TRUTH IN AN UNREAL WORLD

The poorly educated are still obsessing over the diff between fiction and nonfiction.  They are waaaay behind.  Now the question is whether there is any reality outside of what we assemble in our heads.  The evidence is on the side of NOT.  

And in fact, since one cannot step into the same river twice, and memory is a time-river, one cannot access the same memory twice.  Something will drop out, something will be added.  Experiments show how easy it is to plant ideas.  DNA shows how easy it is to send people to terrible fates because they were stigmatized enough that a jury wouldn’t believe them.  The fMRI machines supply evidence that a memory is not a self-contained function of the brain -- one separate memory at a time the way we think of them.  Instead, the sounds are in one part of the brain, the sights are in another, the emotional state of the person at the time emerging from the accumulation of summoned senses.

The unreliability of witnesses is not a question of literary categories, which have just been invented in the recent centuries and become customary over the years, handy references for teachers who are trying to explain how a story works.  “Creative nonfiction” is a recently invented category to explain the journalist who, like Norman Mailer, puts himself in the story or imagines what might have happened by dramatizing it. 

False memories are provable scientific principles based on factual evidence.  People who write memoirs or work with psychoanalysts will report vivid events that could not have happened.  They’re called “screen memories,” the brain’s way of summing up and justifying an attitude.  Sometimes an impressive movie will get woven into one’s own life.

In the early world of the novel, the “roman,” which was an adventure in other places or in a mysterious part of society, the tales were often bolstered by pretending they were accounts “found” in letters or an old journal.  At the time people who did not travel were just beginning to realize how exotic other places could be.  There were two reactions, one denying in order to feel secure, and the other intrigued to find out more.  A publisher benefitted from both.

This is not a question of religious metaphors -- not the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus.  It means that the whole world shifts on its axis all the time and some people are not keeping up.  Religion in particular can become unbelievable and irrelevant if it is based on superstitious claims, if life changes enough that the advice is no longer effective.

Literary categories must be in the hundreds, each with its degrees of fact.  Different cultures, different languages, each have their own customs and indicators.  To insist on fiction v. fact is to show how provincial and narrowly bound to one male-lawyer- dominated context the concept is.  Usually the point of this sort of argument is either political or has some monetary gain at stake, which is why it becomes so vehement, so tied to emotion.  My mother-in-law used to accuse me of reading lies (novels) while she herself read about real things (movie stars).

Another factor is a kind of xenophobia tied to the original organization of the tribal nomad mind to recognize only one’s own band, usually about a hundred people.  People who have never been out into the larger world enough to know that there are different ways of being and thinking become barricaded in their own minds.  Anything that’s not part of THEIR experience has got to be made up.

I call it “high school rules” but in a church it’s called “the one-celled congregation.”  Everyone does the same thing the same way and the same people stay in their roles: queen of the prom, nerd, football hero, the guy who always makes coffee.  If circumstances require broader minds, they fall short and get upset.  When they travel they eat at American food chains.  One of my friends taught a philosophy of religion class in a state university and said he could just about predict how long it would take for the naive small town kids to realize that they were a minority even in their own tradition as the world expanded around them to include Buddhists and Hindus.  For most, it was somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Thinking about the “meta” level of anything is not really possible until the brain has developed the structure and neurons to do it, which is usually in a person’s twenties.  Not everyone can think at the meta level, the abstractions that yield insight.  The capacity may be dependent on a evolved kind of cell that not everyone has, like mirror cells that reinforce empathy so that one person can participate in another person’s feelings.  Indeed, some people seem flat or hard, even at the level of a sociopath who cannot grasp that others besides him or her self is a living being.

Some seem to have had that ability destroyed by trauma, maybe physical excision of brain matter rather than some psych block.

“Theory of mind” is not quite the same as empathy.  The term was invented to describe the ability to predict what other beings will do, which was clearly evolved by hunting.  Those who could see what either prey or a predator was likely to do next would come home with supper instead of becoming supper.

In wartime this ability becomes valuable and so do the unbelievable tales of courage and strategy.  One response is the vaudeville shtick of telling in detail about a famous encounter, challenged by the other guy in the oleo act who asks,  “But wuz ya THERE, Chollie?”  

And then there is the hill-billy old-timer who tells his grandchildren about ‘rasslin’ an impossibly big bear.  He’s vague about who the winner was, so the saucer-eyed children ask,  “What happened then?”  Grandpa, who is tiring, lights his pipe and announces,  “Wal, then the b’ar et me.”

Denying reality is a strategy for dealing with the anguish and starvation of the needy.  Just pretend the homeless are not there, even while stepping over them.  Don’t notice that one’s children are falling into bad company.  Deny that HIV or chronic fatigue or brucellosis is real.  If efforts to get people to see and help deal with a problem are failing, it is often because they are overwhelmed with statistics, but a story strong enough to convince them -- sometimes a work of fiction -- can be effective in changing laws and attitudes.  This is what “Black Beauty” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did.  They were “meta” in an effective way.  So was “The Red Badge of Courage” -- Stephen Crane was never in battle.

People who have obsessive moral accusations about this tangle of what is real and what is not, must be struggling with their own lives, trying to make choices according to emotion instead of logic, hoping to align with powerful people who will support them, or maybe just wanting to make a buck and cynically using “reality” as a selling point.

I find that I have a not-quite-moral attitude that doesn’t require truth so much as the meta-level of meaning.  I value the courage of the journalist who leaves the hotel bar to see the actual place, but I also do not discount the wild tales of persecution I’ve heard old indigenous people tell.  I don’t take them as factual, since they are often provably not, but I recognize the emotion they hold.  And I know the old adversaries on the other side, even “my” side, are no more accurate.  People who are resentful and frightened defend themselves with a pen. 

Every piece of writing can be proven wrong.  EVERY.  ALL.  That doesn’t mean it’s not an accurate account of something felt deeply.  To discount or mock it can be a kind of abuse.  But to cling too hard to one’s own idea of truth can reveal the oppressor’s iron heart.  Sorting it all out is a lifelong task, not a publisher’s blurb.

WHAT WE HAVE HERE IS A DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM.

Powells in Portland is so big it has branches, like a county library.

This was my fav.  Specialized in Native American.

When I was circuit-riding around the state, I saw that there were three distribution lines that terminated in Montana: one from Minneapolis, one from Salt Lake City, and one on the West Coast.  In Billings there was also one from Denver.  Some Missoulians, esp. young people, treat Portland like a distant suburb.  Only the Blackfeet in my experience look north to Calgary and Lethbridge, though both are bigger and more sophisticated than any city in Montana and as close as Great Falls.  Yet Valier, only thirty miles away from Heart Butte which is bigger, lives behind a glass wall between them and the rez.

The Internet used book market redistributes books from throughout the WORLD (I get books from Ireland and Australia), taking them from shrinking or unused libraries and delivering them to me in my mailbox, one by one.  But I don't pick them off shelves myself -- the computer tells me where they are and the distribution system delivers them.  The success of ebooks is partly about the physical problem of moving heavy objects around -- which I’ve wrestled with since my undergrad days.  When my parents came to Chicago with the camp trailer to take me home after college graduation, they were stunned by the number of whisky boxes I had filled with books that had to go along.  But my father’s rule was “no good book is left behind” so I was not forced to abandon them.

In the end, we shipped them by railroad and when those same boxes reached Browning, MT, where I got my first job, Jimmy Fisher had to go fetch them in the school pickup.  He enjoyed kidding me about my drinking habits.  But they were really in whisky boxes because those were the right size and therefore weight for someone to carry.  I would argue that I got more drunk on books.  They were not novels, but rather books of ideas.  

Now I can summon up whole books on the computer, but -- even better -- I have access to articles, conversations, and organizations.  Parallel to music, I don't have to buy albums -- I can buy singles.  Ideas can be caught on the fly and then in a couple of months, a person can check back to see how they have developed.  In the past a book I really wanted might be published when I was at low ebb on money and by the time I knew about it and had the cash, it was out-of-print.  No more.  Now by the time I have the money, the book is second-hand and less expensive.

Strangely, I discover that the kind of peanut butter I want (because it has only one gram of sugar, rather than six) is available from Amazon for about the same price as the local stores.  Extra shipping, though, because it's heavy.

All accessible sources, including the government, pay close attention to the distribution of money, but are essentially blind (or seem so) when it comes to food distribution.  The waste of food in this country, I’m guessing, is partly due to untimely, inappropriate, and perishable food delivery.  I look at this through the lens of my own patterns, but they are revealing.  I had an interesting conversation with a grocery man about this peanut butter. His warehouse had it.  But the customers like more high sugar versions, maybe mixed with jelly -- diabetes or no diabetes, so my brand may disappear.

IMHO, the main factor that is restricting the growth of small towns is not whether they are building new houses, the one thing they seem to see as the key.  Rather it is something they can’t see:  xenophobia.  Fear of what is outside their known world, their comfort zone, their “high school rules” developed by growing up together for generations.  The town is run by the same people who ran high school social life:  the princesses, the athletic stars and those with strong families.  But not necessarily who you might expect.  By now, they've "plateaued", to use the grocery man's word.

In a nearby town's school there was a hazing system in a class with a lot of big football players.  One boy, unathletic, was never teased, bumped, insulted in the way the others were.  I asked a lawyer’s daughter why not.  (She always knew everything.)  She told me the boy’s father’s name, a boy I had known when HE was fifteen.  “He’s in a motorcycle gang.  NO ONE messes with them.”  (I suspected that that included the police.)  Neither boy, father or son, came from a classy high-status family, but I remember the intelligence and determination in their eyes.  They’d found an alternative route.

Little ag towns that are service providers -- not just groceries, hardware, and mechanics, but also banks, libraries, churches, laundromats, cafés, and -- most crucially -- schools, are supported by property taxes and trade, but also accumulate the old folks, the low-pay salaried people, and other citizens content to stay close to home.  The most recent Valierian pointed out that some of the new teachers are the GRANDDAUGHTERS of Valier High School grads.  Yet not only do the people with money and property live outside the town, so that their taxes go to the county, but also they can’t vote in town.  The interface between town and country is managed by boards, committees, districts, seasonal ceremonies, and criticism.  Public opinion.

I’m thinking about what we can do in a system controlled by distant wholesalers that make us dependent on their delivery trucks.  One strategy is the survivalist tactic: buying in bulk.  Another is the co-op solution: grouping consumers to own the business.  The classic American solution is the lively entrepreneur, but lately economics and regulations keep a lid on such a person.  Not just the big surges of credit that fade back into slumps, but the nature of small town bankers, who are as xenophobic as anyone else.  Maybe more so.  When I’ve tried to get credit locally, I’ve been treated with contempt.  But in Portland, where I bank by mail and internet, it only takes a phone call.  Of course, I do NOT abuse it.  My track record there goes back to the Seventies.

A few years ago the bread distributors announced they would no longer supply the sole Valier grocery store.  I thought, “Oh, here’s a chance for a cottage industry in a place that needs it!”  Some people have always sold fancy cakes.  But baking for sale means meeting health department restrictions so involved and draconian, so insistent on expensive machines, that it was impossible.  It turned out that the cake business was sort of underground.  

Then we thought of the Hutterites, who bake for their community anyway, but they are old-fashioned.  They may look like peasants but their idea of bread is suburban American in 1950: white, soft, sweet.  They have not thought of what is sold in trendy chain stores now: unbleached rustic loaves with a lot of seeds and nuts.  But those trendy loafs don't have preservatives and need frequent deliveries.

In terms of time, a whole parallel invisible economy exists, and this is where major shifts have happened, some noted and some ignored, affecting both the rich and the poor. With money inflation comes time deflation.  Part of the xenophobia is simply having to work so many hours, maybe in more than one job, in order to pay for spacious houses, electronic gizmos and huge pickups.  Or, if you are poor, getting enough money for the clothes and equipment kids require and to keep marginal domestic machinery running -- washing machines and lawnmowers.  The energy to take risks is just not there.  The courage and time to find out what your kids are really up to is not there.

What happens is that the larger world suddenly breaks into the glass house.  Global warming was not just a theory.  The bankruptcy of mega-grocery suppliers or buyouts of wholesalers seemed distant but has local consequences.  An untimely fall storm wipes out a year’s profits.  The sins of the banks come down hard on people who are innocent.  Someone elsewhere on the continent strikes gas and oil in a quantity that dwarfs the Bakken.

All of it is entwined with the brute fact of thin population on a vast landscape, a factor never considered by coastal megacity thinkers.  What will we do when the gas runs out?  What does the individual do without a car or in a climate where winter means paralysis?  Can the product go to the homes, like visiting nurses or rolling libraries?  Like the Schwan’s empire?  Like Avon?   Will we go back to the way they used to do it in the old days when the grocery boy brought you your telephoned order?  The way Bountiful Baskets does it now, so that when the big truck rolls in, it’s parted out to the stakeholders on the spot?  No brick and mortar demanding rent for storage.  The Hutterites will deliver chickens and vegetables.

There is another factor, really a pair of factors, that is deeply affecting what there is to distribute.  Many processed foods are meant to be appealing if not addictive: potato chips, Twinkies and the like.  They store well.  Global advertising pushes them, we get tempted to try them and first thing you know we’re having PopTarts for breakfast instead of oatmeal.  Opposed to those forces are those of the health industry which tries to preach organic, natural, Paleolithic diets alongside expensive meds and exercise equipment.  To put it dramatically, food corporations and medical corporations are locked in combat -- one representing pleasure and convenience and the other one preaching danger, danger, danger unless one is compliant.  So we are afraid and scarf down chocolate to calm ourselves.  Distribution responds to consumption.  The snake bites its tail.  This is ecology.

And now we're back to peanut butter.  Why is this bread white?  And dump the jelly!!  But I suspect that to most people in Valier, including me, this sandwich is basic American food, reassuring in its humble familiarity.  They don't think of peanut butter being a commodity food, as rez folks do.

TRUST is the key.  AWARENESS is a second key and the more that extends out into the world, the more opportunities arise, the more preparation for inevitable downturns can be made, and the more resilient the general population can be.  COURAGE is the third key.  Put them together and strike a chord:  CREATIVITY/INGENUITY/INNOVATION.

PS:  I didn't think about home gardens, farmer's markets, and personal greenhouses.