PERSONAL EASTER EGGS

‘Easter eggs” are computer parlance for little hidden links to interesting but maybe peripheral nodes of information. I’m using the idea to justify an inventory of the kinds of thinking that are interesting me. I’m under no illusions that readers will suddenly rush out to buy books, but it’s useful to me to undertake a review. Some of these personal “core thinkers” are discoveries I’ve made myself and others have been offered to me. They represent realms, doors, new ecologies.

None is more powerful than the undertaking of co-writing with Tim Barrus. He and the boys of Cinematheque are more like a sort of living literature than a thought system. The issue they raise for me is more about boundaries than anything else. They are boys who broke the generational and gender boundaries of families, spent time as beleagered isolates, and now are re-gathered into a different kind of family, in the way of artists who smash ceramics and then piece them back together in a mozaic, playing the brokenness off against the wholeness. Tim himself has never seen a boundary he didn’t want to attack, though it’s sometimes like a male cardinal in spring fighting his reflection in a picture window, so deeply controlled by instinct as to be self-damaging. His only rest is in a place like the SW desert of the United States where the boundary is the horizon or in an airport, a place that is all potential. I’m a little that same way, using distance and elusiveness as boundary solutions. I had thought ministry would be a protective boundary, but instead it turned out to be revealing and inviting -- to an excess. Like sex work. Tim and I never run out of ideas. (Or boys, though they die.) We constantly circle back.

I’ve never liked the post-structural, post-colonial, Marxist set of ideas that set everyone gaga just as I hit seminary, so I welcome the thought of the Italians Deleuse and Guattari, who resist hierarchies but suggest connected “flashes” and communities. They have kicked up a flurry of other thought, like Josh Lerner’s analysis of lines of flight. http://www.linesofflight.net/linesofflight.htm (Very useful for a short piece on skateboarding for Cinematheque.) Lerner suggests that some of the best thinking around is coming from Italians, but is not translated in enough quantity or quality for English-speakers to realize it.

Today Boria Sax, whom I have followed through H-NILAS (the discussion list in the Humanities listserv group on Nature in Legend and Story) and environmental listservs, today suggests Roberto Marchesini, who makes a recovery from Deleuzeguattari’s insistence on decentralization and roots-up movements, by changing the focus back to the “tree” model. (I’m very tired of this post-post-post trend, like climbers linked by ropes, or Hollywood trying to number new versions of old hits.) Anyway, the issue is how humans relate to animals versus how humans relate to machines. I feel a blog post coming on: the triangular relationship among cats, computers and old ladies.

Dave Lull, the cross-pollinating librarian, sends me a steady stream of the writing-in-plain-sight of Nassim Taleb, the theorist who brought us Black Swan Theory, the impact of the totally unexpected event. As soon as he suggested it, everyone misunderstood it and tried hard to exploit it, which has caused this wryly funny thinker to retreat while working online for those who are interested. He loves most of all to walk and talk, like Tillich and Eliade. He values practice, experience, being out there wrestling with the world, and up against Socrates, this Greek Arab offers Fat Tony. He says, “There are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books by birds written on birds; and certainly even fewer books on ornithologists written by birds.” Which raises the question, “Why is it that authorities who address the problems of discarded boys, never ask discarded boys what they think?” Likewise the treatment of Native Americans. (Cats, of course, are above all this. Just open a can of food and get out of the way. That might work on boys to some degree.)

Recently I greatly admired (and so did others) a series in the blog called “The Rawness” which is supposed to be about gender patterns that one must understand to have a good sexual life in a modern urban world. Though focused on anxious young white men, it came from a new direction, largely historical. Gender roles is an old preoccupation of mine since I keep trying to be “one of the guys.” And I reject motherhood. “T” or “Ricky Raw”, as the writer calls himself, doesn’t approve of these positions -- he ignores them -- but his structural overview of what goes on is very helpful.

Not long ago I ran across the documentary film work of Adam Curtis (much of it available online), who is trying to work through the major shift in our society whereby we think we’re living in democracies but are actually succumbing to the same old class system, this time presented through psychological means (such as advertising) and obsession with things. The shocking major collapse of banking, real estate, and credit cards has revealed the truth of all this. Also, Curtis leads me back to my earliest memories watching newsreels at a movie theatre that didn’t screen any other kinds of story. They have deeply shaped my understanding of the world. That is, chaos could erupt anytime, even here, and if it does, the effort to stay alive will mean a lot of compromises. Nations are more easily snuffed than we think.

This led me to some social reality movies, like “Nanking” and other critiques of war like “Turtles Don’t Fly” in which Iranian children must save themselves. At the same time I’ve been watching the romanticizing movies like “Gladiator” and “The Wind and the Lion.” What this juxtaposition addresses is one of the kernel dimorphisms of Montana culture that outsiders (and maybe some insiders) never “get.” This is a state of veterans who do not glamorize war, but often escape from the painful reality by indulging in Kiplingesque British Empire/Charlie Russell fantasies of colorful exploits by exceptional men. The hard learning experience that Taleb and Curtis commend to us, is at the hidden core of the colorful dramatic life outsiders imagine. This applies even more distinctly to the Montana tribes, whose very members imagine that their hallucinatory fears are real and who take flight to the 19th century. Montana literature is fat, romantic, and empty while pretending to be tough and insightful. I’m going global.

I’m taking Deleuseguattarian thought most seriously because it is closest to my earliest prejudices, privileging voluntary cooperation, organicism, small-is-beautiful, knowledge gained through experience. I think I share these with Tim enough to be useful. And I continue to explore my own boundaries, otherwise known as limits.