MISSOULA: HUB OF FIVE VALLEYS

My past with Missoula begins in the fall of 1961 when I attended the state teachers’ conference there.  I stayed in the Victoria Hotel, $4 a night and the desk clerk came up with you to make sure no trespassers were already in the room.  In the night there was a fight between drunks in the hall and I stood on a chair to peer over the transom until the woman threw the man down the stairs and stalked off.  Maybe because my college degree was theatre, I found this dramatic rather than scary.  I have no memory of the seminars and so on.  In 1991 when I was teaching in Heart Butte, I had intended to go to Missoula again, but my principal forbade me, saying it would give me wild ideas.  He wanted me to attend in Butte.

The last time I was in Missoula was for Jimmie Welch, Jr.’s memorial.  No one there recognized me or knew of my connection which was through Bob Scriver’s childhood when his closest friend was Jimmie Welch, Sr. which is why I say “Jimmie” rather than “James.”  Of course, the U of M has been a great friend to the Blackfeet.  They ought to be, since the drug and revolution pipeline leads straight from there to the rez.  

I’ve already talked about the Missoula UU Fellowship and the sharp jolt I got recently on discovering they were stuck just where they were in 1982 when we kept urging them to support the Montana Ministry project.  They did, but with reluctance.  None of the leaders from that time are still there, but the attitude is.  They were not the kind of people Leslie Fiedler would have liked or expected when he sold them his house. 

The other amazing news from Missoula recently is that they had quietly sold their municipal water system to a private Canadian company.  To me that’s a bigger scandal than the one traced by Jon Krakauer about the typically American cultural rot that led to paid sports players who were hardly scholars and rapists who stalked girls’ dorm rooms.

Now the Mayor has taken a leave of absence to go into a dry-out program for his alcoholism.  The President of the University has left, politically compromised, but also unable to turn around falling enrolment,

http://flatheadbeacon.com/2016/09/24/university-montana-fall-enrollment/  “The fall headcount at UM is 10,329 students, down from 10,999 last fall and down 22 percent since 2010.”

What we have here is partly economic collapse, since many of the industries in the area have closed down because they were resource dependent and produced pollution.  But I also take it as an indicator of the collapse of the liberal political and academic world, a structure no longer a lever, a refuge, a nursery of ideas, or much of anything else except a library and a nice campus.  The headquarters of Richard B. Spencer, a white supremacist who defends the Nazi salute, are in Whitefish, 2 1/2 hours’ drive north of Missoula.  Whitefish is a luxury resort town, a sort of lifestyle place.

If you want to know more without my squinty take on Missoula, consult:

http://lastbestnews.com/site/2016/11/in-missoula-downtown-living-scarce-and-in-high-demand/

http://www.missoulacurrent.com

When I was working for the City of Portland, I was aware of people who considered Missoula a suburb of the Northwest.  They had good cars and would leave after work on Friday, come back on the evening of the day before they had to be at work again.  Maybe they were drug runners, but they were more like culture runners, the old sex-drugs-rocknroll crowd in middle age.  They might start out for “George”, the major amphitheatre in the middle of nowhere (eastern Washington), meet people from Montana and just keep coming east.  They didn’t usually cross the Rockies.  Between Portland and Missoula it’s 547 miles, an 8 hour drive .  George is halfway between.

Geologists will explain that “Missoula Floods” is the label for a series of glaciation events.  The Flathead Valley formed a natural impoundment for the melting of the glaciers in the cordilleras on either side.  Missoula was approximately where ice jams formed, like putting a plug in a bathtub, so the water rose until the dam broke from melting or just pressure, sending a wall of water roaring down the Clark Fork and then the Columbia, creating the Gorge for which “George” is a pun.  This happened repeatedly.  One can see the “bathtub rings” left by various iterations.

When the State of Montana was formed, which was not a geological event but rather a surveyors’ task, the western boundary — some say — was supposed to go north/south along the Continental Divide in the Rockies.  Those opinionated “some” say that the surveyors were bribed to move the boundary over to the Mission Mountains because "they" believed there were deposits of silver in the Flathead Valley.  This didn’t prove true.

Missoula is sometimes called “the Hub of Five Valleys,” though it is five mountain ranges and only three rivers: Clark Fork, Bitterroot, and Blackfoot.  It is not just a geological depression, for in winter when the temperature conversions put a lid on the air,it's also a sociological depression.  A quick dash to the big cities of the coast can help.

How does one turn around a town sunk in depression?  Shock therapy?  Okay.  Let’s give the Flathead Valley to Washington State.  Probably not necessary to close the Continental Divide since the snow does that in winter anyway.

So then what would be the humanities center of the state?  If it must have an academic anchor, I would suggest Helena (Carroll College) or Great Falls (College of Great Falls).  They already have good arts programs.  Or maybe, like medical and veterinary schools, there just isn’t enough population in Montana to sustain specialization to that degree.

But why keep the model of academia, which comes from medieval Europe and responds less and less to actual people on the prairies where they live.  Why not let humanities be carried on a network supported by the Internet (Skype included).  Instead of making people pay tuition to be part of it, why not let writers, artists and musicians earn their way into participation and publicity by contributing?  So many credits for a novel, so many for a trio. 

Maybe a formula of combined productivity and quality could be devised so that the best and busiest would be supported.  Rather than imposing standards from back east or from credentialed people, a point system could weight rewards for people from minorities, the young, the old, the cutting edge, the classic, the naive.

Then Missoula could be left alone to be the “lifestyle” location it clearly wants to be, a little imitation of New England where they could indulge their fantasies of safety and bourgeois worthiness, hoping no one would drive down from white Whitefish.  Which is not to guarantee no one will ever throw anyone down the hotel stairs again.

DENIAL, EVASION, BLOCKING

Considering how to design meaningful ceremonies that hope to invite the Sacred is not so much a matter of knowing things as admitting that there is so much we — you and I — don’t know, and —even more worrying — don’t know that we don’t know.  Our body does much unconsciously, edits the incoming sensory code drastically, organizes the brain in selective ways chosen in infancy, and supplies cover stories that keep us from access to raw code.  

Much of learning art is figuring out how to get at whatever the body is not picking up on, actively hiding.  Art’s work is revelation.  But if everything that comes to the senses had to be considered, we’d soon be paralyzed — overwhelmed.  And indeed people who have damage to their internal editing process are living demonstrations.  Stunned.

Institutions, hegemonies, families and society in general are also invested in keeping each of us focused on their interests.  I’m always a little startled when I make some kind of generalization, maybe tentatively, that is immediately seized upon and used for institutional evidence and endorsement.  If I write an indictment of Christianity, some Christian is bound to read it as endorsement. 

It means that much of what I call “running the writing through the wringer” is an attempt to prevent misinterpretation.  Families are particularly prone to looking at their members through stereotypes, either those of the bad seed — the assigned villain — or those of the little genius who is not and doesn’t want to be.  If one’s own family doesn’t think one is real, who can?

Harlow's monkey experiment

Bowlby studied children who were hospitalized without their mothers or whose mothers simply abandoned them for a period of time.  At first the little ones roared with protest, made their displeasure known any way they could.  Then they despaired and sank into depression for a while.  The third stage was that they seemed never to have had any problem.  They were just indifferent and went on with life.  But if, after a while, the mother came back, the child did not welcome her, didn’t seem to recognize her.  In fact, rejection was total and deep.  To the mother it felt like punishment.  To the child it felt like preventing anything so painful happening again.

This same sequence can happen with society.  We’re in the roaring smashing stage in parts of the cities right now.  Clearly some politicians are in denial, simply making declarations of the truth of what they wish really WERE true.  Across suburbia and in small towns, the people go right on mowing the lawn and loading the dishwasher as though nothing has changed.  If the daughter is pregnant or the son is gay, throw them out.  Declare they don’t exist.

Sadly, if a child blocks affection, interaction, encouragement and comforting for fear of pain and more rejection, that child’s development can be severely distorted, close to the point of psychosis or at least sociopathy.  The hope is that contact with the Sacred can break through that shell, re-associate the dissociation, and lend the courage to trust or at least test.  But that’s another of the grandiose narcissisms so typical of humans.

The problem is fatal when the dissociation is so severe and seductive that the only safe place is death.  If the cause is “only” neglect or severe discipline, that doesn’t come close to the catastrophic damage of torture, atrocious bodily invasion, culture collapse.  We do not like to think the worst happens to the least deserving.

What many people think is safety is simply conformity.  There are ceremonies and in conventional society — if you don’t think about them or challenge them, they mostly work — if the society is not too confused or dangerous.  But forming little gated bubbles is a great temptation for pockets of like-minded people and doing that both corrodes larger alliances for economic and defensive institutions and limits the evolution of the people in those guarded places.  By pushing out anyone who seems dangerously different, they make themselves targets and psychologically justify the predatory behavior of the outsiders.

Conformity for the sake of safety is a kind of blindness, a paralysis, and it is “fractal” in the sense that guarded anxious people create the same pattern in their family dynamics and those add up to whole communities that are “stuck” and xenophobic, not to say racist.  What was patriotism becomes jingoism, reducing icons of unity like flags and statues to focal points for resentment.  The Sacred evaporates.

It is replaced by greed and profit.  Damaged kids make great little money-makers, either directly (errand runners for drug and gambling criminals) or indirectly through the funding in the institutional response to disorder (prisons and policing).  Of course, they are natural commodities for trafficking.  

HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis — plus violence — keep the kids enervated and powerless, so they plug the pharma industry into the system and die before they can form alliances.  Media machines are divided between flogging fear because it sells and converting real virtue into Disneyland ride tickets.

In the face of all that, imprinting and attachment still happen, still make entrance points for change and caring right in the middle of thieves and rapists, racketeers and bribed politicians.  Mutation and evolution happen right in the middle of war and tragedy.  Survival happens.

Not every person is corrupt and selfish.  Many social groups and individuals still manage to raise healthy children and to reach out to the suffering.  Empathy educates us all.  Our mammal hearts are warm.  It has been the secret of the persistence of our kind for aeons.  

The fall of the Roman Empire has been on our minds for quite a while and Jared Diamond has explained vividly how some civilizations thrive and others collapse — mostly a matter of resources rather than virtue.  But now we have the fossils of two hundred rough drafts of hominins and near-humans, mostly their teeth and brain-cases.  They bite.  We should not deny and reject them.  

When I saw that an academic paper was entitled “F**k Jared Diamond,” and by now has followers and even a YouTube video, I laughed.  Now I suppose I’m going to have to sort through it all to see what it means.  It won’t be anything Sacred.   But who knows.  Maybe it will be real.

As a shortcut, I watched the YouTube rant.  It seems a Native American wants to indict Europe for its atrocities in America and uses China as contrast -- blocking out the Black Plague from Asia that decimated Europe and ignoring Genghis Khan.  The irony is that Diamond's main occupation has been focussed on songbirds in New Guinea, not even Chinese bird flu which occasionally sweeps the world.

"DISCIPLINED HEARTS" by Theresa DeLeane O'Nell

When I was taking a dive into the materials and theories about PTSD, one book was quite different.  It was “Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity and Depression in an American Indian Community” by Theresa DeLeane O’Nell.  The community in focus is the Flathead Valley complex of Salish/Kootenai/Flathead/Pend d’Oreilles.  It’s in the category of “Jimmy P,” the movie about a Blackfeet veteran suffering from PTSD which is based on a book called “Reality and Dream.”  But this book is not clinical.   Some call it “ethnopsychology.”  

What it comes down to is that O’Nell went to St. Ignatius, north of Missoula, and just listened to a lot of people.  The motive was the high rate of suicide among those people and their constant declaration that all the tribes are depressed.  But what does “depression” MEAN to those people? 

These tribes, mostly “high plateau”, are quite different from Blackfeet and have existed in rivalry for centuries, partly because of their different ecologies.  The Blackfeet lived in bands that moved around a vast windswept area in pursuit of abundant buffalo.  The Flathead complex of people were in a verdant valley with much water and less violent weather.  They were contacted by Jesuits early, had friendly relations with them, and accepted the Christian paradigm.  Now and then a small group would cross the Rockies after buffalo, but for the most part they stayed on the west side.  Their reservation lands were broken into a checkerboard, which forced them into assimilation.  Today their tribal community college, “Salish/Kootenai” does well and Blackfeet go there to study.

At first it seems sort of dumb to wonder about depression among a people whose lands and culture were pulled out from under them, forcing them into poverty and stigmatizing them as losers.  Isn't it obvious?  What distinguishes this study is that O’Nell wanted to know exactly how they, still maintaining the concepts of their persisting if suppressed culture, thought depression meant.  Which of the array of emotions and points of view were the ones they really believed?

First of all, she listened to a lot of stories about how dumb the white men are.  They were little vignettes of encounters between Indians and whites in which the whites betrayed that they just didn’t get it.  They were the Indian equivalent of Doug Gold’s “A Schoolmaster Among the Blackfeet” which greatly offended political Indians who realized they were being made fun of.   Such stories are also told about immigrants who misunderstand and television writers use them all the time for comedy between whites and blacks or the generations.  

"Opening the Beaver Bundle" by Bob Scriver

Bob Scriver took a different attitude.  He used to say that Indians believed that all white men were crazy and therefore white men got away with a lot, the way one indulges little children who don’t know any better.  He himself was the butt of the opinion that all “artist fellers” are crazy and unaccountable, as his own family explained him.  

What O’Nell saw was that these Flathead stories had a strong moral component, in that they always made the tribal people seem more compassionate, more tolerant, and just in general morally superior.  This was a defense against stigma and chimed with the Germanic admiration of all things natural/innocent.  White people were simply mean and corrupt, the way many youngsters in our culture see grownups.

In the second section (there are three) O’Nell listens carefully to tribal people as they tell her how they feel.  Their idea of depression is not the modern physiologically confirmed black paralysis of the person who cannot get out of bed.  Rather there are three constant themes: mourning over real loss; being aggrieved over injustice that can’t be resolved or escaped; and feeling worthless.  The core of all three is loneliness.

This book was written with the cooperation and guidance of the Flathead Cultural Committee and often uses words in what I assume is Flathead, but I have no keyboard symbols for them, so I’ll stick to my clumsy whiteman approximations.  I do, however, participate in some of this as James Willard Schultz did when he entitled his book “Why Gone Those Times?”  For instance, O’Nell speaks of the “geography of loss,” meaning consciousness of the places of accidents (often marked with white crosses) where relatives and friends died, or the locations of old-time ceremonies that are now deserted.  On the Blackfeet side, the three bridges that were washed out in 1964 are markers of tragedy, even though they are rebuilt.

The overwhelming injustice of being a peaceful land-based culture that was attacked, looted, and decimated is too much to grasp.  But constant stigma-based put-downs, exclusions from public places, and failure of the legal machinery to support the claims of tribal people continue to be reminders that they are “lesser.”  This is when it’s a comfort to feel that whitemen are morally stunted and Indians are better because they feel pity and offer compassion and comforting.

Some say these are moccasins for the dead because the soles are beaded.

These are problems of boundaries that recur around the planet as one culture overwhelms another.  It was particularly marked here in Montana because the Industrial Revolution made the encounter even devastating.  Steamboats and railroads made it easy to crush cultures without metal machinery.  North American indigenous tribes are sometimes described as “Stone Age,” because of that, and the implication was that their culture would be “neanderthal,” simple and empty.  But it was, if anything, more elaborate, poetic, and fitted to the land than the “high” culture of Europe.  And it was technological, meaning Indians are well suited to the future.

What are beads but pixels?

There were people who protested against genocide.  A compromise was reservations, where the very different tribal people could be preserved.  Cynics predicted that they would die out and then the whites could take the land.  To some extent this has happened.  The Blackfeet old-timers truly were very different from today’s common denominator, but the last of them have died or accommodated in the 20th century.  O’Nell vividly outlines the consequences of what she calls the “empty circle,” the cultural center based on the “real people” from before contact who are now gone.

As the modern descendants try to hold onto their identity, each of them defines it differently, and this puts them into opposition with one another.  In fact, individuals define being a “real Indian” in a different way depending on the context of the argument.  Sometimes it about the material artifacts of the early days, sometimes it is a claim of descent described in terms of “blood,” sometimes it is the stories of moral superiority or about mythic structuring of the world.  This empty and elusive center is the loss and source of loneliness that weighs down the tribal people of today.

Industrialization, resource exploitation, metal, money, competition, are all based on individual achievement.  We have moved far away from responsibility for the least, the needy, the vulnerable.  The group is a symbol of compromise and being trapped in conformity.  But for the tribal peoples, what counts is belonging and counting on the support of a group, however it is defined.  Economic hardship, epidemics and war can push us all back into group mode, but those who listen to media are soon seduced by individual elitism, however ridiculous.  

Kim Kardashian

IMPERMEABLE MINDS

Oh, yes, we say.  We’re fact-based, we obey science, we’re not sentimental.  Then we prove otherwise.  These are some of the scientific findings we ignore -- unconsciously.

Science says that consciousness is not the base of the human thought pyramid, that encompasses everything else.  It is the tip of the pyramid, a little instrument added on when everything else works right.  You are not “you” because of your thoughts, you are you because your body is you and all the things it does — pump blood, digest food, excrete, listen, taste, hurt, itch, move arms and legs, bend over — and all the autonomic nervous system reports about unconscious homeostasis (glucose level, breathing speed, heart beat, salt level, ph score) — THOSE are you.  Your introspective investigation of what you “think” is only a little hat on all the rest of the stuff.  “Think” comes last, not first.

No matter how much you agree with this, as soon as five minutes have passed, you will forget all this and go right on thinking that consciousness in identity, that consciousness should be limited to the rational, and that the rational has nothing to do with feelings.  Curse you!  It’s killing you!

Next denial:  You are NOT a unified, solid, unchanging identity.  You are a process, different from one moment to the next, not entirely under control, capable of being half a dozen “people” at once and neither virtuous nor evil but just THERE, a dance, a song, responding to everything.  Because that’s the secret to survival.

When your body wakes up in the morning (thanks to the autonomic functions that kept it alive all night) it assembles you, bit by bit.  First, your hearing comes back.  Then the other senses.  Then your memory gathers up the time before you went to sleep, though now it has been much sorted while you were asleep.  If you were a little bit awake, you might have relived some of the sorting in dreams.

Your ability to move comes back.  It was shut down while you were asleep to keep you from wandering around with no consciousness.  If you become conscious before this mechanism is off, you will not be able to move and it’s terrifying.  There may be a period of waking motionless wandering, mental drifting around without focus.  This is a nice buffer.  If you are awakened abruptly with no interval, it’s painful and dislocating.

Sometimes people say, “You’ve changed.”  Sometimes they say, “Oh, you’re just the same.”  Neither is true.  When a mass murderer is found and locked up, people say,  “Oh, he always seemed quite normal.  I never saw signs of anything bad.”  As though they knew what those signs were.  They were looking for excuses to reject the person, to find him or her lacking — not trying to get an empathic feel for how this person was in the world.  Anyway, they probably never saw the murderer at the time the lever was thrown that activated the neural connections for fear/hatred/panic/unreality/
flashback  or whatever was the tipping point that set off the tragedy.

It often seems to me that the “depression” everyone talks about and claims to be plagued by — so that they say, “Oh, I don’t follow social issues.  They’re so depressing.” — is not about some sad sympathy for the suffering, but denied and converted rage against them: the people who suffer.  “How dare they exist in a perfectly nice world where I’m happy?  What do you expect me to do?  Give up something that makes me feel good, that proves I’m valuable and cherished?”    A call to action makes them even more angry.  

Freud taught us that our parents and other family made us who we are, both our organic bodies and our mental corridors. That’s true, but I find it also helpful to look at the great cultural thought streams that carry assumptions down through the generations and across continents.  They are not inheritably genetic — they are mimetic and something else contagious and unconscious.  Some are possibly part of the substructure we carry that was created by our evolutionary ancestors: the idea that anyone different is a danger and should be destroyed.  The notion that repetition is a good thing and change is bad.

We have the idea that parents meet, fall in love, marry (which is a legal obligation and an economic arrangement), and assume the care of whatever children they produce so that they turn out well.  I will possibly exaggerate by saying this is not always true.  Parents meet, consider whether this partner is the best they can do, make compromises, meet circumstances that they cannot possibly cope with unless they have help which is not forthcoming, decide to abandon the partner, have children because to NOT have children one must actively resist, and take care of them only enough to avoid social punishment which doesn’t usually start until school years reveal a damaged kid.  If then.  If there is a stable community.  A great many people are now living in surging masses of deprivation that systematically kills many of them.  They don’t just evaporate, but come to live in our communities where they might be integrated or might be stigmatized or criminalized.

We are now accustomed to seeing photos of children born with no brain (results of an originally African mosquito-carried virus in South America) and thinking that it is an atrocity, but not OUR atrocity.  Nothing to do with us.  Nothing to do with nations.  Or the global economy.  Until one studies carefully how the mosquitoes got there and why this new infection is so macabre.

Maybe the most troublesome thing we have learned from science but totally misunderstood is what genes do.  Inheritance, yes. (“You’re just like your father,” my mother declared when she was mad at me.)  But inheriting WHAT?   All you can inherit are MOLECULES.  There is no gene with little eyes or toes inscribed on it.  There are only MOLECULES that interact.  And not one-on-one.  It takes 200 — 200 — of these gene-produced interacting molecules to determine human height.  That’s without factoring in nutrition and exercise, let alone something like the lead in gasoline and paint.  Genetics are an interaction, both among the genes and against the outside world.  The same gene under different circumstances will produced different results.

A related problem is that every time the scientists isolate ONE of the POSSIBLE precursors or enablers of something sensational like an adult desire for sex with children (a missing molecule can be just as powerful as an extra one or a “bent” one), it is translated by the media into a reliable sign of an actual and inevitable action by a person with an irresistible compulsion.  It’s witch-hunting that no good scientist would endorse.  But the media in our time have become devouring monsters avid to promote half-truths and titillating speculation about the neighbors, all the time ignoring something like “normal” beating of progeny as “discipline.”  Media loves stories about people executed though innocent (proven later) thus indicting authorities and proving that life is evil, as though they themselves are redeemed by their cynicism and pure motives, like the pursuit of truth.   They ignore all the things I’m talking about here.

(Sorry.  The image feature wouldn't work except for the first one.)

WRITERS ARE PARASITES

Leaning on lions

I am a parasite.  I try not to call attention to it, but the evidence is clear.

My father told me that’s what I was when I was about eight.  He threw his checkbook down on the table between us.  “Ten dollars!  That’s all the money there is, because of your teeth!  The dentist is taking all our money because of your teeth!”  I didn’t know whether there was more money coming or other bank accounts or even whether ten dollars was much money.  I hadn’t made the decision to go to the dentist -- it always terrified and humiliated me.

In fourth grade Mr. Garnet wrote our schedule on the blackboard, which could be pushed up in the air so as to use the one underneath, told us we’d better copy it fast and did indeed push the blackboard up where I couldn’t see it.  I leaned over to copy my friend’s paper and he caught me.  Said I should do my own work.  I burst into tears.  He looked at me for a minute, then went to the file cabinet to take out an eye chart.    I was near-sighted -- VERY near-sighted.  My mother was chagrined but I had glasses.  My father didn’t say anything.  My mother had always said she had married him for his excellent eyesight.  Those were the days when we all thought about genes but in a very different way from now.

In high school it was my female dramatics teacher who kept on eye on me.  I had good grades.  I was in or worked on every play.  When she and her husband went someplace, I took care of their house and read all their high-end interior decorating magazines.  They kept a cage of birds as big as a room in the backyard and a gentle doberman pinscher indoors.

My mother paid for my college by going back to teaching.  I had a full-tuition scholarship.  I attached myself to my biology partner, a brilliant and careful man destined to be a professor of education law. . . before he died of brain cancer.  He had married his high school sweetheart.  My theatre department friends have stayed friends but we live far apart.  One would call me to act as family vicar for weddings and births.  I did my best but all that luxury made me sick, literally.  And they didn’t want to talk -- they talked to each other about me in front of me.  They were Hollywood people, used to talking about casting.

Browning was my major attachment.  Scriver was my game and Scriver became my name.  It was a world, a foreign country.  For ten years I tucked in behind this dynamo as though I were a VW beetle in the slipstream of an 18-wheeler.  We ate in cafes, he picked up the cheque, I dressed up for shows, and dressed triple-thickness to work pouring bronze.  I helped chase buffalo, skin bears, change tires, and on the side wrote letters, composed catalogues and all that stuff.  We were learn-as-you-go, not like these youngsters who take courses and know the formula for everything.  We just grabbed it in the middle, watched what happened, talked about what that did, and got better at it next time.  A lot of other people helped us.  Everything we earned went back into the business.

Then I began to disappear into the business, too.  I had no identity of my own, no time to myself, no space that was mine, and now that he had fame, other women were lining up, assuming he was rich.  I TRIED hard to do what my mother did: whatever my father wanted and needed.  But he was a traveling man and when he was gone we did what WE wanted.  I would never put all my eggs in one basket again.  And I would never be anyone’s angel.  There were days he thought I was a devil anyway.  Sometimes I ran away, but he never did, because how could he?  Everything was his.  All that work had to be done.  Depression threw a bag over my head.  It made me angry.

When I became the first female animal control officer for Portland, my boss sort of fell in love with me because, he said, I had balls.  I’d walk into all sorts of unknown.  But I wanted brains.  All the time I was taking theatre at NU, I was wishing I were taking something at the U of Chicago.  I wanted to be a “brain.”   I got involved with First Unitarian Church of Portland and their dynamic minister. (Now retired.)  Every book my minister read, I read.  I read the complete works of Ernie Gann, all that airplane stuff.  Jacques Ellul was big and I read his books, but didn’t understand “Christian Anarchy”.  I decided I should go to seminary in Chicago.  He thought I should go to Berkeley, smoke pot, and get laid.  Loosen up.  He was probably right.

The three years I rode circuit for the Montana UU Fellowships were a devotion and a self-fulfillment -- very selfish in the most literal sense.  I lived in that cargo van with no heat, hours of driving on what were sometimes terrifying roads, watched the sky and thought about the Ultimate.  I was no one’s special buddy.  I felt real.

In Kirkland, across the lake from Seattle, everyone was my special buddy and we had a blast.  They didn’t want to grow and change, but I was only an interim minister -- it was against the rules for me to be permanently called, so it was an affair, not a marriage.  It was the way to go, at least for me.  But a little too easy, a little too luxurious.

Saskatoon was too hard, too cold, too involved with being good and right and in control.  I ran away.  I’m no angel.  This time I wasn’t depressed, just determined to protect myself.

One man, a geologist, claimed he needed me to comfort him.  I laughed and got him to talk about isotopes.  Another man, a loser, said he knew all middle-aged female ministers were needy, so he was prepared to comfort me.  I said I was not the temple whore and he said he paid for a car for the last female minister and she was pleased.  She's still in the ministry.

The hell with all that.  I had enough material for a shelf of books.  Back in Portland I did data entry and freaked out my female supervisor, but at the end of the day was too tired to write, so I’d go down to Powell’s where all the Native American Renaissance authors would come through to read.  I settled in with the little group of City of Portland soils engineers and watched.  The cat’s choice, watching.

Then the unexpected: my mother left me $30,000.  It was 1999.  I headed right here, where I am now, bought this collapsing house, sat down at the keyboard and began to write.  You only see the foam, not the beer.  I’m not very sure how I have enough money, or even whether I do.  What’s money?  Nothing.  Foam.

The good thing about not fitting the system is that no one understands you.  After a while they get bored and leave you alone.  They say,  “Oh, she’s a character,” and in Montana that means you get a free pass.  Up to a point.  They get scared if I blog about them.  If I came into a lot of money, they would take back my free pass.  But I’m really writing.  I’m no angel.

This is the famous Angel of Evil

SUICIDE SCATTER

Suicide is generally considered a religious problem:  it’s a sin to commit suicide and you’ll go to hell.  You can’t be buried with the nice people.  It’s also a legal problem: the penalty for trying to kill yourself is involuntary life -- which is not very different from death.  And now it’s seen as a medical problem:  the blood molecules that make you want to die.  Or you inherited it.  Or maybe it’s a family voice in your head: “You earned it, you worthless screwup.  Just do it.”  A few states will let you die early to spare you a few months of terminal suffering.  Spies are expected to use their poison pill as a way of protecting everyone else, as well as escaping torture.  In Japan one commits suicide because of being disgraced, as a matter of honor.  Then, of course, there were the Kamikazes.  Once in a while suicide is a political act.

Re-enactment of the two people who hung themselves from a Portland bridge just as Amtrack passed under them.  

No one remembers what their cause was.

https://medium.com/@cjane87/in-the-valley-268aad03afd3

This powerful piece of writing is about wanting suicide because of the suffering of depression, because somehow not feeling anything is a kind of torture.  A young mother I know of in Canada who tried the usual drugs, electroconvulsive therapy, and so on has finally turned around because of intravenous infusions of ketamine, a cat and horse tranquilizer that is a popular street drug.  http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26647738

No one knows how it works.  So much of treating depression is like trying to fix an old-fashioned TV set by pounding on it.  Ketamine may be like the dopamine discovery in Robin Williams’ movie “Awakenings.”  In a while everything goes back.  Like Robin.

I’ve thought a lot about suicide, more as a peripheral participant than a person considering it, because of being a minister.  At seminary no course was offered in how to handle suicide threats.  The first one I met was a public man who had molested his daughter, had been promised no prosecution if he got treatment, and then was exposed by the DA because he was up for election and needed to sound tough on crime.  I tried to talk this man out of his intention, failed, then did his memorial service -- as he asked.

There was a pair of aged professors, one demented and the other so devoted to him that she killed him and then herself.  She had left little notes all over the house with instructions about things like when the furnace filter was last changed.  The one that impressed me was the sticky on her wristwatch telling when the battery would run out.  Talk about a control freak.  Suicide as ultimate control.  She had not understood that when you die, other people buy your house and change everything.  Not just the furnace filter, the whole furnace.  They don’t even comply with your legal will.

Another woman was suicidal without me knowing it, though I’d stayed in her house.  I didn’t find out until a few years after I left that she had finally succeeded.  In retrospect it wasn’t hard to see.  No one missed her much.  Her husband quickly remarried.

Of my former rez students who have killed themselves (a mix of white and enrolled) the ones who weren’t just self-destructive, daring the devil all their lives, were extra-intelligent and gifted.  Some would argue that made them more vulnerable.  When there was a known cause for the suicide of a young man, it was almost always about love, sometimes same sex.

My kind, gentle professor/advisor at seminary had a son, a handsome jet pilot who seemed to glitter as he walked.  He shot his fiancé and then himself.  The doors slammed shut and we never knew more than that.  At least I didn’t.

When I tried to really hear people who had come to say they want to commit suicide, (esp. kids) I say,  “Well, all right.  But if you really think you MUST do that, please call me first even if it’s the middle of the night.  I won’t tell the cops or try to prevent you, but I’ll try to help you think of options.  Because that’s the FINAL option and you might be missing another one.  When you’re considering suicide, your brain goes flat.”   I really meant it.  They never called.

But that only works with people who are blocked, frustrated, and out of patience -- just need a delay.  Some people are not chemically, organically depressed, but nevertheless in a genuine state of suffering that is near unbearable.  That’s easy to see in someone with cancer or trauma that won’t respond to painkillers.  Or someone who’s had an enormous personal loss, like someone they loved deeply or even a home or job they loved.  These days people lose their country.  

It’s hard to witness when the suffering is the result of social torture as in the situation of -- try to imagine -- a boy with HIV he caught from survival sexwork while living in a cardboard box with infected skin, hunger headaches, exposure to cold rain at the very least, a glue-huffing habit -- the kind of boy who is invisible because his situation is too desperate to think about.  Don’t you secretly WANT him to die?  Don’t you think he can feel that?  Don’t you think some suicides are more like murder?

Jessamyn West

Jessamyn West was Richard Nixon’s cousin, but don’t hold that against her.  She was nothing like him.  You might know her as the author of the book from which the movie “The Friendly Persuasion” was developed.  That word “persuasion” has a little more bite when you realize that Anthony Perkins, the star, despite marriage and children, had relationships with men and died of AIDS-related pneumonia.  Berry Berenson, his wife, died a decade later when her plane flight crashed into the North Tower on 9/ll.  That’s all true but irrelevant here.

Jessamyn’s sister developed cancer and Jessamyn agreed to help her die when it became unbearable.  No one else can say when something is unbearable, but they talked it out, with the sister’s husband -- not quite so steely -- as a sort of fellow-traveler.  The decision was that when the sister had less than an hour a day when she was coherent and relatively pain-free, she would end her life with pills (they had hoarded some) and alcohol.  They did that.  Jessamyn wrote two books about it, one fictionalizing it to avoid being arrested for murder, and then later when the laws changed, a nonfiction version.  These two books are always in the back of my mind when I think about suicide.
  

Kevorkian had a connection to my home church in Portland because his first client, Janet Adkins, was a member there.  She took spiritual guidance from the Reverend Alan Deale, the Portland Unitarian minister in the Seventies.  He felt she knew what she was doing, had a right to her own mind, and blessed her.  Oregon and Montana are both Right to Die states.

Let's hope he's tying the boy's shoe, not attaching shackles.

This is not the same as that street boy I described earlier because if the boy gives the slightest hint he is self-destructive, he will be seized, incarcerated with people who will make his life even worse, denied medicine, denied hope.  He’s a little rat and we play “helper” with him.

If I were Mother Theresa I would be trekking up to Shelby to the private prison to try to redeem inmates.  I probably know them or their parents.  But I am NOT Mother T.  Mother T is a “Martha” if you know the Biblical story.  I’m Mary.  I’m going to sit here and figure this damn social puzzle out.  You should do the same.  Prevention.  PREVENTION.   We know how.  We don’t do it. Why?

"To See Eternity": Bob Scriver's portrait of his dying daughter, Margaret.  
She was Catholic and toughed it out to the end.

The tack I take against the wind, that will eventually blow us all away anyhow, is to get people to think carefully about what would tip the scales into doing it -- for them personally.  It might be the pain, maybe not.  Much of fatal disease is humiliating.  My stepdaughter was shamed by her colostomy, sure we could smell it.  Disease and its treatment put you pretty much out of control so that when you’ve had enough, you might not be able to manage suicide. I recommend that people write themselves a letter in which they figure out their tipping point and how they will cope.  Write, because that makes it more concrete and objective, but burn it or people will read it and interfere.  You may realize that your mind has slipped away too much to write and in that case you probably will not be able to find a way to send your body after your mind.  Soon you won’t be you, just your surviving cell-colony.  Don’t worry about it.  Let it go. 

The boy in the cardboard box can easily step off an overpass, hang from a tree, overdose.  “Nice” people have it harder in this one regard:  people will rush to intervene.  Too often the only intervention we offer the street boys is a bullet, but they won’t be able to afford even one cartridge, much less a gun.  So . . . death by cop.  So easy.