If I wrote a biography today, no matter who it was about, it would be entirely different from what I wrote about Bob Scriver. At that time I structured the book by using the steps of the creation of a bronze sculpture, not what to do so much as how the materials feel, what they can become. I included a lot of local anecdotes and the history of the Scrivers, how they got to the Blackfeet reservation at the beginning of the 19th century. I didn't talk much about being a racial minority in an autochthonous place, but he would be a good example of wearing another creature's skin, since he tried to be tribal. Bob didn't make it to the 20th century, dying in 1999. In short, his life story fit the century, various as it was. But place held him. Dusty little Browning with Willow Creek running through it, the village was an anchor point on the vast East Slope Ecotone created by the Rockies.
In mythology there are stories about trying to capture someone but ending up only holding their skin. Selkies, the marine people who sometimes take human form, are a good example. Bob's mom and Selkies were Scots. Of course, the stories are metaphors for human beings who are captured but finally must escape to exist, because they don't belong to the world of the capturer, no matter how much love is involved on either side.
In a world this various and mobile, in times so confusing and places so changed, the "donkey skins" are still in existence. This is a clip from the old fairy tale, as captured in a 1970 French film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HysasPjF84I
Here's an American version --TRULY American, not European. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nXsCGyFuz8 This is Laura Grizzly Paws.
When a writer takes on a persona through whom to tell a story, they are wearing the skin of that being, which may not be human, but be inhabited by a human. For instance, here's Chewbacca and the actor who wore his skin. I don't know how a wookie dances, but Peter Mayhew (the actor who wore his skin) would. He's part of an invented world that seems very real to us, particularly now that we're trying to capture more than the skin of the Empire that has been striking back at us.
Most of us who live a long time are still wearing the skin of the times and places where we grew up, whether France or Browning, and we think we know what the world is like, but as these stories attest, there are always stories within stories, some of them quite unknown. Some are more "grim" than any fairy tale. Yet we cling to our notion of what we thought they were like.
For instance, Bob Scriver was a portrayer of worlds that he thought he knew in his youth, the cowboy and Indian mythology that overlay what was really a raw struggle to survive in a world where the land-fitting way of life was being destroyed by an empire from across the sea, not even just a Brit empire, but one dominated by a department store called Hudson's Bay, a pattern much diminished into the Browning Mercantile. Scriver Studio and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were Bob's own expression of the 19th century anthropology, collecting, and labeling Brit way of understanding. As soon as he died, it was dismantled, reduced to more mercantilism.
Then the bronzes of the even more imaginary world portrayed in bronzes was housed in a recreation of Fort Benton, because now that time has become myth and is admired, considered real. It was only a few generations in the past. The tribal people still dance, but the costumes are a flurry of modern flourescent colors mixed with echoes of deer tails and eagle feathers. The tribes are PanIndians. The dancing is as authentic a portrait of first contact dancing as bull-riding is an authentic version of moving cattle.
Above is just local observation. Looked at world-wide, new phenomena have appeared, like crime-based systems that stash "money" or records of money on islands that have never been pulled into the Empire and therefore can stay hidden. They have very little idea of what to do with that money, except hide its origin in swindles, predation, death, and competing families. Not just a phenomenon of Sicily, it is a fungus that blooms wherever the conditions are right. A corporation LLC is the hide they wear.
Some of the most interesting developments in the deteriorating Empire world are triggered by sex and gender, because the basic function of reproduction and nurturing have been badly damaged by war and poverty. Examples of what modern technology has made possible include birth control, the empowerment of women (which is related), fluid sexual identity from enforced binary to situational, the relaxation of protecting children (esp, those stigmatized), and the reorganization of men in society according to their sexual gender preference.
Once suppressed by social criminalization and driven underground in various ways, this is not the same as modern medical intervention to change one gender into another. But gender roles and morality have shaped a phenomenon that was once secret into a Empire-outlook. a hierarchical demographic that was once unified but now becomes many chambered and sometimes in opposition to itself. Ostentation gets into it. What was once disguised in the skin of the conventional is now wearing everything from tuxedos to speedos.
At first the permission to relate sexually in any way was the central key and the nature and expression of sexuality, freed from obligatory reproduction in the same way that birth control freed women. It was a joyous celebration of sex-positive as an unalloyed good. Of course, the same unlikeable nerds went without partners. Soon AIDS brought death and crippling dependence on drugs. Real life was again forced into performance, passing.
We have not quite grasped that HIV affects every kind of person and is not connected to same-sex preference at all. We have not quite grasped that jungle-born HIV, Chinese swine flu, and prairie herbivore wasting disease are, like ebola, merely waiting for a chance to strip our skins. Whatever social category is vulnerable this time -- whether insulated by the religious belief that one should not eat pork or in danger because of subsistence hunting -- the gradual realization may or may not change us before the climate eliminates us as we know ourselves. Maybe climate change will kill the cities rather than individuals, who already live on the sidewalks and may now die there, before they have a chance to dance. What skin will they wear? Or does death flay us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment