A blurry and mystical sunrise somewhere in desert along the edge of a body of water, either the sea or a very large lake. It’s still nearly dark so mostly just color stripes the sky, no sun. A low growling. You wait and wait. Pretty soon from the top right hand corner comes a faraway small plane with its lights blinking. When it is close, something parachutes out but doesn’t land where the camera is.
“Scrunch, scrunch, scrunch.” A tiny figure comes from down left, plodding slowly and sometimes staggering with a huge box. It goes diagonally across the empty space, stopping to take a breather next to what is evidently a bunk bed out in the open. Then carries the box on through to somewhere. The man, in military uniform and with a rifle over his shoulder, puts the wooden crate down next to a tent and with a small crowbar pries off the lid. He takes out a piece of paper and sits on the dirt to ponder it, then puts it back.
More scrunching back over to the bunk bed. There’s someone sleeping. The man who has read the paper wakes him and prepares to sleep in the same place. He says an agent is coming to oversee an election and that they are ordered to guard this election. They are incredulous. This is Iran. They have no precedent. They are supposed to be guarding this shore against smugglers.
That’s the setup. When the agent who arrives by small motorboat turns out to be a young woman, entirely draped but wearing khaki trousers underneath and VERY determined to do things right, you’ve just about got the whole story. The wakened guard, who seems to be a little thick-headed, takes the shared rifle and wristwatch, and drives the “agent” -- all the time protesting that she should be a man -- in a vehicle about the shape and tinny quality of a breadbox -- around this back country to collect votes.
The result is an excellent precursor to a college course in the difficulties of democracy. What is a “secret” vote? Why do they have to vote for candidates on a pre-determined list of people they don’t know? What difference would it make in a world that still does what it’s been doing for thousands of years? And in one case, where a “granny” runs everything very well, thank you, who needs a government anyway? And what do you say to the old man who votes for God?
The odd couple putt-putts along, strewing confusion, injustice, and helpful favors among fishermen sheltering a runaway sweetheart, a camp of women who have just birthed a baby, an old man in an impressive but decrepit technical station where a solar array makes enough electricity in the day to light up the night when the old man sleeps anyway and enough heat with a giant parabolic dish to make hot water in a tiny teakettle.
All along the soldier queries what the rules are while the young woman tries desperately to make them fit situations for which they were never designed. The results are often funny. We in Montana would appreciate the stop light in the middle of nowhere that is stuck on red, which causes the soldier to stop and wait. . . and wait. . . and wait. At one point he is so exasperated that he leaves what they call a “jeep” and starts to walk home. The young woman simply gets into the driver’s seat and follows. While they argue, a huge yellow dump truck arrives, loaded with women who want to vote. But one is twelve -- she must be sixteen to vote. “Why?” the women demand. “She can marry at twelve, so why can’t she vote?”
The adobe cubes of the almost-settlements and homesteads are enlivened by collections of brightly colored plastic tubs and buckets, scattered every which way. The women wear many yards of bright, thin, printed fabric, draped and wound ingeniously. One woman has a plastic visor over her face with opaque color except for a strip of sunglass material to see through. When the young prospective bride doesn’t like the soldier’s questions, she simply pulls her drapery over her head, disappearing for all practical purposes.
When I went to imdb.com to check out other reactions, I was surprised to see how many comments there were. The pace is definitely Third World -- clockless -- and the subtleness and subversiveness, the existentialism, of the whole thing is nearly Beckett. I was reminded of a Chinese movie (and in my usual senile fashion I can’t remember the title) in which the young woman’s husband is kicked in the balls by their landlord. Highly indignant because she considers children a crop and thinks the family “seed” has been damaged, she goes to the authorities. Of course she is stone-walled, so she appeals to the next level up. Same result. She goes the next level up. Eventually she gets to the top and gets satisfaction. The determination of energetic young women can change the world no matter how repressive or primitive governmental provisions may be.
That’s one conclusion of this film and a good one. But also there is a lesson in the subtle attachment that develops between these two unlikely people, rather like the American Western plots that play off nuns or schoolteachers being thrown into a common cause with outlaw hardbitten cowboys. Cooperation and growing understanding don’t lead to romantic attachment, but they certainly do form small strands of affection and familiarity. These two people will never see each other again, but one hopes that four years from the election portrayed here, the next agent will arrive to find soldiers who aren’t so blind-sided.
I don’t know why I put this movie and “Landscape After Battle” on my Netflix list -- it was a long time ago. But I wish someone would make movies of this thoughtful quality about contemporary high prairie. Maybe they do, but I just don’t know it. The major cost of modern media is not in the actual shooting and editing of a movie -- it’s in the advertising so that you know it exists. That means “branding” and hyping to a predetermined audience defined by someone sitting in a major city: who THEY “think” will like the movie. They’re often wrong.
There’s another twist to this. Iranian is a repressive country that keeps the lid on education, but this movie was made by an Iranian who lives in Toronto. What is the relationship of diasphoric members of an ethnic community to those who stayed home? Is it disruptive or is it a call to the future?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
BAG LADY
One of my ideals has been to live an “unfiltered” life -- that is, I suppose, one that was not pre-edited by teachers, parents, authority figures, friendship circles, and the media. Life magazine didn’t just confuse Jackson Pollock about what was important, it confused all the rest of us, too. The most valuable (and slowest) realization I got from the University of Chicago was that there’s no such thing as an unfiltered life. At best, one chooses one’s filter.
One’s filter determines one’s identity. There’s only so much time in a life and that amount is never determined ahead of time -- I might be destroyed tomorrow or I might live another thirty years but not another fifty years. One can only be one place at a time. And events come down like cards in a poker game, except that there are a limited number of cards in a deck. So the Indians are right -- it’s a bone game, a stick game, a gamble no matter what you think you know.
Barrus brings me back to the ideas of the Sixties and Seventies, which for me were overlaid onto a small rez town in a very large landscape alongside an obsessed sculptor operating partly on Edwardian assumptions and partly on old WWII movies. And that pesky Life magazine insistence on geniuses and being the BEST. Barrus, born in 1950, overlays those same idealisms and aspirations -- “be where you are, let it be a dance, one day at a time” -- onto the necessity of survival. Just about the time he was beginning to have a little confidence in life, along came the AIDS pandemic and wiped out his world while officialdom stood around with its finger in its ear.
If we get this book published and “out there,” today’s media reporters will be totally stumped. They “get” the Life mag stuff, which they frame mostly in terms of money or did, until money turns out to be fungible. Fungible. Vivid mental image. And they’re slowly beginning to pick up on the necessity of survival in a world they assumed they were entitled to. Unemployment rises while every grocery store around here advertises for checkers and stockers, because all those kids sent off to college to be rich and brilliant think they are too good to bag cat food. In the past all they had to do was kick up a loud embarrassing fuss and someone would fix life for them. Now -- not.
I do not filter death. People are dying in this town, people are dying in Cinematheque, people are dying on the Mexican border, people are dying in Somalia, and so on. (I’m very glad that captain survived. I don’t filter heroism.) Last night I watched “Landscape After Battle,” a Polish movie about the concentration camp people left after WWII and their confusion, to say nothing of the confusion of those charged with managing them. The protagonist is a poet who tries to keep his face in a book, but fails. It won prizes but no one wants to see it -- too depressing. As a people, we filter depressing. Now we’d better not.
Contemporary media-driven filters are so strong that my identity is filtered out. No villages, rural life, Diabetes II, fat cats allowed to go outside, low incomes, teeny old pickups, highly educated people who are not glamorous and powerful. . . Everything I’ve done in my life is wrong according to this filter -- therefore I don’t exist.
But the Sixties/Seventies -- Aquarian? -- revolution supports me. Except that THEIR filter would say that I’m not hedonistic enough. I don’t take enough risks. I don’t know enough music. I don’t get angry enough at oppression. I should put down my books and get involved.
Then there’s the liberal filter -- is that what it is? “Nice” people who know the “right” way and try to help that huge mass of unfortunates out there who need instruction. Lots and lots of filters, which the U of C would call “method.” If you cut an apple crossways, you get stars. If you cut it lengthwise, you get moons.
Barrus just sent me the url for a YouTube animation accompanied by Alan Watts’ remarks called “Music and life.” (I LOVE it!) The truth is that Watts’ messages and the other “third force” or “humanist” messages come to me more through a funnel than a filter. But I didn’t die of alcoholism at age 58, like Watts. (Pollock died younger.) I don’t even drink. I don’t trust hedonism. Did that save me, or was it something else? Simple pleasure is enough and more than that, satisfaction at getting challenging things done. I don’t even care a lot about getting them done “properly” as Watts, essentially Brit, would put it. Is that last a mistake?
I hate quoting Wikipedia, since VizJim (James Mackay) makes such a hash of the Native American stuff and no one cares enough to update it. (My efforts get deleted -- so much for the "peoples" voice.) But I’m assuming that the person who posted about Watts got it right when he said, “he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Maya), hiding from itself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourself as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.” Accurate or not, I can agree with it, metaphorically speaking.
But somewhere in my mountains of printouts that slip and slide around this so very unofficial “office” there is an anthropological concept called the “gathering bag.” It’s just a simple metaphor really, though there are many examples in many cultures. A woman’s metaphor: the shopping bag, the backpack, the root basket -- usually accompanied by the metaphor/actuality of the digging stick, the garden knife, the prod. That’s my method: bag lady. So many women dread being a homeless bag lady, but I’m not so worried about the idea of poverty. I’m too beguiled by the idea of moving along from one “find” to the next. Non-fungible. No mushrooms, magic or not for me. ROOTS!! As in radical.
One’s filter determines one’s identity. There’s only so much time in a life and that amount is never determined ahead of time -- I might be destroyed tomorrow or I might live another thirty years but not another fifty years. One can only be one place at a time. And events come down like cards in a poker game, except that there are a limited number of cards in a deck. So the Indians are right -- it’s a bone game, a stick game, a gamble no matter what you think you know.
Barrus brings me back to the ideas of the Sixties and Seventies, which for me were overlaid onto a small rez town in a very large landscape alongside an obsessed sculptor operating partly on Edwardian assumptions and partly on old WWII movies. And that pesky Life magazine insistence on geniuses and being the BEST. Barrus, born in 1950, overlays those same idealisms and aspirations -- “be where you are, let it be a dance, one day at a time” -- onto the necessity of survival. Just about the time he was beginning to have a little confidence in life, along came the AIDS pandemic and wiped out his world while officialdom stood around with its finger in its ear.
If we get this book published and “out there,” today’s media reporters will be totally stumped. They “get” the Life mag stuff, which they frame mostly in terms of money or did, until money turns out to be fungible. Fungible. Vivid mental image. And they’re slowly beginning to pick up on the necessity of survival in a world they assumed they were entitled to. Unemployment rises while every grocery store around here advertises for checkers and stockers, because all those kids sent off to college to be rich and brilliant think they are too good to bag cat food. In the past all they had to do was kick up a loud embarrassing fuss and someone would fix life for them. Now -- not.
I do not filter death. People are dying in this town, people are dying in Cinematheque, people are dying on the Mexican border, people are dying in Somalia, and so on. (I’m very glad that captain survived. I don’t filter heroism.) Last night I watched “Landscape After Battle,” a Polish movie about the concentration camp people left after WWII and their confusion, to say nothing of the confusion of those charged with managing them. The protagonist is a poet who tries to keep his face in a book, but fails. It won prizes but no one wants to see it -- too depressing. As a people, we filter depressing. Now we’d better not.
Contemporary media-driven filters are so strong that my identity is filtered out. No villages, rural life, Diabetes II, fat cats allowed to go outside, low incomes, teeny old pickups, highly educated people who are not glamorous and powerful. . . Everything I’ve done in my life is wrong according to this filter -- therefore I don’t exist.
But the Sixties/Seventies -- Aquarian? -- revolution supports me. Except that THEIR filter would say that I’m not hedonistic enough. I don’t take enough risks. I don’t know enough music. I don’t get angry enough at oppression. I should put down my books and get involved.
Then there’s the liberal filter -- is that what it is? “Nice” people who know the “right” way and try to help that huge mass of unfortunates out there who need instruction. Lots and lots of filters, which the U of C would call “method.” If you cut an apple crossways, you get stars. If you cut it lengthwise, you get moons.
Barrus just sent me the url for a YouTube animation accompanied by Alan Watts’ remarks called “Music and life.” (I LOVE it!) The truth is that Watts’ messages and the other “third force” or “humanist” messages come to me more through a funnel than a filter. But I didn’t die of alcoholism at age 58, like Watts. (Pollock died younger.) I don’t even drink. I don’t trust hedonism. Did that save me, or was it something else? Simple pleasure is enough and more than that, satisfaction at getting challenging things done. I don’t even care a lot about getting them done “properly” as Watts, essentially Brit, would put it. Is that last a mistake?
I hate quoting Wikipedia, since VizJim (James Mackay) makes such a hash of the Native American stuff and no one cares enough to update it. (My efforts get deleted -- so much for the "peoples" voice.) But I’m assuming that the person who posted about Watts got it right when he said, “he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Maya), hiding from itself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourself as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.” Accurate or not, I can agree with it, metaphorically speaking.
But somewhere in my mountains of printouts that slip and slide around this so very unofficial “office” there is an anthropological concept called the “gathering bag.” It’s just a simple metaphor really, though there are many examples in many cultures. A woman’s metaphor: the shopping bag, the backpack, the root basket -- usually accompanied by the metaphor/actuality of the digging stick, the garden knife, the prod. That’s my method: bag lady. So many women dread being a homeless bag lady, but I’m not so worried about the idea of poverty. I’m too beguiled by the idea of moving along from one “find” to the next. Non-fungible. No mushrooms, magic or not for me. ROOTS!! As in radical.
A COUPLE OF NOTES
"REAL TIME" RADIO INTERVIEW WITH MARY SCRIVER ABOUT "BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT: A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER"
On Monday, April 20, at 6:30 PM, Mountain Daylight Savings Time, George Cole of "Media West, Inc." in Bozeman will air via his program called "Real Time!" on Yellowstone Public Radio an interview with myself. You can stream it at that time (equivalent time wherever you are) on www.ypradio.org. If you miss it, the program will be archived at that website and you can access it anytime by clicking on RealTime. Some other pretty good interviews there, too.
George is a pretty "hip" guy and has been deep into politics for most of his life. We had a lot more fun off the air than on but it's a good conversation and he knew what to ask. I try not to miss his program every Monday.
THE OTHER NOTE is that since Robin Edgar flooded me with line-by-line refutations of everything I said as well as repeating every accusation again, I zapped his comments. Then, in a spirit of equity, I zapped my post. It is NOT "down a memory hole," as Edgar puts it, but "gone, baby, gone."
Prairie Mary
On Monday, April 20, at 6:30 PM, Mountain Daylight Savings Time, George Cole of "Media West, Inc." in Bozeman will air via his program called "Real Time!" on Yellowstone Public Radio an interview with myself. You can stream it at that time (equivalent time wherever you are) on www.ypradio.org. If you miss it, the program will be archived at that website and you can access it anytime by clicking on RealTime. Some other pretty good interviews there, too.
George is a pretty "hip" guy and has been deep into politics for most of his life. We had a lot more fun off the air than on but it's a good conversation and he knew what to ask. I try not to miss his program every Monday.
THE OTHER NOTE is that since Robin Edgar flooded me with line-by-line refutations of everything I said as well as repeating every accusation again, I zapped his comments. Then, in a spirit of equity, I zapped my post. It is NOT "down a memory hole," as Edgar puts it, but "gone, baby, gone."
Prairie Mary
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
JACKSON POLLOCK: LIFE & DEATH ON LONG ISLAND: A Review
People around here understand why I would take an interest in “genius” artists with strong wives, though they think in terms of Charlie and Nancy Russell. “Jackson Pollock: Love and death on Long Island” (1999) is another example. This 45-minute BBC documentary is framed by a straight reading of the formal report about the car accident that killed Pollock and maimed his passenger by a mock cop. Much more is revealed by clips from the famous movie made from underneath a panel of plastic while Pollock painted on it, bits of interview with his contemporary artists and insights from Ed Harris, who inhabited the man while preparing his own movie.
Like so much we’re still confronting in our lives, abstract expressionism was in some ways “caused” by WWII. An influx of European refugees to Manhattan, mostly leftist, maybe Jewish, in functioning marriages of considerable sophistication, formed a community fertile with ideas and accomplishment. Pollock, who was born in Cody, Wyoming, but never forked a horse, and was actually more of an LA valley sort of person, came to “the Village” and dwelt around the fringes of the group. Lee Krasner, whom onlookers agreed was a better artist but struggling with the handicap of being female, gripped Pollock with a knowing and energetic passion that for a few years after 1950 made him famous.
Colluding with this was Life magazine, geared up for war with fine photographers and writers, and feeding the hunger of displaced persons, traumatized men, and voracious business forces. They looked around for “the generation’s greatest American artist” and, according to this film’s point of view, were more or less obliged to pick Pollock because he was about the only one who was American born. A little guy with an enormous defensive persona full of mock-violent macho and obscenity, he started so many fights at the artists’ hangout, the Cedars Bar, that he was finally forbidden to come in. Krasner, on the other hand, never lost her cool. When Pollock overturned the dinner table, she simply announced to the guests that “coffee will be served in the living room.”
Pollock was definitely onto something with his huge complexifications of whatever paint he could afford, swizzling and dribbling with a stick as often as with a paintbrush, causing one to wonder who invented paintbrushes and what for? Evocative and baffling, they seemed to be an accurate snapshot of the inside of his head. These days they would stick him in an fMRI, rather than getting him to paint onto clear plastic, and try to interpret what his “real” brain was doing. Autism? Bipolar? Schizophrenic? Alcohol damage? All likely to some degree.
But he was NOT scholarly or philosophical or reflective, as were the rest of the abstract expressionist community. They didn’t really approve of him. The newly popular category had boomed as suddenly as the Western art explosion in the American SW “outback” with many of the same dynamics. Maybe French impressionism was the same. But it helped to be able to talk about abstractions -- what was this one or that one expressing? Pollock could not have said -- he just “felt” it and did it. Lee could talk about it.
But the times were often as interested in the person, the creator, as they were in the creations. Picasso taught them that. The underlying structure of Pollock’s worldview seems to have derived from a mother who had intense but frustrated artistic aspirations and a father who scoffed at the whole idea. He was trapped in double-bind-land, a box canyon, a blind corral. This fragility/vulnerability kept him beating himself up and then numbing the pain with alcohol. Well, that’s one theory anyway. Maybe he just had loose wiring.
A minister’s joke is about expectations that are too high for anyone to fulfill: “Church member to Jesus: ‘Of course I remember the Crucifixion, but what have done for me LATELY?'” In the Jewish community, where mothers expect their sons to be brain surgeons, it goes, “Have you met my son, the Redeemer?” For every huge dynamic breakthrough painting Pollock did, his audience, the gallery owners, and customers wanted another one even more startling and admirable. One of the aged artists interviewed says sadly, “It a trap. You get into one technique and it’s a trap. You can’t escape. And it exhausts you. You jump through the hoop, you got to land on your feet and keep your balance for the next one, but eventually you can’t. You fall and lie there. But you can’t do that.” His wife sits by his side, nodding in agreement and making rueful faces.
There seems to be a consensus that the painting on plastic idea was fatal, a gimmick that made Pollock so self-conscious that he couldn’t help but watch himself paint. He began to feel the gimmickry of his own dribble style, the indignity of it, the Disney aspect. After two years of sobriety he returned to booze. By then he and Krasner were attacking each other and he was famous enough to attract groupies, including the woman he nearly killed in the car crash. The sexy groupie, very proud, insists that she was madly in love with Pollock and he with her and it was all due to that narrow-minded Krasner who couldn’t adjust. In reality, Lee got outta Dodge to give it a rest, which turned out to be eternal.
Book-ended by the police report, the painful recitations and judgments of the interior of the film are laced with the kind of nature images that pass for religion in America -- eternal horizons over the sea, seething tall grass, a snowstorm on the windshield, flights of birds. The suggestion is that this is really what Pollock was trying to paint, what was really in his head. It’s as good a theory as the others, an American emotional theory that doesn’t need to be intellectualized in a Village bar.
The whole magilla has been internalized by people who don’t even know any artists. They look at a Pollock and think, “Hell, I could do that. Maybe I have an Inner Artist. Maybe I’m worth a lotta money, too.” And who knows? Maybe they’re right. The helluvit is, there’s no Life magazine to make them famous.
Like so much we’re still confronting in our lives, abstract expressionism was in some ways “caused” by WWII. An influx of European refugees to Manhattan, mostly leftist, maybe Jewish, in functioning marriages of considerable sophistication, formed a community fertile with ideas and accomplishment. Pollock, who was born in Cody, Wyoming, but never forked a horse, and was actually more of an LA valley sort of person, came to “the Village” and dwelt around the fringes of the group. Lee Krasner, whom onlookers agreed was a better artist but struggling with the handicap of being female, gripped Pollock with a knowing and energetic passion that for a few years after 1950 made him famous.
Colluding with this was Life magazine, geared up for war with fine photographers and writers, and feeding the hunger of displaced persons, traumatized men, and voracious business forces. They looked around for “the generation’s greatest American artist” and, according to this film’s point of view, were more or less obliged to pick Pollock because he was about the only one who was American born. A little guy with an enormous defensive persona full of mock-violent macho and obscenity, he started so many fights at the artists’ hangout, the Cedars Bar, that he was finally forbidden to come in. Krasner, on the other hand, never lost her cool. When Pollock overturned the dinner table, she simply announced to the guests that “coffee will be served in the living room.”
Pollock was definitely onto something with his huge complexifications of whatever paint he could afford, swizzling and dribbling with a stick as often as with a paintbrush, causing one to wonder who invented paintbrushes and what for? Evocative and baffling, they seemed to be an accurate snapshot of the inside of his head. These days they would stick him in an fMRI, rather than getting him to paint onto clear plastic, and try to interpret what his “real” brain was doing. Autism? Bipolar? Schizophrenic? Alcohol damage? All likely to some degree.
But he was NOT scholarly or philosophical or reflective, as were the rest of the abstract expressionist community. They didn’t really approve of him. The newly popular category had boomed as suddenly as the Western art explosion in the American SW “outback” with many of the same dynamics. Maybe French impressionism was the same. But it helped to be able to talk about abstractions -- what was this one or that one expressing? Pollock could not have said -- he just “felt” it and did it. Lee could talk about it.
But the times were often as interested in the person, the creator, as they were in the creations. Picasso taught them that. The underlying structure of Pollock’s worldview seems to have derived from a mother who had intense but frustrated artistic aspirations and a father who scoffed at the whole idea. He was trapped in double-bind-land, a box canyon, a blind corral. This fragility/vulnerability kept him beating himself up and then numbing the pain with alcohol. Well, that’s one theory anyway. Maybe he just had loose wiring.
A minister’s joke is about expectations that are too high for anyone to fulfill: “Church member to Jesus: ‘Of course I remember the Crucifixion, but what have done for me LATELY?'” In the Jewish community, where mothers expect their sons to be brain surgeons, it goes, “Have you met my son, the Redeemer?” For every huge dynamic breakthrough painting Pollock did, his audience, the gallery owners, and customers wanted another one even more startling and admirable. One of the aged artists interviewed says sadly, “It a trap. You get into one technique and it’s a trap. You can’t escape. And it exhausts you. You jump through the hoop, you got to land on your feet and keep your balance for the next one, but eventually you can’t. You fall and lie there. But you can’t do that.” His wife sits by his side, nodding in agreement and making rueful faces.
There seems to be a consensus that the painting on plastic idea was fatal, a gimmick that made Pollock so self-conscious that he couldn’t help but watch himself paint. He began to feel the gimmickry of his own dribble style, the indignity of it, the Disney aspect. After two years of sobriety he returned to booze. By then he and Krasner were attacking each other and he was famous enough to attract groupies, including the woman he nearly killed in the car crash. The sexy groupie, very proud, insists that she was madly in love with Pollock and he with her and it was all due to that narrow-minded Krasner who couldn’t adjust. In reality, Lee got outta Dodge to give it a rest, which turned out to be eternal.
Book-ended by the police report, the painful recitations and judgments of the interior of the film are laced with the kind of nature images that pass for religion in America -- eternal horizons over the sea, seething tall grass, a snowstorm on the windshield, flights of birds. The suggestion is that this is really what Pollock was trying to paint, what was really in his head. It’s as good a theory as the others, an American emotional theory that doesn’t need to be intellectualized in a Village bar.
The whole magilla has been internalized by people who don’t even know any artists. They look at a Pollock and think, “Hell, I could do that. Maybe I have an Inner Artist. Maybe I’m worth a lotta money, too.” And who knows? Maybe they’re right. The helluvit is, there’s no Life magazine to make them famous.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
A GREEN STICK
THIS IS A RERUN. The sermon was preached at South Park UU Fellowship in West Linn, Oregon, on Easter Sunday in 1997. It’s slightly abridged.
This Easter we have a current event to deal with as we consider a two-thousand year old tradition in addition to a three or four billion year planetary event. Let’s look at the most recent first.
In a San Diego mansion a group of people decided to commit suicide. They were mostly computer programmers -- intelligent, talented, loved by their families. They were influenced by a tall, maybe 70-year-old, conflicted gay man -- a singer, teacher and PK (preacher’s kid) maybe suffering from terminal liver cancer. Wearing Nikes, black clothes, short hair, and plastic bags, they followed Hemlock Society drug protocol and died ever-so-neatly in K-Mart bunkbeds with Target down comforters, purple cloth diamonds spread over their faces and chests.
This would never happen to Unitarians. In the first place the social activists among us would object to the Nikes on grounds that we should support Third World labor by boycotting shoes made under poor working conditions. In the second place many of us think that dressing alike is fashion tyranny. In the third place we are far too individualistic to get the same haircut, do the same thing at the same time, or shop at the same place. We refuse to lie down neatly and die.
On the other hand, we do include many computer programmers and gays, we have been excited over the comet Hale-Bopp, and some of us have been very much intrigued by New Age ideas such as eloping with the dome-headed, bug-eyed operators of UFO’s. Thank goodness we are too anti-authoritarian to ever be described as a cult. Many of us are simply too sceptical to be taken in by sci-fi fantasy.
Though we are founded on the principle of freedom of thought, I object to believing in the preposterous, I object to defining religion as believing in things that are not true, I object to defining community as a group that goes apart from the rest of the world and defines itself as special or privileged, and I object to events that distract us from our real allegiance, which is to the planet from which we arise. These points are at the heart of what I have to say this morning.
Christianity has always had a dangerous edge where inspired poetic theory overtakes mythic story or recorded history, creating a spurious aura of miracle. Thus, over and over everywhere recurs the human phenomenon of a reform leader who is captured and killed by dominating autocrats in the name of keeping order. In Eastern Europe, in parts of Africa, in the southern United States where slave leaders tried to push towards freedom and on the Western prairie where Native Americans tried to preserve their lands, the story is archetypal. We easily recognize it.
The inspired notion that created Christianity and set is apart was the idea that another realm exists in the spirit -- entirely unseen -- and that from this spiritual realm one leader had the indestructible power to survive and then to prevail over this world. Thus Jesus, the man, is killed but the Christ, which is part of God, survives and will return to set us “free.” Some Unitarians have always said this is fiction. Unless you want to call it metaphor.
It’s easy to slip this Christian conviction, which many in our society claim to believe literally, over onto the idea that a UFO traveling in the wake of a comet can carry beings who will come and save us, as this cult believed. Unknown, nonexistent, virtual worlds can be described any way you want. After two thousand years the people in charge of the Christian story have got a pretty good grip on it. Anyone who claims to know better than the Christian establishment story is probably not going to find a big audience. In short, declaring yourself to be the returned J.C. is probably not going to work as well as declaring yourself the returned E.T.
We are used to the institutionalized church celebration of Easter which has grown up around reenactment of the last days of Jesus. Now we have added commodification. I see in the paper there is available a little set of dolls complete with a crucified Jesus, a mourning Mary, and an open-doored tomb with a little plastic stone slab for the body not to be found upon. I don’t know how play with such dolls might shape a child’s mind. Certainly it would be interesting for a therapist to overhear. I wonder what Brother Cadfael, that practical monk of the PBS mystery series, would say.
It seems to me at once trivializing and interiorizing, making something liturgical into something merely subconscious, patterning for self-sacrifice and impossible survival, pre-conditioning for cults. Of course, a modern cynic would simply say it was a marketing opportunity about like the figures for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with ambulatory gargoyles. That was a redemption story, too, wasn’t it?
Easter has two parts: Good Friday’s endarkenment and then Sunday Morning’s enlightenment. Where are the dolls of transcendence? Are they those little gold cherub pins made popular by the Brown family, who wore them to the OJ trial to symbolize their murdered daughter? Are we to take Nicole Simpson as a sort of Christ-symbol, someone crucified and now returned as a pure spirit who hovers over her children? Religion always ends up in such a mix of opportunism and suffering, scholarship and obsession, institutions and insanities. But my darkest thought is that once again we are, as Annie Dillard put it, making itsy-bitsy statues to itsy-bitsy gods.
As Christianity has gone around the world, transforming itself as it passed the boundaries of countries and through the eons of time, the Easter ceremony has become in some places a masochistic and terrifying pageant of people being actually nailed to crosses, as they are in the Philippines. In this country Easter has become so entwined with Martha Stewart Easter egg trees, baskets, bunnies and egg hunts for little children -- all baby pastel and sentimental ruffles -- that no hint of blood persists. Not the blood of crucifixion and not the blood of real birth, real sexuality, real union and conception which is the basis of the historical fertility cults of Europe that gave us rabbits and eggs.
Somehow we are able to accept without reflection the juxtaposition of eager little girls -- in their ribboned, flowered bonnets and Mary-Janes -- with the brutality of an ancient crucifixion that compelled a mother to take in her arms the broken body of her son. So are we able to combine with crucifixion the banal and conforming suicides of three dozen computer nerds, people an unkind denizen of a Waldport bar called “losers,” people so rejecting of fertility that they had been castrated? Is there a difference between the twelve apostles who followed Jesus around and the 39 followers of Bo -- minus Peep? Is there a difference between the Assumption into Heaven which is the official Catholic dogma and the UFO that this group expected to come like Ezekial’s chariot to rescue the human caterpillars into butterflyhood. I should think so.
This is the difference I see. Strategies of escaping to paradise are doomed to failure and corruption because we are creatures of this time and place. Though we can imagine other places much finer and easier than this one, nevertheless, we must stay here. Not because we are trapped or condemned, but because we are part of the Here. We are made of the Here. Our bodies arise from what is Here and our minds and spirits arise from these bodies. To reject our real bodies and this real time and place is to make ourselves unreal, untethered, and susceptible to traveling lecturers in small town motels with conference rooms on the edge of the world.
My favorite Easter story is actually several months after the crucifixion. It is about how Jesus came back to visit his apostles. Early one morning they were out fishing and He was simply waiting on the shore when they came back. Remember that Peter got so excited he jumped out of the boat? And Jesus just hung around the campfire for a bit, toasting bread and visiting. Does it get better than that? Is there more than that?
Unitarians do sometimes lose their grip. A month or so after I enrolled at Meadville/Lombard in Chicago in 1978, the James Jones Guyana mass suicide happened. In the religious community of the clustered seminaries around the University of Chicago, there were connections to that doomed cult. One of the scariest was that Jim Jones had courted Jack Mendehlsohn’s favor. (Mendehlsohn was a major UU minister.) Jones was running what then appeared to be a progressive inner city church with a strong social action program. He inquired about becoming a UU minister and Mendehlsohn was willing to suggest him as a possible Starr King student. The hitch was that Jones didn’t have an undergrad degree, which is a prerequisite for a ministry degree.
Another more anguished connection was a less-known UU minister who was serving a church in San Francisco when Jones’ ministry began to oppress people. The sister of one of the group who died in Guyana came to this UU minister for help, but neither the minister nor other authorities believed her tales of perversion and abuse. Nothing was done. The stories were too awful for him to believe. He just didn’t think people were that bad. Afterwards he spoke to the national gathering of UU ministers in penitence.
That’s enough talk about the dark side of Easter. The shadow has passed. Some of us even saw it pass over the face of the moon a week ago as we shaded our eyes from the city lights while searching for the comet Hale-Bopp over by the constellation called Cassiopeia’s chair. Eclipses and comets are cyclical, like night and day, like the seasons, like the constant coming and going on of generations, like the cyclical mammalian movement in and out of fertility. These are the raw material of liturgy. They are far deeper than ideas, or dogmas, or even civilizations. The awakening and renewal of Easter is not the property of any church or religious position. It is simply produced by the tipping and turning and circling of the planet, something as real as we are, something we belong to, something we are made of. This Easter celebration of the return of the sun is the way life adjusts to seasons, no more and no less. Because we are part of the life adjusting to the seasons, which here in Oregon means mostly adjusting to warm rain instead of cold rain, we feel this in our flesh, our very cells. We cannot help but stretch, awaken, inhale the new smells (some of us will sneeze!) and feel better every minute that the sun floods down on us.
. . . I keep a file of Easter sermons, as do many ministers. The Easter Potato is one of my favorite ideas and I like the empty tomb motif, when people go to the cave expecting something sad and decaying but find instead an echoing emptiness they can fill with hope. Most often I come back to the Tolstoy quote: “Somewhere in the world there is a green branch and on it is written the word that will save the world.” Or something like that, since the original is in Russian.
. . . Once on Sauvie’s Island long, long ago, we kids went for a walk with our parents. We stopped at a willow tree. The sap was just rising. My mother borrowed my father’s pocket knife and cut a green branch the size and length of her finger. Then she took the knife by the blade and pounded the stick with the handle until somehow she had slipped off the bark. A quick notch and a slot, the bark slipped back on, and she blew it -- a perfect whistle with as clear and sweet a tone as a bird!
. . . My mother’s willow whistle was the call of the goat-footed balloon man -- so far and weeeee! The one that Unitarian “PK” e.e. cummings wrote a poem about, about spring when it’s mud-luscious. Follow that whistle among the trees! Real branches with real leaves spread out to the sun. Today, forget the other planets. You can lie down and die some other day. Today, look for a green branch. Read what is written on it and then -- if you want to -- chew on it.
It is real! This is a spring day with a new world beginning! Cast off your old self! Be reborn! Kindle hope and reach out your arms! Dance on the green and twine flowers in your hair! Why yearn for another world when this one can be so very sweet!
This Easter we have a current event to deal with as we consider a two-thousand year old tradition in addition to a three or four billion year planetary event. Let’s look at the most recent first.
In a San Diego mansion a group of people decided to commit suicide. They were mostly computer programmers -- intelligent, talented, loved by their families. They were influenced by a tall, maybe 70-year-old, conflicted gay man -- a singer, teacher and PK (preacher’s kid) maybe suffering from terminal liver cancer. Wearing Nikes, black clothes, short hair, and plastic bags, they followed Hemlock Society drug protocol and died ever-so-neatly in K-Mart bunkbeds with Target down comforters, purple cloth diamonds spread over their faces and chests.
This would never happen to Unitarians. In the first place the social activists among us would object to the Nikes on grounds that we should support Third World labor by boycotting shoes made under poor working conditions. In the second place many of us think that dressing alike is fashion tyranny. In the third place we are far too individualistic to get the same haircut, do the same thing at the same time, or shop at the same place. We refuse to lie down neatly and die.
On the other hand, we do include many computer programmers and gays, we have been excited over the comet Hale-Bopp, and some of us have been very much intrigued by New Age ideas such as eloping with the dome-headed, bug-eyed operators of UFO’s. Thank goodness we are too anti-authoritarian to ever be described as a cult. Many of us are simply too sceptical to be taken in by sci-fi fantasy.
Though we are founded on the principle of freedom of thought, I object to believing in the preposterous, I object to defining religion as believing in things that are not true, I object to defining community as a group that goes apart from the rest of the world and defines itself as special or privileged, and I object to events that distract us from our real allegiance, which is to the planet from which we arise. These points are at the heart of what I have to say this morning.
Christianity has always had a dangerous edge where inspired poetic theory overtakes mythic story or recorded history, creating a spurious aura of miracle. Thus, over and over everywhere recurs the human phenomenon of a reform leader who is captured and killed by dominating autocrats in the name of keeping order. In Eastern Europe, in parts of Africa, in the southern United States where slave leaders tried to push towards freedom and on the Western prairie where Native Americans tried to preserve their lands, the story is archetypal. We easily recognize it.
The inspired notion that created Christianity and set is apart was the idea that another realm exists in the spirit -- entirely unseen -- and that from this spiritual realm one leader had the indestructible power to survive and then to prevail over this world. Thus Jesus, the man, is killed but the Christ, which is part of God, survives and will return to set us “free.” Some Unitarians have always said this is fiction. Unless you want to call it metaphor.
It’s easy to slip this Christian conviction, which many in our society claim to believe literally, over onto the idea that a UFO traveling in the wake of a comet can carry beings who will come and save us, as this cult believed. Unknown, nonexistent, virtual worlds can be described any way you want. After two thousand years the people in charge of the Christian story have got a pretty good grip on it. Anyone who claims to know better than the Christian establishment story is probably not going to find a big audience. In short, declaring yourself to be the returned J.C. is probably not going to work as well as declaring yourself the returned E.T.
We are used to the institutionalized church celebration of Easter which has grown up around reenactment of the last days of Jesus. Now we have added commodification. I see in the paper there is available a little set of dolls complete with a crucified Jesus, a mourning Mary, and an open-doored tomb with a little plastic stone slab for the body not to be found upon. I don’t know how play with such dolls might shape a child’s mind. Certainly it would be interesting for a therapist to overhear. I wonder what Brother Cadfael, that practical monk of the PBS mystery series, would say.
It seems to me at once trivializing and interiorizing, making something liturgical into something merely subconscious, patterning for self-sacrifice and impossible survival, pre-conditioning for cults. Of course, a modern cynic would simply say it was a marketing opportunity about like the figures for the Hunchback of Notre Dame, complete with ambulatory gargoyles. That was a redemption story, too, wasn’t it?
Easter has two parts: Good Friday’s endarkenment and then Sunday Morning’s enlightenment. Where are the dolls of transcendence? Are they those little gold cherub pins made popular by the Brown family, who wore them to the OJ trial to symbolize their murdered daughter? Are we to take Nicole Simpson as a sort of Christ-symbol, someone crucified and now returned as a pure spirit who hovers over her children? Religion always ends up in such a mix of opportunism and suffering, scholarship and obsession, institutions and insanities. But my darkest thought is that once again we are, as Annie Dillard put it, making itsy-bitsy statues to itsy-bitsy gods.
As Christianity has gone around the world, transforming itself as it passed the boundaries of countries and through the eons of time, the Easter ceremony has become in some places a masochistic and terrifying pageant of people being actually nailed to crosses, as they are in the Philippines. In this country Easter has become so entwined with Martha Stewart Easter egg trees, baskets, bunnies and egg hunts for little children -- all baby pastel and sentimental ruffles -- that no hint of blood persists. Not the blood of crucifixion and not the blood of real birth, real sexuality, real union and conception which is the basis of the historical fertility cults of Europe that gave us rabbits and eggs.
Somehow we are able to accept without reflection the juxtaposition of eager little girls -- in their ribboned, flowered bonnets and Mary-Janes -- with the brutality of an ancient crucifixion that compelled a mother to take in her arms the broken body of her son. So are we able to combine with crucifixion the banal and conforming suicides of three dozen computer nerds, people an unkind denizen of a Waldport bar called “losers,” people so rejecting of fertility that they had been castrated? Is there a difference between the twelve apostles who followed Jesus around and the 39 followers of Bo -- minus Peep? Is there a difference between the Assumption into Heaven which is the official Catholic dogma and the UFO that this group expected to come like Ezekial’s chariot to rescue the human caterpillars into butterflyhood. I should think so.
This is the difference I see. Strategies of escaping to paradise are doomed to failure and corruption because we are creatures of this time and place. Though we can imagine other places much finer and easier than this one, nevertheless, we must stay here. Not because we are trapped or condemned, but because we are part of the Here. We are made of the Here. Our bodies arise from what is Here and our minds and spirits arise from these bodies. To reject our real bodies and this real time and place is to make ourselves unreal, untethered, and susceptible to traveling lecturers in small town motels with conference rooms on the edge of the world.
My favorite Easter story is actually several months after the crucifixion. It is about how Jesus came back to visit his apostles. Early one morning they were out fishing and He was simply waiting on the shore when they came back. Remember that Peter got so excited he jumped out of the boat? And Jesus just hung around the campfire for a bit, toasting bread and visiting. Does it get better than that? Is there more than that?
Unitarians do sometimes lose their grip. A month or so after I enrolled at Meadville/Lombard in Chicago in 1978, the James Jones Guyana mass suicide happened. In the religious community of the clustered seminaries around the University of Chicago, there were connections to that doomed cult. One of the scariest was that Jim Jones had courted Jack Mendehlsohn’s favor. (Mendehlsohn was a major UU minister.) Jones was running what then appeared to be a progressive inner city church with a strong social action program. He inquired about becoming a UU minister and Mendehlsohn was willing to suggest him as a possible Starr King student. The hitch was that Jones didn’t have an undergrad degree, which is a prerequisite for a ministry degree.
Another more anguished connection was a less-known UU minister who was serving a church in San Francisco when Jones’ ministry began to oppress people. The sister of one of the group who died in Guyana came to this UU minister for help, but neither the minister nor other authorities believed her tales of perversion and abuse. Nothing was done. The stories were too awful for him to believe. He just didn’t think people were that bad. Afterwards he spoke to the national gathering of UU ministers in penitence.
That’s enough talk about the dark side of Easter. The shadow has passed. Some of us even saw it pass over the face of the moon a week ago as we shaded our eyes from the city lights while searching for the comet Hale-Bopp over by the constellation called Cassiopeia’s chair. Eclipses and comets are cyclical, like night and day, like the seasons, like the constant coming and going on of generations, like the cyclical mammalian movement in and out of fertility. These are the raw material of liturgy. They are far deeper than ideas, or dogmas, or even civilizations. The awakening and renewal of Easter is not the property of any church or religious position. It is simply produced by the tipping and turning and circling of the planet, something as real as we are, something we belong to, something we are made of. This Easter celebration of the return of the sun is the way life adjusts to seasons, no more and no less. Because we are part of the life adjusting to the seasons, which here in Oregon means mostly adjusting to warm rain instead of cold rain, we feel this in our flesh, our very cells. We cannot help but stretch, awaken, inhale the new smells (some of us will sneeze!) and feel better every minute that the sun floods down on us.
. . . I keep a file of Easter sermons, as do many ministers. The Easter Potato is one of my favorite ideas and I like the empty tomb motif, when people go to the cave expecting something sad and decaying but find instead an echoing emptiness they can fill with hope. Most often I come back to the Tolstoy quote: “Somewhere in the world there is a green branch and on it is written the word that will save the world.” Or something like that, since the original is in Russian.
. . . Once on Sauvie’s Island long, long ago, we kids went for a walk with our parents. We stopped at a willow tree. The sap was just rising. My mother borrowed my father’s pocket knife and cut a green branch the size and length of her finger. Then she took the knife by the blade and pounded the stick with the handle until somehow she had slipped off the bark. A quick notch and a slot, the bark slipped back on, and she blew it -- a perfect whistle with as clear and sweet a tone as a bird!
. . . My mother’s willow whistle was the call of the goat-footed balloon man -- so far and weeeee! The one that Unitarian “PK” e.e. cummings wrote a poem about, about spring when it’s mud-luscious. Follow that whistle among the trees! Real branches with real leaves spread out to the sun. Today, forget the other planets. You can lie down and die some other day. Today, look for a green branch. Read what is written on it and then -- if you want to -- chew on it.
It is real! This is a spring day with a new world beginning! Cast off your old self! Be reborn! Kindle hope and reach out your arms! Dance on the green and twine flowers in your hair! Why yearn for another world when this one can be so very sweet!
Saturday, April 11, 2009
BETWEEN GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER
This blog began in part as a way of gathering up Blackfeet history materials so they could be easily found for students and teachers. That’s done.
And it was also a way to carry on with writing after I finished “Bronze Inside and Out” but hadn’t developed the next project yet. Gradually the blog BECAME the project with only one goal: write a thousand words a day. I split it out into parts, which gradually became less important as “prairiemary” became more of an entity. I added book and movie reviews, since that’s how I spend my evenings.
Along came another blog, this one belonging to Timothy Patrick Barrus and his Cinematheque collective of boys at risk. The whole thing dipped, exploded, faded, bloomed, and experimented while Tim and I talked via email. We’ve never met. He’s in Europe.
Then he asked me to collaborate on a book, which shocked his boys, some of which are young men who aspire to be authors. It looks like a good idea to include some of their writing. And yet Tim says he wants something that is “his,” a personal gestation, a virtual child. The three books he wrote as “Nasdijj” dragged him into a firestorm for the politically incorrect act of disguising his mother as a Navajo. That was the excuse. The truth of the hatred was much uglier. And Tim claims that HE is much uglier. He has the idea that it’s safer if one appears wicked and dangerous.
I’m betting on the opposite: that an old celibate lady in a Montana prairie village with a utility minister’s education can turn an undiverted gaze on things like sex, torture, corruption, perversion and so on without being destroyed. Some of this has nothing to do with Tim. For instance, the Nashville UU Congregation has re-opened the subject of ministerial misconduct, esp. in relation to sex. (They might do as well to watch the money.) You’ll notice that I’ve added my voice, partly because I was a member of the PNWD UUMA (minister’s group) when it was the first to address the problem. Partly because I’m outside but know inside things and therefore have no restrictions on my voice except caution for persons.
The position I’m taking is the one that I take on everything because it’s my religious position: everything is connected, everything is changing, what one person does can affect everything else. Most of the conversation about sexual misconduct has been framed as big bad ministers versus little victim parishioners. I want to look at the whole notorious and eternal vulnerability of religious institutions when it comes to sex, both the excessive virtue that demonizes sex and the kind of carelessness that reduces it to a trading token in the race for power.
This will put me at risk in the two months leading up to the denominational election of new leaders in June. I will also be at risk in terms of trying to find an agent or publisher for the collaborative conversation book with Barrus. I’m doing it for several reasons. One is that most publishing figures scream and run for their lives at the very mention of the name “Barrus.” When he is frustrated and angry, he unleashes gutter diatribes on people, even nice ladies in Manhattan.
I’m almost seventy but Barrus is almost sixty and carrying some serious health burdens, like avascular necrosis which keeps him in constant pain. Like the boys whom he constantly presses to stay on their careful regimes of HIV/AIDS drugs, he is often nauseous and so has moved one branch of the group to Amsterdam where marijuana is legal. The group is constantly challenged by events: one boy went back to heroin, was asked to leave, and then returned to the street where he died of a gunshot wound to the head. Several are suicidal. The point of the group is to produce art: videos, paintings, anything else they want to undertake. One is a dancer. Another was resident artist at a wolf refuge for a while. Several are now seriously writing.
The most recent challenge was entirely unexpected. To keep them away from predators and temptations in Paris where the main loft has been, the youngest boys had been moved to a remote village in Italy. When the recent deadly earthquake hit, none was hurt but all were terrified and had to be airlifted out to be with the older boys, forcing those young men into roles as surrogate parents again.
The main question that seems to preoccupy critics is “how do you know all this is true?” They maintain that Barrus is making it all up, that it’s nothing a but a serial fantasy in a fevered brain. Of course, all I have is my own experience of the world, which so far matches Tim’s in much milder form. That’s what told me in the first place that “The Boy and his Dog Are Sleeping” was written by someone who knew reservations. These guys may be invented or not, scrambled and disguised or not, but they ring true to me and their stories seem to me authentic testimony no matter the source. The larger world needs to hear them.
After two years of correspondence, I’ve watched dozens of videos -- some of them losers and some of them intensely encoded with meaning. I’ve seen family photos of Barrus’ past and present. The two gifted and excellently educated Irish youths who lead the electronics are known to me by name and email. Others are familiar faces by now, though I don’t know which names are theirs. I’ve seen the ashes of at least one boy scattered on a favorite beach. I’ve seen one beloved dog die and a new dog take up the story with vigor and glee. Whether Tim and I can get this across to a publisher and then to the public is an open question.
The boys, for all their grandstanding and showing off, are terrified of publicity, for fear it will bring down on them the dreaded “suits,” the people who make it their business to try to get the edges of society under control: police, social workers, nurses, teachers, and -- yes -- ministers. It will also attract more predators and stalkers.
I’m also terrified. There are a lot of losses coming up, including loss of privacy. But most of all I’m terrified of success. I saw what they did to Bob Scriver. Tim calls them hyenas. He’s right, but they aren’t the only animals on the veldt.
And it was also a way to carry on with writing after I finished “Bronze Inside and Out” but hadn’t developed the next project yet. Gradually the blog BECAME the project with only one goal: write a thousand words a day. I split it out into parts, which gradually became less important as “prairiemary” became more of an entity. I added book and movie reviews, since that’s how I spend my evenings.
Along came another blog, this one belonging to Timothy Patrick Barrus and his Cinematheque collective of boys at risk. The whole thing dipped, exploded, faded, bloomed, and experimented while Tim and I talked via email. We’ve never met. He’s in Europe.
Then he asked me to collaborate on a book, which shocked his boys, some of which are young men who aspire to be authors. It looks like a good idea to include some of their writing. And yet Tim says he wants something that is “his,” a personal gestation, a virtual child. The three books he wrote as “Nasdijj” dragged him into a firestorm for the politically incorrect act of disguising his mother as a Navajo. That was the excuse. The truth of the hatred was much uglier. And Tim claims that HE is much uglier. He has the idea that it’s safer if one appears wicked and dangerous.
I’m betting on the opposite: that an old celibate lady in a Montana prairie village with a utility minister’s education can turn an undiverted gaze on things like sex, torture, corruption, perversion and so on without being destroyed. Some of this has nothing to do with Tim. For instance, the Nashville UU Congregation has re-opened the subject of ministerial misconduct, esp. in relation to sex. (They might do as well to watch the money.) You’ll notice that I’ve added my voice, partly because I was a member of the PNWD UUMA (minister’s group) when it was the first to address the problem. Partly because I’m outside but know inside things and therefore have no restrictions on my voice except caution for persons.
The position I’m taking is the one that I take on everything because it’s my religious position: everything is connected, everything is changing, what one person does can affect everything else. Most of the conversation about sexual misconduct has been framed as big bad ministers versus little victim parishioners. I want to look at the whole notorious and eternal vulnerability of religious institutions when it comes to sex, both the excessive virtue that demonizes sex and the kind of carelessness that reduces it to a trading token in the race for power.
This will put me at risk in the two months leading up to the denominational election of new leaders in June. I will also be at risk in terms of trying to find an agent or publisher for the collaborative conversation book with Barrus. I’m doing it for several reasons. One is that most publishing figures scream and run for their lives at the very mention of the name “Barrus.” When he is frustrated and angry, he unleashes gutter diatribes on people, even nice ladies in Manhattan.
I’m almost seventy but Barrus is almost sixty and carrying some serious health burdens, like avascular necrosis which keeps him in constant pain. Like the boys whom he constantly presses to stay on their careful regimes of HIV/AIDS drugs, he is often nauseous and so has moved one branch of the group to Amsterdam where marijuana is legal. The group is constantly challenged by events: one boy went back to heroin, was asked to leave, and then returned to the street where he died of a gunshot wound to the head. Several are suicidal. The point of the group is to produce art: videos, paintings, anything else they want to undertake. One is a dancer. Another was resident artist at a wolf refuge for a while. Several are now seriously writing.
The most recent challenge was entirely unexpected. To keep them away from predators and temptations in Paris where the main loft has been, the youngest boys had been moved to a remote village in Italy. When the recent deadly earthquake hit, none was hurt but all were terrified and had to be airlifted out to be with the older boys, forcing those young men into roles as surrogate parents again.
The main question that seems to preoccupy critics is “how do you know all this is true?” They maintain that Barrus is making it all up, that it’s nothing a but a serial fantasy in a fevered brain. Of course, all I have is my own experience of the world, which so far matches Tim’s in much milder form. That’s what told me in the first place that “The Boy and his Dog Are Sleeping” was written by someone who knew reservations. These guys may be invented or not, scrambled and disguised or not, but they ring true to me and their stories seem to me authentic testimony no matter the source. The larger world needs to hear them.
After two years of correspondence, I’ve watched dozens of videos -- some of them losers and some of them intensely encoded with meaning. I’ve seen family photos of Barrus’ past and present. The two gifted and excellently educated Irish youths who lead the electronics are known to me by name and email. Others are familiar faces by now, though I don’t know which names are theirs. I’ve seen the ashes of at least one boy scattered on a favorite beach. I’ve seen one beloved dog die and a new dog take up the story with vigor and glee. Whether Tim and I can get this across to a publisher and then to the public is an open question.
The boys, for all their grandstanding and showing off, are terrified of publicity, for fear it will bring down on them the dreaded “suits,” the people who make it their business to try to get the edges of society under control: police, social workers, nurses, teachers, and -- yes -- ministers. It will also attract more predators and stalkers.
I’m also terrified. There are a lot of losses coming up, including loss of privacy. But most of all I’m terrified of success. I saw what they did to Bob Scriver. Tim calls them hyenas. He’s right, but they aren’t the only animals on the veldt.
Friday, April 10, 2009
SEXUAL ETHICS IN THE PEWS
Perusing Robin’s ever-indignant “emerson avenger” blogsite, I ran into an open letter dated March 26, 2009, from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville to the two candidates for the leadership of the UUA entire. It was about clergy sexual misconduct, as follows. “We also know that, just as with other types of abuse, silence is a large part of the pattern and that silence often endangers more victims, impeding both justice and healing. So, even though it is a difficult topic, it must be broached for the truth to come out and progress to be made.” I’ve decided to respond to this.
A report at the UUA website recall, “A call for justice was voiced by UUMA chapters in the southeast and the Pacific northwest in 1984 and 1985 as they articulated their concerns about the effects of clergy sexual misconduct on congregations and ministry.”
It also says: “The interfaith "cloud of witnesses" who have educated, motivated and inspired us include many professional clergy, caregivers, and lay leaders. Marie Fortune (founder/director of the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence) and Heather Block (author of Advocates Training Manual: Advocating for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by a Church Leader/Caregiver, Mennonite Central Committee, Canada, 1996) defined our work as "giving voice to the voiceless," called our attention to power and authority issues, and clarified many fiduciary responsibilities.”
I have never been sexually abused by clergy, UU or other. I “vas dere Chollie” when this issue surfaced and was a clergy member of the PNWD Ministers’ Association. I know what the PNWD case was but not the SE case. I also know a lot of cases that were never defined or prosecuted or even made public. Some of them because they involved consent and most, I think, because of confusion about what they were at all.
The PNWD case involved an ordained man, acting as a trained counselor, who repeatedly and systematically took his female adult counselees into bed, often their own. No one among the clergy had the slightest suspicion that this was happening until one of the women blew the whistle. I don’t know what sort of supervision he had from the counseling community or even what specific training he had had. He was not a handsome man but he was warm and popular. It was a big city church and that church was nearly financially broken when the lawsuits were paid and the bill came for “re-counseling” the women. The hearts of some of the more idealistic clergy also broke, but it was a tolerant community. A minister who had proven to be a predatory gay had been removed from active service, but was tolerated at meetings if he attended.
I was serving in Montana at this time and knew about the case of a divorced Presbyterian minister who had been “romancing” a cluster of members of his congregation. Each, thinking she was either engaged or about to be engaged to this man, allowed intimate relations. When one of the women, through being indiscrete with a friend in spite of cautions, discovered there were several “fiancees”, she did not sue -- rightly thinking she had been a fool. Instead one Sunday she arranged for all the women to wear bright red and sit together in a front pew. He got the message and soon left.
When I read over the UUA and UUMA responses to the problem (posted at the UUA website), I see two major blind spots, maybe more. The first one is over-reliance on experts, like Marie Fortune and specifically Marie Fortune, who denominational officials hoped would shield them from accusations of incompetence and guide them in a situation where, indeed, no one knew quite what to do. But Fortune and company were almost entirely focused on victims, rather than perpetrators. The idea was that unwanted sex was the result of a power gradient which allowed a “big person” to prey on a “little person.” So the strategy was to blame power and build up the defenses of the vulnerable, plus restoring their self-worth.
The second was to see sexual events and acts apart from the whole webwork of social relationships that constitute a congregation and a denomination. The problem was seen as about defenseless women and children and situations that were defined as “equal” were supposed to be all right, as though there ever any human relationship that is truly equal. One person is always more needy, more uninformed, more confused than the other, even if both are forty-year-old economically secure professionals, even if the sex is gay, even if the sex is consensual. The difference may be slight but it IS there. None of the participants in the more equal relationships wanted to define themselves as sex victims, especially the clergy. Perhaps this is why no one pursued the question of sexually predatory laity.
The economy of power, sex and secrets has been the stuff of novels from the very beginning of institutional religion, regardless of whether it is Christian or Buddhist. (The latter were having similar problems at this time, having accommodated a flood of female and young supplicants.) Institutions, such as schools, have always wrestled with the problem, as we are esp. aware in the context of residential Native American and Aboriginal schools or Catholic parishes. Maybe this is because institutions define the hierarchical relationship that they feel is at the core of abuse. Anyway, the missionary impulse is always a dangerous one, inviting abuse.
As a former UU minister, a celibate seventy-year-old female who has served in both the US and Canada, in both small fellowships (who normally have no minister) and small congregations, I see the landscape rather differently. Religion and congregations with ministers are about power. The minister is the focus of the power -- those who control the minister control the resources of their congregation. They have a certain underground status, access to normally undisclosed information, and influence on the ministers’ actions. This is particularly true of illicit relationships, because another huge source of power in a hierarchical institution is secrets: being able to blackmail, to attach information seekers to oneself, to influence events.
I see this same complex of forces of status/sex/secrets/power on the Blackfeet Reservation -- have watched it for fifty years. From the outside, the most seemingly powerless people can be the ones who own the game. (Call it bone game, stick game.) Fritz Perls used to say that the underdog always wins. A black female supervisor told me that being black is a huge advantage because “we’ve always seen the whites from their evil underside” and because public sympathy in liberal circles in automatically on the side of minorities.
The most common game is probably Eric Berne’s NIGYSOB. “Now I’ve Got You, You SOB!” in which a person seems to be inviting the victim closer and closer, until there is enough evidence to suddenly turn on them. “Why don’t you, yes but” is a good game as well. The weak one describes a problem, the strong one suggests cures, the weak one has a reason why it won’t work, the strong one tries another answer, the weak one has a reason why that won’t work either, and on it goes, until the weak one is finally able to convince everyone that the strong one has no clue what they are doing and are actually powerless. (Kids are great at this.) The game of “chaos” in which the poorer chess player simply turns over the table is kind of a beginner’s tactic.
The point is that ministers, esp. now that females and older second-career people are common, may also be scared, dislocated, lonely, or confused. Predators -- who may be laity or may be colleagues -- are happy for the opportunities. Where’s the book and the workshops for that? When I was in the ministry, on two different occasions men I hardly knew bluntly asked me for sex. Could I have sued them for that? If they had used force, of course, I could have simply gone to the criminal law. Should a female minister do that? What tough old cop wouldn’t laugh?
A report at the UUA website recall, “A call for justice was voiced by UUMA chapters in the southeast and the Pacific northwest in 1984 and 1985 as they articulated their concerns about the effects of clergy sexual misconduct on congregations and ministry.”
It also says: “The interfaith "cloud of witnesses" who have educated, motivated and inspired us include many professional clergy, caregivers, and lay leaders. Marie Fortune (founder/director of the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence) and Heather Block (author of Advocates Training Manual: Advocating for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by a Church Leader/Caregiver, Mennonite Central Committee, Canada, 1996) defined our work as "giving voice to the voiceless," called our attention to power and authority issues, and clarified many fiduciary responsibilities.”
I have never been sexually abused by clergy, UU or other. I “vas dere Chollie” when this issue surfaced and was a clergy member of the PNWD Ministers’ Association. I know what the PNWD case was but not the SE case. I also know a lot of cases that were never defined or prosecuted or even made public. Some of them because they involved consent and most, I think, because of confusion about what they were at all.
The PNWD case involved an ordained man, acting as a trained counselor, who repeatedly and systematically took his female adult counselees into bed, often their own. No one among the clergy had the slightest suspicion that this was happening until one of the women blew the whistle. I don’t know what sort of supervision he had from the counseling community or even what specific training he had had. He was not a handsome man but he was warm and popular. It was a big city church and that church was nearly financially broken when the lawsuits were paid and the bill came for “re-counseling” the women. The hearts of some of the more idealistic clergy also broke, but it was a tolerant community. A minister who had proven to be a predatory gay had been removed from active service, but was tolerated at meetings if he attended.
I was serving in Montana at this time and knew about the case of a divorced Presbyterian minister who had been “romancing” a cluster of members of his congregation. Each, thinking she was either engaged or about to be engaged to this man, allowed intimate relations. When one of the women, through being indiscrete with a friend in spite of cautions, discovered there were several “fiancees”, she did not sue -- rightly thinking she had been a fool. Instead one Sunday she arranged for all the women to wear bright red and sit together in a front pew. He got the message and soon left.
When I read over the UUA and UUMA responses to the problem (posted at the UUA website), I see two major blind spots, maybe more. The first one is over-reliance on experts, like Marie Fortune and specifically Marie Fortune, who denominational officials hoped would shield them from accusations of incompetence and guide them in a situation where, indeed, no one knew quite what to do. But Fortune and company were almost entirely focused on victims, rather than perpetrators. The idea was that unwanted sex was the result of a power gradient which allowed a “big person” to prey on a “little person.” So the strategy was to blame power and build up the defenses of the vulnerable, plus restoring their self-worth.
The second was to see sexual events and acts apart from the whole webwork of social relationships that constitute a congregation and a denomination. The problem was seen as about defenseless women and children and situations that were defined as “equal” were supposed to be all right, as though there ever any human relationship that is truly equal. One person is always more needy, more uninformed, more confused than the other, even if both are forty-year-old economically secure professionals, even if the sex is gay, even if the sex is consensual. The difference may be slight but it IS there. None of the participants in the more equal relationships wanted to define themselves as sex victims, especially the clergy. Perhaps this is why no one pursued the question of sexually predatory laity.
The economy of power, sex and secrets has been the stuff of novels from the very beginning of institutional religion, regardless of whether it is Christian or Buddhist. (The latter were having similar problems at this time, having accommodated a flood of female and young supplicants.) Institutions, such as schools, have always wrestled with the problem, as we are esp. aware in the context of residential Native American and Aboriginal schools or Catholic parishes. Maybe this is because institutions define the hierarchical relationship that they feel is at the core of abuse. Anyway, the missionary impulse is always a dangerous one, inviting abuse.
As a former UU minister, a celibate seventy-year-old female who has served in both the US and Canada, in both small fellowships (who normally have no minister) and small congregations, I see the landscape rather differently. Religion and congregations with ministers are about power. The minister is the focus of the power -- those who control the minister control the resources of their congregation. They have a certain underground status, access to normally undisclosed information, and influence on the ministers’ actions. This is particularly true of illicit relationships, because another huge source of power in a hierarchical institution is secrets: being able to blackmail, to attach information seekers to oneself, to influence events.
I see this same complex of forces of status/sex/secrets/power on the Blackfeet Reservation -- have watched it for fifty years. From the outside, the most seemingly powerless people can be the ones who own the game. (Call it bone game, stick game.) Fritz Perls used to say that the underdog always wins. A black female supervisor told me that being black is a huge advantage because “we’ve always seen the whites from their evil underside” and because public sympathy in liberal circles in automatically on the side of minorities.
The most common game is probably Eric Berne’s NIGYSOB. “Now I’ve Got You, You SOB!” in which a person seems to be inviting the victim closer and closer, until there is enough evidence to suddenly turn on them. “Why don’t you, yes but” is a good game as well. The weak one describes a problem, the strong one suggests cures, the weak one has a reason why it won’t work, the strong one tries another answer, the weak one has a reason why that won’t work either, and on it goes, until the weak one is finally able to convince everyone that the strong one has no clue what they are doing and are actually powerless. (Kids are great at this.) The game of “chaos” in which the poorer chess player simply turns over the table is kind of a beginner’s tactic.
The point is that ministers, esp. now that females and older second-career people are common, may also be scared, dislocated, lonely, or confused. Predators -- who may be laity or may be colleagues -- are happy for the opportunities. Where’s the book and the workshops for that? When I was in the ministry, on two different occasions men I hardly knew bluntly asked me for sex. Could I have sued them for that? If they had used force, of course, I could have simply gone to the criminal law. Should a female minister do that? What tough old cop wouldn’t laugh?
Thursday, April 09, 2009
PASSIONATE DISSENT
My minister in Portland -- the old-fashioned male one who was not afraid to thunder from the pulpit -- used to ruefully note that there was a man in the congregation who said he didn’t know what position to take on an issue until he heard what the minister said -- then he knew he was convinced of the opposite. There are movie reviewers like that, too, valuable because they are so dependably opposite. When kids take that attitude they are said to have “oppositional defiance disorder.” But the Unitarian Universalist denomination formed in oppositional defiance to Calvinism. The Unitarians thought the Trinity was a nonsensical doctrine and the Universalists thought predestination to hell made no sense. In those days denominations formed based on doctrine. The two separate movements found common cause and merged in 1961 for more practical reasons -- like money.
Anyway, it is perfectly obvious that most denominations and religions (“denomination” is a word invented to describe subsets within the Christian context) are mostly social affinity groups based more on class, education, ethnicity, and similar forces. But the UUA advertises itself as a denomination that can absorb people of many different kinds and styles, that protects doctrinal heresy.
The very fact that the boundaries are weak and porous makes the institutional maintenance of the denomination pretty problematic. That is, the practical matters of hiring, creating materials, supplying managerial needs, encouraging growth, and all the other business of any corporation are based on defining the edge. Usually it comes down to money and membership numbers: if a congregation has enough people willing to sign up and pay dues, and if they forward their obligation to the “association,” then they’re in. It’s a very loose, rather fragile, and hard to explain sort of thing, usually dodged by going back to the doctrinal statement, which in the UUA is so inclusive as to be meaningless or at least interpretable.
This make Robin Edgar very angry indeed. He has mounted an attack through blogging: http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com
“The Emerson Avenger is a "memory hole" free blog where censorship is scorned. This blog will "guard the right to know" about any injustices and abuses that corrupt Unitarian Universalism. Posters may speak and argue freely, according to conscience, about any injustices and abuses, or indeed hypocrisy, that they may know about so that the Avenger, in the form of justice and redress, may come surely and swiftly. . . "Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely." - Ralph Waldo Emerson”
Robin’s quote is from THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW lecture read in the tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11 (Miscellanies) [1909]
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27
Robin Edgar says: “In 1992 I underwent a profound revelatory experience of God which revealed that the total solar eclipse "Eye of God" is a "Sign in the Heavens" that symbolizes God's divine omniscience. This revelatory religious experience inspired me to propose an inter-religious celebration of Creation that would take place whenever a total solar eclipse took place over our planet.” [Robin was labeled a cult leader.] I am now an excommunicated Unitarian whose "alternative spiritual practice" includes publicly exposing and denouncing Unitarian*Universalist injustices, abuses, and hypocrisy.”
So Robin wants “in” to the denomination and the denomination wants Robin “out.” Or at least his opinions and denunciations. They call him a madman, he calls them corrupt. I am familiar with this dynamic, having stepped out of the UU ministry, a context which provided me with lots of stories of injustice, abuse and hypocrisy -- to say nothing of prosecutable offenses. They are present in any defined institution one is able to identify. The schools, the government, the military, the village -- all being assembled of human beings, all include faulty and wicked people. The institution, of course, tries to define critics as the problem and to throw them out. (Kill the messenger.)
Robin has the idea that the UUA is based on monotheism and once upon a time it was. Since the 19th century, it has become a haven for atheists and with atheism has come a streak of defiance of all laws that used to be enforced by the Great Papa God. “You can’t tell me what to do” linked with “you don’t exist anyway!” It’s a way of defining oneself against limits that no longer exist. What is passionately effective against an old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priest with beard and mitre, one of those powerful men who make and break history, is completely ineffective against a nice, well-educated, sympathetic, young, suburban, female UU minister. (This seems to be the new pattern.) Not that some UU ministers, male and female, don’t persist in thinking they are old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priests, which goes to one of the sources of corruption.
What is to be done? Why do anything? What would be the goal? So long as Robin doesn’t enter the public assemblies of UU people and disrupt their proceedings, what’s wrong with him blogging and emailing as much as he wants? Isn’t that exactly what Emerson was doing when he delivered lectures against the Fugitive Slave Law ?
When I was doing my hospital chaplaincy on the neurology ward, I ran athwart a brain surgery formerly a Jesuit monk. He wanted me prevented from talking to a man who had a brain tumor. The man said that a “ball of light” came to him in the night and told him he would be healed. The brain surgeon was afraid I would tell him he was a nut case and that his epiphany was just brain damage. He assumed I would take a scientifically-based and rather brutal approach because I was a UU.
I was never clear about whether this surgeon didn’t want me to upset his patient or really was quietly leaving room for the possibility that the “ball of light” was real and the epiphany was valid, if possibly misinterpreted, though he had to know from his own explorations that the reality was brutally fatal. We didn’t talk.
But I did, in defiant opposition, sneak in to talk to the patient. He told me, his face glowing, about his vision. I told him he was fortunate indeed to have such a precious and merciful gift.
Anyway, it is perfectly obvious that most denominations and religions (“denomination” is a word invented to describe subsets within the Christian context) are mostly social affinity groups based more on class, education, ethnicity, and similar forces. But the UUA advertises itself as a denomination that can absorb people of many different kinds and styles, that protects doctrinal heresy.
The very fact that the boundaries are weak and porous makes the institutional maintenance of the denomination pretty problematic. That is, the practical matters of hiring, creating materials, supplying managerial needs, encouraging growth, and all the other business of any corporation are based on defining the edge. Usually it comes down to money and membership numbers: if a congregation has enough people willing to sign up and pay dues, and if they forward their obligation to the “association,” then they’re in. It’s a very loose, rather fragile, and hard to explain sort of thing, usually dodged by going back to the doctrinal statement, which in the UUA is so inclusive as to be meaningless or at least interpretable.
This make Robin Edgar very angry indeed. He has mounted an attack through blogging: http://emersonavenger.blogspot.com
“The Emerson Avenger is a "memory hole" free blog where censorship is scorned. This blog will "guard the right to know" about any injustices and abuses that corrupt Unitarian Universalism. Posters may speak and argue freely, according to conscience, about any injustices and abuses, or indeed hypocrisy, that they may know about so that the Avenger, in the form of justice and redress, may come surely and swiftly. . . "Slowly, slowly the Avenger comes, but comes surely." - Ralph Waldo Emerson”
Robin’s quote is from THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW lecture read in the tabernacle, New York City, March 7, 1854. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 11 (Miscellanies) [1909]
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1961&chapter=123098&layout=html&Itemid=27
Robin Edgar says: “In 1992 I underwent a profound revelatory experience of God which revealed that the total solar eclipse "Eye of God" is a "Sign in the Heavens" that symbolizes God's divine omniscience. This revelatory religious experience inspired me to propose an inter-religious celebration of Creation that would take place whenever a total solar eclipse took place over our planet.” [Robin was labeled a cult leader.] I am now an excommunicated Unitarian whose "alternative spiritual practice" includes publicly exposing and denouncing Unitarian*Universalist injustices, abuses, and hypocrisy.”
So Robin wants “in” to the denomination and the denomination wants Robin “out.” Or at least his opinions and denunciations. They call him a madman, he calls them corrupt. I am familiar with this dynamic, having stepped out of the UU ministry, a context which provided me with lots of stories of injustice, abuse and hypocrisy -- to say nothing of prosecutable offenses. They are present in any defined institution one is able to identify. The schools, the government, the military, the village -- all being assembled of human beings, all include faulty and wicked people. The institution, of course, tries to define critics as the problem and to throw them out. (Kill the messenger.)
Robin has the idea that the UUA is based on monotheism and once upon a time it was. Since the 19th century, it has become a haven for atheists and with atheism has come a streak of defiance of all laws that used to be enforced by the Great Papa God. “You can’t tell me what to do” linked with “you don’t exist anyway!” It’s a way of defining oneself against limits that no longer exist. What is passionately effective against an old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priest with beard and mitre, one of those powerful men who make and break history, is completely ineffective against a nice, well-educated, sympathetic, young, suburban, female UU minister. (This seems to be the new pattern.) Not that some UU ministers, male and female, don’t persist in thinking they are old-fashioned Russian Orthodox priests, which goes to one of the sources of corruption.
What is to be done? Why do anything? What would be the goal? So long as Robin doesn’t enter the public assemblies of UU people and disrupt their proceedings, what’s wrong with him blogging and emailing as much as he wants? Isn’t that exactly what Emerson was doing when he delivered lectures against the Fugitive Slave Law ?
When I was doing my hospital chaplaincy on the neurology ward, I ran athwart a brain surgery formerly a Jesuit monk. He wanted me prevented from talking to a man who had a brain tumor. The man said that a “ball of light” came to him in the night and told him he would be healed. The brain surgeon was afraid I would tell him he was a nut case and that his epiphany was just brain damage. He assumed I would take a scientifically-based and rather brutal approach because I was a UU.
I was never clear about whether this surgeon didn’t want me to upset his patient or really was quietly leaving room for the possibility that the “ball of light” was real and the epiphany was valid, if possibly misinterpreted, though he had to know from his own explorations that the reality was brutally fatal. We didn’t talk.
But I did, in defiant opposition, sneak in to talk to the patient. He told me, his face glowing, about his vision. I told him he was fortunate indeed to have such a precious and merciful gift.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
MY ON-GOING ED HARRIS FILM FESTIVAL
Assuming that Netflix has all the films, this “festival” could go on for a very long time: there are close to a hundred films with Ed Harris in them. I’m barely making a dent. But I can see a few categories forming. What’s fascinating is that the categories are so different. The three that stand out so far are: nice guys, sorta clueless, who go along until something changes them; whacko creative guys who range from the clearly disturbed and alcoholic Pollock to the more properly “inspired” and driven Beethoven; and military men who have “the right stuff.”
Recently I’ve looked at “Gone, Baby, Gone” and “Empire Falls.” Now that I have broadband, I’ve been picking up on publicity videos and sound interviews. One of the most interesting was described by the media as an “Ed Harris meltdown!” It was promo for “A History of Violence.” The panel of discussers sat at a table across the front and the journalists and photogs were in a cluster of chairs out front. “What is this movie about, Mr. Harris?”
Ed suddenly whacks the table with his hand. “What is THIS?” he demands. WHAMMO again. “What IS this?” And a third time. Then he picks up the glass of water in front of him and hurls it against the wall behind him without even looking. “It’s VIOLENCE! That’s what it is!” Everyone scatters as he stalks out. I thought it was brilliant.
Last night I watched “The Buffalo Soldiers” which has nothing to do with buffalo. The Indians called the black cavalry regiments buffalo soldiers, and the movie is about corruption in the peacetime army, which always includes a lot of blacks because they need the work. In this satirical story Harris is both a clueless nice guy and a military man sans “right stuff.” The cast is very fine indeed but this is not my fav genre. Elizabeth McGovern and Anna Paquin were remarkable. Scott Glenn, another “Right Stuff” guy, is also capable of being either lethal or righteous. It’s a youngster’s movie: lots of explosions and cynicism. But the sentiments probably brought these seasoned actors to the cast out of political sympathy.
A movie rather unlike any of the categories above is “The Third Miracle” in which Harris is a sceptical priest whose job is to winnow out false miracles when the Vatican is asked to certify saints. This is a sophisticated story, a thinking story, of a kind that rarely gets made these days. I have the tape and watch it now and then, never failing to see something new to think about. (I still miss that series from years ago about the religious staff of a major urban cathedral and the moral dilemmas they were called upon to solve, sometimes in unconventional ways, which is what caused it to be canceled.)
Which brings me to “Appaloosa,” the recent triple-threat film from Harris, in which he writes, directs, and acts. Probably had something to do with production and casting as well. This is a man whose life is truly acting, which means he has accumulated a lot of creds. Now he begins to cash them in. I love that the first of these truly auteur movies is a Western, since one of my fav movies (Oh, better start a new category!) is the Western, “Riders of the Purple Sage,” in which he plays the classic hero, Lassiter, the man who comes to restore justice and ends up withdrawing with his lover (his actual wife) to Rainbow Valley, an Eden.
In Appaloosa, Harris is a gun for hire with Viggo Mortensen as his intelligent sidekick. (I often assert that there’s nothing wrong with being the sidekick, though the role can be played for laughs.) The media has had a tussle with the meaning of this film. Is Virgil Cole a good man or bad? Does he have the Right Stuff or is his vulnerability to the Renee Zellweger part a sign that he’s a fool for love? (His PR event this time was to come up behind Renee, who was wearing something low-cut, and bending over to tenderly kiss her shoulder. What did it mean? Were they in love? Would he leave his wife?!!???)
I gather that the original book from which this movie was adapted portrayed Mrs. French for a kind of scheming minx, but Harris’ take on her makes her more of a needy child. When she shows up in the clutches of the bad guys with a rope around her neck, her upturned face is like Munch’s the Scream, but somehow it is also like a face molded of cookie dough -- sweet and distorted. To me, that’s the clue to Virgil Cole: he and Everett Hitch are protectors. They come to the town as gods with the power to destroy and though they seem nearly amoral in their rule-based “justice,” they are capable of deep attachment -- first to each other. They split out when Cole is seduced by his need to protect an appealing flower of a woman -- NOT sex! Hitch stays faithful to his code of honor, learned at West Point and now in service to his friend.
So what we have here is a discussion of what is important for society: order based on love or order based on rules? It’s a religious question in the end. If you could play God, what would you do? Neither is an ideal solution and order based on love is probably God’s big weakness. If He didn’t love us (assuming He exists) He’d have wiped us out long ago. The frontier puzzle of the town with its rules, coming to prairie where there is no rule but survival, is what puts this movie in the Western genre -- not the fact that people are riding around on horses and the women wear bustles. (I did so love Viggo squaring up for the final shootout in Eastern military duel style. Even the “Apaches” -- who were really Blackfeet from here -- have a special fondness for Viggo, partly because he’s so good with horses and so capable of mixing the poetic with the heroic.)
When I look at my motto now: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work,” I see it over the heads of Cole and Hitch sitting out on the porch of the jail, sipping coffee and chatting. They did that, didn’t they? Regular and orderly until violent and original?
Recently I’ve looked at “Gone, Baby, Gone” and “Empire Falls.” Now that I have broadband, I’ve been picking up on publicity videos and sound interviews. One of the most interesting was described by the media as an “Ed Harris meltdown!” It was promo for “A History of Violence.” The panel of discussers sat at a table across the front and the journalists and photogs were in a cluster of chairs out front. “What is this movie about, Mr. Harris?”
Ed suddenly whacks the table with his hand. “What is THIS?” he demands. WHAMMO again. “What IS this?” And a third time. Then he picks up the glass of water in front of him and hurls it against the wall behind him without even looking. “It’s VIOLENCE! That’s what it is!” Everyone scatters as he stalks out. I thought it was brilliant.
Last night I watched “The Buffalo Soldiers” which has nothing to do with buffalo. The Indians called the black cavalry regiments buffalo soldiers, and the movie is about corruption in the peacetime army, which always includes a lot of blacks because they need the work. In this satirical story Harris is both a clueless nice guy and a military man sans “right stuff.” The cast is very fine indeed but this is not my fav genre. Elizabeth McGovern and Anna Paquin were remarkable. Scott Glenn, another “Right Stuff” guy, is also capable of being either lethal or righteous. It’s a youngster’s movie: lots of explosions and cynicism. But the sentiments probably brought these seasoned actors to the cast out of political sympathy.
A movie rather unlike any of the categories above is “The Third Miracle” in which Harris is a sceptical priest whose job is to winnow out false miracles when the Vatican is asked to certify saints. This is a sophisticated story, a thinking story, of a kind that rarely gets made these days. I have the tape and watch it now and then, never failing to see something new to think about. (I still miss that series from years ago about the religious staff of a major urban cathedral and the moral dilemmas they were called upon to solve, sometimes in unconventional ways, which is what caused it to be canceled.)
Which brings me to “Appaloosa,” the recent triple-threat film from Harris, in which he writes, directs, and acts. Probably had something to do with production and casting as well. This is a man whose life is truly acting, which means he has accumulated a lot of creds. Now he begins to cash them in. I love that the first of these truly auteur movies is a Western, since one of my fav movies (Oh, better start a new category!) is the Western, “Riders of the Purple Sage,” in which he plays the classic hero, Lassiter, the man who comes to restore justice and ends up withdrawing with his lover (his actual wife) to Rainbow Valley, an Eden.
In Appaloosa, Harris is a gun for hire with Viggo Mortensen as his intelligent sidekick. (I often assert that there’s nothing wrong with being the sidekick, though the role can be played for laughs.) The media has had a tussle with the meaning of this film. Is Virgil Cole a good man or bad? Does he have the Right Stuff or is his vulnerability to the Renee Zellweger part a sign that he’s a fool for love? (His PR event this time was to come up behind Renee, who was wearing something low-cut, and bending over to tenderly kiss her shoulder. What did it mean? Were they in love? Would he leave his wife?!!???)
I gather that the original book from which this movie was adapted portrayed Mrs. French for a kind of scheming minx, but Harris’ take on her makes her more of a needy child. When she shows up in the clutches of the bad guys with a rope around her neck, her upturned face is like Munch’s the Scream, but somehow it is also like a face molded of cookie dough -- sweet and distorted. To me, that’s the clue to Virgil Cole: he and Everett Hitch are protectors. They come to the town as gods with the power to destroy and though they seem nearly amoral in their rule-based “justice,” they are capable of deep attachment -- first to each other. They split out when Cole is seduced by his need to protect an appealing flower of a woman -- NOT sex! Hitch stays faithful to his code of honor, learned at West Point and now in service to his friend.
So what we have here is a discussion of what is important for society: order based on love or order based on rules? It’s a religious question in the end. If you could play God, what would you do? Neither is an ideal solution and order based on love is probably God’s big weakness. If He didn’t love us (assuming He exists) He’d have wiped us out long ago. The frontier puzzle of the town with its rules, coming to prairie where there is no rule but survival, is what puts this movie in the Western genre -- not the fact that people are riding around on horses and the women wear bustles. (I did so love Viggo squaring up for the final shootout in Eastern military duel style. Even the “Apaches” -- who were really Blackfeet from here -- have a special fondness for Viggo, partly because he’s so good with horses and so capable of mixing the poetic with the heroic.)
When I look at my motto now: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work,” I see it over the heads of Cole and Hitch sitting out on the porch of the jail, sipping coffee and chatting. They did that, didn’t they? Regular and orderly until violent and original?
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
THE MILLIONAIRE'S CLUB
There’s a building in Helena that’s called the Millionaire’s Club. When I first joined the ministry in that town, a big elegant lunch was served to us, but it wasn’t paid for by any millionaires. Rather it was a gift from the morticians' association. I seem to remember that I was the only woman there: it was 1982. My Helena congregation was pretty young and frisky so I had no need for the services of the hosts in that town.
The building, which is right in the center of downtown, was erected by real millionaires, the Copper Kings of legend as well as gold strike beneficiaries. I’m not sure who owns that building now. The point is the concept of millionaires having a club, which I’m sure was meant to seem like English landed gentlemen’s safe havens where they could escape their wives and indulge in crony networks. Bob Scriver was a member of the Salmagundi Club in New York City, an ancient and honorable institution for a certain kind of artist, though I don’t think he ever stayed there or ate there. It was just an honor, a sort of class marker.
In the Eighties in Helena there was another millionaire’s club which didn’t have a building and was not meant to be a marker of prestige. Many didn’t know it existed and no one knew who the members were except the members. The purpose of the group was philanthropy, to be able to do good things for the community without being beseiged by con artists begging for money. They enjoyed relating to people who had as much money as they did, but more because they had interests in common than because they hoped to be in Mrs. Vanderbilt’s book or even in a listing of philanthropic organizations. I knew two or three: one was a collector/dealer who had made some shrewd investments, one had an historic name and had inherited cattle money, and one got his money through inheritance from an entirely different part of the country, money made in a liquor store and a junkyard.
That last one was my own mystery helper. The first was behind “God’s Love,” which ran a sort of independent social work agency that didn’t have to ask government’s permission to create a haven for alcoholics or a Christmas program for low-income kids. Knowing this has given me a bit of a different slant on some of the recent events, less inclined to blame millionaires out-of-hand as a category.
I subscribe to “Vanity Fair,” which likes to keep an eye on millionaires and billionaires, and was reading the long article about Bernie Madoff and the havoc he wreaked, but switching over now and then to a very densely reasoned set of essays called “We Are All Treaty People,” by Roger Epp whose people were Mennonites, a religiously bound group that ended up migrating across Europe and finally to the Canadian prairie just north of me. (I’m writing a review.) They are related to the Hutterites, whose colonies thrive in Montana, partly because the government is forced to deal with them as a group rather than as individuals. They are able to maintain their language, their religion, and their social arrangements -- to say nothing of their costumes -- in a way an individual could not. The social pressure to conform is strong in rural communities and those who are defiant individuals can be made into scapegoats: wicker men.
Some suggest that these behaviors, both rogue individuals (though as the evidence accumulates Madoff is turning out to have had a little circle of co-conspirators ) and historical or affinity-based groups, are anchored in the genetic makeup of animals because of the evolutionary advantages. Outliers die unless they’ve found a new advantage or niche, cooperating bands thrive. Unless the bands happen to be so completely “wrong” that the whole lot is destroyed like a herd of buffalo run off a cliff.
I’m trying to get sense out of this in terms of art. I see that some outliers in the art context become “rare” and “cutting edge,” thus attracting the millionaire investors, who don’t just invest in money but also in the opinion that the particular artist or school of art is brilliant and worth supporting and collecting. I also see that when art becomes well-recognized and familiar enough to be called “popular” it becomes a marker for middle-class prosperity and therefore respectable. But if it’s TOO disconcerting for nice middle-class people, they will try to suppress it. I’m still shaking my head over the evening Bob Scriver received a Governor’s Award for his Western art, which was quite mainstream and prestigious in Montana. The keynote speaker talked about the censorship of Mapplethorpe, so far out on the edge that I daresay most of the people who were not shocked just didn’t know who Mapplethorpe was. Nevertheless, Montana people are steadfast in their hatred of censorship and most kinds of restraint, including Bob Scriver who blew up at the thought of gun control.
Epp is talking about these complex counter-currents and how they interact to affect our fortunes, in both senses. On the one hand we urge ourselves to excel, to exceed, to get out there on the frontier and be the famous cutting edge. On the other hand we know the power of throwing in together, collaborating, making common cause. Is it better to get away with something dangerously innovative by being the lonely only and therefore under the radar, or would it be better to join forces to have more impact? The decision is often economic. The evolutionary imperative for us all is to eat.
Many important prairie coalitions formed for economic advantage, like cooperatives marketing or purchasing to escape oppression from cities. But many were also snuffed because economic patterns, like the oil boom, rendered ag issues unimportant to the larger population. And now, thanks to people like Madoff, the economic catastrophe is changing the politics of the world in what we hope are new and sustaining ways.
It’s probably too early to tell what this will mean for art. Some artists will no longer be able to sustain themselves. I have no idea what it will do to auctions -- could go either way. Certainly the Manhattan throat-hold on publishing is breaking, and it remains to be seen whether the public will go on blindly believing that writing a best-selling novel will save the ranch or whether the two-century book boom will shatter into blogs, Kindles, twitters and tweets.
The building, which is right in the center of downtown, was erected by real millionaires, the Copper Kings of legend as well as gold strike beneficiaries. I’m not sure who owns that building now. The point is the concept of millionaires having a club, which I’m sure was meant to seem like English landed gentlemen’s safe havens where they could escape their wives and indulge in crony networks. Bob Scriver was a member of the Salmagundi Club in New York City, an ancient and honorable institution for a certain kind of artist, though I don’t think he ever stayed there or ate there. It was just an honor, a sort of class marker.
In the Eighties in Helena there was another millionaire’s club which didn’t have a building and was not meant to be a marker of prestige. Many didn’t know it existed and no one knew who the members were except the members. The purpose of the group was philanthropy, to be able to do good things for the community without being beseiged by con artists begging for money. They enjoyed relating to people who had as much money as they did, but more because they had interests in common than because they hoped to be in Mrs. Vanderbilt’s book or even in a listing of philanthropic organizations. I knew two or three: one was a collector/dealer who had made some shrewd investments, one had an historic name and had inherited cattle money, and one got his money through inheritance from an entirely different part of the country, money made in a liquor store and a junkyard.
That last one was my own mystery helper. The first was behind “God’s Love,” which ran a sort of independent social work agency that didn’t have to ask government’s permission to create a haven for alcoholics or a Christmas program for low-income kids. Knowing this has given me a bit of a different slant on some of the recent events, less inclined to blame millionaires out-of-hand as a category.
I subscribe to “Vanity Fair,” which likes to keep an eye on millionaires and billionaires, and was reading the long article about Bernie Madoff and the havoc he wreaked, but switching over now and then to a very densely reasoned set of essays called “We Are All Treaty People,” by Roger Epp whose people were Mennonites, a religiously bound group that ended up migrating across Europe and finally to the Canadian prairie just north of me. (I’m writing a review.) They are related to the Hutterites, whose colonies thrive in Montana, partly because the government is forced to deal with them as a group rather than as individuals. They are able to maintain their language, their religion, and their social arrangements -- to say nothing of their costumes -- in a way an individual could not. The social pressure to conform is strong in rural communities and those who are defiant individuals can be made into scapegoats: wicker men.
Some suggest that these behaviors, both rogue individuals (though as the evidence accumulates Madoff is turning out to have had a little circle of co-conspirators ) and historical or affinity-based groups, are anchored in the genetic makeup of animals because of the evolutionary advantages. Outliers die unless they’ve found a new advantage or niche, cooperating bands thrive. Unless the bands happen to be so completely “wrong” that the whole lot is destroyed like a herd of buffalo run off a cliff.
I’m trying to get sense out of this in terms of art. I see that some outliers in the art context become “rare” and “cutting edge,” thus attracting the millionaire investors, who don’t just invest in money but also in the opinion that the particular artist or school of art is brilliant and worth supporting and collecting. I also see that when art becomes well-recognized and familiar enough to be called “popular” it becomes a marker for middle-class prosperity and therefore respectable. But if it’s TOO disconcerting for nice middle-class people, they will try to suppress it. I’m still shaking my head over the evening Bob Scriver received a Governor’s Award for his Western art, which was quite mainstream and prestigious in Montana. The keynote speaker talked about the censorship of Mapplethorpe, so far out on the edge that I daresay most of the people who were not shocked just didn’t know who Mapplethorpe was. Nevertheless, Montana people are steadfast in their hatred of censorship and most kinds of restraint, including Bob Scriver who blew up at the thought of gun control.
Epp is talking about these complex counter-currents and how they interact to affect our fortunes, in both senses. On the one hand we urge ourselves to excel, to exceed, to get out there on the frontier and be the famous cutting edge. On the other hand we know the power of throwing in together, collaborating, making common cause. Is it better to get away with something dangerously innovative by being the lonely only and therefore under the radar, or would it be better to join forces to have more impact? The decision is often economic. The evolutionary imperative for us all is to eat.
Many important prairie coalitions formed for economic advantage, like cooperatives marketing or purchasing to escape oppression from cities. But many were also snuffed because economic patterns, like the oil boom, rendered ag issues unimportant to the larger population. And now, thanks to people like Madoff, the economic catastrophe is changing the politics of the world in what we hope are new and sustaining ways.
It’s probably too early to tell what this will mean for art. Some artists will no longer be able to sustain themselves. I have no idea what it will do to auctions -- could go either way. Certainly the Manhattan throat-hold on publishing is breaking, and it remains to be seen whether the public will go on blindly believing that writing a best-selling novel will save the ranch or whether the two-century book boom will shatter into blogs, Kindles, twitters and tweets.
Monday, April 06, 2009
AU COURANT
People think that out here in the hinterlands we don’t know nothing, but we do. We know the BIG Nothing which is that humans are temporary. Let’s go on from there.
Much of the commotion about a place like Montana is focused on the 19th century when Euro-based culture smashed into the Native American Indians, destroying their way of life, but not them. Right now (nearly 2010) it is ALL cultures smashing into themselves. We have all barely survived our remnant cultures, the ones we used to know. Nothing anywhere is like the Fifties.
“Why Gone Those Times?” asked James Willard Schultz, and Charlie Russell painted the disappearing edge of the times his own cousins (the Bents as in Bent’s Fort) actually lived. Luckily, his determined wife was able to make his art sell and persist to be the core of museums across America. We know those paintings and bronzes now. We know his illustrated letters to friends, the stories about his high jinks in bars, the pictures he painted on the petticoats of whores or for peep shows. Somehow we’ve forgotten some of the price he and Nancy paid in that maelstrom of early days, even the 19th century versions of AIDS: goiter (which killed Charlie) and syphilis. Somehow he’s been made into a respectable middle-class grandfather. I think it was the money.
Money won’t work now. It’s not that there’s less money -- it’s that the pretense that money is SOMETHING that is gone. We see through the illusion now that we know that the government is addressing our infrastructure crisis by simply printing more money.
It’s time to color outside the lines. But you have to be someplace or everyplace or anyplace, according to your temperament and experience. I choose to be in Montana on the edge of the Blackfeet reservation. This is where I am most me, according to Flaubert’s advice to "be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m pretty good at the first half, except that the village would like me to tend my yard a little better. The second half -- I’m workin’ on it.
If you watched me (you would have to look past the two fat cats dozing under their lamp in the window) you would see an old woman at her keyboard pretending she was pole-dancing alone in the dark before dawn. What I’m doing with Tim Barrus is almost psychotherapy, opening up to his stories of adventure, abuse, risk, inclusion, recovery and trying to understand what it means. His chaos, my order. My NPR Beethoven, Cinematheque’s throbbing, yearning Imeem downloads. None of it ever happened to me, but I listen and try to understand and try to find the words to explain from a slightly different angle, so those of us less driven can learn from it.
Where I am is a village. In it are crazy people, even sociopaths. In it are dying people, gentle loving faithful souls. In it are restless kids, some of them marijuana smokers and probably at least one with AIDS. Some of them get beaten by abusive men who think this will “reform” them. They think nothing ever happens here, that you have to be in Paris or Amsterdam or Italy or at least New York City, but the same things happen there.
People are wrong. Everything happens everyplace. You just have to get in touch with it.
I’m always a little surprised when diasporas are revealed. A diaspora is a population of a defined people scattered through the world. The French diaspora gave us Quebec, San Francisco, New Orleans, and the Metis population of the high prairie. Charlie Russell always wore a Metis sash. Paris is not much like the Red River country inhabited by Louis Riel’s people, but they did speak French. And they believed in “liberty, equality, and fraternity” until the British Empire hung them for trying to start their own country in the middle of Canada.
Some diasporas are invisible until they declare themselves: blacks passing as whites, gays, American Indians, writers and other artists, maybe feminists. Unitarians. The Unitarian leaders were having a meeting about how to relate to homosexuals. They said, “Maybe we should hire someone who IS homosexual.” One of them, a respected manager, said, “No need. I’m gay. I’m just not out yet. What do you want to know?” Why don’t we ask those among us who know. Just turn to them and ask, “What is it like to be you? What do you see?”
Especially the young, who roam the globe and outer space through their keyboards while you think they’re doing homework or playing video games. I’m not talking about porn or drugs. I’m not talking about the grownups sitting on the sofa watching movies about sex and violence and drinking beer. I’m talking about kids who ask “What is spirituality? What happens when you die? Might there really be life in outer space? Will there be a world when I grow up? Can I cope with it? Will anyone love me?”
One of the ways to cope is to exclude everything that’s troubling. Just don’t look. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about Charlie and Nancy Russell and why they couldn’t have children (scarring from VD.) Don’t talk about drugs or sex or accidental pregnancy. Nice people don’t know. Don’t you want to be a nice person?
But the world has gone far beyond that. Everything is connected. Everything is moving. It will sweep you along one way or another. It’s on your radio, in your food, printed in the newspaper, posted on a billboard, talked about in the cafes.
Dave Lull, the librarian/philosopher who so dependably keeps me on the lookout for Black Swans, says he remembers me suggesting we ought to go back to reading sci-fi. He says maybe I’m right. I’m looking for the “unknown unknowns” and sci-fi is good for that. I’m thinking there are too many people and AIDS is only the first of a wave of pandemics. Here on the high prairie we’ve been through two in the last few centuries: smallpox and Spanish flu. Maybe diabetes II is a pandemic.
It’s personal. And what it teaches me is that I must change to survive. I have and I’m prepared to do it again. This is one of the things I have in common with Barrus and Cinematheque.
Much of the commotion about a place like Montana is focused on the 19th century when Euro-based culture smashed into the Native American Indians, destroying their way of life, but not them. Right now (nearly 2010) it is ALL cultures smashing into themselves. We have all barely survived our remnant cultures, the ones we used to know. Nothing anywhere is like the Fifties.
“Why Gone Those Times?” asked James Willard Schultz, and Charlie Russell painted the disappearing edge of the times his own cousins (the Bents as in Bent’s Fort) actually lived. Luckily, his determined wife was able to make his art sell and persist to be the core of museums across America. We know those paintings and bronzes now. We know his illustrated letters to friends, the stories about his high jinks in bars, the pictures he painted on the petticoats of whores or for peep shows. Somehow we’ve forgotten some of the price he and Nancy paid in that maelstrom of early days, even the 19th century versions of AIDS: goiter (which killed Charlie) and syphilis. Somehow he’s been made into a respectable middle-class grandfather. I think it was the money.
Money won’t work now. It’s not that there’s less money -- it’s that the pretense that money is SOMETHING that is gone. We see through the illusion now that we know that the government is addressing our infrastructure crisis by simply printing more money.
It’s time to color outside the lines. But you have to be someplace or everyplace or anyplace, according to your temperament and experience. I choose to be in Montana on the edge of the Blackfeet reservation. This is where I am most me, according to Flaubert’s advice to "be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’m pretty good at the first half, except that the village would like me to tend my yard a little better. The second half -- I’m workin’ on it.
If you watched me (you would have to look past the two fat cats dozing under their lamp in the window) you would see an old woman at her keyboard pretending she was pole-dancing alone in the dark before dawn. What I’m doing with Tim Barrus is almost psychotherapy, opening up to his stories of adventure, abuse, risk, inclusion, recovery and trying to understand what it means. His chaos, my order. My NPR Beethoven, Cinematheque’s throbbing, yearning Imeem downloads. None of it ever happened to me, but I listen and try to understand and try to find the words to explain from a slightly different angle, so those of us less driven can learn from it.
Where I am is a village. In it are crazy people, even sociopaths. In it are dying people, gentle loving faithful souls. In it are restless kids, some of them marijuana smokers and probably at least one with AIDS. Some of them get beaten by abusive men who think this will “reform” them. They think nothing ever happens here, that you have to be in Paris or Amsterdam or Italy or at least New York City, but the same things happen there.
People are wrong. Everything happens everyplace. You just have to get in touch with it.
I’m always a little surprised when diasporas are revealed. A diaspora is a population of a defined people scattered through the world. The French diaspora gave us Quebec, San Francisco, New Orleans, and the Metis population of the high prairie. Charlie Russell always wore a Metis sash. Paris is not much like the Red River country inhabited by Louis Riel’s people, but they did speak French. And they believed in “liberty, equality, and fraternity” until the British Empire hung them for trying to start their own country in the middle of Canada.
Some diasporas are invisible until they declare themselves: blacks passing as whites, gays, American Indians, writers and other artists, maybe feminists. Unitarians. The Unitarian leaders were having a meeting about how to relate to homosexuals. They said, “Maybe we should hire someone who IS homosexual.” One of them, a respected manager, said, “No need. I’m gay. I’m just not out yet. What do you want to know?” Why don’t we ask those among us who know. Just turn to them and ask, “What is it like to be you? What do you see?”
Especially the young, who roam the globe and outer space through their keyboards while you think they’re doing homework or playing video games. I’m not talking about porn or drugs. I’m not talking about the grownups sitting on the sofa watching movies about sex and violence and drinking beer. I’m talking about kids who ask “What is spirituality? What happens when you die? Might there really be life in outer space? Will there be a world when I grow up? Can I cope with it? Will anyone love me?”
One of the ways to cope is to exclude everything that’s troubling. Just don’t look. Don’t talk about it. Don’t talk about Charlie and Nancy Russell and why they couldn’t have children (scarring from VD.) Don’t talk about drugs or sex or accidental pregnancy. Nice people don’t know. Don’t you want to be a nice person?
But the world has gone far beyond that. Everything is connected. Everything is moving. It will sweep you along one way or another. It’s on your radio, in your food, printed in the newspaper, posted on a billboard, talked about in the cafes.
Dave Lull, the librarian/philosopher who so dependably keeps me on the lookout for Black Swans, says he remembers me suggesting we ought to go back to reading sci-fi. He says maybe I’m right. I’m looking for the “unknown unknowns” and sci-fi is good for that. I’m thinking there are too many people and AIDS is only the first of a wave of pandemics. Here on the high prairie we’ve been through two in the last few centuries: smallpox and Spanish flu. Maybe diabetes II is a pandemic.
It’s personal. And what it teaches me is that I must change to survive. I have and I’m prepared to do it again. This is one of the things I have in common with Barrus and Cinematheque.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
TO BE OR NOT TO BE?
The following came in as a comment. I edited it a little.
The reality that I am facing now is going through Div School for UU ordination. To be quite honest I am terrified of the financial burden this is taking on my very new one year old marriage. My husband is extremely supportive but it weighs on me. I love school and I love the challenge but I simply cannot decide if it is still worth it, and not even just financially. I am hoping to do hospice chaplaincy and it seems that that is an even more difficult field to pursue with many more years of "internship" status and CPE hours than parish ministry. I wish someone could just give me a YES- it's worth it, or a NO- get out! I know you can't provide me with that answer but I find myself writing you none the less. Maybe it is your frankness I am drawn to?
Okay, then I’ll go right on being frank. I’m a harsh counselor.
First, at Meadville we had an ongoing debate about whether seminary was a place where one went to discover whether one had a “vocation,” as the traditionalists call it, or whether one should go to seminary only AFTER becoming fully resolved and totally dedicated. Neither side ever won. Maybe you’ll recognize that in the earliest day of Christianity the question was whether the people should be allowed to take Communion only AFTER they were fully converted and convinced or whether the experience of taking Communion might bring them into the fold. Neither side ever won. In short, it’s a human dilemma. Ya gotta accept that, though the people around you might not.
If you are married one year and your husband is supportive, he knows what he’s getting into and is sharing the experience. You need to talk to him a LOT. Is part of the worry that if you decide NOT to be a minister, he won’t love you? Some guys love being the Consort of the Queen and that’s how they interpret the husband of the minister. Be sure you keep him aware of how much the Queen is likely to have to do very unqueenly exhausting things. Or might he be thinking that he can sort of be a minister-by-proximity without the struggle of ministerial credentialling? (This is a common female pattern.) Hard, hard questions. What DOES he do? I pray you never have to make a choice, but do not dump ministry in order to save marriage or vice versa. Negotiate. Find the boundaries. Think of trade-offs. Share good times to “put in the bank.”
A “hospice minister” I take to be something like a Clinical Pastoral Care chaplain. They WILL pay you a pittance after you get started, or they did when I took beginners CPE. In terms of jobs, there will be MUCH need as the population ages and becomes more and more afflicted by the environment, but the truth is that when budgets crash religion is the first to go (after the arts), which they are. It’s mostly hospitals and government that would fund a chaplaincy. In my experience both institutions (ANY institution) like chaplains because they keep order. They frame things in terms of conscience and rectitude (works on you, doesn’t it?) to put people on their best behavior. This can pressure patients hard, so you might have to fight the institution. That means risk being fired. The good news is that by the time you graduate, the world economics may be in much better order and include national health care in the USA.
The best way to find out the most about CPE is to sign up for CPE as early in the project as possible -- like now. Look around, investigate, enlist your counselor and upper classmen for advice. You can be a natural hospice counselor, completely suited, but stumble into a bad situation and get curdled. On the other hand, it can be such a break-through experience in such an exceptional context that nothing will ever match it in the future. Eyes open. No shame in a do-over.
You don’t have to do everything at once in a tight three-year schedule. Take a leave of absence to earn money for a year. Or if I were aiming at hospice chaplaincy and doing it all over again, I’d take a Certified Nursing Assistant job for a year or so. They are hungry for help, offer courses that are only months or weeks long, and give you a VERY true picture of what it will be like. If you are imagining yourself on downy wings, softly cruising from bed to bed, sprinkling comfort at you go, it will be a revelation. Death is about physical bodies. True grit in dealing with defiant, filthy, demented, unintelligible, terrified, fragile people might be exactly what suits you and precisely where you are effective.
Talk to people. Go visit hospices, as many as you can find, as different as you can get access to. Collect the stories. The bitter ones might be more help than the uplifting bliss tales. Talk to rabbis. Talk to Buddhists. Talk to militant atheists. Talk to the parents of dying children. Talk to old people -- or maybe listening is better. Most of all, talk to nurses. Forget doctors. They live in their own world. And search through the denominational people -- not all are wonderful but some are.
You need to look around for ministers, esp. among the Unitarians and esp. the female ones. See what you can find that’s written by Judy Urquhart, whose name changes and who sometimes serves English Unitarians. I recall a famous essay about a terrible week when a teen attempted suicide with Tylenol, causing a ghastly long coma and freaked-out parents, there were a couple of other serious illnesses or traumas, and then trouble in her own family. She just about went under and certainly learned about herself.
Money is a problem. Do the Obama: talk to people, negotiate, don’t let it paralyze you, find options. Find options. Money is only money.
Classical ministry is a congregation-based pursuit. That’s who validates and supports you because they believe in you. If you don’t have a congregation already, go find one even if it’s not Unitarian. But ministry, esp. hospice ministry, is not limited by denomination or institution. I’ve got two dying neighbors at the moment, a couple of friends with major health decisions to make, and my own old-lady-hood to manage. Ministry is something we also do in our everyday lives, not just done by ordained persons.
So is seminary worth it on that level? Hell, yes. Erm, heavens, yes!
The reality that I am facing now is going through Div School for UU ordination. To be quite honest I am terrified of the financial burden this is taking on my very new one year old marriage. My husband is extremely supportive but it weighs on me. I love school and I love the challenge but I simply cannot decide if it is still worth it, and not even just financially. I am hoping to do hospice chaplaincy and it seems that that is an even more difficult field to pursue with many more years of "internship" status and CPE hours than parish ministry. I wish someone could just give me a YES- it's worth it, or a NO- get out! I know you can't provide me with that answer but I find myself writing you none the less. Maybe it is your frankness I am drawn to?
Okay, then I’ll go right on being frank. I’m a harsh counselor.
First, at Meadville we had an ongoing debate about whether seminary was a place where one went to discover whether one had a “vocation,” as the traditionalists call it, or whether one should go to seminary only AFTER becoming fully resolved and totally dedicated. Neither side ever won. Maybe you’ll recognize that in the earliest day of Christianity the question was whether the people should be allowed to take Communion only AFTER they were fully converted and convinced or whether the experience of taking Communion might bring them into the fold. Neither side ever won. In short, it’s a human dilemma. Ya gotta accept that, though the people around you might not.
If you are married one year and your husband is supportive, he knows what he’s getting into and is sharing the experience. You need to talk to him a LOT. Is part of the worry that if you decide NOT to be a minister, he won’t love you? Some guys love being the Consort of the Queen and that’s how they interpret the husband of the minister. Be sure you keep him aware of how much the Queen is likely to have to do very unqueenly exhausting things. Or might he be thinking that he can sort of be a minister-by-proximity without the struggle of ministerial credentialling? (This is a common female pattern.) Hard, hard questions. What DOES he do? I pray you never have to make a choice, but do not dump ministry in order to save marriage or vice versa. Negotiate. Find the boundaries. Think of trade-offs. Share good times to “put in the bank.”
A “hospice minister” I take to be something like a Clinical Pastoral Care chaplain. They WILL pay you a pittance after you get started, or they did when I took beginners CPE. In terms of jobs, there will be MUCH need as the population ages and becomes more and more afflicted by the environment, but the truth is that when budgets crash religion is the first to go (after the arts), which they are. It’s mostly hospitals and government that would fund a chaplaincy. In my experience both institutions (ANY institution) like chaplains because they keep order. They frame things in terms of conscience and rectitude (works on you, doesn’t it?) to put people on their best behavior. This can pressure patients hard, so you might have to fight the institution. That means risk being fired. The good news is that by the time you graduate, the world economics may be in much better order and include national health care in the USA.
The best way to find out the most about CPE is to sign up for CPE as early in the project as possible -- like now. Look around, investigate, enlist your counselor and upper classmen for advice. You can be a natural hospice counselor, completely suited, but stumble into a bad situation and get curdled. On the other hand, it can be such a break-through experience in such an exceptional context that nothing will ever match it in the future. Eyes open. No shame in a do-over.
You don’t have to do everything at once in a tight three-year schedule. Take a leave of absence to earn money for a year. Or if I were aiming at hospice chaplaincy and doing it all over again, I’d take a Certified Nursing Assistant job for a year or so. They are hungry for help, offer courses that are only months or weeks long, and give you a VERY true picture of what it will be like. If you are imagining yourself on downy wings, softly cruising from bed to bed, sprinkling comfort at you go, it will be a revelation. Death is about physical bodies. True grit in dealing with defiant, filthy, demented, unintelligible, terrified, fragile people might be exactly what suits you and precisely where you are effective.
Talk to people. Go visit hospices, as many as you can find, as different as you can get access to. Collect the stories. The bitter ones might be more help than the uplifting bliss tales. Talk to rabbis. Talk to Buddhists. Talk to militant atheists. Talk to the parents of dying children. Talk to old people -- or maybe listening is better. Most of all, talk to nurses. Forget doctors. They live in their own world. And search through the denominational people -- not all are wonderful but some are.
You need to look around for ministers, esp. among the Unitarians and esp. the female ones. See what you can find that’s written by Judy Urquhart, whose name changes and who sometimes serves English Unitarians. I recall a famous essay about a terrible week when a teen attempted suicide with Tylenol, causing a ghastly long coma and freaked-out parents, there were a couple of other serious illnesses or traumas, and then trouble in her own family. She just about went under and certainly learned about herself.
Money is a problem. Do the Obama: talk to people, negotiate, don’t let it paralyze you, find options. Find options. Money is only money.
Classical ministry is a congregation-based pursuit. That’s who validates and supports you because they believe in you. If you don’t have a congregation already, go find one even if it’s not Unitarian. But ministry, esp. hospice ministry, is not limited by denomination or institution. I’ve got two dying neighbors at the moment, a couple of friends with major health decisions to make, and my own old-lady-hood to manage. Ministry is something we also do in our everyday lives, not just done by ordained persons.
So is seminary worth it on that level? Hell, yes. Erm, heavens, yes!
Friday, April 03, 2009
EARLY METHODIST BLACKFEET MISSION
This is the first part of a developing overview of the Methodist presence on the Blackfeet reservation in northern Montana in terms of their clergy. Because of accidents of economics, dynamics within the Methodist denomination and between Protestant identifications, and changing social expectations, the present church has developed an awkward organizational structure. On one hand is the traditional missionary desire to convert and civilize and on the other hand is the concept of the local self-sustaining congregation of the dwellers in the area.
Most of this material is taken from ”Mission among the Blackfeet” by Howard L. Harrod, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Professor Harrod taught religious studies at Vanderbilt University for many years but has now passed on. It is time for a new review of the situation. Changing demographics and major shifts in the paradigm of misson have left the sources of income marooned on one side of the issue while a tiny congregation struggles to find a new identity in a new world where white mainline denominations are shrinking.
When I have recorded as much as seems prudent, I’ll post the whole thing and create a booklet, but I’ve discovered that once I post a blog on a subject, I get many additions from the readership, so here’s a bit of bait to get you started!
EPWORTH PIEGAN MISSION
1893-1899 E.S. Dutcher
1899 - 1913 Francis Asbury Riggin
1913- 1921 A.W. Hammer
In the 1880’s “thirty-seven ministers arrived in Montana, twelve of whom remained in the state for the remainder of their lives. In the next decade and a half, one hundred and forty Methodist ministers were appointed to churches in Montana.
In 1891, one hundred and sixty acres of reservation land was granted to the Brooklyn and Bay Ridge branches of the Woman’s National Indian Association. Rev. and Mrs. E.S. Dutcher went to the reservation in 1893 as employees ofthe association. Dutcher was a member of the West Nebraska Methodist Conference but was transferred to the North Montana Mission upon his arrival at the reservation. In July, 1894, the mission was transferred from the Women’s National Indian Association to the Methodist church and was placed under the administration of the Missionary Society.
The new Epworth Piegan Mission was located on land adjoining the agency boarding school on Willow Creek. Agent Steell reported in 1893 that Dutcher was busily “engaged in completing a residence for himself and family. A chapel is to be erected soon. The chapel, about twenty-six by forty-five feet in size, was built with the assistance of interested Indians. When this lumber for the Methodist venture arrived at Durham Station,some three and one-half miles from the church site, Indians came with twenty-two teams and hauled the lumber to the location."
"Dutcher proved to be an extremely vigorous man, well-equipped to survive the frustrations of life on the reservation. He also brought to his work previous experience as a missionary among the Navajos. . . . His conception of the mission’s goals very closely followed the ideology of his time. Thus, the twin themes of civilization and Christianization, enunciated by the government and pursued by the Roman Catholic missionaries, became the organizing principles for Dutcher’s work as well." When necessary, Dutcher hired himself out as a carpenter at $4 a day.
Riggin was actually a leader who lived in Helena. There was a shortage of Methodist ministers at this time, so no one was living in the mission buildings. This is about the time Young began to give out candy at Christmas, and this seems to have been the chief mission activity altogether, since Young was Methodist.
Hammer arrived as a missionary and was appalled at the condition of the buildings: “. . . in a deplorable condition . . .the church had 48 window lights broken out and the snow was from two to three feet deep over the entire floor. There had not been a service held in the church for several years, and all the other property was in like neglected conditons. There were no records to show who had been members or who had been baptized or married.”
During his first year the mission was moved into the town of Browning where a small group of white Protestants had been meeting. Within a year he had a congregation of seventy-one persons, mostly white ranchers and BIA employees. Browning incorporated in 1919 and was growing.
In the meantime, the Presbyterian church had formed a congregation which was served from 1912 to 1926 by Rev. James D. Gold, a highly educated Scot, whose son, Douglas Gold, built the first Browning public school and instituted a trachoma amelioration project by bringing opthamologists from Pennsylvia where the Golds had previously lived. Douglas Gold became the superintendent of the Browning schools. James Gold, plagued by depression, spent his later years in Warm Springs while Doug Gold went on to a career in state education circles. He was the author of “A Schoolmaster Among the Blackfeet.” The Presbyterians eventually merged their congregation with the Methodists. The entire Gold family kept their identification with the area and are buried in the Cut Bank cemetery.
BROWNING INDIAN MISSION
1921 - 1926 Henry Mecklenburg
1926- 1945 Allen C. Wilcox PLUS Church of the Little Sweet Pine
1945 - 47 Stephen C. Smith
1947 - 1954 Edgar Bernard Smith
1954 summer Paul Hollenbeck
1954- 56 George Ritchey
1956-58 George P. Cox
1957 - summer Dave Olson (intern) Babb, Heart Butte
1958-59 Charlotte Bridges
1959-67 James E. Bell Babb, HButte
1963 - Harry E. Pearson Blackfeet United Methodist Parish (lay)
1965- 68 Conrad Himmel
1963-64 Richard D. Fiero Heart Butte
Meclenburg handled the doubleness of his congregation (white and mostly full-blood Blackfeet) by holding morning Sunday service for the whites and evening services for the Blackfeet. The system persisted until 1930. Since the Protestant churches had no sacramental dimension, they made it their business to visit homes and build friendships, as well as helping in practical ways, but in those days the full-bloods were still mostly Blackfeet speakers and the Methodist clergy had no expertise in the language. Members included Split Ears, Eagle Child, White Dog, Little Dog. Torn Weasel Head and Two Guns White Calf. The clergy probably did not realize that these are also the names of prominent ceremonialists in the old Blackfeet way: “Bundle Keepers.”
BROWNING UNITED METHODIST PARISH
1974-1981 Walter F. Mason
1981-93 F. Richard and H. Marine
1983-1985 James R. Bentley (PM)
1986-87 Ron Barr
1987 - 88 Mary Scriver
1989 Richard (Jake) Jacobson
1989 -90 Peggy Salois
1990- 1994 Donna Lee Martin
1994 - 1998 Rowland Freeman
TO BE CONTINUED
Most of this material is taken from ”Mission among the Blackfeet” by Howard L. Harrod, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Professor Harrod taught religious studies at Vanderbilt University for many years but has now passed on. It is time for a new review of the situation. Changing demographics and major shifts in the paradigm of misson have left the sources of income marooned on one side of the issue while a tiny congregation struggles to find a new identity in a new world where white mainline denominations are shrinking.
When I have recorded as much as seems prudent, I’ll post the whole thing and create a booklet, but I’ve discovered that once I post a blog on a subject, I get many additions from the readership, so here’s a bit of bait to get you started!
EPWORTH PIEGAN MISSION
1893-1899 E.S. Dutcher
1899 - 1913 Francis Asbury Riggin
1913- 1921 A.W. Hammer
In the 1880’s “thirty-seven ministers arrived in Montana, twelve of whom remained in the state for the remainder of their lives. In the next decade and a half, one hundred and forty Methodist ministers were appointed to churches in Montana.
In 1891, one hundred and sixty acres of reservation land was granted to the Brooklyn and Bay Ridge branches of the Woman’s National Indian Association. Rev. and Mrs. E.S. Dutcher went to the reservation in 1893 as employees ofthe association. Dutcher was a member of the West Nebraska Methodist Conference but was transferred to the North Montana Mission upon his arrival at the reservation. In July, 1894, the mission was transferred from the Women’s National Indian Association to the Methodist church and was placed under the administration of the Missionary Society.
The new Epworth Piegan Mission was located on land adjoining the agency boarding school on Willow Creek. Agent Steell reported in 1893 that Dutcher was busily “engaged in completing a residence for himself and family. A chapel is to be erected soon. The chapel, about twenty-six by forty-five feet in size, was built with the assistance of interested Indians. When this lumber for the Methodist venture arrived at Durham Station,some three and one-half miles from the church site, Indians came with twenty-two teams and hauled the lumber to the location."
"Dutcher proved to be an extremely vigorous man, well-equipped to survive the frustrations of life on the reservation. He also brought to his work previous experience as a missionary among the Navajos. . . . His conception of the mission’s goals very closely followed the ideology of his time. Thus, the twin themes of civilization and Christianization, enunciated by the government and pursued by the Roman Catholic missionaries, became the organizing principles for Dutcher’s work as well." When necessary, Dutcher hired himself out as a carpenter at $4 a day.
Riggin was actually a leader who lived in Helena. There was a shortage of Methodist ministers at this time, so no one was living in the mission buildings. This is about the time Young began to give out candy at Christmas, and this seems to have been the chief mission activity altogether, since Young was Methodist.
Hammer arrived as a missionary and was appalled at the condition of the buildings: “. . . in a deplorable condition . . .the church had 48 window lights broken out and the snow was from two to three feet deep over the entire floor. There had not been a service held in the church for several years, and all the other property was in like neglected conditons. There were no records to show who had been members or who had been baptized or married.”
During his first year the mission was moved into the town of Browning where a small group of white Protestants had been meeting. Within a year he had a congregation of seventy-one persons, mostly white ranchers and BIA employees. Browning incorporated in 1919 and was growing.
In the meantime, the Presbyterian church had formed a congregation which was served from 1912 to 1926 by Rev. James D. Gold, a highly educated Scot, whose son, Douglas Gold, built the first Browning public school and instituted a trachoma amelioration project by bringing opthamologists from Pennsylvia where the Golds had previously lived. Douglas Gold became the superintendent of the Browning schools. James Gold, plagued by depression, spent his later years in Warm Springs while Doug Gold went on to a career in state education circles. He was the author of “A Schoolmaster Among the Blackfeet.” The Presbyterians eventually merged their congregation with the Methodists. The entire Gold family kept their identification with the area and are buried in the Cut Bank cemetery.
BROWNING INDIAN MISSION
1921 - 1926 Henry Mecklenburg
1926- 1945 Allen C. Wilcox PLUS Church of the Little Sweet Pine
1945 - 47 Stephen C. Smith
1947 - 1954 Edgar Bernard Smith
1954 summer Paul Hollenbeck
1954- 56 George Ritchey
1956-58 George P. Cox
1957 - summer Dave Olson (intern) Babb, Heart Butte
1958-59 Charlotte Bridges
1959-67 James E. Bell Babb, HButte
1963 - Harry E. Pearson Blackfeet United Methodist Parish (lay)
1965- 68 Conrad Himmel
1963-64 Richard D. Fiero Heart Butte
Meclenburg handled the doubleness of his congregation (white and mostly full-blood Blackfeet) by holding morning Sunday service for the whites and evening services for the Blackfeet. The system persisted until 1930. Since the Protestant churches had no sacramental dimension, they made it their business to visit homes and build friendships, as well as helping in practical ways, but in those days the full-bloods were still mostly Blackfeet speakers and the Methodist clergy had no expertise in the language. Members included Split Ears, Eagle Child, White Dog, Little Dog. Torn Weasel Head and Two Guns White Calf. The clergy probably did not realize that these are also the names of prominent ceremonialists in the old Blackfeet way: “Bundle Keepers.”
BROWNING UNITED METHODIST PARISH
1974-1981 Walter F. Mason
1981-93 F. Richard and H. Marine
1983-1985 James R. Bentley (PM)
1986-87 Ron Barr
1987 - 88 Mary Scriver
1989 Richard (Jake) Jacobson
1989 -90 Peggy Salois
1990- 1994 Donna Lee Martin
1994 - 1998 Rowland Freeman
TO BE CONTINUED
Thursday, April 02, 2009
ARE YOUR FINGERS CROSSED?
Just as the inside of my head was beginning to feel like it had been permed in one of those old kink-making machines, Paul Maliszewski’s small book went to simpler and more engaging stories. A pair of fellows who were annoyed by Modernist poems decided to tease everyone by inventing a wild poet, writing poems for him that were meant to be awful. Their little game went goofy when someone showed up claiming to actually be the poet. Then the poems, even after they were revealed as fakes, were admired and included in anthologies. One sometimes gets the notion that the world is already so tricky that it would be impossible to invent anything so outrageous as the truth. We all know of events that could not be used in a novel because everyone would assume they were fake coincidences, unconvincing inventions.
The chapter of the book I loved the most was the one about Sandow Birk, who invented a war between North and South California -- not that the rivalry (if that’s what it is) between LA and SF needs much inventing. Birk is an artist and was NOT saying anything about California but rather about European styles of painting wars. To signal that the subject matter was a spoof, he mixed eras, putting in tanks next to chariots and battleships next to galleons. What he was hoping people would notice was the differences among the various styles of painting and what they might imply about the attitude toward war and art in the individual times. Were they made realistic or exaggerated? Was the emphasis on suffering and destruction or on courage and triumph?
Joey Skaggs’ hoax was more of a “happening,” an event. He invented a cemetery company, called “Final Curtain,” that based each burial ground on an amusement park theme. The public went for it. He created a board, located addresses, rigged phones and rented post office boxes, bought advertising, designed stationary, and so on. If this man ever decides to get serious about Ponzi schemes, we’re all doomed. He set up a website, invited artists to suggest plans for gravestones, gave interviews and delivered such convincing bullshit that such self-congratulatory crap detecting publications as Mother Jones were deceived. Few of the fooled magazines, newspapers, and TV networks ever admitted it. They just turned away with their hands over their eyes. Er, paws over their eyes. Pretended it never happened.
Some of these hoaxes got pretty serious and finally ended up sadly with jail time. The purported diary of Howard Hughes is a good example. Never toy with a man who has enough money to hire excellent lawyers. Clifford Irving gave it a good try.
One of the interesting slants Maliszewski picks up on is that the Holocaust is so emotionally and politically laden, so confused and so passionate and still so dangerous (Nazi-hunters still working), that it is excellent cover for people like Binjamin Wilkomirski (Fragments) or Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) or Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird) or the woman who claimed she lived with a pack of wolves for two years or the man who claimed that his sweetheart threw apples to him over the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp. In fact, political correctness has created many of these pockets, these “third rails” that no one dares challenge: reservation Indians, unconventional sexuality, child victims, refugees, ghetto dwellers, mafia, insanity. Their stories are always extreme, sometimes the most unbelievable are provable truth, and the fight to challenge them exposes the accuser to attacks from the soft-hearted, the missionaries who still believe in conversion.
One can go at these patterns in several ways. One is to look at the actual content, and that may be what is intended. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Black Beauty” are meant to be morally “truthful” even if not real, because they are meant to raise consciousness and provoke reform. On the other hand a sentimental story, “The Education of Little Tree,” might be meant to soothe the public, to prove to them that everything turned out all right after all. (Even if the author was racist.) A good story is always better propaganda than a lecture. What’s wrong with that kind of persuasion? Would you reject the Gospels?
Another is to look at the author, and this is probably the weakest and most misleading way, in my opinion. What makes us think we can look at the photo on the dust jacket, a few quick bio notes on the end flaps, and think that has any bearing on the story itself? and yet we do it all the time. The premise is that it takes one to know one, so we figure only an Indian can really tell about Indians, but I know Indians who claim to be great authorities and yet know nothing but horsefeathers. I also know a few non-Indians who really know and live Indian stuff. Most of the people who move around in this context are mixed in every way, making the most of fragments. How could they be otherwise, given the time passing so quickly.
There are two areas where considering fakers doesn’t go to content. One goes to the nature of motivation and one goes to consequences. A Montana man named Tooley has restarted a website called McKinleyMontana.com. It collects artifacts of an invented but “located” Montana town down through time. The town is quite a bit like Ivan Doig’s fictional territory but it is not a novel. The writers, who work for nothing, create stories, maps, photos, old letters, photos and newspaper clippings about the place. What’s the point? Well, it’s a virtual world like those invented online Sim Cities. You could call it a kind of anthology. We just enjoy the atmosphere and can say what we like without someone’s Chamber of Commerce or fussy aunt getting in our face. This is small town country and people take even geology pretty personally -- anything can be controversial. I was going to say that another advantage might be that no Californians can move here, but I guess virtual ones could.
McKinley, Montana, is not a Potemkin Village, meant to deceive anyone. It’s not a real estate scam, but I’m beginning to realize that some of the people who have bought property in Valier over the Internet have had a rude awakening when they arrived to inspect. The motives of writers of satirical poetry or the painters trying to explore a particular style and period are pretty benign. Even the big scam that roped people in to the idea of “Final Curtain” was voluntarily revealed for what it was: a piece of social criticism.
In terms of results, the curious fact is that the most likely outcome is an attack on the originator in defense of the egos of who those who rushed to be investors or believers or encouragers. The publishers who knew but pretended they didn’t know about the reality of the authors quickly stepped away. Our reality is not so much governed by religion (that, too, sometimes) as by lawyers, egged on by journalism that celebrates big-buck settlements. One might call that the morality of Publishers Clearing House, who have notified me that they might come by with a bouquet and a check any day now. I’d better go comb my hair. It is a fantasy that gets me through tight spots.
The chapter of the book I loved the most was the one about Sandow Birk, who invented a war between North and South California -- not that the rivalry (if that’s what it is) between LA and SF needs much inventing. Birk is an artist and was NOT saying anything about California but rather about European styles of painting wars. To signal that the subject matter was a spoof, he mixed eras, putting in tanks next to chariots and battleships next to galleons. What he was hoping people would notice was the differences among the various styles of painting and what they might imply about the attitude toward war and art in the individual times. Were they made realistic or exaggerated? Was the emphasis on suffering and destruction or on courage and triumph?
Joey Skaggs’ hoax was more of a “happening,” an event. He invented a cemetery company, called “Final Curtain,” that based each burial ground on an amusement park theme. The public went for it. He created a board, located addresses, rigged phones and rented post office boxes, bought advertising, designed stationary, and so on. If this man ever decides to get serious about Ponzi schemes, we’re all doomed. He set up a website, invited artists to suggest plans for gravestones, gave interviews and delivered such convincing bullshit that such self-congratulatory crap detecting publications as Mother Jones were deceived. Few of the fooled magazines, newspapers, and TV networks ever admitted it. They just turned away with their hands over their eyes. Er, paws over their eyes. Pretended it never happened.
Some of these hoaxes got pretty serious and finally ended up sadly with jail time. The purported diary of Howard Hughes is a good example. Never toy with a man who has enough money to hire excellent lawyers. Clifford Irving gave it a good try.
One of the interesting slants Maliszewski picks up on is that the Holocaust is so emotionally and politically laden, so confused and so passionate and still so dangerous (Nazi-hunters still working), that it is excellent cover for people like Binjamin Wilkomirski (Fragments) or Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) or Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird) or the woman who claimed she lived with a pack of wolves for two years or the man who claimed that his sweetheart threw apples to him over the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp. In fact, political correctness has created many of these pockets, these “third rails” that no one dares challenge: reservation Indians, unconventional sexuality, child victims, refugees, ghetto dwellers, mafia, insanity. Their stories are always extreme, sometimes the most unbelievable are provable truth, and the fight to challenge them exposes the accuser to attacks from the soft-hearted, the missionaries who still believe in conversion.
One can go at these patterns in several ways. One is to look at the actual content, and that may be what is intended. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Black Beauty” are meant to be morally “truthful” even if not real, because they are meant to raise consciousness and provoke reform. On the other hand a sentimental story, “The Education of Little Tree,” might be meant to soothe the public, to prove to them that everything turned out all right after all. (Even if the author was racist.) A good story is always better propaganda than a lecture. What’s wrong with that kind of persuasion? Would you reject the Gospels?
Another is to look at the author, and this is probably the weakest and most misleading way, in my opinion. What makes us think we can look at the photo on the dust jacket, a few quick bio notes on the end flaps, and think that has any bearing on the story itself? and yet we do it all the time. The premise is that it takes one to know one, so we figure only an Indian can really tell about Indians, but I know Indians who claim to be great authorities and yet know nothing but horsefeathers. I also know a few non-Indians who really know and live Indian stuff. Most of the people who move around in this context are mixed in every way, making the most of fragments. How could they be otherwise, given the time passing so quickly.
There are two areas where considering fakers doesn’t go to content. One goes to the nature of motivation and one goes to consequences. A Montana man named Tooley has restarted a website called McKinleyMontana.com. It collects artifacts of an invented but “located” Montana town down through time. The town is quite a bit like Ivan Doig’s fictional territory but it is not a novel. The writers, who work for nothing, create stories, maps, photos, old letters, photos and newspaper clippings about the place. What’s the point? Well, it’s a virtual world like those invented online Sim Cities. You could call it a kind of anthology. We just enjoy the atmosphere and can say what we like without someone’s Chamber of Commerce or fussy aunt getting in our face. This is small town country and people take even geology pretty personally -- anything can be controversial. I was going to say that another advantage might be that no Californians can move here, but I guess virtual ones could.
McKinley, Montana, is not a Potemkin Village, meant to deceive anyone. It’s not a real estate scam, but I’m beginning to realize that some of the people who have bought property in Valier over the Internet have had a rude awakening when they arrived to inspect. The motives of writers of satirical poetry or the painters trying to explore a particular style and period are pretty benign. Even the big scam that roped people in to the idea of “Final Curtain” was voluntarily revealed for what it was: a piece of social criticism.
In terms of results, the curious fact is that the most likely outcome is an attack on the originator in defense of the egos of who those who rushed to be investors or believers or encouragers. The publishers who knew but pretended they didn’t know about the reality of the authors quickly stepped away. Our reality is not so much governed by religion (that, too, sometimes) as by lawyers, egged on by journalism that celebrates big-buck settlements. One might call that the morality of Publishers Clearing House, who have notified me that they might come by with a bouquet and a check any day now. I’d better go comb my hair. It is a fantasy that gets me through tight spots.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
BEEN FOOLED YET TODAY?
Maybe it’s just my own situation but I’m not noticing many April Fool jokes. Isn’t it enough to have barely survived (maybe we haven’t) eight years of hoaxes from our elected officials and corporate CEO’s? And today the news reveals that the Catholic Church from the Pope on down knew about sexually abusive priests as long ago as the Fifties and did not respond, though one dedicated priest -- redeeming his calling -- spent twenty years battering away at the officials to take action and even tried to buy an island where the predatory priests could live out their lives away from victims. Though we might not be willing to invest money and though today even islands are not sequestered enough, we’re fed up with being lied to and fooled.
Yet how do we find out the truth with newspapers shrinking and television going to sensation and celebrity shenanigans? Someone else on the radio (I listen as I go through the day) said that the failure of the big city newspapers wouldn’t be so bad in this time of so much other media, including blogs, except for our congressional representatives: senators included. He said it’s up to each state to closely monitor what those powerful people are doing in Washington, D.C., and only a big high-pay, high-power, state-by-state, networking newspaper has the chops to keep track of them. He suggested that our elected officials get up to some very strange things indeed. Tell us about it!
One evening on my way to the town council meeting I noticed a well being sunk on an empty lot. Nosy as always, I trotted over to ask whether they thought they might solve our budget problems by striking oil. But they said they were venting gas contamination from an old gas station leak. They said they were surprised to find it even thirty feet down. When I got to the town council meeting, they assured me that there was NO contamination.
Were they scheming? Misinformed? Careless about what they remembered? Or did they simply not want to know about the problem? Maybe they already had enough worries and denial was a way of controlling things. They say that dogged whistle-blowers turned in Madolf over and over, pointed out EXACTLY how he was running a Ponzi scheme to PRECISELY the people who had the tools to investigate. Nothing happened. They evidently weren’t paid off or in on the scheme. They just didn’t want to know.
I’m reading “Fakers” by Paul Maliszewski, which begins with an account of his own “faked” letters and articles to his own newspaper -- meant to be satire and preposterous, but immediately accepted as valid by the editors. (Reference Dilbert, the comic strip.) The rest of the book is various essays on hoaxes, masks, con artists, counterfeiters and Great Pretenders, many of them literary. It becomes very clear that pretenses and minor sleight-of-hand are woven through our daily lives everywhere and only recognized when it becomes of benefit for someone to “reveal” them.
One big illustration of how a situation calls out hoaxable circumstances and then presents the opportunity to profit from their refutation is the craze for memoir, which is “memory,” notoriously tricky and inclined to be embellished or overdramatic. A little cluster of unreliable memoirs (caroming off the assumption that biographies and autobiographies are or should be accurate or even CAN be accurate beyond the rough outlines) was almost irresistible for blood-sucking journalists, who then created a “trend” of exposures of cases that were in fact nothing alike.
Frey exaggerated reality in the conventional Hollywood way, making himself a badder boy than he was. JT LeRoy went for the big leap and invented a fantasy, also an underclass tale, because what nice readers would know the diff anyway? And Nasdijj (Tim Barrus) told the truth but changed the names and identifying circumstances, the way doctors do and for similar reasons. But in the past he’d been the baddest boy of all. Frey was soon seen for what he was and, enabled by Oprah, went back to work. JT had to pay or (one hopes) return an enormous amount of money on grounds that she defrauded her publisher. (Hard to believe.) And Barrus became an expatriate, which has made him grateful considering how things have gone in publishing ever since.
Not much has been done with the third step in this sequence: unmasking the motives and methods of those who identify hoaxes. How much money did they make? And who were their witnesses? In Barrus’ case, they were mainly a former brother-in-law with a felony record, a pornographer still angry from Barrus -- then an editor -- rejecting his manuscript, and a non-American living in Cyprus and purporting to be an expert on Native American writing. Don’t we all have people like that floating around at the fringes of our lives? I do. My former students alone could probably come up with enough accusations to... what am I saying? Don’t tell the kids not to put beans up their noses!
One of the lessons of Maliszewski’s inquiries is that people who are hoaxed WANT to be hoaxed. Much like grief-sticken mothers hoping to contact their lost children “on the other side” and therefore willing to be ripped off by spiritualists and table-rappers, or people with terminal illnesses hoping for a miracle (remember Katherine Kuhlman in her diaphanous nightgowns crooning “I belieeeeve in Miracles!”), or wives not wanting to confront what their husbands have been doing to their children, the American public wants to believe that our mighty leaders really ARE mighty. We NEED to believe our doctors and lawyers are competent and honorable. (They used to want that, too.) And yet we are so quick to believe that this one and that one did something horrid and should be tried on the front page of the newspaper.
Right now we are especially vulnerable since there is no consensus on reality, much less culture. People in this town will fight you if you say global warming is real. We seem to have a great need for conformity in our cohort, and enforce the consensus by labeling dissidents as hoaxers, liars. This is not just a right wing phenomenon.
I was interested in a statement I read yesterday: that liberals are very willing to accept all sorts of differences: color, ethnic origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, prosperity, education and all the rest -- SO LONG AS they thought like the other liberals in the group.
But thoughts can be disguised. And who has the broad experience to pick up real dissemblers? Not our professional spies, it seems. And how can unknown bloggers be truth-checked? Even Snopes can’t always know. Sooner or later we’re all bound to be April Fools, right around the calendar.
Yet how do we find out the truth with newspapers shrinking and television going to sensation and celebrity shenanigans? Someone else on the radio (I listen as I go through the day) said that the failure of the big city newspapers wouldn’t be so bad in this time of so much other media, including blogs, except for our congressional representatives: senators included. He said it’s up to each state to closely monitor what those powerful people are doing in Washington, D.C., and only a big high-pay, high-power, state-by-state, networking newspaper has the chops to keep track of them. He suggested that our elected officials get up to some very strange things indeed. Tell us about it!
One evening on my way to the town council meeting I noticed a well being sunk on an empty lot. Nosy as always, I trotted over to ask whether they thought they might solve our budget problems by striking oil. But they said they were venting gas contamination from an old gas station leak. They said they were surprised to find it even thirty feet down. When I got to the town council meeting, they assured me that there was NO contamination.
Were they scheming? Misinformed? Careless about what they remembered? Or did they simply not want to know about the problem? Maybe they already had enough worries and denial was a way of controlling things. They say that dogged whistle-blowers turned in Madolf over and over, pointed out EXACTLY how he was running a Ponzi scheme to PRECISELY the people who had the tools to investigate. Nothing happened. They evidently weren’t paid off or in on the scheme. They just didn’t want to know.
I’m reading “Fakers” by Paul Maliszewski, which begins with an account of his own “faked” letters and articles to his own newspaper -- meant to be satire and preposterous, but immediately accepted as valid by the editors. (Reference Dilbert, the comic strip.) The rest of the book is various essays on hoaxes, masks, con artists, counterfeiters and Great Pretenders, many of them literary. It becomes very clear that pretenses and minor sleight-of-hand are woven through our daily lives everywhere and only recognized when it becomes of benefit for someone to “reveal” them.
One big illustration of how a situation calls out hoaxable circumstances and then presents the opportunity to profit from their refutation is the craze for memoir, which is “memory,” notoriously tricky and inclined to be embellished or overdramatic. A little cluster of unreliable memoirs (caroming off the assumption that biographies and autobiographies are or should be accurate or even CAN be accurate beyond the rough outlines) was almost irresistible for blood-sucking journalists, who then created a “trend” of exposures of cases that were in fact nothing alike.
Frey exaggerated reality in the conventional Hollywood way, making himself a badder boy than he was. JT LeRoy went for the big leap and invented a fantasy, also an underclass tale, because what nice readers would know the diff anyway? And Nasdijj (Tim Barrus) told the truth but changed the names and identifying circumstances, the way doctors do and for similar reasons. But in the past he’d been the baddest boy of all. Frey was soon seen for what he was and, enabled by Oprah, went back to work. JT had to pay or (one hopes) return an enormous amount of money on grounds that she defrauded her publisher. (Hard to believe.) And Barrus became an expatriate, which has made him grateful considering how things have gone in publishing ever since.
Not much has been done with the third step in this sequence: unmasking the motives and methods of those who identify hoaxes. How much money did they make? And who were their witnesses? In Barrus’ case, they were mainly a former brother-in-law with a felony record, a pornographer still angry from Barrus -- then an editor -- rejecting his manuscript, and a non-American living in Cyprus and purporting to be an expert on Native American writing. Don’t we all have people like that floating around at the fringes of our lives? I do. My former students alone could probably come up with enough accusations to... what am I saying? Don’t tell the kids not to put beans up their noses!
One of the lessons of Maliszewski’s inquiries is that people who are hoaxed WANT to be hoaxed. Much like grief-sticken mothers hoping to contact their lost children “on the other side” and therefore willing to be ripped off by spiritualists and table-rappers, or people with terminal illnesses hoping for a miracle (remember Katherine Kuhlman in her diaphanous nightgowns crooning “I belieeeeve in Miracles!”), or wives not wanting to confront what their husbands have been doing to their children, the American public wants to believe that our mighty leaders really ARE mighty. We NEED to believe our doctors and lawyers are competent and honorable. (They used to want that, too.) And yet we are so quick to believe that this one and that one did something horrid and should be tried on the front page of the newspaper.
Right now we are especially vulnerable since there is no consensus on reality, much less culture. People in this town will fight you if you say global warming is real. We seem to have a great need for conformity in our cohort, and enforce the consensus by labeling dissidents as hoaxers, liars. This is not just a right wing phenomenon.
I was interested in a statement I read yesterday: that liberals are very willing to accept all sorts of differences: color, ethnic origin, gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, prosperity, education and all the rest -- SO LONG AS they thought like the other liberals in the group.
But thoughts can be disguised. And who has the broad experience to pick up real dissemblers? Not our professional spies, it seems. And how can unknown bloggers be truth-checked? Even Snopes can’t always know. Sooner or later we’re all bound to be April Fools, right around the calendar.
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