I write from the middle of a triangle that doesn't exist. Each imaginary corner marks a community of people I relate to, sometimes lived with and other times only read about, but who represent something about humans on the land. They are of sensational interest to people, but most know little or nothing about them. One is Blackfeet tribal members and the others who live on that rez. The second is represented by boys at risk for sexwork, drugs, and suicide. The third is the Unitarian Universalist denomination which seeks to be free-thinking while remaining entirely respectable and competent.
Let's take a look at each in reverse order. In the Seventies, full of idealism, I fell in love with the UU denomination. By 1988 I had fallen back out after many discoveries, not about religion but about community and myself. The short version is that denominations, as institutions, convert individual free-flowing energy into culture forces that are sometimes hard to justify. I've stopped trying. As an individual, I discover I am unsuited for the role of congregational leadership. After withdrawing in 1988, the last twenty years have been a continuation of seminary: the pursuit of thought, the gathering of evidence, and a steady output. It's what I thought being a minister "was," but it wasn't. Anyway, the denomination is open to the larger world, which means it is by now essentially changed in spite of the brave principles. It's devotion to science is broken because science as we have known it is changed.
The second group has not involved contact. It operates in print and video and those are the only way I know it. Their suffering and responding heroism has been the prompter for something I've always done for different contexts that were just developing: Western art, domestic animals, humanism, geology (floods, soil, climate), and anthro history as demographics surge and move. Though I read a bit of porn (which turns out to be everything from Japanese octopus intimacy to the excessive movie called "Kink" and the surprising research in "A Billion Wicked Thoughts"), it boiled down to relationship.
The best (most helpful) recent thought about this is the work of Porges, which is anatomy-based and a hugely helpful new beginning in the understanding of PTSD, Oppositional Defiance Disorder, autism, bondage, S/M, attachment, why drugs are necessary to merchandizing sex, and the importance of family and child-raising to create healthy humans. In the end it is about safety and survival, so deep and threatened they're hard to think about. The hardest part has been separating and naming elements that weren't about obsession or stereotyping or sensationalism, the stuff the media loves. I never made contact with the boys, but over time I've seen some of them grow up successfully and others die. This work over more than a decade has been the source of many of my blog posts, not about them but about what might help them.
The third triangle corner is defined as this rez but that's not really what it is about, which is the land of the East Slope ecotone of the Rockies from Yellowstone to beyond Edmonton. The enduring bottom of a once continental shallow sea, it slopes down to end at the Black Hills. This is prairie of great impact and often mysticism. Living under a limitless sky on undulating shortgrass hills and sheltered coulees, we are always aware of the smallness and vulnerability of humans and yet our deep participation in "landscape". Thought in this category expands from poetry to our ordinary daily bread and reaches back through history so far that the rocks themselves must tell the story. It barely survives the Industrial Revolution and its thirst for oil.
Writing -- as most people understand it -- is an outgrowth of school and mostly achieves the level of magazine articles. I can do that. I can NOT write a University of Chicago academic paper, which Richard Stern pointed out in classroom critique. I've never been accepted by an MFA program and I see them as shallow and class-bound reiterations that have the virtue of creating networks for the industry of publishing. I resent editing and left any contact with publishing when an editor simply rewrote paragraphs to contradict me because she disagreed. When I objected, she said she had bought my article and therefore "me." There's a name for that.
In a world where science has exploded every aspect of life -- ironically based on the tiniest of "granular" evidence like one-atom or "misfolding" changes in molecules, or one compass point change in the magnetic orientation of a stone, far far far away and long long long ago -- the only sensible salvation is in story. All stories of life are about an embodied nucleus pushing against an environment that sometimes opposes and sometimes uplifts, but always triggers the changes into variation that becomes mutation.
Members of these three research categories (that are only my invention for keeping some kind of order) mostly do not write. Some of them read quite a bit. None of the three has real boundaries, though they imagine they do, but rather each is wrapped around a kernel concept that may or may not be true. In the case of indigenous people (haveum quantum), it is "tribes." In the case of boys it is survival. In the case of the UU's it is a document of principles. All three struggle towards salvation as they define it. Some feel they have found it. They might be wrong.
I'm closed out of participating in all three for various reasons, mostly about culture. I merely watch and think. Sometimes I write about it and sometimes I don't. It's risky business. All three become enraged if you give them away in specifics. They can become uncontrollable. I become enraged myself when readers try to reduce me into something they already know, the way magazine writers operate, a category that yields a juicy title about early days or Indian lovers or religion gone wrong. So much of media is just churning. Peripheral.
Each of these three corners of my thought triangle is much larger than the actual people occupying them. The rez people are manifestations of land that presses necessities onto different people until they are rather like each other. The gay boys are symptoms of economic and historical forces that affect every generation worldwide. We are in a time when families throw out their own boys and capable men have no work. The UU's are part of a long search for what is real and dependable, old and well-documented because it is much dependent on literacy. It is limited.
I withdraw from relationships so that solitude can help keep lines of thought orderly. I live alone, write along, sleep alone. To keep from getting shack-batty in an idea vortex, I have invented a key friend. Though based on someone actual who is a worthy relationship point, I realize this is mostly projected fantasy. It would be a mistake for readers to assume reality and try to check it out.
Another mistake would be trying to see what the Valier locals see. One person wondered where I went because he didn't see me around. He didn't drive down the alley where he could see the window of my back bedroom where I write all day every day. (He doesn't see the town's drug traffic either. We see what we want to see.) Few if any read my blog, which is really where I live. I wonder whether writing is like shooting drugs.
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