TITLE    : Concluding Unscientific Postscript
STORYID  : concluding-unscientific-postscript
SUMMARY  : The world is both scientific and mythical at times.
AUTHOR   : Cal Y. Pygia@lit
DATE     : 2008-07-07
CATEGORY : transgender-crossdressers
FLAGS    : 
TAGS     : |gender|womb|reproductive organs|dress|myth|religion|science|bra|


Dr. Percy Stanley detested etiological, or so-called explanatory, myths, the lies that ancient storytellers had told to gullible audiences to explain--supposedly--how such-and-such an island came to be, why there are seasons, or how the world began. Nowadays, mothers had inherited the role of the ancient liars, it seemed, for Percy had just heard one of them answer her young son's query as to what causes thunder with just such an absurdity as those that the ancients had made up, telling him that thunder was the sound of angels bowling in heaven, and, a week before, another mother had "explained" to her daughter that the sea is blue because God ran out of green after he'd painted all the grass and leaves. 



Why couldn't mothers tell their children the truth? Was it so hard to understand that thunder is caused by the shock waves that result from the sudden release of the tremendous energy associated with the electrical charge of cumulonimbus clouds or that the sea looks blue because it reflects the sky? It looks green, the mother might add, where an abundance of underwater plant life overwhelms the effect of the reflected sky. (Of course, these explanations would entail further explanations of optics, the affects of atmosphere upon ultraviolet radiation, and the phenomenon of color itself.) Before Percy, a physicist, got hold of these kids in college, his students' minds were full of such nonsense. Sometimes, it took half a semester to disabuse them of the foolishness they'd learned at their mothers' knees. Telling lies to one's own offspring was immoral, Percy believed; he also believed that it should be outlawed.



It was the same in every scientific subject, his colleagues complained. "The ignorance of youth about sex is truly astonishing," Dr. Hugh Lyme confided in Percy once, as they were lamenting of their respective students' general ignorance and naiveté concerning scientific topics. "Romanticism is not dead," he concluded, "despite Poe's 'Sonnet--To Science'":



Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art! Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood, The Elfin from the green grass, and from me The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree? 



The poem to which his colleague had alluded was one of a half dozen or so that Percy enjoyed--in part. He liked the way that the poet admitted the triumph of science over mythmaking and poetry, but, at the same time, he detested the verse's lamentation at the loss of the simple-minded faith upon which a belief in deities--or, for that matter, Deity--was based. Rather than a lamentation, the poem should have been a celebration of such a triumph. Poets, even of the stature which had been accorded to Edgar Allan Poe, never seemed to get anything completely right, especially when it came to science. (Poe's Eureka! Was truly ludicrous.) Still, he had to admit, if grudgingly, that the poem did at least admit science's truth and the falsity of myth or, as it had been understood in its day, religion.



As he sipped a daiquiri at his umbrella-shaded table atop the balcony of the beachfront restaurant that, in the evening, doubled as a nightclub, looking through his sunglasses at the spectacle of human folly that occupied the beach below, he watched the pounding surf roll in from, and out to, sea. The ocean had once been said to have been full of monsters, he mused. Even today, most people had no idea, really, as to why there was a surf or tide or waves. One woman, an especially annoying evangelistic type, had insisted that the tide was an effect of "original sin," adamant that, had Adam and Eve not eaten the forbidden fruit, the ocean would be as placid as a lake today, as it had been before the "fall." There'd been no sense arguing with such a fool, Percy knew, and, wisely, he'd replied, "Interesting." Had the woman never heard of Galileo? Did she never read about the scientific revolution? Did she not know that science had landed a man upon the moon? No, it was unlikely. He'd bet anything that she knew her Bible by heart, though, every scripture.



Percy consoled himself with the knowledge that, for truly educated, modern people, science had replaced myth and religion as the explanation for the universe and everything in it. Such men (and, less often, women), he knew, believed that, at most, such superfluous disciplines as were represented by the dying dinosaurs of the humanities--philosophy, art, and the like--were, if anything, tentative explorations of the inner self, the subjective aspect of the conscious being that was mankind (and, less often, it seemed to Percy, womankind). The human soul was, in the words of the idiot Soren Kierkegaard, science's "unscientific postscript." The self itself was "left over," to use the philosopher's words.



So be it, Percy thought. If some people wanted to retain the ghost in the machine a little longer, the way a frightened child holds onto its teddy bear in the dark of the night, let them. Children, after all, eventually grow up, and, when they do, they set their toys aside.



"May I get you another drink, sir?"



The blonde bimbo in the thong bikini, showing her buttocks to secure tips from her ogling male--and, increasingly, if sexologists' studies could be believed--female customers, paused at his table, baring her teeth in a fairly believable smile, as if she really did care about her "guest" and what Percy might want.



"No, thanks," he said. He'd had quite enough of the world for one afternoon. "Just the check."



"Yes, sir." In a moment, she brought it. He paid the bill, without adding a tip, and started for the sanctuary of his home, a beachfront condo a half a mile away.



En route, he heard a boy with a helium-inflated balloon on a stick ask the woman with whom he strolled the boardwalk, hand in hand, "Mommy, why don't girls have pee pees?"



The sea was darkening. Afternoon was deepening into evening, and the horizon wore pink and purple clouds, edged with gold.



This ought to be good, the scientist thought.



"They do," the mother said, smiling. "They just have a different kind of pee pee."



Percy shook his head. The boy, who was, perhaps, five, might be too young to hear the complete details concerning the sexual differentiation of the species, but his mother could have explained that boys have testicles (and, as part of the sperm's delivery system, a penis) while girls have ovaries, the former organs existing for the sake of fertilizing the latter, and that the resulting offspring, as a mammal, is born alive after its nine-month-long gestation inside the womb.



The boy asked, "Why does sand ripple?"



Percy hurried ahead, not caring to hear the mother's preposterous answer. He was no longer interested in human folly. At the end of the day, he had other things on his mind.



An hour later, at home, Percy, naked, stepped into his bathroom's shower stall. Beneath the steaming needles of water, he soaped his body, luxuriating in the feel of the hot, hammering water. As it sluiced down his chest and belly, over his cock and balls, along his thighs and calves, coursing over his back and following the curves of his buttocks, he felt as if the water were somehow washing away the stupidity and the ignorance of the general public. The water seemed to carry away with it, down the drain, notions of angels bowling, of God at an easel upon which his work in progress consisted of a blue sky and green grass and leaves, and of boys and girls who had sexually differentiated "pee pees" instead of procreative genitals.



People were such fools; their absurdity of thought and belief, born more of emotion than logic and of desire more than reason, were exhausting and, often, seemed unclean. A long, hot shower made Percy feel better, though. After toweling himself dry, he stepped into his bedroom, to dress.



He'd laid his clothing out on the bed.



He sat, still naked, on the bed and, after peeling and rolling one leg of the sheer pantyhose down upon itself, he inserted his foot into the gathered leg, methodically easing it up, and unrolling it over his shaved calf, over his dimpled knee, and up his smooth thigh. He repeated the same procedure with his other leg, before, standing, he pulled up on the waistband, so that it fit snugly around his hips. Then, he donned the brassiere. Next, he put on his blouse, slipped into his skirt--the pink and purple one, edged with gold--and added a complementary bracelet and pair of earrings before applying his makeup and fixing his hair. Finally, he eased his feet into the sexy high-heeled shoes he'd bought just last week. Like the skirt, they were also pink and purple, edged with gold. He picked up his gold purse.



Now that she was dressed--or armored--Phoebe could face the maddening crowds who inhabited the same establishment he'd just frequented, the one that, in the evening, changed from a restaurant into a nightclub, the same way that he changed from Percy into Phoebe, from a he into a she.



Feeling just the slightest bit absurd, Phoebe checked her reflection in the full-length mirror and decided that there was nothing foolish in the least about her appearance. In fact, she looked stunning! 

