THE SEASONS FLIP IN FLAMES

Myself, 1945-'46

This time of year I’m always a little panicky.  It doesn’t help that the weather shifts now, so around here we are due for a cold spell and even some snow, but in the meantime fires are filling the air with smoke so that the nose-brain is signalling “fire,fire,fire. . . “  

But the real reason is the beginning of school.  From the very first day of kindergarten, which was my own personal first day because my mother had to fight to get me in late, because she said that I was overloading her ability to care for the three of us (me and “the boys” who at that point were like one person).  My b-day is late in October, so I was technically too young, but she made her plea stick.

The result was that I walked into a classroom where everyone had already formed their social patterns and there was no place for me.  Lesson learned.  Maybe OVER-learned.  I wouldn’t have known this had happened if my mother hadn’t told me.  Her position about me all my life was that I was unwilling to take the bullet for her and the boys, for the family.  (My father had a traveling job.  He was irrelevant but he was also the reason my mother felt so overwhelmed.)  She never mentioned a precipitating incident, but there must have been one.

A candle-making demonstration about 1953

She felt that my role as a daughter was to support hers as a mother.  She hoped I would be a do-over for every disappointment she’d had.  That meant she finished college while I was in high school as she could not at the proper age (the Depression), and then sent me through college.  But she was enraged that in middle age I went to Divinity School on scholarship.  Twice in life I really screwed up and got into the crosshairs of failure so that I had to ask to come back “home.”  The first time she assumed I was admitting she was right — now I would get a proper hairdo and learn how to play bridge.  The second time she almost didn’t let me return.  

So now at 77 I make my own place.  Ironically, it was my third of my mother’s estate that bought me this ramshackle house.  I’ve been on my own ever since and have managed the necessities — barely.  But the crucial nub of my real, if secret, life has since 1999 has been aflame with ideas and fulfillment.  Only one person really knows and that person was a gift beyond measurement.  

They say that in a sort of foreshadowing of coitus that bacterial one-celled creatures will sidle up next to each other and both will open a sort of port-hole in their cell walls.  Then they exchange some genetic information.  it’s a vivid image.  For me it brings to mind ranchers out on some rural road, traveling in opposite directions so that they can park with adjacent windows and talk for long enough to shut off the engines.  They used to smoke.  What they learn from each other can be vital.  So this writer and I pulled up our computers next to each other and the result was life-saving.

So many people are trying to resolve their life-issues by writing, that there is a parallel industry now that coaches and gives pep talks.  One of the best is steve@stevenpressfield.com.  Best because he really does know nuts and bolts and has sold books.  All these guys operate off pretty much the same assumption: that “writing” is linear, follows the same pattern of a compelling problem that causes rising action through increasingly tougher problems until finally there is a crisis/climax and then a resolution, hopefully one that leads to a higher plane of life.  

This is narrative fiction, but most of the non-fiction also follows this pattern.  The college educated pre-readers, editors, and agents look for it and endorse it.  If presented with a mass of print, they try to find the “narrative line” and develop it, prune it, espalier it onto the familiar wall.  Many times the most inspired but nonconforming writers are murdered by this.  Sometimes they reframe themselves as poets, which means they’re free but they’ll never make a living.

So what are the new patterns, the alternatives?  One has grown out of blogging, on-going sequences of individually composed writing — possibly chronological like a journal, but maybe only related by the writer having written them, like beads on a string.  Way down at the origin of at least one of my strands is kindergarten, and the dread of starting school again but being driven to take the bullet for the family.  A lot of other strands added since 1945, which is the origin of that bullet metaphor.

The formal philosophical underpinning of the three-part syllogism comes out of Greek drama and was both the origin and the exemplar for the Western world clear up through the Enlightenment.  Science and the scientific method is another version of it: define a problem, take evidence, form a hypothesis, make a triumphant discovery.  There were alternatives, but they were ignored.

Most recently I found “rhizome theory” which is the pattern of how sweetgrass grows: in clumps, then in long runners with a new clump forming at the end.  This is how blogs are.  This is how I think and write.  This how the world seems to be for a moment.  It’s a “Silk Roads” theory.  A town, a trail, another town.

Here on the high prairie the temp and the air quality are balancing, still late summer but predicted to flip over into a crisp fall in the night.  It’s hard to sleep and dreams are worrisome.  A repeated dream is that I’m at a conference in a strange town, not all that interested in the agenda and not knowing any of the other attendees.  I walk through the city and only half-realize they are cities from television, mixed and overlain with the cities I’ve known.  Rarely am I stepping over railroad tracks in a rotted industrial zone; usually I’m passing shop windows.  Often it’s all so real and familiar that I wonder whether I’m channeling someone.  There’s no Freudian symbolism nor even any Jungian tale.  I’m just new to kindergarten and wondering what the key might be.

Alan Deale and I at the tea after ML awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A few nights ago I had a telephone call from my original — and beloved — Unitarian minister, Alan Deale, because of writing about clergy misconduct misconstrued and suppressed, then dragged out of the past in vengeance.  We talked about his intern student ministers from the Seventies, who are involved.  I told him about driving by the church at 2AM after an event of some sort and seeing all the lights on, so I stopped out curiosity and the vague thought that help might be needed.  It was an intern in tears over not being able to write a sermon.  My efforts to help didn’t work.

When I went on, I had to cross what they call the “Pearl District” which used to be warehouses and therefore has railroad tracks in the streets.  Now it’s trendy boutiques and galleries, gentrified but with no residences.  I came to a car on fire — totally engulfed in high flames, just like television.  A man with a camera on a tripod was taking photos.  I stopped again.  

“Is there anyone in the car?”  Knowing if there was, they were dead.

“Yes.  In the back.”  He didn’t stop.  I heard sirens.

I left.  There was never anything in the news nor did I hear anything through the sheriff’s gossip.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a dream.  What is reality?  When can we intervene?  When is it right to call on others for help?  Are we ever entitled to guard our own interests?

SEX, WAR, RELIGION, AND SATIRE

Finding the printing press -- "The Wipers Times"

Aha!  Netflix has got a bead on me now!  Last night’s movie was “The Wipers Times”  (less amusingly but more intelligibly “The Ypres Times” )  about trench warfare in WWI and how two of the officers -- in those days officers were from the upper classes and rather well educated as well as having razor-sharp wits -- find a printing press in the rubble and use it to publish a newspaper that is sort of like a burlesque show on paper.  Two dramatic gizmos tighten it up -- the disdain of a serious-minded officer who wants to censor them because he can’t tolerate mockery, and an occasional fantasy interlude of staged versions of the lampooning, complete with song and dance.  Of course, there are bombs dropping all the time.  But this is the antidote to the pustulent “The Act of Killing.”  Intelligence, irony, and valuing the truth.

Sample

Maybe Netflix thinks I’m old enough to remember WWI, but I only remember WWII.  However, I did need a refresher course on the Sixties since I was here in Browning and completely out of touch with the rest of the world because we were re-enacting the 1860’s.  Not that the rest of the world was very much informed.  When I listen to the Nixon tapes, it is horrifying that we elected this morally stunted and filth-mouth man to be president.  I also note that Native Americans were completely outside the national consciousness until AIM.  AIM ended the 19^th century on reservations and converted those places into emotional Vietnams.  We were all very confused.  It had begun so idealistically.

This film may be more powerful and lasting than if George had won.

I don’t know what it was about the 1960-70’s, or for that matter the 1760’s and ’70’s, that fueled desperate domestic terrorisms and rebellions, but they seem similar to now.  Of course, so far in this century we have not been shooting our best leaders.  Instead we kill young black men with the media watching, and young red men and women without anyone noticing.  Only in Montana have tribes become politically powerful enough to make a difference in elections but luckily for our political parties, most of those ready and able to take it on are fairly assimilated to white standards.  That is, they know how to make a profit for themselves.  But Netflix does include the Wounded Knee movies.

Another of my groupings has no category in recent movies, though it used to.  I’m talking about liberal religious congregations like the UUA.  It’s about time for a satirical “Times” version.  The previous president, a man of color, becomes the senior minister of the Portland, OR, First Church just as the media announces that most of the black community in the city has left.  One of the two denominational seminaries survives by getting rid of their campus and their U of Chicago standards and leasing a glass tower, directing students via "distance learning."  The other one survives by hiring a woman of color who is immediately challenged by defiant members of the student body, who -- in this famously tolerant bastion of nonconformity -- find that their diplomas have been confiscated.

The pinkifying of the UUA Seven Principles means that only females and old guys are harmless enough to be trusted with congregations.  Besides, you don’t have to pay them as much.  The old dangerously educated iconoclast model is “out,” because he is very likely to go too far, even onto criminal territory.  

First Unitarian Church of Rockford, IL

My first Unitarian minister was The Rev. Alan G. Deale in Portland, OR.  Quoting the description from his just previous church, Rockford, IL, where I did my Clinical Pastoral Education:  “He was a young, energetic, and feisty New Englander, possessed of a keen intellect which challenged his listeners. Forthright, he had a pithy, lively sense of humor which raised a few hackles - qualities which were balanced by a capacity for compassion for the human condition.”  He was a “double-PK” -- both his parents were preachers -- which gave him a strong sense of institutions.  His love affairs were not with women, but with building.  Construction, not deconstruction.

“Alan was a builder of churches with a genuine understanding of architecture and a probing curiosity about the processes of building, which were to serve this congregation well. The congregation purchased 10.5 acres east of Alpine Road in 1960, and in 1965 Pietro Belluschi, Dean of Architecture at MIT, agreed to accept the commission to design a new church in co-operation with local architect C. Edward Ware. Alan Deale was present to supervise the pouring of each cubic foot of concrete.”  In Portland he consolidated the downtown block of the church, knowing that congregations need location, shelter, place.  The spirit must dwell in a body.

The next Rockford minister was The Rev. Anthony Freiss Perrino.  The history continues:  “He served as a well-known advocate of liberal causes in the area, communicating through his frequent newspaper columns and his moderating of a TV panel show, Probe. Upon his departure from Rockford in June of 1977, newspaper columnist Stan Buckles wrote:

"Tony Perrino was a hair shirt for many. He meant to be. He was constantly at war with the status quo. He perceived in Rockford those qualities that tend to lull a community to sleep - smugness, hypocrisy, self-satisfaction - and he declared war on them."  He also lost his boundaries as a minister accountable to the institution of congregations, and stepped over to sexual behavior many people consider reprehensible.  Wrong kind of body.

Here’s a pretty good sermon about the situation. http://www.trumbore.org/sam/sermons/s3b1.htm  Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Charlotte County  “Setting the Boundaries.”  November 7th, 1993, by The Rev. Sam Trumbore.  The thing is, congregations are about families of one sort or another, and therefore the family and the child are the icons.  It’s one thing to raise bloody hell with a corrupt society and entirely another to drive a new wedge into the lives of people in trouble who have come for help.  The offense was not being immoral, the offense was the painful consequences to the very people who had elected and supported him so he would protect them.  He had mistaken his base of operation.  Whether he was right or wrong in his private life is a separate issue.

Rev. Forrester Church

A slightly different situation was that of The Rev. Forrester Church, who was a big shot -- or at least the son of a big shot -- and therefore assumed to be brilliant, worthy and reliable.   (Did I say the UUA is open to the larger culture to the point of falling out of their own context?)  He was also handsome and, as the sons of politicians tend to be, needy.  The inevitable followed.  There are a LOT of books about ministers -- The Rev. Peter Raible in Seattle had to convert his garage into stacks to hold his collection -- and even some books about UU churches and ministers, though few people realize they exist, much less read them.  A low-risk version of Forrester Church’s rise and fall is an ebook “Being Alive and Having to Die” by Dan Cryer.  http://www.amazon.com/Being-Alive-Having-Die-Spiritual-ebook/dp/B0050IGZL0   Cryer, the son of a Methodist minister, is a high-level respected biographer of problematic people. 

The link below is the only account of rape and/or pedophilia perpetrated by UU ministers that I found on Google.  A very Woody Allen sort of tale.  Three teen girls from Tibet, one of whom the culprit married.  They are common and banal, in some countries not even shocking.  http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=10820  The Emerson Avenger does not find it amusing.  I myself eschew Woody Allen.

 Cyril Smith Liberal MP for Rochdale Lancs, easily blackmailed into political obedience

In England and some of its former Empire right now the sheets are being pulled off the beds and party rooms of many major politicians and public figures.  In past decades certain men had used the small boys of “care homes” as sexual toys, in the most extreme cases “snuffing” them.  (I'm talking pre-teens.) Those who survived have now begun to speak out.  The “ministers,” as English governmental representatives are called, are mostly dead, old, ill.  Vulnerable.  Hugely fat, their ears disappearing into their necks.  Hard to feel sorry.  We can only hope it's stopped.

Once everyone has struggled past their emotional revulsion and titillation, maybe some useful measures can be drawn from the atrocities.    But I hope it won’t be excluding all powerful people with teeth from government or from religious ministry.  Those who want “spirituality” to be about bunny rabbits don’t know much about rabbits, whose lives revolve around sex and war among themselves.  But rabbits don't take on wolves.  They have no printing press or Internet.

Does Netflix have any movies about these matters, excluding liberal clergy?  Oh, yes.  These are basic issues.  Of course, you could always watch National Geographic.