PAPER BOOKS IN PROPER BINDINGS

In our usual binary way, the reading public has actually registered only two things:  paper books which we recognize as objects and pack into our lives on that basis while knowing very little about how they get made; and ebooks which we see only through the glass window of the little tech gizmos.  But the REAL impact of this difference is behind the scenes and the DEEPEST impact is on the developments of “cultures” responding to those changes.

In the popular mind, the “mental image” BEING PUBLISHED has always mostly been one of elite achievement, often after a long period of suffering on the part of the writer -- not the publisher, who takes the parent role, providing the Seal of Approval.  Indeed, nice comfy writers who have private incomes are rather resented, because the other popular conviction of educated persons is that at some point they each could write the “Great American Novel” and vindicate themselves.  Or they could write a revelatory, astounding, and absolutely true memoir. Over and over the books themselves used these concepts as internal plot devices until everyone stopped questioning their reality.  Newspapers had book sections that promoted this assumption.  The idea persists on NPR.

This idea is in fact gone.  The colony of publishers on the island of Manhattan is down to five “legacy” publishers owned by Europeans.  They are simply capital investors who require a healthy return.  These publishers have dispensed with the famous slush piles by outsourcing them to the people who used to be their in-house readers and who are now free-lance agents who only make money if they sell a book.  Each publisher has “imprints” which are sort of sub-sets for which one person takes responsibility.  If they don’t make money, they simply wink out.  Everything is driven by the need to make money.  Editing has become a gypsy occupation.  Advertising is where the money goes.

The people who have the most clout in terms of what is published are the salesmen, considered experts because they go out there in the field and deal with bookstores, esp. volume buyers like Big Box Stores.  Bookstores (endangered themselves) order what they like, return whatever doesn’t sell even if they’ve put dayglo “sale” stickers on the books and let the books be damaged, return books at the end of the year to avoid the taxes they must pay on inventory and then reorder the same books because they do sell.  Bookstores must now compete with online providers, not just the publishers themselves or other new book sources, but also the huge back inventory of used books that used to be available only by going into a used book store or employing a book finder, who did the same.  These are books nurtured in the old system so their quality is much higher. 

Even the salesmen are now replaced by “quants” -- quantifiers who investigate numbers to see what sells the most.  They don’t like “outliers” and “long-tails”.  There is a lively market for “remainders” which are books dumped by the publisher as unsaleable at some mysterious auction.  Possibly these are the result of over-optimism about what will sell, failure to allow enough time for word of mouth to develop, or failure to promote.  They show up in used bookstores or catalogues that include music, movies and calendars.  A person can read wonderful books as low-cost remainders because somewhere someone loved them a little too much.

Amazon weirdly recognizes books as just a product and advertises them alongside bug spray, knee pads, household accessories, clothes.  EBay skims off some of the specialty books or particularly valuable books to sell at auction.  Abebooks.com, Alibris.com and Powells.com sell used books.  Literate people who can navigate Google, etc. declare themselves bookstores and sell through these venues.  I find myself acquiring the books of retired anthros, often books they wrote and used as texts, therefore accumulating a lot of copies of no use without classes.  Sometimes these books come from the Salvation Army and other organizations which accept donations of physical books to sell.  Really valuable old books, unrecognized, show up there.

All of this is the product of the MARKETING changes of physical books made possible by computers.  Nothing to do with eBooks.  Likewise, the disappearance of book reviews from newspapers, which was the primary way many of us knew what to read, is NOT due to the disappearance of physical books.  Quite the contrary.  Newspaper desks are heaped with books begging for review.  It is the shift of news-seeking people to the computer websites as well as television and resurging radio that has impoverished newspapers.  Book sections are cut because the ads from publishers didn’t pay for the space.

Back to the impact of electronics on book manufacturers, which is what the publishers must be if they are making physical books. The only way to cut costs for the physical object has been volume printing -- a lot of copies means less money per copy.  But with electronic printing, it’s possible to “print on demand.”  So if you order my books from Lulu.com, they will print you a copy and mail it to you.  Or you can order enough for a class.  No worries about running out.  There is no such thing as an “edition” or “going out of print” or “first printing” versus “second printing.”  There are no remainders.  There are no returns.  The Espresso printing machine, which is about the size of a player piano, will print you any book that has an electronic file (zillions of them), bind it and kick it out warm as a cookie in the time it takes to drink a nice coffee.  Weirdly (again) the most common use is to create a blank book for journaling, not a manuscript but a binding.

Electronics also affects acquisitions.  Queries go to freelance agents.  Many will not consider any queries from people who have not already had a book published. (The snake bites its tail.)  Agents work in genres -- some do certain age groups, others will only consider certain subject matter.  This is because the value of an agent is in their ability to know the market and predict what the publishers will be willing to acquire.  That’s what all the lunches are about, publisher to agent, agent to agent, agent to writer.  Rarely publisher to writer.  Most publishers do not read books.  And electronic queries are processed in a quick and sketchy way.

The publishers are also imposing editorial duties on agents.  Not just to line-edit for correct English and spelling, but also to advise changes, to push for different outcomes or even contents, to “colorize,” to make everything more commercial, and (OFTEN) to hire a ghost writer or a “book doctor.”  If the writer balks, he or she is told they will lose the offer to publish.  This was once done in-house.  It is more acute now that the cost of making a physical book is higher.  There is constant pressure to be shorter.  

Some publishers require the writer to submit a plan for advertising and estimated sales.  Some, especially academic presses which only exist to serve their community and pay the salaries of the Press employees, will ask the author to secure a grant to pay for all or part of the costs and to pay for all illustrations, which might be costly graphics as well as photos or art work.  Material books must be stored in warehouses, shipped, handled and packed by people with muscles and at some costs, including the vagaries of rising paper costs or health insurance.  It is too expensive to allow authors free or low cost copies of their own books, so they do not have boxes of them at home.   

Authors themselves are dented and remaindered by the increasingly greed-driven, corner-cutting, ghost-written, closed-circle-marketing -- all accompanied by the erasure of advances and the diminution of royalties to 5%.  Some authors understand computers and what they could do as direct marketing websites, what is called a “platform.”  They know it is the same as putting boxes of their books in a car and driving them through the country, hand-selling at readings and events, hoping it will amount to pump-priming.  Others, who had been quietly writing all this time, could not get a grip on what was happening and only knew they were wiped off the game board.

Most wannabe writers have no concept of all this and go on happily scribbling in their fantasy world.  What impact reality will have on writers and their motivations is open to speculation.  But as Abraham Lincoln remarked about the man being run out of town on a rail, if it weren’t for the honor of it all, he’d just as soon stay home.  But as another thinker said,  if all you can see is bars, you need to re-focus on the spaces between them.

Tomorrow I’ll take a swipe at ebooks.

"THIS IS NOT THE IVY LEAGUE" by MARY CLEARMAN BLEW

“This Is Not the Ivy League” is a new memoir by Mary Clearman Blew and refers to Northern Montana College, a small but determined school in the Montana public higher ed complex.  It is in the toughest part of a tough state.   “The Ivy League schools are Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania. A gpa of 3.75 is required for admission to any of these schools.”  If you want to suggest they’re pot-bound, it’s okay with me.

“Havre,” as we refer to it around here, is part of the "Sweetgrass League", a stubborn rhizomous institution that struggles along between vocational education so a person can get a job and humanities education so a person can be more human.  Mary, who is suitably stubborn, grips that conflict and is gripped by it.

Mary and I (also Mary) have lived parallel lives (same age, same state -- mostly, same occupation -- sorta.)  which qualifies me to judge whether she has written an accurate memoir, if memoir is defined as a person illuminating a particular time and place while delineating her own life.  As some would have it, sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug, but the gut-spilling collision might be art.  This one qualifies.  It doesn’t give you every teeny detail, but it doesn’t shirk the truth, whether or not it is admirable.

Both of us were born stubborn and soon became print-addicted, both as readers and writers.  Mary has far more of a gift for academic work and if she had gotten the scholarships I had, she would have had a different life.  No reason why she couldn’t have had one since Ivan Doig (who is our age and from this town where I am) did.  Our GPA’s and test scores were probably about the same, but Mary was interrupted by marriage and babies.  (Ivan and I have no children and neither does James Welch who was also the same age and location.)  Mary and I had tumultuous marriages and were accused of narcissism when we fought for our lives.  Ivan and Jimmy had marriages based on the premise that they were writers who deserved support.  Ivan and I attended NU on our scholarships,  

Feminism responds to economics and since babies plus unreliable men means someone has to earn the living, this pressed Mary hard.  Theatre, drinking and sex helped her to survive, just as it has helped many, even in the Ivy League, though they probably paid no price in stigma.   On the Highline people talk.

A sub-theme I appreciated was the strange-o men who pass through such places.  Sometimes stormy petrels and other times rodeo bulls, they make trouble and then pass on.  Personally, I cannot resist the wonderfully charismatic men like Bob Blew any more than Mary can, and it is a heart-piercing tragedy when they fall prey to madness and death.  One never quite recovers.  Again, it was different for Mary because of the children.

We’ve already read plenty of books about ranch life, wood stoves, beaver slides for building haystacks, racing for the doctor, and so on.   But I never get tired of it.  Also, we’ve had plenty of accounts of female generations pulling and hauling on each other, sometimes in ways that help and other times creating unnecessary walls.  It is necessary to testify, though the ones who could witness do not necessarily survive to do it.

Sometime in the Seventies, newly divorced from the “legendary Bob Scriver,” as the newspapers would have it, I overheard one man say to another,  “The only woman writing in Montana is Mary Clearman Blew.”  At that point she became a kind of marker for me.  I WAS writing, but I wasn’t published and I wasn’t part of the magical circle of approved Montana writers who were considered the “Lariati.”  High sales value.  

Mary took writing classes from Leslie Fiedler, who had managed to run off Walter van Tilberg Clark.  (Bud Guthrie told me this.)  Decades later Fiedler had left, selling his house to the Missoula Unitarian Universalist congregation who called me as their minister 1982-85.  By that time I had a degree from the University of Chicago, which some think trumps the Ivy League.  So there.   (But I didn’t understand Derrida either.)  When I was in town, I slept in the basement bedroom where “Montana Gothic” was gestated.  If you go to the Montana Festival of the Book, ask Peter Koch about Dirck van Sickle.  Not all Montana writers stay in Montana or even in the West.  Welch and Blew did.  Doig left voluntarily.  I kept getting thrown out.

Mary’s son doesn’t speak to her.  My brother doesn’t speak to me.  Who knows why?  Are they threatened?  Deeply wounded by something in the past?  It’s impossible to figure out, since the means is the problem.  But it seems somehow gender-related.

How does one decide whether one’s life is successful or not?  Economically and family-wise, Mary has done well.  She has a string of published books, praised but probably not money-makers.  She has marked a generation that struggled through a transition from our homesteader grandmothers to beloved grandchildren. She’s been an effective part of the history of Northern Montana College, with particular success managing the traditional “women’s” field of nursing.  In the end solitude is a rewarding state, happily interrupted by the need to shelter the next generation.

I suspect that someone pressed Mary to create a happy ending, an epilogue about a beloved child.  The real ending is the one about Leslie Fiedler remarking on her short story in which the protagonist ends the story by running because it is the thing he does best.  Mary goes on because it is the thing she does best.  It is the women’s mantra, since their work is never done, because it is grassroots, rhizomous, tenacious stuff like sweetgrass, that prairie answer to lavender.

In fact, a young reviewer writing for the New York Times was a little irritated that Mary didn’t include some kind of Deus ex machina happy ending -- you know, the MAN.  Or failing that, the Nobel Peace Prize.  Why can’t you be happy?  This is what books have come to mean and it is a corrupting pressure.  Mary is NOT corrupted.  She gives you reality.  The reality is that as the head of the MFA program in Creative Writing for the University of Idaho, she is a success on worldly terms.  In her heart simply being a writing academic is a profound and hard-won success.  Glorious and satisfying as a prairie day in Indian Summer.

MORE INTENSE THAN LYRIC POETRY

The major blind alley I took in my “feeling around” for a strategy to develop my Doctor of Ministry thesis was mostly due to political factors.  I was obliged to have three thesis advisors, one of whom was John Godbey, the Meadville/Lombard history professor with devotion to Transylvanian Unitarianism, a left-wing Reformation development that had no relationship to liturgical theory.  In fact, it was simply (and is now) Christianity that clings to monotheism.  Godbey himself was quite Christian, not quite Trinitarian. 

The second, more natural, advisor was Duke Gray, then the minister at First Unitarian Church kitty-corner from Meadville. The church Von Ogden Vogt built.  This link offers a fascinating look at how some people saw him:

http://www.djkeithjohnson.com/evangelicalucc-cape/documents/chronicler082010.pdf   It’s helpful, because I didn’t see him that way at all.  I found him authoritarian, attached to high prestige Anglican criteria, and inclined to “assemble” religious liturgy in an eclectic and aesthetic fashion that didn’t necessarily respond to the people it was for.  From the get-go he plainly disliked me.  His late move to a more explicitly Christian congregation seems a good idea.  At that time  Gray was a member of Abraxas, an organization of UU ministers and interested lay leaders who explored worship elements and practices.  I was interested in this at first, but finally put off by arrogance and what seemed to me bricolage of elements from a range of cultures, united only by arbitrary theme.  

Rather unexpectedly, it was Father Robert J. Schreiter at the Catholic Theological Seminary, who taught a class on liturgy meant to prepare priests to offer sacraments, who gave me a deeper understanding of what was going on -- or should.  It was an effective countercheck on the tendency, esp. in UU lay-led fellowships, that is mocked as “City Sewer Syndrome.”  That’s when the Sunday morning service drifts over into politics -- secular, sporadic, a smorgasbord -- partly out of exhaustion and partly out of not quite knowing what to do.  Father Schreiter was trying to get us to understand that when reconciling religious material cultures, one cannot assume simply that all foods are communions, so that bizarre ideas about rice and saké communions take hold.  Neither can one let the symbols of material culture, not even bread and wine, become sacralized to the point of losing what they evoke, which may be beyond human understanding except as felt concepts.  Father Schreiter would NOT be an advisor.  I was not Christian, let alone Catholic.

So I forced a relationship to a female professor of Rhetoric of Lyric Poetry, though I had little idea what that was.  I was just feeling my way towards poetics without much idea what THAT was either.  She was justifiably put off by me and my ignorance, though at first she tried to be honorable towards this seminary student, a fringey part of the sprawling complex that is University of Chicago.  In the end we both gave up.

Lyric poetry is a specific kind of poetry that is intensely emotional, often focused on a moment, sometimes in nature.  The “rhetoric” of this poetry is the choice of vocabulary, the tricks of arranging them in various traditional patterns of rhyme and rhythm, the allusions, the images, and so on.  It’s very much relevant to my ideas about liturgy, but in a secondary way, in the preparation of materials, not the actual beats and arc.  As words for hymns, as “prayers,” and in the summoning of mood, lyric poems act for the secular something like the familiar Bible passages used by Christians.  But they are muscle and skin, NOT skeletal structure.

There was another problem.  I had spent a decade on the Blackfeet Reservation and then a half-decade as an animal control officer in Portland, Oregon.  I saw life in very intense chiaroscuro terms, slammed up against death and despair.  But my context at seminary was middle class, mainstream, and bourgeois.  They “had compassion” towards people who lived in Third World conditions -- they just didn’t know them.  To them worship was a Sunday morning harmonious “nice” event, a place of safety and reassurance.  I wanted to think about cannibalism, ordeals, weird New Guinea ceremonies, and insanity.   To my guides, those were disorderly, to be resisted.  Even disgraceful.  When I said “sex,” they said,  “Our time is up now.”

The thinker I needed was Thomas Moore, whom I didn’t come to know until later at a conference in Bozeman, Montana, while circuit-riding there in the Eighties, though I don’t think he was yet quite at the point where our interests converged.  In his book  “Dark Eros” he made “an exploration of sado-masochism in everyday life and culture through a positive reading of the Marquis de Sade. . . .It’s purpose is to deepen our understanding and appreciation for the dark side of life.”  Moore is a James Hillman school Jungian with strains of Asian thought.  This puts him in harmony with my penchant for Eliade and Campbell.  Despite using his therapist’s license to go dangerous places, Moore is still “nice” in the public mind.  It takes someone like Geoff Mains to put a person right up against the extreme.  Your library probably won’t have his books.

Baptism, communion, reconciliation, confirmation, marriage, ordination, and Last Rites are the traditional Roman Catholic sacraments and are or should be on the level I’m talking about:  life-changing, requiring commitment, acceptance of moral terms.  They’ve lost a lot of their punch, partly maybe because they’ve been so effectively claimed by the counter-sacral, the Satanic as developed and expressed in so many music videos.  Secular legal enforcement of these steps has changed.   If the sacraments could be restored to meaning, we probably need additional sacraments of divorce, defrocking, and leaving combat that are equally intense.   

More than that, the sacraments have lost their connections to the inner molten core of life.  We are control freaks, we stay on schedule and on our diets, we don’t like change or risk.  We don’t like to be different.  All our drama is for watching, not participating.  Everything is calculated monetarily.

These are the categories I’m considering at present:  liturgies that focus on 

COMMUNITY: with persons gathered in a unity of purpose:  sharing, rejoining, emerging, changing context, world making, in-gathering, releasing.

GUIDED:  therapeutic, learning. shamanic, intimate confrontation

DEVOTION:  by a person alone:  reconciliation, reunification, empowerment, healing, grief, creation, transformation.

SOLITARY, in extremis:  theology of the void, uncaring, despair, anomie, entrapment, loss of boundaries, substance or trauma effects, madness, death.   Or the positive: ecstasy, fusion, transcendence.

It is these deep-brain concepts -- as much sub- or un-conscious as conscious, much less articulated in words -- that give rise to deep structures of religious experience that are managed by the shifting of consciousness through the use of sensory material culture.  The task of the liturgist then is to find the cultural concepts that can express the elements of these states, and then the derived sensory experiences (words, music, art, etc.) that will carry the structure into meaning for the persons involved.

LITURGICAL "BEATS" AND "ARC" AKA Elements and Sequence

The third year of “Slings & Arrows” is in part about staging a musical.  The avant garde director was making a dog’s breakfast of what was essentially a pretty musical about heroin addiction.  So the business director, who was a suppressed musical comedy nut, stepped in.  He made a chart of what the artistic director called “beats” (the scenes) and the “arc” (the line of plot development) which revealed what the play needed, which guided choices that made it a success.

When I look at the notes for my thesis and then look at the very popular books about the nature of God, I see that what I’m doing can not be considered part of that tsunami of argument about, with, and defining God.  I don’t CARE about God.  I’m working with human beings here.  I’m not even staying within the Christian context, but rather going to a more primal level in the brains of human beings.  (Check that.  I accept the new hypotheses that people think with their whole bodies.)  

Much of what I have in my archives from 1982 about this moldy old thesis of mine is irrelevant.  But it’s sort of interesting and though it doesn’t qualify for inclusion in my contemporary version, it might be worth putting on this blog.  So for what it’s worth, here’s what might be developed into a second book, maybe even called “A Trout in the Chalice.”  (See the post earlier this week about the Arthurian legends.)

In the Thirties (which we seem to be repeating, alas, having evidently not learned our lesson) along came Von Ogden Vogt, who developed an elaborate scheme of beats-and-arc as follows  (Vogt's words are underlined.):

THE CALL TO WORSHIP:  “Every service which has a call to worship begins with the state of the worshipper in mind rather than the presentation of divinity.  Exhortation or Statement of Intention are alternative beginnings.”

(“We gather this morning to acknowledge the beauty of the world and the shelter of our community.”  The bells ring.  A procession enters.”)

VISION:  “An awareness of All Things . . . it is the presentive element, the declaration of the divine life which the worshipper has come to find and it is itself the service of God going on in the sanctuary to which the worshipper has come to offer his praise.  In form, it is the preliminary announcement of the theme of the day, and the initial rhythmic movement of the liturgy, binding together minister and choristers as participants.”

(The first hymn is announced.  All rise.)

HUMILITY:  “The sense of diminution . . . this low point of contrast is a normal and often intense stage in the experience of worship.”

(This is the first part of what I call the Dilation of the Spirit and some Christians call the Confession of Sins.)

VITALITY:  “Out of the world of frustration and weakness into the tides of full and complete life.”

(I call this the second part of the Dilation of the Spirit and some Christians call the “Assurance of Pardon.”)

RECOLLECTION:  “The heightened imagination begins to operate on earthly scenes . . .a wider range, a fuller review, possibly covering a retrospect and forecast of many years and all their affairs.”

(In a Christian context this might be the reading of scripture.  Otherwise, anything that places the congregation in time and space: orchestra, video?)

ILLUMINATION:  “Problems are clarified and wishes reordered.  What seemed important sinks in the scale, the great values emerge and are freshly cherished.”

(For Christians the sermon.  Any equivalent.)

DEDICATION:  “When the mind sees what is right and best to do and the whole man [sic] is made more capacious to do it, the urgence to dedication is all but irresistible.”

For Christians the prayer after the sermon.

PEACE:  “Surely there should be at the end of such a supreme course of experience an integrity of being that is reconciliation and peace.”

(We used to form a circle and sing Shalom/Salaam.  Benediction.)

John Hayward points out that Vogt used this sequence to develop many actual worship services, carefully and poetically written.  He was ambivalent about his relationship to Christianity, wishing to keep the high Gothic forms, but trying to fill them with humanistic content, so that the church he “built” is a replica of a European cathedral but it is decorated with commerce and science.  Whether this is a synthesis or a collision is open to comment but it was convincing enough to energize his congregation and rally their resources.

At any rate, Vogt was working for a universal worship pattern with an integrity of its own that was drawn directly from human experience.  It’s the bit about human experience that’s relevant for this thesis.

Vogt says, “. . . the outer form of the exercise of worship should parallel the inner order of the experience of worship. . .If the principle be a correct one, the first task of an artist in worship is to analyze the experience.  It may be opposed to this suggestion that there is no typical religious experience of worship, that the many varieties of religious experience cannot be reduced to the general norm. . .  I only express my view that in the main there is a comprehending normal experience which covers all these major differences.  However varied the situation of the worshippers in mind, body or estate, however varied the approaches, whether mental or emotional or moral, the essential psychology of the experience is identical.”

The missing piece I needed was about the Von Gennep/Victor Turner three-step idea of “crossing the limen” into a “virtual space” where all taboos are ignored and deep change can take place -- then returning to secular life where that change can be expressed.  Once the idea of “felt concepts” that Suzanne Langer suggested was matched up with fMRI perceptible brain activity, then it could be proposed that an actual shift of consciousness was responsible for this entry into “virtual space,” which is a metaphorical way of describing a particular frame of mind that allows possibility to be considered.  Those who take LSD seem to describe something similar -- beyond the pretty colors and so on, some testify that they are transformed psychologically, that they let go of old conflicts and sticking points.

I’m proposing that entering and leaving this state is deeply entwined with sensory cues and that they touch something real in the person that can’t be accessed in other ways.  Which images of which senses -- a mix of sound, smell, space, and so on -- will demonstrate the skill of the liturgist, both in their choosing and in their arranging:  both their “beats” and their “arc.”  It should be obvious that the liturgist must truly know the worshippers to achieve the kind of intense experience that people find poetic, quasi-sexual, life-changing.  This is not to discredit the daily small rituals that order our lives or even the great patriotic spectacles that can unite us en masse.  They are not quite the same.  

But I’m pleased to have found something useful and fitting in the dim recesses of UU archives.  Sound theory from an old-fashioned humanist  liturgist in a polka dot bowtie!  Here is a good link.  I grieve that the tower of First Unitarian has been taken down due to deterioration.   http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/vogt.html  

ENTER OUR CHURCH!!

The Valier, Montana, Catholic church is one-hundred years old.  Sunday evening, in the midst of a world of strife and alienation, the members came together Sunday evening to consecrate an addition to their brick building, which was begun in 1937 in the midst of world crisis.  This is what it means to be a people of faith: a community of hope aligned against destruction.  It’s not a big flashy church.  The architecture is classic.  The families are sturdy.

But over the years the congregation had aged and the entrance, going up steps necessary so that the basement social hall could have windows, was a little difficult to negotiate for some.  Thus a practical addition would provide a foyer and an elevator.  Though the original church had been built by local artisans in the congregation who knew how to make things square and sturdy, in the case of rebuilding the entry they thought of an architect and found a unique one.  

Bill Grant and his wife, Anne DesRosier, are partners in Ad Graphic, a small business on the Blackfeet Reservation, currently located in Browning, Montana.  Both come from families with pioneer roots in the area and both are devout Catholics.  Ann is an enrolled Blackfeet.  Bill’s ancestor was involved in the history of Lethbridge, a couple of hours north on the Canadian side.  Anne is a birthright Catholic and Bill took the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults after marrying Anne, who feels he was strongly affected by his guide, Sister Edna Hunthausen from the remarkable “peace-focused” family.

Thanks to Frank Lloyd Wright, church architects in particular are often seen as flashy and experimental artists without much regard for practicalities, like a roof that doesn’t leak.  But Bill is “grounded” in his work and though he had help for the early heavy reconstruction, he spent a year carefully finishing -- not just finishing but also perfecting.  Here he is, down on his knees mixing epoxy for some tiny detail the day before the consecration.  Daily for a year he made the hour-long drive down the Rocky Mountains.  He works in silence -- no radio blaring.

The Cardinal’s homily was a review of the history of the Parish, drawn from the church files.  Most of what I know comes from “Harvest of Memories: Historical Events of Valier, Montana,” an account of the founding and families.  Here is a quote:  “St. Francis Church was built in 1909.  In the planning of the Valier townsite, land was set aside for a Catholic and non-Catholic church.  Church records began in 1911 when Father Francis Joseph Shevlin came as the first resident priest.  Baptismal records show that he ministered to the people of Augusta, Choteau, Dupuyer, Williams and Valier.

“It was in 1913 that Father Day, a native Belgian who was vicar-general of the Diocese of Helena made a trip to Europe and brought back thirteen families from Belgium and Holland, eighty people in all. . . .The church was ready and blessed in 1914 by Bishop J.P. Carroll.”  World War I was just beginning.    

The life of St. Francis Catholic Church in Valier was yoked with the Sacred Heart Mission of the Belgium Settlement in Williams, ten miles away, where mass was said in “Belgian,” which might have been either French or German since Belgium is a rather bilingual country.  That old Church still stands and the graveyard next to it is still tended.  In the early days the priest arrived from Valier in a buggy, or if there was snow on the ground, a bobsled.  

These days the congregation arrives in pickups and the priest must serve almost as many parishes as in the beginning.  There is no longer a resident priest in Valier.

The irrigation project that supported the community economically is still in operation.  Wheat is the mainstay and thus the windows claim that theme.

This a simple and elegant place with surprising details, like this cherubic face.

I do not attend this church, but I was made welcome here.  I attend the church under the large dome of the big sky.  In fact, I interpret this large stained glass window at the rear of the church to be a depiction of my church.

There is no contradiction here: both are manifestations of Creation.

Instead of a wooden closet for confession, this church -- because of the addition -- has a simple room for "reconciliation" where person and priest sit on chairs face-to-face.  I suppose one might interpret the two peaks Bill Grant created at the entry in those terms: a dialogue about the sharing of both Creation and Reconciliation.

THE HOLY GRAIL

When it comes to the Bible, there seem to be two “camps.”  (I will not call them “schools of thought,” since thought seems to have little to do with the choice of camp.)  One is the the group that has investigated the actual origins of this collection of writings called "Bible", come to the conclusion that it’s a mess (partly because of politics -- is anyone surprised?) and the other is the group that accepts the miraculous origin of this “Book” in another level of reality as an absolute guide, but chooses to conveniently skip over the contradictions, impossibilities, and fuzziness -- to say nothing of the boring parts. 

So let’s just leave that issue to the side and take up the origins of the King Arthur story as described in Steven Moore’s big fat book, “The Novel: An Alternative History.”   (He’s also cogent on the subject of the Bible but you can chase that fox on your own.)  Coyly called “The Matter of Britain,” as Brits  like to do, this is a tale that came out of the surf between cultures colliding across the English Channel: the French and the English and their many sub-sets.  

Geoffrey of Monmouth is evidently the one who pinned the complex of inherited, invented, and embellished tales on a vague king from the 5th century called “Arthur.”  His manuscript, c. 1136, was called “Historium regum Britanniae” because important authors in those days wrote in Latin.  Most of the versions are verse, because probably they were sung or recited for the benefit of non-readers.  Chrétien de Troyes was one of those using verse between 1170 and 1190 while “Arthurmania” swept the courts of Europe.  Moore points out that these creative types were christianizing the Celtic legends brought back from the Norman Conquest of England in the eleventh century, to make them more respectable, but also injecting them with the cult of chivalry and courtly love.  The practice has survived until now -- even as Diana Gabaldon’s sweeping epics are audible on mp3’s.  The types remain, though I’ll let the fans work out who is Arthur, Galahad, Lancelot and Mordred.

Other versions of this long “soap opera” about Arthur and his Round Table that Moore discusses include Chrétien de Troyes’ long poem, “Story of the Grail” but it’s unfinished.  About 1200 Robert de Boyon wrote a three part verse interpretation called “The Book of the Grail” but not all of it survives, except as a prose paraphrase.  No one can figure out for sure which version came first or even whether both were written by de Boyon.  Taken together, they could be called “Merlin and the Grail.”

This interesting back story to Arthur is the Christian connection more recently made notorious by novels about the kings of Europe descending from Jesus.  De Boron used two books of Apocrypha, “The Gospel of Nicodemia” and “The Vengeance of the Savior.”  Apocrypha are early writing that are sometimes included in certain traditions and versions of the Bible.  They are often printed sandwiched between the Old and New Testaments and are variously considered esoteric, suppressed or discredited.  Even scandalous.  This attracts curious readers.

Moore says the Holy Grail that is the link comes from the Welsh myth of the Cornucopia, a vessel that is inexhaustible, an appealing thought on rocky isles where it is hard work to survive.  The relevant version says that at the house of Simon the Leper, the Last Supper is being shared from a “vessel.”  After the crucifixion -- which this diplomatic ancient writer blames entirely on the Jews so that the Romans bear no responsibility -- the vessel goes into the hands of a secret convert, a Roman soldier, who receives from Pilate the vessel plus permission to take Jesus’ body off the cross.  The soldier collects some of Jesus’ blood in the vessel.

The resurrected Jesus appears and assigns the vessel, now the Holy Grail, to Joseph and his sister, Enigeus, her husband Bron, and a circle [sic] of converts.  Things go along until Enigeus and Bron violate the Code of Courtly Love by having an affair, Egyptian-style, between sibs.  Jesus speaks through the Grail, telling them they must re-enact the Last Supper.  Bron is directed to catch a fish for this meal, so he becomes “The Fisher King.”  The illicit lovers cannot feel the holiness of the Grail.  (I know of NO art image of a fish in the Grail.)  Joseph says that a son of Bron and Enigeus will be the keeper of the Grail.

Bron and the enigmatic Enigeus have twelve sons.  Alain li Gros is the privileged one but he says he’d rather be flayed alive than get married.  Meanwhile, down in hell, demons are plotting and one manages to get a virtuous and virginal young woman pregnant: the issue is a very hairy baby named Merlin.  By similar magic, sending a lustful man to impregnate Arthur’s mother by simulating his legal father, the king is produced.  It seems clear that courtly love is an attempt to deal with the problems of genetic succession to thrones, the possibility of a conception being illegal, and the exceptional attributes of some individuals.  These elements had been around for a while and still persist in spite of scientific genomic discernments of who is related to whom.  Nowadays they are somewhat shadowed by Queen Victoria’s legacy of hemophilia.  (Meaning the blood disorder, though logically the word should mean blood-loving, which sounds like vampires, but also suggests Communion.)

Perceval, a knight in King Arthur’s court, is the grandson of Bron, but fails to secure the Grail.  He has a story of his own. “Perlesvaus” translated as “The High Book of the Grail” by Nigel Bryant, with the Fourth Crusade as a background.  Now religion is expressed as war seeking dominance, a defense of destruction.

In the days when education included such matters, we read Jesse L. Weston’s 1920 analysis of this version, called “From Ritual to Romance” which then informs T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland.”  The element that seems to persist until now is not the many marvelous superhero and CGI- friendly events of violence -- oh, boy, is someone missing a bet by not bringing these tales to the screen!  -- but the ennui and heart-sickness of the king who has lost faith and meaning.  

So!  Is this relevant or what?  The cornucopic Grail of prosperity has eluded us again.  The land is locked into climate change and bureaucratic unreason.  Who among us will go to find this precious connection to Greater Powers?   And must we crucify our leaders?

OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE

All my occupational/vocational/career choices have been opportunistic, defaults.  What I really wanted to do was write, but now that I have the time, the place, the subsidy (old age pension), the subjects, the intense motivation -- the whole bundle of things necessary to be a writer -- publishing has fallen apart.  I can still write.  I DO write -- you’re reading this, aren’t you?  But publishing is different.  It is merchandizing and merchandizing writing on the Internet is selling snow to Eskimos.  (Yes, I know it’s politically incorrect to call them that.  Put it on my tab.)

Sam Harris points out on his blog: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-future-of-the-book/  that people now expect all print to be free.  That’s only one aspect of it.  Another is that the writing now rains down on us like a confetti storm.  And yet another is that the audience of readers is totally unlike any we’ve had before.  Young, hip, scornful, ambitious, willing to talk sex and the supernatural smushed together, unwilling to sit down and read for any length of time -- partly because they are reading on a two-inch screen embedded in their phone -- the writer has got to be swift, incendiary, and edgy.  A strange mix of familiarity (they can handle sci-fi) and surprise (don’t get rational).  

Does the same old Campbell hero cycle work?  Maybe, but it gets harder and harder to figure out how to get the hero back to his/her community, wised up and helpful.  How to describe in a convincing way a transformation that is unimaginable?  Yet science is packed with revelations just beyond our fingertips: a renewable source of energy that is cheap as print, an understanding of cell biology that cures every major disease, a way to travel faster than light so we can finally get to the next solar system.

Last night’s second cycle of the Canadian series called “Slings & Arrows” was based on “Macbeth.”  The plot gizmo was that the main actor was successful, full of himself, and unwilling to move on because he had it so good where he was.  The director had to trick him into using his real talent by substituting a “lesser” actor who did a better job, and by completely disorienting Mr. Hero Actor,  which also put the director out on thin ice.  A big gamble.

Twice in my life I’ve been on unemployment:  once when I left teaching and once when I left the ministry.  Major dislocations and big hits to security, but they preserved what makes me a decent writer: independence and a sense of moral outrage combined with love of the sensory world.  Those two “vocations” were consciously chosen but quite misunderstood and -- anyway -- transformed into something I disliked because of cultural shifts.  Teaching is totally different than it once was and so is ministry.  The “consumers” wanted something different that I was prepared to provide.

Other jobs (animal control, clerical specialist) just sort of dropped on my head like burning pianos.  No choice.  But interesting.  And then there was Life with Scriver and the Blackfeet, which was far more than a job: identity shaping.  I just couldn’t sustain it.  It consumed me as much as it fulfilled me.  I didn’t find that again until writing with Tim Barrus.  It is the kind of thing this new generation wants to hear about, but if you share something that passionate, it  can be very dangerous to both parties.  One becomes a burning piano.

The strange thing (maybe it’s NOT strange) is that while the arts have become far more risky (though demanding less skill), ordinary life demands more tech skill, more money, more bland dependability, more obedience.  Maybe the two things have a compensatory relationship.  The sub-plot of the “Slings & Arrows” episodes was that the audience was aging and leaving because of how boring the productions had become.  An advertising campaign -- devised by a charlatan -- that attacked the audience by mocking their age and mediocrity, brought in a crowd of youngsters, Deadheads, poete maudit wannabes, who re-energized everything.  Is that what’s happening with the whole arts scene?

The continuing ripping of covers off the money industry that everyone has so worshipped for more than a decade has revealed who’s in bed together.  Bankers, CEO’s and senators.  Teachers, ministers, and writers.  Well, publishers anyway.  It appears we’re resuming the Revolution that was started in the Sixties and Seventies.  But we have found the enemy and this time he is us, not our parents.  It hurts.  It is quite possibly fatal.

I never really understood that social bargain between the individual (or the nuclear family) and society that is a “job.”  I asked my mother, who grew up in a small town, how to get a job.  She said that one went to the business part of town and proceeded from one to the next, asking them what they needed and whether they would hire.  That’s how she got her teaching job right out of college (a middle-aged retread) and she never left it.  It served her well.

My father grew up homesteading and farming.  He was the oldest and the college graduate.  He took a low-level job, never was ambitious though idealistic, and was finally unemployable because of a 1948 head injury that by the Sixties had triggered something like Parkinson’s.  Until then he was smart, diligent, and resourceful -- but never progressed and never took the family into prosperity, which is why my mother went back to school.

It’s a kind of “bone game” as the Blackfeet would have it.  (That’s “bone” as in button except there are two bones, only one of them the true one to find.)  An interaction of skill and luck, mediated by a row of people motivated to baffle you for their own ends.  Cynical but realistic.  One cannot guarantee success even with money, contacts, resources, or else John-John Kennedy would be alive today. 

Nevertheless, the length of one’s life trajectory doesn’t mean much.  I’m not even sure one’s contributions to the lives of others are significant, given that “contributions” have a tendency to change in value rather radically over time.  So for today, a brilliant but overcast, blowing, not-quite-chilly, fall day, I think I’ll just settle for hedonism.   It’s a classic solution.  Luckily, my greatest pleasure is writing.  NOT publishing. 

LOOK AT ME!

Situations where one person tries to shift the consciousness of another person abound in ordinary daily life.  Trying to get someone else to go for a walk, to play a game, or to get amorous are pretty usual.  Living with a toddler means constantly distracting them from unwanted behavior based on untrained intentions.  “Oh!” one exclaims enthusiastically, “Look at this!”  One even learns the triggers for pets to keep them -- well, not under control exactly.  More like in sync with one’s own purposes.  Of course, pets reciprocate so that my cats have taught me to go dish out some cat food when they rub against my shins.  They can even resort to negative reinforcement:  a terrible yowl if I fail to respond.  But babies and dogs don’t usually operate on more than one level of consciousness at a time, as adult humans do.

There are a few occupations where the direct management of someone else’s consciousness is the business at hand.  Not just their behavior, as one might think a cop or trainer would want, but the person’s attitude, the way they look at what’s happening, which hopefully makes them participate in the goal, desire the same end as the person trying to move their consciousness -- not just rationally because it’s the right thing to do -- but really collaborating with enthusiasm and shared desire.  Yeah, seduction.  Or advertising.  Religion.  Politics.

Actors think about this all the time, whether they say so or not.  Acting classes might do an exercise where two people face each other across a table and one tries to get the other to change their emotional state.  Some of it will be body language: always eye contact.  Another effective method is evoking memories, maybe rather universal ones like the struggle to learn to ride a bike.  Sense-based images.  Stories, if properly chosen and told, can change someone’s attitude for life.

I’m working my way through “Slings & Arrows,” the Canadian series about a company of Shakespearan actors.  It’s intelligent and complex, dependent in part on knowledge of a different play each set of episodes:  first Hamlet, second Macbeth, and third Lear.  One soon becomes very aware of how much levels of consciousness are the subject.  Shakespeare himself was preoccupied with what is real: ghosts, murderous ambition with resulting hallucinations, and frank madness.  The same conceit that a dead impresario -- older, wiser, and oddly happier in death -- is used in this series as was present in “Being Julia,” the movie featuring Annette Bening who ends the show with a tour de force scene on the stage that is packed with layers of emotional reality, irony, professional skill, phony pretensions, audience reaction, turning the tables, and stage gimmicks for maintaining the power of focus.  Under these amusing situations in both contexts are many questions of consciousness, like falling in love, misunderstanding others, and the exhausting corrosion of constant attention to inner life.

The idea of a dead person speaking to one is not hard to understand.  We all know what influential people would say if they were still present.  (Even God, though we have a notable tendency to conjure different aspects.)  To debate with someone in one’s head is not unusual.  A writer is often doing exactly that on paper.  This inner management of one’s own consciousness can approach something like prayer or might simply be a demonstration of the ability of humans to create inner persons while not losing their own identity.  Sometimes this is conscious and other times it is not.

The work of a therapist is to allow those inner dialogues, which are sometimes half-submerged in the swampy dreamland that underlies what we think we’re doing, to come out onto the “stage” where they can be engaged and explored.  How much is old scripts?  How much is based on fantasy or situations long gone?  So much of adult identity comes from forms invented in childhood and never altogether put away.  The novelist covers much of the same ground but does it alone.  Then the readers pick up the narrative, run it through their own individual consciousnesses and produce a new thing, a kind of collaboration that invites their own ghosts.

A few days ago I watched a TED video made of Oliver Sacks talking about people who are blind but who “see things.”  That is, their brain is throwing up images but they are not generated by sensory contact with the real world in real time.  In the course of explaining this, he mentioned that there is one part of the brain where cartoons register.  I’ve had no luck following this up.  I don’t know whether he meant the mind-rotting capacities of “Spongebob Squarepants,” or the fMRI research that suggests women get more out of amusement at cartoons than men do, or the idea that there is a strange reality in a drawn world that might be related to our ability to “suspend disbelief” when we watch acting.  Certainly my own self-observation is that cartoons, especially the kind we call “comic strips,” can create a world with its own convincing integrity.  I don’t know how to describe the feeling of watching a CGI combination of familiar drawn characters with real actors.  A kind of irresolvable absurdity.

Some of us have that sensation when we confront religious concepts and stories that once worked when they were drawn from the reality of the person using them to affect the consciousness of the listeners -- either persuading or confirming their ideas.  (Lambs and kings.)  Theology doesn’t address this situation because it is focused on logic (-ology) and only considers the theos in those terms.  But an active preacher or evangelist is trying to use a personification in a way that will make it a role model -- an inner voice that can accompany the believer for the rest of their life as a source of courage and a moral guide.  This is entirely honorable.  But it is not a reality connected to the sensory world that obeys the laws of physics.

Leadership is the ability to embody a consciousness that makes people want to willingly follow, to share that view of the world.   I would suggest we are currently stuck in unreality:  too aware of people suffering on the one hand and too afraid of our own possible destructive fate on the other hand.  We mistake the representations in our media for real life.   We simply are not available to rational discussion of alternatives.  The persons wanting to be our leaders have not gotten enough of a grip on our shared consciousness of risk to move it out of defensiveness.   They don’t quite know where we are and neither do we.  Where’s Shakespeare?  Where’s the inner voice of the sadder but wiser dead impresario we refer to as God?