THE CHIMERA WITHIN

The New York Times thinks that if they tease me with headlines they assume I want to read, then I will be provoked enough to subscribe to their newspaper.  They think I am like the people they know.  They don’t know that there are people who are not like them.  (See reference to monkeys’ ignorance in yesterday’s post.)  But I bounce off their teasing by googling the subjects of their headlines to find other sources for information.  

Sometimes the subject itself rebukes me harshly for not already knowing things about it.  Like today’s refusal to let me read Andrew Sullivan’s review of David France’s book version of a movie called “How to Survive a Plague” meant that I realized I’d never seen that movie, so I went to Netflix and watched it just now.  I looked at the numbers go by and watched the people age, both victims and Dr. Fauci who has been a prime medical spearhead, and I wondered why I didn’t know more about it at the time.  

It wasn’t until I began to “talk” on email with Tim Barrus that I understood that a huge and significant movement in the world had mostly passed me by.  I should have known, since in 1981 when the first signs appeared I was at the U of Chicago Div School, taking classes in medical ethics.  I don’t remember Don Browning ever saying anything about AIDS.  The cases we tried to resolve were about melanoma and major burns.  Just as agonizing, but not socially entwined.  “Behavior-related” sniffed senators who probably never had had real sex in their lives.  One would as soon kiss a lizard.

In my circuit-riding years I knew a minister with AIDS but no parishioners.  (We didn’t separate HIV and AIDS in those days.)  “Gay” was a different issue.  I’ve always known “gays” of many different kinds.  (I put quotes because I don’t see the category as being so hard-edged as some do.)  In Saskatoon the most stigmatized group was aboriginals, not gays, and the small UU fellowship did not want to address those issues.  Their primary worry was environmental.  The later UU “Welcoming Congregation” movement was about as much about growth as about justice.

In Portland in the ’90's the issues were blacks, drugs, and shooting in the streets — sort of muddled up together.  Back in Montana I was doing memoir and Western art bronzes until I got the bio of Bob Scriver finished and published:  “Bronze Inside and Out”.  Then there was a kind of space.  And Tim Barrus showed up.

There are cases, genetically proven, of “chimeras” created by two conceived blastomeres, twins, which began to develop side-by-side but then relented and resorbed one of them while the other went on to develop into a person with the nearly quenched one silently folded inside.  I’ve meant to develop that into a short story about people who sometimes seem to be two people and — actually — really are.  In fact, I’ve been accused of being two people myself: one that was compliant and cooperative and one who was outraged and uncontrollable.  It’s one of the things Barrus and I have in common.  People think one can control their internal chimera and make a moral issue of it.

We write.  We read each other’s writing.  We don’t agree.  My little town has grizzly bears in the night, following the edge of the lake.  His has mountain lions coming down to drink from the child’s wading pool he and his boys have put out to make an oasis.  We know forest fires.  Even the conflagrations of the heart.  

AIDS now is often a syringe disease: injectable drugs carrying virus into the blood.  Syringe disease, like all addictions, is a pain-based disease caused by poverty, failure, desertion, and being stuck in a life you hate.  Now we can see in the brain by using fMRI’s, both the craving addiction of the syringe drugs and the emotional suffering it’s trying to address, but doesn’t.  The official declaration that research finally shows this is what’s happening is at:  https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/surgeon-generals-report.pdf

Basically, too many people in this country are miserable and they are miserable because they don’t have enough to eat, or proper shelter, or meds — not even for deadly diseases they can pass on to everyone else.  Not just HIV but also TB, Hep C.  Our leaders don’t care.  At least that’s the evidence.  And despite the valiant and mostly successful efforts demonstrated in the movie “How to Survive a Plague” or the efforts to stop the poisonous industrialism of a pipeline through drinking water in North Dakota — we don’t seem willing to open up to each other.  But healing addiction must be done in a group.

Barrus and I know that opening up is dangerous to ourselves and others.  Part of the misery of our country is the constant attacking and blaming of each other which has made a the shambles of our culture.  (Shambles once meant a butcher’s slaughterhouse.)  Some are trying to revive those assumptions, but they’re gutted.  

So how do we rebuild a culture of solace and growth?  Do you have to be told?  It’s the very thing we keep unfunding when money is short:  the humanities.  That’s why they’re CALLED that, because they create human values and explain and sustain them.  Stories, images, songs, and dances — those are the humanities.  When Boccaccio’s characters were faced with the plague that emptied Europe, they holed up and told stories.  People still read them.

I save everything I find that Tim wrote.  Such a packrat.  I save a lot of what I write, but I’m getting better at believing that writing is like “Bartholemew’s Hats” — do you remember that storybook?  How every time he took his hat off there was a more splendid one underneath it?  Most people who say they are writers don’t write very much.  Then they say they have writer’s block.  But they really have not-writer’s block.

For Tim and I it’s quite different.  The dialogue of the chimera in each of us is so intriguing to the chimera across from us, we just can’t stop with the hats.

WE TURN AWAY FROM CATHARSIS.

http://www.davidludwigmusic.com/shop/haiku-catharsis
 MUSIC PLAYS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WEBSITE.

Whether it was due to serendipity or synchronicity, a totally unlikely source I found by following tags has brought me exactly the insight I wanted about the neglect of the humanities, esp. by the hegemonic English speaking world.  Timothy Haase is a classicist loosely related to Wheaton College, of all the unlikely places for an eclectic lefty like myself to go looking.  His essay was on Medium, of all unlikely places, and addressed a video game called “That Dragon, Cancer.”  The video, consciously breaking with the swords and sorcerers conventions, recounts the real death of a boy in simulacrum terms that are like conventional video-games, but then again, raise the stakes and methods to access true tragedy.

It constantly bugs me that church services and supposedly thoughtful writers’ platforms are so trivial and predictable.  I search for some response to the overwhelming cultural devotion to “therapeutics” in terms of healing warriors missing half their bodies, always in wrenching pain while having no impact on events; or in terms of balancing a child’s death with a trip to Disneyland.  “Backrub Medicine.”  

It seems clear that we are a culture intent on making the humanities into nursery rhymes or Harlequin novels.  Or an economic bonanza for the medical and indemnity industries that have become the real SuperPowers.  It seems part of the feminist agenda to replace catharsis with soothing, as a way of maintaining control and the status quo, now that women have a rhetorical foothold strong enough to fire presidents of Alpha universities.

Beyond that, it bugs me that a certain sort of woman is so tone deaf to what T. tells in his boy-stories over and over, that she will deny tragedy in plain sight without any mitigation or much discussion.  At most the atrocities strike them as “sad” and they offer to “help” in some irrelevant way by saying how much they love the sufferers.  They have no dimension, no stature, or “gravitas,” if I have to use that word.

Reading Haase, I realize they have an education deficit.  They were not asked to read Edith Hamilton or even Greek drama in high school as I was in the Fifties.  In my high school (1953-57) we discussed formal “catharsis” rather than PTSD neurotheory.  And if catharsis came by way of whores, then that’s the truth.  It never occurred to them that Iphigenia may have been sacrificed for nothing or the price Antigone paid in order to sustain moral order was too high.

Humanities have been so overrun by science and math that the high dimensions have been lost.  What ought to be a partner and restraint on the science/techie world has been gut-shot to cripple its hold.  It’s so easy to just de-fund the arts.  Sometimes real tragedy is ignored and sometimes it’s diminished to cuteness, like calling a major anthro journal “Peeps.”  (Coming soon to your neighborhood, “Jehovah.”  We already did Jesus, but we could call a new version “Geez” or “Gee Whiz!”)

Newly hatched baby sea turtles

Science has provided transactional technical expertise that has lifted many a techie into prosperity (immediately sucked up by rent and investment gambles).  They are like the baby new-hatched turtles scuttling for the moonlit sea, in Tennessee William’s “Suddenly Last Summer” image, while the black and ragged predators descend on their cubicles from the sky.  “They” (?) tell us that commerce and social platforms are what keep the peace, because they make us stay in our pre-frontal cortex mode of rules and principles.  Some peace.  More like pieces.

Haase enumerates definitions of tragedy and catharsis:

“Tragedy is a representation of an action of a superior kind — grand, and complete in itself — presented in embellished language, in distinct forms in different parts, performed by actors rather than told by a narrator, effecting through pity and fear, the purification (catharsis) of such emotions.  (from Aristotle’s “Poetics”, Ch. 6, 1449b; Trans. Anthony Kenny)

Isn’t it obvious that much of T’s writing is “performed by an actor,” adding a layer that allows contraction, repetition, irony, oxymoron — and requires empathy?  He has always told us he is a performance artist, a dancer, sometimes “nue”, a primordial practice.  Why is it assumed to be narcissism and deception when we all know Greek theatre was performed wearing masks?  Print is ALWAYS a mask.  But then, so is vid.

"Orestes" by Euripides

“The verbal noun (catharsis) derives from kathairo, “to cleanse, purify, purge” and katharos “ritually purified, cleansed” and can operate in multiple registers: RITUAL (as in the cleansing of guilt or defilement), MEDICAL (the cleaning of wounds, the evacuation of fluids), and INTELLECTUAL (the clarification of problems.)  

Sometimes the problem is in the receiver: a filter like a bag over the head.  Think of these three meanings in terms of unwanted immigrants and whether they are thought of as offending, defiling, guilty beings; or whether they seem wounding to our lives, carriers of infection, draining pus and sewage; or whether they fatally burden economic problems that were already difficult.

Now think of the three aspects in terms of boys with HIV: offending, defiling guilty beings doing sexwork, taking drugs, defacing buildings, wounding us and each other, carrying fatal viruses, being naked and needy.  And yet finding love between each other.  An analysis of all the mass shooters of recent years concludes the shooter is likely to be male, unable to form a sexual partnership, resentful because of believing something is deliberately being withheld from him, mistaking violence for power.

Now consider the failed imperative need of society to purify, cleanse and purge whether it is through the misguided punishment by clinics meant to cure, or through the refusal to rationally allot public funds according to need, or the incarceration of suffering youngsters.  Because we can.

Survival is the driving force of life.  Survival of the individual, of the group, and of us all.  That’s not the tragedy.  We know we will all die in the end.  That’s not the tragedy.  The tragedy is in the knowing and ignoring.  If we pretend that we don’t know, that’s a diminishment.  And tragedies at least deserve some scale, some grandness, some ennoblement.  And witnessing.  This is a humanities issue, not technical or scientific.

The boys of Cinematheque are a Greek chorus.  “You saw us and pretended you did not.”

THE SCRIVER SAGA

Meadville/Lombard Theological School

On my shelves are a set of two 3-ring binders labeled “The Scriver Seminary Saga.”  They are the collected one-page typed weekly reports to my home church (First Unitarian of Portland, OR) during my four year seminary education, including the summer of Clinicial Pastoral Education in Rockford, IL, and the year as an intern minister in Hartford, Connecticut.  (78-82)  Once I began to serve churches, their newsletters replaced the practice.

Firmly, I believe that anything closely examined over a period of time is worth preserving evidence from to look at again when one’s mind and being has evolved or cooled or caught on fire or whatever other change might happen.  I was very much impressed by a course with an historical bent that discussed a church record in Europe that was kept for centuries but had some mysterious gaps.  The point of the discussion was how powerful the gaps were once a person inquired into their cause:  like, for instance, the Black Death.

But there are no gaps in the Scriver Seminary Saga because in those days (and now) I considered one of my virtues to be consistency and tenacity, partly natural temperament and partly reinforced by marriage to Bob Scriver who also valued those characteristics since he was a musician and the way to Carnegie Hall is practise, practise, practise.  (He didn’t make it past the Montana Historical Society warehouse.)  But I haven’t gone back to see what I said or, as Kenner would put it, what it meant.  I have been discouraged by the collapsing of both seminary and denomination.  But maybe it’s time now.  There's been a gap.

A small part of the reason I left the ministry in 1988 turns out to be related to a big part of the UUA’s problems.  The Unitarian Universalist Association that so attracted me changed into something else and it was — in my eyes — ugly.  I didn’t realize until recently that others shared my opinion, at least in part.  This morning I stumbled upon “Regaining Balance” by Michael Werner, a monograph published by the American Humanist Association which is a kind of sibling to the UUA that is sometimes pulled in and sometimes pushed out.  It’s a history of the roller coaster ride both movements have been on for the last decades as the cultures surged around them. 

I can’t order the booklet at the moment because someone fraudulently used my VISA to order car parts (!) which was evidently detected immediately -- maybe because I only order books and cat food.  A “fraud specialist” called me to explain and to tell me to cut up my invalidated VISA.  A new one is on the way.  I gather that there are plenty of these cases, thus justifying a specialist, and I also gather that most of the fraudsters are amateurs, easily caught.  (Is this a clue to religion?)  

So to get the booklet, I went to the AHA to request a review copy.  All copies are Kindle via the Internet, so if they refuse, the delay will only be the time it takes to mail me a new VISA, not mailing the booklet, but the mail is entirely unpredictable these days.  I don’t know whether AHA will send a review copies since I'm only a blog.

"Starhawk" he's not.

So I read the part of the publication that’s on Google Books and was startled that it was so clear and that I am so much in agreement.  BUT it’s old-fashioned.  (Consider the source.) Or at least "old-school" which sounds a little better.  These days, everybody who is more than ten years behind on the avalanche of technical scientific discoveries is old-fashioned. Even "The Edge" is old-fashioned.  So are Aeon, TED, maybe not Nautil.us.  They are ALL culture bound.  To the dominant culture.  Even Ozy.  Al Jezeera went under.  Indigenous equals invisible.

Anyway, why is it is that the American Humanist Association never takes on the current assault on the humanities?

The shifts (indeed, explosions!) in paradigms they (logically) demand, the radical revision of our cherished 19th century humanist and religious ideas, our tanglefooted integration of contradictions, and the necessary economic/governmental implications, require some working premises to anchor or center ourselves for the sake of sanity.

Many, as always, are finding that anchor to be a life in community, maybe simply growing where they are.  Ecology, IMHO, is the root of harmony.  Happily, the Internet means possible virtual community online.  My additional strategy is a rather ascetic private life (AKA poverty) in order to wring out enough time to think and to find sources beyond sensational media skewings and commodifications.  

Werner’s book is part of a series.  I would like to add to it the implications of the new science that I read about and that are so deeply suggestive.  The findings continue to unroll, so it’s not worth a bound book, but there's enough evidence to write something.

Here’s a partial list of what I mean:

1.  New understanding of how the human body works, what “thought” means in bodily terms, the evolution of the brain, the actions of neurons, the 200 specialized sense cells that are in our brain besides the familiar organs, how memory works (it’s complex), gut thinking, limbic thinking, and the capacity to share thought and feeling simply by looking at each other.  Why consciousness is not the key to survival.

2.  Instead of the bricolage interpretations of pluralistic “equal” religious tolerance, an environmentally informed deep understanding of metaphor drawn from living experience, and the dangers of institutional rigidity and “ownership” if it becomes dogma.

3.  The idea that a print-based culture, “People of the Book”, is better than all others;  how that suppresses the more basic speaking-only small-group cultures; and what iPhones means to them.  What many identify as a fall from grace because of agriculture with its walls and hoarding, it’s priests and lawyers and kings, might really be about the hegemony of writing: record keeping, laws, hierarchies.

4.  The slow realization that there is no such thing as “rationality” and logic, as opposed to deep feeling of the Sacred, because both emerge from the formation of basic theories of life when we are infants, structures of conviction that are nearly impossible to escape.  Both rationality and emotional responsiveness are part of it, always in conversation with each other.

5.  Humans, including the 200 estimated hominin species preceding us, cannot be defined as the end point of evolution or even the apex.  The march of life up the beach to the triumph of progressive humans is a broken metaphor.  Rather there is a surge, a sheet, a symphony of unfolding life that emerges from itself in surprising ways.  Salvation is not going to heaven, it's participating in the furor and ferment that we both receive and pass on.

6.  We need far better ways to balance resources with their uses.  Food, rare metals, energy, water, soil fertility, each other.

7.  People, some on the other side of the planet and some just down the street, are suffering terribly and being actively destroyed.  We cannot address this by making ourselves oblivious.  Instead we need to approach, to question, to sift through the shit, get dirty.

8.  Religious denominations are controlled by demographics and economics, much of it unconscious and propelling evil forces. They can stifle all progress and replace genuine responses and observations with whatever makes them feel good:  inclusion, therapy, economic safety, elitism.  They are not about beliefs.  They should not be controlled by political factions in the larger world.  The killer of both AHA and UUA is arrogance, privilege, entitlement.

My tenacity is still paying off.  Consistency is a lot tougher.  People who have not been keeping up with this new research don’t even understand what I’m talking about.  My seminary has literally been gutted, the library and faculty moved downtown.  But the building, now housing the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, IS addressing this new body of inquiry by supporting a series of scholars and lectures.  That’s nice and a good use of the building.

But “nice” is a very suspicious category.  If you think your church is “nice,” you are stuck in the past.  What IS a church anyway, but an institution?

Neubauer Collegium of Society and Culture

ENTERING VIA THE HUMANITIES

The Humanities world, at least the academic part of it, is highly patterned.  The idea originally was the university and that’s still the purported base.  At least the norm is for scholars to be generally people who produce and consume books, which determines their status in the institution.  Native Americans from a rural setting, whether or not it is on a reservation, are not always readers because it’s hard to get books.  But these days if they have access to school and library computers, they can become scholars.  They have to think of it, and they will need a strong guide in the form of a person or persons who can scout territory for them.

A helper for people who are doing “ethnohistory” or working in other Native American related fields is H-Net, which is a loosely organized communication web divided into disciplines.  They announce conferences, which institutions pay for their scholars to attend, but usually they will allow independent scholars to also attend at their own expense.  Part of their distinction is jargon, multi-syllabic words with specialized meanings, carefully organized into sentences trying to evade sandtraps presented by past scholars.  This will make it hard for the uninitiated, but if you keep at it, you can pick up the vocabulary.

There are two barriers to an innocent Native American person wishing to find out more about his own people and wanting to join the conversation among informed people.  One is having a guide and the other is —predictably — money for travel and a place to stay. 

Terri Castaneda

Terri Castaneda is in Sacramento, on the faculty for CSU, and looking for a person to join a panel.  The announcement is below.  To give you a notion of who Terri is and therefore what kind of panel contents might be wanted, here’s the introductory precis of a paper she has presented elsewhere.  Her words:

California Indian Land Claims Activism and Urban Indian Place-Making

TERRI A. CASTANEDA,  California State University, Sacramento

ABSTRACT Peoplehood and cultural belonging have long been primordialized through reference to land and place. The de-territorialization of identity may be a critical hallmark of the 21st century, but ancestral territories and homelands continue to be implicated in a host of cultural conditions and sociopolitical statuses—perhaps especially those that refer- ence being out of, or without, place—whether as immigrant, refugee, alien or expat. This was certainly the case for the Federated Indians of California who mobilized, in the late 1940s, in order to pursue land claims against the federal government for expropriation of their ancestral territory. One unanticipated outcome of their political activism was California Indian place-making and cultural revivification among urban, landless Indians in the greater Sacramento region.

Now I’ll paraphrase as simply as I can.  “People have for a long time identified themselves by a certain location.  Now people float anywhere.  But they remember and are defined according to where they came from.  Much of law and boundaries is about this.  In the late 1940’s the Federated Indians of California sued the Federal Government for taking their territory.  They didn’t expect that the political result would be that Sacramento city Indians would suddenly take an interest, becoming activists.

Here’s a photo of four ethnohistory presenters.

Farina King, Terri Castaneda, Jessa Growing Thunder, and Karin Huebner

What if you were a person with no degrees, but some background in your own tribe?  Suppose you weren’t the usual youngster starting out.  Should you go?  I doubt that anyone would try to stop you.  You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at first you have to know that such an event is even happening.  

Below is a call for a panelist.  The heading is linked to H-Net and the original announcement.

Call for Panelist: 2016 Ethnohistory Conference, Nashville TN

by Terri Castaneda

We are seeking a 4th panelist whose work complements and expands upon themes and papers outlined below:

Engaging with Empire: Mapping Cosmopolitan Lives and Visions—This panel examines individual lives, subjectivities and visions forged at the crossroads of imperial institutions and Indigenous opportunity. Looking beyond narratives that frame elite, bicultural and/or cosmopolitan Indigenous figures and experiences as embodiments of colonial surrogacy, accommodation or means for sheer survival, it takes up the very intentional choices of some individuals to leave home; to venture into—rather than away from—empire. In so doing, it aims to shed light not only on the diverse motivations and pathways by which common individuals crafted uncommon—perhaps even extraordinary—lives, but also upon the methodological and interpretive constraints posed by the challenges of recovering and situating such sojourns and stories within the wider historical context of the overwhelmingly violent and involuntary removals of Indigenous people and nations from ancestral territories, homes and families.

Two papers address these themes by focusing upon cross-country travel, off-reservation boarding schools, and outing experiences as real and imagined sites for the fulfillment of intellectual curiosity, discovery and personal ambition: 

1.  Terri Castaneda explores articulations with empire embodied in the life of Marie Potts, a Mountain Maidu activist, newspaper editor, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School alumna. 

2.  John Gram examines Pueblo engagement with federal boarding schools in New Mexico through the lens of Indigenous values and desires for social, political, and economic mobility during the Progressive Era. 

3.  Nicholas Barron’s paper explores the relationship between applied anthropologists and Yaqui Indians of Southern Arizona during the early 20th century, illustrating how individuals and their movements through imperial entanglements contribute to the construction and representation of distinctly Indigenous places in the present. 

David Dinwoodie will serve as discussant. 

Interested parties should contact Terri Castaneda via email (tac@csus.edu) by May 15.

Surprisingly, this is NOT about the injustice and compensatory claims for displaced peoples, nor a harangue about imperial abuses.  Rather, this is about how you get back into the dominant system of the country while remaining tribal.  Amazing!  And absolutely crucial!

For a kind of example, here’s the title of a previous paper by Castaneda — NOT about being a shaman, but about how to work with  the foundations and philanthropies who help Indians.  (“Piegan Institute” in Browning is an outstanding example of how well it can work.)  Castenada wrote it in 

1987, but didn’t publish it.  “Families and Foundations: Explorations in Philanthropy and Patronage as Dynastic Phenomena”  Unpublished paper, Dept of Anthro, Rice U.  

Darrell Kipp and that DesRosier Kid

The major insight of Darrell Kipp and Dorothy Still Smoking was that they should avoid both government and tribal sources of support because both of those were invested in control and maintaining the status quo, a deadly combination.  The Latham Foundation was a major contributor to the success of the Cuts Wood School that was part of the Institute.  Individuals often called “trust fund babies,” because they had family money handed down the generations, also helped.  Nowadays movie stars and tech moguls get involved, but their efforts may amount to advertising for themselves.  One must be cautious.  And it pays to keep looking for other resources.

HOW A PERSON -- BUT NOT A COMPUTER -- UNFOLDS

Easter Island -- always watching

If a person had been following the latest research in what it is to be human (which in our age has replaced— or should — all the worrying about what it is to be God (let Him take care of Himself)  they would have learned things that most people have not absorbed yet.  I shouldn’t say “things,” because the paradigm shift is away from things to patterns, interactions, and change.  Get your dictionary.  

Most people assume that thinking is done only in the brain, that it is accessible on reflection, controllable by “will-power” and at its highest point a matter of words and math.  These things are not true. The whole body counts and thinks, most of it cannot be summoned up by reflection, and many feel its highest use is in the arts.

The essence of a human being is the meiotic synergy of two plans for a body as an aggregation of individual eukaryote cells specialized to operate in a unity.  The plans are encoded in a double helix of only four molecules which are arranged in a specific number of chromosomes that are in pairs.  One pair is either XX or XY — the Y allows the male gametes to leave everything behind (pack ONE bag) except their code and travel to the ovum.  The united halves then begin to follow a specific plan.  This will take nine months or three trimesters in the womb.  At that point the new human emerges and continues the gestation outside for what is considered by some to be a fourth trimester.

A baby ready for the world?

At this point the infant can breathe, eat, digest, pump blood, feel with all senses.  Some say that when newly discovered specialized cells are included (spindle cells and others) there are as many as 200 senses.  No computer or built machine can do this, at least not all at once.  A computer has no access to sense code unless it is provided by a human or an auxiliary machine.  Humans do not perceive directly or consciously many sensory elements, but they always perceive code for waves and molecular interactions that are sorted and patterned in the brain until they reach our awareness as colors, sounds, tastes, and so on.

The brain begins to weave a scaffold for identity: all of this is code and the code is emotion- and memory-based.  This is the fabric for the rest of that individual’s life.  Anything not relevant to this first structure is discarded, literally, by the deaths of those cells. 

We’ve only recently understood the epigenome, which is another set of molecular codes that I think of as a sleeve over the helixes.  However you think about it, it is from the environment and is capable of turning individual genes on or off, sometimes in an individual, sometimes with a wave of effects lasting into three generations later or becoming permanent code.  We are beginning to learn how to turn individual genes on and off though they turn out to be complex interactions with sometimes unforeseen consequences.  We come in a cloud of imperceptible tiny independent creatures: parasites, symbionts.

Hitchhikers and helpers.

The next five years are devoted to learning basic muscle management — standing, walking, gripping, — coordinating eyesight, organizing the perception of senses, forming habits of all sorts.  Next comes reading, writing and arithmetic along with the protocols of interaction among people.   The basic stories, games, management of emotion.  

We now know that the brain is forming the connections among neurons and clusters of neurons that we call the “connectome.”  It is not just through neurons, but also from the production of molecules by organs that form operational loops that control the on-and-off swings of whatever is needed in the moment.  These interact with the autonomic nervous system that controls unconscious operation of the body, often resulting in perceptible emotion.

From about  age 8 to the onset of puberty, the individual is forming an identity, self-talk, reaction style, shape and dimensions of emotion, and belonging to the family, a cohort, and larger sets of loyalty.  

Then comes the challenge of managing sexuality and finding a life work that will sustain a family.  All this greatly involves the pre-frontal cortex, the most recent part of the brain to develop, believed to contain morality, art, and high concept formation which isn’t complete until the mid-twenties and sometimes not even then.

Another capacity is that for empathy which clearly involves the eyes, absorbing another person’s emotion and understanding by looking at them.  To know how another person feels through one’s skill at empathy is mysterious and not anything a machine can do, though a lie detector can record what the autonomic nervous system is controlling.  Muscle movements can be formulated and interpreted, but that’s not the same as activating mirror cells.

A lot of people were seduced by the right brain/left brain idea and the studies that assigned image to one side (females and artists) and words to the other side (men and scientists), but they oversimplified and distorted what happens.  It may be more fruitful to review the evolution of the brain from the first hominin, though much of it is guesswork.  

The aggregated organ we call "brain" was tightly formed by interaction with the environment, which changes for many reasons, or — if the homonins went exploring, the new place changed them.  The two — human capacities and environmental demands — are as tightly choreographed in retrospect as that first dance between the infant and the world.  Homeostasis is the guide.

The human body/mind is a composite that is always in flux, but also always evolving new ideas and skills.  This is so complex that we nearly have to reassemble ourselves on waking every day.  Trauma or disease can interfere to the point of insanity, crippling and death.  

Thus we need communities to sustain us through the ordeals and to learn and remember our work after we are gone.  Communities are individuals gathered and in tension between what is good for one and what is good for all.  In a way this mimics the tension between the parasitic developing zygote and the mother’s resources as a providing body.  It’s a balancing act.

The tension between the one and the many can be governed by religious principles or — after writing was invented — governmental laws.  Greek drama was meant to act out the struggle between the individual and the state.  I first learned about it as a sophomore in high school when we performed “Antigone” in a classroom, theatre in the round.  

One young woman has two brothers who war over power.  Both die in battle.  Creon, the king, has to pick one brother as justified in order to reunite the country and he does it by denying the other brother traditional burial, using his power as a human law-giver to oppose what was seen as God’s law.  Antigone insists on burying her brother, which ends up with her death and the death of her lover, the king’s son.  The play has repeatedly been recreated as opera, which was intended to use the best and most powerful of the elements of staging to get to the passionate core.  A computer can do parts of this, but no computer can compose and perform an opera.

There is another set of stages related to the empathy stirred by spectacular story, progress beginning with focused attention, then growing interest, entwined memories, accordance, intimacy, bonding, faithful dedicated love (not sex or not JUST sex), virtual concepts of what is true.  One can go through these stages with a person, a work of art, an animal, a landscape, and more.  It is what unites the person and the group, the world, the cosmos.  It is the source of the sacred, a felt dimension of human being that cannot be detected by instruments, no matter how sensitive they are.

CONFERENCES, JOURNALS, PAPERS: PARAACADEMIA

Gradually, after years of monitoring H-Net mailing lists about various “disciplines” (arbitrarily agreed upon clusters of subject matter) and often benefiting just from reading reviews or descriptions of conferences with their calls for papers, I’ve realized that it is a parallel universe to the system of colleges and universities that control thought around the globe by certifying scholars and providing opportunities for them to meet.  Universities have now maximized their control enough to shut a lot of people out and throw even more into lifelong debt.

From Wikipedia:

H-Net ("Humanities and Social Sciences Online") is an interdisciplinary forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It is best known for hosting electronic mailing lists organized by academic disciplines; according to the organization's website, H-Net lists reach over 100,000 subscribers in more than 90 countries.

The H-Net Network has grown until it is now endorsed by many academic professional organizations. Its over 180 topic- or discipline-specific lists are often the primary internet forum for scholars.

Don’t tell them how useful they are, or they’ll start begging for money the way the schools constantly nag their alumni.  (Oh, too late.  They do.  But at least I don’t have to pay tuition.)  Beyond the list-servs, this symbiotic world is also enormously expensive: the conferences are often in delightful places far enough away to put a burden on energy sources.  (Has anyone figured out the total jet fuel cost of a conference in Hawaii?)  Of course, one will need a place to stay.  One must be quite wealthy to attend or belong to an organization that will pay on your behalf.  If the latter, that organization will expect some say about which ones you can attend and what you can present there.

I’ve only attended two of these H conferences, both of them sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, one in Las Vegas and one in Calgary.  It was early in my return to Montana and I was still only in my Sixties, so I threw a mattress in the back of the pickup and drove there.  I didn’t have a network of people I could stay with because I wasn’t coming directly from the academic world.  It was 1980 when Hannah Grey said, "Welcome to the Company of Scholars" and put my MA "hood" over my head.

When I had been in the UU ministry, we had meetings like these all the time, though only a few were places to present papers.  Humptulips UUMA study group was one.  I wrote about the paper I presented at one meeting on this blog:  May 1, 2012:  “Male and Female Created He Them.”  The group assigned the topics, partly playfully, and assigned me to distinguish between the then “new” female-based theologies and traditional paternalistic theology, because I was so un-feminist. The work I did for that (we were expected to meet academic standards) has been a basic part of what I’ve done since.  But UU ministers are no longer “learned.”  Now they're therapeutic.

The other stream of this para-academic thought is journals, which are almost as expensive as travel to conferences, and the gate-keeping for these publications is partly secret.  The editors are announced, but articles are “curated” by secret peers.  That’s the theory.  In the first place the process is extremely slow, expensive in terms of time, but -- worse -- one is judged by rivals and older scholars one might be challenging.  There’s a bit of this is ordinary publishing done through academic publishers and even commercial publishers.  The stories of sabotage, feuds, and person-destroying vendettas abound.  The advancement of learning is not always a priority.

If a discipline is small and perhaps located in a regional or otherwise specialized area, there’s really no way to keep up the pretense that you don’t know who is reviewing your work and what their prejudices are.  Now there is a move towards open-journals which go online, perhaps even uncurated, with the reviewers named and publishing their comments.  This scary experiment is still in progress.  It resembles platforms for public writing like Edge.org, Aeon.com or Nautil.us with the comment function substituting for formal peer reviews.  They can be confusing, offensive, uninformed, and just add to the enormous amount of print -- which is only marginally improved by not being ink-on-paper.  Friendship networks still count large.  

Most people are still not sophisticated about using Skype or other online conference strategies.  I haven’t used them.  Technical savvy begins to be as much a barrier as lack of money.  Thank God (or whomever) for the used book market, although it means I’m looking at books already consumed and discarded as not that useful.  This means I’m working with . . . um . . . excretion, but we already know that’s fertile.  These days everyone is hurtling forward so quickly that they are skipping over material that would address some of the holes in their present arguments.

A major humanities enterprise in Montana is history and fiction about the people and place.  Yet the graduates of the state universities don’t know foundational publications or basic disciplines.  They rush after the trendy issues and they are fed the favorite hobby horses of their professors who don't even get out of the university town.  “News” paper print and local bookstores are far too influenced by commercial motives and that just emphasizes the trend.  Strangely, professors come in from other parts of the world, hired because they know theory rather than the territory.  Theories tend to be transient.   But locals drop out whole categories of writing because they aren’t socially endorsed:  gays, blacks, Metis, the Goths, Canadian writing about the same shared ecosystem as Montana. 

But I’m wandering.  Statewide teachers’ meetings are coming up.  They are highly political -- labor union attitudes vs. professional associations.  Administrators hate them because they can’t monitor what is said.  Anyway, this is hunting season and cattle shipping season.  Teachers’ meetings make a nice gap in the calendar, but unless the faculty is wearing GPS anklets, there is no way to tell where they really are.  That’s not my topic, though I know a lot of funny stories.

People in a thinly populated place where even the libraries can be a little limited, H-Net is a god-send now that there is Internet access to the major campus conversations.  Much of what is happening is cross-disciplinary under a meta-topic.  Right now everyone is trying to understand neuroresearch, so it’s necessary to chase neurotheology, neuroanthropology, neuroarcheology, neuroliterature, neurosociology, neuropsychoanalysis back to their roots as 19th century categories.  Then we’ve got to reflect on whether boundaries and methods need to be revised.  It’s deeper than the earlier gender-realizations when we moved from binary to fluid, from forcing everything to one end or the other of the spectrum.  We haven’t finished dealing with that yet.  Some of us will die clutching binaries.  (Life/death.)

In fact, the computer has opened the world in another way: daylighting practices that are widespread but cloaked.  Some say the real reason for the Rentboy.com raid, which took all the computers and other client registers to secret police locations, was that governmental and corporation names of some prominence were included.  An interesting and powerful threat at the moment is the publication of all the names of members of the Ku Klux Klan.  They may have seen it coming -- they have been trying to redefine themselves.  “Fifty Shades of Gray” was nothing.  “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” was as world-shaking as Kinsey.  No one had known what people were up to.

Can you hear me now?

What will be revealed when the data from African smart-phones are accumulated and interpreted this way?  We already know how deeply we are changed by knowing what our international leaders and their secret squads are saying to each other.  We can only hope it will change them as well.

Society is changing so rapidly now that the academic world can’t keep up.  This parallel stream of thought represented by conferences, journals and papers is helping.  It is a way of joining into the conversation and understanding if one has the chops for it.  Usually that’s indicated by a diploma degree, but not necessarily.  Some people with paper entitlement are sitting it out.

Others blog.  Try this one for some excellent thoughts.  https://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/about/