SEX IS OKAY IF YOU'RE EDUCATED: Part 2 of "Free Radicals"

Talking and thinking about sex are markers of privilege: doctors, lawyers, academics, ministers (but only those of the “learned ministry” -- the denominations that require graduate degrees), all those professional classes.  However, they aren’t supposed to DO it.  In fact, circumspection is part of the entitlement.   The justification for reflection is several-fold.  Anthropological -- they understand the Star Trek prime directive; literary -- they have studied books that are wicked and they generally oppose censorship; therapeutic -- they counsel people in all sorts of predicaments; moral -- though they don’t pass judgment, they curb their own behavior.  This is part of the arrogance of the “privileged” category, which may be marked as “upper” by education but not necessarily by income.  

Most people don’t understand the distinctions between the “learned” (two syllables: lear-néd) and “inspired” (inspiration, related to spirit) ministry.  The “learned” clergy (seen by the media as “liberal”) accepts grad school values: historical perspective, anthropological relativity, ethics rather than rule morality, social evolution.  The “inspired” ministry based on the Bible, conservative values, and direct contact with God, makes room for a certain number of zealots and charlatans.  In general, learned ministers tend to be much more open to gays and experimental sexual arrangements, but only among the “upper” classes, while the inspired ministers tend to be more interested in poor and suffering people, urging them to conversion and prosperity.

But professionals are just as much individuals as any other class.  Knowing ministers from the side of the curtain that the ministers are on is a little like knowing crime from the side of the curtain that the cops and judges are on.  (Great TV series material.  Too bad the church institutions always suppress the religious versions.) On the one hand is what I call the “Dear Abby” factor, which is the way one’s attitude towards behavior changes after walking a LOT of people through pretty tough situations.  When Dear Abby started out, she was confidently strict.  After a decade she was begging people to take care of each other.  And she had completely changed her mind about some of the hot button issues.  No longer was she dealing in stereotypes.

"Laying on of hands" as part of ordination

This works both ways: people who never come up against the reality of poverty and stigma are inclined to be rigid about tolerance, reluctant to intervene, and blind to the limits of liberalism.  They can’t deal with disappointment of facing the reality of ministers being just like everyone else: taking advantage, fooling themselves, doing stuff that’s bad for themselves and others.  But those who are able will quietly seek what mechanisms might get at the bottom of such problems either personally or institutionally.

Intellectual achievement, professional privilege, is like any other source of power.  It can be used for personal advantage: doctors and priests who use their access to children sexually, who avoid intervention even when it is required by law and clearly part of their “job description,” who use blackmail and jealousy for professional gain and corruption.  As a bloc they can exclude the people they are supposed to serve and damage the weak who come to them for help.  An old classmate tells me proudly as she sums up her early life that she was fucked on the floor of her famous professor’s office by the great man himself, feeling that this is somehow a mark of distinction, an accomplishment, not seeing that she was part of the rug rather than the professor.

The major censorship cases of our times, about literary material meant as much to reveal oppression and suffering as to sell obscenity, assume the “maturity” of judges able to read “Ulysses” with comprehension instead of titillation.  In our zeal to lift up stigmatized people liberals overlook little things like jokes about pubic hairs on Coke cans, mayors snuffing up cocaine on video, and other squidgy stuff.  Soon sophistication is a matter of jokingly tolerating icky behavior and Garrison Keillor is telling excrement jokes.  That gives Mrs. Grundy the perfect opening to complain about the coarsening of society while she walks past children living in alleys where there is no bathroom but dodging behind a dumpster.

We find ourselves listening to NPR, trying to decipher cases of international torture (more than a few of them our own) but having to warn the genteel audience that they might be offended so they should turn off the radio temporarily.  Otherwise, Mrs. GoodMom rises up in rage to say, essentially, the world is full of horror and Satanic acts, but I don’t have to hear about it.  I can just put my hands over my ears and remain ignorant.  The preferred upscale pornography is food eroticism.  But don’t let the children partake.  Virtue is slimness, an asceticism.

My family is “scientific” about sex, which can either be an upper class or a bourgeois approach. (The lower classes, of course, are riddled with myths and stupidities.)  This is partly because my aunt stayed with us while she completed her nurses' training at what is now OHSU.  My mother listened carefully to what she said and taught us to say “perineum” instead of pussy.  On her deathbed when I asked if she needed to pee, she muttered, “Pee is not a very nice word.”  My father hid all his Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, etc. books in his sock drawer.  (Why isn’t the symbolism of socks explored as much as that of cigars?) Can anyone really understand in the sense of “digest” such material without discussing it with someone?  

Late at night, driving somewhere, the kids supposedly asleep in the back, my mother was trying to explain to my father what she had just learned in her return to college.  She used the word “puberty,” and my father flared up indignantly, thinking she meant pubic rather than the onset of adolescence.  Of course, he resented her knowing more than he did, so it was displaced emotion.  That dynamic interferes everywhere.

"As an odalisque in the Russell's first home in Great Falls, Montana" from the collections of Amon Carter Museum.  Doesn't say who this is.  Charley Russell was known to hang out with prostitutes.  

Both he and Nancy were sterilized by syphilis.

The upper classes love the feeling of “knowing more”  and the lowest classes claim the same while moving the content of “knowing” to a different ground.  How can you “know” anything about rape without being raped?  (How can you write about Indians on reservations without BEING an Indian on a reservation?)  Our generation of smart professional women (if Great Falls is any example) loves to dress up as prostitutes but does nothing to help the local sexworkers.  Great Falls is an Air Force military base.  The main business street includes “massage parlors.”  The media recently reported a savage attack on an elderly Asian masseuse but not why.  Maybe robbery.  No bordellos -- that’s passé.  All you need now is a cell phone.  So they tell me.

When I realized how many ministers were sleeping around, I asked them about it -- at least the ones who had about the same status as myself.  “What are you doing?”  I never got very good answers, but my impression was that they did it because they could and the opportunities were always there and because it made them feel better.  Why put out money for a high class therapist (most of whom don’t understand ministry anyway) when an obliging and motherly parishioner can secretly reassure you just as well.  If any low-class and suspicious (jealous) person should present a challenge, be shocked, SHOCKED, by such allegations.  Turn it back on them.

I often knew who was gay, who was a guy married to a guy, who was dying of AIDS, who was sleeping around with women, who seemed to be sleeping around but was not, and so on.  No child molestation or I would have turned them in, which would have been professional suicide.  (It got me fired when I turned in people while teaching or working in a nursing home.)  No S/M or serious perversions.  Same among the teachers on the same faculty.  Same among the animal control officers, who were technically deputy sheriffs.  Always theoretically secret -- I think because no one could really understands what to do about it.  

Because then it would be public, dragged out of the dark by the scruff of its neck.  (Where a tom cat bites both prey and female cats in heat.  The Japanese know the seduction of the nape.)

"SILENT TONGUE" by Sam Shepard

Sheila Tousey and the Texas prairie

“Silent Tongue” (shot in 1992, released in 1994) was the first film that Sam Shepard both wrote and directed.  He intended it to be a black-and-white Western, a throwback, but it ended up “sepia,” like old photos.  I’m going to suggest that he wrote and staged this movie as though it were a play except with a little more space (enough for horses) and that it is as much or more Beckett and Shakespeare as John Ford.  I will also try to make the case that he comes closer to the experience of the prairie than any glamour shots of Monument Valley, though both use the long landscapes as though they were cycloramas, kuppelhorizonts at the back of the stage.  

The critics hated “Silent Tongue”, likely because the critics judged it by John Ford templates and because they were urbanites with no other frame of reference.  Oddly, in the end it comes closer to capturing a kind of Native American spirituality than many movies tackling the subject on purpose, and Sam ends up, as always, writing about his own family.  As do we all.

Sheila Tousey, Alan Bates, Dermot Mulroney

Let’s get the family out of the way first.  There are two fathers in this story, played with bombastic verbal skill by two stalwart excessives of stage and screen:  Alan Bates (whom I take to be a version of Johnny Dark) and Richard Harris (an aspect of Sam himself.)  (Shepard spent three years in England at an impressionable age.)  In the background is an approximation of a small road show complete with freaks, managing to be something of a cross between borscht belt schtick and a medieval mystery play.  The songs are the ones that Sam, about the time he was writing this, had been summoning out of his folk song memory for his toddler daughter, but it would be a mistake to overlook the percussive feet of the tap-dancing boy, since Shepard is so much a drummer.  (An early play was nothing but a single actor with percussion accompaniment.) 

Richard Harris

Some of us often remark that one gets at least two families in life: one that’s biological and therefore accidental, and one based on affinities, chosen. A third comes out of one’s own procreation.  Later family can often make reparation for the first and I think it would be fair to say that Shepard and Johnny Dark, as shown in their published letters, formed a healing affinity family that enabled Sam’s biological family with Jessica Lange, for which Shepard was the progenitor.  His model was not his father, but Dark, who also backed him up by fathering Sam’s earlier son.  

But there was always a deep tension between the two families -- the one with Dark and the one with Lange -- that has not been given as much attention as Shepard’s biological, military-based father -- no doubt because Sam seems so often to be portraying that earlier man before the military officer decayed into a drunk.  Certainly in the minds of casting directors.  This particular film, in my view, is for Shepard an attempt at redemption of soul-deep guilt over leaving the first family for the flummery and narcissism of Hollywood, but also for the devotion of an exceptional woman.

The tree is by now such a ubiquitous symbol of so many things that we accept this constructed or at least theatrical tree on the prairie.  It suggests the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil, though at its base is a generous campfire instead of the spring-fed pool in the European version.  It is hung with offal of animals, strung like Malibu wind-chimes or -- to some of us -- like Geronimo’s tree where discarded spectacles are hung tinkling.  But also it invokes the pop-icon image of the burial tree where Plains Indians wrapped and secured their dead.  And, of course, the tree onstage in “Waiting for Godot.”  

The theme is the refusal to let old love relationships die.  Sam was married to one of two sisters, O-Lan, but their mother Scarlett was the real power figure, married to Johnny Dark, Sam’s close friend.  I think she would be pleased to be represented by Tantoo Cardinal.  In 1979 Scarlett had a deep-brain aneurysm that removed much of her thought processes in mysterious ways (“cutting her tongue out”), but didn’t kill her until 2010.  Johnny Dark stayed very close to her and so did Sam when he wasn’t working.  He was always split between leaving to make money and staying to help.

Tantoo Cardinal

  

What the real-life sisters thought about this is unknown, but this film seems to capture the terrible resentment and rage of being tied into something complex and even unnatural.  The son Dark and Shepard shared was also very much wounded by Sam leaving.  Scarlett was the mother of everyone in the group, which lived together.  She seems always to have accepted, to have loved, to enjoy, never rebuking or trying to escape or attack.  Sometimes I wonder if Jessica didn’t have some of the same characteristics.

To Sam, this had to have seemed unnatural, supernatural, but inescapable.  The rage of O-Lan wasn't easy to deal with.  He doesn’t seem to have left the guilt when he left her.  In fact, he dithered for a whole year before abandoning her for Jessica and went after at the urging of Dark.  So in this movie he’s both the son clutching a mannequin to prevent the death of the woman, as well as the father wanting to set his son free with a living woman.  

River Phoenix

By this time, halfway through the film, Alan Bates has become a Lear, guided by his fool son.  Sam has left the real-life pattern for a theatrical pattern, which is more absurd, more surreal, more Beckett.  Also, I would be interested in what a Shakespeare scholar would have to say about the soliloquies.  Are there somewhere written comparisons between the soliloquies of Beckett and Shakespeare?  Shepard says he finally gave up writing these long monologues because they were too hard for actors (except for Bates and Harris) but I suspect also that his inner voice was splitting into an argument with himself, the old binary European division of thesis, antithesis and -- rarely -- synthesis. 

On one level this movie is just a horror film with a lot of American Western stuff and a few Indians.  On another it is about the medieval mysteries of death, reincarnation, evil and punishment, control and greed.  The grotesques of the sideshow are intensely human -- the petrified man who sees it all, the flexible girl who cares for the camel, the two dwarves, the two burlesque clowns, the fire-eater -- and yet they're mysterious.  The Indians are not set-apart but only iconic -- mostly silhouettes on the horizon or the bare legs of the horseback riders when they return the Bates character, somewhat punished but not extinguished.  Except for the tribal women, who are the crux of the whole thing, and -- Greek drama style -- the true carriers of morality.  They are the ghosts, but also the real.

If one removes God from the mystery plays, what remains is not  unlike the world-view of the Plains people, the same questions and assumptions about “death and reincarnation, evil and punishment, control and greed.”  They worried (and still do) about vengeance, the resentment of the dead reaching into the lives of living families, squeezing and snuffing in shadowy ways.  Hippie-blithe dream-catcher floatiness has nothing to do with it.  In the end, the tribal way is often acceptance, in the sense of accepting what can’t be changed.  Figures drawn on buckskin against the broad unscrolling horizon of time on a scale far beyond human.

This film was shot in Texas, but it’s a good example of the genre called “Montana Gothic.”  Patia Stephens in her essay on Dirck Van Sickle (available on Kindle through Amazon) quote the author as saying in “Montana Gothic,”   “The whole scene was in shades of gray, and the utter stillness as well as lack of color made it look like a faded stereoscopic view of somewhere far removed from where Deke felt he should be, and he shivered: it was alien, rejecting, and he was somehow trapped into it and now afraid he’d ended here by error, by walking backward with his eyes closed into what could either be his future -- or his fate.”   A classic description of dissociation brought on by intense and unresolvable emotional experience.  His partner in one story believes “his dead fiancée has somehow become Montana herself, the land as uber-mother embodying mother, wife and lover.”  

What is the difference between a womb and a grave?  Maybe it is a loaded wheelbarrow, like that of the man who now and then crosses the film screen on his way from one to the other.