OCTOPI ADDENDUM

At the moment the Baptist congregation next door has inflated some bounce houses to attract kids to Bible school.  Religion as carnival -- an old tradition, old as tents.  Last year the heretical prairie wind sort of spoiled their fun by converting their house into a sailboat.  They are not hydrostatic, but pneumostatic, like the homemade plaid demonstration balloon in this Ted Talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/diane_kelly_what_we_didn_t_know_about_penis_anatomy.html

As it turns out, there are more than a few hydrostatic organs in the human body.  The pharynx, the cochlea, the aorta.  Why wouldn’t there be?  We began as sea creatures who didn’t need bones because underwater we could fly.

But I'm not the first person to speculate about what it would be like to have a tentacle for an arm.  These examples aren't very sexy.  Maybe to an octopus.

The octopus mouth is at the convergence of all the arms: if it were a vagina, 

it would be a true vagina dentata.  VERY toothy.

Hydrostatic prostheses 

IF YOU GIVE YOUR BODY AWAY . . .

If you give your body away, where do you live?  Lovers, the tortured, athletes, combatants, the grievously afflicted, and perhaps dancers or musicians surrender the control of their physical selves to something larger.  But, doing this, they can feel enormous intimacy, even spiritual.  Perhaps the parts of the identity that dwelt in the larger body come to concentrate in the mental life, brain-based.  There is often some kind of attachment that develops, very intimately and not necessarily caressing.  Then attachment can become obsession and finally addiction, which is a minutely physical neuronal change in the body, most intensely in the brain.  Usually it works against survival.   So now I’m including on this short list all kinds of PTSD and much drug use.  There may or may not be self-awareness of what has happened, no perceived ability to change back to a former self or a future addiction-free state, except through great suffering, like opiod withdrawal.  

I’m speaking from observation and testimony, not my own experience, in the way the first aboriginal people assigned an interpreter, who were often women living at crossroads.  The tribal lives were not lesser, but different; not better or worse, but different.  Those whose brain nodes-of-assumptions (I mean literal neuron sorting centers) have been deeply changed will try to avoid explaining and probably couldn’t if they tried.  The inside/outside boundary cannot be breached except by those very few who can go back and forth.  It is a shaman’s journey and humbling.

My copy of “Love in the Western World” by de Rougement is second-hand (Princeton, ’83).  Ch. 8, “The Love of Love,” has been previously underlined almost throughout.  None of the other chapters are marked except for one sentence in the next chapter: “The Love of Death.”  “. . .the lovers’ secret -- that they are seeking peril for its own sake.  But so long as the peril comes from without, Tristan’s prowess in overcoming it is an affirmation of life.”

The original tale is far more elaborate than we are used to knowing, with many partings and reunions, many struggles to give each other up, many ordeals.  De Rougement is worth quoting.  P. 39 in my paperback.  :  “They are thus in a thrillingly contradictory position.  They love, but not one another.  They have sinned, but cannot repent; for they are not to blame.  They make confession, but wish neither to reform nor even to beg forgiveness.  Actually, then, like all other great lovers, they imagine that they have been ravished ‘beyond good and evil’ into a kind of transcendental state outside ordinary human experience, into an ineffable absolute irreconcilable with the world, but that they feel to be more real than the world.” 

This is a condition of the instrument, not that which is measured.  The sensory interface with the world becomes engraved on the lens of the observer, so that nothing else matters or can be accurately perceived.  But in addition there is always an over-chord of transcendence, a feeling that there must be something mystical going on.  As I write, the radio is suddenly playing Wagner.

Still, we are bodies, embraceable and sometimes singing.  We age.  Unexpectedly I found this quote from a David Brooks conversation with Gail Collins entitled “How to be Old.” “Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner and Cézanne, peaked in their elderly years. These artists shared what he called:  A sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism; a mistrust of reason, a belief in instinct.”  And yet a wish to help others. 

In fact, fascination/obsession/addiction to these issues comes through a felt intimacy (as ill-fated as that of Tristan and Iseult and not at all physical) that holds attention, which is the craved state, but equally strong is fear of entrapment and that’s true on the other end as well, a tie between two people.  It’s not dependent on writing except that print can be the body of the connection. 

De Rougemont gives much attention to the END of this relationship between Tristan and Iseult.  Contemporary derivations emphasize eternal love, endlessness. “love beyond death.”  This seems to come from Christianity and its roots, not as universally transcendent as those sources would claim.  Compared to Buddhism, it seems to me shallow.  Compared to awareness of simple embeddedness in the natural world, it seems to me unnecessary.

Chapter 11, “Unhappy Mutual Love” addresses suffering.  (The previous owner of the book has now begun dog-earing pages.  One could easily write a short story playing that reader against this reader against the text.)  De Rougement proposes (p. 51) these alternatives:  “According to the sturdiness of our spirit, this unhappiness may be the ‘delightful sadness’ and spleen of nineteenth-century decadence, a transfiguring torment, or a challenge which the mind flings down to the world.”  They are not mutually exclusive.  

In spite of the emphasis on transcendence evoked or even forced by the inescapable dilemma, religion is not the solution -- it is an example.  Particularly the ones that premise an anthro-theos can only harden the dilemma of unrequited love locking one into addiction to one’s own brain template.

De Rougement claims in the Freudian way that this is all rooted in a yearning for death.  I think this is pretty much a distraction since we all die anyway.  If you want death, all you have to do is to wait.  Maybe be a little careless.  Live in the wrong place.  Have passionate encounters with the wrong people -- or, worse, passionless transactions with the wrong people.  But since the whole assurance of Christian and Islamic traditions is that obedience will earn eternal life, maybe yearning for death is simply a Celtic assertion of belonging to oneself and one's own body -- not some system imported from the Middle East.

Once one realizes the inevitability of death, then the issue moves to how to be most alive in the time allotted.  One of the figures not often considered in the Tristan and Iseult tale is the “Morholt” which is a kind of Minotaur figure that demands the sacrifice of youths.  Youth is much admired by older persons (in spite of their willingness to sacrifice them) but despised by those still in that state.  The young are still death-deniers, still susceptible to the love-potions, still on the surface of their mind formation.  Therefore they are vulnerable to ill-use, addiction without wisdom, and resistance to the culture that could have supported them.  Tristan slays the Morholt -- then discovers that the creature is Iseult’s brother.  (Remember the giant albino in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy?)

The whole point of King Mark’s marriage to Iseult the Fair is to produce heirs for his kingdom.  Genetic succession keeps order and might even assure quality.  Tristan and Iseult prevent the creation of children, a new generation.  This could destroy the whole nation.  Even Tristan’s legal marriage to Iseult of the Fair Hands is never consummated and therefore produces no rival children, which preserves the community.  The lovers have taken themselves out of the standing order without creating something new except for ideas, story.

SO WHAT'S WRONG WITH A NICE POTTED NARCISSUS?

Nice flower.  But why put up with a human grandiose narcissist?  They insult you, confine you, never pay attention to who you are, take whatever you have and demand more, and generally spread chaos and pain.  But the best ones -- which probably means the more grandiose ones -- are worth it because THEY GET THINGS DONE.  You can name them as well as I can.  The religious ones: Jesus and Luther.  The military ones:  Napoleon and Chief Joseph.  The literary ones:  Norman Mailer and Phillip Roth.  The saints:  Mother Teresa and Gandhi.   The artists: Picasso and Pollock.  There must be a zillion sweet old grandpas out there and we do appreciate them, esp. if they are related, but they aren’t famous and they may not have accomplished a whole lot, unless you count putting food on the table and fixing your bicycle.

Besides, dealing with a grandiose narcissist all the time makes you tough and smart.  You learn to keep your center clean and your dukes up, draw lines in the sand, enforce them, and face the possibility of being abandoned.  That’s good for you.  Don’t slide into being a mushy pushover enabler and don’t confuse hormonal sex/lust with the psych dynamics of what’s going on.  These are good rules for life in general.  The wives of both Picasso and Pollock were accomplished artists themselves, tough enough to have their own careers.

Often a narcissist will come up with a great idea that turns out to have been lifted off you.  So?  The point is to do something with the idea. Peter Matthiessen got Buddhism from his wife, and after her death it became “The Snow Leopard,” dedicated to her in a profound way.  (If you want to know about his narcissism, read his wife’s book, “Annaghkeen.”  She was a very fine poet, Deborah Love.)  If you MUST get involved with a narcissist, it helps a great deal if they have a robust sense of humor.  And you, too.  And a narcissist who wants to escape the condition is more likely to have success with Zen than Christianity.

If the narcissist has all the ego, don’t live by ego.  Live by results for the greater good.  It’s the same human dilemma as always: survival of individual versus survival of community.   Isn’t that why we even care about the people I listed above?  Sometimes what gives the individual survival spins off and deepens into the redemption of a community.   Narcissists don’t care about their communities except to use them, but that’s because they’re out in front.  They don’t take votes.  They don’t have time for democracy.  It’s a matter of expectations.  I read the complaints in internet essays and see they are mostly women who expected to be mothered, mentored, and sexually thrilled.  Get rid of the expectations, take what comes, learn from it, and the problem disappears.

Plains Indian ghost shirt

http://bestofthewestauctions.com//dynapage/IP1775.htm  est. value $3,500.

Being a grandiose narcissist is like wearing a Plains Indian ghost shirt, which is only painted muslin.  The garment is supposed to prevent any bullet or arrow from penetrating.  If it doesn’t work, you won’t live to complain.  If you continue to live, owning it, and are buried wearing it, then unless your grave is secret, people will dig you back up again in order to steal it because its reputation is so major, worth thousands. (see above)  While one is engaged in battle, its real function is the confidence and distinction that powers success.  It is a cold fusion source of energy, quietly working internally, compressing energy that can convert to explosion.

Never put up with domestic violence.  Fists, guns, knives, or threats -- that’s the end.  Clear out.  Do not raise children with anyone who is a grandiose narcissist unless you can protect them.  I mean both children and narcissist.  A wounded narcissist with the grandiosity leaked out should not be witnessed by children or anyone else who loves him or her, unless they are prepared to look honestly at the person unshelled, which could easily break your heart.   Awkwardly, you can’t really explain a grandiose narcissist and claim you’ve been in a relationship with one, even a close friendship, without sounding like one yourself.  If it’s the truth, there’s no problem.  

Incompetent, impotent, childish, abusive grandiose narcissists are a different story.  None of the above applies to them at all.  They are pests, inflations, and a hazard to polite society.  Their misguided attempts to grab center stage are a disaster.  These are the people who give narcissism a bad name.  The point of the narcissus myth is that he was beautiful, worth looking at, but got hooked by obsession.  “You narcissist!” is often a epithet flung at people who are simply deluded, off purpose, not listening, acting in obstructive ways.  That’s not what this little reflection is about.  Too often a psychological descriptive term becomes a whip to lash people into line, making a stigma out of an observation.  That takes away all the usefulness of the term.

This is the point in my essay where I read back over everything I’ve said and look at the other side and say this previous might not be right at all -- might just be a load of hooey -- and all the people who have been sitting there taking notes and nodding will be VERY angry because they think that people who speak confidently on a topic really know what they’re talking about.  They think life is like school.  It’s not.  (Our seminary dean used to say school IS a form of life, but he didn’t know any other.  All I can say is that it’s narcissism-based and at any seminary it’s also grandiose, rarely a contribution to society or even known to anyone outside a small circle.)  A strong assertion is a merely a rhetorical device.

The most insidious grandiose narcissism is believing that you can fix things, that you know what things should be like and you have the power to make it so.  This is the case with most enablers.  Children are often enablers of this type, desperately trying to fix their parents whether the problem is a bad relationship or alcoholism or a culturally imposed distortion, maybe due to something suprahuman like famine or flood or war.  The pattern may stay with them for life.  Some parents encourage it in their children, urging even very young boys to think of themselves as the “little man of the family,” even when the situation is beyond the powers of an adult father.

At the other extreme are the people who are so convinced that narcissism is a form of evil they will pounce hard on all signs of pride or mentions of accomplishment.  They seem to think it is vanity, a sin, and possibly lying or at least exaggeration which is also a corruption.  So it’s a double bind -- being pressed to achieve beyond your capacities and then being slapped when you take pride in exceeding expectations.  Cultures are laden with little traps like that.  Some people are very good at setting them up.

Many human characteristics do not meet with approval from the counseling community and yet are the ferment and tearing-apart that moves human beings as both individuals and groups toward some place we’ll recognize only when we get there.  Fifty years after the rhetorical assertions of the big shot shrinks will be discredited.  And you may have changed your mind about your life anyway.  Or your descendants will.

STRACHAN

The young man in the middle of the back row is Sam Strachan.

My birth family has suddenly acquired an interested historian, Elliott Hanowski, who is exploring prairie culture on both sides of the 49^th parallel, specifically what I’ve always called “prairie humanism” but he calls “rationalist, humanist thought.”  Basically it is the gradual forming of what many saw as a structure something like conventional religion but outside it.  Partly it came from Darwin’s theory of evolution enlivened by an agriculture base interested in improving species vegetable, animal and human; Biblical exegesis and archeological investigation of the Holy Lands; growing industrial power on the prairies where railroads, combines, dams and grain elevators could seemingly control the environment; and Marxist politics that recommended community over individual capitalism and wealth in practical material culture rather than capitalism.  Hanowski found Sam and Beulah Strachan on the membership rolls in Winnipeg.

Christian thought-structures persisted as what some call “Civil Religion,” not meaning “polite” but citizen/government based.  Homesteading land was newly available only by the clearance of the indigenous people, but the early Euro settlers evidently had no awareness that the Highland Clearances were the pattern.  They could see the necessity of governance, law and order, but cherished an abiding bitter resentment of lords and kings.  Inside that opposition was a yearning for middle-class prosperity, enough to guarantee safety for families.  That meant science and the invention of cooperatives for the pooling of wheat, and the founding of schools at every level.  It also supported the new industrialism, even the exploitation of land resources.  In such a broad landscape, shortages didn’t seem possible.  Heaven was simply stars, but an infinity of them.

Newly turned sod carried accumulated fertility so the crops leapt out of the ground.  But then came weeds on the wind and a need for their removal.  Into this environment entered my family, or at least the Strachan thread, who achieved a little prosperity through the assembling and marketing of the Kovar Krabgrass Cultivator.  This success was dispersed by tightening national policies: a tariff on the machine parts imported from the United States, and would have ended anyway with the invention of herbicides.

The name Strachan emerges from a place phrase:  “strath au cairn” -- the river of rocks.  In ancient times those stones were used to build a fortification at the top of a hill, which was later dismantled to build a bridge.  Nice symbolism.  The name is not so unusual in Canada as it seems to be in the United States, though my father once went to investigate a possible relative, a musician, who turned out to be a black descendent of West Indies slaves owned by Strachans.

The Clan Strachan has recently reconvened itself out of the diaspora and takes a keen interest in the next king of Scotland.  Those in my family who still feel attached to our roots have been traveling to see Strachan for themselves.  In actual fact, our grandfather’s birth family came from Kilmarnock, not at all near Strachan, and probably emigrated to America because the coal and carpet businesses there were in a state of recession.  Archibald, my great-grandfather was a finish carpenter, but longed to own land.

The following remarks were a response by Scott Maclean, my cousin, to Hanowski’s inquiry about how to pronounce the name.

“Pronunciation of "Strachan" varies considerably across the family, which I find unusual.  Usually folks are very insistent about the pronunciation of their names, even mildly irked when people get it wrong.  I confess it grates on my nerves when people pronounce my last name "Mc-Cleen" rather than "McLane" as any good Canadian knows.  So it's a matter of curiosity to me as to why the pronunciation of "Strachan" in this family diverged.  

“Of the families of the children of Sam and Beulah Strachan: Bruce, Glenn, May and Seth, I have heard multiple pronunciations.  Now that we have representatives of all these branches of the family except Seth's in the conversation, they can speak for themselves.  

This is what my ear hears:

- In the family of Bruce and Lucy Strachan, I don't know how they pronounced it. Mary will have to fill us in.  [Strahn, close to Strawn.  mhs]

- In the family of Glenn and Elsie Strachan, I have heard cousin Ross pronounce it "Strawn".

- In the family of Murdock and May Strachan McLean, it was pronounced STRA-han (both "a's" soft, as in "bath").

- I have heard members of Seth Strachan's family pronounce it "STRAY-han" (2nd "a" soft).  [This is because Seth was a TWA pilot who flew the Pacific where English was often a second language.  He was asked to use this pronunciation so it wouldn’t get confused with Strong.  mhs]

- My mother May used to occasionally pronounce it as with a Scottish brogue: STROCK-un, with a rolled "r" and gutteral "CK".

- While visiting the town of Strachan in Scotland last summer (site of historic clan lands), I asked a local resident how he pronounced it, and he said "Strawn". 

- I don't know how Sam and Beulah pronounced it.  [Me, neither.  mhs]

Everything evolves, responding to the context.  So Sam and Beulah Strachan, both former school teachers and feeling the limits of their South Dakota homestead, took advice in the form of booklets and pamphlets and answered the call of Canada to populate the northern prairies.  They went to Swan River, Manitoba, where Sam fed the family in part by laboring on the creation of roads, fortified by moose meat.  

Sam Strachan is the man on the left.

Eventually the Kovar business moved them to Brandon in a surge of prosperity that ended with the tariff.  Worsening health -- and the need for ever more possibility for the now adult children who had been educated in Winnipeg during the prosperous years -- meant a move to Oregon.

They arrived in Portland just as the Depression hit.  Even with a pocket of money, things spiraled down.  The planned conversion from Kovar Kultivator to the Kozy Kamp tent trailer was the victim of rationing: tires, gas, steel.  After 1945 the industrial and chemical revolutions that had fueled the war were pushed aside, so now it was Rodale and his ideas of organic and sustainable gardens that sustained the aging Strachans, who still maintained an acre of garden and still sat by the radio in the evening listening to political talks.  One afternoon Sam lay down for a nap and never rose again.  Beulah went to her daughter for her last two years.  The war had opened doors for Doc to start a career in drafting and a bit of speculative building, enough prosperity to build a house on a hillside with an apartment in the basement.  My own family stayed in place.  The Glenn Strachans held their own in Santa Ana, CA.  Seth’s family grew prosperous in Kansas City, the base for TWA.

The values of these people: family, education, community solidarity, economic equity, industrial ingenuity, and attachment to the land itself have persisted until they re-emerge in my thought and writing.  Population limitation and respect for all peoples reinforced the habits of respectable prosperity.  (Beulah’s brother, Orra Finney, was afflicted by PTSD as a result of fighting in the Philippines and died of alcoholism.  She therefore became a lifelong vigorous member of the WCTU.)  They saw no need to reject Christianity, but simply developed their parallel beliefs which didn’t clash with the community faith of country neighbors.  My father was the exception, looking for more, occasionally attending the Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon.

Now the name “Strachan” leaps to my eye from a lot of sources, often Australian.  Literary characters as well as real people carry the name.  They are often bookish, sometimes lawyers.  Only occasionally is there a disgraced politician or renegade.  There is a motto and crest.  The motto is "non timeo, sed caveo."   Not timid, but cautious.

INDIANS AND VIDEO

Indigenous peoples on these continents are like babies in the following way:  people take a passionate and invested interest in babies in utero, but then wander off after the birth even if the babies are starving, unsheltered and unloved.  Likewise, the Indian of the past is cherished and protected, but once they are modern, educated, employed, and walking around, those same idealistic people lose interest.  Indeed, they don’t even recognize the indigenous anymore.  If a story about alcoholism or bad housing is on TV, they say,  “Oh, it’s so depressing.”  That’s because the media loves to picture the downside.  And they need something people can see, because the real problems of the modern reservation Indian are so deep and complex, so drowned in bureaucracy, that most people get their brains tied in knots -- even the Indians themselves.

Out of necessity the indigenous have developed a whole strata of helpers from their own gene base and now they use video to tell their own stories to each other:  how to do things, ways to educate, ideas for controlling addictions and illness.  Here’s an example that I’m listing because this source posts trailers for each of their films and even watching the series of trailers -- each five minutes or so -- is enlightening.  We need a variety of images in our minds -- not just Johnny Depp with a bird on his head.  (Among my mag clips is an old man with white braids in an elegant tuxedo to counter all the naked boys on pintos.)

From: <richard@firstnationsfilms.com>

Date: July 7, 2013

Subject: ANN: First Nations Educational Resources

FIRST NATIONS FILMS distributes and creates award-winning television

Aboriginal documentary films and videos *for, by and about* First Nations

people. Our exclusive educational native programs are shared with schools,

universities, libraries, organizations and other groups and institutions

throughout the world. Please visit our website for a complete list and

video highlights from each film.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

richard@firstnationsfilms.com      or      www.firstnationsfilms.com

At another extreme are videos meant to break down the division between Glacier National Park and Blackfeet kids by collaborating to make vids about the park.   http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL88JUG3-3KEVKNUVsPzMA9ZPcLXx4Sipy   First they had to teach rangers the basic skills, then the kids.  Some of the rangers had experience and contributed their own archived videos.  They had some fancy software to use.

From Alkali Lake

IMAGE is the name of the game when it comes to video made by whites about Indians or by Indians for whites.  But when the task is Indian-to-Indian, things get more serious.  When I was teaching at Heart Butte, which makes it 1990, there was a video -- in those days tape in a cassette -- called Alkali Lake.  http://www.4worlds.org/4w/ssr/Partiv.htm  At this url is an intelligent discussion of the video on other tribal peoples.  I saw it.  The tape the kids had and brought to school (this was not “official” as they were pretty deep into denial) was a copy of a copy of a copy and nearly worn out, but they watched it with the kind of rapt attention any teacher would love.

About the same time some Hollywood hustlers filmed locally “Warparty,” a sensational teen film about a re-enactment of a massacre that turns real.  This introduced the Blackfeet to Rodney Grant impersonating a “two-spirit” person attached to a military man -- not one of his nobler roles.  The movie was pretentious, influenced by Japanese martial film in which it is noble to die, and informed by faux French theory about the nature of reality.  First viewing:  Wow.  Fifth showing:  Duh.  By that time people were saying,  “Look!  There’s my grandmother’s table they borrowed and never returned!”

As I write it's the first day of North American Indian Days in Browning.  Lodges and tents will be going up, but also many RV’s will pull in.  This ceremony, once particular to the Blackfeet and timed by the then-superintendent to be after haying, is now an event of the Pan Indian tribe and draws in people all the way from South America.  (The Blackfeet are a Two Nation tribe, since the 49^th parallel plowed through their lands like a freeway bisecting a ranch.)  There’s a big new hotel nearby and the rodeo grounds have been restored for several years.  Sometimes there is a rock concert.  

The videos will be many and some of them will be made on smart phones, though infrastructure support here is pretty iffy.  Some years there are professional crews on hand.  Once it was Scientology with Tom Cruise in the tent to schmooze Indians.  One of the local Blackfeet gave him an elegant and valuable beaded vest and was thanked.  But Cruise didn’t seem to realize there was an obligation to respond.  He’s never been seen wearing the vest.  Scientology was not there to learn Blackfeet ways.

I probably won’t attend.  The Indian Days in my head can’t be video-taped.  In those days the campgrounds were just dirt and grass -- and a field of debris afterwards that the city prisoners (who had contributed by drinking their way through the days, leaving bottles and cans) cleaned up while they worked off their hangovers.  Nowadays the campground is fenced, policed, provided with enough portapotties, and furnished with a big stickgame hall and concrete picnic tables.  I was telling a young Indian clerk in a nearby Big Box store about how funny it was when some ground squirrel, who had dug his home on what had seemed an innocent field, suddenly popped up inside a lodge between the robes on the ground.  Her reaction was:  “That’s disgusting.”  So there’s your irony:  the white woman looks for the primitive and the indigenous woman prefers civilization.  No surprise.

What outsiders might not see is that what was once local and particular is now as universal and basic as a carnival, which it partly is.  The booths selling “Indian” jewelry, t-shirts with Sitting Bull’s face, dayglo-dyed goose down and faux eagle feathers made from domestic turkey tailfeathers, dream-catchers and frybread -- they’re all fun.  Some years the rides come and other years they’re booked elsewhere.  Recently the “buffalo jumps” have arrived for kids.

Indian Days 1962

In the old days the theme was authenticity with prizes for most authentic lodge interiors.  The grandparents then were born in 1880 and whatever had survived in their trunks came out for an airing.  We all knew each other by name and the center of the dance area held a big bonfire.  Of course, the dancing raised a cloud of dust and there was no shade unless you brought an umbrella. 

If I had an video camera that could show you memories, I would post a closing owl dance on the last night, very late when everyone was exhausted and singing voices were raw.  The people made a circle with arms around each other and spectators were pulled in for a slow stately gyre -- the Great Wheel enacted under the wheeling stars.  

Every dynamic group includes three parts:  the edge that wants to go forward (hope), the longing lagging part that wants to go back (memory), and the middle which is what most people see.  The international pow-wow system includes all three parts.  In the 1960’s the people wanted to go back to the buffalo days.  In the 2010’s the front edge moves towards solidarity, trying to find a political stance that will let them still be Indians.  In the middle are All Kinds, now equipped with video cameras.

WHAT MOGGIES GET UP TO!

A reasonable facsimile of "Squibbie"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567526

This ingenious website above shows vividly the results of using wildlife tracking techniques (attached GPS and mini-cams) to see where cats go and what they do, as well as what they encounter from moths to foxes to each other.  Alan Beck made major breakthroughs in understanding urban dog packs by using wolf tracking techniques on dogs, though he didn’t have this miniature equipment to work with.  Sometimes the closest things to us -- like our families! -- are the creatures we know least about.  Cats weren’t all that surprising except that everyone was startled by their predator dimension.  Those who care react in the usual polarized way when anything about cats comes up.  Some seized on the info as an immediate reason to kill all cats.  Others were intrigued and gratified to know what goes on.    

The village of cats was in the county of Surrey, England, where mutt cats are called “moggies,” parallel to mutt dogs.  But someone, quoting what she called “the madhouse that is Wikipedia,” sent in this answer to a Yahoo Answers website:  “The origin of the word moggy is not a corruption of the word 'mongrel', as many believe. It was first recorded in 1911, and was possibly derived from maggie, margie or mog, all short forms of the female name Margaret. It is thought this was first used to describe an ungainly lumbering old cow, and it may even have been a minor rural English name for any cow; since 'moggy' was used in several 1800s English dialects as an 'affectionate name' for a cow. As rural people flocked to the cities during the latter part of the Industrial Revolution, it seems likely that the cow moggy became maggie, applied as a term of abuse for a dishevelled old woman or older prostitute. The word is often used in the North of England to apply to a female cat.”

My two formerly-female cats are old, fat, and devoted to naps. In their youth they did a little exploring but not a lot, partly because of Caspar, the big white cat across the street who in the years that this house was unoccupied had come to believe this was HER house.  When Squibs and Crackers were little, they got beaten up repeatedly until they learned Caspar’s schedule and avoided it.  When I intervened, Caspar offered to kneecap me, one menacing paw cocked and ready to swipe, until I began to carry a switch.  We finally reached a standoff.

Lately the problem has recurred because of a feral queen (the term for a fertile female cat) who dresses like a Supreme Court judge (black gown, little white fichu) and imposed her rules with tooth and claw.  A few days ago she attacked Squibs.  There’s a cat flap which Squibbie managed to get halfway through before discovering the fatal flaw of the escape route:  it left her rear end undefended for a few seconds.  The Black Queen bit her back legs bad enough to immobilize Squibbie for days.  Technically the Supreme Queen may not be a feral cat but rather a flatly “wild” cat that has never been a pet.  (Feral means once domestic, but then gone wild.)

Enough is enough so I ordered a live trap, assembled it, baited it, and set it in the back garage with the door open.  That evening there was a snap, a lot of thrashing and squalling, but when I went out to see:  no cat.  Must‘ve been a little ways out or backed out fast.  Maybe the latch didn’t catch.  Anyway, the result was that there’s been no sign of the Black Queen for a week.  This suits me,  since it relieves me of the problem of what to do with the cat.  There’s a second queen, a neat little white cat with colored stripe-patches, but she doesn’t make trouble.  If I catch her, I’ll just set her free.  I suspect she “belongs” to someone.

So for now the trap is wired open while I continue to bait it.  On the wire bottom I put newspaper that my cats had slept on, so it would smell like a good cat place.  If the Supreme Black Queen comes back, I’ll use extra good bait and make sure the latch is loose.  I notice that cats like to use an established cat nest or, in the case of my cats, either of my reading chairs.  I finally got a third chair so I’d have a place to sit.  It’s a strange weather year -- much wetter and cooler than usual -- and the Baptist church is being sided where it faces me, so even Caspar has not been using her fav places in the “cat jungle,” which is the tangle of brush and suckers around what used to be a wild plum tree.  

The back garage has a hole so that cats can catch mice.  A year ago the Black Queen had a winter batch of kittens in there, which I didn’t know until I found the remains of one in late spring when I cleared out a lot of stuff.  By then it was only a flat patch of yellow fur.  If I leave the rolling door up so that the interior is exposed, cats clear out. 

Just now I built myself a new flat screen TV stand out of scrap wood and when I rolled out the armoire that used to hold the big old-fashioned TV, there was a little black smudge that didn’t look like the usual dust bunny.  I wiped it up with a paper towel and then smoothed the paper out on a table to see what it was.  This mouse skull was in the tiny debris, complete with a maggot husk.

I warned the town office that I was setting a trap.  I know they get constant complaints about feral cats but also a steady stream of complaints that someone is shooting or poisoning cats.  In a rural community with a lot of older folks retired off farms, cats are not necessarily pets.  They are relentless about dogs, too, but more likely to be aware that they probably belong to someone and red-neck someones are likely to be more attached to their dog than to their wife.  You may remember the saga of the Lady Princess, the feral dog who was raising puppies under a derelict trailer.

When I reported my trapping failure at the town council meeting, I got an earful of stories about feral cats.  The village is small enough that people know individuals and sometimes have given them names.  One person finally closed up her cat flap to keep out a formidable feline home invader who even drove her dog off the front porch.  None had discovered a feral “cat” that was actually a baby raccoon as I did once.  

For a while the theory on trapped cats was that they should be spayed or neutered and then returned to occupy their niche, but that idea seems to be fading now.  Anyway, the niche this cat wants is already occupied.  I’m defending the territory.  After all, I’m the head moggie here.

THE CHEVALIER AND THE FEUDAL KING

Underneath the seemingly unaccountable changes in the way the world unfolds over the centuries are forces that either cause or are caused by war, famine, weather, new inventions and so on.  The issue of human survival always hinges between two kinds of survival:  individual and group.  Sometimes the chances of surviving are much better for the individual and sometimes for the group, but they are highly interdependent.  Since individuals are often protected as well as identified by their group affiliation and since groups survive by the willing allegiance of many individuals, stories about how to reconcile and honor both the triumphs and the sacrifices are always in the air, partly to control what will happen and partly to justify what has already happened.

Denis de Rougemont in his classic book, “Love in the Western World,” reckons that “Tristan and Iseult” is an example of the code of individual behavior that grew out of the Crusades, to keep the discipline and allegiance of “chevaliers” (horseback riders) attached to the folks back home, but sometimes in conflict with the preceding idea of “feudalism,” which meant that power came through the acceptance that a particular patch of land “belonged” to kings (backed up by God, of course) who could control and dispose of everyone who lived there and the assets they created through their work.  The kings in the time period of Tristan used their wealth to underwrite the knights or chevaliers who were assumed to act with great loyalty and dedication in the king’s interests.  So King Mark more or less “owned” Tristan, in the same way that God “owned” the believers:  through an intense idea of faith and obligation.  The King “was” the nation and to betray the king was to betray the country. 

The Romantic idea of an individual falling in love amounted to a heresy.  Adultery was treason.  And once those chevaliers had ridden their horses off to the Holy Land, seeing all sorts of things along the way and relying on their individual wits -- or at least a buddy group -- to survive in unknown territory -- well, once they’ve seen Paree (or Jeroo), how do you keep them back on the farm?  And how do you keep them from figuring out, -- like a horse who realizes that a bit only controls his mouth and that he’s much bigger and more powerful than his rider -- that there are larger forces than a king?  At that point one still believes in God -- or not.  The same with the women left behind or used as a trading token.

A knight, unlike a horse, knows he can be seriously injured or killed.  Healing is a high value in combat, and so the code of fealty can be overcome if the injury is grievous enough.  Tristan is as good as dead when he is set adrift in a boat, unconscious.  It is not his choice to be washed up on the shore of Ireland where a princess, Iseult, has the skills to save him and does, compassion overcoming caution.  He’s not deliberately betraying his king by being healed, but it puts him in tension between his individual survival and the survival of King Mark, which will be much enhanced by marriage to Iseult through Tristan’s efforts.

De Rougement says (p. 19 in my paperback)”  “I propose to consider Tristan, not as a piece of literature, but as typical of the relations between man and woman in a particular historical group -- the dominant social caste, the courtly society, saturated with chivalry, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  The group in question was indeed long ago dissolved.  Yet its laws remain our laws in an unsuspected and diluted form.  Profaned and repudiated by our official legal codes, these laws have become the more compelling in that they wield no power over us except in our dreams.”

I would broaden that out even more.  In a denomination grouped only by the affinities of the congregation members (weakening as the generations thin out), the representative of the whole is the denominational headquarters -- the Pope in the instance of the Roman Catholics.  Then the priests become the chevaliers, risen to knighthood on the horse of ordination.  If their code is strong, they can be crusaders as well as protectors.  If it is weak, the whole institution turns rotten.

The Roman Catholic church still runs by feudal rules, but no longer has the land that would make it a nation except in scattered patches all over the planet.  It is a “virtual” nation with much wealth which comes from the allegiance of its people.  It is a corporation which is less like a person (as is the legal convention, as though institutions could be their own king) and more of a landless nation.  If it cannot protect the members from disease (whether physical or moral) then it is going to rot from within.  And so will the United States which also collects taxes in the feudal way -- though adding representatives of the people whose duty is to keep the faith, and to limit authority by mapped boundaries.  Feudalism died because of abuse by those in power and so can religious institutions or governing institutions.

The consequences to any “nation”  that does not preserve the health of the constituents is a rise in the felt need of individuals to take matters into their own hands, whether it is a formal and land-based country, provoking demonstrations, or a family in which the adults do not act to protect their children, obliging them to rebel or run away.  When it appears that the whole planet is grievously wounded and infected, then God is discredited and we look for a mystical Irish healing woman, an Iseult.  But there are false Iseults, like the one Tristan marries to please King Mark, and she moves under a black sail.

This is a wildly simplified and possibly distorted understanding of what de Rougemont is saying and I haven’t even finished reading the book yet, but I think it is a useful formula for interpreting some very confusing dynamics.  The question is “what should an individual do to preserve his or her community?”  (Assuming one has found a community.)  Then, in reciprocity, what is the community doing to protect its members?  The US claims it can find a unity in plurality through the protection of rights and the prevention of oppression.  But if we get scared enough, that falls apart.  They call in the Chevaliers, the Samurai, and the Predator drones to force authority.

We are waiting to see what all these horsemen of the keyboard can manage.  Will leaking information and revealing corporation disguises return faith to the people?  Or will it destroy order ?  Shouldn’t we be looking for something we can all believe in the way we used to believe in God?  Or is the individual hacker saving us all?

Science, which can amount to a religion, recommends the planet as something we can believe in, the ultimate human group.  (Forget about the rocket riders who go on Crusades to the stars.)  But we are demanding that science heal us.  In the end everyone will die -- the question is what will you live for in the meantime?  Your own right to do what you like, or the honor of your country, or the good of life on this planet, or some virtual world that may or may not really exist?  (Are all those virgins a reward or a problem?)  De Rougement says it doesn’t really matter whether the emphasis is on individual or group -- the thing that counts is making the story go on and on -- now this way and now that way.  It is Scheherazade who knows.  It is the story that survives when all else is gone.

THE SADDER BUT WISER WOMAN

Since I passed into middle age, which roughly corresponded with me assuming the professional role of a minister, I have accepted friendship from men my age or slightly younger who aspire to success as authors.  They assume that since I write but am only a woman and therefore not a competitor, I will help them.  I haven’t looked for them or expected them, but they’re mostly welcome if they act as equals and don’t assume I’m more than I am.  There’s only been one who was a far better writer than I am.  I learned a lot.

So I say (quite honestly) I’m a tubby, scruffy, aging, low-income woman who lives in a decrepit house in a small village next to a reservation, whose respect for teaching is gone, whose five years in animal control were a watershed, who is not nearly institutional enough to be a minister, and who now just wants to write -- to hell with publishing, to hell with being an expert, to hell with everything except running words through my keyboard as though they were silk, with an occasional section of twine or steel chain.  Or thread.  Never a space where there are no words.  A concert pianist told me that if he stops practicing daily, his hands crave the keyboard.  Like that.

Some don’t get it, never get TO that.  They want the cowboy hat without those pesky smelly cattle.  Sometimes they are hoping that I might know how to go about achieving a higher consciousness.  Something beyond classes, reading books.  They never think of looking at their own lives.  They never count their ghostly sacred cows.  They never do their 100,000 hours of practice.  That’s okay.  I no longer feel any impulse to guide or teach or save them.  So I flip ‘em off.  Most just wander away at that point.

There’s another reaction, often from those of whom I have become fond, but without sexual content.  They want me to be more of a success, to wear a fur coat instead of an old cloth parka, to have a CEO job, to write a best-seller book, and to be an all-around glamorous creature.  Even Bob Scriver had that impulse which was more legitimate (and sexy) since we were married.  Part of that is to be the carrier of the husband’s status, visibly demonstrating that he can attract a high status woman.  That was understandable but mostly just irritating until his former sister-in-law showed up: so petite, so French, so high-heeled, such skillful maquillage -- such glamour.  TOTALLY unable to live in Browning, to work in a chaotic shop, or to live on a budget.  The code of the mistress, not the partner wife.  

Men with tough moms who survived in a hostile world, with the help of family but without the inseminator, insist that their sons pull their own weight and the sons do.  But these moms never express “need” for their sons, never use weakness to manipulate them, never yearn to guarantee their own value in the world by being someone’s mother.  They rarely need rescuing -- if ever.  In fact, the mom sometimes rescues her child.

My mother was a little like that; she didn’t make any demands on her sons, but on me, her only daughter.  Maybe that’s why I don’t like the pattern.  She expected me to achieve, but not to be better than she was.  In fact, my aspirations to ministry or writing were labeled selfishness and being too big for my britches.  We were women who wore britches, so men could soar.  Enablers.  But the men were the ones supposed to be brilliant, even if they neither protected nor provided.  If there’s not even sex, where’s the reward?

The issue is ALWAYS fundamentally survival.  Success is a strategy for survival and culture status is a definition of success.  I call this into question because I lived through the success arc as a “secondary,” a Tonto/Sancho Panza/Pancho/Bat Boy, in the Sixties.  Does that really work?   Does it justify my present attitude, which is “sod success”?  

Someone has said that an artist has about a decade of truly productive and growing “upward” trajectory.  After that, with luck, things level off.  With bad luck, the arc turns down, sometimes quite suddenly.   The Icarus template.  I joined Bob as his success was just arriving, rose high until the success began to tear him apart physically and emotionally, and then a short slant down with many opportunists riding his back -- not his coattails.  They wanted barebacking.  They wanted blood.  By then he had thrown me off. 

But I had my reward.  He said that instead of him paying me alimony I ought to be paying him tuition, and he was right.  But I WAS paying as I learned.  The customers had become more important and therefore more demanding, more competitive, less able to appreciate the art work for what it was.  The guys (rarely women and never the guys who worked in the shop and foundry) kicked me out of the way, yet Bob depended on me to be the independent witness who could tell him honestly what was going on.  Except now he didn’t want to hear it.  I have to fight against repeating this cycle.  It’s in both the culture and myself.

I threw in my cards.

There is an archetype, confused, maybe Jungian, that persists.  Belinda, the good witch in Oz; the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio; the mother in “A.I.”  Some will say the Virgin Mary.  Many women aspire to inhabit that model of tender compassion.  We should not discard it nor belittle it.  Either a wife or a mistress can act this out -- but not the woman who wants a separate life.  If she goes against her inner forces, maybe she could take oxytocin pills, but more likely oxycontin.  One needs to be a little supernatural, or at least highly spiritual.

It’s not fair or human to make this role seem unworthy or evil.  Too many of us need Echo, Ariadne, Eurydice, and Kuan Yin. Some theorize that this is a deeply constructed image of the young mother who comforts, feeds, sings us to sleep, and then is lost to time.  She is unattainable, like a mermaid or a nymph who becomes a tree.  I’ve always been intrigued by “Vera” a character in the Prime Suspect series 3 (the one about rent boys) played brilliantly by Peter Capaldi.  He’s not just a female impersonator but an “embodiment” of heartbroken compassion.  There must be men who are figures of male solace.  Of course, Biblical angels are always male.  But they can’t be homosexual if the other party is not human, can they?  And surely an angel is not a beast, despite the wings.

The artist's name is Gorgidas.  www.redbubble.com

Chivalry and courtly love are lost in recent times.  (We would do better to discard the Furies.  We try.)  So now I’m beginning to read Denis de Rougemont’s “Love in the Western World,” which is about Tristan rather than Jesus.  (Or can Tristan BE Jesus?)