THREE PLAYS: GATEWAYS TO THE PAST -- or future?

I don’t have the kind of analysis subscription in place that would tell me who in Chicago reads this blog, though I know there are some.  Perhaps they will be the most directly interested in this video, since they might attend Looking Glass Theatre productions.  I asked whether the whole productions might be on video some day, but they tell me for legal reasons it can’t happen.  Anyway, there’s nothing like live theatre, which is the whole point.

http://lookingglasstheatre.org/content/node/3560

I was struck that this season includes Marguerite Duras’ “The North China Lover,”  Antoine Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” and Sara Gmitter’s “In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story.”  The video above is a teaser triptych by the three directors.  I’d love to see the productions.

But the subject of this post is that though this company is based on a group of Northwestern University students, post-Alvina Krause and in those terms “only” twenty-five years old as compared to my time there (1957-61).  They wished to explore experimental and original works.  Somehow they have come back to three subjects that I first learned about in the late Fifties, right there at NU in Evanston when repertory theatre was only a dream.

Duras

Duras

I came to Marguerite Duras’ work through “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” which is the same autobiographically based story that she returned to again and again.  But that version was entwined with the atomic bomb and the whole issue of peace.  I had never seen such a sexy movie -- the lovers shower together -- nor had I seen eros paired with death so explicitly.  It has never left me.  I watched it again not long ago and I’ve also re-watched “The Lover” several times, but I haven’t read much of her writing.  Maybe I should settle down to a formal study of her work but it would be more fun and possibly more rewarding to rework the Browning Sixties as though they were Saigon, using the holocaust massacre theme.  In my head in those years the images of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” were very much alive -- it was only a year or so after sitting amazed in the Evanston art house film theatre.

The Little Prince

Saint Exupery

“The Little Prince” is bittersweet to think about.  I still have the book given to me by a dear classmate, not as a romantic gift, so much as a sign of sharing a world, a coded version of a friendship.  That friendship endured a long time, but maybe we’re out of sync now.  It's not ended, really.   Again, much of it echoed a few years later in Browning -- like the fox who comes to discuss what it is to be “tamed.”  Of course, Saint-Exupery  himself was never tamed.  I read his biography and the other books and saw that he was one of those men who needed women as a base port, not a co-pilot.

Charles Darwin

His wife and cousin.

The third story is also relevant since my basic biology education was at NU and my biology lab partner became a very close friend.  He died young but not before major achievements as a law professor and as father of a treasured family.  Still reflecting on bio issues, much of my thinking now is about the “omics”:  genomics, proteomics, epigenomics, culturomics and so on.  I still hear that lab partner’s voice.  The Darwin story is about the dynamics of understanding that have gripped us a long time, but the evolution of the actual animals has been displaced by the evolution of the code that makes them -- and our interventions in the code, accidentally and on purpose.  

Since I often drove the barrel of “our” microscope through the slide we were trying to look at (I’ve always had a problem with focusing) but Bill never did, and since I had the greater manual dexterity at that point (I drew praise from the professor for an angleworm dissection), we made a synergistic pair. We often sat together in the back of the auditorium at Annie May Swift to observe the acting classes of Alvina Krause.  At that point he was thinking of becoming a psychiatrist, so we were preoccupied with issues of identity, human heroism, and cultures that challenge and resist exceptional individuals.  He never shared my interest in religion.

From this vantage point in time, Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin seem to walk in light, but they were all three problematic characters who had to weather a lot of doubt, resistance, and affliction.  None of them were saints and none were religious in any conventional institutional sense.  They were people who took chances, met hardship, made love, and left legacies.  I’d like to be like that.

I never shared thoughts about these three individuals with Bob Scriver or anyone else in Browning.  Both my NU friends came to visit Browning with the high school sweethearts they married.  They were both sons of doctors -- what does that mean?  They didn’t know each other except to pass on campus.  Bob knew them only as my former classmates and they were very curious but baffled by him.  No discussions of the meaning of life.

Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how compartmented my life has been.  I suppose it’s an artifact of moving, not just from one place to another, but from one total context to another -- all of them unpredicted and with nothing obvious in common, and yet the themes and skills I learned from Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin have come with me -- the stolons stretching across the continent, connecting rhizomes that were communities of experience.

Maybe it’s a demonstration of how the arts and humanities become like spider silk, trailing along behind one, weaving a pattern.  Or to be more funky, one could speak of the slime trail left by a slug, a kind of excrement in the opinion of some.  When you look it up, slug slime is pretty complicated, implicated in everything from the ability to climb vertical surfaces to assisting sex.  It’s how you use it that counts.

But the “whole point” is the story, the live theatre of all this.  Consider that Ivan Doig was from here, is my age and attended NU at the same time, but in a journalism and history context.  I doubt that he attended that art house movie theatre or that it had any particular effect on him.  His writing is read in Montana, mine is read in Seattle.  His writing is conventional “books,”  mine is blogging.  Our audiences are probably about the same size, but the difference is he’s able to make a living writing and I am not.  But then our lifestyles are also different.  And our writing is nothing alike.  Yet we're both Scots -- maybe I'm more Irish.

If there is someone around here who watches Duras movies, reads Saint-Exupery books, or even thinks about Darwin, I don’t know who they are.  Mere proximity means very little these days.  But if one is “different” and spends the day writing, there are always friends a keystroke away.  There is a lot more to this story.

THE BROTHEL BOY by Norval Morris

One of my little “elitisms” is having attended the University of Chicago, but I didn’t do it for the coursework. I’m a firm believer in the value lodged in people, both faculty and fellow students. The courses are just chances to interact since the content and method of most courses change over the years (or SHOULD) and often radically as they respond to new insights.

Once one knows who is there and how they work, it’s possible to follow them (or even double back and retrace their trail) simply by reading books. I don’t know how internet vids will fit into this, but for now books are at the heart of the “company of scholars” that Hannah Gray welcomed us to when she handed over our Master’s Degree velvet hoods (which are not really hoods anymore -- just a velvet drape to wear over one’s black gown.)

One of the professors who made a huge impression on me without me ever taking a course or having a long conversation was Norval Morris. I was typing for my “supper” at the U of Chicago Law School and technically assigned to the newest profs, but occasionally -- since it was a typing pool -- given work that was overflow from someone else. Thus, I typed a chapter from “The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law.” The chapter was called “The Planter’s Dream,” in which a white man was taking advantage of his wife’s absence by sleeping with his Burmese mistress, dreamt that she was being raped by a mysterious “black man” and shotgunned the intruder, who was not there. His mistress was destroyed. Was he a murderer?

Morris’ work was focused on the insanity plea, but within the context of the hard work of trying to get justice to bear some relationship to the law -- or the other way around -- esp. in places where an empire-mongering nation had come in over the top of an ancient pre-existing way of doing things. In order to do this in a class discussion without either free-floating in theory or invading someone’s privacy (often legally forbidden) and in order to make sure the salient points were covered, Morris wrote up what amounted to short stories, all composed around the invented career of Eric Blair, better known by his nom de plume, George Orwell. Most people who have made it to the graduate level of a good university have read at least one essay (the one about having to shoot an elephant in order to save people and crops, but hating every moment of the task) and have at least heard of his novels, “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Morris decided that he would write taking Orwell’s real name as his nom de plume. Orwell/Blair is considered one of the finest of writers of his type. Morris pretended -- as has often been done, maybe more commonly with paintings -- that he had found a cache of long-lost manuscripts. Morris, as an Aussie, was rather audacious. The trouble was that since he could write as well as Orwell, his faux essays were picked up by the credulous media as real. So he had to get a friend to label him a hoax. It happened that I was typing for him and even answering his phone (his secretary must have been on vacation) when the media began to call about the “hoax,” which excited them as much as the original “discovery.” I went over to the Faculty Club where Morris was playing tennis to give him the “urgent” messages. What I remember was that when I poked them through the cyclone fence, he looked at me sharply and said, “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” And I realized that I WAS. I had an appetite for the strategy and excitement. Something to watch out for in the ministry. A path into the swamp.

Back to the book, which I ordered because of “wrestling alligators” alongside Barrus and hoping that I could pick up some inspiration. Absolutely, I could. And enjoyed every minute of it. Norval Morris was a witty and humane man, much mourned when he passed away.

The title chapter “The Brothel Boy” is obviously meant to attract attention and titillate the reader, but it is a very closely reasoned account of a retarded boy in Burma in the 1920’s who had been produced and sheltered in a brothel. His job, among others, was to be the fan wallah. That is, while customers panted and sweated over the prostitutes, he shared the room and kept a big sheet of fabric waving back and forth over their heads to create a breeze. Often he would lie back and loop the rope over his foot while he nearly slept, so it wasn’t exactly onerous work. He made a tiny bit of money and witnessed both acts and payments. At some point in his physical maturation he tried the act with a laundry girl, who did not cooperate. In the tussle she hit her head on a rock which killed her. He put the money in her pocket and did not seem to realize she was dead. To him, so long as the woman was paid, everything was fine.

So “Eric Blair” had to unravel all this to the satisfaction of the community, his Brit superiors, the boy’s employer/family, and his own conscience, newly challenged by this foreign context. In the story the boy ends up hanged, so it’s lucky he was fictional.

Sometimes Morris rewrites actual cases so as to sharpen the issues and close down the loopholes or create new loopholes. His character of “Blair” is joined by the local doctor, a man of vast experience from India, and a Burmese Buddhist politician who -- with good humor -- loves to exploit Blair’s missteps. Sometimes there are other outsiders, like the overseeing officer and his wife who become involved in the death of a baby out in a village.

A Brit family employ a very pretty Burmese girl who has a baby she leaves in the care of her aged and erratic mother. They are so poor that when the baby’s teeth become abscessed, the problem progresses to gangrene which becomes fatal. The girl brings her dying baby in from the village and shows her to her white employers, who are unsympathetic and direct her to take the child to a doctor but not before serving dinner to guests. The delay contributes to the death. The matter is complicated by the gender of the baby, since females are not valued, and indications that the father may be the husband-employer. Discussion is enriched by the opinions of the beautiful wife of the supervising officer who arrives to make sure “Blair” does the right thing -- whatever that is.

These puzzles are not Sudoku. They are human dilemmas. But fiction. Based on fact. Like much of Tim Barrus’ work. Like my “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” This sort of inquiry is key to the values of a humanities education. And to religion as well as law. Parables.

TWISTING POW WOW

A coincidence in my online stream reached out and tapped me this morning. The first was a piece picked up by Arts Journal in someone’s blog. It was about a study done by Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, She’s been collecting samples of student writing of all kinds -- in class, private, all media -- and doing other surveys of how much college kids write. The surprise is that more than one third of their time is spent writing! And we thought they’d all gone to image and word. They’re moving away from YouTube to twitter and blog, more writing than in the day of pen and ink, and all with an audience in mind. In the professor’s opinion, it is GOOD writing. Maybe not typical, maybe not elite college scholarly writing, but well-adapted to the receiver and quite vivid.

It’s worth going to the following url just to see Lunsford’s picture, which is far from being either the post-mod chick or the frazzled feminist. She has the look of Renaissance about her.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Bios/andrealunsford/index.html


At the same time, Rolland Nadjiwan, my Cree-Chippewa poet friend in Canada, sent out to his circle this url for a You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSzhOEWW8c4

This “mash” has become a subject of controversy among Indians. For those of you who don’t have broadband, it is synchronized pow-wow dancing -- which I have never seen before and find incredibly powerful -- coordinated with Chubby Checker’s “Let’s do the twist.” I don’t think this is done in a spirit of mockery, but the original dancing would have been with a traditional drum group.

One of the dancers says in comments: “this vid was taken at 1995 Red Earth Pow Wow, Oklahoma ... I am one of the dancers you see here . . . um, I am not happy with the disrespect of our traditions in this way . . . Of course you don't see any disrespect. Samskhara, you are not native, not had the teaching, and know very little of the culture, obviously. Um, let me put it this way, what is called Archeology to one culture is called grave robbing to the one's who see their ancestral lands desecrated by non-indigenous grave robbers.”

That comment carries a lot of weight, but my reaction is that this is a lot like me saying a young woman looked like Shelley Winters, which sent her into a tailspin of offense because she was young and thought of poor Shelley as the raddled old woman she was at the end instead of the sleek starlet she was when I first knew her in the movies. Why is timing this to a much loved dance mode any more critical to the past than thinking up synchronized pow-wow dancing in the first place?


Samskara replies, “Excuse me, but I do not see disrespect in it. I see it as a way to demonstrate the possibility of two different cultures through art. . . In my humble opinion the art is to show the state of his spirit of humanity and share the beauty and synchronicity with nature. Peace.”

Pallii says, “I am Lakota and can see where this was made out of fun unless otherwise specified. When you do anything like this you will be subject to criticism, whether you call it art or not. I see one of the dancers commented so that should be one indication it may have crossed the line for an individual who is actually in the video. This is the first I have ever seen a "troupe" dance in synchrony at a pow wow or exhibition. Just like the hip hop pow wow dancing going on, something new to me.”

Pow-wow dancing has become more and more structured and competitive in recent years. The costumes are not like they were even fifty years ago and not ANYTHING like they were 200 years ago. The idea of what is heritage seems to zero in on what the critics knew in their own youth rather than what was long ago. Even 200 years ago is after “first encounter” rather than ancient times when dancing was religious. Pan-tribal pow wows are relatively recent. Anyway, pow-wow gets a little more show biz all the time and MUST do that to hold the attention of the general non-Indian audience. It is living dance.

Is this anymore insulting than a musical opera production of, say, “Star Boy?” And what does it do to express the views and life-images of full-bloods left behind in poverty on the rez? Those people are in many cases far closer to their “heritage” than the college educated, assimilated people full of post-modern theory who have access to YouTube. Pow wow is expensive, especially with high gas prices hindering travel.

So I’m drawing a parallel between modern (or post-modern or post-post-modern) vigorous new versions of pow-wow dancing and the modern (p-m, pp-m) versions of writing. The vigor, the newness, the working together, all pertain. (One of Lunsford’s interests is collaborative writing the way Tim and I are working.)

Some people want to find the “right” way to do things and then stick to it, because they see mainstream convention as the way to get praise and success. Other people are thinking, “Hey, why not try this?” And they do, in all the arts. We’re in a strange time that scares a lot of people, but not the innovators. Some revile Middle Eastern terrorists while others, luckily, are composing symphonies based on Middle Eastern instruments and traditional songs. And then there are the hybrids, using “roots” sounds and cyber-sounds together in order to create a sound track for a futurist military-mode sci-fi show like “Battlestar Galactica.” But then turn around and use the same kind of composing for the historical“Gladiator.” (Different composers and I think they all owe something to Paul Winter.)

This is not a well-written post because I’m thinking too many different things and mixing dimensions of importance. Pow wow dances, “mashing” in vids, historical “heritage,” movie sound tracks, rez culture, sci-fi, defense of culture. And yet it’s the start of something, a line of thought. And it’s a product of a steady stream of ideas that all came to me in print except the mashed vid. I think I’ll watch it again. This clip is hypnotic and I’m not even a Chubby Checker fan.

THE CLOISTERED LIFE

The life of a cloistered old woman who relies on the Internet to interface with the world is not an easy one. This computer evokes more profanity than prayer, though that, too. I keep bumping my head on different kinds of limits, which the indefatigable researchers assure me will prevent Alzheimers because no doubt I’m causing many new brain cells to form all the time because the brain -- it turns out -- is a muscle after all and forms paths just like Mrs. Othus taught us in 1949 when she was trying to get us to memorize poems from Palgrave.. But I’m beginning to suspect that like an old computer, there are only so many gigabites of space in my skull.

The other problem is that like a “dirty” electrical stream my blood glucose (the power source of brains) is unreliable. After a winter of fighting slightly high scores (never above the 140 that I’m told begins to cause cell death in kidneys, toes and eyes), summer means that I’m out in the yard working and my blood sugar plunges into the low seventies. Diet must be adjusted but more importantly I need to monitor “how I feel” which I don’t remember to do if there’s a really absorbing project at hand. At dawn my blood glucose is optimal. The only problem is that dawn here comes about 4AM. The solution is already provided: living alone. I just get up and write.

The money stream problem is harder to solve. My eMac is barely new enough to handle Leopard which is the new system I must now buy in order to run iWorks which replaces AppleWorks, my present exasperating all-in-one system. It’s slow, slow, slow and sometimes stubborn but all my files and books are in Appleworks. I would put up with the slowness but, fiendishly, MAC is in league with the Devil: Netflix. It takes Leopard to interact properly these days.

Not that Netflix is evil. In fact, it is Netflix that really transports me in the evening, back to my own past, forward into the future, and horizontally to other lands. Movies enlarge my experience and my heart these days. Magazines have shriveled. Books after a day of onscreen print weary my eyes. So far I haven’t found anyone in town who is interested in many of the same subjects. (They would be offended if they realized this, considering it a snobbery.) I begin to suspect maybe a few do, but combine it with alcohol, which I don’t.

I am, to my embarrassment, not at all interested in the town’s topics except for infrastructure. I’m out-of-sync to the point of amusement. A hot topic at the last town meeting was the number of yards harboring horses. There are three separate households keeping a horse and the ordinances allow this, since the rules hark back to the days when a horse was a transportation necessity. One of the complainants was a mother worried that a horse would escape and attack her children. She may be like the early Blackfeet who confused horses with elk-sized dogs.

The larger Montana community has also found me limited. The old liberal world of the Unitarians -- Democrats, peace organizations, organic producers, humanities circles, “Montana writers,” and English teachers -- none of which have changed much -- expect me to react as they do, but I’m quite different now, not quite welcome because I’m too rude. Much as I continue to admire Scott Crichton and Frank Kromkowski, Paul Dietrich and George Cole, the many Unitarians -- declared and undeclared -- I’ve gone some crazy hybrid place of my own. None of those would touch Tim Barrus with a ten foot pole, though in many ways he’s my most satisfying correspondent. It’s not the erotica. Are you kidding? With what the doctors insultingly call “a senile vagina” I can barely tolerate a visit to the doctor. (I think I just won’t go.)

Anyway, the physical limit that frustrates me the most is finger dexterity. I can’t make the cursor hit the right teeny spot on the screen, much less avoid what my fellow cashier in Portland called “finger booboos.” Well, maybe increasingly bad eyesight is as frustrating. Lamps proliferate all over the house and I’m glad I bought a fancy magnifying glass for the way it looked, so long ago that I got it at Bill Naito’s Import Plaza in Portland. It has an inlaid mother-of-pearl handle.

The other growing edge that I’ve had frozen by lack of software is pod-casting. There is a new program for pod-casting for a MAC, but like everything else -- including the shelves of the Montana office suppliers and the world of hackers -- Microsoft leads the way and MAC comes along months and years later. Which is okay with me unless I need some small thing peculiar to MAC and have to search around online. Montana doesn’t approve of MAC’s. This state admires conformity, though in fact outsiders never realize that until it’s too late. Anyway, I’ve hit the limits of my credit and must stash five dollar bills until I’ve accumulated the requisite total.

Another limit is the neighbors’ standards -- this time of year mostly about lawns. They would sooner save for a new riding mower than a new computer. This afternoon after I go down in the crawl space and re-attach the feed to the hose for the summer, I mow with the weed whacker. They like Roundup better than weed whackers.

You’ll understand that another limit is this little old house, though it’s also a support and enabler. I love to buy copies of “Art and Architecture” but the prospect of maintaining acres of shining floor, three-story stone fireplaces, and elegant but stain-able limestone countertops embedded with tiny fossils is just too daunting. I already did museum maintenance for a decade.

The real reason I chose this life is that I want to push the outer boundaries of thinking, not just thinking but “re-framing.” It’s a time of amazing ideas about both possibility and limitation, including mortality. I put reflections into this blog, not for you but for me, blazing trail so I can find my way home. Wherever that has gone. It seems to be traveling in its own way. I hope it’s ahead of me, not behind.

I’m watching the limits of the Internet. Spaminators and filters and firewalls are so powerful that I’m hardly getting any spam at all, but what potential ideas and friends are being suppressed? Who is out there deciding what “pornography” an old lady should not know about? The Internet, it turns out, is as fragile as our banking and stock market systems: terrific when it works, catastrophic if some small thing goes wrong. Just like human bodies. But if my info stream gets strangled in the interest of protecting bank business, I’ve got lots of books. And I have NOT allowed automated access to my checking accounts.

So the formal position I take -- and this is Barrus talking -- is in the NOW, richly living the present. But I’m too much me to leave the past and future alone. Or do housework and yardwork, except for the minimum.