GRASPING THE CONCEPTS

INTRODUCTION  to “The Poetics of Liturgy”

This theory of liturgy is hopefully useful for all cultures, all human beings.  It is not unique to any institution, dogma or tradition, but desires to uncover the actual phenomenon of feeling and managing the sacred, both “entering” and “leaving.”  It could be called “spiritual technology.”  This is theory meant as a tool for analysis, but also as a guide for creation.  It is indebted to comparative religion but, perhaps more than that, the mystery of sensory feeling as the substrate of behavior, which involves new studies in evolutionary brain function.  That is, culture as shaped by the strategies of the brain to receive and organize sensation in order to produce behavior.

This way of thinking is not the same as those that talk about the evolution of the physical brain from reptile to mammal to human.  Nor is it the same as what is revealed by fMRI studies of where certain thoughts activate the brain.  It is not available through internal reflection of one's own thoughts.  Rather these are things like face recognition, empathy, deep universal taboos, and certain other identifiable performances that can be tested but not attached to physiology.  Most of them are probably evolved fairly recently and are supported in the forebrain.  They include the skills of art and would encourage social success.

This is not theory for the individual but for community gathering.  It will define “theos” as merely ONE culture-bound concept of the spiritual: that is, this thought does not depend upon God or Christianity or any other form of “theos.”  But they include “theos” -- they are not A-theistic. They could be used in a conventional small town mainstream church. (I’ve done it.)  The original idea came out of a retreat workshop for Unitarian Universalists, solid citizens considered leaders.   

My own bias is towards the extreme, which is often vivid enough to make a point sharply.  I have a strong personal prejudice against the pretty, the facile, the accustomed, the bourgeois, which can diminish or even eliminate the feeling of sacredness.  Though there is plenty of justification for respite in a harsh and tragic world, anodynes are not enough.  Religion should be more than the opium of the people.  What’s more, religion should not be just another commodity in a mercantile world.  I take it to be an aspect of humanness that is not dependent on authority or wealth.

This approach privileges immanental ideas of sacredness -- that the holy naturally wells up from within the experienced world and is not the product of some other-worldly force.  But that does not exclude a sense of the transcendent (which I believe is NOT the opposite of the immanental, but rather “her sister”) and, indeed, may give access to that feeling of being in harmony with some force far greater than human minds can grasp.  Evasion of the dark side can mean diminishing the truly powerful energies for salvation, creation, and life-force that ought to be the artesian sources of immanentalist hope.  If one looks at the origins of the big “Book” based religions, so institutionalized, so focused on preserving their own interests, so buttressed with dogma, it will soon be clear that the roots of them are “watered with blood.”  To tie satin ribbons on them is bizarre and defeating.  Yet we need some way to withstand the crushing forces of life. 

Neither am I including the closely related field of study based on entheogens, substances that are mind-altering.  I do not question or discredit them, but they are far beyond my expertise.   I am agnostic about their use, but I am interested in what the brain does under their influence.  

What I call the “structure” of consciousness is called the “architecture” of consciousness by Lida Cosmides and John Tooby.

 (www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html)  I believe we are referring to approximately the same thing, the physiological basis of “feelings” which underlie both the un- or sub-conscious functioning of the brain and conscious rational thought.   They are probably evolved ways that the brain works that were “invented” and “built in” during the long hunter/gatherer period of human history.   They make us human.  This is NOT the usual talk about reptile-mammal-human brains, but rather about unconscious mental strategies that were not possible before the cerebellum and forebrain developed.  

The mechanism of the whole body is reciprocating and enmeshed binaries -- that is, when one goes up, the other goes down and vice versa.  This is true of the way both the electrochemical nerve impulses work and the way the hormones in the lymph work.  (e.g. epinephrine/norepinephrine, or testosterone/estrogen.)  It’s an IO system like computers.  But there are algorithms and overriding mechanisms.  I am proposing that the sensation of “sacredness” in contrast to the ordinary (Eliade calls it “profane.”) is one of these evolved “domains” that begins to develop possibly as early as in utero and that it works on this seesaw principle.

Further, I’m proposing that the most fundamental perceptual dyad concepts are the most primal, the first formed in the brain:  light/dark, hot/cold, dropped/secure, distant/near.  These pairs can be found in the testimony of mystics, such as St. Bernadette, and are often described as paradoxically present at the same time.  Often they are attached to an Entity, identified as God, a parent and lover.  (We know that infants are born with “face-seeking” though it can be triggered with a Mr. Smiley drawn on a paper plate.)  These earliest domains or processes may be what reappear in dreams and death.  Perceiving them or even approaching them, sensing them, may be what gives us a feeling of the holy.

In the beginning I was reflecting on my own moments of intense “valorization” to use Eliade’s word.  When I preached about this, people would come up after the service to tell me about their own moments.  They wanted to know what they meant.  Now and then I would manage a liturgy that seemed to connect people to that feeling.  What was going on?  A classmate asked me, “How do you DO that?”  Thus the need to develop a “technology of the spiritual.”  This is a bare beginning.

Feelings are recorded in the brain by attaching them to the sensory impulses in that moment of the Felt.  This is why a sense impact (smell, musical phrase) can call up a whole emotional moment from the past.  It’s the coding, the filing for later access in the brain.  The newest theory is that this happens by something called “quantum tunneling.”  I won’t even attempt to explain but you could look it up.  Try looking for theories about the sense of smell that use the ideas of Luca Turin.  It's at the level of individual cells, their internal structure and ability to link.

Consciousness shifts all the time, adjusting to new perceptions coming in -- new decisions about behavior bring more information.  Much of these perceptions are processed below our awareness.  Stephen Pinker suggests that the importance of consciousness in evolution is that it supports language so that perceptions can be shared with other people.  I would assert that any patterned sensory construct (e.g. art form -- whether it’s spoken, sung, printed, painted or sculpted, danced, architecture, film or even some games) can convey a consciousness or persuade a person to enter a consciousness domain that taps underlying assumptions about the world: the architecture of the brain.  The “floor” and “foundation” might be acquired by the brains of all humans.  Others will depend on the individual circumstances of the person in their culture.  Liturgy, then, is a patterned sensory construct that reaches deep levels of brain processing, evoking felt meaning.  

If someone’s architecture of consciousness -- their developed construct of what goes on, how and why -- is challenged by change or realization of discrepancies, there will need to be a bringing to consciousness or possibly a re-experiencing of the area needing to be reinterpreted.  Liturgy, like play or psychotherapy or theatre or other designed experiences, can do this.  Memories, even sub-conscious ones as in PTSD, can get stuck in repetition, triggering the same behavior over and over.  This set of theories is not meant to stipulate harm versus healing.  Torture can be a liturgy.  Pain is a sensory experience.  

Human material cultures, which supply the sensory content of liturgy, evolve out of ecologies.  Communion in the Christian sense is not universal because not every culture provides bread and wine -- these substances are specific to their ecology.  An Inuit cannot be a religious vegetarian, nor can he worship trees: there aren’t any.  Nor is eating bread (“This is my flesh which you should eat in remembrance of me.”) the same thing as eating whale blubber.  Jesus was not a whale.  Nor is communion really understood without the long cultural background of flesh sacrifice and the necessity of giving it up that accompanied the relatively recent leaving of hunter/gatherer material culture in order to accept a grain and vineyard culture. But communal meals are nearly universal.

Both the strength and vulnerability of the Christian paradigm is in the centrality of the family: father, mother, child, which is potentially universal to all humans.  Those faces.  Also, it uses the very early domain of community (people eating together) and the evolved capacity to support and participate in a group of about a hundred people, a congregation.  These are not unique.  Other cultures have equivalents, but there is not always an exact match.  The Blackfeet Napi or Ninah are not the same as Jesus or God, though they have come to be conflated over the centuries in the interest of assimilation.  Sharing sarvisberry soup is not the same thing as communion.  We need to understand why this is true without accusations of heresy or paganism.  This analysis should help to accept what seems bizarre and unreasonable, separating what is valid from what is just adventurism. 

THE INTERVENING WITNESS

My used Ford F150 van was tan and had antennas on it because it had been used to make geological surveys by parking on hilltops and transmitting some kind of signals.  At the time I was affecting an authentic safari jacket, onto which I had sewn embroidered insignia of Glacier Park -- lupine on one side and I forget what on the other.  Probably a bear.  I was traveling on a quiet road leading into a town and saw a parking lot where a woman was trying to get into a car, but a man was wrestling with her, preventing her.  She seemed in distress and was yelling at him.

So I made a u-turn and pulled up so that my arm out the window was next to the guy.  “What’s the trouble here?” I asked, in my animal control voice.

“Nothing, Officer!  No problem!”  He stepped back.  The woman got into the car and drove off.  I left, too, feeling that I’d just saved someone.  That’s about the only satisfactory example I can think of in my life when I witnessed something, made a power move, and it worked.

I’m thinking about “Atonement,” the novel and movie, which I don’t want to write about yet.  A young girl sees something she misinterprets, she bears false witness unconsciously, and carries the guilt through her life until the end when she’s Vanessa Redgrave and writes a brilliant novel about it.  It’s a terrific story and you should see it, not least because it might make you think.

On another occasion I was late getting home from work in Portland, marching along the sidewalk in a temper, swinging my briefcase, and came to a man wrestling with a young Asian woman, yelling at her.  I figured it was an angry boy friend beating up on his girl.  “Leave her alone!” I yelled.  

He wouldn’t stop.  I clobbered him with my briefcase.  “You take your hands off her!”  He wouldn’t.  She said,  “It’s all right.  Leave us alone!”  I wouldn’t.  I hit him again.

A bus stopped not far away.  “Come on!” she yelled, grabbing the guy by the hand and dragging him off to board the bus.  They were getting away.

“Help!  Call the police!  Help!”  No one appeared in windows.  I marched on.  An old Thunderbird pulled up at the curb beside me, driven by a slightly overweight blonde.  I thought she was a “lady of the night,” but she wanted to know what was happening.  I told her briefly and she took off after the bus.  I realized later she was the wife of the chief of police (her photo was in the paper now and then), an officer herself, and patrolling in plainclothes.

I marched on.  Here was a small car with its doors standing open, not so much parked as abandoned.  I just didn’t give a rip.  I went on home.

The next morning I was at my bus stop, slumped on the bench, sullen, still half-asleep.  A young Asian woman sat down beside me but I didn’t recognize her.  She said,  “Thanks for last night, but you didn’t need to protect me.  I sold him a car and he wanted the title, but I didn’t have it.”  She laughed merrily.  I just stared at her, which made her laugh more.

Building inspectors know everything so at the office that day I learned that there was an active Asian chop shop in my neighborhood and the woman probably didn’t have a title to the car because it was stolen.  Oh, well.

Kids told me stuff when I was teaching.  One girl wouldn’t “put out” so her boyfriend told everyone that she was an easy lay and from then on she couldn’t date because they would all demand sex.  Who would I tell?  She’d already told her parents and they advised her not to make trouble.  The administration had the same attitude.  Should I get the boy off to the side and tell him what I thought of him?  Wouldn’t he take his revenge on her?  Wouldn’t it just make the situation hotter?

I turned in a boy I was pretty sure was being molested.  The symptoms were all there, but I had no proof.  There was enough to it after official investigation that he was taken for regular counseling, but the mother brought her brother up to my classroom to threaten me.  He was a big guy, tough.  Simply getting groceries in that place meant driving at least thirty miles at night on rural roads with no traffic.

In Evanston, IL, in 1961 the week before I graduated, on a Sunday, I was grabbed by a drunk in a cobblestoned alley.  It was raining, I was wearing one of those big stiff yellow raincoats and flip-flops.  I couldn’t get my feet under me and he couldn’t grab me anyplace except my neck so he strangled me.  When the police came, they found him in a drugstore buying antiseptic for his bleeding raked face.  I don’t know what excuse he made.  

I was asked to identify him through a small window but I honestly couldn’t -- he’d knocked my glasses off, it was a dark day, and he was black.  The earnest cop was disappointed -- he’d thought he had a case.  But we both knew that if I made a positive ID, it would mean staying to testify in court, not returning to Portland with my parents.  And in the end my attacker was more damaged than I was.  Was I rationalizing?  

The most recent murder in Helena happened across the street from friends.  The newspaper reported some of the neighbors’ testimony, some of which was mutually exclusive or disproven by records.  How reliable are any witnesses when things happen quickly without any expectation?   Suppose one were actually grasping the situation and understood it -- how wise would it be to intervene in such a case?

Take a very small incident.  One day I saw a small boy from down the street come storming along.  He plunked himself down on my parking strip and sat there in a snit.  I wondered whether he needed help, so I went out and plunked down beside him.  “Are you mad about something?”

Scowling.

“Wanna tell me anything about it?’

More glaring.

A pickup pulled up, the door opened, a man yelled,  “Get in,” he did, and they left.  I never found out what was going on.  At least his murdered body never showed up and the man seemed to live at the same house.  When I pass the boy on the street, getting to be a teenager now, he glares at me.  I guess I didn’t do the right thing.

LUST CAUTION: Review and Reflection

LUST CAUTION is an absolutely accurate title for this movie, but it’s better in Chinese because in Chinese it’s two word-characters.  To me the second one looks a little like a sailing ship.  But in fact, “The title is actually an untranslatable pun in Chinese, in which the words for "Caution" and "Ring" (as in jewelry) are written using the same ideogram in Chinese.”  (imdb.com) The movie itself is a French resistance movie as made by a Fifties Hollywood studio except through a Chinese filter.  The “lust” is not French vanilla.  It’s Chinese.  If I were NPR, I’d give you a caution even for this review.  Sex is often one of the most telling areas for distinguishing cultures and the US is one of the most prudish.  To our eyes the sweating, shuddering origamis of these encounters is shocking.  I don’t know whether the lovers being Asian is a plus or a minus.  Their anatomies are so much neater and more flexible than those in, say, “Red Shoe Diaries.”  

Ang Lee is the director and for those of us who have been watching Chinese films, there are as many familiar faces as there are for those of us who watch BBC repertory.  Studios from China, Taiwan, the US, and Hong Kong collaborated  to produce the movie.  The languages are mixed with subtitles when necessary.  Lee’s cinematographer is Mexican and the music was composed by a Frenchman.  If I say I don’t remember the music, it is a compliment.  “Red Shoes Diary” is almost a music vid: the music dominates.

"Trivia" from imdb.com: “Ang Lee made Tony Leung Chiu Wai study the performances of Marlon Brando in "Ultimo tango a Parigi", Humphrey Bogart in "In a Lonely Place", and Richard Burton in "Equus" to give him a sense of wounded masculinity, which Lee felt was right for the character of Mr. Yee.   The song that Wang Jiazhi sings to Mr Yee is entitled "A Singing Girl At The Edge of the World" and was the theme song of a popular film, "Malu Tianshi" (Street Angel) released four years before the events of the film took place. It is still considered an evergreen standard in Chinese pop music and has been covered by many other artists since.”  This is film as literature, packed with allusions that enrich the experience for those who recognize them.

The movie is billed as a thriller because no one would go see a “philosophical” movie even if it DID have sex in it!  It’s clear from interviews that Lee did have a premise that was philosophical and psychological, very schematic.  He used the plots from two short stories by Eileen Chang that are about the Japanese occupation of China and the resistance against oppression.  It could just as easily have been Germany occupying France, but America -- he says explicitly -- could not use these dynamics because the US has never been occupied.  

The heroine is charged with seducing the main occupying officer and luring him into a trap.  Their encounter is so intense that she falls in love with him and she is so genuinely innocent and loving that he falls in love with her.  There is one speech she makes, explaining to her resistance team, that is a classic.  Lee says that there is an old saying: “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach; the way to a woman’s heart is through her . . ." --  well, between her legs. 

Sex here is about the involuntary physiological tie the body makes in any violent, intense encounter.  The intimacy between the torturer and the victim is discussed other places.  So the heroine tries to get the men, one of whom loves her but is too passive to express it, to understand what it does to her to physically and emotionally fuse with this man while knowing that at any moment the team gets access, they will shoot him in the back of the head even if she is under him, merged with him.  The abyss at the end, another compelling image, at least offers surcease.

But Ang Lee’s understanding of the US is framed by the white Euros who are the occupiers of it, and entirely skips over the tenacity of resistance by the original Native peoples of the American continents.  Some have assimilated (those are the ones whites are likely to know), some have been crushed into zombies, and some thread their way through a labyrinth of evasion and collaboration to preserve their identity.  The key book or movie has not been created yet.  When it is, I hope Ang Lee or someone like him is the director.

The comments at imdb.com were intriguing since some came from Chinese people.  In interviews Lee himself said that Western viewers complained that the movie moved too slowly, but the Eastern viewers said it went too quickly.  (It was sort of BBC Masterpiece Theatre speed, except that BBC mysteries move at the speed of light -- I often have to watch them twice.)  But the Eastern viewers wanted others to understand that the point of view was China’s and it SHOULD be.  I would agree.  Hyping the actress or the sex, in the traditional Hollywood way, is a dead end if not an insult.  I’d love to hear how an Islamic or African person reacted.

We are in a time of culture-mixing that is not always attached to genetics or national boundaries, but some of the swirls of plot that they generate become archetypal.  The idealistic but violent attempts to restore the past; the willingness to compromise almost anything in order to reach a goal, which might only be survival; the blunders and epiphanies as people share unsuspected humanity; the preoccupied mahjong players who care only about their “bone game”; the oppressors with their own secret abcessed hearts -- all repeat through history and future.  

At Heart Butte we sometimes explored a story by rewriting it scene-for-scene in our own terms.  So “Dirty Dancing” became “Dirty Trail Riding” as we changed the setting from an Eastern Jewish resort to Glacier National Park where some Blackfeet have guiding businesses.  It worked pretty well.  The main point I wanted to make was that, as Ang Lee shows us, humans are not that different from each other.  You must look for their hearts, which they themselves may feel they have lost.

THE RED SHOE DIARIES: Review

My red shoes.  Never worn.  My knees went out about the time I bought them and I never wore high heels after that.  These are not as high as the heels in “The Red Shoe Diaries” which is the name of an erotic series -- all about women who keep sad diaries about disappointed love and mail them to David Duchovny.  A gimmick as old as Geisha pillow books and Penthouse.

Of course, the original story is a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale from Europe and then there’s the iconic ballet movie.  But this is a little different.  Hans Anderson is always a bit dark but there’s a second fairy tale that slips in here: the bit of glass from the Snow Queen’s shattered mirror that prevents feeling.  Except in the Anderson tale, it’s the boy who gets the glass in his eye and is frozen.  The girl, the sturdy Gerda, saves him. 

In this 1992 made-for-cable-TV story the girl, Brigitte Bako, gets the bit of glass taken OUT of her eye and nearly instantly falls madly in love -- or lust.  She’s already involved with a brainy, angry, achieving architect (Duchovny in what is said to be his “breakout” role.) but now she literally falls into the arms of a street laborer who happens to jackhammer a hole in a water pipe at that moment in a nice Freudian geyser.  He turns out to also be the salesman with the red shoes.  He’s full of temptation and tricks.  (Third T is trouble.)

This is frankly erotica, but soft core.  That means the three B’s: butts, backs and breasts -- as opposed to hard core porn which is the three P’s: pubic, penile, penetration.  In truth, it’s really more about clothes and styling.  It’s one long fashion vignette except the part towards the end when the two guys take their shirts off and play basketball in the huge loft set, very Ralph Lauren.  (Billy Wirth, the actor who plays the working class guy, was very impressed that the glass backboard was shattered but intact -- so classy.  He was also proud of his ball-playing “moves” but grateful that the director protected him in the, um, intimate scenes.)  The movie is full of styling touches:  a searchlight, a strong fan, champagne flutes that are two feet tall -- trombones.  A roaring fireplace.  A pinata that showers confetti, glitter, and engagement rings.  A free-standing bathtub.  All is fire and bubble bath.

The original fairy tale is about an ungrateful little girl whose kind and generous old lady benefactors keep giving her what she wants:  morocco -- or possibly patent leather -- red shoes.  (Nothing quite so fancy as what Judy Garland takes off the witch’s feet.)  But she is never satisfied.  Then the shoes take over and begin to dance.  It’s a curse.  She can’t take them off.  She dances and dances and dances.  When she tries to go to church, an angel intervenes.  She goes to the executioner and gets him to use his big ax to cut off her feet (he carves her some wooden prosthetic feet) but then when she tries to go to church her feet come dancing in the red shoes and prevent her.  By now she is truly sorry.  She goes home to her tiny room and prays, penitent and devout.  That angel comes back, lifts the ceiling off her room and then she’s dead/transcendent -- in heaven and so pleased.  Case closed.

There’s no angel in this movie, though there are plenty of sexy girls.  The girl -- who is rather childlike -- takes off her red shoes, gets in the tub with all her black underwear on, and slits her wrists.  She has been complaining that everyone tries to control her, but no more.  She wins.  No heaven.  (There are, however, other episodes of this series that she’s in somehow.) 

Brenda Vaccaro is a demon mother, not a nice old lady.   (Absolutely fabulous green satin embroidered Chinese kimono.)  This is a psychological drama -- we don’t do religion these days, though there’s a remarkable number of statues of angels here and there,   This girl has the modern curse of more than one young contemporary woman:  she has a black sucking hole in her psyche -- call it depression, call it narcissism -- and everything disappears down it.  She is inconsolable.  More than one man asks for advice about “high maintenance” women who cannot be filled up.  Gifts, praise, vacations, sex, even mood altering pills -- and they just are never happy.  They don’t seem to know how.  Of course, it must be all the mom’s fault.

One of the most charming actors is the dog, who has become rather famous.  I tried to find its name but didn’t succeed.  It was always there, never stole scenes, was even willing to be intimidated by this insatiable girl when she pretended to be a dog picking a fight.  Some of my fav shots were someone striding across the big floor with the dog following along at just the right pace and distance, though I also liked the moment when Duchovny unlocks the gate to his apartment stairs just as a whole bag of citrus comes bouncing down at him.  This is a very beautiful movie.  The music, single instruments wailing the blues -- sax, muted cornet, piano -- is as lush and intense as everything else. 

Wikipedia’s informant says:  “The soft core porn TV series, Red Shoe Diaries episodes were as of August 2010, running on the Canadian television channel Bravo!, early Saturday morning. From time to time, episodes can also be viewed on Showtime, on hulu.com, or for sale on DVD.”  Mine was Netflix, of course.  Both men and women on imdb.com reported that this movie had them enthralled, but many agreed that the shorter episodes developed from this generally-praised movie were nowhere nearly as involving or skillful.  Duchovny doesn’t include it in his publicity.

One of the reasons I remain interested by intense but edgy films is that they do reach human patterns that are not necessarily discussed in polite company.  Self-hating women who are seductive and easily seduced but then become deeply destructive are one of those patterns.  I see there is a new book out about perfectionism, which is one aspect.  Like many social evils, probably related to commodification of human beings.  "Buy this or remain imperfect!"  The glorification of manicures.

THE SOLITARY MAN

This is the beginning of a Western story.  I got this far and stopped.  For inspiration this evening I watched “The Shadow Riders,” an archetypal Western (based on Louis L’Amour for TV) with THREE archetypal actors:  Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott, and Ben Johnson.  Yeah, I know Katharine Ross is in it, but she’s an actRESS.  This is an old-fashioned movie.  Actually, it’s a relatively contemporary interpretation of the old-fashioned.  So let’s see what we’ve got here in MY story.

The single man wanted no encumbrances.  That’s the way he thought of other people or even pets.  He felt he was walking that line on a planet where the light of the sun ends and the dark of the night begins.  There was a name for that line, which he would look up some day if he thought of it in the right circumstances.  What he knew about it most was that on a planet with air, that line was blurred.  On a planet or asteroid with no air, it was a crisp and abrupt line.  At one moment one was in the dark, then the light came -- the sun coming up -- and it was bright.  Or vice versa.  And it was a line that moved all the time.  It might be possible to stay on that line, more or less, if one kept moving.

This was all fantasy, of course, science-based as it might be, and out here on the open prairie frontier, it was a little too easy to indulge in such fantasies.  Still, there was truth in it.  He kept moving.  He was solitary so he could.  He moved from his house to his workshop and from his workshop to the house.  There’s no sense in trying to figure out which was bright and which was dark because that was a metaphor.  His house and workshop were realities.  All he really cared about was his hands on wood, working it, persuading it, polishing it into fine furniture.

I don’t know how much of of this solar system stuff I can get away with, but this is going to be the 19th century and it was new information then.  A curious and educated man would know about it.  Maybe one of my themes will turn out to be the pressure of new scientific knowledge.  As for the wood part, my great-grandfather was a finish carpenter and cabinet maker.  He’s famous for paneling a house in Faulkton, South Dakota.

Don’t worry.  This is not going to be one of those stories where the statues come alive, because though he was working on wood, he was not making statues.  He was making furniture.  Very fine furniture for these days, though he hadn’t started out that way.  Originally he made chuckwagon and sheepwagon boxes that had compartments and drawers for specific things: the flour, the bacon, the pots and pans -- though they could just as easily hang from hooks and swing along jangling when the driver moved the wagon.  The sheepherders weren’t so particular, but cookies were inclined to ask for special caches for the sugar so it could be locked up or maybe a little place for spices.  Even a ventilated basket for things that needed to stay dry with circulating air.  A place to hide money.  Fittings for men who lived solitary lives, traveling.  

He got a little better at the work all the time, both in terms of designing it and executing it.  Then people living in homestead shacks asked for chairs.  At first he made them out of peeled pine with snowshoe-woven rawhide seats, but rawhide is slippery, slimy, stinking stuff -- not his taste.  He liked the dry scent and feel of wood.

So which of three styles from the movie?  Sam is whiplash slim, sits erect in the saddle, looks at you slyly out of the side, and is generally honorable.  Tom is burly, kinda sits down low, and grins straight into your eyes.  Ben is older (he’s supposed to be an uncle) and he’s as authentic as they come, an old rodeo hand and stunt man before he took on acting.  He doesn’t ride a horse, he sort of becomes continuous.  And he’s always got a racket goin’.  He wears his neck rag the old way: up tight to keep the dust out.  I don’t know where that “knotted at the nape” pretty bib stuff comes from.  I’m goin’ with Ben’s style.

Then there’s women.  A lot of talk about sex and drinking, but you never really catch them in the reality of it.  A lot of joking, no poking.  

He was happily working alone, making dovetail corners on a drawer and pleased that they were fitting together so slick and tight, when he heard a lot of giggling and rustling behind him.  When he looked, there were three Blackfeet girls, not quite adolescent, wearing mission dresses, old men’s suit jackets for coats, and cowboy hats that appeared to have been sat on as much as worn.  They were more than a little rumpled, but when he turned they became very grave and formal.  “We’ve come to take care of you.” 

He was terrified.

So now we’ve got the main problem: what to do with these girls without getting into major trouble.  One of the characteristics of the John Wayne and remake school of thought is a certain amount of slapstick and horseplay.  Three girls ought to be able to manage that.   But what about the booze?  It’s easy to make him an evening drinker, but what does he drink?  And why?  And why does he drink alone? 

Since he couldn’t think of what to do with the girls, he just ignored them.  They went into the house and began turning it upside down, scrubbing and rearranging and dragging things out to the clothesline until he dreaded the thought of going into his own house.  They were washing things that had never been washed in their entire existence.  Since his dovetails refused to fit properly now, he went off up one of the many foothills “game trails” that led into a deeper draw than the others.  His still appeared to be safe, the copper coil dripping a little.  

He collected enough pure alcohol for a good comforting hit and sat on a rock to sip while he tried to think of a way to get rid of the girls, whom he considered a kind of cooties.  An affliction, even if they were Indian.  Maybe their daddy would come for them soon.

I don’t know what will happen next.  Over the next few days I’ll think about it and finish up.  What would Ben Johnson do about three determined Blackfeet girls, no longer children, not yet women?  And I suppose a dog is going to show up.  They do that around Blackfeet kids.  Then an Indian papa -- or are these mixed blood girls?

NEIGHBORS

Nothing like a chainsaw and a bucket truck to attract attention.  This time is was the Baptist church next door to me that had decided the trees next to the building had to go.  They were destroying the old siding and interfering with the application of new siding.  It took about an hour to knock down these two stalwarts on the south side of the building plus another two who were sentinels at the front door.  This guy (one citizen calls him the “tree butcher”) is the same one who took down the trees in front of the Town Hall.

Controversial stuff in this little prairie town.  Opinions split out among those who thought a) no tree should ever be cut; b) these trees were too darn old to save; c) trees make mess; d) it will mess up the heat bills; e) those trees should never have been planted so close to the building in the first place -- they are interfering with the foundation; f) why didn’t they take down that big cottonwood at the same time?  Cottonwoods only make mess.  That cottonwood will fall on the fire hall -- it’s only a matter of time.

So we all had to talk it over a while.  This is Tom, my neighbor across the alley behind my house.  His mom, Rose, was a good friend of mine and I officiated at the burials of both his parents.  I can never remember the names of these hounds, but I rest secure in the knowledge that nothing will ever sneak up on us.

Homer lives across the street from the Baptist Church.  I thought he was an old cowboy for a long time, because that’s the image he projects, but in fact it was his dad who was the old cowboy.  He told a wonderful romantic story about how his dad was riding way back in the old days and was passing by Gold Butte in the Sweetgrass Hills.  Somehow his attention was attracted to something bright in the grass and it turned out to be a big old gold nugget!  That’s the way Gold Butte was in the old days.  It’s a volcanic cone that extruded precious medals and once was mined but it’s about exhausted now unless you use cyanide heap leach mining.  In fact, in the Eighties once a Canadian company had begun digging out and trucking away gold-bearing dirt from the north side.  It was a while before they were caught and stopped.  But Homer’s dad wasn’t into any of that.  He had the nugget melted down and made into a wedding ring for Homer’s mom.

Tom’s stories were about in Illinois where he said he used to bring down trees the old-fashioned way:  he just cut the bottom most of the way, hitched a rope to the top and dragged ‘er down with a tractor.  Then he was telling about John Deere tractors (Homer called ‘em “Little Johnies.)” and how he had a job in the southwest dragging out sagebrush.  He said the two-cycle engine would go “ker-pow, ker-pow. . .ker-pow . . . . ker . . . . ker”  and then you had to get it out of gear fast or it would die and the stretched sagebrush would catapult you in the opposite direction.

We were wondering about the Harley motorcycle family up the street.  Homer (who gets around and finds out things everywhere.  He goes to auctions and talks his way up the street on the way to the post office) says the previous owners sold out -- barely avoiding a loss -- and bought acreage near Bonner’s Ferry far away from anyone.  I had some comments about them but they are censored for legal reasons.  He said the new owner was a lawyer and I’m quite positive he doesn’t intend to move in.  It’s a more humble house than mine, which is pretty humble.  There seem to be guys on motorcycles who live there now, but no more pickups parked all over.

The two men had a brisk conversation about John Deere tractors and Harleys and the way their motors sound, which is distinctive enough to recognize anywhere.  Somehow that led to the windmills -- the huge wind farm just to our north which covers many acres.  Tom and I had the same experience, coming over the horizon just as it got dark and -- without expecting it -- seeing the huge spread of red warning lights on the windmills themselves and the transmission lines leading away.  In my case there was also a lurid sunset.  We both had the quick thought that this was something like the end of the world or an invasion from Mars.

One of the most dynamic but ancient church members stopped in her car to watch the tree-cutting and to visit with us a bit, but I didn’t take her picture.  She’s on oxygen these days but it only slows her down a little bit.  She used to be everywhere, serving food or keeping records for the cemetery, or attending town meetings.  She urged me to come to church, said I would be welcome, explained that they had a new minister from Choteau.  Named Brubaker.  Hmmm.  I might know this guy. I might attend next Sunday.  I explained that I wasn’t Christian, but she thought I COULD be, if I tried.  She doesn’t know me.

Tom doesn’t attend church.  Homer is a Jehovah’s Witness.  He’s getting his RV ready for their migration to Yuma.  He doesn’t stay in a park, but right out on the desert where he’s off the grid, on photovoltaic and batteries.  Tom and I were VERY interested in that and Homer was happy to describe what’s available and how prices have come down.  Big R is a good source, he says.  

We also pooled what we knew about the proposed big sports complex that’s surveyed out with stakes at the end of the airport on the west side of town.  A well was drilled out there, though it was known that the water in that area was not potable, but it’s very convenient for this complex that wasn’t mentioned at the time.  The mayor has already decided that instead of being capped it will be developed for irrigation at city expense and claims it will eliminate summer road dust by sprinkling.  Dust is a great buggaboo for the kind of people who hate messy trees.  They’ll let their taxes go up if only they don’t have to fight dust.  I think it’s genetic.  The same people who want to cut down all the trees.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2011/09/extended-interview-russell-banks-on-lost-memory-of-skin.html

Russell Banks claims in this interview linked above that when he sits on his terrace in Miami, he can see under a causeway to a little encampment of pariahs.  He began to wonder about them, went down to visit, did some library research and came up with this plot to explain what was going on down there: first, a likeable but clueless young man with a pet iguana; second, a professor who knows everything except how to stop gobbling food; and third, a writer who helps to tie up the loose ends with a philosophical discussion.  Since it is advertised as being about a pedophile, I had been a little worried about reading this book or even admitting that I was reading it, but believe me -- this book goes in at the shallow end of the pool.  (The title is nice, but not very relevant.)  Still, I’m grateful that someone presents an entering wedge that won’t make whatever middle class people are left go screaming out of the room.  Banks is considered a serious and politically respectable writer.

This is not really about pedophiles or what happens to children.  Believe me, this doesn’t even come close to the videos of Russian children living in sewers like packs of rats, doing sex acts for food money.  No one can see them from any terrace, but try YouTube.  The premise of the book is the double bind presented to sex offenders who must stay a certain distance from any place children might gather, which eliminates every habitation in the community.  They have GPS monitors clamped onto their ankles.  If they cut them off, they will have to leave the territory entirely.  So they have to stay there under the causeway, but they can’t stay there; they would like to leave there, but they don’t have the resources to go.  Prison begins to seem attractive.

Our Young Man, the “Kid,” the protagonist, has been ignored by his mother (WHAT father??), his teachers and classmates, his commanding officers in the army until they threw him out for a petty offense, and so on.  The iguana is enormous, a kind of dragon watchdog except that he’s not warm to sleep with.  The boy is compared to Huck Finn but Huck never had an electronic manacle on his ankle.  The boy is both sustained and betrayed by technology: his computer both shows him as much porn as he can absorb and announces him a sex offender, though he’s a virgin.

The Professor, who shows up from above like a Deus ex Machina, is so fat that no one even thinks he has normal sex, though he did manage a wife and two children.  He’s like a television character out of a legal crime series:  “Cracker” maybe.  The guy who figures it all out.  So Banks is playing with us, this is true, but when this countervailing force is presented, what does that amount to?  At the end he himself, The Writer, appears, walking onstage, like those Shakespearean characters who tie up all the loose ends after the action of the play has finished and the stage is littered with dead bodies.

The real subject is our incorrigible society (perhaps all societies) which insists on defining “us” a certain way and excluding all others who don’t fit that definition.  The hope seems to be that they’ll simply disappear or a convenient natural disaster will wipe them out.  (There’s a hurricane.)  But they still hang on tenaciously, like bugs or rats.  And yet the very characteristics that we blame them for (sex, predation, violence, poverty) are always right there in our own lives just under the surface.  

If I had written this book, I would have done more with the Shyster, the lawyer “chomo” (child molester).  The episode that comes closest to illustrating what I’m saying here is the one about the filming of some pre-adolescent children naked but for draperies, dancing innocently in billows of mist from a fog machine.  Little Salomes pretending to be Isadora Duncan.  The question the author throws out is whether this is porn for chomos or an advertisement for detergent.  He’s pretty clear it’s the former, but you could fool a lot of people.

There’s a lot of geology and a certain amount of Darwin in this book.  The iguana, shot by cops, is replaced by a grey parrot, partly because Banks wanted to set up a second classic echo besides Huck:  “Treasure Island.”  (There is no “Long Dong Silver,” however.  Just an old man with a broken leg.)  I kept thinking about the grey parrot (we all know how intelligent they are, thanks to the book about one) in terms of David Quammen’s hardly noticed sci-fi tale about a red parrot-like creature who is actually a very cranky alien and how critical the creature is of human arrangements.  There is no actual sex act in “Lost Memory of Skin,” only references to them, usually by slang terms.  Your vocabulary will be broadened, though one would have to be careful about where one used the words.

At the end the story began to ring true -- I’m talking about the sudden introduction of spies, undercover agents, informant rings and so on.  All things secret tend to converge below.  The death of the professor is left ambiguous but scary, as though to acknowledge that there is far more to all this than anyone realizes -- and of course there is.  Human trafficking, prostitution, drugs, mafia --  it’s part of the international underculture most people hardly suspect, most cops overestimate, and the media industries love to romanticize.  Other books and movies tell all about that stuff, but it’s not unrealistic for Banks to include it.  The underculture is constantly fed by the people who get crowded out of the mainstream and have no other way to survive -- nor any reason to conform.

In fact, what Banks seems to understand is that after people have lived like that for a while, they are like the grey parrot whose wings have been broken and reset so it cannot fly.  They will not leave their cage.  Not even if they are brought out to shelters for the homeless or SRO hotels, which are only other cages anyway.  Your mind becomes your cage.  Maybe it already was.

DRAW THE LINE

From the very beginning I was looking for examples of ceremonies and rituals that were unusual, even off-the-wall, extreme, although I did want to think about the traditional sorts of things, the Roman Catholic Mass, the Anglican  Vespers, and the Unitarian Universalist Leadership School gentle experiments.  But even when thinking about the grotesque and the illegal, a person ought to know where the line is drawn.  So this is where it is:  I won’t write about Jonestown, MOVE, or Waco.  Just enough to tell you why.

Jonestown was supposed to be a “religious,” utopian, self-contained society, which it wasn’t, of course.  The end came while I was in seminary and there were two points of contact with Unitarianism.  One was that a Methodist fellow student (who was at Meadville because of an interest in social justice) knew people who died there and grieved hard.  They were church family friends who had left the Methodist context and wandered over to the People’s Church.

The other was the Unitarian minister in San Francisco.  When James Jones was young and feeling around for possibilities, he had visited this minister to ask about becoming a Unitarian minister but could not be admitted to seminary because he had no bachelor’s degree.  Ministry in the UU tradition requires a master’s degree which is predicated on a bachelor’s degree.  (Actually, another student later did attend M/L without a bachelor’s degree.  He was an older man with a solid work record.)  Later this Unitarian minister had been approached by the sister of someone in the congregation of the “People’s Church” who tried to tell him terrible things were happening there.  He didn’t know what to do, even whether to believe her since the church had done many good things, so he did nothing.  His guilt was great enough that at the annual UUMA minister’s meeting, he rose and confessed, asking forgiveness.  The other ministers had no idea how to respond.  They knew they had often sort of finessed similar appeals.  Some felt he was weak to confess.  Others searched their own souls.  Basically, he was encouraged not to share.

MOVE was in Philadelphia.  The members went unwashed and naked, piled up feces and garbage, cursed and railed with bullhorns around the clock, had no detectable means of support and generally enraged everyone.  They were black and everyone took the surname of “Africa.”   But it was all principled, “living naturally.” The city decided they had to go.  In 1985 when they barricaded themselves in a gun fight, an actual bomb was dropped on the roof.  Somehow it caught fire and since they were row houses, sharing walls, a block of housing had burned out by the time it had ended.  Many died, some by gunfire.

WACO was similar except rural.    This is from Wikipedia.  “The Waco siege began on February 28, 1993, and ended violently 50 days later on April 19. The siege began when the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, a property located 9 miles (14 km) east-northeast of Waco, Texas. On February 28, shortly after the attempt to serve the warrant, an intense gun battle erupted, lasting nearly 2 hours. In this armed exchange, four agents and six Branch Davidians were killed. Upon the ATF's failure to execute the search warrant, a siege was initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The siege ended 50 days later when a second assault on the compound was made and a fire destroyed the compound. 76 people (24 of them British nationals) died in the fire, including more than 20 children, two pregnant women, and the sect leader David Koresh.”   There’s quite a lot more about the mixture of sex, violence and sectarian religion.

When Jonestown happened, I was in Don Browning’s class about ethics for ministers, one of the most useful classes I’ve ever taken.  The explanation he proposed was that these people in Guyana had crossed the liminal threshold into a space where anything was possible and had failed to ever emerge.  In other words, they died because they were out of control, basically insane or at least mentally dislocated.  I don't agree.  In both Waco and Philadelphia, it was government that foreclosed the liminal space with fire.  They were militant Christians with hell at their heels, entirely respectable, inside the law, and deadly.  I’m not prepared to take that on at this point.

Every postal box holder in Valier received last week a little booklet from “A. Jan Marcussen.”  You can find him on Wikipedia.  He “joneses” for apocalypse.   He makes two mistakes of hubris:  first, that anyone can tell when the Judgment Day is nigh, and second that when it comes, he will survive.  He’s a Jehovah’s Witness, one of the Valier churches, and their missionaries come to the door.  I am not in sympathy.  This is a small town with many older people who should not be frightened into false salvation.  The people who come to the door seem nice and they are easily turned away when I tell them I’m ordained.  They have a high respect for authority.  Maybe too high.  Someday they may have to choose which authority.

Beyond that, none of these three examples are really rituals or liturgies.  Though the von Gennep and Victor Turner theories can be applied to the larger festivals of various cultures (Halloween is coming up.), they are still not the pattern of the “fire in the chalice” that I am discussing.  They are simply conflagrations with no containers.

And that’s the bottom line.  I do not want to think about uncontained fires.  I want to think about what sort of chalice can contain the burning hearts of human beings.  I don’t want to talk about supernatural authority figures in the sky who impose their timelines on us.  I want to explore the perfectly natural and absolutely real shifts of consciousness (brain waves and neurotransmitters) in our own human thinking.  As real as to sleep and perchance to dream.  Then to wake renewed, knitted up.

What I know from research, evidence and experience is that this little schema I’m exploring will work.  But there is another element that is necessary:  the liturgist must be open and sensitive to the personalities and material cultures of the persons attending.  They must be based on understanding which is the chalice for love.  This is the way to affect the deepest assumptions of people.  Not rules, force, punishment, and suppression.

EBOOKS: WHAT'S TO LIKE?

It took me a while to realize that readers of ebooks think they are about the device or the formatting software.  In fact, they are about the infrastructure.  Two kinds of manuscripts exist: one is down-loaded to the reader’s hard drive on whatever gizmo in whatever format, and the other remains in the “cloud” of information.  The “cloud” is only a metaphor for huge databanks -- and I mean on the dimension of Bonneville Dam power plants -- where everything ever sent on the Internet is stored “forever,” whatever that means in a world where those places are vulnerable which is why their locations are kept secret.  They are not the “cloud.”  They are the “matrix.”  They generate the “cloud.”  If the sun sends out a really powerful electromagnetic burst, it could possibly take out the satellite links among these places plus the places themselves.  Electronics are tiny delicate IO tracings in electromagnetic form.

The ebook that is actually still safely in the cloud can be interrupted by the canceling of the link between the book file and the reader.  This could happen for physical reasons (both my internet and telephone were off-line for an hour yesterday evening) or for legal reasons (the book publisher is being sued or the contract with the author is re-negotiated or censorship laws have been imposed or you only had permission to read the book for a certain period of time).  It could happen for political reasons.  Anything that shuts down the internet, which is only links and not normally controlled by individuals.  If you live in the hinterlands, you know that support for fancy gizmos is not always dependable.  (Can you hear me now?)  Mostly they are meant for urban people.

Readers have still not really figured out how to “consume” ebooks.  In the first place, they are often in the habit of cruising bookstores or libraries to discover what they want to read, but they don’t know how to “cruise” ebooks.  They often went by the covers or blurbs, but those are missing.  It is an entirely unwarranted assumption that all people have computer gizmos or want them, much less to read print on them or fish around looking for book reviews.  

But ebooks are great for people who read three or more “immersive” novels a week, never buy the books but only borrow them from the library, and know about them because they hear from friends.  They are the modern equivalent of the original little paperbacks that fit into pockets and could be discarded or given away once they were read, because they only cost fifty cents or a dollar.  Ebooks are not so good for people who would have to print out the file in order to use them the way they want to: for study, for rereading, for keeping.

An ebook is a challenge to the author to be media-inclusive.  Video?  Sound?  Links?  Persons who are good at those modes (photography, composing) might not be the most powerful writers so might want a partner.  At present many authors or formatters simply grab images or music from other sources and introduce them to manuscripts.

Format has not settled down.  There is no universal format.  Each format serves books that can only be seen on its related gizmos and there are wars between publishers over who gets access to which books.  Format is crucial when print meaning is often managed by line-breaks (poetry) or spacing (episodes).  On paper the way a book looks has been determined by the paper’s dimensions and the printer’s capacities, but now it is not.  Beyond consideration of fonts and margins is the possibility of making the words writhe like snakes or blink or change color. Do you really want your book to tell all your friends what you are reading and what page you are on?  There are “books” now that can detect where your eyes are looking and supply sound track.  Do you want a book that reads you while you read it?

Here’s a crass one:  what about batteries?  The constant consciousness of their state, the need to dispose of them ecologically, and -- indeed -- the impact of mining the rare materials -- are a lot to think about.  And then there’s the need to keep track of the gizmo at all times, not to drop it, not to put it on a cushy surface that will suffocate it, not to leave it behind or allow the dog to chew on it.  (Some of this is true of paper books, too, but people are not so inclined to steal a simple cheap book.  They WILL steal an ebook file.)

The most amazing change has been the enormously diminished cost of publishing.  I am “publishing” this blog right now at no cost but electricity, my Internet access, and I suppose, the depreciation of my computer.  What this has done is to dump out the need for venture capitalism, which was the role of the publisher and also his/her/its leverage.  But what I’m doing here is not really publishing in a complete sense.  It is only public printing, not much different from having a printing press and then posting what I’ve printed on walls or poles.  

Publishing includes curation (deciding what is worthy), research, editing, formatting, illustrating, publicizing and distribution.  Google is doing much of this for me by providing a template for this blog, posting my writing in an accessible way, and even listing it on Google, which is a sort of combined distribution/advertising.  I could do most of this for a book myself through a service like lulu.com, which will create a file of my manuscript and store it, then print copies on demand.  “Doing it yourself” puts the writer in direct contact with the reader (disintermediation) IF the reader can find the writer.  If the latter is already “famous” and followed by the media, this will not be a problem.  If the writer is unknown and the reader doesn’t have the skills or motivation to find the writer, it’s the same as not being printed or published, either one.  So now the crucial issue is “discovery” -- how the writer and reader can find each other.  Write that software program and you’ll have enough money to write for the rest of your life.

What has happened (take a look at Lulu.com) is a shattering of what was publishing houses into “services” who will contract to format, proof, distribute, promote.  The difference is that the writer must manage them, hound them to meet deadlines, pay them.  So why not also hire an agent to do that for you?

The other solution has been a different kind of shattering:  a million little publishers, each small entity specializing in region, subject, or kind of writing.  Poets have been doing this all along with chapbooks, which value beautiful printing -- not many copies.  No money in it until years later when collectors may take notice.  Poets love find printing, but they might also have enough sense of adventure to publish cross-media.

What is needed (besides the software) is the romanticization and honoring of the people who can be in the middle in a constructive way, not by buying their way with venture capital but by putting their hearts and minds into the effort.  A conductor for the orchestra that produces the symphony.  (That’s the book, in case you’re not following the metaphor.)  When we esteem a writer’s support person -- whatever name we give him or her -- then maybe some of the people who want to be writers but aren't that great at it will turn their attention to the support of fine authors without feeling as though they're failing or compromising.  The way editors used to do.