AS THE WORLD TURNS -- THE CASTRO

In the Fifties in Portland, OR, when I first began to be old enough to travel around the city alone via bus, I was always careful to sit on the side of the bus where I could see the old warehouses where gypsies lived.  The doorways were draped so it was impossible to see in, but the women often sat on chairs along the sidewalk.  Darkly beautiful, wearing bright flowing gowns, they might have been up to something nefarious since they were in the shady part of town, but to me they only represented glamour in the original sense of magic.

Our house was near the corners of NE 15th and Alberta.  In my childhood it was a European immigrant neighborhood: Swedish bakery, Scots doctor, Greek grocery store, and so on.  Alberta, of course, was named for Queen Victoria’s daughter.  After I had grown up and left, the neighborhood turned black and the street I had walked to elementary school, Sumner, was considered a gang street where cops went carefully.  At night there was shooting.  The shops and the apartments on top of them deteriorated.  

Then gays and hispanics moved in.  Now Alberta is an arts and bodega street.  My mother lived in the same house until 1999.  A cousin of mine lives up 15th a few blocks, across the street from the doctor’s house my paternal grandparents bought when they came back to the States from Manitoba.

So when doing research for another project, I came across the history of the Castro District in San Francisco, less well-known than the “hippie” Haight-Asbury, I was intrigued.  I’ve always been interested in enclaves and bubbles of culture, where they come from, how they morph, and where they go.  This applies to both Valier and the Blackfeet Rez — it’s part of their charm, their historical flavor.

All-male Miners' Ball

I was surprised to learn that in the 18th century the area was Russian.  In 1809-1917 Finland, then a satellite of Russia, used the settlement to serve merchant and naval fleets with a heavy Finnish participation.  Finns are tough, practical, and free-thinking, with the liberal wing of the Lutheran church overlapping enough with Unitarians that the clergy serving Montana’s Finn communities hired Unitarian ministers.  Many Finns settled in SF during the Gold Rush.  Finnish Club No. 1 was established in the Castro District in 1882.  A bathhouse was built about 1910.  After the disastrous 1906 earthquake and fire, many Finns moved to Berkeley.

A decade or so after WWII when many families had left because of prosperity that produced suburbs, two new concentrations formed.  I’ll directly quote from Wikipedia:  “The U.S. military dishonorably discharged thousands of gay servicemen from the Pacific theater in San Francisco during World War II (early 1940s) because of their sexuality. Many settled in the bay area, San Francisco and Sausalito. In San Francisco an established gay community had begun in numerous areas including Polk Street, the Tenderloin and south of Market Street. The 1950s saw large amounts of families moving out of the Castro to the suburbs in what became known as the "White flight", leaving open large amounts of real estate and creating attractive locations for gay purchasers. By 1963, the Castro's first gay bar was opened called the "Missouri Mule”.

This is one of the unintended and rather unacknowledged consequences of WWII, another attempt on the part of government to control the nature of populations.  The Navy’s failure to understand that gays can be tough enlisted men meant that when were surprised by individual examples, the gay men were pushed out.  Since they were clustered on the mid-California coast, they magnetized into a functional community.  

A parallel example might be the Native Americans who formed communities along the coast in order to work in the factories that supported the war effort.  A second set of Native Americans arrived in cities when Eisenhower tried to extinguish the reservations by sending the people to cities, but not supporting them there, so that they ended up in ghettos, making common cause with blacks and hispanics who had also come to build ships and planes, but were at loose ends when the war ended.  The groups had been mostly rural, which made them sympathetic to each other.  And they were all stigmatized.  Black Power taught Red Power.

“Beat culture erupted in San Francisco in the 1950s with a rebellion against middle class values and thus became aligned with homosexuality and other lifestyles not part of mainstream culture. The beat poets who relocated to San Francisco from New York flourished in San Francisco's permissive atmosphere, and some like Allen Ginsberg were openly gay.”  This literary dimension easily merged with academic study of gays, called “queer studies”.

Being gay was neither rural nor urban, and not related to skin color, but, in addition to natural sexual preference, came out of military background, working-class.  Not so much the officer elites.  Wikipedia:  “Some of the culture of the late 1970s included what was termed the "Castro clone", a mode of dress and personal grooming that exemplified butchness and masculinity of the working-class men in construction—tight denim jeans, black or sand combat boots, tight T-shirt or, often, an Izod crocodile shirt, possibly a red plaid flannel outer shirt, and usually sporting a mustache or full beard—in vogue with the gay male population at the time. . .”

Cross-dressing exploded into a show biz performance art that might or might not signal trans-sexuality.  Presentation as advertising was the idea, in the sense of big birds with splendid plumage.  Today people can change physical gender.

Alfred Laliberté's "Les petits Baigneurs," 1915 restored 1992 at Maisonneuve public baths, Montreal, Quebec

“Public” baths exist where people have no bathrooms at home, as in immigrant tenements, and were meant as a public health measure.  Urchins were made to bath naked to so they could be checked for sores and bugs.  With an all-male gay community used to communal showers, baths were a natural venue.

Then came HIV/AIDS and a new kind of war, just as deadly as combat.  The men rallied to comfort each other, but despair and terror crept through lives.  Still, it didn’t extinguish the identity of the area as a special community that has now expanded to LGBTX, people who are in solidarity to defend their right to be different.  But then they had to defend their right to be the same, as in marriage and raising children.

The next challenge is upon them now: a form of “gentrification” which is not focused on reclaiming the graciousness of the housing, but rather on crowding in tech workers for the cyber-industry.  The world is based on change, each new phase displacing the old.

I watch all this from my celibate redoubt much in the way that I watched the gypsies from the bus, a kind of sympathetic outsider.  Unitarian congregations often share buildings with the Metropolitan Church.  They are not monsters to me.  But they do have a bit of a dark edge.  Like military people.  Or rez folks.

LANGUAGE LINED WITH FLESH

Robin Lydenberg

This post is as close as I can come to a religious statement right now.  It is bracketed by the parentheses of two “TED” talks from the early vids before they got pulled into the vortex of popularity.  But that’s not where the thinking came from, which was only a phrase:  “A language ‘lined with flesh’” which Barthes first said and Robin Lydenberg used in a review of the work of William S. Burroughs called “Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ fiction.”

William S. Burroughs

Other phrases are “a resistant queer formalism” and “by the light of their author’s character.”   And a paragraph:  “the 'spirit of the whole,' the Stimmung, the sense and the secret deeply interwoven with the queer and desired male authors who produced them.  However imagined, however bound to the text, there exists here a trace of a living, breathing queer, of that “Language lined with flesh” Barth called it, barely audible except to the initiated, increasing becoming, in such an economy, the male homosexual critic.”

My excursions into homosexual thought are pretty much over, but my explorations of what is Other are far from finished, nor do I exclude “Queer” from “Other.”  So I’m after the Spirit of the Whole, but insist on always including — not just "the sense and the secret" deeply interwoven with the unique person — but the senses of their bodies and the secrets of their work.  I need to do more research on “stimmung” before I can use it properly, but probably my friend Aad is coming close when he says he doesn’t watch videos for the narrative line as much as for the transient but sometimes intense moments of illumination.

The recent decade of neurological research, which is a beginning rather than some final insight, proposes that both memory and identity are created in the body by the flow of sensory information coming into us, becoming a record, and provoking a response.  This happens by the use of metaphor, which unfolds into art.  So here’s the first vid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48PeG47UFXg

Art Encounters: Dorothy Cross at TEDxDUBLIN

Cross lives on the West Coast of Ireland where, as she says, dead whales wash up.  She works in a tension among the organic remnant, theological symbolism, and precious metals.  She uses the phrase “vesselized adventure” to describe what a person is and that also describes her work.

"Kiss"

For instance, in this video she shows us a casting of the insides of two mouths kissing, what she calls “the bone of a kiss”, now cast in silver.  It is mysterious, yet recognizable, the sculptor’s constant ghost of the reverse of a mold, the space contained but not yet cast.  She also shows us a dead shark she has eviscerated, gilding the hollow insides of it to honor something normally repulsive.  She make a little family out of three crabs she found in a lobster pot not far from her house and shows the heroism of the valiant male crab who rushes out to confront danger, but cannot protect his male crest and symbol, a realistic human penis, doomed always to be vulnerable.

She had in her studio her grandmother’s shimmering silk train from her wedding dress, which she combines with a cow’s udder to make a life/death figure, beautiful but shuddering, and she takes five fingertip bones from her dead great aunt’s hand and has them implanted in oysters but only one oyster made a pearl of the bone as intended — it was the index phalange.  

Unless you’re Irish and living by the sea, I doubt you have access to your ancestor’s skeletal hand.  But Life gives us materials and so does Death.  Then we make something — an idea, something gilded or pearlized.  Cross is spontaneous, responding, but hoarding in order to transform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX32U_hfri4  by paraplegic  Janine Shepherd is entirely different: structured, focussed and controlled by a goal.  One can tell by the audience reaction that it hits the target.  The blurb says:

“We often define ourselves by things that are "outside" us: relationships, work, family — even our own bodies. But what would it mean to have your life dramatically altered and your body irrevocably damaged? Who would you be then? This talk explores the impact of loss on the human psyche and the universal quest to find meaning and fulfillment. It is only through the process of losing everything we thought we needed that we find who we truly are.”  

This is our Christian model:  “Pilgrim’s Progress” — “Climb every mountain, ford every stream.”  When I was teaching and came across a case “give-up-itis”, I would begin to sing the song, dramatically building, stepping onto my chair so I could triumphally summit on my desk.  It made the kids groan and laugh, but they didn’t just shrug it off.

Shepherd offers us one major metaphor, being smashed and then rehabilitated until flying.  Then she anchors that in the joined straws metaphor.  It works.  This is one of the principles I used when designing worship services, especially those for major holidays, as it has been done for millennia: holy water, bits of bread, candles, wine, palm fronds, and kneeling.  Because the point of bodies is to hold and create metaphor so the brain, gathering memory and identity together into consciousness, responding to the stimmung in the unconscious, and vesselizing the adventure of ideas that is unique even in so rarified a category as “male homosexual critics”.  

As opposed to “female omnisexual artists”?  We used to play a rhetorical game: if one made a generalization of that sort, the demand was to “name three” examples.  Oscar Wilde, Burroughs, and . . .  Why three?  The skeleton of Euro-African Christian theology comes poking through.  The great value of the artist named Cross (WHAT??!!) is that she lines ideas with flesh, the gilded body cavities of sharks, and bone, the tips of her great-grandmother’s fingers pearlized by oysters.  But for those less macabre, why not a Shepherd (WHAT??!!)

And so it is that religions of many sorts besides Christianity are assembled from old rotten things and newly devised things until they hold value even for those who are excluded, persecuted and misunderstood.

ANOTHER BIG SHIFT -- THIS ONE AN INSIDE JOB

I save too much internet stuff and I don’t want to stop doing it long enough to find a techie solution, like a sorting-and-labeling app.  Part of the problem is that I subscribe to atypical and absorbing feeds: the Economist, Al-Jazeera, the Guardian, Edge, Aeon, OZY, MedPage Today.   I rarely correspond with individuals, partly because they stay in compartments and I hate compartments.  I’m a cross-disciplinarian (but not a dominatrix), which is a major advantage when a lot of disciplines are collapsing or merging anyway.  This means that some people are stuck in 1950 and others, feeling they are very modern, are stuck in 2000 which was fifteen years ago.  They are often discouraged about life, because the media reporters constantly cry “danger, danger,”  because the editors and publishers want money and crying danger is one effective way to get it.

But the subject is trying to keep track of my downloads.  The one I’m looking for this morning is about the consequences of the leap in brain function that separates us from neanderthals.  I use google to search and find other wonderful things.

The First Narcissus

http://aeon.co/magazine/science/marek-kohn-neanderthals/  a  link which is illustrated with this classic and wonderful image.  I try to save images of the reconstructed neanderthals done by brothers Kohn specifically for museums.  I see a book called “The Singing Neanderthals.”  Oh, I WANT it!  Much of this is coming from brain research -- a shift from sociology or anthropology to instrument data collected inside the skull -- and much of it is coming from the gnomic post-modern thought.  In the past we made an immense social “shift” when we went from governance by power to governance by laws.  Some places or individuals have not caught up yet.

But there was another earlier big shift in brains that made that governing shift possible.  First we had to develop the cell-ability and organ-power to abstract social theories and also to intensify our ability to know what other human beings are feeling and to reflexively look at ourselves.  The main thing that changed between neanderthals and ourselves was our capacity to handle metaphor as a source of order and meaning.  Not little literary comparisons: organizing principles for life itself.

The paragraphs I saved were about the religion-defined culture wars that are destroying so much.  The idea was that right-wingers think that the metaphors they have known since childhood are real.  That is, the abstract felt meanings of the world in baby terms, like the idea that there is some big Person who can control one’s entire life -- which is true for most surviving babies -- becomes an idea they simply cannot give up.  If there is no high being called God or Jehovah or Allah, then there is no meaning to life and the whole thing collapses, so there is a desperate drive to make sure that idea is never challenged.  All theology must begin with an argument about whether there is a God.  But it matters more whether there is a human father.

A religious metaphor with intense survival-level meaning --  giving power to institutions that resort to killing -- is biologically based on competition for resources and ethically justified by seeing rivals as “Other,” as though they were another species in competition for territory.  It takes post-neanderthal sophistication to understand ecology, evolution, and emergence (mutation) with enough confidence to see that the more different peoples (or species) can specialize into related niches, the less competition there is for resources.  

My key principle is that it was not the gold rush miners who got rich, but rather the suppliers and transporters: the guys who got the groceries and equipment to the miners.  In modern terms it is not writers who are making any money, which has been true for a long time, but rather the publishers, the agents, the venues, the reviews, the promotion.  In both cases there is a near-religious belief that if a person strikes gold or writes a best-seller, they will be in paradise.  Those beliefs fuel desires so strong they can become obsessions worth any sacrifice.

Consider our current frenzy about sex and our infantile belief in return to the transcendent bliss of an embrace as though it were not a metaphor but a reality that can’t be put into words.  It’s almost impossible to get people to admit the truth of this.  They also insist on the metaphor of “money” which is not at all real, entirely invented, and infested with theological-level rules and assumptions that justify destruction.

The generator of all these passions is not conscious but part of the "animal brain" that precedes and supports both rationality and consciousness.  We have the desire first, and then justify it before we recognize it.  It’s “well-known” that rationality and ethics are “higher” orders of thought, allowing us to shape and control our “animal emotions.”  And writing, or spoken language, are assumed to be what makes us “better” than animals.   But all words are metaphors.  All written language, whether on paper or via pixels, is metaphor.  Before they can be words they are “felt meanings,” direct experience, sensory life.  

One of the short downloads I can’t find was a discussion of how our (English-writing mostly Euros) alphabet emerged from the eye of the hunter who had learned to perceive and understand tiny cues like the patterns of eyes or tails of prey.  Turn a capital A upside down and you can see the face of a deer -- if you respond to a very old metaphor.  And recognize a deer only from National Geographic vids.

In our obsession over writing we have cut ourselves off from the meanings of the senses that used to be acquired from working fields or doing child care.  In some ways we’ve made the living stories of our surroundings into mathematical constructs.  The next step -- to my mind towards thought impoverishment -- is machine-generated algorithms -- guiding one’s life according to statistical formulas.  So I go to the doctor and she gives me meds based on a predictive curve, though she has no way of knowing where I am on that curve.  Or whether there is another intersecting bell curve.

My most cherished correspondents are poets who live in dreams, images, arts of every kind.  They are renegades who make their livings by taking care of people who are irrational -- either by damage, by unique physiology from the beginning, or by social definition.  Don’t define it as “compassion” because it is not pity-based or even "love" in the romantic story of engulfing someone.  Rather it is dignified sharing of “interior” life without even defining it in words -- as equals.  

To those who need everything to conform to their life-metaphor, this work is incredibly threatening, world-crashing, overwhelming.  In short, heretical.  By their metaphorical construct, people who do not conform are animals -- of course they are!  we all are! -- and must be captured, controlled, or destroyed.  These strict judges don’t know they are acting like species defending territory against other species.  They truly believe anyone different from them is another species.  As our favorite dwarf says,  “We are under attack by many brave men who are fine warriors.  Let’s go kill them!”

OUR MORAL OBLIGATION TO THE OTHER

What is our moral obligation to the “Other”?  First is the necessity of admitting that there is such a thing as “Other.”  A lot of people have major difficulty with this.  Maybe it’s a lack of imagination.  Maybe it’s the possibility that the “Other” might be “better” rather than just different.

Second principle might be that the “Other” must be allowed to set his/her own terms for existence and even preference.  But that leads to the third, which is that the real need for a morality is the interface between mutual “Others,” so they don’t destroy each other.  This would be a morality of accommodation rather than domination, at least according to my own morality, which is a morality of multiplicity and situation.  I am no Levitican.

Deep under morality is survival as a motive for action.  Survival is on two levels.   One is that of the individual, whether oyster or author, and the other is on the level of the whole group from family to species.  If a species evolves into something with a different but better prospect of survival, is that actually survival?  What is the morality of evolution?  It must be dynamic. The most final and inarguable criterion for a moral stance is whether it is survival-based, but is there a case to be made for something that must be lost in the name of evolution to make a “better” world?  Can “progress” or “improvement” be defined in advance, or must it always be seen in retrospect?

I ask because I fear that our present “culturome” in many aspects (education, medicine, trade) is reinforcing the least likely paths to defending the Other.  In fact, we seek to eliminate or at least confine the Other.  But too often all we really do is empower the toughest, least forgiving Others, the least compassionate, the most greedy, the most insensitive, the most devious.  So it seems.

My conviction is that those qualities give a short term advantage, but in the end they are fatal.  First, they risk destroying the foundational matrix of life because of eliminating so much in the name of their own benefit.  (Eliminate all the predators, become overrun with prey.)   As a friend of mine with fungal pneumonia was told by his doctor, “We could easily destroy your fungal invaders.  The trouble is that it would also destroy your lungs.  To detect and protect the fine line between those two is what makes medicine difficult.”  

In modern times we CAN tell one from the other.  In some primitive places the only way to defend the village from some afflictions was to destroy the afflicted individual, to make them Other and therefore expendable, the way we do our enemies in war even when they are our brothers.  I write about sex quite a lot because it is so entwined with survival.  A morality that legitimates rape is likely to encourage a level of violence that will not allow the resulting infants to survive.  The rapacity of some opportunistic businesses (do I dare mention publishing or should I just say drug trade?) will erode both the generators of the material and its consumers.

Dictatorship is always doomed.  Even if there are mechanisms for maintaining dominance beyond one lifetime, for instance genetic succession, dictatorships cannot eliminate every deviation, every defiance, every creativity without killing the society they rule.  This is the lesson of the former USSR, for one.  By killing the individuals who dissent, authorities end up making living dead of the group.  They are so blinkered by the limits of their own lives that they never get hold of the “big picture” nor can they predict the forces that come from some completely unexpected source, like climate change.  Any geologist could tell us that climates do not remain stable for long, except in terms of human life history -- unless it the humans themselves who make the changes.  Which is not to say that democracies aren’t prone to stifle, eliminate, and deny just as dictators do.  Ask the whistleblowers and ask why they are emerging now.

As I typed this, the email binged and this story arrived:

“Earlier this year, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar, president of a prominent Indian rationalist organization, the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (MANS), or Committee for the Eradication of Blind Faith, was killed for his efforts to get an anti-superstition law passed. Like other movements of organized rationalism in India, MANS sought to promote scientific knowledge and combat the influence of black-magic practitioners and self-styled godmen. Although his assailants have not yet been apprehended, Dr. Dabholkar (b. 1945) received significant threats from hard-right groups who claimed to be defending religious sensibilities.”

Stories posted on “Sightings” at the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School are archived at http://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings  (The rest of this article will be at the site soon.  I’m on a mailing list so got it early.)  India IS a democracy.  There are people in this town who would be on the side of the assassin, though they would probably not consider murder.  India is the homeland of a key pacifist, Ghandi, but he is not well-known in Valier.  Even American Indians can be “Other” here, except for the citizens who ARE Native American.

An assassin is a free-lance dictator, imposing his/her will on the rest of the world but particularly any individual who defies him.  (Or her.)  The advantage and disadvantage of the assassin is s/he is so identifiable, so personal, that s/he can be caught and punished.  A movement cannot.  But each can act on behalf of the other, one can justify the other, both can “justify” government suppression even to the level of fire-bombing we watch on television news.  (Waco, MOVE)

What intrigues me is what might happen when two Other-from-each-Others find a creative meiotic way of melting together.  Maybe that’s why I married a man twice my age.  Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to a Montana reservation in the first place.  Maybe that’s why I’ve maintained a careful relationship with a group no one even wants to admit exists: young boys doing sexwork either because it’s the only way they can survive or because they have come to be shaped by that life.  These guys are resourceful, tenacious, funny, and appealing -- sometimes very beautiful in part or in whole, separate or in a group.

But I don’t want to see them as subjects for National Geographic specials or for depth psych analysis of human potentials.  For me, an old woman in small town, they have an intensity and outrage about life that keeps me challenging myself to think harder.  

And yet, when once I remarked that no one wants to make love to an old woman, they were indignant at my limited experience of life.  “We know better!” they said, and I was glad, though it’s not on my agenda.  (I’d rather read, which is a very strange idea to them.)  I love their freedom from clothing, their ability to move, their tolerance for pain.  They revel in physical contact, never fear being goofy or reckless, defy vertigo.  You don’t get any more “Other” from them than me.

And yet again, one said he longed to have a grandmother, so I volunteered though I’ll never see this boy, never touch him, only know the idea of him.  For moral human beings this is sometimes enough.