APOPTOSIS OF WRITING

http://www.duotrope.com/ is a useful website where the organization, operating on voluntary donations, lists markets for short writing: paying, non-paying, which have died, which have revived with money, which have revived with no payment, interviews, themed deadlines, and whose work has been accepted recently. If you can’t remember to check it, there is a weekly newsletter that comes to you automatically.

It’s hard to imagine a more useful or timely function, especially for beginners trying to find homes for their writing. But I’m always bemused by the info that’s provided. There are always a LOT of listings, but as new ones arrive, the list of dead markets is just as long. Here’s a sample:

Anubis Magazine (fiction, teen-written sf/f/h)
Candlemark & Gleam (fiction)
The Darkleian Times (fiction, sf/f/h)
Fender Stitch (fiction)
Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction (fiction, noir/crime)
Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism (fiction & poetry, fabulism)
Candlemark & Gleam: Substitution Cipher Anthology (fiction, themed antho)
The Zharmae Publishing Press (fiction)

Non-paying market listings added:

Alligator Stew (poetry)
The Applicant (fiction & poetry, Nepalese lit)
The Broken City (fiction & poetry)
Coffee Plus Fiction (fiction)
em: A Review of Text and Image (fiction & poetry)
Bank-Heavy Press: Husbands and Malfeasant Dogs (fiction & poetry)
MaLa: The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal (fiction & poetry, Chinese lit)
Mind's Eye: U Magazine (fiction & poetry)
new graffiti: Literature on the Streets (fiction & poetry)
Spiracle (poetry)
The Tavern's Vault (fiction)
The Vehicle (fiction & poetry)

I don’t know whether the links will survive the blog transfer, but they are great since they take one to the publisher’s website with little effort. What strikes me is that this is clearly a young person’s activity, which is probably why there are so many deaths of publications. Big ideas, good intentions, life intervenes. Probably because of the youth of the editors, the subject matter is dark indeed. To a kid’s eye (kids being someone not yet thirty) all that ghoulish, death-ridden, obsessed subject matter equates to courage, truth, and social action. Just check the news, eh?

And check this list

Caribbean Writer, The: Deadline extended (fiction & poetry)
Cincinnati Review, The: Now accepts electronic submissions (fiction & poetry)
DemonMinds: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Dog Oil Press: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Kugelmass: Now accepts poetry (poetry)
Lonesome Fowl: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Ramble Underground: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; now emails to the editor bounce; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction)
technicolor: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)

Imagine the time and effort it takes to check all these people. You’ll notice that the list is not limited to weird little vampire-fang publications, but also follows big respectable outfits like “The Cincinnati Review.”

Nature’s way is to create a zillion of something and then muster up the equivalent of cell-death. That is, sometimes death by trauma but far more deaths by apoptosis, the quiet falling-apart. Shockingly, this is how a human is formed in the womb: lots of cells, then most of them pared away. If that process goes a little too far, abort. Even the brain: as soon as you are born, unused brain cells “apop.” It appears that this is the way writing and -- more than writing -- publishing is going to unfold -- IS unfolding. Writing: making marks or images that convey consciousness. EVERYBODY’s doin‘ it, doin‘ it. The market is flooded.

Publishing: investing money in making profitable writing available through curation (choosing), editing, promotion, and so on. Publishing is a business model. Writing is only a business if publishers make it that by shaping it towards sales. Sales -- in one way of thinking -- are what define fitness for survival.

It is possible to find a symbiosis or niche where writing can survive without being published: academia, blogs, private subsidy, institutions. Blogs are the only environment where writing is controlled only by the writer. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will have readers. In today’s commercialized atmosphere, I don’t expect free long-form blogging to persist. Use it while you can. On the other hand, it is an artesian spring of ideas, networking, and hot-housing language and image that would impoverish the culture if it were missing. Increasingly people are resenting pay-walls for professionals.

Social media is not writing even though some poets use it that way because their work is normally short or because they use linking to continue elsewhere. Social media, which means very short personal messaging, is proliferating faster than blogs, they say, which means that it becomes ever more ripe for apoptosis that will turn it into something else -- evolve it like a fetus from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. (Don’t panic. Only a metaphor.) It’s great advantage is its speed and numbers, which are marketable in the same way as votes -- indeed, it is fascinated with votes: thumbs up/thumbs down, like/dislike. traffic quantification. Quickly, a kind of group mentality forms and it is cross-national. In fact, when it jumps to cross-media by including music and video, the language barrier disappears.

But not the capacity for creating illusions. We’re seeing things we never saw before, things that might permanently change the way your brain is organized -- the things you always took for granted. Particularly, both taboos and idealizations get mocked to dust. Apoptosis of the reputation.

I love the word “apoptosis” because it’s onomatopoetic. If you’ve forgotten, those are the words that sound like what they mean (bark, plop, clang). So many concepts are soap bubbles that I like to imagine make a little pop when they burst. Thin rainbow membranes around ideas and categories. In the 19th century there was a huge proliferation of sorting categories that seemed to be permanent. Now we pop them. No more dodos. Pluto is not a planet. What will happen if we pop too many things? Abort the world?

What if we pop ALL the ideas about the world? Won’t new ideas arise, like the publications listed by duotrope? Some with costs associated, some with rewards? We’re trying.

A TRAJECTORY COMPLETED

Some people are like doors. In the case of Tim Barrus and I, the door was one not often used because stigma makes it “stick.” Nice people don’t go there. Wicked people want the privacy. Books were what opened it or maybe “were” the door itself.

The end of publishing as we know it has closed that. It’s over now and will not be resumed, but the door was not between two people -- it was between two worlds. I read as much as I could about Tim’s world, sometimes with his guidance and sometimes not, because it was so completely different. I wasn’t so much reading about his personal life (though I learned about it) as I was learning about a whole planetary subculture I’d only glimpsed before. I DID know it was there and didn’t like being excluded.

Tim’s world absorbs him so completely he had no time or energy to look at my subculture, which is becoming as exotic as his: the world of the liberal, thoughtful, unconventional people who find stigma is a big fat nuisance. Call us post-modern if you want -- the truth is that we’ve always been here and we’ve always been feared as much as Tim’s world because we question everything. Tim hardly believes we exist. He thinks I’m one-of-a-kind. He KNOWS at gut-level he is one-of-a-kind. We both like being unique.

My life path has been marked by short trajectories in which I attached to someone, learned what I could, and then generally got chucked out at the end -- a few times I walked because of abuse or neglect which I will not tolerate. By the time I leave, I have internalized as much as I could, so now these attachments live in me. (Skills, sense memories, patterns.) That’s the way children learn and grow and I don’t stop as I age -- at least I try not to. Tim has done the same thing.

Our shared trajectory is as much a victim of the collapse of conventional publishing as are bookstores, publishing houses, reviewers and agents. The great goal we had in common was getting published. We both had the idea that it meant money, honor, status, legitimacy, access -- vindication. Together we watched it tumble and empty. That trajectory is over, done, fried, kaput.

It is very painful: identity threatening. Even life-threatening. In a sense, I let my brother die broke and alone on the street so I could write. I quit a secure job so I could write before I got too old. I have toughed it through some cold winters and let my house fall apart so I could write instead of getting a job. I have not tended to the problem of self-publication because I’d rather write. I did manage to get Bob Scriver’s biography, “Bronze Inside and Out,” published entire in spite of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. That was before Tim. who now says even the idea of writing suffocates him.

Tim and I ending our writing collaboration is not the end of the world. It was an organic relationship (natural, nothing added, growing in its own way), which is why it ended without us really admitting it. It was not quite a friendship. It had nothing to do with smiling and being nice. Together we rocked.

It cannot be revived. Which is not to say another door might not open somewhere in a different wall. But now Tim’s door is like the one in “Gladiator,” a shadowed door that opens into a place none of us go except over the threshold of death. Tristan is waiting over there. That is the relationship that counts to Tim. But maybe this is wrong. Maybe it will change.

Most of my trajectories were about jobs (teaching, marriage, animal control, ministry). Some of them were “romantical” which I begin to think is a matter of longing to fuse with someone else, the way one was fused in childhood -- a “mitochondria,” a co-dependent, a flat-out dependent, a symbiont, an endosymbiont. This should be resisted. If you want to write.

Tim and I share ruthlessness. It is a survival skill. We cut off relationships in practical ways, like leaving, blocking email. As emotional relationships, they never end -- always there. We both detest control (even disguised as “love” or “healing”) and we always keep a hole card somewhere. (Make that a pun if you want to.) A writer’s notes, an artist’s pigments -- emotions are the substance of art. Tim cannot make me stop loving him. Nor can he make himself stop caring.

In the end we took aim on each other like an old-fashioned duel: thirty paces, turn and fire. I spoke a little piece about feeling old, he took it personally, I was irritated, he was shocked -- the end. By that time there had been a few “practice” sign-offs that aborted. But he’s right -- it’s not about publishing or even writing -- it’s about the end of the trajectory. We will not be returning any engagement rings because there never were any. There was no book-keeping, no obligation. It does not leave a job opening.

What’s weird about it is that the collaboration from 2007 to 2011 produced a body of work that in this internet world can’t be extinguished. Quite apart from copyright laws or deleting, his images and vids, my blogs and binders, go on and on: cached, stashed, mashed, rehashed. People find them and read them -- maybe more than they would if the work were bound in codexes on shelves. Which can’t be done with vids anyway.

Beyond that, shared moments abide in both of us. I cannot think of him without warm feelings. I smile. I never have been bitter and punishing about any of my completed relationships, though I’ve withdrawn from most and slammed shut one or two. I do have ethical obligations that arrive through the years in the ministry. I walk a wobbly line between discretion and disclosure, mostly because I love the story of it and also because I always think (usually wrongly) that if something were just explained and understood, the damage will dissipate. Tim doesn’t think so -- with reason. He is not just one person and some of the people he loves have been hurt badly in the past. That’s “at risk.” “A boy is not just an age,” he says someplace. “A boy is someone vulnerable.”

A co-writer is not just a partner: a co-writer is a mirror. Much of what I saw in Tim was me and vice versa. Many times he’d say, “Mary believes X.” But I didn’t. He made it up because he needed me to be the straight man for his gig and I didn’t mind. But I’d look at Tim, see myself, and think, “Oh, he’s being tricky.” But he wasn’t. Bits of us stuck inside each other, the gene exchanges of one-celled animals, mitosis, not sexual.

Outsiders’ views complicated it. Mostly they tried to make us like a movie they saw once. Some tried to worm in between us. They could not see our hearts, which are pre-verbal, subconscious, just the rhythm under the music. (Aad says, “volcanic.” He knows a thing or two.) Upwelling, landscape-changing, too hot for comfort, unpredictable. Can’t be googled. Can’t be hacked. Too organic. Just grew. Impossible to put into words. Impossible to stop. I’m so amazed that there were two of us in the world and that we found each other, however briefly. Parle, ecouté. Parlicoots.

THE ONE-CELLED VILLAGE & THE MIGHTY MITOS

THE ONE CELLED VILLAGE: POWER, SEX AND SUICIDE (Just like a mitochondria) “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life” by Nick Lane, a big handsome guy who looks vaguely like Clive Owen, is the most exciting book I’ve read in a long time. Here’s the url for more info. http://www.nick-lane.net/Power,%20Sex,%20Suicide.html This is the gaudiest “scientific” website you’re likely to encounter, and -- believe me -- the book is just as bright and exciting! That means both the ideas and the writing, which is full of witty asides that make it much easier to grasp and digest. This is a guy you could spend a roaring evening with in a pub! His science benefits deeply from it -- no lack of ATP in his social mitochondria!

I don’t suppose there will ever be a village with an athletic squad called the “Mitochondrians,” but if there were, both team and village (likely populated by biologists), would be formidable, with many backup strategies. Yet so much simple loyalty to the purpose that the Infections and Traumas would rarely win a game. Even Old Age might be backed off. I’ve returned the book (Had to borrow it from the U of Montana Bozeman library) so don’t trust the accuracy of my account of what is traced here, but the main storyline is worthy of a troubador. The theme is membranes (think of castle walls and coastal cliffs) and their necessity in the creation of life (community).

The creative generation of energy to be used by one little entity is what we call “life.” It needs to be separated from the primordial soup and so the question has been “where did the first membrane come from?” Nick (it seems permissible to call him that) likes that idea I first saw in the Fifties in Life magazine where guys in lab coats were zapping soup in a fish aquarium with mini-lightning to see what they got. It turns out that metals might be the key, though that’s not intuitive unless you’re trying to create mechanical life. Still, with the right conditions, the result is a blob with a membrane around it. Pretty soon -- I must have got up to feed the cats at that point because I don’t remember the details -- a nucleus forms, a bracelet (one chromosome arranged in a circle) that has the formula for both how to make ATP and how to make a new bacterium, because that’s what this is: a bacteria.

They’re promiscuous little beasts who leak enzyme instructions right and left, acquiring and discarding all the time. But their membranes are unyielding -- they cannot change shape. There is another couple of kinds of little beasts and one DOES have a flexible boundary. It eats by surrounding little bits and drawing them in. (Amoebas.) It’s BIG and has LOTS of genes, arranged in double rows. It likes buddying up with the stiffer bacteriums, and one day it swallows its little pal. But it doesn’t digest it. It lets the bacterium, now a mitochondria, replicate and share nutrients. The mito, in turn, stuffs a few of its genes into the nucleus of the eukaryote, delegating authority, as it were. But it always keeps the secret ingredient of how to make ATP for itself, in its bracelet.

Now Nick tells us what ATP really is and how it works. It’s an itsy bitsy bucket brigade of electrons the same as the power cord on the lamp. It’s made by pumping electrons across the membranes. Mitos know how to control the flow, how to pass it along, signal to slow down or speed up. The eukarote is now free to evolve by forming colonies, specializing, and generally thriving while the mitos keep stoking the fires of the ocean liner species that eukaryotes become. They are literally “burning” because one main ingredient -- the “beef” -- is oxygen. (I love mixed metaphors but I probably should say “coal”.)

We think of evolution as being a matter of sex as a means of pressing mutations against the environment so that the creatures’ mutations become more suitable for survival, but when scientists were able to look at the mitos at the ATP level, it became clear that they were still swapping genes around and that life takes leaps. Of course, if it goes hopping around too much, it’ll just disperse itself. So sex developed as a way of letting one donor’s eukaryotic egg -- which is an egg because it carries the donor’s mitos along with a bunch of other funny little inclusions captured from the bacteria world -- dump the donor’s mitos way back in the scrotum. Some of the little mitos manage to smuggle along with the sperm, but they aren’t entirely welcome and the egg mitos will try to eliminate them. Mito wars and failures are probably at the heart of the many, many (MOST!) discarded fertilized eggs that fail to develop.

But it’s a quiet carnage. There are two kinds of cell death: one is necrotic: “blood”, bits, and general mess. The other is called “apoptosis” which is just quiet, voluntary disintegration. I can’t help thinking of a pop-it bead necklace that loses all its connections and becomes little bits, which the surrounding tissues “eat.” Apoptosis means that worn out mitos and cells are told “that’s it, time’s up, stop existing.” So they do. No muss, fuss or bother. No evidence, no fossils. Re-sorbed. If apoptosis fails, the result is cancer, our scourge. If mitos are faulty, they create an array of hard-to-diagnose and possibly one-of-a-kind afflictions.

Figuring out how all this happens and the evolutionary path from soup to -- dare I say, “human nuts?” -- is clear and exciting because it begins to point towards a future that might not be so much “post-human” as “trans-human,” since it will admit at last that we’re not the lone, proud individuals we thought we were -- nor is our species. We are processes with electrons and oxygen molecules pouring through us, carrying information that could be either “eu” or “mal.”

It may be that we’ve been neglecting the uses of apoptosis, depending far too much on carnage to control each other in our greed to maintain our own emotional membranes and internal mitos. The way we see the world has a deep impact on how we manage ourselves and what is around us. This book can change the world. Certainly it describes how it’s already changing constantly. Maybe the mighty Mitos can’t survive if the towns that support high schools all die of apoptosis. Or maybe old teachers and coaches fail to retire, so the game plan never changes and the larger shifting world snuffs it. Is this a plot for a novel or what?

THE FERAL HOUSE

In Marilynne Robinson’s beloved book entitled “Housekeeping,” which is about NOT housekeeping, there is a sequence telling how the aunt and the niece most like her begin to drift away from the house while the outdoors begins to drift in the left-open door: piles of leaves scurrying over the rugs, birds and small mammals and bugs finding niches.  All it takes for a house to go feral is to stop pushing back against the surroundings, even in a small town.  So my yard tries to become a thicket and my water tries to escape the pipe and spiders spin webs across the dirty windows that nevertheless admit enough light to attract bugs to beat against them.  My cousin remarked that coming to visit here was like camping out -- and that’s when the electricity was working.

The yard has appreciated my non-intervention.  Most notably, I stopped mowing the cotoneasters that the robins planted under the poplars.  This was a big success -- they are a lovely red right now -- but I worry a little that they might compete with the poplars enough to kill them.  This was a wet year so I hardly watered.  The poplars were already traumatized by an exceedingly cold winter.  The poplars are volunteers and were never really watered much, so their roots spread out just under the surface, sometimes rising up in knees that make mowing with a regular push mower -- which is what I’d expected to do -- a punishing series of jolts to the shoulders.  So I use a weed whip.  It’s not much of a yard anyway -- not big.

Leo, the backhoe operator, blames the roots of the poplars as well as the medieval practice of lead water piping for the recent break.  It was under the sidewalk, a half-inch split that -- once uncovered -- created a little stream.  A Jack Russell dog came rushing through, stopped for a drink, then ran on.

The first sign was a small clear pool next to the sidewalk.  It had rained.  That was last Thursday.  On Friday it was clearly spreading so I went down to the town shop to find Roger, the other town worker.  (His specialty is the grader.)  We decided it wasn’t destroying anything so we could justify letting it go over the weekend.  In fact, it was Tuesday, today, when “we” dug with the backhoe.  Down four or five feet we got cautious.  Roger went down in the hole with his shovel to “flake off” the walls -- the pipe was offset a little over a foot.  We agreed that any time one “opens” the ground, what is exposed is an adventure, but this was only a small variation.

The lead piping was right next to equally medieval “oznaburg” sewer pipe, which is merely molded paper soaked in tar.  It was damaged as part of the excavating, so a section of that was replaced with pretty blue PVC, the connections made with big rubber collars just like the ones on automobile hoses.  Leo made the first cut in the ground about 9AM and by noon the pipes were ready to go again.  In the afternoon he came back to pack in sand and gravel.  Now to let it settle.  The sidewalk concrete could not be saved.

In the meantime when I went down to the cellar hole to see if there were water, a second leak hit me in the back of the neck, oozing through the kitchen floor and then down my spine, and there was no pipe anywhere near!  I went for another consult with Roger and a plumber recommend, then came back to find a small lake in front of the kitchen sink.  Was the leak inside the sink unit, which is an all-in-one Thirties metal monster?  I cleared out everything under the sink, then went to move my reserve water buckets and noticed that one was down to one-fourth.  Picked it up to move it -- there was the leak.  In the bottom of the bucket.  Problem solved.  

The cats walked through, shaking each foot delicately when they waded the water.  Crackers was HIGHLY suspicious of the gaggle of bottles and jugs and kept a close eye on them as she passed, then couldn’t repress a two-foot-high hop in the air when she was safe again. 

A guest came knocking to tell me about the leak before we dug.  She has built a proper house just down the street -- in fact, she’s not quite in yet.  She is 78 and didn’t want to sit down, or set her purse down, though I cleared off the cat-hairy blanket  on the company chair.  She remarked, rather tartly, “If you took down those pictures, you could put another bookcase there.”  Three walls of the front room are floor-to-ceiling bookcases.  I explained carefully that one of the reasons I bought this house was the long walls for bookshelves.  She did NOT ask whether I had read them all, which is a point in her favor.

My kitchen didn’t make a good impression.  I only wash dishes when I have to and I replaced the cabinets with open shelves.  By the back door there is a stack of stuff waiting to go out.  I haven’t washed my big window this season.  Maybe not last.  She didn’t go into my writing room or my bedroom.  Good thing.  The stacks of filing sorted into shallow cardboard cat-food cases (just the right size!) are getting high again.  She’s a reader and she uses the library.  She is not a writer or a book keeper.  

Her brother lives across the alley from her in a house that has no lawn: just a gravel approach in the French manner.  It’s a very square house, very regular.  I’ve never been in it.

Given a choice, I would not live here.  I love the house, though I want to make changes, but I would live in a one-room cabin with a creek for water, a windmill for electricity, and wood for heat.  I inch towards that as much as I can, but I’m getting old.  Still, if my neighbor -- who is really quite vigorous and alert -- is as dynamic as she is at 78, why can’t I squeeze out another ten years here?  Then I’ll look for a clean white cube of a room somewhere with a bed, a table, a chair and a good strong light.  And start another book.

In the bathroom there was an earwig.  On the wall there was a moth.  On the ceiling was a spider.  My ecosystem must be hospitable to wild things.  I track in mud.  I hate to close the windows for the winter.

WATER, WATER, NOT!

No blog today.  Too interesting to watch Leo and Roger work on my water line.  An old lead line that developed a split.  Not quite six feet down.  Half-inch split.   Water off.  Orders not to put anything down the sewer.

Also, Yellowstone Public Radio is off the air for some reason.  I DO seem to have electricity and gas for now, but who knows.

This is what it means to live in a small remote town about a hundred years old.

Back tomorrow.  They tell me I'm not allowed to take pictures of them in the hole they dug because they don't like it. ????

POETICS OF LITURGY: AN APPENDIX

APPENDIX 1

KINDS OF CONTEMPORARY CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH

Historically people have been eager to understand how they “are,” who they “are,” in terms of awareness.  Then came Freud with his ideas about the conscious versus the unconscious or subconscious.  Then came the computer with the challenge that the computer might have a “consciousness” like humans.  Where is the line?  And if we must draw a line between ourselves and machines, where is the other line between ourselves and animals?    Can a brain be separated from a body and still be conscious?  These issues have made consciousness research both dynamic and surprising.

ORGANIC (FROM OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION)

ORGANIC: STRUCTURAL/AREAS

It is confidently known that certain little bits of the brain have assigned tasks, though not exactly what they are or how they work or interact.  A good reference is:  http://www.brainwaves.com/brain_diagram.html

ORGANIC: fMRI

This technique rests on “hemodynamics,” the idea that brains use oxygen and increase blood flow to the parts of the brain that are operating.  This can be captured by MRI images and since they are “dynamic” the images are more like video than still photos.  http://www.fmri.org/fmri.htm  is a little technical but seems reliable.

ORGANIC: AUTISM

http://www.brainresearch2010.com/  is a report from a conference.  This field is pressed by the anguish of non-functional or differently-abled people.  So far no real answers have emerged, but many strategies for maximizing progress have developed.  Whether it is chemical, neurological, a matter of development, genetic mutation, environmental debits or something else entirely is still not known.

ORGANIC:  TRAUMATIC DAMAGE

Since closed skull injury is the “marker trauma” for the wars conducted with hidden explosive devices, which are the most recent US combats, we have many cases to explore.  http://www.allabouttbi.com/closed-head-injury/  There also major questions about sports injuries, car crashes, strokes.  People may seem quite “normal” but have major deficits in self-management or even maintaining consciousness.  I am classifying tumors with trauma.

ORGANIC:  CELL LEVEL

Some of the most esoteric study is about quantum “tunneling” or “processing tubules.”  This is suddenly intensely interesting because it turned out that the stain used for studying cells was dissolving its inner structures, which led to the belief that there was nothing there.  Also, now we have the equipment to work at the atomic level.  The senses of smell and vision are being studied in a startling way.

ORGANIC:  WHOLE BODY

It has become clear that the body “thinks” with every part, not just with nerves and brain.  There are co-existing networks like the enteric net embedded in the walls of the gut, the limbic system, molecular flows that carry information, and sensors in crucial places.  

ORGANIC:  BRAIN WAVES

Electrochemical action in the brain creates wave patterns that have acquired names and accompany known moods and functions, like sleep.  Disturbances can cause seizures, trances, out-of-body experience and so on.

FUNCTIONAL (FROM BEHAVIOR)

FUNCTIONAL:  INTERNAL REFLECTION

Reflecting on one’s own thoughts and perceptions IS a behavior.  What one can learn from it varies considerably, depending on the sensitivity and eloquence of the person.  This in turn can be misunderstood or ignored by the listener.

FUNCTIONAL:  PAIN

Pain can be perceived even if it is not reported and even if there is no outer sign.  Pain is a real phenomenon, which the brain can interpret different ways, denying, intensifying, transforming, claiming even in the absence of pain  (ghost pain in missing limbs).

FUNCTIONAL:  DISSOCIATION

The most “pop” example would be hypnosis, but this is also the term assigned to any “different” or alienated consciousness.  Multiple personalities are sometimes assigned here. 

FUNCTIONAL:  “MADNESS”

Any behavior that seems to other people to be irrational, unjustified, possibly too violent or non-reactive, can be assigned to “madness.”  Actual “dementia” (de- mental) is usually organic in origin.  A person can feel as though they’re going mad while other people deny that there’s any difference in them.

FUNCTIONAL:  MOLECULAR INTERVENTION:  DRUGS

Two kinds: mood-altering on purpose, sometimes for ceremonial purposes, usually with a long folk history.  Pharmaceutical meds may be prescribed for almost any reason with mental and emotional effects either as the deliberate purpose or as a side-effect.  Sometimes one is pressed to surrender comfort in order to stay alive.

FUNCTIONAL:  ART/FLOW/CREATIVITY/CONCENTRATION

The theories of flow are the clearest interface between individual consciousness and the uses of group consciousness.  This list from Mihali Csikszentmihali is both suggestive and practical.

1. goals are clear

2. feedback is immediate

3. a balance between opportunity and capacity

4. concentration deepens

5. the present is what matters

6. control is no problem

7. the sense of time is altered

8. the loss of ego

FUNCTIONAL:  BRAIN INTERPRETATION  (MEMORY, CLOSURE, IDENTITY)

Time perception is one example of a demonstrable brain function that can’t be seen, but that is reported subjectively.   Most of us have known time that dragged, time that flashed past -- those expansions and contractions.  It appears that there are many small “programs” like this.  One is closure: the tendency to invent an ending where one is expected.  Another might be identity: one’s sense of who one is changing in response to environment, esp. social environment. 

The material below from http://edge.org was very helpful in devising this “inventory in progress.”  I haven’t worked through it yet.  Each thinker is coming from a different discipline with different assumptions, but they are all useful in some way or other.

In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; 

Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; 

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; 

UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; 

UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; 

and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations.

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.