If you’ve ever loved and lost a pet, you may have dreamt of being able to bring it back to life. In China, where animal cloning is legal, this already possible. Several companies offer cloning services to pet owners, using the DNA of the dead animal to create a new pet that’s very much like the old one. The procedure can cost up to €45,000 depending on the size of the animal. Despite the ethical questions raised by cloning, business is booming. Our correspondents report.
Lucy Sante recounts the trials and joys of her gender transition in the memoir “I Heard Her Call My Name.”
Lucy Sante’s transition began after she made digital images of her male self as a woman. “When I saw her,” she writes, “I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.”Credit…Erik Tanner for The New York Times
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I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante
“I want to change my sex,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1948. “Is that possible?”
It is a longing that has existed as long as we have. Now comes Lucy Sante with a memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” about transitioning in her late 60s from male to female. She can hear what some of you are thinking. She fears that, by coming out as transgender now, she will be thought to be “merely following a trend, maybe to stay relevant.” She worries her transition will be viewed as a timely shucking of male privilege, a suit of armor that has grown heavy and begun to rust, or as a final bohemian pose, or as something more literary to do in semiretirement than sucking on a Werther’s Original.
Sante worries too about her byline, her newly “dead” one, as if someone had shot it. It “was, in a sense, my shop sign,” she writes. “Would I be risking my public identity as a writer by changing it?” Her books include a classic work of urban history, “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York” (1991) — it always seems to be on a front table at the Strand bookstore, where she used to run the paperback department — and the well-regarded “Evidence” (1992) and “The Factory of Facts” (1998). At one point, she writes, she considered publishing a memoir that began: “This book is by Luc Sante, although it was written by Lucy Sante.” Yet here, happily, is Lucy entire. It is an ideal letter, her added “y,” to symbolize a fork in the road.
We are living in what appears to be, pun barely intended, a transitional moment. Without dismissing the punitive effects that anti-trans bills are having on lives in some states, including the right to publicly exist, it is possible to recognize that trans existence is slipping into the vital center. Take for example the forthcoming Will Ferrell documentary, “Will & Harper,” the toast of the Sundance Film Festival. It is about Ferrell’s cross-country road trip with his best friend of 30 years who is transitioning. Writing in The Washington Post, Jada Yuan called the documentary “so generous and gentle about explaining trans-ness to older generations that it feels like it should be shown in schools and toured around the country as a vital, lifesaving tool.”
“I Heard Her Call My Name” might function, for older readers, in a similar manner. Beware, though: Sante is not as cuddly as Ferrell. Like a shark, she has an extra row of teeth. “I’m urban, concrete, disabused,” she writes. She was a New Jersey kid, the only child of immigrants from Belgium. She attended Columbia and her sensibility was formed on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s, where she ran with a crowd that included pre-fame Nan Goldin and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She worked as the editor Barbara Epstein’s assistant at The New York Review of Books, a launching-pad placement, before becoming a critic and a writer and teaching for many years at Bard College.
Her memoir is moving for many reasons, but primarily for its observations about aging and vanity, as seen through the separated colors of a prismatic lens. She has, in her late 60s, begun to shrink. She has back problems, knee problems and kidney stones. She is told that, because her facial hair has gone gray, she cannot have laser treatments to remove it. These would have been vastly quicker and less expensive than the painful weekly electrolysis she must undergo instead.
The better news is that she gets to go shopping, and she takes us with her. The reader experiences these vividly written scenes as if they were montages from an updated, late-life version of “Legally Blonde” — “Legally Platinum,” perhaps.
I learned that an empire waist on a long torso will make the wearer look pregnant, that shapeless things like sweatshirts only flatter 20-year-old bodies, that flouncy tops require considerable mammary buttressing, that puffy shoulders make me look like a linebacker, that suspiciously cheap clothes are best avoided for both moral and aesthetic reasons, that wanting to look like the model in the picture does not constitute a valid reason for buying the garment.
Reading “I Heard Her Call My Name” sometimes put me in mind of a throwaway line from “Detransition, Baby,” Torrey Peters’s shrewd 2021 novel: “Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.” Sante’s wrestling with her vanity also brings out some of this book’s darkest moments. She is subject to intense moments of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. There is a bleakly funny moment when, on a friend’s Instagram, she sees a photo of “a wig atop an upright stick, and I felt an instant shock of recognition.”
Sante writes that, from nearly the beginning, she absorbed every cultural detail that had to do with “the matter of boys changing into girls.” She filed all this material away. “It was the consuming furnace at the center of my life.” Was it a sign that her first sexual experience, as young Luc, involved a trip to the emergency room because of a uniquely painful condition called phimosis, “a congenital narrowing of the opening of the foreskin so that it cannot be retracted”? (Talk of genitalia is otherwise mostly elided in this memoir.) She would go on to marry twice and to have a son.
The urge to transition became undeniable during Covid. In early 2021, she found FaceApp, which has a gender-swapping feature. The images, some of which are printed in this book, floored her. “She was me,” Sante writes. “When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body.” She showed them to her partner of 14 years, who was confused by what Sante was trying to tell her. They ended up parting ways. They were both upset and torn. “It was not so much that I had betrayed Mimi’s trust, but that I had never honestly earned it,” Sante writes.
The book presents a life in layered stages. We shift back and forth between present and past. The present has greater impact. We are with Sante as she tries on wigs, joins support groups, finds an endocrinologist and begins to take subcutaneous injections of estrogen. She practices sitting like a woman, to shake off what she thinks of as her lifelong imitation of masculinity. She was tired of, she writes, “trying at all times to mount a production titled ‘Luc,’ written and directed and produced by and starring me.” She gets into jewelry. She has a mani-pedi. On a deeper level, she senses herself becoming more open toward the world. She finds that she is becoming more social, less shut down.
One of the things that make this memoir convincing is that it is, on a certain level, unconvincing. Sante is a writer with a lot of peripheral vision. Below and beyond the press of her sentences, you sense her working as both her own private investigator and her defense attorney. Is femininity some kind of test that she still might not pass? The book is powerful because this has always been true: Ambivalence is more convincing than stone certainty. Masculinity had long been Sante’s oversold thesis, and here came the more honest and understated antithesis.
“I Heard Her Call My Name” will not be, I hope, the final memoir from Lucy Sante. It’s a story worth following, to watch her ring the bells that will still ring. Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal. She does not try to arrange herself in a consistent mellow light. As Sarah Moss wrote in “Summerwater,” her excellent 2020 novel, in a line that I will only paraphrase: Being “a little old lady” does not stop you from wanting to smack people.
I HEARD HER CALL MY NAME: A Memoir of Transition | By Lucy Sante | Penguin Press | 226 pp. | $27
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade. More about Dwight Garner
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 25, 2024, Page 9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Dawn of Woman. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Mike Popovich – Freedom Ministries • If you’ve been encouraged by this message and Freedom Ministries, please consider sharing it with others or giving online at https://give.cornerstone.cc/Freedom+M… Official YouTube Channel of FREEDOM MINISTRIES Colorado Springs, CO Mike and Barb Popovich
MOVING = capable of movement; relating to a change of residence; stirring deeply in a way that evokes a strong emotional response
QUESTION: Is something moving you?
STORY: Cindy and I have been together for 31 years now. We are different people but we do share a common purpose. Life is constantly moving right? Well, in 2017 I retired from 18 years of teaching middle and high school students. In 2018 the college where Cindy was a nursing professor suddenly closed. In 2019 we decided to move from Vista, CA back to Wisconsin where we both grew up and where our sisters and brothers live. COVID kinda divided our family. Cindy and I are in our elder years and now in 2024 we are moving again. We are moving to Tennessee. Why? Well, our purpose for moving has always been simple: We want to share the valuable principles that we have learned in our life and we want to help people who are interested in waking up. Cindy is a nutritionist and an herbalist. She values bodily health and natural food. I am an Ontological artist. I focus on a problem and then I listen to my heart and soul (my Inner Beingness) and I use paint or pencils to draw out an expression of the TRUTH of the problem that is here now. We are teachers and our purpose is moving us.
QUOTES
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” ~ Dalai Lama
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” ~ Carl Jung
“True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” ~ Helen Keller
“The purpose of education is to make good human beings with skill and expertise… Enlightened human beings can be created by teachers.” ~ A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
EXERCISE
STOP.
Sit quietly. Assume an erect posture.
Sense the breath. Sit calmly and reflect upon your life purpose.
Feel the energy of life moving in your body.
Get your pen and paper and write a few words or draw lines expressing your unique purpose in life. Move forward into your day listening to your heart and soul calling you to express your purpose.
Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance, he saw a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and the beach. As the man approached, he could see there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.
The man was stuck by the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached, the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.
As he came up to the person, he said: “You must be crazy. There are many miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked up at the man, then stooped down to pick up another starfish to throw into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said: “It sure made a difference to that one”.
Author Unknown
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
The Lord of Oppression is a hard card to come to grips with, for it indicates blocked or thwarted Will. We want something badly, and yet we seem to stand no chance of getting it. We feel frustrated, irritable and disappointed.If a situation marked by the Ten of Wands goes on for too long, we will begin to feel trapped and deeply unhappy. We will begin to lose faith in ourselves, and our abilities to make our lives into what we want.There are a couple of things to bear in mind if the influence of the Lord of Oppression is a fairly fleeting one – sometimes we have to wait for the right moment to get our heart’s desire.However it’s worth bearing in mind, if you ever read on a specific situation, and this card comes up in the final result position, the reading is probably telling you not to waste any more effort on a conflict that you cannot win. Sometimes we are better off just walking away.The long-term appearance of this card carries a warning with it that you really cannot ignore. If the Ten of Wands is a regular feature of your readings for some time, you are probably hurting yourself more than you care to admit. You are not fulfilling your needs, and you are leaving yourself open to negativity.Time to get a little bit of Ace energy in there, and sort things out!
Aaron Bushnell, an active duty U.S. airman, died on February 25, 2024 after self-immolating outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the Gaza genocide.
(Photo: Talia Jane/X)
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it.”
“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.”
That’s how the 25-year-old from San Antonio introduced himself—and bade farewell—to the world in a livestream video of his Sunday afternoon walk to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Arriving outside the front gate, Bushnell set down his phone, took eight paces, turned to face the camera, doused himself in an unknown accelerant, donned his service cap, and set himself alight. He repeatedly screamed “Free Palestine” as he burned.
Uniformed Secret Service officers arrived on the scene even before Bushnell was able to ignite the fire. They repeatedly ordered him to “get on the ground.”
“Get on the ground, you fucker,” someone—presumably an officer—can be heard saying in the video as Bushnell screams and writhes in agony. He managed one final, garbled, yet unmistakable “free Palestine” as his body was engulfed in flames.
Note: The following video contains blurred graphic images that some readers may find disturbing.
The last walk of Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old member of the US Air Force who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington in protest against US involvement in Israel's genocide in Gaza.https://t.co/FwAAH0GJ8B
Nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the video, an officer in a white shirt rushes in with an extinguisher while an officer points his pistol at Bushnell’s burning body.
“I don’t need guns,” implored the man in the white shirt, “I need fire extinguishers.”
NPRreported Bushnell was rushed to a hospital in critical condition. He died Sunday evening.
Bushnell left a final message on social media early Sunday morning.
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?'” he wrote in his first Facebook post in nearly six years. “The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Some observers criticized U.S. corporate media outlets for publishing articles with headlines omitting the words “Gaza,” “Palestine,” or “genocide.”
Why did he do it?
Four major news outlets have almost the exact same headline for the self-immolation of 25-year old Aaron Bushnell. Not one of them mentions the words “Gaza” or “genocide,” the reason for Aaron’s protest, or the word “Palestine,” his last words spoken. pic.twitter.com/MdRCFsptzD
Others took aim at reports attributing Bushnell’s act to mental health issues.
“They will try to spin-doctor it as mental health issues, but he was rational and clear about his political reasoning, which resonates with [the] majority of the world,” Syracuse University professor Farhana Sultana said on social media. “May his sacrifice not be in vain. Indeed. it was legitimate moral outrage and courage against the holocaust and barbarity in Palestine with U.S. full participation. May his sacrifice not be in vain, may his last words on this earth ring true. #FreePalestine.”
CounterPunch editor Joshua Frank wrote: “Please, stop saying Aaron Bushnell was mentally ill. The real mental illness is witnessing a genocide taking place and not doing a thing to stop it.”
Notice after Aaron Bushnell burns himself alive to protest Israel, how everyone cheerleading. Israel’s carpet bombings of Gaza have, overnight, become mental health experts.
They learned it from the NRA after mass shootings of children. That’s who they’ve become. And worse.
More than 100,000 Palestinians—mostly women and children—have been killed or wounded by Israeli bombs and bullets since the October 7 attacks on Israel. Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, and at least hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on the brink of starvation.
The U.S. government backs Israel with nearly $4 billion in annual military aid and diplomatic support including three vetoes of United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions. The Biden administration is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance for Israel, and has twice sidestepped Congress to fast-track emergency military aid.
Last month, The Interceptreported that documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request suggested that the Biden administration deployed a U.S. Air Force team to Israel to assist the Israel Defense Forces with targeting intelligence.
Bushnell’s death is the second reported U.S. self-immolation since the start of the Gaza genocide. On December 1, a woman—whose identity and outcome remain unknown—carrying a Palestinian flag was hospitalized in critical condition after setting herself alight outside the Israeli consulate in Atlanta.
Police called it an “act of extreme political protest.” Israeli Consul-General Anat Sultan-Dadon called it an act of “hate and incitement toward Israel.”
Aaron Bushnell is the second person to self immolate over the Gaza genocide. The first was a woman whose name we do not know because her story was buried. Our monstrous rulers are forcing people to engage in the most extreme, desperate act of political protest just to be heard
People have set themselves on fire as an act of political protest for many centuries. Following the examples of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns who self-immolated in 1963 to protest persecution by the U.S.-backed Ngô Đình Diệm dictatorship, at least half a dozen Americans burned themselves to death to protest the Vietnam War. Americans also self-immolated over the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq, the climate emergency, alleged corruption at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and other reasons.
In December 2010, the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi was a major catalyst for the Arab Spring uprising that swept across North Africa and the Middle East.
The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author Thích Nhất Hạnh explained in a letter to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that the monks and nuns who self-immolated were not committing suicide. Rather, their self-sacrifices were aimed “at moving the hearts of the oppressors, and at calling the attention of the world to the suffering endured.”
ENERGY = a dynamic quality; force of expression; a vigorous exertion of power
QUESTION: Are you aware that you are ENERGY?
STORY: I was 23 years old when I lived in a very special community in Mt Shasta, CA. Liz Andrews was a very good mentor and teacher devoted to helping young people like myself who were interested in knowing our higher capacities. Liz taught classes in the living room on week-ends and during the week we all had jobs. Here is a sentence in my notes from one of Liz’s classes: “We all believe we are physical forms in a material world – BUT – the truth is that our True Nature is ENERGY”. So when our body experiences pain, tightness, injury or difficulty of some kind – we can take charge and Translate the appearance back to the True ENERGY that is here now. I have done this many times over the years and now at 77 my bodily health is flowing with good energy. Yes my 77 year old body is different from my 23 year old body – but the energy continues to flow. It is good for us all to connect with the ENERGY part of us.
QUOTES
“There is enough energy in Hydrogen in the water of your body to run every electrical appliance in the US for 13 weeks. How can you call yourself a physical being? Pathagorus’s theorem of the universe being light and waves was right!” ~ Liz’s Translation class 1971
“The energy of mind is the essence of life.” ~ Aristotle
“Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.” ~ Eckhart Tolle
EXERCISE
STOP.
Sit quietly. Assume an erect posture.
Sense the breath.
Feel the Energy of life flowing through you now. Feel it in your arms, legs, shoulders, hands.
Listen to this Energy.
Get your pen and paper and write words or draw lines expressing the Energy of the Universe flowing through your body offering guidance. Move forward into your day knowing you are the Energy of the Universe.
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E.E. Cummings told students from the hard-earned platform of his middle age, not long after Virginia Woolf contemplated the courage to be yourself.
It is true, of course, that the self is a place of illusion — but it is also the only place where our physical reality and social reality cohere to pull the universe into focus, into meaning. It is the crucible of our qualia. It is the tightrope between the mind and the world, woven of consciousness.
On the nature of the self, then, depends our experience of the world.
The challenge arises from the fact that, upon inspection, there is no single and static self but a multitude of selves constellating at any given moment into a transient totality, only to reconfigure again in the next situation, the next set of expectations, the next undulation of biochemistry. This troubles us, for without the sense of a solid self, it is impossible to maintain a self-image. There is but a single salve for this disorientation — to uncover, often at a staggering cost to the ego, the constant beneath this flickering constellation, a constant some may call soul.
Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) takes up the question of discovering the soul beneath the self in his 1927 novel Steppenwolf (public library).
Hermann Hesse
He writes:
Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men* habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications — and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again… And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key.
Accepting the fact of the bundle is not easy, for it requires seeking the deeper unifying principle, the mysterious superstring binding the bundle. (After all, daily you confront the question of what makes you and your childhood self the same person despite a lifetime of physiological and psychological change — a question habitually answered with precisely this illusion of personality.)
With compassion for this universal human vulnerability to delusion, Hesse observes:
Every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion.
Considering this ego-self a kind of “optical illusion,” Hesse insists that, with enough courage to break the illusion and enough curiosity about these “separate beings” within, one can discern across them the “various facets and aspects of a higher unity” and begin to see this unity clearly. He writes:
[These selves] form a unity and a supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed.
We call this consciousness, this higher unity of personhood, soul.
I see my soul reflected in Nature — one of Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a rare 1913 English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)
Knowing that even the soul is two-fold, Hesse offers his prescription for resisting the easy path of illusion and annealing the soul from the self. Half a century before Bertrand Russell insisted that the key to a fulfilling life is to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Hesse writes:
Embark on the longer and wearier and harder road of life. You will have to multiply many times your two-fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace.
It is only by nurturing and expanding the soul that the self, fluid and fractal, can be held with tenderness. And without tenderness for the self, Hesse reminds us a century before the self-help industry commodified the concept, there can be no tenderness for the world and no peace within:
Love of one’s neighbor is not possible without love of oneself… Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.
Even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men
