THE SONG OF THE TURTLE

These many recent breakthroughs about how neurons work are possible because now we have the ability to look at one cell at a time, to see messages go slipping down the axons to the next cell, to figure out what’s happening to the molecules in the cell, even which atoms of the mitochrondria are going on walkabout and what it means when electrons jump.  We know now that the neocortex is six layers thick and the layers are connected through and through by columns.  Only mammals have this, but ALL mammals have this.  All mammals have that neocortex wrapped around the brain.  Only humans have a PRE-FRONTAL neocortex behind their forehead, over their eyes.

http://3tags.org/article/for-the-first-time-researchers-see-structure-that-allows-brain-cells-to-communicate 

But recently, by being able to describe cell by cell, the scientists have figured out that birds do have neocortex, but it’s not in sheets wrapped around the rest of the brain.  If it’s a matter of how many neurons they have, they’re smarter than monkeys, so numbers can’t be the whole story.

“Both the mammalian neocortex and a structure in the bird brain called the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) originate from an embryonic region called the telencephalon. But the two regions mature into very different shapes, with the neocortex made up of six distinct cortical layers while the DVR contains large clusters of neurons called nuclei.”

It appears that one little nuclei of neurons is what enables birds to sing, and the premise is that an equivalent, possibly “Broca’s brain”, is the same thing in humans and enables us to speak.  Our words are songs.

“A similar experiment was conducted in a species of turtle, and revealed yet another anatomical possibility for neocortex-like cells. Instead of a six-layer neocortex or a cluster of nuclei, the turtle brain had layer 4- and 5-like cells “distributed along a single layer of the species' dorsal cortex.

If turtles had that little nuclei, perhaps they could sing, but the Song of Solomon meant turtledoves.  There are no singing reptiles.  Right?

Brains are cumulative — that means that the old brain versions are not discarded when new ones develop, but rather the old parts are kept whether changed and newly useful, or simply there, or interfering.  The connecting filaments wind back and forth through old and new.

Brains are ecologies, not homogenous tissues but clusters of specialized but communicating cells, some grouped into organs and others as independent as the original eukaryotic one-celled animals we came from, still capable of telling which direction is forward and what the environment tastes like.  

I don’t understand this passage, so I’ll just note it and leave the wiki-links.  “There are two types of cortex in the neocortex, the proisocortex and the true isocortex. The pro-isocortex is a transitional area between the true isocortex, and the periallocortex (part of the allocortex). It is found in the cingulate cortex (part of the limbic system), in Brodmann's areas 24, 25, 30 and 32, the insula and the parahippocampal gyrus.”

So far what I get about a lot of brain stuff is that they can tell the little bits are subtly different and sometimes what they do, so they just label them to make a way of talking about them.  “Archicortex is a type of cortical tissue that consists of three laminae (layers of neuronal cell bodies).  It has fewer layers than both neocortex, which has six, and paleocortex, which has either four or five. Because the number of laminae that compose a type of cortical tissue seems to be directly proportional to both the information-processing capabilities of that tissue and its phylogenetic age, paleocortex is thought to be an intermediate between neocortex and archicortex in both aspects, and archicortex is thought to be the oldest and most basic type of cortical tissue.”

So now I’m going to say that ideas are just big echoes of brain tissue;  first we label, then we guess, then we test -- often by ablation which means destruction.  The brain is limited by the size of the skull, the turtle is limited by the size of its shell, and people are limited by the boundaries of their experiences.  My visitors over the past couple of weeks were all friends in the Sixties when I was in Browning.  Unlike the people in Valier, who are full of fantasies about the rez except for those who moved here after years there, these friends had real experience in the same place, but a time long ago, a time that amounts now to a far distant place.

We all left for various reasons, some of us continued to cross paths in Portland or maybe just on the Internet, and so our constructed idea-shells are quite different.  As it turns out, because since 1999 I’ve deliberately limited myself to this little house lined with binders of writing and books for reading, I’m probably the most different. Some of the characteristics that I have strengthened for writing, are not good for socializing.  For instance, my rigid daily workflow or my long chains of logic and failure to pause for response.  Hard on conversation.  It seemed to me that they just didn’t believe much of what I said.  They were urban-suspicious, rejecting of difference, and echoed the conventional media, though it's the subset for educated urban people.

Portland, OR

They don’t care to know all this detailed stuff about the brain or thinking.  Why should they?  They cling to the world of our college years when there was science over here and humanities over there and “religion” was anything it said it was.  They still think "church."  All these friends are writers in a passing way, but still are totally naive about the developments of print and publishing over the past decade.  When I get intense about it, they ask what I’d like for dessert.

But somehow that culture — polite and limited, competent but not quite informed, charming but exasperating — must be wrapped around by layers of the one I live in — not the one represented by a physical town, but the one built since 1999 out of ideas as they evolved into an ecology of premises, many of them created out of the destruction/conversion of dyads from oppositions into interacting continuums.  My ideas are worrisome, full of danger, crossing into taboos they’ve skirted all their lives, while using secrecy as a shield.  They think I’ve been hoaxed.

The Pearl District

I’m not really here and yet I’m more deeply here than I am anyplace else.  Because I live in ideas and one of the strongest ideas is that my body in its grappling is my brain/self but the grapple extends through empathy into the world far outside my body.  I just have to remember to eat and pay the bills.  My friends get that (they fed me) and they’re doing well.  All I can give them is my time and my ideas, but it’s awkward.  They accept politely and lay them aside.  We don’t quite have the right structure for our brain cells to communicate.  It’s okay.  But it makes for incoherent posts like this one.

WHO CAN CONTAIN BOYS?

A child should be embraced in loving arms as the first container of life outside the womb.  This is a given of survival.  Even before birth the child is experiencing and creating the contents of his own brain/body which are interwoven through the process of being alive, centered in the bony chalice of the brain, flickering chemical/electrical neurons weaving patterns that are the floor of the rest of identity.  By the time the baby gets to language, the patterns are entrenched and unconscious.

What the circumstances of birth and the ensuing years will establish to the rest of society is what category to put you in.  The first decision will be “like me” versus “other”.  Then “others to be feared,” and “others who should fear you.”  What all that means in terms of attitudes and behaviors is the source material for novels and psychotherapy.  Some distinctions are so subtle they are hard to understand for those outside the system: can you tell a Hutu from a Tutsi?  Even they had to resort to documentation.

The attitude of separation ends in differences in survival and encourages the polarizing of continuums into binaries.  Lately we’ve been challenging the binaries of gender identity, not least because such dichotomies underlie prejudices that damage the whole culture and destroy lives, even entitling murder directly by violence or indirectlys by withholding the basic needs for life, not excluding meds, but including food, shelter from weather, basic cleanliness, safe sleep.

I’m talking about the category of “boys.”  

Big and little, blonde or black, thin or thick, cheerful or morose, “nice” or “wicked.”

There is another set of binaries that controls how we react to these differences. Among a myriad of reactions is the idea that we will kill the bad ones.  Or we will “save” them by taking them home and making them be like us.  We will use them for our own purposes, whether chimney-sweeping or as sexual objects.  We will consider them toys, playing with them so they are made fools or maybe in "good" play so that they pass small hurdles that improve their skills.  We can teach them to belong to us or to belong to themselves.  But they are not belongings.

We are slow to realize that it’s possible to be a mix of boy/girl -- anatomically. hormonally, psychologically.  A “boy” can feel he is really a “girl” or a “boy” can actually have the nuclear DNA code for “girl”.  More than that, there are many dimensions to being one gender rather than another:  physically, boybrain-shaped (yes, there are differences), and testosterone-powered boys might nevertheless be disinterested in what the culture thinks a male should be, which is to say:  physical to the point of violence; competitive; scientific; dominating; tolerant of grease, dirt and pain; indifferent to aesthetics and nurturing; constantly “up” for sex.  All these are arbitrary markers for the cultural container we call “men” or “boys.”  Conan the Barbarian fits, but the man who invented the character of Conan does not.

A certain kind of man -- obviously an aggressive, powerful, competent person -- might have a son who is thoughtful, even poetic, slight, better at reading than manual labor -- and might interpret that son as “girlie.”  Using the only tools he has, he might try to shape the boy as a blacksmith shapes metal:  hot rage, steady pounding.  Since boys are not horseshoes, the result might be a smashed container for a life.

Now that we’re beginning to accept the container we call gay, we still have a lot of sorting to do in terms of other sub-aspects.  Consider the possibilities.

A boy who is physiologically an outlier on the spectrum of possibilities: an “elf” or an “orc.”

A boy who simply doesn’t match the culture that contains him.

A boy who reaches adolescence and -- when his hormones turn on -- finds his desire is atypical or low-powered or uncomfortably high-powered. 

A boy who realizes that his sexual desire is focused on his own sex instead of the opposite, but not other gays -- only straight guys.

A boy who is abused so much that he is confused about whom to love, how to love, how desire is different from love, which is different from the expectations of the culture.

A boy who desires sex with one gender but prefers forming bonds/attachments of intimacy with the opposite gender.  There are other ways of dividing up the dimensions of gender distinctions among different cultural “containers.”  Aggressively physical in dance instead of sports; delicately creating porcelain objects instead of welded steel public art.

Some aspects of this will be considered transgressive by the culture, at least one culture, and may be punished.  For instance, drug-taking or sexwork.  The punishment may be overt, like confinement by this incarceration-crazed society, the ultimate idea being that containing is what imposes order.  Or it can be exclusion from all containers, even locking the dumpsters that are a source of food for street people.  Like other feral and wild mammals, these boys are forced to find or make burrows, nests, out of the debris of a culture so rich that it cannot help excreting, dumping, trashing -- people as well as objects.  People forced to BE objects in solitary confinement that empties their bone chalice skull, snuffs out the fire that burns there.

Then there are the diseases, but none of diseases is specific to males.  NONE.  (Maybe sperm diseases.)  Microbes don't care about human sex.  They are opportunists of skin, blood, bone and flesh.  TB, Hep C, Herpes, and, of course, HIV.  

Containers can be protective or destructive.  Most are unconscious and managed by metaphor, but if those metaphors are examined -- often through art -- they can be brought up to the surface for moral reflection.  Which assumptions are necessary?  Which walls need to be taken down?  Why do we think a wall will keep people from migrating or smuggling in the first place?  Why do we think that a walled community will guard us against trouble when we are most endangered by those inside with us?  Like our families.

What Lakoff and Johnson try to get us to “see” is that in order to change these categories that punish boys for who they are, we must EXPERIENCE who they are.  More than that, we need to see what they see.  Luckily -- as organizations like Real-Stories Gallery, Smash Street Boys, and Show Me Your Life -- have discovered, there is a container that can do this: digital screens.  Forsaking words as too many levels removed from raw sensoria, the boys themselves are able to take you into their worlds -- both internal and of the streets.

Boys who desire males and identify with that.  (Gay, one style or another)

Boys who do sex work because their bodies are all they have. 

Boys who have been so abused and confused that they are drifting, letting anything happen.

Boys with infected and deprived bodies.

Boys stigmatized, marked as victims and constantly in mortal danger.

Boys who have lost the boundaries of behavior that signal to the larger culture that they are    safe to others.

Boys who challenge and try to smash every attempt to contain them because all of them have meant confinement, torture, invasion.

Why should we embrace them?  Because we are the ones who made them that way and because we know what we need to do.  We just don’t want to.  Asking the reason for the refusal is the most dangerous question of all.  The answer has to be action, resources.  From ALL of us.