ROUND AND ROUND WE GO

Whether it’s omission by repression I couldn’t say, but I’ve been talking about the role of the minister in terms of prophetic (warnings and predictions, often political) versus pastoral (reassuring and counseling) while entirely neglecting the priestly.  Not surprising for a former Presbyterian claiming atheism.  By priestly I mean liturgical -- exactly what I’ve been claiming to talk about in “The Bone Chalice.”  Maybe I’m writing that manuscript in an underconscious effort to remind myself of the power and danger of liturgy -- not just in church but in life itself.

I googled “performance arts” and liturgy and what did I get but an art prof at a Christian institution trying to make a case for social disruption!!

http://open.biola.edu/resources/contemporary-liturgies-performance-art-and-embodied-belief   Actually, this is a pretty powerful lecture.  If you can’t stay for the whole thing, go to the 70 minutes point.

So the main enforcer of order, which has claimed the whole field of liturgy for its own so thoroughly that all of the experts I’ve consulted on the subject define it within Christian terms, is now still conservative but advocating disruption.  This means using liturgy as a terrorism.  Surely that’s not new, and Performance Arts knows it.  Is there a more potent and final liturgical act than burning someone at the stake for heresy?  But we have thought of liturgy in terms of Sunday morning sentiment and idealism.

Performance Art as a discipline allows us to escape the Sunday hymn sandwiches into the world that we often call “Third.”  (I know English-speaking Christians are supposed to be the First, but who is the Second World?)  Dangerous territory.  Liturgical tropes may be one way those people manage their lives and possibly a way we can enter into their world without being destroyed.  Or not.  Islam does liturgy, too, you know.

Not that the “third world” is always in Africa or Asia or South America.  Consider the ghettoes of any city and their layers of ethnic enclaves or drug cultures or sex work.  Are there not liturgies of drug ingestion or sexual transaction?  As the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines liturgy, “People performing”?  An intense and repetitive act with high significance relating to the core of life.  Like a GIF.

Tim says:  “GIF is an entirely new or different way to present poetry. GIF is technically animation but animation with photography. Instead of a video digital signal, it's collating about 100 photos per 4 seconds of playtime. It takes a bit of power to run them. But sometimes competition on the Internet is a good thing. Running that many photographs in four seconds does tell a story. Kids have been making GIFs for years. I am new to it. But I want my GIFs to be more seriously symbolic than pop culture, and, in fact, I want them to comment on pop culture itself.”   

If you went to YouTube and asked for GIF’s you’d see some.  Tim makes his GIF’s run in a loop, like a litany or mantra: repeat and repeat.  The same sequence goes around and around at the top of the page and then the poetry comment stays stable underneath.  

For instance, reacting to the icky sweet overoptimistic people of the world, Tim has his own disruptive riff on a GIF called tim barrus: “the world is a shit hole.”  (This will not shock kids, but adults might better go wash dishes or mow the lawn.)

something tells me the world has always been a shit hole/ i still have some friends who do not buy my kafkaesque vision of reality/ their loss, it will get them, too/ and most of us are just post-World War Two. It was a big deal back then if we can remember it or not

Or not/

the world is a shit hole/ you will not stop global warming/ you will soon be living in a microwave oven set on high and the only thing in the microwave is you and a cat/

it’s over/ when you need hope, go get your little fix, but it’s over/ some people know/ it’s too late/ the world is a shit hole and you live in it/ fuck your religions/ fuck your jesus/ and fuck you/

and some of you evil bitches get what you deserve/ eat me/

you will find a way/

i have not one remnant of a fucking illusion/

Classic existential nihilism, but when you add the GIF images, it jumps to a different level of “performance art.”  In quick succession you see: 

a man sitting in a chair in a warehouse with a fire off to the left.  A gunman is about to shoot him in the head.  

Then a flash to what seems a microscope photo of a cell.  

Then a man in a strange apparatus, a head cover like a deep sea diver with hoses coming and going.  

Then a bare-chested man in a chair with his hands bound behind his back.  

A second version of that.  

Strands of something organic.  

Bubbles.  

Then it starts over.   Every four seconds.

These images come fast,  too quick to assimilate until you go around the loop several times. The statement is brutal, industrial, life at the cellular level.  Life-support (steel and hoses). helplessness in the face of mysterious enemies, death, decomposition.  Nothing we don’t see on the nightly news report.  But somehow disconcerting when it goes around and around.  Just as life and death do.

Often the ones the kids make capitalize on reversibility, people going backwards into high windows -- originally filmed jumping out.  The first one of Tim’s that I spotted was him throwing a pillow but seeming to have it thrown AT him.  A cartoonish effect might be a destructive crash but -- like a cartoon -- when the 4 second loop comes around, it’s back to intact.  There’s a fascination in this that can become a meditation.   Or an obsession.  But also a philosophical issue: can time be reversed?  Is time a loop?

Meditation, litany, mantra -- these are liturgical terms.  The content may be anti-inspiring, urging contemplation of the apocalypse with no relief, and yet the mechanisms of the art, the reactions of the brain, are not different from what the religious institutions use all the time.  Maybe it’s time to disrupt them.  Something needs to change.

WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT ALVINA KRAUSE?

Why after all these years (AK was dismissed from NU in 1963 and died in 1981) do we still care?  What is there to say?  What relevance can there be now?  I see several quite vital issues, some of them pressing and some of them so deep that I might be imagining them.  After all, I was not part of the inner AK circle.  She did not confide in me.  But there are far larger social issues here.

THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSITY

Colleges grew out of the practice of becoming a scholar by finding a learned person one could admire and “shadowing” that person, as one might do to learn a trade.  The learned person generally had a library and a cluster of students would accumulate around man (always a man) and library.  The pressing subjects in the beginning were theology, medicine, and the law -- all “professions,” analytical, print-based.  That is, in the split between Apollonian vs. Dionysian or mind vs. body or art vs. science that plagues us still, the college was professional, Apollonian, brain and science.  

Universities began to group colleges of several sorts and to elevate the classic professions to graduate schools.  And yet the colleges of all sorts began to form their own graduate schools.  Today, there are “post” graduate schools.  The ladder never goes high enough.   At the highest levels once again a student would go to an individual with resources. 

ANALYTIC THOUGHT VS. EMOTION

I became familiar with this issue at Meadville/Lombard Theological School, part of a cluster of seminaries (now dispersing) around the University of Chicago.  In my class were six students while the faculty numbered four, if you counted the librarian.  We had a fine library.  Constantly we confronted the problem of whether we were studying analytic “theology” (the study of the Theos in the Christian context) or whether we were learning to minister as whole and authentic persons, which is surely an art form.  Within that art form, there is another split between Apollonian and Dionysian -- were we the dignified robe-wearing pulpit-occupiers or were we Pentecostal snake-handlers?

Actors have something like the same problem.  Theatre -- which is a root of both Christianity and colleges -- is on the one hand professional and academic (the study of anything renders it academic) and on the other hand cannot be measured very well by stipulated standards.   Acting either succeeds or it doesn’t.  ‘Why” might be in the script, the actor, the director, or the phase of the moon.

Nevertheless, if an institution purports to teach theatre arts, there has to be some way to establish what is worthy of paying tuition for.  The ultimate criterion -- at least for those who actually go into the theatre "industry" as opposed to academics -- must be financial and critical success.  If students must be evaluated with grades (not always helpful) then the institutional program must be measured according to the number of actors who succeed, disallowing the ambiguity of success.  (Is a star a success?  Or is the character actor who makes a living by doing small parts equally successful?)  Some NU Department of Theatre profs at present frankly advise acting students to go to a good conservatory.

WHICH WAS ALVINA KRAUSE?

Alvina Krause, in her wholistic and humanistic way, offered actors training for the “profession” (is acting a profession?), but also her classes were an inspiring and enriching experience for people like myself, who took the training in quite a different direction.  I’m not sure this can be said of the famous Manhattan “Method” actors.  Because of this broader usefulness, she is deserving of reflection in ways that Strasberg, Adler, et al, are not.

In her own vocational trajectory, AK grew up intermingled with the invention and development of the Theatre Program at Northwestern -- from the Comstock School of Oratory to Voice and Interpretation to the Studio Theatre, to University Theatre to Workshop Theatre.  Today I spent an hour calling the NU campus by telephone and discovered that not only has the School of Speech become the School of Communication but also the Theatre Department has split between  “Theatre” and “Performance Studies.”  I’m sympathetic to both.

I didn’t make much progress beyond that, since classes don’t start for a week, but it’s a fascinating thing to explore.  http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/    It sounds very much as though it’s responding to the split I’m talking about here  -- the split between acting theatre (like ministry) and the academic study of performance (theology).  The website hosts a short video of all faculty introducing themselves and explaining what they are doing.

WHERE IS THE FUTURE?

People forward me articles from the Chronicles of Higher Education.  Plainly the university, as an institutional form, is being challenged on a lot of fronts.  They have crossed the line between being an instrument of inquiry and development into maintaining themselves for the sake of their own existence.  Beyond that, they are challenged on the basis of their relationship with corporations through research and endowments for building.  They begin to look like a herd of sacred cows.

Anyway, what people tend to mean by “professional” these days is “can I get a job?”   The advantages of a humanities education and a Ph.D. in some “nice’ field are becoming a little obscure.  

BACK IN THE DAY

The big preoccupation with Alvina Krause’s work until now has been the division between Method acting and Technique acting.  Looking at the NU website, I see that no one talks about Method now.  In fact, few even talk about acting in the near-religious way we did.   We were psychoanalytic in our willingness to investigate ourselves and then use that, even though it was often painful and sometimes too disclosive. We used to play “What’s Your Price?” and spend a lot of time talking about sacrifices.  The choice was between Broadway and Hollywood -- or maybe some academic repertory company.  Some of us went to the Guthrie in Minneapolis or the Ashland Shakespeare Festival and considered ourselves blessed.   

Krause herself had strong ideas and didn’t tolerate much resistance because she KNEW it worked.  Of course, at Eagles Mere she was in complete control of even the housing.  But why would you go there unless you wanted to?  No pay, no class credit.  She resisted the idea of being a Method teacher, but in addition saw her whole life as being a struggle against people trying to capture, resist and suppress her.  For the most part that was probably true, but there was a little streak of self-fulfilling prophesy in there.  

This story might sum her up the problem.   On a hot summer day she and Dean McBurney (who was not always helpful) were both paddling at the shore of Lake Michigan in their bathing togs.  Dean McBurney. seeing her shoulders, exclaimed,  “Why, Alvina!  You have freckles!”

“Oh, didn’t you know?” she returned.  “Those are flecks of rust from my iron will.”  Dean McBurney knew quite a bit about her iron will, but probably never registered that freckles -- and being short -- haunted Krause all her life.

(This post was also posted at www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com which is about AK..)

THE GLASS SKULL

Ever since way back when Pavlov was studying stimulus/response and Skinner was torturing rats (my psych prof showed movies of it and gave us hell for laughing at the rats with hot-foot), we’ve known that information from the senses went somewhere in the brain, something happened to them, and then the nerves sent messages to the muscles or to each other about what to do. (“Jump, you little rat!  Jump!”)  But no one could figure out what it was happening there in the skull  -- it was a black box.  Now we know how to look into that box -- it has become a glass skull.

But all along, people who taught acting DID know what happened in there.  The message came in from eyes, ears, skin or whereever; there was a moment when everything stopped.  (Alvina Krause called it -- SLAP!  -- Tim calls it “stop the world.”)  A moment of realization, of evaluating, of decision.  Then the response.  It can be observed; it can be felt.  But until recently it could not be seen among the neurons in action.

It was rhizomatous:  a little complex of neurons sorted the sights, another sorted the sounds, and so on.  Then they forwarded the sorted information to a place where it was weighed and possibly compared to things stored in the memory banks according to past sights, sounds, kinesthetic sensations, until it became a “gestalt.”  This all happened in a flash, esp. if the amygdala marked it DANGER!  And the brain said JUMP.  By that time the jump had happened.  

Or maybe it took a while, like overnight while the memory-sorting neuron complexes (from the front of the hippocampus to the back of the hippocampus) put this here and that there and like with like and threw out the trivia or nonsensical -- wait now, maybe that wasn’t nonsense after all.  And the person dreamt, watching the traffic passing, hailing a cab.  In the morning it was at the curb with the door standing open.

What’s interesting is that the most recent development -- the cutting edge of evolution -- is that not only can we see the other person stop/SLAP but we can tell from the response -- or maybe just the pause -- what it was that the rhizome neuron complexes were working on, realizing, deciding.  And beyond that, (this is the secret of acting) -- that when we see someone working their way through this sequence, it is to us as though we had done it, too.  “Vicarious,” they call it.  You watch someone dance and your muscles, ever so faintly, imitate what you see.

Even more interesting -- and sometimes perilous -- is that we all have several aspects of ourselves inside and those rhizomatous neural complexes can put these part-puppets to good use, setting up conversations among them.  You know the cartoon:  an angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other.  There can be a whole school of little critters swarming around, some tougher and more intense than others.

Partly they are a matter of stored experience (memory) and partly they are organized by feeling.  Feel maternal?  Is that you, mom?  Feel powerful?  007 at your service.  Walter Mitty might drop by with a few adventures.  When Freud wanted you to repose on his couch and free-associate, he was hoping that your puppet show would activate and let him watch long enough to pick up clues about the puppeteer.

Jung had an idea you would draw on plot lines from the great classics.  The contemporary Internal Family Therapy shrinks figured conversation would probably sound like the supper table.  When my brother with the head trauma was looking for a cover story, he told us television plots, often courtroom tales.  We so often see life as being on trial -- I suppose, for the crime of being human.

Alvina Krause’s “method” was to watch closely when an actor was “acting” and try to deduce which neuron complexes were doing what.  She was very much aware that no two human beings have organized their brains the same way (after all, we are preschoolers when we set up our basic categories and who knows what has happened since then?) but she tried to know students well enough to have a good idea of what their “dashboard” conversations were like.  One thought everything was an intellectual puzzle, another saw only wine and roses, and a third was shuttling from one thing to another without settling.

Over and over in her notes you’ll read,  “I think what X is doing is trying too hard to . . .”   Then she would try to devise something that would derail that unhelpful process, whatever it was, into something that worked.  One of the funniest is the woman who was being so lyrical and poetic with her iambic pentameters that the sense left them.  To get her feet back on the ground, Krause asked her to say “mashed potatoes” at the end of each line.  That was the most ordinary, bland, unpoetic phrase Krause could think of.  It worked.  Suddenly the actress had her feet on the ground.

The riskiest was when an actor had gone off to cloud-cuckoo-land, some strangely dissociated parallel universe.  She would resort to a slap, the kind that movie heroes used on hysterical movie heroines while commanding, “Snap out of it!”  And then the heroine says,  “Thanks.  I needed that.”  You’d never get away with that today.  The main reason Krause got so close to her actors was so that she knew how to calibrate whatever she was doing, but there’s a total taboo on contact now.

Of course, the misfires and those impervious to such tricks simply left.  We writers watched very closely indeed.  Even though we were too -- what? -- to get on the stage.  But for us the cast of characters inside has never stopped talking to each other.  We can put it on a page rather than the stage.

The world comes at you:  sun in the morning, fog at night;  sounds of traffic and sounds of wind;  taste of wine and crunch of bread; smell of a lover and reek of death; and in your glass skull you weave a story about it.  Then -- wait, go back!  I was wrong!  It works better this other way.  SLAP!  Thanks, I needed that.

(Also posted at www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com.)

THE SILVER COMB

Miss Alvina Krause was very nice to me.  Those who got from her the full force blast of her personality will know that this meant she didn’t think I had any talent as an actor.  She was quite right.  But I don’t think she would be surprised that what she taught turned out to be an excellent foundation for many other things.  She was teaching HUMANITIES in the largest sense, the kind that was understood in her times as honoring human beings and pushing them to be as worthy as Elizabethans or Greeks, two of her ideals.

Why revisit an acting professor who has been dead for thirty years?  Why bother to talk abut “the Method” which we all “know” now it was about mumbling?  Why talk about a woman who passionately fought the star system, believing instead in repertory theatre companies, when now the star system has taken over everything?  Though today film rules, she had little to say about it.  Isn’t Alvina Krause simply out of date?  My cohort of NU students is in their seventies.  What do they care?

Ask David Downs at DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com  about the people who worked with him as AK’s successor and some who actually worked with AK herself.  You could ask him on Facebook.

Ask Jim Goode in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, should you be so lucky as to attend a production at the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble where the work goes on in repertory as she hoped it would.

Ask David Press, quietly retired professor, whose thesis -- written in collaboration with AK but repudiated by her halfway through -- had roughly the effect of stirring a stick in a wasp’s nest forty years ago.  Few have read it since for fear being stung.

Well, I did read it, (Order from www.proquest.com) and it gave me a lot to think about in many different ways.  These ways have developed out of work I’ve done based on my preparation for the Unitarian Universalist ministry at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Meadville/Lombard Theological School.  Those who are surprised that there would be any connection should consider these things:

1.  For the Greeks religion and drama overlapped so deeply that it was hard to tell them apart.  They are the epitome of agonistic tragedy as well as trickster comedy.

2.  For the Elizabethans consciousness of religious issues raised by the discovery of a New World, the defiance of the Pope, and the need to leave off the destruction of wars over religious dogma and affiliation badly needed to be addressed.

3.  Northwestern University’s School of Communication was the School of Speech when I attended.  When Annie May Swift Hall was built, funded in honor of his dead daughter by Gustavus Swift, the School of Speech had been called the School of Oratory.  The school was actually organized and taught in 1878 by Robert McLean Cumnock, originally closely supported by Garrett Biblical Institute, which shares the campus with NU.  In those days before radio. the importance and power of live speech from the pulpit and the podium were a vital heart of America.  If AK had been influenced in slightly different ways, she might easily have been among the early female Universalist ministers.

4. AK’s life stretched over one of the most interesting and perilous centuries ever.  Born into an American rural Edwardian world, she began her adult education just as WWI was declared and the long shuddering hardship of it eliminated the men of a generation.  Then America roared into recklessness that plunged us back into the Great Depression, and again WWII and -- in the Fifties when I knew her -- a sober consideration of what civilization means anyway.  Sputnik went up in 1957, just as I hit campus and sat down in B43 acting class.

5.  Fifties culture was dominated by the Manhattan Mandarins who had formed from the European (often German and Jewish) immigrants.  Highly intellectual, they knew psychoanalysis, experimental writing, abstract expressionism, and were hypnotic, nearly magic, for many people.  Method acting, mostly derived from Stanislavski’s work in Russia, was part of this high-prestige, glamorous, and exotic way that Life magazine admired and touted across the country.

Alvina Krause, Midwestern rural American, had developed “methods” of her own, partly from oratory or rhetoric and partly from physical culture, both athletic and artistic, almost as Eastern as Tai Chi.  Her results were stellar, worthy of Broadway.  How she got them is worthy of inquiry that is not dominated by ideas about the Method.  She was an American original in counterpoint to Manhattan ideas.

6.  At present there is a great deal of attention being given to the idea of gender and the relationship between the two ends of a continuum that had previously been seen as binary.  The interrelationship between physical (genetic and anatomical) determiners of gender and the identification of the person with his or her gender role, including the gender assignment of those he or she desires, have preoccupied us all.  When I went to high school in Portland, OR. (not far from Seaside, where AK started her teaching career) -- 1953-57 -- the teachers, mostly women, had been born at the “turn of the century” which meant their opportunities to bond with men were much reduced.  They chose professions (usually teaching or nursing) instead of becoming wives and mothers.  Among those teachers I knew, several were in “Boston marriages.”  That is, two women living together lifelong in a private way.  We hardly thought about it.  One was the head of the NEA for a year.

Because AK and Lucy McCammon were pair-bonded, it would be easy to interpret them in today’s political way as defying convention and being “queer” in a formal sense.  I think this would be misleading.  Certainly at the time we all knew (some of us lived in her house) and none of us cared.  However, because the unique sexuality of individuals was quietly honored, many students found their feet. By the way, AK was fond of men.

7.  By now (since the invention of the fMRI and other methods of study) there are bodies of neurotheory and counseling that address the constantly renewing question of human identity.  The work I’m following accepts the idea that every person includes MANY personas and daemons -- not in the dramatic way of “The Three Faces of Eve” but in the daily way we answer the door to a salesman with one “face” and return to an argument at the breakfast table with another “face” and then go out to our jobs with a third “face.”  I find it fascinating and enlightening to apply these theories to the work of AK with aspiring unformed actors.  There’s a lot of explanatory power that is surprisingly -- well -- “spiritual.”  Victor Turner’s anthropological idea of “liminal space” certainly informs theatre and Eugene Gendlin’s work with “focusing” is the most basic of acting skills.

For a person of my background (English teacher), the first idea is that this ought to become a book.  Let’s be modern and -- for now, at least -- think Blog.  And in the metaphorical way one says a boat is a sail, let’s call it “The Silver Comb” to honor that anchor on AK’s head.  www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com is in very early stages.

(This post is also posted at www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com.)

FORMATION: NOT GEOLOGICAL

Some human occupations involve the entire person and cannot be separated in the way they can be for 9 to 5 jobs.  Those “occupations” include clergy, actors, artists of every sort, and prostitutes.  (I challenge that.  Did I say that?  Maybe some people CAN do sexwork without involving their whole selves.)  Sometimes, in the case of clergy, the individual’s personal behavior separates from the professional qualities necessary for the job.  Preparation through seminaries or other means are intended to make sure that doesn’t happen.  The preparation is called “formation.”  

In the case of clergy, integrity and authenticity are given high value.  A person who has separated part of his or her self in order to act in unclergylike ways, is bound for trouble.  But in the case of a sexworker, a person would be well-served by the ability to confine the daring, risk, invasion, shock and other sexual values to a specific time and place that can be kept separate.  This is not to deny that some possible qualities of sexworkers (understanding, empathy, compassion, compliance) might be admirable in another circumstances and people who can preserve those qualities and carry them to ordinary life are fortunate.   

The sex worker who falls in love with clients is in trouble.  Tricks look for people with no boundaries (abused or very young) because they want to trouble their worker.  It’s part of the experience.  The same applies to clergy, but also in the opposite way: some people want to trouble authority figures like clergy.  Sometimes this is revenge, and sometimes it’s an attempt to wake them up and get them functioning.

An actor is somewhere in between.  Getting totally absorbed into the work blocks off the ability to value and learn from all of human life in the world.  But on the other hand, shutting out empathy, the merging with other personalities, the suspension of taboos, may cramp and diminish the acting.  Exploring a taboo -- let’s say heroin addiction -- is not the same as becoming addicted to heroin.  Where is the line between allure and restraint?  If an actor acts gay for a performance, will he become gay?

Luckily, human beings are able to assume different roles within their own identity.  In some increasingly detectable way (fMRI), brains and bodies -- which always work together -- can be their own True Self at the same time that they can be one or more “Mock Selves,” both as actors and as ordinary happily functioning human beings.  The “formation” of an actor, therefore, must help them recognize and manage their own inner boundaries between selves.  This is done largely with sensory information -- present and remembered -- reflection from others, and experiences like observation and exercises, including physical exercise.

A big part of this is what might be called the “holding culture.”  To be clergy in one time and place (let’s say upper crust Boston in the 19th century) might be quite different from a similar role (let’s say San Francisco in the Sixties).  A high awareness of culture -- not to obey but to negotiate -- shapes (forms) such activities as ministering or paid sex.  Even if the person is able to step away from the cultural prescription, the people around the person will still be responding to it.

It is ridiculous for a religious leader to advocate the recommendations of his point of view, whether or not it is institutionalized in dogma, but not to act out the reality, the illustration in his or her own life.  This hypocrisy in itself is tolerated by some cultures or subcultures (priests who molest boys) but severely punished by larger or opposing cultures.  On the other hand, the official cultural position may oppose something that is secretly needed and protected.  (A respectable sexworker in a small town.)  To distinguish between these two positions -- advocacy without obedience versus seeming compliance as protection -- is an excellent subject for drama.

One of the good uses of institutions and rule-based ethics is that both protect boundaries or at least promote awareness of them.  Both are forces for “formation” that are particularly helpful for people still in the process.

Some people are faced with the necessity of “re- formation.”  They are usually removed from the larger culture temporarily, so as to have the support of a small “holding community” where they are guided and monitored.  (The Catholic church maintains several of these retreats.)  Whether this works depends in part on the person’s own willingness to examine and either strengthen or remove boundaries.  Institutions and moral rules can be splints for broken or weak bones or they can be Procrustean and crippling shells that prevent vital growth.

At some point all efforts at “formation” must confront the issue of worthiness.  If there is doubt either about how to define that or how the person being formed succeeds in embodying it, trouble results.  And yet both the nature of the goal form and the potential of the candidate to fulfill that form must find a balance between being too easily challenged versus destructively confined.  Much of that balance will depend on human experience, often painful in the extreme.  Cultures are relentless.  The embodiment of Jesus was crucified.  

But each human is unique; each is a new embodiment, each is in a slightly different culture.  What if Jesus had manifested in India, built an ashram, acquired many inspired students, became highly revered, led successful cultural reforms and died as an old man?  What if he had been female in the American West?   This kind of thinking inspires movies.

Most of us are aware of “formation” if only that imposed by our families, and then again aware of “re-formation” when we grow up a bit and discover worlds quite different from what our families knew.  Some of us learn to think in terms of the “greater good” for all human beings and the necessity of rule-morality (laws) to keep order.  Some again want to impose MORE laws for the even greater good:  “No more big sugary drinks for you, kid!”  Where is the line?  To some degree the universe is always out of control.  (The melting of the arctic and antarctic poles.)  No rule will work.  Humans as species may be doomed.  What “formation” can cope with that?

Some riot.  Some retreat.  Some use drugs.  Some pray.  Some start a garden. Responses have probably already formed in both individual and culture.  Whether or not they are effective in any way is irrelevant.

WHAT'S A BLOG?

Recently I’ve run into people who are confused about blogs.  They seem to fall into categories.  Even now, people have only heard of blogs and never or seldom read one.  They don’t distinguish among a blog, an email, or a website.  It’s just print that mysteriously appears if you do something funny with a keyboard.  So here are some basics:

a.  Email is print that comes like a letter to your personal site.  

b.  A website is a formatted window where images and print appear.   You have to go to it on purpose, using a “url” at a search engine.  Usually it’s not stored on a personal computer, but on a much bigger hard drive somewhere else.  That hard drive might be in a business computer or it might be in the “cloud” which is a huge regional warehouse/turbine complex.  There might be changing content, but mostly it stays the same.

c.  A blog is a website that is pre-formatted.  Part of that website will “host” changing content, usually print but also images.  The one I use is “blogspot” which belongs to Google.  

d.  A blog, at least at blogspot, can be controlled so that only certain people can look at it -- maybe only yourself.  (Remember that the techies can always look at everything online and authorities -- theoretically with a warrant -- can look at anything.)  It can be controlled so that certain people on a list can post new material.  And it can be controlled as to comments: commenters might need to use a password or puzzle to defeat machines that automatically post advertising.  Or the blogger can simply require every comment to be looked at individually, which is what I do.

Many people start a blog, get bored, ignore it and there it sits.  So far I don’t know what the protocols are for removing an unused blog except that the blogger can remove parts or all at any time.  But blogs are “cached” which means they never really go away and also people download to their home computers whatever they choose and may forward to others or archive.  It’s remarkably difficult to get rid of blogs or even their traces on Google and other search engines.

Now my own blog.  I post 1,000 words or more every day and sometimes throw on an image for fun or to make a point.  The subject matter moves around among categories which are basically:  regional, Blackfeet, Bob Scriver, religion, memoir, current events, reviews of books and movies, and a few more.  Some are meant to be eventually compiled into books.

There is always tremendous pressure -- esp. now that the economy is in trouble -- to find a way to make money through the use of a computer.  This is why I control my blog so tightly: it is NOT to make money.  It’s for me to write and share what I write with interested parties in the various categories.  The way to write well is to write a LOT.  I am retired, choose to sit here and type all day, and enjoy hearing from my readers.  To publish I use www.lulu.com/prairiemary, where -- I discover -- the books are almost immediately pirated to the Internet at large. 

One little problem is that many people will NOT read a blog even though they know it exists and claim they admire the blogger.  They say they don’t have time, but in some cases I know this is just an excuse.  I suspect that they are afraid of finding out something they don’t want to know or are competitive and feel that if I blog, they ought to be doing the same thing at the same rate.  But most frustratingly, people have no context, so they either treat the blog posts as if they were personally meant for them or they want to have a private, protected, intimate conversation with me which they assume will be different.  The previous problems are often gender-linked to females.

But two problems seem to be gender-linked to males.  One is the male in mid-life crisis who ought to be going for professional counseling, but thinks that because I talk about psych and religion, I might provide an equivalent without money or risk.  The other is the relentless marketer, esp. of writing, who believes that a review on my blog entitles him to my life and devotion.  His writing, he says, will lift my blog up to acclaim and income.  After, of course, I’ve given him sufficient free advertising.  This is an old pattern, often labeled “grandiose narcissism.”  Some men are simply used to women doing their bidding.

I hasten to say that I have a little dance card of people for whom I will do the utmost I can, but that dance card is filled.  And private.

Print (and images and sound) is an interesting phenomenon to contemplate and, like sex, it takes quite different forms in different circumstances.  The Big Book, carefully traced out and illustrated in a Scriptorium by devoted monks is one thing.  Printed repetitiously on a machine is another thing.  The Xeroxed manuscript came and went quickly.  (People skip over “Kinko publishing.”)  And now communication has leapfrogged print by skipping to image and music.  Essentially print for illiterates.  Children of every nation speak it.

The shadow of past printing methods lingers behind even this post.  The numinous mystery and gravitas of a Bible or Koran still persuades people that What Is Written either is or should be TRUE.  The penumbra of Gutenburg still implies handbill politics.  Kinko books are so personal, so unique.  The hope of salvation lingers in them all, whether one considers that a perfume or a taint.

Most people cannot distinguish between printing and publishing.  Publishing -- the selling of print -- as a business enterprise is invisible to most and, even to those who are involved, now is morphing so quickly that no one can get a firm grip on it.  The Manhattan Mandarins are fading.  Kids walk the sidewalks watching YouTube on two inch screens.

The most difficult aspect of publishing is its embeddedness in European class systems, the same ones that gave rise to capitalism and manufacturing, a firmly middle-class anchor point now diminishing.  Books are both a luxury and a marker of virtue.  Ask someone if they have read [fill in the blank] and you’ll see them bristle with the assumption that you have just unjustifiably inspected them.  Reading best sellers is one kind of marker, reading obscure books praised by professors is another, and a writer who is actually PUBLISHED has the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  Can the Pulitzer Prize be far behind?  Can going to heaven be any higher an achievement?

But blogs and websites are different.  They can be anything.  They are always more than you expect.  They are like magazines more than books, and might be quite shocking.  My own blogs -- which include family albums and genealogies, private conversations that need to be shared and recorded, archives for my eyes only, works in progress, and other things -- are not for sale.  What a surprise!

"PARADISE NOW": More Than Just a Movie

Mimi Hanaoka suggests:

The chaotic violence that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three American staffers in Libya, and that led to a mob storming the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, has been garbed in religious language and references. That distracts from the real issues: serious domestic political fragmentation in Libya and Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and America's place in the region.

Media attention has focused on a polemic, anti-Muslim movie trailer posted on YouTube, which prompted protests in Benghazi and Cairo. The film was allegedly produced by Sam Bacile, who has identified himself as an Israeli Jew. In the Wall Street Journal, Bacile called Islam a "cancer" and claimed he raised $5 million from Jewish donors to fund the film, details that intensify its polemic power.

The trailer, translated into Arabic and viewed thousands of times in the Middle East, portrays the prophet Muhammad as, among other things, a child abuser.

[Mimi Hanaoka is an assistant professor of religious studies and Islam at the University of Richmond. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.]

An old Greek myth tells of a field being sown with the teeth of a dragon slain by a hero.  These seeds spring up into ranks of warriors, armed for battle.  Someone throws a stone into their midst: they immediately spring into combat and kill each other.  If it were a modern tale, there would be a gunshot at a riot which triggers the previously restrained National Guare and leads to the slaughter of protesters.  With modern media all it takes to destroy an embassy, a diplomat, and possibly progress towards peace in the Mid East is a myth.

We already know what a myth (all about weapons of mass destruction hidden by a tyrant) did to our country and Iraq -- turned the worlds of thousands upside down with invasion.  We already know that lies on Facebook tipped a vulnerable American girl into suicide.

What we don’t know is how to persuade people to resist mayhem, to resist starting wars just because they can.  How do we get them to see that they didn’t grab a banner and lead troops into battle, but only threw a rock through a window like any common delinquent?   In this case, the rock was allegedly thrown by an Israeli Jew living in prosperous California.  Israel, the country created so this sort of calumny-based violence would stop such persons from trying to produce a Kristallnacht with no danger to himself.  And succeeding.

Recently I watched “Paradise Now,” a movie that explores the minds of two Palestinian suicide bombers -- handsome young men who have become convinced that because Israel -- much more powerful than the marginalized Palestinians who have no air force and nowhere near the machinery of oppression -- holds them and their families in a paralyzing grip, they must resist in the only way they can.  Is it not more honorable to die in the explosion one causes, rather than dropping bombs from so high there’s really no control over whom they kill?

What are the forces that persuade these two young men?  First of all, let’s get prosperity out of the way.  These are the young men “leaning against the wall” who are always the front lines of violence because they have nothing to lose.  They have stupid low-pay jobs, if any, they must live at home without fathers, and they cannot start families of their own.  Today every nation has this tinder.

The more intense issue is identity: what can a young man do with his incendiary mix of testosterone and adrenaline except find identity in the politics of nationality, race, and religion.  How can the women around the young men persuade them that they are only making things worse when the older men, covert but controlling, play their chess game by making boys into pawns for their own ends?  So easy when the fathers were heroes, even more easy if the fathers were collaborators.  A little video shop makes clips of goodbye speeches from young men on both sides and sells them to a public eager for drama.  The dragon’s teeth: buy one for a lucky charm.

So the two young men who grew up together, bonded buddies, decide to become suicide bombers.  Prepared to pass in Israel simply by being bathed, shaved, and clothed in black suits so they look like either FBI agents or Mormon doorstep proselytizers, they find that things go wrong in unpredictable ways and are separated.  One is adrift in a city he does not know, wearing a bomb, and the other is desperate to find him.  

The end is ambiguous.  I kept thinking about the yahoos who thought it was funny to tie a stick of dynamite on the tail of a coyote until the coyote took refuge under their new pickup.  The world is always a stone’s throw from violence.   I’ll mix metaphors: some people are so blinded by their own need for prestige and the illusion of control that they sit on a barrel of nitro striking matches.  If they’re lucky, their family misses them.  

Religion DOES have responsibility in this.   Ms Hanaoka takes the position that the outbreaks of violence are the result of pre-existing shattered order.  Well, sure.  The current US political dilemmas are due to something like the same causes.  But don’t the radical identity obsessors use religion as their justification?  Didn’t the Nazis use the issue of religion to destroy Jews?  Didn’t the Ku Klux Klan (shouldn’t I use present tense?) conflate Christian identity with white superiority?  Am I the only person to ever watch “Oz” while thinking about the spiritual identities of those naked men?

This recent violence was caused by a TRAILER of a lousy movie made by zealots.  Not even that.  It was the IDEA of the trailer.  YouTube removed the trailer but how do they remove an idea of a rumor about something most had not seen in the first place?

How do we get people to watch a WHOLE MOVIE that explores what responsible people are trying to understand and solve?  When “Paradise Now” was put up for the foreign film Oscar, it was thrown out because it could not be attached to a nation, since Palestine is NOT one.  Various end-runs were tried but finally the national origin was tied to the financing.   Israeli writer Irit Linor points out that "according to internationally accepted conventions, the nationality of a film is usually determined by the country that invested in it - and that while the film was categorized by the Academy as representing Palestine, it was produced with European funds, by an Israeli-Arab director."

The director was Hany Abu-Assad, who “made a plea for a Palestinian state, saying he hoped the Golden Globe was “a recognition that the Palestinians deserve their liberty and equality unconditionally."

In an interview with Jewish-American Tikkun magazine, Hany Abu-Assad was asked "When you look ahead now, what gives you hope?", 

"The conscience  of the Jewish people" he answered. "The Jews have been the conscience of humanity, always, wherever they go. Not all Jews, but part of them. Ethics. Morality. They invented it! I think Hitler wanted to kill the conscience of the Jews, the conscience of humanity. But this conscience is still alive...Maybe a bit weak...But still alive. Thank God."   

Is not conscience a part of every religion?  What is it about the sons of Abraham (I’m including Christians) that makes them quarrel so?  Must we bring in some wise old Australian aborigine to point out that violence is always a boomerang?