What is ‘weird’? How do you define ‘weird’?
If weird is a word you use for anything strongly unfamiliar and unexpected, then ‘weird’ is merely a marker for the limitations of your knowledge of reality.
Man loves to think that he knows reality. He looks around him and sees things ‘as they are’, unaware of the irony that his vision is limited by itself. Thus we coin and use expressions like ‘Natural, ‘Unnatural’, ‘Freak’, ‘Usual’ – and so on. There is a rule that among observed instances, the pattern that occurs mostly will be taken as normalcy. But this is for the sake of scientific convenience, I’m afraid, and does not in any way convey the actual rules that the universe and its inmates follow.
For example, we might perceive an evening as quiet and peaceful, with the purple-grey sky overhead where bats wing to the hunt silently. We never hear the vast panorama of sounds that lie beyond our quota of 20-20,000 Hertz – we can’t hear what those bats hear, we can’t see what the owls see from their cotes, we can’t smell the hidden odours that rise from myriad elements of nature at that hour.
Our rainbow is bounded by Violet on one side and Red on the other. Our eyes are ignorant of what incomparable spectra lie beyond their sight.
The wonder in Miranda’s eyes when she first saw Ferdinand on her lonely island – that wonder is latent in all our eyes, for we are but children in the classroom of nature.
In history, people have regarded many things as unnatural. And they have tried to define for themselves what is natural, too. Very often, these assumptions have proved to be utterly wrong. One particularly seductive trap is the idea of regarding Nature as something idyllic and pristine, something that is the paragon of Beauty and Justness as perceived by the human mind – the human mind of a particular point of view, we might say. This idea is childish, because Nature does not care about our notions of what is nice what is not. It is we who have to keep learning and keep adjusting our worldview, because that is the true scientific attitude.
Here is a news that is quite interesting to me, though not too surprising or shocking. This shows that rape is not only a naturally occurring phenomenon, it can take ‘weird’ forms we can hardly imagine. We are humans, after all.
One thing should be kept in mind, that though rape is natural, – well everything above and under the wide sky is natural, innit? – it does not have to be acceptable in human society. This is a very complex issue which I cannot address here properly. To any potential rapist who would act unapologetically thinking that he is only doing something natural, I say this – death by getting gored is also natural; let’s see you take it calmly if that happens to your parent.