November 11, 2006
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A mixed-up account - was she held over the fire on the fourteenth or fifteenth? Anyway the dark side of folklore, I think.
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Maybe Michael Cleary had a case of Capgras delusion.
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Fascinating. I wonder if there are similar cases in the US among descendants of Gaels or rurally-settled emigrants at around the same time.
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Gesundheit!
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I read a decent social history about this case called The Cooper's Wife Is Missing: The Trials of Bridget Cleary a couple of years ago. It gives you context, which is the sort of thing I love in histories of interesting incidents. Also, randomly, there's apparently a band out there called Burning Bridget Cleary, which if I weren't already scheduled to go to three concerts next week, I'd be seeing at Godfrey Daniel's next Sunday.
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That Capgras delusion is fascinating, he! I'd have never guessed that it was common enough to have been observed by doctors. Maybe we're all imagining those other incarnations of petebest!
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don't tell me I'm only imagining you imagining me though sometimes it seems with you my life's been a dream was your love illusion and mine make-believe? are we lost in confusions that we can't perceive?
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From the OED: Changeling - A child secretly substituted for another in infancy; esp. a child (usually stupid or ugly) supposed to have been left by fairies in exchange for one stolen. (In quot. 1590 applied to the child taken, not to that left.)
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On the subject of changelings: I wonder if, in many cases, dubbing a mentally deficient child a "changeling" mainly served to open the door to socially acceptable infanticide of an infant/child that would cause undue burden to the community? I've heard accounts of similar traditions among isolated Catholic villages: if the baby is born with a severe deformity or somesuch, the villagers declare that he is "one for the angels" and leave him outside in some deserted place for the "angels to take him" (ie: he dies of exposure).
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That's the wrong way in Tipperary.
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/collapse
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An anthropologist in Brazil, studying the phenomenon, says: ‘What does it mean, really,’ I asked Doralice, an older woman of the Alto who often intervenes in poor households to rescue young and vulnerable mothers and their threatened infants, ‘to say that infants are like birds?’ ‘It means that... well, there is another expression you should know first. It is that all of us, our lives, are like burning candles. Any moment we can suddenly “go out without warning”. But for the infant this is even more so. The grown-up, the adult, is very attached to life. One doesn’t want to leave it with ease or without a struggle. But infants are not so connected, and their light can be extinguished very easily. As far as they are concerned, alive or dead, it makes no real difference to them. There is not that strong will to live that marks the big person. And so we say that “infants are like little birds” – here one moment, flying off the next. That is how we like to think about their deaths, too. We like to imagine our dead infants as little winged angels flying off to heaven to gather noisily around the thrones of Jesus and Mary, bringing pleasure to them and hope for us on earth.’ When an infant dies on the Alto do Cruzeiro there is neither great joy nor grief. A mother is likely to suggest that death came as a blessing. ‘I feel free,’ is a common response. This is not to say that women are cold or unfeeling. Often a mother will say: ‘What a pity it is to see them suffer and die’. But pity is distinct from grief. The dead baby or ‘little angel’ is seen as a blameless creature whose future happiness lies in heaven. All in a row and made to measure: children's coffins in Bom Jesus.Today in Bom Jesus an ‘angel-baby’ is sent to heaven, on average, once every other day. Traditional wakes for infants are brief, rarely lasting more than a couple of hours. There is a minimum of ceremony, there are no songs, prayers or rituals of any kind. Household life goes on as usual around the infant who is usually in a casket on the kitchen table. The baby’s grandmother or godmother is in charge. One particularly poignant infant wake followed the birthday party of a one-year-old child in the same household. Mariana, the middle-aged mother of the little girl, had purchased a birthday cake with candles, balloons and party favours. The fiesta lasted the better part of a Sunday afternoon and evening and the birthday girl in her ruffled dress was the centre of a great deal of attention. Meanwhile, Mariana’s 16-year-old daughter, herself the mother of a four-month-old, sat out the festivities. To engage her a bit I asked if I might take a peek at her baby. She led me into a back room where her infant, in an advanced stage of malnutrition, slept deeply. Next morning I was called back for the baby’s wake and burial. The young mother sat repairing a fishing net. The baby, in her white tunic, decoratively strewn with forget-me-nots, had taken the place of the birthday cake. A few crumbs of cake were still on the table. The previous day’s birthday girl seemed confused by the muted atmosphere so soon after her own animated party. When she demanded to see her infant niece, Mariana carried the child to the table. ‘Baby, baby,’ said the toddler. ‘Yes,’ replied her tired mother, ‘baby is sleeping’, and she leaned over to adjust the infant in her tiny, cardboard coffin. The strong mandate not to express grief or shed tears for the dead baby is reinforced by the belief that when the infant is in the coffin she is neither human child nor yet blessed little angel. She is struggling to leave this world and find her way into the next. The path is dark. A mother’s tears can make the road slippery so the spirit-child will lose her footing, or the tears will fall on her wings and dampen them so she cannot fly.
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I tried to enter the source of the quote, but it wouldn't enter above; New Internationalist: Daily Life in North-east Brazil
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That's fucking depressing.
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The coping mechanisms of the human psyche are many and fascinating.
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When I first saw this in the sidebar I misread it as "The Burning of Beverly Cleary."
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God, that story makes me want to cry. How sad.
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Oooh! *Chucks Beezus and Ramona on the fire*
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Yes, it's tragic. Not identical to the Cleary case, but similar in that both communities of otherwise rational people found a desperate way of coping with bizarre circumstances. And the exposure of unwanted children by the ancient Athenians strikes me as no less desperate, though it was socially sanctioned - something neither of these more recent cases are. Our modern idea of medical triage in case of a major disaster where many are injured also seems like these: the most hopeless injured get immediately sorted out and set aside, while efforts of medical personnel go toward saving those who are not quite so seriously injured and therefore have a better chance of survival. All of these are brutal - if effective - methods of ensuring survival of some. I suspect the Cleary situation, people living in a relatively isolated community, was not entirely dissimilar.
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I've read similar things about the relationship between families (mostly mothers) and their babies in Colonial America. Because infant mortality was so high, women had to have a lot of babies in the hopes that at least a few would live. When their babies would die, they (theoretically) didn't express the grief we would today. Some experts argued that babies shouldn't be named, or mothers become too attached to them, until they'd "proved" they would live.