EXPERIENCE: BONE DEEP, HEART HOT

Community teaches by experience, not by supplying information, though that’s also important.  For many people it is the experience of high school that gives them their theories of what life is all about.  Certainly this was true for me, but not involving sports.  I am the only person in the US who took a book to basketball games because I got bored.  It was dramatics that saved my life.

The adolescence of humans is when a whole new set of hormone molecules complicates what the body has learned in what was mistakenly called “latency” when people group up in various ways.  It’s meant to break up relationships so that sexual pairs can form between people not too closely related, which messes up the DNA.  In the best of times it is a period of idealism and attachment across differences, even as great as those between Romeo and Juliet, even forbidden..

Dramatics in my large high school, Jefferson in Portland,

meant resources and space for near-professional stage productions.  Melba Day Sparks was able to instill us all with an ethic of one for all and all for one that made it possible for there to be no small actors, just small parts, none of which could exist without the humble person who opened and closed the curtain.  That’s the way I see writing:  opening and closing the curtain.

For us, who teethed on Antigone. there was no silliness about cavorting for the sake of nonsense.  Our assemblies, crafted episodes, may have included slapstick and burlesques, but we knew how to make an actual slapstick and that burlesque is often relevant satire.

College, of course, was serious theatre, so intense that some people cracked up.  It was Method, near psychotherapy, the elevation of experience to an art form. When this ended, I was devastated.  Those relationships, even the distant ones, inform the person I am and shape me daily.

Animal Control, being a special deputy, charged with responding to emergencies in my “beat” (SE Portland) and then as education coordinator, forced me to be an interventionist and also to not take anything for granted.  I learned to define problems and research solutions in a pattern that persists.

Then came ministry, complex, political, and urban.  This is partly because of being Unitarian Universalist.  I believe it is a denomination trying to keep up the numbers and income by lowering standards, both in seminary and in the congregations.  It is an excellent and virtuous idea that has been captured by mercantile meritocracy thinking and thus has doomed itself even further.  

But it informs so much of my thinking because of the experiences, some of which were voluntary and self-imposed, like living in a van for three years while serving four fellowships.  There is no experience quite so informing as driving an old van that easily fish-tailed across an ice-encrusted highway for a hundred miles with cold so deep that the batteries for my new Walkman (just invented) could not make power unless I dropped it down the front of my down “ranchers’” coat.  In one's little tin box on wheels the cosmos in a diamante sky presses down hard, regardless of how brilliant the sermon was that evening.

When I realized how peripheral I was to the UUA, I went back to Portland to my old friend Civil Service, this time at the Bureau of Buildings, beginning in the Nuisance Abatement department.  They hired blacks to go into the black neighborhoods as inspectors, so I got to know a few.  Earl Blumenauer and Ron Wyden were there.  I finally found a niche with the Site Development team until one of them — concussed in a series of bicycle accidents — decided I was after him.  

Then my mother dying at 89 left me enough to move back here.  Portland had changed.  Those charged with governance and regulation of a city were not quite at the point Trump thinks, but it would become famous for rowdy demonstrations.  The Gray Lady had gone weird.  I keep in touch with no one from there, not even family.  Not because I’m mad at them, but because it derails me. This time I was glad to leave.  Even so, PERS pays a third of my retirement income.

My biggest allegiance and continuing experience is roughly the Blackfeet lands — not so much the rez but the original Rockies-to-Black Hills-Yellowstone-to-Tar Sands.  It’s ecological, not limited to technical Blackfeet by genetics, culture, provenance or governmental boundaries among nations or smaller boundaries.  The historical stories are still gripping, esp. the ones that I have been in.  This land sustains all numinous meaningfulness for me.

Experience pressed me to see that all life is continuous, interwoven in spite of our penetrable skins and borders, beyond humanism or eco-thinking.  If a bit of viral code can escape in human breath to travel the planet and knock back the population that has overwhelmed everything, killing in great numbers that are changing the temper of our demographics even as it redefines them, then what can the next code-byte do?

Wallace Stegner, who grew up not far from here on the HighLine, both sides of the border, almost lost his parents to the Pandemic of 1918 and put the experience in “The Big Candy Mountain”.  My mother survived that pandemic as a child but her doctor did not.  She was in Washington State then, and told how her playmate came under the window to ask if she was getting well.  When the news of exhuming a far north victim of that flu to capture its code was published, she was fascinated.

The code formula for the Black Plague that killed one third of the population of Europe and changed its history is still alive in small mammals on the prairie here.  But antibiotics will kill it.  They will not kill Covid-19, which is changing our history as I write.  But viruses mutate and evolve, already have, just as HIV has, another plague that has changed our lives.  Somewhere is another batshit killer waiting for us.

A small community stays with me mentally, experienced only on the internet and dispersed now simply because it was boys and they either died or grew up. In the territory of my mind, somehow interwoven with “Indians.”  All was experienced as surely and indelibly as the rez years of the Sixties.  

Bone deep, heart hot.  Earned by living through it together.