"THE TRANSCENDENT YEARS"

Kevin Leonard shepherds archives at NU, where I sent all my old notes and journals about Alvina Krause.  I was surprised when he let me know via email that I am named in Marshall S. Mason's latest book, "The Transcendent Years" which includes the years at NU at the end of the Fifties when were classmates.  Leonard said, "I just received my copy of Marshall Mason’s new book.  I’m only 20 pages into the story and there you are, working on Mary Stuart at Eagles Mere."  My own copy came this week and I put everything else down so I could read it.  I already had his earlier books about directing and acting which describe his use of the concept of "beats", which is a way of dividing any time-art into the near-musical concept of small arcs.

Besides being classmates at NU, Mason and I were both at Eagles Mere, which was the summer repertory company in the Poconos that Krause ran.  The first sentence of the book quotes Krause's key belief: "I am training you for a theatre that doesn't exist."  She meant the vision of a local repertory theatre like Eagles Mere:  cooperative, exemplary, excellence-based, beyond political to the point of what Mason calls "transcendent."  It is an idea not limited to theatre companies and has guided my life as well as Mason's, though we've taken very different paths.  

Claris Nelson's life-path often travels with Mason's.  She is a person I owe a great deal: there was a gap of several days between the university housing closing at NU and the opening of the Lodge at Eagles Mere where we all stayed.  Claris and her family not only allowed me to stay at their house, but also drove me with Claris and others across the miles to the little mountain resort.  The Nelson family house was one of many in Evanston built in a time of wealth and elegance.  I had never spent a night in such a fine place.  It was the first time I saw window shutters that were fine cabinet work that folded into niches next to the sashes.  Claris' father was an architect but it was years before I realized that the fabulous magazine he read was "Architectural Digest."  

The house was not furnished in a pretentious way and the family was vegetarian.  I had never known a household like this, idealistic but luxurious.  High-end glossy shelter mags have been a pleasure and refuge ever since, though I've always lived in shabby circumstances.  Claris herself was gifted and unique, a writer and actor of insight and power, though her taste for the whimsical might not be mainstream.  

The truth is that after we all graduated in 1961, we all went separate ways.  Oregon at the time was a backwater and in Montana, where I went for the next decade, I didn't pay attention to New York until Bob's sculpture was ready for the Manhattan galleries of Western art, like the Kennedy.  I didn't hear about Marshall S Mason until he was involved in"Angels in America."  By that time I was at the U of Chicago Div School (Eighties) and could make a pilgrimage back to Annie May Swift hall, the scene of so much.  And I was more than ready for both fantasy and grit, the gruesome real and the surprisingly salvific.  

Which is why I headed back to Montana in 1999 and discovered that Rollie Meinholtz, who directed both Marshall and I in "Queen of the Rebels," was now a prof at U of Montana.  Sometimes I feel like there are only a hundred people in the world and I know ten of them while all the rest know each other.  The thread of this book is double: plays and theatre people, in a setting of the political and world-wide news of the time.  I didn't remember how violent and extreme events were, but it explains why I was determined to stay in Browning, Montana, where things that terrifying had happened in the 19th century rather than the 20th.

I've never been central in any context and that had been true of Eagles Mere as well.  I didn't go as an actor but as a costumer, a one-summer career, and Mason claims to remember the stunning white brocade dress I made for Penny Fuller, with white fox cuffs on the oversleeves.  He mentions the black dress also made for the character but doesn't remember (mercifully) that the brocade from which I made the dress was dye-resistant.  No matter how many boxes of RIT I used, I could never get the dress darker than deep purple and then I ran short of time so that it had to be dried hanging above our only stove: an ancient and massive woodstove unbelievably called "Othello" -- a name embossed on the front.  IT was black.  The dress remained a little smoky.

The costume shop was in the old ice house but I doubt Marshall was there much.  It was full of trunks of the most glamorous clothes I've ever seen, beaded chiffon encrusted with beads and embroidery, hemmed in points or asymmetrically.  Absolutely un-useable in any plays we produced.  Remnants of former glory that probably ought to have a play written about them.

So many of the plays Mason mentions from those NU years are vivid in my mind's eye.  Mason, his close friend Rob Thirkield, and Bill Shaw  were roommates.  Bill was my biology partner at first and then my thought partner as we sat in the back of the auditorium through AK's classes, trying to understand and appreciate what was happening.  I have never seen staged productions with as much power and resonance as some of those uncostumed vignettes on an empty stage.  

For instance, Penny Fuller in a bit from "The Property Is Condemned" as the central character balanced along a bit of old railroad.  It was ironic that several of us, including me, were practically hypnotized by Tennessee Williams, considering that AK was essentially Edwardian.  But then, the undercurrent of fluid sexuality (often paradoxically faithful) ran through her and many of the rest of the actors.  It was an underground source of power that destroyed some and raised others into transcendence.

FANCY DANCERS

Somehow I seem to be producing a series of posts about gay men, partly because of friendships and partly because they can be a powerful metaphor, embodying nonconforming lives based on intimate relationships.  I’ve compared them to tribally enrolled men, who often have highly productive but sociologically ambiguous lives that raise religious questions.

“Tom Meeker is a handsome rookie priest stranded in a dying rural parish. Vidal Stump is a proud, gay half-breed with a criminal record and unlawful desires. Father Meeker must choose between his sacred vows and his secret attraction to this Fancy Dancer who lures him into forbidden love.

First published two decades ago, this provocative, hard-hitting novel was the first bestseller to portray a gay priest and to explore gay life in a small town.”  (http://www.anobii.com/books/The_Fancy_Dancer/9780452263208/019971144dca592e16)

Marshall W. Mason says in the Afterword of “The Circle Repertory Company: the First Fifteen Years” that at one point he was interested in making a film from another of Patricia Nell Warren’s books, “The Front Runner” but it didn’t work out, as most movie projects do not.  I would like to raise a vision of a film of “The Fancy Dancer” shot on video with all the special effects that Tim Barrus and Cinematheque have developed over the past decade.  

Full disclosure: I only wrote with Tim rather than making video, but I’ve seen most of them, often repeatedly.  One of the early vids juxtaposes two dancers: one Asian man dancing in a bare cement space and one white dancing in a standard mirrored studio.  The two overlap contrapuntally, seeming to dance as partners, then merging into one dancer, then separating and contrasting.  Another vid in the same mode melds skateboarding with surfing.  Physical movement is one of the hallmarks of Cinematheque and is key to the lives of boys.

In the years Marshall and I were in the community around Alvina Krause at NU and Eaglesmere (1957-1961), we were not close but both of us walked and thought in multiple levels, overlapping or informing each other, slowly unfolding as we came to grasp more and more about what it is to be human.  It was so intense that ever after I’ve had a little trouble finding a world as idealistic and piercing.  The rez in some aspects, the world of sculpture before it was seized by the cowboy commodifiers, sometimes ministry, and mostly writing have been far more to me than they seem to be for other people.  These things are full of bright shadows, in that paradoxical way informing the work of some artists.  My skill level only pursues them, but Tim, in the years he had strength and health, captured.  His poetry still does.

Marshall and some other NU people were fortunate — oh, fortune had nothing to do with it and not money either — because they created The Circle Repertory Company, which was as much workshop as theatre, in the same way that Cinematheque is a school, in the sense that a school is a place to grow, a kindergarten.  For me my school was seminary, a seedbed, a place of insemination.  But then I had to return to the land.  Like Sam Shepard, who was peripheral to Circle Rep, I am a Westerner.  (Actually, Marshall is, too, but I don’t think he identifies that way.)

Living in the world as an artist, particularly as a solitary, is not easy because the visions can come with overwhelming kaleidoscopic impact, but might also contract into darkness.  Unless one has built habit and discipline, there will be no container that can hold and shape the patterns.  If there are others who interfere with that, it dies.  If there are others who can be dance partners, it is elaborated.

Alvina Krause was not self-promoting, nor was she a star-maker, but she had learned in her own life how to be a effectively contained “dancer” and could pass that on to others.  We knew her in old age when even the tribal old warriors dance with slow steps, enormous dignity, wrapped in a blanket but wearing a headdress.  (In her case, a silver comb.)  Deceptively simple her life seemed, and yet it was layers and layers deep, non-conforming in private ways because she was always in danger of exploitation or exclusion.  Inside this small Edwardian-style woman was Marlon Brando on a motorcycle, a leather-lady. 

Paula Ragusa Prentiss and Rob Thirkield

Caesar and Cleopatra  at NU

Marshall is something like that as well and so was his collaborator, Rob Thirkield, who was finally “washed out to sea”.  That’s a metaphor for suicide.  The other suicide that deeply affected the company was that of Joe Cino, who danced his self-slashing death while Maria Callas sang “Norma” on the record player.  It’s much easier to understand Cino in a time when young people practice “cutting” to relieve psychic pain.  I think about Montgomery Clift and James Dean as twilight dwellers, while today’s youngsters go directly to werewolves and vampires, but always keep the intense bonding of pairs.

One of the powerful patterns today, coming from biology as well as philosophy, is that of the rhizome network: nodes connected by long filaments.  This is the pattern of the connectome in the brain, which plays the neurons as though they were the keys of a piano.  The visionary aspect of the artist, priest or dancer is not imaginary — it is the symphonic expression of an electrochemical instrument.  Not just in the brain.  Muscles and bodily fluids play their part as surely as brass and strings.  But the pattern is also expressed in lives of lovers and nomads — fusion and flight.

Still alive in my memory is sitting in the back of the auditorium of Annie May Swift Hall during acting classes watching moments when meaning came alive.  I’ve been more the observer than the performer all along, except for the years in ministry when I led services and preached.  I’ve avoided most intimate relationships for fear of being trapped and prevented, used by people who don’t have the vision.  

That may just be a rationalization, but even just sitting safely in this old house with kittens grappling my ankles, I can feel the danger in great effort and risk.  The world itself flames and gutters, not just with human life but also with the hurtling cosmic rays and ringing of the universe.  Gay men in the arts seem to understand.  So do Native Americans and the best priests.

METHOD ACTING IS A FORM OF EMBODIMENT

In undergrad classes (1957-1961) I was on scholarship and had to maintain a B average, which I did.  Luckily, I had enough A’s to offset my two lowest grades: a C in acting and a C in philosophy of religion.  These are probably the two courses that have been most meaningful in my life during the half-century since.  Part of the reason I got low grades is that I was thinking about the issues too much to focus on tests of content.  Both professors were exceptional: Alvina Krause and Paul Schilpp.  I want to talk about Stanislavski’s Method acting as AK taught it.

Basically, this approach to acting was very similar to Mark Johnson’s understanding of embodied meaning, using sense memories to manage the actor’s inner life in a way that communicated the meaning of the character in a play.  We worked on our bodies as instruments — doing exercises of posture, voice and movements — but also increasing awareness of each other and building empathy.  A big component was studying cultures and how they pattern emotion and reaction, what the embodiment people might call “framing”.

Alvina Krause

But always the base of operations was the senses, including internal body feedback.  It is now a pretty well-confirmed premise that the brain’s index to what it knows, particularly memory, is filed according to senses associated with the content so that it is not frivolous to think of grasping a concept in terms of the sense-ambiance of the moment, for the senses interact to create a sort of globe that contains knowledge.  This is why Johnson speaks of “the aesthetics of human understanding.”  The director of a play aims to create just such a “globe” of sight and sound in a way that will illuminate the meaning of the presentation by being both vivid and coherent.  It should offer feeling, not just evidence.  The same is true of religious ceremonies.

When intensity is high and the actors have properly entered the inner lives of their roles, something palpable happens that is fabulous but also a little frightening until the actors have a bit of experience: the boundaries melt, onstage becomes realer than real, and somehow the audience is able to participate in that.  Even actors working for film find this to be true, though it’s more difficult for a number of reasons.

Paula Ragusa and Dick Benjamin

my classmates

Still, it isn’t necessary to have an audience or at least not a big one.  These moments happened in acting class with only a few observers or even when working in practice halls.  The most powerful idea coming out of embodiment theory is the ability to “merge” or attune with other people.  In terms of music, it’s being perfectly in tune, and in that context it’s also very powerful.  Bob Scriver, who was famous for the quality of his high school orchestras in the Fifties, used to say that if junior high musicians learned to play perfectly in tune, they could sound as good as professionals.  Witnessing true engagement between actors is much like hearing music perfectly in tune.

A friend who expected to become a psychiatrist used to observe AK’s acting classes with me, a practice that was neither encouraged or discouraged so long as observers were quiet.  I met him when he was my assigned biology lab partner.  Much of our discussion after these acting classes was about rationality versus emotionality.  He was from that kind of student (usually male) full of introspection, trying to reason out the meaning of life instead of experiencing it.  I was the other way around, skipping in and out of logic, which was why we were friends — one of those opposite relationships, which can be very intimate, but maybe not physically.  He was not a “cold” philosopher: his close cohort called him “Hume.”  I loved him dearly and we remained friends after I left for Montana and he went on to a Ph.D. and teaching.

I’ve repeatedly sketched out my current understanding of how persons grow through life, beginning from conception, continuing through the school years, on into adulthood and through until death.  After one drastic pruning of brain cells in toddlerhood, there are several points of brain expansion — actual neuron development and connectome thickening — as at the adrenarche, puberty, and a crucial reconfiguring in early twenties that has no name except maybe maturity.  By this time a person is no longer confined to what’s inside one’s skin, but through empathy can extend awareness into all living beings and the world that sustains them.  Interaction, attunement, attachment, concatenation, and other subtle things with multi-syllabic names have embedded mere embodiment into a system of understanding and action.  It happens all by itself and may not be conscious at all.

Russians have not been so confined by the Platonic roots of thought that have made an obsession of what was once Enlightenment, which actively rejected emotion as a distortion, some kind of reversion to animal life, not as real as what Johnson calls “propositional” thought.  This elevation of math-driven and introspection-developed rationality, as free from emotion as possible, has become demonic in its ability to enforce dogma and justify domination.  It is the engine of terrorism and the enablement of crime.

And it’s stuck.  Even the UU’s with their list of principles that are supposed to be bulletproof, can’t get past them in order to join the universe and act with effectiveness.  Few can grasp that insisting on a list of principles is what the principles were supposed to oppose, a path to arrogance.  Once a person has arrived at a totally logical and convincing “proof” of something without awareness of the emotional structure of their own brain and the frame of their own family and culture, it is very hard to give up.  Efforts to enforce a rigid conviction of “rightness” is at the base of many a malignant family.

Of course, the Russians, for all their inquiry into the physical dynamics of emotional life, have not learned how to manage their rage and romanticism into a viable government.  Maybe it is the anguish of always slipping back into scarcity and brutality that drives their interest in operant conditioning, inherited mind, and the sharing of melancholy.  Or maybe their environment is so harsh that it limits them somehow.  Humans can never entirely overcome the planet.

"The Cherry Orchard"

Making oneself transparent is not always easy and is sometimes painful.  Sustaining empathy for other people takes energy and courage.  They don’t always want to be understood, particularly if they are victims of stigma that has taught them that the only safety is secrecy and deception.   For them, to be detected and understood is to be targeted.  Therapists and playwrights investigate under very specific and guarded circumstances and even then some inner dynamics are explosive when exposed to “oxygen.”  Actors and writers use various personas to buffer and reinvent, but the strategy doesn’t always work.

Community, if it is trustworthy, sustains individuals, keeps track of who they are so they can explore.  Therapy circles have never gone out of fashion, though some have turned toxic.  Others have devised a protocol, a system that guides discipline, that guarantees integrity, until it as well becomes corroded and worn.   Something like that has happened to both Freud and Stanislavski.

THE TRAIL NARROWS

The urge to leave a record.

This morning I woke with a new plan for spring.  To discard many boxed things I’ve loaded into one You Haul after another, carrying them across the continent because I believed they were important, even valuable.  I come from two lines of hoarders, maternal and paternal, who believed in paper and saved the documentation of the family back far enough that letters from Andersonville have come down to my generation.  (For those who don’t know, Andersonville was the notorious Civil War prison in Georgia where Union soldiers were held under Auschwitz-like conditions.)  

So here’s a list of what I’m going to discard now.

My boxes of old Glacier Reporters, because bound books of them have been given to Blackfeet Community College.  When I started in 1961, there WAS no BCC with a library and the Museum of the Plains Indian had a limited archive that has been raided several times: once to weed out anything that wasn’t relevant to the material culture of the 19th century and once to weed out anything about white people.  In short, politics break through scholarship on the rez.  It's print stuff in an oral culture.  But the people themselves are capable of wrestling with that now.  The Millennials will decide.

I hope they value it as much as the people who constantly come in from outside, determined to squeeze more out of the 19th century.  It’s time for the rez folks to get into the BIA and FBI files.  The descendants of the demonized early whites have already destroyed much of their trader records which were mostly about buying and selling anyway.

I’m just now beginning to reorganize my library of books about Blackfeet and what we used to call “vertical files” of articles and tear-outs.  The death of Darrell Kipp has shaken some of my ideas.  At one point Piegan Institute was supposed to be an archive of scholarship as well as an immersion school.  

I’m putting a list of all my Blackfeet books on prairiemary.blogspot.com, which is taking a while as I add a dozen books at a time.  If you’re looking now, come back in a month.   I don’t think most Blackfeet scholars even know about all of them.  Like university classes, media pieces and published books go over and over the same old worn out stuff and ignore the cutting edges.  Of course, the post-colonial stuff is almost unintelligible and rarely digested.  There’s a great need for translation, esp. the things written in European languages.

I have one four-drawer cabinet and a few scrapbooks of materials about Bob Scriver, but I’ve already discharged my obligation to testify to his life.  The book is “Bronze Inside and Out, A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver.”  The Montana Historical Society has tricked and ignored me, so I do not feel good about giving them anything.  We don’t live on the same planet.

Alvina Krause

A few materials remain in my possession about Alvina Krause (my B43 Acting Class journal, for instance) and have already been offered a home in the Northwestern University archives.  I managed to get an article about her published in the Stanislavsky Studies international journal, for whatever that’s worth.

The materials from my ministry (newsletters, correspondence, pamphlets) seem curiously irrelevant now.  The individual congregations turn over their membership and their focus much more than they realize, but esp. the Montana people — the most ephemeral — have no time, energy or central location interested in these materials.  I’m divided between stuffing them into mailing cartons and sending them to the individual groups or just taking them to the dump.  The denomination and districts are so absorbed by the need to “market” — meaning increase membership and income — that they see nothing of value in the little low-population edges far away from Boston.  They have become an urban phenomenon, or maybe the Unitarians always were.

Aside from that, I think that the UUA and the whole concept of denominations is on its way out — again.  They are luxuries and when low status populations like women and people of color manage to get into the leadership, they are no longer valuable to the old white men who have the money, since their idealism clings to Edwardian British values. 

For a while I saved a lot of material about Cut Bank High School which I intended to digest into a novel about how we destroy our children: the boys by encouraging violent sports, extreme street fighting for betting, and substance abuse; the girls by discarding any who don’t look like movie stars and put out like whores — except for a few destined to be moms sustaining the grudgingly necessary families.  By now none of these forces are undocumented by the media or even unstudied by sociologists.  The destructiveness of American schools is no secret, nor is it unconscious any longer.  Now what I have is redundant.  I liked the kids, so I’ll keep the yearbook.

The family archive on my father’s side rests with my cousins except for the little book I made from photos of all the places the Strachans lived, mostly pretty minimal rural prairie houses.  Everyone is much more comfortable now.  Even my house would count as pretty nice.  Beulah Strachan raised her children in a tarpaper shack.  But that much of the story is told and the other relatives are intent on silence.  I might do an end-run around them to the five emigrant Scots sisters who originally came to America, but it would have to be fiction.  Still, they had very suggestive divergent fates.  There is another writer among their descendants, Kathy Rouzie.

Beulah Swan Finney Strachan, my grandmother

What I will save, burdening my niece Adrienne Lulay who is my inheritor and executor, the family photo albums, partly because I still want to use them for my own memoir.  I need to learn more about layout and the kind of programs used to do tricky things like montages.  There is no video, but I’ll go to CD technology maybe.  None of the current cyber-technology can keep itself from transforming and updating.

On my mother's side I'm alienated enough to tell the double story of the Hatfields/Pinkertons with no restraint, maybe as fiction.  The Hatfields and McCoys are nothing compared to Hatfields against Hatfields with Pinkertons trapped in the middle.  (My mother was the only sib of the Pinkerton girls who didn't marry a Hatfield.)

Pinkertons - my grandfather on the right, seated

I may not have time to finish one small part of this project, but again a death hustles me along, this time the recent death of Mike Burgwin who did so much to professionalize animal control.  I did get a book self-published ("Dog Catching in America"  but I see that www.lulu.com/prairiemary is marketing it as a PDF instead of the Print On Demand that I expected.  Animal Control has developed much farther since our time, so maybe it’s just a collection of war stories by now.  In the background the study of the relationships among animals — including humans — has expanded and become more startling and absorbing than anything we expected.

My life has been a series of lives:  theatre, the Blackfeet reservation in all its aspects, animal control, Unitarian-Universalism both as scholarship and as practicum, a return to the reservation with special attention to geology which has persisted even after the forced return to Portland, OR, where the interest in geology — this time in regard to cities — grew deeper: the basic engine of ecology and therefore of mutation that drives evolution.

Now that I have the great privilege of living in a quiet, safe place where I can write, I’ve tried to do as much as I can towards developing skill.  Since 2005 blogging has replaced publishing (it IS today's publishing) and I’ve had a writing friend of great force and daring (Tim Barrus) who has pushed me along.  Now I’m looking for master concepts that can project a future I won’t share and don’t much want to.  We knew it was coming, this present quandary produced by too many people, the exhaustion of resources, technical shifts that get out ahead of our ability to assimilate them, global warming and so on.  But we had thought maybe 2025 was a good predicted onset.  We’d be gone.  Now we know a lot of people are likely to be underwater.

When I’ve fallen in love with a writer, I’ve expressed it by buying and reading all their works, so Peter Matthiessen is probably the next death that has prodded me.  Wendell Berry is still a bit in the future.  A.B. Guthrie, Jr. died quite a while ago, also Norman McLean and Richard Stern.  The whole category of “Montana writers”— which was kind of invented anyway — is dented by the death of Jim Harrison.  Wallace Stegner and Jim Welch are gone.  I don't want to write like a lady.

The big secret about publishing is that it is the publishers who control the fates of writers and these days do it only in terms of sales.  No one cares about the quality of the writing. Publishers have concluded that Indians and women don’t sell except in romantic genre eBooks.  Of the major publishers of literature of the West based in universities, one is captured by self-aggrandizers and the other fell under the ax of the post-structuralists.  The real action is in Canada but even there it’s a bit of a struggle.  No one in the US knows their work, not even the tribes that are on both sides of the border.

My shelves of psych and communication insights have somehow become outdated.  Eric Fromm, though he was a death camp survivor, is not adequate to the AIDS pandemic, a country like North Korea where the whole nation is a death camp, or the total questioning of everything, even male/female or the nature of reality as managed in the brain.  Now I have shelves on neuron research, hominin evidence, revisionist long history (pre-human).  They are the only way I participate in the frenzy of acquisition around me.

There’s plenty to do and some of it will be muscle work like sorting and carrying books.  I’d better do it while I’m still only 76.

MALVINA HOFFMAN'S HALL OF MAN

Alvina Krause, the legendary Method acting teacher, used as a teaching tool Malvina Hoffman's Hall of Man, sculptures of examples of human groups, life-size.  Our assignment in 1957 was to go look at the bronzes, think about them and research them until we understood each of them as unique, thinking and moving individuals.  It was one of the few times in my undergrad life when it was not assumed that all people were like the campus people, and that didn’t mean the janitor.  But then, acting means accepting the idea that one might need to portray any one of the planet’s humans, including janitors.

This is about Malvina, not Alvina.  Malvina Hoffman was a privileged woman in a high-culture context married to a violinist tuned so tightly that he spent much of his life in hospitals.  She wrote three books: one about traveling around the world creating these portraits, one about how to create and cast bronze sculptures, and one that was a memoir. In 1961, when I came to Browning, MT, to teach high school English on this Blackfeet Reservation, I met Bob Scriver, a major sculptor of Western subjects.  In our first conversation we discovered that Malvina Hoffman was an object of intense admiration from us both.

In the Fifties Bob had earned a Master’s Degree at Vandercook School of Music on the south side of Chicago.  He was just transitioning from teaching music to running a taxidermy business and went to the Field Museum to visit their master taxidermist, who was from Billings, MT.  Of course he explored the rest of the museum and was stunned by the beauty and understanding presented in the Hall of Man. 
   

The Blackfoot Man was Canadian, so we didn't know him.

In the Sixties Bob’s work attracted the attention of Major Eric Harvey at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and we went up to tour their growing collection, still being curated in warehouses.  Staggered by the amount of material for exhibits, we went up and down ramps, through doorways, through hallways.  Bob was ahead of me.  Suddenly he disappeared around a corner and then came back to grab me by the shoulders, thrust me around the corner for a few seconds, then pull me back.  “What did you see?” he demanded.  In that flash I saw the complete collection of Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures — not the Hall of Man, but portraits, maquettes for monuments, and so on.  Hundreds.

Semang Pygmy -- Bob bought a casting of this from Malvina.

We didn’t see them again until 1965 when Bob was on “To Tell the Truth” and we went to New York City.  We had the address to Hoffman’s studio, which was in a mews, a place where horses were once kept in big spaces with strong floors.  Sniffen Court had become famous for its community of prestigious sculptors.  We made an appointment and arrived with our arms full of flowers as tribute.  The entrance was into the studio space, dim and huge, with the small sculptures on tables, but we hardly had time to linger.

Upstairs Hoffman, dying of emphysema from stone dust, was on her “lit de repose,” and Guldie, her companion and guardian, took us to her side.  Bob had brought red roses, the classic, and I brought anemones.  We were dizzy with the reality of a figure that had been with each of us for so long and so intensely.  We visited a little while and Bob showed her photos of his work, which she praised, saying he was particularly good at fetlocks on horses which so many get wrong.  But then she was gasping and we had to leave.

In 1978 when I returned to Chicago to attend the U of Chicago Div School and Meadville/Lombard Theological School, at the first chance I got, I  went to the Hall of Man.  It was gone. I was stunned.  In the cultural revolution of the Seventies it had been dispersed as racist.  The revolutionaries of the time were Levelers, trying to put aside all differences in order to assure equality.  Of course, that’s not what happened.  Like my undergrad profs, they were simply trying to make everyone agree with them.  As Malvina would say, which she DID say to us about some ridiculous edict we complained about,  “Tell it to the Marines!”

Powered by the fear of stigma and the inability to tolerate difference, it is only now that society has recovered enough to reinstate the Hall of Man for its original purpose of celebrating variousness and the unique individual wherever they might be.  Every acting student who did this exercise of empathy for Alvina Krause, still carries the strong memory of that portrayed body and the mind it carried through a space we could only imagine — but DID to the best of our ability.  Of course, by now Alvina and Malvina are dead, so are the models for the bronzes, so is Bob Scriver, and so are many of Alvina’s acting students, even many of my students on the Blackfeet Reservation — not from a holocaust unless you count the truly universal scythe of old age.  

Now that the sculptures have been brought up out of the Field Museum warehouse (where they might have been in danger of de-accessioning like so many fine artworks), people can again take into themselves the lives of people unlike themselves

The first book of Malvina Hoffman’s that both Bob and I had in our libraries when we met was “Sculpture Inside and Out.”  It was one of our guides when we created the Bighorn Foundry in the backyard and learned to cast bronzes by using the classic Roman block investment method, not the modern chicken-fried bronze (dipped in glass batter) created from a kit.  Those who know about my biography of Bob Scriver will understand the title:  “Bronze Inside and Out.”

The second book we had acquired separately was “Heads and Tales,” the story of the making of the Hall of Man (that word “man” probably needs to be modernized to Human), named since most of the portraits are busts.

The third book is entitled “Yesterday is Tomorrow: A Personal History”.  Besides carrying flowers to her “lit de repose,” we each carried a copy of this book and she signed both copies.  Nothing fancy:  “with cordial good wishes.”  When she died, Guldie let us know, but we never sent any acknowledgment.  There was no way writing could say what she meant to us.  Time has helped.

My seminary in Chicago sold its building which his now occupied by the Neubauer Collegium, a center for reflection — a place where indeed “Yesterday is Tomorrow.”  The following is quoted from their website.

Alaka Wali is curator and applied cultural research director at The Field Museum. She was the founding director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change from 1995-2010 and currently curates the sizeable North American collection which includes a contemporary urban collection. Her work concerns the relationship between art-making and the capacity for social resilience. She has curated over 10 exhibits for The Field Museum, with the most recent being  “Looking at Ourselves: Rethinking the Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman.” 

ABOUT THIS PROJECT

Recent shifts in legal, political, and ethical demands on natural history museums have compelled them to open their institutional logics to interventions informed by indigenous peoples’ self-understanding—an understanding that makes specific interpretive claims about the meaning of given cultural phenomena, ontological claims expressed by their religious commitments, and even aesthetic and epistemological claims about the contributions contemporary Native American artists might make to the articulation of a long-standing historical tradition. Our interest, in short, is to understand how these interventions are playing out in the everyday work of the Field Museum and its efforts to engage, educate, and encourage the interest of an increasingly diverse public, Native and otherwise.

We endeavor to undertake this project in collaboration with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, the Field Museum, and a growing pool of indigenous leaders, museum specialists, advocates, and artists in two ways. First, through on-the-ground participant observation of Field Museum staff as they plan, produce, and execute a major exhibition already under way in Hall 8, the North America Collection. And second, by staging conversations among invited Native American artists and advocates, Field staff, and scholars with a view to exploring how the future possibilities of ethnographic museums can be addressed through the specific efforts being undertaken by the Field in its renovation project. From questions concerning the status of indigenous cultural property rights, material and intellectual, to the enduring problems of reification and the marginalization of Native Americans, ethnographic collections like those at the Field have long been the focal point of debates about the relationship between scientific ethics, religious commitments, and aesthetics.

With its plans for renovation and its willingness to be the site and subject of this inquiry, the Field Museum stands at the forward edge of these questions and how their answers might offer lessons for the future of natural history. 

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/open_fields/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Open%20Fields%3A%20Ethics%2C%20Aesthetics%20and%20the%20Very%20Idea%20of%20a%20Natural%20History&utm_campaign=Lincoln%20and%20Alaka

I want to add that Malvina Hoffman would have loved to have portrayed Alaka Walli and her strong face.