THE SEASONS FLIP IN FLAMES

Myself, 1945-'46

This time of year I’m always a little panicky.  It doesn’t help that the weather shifts now, so around here we are due for a cold spell and even some snow, but in the meantime fires are filling the air with smoke so that the nose-brain is signalling “fire,fire,fire. . . “  

But the real reason is the beginning of school.  From the very first day of kindergarten, which was my own personal first day because my mother had to fight to get me in late, because she said that I was overloading her ability to care for the three of us (me and “the boys” who at that point were like one person).  My b-day is late in October, so I was technically too young, but she made her plea stick.

The result was that I walked into a classroom where everyone had already formed their social patterns and there was no place for me.  Lesson learned.  Maybe OVER-learned.  I wouldn’t have known this had happened if my mother hadn’t told me.  Her position about me all my life was that I was unwilling to take the bullet for her and the boys, for the family.  (My father had a traveling job.  He was irrelevant but he was also the reason my mother felt so overwhelmed.)  She never mentioned a precipitating incident, but there must have been one.

A candle-making demonstration about 1953

She felt that my role as a daughter was to support hers as a mother.  She hoped I would be a do-over for every disappointment she’d had.  That meant she finished college while I was in high school as she could not at the proper age (the Depression), and then sent me through college.  But she was enraged that in middle age I went to Divinity School on scholarship.  Twice in life I really screwed up and got into the crosshairs of failure so that I had to ask to come back “home.”  The first time she assumed I was admitting she was right — now I would get a proper hairdo and learn how to play bridge.  The second time she almost didn’t let me return.  

So now at 77 I make my own place.  Ironically, it was my third of my mother’s estate that bought me this ramshackle house.  I’ve been on my own ever since and have managed the necessities — barely.  But the crucial nub of my real, if secret, life has since 1999 has been aflame with ideas and fulfillment.  Only one person really knows and that person was a gift beyond measurement.  

They say that in a sort of foreshadowing of coitus that bacterial one-celled creatures will sidle up next to each other and both will open a sort of port-hole in their cell walls.  Then they exchange some genetic information.  it’s a vivid image.  For me it brings to mind ranchers out on some rural road, traveling in opposite directions so that they can park with adjacent windows and talk for long enough to shut off the engines.  They used to smoke.  What they learn from each other can be vital.  So this writer and I pulled up our computers next to each other and the result was life-saving.

So many people are trying to resolve their life-issues by writing, that there is a parallel industry now that coaches and gives pep talks.  One of the best is steve@stevenpressfield.com.  Best because he really does know nuts and bolts and has sold books.  All these guys operate off pretty much the same assumption: that “writing” is linear, follows the same pattern of a compelling problem that causes rising action through increasingly tougher problems until finally there is a crisis/climax and then a resolution, hopefully one that leads to a higher plane of life.  

This is narrative fiction, but most of the non-fiction also follows this pattern.  The college educated pre-readers, editors, and agents look for it and endorse it.  If presented with a mass of print, they try to find the “narrative line” and develop it, prune it, espalier it onto the familiar wall.  Many times the most inspired but nonconforming writers are murdered by this.  Sometimes they reframe themselves as poets, which means they’re free but they’ll never make a living.

So what are the new patterns, the alternatives?  One has grown out of blogging, on-going sequences of individually composed writing — possibly chronological like a journal, but maybe only related by the writer having written them, like beads on a string.  Way down at the origin of at least one of my strands is kindergarten, and the dread of starting school again but being driven to take the bullet for the family.  A lot of other strands added since 1945, which is the origin of that bullet metaphor.

The formal philosophical underpinning of the three-part syllogism comes out of Greek drama and was both the origin and the exemplar for the Western world clear up through the Enlightenment.  Science and the scientific method is another version of it: define a problem, take evidence, form a hypothesis, make a triumphant discovery.  There were alternatives, but they were ignored.

Most recently I found “rhizome theory” which is the pattern of how sweetgrass grows: in clumps, then in long runners with a new clump forming at the end.  This is how blogs are.  This is how I think and write.  This how the world seems to be for a moment.  It’s a “Silk Roads” theory.  A town, a trail, another town.

Here on the high prairie the temp and the air quality are balancing, still late summer but predicted to flip over into a crisp fall in the night.  It’s hard to sleep and dreams are worrisome.  A repeated dream is that I’m at a conference in a strange town, not all that interested in the agenda and not knowing any of the other attendees.  I walk through the city and only half-realize they are cities from television, mixed and overlain with the cities I’ve known.  Rarely am I stepping over railroad tracks in a rotted industrial zone; usually I’m passing shop windows.  Often it’s all so real and familiar that I wonder whether I’m channeling someone.  There’s no Freudian symbolism nor even any Jungian tale.  I’m just new to kindergarten and wondering what the key might be.

Alan Deale and I at the tea after ML awarded him an honorary doctorate.

A few nights ago I had a telephone call from my original — and beloved — Unitarian minister, Alan Deale, because of writing about clergy misconduct misconstrued and suppressed, then dragged out of the past in vengeance.  We talked about his intern student ministers from the Seventies, who are involved.  I told him about driving by the church at 2AM after an event of some sort and seeing all the lights on, so I stopped out curiosity and the vague thought that help might be needed.  It was an intern in tears over not being able to write a sermon.  My efforts to help didn’t work.

When I went on, I had to cross what they call the “Pearl District” which used to be warehouses and therefore has railroad tracks in the streets.  Now it’s trendy boutiques and galleries, gentrified but with no residences.  I came to a car on fire — totally engulfed in high flames, just like television.  A man with a camera on a tripod was taking photos.  I stopped again.  

“Is there anyone in the car?”  Knowing if there was, they were dead.

“Yes.  In the back.”  He didn’t stop.  I heard sirens.

I left.  There was never anything in the news nor did I hear anything through the sheriff’s gossip.  Sometimes I wonder whether it was a dream.  What is reality?  When can we intervene?  When is it right to call on others for help?  Are we ever entitled to guard our own interests?

EARLY COLD

Just before waking, despite an electric mattress pad and wearing several layers of fleece -- quite aside from a huge imitation-down comforter, I’ve been cold.  Not shivering, not chilly, just inertly cold.  I live in Montana and this winter went into double-digits below zero fahrenheit.  But this cold is not like that.  It’s not coming from anywhere outside me.  It’s body-cold.

Today is Easter so it ought to be warm, right?  The time for cold was Friday in the tomb/cave.  Maybe this cold is some kind of symptom.  I’m rather cold-hearted in the sense of ruthless, able to put aside passion (esp. in the sense of Easter Passion) when the situation requires it.  I’m not particularly compassionate because that is a mirror-state, dependent on the misery of someone else.  I depend upon justice.

But justice is an arrogance that assumes one knows all the facts and can see that a pattern forms, one way or the other.  So with this cold I’m also feeling the ocular migraine that develops from scrutinizing too much too long.  Sometimes one has to look a long time to even interpret the images and their shadows.  Sometimes one must already know what is going on in order to figure out what is happening.  But the uninitiated can look and never see past their previous assumptions, because that’s how they cope: by not seeing.

Ocular Migraine pattern

There have been several distinctive occasions in my life when I’ve had to make a decision that made my blood run cold because I did NOT want to do it, but it was necessary, so I did it.  Divorce was one.  Turning in abusers was another.  Oddly, it was never when I was wearing a uniform and badge, working on the streets and knocking on doors that hid deformed and degraded people.  (The abusers were ordinary public people.)  But it was a deeply radicalizing experience.  I saw the things that have separated me from the convictions of many of my middle-class conventional friends and family members.  They choose to believe that those things don’t exist; I have seen them myself and will not forget them.  

I know that cameras lie, people lie, and editors change what the reporters really saw for themselves.  The reporters have told me they have had to rewrite their stories to fit -- not the convictions of the editors about reality, but the convictions of the editors about what will sell.  They do not think bad things sell. Also they suppress what they think will make trouble from powerful people if they publish it.  Yesterday I looked for the image of the crucified Easter Bunny that Hustler once put on its cover, but Google images won’t touch that one.  To see what they will “touch,” take off your net nanny.  Google did show the cover that demonstrated how to put a woman through a meat grinder, as though anyone needed help to figure it out.

Maybe because I was a little cold, I dreamt a lot last night.  I always have a two-sleep night, getting up at 3AM and then sleeping again.  Three AM is when I used to get up and go “home” through the Browning snow to preserve the appearance that I was sleeping alone.  Everyone knew but pretended they didn’t.  3AM is also when I used to wake up to see what my European friends were up to.  And 3AM is when my bladder is full, a characteristic of all my female relatives.

One night I camped (if you can call sleeping in the back of a pickup with an aluminum canopy “camping”) in a out-of-season Glacier Park campground when there was still a bit of snow.  It was posted with a warning that grizzlies were hanging around.  I did not pee far from the truck.  Nor did I check for tracks before I left in the morning.  Sometimes it's better not to know.

Another night I was "camping" at an all-state religious retreat where there was a cement-block washhouse barely warm enough to protect the pipes.  I had had a nose bleed but didn’t feel anything except enough discomfort to rub my nose, so when I washed my hands and glanced in the mirror, I was shocked to see my face covered with blood.

Last night the dreams were not so dramatic.  One was complicated and has already faded.  The other was when I woke suddenly because I was sure someone was pounding on my door.  But no one was.   Must've been a neighbor.   I dreamed there was a boy on the steps to my back porch, sitting wrapped around himself, wearing a hoodie.  But there was no boy, there is no porch so there are no steps.  It felt like a message dream.  Maybe it is the germ of a story.

Aren’t there too many boys huddled on our back porches?  “It’s time for breakfast, boy!  Come on in.  How many pancakes can you eat?”  

There used to be almost an English genre of books about young men who showed up at the houses of women living alone.  Of course, they were about a situation caused by war where boys too young to be drafted or actually AWOL because they were only old enough in chronological terms, not psychologically.  You could write such a story about today’s Africa or today’s North American mega-city ghetto, because war is always sneaking around somewhere, sending the men far away so women are left behind.  With luck, they have a house and can make breakfast.

A variation has a man, badly wounded, take refuge with a woman, often a nun.  Sometimes they become lovers.  Rarely (but only because the story isn’t published where most people see it) the wounded boy is taken in by a somehow left-behind man and they either become lovers or not.

Law "enforcers" like to use cold-torture to make people talk about things that are secret.  It leaves no mark.  For a while the Saskatoon police were notorious for taking troublemaking Indians outside of town and leaving them with no shoes or jackets.  When their bodies were found, the explanation was that they were drunk or drugged.  Of course, in Africa or on the US Mexican border, it works the other way around: heat and dehydration.  The explanation then is that they are greedy and want what the US has.  

The following is from http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2015/04/.  I subscribe.  The writer is a demographer and, yes, he worries about overpopulation.  But here’s his annual Easter reminder:

The cross is the cross of the sun -- the same cross representation of the sun we see in every culture going back before the dawn of time. . . .

Easter is not a holiday mentioned in the New Testament, and seems to have its origins in Rome where the Cybele cult flourished on the hill where the Vatican is now located. 

Is it really an accident that Cybele was a virgin who gave birth to a son, Attis, on December 25th, and that this son was crucified on a tree on Black Friday, and resurrected three days later? . . .

According to the Venerable Bede, Easter or Eostre, was the pagan goddess of fertility, spring and the dawn.

Her symbols, we are told, were flowers, rabbits, and eggs, as well as the sun and the moon.

Everything is a symbol because everything is a metaphor because that’s the way our brains understand whatever the senses detect outside our skins.  There was no real dawn here this morning.  The indigo sky simply became a pale blue opaque-but-glowing sky.  PBS is a little wary about Easter music, especially with Passover so close, so the music was not so triumphant as in past years.  My speaker is the size and shape of an egg but loud enough.  In my lawn are blooming buttercups and snowdrops.  A little too cold and early for tulips and daffodils.  Soon.

DEMENTIA or DREAMING or DISTRACTED

Not all dreams are this sweet.

Not long ago I went to the post office in my nightgown.  It’s not as bad as it sounds.  I was also wearing a man’s 3X fleece shirt, a silk padded jacket, a baseball cap, and some velour trousers because I had started to get properly dressed before I got distracted and then thought of getting the mail.  It was the opposite of going down the street with nothing on.  Normally, I try to comb my hair, wash my face and even remove my lady whiskers as well as lining my eyes.  (I’m allergic to mascara or I’d use that as well.)  I doubt anyone notices.

When I forget some parts of clothing or footware, I’m reminded by the environment: a cold breeze or sharp gravel.  But I’m interested in why I forgot.  The postmaster (a woman) tells me that people come to the post office wearing almost anything -- bedroom slippers are common.  We’re an aging town and like to be comfortable.  But we’re very proper and so far no one has shown up bare.

I’ve begun to occasionally forget to turn off stove burners.  Less seriously, I forget to take my meds.  Or maybe that IS serious and I ought to be keeping a chart, except that I would forget to fill it out anyway.  I’ve stopped buying coffee beans to grind because once in a while I put the whole beans in the paper filter and don’t realize it until I’ve poured hot water on them.  And occasionally I forget to turn ON stove burners and after a half-hour or so wonder why I don’t hear boiling or see steam.  I tried an automatic coffee maker but forgot I had it and went back to my old filter cone.  I hate whistling teakettles, esp. first thing in the morning.  

Most of this is not madness but rather a failure to keep my attention on the task at hand.  If you follow this blog, you will know two things: one is that the “working brain” can only handle maybe a half-dozen big ideas (chunked up into complexes by putting together small issues) and the other is that my brain is a seething mass of ideas at any given moment.  When I go to sleep, they transform into “felt concepts” and when I wake up, the words begin to form, but the constant stream, the mental thalwag, is not interrupted.  

Not long ago I dreamt that I was looking for a l’Oreal lipstick in a red case.  It was an actual lipstick, my preaching lipstick, a kind of red with gold flecks in it that was flattering and glamorous.  I once attended a women’s conference on spirituality at which we were urged to “surrender” three objects of vanity, precious to us and symbolic.  I put up my lipstick and a porcelain doorknob that I had picked out of the ruined remains of an old house on the way home from my undergrad years at Northwestern.  The lipstick disappeared forever and I never found that color again.  But another woman slipped the doorknob back to me as I left.  She said she thought I had not really meant to give it up.  

So I know what some of these symbols are.  Not the conventional Freudian things.  (Lips.) The lipstick stands for my brief and mismanaged ministry career -- too many things I didn’t understand that were about speaking, intimacy, and community.  I was presenting my best ideas, which I hoped would be life-changing or at least meaningful to the congregation, and they were sitting out there wondering what the name of the lipstick color was or whether they could get me to be personal friends apart from all the others.  (At this point men will be going “huh?” Or maybe not.)  It was about gender, not sex.  You don’t wear lipstick during sex.  It’s about presentation, not deep meaning.  So I dreamt that I found the tube, but it was empty.  At the same time there had recently been something in a TV movie about the lid coming off a lipstick so that everything in the purse was smeared red.  So it was about blood money, too.

I have been working with old family photos.  One cousin in California used to wear bright orange lipstick.  Another one, quite a bit older, wore purple lipstick.  All through my youth I wore Revlon “Persian Melon”, which I was startled to see in a makeup display not long ago.

My premise is that I was not demented to wear my nightgown to the post office, but heavily distracted -- thinking about so many things that there was no room left over for daily habits.  Usually habits are pretty hard to displace because they are embedded in muscles and in the environment.  But I live alone and there are so many small habits that I tend to miss some of them.  For instance, I’m supposed to check all containers before using them, esp. dishes and esp. this time of year, the way one gives one’s shoes a sharp rap upside down when getting up in the jungle -- scorpions, you know.  This morning it was a small beetle in my coffee cup, but I didn’t see it -- just felt it bump my lips when I began to drink.  I’m still squeamish enough that I poured the coffee down the drain.  I suppose when I lose squeamishness so much that I just drink the beetle, then I will be demented because part of the point of sanity is to guard against things that are risky, like ingesting bugs.

Most of what we do is not conscious and our conscious thoughts are just cover-ups for what we are really thinking and believing way back in the dark.  My mother-in-law was convinced that when people were drunk they said what they really meant.  She was right in that the pre-frontal cortex behind the forehead is the most recently evolving part of the brain, the most “rational” part and it is in large part a matter of restraint -- recognizing that it would be more judicious and tactful not to tell or do what might make a lot of trouble.  And it’s true that alcohol can allow expressions that are rude, actions that are stupid.  But she never had any insight into her own hidden ideas, sometimes malicious and destructive.  Or childish.  She NEVER got drunk.  Good thing.

The beetle in my coffee was much smaller.

My own mother knew there was more going on in her mind than she had conscious access to but she knew something was going on while she slept.  The old “dream book” by her bed was almost worn out beyond usefulness by the time she gave it up.  It was full of 19^th century symbols: rivers, trees, trips, horses.  Mostly the advice was about “luck.”  Love was about luck.

If I remember a particularly vivid dream, I sometimes write it out into a short squib and file it in the computer.  There’s no particular message.  They’re usually like a YouTube video full of images and movement.  Once in a while, years later, I’ll run across a half-page, read it, and realize (make real) what it meant.  By then I’ve acted on it or maybe not.

I wonder why I write so little fiction, which is what women are supposed to be obsessed with, and I think it is because I’m more interested in how things work, where dreams come from and how the brain chooses the symbols as image instead of word.  If I can only consider less than ten “chunks” of idea at a time, where are the ones that got bumped off because there was no room to think about them?  Were they more meaningful than what I kept?  Can I call them back?

A culturally shared dream image

THE UNDER-METAPHORS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd3a0pD2Fj0

Darrell Kipp and Jesse DesRosier

Native Americans value their language because there are things they can say in those words that can’t be said in English.  The reason I had to pass a French test in order to earn an MA in Religious Studies was the same -- there are words in French that say things that can’t be said in English without a lot of explanation and even then it might not be clear.  More than this, to realize that ANY language doesn’t have a lock on meanings, is not the only way to interpret the world, is to begin to work toward a future we all want -- one of understanding.  I should reread S.I. Hayakawa.

This much is pretty clear.  But what has remained unexplored are the concepts UNDER the words, the concepts that come from living a certain way in a certain place and time.  Those FELT MEANINGS are the real content and they are usually unconscious.  Getting into the unconscious is a key to understanding the world in a deeper and more intense way than otherwise possible.  It’s what the poets touch with words, if the metaphors and rhythms are right.  But most purely it’s found with the other arts: movement, color, shape, music, and maybe touch.  Even eye contact.

People are trying to understand consciousness, esp. self-consciousness, the knowledge that one is oneself, in charge of oneself.  But dreams come to tell us that there’s a lot more to being a person than being conscious, a lot more to what you know and what you do than what you can remember or plan.  It’s a puzzle how a Viennese doctor in uptight Victorian times could figure out what every shaman, guru, and other meddler in the metaphysical already knew -- the subconscious is far more vast and powerful than the conscious.  The problem is figuring out what’s in it.

Photo by Tony Bynum

This is where the enviro thinkers meet George Lakoff -- where the metaphor meets the map.  “Life is a desert but we once had a garden.”  “Life is a dream and suffering means nothing.”  “Life is a horseback ride and my horse has wings.”  “Life is hard work.”   “Life is a battle won by strategy.” Lakoff and Johnson have a whole book of these “Metaphors to Live By.”  The trick is knowing which one -- or complex -- has been guiding you without you knowing it.

Consciousness is a tricky phenomenon.  People like to speculate and theorize about it and science is now investigating in the most delicate and specific ways, using filaments of light and amplified DNA, finding membranes and special neurons and connectomes beyond anything the philosophers imagined.  At the same time, from the inside, it all seems so real.  Being several people. Walking in a silver landscape of sand.  Fighting through a living jungle that writhes like pythons against one’s body.  Or maybe it’s not scary or negative.  Maybe waltzing on a polished floor.  Maybe Aladdin’s jeweled and glittering cave.

It’s a little bit like the way I understand “rhetoric”.  I was trying to explain to someone with classic Ph.D. training that a friend’s world sphere is more or less the idea that “life is a sordid bordello” but that I loved his poetry.  “Oh,” she said, “then the workmanship is so well done: the lapidary construction.”  I explained that wasn’t it either, but was hard-pressed to convey what it was.  Why would I respond to such a thing?  I don’t want to live a sordid life.  Something about primary experience, the iridescence, the bitter persistence, the defiance of death, the friction and frisson and fantasy of bodies.  The persuasion didn’t work.  A word person only recognizes words, not the underlying tectonics that generate the words.

Why isn't she honored the way we privilege 19th century North American romantic Indians?

Such an education is a horizontal separation that often signals privilege.  The usefulness is less important than the shared class conviction of what is important.  But what does it mean to a Guatemalan peasant whose husband was killed for nothing?  We can address her statistically, but can we “feel” her?  What she eats, what she wears, what she sings to her baby, what she tells her boy who is almost old enough to be forced into a gang?  What comforts her?  Where does she get hope?  What is the wind against her skin?  Does she know it or is it only in her deep mind where her heart beats?

An imagined creature

Under even the sensorium is the steady commotion of existence within the skin, the maintenance of life that means survival.  The cilia in the lungs carry out particles.  The cilia in the inner ear respond to vibrations of the air.  The intestines untangle molecules and ooze them through their walls into the traffic of the blood.  The chemical factory organs of liver and pancreas respond to those molecules, secreting additions or subtractions or combinations.  In the sea of lymph that bathes all cells, the white blood cells patrol with their rings of keys, trying them on the skins of every cell so that if they fit, the cell will be entered and eliminated as an intruder.

A technological image

This business is recorded in the brain, even sometimes controlled in the brain, but more than that it controls the brain, for the neuron cells are even more dependent on oxygen and glycogen than the other cells, and the secretions of the brain organs -- pituitary, amygdala, hippocampus and all those other clever bits -- are what finally by their interaction create the connectomes, the great chords of the symphony of the mind, the melodies of personality.  (“The brain is an orchestra.”)

An imagined sea creature

So now I’m obliged to add another level to the “brain” -- which I’ll put on the beginning of the sequence, number one of five.  The deepest level of unconscious is cellular function.  “The body is a sea of specialized planktons that give rise to more specialized creatures and eventually the flashing schools of fish that are thought.”  Swimming at various levels.  One thought consuming another, salty and bitter, the bright sharp gills sucking oxygen out of the water . . .

STOP!  You’re having a runaway!  

The brain is not a pyramid, it’s not a hierarchy, it’s an evolved and increasing complexity that interacts to create new functions.  The blob in the skull is only the most specialized part of running a body and only the dashboard for everything right down to plasmolizing unwanted substances through the walls of the kidneys.  It’s only when it gets to the level of having to pee that it becomes conscious and some of us leak without the brain’s permission, just with its awareness of wet.

A real sea creature

I was astounded to hear that there are tens of thousands of kinds of specialized neurons in the brain, capable of quite different duties.  VENN cells, spindle cells.  It’s a proliferation full of possibility for consciousness, all created by the accumulated proliferation of DNA codes, both producing proteins and turning them on and off.  Get the level of glucose not-quite-right and some cells of the eye’s macula will stop functioning.  Get the level of serotonin circulating in a greater concentration than usual and you’ll be on a “high” your brain will mark and try to return to and  -- if you fail to do so -- mourn with punishing withdrawal symptoms.  Behavior is at the mercy of such switchboard binaries.

The brain is a sub-animal that runs on metaphor (the filing system) and mapping (the drawers).  In synchrony with fractal theory, my mind is as stacked and sliding with ideas just as all my tables are piled up with paper.  I’m scribbling as fast as I can.  “Life is writing a book.”

DREAMS OF BLOOD AND THUNDER

A fetal scan projected on the White Cliffs of Dover

Two chapters in the anthology “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams”  by Tim Barrus (published under the nom de plume of "Nasdijj")  are mirror versions of each other and yet they are not, each coming from a different point of view.  The story that gives the book its title (and was the original version in Esquire magazine) weaves together the Navajo setting, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (which was just coming to consciousness at the time), and a father’s love of his son, who dies.  The point of view is the father’s, despairing over his own limitations and inability to save the very young boy.  The second, “Dreams Come Down Like Thunder,” is from the son’s point of view, now adult, looking at his all-powerful but deeply flawed father and wondering how much is inherited by himself.

Consider these two paragraphs, one from the first story and one from the next.  

1.  “Fishing with my son was like surrendering myself to the talons of some wondrous beast.  Death is always the uncharted logic of its wars, the punished boy child who has been terribly burned, disfigured, standing like an Aztec priest under his father’s infinity.”

2.  “I have a recurring vision, a nightly dream where my cowboy fisherman father, the white man whom I look like and take after, returns to me mounted on a horse.  Life itself seems suspended.  His despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Him struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods. . . ride with him through the dream I must.” . . .  later:  “I wish there was something other than my father to hang on to.  But there is nothing.”

I will say -- provocatively -- that these are deeply Euro-Christian visions in spite of the invocation of Aztecs, who cut out the hearts of their living sacrifices -- who were not necessarily their sons.  It was Abraham who was about to cut out the heart of Isaac before the ultimate Father relented.  The New Testament version is, of course, Jesus broken and splayed naked by authorities for all to see, unable to escape except through transcendence eventually provided by his Father/God.  No one saw it -- it happened in the darkness of the cave/tomb.  Did Jesus dream his resurrection?

Waking from his dream, the author comes down from the sleeping loft of his cabin and escapes on his father’s horse, “which has a saddle now.  Through the woods again, and the dreams come down like thunder in the rain.  My despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth, deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods.  My compass is a savage thing.  My own vehicle waits for me in a clearing.  Go. Go.  Your life is in your teeth.”

He is as much seized as his father.  He sees the abyss that terrified his father.  We know from the previous story that his vehicle is Old Big Wanda, the F150 Ford pickup that he immobilized so that his little son could pretend to drive it.  But at the end we see that HE is the horse, with life as the bit in his teeth.  A horse who takes the bit in his teeth is uncontrollable.  

The rules of some kinds of literary criticism say that the author’s personal life cannot be drawn into the discussion and others, probably less adept at the literary elements, can ONLY discuss writing in terms of the author’s life.  I’ll pick my way through here by revealing only a few things from the author’s life.  One is a Methodist upbringing spiked by counterculture indignation (if God is God, He is not good.); one is that Old Big Wanda is a real truck I have seen in photos; and one is the observation that has been made by others:  that writers spin out their stories from their own volcanic hearts, pounding them into slightly new shapes on the old themes.  Virtual worlds come from the details of actual worlds.

The father/son relationship, particularly in terms of power differential and obligation, is the crux here as in all of the three Nasdijj books.  Tim’s life has been a consuming effort to help sons, boys, esp. the ones at risk, including himself, and to empower them to save themselves -- both practically and politically.  There is no need to summon up Tim’s genetic family, but the shadow of abuse is palpable.  

Stick to the tropes.  The horse: Pegasus, the winged horse, is the embodiment of poetry.  Woods: not forest but second growth where the smaller animals find food and shelter, where dryads and nymphs pursued by rapists can escape by becoming daphne, laurel, willow.  Buzzards: death on wings.  Dragons: power on wings.  Stars: more sky stuff.  This is“Star Wars.”   Fishing: the hidden lives in water teased out by skill and proper equipment.  The source of sustenance, the substance of transmitted skills, shared joy. 

Phaeton

What is more powerful than the father, even the father in the sky?  What is the meaning of the recurrent word “light”?  Ultimately is it the sun that curbs the hubris of Icarus, who flew too high, and Phaeton, who attempted to drive his father's Sun chariot but lost control and set the earth on fire.  Or is it being able to see?  Enlightenment.

What does the dog stand for?  “She went back and forth between the two of us like a gentle conduit between his demons and my determination to tame them.”  Sounds like the ideal mother or wife, an aspect of a human wife.  But NOT the real mother because the ultimate source of the damage was the drunken mother.  “I am still trying to find ways to forgive her.”  The man wants to do the mothering.  He has a hard time sharing it except with the dog.  In the wilderness the wife and the hospital are pushed aside.

As for many others, water is the transcendence, that old baptism, “where the sun glitters golden on the gravel of the riverbed, and life with all its prowess, its struggle, its tenacity, and its yielding exists in a turbulent crescendo all around you as it rushes downstream, uncomplicated by the complicated likes of man.”  This is where the boy dies.  Then there is nothing.  “Just the soft sound of the river, with its unruly grandeur and its fluid savvy.” 

The Abyss by nac-nud

In the second story -- near the beginning of it -- the man says, “I was a major disappointment to him in his life.”  But nearer the end the father says, “I’m the one who was a disappointment to you. . . I couldn’t MAKE you grounded.”  Now the father’s mother is present and tries to intervene, but the father demands that the author back up the pickup with an empty stock trailer attached.  It’s too much.  The father/boy is again helpless on his father’s anvil, pounded, seized and unseeing.  He senses the abyss under them, not the sky and the light.  It is night.  

Go back and reread:  “My despair can fill the sky like starving buzzards.  Riding dragons.  Struggling against some unseen force, a monumental void, a fissure in the earth, deep below, and the stars fall in the echoes of the woods.  My compass is a savage thing.  My own vehicle waits for me in a clearing.  Go. Go.  Your life is in your teeth.”

Dreams are projections on an unyielding world.  Indians know.

CAVERNS OF THE MIND

No amount of theorizing by introspection with a psychoanalyst or high tech recording of neuron connections and functions can ever capture what goes on in the brain of the dreamer and the poet.  The movie called “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is about the thirty-thousand year old Chavet cave.  Once a more conventional open-mouthed cavity, one of many along limestone cliffs penetrated by water and fronting on streams, places where people would laze on a stone porch to cook fish on sticks, the cliff front here had collapsed tens of thousands of years ago so that access was nearly impossible.  No one could get into the caves to erase the many sketches of prey animals, the many imprints of hands -- one clearly a man with a crooked pinky finger on his right hand and many evidently women plus a few children.  The floor is littered with the skeletons of the ungulates and the cave bears who evidently lived there.  No human skeleton has been found.

The very early modern humans who evidently made this art with intervals between drawings of thousands of years, overlapped with neanderthals for many thousand years, but there is no evidence that neanderthals drew in these caves.  Until recently, there was no evidence that neanderthals and modern humans mixed, but now we find neanderthal genes in contemporary cells.  One woman claims she can “hear” the sounds of the animals, running with open-mouthed cries, and a perfumer with a highly trained “nose” walks among the cliffs outside, sniffing the drafts of air coming from caves through crevices.

Some people think they can decode this art, discover the hearts and minds of the artists who were part of the evolution of our species-line and therefore must have had survival value for both individuals and groups. Laming-Emperaire was a female member of the French underground during WWII, which may be why her structuralist analysis seems somehow more helpful.  Her work is mapped on computers now, pointillist, a swarm of dots.  Others say these images will always be mysterious and should be left alone.  Just feel them.  Don’t analyze.  Modern instruments reveal that the deepest caves are hypoxic because of high CO2 and therefore narcotic -- suggesting that the artists were hallucinating.

The work of Laming-Emperaire and her husband led to the discovery of the oldest human bones in Brazil, twelve thousand years old, which may have meant that South Asian boat people reached South America and populated it long before Europeans found the Caribbeans.  (Remember Kon-Tiki?)  Discoveries are as much a victim of the explorer’s imprinting opinion as they are a function of the sensory reality.  Analysis of the order in which the paintings were made revealed that the most ancient were horses, then aurochs, then stags. 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman

Judith Thurman, who wrote about the caves in the New Yorker, suggested that “the variations in their coats correspond to their respective mating seasons. The triad of “horse-aurochs-stag” links the fertility cycles of important, and perhaps sacred or symbolic, animals to the cosmic cycles, suggesting a great metaphor about creation.”  Quite a leap.  Quite abstract.  Rational thought, not feeling.  She has not stood in a classroom next to a boy drawing horses over and over, seeing from his face that he’s re-living the smell of horse, the swelling power of its back between his knees, the flight over the grasslands in a swift dangerous dazzle.  If I stood next to a French schoolboy drawing the horses of French grasslands, they would not look very different.  In fact, some “experts” suggest that all those smallish “female” hands might actually be boys: “horny, reckless, and transgressive”, making graffiti with their own mouths as spray cans. 

Jean Clotte had been an English teacher where there are many caves.  He is the Jung of the scientists, an honorary Taureg, and the discoverer of caves only accessible by diving through water.  They say that among the many bear paw prints are the footprints of an eight-year-old boy, his imprint older than nations, older than glaciers.  The bears clawed height-marks on the cave walls as they still do on trees.  All is flow, but some swirls remain.  From charcoal sketches to boys leaping Cretan bulls, to minotaurs and labyrinths, to homeless street boys in New York fleeing "bulls" -- cops.  All these thoughts apply as well to our internal sleeping lives in the soft undergrounds of beds.  Even more so to the dreams of those who “sleep rough” where they can find a niche, dreaming not of nature but of a predatory culture and its built environment of catacombs.

This is from Thurman’s article: “In an earlier article, “The Signs of All Times,” written with the anthropologist T. A. Dowson, Lewis-Williams had explored what he called “a neurological bridge” to the Old Stone Age. The authors cited laboratory experiments with subjects in an induced-trance state which suggested that the human optic system generates the same types of visual illusions, in the same three stages, differing only slightly by culture, whatever the stimulus: drugs, music, pain, fasting, repetitive movements, solitude, or high carbon-dioxide levels (a phenomenon that is common in close underground chambers). In the first stage, a subject sees a pattern of points, grids, zigzags, and other abstract forms (familiar from the caves); in the second stage, these forms morph into objects—the zigzags, for example, might become a serpent. In the third and deepest stage, a subject feels sucked into a dark vortex that generates intense hallucinations, often of monsters or animals, and feels his body and spirit merging with theirs.”  

Terrifying and empowering at once, because this is how to learn to bullfight -- naming it and analyzing it, controlling emotion with rationality.  But if the intense feelings are lost, which has happened to many moderns, sometimes by resorting to drugs, then there is nothing to control and rationality is useless.  They have even imagined to blot out and reinterpret the sky.  When they managed to redact their own dreams using the customary black bars, they have erased their humanness and have gone mad, reduced to robots. Then it is the work of the poets and artists -- even if they’ve been eliminated from the curriculum -- to restore us to our hearts.

Jean-Michel Geneste, operating on the Jungian principle that at the deepest level humans converge, brought Australian aboriginal shamans to see what they thought of the caves.  Reacting like our Canadian Blackfoot consultants when Bob Scriver painted his own dream lodgeskin, they were worried and created a smoke-curtain limen at the threshold.  (The Canadians merely smudged.)  But they did not know these animals and they did not abstract principles.  They do not value pristine preservation for scientific study, but rather will renew old paintings to keep them bright because the power is in the art work which they say is not created by humans but by spirits, even as they apply more paint.

Those who do religious work -- not the institution’s prescribed ritual but the true transmission of spirit into deep experience -- know that it does not come from the officiant but through that person.  It is a harmony, a contact, a transmission, a unity with creation, a survival.