SEARCHING THE MAP OF FAMILY

As the amazing study of human mind and inheritance continues and as we apply what we learn to our friends and family, the result is high impact but hard to resolve.  Here’s an example.

https://medium.com/the-break-down-wake-up-journal/i-went-my-entire-life-not-knowing-i-was-autistic-aa869b7b09ab

My mother and my father’s only sister were not much alike and not exactly compatible, though they never let their relationship get out of hand, except for private grumbling.  I always thought of it as a culture difference, my aunt growing up cherished with three brothers on a northern prairie homestead and my mother growing up the oldest of four girls in the Willamette Valley in a conventionally religious family.  The paternal aunt’s family, when I raised the subject in recent years, thought I was implying something indecent, almost a sexual competition, because it was partly based on my father and his aunt having a kind of child romance — that he was her hero and protector.  He missed that admiration.  

When my mother died, I became the keeper of the family photograph archive, created by my father.  He also enjoyed the family’s opinion that he was a brilliant college man who knew classical music, played chess, and took photos. As I sorted and shifted them to digital images, I saw that his mother, my grandmother, had a major goiter on her neck, the most obvious sign of iodine deficiency.  The thyroid is a subtle but crucial organ in body regulation.  A bit of research and deduction, and I realized that this was the reason the family moved to Portland where the ocean provides lots of iodine in the food.  It worked and her goiter diminished.

Research on the effect of near-starvation in Holland during WWII has shown that the change in body chemistry that is triggered can be traced down the generations from grandparents to grandchildren, recorded in the epigenome.  The tendencies probably amount to a novel-worthy unrolling of what seemed to be personality traits coming down through the years.  

I suspect that because the effect began with my grandmother and had later possible impact on her daughter, her granddaughter, and possibly her great-granddaughter, means that it’s on the X chromosome, which they have as XX.  But even my father, XY, seems to be slightly influenced.  It’s hard to tell with him because of the impact (literally) of a concussion in a car accident that caused a personality change.  But his heredity must have some effect on me because he and I are the only fat people.

My mother’s XX seems to have been unaffected by anything I can detect, but both my brothers were slightly atypical, and one also had a concussion that crippled his brain.  Both were Marines,  both earned college degrees, and only one married.  The other one had a daughter outside marriage, though he was devoted to the child as long as he was allowed access and we've found each other now.  My mother said she married our father for his good teeth and eyes, but none of us inherited them.  We're about the same smart but with different results, maybe traceable to their choice of Benson Polytechnic High School for boys.

My marriage was only an interval inside a long relationship and I actively resisted pregnancy.  I am solitary.  I have three degrees: BS, MA, and MDiv.  As Hanna Gray put it when she handed me my MA diploma, they were “hunting licenses” — often hunting myself.  Both boys sort of fizzled out. I've been baffled about why. Why did our family of cousins disperse?

The family on my father’s Scots/Canadian/Dakota side, were masters of presenting themselves.  They were not church-goers, but idealistic about national identity and governmental support and protection.  Rural granges were their churches. My paternal grandfather was well-educated in Scotland and was superintendent of schools in South Dakota.  

On the cusp of the industrial revolution that changed from horse-based energy to machines, they were doing well raising potatoes and selling farm machinery, but then were undercut by WWII which nevertheless improved some fortunes, like the ship-builder uncle and bomber/transport pilot uncle.  Anyone meeting them casually would consider them typical achieving and honorable Americans.  Certainly my mother was.

Both her sisters married brothers, prosperous ranchers respected in their communities for generations.  They did not go to church but they did not drink, smoke, or gamble.  One taught her three daughters to marry well, but unfortunately one lawyer husband died young.  The other thrived and was a community asset.

The other aunt had served in WWII as an army nurse in London and Rheims, sustaining damage from intense smog and other possible second-hand effects.  Her four children have had varied stories.  The daughter had an extra toe and the daughter's son had a “club foot” but became a brilliant scientist.  Other close family in that line but with no war history have had missing thumbs and so on.  The name “Hatfield” seems to be confused with Hartsfield which is an inherited mutation of extremities, but it does seem to travel with the Hatfield name as well.

A Hatfield cousin not related to me had no thumb, but the surgeons transplanted her toe to her hand and it works well.  Though surgery made things “normal”, my cousins seem to have a sense of being secretly different and a special concern about how they seem to society, a willingness to accept the slightly shady in order to be prosperous.  Still, none is a church-goer, the girls have graduated from college, and all are hard-working.  They have blocked me out of their lives.  I do not seem prosperous to them.  Maybe irresponsible.

The questions that are raised by all this are things like what to do about the high social value of family solidarity that was American before the immigrants made it even more intense.  What are the obligations of a writer to originating family?  How much secrecy and disguise is actually moral and protective?  What about the children and grandchildren of the cousins I grew up close to?  I can’t even name them.

I disclosed the main patterns of my Sixties marriage and the genealogy of my husband, with some hints of more than what appeared on the surface, but he was an “artist” and considered a public figure already.  In fact, as it turned out, the community knew secrets about him that I had no idea about.  On a rez everyone knows everything.  Some didn't tell me until after they read "Bronze Inside and Out" to see whether I already knew.  Some things I probably never will know.  Except no one had much interest in me and most of what they knew about me has been outdated.  Many crucial things happened to me since my years in Browning.  People here don't read.  "Divinity School" means nothing.  They know bible college.

My family on both sides buys into “capitalism” as the moral center of life.  Only female cousins on my Scots paternal side pay any attention to my writing or understand my interest in “religion.”  Yet one paternal aunt by marriage was a published poet, popular among magazine readers.  A great-aunt on my mother’s side is a fine painter of still-lifes.  Within their media they were both far more conventional and sentimental than me, but charming and skillful. 

The most careful conformity can be disrupted.  I’ve felt protected by education from any prohibition or danger resulting from wandering wild fields.  But feeling alone is not enough.  Examination and reflection are demanded.  In times like our present multiple crises it's all more intense.

LIFE BITES (fiction)

When the weather was good, she liked to work with the big double garage doors standing open.  The old garage was a good place for a ceramics studio, just off the main street of the little town.  People liked to visit her while she worked and then later buy something.  She didn't mind company when she was at the kick wheel of the turntable.  Greenware cured on the shelves by the walls. The kiln, a little dangerous, was in its own little shack out in the backyard. Outside over the big double doors was a board with the name of the studio:  "Mud Shark."

"Don't you know that's a bad thing to say?"  A boy, maybe nine years old, was standing in the doorway.

"Oh, yeah?  Who says?  Why?"

"I guess no one ever told you it means a white woman who likes to fuck black men."

"For heaven's sake!  What a shock!"  She laughed, ignoring his language, and threw a double handful of wet clay on the wheel.  Whap.  Double-handed she held the slippery mass down and started to pump the wheel to shape it under her palms.  In truth, now that she was late in life she could admit that most of her lovers had been dark.  She judged this boy was trying to be a man.  Or maybe a man trapped in a boy. 

"You're white, right?" asked the boy.  He was definitely dark, straight black hair, dark eyes.  But Asian?  Mediterranean? Native American?  Mixed?  She herself had picked up a good tan this summer and her hair was dark, but curly.

"Well, I guess so."  The clay was round now and she dug her thumbs into the middle to open it into a bowl.  "What's your name?" she asked the kid. Maybe it would explain his patrimony.

"Gillette.  "Cuz I'm so sharp."  He laughed as though this were really funny, though she could tell it must be an old joke.

"What do they really call you?"

He scuffed his feet and looked around.  "Joey."  To change the subject, he asked, "What are you making?"

"A bowl."

He looked around at the shelves.  There were bowls everywhere, all pretty much the same size, all still greenware waiting for glazing.  "Is bowls all you make?"

"Sometimes.  I've just felt like bowls for a while."

"How do you feel when you feel like a bowl?  Hollow?"  He laughed uproariously.  She took a sharp look at him.  Something was bothering this kid.  He was a little off somehow, unhappy, upset, and disguising it.

"I dunno.  I just take a look at my insides and I see that I feel like a bowl."  The sides were thinning and she had to think about curving the lip.  She loved the feel under her hands, her knowing just how much pressure and where to put it.  She'd always been a receptive type, a holder, a keeper.

From the open doors a big shadow loomed over the boy and a deep voice spoke.  "Joey, you gotta come home and clean up now.  We're goin' out for dinner."  A massive very black man in an army uniform, crisp and immaculate, stood there, relaxed against the doorframe.  He hadn't made noise until he spoke.  He was very handsome, with a small diamond stud in each earlobe.  "Gay," she thought but didn't say it.  She stopped spinning the bowl and dunked her hands in the bucket of water she kept alongside, used an old towel and held out her hand.  

The beautiful soldier came close enough that neither had to stretch.  "Glad to meet you, Ma'am." His hand was firm and hard. Hers was a little damp.

"Is this your dad, Joey?"

The boy was sliding along the back of the shop among the shelves, hiding.  "One of them."  Reluctantly, he came forward and the two left together.  It was a little awkward and mysterious.  

"Thanks for talking to our boy."

The next morning another man showed up.  This one wore a fatigue shirt with the tail out and khaki shorts.  He was missing one leg but had a prosthesis, the kind that is not like a human foot, but rather a kind of curved spring, like a disabled runner.  "Joey here?" he asked.  He had one of those military mustaches that sometimes tip off being gay.  He was ruddy sort of brown.

"Haven't seen him.  I hope everything is all right."  

This man smiled.  "We're an army outfit so we move a lot," he explained.  "Joey always hates moving so he hides." 

"What does his mother say about it?" she asked, being strategic with false innocence.

The man looked into the distance.  "There is no mother, just us dads.  Three of us.  We adopted him in Afghanistan."  He grinned and held up his metal "Cheetah" foot.  "I don't get sent into action anymore, so I'm the stable constant and the one it's safe to get mad at."

She understood.  "Not very pleasant, but crucial!" she exclaimed.

"Let him know I'm looking for him?"

"Sure."

The third dad came the third day.  He was not so dark, smallish, wore round glasses, and had a bald spot where a yarmulka would go.  By now he knew she had been clued in, but there were still loose ends.  "I don't go into combat," he explained.  "I do the cyber stuff."

He turned over a sturdy bucket and sat down, interweaving his fingers and bracing his forearms on his thighs.  She didn't stop her wheel; it seemed to help stabilize what could have been emotional.  Today she had moved to porcelain, which is a white mud -- clay. 

"When King -- the biggest and highest-ranking of us -- was our leader, we went into a town that had been bombed.  King heard Joey, just a tiny whimper from the jumble.  We had come in to scout, not rescue.  The baby was deep in the rubble and nearly dead but we helped King dig him out.  No local people or support services were around so King just put him in the front of his shirt and we took the baby with us.  We kept him."

"How could you manage such a thing?"

"Complicated to get him out of country and back to the US, but we did it -- barely.  By that time he was really ours.  Some people brought back guns, some brought a puppy, and we brought our son.  Since there are three of us, we can compensate for each other so there's always someone there for him  We need to be a little careful and every time we move there's a danger someone will take him away.  We don't want trouble."  Families are of all kinds. Not everyone recognizes all of them.

"We're about packed.  Go tomorrow. Just wanted to say goodbye."

Then Joey showed up, running, crazed with emotion.  "I'm a baby shark!" he yelled and careened into the workshop and around, knocking over shelves, greenware dishes crashing everywhere.  Both adults jumped to their feet but there was little they could do -- he was small and fast.  "Baby shark," he screamed.

Finally the third dad caught him and held him tightly.  Joey, nearly incoherent with crying, said, "Sharks gotta keep moving.  Otherwise they're gonna die."  This was true.  The third dad carried his baby shark away.  

"We'll pay," he shouted over his shoulder.

She called back, "No need.  It was all potential.  No cost yet."

The potter started a new bowl and when the shape was ready, she embossed it with small sharks.  It would not be for sale. She would keep it in case this kid came back, so she could give it to him.

_______________________________

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN-c-q2W3nY

RELATIONSHIPS OF FUSION WITH ANOTHER

Beyond “bonding” or “attachment” is the emotional relationship we might call “fusion,” when the boundaries between two people are entirely erased.  Or at least that’s the goal.  When one googles for information, most of the writing is about romantic couples and describes men trying to make women an extension of themselves, almost trying to be pregnant with their wives (wife as fetus) so as to own their energy, intelligence and emotion.  But it can also be a phenomenon in parent/child relationships, esp. if the husband/wife dimension doesn’t really work.  Women might dominate sons or daughters, refusing to let them leave infancy, and men, less often, might do the same.  

The result is that the adult, esp. if it’s the father, can go so far in trying to control his son that he resorts to force and even kills the child.  Or makes him a sex object, esp. if the understanding of sex is based on penetrating oneness with the partner.  What can evolve is the merging of opposition with intimacy, so that after that nothing less than a battle feels like real contact.  It becomes impossible to break off after fusion is complete, so the person often learns to break off all intimacy that begins to approach fusion.

All this is rich novel material, esp in sci-fi stories where simple empathy (feeling what others feel) becomes true mind-melding which no human can achieve so far.

Human identity is a dynamic process rather than a box or object.  Much of the dynamic is simply repetition of what has happened before, which might not be psychotic but maybe a strategy of foreplay, flirting with the idea of perfection — which is an end like death, frozen — an intimacy with the near-intensity of approaching the end without completion.

The trouble with intimacy that ends in fusion is that of the two people involved, one is erased.  In terms of parenting, which  in nature requires that the child break free and become separate, fusion perverts the whole idea of creating a new generation.  It is a refusal to give birth, to break the umbilical cord.  But a healthy child will fight to be free, maybe with rage or maybe by looking for another dominator who is more powerful and can fight to detach the child.

A child who has been completely or partially successful at separating from an overwhelming parent will be torn between their own drive to be free and an intolerable anxiety about being free.  Sometimes they will cope by finding another smaller and weaker child than themselves and in turn forcing fusion on them.  Or maybe this fragile child WANTS domination to relieve their own anxiety, which might be related to raw and justified fear in a world full of treachery and violence.

https://www.sowhatireallymeant.com/articles/intimacy/passion-vs-predictability/

This abstract pattern of craved but terrifying fusion overlaps quite a bit with narcissism theory.  The idea of narcissism is that the individual pays no attention to anything but his or her self, pulling others into his or her orbit only to exploit them and demand surrender of their independent identity.  “Narcissistic supply” is the constant need for praise and reassurance.  Narcissists are considered villains, people-eaters.  

But this ignores the narcissist who is only trying to save himself or herself from destruction by others.  Their boundary, meant to be protective, has become an inpenetrable castle wall and without that narcissistic supply, they will die of starvation.  They might test it both by attacking and by departing, only to return.  Police and social workers see this all the time.  

Fusion “defines a relationship of distrust between two individuals where at least one of the individuals lacks confidence in the other's intentions. Defines a fused relationship between two individuals. Individuals become dependent on one another, and also become inseparable, with little room for their own identities.”  [This was on Google but I couldn’t figure out the attribution.]

My grandfather Pinkerton was of a generation and from a family that demanded that there be a primary son who would carry on the intentions of the father, a feudal idea in this case brought from Ireland through the American South (Virginia).  He had no sons so he made his oldest daughter into his proxy, but he was an intermittent father because he was a building contractor and had to go to the location of the project.  

This weakened his bond with my mother and on some level made her very angry about the sequence of abandonments.  She tried to bridge them by doing what her father ought to have done, acting towards her mother and sibs as a protective son might.  And she married a man sure to offend and resist her father — not fight him, just offer escape.  But he, too, was an intermittent husband because of his work and again she had to bridge the gap.  She was an angry, secretive woman who did what she had to but never really felt safe and loved.  She tried to make me into what she felt she had not been: admired, attractive, socially upscale.  Instead I became what she was: angry and secretive with very strong boundaries.  (Of course, you might not see that right away.)

A perfect prescription for a writer.  But that was only the beginning.  My early attempt at a fused relationship with a man twice my age meant that my “gestation” was completed only with some pain and violence, because an aging but successful narcissist with a narcissistic mother of his own can’t be expected to extend much understanding.  

What about a fused relationship with another writer, completely non-physical?  What about a fused relationship with a therapist?  Is that the source of therapies that never end?  Can fusing with someone be a professional relationship based on money?  How much intimacy must be accompanied by secrecy?  The idea of the writer as one who is intimate but revealing, leading to money, is strong in our culture.  To deny it is to prevent publication, even when that was a viable business model.

Is interpretation, as in biography or therapy, an assault on identity?  Often society at large develops its own “identity” role for a public individual and will fight any departure from their own version.  So much of this is illustrated over the years in the relationships of the royal family of England where genetics don’t always mesh with obligations.  At least Charles finally found a fused relationship, as did his great-uncle.  Diana’s relationship with her sons was ended by fate.  And Elizabeth II's strong boundaries are enforced by a nation.  William seems to have found his proper identity.  So far it appears Harry is the free spirit, not without the help of therapy.

MONKEY BRAIN

One of my more interesting feeds is from the National Institute of Mental Health, though they often seem sort of overwhelmed, esp. in the midst of this giant revolution in how to think about human beings and their mental health.  I mean, we are shifting from brilliant schemes invented by thoughtful people who were only partly right, to evidence-based electro-chemical reactions in the brain, observable in screen data.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2016/schizophrenia-autism-risk-gene-trajectories-point-to-shared-causes.shtml

Today’s post was about monkey brain, not the metaphor of a jabbering pack of primates babbling in one’s head — which can either be healthy ideas competing with each other or just a lot of trash fermenting.  This research was about the risk genes for schizophrenia and autism, which are located close to each other in the brain’s cortex.  A hundred scientists collaborated on the project.

“Their study, which pinpointed the developmental trajectories of the suspect genes in the monkey brain, also identified divergent timing of risk gene activation that might help to explain the differing courses of the illnesses. Autism-related genes first switched on in newborn neurons during prenatal development, while schizophrenia risk genes didn’t activate until infancy.  

“This suggests that genetic risk for autism may have more to do with prenatal processes, such as the birth of new neurons, while schizophrenia risk genes may impact processes underway during infancy, such as refinement of neuronal circuitry. The delay is consistent with schizophrenia’s much later onset of symptoms in late adolescence/early adulthood, the researchers note.”

I don’t know how much of a problem is presented to monkeys by schizophrenia and autism unless it makes them fall out of trees.  Both are devastating for human beings and demand major effort to compensate for the malfunctions.  Among the many things that people don’t know they don’t know — and therefore never try to find out about — are the complexities of brain function and the huge importance of gestation and earliest childhood.  If high schools taught these crucial things to know, it would help a lot of adolescents think more clearly about their sex lives.  Sex not as falling in love but sex as creation of new life.

For a while there I was buying a lot of books about troubled children and technical things like dissociation.  I’d read them, try to think about how they would help with kids I’ve known, explain what I thought to Tim, and discover what the books were saying didn’t really fit.  Now I’m glancing back through them and seeing that politics and Dunning-Kruger (not seeing what you don’t know exists) were distorting conclusions, but — more importantly — just leaving a lot of kids out without realizing that they were doing it.  

The mayor’s wife said indignantly that her neighbor was feeding feral cats, but that if “feral” means wild, that’s not what they were.  I suggested the category of “satellite” cats which are like barn cats, not cuddly but fed regularly while still hunting rodents.  She works with rez kids; I wonder whether she has a category for “satellite children.”  I do.

When I was doing animal control education, I saw that people had only two categories for dogs:  owned pets and unowned pets, strays.  In fact, research suggested at least five categories: feral dogs (totally wild), pye or pariah dogs (living off human garbage, feces, and corpses), child surrogate pets, working dogs, dogs “owned” by other dogs.  Pye dogs, which are mostly a Third World category, are the ones that are dangerous enough to require taboos.  For one thing, they carry rabies.  Dogs “owned” by other dogs will never quite understand humans.  There are probably other categories that need to be invented in order to have “handles” for recognizing and dealing with dogs. 

The same for human children, who are shaped by genetics, gestation, earliest care, trauma, education and experience.  My first superintendent, Phil Ward, used to say that HIS father (also an educator), would say that the best teachers were the ones with as many strategies for teaching as there were kids in the classroom, plus a couple of extras just in case.  This is pretty idealistic, but at least it acknowledges that humans are different at every stage and in every life path.  He would have made a good teacher of me if I hadn’t gotten involved with Bob Scriver.

So now I’ll get personal.  I hardly relate to my family in the “now.”  I’m so politically and sociologically different that we have trouble communicating. The parent generation is all dead.  Three aunts, two maternal and one paternal, died after years of dementia.  The two paternal uncles died of strokes, like my father, and showed vascular impaired personalities before death.  (I agree with Michael Moore that Trump should be medically screened for these things.)  

My father and brother both had personality changing head trauma to the pre-frontal cortex.  Of my maternal cousins, several have mal-developed digits (too many or missing fingers or toes) corrected by surgery.  This is a well-known English gene that runs in families: Anne Boleyn had an extra finger.  One cousin, whose mother was an army nurse in WWII, was constantly suspected of some kind of brain malfunction, seizure sorts of things.  Her son is probably the most brilliant among that generation.  He had a strong stable father, but the marriage ended in divorce.  And so on.

The next generation, which now has school-aged children themselves, are a mystery.  I don’t know their names, have never met them.  Two are adopted Chinese girls.  Even my mother, who monitored family, never knew these descendants.  She died in 1999, so anyone born after that went unrecorded in her book.  No one sends birth announcements anymore.

I’m not very tempted to see what my genome shows.  Mostly Scots immigrants with a dose of Irish.  I used to beg for a Native American in the family tree, but we never found any.  By accident I discovered that Tim has one, an early and honorable person on the East Coast. 

I’m slightly more interested in what my epigenome might show.  And the actions of what I suppose is called the “microgenome.”  I’ve read that lovers and intimate pairs like nurses/patients or mothering/infants soon share tiny migrating life-forms almost entirely.  So what does it mean that — unlike today’s youngsters — I was first intimate with an older man who had had many partners, living on a reservation and more briefly in Edmonton and Chicago.  I know he had herpes because it nearly took his eyesight, but I was vaccinated.  Now they speak of one’s “mineralome” or “metalome,” which would have been much affected by our development of the bronze foundry.  Since I did the patinas for years, I breathed in many compounds, mostly iron, sulphur, and copper.  

Frankly, I think I either inherited or developed schizo and autistic glitches and channeled them through Victorian/Edwardian reading of novels, which made me think of teaching and, more grandiosely, ministry.  I wasn’t good at either; they weren’t what I thought they would be.  Worse, one of my character flaws is a reluctance to compromise.  I see that people are back to reading my posts on Oppositional Defiance Disorder.  I better check out the recent research.

I’ve sometimes been perilously close to living on the street.  My youngest brother did, the one with brain trauma that made him oppositional and defiant.  Education has at least taught me how to present myself in a good light, but “retirement” frees me to be myself, at least in writing.  I’m grateful.  But sometimes it gives me monkey brain.

THE SONG OF BOOKS

The Strachans: Bruce, Lucy, Mary, Mark, Paul

My father (1903 - 1969) was a problem.  He also evidently had a problem he couldn’t resolve and his search for answers packed our house with books.  He was the oldest surviving child lived 17 days because he was premature.   (The first conception — and I’m aware that probably women lose several conceptions without knowing.) I’m the oldest surviving child of my father’s, assuming all his children were inside the marriage to my mother, which was certainly faithful on her side.  She always thought my father might have a second family somewhere, so to her mind if he were unfaithful, it would be in conventional terms.

I inherited his search for an indefinable solution and acquired as many books, but the difference is that I read mine.  Not just read, but try to tear apart in the interest of understanding.  I couldn’t do this until my books were purchased — one doesn’t harm library books which are community property.  I have always been highly “moral” in the interest of avoiding danger.  But at some point, maybe late high school, I decided that I would follow good evidence wherever it went, though it made my ears sing with adrenaline.

My father traveled with cameras for his job (PR) and took this photo himself.

He had a concussion.

It’s not as though my father would turn out to be a bank robber or a murderer.  He was a “spanker” and a lousy provider.  I decided this was due to head trauma from an accident driving at night in the Oregon Coast Range when a drunk driver hit his car head on.  But maybe there’s more.  His job — except during WWII — was as a traveling man, a “drummer” not to sell things but as a field man for Pacific Supply Cooperative, which supplied things (mostly petro-derived) to farmer co-ops.  Since he grew up on the prairie, partly in Canada, he was highly aware of the power of co-ops, as though they were his church.  Otherwise, he claimed to be an atheist.  But he was certainly a progressive, esp. when it came to things like nudism or birth control — that is, the taboo parts of life.  

My father tried to make taboos pretty and harmless.

I inherited that.

I inherited that, too, though I never really acted on any of it.  Like him, I mostly read books, but the Seventies revealed that a lot of people shared his ideas.  I know some of them now, still, though they’re older.  Rainbow Family, hippies, off the grid.  I’d sort of timidly approach them, but get rocked back on my heels.

My father traveled during the week, came home exhausted but also wanting a little RandR, like movies; wanting to involve his family in hiking.  Consciously or unconsciously, he chose my mother as someone competent who would manage while he was gone.  This worked until my mother, realizing there was never going to be enough money, went back to college to get her teaching degree.  Adding this meant her weekends were jammed and she became less willing.  Also, what she learned changed her.

When my father died, we discovered that hidden behind his conventional books, some of them popular writing (novels, self-improvement, and culturally admired books like Shakespeare), was a lot of porn.  Not sophisticated erotica (he kept his medical sexology books in his sock drawer — Masters and Johnson, Freud, Kinsey) but lurid truck stop paperback porn.  This was female-overpowering, vulgar, violent stuff.  I only read a few before my brother threw them in his pickup and took them directly to the dump so no garbage man could say where they came from.

With all this information at hand, why was my father reading porn in cheap motels instead of continuing his education? (There was no TV.)  He had a BS from Manitoba and an MS from OSU (then a college) — was it their fault that he never progressed to the level of the Saturday Book Review?  He was a magazine addict, very conventional:  Newsweek, Time, Post, Look, Life.  (I read all of them, too.)  My mother had no time to read until she was retired.  Then she read “Book of the Month” sorts of things.   She liked to do what was popular. 

When I was serving the Kirkland Northshore Unitarian Universalist Church (across the lake from Seattle), as an interim minister, the book causing a sensation was Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child.”  This congregation was a cheerful, lively bunch of artists, teachers, counselors and journalists and many of them loved that book.  

They had been raised humanely and loved their parents (mostly) though they tried to live even more ideal lives.  Miller’s premise was that above-average kids tended to break the taboo on criticizing their parents and critiquing their childhood.  They wanted to be original, not owned by family.  Pretty safe with this group — I don’t even remember any alcoholics.  Drugs weren’t in play. 

In those days I knew nothing about incest based on idealism, and little about male gays.  Neither did most other people.  That may have been a quiet pull beneath our lives.  Would it have explained my father?  Was he abused?  Did he abuse my brothers? (I asked the surviving bro, who said, “Certainly NOT!”)  Then what was the fixation on sex about?  Was he aware of some shortfall in his own dynamics, maybe connected to his failure to be aggressive at work?  He was quite fat and about as sexy as Santa Claus, except no beard.  (I find beards sexy.)  His mother developed a goiter later in life, so I wonder whether the iodine deficiency of the prairies affected her pregnancies.

There’s a body of literature about parents who believe that their children should be gently and lovingly initiated into sexual activity by their own parents (same or other) or by a sex worker surrogate while they wait in the next room.  This is a violation of the conventional (Victorian) boundary between the generations and very confusing.  Esp. if the natural desire of the still-child is same sex or just null.  For some people sex arrives as an overwhelming thunderbolt and then the problem is quite different.  It’s also different in a rural setting than in an urban one with many layers and categories of private culture.  And different between English and French.

My mother (1909 - 1998) had three sisters and an intense Irish-descent father who never really succeeded, but kept everything going by taking construction projects which meant traveling.  The family construct was that the three girls were as good as any boys.  One summer my mother used a borrowed mule to raise a cash crop of corn.  The two oldest girls in particular were strong and competent, very attached to their father, comfortable working alongside men.

My father’s sibs were two male and one girl, very pretty and refined.  In fact, that family’s formal position was that women are princesses, gracile, to be cherished, beautifully dressed, and taught to play the piano and paint charming but tiny watercolors.  My father then played the gallant guardian, romantic and faithful, but never sexual.  He tried to pull me into that story (though I found it confusing for him to offer to take me to a burlesque show) but in that aspect I remained with my mother’s take on the subject, which included jealousy of all precious princesses.  As soon as she had an actual son, I was demoted to being her assistant.

Luckily, I had excellent teachers.  It was the Fifties and they were nearing retirement, essentially Edwardian, often single, and unconflicted. Education (liberal arts) was their answer to everything.  It worked and still works.  Of course, I read all those books, but never discussed them until I got to college where the doors flew open.  They were stage doors and from then on life was dramatic, multiple, and incredible.  I like it when my ears sing.

FALLING THROUGH TIME

Diorama by Bob Scriver. Not quite hunting season yet.

A couple of weeks ago I cancelled my subscription to the GF Tribune on grounds that I couldn’t justify the cost when the content was so trivial, largely focused on high schools. The “big” international stories were two paragraphs long. I don’t think that anyone at the newspaper was very upset by my defection. It’s been common knowledge that they’ve wanted to get rid of paper for more than a decade. They don’t like the work of delivering it over so much area. There go more jobs.

But paper was the main connection I had to them. My brother was a “paper boy” in Portland, OR, where our family copy of the Oregonian was usually wet. The chair I now sit in to read stood in front of a hot air register that led directly from our big coal and wood furnace, so that early in the morning the wet limp paper was often draped over the back of the chair to dry. If it was already dry, one of the earliest sounds of the morning was the rattling of the pages as one parent or the other read it, thoroughly. Except the sports pages. No one in my family read the sports section.

Now I get up and have a vague remaining impulse to reach out the front door for the roll of newsprint and settle in that same old chair to understand what is happening in the world. My fingers think they should have paper. But my brain looks forward to the catchment of print on the computer. I subscribe to widely contrasting sources, so to give you an idea of the range this morning I read these following stories. (Forgive me for not learning how to make tiny url’s out of these links. I don’t want to take the time.)

Kalief Browder

I. This story from VICE about a youngster in New York who was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack and got sucked into the criminalization frenzy of America, which destroyed him. He was in solitary confinement for years until his whole integration as a human being was destroyed and he killed himself.

http://www.vice.com/read/what-kalief-browder-taught-america-about-criminal-justice-922 by John Surico

Derrida

II. This story from Aeron, an online mag run by Australians in England who are intent on being high class intellectuals, about whether the French are losing their grip on thought. Curiously written by a man who has an un-English name.

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-did-french-thought-end-up-in-crisis/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=e023706f36-Daily_Tuesday_September_22_20159_22_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-e023706f36-68600437 by Sudhir Hazareesingh

Italy in 1850

III. This one is a mailing list of excerpts that focuses on history and nationality. It’s quoting from “The Pursuit of Italy: a History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples.” This report really surprised me: in the 1850’s in Italy the country was just unifying and only a small percentage of the people (2 or 3%) actually spoke Italian. At this same time the native tribes of prairie America were just beginning to sign treaties and few of them spoke English. We think of Europe as a source of civilization that had been in place for centuries, not as competing tribes.

http://www.delanceyplace.com/index.php

My problem is not being uninformed, but that even though I’m retired and (like Annie Dillard) do not do housework, there is never enough time to think things through. I suppose many people do this in conversation with others, but there are few if any people around here who read widely or think hard. Most of them — as many remark in many other contexts — are zombies, stumbling along in habit patterns they developed long ago like everyone else.

The media, desperate for attention that will result in money, pounds on our consciousness the way people who visit zoos and aquariums rap on the glass to make the occupants react. How hard can they strike the glass before it breaks and they are deluged with dying fish? Maybe we’ve already reached that point.

If the Pope thinks, as the radio just said, that “the family is the true location for freedom,” then he hasn’t realized how much families have changed, at least in America. More like the locus for neglect vs. shared conspiracy. They are the pattern and trigger for our criminalization and incarceration obsessions. So many of our insurance and medical systems are simply diluted incarceration; our economic systems verge on criminalization of simple existence. Late fees and fines for trivial matters. The verge of debtors’ prisons.

What are we to do? I just don’t know.

I do know it is the autumnal equinox and the leaves are turning yellow. Workers are putting a porch on the Baptist Church next door, their hammers pounding away. The light is relatively clear after a smoke-reddened summer, coming in level through my house, shooting from south to north, but in afternoon from behind the spruce in the front yard so that it doesn’t get in my eyes when I read close to suppertime. My rule has been to walk to the post office no matter what the weather, for the sake of the exercise, but now I take the pickiup because I want to drive out of town a bit, check the landscape esp toward the mountains. Usually there is a storm shelf of clouds standing behind the Rockies. I make lists of what needs to be done RIGHT NOW in preparation for winter. Like order a tarp for the garage roof.

The media, typically, is obsessing hysterically about El Nino, but their examples of disastrous years were only a few decades ago, well within my memory, and they weren’t that different. Those determined to commodify the seasons are turning to Mabon, which is supposedly the Wicca/Pagan harvest festival. Well, what else can you do when Thanksgiving has been debunked out of the Puritan/Squanto stereotypes, turkeys are caged torture victims to be deep-fat fried in the yard, and no one’s very thankful anyway. Around here harvest was interrupted by fire and rain until it began to seem interminable and some smaller fields might just be abandoned uncut.  I do believe in global warming, or rather weather tumbling.

Some are grieving over the town dying and others are denying vehemently that any such thing is happening. Or wouldn’t if we’d just take care of our yards. They are still not reconciled to the idea that life is a process. In Christian terms the Creation is continuous — each day a new version of the world — and so is the End Time in small omissions. Tiny spaces and overlaps are everywhere, coming and going, like the migrating birds that travel through my big cottonwood where at night the moon perches. The trick is not stopping. The Pope will say so, I’m sure.