On the east slope of the Rockies I survived by accident. I was in the habit of regarding my marriage to Bob Scriver from multiple points of view. The first was the culturally endorsed idea of romantic love, being destined, deep relationship, and sex. No one could ever define these things. They'd say, "Oh, you'll know it when it finds you." But what if I hallucinate easily?
The second was from the outside, a cold investigation into the age mismatch, the workload, the skills required, the value of the achievement, the trade-offs and injustices. This had a lot to do with family and the idealization/commercialization of art. Being a third wife in a four wife marriage meant old patterns persisting, but new circles of influence opening that demanded adaptability.
The third was a major pattern consideration of cultures and the forces that swept up people and put them in situations. This was esp. salient in view of the shifts in our global-wide understanding of so much, social ways of organizing and on a rez at that. What do entitlements, advantages, being owed, mean in the daily adjustments of getting work done? Why should a hundred years of open range cattle raising have so much power over people with a millennium of living with grass and buffalo? Why do they grip us emotionally? How did the industrial revolution send railroads across it?
Fourth was pretending to be Bob Scriver, which came from intending to write and also acting. I tried to inhabit him, to know what he felt as he pushed the clay around or expertly skinned out an animal. I borrowed his clothes, even his jeans and bedroom slippers, which made him angry. He changed as he aged and as he became famous, which put him beyond anything I could "grok," as did his relationship with Lorraine, a person who had very few happy relationships. It also put me in deeper touch with the land. But it pulled him away to nightclubs in Manhattan, a pretend world.
This was curiosity, preparation, and remembrance. Bob was born in 1914. His dad was born in 1879. The oldest of the Blackfeet present in 1961 were approaching or even passing 100. The Rockies in whose lea we lived, were the third iteration of the continent-long cordillera thrown up by two crashing tectonic plates. For those of you who like time-lines and statistics, take the following to your next cocktail party. Consider oil deposits found here and their unfulfilled promises.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Rocky-Mountains
"The Canadian Rockies include the Mackenzie and Selwyn mountains of the Yukon and Northwest Territories (sometimes called the Arctic Rockies) and the ranges of western Alberta and eastern British Columbia. The Northern Rockies include the Lewis and Bitterroot ranges of western Montana and northeastern Idaho. These ranges formed along the eastern edge of a region of carbonate sedimentation some 17 miles (27 km) thick, which had accumulated from the late Precambrian to early Mesozoic time (i.e., between about 1 billion and 190 million years ago). This structural depression, known as the Rocky Mountain Geosyncline, eventually extended from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico and became a continuous seaway during the Cretaceous Period (about 145 to 66 million years ago). The ranges of the Canadian and Northern Rockies were created when thick sheets of Paleozoic limestones were thrust eastward over Mesozoic rocks during the mountain-building episode called the Laramide Orogeny (65 to 35 million years ago). Some of these thrust sheets have moved 20 to 30 miles (32 to 48 km) to their present positions."
This is a fifth point of view, not available earlier, a whole new understanding of the formation of the world and the hominins in it. There went most of the Bible, but not the central idea of relationship based on family -- not monarchy -- because kings will start wars. Now attachment comes to the fore and the tension between individual and social group shifts to a pinpoint of existence in all of the cosmos. We are minute, and yet we are connected. What we do is infinitesimal and unconscious, but we are each significant in the symphony of stars and dust.
Of course, I'm much influenced by the sci-fi story that speculated about what might be changed if a time-traveler stepped on an ancient bug, breaking the evolutionary chain we believed in then, before horizontal DNA exchange. All this infinite code may be a more profound moral guide for the future than even the Golden Rule. To begin a different future what are you doing right now, no matter how insignificant? Even child-rearing influences, which can change civilizations, aren't really apparent until decades later.
It appears that we have trashed and suffocated the planet without realizing what we were doing when we threw our gum wrapper on the sidewalk. Writing can ask whether I did that to my own life, my own one-and-only marriage. Did bad housekeeping have that much impact? Did I with my child's attitude toward life prevent Bob from creating a final masterpiece? Or did I make it possible for him to do impressive work? These are two poles for speculation and philosophy. And where is my own work?
But there is also a middle ground of both horror and delight. Put any mass shooting against the enormity of world change. What can any such tragic and fatal striking-out do to change Time? On the other hand, can we name art or music or dance that can fire our brains with joy? We could name hundreds and hundreds. Telling the stories of both ends and the middle are the ground of writing, not what will sell or what editors will buy.
So many terms and categories need to be reworked now. What IS nation? What is border? What is money? What is owning? What is race? What is species now that we know everything is code? What are we but everything around us that presses us into being?
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