INVENTORYING THE SENTIMENTAL WEST

The American "West," which is really the prairie since the coast is actually west and what we call the West is east of the Rockies, is almost as defined by sentiment as it is by actual geography.  The same goes for the state of Montana, which once defined a kind of writing or at least it's quality.  Now that "emotional" felt thought is given the attention it deserves in relation to the logical, reasonable, results-based thought, I want to look at the "felt" in relation to the American West trope.

I thought of doing this with fiction, using my experience in Browning in the Sixties as a source.  But why not go directly to the events and thoughts which are fifty years old now and safe from motives of vengeance (very Western)?

Not that we've escaped the mystique of the indigenous people of the prairie, the ones on horseback with feathers, the ones who have transmuted into dance pow-wows with whirls of frenzied moves, so many florescent flying ribbons and dyed plumes that it's hard to see the person at the center.  The same forces have made the tough, dusty work of early livestock-based ranches into bull-riding spectaculars that introduce the contestants with explosions and search-lights.  Buffalo Bill may have started both, but he would faint if he saw these.

Back to the Sixties when the sentimental love of art about horseback culture, both indigenous and introduced, against a vast background of distant horizon and baroque skies, dominated whole galleries.  The individual who pushed this was Charlie Russell (or maybe actually his wife).  Remington was a back east representative, a man so fat that horses groaned, a painter of Indians so fond of handsome young military men . . . This art was around in many forms, some of them more focused on landscape or animals.  

Sentiment also dominated the movies but not so much the TV shows of the Fifties when Westerns were a theme of many series.  I've called them "stand down" movies for the men who fought WWII.  The plots often opposed the passionate gut reactions of Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood) to the reasoned strategy of Mr. Favor (Eric Fleming).  This was the "magic" of the show which was cancelled when Fleming died in 1965. The basic drive died.  We know what happened to the emotional Eastwood by now -- he's far to the right, treats women badly.

Teaching on the Blackfeet Rez was wildly romantic.  I was the only person in town who was charmed by finding a group of horses grazing in my yard.  I didn't see manure, only "Green Grass of Wyoming."  Like many Western stories, this book came from the real life romance of a woman linked to a narcissistic man.  Exceptionally capable, charismatic, achieving men in the West have often depended on women or a series of women falling under their spell.  Bob Scriver was no exception and his mother was one of the women.

Wessie MacFie Scriver, the cosseted daughter of a prosperous farmer near Quebec, had no doubts about her entitlements and the proper qualities of a sentimental home.  By the time I knew her, she was old and had at least the illusion of what she had originally expected, but if it hadn't been for the fancied adventure of life with Thaddeus Emory Scriver in Indian Country, she might not have come.  In fact, once she had produced an heir and a spare, she thought to go home to Quebec.  That idea faded in the supposed reality of safety and comfort, the romance of being the mother of sons -- much intensified when they served in WWII.  None of this was rational and much of it was powered by the Edwardian culture in Britain/Canada carried to the American West.

When I had pneumonia just as entering puberty, the neighborhood doctor saved me from what had previously been near-certain death with a shot of penicillin in my little butt.  I was mortified by my exposure but soon began to recover.  Next to my bed was one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases my father built against every wall.  I found "Riders of the Purple Sage" (1912), as potent a mixture of romantic love and the romantic West as ever written and at exactly the formative time of my identity.  It wasn't until I read "Marjorie Morningstar" (1955) in high school that "art" and "theatre", both intensely romantic in the Manhattan way, became an element in my ardent drive to be exceptional.  (Jewish never quite came into it, one way or another.)  Of course, Jo in "Little Women" had already made it acceptable to fall in love with an older man like Professor Bhaer.

A hard-headed therapist looking at this little plotlet would have had a lot to say about father-hunger (my father was subtly disabled by a concussion), oldest-child syndrome, and sneaky Christianity.  The elementary school librarian said casually as she handed me a copy of "Pilgrim's Progress" (1672), "I think you are mature enough to read this."  I was very earnest about religion, to the point of disabling any belief in the church's fantasies so that I was offended to the point of beginning a long search, as much rational as sentimental.  But I did love things like "Mother's Day" in our little Presbyterian church when we carried the tables out to the yard, spread beautiful tablecloths, and each wore a rose -- red for a living mother and white for a dead mother.  Wartime makes a romance of death and mothers.  ("Little Women")

This is plenty of stuff for fiction, but in terms of fact, romance is a matter of attachment, often on the basis of familiarity.  The taste, temperature, and tactile become literally part of our system.  It is a force for valuing and preservation that is biologically based, kept in cell chemistry.  Now that Westerns like "Yellowstone" justify corruption, power, and violence and try to make us sentimental about status and bonds between men, the terms of the Western are confused.  Check this out:  https://twitter.com/NativeApprops/status/644183098964463617/photo/1  Commodifying the PowWow.  Got quite a backlash from those who guard the fence around a certain kind of "Indian."

In fact, my favorite contemporary Western is Australian, "Mystery Road" (2013)  This link is to the trailer for the second story, but it doesn't have Judy Davis in it which is a serious shortcoming.  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2236054/videoplayer/vi717273625?ref_=vp_pl_1

OUTLIER WRITER

Before anyone was fussing about “Game of Thrones”, my cousins were enthralled with “The Outlanders,” the Diana Gabaldon series about a Scots woman who had gone back in time and was involved in clan warfare over the Scots throne.  Though the series is basically a romance thriller, they were so anxious to include me in what they took to be actual events in our shared Strachan past, so significant to our family identity, that they actually sent me a little green iPod with the story on it in audible form, read by a woman with a seductive but (luckily) intelligible Scots accent.  I enjoyed it.

But I was shocked.  The books, written by a biologist who knows sex and murder when she sees it, the plots were packed with S/M, perversion, violence, herbal witchery and miserable living conditions.  My cousins said they just skipped those parts and read for history, but I didn’t see much history.  What they valued was the importance of family (clan) and salvation by love.  It’s not hard to see why our family history in the last few generations since immigration from Scotland had taught us to believe in our superiority over others as a defense against poverty and hardship as well as a kind of helplessness about economic matters.  Pride in education traced back to Scotland, but didn’t show much understanding about what a high "intellectual" education might be like.  Not that I knew either until Div School and beyond.

Hero tortured by villain -- those are not swords Jamie is holding -- he is suspended.

Do not mistake me.  I’m not a print snob.  I will read anything about the worst stuff: torture, genocide, destruction of vulnerables, and so on -- but not with the idea that they are necessary or tolerable or that they can be skipped over or that our family never participated in such abuses.  It was through considering what I read, acting to get a “high” education, and trying to understand how to effectively oppose what -- for lack of a better term -- must be labeled “evil,” that made me a “justified outlier.”  (Until then I was just a rebel without a cause except self-protection.)   Some of the attitudes and practices I reject and oppose are part of my cousins' lives -- mostly worship of status, obsessive secrecy about small difficulties, and constant insistence on control.  Fawning and cooing will not turn me away from trying to at least think these issues through -- even sometimes to act.  So much fear, so much willful blindness.

Diana Galbadon among standing stones in Scotland.

My mother's family was Irish, American since the 1600’s, and not afraid of a scrap.  (“Albion’s Seed.”)  My Scots cousins are secular, but moral in the most respectable Protestant way.  No drinking, no smoking, no cursing, no nightclubs, no gambling.  But no church.  Ever.  Except one in-law, late.  Their children began to explore the edges.  My cousins forgot that my grandmother’s horror of alcohol came from family susceptibility until they suffered the consequences in their own children. (I still don’t drink.  Some of them have a horror of sex.  I don’t.  I just have a horror of responsibility for children.) I went looking for edges: Indian reservations, art, law enforcement, religion and writing.  I think about sex a lot, not as a practice but as an identity, a biological function on the cellular level, and a force in society.  I think about brain function and sanity.  I think about creating a body of work, thought-work.

Scotland is a darker country.

I did not marry into a tribe: I married another outlier with a Scots cultural identity, whose family was always fondly trying to draw him back into conformity, away from his career as a sculptor.  (Success destroyed our marriage which taught me to avoid success -- not sculpture.)  In the end of ministry I didn’t fit my denomination, though it represented itself as welcoming outliers.  No denomination or congregation can accept many outliers without losing its existence --  constant challenges and perforations and exceptions will destroy the boundary. 

The UUA is no more tolerant of dissenters and nonconformists than the Catholics.  UU clergy are no more obedient to high standards of personhood.  Nor are any other theoretically privileged categories like doctors, lawyers, Buddhist priests, generals, college professors or Native American ceremonialists.  Status no longer means obligation to a higher standard.  The deflation was meant to be a kind of leveling in the name of democracy and it succeeded.

Outlier writer

I live in a small town as an outlier who is morally careful about not challenging the consensus boundary, though I try to have a bit of influence without interfering.  Diana Gabaldon and her understanding of biological communities would see that if I destroyed this community, it would damage me, because it is their grudging willingness to tolerate variance that makes the little niche where I dwell.  Yet they tolerate me, not because they approve but because they do not understand me.  I might challenge their ideas, but I’m reliant on their consistency.

In other niches on the internet I am also an outlier, but in a more mutually understanding way:  circles of environmentalists, tribal members from across the continent, religious thinkers, and social activists in the most perilous and reviled contexts.  I am a hunter-gatherer of ideas among them without signing up for membership.

Outlier writer.

There is another niche that I look at from afar with amazement and sometimes disgust.  Mass publishing is the most misunderstood business in America.  Once attached to upper-class Euros and then the romanticized Transcendentalists of New England, it is now occupied by people who want a steady stream of narrative that won’t scare anyone while being outrageously sensational in the most brutal ways, always winking -- in shades of gray.  The business model is the lowest common denominator with the highest gross profit, which often comes from big numbers with small margins, the dimestore model.  It is arts exploitation, forcing individual expression into forms to sell, and supplying false flattery.

To be published, writers must present manuscripts ready for print and agree to promote them.  Publishers are only advertisers, if that.  More like handlers.  Writing is a kind of personal obsession possibly better handed off to arts that demand less skill.  Publishing, with a few exceptions, is the manufacturing of highly seasoned, morally fattening soup.  No one reads the books, except those romantic women and idle men who run narrative through their brains without any retention --  unnecessary since it’s all repetitious fantasy anyway.

But blogging exists in a sort of limbo where no one can find anything without tracking skills and already knowing the territory a little.  Partly academic, partly wild-hare, partly deeply personal, blogs might be sound, image, and/or word, any language.  It’s wonderful for outlier writers, in spite of the relentless attempts to industrialize writers into commodifiable groups, partly by constantly changing the terms of service.  

There’s no status, no reward, no profit and therefore no door-keepers, no unwanted editing, and no reputation.  Just the pure pleasure of driven writing.  If someone should read it, so much the better.  Someday a form of true publishing -- that is, an interface between serious writers and serious readers -- will form again.  Probably not in my lifetime.  I'll save what I can.  The secret of every blog is that someone somewhere is always saving everything.