BEAR BY BEAR

Human beings think with their bodies in very complex and mostly unconscious ways.  The most powerful mechanisms underlying rationality reach down to the cell level.  For instance, what the incredible neuroscience now possible can tell us.  This was in “Nature Communications":  “The scientists discovered two types of neurons that they found particularly interesting: one that tells the brain food is present, and one that tells the brain whether it’s hungry. But the brain seemed to tamp down the activity of those neurons when food was absent as a way of conserving energy.”  http://www.nature.com/ncomms/index.html  This study used snails after lettuce, but it certainly suggests interesting cellular and molecular workings that are probably also in humans.

Maybe explanations of animal perceptions seem to some people to suggest that humans are just animals, to diminish God’s participation in the world, making animals seem too much like machines.  But other people feel that animals ARE like machines and anything that makes them seem human-like interferes with decisions.  They should have no special status or fantasy souls.

Of all the groups trying to understand and resolve problems with grizzly bears, the ones I greet with the most skepticism are the humane societies because those are the groups I know best, having worked with them in the national urban context.  They are where the money is but where it goes not enough people “knows.”  It doesn’t go to the animals.  

Aside from supporting the institution -- as it raises more money to support the institution -- humane societies often become cults for individuals, some deserving and others not.  We used to joke that “Fund for Animals” was for just one animal: Cleveland Amory, their founder and leader until his death.  He insisted on only the best luxuries in his own life.  His family was privileged and he moved in the “highest” circles of society so it was his normal.  He loved sensational journalism and found vivid causes from wild burros to the Sea Shepherds.  His following and profits were huge.

From up close and personal, the Humane Society of the United States is a platform for a zealot with no limits, Wayne Pacelle.  He would not like you to realize how many humane societies there are, such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or the American Humane Association, which protects children as well as animals.  Investigate these people carefully before sending them money.  Local is better.  And realize that some animal control operations are more humane than the humane societies purport to be.

From one angle groups that address grizzlies use the same template as the humane societies formed for domestic animals, especially pets.  The ASPCA was founded by Henry Bergh responding to the abuse of work horses before there were automobiles.  Part of humane society work is teaching people what IS abuse of animals and part of it is responding to cruel and neglectful people.  It’s all about individuating the animals, so they have names and stories, and there are sentimental themes about adoption: “forever homes” and so on.  Some run shelters, some enforce laws on a contract basis for governmental bodies, and the Oregon Humane Society has a pet cemetery.

Bart and Doug Seuss

I’m not taking a moral point of view about cats or grizzlies or whatever. I just want to point out that dealing with the animals is quite different from dealing with their terrain, their habitat, but the latter may be more effective.  Vital Ground, which evolved out of the most personified of bears, Bart, keeps its dignity by making that choice.  Specifically, knowing the importance of large uninterrupted spaces of land in order to keep individual bears in breeding relationship to save the species, they locate and buy the little patches of land that interrupt free circulation of bears and help join adjacent parks, wildernesses, and protective private land.  

The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society takes the same kind of focus, not for the individual bear, but for the species as an indicator of habitat ecology health and as an umbrella species.  Bears are at the top of the food chain and travel the farthest (close to wolves) so if something goes wrong with them, the whole webwork of life has got to have something wrong with it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgEuO7xvozY   Bear troubles reflect problems with land status.

When dealing with bears as individuals, one enters some powerful behavior loops wired into every mammal from the beginning.  I’m talking about sex, death, conflict, food, protecting babies (all species), agony and attachment.  (Some people are powerfully attached to agony, which seems counter-intuitive but is well-documented.)  These elemental triggers are survival level.

The Oregon Humane Society in Portland is independent of government though they once had the contract to enforce leash law, license dogs (dog licensing is a form of rabies control), and respond to cruelty.  Two women at OHS did their public relations and the three of us were friends, often lunching together to swap ideas.  I’d be the only one in uniform.  Zizi (her real name) was a classic movie star blonde, competent and socially prominent.  You know how much movie stars and their pets go together.  (I’m including Trigger and Silver: cowboys love their horses.)  My bosses (not Mike Burgwin but the management higher up) so badly wanted me to be like Zizi, because they figured that would distract the public and glamorize their own image by association.  They were right.  But I’m not the type.

There was a second woman, smaller, darker, and far more shadowed.  Her private life was dramatic, all about abusive men.  She often had bruises.  When she was trusting, she spoke about the ecstatic bond of violence and said she envied the antelope its intense final moments in the jaws of a leopard clamped on its throat.  Most people react with repugnance and turn away, so we never really learn about it or how much it is part of being human.  The paleo-pushers tend to stick to diet.  

Prostitutes (especially the children who do survival sexwork) know that abuse, even to the point of death, is often part of a “sexual” transaction.  Cops and social workers know how addictive are the molecular circuits energized by danger and the fantasy of finally being redeemed by love.  You could call it Timothy Treadwell syndrome.

Empathy with near-death of the helpless, whether victims of ebola, a refugee child drowned, a child being dragged around a gorilla enclosure, or a tortured puppy, makes us want to see and participate second-hand.  Part of it is wanting to the rescuer and part of it is a kind of affiliation with an overwhelming, uncontrollable force.  Charismatic megamammals with names and stories grab us physically, not with muscles but with molecular surges we call emotion.  Adrenaline, serotonin, auto-highs.  We are far more likely to write checks and make laws about such climax events than we are to spend the same amounts on habitat or land protection or even practical defence measures like electric fences.

The current investigators and protectors who work against the abuse of humans tell us that one in six men has been sexually attacked as a child.  The figures on women are only slightly different.  Consequences to the kind of people who form our culture, our choices and assumptions, are sublimated into how we relate to animals, most of it deeply unconscious.  

If you can tap into some of that — say “Bambi” or “The Biography of a Grizzly” or “Black Beauty” — you’ll have a powerful public response, maybe worth a lot of money.  Rational logic has nothing to do with it.  “Finding Nemo” is another example, even though it was a cartoon.  When people told me they loved the movie, I’d ask them how a child/fish whose mother died, who couldn’t find home, who was always in danger, who was finally trapped by the ultimate threat — a dentist! —could be appealing to watch.  Their eyes would wiggle back and forth in that “tell” meaning “this does not compute.”  Brain-blank.

The same dynamics apply strongly to bears, who are often presented as cubs.  Bears as maternal, bears as monsters, bears as mysterious sleepers, bears as lovers, humans that cross the species barrier, humans who mother cubs, dictators who bare-chested ride flying brown bears — this is all the stuff of myth and emotion. 

Putin knows the Russian love of bears.

It would be stupid to try to suppress or discount such ineffable but gripping mythic dimensions of being human.  But it is smart to ADD the rational, the logical, the research-based knowledge that can keep the balance and prevent deaths.

SHAME VS. GUILT

This "embarrassment" is an illusion.  

Polar bears have nothing to be ashamed of.

Googling reveals lots of material defining “shame” versus “guilt”, mostly explaining that shame is something that is inherent in one’s being (“you should be ashamed of yourself”) sort of like original sin, but guilt is knowing you’ve done something wrong. You've broken the rules.  

Both will estrange a person from any community, because both are factors of culture, categories developed over time and meant to keep people (in the back-and-forth between culture and individual) under control for the good of the community.  Their game is blame, which imposes a stigmata like forcing people to sew a yellow star on their coats or, more drastically, branding the faces of runaway slaves.  it is an excruciating vulnerability affecting one’s worthiness, their sense of love and belonging.  They must always feel they are not good enough.

Dogs feel guilt -- cats do not.

Dogs are social -- cats are not.

If shame is something that the culture imposes on groups and individuals because of their perceived characteristics, like skin color or way of dressing or food choices or — worst of all — poverty; and guilt is something a group or individual sees as a rule broken, a bad behavior, then we express that in the idea that one can love an individual but hate their behavior.  Or sometimes that we hate the individual regardless of his or her appeal because of his or her behavior, especially if they are shameless and refuse to accept their guilt.  Because then what hold does the society have?

Global warming is starving polar bears.

I want to introduce a new factor:  bad things that happen that seem totally unrelated to either shame or guilt, but introduce both in such dynamic quantity that the whole culture gets involved in blame, wanting to sacrifice someone in order to restore order.  Hurricanes, tsunamis, famine, wild fire, and pandemics are natural events, but war, economic inequity, overpopulation are human group overwhelming events.  They are all full of shame and blame, from the New Orleans disaster to the children dying in the streets of our cities.  (You don’t see them because they try to diminish their vulnerability by hiding.)  Attempts to deal with all this seem ineffective.  In fact, even the most innocent and praiseworthy efforts, like providing food to starving people, become corrupted or objectionable.  We are facing helplessness, which makes us scared, which makes us angry, which is of major use for politics.

Queen Elizabeth II

In a time like the present, when the rules of the culture are changing and uncertain, individuals suffer.  Should one be shamed for not being thin, sexy, blonde and sixteen?  Should one feel guilty for wearing a headscarf while not being the Queen of England?  If one is either shamed or guilty, does that mean punishment, debasement, confinement, permitted penetration, exploitative research, is deserved and proper?   BLAME:  a way to discharge pain and shame.  It’s everywhere.  It wins elections.  It’s too scary to react in a sensible way.  Understanding is not a priority anyway — someone yells fire (the president has no birth certificate, vaccination will make your children autistic, drinking coffee will either give you cancer or save you from cancer) and we get so jammed in the exits that no one can escape.

A triangle forms:  shame, guilt, and I’m going to add frustration, being blocked.  Shame and guilt are tools of the predominant culture.  Frustration is what finally will break through to change.  I was surprised when I googled “penetration” that many of the definitions were about knowledge -- getting to the heart of things, I suppose.  Frustration and penetration are individual responses to oppression that trigger evolution, both social and personal.  Aggression, withdrawal, finding allies, artistic expression might also be responses.  “Find a way to cope or die”, is the message to the individual, but the message to the culture is “cut off too many of your people and you no longer exist.”

Black "bottom"

The issue seems to be one of boundaries, often expressed physically by the places people live.  Stockton speaks of "bottoms" where blacks live, because in the South those are the jungly marshy places where diseases lurk.  In Browning the equivalent was called “Moccasin Flats”, built parallel to the school blocks, originally as 1900 log cabins for old people who had been living in scattered tents.  Over the decades the cabins became a jumble of lean-tos, derelict trailers, abandoned cars, and crooked TV antennas.  They were mostly cleared away after the Sixties drive to improve housing.  Highway patrol housing, three modern houses built near the top of Snowshed hill, were jokingly called “Moccasin Heights” and a sign was put up.

Stockton talks a lot about anal focus, which is, of course, about biologically discarding, but in other acts of sex (arousal), hygiene (enemas) or even rectal feeding -- which is to save an infant in Morrison’s book, but in real life done for torture and punishment to the Gitmo captives protesting by fasting.  These are the crossing of boundaries, social as much as physical (sphincters), meant to reduce captives to an infant’s involuntary existence.  Until our culture became so obsessed with medical and enforcement issues that it gave permission to meddle with bodies (coffee enemas, storing contraband in the rectum) no one would ever address these matters.  Even now people worry about smells and feel violated by a colostomy, a third “hole” no one finds attractive.

Cancer and trauma are phenomena that are entwined with shame and guilt and treated with denial or exploitation by the culture.  Our professions (medicine, law and clerical) have become corrupted by this, removing the dignity and solemnity that once marked them as consciously dealing with privileges that affected lives, such as cutting into them (penetration), incarcerating them, or shaping them into institutions.  But "Medicins Sans Frontieres" give new life to the concept of transcending limitations, even those of the culture. Out of the oppression of one big group, comes the transcendence of a small opposing group.

A doctor responding to need.

Some parts of all cultures value this.

All three professions are connected to a writing-based culture where the “pen” is the penetration.  (Laws, Bibles, Prescriptions.)  Writing that deals frankly and vividly with these three categories will often be stigmatized and destroyed as though they were the people instead of the synecdoche (metaphor) for them, only marks on paper.  Even this little discussion of shame and guilt may get me into trouble if it has as much penetration as I hope.

On Medium.com where beginning writers are struggling and even seasoned writers are trying to monetize, I suggested that if there were authors’ discussion groups out there, they ought to devote an evening to discussing two movies:  “Authors Anonymous” and “Pinero.”  The first is not just culture-compliant but culture corrupted and stereotyped, presented as comedy.  The second is a confrontive portrayal of the life of a Puerto Rican man in New York (Newyorican) trapped by racial and nationalistic barriers plus poverty and early trauma.  Drugs, friendship, sex, are there aplenty and will attract people looking for scandal, arousal by misery.  These people ("trolls") are now interested in Medium.com.

If a writer is just writing for profit or good feeling, that’s fine, but maybe they have not earned the respect for dedicated penetration to “truth” as Pinero did.  Or did he?  Did he sell out to self-destruction?  Should he feel ashamed of himself?  Or should we feel guilty that gifted people are destroyed even as they may be leading to evolution that will save us all?

THIS IS A BIT REPETITIOUS

A Jain text in images

An arguable review of thoughts about what I'm doing.

Art is the expression of a relationship between a human and the universe.  Liturgy is an intense affirmation of this definition that provides a meaningful guide within the specific parameters of survival for either an individual or a group.

"Religion" -- before it is frozen into theology, maybe called spirituality -- is an extension of identity, which is an active relationship between person and situation.  Too much thought about spirituality is just fuzz and custard -- pleasant, but with limited meaning.

Material culture, used to record memory and to create metaphor, is the vocabulary and instrument of arts, including liturgy.  It is useless to argue over whether the images painted long ago in the depths of caves are either "art" or "liturgy" because in those days there was no separation between the two.

The world needs some sort of way of thinking that will bring us together.  Since formal "named" religions are institutional -- ethnically and turf-based, we can't reach unanimity on that level.  But we can go to the universal human experience of spirituality (NOT just emotions of love and all that) which kindles the spark of all religions.  That is, instead of looking at the content, we can look at the structure, not the structure of the outer world but the structure of human experience of it, which has two parts -- cognizant or beneath reflective access -- in the mammalian and even reptilian sub-brains.

Spirituality is an experience of meaning in two ways: it confirms the identity of the person and validates participation in the group.

Spirituality is not verbal.  Therefore it cannot be approached primarily through words but rather through whole-body thinking which precedes, underlies, and expresses thought:  art, dance, music.  It has evolutionary value in that it promotes survival for the individual and the group.

Spirituality is emergent.  When conditions are right, it emerges from the brain/body, called forth by sensory cues, a connectome hippocampus function.

Human development depends first on safety and then on attachment to another human in order for the brain to stay in growth mode.  Otherwise it closes down in hiding and defense, which is a different and higher priority connectome pattern that prevents growth.  The liminality of Victor Turner, et al, provides this safety and attachment necessary for even adults to confirm, re-affirm, or convert their thinking.

Crucifixions

What I'm called "liturgy" is an art form.  It's closest relative in theatre in several ways.  Actors study the skills for managing internal consciousness, even in multiple (the character and the actor) and even in what are labeled dissociated states.  Actors learn to modulate emotional responses, to respond to others, to express emotion clearly, to manage their bodies, to use transferences through empathy, not to fear human extremes and excesses.

Liturgy can interact with what we call therapy in various ways.  Liturgy can be a kind of therapy, reducing stress and providing a context for insight.  Likewise, a therapy can become spiritual when people arrive at deep meaning with the support of the therapist or a group.  A therapy group can serve as a congregation, both a "holding community" and witnesses.

a holding community supports you

Liturgy can bind a community together and keep their attention centered on specific acts and events, often those recorded as print of some kind, though there can be great importance given to memorization and to reflection on the meaning of the words and stories.

Most books about liturgy are about institutional, print-based, prescribed events that may be repeated over and over.  The Catholic church is often seen like that, but reading Dom Gregory Dix’s book “The Shape of the Liturgy” taught me a number of things.  The first was that there WAS a shape and that it was not just historical but also evolved:  first came the invention of a “book,” which at that point was a scroll which rabbis gathered to study and reflect upon.  Since this was holy work, it was marked off not in space, but in time, by the saying of prayers.  So the liminal time was closed by another prayer.  So now we have four elements: the prayer of in-coming, the reading of the passage to be studied, the reflection on that passage, and then the outgoing prayer.  

When the Jewish tradition became the foundation of Christian community, the younger groups accepted that Jesus had prescribed to them the ceremony of Communion: the bread and the wine that were normally eaten by a group staying together through mealtime anyway.  These were brought from home and left at the door until the Communion, and that moment of going to get the bread and wine so it could be consecrated for significance, is now in the Mass.  

Togo -- the place, not food "to go"

When the Protestants broke off from Catholic Mass, they kept the basic pattern since it is so natural to humans (the picnic, the potluck, the tailgate party, the hunt breakfast, the pizza party).  Sometimes they simplified.  Then when the Unitarians broke off from the dissenting Protestants, they began to drop out the Communion, the most extreme of them calling it “cannibalism.”  

Part of what makes the Catholics so interesting is that there is always a breaking away but also always a reform from within.  So Schreiter’s book about the problem of explaining bread and wine to people who have never seen either one (Inuit, for instance) is one of the most valuable resources I know for understanding how the deep equivalent human dynamics at the level of the limbic system can be discovered and resolved into new acts that celebrate the same thing.  One must go to the paradoxes of the saints.  The landscape itself becomes the Bible.  The human family remains meaningful.  Death by torturing authorities that turns out to be a release into some kind of transcendence may also be meaningful.  But an institutional religion that formed in one environment will always have to be translated very carefully to keep it from being reduced to toys and magic.  What can the desert say to the jungle?  What can the shepherd say to the keyboard junkie?

I have come late to an appreciation of community, which is partly temperament, partly the times when I was growing up which emphasized individuality and “creativity,” and partly my birth family which was immigrant homesteaders who sequestered the family.   Mathew Lieberman adds to the other specialized cells in the prefrontal cortex the “mirror cells” that support empathy -- the ability to look at another human and understand how they must be feeling.    “We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions.  Yet, new research using fMRI – including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab -- shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure.”  

The assertion is made that humans spend a lot of time thinking about their relationships to other people, particularly those towards whom one feels intimacy.  Balancing that, it also appears that we need “out-groups” -- people we disapprove of, whom we shun or even attack.  This mob xenophobia can become destructive, but isolation is equally destructive, and we begin to understand that using it for punishment creates insanity.

Praying for others might be the most common liturgical element for justice, but also imagining a higher power who understands beyond what humans can grasp is often expressed in prayers.  Still, FELT meaning may be different.  Consider ordination of clergy during which the ordained person is not just prayed over and advised, but also is actively leaned on by the hands of those already in ministry, so that the weightiness of the moment is physical and real.  This interaction between words and enacted images is what I’m trying to explore.  

SOME BASIC TEXTS:

"The Shape of the Mass" by Dom Gregory Dix

"Constructing Local Theologies" by Robert Schreiter

"Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect" by Matthew D. Lieberman

"The Ritual Process" by Victor Turner

THE OTHER GENE ROBINSONS

Eugene Harold Robinson

"Eugene Harold Robinson (born March 12, 1954) is an American newspaper columnist and the former assistant managing editor of The Washington Post. His columns are syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group, and he is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

"Robinson is a board member of the IWMF (International Women's Media Foundation)." 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/eugene-robinson

Booknotes.org  interviewed this Eugene Robinson in relationship to the publication of his book, “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race.”  The title comes from his grandparents: a very dark man and a very light woman.  He is formally addressed as “Mr.” but the transcript rather curiously put in every stutter, every misspeak, every stopandstart, of what he says. 

This Robinson grew up in an academically centered all-black community, so was only vaguely aware of color-based discrimination until he was assigned to South America as a journalist for the Washington Post.  In Argentina where he lived and Brazil where he often traveled, he became aware of how skin-color interacted with status and class assignment, splintering “black” into a lot of sub-categories, whereas in America, if you were a little bit dark, you were considered black.  This forced unity gradually became a political entity with some real power.  The book is how that happened and the people involved.

http://www.booknotes.org/Watch/153355-1/Eugene+Robinson.aspx

Rev. Eugene Robinson

The white Eugene Robinson is MORE controversial.  He is a gay man, a recovering alcoholic, married to another man for twenty years (he had been previously married to a woman and had two children with her), ordained and consecrated as a bishop, though he had to wear a bulletproof vest under his liturgical vestments at the ceremony.  The event split congregation, the American denomination, and world-wide Anglican networks, which roughly follow the British Empire.  He has resigned by now after seven years of turmoil.

He wrote two books:  “In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God,” and  “God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage.”  Basically he is defending the right of an individual to have a relationship with both "God" and social respectability while committing to an unconventional marriage that the group disapproves.  He has been a highest level religious leader, but in a small context (New Hampshire) that stood by him personally.  This is a definitively Protestant stance, which means that the Roman Catholic church and the “high” Anglican denomination find him disruptive enough to label him evil.  

What I’m seeing in these two men is a much more global tension between the individual seeking a personal stance and the category, which in terms of the black community is crucial to the preservation of power.  Since I’m currently feeling very anti-institutional and since the institutions themselves have fossilized and eroded, it seems an important issue, even a central issue to everything else, generating a host of questionnaires and theories of change.  Add in the other two Gene Robinsons, and we’ve got two more versions, one noisily (literally) counterculture and the other quietly but supportively conventional, though progressive. 

Entering Valier

Like most things in life, one must seek balance if not harmony, but how do you do that?  As a flaming liberal thinker whose lifestyle is even more conservative than this Belgian-diaspora irrigation community I live in, but who is affiliated over fifty years with the violently splintered Blackfeet rez community just to the north, and who is merely tolerant of the Southern Baptist congregation at my elbow (If only they were Progressive Baptists!), I am rather urgently pressed to work on this.

All the feminists and enviros will urge me to look to the land: identify with the larger East Slope community but it is also split -- not splintered, but cleaved between those who (religiously) think the point of human life is prosperity and those who think humans must respect their participation in the planetary interwovenness.  Prosperity is individual (unless you’re a Hutterite) and interwovenness is the ultimate in community, without limits unless you consider the planetary troposphere as the boundary.  And we must do that or suffocate ourselves.  ALL of us.

Browning, MT

This week the Eloise Cobell Trust Fund settlement checks are going out to individuals, whose financial fortunes have been separated from each other by the US Government through the Dawes Act and the imposition of the rules of property developed in Britain and spread through their pre-empted empire.  At the same time the Blackfeet Tribe is trying to consolidate and “clean house” as a community in the interest of keeping at home the profits of a new wave of oil discovery (among other things, like fighting poverty).  The next couple of years will be fascinating to watch.  It is important to realize that there are more players than the tribe at this poker table, this bone game, but that the tribe’s players are new, just elected.  The government, the corporations, the underground culture of booze and drugs, and now new categories, local academics, and check-receiving diaspora Blackfeet are all keeping time with their sticks.

At the same time, the issue presented by the land -- water produced by the Rocky Mountains -- is an uncomfortable but real unifying force.  There is a famous experiment in which two summer camps of boys were encouraged to be rivals, to strive hard against each other in competition and make that opposition central to their lives.  It worked, all too easily.  But the two camps were dependent on the same water system.  The experimenters deliberately interdicted the water in a way that could only be repaired by the cooperation of the two camps.  The boys worked together -- carrying rocks, digging, planning, joining pipes.  By the time the water was running again, the boys were a single community, connected by many small friendships.

There are two water systems originating in the East Slope: one runs north/south in a rain and snow run-off belt;  the other is man-made and runs along the boundary between Canada and the US which happens to be high land due to volcanic activity, but not high enough to draw much water.  The pipe and diversion systems run parallel to the east-west railroad which prompted settlement dependent on that water.  Now the system is aging out.

The water coming off the Rockies is regulated by water law, a water master, a water court.  The trouble is that the humans have mostly ignored it and now the differences in development between the rez and the rest must be reconciled.  It will hurt, but there are guidelines.  The water along the High-Line is dependent on non-governmental sources and one-time funds.  The two communities created by water use face different problems.

It seems to me that the same split is between human-dependent systems and land-dependent systems throughout the world.  As much as we are in tension between individual and community, we are also in tension between places that are easy to live in and places that are pretty damn tough.  But the binary is on a sliding scale.  In summer and fall the East Slope and even the High Line are wonderful windswept spaces of light and grass.  In winter you might as well be at the North Pole.  

The easier the environment, the more the emphasis can be pushed toward the self-sufficient individual.  The tougher it is, the more people must unify to address survival.  Tough social conditions produce one kind of “Gene Robinson” and clearly supportive institutions help another sort of “Gene Robinson.”   It’s the transitions and reconciliations that are turbulent.

"WILL THIS BE ON THE TEST?" (Mountain Climbing)

The Rockies seen from Valier

Since I’m living on the East Slope of the Rockies, the three things that the mountain range means to me are 1) a reservoir of snow for summer water, 2) the creation of catabatic winds (now blowing) that give us warmth in winter and 3) a rain shadow that prevents forestation so that this remains a vast ancient grassland with the trees confined to the foothills, the coulees or on the refugia volcanic cones.

What mountains mean to Barry Greer (an elision of Macgregor) is 1) a challenge fit for a Highlander, 2) an escape from rules and authorities, 3) a way to explore his identity by challenging its limits.  Or course, there’s that little matter of adrenaline addiction as well.  And to use a pre-Christian religious metaphor, mountains can be Jacob’s ladder.  He lives in the rain trench that is the Willamette Valley between the Coast Range and the Cascades, which present a formidable series of peaks.

The text of this review as well as the pith of the issue is that the way we think of mountains changes over time and place.  The vision of the North Sister in the Cascades is what pulled Greer through the near-death of cancer and its near-lethal cure.  My own challenge was crossing Rocky Mountain passes in winter on my UU circuit-riding rounds as a stubborn middle-aged ministry "broad."  The two approaches are close enough together to establish another principle: that the best of writing about mountains is based on experience.

Middle and North Sister taken from summit of the South Sister

Any contemporary professor assigning the "North Sister Protocols", which is a mind-opening assortment of essays published in the past, will be asked “Is this gonna be on the test?” The education system works now by increments, data, steps, entitlements, proof, and political viability. We read the little squabbles about who did what when, like those between Krakauer and Mortenson, literary mountaineers.  Cheap thrills.  I’d like to read what Greer thinks of them.  

The first publishers of this material include:  Appalachia, Climbing, FreeSolo Press, Summit, Orion, Oregon Conifer, Wild Oregon, Dog River Review, and High Plains Literary Review.  Oregon Sierra Club, the Oregon Natural Resources Council, and the Nature Conservancy.    The pieces sketch a topography of mountain climbing literature.  

Some quick quotes:

On the laws forbidding solo climbs:  The best explanation for the paradoxical public attitude toward solo climbing, then, is political threat, a threat to recognized values, to doing something for personal rather than state reasons and to doing it without first getting permission. In short, it is a threat to group cohesion, control and authority.

A challenge to academic values:  That particular generation gap is nothing new. The hippie/yuppie generation is far from the first to decide that human life moved not inevitably upward from poverty toward never-ending material gain, spiritual enlightenment, and the Internet.

Growing up as a Preacher’s Kid:  My father wandered all his working life, leaving the South in search of spiritual and material progress. We never lived in the same house for more than three years; I never felt a sense of what my wife calls, "connection" until I discovered "Greer" to be a contraction and sept of Highland Scot "MacGregor." My father remains restless, irritated, searching after Progress.

Glen Coe in the Scots Highlands

Roots:  I seem to have come full circle after a seven generation diaspora for Jacobite rebellion against British imperial progress. I'm still against the forced unity of Scotland and England, love mountains because they happen to be there and have no roads to allow infiltration of dubious Saxon modernism. 

History:  American wilderness historian Roderick Nash suggests that the idea (and it is an idea because it originates in our minds) of being lost appeared when humans separated themselves from the natural world. Only when we left a hunting and gathering existence and stopped moving through nature, only when we built fences to protect cultivated fields did we begin to think of something called wilderness.

Compare and contrast:  American environmental writing, or what used to be called nature writing, split, I think, about a hundred years back into two distinct schools: the Muir and the Burroughs schools.

East coast essayist John Burroughs preferred to wait for nature to come to him. "One has only to sit in the woods or fields, or by the shore of the river or lake, and nearly everything of interest will come around to him, the birds, the animals, the insects."

The Burroughs school had its origins in Emerson and Thoreau and remains dominant today, represented by writers such as Annie Dillard, John McPhee, and Barry Lopez. Observation of natural phenomena is preferred by these writers over experience in nature.

Being a writer:  Anger is the greatest prose motivator in the world, one of the best techniques known to humanity for getting past blank page terror.

And I would add that moral indignation is a bottomless well of rage, the Vesuvial inkwell fit for a pen made of Condor quill. (Melville.)  The fiction called “The First” is about the ambiguity of summiting solo by default.  When others are involved, there are moral dilemmas, to say nothing of the elusiveness of fact.  Writing is like that as well.

But some of the ground Greer is covering has shifted.  He doesn’t provide dates of publication for the pieces in this anthology -- only their venues.  Building on the solid foundation of Nash’s “Wilderness and the American Mind,” as well as a sturdy family background of Baptist ministers, Greer comes back and back to the split idea that has sped many an intelligent and athletic young misfit into the mountains:  nature is good/culture is bad.  Wilderness is good/civilization is bad.  The proposed enterprise is to find oneself by hitting one’s boundaries in the wilderness -- physically and mentally -- in faith that the peace it will give your soul will either equip you to do better among civilized men or you’ll at least know who you are.

But Greer is old-fashioned. One piece describes the advice of an old-fashioned editor telling a beginner to read all the best nature writers and then find his own voice.  Today few editors would understand the concept of “best” being a matter of the quality of writing, nor would they spend time counseling writers.  They want books to pass the “test” of high sales potential, as demonstrated by previous performance.  Ground-breaking loses money.  And they want to buy books already edited, proofed, indexed, footnoted, illustrated and supplied with blurbs.

It’s not that Nash is discredited, but that he is -- well -- maybe transcended by the stunning insights of recent science.  Science mysticism.  In Corvallis -- half cow college, half liberal enclave -- the word has not quite soaked in yet, but it will, that culture and nature have merged, wilderness and city are enmeshed, the sacred and the secular cannot be kept apart.  The cutting edge is not Christian or even Abrahamic but near-Buddhist, even as China suffocates itself in progress.  Consult the Bioneers, the Edge, even Tedtalks.

The obstacle that makes a person despair can reveal new ways to go -- a climber knows that.  If conventional publishing and review venues are blocked, then there are pdf’s and old ladies who sit in the back bedroom reviewing books, hoping the wind from the Rockies won’t tear the roof off her house.  (The library had an anemometer on top, but it blew away.)

Mt. Katahdin in Maine which challenged Thoreau.

"SEVEN TWO: A FIREFIGHTER'S STORY"

Barry Roberts Greer sent me a free pdf of the book I’m reviewing here, called “Seven Two: A Firefighter’s Story” and I’m glad he did.  I’m not sure what the title means and to me it doesn’t matter much anyway.  The book is dedicated to Beckett, but could almost as well be dedicated to Kafka.  This is a triptych based on personal experience, partly autobio-graphical, but jazzed up to make a story.  

Years ago when I was in the ministry, I had a parishioner who once had a high-pay lawyer’s career but junked it in order to come West and learn how to repair small motors.  He found it FAR more satisfying.  “In law,” he said, “Everyone asks you what YOU think and there is no real answer.  But with small motors, if the thing doesn’t work, you ask how to fix it, they tell you, and then it works.”  In short, that man’s insight and the insight of Greer’s book are the same -- though they head in opposite directions since Greer started with a do-able physical job.  A physical, needed, definitive job is by far the most satisfying kind of work a person can have.  Somehow our society has the prestige and status quotients of the two turned around, the reverse of what might seem logically to be the due rewards.  If you risk your life, endure pain and irreversible damage in order to help others, you get paid less, like soldiers on food stamps.  (Until they cancel food stamps.)

The first part of this book, about learning to be an effective firefighter, is full of technical information and incident analysis, as well as a bit of the usual team dynamics as shown on a good TV series.  I loved it, reading along as fast as I could to soak it all up, trying to keep back all the personal stories that memory kicked up because in a small rez town in the Sixties we ALL responded to fires and because we were building a foundry with high awareness of the fire-tigers we might release.  If I hadn’t been born a woman and raised a wary tight-assed Presbyterian, I would have loved to be a firefighter.  But given the realities, I made a cat’s choice.  (Watching.  Reading.)  Life pulled me in anyway.  (Adrenaline junkie.  Forget testosterone.)

To match expertise and team cooperation with high adrenaline emergencies must have been in human genes from the beginning.  It is hugely satisfying -- I know from my animal control years.  But the damage does come.  In the protagonist’s case it was trauma from a falling beam to the back of his skull that nearly destroyed his eyesight.  Starting over, he went back to school, only to suffer testicular cancer, very common among firefighters -- it used to afflict chimney sweeps.  Soot is not good for tender tissues.

This book is about survival of an individual in the face of corrupt group dynamics -- as I’ve been framing my thinking for a while now. The second panel of the series is in the jungle of Lansing, MI, where politics is . . . well, you can guess because by now the systems of corruption and power are so common throughout so much of the country.  Much of this is long-standing.  He takes the same escape route as earlier: more education.

Surely, the reader thinks, now he has found the sacred grounds of American democracy where professors educate the leaders of tomorrow and all is grounded in the highest principles of the founders.  But, sadly, he discovers -- as so many have before him -- that academic politics is as cut throat as bootlegging or drug peddling.  I started skimming.  The politics of religious denominations, of state and city governments, of public schools, of publishing, of infrastructure co-ops -- you name it and the same shenanigans go on in spite of all the transparency and all the clever organizational design strategies.  (I once thought organizational design would save us all.)  Especially in an economy where the people who are on the front lines are paid the least, forced into working two and three jobs and postposing family and house-ownership, no one has time or energy for reform.  In a college setting they call the poor guys stuck with teaching bonehead English to people who slid through high school on good looks the “comp dogs.”  There ought to be a name for university presidents with good hair and hard-driving wives.  And a name for the people who went back to school because they believed it would mean better jobs.  Like, "gut-shot."

Greer brought his dilemma to the listserv of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, which used to be a loose and contentious bunch of wiseacres and adventurers but has now somehow become kind of cautious and polite.  He wanted them to read this book and three others (I’ll do it and report) but most are putting all the energy and attention they have into their own survival.   

Graham Spanier and Bill Clinton

By the end section I was outright skipping.  There is a LOT of the kind of detailed trial-level indictment material that I have neither the mind nor the motivation to read.  I don’t CARE about all that heaped-up wrong-doing.  It’s banal, it’s everywhere, it’s Kafka, it’s Beckett.  It’s surrealism in defense against despair.  The whole big picture has gone screwy and we need broad strokes, on the level of culture change, to get us back to any kind of rationality.  

Attacking the founders of a listserv is a self-destructive way to go forward -- it’s running into the burning building.  But if it gets people to read the material, does the end justify the means?   We used to have a high school counselor, a pretty effective guy.  A kid would do some obnoxious, possibly self-destructive, thing -- like attempting suicide -- and the bitter old women would say,  “Oh, they’re just looking for attention.”  Haw would answer, “Well, yup.  And so we ought to just give it to them.  They must really need it and we might learn something.”  He knew that a belittling dismissal is really a defense on the part of people who don’t want to get involved, to risk their own comfortable lives.  NOT good fire fighters!  But how much can we ask from people?

Back a while I made it a point to search out and read books about emergency responders: how did they cope, how did they survive, how did they let themselves off the hook when interventions failed?  It was partly because of my brother who had head trauma in the front of his skull and eventually died on the street in Eugene.  I didn’t know he could have qualified for disability, but anyway he refused any medical advice out of that Willamette Valley hippie cynicism that no authority figure knows anything anyway and fear that they would label him crazy.  In the end Greer doesn’t offer a solution except to go push your body up into the mountains where you can feel real -- if frozen -- again and rely only on your own survival skills.  (A few too many people are out on the trails pursuing that end already.)

Everyone just has to make their own way, whether or not the group approves.  What’s miserable is when in their disapproval they try to destroy you.  The group loves more than anything else the Status Quo and will fight change.  I try to keep my head down.  Mostly.  Thanks for the book, Barry Roberts Greer, provocateur.  Fire belly.  Things may change.