THE GREAT SEA OF TIME IN WHICH WE LIVE

Cannon Beach

Much of Oregon’s coast is not sand but volcanic rock.  The exception is that the mouth of the Columbia River creates a very long shallow wash that makes the tide really work to come ashore, but which the Japanese current has bent north powerfully enough to create “Long Beach,” a seemingly stable island still attached to the continent on the Washington State side.  There’s a town that specializes in amusements like shooting galleries and salt water taffy.

To the south the volcanic rock is sharp and surf-pounded.  The animal life, which is abundant, is mostly equipped to hang on, as opposed to the clams over in the sand which are captured by digging and can dig away from you very quickly indeed.  On the rock, the creatures must be pried off.  If you’ve ever tried to collect a starfish, you know that you have to tear off their multitude of legs to get them.

When you walk on the rock, you must be wary, because the rock has holes worn in it that create water spouts when the surf hits hard.  Without warning you might be drenched by the marine equivalent of Old Faithful, roaring.

I’m raising these images to discuss print-talk on websites, specifically on Aeon which has resourcefully split itself into two venues: one is curated and edited articles of good quality on the announced topics of the group, which are all honorable disciplines like those one might encounter in academia.  That’s the beach, the result of aeons of depositions.  

The other one is a parallel environment, volcanic and stony, featuring a whole lot of mostly men clinging to their educations which are mostly out-dated from my point of view.  Their generalizations are limpets based on only the life they know in their circles, their margins of the landscape.

All these factors apply to me, of course, because I’m going up and down the coast while living on the prairie which hasn’t been a sea for a very long time. It's name is the Bearpaw Sea.  It's the name of something that's only evidence now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoRxn-7nWNg.   
Here’s a dated and amusing explanation given by two college-aged geeks.  They also discuss baculites, which are the “buffalo stones” (iniskim) of prairie tribal people.  These fossils, I will propose, are good religious icons.  Out-dated.  Which fascinate theologians in wet suits, carrying their own oxygen supply.  The devil arrives.  A very long and toothed serpent.  They eat Albertonectes.

Albertonectes

I consciously live in metaphor, which is why I’m able to step away from the “given” so easily.  When I read what the young ‘uns write, I see that they are much more easily metaphorical than their elders.  The people lamenting the corruption and overgrowth of the academic world want to return it to the way it was, with proper grammar and punctuation.  The younger thinkers are trying to disassemble the old Notre Dame (Alma Mater) schools into parts more suitable for an internet age.  

Which elements are skills, which are content, which are structuring systems?  What evidence is there?  What can anyone do alone, which require resources, and which can be accessed through older, different, more experienced people?  In the end everyone learns, no matter what.  

The autodidacts of the world are always with us, actively seeking, which means they don’t need expensive universities with pretty campuses.  But can they really get an education at a “mail order” institution that has sold its remaining assets, the ones originally provided by founders at great cost and effort?  Can there be an “auto-academy,” unattached from the kelp forest and washed up on the beach?

Seaside, OR

The popular conception is that an education will get one a better job, providing a filter and certification that will signal competence.  In fact, the advantage I see is that it gives access to bonding and relationships that form friendship communities.  This is how many people get high level jobs: they know someone with contacts.  This is how one gets published, how one gets to speak at the expensive fuel-using conferences where everyone flies in to attend, and how one finds a proper marriage partner.

This is not evil or wrong — it’s just how the world works.  I was surprised to see it demonstrated in the comments to Aeon issues.  Many of these people know each other, expose their ongoing friction, and tread around in the same old circles like oxen bound to stone grinding mills.  Immigrants with bad grammar must struggle.  Women are shooed away — few of them bother anyway.  Why be dashed on the rocks by the forces of sexism when the library is open?

I love mixed metaphors.  Even more lovable can be depictions, like maybe an octopus with a book in each tentacle and spectacles on its separately-evolved but humanoid eyes.  Sci-fi.  That is, extending what is known into the virtual world.  It’s much easier to explain what “virtual” means to people who have been playing as avatars in online games.  I could not persuade my professors and would not be able to persuade some of the commenters on Aeon that it is possible, even likely, that there is is NO ultimate reality that never changes, that is a rock to which one may pinion oneself with a thousand little sucker-feet.  The real shape-shifter is the world itself.  We only exist through fitting our lifespans into survivable intervals, powering our computers with electricity derived from Cretacous coal that was once the lagoons and jungles along the Bearpaw Sea.

The genome analysers working on the deep past (much later than the Bearpaw creatures) suggest that neanderthal males were not able to produce viable offspring with homo sapien women (at least in the 600,000 year ago versions) because of missing genes.  But that around 100,000 to 60,000 years ago the babies survived, endowing us with depression, addiction, allergies and red hair.  This is all “maybe, possibly, tends to” stuff which I predict will soon develop into a tirade blaming X chromosomes, since one of the genes seems maybepossiblytendsto be one that interprets a fetus as a cancer.  How modern.

Can we actually hold physically mature women accountable for the interaction of molecules 600,000 years ago?  Yup.  If we are old abalones clinging to the rocks, mostly throwing their code into the water and taking no responsibility for their fate or the physical cost of creating eggs, we're out of the loop.  Female as evil and destruction is a steady theme in science, because science is institutional and political, just like the other religions.  The difference is that unlike most theologians, good scientists are open to new information, esp. the ones that reconfigure the thought world into an entirely new virtuality.

In the days of my childhood when we walked the beach, we found gorgeous blue-green hand-blown glass net floats that came all the way from Japan.  The glass had bubbles in it.  The spheres had floated unscathed across the Pacific.  Now when we walk along the Pacific coast we find tennis shoes, washed overboard from cargo ships.  Lucky if any of them make pairs.  Even luckier that they can trace the ocean currents that control our shipping and our weather.

In my childhood we visited a bit of flotsam that was two dead whales, one very large and one rather small.  At the time I thought of them as parent and child, but they weren’t even the same species.  Maybe our thinkers are also developing into two "species", one that clings and one that digs.  But there are also shape shifters like the octopus.

gray whale carcass

THINKING ABOUT EVOLUTIONS

Since keeping a focus on “deep time” or primal evolution means always working two dimensions against each other (one might say horizontal against vertical), one is forced into different kinds of sequencing.  One is the cause-and-effect of time, one thing emerging from the circumstances of what was just previous. Another is a hierarchy of complexification, simple things co-existing and interpenetrating to create something new, presumably better.  When thinking about the evolution of the brain, one is always conscious of working from earliest to most recent, from simple to complex, and — we hadn’t thought about this in the past — pruning or editing for one reason or another, often imposed by the environment.

So the kiwi devolved from Tyrannosaurus.

What makes an advantage will persist, what makes a disadvantage will disappear, and what is neutral might come along for the ride but maybe not.  The environment might change everything.  Particularly in the case of hominins who have evolved a cultural environment, a social network that can change quickly, a kind of interpersonal neural network now made actual by the internet.

In every hominin’s brain “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” in a quick sketch of evolution.  It’s not that we’re descended from apes, but that the development of the individual retraces the evolutionary steps of the species — from its conception to its birth, every animal passes through the evolutionary steps of the species, from one-celled animals to advanced life-forms.  This is true of the human brain:  at 25 days the embryonic brain resembles the brain of a worm; at 40 days the embryonic brain resembles the brain of a vertebrate like a fish; at 100 days the embryonic brain resembles a mammalian brain.  At 5 months the embryonic brain resembles the brains of other primates.

In previous posts I’ve talked about the idea of the fourth trimester.  It is not until the end of the first three months after birth that the brain begins to seem like that of a hominin that has a prefrontal cortex, but it still needs to “install” the operations, the operating system, of what that brain can do.  The caretaker (mom) will do this over the next three years.  You could say that cultural apps are being installed.

The personal intrauterine evolution, the construction of that physical brain through its stages and the body in which the brain dwells, may have glitches.  We knew about things like cleft palate, spina bifida, club foot and even intestines that develop outside the body rather than inside, or arms and legs that fail to lengthen.  We have not been able to tell what is going on in the brain as it develops.  Now there are all sorts of theories about what neuron structures and choices during gestation might do.  Some claim it might determine the orientation of desire, for instance, which is always understood as either/or because that’s the way our culture sorts people.  This drastically underestimates the possibilities.

Until recently, many people — philosophers but not just philosophers — achieved their understanding through the contemplation of their belly buttons.  That is, they are attached so thoroughly to their cultures that they cannot step outside the cultural circle except by scientific methods — which are also cultural.  Those who study culture are from a culture, even one that struggles to be objective which they think IS what scientific methods are.  But science is as much subject to evolution as everything else.  

In particular the methods of science have depended upon introspection (belly buttons) and meta-introspection — that is, reflection upon how one is going about gathering evidence and sorting it and what sort of evidence counts as valid, and trying to guess what is shaping one’s ignorance: what one DOES NOT know.  What are we missing?  Could we find clues in the structure of an organ like the brain?  Could we devise experiments that would indicate how people are thinking without slanting the info?

“Science” comes out of a specific culture that evolved on the European continent from a creature structure (with a culture) that evolved on the African continent, but migrated across the world’s continents, always evolving as it went.  Part of European culture is constant sorting to see who is the “best,” the “highest.”  It is quick to use evolution to prove that the best among Europeans is the best kind of human it is possible to be.  Because lesser humans were defined as slaves or even beasts.  "Best" meant high-born and educated as far as was possible.

"The Young Doctor Freud"  PBS

Out of this comes the idea that introspection is a “high” and valuable practice.  And then Freud’s idea (I just watched the movie called “The Young Doctor Freud”) was that if you relaxed and reflected, your core issues would rise to the top where they were visible, like one of those party 8-balls.  Many of the core issues were about sex, the most distortable, tabooed and intense human cultural and physical issues, right at the belly button of the survival of the species.  (The movie about “The Young Chanel” was more fun and just as sexy.  Of course, the plots of both movies are about the evolution of remarkable individuals who did not fear taboos.  At least in their adolescent stage.)

The trouble with introspection is that it only deals with what is “thought” and conscious.  But the evolution of ideas, as individuals and as cultures, is largely UN or SUB conscious and not accessible to introspection.  Even an outside observer would be interpreting through his or her own consciousness.  Much is being left out, without the person realizing it is missing. When I say this on Aeon, the educated Euro men get angry.

It is the advent of metaphor that makes way for writing, in which little marks are metaphors for sounds and sound patterns become words, metaphors for concepts and objects.  This is not objective and rational.  At this point some people begin to hear voices.  Voices are essentially music, which are brain-perceived sequential patterns of sound.

Paul Otteson

I’m going back over this ground in part because Paul Otteson, a musician and romantic quite a bit younger that myself, just now responded to my old comment on Aeon about Julian Jaynes’ book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.”  I assigned Jaynes to a social class.  His father was a Unitarian minister, as was I for a while.  The book was an effort to understand the brain, keeping in mind that it’s in two halves.  Jaynes was a psychologist.  His cousin, Nat Lauriat, was the Unitarian minister who supervised me as a student intern.  Clearly, I’m assigning Otteson to a cultural class niche.  

Veronique Greenwood than commented, approving of what I said.  She is a science writer, maybe the same age as Otteson, but not the same style.  Not in the same culture class.  Otteson is a musician.

Veronique Greenwood

Unitarian Universalists at present are like Otteson and Greenwood, partly romantic, wanting to sing to small animals, and partly scientific, wanting scrupulous information.  This is a problem and it is cultural.  All three of us have good minds.  The two sons of Unitarian ministers — from the old days when they were trying to be objective, logical, and superior — have special problems.  I would love to see a comparison of e e cummings (also the son of a Unitarian minister) and Julian Jaynes.  (Nat Lauriat’s father ran a bookstore in Boston.)  In fact, Aeon — the online magazine that proposed this debate of comments — is pretty much in the same split space culturally.

My divergence is because of fifty years of experience with Blackfeet culture, which is not European or African, but a Third Force that I can’t really explain very well so far.  More present than people realize.  It’s phenomenological, oral language-based, HIGHLY metaphorical.  The metaphors are more than rural — land-bound.  Most of the thinking about metaphor has been done by academics like Jaynes and Lauriat.  They discredit experience and trust their belly buttons.  Maybe I’m more aligned with Jared Diamond who spent so many years in New Guinea.  But I think I should catch up with Greenwood. 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/authors/veronique-greenwood/

REMEMBER "DEEP ECOLOGY?"

Some years ago there was a movement called “deep ecology” that tried to get people to look beyond saving their favorite landscape or species so as to get to the roots of the system and the forces that try to derange everything, including humans.  It was severe, even harsh, and didn’t last except as something maybe in the backs of some people’s minds.  Here’s what the Wikipedia writer says:  “Deep ecology is a contemporary ecological and environmental philosophy characterized by its advocacy of the inherent worth of living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, and advocacy for a radical restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas.”  I wish I knew who this writer was -- I would look further for more of his/her writing.  (This is one of the major flaws in wikipedia, that it breaks the chain of attributions.)

I have two problems with this statement:  It only includes living beings, when the ecology always includes -- indeed, derives from -- the environment with all its rocks and rills.  That’s not counting viruses which we haven’t figured out yet.  Are they alive or not?  They certainly participate regardless of human needs.

"Jack Strong"  totalitarianism

The other problem is the human craving for total control.  My movie last night was “Jack Strong,” a painful "true story" about a spy trying to save Poland by collaborating with the US.  It’s not so black-and-white as the usual accounts because it was a Polish film.  In explaining why an intelligent and honorable man would be a spy, they illustrated the effects of totalitarianism.  Most of the reviews of the film were interested in how much money it made: not much.  It was promoted as a thriller, not that total control isn’t a horror.  No human, even with the aid of computers, can plan the world.  

More reassuringly, no human can destroy the world, not even with atomic bombs or plagues or global warming.  It can only change the conditions that make human life possible.  I suspect “deep ecology” dreaded to make that explicit.  But Arne Naess, with this basic idea, prompted a lot of thinking and some pretty effective movements.

“Deep ecology takes a more holistic view of the world human beings live in and seeks to apply to life the understanding that the separate parts of the ecosystem (including humans) function as a whole. This philosophy provides a foundation for the environmental, ecology and green movements and has fostered a new system of environmental ethics advocating wilderness preservation, human population control and simple living.”

An Ayahuasca vision

“The central spiritual tenet of deep ecology is that the human species is a part of the Earth, not separate from it, and as such human existence is dependent on the diverse organisms within the natural world each playing a role in the natural economy of the biosphere. Coming to an awareness of this reality involves a transformation of an outlook that presupposes humanity's superiority over the natural world.”   That knocks out most religious institutions, since institutions need money no matter how elevated their goals may be and the begging program always claims to be superior.  When snails and bamboo pledge and tithe, they can come to the table of argument and budget.  Of course, coal pays its own way, but at a suicidal cost: immolation.

“Deep history” has the paradoxical effect of getting at questions about humans in the future.  To understand who we are and what we have done is -- hopefully -- to figure out what we can do in the future, particularly now that we have this enormous technological ability to perceive how the world fits together from sub-atomic particle to cosmos.  It assures us that every individual person carries this story.  

A first advantage is our new ability to go far deeper than the written word, back to the beginning of spoken language and the development of its structure.  This is done two ways:  the ability to analyze “trace” in human remains, their environment and material culture; and then the new knowledge that human brains actually extend through the whole body since skulls are only the location of the processing centers for information gathered from the skin in or from empathy among living things, esp. our own species.  We can “see” our brains and neurons gathering and sorting.  With empathy -- and even imagination -- we can see others.

We have known that living beings “burn” oxygen or carbon dioxide in a reciprocating cycle through plants without quite understanding how we do it or how we use the energy except for the obvious food and shelter.  Now the strongest theory is that the human mind is dependent on our ability to code sensation of many kinds.  Not only that, but also to form memories and stories by using that information.  It is these that enliven material culture and make us into families, tribes, nations -- and, oh, how much we need to figure out the next step.  It is stories and images that will take us there.  The proof that the desire is already kindled is in the raft of dystopic tales about destroyed cities and a lesser number of idyllic places, usually primitive, childlike, rural or wilderness.

“Deep history” is about these two strands: first language, and metaphorical thinking derived from material culture.  Both are what we call “arts” or “humanities.”  It endangers our ability to weave these ideas to have arts constantly belittled, defunded, or defined in terms of greed, mere commodities.

About the time human fossils and artifacts were being found and the project of organizing thought about them first began, a museum displayed its holdings in terms of their idea about materials.  They grouped the artifacts in a continuum: stone tools, then copper, then bronze, then iron and finally steel.  I suppose now we’d have to add plastic.  From that came the idea of “ages,” the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, et al.  This domination of “progress” required the notion that humans were also getting more clever and upright, in that familiar line from simians to pre-humans to knuckle-dragging Neanderthals to modern humans -- now often mocked by adding a robot or a miserable workaholic.  Recently there has been an overwhelming conviction that everyone was a hunter-gatherer, but then -- partly because of inter-glacial weather changes -- we all converted to agriculturalists who stored grain, domesticated animals, and raised up temples and trading ventures out across the land.

You're just data.

All the lovely bones and hides, ivory and hair, all the vegetation, all the paintings and ceremonies, disappeared except in deep caves.  And one other place: the recent lives of plains buffalo Indians who were hunter-gatherers until a couple of centuries ago.  But also collaborators with dogs and growers of tobacco -- in some places also corn, squash, beans.  They are not gone -- only transformed by horses, pickup trucks, tourists, and computers.  Their memories and visions are there in the arts, which have been part of their salvation.  Check out Native American art -- not just the romantic 19th century stuff but the abstractions like those painted on tipi skins (polymer paint on cotton canvas).  

This is something rarely considered in a Euro-centric world whether you think the tribal population of the Americas came over the Bering Straits or arrived by boat-hopping in pursuit of whales, its genomic core was Asian.  As the world tips towards circum-Pacific Ring of Fire concerns, this becomes more relevant.

By Valentina LaPier

So much to think about, so many stories to frame besides being lost in the galaxies.  So little reason to limit and exhaust ourselves by trying to force everyone into old ways of living.  So much to be learned by sitting on your own doorstep making something with your own hands.  A drum, a sweater, a song, a necklace . . .

FELT MEANING

All my efforts to understand the feeling of the Holy have led to the conviction that all contemporary religions are institutions that claim knowledge of and access to the sacred, but -- hopelessly --  can only echo and derive because they are based on writing.  Words can only point to “felt meanings,” which are inexplicable and unique products of persons interacting with the world that are better expressed by the arts: music, dance, arts, and the other uses of the creating senses.

There is always a lot of interest among people to “create,” but a reluctance to seek felt meanings by interacting with the world, which is the source of what is called “creation” but is really “translation” from felt meaning to its metaphors, which might be only a chord or a shape or a gesture.  It is the metaphors that the institutional religions seize on and claim are unique and privileged: owned.

The felt meanings are bodily sums of the human sensorium.  The written analysis of them in tracts and Bibles and sermons are products of rational thought about the instinct-infused felt meanings.  It is like the analysis of how to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, and even suggestions of how to do it oneself -- but though the descriptions might help you understand it better, they will never enable you to actually do it.  Because the actual creation is in the realm of “felt” meaning, not constructed rational definitions.

I bought a book called “The Felt Meanings of the World: a Metaphysics of Feeling,” by Quentin Smith, which is a careful and reflective observation of what people feel, sorting the happening.  I haven’t read it yet though I’ve had it a while.  Suzanne Langer was doing something similar in her own way.  Universities -- even Divinity Schools -- are about rationality, introspective reflection, theories of analysis.  If you get too emotional, they’ll send you for therapy.  At a Pentecostal Bible school, they’ll accept your ecstasies and miseries, but push them into pre-existing Christian categories, not very sophisticated ones but ones expressed in writing.  The poetic passages -- Song of Solomon or the Psalms -- the ones related to prayer and metaphor -- come closest.  

Otherwise, one must go to the anthropological non-literary religions that the Abramic world will refuse to accept as legitimate.  They are called animistic because they work directly in the metaphors of real objects instead of words, for instance, the skins of animals associated with dance and song that carry the concepts in the Thunder Pipe Bundles of the Blackfeet. 

Religion in words is a hostage to academia and legalistic argument.  Feeling the sacred cannot be argued -- one either feels it or not, though it’s possible to have some sense of it through empathy.  Because of pre-existing definitions meant to capture the power of metaphors, institutional religion cannot allow re-definition of concepts like “God” so that it must always contest the claims of primal, instinctive, poetic perception of the Holy.  This is done by defining, appealing to precedent, invoking authorities, and basically never leaving the functions of the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, a product of mutation and evolution that allows language to be a filter of experience.  This requirement limits accounts of the sacred to those who have mastered professional (professing) systems supported by institutions. 

But systems exist in juxtaposition to other systems, including those of physiology, physics, and even aesthetics, though they are “about” human experience rather than exemplifying it.  Because these macro-categories or disciplines start from different ways of experiencing, they can oppose each other or reinforce each other without arguing about dogma.

Thus, the Bernini portrait of St. Theresa in the throes of spiritual orgasm is inarguable.  It just IS.  And the ISness of it means that sexual experience can be -- as in Song of Solomon -- legitimate, though it is not wordless.  Part of what legitimizes sex is that it is involved in “attachment,” or “bonding,” or the phenomenon of love that has become so badly corrupted, partly through overdependence on words rather than experience.  Quite like religion.

One of the most useful texts for me is Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane.”  In it he points to the feelings we have in what Turner calls “the liminal space.”  We can actually experience the difference between standing or passing through a doorway, or up or down a height, or at the edge of something like the ocean or in a place where something significant has happened.

No doubt this is physiological, a feeling produced by the brain and its subtle sensorium that animals use to keep from falling over cliffs or returning to a dangerous place, though this is a negative way of putting it.  Still, even a one-celled animal senses molecularly what to avoid and what to approach.  As evolution has proceeded, those functions have been elaborated, but any creature that didn’t have those abilities was likely to be eliminated.

It’s a long leap from a paramecium to Gerard Manley Hopkins, but even something as complex as his poetry is basically a construct of senses filtered through language. One could reverse-engineer it to the original experience, and -- indeed -- that’s basically what we do as we read.  Of course, in some times and places authorities will insist on literal meanings and burn you at the stake if you say god/father is just a metaphor.  Some fathers, who believe THEY are god, will also insist with near-lethal punishment and this is the core evil -- not the concepts of god or fathers, nor even their confusion into entitlement -- but the departure from reality, which often means giving up control and recognizing suffering, if only through empathy.  There is no way prosperity is either a privilege or a virtue.  It’s just another ISness.

The first step towards Felt Meaning is awareness through all the senses, every way that the body interacts with the world including gravity, which way one is facing, memory, the state of muscles including the gut, sound, the present chemistry of one’s blood.  The second step is the neurology of recognizing and sorting the information.  The third step is deriving meaning from all those factors.  The fourth is acting on the meaning and sharing evidence with others, writing poems and painting pictures as well as defining words and arguing about them in shared strategies of rational thought.  

The fifth step is renewing awareness of embeddedness, which is a Felt Meaning.  A human is woven of the universe, an instrument of the planet able to produce consciousness and response, thus part of the flow of change, the velocity of creation.  One can feel it.  This is where the future will come from.

ANOTHER BIG SHIFT -- THIS ONE AN INSIDE JOB

I save too much internet stuff and I don’t want to stop doing it long enough to find a techie solution, like a sorting-and-labeling app.  Part of the problem is that I subscribe to atypical and absorbing feeds: the Economist, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, Edge, Aeon, OZY, MedPage Today.   I rarely correspond with individuals, partly because they stay in compartments and I hate compartments.  I’m a cross-disciplinarian (but not a dominatrix), which is a major advantage when a lot of disciplines are collapsing or merging anyway.  This means that some people are stuck in 1950 and others, feeling they are very modern, are stuck in 2000 which was fifteen years ago.  They are often discouraged about life, because the media reporters constantly cry “danger, danger,”  because the editors and publishers want money and crying danger is one effective way to get it.

But the subject is trying to keep track of my downloads.  The one I’m looking for this morning is about the consequences of the leap in brain function that separates us from neanderthals.  I use google to search and find other wonderful things.

The First Narcissus

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/marek-kohn-neanderthals/  a  link which is illustrated with this classic and wonderful image.  I try to save images of the reconstructed neanderthals done by brothers Kohn specifically for museums.  I see a book called “The Singing Neanderthals.”  Oh, I WANT it!  Much of this is coming from brain research -- a shift from sociology or anthropology to instrument data collected inside the skull -- and much of it is coming from the gnomic post-modern thought.  In the past we made an immense social “shift” when we went from governance by power to governance by laws.  Some places or individuals have not caught up yet.

But there was another earlier big shift in brains that made that governing shift possible.  First we had to develop the cell-ability and organ-power to abstract social theories and also to intensify our ability to know what other human beings are feeling and to reflexively look at ourselves.  The main thing that changed between neanderthals and ourselves was our capacity to handle metaphor as a source of order and meaning.  Not little literary comparisons: organizing principles for life itself.

The paragraphs I saved were about the religion-defined culture wars that are destroying so much.  The idea was that right-wingers think that the metaphors they have known since childhood are real.  That is, the abstract felt meanings of the world in baby terms, like the idea that there is some big Person who can control one’s entire life -- which is true for most surviving babies -- becomes an idea they simply cannot give up.  If there is no high being called God or Jehovah or Allah, then there is no meaning to life and the whole thing collapses, so there is a desperate drive to make sure that idea is never challenged.  All theology must begin with an argument about whether there is a God.  But it matters more whether there is a human father.

A religious metaphor with intense survival-level meaning --  giving power to institutions that resort to killing -- is biologically based on competition for resources and ethically justified by seeing rivals as “Other,” as though they were another species in competition for territory.  It takes post-neanderthal sophistication to understand ecology, evolution, and emergence (mutation) with enough confidence to see that the more different peoples (or species) can specialize into related niches, the less competition there is for resources.  

My key principle is that it was not the gold rush miners who got rich, but rather the suppliers and transporters: the guys who got the groceries and equipment to the miners.  In modern terms it is not writers who are making any money, which has been true for a long time, but rather the publishers, the agents, the venues, the reviews, the promotion.  In both cases there is a near-religious belief that if a person strikes gold or writes a best-seller, they will be in paradise.  Those beliefs fuel desires so strong they can become obsessions worth any sacrifice.

Consider our current frenzy about sex and our infantile belief in return to the transcendent bliss of an embrace as though it were not a metaphor but a reality that can’t be put into words.  It’s almost impossible to get people to admit the truth of this.  They also insist on the metaphor of “money” which is not at all real, entirely invented, and infested with theological-level rules and assumptions that justify destruction.

The generator of all these passions is not conscious but part of the "animal brain" that precedes and supports both rationality and consciousness.  We have the desire first, and then justify it before we recognize it.  It’s “well-known” that rationality and ethics are “higher” orders of thought, allowing us to shape and control our “animal emotions.”  And writing, or spoken language, are assumed to be what makes us “better” than animals.   But all words are metaphors.  All written language, whether on paper or via pixels, is metaphor.  Before they can be words they are “felt meanings,” direct experience, sensory life.  

One of the short downloads I can’t find was a discussion of how our (English-writing mostly Euros) alphabet emerged from the eye of the hunter who had learned to perceive and understand tiny cues like the patterns of eyes or tails of prey.  Turn a capital A upside down and you can see the face of a deer -- if you respond to a very old metaphor.  And recognize a deer only from National Geographic vids.

In our obsession over writing we have cut ourselves off from the meanings of the senses that used to be acquired from working fields or doing child care.  In some ways we’ve made the living stories of our surroundings into mathematical constructs.  The next step -- to my mind towards thought impoverishment -- is machine-generated algorithms -- guiding one’s life according to statistical formulas.  So I go to the doctor and she gives me meds based on a predictive curve, though she has no way of knowing where I am on that curve.  Or whether there is another intersecting bell curve.

My most cherished correspondents are poets who live in dreams, images, arts of every kind.  They are renegades who make their livings by taking care of people who are irrational -- either by damage, by unique physiology from the beginning, or by social definition.  Don’t define it as “compassion” because it is not pity-based or even "love" in the romantic story of engulfing someone.  Rather it is dignified sharing of “interior” life without even defining it in words -- as equals.  

To those who need everything to conform to their life-metaphor, this work is incredibly threatening, world-crashing, overwhelming.  In short, heretical.  By their metaphorical construct, people who do not conform are animals -- of course they are!  we all are! -- and must be captured, controlled, or destroyed.  These strict judges don’t know they are acting like species defending territory against other species.  They truly believe anyone different from them is another species.  As our favorite dwarf says,  “We are under attack by many brave men who are fine warriors.  Let’s go kill them!”

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WRITING

There’s no such thing as writing.  All those people called “writers” you see in movies, on stage, in magazines, and all the writing about writers is a hoax.  All the prestige and awards and praise and respect and the money that rolls in -- it’s all a hoax.  When you see the “writer” portrayed as sensitive, exceptional, but an outsider; and then you see him or her pounding on a typewriter or scritching away with a pen; and then you see a big pile of crumpled up rough drafts; then something mysterious happens, the person is wreathed in light and words roll out onto paper.  Some angel steps out and dumps money on a table -- VOILA!   The writer is a young god or goddess.  Better than being a movie star because you don’t have to dress up.  It’s a myth.

Lucy Maude Montgomery pr photo

No one tells you that Lucy Maude Montgomery, who wrote the wonderful and inspirational “Anne of Green Gables”, committed suicide after years of drudgery repeating and repeating the same formula about “Anne” to please her publisher so she could pay bills -- the same as Louisa May Alcott.   My mother said, "Why can't you marry a nice Presbyterian minister and then everything would be all right."  Lucy Maude (same name as my mother) needed money because her nice Presbyterian minister husband was paralyzed with depression.  Louisa May's family was Unitarian, like me, but she was on the same treadmill.  No one points out all the miserable depressed men who went right on being miserable and depressed all their lives, thinking they could self-cure with writing.  It's fantasy. 

France loved Jim Welch.

Recently I’ve had occasion to talk to a young Blackfeet-enrolled writer who attended a famous writer’s workshop.  They didn’t teach him much -- specifically, not the courage it takes to be a writer, the risk, the danger, the level of work that is necessary.  The likelihood that someone will make you into a cash cow and not let you write what you want to write -- even if you’re Jimmie Welch.  Readers want brand consistency.

So what the heck IS writing?  It’s a metaphor.

A complexity of steps and motives are necessary and they are not different from the multitude of small functions and abilities that I frame out as the steps of worship -- which is really just focused intensity of being human.  No math necessary.  No dissection.  No posing.  You don’t even need a computer.  But there will be consequences, unpredictable.  Your unconscious may come out, but not because you want it to.  They call it "acting out."

Writing can’t be taught, but it can be learned.  It might not be saleable or even read by anyone.  A major part of it can be mastered without real public accomplishment happening.  No closure, no turning point, no epiphany or revelation.  No real explanation.  Some of it is found after the writer’s death and other people get rich from it.  Then there are the people who make a living by explaining you even though they never knew you and have no clue about your real, private, secret, dreaming life.

But there’s where it starts, where the sensory world and what it requires for survival, gets through the skin into the body and forms patterns in the mind.  If part of that is learning to read and if the person reads and reads and reads, they will have created a thick network of neurons in the brain that specializes in print, grammar, sequences of story, bits of dialogue, and a lot of other elements.  The thing is -- it’s all unconscious.  You don’t know it’s happening, it’s not on purpose, no one makes you do it, it just happens in there.  

Except for a lot of people, it doesn’t.  The neurons shrug and turn away.  But if their attention is caught by color, shape, line, contrast -- other visual elements that have nothing to do with writing but everything to do with seeing, they might paint.  Or it might be movement -- dance, athletic competitions.  It’s not a matter of choice.  It's choosing to DO it even before you can.  What was that meme going around about how many hours of practice it takes to master something?  Hundreds and hundreds.  It’s all unconscious.  

"Teaching writing" is then a matter of providing the opportunity to learn -- the space, the safety, the materials, the exposure, the time.  Bring your own motive.  Writing is the most minimalist art in one sense -- all you need is a surface and something to mark on it.  You could do it in solitary confinement, orally, by memorizing.  Since the material is life, it is everywhere, but like the water in which the fish swims, the writer has to realize it’s there.

What a person actually does with words might stay spoken instead of marked down.  It’s nice if people will respond.  Some of them might know where to find things you’ll like.  No one CAN tell you what to like, but you can figure it out.  There are things that will keep you from writing:  starvation (not just being hungry), sickness, no sleep, drugs, people mocking and sneering, worry, fear, fear, fear.  Exploitation.  Madness can be an advantage.

So you have stored up sense memories about a place and time.  You feel the patterns of it, you can see the dancing mosaic going on.  You begin to write everything down.  Confusion gets in the way.  Now comes some stuff you can learn.  A good teacher can chop it up so as to explain grammar, usage, sentence structure, stuff like antecedents, metaphor strategy.  Actually, you probably already know it, but it’s unconscious so the problem is figuring out what you already know and learning to manage it: your own internal life.  Learn without self-accusation because you're hitting the limits.  It's a good and necessary thing.

Once upon a time there were people who cruised the country, looking for writing that was marketable.  That’s as gone as writing books on clay tablets with a little stylus.  Those scouts disappeared along with grandma’s apple pie and the nuclear family.  You’re on your own now.  I have no advice.  Anyone who says they do is a con artist.  There is no publishing in the sense we once knew it.  Neither are there bonanzas of money.  There are a LOT of jobs for people willing to write in harness, producing unattributed print that explains, persuades, argues, advises and so on.  You can make a living that way.  (Wikipedia is a scam, getting you to write entries for free.)  Teaching is writing in harness.

Teaching can destroy your ability to write.  It can even destroy your ability to read.  Nothing is more destructive that the contemporary school lockstep through grades and certificates.  Public or private, day-care to post doc.  Writing now is a great numbing glacier of trivia.  It can destroy your soul.

Oh, come on.  That’s over-dramatic.  But that’s the pattern I see.  So, okay, how does one endure the Great Wall of Winter?  Well, there’s this ingenious thing called the Internet.  A blog is as good as a book and will probably be read by a lot more people.  You can illustrate it.  You can’t confine it.  Every published book of mine has soon showed up as a pirated PDF on the Internet, including the book published by the University of Calgary Press.  Copyright is a creature of nations, which are as much threatened and limited as publishing.  Literarily, we’re not far away from “Game of Thrones” except that the Thrones are not nations -- they’re affinity groups and transnational corporations.

In spite of all that, sometimes a hand reaches out to take yours in the dark, sometimes an arrow pierces your heart, sometimes you look up and see eyes as blue as those of newborn kittens.  Then you think,  “How did they do that?  I want to do that.”  So figure it out.  And do it.  Let it be its own satisfaction. 

The last step in this 5-step thing I have going is the factor of sharing with others, the empathy, the reaction, the consequences.  Uncontrollable.  You take your chances.  All this is drastic, but it’s metaphorical.  Hyperbole: exaggeration for effect.  Except I’m telling you the truth and the bottom line is always survival.  Do what you have to.  Smash all mirrors.  Buy more ink or toner.