WHAT CAN WE KNOW?

Mythic subjects like much of my writing -- things like mountains, shamans, Blackfeet, horses, religion, prairie -- have acquired such towering, overwhelming, seductive, popular images that they are almost impossible to address as a matter of simple daily experience. “How beauuuuutiful the mountains are!” they cry. “Oh, I LOOOOOVE shamans!” “Grizzlies -- surely you never meet them or you’d be dead!” You can see the National Geographic images, the Jungian claims, the dances of homage, on the retinas of their eyes. To put it frankly, they’re full of shit -- idea-shit, which is to say what is left of processed and reprocessed raw experience, the first-hand and personal experience of the original phenomenon. All their Indians wear beads and feathers, all their shamans provide enlightenment, all enlightenment is life-enhancing.

How can a person push back against all this? Mountains are life-threatening and storm-making. They really are. Shamans can be very dark and even murderers. Grizzlies are shy. Jungians can lose control of themselves and roll around on the carpet with their analysands just like any other fools. The National Geographic loves Photoshop.

Revising the stubborn pigeonholes of the mind is hard work, demanding liminal space -- that neuronal workspace in the brain -- that just isn’t available these days. It’s already preoccupied with preserving safety and getting laid, or at least appearing to. Maybe keeping one’s job, marriage and children alive. What new info gets into people is likely to enter as videos, so maybe I’m wasting time on print. Nevertheless, it’s what I can do. So I can only try to use stories to disentangle me from Laura Ingalls Wilder and Black Elk. Can I wear my mariposa shawl (iron-on butterflies) without having to cure cancer?

Turning this around to the other way, what huge concepts have I been addressing, trying to grasp what they really are -- with about as much success as if I were throwing my arms around cumulus clouds. I see it, it disperses. Among the most frustrating are “gay” and “AIDS.”

Gay is the easiest to grasp in some ways, though locally it doesn’t mean sexual orientation at all. In this place it means a “loser,” weak and effeminate. Which is ironic since women around here are pretty tough winners. “Gay” to the average person here means a male pedophile, one who preys on pre-pubescents or even pre-schoolers. They don’t think it’s possible to prey on adolescents. Nor do they think it’s possible for a woman to be either gay or a pedophile. Everything is about big, dominant, maybe violent, competent males who own a lot of machines and make a lot of money. That’s THEIR cumulus cloud. And they all think that anyone who talks about “gay” must BE “gay,” because only Indians are allowed to talk about Indians and only women are allowed to talk about women, so only people who are gay must be allowed to talk about gay. (No one speaks for these local guys themselves. They wouldn’t dare. There’s nothing to say anyway. And they’re inarticulate.)

I’m not gay but many of my long-term (like half-century) friends are. (I don’t mean lesbians. I hardly know any lesbians.) When it comes to “gay,” my experience is that there is no such category. Every person’s sexual life and identity is unique and people cannot be herded into groups. SHOULD not be herded into groups. Every relationship must be individually negotiated. You may not agree. I may change my mind.

HIV-AIDS is a quick label for a hugely complex, constantly shifting subject packed with economic and political forces. My reference points are Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Spotted Knapweed -- all about ecology, habitat loss, parasitic invasion, pandemics of little teeny code frags that become human plagues and sheets of pretty purple flower mist that kills every nearby plant. My prairie is not “Little House on the Prairie,” long-grass prairie of incredibly fertile deep soil yielding to the plow, profitable producer of corn and soybeans -- but rather the short grass prairie: alkaline, wind-scoured, blasted by ultraviolet sunlight. Thickly interwoven under the ground but if that’s broken it blows away, dry. Adapted for grazing by immense herds that scythed through, then left for years. Now wheat and barley in a weather-lucky year. If there’s money for chemicals and gas.

The point is that different environments create different phenomena, so that AIDS in Africa/AIDS in cities/AIDS in Alabama/AIDS in China, are entirely different. AIDS is not just the little bit of code that gets into protective white blood cells and prevents them from providing immunity. It is what that vulnerability thrusts the person against -- his or her own nature, community, work, and all the possibilities lost and gained in the process.

The arts are also mythic, seductive, and too rarely a matter of experience. Not enough word-smithing and paint-smearing and string-tuning and plaster casting. It took me a very long time to understand that the only way to learn to write is to get up every morning and write -- an hour, eight hours, twelve hours, whatever -- until the “writing” braincells in my head are crowding out everything else and the cats have to come and tug at my cuffs to make me open catfood cans. It’s not “talent” as though “talent” were a sort of golden cloud that settles on one’s head, a gift, a privilege, a crown.

When I write about mountains, shamans, grizzlies, Blackfeet, I’m writing about what’s right HERE in my daily life, that I’ve known for a long time. Granted that the grizzes I put my hands on were dead or even tanned, granted that the Blackfeet are mostly assimilated students and businesspeople, granted that the mountains are a nuisance if you’re trying to drive across them -- I know that. What I don’t know is how to make the rest of the world discard the foaming ephemera of fantasy that wraps their heads. It will do no good if they come here. Even if they move here intending to stay. Their minds have been greased with fantasy -- they can’t take hold. In a while they make some excuse to leave and we’re happy to see them go.

They come to something drastic, obdurate, potentially lethal, and therefore significant, and reduce it to a product suitable for nice people to buy for souvenirs: a refrigerator magnet that says “The Big Sky.” Then their children some day say, “Oh, yes. I know all about Montana. Every morning I ate my breakfast looking at a magnet that said “The Big Sky.”

When I was little, I ate my meals looking at the spine of a book shelved nearby that was called “Over the Top” by Empey, which I sometimes mocked as “Empty.” I finally read it. It was about trench warfare in WWI. What does any of us know about anything? Especially each other?