IN SWEET FIELDS OF AUTUMN

This time of year -- actually, every seasonal change -- I find myself humming the songs I was used to in the Unitarian context where many of us were “immanentalists” if not simply nature worshippers.  So my head has been resonating with “In Sweet Fields of Autumn.”  The UU hymnals are full of pillage from other contexts -- usually a poem from here slapped together with a tune from there -- but the people who do this are often academics and carefully footnote where they got them.  “Oh, I say,” I thought to myself (I’ve been watching too much BBC again)  "I’ll look this up and find out what the origins are."  It’s always been such a natural tune, as though I’d always known it.  

And I had.  But when I learned it , it was called “Away in the Manger” !  

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W6975_GBAJY9366813&vw=dc

Full choir traditional version suitable for a cathedral.  And you can download it.  There are MANY versions in many styles on YouTube.  The words in the UU hymnal are by Elizabeth Madison (b. 1883).  To go farther, you’ll need a musicologist or a UU historian.  But here are her words:

In sweet fields of autumn the gold grain is falling, the white clouds drift lonely, the wild swan is calling.  Alas for the daisies, the tall fern and grasses, when wind sweep and rainfall fill low-lands and passes.

The snows of December shall fill windy hollow, the bleak rain trails after, and March wind shall follow.  The deer through the valleys leave print of their going and diamonds of sleet mark the ridges of snowing.

The stillness of death shall stoop over the water, the plover sweep low where the pale streamlets falter; but deep in the earth clod the black seed is living; when spring sounds her bugles in rousing and giving.

The secret to this business of mating poetry with tune is a little formula the hymnal  (Singing the Living Tradition) puts down in the bottom righthand corner:  in this case, 12.12.12.12   It’s the meter.  In the back of the hymnal is a list of the meters used, so if you know the meter of your poem, it’s simple to match it up with a tune.  

Back to immanentalism, which in its more popular versions is simply nature worship.  I think the difference between the two categories is a matter of sentimentalism.  The nature worshippers don’t have much truck with the more destructive and human-hostile features like storms, volcanoes and earthquakes.  They like things nice, which always makes me impatient.  Niceness steals holiness.

Much as I love solstices, I think I turn to equinoxes -- which are transitional, bittersweet, unpredictable -- with more responsiveness.  This last full moon was a bloody one here because of the fires in the Rockies where smoke rose from within the cordillera.  We see the line of peaks against the sky and somehow assume it is a flat cut-out of one row but in fact it is a complex of ridges and valleys created when the land was shoved together by the underlying subductive tectonic plates.  Now we’ve had a cold spell and a bit of rain which on the inner higher peaks of the mountains left snow.  Just now there is a dark formless cloud over that way -- dunno what it means.  But the nights are clear and extra starry because the moon rises late and when it does, it’s a silver scrap that lingers into morning.  If you were lost in the wilderness with no warm clothing, you’d better have survival skills.

This month I ran out of metformin and money at the same time, so decided I would make a virtue of this pickle by converting it into an experiment: going cold turkey without meds.  (Not very dramatic -- it’s only one pill a day.)  Instead of turning my head away, I made a chart and have been taking blood sugar readings five and six times a day.  Same diet as usual, but I added a little walk around our small civic park at bedtime which is often when my blood sugar is highest.  That’s why I’ve been extra-aware of what the moon is doing.

The surprise is that my glucose readings are the same without medication!  After two days I had a day of subtle malaise, rather like a reaction to a vaccination so I assume it meant that my inner community (I am a tower of micro-organisms) was adjusting.  So far the same is true of my blood pressure -- normal readings.  On Saturday I’ll go back to meds and see what happens.  I am much supported in this sort of strategy by a number of people who are deeply interested in diet, their own body dynamics, and what a constant stream of data can reveal.  It’s not idle, but it’s not quite academic or clinical either.  I sort of hate to name the websites for fear people will pursue the information the way the media does: grab an implication and make it a marketing occasion, a “rule.”

But we do know that bodies adjust to the seasons.  Day length, temps, changes in the vegetation and animal life of the ecology are deeply important.  This morning I slept long and well because dreams follow bodies.  It was a category I often visit:  I am moving to a small community in foothills.  It’s a combination of East Glacier, Heart Butte, a tiny house I lived in one summer in Browning, and a little place called Bridal Veil along the Columbia River that was a cluster of old logging camp housing.  At the time I considered renting there (Seventies) it was run by a sort of hippie community.  They didn’t think I’d fit in.

In this version of the dream I was staying with a family for a few days before moving into my new house.  The new element was that I had a set of six or seven beaded buckskin dresses.  They were mine, the woman of the house admired them and expressed a desire to have one of them, and I was considering whether to give it to her.  You can interpret but it will be about you, not me.  For me it is about transitions, time-driven so including aging, resources, community -- these are the forces that brought me to here and now.  Sometimes I think I might be kind of a "Dog in the Manger" about it.  Maybe I need a song.

ROBERT JAMES FRASCINO, M.D.

On Saturday, September 17, 2011, there was a death that has gone entirely unnoticed by the press, or maybe they know but decline to report it.  I wouldn’t know myself except that I subscribe to TheBody.com, which is a source of information about the management of HIV-AIDS.  I do this because I was writing with a group of boys with HIV.  No panic: they are in Europe and on the East Coast.  And, since you asked, since 2007 their care has improved enough that they’ve stopped dying so much.  

I do NOT have HIV.  I have diabetic metabolic syndrome (mostly because I’m 72), and I write about sex as a nonparticipant (in the contact sense).  I am not gay -- I’m solitary and celibate.  Viruses are part of our global environment.  Hanta Virus, West Nile Virus, rabies -- they’re right here in Montana.  HIV-AIDS has had an impact on the arts only matched by tuberculosis in the 19th century or smallpox among the Native Americans a little earlier.  I’m old enough to remember the polio epidemic, which was deeply sympathetic to most people because it struck kids and a president.

Robert James Frascino, M.D. was a prize-winning concert pianist as well as a specialist in fatigue, anemia, rheumatology, and immunology.  These are slippery vague afflictions that seem pretty widespread (unlike HIV in Montana, which is probably exceeded by Hepatitis C, another deadly virus).  The cutting edge research is on the molecular and sometimes atomic level, deep in the machinery of the cell.  When the cure for AIDS is discovered (and it only lacks money and a few lucky break-throughs) it will be a “convergent” cure for many other diseases as well, possibly even cancer and diabetes.  The research is that basic.  

“Dr. Bob” was gay, married to another male doc for 18 years, and acquired the virus in 1991 when a blood sample in a biopsy needle was accidently driven into his hand.  He died from bacterial sepsis, aged 59.  AIDS is a disease of vulnerability, but they are saying the “blood poisoning” was not from the virus.  People die from bacterial sepsis in major numbers.  They say in the US, there are more MRSA (antibiotic resistant infection) deaths than AIDS deaths.  You don’t catch MRSA from sex -- you catch it in the hospital.  

Dr. Bob’s first response to HIV infection was to start a series of benefit concerts.  His second was to begin answering questions in a Forum on TheBody.com.  Even I read all the questions (some of them so crazy off-the-wall that most people would have just thrown them out) in part because HIV is as much an environmental issue as, say, grizzly bears, and in part because he was so full of tender and funny common sense.  HIV-AIDS is almost as much a mental disease as a virus.  People get so paranoid and denying about it that they think they’ve caught it from walking past men in pharmacies who look effeminate and part their hair on the wrong side.  When there was a contest for the funniest and most out-there question to the forum, it was hard to choose.

Dr. Bob was consoling.  But funny.  “Really,” he assured the questioner, “You are not the only person who has had sex with a Republican bisexual transgendered Mormon midget with webbed feet wearing a strap-on.”  His main casualty was political correctness, but people who are desperate for truly scientific advice relevant to their problem tend to be so paranoid about where they got the virus and so likely to blame those they believe hate them, that only jokes could carry the info into their brains.  (Anyway, you can tell the category Dr. Bob describes here -- the marker is that they’re all running for Congress.  That’s a joke.)  The questions and answers are still posted on TheBody.com, if you’re not too paranoid about your computer being hacked to go read them.

My issue, my focus (which is hard to pick out) is not AIDS or viruses.  I am a “whole-ist,” an “everythingist.”  What I see is a world of woven forces that travel through each other, morphing as they go, forming patterns that we mistake for permanent realities, and always creating stories.  It’s overwhelming to think about.  One hardly knows where to start except that the general rule in life is to start where you are, to hone your own perceptions and attitudes into instruments of perception.

I want to leave you laughing.  Here’s Dr. Bob’s answer to a seasonal question.  You can figure out the question:

“You haven't seen a question that discussed worms growing in the vagina after masturbating with a zucchini??? Gee, I wonder why.

"First off, can I ask why you decided to go all the way with Mr. Zucchini? Did you get bored and/or horny while shopping in the fresh produce aisle at Whole Foods?

"Your worries about worms in your vajayjay after your sex date with the squash are unwarranted.

"Next, you wonder why after your vegetable love-fest your nether regions were a bit sore. Hmm. Sweetie, you shoved a zucchini up your serpent socket. Don't you think that might account for the discomfort?"

I’m guessing this is probably not among the countless zucchini jokes one hears this time of year.  And I’m not resisting the use of the word “interpenetration” very much, or asking the age of this adventurer, but it is pretty typical of the questions that can torment young people in particular and much safer than trolling the bus terminal.  I know this person was concerned about safety because she says she washed the squash carefully.  And don’t tell me a boy wouldn’t do that.  In Somalia no one would do such a thing because they would immediately eat the zucchini to fend off starvation.

Dr. Bob and his partner had recently gone on a long trip around the world.  They were not impoverished or uneducated but they did not shut the inconvenient and scary others out of their lives, nor did they go to the other extreme and devote themselves to carrying bedpans for the afflicted.  The intelligent thing to do was write funny but true answers on The Forum and intelligence was the name of the game.  When such a mind is lost, we should all grieve.

WRITING, GRAMMAR AND LITURGY

Now and then I consider “teaching” or “coaching” or “tutoring” writing.  Sort of a “share the wealth” idea.  I have to use so many quotes because I realize how out of sync I am with the culture.  I don’t even mean the same thing by “writing,” much less “good writing.”   These days one writes to sell and that means writing to order, as patterned as a pie.  Then, of course, the publishers will tell you that it is a status thing: good writing means being a “published writer,” sort of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Once I was asked to judge a high school speech contest and completely bolixed up the process because my idea of a good speech was so different from what was being taught and so counter to the expectations of the sponsors.  I thought originality, intelligence and passion should count more than anything else.  They did not.  

A related problem is that so many people think that teaching is something imposed on a yielding but passive student, rather than an energetic pursuit BY the student with the teacher panting to keep up.  At the same time students prize their own personal ideas so much that they resent any kind of judgment from the teacher as a denial of their identity and possibly an affront to their religious position.  They will not accept discipline (I mean self-control, not punishment) or alternatives.  Most of them are dominated by the group to which they belong, whether demographic or through some kind of affinity or simply income level.  This has been deadly for some groups, since the circle of people who are willing to be consumers gets tighter and tighter.  There seems to be a sociopolitical complex arising as a monster from what was once well-intentioned “creativity” and “independence” and “self-respect.” 

Among the ordinarily resisted disciplines is that of grammar.  In some ways I’m not surprised because grammar is taught as an end when it is simply a means to clarity.  In fact, most people confuse grammar and standard usage -- not saying “ain’t” is not a matter of grammar -- it’s usage.  Using a double negative IS bad grammar if you’re speaking English.  Usage is convention within a community.   Grammar is the structural pattern of the sentences that guides the sense.  Unless one can at will change a participle to a prepositional phrase, a gerund to a noun-adjective combination, keep parallel structure and connect participles to their antecedents, the poor reader may have to reread and reread to get sense out of the passage. 

Nowadays we get forced out of one set of “writing” conventions into another because of technology, adding signals to conventional punctuation.  A good example is the automated formatting of print on an eReader, which can make hash of such elements as lines, stanzas and verses in poetry.  Many poets now use a slash mark to end a line.  If the program is nimble enough and one’s techie chops are up to it, colored fonts, completely different fonts, strange  alphabets, drawings, videos and even music can be introduced.  This is hard to teach -- standards are not worked out yet -- and it’s way too complex for a conformity-based culture (like ours) to support so far.  We sit scratching our heads.  But the kids, maybe through games and maybe through music, ARE willing to exert themselves to learn in those contexts.  Does it follow that we should use games and music to teach writing?  I hope not.  But surely teachers can learn. 

Teachers study students in order to bridge the subject with the students.  But it is not lesson plans nor standardized tests that make it happen.  The main instrument is the personhood of the teacher.  I was just looking at the website of a self-declared writer who in fact teaches English at the college level and writes about it on her website.   Her writing is full of high school level errors.  Does she compensate for this with insight, analysis, tenderness, epiphanies or bravery?  Who says she should?  I can’t tell you who she is without giving you her name and that would expose her too much.  She’s a Westerner, runs with the right crowd, and is beautiful.  She evidently does not believe in proofing.  No one seems to mind.

A teaching friend finds it unnerving that his students demand all the time,  “what must I do to get an A?”  -- “what do you want from me?”  As though they were whores bargaining a price.  They have no sense of possibility, no intentions of their own except to get certified for prosperity.  What enormous irony this is, since no one can teach prosperity -- it’s like the Holy Ghost, totally dependent on forces way beyond one’s transcript.  But they have no sense of irony either, because irony bounces off reality and they have no commonsense grip on reality.  Learning can be fun and learning together should be intimate, but in our culture fun is frivolity and intimacy is sex. 

What’s to be done?  No need to do anything.  This problem is self-correcting, painful as correction may be, maybe like an economic “correction.”  No government, institution or even family can keep people from learning.  The world is different enough now that the original plan of universal county/state tax-supported education for citizenship and literacy is not working.  The schools have become the tools of corporations -- but they were always meant to make us factory workers.  Mega-cities are pyramidal puzzles.

It may be that the new schools will be online or take libraries as their nucleus.  Here you go:  http://www.youtube.com/education.  Maybe charter schools,  Churches?  Writing is really about thinking and thinking is about what matters in the world which is feeling.  How do you teach that to people?

Somehow I stumbled onto a path into the future.  In seminary for my thesis I was reading Suzanne Langer, who spent a lot of time thinking about what she called “felt concepts.”  They are the things that are pre-verbal, subverbal, even subconscious, inhabitants of dreams.  Today we would say they were the sensory elements that compose thinking and identity.  This is the level kids seem to be on, especially the ones worldwide who have escaped all formal schooling, who do not sit at desks, but spend their days foraging for food and their nights hiding from predators.  The gizmos that are only Gameboys to our suburban kids, smartphones to our professionals, are spaceships for those kids, a leap into hyperdrive where they can actually show us what they know through video, painting, song and dance, the eloquence of the senses calling us.  

That’s liturgy, NOT writing.  It precedes and underlies writing, but many people writing today do not have this level of being in their lives.  It has been replaced by media.  In the meantime, if anyone wants to know how the little teeter-totter of the sentence works and how meaning dangles from it in dependent clauses like a chandelier, a mobile, a candleabra -- I could show you.  It’s not the most important thing, but it’s useful.

SOLDIER'S GIRL: Review and Reflection

Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been “homosexual.”

This script is exemplary in its clarity, its foreshadowing of what we know will happen, and its simplicity in presenting a convincing love story.  Calpurnia (Lee Pace) is elegant, played with dignified grace by a male actor in prosthetic breasts and a wig.  She is not a campy over-the-top swish figure like the announcer at the competition she’s in, but a calm, generous, balanced person whose femininity is more Grace Kelly than Cher.  (Actually, she has shoulders like Linda Evans.  I wonder whether a genital eversion amounts to as much plastic surgery as Cher has had.  Chas (formerly Chastity) Bono knows for sure.)

Barry (Troy Garity) is a simple guy -- not too swift and not very experienced.  I kept thinking about Pierre in the Audrey Hepburn version of “War and Peace,” and found out why when I went to imdb.com -- Henry Fonda played Pierre and Fonda was this actor’s grandfather.  Garity looks like his father, Tom Hayden.  It’s Calpurnia who is reminiscent of Jane Fonda, his mother.

Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).

Gender identity emerges from the interaction of a number of continuums.  To which of the binary are you assigned physiologically?  Even without discussing the chromosomal variations (not just xx and xy, but also xxx or xyy or broken versions with incomplete or doubled sections (sextions?) of chromosomes) and all the bodily and temperamental variations a person can be born with or develop at puberty or have traumatically imposed, common sense and ordinary experience shows that a male can be anywhere on the continuum of “maleness” in terms of size, aggression, and so on.  He can be Conan the Barbarian but if his sperm isn’t dynamic and fertile -- is he a male?  The same for a female.  She can be the most curvaceous and alluring woman of all time, but can she produce healthy babies?  Which criteria are you choosing?  

The aspect that crushes all the life out of discussion is desire in the sense of lust.  Whom do you want to have sex with?  Someone the same sex or someone of the opposite sex?  But those aren’t the only choices or even the controlling choices.  In this movie it is clear that Barry loves elegance, high class presentation, kindness, and Calpurnia does, too, so they meet there, escaping the accusation of "low class."  They are both genuine in the sense of character and they meet there in honesty and acceptance.  She is knowing and he is innocent so opposites can also meet.  These two are not game players.

So what about authenticity and truth?  Who is putting on more of a show in drag, the singers at Visions or the soldiers in camo fatigues at the base?  Is the announcer at the competition more of a cross-dresser than the female sentry at the gate in the beginning of the film?

Our culture makes a binary of gender identity more than others do.  The Navajo defined many roles, some depending on what one wants to do -- the things normally done by women because they are anchored by babies or the things normally done by men who go out to hunt.  In many cultures the priestly/sacred/holy people are not gender-assigned or are considered both.  But they cannot be menstruating women.  It’s the baby part that’s the big divider.  But even then, an assigned nurturer is also a mother even if male.

Simpler animals sometimes have the ability to change back and forth between male and female, maybe depending on the ecology or maybe on whether there’s a shortage of one or the other.  Some animals carry both genders and can fertilize themselves.  There is probably not a lot of pillow talk in those species (angleworms), but people do talk to themselves. (jokes)  Androgeny and/or bisexuality are quiet values in some human contexts.  Think Teresias.

No one understands how it is that an apparent man can be innerly and utterly convinced of being a woman or vice versa.  It is easy to understand that some people don’t fit into the culture’s idea of what they ought to be and how that stigma can cause them to be targets.  Ugly women, pretty men.  Brainy women, ineffective men.

How did the sexual identity of “whom do you desire” get to be so important in our lives?  Haven’t there always been people who liked their own sex better than the opposite one?  (“Liked” being a euphemism for wanting to fuck.  Why so many euphemisms now that kids use the “f” word as much as combat Marines?  What kind of role swap is that?)  Haven’t there always been people who found elements that deeply touched them and made them yearn for fusion with individuals that were not “appropriate”?  (I hate that prissy word.)  One of my favorite movies is “Carrington,” about a totally mismatched couple who were deeply in love with each other though they fucked nearly everyone in sight and the bedpost as well.  

Why is sex the controlling moral dimension in our lives in a time when we can surgically change our bodies, chemically control our fertility, get professional help with relationships, earn money, co-habit with no license, and die for our country without regard for gender?  Is that why?  Is it all this freedom that makes everyone obsess so much about the subject?

Or is it that sex keeps us from thinking about violence and greed?  It’s not that we’re all so sexually hot or why would there be such a need for Viagra?  Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.

There are some fascinating levels to think about in this film but one of the most absorbing -- if trivial -- is the difference between fiction and reality.  The real Calpurnia is certainly attractive, but in quite a different way from the movie version.  The real one is almost cute, a little touch childlike.  The movie version of the military camp is toned-down with a homogenized (they all look sort of cub-like) cast including tolerant hets, Asians and blacks.  Testimony was that the taunts and harassment of Barry were actually much worse.  Andre Braugher is one of my fav actors and always carries with him a kind of moral force not seen a lot in ordinary life.   Barry’s mother is not as I would have imagined her, but no doubt this murder was an experience that changed her.

It is my hope that this movie will help to change a culture lost in hatred and ignorance.  It’s not the only force for good, but it is a vivid and heart-breaking one.

BINDING SOUND TO LITURGY

During North American Indian Days everyone in Browning can feel as much as hear the big pow-wow drums over at the campgrounds.  Through the year at every honoring or funeral mass or major announcement a “rawhide band” of three or four hand-drummers may assemble to herald, accompany and dedicate what’s happening.  But this is the first time I’ve heard of “walking drummers” visiting every neighborhood in town to bless and smudge.  We certainly need it now that so much happens so quickly, much of it terrifying and disheartening.  Sometimes the good things (incoming money) are as dangerous as the bad things (incoming drugs).   Here’s the URL if you want to read the story and look at the photos.

http://cutbankpioneerpress.com/articles/2011/09/16/glacier_reporter/news/doc4e70c5e66a355991575989.txt

The drummers pictured in the Glacier Reporter included Shawn Bird Rattler, Wade Running Crane, Larry and Rich Ground.  They are defining themselves as “Crazy Dog Society” which is an ancient group whose charge was to protect the community, doing whatever it takes.  It’s about service to others, whether as warriors or as singers or even something more practical, like distributing food.  This impulse is strong among the Blackfeet or they wouldn’t be here anymore.

Yesterday’s blog post was looking at the bad, the “Confession of Sins,” so today I look at the good, “The Assurance of Pardon.”  They should be read together as a way of stretching consciousness from doom to hope.  

I like drumming because it is music and because it is simple.  One does not need some hundred dollar painted artifact suitable for hanging on the wall.  A stick, a finger hitting a table, a foot kicking a box -- rhythm is everywhere, rhythm is life.  The mother’s heartbeat is joined by the heartbeat of her embryo.  Light is rhythm; the colors are the songs.  Scientists tell us that instruments can detect the ringing of the earth, a long very low resonance, an immense gong.

When times get desperate, new heartbeats form, new ideas.  The internet is an instrument for detecting ideas.  Try the video below.  It is about people who take their violin bows out to play the barbed wire fences in fields or alongside prisons.  Or who translate the northern lights and seismic rumbles into symphonies.  They expand their own perceptions to find order and creation everywhere.   http://vimeo.com/15182524

Here’s the description of the accompanying website:   "The Reach Of Resonance" is a meditation on the meaning of music, which juxtaposes the diverse creative paths of four musicians using music to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world around them. Among them are Miya Masaoka using music to interact with insects and plants; Jon Rose, utilizing a violin bow to turn fences into musical instruments in conflict zones ranging from the Australian outback to Palestine; John Luther Adams translating the geophysical phenomena of Alaska into music; and Bob Ostertag, who explores global socio-political issues through processes as diverse as transcribing a riot into a string quartet, and creating live cinema with garbage. 

http://www.reachofresonance.com/   At this location are links to longer videos and more ideas and images.  There are two basic principles I see right off: there is always music hidden in both noise and silence, waiting to be called out; and humans are instruments who can expand their awareness even as they “play.”  (A word to consider carefully, take significantly but not seriously.)

I subscribe to several NPR summaries, but esp. the pop stuff I just wave on by.  This “big bird” song made me stop and listen.  It comes in part from ideas like “reaching for resonance.”    http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/136056073/yellow-ostrich-echoing-drums-and-distant-drones ft=3&f=4703895&sc=nl&cc=sod-20110916   I guess I listened to it because I expected a Scots pipe band (drums and drones).  It’s totally unique but a concatenation of elements.

I’ve been discussing the elements of liturgy.  Here in this blog post I’ve stacked up enough elements for a liturgy (same root word as ligature) to bind together into an event of some kind.  Call it worship if you want to, but you don’t need God.  Think about my five steps: entering over the threshold, confronting evil, naming hope, exploring a concept (“God is a gong?”), and returning back over the threshold to the world.  How you combine these elements or others you might find is up to you.  Think about the rhythm of the sequence between one thing and the next.  Get clear in your mind where the people are and how to draw them along.

Then pick up your drum and walk.  Sing.  Invite others.  Enter the liminal neighborhood.  Will you walk alone?  Will you be a group?  Will you lead the people over the threshold or let them hear you approach and enter?  Will you ask them to sing oh-oh-oh?  Will you strike a gong?  Make a smudge to carry?  Should the people kneel with heads down low, hands at the backs of necks as though a grizzly might come along?   (It might.)  When you get to the center, will you dance, lifting your knees and flinging your arms like David dancing before the altar?  These things are so old, so child-like, so surprising.

My friend Leland Ground, brother to Larry and Rick, was in the original seventh grade class I taught in 1961.  We’re much changed, but there’s still a connection between us and he drops by now and then.  Earlier in his life, he was an evangelist far to the north and he’s still a dedicated Christian without feeling any contradiction with other religious modes.  When he comes to see me, he asks whether I believe in God.  I always tell him I do not, because I don’t want any anthropomorphic authority standing over me.  I believe in holiness and right behavior in order to stay in harmony (rhythm) with the world.  He accepts my answer.  

Then months later he will ask me again, hopefully,  “Do you believe in God?”  And I say,  “Define the concept.”  God would be flattered by Leland’s definition, but I still don’t believe in “Him.”  Leland is able to accept my account of the immanence of the Sacred, but I am unable to accept his approval of hierarchy.  We can walk together.  Leland is an excellent drummer.  That’s enough for me.  He wants more.  He still hopes I will begin to believe in God.  I honor his life.  I honor all life.  Just not God.  Go look at those vids of Siberian shamans Anonymous posted in comments a couple of days ago. 

Oh-oh-oh!   I’ve got bagpipe music in my head, not from a recording, but from a Highland Games when I was a teenager.  It was in some forested park and the bagpipers were wandering among the trees while they practiced.  Some were near and some were far.  None were playing the same tune.  All were walking.  Oh-oh-oh!  

WHAT KEEPS US FROM KNOWING?

Every time we invent a new instrument that reveals more about the world than we had previously known, we end up being terrified by the possibilities for destruction, the hurtling of time pushing us into a future we don’t want, more troubles bursting out of Pandora’s cursed box, more rules we are supposed to enforce on ourselves and others to prevent total disaster.  But if you try to pass on the warnings or suggest changes, you’ll be attacked.  Kill the messenger.

The oceans of the planet have been our symbols of eternity, oblivion, making it all go away.  Some say we’ve explored the oceans less than we’ve explored the moon.  Now that we find out more about our submarine planet, it is as complex and scary as the land.  Garbage vortexes.  Dead zones the size of continents.  Bleached bones of coral reefs.  The water is turning fresh!  That sounds good, doesn’t it?  Our oceans are turning acid.  Uh, oh.  Our oceans are rising into the air, where they will fall again as rain and snow.  Yes, I’ve seen that myself.  The ocean is becoming bitter.

I’ve always known about the Japanese Current because in Oregon that’s what brought turquoise bubbly-glass net floats to the beach after they escaped in Japan, and then during WWII the same current brought bombs meant to set our forests on fire.  They did, too, but not very effectively.  When I was little, sentries watched from wooden towers like “lifeguards,” which they were.  We were warned not to touch anything tangled in the washed-up windrows of seaweed.  We were obedient mostly.

A woman scientist was the first to describe the conveyor system that moves both water and air in a long planetary dance, sinking, traveling, rising, returning.  Her gender was nice for the scoffers since she was easier to discredit, but then the big males came on board to confirm that a combination of temperature and salinity, both of which affect the gravity of water -- pun intended -- are what make the northern edges of the continents comfortably inhabitable.  Not only that, but they control the turn-over of nutrients that support life.  Without movement -- stirring up -- the sea would be a dense, light-less, lifeless, pousse café that could not benefit humans.  

Not until I got to Montana and did wintercounts did I understand about Los Ninos, the “male” and “female” phased Christmas “babies” that somehow by turning hot or cold (no one knows why or how) way out there in the ocean could make our Montana winter open on bare ground or close with ten foot drifts.  And not until recent years have I understood that the bull pines and aspens were moving up the mountains, the pikas were pushing up into high talus, and the bugs were going out of sync with the flowers so that the latter were not being visited on schedule, so no berry crop.  In short, climate change is turning up the heat under we frogs.

Climate warming sounds like a good thing in a Montana winter, but those who escaped the cold by driving their RV’s to Yuma, Arizona, had better hope they have enough gas for generators or reliable electrical connections to keep their AC’s running even in winter.  Up here a few hundred feet of elevation, a few hundred miles of north/south location, can make a difference for a rancher between successfully raising wheat or having to switch to barley and even then see it fail to mature.

Climate drives politics, partly by affecting agriculture, particularly where farmers grow cash crops instead of doing subsistence farming to feed their own families.  Cash crops force small landholders into the global economy where they are prey for corporations.  But researchers were also surprised to find that disease (which is highly related to climate because of what vectors can be sustained -- malaria-carrying mosquitoes, for instance) correlates almost exactly with war.  When countries are in anguish and chaos, they turn to terrorism which tips into war.  Boys without jobs become soldiers.

Lewis and Clark explored this territory where I live because they were searching for the fabled Northwest Passage.  It opens now in summer -- it crosses the Arctic Sea and opens ports in Russia as well.  This will change politics, already has since the oil-mongers are pitched against the pristine-landers in the far north.  Warming has doomed the lives of people who had lived on permafrost, now no longer solid.  The Panama Canal is no longer the only route past North America.  In time the Isthmus will submerge.  So will Manhattan.  So will Bangladesh, which even now is wiped of life in every major storm.

We’ve all learned to say “albedo,” because that’s the difference between the reflective capacity of arctic ice versus dark water.  The albedo causes the effect of melting to fold back on itself, so more ice melts faster.  The more the change, the faster it goes.

“All that additional heat threatens to light the fuse of the world's biggest ‘carbon bomb’, the vast permafrost region spanning 13 million square kilometers across Alaska, Canada, Siberia and parts of northern Europe.  Permafrost contains at least twice as much carbon as is currently present in the atmosphere. Even if a small percentage of this is released, catastrophic climate change is likely, experts believe.”

Christians take for granted a three level world on earth:  the ground in the middle, heaven in the sky, and hell under the ground somewhere.  But in the ocean there is a different three-layered trinity.

"At the surface to a depth of about 100 meters (330 feet), we have the layer of the ocean where there is enough light for photosynthesis to occur. Below this we have what I call the barrier layer.

“The barrier layer is what oceanographers refer to as the thermocline (because it is where temperature changes rapidly with depth) or the pycnocline (because it is where density changes rapidly with depth).

“Since density variations in the ocean are due mostly to temperature, the terms "thermocline" and "pycnocline" are interchangeable, according to Sarmiento.

“The barrier layer averages about 500 to 1,000 meters (1,600 to 3,300 feet) in depth. The deep ocean, which has an average thickness of about 3 kilometers (2 miles), lies below the barrier layer.”

I'm getting all this from the following url: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0615_040614_SouthernOcean.html

Maybe society is like the ocean: three layers.  The top layer of enlightenment (330 feet); the barrier layer (1,600 to 3,300 feet) which prevents knowledge from sinking in; and the deep ocean (an average of two miles thick).  They say “ignorance is bliss.”  If you don’t know the bridge is out, you’ll only have a few moments of panicked surprise when you drive off the end.  To know or not to know, that is the question.

THE SHAMAN'S PATH OF THE HORSE

This list is taken from the website of RAVEN KALDERA.  If you are interested, you can find a LOT of stuff there.  http://www.ravenkaldera.org/  This is his list of the 8-fold path of Shamans.  He speaks of classic Northern modes.

The first path is the Path of Meditation. This is also sometimes called the Path of Breath, because altering consciousness through specific forms of breathing is one of the classic techniques of meditation.

The second path is the Path of Ritual. Creating sacred space and doing deliberate (and often repetitive), mindful activities that are heavily laden with meaning in that space can create an altered state by itself. 

The third path is the Path of Rhythm. This includes drumming, dancing, or any repetitive rhythmic motions.

The fourth path is the Ascetic's Path. This includes fasting, sensory deprivation, and purification ordeals, all of which have various precedents in the North. 

The fifth path is the Path of Sacred Plants. From Thor's henbane beer to the infamous Little Red Man mushroom, hallucinogenic plants have been used with surprising frequency in the ancient North. 

The sixth path is the Path of the Flesh. This path involves using sexual energy as a way of opening one's self to the spirits.

The seventh path is the Ordeal Path. This path revolves around intentional and careful use of pain in order to put the body into an altered state. 

All of the above have crossed my research more than once in surprising ways and have shown up in real life -- I run across persons who actually practice one or more of these paths with no reference to shamans.  Sometimes the experience was imposed on them, unasked for.  

But the eighth path is not one that I know at all, unless Raven is talking about shape-shifting, in which case the path should be the “Path of the Creature,” since sometimes we’re talking seals or big birds or bison.  

There are certain domestic animals which will “bond” with a human being and become attuned to his or her mind and goals -- horses and dogs do this so well and so thoroughly that the relationship becomes more one of extension than of partnership.  There’s a little sexual fusion to it, mind-reading, picking up signals so subtle that one is not conscious of them.  But that’s not what Raven is talking about.  This what he says:

The eighth path is the Path of the Horse, which involves direct spirit-possession, bringing the Gods or wights into the body for a short period of time. 

First, let me disclaimer right off that the word "horse" is borrowed from the Afro-Caribbean religious traditions. In those religions (Voudoun, Santeria, Candomble, Umbanda, Palo Mayombe), the person whose body is borrowed by a God or a spirit is referred to as a "horse", and the act of being spirit-possessed is referred to as being "ridden". While we who do these things in a modern northern-tradition context do unashamedly borrow this term, it seems oddly appropriate in spite of its origins. One is reminded of the runes Ehwaz and Raido, the Horse and the Ride, which are also Movement and the Path.

He’s talking about possession, some mind-force coming into a human being and taking him or her over for its own purposes.  This is much darker and scarier than the appreciation of a willing horse.  We know one metaphor for sex is riding or being ridden (“ridden hard and put away wet”).  The play “Equus” bitterly recounts the merging of sexuality with equitation, but even that is innocent when compared with the notion of invasion by a completely different consciousness that is anthropomorphic but not human.  

Maybe there’s “channeling” as when a spirit personality talks “through” someone.  Or “speaking in tongues” or maybe there’s what might be called psychosis or a “split personality.”  Those who like to think of such phenomena as being explainable by science will look for descriptions of changed consciousnesses and identities, maybe arguing for a kind of brain-reorganization, extreme playacting to the point of losing the boundary with reality.  At least some pre-existing reality.  Where’s that fMRI machine?

On the other hand there will always be people who accept a magical, other-worldly explanation.  I don’t see a problem so long as one is able, in that U of Chicago Div School way, to state one’s method.  Don’t mix science with superstition.  But one who is clear, and at least in control of their own thoughts, could go back and forth from one method to another:  observe someone who seems to be possessed; let the scary feelings run up and down the spine; then step over to questioning about what forces are scientifically operating on this person.  Maybe ask about trauma or hormone levels.

So it turns out that the Path of the Horse is not even about equines.  Shucks.  There is so much that is magical about a horse even if you’re not riding it. Sitting up on a horse makes the world a different place, as the plains Indians quickly figured out.  Even walking across grass with a horse willingly traveling beside you, keeping its head by your shoulder, seems so companionable, so natural.  Horses are curious and -- once they know you -- trusting, so that you can put your hands all over them, sliding palms over their slick warm quivering and flinching ribs and flexing round rears; blow your breath up their noses; put your fingers in their mouths.   But if you get out of tune, de-synchronized, you’re liable to be bitten hard and even kicked.  A rearing, striking horse is deadly.

My niece’s ranch was bought by a man who was raising wild horses, the original mustangs, except that it all went wrong and collapsed.  Maybe something made a “horse” of him, though his name was Black Bear.  Anyway, my niece and her son and grandson, a toddler, wanted to visit them so we went out into the field in the foothills of the Rockies where the horses that Spring had run off a couple of gregarious young moose.  Now it was mid-July and the grass was tall but still green.  These horses are gray, dun, buckskin, mouse-colored, sometimes with that ancient stripe down their back and vague stripes across the backs of their rear legs, as though they’d been switched by something soft but dirty.  They were very curious about the baby, who was wearing only a diaper.  They came to peer, with their manes in their eyes like bashful girls, 

The baby’s father put his crying, fussing, boy down in the grass to rub sunscreen on him, blue goop that made me think of the Picts. The baby calmed and the horses -- a band of mares with colts -- came even closer to see what was happening and try to interpret it.  But when my niece and I reached out to touch the horses, they struck the ground with their front hooves and blew snot at us, backing off.

The shaman’s idea of the Path of the Horse is one of a big something possessing a little something, but a rider is a little something on a big something, so this Horse Path is one of Reversal.  But what we felt that summer afternoon in the grass was an enveloping fusion, light streaked with shadow, no need for any sort of possessing.  

But shouldn’t an aspiring Dionysian welcome being possessed?  Perhaps I am this blog’s “horse.”

  

DIONYSIAN/APOLLONIAN: What is the message?

Doesn’t everyone know that old literary distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian?  I mean, they don’t name rocket ships the “Dionysus,” do they?  But the astronauts who were so Apollonian when they were in their pressurized suits and strapped down were pretty Dionysiac once they got on the ground again -- hot cars, easy women, booze -- taking chances they never would have taken in space.  How did they make the transition between one mode and the other?

The other night I watched a movie about “The Cockettes” (meant to rhyme with “Rockettes”) which was a sort of stage revue “disorganized” by an extravagant man called “Hibiscus” in San Francisco at the turn of the Sixties into the Seventies.  The shows were about as wild and heartfelt as they could be and rose in a great crescendo of sequin-encrusted passion and ecstatic outrageous love for a few years.  The echoes persist.

Tonight my movie was “Everyman’s War,” an Indie movie based on the WWII experiences of Don Smith, the father of the writer and director.  Just about as sober and focused as a movie can be.  It’s much like the black and white movies about “ordinary heroes” I saw as a small child.  Most of the cast and crew were local people rather than seasoned professionals, so there wasn’t so much artifice as just straightforward “doin’ it.”  But very carefully and respectfully.  That’s not quite what Apollonian is, but certainly a major contrast.  It is the mode in which much of my life has been lived because that was the first world I knew. (Born 1939.)  My maiden name is Strachan; the motto is “Non Timeo, Sed Caveo.”  Not timid, but cautious.  I go along very observant and wary, with a knife clenched in my teeth, all the time pretending it’s a smile.  Most people accept that deceit at face value, but in fact they should not.  It is an echo of that war.  Tim nailed it when he said I was an underground partisan in France bicycling desperately in a driving rainstorm to deliver the crucial message gripped in my teeth.

But what I really wanted to be all along was a Dionysiac.  The trouble was that I had been convinced as a child -- I guess by my mother who recognized that knife in my mouth (she had one, too) -- that I was a time bomb, a land mine, that I must always be very careful or I would explode and kill people.  (Don’t tell this to anyone.  Most will laugh and that always irritates me.  A few will move closer to the door.  Those are the ones I’ll make friends with.)  Or worse than killing someone would be literally creating someone by getting pregnant and then being chained to them and marriage.  She thought sex was very, very dangerous.  I guess she’s right.  All those neglected or abused children.

So I don’t drink, because then I might do almost anything.  In a short time period after Bob divorced me, I experimented, but made sure I was going out of control with people who would take care of me and they did.  But what use was going out of control on a Saturday night?  If you’re a walking time bomb, why waste it ?  A life should not just be, but mean something.  I mean, first one should “be” and as well as possible, but then what?

Heavy, man.  When those WWII guys got home, knowing they had done terrible things but that it HAD to be done and that they were mostly heroes -- if only for obeying orders -- they just didn’t want trouble.  Bob’s brother had been with Patton, maybe alongside the men in this movie.  Nightly he got quietly drunk at home because his wife was afraid he’d get killed in a bar fight otherwise.  His life was bookkeeping and waiting on customers with a smile.  And he was grateful for that.

Vietnam was the Dionysian war and it came home with the soldiers.  Go outta yer mind.  Nothing really matters.  Yer jist bein’ used, man.  Life is short and desperate.  So many people felt like that on the rez that it seemed excessive for me to come apart that way -- but I did, a little.  This Blackfeet rez is more like Korea -- cold, sometimes bleak and crazy-making.  I recovered from the end of everything, an explosion, on the little ranch on Two Medicine with the horses and cats.  Then the two-story yellow house in East Glacier.  It was Third Force Psychology that brought a lot of people back:  Maslow, Perls, Hillman, Ericson, and then the theologians who followed that trail:  Tillich, Eliade, Campbell.  All that stuff has not saved the world but it probably saved me.  My head.  I am protected against greed, except not necessarily greeds of the heart.  Passion.  Intensity.  Triumphant collision.

The quote posted over my computer is “Be regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your work.”  It’s Flaubert.  Apollo is the chalice, Dionysius is the flame.  Both are essential.  It is a synergy.

It used to be that I thought this trope of chalice/flame (the Unitarian Universalist logo but it goes back much farther to the time where heretics were burned at the stake -- a kind of alternative to the cross)  would turn out to be a book, but now that books have exploded in a disorderly Dionysian way -- accusations, lies, rage, despair -- I’ll have to just wait to see what happens.  We’re living in a time of embers, regret, re-thinking.  So far, long-form blogging is what they call this.  I’m glad I “preached” for ten years, because I could see everyone’s faces, but it was really long-form blogging out loud.  Probably more “religious” than the therapy or self-congratulation of many pulpits.  Probably just as arrogant and not as useful as the “we’re the best” refrain of Sunday mornings.  Our Middle Eastern wars have been humiliating, ineffective, and draining, unsupported by anything but fear and greed.  The Apollonian era of space travel has ended and on earth the wives of astronauts are shot in the head by madmen.

I was reading about tuberculosis, the 19th century equivalent of AIDS.  The first effective meds were so harsh that people woke up with their mouths sealed shut by their own blood.  Now the medicines are more effective but the society itself will not support their use for the people who need them most.  TB is a disease of poverty and crowding.  Now people who have AIDS often have TB as well.  It is time to make a knife of words.  Quietly.  Sitting here at my keyboard in the dark on a chilly September morning.  Under the original sky.  What is the message I clench in my teeth?

  

SMALL TOWN WEALTH

The newspapers are full of statistics about how many people are living in poverty, which is defined only by income: $11,139 for a single person and $22,314 for a family of four.  But the circumstances of other factors are not at all considered.  Let’s reflect on them a bit, since I’m roughly at the poverty level for a single person.  

First, I’m mystified by that $139.  That’s a little over ten dollars a month. But it DOES make a difference.  Until the last few months I could buy everything I truly needed in a month and still have $5 left at the end.  Now if I bought everything, I’d end up $5 in the hole.  But in the past there was a nearby book store that would buy my used books, which sometimes boosted my monthly income by as much as $60.  Now that book store has left.  There is a free-lance market here in Montana that would buy stories for $40 each, but that market is faltering.  Small amounts make a big difference.

A few years ago I could see that something was going wrong with the Big Picture of money management, so I consolidated all my debts and credit cards into one big loan with a payment of several hundred dollars a month.  That payment is what is crimping me badly now, but it will be paid in a year.  When my mother died a decade ago and left me $30,000, I bought this house for that amount.  Some of the consolidation debt had gone to appliances and small upgrades of kitchen and bathroom.  Because I borrowed, I’ve enjoyed those for the past ten years.  If I had to pay rent, it would mean twice what my loan consolidation payment is and I would always be in danger of landing in the street.  Even now, my tax bill is sometimes delinquent and the sheriff threatens me with auction.

But the lesson that I was slow to learn and that the Town of Valier still has not learned, is that when someone buys something, that doesn’t mean it will be cost-free afterwards.  Maintenance is often roughly what the cost of acquisition was.  So the “free” flowerbeds in front of the Town Hall are now a continuing expense for labor, water, and flower starts.  (They replace two “aged out” trees which had only been watered.)   Being poor means owning something you can’t maintain.  On the other hand, as soon as I became a house-owner, my credit went up and a lot of coaxers paid attention.

Some things vital to a writing life cost nothing now, like my carefully acquired library of reference books.  (Almost every book printed about Blackfeet, for instance.)  But others are vampires:  a printer can suck up $100 in toner per month.  The computer and Internet costs $85 a month for a telephone connection and Internet account.  On the other hand, the cost of xeroxing a manuscript and mailing it is pretty much obsolete.  Going in the other direction are “reading fees” from the agent or editor who handles the slush pile.

But every household is ASSUMED  to have internet access now, if only at the library.  The pharmacist found an old prescription the other day, not very expensive (a good example of this same thing -- blood glucose test strips at $1 each for a little machine that cost about $40), and casually debited my bank account, throwing me within $1.50 of being overdrawn.  If she hadn’t included a bill when she mailed me the strips and hadn’t hurried to reverse the debit when I called her on the phone, I would have been overdrawn for a cost of $30 penalty, which would have thrown every subsequent check into overdraft.  The banks do not notify people of overdrafts, even though they have my email and could do it for no cost.  If I didn’t pick up my mail daily, check my bank account electronically every day or so, and have a phone to call her right away, I could have run up hundreds of dollars in debt.  In short, without the ability to constantly and electronically monitor one’s finances, there are tiger pits.  

One of the major variables of poverty is population density.  Travel in Montana is a matter of individual vehicles -- the public transit of the Sixties is much diminished.  Gas, of course, is far more expensive.  Maintaining a vehicle is more expensive since they acquired internal computers, since insurance has become mandatory, since the standards for emissions and so on have risen.  It costs me about $30 to drive to Great Falls.  The city dwellers do NOT drive to the outliers.  That means a conference with the Montana Historical Society about Bob’s estate costs me about twice my monthly Great Falls grocery trip.  I can no longer cross the border into Canada because I would have to pay $100 to renew my passport -- I didn't use to need a passport.  

Some costs are out of one’s control and personal money may not make a difference.  Valier’s electricity is undependable -- there was a two or three hour “brownout” on Sunday at suppertime.  Three Rivers, my internet provider, is so overloaded by school kids after supper that I can’t get online to do my own research.  In this part of the world the Internet is not seen as an instrument of business except by ranchers watching the stock market, even though many transactions are online if you think about swipe cards in restaurants and service stations.  The US government is considering subsidies for infrastructure upgrades but only for the cities where people live on their Smart Phones.   A quarrel about siting a cell tower in Valier has left us continuing the practice of going outside to make calls.  “Can you hear me now?” 

They talk about closing the post offices.  The city people say,  “Oh, no problem.  I just use the package service in my local mall.”  Valier has no mall, only one small family store.  Then why live here?  Because I don’t have to take a vacation to Glacier Park -- I already live here.  I escape the steady Walmartian pressure to acquire a new whatever instead of fixing the old one. I have clean air (when there’s no forest fire).  

But the state keeps enforcing higher and higher standards for the management of water and sewer, so those costs are rising.  The guy who sends in the water tests says they are so detailed and numerous that he devotes one workday a week to the task.  But, of course, we could buy a machine that would do that for $10,000.  Which came first?  The machine or the requirements?  The Town has just approved $25,000 for an engineer to find out why so often we don’t comply with the state requirements, since our system is relatively new.  You think the engineers didn’t lobby for higher standards?  Yet authorities permit “frakking” of old oil wells that may contaminate the ground water for the whole region.  There is a high cost in terms of time, effort and alertness in a rural place.  

We even keep an eye on each other.  According to the statistics keepers on the monitoring websites, Valier has two sex predators.  (We already know.  One is so ancient he can barely walk.)  I was once told we had three active drug peddlers.  We have a few soreheads, an excellent library (still people who read paper books), a lot of growing families, dozens of old solitary people (like me), a newly remodeled Catholic church, a stable school system, people who know how to fix stuff and do stuff, and so on.  Not bad for a few more than 300 people.  The real point is that we know each other -- or think we do.  Some of us are too impressed by prosperity and appearances.  Some of us are hustlers.  Most of us are pretty solid.  That’s the wealth that cannot be measured in dollars.

LITURGICAL STORIES

It’s suggested that the oldest rabbinical scenario for liturgy was that of a rabbi -- so ancient that he was the equivalent of a shaman -- who would obey the necessity of worship by going into the forest to a certain place, a clearing; kindling a fire there; saying an ancient prayer; and then telling a specific story.  (I suspect it was what they call a “founding story” -- how the larger religious group came to be.)

Decades and centuries passed.  The next rabbi couldn’t quite remember how to find the place in the forest -- it had changed.  Maybe clearcut.  The next rabbi was not able to start a fire.  Finally the original prayer was forgotten.  But always they told the story -- people don’t forget stories.

Historically, the first Jewish worship evolved out of people meeting in a study group who studied the scrolls that became the Talmud.  This was so important that they said a little prayer at the beginning and the end.  Prayer was a threshold for entering the liminal space of the text.  The content of those scrolls was sometimes rules, sometimes genealogy, but what brought the scholars back was the stories.  Rabbis are often excellent story tellers and liminal space is the right setting for the really significant ones.  As Steven Moore points out in his brilliant history of "The Novel," these stories had been floating around for many centuries before they were sacralized in texts.  They are the real foundation of Judaism.

Let’s go to an historic female liturgist who knew about stories: Schaherazade.  Most of us have read “The Arabian Nights” in bowdlerized children’s versions, the same as we read the diminished “myths” of indigenous peoples that have had the power of sex and death taken out of them.  Schaherazade’s stories included sex and death.  She was not telling children’s nursery stories to an indulgent sultan.  Let’s suppose the sultan was like someone we know:  Muammar Gaddafi.  (Not Bin Laden, who would prefer a different story.)  What should Schaherazade think about when choosing her literally life-saving stories?

When one googles for Gaddafi’s psychology, there is a long list of material .  One is at:  تحليل نفسي لشخصية القذافي – د. طارق الحبيب   the title of a YouTube vid that’s also spoken in Arabic.  At the other end of the scale is the DSM, the diagnostic manual for psychologists.  One commenter suggests “multiple diagnosis personality disorder – narcissistic/histrionic/sociopathic. All may evidence psychotic episodes. The revolt of his “subjects” has caused him significant narcissistic injury which has resulted in narcissistic rage and/or OTT  [over the top] self-pity.  He is also delusional.” (“My people love me.”)

Then the commenter makes this rash statement:  “At any rate his narcissism is a reaction to deep insecurity and narcissism which may be said almost to be endemic among Arab Muslim males – viz Saddam Hussein and the Muslim prophet himself.”  This brought a fiery reaction from a woman recently attacked by super-conservative Jews in Israel.  And another commenter suggested that narcissism and paranoia are characteristic of all intensely religious people:  no distinction between left and right within religions.  Anyway, Gaddafi declares no affiliation, neither Arab nor Islamic.

Schaherazade is presented with the necessity of converting a sultan.  She has a different (imposed) liturgical sequence than the shamanic rabbi: the sultan calls for a woman from his harem, she is brought in, they have sex, and we don’t know whether the other women told stories, but they are killed at dawn to make way for the next woman.  Does Schaherazade tell the story to keep the Sultan from having sex with her?  She is smart.  His "love-making" will tell her how to shape her story.  With luck he will tell her HIS story, which will furnish all sorts of clues about his narcissism, his grandiosity, his paranoia, his extremism, his insecurity, and what he thinks love is.  (The unconditional positive regard of the mother?)  

It’s important to avoid stereotypes, which can lead one badly astray.  Gaddafi’s actual origins are strategically ambiguous: possibly Jewish in part, maybe Bedouin, certainly tribal since that’s what the country is and he has fit into their assumptions.  Schaherazade, assuming she has access to all the stories that ever were, might do well to use Plains Indians stories like the life of the actual Crazy Horse or the archetypal Star Boy.  She would be well-advised to stick to the Joe Campbell stories of heroes found in every culture and religion, because we’re ALL a little narcissistic, grandiose, paranoid, extreme.  (Dick Cheney?  Tom Cruise?  Mel Gibson?  Oh, surely we’re not so nutty as they!)

She would remember hearing Gaddafi say:  “I am with you in the battle.  My gun is with you.”  (How Freudian!)  He believes that millions of followers love him intensely and will defend him to death, which will be the sacrifice of a martyr.  That the Western powers were traitorous and exposed him to the malevolence of enemies.  When he looks in the mirror he doesn’t see a disordered old man, but rather the rock star in aviator sunglasses of his youth.

Schaherazade has a lot to work with here, but the actual work depends on her skill in two ways:  her ability to empathize with this man, to “read” him, and her stability and resolution along these same dimensions so as not to be pulled into his fantasy world.  She must know the narcissism and paranoia in herself well enough to have compensated for them, to be anchored in reality.  (Is that possible?)  Her understanding of the universe must be so huge and coherent that she is not threatened by her own miniscule participation in it, nor intimidated by the threat of death, but still able to think without paralysis and indecision.  (How does a shrink keep from being driven crazy by clients?)

Obviously she must praise this man.  (Probably his love-making is like his politics.  He has made some brilliant moves when it comes to deceiving the West.  Declarations of love for his people might even include the woman he is fucking.  More accurately, raping.)  And she must reassure him so that he doesn’t -- in panic -- order her death.  She must convince him that martyrdom is realistic and death will be a triumphant explosion, not a long miserable erosion in confinement.  His fragile bubble must not be broken, because outside of it will not be sanity but rather psychosis unlimited and destructive, raging formlessly.

Qaddafi is a story for us to ponder, religiously or not.  Certainly politically.  Schaherazade, wise about dictators, may still be living among us, so where are her stories?  Are they the same ones as before, or is everything changed by our modern contingencies?  What stories would she tell to the mothers in Somalia, laying their skeletal dead babies down in the dust before they stagger off in any direction, seeking their own death.  What is the story that would save their lives?

Take your hands off your ears.  Dry your eyes.  Think like Schaherazade.  The moral rule for the liturgist and the rest of us is to have the courage to preserve empathy even for madmen, without being drawn in or walking off.   Use shared liminal space effectively.  Tell a story.