A WORLD IN PROCESS

WHERE’S OMAR? TIME TO TAKE IT INTO OUR OWN HANDS?

It has always been true that the ability to create a whole and compelling world out of the scraps of information and experience that come our way out of family, travel, reading books, watching films and so on is the source and substance of the humanities. A person who can construct a world that mixes truth and imagination, in the way that David Simon did for Baltimore long before political tragedy forced the rest of us to pay attention, is a kind of artist who has the ability to focus, like an author or poet, obsessed by a wavering but always-there vision between reality and insight. But as we become more and more aware of how arbitrary life can be, and are repeatedly faced with the necessity of rebuilding lives on new terms, such a person — an “auteur”? — gets our attention.

More than that, an “auteur” often is embedded in a community that outsiders can’t know. He (most often) must manage boundaries: when to open them to secure understanding and protection, when to close them and run like hell for self-preservation, and how to keep track of them over time — because all boundaries change over time. The boundaries of communication have changed dimensions entirely.

In the last few decades, pressing the abilities of computers, the mainstream has created a statistical, granular, bureaucratic world out of advertising, secrecy, and surveys. I became estranged from my religious community when they did this: constantly surveying themselves to see what the majority wanted, proclaiming individualism at the expense of the community, presuming popularity is the key to meaning and growth in membership and money numbers is the definition of significance in world thought. The medical community questions patients, converts the responses to statistics, averages them, and then treats the imaginary case they have invented, entirely ignoring me sitting on the examination table with all my clothes on because medicine is no longer about my actual body. No one wants it.

I came back to the reservation where basic dynamics are still mostly human relationship close to the terms of survival, partly because the boundaries are geographic and therefore more reliable, though surveys on the ground may move them a bit, using transit and theodolite. Even here we still realize that no one lives in the “real” world, we all live in maps that we partly are handed and partly draw ourselves. There is no “real” the same as there is no “God” because humans have always lived in a self-constructed world, even before they had statistics.

“The Wire,” “Game of Thrones,” and “House of Cards” are all constructed worlds but coherent and vivid in a way that scrappy old everyday life is not. Religion used to perform that task — I mean institutional religion like the ones described in “Major Religions of the World” courses, which ignore anything different enough to be outside the prevailing dogma schematic. Or something like the mythology of patriotism, which is still alive in small towns. Sometimes.

There is a kind of person who has defined a world — partly by happenstance and partly by creativity which is only another word for necessity. To the outsiders, particularly those not educated to understand irony, ambiguity, rhetorics, pop underground cultures, unreliable narrators, foreshadowing, subtext, and jargons, this will be very upsetting and they will either demand explanation on their terms, or will set about stigmatizing and criminalizing it. You know — sex, drugs and rock and roll. But even that has sub-categories and internal worlds.

Such a sub-sub-category is unwanted boys. They become interstitial, feral, networked, messengers and accommodators in every place and way. Add the Internet to that and you’ve got a global explosion that no one quite realizes is happening. Those who admire science have long considered the impact of mutation and evolution as defined in a linear and progressive way. Onward and upward.

Physical mutation may support major insight.

Not so many have realized the importance of “horizontal evolution,” that is, the exchange of genetic code from one creature to another, sometimes nested in each other. Some are as minute as the migration of nuclear code from the nuclei of mitochondria in cells — which have always been considered subsumed ancient “cells” — into the nuclei of the main cell. Others are cosmic. Everything in-between — which we now can name and analyze because our instruments can directly see things we hadn’t known existed — everything is moving and changing. The old categories are gone. Indians aren’t what they used to be.

But to a boy unsupported on his own, nothing changes. Life is a trap, suffering obliterates everything else, the only hope is to shut down through drugs or suicide or to find someone who “gets” them without putting brands and bracelets on them. Envisioning and actually making what amounts to a virtual family in a virtual world, is an art form. In our time it can be a highly technical art form: videos, music, travel and performance, all transmitted like viruses without ever being quite put into words, created by interaction, not just pathways into the future but actual terms of whatever future awaits us all. We can no longer ghettoize them.

I’m talking about the community around Tim Barrus. For decades he has been a participant in communities from the Seventies' Dead-heads, Headstart, free-school, commune, social progressive movements. He traveled the horrifying arc of men-who-loved-men in an ecstasy of acceptance — then were thrown into an annealing cauldron of suffering — still met with love. He was in groups of photographers and performance artists, sensitive to the Peace Corps impulse to help the waves of displacement and famine in our times, and then the impact of drugs that can save lives and reorganize minds. Nudity transformed from obscenity to humanity. His “home” has been hot beaches smelling of iodine or darkrooms smelling of vinegar. Sometimes he’s been hurtling along asphalt on powerful motorcycles, others he’s been barely kept alive in a hospital bed. The time he loved most was climbing in the rigging of an old-fashioned sailing ship with a crew of lesbians. Oh, the stories!

The “through line” of his narratives is staying alive. It has been hardest to endure when boys die. Accusations of forbidden acts came from people who used media to destroy for profit.  None were at the level of felonies.  Unaccountably linked with two other writers, one a woman who fabulized her sex life and one who fantasized his jail time, the media invented the “terrible crime” of pretending to be an Indian. (Actually, his family tree goes back in the earliest days to an Indian called “Counselor.” But so what?) It was a culture war between imaginary elites, a slowly rotting “liberal” worldview that pretended it was generous, and an inquisitor’s license to force compliance — not with what was good and healing but with what would guarantee the inquisitor’s importance.

There are always a lot of people pretending to be Indians, some of them genetically but not cuturally qualified, as well as a lot of other people pretending NOT to be Indians whose DNA would spell “tribal”. This was at a time when people thought “publishing” was what defined the value of writing (or, failing that, at least a college degree, the MFA being invented specifically for this purpose). Claiming to be an Indian would make better sales, the same as writing a “memoir” instead of a novel would do the trick. Sales, of course, are Satanic, according to critics safely protected by tenure in universities. Writing books no one reads and that are only published by university presses are, of course, the conditions of tenure. But writing for profit is just so “whore-ish.” Oh, shudder.

In which Cochise was played by Jeff Chandler.

1950, considered a liberal breakthrough.

Now, of course, no one has to worry about publishing — you just put it on the Internet. If you’re going to need money, you ask for it on a “cloud-sourcing” platform. Anyway no one knows how to “publish” something that is cross-media. Cross-cultural . . . ? Live it. Art as life, life as art.