People talk about bi-coastal culture, mostly based on the megacities and culture capitals of Manhattan and Hollywood which are secretly powered by the urban ghettos of blacks and hispanics. That is, a kind of arch glamour exploiting really bad but energetic and ground-level phenomena. No risk. The whole thing is governed by an oligarchy that pretends it’s about merit, awarding prizes interpreted in terms of money. It’s actually a closed mono-culture. It all depends on connections.
Washington DC is simply irrelevant to this paradigm, down there in the swamp throwing levers and making much ado about nothing. If they start making too much trouble, the few dozen people who control everything either throw money at them or mock them in a popular movie. That cuts them down to size because it controls the pretense of elections which are really a popularity contest. (Pretty face, rich backers.) If the legislators weren’t all lawyers, it wouldn’t work. They’re used to manipulating juries with hints and teases. This bi-coastal thing is mostly American, though it operates on assumptions from the British/German class culture that produces royalty. For decades now people have said the pattern is exhausted. But it doesn’t change.
The alternative is one I inhabit. It is also a unified binary: the Northern-Pacific-Coast-Asian-derived and the East-Slope-of-the-Rockies-indigenous-based matrix -- both often rural. Forget the numbers “chicken farm.” This metaphor is about taking an eagle lifestyle, and don’t gimme any of that patriotic bald eagle stuff (they eat carrion and fish) -- I’m talking golden eagle, cruising in search of what is alive and seizing it whole. Ideas as burrowing squirrels, lively and elusive.
You can see the two cultures interacting in Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi which often hinges on contrasting ecologies: one lush and hedonistic and the other ascetic and idealistic. I know people who shuttle between these two, either physically or mentally. (I would if I had the money.) They tend to be sophisticated, educated but without certification, skilled at something physical, whether art or craft or service. The combo of two contexts seems to develop people more fully.
I am NOT talking about all the people who wanna-be famous and prosperous and who have recently gone from being Montana carpet-baggers to Portland latte addicts. The difference is not that I went the opposite direction, growing up in Portland and coming to grips with Montana in 1961. The difference is that my Portland is WWII, ‘70‘s culture rebellion, and ’90’s shelter issues. My Montana is persisting 19th century reservations and enduring geology. Being a famous Montana writer is impossible now. The national people who bought books are narrative hounds but they’ve gone to vid. Local Montana people still read books, but there’s only one bookstore in the state that reports to the NYTimes, whose little best-seller list is the keystone of fame, now fatally distorted by Big Box stores.
I can’t get too carried away with technology because in small-town Montana the infrastructure barely exists to support cell phones and commerce. I’m blogging over the old copper wires of original telephone lines. You can’t watch PBS here without a cable. The wind farms that look so futuristic merely interfere with the quality of our local electrical supply. We worry about water, which was recently described by a coastal as a “sale-able commodity like any other.” Smart phones are going down for a week because of contract dispute about using cell towers.
Social push-through from youngsters and immigrants (both coastals and Euros) tends to be just that -- they come and they go. They fall off the mountains and find horses kind of scary. Local people around here don’t really bother to focus on anyone who hasn’t lived here a few decades. Nevertheless, because they remember back through history for at least two centuries, the locals have a keen sense of things changing, always being in process. The default “race” of people on the Pacific and the prairie is brown. Whites are temporary. Blacks? What blacks? Oh, on the coast.
If you’re an old white busybody who writes and who once had fantasies of being significant -- not famous but making some kind of contribution -- what should be your goal? Or do you need one when you’re 74? Why can’t I just sit here and keyboard all day without any particular reason or any recognition? I so enjoy the feeling of ideas forming into sentences, like silk scarves running through my hands. All the colors, all the patterns, all the clever knots.
Books are only a delivery system. They mostly replaced talk and then only among certain people. The kids I taught used to discard them anywhere. Slick hundred-dollar brightly illustrated bullshit guaranteed to cover the administration’s butt when parents complained. Only a few people here ever read much of anything except in winter. They are radio people where they can get decent reception, but the east slope is full of coulees and the transmitters are never high enough and the wind rips them up. That guy on the white horse at the top of a ridge yelling, “Can you hear me now?” That was here. Anyway satellite connections are a loss of quiet, not a gain in ideas.
The idea stream is what counts. How it gets to you is only marginally relevant. The idea stream on both the West Coast and the East Slope is a moving pattern of information crucial to how one survives between parameters that are connected to the planet. Watch for tsunamis and mega-blizzards. Watch for the right weather for what you do, tides for clam digging, ground moisture for planting. Steady practice day-after-day in a location well-known will become both culture and religion. It will bestow both humility and dignity. It will keep you from hoarding your own little life at the expense of all the others.
Until the time I came back to the East Slope, I accumulated stuff. I haven’t bought clothes since 1999 except a much heavier coat. I wear the same old yellow slicker I bought at REI in 1993. But I buy books. I never buy the books they recommend on NPR or the ones that are promoted at Montana Festivals of Books and Chambers of Commerce. Those are commodified little horse biscuits for the trendy. Mostly I buy whatever seems to hold what I need to know, which is sometimes in sync with others -- like brain neurotheory. I don’t mess around with ebooks because I want to scribble in the margin, highlight, save stuff between the pages. Books are TOOLS, not ends but means. Many of mine cannot be resold.
I ask people “have you read such-and-such” and they get mad, because they think I’m trying to put them down as dunderheads for not keeping up. But I really want to know whether they have the info so we can talk about it. They don’t know “talk-about-it.” Not bicoastal cocktail-time quips, but sitting around a firepit in the dark, musing while the shooting stars write on the sky. Books, like everything else, are prey to hook-up culture. But grass is not, whether it is short-grass on a windblown ridge of glacial moraine or sea grass on a windblown dune that’s moving inland. Boats or horses, pickups or gliders, books or video -- the necessity is to keep moving, even if it’s only with your head.
But time may be running out. I was startled to read what Mary Moe said today.
Hi Mary,
ReplyDeleteYou are the most active significant writer in the region, and have certainly made a huge difference in the way I view the Foothils of the Rockies.
Keep up the meaningful journalism.
Best wishes, Sid