OUT OF THE BURROW, LOOKING AROUND

A lot of people are being pushed out of their homes now, having to find a new place that will probably be temporary. Some of them will be dangerous and some of them will be no more than a sheet of plastic stretched however possible. I decided a long time ago that this was as close to a safe place as I’m likely to find, though not as safe as some think. People are still being shot in the streets in Portland. This is a quiet place. But only thirty miles away are communities full of hate and crime. What can you say about a town where the MacDonalds’ employees poison new border patrol agents because they “thought it would be funny.” And that’s off the reservation that scares some people.

I’ve always read a lot about Native Americans and followed their issues, but now they seem less and less to be people I can recognize. The young ones have no personal relationship with me and they don’t seem “Indian” to me, though they talk about it all the time. I’m not the first person to have this problem. Both Russell and Schultz complained about it. The past is a receding horizon by definition. We get attached to the older generations.

The same thing happened with Unitarianism. What once seemed so organic and important has eroded away into something pretty much like other denominations. I know few of the people anymore.

Bob Scriver as a personal issue I’ve pretty much worked through by now. There’s still gathering-up work to do, but “Western art” in general is becoming a kind of pentimento under far more modern interpretations. Same with Western writing and particularly “Montana literature” which barely exists the way it did only a few years ago. Maybe some people, in their effort to squeeze out profit from the “brand” have ended up strangling it. More than that, “Western” stuff in the sense of cowboy life has identified itself with prosperous, conservative Republicans. It will be interesting to see whether the new turn on the wheel will re-energize it or drive it farther under. It’s all economics.

Being an eclectic blogger, hopping from subjects relevant to one context and then another, even if the subjects come back around at intervals, probably doesn’t help to build a readership, though it certainly makes it easier for me to blog 1,000 words daily. There are almost always a half-dozen topics waiting to be addressed. Right now I’ve just watched the 2006 version of “The Wicker Man” which is universally booed and am waiting for the 1973 version which is a cult classic. Why IS the newer version so awful? (I assure you it is.)

Also, I’m reading Jack Fritscher’s relentlessly detailed history of the Gay movement in San Francisco, which offers a good insight into society about every ten pages. He was a great admirer of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” which he read twice, once in college and then in Alexandria, Virginia, during the Sixties when Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech. He saw it as addressing subjectivity, like “Rashomon,” but with the addition of shifting as time passed, a sort of three-dimensional chess game of memory. I found the “Quartet” in the rented cabin during an Oregon beach stay in the Seventies and paid no attention whatsoever to the plot. I read for the elegance of the sentences and the sumptuous metaphors and only realized later that Gerald Durrell, a much earlier favorite of mine and everybody else's, was Lawrence’s brother. I still alternate rereading the two Durrell’s, currently “Livia.” Now I see Lawrence Durrrell’s work as a window into the European world of educated bohemian free-spirits that was dispersed by war and that is one of the roots of the American beat and hippie movements, which quickly became many-celled.

I had never thought of the male Gay movement in contraposition to the more extreme parts of the female Feminist movement. (The parts clearly mocked and hated in the newer “Wicker Man,” to its detriment.) Now I need a good book that relates Red Empowerment to Black Empowerment, especially in Minneapolis where AIM formed. Then maybe I could see more clearly how these new movements boil up from underfoot among the grass roots, one begetting another and then trying to destroy what they just provoked. Maybe I’d have a better feel for whatever it is that’s growing now -- a reform of some kind, maybe a religious renewal. Maybe a very uncomfortable kind of Puritanism.

For the “Wicker Man” review I need to walk back through some of my Green Man and tree worship books. Maybe “The White Goddess” which explains the code -- I don’t quite recall the exact significance of rowan, but I do know I could grow it here. Quite a few people have rowan trees in their yards and the mountains are full of them. Also willows. Are there cottonwoods in Europe? I don’t remember them being mentioned anywhere. They seem Asian. This stuff expands until I have a dozen books to reshelve, in spite of Google.

Wicker Man or Burning Man ceremonies are one thing. Not as complex as the whole web of groundhog mythology (which works because rodents along with skunks and badgers come out to mate right now), and how it was co-opted into the Middle East Christian stories mixed into European stories underlain by this being halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. I read that the original Wicker Man movie was not about a gender war but a confrontation between the ancient ways and a contemporary Christian worldview.

The media is getting better about reminding people of such things. On his radio poetry blip Garrison Keillor was even explaining the Muslim ceremonies of this time of year. Maybe smart people know that there are two ways of reducing the terrible faced-off dualities that plague us: introduce lots of third, fourth and fifth valences or show how everything is really a unity at its heart. It’s ALL about hope, about squeezing through the last cold days and the food shortages this time of year. I started to say “in the old days” and then remembered about empty food banks and waves of unemployed people just now. We know that when there’s not enough to go around, some people will be desperate enough to just take what they need, violently if necessary. And some people will be scared into foxhole religion.