![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Something quite new was required
It is not an important yahrzeit of Alan Turing. That will be in a couple of years; in a couple of weeks it will be a more important birthday. He did not really live out of time like T. H. White's Merlin, but the Pet Shop Boys called him a man from the future. Since the last time I checked in, there seems to be a poetry collection about him and a poetry fest judged for humanness by an AI, not to mention a train named in his honor. The statue at King's College is still in zoning limbo. I like the news of these memorials and investigations, these personal or institutional engagements, but I keep recurring to the idea of how much easier it is to honor the dead than accept the living: how badly governments learn the lesson of letting people live as themselves. If I'm still here this time next year, I'll have outlived him. When I was sixteen and reading Hugh Whitemore's Breaking the Code (1986) in the red-jacketed secondhand hardcover whose spine has faded with time and sunlight to a most acceptably queer pink, dying like a fairy tale of injustice at forty-one looked a long way off in an eventful life. I didn't have to come this close in time to know his life had a lot in it, but it could have had a lot more.
no subject
(Thank you.)