The 2% of my brain that is conscious struggles with the rest of my mental and emotional life, which is inconveniently hidden. Just a bit ago this tweet came up on Twitter. It's from Virginia Heffernan and very useful. "As a commenter just pointed out, this emotional connection—the activated parasympathetic nervous system—only happens when two bodies share space. And within a pact of non-exploitation (mocked as “safe space”) that used to be the baseline for any civilized interaction."
"I’d further add, without I hope getting too weird, that this kind of synching is made more difficult when faces & bodies are distorted w/uncanny cosmetics or cosmetic surgery. Trump’s matte orange complexion codes as inhuman (or, for fans, superhuman) . . .
My starter for this story about two people interpreting wolves has a old woman artist -- like me, except so far too bland and virtuous -- and a writer whom I've identified as Black. Which means that I've slipped up. I'm too close to writing something socioeconomic about underclasses. I've assumed that this Black man is somehow disadvantaged and "coming up," when it would be better to let the old woman be the underclass and build an elite, wealthy Black man, a Matthiessen type instead of a political rebel.
But there are also objects and territories. Before I woke up the second (or third) time this morning I was dreaming with great reality that I was in Wyoming (the only Western state wilder and less populated than Montana) which had fallen into such chaos that "Tennessee" and Tennessee banks had taken over the state. In reality it is the state of Montana that threatens to take over the county of Glacier which is practically rez and between Pondera (my county) and Canada.
So I'm still working on the nature of society and trying to understand how individuals can survive in it. The wolf pack vs. the lone wolf. How do we get to "a pact of non-exploitation" as Heffernan puts it. How can I work into the story a "wolf mask"? Does it relate to the artist's dog or her friend Max who is indigenous and was asked to put up her lodge? Is it about painting the lodgeskin with the mask of a wolf? I don't want faux ndn woo-woo.
At 4AM I woke up and wrote the following about airplanes and artists. Should I keep it or dump it? So far it's only raw material, memories.
The Valier "airport" is just a few blocks south of me. It's just a flat pasture, with a windsock, a newly renewed tight barbed-wire fence, and some shed hangars to keep small planes from blowing away. A small flock of grouse raises their babies in the grass there in spite of cats. During WWII it was an active place with a landing beacon that became a "lighthouse" restaurant, now closed after a stellar career as a dinner restaurant. The lake -- parallel to the airport -- was considered capable of accepting seaplanes. Today it's a fishing spot, as active for ice fishing in winter as for small boats in summer.
For a while there was a mysterious unmarked helicopter that would often land there for a couple of hours and rumours about what it was swept the town. One schizophrenic citizen developed an entire fantasy about black helicopters which rose out of the lake next to the airport and stole children. Then it turned out that the pilot was a guy employed for something -- I forget what. Checking irrigation ditches or counting grizzlies -- something like that. His mom lived close by, and he had gotten into the habit of going to her house for lunch.
No one has ever landed on the grass runway and walked down to my house, but they could. We think of airplanes now as big commercial airlines with monster machines on elaborate developments. We forget that barn-stormers like my uncle in South Dakota could keep a small plane maintained and covering territory, except in Alaska where there are no roads. He delivered the family business of ag machine parts.
In the Sixties when the Scriver Studio was more about taxidermy than sculpture, small planes flew into a field near Starr School, ten miles from Browning. Bob had painted "Museum" on the roof so pilots could buzz us or we could be called by the Cut Bank sheriff who had a radio tuned to their slightly bigger airport. Hunters returning from Alaska or coming to fetch their finished products would have enough money to be short on time. Browning is near the Canadian line, a long drive by highway. That continued with high-dollar sculpture customers.
The memory that came back when I began to think about this wolf story was not about wolves at all. Harry Jackson was a "cowboy artist" like Bob and we had just met him in Cody at the Buffalo Bill Museum, not yet the major complex people now sometimes call the Smithsonian of the West. Harry looked more like Bob than his own brother, and was completely unthreatened by Bob, though Harold McCracken meant Bob to intimidate Harry because of Buffalo Bill politics. There was no time to talk in Cody, so Harry simply flew up to spend a couple of days. He and Bob immediately formed a deep bond, not just about the sculptures but also because somehow they were alike.
Harry's past is sort of gussied up in documents. He was born near the Chicago stockyards but his grandmother did not run just a café. He was commercially abused from toddlerhood, which contributed to his five marriages, all to prominent and well-heeled women as near as I could tell. But he was immensely charismatic with a ranch near Cody and a classic atelier in Italy. During WWII he'd been a combat photographer on a South Pacific island and, suffered a head wound which meant persistent epilepsy. While he was with us, his Italian foundry foreman ran off with one of his wives.
In the last years before his death, he entered a kind of therapy with a female counselor who inspired him with a vision of the universe. He put this on CD discs and sent me a set. I listened, was confused about what to do with them, and simply stored them. They weren't the sort of thing that sold bronzes. I should get them out and listen again.
Maybe I was dreaming about small airplanes because of noise coming from our nearby landing strip. It's a much more welcome sound than the thunder of big C-series planes from Malmstrom flying high to practice because they say the east slope is not too different from parts of Russia. It was a full moon last night.
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