UNFOLDING FELT IDEAS

What was once my thesis idea for a “poetics of liturgy”, which no one understood or liked, is now a theory of experience design based on “felt thought.”  Many ideas have helped me expand all this.  Finally I realized that many of the objections were from Christians who were not supposed to BE Christian, but had the patterns so deep within themselves that they just changed the names and went right on “feeling” the same and blocking all contradictions, esp. in university or big-shot church leaders.

The second was circling around to remember the ideas of Hayakawa and Whorf, whom I met in the late Fifties as an undergrad.  They were responses meant to understand the exposure of soldiers and anthropologists to other cultures after WWII, but they tried to deny tragedy and violence.  Some said they had no “theory of evil.”  Though a few, mostly Jews, dedicated themselves to the premise that the Nazi Holocaust was the most extreme possible evil, exceeding all others.

Beaver Bundle Ceremony by Bob Scriver

Add to these the experience of the Blackfeet Reservation and what was left of their ceremonies and land.  An adventure in the City of Portland as an animal control officer revealed the raw and underground side of undigested evil. Serving as a Unitarian Universalist minister for small fellowships who claimed they hated institutional religion while clinging to the worst aspects of it: status, economic privilege, general exceptionalism in two related countries: smug America and Canada which claimed to be better than America.  And so on.

A big part of these new ideas is science, esp in the high drama of neurology research.  The importance of the pre-frontal cortex in the management of human behavior and thought was pushed into my face by damage to my brother and father, which changed them forever and destroyed the family by their inability to function at a time when they ought to have been engines of economic security.  At the same time I was struggling with my own darker emotional life in marriage with an overpowering man and his Edwardian parents.  The Blackfeet Reservation was at the time and still in to some extent, a 19^th century place.  Once I connected the radical structuralist and postcolonial thought to Hayakawa and Whorf, things became understandable, because in their challenging of the meaning of words they exposed the vast animalian world of pre-verbal thought.  Deep thought.  Subtext.  

Most people, particularly if they are college-educated, believe that thinking and words -- particularly written words maybe because they are revised and edited -- ARE thinking.  On a hierarchic pyramid, which they love because they assume they are at the top and because Maslow put the most intense experience at the peak, writing is the top.  Under that is speaking, like brilliant conversation at Jimmy’s tavern, and under that is either science or art -- they are considered to be split.  Eating, sleeping, traveling, fucking, etc. are considered below human function -- just animal stuff at the base of the pyramid, unfortunately necessary but instinctual and thus more-or-less uncontrollable.  Much of fiction is the struggle to control this level which is not just desire, but also survival.

Fiction is also often about the struggle between individual and group.  Unless one is Chinese, the individual is the highest value.  Thus, when I encountered Barrus and his boys, their “groupness,” always shifting and never compulsory, was a new consciousness to me.  Also their near-complete absorption into a world of flesh and drugs meant to exaggerate or mute the suffering from that world.  The boys, in their social exclusion, only survived if they undertook sexwork.  If they were physically attractive, this could make them wealthy and desired.  But the desire of others became a danger to their personhood because the desiring persons denied everything BUT their physicality.  The boys yearned for an intimacy and love that embraced their real selves.  The reality of the world could be so twisted that obsession, madness and suicide ensued.  Yet they had the capacity to leave all that through art, which restored their control.

It is pretty well accepted that a human being “constructs” his version of what is real, beginning as an embryo evolving a brain.  Neurons conduct information in through the skin which is then edited, transformed, recorded and eventually used by the brain to control the body.  This solipsistic understanding of perception and motivation is only broken by our ability to “feel” each other, which we call “empathy.”  Sensitive instruments can perceive that when we watch someone dance, the neurons in our own bodies will vaguely fire a version of ourselves doing the same thing.

This links up with another part of my undergrad education which included “Method” acting, in which one uses sense memories of one’s own to create in one’s own body the muscle tensions, reactions, and subtle variations that will be convincing enough while acting a character to evoke empathy from an audience.  One does not imitate a person holding a rose, one holds the rose in one’s own mind and the audience sees it.

Recently while looking back over my previous struggles with all this material, I became impressed with how much, esp. in the more elite and educated circles, was about talk and writing.  Word dominated all else, with books and institutional authorization.  This completely shifted the spontaneous -- what happened in the liminal space of play and emotional life -- into a more distant and analytical mode: the director, the anthropologist, the psychoanalyst, and -- indeed -- the professional religious leader.  Yet the POINT of creating a liminal space (over the threshold into the older, darker, limbic functioning of the brain) is to allow change in the person’s worldview or to reconfirm worthy convictions.  The conventional group gets into it because it wants to prevent change and keep individuals in the group.  It will thwart any new enlightenments.  Writing can be the thread-web that keeps the person in place.

Perls and his group

So now, having already started with the importance of the sensorium, I find out that the current theory of how the brain works in practical molecular terms of memory and reflection, is all neuronal, accepting and recording in the very cells of the brain, but also in muscle and viscera.  After all these years of the ascetic, the attempt to escape bodies, we find out we ARE bodies.  This is what I was after in recently viewing two sets of movies: one set about the human ability or inability to act against our own best interests (“Hunger” and “Shame”) and the other set about innocent predators in groups and alone: lions, tigers and elephants.

This information again links back, this time to the experimental vespers at the Pacific Northwest Unitarian Univeraslist Leadership Schools.  They were highly thoughtful, might or might not include writing which might or might not be traditional, and they included the sensorium: feeding each other grapes, sitting on a cushion with eyes closed and suddenly hearing a cello played in an overhead room, or sometimes holding hands in a long line, being led in the dark on wet grass to somewhere we hadn’t known about.  These were week-long workshops, one per summer for three years.  The idea continues, but those original leaders are dead of old age and I’m not sure the key was preserved.

Starhawk's spiral dance

I’m a Montana writer in the sense that I’ve been here in intervals for half a century.  I’m not a Montana writer in the sense that, more than any state-name, the east slope of the Rockies is an access point to the nature ofthis planet and beyond it to the stars.  This is a place that insists on mixing desire with survival.  That’s where I am.  It’s not exactly physical and yet my only instrument is my body.  Sometimes I think about Starhawk’s spiral dance.

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL?

What’s so special about humans?  How are we different from other animals?  Do the new neurology insights make it clear that there is no such thing as a soul, as a super-natural connection to another world, as magic?  Everyone seems to be abandoning “religion” so they can justify greed -- virtue as defined by income.  

What about spirituality?  It is irrefutable that people feel sacredness, whatever it is.  The circumstances and terms, like the environment and the previous experience of the person, appear to be wildly various -- not that they can’t be made “domestic”, pulled into daily life.  Even then the “wild” unpredicted experience of the sacred can burst upon us unexpectedly.

Human institutions are the way groups try to gain control and to guide arrangements and duties by defining “memes” (customs -- little sections of culture -- that people perform, mostly because of ecological factors like food, climate, transportation, the raising of children).  Institutions are constantly trying to capture sacredness for their own ends, partly in order to be exempted from accountability.   This may not be cynical -- may be sincere conviction and experience -- but no institution can experience the sacred because it is a human experience.   An institution is not itself human, only a product of being human.

But an institution, through memes, assumptions of reality, has an eerie way of pretending it’s a person, trying to get control in order to perpetuate itself, and even building a “super-meme” of laws that will protect its wealth and power.  It does not like variousness and competition, but without these, it will harden and fossilize until it is useless, or perhaps accrue so much resistance and hatred (emotional resistance) that it will be pulled to its knees with violence.

Institutions need infrastructure (buildings, transportation, storage, sources of power) but can be tempted to neglect them when they prefer memes that are empty, like luxury that is useless or toxic.  (I do not mean art.)  Both institutions and infrastructures must support memes that do not destroy the larger context -- the planetary environment and the beings of it.

The meaning and use of memes is to guide behavior at the level of individuals, organizations, and religions, which are organizations protecting meme-systems that work for the people and other life in a specific ecology.  If that ecology (system of interacting and mutually supporting symbiotic region) changes or the system is applied to a different ecology, it will break down.  This applies to communities, categories of thought, nations, businesses, corporations and religions.  Their authority, usefulness and boundaries will empty.  This will often cause them to resort to force and destruction.

New memes are always needed.  They arise from research that offers new ideas, new words to describe them, and the jostling for new relationships.  Right now, neurological and cosmological realizations are causing major reframings of understanding that were once the province of religion.  Religion, in the institutional sense of theologies and practices, are now “provincial” in the sense of limited to an area, even in the pejorative definition of “concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.”   It is sophisticated to presume that what one knows is smarter and more refined than what others know, even when there is no way of really knowing.  Until the sacred breaks in.

We need some terms and strategies to address the disconnect between the cities and the rest of the earth’s surface, since the city dwellers have lost touch with the “boonies” even for the practice of marketing.  I get questionnaires about my address that make it impossible to answer. Their own way of relating is either through “picturing” -- making distant and “artistic” the views of what is considered attractive but scary, like mountains or deserts -- or by statistics: GPS, temps, crop yields, miles between two points, house number, street name.  

Memes come from material culture.  The homogeneity of cities based on building materials, use of light, street grids, labor shifts, high levels of supervision and stipulation, noise, ubiquity of machinery, mean that to many people these are reality.  Their sense of sacredness is likely to be pushed aside for the sake of productivity, often expressed in numbers rather than in sensory metaphor.  Thus people go to the past or to the mock planet of a spaceship, sources jammed with images never really experienced (suits of armor, catapults, walled castles) or to “sets” invented by designers, closer to machines than art.  Religious institutions do the same thing: cathedrals or self-containment.  (I’d rather have dragons than angels.)

The hardest part of the environment to capture and systematize is other people.  There are a great many of them in cities and they are much more assorted than in rural ecologies.  In a small village, everyone knows everyone else and they all keep track of each other.  If someone is missing in a village, people wonder.  If someone is missing in a city, people shrug if they even notice.

In the city there are always a lot of excess people, maybe from some other ecology where they would have fit, or maybe because they were damaged or malformed early, or maybe got addicted -- anyway, they’re a drag on society. A meme that they ought to be just eliminated grows out of frustration and for lack of any other ideas. Resistance to the idea of just exterminating them begins to become more powerful but unexpressed and therefore unaddressed and more powerful in reprocity.   Taboos always intensify what they are trying to avoid.

People are shot in the streets.  Or roughed up enough and helplessly exposed to disease and violence, that they will die secretly.  Or be put into situations of hopelessness so deep that inanition and marasmus will kill them, either by active suicide or gradual fading.  

Sacredness can re-empower them.  It is an art of hope and vision.  It rests on and emerges from biology as much as the fantasy of other worlds.  It’s where the memes meet genes and the spiral chromosomes in cells empower the cramped body/minds to endure, think, and eventually rise up.  The genes teach the memes to do idea-judo, where the raw force of dictionaries and laws are met and deflected by reinterpretation, new stories, going for the joints and leveraging the weight of flesh.  It is the power of the under-power, the shadow world growing stronger because it is unexpressed.

Bill T. Jones

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_t_jones_the_dancer_the_singer_the_cellist_and_a_moment_of_creative_magic?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2015-05-06

It is the power of the particle, the granular accumulation of tiny bits, like one-celled animals building reefs that create and protect islands.  It is possible because of the universal sea in which they dwell and which conveys the forces of pattern that can change everything.  We must each do our tiny daily bit.

DREAMING OF ARCHITECTURE

The current theory about dreams is that they are the result of neurological processing -- at least when everything works the way it’s supposed to.  If the brain can’t finish the job, it evidently wanders a labyrinth, trying to find the right place to store (I imagine a police evidence lock-up) or discard (I imagine a waste chute like a tall apartment building’s disposal out in the hall) impressions from the day.  Since I usually watch movies in the evening and since they are usually mysteries, cop shows, procedurals --  which covers a lot of territory -- I dream images from them.

Contemporary movies of this type, especially the American and Scandinavian ones (I’ve become a big fan of several standout Danish actors:  Mads Mikkelson, Thomas Gabrielson, Jens Albinus and others.)  But also I am a fan of the cinematography and sets.  Because these sorts of film are normally attached to cities there are fabulous helicopter shots of skyscrapers with their light patterns and finial tops. 

Portland, Oregon

We look along the streets and, esp. in the Scandinavian and New York shots, see the sky over harbors, often at sunset or sunrise, sometimes with huge ships sliding along.  The incredible wealth of a major city shows in the glass-doored luxury buildings while the dark underpinnings and infrastructures become night scenes of Bruegel-people in temporary cardboard villages and elevated trains make their terrible screams overhead when going around a corner, pushing walls of hot air ahead of them -- but those aren’t photographable, just dreamable. 

The Scandinavians live indoors in winter but outdoors in summer, so there are always scenes in summer fields, small rough cabins or the kind of country houses the east coast of America used to call “cottages.”  Americans scattered to the countryside before there was air-conditioning, but now the wealthy go to warm shores in winter.  In the days when I was more likely to read magazines in the evening, I dreamt house interiors because most of the magazines were high end “shelter mags.”  Now I’ve stopped, in part because I’d have to subscribe to have access, and anyway they’ve slid over to being celebrity mags -- the houses of the rich and famous -- and I don’t care about them.  No one really lives in them anyway.  Sometimes I’ll flip through the mags about “cottages” in the more modern sense: small old-fashioned buildings with clever recycled furnishings.  But I never dream about them.

Nor do I dream about the American luxury bedrooms which always have acres of mattress and dun-colored bedding because human skin looks better against it.  (Cinematographers hate white.)  Print has disappeared again, but sometimes there are navy blue or espresso sheets.  Headboards are interesting to watch.  But bedrooms of the Great British Houses are still the most suggestive.  Some of their coverlets look to be several hundred years old.  I don’t dream about them.

It’s the rushing modern streets (not sheets) I dream of, because they connect with sense memories from the Nineties when I was working for the City of Portland and using my lunch hour to circle through Meier & Frank to Rich’s Cigar Store where I picked up any new mags -- stopping briefly to scan the bead stores -- then through the Galleria which was a restored atrium with an Asian import store at the top level and Mother Goose, the nearby luxury artisan object store where my cousins have worked; on around through Nordstrom where a three story escalator goes up alongside a wall of mirror while a grand piano tinkles away at the bottom, played by a young man in a tux; and finally through the new-built shopping atrium, Pioneer Place, where the escalators seem totally unsuspended or supported and it took me months to work up to enough vertigo tolerance to step onto them.

Pioneer Place

Just now online I looked for photos and found a few, but Portland -- maybe because of the rain -- is a books and cafés sort of place.  What I know is the neighborhoods, the arteries and seedy parts that I drove as an animal control officer.  I don’t dream about them much, but I do think about them as a waking, pondering, remembering person.

In dreams I wander downtown Boston, Philadelphia, Hartford and Oxford.  (I've never been in that last.)  Most of all I go back to academic settings -- not the pleasant campuses and bland buildings of Northwestern at the end of the Fifties when I was an undergrad -- but the indoors labyrinths and catacombs of stone quads, built like Gothic forts around a square of grass.  (There are usually warnings to keep off the grass.)  Some say quads are descended from religious cloisters.  The effect of them -- since they can be closed off from the surroundings -- is to allow a protected environment even in a ghetto like the South Side of the Chicago.  However, protection is only another word for confined.

Some say dreams are records of unfinished business and I suppose that’s true.  Indeed there are loose ends in my ’78-’82 sojourn.  The degrees were granted and all that.  I’ve finished the possibilities of my professional arc as a Unitarian Universalist minister.  So what is it that’s undone?  Unsolved. Unresolved.  It’s not about me, I think.  It’s about institutions, whether housed by academic quads, commercial shopping atriums, or governmental office buildings.  

Yesterday I watched a TED talk by Louis Kahn’s son. as he visited his father’s masterpiece: the capitol complex of Bangladesh, the poorest and most endangered of all nations.  It is built on a flood plain, with workmen using bamboo scaffolds instead of steel, and concrete technology that my grandfather and his brothers used to create the concrete silos of dairy farms on the flood planes of Washington State at the beginning of the 1900‘s.  But not even they carried the concrete to the top of the forms in baskets. Here’s the Kahn building:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMjWPoixRzA  The man himself was ugly and rude, totally preoccupied with his work, hardly knew his children, but he created this very beautiful simple complex with huge vaults of space that inspire a people desperate for inspiration.

I love architects.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK_gGQ91rmQ  This is a short clip of Douglas Cardinal, Calgary-born architect who is well-known and much-admired in Canada.  He is Blackfoot and Metis and has made it a point to claim his heritage.  His basic geometry is not the quad but the serpentine curve and his material is more likely to be brick than steel.  Some of his buildings are only a few hours’ drive from here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIgR4d9p5dQ is a TED-like talk of Cardinal talking.  He is five years older than me, but looks much younger.  Not in a “suit” but in khakis and polo shirt, he stands before a screen that shows his work.  Locals, even the Blackfeet, don’t know it.  Cardinal says that his key is living in the questions instead of the answers.  

This is how one gets to dreams: questioning.  That’s what’s not finished, nor should it be, even in the square stone Gothic boxes of universities.  And yet in the square-cornered sheet of paper lurks the organic.  One only has to set it free.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwJB7KzDEbQ   

"THE WIRE" -- IDEALISTIC VOYEURISM

“The Wire” is a highly acclaimed HBO series about cops, longshoremen, teachers, and journalists. Working people, maybe moving up the class ladder. So? It’s not glamorous, there’s not that much sex, it’s written by people who KNOW and step outside the stereotypes, so it doesn’t win the big prizes which always go to the stereotype du jour. I came to love it.

Why? Because it is written by my kind of people. Not that smart or educated in an academic way or any of that stuff, but people who work at the interface between worlds. When I was first making educational materials about animal control, I said animal control is “at the interface between people and animals.” I’ve tried to make the distinction between humane society people, who usually work out of shelters for unwanted animals, and animal control people, who work in the streets, like the other emergency responders and keepers of community order.

The best explanation of the series, what motivated it and how it achieved what it did, is this interview by Terry Gross with Ed Burns:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6524743

Here are quotes from each of the partner originators. David Simon has said that despite its presentation as a crime drama, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals. Whether one is a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge or a lawyer, all are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution they are committed to."

When Burns was teaching, he “saw his primary role as instilling caring behavior in his pupils.” He felt his major impact was in giving the children an example of an "adult who's consistent, who's always there, who always comes through with what he said, then that's a new world for them.”

Institutions arise to address needs: governments, hospitals, schools, police, building inspectors, “dog catchers”, and drug networks. Need drives, shapes, and sometimes destroys the institutions. With the institution comes what I call the “interstitials,” the corner boys, the truant officers, the cooks, the snitches, the shelter attendants, all the backstage invisible stuff. What is legal or not, what is evil or not, is negotiable. Simon and Burns saw this.

It’s not different from the discussion in brain theory contexts about how people develop categories in childhood (Burns calls them “certitudes”) about how the world is organized and then work their way through their lives by making adjustments and getting tough. Even the institutions are constantly adjusting -- this is the twenty-first century way of understanding society, VERY different from the Victorian and colonial givens. This is the impact of both science as it perceives forces imperceptible and unaccountable without modern technology, and of our intense media access to so much -- other cultures, other creatures. Also, we begin to understand that we cannot survive if war is the only solution we have and the idiocy of framing everything as war.

“The Wire” is organized around the idea of voyeurism: there is as much surveillance photography as wire-tapping. The chief use of interface people is to gather information and convert it into understanding. So you have pictures of clock faces being sent -- what does it mean? So you have no bodies in spite of inevitable enforcement killings -- what does it mean? Not just “what’s happening,” but “what does it mean?” The killings are rarely sensationalized: people are popped in the head and simply no longer there. What does it mean?

Next come the “what if” questions, like the police chief who tries the “Hamsterdam” experiment of confining drug biz to a certain area. Going back to my animal control experience, Mike -- very much like the Bob Wisdom character -- was always trying something. But, just like the Wisdom character, he was shut down. We were using a hypobaric chamber to kill dogs -- which is inevitable. (A big tank pumps out the air until the dogs don’t have enough oxygen to survive. The guy who invented it crawled in and experienced it as far as unconsciousness and said it was like being drunk. Alcohol chemically prevents oxygen from reaching the brain.) It looks scary and is easily misunderstood as suffocation where airways are closed by force.

So whatever force it is (sentimentalism?) in our society that denies death and suffering, insisted that this form of killing be removed and drugs (medicalization) be substituted. They are very desirable drugs. Mike became aware that someone was stealing and selling drugs. He set a trap, caught the culprit, and reported him to the bosses. He was fired for that, just like Bob Wisdom’s character. This sort of thing happens again and again.

Omar, says Burns, was deliberately defined as the one person who stands against all institutions. The many real stickup artists were less colorful, but just as much voyeurs, information gatherers. Omar was given a shotgun, an Aussie duster, and outsider status as a gay, but Michael K. Williams added an actor’s ability to make objects part of his character, his own scar, and his willingness to open-mouth kiss a guy (not in the script) or rise from a bed naked. Soon he was mythic. Others, like the actors who played Stringer, Chris-and-Snoop, Bubbles, and the four boys whom we see grow before our very eyes, inhabited their parts to the level of realer-than-real.

But the ultimate interface roles were those of the writers. They were the ones who knew they were making a long-form filmed story that was exactly a novel in the sense that a novel is always a moral investigation. They were the ones who knew the material culture of Baltimore and loved it. They made the Edwardian rowhouses that stand solidly together into both symbol and reality as beautiful tombstones of a city destroyed. Maybe someone else will show their renovation and re-inhabitation as a new way of living in the city, old bodies (bottles) for new lives (wines). Or maybe they will be rubble.

What happens to people who do this work of understanding and explaining in images and interactions? What preparation brought them to this? For whom are they writing? I can only conclude that they write for people like me and maybe the Peace Corps and Headstart generations. Idealists who have worked in rat-ridden trenches that challenged their certitudes and abilities. There are a lot of these people -- more than anyone realizes, I think. They are always watching and looking for ways to get the word out to people who have power, or maybe ways of empowering those trapped among the tombstones. On “The Wire” the word is out.

THE TRANSCENDENT CITY

For many years I’ve had a strange sleep pattern. I go to bed about ten, wake up at three or four (depending on whether it’s daylight savings or not), work for a while, and then go back to sleep until nine or so. Some days I would sleep longer except that the Baptist church next door has a carillon that starts at 9AM. This village won’t tolerate noisy vehicles or barking dogs, but welcomes bonging hymns. The minister told me proudly that he sets the volume on high. I think he feels people might be converted. I don’t hear it anymore but it drives company, well, bonkers.

In those few hours I call my “second sleep,” I dream my most revelatory and (increasingly) detailed stories. Often they are about cities, roughly the same city, which is a composite. There is a river, hills or mountains, tall buildings clustered in a downtown, and neighborhoods of graceful Victorian houses. NEVER a suburb or a strip mall or even an enclosed mall. Often there are shops, elegant and luxurious, but I never buy anything.

It’s a composite place. Sometimes I can entertain myself by figuring out which little piece came from BBC movies about Edinburgh (the rim of the ancient volcano) or London (the Millenium Wheel), which are from Seattle or San Francisco or Vancouver, B.C. Chicago from the end of the Fifties and Portland from slightly earlier and much later are probably the main sources. Before I left Portland I often preached in Oregon City, making the drive along the Willamette and then up to the top of the bluffs to where the old town is. The four small cities I served as a circuit rider (Helena, Great Falls, Missoula and Bozeman) sometimes contribute in small scraps.

Such dreams key to a mood: the main work is done, the machinery of thought is still fly-wheeling but the content-sorter is idle. Cities are sort of an always available substrate. Cities = books. Not the physical covers and pages that surround me in my house, but the ideas in them. I don’t dream the ideas themselves, I just dream the places ideas come from: cities. Because cities have the libraries, the universities, the bookstores, the theatres, and -- until recently -- films. Some parts of my cities are from sci-fi movie images, but never the claustrophobic ones in the rain.

Cities are places of transcendence as well as grimy ghetto traps. Parts of cities have always been slums. But I don’t dream the times as an animal control officer when I was riddled and gasping from adrenaline left over from danger. I do remember the times as a little child I stood on the end of our block and realized our street ran along a glacial moraine, that I could see across the neighborhood to the West Hills which divert the Columbia River into that sort of tab at the top left-hand corner of Oregon. Another time I stood in Vernon Park, across from my grade school, and realized I was looking across the Columbia at the historical location of Fort Vancouver. The history teachers at that school were pretty effective so I could imagine the log palisade and the bonfires that burned in front of it. I felt the connectedness of the world, its historical substrate.

It was the age of department stores with marble steps and bronze drinking fountains that carried chilled water -- not that Portland water requires much chilling. My parents both grew up on tough water-short farms and felt such a place was the cave of Ali Baba, so I picked up that attitude.

It persisted in the Nineties when I was working for the City of Portland and spent my lunch hour along a little trail that went up a street of shops to The Galleria, a restored department store with an atrium in the middle; to Rich’s Cigar Store where every kind of magazine was carried; to a bead store where I bought two of everything to make earrings; back down to Nordstroms, the glitziest store, with an escalator alongside a huge mirror so dizzying that it took me several tries to go all the way to the top; and then across Courthouse Square, the outdoor version where kids played hackysack and food carts steamed; then through glassed-in Pioneer Place full of shops where the escalator is just as dizzying; back through Saks and up the street to the Portlandia building. It was all a display of sophisticated commodities I couldn’t afford and wouldn’t have bought if I could have. I buy books.

I never dream about Powells, in spite of all the hours I spent there, because in those aisles my inner thinking flywheel had plenty to process and no space for fine china, elegant linens, clothes way too small for me, magazines in French. The whole point of these repeated dreams is “trans” cendance, floating through with no goal, the way the air shuttles go among the pointed white towers of Star Wars or Firefly.

For the last ten years I’ve barely left Valier. Calgary is the closest to one of these cities but since I need a passport to cross the border and a passport costs more than a hundred dollars, I don’t go there anymore. Now the Internet is my city. I slide through the blogs and websites, frictionless and unthinking, their images crossing my retinas but leaving no trace until I find a good book.

I don’t dream of mountains. I don’t have to: they’re right here. I don’t dream of the ocean except when I’m dealing with some much deeper issue than just “Western Civilization” which is what the city dreams are about. In a city dream I’m always moving, maybe walking on sidewalks or even through the spaces between buildings, esp. when the cities are old Mediterranean ones. But most often I’m driving, slantwise down the cliff, across some streets of old houses, turning onto a highway that runs along the river, seeing high bridges in the distance, noting the ship-mast-worthy Douglas firs along the way, accepting the gleam of sun when the clouds leave a space.