FELT MEANING

All my efforts to understand the feeling of the Holy have led to the conviction that all contemporary religions are institutions that claim knowledge of and access to the sacred, but -- hopelessly --  can only echo and derive because they are based on writing.  Words can only point to “felt meanings,” which are inexplicable and unique products of persons interacting with the world that are better expressed by the arts: music, dance, arts, and the other uses of the creating senses.

There is always a lot of interest among people to “create,” but a reluctance to seek felt meanings by interacting with the world, which is the source of what is called “creation” but is really “translation” from felt meaning to its metaphors, which might be only a chord or a shape or a gesture.  It is the metaphors that the institutional religions seize on and claim are unique and privileged: owned.

The felt meanings are bodily sums of the human sensorium.  The written analysis of them in tracts and Bibles and sermons are products of rational thought about the instinct-infused felt meanings.  It is like the analysis of how to paint like Rembrandt, dance like Nureyev, and even suggestions of how to do it oneself -- but though the descriptions might help you understand it better, they will never enable you to actually do it.  Because the actual creation is in the realm of “felt” meaning, not constructed rational definitions.

I bought a book called “The Felt Meanings of the World: a Metaphysics of Feeling,” by Quentin Smith, which is a careful and reflective observation of what people feel, sorting the happening.  I haven’t read it yet though I’ve had it a while.  Suzanne Langer was doing something similar in her own way.  Universities -- even Divinity Schools -- are about rationality, introspective reflection, theories of analysis.  If you get too emotional, they’ll send you for therapy.  At a Pentecostal Bible school, they’ll accept your ecstasies and miseries, but push them into pre-existing Christian categories, not very sophisticated ones but ones expressed in writing.  The poetic passages -- Song of Solomon or the Psalms -- the ones related to prayer and metaphor -- come closest.  

Otherwise, one must go to the anthropological non-literary religions that the Abramic world will refuse to accept as legitimate.  They are called animistic because they work directly in the metaphors of real objects instead of words, for instance, the skins of animals associated with dance and song that carry the concepts in the Thunder Pipe Bundles of the Blackfeet. 

Religion in words is a hostage to academia and legalistic argument.  Feeling the sacred cannot be argued -- one either feels it or not, though it’s possible to have some sense of it through empathy.  Because of pre-existing definitions meant to capture the power of metaphors, institutional religion cannot allow re-definition of concepts like “God” so that it must always contest the claims of primal, instinctive, poetic perception of the Holy.  This is done by defining, appealing to precedent, invoking authorities, and basically never leaving the functions of the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, a product of mutation and evolution that allows language to be a filter of experience.  This requirement limits accounts of the sacred to those who have mastered professional (professing) systems supported by institutions. 

But systems exist in juxtaposition to other systems, including those of physiology, physics, and even aesthetics, though they are “about” human experience rather than exemplifying it.  Because these macro-categories or disciplines start from different ways of experiencing, they can oppose each other or reinforce each other without arguing about dogma.

Thus, the Bernini portrait of St. Theresa in the throes of spiritual orgasm is inarguable.  It just IS.  And the ISness of it means that sexual experience can be -- as in Song of Solomon -- legitimate, though it is not wordless.  Part of what legitimizes sex is that it is involved in “attachment,” or “bonding,” or the phenomenon of love that has become so badly corrupted, partly through overdependence on words rather than experience.  Quite like religion.

One of the most useful texts for me is Eliade’s “The Sacred and the Profane.”  In it he points to the feelings we have in what Turner calls “the liminal space.”  We can actually experience the difference between standing or passing through a doorway, or up or down a height, or at the edge of something like the ocean or in a place where something significant has happened.

No doubt this is physiological, a feeling produced by the brain and its subtle sensorium that animals use to keep from falling over cliffs or returning to a dangerous place, though this is a negative way of putting it.  Still, even a one-celled animal senses molecularly what to avoid and what to approach.  As evolution has proceeded, those functions have been elaborated, but any creature that didn’t have those abilities was likely to be eliminated.

It’s a long leap from a paramecium to Gerard Manley Hopkins, but even something as complex as his poetry is basically a construct of senses filtered through language. One could reverse-engineer it to the original experience, and -- indeed -- that’s basically what we do as we read.  Of course, in some times and places authorities will insist on literal meanings and burn you at the stake if you say god/father is just a metaphor.  Some fathers, who believe THEY are god, will also insist with near-lethal punishment and this is the core evil -- not the concepts of god or fathers, nor even their confusion into entitlement -- but the departure from reality, which often means giving up control and recognizing suffering, if only through empathy.  There is no way prosperity is either a privilege or a virtue.  It’s just another ISness.

The first step towards Felt Meaning is awareness through all the senses, every way that the body interacts with the world including gravity, which way one is facing, memory, the state of muscles including the gut, sound, the present chemistry of one’s blood.  The second step is the neurology of recognizing and sorting the information.  The third step is deriving meaning from all those factors.  The fourth is acting on the meaning and sharing evidence with others, writing poems and painting pictures as well as defining words and arguing about them in shared strategies of rational thought.  

The fifth step is renewing awareness of embeddedness, which is a Felt Meaning.  A human is woven of the universe, an instrument of the planet able to produce consciousness and response, thus part of the flow of change, the velocity of creation.  One can feel it.  This is where the future will come from.

EVEN WITH PHOTOS, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT'S REAL?

Since my father closely documented the lives of my nuclear family with photographs, I’ve been using them to compose an outline for a memoir, separating them out into themes and chronologies and posting them on Thematic.co, which concentrates on sequential photos.  I run onto problems and insights that are a little disruptive.

The times were much more innocent and so there are photos of us nude, quite young, from the back, cavorting at pajama time before the pj’s went on.  If I publish them, am I inviting accusations of pedopornography?  They were used by the family as markers of growth, freely shared, posed in front of my father’s cherished phonograph console which -- in a kind of metaphor for the times -- seemed to have drawers but in fact had a lid which opened to the turntable.  That is, since my father was an aficionado of classical music and had a respectable collection of 78’s which he stopped playing at some point in the late Forties, it represented Culture but never explained or developed.  We danced madly to the Khatchaturian Sabre Dance but didn’t know what it was.  Only my father had any idea what he was playing on his records.  He had no formal music education.

We used the radio buttons alongside the turntable which had little stickers on the keys to denote which station it would bring up.  We loved the sensation of pushing them, even when the radio was off. There were two seeming “drawer pulls” on the front which we kids would turn and turn, in hopes that they would at last do something.  At some point that piece of furniture disappeared but I have no idea the circumstances, so I must have left by then.  The records had been moved to an inaccessible set of shelves he created under his desk in the basement between the wood pile and the laundry with stacks and stacks of orange crates full of genre paperbacks.  The “literary” books were upstairs.

My father was a fond man, unless opposed, and in the early years liked to play with us and read to us.  He had a lot of little parlor tricks about paper wads and illusions involving silk scarves and pocket toys like a black Scottie and a while Sealyham with magnets mounted on the bottom that would make them repel or attract each other.  A similar magnet trick involved King Tut and his sarcophagus.  His tricks were a defense, to keep things from being real, make people laugh.  He was a traveling man in rural Oregon and used his tricks with the farmers he dealt with as well as with his family.

I cannot recall either of my parents ever holding my dolls as though they were real babies, but my mother would sometimes make doll clothes.  I was given a “Cherry Ames, Student Nurse” book, one of a series, sort of a medical version of Nancy Drew.  In it, the intrepid student nurse on night duty finds a bedridden little girl crying.  She has no doll, so Cherry goes to fetch the demo doll the nurses use to learn things.  It’s life-sized, inflatable, and there is a funny sequence about Cherry wrestling the creature down the hall to the ward, meeting someone and pretending to be dancing with it.  I had no idea that the doll the writer was really thinking of, entertaining himself with the thought of, was a sex surrogate doll.  But I read the sequence over and over, feeling that there was something behind it.

One of several family-darkening forces was my maternal grandmother’s cancer, which killed her over a period of years.  I have no memory of her but my mother said I used to play alongside her bed where she would watch me with my paper dolls.  I do remember an episode when we stayed with my grandfather in Roseburg so my mother could do the canning.  My grandmother must have been in the hospital.  We left in such a hurry that neither I nor anyone else thought to bring any of my dolls.  Today’s middle class families would simply go buy another doll, but then money was tight.  My grandfather asked me to draw a doll on a thin piece of plywood and he cut it out for me with a jigsaw.

By then my dolls were transitioning towards adulthood.  There were no sexy Barbie dolls on the market yet.  I didn’t draw a baby doll but something more like a paper doll.  Paper dolls are all about clothes and posing.  A little girl in that Roseburg neighborhood invited me to play dressups in her mother’s old nightgowns.  My mother wore plain flannel dress-length nightgowns, but her mother wore slippery satiny full-length nighties with embellishments.  We were Betty Grable and Lana Turner.  I had never heard of them, but that sophisticated little girl assured me they were the most sexy women in the world.  Her mom read movie mags.  My mother didn't allow them.

She and her family lived in the basement of their house while her father built the rest of the rooms above them, so that the first floor was like a stage on which to prance around, throwing our skinny hips back and forth and patting the back of our hair.  Her young veteran father thought we were very amusing and her mother rolled her eyes but smiled.  My mother was too involved in a row with her father to notice.  My father was, of course, missing, working.

Back in Portland, in good time, I had a “Toni doll” with hair as red as Maureen O’Hara’s -- a slightly larger scale figure than Barbie and not so busty.  You could set the hair with sugar water.  The girl across the street had a Madame Alexander doll, which was too splendid to take out of the box.  It was Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in the famous green dress impossibly made from drapes.  Fortunately, the package had a cellophane front so we could at least admire her.  A few houses down lived a girl who had an untouchable collection of small Story Book dolls: Little Bo Peep, and Cinderella and Snow White.  They were like six-year-olds with beauty contest hair who wore elaborate fussy costumes.

My last doll was a realistically squalling infant which my mother thought I was too old to want.  I never did play with it much or even cuddle it very much.  By then I was sewing my own clothes, but never made any clothes for the doll.  My eighth grade graduation present was a kitten and I transitioned to a living creature that slept stretched against me in a mixture of child and lover.  Somehow I got stuck at that stage.  Or circled back.

Today the remnant of my dolls is in a box out in the storage shed that I used to call my “bunk house.”  I can’t quite bear to just throw them in the trash, but the heat and moisture of storage has made them neither collectible nor desirable as toys.  Anyway dolls now are far more sophisticated.  

Included in the box is “Dottie Dimples,” my mother’s cherished doll with a bisque china head.  She entrusted me with DD, but I dropped her and broke her head.  After a trip to the doll hospital (in those days one got a damaged doll fixed rather than buy a new one) she was restored.  But I broke her again.  Another doll infanticide.  The look of pain and contempt on my mother’s face has never left me.  This time she refused to fix “Dottie Dimples.”

The truth is that I didn’t care a whole lot.  She wasn’t MY baby.  I didn’t want babies anyway, I told myself.

What does this have to do with my father’s nude photos of his children?  I can’t quite get at it. Do I want to?

VIOLENT FATHERS

In my usual recalcitrant fashion, even though it’s supposed to be Mother’s Day, I’m writing about Father’s Day. Who is the media to tell me what day it is? Anyway, when it comes to parents, the days are pretty well enmeshed. I’ve been thinking about fathers who beat their sons, which is a problem for mothers, and I’ve been trying to understand how fathers, like my father above with myself and two brothers, would get to the place where they would beat sons. He read us the comics every Sunday so I still hear hear his voice when I look at certain strips.

In my father’s case, he was a spanker -- that is, no stick or belt -- and he was not gender discriminating. I got as many spankings as my brothers. Always vowed I wouldn’t cry, but never could hold out long. Partly it was the humiliation. The last time he lost his temper he dragged me out of the car (for fighting with my brothers) and spanked me on a public highway. If he did that now, other people would probably interfere. I was as big as an adult woman, though only beginning high school, and dressed up. I locked the car door to keep him away from me. After a good deal of stalling which made my father even angrier, my mother unlocked the door.

I have no idea what my brothers thought. They made a transition from fear to anger somewhere in there and joined the Marines at seventeen. None of us talked about my father’s rages. None of us ever lost our reciprocal rage except that my mother managed to suppress it mostly. Anyway my father was a traveling man, only home on weekends. None of our relatives ever knew anything about it and they think I’m lying or at least exaggerating if I talk about it now.

Such a situation is “sticky.” I’m attracted to overtly angry men, but split in a hurry if anger turns to violence. I have an exceptional need to be an “emergency responder,” an adrenaline junkie who tries to match my spiking emotion to competence that justifies and shapes it. But I go a little nuts when nothing happens, when it all gets soooooo noooooormal. On the other hand, I’m a crackerjack sublimator and I can let the syndrome play out in a virtual mind-bounded universe which is a source of writing. Reading and movies are also good.

There is a bunch of redneck motorcycle bums up the street: they beat up their womenfolk until the sheriff intervened. Now the women are gone. I have no intention whatsoever of drawing their notice. I hear them go by on their machines -- that’s all I care to know. My alarms for danger go off early. I believe in prevention, which is why I think about violence.

As I do with everything, I tried googling for research on fathers who beat their sons. It seems clearly related to the biological phenomenon among all animals of throwing out males as soon as they are old enough to be a threat. Wolves are a little more tolerant, if the extra males will help feed the pups. Male lions will kill cubs if they belong to a different sire, so that the female will come back into season and he can start his own cubs.

It’s pretty clear that my father changed when he suffered a frontal skull fracture and concussion in 1948. It was subtle damage, but the structures of the brain behind the forehead are delicate and they are the ones most crucial to human characteristics, like empathy, compassion, ability to work with others, the impulse to protect, and so on. The same thing happened to my brother, except at a slightly different location on his forehead. He was not functional after that, not because of being violent but because of being always inconclusive, never being able to judge or choose, and because of being deeply invested in obfuscation, which mostly took the form of telling wild stories. My movie last night was John Le Carre’s “A Perfect Spy,” and those were the kinds of resourceful tales my brother told.

Another clear source of paternal violence is the social conviction that sons “belong to” fathers, are economic chattel who can be forced to work or be hired out with wages going to the family. My great-uncle’s son, in his eighties, told me about being sent to work for a neighbor without so much as shoes or a lunch. That was seventy-five years ago in rural Dakota. He wouldn’t have thought much of it, except that the neighbor was scandalized.

No doubt psychological boundaries between an overwhelmingly powerful father and his son must shift over a lifetime, especially if the son turns out to be as powerful as the father. Bob Scriver had two actual fist fights with his delinquent teen-aged son: one on the main street of town in front of the show house and a crowd, and the other in the house, where I found the sprays of blood on the walls the next morning. The explanation I got never made sense. The son had been stealing as a misguided way of asserting his own power.

The phrase “I’ll beat it out of him,” comes to mind. The way one beats bad behavior out of a dog or horse. (But does that work either?) Notoriously, fathers over-react to what they most fear in themselves, like homosexuality or incompetence. What would be wrong with “son whispering?”

Once I called a father to tell him about his son who was misbehaving and defiant in the classroom. The father said, sighing, “Well, okay. I’ll beat him again. But I doubt it will do any good.” It didn’t. I don’t know where we got the idea that beating anyone would change their behavior. Was it the mothers who put discipline over onto the fathers? (“Wait until your father gets home!”) Was it all those English schools and early American schools that believed in “caning?” Is it an expression of ignorance and, therefore, frustration?

I did find one study of men on steroids that described “roid rage” as a possible cause of violent behavior. Some feminists would chant “testoterone poisoning” -- as good a theory as any. And since families would inherit their hormone levels, a big dominant father is bound to run into a big dominant son. If they have the same values, things might go well, an alliance. If they don’t, one or the other must win the war or leave. If it lasts long enough, it’s likely to be the son who wins because even the most powerful men must age. But if the son loves his father, what can he do but leave?

Very hard on mothers. I haven’t seen any good writing about what they should do, esp. if they are economically dependent, isolated from others, or emotionally enmeshed. It’s fiction material, but I’d like to see some insightful psychological material.