What American gender politics has done to my mind.

I wanted to read Maureen Dowd's new column, "Sick to Your Stomach? #MeToo" (NYT). It begins:

Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind, I can recall a time when the sight of that white dome thrilled me. As a teenager, working for a New York congressman, I felt privileged to walk the same marble corridors where some of America’s most revered leaders had walked.

I swear that when I read that, I thought the "white dome" was the bald head of the white man she was working for. I don't know how many more sentences I had to read before I realized the "white dome" was the Capitol building.

I read the sentence out loud to Meade, to see if he got tripped up in the same way. First, he heard "white dome" as "Whitedom" (which I guess is the dominion of white people). I read it again with better enunciation, and even though he did (he admitted later) know it meant the Capitol, he said, because he knows my mind so well, "I think of the heads of 7 bald men." That is, he knew I pictured a bald head, and he was teasing me about my oft-stated remedy for the hiccups. (It works. Try it. Think of the heads of 7 bald men.)

But enough about my mind. How about Maureen Dowd's mind? Meade got stuck on the first phrase, "Somewhere in the dim recesses of my mind..." Soon, he was singing "In the dim recesses of Maureen Dowd's mind..." to the tune of The Grateful Deads' "Attics of My Life":



Here are the lyrics, in case you want to write your own parody:

In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me...

2 more verses at the link, to Genius, where there's only one annotation, on the line I bold-faced, above:

You fill to the full with most beautiful splendor those souls who close their eyes that they may see

St. Denis’s Prayer: A fourteenth-century poem from Saint Denis’s The Cloud of Unknowing.

IN THE COMMENTS: Angle-Dyne said:

Nobody knows who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't St. Denis.

I said:

Thanks. I was wondering about that. I've read "The Cloud of Unknowing" — one of the greatest books ever — and when I read it it was anonymous. Somehow I was ready to believed that they'd tracked down the author!

The link in the Genius annotation goes to a page that identifies the unknown author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" as having also written "The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis." That seems to be the source of the confusion.

ADDED: I think the problem is that there's one book with "The Cloud of Unknowing" that also has "The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis" and the text of the St. Denis prayer, which is properly quoted above. Did Saint Denis actually write those words? I don't know. But I did look up St. Denis, and I have a better understanding of the illustration:

Denis is the most famous cephalophore in Christian legend, with a popular story claiming that the decapitated bishop picked up his head and walked several miles while preaching a sermon on repentance....

A cephalophore is what it sounds like — someone who carries his own severed head. You never hear about that happening anymore, but people used to say it did:

A cephalophore (from the Greek for "head-carrier") is a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head. In Christian art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading....

[T]he folklorist Émile Nourry counted no less than 134 examples of cephalophory in French hagiographic literature alone....

Aristotle is at pains to discredit the stories of talking heads and to establish the physical impossibility, with the windpipe severed from the lung. "Moreover," he adds, "among the barbarians, where heads are chopped off with great rapidity, nothing of the kind has ever occurred."

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