JAY VEST IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

Talking to Tom Carrels about Jay Vest made me curious, so I looked him up on Google. It was a surprise of the good kind and I downloaded four documents:

I. www.uncp.edu/home/vestj/ which is his faculty CV and bib.

II. WHO COUNTS AS INDIAN IN POST APARTHEID VIRGINIA - ...www.mitsawokett.com/

III. [PDF] THE OLDMAN RIVER AND THE SACRED: A MEDITATION UPON APUTOSI PII ... Impacted by a water storage dam during the late eighties, the Old Man. River, in present-day Alberta
www2.brandonu.ca/Library/cjns/25.2/cjnsv25no2_pg571-607.pdf -

IV. [PDF] THE HERO'S JOURNEY IN JAMES WELCH'S SACRED GEOGRAPHY by JHC Vest - 2005 - Using an auto-criticism reflecting the author's ... James Welch's Fools Crow has figured greatly in that odyssey
www2.brandonu.ca/Library/cjns/25.1/cjnsv25no1_pg337-353.pdf

Jay came through Browning (I suppose he was actually in Missoula with side trips) at a liminal time -- meaning “on a threshold,” because that piece across the bottom of the door is called the limen. The same word, sometimes spelled “limin” means the threshold of perception, the least amount of sensation that can be detected. Psychologically and theologically, it is meant to be the point of entrance, transition, crossing, often into holiness or at least potential. It was a liminal time for the whole planet as the cultures shifted towards openness and experiment; for me because I was newly divorced; and for Jay because he was just reaching that point in a young man’s life when he’s trying to figure out his identity.

Normally there’s a lot of thrashing around, experimenting, emotion, and risking at such a time and that was certainly the case with Jay. I don’t think I ever exchanged two words with him, but there were conversations about him -- sometimes approving and other times not. He was one of the MANY who came thinking that if they could sort of meld with the Blackfeet, they would become powerful and knowing. The trouble was that they usually picked out advisors who were pretty full of it, to be frank. Tricksters. I won’t name them. Of course, I have a certain point of view which is that of a white female older woman. Sceptical. A little over-experienced. Okay, cynical. After all, I’d known some of these people since they were twelve and my husband and father-in-law were older than most of them, as old as the enrolled grandfather elders and here since 1903.

Liminal time in the theatre is when the curtain goes up. In church it is the call to worship. At a concert it is the first chord after the tuning up. At that time this country's crossing of the limin into some new way of being was almost to the point of critical mass, the tipping point. Something happened and the whole political scene backed off. I think just became terrified, maybe like now.

Jay was pursuing his degree, now in hand. Both of us have gone through many new spaces since then, stepped over many a limin. My hope is -- and I think there is some evidence -- that the world is again crossing a threshold, but the point is that in a liminal time/space anything can happen. The car is out of gear. There is space to be Dionysian, even with an Apollonian president. But immense destruction can be one result.

The paper about “The Hero’s Journey in James Welch’s “Fools Crow” is competent and engaging, useful in particular for people who don’t have much background in Blackfeet matters. I see that now Jay is claiming his own enrollment in the Mohacan Indian Nation but I don’t know much about that group.

The paper called “The Oldman River and the Sacred: A Meditation Upon Aputosi Pii’kani Tradition and Environmental Ethics” is the one that had me wielding two colors of highlighter and scribbling in the margins. There is really good stuff in this paper, mixing realistic sociology with story and theory. Of course, I like it because it’s theory I can understand.

SOCIOLOGY: “. . .the Pii’kani community was divided in response to the dam, which created a position easily exploited by the outside interests. Since Native Modernists, motivated by poverty, tend to be willing to accept change provided it brings the promise of monetary benefit, they were largely unopposed to the environmental degradation. It was, however , the Pii’kani traditionalists who had the most to lose. In the traditionalists’ identification with place, specifically the Oldman River, these Natives were impacted with a major disruption of their religious ethos and cultural identity.”

STORY: “According to Campbell, mythology concerns the mystical dimension, for without this you have ideology. Myth also concerns ‘the pedagogy of the individual, giving him a guiding track to guide him along.’”

THEORY: “Elements of this [spiritual] integration include include: first, purification of body, soul, and spirit; second, spiritual expansion in realizing a relationship to all that is; and third, identity or realization of unity in a state of oneness with the totality.” (The reference is to Joseph Epes Brown, “ The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian,” 1982 p. 113. Vest studied with Brown.)

These ideas have not been exhausted and the development of ecological and scientific awareness of a changing planet makes them sharply useful. I’m a little surprised that Jay doesn’t pick up on some of the more recent thought. Many of the people he quotes have been gone for some years, which doesn’t make them less true and useful, but the torch has not been extinguished -- just handed on. Today the challenge is the Alberta Tar Sands and international high-tension power lines. The corporations are far more dangerous and powerful than anything in the Seventies.

Jay seems not to have heard about the “RENEGOTIATION OF THE BLACKFEET REALITY” . . . strongly challenging the idea of “culture,” which is so obsessed with accuracy that it tries to freeze everything at one point in time when, in fact, the shared lives of people on the land is always dynamic and changes as it goes.” (Quote from the recent history seminar at Piegan Institute.) Nor has he heard about Jack Gladstone’s generous troubador synthesis of song, philosophy, tradition and land.

There is a website where students critique their professors and Jay took some hard comments, mostly having to do with rigidity. I realize that today’s college students tend to be a self-important and contemptuous lot, but it sounds as though now HE’s the Culture Police, quoting a stack of white men’s books and telling about things that happened to him a half-century ago. Why does this happen so often? It seems as though he ought to be here celebrating and growing with the rest of us.

Maybe we should organize a convocation of all those white and low-quantum guys who came through here in the Sixties and Seventies, looking for liminality. Some found it and were transformed. We should find out what it did for them. And see what they can do for us.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN -- BUT I CAN SEE IT FROM HERE

Ang Lee, always at the cutting edge of the culture, has picked up on the returning interest in the Sixties and Seventies by making a movie about Woodstock. (“Taking Woodstock,” now showing at Cannes.) But is he really? The diagnostic anecdote is that when Lee advertised for extras -- a LOT of young people willing to get naked, slide around in the mud, and have their faces painted with flowers -- there were plenty of applicants. The problem was a modern fashion: shaving one’s pubic hair. In the Woodstock days one didn’t even shave one’s legs and pits! What does it mean? My best guess is that it’s a refusal of adulthood. An unwillingness to risk being grabbed by the short hairs? I had no idea it was a fashion and it seems to me an inconveniently itchy one.

I’m always talking about the Aquarian Revolution in San Francisco -- as though I were there, even though in the Sixties I was in Browning, Montana, reliving the 1860’s, a steady stream of tragedy and loss for the Blackfeet. These were indigenous people the hippies intended to make common cause with, if they ever figured out where they were and what to do. I never heard any Blackfeet say he was at Woodstock, though some made it to Haight/Asbury.

So I thought I’d do a little research on those people a little younger than myself, the hedonistic idealists, the ones I wanted to join but didn’t. I've told about the young man on his way to Stanford who stopped in Browning long enough to help build the fireplace in Bob’s studio and then asked me to go on to California with him. (I wonder where he is now?)

My counterculture participation was mostly buying a copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue and writing theatre reviews for the Portland Scribe. I never tried weed, or even tobacco, much less alcohol and free sex. Where are those people now? I googled and my first hit was a win: http://aquarianrevolution.blogspot.com/ It’s a blog that is nothing but long interviews of former hippies now living in Arkansas. It was intended to become a book, though there’s no sign that it has. I realize now why Clinton did so well in Arkansas: there is evidently a huge population of free-thinking do-gooders, all quietly minding their own business. I can only hope this is true of other places.

The book it makes me think of is “Class: A Guide Through the American Status System” by Paul Fussell in which Fussell calls a certain kind of people, brought up in prosperity with “good” educations but living as hippies, “Class X.” This is not the same as Generation X, which is an age group, the children of the “boomers” I guess. Class X goes back to the rebel younger sons in Europe. Maybe it goes back to Caravaggio, about whom I’m currently reading. The group Fussell proposed was later corrupted to Bo-bo or “bohemian bourgeois” which is another book which I haven’t read. (“Bo-Bo’s in Paradise.") At least it breaks up the constant obsession with the Middle Class, which is much less the high-school-style uniformity that is assumed. At least I hope so.

These earnest life stories from people now old enough to be grandparents (maybe ten years younger than myself on average) are full of trap-doors and surprises, even though the over-all gist of them is about the same: “I had an easy childhood; in college I woke up to the draft, riots and urban blight; I couldn’t sustain an ordinary respectable job; and then I began to find my way to a rural life doing work with my hands and gardening. Since then I’ve tried to help others.” Sometimes there are sequential partners, other times only one. Always a lot of concern for the children. ALL the children. Always social action on behalf of the poor. Always worry about education, kinds of knowledge.

They’re an admirable lot, not in the least dangerous, quietly resisting Bush as they wait for an Obama. And they DID see the economic plunge coming. They were prepared. Along the way most lost interest in their early psychedelic explorations, though there are no regrets and many credit those epiphanies with finally putting their feet on the right path. Not many of them in this town. I can only think of a couple and they are as resented now as they were when they were in high school. In Montana one says they’re “different” and looks away. Lots of them up on the rez, though, but Montana isn’t the right climate for living in tents and raising veggies.

It’s been a while since Woodstock. Even the dangerous anarchists are out of jail and doing good works now. The generation of direct descendants has been mostly orderly, diligent, and honorable. But they DO know how to be hippies living on the edge of society if that should become necessary. I suspect that their books -- which they are bound to write -- won’t be conventionally published, but that these are the people who will be quite willing and able to self-publish. Maybe they’re doing it right now. After all, a blog is self-publishing and I just read a LOT of Aquarian Revolution stories this afternoon.

I suspect that the Aquarians, like every other category, exist in a continuum from mellow to pretty damn dark. I’m curious about that dark edge and what it might do if it got activated. I suspect that now it’s busy smuggling drugs, but if drugs (at least marijuana) is decriminalized, then what will happen? The last counter-culture was fueled in part by the Vietnam War, but these “sand wars” are different, they say. Still, the underculture, the criminal culture, the subculture is now global just like the international corporations that have screwed up our financial systems. How can we appeal to the JFK-style patriotism when the boundaries of nations have been erased? Or did the Peace Corps help to erase those boundaries? It's going to be different this time.