prairiemary

"CONFIRMATORY" WRITING

2012-01-27T09:28:00.003-07:00

The kind of books that are booming now, especially on ebook gizmos, are “immersive” -- strong narrative theme, maybe fiction and maybe not. The kind of book that sweeps you into a forcefield, another world, that holds your attention so strongly that you forget all about the time and have to go out for dinner because you didn’t peel any potatoes early enough to boil. Non-readers sink into movies the same way, but they will not remember long ago being called by their mothers to do chores and begging for “just one more page”!

I don’t quite know how to describe the kind of books I read, partly because they are an assortment. Non-fiction that is research, like the brain function books I’ve been exploring; “high” literary Western writing of many kinds including Native American books; deliberate but limited forays into genre writing like pulp Westerns; sci-fi of some kinds, and -- oh, I confess -- Maeve Binchy. Plus censored and verboten books. I started reading every Montana writer’s book I could find and still do that some, especially the women, but the category has sort of dissolved. Now they’re all over in Portland. Or don’t write anymore.

It’s only logical that people should “write what they know” because what choice do they have? Whether anyone would want to read it is another question entirely. To publishers that’s the crucial question: will people buy this book? They care nothing about any other dimension or quality. If immersive sells, that’s what they buy and promote. If scandal sells, THAT’s what they buy and promote.

To the reader it’s a matter of personal taste. Do I “like” this? Do I want to keep reading? Do I want to read other books like this?

To the writer a book could be almost anything. A shedding of ghosts. An analysis of survival. A scrapbook of lost things. The seeds of tomorrow. If you’re a writer, people will ask you “have you been published?” To them it is the dividing line between amateur and professional. If you’re not published, you’re not really a writer. It’s the criterion for a lot of memberships in organizations, as though it were a college degree. It says, “someone more important than you thinks this is a worthy writer.” That’s what people THINK it means, esp. if the book has won prizes. But in fact it only means that the book sold, it made money for the publisher. Or if it didn’t, there’s one pissed-off publisher somewhere.

Self-published puts all that stuff in the whirling machine. Some things are too good for any publisher. Some things are just fine being published for a defined group: proceedings of conferences, repair manuals, family memoirs, porn.

The point of some writing is the actual procedure of writing which can be a kind of self-education or auto-psychoanalysis or growing process or safety valve. If a person I care about is doing this kind of writing, I’m very much absorbed in it, because it’s a window to a soul, but I probably get too interested in the writer and so do others. It radiates passion-vibes.

Most people don’t know “how” to write which is why they get writer’s block. All they know is how to spell (with a little help from spell-check if they think of it) and string words together, but they don’t know how to access their sub-verbal being, which is really where the writing lives. Down in there someplace is the fuse and the bomb and the debris. What one writes is the debris. You have to figure out the rest. But no two people write the same way. Despair, revenge, true love, bad habits -- they all get into the mix.

In 1961 when I first began to teach public school, I signed up for the Famous Writers course. It was a LOT of money, which mostly went for stuff you didn’t need, like special paper with a Famous Writers logo at the top. That outfit made a mint for decades until someone finally uncovered the scam: the idea was to sign you up for a contract you couldn’t escape and then give you uninspired assignments. If you doggedly sent them back, there was a panel of supposed experts (meaning people who couldn’t make a living writing) who tore your writing into shreds. The bloodied endurance champions who kept on with it didn’t learn a damned thing, because all the criticism was grammar, usage, and stock remarks like “don’t be pretentious” and “show don’t tell.” What the hell are those supposed to mean? It depends on what you’re writing, doesn’t it? And who you are? The goal of these hired critics was to kill your ego. They were good at it.

Confirmatory writing is quite the opposite, more like the teacher who tries to be encouraging by strategically praising what fits a general consensus of what writing ought to be like. Which means establishing what sort of writing is in hand. I mean, if you are writing something that confirms the ideas of a suburban liberal, that will be quite different from writing a story about small town set-in-their-ways recently-immigrated populations. If those two “kinds” are pitched against each other in a story, one faction will want the green horn slicker to be showed up and the other faction will want the rural guy to look like a hick. (And maybe a convincing story about the two types collaborating and becoming friends would sell pretty well.) I will tell you this: I met very few teachers besides myself who would allow the kids to write about their real lives, and with good reason. I sometimes wondered whether I should call the police.

Confirmatory writing always has a happy ending. Everything turns out all right, meaning that it meets with the approval of the person reading. Presumably the writer wanted it to turn out that way as well, but consider Debra Magpie Earling who could not sell “Perma Red” for ten years until she finally buckled and wrote an ending that falsified the reality she had wanted. And she’s Native American which for a while was supposed to be a guarantee of saleability.

Confirmatory writing sticks to what is expected, so Doig “must” write pinafore stories about cowboy country and Hillerman “must” write cop tales about the SW. Territory too new, too much shock, and the book won’t sell. I always wonder what it would be like to read what these well-established writers REALLY know.

PS: Two of my self-published books are available as ebooks for the Nook. Go to Barnes & Noble and look for Mary Scriver. One is the story the 7th grade in Heart Butte composed collaboratively in 1989 and the other is about my exploits in Portland as a lady dogcatcher in the Seventies. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether they are confirmatory.

"CONFIRMATORY

2012-01-27T09:28:00.000-07:00

I don’t quite know how to describe the kind of books I read, partly because they are an assortment. Non-fiction that is research, like the brain function books I’ve been exploring; “high” literary Western writing of many kinds including Native American books; deliberate but limited forays into genre writing like pulp Westerns; sci-fi of some kinds, and -- oh, I confess -- Maeve Binchy. Plus censored and verboten books. I started reading every Montana writer’s book I could find and still do that some, especially the women, but the category has sort of dissolved. Now they’re all over in Portland. Or don’t write anymore.

To the reader it’s a matter of personal taste. Do I “like” this? Do I want to keep reading? Do I want to read other books like this?

In 1961 when I first began to teach public school, I signed up for the Famous Writers course. It was a LOT of money, which mostly went for stuff you didn’t need, like special paper with a Famous Writers logo at the top. That outfit made a mint for decades until someone finally uncovered the scam: the idea was to sign you up for a contract you couldn’t escape and then give you uninspired assignments. If you doggedly sent them back, there was a panel of supposed experts (meaning people who couldn’t make a living writing) who tore your writing into shreds. The bloodied endurance champions who kept on with it didn’t learn a damned thing, because all the criticism was grammar, usage, and stock remarks like “don’t be pretentious” and “show don’t tell.” What the hell are those supposed to mean? It depends on what you’re writing, doesn’t it? And who you are? The goal of these hired critics was to kill your ego. They were good at it.

Confirmatory writing is quite the opposite, more like the teacher who tries to be encouraging by strategically praising what fits a general consensus of what writing ought to be like. Which means establishing what sort of writing is in hand. I mean, if you are writing something that confirms the ideas of suburban liberal, that will be quite different from writing a story about small town set-in-their-ways recently-immigrated populations. If those two “kinds” are pitched against each other in a story, one faction will want the green horn slicker to be showed up and the other faction will want the rural guy to look like a hick. (And probably a convincing story about the two types collaborating and becoming friends would sell pretty well.) I will tell you this: I met very few teachers besides myself who would allow the kids to write about their real lives, and with good reason. I sometimes wondered whether I should call the police.

"BECOMING DINOSAURS" by David Trexler

2012-01-26T11:10:00.003-07:00

When people aren’t cautioning us about following Rome into the crash of civilization, they’re warning us about going extinct like the dinosaurs. They’re just trying to scare us, right? Well, right and wrong.

I first met David Trexler when he was about nine or ten years old. We often stopped in Bynum to check out the rock shop because Bob and the Trexlers were long-time tourist business owners. In the Sixties one night Bob Scriver and I went down because David’s mother was selling her skeleton with an arrow embedded in it. (Not HER skeleton, but she owned it, kept it in a case to show tourists.) Marion, widowed, needed some money fast, but Bob decided against the skeleton. In the Sixties we didn’t know about the dino eggs but they were probably in the buckets around the room.

Here’s a media account of the dino egg story.

http://www.lacusveris.com/The%20Hi-Line%20and%20the%20Yellowstone%20Trail/The%20Rockies/Dino_Hunter.shtml

Now David Trexler is all grown up, a full-blown paleontologist with a Master’s degree from the University of Calgary. And he has written a book: “Becoming Dinosaurs: A Prehistoric Perspective on Climate Change Today.” It’s both reassuring and scary. Reassuring because climate change is not as cut-and-dried simple as the media makes it out to be. But there are still a lot of variables out there and some of them -- the most scary one, in fact -- have not been considered until only a few years ago. You ever hear of “methane clathrate”? Me, neither, but if you did, I’ll bet it was in the news coverage of the big ocean oil rig explosion and spewing. One of the problems -- maybe causes -- relates to this material of methane clathrate clogging the pipes and valves of the rig.

Methane clathrate is basically ice that burns, even explodes. It forms in cold water and there are huge deposits on the “shelfs” of land under the ocean along the coasts. If the ocean deposits -- or any other methane clathrate deposits -- get to a certain temperature, they will be released as gas and rise to the surface. There could be enough released to sharply increase global temps to unendurable levels or even to smother nearby oxygen breathers.

Methane, you know, is the gas that cows and frat boys contribute to the atmosphere at the literal end of their part of the food chain. But the amount is trivial compared to what comes out of smokestacks, cars, and various natural processes. It is part of a molecular dynamic that shapes what life can exist on this planet. Only a few centuries ago humans figured out that “air” was actually something, that it had constituents, and that they changed -- much less found ways to understand how the proportions of gases have varied over the millennia, why, and how that affected living beings. We still know a very limited amount about these unseeable gases.

If we keep on with global warming, it will not just mean that you can grow plants farther north. (Today the Great Falls Tribune had a story about changing the boundaries of the growing zones.) Mostly people are thinking in terms of gradual change, gradual enough to deny. But global warming could easily heat the ocean, which is our moderator of temps planet-wide, enough to release a LOT of methane ice at once which WILL create an actual apocalypse, a sharp rise in planetary temperature over a period in between one and two decades, which will kill a very high proportion of humans and other living things. This has happened at least once in history, according to the records preserved in geology.

Most of the thinking about global warming has been in terms of a household thermostat. We like gradualism -- so we have time to adjust. Our understanding of evolution has also been that it was gradual. But lately there has been new willingness to consider sharp changes -- for instance, genes that relocate or precipitate a cascade of changes. Likewise, there has been a new understanding of geological processes. It’s hard to envision a mountain jumping, even as one looks at photos of Mt. St. Helens erupting, and harder to think about its impact on the atmosphere once the effects are very high.

Much of the thinking about the effects of methane ice melting is described by D. Dorritie on a website called www.killerinourmidst.com and there are other sources of information, but David Trexler’s book is a colorful, thoughtful, deeply informed description that will have you pondering how to take action. The OTHER and quite bright side of understanding methane clathrates is that the deposits are holding energy (methane is natural gas, right?) in amounts that dwarf any oil or coal deposits on land. Now that we know it’s there, and if we can figure out how to “mine” it, we will have a source of energy that can last a very long time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “short term” morality, which is expedient and can bring in quick profits -- maybe at very high cost, like borrowing against payday at an exorbitant interest rate -- as opposed to “long term” morality which might mean saving or waiting because of the future benefits and resources. It’s also the difference between a few people “making a buck” now and everyone profiting in the long term on a dinosaur scale.

People like David Trexler who work daily, hands-on, with the bones of life forms long gone, while living on the east slope of the Rockies, knowing that those mountains are the THIRD cordillera thrown up by plate tectonics and then worn down to a peneplain, feeling the sense of embeddedness and participation that one gets from living here under high winds and relentless cold, can step away from the greed and markers of success in the cities and corporation board rooms. Grounding in science becomes infused with a kind of mysticism, a protective merging with the land. Okay, it’s religion. It supports a morality.

I’ll go even farther and say that industrialization -- world-wide -- has resulted in a kind of “frakking” of the heart, but this landscape and awareness of its long history since it was part of Gondwandaland, the unified first land mass, will restore you. “Becoming Dinosaurs” is an excellent meditation manual.

TOO MANY KIDS

2012-01-25T08:40:00.002-07:00

Sexual morality is not based on sex at all. It’s based on money and power, the same as everything else. Those two forces, which are two sides of the same thing which is economic survival, stay potent in human life as they have since evolution popped up the neocortex and the skull over it so that people had foreheads. But in the last hundred or maybe only fifty years, sex has suddenly changed.

For one thing, there are far more people -- so many that there are TOO many to support and you can buy a little boy in some places for less than the cost of a puppy in other places. For another thing, it’s far easier to move children around from a place where they have little or no value to a place where they have a high value; from a place where most children are at least snoopervised, to a place where no one cares or the child who is a different color is unsee-able.

For another thing, in the industrial world conception, gestation, birth and rearing are entirely different than they used to be and different from one place or one class to another so that the memes almost overpower the genes. This is changing the role of women in the world, though it’s more often doubling up than change. Another difference is that one part of the world can see what it’s like in other parts of the world -- even talk to people there. So a Manhattan reporter (Thomas Friedman) can go to a brothel in SE Asia, buy himself a woman, and re-define her life, "free" her, to suit his standards (maybe from prostitute to shop-keeper) -- sometimes with success and sometimes not.

Disease patterns are changing along with all the other patterns. Places which are losing major parts of their population plus major parts of their generational culture transmission (just the same as happened to the North American Indians two centuries ago) are tumultuous enough to become pirates preying on the cream of society in luxury liners. Food is also a force that acts almost like disease (even in America) except that diseases go from person to person without reference to class or education. Or do they?

Just now I’m thinking about questions like what difference scale makes: systems form in terms of large scale phenomena, so something like child trafficking is not profitable enough to maintain itself unless systems can develop, the same as drug systems: producers, distribution, consumers. When the population being drawn on is planetary, so that humans are produced on one continent to be consumed on another, the systems will be big and tied into politics in order to protect themselves.

We tend to think of the problem as one-at-a-time, this kid and this kid and this kid. This unwanted pregnancy and this unwanted pregnancy. This freak who consumes kids and then this other freak who consumes kids. What about the systems that one-by-one accretions feed into? What about the countries, mostly Asians, who have seen that too many kids can lead to disaster and have mercilessly stepped in to limit pregnancies. I say mercilessly. And with unintended consequences like the female babies adopted in the United States who now form a body of people, usually wealthy and educated like their adoptive parents, who are emotionally tied to their genetic origins as well as their adoptive country. Are they a bridge or a breach? Or the unintended consequence of too many young Chinese men with no access to women, no way to marry, no reason to settle down. Where will their restlessness go? What if they import women of another culture, like American rednecks importing Phillipinas?

What about the African lack of social maintenance which has allowed famine, destruction of human communities and cultures, destruction of the flora and fauna that supported life, mutilation of souls, collapse of nations. In both of these extreme national reactions the economics of survival through power and resources include sex. Sell yourself, sell your child, sell your willingness to do the unthinkable: meth in one pocket, viagra in the other.

“Civilized” cultures are more subtle, using sentimentality and romanticism to convert individuals into pawns in the economic system: women who will betray each other by replacing aging wives, men who will use women and then discard them, men who want to own their genetic children, women who will get pregnant to keep a relationship. Once the basis of wealth was inheritance and therefore sexual allegiance on the part of women was the guarantee that children were really one’s own and therefore a continuation of one’s self. Even the ruling of countries depended on inheritance. But now inheritance can be proven or disproven by genetics. There are no more mysteriously fatherless children.

And increasingly it begins to be clear that simple biological inheritance does not mean that a child will become like the parent. What if the throne is limited to male inheritors and the only child able to replace the parent is female? The likely preventative of female kings was the high possibility that pregnancy/birth would kill the queen. That doesn’t happen often now. But then later, with irony, it turned out that the urge to knit political systems together through family relationships became a genetic throttler that made royalty unable to produce any children at all.

Most of our moralities that have to do with sex have close horizons: what will it do to our lives in the next few years? Because who knows what will happen in the next decade? Sequential relationships have their impact on the emotions of the persons passing through them, but what happens to the children produced accidentally or on purpose? What about the stray men in the house? More sentimentality and practicality working against economics. Vocations -- locking people into jobs. War -- destroying the men, blowing their balls off. Careers -- preventing pregnancy until fertility is expired. One by one, they are maybe tragedies. Taken altogether, they are marketing opportunities. (Now the docs are saying it’s better not to implant triplets.)

What happens when the script changes quickly? I once had a conversation with a man who was enraged because he had played by the rules and been faithful to his wife, with some pain, but now discovered that he could sleep around with impunity -- if he had the ability. Maybe viagra saved him. But I hope he had his tubes tied first, since many babies with disabilities result from old sperm. The US with its prosperity and its sentimentality about people having babies “no matter what” and “saving” marginal babies is now burdened with huge costs and in danger of a reactive flip of sentiment that will make it morally acceptable to kill all “substandard” people. (And some only worry about abortion.)

Commodities, even children, can be made profitable in two different ways: one is dealing with whatever in terms of standard units: kid, kid, kid, qua kid. The other is by producing high quality unique whatevers. In terms of kids, that means health, intelligence, the ability to form relationships, curiosity, courage, etc. etc. etc. But kids are commodities that change daily -- they get better and they get worse. Kid by kid that’s all-absorbing. When it is a trend, throughout an entire country with many kids following some unforeseen pattern, it is world-transforming. Both better and worse. It begins with coitus.

HEATHER DEVINE ON JOSEPH KINSEY HOWARD

2012-01-24T11:14:00.002-07:00

Yesterday at the Valier library I checked out the winter issue of “Montana, The Magazine of Western History” without looking at the contents. When I got home I was delighted to find an article by Heather Devine, whom I met years ago on a list serv of indigenous people. She is the author of “The People Who Own Themselves” http://people.ucalgary.ca/~hdevine/ which was published by the University of Calgary Press at about the same time as they published “Bronze Inside and Out,” my own book about Bob Scriver. We’re border-jumpers, who find the 49th parallel a nuisance because we have roots and interests all over the high northern plains and relate to that ecosystem rather than political divisions. Not that there isn’t a price to pay, especially now that US Homeland Security is trying to swallow both the Blackfeet reservation and Glacier National Park in the name of controlling the border.

The article in “Montana” by Devine, called “Ahead of his Time,” is about Joseph Kinsey Howard and his book “Strange Empire.” A life’s work, the book was not quite finished when Howard died of one of those mid-life heart attacks while driving a publisher’s rep to the airport in 1951. His life was almost as much an illustration of the Metis predicament as it was an accounting of the cost to a people created when European men took indigenous wives, forming what nearly became a separate nation. Reconciled within their own world, they were estranged from both their culture sources which tried to maintain controlling boundaries by enforcing stigma and restriction. Remarkably, the Metis are still with us, only invisible until you learn to recognize them and then everywhere around here. At the edges of frontier there are always mixtures, creoles, as rich in life as any shoreline.

Because I’ve mentioned Howard now and then in this blog, I get inquiries about his life, though I’ve never systematically worked through the material about him. Neither have I made a study of Riel or Dumont, who echo Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in their relationship and style. Riel and Crazy Horse were the mystics. Dumont and Sitting Bull were the practical strategists. Howard was a little of both but maybe more visionary than academic, though he worked hard to meet academic standards, which is the point of the article.

There is currently another of those evolutionary academic discipline crises erupting between scholar-historians with all their trappings of footnote, citation, bibliography, index and so on as contrasted with the story-tellers who pick up dreams and tales of intense passion and symbolic images. Consider that the Western History Association http://www.westernhistoryassociation.org/ has just given birth to an offshoot, the WILD Western History Association. http://wildwesthistory.org/ The stiffened collars of the professors smash into the open-necked flannel shirt guys. There are phonies and martyrs on both sides. Even a few women. Damn few minorities.

Like Heather, I count Howard as a martyr but not a saint. He was a wonderfully charismatic and seductive man in the style of Clark Gable, mustache and all. His and his agent’s hope was that “Strange Empire” would finally become a movie. (It’s still a good idea.) His publisher, William Morrow, made the choice stark: do you want to produce an admirable but unread academic book or do you want to sell books? The same untenable choice persists today, but in 1951 with an ailing mother and health issues of his own, Howard was so paralyzed that he was advised to seek psychiatric help. Since he was in Great Falls and considering that post-WWII psychiatry was about conformity, I doubt that it was good advice. After Howard’s death Bernard de Voto tried to reclaim the not-quite-finished manuscript. Just this last few weeks arguments about de Voto have been going back and forth on the Western History listserv. This is an unfinished issue. Devine’s book about Howard is maybe more relevant than ever.

Now that we are post-modern and some of us are even post-post-modern, meaning that one has to actively decide how to read and reflect rather than simply accepting the consensus wisdom, there is a lot of thinking and meta-thinking to do. Can we accept the experience of people actually IN the subject matter, with full emotion and moral emphasis? Is the white academic Euro-defined scholar any wiser than the rest of us? Is there any such thing as a fact? What does gender and sexuality have to do with it, especially when there is an ethno-divide that runs between partners but not their children, who must create a new culture? Why do we privilege paper records over real speaking people in the landscape that shaped them? Why is love excluded?

Some have tried to read between the lines of Howard’s partnership with his mother instead of a wife. They don’t seem to get the reality of money, both the cost of his mother’s bad health, of his own bad habits (alcohol and tobacco), and the expense of travel and correspondence when doing historical research. This was all before the Internet which has at least cut down on the cost of copying and mailing materials. But Howard was basically living on the profit from his earlier book, “Montana, High, Wide and Handsome,” plus being paid for managing the Regional Arts Roundup, which must have been a predecessor of the contemporary Montana Festival of the Book. It had just concluded when the killer heart attack struck.

While at the library I also checked out a Peter Bowen novel. Bowen lived in Choteau for a while. A small Metis community persists there as well as at Heart Butte. St. Mary’s and other quiet corners, partly because the Cree-Chippewa-identified Red River people were assigned to this reservation and their descendants still persist. Bowen restores all the passion and excess of a proud Metis, along with the French fiddling and dancing that show up at Valier parades. In Choteau there is a replica of a Metis cabin.

The US scholars wrote off both Howard and Devine as Canadians, and vice versa from the other side of the border, but Devine had a validation not available to Howard. She won an award from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The $1,000 cheque prize was immediately spent on the Christi Belcourt pointillist acrylic painting that is the cover art for her book. The pattern is of Cree-Chippewa floral beading on black velvet.

FRAKKING

2012-01-23T09:56:00.001-07:00

Oil on the Blackfeet rez has been a hot issue for more than a century. From the beginning it has driven a wedge between the older, more traditional people who thought the US Government would protect their interests in a context they could not hope to understand and the younger more activist people who felt competent to learn whatever was necessary and take charge of their own decisions. This split was an opportunity -- as all splits are -- for wheelers/dealers/sneakers/traitors to increase their webwork of inside info and sweet deals. The antidote is knowledge, so I was delighted to see the GF Tribune add a regular feature, an Oil and Gas Report written by Darryl Flowers, who is the publisher of the Fairfield newspaper, The Sun Times.

I did not know that oil wells have names, but that’s how Flowers lists them. Here are some of the local wells he has mentioned so far:

Anschutz Exploration Corporation:

SW Browning 1-35H-32-11 in Glacier County, aiming for a depth of 11,725. It is a horizontal well, meaning (I suppose) that it is drilling sideways, one of the new capacities that seems likely to restore old wells.

Paisley 1-4-37-13 in Glacier County.

Rosetta Resources

Brandvold 3509-25-05, completed at 7,502 feet.

Glacier Farms 3207-22-12, 6,200 feet.

Benton Bench 16-5-28-4 is a vertical well by Primary Petroleum Company USA that is aiming for the Duperow formation at 5,000 feet.

UnionTown

New Miami 42-20H (west of Dupuyer) is using horizontal drilling to get at the Sweetgrass Arch and is actually producing oil. They expect to place as many as 17 wells to tap the Sun River Dolomite pay zone in the Madison formation.

Newfield Production

Peacemaker 1-5H (NW NW 5-33N-6W) in Glacier County went to 9,038 feet, shooting for the Nisku Formation,

Flowers contacted companies that provide the drilling rigs and they claimed there are about a thousand of them out there. I don’t know how many jobs that represents. One must count clericals and community impact like cafes and motels. The real boom is over on the Dakota border where the Bakken formation promises major strikes. Those small towns have now discovered the dark frontier side of boomtowns: a teacher out jogging as she was accustomed to do has disappeared, evidently into the tar pit of a couple of violent floaters who had come looking for work. People in Valier are salivating over the prospect of oil field money but not thinking much about having to start locking their doors and hire more peace officers.

Throwing such a big rock into our small ponds has a lot of impact. Rings of waves go out and out. One faction is insisting that we must provide more rentals to prevent boom-town trailer ghettos, and suddenly there are people trying to map out subdivisions and others figuring out whether their deceased grandma’s house might be rentable. Maybe the Panther Cafe or the motel might finally find buyers -- or maybe the present owners will take them off the market.

Here’s my amateur English teacher version of origins. Once upon a time there was a continent-wide not-very-deep ocean covering the whole prairie from here to the Midwest. At some point, due to plate tectonics, the continent tilted up along the Rocky Mountains and creased at the Mississippi River, which drained off the water. But the bitter alkali and salt remains in our soils and the water itself is in underground pools called aquifers, some of them sealed over with limestone formed by the zillions of years of tiny shells of animals that died in that shallow water.

Much of what we see now as land formations were once underwater and began life as reefs and atolls, home for little squiddy things as well as shelly things. All along the water’s edge or where bumps stuck up, there was vegetation and, to take advantage, browsers and then carnivores to eat the browsers. It was tropical here then, and there were no mammals because they hadn’t been invented yet. We’re talking dinosaurs and giant ferns.

When the weather or the meteorites or whatever killed all these carbon-based creatures -- plants and animals alike -- and then crushed them under millennia and millennia of geological developments, they became oil. So there are pockets of oil, of gas, and of water under the surface. Our small towns exist because of those water pockets or else because of the run-off from the mountains that at this point accumulate snow all winter. The snow load seems to be diminishing enough to stop creating glaciers or even maintaining them. So the pockets of water under the ground are more crucial and more non-renewable.

One of the ways to get more oil and gas out of the ground is to inject water into wells to make the pressure break up the solid rock formations into fractured, cracked rock. (Frakking.) This injected water is loaded with chemicals. There is no real way to tell whether this undrinkable and harmful water will seep over into the pockets of water we’re using at wells and watering ponds for livestock. In some cases the frakking has opened pathways for gas to get into water dramatically enough that one can set fire to what comes out of the kitchen tap. Also, the injections are highly pressurized and there is some evidence that they can trigger local earthquakes. All these consequences are irreversible: no backing out of frakking.

Here’s where the rez comes back into the picture. Oil companies started contacting people early to get contracts before the bad publicity got around. They hired people to comb the records for people who didn’t live here any more, to find and call them. And they hired older people with some education and a big need for money to get to the more traditional tribal members who might be susceptible to a pitch about how harmless frakking is.

As statewide pushback, the Montana Farmers Association has begun offering workshops on leasing that are drawing big crowds in sub-zero weather. A category of people called “landmen,” who had mostly cleared out when the last wave of drilling ended, are now back. Sort of like the “locaters” who helped the homesteaders find good claims. Some reliable, some not. It’s hard to tell when the laws and regulations are complex.

Flowers’ articles are hard to read until one has a little experience. It can’t be harder than the sports analysis or politics, can it? In many ways it’s the same thing: winners and losers, the inevitable split everywhere.

2012-01-22T08:45:00.002-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LG2CJzvro&feature=player_embedded#!

Don’t worry. The apocalypse is only human. This is an apocsploitation film. Sort of, since it’s really kind of “meta.” (Thinking about thinking.) Sort of like the philosophy of car crash porn in which death displaces sex. There IS apocalypse porn that’s about sex -- “the world is ending -- jump into bed!” Sort of like the idea that if you’re already dying of cancer, why not light up a Marlboro?

Here’s a quote from David Spangler, the Findhorn guy: “There’s a long history of this [apocalyptic stories] in Western culture. Usually, the scenario is that a special group will be saved (which almost always includes the one making the prophecy) while everyone else will either die or go through a period of tribulation and suffering . . . I call this “apocalypse porn.” It can be addictive, and it reduces people to victims in a planetary disaster movie. It is disempowering because it suggests that change cannot come through human effort and transformation or through joy and creativity but only through disaster and suffering. . . .There is a lighter version (“soft-core apocalypse porn”) in which the earth or civilization are not wholly destroyed but there are still enough disasters and catastrophes to bring about a change of consciousness in people that in turn will lead to building a bright, new world.”

Then there’s a kind of psych version that proposes that apocalypse is continuous because we are always destroying the personal world handed to us by the previous generations and then creating a new world, what Novak, the guy in that video, calls the “paleofuture.” (I like it. Beats saying “today is the first day of the rest of your life.”) Not just the social and physical world we live in that apocalyptically explodes or withers -- it’s also the Heaven and Hell of our parents. (That’s the part the evangelicals miss. They want to hang onto Heaven for themselves and Hell for us.) The Apocalypse we envision now even destroys God along with the world, because God is humanoid and Heaven is Earthoid. Hell, too. All gone.

I’ve proposed in my “Molten Chalice” manuscript that religion is meant to be the interface between what is impossibly inconceivable to humans as opposed to what we humans can and do know. In the hunter/gatherer times the interface was nature itself -- a mountain, a shore, the animals, the life force we inhabit. In the Old Testament times during the shift to agricultural and domesticated animals, when we were adjusting to the built environment we created by walling our granaries and guarding our wells, we went to a KingGod, very humanoid. Burn meat to please the guy. Then the New Testament, describing a time of dynamic populations, went to a FatherGod, with a Son as interface and bread and wine as sacrifices.

This is way oversimplified and sophomoric, but it leads to some interesting questions. What is our interface with a non-anthropomorphic, non-anthropocentric still-mysterious cosmos? And what are the sacrifices that will propitiate it? And what is an apocalypse in a cosmos if apocalypse is only the destruction of the human anyway? So now we’ve got a meta-apocalypse that has destroyed itself.

The term, “apocalypse porn”, came to my attention at the environmental listservs in a discussion about Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” I suggested it was just a burnt-out (ashen) version of “Blood Meridian.” Others thought “The Road” was hopeful. One writer has proposed that just recently apocalyptic novels and film have changed in that they have abandoned the causes of the trouble -- no longer is it nuclear war or climate change or an invasion from outer space. Instead, it is about how to cope afterwards. It has “softened.”

One researcher was a bit taken aback when interviewing people who had believed in the most recent apocalypse, disposed of their belongings, and gone to the top of the mountain to await whatever destruction might come. When nothing happened they were not relieved -- they were ANGRY. They WANTED apocalypse. One woman said she HATED this world, it SUCKED, she wanted it destroyed. She said she had a bad marriage, a worse job, and was waaaay overweight. Her desired apocalypse was personal. Instead of divorce, an employment agency, and Weight Watchers, she wanted God to destroy everyone, EVERYONE !!! She thought of it as a clean start, but it sounded more like revenge.

For a while in environmental circles -- as the youngsters slowly began to understand how much we are to blame for global warming, trash gyres in the oceans, species loss, oil spills, and so on -- there was a wave of self-hatred. The comic strip called B.C. was always showing the planet complaining about being infested and wishing to get rid of its infecting humans. The theme didn’t last long and pretty soon people were back to saying, “Oh, if we don’t develop the planet, we’ll all starve!!”

Much of our religious theory has been about personal individual salvation: what must I do to be saved? Jesus died for YOU -- not for all humankind. Not for all living beings. Not for the planet. And what use is salvation and eternal life if you don’t even know where Heaven is these days?

We need to shift to a model of participation -- all things being connected. What is the quality of your connection? In truth, scientifically, humans are simply a product of the crust of the planet earth which provided the minute clay molds for the molecular patterning that was the first life, then the resources (sun, wind, water, oxygen) for the long complexification that is still going on. Our brains are still developing. We’ve just found out how much brain cells change continuously throughout life, like everything else. When I was in high school, we were taught that brain cells were permanent and irreplaceable. Now that we can look at the insides of individual cells, we find them to be very busy and constantly changing places, just like all the rest of the universe, and to be stringing communication filaments among themselves faster than Verizon.

Can you hear me now? Take my hand. I need the connection.

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK

2012-01-21T09:19:00.002-07:00

I don’t think I was supposed to read “The Mad Man.” Someone told me that Samuel R. Delany was a major sci-fi philosopher and writer so I bought a second-hand copy of this one of his works by mail. Once I spend money on a book (I think it cost a $1), I read it. The beginning, a “proem” about a huge obscene roc/griffin monster, was wild and impressive. The rest was a little hard for nice ladies to relate to. I’m not recommending this book.

Luckily some parts of my life have not been nice. In the nineties I lived in a decrepit apartment in Portland. There were three of us in the building who were or had been ministers. Me; a divorced guy with teenaged kids who lived in a basement studio; and up on the top back corner a black guy, not unlike Andre Braugher. Bald. Intelligent. His apartment had a hole in the ceiling/roof big enough for a vampire to fly out of at night. He told me about it (I tried to be friends with him) and I tried to get a city inspector to take a look, but the occupant wouldn’t open up. This third minister had a special ministry for people with AIDS. I still have his card in my Rolodex, but I doubt he still exists. A sweet little old white lady would come to drive him to church on Sundays. He didn’t have a car. He was civil but not friendly.

When he left, the manager of the apartments was outraged at the horrendous mess -- not the hole in the ceiling, but the stinking trash bags of beer cans and takeout boxes stacked to the ceiling that crammed the kitchen and in the front room a huge avalanche of AIDS materials: books, curriculums, handouts. On top of the four-foot-high heap was an upside-down emerald green velvet Victorian settee -- a beautiful thing. Probably a gift from a little old lady. The manager raved, “This guy had to be insane! What does this mean? How could he do this?”

I said, “He was one helluva mad man.” Double meaning.

The trashed apartments in this book are not just a mess. They are also full of excretions of every male human kind. From the description I would say I saw (and smelled) two places like that in my career as an animal control officer. One was a house inhabited by more than sixty chihuahua mixes and one old lady. There was a three inch layer of dog shit on top of everything, which included a lot of boxes of Salvation Army clothing. In the end they bulldozed the house and burned it. The other was a house where a young woman who had nine Great Danes had to let them go in and out the window because the door was blocked by a layer of shit six inches thick. The guy who contracted to remove it took out four pickup loads. I’m saying this book is supposed to be fantasy, but maybe not.

People just underestimate how easy it is, once such things get out of hand, to get used to it. But that’s not quite what this book is about: it’s about street people, abandoned, repellent, rejected, and yet somehow able to form bonds among each other. But there’s more to it than that and probably someone will tell me about it.

The MAIN thing I get is a kind of riff that might be only my own: the preoccupation of high-flown literary academics with the down and out. We three ministers in the apartment building, who hardly knew each other, were of the same type: liberal by principle, academic by preparation for the ministry, and do-gooders as justification. There’s a kind of symbiosis between the theories and the realities. It’s almost like crime fiction, except that for that one needs a head for plot, some narrative skills, and so on. A theological education is more like philosophy. Why people do stuff, what will redeem them. Any of the three of us could have been the main narrator of this fat novel, who is dedicated to investigating the work and death of an older philosopher, but is captured by his low life. None of us would have gone to these lengths. I THINK. (I'm prevented by gender.) It was the dawn of the AIDS danger, but the guys in this book were more in danger of dying of e. coli or hypothermia from being soaked with various substances.

The great advantage of buying a used book is that someone already made notes that are often very helpful. (The disadvantage of a used book is that this one smelled like pee and I had to spray it with “Pet Stain and Odor Remover” to tolerate it at all.) An educated guy with a ballpoint pen had drawn a line alongside the notable paragraphs. He wrote neat remarks like: “NB: not only rel to rev -- to norema’s revelation & mirror -- strat -- also a new angle on waste -- def where ‘chaos’ etc. comes in now.” The reference escapes me. I did catch another one about Heraclitus though. And I rather liked a quote on in the inside of the back cover: “Why If You Must be a Savage You Should Be a Noble One.” (It might be a title.)

I’m not sure these guys quite qualify as noble savages. Neither have I figured out the meaning of the Old Poet, who was a female in a wheelchair living at Big Sur -- a friend, scholar, and preserver of manuscripts by the philosopher/poet we never quite know much about. The Old Poet is white. (Race winds in and out. Delany is black.) She seems to be a person of privilege and status in the old-fashioned academic world, whereas the narrator is one of the great mass of people who have done all the work for their Ph.D. except their thesis.

Delany himself says explicitly that the book is not about homelessness or it would be far harsher. (There are no winter scenes.) He says, “It is quite sobering to think that the Great American Novel to come will have to be so little to do with the “American Dream” but will have to be far nearer a contemporary Les Miserables.” This was 1994. Was “Les Miz” on Broadway then? The book ends with a serious (seroconversion) medical warning about AIDS, dated 1987, originally printed in “The Lancet.”

Is it better or worse that now the misery books are on an electronic device that will serve up photos, video interviews, relevant music (what is the relevant music for AIDS?), movie clips, and maybe a link to “thebody.com?” The male liberal intellectuals are still endlessly curious and intent on slumming. There probably really are street guys out there who are a cross between Paul Bunyan and Peter Lorre, as envisioned by Grace Metalious. If they can get access to the meds they need by now.

Somehow, the most realistic and convincing figure is that taurine gargoyle crouched, reeking, glinting of metal, scaled and feathered, tufted and spiked, too obscene for me to describe exactly here. Oddly familiar to some of us. Pogo, who knew his swamp creatures, would recognize it.

I SIT HERE TYPING

2012-01-20T09:44:00.002-07:00

I was into the Ira Progoff Journal method once. www.intensivejournal.org/ Left my journal in a briefcase in my van while I hiked Macleay Park in Portland and it was stolen. At least they didn’t take the van. The journal was not a big loss. But it’s an interesting method.

You start by divvying up your time-line. Make a list of “steppingstones” like when you moved, when you had an operation, when you went to a new school, your jobs, and so on. Of course, this is meant for nice stable middle-class people who can pay for intensive journal workshops, so writing a list of the milestones won’t be tough: pre-school, primary, grade school, jr. high, high school. community college, state university. First job. Maybe a few more. Marriage. Kids. Grandkids. With a little luck, retirement. That’s about it. March, march, march, march.

Then you go back to the spaces in between the steppingstones and think of a metaphor that describes it: waterlily drifting, Harley roaring, a loaf of white bread, fireworks over a lake -- really more like how you felt about it than whether it’s accurate. In fact, the steppingstones don’t matter all that much. Just put down the ones that seemed important, a point of transformation or resignation. This is where it gets interesting.

They sell you a three-ring binder with tabbed dividers for doing this work, because the steppingstones are only the beginning. There is a whole series of assignments about different aspects of your life. Workshops are set up for you to sit in a room with the other people, write to an assigned topic under the guidance of a leader, and maybe read a paragraph or two out loud to the group. This is Jungian theory filtered through the Sixties and reframed for a certain kind of person.

The new take on Jung (“A Dangerous Method” by the same guy that did “The Black Swan,” David Cronenberg) breaks up this “nice” memoir mode. Instead of the Shared Depth Consciousness, this director is saying, “Hey, this stuff is all experimental anyway. Why NOT have sex with your therapist?” There’s a new day coming. Or already here. But remember this is the guy who made the movie about being turned into a fly because why NOT experiment on yourself?” (Straight from "why-not" to horror.) Jung, Freud, et al can be taken in a number of directions -- some safe, some not. My first Progoff journal must have been in the Seventies and it was very safe. If I were to write a new journal, the first thing I would do is dump Progoff. Or even Jung. If they think an hysterical pretty girl screaming and pounding is dangerous, they don’t know “nuthin’.”

I always want to start back a few generations, which can be dangerous because people (family) get angry. That’s where they start arguing about “facts” when facts really have very little to do with it. I think about the huge forces acting on the planet: climate, war, comets flaming across the skies. Whole populations moving across the continents or seas. Immigration, economics, secrets, sham identities.

Though I missed the Great Depression, barely, it had something to do with my parents marrying late and starting life in a repossessed house, a little nicer than they could have bought otherwise. But the Depression also meant my mother had to drop out of college, which made her determined to get me through to graduation (bachelor’s), which connected up with her going back in the middle of her forties, which probably connected up with me going back to seminary in the middle of my forties. But why did my grad school make her so angry?

My father’s family made sure that as the oldest he got his Master’s degree, but it was in agriculture, which meant he didn’t know anything about the humanities world except the names of the famous people. His idea of an intellectual life was playing chess and subscribing to magazines -- which I read. All of ‘em. Life, Collier’s, Look, Time, US News & World Report, Redbook, Reader’s Digest, Boy’s Life. It was Life that told us who was a genius: Picasso, Pollock, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Mailer. All identified by Manhattan/European/Jewish Immigrants. He also subscribed to the Police Gazette, accounts of sex and murder. So I had a funny split in the way I saw the world. We all did.

In the Fifties the relief of winning WWII was sometimes just exhaustion. As a family we traveled across the USA and into Canada, admiring the huge engineering projects like the Grand Coulee Dam. Camping in all the famous parks: Banff, Yellowstone, Yosemite -- we missed Glacier, which is why I’m here now. It was a 1961 make-up for a wrong turn my mother took in 1953 while my father was asleep. We kids were either fighting or drugged on comic books. We slept in a tent trailer along the road or sometimes in a “tourist cabin,” tiny minimal places.

Everywhere we went, people seemed a little stunned. Everything needed a coat of paint. Every small town had many bar signs, two kinds -- a straight-sided stemmed Martini glass or a round-bowled champagne glass. We didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, go to dances. Every meal except breakfast was a hamburger and a shake. Dakota and Michigan were crammed with our relatives, or so it seemed. Small town and rural folks. In high school (Class of 1957) I refused to go on any more family trips and stayed home alone.

Going off to college in Chicago was like walking off a cliff. I had no idea. Still processing it. So are my classmates from then. It was immersion theatre; it was Jung-er than Jung; it was religion; it was class/culture issues; it was sexuality challenged. You wanna talk danger? We were at risk. Never for anything criminal, but . . . Several were insane enough to be institutionalized. I guess figuring that out would make this a memoir worth reading by someone else.

The reservation years were a great gift. Couldn’t be duplicated now. I was a child again and this time I got a lot closer to growing up. Bob used to say that instead of him paying alimony, I should pay him tuition for the education he gave me. He was right.

In the animal control years I discovered my strength, which was hard determination rather than flexibility. That segued into the ministry in a solid but counter-intuitive way. I was tough, and -- one counselor told me -- counter-phobic (see something terrifying, deliberately walk right into it) and fatalistic (willing to risk death), which worked in both contexts. Animal control is a street job, not a shelter job, and in a devious way, so is the ministry -- just more dangerous. Ministry, I mean. After ten years it was clearly not suitable for me.

Then came the Nineties doing data entry in Portland downtown: drug gangs shooting in the streets, homeless people old and young everywhere, political corruption, gambling with lives over floods, dead women found in trash bags under houses. (So repetitive.) Black issues, not at all like NA politics -- two majorities struggling. I escaped to Valier just in time to get my book about Bob Scriver published before the whole industry crashed.

We don’t know what will happen next -- none of us do. That’s probably a good thing. The last five years have been the most exciting and most dangerous yet. And all I did was sit here typing.

WHITE OUT

2012-01-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

THIS IS A WHITEOUT IN PROTEST OF WIKIPEDIA.

ALSO IN SYMPATHY WITH MOTHER NATURE.

ALL THE VARIOUS PORNS

2012-01-18T10:00:00.003-07:00

Among my bookmarked pages is one called “bookshelf porn.” (bookshelfporn.com) It’s all photos but none of the shelves are naked. I don’t dare look for long or I get feverish.

Word roots: “porne” comes from Greek for prostitute and graphic comes from “graphein” to write. Pornography is a concept that baffles even the Supreme Court. Clearly it is supposed to be about pleasure. (How is being a prostitute a pleasure?) Clearly something is supposed to be TOO pleasant, so much so that it has to be controlled by stigma, the imposition of social taboo and scorn. (People here sneer at my books. “Get a life,” they say.) Money is involved -- money paid for something that one ordinarily thinks of as a gift (intimate expression of love) or an assault (unwanted forceful penetration). (“You gotta lotta bucks in these books.”) So, a monetary transaction that is pleasant on one side and profitable on the other. Well, heck, that’s life, isn’t it? So much so that we can talk about “food porn” or “fashion porn” -- almost anything that seems a little too pleasant and a little too expensive, offending two Puritan taboos at once.

What was up with those guys anyway? Did life have to be one long hairshirt? Isn’t that “prudery porn”? “Asceticism porn”? That stuff can get to be pretty expensive, especially emotionally. If porn is just skimming the top off of the real full-scale experience, like eating the frosting off a cupcake, then I can imagine the thrill of sitting on the Seat of Scorn. (It’s in Psalm One -- I looked it up.) But is that the full-scale experience of denying, constricting, censoring? (I’m starting to sound like a character out of “Homicide.” Oh, hey. Maybe the full version of scorn is murder. I’m onto something.)

Part of the problem with porn is knowing where to locate the source. Is it in society, who seems to believe they have the right to draw the line, maybe by confining all the merriment to Merrymount? (Historical reference. Look it up.) Or is it in the consumer, who doesn’t want all the fuss and bother of having to develop full-scale relationships in order to have sex ? (Why is it always about sex? Why isn’t it about money? Or politics?) Or is it in the producer, who has a shrewd idea of what to “make” that will sell?

Of course, once the commerce angle gets into it, there is the question of high-end porn versus low-end porn, which immediately means that there are class issues in this business, just like every business. Aesthetics may be one dimension -- how skillful and beautiful the porn is. How much power can entitle the consumer to do the most extreme thing that is even more stigmatized, like the eroticism of killing small animals or even human beings -- the “kill thrill.” (Maybe only governments are entitled to that.) Isn’t that young man just arrested for killing homeless men (his own father is homeless) indulging in “murder porn”? Homeless men is pretty low-end. What about the guy just arrested for killing society girls in Caribbean resorts? Is that high end?

The environmental listservs to which I subscribe have just begun to consider “enviro porn.” The class issue pertains here, too, because some people can afford to visit exotic spots, but I responded to the idea right away because tourists of all incomes come here, spot a snow-capped mountain, and sigh, “Oh, how beautiful!” They are conditioned by National Geographic in much the same way as naive men are conditioned by Playboy. (Sex is blonde sixteen-year-old girls on the pill.)

Personally, I’m susceptible to “shelter porn”, not so much the log/plateglass/corten-steel ridged-roof, stone mansions of rich people in Montana, but more the country cottage that’s a little rough, a little unexpected. Maybe a converted old railroad station. Not that I could or would BUY something, but that I like the pretty pictures -- isn’t that the same as porn? There’s a wide streak of Puritanism in the environmental movement, too, and they would insist on the ecological soundness of every aspect. Is it possible to have porn without Puritans? Is every context veined with sin and virtue? Isn’t there any just plain vanilla innocent life?

Alongside -- or maybe interwoven -- the continuum of money and class is the continuum of drugs and criminalization. It’s not a neat inclined plane but a twisted synergy of teasing, addiction, enslavement, that comes as much from the assumptions and practices of those who criminalize (using a Puritan entitlement) and stigmatize the most vulnerable on that continuum they can find (those who need the drugs because of their wretched lives) -- and dine out with the sleek beneficiaries of the criminalizations. (politicians, CEO’s, police commissioners) Then comes disease and the medicalization of sin, which provides even more stigma plus greater exclusion and blame. (“You aren’t taking your meds, are you?”) And that leads into more blame for poverty because every profit of some individuals has to go for meds that are sold at a huge markup by pharm corporations. (Since corporations have been ruled to be persons, they can be murderers, too.)

Writers have to take some responsibility for this. They love the plot elements of all-of-the-above for their own pornographic versions of real life. Even the writers who hope to be true and revolutionary end up repeating the same old stereotypes because if they really knew through their own experience, they would not be in a position to write. Nor am I. Everything is second-hand. If you’re talking about sex and drugs.

But I’m talking about life. Sex and drugs are not separate categories of being. Our ordinary days, our little management habits in the worlds of food, clothing, and transportation, are also tracking along the same paths. My bookshelves may be as pornographic as any. A carpenter once expressed horror that they are so poorly made. (Knocked together boards that I carried around for decades.) Someone else noted how dangerous they are, since they’re just piled up there, not attached to the wall. In fact, they have a tendency to bow out at the sides. I keep a long clamp on one so it won’t separate enough to dump the shelves of books. Very low-end this is. (The clamp makes a good radio antenna, too.)

I have books that would shock some people, though would have to be people who read since not many of them have pictures. A few expensive ones. Drugs, they are. Don’t get me started on the kind of work I’ve had to do to survive in this world and that have pressed me into rebellion. It wasn’t sexy. But I had my pleasures.

Pornography/prostitution are metonymes, the kind of metaphor that uses the part for the whole (like "skirt" to mean woman). Reading about it, paying for bits about it, instead of IT. I do know a thing or two about the continuums of religious porn. If you extend one of those lines out far enough it will reach around the planet back to the beginning, like the equator. After church one Sunday a nerdy guy came into my office and said, “A minister is meant to attend to my needs. I need sex. Therefore, you should go to bed with me.”

I stood up. I was a foot taller than he was. I said, “Well, as a minister I’m pretty low rent, but I charge a helluva lot more to be the Temple Whore.” He left. I had a lot of bookshelves in that office. I built them myself.

LITURGICAL SMELLS

2012-01-17T08:53:00.002-07:00

Of all the conventional five senses (as distinguished from the less-considered senses like orientation in space or internal distention, or non-ocular light sensitivity) smell is the most primal, since it is the earliest sense, present even in a one-celled animal, for it is the detection of molecules in dispersal, either in fluid or gas. Those without this perception cannot find substances nor avoid substances, nor distinguish whether they are good or bad.

In mammals the sense of smell is directly connected to the brain, even more so than the eyes, and linked neurally directly to the hippocampus which is the locus of memory sorting for preservation. Smells and information or incidents linked with smells are more memorable -- remembered longer and more vividly. Memories connected to “unpleasant” odors (subjective as that may be) are remembered better than those associated with “pleasant” odors. This makes sense in two ways: toxins and rot should be remembered so as to avoid them, and the funky smells of intimate bodies associated with intense stimulation (not just pheromones) should not be forgotten for positive reasons. But unless you’re a bee, the smells of flowers don’t matter that much -- they are decorations.

Octavian Coifan, on his blog called 1000fragrances.blogspot.com, is often eloquent about the primal connection between perfumes and religion. Consider this review of Aesop Mystra, which comes in a small brown bottle as though it were medicine.

“. . . Taking inspiration from religion or past is a hard work but Aesop succeeds at it in all ways. It's not the opulent sexy Byzantine perfume that would make you feel attractive .... but a mysterious mixture like a formula from the past that would transport you in other world. The main ingredients are incense, labdanum and mastic, and a lot of other naturals that would make it dark and uneasy to explore. There is an unusual quality I found inside - it’s profoundly animalic and dirty like a sinful woman. It has the combination of jasmin-amber-musk of the old world. . . a whisper of death in a decadent universe. “

Unafraid of being offensive because he’s in pursuit of deep truths, he traces the associations of perfume to the preservation of the dead, the attempt to prevent corruption, the need to disinfect, and the original substances used by the Egyptians for mummification. “Natron” (which is merely sodium bicarbonate to dry the tissues), minerals, bark derivatives, alcohol, acids, salts, resins, oils were all used and became associated with the hope for an afterlife. Frankincense and myrrh. All aromatics.

Another source of memorable smells is fire and burning. Smudges. Incense. For those people who maintained household fires, the collection and uses of different kinds of wood became a vocabulary in themselves: what burns hot, what makes smoke, what holds embers -- each with a distinctive smell. Through the long period when religious offerings were creatures, burnt flesh in the temple sent messages to Heaven. Add burnt feathers, bone and hair. Ritual cremations of humans at death. As soon as people understood how to make a fire hot enough to smelt metal, those pungent smells also became associated with acts so powerful and mysterious as to amount to magic.

Tanning is a messy process, fairly odorous. First, some means of removing the water in the new skin with salt or other dessicant is necessary; then working out the sub-cutaneous fat, perhaps by diluting it with the fat of brains, well rubbed in; and then removing the glue with a mild acid, maybe vinegar or urine. Native Americans used smoke to preserve. In Europe elegant leather gloves, still retaining a whiff of tanning methods, were all the rage in some historical periods, and traditionally scented by keeping them in a sandalwood box. Shawls being shipped from India were packed with patchouli, an aromatic plant that repels insects. Tobacco and sweetgrass did that, too. Maybe camphor or menthol. Where there is wealth, there are preservatives.

The smells of the pest house and various corruptions were fought with vapors of sulphur and solutions of iodine, all the disinfectants like ammonia or pine-sol and lye. Garlic and mustard were used as poultices. Even so came creeping the reeks of excrement, vomit and rot. Skilled doctors used their noses as much as their eyes to understand what was happening. Not many of us know the smell of blood as well as they did. (I’ve never understood why it smells coppery when it is in fact mostly iron.)

Then the smells of food preservation: pepper, chili, vinegar, char, cinnamon, dill, various dried substances both animal and vegetable, sometimes mineral. The smells of distillation and fermentation, baking and roasting, fresh torn greens and newly shucked peas or corn. These are life-sustaining odors, associated with contentment and energy. The Christian tradition has chosen bread and wine to celebrate, when they could have chosen dried fish or even burnt flesh, but those were about earlier times before households had the time and stability to grind flour or ferment grapes.

The smells of the city and of the industrial age are with us now, but not so associated with religion though they certainly saturate our understanding of reality. Hot asphalt, new tires, WD40, gasoline fumes, hot metal, a passing cigar smoked in the rain on a cold day. Perhaps churches have smells of their own: lemon oil rubbed into the pews, beeswax candles.

Years ago when I was in the ministry I attended the UUA General Assembly back east. It was pretty miserable, too hot and humid. When I got back, I stepped into the dry wind of the little Helena airport and found that all the sweet clover had just bloomed, billowing in a yellow cloud everywhere. When the burnt jet fuel blew off, which didn’t take long in a stiff Montana breeze, I was saturated by the honeyed smell of those weeds. It was so healing that I sat down on the curb instead of going to my pickup and on home. I sat there a long time. Sure, I know that the “sweet” smell of sweetgrass and sweetclover and even sweetpine (balsam fir) is coumadin, which is the blood thinner many people take as medicine. It’s the effective ingredient in rat poison (renamed Warfarin). But my blood needed thinning.

Something similar happened again on another occasion except that I was flying in and out of Portland and got back on a warm spring evening when the frogs had just burst into song in the slough next to the airport parking lot. I stayed there a while, too, watching the full moon rise over the Columbia River. These two threshold experiences are so deeply embedded in my sense memory bank that when I grow very old and can’t smell anymore, I’ll still be able to summon at least one Holy smell and one Sacred sound.

THE MAN WITH THE ANTLERS

2012-01-16T06:42:00.002-07:00

A beautiful and intelligent woman once spent an hour at a national conference swearing me to secrecy and then telling me about every powerful man she’d ever been to bed with. Everyone already knew, so she was basically boasting and also informing me that I was no threat. Her premise was that the duty of a woman was to attract and you-know-what only physically impressive and politically powerful men because that was the only way to guarantee the success of the children she would bear. Presumably, his genes would be good and he would be able to provide for a family. She did not care to think about the dark side of this plan.

Barbara Richard (http://www.dancingonhisgrave.com/) has written a trilogy, with the help of her mother and sisters, about a family dominated by a man with antlers, the herd stallion, an alpha male, who kept his harem in line with sex and violence, whipping them bloody. She has also been able to illuminate why five daughters and their mother, all of them gifted and intelligent, would stay and endure such a situation; how heredity, society and economics conspired to create this man with antlers too big for his head; and what modern research has to say about it. They call such a man a “narcissistic sociopath” -- no conscience -- and estimate that as many as 5% or even 8% of all people have somehow escaped having compassion or empathy or simple decency. They are often willing to sacrifice anything or anybody in their attempts to be the now-legendary 1% who are better than everyone else because they have the money. They are like biting dogs: if a small dog bites you, that’s one thing. If a really big dog bites you, the wound will be serious. This is why at first there were no mean St. Bernards: any such dog without the instinct to protect was simply destroyed. Out in the country a truly mean bull or stallion is simply too dangerous not to kill. But we don’t do that with people. Until they kill a few other people. And get caught. A lot of men are just small dogs with a big dog complex.

The nineteenth century in middle America has mostly been celebrated as an exemplar of progress, lifting up the hard-working immigrants (at the expense of hard-dying Native Americans) into prosperous small towns and homesteads carved out of the tall grass prairie. How tall? Sometimes twenty feet tall, a sea of grass that had to be burned off before it could be plowed. There are plenty of stories about how hard it was on the people, human plowshares broken against the sod of nature, burned in the consuming economic possibilities as the new railroads brought more and more and more desperate people to what amounted to a threshing floor. The weak simply died, or if they had family back east, went home.

The strong lived by a code of honor: work is everything, a powerful man should take whatever he could, women must buckle under to their men and could get their reward later through loyal children or maybe, if their reproductive powers were weak, in heaven. In the meantime, lay up credits by being publicly virtuous: dress modestly, show up in church, stay clean, hide your hair, sneak your laudanum. Hope to hell you don’t get pregnant too many times because childbirth can kill a woman, let alone the pregnancy itself.

In the last book of the trilogy, “Chasing Ghosts,” it took courage for Barbara and her sisters to unravel the misadventures of their ancestors, both male and female, horse traders, burglars, drunkards, abusers with no sexual boundaries, and the bitter, driving women who rescued the men and bore the children even as they could not rescue themselves. She vividly portrays -- okay, fictionalizes scenes -- these “interstitial” people trying to find a quick fortune with little effort. One man, clearly a guy able to keep his mouth shut, was approached by a tire company to travel the country purporting to sell rubber tires but in fact actually selling latex condoms, newly invented and -- like everything new -- illegal, labeled by the church wicked. (The church wants children, children and more children. Until they are born and hungry.) He did very well for himself until condoms were legalized. Or at least available at the drug store from the back room.

For those who were hopelessly impoverished, it was often the Salvation Army that gave them clothes and enough travel money to move on. No different than today. The city “fathers” resorted to floating troublesome people out of town. Riding the rails was still a possibility if you didn’t know how to steal a horse. How the horses suffered in those days! But best not to hop a freight while you’re drunk.

If 5% of people are sociopaths, in this town of 400 or so where I live, there must be twenty of them, mostly guided along by convention and an alert sheriff’s department, probably most of them still kids or else too old or sick to make trouble. If 1% of people are very rich, there must be four millionaires in town -- more likely on the ranches around town. If 2% per thousand people is a natural Unitarian, then a fraction of me must be it. I don’t know how much I trust such figures, but I recognize the types, the antlered men, the cowering women, the abused kids.

A friend of mine with a father along these lines talks about how waitresses always light up and banter with such men, even when they’re too old to be the engines of lust they once were. Some kind of Clark Gable aura, the strong handsome man with the mustache, excites the tired woman trapped in a small town cafe with an order pad and an apron. It’s strictly a fantasy -- she knows it and he does, too. In the end, frankly, my dear, he won’t give a damn.

Why doesn’t he take care of his children? Why doesn’t he flirt with his wife? He doesn’t have to. He thinks he owns them. They have to do what he says. He can do anything to them in the name of “discipline." The law used to say so, the ministers used to say so. It was the standing order. Everyone thought it was the entitlement of the Man with the Antlers, the Horny Man. Then suddenly everything changed. Thank God! But even now, when my hands aren’t strong enough to take a wrench to a pipe or something and I ask a guy for a moment of his time, he’ll say, “Where’s your man?”

WHEN EVIL IS WHITE

2012-01-15T08:25:00.002-07:00

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/fallujah-the-hidden-massacre/

Do not watch this vid carelessly. My tender-hearted cousins are strongly warned away. The url was sent to me by a Potawatomi poet grandfather I’ve known for fifteen years, since I pretended to be Native American in order to join Reznet. (Oh, I suppose you thought only evil-doers did that!) This man, who really IS Potawatomi, identifies the Evil recorded here with the Evil genocide of the indigenous peoples of all continents, probably going back to the Neanderthals. I agree with him, but I’ve never seen bodies quite like these, though my years of scraping crushed animals off the streets of Portland were an education in mangled tissue.

White phosphorus, or “Willie Pete” in military jargon, is something like napalm and showers intense light and smoke. If it gets on flesh, it burns, dissolves faces . The bodies in the video show this. Their clothes remain. Their skeletons remain. The flesh partly remains and WP doesn’t seem to bother the maggots much. I suppose it’s worn off by the time their eggs are laid. This corrosive stuff was used in the 19th century Fenian revolution in Ireland, in Greece, in just about every war against insurgents, including war on the IWW Wobblies. The video claims to show the results of United States usage of it in Fallujah. There is considerable discussion at the level of international arms negotiations about whether it is a tolerable weapon, how it should be restricted, and so on. Is it worse to kill a child or woman with white phosphorus than it is to kill a soldier? Is it worse to napalm whole countrysides, whole ecologies? Oh, we just use it for the light and smoke, say the military. Sorry about the side effects.

I see this video as a good opportunity to talk about Evil. I try to stick to “religious” topics on Sundays and Evil is just as religious as Good. Evil is often described as being black, but it could just as easily be as white as “Willie Pete.” A whiteout, we prairie people know, can be deadly and a white polar bear is more dangerous than any dark bear. There’s a condition at sea called a “white storm” that is nearly unsurvivable, the turbulent water/wind combination whipped into foam.

Repeatedly I try to say that Evil/Good are HUMAN, just as religion itself is human. Evil results are constructs derived from human ecology/genes/memes as they have played out, region by region, year after year. The fact that Good/Evil are human classifications means that they can be reorganized, reinterpreted, and -- one hopes -- eventually curbed. White phosphorus is not an Evil Substance: it simply IS. Far more terrifying than our personified images of Good (God) and Evil (Satan) is the raw fact of physical existence which is NOT anthropocentric. Neither are its natural “laws” anthropocentric. We all die, no matter how virtuous we are. Few escape suffering. But to destroy masses of other living humans to protect our own wealth and interests is Evil.

What is labeled with stigma and punished with human zeal varies from one time and place to another, but it is always administered with righteous enthusiasm to those who defy authority, whether they try to go off on their own or stay to actively oppose the standing order. Questionable measures taken by either side are usually kept secret or vigorously denied. I’m not saying this idly: in mild ways I’ve been there, done that, been a witness. Now that I’m old and willing to risk a little more, like my Potawatomi friend, I go into forbidden thought territory a little more. Suffering, disease, hatred -- that sort of thing. It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a massive culture-wide re-framing of the rules about Evil that nearly amounts to an insurgency, begun in the Sixties, abandoned, and now somehow appearing again, except this time it has spread around the planet even more than it did last time. What IS bad? And WHY?

Clearly every ecology is an economy: resources for living things (such as people) can give rise to an equity or an inequity. It is the inequitable distribution of resources and the ferocious attempts of people to survive (though their ideas of what survival is might be twisted or excessive) that give rise to Evil. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards, tsunamis, droughts are simply the active surface of the planet and it’s gaseous envelope. The Evil arises in the enforced famines of North Korea, China and Russia when the people are carelessly starved like fishes at the bottom of a drained lake, flopping briefly. Or on the great threshing floor of the homestead years on the American prairie or the urban grinding machines of the industrial revolution which continues in China. Evil is arising today from the overpopulation that makes children into disposable commodities and adults into owned labor, worked until their souls are rubbed out of them. (Doesn’t take long.)

Ironically, overpopulation arises from what we thought was good: sanitation, antibiotics, transportation. So often this happens: a physical fact is converted into immoral destruction: a poppy is just a flower until it is “crack,” called into existence by human craving, either for profit or oblivion. THESE derived things should be labeled Evil. The systems that support unwanted babies, unwanted lives, are so often the result of greed, not just for money but also for respect, for the feeling of worthiness and mattering in the world. Religion is supposed to supply that, even the ones that oppose contraception.

My movie last night was “True Confessions,” the John Gregory Dunne movie from his novel and then screenplay (collaborating with his wife, Joan Didion). With the usual Hollywood cynicism, everything is corrupt, everything is split between the fabulous rich and the blameworthy underclass, and the basic assumption is that if we just KNEW what goes on in church, whorehouse, police station, town hall, everything would be cleaned up by “decent” people. But here we are -- watching a movie that drew a map for us years ago, and nothing has changed. Maybe “Homicide” and its descendent “The Wire” are a little smarter about how systems work and why decent people do Evil things, but they too despair over equitable reform.

Because of the sudden interest in Marie Heavyrunner’s murder, reporters have been finding my blog and calling. The NY Times guy was transparently interested in becoming a hero by revealing the “truth.” The Montana guy had worked with reservations before and knew how convoluted the secrets can be. He doesn’t even mind driving up here. When I suggested to the NY Times guy that in a Third World setting there is always a parallel economy of secrets and sex, his head jumped to Hollywood, something dramatic. The Montana guy knew I meant little accommodations, banal pillowtalk and over-coffee flirtatious tips -- let alone bar gossip. Of course, people have to be a little more careful these days because of all the fancy electronics. Is that guy at the next table talking to his wife or recording your conversation? Even in Fallujah, the images, grinning skulls, are talking on video. They speak Evil.

So where is religion in all this? I don’t know and I don’t think any of the churchly institutions know either. The Roman Catholics, for instance, have discovered that you can’t take sex out of the church's economic network. They are now allowing married men to be priests under special circumstances. Eastern Orthodox and Greek Orthodox priests, who marry, must be grinning through their beards. White teeth. Not evil. Just human.

If you google Marie Heavyrunner you might find a website where people pray for others and see that her daughter, when she couldn’t find her mother, asked those people to pray.

CONSCIOUSNESS (A Chapter from "The Molten Chalice")

2012-01-14T05:42:00.001-07:00

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

Consciousness is as hard to define as “religion” because it is used so carelessly and yet emotionally in so many ways. It is a concept arrived at through introspection, which is part of the problem. But also it is sometimes defined by its lack -- it’s “un” unconsciousness, its wakening. Then there is the Freudian complication which draws a mysterious distinction between things done on purpose, intentionally, and those that are controlled somehow by stored impulses and patterns we don’t even know are there.

Focus, attention, awareness, mood, attitude, frame of mind, receptiveness, inspired, “hot,” are only some of the synonyms and aspects of consciousness. Sometimes consciousness is only “feelings” or instincts and sometimes it is sharp and objective, factual, even mathematical. We are still fascinated by “FLOW, the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.”

Part of the reason we are so interested in flow is that the study of it showed how to achieve it: merely do something you want to do that is at a level of difficulty right at the edge of your capacity to do it, whether chess or mountain climbing or surgery. The result is “absorption” in which one’s brain is so engaged and focused that there is no consciousness of time and even no awareness of pain. Knowing how to achieve flow is a combination of knowing one’s self in all it’s particularity and uniqueness (your style of strategy), and knowing the enterprise at hand in both a technical and participatory subjective way (the strategies of chess). We are sometimes yearning to be able to move from the consciousness of waking into sleep or in some cases, as when driving, to keep from doing that; the consciousness of uncaring to the eroticism that opens sex; the consciousness of fear into the context of bravery; from apathy to engagement. We prize media and events that can take our ordinary consciousness into passion, catharsis, extraordinary sharing. All of this is relevant to religious consciousness.

Surely part of controlling consciousness in oneself and others is the establishment or awareness of a boundary, that threshold/limen, maybe something like the division between Freud’s conscious and subconscious, though that’s a blurry division. I always think of it as a kind of water level, moving around with thoughts like fish leaping into one’s mind for a flash, then diving again. Sometimes there are things passing just under the surface, like a whale going under a boat, only a dark shape to those onboard.

Daily consciousness is a matter of habits, relationships, tasks, and time to reflect. What this manuscript (“The Molten Chalice”) hopes to do is to raise the awareness of ALL sensory inputs, even realizing that unconscious ones are recorded and guessing what they might be, both in the body (muscle tension, breathing, intestines) and out (temperature, smell, movement, other presences) and to suggest their use in the art form called “liturgy” to shift consciousness into a liminal state. Within that liminal state, once achieved, major changes in identity and belief are possible. Conversion, if you like. Visions, if you’ll allow more than sight. Realization, for a less threatening word. “Growth” maybe. More than words, more than any body of literature, more than devotion to a leader or icon, the sum of the body’s life and identity.

This is not a matter of words, but we must acknowledge that “word magic” like “number magic” is powerful and not to be ignored, whether it is Kyrie Eliesen, Open Sesame, Shazam, or Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo. A key to consciousness shifting may be a familiar phrase valorized by use at significant moments. Consider how the ventriloquist uses a magic word to bring a hypnotized person out of a trance.

POINT OF FOCUS

It is characteristic of brains (and eyes which are an extension of brains) that they actually only “see” a part of what they are looking at. Though the cell “pixels” in the retina are picking up information, the brain decides at either the level of whatever sub-part organizes ocular information or at the level of the “dashboard” neuronal workspace what is important. Then the point of focus is aimed at it. This is parallel to what happens with the whole brain: only what is assimilated and interpreted CAN be conscious and even only part of that might be stored in the unconscious or preconscious -- what I’d like to call the “underconscious” since it is not “un” at all. Maybe subconscious. (Actors use what they call the “subtext” which is the forces and information that are not in the script, but “under” the dialogue and action.

The brain can be trained to not see things, it can have damage at the point of transmission or assimilation that prevents awareness of phenomena. Since brains grow and constantly re-allocate cell resources, experience with the phenomena makes it more perceptible. So kids who are used to quick flash-edits in vids and popcorn movies can see MUCH more than adults, but adults who have learned to read faces and situations are far more patient with slow foreign films because they are processing a lot more information than a kid could perceive.

Things that are unimportant to us are simply not noticed. Some things are blocked for psychological reasons, like a new death, which will take time to sort through and assimilate. There is a now-famous experiment in which a man in a gorilla suit walks through an exciting ball game but no one sees the gorilla.

A religious event is no different. People can assimilate what they know, but they may grow if they are exposed to the unfamiliar in ways they can recognize. The expert liturgist knows how to manage both and to weave them together. High value is usually given to media that can take us from a tragic consciousness to a moment of comedy without compromising either one. Laughter in church can be revelatory.

DISSOCIATION

Dissociation is a whole category of states of mind that are outside reality. They could be frank psychosis as in the case of a brain that is not working or they could be a hypnotic state or they could be drug-induced or an out-of-body experience after surgery. Children and sometimes adults who are severely abused will enter this state. These states are coherent and real to the person experiencing them but not to others, who may not know how to react.

Religion has sometimes claimed dissociations like trances, speaking in tongues, having visions and hearing voices. It is always possible that a deeply moving liminal state might cause dissociation.

GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS

Talk to the sports people to find out about actual people grouped physically and sharing. Major coliseum and gymnasium events are among the biggest and most powerful groups, all focused on the game -- either by playing it or participating through mental and emotional sharing. Many of what used to be groups (theatre, classes) have been individualized by electronic devices. Much to explore here.

In general, people in groups pick up cues and energy from the people around them which could either carry them into the moment or possibly exclude them. Turner felt that a characteristic of the liminal state was an essential equality of every person present and the use of reversals.

THE GOAL

Thinking of “flow,” how does the liturgist take the congregation to a level of difficulty right at the edge of their capacity and awaken their consciousness to a new level? How do you learn how to cross the limen, kindle the liminal state, and then leave it? Much of it will have to be sensitivity to the worshipping group and even more will have to do with the ability to handle one’s own consciousness with clarity and stability.

A FINGER, A TOOTH AND A TOE

2012-01-13T09:04:00.002-07:00

A finger, a tooth and a toe change everything.

http://www.edge.org/conversation/rethinking-out-of-africa

This url will bring up both the video and the text of a talk by Christopher Stringer, a paleoanthropologist, who is himself a good example of a cultured and evolved man, which is to say that he is clear-headed, generous, willing to reconsider new facts, and persistent. I recommend the video.

He has been an advocate of the idea that all modern humans evolved from a population in Africa which was over millenia driven by weather events to both migrate and evolve. Now there is genomic evidence first that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans enough that we all have a little Neanderthal in us, and also that the mitochondrial DNA of a fossil finger of a little girl that was found in a Siberian cave indicates a whole new branch of humanity called Denisova. The finger is confirmed by a tooth and a toe found in SE Asia, which also supplies nuclear DNA (the main cell code) confirmation. The genomic map shows these people in Australia and New Guinea as well as a few other places. Evidently they were once all over eastern Asia. Many more fossils are expected.

Now it appears that the original hominids who left Africa separated into at least three large evolving mainstreams, some of which ended and some of which merged back into the people of today. The whole story gets more complex all the time. I will say, with no grounds whatsoever, that aboriginals in Australia and the people of New Guinea have always seemed eerily and qualitatively “different” somehow. Dare I say more “Zen”? I’m anxious to hear what contribution the Denisovans made to the genomes of Native Americans, some of which (not all) seem to have that same vibe.

One hardly knows whether to be more curious about the mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA, the little bracelet of “power” code in the intracellular blobs that convert glucose into energy) or the main nuclear DNA. I sometimes wonder whether the diabetes plague is related to the mtDNA and whether we are doing something that hurts those little power paks. There are swarms of them in each body cell, but a proportion of them can die or fray as we age. Maybe CAUSE aging. Too many missing would cause death, I suppose. Stringer is confident that even without more fossil finds, a thorough review of the fossils we have, using the new techniques, will reveal a great deal.

When he began his doctoral thesis, he set out across Europe with a set of calipers and rulers, going from one collection of fossils to another so he could carefully measure certain forms and bony spans considered characteristic of different stages of human development. A half-day per skull on average. It took years. Then more years to record his findings on punch cards, which was the way many computers worked in those days. Today that work could be done in a matter of weeks by scanning and using computer programs. BUT, he cautions, it was quite different to hold those skulls in his hands. No computer could give you that experience. It is human.

So here we are with our lives in our hands, stranded between what we thought we knew about the past (now rolling over into revision), speculating about what might happen in the future, where our evolution will carry us next, given that we are now meddling in our environment so massively as well as directly tweaking our genome, epigenome, hemocycling, and things in us that we barely know exist. Can we evolve fast enough to handle industrrial chemical contamination? A new climate? Beyond that we realize that evolution has gotten into our culture -- those memes instead of genes -- equally uncontrollable and contagious, moving across the continents into each other’s lives.

The just previous new paleoanthropology species proposed was homo florensiensis, a small microcephalic creature with big feet which was dubbed the “Hobbit” because it looked so much like that fictional species. The developing consensus is that they were dwarfed by the restriction of resources because they were trapped on an island, something like the current below-standard growth of North Koreans due to governmentally enforced starvation. The alternative is that the fossil people were suffering from some sort of pathology, but there are enough of them over a time period to challenge that idea. In time that species simply died out, almost certainly in a massive volcanic eruption 17,000 years ago.

What truly IS being challenged is the idea of species. There are enough living people walking around with Neanderthal or Denisova genes to make it clear that there must have been sex between these species -- but the definition of species is evolved sets of creatures who are separated enough that they cannot interbreed. The double helix unzips, one side of it goes to the other partner, and in that other partner’s ovum it zips to that new and different zipper strip. If there’s a bad fit, the code doesn’t work and no viable baby is produced. If there’s a possible fit, just a little wonky, you might get a mule. You can cross breed a zebra and a horse, or a lion and a tiger, but they don’t occur in nature because part of the process is the sexual memes: the timing, the place, the conditions, the come-on. If a zebra comes into heat in May and a horse comes into heat in June, it may only be a few outliers of each group who overlap enough to be in the proper state for zipping. If all the lions live on the grasslands and all the tigers live in jungle, they never meet. What not-interbreeding may say about species is simply that they don’t patronize the same bars, so to speak. We already know from YouTube that primates are a kind of animal that never gives up hope of fucking something new. Sod the consequences.

I keep thinking about the time-line. The homo erectus line left Africa 60,000 years ago. The long withdrawing roar of the glaciers melting back was 10,000 years ago, presumably the beginning of agriculture. By Old Testament times, the written records were having to provide a justification for moving from hunting/herding to agriculture and for building cities. By New Testament times anti-war ideas were seeping over from India, or so some think. So was Jesus simply a man with more than the usual percentage of Denisovian genes? On one side of the zipper it’s a silly question. On the other side, what sort of really rockin’ sci-fi story could a person get out of it?

But the kind of sci-fi stories that always worry me are the ones about outliers who are destroyed because they are different, stigmatized, non-conformist. There are quite a few of these worrisome stories because so many people who are interested in speculations are outliers themselves. Roiling times seem to create the danger out of for fear of their new memes. On the other hand, we’re in need of more evolution.

BUG-EYED MONSTER FILM FESTIVAL

2012-01-12T09:41:00.006-07:00

I had a Bug-Eyed Monster film festival last weekend because I got out of sync with Netflix and the Valier library had a lot of donated movies. I checked out "Solaris" and "Alien," then discovered "Predator" was packaged with "Alien." When Sigourney Weaver stopped being their narrative thread, the Alien producers tried a few collaborations with the Predator producers, sort of like Godzilla meets King Kong.

“Solaris” was interesting, a love story reminiscent of the first sci-fi love story I ever read, which was an H.G. Wells tale about an EXTREME shrinking man, who became so small that the gold ring on the tabletop where he was standing became a universe and a gold atom became a solar system with a planet on which lived (remarkably) a woman with whom the man fell in love. Which was all fine, but he didn’t stay shrunk. Well, life is like that, and he had the pain/pleasure of grieving for her the rest of his life. The “gimmick” of Solaris was fabulous casting and the slow realization that a planet can be a creature -- the Gaea principle -- which is a mixed sort of phenomenon.

“Predator” had both Arnold Schwartzenegger and Jesse Ventura (political monsters) in it, plus a few other bulgy fellows who en masse required the re-casting of their monster, because the first stunt man was dwarfed. Actually the monster is pretty ingenious, personifying a bit of forest in an eye-dazzling trick. Arnold left for two weeks in the middle of shooting in order to marry Maria Shriver. Everyone is incredibly young-looking. It was 1987.

“Alien” was the one I wanted to watch because of Ridley Scott, who has a hard-headed Scot attitude towards special effects. He is interested in the consciousness of the viewer, not the expertise and expense of the set. The precursor here is “The Thing,” filmed in Cut Bank which was expected to be like the Antarctic for script purposes but turned out to be having a winter just like this one, so that snow had to be trucked in. Aficionados know that the Thing itself was James Arness in one of those suits that let you be set on fire. My father believed kids should see horror movies, so he went with us though my mother stayed home. He fell asleep. His snoring sort of interfered.

Most people have a sci-fi period in their lives, roughly about junior high school age when everything seems like sci-fi anyway. Mine coincided with the earliest Heinlein books. Now that genre books are what sell and “predator” is the name of an armed drone and “alien” is simply an immigrant, I’ve doubled back to see what I can understand.

On the last expedition to Great Falls, I bought a couple of mags: Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Most of the action I was aware of these days is girl-fantasy: werewolves and vampires, but there is also an offshoot in graphic books and mags like Heavy Metal which follow up on the exaggerated body theme of Predator. My friend, Tom Foral, www.tomforal.com and thomasforal.com is an artist I’ve known since undergrad days at the end of the Fifties. His work is in several streams of subject matter, one of which is “beefcake,” the bodies of weight-lifters, beyond ripped.

At first he was just admiring the development possible, but over the years drugs came into the picture, steroids and then addiction, as men became more and more impossibly, mindlessly, ultra-muscled to the point of parody, even mockery. We don’t usually think of this as science fiction, but steroids can be a jungle-drug, not meant to make one hallucinate but to go beyond Charles Atlas to an inhuman level of incarnation. The great irony is that the same drugs shrivel their reproductiveness. "Predator" is monomaniacal, destructive of the actors, basically plotless, and gruesome in its awareness that humans are flesh.

"Alien" features Tom Skerrit, who is non-stereotypically Native American, as a thinking, protective leader, and ironically shows the destruction of an imitation human. The official monster is a French surrealist lizard in a cat suit that drips KY jelly. (So did the Predator, but it was KY mixed with whatever is inside glo-sticks.) Over the years of Alien series the monster is gradually seen as a “mother” and a second android becomes “human,” not of flesh but of emotion and attachment.

All these stories are attempts to understand how it is that human beings are self-aware, what lives are worth, and what it means in terms of the universe. (Not just “Mr. Universe.”) Vital stuff. Even theological.

I haven’t read much in my sci-fi mags but in Asimov’s Sci-Fi, I found “The People of Pele” by Ken Liu, self-described as “a liminal provincial in America, the New Rome.” http://kenliu.name/ He lives near Boston. The story picks up a crew, something like the Alien crew, and deals with the time element, since these people can only sensibly travel to planets that are light-years away by staying in suspended animation. By the time they get to their destination, everyone they knew on earth is “a bag of bones in a box,” but they get periodic messages from home in the proper time sequence, just impossibly out of date.

We hear about the geology of this planet: it is smooth and flat with shallow lakes, the wind blows all the time, there are two moons -- one big and one little. Far away on the horizon is a constant moving twinkling and when the explorers go to see what’s there, they find crystals with odd striations and bumps on them. They are all round and the wind is rolling them along. The explanation is so beautifully and gradually given that I’m reluctant to paraphrase it, but we’re not talking Bug-Eyed Monsters here. We’re not talking steroidal or interspecies humanoids or a planet with plans. This is a kind of poetry, what one might call Daoist ecology. A little like east-of-the-Rockies prairie pothole country. Liu's wife, Lisa, www.lisatangliu.com , a photographer, is into cowboys. I think maybe she’s been here.

If I see glittering bits on the wind, I will greet them. Maybe I should carry a mirror. Somehow the least humanoid creatures are the most appealing to this human.

ATTACHMENT FOR ADULTS

2012-01-11T07:57:00.002-07:00

Reviews and promotion have called my attention to a book called “Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find-And Keep-Love” by Amir Levine, M.D. and Rachel S. F. Heller, M.A. It turns out to be a re-visit to my old friends Bowlby and Winnicott, the “teddy-bear” Object Relations theorists. During seminary, late in the evening, I would walk down to Michael Powell’s Hyde Park bookstore (the precursor for the Portland Powells’) where I checked the shelf for the Object Relations psychotherapy books coming in from England where the “school of thought” was developing. Much of it was a response to the confused child-raising practices and shattered families of the Brits trying to understand class differences, WWII, the end of Empire, and so on. They were asking something like the questions about “resilience” today: what can make a child invulnerable to tragedy?

Obviously the answer is NOTHING and they were naively more concerned with their own Brit children than the children of the Third World they had once known intimately. Nannies were one answer, though the theory that supported that was not about the discipline stuff that’s fun in comedy sketches but about the continuity of a caring and constant care-giver. (Where does all this alliteration come from? Oh, well.) First intimacy -- that of warmth, enfolding, cleanliness, food, and skin contact (the orphanages discovered the importance of skin contact when the babies without it died) -- becomes one’s template for every other intimacy throughout life. It’s best to know what that template is, even if there’s no wish to change it, because it affects one’s life so deeply.

Without making allowances for differences in temperament (which could be pretty problematic if there were a major style difference between the mother and child) kids tend to sort out into three groups: those who are "anxious" if they are separated from their care-giver (let’s call her “mom” since that’s a short word to type) but settle down quickly when she comes back; the “anxious-resistant” (20%) who are even more upset when Mom is gone and try to punish her when she comes back by pretending to not notice her or to hate her; and those called “avoidant” (20%) who seem self-sufficient and turn away from mom. Of course, in the early thinking of the experts Mom was to blame. Now, not so much. Nowadays some of the experts ARE Moms.

The pattern that had been identified with me at seminary and that I was trying to resolve (didn’t) was not really represented. It was seeking for a savior, choosing someone impossible, providing devotion, and confirming that the relationship ended because it was impossible. Clearly I must really want a relationship for some reason but -- then -- not after all. The professors and mentors liked the first part, but thought of their fall from grace when I detached as my serious character flaw. This turned out to be predictive when I left the ministry. If one is looking for an impossible and disappearing love-object (which was probably originally my father since he was on the road all the time), God is an excellent choice, esp. for a ministry student. So why wasn’t a religious love good enough, any more than any human?

The answer I came to was “fear of fusion.” The feeling that I would be swallowed into the personhood of the loved one and lose my own identity. It was not unrealistic and probably came from my mother considering me an extension of herself, therefore just like her, which I wasn’t. Or maybe she too chose a “leaving lover,” because of her own dad who was a building contractor for large structures (barns and warehouses) and often gone.

There’s another element that I haven’t seen in “scientific” literature, though it’s there in novels. Both my parents were coming from a rural setting to the city where they had petit professional jobs. (White collar/no power, like teaching.) It was a self-conscious time when people monitored themselves, watched themselves, to see how they were doing. Were they stylish enough? Up with the latest stuff? Raising their kids properly? How big a car, how big a house could they afford? How many children? How high an education?

Very much like now, except that then, mid-century, the moving was country to city and now the migration is likely to be regional or even international. These days this “reflexivity”, always watching ourselves, is practically an industry. Surveys. Advice columns. Articles. Night classes. The ‘zines provide questionnaires. You can find “attached” questionnaires on the Internet. For myself they confirm what I already know.

Maybe this element of watching oneself all the time is a good distancing mechanism that leads right into writing, which is one way to commercialize (or was) human relationship. (Short of whoring or counseling.) Watching oneself “parent” distances one from the kid -- interferes with the sincerity and spontaneity that make intimacy work. “Helicoptering” alienates children as much as paying no attention.

What about those floating Third World street kids with no parents? Some attach to an older kid. Some attach to a trick. Some attach to someone who exploits their labor. What choice do they have? Most don’t live long enough to have to worry about it. But they’re skeeters -- vectors for disease and disruption. Otherwise why would society pay any attention to them at all, except to use them as convenient? These children expect nothing, take what they need, but even they spin the fantasies of intimacy: a family, a gang, a sponsoring partner.

A family is no guarantee of intimacy. Families are hard work. The rivalries and injustices and left-over agendas from previous generations interfere all the time. If it’s a real family, someone nearly always needs to be rescued. People die. When people marry nowadays, the two sets of parents are often nothing alike and make no effort to weave together, because their children remarry and remarry and cohabit and don’t settle down until they are old. Dear Abby is always having to sort out entitlements and point out irreconcilable templates. Will someone write a book entitled, “Detached?” Hurry up, please. It’s time.

BOOKS DEBROUILLARDISE -- WELL, PAPER ANYWAY.

2012-01-10T09:43:00.002-07:00

System D business is related to the “black market” or the “gray market.” That is, the materials being marketed are small, the venue may be a cart or stall that is not licensed or that moves, the customers don’t have much money, and the business is beneath notice, unlicensed and untaxed. Maybe illegal, not so often criminalized. In Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy by Robert Neuwirth the journalist suggests that half of the world’s economy is rising to two-thirds very quickly.

In French it’s called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, In China the word is shanzhai which refers to the mountain hideouts of bandits in the Middle Ages. (“Shanghai” as in kidnapping sailing crews?) But it has come to mean cloned or knockoff-branded goods like those sold on sidewalks in major cities. It’s close to what I’ve been calling “interstitial,” the small services like house-cleaning or cake-decorating that people do informally. The evidence Neuwirth presents is mostly about the Third World, but I suspect there’s a lot of it wherever there are poor people, including urban ghettoes, small towns, and reservations.

I suspect that books are entering this context. They are now cheap to make, even as paper. When a child, I was given newsprint scrapbooks in which I drew “graphic” stories. They are ephemera, most such “books” are destroyed or abandoned along the way, but I’ve kept mine. They might be interesting as clues to a child’s mind. I can easily imagine a wonderful compilation of the kind of “newspapers” that kids used to peck out on toy typewriters and distribute to the households of the block. What about all the yearbooks, the local histories, the business directories?

Regional ephemera can be valuable. A used book business in Spokane, Buckingham Books, specializes in things “Western” and sells ancient “wanted” posters or brochures for immigrants to the prairies. A man in Minnesota collects all he can find about Kovar equipment because his grandfather founded the company. He wants brochures, snapshots, even letters of agreement. The standard for ephemera is not brilliant writing or deep insight, but rather sentiment and minutia.

Most of this stuff is not valued or admired. All his working life my father kept a little shirt pocket notebook in which he noted facts as well as info about the photos he took, partly for business and partly for family or “just because.” He noted f-stops and distances, the names of people, the names of geographical features (the heights of all mountains), and miscellaneous things he ran across through the day. He wrote with the same mechanical pencils he used to dig wax out of his ears. The notepads always had a rubber band on them and he filed them in chronological order in shoeboxes. When he died my mother sent all of them to the dump. For all she knew, there might have been checks or hundred dollar bills in there.

When my mother died, I took the family photo albums and posted all the early photos my father took in Swan River, Manitoba, to a blog: www.swanrivermanitoba.blogspot.com. Now and then someone up there discovers the blog and adds more comments, names of places and people, how they’ve changed over the years.

I have my paternal grandmother’s journals, or at least some of them. I’ve typed some of them into the computer so cousins could share them. The most interesting was about camping on a parking lot in Portland OR in their home-made Ranger RV while they tried to decide whether to move from the Canadian prairie to the verdant Pacific North West. They did, just in time for the Depression to blind-side them.

On my mother’s side was a box of letters written from Andersonville, the notorious prison camp, plus a ring made there by filing a bone button. My brother took these. He has not typed them up or photocopied them. He is a secretive man who does not communicate. Has been that way since his earliest years, so it must be hard-wired. He has no children. As a youngster he read the Mackinley Kantor book called “Andersonville” and was deeply moved. Privately.

Some day I’ll get a book out the schism between my contentious Irish maternal grandfather and my educated Scots paternal grandfather and their contrasting values. I don’t think I ever saw them in the same room together. Then I will want letters and journals and historical documents about those people, so similar and so different, unless I just invent the struggle in my own head. That may be inevitable anyway.

Writers’ first drafts and resources or even an artist’s musings and scribbles on placemats or calendar backs can be valuable to scholars. The difficulty now is that much of that sort of thing -- we all realize -- is digital, so ephemeral as to be phantom. And yet you can’t stamp it out. My former co-writer and I decided to remove the manuscript of a book from the Internet -- it can’t be done. The thing pops back up on Google when you least expect it. The giant turbines of cloud storage have created something like those cycles we learned in elementary science: how the water goes into the air as vapor, becomes clouds, rains back on the land, where it forms streams and runs into the sea again.

Every cop writes reports that are saved. Every inspector of construction, plumbing, electricity; every nuisance complaint inspector writes reports. Think of the maps and diagrams and blueprints and floodplains, all recorded on paper in the past, but now? Homeland Security is demanding proof of citizenship from people who came to this country as small children decades ago -- documentation: birth certificates, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses and certificates, diplomas, proof of membership. But those things disappear.

So what’s the difference between all this printing and actual “publishing” in the old-fashioned sense? The question came up between two friends of mine who had separately taken poems, written in one case by a husband and in another by a mother, typed them, devised a cover, stapled them, and distributed them to family and friends. Many people do this, meaning it as an honor and memento. Is it publishing?

Here’s the checklist:

1. Acquisition: finding something to publish

2. Curating: deciding whether it is worthwhile or not and choosing the best examples.

3. Editing

4. Illustration: finding photos or graphics.

5. Printing.

6. Binding

7. Distributing.

You’ll notice there’s no money changing hands. Is it possibly publishing if no money changes hands? How many people have to read it to consider it “published?” Isn’t this blog published?

I’ve lived with stacks of paper all my life, constantly fighting to get it sorted, filed, located. Most of it is just ephemera, miscellaneous, valueless except to me. Stray notes. Clips. But somewhere there is a theatre program autographed by Peter Ustinov and a program for “The Visit” signed by the Lunts, and somewhere there is an 8X10 photo of Audie Murphy, signed by him. (I wrote him a fan letter -- I was ten.) I’ve been looking for them for years. Might be worth money! But which box are they in?

HAROLD REED & THOMAS WALL

2012-01-09T09:29:00.003-07:00

The earliest classes one teaches remain vivid in the mind. At age 72 moments from the early Sixties are easier to remember than classes I taught in the Nineties. I never get used to my students turning up in obituaries. Today there were two: Thomas Wall, 68, and Harold “Big Beaver” Reed, Sr., 66. They were ordinary guys -- albeit a little more handsome than most -- and not the most colorful among their sibs. Francis Wall, for instance, is a noted abstract painter. Thomas liked to tease him about “painting like a kindergarten kid” -- which is a quality that some people value enough to pay for! And I don’t think Harold was the reckless adventure-hound that his brother Volley could be. Harold and Thomas are pretty much of my own generation though I was their English teacher. They were steady, never really in the news for being either very good or very bad.

But these were typical Blackfeet enrolled members. Probably you’d not recognize them as Indians, though Harold’s brother Volley was in the movie version of “Last of the Mohicans.” Thomas Wall, born in 1943, was a wartime baby. Harold Reed, two years younger, must have been a “welcome home” baby. His mother was the enrolled Blackfeet, while his step-father, Bill Reed, was blonde and, if I were to guess, once a sailor. I’d also guess that since Harold’s sister Minnie is in Georgia now, that’s where Bill came from. When Bill was finally ill, getting ready to join his gone-on-ahead wife, I sat on his couch visiting with him for a while, but don’t remember much we said. I think we talked about his kids.

What I remember about both Harold and Thomas was how tall they were, how lean, and how wide their flashing grins. That was the era of ducktail hairdos. They both finished high school, I’m pretty sure, and probably both played sports of some kind. Basketball is King on the rez. I don’t think I ever saw either one on a horse. To the naked eye Harold and Thomas were All-American middle-class, make-the-world-go-round family men. I never knew that Harold’s blood father was a Big Beaver, though Eddie Big Beaver was the model for Bob’s bronze called “No More Buffalo.”

________

Harold Big Beaver Francis Reed Sr., 66, passed away Thursday, Jan. 5, 2012.

He was born on Dec. 18, 1945, in Browning to George Big Beaver Sr., and Ruth Walter, and was later adopted by William Paul Reed Sr. He was raised in Browning, served in the Army during the Vietnam War and returned to the Blackfeet Reservation, where he worked as a park ranger, police officer, ranch hand, firefighter, and as a mechanic in numerous service stations, eventually owning Big Sky Standard. He liked to hunt and fish, stock car races and restoring cars.

He was preceded in death by his birth father; his parents; three brothers, William P. Reed, Aaron T. Reed and George Big Beaver Jr.; and a niece, Mandy. He married twice, first to Linda Johnson, and then to Bonnie Bongey.

He had three children, Harold F. and Sherri Reed, Jr., Lynn L. and Jason Stott, and Kaitlin R. Reed. He is also survived by his siblings, Minnie and William Elmore of Georgia, Volley Reed and Opal Boggs of Babb, and Lawrence and Yvette Reed, Nellie Whitford, Llona and Verlin Wippert, and Lillian Reed, all of Browning, and Willow and Richard Ell of Conrad; and five grandchildren, Taylor, Marc, Taryn, Thomas and Madeline; as well as numerous aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins.

A wake began Saturday in Browning at the Old Eagle Shield Center and moves to the Starr School on Monday, where a rosary will be recited at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. Funeral Services will be held at 2 p.m. Wednesday in the Starr School, with burial following in the Willow Creek Cemetery.

Memorials may be made to the Vietnam Veteran Treatment Facilities in Walla Walla, Wash., or the Wounded Warriors Fund.

_____________

Thomas William Wall, 68, of Browning, a retired barber and meat cutter, died of natural causes Jan. 4 at his home.

Prayer service is 7PM Monday at Glacier Home Center. His funeral is 11 AM Tuesday at Four Winds Assembly of God Church, followed by burial in Whitegrass Cemetery. Pondera Funeral Home is handling arrangements.

Survivors include daughters Rose Ann Wall of Ferndale, WA; Virginia Boe Tom of Bellingham, WA; Melissa Wall of Ferndale; and Mary Jo Wall of Browning; sons Clayton Whitegrass of Billings; and Jesse Wall of Bellingham, WA; sisters Irene Old Chief, Angeline Wall; Bernadette Wall; and Roslyn Azure, all of Browning; brother Francis Wall, Jr. of Browning; 17 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Thelma Whitegrass Wall.

___________

As it happens my card file contains the obituary for Thomas’ mother, Annie Dorothy Mad Plume Wall, so I can add some genealogy for him. Born in 1914, Annie passed away in 2004. When she was a year and a half old, her mother Red Shell Woman (Minnie Mad Plume) died, so she was raised by her mother’s parents, Mary Spotted Bear (Not Real Beaver Woman) and Tim No Runner (Under Mink), and her great-grandmother, Big Mountain Lion Woman. She was given the name Yellow Fox Woman by her grandfather Middle Rider, and passed that name on to her granddaughter Rosalyn LaPier Beck, who is now finishing up her Ph.D. in Missoula. Annie was a fluent Blackfeet speaker and a plantswoman. She married Francis (Aimsback) Wall in 1936 and they remained married until his death in 1973. They were educated at Holy Family Mission and lived on the South Reservation until they bought a house near Willow Creek in Browning.

_______________

It’s hard to grasp that to the school kids on the rez now, Harold and Thomas are old guys, not quite ancestors but the next generation after the last buffalo people, too early to be Headstart Kids. People want to romanticize Blackfeet, not see them as solid citizens like everyone else, but why can’t they be both? Why aren’t they just as much Indian in jeans and ducktails as they might be in buckskin and braids?

CAN YOU RAISE YOUR LEFT ARM?

2012-01-08T07:51:00.002-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDHJDKPeB2A

V.S. Ramachandran's lecture on Anosognosia

This video is almost an hour long, but it is fascinating and it is relevant to religion because it addresses belief systems. In this particular context the belief system is that of a person about his or her own body. The presenting situation is a person (dubbed “Mrs. D”) who has had a right-brain stroke which has caused her left side to be paralyzed. But she refuses to admit this even though her thought processes are not affected and she is perfectly lucid and otherwise rational.

The professor asks her to lift her right arm and she does. Then the same with the left arm. She can’t. But she doesn’t want to admit it, so she tries all sorts of dodges. (Neither consciously nor intentionally.) She “confabulates” -- claims that she IS lifting her arm. Some subjects say their arm is very tired. Some say they have arthritis which is preventing movement. One man said with dignity, “I am a military officer and I am not accustomed to obeying orders.” This is quite common in right brain stroke cases and usually persists several days before the person becomes reconciled and admits there is a problem.

In the meantime, if they are asked to pick up a tray loaded with champagne glasses, they will pick it up by the left edge -- as they would with two working arms -- and dump all the glasses off. If given a choice between two reward tasks, one screwing in a lightbulb for $5 and the other tying a child’s sneaker for $10 -- the first do-able with one hand, the second only feasible with two hands -- the denying person chooses the shoe and will persist in struggling with it until stopped. Even after four episodes of this over a period of days, the deny-er persists.

The doc tries a new angle. “See that big heavy table there? Do you think you could lift it with your right arm?” “Oh, yes.” “How far?” “Three inches.” “What about your left arm?” “Of course.” “How far?” “SIX inches!” No consciousness of lying or exaggerating.

Then the doctor has a new test. He injects the paralyzed left arm with a saline solution which he pretends is an anesthetic that will prevent movement. “Please raise your left arm.” “Why, doctor, you know very well that the arm is paralyzed. I can’t raise it!” (The TRUTH at last!) So another day he tries the injection trick on the good arm and the patient raises his right arm in spite of being told it’s paralyzed. “Oh, look, Doc! Your drug doesn’t work!”

When the stroke is on the left side and paralyzes the right arm, the patient will rarely deny the problem.

The conclusions drawn from all this is a confirmation of Thomas Kuhn’s idea about paradigm shift, which he derived from simple observation and reflection rather than experiment. These experiments confirm Kuhn’s idea and add a split-brain dimension. If there is a “neuronal working platform” on the left side (usually) of the brain, and if a stroke affects its ability to acquire and process information (like paralysis of the left side), then that processing platform will cling to the pre-existing conviction that the arm is in good working order. Over days, as the evidence mounts up and possibly as the brain damage clears a bit, the patient begins to revise his or her mental convictions about his or her own body.

Kuhn proposed that one daily discovers small discrepancies in convictions and is able to revise and include them without disrupting the day’s tasks. But sometimes, when there is a catastrophic change, the person must go the “neuronal working platform” with a problem that takes days or years or a lifetime to solve. Consider the death of a loved person: for days it’s simply unreal. Consider 9/11. Again, it was not real and we watched over and over and over as though trying to grasp it, confirm it. The final result was a massive change in our collective understanding of the world, though the world had not actually changed at all. Some people proposed a planet-wide network of evil-doers just waiting to repeat this event and we have proceeded on that assumption. It is not a testable assumption and yet we are turning our world upside down as though it were real.

The religious system developed two thousand years ago is now challenged by science -- not just the scientific method of testing but also instrumented measurements and vivid photographs never seen before. The limit of what can be worked through on the sub-paradigm level has been passed. Now the world consciously demands a new formulation. The world order of humans is as much on the table as are our ethical systems. Our religions clearly do not prevent evil within or without. They do not reliably tell us about ourselves.

At the beginning of Ramachandran’s talk, he mentions another more cynical explanation of why people might deny a paralysis of their arm -- that they are doing it for emotional reasons to make themselves feel better. They are simply lying, which is our assumption about heretics and competing religious systems. They are liars. They are resisting our truth.

This is explained in evolutionary terms by proposing that a juvenile chimp has a cache of bananas and hides them to keep them from an Alpha male. The big chimp demands to know where the bananas are and the juvenile says, “Oh, way back there under the bridge a mile away.” So Alpha male goes charging off. The trouble with this scenario is that from primates up (and to some extent even lower orders of animals) it is possible to lie. But we can often tell by small cues in muscles, eye dilation, behavior and so on when people are lying, unless they convince themselves as well. Some people propose that the liar actually believes his own lie. Their lie becomes their reality.

To some extent we have seen this happen. There is one trouble with it. The self-convinced junior chimp will no longer know where his bananas are. It is a flawed strategy. Much of the work of psychoanalysis is helping people to figure out, so to speak, where they hid their bananas before it became necessary to lie, to confabulate, to excuse, to confront and deflect. I would suggest it is also a religious task at the core of confession and repentance. A liturgy, like psychotherapy, can provide the safe space in which to shift one’s paradigm.

There’s another implication here. The evolutionary sequence of the brain seems to be the development of an array of small systems each specializing in some crucial function, and then -- to keep order among them -- the development of this “neuronal working platform”, a kind of dashboard. If the small systems have big enough problems, the dashboard platform is forced into addressing them consciously and does that. This is the reason and justification for the kind of consciousness we have.

Here’s the second implication: what is the next step in brain evolution? If unconscious and repressed information can come to consciousness to be dealt with, what is the next step? Can consciousness rise to something above itself? What might that be like? Visions? Trans-personal awareness like mind-reading? Scales falling from our eyes?

WAS EMERSON "SELF-RELIANT?"

2012-01-07T09:25:00.002-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFEarBzelBs&feature=youtu.be

This is the original Steve Jobs “think different” ad in which he celebrates “being different” and changing the world. Of course, most of his examples were huge commercial successes, which some would say indicates that these folks merely struck a line of thought that resonated with a lot of people, but it’s worth looking at it just to see that first image of Jobs holding a real apple, both man and metaphor so young and full of potential, so ripe.

The url citation was in an article called “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance’” by Benjamin Anastas in which he lampoons himself and his private boys’ school as well as Emerson. I’d been thinking a lot about grandiose narcissism when I ran across this article that takes on Emerson. “I have my own stern claims and perfect circle,” Emerson writes. Hmmmm. A role model.

Of course, I relate more to Thoreau the Solitary and even Margaret Fuller the Romantic. Emerson sort of aggravated the Unitarians, partly because he said he got more out of watching snow fall outside the window from his seat in the pew than he did out of the sermon and partly because when he was the minister he refused to serve communion on the principle that it was not rational. (Eat your Gods? What are you thinking?) He just sounded balky to the locals, so he turned to a larger secular world where he was a huge success.

When I taught at Heart Butte a quarter of a century ago, I insisted on teaching out of college prep lit books, because the no-hope administrators didn’t expect any student there to go to college. (By now, many have, but not because of me. It was their own self-reliance linked with family support, tribal pride, and general good will.) I thought the kids should at least know that the works existed and were admired by educated people. But the only way to teach these canonized pieces was to paraphrase, interpret, and show movie versions of them. I sat down one evening to paraphrase “Self-Reliance.” The whole thing fell apart. In a society based on the whole-for-the-part, the importance of “tribe,” it seemed transparently a justification for selfishness.

Also, pompous, pretentious, self-important, and Jonesing for personal importance. Is there something wrong with that? It depends. If you don’t achieve what you are sure you deserve, it will frustrate you and make you very angry, which you may take out on those you consider lesser beings. You may blame and punish yourself for failure, failure, failure. Which is pretentious in itself. Even death is a kind of achievement. And behind every grandiose narcissist is someone demanding an impossible standard. That’s the person, maybe a parent, whose death can mean freedom. Maybe -- though ghosts wind their legs around one’s neck in an implacable embrace and ride their victims forever. Blackfeet knew that.

So did Emerson. He dearly loved his young wife, who died of tuberculosis (the AIDS of that generation). He had married her over the protests of her family who thought they could do a better job of keeping her safe and alive, so he was mostly justifying his own selfish love by denying their claims and maintaining his narcissistic belief in his own power to keep her alive. When she died, she was put into one of those little houses in cemeteries, a mausoleum. Emerson later went there and slid off the lid of her coffin to see if she were really dead. The fact that he inherited through her a good deal of money that underwrote the beginnings of his major career added gratitude and guilt to his emotional web. (He had to sue the family to get the money.) He remarried a capable woman who managed everything very well. Yet he wanted to claim he and he alone was the captain of his soul.

My family visited Walden Pond. It is deep enough to escape eutropification (stagnation) and is probably fed by deep springs. But the shore tends to erode and when I was working with the soil engineers at the City of Portland, reading all their professional magazines, I ran across an article about how that erosion was addressed, mostly a matter of embedding woven mats of organic material along the shore until new growth from brush and willows could take hold to hold soil in place.

I wrote about it on a listserv and was attacked by romantics who could not bear the thought that Walden Pond was not pristine, intact, original, self-sustaining, and altogether other-worldly. A self-reliant pond. There are people who think of marriage or even the United States as being like that. Permanent, immutable. Never needing advice or help. Yet when my family was there, one side of the pond had been equipped with a concrete platform for swimming and boats. My father took a photo of us perched there, framed to exclude the naked splashing kids. Not us kids, solemnly respectful. We were better (safer -- virtue is safety).

Likewise, the torrent of comments that followed this essay (a “riff” it is suggested) are indignant, attacking, defensive, mocking, praising, and offering long bibliographies. At least they know who Emerson is. I expect not many would have heard of Margaret Fuller.

Making fun of Transcendentalists is shooting carp in the rain barrel. They just had a big glorious idea and hadn’t worked out the details yet. Neither have we. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was the one who had the courage to go to Italy, join the revolution with Mazzini and have a son with Ossoli. She was educated as though she were a boy and used what she had learned to become a major feminist. A teacher and a journalist, Fuller was recruited by Emerson to edit The Dial, but he never got around to paying her annual salary of $200.

Margaret, her husband and their child died in a shipwreck off Fire Island. (No cracks. This is serious.) Only the body of the boy, Angelino, washed ashore. So what did Emerson do? He sent Thoreau to walk the beaches looking for the trunk with Margaret’s manuscripts in it. Lost, all lost. And he censored the facts about her two lovers, Ossoli and another, earlier. But Hawthorne used the self-reliant Margaret as the model for Hester Prynne in “The Scarlet Letter.”

Sometimes it seems as though that Concord community was a little too interdependent. Kind of like Heart Butte.

http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/walden/36.htm

FIVE-PART LITURGICAL OUTLINE

2012-01-06T09:02:00.004-07:00

A big turquoise envelope was floating around the kitchen. I thought it was full of newspaper clips about cow fertility for my niece, but it turns out that it’s five-step liturgies for worship that I wrote for the Blackfeet Methodist congregations in 1988-89. I wonder whether I could or should find the concordance for the year, the scriptures assigned to each Sunday. The weather had its own ideas about the calendar and since my theology is “immanental,” the seasons had as much to do with what I wrote as the Bible verses.

Here’s a sample from January 8.

___________

CALL TO WORSHIP (Responsive)

We come again in this New Year to renew our faithful attendance at this house of worship.

The calendar has turned now and we look down the length of the months for a whole year to the next Christmas.

It is cold and we draw together as families and as friends in order to keep our hearts warm.

And we warm ourselves before this great flame of glory that we give the name of God Almighty.

INVOCATION

May those who are frightened come to be with us here where we may comfort them. May those who are joyful come to be with us here that we may rejoice with them. May those who love life come to be with us here, for this is a place where we love life and all its beauty.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

A great wind came last week to rip at our roofs, tear at our windows, knock us off our feet when we tried to walk. Now it is stone cold and we must watch our fires to make sure they don’t go out, watch our children to make sure they dress warmly. We feel fragile in such a world. On the news we hear of terrorists and nerve gas and we hear the wails of the bereaved mothers. We are very small, oh Lord, and we must trust others to guide our country through the perils. Keep us from the loss of hope when the chance of peace is great, but the powers of hatred are still potent. Let us never lose hope or confidence that good will overcome evil. We falter.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Our God has made us various and resourceful, able to draw on each other’s strengths. We are not alone in the world, for we have families, fellow country people, wise people, strong people, people who will be with us even as we are with our God. For if we are unable to reach out for God, behold, the wind of His Spirit reaches us and lifts us up.

BENEDICTION

The change in our lives sometimes feels like loss, but other times it is a gift and we are glad to be different. Some of the trees who live alongside us survive by dropping their leaves and growing new ones, and others survive by conserving and renewing the old needles. In the coming week may we both conserve and renew, sending our roots deep into the soil of our world. For through us blows not just the cold winter winds, but also the wind of the spirit which lifts us up everlastingly.

________

These liturgies were written for the Sundays from September 25 to May 28. I’m thinking about just posting them on a separate blog even though I wouldn’t be able to get the dates to match. They’d make a pretty nice meditation manual for people around here because the whole thing is based on the material culture of the people who live on the Blackfeet Reservation.

One would have to add the prairie fire for this Sunday. The photos are remarkable. (See www.gftribune.com) Black velvet spread over the land in stripes, stopping just short of the houses. The sentiments are meant to be Christian -- the Methodist symbol is the fire with the cross against it, so fire is an easy “gimme.” If you want to see Divine Intervention or the Devil’s handiwork in the fire, be my guest.

One of the little knots for a minister to work out personally is how much to accommodate the beliefs of the congregation and the doctrine of the denomination. If it’s insincere and rote, people can feel it. But I don’t think the minister going off into private ecstasy is very helpful either -- that’s performing and leaves no way for the people to participate. Where’s the communication?

But there’s nothing wrong with following a liturgical year. We’re roughly a little past epiphany, which Christians more or less consider to be when the three Magi or Wise Men or whoever they were, finally got there. (A recent piece I read contended that the three Magi were considered jokers, goof-offs, for thinking that any baby could be God. But then they arrived and saw that the God had become the baby. A little tender pearly damp specimen of incarnated flesh.)

By now this stuff is old, so you have to work a little to knock some surprise into it. Each time period has its own style. The Christian Year is a series of poems for every day of the year by John Keble in 1827. Victorian scholar Michael Wheeler calls The Christian Year simply "the most popular volume of verse in the nineteenth century". It was considered "Tractarian Aesthetics” in the Romantic Tradition.” My seasons of Sundays would be “pastoral” in aesthetics but still in the Romantic tradition (see note at the bottom, cadged from Wikipedia), which is laden with nature imagery. But informal. Rather more like the guided imagery of a modern meditation group than hymn language. Keble is writing a love letter.

Here’s Keble:

SUN of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,

It is not night if Thou be near;

Oh may no earth-born cloud arise

To hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes!

When the soft dews of kindly sleep

My weary eyelids gently steep,

Be my last thought how sweet to rest

Forever on my Saviour’s breast!

Abide with me from morn till eve,

For without Thee I cannot live;

Abide with me when night is nigh,

For without Thee I dare not die.

The nature imagery here is melded with personal romantic and physical (!) love. It is sensual and bedroom-obsessed in the way that girls in our culture somehow confuse physical passion with being nursed by their mothers. It’s chick-flick religion, pulling God off into a little one-on-one in seclusion, wearing a maid’s uniform, no less. Think about it.

FOOTNOTE:

“Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to the Industrial Revolution In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.”

PRAIRIE FIRE AROUND BROWNING !

2012-01-05T10:50:00.003-07:00

http://www.krtv.com/news/multiple-fires-burning-in-near-browning/

What shall I write about on my blog, I asked myself, reaching my nightgowned arm out for the newspaper, and the answer was on the front page. “Prairie fires surround Browning, Montana.” The town was not evacuated but Cut Bank Boarding School was, Big Sky Hutterite Colony was, and the highways in and out were closed except over the mountains to the West. The Valier volunteer fire department was up there helping alongside others.

In the Sixties the dumpground a couple of miles east of town often caught on fire and sometimes escaped into the fields. Bob said many times he fought fire alongside other townspeople, whipping it with burlap bags. Once he looked up and discovered he was at the town limits. Today the dump is tightly regulated (not even there anymore, though people still speak of the dumpground road) and monitored to prevent fire.

For the Old People, the Nitzitahpi, fire was one of the most terrifying things, but usually happened in spring when lightning was striking the prairie. They could strike camp and be on the move in a very short time, but fire driven by wind can outstrip a modern vehicle.

The fire on the east side of town was started by “modern lightning,” a power pole thrown down by the wind so that the shorting, sparking, broken wire turned arsonist. If you’ve seen these broken wires, they can thrash like snakes, but some lie silent until their lethal ends are touched. The origins of the other fires are not known yet.

Spectacular news stories about torched cars in LA? They could turn some people to snakes. Wild quasi-religious tales of apocalypse seize whole groups in poisoned jaws. Boarding school? In some minds not modern shelter for homeless kids but 19th century penitentiaries where children were victimized. Hutterite colony? Not peaceful self-contained and hard-working community but strangers, aliens, German-speakers. The story will come out now, both the true one and the fermented insane ones that are dormant in the earth like anthrax. Stories of narrow escapes, stories of ghosts, stories of lost family homes, but hopefully no stories of deaths.

Montana is an ecology that has included fire and wind as much as geology and grass. Not quite as fire-swept as Australia where the eucalyptus explode in flames from the kindled bark shreddings at their foot and the giddy koalas are burned in their tree forks. But often enough to clear any forest upstart enough to grow in the rain shadow of the Rockies. Once the atmosphere of the planet was changed -- so slowly, so gradually, that if humans had been there they would have denied it -- so mammal-friendly with the new high-oxygen gas ratio -- then fire was everywhere. Even far to the north the tundra smoldered under the snow and ice.

The Blackfeet used to burn the prairie on purpose, renewing the grass (grass is underground, the original Underground Culture) and driving the game along to a more convenient hunting ground. Maybe frustrating enemies with a wall of fire that scrawled smoke into the sky. Some say that’s why Siksika are called “black feet” -- from walking on burnt ground. There was a Sioux group called Brulé. ('burned,' the French translation of Sichángχu, `Burnt Thighs,' their own name, of indefinite origin). One story is that a small group of warriors was trapped by fire but survived by pulling their buffalo robes over them, like the “space blanket” portable emergency shelters modern firefighters use. The hot ground burned the bare thighs of the warriors.

Today the Blackfeet “Hotshot” fire fighters are famous for their fearless intervention in forest fires. Yellow reflective fire-resistant suits with hard hats armor them against all but “widow makers,” fire-weakened trees that fall suddenly and anywhere. Ironically, what is worse than a high-fire danger year is a no-fire year, because Hot Shots make their winter grub money in the summer. No fire, no money, no shoes for baby.

The news sources had no trouble finding the proper officials this time:

Bruce Running Crane, an investigator with the wild land fire department for the Blackfeet Tribe; Wayne Smith, tribal spokesman; Blackfeet Law Enforcement Chief Greg Gilham; Shannon Augare, state legislator; Darrell Norman, sentinel. Fifty years ago no one in Great Falls would have known about the fires until maybe the Cut Bank paper told them. This time there was a “cloud of witnesses” sending digital photos, personal accounts. This time there were Twitter and Facebook prayers for the people who were in danger. The Tribal Offices are open as a refuge. A plan was in place, prompted by Homeland Security concerns.

I remember the night the old Tribal Offices burned in the Sixties where now Phoebe Magee and others live along Willow Creek in a grove of cottonwood trees, a pleasant place, just upstream of the crossing into Government Square. In those days they blew the fire siren on the watertower and we all turned out. (Nowadays no siren blows, just the pocket cell phones in firefighter bedrooms activated by an automated phone calling system. But what if that system is interdicted by fire?)

Flames leapt in the air among the high old trees, shriveling back leaves, withering them in the heat before briefly burning. No light except car headlights. People crowded in the smoky dark, just silhouettes. Much shouting and torrents of water reaching out for the building. I can’t remember the actual building, just the showers of sparks when it collapsed in on itself.

I was standing next to Sophie and Bert Fitzgerald. “Let’s go make coffee and sandwiches for the fire fighters,” they said, and took me along. In a while we were back, but the fire had ended. Wooden buildings are quickly consumed. There was only a velvet black space in the indigo night. Bert and Sophie took the sandwiches down to the jail for the inmates, who were always hungry. I went home to bed. A few years later the Fitzgeralds were killed in their sleep by carbon monoxide when their furnace chimney was clogged by snow.

No one escapes alive and yet life goes on. In the photos the prairie is a spectacular conflagration, looking like the campfires of an army. We grieve and take precautions and do our best, but when a great wind comes, our poles and wires cannot stand against it. We had all been remarking about the mildness of this warm, windy, snowless winter and all the time it was lying in wait.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

2012-01-04T09:35:00.001-07:00

Getting back to those young men who seek out and participate in Sun Dance piercing ceremonies, why are they doing it? What do they get out of it? Originally it was a way to model and experience the consciousness changes connected to ordeals. Plains Indian men had lives based on hunting and fighting to preserve their band. They needed courage and determination and had no thought of painlessness as desirable. (The pre-anesthesia era.) Life was challenges and a “swag” (swagger) attitude was crucial. In return for their demonstrations the people gave them respect.

But traditional Blackfeet did not inflict pain on their children as a means of control or punishment. The harshest punishment in the early literature is “throwing water up their noses.” (Waterboarding! But that is far more extreme.) There was none of the thrashing by irate fathers or caning by frustrated teachers that is a steady theme in Euro fiction and bio.

The Sun Lodge ordeal was embedded in the culture in the same way as the Vision Quest trial. This is not to say that free-form or formally imposed affliction was a value nor was all pain a matter of blood and force. The virtuous old woman with her digging stick ceremonially fasted for three days, which was life-threatening and unpleasant, but this was a time and place where people might go hungry for any number of reasons and could survive it. Why is it that old white ladies of virtue don’t arrive at Plains Indian gatherings to declare they are going to fast as a sacrifice for others? Is it because they may have been on diets their whole lives in order to improve themselves, their own status?

The two rituals, piercing and Vision Questing, have similarities and differences. Piercing at a Sun Lodge ceremony was witnessed and highly prescribed -- a rawhide thong to pinned to one’s chest muscles with a skewer. One had to tear oneself free, ripping the chest muscles. Others danced and sang in the special “lodge” like a round tent with a leafy canopy and high leafy sides that contained a center pole, as is often present in religious symbology. Vision Quests were solitary, high in the mountains, and often detectable today because of leaving one of the rare “architectures” of worship that whites are used to: a low outline of stone the right size for someone to lie down in: a “dream bed.” The person, usually a boy ready to become a young man, went there to fast and thirst until his consciousness had changed enough to invite a vision.

The similarity between the two ordeals was that even for the solitary youth, someone was watching and ready to intervene. In the case of those skewered and pulling at tethers or dragging bison skulls, the helper might add his own weight to make the ordeal shorter. Or the man in charge of placing the skewers might, in his judgment, decide the skewers should be fairly shallow because the person who had volunteered was overestimating his stamina. This in spite of everyone agreeing that the deeper into the muscles the skewers were implanted, the more honorable the ordeal. Pride, showing off, was the big danger of ordeals. (Also of combat, though there it was encouraged.)

Since showing off is a part of adolescence and knowing one’s limits is a part of growing up, there was some danger of a young man simply dying in pursuit of his vision. So a relative or older mentor would make it a point to check on him, maybe from a distance so that he didn’t even know it. There is a cautionary tale about a man who wanted his son to fast longer and better than anyone else’s son. When he finally got around to checking, the son was gone and all that was left was a little mournful bird. It wasn’t even the son’s own pride that killed him.

When members of one culture, who have organized their brains according to the assumptions of the people they have known and loved, encounter another culture with entirely different cubbie holes and secret compartments, they can’t see what’s before them. This is now notorious knowledge.

One of the most secret of Blackfeet societies was the Horn Society doin’s. It was so secret that accounts of it were written in Latin, the assumption being that REAL authorities mature and entitled enough to know about it would be able to read Latin -- like priests. And the others didn’t need to know. The reason it was secret was that it was a ritual based on congruence: the vital buffalo had to make babies, so the ceremony re-enacted how to do it, from the heat to the birth. The Blackfeet women sequestered themselves to be yearning cows. At some point they imitated the delivery of calves. The Blackfeet men did their best to look like old bulls. At some point the chief among them demonstrated the sex act. (It was noted that if the most important man were too old, once he had taken the most appealing of the women off onto the prairie to show the bison what to do, he should just pretend.)

Prissy anthropologists were shocked! Well, actually they weren’t. But in the 19th century they thought that on the one hand people would think they were naughty to know such things, much less write about it, and on the other hand it undercuts the mystique of anthropology not to know racy things about native cultures with no taboos. (Well, not the same ones as the Victorians.) It was a woman, Alice Kehoe, who let the English version out -- as bold a social action as celebrating the Mass in English.

The Blackfeet had some small personal rituals, little things with the efficacy of rosaries, like the fossil stones known as “iniskum,” or buffalo stones. With a bit of imagination and maybe some helpful filing, these little bits shaped by the insides of compartments in baculites (a sort of squid) did look quite like a buffalo. The idea was that the people were starving and again it was a woman who came to the rescue. This time it was not an old woman who knew how and where to dig roots. It was a young woman, the youngest and least valuable of multiple wives, who was left behind on a women’s expedition for firewood. She hears a little voice, some say a whistle or song, and finds an “iniskum.” It has the power to call buffalo and it does. The people are saved by an humble person, unexpectedly. It’s a New Testament sort of story. And in this case, two cultures are in agreement. “The least of these” is important and should be valued, a basic human truth.

PRAIRIE LITURGY

2012-01-03T10:16:00.002-07:00

A competent ethnographer who comes to a new community to study “religion” will look at the most global and thoroughly integrated information possible, but a naive pop religionist will tend to look at rituals in isolation and accumulate “theological” statements apart from everything else, pressed into categories from another continent. This is an radically important difference and will lead to quite different results. Most ceremonies and liturgies arise from within the lives of the people. If their lives are changed -- most likely by the introduction of the industrial revolution and concepts of modernity or Christianity -- the whole meaning of everything will change.

Even the sensory world will change: think of the difference between traveling on horseback and traveling by pickup. The smells, motion, distance traveled, exposure to nature, necessary skills are all radically changed; in fact, as much as it was to go from walking alongside dogs to riding alongside dogs. Dogs remain. Perhaps there are few liturgies about dogs because they are “givens” to all reservation life, participants rather than objects of veneration.

The “givens” of the ecology are the substrate of all religion and culture, so for the Blackfeet the four directions, the cycle, the achievement of harmony (fittingness) are the key to survival and therefore feature in ritual. The sterilizing effect of sun, the unpredictable deadliness of lightning, the persistence of wind, the paralyzing cold, are constants. Circling the lodge, monitoring virtue in the sense of tenacity as much as bravery, the importance of being in the right place at the right time are all vital. "Indian time" in its own context is not about being late: it is about waiting for the proper moment when the forces are aligned, then acting.

Amateurs and some professionals only spend part of the year in locus, which usually means they miss the winter. They might not realize the brevity and harshness of the summer arc when hail storms can be barrages of fist-sized ice chunks rather than the little white pellets many think of. They have not competed with bears in the sarvisberry patches. They have not as children lain quietly by a ground squirrel burrow to snare one of them. Such small but indelible sense memories are threads in the fabric of life. I’ll resist my natural impulse to go on with ideas about that metaphor, particularly since there was no woven fabric until Europeans began to supply it.

In fact, the early culture was about tanned hide, fur, bone, feathers, wood, and stone as incarnated in plants and animals. The beads, ribbons, metal thimbles, brass tacks and falconry bells, the knives and spark-striking firestarters were all from European culture. Blackfeet “bundles” developed out of the need to pack things along on horseback in a life based on movement through the cycle of food availability: camas roots now, chokecherries later, newborn large animals now (the skins are lightweight for clothing and, if kept whole, make a container) and fat bison cows later. In spring move towards the prairie while there is water in rivulets, in winter move towards the stream shores where there is wood to burn.

So now it’s possible to understand the major June gathering when all the small groups of nomads came together while there was grass for their horses and it was a little too early for harvesting most things. The importance of sarvisberry soup, which is made from dried berries, as a ceremonial food becomes clear. It’s not about the body of someone -- it’s about having enough food to have gotten through the winter and to eat the last of the stored berries in faith that there will soon be a new crop. It’s a show of appreciation, which is why one fishes out the biggest, fattest berry and hands it up to the little altar.

Christian liturgies have come to be an individual act even if practiced in company. One [sic] tries to save one’s own soul, though it’s good to pray for others. Blackfeet are far closer to the reality that the unit of survival and evolution is the band. Individual loss and suffering are certainly mourned, but the individual acts on behalf of the whole group. Therefore, the modern young men who seek meaning in the Sun Dance ordeal of piercing are guided by individual motives, but in the original ritual this was only part of a complex that rested on the virtue of one old woman. She was not virtuous for her own glory, but because her acts affected everyone. The same was true for the Bundle Keepers; Bundles were meant to be maintained well because they affected the fortunes of the whole band.

It is very hard to keep any religious ritual from drifting off into personal demonstrations of wealth, like the Pacific Northwest tribes who practiced the ritual of potlatch. In that rich ecology one person could accumulate a LOT of wealth, which he redistributed in a feast so generous that the communal bowl was the size of a canoe. The Blackfeet will give blankets and tobacco, but the Kwaikiutl moguls gave everything they had. They could accumulate wealth in intricately embossed sheets of copper which were broken and thrown into the sea. In return for all this, they were entitled to put a sort of disc on their hat. Some men had several discs.

The complaint that people tend to reduce meaningful rituals into attempts to superstitiously and magically control events recurs again and again. When I did my hospital chaplaincy, the Catholic chaplains hated to supply rosaries because people didn’t use them to discipline devotional prayer (keeping track of the number of repetitions of the formula) but rather considered them magical. I wangled a rosary for a young mother with a baby who needed surgery that would require resources the mother didn’t have -- not even emotionally -- and, sure enough, she wound the rosary into the baby’s crib and disappeared, as though the “magic” of some beads would be compensation.

In the same way the liturgies of indigenous peoples are used to supply prestige and “magic” without any real care for the context of the land itself, which is only a backdrop for them rather than the substrate of existence that it has always been.

RED CLOUD THE EDUCATIONAL MULE

2012-01-02T10:09:00.002-07:00

One of my big categories of bookmarks is “animals” which includes an assortment of websites, blogs and listservs. There’s a LOT of action of many kinds: vids, biology, environmental studies, people who work alongside dogs, and so on. Boria Sax keeps trying to get people to talk about mythology and stories. HSUS always has someone on board to make a pitch for their goal of a perfected and vegetarian world where the money rolls into their coffers. Through all of these venues twines and twirls a kind of philosophical kudzu that says not only are all prosperous white men evil, but also among all the animals, humans are the most evil and express this by confining chickens in close quarters and eating cows.

This seems to come from having no contact with animals. Our housing is so inappropriate and our incomes so tight that only the poor people can afford dogs, because in that situation they fend for themselves -- just like the people. Religiously, we’ve given up on the existence of angels, so we need dogs to assume their characteristics -- except for the wings, of course. Or sometimes, when people hesitate to have babies, the dogs and cats occupy that cradle niche. Whatever the forces and circumstances causing these strange theories, they overcome almost all points of view and even interfere in ranching, causing Oprah to stigmatize beef, which badly damaged sales.

“Yogi Bera once said that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” -- via Taleb Nassim, the “Black Swan” guy. My mountain man friend, Paul, sent along a story that is an excellent illustration. I post it here as a public service and a pleasure.

____________

I've probably told you all my Red Cloud stories including this one, but a recounting will fit in with your current observations.

David wasn't one of the original land partners at the Garden [a commune based in the forested Northwest], but he was an early arrival. He hailed from Utah where he'd had an organic grocery store or something like that. David was always a go-getter sort of guy. From sun up to sun down he was busy with one project or another and was pretty good at encouraging others to join him. For a long time we changed his name to Manual, for manual labor. He would have spelled it Manwell.

When the animal liberationists started showing up, he easily fell in with them, asserting that manpower was all we needed to get anything done. Red Cloud and Kyrat the horse were visible lightning bolts for those folks that didn't understand that these animals weren't necessarily beasts of burden kept only to do our bidding. They liked to work rather than stand around watching the world go by. Red Cloud was especially enthusiastic. All I had to do to demonstrate that was to produce his harness and lay it out on the ground. He'd come running and willingly step right up to be suited up. I think it made him feel like a superman mule or something. He loved to show off his strength and challenge himself.

Red Cloud came already sort of trained to harness and riding. Anything I learned about it came from him because I had no prior experience other than a bit of riding. The first logging contract I got with him was interesting because he not only taught us how it was done, but also trained up the horse who became his work mate.

We didn't have much luck teaming them together for the most part. The differences between horses and mules became evident right off the bat. When the mule would be hooked to a drag and get hung up on a tree, he'd look back and assess the problem, figuring out what it was going to take to get loose and generally succeeding. When the horse got hung up, he'd just wait patiently for a human to come figure out things for him and free him.

Anyway, back to David/Manual... after observing the animals obvious relish for hard work and not having much luck in motivating human powered labor, he undertook to move some house logs with Red Cloud. He'd watched me long enough to figure out how to hook up the harness, but he was rough with Red Cloud. I don't recall what set it off, but he got frustrated with something the mule did and hit him with a 2x4. Not a good way to get a mule's cooperation.

Red Cloud was a patient teacher though. He waited until David wasn't paying attention and bent over hooking up the traces. Red Cloud looked back, took careful aim and let him have it with both feet. Heh, I laughed my ass off with the mule after I assured David wasn't seriously hurt and told him it was payback for the 2x4 incident. David took it pretty well and decided to watch how I got the animals cooperation rather than forcing them to do something they didn't want to do. Even then it was a long time before he turned his back on Red Cloud after that.

Red Cloud's educational legacy lives on. David went on to become a millionaire potato farmer here and made a name for himself raising and training Halflinger draft horses on his organic farm.

We didn't have much for dependable rigs in those days, A 36 dodge pickup that I can't recall the name of and Gus. the two ton truck from the 40's. Oh, and my trusty International travelall, but I needed that for getting back and forth to work.

I meant to tell you about the van we collectively leased. Named it Blue Star, it was big enough to haul us all around in comfort when we left the place. which was a much better option than riding everyone in the back of Gus.

That van was always getting stuck somewhere on the property and Red Cloud and Kyrat were all the time having to harness up and yard it back out. Looked funny to have to pull around a brand new fancy van with a mule/horse team. That's probably why Red Cloud always thought himself supreme.

Addendum:

Remembered the name of that old dodge pickup while reading your blog post. Aggie. Odd that only the really old rigs earned names for themselves, except Blue Star. I think it only got named because we felt sorry for it. My travelall was Faith. It got it’s name for getting us from a tree planting contract somewhere around Libby, all the way to Kalispell with no gas. At least that’s what the gas gauge said.

LUCIFER'S CHOICE

2012-01-01T06:25:00.002-07:00

The darkest angel, who was little but not the littlest, was constantly punished by God for some unknown reason. Maybe for being dark. The confusing part was that God would say, “I’m only doing this because I love you,” and would embrace him, kiss his bruises, bind up his broken bones. The ones God himself broke! So the darkest angel, whose name was Lucifer, felt that this was the price of love, it was the most normal way to be, because why would God be different than that? And no one else was willing to oppose him. Because this was a MONO-theism, not a DUO-theism.

So one day God said, “That’s it. I’m throwing you out of heaven.” And Lucifer said, “You can’t do that because . . .I’m jumping!” and the last two words were uttered as he fell from a rainbow. There was no going back. He had wings, very DARK wings, but they were bound at that point. It took him years to unbind them. They turned out to be leather, not feathers.

Actually he was quite powerful, but he never used his power to destroy people -- that was God’s thing. What he did was get very close, intimate, entwined -- then jerk away and leave them yearning. The yearning got them into all sorts of trouble as they searched for some equivalent, some healing, some forgetfulness. It grieved God. That pleased Lucifer. “Now what do you think of free will, Big Guy? Shall I start a democracy?”

How did it all get so turned around? Why do we all want to love Lucifer and defy God? People are obsessed with Lucifer, his seductive darkness, his secrets -- what IS he up to? Can we go, too? Curiosity comes from all the warnings NOT to go with him. Worse than the Pied Piper, he is, he is! We hear the grownups whispering but they won’t tell us anything.

We look to the mythology and find a god of light! Lucifer, the flaring match. Lucifer, the dawn star. He flies above the abyss. (Sounds like a shaman to me.) We look to science and they tell us that this is because the dawn star is a planet, contrarily named Venus. (Is Lucifer transexual? That would explain a lot!) In addition, this planet is INSIDE Earth’s orbit -- an inner circle -- so it can only be seen in the morning and evening. Sometimes it’s a morning star and sometimes it’s an evening star. Whether or not it is “bi-”, it is certainly “diurnal.” It moves. You cannot steer by it. But you cannot mistake it.

The forces of darkness think of themselves as a closed club, one you’re too young, too naive, to know about, though if you’re attractive enough Lucifer might come to slip beneath your covers. You won’t like that. You SHOULDN’T. It’s forbidden. He’s OTHER.

Then along comes a new Dawn Star and displaces Lucifer. This time it’s Jesus who is the Morning Star. Always someone horning in. Now there’s a tritheism. Next I suppose some Cavalry officer with a bad reputation will be trying to get into the game. (He was blonde, but very dark inside.)

Women love the bad guys. Like Custer’s wife, they claim, follow and eulogize them. The hidden message is “Don’t mess with me -- I’m more powerful than my boyfriend, the Devil, because I can control him.” Or maybe they just like the drama of it all. There are groups for that, so they can tell their wild stories and how they suffered. STILL suffer. Write books about it and get rich.

Christianity is so entwined with Zoroastrianism (thus spoke Zarathustra !) and Manichaeism, which all came out of the same region and thus the same imagery, that they echo each other all the time. Ahura Mazda is also known as Ohrmazd, Hourmazd, Hormazd, Hurmuz, Aramazd and Azzandara. Ahura Mazda's counterpart is Angra Mainyu, the "evil spirit" and the creator of evil who will be destroyed before frashokereti (the destruction of evil). The names didn’t catch on but the binaries of light and darkness, good and evil, never changed. Would Lucifer by any other name be as wicked? Just as dark? Just as seductive? If his wings had feathers would we be any less or more willing to be enfolded and rocketed away into the darkness, full of power?

Here’s the twist. This next year will be obsessed by the polarized politics that have gotten us stuck for the last few years. Will it be Lucifer Gingrich or Lucifer Obama? Which one is the real demon lover? It seems plain to me that it is neither. The real Devil cannot be named because those who control the planetary networks of military, corporate, and financial power can afford to be anonymous. You’ll never know their names. They’ll never be hauled into court. You’ll never find their wealth. They live in darkness, that seductive Black Hand world where people are “taken care of” in more than one sense. None of the strutting despots who are being thrown out of their palaces were ever truly Lucifer. Not even the financial moguls who have been caught were truly Lucifer.

A strange phenomenon in the last few days has been anonymous crime. “Flash” robberies where more than a hundred people, coordinated by cell phones, show up at a store and clear the shelves -- overwhelming all defenses. Someone is in the streets of Great Falls at night setting fire to one car after another, a dozen at once. Anonymous hackers are stealing from security businesses -- the BEST high-level security businesses! Stealing and revealing government documents and secrets. It’s hard to know whether these last are on the side of the good or the bad. They are Anonymous. They are Occupy. We TALK sunshine and transparency. But can we handle the truth?

It’s about time we did. This essay started with a story, the kind of fantasy with “Freudian” and superstitious overtones that the media dearly love and that seep into our assumptions without ever being checked against reality. By luring you in with a story, maybe it’s possible to wake up the sleeping. Otherwise we risk Custer’s Last Stand, which was not about Indians at all. It was about hubris, about thinking you know everything and that the right is on your side and that there is no risk. The Devil is in the details.

"DANCING ON HIS GRAVE": A Montana Testimony

2011-12-31T10:19:00.002-07:00

Barbara Richard is a female Montana writer you may not have heard of since she doesn’t fit into the pretensions of the Montana bourgeois gatekeepers. She wrote a powerful trio of books with gerund names: “Dancing on his Grave,” “Walking Wounded,” and “Chasing Ghosts.” The first is relieved testimony from a family of five girls and their mother at the time of the father’s death. They had been terrorized, scarred and nearly murdered by that narcissistic sociopathic grandiose man. The phrase is not careless: it is a scientific category for a certain kind of person, usually a man.

The second book is about the girls and how they became competent women with happy children of their own. The mother did as well once she broke the “battered woman syndrome” enough to escape. The third book is in part an attempt to understand where such sociopaths come from, what makes them tick, and -- if possible -- what can be done about it. I’ve only read the first book and gave it away to someone who needed it. Now I’ll order the others. If you want to read these books, go to http://www.dancingonhisgrave.com/index.html to order them, or go to Barnes & Noble. Amazon, for once, is not selling this book. There are excerpts on Barbara’s website.

When I was writing about Bob Scriver, I did a lot of reading about narcissistic sociopaths (people who think only of themselves) and Barbara has also done a lot of research. There’s a huge body of stuff out there. Bob Scriver was only mildly touched by this syndrome but Barbara’s father was extreme, whipping them bloody. He bashed his wife into unconsciousness. His mother died under ambiguous circumstances as a result of violence. There may be a genetic component to this, probably on the Y gene, and it is aggravated by hardship and violence, like dryland homesteading or combat.

One school of thought is that all this should be hidden, repressed, and erased in the hope that it will go away. It’s bad for sales. The impulse to achieve prestige by being irreproachable is a strong one. But, as the saying goes, it will come back to bite you in the butt. Anyway, I just have this craving to KNOW in order to do something about it. It’s intolerable to let it keep on happening without at least responding to the victims.

Another problem is raised by the worship of genius and a willingness to excuse all shortcomings in the interest of exceptional achievement. One of the publisher’s readers for my bio of Bob wanted me to remove any reference to him being narcissistic (I didn’t say sociopath -- he wasn’t that) because she said it undercut his artistic genius. Such ideas make good media fodder, but there are plenty of mild, generous achievers with major talent.

The next place that I think the public has a mind-skip is confusing a person who has this personality dominated by "narcissistic grandiose sociopathy" with the character of their offspring, damaged by growing up with such a man. They may have some of the markers of their fathers without suffering the whole syndrome. I don’t think there is much research on people like Barbara Richard and her sibs who have mastered the damage. If it is heritable, then females may escape the genetic component but will still be imprinted by violence. Barbara suggests that women who seem to have this syndrome often work to express it through their children, esp. their male children, to act out their abusive attitude towards others, esp. other women. That sounds right to me. Maybe a source of mother-in-law mythology.

And the next element I would add is grandiosity, the drive to be dominant and also to have exaggerated respect and status in a community. We see it in these Middle Eastern despots recently thrown out of power. But it’s not very hard to find in American cities and small towns. Consider our admiration of “Godfathers” in the Mafia or J. Edgar Hoover on the other side of the sheets. Barbara muses about Hitler, who was clearly a sort of Charles Manson -- not at all attractive or capable of force, except that that both somehow had the charisma to attract big powerful and yet controllable men. I think it is so deep in the brain that it even pre-dates the mammal brain. Much of evolution consists of a powerful drive that is then modified by the addition of controls or converters. At the heart of an engine is an explosion. It is guided and controlled in order to go forward. I suspect that the model is not an intruder mutation that can be somehow extirpated with drugs or punishment, but rather a drive close to the heart of biology that is missing the evolved controls that mutations had gradually built in, making space for civilization.

These men are notorious through history for their power and effectiveness. They occupy the bleeding edge of what makes us human, shading into the force that allows a chimpanzee to snatch off a human face. But we don’t think of them as SUB-human -- we admire them as SUPER-human, potent. Old age mellows some of them. Some become zombies. I’m not guessing: I knew some of these men on the rez in their young and rampaging days. Most were killed, accidentally or on purpose. Some women (co-dependent, enabling) fit into relationship with these men.

Barbara hand-sells her self-published books and travels around the territory being on panels and speaking. The result of this is low sales (there just isn’t the population density in Montana) and a bulging file of women testifying, “Oh, I recognize this! This is ME!” What does one do with this? Go on Oprah? (It’s an idea!) On the one hand the Big Media love shocking stories like this -- on the other hand, it scares them. And there is a small element that will blame Barbara herself for tolerating it or writing about it or thinking about it or doing anything that admits such people exist.

But some researchers suggest that as many as three or four in every hundred people is carrying at least the potential for these acts. Shouldn’t we be looking for markers, especially in this age of sudden berzerk attacks on innocent people in public places?

"IN TREATMENT": Review and Reflection

2011-12-30T09:11:00.001-07:00

“In Treatment” is a television remake series that lasted for three years, which was in addition to the previous years the original series ran in Israel. Today I watched the last week of the third year of the American version, the only year not based on the Israel stories. After all this struggle the psychotherapist, “Paul Weston,” 57 years old, played by Gabriel Byrne, goes off into the Brooklyn crowd determined to close his practice because he doesn’t know how to love. Of his last three cases, the gay boy is collected by his MASSIVE Italian adoptive father, the Calcutta man deceives him enough to be deported (which is what the man wants), and the actress is “all alone in the world” trying to decide whether to “pull the plug” on her dying sister. She might do better to slap her daughter. Paul’s own therapist can’t talk him out of quitting. Off he schleps down the sidewalk like an Irish Woody Allen with his muffler wound tight.

What good is this psychotherapy stuff anyway? This series throws the doctrine into doubt even more than “The Dangerous Method” which at least makes it seem exciting. I’ve always been a skeptic about Freud anyway -- preferring Jung and seeing more common sense in Victor Frankl’s version of the “talking cure.” (His ideas came out of working with holocaust survivors.) Maybe I’m just not Jewish.

A friend suggested that “In Treatment” was well-Americanized, but I counter-suggested that it was well-“Manhattanized” even though it’s set in Baltimore and Brooklyn. The more I think about that idea, the better I like it. In Germany there was a high culture of bourgeois people, mostly Jewish, very educated and tightly socialized, squeezing their corseted women into hysteria, and distorting their children’s lives with arbitrary discipline while they regarded their own cigars with phallic attachment. When the rise of the Nazis threw them out of their cushioned surroundings, many landed in Manhattan where their high skills were seen as the pinnacle of civilization. The same in Israel. And they WERE, in fact, gifted and educated -- and now free to bloom, which they did. Think abstract expressionism.

But maybe they were in fact and reality, the same sort of searching -- indeed, ransacking -- of human nature after the death camps to find what was true and dependable. And in their trauma and suspicion and supersensitivity, maybe they came to the position of Paul Weston, who can’t accept a therapist who won’t enable him. This guy sympathizes with the patients whose parents ignore them, and yet will not pay attention to his own children and lovers. Indeed, when he isn’t ignoring them, he’s rejecting and critical. Who wants him? Only the co-dependent, the enablers.

So IMHO this series is a brilliant exploration of the problem, but not much in the way of solution. The one true solution I see (aside from the final therapist, who must give up her opportunity to relate to this man in order to stop the co-dependent process, choosing profession over romance) is in the man from India, who has a strict personal code and lives by it. It does not include being honest with one’s therapist. It is near-Viennese in its rigidity and preoccupation with family honor. But it works. Samil is not depressed, not confused, able to act to change his life in the way he chooses. He provides much needed friendship to his therapist, using his different culture as a cover.

It has been said that this series and “Paul” himself are most interesting when the script explores the boundary between culturally dictated duty and the real -- nearly biological -- response of one human being to another in the way that creates bonds and loyalties, even true love. I suppose one is skeleton and one is flesh, but I’m not sure where that gets a thinker trying to find a principle of reconciliation. People get lost on both sides of the line between the two. Nor are they helped when the line blurs.

But by the seventh week of the third year I was getting to the point where I wanted to give this “Paul” character a good kick in the pants. He WAS helping his patients, at least some of them most of the time. But he had only a few theme songs that he played over and over. Of course, this character is a creation by several writers sitting around a table, sketching out plot lines and discussing how to stretch and re-invigorate what is actually a very confined template: an office, two or possibly three people at a time, only talking. The ultimate “character” that results is a composite of those writers: mostly Jewish, probably mostly middle-aged, mostly in Manhattan. That is, the same people who have controlled the media and the publishing industry, as well as much of banking -- systems now collapsing.

These people were raised to believe they were intelligent, to aspire to creative work of some importance, and to assume this “earned” world would continue as usual. It has not. In some ways the electronic revolution and globalization have erased a way of life to the same degree that WWII did, though I suppose it’s heresy to say so. They ARE “Paul Weston.” Confused. Mice in glue traps. At least feeling that way.

The Valier librarian and I confer. She says the fastest moving books she has are fantasy -- that’s what she has ordered the most of for this year. People are in escapist mode. Or is it “speculative mode?” And the BEST books she’s been reading have been “YA” or Young Adult, a genre of books that is almost gruesome in its willingness to look at social problems. Very “gritty,” as they say.

YA gritty fantasy. It’s fun to imagine a panel of Paul’s imaginary young patients sitting down with him to try to crack that Eeyore carapace of his. “What are you doing for the poor people?” one might ask. “Where is your dedication to the welfare of the earth itself?” demands another. “What is this elitism thing you’ve got, this fascination with class?” “So -- you had no mother. Why won’t you let us mother you?” Or, as many of his patients demand, “What do you want from me, Paul?”

Indeed, Paul wants to mother everyone else, even the ones who yearn instead for a father or lover. Or a teacher or limit-setter. And would it hurt to have a few belly-laughs now and then? If human beings in therapy aren’t ridiculous enough to provoke both laughter and love, what is? Better for us all to be out in the world, but this series can’t hurt you and might give you ideas. I thought it was interesting that in the sidewalk-ending Paul was occasionally obscured by a closer, bigger, handsome, briskly-walking, black man. Maybe that’s the other Manhattan.

TWO HANDS CLAPPING

2011-12-29T10:04:00.003-07:00

When one reads about the evolution of mind it is clear that percussion, dancing and chanting pre-date the Stone Age or even hominids themselves. Chimps are enthusiastic burlesque performers. In fact, it’s hard to resist their joyful hooting and prancing. Therefore, I suggest that if one is constructing a liturgy of joy and celebration, the key might be in NOT using the concept of the "neuronal platform" that normally coordinates thinking and action, that which may very well be the late-evolving brain element that finally distinguishes between humans and their relatives. Successful liturgies of joy might have to shut down or evade that super-egoish “working neuronal nexus.” Alcohol does it easily, of course, but there may be other ways if we think about civilizations that have learned how to be publicly and physically joyful. Zorba the Greek, for instance, and his love of dance.

Some peoples have managed to avoid performance -- which tends to be about a bunch of people watching few persons -- by emphasizing participation, a pre-theatre mode of expression. One could argue that rock n’ roll, hip-hop, and “flash” events where people come out of nowhere to perform in a public place are a partial return to participation, a reaching back for joy. It seems we agree that the Puritans were a repressed and sober bunch who sat in pews, resisting the wild May Day celebrations of Merrymount. And we know that the hands-up, swaying, lung-busting celebrations of the evangelical and black churches express happy ecstasy.

I was thinking about a kind of theory of sensory context: which are the earliest, which sense prevails, how that relates to the culture. One of the ceremonies I will discuss in the “Molten Chalice” is a New Guinea jungle event where the beat is kept by men jumping up and down to make the gourd fitted over their penis smack sharply against a belt studded with shells and nuts. It occurred to me that in jungle-based locations where one can hardly see very far, sound would become extremely important, more highly significant than sight as one listens for the rustling of prey. Smell would also count big.

But on the grasslands and shorelines of the early hominids, binocular eyesight would take precedence. Whatever that did to the development of the brain processor (probably pushed it right along) it would have been crucial to see and identify objects at a distance or shapes glimpsed but incomplete behind an outcropping. The ability to see and remember shapes might be the platform on which writing and reading developed. Writing and reading may have been what got everyone sitting in pews or at least standing at attention in a cathedral while a priest read from a big book chained to the pulpit. One takes a missal or bible or order of service to one’s seat to read along, so to that extent there is participation. In the beginning books were important to the point of being magic. (So far church goers don’t seem to follow on iPads, but students do that.)

The significance of smell is a great subject but I won’t develop it here. In fact, I’m not going to go on with this idea of puritans on the plains and bacchantes in the forest, but it would be fun -- worth someone’s time to research. It does suggest to me that we have made life so safe, so repetitive, so channeled, that we crave some excitement but our passive regard of pictured explosions, murders, political fiascoes, and natural disasters has no outlet. We never get up and run off the chemicals these images create. I suppose we become habituated and numb, incapable of either despair OR exultation. Stuck like a mouse in a glue trap, as the therapist who is in therapy himself puts it on “In Treatment.”

At the third-year UU Leadership School I attended, we were invited to design our own event. Out came the newsprint and the fibertips so we could write our lists. One item was an evening devoted to “fun.” The problem of how to design a “fun” event was solved in a way predictable if one knew the audience: middle class, white collar, conscientious, socially conscious, etc. They decided on an event of reversal (very Victor Turner): a cross-dressing Miss America pageant. (We had a lot of raving feminists at the time. No “out” gays, which there are now.) So the men would have a swimsuit competition. They had never been on a bright stage in swimsuits before and though they weren’t wearing Speedos, they weren’t used to public “gaze” and had not brought along dance belts or athletic supporters. As some pranced across the stage, intending hilarious social comment, they sported commendable and quite apparent “boners.”

No one knew what to do. It seemed the women could do such a thing without embarrassment, but these quiet officemen could not. Finally someone draped in an armload of beach kelp charged the stage as the “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Everyone ran off screaming. Much of the night was spent discussing, particularly between married partners.

So the next night Peter Raible decided unilaterally on a “do-over.” (This was the year we got stuck several times and had to jettison democracy in order to save ourselves. At one point we elected a “queen”-- the most sensible and trustworthy person among us -- to tell us what to do, which DID work.) Peter and his helpers told us all to be at a certain place at a certain time, to bring a cup and a dollar, and to wear old clothes. A van pulled up, someone jumped out and took our money, and then they left. We milled around nervously for a while. Then the van returned with -- VOILA! -- champagne !! Just as we got out our cups and were ready to imbibe, the windows above us opened and we were barraged with water balloons. Being surprised, remembering childhoods, imbibing a little alcohol, risking little, at last we were having fun. If the van had unloaded a troupe of nude dancers there would never have been another leadership school. So much of success is knowing the audience/participants. We were bold talkers but timid riskers.

Experiments in sensory elements of liturgy are fun. More is out there than drumming groups and liturgical dancing. One year at Easter I used as a theme Tolstoy’s “somewhere in the world there is a green branch and on it is written the word that will save the world.” I handed out raw asparagus with “peace” or “love” printed on each stalk and -- after assuring the worried that the words were written with food-grade markers -- we ingested the “branches,” thus internalizing the lesson. At another event dedicated to the earth we had a gummi worm “communion.” But it would be a mistake to call it a communion since there has not been a salvific worm. Or has there? Maybe considered in toto as preserving the topsoil of the planet?

At a ministers‘ meeting, one of the jokesters offered a banana communion in honor of penises. It was funny until it turned out there were too many ministers for the number of bananas and some had to be cut up. (Bananas, not ministers.) Another time I told the Demeter/Persephone story and handed out to each person six little kernels of pomegranate -- a minor disaster since the juice stains clothes. After that I used six red beads about the right size. If I were doing it again, I would string them together in clusters of six in order to save time counting out. It is not EASIER to include sensory information into liturgy. And it is not easy to make sure it’s joyful.

Here’s a liturgical story, which was told to me as true. A minister wanted his Easter sermon to be memorable, so he paid a small boy to go up above the ceiling of the sanctuary with a dove in a cage. There was a trapdoor up there and the idea was for the minister to cry out in amazement, “Lo, the Spirit was among them!” Then the boy would release the dove to fly down over the heads of the parishioners.

The minister gave the cue -- nothing came down through the trapdoor. He repeated again, louder. Still no bird. One more time, practically bellowing. The boy’s wavering voice from above: “Reverend, the cat ate the bird. Shall I send down the cat?” It’s meant to be a joke, but I wonder about possible interpretations. By being so serious in our worships, have we let the cat among the pigeons?

Oh, well, let’s just beat out a rhythm on the back of the pew just ahead and sing with Bobby McFarin, “Don’t worry -- be happy!”

CUPPED HANDS

2011-12-28T06:33:00.003-07:00

Not open legs. This is not about sex. It’s about humanness. When the chalice is cupped human hands

When we hold each other’s fiery hearts in our hands, we risk blistering what makes us human: opposable thumbs, readable palms. The liturgies of intense third-degree intimacy can be among the most painful. I’m impressed that when I read romantic genres, the moments of high passion are usually mixed with ordeals: knives slashing across bodies, struggles to climb a cliff, dropping from heights into water, gunshot wounds, and so on. There seems to be a struggle to find something intense enough to express extremes.

CONFESSION: Though we mean all tenderness and put our two hands on the sides of the beloved’s face to hold still their familiar visage, their uniqueness, and their returning gaze, yet we fall into anger, resentment and selfishness. The same two hands that caress can slap and rend. Or they are not strong enough: the bones break, the knuckles swell and jam, there are calluses and scars and warts. We drop things, we are clumsy, our scribbles are unintelligible, we can’t hold on. Our hands char with pain.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON: With luck, we arrive in the world to the hands of a skillful and loving human being. Two hands, cupped together, just about the right size to hold a newborn.

Two hands, cupped together, just about the right size to receive a meal’s worth of food.

Two hands, a little apart, hold a book.

Two hands, flexed and percussive, on the keyboard of a computer or a concert grand.

A hand on a shoulder. A hand on a foot.

Again that hand laid against the side of a well-loved face.

We hold out our hands to each other, no matter the risk, the damage, the mutilation, the stains and tattoos.

“Here, shake hands on it.”

“Hands up -- I surrender.”

One hand up: salute. Flat open: I am unarmed.

In the Gladiator series: fist strikes heart, then -- open -- extends to horizon.

Sign language: hand on heart -- "I love you".

“I swear,” holding up the hand.

But there’s no limit to the extremity of intimacy trials. They go beyond sanity. Men kill their best friends in a frenzy of drinking or drugging. Women in the grip of postpartum psychosis can’t be trusted to bathe their own babies without holding them under the water. Heartbroken youngsters hang themselves, sometimes in a pact. Weren’t all of them loved? Was it just a matter of not accepting the intimacy, not recognizing it, not thinking they deserved it, not tolerating the possible meaning? Loving hands could not save them. I’ve seen old movies of toddlers with rabies who writhed and lunged with fear-biting when the nurses offered them milk they craved. The nurses wore heavy rubber gloves to their elbows, their hands deep inside.

When the reconciling neural platform of rationality in the brain is burned through by the conflagration of insanity, the result is devastation, mass murder, suicide bombs. What’s a liturgy in the face of that? The chalice itself is destroyed. The holding community is flattened, prostrate with grief, like trees around a meteorite hit, immobilized. Yet the image of Communion was able to save the sanity of a group of Uruguayan boys in the Andes who had to resort to eating their best friends and closest relatives in order to survive.

I included that and another surprising liturgy of intimacy in “The Molten Chalice.” In fact, one of the things that got me thinking about it in the first place was reading an account -- I think in the Journal of Pastoral Care published about 1980 when I was doing my chaplaincy -- written by a pastor responding to a young woman who wanted to go through with a wedding though the groom had been killed in a car accident on the way to the ceremony. No one in her family wanted her to do this. They thought it was a crazy thing to do.

The article was not a justification for marrying a young woman to a corpse, but rather -- after he had already concluded that it would be sanity-saving rather than destructive, that such a ceremony would be a chalice for living love, so he told how he went about organizing the liturgy. It was and was not a marriage. That is, there were vows, prayers, and a ring, but no walk up any aisle and no congregational witnesses or attendants.

Mormons will “marry” in unconventional ways, including “marrying” long-dead ancestors to each other. In other cultures, for instance the Chinese, there are customs of marrying a dead man for various reasons, most of them having to do with the status of the family, the economic and political ramifications. In fact, I own a DVD of a Chinese film, “The Wooden Man’s Bride” in which the dead man’s stand-in is a block of wood, toted around even to the bed. It’s not at all about intimacy. In fact, it means the bride will have no intimacy. Nor children. Liturgy can be twisted and emptied, two skeletal hands, one clapped over the other to confine, create a prison. But a covered container will suffocate the contents.

I used to have a little quote about a young person asking an old person how to maintain a relationship. They happened to be at the beach. The older person took up a handful of sand. “Watch.” The hand was open, cupped, and the sand rested in it. “Now.” The hand clenched over the sand and squeezed: it escaped everywhere between the fingers.

There was another quote that used to be on Seattle area bumper stickers in Eighties, very New Age. “I release you, let you go free, and if you return to me, then I will know you are mine.” And the demonic variation: “I release you, let you go free, and if you don’t return to me, I will track you down and kill you.” Very strange culture we live in. Better to marry a block of wood.

In another story, a child holds a bird in his cupped hands, as though in a nest. He goes to his wise grandparent and asks, “Will this bird live or die?” The old person says: “It depends on what you do, doesn’t it? You could either crush it or set it free. It’s in your hands.”

* * * * * ADDENDUM:

This post has too many ideas in it, but here I am, about to add more. I just rewatched "The Wooden Man's Bride" and discovered the film is packed with ceremonies, liturgies, protocols, trials, ordeals from one end to the other. It's a gorgeous movie in a landscape very much like the American SW and a frank "Western" except for being Western China. A fort-household, a gang of outlaws, and a mother-in-law ruled by custom and reputation pitted against a girl so young she is "hairless" but old enough to be a rebel, even with both ankles broken. Love wins out -- partly sweeping aside the old traditions and partly adapting them new ways.

NATURE'S MIND: Some Notes

2011-12-27T08:31:00.003-07:00

The subtitle of “Nature’s Mind” is ambitious: “The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language and Intelligence.” Published in 1992 -- twenty years ago -- it’s now a little old-fashioned. This is Michael S. Gazzaniga’s report on “results so far,” mostly in the field of split-brain research. It had developed from that same lust for surgical intervention that justified lobotomies which severed the pre-frontal cortex from the rest of the brain in an effort to control intractable (socially unacceptable) behavior. The lobotomy scandal had demonic consequences for Tennessee Williams’ sister, one of the Kennedy sisters, and many others, mostly female. As it turned out, less brain was not more normal.

This time around the idea was to sever the corpus callosum, the thick connecting cable of nerves between the two halves of the walnut-shaped brain. The consequences hoped for was the quelling of electrochemical brain storms that threw the victim into life-threatening seizures. It was known that one-half the brain could even be removed or have been missing from birth without killing the person. For a while it was thought that the two halves were simply flipped-over mirror images, duplicates. But it turned out to make a huge difference which side was removed, which opened a lot of questions about what the difference was. To the naked eye, a brain just looks like oatmeal and jello. At least that’s what the special effects people use in movies when brains leak out.

But it has developed that the brain is pretty complex. And the difference between one side and the other turned out to be what Gazzaniga was at this point calling “the Interpreter.” (Later called the “global neuronal workspace.”) Nerve networks for various purposes were known to exist, sub-structures of the brain appeared to have independent reconciliation and sorting duties, but no one had realized that there was a location -- usually on the left side in a right-handed person -- where the inputs of these various sub-structures (mostly never available to consciousness) were given a final “staging” that filled in blanks and dropped out what didn’t match pre-existing expectations. This led to a lot of clever experiments that have over the years erased any idea that humans are “objective,” but in compensation began to uncover a lot of human resourcefulness.

I won’t try to summarize the book more than that, but I marked several ideas as particularly interesting.

Page 68. “In 1976 D.G. Freedman . . . was able to demonstrate clear differences betwen newborns of Chinese ancestry and matched groups of Caucasians on temperament items from the Cambridge Neonatal Scales. Although the two groups were indistinguishable in many areas of development, European-Americans tended to reach peaks of excitement sooner and to show greater instability to new states. Chinese American neonates, on the other hand, were calmer, steadier, faster to habituate or accommodate to external stimulation, more highly consolable when upset, and better at self-quieting.” Jerome Kagan got similar results at Harvard. No one has performed this comparison on Native American babies though their basic genome is also Asian

p. 149 “Asians have long been known to have a low incidence of alcoholism”. . . But consider North American Indian and Eskimo people whose genes are Asian. “Both of these groups are notorious for having drinking problems.” Both respond physiologically to alcohol in the same way. (Turn red with “Oriental flush,” palpitations and nausea.) Even babies given milk with a drop of port in it react this way. Why do Chinese people not become alcoholic? Does culture override physiology?

p. 147 After describing “kinds” of alcoholism, he proposes that “the evidence for a genetic link to alcoholism, particularly in Type 2, is growing. (“Occurs only in men, is characterized by antisocial personality traits, criminal activity and the pursuit of alcohol for its euphoric effects.”) Hard for the environment to impact. Still, inheritance is not inevitable -- 20 to 25% inheritance in sons with alcoholic fathers.

p. 79 “There is a good body of evidence to suggest that language can be dissociated from general-purpose cognition. For example, it is easy to show that you can have cognition without language. Animals, infants before they have a language, or stroke victims who are aphasic, can all display intelligence without the benefit of language. Looking at it in the other way around, patients who become demented are frequently able to speak relatively normally, but have little capacity to carry out the simplest problem-solving behavior.”

One whole chapter is about addiction theory. He is critical of using addiction models to account for obsessive behavior like hypersexuality because no substance is ingested and there are no physical withdrawal symptoms if the activity is stopped. But I think he overlooks the ability of the body to generate substances and the thin wall between addiction and habituation.

p. 134 He speaks of the advantage of the “interpreter structure” in the brain and likens it to a “system that allows for thought about the implications of actions, generated both by others as well as the self, will grasp a social context and its meaning for personal survival. Thus, you can both carry around and have access to your own “video camera” of events in which you are continually involved and think about the impact of your actions on your working environment. Furthermore, you can come to see the difference between your public and your private selves, as you realize that others think of you in terms of their interpretations of your actions. You come to learn that the public’s theory of who you are can be different from your own personal theory of being who you are and how you feel. Human beings learn quickly that feeding those two different selves is a major function of human existence and survival.” Ouch. I’m watching “In Treatment” on DVD’s. How true. I think the scriptwriters read this book.

So here’s the bottom line: p. 113 “The special capacity to make an inference about both internal bodily states and external actions of ourselves and others seems, when fully developed, to reside in the left hemisphere of humans, and is called “the interpreter.” “The interpreter is a powerful system that is at the core of human belief formation. Without it, we would be little different from animals. With it, we become wonderfully inventive and individual even though our nervous systems are more similar than not. The selection pressures developed in humans a capacity that saves us from being completely beholden to the environment -- and thus, in some ways, has outsmarted itself.” I’m reading about this capacity in order to reflect on liturgy, but it is such a seductive idea that I keep getting distracted. I may be outsmarting myself.