WHY BLOOD QUANTUM IS NOT ABOUT BLOOD

An Easterner who knew nothing about "Indians" questioned the title of one of my short stories:  “Blood Quantum,” which was meant to be a fictionalized tracing of how the US Army originally tried to impose order on a population they had just “conquered” and were therefore obliged to record and feed.  (In modern times conquerers feel no such obligation.)  The People were lined up, their names written down (though these People had several names each without counting nicknames or translations and they belonged to an oral culture unacquainted with writing which is different from being illiterate in a writing-based culture) and that original list became the provenance (the genealogy) and fate of all the following generations.  They were LEGALLY  pure Blackfeet, no matter that there were Cree, even  enemy Shoshone, maybe a few Irish and several other categories on the list.

“Tribe” was a European concept and so was Nation.  So was “legal.” The People just traveled together, partly because of being related and partly just because they liked each other.  There was no boundary, as there is for the category called “citizen.”  The reader asked “quantum what?”  He’s used to hearing about quantum physics, I think.  We can only interpret new things via things we already know -- unless one has means of inquiry that opens both cans of worms and the sky after storm.  This guy will try to fit “quantum” into “genome” but basic blood types hadn’t even been discovered when the first list was made.

The biggest problem is the courage it takes to look at something that may challenge one’s assumptions, which is the basis of one’s identity and relationships.  Trying to go farther and deeper has destroyed a whole sequence of communities who thought they had it all -- including me.  The main thing I learned is that to learn some things will mean a death of illusion.  For instance, the more I learn about my family, so sure it was fairly virtuous and educated, is that it wasn’t.  This makes me unwelcome at family events, but there are few of them now anyway -- they’re out of fashion and I have never met the people under thirty.  Even the denomination that claimed it accepted everyone turned out to be as prosperity-worshipping and proselytizing as any others.

My terms of understanding are drawn from fields so far from what most people know that to them I sound like a stuttering idiot speaking nonsense.  (Blood quantum -- WTF?)  The assumption of our times is that people exist in friendship networks which they are proud to extend and which mean good commercial skews.  Prosperity and proselytizing in their devil’s bargain.

The first of my favorite two fields is methods of indigenous thought -- both by and about and inclusive of a number of “disciplines” like paleogenetics, cell morphology, disease and language patterns, neuropsychology -- stuff we’re just defining as we come capable of perceiving them.  The two main principles are that everything is related, even interwoven; and that everything is a process -- it’s all constantly changing in some random and surprising way.  Someone recently suggested that if we knew the genomes of everything, we could make the world be the way we want it: safe, luxuriant, and easy.    They haven’t understood anything.

The other field of method and awareness I’ve internalized is that of theatre.  Not just naturalistic portrayal of humans, but also the landscape and illusion projected on the kuppelhorizont of our minds, which means all the aspects of religion from the rigid and politicized “organized” religions to the drug-propelled visionary sensorium people sometimes call “spirituality.”  On the one hand, all this stuff is just a kaleidoscope of broken glass making patterns in a handheld tube.  On the other hand, it’s the only focus and meaning we have and we must hold on despite the tumbling.

Lou Diamond Phillips in place

Indians just seem so different.  Are they better or worse than us?  Should we imitate them or run from them?  By now isn’t their blood quantum so diluted, their cultural context so broken, their competence so challenged, that we ought to just dump the concept of indigeneity -- people shaped tightly to their location -- altogether?  Movies begin to be about the entirely pristine tiny groups in the Amazon forest who have never made contact with the larger world.  How do we know ANYTHING about them?  Should we send an envoy?  Sting? (To “help” them -- i.e. control them.)  In there somewhere is the hope that they really are magic.

I’m interested in the series called “Longmire” that’s based on a wagonload of procedural mysteries by Craig Johnson.  I was startled that our librarian dislikes the video series on grounds that it portrays tribal people as corrupt and avaricious.  It took me a while to understand that the show uses the point of view of actual "indians" and from the tribal point of view right now people are obsessed with corruption among their own people.  So is the larger world, which makes the issue worthwhile.

Graham Greene in "Clearcut", an early Canadian film

Graham Greene in "Longmire", current

The fact that many roles are played by NA’s with chops means that there’s a “real-feel” that can be disconcerting.  I mean, watching Graham Greene’s career and personal life can be wrenching.  On the other hand, the idea of an old woman who is an authority and a mystic at the same time, is absolutely convincing when the battered hat and impossible shelter belong to Tantoo Cardinal.  Lou Diamond Phillips is plainly at the heart of all the plots, sometimes more than the sheriff.

I haven’t talked to any local tribespeople about these things.  The ones under thirty or even forty are nearly indistinguishable from small town whites, all wrapped up in  music and celebrities.  The ones with whom I used to discuss these ideas are dead -- not long ago.  They used to be travelers, widely-read, linked to people who knew things.  More political than anthropological.  It is lucky that I saw my solitary state coming and prepared for it.

But I’m disappointed in all cultures most of the time.  They’ve forgotten so much and refuse to learn anything at all.  The movement called “political correctness” has created much evil with their idea that people can only speak for people just like themselves.  Instead of creating an even playing field it has opened a litigious abyss.  Publishers and producers are afraid of such poison -- it costs money.

Australian and Filipino = contemporary American West

Theatre teaches me to enter other people, to feel their spines in my own back, to look out through their eyes. There is so much stored in people of the land, even now, but not for much longer.  Not because they are disappearing but because their land is disappearing, industrialized, poisoned by agriculture, and now dried and burnt by cities sucking up every resource.  The cities make the laws, the cities still want us numbered, recorded, controlled.  The cities are the Matrix.  They know nothing, John Snow.

WHAT WOULD MATT DILLON SAY?

Scott Gese has a passion for those old Westerns of the Fifties and writes them himself.  As a high school kid, I used to love them very much.  I’ve speculated in the past that they were “stand-down stories,” meant to suggest that strong men can take charge of situations in tumultuous times like the American frontier (or war) without ALWAYS being violent.  That is, gunmen need to have some kind of internalized guidance about when violence is justified and how to overcome reflexes acquired in war.  Part of their appeal is their concentration on moral issues. particularly when one is the authorized and responsible gunman in question.   (A lot of cop and detective pulps have the same issues.)

One version is “High Noon,” which many take to be about courage but is also (like “The Quiet Man”) about where the line is when defending home and orderly society.  Another version is “Shane,” when the man who restores order is forever forbidden to stay and enjoy that order in a home of his own.  And “The Searchers,” about a man who can’t give up revenge and retribution.  The iconic cowboy series was “Gunsmoke,” but I was also a devotee of “Cheyenne,” “Rawhide,” “Wagon Train,” and “Have Gun, Will Travel.”  Part of the appeal was that they were about strong men one could depend on, but also there was always that dilemma of means against ends.  

Scott has a website, www.ropeandwire.com, where he prints short stories in this mode as well as streaming old movies and offering merchandise and recipes.  There’s even a “friends” feature like Facebook.  Ever the resourceful one, now he’s got a special “imprint” on Amazon.  This is what he sent me:

This is an exclusive invitation asking you to join with Rope and Wire, Lobo Books and many fine western authors as we continue moving the western genre back into the forefront, by offering our newest generation of readers a preview of some of the genres’ finest authors through our newest venue, ePulps.

Rope and Wire has recently listed on Amazon, its first volume in a brand new series of eBooks. We are calling these books, ePulps, as with the first volume, these new ePulps will be an electronic version of the old pulp westerns which were popular in the 1940’s and 50’s.

The series is called “Rope and Wire Western Short Stories”.  Here is a link to give you a good idea of what volume 1, and future ePulps will look like.     http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005NN1BPC      Each future volume will include a variety of authors. 

                                     

Rope and Wire is currently soliciting, by invitation only, a select group of western authors who may be interested in submitting a short story for one of our upcoming volumes in this series.

In the Sixties and Seventies the children of veterans turned to debunking all that horsefeathers stuff.  They wanted to show that what the frontier was really about was greed and exploitation.  I never did develop a taste for “Deadwood,” which argued for means, the only ends being survival and money. That generation's sympathies were with the Native Americans who were steamrolled and starved out of the way.  This is where I signed on. 

They were also after the taboo of the times against any talk about sex or using the f-word.  In reversing that taboo, they created an anti-Western that was almost exclusively about f-ing and cursing.  (Corman McCarthy gave it a nice historical elocution without giving up his Southern Gothic death sensibility.)  So Scott says NO sex or cussing.  (I’m writing a story for Scott about a guy who is only kissed by his horse.)

I consider it honorable and legitimate to set arbitrary rules.  The difference between Scott Gese and the Manhattan publishers is that Scott is operating on principle, a virtuous goal.  Manhattan publishers want what they think will sell.  (The Deadwood principle -- which has ironically killed them.  It wasn’t just ebooks.)  Maybe Scott’s rules will work, and maybe not.  My suspicion is that his sweet spot will be profitable to the extent that it’s shared by others, a demographic that might be disappearing or might be renewed by immigration from places where sensibilities remain equivalent to American Fifties-think.  Scott is up-front about what he is doing.  I think he is too busy to sit around speculating about it, so I’ll just help him out.

The question is about violence.  Some of the stories are packed with traumas inflicted on the hero that are near impossible for a real person to survive, but he does.  No one grieves for anyone righteously killed.  Righteously doesn’t refer to the method -- only the justification.  The writer who really has the formula down is Tom Sheehan, who is a Bostonian veteran of the Korean War.  The name of the lawman is always colorful:  Cawdy Bellrock, Jonathon Digsby, Chadsey Brenault Cushing, Link Colburn, Burt Hollister.  A town is like a set for a Western “all the way from beautiful and sultry Ma Taylor’s Suitable Emporium of Taste at one end of the town to puckish Noah Cunningham’s Mortuary of the True Stillness at the other end.”  Tom can turn these stories out two and three a day and still manage to include a snapper surprise on the end.

This is very much like the nostalgic BBC serieses about small English villages, say, “Lark Rising to Candleford” or the CBC version, “Anne of Green Gables,” or even “Northern Exposure.”  Stories of small-town known characters who are invaded by strangers threatening to change the status quo.  It’s a story that happens again and again, everywhere.  And the situation often DOES make someone turn violent.   

There are also similarities with Steam Punk, which is Alternative History Sci-Fi in which electronics were never discovered, so that computers are steam-driven and considerable attention is devoted to devices and how they evolved.  The corseted women and other main elements of Victorian society remain.

So how has our understanding of violence evolved?  Let alone our idea of what a woman should be like?  Is a suicide bomber acting on principle a moral agent?  Or is the contract soldier working as a rogue outside the law who identifies and kills that bomber acting with sufficiently virtuous ends to justify his means?  And then the one that stumps us all:  the internet pilot who guides a predator drone into a house in a foreign country where it blows up an entire family.  What would Matt Dillon say?


NOTE:  http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2011/09/29/consequences-combat-vietnam  makes a cogent counterpoint to what I'm trying to say.  

SEVENTH CAVALRY: A Real Story

The little teaser below is from www.ropeandwire.com which is a website community for folks who love the old-fashioned West.  Duncklee once cowboyed up in this country where I am.  One of the by-blows in his little satirical tale is a snotty suggestion by one character that next someone would write a story about two gay cavalrymen at Custer’s Last Stand.  I’m gonna take it on.

Duncklee’s tease:

THE REAL CONVENTION

John Duncklee

jpduncklee@earthlink.net

www.johndunckley.com

The panel sessions during the annual convention of the auspicious Horseshit and Gunsmoke Writers of the West had been going full blast all morning and half the afternoon. It was the third day of the week-long meeting at the Cowpie Palace Hotel in Denver. Not all the writers, editors and agents attended the panel sessions. There was always at least one table in the lounge occupied by those more interested in networking, ( a P.C. Word for ass-kissing), than listening to such topics as “Women of the West Smell Like Horseshit Too”, “Horseshit and Gunsmoke Markets in Belize”, or “What Does a Horseshit Editor Look For?”.

Read Full Story>>

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ANOTHER REAL INCIDENT

The soldier was only a kid.  It wasn’t an unknown phenomenon since overburdened families could use the enlistment fee.  Or maybe he was a runaway -- just a drifter.    He didn’t seem to know much.  Knife skills.  Knots.  But not human relations.  He was good with horses but not other men.  Maybe grew up in country not yet that settled so men worked alone, couldn’t afford to take a kid to town with them.  He kinda hung around the edges of the company.  The old cavalryman didn’t pry.  He was a big man with a thick neck and he, too, kept to himself.  Just liked it that way.   

So they had a tendency to hunker together out at the edge of the firelight for no particular reason.  It just happened that way.  As a cavalry old timer, the big man knew the importance of awareness, not just of the enemy but also of supposed allies who could be far more dangerous since they had access and knowledge.  In fact, every time he looked at Custer his guts clenched.  The unreal arrogance and conceit of a nearly bald man who grew out his side hair to shoulder-length and then kept his hat on to maintain the illusion was dangerous.  Irritability in a leader was dangerous enough, but once this old-timer soldier saw Custer’s wife, he knew the two of them were entwined in a folie a deux of fantasy and ambition.

He didn’t have much use for women, not even the worn and essentially sympathetic whores near any army barracks.  His preference was more secret, more condemned: the male Indian accommodators who hung around the fort for more than whisky.  They were not likely to talk much to anybody about anything, but he did pick up a few tidbits now and then.  They didn’t always realize how well he spoke their language.  He could see an apocalypse coming.

He didn’t much care.  The frontier was ending but everything ends.  He felt very tired.  Maybe it would have been different if he’d had children, but his kind didn’t marry nor did he suspect any accidental plantings outside the garden.  It was hard to think what he could do outside the company of men.  Not that he had any taste for ordinary men with their need to acquire both material goods and imagined status.

The kid felt good with the old soldier near him.  The man was generous in teaching little techniques and relaying small stories that might come in useful later.  Sometimes they laughed together.  At night the man was careful to roll out his bedroll at some distance, which hurt the boy’s feelings.  Once he dragged his soogan over to the man’s massive prone bulk, but the man -- without a word -- gathered up his bedding and moved to the other side of the camp.  A few tears that time, but the boy didn’t think anyone saw them.  He hoped not.  He knew it was a major mistake to show weakness, which is why the big man interested him so much.  No one doubted his skill or potency, in battle or out.

Rumors about the Indians began to fly.  The man started to advise the boy to transfer out of Custer’s command, maybe to the supply train.  The boy was hurt, thinking that this was because the big man thought he was unfit for combat, so he was defiant and said he would not change anything.  Inside, the big man sorrowed.  He had an idea what might be coming and he loved the boy, wanted him to escape.

Though he was afraid of what trouble night-walking might get him into, in daylight he liked being near the boy, riding beside him when they were on the move, and sitting near him when they took their breaks.  They shared tobacco, each in his own pipe.  The boy was trying to grow a mustache, but his eyelashes were both longer and thicker than the hair on his upper lip.  Sunlight caught in both, making them into bright feathers.  No matter how dusty the riding, the boy’s clear eyes and white teeth flashed bright.  Daily the bone around his eyes and along his jaw grew thicker, more defined.  He tipped his hat at a jaunty angle, though that was discouraged by the officers who despised individuality.  Except for Custer’s flauntings, which might have been the source of their displeasure.  

Nevertheless, it was late in June.  If they got off the trail. the green grass -- full of flowers -- was up to the bellies of the horses, and the streams still had cold running water.  Meadowlarks called and hawks circled the sky.  It was easy in all that bliss to forget what their job really was.

When they approached the Greasy Grass, the veteran unbuttoned his jacket, letting it blow around him to make a deceptive target from a distance.  He’d heard Indians had picked up some Sharps rifles and were practicing.  “Keep a peeled eye,” he advised the kid.  “Stick close to me.”  He sat high in his saddle, full of tension,  trying to remember more scraps of conversation with Indians.  This spring’s ceremonies had been intense and well-attended.  

When the column rode over a bluff and down a coulee towards the river, a steep descent that threw some horses, the boy thought that’s what his older friend meant, so he was braced and kept his horse under him.  Then he smelled the campfires.

The rest was much confused, though the boy did his best until an arrow pierced him and the bright blood sprang out.  He fell down to the grass now greasy with his own slipping-away.  Then assailants were close around, using hand weapons instead of arrows, and the older man dismounted, letting his horse go.  He stood beside the boy’s body for just a moment before he saw a shadow from the corner of his eye and threw himself down over the youngster, even knowing he was nearly gone.  The pressure made the boy sigh.  Then the shadow, wielding a stone battle hammer, slammed it into the big man’s head.

In the desperate second of death, which he did not regret, he was aware that at last he was holding the warm boy beneath him in his arms, so familiar, though he had never touched him.  He could not tell whether the boy knew.  

Much later when the Indian women came through the tangle of bodies -- stripping and looting, finishing off and mutilating, ululating and singing -- they came to the two men, one older on the top of the younger.  They stood looking.  One said,  “Father protected son.”  They moved on without touching the men.  

VOLLMAN GOES TO THE MOVIES: "The Proposition"

Catching up with William T. Vollman’s writing output is hard to do. Even as I was finishing up his condensed version of his seven volume series called “Rising Up and Rising Down,” he himself was just seeing into publication his fat new book, “Imperial,” about the illegal immigrants crossing the border in the Imperial Valley of California and Mexico. He is a poetic journalist, if you can accept that category, who mixes his fact-finding and interviews with evocative images. There’s an excerpt at the NYTimes today if you want to see for yourself.

“Rising Up and Rising Down” is an attempt to come to terms with some kind of moral rules that will help us make decent [sic] decisions about violence, mostly based on relationships. He has gone into war zones and ghettos to see what is there and has not been a fellow in a lab coat but rather a companion to those in trouble. He leans on the lip of the great maw called “Violence” that swallows so many and counts its bloody teeth. I was wondering how I could make any of this new when we stare at so much banal violence in the daily newspapers and television. What reference point can we share?

Netflix to the rescue, as so often. Last night I watched “The Proposition,” a so-called “Western” but set in Australia, an even harsher and more ancient frontier than the American Desert. It directly confronts these kinds of moral boundaries: spouses/protection, family/allegiance, races/oppression, settlement/disorder, colonialism/genocide, and righteousness/punishment. The story is balladic: there are brothers, the youngest can only be saved by sacrificing the oldest, and the outcome hinges on the decisions of the middle brother. The point is not really how the plot ends: it is all in the getting there and like Vollman, the writer (a song writer of considerable stature) sees poetry everywhere. As the actors commented, the intensity is increased by the fact that people went to America willingly and in search of a New Eden. The founders of Australia were felons deliberately banished to Hell.

BILL’S OBSERVATION: “Give me a soldier anytime. For straightforwardness a soldier cannot be beat. Like cops, doctors, mothers and whores, they’ve been through it and they cannot be fooled.”

Therefore, the real pivot of this story is the Captain who is supposed to protect the settlement and dearly wishes to protect his wife. He suffers over ends/means as he tries to obey Vollman’s SHEPHERD’S MAXIM: As authority enlarges itself, its obligation to protect from violence the individuals it controls increases, and the ability of those individuals to defend themselves from violence correspondingly decreases.

The self-appointed mayor and “owner” of the town obeys CAESAR’S MAXIM: Should I extend mercy beyond expediency, then I have the right to commit whatever aggression I please. Though I didn’t notice much mercy as he orders the youngest brother to be whipped to death to satisfy the blood thirst for vengeance in his town dwellers. He’s also a believer in TROTSKY’S MAXIM: No one who disagrees with me is allowed to judge me.

The Irish Murphy brothers’ principle is THE AMERICAN MANTRA: Because the right to self-defense remains inalienable, each of us can and should maintain a self-reliant distrust of authority. This idea was undoubtedly born in Britain where England and Rome struggled to control the pre-existing tribes but Robin Hood always wins over the Sheriff of Nottingham. Because of the colonialism of this little island, Australia shares this conviction -- at least in the Outback -- and no displaced population more so than the Irish who arrived in chains.

So the Brit attitude has been governed by CORTES’S MAXIM: In order to secure and defend my ground, I have every right to conquer yours.

That quickly drifts over from land ownership to people ownership, as blacks of both America and Australia know, so then operations are governed by THE KLANSMAN’S MAXIM: If I believe your race or culture threatens mine, I have the right first to threaten you back, then to remove your threat by violence.

This in turn triggers in both America and Australia (and oh-so-much in Ireland) THE VICTIM’S MAXIM: If any members of your side harmed any members of my side, then your side is in the wrong.

There are other assumptions like this buried in the minds of voters, politicians, businessmen, teachers, and so on -- none of them dug out, defined, examined and either rejected or reformed. All of them can lead to horrendous violence, if only the slow self-destruction of drugs and alcohol.

There are two interacting assumptions that Vollman doesn’t directly define but that I’ve been pondering here in Montana. They both come from sports violence, which seems to be increasing regardless of lip-syncing about “sportsmanship.” They are particularly strong in the small towns and reservations of this high prairie or maybe I just think so because I see it first hand.

One is that Winner takes all. The other is that Being the “last man standing” is the same as winning. In a place where survival is tough, the idea of controlling everything is a very attractive one. Not only does it protect the group to which you have allegiance, whether family, tribe or town, but also it increases power because other people will have to come to you to beg for survival.

That’s when the other rule kicks in: if winning depends more on the weakness and neediness of others than it does on true excellence of leaders, then it is always a temptation to cut the minority losers down, regardless of what they deserve.
Weak persons then begin to turn to the victim’s maxim and the Klansman’s maxim, keeping track of offenses against them and waiting for a moment of weakness in the winner, which always comes sooner or later.

Aside from the Golden Rule, worthy religions oppose the “winner takes all” idea with the principle that if the weakest among you are protected, then also the strong can prosper in peace, because there will be no need to accuse and suppress them.

Would someone please write out this idea on paper, wrap around something heavy enough to be thrown, and heave it over the wall into the Republican party? I don’t think they are enough in the modern times to read a blog. Or particularly books as fat and frequent as Vollman’s. Anyway, if you drop Vollman on them, they’ll be squashed. Maybe they would sit through “The Proposition,” but they might not get the right message.

FEMINIST-STRUCTURALIST AUTO-DIDACT

It’s a biological principle (for a minute there I had a typo that said “biolegorical” -- bio-allegorical -- quite relevant) that life forms in the edge ecologies around meadows or forests or lakes are richer and more diverse than those in the middle. This comes to mind -- here in Valier on the edge of a lake, the edge of the Blackfeet reservation, at the edge of the Rockies, near the edge of Canada -- because I have a strong awareness of inventing my own way of life along those edges, partly made possible by technology: the Netflix/imdb/Google world which are also an edge.

Out the window I watch the poplars and storm skies go through the seasons. On the “window” of the computer and the television screen (which has long been detached from either cable or broadcast television) I’m back to a self-imposed course of study that began in 1957 when classmate Stu Hagmann took me along to film series and classes. It was definitely edgy. (Stu went back to the mainstream.) It was the time of a terrific explosion of film: Bergman, Fellini, Truffault and so on -- technically and culturally challenging. Though these were considered “foreign” films and “auteur” films, I was not a film student and so they washed over me as experience, no differently than “Joan of Arc” with Ingrid Bergman, or “Prince Who Was a Thief” with Piper Laurie, or “The Quiet Man” with Maureen O’Hara, and hundreds of other studio films. In the television years of my childhood (after the Fifties) I was as devoted to Westerns as anyone, which is partly how I ended up here in Montana.

But now, without leaving Montana, I’m going back to film, partly just roaming and partly with some specific inquiries. Lately I’m looking at what are evidently called “structuralist feminist” films. That is, movies like those made by Sally Potter and Jane Campion. For me, Jane Campion’s “The Piano” is a link with Montana. If Harvey Keitel’s role in that movie doesn’t remind you of Bob Scriver, you didn’t know Bob Scriver. At least not the way I did.

And yet, I’m nothing like either Campion or Potter with their boomer-generation, head-trippy, sometimes over-intellectual and pretty Marxist (I mean that ambiguously) approach to life. My trip from theatre to theology has been anchored in blue-collar work and the very real community of small congregations (not unlike the community of theatre and film creation). My sensory life is aesthetically influenced but not at all dominated by art of the American West and it doesn’t exclude the abstract, but it does carry an interest in costume and setting that is shared by Campion and Potter. We examine and criticize culture through those elements.

One point of departure from the “feminist” thing is that I don’t feel it as a political problem so much as a practical problem, like where do big fat old women buy clothes that fit except in the men’s department? I’ve always been uncomfortable with “ists”, more interested in how the unique can demonstrate the universal than making the unique precious.

Another is that the romantic dyad is pretty much “solved” for me. I mean, I bypassed children, bypassed financial success, bypassed dieting and makeup (mostly -- hey, even Gary Cooper wore eye liner!) and fancy clothes. Still, I’m not into that tango personally, but I’m not past thinking about it in a more abstract way.

I do not confine my attentions to “nice people” which is the way many thinkers avoid anxiety. I’ve been exposed to people “in extremis” and though I don’t go out of my way to look for them, I feel that I should respond to them and do my best. I have been out on the edge myself and appreciate the help I got.

So I’m not the feminist -- am I the structuralist? MUCH closer. It does seem to me that everything has a “song,” an algorithm, an inner pattern, and that they are the source of meaning. Changing one’s religious pattern from the three-layered world of the tribal Mediterranean to the cosmic world of waves and particles, all connected and all moving, has major implications in the way human life is considered. For one thing, this conversion or “paradigm shift” deeply challenges the idea of the romantic individual who can do as he/she pleases without affecting the lives of any others. This notion is still alive in the work of Campion and Potter, as nearly as I can tell. Less in Potter, who thinks about things like world peace. Maybe it is necessary for anyone working in the “auteur” tradition.

Last night I watched Potter’s “Orlando,” based on Virginia Woolf’s novel which I have not read. It’s philosophical fantasy, but openly so -- right out there in plain sight, rather than hidden in a fancy story like, say, the “Elizabeth” with Cate Blanchett. But it is equally beautiful and seductive, pulling us into vignettes of enormous power. The first scene especially, which shows the young “Orlando” in 1600 in a long sequence on ice -- literally -- is strange and horrifying, from the girl frozen into the lake causing the men to laugh, to the old woman carrying her burden of sticks, a sight also archetypal in the art of the West context. All those so-familiar court pavanes are quite new when done on ice! The costumes are beyond gorgeous. But nature as winter, uncontrolled and killing, is something we know in the high West.

We also know desert and strange cultures, as the Arab sequence illustrates; we know the relief of a culture that doesn’t press everyone into the Euro-dichotomies of gender. The high intellectual drawingroom/salon sequences mean nothing to us but dispossession of the property of the weak by the strong is our preoccupation.

Campion is from New Zealand, which is much like the Pacific Northwest. Potter is English. Kimberly Peirce, writer/director of “Boys Don’t Cry,” is the US rough equivalent. Follow Hillary Swank from that stunning film (based on a real story of a girl passing as a boy) to “Million Dollar Baby” and who do we meet? Clint Eastwood. And isn’t that a gender-role challenging film?

Maybe the “edge” meets the frontier in the ethnic persons of Katy Jurado and Tantoo Cardinal, though they don’t so much question their cultural assignments as just overwhelm them. I like that game plan. But in the meantime I really like this impromptu nighttime wandering back and forth over boundaries between Westerns and foreign film, feminism and BBC costume drama. Maybe no product will be produced by me. Who cares? I’m subsidized by Social Security.