FOR THOSE WHO ARE AFRAID OF DYING

X had marked time in the limestone ledge since the Paleozoic seas covered the land.  Time, to an atom locked in a rock, does not pass.

The break came when a bur-oak root nosed down a crack and began prying and sucking.  In the flash of a century the rock decayed, and X was pulled out and up into the world of living things.  He helped build a flower, which became an acorn, which fattened a deer, which fed an Indian, all in a single year.

From his berth in the Indian’s bones, X joined again in chase and flight, feast and famine, hope and fear.  He felt these things as changes in the little chemical pushes and pulls that tug timelessly at every atom.  When the Indian took his leave of the prairie, X moldered briefly underground, only to embark on a second trip through the bloodstream of the land.

This time it was a rootlet of bluestem that sucked him up and lodged him in a leaf that rode the green billows of the prairie June, sharing the common task of hoarding sunlight.

— Aldo Leopold

Blue Stem Grass

Those who think about fear of dying think about the future rather than the past.  The truth is that you have already died many times.  Like X, the traveling atom, your bits have traveled from all over the cosmos to be you for a little while, but they have already been “you” in all the incarnations that came before, most recently in the cells of your mother and what she ate and breathed, according to a plan settled upon by your father’s and mother’s directions for assembling a human being.  You are as temporary as they were.  Human beings are temporary arrangements of elements assembled as molecules, then cells, and then a body that constantly changes.

Not only does it change by taking in the world, sorting it, keeping part of it and throwing the rest back out, but also the cells collaborate to make the identity “grow.”  I resisted this as soon as I understood it was happening.  Partly it was because of all the smug grownups who would say, “You’ll grow out of this.  You’ll be different later.”  Growth sounded to me like the death of the familiar identity I knew and loved.  This was accurate.  But I tried to defy it.  I hated giving up my old familiar clothes simply because I’d gotten too big.  I hated having to give up pablum.  

Somehow identity was mixed with consciousness, not to be conscious was to be dead.  So I tried to be conscious of everything.  That was easier before school, where all the other identities interfered with me.  My own insides were so vivid, so known, so cherished, that everything else was merely shadow.  Were you like that?

Staying alive means changing and growing.  When I finally realized that, partly because of needing to achieve in school and to avoid punishment at home, I wept.  How could any new self be manageable?  It meant accepting the belonging to a group, which I had always resisted, felt was a step down, a surrender.

So now it’s easy for me to see that when people (maybe adult and maybe not) finally understand that their familiar identity as an alcoholic, or a risk-taker, or as the oppositionally defiant person (which can only be an attempt to stay the same despite the wishes of others, usually authorities) and who sees that this set of behaviors is likely to cause their bodily death, which will mean the end of their consciousness, will only then make an effort to change their consciousness and behavior.  Religiously, this is often called a “rebirth.”  Often it means access to good behavior that had been left behind, at last pulling it out of the darkness where it was pushed by the struggle.  This might be called a “renaissance,” which means “rebirth.”  

Usually this is not the violent, squalling, relinquishment of safety in a womb of some sort, but rather a kind of gradual shift, a new compass point as destination.  But a radical difference in environment might indeed be the rock cracking open to release atom X so it can start another journey.

This has happened to me repeatedly by now.  Death will only be another version of it, but I’m greedy for more consciousness and I’m not through with this identity so I fight to keep it.  Partly I’m in the habit of this oppositional defiance of everyone else trying interpret, control, demand what I think or do.  It still continues.  It’s part of being alive, but a lot of people concede and do what’s expected, even if it makes them ache and empties them -- so they try to be numb and automatic.  Dead while alive.  Atoms trapped in uselessness.

I did not understand that evolution is not about monkeys and humanids.  It is about everything.  It is simply time.  We borrow everything from time, which soon enough takes it back.  The brain itself evolves, and therefore can think new things, which means a renewed identity and consciousness.  And yet part of the evolution has allowed memory, though it’s probably not all that accurate.  Yet, I DO seem to remember what it felt like when I was five, before school.  I hated school.  It interfered with me all the time, until I evolved enough to have access to what it was “for.”  Then I could see the usefulness.

And now I’ve evolved enough to abandon school, generate many identities and consciousnesses — or at least play my connectome like a piano or harp so I can experience many things many ways, without drugs.  Those who insist I be who I was, the person who was familiar and convenient to them, are always aghast now because they haven’t changed so they deny and despise some of who I have become.  My mother struggled with this lifelong.  Why couldn’t I marry a nice safe Presbyterian minister and be a helper and a better cook — like her?  All that means is that she had no idea what misery a nice safe Presbyterian minister can be or suffer, even married, even male.

There is no safe life.  All lives are transient, even the ones that come and go through the same bodies and are changed by social participation.  Few lives are very intentional.  We forget that previous times, viewed with nostalgia, are dishonestly remembered. 

Every day is evolving into a time of great possibility. One of them is the possibility of death — it has happened to so many people in our times.  Millions.  So now I sometimes turn my attention to the issue of how to die well.  I don’t mean courageously, but something more like gracefully, having made a contribution even if no one recognizes it.  Setting X free to be whatever comes next.  Joining the bloodstream of the land, which in this case is an ancient dry seabed, next to the tectonic collision that raised the Rockies.  

WORSHIP DESIGN THEORY

Sanctuary of First Unitarian Church of Chicago

At my seminary the students prepared a short worship service as Vespers on Friday close-of-day.  We were encouraged to be experimental, which interested me very much after some eye-opening events when I was a lay person attending a Leadership School. They were simple designed events with deep impact.

In seminary we used a small side chapel at the cathedral-like main sanctuary of First Unitarian.  A firewall normally separated the two spaces, but it was stuck, fully raised open, leaving a dark chasm where one sensed the height of the stone interior even with lights off.  I was struck by this “feeling” of unseen emptiness and remembered a scrap of poetry about facing the void, how what we see is somehow ourselves.  So I organized a conventional sequence of song, reading, lesson, prayer, but all on this theme and with everyone seated looking into the dark past a big mirror where we were reflected.  It was pretty effective.

Years later, when serving a small congregation in Canada that was in love with the UU practice of lighting candles adapted from the Catholic practice by adding words by the lighter to the congregation.  They never got enough of lighting candles on Sunday before the service, so that sometimes the entire hour was taken up with candles lit for things ranging from deep grief to trivia.  One Christmas Eve I decided we’d just go with it.

I arranged the space with rows of chairs on each side and a line of folding tables down the center.  Down the middle of the tabletops, I set up dozens of candles, using Pyrex drinking glasses half-full of salt as candleholders.  The theme was babies: our babies, other people’s babies, dead and lost babies, climaxing with the Baby Jesus.  Each section was begun with a short reading, then the people were invited to light candles.  Soon we were all shimmering in heat waves.  (Do not do this without a good fire strategy, even if it’s only buckets of water ready to throw onto the tables!)  Tears poured down cheeks, laughter met song, and people talked about this for days afterwards.  I doubt that anyone has forgotten it.

Abrahamic liturgies that developed into today’s mass used by various denominations have their roots in sacrifice -- some say human, certainly animal, and gradually becoming less bloody, diminishing to symbolic substances  (water,oil) and merging with communal meals, accompanied with study of written materials that so dominate religious experience even now.  The Christian branch has kept an echo of sacrifice in Communion, shared food considered to be intimate recognition of the life of Jesus.  The Jewish sequence is anchored in Friday Shabbat, a family congregation that shares bread and lights candles.  Muslims ask for prayers throughout the day, wherever they are, but always with their heads pointed to Mecca.  Fasting is their sacrifice.

Blackfeet ceremonies like opening Bundles with song and dance have no written material but rather use songs associated with specific animals whose hides are in the Bundle as prompters.  At the opening of the Thunder Pipe Bundle in spring --  meant to beg for protection from the lightning strikes that walk across the land with thunderstorms, -- a big bowl of sarvisberry soup is eaten after everyone picks out the biggest berry and passes it up to the smudge altar to prompt a good crop.

Heartfelt ceremonies in the face of danger strong enough to threaten survival will have much power that crystalizes into forms that are natural to daily life.  The trouble with designing powerful ceremonies today is that most nice prosperous people who attend mainstream churches slide along grooves without much intensity, mostly controlled by media promotion of events as opportunities to buy.  

Depression, despair, ennui, meaninglessness, skepticism, drug-taking are the result of lack of contact with the fundamental reality of our animal selves: the senses.  Research now suggests that the neurons of the body (not just the dashboard in the brain) provide information about the out-of-skin-world to the in-body self through hundreds of perceiving cells, not just the five senses.  And these sensate codes are stored in other specific cells according to the moments of first perception.

The coded information may be very simple and subtle: the perception of being along the edge of a space, the information that your head (still attached) is leaving the top of your body, where it ought to be, because you are bending over.  Some people have eidetic memories which means they can store so much sensation that they can summon up pages they have seen and “read” them from memory.  Most of us might remember when looking for something written that it was in a book that had a red cover with a picture of a tiger and on a page about halfway through, printed halfway down.   Some researchers suggest there are as many as 200 different kinds of perception, some of them linked to memory more than others.  Mostly never rising to consciousness.

The sensate codes developed by experiencing moments and linked to memory may be the sensing of one’s own interior emotional state, which has its own perceptual system (the autonomic nervous system) operating with both electrochemical strands of nerve fiber and excreted molecules, floating in blood and plasma, from various sources with various effects.  Most people know that twisting squeeze of the guts that goes with high excitement, maybe awareness of danger.  Others are so used to denying, controlling, forcing the appearance of compliance, that they have sealed off awareness.  Many techniques try to recover code in memory or possibly to create new ones.  The line between therapy and worship gets blurred in the process, but that doesn’t seem like a bad result.  It's not the practice but the content that might be disturbing.

Intense awe and the humbling of cosmic awareness are harder to provide, but it seems to be coming to us now through what some have called Mystic Science: the feeling of being part of a whole far beyond our ability to perceive.  No longer do we believe in the protection of a big humanoid ruler, but we still remain vulnerable to the impact of looking at a long vista on earth or the limitless spaces a time-linked telescope can reveal.  I have no idea which organ secretes what (though there are suggestions) or which cells respond to "Eternity", but something certainly seems to make the body respond and since the body is the substrate of felt meaning, the response can be measured by instruments.  

Personal behavior is a little trickier.  If survival is predicated on control and domination, reinforced by a religion’s assurance of the right to domination, then -- unreasonably -- violence and destruction of threats, real or not, the results will be (in my book) Evil.  If the response to awe is an impulse to participate and protect others, it can slip the issue of survival over to the whole complex of the planet, including all beings without worrying about the priority of humans, of living things, or any one “ideal” state.  Then the focus goes to the ongoing torrent of time, which tears everything apart -- then reunites them in transformation.

Our societies around the globe seem to be re-enacting this now.  The imagery of holocaust is nuclear/drought/famine based.  We see the images daily but without a powerful, emotional, sense-coded feeling of belonging and participating.  What ceremony can we design that will provide this?

TY SHOW, BLACKFEET OF THE FUTURE

This is a very self-indulgent post.  So I’ll begin with a 1972 photo of myself in my classroom in Browning High School (now the “Old” high school) with Candi Henkel (r) and Geri Show (l), two energetic and charming young students.  Probably grandmothers by now.

Next we go to Ty Show in a photo I stole from the GF Tribune about outstanding Montana students this May Day Sunday.  

Now consider one of Bob Scriver’s fav stories.  When I came in 1961, Bill Show owned a service station in Browning, Montana.  His son, Joe Show, was a co-owner, so Bill could afford to relax on the bench out front of the outfit soaking up the sun with his cowboy hat tipped down over his face.  One day a big ol' Cadillac convertible pulled into the pumps.  A set of longhorns was attached to the grille in front and the license plate said Texas.

“Waal,” drawled the big ol' so-called cowboy in the front seat, addressing whomever.  “Waddya got here we ain’t got in Texas?”

Bill never even looked up, but he tipped his hat back enough to be heard.  “GREEN GRASS AND WATER!” he said, and went back to sleep.

Bill and Reese Show were the parents of Joe and Jerry Show.  (Jerry is the father of Geri Show and was also on the school board.)

Joe was the parent of TJ Show  who married Shonnie Kipp (sister of Woody Kipp) and produced Ty.  I think that the grandmother with the Ph.D. mentioned in the news story is Billy Joe Show Kipp, a name that sort of sums things up.  Other names in this family tree include a Heavy Runner and a Sanderville.  If you know your rez history, you’ll recognize these names.  Otherwise, look ‘em up.

Geez, I sure hope this is right, but if it isn’t, please forgive me and add comments to straighten it out.  I tried to look it up on the Internet but discovered I was waaaay behind and would have to do hours of work to figure out what genealogy was there and how to decipher it.  I can’t remember what Jerry’s wife’s name was -- just that she was small, smart, and pretty -- or who it was that his daughter Geri (the one in the photo) married so I can’t figure out what Ty’s relationship to her might be.  Cousin is a safe guess, though she’s older.

What I know for sure is that Ty is a pretty special kid and comes by it through both genes and upbringing.  You could put him down anywhere and he would shine, but his real roots are right here in a place that’s supposed to prevent achievement.  He’s been one of the change-makers, always thinking up a community improvement scheme.  But he’s also an athlete, including rodeo competition, with a specialty at bull-dogging.  The Show ranch is off to the west where the “inside road” crosses the Two Med river, and it would be hard to find a more beautiful place to summer.   Plenty of water and grass.

Because of this blog, I get occasional inquiries about Blackfeet history, usually about battles or ceremonies.  My tendency is to rock those people back on their heels.  What they’re really looking for is what Sharman Alexie called “The Toughest Indian in the World,” though no one got what he was talking about.  (That’s the story that caused some people to think Sherman was gay.)   He meant that 19th century construct of the nude long-haired warrior on horseback, painted and feathered.  You can’t kill that dude.  He’s a shadow, a myth, a trickster, who seduces every teenaged girl wanting to be initiated and every mid-life-crisis white desk jockey who thinks he can become acculturated by reading some books.  Maybe picking up a few tips from a tubby old white woman who’s been around the rez a long time.

Why isn’t the story of Ty Show, a handsome senior with a near 4.0 GPA and a Catholic cross on his necklace but -- just above it -- a Napi mischief smile, why isn’t that good enough?  Why isn’t THAT an inspiration?  I reckon it is around here -- on the rez and in Montana.  That “Toughest Indian” doesn’t live here -- he’s an urban dream.

Partly it’s a question of scale.  We think in terms of family and place.  (That’s what local means.)  When I’m trying to figure out a kid, I ask “Who’s your grandmother?” which generally tells me more than his or her last name which may or may not belong to his grandfather.  It works for Valier homesteaders just as well as rez families.  Cut Bank, an oil town with a lot of drifters, not so much.  When the kid does NOT know the names of his grandmothers, that tells me quite a lot.

Darrell Kipp (related to Ty somehow -- probably another “cousin”) taught a special class in Missoula at the U of Montana this winter.  He was telling me that there was no lectern or chalkboard or even whiteboard.  Instead there was an electronic console and a big projection screen behind him.  He was supposed to bring his laptop to plug in but it also had internet access.  When he looked out at the classroom, the students were all eyes-down to their electronic devices.  The text was Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock,”  (1984), costing a penny on Amazon.  (No doubt thwarting profits at the student book store.)  You can get it for Kindle or as audio.  I expect this is predicted in the book itself, which is no longer a prediction since most of it has happened by now.  

Also, Darrell said that Tom McGuane read from his latest book in Missoula not long ago.   Tom broke into literary consciousness with “The Bushwacked Piano” (1971, now ten bucks for a used paperback, no Kindle or audio version) and has been haunted ever since by the Toughest Author in the World -- the guy who wrote the Great American Novel.  Maybe Hemingway, maybe Faulkner.  Not Alexie.  At the least McGuane established the eastern side of the state as a place to write.  After the reading some “seasoned” guys went to a big new coffee house, expecting to kid around and laugh the way we all used to in high-backed booths when the beverage was more likely to be beer.  Instead, Darrell said the place was quiet, people sitting separately at tables with earphones,  laptops and hand-held devices, clicking away.  No one meets eyes anymore.  No one checks to see who’s in the room.  Anyway McGuane had gone back to the hotel to sleep.

What’s this got to do with Ty Show?   He’s not missing what we old guys miss.  I don’t know how much he’s into the world conversation where Tim’s boys post, but  I expect his computer is as much a part of him as that Toughest Indian’s horse was and he can ride the internet easily with a bulldogger’s timing and strategy.  So will you city white guys give up the fantasies and try to keep up?  Ty Show is not in Texas.  We're pretty proud he's in Montana.

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR TIME

I’m being nibbled to death by ducks.   I get the mail and the first thing is a notice:  Your Extra Help with Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Costs Notice of Termination. (It’s not much money, but still . . .)

The second thing is another notice:  “You owe $50 on your account with the GF Clinic and we are sending it in for collection.”  AFTER the “extra help” my co-pay was $100, which I was paying in pieces.  They want me to use a credit card.   The doc spent about three seconds max with me and never told me the results, though he discussed his diagnosis with the assistant.  When I asked, he left.  I hounded the office for months before I got a printed diagnosis.  I’m right on the dividing line for glaucoma treatment.  My advice was not asked.  HIS time is valuable.

There are other nibbles, too similar and boring to recount.  Takes too much time.

I call my pharmacist for more glucose diagnostic strips.  She tells me what the price is in her computer -- some mystery app that is a collaboration between Big Pharm and Medicare -- and she says the strips are free.  But when they come, the bill is $35 for fifty strips.  No explanation.  Already deducted from my bank account.  I’ve had refunds as big as $75 and debits as much as $50, all totally mysterious.  The pharmacist never knows why either.  It’s just bookkeeping.

Then I go by the only grocery store in town.  My order has come in.  The cat food cases are 25% more expensive than if I’d bought them in the county seat thirty miles away.  I ordered them when the road was perilous.  When I unpack them, one case is the wrong kind.  The rest of my order was canceled.  The peanut butter I want cannot be had unless I buy twelve jars at once because no one else in town buys it.  (Adams: half as much sugar in it.)   

As directed in order to sort out the first problem with that termination, I get on the phone.  I sit through all the usual advice to push this and that, to use a computer, to leave a phone message, to fill out a form I don’t have, etc.  Then I find another more local phone number with all the same information about stuff I don’t need to know.  I get a person, who is very nice and looks everything up and says I didn’t send in something I was supposed to and I was asked to call them weeks ago but I didn’t.   I did, but got put on hold, left a voice message that was not returned, etc.  Until I just gave up.  

She is sending me a form.  She asks if I’d like to come in in person:  she’s eighty miles away over icy roads and my pickiup is undependable, aside from the cost of gas.  There is no bus.  I’m fairly polite until she asks for time while she looks something up and I say,  “Oh, sure, go ahead.   I’m reading an article on left-handedness on the computer.”  Two things: immediately she wants me to do everything online and then she remarks lightly,  “Oh, the things we do to fill up our time.”  (ie.  I’m a little old lady who is wasting her time.)  Click.   As we used to say in Ms. Mag about feminist moments.

I’m nudged to think of Cass Sunstein and Clay Shirkey, two on my list of heavyduty thinkers.  I google Sunstein and the U of Chicago Law School says they’ve reorganized -- the Sunstein page is gone.  So I google “Nudge.”  This is what Wikipoopia says:

“The book received mixed reviews. The Guardian described it as "never intimidating, always amusing and elucidating: a jolly economic romp but with serious lessons within." But The Sunday Times called it a "very, very dull read" and others contended that the many policy proposals it contained became "a bit wearisome". It was named a "Best Book of the Year" by The Economist.”

And Shirkey?  “Cognitive Surplus” proposes that computers have released so much unused time that used to be sunk in watching stupid TV that we are in a veritable renaissance of creativity on the Internet.  Like starting Middle Eastern revolutions, I suppose, until they shut off the Internet.

Here’s another book to think about (I never buy them -- I just bounce off reviews):   “The Googilization of Everything” by Siva Vaidhyanathan.  It’s about (in part) the secret algorithym by which Google decides what to put on their lists and in what order and this new deal about the “quality” of what’s there.  Evidently, good website design will get you higher on the list which can make a big monetary difference if you’re using Google to sell.  Of course,  you can pay Google to be at the head of the list.   Most people never google past the first page.  


I’m fascinated watching my own name go up and down.  Sometimes someone will pick out a “hook” sentence from the body of the day’s post and put it at the beginning of the entry about my blog.  I try to write a good enough one of my own.  When I tell people this happens, they are shocked.  They think that the stuff that runs like water through a pipe across the Internet is never seen by anyone.  They’ve evidently never been in a tech room with a screen somewhere showing what’s flowing.   


In the early days of blogging, they used to post on the blogger website the titles of blogs as they posted online.  I was always surprised by how many were not in English.  Now, of course, thanks to Homeland Security and Pediapanic, there are filters that can pick out individual bloggers on the basis of their views and vocabulary.  Even their faces.


Evidently some people have just realized that they are being manipulated by their computers, even though Shirkey thinks it’s an active pursuit that lets us be creative.  And Sunstein/Thaler have pointed out that simple small percentages in the way we make decisions can change elections, start waves of popularity, determine your income tax, etc. etc.  (But then along comes the Big Dog of the U of Chicago School of Law and erases your carefully designed website so that Google can’t find it.)  


I see a pattern where banks and retailers (and other bureaucracies) deliberately overcharge or underprovide, knowing that the consumer will probably not have time to check closely and -- if the error is perceived -- will find it too small to spend time correcting.  On the other hand, there are women in this town who spend an hour or two on the phone every single day correcting small errors and injustices.


Getting back to my original experience, which is only a sample of miniature ongoing struggle, minor as it may be when compared with my real work of writing and thinking, it is clear that our world has been particle-ized in the service of commodification.  A million little rules and decisions are guiding things so simple as buying a jar of peanut butter.  I don’t grudge the money so much as I do the time.  I retired early, meaning poor, in order to have the TIME, and I resent that being drained away by trivia in the name of profit.  I keep thinking about the guy who programmed a lot of ATM’s to round off all deposits downward to the nearest dollar and deposit the extra cents to his account.  He picked up millions.  I forget what finally happened to him.  Too bad we can’t reprogram time.

LEAPING INTO THE FUTURE

Technically, the first computers I knew anything about were punch cards that the principal in the 1960’s used to sort the kids into classes. The edges of the cards had holes or notches, corresponding to today’s X and O, and one stuck an awl through so that only the holes were lifted out.

At seminary (1980) when I was a typist for the U of Chicago Law School, we were on computer “stations” with the hard drive in some mysterious place far away -- like the basement. The directions were complex and touchy, but it was where I learned keyboarding as opposed to typing. I did both and my appreciation of keyboarding (which was only available for senior professor manuscripts) was the insistence of the junior faculty on error-free letters. I am not an error-free typist.

Then a centralized computer system, linked to banks of stations, was made available to students. One unfortunate typed in his thesis, only to have some line length command go wrong: every line was one letter shorter than the one before until it dwindled down to one letter and then zero letters. Talk about your long tail.

When I was teaching at Heart Butte (1989), I fell upon the little Macintoshes with glee. But the administration only recognized IBM as “real” computers and refused to support the lovable little boxes. Nothing daunted, I spent my own money and so did the kids, who learned operation far more quickly than they learned grammar and gave the computer a virus within two weeks.

When I was fired (1991), I invested some of my last money in a LISA, which I operated next to my mother’s washing machine in her basement in Portland, because that was the only three-prong plug in the house. It was that machine I was using when I first went online, making contact with a network of some kind in Dillon which caused me to burst into tears. Then I found the Native American bulletin boards and became Prairie Mary.

After getting a database entry job working for the City of Portland (1992), I could afford another Mac and it’s been slowly newer Macs ever since. I even went to PMUG meetings (Portland Macintosh User Group) and got a discount on discs which were quickly piling up. I was using the hard 3.5 discs at home and we used the bigger “floppies” at work. Then the City went to a centralized Oracle set-up and all was chaos for months. By this time I was working as cashier for the Bureau of Buildings and aware that if the public knew how muddled everything was, there would be lawsuits. When we had earlier developed an algorithm for finding deadbeat landlords and acted on it, we did get sued.

So here I sit (since 1999), retired, at last free to think with a computer that will let me do it publicly, part of a planetary network of affinity groups and linked to a co-writer I’ve never met (Tim Barrus) because he mostly lives in Paris when he’s not traveling. I’ve quit traveling. After ten years of traveling to preach, blogging means the same amount of writing and, blessedly, no driving.

This trip through the past is nothing compared to the shifting world of literature but fewer people realize the changes. This story happens on several levels, like three-dimensional chess, which interact with each other to constantly create new things. The levels I am aware of so far are: content, technical, marketing. There will be more.

In the past "literary" books have been controlled by publishers or sometimes universities. Publishers staked out a territory and provided capital to “feed” books into that venue. The most respected was, of course, in England. Next after that, esp. when the WWII intelligentsia of Europe had fled to New York City, it was Manhattan. Manhattan and the area within commuting distance, like Connecticut or Long Island, became the Wall Street of books. High school teachers who read magazines like Time or Harper’s revered the writers based in this culture and taught us to aspire to it. That ideal was dispersed by two forces: corporation ownership of publishers and Internet impact on sales, which made access to used books practical, undermining traditional bookstores. The diminishment of newspapers with review sections also hurt.

But what has really challenged publishing is Print on Demand, books that are entirely electronic and read on computers, and self-publishing. Also, the shift from physical books stored in warehouses and taxed as property to books as “potential” databases has muddled business models.

Now we are in a position to entirely bypass publishers and are dumped into chaos again. The model is music, which has become the compelling base of younger culture, displacing television. When music went from 78 to 33 1/2 to 8-track to cassette to MP3 and then to viral transmission through the Internet, it showed the way. They’ve taken the ride from radio to television to cable to satellite. At the same time the music went from one genre to another, reaching out to world music sources. We aren’t even close to a “pause” in development yet. Innovations tumble out all the time.

It has escaped some that content of literature has shifted. What was largely a print industry has gone to image: movies, television, computer screen, and now small handheld media like iPhone, iPod, and other permutations reminiscent of Dick Tracy’s wrist-radio. I worry that all these tech innovations will belong to the young only and then only to the affluent young. But street urchins “magically” acquire the devices and figure it out toot sweet. And grandmas want email from descendants.

This has impact. A story this morning says that the simplest solution to the cryptic and problematic nature of police communication -- to say nothing of the public nature of radio -- is simple: cell phones. Which means that plain English works, which means that there is now again a market for someone who can teach it.

That won’t include me. I’m not quite techie enough to make videos, but I finally signed up for DSL so I could watch them. I do BLOGS, which in my case means 1,000 word essays daily. Barrus and Cinematheque do VLOGS, which are blogs with videos embedded in them. When I get enough pretty good blogs, I compile them into BLOOKS, available through www.lulu.com/prairiemary. Now Tim and guys are creating VOOKS which are online books with embedded video. I’m contributing to them in a literary genre called “metafiction” in which part of the writing comments on other parts of the writing.

They write transgressive stuff, wild romance and forbidden adventure -- which is what they know. I drag in high-falutin’ theories and moral issues. Barrus is the interface. Surprisingly, the boys welcome this. They worry about the nature of God, the meaning of existence, how to achieve true intimacy, and where this universe is heading. Don’t we all? We must learn from each other.

TIME AND THE WRITER

I have two schemata for thinking about time. Neither one of them is anything like Einstein’s. In the first one, I imagine that the universe is a huge complexity of interwoven and swirlingly tangled fiber-optics. (This is sort of the way I see “string theory” though I don’t understand the latter at all. I’m after narrative “line.”) The gimmick is that I define an individual consciousness as traveling along those fiberoptic strings which exist both before and after the consciousness. That is, usually we see time as something rushing over us, only existing while we are “in the moment.” My formulation has existence going on without consciousness until someone is there to “light it up.”

Thus, one’s entire life is still back there somewhere -- yourself going to grade school, yourself at your first job, etc. -- and your entire life is pre-existing in that God-knows-everything and pre-ordained-it way, except that there are MANY potential futures and one’s consciousness shuttles among them. This is my idea of free will -- that it doesn’t consist of inventing options but more often is a matter of choosing the path. Once on a path, it’s hard to double back, though there might be emergency cross-overs as on a freeway.

The other schemata is more nineteenth century: an old-fashioned steam-powered locomotive on a train track. In this case one’s identity is the locomotive, rushing along with all its baggage behind it, powered by the resources found along the way. The train tracks -- rails on cross-ties -- are factual. Born here, parents named thus and so, married to so-and-so, living at this address, this many children. All that stuff that newspapers like because they can be pinned down in print and “fact-checked,” though once a “fact” gets into print wrong, it’s pretty hard to get rid of it. One can at least address what has happened already. The future might be around a curve or over a hill or hidden by fog or mirages.

Above and parallel to the train is a stream of smoke and steam that writhes and changes and sometimes is full of sparks. This is one’s emotional and creative life: impossible to pin down but certainly there and produced by the energetic transit along the rails. Below, extending along the train tracks, is a lake with a surface either calm enough to reflect the train and its evanescent smoke trail or ruffled by something else like wind or debris that distorts the picture, making it hard to see or altogether invisible. This is memory.

What I’m trying to get at is the idea that an artist addressing his/her own life has a choice of kinds of sequences: stream-of-consciousness, fact (reliable or unreliable), and reflective. People have experimented with using the lines of sentences, running alongside each other in different colors or fonts, so that one reports what a camera might see and the parallel suggests what is hidden but potently present, affecting events. The techniques are an attempt to capture identity in some of its JoHarri window mystery and honesty.

Writing and reflection on writing play back and forth between each other. One person writes spontaneously in the way that seems natural to them. Another person looks at it and says, “This is a first-person narrative, told as experienced by someone.” Then, there’s that old burlesque shtick that Bob Scriver used to love. (One guy tells about some incredible and vivid event like Custer’s last stand or the sinking of the Titanic or the summiting of Mt. Everest in such detail that one begins to think the person was there, until the other guy asks, “Wuz you THERE, Charlie?” That makes us laugh because obviously the yarner was not. White people from back east were constantly telling us with great authority some historical “fact” they knew from a book and Bob would ask, “Wuz you there, Charlie?”) Technically you call that an unreliable narrator or maybe you say this is the omniscient voice on the premise that God was there always, omnipresent. However, God was not reading a book by an unreliable narrator.

Most early non-print peoples handed over their oral stories to print-educated people, so that the reflection of their train could hardly help but be distorted by the new context -- in the first place a different language, in the second place with a different philosophical schematic of the world in all the unconscious assumptions, in the third place distorted by the need to sell the story either to publishers or department chairs, and then subtly altered for political reasons. Only recently have we been aware that someone like Black Elk was seeing something in his own mind that was probably not a lot like what was recorded in “Black Elk Speaks,” much less perceived accurately by the readers who love the book. Readers of the book when it was new cannot perceive it in the same way as now with all the intervening events throwing kaleidescopic colors on the same words.

Lately literary figures have been wrestling with the categories of fiction versus fact, autobiography versus memoir, psychoanalytic “truth” versus what an outside observer would report. We seem to have trouble accepting the ambiguity of life itself, much less our own identities. Back when we lived in villages, people told us who we were or maybe our families told us who we were or if you lived in India maybe they told you of whom you were the reincarnation. Then value judgments crept in. Was it good to be “just like Aunt Helen who died as a teenager?” Was it damning to “have a temper just like your great-grandfather who died in a shootout?” God knows. (Predestination -- or at least omniscience -- can be a comfort.)

Critics cannot agree, but today’s public seems to have an insatiable need for the TRUTH, for things to be resolved and to stay put, even as science opens the floodgates to more and more ambiguity. “We’ve resolved the nature of the genomic helix and now we know who you really are! It’s just a matter of checking out the molecules,” they proclaim. And then two days later the newspaper has a story about the myriad ways that the molecules of the double helix interact and how outside influences can change what was meant to be one gender or one eye color to something quite different.

We must give up our old nineteenth-century ideas and vocabulary, even when they are elaborated with additions and qualifications, and learn to dance with Rashomon in a world of swirling stars, trusting our own molecules to maintain our identities no matter what we say. That’s the way to be there, Charlie.

COLD HARD HOPE

There’s been a lot of comment on the duckbill platypus genome. As usual, looking at the molecules of the spiral helix is quite different from looking at that cute little beast that resembles my cats fixed up for Halloween. Every one of these re-framings of what things “are” leave us standing at the edge of a paradigm precipice looking out over space we hardly dreamed existed. We stare at the vast expanse of time and the realization of all the things that can happens over aeons, the pressure of galactic-scale events changing the world forever. “All is whirl.” Humans are NOT the center. Humans are no more special than platypusses or cats (just pusses).

Scientists noticed some time ago, on a much smaller timescale than dinosaurs that about the time the glaciers began to draw back to the north after reaching into northern Montana, there were hunters here on the prairie using Clovis points. Then they disappeared and so did their prey: mammoths and other mega-mammals. The scientists, who had probably just filled their elk tags for the fall, suggested that Clovis points were so effective that the hunters had simply eaten all the mammoths. But a high school girl here in Montana spent the last year or so looking for evidence of a meteorite impact at the crucial break in prehistory, and she found it. The mammoths -- and the American horses of the time -- were killed by the darkening of the earth caused by the meteorite impact. The evidence still clings to their bones.

I caught just a snippet of a radio speech last night: someone was saying that if an asteroid more than a mile across hit the earth it would not extinguish all life, but it WOULD extinguish all the fancy cultural amenities: transportation, electronic and wire communication, air traffic, and so on. Some humans would survive. In other words, this is the same apocalyptic scenario that our writers and movie scripters seem to be exploring. Earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones, floods, the possibility that the planet’s magnetic poles might trade places (It’s happened before!) and a host of other uncontrollable events -- plague, drought, famine, war, die-offs (frogs, bees, bats) are all around us.

Some say it’s safe to predict such things since they are continuous phenomena that are always happening somewhere, but they sharpen in the presence of immediate phenomena. For instance, this is a late, cold spring that keeps the gas bill from shrinking and doesn’t let the crops come out of dormancy. Or here’s another on the molecular level: diabetes 2. As research begins to escape the rigid confines of the pharm corporations, the evidence strongly suggests that the problem is the inundation of pesticide, herbicide and fertilizing molecules we’ve been pouring out onto the land. Can’t see ‘em, can’t smell ‘em unless there are lots and they’re aromatic, too tiny to measure without special instruments and yet our genomes can’t adjust fast enough for some of us to survive. We begin to die wrapped in fat even as our cells pant for more glucose that can’t get through the cell walls because the receptors are plugged up with man-made molecules meant to mimic hormones, which is how they kill bugs.

The great advantage of humans have over bugs is that culture can evolve fast: we can eat in a way that doesn’t flood our systems with glucose, we can plow, plant and reap different crops, we can change chicken/hog raising practices in SE Asia -- the ones that allow flu to morph into viruses humans can catch. After all, now that we understand genetics and molecular metabolism, so many things are less mysterious, more controllable. Or at least predicable -- up to a point.

Another “tiny bits” revolution has completely changed the culture in content, access, form, message and speed. I’m talkin’ digital media. I bet my retirement (in fact, most of my economic plan for life) on the idea that I would write books that might not make me rich and famous, but that would provide a living, or at least a supplement. Now that I’ve retired early on minimal income, I’m trapped between Bush’s killer economy and the complete scrambling of publishing as we know it.

All the assumptions that we learned in high school turn out to be 19th century phenomena, based on printing machinery that had to physically smack ink onto paper and then glue the paper into a permanent stack of numbered sheets that a person could hold in their hands and turn one at a time. BOOK! Now the same content is electronic, dancing bits of energy -- as likely to be a picture as words. Capable of packing a whole set of movies onto a little disc of plastic. The whole business of learning to read, absorbing cultural values about “the canon” and what it means, accumulating a library, being sponsored by a publisher -- it’s all just irrelevant. What does the Third World want? Not books: cell phones.

The writers are not in as much financial trouble as the musicians and composers, whose sounds go everywhere without any payment coming back to them. And the songs that become popular are ever more a matter of intensity, passion, cynicism, underground -- dark and noisy stuff. And the art? Where did it go?

All this raises questions for farmers, authors, and consumers. How should we manage our lives to make them safe enough to be endurable, economically viable enough to keep us eating, inspiring enough that we don’t wake up screaming in the night? Don’t ask God. My seminary just made the claim that they are changing “right down to their marrow.” How are they doing this? Calling in two prosperous, popular, Big Ego guys -- which was the way the seminary was founded, a strategy that soon took them to disaster. Institutions are doomed to repeat their histories until they fall apart. God is an institution.

So, sitting up in bed at 3AM with two snoring cats, how do I get back to sleep? Here I am, an old lady in a decrepit house among poplars knotted on the ends with buds too cold to open, in a little village of mostly older folks in the midst of vast still ungreen fields, under a crescent moon like something dropped off a charm bracelet. Here’s an image: just up the street where Lake Francis adjoins the little airport, the geese are paired up and incubating eggs. Think of those warm eggs, packed with genes that include those of dinosaurs and duck-billed platypuses, destined to fly cross-continent, sheltered under downy breasts. Maybe this will be the day I hear a meadowlark.

WATCH OUT!

Lately the spam I get relating to a generative organ I don’t have has been almost equaled by the spam about wristwatches which have evidently become great markers of wealth and prowess, to say nothing of incorporating a GPS so you know where you are. I don’t even recognize most of the brands they tout, as follows:
“The time is NOW to get YOUR replica watches that are famous around the world. These affordable imitations make you look rich at a fraction of the cost. Choose from any of the following replica watches: AUDEMARS PIGUET, EBERHARD and CO, BAUME and MERCIER, BREITLING, BVLGARI, CARTIER, CHOPARD, FRANK MULLER, IWC, PANERAI, PATEK PHILIPPE, TAG HEUER, TECHNOMARINE AND VACHERON.”

The closest thing I have to a reference point is a little scene in “The Painted Lady” wherein Helen Mirren proposes to pretend to be a countessa. She buys a lot of designer clothing and adds an erzatz wristwatch from the street, cleverly labeled “Fartier.” But she doesn’t wear it because her sister lends her an authentic invaluable wristwatch -- a plot point indicating that though the sisters -- only HALF-sisters, after all -- quarrel quite a bit, they actually love each other very much.

In my birth family on my father’s side, major milestones were celebrated with a fountain pen, new spectacles or a wristwatch. Therefore, when I graduated from the eighth grade, I was given a wristwatch. Perversely, I hated the thing because it had a practical round face and I thought it should be delicate. I wept, trapped between the proper gratitude and hating it. I can’t remember what finally happened. I think I was told off.

*

In this photo what is rather notable is the way I display the watch -- not holding out my dainty wrist but bending my arm as though showing elbow scabs. The picture always makes me think of the bit when Tom Sawyer is pretending to be a girl until a woman he is visiting tosses a ball of yarn into his lap and he claps his knees together to catch it, because he’s used to pants. The woman sees at once that if he had been a girl used to skirts, he would have spread his legs apart so his skirt would make a lap to catch the yarn. So was I defiantly “being a boy?” I don’t remember.

*
In defense of my mother, here I am in my 8th grade graduation dress, which we made ourselves. It was pale green organdy and for my mother it evoked her own 8th grade graduation when she had a dress the same color. Her mother had sent her out to get the cows on the day before the ceremony, the cows had wandered a long way, and my mother was painfully sunburned in a different pattern than the dress. My grandmother was mortified. In those days a nice lady didn’t let herself get sunburned. I don't think she was given any 8th grade graduation gift.

When my mother’s father died and left her a bit of money and his car, she told each of us she would buy us something to remember him by. I don’t know what my brothers asked for, but I picked out the most elegant of bracelet wristwatches from Jerome Margulies, a fancy Portland jeweler. It had a tiny square face, nearly impossible to read. Worse, the design of the plates of gold, linked, was such that it constantly unbuckled itself and fell on the ground. If I were lucky, I heard it fall and found it right away. Finally, I moved it to a jewelry box -- to impractical to wear, too sentimental to discard.

When Bob divorced me, I used part of my $1,000 alimony to buy him a fancy wristwatch with engraving on the back. (The last of my co-dependence. Well, maybe not.) Lorraine, the fourth wife, bought him an even fancier wristwatch with sappier engraving, which he flaunted in front of me when we secretly met. I laughed. He never wore any wristwatch anyway.

By the time I went into ministry, everyone had switched to digital wristwatches. I had a dandy little digital clock that velcro-stuck to the pickiup dashboard, but it ran on a battery and when the weather got cold enough, the battery no longer generated any electricity. I always forgot to bring it into the house with me between trips.

But my wristwatch then was big, round, and analog, though it also ran on a battery. It had a leather strap and was actually a man’s wristwatch, which I wanted so I could see it when I was preaching or counseling without having to hold it up to my eye. People don’t mind if you keep track of the time while you preach, but they aren’t always pleased if you check the hour while they’re telling you the most significant moment of their life.

When I retired, I also retired my wristwatch. I only wear it to meet someone or get to a scheduled event and I had to put a reminder note on my back door to remember even do that.

But I still watch the time and have a collection of little bookshelf clocks. My bathroom one died and I felt badly -- it was a frosted aquamarine circle, very Art Deco. My next favorite is the little wooden one on the bookshelf behind this computer. I use them to keep track of radio shows, to time spoken pieces, to sort of keep a bit of schedule -- though the cats suffice for that.

Except that I need a re-set button on Squibbie. I had a nightmare that woke me at 2AM a couple of nights ago and now Squib wants to get up at 2AM, EVERY night. She’s a very nighttime cat. Crackers is a daytime cat: she wants to take a nap on the electric mattress pad at 3PM every afternoon. Usually that’s exactly what I want, too, so we nap together.

A person can find tons of philosophical speculating about time-keeping and village bells that keep the liturgical hours and all that sort of thing. I’ve read quite a bit of that stuff, which keeps the next door Baptist church bells interesting -- even knowing that they’re computerized recordings. I try to keep track of the moon cycles as well, and of course the big calendrical cycles. We’re not quite to the halfway point of the first quarter (AKA Ground Hog's Day) -- time to order seeds to start indoors, according to today’s paper. I haven’t done that before. Maybe this will be the year I try it. Maybe I’ll grow some “Four o’Clocks.”