us to generate more souls to save. Our primal role is to continue the species and, whichever way you look, the icon of reproduction is breasts. Enjoy.

Do you have strong views on breasts. Share them with a COMMENT. LINKS welcome. No sign ups, no number puzzles, no fuss. SUBSCRIBE for a free book and never miss another pair of breasts.

 

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Does Ringo Starr Works Eight Days a Week?

The Beatles may have been on to something when they wrote Eight Days a Week. The passionate lover in the song won’t be satisfied by anything less than absolute commitment – ‘eight days a week.’ And why not? Think how much more we’d get done if the astronomers who decided that 7 spins of the earth should represent a week had chosen 8 instead. Think of all those 3-day weekends. Think of all the times the boss has said: I want this done in a week. Eight-day weeks would give you a whole extra day.

Ringo Starr

Number 7 swaggers around with David Beckham in a Man U shirt, its Samurai and Wonders of the World. It’s always selling itself as being lucky. But is it? According to the Roman philosopher Seneca, luck is preparation meeting opportunity. Not the covert blessing of unknown Gods on magic-worshipping mortals. Luck comes from taking chances and seeing opportunities; a combination of intuition and positive thinking.

Number 3 proudly boasts of the Trinity, but has a mixed reputation beyond that. In the fairground we say third time lucky while throwing bean bags at cans to win a stuffed panda that no one ever wins. Soldiers are famously superstitious about being the third to light a cigarette from the same match. It takes the sniper three seconds to get his eye in.

For all the loyalty heaped on 7 and 3 as bearers of good fortune, number 8 gets a lot of respect from the religions. The Buddha reached Nirvana on the 8-fold path. Hindus have 8 spokes in the wheel of dharma. Mohammed was carried to heaven by 8 angels. Christians see the 8 as the symbol of what lies beyond time; drop 8 on its side and you have infinity.

The Chinese revere the number 8 for onomatopoeic reasons. In Mandarin, 8 has the same sound as the word ‘prosper’ and people figure if they say it often enough it will come to pass. And maybe it has.

In numerology, 8 represents harvest, reward, abundance: the bearing of fruit from your labours. Note: your labours, that is preparation, as we know from Seneca. In astrology, the 8th House governs sex, death, transformation, and ‘things you have no control over,’ (ie: luck). The funniest call in bingo is two fat ladies – 88; the 8-ball rules the pool table, and you can divide a cake nicely into 8 pieces, not 7 or 3.

To return to the Beatles, there were four, half of eight. Paul McCartney told Playboy in an interview in 1984 that Ringo Starr once told him about a sleepy driver who had complained that he was working ‘eight days a week,’ which became the title of one of the Beatles’ biggest hits. Ringo was fond of malapropisms and also inspired the quirky titles Tomorrow Never Knows and A Hard Day’s Night.

There will never be another group like the Beatles. John Lennon brought the band a blend of fury and genius. Paul McCartney has virtuosity and soul. George Harrison was the beating heart. Ringo Starr provided the magic.  His nostalgia album Liverpool 8, released in 2008, was a critical and sales success, a Beatles album without the other Beatles. Was it all down to lucky 8? Or did Ringo labour in the studio eight days a week?

Would you prefer an eight days a week world? Leave links with comments.

 

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Does Ringo Starr work Eight Days a Week?

The Beatles may have been on to something when they wrote Eight Days a Week. The passionate lover in the song won’t be satisfied by anything less than absolute commitment – ‘eight days a week.’ And why not? Think how much more we’d get done if the astronomers who decided that 7 spins of the earth should represent a week had chosen 8 instead. Think of all those 3-day weekends. Think of all the times the boss has said: I want this done in a week. Eight-day weeks would give you a whole extra day.

Ringo Starr

Number 7 swaggers around with David Beckham in a Man U shirt, its Samurai and Wonders of the World. It’s always selling itself as being lucky. But is it? According to the Roman philosopher Seneca, luck is preparation meeting opportunity. Not the covert blessing of unknown Gods on magic-worshipping mortals. Luck comes from taking chances and seeing opportunities; a combination of intuition and positive thinking.

Number 3 proudly boasts of the Trinity, but has a mixed reputation beyond that. In the fairground we say third time lucky while throwing bean bags at cans to win a stuffed panda that no one ever wins. Soldiers are famously superstitious about being the third to light a cigarette from the same match. It takes the sniper three seconds to get his eye in.

For all the loyalty heaped on 7 and 3 as bearers of good fortune, number 8 gets a lot of respect from the religions. The Buddha reached Nirvana on the 8-fold path. Hindus have 8 spokes in the wheel of dharma. Mohammed was carried to heaven by 8 angels. Christians see the 8 as the symbol of what lies beyond time; drop 8 on its side and you have infinity.

The Chinese revere the number 8 for onomatopoeic reasons. In Mandarin, 8 has the same sound as the word ‘prosper’ and people figure if they say it often enough it will come to pass. And maybe it has.

In numerology, 8 represents harvest, reward, abundance: the bearing of fruit from your labours. Note: your labours, that is preparation, as we know from Seneca. In astrology, the 8th House governs sex, death, transformation, and ‘things you have no control over,’ (ie: luck). The funniest call in bingo is two fat ladies – 88; the 8-ball rules the pool table, and you can divide a cake nicely into 8 pieces, not 7 or 3.

To return to the Beatles, there were four, half of eight. Paul McCartney told Playboy in an interview in 1984 that Ringo Starr once told him about a sleepy driver who had complained that he was working ‘eight days a week,’ which became the title of one of the Beatles’ biggest hits. Ringo was fond of malapropisms and also inspired the quirky titles Tomorrow Never Knows and A Hard Day’s Night.

There will never be another group like the Beatles. John Lennon brought the band a blend of fury and genius. Paul McCartney has virtuosity and soul. George Harrison was the beating heart. Ringo Starr provided the magic.  His nostalgia album Liverpool 8, released in 2008, was a critical and sales success, a Beatles album without the other Beatles. Was it all down to lucky 8? Or did Ringo labour in the studio eight days a week?

Would you prefer an eight days a week world? Leave links with comments.

 

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Death and the Maiden

The erotic bond between sex and death is deeply-rooted in the human psyche and has been played out in the allegory Death and the Maiden since the beginning of time. The story always has the same theme: a pretty young girl is seduced by death. The girl represents purity and fertility. Death is depicted as a withered old man with his last carnal desires.

The first known version of Death and the Maiden appears in The Myth of Hades and Persephone. Persephone, the daughter of Zeus, performs a dance while gathering flowers in a lush garden. She reveals her white breasts as she bends to pick a narcissus. At that moment, the ground opens beneath her feet and she falls into the arms of Hades, who carries her down to the underworld.

Before the Christian era, man and his morals were less tightly bound. Gory death in gladiatorial combat and, for the rich, wine-soaked orgies were the staff of life. Campfire stories of virgins and crucifixions travelled the silk routes from India and Mesopotamia. When the gospel writers came to tell parables of Jesus, Mary and the Holy Ghost, they would have drawn on classical legends to create an account that was both fresh and familiar, the formula designed to woo the pagans into the new church.

During the Middle Ages, the maiden transforms into a virgin and the union between sex and death grows stronger. The iconography changes from the girl dancing with death to the girl having sex with death, the images ever more erotic, the basic premise the same: that young girls should be plucked when ripe like an apple from a tree. The earliest painting of Death and the Maiden is a 1517 work by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch. It shows death as a rotting corpse, its hand brushing the maiden’s sex. As death presses against the girl, she does not resist, but yields to its kiss.

When Schubert in 1824 wrote his String Quartet No.14, I am not sure if he was reminiscing over all the young women he had bedded, or would like to have bedded, but the work became known as Death and the Maiden and has become one of the most popular pieces of music of all time. The Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman used Schubert’s composition for his production of Death and the Maiden in 1990, the play turned into a movie by Roman Polanski.

The story is set during a violent dictatorship. Political prisoner Paulina Salas is raped by a sadistic doctor whose face she never sees. Years pass and the regime falls. Paulina now lives in a country house with her husband, who returns home one night with a stranger named Dr Miranda. Paulina recognises the voice of her warder. She takes him prisoner, reversing their roles, and makes audiences feel uncomfortable as they witness her own sexual desires stirred by this messenger of death.

Gabriel García Márquez in his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005, relates the tale of a man who decides to pay for a final night of love with a virgin on his ninetieth birthday – a new slant in the new world, but still we can picture the white breasts of Persephone as Hades reaches out from the underworld.

Death and the Maiden reminds us in each revival that the sand is racing through the hourglass, youth is fleeting, and death comes for us all. Eat, drink and make love now, this instant, before it is too late. Not bad advice, but the retelling of the story has always been taken up by men who pay scant regard to beauty as a product of character, or love as a mysterious fusion. Their pens are stiffened by visions of the virgin falling for their own mirror image, a horny old bloke sliding towards the grave.

New times warrant a twist on the theme, Death and the Maiden as Death and the Adonis, perhaps, the slim young deity (played by Justine Bieber?) falling for the Gorgon Medusa with her fearful features and snakes for hair. Now, who shall we cast in that role?

 

 

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Why Writers Write

Every day I wake up, go to my office with a cup of coffee and stand in the doorway horrified by what has appeared in the night – a huge block of granite, taller than a man, big enough to carve the David. Like Michelangelo, that’s the task of the writer. Why writers write is a mystery, even to themselves.

Writing isn’t a job, even a calling. It is an fixation. A sickness. Writers write because they are obstinate, passionate, unreasonable. All writing is vanity. The characters we invent are aspects of ourselves. We set them free and then impose on them our own doubts, fears and paranoia. When you go to bed at night, you lay there with the threads of your story wondering what’s going to happen next. When you do slide into a restless sleep, your characters weave their own plots and make their own choices. The writer creates her characters. She does not imprison them.

Fiction makes our factual lives worth living. You will learn more from a novel than an encyclopaedia. But novels are not self-help books. Novels are a ring of keys that will open many doors. Literature is the question without the answer. Philosophy is the answer without the question. Between these opposing states there is a puzzle that can be pieced together in many different ways and it is up to the reader to work out the solution that’s right for them.

Writing a novel requires unflinching self-belief and self-doubt. It has been said that there is only a handful of stories, seven, ten, a dozen, it varies. Every love story is Romeo and Juliet. Every quest is Jason and the Golden Fleece. Your great story must be like all the great stories but different. This paradox is the essence and absurdity of writing.

Knowing how to write and knowing how to write is not the same thing. Writing is an art as well as a craft. The craft you learn. The art is in you as music was in Mozart and oil paint ran in the veins of Picasso. Writers blessed with the gift and curse of being writers don’t write for fame or fortune. If it happens it is an unexpected collision between fate and perseverance, preparation meeting providence.

All success comes from obsession and a touch of madness. The madness required to write and keep writing a story that is authentic without clichés, original yet universal. To create a novel that is compelling over the course of many thousands of words, characters that your readers believe in, to write and keep writing without a publisher, an agent, a patron, is an attempt to answer questions that may have no answers, and make sense of a world that makes no sense. That is why writers write.

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