THIS MOVING EARTH

The planet we call “Earth” or “Home” includes three dynamic fluids that cause constant change.  When they are proceeding through recurring fairly orderly cycles that interact with each other in ways long-lasting enough for the animal and plant populations to become fitted to them and dependent on them, we are happy and growing.

The three big fluids are:

Molten planet interior, on which the tectonic plates float, carrying continents

Seas, lakes and rivers moving water on and between the continents and also rising by evaporation into the air, then falling back on it

Atmosphere, moving around and around in currents, but also rising and falling

Animals that live in water are of two kinds: those who stay in one place like barnacles and those who travel through the water, responding to the temperatures, like fish.

Animals that live out of water must have a skin or boundary to carry water with them.  If there is not enough, too much, or the wrong kind, the animals die.  

There are other dynamics that make the planet change.  Sunlight sends energy, both the force and feed of light, which travels around and around the planet because the planet turns, creating the cycle we call day-and-night.  The sun’s heat drives the convection winds that create the currents of water and air, forming jet streams that circle the planet and driving the currents in the oceans among the continents.  Because the continents are partly ice, controlled by altitude, they change, which changes the currents of water and air.  If the ice on the planet all melts, the ocean currents will be quite different and climates will change.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-earth-timelapse-now-you-can-see-how-the-planet-has-changed-since-1984/

Variables create and control life.  And yet humans focus on keeping everything the same.

We know all this though we don’t think about it much.  But now that writing has been invented, we have information over a much longer time period, and realms of knowledge we haven’t had time to digest:  DNA, records drawn from geology that go back to the formation of the planet, self-observation from satellites that are able to image us from far above, molecular and atomic understanding.  There’s too much to think about properly and many people have no access or interest in the conclusions anyway.  Their earth is flat, their people are local, and their possessions are everything.  They live in day-tight compartments.

Watching the news, I consider whether fire is a fluid.  It is certainly a change agent and I suppose observation from satellites would see flames move in cycles across the continents.  The smoke of fires enters the atmosphere, changes the temperatures, and if it is big enough — like the magma-driven fires of volcanoes — changing the climate.

Within all this, as my small self, I try to preserve identity.  I have two strategies:  boundaries and patterns.  These are the essence of life itself, the processes of bodies as they germinate, differentiate, age, and die.  My skull is a planet with a connectome of electrochemical flow fed by the oxygen brought by my whole-body circulation of blood and lymph.  The patterns are ideas and cause acts.

I have a sphere of influence, this blog in particular.  But the spheres I once thought were so important, where I thought I had impact, have dissolved.  No one remembers the animal control skirmishes, the UU fellowship efforts,  or even my part in the Scriver bronzes.  Teaching was only a wandering.  These were institutional contexts.  Institutions are human organized efforts to keep everything the same.  Now I see that nothing can stay the same and it wouldn’t be a good thing if it did.

I’m amused that this new NY Times investigation into Trump’s “empire” have revealed that most of his “holdings” are actually just legal agreements to use his name, deals with other institutions as a short cut for their branding.  It turns out he actually “owns” much less, the same as his nonprofit foundation simply took credit for other people’s contributions and his university taught nothing because there was little or nothing to teach about how Trump got rich.  His achievements are no much more than that little child’s book about a kitten who boasts “I Could Pee on This.”  No wonder he didn’t want anyone to look at his business books.  No wonder he’s suddenly willing to divest — it will be much less of a problem if there’s little actual ownership — just legal agreements.  It’s all paper, bookkeeping.

Money doesn’t exist.  Value changes.  It is a swirl of exchanges recorded by beads, discs of precious metals, printed IOU’s, and now simply computer records in a machine somewhere.  The most potentially valuable commodities, the ones that never lose their value, are water and oxygen, but we do not protect them.  When they are lost, we will die.  They are international, global.  But we pursue money instead and expect nations to protect bookkeeping profit, not the ultimate infrastructure of air and water.

When I try to understand what I should do with the fragment of my life that is left (I’m 77) and try to grasp what I’ve achieved up to this point, I end up only confused.  How much of the lives of individuals is bound up in the far larger swirls of civilization and how much are those huge forces the product of geological and biological changes that we might not even notice.  What could anyone say that would matter?

The Manhattanite political opinionators were shocked SHOCKED that the middle of the USA voted for Trump, because they were still envisioning them as Mayberry rural places where people live on family farms and ranches or in small towns where the values were traditional and conservative.  Surely none of those people would vote for a clown with a naked wife whose wealth came from fancy hotels (with all those lovely private rooms for assignations) and pretentious golf courses which all the men love because that’s where all the real deals are made.

They didn’t see that the families had been bought out by companies who run big industrial ag operations — feedlots and mega-elevators that shift meat and grain around the planet in major deals.  These people are wealth-affiliated because on this scale ag is really capital-based, esp. when one factors in the commodities stock market.  These are the people who constantly check the computer version of ticker tape.  The ones who are American (I’d like to see a percentage) are far more likely to be Republican.

Yesterday I had coffee with a man who had been offered a job on a big ranch.  $400 plus a little old house forty miles from town.  He had no trouble turning it down because he has a LOT of money:  a few years ago when he had an industrial job of some kind and took a violent head injury,  insurance and a lawsuit brought him a big payout.  The only trouble is that beyond buying a new pickup at the top of the line and a humonguous flat-screen on which to watch trash and propaganda, he can’t think what to do with himself.  He probably won’t live very long anyway.

The insight, guidance and just plain morality of religious systems fall short these days.  The pill turned out to be as explosive as gunpowder.  Science tells us all sorts of things, but we pay no attention.  China was crushed by its own overpopulation, so forced people to observe a law mandating one-child-per-family.  If a woman got pregnant a second time, she was forced to abort.  Since couples could only have one child and boys were more likely to make money to help with their parents’ old age, they voluntarily aborted girls if they could determine that before birth or secretly killed them at birth.  

Now China’s major problem is men coming of age with no wives to stabilize them and create new families.  They lean against the walls, yearning for meaning, ready to catch fire in a war, probably more dangerous than nuclear technology.  One solution would be the importation of wives from another country, but wives carry their culture to the children, so they would not really be Chinese and the country would not be an institution that preserved its past.

America’s workforce is not just being displaced by industrialization and major international corporations who “off-shore” industry.  Their work culture has shifted out of their hands.  Now the pride, the allegiance to institutions (labor unions, church, towns) has betrayed them and they are the ones leaning against the saloon counter.

History offers us more examples of power crash than the Roman Empire, which is the one we like best.  The harrowing of plague, of disaster (in 1450 a series of erupting volcanoes dropped average temps below what would grow crops), of invasion (Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane) cause death and destruction.  But then afterwards, when balance is regained, things are often much better for a while.  From a kind of exaggerated point of view, if you think of the Islamic countries as a harrowing recurrence of the Mongols, one should simply survive until the wave passes.  Prepare for a New Order that includes them.  The old white wealthy males are going to die soon anyway.  Even dictators die.

CSI: DEEP HISTORY

Father Marquette, early Jesuit

I welcome the advent of thinking about pre-literate history, not just because it is another breakup of the hegemonic world of Western Thought, but also because it is so valuable in thinking about Blackfeet and their history which has been written for such a short time, usually by Others.  Only now -- after the revolution in thinking represented by those slippery “French” thinkers like Foucault and Co. who have legitimated post-colonial ideas -- have the tribal people of the prairies been free to think about pre-contact culture, mostly because contact missionaries used shaming to suppress anything not “civilized”, rather transparently meaning “like Euros.”

Once the graphic marks that are the substrate of “writing” and “math” -- the meaning of literacy in our culture -- are pushed back from their dominance in our education systems, the language of information becomes “trace.”  That is, the stories and relationships embedded (literally) in geology and memory or even the morphology of bodies.  The same subtle evidence used by post-modern thinkers to unmask printed words to reveal their secret meanings can be used to explain the supposedly mute world around us.  What is the grammar of geology?  What is grammar?  To so many indigenous people it’s a burden and an abyss because it is used to force conformity to white ways.  But to many white people it’s just a waste of time.  Or a challenge to break all the rules while not entirely abandoning intelligibility.  On the other hand, many cling to rules as sanity and strictly limit inquiry into anything disturbing.

Maybe literacy is also a ball-and-chain of thought

I was sitting in the break room of a local school when an older boarding school educated woman remarked that a certain white woman in the past had been the best English teacher the school had ever had.  “She really knew the right way to talk and she corrected the rest of us all the time.”  That is, teaching English -- to this woman -- meant only correct usage. 

Another time, soon after Montana passed a law requiring the teaching of Native American history, an educated woman said to me,  “I don’t see why we have to study THEIR history.”  This community has a Belgian origin of which it is proud, but they don’t know anything about the European country (war, King Leopold) except it looks quaint and cultured to them.  Their emigration as a community just before WWI seems to them an arrival in the Promised Land.  1900 is the beginning of time.  

Grammar is about structure, DEEP organization of phrases, clauses, and order that rests on sound thinking about relationships.  Too fancy for high school -- maybe.  But I have yet to come across young people who aren’t enchanted by Whorf’s ideas of Hopi language being founded on gerunds and participles because it’s based on seeing processes instead of our noun-based sentences.  A unit on “Yoda’s grammar,” which is about word order (actually Celtic), was a hit in 7th grade.  I left teaching before I took it much farther.  Taking it that far is part of why I had to leave.

The grammar of the planet is geology, isn’t it?  Sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic, plus the effects of erosion and the subterranean tectonic plates?  These elements have always created and destroyed culture, which is assumed meanings about survival.  Very verby.  Volcano, flood, fertility, earthquake, cyclone, monsoon, the adjectives and adverbs of the land.

CSI lab

Ironically, much of the “trace” of early human times must be accessed by highly technical means in many dimensions and scales.  Analysis of compilations of language over time so that we can see the changes and where they probably originated.  “Bar codes” of the genomes of creatures, diseases, and all other entities dependent on meiosis rather than cloning.  Environmental evidence (drowned forests, clam fossils at the tops of mountains, retreating glaciers revealing Otsi).  The structure of the individual cell and the ports in its wall.  How stars form and now how planets form around stars.  These are traces beyond the ken of early story-tellers.   Much of their ceremony is in the scenes of CSI programs: lab work with mysterious machines but also little containers and eye-droppers of fluid, scrapings from the fenders of cars, analysis of hairs picked off a lapel with tweezers, interpretation of graphic screen evidence.

We know now how much we rub up against each other and our environments and how tiny bits stick to us, just as we leave little dots of ourselves: epithelials.  We’ve figured out that the epigenome is one way the genome is played like a piano and that things like nutrition, trauma, and contagion can imprint a genome for generations to come.  We can methylate single genes to turn them off and on and use light filament to pinpoint which gene we mean.

Lucy Parsons (circa 1853–1942) Labor organizer, socialist, and legendary orator. 

No one is admitting that our writing is a big part of modern consciousness, much of which rests on words.  The underlying concepts are quite ignored.  We begin to move back towards speaking.  Even a person in Africa who cannot write can speak with our clever handheld instruments.  This means primacy has shifted back to story and eloquent spoken persuasion, very much the core of Blackfeet life until a few hundred years ago.  Most of our politicians have not caught up with that yet.  Many of them still can’t figure out a computer.  Our political systems are garroted by words.  We still live in a noun world full of thing-acquisition, instead of a verb world of process, becoming, discarding.

Changing focus to physical remains, maybe you know the story of the first grave opened to reveal neanderthal remains which were "strewn with flowers":

(Wikipedia:  Shanidar Cave (Kurdish: Şaneder or Zewî Çemî Şaneder; Arabic: كَهَف شانِدَر‎) is an archaeological site located on Bradost Mountain in Iraqi Kurdistan.  The remains of ten Neanderthals, dating from 35,000 to 65,000 years ago, have been found within the cave.The best known of the Neanderthals are Shanidar 1, who survived several injuries during his life, possibly due to care from other members of his band, and Shanidar 4, whose body lay beside a flower that can either be explained as evidence of burial rituals or animal contamination.)

Our romantic media immediately summoned up a beautiful woman tragically killed and wreathed with our Victorian "language of flowers".  The facts turn out to be more prosaic, but still tragic since war in the Middle East now has destroyed most of the skeletons.  “Shanidar I” was an “old” (40 to 50) man with a disfigured face and many injuries.  The flowers in the grave were sometimes interpreted as evidence of “religion”, but it turned out there is a little gerbil/pika/hamster that will dig holes and stash both grasses and flowers in loosened soil.  I never did understand why strewn flowers proved there was an afterlife anyway.

Gandhi's body

More shocking to racial purists has been the fossil genetic evidence that modern humans in some places are carrying neanderthal genes, which calls up images of King Kong running off with blonde Jessica Lange clutched to his hairy chest.  Another version of this brute-haunt has been idea of the origin of contemporary persons being displaced from the Middle East to Africa.  Eve was BLACK.  Think of THAT!!!

So evidence of trace and stories by interpretation wind in and out of each other, saturated with emotion, just as they do in the CSI serieses.  Because these crime stories are contemporary, they are gender-inclusive.  Though the lab personnel are one gender or the other, perps might be atypical.  However, the series called “Bones” addresses a unique science problem, which is a kind of person (Asperger?) who is blind to human relationship but able to handle incredible amounts of “trace” information and bring them into meaningful implications.  Technology has overwhelmed their feeling systems. 

This is a sub-cellular medical illustration -- I don't know what it represents.

Another powerful force of the series is the constant and respectful attention to human bodies, vividly illustrated with “medical” cartoons of the rushing around in our flesh as the cell community of eukaryotes goes about their business of trying to stay alive.  We learn how subtle changes can force death as well as horrifying tearing apart of flesh, and then the putrefaction that reduces us to goo and the other beings who ingest and digest us, to their benefit.

There’s a lot more to say.

IN SWEET FIELDS OF AUTUMN

This time of year -- actually, every seasonal change -- I find myself humming the songs I was used to in the Unitarian context where many of us were “immanentalists” if not simply nature worshippers.  So my head has been resonating with “In Sweet Fields of Autumn.”  The UU hymnals are full of pillage from other contexts -- usually a poem from here slapped together with a tune from there -- but the people who do this are often academics and carefully footnote where they got them.  “Oh, I say,” I thought to myself (I’ve been watching too much BBC again)  "I’ll look this up and find out what the origins are."  It’s always been such a natural tune, as though I’d always known it.  

And I had.  But when I learned it , it was called “Away in the Manger” !  

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W6975_GBAJY9366813&vw=dc

Full choir traditional version suitable for a cathedral.  And you can download it.  There are MANY versions in many styles on YouTube.  The words in the UU hymnal are by Elizabeth Madison (b. 1883).  To go farther, you’ll need a musicologist or a UU historian.  But here are her words:

In sweet fields of autumn the gold grain is falling, the white clouds drift lonely, the wild swan is calling.  Alas for the daisies, the tall fern and grasses, when wind sweep and rainfall fill low-lands and passes.

The snows of December shall fill windy hollow, the bleak rain trails after, and March wind shall follow.  The deer through the valleys leave print of their going and diamonds of sleet mark the ridges of snowing.

The stillness of death shall stoop over the water, the plover sweep low where the pale streamlets falter; but deep in the earth clod the black seed is living; when spring sounds her bugles in rousing and giving.

The secret to this business of mating poetry with tune is a little formula the hymnal  (Singing the Living Tradition) puts down in the bottom righthand corner:  in this case, 12.12.12.12   It’s the meter.  In the back of the hymnal is a list of the meters used, so if you know the meter of your poem, it’s simple to match it up with a tune.  

Back to immanentalism, which in its more popular versions is simply nature worship.  I think the difference between the two categories is a matter of sentimentalism.  The nature worshippers don’t have much truck with the more destructive and human-hostile features like storms, volcanoes and earthquakes.  They like things nice, which always makes me impatient.  Niceness steals holiness.

Much as I love solstices, I think I turn to equinoxes -- which are transitional, bittersweet, unpredictable -- with more responsiveness.  This last full moon was a bloody one here because of the fires in the Rockies where smoke rose from within the cordillera.  We see the line of peaks against the sky and somehow assume it is a flat cut-out of one row but in fact it is a complex of ridges and valleys created when the land was shoved together by the underlying subductive tectonic plates.  Now we’ve had a cold spell and a bit of rain which on the inner higher peaks of the mountains left snow.  Just now there is a dark formless cloud over that way -- dunno what it means.  But the nights are clear and extra starry because the moon rises late and when it does, it’s a silver scrap that lingers into morning.  If you were lost in the wilderness with no warm clothing, you’d better have survival skills.

This month I ran out of metformin and money at the same time, so decided I would make a virtue of this pickle by converting it into an experiment: going cold turkey without meds.  (Not very dramatic -- it’s only one pill a day.)  Instead of turning my head away, I made a chart and have been taking blood sugar readings five and six times a day.  Same diet as usual, but I added a little walk around our small civic park at bedtime which is often when my blood sugar is highest.  That’s why I’ve been extra-aware of what the moon is doing.

The surprise is that my glucose readings are the same without medication!  After two days I had a day of subtle malaise, rather like a reaction to a vaccination so I assume it meant that my inner community (I am a tower of micro-organisms) was adjusting.  So far the same is true of my blood pressure -- normal readings.  On Saturday I’ll go back to meds and see what happens.  I am much supported in this sort of strategy by a number of people who are deeply interested in diet, their own body dynamics, and what a constant stream of data can reveal.  It’s not idle, but it’s not quite academic or clinical either.  I sort of hate to name the websites for fear people will pursue the information the way the media does: grab an implication and make it a marketing occasion, a “rule.”

But we do know that bodies adjust to the seasons.  Day length, temps, changes in the vegetation and animal life of the ecology are deeply important.  This morning I slept long and well because dreams follow bodies.  It was a category I often visit:  I am moving to a small community in foothills.  It’s a combination of East Glacier, Heart Butte, a tiny house I lived in one summer in Browning, and a little place called Bridal Veil along the Columbia River that was a cluster of old logging camp housing.  At the time I considered renting there (Seventies) it was run by a sort of hippie community.  They didn’t think I’d fit in.

In this version of the dream I was staying with a family for a few days before moving into my new house.  The new element was that I had a set of six or seven beaded buckskin dresses.  They were mine, the woman of the house admired them and expressed a desire to have one of them, and I was considering whether to give it to her.  You can interpret but it will be about you, not me.  For me it is about transitions, time-driven so including aging, resources, community -- these are the forces that brought me to here and now.  Sometimes I think I might be kind of a "Dog in the Manger" about it.  Maybe I need a song.

BODY BOOKS

Decades ago, I started accumulating books about something I might call “the philosophy of the body” if I wanted to be pretentious. “Incarnate Being” if I wanted to be religiously poetic. But the nine books that have survived many purges and moves over the years are a hodge-podge. Now I need them and books like them, because of Barrus and Cinematheque, so I can think clearly about subjects normally pushed away as pornography. I see that the books are all from the Seventies and Eighties. Did I stop buying them? Was no one writing them anymore? Or was I just in places where they weren’t on the shelves anymore? Surely in the Nineties when I haunted Powells they would have been there.

I think (at least I hope) the books are trying to get at ways of thinking about subjects as vital and timely as sex, torture, death, addiction, disease, combat trauma, mutilation, and some of the edgy health issues we seem to be addressing now. Plastic surgery, nutrition, meds vs. supplements, euthanasia, DNA. Are we animals? Are animals human? What is there besides the body? What is extending life if one’s body breaks down?

Here are the book titles, in case someone has something to say about them. They’re all paperbacks:

Duyckaerts, Francois, (translated by John A. Kay) “The Sexual Bond,” A Delta Book, Dell Publishing Co. by arrangement with Delacorte Press. Originally published in Belgium in 1964. Delta edition in 1971.

Hutchinson, Marcia Germaine. “Transforming Body Image: Learning to Love the Body You Have.” The Crossing Press, 1985.

Keleman, Stanley. “Somatic Reality: Bodily Experience and Emotional Truth.” Center Press, 1979.

Fisher, Seymour, and Sidney E. Cleveland, “Body Image and Personality.” Originally published by van Nostrand in 1958. Dover, 1968.

Kurtz, Ron and Hector Prestera, M.D. “The Body Reveals: An Illustrated Guide to the Psychology of the Body.” Harper & Row, 1976.

Nelson, James B. “Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology.” Augsburg Publishing House, 1978.

Scarry, Elaine. “The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.” Oxford University Press, 1985.

Scarry, Elaine, ed. “Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons.” Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Stuart F. Spicker, editor. “The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism.” An Anthology. Quadrangle/New York Times, 1970.

I think I have some other “high philosophy” from Anne Douglas and maybe some anthro stuff. And my brain books. But wait, here’s a sweet little booklet: Laiken, Deidre S. “The First Kiss: a Teenager’s Guide to the Gentle Art of Kissing.” G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982. Some nice little tips in case you’ve been practicing on the back of your hand or kissing your dog. (I used to leave the booklet around my classroom because I’m here to tell you cowboys can’t kiss! Now, cornet players! For one thing, they don’t chew snoose!) There is a class angle to this. (like everything)

My original purpose was for thinking about liturgy: what positions and gestures connect to what concepts and emotions? Kneeling, folding hands? The Cinematheque crew must address their defenselessness, both as bodies whose antibodies keep being suppressed by the HIV virus and as boys who had to resort to painful and desperate ways of getting money, which meant they often turned to self-administering drugs to comfort themselves. Their naturally unfolding emotional lives have had to grow around and through many obstacles, but grow they did and continue to do. Barrus, with his avascular necrosis, faces daily limitations hard for a former dancer to accept, as well as constant pain.

Contempt and ferocity are effective defenses, but they take a lot of energy. Boundaries, structure, the mechanisms of sussing and testing, are all distorted and/or imposed from the outside. Normal functions like eating, sleeping, and caressing have been converted and re-interpreted. Appearance, always a big issue for pre-teens and teens, is scrambled among appeal, saleability, self-respect, and feeling dirty. Rhetoric is the same. One minute swaggering obscenity and the next a child’s need.

Asia has been the place on the planet where the power of helplessness has been developed into systems. Judo and all that. Weaponless combat. Body as weapon. Strategy as weapon. America is the place on the planet where the power of helplessness has taught biding one’s time and unexpectedness, guerrilla warfare. The populations of these two places are historically genetically continuous.

We are protective of our flesh but so willing to risk that of other people. We worry about flu but never worry whether our neighbors have enough to eat. We worry about global warming but blame and stigmatize street people. We worry about meds but eat dreck and excrete our meds in such quantity that the frogs become hermaphrodites. We have the illusion that we can be apart from everything else. Safe. And then drive drunk or texting.

We are so protective of our flesh that fear of death prevents us from being alive. Once one has faced, risked, and temporarily survived death, life becomes a new thing.

Making such pompous pronouncements is easy, especially on the Internet. Forming one’s own strategy and setting one’s own small daily goals is much harder. But I feel as though reading this stuff and thinking about it is necessary and why I want to live in a small house without doing any housework so I have time to think. Besides, I hope it won’t attract any other people except on the Internet and then only people who also want to think about what it means to live in a body. Without bringing it here, hoping to be fed and held.

My body is not exceptional: old, tubby, hair thinning, eyes dimming, hands fumbling, feet stumbling. But I’ve always been curious about it. Never imposed much discipline until the necessity of going sugarless. Every morning I spent a half-hour with my friends, one dying of cancer and the other operating with one arm and a morphine pump. They’ve been married fifty years, worked hard, had many dreams. Yesterday morning I watched she and her husband trying to get her little pain-killer patch (a square inch) peeled off its backing and stuck onto her chest. It was a ten minute struggle. They wanted to do it themselves. The stuff is so powerful she only needs one every three days and drinking alcohol at the same time would kill her. I bring gossip, pet the busy little dog, and help him put on his shirt and socks. I go at the same time every morning. Dependability is important. Bodies understand it.