THREE WHO "WENT AHEAD"

It's a classic truism that when Spring gets here, old people leave us.  I always forget, mostly because I haven't realized who has gotten old.  Maybe because I haven't seen them for a while.

For instance, I was rocked with I learned from a visit from the plumber and his helper that Gordon Monroe had died.  In my mind Gordie is the same young man in my senior English class in 1962 who announced that he intended to leave high school in April so he could go attend Bible School.  He was a good student. Many years later I told him how sad I was that he would give up his diploma like that.  Calmly and rather sternly, he pointed out that he had easily qualified for a GED as well as doing well in Bible School, which had been the real core of his life.  He had never stopped opposing corruption and evil and took the challenge to authorities before he stopped trying.

Gordon was Bob Scriver's fiberglas man.  He made the two giant outdoor statues on the rez: the bucking bull in front of the former Scriver Studio and the bucking horse in front of Babb School.  His eye for replication is remarkable.  Bob's small crucifix was enlarged to heroic-sized for the front of the Church of Little Flower.  Some people feel they have a personal relationship with the figure and want to add decoration to suit the season.  A devout woman explained, "He is our Son."

In addition, Gordon became a sculptor of his own subjects, using a bigger scale than Bob's, which were one-fifth lifesize.  He specialized in ceremonial events and small social groups like stick gamers.  Instead of the plastilene that required molds -- though he was expert at molds -- he used the new plastic-based clay that could be baked directly, becoming hard and permanent.  FIMO is one brand.  He also ran a Browning motel.  I hope his children learned from him, but I don't know them.

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Frances “Francy” E. Hardman, 77, of Dupuyer, passed away Monday, Jan. 28, 2019, from natural causes. 

Francy was born in Conrad on Sept. 23, 1941 to Frank and Elizabeth Johnson. She attended and graduated from Valier High School. She married Jay Hardman on Sept. 1, 1961. They were married 57 years until his passing.

Francy worked as a Teacher’s Aide at Heart Butte Elementary School and ranched with Jay and her family. Francy enjoyed a simpler life raising cattle, horses, cats and most importantly her dogs. She enjoyed music, dancing and evening walks with her dogs.

Frances is preceded in death by her husband of 57 years, Jay Hardman; her parents, Frank and Elizabeth Johnson; brother, Roy Johnson; and many close friends and family.

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The Teacher's Aides in Heart Butte were often more stable and helpful than the teachers, because the aides were local and often enrolled.  Francy was one of the most sensible and even-tempered, quietly seeing what to do.  She mostly worked with the elementary school, but I visited with her in the coffee room.  One day she was a little sad; it turned out because they had lost a colt over the weekend.  "We know it was a cougar because we found the remains up in a tree." 

There is a quiet, rather old-fashioned community that stretches from HB on the rez down along the east front to Dupuyer and close enough to Valier for students to attend there.  The land is mostly ranches.  This is where Ivan Doig was during his high school years, and he got a lot of attention.  Francie was quiet and indigenous, so no formal school people urged her on.  She just paid close attention and remained self-owned.  She was a dignified woman, much loved by many.

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Kathleen Marie (Stevenson) Barcus passed away in her sleep late in the evening of Sunday, Feb. 3, 2019. She spent the last six years of her life at the Glacier Care Center after suffering a stroke.

Kathy was many things in her 84 years, daughter, wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were the most important but she was also an artist in paints and pottery. She was a horticulturalist in that she could grow anything. She loved to bowl, crochet, garden and travel. She was well read and well spoken. She was above all else loved and will be greatly missed.

Kathleen was born in Kalispell on Nov. 9, 1934, to Cyril W. Stevenson and Teresa J. (Rieling) Stevenson. She grew up during the depression at Many Glacier Hotel while her father was the caretaker there and then at East Glacier Park when Cy became the Chief Engineer for the Glacier Park Hotel Company, a subsidiary of the Great Northern Railway. Many are the stories of exciting times in Glacier National Park, where she and her brother ice skated on upper Saint Mary Lake and rode with her father to Wild Goose Island in a car across the ice and had to walk back after it broke down. The car stayed there until the next winter. Stories of her hiking through the park and riding her horses across the as yet unfenced prairie.

Kathy moved to St. Paul to stay with her mother’s family during the final years of the war while Cy became a tank commander in the Pacific Theatre. She finished her eighth-grade year at East Glacier Park and moved onto high school in Browning. Kathy graduated in 1952 and started college in Missoula. She moved back to East Glacier Park and started a job with the post office. She met and married Steve Barcus who had returned from the Navy to resume his job with the Glacier Electric Cooperative. They married and had five children before Steve lost his arm, electrocuted while working at the top of a power pole.  The family moved to Browning to buy Park Lanes where they took in and helped raise two more kids.  [More accurately, Steve lost both hands, learning to use hooks instead.  He was essential to the Browning school board.]

Kathy was very active in Browning’s Garden Club and kept busy running the bowling alley while shepherding her children through school activities. Kathy volunteered and then worked for the Vision Program for Browning Public Schools for a number of years. Steve and Kathy owned and ran Park Lanes from 1963 to 2001. They continued to bowl until 2008.

Kathy is survived by her brother Don (Vicky) Stevenson; her children, Steve (Loyce), Dan (Cindy), Colleen, Jim, Don (Johnel), Will (Jennifer) Wood and Crystal Wood; her grandchildren, Daniel (Tiffany) Barcus, Jeremy (Julie) Barcus, Katie (Joel) Barcus-Kuka, Trecia Taylor, Katelyn Barcus, Jeran Barcus and Callie Wood; and 13 great-grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by her parents Cy and Pat Stevenson and her husband Steve.

________________

By the time the second generation was running the bowling alley, the Barcuses wanted to live nearby so, remarkably, they bought the old  two-story Masonic Hall, at the side of the town square and remodeled the upstairs for living.  I was never there again after we buried T.E. Scriver, Bob's dad in the little auditorium.  Kathy also added a garden strip along the side.  The last time I saw the Barcuses was at the funeral of Joyce Clark Turvey, the daughter of John Clarke, in the Catholic church in East Glacier.  It was after Kathy's stroke so she was in a wheelchair, but she was THERE.  Her life connected all over the rez and the Northwest.

These are the kinds of people who hold the reservation together and make it work.  The connections are strong and weave in and out of tribal allegiance, age, education, and businesses.  Reporters and most government officials from the BIA never know these important people exist at all.

AN EMERALD GREEN OPERA GLOVE (Fiction)

Young as he was, only in his twenties, the boy was the executor of his aged uncle's estate.  So here he was in this rather nice apartment which he needed to clean out in the next few weeks or else pay for another month's rent on it.  Of course, it was possible to just move in and live there, let his old apartment go.  He had inherited a bit of money, too, but he was unsure whether it were enough to justify the change.  He was unsure about everything these days between grad school and a first real job.

After days of going through legal-sized boxes of old bills, receipts, and other stuff, all categorized, alphabetized, calendarized and bundled, he was beginning to feel like the thing to do would be just  to dump the lot, unvisited.  This uncle was obsessive in his record keeping.  Why would anyone need to know all that old stuff?  Then he found the glove.

It was down between two folders, not jammed but carefully folded and put in flat.  An emerald green satin full-length opera glove.  Only one.  It was scented, but he couldn't name the perfume.  It smelled expensive.  He sat for a while with the glove smoothed against his blue jeaned knee.  Was this the trophy of a love affair?  A long opera glove is normally worn by a woman, but he felt that gender was a fluid idea.  These days anyone could wear such a glove, seriously or in jest or as performance.

He'd searched and discarded about half of the dozen legal boxes so far.  Maybe the other glove was in the other boxes.  Getting bored, he delayed for a bit, playing with the glove.  He pulled it on, first sliding his hand all the way through to the fingers, then pulling from the top. It felt a bit strange.  He made gestures that were really a extension of smoothing it up his arm.  Since this was kind of glove with buttons at the wrist, so that one could take the bare hand out without taking off the glove, he fiddled with that and found it tricky.  Whoseever glove this was must have practised a bit so as not to be embarrassed by struggling with buttons at an elaborate dinner party.  There were three pearl buttons.  The opening was three inches long.  The satin was clean.

Pretty soon he put the glove aside and finished the rest of the legal boxes, piling them by the front door to be taken away.  He was pretty sure he had been thorough, hadn't missed the second glove, didn't see any other clues.  He threw a TV dinner into the microwave.  There were still a lot of them in the freezer, though he had always had the impression that his uncle ate out most of the time.  He was pretty old.  Maybe eating out just became too much work.  There was no way to tell whether the glove was a souvenir of an earlier life.  No date on it.

After supper, sprawled in the rather worn reclining chair, he stared at the shelf of operas alongside him.  He hadn't thought about his uncle being an opera fan.  Not that there was much reason to discuss it with him.  He never talked about it and evidently only played his many CD's if no one else were there. Halfway between being a snob's preoccupation and sexy, militaristic propaganda, the stuff seemed unlikely for a mild, handsome man who lived quietly all alone.  Could he have been a transvestite?  Was the glove part of a Queen Kit?  The nephew was worldly enough to know that gay men are not necessarily obvious and might even be married with children.  Was this the glove of a paramour?  Male or female or indeterminate?  People's lives were so mysterious.

All the bank boxes were piled by the door.  He decided not to pack up the opera CD's or even the books.  Standing before the closet of his uncle's clothes, he slowly realized how detailed they were, fine bits of thoughtful tabs, suede reinforcement, and slit accesses to pockets.  He went through the pockets slowly, taking out the contents to put in a tray sitting on the bed.  Old ticket stubs, folded up brochures and guides to theatres, once a letter he had written to his uncle when he was about ten.  "Deer Uncle,  What kind of car do you have?"  He still didn't know.  Was it a sober, dark Ford?  Was it a jazzy car for giving fancy women rides to some romantic destination?  No one had told him about a car or given him keys.

He dozed and dreamt he was onstage wearing only one green opera glove with something indescribable -- he was not naked.  The conductor scolded, "We cannot go ahead when you are incomplete!  Where is the rest of your costume?"  But he began to sing anyway and had an excellent voice -- which he didn't have in real life.  Then his voice was joined by that of a woman and their song soared together.  He reached out for her hand, and realized he was extending the arm with the opera glove -- but then so was she!  She was also wearing emerald green opera gloves!  He couldn't think what opera this was.  Or even how he felt about it.

The day was ending so the windows were darkening.  He had been through all the clothes.  There were high shelves with hats, which he enjoyed trying on.  They were serious men's hats, no derbies but a homberg with a "gutter crown" and a grosgrain band.  A Manila straw summer afternoon hat.  Were these roles he played?

Everything had been gone through except one small drawer in a little table in the bedroom.  A game table, possibly.  Since it had been turned so the drawer faced the wall, he hadn't seen it until he moved the table.  In the drawer were photos, some casual and some made in a studio, now loose, no identification.  Some were female and some were male.  All were his uncle.  One was a beautiful professional quality nude, quite beautiful.  And there was the other glove.

RIFFING ON QUAMMEN

Boundaries, separations, differences, borders, distinctions -- these words point to the places where new things, unexpected things, can happen.  Maybe they make room for something or maybe they don't fit on either side, so must invent a new space.  

This new thing might be organic -- as it has to be in the biological world-- or cultural -- as it is in the social world.  That is, molecules interacting, ecosystem shifting, lightning striking, flooding, may change the nature of cells and how they grow.  Our expanding ability to figure out what is going on is fascinating and scary, which is why Quammen's book, "The Tangled Tree", is so compelling.  (I hope that most people realize that the title refers to Darwin's "tangled bank," a quote from Darwin that has been used as a title by Zimmer.)  Brilliantly, Quammen includes centuries of various proposed genetic trees, only to sweep them all aside.  The various sketches also illustrate how much the culture influences the artist.

For years I've been reading about how humans develop from two cells into a walking, talking, thinking individual.  It's clearly a two-step process: 9 months inside a  "mother" and then three YEARS in a family, which ought to be thought of as a social womb.  The boundary we call "birth" is when the infant is pushed out or cut out of the mother.  This is arduous, dangerous, done with assistance or not, and momentous.  Nevertheless it is less drastic than the "birth" transition of some insects, like a caterpillar giving "birth" to a butterfly in a "womb" chrysalis it created itself, stuck to a twig.  This change is so transforming that some scientists suggest that the individual has just changed itself from one animal species to another -- from a crawling thing to a flying thing. 

For humans the cultural implications are huge, because it is proposed that our bodily "being" is actually just access to all the other humans and their living circumstances, which will shape that person in many subtle ways, right down to molecular processes.  (My grandmother, deprived of iodine by living in northern Manitoba, developed a goiter. It was cured by moving to Portland where there is iodine from the nearby ocean.  The impact, including our emotions affected by the thyroid, have come down to my generation.)  Capacity for empathy to other people is a huge survival characteristic.  I've been mouth-hanging-open amazed by the polyvagal theory of emotion/expression, which explains the crossover from brain molecules to the expression on your face.

Another question that was never clearly framed but always there, was about how it happened that mammals were invented out of egg-laying reptiles.  What Quammen explains carefully but few reviewers have touched, is a sequence of mutations among certain viral/genetic codes that invented the placenta to bridge the space between a conceptus and the wall of the womb, generating the umbilical cord as a literal life-line between two beings.  How is it that the mother's body doesn't simply think this new being is an intruder and reject it?  (Sometimes it does.)

I've been watching the "The Yorkshire Vet," a BBC movie about the work of those who run James Herriot's veterinary practice.  Much of it is reaching up a cow's butt to tease free and remove a placenta that failed to detach from the cow's uterus wall.  Easy enough to cut or tear the umbilical cord away from the calf. "Plop" goes the placenta into the straw, a kind of flesh pudding.

Quammen identifies the tiny entities, microbes with the ability to bind several cells into one new entity -- and do other tricks.  Mice that have had these "genes" knocked out, die in the womb in days.  In other circumstances, the same placenta-makers kick up cancer.  Several different strands of mammal incarnation have "discovered" placenta-making at different times from slightly different versions of the originators.  Quammen tells a lot more about the variations, like mammals who lay eggs or marsupials.

The point is that bodies accept microbial plans from other kinds of animals or from microbe doin's.  They call this "horizonal heredity," never suspected until we knew it existed.  Now we 're a little stunned by it.

It seems clear that gestating a baby inside a mother is an advantage because the growing cells can be quickly transported inside her to avoid danger or get food.  An arrangement that requires eggs that must be kept warm means that someone with body heat has to sit there on the eggs, a "sitting duck" so to speak.  A recent Twitter bit was about eagles brooding on rough stick nests high in trees who sat there keeping those eggs warm (and succeeding) despite horrendous storms.  Turtles, which are cold-blooded reptiles, depend on warm beach sand to be incubators.  The babies run for the sea when they hatch, not needing any three years of development.

I wonder if anyone has written a short story that entwines the story of an indigenous-to-North-American woman, heavily pregnant, determined to escape the invasion of Columbus (all men), with the story of a mother turtle and the fate of her egg-babies with gulls descending upon them as they scuttle.  It would make the point.

The break between eggs gestating in a woman and formed individuals birthed to the world, is that anyone can be a caregiver: a father, a grandparent, an older child, or even another species.  There are many stories about human babies raised by animals.

A local Blackfeet story is about a real woman I knew in her old age.  Her name was Mary Ground because Ground (He Who Dismounts to Fight from the Ground) was her husband's name.  She was also called "Grass Woman".  When she was born, the father saw that she had blue eyes but Blackfeet have dark eyes.  He thought this meant his wife was unfaithful but it could have been a mutation or a recessive gene or the action of some microbe intruder.  Thinking to let fate solve the problem, the baby was put out in the tall grass alone through the night.  She was a tough baby and survived in the womb woven by the tall grass around her.  It doesn't get anymore indigenous than that.

We are all in this together.

IS A BABY AN UMBRELLA?

The accusation that one's enemies kill one's babies is very old, reaching back through Euro history to the first writing.  I remember the cartoons of Asian soldiers bayoneting infants in WWII and the more recent constant descriptions of American cavalry killing indigenous babies.  Police today kill children with little or no provocation.  Inflamed, prejudicial, indefensible murder of children runs along constantly. There are countries where street children are simply shot on sight.  No one knows whose children they are until they don't show up at home that night.  If they had a home.

We place the value of children higher than grown people.  We are shocked at children being required to carry guns in rebel armies. We are horrified by a little boy's body being washed up on a beach.  Somehow it seems like adult men are okay to kill or make into killers.  Women?  We don't think about them.

In real life sometimes things go wrong and the mother kills the infants -- maybe during the period of gestation and maybe in that three years which amounts to a second gestation.  Some mammals kill their babies if they are frightened, attacked, alienated.  Only recently have we understood anything at all about postpartum depression, which can do the same thing in humans, or about "crib death" when the baby just stops living and no one can pinpoint a cause.  We don't want to hear about it.  We pretend we're not animals.

This has always happened.  Plague, famine, war, and so on take varying fractions of the human birth rate over the years and places.  Even 100% like an environmental catastrophe.  But in the US lately there was been a steady obsession with the handling of abortion and newborns, a conviction that somehow there is murder and the expert scientific doctors are to blame.  The birth rate is going down.  Not as much as in Russia.

Politics is quick to pounce on these dynamics.  The Repubs don't QUITE claim that Dems drink the blood of babies in order to stay young, but if one looks at the faces of the more Reptilian control dominators, a semi-secret party within a party, it's not hard to think they might do it if they thought it worked.  In fact, there is talk about scientifically, medically, drawing the blood of young people to infuse into older people.  They say that about shit, too.  You're supposed to swallow it in a capsule.

Not long ago someone posted on Twitter a protest about the way we handle babies now.  Rather than sequestering our little ones and their mothers in a safe, dark place and leaving them to bond, we put newborns in plastic carriers and take them everywhere at the end of our arm, as though they were sea creatures in calcareous shells.  This is not the same as people who put the babies against their backs so they can do the day's work, rhythmically pounding and bending.  The modern babies are dazzled, chilled, banged into by careless people, left behind as convenient -- sometimes left behind for good, forgotten.  Like an umbrella.  In such a situation, the idea of a newborn murdered by neglect, ignorance, malevolence, opens up a well of guilt and too-late realization that can easily translate to hatred.

Images of tiny bodies in pieces explode advertising imaginations of pink and tender bliss, so that the actuality of pulling or pushing one new person out of the supporting older person gets entirely lost.  Again, a fraction of conceptions die soon afterwards and are never even noticed.  Another fraction have something bad enough wrong with them that they can't survive, even in the womb.  Another fraction exist until they lose their umbilical feed through birth.  I can't remember any statistics about how many babies die at birth or soon after.  There are lots of statistics after that.  Risk at every stage.  The highest rate right now is the adolescent and the nearly highest cause is suicide, not wanting to live.  Is that not a form of abortion?  Shouldn't that be addressed?

When is a baby a little human being?  One modern opinion is two-fold: the gestation period and then the three years following.  We have special protective sentiments towards little mammals in this "basic becoming" time period, much shorter in most mammals.  They are "cute" and we say "aaaawww" and want to put our hands on them.  We try to make giving birth into an heroic event, an euphoric ordeal -- and it is.  But even on "Call the Midwife," the actuality is often tragic and wrenching. 

Birth is one of the clear, organic, in-or-out points in a woman's life.  But after that, every baby is unique -- unused parts of the brain pruned out, little bodies nourished and exercised differently, some received into happy families and some distorted by starvation and abuse.  Suffering and delight will mix throughout whatever happens.  This is true of any mammal.

To make this into a political football and a source of torture by controlling abortion clinics is evil.

BRIEF CHANGE

Since my dislocated arm tortured me all night, I'm unable to form a decent post.  Therefore, I've been posting snarks.  Tomorrow might be normal, whatever that is.  At least it will be warmer weather, they promise.

THINKING ABOUT HIV-AIDS

So much of the news (and our fate) is about coalitions, categories, and community that I spend time thinking about them as much in the abstract as I can manage, though there is plenty of concrete evidence of their constituents out there.  Through my life time one of the most interesting has been the history of "gays" -- men (specifically) who prefer other men as objects of arousal.  You'll notice I don't say "sex."  There are many kinds of relationship and despite American advertising, they are not all about fucking.  Advertising treats humans like livestock, trying to drive them, brand them, and treat them all the same until they are "killed" one way or another.  But gay men are as various as any other group.  They differ even over something as overwhelming as HIV-AIDS.

HIV-AIDS seemed at first to be connected to sin until people calmed down and thought about viruses.  It turns out it was not that monkeys had climbed down from the trees and become people, but that monkeys had been shot out of trees for food and the viruses they carried killed humans.  It was sort of like Europe crossing into America, bringing all sorts of nasty things like smallpox.  It's possible that HIV-AIDS were simply mystery deaths.  HIV travels in body fluids, no matter their source or nature.  It might be in blood packaged in plastic sacks for transfusions or in mother's milk or in semen.  It's just chemical code based on 4 molecules with a certain arrangement.

When I first began to read and think about the "category" of homosexual men, called "gay," they seemed like one sort of exuberant, defiant, physically invested sort of person.  But then I began to realize how very many different kinds of people had historically, internationally, and still presently live under that umbrella whether they admit it or not.  The kernel of the group is now called MSM, "Men who have Sex with Men."  Some have sex with women, some are fathers, some are religious, some are pedophiles, some are combat veterans or prison graduates.  Some are artists and some are academics -- you get the idea.

Stigmatizing and hiding MSM increases the monetary value of sexwork, makes accusers think twice because the disapproval will rub off on them as well and be hard to explain, draws a line around who's in and who's out, and generally adds an element that is very powerful.  Dynamics about STD's (technically, HIV is not just an "sex transmitted" virus it's NOT an STD.)  pick up a lot of interpretation and management from WWII VD cautions in a time of combat and invasion.  HIV-AIDS is a universal virus.

Revealing known but historically hidden dimensions of sexual interaction have uncovered such propositions as that the Lewis and Clark expedition returned home infected with STD's except for Clark.  (Raises the question why?)  Lewis probably died of tertiary syphillis.  The diseases are clearly evidence of sexual interaction along the way, which to some people is very wicked and to others is proof of virility.  

So this is the way I've been thinking about HIV-AIDS and sexworkers and contagion and social attitudes towards viruses and so on.  I bring this to the problem of how to understand boys whose only way of making money is to sell their bodies various ways, mixing violence and drugs with sex.  The first thing I've become convinced of is that it's important to just leave the whole issue of sex out of it.  Go for the human, boy by boy.

After listening and reading for a couple of decades (not everyone because a lot of stuff is just static -- only a dugout) what strikes me most is that boys of every nation and economy (even the rich) are vulnerable but also have enormous reserves of potential, partly because even under the worst and most deforming circumstances, they grow.  They get bigger, smarter, stronger and more resourceful all the time, maybe by tiny increments and sometimes dying before they get very far along.  

One of the most dynamic potentials for change is showing these boys how to help each other.  They already do it by spontaneously pair-bonding.  Call it love if you want to, but close relationship is basic to human existence.  (There is considerable scientific description about how this works and how irrepressible it is.)

More difficult is the international formation of social structures, circles of people who know each other and who can reach out or even provide resources.  This was once the work of churches, governments and trade unions, but now may be NGO's like Doctors Without Borders.  Specifically HIV positive groups have formed, like "LetsKickASSoregon.org", which is in Portland, Oregon, first meeting in the Rose Garden of Peninsula Park, where my playmates and I used to play.  Generous and humorous, this modern group is people -- due to being tough, lucky, or maybe signing up for unpleasant med regimes back in the beginning -- have outlived every prediction and have had to rethink their lives.  Auxiliary groups are forming.  

Then there's the internet.  It's important that it plays on pocket-friendly gizmos without being plugged into a wall.  It counts that it will take photos, almost as much as cameras.  It's part of the working of safe houses where boys share space.

For some boys learning domestic routines is a whole new adventure.  Due to derelict original homes, barely enough to keep a child alive esp. if you add violence, no one ever had Clean-Up Day.  There was no dishwasher.  These boys learn to do the wash (stacks of blue jeans), scrub the bathroom, toss a big California salad or manage an outdoor grill, plan a grocery run, which no adult in their life had ever done.  Each little task is a chance to have a success and every little success builds towards the future.  It's not all poetry and masterpieces.  It's possible to feel good about sweeping the floor

These things are organic developments unfolding naturally.  Just being real.  What makes it possible is all the hard work that has been done to legitimize "gay" and every other sincere variation on whom one loves and what one does about it, plus more hard work to understand HIV-AIDS and the onerous burden of fighting the politics and emotional chaos.  It's clear that what we are struggling with is not Satan, but families that are volcanic with hatred and toxic with control.  No need for fancy expensive therapy --you can start tonight by sitting down with YouTube and dialing up advice.

In the background, heroes are discovering how to "cure" HIV-AIDS.  You get ready by curing something much harder:  families.

"SAVILE ROW": a film

Recently I watched a documentary called "Savile Row" about the famous suit-makers.  The tailors have achieved a satisfying reconciliation between high end luxury (the suits can cost thousands) and conscientious parsimony (the suits last forever -- not just a lifetime but for generations).  The kernel idea of the narrative was that Abercrombie and Fitch had just moved into a big old building on the street and they were spoiling the venue by being modern, vulgar and cheap.  I didn't quite get that because I thought Abercrombie and Fitch were also high end.  Wrong.  

"Abercrombie and Fitch is an American lifestyle retailer that focuses on upscale casual wear. Its headquarters are in New Albany, Ohio."   https://www.abercrombie.cn/en_CN/home  This looks like a mix of outdoors, semi-military, expedition wear.  I had a safari jacket from them.  Wore it out. Thought I was in an Isak Dinesen story.  (Also had an Antarctex sheepskin coat until someone stole it out of the hunting gear at Scriver's.)

The peculiar thing about the film about Savile Row is that all the advertising for "A and F" depicts naked men!  No clothes at all.  They are very well-developed young men with heads cut off and ending below at the Adonis belt, also called the "iliac furrow" that marks the top of the groin.  Large photos of torsos are on all the shopping bags.  No hair whatsoever.  An advertising version of sexy, I guess.  Not allowed to smell.

Photos of the customers waiting to get in at the opening include no one who looks like this, though there are paid models inside.  (Pants on, worn low.)  It's raining (it's England) and there are women.  Everyone is young and rather grungey.  We're told that the clothes offered are mostly t-shirts and jeans, worn with flip-flops.  The bare models were not at all sexy to me -- maybe to others.

In the bespoke suit shops that otherwise fill the street and are seen as highly desirable tenants because they bring in money and class, most customers are old because it takes time to make money.  This is not seen as a bad thing.  (I'm told that those who make sex-dolls for women have changed their molds to create dummies with "dad bods," a little paunchy.)

Satisfying shots of tailors at work in large rooms suitable for hanging trophy heads of African animals with very long horns abound.  This a business supported by 19th century colonization and exploration, Brit glory.  One man of the type explains his suit.  He tells us it is exceptionally comfortable in every situation, which is good since one will probably wear it constantly.  We are shown that the label is modestly sewn inside a pocket, so as not to brag to those who can't tell by looking.  There are special pockets according to the needs: fountain pen, watch, keys, handkerchief, clippers, nail file, Swiss folding knife, kinds of papers and moneys -- some with zips to keep contents guarded.  One supposes possibly a compass and, of course, today's electronic gizmos.  The major jacket itself takes months to adjust, baste, pad, and ease -- on the customer, of course.  Finally we drive off to see the remote source of the particular well-known, and greatly loved source of the tweeds.

Near the end, one of the men demonstrates the accumulation of family tail-coats, dinner suits, military uniforms and so on needed by Englishmen of a certain class.  He shows his great-grandfather's jacket which he considers to be of great age: sewn in 1960.  (I was in college.)

When I lived a few blocks from the Lloyd Center ('70's) and had a little dog that needed to be walked at bedtime, I often stood for a while at the windows of Marios.  https://shop.mitchellstores.com/t/mens  The clothes were only men's and almost as high-end as Saville Row, with clever tabs and collars, unique pockets, suede elbow-patches, special buttons, subtle but sensual colors.  They were meant for slender but athletic young men, possibly gays or blacks -- men who really cared about how they looked.

When there is writing about sex/gender, it is often by youngsters who -- like a horse we once had -- only operate sexually at two speeds: fast-as-you can-go and stop.  Older people with more dimension have many more modes and speeds, but I've read few pieces about females who identify as males in terms of life-styles, something like gender nonconforming, because of reading so many novels and seeing so many movies and living so many scenarios in which males are the protagonists, maybe in pairs but not lovers.  Huck and Tom, you know.  "Penrod and Sam" (Booth Tarkington's version), "Two Little Savages" (Ernest Thompson Seton's version.)  Even adult versions like Matthiesen and Schaller expeditions. ("The Snow Leopard.")

I'm not lesbian, I just wish I were more like Katherine Hepburn.  I don't want to kiss Katherine anymore than Spencer, but I would like to be built like her so I could wear suits from Marios.  (Savile Row is too much to aspire to.)  I don't need to be sexy or to attract partners -- I just want to embody that ease and style.

Somehow this seems to be related to a category of novels about gay young men, lovers to powerful older men, that are written by lesbian women.  Mary Renault and Patricia Nell Warren are among them.  (The latter died just now.  I'm so glad she was able to be herself, cherished by others.  I should find a bio of Renault.)  Maybe it's that these women's physical/sexual selves were able to identify with the male freedom to attach and perform as they please, which is supposed to be the idea of the protagonists of novels.  The reader is free to invest in them emotionally without being forced into crinolines and brassieres.  No one will question what they wear, the class and convenience will be a moot point, obvious to those who care, even if they were picked up in a second-hand shop.  They used to tell us that using the male pronoun was meant to include women.  I would like that to be true.

WHAT IS MAN? I MEAN, TODAY!

The quote below is from Psalm 8:4, but it also exists in Job 7:17 and Hebrews 2:6.  Here a religious thinker is regarding the idea from a conventional point of view, a few decades ago.

". . . I must try to answer the question raised by King David in his Psalm: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man that thou attend him."

Both men and women in the "Western" world -- where ever people are Jewish or Christian and probably some other closely related institutions --have been mulling this idea for a long time.  The answers change over time as we learn more about the world.  We've survived the idea that we were little clay puppets and also the theory that we were once monkeys who mysteriously transformed.  Serious people understood early versions of evolution, which has partly been thought of as a tree, as a pilgrimage to the future, or as a huge wheel.

Now there is a totally different vision of what life itself is, and therefore a new vision of humans, a new understanding of sentience (living with thought).  We know that everything is code, both the DNA code that creates and runs our bodies and the electromagnetic code of sense organs translating the world to us.  We've dumped the notion of God as a great big land-owning white man, who was a mirage anyway.  Until now we had assumed that even if we weren't in the image of our mirage we were more special than other creatures.  Now we see that the world and the other creatures are what make us who we are, pressing us into our shapes.  Lose them and we lose us.

We see this planet -- if not the whole cosmos -- as enveloped in codes of life: ingenious, interwoven, barely perceptible to us but omnipresent.  Some "religious" systems have already suggested something similar as did the early "Western" people.  (West of what?  On a sphere can such compass points be absolute?)  Even the movies speak of "the Force."

We used to think every human who appeared to be in one body was an individual according to a unique DNA code.  This is true as a beginning, but as soon as the blastophere of a mammal begins to grow, it edits the code to suit the part of the body being built.  It builds the airplane as it flies.  Bits of code go up the umbilicus and live in mom forever.  By birth the microbes, little independent cells, have joined the party -- coming and going according to the environment, the economy, and all these living others, not necessarily human at all.  Bits of your dog are now living in you.

Like the elements, like the idea that energy can become matter and vice versa, the creatures that are existing now are those who managed to survive so far, not as individuals -- for all of us die eventually -- but as a code pattern.  Thus, no one really dies but is only transformed.  Death is not much of a puzzle (unknowable) but suffering is.  Why must we suffer?  What does it have to do with death or survival?  Is it the price of self-awareness?

The reciprocating puzzle is joy and delight.  They make us want to live more, bigger, wider, with more others.  How does that interact with suffering?  How does one affect the other?  Why do we always think of one thing opposed to its opposite when we know that so much is mixed, spread along a spectrum, capable of transforming, harbouring exceptions.

The "West" is always struggling with individual versus community.  Science says we need each other.  But also, the community needs the lone adventurer who enacts the Campbell hero cycle of going to see what there is out there and coming back to tell the others.

When we lived in valleys and along ridges that separated us into tribes, we developed the technique of protecting ourselves by hating others.  This has persisted too long and has translated into stigmas against one practice or another.  Cultural codes have imitated biological codes by trying to survive by oppressing others.  This is a deadly and doomed strategy.  As is the idea that simply being virtuous and "smart" can assure survival to children by avoiding vaccines and certain kinds of knowledge, like where babies come from, while promoting others, like how to have a bigger orgasm than anyone else.

The true nature of God is Time.  The true nature of human beings is survival.  Humans have understood that if they can dance with time, finding and accepting new ways, they can survive, especially if they hold hands with others and pull everyone along.  This is the beginning of a whole new religious point of view, an idea that life is music both sad and celebratory, and that we can all hear it most of the time if we help each other.

RAMBLING ABOUT WRITING

How we love to write about each other.  And we love to read about each other (or watch movies) as well but for very different reasons.  I want to ramble about it a bit.

One notion is that we think that we are now getting the absolute truth because how else would it get into print?  Publishers know they print what makes money, what people buy, but if this idea about absolute truth sells books, what's the trouble?  It may not be true at all, but who will ever find out?  Publishers love to pretend that writers are part of a meritocracy, that there is some absolute way to tell which writer is "better" or even more truthful.  There is actually no way except sales, which are hardly based on merit.  More like notoriety.

One might be a sophisticated person who knows a story is white-washed but enjoys guessing what was left out or finessed.  This is esp. fun when you find out something bad is even worse.  For instance, when we find out that evil as Hitler was, it wasn't as bad as him persuading his mistress to poop on him because it was arousing. (To him.  Not to others, maybe.)  That seemed to us WORSE, somehow, though it didn't really hurt anyone.  (I have not seen any movie that incorporated this fetish though there are lots of Nazi stories.)

The story that a loving mother might tell is quite different from the tale of the kid next door, victim of the brat's predatory narcissism.  Consider Michael Jackson's family.

One bio might simply list facts and dates, though reflection would accept the idea that these could be slanted, enriched, or edited to render different judgements.  In fact, that's what our history books have always done, always arranged to flatter whichever power is in control.  This can boomerang badly, as the Repubs are finding out.  They should have contemplated what they left out before it went public.

Strangely, there is a public consensus about groups (sometimes individuals) and who they are.  When it's bad we call it stigma.  But the reverse is saint-making.  We KNOW  what "Indians" are like, so we accept and defend "The Education of Little Tree" as true, though it was written by a white bigot with his head in LaLa land.  We sometimes demand such untruthful but satisfying stories be removed, but this one remains in print because the income is pretty good.  And authentic "Indians" acted the parts of fantasy people in the movie because they need the work.  The facts came to mean little.

Our president is believed in spite of thousands of lies because the alternative is unthinkable.  The alternative to that theory is unthinkable.  World-shattering.  It's the death of money as a sign of merit, so how will we know where the "top" is now?  Can compassion form a hierarchy?

One should not attempt a style or "voice" when beginning to write because that is something that arrives organically through literal connections between neurons in the brain.  It takes a hundred hours, they say.  I agree.  But even if a writer is not yet developed, what they say might have considerable value.

Drawbacks for writing about someone personally known are different from drawbacks for writing about someone UNknown, but there are always drawbacks.  Feel free to "go fantasy" and make someone up -- people have done that from the beginning -- but there are drawbacks there, too.

This morning I spent some time on email talking about the consequences of the opposition to historical white man's triumph stories.  My correspondent sells cowboy and explorer bronzes, the kind Bob Scriver used to create, but the bottom has gone out of the market as the reputation of those frontier folks has fallen.  Lewis and Clark are no longer heroes around here, because the only "Indians" they killed were Blackfeet only a few miles from here.  They are real, with names and descendants.

If Bob Scriver or his equivalent were working today, their sculptures would be a hard sell.  Too bad for those who imitate his work, hoping for the same outcome.  Different times mean different merits.  Consider historical change-making books like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" or "Black Beauty."  What book really NEEDS to be written right now.  Is there any way a white male person could write it?

LOOKING BACK AT UNKNOWN THINGS

Now that I hear about the third loop called "Social Communication" of the Vagus Nerve system, I understand more.  One part of this loop originates in the brain, in emotions, and directs things like the heart rate.  When we saw Whitaker's flop sweat, that was the vagus "affective" part at work.  Unconscious, uncontrollable.  In my father's case, when he began to be irritated and then angry, he turned red, puffed up, lost control.  Abused kids see that all the time.  We think of this change as sort of a "fault", not a thing that's organic, but a source of moral blame.  "Control yourself!"  More likely it is the residue of trauma, the instinctive triggering of danger compensation by attempting to dominate or wave off other beings.

In those days we hadn't yet discovered and didn't understand compensations like pair-bonds or a place in a stable social group or self-recovery strategies.  Most of us still don't know this stuff, much less how to feel the need for them coming in time to compensate.  Now it's suggested that learned trauma reactions can even carry across generations through the epigenome.  When it happens, it must feel like a mysterious capture and loss of control.  Because it is.

As soon as I started learning this stuff, I quizzed my mom about our own family, our susceptibility and possible causes.  She was reluctant -- the family strategy is not to admit anything, to deny it all.  Don't look down -- it will make you fall. Counselors told me I had symptoms of sexual child abuse, but I couldn't think of anything sexual that happened, nor could she.  From the violence side, the family believed in spanking, switching with a yardstick or a dog leash,  very occasional slaps, but it was always in the heat of the moment and never raised questions in a community with the same standards.  We were not very "fond" and never used terms of affection, so that even now I'm startled when someone says, "I love you."  I don't know how to respond.  I don't like the familiarity of servers who call me "honey."  My family never hugged.  

On the few occasions when I really was weeping with total despair, my mother's response was to get as far away as she could -- like the back of the yard -- so as not to hear me.  (The despair was not from abuse, but from having to give up a beloved place where I had been happy -- like graduating from college.)  If she had tried to hold me and comfort me, I would have fought it, feeling captured and stifled.

Given the pervasiveness of children being sexually misused in every society, there are bound to be some relatives of mine who were molested when small.  I suspect two of them, one on the maternal side, and one on the paternal side.  They don't know each other and are quite different, except that both of them were truly beautiful little girls.  It's possible I'm guessing wrong.

One confided that she was scared all her life.  She had an uncle who was totally rejected, denied, removed from family trees online, photo taken down, made invisible.  He was a diagnosed schizophrenic usually confined to an institution.  Those cousins had orders never to let him in the house, unreal in a rural place where doors were never locked and danger rarely came.  The girl was very sexual, always in an exclusive relationship with an Alpha male like her dad.  Totally faithful.  No one ever said anything about it.

The other was a girl who was impossibly droll and athletic even as a baby when she crawled out of her crib, made it over the sill of the open window (first floor, thank goodness) and went strolling through the neighborhood in her nighty.  In photos she is always making a face, standing on her head, and being scolded by her mother.  One thinks of Oppositional Defiance Syndrome.  Where does that come from?  It seems like a good trauma antidote.

As an adult she is a perfect lady who dresses well, enjoys expensive haircuts, and taught special ed for years.  People love and trust her almost immediately.  A very bad case of flu in early teen years killed her sense of smell.  (The operative nose is part of the brain.)  She faked it for a long time, talking about the smell of chocolate chip cookies or sheets dried in the sun.  She was quoting other people.  Her shield is literacy, reading, and the pretence that all is well.  If you push her hard enough, you smell sulphur.  The younger nuclear family has autistic traits and tendencies, aside from the usual drug and alcohol symptoms, but stabilized as everyone aged and got professional help.

In casual contact these cousins seem far more normal and attractive than me, who is described as warm but surprising.  "Colorful," one employee mediator put it.  But a whiff of trauma in the air puts me on point and I mobilize.  It takes me a long time to recover by figuring it all out.  I'm not inclined enough to reward myself for surviving.  I'm intrusive.

When my little brother was in earliest grades, he had trouble learning to read and a year or so later he got into trouble because he kicked a girl who was tormenting him. (Why was she doing that?  He was a quiet, serious boy.)  My brothers had metal plates on their shoe-soles to make them wear longer and the girl's resulting wound to her leg became infected.  There was trouble.

My mother went into what in some birds do, called "mantling."  That is, she put her emotional wings around him as a shield to make a safe space.  I felt it and wanted some for myself but didn't get it nor any explanation.  (My mother was very concerned that she "raise boys" properly since she had only female sibs.  Girls, like herself, were tough and just take care of themselves.)  That boy always tended to roll up like a pill bug when he was hurt or offended.  But he was okay as a high schooler: wrestled, debated, made radio shows.  He got along fine as a drafted Marine.  My father, as usual, was gone.

Now I remember a time before we were in grade school when a house near us stood empty because the old lady who lived there had died.  Two boys had put up a pup tent in the backyard and they dragged my bro in there.  I don't know what happened, but he was different after that.  He wouldn't talk.  Pill bugs don't talk.  The boys were only passingly interested in me.  "Show us your pipi!" they said.  I didn't know why anyone would be interested in such a featureless part, but okay.  Shrug.  They didn't touch me.  Then the boys were gone.  Was that enough to put me on the list?