CENTER VERSUS EDGE

I remarked earlier that we need to think about defining groups by their outliers, where things fuzz out into the next group or no group, versus defining a category by its nucleus.  Or what about variegated categories where components mix to make a kind of striped group?  Then what holds them together.  What is their axis mundi?

We’ve broken down the sharp lines between male and female, between the many kinds of desire, between various races -- esp. the ones defined by appearance whether skin color or epicanthal fold.  DNA smashes so many of our cultural and governmental categories.  One of the reasons I watch CSI is that it is an easy way to consider what the show writers have already debated over a coffee-stained table and defined for reflection.  What technical tools have reframed the same questions over and over?

Should we each get a genomic printout attached to our birth certificates?  Or should one be made in the womb so that “faulty” or stigmatized elements can allow an abortion of the fetus before it makes trouble?  Or, since CRISPR allows genes to be replaced rather accurately, should we just do that ?  If we can closely control who we are, what will we do?

What does that imply in terms of demographics -- not who prevails so much as how it will confuse the bean-counters.  Now it appears that everyone is “metis,” mixed.  There’s no such thing as a purebred human -- what a scandal to discover Neanderthal genes -- but, in fact, there’s no such thing as “purebred” anywhere anything, not even in a lab where an impure mix of e-coli strains can abort your doctoral thesis.  Even sitting there isolated in a petri dish, the little bugs mutate.

But history has insisted on sorting everyone by appearance and location.  And using location means drawing boundaries, which means the possibility of gating, controlling who can enter or leave.  Of course, a cell and a body MUST do that -- there MUST be a way to keep out poisons and eject debris.  

Recently the most paradoxical use of face-scanning recognition technology is using it to filter who may attend church services.  Troublemakers?  Heretics?  The disobedient?  Someone with a gun?   In the early days of Christianity there was a phenomenon called "fencing the Communion."  That little rail where you kneel and rest your elbows?  It's meant to prevent you from just walking up and helping yourself.  

Or it could exclude some people from the inner chambers where decisions are made and study becomes more intense.  It took me a while to realize the Board of Trustees of the seminary was mostly for show, to identify people with a lot of money, so as to keep them in mind of the next pledge drive.   The real decisions were made by a sub-group.  In the old days, they were men who retired for whiskey and cigars; naturally, rich widows did not attend.

Who's in, who's out.

Maybe you’ve never participated in a pledge drive in a big church.  The committee -- carefully chosen -- sits down with a set of cards or a list of members and guesses the income of each formal member and then informal Sunday attendees.  (There’s always a banker on the committee.) An estimate is made of the capacity of that person to pledge.  (Kid in college?  House burned down?)  Canvassers are each assigned a certain number of people to visit.  The idea is to remind them what good things generous pledgers had made possible in the previous years and then to hint a bit about “norms.”  One of the men I visited -- wives often weren’t present -- was an important doctor.  He knew I was not making a lot of money.  All I had to do was mention the amount I was pledging to cause him to blush and raise his pledge.  

So a lot of norming -- doing what others are doing -- is based on guessing secrets, which money matters normally are.  DNA suggests belonging to a population whose norm is attendance at a good school and many connections among themselves that will help to attract job offers and provide support after getting the job.  DNA counts more than IQ.

Schisms and eccentricities are bad for business, bad for research, bad for strategies -- IF your goal is to perpetuate an institution.  What kind of institution could be defined by it’s core?  Medicins sans Frontiers seems obvious.  No doubt there are differences among them, but the axis of it all is to heal as many as possible.  They have preserved the original pledge of doctors.

Of course, there are always many forces that are uncontrollable.  Even DNA is constantly being changed by the environment -- providing new opportunities or damages and, more subtly, turning various genes on and off.  Genes don’t necessarily control something like coloring but rather things like the timing of maturation or the interaction of sets of linked genes.  If some CRISPR enthusiast knocks out the gene for something linked to, for instance, metabolism, the person may fail due to its own attempt to succeed.

There are many subtle, internal, unseen dynamics of the code that is each of us.  But ethnic populations of many people also operate as codes, esp. when governments are trying to keep track, politicians are trying to persuade, and advertisements are trying to re-norm us so that we just MUST have some gizmo.

After I read about a lot of this teeny stuff, I love to read the macro research.  Like this quote:

“Until about 9,000 years ago, Europe was home to a genetically distinct population of hunter-gatherers, the researchers found. Then, 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, the genetic profiles of the inhabitants in some parts of Europe abruptly changed, acquiring DNA from Near Eastern populations.

“Archaeologists have long known that farming practices spread into Europe at the time from Turkey. But the new evidence shows that it wasn’t just the ideas that spread — the farmers did, too.

“The hunter-gatherers didn’t disappear, however. They managed to survive in pockets across Europe between the farming communities.

“ ‘ It’s an amazing cultural process,’ said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the university’s team. ‘You have groups which are as genetically distinct as Europeans and East Asians. And they’re living side by side for thousands of years.’

“From 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, however, hunter-gatherer DNA began turning up in the genes of European farmers. “There’s a breakdown of these cultural barriers, and they mix,” Dr. Reich said.

“About 4,500 years ago, the final piece of Europe’s genetic puzzle fell into place. A new infusion of DNA arrived — one that is still very common in living Europeans, especially in central and northern Europe.”

Dr. David Reich

So this population, possibly sheep herders on horseback, came in from the high north and their clue DNA is present in North American Indians!  Is this an example of NA’s infiltrating Eurasia through Russia?  

“The Ancient North Eurasian line was not present in either the 8,000-year-old hunter-gatherers or the 7,000-year-old farmer, so researchers believe it represents a migration into Europe sometime after those individuals lived but before recorded history in the region.

“These Ancient North Eurasians must have spread into Europe at a later time, and so encountered early farmer- or hunter-gatherer-type populations and mixed with them,” Lazaridis said. “It’s definitely, chronologically, the last thing that arrived in most of Europe.”

“Lazaridis said the period of approximately 4,500 years ago appears likely for the influx, because that is when new types of mitochondrial DNA appear in the genetic record. Reich added that there are hints from other disciplines, including linguistics, that point to migrations during that time span.”

A far more controversial and politically incorrect study suggests:

“A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

“The selective force was the restriction of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe to occupations that required more than usual mental agility, the researchers say in a paper that has been accepted by the Journal of Biosocial Science, published by Cambridge University Press in England.

“He and two colleagues at the University of Utah, Gregory Cochran and Jason Hardy, see the pattern of genetic disease among the Ashkenazi Jewish population as reminiscent of blood disorders like sickle cell anemia that occur in populations exposed to malaria, a disease that is only 5,000 years old.

“In both cases, the Utah researchers argue, evolution has had to counter a sudden threat by favoring any mutation that protected against it, whatever the side effects. Ashkenazic diseases like Tay-Sachs, they say, are a side effect of genes that promote intelligence.”

Tweets between @DavidQuammen and @Dr. Neil Bodie:

 "Why has there never been an outbreak of #Ebola in Pygmies? Very low rate of serious malaria? Genetic protection?"

Now consider what HIV and addiction are doing to the DNA of America.  Which is the center?  Maybe it is NOT entitled white men.  Maybe this winnowing will create a concentration of something new.  The name of the game is survival.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365516010/     First peoples.  So far, so good.  Maybe.

IF YOU GOT "HAPPY" WOULD YOU KNOW IT?

The Satisfaction with Life Index. 

Blue through red represent most to least happy respectively; grey areas have no reliable data available.

The second of these “domains” that the psych people are trying to think their way through organizing is “Positive Valence Systems.”  There are a number of problems, some of which are listed in the NIHS minutes of discussion and some of which are not really considered.  http://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/development-and-definitions-of-the-rdoc-domains-and-constructs.shtml

Notoriously, it is far more difficult to define mental health positives than negatives, though people since Maslow have been working at it.  “Negative Valence Systems”, the first one tackled by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in terms of reconciling and consolidating it with the new neurology science was easier in part because of decades of research by Joe LeDoux and his colleagues, specifically about fear and anxiety pathways.  Anyway, people who are maladjusted, hurting, or a pain-in-the-butt to others tend to seek out researchers in hope of relief.  Happy people are fine until there is some sweeping change to the world (climate change, political grid lock, economic hardships) that interferes with them.  These forces have been at hand recently.

http://www.cns.nyu.edu/home/ledoux/

Here’s what NIMH has so far.  It’s packed with jargon which I’ll try to paraphrase, but remember that I’m not a psych professional and might get their Latinate multisyllabics all wrong.  The acronym they’re using for this project is “RDoC” in case you’re trying to use search engines.

Approach Motivation Systems: 

Rather than asking, as Maslow did, what are the characteristics of a happy and healthy person, this category is more about how people go towards behavior that works in favor of growth and health.  It's a subtle difference.  “This is a multi-faceted Construct involving mechanisms/processes that regulate the direction and maintenance of approach behavior influenced by pre-existing tendencies, learning, memory, stimulus characteristics, and deprivation states.”  So these are the conclusions one’s brain has come to and stored to guide the management of what one does. 

“Approach behavior can be directed toward innate or acquired cues (i.e., unconditioned vs. learned stimuli), implicit or explicit goals; it can consist of goal-directed or Pavlovian conditioned responses.” Below are eight sub-categories, proposed so far.

"Eat your Wheaties, kid!"

Reward valuation. Processes by which the probability and benefits of a prospective outcome are computed and calibrated by reference to external information, social context (e.g., group input, counterfactual comparisons), and/or prior experience. This calibration is influenced by pre-existing biases, learning, memory, stimulus characteristics, and deprivation states. [Whatever makes you think this is a good thing to do.]

Effort valuation/Willingness to work. Processes by which the cost(s) of obtaining an outcome is computed; tendency to overcome response costs to obtain a reinforcer.  [Why get up in the morning? How much effort will you put in?  Will you accept the cost of an education?]

Expectancy/Reward prediction error. A state triggered by exposure to internal or external stimuli, experiences or contexts that predict the possibility of reward. Reward expectation can alter the experience of an outcome and can influence the use of resources (e.g., cognitive resources). [If things get tough, how much frustration can you tolerate?  What if the reward you expect just doesn’t materialize?]

Action selection/Preference-based decision making. Processes involving an evaluation of costs/benefits and occurring in the context of multiple potential choices being available for decision-making. [Making a career choice.  Choosing one of three doors.]

Initial responsiveness to reward attainment: Mechanisms/processes associated with hedonic responses—as reflected in subjective experiences, behavioral responses, and/or engagement of the neural systems to a positive reinforcer—and culmination of reward seeking.  [Why do they insist on using the word “hedonic”? What’s wrong with “pleasure?”  Having said that, we get pleasure from different things that may not be frivolous or obvious.] 

http://www.slideshare.net/bright9977/10-leadership-lessons-from-genghis-khan

Sustained/Longer-term responsiveness to reward attainment: Mechanisms/processes associated with the termination of reward seeking, e.g., satisfaction, satiation, regulation of consummatory behavior.  [ How much is enough? The opposite of addiction.]

Reward Learning: A process by which organisms acquire information about stimuli, actions, and contexts that predict positive outcomes, and by which behavior is modified when a novel reward occurs or outcomes are better than expected.   [When good things happen and rewards appear, do they register with you?  A lot of people can’t handle good times, praise, or security.  It feels stuck, boring.]

Habit: Sequential, repetitive, motor, or cognitive behaviors elicited by external or internal triggers that, once initiated, can go to completion without constant conscious oversight. Habits can be adaptive by virtue of freeing up cognitive resources.  Related behaviors could be pathological expression of a process that under normal circumstances subserves adaptive goals. [So -- you learned to do something so well that you barely know you are doing it, but now it doesn’t fit the situation.  It's a drag and a drain.  Can you get it up to consciousness and extinguish it?]

I’ll make my own list of comments:

1.  The main thing about positive rewards is distinguishing between those that address simple existence, like food or shelter, and those that are only rewards to some people.  Is opera a reward or a punishment?

"Then I thought: Why not me? I hemmed and hawed. 

I wanted to go, but debated. The cost of BART. Lunch out. 

But mostly it was the word: OPERA."

2.  This group of people doing the thinking has a particular set of experiences and therefore assumptions.  A high-end shrink with a proper couch and high fees is going to see a population that is VERY different from those of a prison chaplain or a Medecins sans Frontieres fighting ebola.  Beyond that, to achieve the level of education that qualifies people to be on these sorts of committees means that they have been socialized to accept a very specific set of beliefs about what to do and how to do it.  The existence of this boundary (frontieres?) means that they are excluding many -- maybe infinite -- points of view and sources of information.

3.  It is surprising that often the neurology structures that light up on fMRI's and so on for negatives are the same ones that light up for positives!  (S/M folks are not surprised.)  It's the SYSTEM.  This is the sort of thing that has to build up considerable credibility before it can have impact on what’s always been accepted as truth.  Organic neurology research has reached that point and the NIMH is forced to take it into account.

4.  Keeping track of the interaction between culture and pleasure is much more difficult because culture is constantly affecting what is success, why it’s success, and the consequences of success, which might be rewarding and punishing at once.  (Consider a top ballerina who is admired but who suffers physically in order to achieve.)  This is complicated again by overlapping cultures which contradict each other, like a ghetto kid whose peers think success in school is a marker of weakness while the kid’s mother is determined that success is only possible through education.  And what if the kid is dyslexic?  

ballerina feet

“Success” beyond simple survival is a slippery concept.  We tend to measure it with money, security, status, authority over others, admiration from those we care about.  What about contributions to society, cultural insight, or simply being virtuous -- except "virtue" takes us back to the same slippery ground as success.  Both are defined by participating in a culture, but cultures are incredibly various and contradictory.  In fact, the “standing order” of mental health systems may try to destroy this RDoC enterprise .  My guess is that there’s enough of a sub-culture -- humanistic, progressive, clinical -- to keep the project alive.  But not easily.  We should support this enormous re-framing.

IT'S QUEER THAT YOU'RE SO NORMAL -- OR . . .

Something like the man in the Moliere play who was shocked but pleased to discover that he was speaking “prose” without even knowing it or trying to do it, I discover that I’ve been exploring “queer theory” at least part of the time.  Not just peculiar or odd, but a category invented fairly recently so as to think about the atypical.  Formally defined.  Mostly sexual.

“Queer focuses on "mismatches" between sex, gender and desire. Queer has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, intersex (physically both sexes), gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. [I notice pedophilia is not mentioned, though in other queer places there are discussions of paraphilias, like glove fetishes. Silence means a third-rail: touch it and you're dead.]

“Gay was mobilized as a specifically political counter to that binaried and hierarchised sexual categorization which classifies homosexuality as a deviation from a privileged and naturalized heterosexuality. Queer marks both a continuity and a break with previous gay liberationist and lesbian feminist models.”

“Queer theorists challenged the validity and consistency of heteronormative discourse, and focused to a large degree on non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices.”  And NOT hierarchical.

Heteronormative, but maybe 12% or so are not.  We just didn't know until DNA.

So most of this thought is about escaping the social categories of male over here and female over there and perverse in the middle.  One is supposed to pair off (not triple off) with the opposite sex wherein the man is two inches taller, two years older, and has two more degrees than the woman.  It’s a given that gender identity is more than coitus in the interest of fertility, though most non-thinkers don’t seem to figure that out.  They are so hypnotized by what goes where that they can’t think of any other issues.  Like desire in all its colors and all its specificity.

Mary Strachan and Bob Scriver,  1962

So let me throw in a few loops of the rope:  I fell madly in love with a man twice my age or almost.  I was 21 and he was 47.  Was it a kind of late onset pedophilia?  Which one was the trophy?  Or was he a daddy, though I sometimes bathed him like a child?

Desire was enough for a decade, but it was not the only boundary crossing.  We were differently educated -- not the subject, the "Method" -- literally.  We were in a reservation world where things were dominated by the two races and their uncomfortable mixes.  Sex was in there someplace.  He became highly successful, praised, courted, and Gulliver-style confined by a host of small obligations and deadlines.  All the while he gave me protection, guidance, instruction and validation that made me stronger and freer, more desirous of freedom.  We were doomed.  Queer?

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. 'Queer' then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.”   WHAT normative?  On a rez in the Sixties?  The norm was a choice between hunkering down and uproar.  And suddenly -- fame -- there was a huge discrepancy in economic viability:  he could buy a ranch.  I barely had enough for gas to drive back to my mother’s house in Portland.  I hocked my engagement ring, the one my mother-in-law obsessed about for fear the diamond would get lost out of it.  That upset him, but he wrote the letter of recommendation that got me the animal control job.

The next non-normative was that we remained attached, much to the disgust of the fourth wife.  He had had female intimates before me which conventionally should have ended with marriage, but they didn’t.  So that was his norm.  His first wife followed the conventional pattern -- animosity and remarriage.  His second wife had broken off finally, but her sister and brother were more bonded to him than ever.  Atypical.  The rez people observed this.  Whites said, “These artist people have their own rules.”  Indians said, “All white people are crazy.”  My family knew nothing about it -- a good thing.

Though we were differently educated, both of us were in the arts:  Bob, music; myself, theatre.  That helped give us a little extra room.  I was taking OTC pills called “Scope” as though they were aspirin.  Probably most of the effect was placebo, but when I googled them just now, the pills turned out to be scopolamine, a member of the same family as powerful mushrooms.  Maybe I could have gotten into more serious drugs except that real wickedness always eludes me.  THAT's queer.  Near the end I took Bob’s Nembutal one night which scared everyone and the doc gave me Benzodiazipam (Valium) which just put me to sleep -- very nice.  That was the extent of my drug experiments in a time when many around me were hooked.  (Oh, I forgot.  When I was supposed to be losing weight, the doc gave me speed.  I never renewed the prescription.  I was speedy enough already.)

I wrote lists of what I took to be facts, using green ink and block printing in spiral notebooks.  Green ink is supposed to be a sign of something.  I suppose block printing is as well.  Then I went back through the list and challenged each assertion by flipping it over.    Edifying.  Painful.  An auto-therapy.

Recently we’ve learned about epigenomics, environmental impacts, the constant evolving of the brain’s structures, and mosaic genetics, which means that not all the cells in one body have the same DNA.  There may be bits of an infant that was carried years earlier, there may be bits of a twin that never developed, and some might have come through something like transfusions.  Many of us are chimeras and never suspected it.  Might have felt it.

Kylo-Patrick R. Hart

I’ve just been quoted by a cultural critic:  Kylo-Patrick R. Hart wrote “Queer Males in Contemporary Cinema: Becoming Visible.”   He is chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at Texas Christian University. This book follows two streams: explicitly gay movies and movies that are moving and tender, but the gay subtext is unstated.  If you aren’t looking for it, you might not know it’s there, but you may feel it and respond to it, subliminally.  (Oh, there’s another one of those words!  Don't we EVER know what we're doing?)

Troy Garity and Lee Pace

Hart quoted a review I wrote of “Soldier’s Girl,” posted Sept. 19, 2011.  I like what I wrote well enough to quote it a bit:

“Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been 'homosexual.' ”

“Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).”  Morality should not be based on word particles.

This is what Hart quoted:   “Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.”

The filmography in this book is very useful.  I’m adding some of it to my Netflix queue, but I’ve already seen a dozen of the 35 films, some of which are classic.  (“Red River,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “From Here to Eternity,” "Boys Don't Cry.")  We all love these boys -- you know the ones I mean.  Even the ones who aren't male.

John Wayne and young Montgomery Clift

Slightly older Montgomery Clift

James Dean

Hilary Swank

WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO TO BECOME FAMOUS?

1965

Now that it’s a hundred years since Bob Scriver was born, it’s interesting to try to understand what we were thinking in the Sixties, the key years when his reputation as an outstanding sculptor of Western subjects was being formed.  Fame and fortune are something like the determination of a dog to chase a car, trying to catch it without understanding what to do with it once you’ve got it.  

While Bob’s collateral relatives from Canada were here, I rustled up the DVD that the lawyers made of Bob talking about himself when he was eighty.  It’s a 30 minute disc that includes both Bob and some “mood” images of the Blackfeet sculptures that are included in the book “No More Buffalo,” which Bob paid to have printed.  The DVD has disappeared off the market.  You can find "No More Buffalo" on the used book websites on the Internet, but many copies were ruined by water damage when the museum burned and others are in storage at the Montana Historical Society because no one understands the legalities that would allow them to be sold or reprinted.  The bronzes themselves are on exhibit in Fort Benton.

Watching the DVD, Bob's cousin asked whether he was drunk!  He’d had a stroke and he has trouble with his teeth, but also he has adopted a defiant, boasting, false humility about his place in history.  Actually, I agree with him.  His claim is based on being in a certain place (the Blackfeet rez) at a particular time (the booming popularity of Western art as the last of the frontier faded) and taking advantage of it with the skills and drive he had developed since his earliest years.  He shows the tiny figures he made as a first grader, developed into his basic skills by the time he was in high school.  He puts considerable force and eloquence into explaining why he took the detour into music, describing “foul” years.  Actually, they were considered quite brilliant at the time, with his school bands winning prizes and praise.

Browning town square -- Browning Merc to the right

But he wanted to be a star.  Not a high school band conductor but first chair in a major orchestra.  Of course, that would have meant leaving Browning.  Much of the guidance and energy in his life came from his mother, who was determined that Robert would be outstanding but also that he would NEVER leave her.  Bob's father had no use for art, but understood brass bands from his own years with a cadet band in rural Quebec.  His father’s idea of a proper man's vocation was that of Bob’s older brother, Harold, who ran the Browning Merc when his father was too old, but he still wasn’t even trusted with the key to the rolltop manager’s desk.  

Sir Albert Edward Kemp

The two boys were more like extensions of their parents than independent human beings.  Both parents had made a huge leap -- across the continent -- away from their own birth families. Thad’s brother had indeed become enormously rich, but by chance.  He owned land that turned out to be in the center of Minneapolis.  No other Scriver, MacFie, or Hawley became rich or famous, but Wessie’s mother, maiden name Creller, had a cousin who became “Lady Kemp” (her husband owned a machinery business that was of service to the crown) which gave them all that confounded British Landed Gentry complex that the BBC has been wrestling with in series after series.  Nothing short of a knighthood would have satisfied Bob’s mother.  

John Clymer's portrait of "Big Medicine"

This is part of the reason Bob focused his efforts on Alberta (British) instead of the American SW where the other cowboy artists were getting rich.  Also, he was as interested in animals as people (also characteristic of his mother) so that the Connecticut illustrators (John Clymer, Bob Lougheed, Bob Kuhn) became early personal friends who invited him into the Society of Animal Artists.  Those artists didn’t get pulled into the “cowboy” obsession until the demand began to boom and more work was needed by galleries.  

John Clarke

Also at that point, the “other” Western artists, including those who were interested in Indians (Joseph Sharp, Winold Reiss, Hart Schultz, Charlie Beil, John Clarke) and those invited into Glacier National Park by the advertising campaigns of the Great Northern, began to sell big.  Bob knew many of them personally, learned from them.  Many of the important families associated with Glacier Park and the reservation became close to these men, but Bob’s family did not.  However, the Carberry family was friends with both the Scrivers and the arts community of the park.  Their artifact collection is in the Field Museum in Chicago. 

Paul Dyck

Harry Jackson

Bob's entry into the "cowboy world" of the SW was through rodeo when he did the portrait of Bill Linderman.  For a while Harold McCracken included him in the Cody context along with Harry Jackson and Paul Dyck, both of them personal friends but friendly rivals.  None of the three was Cowboy Artists of America material: too independent and unique.

Leon Walters

When Bob had gone to Chicago to study at the Vandercook School of Music, he haunted the Field Museum and connected with Leon Walters, a major diorama taxidermist, who taught him many things as well as causing him to take a serious scientific approach to animal preservation.  (The current conviction that there’s something macabre -- even obscene -- about mounted animals or hunting was unknown at the time.)  Also at the Field Museum there was a room called the Hall of Man that contained a series of life-sized portraits of what were then considered “races,” each individual carefully portrayed.    Malvina Hoffman had been subsidized to undertake this massive project as an aspect of anthropology.  The whole concept has since been attacked as a source of racism and hatred.  The bronzes have been put into storage except for the judicious use of a few with other exhibits.  But for Bob, Malvina was his Muse Mother.

Malvina Hoffman's Hall of Man

Because of Bob’s devotion to these bronzes, both the geography dimension and the skill of the work, we went to see Malvina Hoffman and also became friends with Joy Buba, her sculptor friend.  The two women proposed him for the National Sculpture Society.  Warren Baumgartner, another illustrator friend, proposed him for the National Academy of Design and the Salmagundi Club, and these were key connections to the certifiers of value in realistic art.  Because I had been a theatre student and accustomed to read the New York Times, which I purchased in Great Falls at Val’s Cigar Store, I prompted Bob to send his work to the major Manhattan shows of realistic sculpture advertised there, and the bronzes were accepted.  The scrapbook of these honors was reassuring to novice art buyers.  

But his father always demanded “Are you making any money, Robert?”  He didn’t until the Calgary Stampede, backed by Colonel Harvie who had made a fortune in the equivalent to a Bakken strike between Calgary and Banff, bought the entire set of rodeo bronzes.  When Bob divorced me in 1970, he had just finished those bronzes.  The sale was completed just after I was gone.  I don’t know what his dad said then, but I suspect he found some way to undercut his son’s pride.  It had become a habit.  He was ninety.  His mother was delighted and told all her friends.  But the real excitement came when Bob was on "What's My Line?" This was her audience, not the art world, which she didn’t grasp anyway -- neither the in-state promotions nor the big Manhattan scene.  None of my praise meant anything to Bob because we had agreed from the beginning to merge egos -- I’d just be praising myself as far as he was concerned.

Contemporary art writing is often contemptuous, mocking, and intent on finding the cracks in the golden bowl of fame and fortune.  It’s always easy to do, since anyone with a relentless drive to achieve is going to expose an underside;  trampled bodies love to rise up to make accusations.  So why work so hard at building a reputation?  If family doesn’t get it, if the professional world is oblivious, if the money means nothing in terms of improving the quality of one’s life, if friends turn to competitors -- what’s the point?  All these people are dead now. I was young when they were old -- now I'm old myself.

They made art for the sake of the doing of it.  “Art is the expression of the relationship between a person and the universe.”  I think I’ll change that definition again.  Now I think it should be “art is the universe expressed through a unique person.”  Can't be stopped.  Almost can't be controlled.  But I remember all these people and how much they relished working.

BATMAN WEEPS

This post has had to be started over three times.  It began as a Sunday post about a minister who survived a midlife crisis but left the ministry.  Then it got pulled out of shape by my reading of an invaluable book about Hutterites, called “The Forgotten People,” because it is such a clear alternative to the society that creates a much-admired mainstream minister, but then leaves him hollow and blames him for being a “narcissist.”  To the Hutterites all this would seem like nonsense, but to the author Michael Holzach it would be clear.  His huge achievement was to be curious and nonjudgmental in experimentally moving from his upscale and mainstream life in Germany to the medieval communal peasant life of a Hutterite colony a little over a hundred miles north of here, outside Lethbridge, Alberta.  He just wanted to write a book, but it turned out to be much more.  I’ll come back to that later in the week.

Because as I was writing, along came the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and its many questions about society.  The most useful thoughts for me showed up on Warren Olney’s NPR program, “To the Point”,  The first shocker was the statistic that in the USA these incidents (mass shootings involving more than four deaths) happen a couple of dozen times a year.  The media only picks up on the sexy ones with an angle.  The headline in the GF Tribune Saturday morning was “SLAYING SUSPECT WAS BRILLIANT STUDENT” which captures some of the Montana suspicion of fancy educations and the high expectations that go with them.  If you make it to grad school, you’re supposed to be bullet-proof.  But in this part of the world, contradictorily, being a smarty-pants is worse than being a gun nut.

Richard Florida in “The Geography of Gun Violence” http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/07/geography-gun-violence/2655/  suggests there is a difference between the nature of mass shooters in terms of grouped statistics and the nature of mass shooters as individuals.  If you look at state by state, the slightly higher incidence is in states with a lot of working class people who are conservatives, NRA members, and in economic difficulty.  If you look at individuals, you see something different.  Roger Ebert, in an effort to prevent the idea that a Batman movie caused the incident, picks up on this, suggesting that James Holmes, like other shooters, felt a “deep, inchoate insecurity and a need for validation.”  Florida says there is a definite connection to the rise in instant witness media.  Shooters know they have an audience, possibly worldwide and simultaneous.

My question is not why Holmes escalated his despair when he got into school difficulties.  It’s plain to me that his academic choice was an attempt to understand himself -- not unlike a lot of heavy drinking or drugging at that age and evidently equally useless for him.  This is not different from the case of the shrink who became a recent mass killer.  I’ve personally witnessed that a lot of mainline professionals and working class men (put military men where you like)  carry this same “deep, inchoate insecurity and a need for validation.”  They often look to women to resolve this and can become violent in their demand.  Some sublimate violence to sex, other sex to violence.  Institutions do not question this because it would lead directly to challenging the assumptions on which they rest, like the nature of authority and what a worthy man is like.  It would challenge the idea that they are effective and relevant.  

Hutterites are pacifists who arise from the same roots as Unitarians (NOT Universalists) but the Unitarians dropped communal ownership and then later the all-powerful God.  Today they are quite mainline.  But Hutterites in Montana moved north to Canada during WWI because their German origins and stubborn pacifism caused them to be stigmatized and tortured to the point of death by American authorities.  They have remained stubbornly sequestered in Medieval communal agriculture with some tech improvements.  The burdens their men carry are shared.  Deviators are counseled and -- if intractable -- put outside the circle.  Gender differences are clear and again the women's hard work is shared.  Around the outside of the colonies is a ragged edge of interaction with the larger culture.  The Valier library checks out hundreds of “Christian romances” to the women and the men come to use the computers for business.  At night I can see the lights of the nearest colony just across Lake Frances.  

Once I stepped into a major quarrel across the alley where a runaway boy had taken refuge with a couple of alcoholic old men.  A sheriff’s deputy finished the intervention.  

Once I stopped at a colony to buy vegetables and the senior patriarch who sold them wanted to find out why a middle-aged woman was driving a van alone on the back roads of Montana.  I was a circuit riding UU minister.  This REALLY got his attention.  “Do your people obey you?” he asked.  

“No, they INSIST on thinking for themselves!”

“Sister, this is terrible!  You must get them under control at once or their souls will burn in hell!”  A lot of non-Hutterites agree.

Go back to that entitled but deeply burdened and obligated mainstream minister, whose fancy education did not prevent him from a crisis and whose devoted wife could not save him.  (I don’t want to name him because as the saying goes,  “God is not through with him yet.”)  Why didn’t his colleagues see what was going on and step in?  Why didn’t Holmes’ classmates and teachers step in?  Was it that they felt they didn’t have the right or because their sense of what is “right” was too weak?  Or were they too busy thinking about their own issues?  Or did he successfully deflect them?

Ministry gets a bad rap these days, often with good reason.  The pattern was supposed to be “A Man Called Peter.”  (Now THERE was a movie!!  Right?  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048337/plotsummary)    This contemporary minister whose book I read now runs secular workshops for professional men.  They’re “suits,” living in as much of a bubble as ministers.  (I suppose one could call it “Mad Man Syndrome.”)  His work is worthy, sounds effective and -- maybe most of all -- keeps the lot of them from picking up assault rifles.  The emphasis on women in this book is not of much use for gays, but I think that will change.  The larger world seeps in everywhere, even among sequestered executives.  

Too much depends on “success” in an uncertain world.  We cannot prevent the chaos of the planet -- it is what creates and sustains us.  But we can certainly redefine success, whether as a communal group or as individuals.  It is more than being famous.  Even those who seem to have it made can be secretly desperate for a little help.  We need the sharp focus on each other that the elders provide in a Hutterite colony, but without forcing conformity.  And we can reach out to each other BEFORE we leave bloody handprints.