It appears that the spring monsoon has caught up with me again this spring, so as much as I’m urged by cats, I don’t want to get up in the morning. I turned over and dreamt a nightmare — that the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife was burned up in a prairie wildfire and I tried to put the approaching fire out with a wet blanket though my mother wanted me to stop. I failed anyway, so I got up to open cans for the pesky cats, crossing back into reality.
When I returned to bed, I had a happier dream. Trump’s airplane was diverted to Venezuela where a dictator had hopes of a wildly profitable kidnapping but was chagrined to discover that no one wanted to pay any ransom at all and Trump’s check — written on Deutsche Bank — was declined, stamped “insufficient funds.” The dictator attempted to sell Trump to another 3rd World country but no one would have him.
Normally, toward morning I have one of two dreams. In one I’m living in East Glacier in the abandoned two-story yellow house and going over to Bob’s workshop through snow which is mysteriously in the same town. In the other I’m starting college in one of the several colleges I’ve attended. Judging from the splendid traditional buildings, I’m at the U of Chicago and full of expectations. These are happy dreams.
By now I’ve outlived my end-of-life plan and may have outlived my country as I’ve known it. The land here remains the same, which is my salvation — though it’s not assured, given the resourcefulness of profit-makers. I mean, frakking and windmills have made changes I don’t really feel yet, but I might. Certainly at night I can see the red danger lights of the windmills and the strobing cell towers in every small town.
It certainly was not expected by anyone that protecting species would mean that people in Valier found the footprints of grizzly bears in their morning alleys. Worldwide flu pandemics were a story from my mother’s childhood when she survived it but her doctor didn’t. Now my unwashed clothes pile up because I’m afraid to go to the laundromat in a Montana hotspot for covid-19. More afraid than I am of meeting a grizzly.
It certainly was not expected by anyone that protecting species would mean that people in Valier found the footprints of grizzly bears in their morning alleys. Worldwide flu pandemics were a story from my mother’s childhood when she survived it but her doctor didn’t. Now my unwashed clothes pile up because I’m afraid to go to the laundromat in a Montana hotspot for covid-19. More afraid than I am of meeting a grizzly.
The thought of dying for some cause has crossed my mind, since so many do and are honored for it, but I am not proud enough of my country — maybe for my landscape, my eco-niche, since I AM it every day when I get up and face the sky. What good would it do for a dumpster country? I don’t have any “standing” as I was told when I tried to counter the corruption in dealing with Bob’s estate. The most readers I have on a hot topic is about 1,000 people and many of them are there to look at the post about Tom Selleck’s wardrobe because the last image is him in a Speedo. Still, the publishers of my bio about Bob Scriver only printed 500 copies.
The issue of a literary executor has come up, but I’m lucky to even have an inheritor in my dispersed and deceased family. None of my relations ever read what I write.
I’ve been appreciating the sentiments of Sarah Kendzior, though Montana is far from being the Midwest and if you’re going to "flyover" this place, you’d better be pretty high in the sky or you won't clear the Rockies. One can read the first few pages for free at this link below. It’s mostly about St. Louis, which the white intruders to Blackfeet country used as their jump-off point to travel up the Missouri/Mississippi drainage to Blackfeet country. They had no consciousness that the watershed had been created by the melting of the glaciers ten thousand year earlier and Kendzior doesn’t think about it either, but I do, because I don’t think about politics. I think about geology and deep time. The planetary poles are melting.
I do appreciate the phrase of “Images tied together by the logic of feelings” Politkovskaya as quoted by Sarah Kendzior. This is the key to much of my writing and therefore line of thought. It can be zigzag or convoluted, but rarely needs to be “re-wiggled” as the English land-recovery tweet posters describe work on their brooks that had been turned into chutes.
My senior year (1957) I was double-cast as Maria Feodorovna, the Empress asked to authenticate Anastasia. The old woman had survived/evaded the Russian purge of her time. At one point my line was something like: “The red ants have invaded the country. They will fail but then ants of a different color will take over. They will still be ants.” (Unless they are giant killer hornets!)
No one ever resolved the Anastasia question, but I’ve come to value ambiguity and identity shift anyway. Who am I when the continents sail around on tectonic plates and totally transform themselves, carrying along the doomed small lives of animals and plants. Who are hominins to aspire to permanence, only imaginable because of short lives? If one is capable of empathetically entering someone else’s life and learning from it, why isn’t that a good thing?
The wars among nations, political “parties”, and religions are not as relevant as planetary issues, like whatever are the forces are that encourage domination and hoarding all over the globe? Why is there a yearning for democracy at one point and a flight from responsibility at another point? The consequences are massive, many causes are suggested, but no one really understands them except as “Images tied together by the logic of feelings”. We are nearly drowning in images. What the hell is the logic of feelings?
I submit it is the logic of attachment and empathy, but so what? They are more likely to be stories than equations, but they certainly carry feelings. One formal system defines feelings as the inner “gut” guide to whether you are on the right path forward for survival. Are the two banks of the stream of life on one side chaos and on the other side slavery? Then where is the middle? I note that it is a process more than a single state. A culture is not a dumpster but . . .
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