SHAME VS. GUILT

This "embarrassment" is an illusion.  

Polar bears have nothing to be ashamed of.

Googling reveals lots of material defining “shame” versus “guilt”, mostly explaining that shame is something that is inherent in one’s being (“you should be ashamed of yourself”) sort of like original sin, but guilt is knowing you’ve done something wrong. You've broken the rules.  

Both will estrange a person from any community, because both are factors of culture, categories developed over time and meant to keep people (in the back-and-forth between culture and individual) under control for the good of the community.  Their game is blame, which imposes a stigmata like forcing people to sew a yellow star on their coats or, more drastically, branding the faces of runaway slaves.  it is an excruciating vulnerability affecting one’s worthiness, their sense of love and belonging.  They must always feel they are not good enough.

Dogs feel guilt -- cats do not.

Dogs are social -- cats are not.

If shame is something that the culture imposes on groups and individuals because of their perceived characteristics, like skin color or way of dressing or food choices or — worst of all — poverty; and guilt is something a group or individual sees as a rule broken, a bad behavior, then we express that in the idea that one can love an individual but hate their behavior.  Or sometimes that we hate the individual regardless of his or her appeal because of his or her behavior, especially if they are shameless and refuse to accept their guilt.  Because then what hold does the society have?

Global warming is starving polar bears.

I want to introduce a new factor:  bad things that happen that seem totally unrelated to either shame or guilt, but introduce both in such dynamic quantity that the whole culture gets involved in blame, wanting to sacrifice someone in order to restore order.  Hurricanes, tsunamis, famine, wild fire, and pandemics are natural events, but war, economic inequity, overpopulation are human group overwhelming events.  They are all full of shame and blame, from the New Orleans disaster to the children dying in the streets of our cities.  (You don’t see them because they try to diminish their vulnerability by hiding.)  Attempts to deal with all this seem ineffective.  In fact, even the most innocent and praiseworthy efforts, like providing food to starving people, become corrupted or objectionable.  We are facing helplessness, which makes us scared, which makes us angry, which is of major use for politics.

Queen Elizabeth II

In a time like the present, when the rules of the culture are changing and uncertain, individuals suffer.  Should one be shamed for not being thin, sexy, blonde and sixteen?  Should one feel guilty for wearing a headscarf while not being the Queen of England?  If one is either shamed or guilty, does that mean punishment, debasement, confinement, permitted penetration, exploitative research, is deserved and proper?   BLAME:  a way to discharge pain and shame.  It’s everywhere.  It wins elections.  It’s too scary to react in a sensible way.  Understanding is not a priority anyway — someone yells fire (the president has no birth certificate, vaccination will make your children autistic, drinking coffee will either give you cancer or save you from cancer) and we get so jammed in the exits that no one can escape.

A triangle forms:  shame, guilt, and I’m going to add frustration, being blocked.  Shame and guilt are tools of the predominant culture.  Frustration is what finally will break through to change.  I was surprised when I googled “penetration” that many of the definitions were about knowledge -- getting to the heart of things, I suppose.  Frustration and penetration are individual responses to oppression that trigger evolution, both social and personal.  Aggression, withdrawal, finding allies, artistic expression might also be responses.  “Find a way to cope or die”, is the message to the individual, but the message to the culture is “cut off too many of your people and you no longer exist.”

Black "bottom"

The issue seems to be one of boundaries, often expressed physically by the places people live.  Stockton speaks of "bottoms" where blacks live, because in the South those are the jungly marshy places where diseases lurk.  In Browning the equivalent was called “Moccasin Flats”, built parallel to the school blocks, originally as 1900 log cabins for old people who had been living in scattered tents.  Over the decades the cabins became a jumble of lean-tos, derelict trailers, abandoned cars, and crooked TV antennas.  They were mostly cleared away after the Sixties drive to improve housing.  Highway patrol housing, three modern houses built near the top of Snowshed hill, were jokingly called “Moccasin Heights” and a sign was put up.

Stockton talks a lot about anal focus, which is, of course, about biologically discarding, but in other acts of sex (arousal), hygiene (enemas) or even rectal feeding -- which is to save an infant in Morrison’s book, but in real life done for torture and punishment to the Gitmo captives protesting by fasting.  These are the crossing of boundaries, social as much as physical (sphincters), meant to reduce captives to an infant’s involuntary existence.  Until our culture became so obsessed with medical and enforcement issues that it gave permission to meddle with bodies (coffee enemas, storing contraband in the rectum) no one would ever address these matters.  Even now people worry about smells and feel violated by a colostomy, a third “hole” no one finds attractive.

Cancer and trauma are phenomena that are entwined with shame and guilt and treated with denial or exploitation by the culture.  Our professions (medicine, law and clerical) have become corrupted by this, removing the dignity and solemnity that once marked them as consciously dealing with privileges that affected lives, such as cutting into them (penetration), incarcerating them, or shaping them into institutions.  But "Medicins Sans Frontieres" give new life to the concept of transcending limitations, even those of the culture. Out of the oppression of one big group, comes the transcendence of a small opposing group.

A doctor responding to need.

Some parts of all cultures value this.

All three professions are connected to a writing-based culture where the “pen” is the penetration.  (Laws, Bibles, Prescriptions.)  Writing that deals frankly and vividly with these three categories will often be stigmatized and destroyed as though they were the people instead of the synecdoche (metaphor) for them, only marks on paper.  Even this little discussion of shame and guilt may get me into trouble if it has as much penetration as I hope.

On Medium.com where beginning writers are struggling and even seasoned writers are trying to monetize, I suggested that if there were authors’ discussion groups out there, they ought to devote an evening to discussing two movies:  “Authors Anonymous” and “Pinero.”  The first is not just culture-compliant but culture corrupted and stereotyped, presented as comedy.  The second is a confrontive portrayal of the life of a Puerto Rican man in New York (Newyorican) trapped by racial and nationalistic barriers plus poverty and early trauma.  Drugs, friendship, sex, are there aplenty and will attract people looking for scandal, arousal by misery.  These people ("trolls") are now interested in Medium.com.

If a writer is just writing for profit or good feeling, that’s fine, but maybe they have not earned the respect for dedicated penetration to “truth” as Pinero did.  Or did he?  Did he sell out to self-destruction?  Should he feel ashamed of himself?  Or should we feel guilty that gifted people are destroyed even as they may be leading to evolution that will save us all?

MIKE BURGWIN, NACA FOUNDER

Mike Burgwin has died at the age of 87.  He and his wife Lorna made a tour of friends a few years ago and I was delighted to see them.  Mike and I have strong history, because he’s the one who hired me though management did NOT want to hire a woman, didn’t think a woman could handle the job and would not stick.  When I finally went out into the field alone in a radio truck, they called me every hour or so to see if I were still alive.

Of course, in those days Portland, OR, was a port where rats still came down mooring lines into the city and there were two parts of town where the cops went in pairs:  Errol Heights was the largest concentration of law-breakers outside prison and North Portland was the largest concentration of families with a member in prison — they were Black.  The part of town where I was most useful was around Reed College where no one thought any laws applied to them and they treated any officials not at their own social level as intrusive thugs.  The Portlandia nonsense didn’t exist, but Old Town was beginning to explore erotica.  The rumor was that Patty Hearst was hiding somewhere in town.

Mike was a little scary to people who didn’t know him, because his years as a cop in Martinez, CA, another port, had taught him to be inscrutable no matter what he was dealing with — CSI kinds of stuff.  He’d had a lot of jobs over the years and got something good out of each of them; for instance, he’d managed a paint company franchise and had a lot of Organizational Design training.  At one point he drove a diaper service truck and met a lot of babies and their young mothers.  

Just before he came to Animal Control, he was serving warrants.  He told about going to a front door one summer.  Through the screen door he could see a couple sitting on a sofa watching television.  The man willingly came to the door and accepted the paper.  Seeing that it was a summons to court for a divorce, he turned to the woman and asked, “Are you divorcing me?”  “Yes,” she said, showing no reaction.  “Oh”, said the man with no emotion, and sat back down.  This story bugged Mike.

He told me cop stories, many of them violent, and I told him rez stories, but I was not the official emergency responder in Browning.  It was just that when something happened, you had to deal with it because in those days no one else was there.  We both laughed a lot.  A lot of the stories were sexual — not rape and riot but ridiculous more than anything else.  Guys who got their pricks stuck in the spigots of bathtubs.  

But then we’d shift gears and try to figure out what would make animal control more effective, more professional, more respected.  After I was a few years in the field we thought up the idea of education coordinator, a job that included taking photos, keeping statistics, writing a textbook, designing a formal training class for new hires, interfacing with the Oregon National Primate Research Center, the zoo veterinarian, and keeping the peace with the Oregon Humane Society which had traditionally held the contract for animal control.  Also, dealing with Graziella Boucher, a tiny ancient tyrant who kept a wolf for a pet.  (It was a husky.)

We needed a new animal control ordinance, so Mike pulled together a panel of people with the able guidance of Francis Smith, a local lawyer who raised beagles.  Since Mike had kept records of all the people who had testified for and against us over the years, he drafted the extremes and some middle people (harder to find) into the project, which took a year.  I attended all meetings and did a lot of original research of laws, news stories, and so on.  The ordinance was fine, but struggling through the issues was game-changing.

The biggest step forward was organizing the National Animal Control Association for professionals.  Previously Mike had developed a relationship with the American Humane Association, which was friendly to AC and also dealt with cruelty to children.  Humane Society of the US was the other big player but played down anything practical except for shelter advice.  Their agenda was not yet attacking everything pitiful as a means of raising money, but they ignored actual AC problems in the field.  The single biggest mistake of outsiders is mistaking the shelter for the whole program.

It wasn’t just dogs.  Mike shows up on Google explaining a runaway elephant in Hawaii.  The relationship with wildlife entities was problematic.  Fish and Wildlife sat at their desks without any way to respond to a raccoon tearing screens off windows or a pet skunk wandering around biting people.  or the deer with cougars tracking them that mistook freeways for rivers and traveled in the landscape buffers up to the Lloyd Center where they panicked and crashed windows.  If things got really exciting, Mike went to the field and helped.  In fact, some officers who had found interesting things they could do in the truck aside from work (like napping), were disconcerted when Mike quietly arrived in an unmarked car.

Personally, Mike and I became close because his marriage was breaking up, bringing up unresolved issues from his childhood when his mom disappeared and his dad, traveling to labor jobs in remote places, left the boys in an orphanage where they were glad for berry season because they were never fed quite enough.  Things did get better, but Mike married too young.  Hard times did not callous him, but rather made him protective of people who were struggling.  That included me, just coming out of a long-term totally dedicated (I thought) marriage and trying to figure it out.  The key dilemma was that I wanted an active intellectual life, but it was not a way to make money.

At that point I began working on a masters in clinical psychology and realizing that it was taught as social work.  Welfare cases, parole monitoring.  I discovered Unitarian Universalism and switched to ministry which was friendly to all the Seventies psych thought.  This baffled Mike but he never criticized it.  Intelligent as he was, there was a wall where access to universities should have been.  Just about the same with religion.  His biggest disappointment in me was that he was always on the lookout for tennis players and I was hopeless.  “Are there even any strings in your racquet?” he asked.  Then it was over.

After I left for seminary, people pounded on Mike because his reforms were against their interests.  Finally, the shelter supervisor was caught selling the drugs that were used to kill the animals because the needle was supposed to be more humane than the high-altitude chamber.  Toby was gregarious and friendly enough that people named their adopted dogs for him.  He lost his job, but so did Mike as the person who “should have known.”

At about that time, Seattle Animal Control blew up and Mike moved up there to apply all the principles and strategies that NACA had developed.  It worked fine.  By this time he had married Lorna and things kept improving.  Lorna’s family had a store on the Sound and in retirement that kept Mike busy.  He was always building something.  In fact, at AC if two factions started feuding, they might come to work and find that overnight an actual wall had been erected between them.  

When someone has had a tough childhood, they might react by imposing hard times on everyone else, but a few find a better way and stretch out a hand to pull people out of trouble.  Mike’s sons are the same.  Many will miss him in the most practical way.  But also, he was an idealist and many loved him for it.  Or just for his great guffawing laugh.  I always wished I’d heard him sing Welsh drinking songs in the bar he once owned in Tahoe, he said because then no one could make him stop singing.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?  (Degradation Part 2 -- not Chapter 2)

Frontispiece photo is J.B. Higgins photograph “Andre"-

http://www.jbhiggins.com/black_and_white/bw_galleries2.html

Okay, here’s a very intellectual and introspective way to look at degradation.  If you want the really basic experiential gruesome details, go look for something by Vollman, who experiments with how low people can go.  There ought to be a body of writing about/by Native Americans, not by people with the genetics but people who actually live on reservations, but I only see streaks here and there.  Publishers would resist.  (The gutter drunk version of “Indians” doesn’t sell unless it's funny and makes "Indians" look stupid.)  

If that’s what you want, look for Adrian C. Louis.  (He wrote the book on which “Skins” was based.)  His new book is “Random Exorcisms”.  “. . . these poems tackle a broad range of subjects, including Facebook, zombies, horror movies, petty grievances, real grief, and pure political outrage.”  http://www.amazon.com/Random-Exorcisms-Lena-Miles-Poetry-Series/dp/0807163716

I haven’t gotten Louis’ book yet.  The book I’m still trying to figure out, alongside my own degradation issues, is Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame.  Stockton says shame “has often been a meeting place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp?”

I'm not black, I'm not lesbian, and I don’t “get” camp.  I’m very hard to shame, but I carry a lot of guilt.  As Kenner used to say,  “What does it mean?”

Scene from the movie version of "Beloved."

“Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study . . . Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. 

The results of flogging.

"Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.”

Since I haven’t read all this stuff yet, and might not understand it when I do, I’m going to start with the small domestic end.  I notice that some people, usually women, when they are guests in my house, will choose the cracked cup, the bent spoon, the chair that wobbles — anything defective or even painful or a little risky.  I have a hanging candelabra that is never lit because my company protests, “Oh, no no no!  Don’t light it for me.  I’m not worth it.”  Neatly depriving me of a chance to show off by honoring them.  It’s not debasement so much as self-erasure.  Is there a connection?  Are they afraid of something?  Me?  Are they topping me by saying, “an honor from you means nothing to me.”

Indeed, there is often a faint tone of mock admiration — or am I imagining it? — because I went to college, twice, at fancy places  (NU and U of Chicago) and even managed to get ordained.  They say,  “You’re so smart,” and there’s an edge that says, “you betrayed us, you look down on us, you’re an outsider now.”  Native Americans would recognize this.  Probably Blacks as well.  

It’s not jealousy, it’s messing with the universe.  Achieving females don’t break the standing order as much as people of color, but they do.  If the standing order is broken, my female cousins’ husbands will no longer owe them (in the best sense, totally earned) their protection, the home they provide, even their love.  (True love, not invented.)  The whole equation that holds the family together will collapse, or so they feel.  When I left for college, one of my more world-wise high school friends said, “You’ll never be our friend again.  We won’t know you.”  It was almost as though I’d suddenly revealed I was gay — different but unimaginable by “normal” people.

Because of my jobs (mostly taken because it was the only choice on both sides) I know a lot of “degraded” people.  I mean, I’ve worked with them,  talked to them, thought about them, tried to figure them out, written tickets for court and gotten convictions.  I didn’t have them over for dinner.  (I never have ANYONE over for dinner.)  I’m not good at “doing good.”  That’s the source of some of my guilt.

One rez man had a nice life, a good wife, a house and all that.  He walked off from it to join the “street people,” those we used to call winos.  One day I saw him propped against an alley board fence in the sunshine and weeds and decided to go interview him.  Why had he made this choice?  He said it was for freedom, that the house was full of bossy people.  He did not mention that in the past he had caused the accidental death of a child.  

This is not to mention my life as a "dogcatcher" which my mother, totally embarrassed, called “a government job.”  Not elective.  It was a civil service job with a panel interview.  The deciding vote was from a Black man, partly out of solidarity with a minority (female) and partly because he really got off on my stories about Browning: bears and wolves, cowboys and Indians.  If filth is degrading, I know a lot about animal poop and hideyholes where drunks have been peeing and throwing up.  Sometimes I need the ego-defense of dissociation.

In fact, since I always took low-pay, low-prestige jobs (even in the ministry where success is defined as a big congregation in a very nice building), I discovered that one way to buy books instead of paying rent was to take on a really repulsive old wreck of a house, scrub it out, throw on some paint, and do without dishwashers and so on.  I drew the line at trailers.  NO trailers.  

The other line I draw is that the space must be MINE.  I will not share.  I don’t want things moved around.  I don’t want anyone breaking the protocol that keeps thing functioning.  It’s happened and the consequences are never good, though the intentions might have been.  It’s my biggest paranoia in Valier where people might want to come over and “improve” you.

I don’t know whether Stockton considers this freedom dimension.  I also think that she and her cohort do not experience degradation very much — just the idea.  I do hear stories about her fancy thinkers, the ones with French names, turning up at the San Francisco bath houses.

What I discovered about myself was that I can bear almost any degraded environment — unheated, rusted, filthy, even stinking.  (I don’t mind mice but bugs and rats are deal breakers.)  But I will not tolerate being degraded or confined or dominated socially.  I think that’s partly what I mean when I say it’s very hard to shame me.  

Most people around here are the other way around: if they have an nice house, good clothes, and esp. a new, clean car, they will accept an incredible amount of personal degradation.  In fact, they won’t even realize it, because it can be the norm for blacks, gays, women and drunks.  I dress in baggy old men’s work clothes, a “skin” that protects my disguise.  Stockton offers a whole chapter. 

There are a LOT of articles listed by Google that try to work out the relationship between guilt (usually defined as something you did that you knew you shouldn't do) and shame (something essential about yourself that is disgraceful, that can't be erased).  But I want to add a third factor that comes for me from aging:  frustration.  Something you want to do, have the ability to do, but are prevented from doing by circumstances outside your control.  The climate changes, the economy falls through, you catch a disease . . .you get old.

Jim Harrison

Now that I'm aging, I can't unscrew lids of containers, pull apart either the little blisters of meds or the plastic wraps on string cheese.  I can't hammer nails straight, see to thread a needle, and so on.  I'm often a little off balance, forget sequences like closing up the house at bedtime.  Jim Harrison has just died and I reflect that the one thing that I remember most vividly of his writing is a passage about him always forgetting how to take a bath and ending up sitting on his bed, still soaking, getting the bed wet.  He saw another world with that errant eye and went there.  In the end a friend (male) sat with him a little while and taught him a simple routine he has used ever since.

Did I forget what I was writing about?  Stockton's Chapter Two is entitled "Anal Economics in the History of Black Neighborhoods."  I need a couple of days to get the lid off it.

CLOTHES AND SKINS

Traditional warshirt

Note that the bottom is not cut off square,

but keeps the shape of the animal.

Chapter two of “Beautiful Bottom, etc.” is entitled “Cloth Wounds, or when Queers Are Martyred to Clothes: Debasements of a Fabricated Skin.”  The idea seems to be wanting to wear clothes normally assigned to the “other” gender, but I don’t think it works that well in a post-Chanel world where we all wear — or don’t wear — whatever we can get away with.  Anyway, the binary gender world gets ambiguous (men in skirts) and various when one takes a planetary approach, unless you’re talking about New Guinea penis sheaths which are definitely gender assigned.  

Anyway, I’ve been looking for a place to wedge in concerns of Native Americans instead of all the black/white stuff, so maybe this is the place.  The central dilemma of NA’s is not whether they’re male or female, but whether they’re NA or “white.”  I suppose “vanilla” still works and that it works for either the standard Euro mode (on top) or the standard kind of sexuality (assigned holes), though in fact both race and gender (certainly gender/desire) use vanilla in similar ways.

So for the NA (and let’s stick with “he” because most vanilla people are already totally confused and misinformed about NA’s in general) the real question is how to reconcile being NA and being assimilated/educated, and it is often presented as being about clothes.  A pre-contact NA would have had only a breech clout, if it’s warm enough, or pieces of clothes: a long fringed shirt, accompanied by tie-on sleeves and leggings, all of which can be adjusted.  If an NA man were active, for instance hunting, he would just wear the shirt, which was quite long.  

If you went up to the Heart Butte high school and looked around, you would get the impression that anyone under eighteen is in black sweats, like ninjas.  Or if the weather is warm, shiny to-the-knee basketball pants that look like skirts.  In the Sixties players wore shorts so short that the Pentecostals considered them indecent.

What Stockton suggests is that “plain style” is a Euro-convention that forces conformity by indicating respectability.  (That's the dark three-piece suit, matched.)  NA’s have an opt-out for ceremonial clothes, which means a full suit (Euro-style) made of buckskin and beaded in strips plus moccasins and a Sioux-style (fanned) eagle-tail-feather headdress.  The spectacular formal wear of an NA is therefore at the opposite end of the spectrum from tuxedos and indicates the opposite of shame or wounds.  (Does a cummerbund suggest a bandage?)

What Stockton, in her circumscribed academic world, doesn’t seem to know is that cowboys wear elaborate shirts with creative yokes and pearl snaps, plus jeans (quite stylized), silk scarves (NOT farmer bandannas) and what used to be wide-brimmed hats but are now more likely to be billed caps.  These confer status — even privilege and competence — as well as being practical.  But the wearers in movies seem to be “injun-haters”, shooting anyone with a headdress off his horse.

Temple Grandin, both sides of everything.

Leaving that, Stockton has another trope to explore that I don’t quite get, but I’m writing on Easter weekend, so maybe I can manage.  It is the “garment worn” — meaning wounded nakedness as in Jesus crucified, and then like his cast-off body/clothing thrown down into his mother’s arms, the Pieta.  As it happens, there’s considerable association with these figures for me because Bob Scriver made a sculpture of each, the Crucifix by commission and then the Pieta when his daughter died.

Bob Scriver's "Pieta"

The Pieta’s Mary figure stayed with us for weeks because when Bob was working on the folds of her robe, he needed “her” to stay still so they wouldn’t change.  I made the gown for the human model to wear and I also made an effigy form and put the gown on it after the model had left.  For a summer I was a costumer at a summer theatre so I used my Lucy Barton book to design what I hoped would be authentic, but used a fabric that was soft polyester so it would drape nicely.  After it had been there a week or so, one of the kittens began to sleep in its lap.  The clothes had acquired a comforting mother dimension, cross-species.

Garment as symbol comes up in the Easter story “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his garments (ta himatia) and divided them into four parts, to every soldier a part, and the coat (kai ton chitona). Now the coat was without seam, woven whole from the top down. Therefore, they said among themselves, let us not tear it, but cast lots for it, whose it will become. Thus the saying in Scripture was fulfilled.”  So the principle of “not-dividing” that which is whole is invoked.  

But since Jesus was nailed to the cross, had thorns thrust onto his head, and was speared in the side, he was certainly wounded and there are many symbolisms for that.  The wound as a speaking mouth, the wound as a place of entry for truth, the wound as stigmata, being marked.  Even a strange Euro myth about pelicans feeding their babies with blood from a wound in their side like that of Jesus.  Blood as milk.

Clothing a mastectomy scar with a tattoo.

In these times some have made our skins more splendid than our clothing and there are businesses who will remove tattooed skin, preserve it and frame it for the families to keep.  This counters the stories of Jewish holocaust victims’ skins made into lampshades but rhymes with the rumored books bound with the skin of the author at the author’s request.

Clothing as a second skin, deliberately ripped, purposely leaving exposed skin in usually shielded places, or — going the other way, homely fabrics studded with rhinestones — can be meant to turn away shame, to either suggest a working person or to demonstrate glamour even in a t-shirt.  But “high” sophisticated culture can be embarrassed by such efforts, respecting plain elegance.  Abby on NCIS exemplifies tacky "theme" glamour.

I suppose this is where “camp” comes in, when sophisticated wealthy people violate expectations for fun.  In “White Mischief”, about African colonialists, the corrupt swankers cross dress.  Charles Dance in an evening gown and earrings is not to be missed. (I couldn't find a photo.) Or if one is enslaved, it can be a point of mockery to wear exaggerated goofy imitations of fancy dress.  Though sometimes, like toddlers in high heels, they are “trying it on.”  The maid trying on the ball gown of Miss. Scarlett.  A transvestite is crossing over vestments, changing clothes, but a transsexual may be changing sexual skin, with the healing wounds of surgery instead of the stitching of clothes.

Christian imagery would say that the flesh shirt of the body is torn off at death and thrown down like the skin of a snake into the embrace of those who love, as a memento, a mere keepsake of a changed being.  And that those in hell are trapped in their burning flesh, unpurified.  Pretty drastic stuff, but that’s the point of religious symbols.

Socially, something as small as which side your buttons are on can be gender significant.  White people could hardly rest until they got the girls of Heart Butte into “proper” glamorous ball gowns for their senior prom — echoing the British custom of “coming out,” a formal declaration of readiness for marriage.  They thought they were making life wonderful for those girls.  But were they inflicting humiliation?  When the girls leave the rez and discover they are not equal after all?  And the feminists tell them they were acting like sex objects, not valuable marriage partners.  (They have to give the expensive dresses back after that one night.)

SID GUSTAFSON, WRITER

https://scriggler.com/SharePost/Story?cash=3a16552853c5421a7d5a0460d4501c32

Sid Gustafton, who is from the high-achieving family of Rib Gustafson, is known around here as a veterinarian like his father and brother, except that he has a specialty practice in race horses.  He teaches equine behavior, and posts on Twitter.  In addition, he writes both nonfiction and novels, often based on truth, like “Swift Dam,” just published.  The link above is to a website called “Scriggler” where you can read his story called “Smallpox.”  He often expands such stories into whole novels.  Lately he has been recording short stories on Sound Cloud, something I would like to do but never get around to actually doing.  

“Swift Dam” is about the 1964 catastrophic dam collapse on Birch Creek and the lethal consequences, changing lives and the land right up until now.  I was here at the time.

The year 1914 is the year Bob Scriver was born, and those who knew him will realize that he is sort of the inspiration for the character called Stuf.  Sid knew him mostly by stopping as a kid with his father at the Scriver Studio and taxidermy shop in the Sixties.  Raised on the Blackfeet reservation and often spending the summer cowboying with someone like Billy Big Springs Sr., Sid has more ties to the rez land and families than Jimmy Welsh. Jr. did, though no one would dare say so.  Every spring Sid goes up to the grave of James Willard Schultz, which is near the Gustafson ranch on Two Medicine, and does a little maintenance.  Schultz was a white man who married a Native American and longed to be NA.  His versions of their lives were sometimes a bit more dramatic than real, which is not an advantage in this prudish just-the-facts culture.

Sid is more romantic than I am but quite truthful once you allow for that.  “His” bears do things that “my” bears would not.  He’s inclined to mysticism and always searching for true love, but very much anchored in practical how-to.  Bob Scriver would have loved these stories.  It’s good to be near Sid some of the year and via the Internet.

www.sidgustafson.com   More books, photos, ideas.

"BEAUTIFUL BOTTOM, BEAUTIFUL SHAME" by Kathryn Bond Stockton

Stockton’s “Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame” evokes such a storm of ideas — well, not QUITE ideas, but sort of shadowy concepts that seem so vital that I try to capture them in ideas, words, diagrams. I’ve said in the past that I’m very hard to shame, but I carry a lot of guilt. There are scholarly discussions about the difference between shame and guilt.

In some strange way I relate that to Bob Scriver’s observation that I know what I CAN do, but don’t know what I CAN’T do. Of course, he was so innocent that he asked his fourth wife if she were an alcoholic and when she said “no,” he took that as fact. I think it was a way of putting the blame for her excesses on her, so that it was not his fault for not recognizing and dealing with her binges, but rather hers for misleading him, in spite of the facts being so obvious that everyone in town not only saw that SHE was a drunk, but were always telling me that HE had become a drunk. I refused to believe that. 

Humans are so bad at looking at plain facts because it demands changes in what we do, and giving up old attachments to what we wanted to happen. Is repression the came as constipation? Or depression?

This Stockton book made me look again at the binaries I’ve been claiming as the basic neurological construction of “the world” that an infant must make in order to think. I’ve talked about the intrauterine binaries of moving/static, sound/silence which are constructed (actually built into neurons as soon as they exist) from experience in the womb. And then the falling/embraced, fed/hungry, quenched/thirsty, cold/hot, bright/dark; all expressed as simultaneous in the efforts of the saints to describe their mystical experience of the Holy.

But I never even thought of the binary of filthy/clean, a nearly pre-word concept expressed by a gutteral hiss signalling, “Put that down! It’s filth!” Of course, babies — like puppies — put it right in their mouth anyway. It is the most morally tagged, most unilaterally stigmatized of all the pairs.

Only recently have I understood that proper solid excretion is at least in part controlled by the management of water — drinking a glass of water may provide enough hydraulic whateveritis to release the gut knot. Rather Freudian counsellors have interpreted constipation as refusing to surrender to the mother, who demands obedience and then immediately destroys the evidence.

There’s no doubt that my mother and I had a boundary problem, and that she had plans for me that I refused to fulfill. In the end she forced compliance with the enema nozzle, medically authorized but experienced as rape. 

Kozy Kamp

This next vignette will seem like a tangent, but slightly more polite. In the Fifties we were camping in our Kozy Kamp, a travel tent trailer and spent the night in some campground that had good old pit privies. My mother had made coffee for herself with a percolator on the Coleman stove and dumped the used grounds out onto newspaper, along with some other food scraps. She had not emptied the coffee basket, expecting to do that at the hole in the seat of the privy. Half-dreaming as usual, I just threw the whole packet of stuff down the hole.

When my mother discovered what I had done, she was enraged. She threatened to make me climb into the pit to retrieve that basket. I thought she meant it. Even my father paid attention. My brothers thought it was a good idea. Only lately have I reflected that it wasn’t just the basket lost, because she used coffee as a goad to keep her doing all her many chores, because that’s what her role was as the mother. How would she make coffee now?

My mother and my youngest brother.

I’m much older than she was then. (She conceived me when she was thirty.) I recognize that she was depressed. (Her mother was dying and my father was showing the first symptoms of his head injury, plus there was never really enough money and my father objected to her two ordinary comforts: alcohol and cigarettes.) It took her all concentration to keep us respectable.

Looking back, it seems to me that she had a curious lassitude that intensified at the end into the blood cancer that killed her, until she had little energy for anything. I feel something like the same lassitude in myself except when I’m writing. She went back to a little alcohol and many cigarettes. I go to ideas. Which I can have lying down.

But I share her idea that coffee would help. She often said, “I wish I had a cup of really strong hot coffee!” No matter how I tried to produce that or how competent the restaurant was, the coffee was never strong or hot enough. I finally decided it was symbolic.

I make cone filter coffee and it’s often cold when I drink it because once I hit the keyboard I forget everything else. I have to make a rule never to set my mug down where it can spill onto the keyboard. I’ve never gotten into espresso except at Starbucks where I drink latté and enjoy teasing the barrista. (“What flavor would you like?” “Coffee flavor, please.”) Even as latté, it’s very hot. Just recently my local Albertson’s evidently bought a low-cost supply of Boyd’s coffee which was my mother’s brand. I recognized the first sip. An Oregon store must have closed out.

But all this is only elaboration of the ideas in Stockton’s book, which relies quite a bit on Bataille’s philosophy, a guy who spent a lot of time thinking about shit. As in a pit privy. As in Pasolini:  in one of his movies there is a scene that haunts me.  A woman being punished is naked, sitting up to her neck in what appears to be sewage. Her crime was disobedience. (I hope for her sake it was not real excrement but rather gravy and meatballs, which look similar, which is also something to think about — how sometimes food-going-in looks much like food-coming-out.) And then I think about “Mineshaft.” If you don’t know what the reference is, don’t look it up.

Pasolini

The opposite of clean is dirty, but filthy means something different, more like infective, dangerous, totally rejected. Dirt can be the matrix of growth, something fertile, a source of life. The opposite of dirty is clean, but clean doesn’t have to mean sterile, just safe, digestible. Clean dirt? One’s mother teaches these things to her toddler. To defy her, think filthy. Smearing excrement is not an unusual symptom of child rage.

It takes me a long time to work through all this stuff, because I have to figure out what the abstractions and structural relationships are, and then translate them into human memory and story. Then I have to go walk it off. (That’s a lie. This kind of thing fills me with lassitude. They say walking is good for that, but it’s a little like telling a depressive to cheer up.) Writing like this — going from “high” academic theory to applications in my real past (and note that all the people mentioned have been dead a long time — except me, of course.) is quite unlike simple memoir or even testimony.

It is not lightly done, because it changes one’s view of the world. It’s like doing psychoanalysis, which is not usually done alone. And it often hurts, because it takes the depths of loss and misunderstanding even deeper before it can be reconstituted into something better. One might even say “cleaner.” But at least finally more free. It appears to be something I CAN do.

The point of the clean/dirty dyad is that dirty things get pushed away, denied, even criminalized. The point of this Stockton book is that both being black and being gay are “dirty” and therefore denied, stigmatized, sometimes equated. She proceeds by talking about the “Down Low” but I’m not up for that yet. More reading. It pulls in boys-at-risk, because the worst “dirty” thing about MSM is that it spreads the infection of HIV to innocents (if there is such a category).