THERE ARE DRAGONS

This was a strange week.  Two former students from Browning in the very beginning of the Sixties and Seventies, died, both white.  One was a boy who never behaved and had a malicious streak.  I called his father to ask for a conference.  His father sighed and said, “Oh, I’ll beat him again, but it won’t do any good.”  

The other one was a polar opposite, a glamorous hard-working young woman who starred in a play with the man she would marry, both of them respected, invested in education and ranching.  Cancer took her early.  These contrasting former students are the boundaries of a world I shared for a decade and then left behind because of — sorry, but this is going to sound pretentious — intellectual hunger.  I wanted university in an inchoate way, but not the way college is thought of around here: beer blasts, best friends, good connections, certification, escaping parents.  

I wanted the full ivory tower.  With bells.  And I got it, though it wasn’t what I expected.  But it was serious, it mattered, and it was actually about how to think.  Not much to do with IQ or being smart.  Rather how to join into a conversation that has lasted for thousands of years, one that some people think of as religious and others think of scientific.

This same week an old friend and her husband stopped by on their way to a family reunion.  Kathy was the sister of a gifted chef in East Glacier in the earliest Seventies.  We had grown up not knowing each other but in the same time and place: Portland in the Fifties where nothing ever happened.  I was newly divorced and sorting out my head while living in Ramona Wellman’s big abandoned house.  We sat for hours talking in the built in breakfast nook that has now been torn off the building.

Now we’re all grown up now, getting old, and Kathy and Craig have accomplished children with happy grandchildren and good jobs and everything has been pretty much resolved.  People walk into my house and are impressed by my books, a working library that covers most of the walls.  They think it’s a sign of erudition instead of just a tool, but Craig — who is not quite retired — was interested because of his own equivalent library— housed in his office at Portland State University as an Associate Professor of Public Administration, and coordinator of the MPA specialization in environmental and natural resource management for the Division of Public Administration.  He asks, what does one do with such a library on retirement?  The sheer effort of sorting and transporting is overwhelming.

But it freed me to talk about what I’ve done with MY retirement:  I’ve recreated my seminary setting, my ivory tower.  (Good thing — since my seminary’s library has been moved and probably reorganized and edited.)  The categories on my shelves are Montana history (including natural history), Montana writers, Western and French bronzes, Blackfeet, theatre, UU history, and miscellaneous things like clouds, sewing, star constellations and the complete works of certain authors: Matthiessen, Berry, Dinesen, Stratton-Porter. 

The most active section is the current research on neurology, deep time, the evolution of the brain, pre-literate and sub-literate thought, and the design of sacred ceremonies, with emphasis on anthropological thought — NOT institutional dogma.  I don’t talk to people about it much because they never understand it anyway.  Not their fault.  The concepts are just now forming and they are entirely different from what we have assumed because instruments give us so much more information.

In fact, I don’t think I really understand it that well yet myself.  We know that there seems to be a “real” world with solid objects and predictable characteristics and actions.  But we also know that all that is just waves and tiny impacts, ion showers, molecules and radiation.  Now we realize that each of us is an evolved colony of cooperating cells that are somehow capable of perceiving the “real” world in various ways (far more than we suspected), translating all those waves and molecules into code that can be transmitted along the axons of nerves to the brain where the code is sorted and translated into what we fondly think of as reality.  

The brain is an extremely complex “organ” that is actually just the dashboard for what goes on everywhere in our skins.  Almost artistically, the brain decides what to recognize, what to ignore, what to pretend is something it isn’t, and what to do about it.  It saturates the body with indicators and directions, and evokes what we think of as emotion.

Mark Johnson

We end up with something we call our identity.  At seminary I struggled to understand Stephen Toulmin.  I could only get a shadowy impression.  Now I’m reading Mark Johnson’s  “The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding” which you can get an idea of on YouTube through an hour and a half lecture at this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaMeGdrKnEE

There are a lot of related vids that YouTube will suggest.  It’s all this material and more that I’ve been struggling with for half a century.  For the last decade I’ve been in conversation about the issues in a “practicum” for these ideas.  We owe a lot to the real lives of a steady stream of boys and young men searching desperately for meaning.  Drugs, abuse, displacement, catastrophe, disease and torture have sorely tested their ability to survive.  The effort to protect them, and help them grow, constantly suggests hope but also raises questions of metaphysical dimensions, and sometimes casts us all into an abyss of despair.  They die incomplete.

So I read my books and  across the continent T folds the laundry while making sure there are pills to take.  (Those are metaphorical statements.)

Kathy Shinn had not long ago taken a trip to Bhutan, the real Dragon Country, with a group of brave women who crossed suspension bridges and toughed out icy nights.  She’s still processing it.  Craig understands and admires this.  When I said that I begin to think that the end of the civilized world is coming, maybe sooner than we thought, he agreed but then began to lay out the evidence for prevention and mitigation.  We didn’t have time to go far with this, but it’s real and it may turn the tide.

Bhutan

I don’t include many people in this conversation because there’s already too much to process.  I’m narrowing my own goal down to the composing (think music) of experiences that are sacred for humans, carrying meaning.  I have no interest at all in institutional religion nor in conventional philosophy.  It was strange to talk to people who understood, not because of being beaten or because of conventional university courses, but because they yearn for knowing and they love the world.  They see a lot of books and know they are means, not ends.

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.

CONTAINER: METAPHOR FOR WORSHIP

Mediterranean-based religious worship is based most deeply at the metaphor of the contained.  Since all religions are based on survival, both the individual and the group, and since food is so essential to survival, it is the domestication of grain and fruits ten thousand years ago that reified the idea of the container: the granary where food could be stored and the wall that protected the town against raids on the granary.  Accumulation of wealth in terms of food meant that some people could be freed to think about sacred issues, like fortunate crops and avoidance of disasters like volcano eruptions, and so they built temples, containers for their ceremonies, and palaces, containers for their leaders.  

By now speech was well-established but the invention of writing allowed a new “container,” the manuscript (not yet the codex form we call “book”) that contained ideas.  The people who revered books but could not read depended on leaders and priests who could.  The study of writing (both historical records and prescriptive rules) was considered a portal into the privileged enclosure that defined the wise and therefore those best able to guide the people past disaster.  This is the core of Jewish religious practice.  It is not suited to hunter-gatherer styles of worship which tend to be more directly sensory, often a re-enactment and dispersed in sympathy towards things that have their own lives rather than a leader, esp. a single powerful leader who controlled a town, its wall and its granary -- therefore its fate.  

Studying written wisdom ought to be a nourishment and can become an addiction.  Therefore, it is both bread and wine.  Often debate and discussion about learning proceeded at a communal meal, another deep metaphor-pattern for human behavior. When the Christian movement broke away from Judaism, it did not discard the study of scripture but eventually created a New Testament, partly Good News (gospel) and partly letters about communal life.  In the meantime, the Jewish-style study group was followed by a communal meal of the ordinary bread and wine brought pot-luck style.  It was this pot-luck, associated also with the ceremonial meals of Passover and scholars, that became communion when Jesus (at the Last Supper) asked the people to remember his coming sacrifice by taking bread as His Flesh and wine as His Blood.

Sacrifice is also a very early and deep concept for ceremony which was crucially shifting in the early days of the change from a hunting/gathering culture to one of agriculture.  The way of “sending” a sacrifice to whatever higher power or force might be propitiated was to burn it so that it rose and dispersed in smoke.  The smell of burnt flesh was thus pleasing to the gods.  The greater the generosity of the sacrifice, the more virtuous and effective.  Thus, a holocaust was the greatest generosity, since none of the sacrificed animal was kept to eat.  

But there were limits and one of them is the sacrifice of one’s children, so we have the story of Abraham ready to kill his son at God’s command, but then sparing him, also at God’s command.  This is echoed in the idea that God is willing to sacrifice HIS own son, but then spares him through ascension to heaven.  Some of this probably relates to the need for a leader, a king, who will not sacrifice his people.  (All of this is highly relevant to the world cultures today, some of whom are willing to kill or allow their people to die in various ways, ranging from gas attacks to famine to pencil-daggers like not funding health care or food support.)

Communion consisting of bread and wine both evoked family meals and reinvigorated the idea of God as a Father All powerful while also stepping away from the holocaust of living beings.  Scholars suggest that the story of Jacob and Esau addresses the change, so that Jacob is the agriculturalist and Esau is a hunter or pastoral herder who sacrifices his animals.  The story speaks to the inner anguish of the person whose most basic assumptions of what will keep him safe are destroyed.  Loss of heritage, rage, fear, and disinheritance.

So communion is a material embodiment of the people’s ordinary familiar meal but as a metaphor of safety and protection from God.  The more beautifully it is done, the more moving, but the essential center of breaking bread and sipping wine is sacred no matter what.  But what if the material culture is different?

This became highly relevant to Catholic missionaries going to indigenous peoples at other places on the planet.  What about the Chinese who take their wheat as noodles?  Can one have a Communion of noodles and tea?  What about the Inuit who never ate bread, never drank wine -- had no plants, lived on sea mammals.  Could one have a REAL flesh and REAL blood communion?  

Once the bread was stylized into unleavened wafers and blessed wine, it took on a specialness that verged on magic.  The idea that the bread actually became the real flesh of Jesus presented the philosophical problem called “misplaced concreteness” when a metaphor stops being a metaphor and becomes simply a reality in itself, but with magic powers which inhere in the object rather than what it stands for.  Communion is supposed to be a portal, a threshold, rather than a scientific medicine or technology.  When people began to try to heal wounds by applying Communion wafers, they were diminishing the metaphorical engagement into simple instruments.  

Anti-vampire kit

But there WERE ways to preserve and even enhance the meaning of Communion.  When a woman at a Catholic seminary where students served Communion every Friday was denied this opportunity, she served ceremonial bread and water, a traditional prison meal, so she technically was not serving Communion.  Water is as powerful a symbol as wine.  Baptism in the Western context also has meaning as birth, cleansing, conversion, and renewal.  Yet there are African cultures where water sprinkled on a woman’s head was thought to make her barren.  All metaphors of worship are rooted in the culture from which they arose.

Robert Schreiter in his book “Building Local Theology” explores all this in much depth as a real practical problem and also a key to the future of any culturally based metaphorical system given sacred connotation.  His message is that all humans have the same instincts for salvation in the most practical and concrete sense, so that their emotional concepts at the deepest level are always there, but reaching them means knowing them well-enough to understand what in their lives will express what Communion expresses.

When the Jesuits first came to the prairie indigenous tribes, they attended ceremonies and saw that the people at communal meals ate a kind of soup made of sarvisberries and buffalo fat.  They told the people it was Communion but it wasn’t.  Or maybe it was.  The first ceremonies in prairie life came in spring when the lowest places were blooming and the calves were coming.  After a winter of deprivation, these were the equivalent of the Easter feasts of egg and lamb.  

The last of the grain must be kept as seed and not eaten.  According to some, this is Lent.  The last of the dried berries can be eaten in soup as a presage of plenty to come and at the time of the earliest thunderstorms, the berry bushes are in bloom on which the berry crop depends.  Hail, a severe freeze, could mean a bad berry crop, competition with bears inclined to come into camp for food.  Safety and food entwine in what is sacred and ceremonial.  Berry soup is a communal meal that petitions for survival -- it just doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus.  Introducing bread where there were no ovens meant the use of fry bread, which is now seen as “Indian,” especially when fried in animal fat, and the introduction of wine turned out to be a very mixed blessing.

A contemporary ceremony of immanent meaning and generosity is a day when donated handmade ceramic bowls, ingenious and unique, are sold containing soup for lunch.  The profits then go to people on short rations.  When one buys the soup, one also gets the bowl.  This is so fitting a part of the material culture that it grows in popularity every year.  It is as valid as any other ceremony.

STATE OF MIND

This morning when I first woke and stumbled into my front room, which is all shelves of books, I looked around and realized the books were all “blogs” compressed and captured on thin leaves of paper that had some kind of order, then captured again between two boards covered with fabric that made a hinge at the back, according to the subject and writer. . . Then the vision dispersed and again I was looking at books resting on edge along boards I’d nailed together to support them.

Crackers and Squibs

The Tiny Mite, the runt who is always ravenous.

This house exists to protect these books, plus two assortments of cats: two fat “marmots” who are ten years old and live indoors, plus four ferals -- the mother, two toms and a crippled female calico who live in my back garage like foxes.  I make them beds but they prefer holes under the floor.  I’ve never been able to pet them except once I touched the Tiny Mite (the small gray striped runt tom) and it was like touching smoke, dispersing while hardly leaving a sensation.  By contrast, the indoor cat the color of a ritz cracker sleeps on my left arm and is so heavy that by morning the arm has gone numb as as though a lover had slept there.  She does love me in her patronizing way.  She thinks I’m a kitten, very large but able to open cat food cans.  

I think I’m a writer and so that’s what I do.  But what I thought was publishing no longer exists, so I just blog.  I’m a backwards version of the princess in Rumplestilskin who spun straw into gold -- I spin life into print.  The images I tuck in are just equivalent to little marginal illuminations.  They are prettier than the print and the print is far far brighter than my inner life, which slips focus back and forth with my practical real life, sometimes dark, sometimes sunny.  Always curious.

In the Sixties my step-son-in-law, Butch DeSmet, ran this service station.

In real life I try to be a contributor to progress, attending town council meetings, responding to inquiries about Bob Scriver’s sculpture, translating the notes from undergrad theatre classes for the archive about Alvina Krause, and growing my old M.Div thesis into a guide for creating intense experience -- no longer attached to dogma or institution, but far from being “woo.”  I do barely enough maintenance to keep this house from collapsing or getting me fined for tall grass.  I love this shack and find it is as convenient as I’d hoped, but it’s generally a mess.

Mostly, like Tim, I try to work through the issues in my life by writing.  I've been saving them all this time.  Like him, I try not to provide TMI, and like him, I know how to provide clues that are entirely misleading.  It’s all part of the game.  But I did live a life on the edge, just not on the same terms as he did.  It would seem pretty tame to some but it had its colorful moments.

The cold brings back full force the winter nights sleeping in my old van on a space blanket in a sleeping bag, clandestinely parked off on a spur road or between a warehouse loading dock and a railroad.  Always I was traveling, sometimes as a circuit rider and others just going somewhere.  I’d lie very still and straight, waiting for my body heat to catch up, waiting for my mind to stop wheeling through the sky and land in the tree of sleep where branches made paths for dreams.

One of the lessons from Tim’s writing is the use of the irreconcilable in both metaphor and meaning.  If one says, “bitter honey” or “scalding ice”, the brain stops its whirling and tries to understand the contradiction.   Some people will just skip it.  Others will stop and mark the phrase as “poetry” or something like that.  "Not literal."  The trick is to be insoluble, but suggestive, so that the brain finds an answer of its own.  So if I say I am a “cosmic recluse who consorts with the grass,” you’ll decide what it means but the meaning is elusive.  There is no scientific replicability or unanimity.  

If I say water has three states: vapor, liquid and solid, this is a scientific fact and the shift among the states will happen at certain temperatures except under certain other relevant forces that can be thought of and tested.  But it’s likely that you have experienced all three states.  I just brought in the feral cats’ saucepan of frozen water and put it on the stove to reduce it back to liquid.  I just put on the teakettle for coffee and listened for the vapor state to signal its boiling.  So then if I say that God is like that, you’ll have something to feel, think about, even manage -- but without any scientific basis because the idea of God is irreconcilable, irreducible, insoluble.  That's the secret.  That was often the tree where my mind roosted as my body lay stiff and straight in that van and a white cloud of breath formed above my face.  Not so much about God as about the world, so I left the ministry.

A book is more like water, but a blog is more like steam than a book.  Silence is ice.  It is the thought that is irreconcilable, immutable.  For a long time I kept a poem by Georgie Starbuck, about a man who was “sheveled, kempt and couth” -- words created by removing the prefixes.  No one even remembers her now, but she actually made a living as a poet, which she accomplished by using more than 125 pseudonyms.  In fact, she was actually a man. 

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2004/09/starbuck_the_great.html   His prodigious, prestidigious manipulation of words was dazzling but his major contribution to our society was stubbornness.  “Starbuck, who was born in 1931, is actually the reason loyalty oaths are illegal in the United States. When the State University of New York-Buffalo fired him in 1963 for refusing to sign one, he fought the university all the way to the Supreme Court and prevailed.”  One does not often meet a poet with the potential to change the country.  Not all poets are steely enough to engage it.

So sometimes I want to show animity, conciliability, ducibility, solubility.  I want to rip off all the prefixes and maybe now I’ll go back and rip off those monkey-tail suffix “y’s” because there are too many “y’s” in the world and not enough core meanings: anime, concile, mute, duct, soluble.  Too much aping of the Latinate and not enough walking in the grass or even parking in the trees.  

Here’s a George Starbuck poem:

"For an American Burial," 

The earth is fair;
all that the earth demands is the earth's share;
all we embrace and revel in and vow
never to lose, always to hold somehow,
we hold of earth, in temporary care.

MY FATHER, MY SELF

The Sam Strachan Family

What appears every day on this blog is only a small part of what goes through my head all the time, which is a wandering torrent of idea, sensation, memory, print, and echoes from others, though I don’t use social internet and have dumped out whole search categories, like “Montana writing,” which has dwindled to nearly nothing anyway.  Blackfeet are still part of my life, but they don’t consider themselves “Montana” and neither does “Montana.”  They are a semi-sequestered semi-sovereignty.  In the meantime, posting my notes from acting class in 1957-61 has unfolded into a possible manuscript.  These are only examples.

There is one overwhelmingly powerful relationship that has wakened my consciousness more than I ever anticipated and that pushes me to my limits of skill.  It has also challenged the very idea of “publishing a book.”   The point of my move to Valier was to concentrate on producing “Bronze Inside and Out.”  The response to it revealed what publishing had become: something like Hudson’s Bay’s trading posts on the prairie: little outposts that exchange beads and alcohol for the blood and skins of many animals, including humans.  But that's not what I'm talking about.  

I got one amazing response, from Paris.  It was a video, which would mean nothing if you haven’t read my book.  I’ve been remembering the vid wrong, which gave me a good post about crowding Bob Scriver out of his clothes, because I remembered the sound track as “Honey, Can I Put on Your Clothes?”  which is usually a woman’s song.  But it was actually Bruce Springsteen singing “I’m on Fire.”  Here are the lyrics:

Hey little girl is your daddy home

Did he go away and leave you all alone

I got a bad desire

Im on fire

Tell me now baby is he good to you

Can he do to you the things that I do

I can take you higher

Im on fire

Sometimes it's like someone took a knife baby

Edgy and dull and cut a six-inch valley

Through the middle of my soul

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet

And a freight train running through the

Middle of my head

Only you can cool my desire

Im on fire

Sam and Beulah Strachan with Bruce, their Great Hope

The group -- it was a group of boys, Cinematheque Film -- could not have known that my father’s name was Bruce.  They were thinking about my much older husband, the sculptor with whom I built a foundry, as powerful a source of imagery as the landscape around here.  (Google the Rocky Mountain East Slope.)  Over the years since, the boys -- who have been developing faster than I am -- have done nothing to cool my fire but have shaped and intensified mine with theirs -- parallel, not together.

But why did I misremember the song?  Because I was dodging something.  My father.  It’s not that I was really abused, though he did “spank” we kids too much and too hard and after I was so old it was almost sexual.  Then my mother stepped in. She put me through college and ended up supporting the family by teaching.  No divorce, no separation, increasing frozenness.  I have never understood why and how my father was such a failure: so out of touch, such a clown, so unfocused, such an accumulator of books he never read nor turned into an education.  At the time of these graduation photos he was all promise and virtue.

Oregon State College.  Thesis:  "The Price of Potatoes"

Closed skull brain trauma is only recently beginning to be understood.  A brain can’t be studied easily.  You have to cut a trap door and even then it just looks like a bowl of jelly.  In 1948 if you were in an auto accident and your skull was cracked, so long as there was no bleeding or swelling associated at the time, you were thought to be all right.  He wasn’t.  But you couldn’t tell.  Maybe my mother realized how much his personality had changed, but his job was on the road all week.  Not until the Fifties was he obviously short-tempered and grossly obese.  The wholesale co-op where he'd worked for decades didn’t find a reason to fire him until the Sixties,  a few years before he died of a massive stroke.  It’s a family vulnerability: his brothers also died of strokes.  It wasn’t just a matter of care or trauma: the youngest brother was a TWA pilot, carefully monitored.

But that’s too simple.  My mother had an "inner command" to save her own father or at least compensate for him but ended up quarreling with him.  He also was on the road as a contractor when she was growing up and he was hot-tempered.  I don’t know whether he ever had a head injury -- I think that was just his real temperament: Protestant Irish.  

Back to my father.  His grandfather, Archibald, had been a contractor and was so prone to rage that when in old age he came to stay with my grandfather Sam's family, Sam asked him to move on.  He died alone in a boarding house in Minneapolis.  It was Archibald who had moved the family from Scotland to Dakota homestead lands from which the Brulé Sioux had just been displaced. By immigration Sam had finished his education.  I do not know what Scots degrees he earned.  I didn’t know any of this until I set out to do research.  I have inherited the hot temper of both sides, but no blow to the forehead has broken the constraints on it.

Northwestern University, BS in Speech (really) 1961

No one in my family ever wrote a book and I never exactly intended to write a book -- I just wanted to write.  And I do.  But where does that need come from?  Worse than that, where did books go?  I mean, books are now just lovely artifacts, like the fountain pens my family valued highly.  We got more use out of the pens than we did out of the books.  At the Sam Strachans' height of prosperity, in Brandon, Manitoba, they bought the writer Martha Ostenso’s lovely big house.  She made her reputation with a book called “Wild Geese”  (1925) about a tyrant father whose dominance was finally broken by a boarding school teacher.  Also a movie called “After the Harvest” (2001) in which Sam Shepard plays the tyrant.  I'm the only one to read her books, but my cousin went to visit the house.

It was my high school teachers who wanted me to write.  They were mostly spinsters (because the men were killed by WWI), bourgeois, accepting Edwardian values because that was the age they were born into, unsophisticated, settling for a decent income and community respect but secretly worshipping “genius”.  None of their other students, so far as I know, ever wrote a published book, which in those days meant a sort of diluted Brit approval from tweedy gents.  They really didn’t know much about writing, nor did they have very good backgrounds in the humanities.   Still, in our sophomore year we read modern poetry, my epiphany about metaphor.

My dramatics teacher steered me to Northwestern University, the theatre department.  It was not about writing, but about oneself as an instrument and what I might call the architecture of narrative.  (“Writers as Architects” by MATTEO PERICOLI http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/matteo-pericoli/ )  Quite a bit more complex than narrative, since so much theatre is the interaction of the characters and their times or location. 

Mercilessly, I used the Unitarian denomination as access to a "real" education at the University of Chicago, famous for its brawny intellectualism.  I went in through a seminary mousehole and found myself in a lofty Gothic labyrinth where I learned to fly to the rafters, so now I am a bat.  Or just batty.  Capable of echolocation.  The hidden observer.  Oh, I paid my denominational dues, serving at the edges where no one else would.  I like the edges.  I like people at the edges.  I try not to attract attention, but I DO have a lot of books.  The difference is that they are working books: not status symbols but tools.  Rafters.  Where I roost to write.

Now read the Springsteen lyrics again.  Don’t look at the metaphors.  Look through them.  That’s what Cinematheque Film is about.  Me, too.

INCORRIGIBLE BOYS

n·cor·ri·gi·ble  

adj.

1. Incapable of being corrected or reformed: an incorrigible criminal.

2. Firmly rooted; ineradicable: incorrigible faults.

3. Difficult or impossible to control or manage: an incorrigible, spoiled child.

4. (Philosophy) Philosophy (of a belief) having the property that whoever honestly believes it cannot be mistaken.

"Being beyond the control of parents, guardians, or custodians or being disobedient of parental authority. This classification is referred to in various juvenile codes as unruly, unmanageable, and incorrigible. "

Recently I watched two movies about incorrigible boys.  I have a weakness for them.  I think it is because male incorrigibility is often successful in a way that female incorrigibility is not.  (I am covertly incorrigible.)  The female is burdened by her sexuality (pregnancy and children) while the male is set free.  (Until genomic analysis made it possible to encumber his income for the rest of his life, unless he sticks to other guys.)  Both girls and boys, while young, are expendable.

In adolescence both soon find that sex is a way to survive, a commodity to get food, shelter, and other protections.  Incorrigibles are not likely to make good marriages, so they step outside those cultural guidelines and free lance their survival without regard for the next generation.  Yet their creativity and energy often contribute to the larger culture.  They inhabit a zone between convention and defiance, often in a ferment of interaction that can be good or bad for individuals.   Even in the big rich countries, we do not know how to educate them. http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2012/12/aa-gill-schools-ruining-our-kids  The addition of predators, drugs or disease makes this ferment lethal.  But in spite of the pill, abortion, infanticide and neglect, we have an excess of youngsters. 

These two classic movies were about incorrigible boys in the coal country of England where families are dismembered by early deaths of fathers who go “down the pit” and the alcohol needed to bear the life.  Some fathers simply desert.  One film is “Kes” and the other is “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”  Each film shows the relentless and destructive pressure of institutions trying to control the boys and -- against that -- the endless stores of energy and ingenuity the boys have learned for survival.  Each is based on a metaphor:  the boy in “Kes” has taken a hatchling kestral hawk from a nest and trained it for falconry.  The boy in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is exactly that: a runner who can win marathons.  He has both tenacity and strategy, as well as an expressive wolfish grin.

The boy in “Kes” -- ribby, forelocked, plaintive little fellow -- takes what he needs, including freedom.  This provokes bullies everywhere, from fellow students to the head of the school to the ox of a soccer coach, who traps the boy in a cold shower for so long that even the other boys protest.  Only one English teacher (maybe the one who eventually wrote this story) shows any interest in what the boy actually cares about.  The lesson this boy learns is that the clever bully doesn’t make YOU suffer, but takes it out on what you love, which hurts more.

The boy in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is older, with more major crimes.  At the reform school where he is sent, the head master sees him as useful in interschool competition and gives him freedom to run so that he will win against an upscale snob school.  As the youth runs, there are flashbacks to what he loves and hates, but also he begins to figure out how much power he has over the situation.  When it is time to compete, he is far ahead of the other school’s champion, comes close to the finish line in view of the officials and audience, and stops -- letting the other side win.  What he wins is not some cup.  He has to go back to stupid jobs, but he has made a mark with his peers and kept his self-respect.

Two of my other favorite movies about incorrigible boys are “Empire of the Sun” and “Kim”, the 1950 version in which Dean Stockwell played the title character though Errol Flynn was supposed to be the star.  On frontiers in times of chaos these incorrigible boys have the skills that will not only help them survive but also prove useful for powers that be.  True leaders always recognize and enlist the incorrigibles.  It’s a favorite trope for the British Empire which has always abused but secretly cherished the cabin boy, the stable boy, the messenger boy. More recently, the boy who doesn’t fit in powers the “Harry Potter” books and “Lord of the Rings.”   In fairy tales it is the “Jack” stories (Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack the Giant Killer).  In the Bible it’s Joseph.  In America it’s been Tom and Huck, Penrod and Sam, “Two Little Savages.” They tend to come in pairs.  The boy in “All the Pretty Horses” is a particularly memorable version, esp. in the movie.

Where do they come from?  Bad families?  Evil schools?  Sick societies?  Or just simple chaos?  Oh, that’s the easy part. (All of the above.)  What’s harder is understanding what makes such incorrigibles take on the role and make it into an advantage.  It must be genetic: surely such physical endurance must have a genetic source -- their brains and daring as well.  But they may have gotten the focus from a book or even some adult in real life who took time to listen and give advice.  These days, when boys on many parts of the planet are illiterate to print but avid for images and story, it may have been a glimpse of the movies that float through now.  Short clips, music vids.

In “Kes” when the boy is explaining his kestrel to the interested English teacher, he describes indignantly how people on the street will talk to him patronizingly about his “pet” hawk.   “A hawk is never a pet!  A hawk is always wild.  You cannot tame a hawk.  You must MAN it.”  He means a meshing of training with the hawk’s instincts so that both man and hawk can be fed.  Of course, not all that feeds a boy is food.  He must yearn and dream.

There must be similar stories being written, filmed or simply lived out all over this planet.  Consider the “barefoot bandit,” Colton Harris-Moore, who managed  to flee across the continent by speedboat, light airplane, bicycle, and multiple car thefts without even putting his shoes on.  He is incorrigible but almost incredibly competent as well as auto-didactic.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris-Moore