What was once my thesis idea for a “poetics of liturgy”, which no one understood or liked, is now a theory of experience design based on “felt thought.” Many ideas have helped me expand all this. Finally I realized that many of the objections were from Christians who were not supposed to BE Christian, but had the patterns so deep within themselves that they just changed the names and went right on “feeling” the same and blocking all contradictions, esp. in university or big-shot church leaders.
The second was circling around to remember the ideas of Hayakawa and Whorf, whom I met in the late Fifties as an undergrad. They were responses meant to understand the exposure of soldiers and anthropologists to other cultures after WWII, but they tried to deny tragedy and violence. Some said they had no “theory of evil.” Though a few, mostly Jews, dedicated themselves to the premise that the Nazi Holocaust was the most extreme possible evil, exceeding all others.
Beaver Bundle Ceremony by Bob Scriver
Add to these the experience of the Blackfeet Reservation and what was left of their ceremonies and land. An adventure in the City of Portland as an animal control officer revealed the raw and underground side of undigested evil. Serving as a Unitarian Universalist minister for small fellowships who claimed they hated institutional religion while clinging to the worst aspects of it: status, economic privilege, general exceptionalism in two related countries: smug America and Canada which claimed to be better than America. And so on.
A big part of these new ideas is science, esp in the high drama of neurology research. The importance of the pre-frontal cortex in the management of human behavior and thought was pushed into my face by damage to my brother and father, which changed them forever and destroyed the family by their inability to function at a time when they ought to have been engines of economic security. At the same time I was struggling with my own darker emotional life in marriage with an overpowering man and his Edwardian parents. The Blackfeet Reservation was at the time and still in to some extent, a 19th century place. Once I connected the radical structuralist and postcolonial thought to Hayakawa and Whorf, things became understandable, because in their challenging of the meaning of words they exposed the vast animalian world of pre-verbal thought. Deep thought. Subtext.
Most people, particularly if they are college-educated, believe that thinking and words -- particularly written words maybe because they are revised and edited -- ARE thinking. On a hierarchic pyramid, which they love because they assume they are at the top and because Maslow put the most intense experience at the peak, writing is the top. Under that is speaking, like brilliant conversation at Jimmy’s tavern, and under that is either science or art -- they are considered to be split. Eating, sleeping, traveling, fucking, etc. are considered below human function -- just animal stuff at the base of the pyramid, unfortunately necessary but instinctual and thus more-or-less uncontrollable. Much of fiction is the struggle to control this level which is not just desire, but also survival.
Fiction is also often about the struggle between individual and group. Unless one is Chinese, the individual is the highest value. Thus, when I encountered Barrus and his boys, their “groupness,” always shifting and never compulsory, was a new consciousness to me. Also their near-complete absorption into a world of flesh and drugs meant to exaggerate or mute the suffering from that world. The boys, in their social exclusion, only survived if they undertook sexwork. If they were physically attractive, this could make them wealthy and desired. But the desire of others became a danger to their personhood because the desiring persons denied everything BUT their physicality. The boys yearned for an intimacy and love that embraced their real selves. The reality of the world could be so twisted that obsession, madness and suicide ensued. Yet they had the capacity to leave all that through art, which restored their control.
It is pretty well accepted that a human being “constructs” his version of what is real, beginning as an embryo evolving a brain. Neurons conduct information in through the skin which is then edited, transformed, recorded and eventually used by the brain to control the body. This solipsistic understanding of perception and motivation is only broken by our ability to “feel” each other, which we call “empathy.” Sensitive instruments can perceive that when we watch someone dance, the neurons in our own bodies will vaguely fire a version of ourselves doing the same thing.
This links up with another part of my undergrad education which included “Method” acting, in which one uses sense memories of one’s own to create in one’s own body the muscle tensions, reactions, and subtle variations that will be convincing enough while acting a character to evoke empathy from an audience. One does not imitate a person holding a rose, one holds the rose in one’s own mind and the audience sees it.
Recently while looking back over my previous struggles with all this material, I became impressed with how much, esp. in the more elite and educated circles, was about talk and writing. Word dominated all else, with books and institutional authorization. This completely shifted the spontaneous -- what happened in the liminal space of play and emotional life -- into a more distant and analytical mode: the director, the anthropologist, the psychoanalyst, and -- indeed -- the professional religious leader. Yet the POINT of creating a liminal space (over the threshold into the older, darker, limbic functioning of the brain) is to allow change in the person’s worldview or to reconfirm worthy convictions. The conventional group gets into it because it wants to prevent change and keep individuals in the group. It will thwart any new enlightenments. Writing can be the thread-web that keeps the person in place.
Perls and his group
So now, having already started with the importance of the sensorium, I find out that the current theory of how the brain works in practical molecular terms of memory and reflection, is all neuronal, accepting and recording in the very cells of the brain, but also in muscle and viscera. After all these years of the ascetic, the attempt to escape bodies, we find out we ARE bodies. This is what I was after in recently viewing two sets of movies: one set about the human ability or inability to act against our own best interests (“Hunger” and “Shame”) and the other set about innocent predators in groups and alone: lions, tigers and elephants.
This information again links back, this time to the experimental vespers at the Pacific Northwest Unitarian Univeraslist Leadership Schools. They were highly thoughtful, might or might not include writing which might or might not be traditional, and they included the sensorium: feeding each other grapes, sitting on a cushion with eyes closed and suddenly hearing a cello played in an overhead room, or sometimes holding hands in a long line, being led in the dark on wet grass to somewhere we hadn’t known about. These were week-long workshops, one per summer for three years. The idea continues, but those original leaders are dead of old age and I’m not sure the key was preserved.
Starhawk's spiral dance
I’m a Montana writer in the sense that I’ve been here in intervals for half a century. I’m not a Montana writer in the sense that, more than any state-name, the east slope of the Rockies is an access point to the nature ofthis planet and beyond it to the stars. This is a place that insists on mixing desire with survival. That’s where I am. It’s not exactly physical and yet my only instrument is my body. Sometimes I think about Starhawk’s spiral dance.
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