Joseph LeDoux, in his latest column for “Psychology Today,” claims that research for effective anti-anxiety drugs has faltered. The reason he suggests is that the definition of what anxiety is and our practice of treating the behavior instead of the cause or the actual physiological syndrome has proven inadequate. Partly the assumed key value of white males as the measure and beneficiaries of all things has deformed or at least limited the science.
At the same time, in the online newsfeed called “Religion Today,” an article summarizes the unimportance of religious issues among Western Society millennials. There is no suggestion that they are anti-religious, just that they don’t think it matters.
In other words, in two major categories of culture, mental health and religion, the air has gone out of the balloon. Has science out-flanked our traditions? Or is it technology and money? Or are we the victims of a “metonymy,” mistaking the part for the whole in the first place? What IS the “whole” of existence? Our species? (We’re wiping out all the others.) When I see male writers, old or young, making bold diagnostic statements about society, I ask them whether they have taken into account other cultures than their own. Some shut me down at that point. Others respond, bravely, “I guess I didn’t.”
It finally registered on some people around here that I’d come back to the edge of the rez. (I’m a borderline person in several ways.) Two old guys had formed a tiny historical society devoted to visiting the local historical (encounter) places they knew and telling each other the stories. They decided that I would be the next local historical “site” and took me to lunch. We had a fine time. They’re both dead now. But it certified to me the idea of a particular kind of history, just over the time-line horizon. I'm one of the few who remembers some things first hand.
Only a couple of weeks ago, a little delegation of Blackfoot scholars asked to interview me at the library. I was acting as a refugia again, even as an aid in feeling their way towards a new future. They were on their way to the site of a tragic confrontation, the location of the “Baker massacre.”
On my father’s side I’ve done a bit of family history, because my mother saved my father’s photos and my great-uncle wrote out the narrative. I sort of “published” it with a xerox machine and so did my great-uncle. A few cousins seemed to appreciate it. Their children could care less. Later today I’ll take a lot of it to the dump. I sent many of the photos to the Oregon Historical Society.
Sweetgrass Hills
Off and on I’ve lived next to the rez for a half century. The culture of encounter between the indigenous and the invasive (both of them constructed in response to survival) slowly yield to an invasive wave though some niches (Heart Butte) have remained refugia. (“I alone escaped to tell you. . . ) I myself am a culture refuge of sorts, the Sweetgrass Hills of the family landscape, the twining trails.
Over the same decades I’ve searched for a way to be a meta-cultural person, mostly through the idea of “religion.” Study and experience reveal the term to mean institutionalized systems, too rigid to survive. But at the same time holiness is gaining strength both in relation to the land and at the limits of science. Mystical science is slowly forming into something like a community, but not yet institutionalized, only commodified in this invasive society. (New Age) In Afri/Asia sacredness is still a walking meditation, indigenous because it’s on foot.
A squid
My thought has taken into account all mammals, which is part of the reason I respond to LeDoux’s understanding of the pre-conscious brain -- which has to include the whole body to be meaningful. Muscles remember, the nerves of distended tissues can be erotic. I have to think about sentient molluscs, who have followed another path of development. Consciousness is only foam on the surface.
In seminary I was part of a “formation group” not so different from therapy. The black male leader became fascinated with my Celtic skin, meant for dark rain, pale and freckled. Change in emotional blood flow made my face as changeable as the skin of an octopus. If I scratched an itch, the tracks of my nails persisted for a second or two. Terror made me blanch. This was new to him, for some reason, and he tracked it carefully as a window to my innards. The other group members had no interest and looked away. But he was a good Christian, intent on being compassionate, benign, and helpful. Therefore he never saw my poisonous beak, which all octopuses have. A few women in the circle saw.
Religions are detached tentacles, even when they try to return to gospel days, even when they try to join ideas from times and places where survival was nothing like it is today and here. Even when they are so easily morphed that they can fit into small spaces. But I already covered that.
I want to look at the refugia of confrontation, which prove that it’s not over -- “con” meaning “with” and “front” meaning “plane of contact” -- is a kind of intimacy, accepting the same terms of survival, but interpreting them in quite different ways. So some therapists try to make the client conform (with-shape) and others try to set the client free (go roam to see what else there is). I’m just fooling around -- this is a kind of thought-jazz. Riffs.
So much has gone underground both in our government and in our business worlds that there’s little confrontation. Maybe that’s why Trump is interesting. But there’s an excess that becomes bullying and even madness. The only way to argue with a predator drone is a ground weapon of equal devastation, between the two forces reducing humans to bloody ash. So fear is legitimate.
Whole landscapes and built environments are destroyed. This is anti-survival. Distancing. Emptying. Millennia of orchards, vineyards, and irrigation systems all destroyed. Something similar is happening financially. Eurasia is depopulating except for the cities, and replenishment is coming from entirely other people.
This makes the urgency of refugia stronger. The old Blackfeet indigenous practice was to go to a high place, build a little rock wall to mark the spot, lie down and dream, echoing the refuge nature of the hills, old volcanic cones that stuck up above the grinding glaciers so that earthworms as long as your arm and plants not seen elsewhere persisted and survived.
I wrote a story about it. The confrontation was between a Blackfeet boy who wanted the old days and a modern white girl who wanted reconciliation. There were animals. (“Twelve Blackfeet Stories” available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary) I’m a little wary about telling you this. Refugia are endangered by exposure.
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