THE UNDERGROUND, THE BEAT POETS, AND CANNIBALISM: WHAT INTELLECTUALS DISCUSS

The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment is a list serv I’ve followed for more than a decade.  It has changed over the years.  Just now a member has challenged the lack of online “discussion” which I suppose might be interpreted as a lack of argument or personal opinion.  Instead, the complainant, who was immediately joined by a few others, says the listserv is dominated by appeals for textbook ideas for courses, or book announcements (sometimes written by members) or a constant stream of Calls for Papers (CFPs).  Granting that it’s true, and also it’s true that we’ve become kind of humorless, what I think I’m hearing is loneliness.  I am not lonely.  I do not want to be argued down.

ASLE folks in person.

I’m doing a cut-and-paste of three recent CFP’s so you can see them, because I suspect that most people don’t even realize that intense and gifted people are closely scrutinizing these topics.  Personally, I learn a lot just from reading the thinking that went into framing the question, though there’s no chance at all of me attending, much less submitting a paper.  That’s about all this particular post of mine is: samples of what I read daily and sometimes respond to here.  But I know some of my readers are active participants, so I left the particulars at the end intact.

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WWI trench warfare.

"Ecology and War: "In the Trenches: Ecological Subtexts of War and Protest Literature"

In honor of the centenary of World War I, this panel aims to address the part that ecology and other environmental images/narratives play in capturing the tensions and terrors of war, conflict, protest, and resistance. The concept of the trench inspires the topic of this panel, as the trench was conceived of as a way to protect combatants from death and/or disfigurement. Those that resorted to "trench warfare" overlooked the fact that in protecting soldiers from the scars of war, the trenches would instead indefinitely scar the earth. We can see this most evidently in the fields of France where the deep wounds in the ground are still healing, now grown over and caved in as the land reclaims itself for its own. In keeping with the conference theme of "underground," we will be exploring how the various parties within a conflict -- from the combatants on the battlefield, to the citizen opponents and enemies of the state -- must seek shelter within the earth, either metaphorically (as in political parties that must "go underground" to survive) or literally (for example, the poets of the Great War who wrote from the trenches). 

An anthology of poems and "comics"

The panel is open for broad, global interpretations of the relationship between war, literature, and ecology; scholars of all geographies and languages are welcome to submit to the panel. As we are in the centenary years of the fighting of World War I, papers on the literature of the Great War are of particular interest, but are not intended to be the sole focus of the panel. Please submit 250-word abstract and brief bio, along with any audiovisual specifications that would be needed for the presentation to the chair before November 1, 2014. For any inquiries and to submit to the panel, please send all correspondence to Anna Hiller at Idaho State University  (hillanna@isu.edu) . 

Anna E. Hiller, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Spanish

Department of Languages & Literatures

Idaho State University

Pocatello, ID  83209

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"Fractured Ecopoetics from the Beat Underground"

As direct heirs to Dostoyevsky's bleak vision in Notes from the Underground, the Beat Generation also wrote from the cultural and poetic underground of the twentieth century at a pivotal moment of transition in Zeitgeist.  As avant-garde, subterranean writers, the experimental lifestyle and poetics of the Beats were forces that shaped one of the most important forms of contemporary subculture—a fact that has been largely recognized.  However, a fact that has remained mostly unrecognized to this day is that Beat experimental procedures, from sketching composition to cut-ups and Buddhist-inspired poetics—also belong to the precursor forces that fractured the pastoral and the romantic, and laid the groundwork for contemporary forays into the territory of wild radical avant-garde ecopoetics.  

Indeed, with the exception of Gary Snyder, what the Beat Generation brings to ecopoetics has been largely disregarded.  Yet, the Beats' grounding in the urban, the toxic, the "wilderness of the mind," and the experimentally aesthetic offers a fluid poetics of field-being that invites us to rethink both physical and mental ecologies, as well as the link between them.  

Open to both scholars and practising poets/artists, this panel wishes to explore how the Beat underground and its experimental practices are soils nourishing and renewing our understanding of experimental ecopoetics and its contemporary offshoots.  Papers/creative contributions investigating, but not limited to—the following questions are sought: 

• To what extent do concepts like composting, accretion, sedimentation, recycling, waste, rhyzomatic proliferation, fractals, fracking, and others help us to understand Beat poetics as an ecopoetics?

• Conversely, to what extent do Beat poetics anticipate/partake of some of the varieties of radical landscape poetry today and wild avant-garde experimental practices (including digital poetry)?

• How do Beat writings fracture, bend, and renew the pastoral into the post-pastoral, the romantic into the post-romantic?  To what extent do Beat writings mesh with the concept(s) of "dark ecology"?

• What light do Beat experimental practices throw on the question of  flow and fracture between eco-aesthetics and eco-ethics? 

• How do the shifting structures, processes, and material agencies underground help us to understand the Beat underground better in terms of a transitional avant-garde formation?  And by extension, how does the physical underground below our feet help us rethink the avant-garde and the cultural underground?  How can we reconceptualize the avant-garde and its different waves anew by using material underground forces as a reading grid?

Please send 300 word abstracts for 15 minute papers & a biosketch to both Franca Bellarsi (fbellars@ulb.ac.be) and Chad Weidner (c.weidner@ucr.nl) by 20 October 2014.

Dr. Franca Bellarsi

Associate Professor (English and American Literature)

Université Libre de Bruxelles

CP 175

+ 32 (0)2 650 67 47

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It's not just an idea.

“What Lies Beneath the Clothes of Culture? Cannibalism in Fiction” 

ASLE 2015 Call for Presentation Abstracts for an organized panel submission

11th Biennial Conference, June 23-27, 2015 in Moscow, Idaho

CFP Deadline: November 30, 2014

From ancient Greek myths to 21st century post-apocalyptic novels, cannibalism abounds, forcing us to reconsider easy binaries of self and other or civilized “us” and a savage “them.” As Maggie Kilgour argues in From Communion to Cannibalism, incorporation—the most basic example of which is eating—“depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears,  dissolving the structure it appears to produce”. What, then, when the food being eaten is human flesh?

This panel proposes to examine the various ways literature explores acts of cannibalism to break down notions of absolute difference and articulate the dual fears of anthropophagy: the fear of being cannibalized and the fear of becoming cannibal, the fear of becoming human meat and the fear of eating it. Often considered the demarcation of civilization and barbarism, cannibalism in fact explores the problem of our status as human beings who become hungry: the specter of our common animality. As Simon Estok points out, “Cannibalism is an unambiguously ecocritical issue.”  One cannot be a cannibal without also being human, and meat cannot be but human flesh to mark the consumer of it “cannibal.”

Following the conference theme, then, this panel explores “the importance of experiences that lie beneath (and before and after) the shiny edifices of progress, rationality, and industry […]. to consider what lies beneath us” in terms of culture, definitions of humanity, and what makes us human via explorations of fictional anthropophagy and what those representations mean.

Please see http://www.asle.org/site/conferences/biennial/ for the full conference description and keynote speakers. 

Please submit 300-word abstracts of proposed 15-minute presentations to Sarah E. McFarland ( mcfarlands@nsula.edu) by November 30, 2014. Questions are welcome!

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As constant readers will know, I’ve already written about some of these concepts.  They seem to be the shared product of people going deeper into thought about the world, almost Jungian as a shared unconscious.  

Sometimes I get exasperated that all these highly educated academics DO is talk and fly around from one nice place to another to have conversations.  But I appreciate the fact that this hermit has the chance to consider such issues.  I don’t necessarily have to be there.  And I don’t necessarily want to argue about the topics.  I am solitary but not lonely.  

FALL MEANS FALLING AWAY

Available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary

We’re just emerging from a cold spell, though it wasn’t arctic -- not even all that cold except it felt that way after summer and we sort of resented it because there have been only scraps of summer, mild and intermittent.  We kid about our turbulent weather, but it’s at least something to talk about and at best something that keeps a person adapting and planning.  Always carry a jacket.

The real cold was in the middle of last night when the gray woolly blanket of clouds pulled away from the dampened earth and stars like stilettos pierced the sky.  When I was circuit-riding and sleeping in my F-150 van with real bedding instead of a proper sleeping bag, I’d sometimes park for the night in someone's yard up one of the valleys around Bozeman.  On a night like last night, suddenly clearing, I could count on waking at 3AM and having to walk a bit to get my blood moving again.  No regrets.  It was beautiful, sort of exalted.  The family dog always came along, but refused to come into bed with me when we got back to the van.  It would have been warm for me, but confining for the dog, who planned to sleep all day anyhow.

As I write, I can hear Roger out there with the many-times-welded town grader, trying to get some stability out of the graveled dirt streets while it's still damp.  The townsfolk, esp. the men and esp. the ones who are recently moved here, fixate on the state of the streets and incessantly nag about them.  The soil base is unstable, no proper storm drains were ever installed, and everyone screams  when they hear the amount of money that would be necessary to pave the grid. But they’re like that about everything.  Imagine living in the same house with them.

The kittens' fav playground equipment.

The summer was so wet that my yard is well on its way to being a grove of trees and I’m seriously entertaining the idea of letting that happen.  But at the same time, the previous summer was so dry and the winter was so cold (thirty below) that there are a lot of dead limbs up at the tops of all the town trees, sticking out of the leafy boughs below.  

The birds, esp. hawks, appreciate that and perch at the very tips.  The bare limbs fall down in the usual high winds, and I hoard them into a pile.  At first I was going to decorate the house with them -- make archways and woven gates, maybe even some kind of free-standing art project.  But then I thought that it would be better not to attract attention in this town.  They don’t like difference.

When the adults criticize anyone, their children listen carefully because they know that if they perpetrate mischief against THOSE people, they won’t be punished.  I nailed up some sort of Iroquois-looking masks high on the trunks of some of the trees, but no one notices them.  People are not observant about subtleties -- only the major things like mown lawns and the state of the streets.  But I’m fifteen years older than when I moved back to the prairie, and now I don’t have the energy and vision for any major projects except writing.

The pile of limbs, some of which are fairly big, made a good jungle gym for the growing feral kittens, as well as a place to dodge hawks.  I figure if I leave the branches uncut into stove billets, they’re less likely to be dragged off, but there are fewer and fewer of the old fringers who used to have wood stoves.  I’m not dependent on wood -- it’s just a backup.  But the day may come.  Both gas and electric infrastructure are aged.  Not just at my house -- the whole grid.  Every now and then it fails for a few hours.  And they just asked for another price hike.

Squibbie claiming the space under the lawn recliner.

There’s only one feral cat left: the Smudge, who is bereft now that the Skeezix is gone.  I hope that little gold-and-white cat is alive.  It was the only kitten I spared when three female ferals had babies at once.  Skeezix was adopted by the Smudge -- one of the three “mothers” -- to be both her baby and her playmate.  They actually had the same mother.  

Smudge and Skeezix stayed in the yard when all the others disappeared.  Now Smudge sleeps alone and the aging indoor “marmot,” Squibbie, resents even that.  When she has the energy, she chases Smudge.  I would like it if the Smudge joined the house cats.  She’s slender and big-eyed, like a sort of striped trout, and comes meowing softly when I call but won’t let me touch her.  If I trapped her, I could not afford to spay her, or even drive to the free-spay clinic.  So she lives like a bird, on her own, “free.”  Except for food I supply.  Like feeding birds, for the pleasure of watching.

The scientific explanation for the severe winter is paradoxically global warming.  The pattern is that the seas along the Pacific coast of Russia are warmer, which thins the ice and even allows it to melt.  The relationship between air and water is one of energy, as expressed in heat, so that air pulls up energy from open water and carries it across the land just as the water carries it in the huge gyres of the sea.  Normally, there is a steady stream of air, a conveyor belt jet stream, that travels west-to-east across North America roughly at the border between the US and Canada.  We can see it in cloud patterns; we feel it when it comes lower to the ground.  In summer it travels farther north and in winter it comes south, both times passing over us here on the East Slope high prairie.

They say that because of the energy picked up over the open Russian waters, the jet stream gets jags in it that poke down towards the equator.  Normally the stream keeps the arctic air on the north pole side, but when one of the bends -- like a shaken rope -- loops over us, the “polar vortex” forms and brings that air down.  Strangely, there is warmer air north of it so that the true arctic at the same time has atypically warm weather.

We know to stay prepared for blizzards, starting in August.  We've already had one.  I discovered that my pickiup had run completely dry of coolant!  No damage that I can detect.  At least I poured in the new supply through the right hatch.  Once I filled the windshield wiper reservoir with anti-freeze.  The oil change man was horrified, but it worked pretty well.  I have two new tires and new windshield wiper blades.  Before we freeze, I need to remember to hose out the back.  

Living in the cab is a big fat spider, or series of spiders.  This time of year she gets serious about killing flies, which is why I like her.  Somehow she survives my infrequent provisioning runs -- sometimes I see her clinging to the side view mirror with all her legs -- and always replaces herself with an egg sac somewhere.  If I forget to go out and roll up the windows at bedtime, she weaves a pretty web across the opening, so I guess she’s an orb spider.  Soon -- maybe now, because I haven’t gone to look -- the stubble fields will have silky coverlets of spider web, meant to ride the wind, carrying babies to colonize unknown worlds.

This time of year (actually most of the times of the year) this house makes funny little noises: creaks and pops.  I don’t investigate much.  There was a micro-mouse in the house, too small to set off a spring trap, so I got some sticky traps and caught the rodent, but the trap wasn’t fastened down -- I haven’t used them before -- so the mini-mouse was rattling around behind the heaviest furniture for a few days until it either died or broke loose.  Squibbie was fascinated but there were four traps and she stepped on one, doing a screaming tarantella until I caught her and ripped it loose.  We’re both feeling the learning curve.

Sun comes in low and further south now, revealing dust and fur wisps as well as the consequences of my popcorn habit.  Usually by the time I quit writing and get the vacuum cleaner, the floor is in shadow and no one comes to visit anyway, so the chore sinks down the to-do list even farther.  Now we’re due for a week of decent warm weather.  Maybe I’ll work on the yard.  Fall is a falling away, but I’m sure what from.  Or to.  I just know to keep going.

American Prairie Reserve

GAME THEORY AND NA LIT: STICK GAMES

“Stick game,” sometimes called “Bone Game,” is a sleight-of-hand gambling game played between two teams.  They used to kneel in front of two parallel logs with space between, but now too many people have trouble with knees so they sit in folding chairs.  It is a game much, much older than chairs.  In fact, two stones found in a extremely ancient cave on the Pacific coast of Africa seem to be markers for playing this game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BBHge8wzR0  This vid will probably explain it better than words can.  The sticks are of two kinds of uses:  one is to keep the beat going on the logs and the other is to keep track of the scores.  You’ll see in this vid that hand drums sometimes beat along with the pounding sticks.  The actual skill is in the “psych-out” manipulation of two bone sections, one marked and one not.  The idea is for one side to guess where the marked bone is, while the opponent moves it around, hides it, passes it, whatever misdirection the player can come up with.

The materials that are put on the ground in the middle are the bets.  I’ve seen sacks of cash or deeds to ranches.  The video talks about games at funerals in which the family bets their best possessions.  The game teaches NOT to hang onto belongings but to keep them moving through the community.  

By contrast Bingo, beloved in many low-income places, teaches acquisition.  The prize is always money and it is always a game of chance.  The only skill is keeping track of the squares of numbers on cards.  Some people can operate a lot of cards at once.  But Stick Game is more like Poker, in that there’s a lot of skill and bluffing involved.  Stick Game is a team game, not played by an individual but, in a way, a sedentary version of Basketball.

Pick-up-sticks is a game in which a handful of slim sticks are let fall in one spot so that they make a tangle, like a beaver dam.  The skill then is to pull out individual sticks without collapsing the pile.  The person who can pull out the most sticks wins.  This is a game for writers.

Now comes the switch.  I’m using the game metaphor to talk about Native American writing.  I’m going to try to pull out notions about NA writing, one at a time.  First, a quick run-through of the history of the genre.  The earliest had to be told to literate (white) people because there was no “writing” as the Gutenberg and goose quill crowd knew it, though some quickly learned to read the Bible and Benjamin Franklin had helpers who were native Americans.  Then there were “captive stories” about children or women who became part of tribes.  They were meant to be tales of horror and fear, but often the longing for that life came through.  That early ambivalence has carried through to the present time:  those who write about terrible savagery and those who write about the rewards of tribal life.  

Everything that happens in “white” life over the years gets echoed in literature about indigenous people, including all the things that happen in “black” or even Asian life.  In fact, what is unique about autochthonous people, taken tribe by tribe, is often lost.  Indians get mushed together in a big blob, Pan-Indianism, where the competition and politics begin to dominate and distort personal experience.  People often ask me about the Blackfeet,  “What do the Indians think?”  about some issue or other.  And I have to say, “Which Indians?”  since there are as many ideas as there are Indians, plus a few more.  Anyway, there’s no use trying to tell them what the Indians think because outsiders already think they know what an Indian is and what Indians think.  Which is remarkable, since the Indians themselves are not sure what they think and, anyway, it depends on what’s happening.

Vine Deloria, Jr.

Mostly, like everyone else, Indians FEEL more than they analyze.  They get angry and violent, or at least argumentative, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in that, but by now the AIM strategies of confrontation and guerrilla stunts have mostly brought down trouble and stigma.  Vine Deloria, Jr. was protected by his church and Ward Churchill was not protected at all because of his genetics.  Publishers gave up on Indian writing: too much trouble.   But most tribal people or even individual Indians in the diaspora, are very much afraid of covert politics.  Not the whiteman politics, which are usually only about money and access to natural resources, but the hands-on local politics of jobs, grants, housing and personal safety.

Ward Churchill

Indians don’t necessarily hate everything Euro.  The Catholic church has been very successful on reservations and so have the Pentecostals because both of them understand feeling and both confront poverty, disorder, abuse, stigma -- though to go so close in confrontation is to risk being drawn into the patterns.  Both are based on the idea of reform, forgiveness, inclusion and going forward.  Pentecostals are better at developing indigenous leaders, but the Browning Methodists have just been assigned an NA pastor, albeit from the SW tribes.

The real elements of tribal life are the nature and connections of families, many of them braided together from historical elements like becoming American warriors (actually, Indians fought in every American war, including the War for Independence) the relocation of people to cities after WWII, the government boarding schools that were one source of the Pan-Indian movement and the mixing of tribes, and even something so seemingly small as IAIA -- the Institute of American Indian Art where ideas take the form of felt images instead of words.  Every inclusion, every exclusion, every mixture, gives rise to new ideas and styles.  Most white people aren’t aware.

The Institute of American Indian and The Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) 

Of course, every stigmatized minority develops an underground culture, partaking of the illicit, the illegal, the down/low.  Then the pre-existing networks of global criminality surround and convert it to their own uses.  I’m talking about drugs, but also about oil.  Much of the culture gets attuned to that:  secrecy, threats, diversions like gambling, drinking.  Eric Berne game theory like “uproar,” “rape-o” and “now I’ve got you, you SOB.”  This is rich territory for writing.  I would argue that game theory ought to be taught in lit classes.

Instead, much of contemporary academic literary life is focused on the New Yorker type story about a subtle shift of feeling, often having to do with depression or social paralysis (if those are two different things).  At the same time, the misery voyeurs can always get off on revelations of suffering imposed on the innocent (if there are such persons as innocents).  They don’t realize that in a rural place -- where people are trying to escape stigma -- confession and revelation can signal vulnerability and have major consequences in the real world.  Hiding is often a matter of survival.

Anthropology has spread out into a great delta of approaches and sub-disciplines that on the one hand express a concern for propriety, “rightness” and ownership -- though the great flow of culture will not allow anything to stay the same over time whether it’s sacramental or not -- and on the other hand a particular interest in the strange and transgressive, which taken out of context is just another source of stigma.  Except that for some it becomes a refuge, a legitimation of something that in the mainstream justifies hatred.

Franz Boas, anthro elder

I used to say that my English classes had “sunburned souls” meaning that if any sensitive phrases or implications came along, they reacted as though I’d just inadvertently put my hand on a blistered back, “red skins,” that hurt so much it made them scream.  Some masked and others tried to make me hurt as badly as they did. Both succeeded. That carries over into writing and public presentation of writing.   It dangerous for me to even point it out.  My sticks have collapsed now.  But I always knew that writing and teaching were dangerous.

I will print legitimate comments but the Great Indian Flame Wars of the Internet have pretty much passed.  In Valier most people won’t even know what I’m talking about -- they barely notice that my lips move -- but I make it a policy not to drive at night.  So which hand is holding the marked bone? 

TWILIGHT AT THE GETTY (fiction)

The Getty Art Museum in Los Angeles.

It was barely dusk with the sun lingering at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  The two old friends -- only approaching retirement age -- stood side-by-side, looking out over the city.  They were at a wall instead of pipe railings, for which Meier was famous, and they said nothing.  His son-in-law had left them alone in case they did have something to ask or confess or admit.  But there was nothing.  Silence is sometimes eloquence.

The long plaza in front of the building had a reflection pond in it, not deep, but the water was exactly level with the travertine so that if there had been a shower, one couldn’t always tell the solid from the liquid and people walked into the water.  Carefully designed benches had been strategically put along the edge to guide people away.  But they didn’t want to sit.  And they thought they could tell the solid from the water.  At least in the architectural world.

He was a major success in Tinsel Town, making his living off preposterous assumptions that she had long ago discarded.  They had parted ways after college, where they had been film buddies.  Outsiders might have thought they paired off like birds in a courting context, but not.  It was the Fifties and film was a revelation, even if a person weren’t enrolled in a sophisticated university.  Not until Netflix was it again possible for a person with only a computer connection to watch film on that scale again.  The impact on her was now quite different.

He stood gracefully, a handsome man, expensively dressed.  To her older eye it was obvious that he was a gay married to a sympathetic woman.  And so was the son-in-law.  But she no longer defined gay in any kind of confining way -- more as a center from which to act.  But she was slowly realizing that he and his family thought she was also gay/lesbian and that was what had been the tie.

She was a lover of tough, competent, older cowboys -- Western men capable of both ruthlessness and tenderness, even mixed and simultaneous.  She saw that her friend was aesthetic and psychologically guarded.  He’d been in therapy all his life.  Of course, in this town, one had a therapist the way one had a good dentist -- keeping things straight.  To her, he seemed a shadow.  She had no idea what she seemed to him now.  A puzzle maybe.  Maybe that’s why he had sent for her to celebrate this major award he was receiving.

In the past he’d come -- with his wife -- to visit her on the east slope of the Rockies but it was not a success.  Her ancient primitive phone with a cat-chewed cord was not adequate and her old house was so small that the only way he could have privacy for what seemed to be intense arguments was to sit on the front stoop, which was only a cement slab.  When he had insisted on taking her out to dinner, the best place for miles around had only one dusty bottle of champagne and it wasn’t chilled.  He berated the waitress, who was a friend of hers and who looked at her with wounded eyes.

They had driven up to the mountains and the wife said, “Oh, how beautiful!”  But neither of them was really looking and, if they had, they would not have understood it.  They knew nothing about geology or weather patterns.  Living on the LA delta, there was no need.  So now, aware, she tried to look out over the jeweled valley below them where the lights were coming on.  What did he see?   “That’s Universal City over there.  The studio had to sell it to make up their losses on Caesar and Cleopatra.”  

When the town car chauffeur had seen her recognize her name on his placard, he smiled broadly.  He’d wondered what she’d be like.  They chatted on the way to the hotel which she understood later was very bad form.  He was clearly trying to tempt her into telling him things that would help him curry favor.  He laughed merrily when he left her at the hotel where she was rendezvousing with her host, though he wasn’t allowing her to stay there.  He had arranged for her to stay with a famous editor in her “modest” house on Mulholland Drive, thinking that since she wrote, this would be a career advantage.

The desk clerk would not give her the room number or even use the house phone to call upstairs.  Looking inscrutable, he made a soft-voiced call and soon the elevator had opened on her friend.  It was clearly a place of assignation in a strange combination of secrecy and boasting.  The lobby was furnished like a London men’s club.

She was famished but supper wasn’t until 9.  They met his wife and a couple of screen writers and cinematographers for drinks.  She was a very bad drinker, easily becoming confused, and consumed far too many breadsticks.  He ordered her drinks -- all with fancy names, evidently fashionable.  The place was too dark to read faces and no one tried to include her in the gossip anyway.

So her head went off into memories of university, so long ago that women had to be checked in at the dorm by 10PM and no men could come past the entryway, unless they were relatives.  It sounded almost Islamic now.  But there were ways -- duplicate keys to the back door, for instance -- so she met her friend at a nearby all-night laundromat and they took the El into Chicago to the strange places where foreign and experimental films were shown.  Sometimes they were a little sinister or in dubious parts of town, but the viewers were intense.  No popcorn.  She could not have gone to such places alone.

Bonds formed in such a setting were a strong entwining of emotion and rationality, subject and method, personal and universal, subjective and objective.  Liminal, perhaps,  on the threshold, nearly sacred and more felt than could be described, though they spent a lot of time over the days trying to figure it all out.  They were so engaged in this conversation that others thought they MUST be sleeping together.  But they were disembodied.  No one thought of suggesting gay.  They just weren’t sophisticated or experienced enough.

And now, he had -- she suspected -- fallen into a prescribed, expensive, political way of life while she had such a broad understanding of sexuality -- dimensions, practices, accommodations -- that something so binary as gay/straight was as irrelevant as male/female.  Anyway, sexual desire and sexual identity had shrunk in both of their lives, crowded out by success on his side and something on her side that she called “environmentalism” but it was much more sensory than that would imply.

When he dropped her off at the editor’s house, going past the gate by using the electronic code pad like an ATM, he didn’t come in but the woman met her at the door and showed her the bedroom.  It was mercifully plain except for the sheet of glass that was one wall.  The view, like the one from the Getty, was out across the valley, but on that first night there had been a thunderstorm traveling through with actual lightning striking here and there, occasionally exploding something electrical (transformers?) so that sirens -- faint and far away -- would trail throbbing through the streets behind strobing lights of fire trucks.

The two women sat outside a little while, editor with her customary bedtime Ovaltine and guest with club soda to settle an unaccustomed sort of food.  Was that pureed parsnips with caramalized cranberries?  At home she fried parsnips cut into coins and liked them, but never thought of cranberries.  If she had and if she’d HAD cranberries, which the local stores only carried at Thanksgiving, she’d have just thrown a handful into the pan.  Maybe she’d try it.  Someday.

The editor had inquired politely but guardedly about her writing, but was a bit baffled that she wrote about landscapes and natural history -- not politically, either, but in her own way.  “My dear, you really must develop a platform in order to sell, or no one will know what shelf is for your books or how to promote your image.”  Then she saw the guest’s face and -- since she was not stupid -- said softly,  “Of course, books are no longer put on shelves and you are a reality -- not an image.”

Now, the big celebration (ordeal) over and fatigue making the friends mellow, they stood at the Getty as though on the balcony of a Mediterranean villa in some time-out-of-time, their present lives fading to make room for memory.  Had they actually stood together this way on the El platform with stars barely visible through the heat-trembled air and felt merged, empowered and shaken by what they had seen?  Or was that just a kind of derivative memory of the powerful films?

The son-in-law came up from behind and put an arm over each.  “Ready to go?”  They were.  Flying back home, she decided she and her friend were related but different species who had shared an environment -- all those elms and all those paths.  Crocus in spring.

RACISM, STIGMA, AND RAW FEAR OF NOT SURVIVING

Racism has become far too chiaroscuro:  black and white. 

In the first place, few people are unmixed nowadays. 

In the second place, this whole race thing is polarized between only TWO races when -- assuming you accept the concept of races -- there are dozens, hundreds, of groups of people interacting, few of them purely anything biological or even cultural.

In the third place, much of what purports to be about race is really about an urban/rural split or maybe only an urban/urban split.  The issues of country people, the racisms of small towns, are not addressed, though they have much to do with economics.  So long as survival is about money, it will be about potential for getting it.  The one thing that makes it easy to get money is to already have money.  The stigma of have/have-not is gaining -- could potentially change the terms of what we’re now calling “race.”  Or even nation.

Tribes.

So in the fourth place, I’m beginning to wonder how much racism is a red-herring.  The real issues -- as always -- are things like education, jobs, marriage, social conformity, health, and even religion.  The real issue is survival in spite of competition for limited resources.

But the most dominant factor, the most dynamic factor, is stigma.  Stigma is deeply biological and erupts through culture volcanically, both the creeping lava kind and the explosive dust kind.  Stigma is a reflex that has in the past served survival, or it would not have survived itself.  Stigma is a domination reflex.  Grabbing the lesser beings by the back of the neck.

One counterweight is pity.  If we feel pity for the stigmatized -- whether lepers or babies born out of wedlock or minorities or the disabled -- then we will tolerate them, even make allowances for them, but if they show any signs of anger, resentment or -- worst -- POWER, all pity is gone and we try to eliminate them.  Uppity women and n. . .   (Don't even think it.)  This is a reflex, below conscious control.  But it teaches people already hampered that they are powerless and dependent.  This is called "demanding respect" even when your drunken father shouts it at you.

Separation of territory is a biological factor.  Groups form when they are separated by a river, a mountain range, or the languages they speak.  One form of separation is exclusion.  Push people onto reservations, into special schools, into ghettos, into menial nighttime jobs like cleaning, into junk housing on marginal land.  Worst: incarcerate them.  Even worse than worst: incarcerate them in a foreign country.  (Solitary confinement is the same thing.)  Know as little as possible about them.  If they come on your territory, drive them off.  Deport them.  Wall them out.  See them as animals, as machines, as zombies.  Contagious filth.

If you can’t exclude them, fort up.  Walled housing projects, red-lining, patrolled universities, controlled-access shopping malls.  Invitation only.  Lock the church doors.  If this makes people angry, say they are vandals, rioters, terrorists.  By then they probably are.  Or in small towns the strategy is to set up athletic competition so intense that rivalry becomes resentment, maybe active hatred.  If you lose the game, overturn the bus with them in it. (Romeo and Juliet relationships are against separation.  War dissolves internal separation in a common cause.)  

Disconcertingly, the world with connections to the former British Empire where same-sex relationships were stigmatized and even criminalized in order to keep lower classes from entering upper classes through the bedroom, has now discovered that gays were NOT separate.  Everywhere they are individuals among us in families, jobs and classes.  When we realize how many and how “normal” they are, the stigma weakens and the laws relax.  Now the gays themselves want gays to be normal -- at least conventional.  

Many people cannot tell “pity” from love, esp. men.  Most women cannot tell “awwww” cuteness from ownership.  These little problems of distinction combine in “compassion,” which makes demands on those able to provide protection, patronage, and other survival-based contributions that maintain separation.  That is, until the receiver of “compassion” begins to feel entitled and confronts, which is a form of connection, so that separation in terms of intimacy resorts to violence.  Separation in terms of welfare safety nets flips to withdrawal and punishment.  Blame.  You'd have a job if you'd accept oppression. 

These dynamics are part of producing and raising children, who ideally DO become separately empowered in spite of parental attempts at control and merging.  This is also biological.  If the crucial biological forces of stigma and compassion are allowed to overwhelm any cultural counterweights -- which sometimes become aligned with those raw biological drives and enflame them -- the result is war: gang war, territory invasion, terrorism, economic “pencil” death, and the general destruction of culture that the dystopic books, films, and theories vividly illustrate for us.

My experience with stigma and compassion has shaped my opinions.  When I came back to occupy this marginal old house so I could write on a very low income, I was interpreted as needy, weak, and pitiful and so people gave me food.  I only accepted it from people who were established long-term friends BECAUSE it marked me as weak and stigmatized.  On the other hand, people who believed I was a writer said they were in awe and meant it.  A few took me out to supper at the nicest place around.

I was respected by people who remembered Bob Scriver because he was famous.  (Though one old farm wife said, "He wasn't THAT famous.  He wasn't Charlie Russell."  In her eyes, that was failure.)  When I showed power by telling what I knew in books -- "an exposé of the Western art world", said the only honest reviewer -- I was re-stigmatized as a bitter old ex-wife.  

As an English teacher I was respected as a representative of propriety.  As an animal control officer I was stigmatized as a persecutor of animals.  As a friend of Blackfeet I was both stigmatized by locals and given status by romantic liberals.  As a former co-writer with Tim Barrus, I was stigmatized except by the other people who love his writing and vids.  I don’t align with the compassion people either, because Tim's work proves daily that even boys pushed out of the system are not powerless.  It is their brave work as observers and interpreters that aligns us.

A sharp issue (indeed, "cutting") arose when the clergyman next door to me refused to see me as his equal -- we both attended the U of Chicago Div School -- and insisted that I was a needy old woman who should be grateful for a gift jar of jam and could be freely dominated if my tree interfered with his desire for a suburban lawn (status).  We ended up in a stigma standoff.  All compassion blasted.  (Much laughter around town -- deserved, I admit.)  We are the same race.  He has more money since for much of his career he was a veteran’s hospital chaplain on salary.  He feels it is an achievement to have children, though his wife did all the work -- as usual.  Religious affiliation can be racial even when color is not involved.

In the interest of self-preservation, there are people in this village whom I actively avoid.  I move on quickly, try not to “see” them.  They are too curious, too eager to find a weakness to exploit, if only by gossip.  There are other situations -- church, school -- that I avoid because I am socialized to a world so different from here that we can’t read each other’s signals.  I was asked to judge a speech contest when I first returned, and discovered that I’d given the highest ratings to those the other judges gave the lowest ratings.  I valued personality, creativity, uniqueness.  They wanted conformity.

Of course, identifying with the rez towns -- Browning and Heart Butte -- does me no good in Valier and it IS color-racial.  In the larger world, I have a hard time not stigmatizing many people in my former denomination and profession.  They seem like a different privileged race, perpetual children so confident of their entitlement that they are inadvertently cruel, greedy, and stigmatizing of any difference.  

It surprises me that they complain they are powerless, since they are not, though their power is a little atrophied and they turn it on each other, like the recent attack on her own seminary by a social activist used to attacking "bad" people.  They won't award her a diploma though she has completed her course work.  She is SHOCKED.  Of course, it means she won't have to candidate for a pulpit and do that daily drudgery or that weekly sermon.  

But she's not used to being gripped by the back of the neck, nor did she realize she would be stigmatized. The world cares about her predicament about as much as they care about the rez kid thrown out of the local high school for being a pain in the butt.  Not only do the two kinds of ostracized students not care about each other, each thinks he or she is unique, just trying to survive.  Neither knows the other exists.  Would it help if they did?