RESEARCH AND TRANSFORMATION

My idea of research is amateur at best.  In cities I went to libraries before there were the kind of professional research librarians we have now.  Much of my motivation was a kind of snobbery, feeling how elite it was to go to the Multnomah County library downtown, proceeding up the grand marble stairs to the third floor where the arts materials were kept so I could read about ballet.  It was deluded -- that is, some of the books were in French and I sat looking at them, hoping that suddenly I would be able to read them, the way I was once miraculously able to read English.  Of course, then I was in first grade and now I was in the "junior high" years.  

In high school I was old enough to take the bus out to Reed College so I could use their library materials about Commedia dell'Arte for dramatics class.  My teachers endorsed these adventures and supported the idea of being special.  The other encouragement is that I found out so much that was really absorbing.

By the Sixties I was teaching in Browning and then partnering with Bob Scriver.  We were building a foundry and I found information that sometimes worked.  Long afterwards, here in Valier, I built a small library about French lost wax casting, how it developed and what the consequences were for the community of marble cutters in Italy, so that I could put Bob's work in context to write his biography, "Bronze Inside and Out."  Most of the info I acquired about Blckft was oral and experienced. The anthro materials in books were old and old-fashioned.

When that ended and I became an animal control officer, I had an excellent boss who had the idea of an education coordinator with a three-fold purpose: public relations, in-house education, and research.  There wasn't much to research in those days.  Two men did fascinating work and wrote books about it.  One was a scientist studying the heritability of canine temperament who built four corrals with an observation post at the top.  He put four breeds in the pens -- terriers, cocker spaniels, poodles and some kind I don't remember -- fed them, sheltered them, but otherwise just watched through generations and saw how true to their breeds they were, very different from each other.

The other man had wanted to study wolves in the wild, but couldn't raise enough money.  At the time in NYC there were packs of wild dogs living in empty buildings.  He used his wolf techniques to follow them and analyze their lives.  After some months I had enough stuff to write a textbook, the first on the subject that we knew of.

Seminary was a formal academic research-based experience with a vocabulary and concept shape that was all its own.  It was all about precedent and paradigms.  I had been working on clinical psychology, but it seemed to be all about data: statistics.  I was very bad at it.  And I thought psych stuff was wobbly -- still too many big shots.

Walking off from the UU world of ministry, I took a civil service job as a clerical specialist for the City of Portland in the nuisance department.  People called asking for help and we tried to advise them.  Investigators went out to see what was happening and could take bad guys to court.  We had a very bad manager and no one really knew where to find answers.  There were six of us so I made six binders with info about where to get help: phone numbers, ordinances and so on.  When I finally managed to transfer out to the building permit section, the manager collected all the binders and trashed them.  

In "permits" I was a cashier and had no idea what I was doing until we hired another person who had banking experience.  No one had managed to keep track of the cash flow until she made us a daily worksheet to fill out at the end of the shift.  Voila!  It wasn't research, it was know-how.

Then my favorite department:  the site development team who analyzed the placement and structure of buildings according to the soils, possible flooding, previous use, contamination, and so on.  

After moving to Valier to live on a shoestring and augment books with the Internet, I was asked to do research as a long-distance volunteer following the development of knowledge about HIV: the physiology of the virus, the impact on gays, and the lives of boys who are now men because research made it possible to stay alive.  That unfolded into the vast unfurling of what was once disciplines of science and history, now a transformed paradigm that has completely left the old concepts of what humans are in an unlimited eternity and infinity.  If you've been following this blog, you've seen me try to absorb all this.

In the course of my unguided and wandering explorations, I've spent a lot of time reading about cells and human bodies as cooperating single-cells that now specialize and reciprocate as bodies.  More marginally, there is something going on now that brings that into collision with the organizations of humans trying to stay alive in patterns we call culture.  Because we know now that it was not just Rome that rose and fell, but over a far longer span of time there have been perhaps a hundred recurring rough drafts of humans, evidently rising up from the sheets of life on this planet until they knew enough to take hold of their own lives, change their environment, explore everywhere.  Those at the primate stage who were the source of hominins still exist but today we are all endangered, including all the other species and lifeforms.  Most of this comes from human activities that have actually changed the climate and the sea.  Our binding together is in danger of becoming trash.

One can regard this new virus, the most recent of a series with names and terrible consequences, like decimating the human population, as a new corrective for overpopulation.  But the need it imposes for human self-discipline, research, and cooperation may transform and save us.  Hurry up please -- it's time.