"JACKALOPE DREAMS": a Review

When I was working on my bio of Bob, I would joke that I didn’t know whether I should say I was writing nonfiction, though I was carefully leaving out or even changing a few things to protect the guilty, or whether I should say I was writing fiction and tell the real truth. This has become rather a barbed issue in publishing these days, with some people claiming to be far more wicked than they turn out to be when investigated. I would say that Mary Clearman Blew’s most recent book, “Jackalope Dreams,” is over on the side of fiction that is true.

When I was trying to write in the Sixties, some guy said carelessly, “There are no women writing in Montana except Mary Clearman Blew.” (Actually, Mary Clearman in those days -- up in Havre.) It made me mad, but he really meant “getting published” and it was true. So Mary, writing on the trail I couldn’t get my feet onto. But I loved her books. So over the last half-century I bought ‘em and read ‘em and kept ‘em. She was born the same year I was, 1939, same as Ivan Doig and Jim Welch. The books came steadily:

“Lambing Out,” 1977
“Runaway: A Collection of Stories,” 1990
“All But the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family” 1991
“Balsamroot: A Memoir,” 1994
“Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place” 1999
“Sister Coyote” 2000
“Writing Her Own Life: Imogene Welch, Western Rural Schoolteacher.” 2004
“Jackalope Dreams” 2008

There are some edited or introduced books and a few other things, but these are Blew’s main books. You can tell whether I had money or not: when I had money I bought hard backs (4 of 8). Here ends the competition.

This particular book, “Jackalope Dreams” is not just a novel but a thriller with a suspenseful plot, more like Hillerman, thick with local truths. This is contemporary, the dilemma of old ways and lives not quite gone yet and up against modern twists like drugs, religious delusion, posse comitatus fantasies, and human perversion that only the kids seem to understand exists. Against those twistings of the Romance of the West shines John Perrine, a Denver lawyer who expresses his love in a re-enactment of a train robbery, like the Charlie Russell Choo-Choo that operates out of Great Falls. (You can live this part of the novel!) What a fine hero he turns out to be, soft-handed and a little fat, but solid and warm -- a refuge in a bewildering time. He just ain’t no Lassiter.

The heroine’s father, however, was rather more like Lassiter, making time stand still even though he bankrolled his ranch with his daughter’s teaching paychecks. Blew has said that this was the life she had been expected to live, but lucky she didn’t because times change. Several other noted women writers of the West made the same choice: Judy Blunt, Linda Hasselstrom... Gretel Erlich come in from outside, as did I. But now we make common cause. Still, those hard-handed, hard-headed men haunt all of us, I think. Mary Blew just goes ahead and writes the ghosts into the story. After all, they are still players.

The most moving and emotionally true moment comes almost at the beginning of the book when Corey’s father, sitting in his pickup in the back of the ranch, shoots himself in the head just as Corey on horseback comes looking for him. It is sunset. She simply opens the passenger door, slides in, and sits beside her dead father until it is dark. No screaming meemies. No futile revivals. Just a last sharing while the world and the body cool. If you’ve read the earlier memoirs, you’ll know that under this fiction is bone fact.

As well, that exasperating Ariel, who is forced into a far different kind of punishment, the kind that little girls face everywhere, is an expression of a real relationship in Blew’s life. Ariel, in attempts to escape so frantic that she is like a doe hung-up on a fence, drives the plot by shaking Corey out of her complacency -- first getting her fired from her teaching job and, finally, becoming the daughter she never gave birth to because of serving the ranch. In the process Corey goes back to her painting, so long ignored, even though all the people in her life are skeptical -- except one, a long-ago artist-lover who understood, but not enough to make a life with her so he only persists as a voice.

The second and third growth trees that thicket the old ranches are webbed with game trails that the kids follow to hidden places the way kids always do. THEY know about the drugs, they know about the cached weapons, they know about the abuses. Some buckle and join the so-called adult men. Some stand against them, trying to do right though their resources are very limited. The law is underground, unrecognized, waiting for something to blow up -- and it does.

Many traces of the 19th century persist in Montana, esp. in the old towns now shrinking and in the old ranch headquarters not yet torn down. More patterns are unseen inside the people, though they still have as much power as the ghost voices in Corey’s head. Outsiders have a hard time catching on, even the ones that mean well and will eventually be part of a new world here.

A book like this has a lot of power under the surface. Many people will read it in a rush to see what happens next, but others will reflect, see metaphors and dynamics that are all around them. Then the book becomes evidence for the ongoing work of living on the high prairie, whether born here or not. Corey’s artwork stands for New Vision, creativity without denying the past, in the midst of second and third-growth culture. The secret to good writing, in part, is this multi-level quality.

If you’re trying to write, as I still am, this url gives you access to some suggestions from Mary Clearman Blew, Mary Clear-Headed Deft-Handed Blew. Bless her.
http://www.washington.edu/uwired/outreach/cspn/Website/Hist%20n%20Lit/Part%20Five/Commentary/Blew%20Comm.html

I HAD EXPECTED A BOOK READING, BUT...

Book publishing has for a long time been seen as a sort of combination redemption/prestige act: a way of reforming reprobates through confession like St. Augustine or a way of certifying skill, like a college degree. The publisher was the go-between like a university, guiding and funding. No more. Today anyone gets into print and the ways of publishing are so accessible and inventive -- not even printed on paper -- that publishers, authors and consumers are at a loss to know what the new meaning of the act might be.

Yesterday at Barnes & Noble in Great Falls my publisher (U of Calgary Press) and I had scheduled a reading and book signing. In the old paradigm, this would have meant a famous writer, a swarm of admiring fans, and a novel. But the weather was terrific, there was a big air show, it’s graduation season, and no one came except the people I’d invited to do introductions: Donna Stebbins, the mayor of Great Falls; Leland Ground whom I had invited to give a blessing in Blackfeet; and my publisher, Donna Livingstone. A few others like the husbands of the two Donnas, Leland’s family, Norma Ashby, and some other former students who happened in by chance: Stan Juneau and his wife, Carol, who is a state legislator. Amazingly, it turned out that all those empty chairs were an advantage. This mix of people needed to talk to each other, both about Bob Scriver and about books and life and Blackfeet and... well, the new paradigm.

I see that in this version of “publishing” the focus is on the real lives of people, national borders mean little, the land itself is part of the community, and one of the things a publisher does is to network among media and people. It was remarkable that the people with power in this conversation were mostly older, highly experienced women who were used to working with potent men. They had taken the burden of what some men consider to be beneath them and now that has turned out to be the more important part of public life. (Okay, go ahead and invoke Hilary Clinton. Pretend Leland is Obama -- he’d like that!)

So after Leland did his blessing, I did my reading -- forgetting that I was supposed to be introduced by Donna Stebbins, who gracefully slipped herself into the conversation and did it anyway -- and then we did something that I’d call “idea jazz.” Someone would make a statement about Bob Scriver or art or life in general, someone else would pick that up and do a “riff” on the subject, then the next person, until there was a seamless multi-voiced piece of verbal music going on.

This used to happen occasionally in the Unitarian context and it’s one of the phenomena that just absolutely lifts me up by the hair roots when it happens. Forget the pattern we were supposed to follow! It turned out that Donna Livingstone had attended a Blackfeet “Horn” Ceremony (it’s about buffalo), so she and Leland clicked right away; Dona Stebbins and her husband are musicians and really understood those dynamics, Edward Cavell (Donna L’s husband) once dated Charlie Beil’s daughter (!!! Beil was one of the key figures in Bob’s beginnings) and Norma Ashby has been a long-time and passionate Bob Scriver supporter. (Bob loved this sort of idea session!) So we were explaining, asking, dreaming, elaborating together as fast as we could. I kept nudging things towards the idea of a culture tie between Calgary and GF equivalent to the electrical power tie-line between GF and Lethbridge.

Even urban and sophisticated people like Michael Blowhard and Tim have become increasingly disappointed and even enraged by the hegemony of Manhattan publishing where something originally a gentleman’s work, done with dignity and high standards, has been made into a profit machine like everything else. They've drained out the heart’s blood and strangled the authors, which ironically has only helped the little grass roots operations to see that their work was important and could be unique. Small printing “publishers” now abound everywhere, esp. if you count blogs which are a sort of daily publishing that is rapidly replacing newspapers. And if you look to video, as Tim has done, and frankly admit that we’re all learning how to make music/image/word compositions so that young people’s input is just as valuable as that of the old tweedy “club” editors, then suddenly the world doesn’t seem to be contracting after all -- indeed, expanding rather more rapidly that we can assimilate, which makes us underestimate what’s happening.

Even more exciting, national boundaries no longer count (I look for nations to take a Chinese view of this and put some hard pressure on the Internet in the near future), so one culture can be just as meaningful as another because we aren’t bound by a particular language or medium, and -- what’s most important of all, the real “cassowary” event -- is the formation of a new cultural ecology that includes everything that has happened in this galaxy so far. God is dead, hello Cosmos! (And if you want to call the Cosmos “God,” that’s your choice.) There is a future after all!

Well, I could read about all this in the New York Times (ha!) and on Manhattan-focused blogs (double ha), but to have it right here in “River City,” weaving together people I’ve known for half a century with others who say, “Oh, that’s so much like MY life,” even though we’ve just met --- well, the evidence is just too strong to be denied. Something is happening that has nothing to do with conventional politics, though it's affecting them as well. No one can figure out where the money is going to come from or how we’re going to survive until it does. We still don’t know how to educate people for their lives.

But if there’s anything I learned in the ministry and from Bob Scriver, it is the great counseling truth that “focus gives power.” The more a person or a society can get focus -- not a hokey mission statement someone developed with Magic Marker and newsprint taped to the walls -- but a from-the-heart understanding of what it means to be human on the prairie along the Rockies, the more powerful the idea becomes without anyone having to force anything. Whateveritis comes THROUGH us, not from our pushing.

The biggest risk is that the Status Quo might try to stamp out this gathering power, so it’s a good thing to be disguised as merely a little book reading on the first really fine Spring day, such good weather that no one attended except those who were somehow guided to be there. For all I know, one of Leland’s grandsons might catch fire and write a book or make a video that changes everything. Or it might be the Coburn family, who came after the reading and sat quietly talking about Bob Scriver, continuing the conversation even though they hadn’t been there earlier. They are a dance family, composing a celebration of Lewis & Clark in ballet terms. Last year’s Sacajawea/ballerina loved her first year of college in Purchase, N.Y., where two classes were academic and the rest was ballet. I asked to see her toes after that much en pointe and was pleased to see that modern tech materials have gotten to those classic pink satin slippers: silicon padding and restructured support are saving her Blackfeet toes.

While all this was happening, my poplars finally unfurled their leaves. Archibald Macleish, addressing the despair of his own times in J.B., said, “I would not stay here if I could...” meaning that he was tempted by suicide, “except for the little green leaves in the Spring and the wind on the water.” Today is gray and softly warm, good for planting the hollyhocks and nicotiana I bought in Great Falls.

SMALL TOWN PROBLEMS

A new citizen of Valier, one of a clutch of new home builders from other places had busied himself with investigations and spread the word that at this monthly village meeting he would confront the council about the infrastructure, which he didn’t investigate much before moving here. As it happened, a half-dozen old-timers were present but their concern was loose dogs. The problem of big dogs, one of which appeared to be ornery enough to snarl at people and start fights, is very mild compared to most places, but has certainly increased recently.

I had the impression that this new man in town was an engineer and this was the reason he was concerned about water and sewer. It turned out that he’d spent ten days bugging the town clerk about the town financial arrangements and made the assertion that $142,000 or so of cash was sitting in the bank, not drawing interest, and unexplained because it was embedded in a mesh of obligated income, state or county payments, and dedicated bits of this and that. The only one who understands it all is the town clerk, who is the best we’ve ever had, a former bank employee. Gradually it became clear that this “engineer” only had a firm grasp on one fact: the town had enough money to do what HE thought they should do. He was so assiduous in his role as Perry Mason that finally one of the council members (all the council members are male, young and probably weigh 300 pounds or so) rebuked him for persecuting the clerk and directed him to take on the council members if he wanted to attack anyone. The “engineer,” considerably smaller, backed off.

The REAL attack dog at the meeting was the old lady who feels entitled to punish anyone who deviates from the way things were done in Valier just after WWII. Everyone generally shines her on, but her tongue is sharp enough that one hopes not to attract her attention. She was so angry about dogs that I got up early yesterday morning and went out to “patrol.” There is one big young long-legged black lab who was loose in his yard and probably is the troublemaker. Another who bugged the “engineer” is locked into a kennel now. Two others were loose in their yards and have been that way for many years without causing much trouble. A golden lab who occasionally crosses my yard was loose in his own yard up the street. The St. Bernard who used to be chained to a tiny house at the edge of town was gone and a “for rent” sign in the window. I think that as soon as the sheriff gets a little more active about contacting people these problems will abate, but we definitely have more, bigger and less confined dogs that we used to.

A more pressing matter is the budget and financing practices of the village. It’s clear that ancient decisions and practices, probably dating back twenty or thirty years, have been continued without reflection. This is the sort of thing that happens when citizens become preoccupied with their own affairs and let those few willing to guide the town do things their own way. New council members are not willing to change money matters in particular, esp. in a drought period when businesses are closing. Our mayor has not been a numbers sort of person and, indeed, even the Portland bureaucrats sweated when they came to such matters. It’s the national dilemma and catastrophe over the stock market writ very small. What seemed to be prudent “sugar bowl” methods, are now too complicated to be monitored efficiently.

But the gorilla that wasn’t on the agenda is the stockpiling of poisons at the airport where the crop duster is surviving by selling herbicide and pesticide, mixing the concentrate by adding water from the city water system. A month ago the “engineer” insisted that the backflo valve needed to be professionally checked, but it still hadn’t been done. No one has done ground checks for contamination, though the city’s drinking water wells are not far away. If the poisons somehow made a major spill, they would travel downhill through the yards. The person whose yard abuts the airport claims his pets have a remarkable number of tumors and die young.

We may have a potential Love Canal situation here: worst case, forced government buyouts. If the contamination gets into Lake Francis, Conrad will also be affected. A few years ago the Hutterite pig farm across the lake sprang a leak in their sewage lagoon and filled Lake Francis with pig poop. Valier’s attitude was sort of, well, it’s Conrad’s problem. Which is only fair since Conrad, the county seat, seems to think Valier is beneath notice.

The “engineer” turns out to simply run an underground lawn sprinkler business, one of the real water-hogging practices in Valier since the valves and timers are always going wrong. He’s another lawn worshiper. In front of his new bachelor pad he has installed a massive fountain, burbling away in recycle mode, but still rather a taunt in a dry farming area where farmers must come in with a tank to get their household water.

A few months ago the council discussed the case of a resident who refuses to pay for sewer or water, on grounds that he doesn’t use them, which ended up more or less stumping the panel by his resistance. This week I learned that last summer the man took two 55 gallon drums of his own excrement to the roll-off dumpster site. I’m unclear about what happened after that, but it seems to prove that he was telling the truth about not using the sewer. The next question is what happens to urine. He seems to be using a tank truck for household water. He’s IN the town, on the highway.

Like the sprinkler salesman, many of us judge by appearances and get distracted by small matters of individual concern. And all the while, true disaster is simply not recognized. In my efforts to find a small safe beneath-notice place to hole up and write, I may have gotten myself dead center in trouble. I had thought this was a timeless sort of village where things didn’t change much, and they haven’t in the past. But it is a microcosm of Montana, and of the West as a whole. People of very different kinds and assumptions are moving in and out. And the poor, the weak, the old pay the price. I feel an obligation to make a fuss.

TAKE THE UMEDA, FOR INSTANCE

The Umeda village that Alfred Gell studied was a complexly patterned community, really a complex of hamlets in a larger area, that had evolved to fit the circumstances. The people themselves were physically evolved to survive, sturdy sun-darkened folks who probably had a lot of inner physiological molecular mutations that allowed them to live on a diet largely composed of sago palm mush, a carbohydrate, with very little protein or vegetables except for yams. I suspect that they would do very well on a teenager’s diet of Twinkies and Korn Kurls so long as they stayed away from carbonated sugar drinks!

Arrangements for their life cycle were not elaborate on the surface, but extremely complex -- full of checks and balances -- under the surface. Much had to do with a preoccupation with food. The most common form of marriage was simply trading sisters. All women were considered desirable and were sometimes traded or promised as youngsters. Widows, full grown and fully skilled, could just about take their pick of men. Birth as an event and as a topic was not discussed, taboo, and anyway not always successful because of poor nutrition.

Everyone carried a net over their shoulder at all times, so that if they came to something edible, they could bring it back to the village. The mothers carried their infants as well in that handy net. All the women wore grass skirts. When they wore out, a new skirt was made and put over the top without removing the old one. Men of a certain age wore a gourd over their penises -- highly decorated -- as both an adornment and -- hopefully -- an attraction and to catch any dripping semen. In this culture breast milk and semen were considered to be equivalent, related to egg whites. All valuable sources of food, it was thought, and a man was believed to be feeding his baby in the womb when he had intercourse with the mother during pregnancy. (The other side of that idea was the notion of vagina dentata, the “toothed” vagina that could bite off and “eat” the whole penis.

Once the baby was born, it went everywhere with the mother in her net. The fathers sat in the middle of the village hut, talking and smoking and so on. The mothers did their cooking and making things out on the surrounding veranda. When the baby was old enough to escape from the net and totter around, it migrated to the father. For a while the toddler is besotted with its father, crawling over him, chewing on him, even twisting his semen-collecting gourd -- which made the observing anthropologist flinch but not the father. Normally there is a gap of three or four years between babies and the toddler may continue to nurse that long while learning to eat solid food, maybe sago from the mother which is everyone’s staple and always available -- or maybe some bit of protein from the father, a treat. An angry father denied protein to his child and as the children grew up, fathers tended to be more impatient.

Until the next baby comes toddling over, the child stays with the father all the time and rides around on his shoulders. When a boy is too big for this, he joins a pack of little boys who run off together through the jungle, doing their version of grownup stuff like hunting lizards with small arrows. The girls at this age go back to their mothers but as helpers, sitting alongside and learning how to do things.

A boy who is adolescent -- which might last until nearly thirty -- goes with the bachelors, who might sit with the men a little bit. But mostly they work at getting to be serious hunters. A girl by this time -- and they do not reach puberty until late teens -- is married.

Married men settle into helping their wives produce sago for food. It’s hard work, preparing the field, cutting the trees open, scraping out the insides and washing the pith thoroughly -- then pounding it into flour to be boiled. The work is loosely gender-assigned, with the wives doing the washing and scraping after weaving containers out of palm fronds. At one point the material has to be pounded hard a long time in a sort of mortar and pestle way that certainly suggests coition. The harder they work, the more the men stop tending their hair, maybe even discard their penis-gourds. But they are nevertheless growing wiser and more clever in the talk among the men while the bachelors who haven’t mastered hunting yet are dependent on the married couples for the basic sago. No one denies anyone sago. Just protein.

Women are scarce and die early. Men who live a long time tend to wander away from the village and set themselves up in solitary huts, maybe maintaining a friendship with another man. All of this becomes significant in the ceremony that is the centerpiece of Alfred Gell’s book and one of my chapters on the Poetics of Liturgy.

At one point Clifford Geertz is trying to get to the basic human universals, what Paul Tillich calls the “Ultimate.” He remarks that the truly basics: eating, sex, excreting, social relationships, are too basic to be anything religious but parody. He forgets to think about Communion -- but then again, it IS easy to parody people who “eat” their God.

The Umeda connect eating, sex, and death rather directly, with a constant undertow of craving, rage, jealousy, sorcery and cannibalism. They have a word that is very much like “take” in English: to “take” a woman, to “take” supper, to “take it out” on something, but our culture is too well-fed to have much thought about cannibalism except for exceptional circumstances and deranged individuals when it suddenly dawns that human beings are made of meat. (One of my other chapters is about the airplane load of soccer players who survived in the Andes by eating each other. Well, SOME survived.)

I’ve sometimes speculated on how much this thesis was a disguised and subconscious attack on the seminary where I was “taking” courses and they were “taking” my money. Maybe that’s why my poor thesis advisor was too scandalized to continue. While I was there, his son “took” the life of his fiance and himself. Maybe that was the real scandal. If he’d been Umeda, he would have been convinced of sorcery. As it was, I’m sure he thought of the Devil.

CASSOWARIES

Cassowaries are close to being the oldest living descendants of dinosaurs -- not the big ones like diplodocus, but the fast ones like the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park.” They are rattites, which means they have no keelbone in their breasts -- the anchor-point for the broad wings that allow eagles and geese to fly. Cassowaries like emus and ostriches, are without wings fit for flight. They look a little bit like guinea fowl on steroids, which is natural since they are found in New Guinea these days. The rattites evolved in Gonwandaland, the continent that pre-existed what today is South America, Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica, India, other parts of South Asia, and Australia.  At one time it even included Florida and most of Southern Europe. “Science tells us that the Continents of Australia, India, South America, Africa, and Antarctica, existed together as a separate landmass as long as 650 million years ago.  And as these continents only began to break up some 130 million years ago, this great supercontinent had a life of around 520 million years; making it perhaps the most important geological structure of the last billion years.”

Dinosaurs crashed about 65 million years ago. By that time Gonwandaland had reconfigured very slowly quite a lot, changing ocean currents -- which changed weather -- and slowly separating in some places while staying attached in others, so that the evolution of those animals stayed connected as well. But the evolutionary paths were QUITE different, as playpuses, kangaroos and koalas demonstrate.

The inhabitants of the little complex of villages studied by a man named Andrew Gell in the 1960’s didn’t know anything about this plate tectonic geological history, but they knew a lot about today’s cassowary. The bird lives in jungle, has a five-inch blade of a claw, and can disembowel an adult human. They are the second biggest bird on the planet (after ostriches) and the third tallest. (After ostriches and emus.) So elusive that they can stand within a few feet without a person realizing it and then slip away without ever being sensed, they sometimes go on reckless crashing flights through the thick tropical growth, even smashing headlong into tree trunks, achieving speeds of over thirty mph and jumping five feet in the air. They are good swimmers.

A cassowary might be five and a half feet tall and weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, roughly the size of a sow grizzly. Like grizzlies, they are frugiverous (they love to eat fruits) and are interwoven with the forest in part because their droppings distribute the seeds of the plants (well-fertilized) over a wide area. Unlike grizzlies, cassowaries lay three to eight pale aqua eggs at a time, each one three and a half by five and a half inches. “The female does not care for the eggs or the chicks; the male incubates the eggs for two months, then cares for the brown-striped chicks for nine months, defending them fiercely against all potential predators, including humans.” And that scourge of wilderness, pigs.

On the tops of their heads is a kind of callus structure that is evidently a sort of crash helmet. But they are also very aggressive, ferocious fighters, which might make a protection like that attractively potent silhouette for the ladies. Birds seem to admire headgear (which is ironic since so many were almost stamped out when they became popular decorations for human ladies). One experimenter “helped out” a certain kind of songbird with a plume on its head by gluing on additions and then showing the augmented suitors to females. They became ever more attractive as, like Bartholomew Cubbins, their heads became more elaborate -- until they could hardly hold their heads up. Google reports no athletic teams called “The Cassowaries” though one could easily imagine someone in a mascot suit disguised as a big aggressive bird with a helmet. (I note that there is no school mascot for the “The Pigs” either.)

New Guinea as it exists today is the product of a plate tectonic crash that left it with a miserable combination of swampy bug-ridden lowlands, tilted rocky foothills and highlands so tall that they cast their rain shadow over Australia, making it the fire-swept droughty continent that it is. The humans who live there have a precarious existence, always on the verge of starvation. The people are among the last to be introduced to the contemporary world. One should not deduce from this that are not smart and resourceful -- indeed the environment is so harsh that the weak and stupid don’t last long and Gell reports that no man was able to point to a grandson -- only sons. Life was only two generations long.

When “law and order” arrived and dealt with a violent incident by removing the most aggressive men, some to prison and some to work on plantations, the seized men took note of the terrain through the airplane window as they were flown out -- over two mountain ranges. In the new place they immediately escaped and headed home. Only a few achieved the goal but none were stupid nor weak -- veritable cassowaries of men, single-minded. There are no athletic programs (instead of “modeling war,” they proceed straight to battle) or even schools to have mascots in remote New Guinea, but the men consciously identify with the monster birds. They feature largely in ceremonies.

My hypothesis is that meaningful ceremonies are as ecological as life itself is -- that is, what people believe is true is very much shaped by the world around them. The efficacy of their symbols is directly drawn from their familiarity with the phenomena. “The Lamb of God” can hardly mean much to an Inuit, but it means a great deal to a sheep rancher who has delivered a real lamb, held it in his arms, and taken it to maturity. Still, raising a lamb in Mexico is different from raising a lamb in Montana or Australia. So knowing that a cassowary is a vital symbol to the Umeda tells us what they think the world and the sacred is “about.”

Today most people in the world are no longer “emplaced” as were the New Guinea tribesmen of the Sixties who had never left their valleys. Now we look at ecology on a cosmic scale and see relationships over incredible spans of time. In spite of Planet Earth images, we no longer have the rich tactile and concrete nourishing connections with the local ecology since we don’t know where our food was grown, what it looked like before it was picked or killed, what its habits were, its style, its charisma. But the Umeda knew cassowaries very well, especially how they tasted.

THE WHITE DRESS

My reading right now is focused on preparation for a novel (“Both Sides Now”) and my unfinished thesis (the poetics of liturgy), so I’m reading Clifford Geertz again (“The Interpretation of Cultures”) and Alfred Gell’s “Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries.” Both are from the Seventies, which means they were composed in the Sixties, and neither has the slightest clue of what the cyberculture was about to do.

But what caught my attention was a newspaper story about weddings -- I’m sure editors everywhere were clearing their shelves of material to substitute for Jenna’s marriage in Texas, since they weren’t invited. In the late Sixties hip brides wore cotton peasant clothes -- real or faux -- and were married in meadows. In the Seventies there were nude weddings not in nudist colonies. Briefly there were paper wedding dresses, which everyone thought meant that weddings were ephemeral and about to become obsolete. By the Eighties and Nineties, couples weren’t marrying until their children (some of which were produced by previous relationships) demanded that they be legalized. That’s the bottom line -- legalizing children for the purposes of economics: who picks up the bill. With the advent of DNA testing, the “real” father -- if he could be found -- was held responsible economically, but many had an increasing realization of the emotional need for fathers.

The religio-ceremonial linking of family, prestige and dynasty that we all admired with Trisha Nixon and Princess Diana are not just passé, but nearly jinxed. Anyway, the wedding was no longer linked to sex. No more need to fear the wedding night. The couple knows all about going to bed -- probably much less about raising children.

Someone remarked at some earlier event that the Bush twins dressed more like movie starlets than debutantes. Anyway, the Victorian debut is supposed to be “coming out” to society, while the twins have made it clear that they intend to “go in” to privacy. But then, starlets work for a living and debutantes do not. So Jenna’s dress -- described as “simple” Oscar de la Renta was encrusted with embroidery -- but no more bare than any Texas sundress and on the demure side: no rhinestones. Her twin’s dress was even simpler. Laura seemed a bit more matronly than usual and Bush was his usual boy-toy self. The groom rather reminded me of Al Gore.

But these details were not really what set me thinking. It was a newspaper story about young brides who routinely and with mischief aforethought trash their wedding dresses. Partly this seems to be the product of youth, partly rebellion against boredom, and partly a deliberate transgression against the bridal purity of a white dress. Probably they don’t realize fancy white dresses -- that no one ever wears again anyway -- was a phenomenon of the Victoria Era when prosperity and embellishment nearly strangled a generation. Before the Victorian upper classes, people wore their Sunday-best BLACK dress, or, with luck, a NEW Sunday-best black dress. The fancy white dress became a symbol of prosperity and prestige, though the cover theory was that it symbolized virginity, purity, and a last flowering of daddy’s little girl before she began the hard work of running a household. (And it WAS hard work in those days.)

Once I was asked to perform a wedding between a liberal Jewish boy and a charming Unitarian woman. They were both Ph.D. holders, humorous, good-looking, and already launched on bright futures. They wanted to somehow blend the traditional with some new understanding of their commitment, which was quite real. One element that the groom’s grandfather INSISTED on was the act of the groom stomping on a fragile wine glass. (I had learned to put a piece of plywood on the carpet, then the wineglass wrapped in a napkin or, better, a small throw rug over it. I was paranoid that some groom, in spite of wearing shoes, would get badly cut.) The groom said he’d like to include this but to please make sure that I didn’t refer to the bride’s hymen, which the traditional Jewish liturgy does. (Less subtle than thrusting a finger through a circle of gold.) So I wrote something about this symbolizing the shattering of an old life and the beginning of a new. Somehow in saying it, the breaking of the hymen snuck back in, to much laughter. They forgave me. But the lesson to me was that these old metaphors are strong and deep. So symbolisms change up to a point, depending on the context, tradition and economics -- but their essence stays.

Photographers have been the guerillas in the dismantling of the pristine white dress as the essence of bridedom. A few years back I ran across a series of brides photographed underwater -- Ondines. Their veils floated like delicate sea membranes. Water, that old symbol of life and fertility! The newspaper story declares that so many brides in wedding dresses have plunged into fountains that it’s almost a cliche. Taking a transgressive tack, the happy couple might be portrayed in a junkyard or a back alley with a dumpster instead of an altar. Perhaps the most extreme was the photo of the bride’s feet sticking out her dress in a half-closed car trunk with a shovel alongside. But it's hard to beat the photo of a bride on fire! (It was a Photoshop trick.)



And then there was the pictured couple who played paintball with the bride in her strapless bouffant dress. The groom wears athletic gear as he kneels alongside. Her paintball gun has a long barrel and her arm is over him. One could say she was dominant. But his expression is sly and potent. Is that a “soul patch” under his lower lip? The bride is without protective gear. Think about THAT!

My niece and her groom played paintball the night BEFORE the wedding, properly protected. Married on the home farm with a long wide lawn, they played running games all afternoon. The bride was barefoot in the grass and said it was certainly a good thing her dress had a deep, green satin hem. The imagery was pastoral, free, energetic and unpretentious, like the couple.

My cousin’s daughter wore my cousin’s wedding dress, which was entirely traditional, but revised it into a Renaissance gown through many additions like long sleeves and a wreath of field flowers on her head. The groom also dressed according to the fashion of the Society of Creative Anachronism. It was another outdoor wedding.

The spirit of play, when it is brought into religious liturgy, should not be mistaken for a lack of seriousness. Indeed, it signs renewal, reinvention, and a refusal to be locked into precedence. Nowadays, it seems the bride’s makeup kit should include a bottle of Bullfrog sunscreen. New demands, new responses. But often within a familiar cycle. Re-cycling. Still, as subconsciousnesses will do, sometimes a bit of the sinister creeps in -- just as it does in marriage. In life.

DOOGIE'S PROJECT

CLARE

It was a bit awkward to be a survivor for so long. She’d outlived Clive for a decade now but their relationship was still intense and she had no desire to start another. What she wanted was time to think, alone, but in a place and with a people she had known and cared about. That was NOT the campus where they had spent so many years -- she couldn’t leave quickly enough. She didn’t like the way things were going there -- the corporate taint, the left wing bullying, the pernicious reliance on theory with no connection back to the reality it was supposed to address. She wanted the Blackfeet reservation where they'd spent so many summers.

Now painting was exactly the right thing for her: color, shape, distillation and elaboration, just enough pressure to observe and interpret to keep her mind occupied -- which seemed to be the best way to keep her emotions under control. She didn’t want to admit how much depression had crept over her like a gray shawl, somehow gray and sheltering. It took away the sharp edge of reappraisal that had begun to fray her understanding of Clive’s work, for one thing. And it kept her from thinking about whether she’d given up her own life and goals for his -- for no good reason. She’d had such a high regard for academic achievement and such a love for the raw encounter with a unique culture. That was what she had thought was the point of anthropology. Wasn’t the idea to interpret them so that they would be respected, protected, and willing participants in the future?

What happened to that idea? Was it wrong from the beginning? Now it seemed as though people were full of hatred, paranoid about any inquiry, demanding money and demanding control though they had no idea what was going on. They wanted “this” -- but when you gave them “this,” they said they had really wanted “that,” and if you showed them a paper contract or even a tape recording, they claimed they were tricked. But they had no idea of what academic rewards were: tenure, publication, respect from one’s peers. They had no idea about the definition of a discipline, like anthropology -- and now the whole field was morphing so quickly -- both in response to the changing world and in response to more sophisticated methods (but were they?), how could anyone get sense out of it?

So she backed off to not looking for sense, though a friend of hers had once remarked that painting was the most cerebral of the art forms. One had to constantly think about the focus, the implications of using a warm color here and cool there, how to make a brush stroke that caressed, delineated, illuminated... It was true. If she didn’t keep focus, the painting was no good and at the end of the day she scraped off as much paint as she could so she could re-use the canvas.

Was that what was happening to intellectual disciplines? Was this a time in which paint was being scraped off the canvas? Who was doing it? Which thinkers?


A knock on the door of the studio. It was Doogie. His buzz cut was growing out and he’d gained a little more weight so his t-shirt crept up from his belt, exposing a brown belly. He wanted to ask her some questions.

“What kind of paint should I use on buckskin?”

“What are you doing, Doogie?”

“I want to paint on this piece of deerhide I have.”

“Commercially tanned or Indian tanned?”

“My auntie brain-tanned it a long time ago. Want me to get it from the pickup?” He didn’t wait. In a minute he was back with it rolled up under his arm. It was dark and smoky. He threw it out over the old wicker chair.

“I dunno, Doogie. The smoke might interfere. The best thing to do is to test a little corner, see what works. It’s so dark that you might have to use thick paint to get the image to show.” They bent over the supple hide.

“Maybe I ought to use it for beading -- cut it up.” She didn’t answer but she didn’t like the idea. “But I do a lot of body work, you know, on cars? And I got a LOT of car body paint left over.”

She had a sudden flash of what metallic paint might look like on this old soft hide. What would gold or silver look like? “What are you going to paint? Old-style horses and warriors? A war story?”

He looked at her, balancing the risks of telling her the truth. “A Thunderbird.” She looked surprised. “You know Thunderbird?”

“The huge bird that lives on top of Chief Mountain and comes in spring thunderstorms.”

He relaxed a little. “That one. You know that Thunderbird fought the Water Monster, the one that lives at the bottom of lakes and swallows our people? I want to paint that battle on here.”

“It’s a beautiful myth, Doogie.”

“Not no myth -- it really happened,” now Doogie was alarmed again. Danged white women never REALLY understand. “I’ve seen the bones, really I have.”

Clare was silent, thinking about the concern and frustration in his face. “It must have been quite a battle. Good against bad.”

“Yeah. Water Monster is evil but Thunderbird ROCKS.” In her mind she saw “rocs” as in Sinbad the Sailor. She stroked the leather. Just accept his reality, she thought. “Doogie, I think if you tried a little lacquer thinner on a scrap off the edge, just to get rid of oil, and then painted a little bit, it might work for a good test.”

“Thanks, Missus.” He rose with dignity, rolled up his hide and left. His old pickup hammered and smoked its way down the hill.

That night Clare dreamt of the battle between the Water Monster and the Thunderbird, the surging up with gaping jaws like a shark, sending shock waves of water flying -- the Thunderbird coming down out of a cloud with outstretched huge flapping wings, grabbing with outstretched claws like grappling hooks. Strangely there was a soundtrack -- “Rites of Spring,” the Stravinsky sequence that Walt Disney made famous.

Of course! How many times had she seen Fantasia? Dinosaurs! Doogie’s Thunderbird and Water Monster bones were fossil bones from dinosaurs. He HAD seen them, the bones eroding out of the Montana prairie as they did all the time. Had he seen “Fantasia?” She’d ask him. On campus it was fashionable to watch that movie while high on acid.