THERE ARE DRAGONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

Bhutan

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

TWILIGHT AT THE GETTY (fiction)

The Getty Art Museum in Los Angeles.

It was barely dusk with the sun lingering at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  The two old friends -- only approaching retirement age -- stood side-by-side, looking out over the city.  They were at a wall instead of pipe railings, for which Meier was famous, and they said nothing.  His son-in-law had left them alone in case they did have something to ask or confess or admit.  But there was nothing.  Silence is sometimes eloquence.

The long plaza in front of the building had a reflection pond in it, not deep, but the water was exactly level with the travertine so that if there had been a shower, one couldn’t always tell the solid from the liquid and people walked into the water.  Carefully designed benches had been strategically put along the edge to guide people away.  But they didn’t want to sit.  And they thought they could tell the solid from the water.  At least in the architectural world.

He was a major success in Tinsel Town, making his living off preposterous assumptions that she had long ago discarded.  They had parted ways after college, where they had been film buddies.  Outsiders might have thought they paired off like birds in a courting context, but not.  It was the Fifties and film was a revelation, even if a person weren’t enrolled in a sophisticated university.  Not until Netflix was it again possible for a person with only a computer connection to watch film on that scale again.  The impact on her was now quite different.

He stood gracefully, a handsome man, expensively dressed.  To her older eye it was obvious that he was a gay married to a sympathetic woman.  And so was the son-in-law.  But she no longer defined gay in any kind of confining way -- more as a center from which to act.  But she was slowly realizing that he and his family thought she was also gay/lesbian and that was what had been the tie.

She was a lover of tough, competent, older cowboys -- Western men capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness, even mixed and simultaneous.  She saw that her friend was aesthetic and psychologically guarded.  He’d been in therapy all his life.  Of course, in this town, one had a therapist the way one had a good dentist -- keeping things straight.  To her, he seemed a shadow.  She had no idea what she seemed to him now.  A puzzle maybe.  Maybe that’s why he had sent for her to celebrate this major award he was receiving.

In the past he’d come -- with his wife -- to visit her on the east slope of the Rockies but it was not a success.  Her ancient primitive phone with a cat-chewed cord was not adequate and her old house was so small that the only way he could have privacy for what seemed to be intense arguments was to sit on the front stoop, which was only a cement slab.  When he had insisted on taking her out to dinner, the best place for miles around had only one dusty bottle of champagne and it wasn’t chilled.  He berated the waitress, who was a friend of hers and who looked at her with wounded eyes.

They had driven up to the mountains and the wife said, “Oh, how beautiful!”  But neither of them was really looking and, if they had, they would not have understood it.  They knew nothing about geology or weather patterns.  Living on the LA delta, there was no need.  So now, aware, she tried to look out over the jeweled valley below them where the lights were coming on.  What did he see?   “That’s Universal City over there.  The studio had to sell it to make up their losses on Caesar and Cleopatra.”  

When the town car chauffeur had seen her recognize her name on his placard, he smiled broadly.  He’d wondered what she’d be like.  They chatted on the way to the hotel which she understood later was very bad form.  He was clearly trying to tempt her into telling him things that would help him curry favor.  He laughed merrily when he left her at the hotel where she was rendezvousing with her host, though he wasn’t allowing her to stay there.  He had arranged for her to stay with a famous editor in her “modest” house on Mulholland Drive, thinking that since she wrote, this would be a career advantage.

The desk clerk would not give her the room number or even use the house phone to call upstairs.  Looking inscrutable, he made a soft-voiced call and soon the elevator had opened on her friend.  It was clearly a place of assignation in a strange combination of secrecy and boasting.  The lobby was furnished like a London men’s club.

She was famished but supper wasn’t until 9.  They met his wife and a couple of screen writers and cinematographers for drinks.  She was a very bad drinker, easily becoming confused, and consumed far too many breadsticks.  He ordered her drinks -- all with fancy names, evidently fashionable.  The place was too dark to read faces and no one tried to include her in the gossip anyway.

So her head went off into memories of university, so long ago that women had to be checked in at the dorm by 10PM and no men could come past the entryway, unless they were relatives.  It sounded almost Islamic now.  But there were ways -- duplicate keys to the back door, for instance -- so she met her friend at a nearby all-night laundromat and they took the El into Chicago to the strange places where foreign and experimental films were shown.  Sometimes they were a little sinister or in dubious parts of town, but the viewers were intense.  No popcorn.  She could not have gone to such places alone.

Bonds formed in such a setting were a strong entwining of emotion and rationality, subject and method, personal and universal, subjective and objective.  Liminal, perhaps,  on the threshold, nearly sacred and more felt than could be described, though they spent a lot of time over the days trying to figure it all out.  They were so engaged in this conversation that others thought they MUST be sleeping together.  But they were disembodied.  No one thought of suggesting gay.  They just weren’t sophisticated or experienced enough.

And now, he had -- she suspected -- fallen into a prescribed, expensive, political way of life while she had such a broad understanding of sexuality -- dimensions, practices, accommodations -- that something so binary as gay/straight was as irrelevant as male/female.  Anyway, sexual desire and sexual identity had shrunk in both of their lives, crowded out by success on his side and something on her side that she called “environmentalism” but it was much more sensory than that would imply.

When he dropped her off at the editor’s house, going past the gate by using the electronic code pad like an ATM, he didn’t come in but the woman met her at the door and showed her the bedroom.  It was mercifully plain except for the sheet of glass that was one wall.  The view, like the one from the Getty, was out across the valley, but on that first night there had been a thunderstorm traveling through with actual lightning striking here and there, occasionally exploding something electrical (transformers?) so that sirens -- faint and far away -- would trail throbbing through the streets behind strobing lights of fire trucks.

The two women sat outside a little while, editor with her customary bedtime Ovaltine and guest with club soda to settle an unaccustomed sort of food.  Was that pureed parsnips with caramalized cranberries?  At home she fried parsnips cut into coins and liked them, but never thought of cranberries.  If she had and if she’d HAD cranberries, which the local stores only carried at Thanksgiving, she’d have just thrown a handful into the pan.  Maybe she’d try it.  Someday.

The editor had inquired politely but guardedly about her writing, but was a bit baffled that she wrote about landscapes and natural history -- not politically, either, but in her own way.  “My dear, you really must develop a platform in order to sell, or no one will know what shelf is for your books or how to promote your image.”  Then she saw the guest’s face and -- since she was not stupid -- said softly,  “Of course, books are no longer put on shelves and you are a reality -- not an image.”

Now, the big celebration (ordeal) over and fatigue making the friends mellow, they stood at the Getty as though on the balcony of a Mediterranean villa in some time-out-of-time, their present lives fading to make room for memory.  Had they actually stood together this way on the El platform with stars barely visible through the heat-trembled air and felt merged, empowered and shaken by what they had seen?  Or was that just a kind of derivative memory of the powerful films?

The son-in-law came up from behind and put an arm over each.  “Ready to go?”  They were.  Flying back home, she decided she and her friend were related but different species who had shared an environment -- all those elms and all those paths.  Crocus in spring.

"DEATH IN ALL IT'S . . ." WHAT IS IT, ANYWAY?

Daily I review the obits in the GF Tribune.  If the person is from the Blackfeet rez, whether or not enrolled, I clip the piece, stick it to a card and file it.  Sometimes I file others in the state.  Today I cut out the obit for the amazing Great Falls mother (Jeanne Elizabeth Bartsch) of a UU in Bozeman (Susan Backer) who is much like her mother.  This week I cut out the obit for the wife of my neighbor up the street.  Valier’s population is old and cards record a number of people on our street, but nothing like the number of dead on the rez.  (No one in Valier has been murdered since I got here in 1999.)

Two recent deaths not on the rez were from my past and could not have been more different.  Neither will fit on my filing cards, so they’ll have to go into a folder.  One was the movie star Karen Black (74) and the other was the cartoonist Stan Lynde (81).  Both were gentle, imaginative, hard-working people who were each married four times.  Black had a son and Lynde had eight children.  People are always fascinated by the interplay between private life and presented work.  I have no insight into that, only a few memories that don’t really add up to anything.

I began to read “Rick O’Shay” when it was first published and continued always whenever I had access.  In Browning when the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife opened a gallery room in 1962, the first show we hung was enlarged Rick O’Shay comic strips. Both Bob and I dearly loved Stan, though we kept calling him “Rick”

The memory that means the most to me came after I returned to Montana in 1999 and attended some shindig for writers.  I was discovering that people had me pegged as an adjunct to Bob Scriver, a surviving remnant who was no longer useful and had no other identity.  I was wallpaper.  Until Stan recognized me and came to sit by me, visiting as though we’d just been together a few days before. THEN people saw me. When the Charlie Russell auctions first began at the Rainbow Hotel -- well-lubricated with champagne -- Stan’s wife at the time and myself, both of us little more than teenagers formally gowned for this major event, wandered down into the basement and enjoyed a game of tag in the echoing storage hall until a majordomo caught us and shooed us out.  I told Stan.  He smiled and named the wife with rueful affection.

Karen Black attended Northwestern University’s famous theatre classes at the same time I did but she was only there two years.  We were in the same play at one point -- I think maybe “Queen of the Rebels” -- and while we were waiting during rehearsals she read my palm.  She was fully conscious that her voluptuous figure and Siamese cat eyes gave her an eerie aura.  She said that my lifeline predicted I would have a life-long passion (which we thought meant a man) that was broken in the middle and that the creases under my pinkie meant I would have children but that part was vague and she couldn’t tell whether there would be three or four of them.  It all came true.  (The man and Montana are conflated; the children are his grandchildren, one deceased.)

My Valier neighbor is a Jehovah’s Witness so when we met on the street I said his wife was in a place better than this one, which made him smile.  Oddly, the cartoon sheriff  “Rick O’Shay” was a church-going Christian whose pastor was “Jubal Lee”, the cartoon version of Stan’s real pastor, but it was “Hipshot Percussion”, the gunslinger, whose Sunday sentiments, out there in the mountains with his horse, evoked far more reverence than any human institution.  Not quite nature worship either, but respect for the world as the Face of God.  Whenever I had a bulletin board, a Sunday “Rick O’Shay” strip seemed to be on it.  My Bozeman friend’s mother was a sturdy Episcopalian; the daughter was a sturdy Unitarian Universalist.  It was not the content of these women’s faith that counted so much as its expression through community.  

And what about Karen Black who was in so many horror and free-spirit movies?   (I know nothing about her formal religious affiliations.) The French would not have a problem with the venue nor would they consider it “downscale”.  They recognize the transcendent and sacred in all its forms, even underground and defiant, as horrifying as catacombs.  It’s Americans who have the silly idea that only the conventional are religious and that faith means only that you must follow the rules.  Neither do the French puritanically demonize sex.  Hedonism can be a respected choice.  As my mother said on her deathbed, “I hope the next world is as much fun as this one was.”  The French respect nihilism (meaninglessness) and France is where Catharism (the world is evil) bloomed.  But those ARE meanings.

The shift from father-fixation on the Creator to the “works” focus of Creation, has left us with a problem, usually phrased as a-theism or sometimes called “deus absconditus,” the god who abandoned us, which is the opposite of the “deus machina” which is rescue through the intervention of a supernatural being.  Our explorations of outer space and inner DNA have challenged our “humanism”.  Our evil deeds insist we are a-human, which is to say “inhuman.”  The horror side emerges when we realize that the Cosmos includes but does not give special status to humans.  The Milky Way will not lower a basket containing a god as in Greek drama.

But it’s all theatre, isn’t it?  Acting training teaches us to look at the unique person in the specific context -- not at all the position that psych (which is cleverly disguised missionary work) takes in trying to make everyone “normal,” a concept so slippery that the official shrinks’ handbook of definitions changes all the time, by VOTE, not by ART which would call us to inhabit humans and all else with our hearts.  One can’t do rational scientific research on death.

The little boy asked, “Do dogs go to heaven?”

The wise man answered, “We don’t know, but we should act as though they did.” 

We feel as though these beloved people are still alive somewhere, so we should act as though they are.  It could be as real as anything else if we feel it to be so.   The boy, who was in a hospital bed, went gladly to meet his dog.  Maybe.  There was no obit.