THOUGHTS ON WATCHING "LAW & ORDER SVU"

This post was started before I knew that Dick Wolf had a new series opening.  I had been following Chris Meloni which led me to “Law & Order SVU.”  This series is intentionally provocative, but I’m not responding to the “ripped from the headlines” sensationalism of the cases.  Rather I’m thinking about the development of an American “repertory theatre” body of actors something like the beloved BBC actors we watch in so many roles.  Since I’m typing up acting notes from classes I took at the end of the Fifties, I’m thinking about acting per se.  And I’m thinking about the show in terms of how I have understood the tussle between law and justice over the years, esp. in the five years I was an animal control officer.  

The first phenomenon, a “stable” of extremely skilled actors who work well together, seems to be due at least in part to a shift from Hollywood to New York where many of the actors also appear on the stage.  Then, in turn, long-term series like “Hill Street Blues” leading into “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide” leading into “The Wire” -- mostly driven by a person or persons with a vision -- has supported a high level of writing.  Now I read in the NYTimes that Wolf wants to create the same kind of talent complex in Chicago, which is where I took my undergrad degree in “Speech Education,” actually a lot of theatre.  I KNOW there are a host of small repertory theatres and very fine actors who do academic teaching.

As I watch “L&O svu,”  I recognize many regulars from “Oz” and “The Wire” or even as far back as “HIll Street Blues”.  (My boss at Animal Control was very much like the sergeant who cautioned the officers to “be careful out there.”)   Chris Meloni’s career kicked off with “NYPD Blue.”  With a face like an Aku-Aku effigy, he somehow manages to make it ripple as subtly a summer pond in a breeze.  Both as the sociopathic convict in “Oz” and as the stalwart moral enforcer in “SVU”, he radiates intelligence .  He can say more with a brief sideways glance while leaving a room than anyone who would wheel and give a lecture.  When he left the series, fans also left.

The two shows are quite different.  “Oz” was character interaction in a pressurized environment where all bets were off.  Death removed main characters.  But if a person followed industry backstage gossip, it was not long until one realized that under the chaotic plot lines were the lives of the actors.  If one of them needed a break, something happened to put the character on hold, the way it happens in soaps.  In fact, “Oz” was much like a soap for tough guys with great bodies but it sometimes reached for epic novel.  Because the lid was off sex as a subject matter, the same old familiar plot lines of greed, turf and intimacy took on new life -- went deeper, hit harder.

“L&Osvu” is very patterned: first, for television so episodes will fit between advertisements, second, because it is presented in the same mold as the Law & Order franchise: segmented by titles with a cue noise, case presented, evidence accumulates, climax, resolution in court.  Clearly the key is again justice versus law.  MUCH of the script is explanation of the law, psychiatric information, medical information, so the acting has a lot of technical exposition in it, rather than emotional impetus.  But sometimes there is a socko combination, like “John Boy Walton” as a murdering madman, once a responsible and loving husband, brain destroyed by tertiary syphilis.  This is not just theatre -- this is wising up the American couch potatoes.  As the series grew popular, other major actors appeared in one-shots:  Piper Laurie, Margot Kidder, Karen Allen, Penny Fuller (once a classmate).  The scripts are not for interchangeable twenty-something kids.

One of the recurring themes and the one I wrestle with in my own life is how much a private citizen should trust and rely on public authorities.  When I was an officer on the street addressing animal problems, I often only had a little scrap of information about something much bigger -- like the man who filed complaints against every barking dog in his neighborhood because he was dying of cancer and couldn’t tolerate noise.  Or the man whose neighbors accused him of keeping crowing roosters -- who was actually staging cockfights and probably distributing drugs.  Or the barking dog a judge complained about in the house that abutted his at the back -- it was chained to the motorcycles of the Gypsy Jokers to keep rivals from meddling with them.  (The judge said he had no idea.)  So many times I was ineffective.  So many cases seemed unresolvable and are still in my head after thirty years.

I go back in memory to problems in my family or ministry involving abused children, old people, or dementia.  I never felt I knew who could help, how to approach them, or how they might react.  I don’t think I’m much different from most citizens, though it does help to be in a small community now.  My mother said she wanted to talk about my brain-damaged brother, but was so afraid of doing it that she would shut any conversation down.  I ought to have gone to a social worker of some kind.  I had no idea there was a closed-skull trauma specialist at OHSU.  My minister friends were as much at sea as I was, though they meant well.  

In the days of the worst trouble, I was very young and the complexity of Bob’s life -- twice as long as mine -- tied my hands.  He wanted me excluded.  After the divorce I was hard to explain to schools and doctors:  a former step-grandmother third wife dealing with a runaway kid who’s living with a family not her own in order to escape alcoholism, but who is drinking herself and needs multiple abortions but doesn’t want them?  No practical evidence -- many possible motives.  This is the sort of thing that “SVU” deals with.  I think for many people it is a map to use in their own lives.  It is almost entirely outside the education of ministers, but people like Dear Abby constantly say,  “Go to your minister.”

To watch a long (300 episodes now) intense series like this on DVD’s is like a book performed.  One can proceed at one’s own pace -- I find myself stopping to walk around and the day I watched three discs of “Oz” (twelve episodes) I was like a drunk for a while.  Literally staggered.  There is always a strong point of view, partly guided by Dick Wolf and inspired by the day’s news, but I’m always aware that every script comes from intelligent, hip, probably educated, probably English majors, sitting around a table suggesting premises and working out the plot line.  It is THEIR morality that is filtering into the culture and I do not think it is a bad thing.  

Sometimes it is not a real thing.  They only know their own lives.  There is so much more that they have no idea even exists.  In interview "extras," Mariska said that when she began making contacts to do research she realized that there is far more abuse and sexual abuse than she had ever guessed.  "It's just everywhere."  And Chris said that women on the street would throw their arms around him in gratitude for the fictional defense of women like themselves.  For too many people -- male, female and juvenile victims -- there are no heroes.

HUMAN HOMEOSTASIS

Anthropologist Ray Rapaport’s formulation is that human homeostasis is like a stream in which humans can live, though not always comfortably.  If humans go outside the streambed to where there are not enough of the essentials for the individual, that individual dies -- either quickly or slowly.  If the whole landscape changes so that the stream bed dries up or changes course, the whole species dies.

What are the elements of human homeostasis, and how do they interact with the individual body?

AIR:  In the proper proportions, pressure, temperature, freedom from toxic gases and particulates.  (The ability to inhale, distribute oxygen through the body, and exhale unwanted gases.)

WATER:  Same as above, in sufficient liquid quantity to keep the body resupplied in the proper proportions for the cellular fluids that support electrolites, digestion, respiration.  (Water must flow through the body: in through the mouth, distributed through the body, out through lungs, skin and kidneys.)

FOOD:  Sufficient calories, sufficient roughage, trace elements and vitamins, so on.  Not too much sugar, salt, fat.  (Nourishment is taken in, processed, the molecular elements distributed, leftovers excreted.)

MOVEMENT:  Large muscle exercise, smooth muscle function (intestines), rhythm maintenance (heart/lungs).  Interaction with gravity.

PROTECTION:  Not just shelter in the sense of a roof for shade and keeping dry, but also protection against diseases, vectors and predators.  (Seeking, building, maintaining an active and vigilant interface with the environment.)

HUMAN INTERACTION:  Obviously without sex the species cannot continue, but without other humans, an individual will not survive.  The essence of this category is brain function in terms of managing thinking and emotion.  The following are necessary:

Nurturing and education through childhood at least; lifelong is better..

A holding community (family, neighborhood, congregation, tribe, nation)

A psychological platform shared by others so as to be confident.

Intimacy.

Exploration of ideas, beliefs and habits.

Sex.  (So strong it can sometimes override most of the other necessities.)

A brain that is frightened is closed up, unable to learn new things because it is processing for survival.  A brain that has enough of the things on this list, will be open to existence at the outer limits of its capacity, which is where the intense emotion we call “spirituality” can be felt.  

Remember Abraham Maslow’s pyramid with Self-Actualization at the top?  Maslow came out to Alberta briefly to see about studying Blackfeet but decided it was too tough for him and left it to others. (He was a Brooklyn boy and a bit of a runt.)  One of the women doing the study actually published results but others also found it too tough and left.  The high prairie is not an easy place to live.  Beyond that, “self” actualization is not particularly helpful in a place where interaction with others is often the key to survival.  "Self" can slip over into being narcissistic, encouraging hoarding, or blame, or powering down those seen as less worthy.   A Manhattan intellectual Jew from a close family can be a loner, but a rez-dwelling “aboriginal” with a shattered family and no education will be hard-pressed.  His or her survival will depend upon belonging to a group.

The key to the success of the Blackfeet was that they had strong but fluid “holding communities” in their gens or clans of mostly related people.  Usually about a hundred folks, everyone knew everyone so that peer webbing often took care of justice or compassion issues in the same way that a small church congregation works, or maybe a small business or a neighborhood.  Because the Blackfeet were nomadic, the very fact of seasons kept them flowing over the land, interacting, in the now but able to predict and prepare for the future.  Probably they were less vulnerable before horses, which needed grazing, allowed long-range raiding, encouraged the accumulation of goods, made it easy for strangers to come and the young to escape in something like the same way as the later invention of the automobile.

Yet we try to see tribal life as ideal and stable rather than the constantly recalibrating and analytical people they were.  As long as they were close to the land, dependent only on their own hunting skills because buffalo were so abundant, defended against disease by simple remoteness from the urban places where people exchange contagion and from the kind of farms with domestic animals like cows and pigs that constantly “spill” (in David Quammen's word) disease, evolved physically to be runners and meat eaters, the Blackfeet were in their stream of homoestasis and survived.

Their stream did not dry up:  rather it received a confluence from a much bigger and muddier stream of elements they were not prepared to manage.  A century is a short time, as cultures go, to evolve after millennia of what seems to us to be “always.”  But in those millennia the scientists find many patterns of change and adaptation.  Blackfeet -- Plains Indians in general -- have been for modern society a “platform” idea, an ideal.  They were, even in the days when we were starving them to death.  They are, even now as they struggle with “fracking” which was legally enabled -- very quietly -- under the table; that counting table which is a different kind of platform.  Drilling can dry up a stream.

The language of the arts is metaphor and since the management of the interface with the world, the intense feelings we call sacred, is an art form, liturgy is a metaphor art, dependent upon sensory awareness.  As long as the metaphor system and the wisdom it holds responds to the actual world of the person or community, it will work to sustain homeostasis.  

The language of kings and shepherds, miracles and conquest, tribe-against-tribe that came out of the environment around the Mediterranean and formed platforms called “Judaism,” “Islam,” and “Christian,” no longer works very well.  As documented in the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and all the papyrus scroll writings floating around without ever making it into anyone’s canon, some of the wisdom works and some of it doesn’t.  Some of it is outright toxic.  Too many people insist on a “holus-bolus” swallowing without chewing.  They say their chosen documents are “sacred.”

But they are not.  They have become a labyrinth, a man-made series of walls to control behavior.  “Sacredness” is a process between the person and the universe, a functioning interaction at a high level that changes constantly in order to maintain homeostasis by offering a metaphor platform.  Homeostasis does not mean paralysis.  Quite the opposite, it means change.  It is not a statue but a dance.  Wasn’t it King David who knew that?  And demonstrated wearing only an apron?

THE SHORELESS SEA

The opposite of a labyrinth is a shoreless sea.  Scientists invent both in order to test poor victim white rats, in hopes that they will teach us something about ourselves.  Most of us have seen photos of rats in a maze, searching for the cheese.  Fewer have seen the tank of opaque water that has a platform just under the surface, just big enough and high enough to save a rat from drowning.  The rat must find it by swimming.  If the rat learns where one is, it can be moved.  It can be surrounded by other platforms or removed entirely.  The idea is to give the rat drugs to see what that does to performance and memory.

A labyrinth is architectural.  Right now corn farmers are teasing willing customers with “maize” labyrinths of corn rows.  A shoreless sea is sometimes present in nature itself.  Right now polar bears are in arctic seas with no ice platforms, drowning.  Both are powerful metaphors for human experience -- that which is so structured that there is only one action possible and that which is so unstructured that there is no point of attachment, no place to begin, no frame of reference.

Those who do art of any kind know about structuring experience.  I’m just beginning to type the notes of Alvina Krause for a production of “King Lear.”  She speaks of it as a symphony with the actors being instruments.  Musicians have a high consciousness of the structure of sound, which has direct access to the feelings of the listener.  Composers know about the literary introduction-rising action-climax-and resolution of stories, and the use of a script, though notes on lines look different from words.  And they know about jazz, in which there is no sheet music but a through-line melody known to all; each is free to create spontaneously -- fitting into the patterns of others.  

When I was in high school I fell in love with Balinese culture and did a lot of reading about the gamelan, a sort of xylophone, which is used to play “organic” music that twists and rises like a vine, stopping here and there to form “leaves” of small complexities.  More recently I read about John Cage who did a lot of experimenting with expectations.  For instance, since people were used to listening to composed music and resenting the coughing, scraping and radiator clonkings that interfered, he framed a piece of “music” that WAS the coughing, scraping and clonking.  It was more interesting than anyone expected.  Try YouTube for both examples.

Every art form IS an art form because of its structure, whether it is the labyrinth grid of the blocks in the Holocaust Memorial or white-on-white or black-on-black paintings in a gallery.  There is also such a thing as a “found structure,” that which has just happened by itself in the world as an “emergent” phenomena, untouched by human hands -- as the phase goes.  But detected by a human brain and point of view.

Brains, you will remember if you’ve been reading along with these thoughts, is a whole-body activity, a complex of sensations that includes awareness of where you are in space.  It is exquisitely sensitive to patterns, sometimes imposes them if there are none or if it is feeling something is incomplete.  We always want to complete the circle.   We assume what is behind facades, we are startled when we expect one pattern but are presented with another.  The pattern, the structure of experience, is our real platform under the surface that allows us to stop searching for the time being.

An artist who can see what that shoreless sea is made of and can create a platform in it, is going to attract those tiring of struggle in the water.  Religion is an art form that operates just like any other.  What I’m looking for is “performance art that is liturgy for a churchless people.”  Not dependent on dogma, buildings, or specially trained leaders.  Maybe wordless.  A structure of feeling.

The human population of the planet has only two things in common: the need to survive as individuals and the need to preserve the planet in a livable state for humans.  (The planet will go on without us.)  The immediacy of personal need too often cancels out the actions that would be good for the planet.  Indeed the immediacy of hunger can prevent the kinds of personal actions that would save the person.  (There are many kinds of hunger.  Artists, for instance, don’t just starve for food.)

So why is there always a big fuss about “being in the now”?  Because the past is gone, leaving only traces.  It morphs and self-destructs, or it has hardened and is stuck in your gut in a way that prevents you from digesting.  The future is not here.  You can only change tomorrow by changing the now.  Regardless of the art form, regardless of the purpose and goal, what is really being changed is the consciousness of the person creating and the consciousness of the receiver.  The created platform is between those two.  The “now” is the working space for creating the platform.

This is what Whitecalf said about his people in the years after the Baker Massacre, just about the time of the Starvation Winter when 600 people starved to death just north of here,  where the government confined them though there was nothing to eat.  I found the quote in Bill Farr’s article in the Summer 2012 issue of Montana, the Magazine of Western History:  “The Blackfeet were like people lost in a fog.  They wandered around, not knowing where they were going, or what they were going to do.  They could see the things close to them, but the things that were further off were hidden so they were like people who were lost.  They had nothing and they knew nothing.”  They swam in a shoreless sea.

In medieval times when one-third of the population of Europe had been killed by plague, monastics created a platform, a time labyrinth to walk, by dividing the twenty-four hour period into named three-hour intervals each marked by prayer.  One was at 3AM.  The monastics went from their dormitory down to the chapel for a period of prayer before returning to bed.  It was a performance art, a platform of meaning.  The stairs are deeply worn by many feet.  It’s not hard to imagine the cold night stone, the swish and rustle of the robes, the slap of sandals, wind cutting through the spaces. 

I usually wake up about three AM for a little while.  I’m not claiming to be a monk.  A sleep study recently claimed that humans naturally sleep in two periods, broken about three AM.  One theory is that it was an evolutionary advantage when someone had to stoke the fire about that time.  Others say there is a brain wave change between first sleep and second sleep.  First sleep is devoted to clearing the day’s vibrational and electrical debris away, sorting and storing memory.  Second sleep is the rapid eye movement sleep when mammals dream.  People can get along for quite a while on only four hours of sleep a night, probably “first sleep.”  But if they are prevented from dreaming for too long, they begin to hallucinate, drowning in a shoreless sea.  The Blackfeet were a dream-based culture.  Dreams gave them a platform.

THREE QUEENS OF THE STAGE

While searching my shelves for acting and theatre books, I found three old favorites from early in life.  They aren’t the only books I’ve owned about remarkable women, but they’re among the earliest and they’re all stage folks, which is a deep part of my inner world.  Each is presented as memoir.  

THEATRE STREET:  The Reminiscences of Tamara Karsavina” with a foreword by J.M. Barrie.  (E.P. Dutton: 1931)

ARTIST’S LIFE by Angna Enters (Coward-McCann Inc.: 1958)

MY LIFE by Isadora Duncan  (Garden City Publishing Co, 1927)

I was startled to see that Isadora Duncan’s book was bought by my father in June, 1939, which would have been about halfway through my mother’s pregnancy with me.  I must have found it at home -- not the library -- and I certainly read it when I was so young that when Duncan rhapsodized about sleeping with her lover, I thought she meant exactly that: sleeping.  I didn’t know it was a euphemism because I didn’t know what people actually did when they had intercourse.  But she was right -- it IS good to sleep with a lover in both senses.  I appreciated Isadora’s appetite for life, no matter where it led, through grief and hardship, glory and adulation. 

But why did my father buy that book?  In those days one didn’t know the gender of a baby until it was born, but he had some kind of alter ego that he encouraged me to assume once I was arrived and female.  It was a thing about princesses or something.  My mother was NOT this type, nor was his mother.  In fact, my mother was wary of my notion that I should be a veiled dancer, even if it was only wearing window curtains in the backyard.  My father never did anything indecent but he would have loved to have been a hippie or bohemian of some kind.  Our city bus went to downtown Portland through the part of town that had gypsies and burlesque houses.  I expressed interest in the latter and he offered to take me to one as soon as I was of legal age.  My mother and I never talked about it, but both our eyebrows went up.  (When did HE go there?)  I never learned to be sexy -- in fact, counter-sexy.

I wrote my name in the front of “Theatre Street” with green ink, which means I was a teenager.  The price was fifty cents.  “Angna Enters” was full-price:  $5.75 -- also green ink.  At Northwestern I saw her on the stage with her solo mime production and was smitten.  None of this stuff of being trapped in an invisible box or walking against a wind.  Her production featured, for instance, the acting out of the enrobing of a dauphin or a pope -- I forget which now.  Layer upon layer of underclothes, slips, petticoats, surcoats, vestments, robes, capes.  We were sure we could see each item though we really had no way of knowing what such a person actually wore.  Talk about the Empress’ new clothes!  I remember that Alvina Krause admired her, but I did not know that Enters had taught in the Stella Adler Studio, a “Method acting” center.

Karsavina moved among famous -- I should say “notorious” -- people like Diaghileff and Nijinsky.  Again, I read it innocently with no concept of what was hinted at.  If I read it now I would pick up dark subtext.  All three of these women talk about Pavlova with awe for that strange mixture of near S/M discipline in a powerful sinewy extended body expressing ethereal yearning love.  Karsavina, Duncan and Pavlova are on YouTube.  I suppose a movie like “Black Swan” was intended to be a modern version of their lives, but maybe “Being Julia” catches other aspects better.  These were grownup women, not teeny-boppers. 

These grown woman made life itself their art form, all the while mounting stage and gallery productions that had to mean an investment of hard work and practicalities behind the scenes.  Our culture doesn’t admire the type much.  Unless it’s played in a movie by Helen MIrren or Vanessa Redgrave: neurotic, sexual, uncommitted to any adult male unless he’s a rich old man or a clever little boy.

Over the years I’ve come to know the sons of such women.  Maybe they see me as an attentive, seen-everything, indulgent version of an older woman who is not likely to cling.  Someone safe.  These guys were attracted to AK as well.  They dearly loved their glamorous mothers but found them demanding, even smothering.  Still, they loved to watch a woman “enrobe” for an evening out -- in those days it meant garter belts, girdles, maybe corsolettes. Diamonds at night, pearls in the daytime.  Earrings had screw-posts that took time to fasten through pierced ears.  Chanel or Arpege.

In the Fifties lips were Cherries in the Snow, eyelids were Cleopatra enamel.  My high school drama teacher taught me how to pull the eyelid taut to draw a line and put that little eyelash curve at the outside end.  Mascara came in a tiny red slide-out box.  It was nearly stage makeup.  In a Chicago bitter winter I went to the stage door to wait for Vivian Leigh: it was worth it.  Black fur held up around a slender little white face with impossibly thick eyelashes.  I can understand how such a woman would create a longing to cross-dress.  In fact, sometimes yet I feel it myself.  

The preface to “Theatre Street” was written by J.M. Barrie, that seemingly innocent but somehow suspect author.  He tells this story about her convent-like school:  “The girls were counted every day after one of them disappeared with an officer of the Horse Guards, leaving behind her the story of her love adventure which was found long afterwards when a wardrobe was being re-papered.  She had written it on an inside wall of this piece of furniture, and the girls who read the narrative said it was thrilling, and, what was more, that there was a dash here and there to be filled in by the reader.”    

The other story he tells is a day the Emperor Alexander decided he wanted to eat pancakes with the theatre company to which Karsavina’s father belonged.  Trestle tables were set up on the stage, the equipment for the pancakes was brought and Marie Feordorovna herself, in a little apron, put them on the plates.  In our high school senior class play, “Anastasia,” I played Marie Feodorovna, Dowager Empress.  At one point, as I spoke, I heard someone in the audience sob.  

Strange mixtures of sex, mystery, power, consoling domesticity, dress-ups so fabulous that they are at the edge of mockery, and a resisted mother/son dynamic that has nothing to do with King Oedipus.  Rather it is some kind of gender-envy that even a plain woman can feel.  It is a sharp goad to achievement.  They know all about it in Paris.

AN ACTING POINT OF VIEW VS. A LITERARY POINT OF VIEW

Part of the reason I went back to thinking about my old acting classes  (krausenotes.blogspot.com  and thesilvercomb.blogspot.com) is that I’ve been pondering the difference -- subtle as it may be -- between coming to Browning in 1961 from an acting context as compared to a literature context.  Of course, I DID have a literature context, because I read all the time, even books by and about Indians.  “Kutkos,” I’m fond of reporting, was written by my fourth grade teacher, a Chinook Indian, and I read “Tangled Waters” over and over -- written by a white woman married to a trader on the Navajo reservation.  “Two Little Savages,” of course, is about two little wannabe Indian kids, written by that wannabe Indian Ernest Thompson Seton.

But that’s not what I mean.  Being in an acting frame of mind is inhabiting the people you meet, trying to suss what it would be like to be them, to see what they see when they look out of their eyes.  But a literary frame of mind asks for omniscience, maybe judgement from the outside, certainly plot line and structure.  Maybe conflict (agonism).  When I’m in that novelist’s frame of mind, I’m scribbling in the back of my brain, taking notes -- “Oh, notice how he holds that pencil!”  But if I’m in an actor’s frame of mind, I don’t even ask what it would be like to hold the pencil that way -- I’m already vicariously gripping it myself.

This was explained to me as “empathy” years ago when some teacher was trying to distinguish empathy (feeling AS someone) from sympathy (feeling FOR someone).  When empathy is activated, the judgement just isn’t there, unless you’re feeling it from someone else outside both of you.  The boy says,  “My mother is so STUBBORN.”  He’s sincere, but the novelist might say from outside that she was faithful, tenacious, or committed.  The boy might be quoting his dad, identifying with him.  

Of course, sci-fi stories have pointed out the treachery of being too open to other minds.  It may be pretty hard to handle other people’s pain, so you need ways to draw the curtain -- even armor up.  Once I read a story about dolphins, who can read your body through penetrating echolocation right down to what your gut is doing.  They can get upset.  People like to think that dolphins are full of peace and harmony, but what if they sense fear, rage, contempt? 

Trying to understand other people, one way or another, is shared by both writer and actor -- but also psychoanalysts, who sort of walk both sides of the street.  While the writer is noting,  “This person has bitten his nails to the quick, leaving ugly scar tissue,"  the actor is feeling a sudden urge to bite his nails.  The psychoanalyst is noting:  “Bitten nails.  Obsessive syndrome?  Anxiety due to?”  That kind of diagnosis is a dangerous sort of judgement because the next step can be treatment and not necessarily voluntary.

The detective wants to know lots of observable and provable stuff as well, and that could lead to consequences that could be influenced by the opinion of the shrink.  The anthropologist’s reaction depends on the sort of anthro he or she is, but generally the inclination will be to consider a long view: history, the larger patterns of the culture and how they form development.  They might look at the ecology: what is there to eat and what must you do to get it?  What does the climate encourage in the people?  What natural barriers create isolated communities?  What objects and animals are in their lives?  What are their homes like?  And the actor wants to know all this stuff, but -- again -- from the inside.

When I came to Browning to teach, I was still feeling my way into “being” other people, not building evaluations of them -- which might have been more proper.  The kids themselves did not want any intimacy with their teachers.  The more distant and robotic a teacher was, the more they were interpreted as “professional.”  Surgeons are professional.  Missionaries are suspect in their declarations of love and understanding -- unprofessional.  Amateur in the pure sense of “loving.”  (There’s a book I should read:  “I Love You.  You’re Perfect -- Now Change.)

The irony is that the kind of acting I learned (if a script is considered literary which I believe it is) was literature-based,  We weren’t improvising -- we were learning lines and acting out a plot with presenting situation, rising action, climax and resolution. It contained a point of view supplied by the playwright.  Becoming the person was the means to that point of view.  

But for the rez kids, resolution was the last thing they wanted.  Their idea was to prevent change, NOT to grow up, NOT to graduate, NOT to know things about themselves and their families.  They had been well and thoroughly taught never to let nobody know nothing.  They did very well at it.  Their point of view was that they were doomed to an early death anyway. (They saw it all around them.)  Why even try?  Some were pushed hard enough to make them close down: sleeping all the time, drinking, dissociating, drugs.

Except that to an actor, their posture, their voices, what they did with their hands and eyes -- all gave them away.  Most of the school personnel had no intention of “being” them, understanding where they were coming from, because their mission [sic] was to change them.  With good intentions, of course.  The kids could feel it.  The school district was paying them to do it.

Over the years the context of things has changed.  Many more of the teachers and administrators are Blackfeet and local.  The buildings are new.  Students from decades ago have returned from the outside world where they succeeded and are not willing to accept the same old patterns.  There are women on the tribal council.  Agitators complain that the main street is packed with deteriorating old buildings, but in a ring around Browning there are new buildings, including both the hospital and the casino.  Openly gay people work in both places.

Recently a volunteer-built playground was destroyed by the kids it was built for and who had previously enjoyed it.  What do I see when I look out of their eyes?  Frustration.  Now they are awake, they feel the rage, the pain, the grief.  They need action, any action.  Impact.  This planet is packed with people who feel that way.  We should be stubborn about pushing forward until we get past it.  But how?  More plays!  More movies!  More novels!  More, more, more!!  Don't stop now!

"SAVAGE SUNSETS" by Adrian C. Louis

My favorite Potawatomi grandfather, who writes poetry and sometimes runs a trap-line and even possibly plays the grand piano, has been a friend since the Nineties when we were on the same listserv and had such a heated exchange that Carter Revard cautioned us.  The other day he sent an exasperated email to this funky old white woman noting that traffic had nearly stopped on the last remaining Native American literature listserv.  NATIVELIT-L@LISTSERV.ILLINOIS.EDU   Either there haven’t been any messages for a long time or else I’ve been taken off the list in one of the periodic blood-quantum purges.  (Since I’m zero quantum.)   Or maybe the tech support has collapsed.

My friend wanted to stir things up.  Indeed, everyone is so busy making money or pursuing the finer points of French post-modern philosophy (those French loooove Indians) or hooking up with eager little Ph.D. scholars, that there’s not much interest in speculating about what’s happened to all those great writers we used to know and argue about and with.  I got down my cherished copy of “Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion” (1995, Visible Ink Press)   While I was at it, I looked to see what that press was publishing now.  Sure enough, the NA writers at Visible Ink have been made invisible by Blacks and vampires.

It gets worse:  Adrian C. Louis was not listed in “Smoke Rising.”  He was not the romantic gentle-but-sad Jim Welch, nor an indignant Red Feminist, nor the crowd-pleasing Sherman Alexie (now writing YA novels about masturbation -- very funny, they tell me) nor was he one of the suicides,   But he is closer to the Red Heart of Truth than many of those others.  More than anything else, he is a survivor and that’s a good a definition of what it means to be indigenous.  

There are many strategies for survival, so naturally not all of them conform to expectations.  But those of us who live on or near the big prairie reservations will recognize Adrian’s work.  He’s been able to move around in the disciplines of newspaper editing and university teaching.  Twelve books of poetry, two novels, one of them (“Skins”) made into one of few truly authentic Indian big-screen Hollywood movies.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284494/  His fellow poet, Lee Ann Roripaugh, blurbs:  “A mournful howl and raw elegy, sliced through with the razor-flecked wit of an acerbically world weary jester, Adrian C. Louis’ Savage Sunsets veers between the sacred and the profane, the terrible and the mundane, the lewd and the transcendent in tautly-welded lines that are both searingly elegant and fiercely plainspoken.”  That about covers it.

No need to market Louis as an “Indian."  Anyway, he’s not a bare-chested guy on a horse waving a spear at some buffalo, which is the way people want to see Indians.  Take a look at the reality.  http://www.adrian-c-louis.com/  Other blurbs from James Tate and Sam Hamill.  A vid at http://vimeo.com/45367747  

The people I know best who write like this are white but not among the anointed.  That means nothing.  This is human.  Labels don’t stick.  Except one:  love/grief.  This last collection includes poems of mourning because of the death of Louis’ wife after a decade of Alzheimer’s.  The sound of these poems is not the drum -- it’s the whip.  Also traditional.

When I reviewed an earlier book of poems on this blog  Dec 8, 2006.  (“Adrian Louis’ Strong Brown Wings.”)  and sent him my usual courtesy copy of the post, his response was more or less “I’ll be over to do the honors.  You don’t live that far away.”  A little startling, but that direct response turns up in the poems.  The consequence is a jolting return to rude and preposterous reality.  

Here’s a demo from “Senor Skull’s Parade”:

“Today at work a white girl,

a secretary I like too much

said (half in jest, I hope),

“Do a rain dance.  It’s been

so dry & my tomatoes --”

Yes, do a “rain dance.”

As if . . . As (fucking) if . . 

my blood contained all

azimuths of red arcana

& I could produce such

utilitarian wetness at will;

“I wish I could,” I said, but,

jack-in-the-box Senor Skull

snorted out a snide aside:

Darling, tonight I’m going to 

sneak into your pale garden

&cornhole your tomatoes,

make them wet & juicy

one moaning globe at a time.”

Tomatoes are indigenous, once considered dangerously toxic “love apples.”  But many female readers consider Indian men to be “safe” to romance because they aren’t quite real and there are too many manifestos about frontier white women preferring the red warriors who captured them.  But Adrian is as real as any human in a tractor hat ever gets.  All the politicians are worrying about the “middle class” with never a care for the “working class” -- often indigenous of one sort or another -- that never quite gets ahead.  And yet . . . is never entirely crushed.  Louis is enrolled with the Lovelock [sic] Paiute Tribe which is federally recognized.  It’s in Nevada, but he’s spent most of his working life in South Dakota, sometimes as a teacher of English.

HORSEHIDE

At my martini limit,

I come face to face

with a typically lame

Freshman essay holding

a plenitude of platitudes

in drippy, run-on sentences

that feature tense changes

& ampersands plus a lexicon

of abused or misspelled words.

The kid, mostly silent in class

is rambling about his lifelong

love of baseball & it must be

the ghost of horsehide on

my fingertips that glides,

warps the breaking curve

of a C into an A & then I

slide into bed, safe at home.

If the Dakotas and Nevada don’t teach you survival, teaching freshman English surely will.  The epigraph of Louis’ “Wild Indians & Other Creatures” is from Thomas Merton.  (The Seven Story Mountain.)  

“Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.

“And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection.  And in that day you will begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired.  And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.”

Rain on tomatoes is nothing.  Do you agree, Potawatomi grandpa?  (He did.)

THE STIGMA OF "BLOOD"

In private communication, a reader objects to me talking about “German blood.”  The reader was correct.  Never mind that the context was that I was making fun of my mother for calling my father a Teuton when she was angry with him.  The fact is that it’s impossible to have “German” blood because there was no Germany until a little over a century ago.  Anyway, blood “types”  A, B, AB and O, (which weren’t discovered until 1900)  have sub-sets but they have nothing to do with place or nationality.  My mother meant pedigree or national citizenship.  Way back in there was a little whiff of “Nazi.”

The sore spot my mother was hoping to hit was actually in my grandmother, who had enough German nationality in her background to be very nervous about being stigmatized as a hostile alien, the way Islamic people are today.  WWI was bad enough, but in WWII the nation had witnessed the Japanese being stripped of their lives and thrown into internment camps, too much like the fate of Jews in Germany to be comfortable.  Or moral.

The German nation, as a unified country for the first time, begins in 1871.  This is 21 years AFTER the major treaties with prairie tribes, assigning them reservations, were signed in the United States.  Before 1871 there was no Germany and therefore no Germans and therefore no German blood.   The idea of “Germania” as it is portrayed in Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” movie (loosely organized tribes) goes back to Julius Caesar.  I am almost accidentally learning a lot about all this by reading “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama.  I thought it was going to be about philosophy of place and it is, sort of, but it also explores a major north/south schism in Europe based on civilization versus wilderness -- or, as he styles it,  “masonry” vs. “vegetation.”   The constructed vs. the natural, interpreted as the sophisticated, educated, scientific versus the childish, earthy, mythic, primitive.  Which side you consider superior depends mostly on which side your ego dwells.  Rome (lingering on in England) or Germany (yearning for the Aryan paradise).

During WWII my brother-in-law saw some of the worst combat and was present at the liberation of the death camps.  He could not tolerate anything related to Germany, meaning to him Hitler.  In the Sixties a tourist family came through our Museum of Montana Wildlife on the Blackfeet Rez.  They were English-speaking with a German accent and we visited a bit.  (Bob had fought what he called “the Battle of Edmonton,” and had no particular feelings about “Germans.”)  After a while they were friendly enough to ask us why the Blackfeet were so cold to them.  They themselves had felt a great affinity, identifying Native Americans with the leafy and natural Germania tribes, a sort of Rousseaian ideal.  No one loves playing Indian more than Germans!  They were surprised to hear that many Blackfeet were, like Bob’s brother, veterans of WWII and therefore considered them enemies.   They had not known that the Blackfeet remembered enemies from centuries ago.  Though no doubt the Romans did, too.  And the tribes of Europe, the ones who eventually became Germany, remembered their rivalries, if not what they were about.

Lately videos about Mohammed have taunted the Islamic countries, who are lethally indignant and claim that all religion is sacred and must not be questioned or blasphemed against.  Then they go on to war sect against sect, north against south -- just the same as the Western world.  And in the Western world we claim we believe in free speech and yet people lose their jobs -- important people like the presidents of prestigious universities, because they took a “politically incorrect” position -- or so it seemed.  An English teacher was fired for using the word “niggardly” which means stingy, because it sounded like the forbidden “n” word. 

When my mother threw out “Teuton” (not German), she meant cold-blooded, technical, over-educated.  At that point she hadn’t gone back to school herself.  She returned to finish her junior and senior years when I started high school so she could put me through college.  But when I went to seminary decades later and paid my own way, she was incensed.  I was getting too big for my britches.  I was inviting trouble.  I didn’t tell her that most of the major theologians were Germans whose names started with B.  She was angry all over again when her good earnest Bible-based Presbyterianism didn’t match up with my high-flown Unitarian Universalist ideas.  I don’t know what she thought when she found my father’s carefully bound copy of his Master’s thesis:  it was about the price of potatoes.  Pretty organic.

These schisms and pre-judgings are insidious and come without being invited.  The north Blackfeet rez is prejudiced against the south Blackfeet rez and vice versa, but it is an old complaint and I can never get the straight of it.  I think it had to do with the Indian agents and the sequence of agencies as the reservation shrank.  It also seems to have something to do with the split between old-timey people and progressive people -- though that’s more of an east/west split -- mountains versus flatlands -- which also correlates with those who would like to subsistence hunt versus those willing to farm for profit.  If you don’t live here, you’ll never figure it out.  Cain and Abel are everywhere.

Back to blood.  There are two ways to overcome a two-split.  One is to emphasize the underlying unity of the issue -- after all, everyone has blood and the REAL dichotomy is not-enough-blood-to-sustain-life versus enough blood.  The other way to escape dichotomizing is to realize that there is a multiplicity.  Now we know that after you do the A, B, AB, and O sorting that everyone learned about because they were stamped on GI dogtags for the medic’s reference in battle, has had other variations added.  Rh factor was an early one.  At the level of organ transplants, the whole genome is necessary to get a good match and THAT proves every human being is unique.  The variations, which are tiny and influenced by another set of instructions in a kind of sleeve around the chromosomes called the epinome, are extremely small from one person to the next, but can have major consequences in terms of responses to environment and experience.

So what do we want?  Homogenized cultures where everyone is alike all over the world, or myriads of variations rich with the unexpected, the one-of-a-kind, the precious only?

THE IMPORTANCE OF THRASHING AROUND

In nature, thrashing around is what creatures do when the situation is so serious that there is no skill or strategy or strength that will let them escape.  In the jaws of the carnivore, at the last moments of fatal wounds, the body wants to live and thrashes in hopes that the random action will set it free.

In approaching creative acts, at the beginning of the enterprise it is important to allow this thrashing around, maybe muted to mere experimentation but sometimes extreme.  For an artist, underpainting, small studies, mockups, might all be helpful.   For a dancer, just moving around in a studio.  For a writer . . .  you’re lookin‘ at it.   People think that rehearsals for plays are a matter of learning to do exactly what the director or playwright wants done, but in fact it is often a period of experimenting in subtle and minute ways -- “tweaking” if you like.  Not always something major like, say, translating “Taming of the Shrew” into cowboy lingo (I did that, if you want a copy of the script.  It was easier than I expected.) but sometimes more a matter of internal attitude to adjust for style and maybe things like timing or set changes.  For a play, all this is done ahead of time.  For a movie, it is done both while shooting (maybe twenty versions of one fifteen-second reaction shot) and in the editing room.

People who paint know that if they put a bright yellow splotch in the upper lefthand corner, no matter what it is supposed to be, every bit of color and composition after that will have to take the yellow splotch into consideration.  What AK seemed to have as her central genius was not so much being able to crack open actors to their own inner lives (which she did when she could) but also the ability to look at the painting and say,  “Look, in this particular sort of painting, that yellow splotch badly needs a blue line top-to-bottom on the right hand side.”  That is, she had a sensitivity to the pattern of the whole and how that would affect the audience.  One can see that in her Eagles Mere notes more than anyplace else.

Carl Rungius’ equivalent was his practice of drawing a big X on the canvass from one corner to the other and then aligning the elements of the picture (downed trees, rock crags) on that X while the subject of the painting (moose,  mountain sheep ram) was at the crux.  This led the eye through to the focus.  AK also was wanting to lead the thought and emotion of the audience to what was the importance, the message.  It was composition in time, voice music, and movement through stage space.  

By obsessing about “the Method” people manage to avoid all these considerations, which are as much matters of experience as academic training.  Also those sunk in “Method” can avoid the on-set film community, which is the “holding community” that contains a play as much as the script is.  In undergrad years in the Department of Theatre, School of Speech, I sometimes saw emotional “thrashing around” as people fought for their identities.  Quite seriously, they felt their identities were dying.  As aspiring actors.  To make way for their real selves.  Often that meant recovery of deeper identities.  An identity is “emergent” -- it comes by itself.  You don’t choose it.  The same phenomenon sometimes showed itself at seminary.

Once I was obsessing about whether I were “feminine” enough.  An older and wiser person in the conversation said,  “Knock it off.  You are some kind of version of female so far as you know, and nothing else matters.  Just be what you are.”  Ah.  And the aspiring actor must discover what version of actor they are, with the yawning possibility at hand that they might not be actors at all.  Maybe just ordinary useful stage people.  Maybe something outside theatre.  The problem comes with wanting to be a star.  And keep the politics out, dammit. 

The opposite of “thrashing” is freezing, which is what I’ve often seen among American Indians, even adults.  It was a survival necessity a hundred years ago and earlier.  One froze to become invisible, to be safe because there were enemies, both red and white, who would kill you.  Even fifty years ago the kids wouldn’t dare do anything unless they were convinced they could do it “right.”  They knew if they did it “wrong” they might be beaten.  So if they were asked to do something they didn’t understand or thought was risky. they froze.  It was safer.  If you demonstrated how to do it, if you did it alongside them, they might take the risk.  Teaching acting is sometimes like that.

Now it has changed.  Rez kids of a certain prosperity feel they are not just safe, but entitled to get out there and do stuff.  Suddenly they shine in speech competitions.  They put on plays, dance and sing in musicals, paint, compose -- not so much writing.  Still afraid of the English teacher with the blood red pencil.  But new identities are emerging.

As I read through some of my old books about acting (the bulk of them seem to be from just before WWII and a few just after because they were what AK used as texts -- I posted a list on www.krausenotes.blogspot.com) I begin to realize they are teaching one kind of acting, the kind that worked with the kind of plays being staged.  I think it simply became film.

Peter Brook wrote quite a brilliant book (“The Empty Space” 1968) trying to sketch out some categories for discussion.  He called his four essays, originally lectures, The Deadly Theatre (the old, fusty one), The Holy Theatre (trying to reach something unseen), The Rough Theatre (wild and wooly romping), and The Immediate Theatre (the living event that happens “emergently.”)  Interestingly, he concludes that good theatre needs good audiences and that the latter can be created or attracted.  He’s talking about experimental theatre companies supported by people who are specifically engaged with their work.  Very contemporary sort of preoccupation.  Difficult to consider when you can't see your audience.