HOW CAN WE HELP THE HELPERS?

Like Steve Jobs, I have some little key stories, homilies that I use all the time.  One is about my little brother on a camping trip at Lost Lake, which is on the side of Mt.Hood.  We stayed in our folding camp trailer near the shore in a mostly undeveloped campground.  My brothers discovered the salamanders that lived along the edge of the water and enjoyed playing with them.  When it came time to go home, Paul had attached strongly to his mud-puppy with its little hands and wide mouth and he didn’t want to give it up.  

My mother explained that Portland is no place for salamanders, but Paul insisted,  “He’ll be all right.  I’ll keep him safe in my pocket!”  Of course, that would kill a salamander.  In fact, removing any living creature from its environment might kill it, because living beings are interwoven with their surroundings, adapted to them.  Some of those surroundings are created by humans but that only means they are adapted to one kind of person.  In the early days of Euro exploration, when sailors insisted on dragging home treasures and treated other human beings like keepsakes, many Native peoples died in the perfectly comfortable London surroundings of the sailors.  It wasn’t just psychological — it was physical: failure to adjust to food, climate, germs, uncertainty.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sebastian_junger_our_lonely_society_makes_it_hard_to_come_home_from_war?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2016-05-18

Sebastian Junger, the war correspondent, has a TED talk in which he points out that PTSD may not always be the result of combat — in fact, a small percentage of soldiers see actual killing up close and personal —but rather the consequence of going from a regimented, organized, tightly bonded band-of-brothers where decisions are made for you, to a society that has become confused, torn, alienated, uncertain, judging and hostile.  It’s not even particularly admiring of soldiers.

People who “rescue” young women from Asian brothels are disconcerted when the girls want to return to where they knew what was expected of them, were protected in some ways, and had many friendships.  Going to another country or starting a small shop was beyond many of them.

“Helping” people depends on the assumptions of the attempt.  Many do-gooders do it because they assume they will be admired and the receivers will be grateful.  When that doesn’t happen, bitterness can be the result. If the “helping” has lasted long enough for the helpees to get used to it and depend on it, removing that help can be devastating.  This is the problem of Indian reservations:  what was intended to be a protecting reserve becomes a unique environment sustained by outsiders, a trap.  It’s heresy to say so, but maybe reservations — which were not used by conquerers outside the British mindset — are only a delayed cruelty that cripples the People so that they can’t function in the larger society.

Such situations are always triage:  some will be able to cope and others will not.  Those who survive will be most like the conquerers — either were in the first place or become that way.  The problem is often those who are neither here nor there or waffle back and forth, like frequent offenders of criminal law who go in and out of jail or prison, carrying subtle dangers in and out with them.  Behaviors, networks, diseases, addictions — all things that were meant to be confined by prison walls.

Less dramatic and more sentimental are the people who come in and out of reservations, partly because of romantic notions about accessing a secret Shangri-la where they will be appreciated at last; partly about the stubborn conviction that spending the summer painting buildings and getting to know old tribal people will do the tribe good; partly as scholars looking for material that can be published to enhance their tenure; and partly by rabble-rousers, usually counter-culture youngsters who bring in radical political notions along with drugs.  These are innocent compared to the people who take criminal advantage of any place where laws are complex and overlapping, populations are in disagreement, the larger culture demonizes individuals, corruption dominates all levels of government and some people suffer so intensely that raw survival is their only concern and the help they wish for is death.

So being a helper can be approached from the values of the helper, from the values of the receiver of help, from those who find the situation an opportunity for abuse, or from the larger context of a nation, a planetary given imposed by the environments of locations.  It’s three-dimensional chess that is dynamic, because every intervention creates a whole new set of givens.  The environmental givens overwhelm everything else: floods and forest fires, earthquakes and volcanoes, drought and famine all challenge the survival of humans, who are — after all — as vulnerable as soft little wet salamanders.

Those who work with minority populations who are suffering — let’s say street people, let’s say delinquent boys — okay, “at risk” or whatever euphemism you want, most of them imposed by helpers from outside — will find that the suffering might not be hunger, numbness, fear of death, loss of family, or whatever other horrors are in Pandora’s box.  It’s not enough to supply food, shelter, literacy, or even skills that can be monetized.  Down there in the bottom of the box — according to the story — was “hope.”  You cannot “give” people hope. 

Hope is an emergent capacity of human beings.  Emergent means that it comes from the right conditions for it to spontaneously kindle.  Those conditions will not always be there even after all the animal needs are met, including a belonging group with a name for itself.  Some have been damaged so deeply — looking at it from the helper’s view — that they cannot be “saved.”  Unless they go back to the life that they adapted themselves to.  The people in that context will consider their return to be salvation.

So this becomes damage to the helper, who feels it as loss, failure.  Where is the helper’s hope?  It can’t come from praise of those who assumed everyone is pleased to be just like them, prosperous and happy, and who enjoy the reflected participation of praising people they define as saviors.  These latter folks will only be damaged by the knowledge that their safety can be removed so easily by an economic Depression, a health challenge, loss of a loved one.  This is the point where some kind of belief system, a conviction of what the world means, will be very “helpful.”  If you believe Jesus loves you, even when a scroungy, mean, hopeless little humanoid spits on you, that “helps.”  If you can’t believe in Jesus, then what?

Hope, the capacity to be helped even by people who ask us to create a new identity, to be “reborn”, can be either a individual emergence or a group emergence, possibly labeled religious or political or even cultural through the arts.  I’m transcribing and consolidating old conversations and note how often the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies comes up.  Did it do damage by breaking all the rules, just for the pleasure of seeing how brittle they were?  Did it start to liberate us, but then scare us into being obedient suits?  Did we aim for Jesus and get Trump instead?  How do we help ourselves without getting stuffed into someone's pocket?

WHAT CAME BEFORE LANGUAGE?

A woman on her way out to Heart Butte to interview for a position as an arts coordinator and artist-in-residence, stopped by in Valier to say hello, since in researching Heart Butte we had chatted on the phone and gotten a little acquainted.  She is an experienced teacher who has her own studio.  I had made muffins, cautioning her that my muffins are loaded with berries and nuts but contain no sugar or salt.  She was game for that and arrived just as the muffins had come out of the oven and were cool enough to put on a plate.  The knife I was using to lift them made the muffin tin slide around the stovetop.  She put her hand out to hold it still and I reflexively snatched it aside from her.  She didn’t say anything for a minute, watching to see whether there might be more to it.  Maybe I got burned?  “I was just going to hold it still,” she said.  I scowled and grumbled.  

I live alone.  I didn’t know this woman.  I didn’t interpret what she was doing as helpful but rather as interfering.  It’s a thing we all do once in a while, but she was shocked and I was chagrined.  It was so little, but it’s a clue to a new theory of how humans began to become themselves, a new species.

Bob in his studio

On a pleasanter occasion, I stopped by Scriver Studio to visit for a while on my way to somewhere else.  Even after our divorce, Bob and I remained friends and even after a couple of years after the divorce, living elsewhere, the materials and their handling were deep in my senses and muscles.  He was at his work table, mixing plaster, mold-making, moving things around in the clutter as they were needed.  I watched, then without thinking, I reached out to get the next step ready, to keep things from tipping, knowing what he would do next and how the materials would act.  He just accepted me as though it were natural, which it was.

When I wrote Bob’s biography, “Bronze Inside and Out,” I based the whole book on the steps of casting bronze -- what it FELT like to work with the sequence of materials: plastilene, blue plaster, white hydrocal, Koroseal, wax, investment, bronze, patina.  Our relationship was still anchored by having done so much together, sharing non-verbal understanding of what to do.  But we were better with objects than the subjective emotional element.

About communication long before there was language.

In “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” Clive Gamble proposes that the first concepts were wordless, simply the sensory elements of objects handled and known.  He suggests that there are two basic human concepts:  container and instrument.  What “goes into” what and what happens if you do something with maybe a twig -- poke, bite, wave, strike.  His convincing premise is that the first thinking hominins (not quite human yet, but close) were in small groups doing something, each one watching both the object and the others hunkered around.  As they understood, they began to interact, reaching out to participate or intervene, then checking the reaction in the others.  This was real and effective communication but language came later.  At this point the early human mouth and pharynx were not capable of making sounds with precision enough for language, except maybe yabba-dabba-do.

Looking at evidence like this comes into the Cartesian thought world like a little dust devil, making trouble, not really solid.  But I find it very welcome indeed, because it feeds into a line of understanding that I’ve been following since seminary at the end of the Seventies, the idea of sensory information as the origin of concepts, silent underneath our words and shaped by our grammar.  Suzanne Langer was exploring it.  Benjamin Whorf and his idea of Hopi being a process-based language (not a chair, but chairing), first proposed this at the end of the Fifties. 

Feminist studies pointed out that when two biologists went to study a herd of antelope, the woman’s observations were all about birthing, caring for the babies, and finding food.   The man’s notes were full of fights with predators, rivalry over the females, and scouting territory.  Everyone, according to his or her culture and experience, sees his or her own reality and ignores the rest.  This challenges the Cartesian idea of reality as something independent and “real”.

Awareness, taking everything into account; language, being able to interpret it in words; and reasoning, which is always in words, are privileged in our Western culture.  Writing is more potent than speech.  Declarations, law, business, treaties are all in written words.  Maybe it is the computer and internet that have begun to make it clear that even technical and legal language is shaped by culture, expectation, goals.

Recently, the major overturning of our understanding of consciousness rests on the ideas above, but some of it is neurological research.  We have not allowed for the autonomic nervous system, which maintains the homeostasis of the viscera, which is the basis of a kind of feeling/consciousness. Mark Solms talks about the unconscious conscious which sounds like something Gertrude Stein would write, but what he means is this phenomenon of the body guiding itself along without our attention unless something is going wrong that requires some kind of action.

Mark Solms

And we CERTAINLY never thought that one’s gut biota had anything to do with thinking, but experiments show that they have an influence on one’s mood, “feelings” that influence one’s ability to think. 

That’s not all.  The brain can only handle about seven different concepts at once.  If there are more than that, the brain chooses the most important ones and the lesser matters are “repressed,” or “denied,” or just ignored.  This allows enough metaphorical “elbow room” to deal effectively with matters at hand.  Sub-concepts can be “bundled.” One way to do that is to use a metaphor.  Metaphors are at the heart of language, letting sounds or marks stand for concepts learned by the body through experience with objects and other people.

But different groups of people form their own little cultures with their own ideas about what you should eat or wear, what crimes deserve punishment and so on.  Their language will reflect this.  Their awareness will be shaped by it in very subtle ways.  I once took a college make-up test where several classes came into a large auditorium and chose their own seats.  Strikingly, the Euro-whites spaced themselves out, each claiming as much space as they could.  The Middle Eastern and Asian people sat in a group, not so that they could cheat but because to them that seemed “right.”  Even in the hallway they stood close to each other while the whites left as much space around themselves as they could.

I find that all this is clumsy to talk about, almost too “poetic,” and indeed poets deal with these matters.  But what I’m labeling here as “Cartesians,” meaning those who want a geometric inevitable world that we all share, have a strong emotional resistance to the idea of subjectivity.  Cartesian, supposedly objective thought, enables science, math, technology, and for that reason alone has pushed aside everything else for centuries.  Since it is the basis of prestige and status, esp. among those who claim male-gender-roles, there is a lot at stake.

The way the world looks at itself is changing, trying to achieve the reconciliation of differences that result from the media showing us the worlds of the other and a shrinking supply of resources.  Some people, you could say, are “violently opposed.”  This process is just beginning, but no doubt the issues were always there.  We must teach ourselves not to snatch away the muffins.  That’s a metaphor.

I realize that muffins and cupcakes are gender assigned, but don't tell your mom.

ANOTHER BIG SHIFT -- THIS ONE AN INSIDE JOB

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

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

The First Narcissus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY I BLOG

A woman sent a comment to one of my various posts on “adult oppositional defiance disorder” and “grandiose narcissism.”  These posts consistently get more hits than any others.  Depending on which program I use to “take the pulse” of prairiemary, there might ordinarily be a couple of dozen hits (there are 26 subscriber/followers -- I don’t know what the distinction is), but the two subjects above can hit two hundred or more.  According to another program, I get about 400 hits a day and another one yet shows where readers are.  Often I think I know who the reader is.  For a while I was wondering who I knew in Mountain View, CA, and Friday Harbor, WA, until I realized those are Google hubs.  About half the hits come in on Google or other search engines over the years after the post is made. Sometimes a decade after the post.  

I’ve resisted using Google Analytics because it is the most specific and market-research oriented algorithm -- all that like/dislike, “favorite,” and hit analysis is meant to guide what your strategy is.  But I don’t CARE about who’s reading my blog or why.  If I did, I’d go crazy.  There are a lot of people out there trying to CONTROL this blog and others by using like/dislike, “favorite,” consumer reviews, five-star ratings, and all that stuff.  The content means nothing to them -- only the reactions of those who happen to call up this particular blog using tags and titles scanned by computers.

On the other hand, there are people, mostly regular readers, who assume that I’m preaching to the choir, namely them.  Their pattern is that they want someone to “conduct” in a confusing world so as to keep everyone in harmony and on the same page.  If I seem to be off the path, they will send correcting comments, though most individuals are wary of letting themselves be identified.  It seems to them immodest to sing “solo,” and they feel safe in a selected and even “talented” group that stands together.  But they sometimes try to be choir directors themselves which would be fine if they gathered their own choir instead of instructing me.

The truth is that I write these blogs for myself.  But some persons don’t understand much more than how to type something into a search strip on Google and can barely figure out how to operate the comment feature, let alone read the column on the right with the directions about how to send me a private email.  They are still coming from a place of obedience and dependency where they do not know what the little Blackfeet kids at the local library know: you should click on everything to see what it does.  With luck these searchers will stumble onto a support forum for their issue and score a boatload of ideas and advice, not just what one person says.

A few years ago I began to explore some really frightening and disturbing issues about “places” I don’t know.  Since I am so solitary, I organized a little group of women I considered stable, compassionate, and well-read so that I could balance the screams of agony I was reading with ordinary household calm.  Big mistake.  They could hear the echo in me.  Some asked to be excused.  Others thought I should address their own troubles.  Since several had been teachers, they would say,  “Keep up the good work,” as though they were qualified to decide what was good work or even had any idea what I was doing.  (I told them very little.  They don’t even suspect where I go.  If I told them that, they would demand to know exactly where that was and feel free to tell me not to do that.)  

What I was stupid about was that their own challenges (kids trying to stay employed while managing babies, parents fading into incoherence, disease and disorders stalking the land).  Their constant rejection and indignation over politics wore on me.  They were not interested in the progressive and brilliant groups who are working for change -- not grimly either, but with good humor and a confident sense of reflection and a willingness to throw ideas at the wall over and over and over.  They didn’t want the boat rocked.

On this planet there are a lot of structural changes that need to be addressed: false economies, mass assumptions that are not true, damage that is discounted, old religions based on the first shift from hunter-gatherers to grain-based towns.  It’s enough to give anyone vertigo.  The humanities are giving way because they are human-based and that’s a limitation.  The anthro-god is the least of it.  The floor has fallen out from under the chattering classes: no publishing, no newspapers, no privilege for Ph.D’s, no professorships, no support for orchestra, theatre, opera, gallery, no advances for books or scripts -- all dissolved into populism, quality defined by money and votes.  (The same thing, really.)  Reviews mean nothing.  There is no Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, no state regulation, no inspector, and neuronal research cannot find a conscience or a superego -- not even an internalized role model.  No course, no book, no guru, no system.

Long ago when I was an AC officer, the radio asked me to go to a house in a bad neighborhood to pick up a batch of unwanted puppies.  I was to go up the back stairs to an attic.  Inside was a young woman in a butt-length skirt and white patent leather go-go boots.  She was very blonde and very bruised.  A dark baby was bouncing happily in a crib, chewing on the railing.  The only other furniture was a mattress.  The ceiling was simply the underside of the roof.  The puppies were the usual mix, insecurely contained in a big cardboard box I could barely carry.  The whole place stunk.

“Hurry!” begged the girl as I struggled to get the tumbling puppies balanced and keep them in the box.  “He’ll be back really soon and this is going to make him really angry.”  I wanted to reflect to her what I saw: that she was a prisoner, in danger, and that she should reach out to escape. Her bondage was stigma -- I had no doubt that “he” was a lover/pimp -- and the same romantic conviction that I’m trying to understand by reading de Rougement, a set of assumptions that mixes love with death.  I did manage to get the pups down the stairs and into the truck.  There would soon be another litter, another abused woman.  This is survival of the group at the expense of the individual.

So when I got that blog comment that was really a plea, I took a little canvass among some of my known readers, hoping for new ideas.  The men advised looking for help but had no specifics.  The women were scornful and advised me to move on, since the woman was obviously stupid.  I was surprised.  These reactions are not typical of the gender divisions in the larger world as described by the media.  Somehow the women in particular thought that diagnosis and labeling would solve the problem.  They assumed that it was accurate, developed by people who “knew,” and could not be questioned.  They are universally “humanities” people.  That’s who reads my blog.  

I don’t blog to simply report ideas -- I blog to challenge them.  Blogging is skateboarding on ideas.  Can you get it?

RESPONSE TO SUFFERING

After working out my theory of liturgy, all based on “feeling” rather than dogma, individual human response rather than institutional imperatives, I find a crack.  It is the issue of compassion, defined as empathy with a suffering “other” to whom one responds  with attempts to help.   The problem arises when the help is offered on the terms of the helper rather than the helpee.  Usually on the assumption that the helpee doesn’t know what’s good for them anyway, so why ask?  

For years I saved a New Yorker cartoon about some men struggling with a piano stuck in a doorway.  A passerby comes along and generously helps them stuff it inside.  The only trouble is that they were trying to get it OUT.  It’s the whole phenomenon of helping old ladies cross streets through traffic when they didn’t WANT to cross the street.  When this happens to me I kick and scream, so I know firsthand how resentful and destructive the doer of the good deed can become if you resist “good.”

Somehow this is mixed into romantic love and parental care in many subtle and troublesome ways.  I’ll make an incomplete and probably confused list:

1.  Wishing to go back to childhood and therefore seeking someone to “help” one.

2.  Looking for the warm and merging feeling one got in childhood from comforting puppies and rocking one’s dollies.

3.  The amount of control that a suffering person has over helpers -- the Munchausen Syndrome reward.  Could be one’s own suffering or could be the second-hand suffering of one’s small dependent, like a child or pet.

4.  The panicky feeling as the receiver of help, esp. when docs, nurses, social workers, and clergy are out of sync with the need.  The old Vietnam trope of “ we had to burn the village in order to save it.”  Or the punishing parent who says “I’m doing this for your own good.”

5.  Enlisting the sympathy of others, esp. when the suffering is emotional.  Most people will be moved by obvious disease and trauma.  (Broken hearts not so much. People may disapprove of the emotional response and therefore welcome one’s suffering.)

6.  Knowing there is a need for intervention but being powerless to supply it.  A loved one is dying of cancer -- why can’t you cure it?

So the idea of “God” as the ultimate lover or parent or at least witness becomes very powerful indeed.

In practical terms, sometimes one is the helper and sometimes the helpee.  What are the principles? -- oh, before that, the awareness -- that must be in place in order to give and accept appropriate help triggered by compassion.  Many will be cultural.  Many will be circumstantial.  Some will be internal to both parties, only accessible by reflecting, which there may not be time for, or maybe overruled by the needs of the group/institution which no doubt wants trouble dealt with.  In jobs over the years I’ve done a LOT of emergency and nuisance complaint response.  The almost inevitable, though lamentable, practice becomes to “eliminate the complaint, not the situation.”  Worse than that, an effort to isolate and address the underlying causes of the recurring dilemma is difficult and maybe impossible.  How can anyone change the geological configuration of the planet that leads to economic inequities, that constant gradient between the haves and have nots?  So much depends upon whose crops are good that year.   Our willingness to use food for blackmail is even more evil than our withholding of drugs.

Then there’s the problem of what seems to be help that is actually a disguised means of making a profit, like the subsidies for high-priced drugs that keep people from banding together to demand more responsible pricing.  I found that hospitals hire chaplains in theory to help patients, but actually to keep order, suppress anger, convert action to obedient prayer.

Too big.  Too much to get one’s head around and still make it work.  

Here’s a weird idea.  Maybe the way to address compassion is not just amelioration, but the creation of pleasure, something liminal liturgy can do.  Not just a back rub but real and abandoned joy -- abandoned in the sense of letting one’s guard down and letting new things in.  We think of drugs in terms of constricting, limiting, but what if something like LSD or marijuana really DOES put the brain into a configuration that is accepting?  That’s often the reports of users, including those who use “theogens,” drugs that are supposed to “call God” as an awareness of joy, not judgment, punishment or even salvation.  Is that justification?

As long as I’m being Christian I’ll suggest the next weird idea as the “pick up your bed and walk” factor.  You remember that story about the paralyzed guy whose friends took him to Jesus, the specialist, to be healed.  When the crowd was so thick around the house (waiting list), the friends broke through the roof and lowered their friend, complete with bed, practically into Jesus’ lap.  His response:  “Pick up your bed and walk.”  No enabling here -- though the determined friends were certainly doing it.  The afflicted person picked up the bed and walked out with it.  It was a miracle.  Or something.  The point I get from it is that we should be our own doctors.  Why wait to be empowered?

We should be our own priests, our own liturgists.  Resist the idea of a specialized class with “magic.”  I don’t see any other way of guarding against the helper who assumes superiority and therefore justifies force, oppression, and hypocrisy -- or equally destructive -- from the helpee -- the wish to remain a child and let one’s powerlessness and dependency become an entitlement and then a demand.  But we should participate in our treatment.

With a friend who often discusses my posts “backstage,” this dynamic has been framed up in a triangle:  Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens, and the dying masses.  My friend says he appreciates both MT and CH and backs off from the masses but is glad if they are helped.  Regarding CH, my friend says, “He could be a hard nosed bastard. I think the main reason he didn't care for her was her propensity to toe the Vatican lines. If I were to create a tally sheet on both individuals as far as to what they left behind, Mother Theresa would be far ahead.”  This friend acts on his compassion and helps many.  

But I side with CH, fearing that MT is a step along the path to a bully Pope and a lot of bully priests who take out their frustrations by victimizing children, insisting it’s all an honor.  Until retirement I have not been one to avoid suffering masses, even those of other species.  Maybe I’ve shirked helpful interventions in specific cases.  I’ve walked off.  A hard-nosed bitch.  So I have to justify this at the level of looking for the causes of suffering, using this great retirement privilege of time to reflect.  It’s just that it seems to me that all of us should have the right to decide when or whether to cross the street and it would be a lot easier to ASK whether the piano is going in or out the door.

So what does my manuscript about liturgy need in order to discriminate between true “feeling of holiness” in the sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and simply cultural warm-glow do-goodery?  

"HELP" THAT IS MERELY CONTROL

My eyes get far too much use because I’m such a print-freak.  When I was in Saskatoon, I began to see strange patterns, esp. grids, when my eyes were closed.  One of the reasons I was living there was for the universal health care, so off I went to the eye doc.  But one of the reasons the system works there is that access is filtered.  I was shunted to a bored little man, very interested in his cuticles, who gave me a stiff lecture on how I -- an American carpet bagger -- was depriving worthy people of the land, little old work-worn peasants, blinded by ultraviolet rays while toiling on the prairie. How dare I crowd them out with my trivia?  Then he mocked my symptoms, asking whether my “grids” were pink and whether I also saw elephants.  Back in the States, I was diagnosed with ocular migraine (malfunction of vascular supply) and given laser surgery to fuse the holes left in my retinas.  Painless.  Took minutes.  Extremely expensive, requiring high-tech machine and training.  Lucky.  VERY lucky.

Fast forward a couple of decades.  I go to the American eye doc thinking I’m having a routine checkup and he urgently refers me to a regular doc because of eye damage from diabetes.  Since I’m female, he refers me to a female doc.  She does a blood glucose assay, sits me down and fills me with terror.  Unless I do EXACTLY what she says for the rest of my life, I will soon be entirely blind and have my feet cut off.  My blood glucose score is 325.  (Normal is 100.)  I can barely drive home.  (Docs here are 130 miles away.)  Her prescription meds take my bg score down to 60, which is close to losing consciousness.  The little meter starts beeping and says (in print):  “Call your doctor !!!” I call her -- she’s angry.  I must be doing something wrong.

But I am super-responsible.  By my next visit, I’ve radically altered my diet, my bg score is 135  (cell damage is thought to start at about 180 and must persist over time to make you blind and foot-less), I’ve lost weight, and I’m proud.  The doc sets about demolishing me.  She tells me I have fudged my scores.  Clipboard in hand, she goes down a list:  what do I eat?  when do I eat? how much do I walk?  etc.  Every answer is inadequate.  As she talks, I grow older and wiser.  I stand, leave, never return.

So here are two cases, one of a helper who does not intend to help, and the other of a helper who wants total control -- emotional control enforced with fear.  Both of them are evil, but both of them are good examples of how entwined “help” is with “control.”  Both of them are forms of domination.  

Now let’s flip this over.  I have a friend who defies every attempt to help her.  Though she constantly appeals for advice and assistance, every suggestion or intervention embroils us in a kind of sword fight -- thrust and parry, parry and thrust.  (Berne calls this, “Why Don’t You, Yes But.”  Friends, docs, exercise consultants, relatives -- all are cut off at the knees while the victor stands over them crowing,  “You see?  You can NOT help me!  I win!!”  Domination.  Control.  One can only walk off, ignoring the writhing anguish crying out behind one.  It’s real enough, but it’s a tool.  To cure it would be to remove a defense, possibly even the structure of a personality.

My short list of where things go wrong when it comes to “help” (or pleas for help) that are really “control” include, first,  motivation (who is defining the situation as requiring help or being susceptible to help -- is this for the benefit of the helper or the helpee?)  Second, the nature and source of rewards when help is successful -- or not.  Third, the methods of helping:  how authoritarian, how “scientific,” how intimate?  Fourth, the unintended consequences of helping people in the aggregate, since society is such a responsive complex ecology that changing a small meme somewhere (e.g. “addiction is not a crime but a physiological response to toxic substances”) can throw huge organizations and budgets into disarray.

In the individual personality, the pattern of needed help (infant dependency) versus provided control (parental intervention) is formed early on.  Resources, genomic potential, and the larger society all come into play.  It gives me the shudders.  I vividly remember at the age of maybe six or seven -- probably because of attending school -- I was facing an uphill struggle to remain myself as I knew myself to be.  You’re smiling, but to me it was dissociation, being forced out of my identity by adults telling me,  “Oh, you’ll change when you grow up.”  Meaning:  you’ll be the way we want you to be.

So when I sit down with some big scary hairy smelly alcoholic back-country brute, what I see is that same fear in his eyes.  Quickly replaced as he looks back at me by calculations about how easy it will be to game the system this time.  If it looks like the game won’t pay off they dissociate.  (Ever play Indian stick game?  Well, DON’T unless you grew up with it.)  That is, they look at the far horizon and suddenly don’t speak English anymore.  If there’s nothing on offer, why should they give up the small advantages they already have, like the welcome buzz of being drunk and the easy company of street people?  In my experience, which is more about highly educated professionals, the latter are worse.  More complex, more resourceful.  Exhausting.  VERY controlling.

In the end professional helpers can hardly help but perform triage, helping those who will accept it, helping those for whom the price is right, and waving on the impossible energy-suckers who will fight “help” all the way.  The trouble is that in some cases those intractables are vectors who can re-seed trouble (TB, HIV, violence, IV drugs) among the innocent throughout the culture.

So the helpers, not getting any rewards from their clients, turn to satisfying themselves with the feeling of being helpful, cheerful, exceptional people, rushing around improving everyone.  My mother thought this was the definition of ministry and was much disgusted by my constant fishing in the Abyss.  She saw it as no different from being a common misery-voyeur, entertained by maimed beggars in India instead of getting the dishes washed.  She herself usually went at problems as though she were killing rats.

Since that was our family pattern (which usually sent my dad running for cover out of the house) it feels to me far more trustworthy than cheery, kind, embracing “help.”  Alarm bells go off in my head:  “It’s a trap!  It’s a trap!”  Cool analysis, design of some strategy for change -- those to me are help that might work.  My mother’s gynecologist, who took her through three children and a major mastectomy, was strict, brisk, and VERY skillful.  The first two qualities are not enough.  The SKILL counts.

So now you know why I’m a print-freak.  It’s cool, it’s remote, it’s relatively safe, and not only do I not have to help anyone, but also I can play identity games that will always keep me moving, just out of reach.  But you remember that thing about “unanticipated consequences?”  I had not realized how intensely one can get attached to others via print.  No help for it.  Very little control.