It is a magic word for the Wizards in White to use, and failure to acquire it before you do what you do makes you an evil sorcerer without a soul. The word is consent.
con·sent
noun
- permission for something to happen or agreement to do something. “no change may be made without the consent of all the partners” Similar: agreement, assent, concurrence, accord, permission, authorization, sanction, leave, clearance, acquiescence, acceptance, approval, seal of approval, stamp of approval. imprimatur, backing, endorsement, confirmation, support, favor, good wishes, go-ahead, thumbs up, green light, OK, approbation Opposite: dissent
verb
- give permission for something to happen. “he consented to a search by a detective” Similar: agree, to assent, to allow, give permission for, sanction, accept
Hopefully, she is getting permission to draw the people she is putting in her pictures before sharing them with the world. If the person you are drawing is a real person, you have to have their consent to use their image. If I am drawing a real person, I am careful to get consent. Of course, if I am drawing out of my head, using one of those little wooden pose models, or just making it up straight out of my head, imaginary consent is pretty much superfluous. (Superfluous… a very good word. But you should look it up before you use it so that you use it correctly. Much as this article does with the word consent.)
Both of the characters in the cartoon are made up. The first lady, the pirate Zorah the Seawitch, is a re-interpretation of a George Perez comic-book character (being an altered image that looks like the original only in pose and proportions, it essentially becomes my own creation.)
The portrait at the left of Naomi, was made from a photograph given to me by the girl herself, asking me to draw her as I saw her. This was consent. I not only gave her the first original, she expressly knew that I have a blog where I have posted such pictures before.
Of course, Naomi herself told me it doesn’t look enough like her that her friends would recognize her without help. And she did not give me permission to reveal her actual name. I made the name Naomi up for the portrait, using one letter that is the same as the first letter of her last name, and I will not reveal which letter that is. Thus, I have a sort of consent for calling the portrait by the name I call it.
Being a naturist or nudist requires a good deal of knowledge about consent. If you carry a camera around on your phone in a nudist park or naturist club, you have to understand you don’t have consent to take pictures of anybody without express permission… or written permission if you are in any way planning to publish it or put it on the internet. You also don’t have permission to stand around and stare at other nudists, just as they don’t have automatic consent to stare at you. Or laugh at you, unless you give consent by laughing about yourself first.
But the thing that makes the word consent a powerful magic word, is when somebody realizes using a little bit of common sense (which is actually an oxymoron because sense is not common and what the common man believes is true is rarely good sense) that this word needs to be taught in sex education classes (another oxymoron because nobody can teach sex education anymore due to the fact that the average ox who votes for the school board members is a moron and never had sex education himself but has a religion that tells him that he should reject any attempts to make his kids smarter as loudly as possible.)
In my own case, as a victim of a sexual assault by an older boy at the age of ten, I did not know about consent. And neither did my attacker. I did not give any consent to having my testicles twisted at the same time I was forbidden to scream in pain. And because I did not give consent, it was a crime, even for someone who wasn’t yet legally an adult, like him. Neither of us knew that I could say no legally and he had to stop. I was too traumatized to let myself remember what he did to me for another twelve years so he got away with it completely. It would’ve helped if I had known a little bit about what he was doing to me and why. And what my rights were supposed to be. And it wouldn’t have hurt if somebody had told him that what he was doing was wrong.
Kids need to know at a really early age more than just about bees pollinating flowers and birds singing to attract a mate for some serious egg laying. They need to know about consent. And what people should not do without consent. Or even with consent if it is forced, coerced, achieved through trickery, or not valued in court because you were under-aged when he did what he did.
Teaching consent as a part of sex education is an important enough idea that I will need to come back to it again later.
Catch a Falling Star 
Vonnegut
My experience of the works of Kurt Vonnegut is limited to the reading of three books; Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse Five. But it was enough to make me love him and use him as a shaper of my soul.
I deeply apologize for the fact that even though he only wrote 14 books and a bunch of short stories, I have not read everything I could get my hands on by Kurt. Three novels and one short story (Harrison Bergeron) is not really enough to compare to the many, many things that I have read by Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Louis L’Amour, and Michael Crichton. I can’t begin to count how many books of each of those four I have read and reread. But it is enough that I read those three novels and have a lifelong regret of never buying and reading Slapstick when I had the chance. Vonnegut writes black humor. The ideas are painful, and burn away flesh from your personal body of being. And at the same time, you cannot help but laugh at the pure, clean, horrifying truths his ridiculous stories reveal.
If, in the course of telling a story, you can put the sublime, the ridiculous, and the horrendous side by side, and make the reader see how they actually fit together, then you can write like Vonnegut.
Let me give you three quick and dirty book reports of the Vonnegut I have read in the order I have read them;
I read Cat’s Cradle in college. I was young and idealistic at the time, foolishly convinced I could be a great writer and cartoonist who could use my work to change mankind for the better.
In the book, Dr. Felix Hoenikker (a fictionalized co-creator of the atomic bomb) is obsessively re-stacking cannonballs in the town square in pursuit of a new way to align water molecules that will yield ice that does not melt at room temperature. Much as he did with the A-bomb, Hoenikker invents a world-ending science-thing without any thought for the possible consequences. The narrator of the novel is trying to write a humanizing biography of the scientist, and comes to observe the inevitable destruction of the whole world when the oceans freeze into Ice-9, the un-meltable ice crystal. Before the world ends, the narrator spends time on the fictional Carribean island of San Lorenzo where he learns the fictional religion known as Bokononism, and learns to make love to a beautiful woman by pressing bare feet together sole to sole. It is a nihilistic picture of what humans are really like more savagely bleak than any portrayal Monte Python’s Flying Circus ever did on TV.
Needless to say, my ideals were eventually shattered and my faith in the world shaken.
I read Breakfast of Champions after I had been teaching long enough to buy my own house, be newly married, and a father to one son. It was probably the worst time of life to be reading a book so cynical, yet true.
In this story, the author Kilgore Trout, much published but mostly unknown, is headed to Midland City to deliver a keynote address at an arts festival. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy business man who owns a lot of Midland City real-estate. Trout gives Hoover a book (supposedly a message from the creator of the universe) to read that suggests that all people (except for the reader of the book… meaning Hoover) are machines with no free will. Hoover takes the message to heart and tries to set the machines free by breaking them, beating up his son, his lover, and nine other people before being taken into custody.
The book contains devastating themes of suicide, free will, and social and economic cruelty. It makes you sincerely reflect on your own cog-in-the-machine reality.
Slaughterhouse Five is a book I bought and read when I missed my chance to buy Slapstick and needed something to take home from HalfPrice Books to make me feel better about what I missed. (Of the five books I had intended to buy that day, none were still on the shelves in spite of the fact that they had been there the week before.) It was fortuitous. This proved to be the best novel I had ever read by Vonnegut.
Like most of his work, the story of Billy Pilgrim is a fractured mosaic of small story pieces not presented in chronological order. It details Billy’s safe, ordinary marriage to a wife who gives him two children, but it is ironically cluttered with death, accidents, being stalked by an assassin, and being kidnapped by aliens. It also details his experiences in World War II where he is captured by the Germans, held prisoner in Dresden, kept in an underground slaughterhouse, and ironically survives the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies. Further, it details his time as a zoo exhibit on the alien planet of Tralfamadore.
It explores the themes of depression, post-traumatic-stress disorder, and anti-war sentiment. Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the fire-bombing, so real-life experiences fill the book with gravitas that it might not otherwise possess. Whether the author was ever kidnapped by aliens or not, I cannot say.
But Kurt Vonnegut’s desire to be a writer and portray himself as a writer in the character of Kilgore Trout, and even as himself in his work, has an awful lot to do with my desire to be a writer myself. Dark, pithy wisdom is his thing. But that wisdom, having been wrung from the darkness is all the more brightly lit because of that wringing. It is hard to read, but not hard to love.
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