EXTREME WRITING

This is from a time when several of us were writing hard and high.  There was a lot of hate flying around the world -- just like now.

7/31/10 

Extreme writing is like cage-fighting on roller-skates.  (Someone in the newspaper used that for a description of hockey and I like it as a metaphor.)

What I’m thinking about is yesterday when we were all impressed by the image of the giant invisible boy, which was legitimate and I hope released HIM from his cage.  But then I was in the bone cage of my head rolling around on second thoughts.  I was saying that it’s okay to hate.  Is it?  Every liberal would rise up to say,  “Oh NO!”   But why do we stigmatize emotional categories as though “hate” were all one thing.  I said it was okay to hate me, okay for me to hate others, but what KIND of hate?  I would argue hate demonstrates connection, maybe even love.  Apathy kills.

Extreme writing is facing such questions.  Some wiggle out of the cage by saying they are “hating” an act or a phenomenon but never a person.  Uh-huh.  Others label what they hate as “evil” and justify hating that way.

There’s got to be a “hate continuum.”  Hating washing the dishes is not the same as hating a murdering tyrant.  It’s different to “ cold hate” for dynamics unclaimed by anyone that nevertheless destroy.  Numbers.  Theories.  Hating is different when it’s frustration than it is from pure contempt.  I have NO contempt for anyone at Cinematheque.

Hatred can be a deal with the Devil, but sometimes the Devil is a better friend than God.  Since both are cage-fighting on rollerskates in your head. 

What makes writing extreme?  Brutal honesty.  Cutting accuracy.  Devastating exposure.  Can it be survived?  Dunno.  No limits on subject matter, even if it’s taboo.  Push the limits of the little abacus of a brain, make it do what a computer does even if you don’t really KNOW what a computer does.  Accept the loss of former friends (one left this week) and the acquisition of new friends (??)  Profanity and incoherence are OUT.  They just add bars. 

The hardest part might be not the body blows of loss, but the ringing in one’s ears of ambiguity, the eye-cuts of doubt, the broken nose of I-myself-might-be-absolutely-wrong.  Down for the count out of sheer unbearability.  There is always the possibility of death, I mean the actual death of the writer in a hail of reciprocated severity.  The only people who think writing is harmless are those who never read.

Beyond that there are the years of training, building muscle, trying to understand theory and methods, vocabulary beyond my experience or anyone else’s either because of being abstract, virtual, platonic -- irrelevant?   Eleven thousand dollars a year, four years, roughly fifty thousand dollars worth of equipment, about thirty years ago, mostly paid for by other people through scholarships and subsidies.  It amounted to an elegant can opener.  What’s in the can?  You gotta open it to find out.

A can of hate.  Sort the worms:  fear, grief, jealousy, thwarted love, helplessness.  Kids scream,  “I hate you!  I’ll never speak to you again!”  They DO mean it.  The worst is being caged with someone you love and don’t want to hurt, but it’s the only way to stay alive, even as you realize they can kill you.

Waitaminute.  You’re stuck on a metaphor.  We’re supposed to be discussing hate -- that was the subject.  

But hate IS about the cage.  You want what you hate to be outside and yourself to be inside where it’s safe.  

Waitaminute.  There’s something wrong with this idea.  What if I want to go somewhere.  Let’s get hate into the cage and I’ll be outside.

Can’t be done.  The hate is in you, not them.  It’s easy to hate an “out-group”, esp. if they’re “way out,” (add contempt) but hate is in your gut, your gut IS the worm.  The physiology of hate is that it eats on the lining of your tubing and bleeds your life right out of you.  “Shit for brains” is just code for “brains shit out.”  The vagus nerve goes straight from brain to stomach.  The intestine is netted with nerves and juiced with brain chemicals.  Hate is a physical phenomenon.  So are fear and grief.  They are braided in your gut.  Extreme writing is about blood and guts.  Not theirs -- your own.

I read a story the other day about people who are paid to sit and look at EVERY image posted to the Internet.  If a photo is outside certain boundaries, it is zapped.  They look at everything -- no filters.  They throw up: there is a sink in the room.  They develop post-traumatic stress syndrome.  You cannot imagine what they see.  That’s why they zap it.  For them it’s no longer imagined.  Of course, the same protocol can be used to zap things you WANT to see.  I used to think I wanted to see everything.  Now I’m not so sure.  But extreme writing requires that.  Anyway, who decides what is truly awful?  What if one person throws up at what makes another lick his lips?  How many days did the cream n’ sugar party last?  Three, four?  There’s a huge backlog from Afghanistan.

First you gotta name it

Then you will define it.

Never try to shame it.

Give us some examples,

Ones we recognize.

How much hate is really grief,

How much hate is fear.

All this shifter-shapin’ is kinda hard to bear.

Take the C away from Cage and it is Age.

Add a Place and there’s your Ace.

Mine is here.

Yours is there.

We are such a funny pair!

Where you goin’?

What you sowin’?

Wait for me!

Can’t you see

I’m in a cage?

For every bar there is a space.  

Turn sideways.

Break up in tiny pieces

Then reassemble on the other side.

You could write on paper if you were old-fashioned.

Pass a note.  Use a code.

Or XOXOXOXO  your way out with pixels of your face.

I’ll give it more thought later.

I’m not going anyplace.

I’m too old for skateboards.

You go on ahead.

Then double back, if you see a hater.

HOOP DANCING

Scene of the Marias Massacre

The rez kids I know best are the ones I taught fifty years ago, which was about a hundred years after the last massacre, when a whole band under the leadership of Heavy Runner who was at peace with whites and had a certificate to prove it (the way Ebola survivors are given certificates) were destroyed by US Cavalry because by chance they had camped in the wrong place along the Marias River. Nowadays Blackfeet activists certify their provenance by descent from the survivors of that atrocity. Or some others will claim they are descendants of Kipp, one of the scouts. And last week the tribal people of America received US settlement checks for mismanaging their assets in “trust.” Cobell is the name of the settlement — it was also the name of the other scout.

Frank Waln, Sioux rapper

http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars-and-provocateurs/hip-hop-native/36577.article. This video is not about Blackfeet, but rather about their 19th century enemies, the Sioux. The line between the two powerful buffalo-hunting tribes moved back and forth, in tension between the Sweetgrass Hills and the Black Hills, both sacred. The vid is the descendant of more modern social movements: not the uprisings or the long marches or the killings of women and children. Rather it comes out of the environmental movement rallies, huge rock concerts, the steady trickle of movies trying to be authentic that has created a casting book of Native American actors, the international powwows that include all indigenous people (even Hawaiians and Maoris), the t-shirt industry that finances travel, Disneyland in Paris that has an ongoing dance show, and the internet — because now kids all have cell phones and many have smart phones. These are the children of AIM leaders and Will Sampson. Misty Upham probably knew them personally, but she didn’t dance. She just had connections.

Galen Upham was one of my students. He wrote. Marvin Weatherwax was one of my students. He is a college professor. Woody Kipp was never my student. He was a journalist and now a college professor. Darrell Kipp was never my student. He went to Harvard (Harvard likes Indians) and Goddard (Goddard likes Indians) and was one of the founders of the Immersion School movement at the Piegan Institute. Galen and Darrell have gone on ahead. Marvin and Woody are still at Blackfeet Tribal Community College which against all odds has put down roots and thrived, just like all the others across the country.

The first rez rapper I knew was Jonathon Heavy Runner, free lance spontaneous classroom disrupter. He’s a calm productive guy now, probably a grandpa. Last time I saw him was accidentally on the street in front of the Valier bank where he was going in to do business. His pickup was full of kids who called him “dad.”

In the Sixties I was the dramatics teacher and wrote plays for the kids to be in, so that there would be a part for each one of them and they hardly had to act, since the character was written around them. One of the actors was Curly Bear Wagner, who became a kind of shaman/historian, but in high school he kept going fishing instead of attending rehearsals so we finally gave up on him and wrote his part out of the play. You can do that when you wrote the play in the first place. It changed the plot a little bit.

Recently Robey Clark asked me if I remembered the play in which he had to kill a mortally injured puppy — a puppet I made out of a Salvation Army Persian lamb coat. He was supposed to hit it with a mallet while another student yelped and cried offstage, but the sound effects didn’t stop, so the pounding went a little long. We took the play to State Thespian competition in Missoula and were praised but not given a prize.

The next year we took a Western version of “Taming of the Shrew” to State Thespian competition at the Brewery Theatre in Helena and were praised, but still no prize. I was the fool that time around. I confused the calendar and we took the school bus down a week ahead of time. The superintendent refused to send out the bus again at the right time, so we convoyed in old bomb rez cars. Show biz is important. No one can keep you down if you really want the show to go on. I was surprised by how easy it was to slip Elizabethan English over into cowboy slang. The scripts for this stuff are still around somewhere in my papers.

Eventually there were champion dancers who went to France, but at that time they were still little kids. The founder of the Black Lodge Singers, Kenny Scabby Robe, hadn’t yet started the family that became the core of the prize-winning group. The Blackfeet trick riders who make Westerns exciting were still just kids zooming around bareback on whatever horse they could find. The thing about kids is that they’re all potential and you can’t tell how they will turn out. More than that, you have no idea what the world will be like when they come of age. No one even dreamed of video. Or computers or the way YouTube could go viral. No one suspected that someone would start a newspaper called “Indian Country Today” and that it would be sold in the supermarket alongside “People” magazine.

The recent Marysville school shooting looks quite different from their point of view.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/10/25/wake-school-shooting-tulalip-and-area-communities-unite-grief-and-prayer-157527 Marysville is where my mother grew up, before there was a Muckleshoot reservation. She was white and told not to go near Indians, so she watched them, kneeling at her bedroom window while they set up camp to harvest crops not far away. “Sing your songs loud and pray hard for the Fryberg family, Tulalip Tribe, Marysville community and all those who knew Jaylen,” Chief Seattle Club program manager Caleb Dunlap wrote on Facebook. “. . . If you are sad, mad, confused or experiencing any other forms of grief, turn to your songs, medicines, prayers, elders [and] loved ones.”

Fifty years ago kids were encouraged to be assimilated. They didn’t know any songs, medicines, prayers. Their loved ones might be drunk or violent. No kids shot other kids because they had no guns. They used knives. In summer when the residential schools were on vacation, elders were raising them out on the allotments, but the kids never stayed indoors in those days. Down along the creeks in the coulees it was just luck if you could get AM radio. There were no rock concerts because Elvis Presley was just beginning to be on the Ed Sullivan Show. The Native American Literary Renaissance hadn’t happened yet. The main thing was basketball. (You had to cut your braids off to play.) The main thing is STILL basketball! But also college, amphitheatre shows, and the Internet. It’s all still hoop dancing. Sometimes traditional. Sometimes not.

Traditional

Rave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLadYzp9_FY#t=32 This video is traditional, both the oratory and the dancing.  The rap not so much.

This version is Hollywood. It’s all connected. The world is round. And spinning.