Now, That’s a Very Difficult Poem to Read --

 

" That’s the terror of every bourgeois radical. That's the nightmare that they have: they wake up sweating in the night [laughter]. All the Labour MPs, all the reformers, they wake up and think, 

“My god, have we unleashed The Mob by what we’re doing?" [Laughter.] 

"Shelley! You’re preparing the sea of blood! 

Remember what Godwin said? 

Perhaps that’s what’s gonna happen. 

The Mob! We’ve got to watch out for The Mob! 

The Mob aren’t intelligent!” 

And all these prejudices sank in to the ruling class mind, that sensitive, intelligent and ruling class mind, the one that doesn’t go along with his class’ ideology. 

But then that sort of person comes to some other ideology, some reforming or radical ideology, and then he finds he’s worried about what he unleashes. Just like the people who 40 years later read Felix Holt. 

Nice, radical bourgeois people read George Eliot, read Felix Holt and thought "Oh it’s the nightmare! The mob, the election riot and Holt who is shot through the shoulder and then put in prison, by the way, for leading the riot in the first place." [laughter]. 

And that sort of idea is in some of Shelley. 

People aren’t — They aren’t Perfect. 

And they don’t have ideas which are pure. 

And there’s some part of Shelley all the time forging its way out, here and there, in some of his poems. You know, there’s a passage in The Mask of Anarchy where he says the answer to violent oppression is to fold your arms when the yeomanry come next time.

He’s talking to the people that had been MOWED DOWN at Peterloo! 

Women and children, murdered at Peterloo. 

And he says, “Next time, fold your arms resolutely, thinking about the laws of England, the good old laws of England. 

Stand there and talk about the law of England, and stand there and let them mow you down and then maybe everything will be all right but whatever you do, don’t unleash yourself.” 

 And that was one part of him. Of course, there was another side of him, the side that I talked about already, the side of him that says, “Yes. You’ve got to get them [laughter]. You’ve got to move and get them.” 

There are two sides to his personality, constantly coming out. 

Shelley wrote a whole series of letters to a woman called Elizabeth Hitchener when he was a young man. He had a long correspondence with her. 

And I’ll just read out one section of it but this is typical of his other side, a side that was different from the reformist side, the side that was worried about The Mob. 

There was another side to him as well. Shelley wrote: 

“They may seethe and they may riot, and they may sin at the last moment. 

The groans of the wretched may pass unheeded till the latest moment of this infamous revelry (of the rich), till the storm burst upon them and the oppressed take ruinous vengeance on their oppressors.”

“Ruinous vengeance”? What the hell is that? 

That’s Felix Holt saying exactly what you shouldn’t do! [laughter]. 

In Shelley’s poem Swellfoot the Tyrant, which is a wonderful poem, which has been sneered at by a lot of people who think it isn’t funny, what he has, is a lot of pigs. [laughter]. 

The pigs are snorting away and doing everything they are told and then suddenly the pigs turn into people and all the oppressors, all the priests and the parasites and speculators and industrialists and people of that kind and commercialists, they turn into pigs. And the pigs turn into people. And then you have a fantastic scene at the end of the poem in which he has the pigs driven out and killed. 

What happened to all this talk that "Oh,you must never take people’s lives, that you mustn’t be a retributionist and you mustn’t seek revenge? 

And then he goes completely out of school, and now he’s ultra-left in his attitude to what they should do to the pigs : "Get them out, drive them out, pin them down and stick them in the back! Anything! Just get them!" 

When Shelley is aroused to fury by what he sees going on around him, you see a very different attitude to violence. 

And really it comes to a climax, this division, this contrast between the way in which he thought about revolutions and oppressions and the mob: all these things come to a climax when he writes Prometheus Unbound. 

Now that’s a very difficult poem to read. I have lots of people who’ve come up to me since we had the meeting at Skegness last year and they say, 

“Well, I tried to read this thing, this Prometheus Unbound, but it is very difficult to read.” And so it is. 

It is very difficult to read. But the most important thing about it in my view, is that it brings that contradiction — between his Fear of The Mob and The Need for Revolution — to a head and forces it through to some kind of conclusion.

 

Peterloo Massacre: A turning point in UK history? - BBC Newsnight

PURITY CONTROL

“The method, as they call it, though it was more so a germ-line procedure of singular meta-scientific complexity, had been given to them by the alien colonists as a quid pro quo. The Syndicate would help them to create a population of alien hybrids who would hide in plain sight, cloned from human ova and alien bio-material, so there would be a clone race immune to the effects of the black oil when the return to the planet began. For this, the Syndicate would be sequestered, granted a sort of immunity or asylum, given a place in the grander scheme.

They were the Vichy government to the German "Final Solution": collaborationists whose motivation was simple, self-directed survival. These cloning operations were spread across the country, the cataloging and record-keeping done through a complex intra-institutional system that connected to every branch of government, from the Social Security Administration to the Department of Defense.

"The operation, under the working title "Purity Control," had been launched in 1948, its original conception the brainchild of German scientists given immunity themselves for war crimes, and allowed to continue the eugenic experiments that were Hitler's dark legacy.

The Syndicate had begun as a subset of a shadow intelligence agency whose original orders were to create plausible denial and an effective cover-up of Purity Control. But through 50 years, numerous U.S. and U.N. administrations, the principals began to wrest control, accumulating power and influence across international borders, such that - by 1990 - the operation ceased to have a member accountable to any one government and whose only orders would be taken from a man named Strughold, a German industrialist who had fled his homeland to northern Africa.

These men, whose knowledge and access provided control of a foreseeable future, had, in spite of this, everything to lose. Their secret work, the cloning preparations and the cataloging, constituted their greatest vulnerability: exposure. Their detection would ensure not just their own demise but a far-reaching dissolution of social and religious order around the globe.

To protect against this, the Syndicate employed methods of disinformation, using covert government programs that had been regrettably discovered, as a kind of smokescreen - a dodge or blind where the transgressions of Congress-accountable agencies served to hide their own more odious undertaking.

They had even at times used the UFO phenomenon to create a hysteria that science and the intelligentsia denounced, so completely, as to make belief in believers seem ridiculous and completely discreditable.

They had also, in a crisis, used a tool of the colonists themselves - alien bounty hunters who policed the cloning operations and enforced rule on the countdown to colonization. A double-edged sword whose cold-blooded tactics had helped to stem a leak or threat, but who also kept a watch on the Syndicate. A threat in itself, as the Syndicate had something to hide that not even the colonists knew of: a vaccine against the black oil, an inoculant against the substance in which the alien life force was held - in fact, the very medium of the life force itself.

To guard this secret was perhaps even more critical than the truth of the existence of alien life, and of colonization. If the Syndicate's own secret vaccine were discovered, the vaccine that would make themselves immune from the effects of the black oil, they would certainly be destroyed and the timetable for colonization stepped up. They would protect this secret with their lives. They would kill to protect it, as it symbolized the only hope they had of avoiding enslavement when the planet was overtaken.

That they had been able to, over decades, conduct their work on the vaccine undetected was the result of a code among the Syndicate members that put honor and the future above personal politics. But now this code was beginning to break down, an incipient scramble for power beginning to develop. A threat from within that doubled the threat from without: from agents Mulder and Scully, and the X-files.”

The Necessity of Atheism by Percy Shelley

Under Church Law, Death by Drowning CANNOT be Considered Suicide.

“ It is curious that The Necessity of Atheism is less atheistic than it is a challenge to theists to acknowledge that belief is a human passion, and as such cannot stand up to the test of being reasonable, thus the necessity or reasonableness of atheism. 

Atheism, in Shelley’s case, is an argument for human reason to be given preeminence over passions, which are always subjective, lacking reasonable proof, and therefore can not be enforced upon any free person. 

Newman Ivey White summarizes Shelley’s tract accurately, writing :

Except for the title and the signature to the advertisement (“through deficiency of proof, an Atheist.”) there was no atheism in it. 

In its seven pages of text it argued that belief can come only from three sources: physical experience, reason based on experience, and the experience of others, or testimony. 

None of these, it argued, establishes the existence of a deity, and belief, which is not subject to the will, is impossible until they do. 

Hence the existence of a God is not proved.

Shelley’s words were temperate, reasoned, and yet also revolutionary at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a century still reeling from the effects of the American War for Independence and the French Revolution: 

The mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God: it is also evident that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attachable to disbelief; and that they only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false medium through which their mind views any subject of discussion. 

Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.

It did not take long before Percy Bysshe Shelley was found out and brought before the Master of University College, Oxford, Rev. James Griffith. 

Shelley was questioned amidst much anger from the Master of the college concerning his part in writing the anonymous atheistic tract. Shelley’s response to Griffith was, 

If I can judge from your manner … you are resolved to punish me, if I should acknowledge that it is my work. 

If you can prove that it is, produce your evidence; it is neither just nor lawful to interrogate me in such a case and for such a purpose. 

Such proceedings would become a court of inquisitors, but not free men in a free country.

And with his patriotic appeal for evidence to be produced, Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from the University of Oxford. 

Before the University gates could slam behind him, Shelley had already sent the tract on atheism to all of the bishops, and apparently to many professors, heads of colleges, the Vice Chancellor, and at least one Cambridge professor.

Ironically, in the grand tradition of sanctifying sinners into saints — if such men or women achieve fame after their deaths — a monument now resides at University College, Oxford, to pay homage to the University’s most famous expelled atheist. 

For Shelley, however, still being quite alive in 1811 and not so saintly as death would later make him, this event only tempered his steel and focused his aim for future literary projects. 

He learned from this event that greater care must be taken to remain anonymous, to conceal his agenda, and to mislead those who were most likely to assume his part in such future affairs. 

Writing to his co-laborer in the infamous Necessity of Atheism tract, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Shelley revealed his new design, a plan in which Shelley would suggest to the public that he had given up writing:

 …I give out therefore that I will publish no more; every one here, but the select few who enter into its schemes believed my assertion. 

Of course nothing was further from his mind than to abandon his vow to thrust his dagger deeply into the heart of the Christian faith. From this point forward Shelley would guard his “schemes” among the select few who could be trusted and he would learn even better how to apply the principles of a quiet revolution. 

He reasserted his vow to Hogg, exclaiming, “yet here I swear and if I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity.”

Demogorgon

You're Just Saying it Wrong

Spike: 

Never much cared for you, Liam, even when we were evil. 

Angel: 

Cared for you less. 

Spike: 

Fine. 

Angel: 

Good. 

[long pause]

Angel: 

There was one thing about you. 

Spike: 

Really? 

Angel: 

Yeah, I never told anybody about this, but I-

I liked your poems. 

Spike: 

You like Barry Manilow.

Frankly, Mr. Shankly, this position I've held,

It pays my way and it corrodes my soul.

Oh, I didn't realise that you wrote poetry

I didn't realise you wrote such bloody awful poetry...

Host:  
My Question first -

And answer True, 

Because you Know I'll Know. 

 Why Mandy?

Angel:  
Well, I-I know the words - and (leans in closer) I kind of think it's pretty.

Host (smiling):  
And so it is, ya great, big sap!  

There is not a Destroyer of Worlds that can argue with Manilow -  and good for you for fessin' up.

Reconstructing William's Poetry

(an essay on the worst English poet ever to be turned into a vampire, by Am-Chau Yarkona). 

Obviously, actual examples are the best place to start, but there is very little material here. The sum total of what we know comes from the Buffy episode `Fool for Love', and what we can piece together based on William's likely reading matter, education, and inspirations. 

In `Fool for Love' we get a snippet to begin working from. William doesn't read any of it out (though we do hear him choosing words: I'll come back to this later) but Aristocrat #3 does. 

He says: "Don't be shy. "My heart expands/'tis grown a bulge in it (shooting script gives `in't)/inspired by your beauty, effulgent." (laughs) Effulgent?" 

Let's look at that written out as poetry, shall we? 

Transcript: 

"My heart expands `tis grown a bulge in it

inspired by your beauty, effulgent." 

Shooting script: 

"My heart expands 'tis grown a bulge in't

inspired by

your beauty effulgent."

There is a quite definite change of meaning here, which is why I have given both versions. Without the comma, the laughable adjective `effulgent' is applied to Cecily's beauty (and he does confirm that it is her beauty referred to). With the comma, the whole sentence becomes a little grammatically dodgy. 

In modern English (i.e. without the `poetic contractions') it reads: "My heart expands it is grown a bulge in it inspired by your beauty, effulgent." This renders it highly confusing. With a little more punctuation, however, we can turn it into: "My heart expands: it is grown a bulge in it, inspired by your beauty, effulgent." We can now see that `effulgent' could also refer to his heart. Presumably `it is' is William's poetic speak for `it has', and allowing that this is so, he could easily have meant "My heart expands: it has grown an effulgent bulge in it, inspired by your beauty," but twisted the sense to produce a rhyme (of sorts). 

To see which of these is more likely, I turn to my trusty `Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles' which gives: 

"Effulgent a. 1738 [-effulgent-, pres. ppl. stem of L. effulgere; see EF-, FULGENT.] Shining forth brilliantly; diffusing intense light; radiant. 

He is upborne by an e. cloud 1852. Hence Effulgently adv." 

This leads us to believe that `effulgent' is the word William arrived at from his choosing of words: `luminous', `irradiant' and `gleaming' would all be reasonable synonyms for `effulgent' (and William is nothing if not reasonable). Given this, we can assume that it is Cecily's radiant beauty he is describing in this laughable manner, and not his heart or its bulge. 

The next obvious step is to consider the other poetic materials with which a young gentleman in 1870-80 could be expected to have been familiar- because William undoubtedly would have known of them. 

He would have been familiar with the work of Shakespeare, and of famous British Victorian poets: Tennyson, for example, and probably Wordsworth, Coleridge etc. He would also have been aware of the work of other poets who were becoming popular- Andrew Marvell, and some others. He may well not have known some poets whom we now consider to be classics of their time; Keats, for instance, was not famous until more recently, as Byron and Shelley overshadowed him. However, it plausible to assume that William, given Spike's later rebellious streak, may have sought out and read obscurer poets as well as the mainstream ones. Reading poets that his teachers and possibly parents disapproved of is the sort of quiet act of rebellion that I see William going for. This rebelliousness, this interest in the poetic work of the lower classes (John Clare, maybe, or the almost unknown E.A. Poe) may explain why Cecily considers a man of apparently equal social standing `beneath her'. 

Poets William is certain to have known (of, if not well):

 

William Shakespeare

John Donne 

Ben Jonson 

George Herbert 

John Milton 

Andrew Marvell 

Alexander Pope 

Thomas Gray 

Oliver Goldsmith 

William Cowper 

William Blake 

William Wordsworth 

Sir Walter Scott 

Lord Byron 

P. B. Shelley 

John Clare 

John Keats 

Thomas Hood 

William Barnes 

Browning E.B. and R, though more likely the first) 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (could be great, could be worse than William) 

Edward Lear 

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (*) 

Lewis Carroll 

A.C. Swinburne 

Oscar Wilde (*) 

(Names marked with a * are likely candidates for writers whom William may have admired, but older generations may well have felt were rather on the scandalous side.) 

On considering this list (and I can recommend that you try reading any or all of them) something does stand out- that the name `William' is very common. It is plausible that William's parents, one or both, were very fond of literature, and named their son accordingly. This may then have lead to their putting pressure on their son (on William feeling that they did) to be like the famous men he was named for, and write poetry. Past speculation seems to have gone in favour of William enjoying writing poetry, although he wasn't very good at it, but if he was under pressure to do so, a mother's boy such as William may have felt compelled to write anyway. This is probably incompatible with my earlier theory that William may have used poetry as a means of quiet rebellion- but it may not. It is not inconceivable that William attempted to subvert his parent's desire for him to like literature, by liking it so much that he began to read and write things they weren't so keen on. 

The combination of rebellion and apparent lack of independence would, I feel sure, be plenty of grounds for Cecily to reject him on. 

Those writers who want to write William or Spike slash fiction may want to note (and research) the presence of Oscar Wilde in the above list. 

I hope that this essay has given some background to the poetry of William's time, and raised some interesting ideas for the writing of fanfic. You are welcome to use them, but I'd be very interested to see what you produce. Please feedback to 

mailto:amchau@popullus.net

I've Been Renewed, Have I? That's it. I've Been Renewed!

Well, 

If this isn’t actively embracing Evolution with a Glad and Open Heart, I don’t know what else is (or might be) —

I can’t quite believe it myself, but — 

I just  made an UnBoxing Video.

BEN: 

Now look, The Doctor always wore this. 

So if you're him, it should fit now, shouldn't it?

(And slips it on the man's finger. It's far too big.)

BEN: 

There. That settles it.

The Cosmic Hobo: 

I'd like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it's spread its wings.

POLLY: 

Then you DID change!

The Cosmic Hobo : 

Life depends on Change, and Renewal.

BEN: 

Oh, so that's it! 

You've been RENEWED, have you?

The Cosmic Hobo : 

I've been renewed, have I? 

That's it. 

I've been renewed!

It's part of The TARDIS — 

Without it, I couldn't survive.

Psychology of Redemption in Christianity

I feel The Force! -- I'm Not Afraid.

You will be --

You will be.

"What about Women...?

Well, you gotta be pretty awake to outsmart A Woman...."

Men Give Watches

" And the Sons of Noah, that went forth of The Ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the Father of Canaan. 

These are the three Sons of Noah: and of them was the whole Earth overspread. 

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard. 

And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. 

And Ham, the Father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of His Father, and told his two brethren without.

And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not Their Father’s nakedness. 

And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. 

And he said, “Cursed be Canaan; a Servant of Servants shall he be unto his brethren.”

And he said, “Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his Servant. 

God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servants.”

And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years. 

And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died. 

And The Whole Earth was of One Language, and of One Speech."

I remember thinking about this story 30 years ago. I think the meaning of the story stood out for me. When you read complicated materials, sometimes, a piece of complicated material will stand out, for some reason. It’s like it glitters, I suppose. That might be one way of thinking about it. You’re in sync with it, and you can understand what it means. I really experienced that reading the Dao De Jing, which is this document that I would really like to do a lecture on, at some point. I don’t understand some of the verses, but others stand right out, and I can understand them. 

I think I understood what this part of the story of Noah meant. We talked a little bit about what nakedness meant in the story of Adam and Eve. The idea, essentially, was that, to know yourself naked is to become aware of your vulnerability—your physical boundaries in time and space and your fundamental, physiological insufficiencies as they might be judged by others. There’s biological insufficiency that’s built into you, because you’re a fragile, mortal, vulnerable, half insane creature, and that’s just an existential truth. And then, of course, merely as a human being—even with all those faults—there are faults that you have that are particular to you, that might be judged harshly by the group…Well, will definitely be judged harshly by the group. And so to become aware of your nakedness is to become self-conscious, to know your limits, and to know your vulnerability. That’s what is revealed to Ham when he comes across his father naked. 

The question is, what does it mean to see your father naked? And especially in an inappropriate manner, like this. It’s as if Ham…He does the same thing that happens in the Mesopotamian creation myth, when Tiamat and Apsu give rise to the first Gods, who are the father of the eventual deity of redemption: Marduk. The first Gods are very careless and noisy, and they kill Apsu, their father, and attempt to inhabit his corpse. That makes Tiamat enraged. She bursts forth from the darkness to do them in. It’s like a precursor to the flood story, or an analog to the flood story. 

I see the same thing happening, here, with Ham. He’s insufficiently respectful of his father. The question is, exactly what does the father represent? You could say, well, there’s the father that you have: a human being, a man among men. But then there’s the Father as such, and that’s the spirit of the Father. Insofar as you have a father, you have both at the same time: you have the personal father, a man among other men—just like anyone other’s father—but insofar as that man is your father, that means that he’s something different than just another person. What he is, is the incarnation of the spirit of the Father. To disrespect that carelessly… 

Noah makes a mistake, right? He produces wine and gets himself drunk. You might say, well, if he’s sprawled out there for everyone to see, it’s hardly Ham’s fault, if he stumbles across him. But the book is laying out a danger. The danger is that, well, maybe you catch your father at his most vulnerable moment, and if you’re disrespectful, then you transgress against the spirit of the Father. And if you transgress against the spirit of the Father and lose respect for the spirit of the Father, then that is likely to transform you into a slave. 

That’s a very interesting idea. I think it’s particularly germane to our current cultural situation. I think that we’re constantly pushed to see the nakedness of our Father, so to speak, because of the intense criticism that’s directed towards our culture—the patriarchal culture. We’re constantly exposing its weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and, let’s say, its nakedness. There’s nothing wrong with criticism, but the purpose of criticism is to separate the wheat from the chaff: it’s not to burn everything to the ground. It’s to say, well, we’re going to carefully look at this; we’re going to carefully differentiate; we’re going to keep what’s good, and we’re going to move away from what’s bad. 

The criticism isn’t to identify everything that’s bad: it’s to separate what’s good from what’s bad, so that you can retain what’s good and move towards it. To be careless of that is deadly. You’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father, right? Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, which, of course, is something that the postmodern neo-Marxists are absolutely emphatic about: you’re a cultural construction. Insofar as you’re a cultural construction, then you’re inhabited by the spirit of the Father. To be disrespectful towards that means to undermine the very structure that makes up a good portion of what you are, insofar as you’re a socialized, cultural entity. If you pull the foundation out from underneath that, what do you have left? You can hardly manage on your own. It’s just not possible. You’re a cultural creation. 

Ham makes this desperate error, and is careless about exposing himself to the vulnerability of his father. Something like that. He does it without sufficient respect. The judgement is that, not only will he be a slave, but so will all of his descendants. He’s contrasted with the other two sons, who, I suppose, are willing to give their father the benefit of the doubt. When they see him in a compromising position, they handle it with respect, and don’t capitalize on it. Maybe that makes them strong. That’s what it seems like to me. I think that’s what that story means. It has something to do with respect. The funny thing about having respect for your culture—and I suppose that’s partly why I’m doing the Biblical stories: they’re part of my culture. They’re part of our culture, perhaps. But they are certainly part of my culture. It seems to me that it’s worthwhile to treat that with respect, to see what you can glean from it, and not kick it when it’s down, let’s say. 

And so that’s how the story of Noah ends. The thing, too, is that Noah is actually a pretty decent incarnation of the spirit of the Father, which, I suppose, is one of the things that makes Ham’s misstep more egregious. I mean, Noah just built an ark and got everybody through the flood, man. It’s not so bad, and so maybe the fact that he happened to drink too much wine one day wasn’t enough to justify humiliating him. I don’t think it’s pushing the limits of symbolic interpretation to note on a daily basis that we’re all contained in An Ark. You could think about that as The Ark That’s Been Bequeathed to Us by Our Forefathers : that’s the tremendous infrastructure that we inhabit, that we take for granted because it works so well. It protects us from things that we cannot even imagine, and we don’t have to imagine them, because we’re so well protected. 

One of the things that’s really struck me hard about the disintegration and corruption of the universities is the absolute ingratitude that goes along with that. Criticism, as I said, is a fine thing, if it’s done in a proper spirit, and that’s the spirit of separating the wheat from the chaff. But it needs to be accompanied by gratitude, and it does seem to me that anyone who lives in a Western culture at this time and place in history, and who isn’t simultaneously grateful for that, is half blind, at least. It’s never been better than this, and it could be so much worse — and it’s highly likely that it will be so much worse, because, for most of human history, so much worse is The Norm. 

Then there’s this little story that crops up, that seems, in some ways, unrelated to everything that’s gone before it. But I think it’s also an extremely profound little story. It took me a long time to figure it out. It’s the Tower of Babel.“

Do You Hide from The Flood or Build a Boat?

What did he just say..?

He said,  

“There’s a Storm Coming.”

An ORION Pictures Release

Jor-El:

Even though you've been raised as a Human Being, 

You are Not One of Them. 

They can be a Great People, Kal-El, 

They Wish to Be. 

They Only Lack The Light to Show The Way. 

For this reason, above all, 

Their Capacity for Good, 

I have sent Them YOU... 

My Only Son.