Card shops have a lot to answer for. It pains me to think how many frustrated, fruitless hours I've frittered, failing to find cards which send messages I'm OK to sign my name to, before settling on ones that (by way of damage limitation) say as little as possible. You see, I'm not sure that I want to help colour-code babies, or teach kids to be pirates/princesses; suggestions that ageing is something to be ashamed of dismay me; I'm more inclined to pray for blessing than to wish for luck; it seems to me that alcohol is best enjoyed in moderation, most of us don't really need more sugar in our diets, and enslavement to consumerism is lamentable, not whimsical; I've a dad who can't bear football, beer, cricket, cars, golf or rock music, a husband who can't bear bad copy, and a sister whose brains and compassion are way more impressive and worth celebrating than her shoe collection (and she has quite a shoe collection). Blank cards it is then ... except, of course, there's morbid and/or lewd connotations in any visual image if you look closely and anxiously enough. People who get cards from me mostly get pictures of birds. Of the feathered type, that is. In tenuously occasion-appropriate configurations, if possible. Somewhere along the line this has become my idea of a safe-ish bet.
Not that I'm accusing the greetings card industry of constructing social norms. It's just strikingly transparent in its (mass) reproduction of them. This makes perfect economic sense, of course: the messages most likely to sell are the ones we've bought into already, rendering your average Clinton's something like a walk-in filing cabinet of the nation's subconscious. Sift beneath the glitter, and it's not a pretty picture. We think all sorts of things we've never even thought about, and with what consequence? Received wisdom – unchallenged, unchecked, compiled from a mish-mash of unreferenced sources – shapes our lives; our aspirations, interactions, opportunities and societal institutions. And it doesn't necessarily shape them in a way that's just and life-giving for all of us.
Hence this poem, the makings of which, as it happens, began a card shop. So at least I came away with one thing I was happy with, for once.
HOME TRUTHS
a woman's place is in
the home
is
where the heart is
there the treasure will be
also
deceitful
above all things
and desperately sick
who can understand
a man's heart
is where his home
is
his castle
where his treasure is
above all things
his woman will be
desperately deceitful
understand it
where
a man's place is
above all things
a woman's heart will be his
treasure
in his castle
where her place is
desperately home sick
Carolyn Whitnall, March 2016.
See Jeremiah 17:9, Matthew 6:21.
[Thumbnail image cc from Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine on Flickr.]
Not that I'm accusing the greetings card industry of constructing social norms. It's just strikingly transparent in its (mass) reproduction of them. This makes perfect economic sense, of course: the messages most likely to sell are the ones we've bought into already, rendering your average Clinton's something like a walk-in filing cabinet of the nation's subconscious. Sift beneath the glitter, and it's not a pretty picture. We think all sorts of things we've never even thought about, and with what consequence? Received wisdom – unchallenged, unchecked, compiled from a mish-mash of unreferenced sources – shapes our lives; our aspirations, interactions, opportunities and societal institutions. And it doesn't necessarily shape them in a way that's just and life-giving for all of us.
Hence this poem, the makings of which, as it happens, began a card shop. So at least I came away with one thing I was happy with, for once.
HOME TRUTHS
a woman's place is in
the home
is
where the heart is
there the treasure will be
also
deceitful
above all things
and desperately sick
who can understand
a man's heart
is where his home
is
his castle
where his treasure is
above all things
his woman will be
desperately deceitful
understand it
where
a man's place is
above all things
a woman's heart will be his
treasure
in his castle
where her place is
desperately home sick
Carolyn Whitnall, March 2016.
See Jeremiah 17:9, Matthew 6:21.
[Thumbnail image cc from Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine on Flickr.]
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