"THE FAR PAVILIONS": a Very Long Journey

Ben Cross and Amy Irving

By chance Netflix delivered the two-disc form of “The Far Pavilions” (book in 1978, film in 1984) just as I was trying to get sense out of the concepts of “narcissism”, co-dependence in persons attached to grandiose narcissists to help support their accomplishments, and — inevitably — anti-dependence in “recovering co-dependents” who have converted all the way past relationship.  (This last idea has neither been defined nor explored by anyone I’ve found so far.)  This film (I haven’t read the book) also addresses the tension between personal desire and political obligation, and rather flirts with same-sex attachment versus traditional (obsessional) “true love.”  Also, familial love and intimacy versus Others.  It’s a lot to think about.

That’s not even considering the echo of this book with “The Raj Quartet” (AKA “The Jewel in the Crown”, 1965-75, film in 1984) which was written by Mary Margaret Kaye’s literary agent, Paul Scott (1920-1978), who became so obsessed with his own huge masterwork that he more or less disappeared into it.  All this writing is set in the northwest corner of India, abutting Afghanistan where wars go to grow old and die.  There’s a lot about Kabul.  (Rossano Brazzi plays The Rana of Bhithor, a corrupt old caliph, clearly the Donald Trump part.  Don’t confuse Brazzi with Rossano Rubicondi, who married Ivana Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He was her third husband, twenty years younger.  The marriage ended but Ivana does not end relationships.)

The hero of “The Far Pavilions” is played by Ben Cross, a far more honorable man, in fact a family man whose genetic family has been replaced by the British army.  An orphan English boy saved by pretending to be native, his first love is the people of India who raise him.  They include a “sister” who is half-caste.  (Half-Russian from the intimacy of a previous Afghan war.)  

After being sent to England to become a “sahib,” he returns to fall in love with a blonde Brit female, a narcissist who chooses an older rich man.  Then he becomes extremely close to a young blonde beauty of a fellow soldier, who remains faithful even into mortal battle.  The half-caste girl returns to the story, in her turn obsessively devoted to a shallow and needy “sister”, a classic narcissist.  No one in this long complex tale ever achieves recovery from either narcissism or co-dependence, but in the end the two lovers ride off up the slopes of the Himalayas described as the “Far Pavilions.”  This is, of course, fantasy.

But for both Scott and Kaye, their epic romances of India fulfill the fantasy of writing a best-seller that will secure them economically and make them famous, justifying all hardships and reinforcing the British middle-class  notion of success-by-publication, which is almost as good as marrying landed gentry, Jane Austen style.  “The Far Pavilion” looks to be a lot like a book store.  Between author and agent, it’s hard to tell which is the narcissist and which is the co-dependent.  Very hard on ordinary human intimacy.

I consider myself an anti-co-dependent who learned from being co-dependent (an enabler) to an artist and later to a vocation (ministry), both of which used and tried to own me, the way the caliph owned women and catamites.  (This is over-stated to make the point.)  But here I am, obsessed with writing a blog, like a frog in a bog, barely saved by a sense of humor and a house full of comedic cats.  Is this post-dependent?

Sending me money or treating me like hired help will trigger reflex actions I cannot control, old and deep defences that will prevent me from ever being published in conventional terms.  I take notice that another of M.M. Kaye’s books, “Shadow of the Moon,” was nearly destroyed by cutting out all romance so as to emphasize war.  (Later she recovered and restored the book.)  I only know one other author who has the same sort of revulsions and panic attacks as I do, and we even trigger the responses in each other.  As I say, it interferes with intimacy.

But it frees us to go places most people never go, indeed, don’t know exist.  “Far Pavilions” indeed, and not idyllic.  In spite of the romantic pretensions of the immature, the historic world of the Plains Indian is a rawhide drumhead, as Ivan Doig said before he turned away to pinafore stories about school teachers and bar tenders.  The prairie is a ground of winnowing where the lightweight are blown away, a kind of dry sea where ships meet hurricanes of wind.

Liberals have been preaching in streams of thought going back earlier than we can trace because writing hadn’t been invented yet, especially in novels which didn’t form until the middle class formed, claiming that people can change their identities, fall madly in love without losing themselves.  Or not.  We think it’s some kind of key when Flaubert says, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”  But we go into a rage if someone says, “Tonto, c’est moi.”

In the end of this film, “Ashton,” who becomes “Ashar" in order to survive, and then is addressed as “Ash” to his intimates, is advised by his surrogate father to resolve the rending problem of his two identities, native or Empire soldier, by creating a third identity that reconciles them.  (The obsessed-with-love half-caste woman is evidently to solve her own problem by devoting herself to Ash.)  This idea of this kind of solution persists, though it is often pretty hard to perform and can cause a girl to be killed if she flubs up.  The formality of Suttee is not necessary.  Domestic violence is just as good an argument against unwary co-dependence.

It’s a little dubious to inflate the structure of families to the dynamics of domestic politics, but there is a sort of fractal relationship.  (Fractals being the idea that big patterns are made up from the reiteration of little patterns.)  Political parties also interact on the basis of identity and economies.  At the moment we seem ready for a third party solution, though some yearn for “far pavilions,” this time as warm climate islands tall enough not to be submerged by climate change and sophisticated enough to be tax havens.

Once sex was set free from the constraints of Queen Victoria’s world, we found the dynamic replaced by money.  (Death and disease have always trumped both, but let’s leave them out.)  Now it is war that complexifies both sex (esp. in terms of families) and money (war machines).  I suspect that we will see internal violence for quite a while and possibly lose cities to atomic bombs.  

("The Far Pavilions" is streamed by YouTube.)

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE SYNDROME IN THE TRUMP ERA

A dramatic plea for help has come in response to “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” posted 2-18-12, which always gets more hits than most other posts on this blog.  In fact, I’ve been thinking about it again myself because of Trump, who makes a good illustration.

The person, calling herself “Raven Albatross” because I stopped accepting anonymous comments, tells a long story.  She is a perpetual student, caught in that terrible national vortex of going to school, finding the degree doesn’t lead to an income, going back for another degree, repeating the same experience until debt levels are too high to function.  She is clearly intelligent and researches her dilemmas, but she doesn’t say how or whom she has contacted in terms of research.  She has come to the attention of cops, which meant visiting a “shrink”.  Neither was helpful.

I’m not an expert.  I cannot cure ODD.  It’s a great temptation to create a term like ODD and then treat it as though it were something real, with clear boundaries.  Then the definition begins to suggest how to think about it and we get stuck.  Or someone comes up with a pet reason or cure and bends the evidence and results to match their original concept. It may be part of something bigger or it may be a big consequence of a small thing, or sometimes it’s a legitimate survival mechanism in a bad situation.  It’s important not to get captured by one idea so as to look from different angles. 

As they say,  it’s not paranoia if something is really after you.  Right now, everyone in the country is paranoid.  It’s a marketing strategy:  the two major themes are sex and danger, esp. economic danger.  No one will sleep with you and you’re bound to go broke and live on the street.

Lately we’ve all been fascinated by the brain mechanisms behind the forehead, the prefrontal cortex and its function as a dashboard for a multitude of perceptions, assumptions and judgements.  Also, a team headed by Joseph LeDoux is very interested in the amygdala which decides whether danger should be responded to by fight, flight or freeze actions.  It’s a little blob, often compared to an almond but turning out to be complex;  a problem there can definitely make you nutty.

When people begin to feel or act in atypical ways, sometimes inconvenient, authorities (since they are supposed to “know”) define a “syndrome” according to some psychiatric model or system devised by someone like Freud or Jung, which was only invented from reflection with no physical evidence.  Today’s psychological community uses thought experiments to discover unconscious functions of the brain and there are a LOT of them, sometimes very powerful.  These ideas get sucked up by the media, not entirely understood, and gradually turn into something approaching morality.  That is, people are blamed for narcissism or punished for being defiant or oppositional, sometimes criminalized and arrested for not accepting the commands of authority.  Jobs and marriages are lost.

Generally, most people accept the idea that a child goes through a stage of defiance, evidently in service to separation from care-givers so as to become their own identity.  Sometimes it’s funny.  (“Would you like some ice cream?”  Toddler, bellowing:  “NO!”)  If a child (meaning too young to turn away force) is afraid or enraged, punished to the point of trauma (which might be what came first), a cycle of defiance and force may develop that is life-threatening.  Even a surviving child may be too quick to throw up an impenetrable wall that could blight their life.

There is some thought, and probably research, into the coincidence of this emotional refusal with the time that toddler’s brains are being “pruned” by the withering of any neurological branches that are unused.  Sometimes very old people become oppositional in the same way.

When we get into the work of Joseph LeDoux, we are on new ground that doesn’t use philosophical constructs of what theoretical forces are clambering around in your unconscious.  Rather they look at the molecular and cell structures, how they interact, and what can be done about it.  Neuroresearch is evidence-based and not very well reconciled with the traditional “talking cure” psychoanalytic approaches so far.

The commenter was in a car accident, quite serious, but seemingly only suffered minor injuries.  She says, “I went into a traumatic like withdrawal from reality. Weird thing is for two months after the accident (when I became so reclusive that I ended up diagnosed agoraphobic as well as manic depressive, which is a form of bipolar).”  It was not LIKE trauma! A serious car accident IS trauma!  The withdrawal from reality might be called “dissociation” which offers another term to look up, though it’s not that well understood.  Sometimes it’s related to split personality.  Other times it’s seen as a way of coping with abuse.  PTSD is the acronym for combat dissociation: “post-traumatic stress disorder”.  Flashbacks, unwanted thoughts, difficulty in controlling mood,  going to violence easily, and a lot of other unpleasant things.

Agoraphobia, reclusiveness, manic depression, bipolar or ODD, general balkiness and refusal to agree, are all psychoanalytic concepts, labels about emotional and rational life that make a person anti-social, thus attracting treatment, adjustment, even incarceration.  They are REAL and there are a lot of people struggling with them.  They can serve an important purpose.  But that’s not the same thing as neurology, which is how the tissue of the body functions, actually DOES things at the cell level.

These syndromes can be triggered by drug episodes (legal or illegal) and by viral infections of the brain, which we begin to recognize are more common than we previously thought.  The brain had been thought to be protected by blood barriers but now we locate slippery little by-paths.

One of the major changes in the way we think about a person is in terms of identity, which was once seen as a steady state, a box with labels or a sculptured construct that stays the same through life.  It’s YOU and others recognize it that way, though each relationship is a little different. 

Now the idea that seems to fit the best is that a person is an interacting set of processes that is assembled from the unconsciousness of sleep into the consciousness of waking, subtly new every time because the work of sleep does memory sorting and makes new connections.  The “connectome” is the word for the networking (internal internet) of signals shuttling around, ESPECIALLY IN THE OLD PARTS OF THE BRAIN.  You might not be conscious of all the commotion, but it can be detected with special machines like the fMRI.  Even when asleep, the brain is still busy keeping heart, lungs, kidneys and so on operating or you won’t wake up.  The brain’s main work is NOT thinking, but rather the maintenance of homeostasis in the body for the purpose of survival.  

Concurrent with this paradigm shift from box to something more like music, is that there is no reality.  NO REALITY.  All the aspects of the world that impact our skins and organs are things like electromagnetic light waves or sound vibrations — so you’re right to suspect all the waves we’re producing as well as waves from the sun and the cosmos, but that’s not what I mean.  I mean that the brain does not receive faces or words or tunes — it composes them from whatever the nerves attached to sensory receivers produce in the way of code.  Not everyone has the same sort of receivers.  More than that, much of the “wet ware” in the brain will interpret what it receives in possibly inaccurate ways.  It can only work with the categories it already has, until something happens to create a new category.  

There is a LOT to read about neurological research and I think it is far more helpful than “shrink advice”.  A good shrink is more than a diagnostician, but also a companion and support as the search goes on.  (Everyone’s search always goes on.)  A psychiatrist can handle drugs because of also earning MD credentials, but a clinical psychologist might be warmer because of NOT earning MD credentials, which encourage a cold objective approach.

As I say, I’m no medical or psychological expert, but my opinion is that when your car rolled, you got a significant head blow and should be checked for clots, bleeds, and tearing.  It would take very little damage to create ODD if it were in the right place.  Look for people who know about “closed skull trauma,” meaning that the damage doesn’t include cracks in your skull but rather damage in the soft tissue.  Go to the nearest university medical school and ask them to find you the closest neurology research lab.  

There’s a ton of things to read in the research.  Do not trust Wikipedia, but google can be very helpful if you’re looking for definitions or the work of someone like Joseph LeDoux.  In fact, he’s on YouTube, giving lectures.  I sometimes have to watch them three times to “get it” or there is sometimes a transcription feature with the vid.

Your advice to turn off the television and limit the radio is probably wise even for someone who has no apparent problem.  Television is jammed with plots meant to be sensational, frightening, and addictive.  And that’s just the news!  (Jokes.)

If you give me an email address, I can communicate more privately.

WEIRDING OUT

This morning I woke in a strange amber smoke world, a little nacreous, with an acrid stifling and alarming reek.  I would be totally weirded out if it hadn’t been predicted by the weather forecast last night.  It’s thinning now (9AM) and is supposed to be clear and windy by afternoon.  I don’t know where the fire is, but smoke is not unprecedented in August on the Montana prairie.  Usually it’s from the far north, where there are no settlements, no reason to stop the fire from consuming boreal forest.  Snow will put it out soon enough.

I would not be as weirded except that my late movie last night was “Under the Skin.”  It’s pure sci-fi in the way that I’ve only found in writing before.  That is, the narrative is metaphoric and leaves reality, but even the metaphor is not easy to interpret.  My copy of the DVD was way too dark, so I couldn’t really tell what was happening.  Luckily, YouTube has so many clips and spoiler-analyses that I slowly realized what was going on, what I had not-seen.

An alien is played by Scarlett Johanson, casting that would pull in unsuspecting people who didn’t know this wasn’t a cop show, maybe from Iceland — always a little inscrutable with hard bare scenery, very beautiful but abstract.  (“Lava Field”, a series, is what I mean.)  In the back of a van she undresses a body that looks like her, and puts on the clothes herself.  She sees an ant on the body and looks at it closely.  It looks back.

As the narrative goes along, she is plainly picking up men who won’t be missed and now the strangeness really begins:  she lures them into some dark liquid where everything but their skin dissolves.  The effect is totally convincing.  Eventually she lures a rough logger man who manages to seize her and begin to rape her, but now it’s HER skin that comes off.  In pieces.  Inside is an ebony transfiguration, hairless but whole and beautiful as a pure sculpture.  The man is horrified and sets her on fire.

So it’s about identity, the sexual aspect.  How we want to seize each other, sometimes losing ourselves and sometimes destroying what surprises us, frightening us with difference, like a trick who doesn’t expect a trannie and has such an emotional explosion of horror that he kills.  What if the man who finally grabbed this creature were an artist who could recognize and honor this unique form?  Who is the man on the motorcycle who shadows this “woman” as she goes through the streets in a van?  A pimp?  Some kind of handler.

Not everyone has a taste for this sort of film and reflection, but I’ve been surprised how often young people, particularly those with atypical lives and maybe even those who’ve done a bit of luring and exploiting themselves, can really get off on what it means and whether it works.  It’s just abstract enough to see the reality of it, but also to pull out the pattern.  

Before the vid games that so absorb adolescents with their possibility, the readers of sci-fi often began to explore the genre at about junior high.  (I did.)  Often a chord is struck that is strongest for the loner, the exceptional one.  Darrell Kipp used to say that the book most accurately describing what it was like to be a Native American was Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”  But Heinlein was also the author of “The Red Planet Mars” which is clearly a prototype for “Star Wars” so near-universally beloved by everyone.

Obviously, the transformation of adolescence when sex is added to identity, is something like being dissolved internally, only one’s appearance seeming the same.  Almost.  Distorted.  Approaching others and hoping for intimate understanding can result in one’s assumptions dissolving, revealing someone unrecognizable: oneself.  That can be horrifying.

This film was adapted — more like “distilled” — from a book by the same name, written by Michel Faber.  The first chapter of the book is at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/may/02/firstchapters.reviews  Faber was born Dutch, grew up in Australia, and as an adult has lived in Scotland.  All three countries claim him, though the expected characteristics of each nation’s people are quite different.  He says he’s simply “European.”  

This specific novel (his first among many) is based on the Scots highlands — not QUITE Iceland.  He’s worked as a nurse and has a vivid sense of embodiment, but a tough one with a strong spine of social justice.  Traveling with Médicins Sans Frontiéres, he confronted the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Ukraine in 2004.  The intended anthology of writers facing tough subjects was abandoned by the publisher.  (Freaked?  Politically frightened?)  But Faber’s article, entitled “Heart of Darkness” was published in the English Sunday Times.  “Bye Bye, Natalia”, a fiction version, was published in Granta.

The same material in different media can be quite different, as different as the same events seen through the eyes of two different people, and maybe that’s what Faber is after.  In his book the Alien examines her body in private ways and reflects on the way humans treat life forms around them, like the sheep on the Highlands.  The film is much simplified and the Alien says nothing except to check out the male prospects for digestion.  We simply see what she sees.  To her, sheep are not edible — the meat is human.  The result of image rather than word is much more immediate, colder, the intense feelings are in the viewer instead of analyzed on a page.

And yet there is so much to think about, and — ideally — to share with others who are interested in analysis and the political horrification that can often get criticism past the defenses of the media-owners.  This IS a polemic, meant to open the viewers’ eyes.  One can approach these images through the sensibility of the Alien or (weakly) through the horror of the stunned victims.  Many critics say the hardest episode to watch is the one where a mother drowns while her child bawls on the rocks of the shore, a child simply ignored by the aliens.  Not big enough to eat.  Too human to touch alien sensibilities.

The Alien could not do this job if she were empathic, able to feel what others are feeling.  It is torture to really share the inner world of some people, but empathy is insidious, it creeps into a person quietly through the eyes, until one is “seeing” almost against one’s will.  A photograph of a little boy: drowned, stunned — and we embrace him, even though he is a victim of human hatred and our own unseeing.  It’s not surprising that Scarlett’s usual fans quickly dropped this film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyW01TOyEKI is the link for “Under the Skin” Explained.   I recommend it.  It was cheating to go here instead of just reacting, but my version was so dark (literally) I felt justified.  Anyway, this film is dense enough that it will reward and support many interpretations.  Try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izfCswgEnxs  

At the end the flaming body of the skinned alien runs through a snowy forest.  The image is a metaphor, but one deep in the instinctual life of humans.  With relief I hear the wind begin to rise outside though it is fanning flames somewhere.

BLACK BOX OF DESTRUCTION

I reflected a bit before putting this on prairiemary.  I have other places to post that are a little more private.  But I decided that holding back just increases the likelihood of skewing what people think.  If there is any subject more emotionally juicy than grizzlies, it's gays or terrorists.  A gay terrorist is going to send some people into a tizzy.  But this story is only endlessly sad.  It's not really about either gay or terrorism at its heart.  It's about identity.

Omar Mateen

This selfie was taken in the Pulse men’s room.  Mateen evidently bought the shirt in a novelty shop.  There were other shirts with NYPD logos in other selfies.

“We assumed from minute one that this was a closet case of mental mumbojumbo who was probably having sex with as many men as he could tap.”

You were right. I thought the same thing, except when the media said he had been employed as a guard at a juvenile detention center I figured the sex was with boys, non-voluntary, and that it was violent, if not deadly.  (His official job record as published did not list the juvvie job.)

Also Omar Mateen.

I figured that the “mental mumbojumbo” was dementia by definition but that the “black box” of dementia is a lazy label for the complexity of the brain against itself, usually limbic craving and addiction pitched against the pre-frontal cortex rational and ethical rules. Irreconcilability. Irresolvability. Both mechanical and emotional. In this case it appears that the inner war — which goes on in everyone but usually not so intense and therefore can pass as sanity — had reached such a catastrophic pitch that it had burst the box.

Seddique Mir Mateen, Omar's father.

He could not please his rigid father nor could he turn on his father in order to be himself. Some would shrug and walk off. Omar Mateen couldn’t do that. I think because he LOVED his father and was driven to please him, but he also loved men, which would make his father despise him. I wonder how much abuse he took as a child, maybe from his father; how much did his father protect him from other abusers?

When the culture formed by men who claimed their identities as atypical and man-desiring in San Francisco — a culture that only lasted as a developing whole for a decade or so — was dispersed and destroyed by AIDS rather than a gunman, it had begun to develop “play rooms” that were safety valves for men like Mateen. They could use the psychological therapies of the time, “acting out” rather than discussing analytically. They kept the pressure down. Scary stuff sometimes, even to this old lady sitting out on the high prairie reading books. Out here it gets acted out with massive animals. (“Brokeback Mountain” is nothing. What about rodeo? Consult “When the Legends Die” in which rage gets loose. If you don’t read, rent the film.)

The hero loses because he cannot tame his rage.

I’m saying this is not just issues patterned by how a culture prescribes gender roles, but deep mammal tissue forces — as much in bulls and bears as in humans, except that bulls and bears don’t have pre-frontal cortexes, so the rage and frustration is frank, only slowed by conditioning or fear of a greater power. I think Mateen was at the Pulse this last time as much to destroy himself as to destroy others. He saw life as a conflict and cops as a greater power that he could not claim.  But, you know, if you can't be the president, you can be the guy who killed the president.

Much more information will come out. Mateen had evidently been active online and actually in the Pulse specifically and repeatedly, sometimes interacting and sometimes sitting in the corner glowering. No one has copped to actually having sex with him, mostly because he was creepy with his politics and the weirdness of being a loser who demanded that he be seen as a winner, but on the side of Darth Vader. I think a Freudian who got him on a couch (impossible) would soon be worried by demands for love and then threats on his life, alternating or mixed.

I’m grateful that the astute customers of the Pulse and even of the online dating scene are clear-eyed in evaluating a tortured soul and they are willing to talk about it. Denial and demonizing only increase the pressure in the black boxes of others out there.

I'd love to hear the Canadian writing team responsible for "Flashpoint" discuss this whole incident.

IMPERMEABLE MINDS

Oh, yes, we say.  We’re fact-based, we obey science, we’re not sentimental.  Then we prove otherwise.  These are some of the scientific findings we ignore -- unconsciously.

Science says that consciousness is not the base of the human thought pyramid, that encompasses everything else.  It is the tip of the pyramid, a little instrument added on when everything else works right.  You are not “you” because of your thoughts, you are you because your body is you and all the things it does — pump blood, digest food, excrete, listen, taste, hurt, itch, move arms and legs, bend over — and all the autonomic nervous system reports about unconscious homeostasis (glucose level, breathing speed, heart beat, salt level, ph score) — THOSE are you.  Your introspective investigation of what you “think” is only a little hat on all the rest of the stuff.  “Think” comes last, not first.

No matter how much you agree with this, as soon as five minutes have passed, you will forget all this and go right on thinking that consciousness in identity, that consciousness should be limited to the rational, and that the rational has nothing to do with feelings.  Curse you!  It’s killing you!

Next denial:  You are NOT a unified, solid, unchanging identity.  You are a process, different from one moment to the next, not entirely under control, capable of being half a dozen “people” at once and neither virtuous nor evil but just THERE, a dance, a song, responding to everything.  Because that’s the secret to survival.

When your body wakes up in the morning (thanks to the autonomic functions that kept it alive all night) it assembles you, bit by bit.  First, your hearing comes back.  Then the other senses.  Then your memory gathers up the time before you went to sleep, though now it has been much sorted while you were asleep.  If you were a little bit awake, you might have relived some of the sorting in dreams.

Your ability to move comes back.  It was shut down while you were asleep to keep you from wandering around with no consciousness.  If you become conscious before this mechanism is off, you will not be able to move and it’s terrifying.  There may be a period of waking motionless wandering, mental drifting around without focus.  This is a nice buffer.  If you are awakened abruptly with no interval, it’s painful and dislocating.

Sometimes people say, “You’ve changed.”  Sometimes they say, “Oh, you’re just the same.”  Neither is true.  When a mass murderer is found and locked up, people say,  “Oh, he always seemed quite normal.  I never saw signs of anything bad.”  As though they knew what those signs were.  They were looking for excuses to reject the person, to find him or her lacking — not trying to get an empathic feel for how this person was in the world.  Anyway, they probably never saw the murderer at the time the lever was thrown that activated the neural connections for fear/hatred/panic/unreality/
flashback  or whatever was the tipping point that set off the tragedy.

It often seems to me that the “depression” everyone talks about and claims to be plagued by — so that they say, “Oh, I don’t follow social issues.  They’re so depressing.” — is not about some sad sympathy for the suffering, but denied and converted rage against them: the people who suffer.  “How dare they exist in a perfectly nice world where I’m happy?  What do you expect me to do?  Give up something that makes me feel good, that proves I’m valuable and cherished?”    A call to action makes them even more angry.  

Freud taught us that our parents and other family made us who we are, both our organic bodies and our mental corridors. That’s true, but I find it also helpful to look at the great cultural thought streams that carry assumptions down through the generations and across continents.  They are not inheritably genetic — they are mimetic and something else contagious and unconscious.  Some are possibly part of the substructure we carry that was created by our evolutionary ancestors: the idea that anyone different is a danger and should be destroyed.  The notion that repetition is a good thing and change is bad.

We have the idea that parents meet, fall in love, marry (which is a legal obligation and an economic arrangement), and assume the care of whatever children they produce so that they turn out well.  I will possibly exaggerate by saying this is not always true.  Parents meet, consider whether this partner is the best they can do, make compromises, meet circumstances that they cannot possibly cope with unless they have help which is not forthcoming, decide to abandon the partner, have children because to NOT have children one must actively resist, and take care of them only enough to avoid social punishment which doesn’t usually start until school years reveal a damaged kid.  If then.  If there is a stable community.  A great many people are now living in surging masses of deprivation that systematically kills many of them.  They don’t just evaporate, but come to live in our communities where they might be integrated or might be stigmatized or criminalized.

We are now accustomed to seeing photos of children born with no brain (results of an originally African mosquito-carried virus in South America) and thinking that it is an atrocity, but not OUR atrocity.  Nothing to do with us.  Nothing to do with nations.  Or the global economy.  Until one studies carefully how the mosquitoes got there and why this new infection is so macabre.

Maybe the most troublesome thing we have learned from science but totally misunderstood is what genes do.  Inheritance, yes. (“You’re just like your father,” my mother declared when she was mad at me.)  But inheriting WHAT?   All you can inherit are MOLECULES.  There is no gene with little eyes or toes inscribed on it.  There are only MOLECULES that interact.  And not one-on-one.  It takes 200 — 200 — of these gene-produced interacting molecules to determine human height.  That’s without factoring in nutrition and exercise, let alone something like the lead in gasoline and paint.  Genetics are an interaction, both among the genes and against the outside world.  The same gene under different circumstances will produced different results.

A related problem is that every time the scientists isolate ONE of the POSSIBLE precursors or enablers of something sensational like an adult desire for sex with children (a missing molecule can be just as powerful as an extra one or a “bent” one), it is translated by the media into a reliable sign of an actual and inevitable action by a person with an irresistible compulsion.  It’s witch-hunting that no good scientist would endorse.  But the media in our time have become devouring monsters avid to promote half-truths and titillating speculation about the neighbors, all the time ignoring something like “normal” beating of progeny as “discipline.”  Media loves stories about people executed though innocent (proven later) thus indicting authorities and proving that life is evil, as though they themselves are redeemed by their cynicism and pure motives, like the pursuit of truth.   They ignore all the things I’m talking about here.

(Sorry.  The image feature wouldn't work except for the first one.)

LITURGY: BINDING TOGETHER

Chicago Cathedral of the Russian Church Abroad

I spent decades reflecting on liturgies -- not just Christian worship structures, but religious or spiritual protocols from everything from African tribal rites to New Guinea ceremonies  to Blackfeet Bundle Openings.  I was raised Presbyterian and grew up in the neighborhood church where the minister was very preoccupied with conformity, texts, and propriety -- all of them aimed at prestige.  This turned me away.  In my undergrad years at Northwestern (’57 - ’61), I took courses in religion.  (My major was supposed to be speech education, but was, in fact, Method acting.)

When I attended the Pacific Northwest UU Leadership School in 1975, I had my first experience with designing experimental non-conforming liturgies based on human experience (blind-folded silence, feeding each other, excellent music, memory of one’s own turning points, a long line holding hands in the dark while crossing a broad lawn to the sound of a nearby ocean).  I was smitten.  

Blackfeet Reservation

By that time I had a decade of experience on the Blackfeet reservation next to Glacier National Park where I had participated in ceremonies.  I signed up for an MDiv in Chicago and an MA in Religious Studies from the U of Chicago and achieved both, though I was a little exotic from their point of view.  I turned forty during that time.

In congregations I found I could design services that made people react.  They said they were feeling something spiritual.  Sometimes they wept, not necessarily from sadness.  Nothing to do with dogma or even history, except their own personal story which I didn’t always know.  What WAS that?  How did I figure out what to do?  I’ve worked on those questions ever since.  I’ve come to believe it wasn’t liturgy, though that was one pathway.  It was something I might call Deep Experience, a human response to what recent neurological research requires me to call a “connectome.”

Human Fetus at 8 weeks

A person’s identity is first created in the womb by the interaction of molecules that build a certain body with certain capacities.  After birth, the baby continues to develop those capacities at a very basic level, since the first years of a human are really a continuation of gestation, the finishing process that in other animals is mostly over at birth.

This certain body/person will become an identity according to the influence of the environment which includes culture and family.  At about age 3 the dawning person will continue to grow with a complete but not entirely developed brain, which is an aggregate of evolved parts connected by nerve fibers --the connectome -- managed by the brain.  Part of this guidance and experiencing system is fluid, carrying molecules that also supply information and modulation.  Throughout the adrenarche --ages 6 or 7 through maybe 10 -- the person grows into his or her self, guided by the adrenal glands.  The issue seems to be discovering what arouses that person.

At the end of adrenarche, adrenals kick off adolescence.  Adolescence is too powerful for a young child.  Physically they can be torn apart by sex, as well as emotionally.  Their guidance system will not be able to cope with their urges.  They will be presented with dilemmas that cannot be resolved and therefore are stored and ignored.  Later these deadlocks make trouble.

Through adolescence the person develops control and ability until the culture declares it  is adult, but the brain goes on developing until maybe halfway through the twenties, which is when the abstract and insightful meta-thinking are complete.  AT EVERY STAGE it is possible to have Deep Experience, a moment of spiritual intensity and meaning.  I would propose that even an infant can feel it and certainly from adrenarche on, the capacity is present.  I remember.

But Deep Experience can be blocked, forced by drugs or events, or stuck in terms of meaning so that it stops being a process and starts being a dogma or superstition.  The “connectome” can forget how and what it connected.  The memory of a crucial piece might be lost or “mislabeled” or suppressed or those irresolvables from childhood may come back to interfere.

I would not be able to think about this clearly except for the new research on neurology and “trace-based” neuropaleontology, pre-verbal.  I need to keep repeating this stuff to understand it better.  Anyway, the research is moving quickly.

Because “liturgy” as defined in our culture is institutionally generated and owned, and is about words, often specifically dictated repetition, combined with certain gestures and material culture, it can be an instrument of outside control.   I mean outside the person.  It works sometimes for some people.  It’s one path.

I won't sell this classic book.

I’m selling my books about liturgy.  Inquire on email if interested.  prairiem at 3rivers.net.  Liturgy wasn’t what I was after.  They aren’t out-dated or mushy popular books.  Some are theory.  I’ll keep a few. They are still perfectly useful for those who respond to liturgy.  I recommend to those folks something like the books on David Montgomery’s website:  http://cardiphonia.org/tag/david-montgomery/  I still enjoy reading them, but they are institutional and I’ve discovered that there is no institution that suits me.  Not even the UUA in its present incarnation. 

Be warned:  Montgomery knows that shock liturgy like this Pussy Riot intervention on You Tube is valid, meant to revive some of the original meaning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN5inCayfnM&app=desktop.  Consider that “Game of Thrones” could be seen as really a reiteration of the Bible.  But liturgies are words, experiences are feelings, often wordless.   That may or may not coincide with liturgy.

Finding the human primal feelings that unite us is -- I strongly believe --  the best way to approach a variety of conflicting but coinciding theologies.  I came to this through “Contructing Local Theologies” by Father Robert J. Schreiter, CPPS.  The book is for sale on Amazon for $0.23.  I would not sell you my copy for $230, but if I did, I would buy as many $0.23 copies as I could and hand them out for free.  This is the way to reconciliation, not just among the many kinds of Christians but among cultures.  To hear him speak go to:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBiUMB74FAs  He hasn’t lost his touch.  He knows deep experience and speaks from it without dogma.  The ideas in the book derive from missionaries trying to explain communion to people who have neither bread nor grain, like Inuit.

Father Robert J. Schreiter, CPPS

These kinds of ideas -- some scientific, some historical, some rude and shocking -- are all pathways to deep meaning, which is different for each person according to their original germ plasm, life experiences, and environment.  It doesn’t have to be done alone.  It doesn’t have to be recognized as "religious".

HOW DOES AN ATHEIST EXPLAIN DEATH TO A CHILD

This is in response to Cormac James on Aeon, who worries about what to tell his five year old son about death because Cormac is an atheist.  Big deal.  What’s God got to do with it?  There’s a particular irony in this man being named “Cormac,” a writer whose accounts of evil, suffering and death has hypnotised the whole field of Western literature profs.

Cormac says “Sigmund Freud’s belief that ‘in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality’”.  I think not.  I think everyone is convinced of their own consciousness being THEM and that their consciousness can escape their bodies and endure somehow out there in some form with no body.  But if all consciousness AND unconsciousness has left the body forever, that’s the definition of death.  That’s when someone can note the “time of death,” certify a “cause of death,” and dispose of the body since there’s no more use for it.

The idea of God is really an identity with no body -- nobody, nobadaddy.  Indefinable.  Can’t kill it because there’s nothing. It’s an idea, one that transforms and disappears.

The best lesson -- and a five year old should by now have had a pet that died -- is simple before-and-after.  Bob’s first wife was working in a nursing home that cared for an old woman who was only living because a machine breathed for her.  This caretaker was not “churchy” but she protested to the head nurse that she thought it was cruel and simply making money for the institution.  The old woman didn’t even have any living family.  The head nurse said,  “Okay.  Turn the respirator off.”

“I don’t have the authority,” said the hapless CNA.  

“I give you the authority.  YOU turn the machine off or you’re fired.”

Hapless needed the job.  She turned off the respirator.  The old woman died in a moment or two.  Hapless felt very strange and she never forgot.  Figuring out death is only a task for the living.  

It’s the EXPERIENCE that can only be felt.  The brain-dead are body-dead, identity-dead, GONE.  It is the living who know it and ONLY the living.  Everyone knew that once in the days when there was chicken for dinner on the farm and someone went out and killed it.  You can’t eat it alive.  Have you no culture?

On my cat post a few days ago I talked about reducing the size of a kitten litter by “human intervention.”  I drowned the extras.  (Cat litters can go as high as 13, though it is “normal” for there to be three or four.)  Three.  I cannot catch this feral female, Patches.  If I could, I would get her spayed -- if I had money or could find help.  Men here have offered to shoot her, but it's against the law to shoot in town.  

There are pop-up cat spay clinics on the rez, but not advertised off it.  If I COULD catch her and her kittens, I could take them to the nearest humane society (thirty mile drive), where they would be killed by plunging a needle into their hearts, because they are untameable and because all the kittens on the planet are born about the same time in a great wave of synchronicity.  Many of them will die soon, because this is the crushing wheel of life that creates thousands of beetles or whatever, and then kills most of them.  Kill death by reducing fertility.  Predators have to eat, too.  There are no vegetarian predators.

I asked the veterinarian for cat tranquilizers so I could catch them.  He was shocked and horrified.  “Just stop FEEDING them,” he said.  They’d find a way to eat, but it wouldn’t be as nice.  He charges several hundred dollars to kill a cat.

My bathroom sink is rather splendid.  I knew within an hour when the kittens were born.  Patches came for breakfast much thinner. I carried them gently, used warm water and it took only a minute or so.  It was not that different from a womb.  I wept.  I did something I can’t call prayer because who would I pray to?  Call it mindfulness.  Call it poetry.  

Then I took the little bodies out to the trash roll-off.  “Been gopher huntin’?” asked the old rancher unloading his pickup.  

“Had to drown some kittens and feelin’ bad about it,” I told him.

His wife said,  “A terrible job, but sometimes it has to be done.”  

What’s so privileged about kittens that it’s okay to kill gophers but not kittens?  Kittens are domesticated, meaning if they are tamed (ie: form a bond with a human, like the fox in “The Little Prince”) they are different, in a different category.  We’ve attached, or at least find them useful.  Owned so we protect them.  Give them individual names.  We tamed a gopher once.  It drowned by jumping into the toilet when someone left the lid up.

Why does the United States kill five-year-olds, not entirely by accident?  Sometimes with malice and enjoyment.  So long as they’re not OUR children.  Only Other.  Only Feral.  Meaning, no identity, no attachment, no duty to protect, no value.  Unless there’s a use for them, which use might not be sitting at a kitchen table eating Cheerios, without names.

And why does Cormac worry about what HIS son thinks when feral children have already found out about dead things, sometimes human -- call CSI.  The domestic children get up in the night and search the Internet to look for pictures of death, torture, suffering, to understand what it’s about that it’s so secret, a big door on the front of the subject marked “GOD,” who is purported to be unkillable, at least if you accept the proper definition.  Otherwise you’ll notice that God is dead.  ALL the gods are dead.  They’ve lost their identities except for poetry.  (Actually, by age five most American kids have seen a LOT of death portrayed, heard a lot about it.)

My mother's mother in the center,

Her sisters second in from each end.

My mother took the photo.

When my mother was dying, she asked me what I thought the “other side” would be like.  I said,  “It will be like where ever you were before you were born.”  She pondered that as a good Presbyterian, then moved over to science.  “I hope the next planet will be as much fun as this one!” she said cheerfully.  She was acting.  For our sake.  Her cousin knew.  “What were her last words?” she asked.  But can you count the muttering of a comatose person without their dentures?  I told her the “next planet” thing.

My mother’s identity was not lost.  Neither was her mother’s nor her grandmother’s.  Her identity was genetically and culturally blended from those of the people who raised her.  She was lucky.  Neither catastrophe nor drugs tore those identities out of her.  Some  people have to leave a hole in that place or invent a fiction or just not think about it or -- the worst, to regret the identities that created their own.  I knew that early and therefore refused to have children.

It didn’t do any good.  There are still people whose identities are in part derived from mine: students, readers, people I so dearly loved and tried to be like even if it meant damage or suffering.  Still, there a little part of me that remains feral.  I think it came from my mother.  Or maybe from books.  It makes me risk -- like telling you this.  I can already feel the hands slipping over my mouth.

"Hop"

My mother used to say, “All cats are gray in the dark.”  I would agree.  Except that sometimes a little gray half-kinkajou invades us despite resistance and now sleeps behind my knees. I’ve finally decided Hop is NOT related to any of these yard ferals -- in fact he’s not feral, just unfed.  Sometimes some cat like that will come busting onto the scene and his identity will be so loud, messy, stinking, and otherwise vivid that you end up tolerating the beast -- even though it just flipped my computer mouse on its back for the third time.  Can I help it if he gets comfort against my throat?  Makes it vibrate with his purring?  His song.

Double in size and still growing.

Very messy eater.