ACCEPTED IN BOTH AFRICA AND AMERICA -- HUH?

Ceremonies and rituals have a number of functions that are helpful to human beings.  One is the management of the individual in tension with the community, which can overwhelm persons, give them identity (good or bad),  throw them out or protect them.  Only after these patterns non-verbally exist in some kind of resolution -- instead of constantly re-organizing -- can they be usefully expressed in words, though exploration in words can help define the patterns.  

One of the forces that keeps patterns in motion is that of globalization and that is closely related to values.  “Ethics” and “morals” are always framed as being permanent and as-high-as-you-can-go (God), but they are not.  What seems moral in one place is immoral in another.   The example here is genital mutilation.

Infibulation

 In parts of Africa concern over whether a “wife” might bear another man’s child is so entrenched and vicious that women have their vagina sewn shut, except for a tiny aperture for menstrual blood.  In other parts of Africa, worry about a wife becoming sexually turned on enough to stray from her proper behavior, is so strong that a female child’s clitoris is cut out of her at a young age.  This is done without anesthetic or ordinary cleanliness with the mother holding her screaming daughter down while an old woman with a rusty razor blade does the cutting.  Everyone accepts this as "just the way it is."

This is enforced in part by the economic value of marrying off a daughter.  If these things are not done to her, she is not worth as much.  Often, in any place, what are considered to be moral or religious issues are really about money.  The overwhelming issue of virginity -- is again about guaranteeing that a man’s progeny are really his own since inheritance is based on blood lines -- has controlled the destiny of whole countries when what is required in succession to the throne is true blood inheritance.  It has created the problem of inbred, and therefore faulty, aristocracy.  Sterility can cost lives.  Ask the wives of Henry VIII.

Now that births, esp. in the inbred royalty of Europe, could involve multiple parents, which challenges even DNA analysis, the value of blood inheritance is under scrutiny.  This affects even Montana reservation legalities, again controlling the transfer of money.  The value of being a full-blood Indian is quite real in terms of membership in the tribal corporation.

This girl in India was told by elders she was cursed, 

but could escape by marrying a dog.  She didn't love the dog and he couldn't make a living.

But romantic values set up a competing, iconoclastic and disruptive set of ideas: that people should marry for “love” or at least compatibility, that parents should not interfere in the love lives of their children, and that children should not be “trafficked” for the sake of linking to wealth or power.  Love is seen as a higher morality than money.

Science sets up yet another system: that people should not marry unless they have a genome check to see if there are worrisome matches and a body check for diseases, esp. something like HIV/AIDS that can simmer for years, then explode into devastation or at least a lifelong burden.

And governments meddle by insisting that people have more babies (Russia is de-populating) or only one baby (China).  These practices throw off demographic gender proportions.  We know that an excess of young unmarried men always leads to trouble.  The excess of unwanted girl babies means international trafficking, legal or not, and a class of adopted children who are unique.  Native Americans who are adopted by white families are one category; Korean girl babies are another.  It seems there is no market for orphaned black boys except for immoral purposes.

Consultation before labiaplasty

Every middle or upper class American person will be shocked and horrified by the African practice of cutting out the clitoris of a young girl.  But in American now it is accepted and desired to cut off the labia, the flesh “ruffles” around the opening to the vagina.  There are plastic surgeons in Montana who specialize in this, as well as “restoring” virginity and tightening the vagina.  At least we assume they use sanitary measures and anesthetic, which are also moral issues at some level.  

I’ve seen a video of a woman being operated on while her best friend (instead of her mother) holds her hand.  Both women have very expensive long false nails and full makeup including extravagant false eyelashes.  There was no information about whether they were prostitutes, and one would be criticized for suggesting it.  In truth, these women were doing these things to impress and “top” other women.  It never occurred to them that they were making a religious choice -- the religion being salvation by winning competitions like beauty queens.  

Very rarely there is medical necessity to remove labia, which one assumes evolved for a purpose, maybe as a protection.  Somehow the idea has taken hold in young women who wish for more sex that a vulva with no labia is more attractive to men.  Why or what kind of men is a mystery.  Some say it makes a woman seem more childlike.  Is she trying to attract pedophiles?  The hymen is now revealed as just tissue to be taken away or restored, not a marker of having "saved oneself" for Mr. Right.  But then wearing modest white wedding dresses, which were supposed to sign the same thing, have become passé.  Now one dresses in a strapless but extremely extravagant gown.  Money overwhelms purity.

As the act of fucking becomes an obsessive marker of desirability, a woman’s value of her body as a unique and personal expression of her identity is radically reduced. Vanity surgeries are radically affect emotional and physiological desire.  Scar tissue interferes with feeling.  Removing the hood over the clitoris (something like male circumcision) can create super-sensitivity that interferes with love-making, to say nothing of one's sense of self.

Then there is trauma damage that genuinely needs surgical repair, fistulas that destroy the wall between the intestines and the vagina so that elimination can’t be normal and infections take hold easily.  They may be the result of rape or some other kind of damaging force.  Again, in Africa there are neither the resources nor the skill to repair a fistula.  If they did exist, incomes are too low and the value of women too low, to get these women repaired, so they live as pariahs, valueless.

All this sort of information has been cloaked in the past, considered too personal and too medical to be decently shared.  Yet it’s basic to our lives.  At present not enough people have a background to understand their own genitals, much less their drives and assumptions.  We get most of our information about such matters from media, either fiction or so-called non-fiction, often written by reporters who are young and romantic or out to shock, supervised by editors and producers who are old and cynical -- perhaps like Denny Hastert, twisted by their own secret lives and yet controlling ours.

Because religion is represented as something all-powerful handed down from above, we evade many value issues by obsessing over the nature of God, the hander-downer.  But in fact, religion is something that rises up from the roots, and is then shaped by the forces of survival.  Either conform or you die.

I wonder how this went.

It’s not just individual persons who are subject to these forces, but also whole cultures.  Economic viability is a matter of ecology.  The more intricacy and ways to fit into the larger pictures, the more survival.  The more life survives, the more it finds the resources to adapt to each other, to become more than isolates, not through domination but through symbiosis.  Love is a kind of symbiosis.  We should celebrate that in the heart of our morality.

FROM THE BEGINNING

Basic individual minds are developed by dynamic brain organization -- self-creation -- pushing against the environment through the use of the senses and muscles.  This happens according to the instructions encoded in the genome and annotated by the epigenome.  

Gradually the fetus assembles itself in the first environment, literally supported by the womb, which has its own separate genome+epigenome (the mother’s, not the father’s).  It gives the fetus what it can spare, while the fetus seizes what it can.  Once the infant emerges into the world, there are two environments: the sensate world which is presumed by interaction with whatever is outside the skin through the senses and the internal mental world which is partly unique to the person and partly “imparted” by the culture through other humans.

Environment provides the basics of food, shelter, and nurturing through whatever resources are there (animals, plants, minerals, temperatures, water).  Foods might be rice where there is shallow water, wheat where there are grasslands, marine animals at the north pole.  What is eaten, how shelter is formed, responses to weather -- all form the culture which encodes survival: boats, weapons, cooking, sexual relations.  Once internalized, the person becomes committed and finds it hard to change.

Certain ideas are valorized when they lead to success and weeded out when they cause bad things to happen.  “Thou shalt honor thy father and mother” is usually a good and “Thou shalt not kill” is usually preventing a bad.  But if father and mother are abusive and restrictive, one might want to kill them in spite of knowing there will be bad consequences.  These ideas are stored in the brain, generally behind the forehead.  We call them “ethics” or “morality” or “laws.”

At the same time the body is storing a different kind of thought which every living creature has, an accumulation of knowing that is not conscious.  The autonomic nervous system governs this knowledge, which does not normally become conscious unless it prompts noticeable reactions like panting, fast heart beat, or a clenched gut.  The autonomic nervous system is deeply involved in what is called the spiritual when practices or ideas trigger basic blissful or otherwise intense internal reactions.  These abilities form in the fetus as soon as the necessary structures have formed.  They are wordless.  They constantly adapt to new circumstances, maintaining homeostasis.  They are vulnerable to drugs.

Probably the experiences described by saints -- which involve basic binaries (hot/cold, dark/light, embraced/falling, distant/close) -- are perceived, like sex, through the autonomic nervous system.  This system is parallel to conscious nerve/muscle systems and not necessarily controllable.  At one time it was described as dyadic whole-body reactions that work in opposition: calm and resting (parasympathetic) versus alert and ready for action (sympathetic).  Now the enteric system, a mesh of nerves in the wall of the intestines, is considered part of this larger system.  In fact, even the colonies of microbes that live in the guts can influence mood.  These things are connected to the limbic mid-brain unconscious that every mammal has.

Freud realized that something "below" consciousness existed and tried to get at it with free association and by thinking about old stories like Greek drama, which are very close to being religiously valorized and which provide the idea of sitting together, focusing on some kind of performance.  The most distinctly and recently evolved human capacity is that for empathy, which allows us to experience second-hand what another person is experiencing.  Thus we can know strong emotions and deadly reactions without endangering ourselves.  These can prompt us to put felt concepts into words.  These functions are located partly in the pre-frontal cortex.  The arts can move unconscious ideas to consciousness.

There is a thin wall between the religious practice of a communal experience and psychological or artistic sharing.  The crux of “religion” is survival, either survival of the group and species or survival of an individual.  When they support each other, the autonomic system runs along happily and the ordinary sensate world is enjoyed.  The opposite might be called evil and be felt as coming from the outside or seeping up from the inside -- something supernatural and uncontrollable.  If it IS controllable, it is merely sin or crime.

cucumber flower

Beyond empathy is rational thought like mathematics and, more recently, science which by observing certain rules (detachment, testing, repeatability, mathematical measurements) can offer shared concepts that don’t change as obviously as humanities ideas or art styles, what are called “memes”.  Through the use of instruments, we have extended our perception and understanding of realms never dreamed of: subatomic particles, virus codes that invade cells, how the neural networks connect.  These are real and provable, imperceptible without instruments but not unconscious.  When the attitudes of reflection and analysis are used on the problem of non-sensate but significant concepts, they become theologies -- theories of the sacred, which are felt through the autonomic system, translated into social assumptions and groups.  (If the system has no “theos” or concept of “God,” then it is called philosophy or sometimes anthropology.)

cucumber

Individual unconscious feelings (felt meanings) guide people into socio-economic groups provided by the environment and culture.  We call them “congregations” but could call them aggregations.  People group together spontaneously in a pluralistic society but can be forced into groups by a coercive culture.  (Schools, military)  Or they may simply have developed as genetically related people or people in a specific environment or of a certain age.  (Though I don’t know of any teenaged religious congregations, maybe a case could be made that fan groups count.)  When the business of the group is supporting a world-view that controls their behavior, then they are seen as religious by others and begin to be institutions.

Ancient grain

In the Middle Eastern lands around the Mediterranean, kingdoms and tribal groups spontaneously formed which defined themselves with theological dogma drawn from living in that place.  Gradually through the millennia, responding to war over territories, dwindling resources, the invention of agriculture allowing grain storage and domestic animals to accumulate wealth, and forms of government that developed into walled towns with focused resources, supported by a specialized priesthood who performed a kind of theatre of sacrifice -- all this formed into a few dozen theological stances and their members.  Then three “took off” in power and wealth, supported by written “books” that were said to be supernatural:  Judaism (Torah), then -- emerging from it -- Christianity (Bible), then -- using many of the same concepts -- Islam (Koran).

These three have dominated our idea of what a “religion” is: an institution.  As Christianity spread over Europe, piggy-backing on the Roman Empire, it became the Holy Roman Church and managed to convince the several governments that it represented “God” who was the Caesar of all Caesars.  It brokered peace, crowned kings, created a supernatural reality of heaven, saints, the devil, and so on that gradually became corrupt.  The reacting Protestant movement meant that many small subdivisions of Christianity formed, according to the environments, temperaments, and sources of success in different groups.  

The original Christian church, as expressed in the Catholic system, had many different styles and subdivisions that came out of spreading into new territories (like teachers learning from students, the Romans were penetrated by Celts), but they were strongly connected to Rome.  The Protestant church had no such restraint and often reached into “spiritual” sources as guided by the autonomic system, the mammal brain of felt meaning.  But also theology could build on rational ideas.  All these differing groups could then be called “denominations” or different "namings" of the basic idea of Christianity.  Denomination is a term usually reserved for Christian sub-groups.

Islam and Judaism are related but separate RELIGIONS, not denominations.  They are grouped with Christianity as the Abrahamic religions, since the holy books of all three say they descended from Abraham, who was asked by God to kill his son but was then spared, an emblem of survival.   Religions and denominations are both institutional: that is, they are organized, hierarchical, supported monetarily and with staff, housed in buildings, legally documented as corporations.  Spirituality continues parallel/beneath/overarching theology.  If the institution supports spiritual meaning in the lives of its people, it succeeds.  Survives.  As do the people.

Spirituality is immanent, an upwelling from within, a product of the limbic/autonomic brain and therefore unconscious except in physiological phenomena.  Theology is a way of unifying and empowering institutions.  What I want to understand is the path from a felt meaning to a power structure intent on perpetuating itself.

The dance of life

MORALITY VERSUS SPIRITUALITY

Komodo dragon

Let’s look at this in terms of brain evolution.  For the reptile, good and bad are certainly Manichean.  What you can eat is good and what can eat you is bad.  Pleasantly simple.  As long as you get it right.  Of course, as Rappaport reminds us, there are two kinds of survival: that of the individual and that of the group.  Lizards don’t worry about it.

A mammal group

Then comes the mammal brain when the group is important because mammals must invest in birthing families, which are the core of bands, and then tribes with their bonded center of genetic connection and the looser surrounding relationships based on affinity.  By the time these bands and tribes exceed a hundred members, there begin to be difficulties between individuals, between groups, and between the individual and the group.  Two forces evolved to regulate these oppositions: one is the pack structure with an alpha, sometimes two (a male who fights, a female who keeps the pack or herd knowledge and teaches the cubs or calves).  And then the one for humans that came with language: written rules like the Ten Commandments or the Code of Hammurabi.

A stele recording the Code of Hammarabi

Human groups who could write developed bookkeeping systems, stories, and courts of both justice and status.  Sometimes they illustrated principles in ceremonies, drama, and artistic depictions.  The laws remained rules rather than principles until the evolution of the pre-frontal cortex, which was able to weigh conflicts in order to reconcile them.  With the advent of spindle cells, some of these principles reflected awareness of compassion.  This is where Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed enter history.  Confucius, not so much.

No animal, no mammal except primates, has morality or ethics that employs a pre-frontal cortex because the only animals with that part of the brain are elephants, whales, dolphins, and humans.  The empathy of dolphins is sonar-powered: they don’t have to read your face because they can hear your guts, but even they can be governed more by instinct than by “rules.”  Except that all humans and most mammals can be brain-shaped by operant conditioning:  that is, the powerful “rule” of doing what is rewarded and not doing what is punished, a duality without nuance.  Domesticated animals (and humans) are conditioned animals.  Ferals have slipped the bonds of punishment and reward, sometimes because the two are conflated or reversed: what was once punishment has become rewarding, or vice versa.  Or simply lost their meaning.

Generally, the term “morality” applies to ordinary daily behavior and “ethics” is more abstractly principled, requiring reflection.  Morality can be forced by external monitors but ethics are more often thought and felt by the acting individual.  Neither has anything to do with spirituality, which is a whole-body response to the universe, entirely amoral, beyond ethics.  Morality is mammalian, ethics are human, and spirituality transcends humanness to include all of existence.  That's just tentative, but I like it.

Yet mainstream institutional religion in America concerns itself mostly with morality (esp. on the conservative side) while ethical behavior is confined to more thoughtful circles -- academic, legal.  Much of this may be because there are so many unreconciled cultures and because the world is so changed by technology that many moral assumptions must be re-thought.  Now that we know skin color means nothing, the morality of miscegenation is obsolete.  Now that we know so much about conception, gestation and birth, many choices are forced when once we were only asked to accommodate whatever happened.  Something similar affects our behavior concerning death.  We have increased the stress and exploitation of our environment to the point of altering it into something that kills us.  All these are moral and ethical issues requiring many adjustments.

But spirituality infuses our being with something beyond that.  It is even beyond the commonly assumed value of compassion.  Because the pre-frontal cortex of primates contains spindle cells that allow empathy -- shared experience, knowledge of what someone else is feeling -- many people want that information included in thinking about decisions, even awareness of the “enemy’s” likeness to ourselves instead of defining them as something “bad”, i.e. to be eaten.  

This lioness killed a mother antelope and then tried to adopt the baby.

It is the mammalian need to nurture that can overwhelm everything else so that maybe the lamb doesn’t lie down with the lion, but we witness a lioness who tries to raise an antelope in spite of the obvious difficulties.  It is a “mommie” impulse (mommie from mammal) that wants everything safe, warm, fed and clean.  Mammals like cuddling and nurturing.  That helps individuals survive.  It may not help the group get through risky, cold, dirty and violent circumstances whether from natural disasters or unreconciled warfare.  Mommie stuff means vulnerability.  We take children away from abusive parents and then place them with abusive foster parents.

Nanny

I say “mommie” where others say “nannie” because nannies, at least in the English culture, are rule-enforcers, dedicated to the rules of the group (censoring) and the shaping of the young into useful adults (conditioning).  A mommie cares about nothing except her own child and its welfare.  A mommie will lie, cheat, steal, and kill to defend her own cub.  But it is based on ownership, that the cub is an extension of her and her pride.  If it defies her, she may kill it herself, not recognizing that it is a separate being.

A notorious book about momism.

I have been careful never to have children because I could not stand either the loss of them nor the compromises necessary to provide for them.  I am selfish.  The dark side of mommies is the huge cost to the mother from the point of conception to the witnessing of death.  But “momism” is still a potent force in the culture and still connected to sacrificing young men, as in war.

Mammals, including humans, have the ability to bond, to attach, to enmesh with each other, sometimes through the instincts of sex and sometimes more of a pack identification and sometimes through empathy, shared lives.  These abilities emerge from instinct and experience but can transcend everything rational, which only engages part of the brain.  It is a human phenomenon, though occasionally animals will pair-bond beyond what is necessary for sexuality.  This force is sometimes called love, which is too bad because love in our culture is reduced to greeting cards and other little rule-based dances.  Whatever overwhelming devotion this relationship really is moves far beyond that, exceeds all cultures.  It is the beginning of spirituality.  But only an entry point.

Rather than being a phenomenon of part of the brain, spirituality engages the whole body and all its experience of the past and ability to envision the future.  It is mostly unconscious, because human consciousness in the sense of identity and purpose is a small sub-part.  Spirituality is participation in the totality of the universe, not the preservation of the identity of one person or their body, but rather the total interaction of patterns that is Being.  Awareness of it is only in glimpses and that’s a good thing because it is so powerful and overwhelming.  It’s not very helpful in terms of making decisions.

Spirituality can be confused with madness.  It worries people.  It might trigger attempts to control or even eliminate a person who seems to see beyond the culture horizon.  Sometimes a culture will set a highly spiritual person apart, even found an institution in his or her name, which is a pity because institutions destroy spirituality.  Lifting spirituality up as a founding impulse only puts it in a box, even a coffin.

NASSIM TALEB & THE 3-COLUMN MORALITY

Since we have defined corporations as persons, though they have none of the characteristics of what makes people human and often make human beings into greedhead zombies (oops -- have I tipped my hand already?), we need a new matrix for morality. I say morality rather than ethics, because it is a matter of small daily acts more than grand theories.

Nassim Taleb to the rescue. He has used his time, money, and fame to investigate the roots of our Western culture, looking for keys. They turn out to be more simple and more obvious than one might have thought, knowing “Greek” was involved, which has been hard to understand even for the Greeks. But we all lose our way with money now and then. (Some are beginning to question the usefulness of “money” as a marker of wealth.)

Once on an enviro listserv I got into an argument with someone (probably a young white academic male) about whether corporations were hopelessly evil. My position at the time was that since they are “owned” by share-holders, reform would be simple: enlighten the shareholders and they would take their votes and proxies to the annual meeting to demand that the business wake up to human suffering and global warming. (It worked on MacDonalds.) The arguer couldn’t explain why that wouldn’t work (he was a Marxist and went by theory), but Nassim can by using his little charts and his invented characters with their well-defined points of view.

He’s talking about the same sort of thing I talked about when I was discussing Native American artifacts: the gradient of value. (You can get rich if you find something that is of low value one place and high value the other place, and then carry it across to sell.) But this is in terms of money. Long ago, someone explained that lawyers get rich because they are the ones who pass the cookies. That is, when someone wants a cookie, they ask a lawyer, who passes them the plate and takes a cookie for his trouble. Then he returns the plate to the cookie maker, again taking a cookie. Every time the plate moves, the lawyer gets a cookie because he controls the plate.

It is not the “owners” of corporations who get rich, it is the CEO’s, the managers. They are passing the plate between owners and investors. And they carry it between rooms, never revealing to one group what the other group knows. They themselves are the only ones who really know what is going on and, Oz-like, they control that knowledge partly by pretending that it is beyond the understanding of mere mortals, quant-magic that only they can provide. No one else could pass cookies like they can, though they can’t bake and always hoard. In fact, they begin to pass bits of paper that say “cookie” instead of the food itself. No one knows where the cookies go or even whether they ever existed at all.

Nassim writes “in plain sight” online with readers giving him feedback and asking him questions while he develops the chapter. When he begins on one of his ideas, it’s a great big tangle with his typos and second-language locutions getting in the way. He doesn’t like dumbheads and tells them so. But then he finds a guiding phrase and it all comes into focus.

This time the phrase is “skin in the game.” The investors and the owners have skin in the game. The CEO does not. He’s a manager on salary which he manages to shove up high (ahem) and bolster with bonuses whether the company is doing well or not. He has NO skin in the game. In ancient times a bridge builder and his family were required to go live under the bridge for a time until it was evident that the bridge was solid. When there was a war, even so recently as Napoleon and George Washington, the leaders of the war were in the field on horseback, unarmored, risking their hides, not sitting at a polished table somewhere, glancing at their watch to make sure they aren’t late for cocktails. (cock-tails). Even society at large has “skin in the game,” so that tax-revenue bailouts are mandated, at immense cost to citizens.

If the CEO is fortunate in the circumstances of the corporation (which he may not control as much as timing and politics do), the money rolls in and no one questions strategy. If things go sour, the owners (whether shareholders or family founders) take the loss or society pays cents on the dollar. The CEO keeps the plate. Managers of mutual funds are also working on salary and not at risk if things go wrong. They do not lose their pensions and life savings.

So Nassim’s chart has three columns: one for those who have NO skin in the game, one for those who DO have skin in the game, and a surprise category: those who have SOUL in the game. That is, people who are willing to take a loss for the sake of others. (He’s been hanging around with idealists like Ralph Nader.)

By occupations, the first column (no skin in the game) includes bureaucrats, consultants, corporate executives (“with suit”), theoreticians, data miners, observational studies, centralized government, editors, journalists, politicians, bankers.

The second column (skin in the game) includes citizens, merchants, businessmen, artisans, entrepreneurs, lab and field experimenters, city-state government, writers, speculators, crusading journalists, activists, traders and his character “Fat Tony” who is always practical. He says, “Do not fly in a plane without the pilot aboard.” (Predator drones risk no lives -- just a lot of taxpayer money. Aside from the targets, of course.)

The third column (soul in the game) includes saints, knights, warriors, soldiers, prophets, artists, innovators, mavericks, municipal government (I’d argue.), great writers, rebels, dissidents, revolutionaries, taxpayers (involuntarily -- whether providing safety nets or needing them). This is where he assigns his character “Nero Tulip.” (Himself)

The next step is linking the fragility theory from the Black Swan idea. The more distance and lack of understanding between columns one and three, the more fragile the system is, the more unexpected the disaster because the farther from reality. The corollary is that modernity (technology, globalization) increases the difference between columns one and three, because it is education and wealth that takes people’s skins out of the game. (Until now, when education of the academic kind has proven much less effective. Wealth ALWAYS works.)

The middle class is in the middle column. The much discussed distance between the rich and the poor corresponds to columns one and three. Talk (Fat Tony says “tawk”) lives in column one, but direct experience is heaped up in columns two and three. The trouble is that column two can be persuaded by clever talk and they are over-impressed by the wealth and status of column one. They tend to be wary of column three.

The discussion goes on to name names. It will be in the next book but by then the lawyers will have things to say about it. It’s more fun now. And I think he’s right. Even helpful.

I must add to this post a grateful hat tip to Dave Lull, who keeps me in this particular Nassim Taleb loop.

THE INTERVENING WITNESS

My used Ford F150 van was tan and had antennas on it because it had been used to make geological surveys by parking on hilltops and transmitting some kind of signals.  At the time I was affecting an authentic safari jacket, onto which I had sewn embroidered insignia of Glacier Park -- lupine on one side and I forget what on the other.  Probably a bear.  I was traveling on a quiet road leading into a town and saw a parking lot where a woman was trying to get into a car, but a man was wrestling with her, preventing her.  She seemed in distress and was yelling at him.

So I made a u-turn and pulled up so that my arm out the window was next to the guy.  “What’s the trouble here?” I asked, in my animal control voice.

“Nothing, Officer!  No problem!”  He stepped back.  The woman got into the car and drove off.  I left, too, feeling that I’d just saved someone.  That’s about the only satisfactory example I can think of in my life when I witnessed something, made a power move, and it worked.

I’m thinking about “Atonement,” the novel and movie, which I don’t want to write about yet.  A young girl sees something she misinterprets, she bears false witness unconsciously, and carries the guilt through her life until the end when she’s Vanessa Redgrave and writes a brilliant novel about it.  It’s a terrific story and you should see it, not least because it might make you think.

On another occasion I was late getting home from work in Portland, marching along the sidewalk in a temper, swinging my briefcase, and came to a man wrestling with a young Asian woman, yelling at her.  I figured it was an angry boy friend beating up on his girl.  “Leave her alone!” I yelled.  

He wouldn’t stop.  I clobbered him with my briefcase.  “You take your hands off her!”  He wouldn’t.  She said,  “It’s all right.  Leave us alone!”  I wouldn’t.  I hit him again.

A bus stopped not far away.  “Come on!” she yelled, grabbing the guy by the hand and dragging him off to board the bus.  They were getting away.

“Help!  Call the police!  Help!”  No one appeared in windows.  I marched on.  An old Thunderbird pulled up at the curb beside me, driven by a slightly overweight blonde.  I thought she was a “lady of the night,” but she wanted to know what was happening.  I told her briefly and she took off after the bus.  I realized later she was the wife of the chief of police (her photo was in the paper now and then), an officer herself, and patrolling in plainclothes.

I marched on.  Here was a small car with its doors standing open, not so much parked as abandoned.  I just didn’t give a rip.  I went on home.

The next morning I was at my bus stop, slumped on the bench, sullen, still half-asleep.  A young Asian woman sat down beside me but I didn’t recognize her.  She said,  “Thanks for last night, but you didn’t need to protect me.  I sold him a car and he wanted the title, but I didn’t have it.”  She laughed merrily.  I just stared at her, which made her laugh more.

Building inspectors know everything so at the office that day I learned that there was an active Asian chop shop in my neighborhood and the woman probably didn’t have a title to the car because it was stolen.  Oh, well.

Kids told me stuff when I was teaching.  One girl wouldn’t “put out” so her boyfriend told everyone that she was an easy lay and from then on she couldn’t date because they would all demand sex.  Who would I tell?  She’d already told her parents and they advised her not to make trouble.  The administration had the same attitude.  Should I get the boy off to the side and tell him what I thought of him?  Wouldn’t he take his revenge on her?  Wouldn’t it just make the situation hotter?

I turned in a boy I was pretty sure was being molested.  The symptoms were all there, but I had no proof.  There was enough to it after official investigation that he was taken for regular counseling, but the mother brought her brother up to my classroom to threaten me.  He was a big guy, tough.  Simply getting groceries in that place meant driving at least thirty miles at night on rural roads with no traffic.

In Evanston, IL, in 1961 the week before I graduated, on a Sunday, I was grabbed by a drunk in a cobblestoned alley.  It was raining, I was wearing one of those big stiff yellow raincoats and flip-flops.  I couldn’t get my feet under me and he couldn’t grab me anyplace except my neck so he strangled me.  When the police came, they found him in a drugstore buying antiseptic for his bleeding raked face.  I don’t know what excuse he made.  

I was asked to identify him through a small window but I honestly couldn’t -- he’d knocked my glasses off, it was a dark day, and he was black.  The earnest cop was disappointed -- he’d thought he had a case.  But we both knew that if I made a positive ID, it would mean staying to testify in court, not returning to Portland with my parents.  And in the end my attacker was more damaged than I was.  Was I rationalizing?  

The most recent murder in Helena happened across the street from friends.  The newspaper reported some of the neighbors’ testimony, some of which was mutually exclusive or disproven by records.  How reliable are any witnesses when things happen quickly without any expectation?   Suppose one were actually grasping the situation and understood it -- how wise would it be to intervene in such a case?

Take a very small incident.  One day I saw a small boy from down the street come storming along.  He plunked himself down on my parking strip and sat there in a snit.  I wondered whether he needed help, so I went out and plunked down beside him.  “Are you mad about something?”

Scowling.

“Wanna tell me anything about it?’

More glaring.

A pickup pulled up, the door opened, a man yelled,  “Get in,” he did, and they left.  I never found out what was going on.  At least his murdered body never showed up and the man seemed to live at the same house.  When I pass the boy on the street, getting to be a teenager now, he glares at me.  I guess I didn’t do the right thing.

PUBLISHING AS A SHELL GAME

“Publishing” “books” under the guidance of a benign, self-effacing and all-knowing editor and thereby becoming rich and famous -- aside from curing whatever psychosis was imposed on you in childhood -- is a myth that has died. Now what?  Like, what vocabulary can we use?  I’m going to use my own inventions and you can just gather from context what I mean.  But these thoughts are too new to be easy.

The merchandizing of the arts is older than the commodifying of grizzly bears in an effort to “sell” the value of wilderness.   But it follows along in the same pattern:  if you want people to value something, you have to assure them that it’s scarce, that they are privileged because they have been initiated on the subject, and that you can help them continue their nice prosperous life while providing a little more titillating inside info that will impress the neighbors.  Since even your arms and legs, as well as your mind, have been commodified on insurance compensation lists (in case of trauma and mutilation), one can be confident of getting good value in the arts if likewise the price is something definite, not on a sliding scale of some mysterious kind.  We expect sticker prices -- but we expect to dicker.

The merchandizing of narrative is one big segment of the print biz, whether on paper or bytes.  We’ll have to separate poetry off to the side, because poetry has always had a privileged status, sort of like abstract expressionist paintings or ballet or opera.  I mean, no one expects them to make Money.  They are high prestige phenomena that a few people like to explain and that have therefore become markers of sophistication even if you can’t grasp them yourself.  For those who write poetry, the act is the compensation: the true poet needs no other compensation.  Poetry is insuppressible. (Which doesn’t mean poems are not a lot of work.)

Narratives that are “immersive” (to get lost in) have split into two streams, one that purports to be made up and one that represents itself as truth.  Some people stand on a bridge between:  I’m listening to Diana Gabaldon’s novels which involve time travel  (I assume that’s invented.) but also history.  (The Scots Jacobite rebellion, which I’m told really happened.)  Thus some women don’t mind others knowing that these books are packed with sex and violence in graphic detail, because they are “reading for the history part.”  (Since I’m listening to an audible book so I can deny “reading” any part.)

The issue of what REALLY happened to whom is a third-rail issue in today’s world.  Lie, exaggerate, disguise, displace, co-opt and the press will be on you, wielding their branding irons.  (Of course, they do those things all the time themselves, but they are Journalists and therefore entitled.  They are the ones who keep the politicians honest so it’s okay for them to use any means.  But wait, isn’t that what the politicians think?)

See:  http://www.themayborn.com/WriteHardDieFree.html   Here’s a quote from Kevin Fedarko, one of the co-authors of the now notorious Greg Mortenson’s second book:  “Stones for Schools.”  It’s a glimpse of a reality I’ve experienced myself:  editors want sales.  The hell with ethics.  They don’t sign their names anyway.  It’s on the author.  But the editor controls it.

A few years ago, for example, I [Fedarko] got upset when an editor at Outside expressed interest in publishing a particular photograph to accompany a story I had written about the Siachen War in the Himalayas. I feared the photograph might provide the Indian Army with some clues about the exact location of a Pakistani military base I had visited—a concern shared by the art director and the photographer. The editor went ahead and published it anyhow. Several months later when the military base in the picture was hit by an Indian artillery shell that killed three men and a string of high-altitude pack ponies, a number of my friends pointed out–correctly–that there was probably no connection between the photo and the explosion, and they advised me not to say or do anything that might upset the magazine. “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face,” they urged. “You cannot afford to piss off Outside.” 

In short, even if you were actually there and are telling the absolute truth about what you saw, your editor may insist on something else.  And then deny it, hiding behind the fantasy of what an editor is like.

Bob Scriver used to say,  “But wuz you THERE, Chollie?”.  It occurred to me to Google to find out where this phrase came from.  It’s a vaudeville catch-phrase that may have emerged from war stories.  (“What did YOU do in the war, Dad?”)  One uses it as a satirical query to someone who tells wonderfully far-fetched tales of adventure.  The proper ending, modeled on frontier legends of derring-do, is “And then the bear et me.”  Maybe that explains the impulse of GI’s all over Europe who scribbled “Kilroy was here!” to leave a record that some farm boy was in Europe though he could hardly believe it himself.

Really sensational stories with political overtones, a history lesson of sorts, might attract investment capital to get a tale actually on paper, advertised and distributed.  That’s “publishing.”  The author does not control it.  The editor and publishers control it.  Writers just have marching orders.  Is the story a reality if it is controlled by someone in an office who was NOT there?  Someone whose ethics are dominated by profit?

Other undertakings that attract capital might come out of idealism, like the stories of wise men who go to live in some strange place where they produce advice about good living for those who can find them, like -- say -- Carlos Castenada.  Big Bucks.

Or maybe there’s money for the aggrandizing of ancestors, though the past is a lost land.  As Barnaby Conrad III discovered in “Ghost Hunting in Montana,” family history can be a rather checkered undertaking.  Maybe the writer and publisher are creating an archive, some kind of inventory or theory or explanation that they feel should be preserved, however quietly.   Maybe not. 

Maybe composing a catalogue raisonée (using French terms helps) with a list of someone’s work plus a bibliography plus illustrations and analysis is fact-based enough to guide investments in that art.  Maybe not.  One art can help to sell another art media, as the fast food restaurants know when they put miniature figures of the latest movie fantasy heroes in the children’s Happy Meals.  The churches, of course, have always gotten a lot of worldly capital out of hagiographic paintings.  True?

Not everything sells and what sold well yesterday may not sell today.  Things go out of fashion -- then without warning they come back.  Like Westerns.  What does it mean that cowboy movies were passé and now are coming back?  Does it mean there is money in them?  Or is it that very popular male actors who can call their own scripts are remembering the heroes of their youth?  Harrison Ford can’t pay “Spidey,” after all.  But we love him anyway.  Unless “Cowboys and Aliens” doesn’t make money.  Same with Charlie Russell, though the latter hasn’t quite failed us yet.

Commodification destroys possibilities as well as writers and even the subjects of their stories.  This ethical change is disguised by the furor over ebooks.  The accusations of hoax are sniffing something right enough -- but not what they think.

CONSOLING THE WINDIGO

Brace yourself.  This is a Sunday sermon.

When I listen to the email and listserv issues and blogs and e-articles, etc., I hear inconsolability -- the belief that there is no comfort or relief for loss and suffering.  The only palliative seems to be domesticity but it is never enough.  Life is acquisition, remodeling, fortification.  Dominated by prescriptive advertising.  This is pretty understandable when people are raising children, which is much of the point of domesticity. -- making a nest for ducklings.  I remember a hippie friend who wasn’t afraid of anyone until she had a baby and shocked herself with her sudden fear of street people rooting in dumpsters.

But I don’t understand the constant seeking out of trouble to watch, the active compiling of disasters around the world (some human and others geological), the hunger for photos of explosions and dead bodies, the greed for the details of rape and torture -- all of it replicated as realistically as possible in CGI movies about Zombies or CSI shows about murder.  It’s like the old Calvinist fascination with hell, which still continues in some quarters.  I think it comes from a denial of the dark side, an effort to encapsulate it as the Devil or Evil or objects of disgust so as to get it named, confined and excluded -- esp. from inside ourselves.

Timothy Morton’s thoughts about “dark ecology” seems to be partly focused on mystery -- the impossibility of a human mind big enough to encompass the universe, with the markers being black holes and “dark matter” -- and partly on the idea that the muck, infection, slime, excretion, rot and death we so reject and label (in Martha Nussbaum’s word) “disgusting” is the source of raw material and reciprocity.  That is, one bug’s rejected excretion is the next creature’s wine.  So part of the darkness is fearing the unknown and part of it is believing we are shit.

No wonder we’re inconsolable.  No wonder we think someone might try to murder us.  It’s as though we felt existence must be held open around us by our constant effort and achievement or it will close on us as though we were three dimensional figures in a two dimensional world.  Constant vigilance seems necessary but it wears us out, so we invent burglar alarms but they get triggered all the time which defeats the feeling of safety we want.  We feel ourselves in opposition to this world, superstitiously trying to be “good enough” to get to the next world which is imagined as effortless.

I think the remedy for our inconsolability is in participation and acceptance.  Easier said than done, esp. when one’s culture designates one for exclusion and stigma.  Stupid.  Gay.  Old.  Foreign.  Criminal.  Poor.  Sick.  Crippled.  Indigenous.  The trouble with religions based on books (Bible, Torah, Koran) is that there’s too much reading and not enough cultivating the gardens.  (Of course, this is my personal shortcoming so I take it seriously.)  I’m not saying we need the vegetables from the garden.  I’m saying it will do us good to get out there and dig around in the worms and compost,  Darwin’s tangled bank all mucky and weedy.  The word “HUMan” comes from humus, fertile soil.

“Dark ecology” is actually far darker than dirt.  I’ve rejected the common idea of evil for a long time, not because I don’t think there is any but because I think it is a human construct, a concept created by humans that only applies to humans both in terms of motives and in terms of consequent suffering and destruction.  The Japanese earthquake and consequent tsunami were not evil.  The nuclear reactors were the result of human evil -- failure to recognize, over-optimism, denial, false statistics and engineering.  The Japanese as a category are not evil.  The suffering is human.

The real darkness is that every creation is also destruction and it doesn’t care.  Jesus doesn’t love you.  Jesus is imaginary, only a concept.  (A good and useful one, but human-invented.)  The same with God.  We only have each other and sometimes not even that much.   But personal existence, attached to the world and each other as we get, doesn’t matter.  One winks out, another is conceived.

The curse and blessing of being human, the key inconsolability, is that we know this.  When we give up our denial and fear, we know very well that everyone dies.  All living things die.  Animal or vegetable, we go into each other as fuel and emerge as shit.  Once a person accepts that, dealing with the facts and hallucinations of our lives becomes much easier.  We only have to do as well as we can.  It will take some testing to see what that is, so we must tolerate our mistakes or it won't be a real test of boundaries, which are found by exceeding them.

We cannot comprehend the cosmos, but we can try.  We can imagine that there might be a color greener than green, but we can’t SEE it.  We can invent the premises of eternity or infinity, but we cannot perceive them.  So maybe this is the source of our fascination with evil and suffering:  trying to perceive the imperceptible.  What is the tortured person really feeling?  What is the torturer is feeling?  What makes a person able to do such things?  I would say it’s not the evil itself but the denial that such an act is evil and the refusal of the empathy that would force them to share the suffering.  

The same denial and refusal are what prevent consolation.  In our vigilance against what might kill us, we also wall out what might renew us.  This is not a new idea.  It’s in stories over and over and over from every culture.  I’ll tell you one I heard from Joseph Bruchac, a wise and generous Native American writer.  I heard it from him personally when he told it in an assembly in Browning, where most people are Blackfeet.  It was about a horrible Iroquois monster, a windigo which is a starvation cannibal embodying the struggle with winter hunger.  It was wailing and staggering across a frozen lake, looking for people to eat.  A young woman, unafraid, went to him, took his hand, and said, “Come with me, grandfather.”  She took him to her lodge and fed him hot soup.  Shrieking with the pain of it, he shrank down from his monstrous form and did indeed become just an old man again.

She was able to do this because of her confidence in what was right (feed the hungry) and her willingness to die in the effort.  People like her are doing this right now all over the world.  They are living consolation.