THE BIGGEST PICTURE

It’s hard to believe that I moved back here in 1999, which now amounts to sixteen years.  Things have changed considerably.  I did get the book about Bob Scriver written and published, just barely before the whole publishing industry collapsed.  But I have not been able to redeem Bob’s work from the profit stranglers who control Western art.  The best thing about this Charley Russell trope was that it was land-based and authentic.  That was left behind long ago.

The whole concept of “reservations” for a captured indigenous people has changed radically, which means that my thinking about them must also change.  This empowers my thought about the environmental movement that has always been present in one form or another.  What was specific and experienced has now become planetary and even cosmic.  My grandfather's Rodale organic gardening and Bob's practice of keeping “wild” pets as babies have now become concerns about universal chemical pollution and the extinction of species.  So many people are concerned and involved that the flow of information and concepts and the demand for response is almost overwhelming.  

Another self-assigned task has been preserving and using my father’s photos, not because they were artistic or historic, but because they illustrate a little strand of life across time.  In researching the genealogy that they record, I discovered many things, including distortions and tragedies.  My family has not wanted to hear about these, because their idea of the virtue of relatives is fragile.  We are separated now.

The connected steps I’m following are:  cosmology leads to planetary morphology leads to geology leads to ecology leads to the historical formation of cultures leads to human individuation leads to creations.  There is no reference to theology.  Its place is taken by survival of elements at each step.

Parallel to all this has been trying to keep up with what a human being is and does, particularly in terms of neuro- research.  There are five aspects to this:

1. The specialization and collaboration of one-celled creatures into complex animals.  This is crucial to brain function.
2. The message system of the whole body -- not just the senses represented by organs like eye and ear, but the hundreds of small awarenesses, roughly sorted into internal vs. external at the skin barrier but including every tissue and extending down to the molecular level.  Action responses are included from molecular secretions to whole-animal skilled exertions like athletic feats.  Some estimate that there are 200 differently specialized brain cells assigned to subtle perceptions like whether one is right-side-up (head on top for humans).
3. Empathic access to the thoughts and feeling-states of other people through identification, special “mirror” functions of cells in the pre-frontal cortex, experience, and communication systems like speaking, music, art, and words, both oral and written.  Results might include bonding, families, patriotism.
4. “Group think” which is a phenomenon that forms spontaneously, an aggregate of individual ideas and responses.  Philosophies and governments.  A weltanschaung.
5. Interaction with the infinite, including planetary conditions, sun storms, and massive evolutions of creatures and phenomena.  A consciousness that there is far far far more than we CAN know.

“Millennials” are so different from me that I not only don’t understand them, but I begin to resent them for their narcissistic domination of so much.  On the other hand, I’m old enough to see how change ripples through everything, most of it useless to oppose.  Peoples who have lived through the Great Depression or the World Wars were stretched to their limits and knew it.  

The generation that has been in control of the US and probably much of the English-speaking world is just about gone.  I relate to them better than to my own generation, partly because of the ten years with a man so much older and partly because of being in Browning, which is just leaving the 19th century.  But my own generation is dying as well.  

A K-12 Portland classmate died last week -- a woman who had a heart attack.  (Actually, I see by her obit that she was only my classmate after 1947 -- moving from California.) This person was intelligent and conventional, charming and dependable, quite mild and gentle.  She had two children but her husband, whom she met on vacation in San Francisco, somehow evaporated, probably about the time she went to PSU for an advanced degree.  Her work was books and then computers.  She was the kind of person I was expected to be, but risked and paid dearly NOT to be.  I don’t know where that difference came from except that at some point it dawned on me that it was better to actually live adventures than to just imagine them.

It made a difference that our teachers at Vernon and Jefferson -- and then later in university -- were mostly born at the turn of the 19th century, just before WWI, about the age of Bob Scriver.  It was a time about to turn violent and by WWII to murder children as well as destroying cities.  Our teachers were educated just at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties when all was optimism and determination, but the war had decimated men of an age to marry them: anyway they were few and scarred.  The Edwardian women threw their hearts into secondary education.  They were not allowed to teach in universities, so they taught what is now considered graduate level to adolescents who barely grasped it.  Here we were, pondering Kitto and Edith Hamilton.

That generation witnessed the desperate war against Nazism, an evil and oily snake impossible to kill.  The Millennials so enjoy waving the ghosts and skulls around to upset their elders.  They give it Goth Glam, quite unconscious of how easy it is to commit genocide.  In fact, they have a hard time thinking of adults as human.

Now both the brokenness of war, often internal to what was thought of as a group joined by faith, and the continuousness and interwovenness of human-caused destruction (sometimes identified as Evil), are becoming clear but not effectively opposed.  We keep trying to "solve" it.   We begin to think that the roots are paleobiological tendrils reaching back so far they are invertebrate.

I have no way of knowing how many years I have left, but a felt obligation to do something with them.  I no longer have the illusion that I can influence others -- that was snuffed by ministry.  The drive to write remains strong for its own sake.  I do have a passionate sense of what I love to write about.  I want the basics, the foundational concepts that are transforming right now.  

Why else would I live along the Rockies where the planetary plate tectonics have thrust up ramparts of stone and some day in that rain shadow grass and forbes might return to replace the human-distorted monoculture of grain because climate change from rising temps have prevented industrial irrigation.  We are told that we’re about due for another immense upthrust, a massive earthquake.  We are told that the two sub-continental plates press together so hard that the earth vibrates with stress, a kind of unheard resonance, all the way down the Old North Trail to the tip of South America.  It is a mystical idea that some claim to feel physically.

My understanding is not of the Christian petulant insistence on their individual survival in Heaven, but rather a kind of Taoist acceptance of my participation in these interacting forces.  I have no idea which action or thought or insight on my part will affect the future, but it is inescapable that my small actions, even washing the dishes, have impact.  (I may be creating a new life form in my neglected dishpan.)  Or maybe a word-scrap of my old-fashioned lyric realism will trigger something transformative in someone not born yet, just as reading has done for me.

WHO'S YOUR MAMA?

The recent catastrophic earthquake in Nepal revealed something few had suspected.  Gay men who had used an intricate international system to traffic ovum, using their own semen to create children, were trapped in front of their Nepal hotel as they tried to fly home with the new child. 

Conventional Israeli couples who want children were unable to use the newest technology in their own country because that nation is a theocracy, dominated by the principles of Judaism of long ago.  Therefore, parents froze ova of that woman or another, shipped them to Thailand where the man’s frozen semen (actually just the healthiest seeming sperm) was injected into the ova in vitro, the resulting zygote then shipped to Nepal where a surrogate mother carried the baby to term.  Presumably, the checkbook parents then raised the infant to bond with them and sustain the family continuity.  If you can call it that.  The cost is about $50,000.  

There are few ancient tribal prohibition about being rich or what money is used for -- at least until Jesus.  But the ancient tribal obsession with genetic inheritance is still in play, working against adoption.  There are “tribal” prohibitions on homosexuality, though they are being challenged.   Tribes want members. 

The fact of harmful mutations accumulating in closed natural communities is only considered at the molecular level -- like, how to jigger the faulty gene while preserving the parent genome, but now research suggests that parent genomes change in the transfer and ensuing environment more than we ever suspected, beyond the changes in the original mix-and-match of male and female.

Below is an interesting example of a conservative Jew wrestling with the situation.  http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/moshe-feiglin/surrogate-motherhood-and-nepal/2015/05/07/  When science-loving people are forced into conflict with traditional morality, it’s tough to figure out what’s right.  God laughs.  Satan only smiles -- there is more to come.

In low income USA the problem is likely to be the opposite: there is a mother but no father. (Is there any country that exports dads?  Maybe China, which gave away all its girls?)  A wicked development is the low-income mom-only baby, reluctantly conceived because the mother didn’t (maybe couldn’t) take steps to prevent either intercourse or fertility.  Once the baby is born, infanticide is pretty easy.  The other day's Great Falls Tribune had as many stories about babies murdered as about wedding anniversaries.

The baby might be breastfed because it’s cheaper, but the breast milk may be contaminated by the mother’s intake of alcohol or drugs or both.  Or bad nutrition.   Medical interventions will be VERY expensive, but paid for by the public.  The crucial nurturing of being held, warmed, kept safe, may be entirely missing.  The child may believe that all mothers are only angry or rejecting or impossibly confusing, going back and forth emotionally.   In their words, when they are old enough to express themselves, “a cunt.”

Mothers may try to make little boys assume the role of husband, even sexually, but particularly in terms of taking the brunt of poverty, rage, and social pressure.  Even in a more “normal” family a boy of a certain age, maybe long before he is ready, is expected to be “a little man,” to interface with business people by carrying messages or substances. This can be either a burden or an advantage, but a boy still in elementary school will be twisted by it.

One of the hardest twists is a boy who is supposed to be the shining light who would save the family with his brilliance, but then if things don't turn out well is blamed and thrown out.  Sometimes the whole family slides into despair and sends him away as the one most likely to survive on his own.  This is almost biological, as animals also exclude young males, esp. those who challenge the alpha male.  It is not always girls who are sold as children for purposes we don’t want to think about.  Boys are also trafficked, prostituted, tortured, forced to be soldiers or pushers, drugged.  

Some boys go to the street to escape their uncontrollable families.  Increasingly, boys are thrown out onto the street because they are gay and/or infected with HIV/AIDS or transsexual or simply defiant.  All these things are seen as endangering the family.  But a boy who quietly does sexwork might be supporting his family.  Or maybe that makes him part of a voluntary family, wicked as it might be in the eyes of the public.

Komodo Dragon

So how should we think and feel about all this?  I still haven’t digested that boys fall short in school or are demonstrably fragile emotionally.  Then there is the dismaying news that the Y chromosome, already missing one leg off what would be an X in a girl, is losing even more genes through evolution.  And all the tinkering with insemination has taught us that a little slender pipette can do the job -- no penis of any size necessary.  

No one has succeeded in creating either a human ovum or sperm without a human.  But there has been some success in causing an ovum to just begin growing on its own.  Lesser animals -- reptiles and amphibians -- can grow to completion.

Komodo dragon parthogenisis zygote

The practice of creating zygotes that are frozen against future failure to conceive has presented law with insoluble problems, like lawsuits over the “ownership” or “parenthood” of tiny cell masses -- too teeny to be split in half with Solomon’s sword -- that might or might not develop into a real baby, hopefully healthy. 

Then there is the problem of sperm donors with hundreds of descendants, some of whom will have a strange attraction to familiar others, even marrying them.  Or the doctor who runs a clinic that doesn’t bother with sperm donors since the doc himself thinks his much superior genetics (he’s a doctor, isn’t he?) is good enough for all women, populating his waiting room with babies who look just like him.

Frozen storage

The problems are hairy enough for individuals, but what about the society as a whole?  What is the law to make of so many systems that assume traditional marriage, natural conception, genetic inheritance?  Ownership, taxation, all sorts of small exemptions and prohibitions even in criminal law, like not testifying against a spouse.  (Does that include common-law marriages? or live-ins?) What happens when according to the relevant laws of parentage, there’s no allowance for a baby created with a mix of conception, gestation, delivery, nurturance, and economics.  How many parents can a child have?

People from coherent cultures that worked in other places and times are often emotionally discombobulated by new requirements imposed by quite a different system.  That means they’ll go underground and be forced into evasion of authorities.  The ambivalence of many places, like polygamous Mormon communities, don’t help.

A Mormon family

Most of the desires and decisions are out of the hands of the babies themselves.  They must simply cope with whatever happens.  If it’s damaging, the child will have to find a way to repair, if there IS any.  It’s too early to hear the stories of adults who have made the best of it.  Right?