ANOTHER BIG SHIFT -- THIS ONE AN INSIDE JOB

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

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

The First Narcissus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT'S QUEER THAT YOU'RE SO NORMAL -- OR . . .

Something like the man in the Moliere play who was shocked but pleased to discover that he was speaking “prose” without even knowing it or trying to do it, I discover that I’ve been exploring “queer theory” at least part of the time.  Not just peculiar or odd, but a category invented fairly recently so as to think about the atypical.  Formally defined.  Mostly sexual.

“Queer focuses on "mismatches" between sex, gender and desire. Queer has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, intersex (physically both sexes), gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. [I notice pedophilia is not mentioned, though in other queer places there are discussions of paraphilias, like glove fetishes. Silence means a third-rail: touch it and you're dead.]

“Gay was mobilized as a specifically political counter to that binaried and hierarchised sexual categorization which classifies homosexuality as a deviation from a privileged and naturalized heterosexuality. Queer marks both a continuity and a break with previous gay liberationist and lesbian feminist models.”

“Queer theorists challenged the validity and consistency of heteronormative discourse, and focused to a large degree on non-heteronormative sexualities and sexual practices.”  And NOT hierarchical.

Heteronormative, but maybe 12% or so are not.  We just didn't know until DNA.

So most of this thought is about escaping the social categories of male over here and female over there and perverse in the middle.  One is supposed to pair off (not triple off) with the opposite sex wherein the man is two inches taller, two years older, and has two more degrees than the woman.  It’s a given that gender identity is more than coitus in the interest of fertility, though most non-thinkers don’t seem to figure that out.  They are so hypnotized by what goes where that they can’t think of any other issues.  Like desire in all its colors and all its specificity.

Mary Strachan and Bob Scriver,  1962

So let me throw in a few loops of the rope:  I fell madly in love with a man twice my age or almost.  I was 21 and he was 47.  Was it a kind of late onset pedophilia?  Which one was the trophy?  Or was he a daddy, though I sometimes bathed him like a child?

Desire was enough for a decade, but it was not the only boundary crossing.  We were differently educated -- not the subject, the "Method" -- literally.  We were in a reservation world where things were dominated by the two races and their uncomfortable mixes.  Sex was in there someplace.  He became highly successful, praised, courted, and Gulliver-style confined by a host of small obligations and deadlines.  All the while he gave me protection, guidance, instruction and validation that made me stronger and freer, more desirous of freedom.  We were doomed.  Queer?

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. 'Queer' then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.”   WHAT normative?  On a rez in the Sixties?  The norm was a choice between hunkering down and uproar.  And suddenly -- fame -- there was a huge discrepancy in economic viability:  he could buy a ranch.  I barely had enough for gas to drive back to my mother’s house in Portland.  I hocked my engagement ring, the one my mother-in-law obsessed about for fear the diamond would get lost out of it.  That upset him, but he wrote the letter of recommendation that got me the animal control job.

The next non-normative was that we remained attached, much to the disgust of the fourth wife.  He had had female intimates before me which conventionally should have ended with marriage, but they didn’t.  So that was his norm.  His first wife followed the conventional pattern -- animosity and remarriage.  His second wife had broken off finally, but her sister and brother were more bonded to him than ever.  Atypical.  The rez people observed this.  Whites said, “These artist people have their own rules.”  Indians said, “All white people are crazy.”  My family knew nothing about it -- a good thing.

Though we were differently educated, both of us were in the arts:  Bob, music; myself, theatre.  That helped give us a little extra room.  I was taking OTC pills called “Scope” as though they were aspirin.  Probably most of the effect was placebo, but when I googled them just now, the pills turned out to be scopolamine, a member of the same family as powerful mushrooms.  Maybe I could have gotten into more serious drugs except that real wickedness always eludes me.  THAT's queer.  Near the end I took Bob’s Nembutal one night which scared everyone and the doc gave me Benzodiazipam (Valium) which just put me to sleep -- very nice.  That was the extent of my drug experiments in a time when many around me were hooked.  (Oh, I forgot.  When I was supposed to be losing weight, the doc gave me speed.  I never renewed the prescription.  I was speedy enough already.)

I wrote lists of what I took to be facts, using green ink and block printing in spiral notebooks.  Green ink is supposed to be a sign of something.  I suppose block printing is as well.  Then I went back through the list and challenged each assertion by flipping it over.    Edifying.  Painful.  An auto-therapy.

Recently we’ve learned about epigenomics, environmental impacts, the constant evolving of the brain’s structures, and mosaic genetics, which means that not all the cells in one body have the same DNA.  There may be bits of an infant that was carried years earlier, there may be bits of a twin that never developed, and some might have come through something like transfusions.  Many of us are chimeras and never suspected it.  Might have felt it.

Kylo-Patrick R. Hart

I’ve just been quoted by a cultural critic:  Kylo-Patrick R. Hart wrote “Queer Males in Contemporary Cinema: Becoming Visible.”   He is chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at Texas Christian University. This book follows two streams: explicitly gay movies and movies that are moving and tender, but the gay subtext is unstated.  If you aren’t looking for it, you might not know it’s there, but you may feel it and respond to it, subliminally.  (Oh, there’s another one of those words!  Don't we EVER know what we're doing?)

Troy Garity and Lee Pace

Hart quoted a review I wrote of “Soldier’s Girl,” posted Sept. 19, 2011.  I like what I wrote well enough to quote it a bit:

“Gender binaries have become so troublesome that social philosophers have begun to reflect on them.  When I say “trouble,” I mean murder.  People are murdered because they don’t fit our notions of gender binaries.  I’m pondering “Soldier’s Girl,” which is a movie version of a real event in which a soldier was bludgeoned to death as he slept -- by his fellow soldier, his dorm mate.  The killer administered capital punishment for loving a person who crossed the binary division -- not just a cross dresser but a transsexual person in the process of going from male to female.  Post-surgery, the relationship would no longer have been 'homosexual.' ”

“Leggo words, assembled from particles, are unfortunate predeterminers.  “Homosexual” is as misleading as “atheist.”  Both are stuck together from pre-existing concepts and both over-control the discussions.  It is possible to be homosexual while being strongly “male” and possible to be deeply religious while not believing in God (theism).”  Morality should not be based on word particles.

This is what Hart quoted:   “Pole-in-the-hole is not all there is to sex.  REAL intercourse in the sense of physical intimacy is skin and brain: a million little physical, mental and emotional transactions of sensation that enmesh and bond and console.  Otherwise, it’s friction followed by a sneeze.”

The filmography in this book is very useful.  I’m adding some of it to my Netflix queue, but I’ve already seen a dozen of the 35 films, some of which are classic.  (“Red River,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “From Here to Eternity,” "Boys Don't Cry.")  We all love these boys -- you know the ones I mean.  Even the ones who aren't male.

John Wayne and young Montgomery Clift

Slightly older Montgomery Clift

James Dean

Hilary Swank

THE UNDER-METAPHORS

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

Darrell Kipp and Jesse DesRosier

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

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

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

Photo by Tony Bynum

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

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

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

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

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

An imagined creature

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

A technological image

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

An imagined sea creature

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

STOP!  You’re having a runaway!  

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

A real sea creature

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

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

WHORF IS BACK!

The seminary program I undertook 1978-82 was premised on a special status with the University of Chicago Divinity School which used a one year MA program in Religious Studies to separate the sheep from the goats.  On the one hand it was meant to locate Ph.D. candidates with brilliant promise and on the other hand the original charter of the school was meant to produce ministers.  As declared students for the UU ministry, we made the statistics look good and a few of us were brilliant enough to leap across into the straight Div School program.  When David Loehr was thrown out of M/L (mostly for defiance) he was taken in by the U of C Div School.  The Div School operated in large part as participants in the great research and theory juggernaut that is the larger university.  One passed two series of three courses each, one set of religious history and one set of religious thought, plus a series of three “free choice” classes.  An MA degree traditionally distinguishes itself from an MS by requiring that one learn a viable research foreign language, usually (in religion) French or German.  Maybe Hebrew or Greek, which are required subjects in a Lutheran seminary.

I knew this ahead of time and had already taken a year of French in Portland.  I did pass the exam.  But no other requirement made the M/L students so desperate and indignant as that requirement.  Even the ones who could NOT pass the Big Six essay exams courses, were more meek about those than having to learn a language.  (In fact, if one looked at all deserving, one’s exam paper disappeared into the hands of a forgiving nun who marked it rather differently than the profs concerned.  No such arrangement for the French exam.)  Students delayed, sent ringers to take their test for them, petitioned for different languages, and argued that since few UU’s are anything but English speakers and there is no significant body of scholarship about Unitarianism except John Godbey’s Transylvanian studies (insert jokes about vampires here -- actually today being able to speak the “original” vampire language might come in handy).  They insisted it was an act of imperialism for the Div School to continue to impose the requirement.  Etc.  So the French requirement was dropped, then the MA from the U of C was dropped, and then any major scholarship component left.  Now M/L is downtown in a glass office building in the Loop.  Terribly trendy and impressive.  I dread to find out what their GRE scores are.

But that’s all background -- though crucially relevant -- to what I want to say, which is to that due to the amazing brain research (not so much of it done at the U of C, I think) that recently provoked Obama into suggesting a brain research project on the model of the genome project, Whorf is back.  Not the Star Trek character (fond of him as I am).

No, I mean Benjamin Whorf, the anthropologist who proposed (along with others) that how our language is constructed is interwoven with how we see the world -- one informs the other.   Here he is:

Here’s your NYTimes quick version of what's going on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/opinion/what-our-brains-can-teach-us.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130223&_r=0

Here is a far more extended and clear version as explained by a beautiful professor.  http://www.edge.org/conversation/encapsulate-universes

This is an “Edge.org” talk so it’s not as short and smooth as a TED talk, but the content is crucially important to the modern world in which we are all voyagers among islands, each of which speaks a different language and lives in a different material culture.  We are beyond United Nations now, because nations are not necessarily a useful concept anymore -- so many of us are in diasporas largely defined by the languages we speak.  Each of those languages or concept systems is the equivalent to and the means of maintaining a unique religious point of view, whether or not it is embodied in an institution.   

The existence of these “encapsulated universes” suddenly came into focus for Whorf when he was working with Hopi and realized that they saw the universe as process, noting the difference by speaking in verb forms equivalent to English participles -- they did not speak of a chair but of “chairing” or at least “sitting”.  The great theological freedom of this is that when one says “Godding” one is not locked into the mistaken assumption that “A God” is an entity somewhere -- but rather God is a process.  One would learn to do “godding” rather than quarreling over the nature of “The God.”  Euro world-view and grammar is dominated by nouns, some would argue because it is a system based on the aggregation of objects.

Beyond that, a good communicator, educator or shrink MUST realize that each human person has constructed a world with a language from the materials of their own life.  The great mistake -- an Evil and Demonic mistake -- is using that realization to punish and convert people by forbidding them their own language, which is the same thing as forbidding them their own world.  In fact, that world is both their consciousness and their identity, so that the forced choice is to either become subversive or to destroy part of themselves.  (Mike Eigen, psychotherapist, was posting today about “the annihilated self.”)

Around here that happened in terms of Blackfeet falling into the hands of European missionaries.  Luckily, some individuals were able to navigate both worlds, even to create a new one that includes both (metis).  NA activists never quite realize that the new America imposed this world/language destruction on anyone not conforming to their goals -- whether Chinese, Ukrainian, or even Irish.  And the new Americans never quite realized that all those pluralities were quietly preserving and building back new versions of their old selves.  The first frontier churches were often formed around the imported language so that the preachers could speak in that familiar way.  The Hutterites still do that.  But often when the congregation has all learned to speak “American,” their world view remains what it was.  In Valier there are a lot of subconscious Belgians.

Conversely, denominations that seek to preserve themselves by identifying and exploiting a mainstream identity tend to slip into amorphous tolerance with no rallying flag.  They become political more than religious and fear to make trouble for fear of losing members.  If they are TOO tolerant of pluralism, people begin to press for pledges of allegiance and some folks will drift on out the other side of the category.  The more frightening the cosmic global world, the harder people will press for some solid point of reference and a language in which to express it.  It is not surprising that post-modern thought arose in French Algeria.

Maybe it’s more surprising that this category -- newly named “the Nones,” as distinguished by their assertion that their religious affiliation is “None” -- has formed in a time when institutions are being eroded by concepts like free-form individual “spirituality.”  IMHO, this has paradoxically formed from the spiritual side of science.  The right-wingers are right.  And they SHOULD be worried.  It’s as big a shift as from noun to verb.  Have you noticed how many nouns are used as verbs these days?  

I used to have a seminary classmate who often asked, “What does it mean?”  His two respected authorities were Paul Ricoeur and John Coltrane.  He did not enter the ministry.  What did he do with his formidable intelligence?  He sells wine.

THE STIGMA OF "BLOOD"

In private communication, a reader objects to me talking about “German blood.”  The reader was correct.  Never mind that the context was that I was making fun of my mother for calling my father a Teuton when she was angry with him.  The fact is that it’s impossible to have “German” blood because there was no Germany until a little over a century ago.  Anyway, blood “types”  A, B, AB and O, (which weren’t discovered until 1900)  have sub-sets but they have nothing to do with place or nationality.  My mother meant pedigree or national citizenship.  Way back in there was a little whiff of “Nazi.”

The sore spot my mother was hoping to hit was actually in my grandmother, who had enough German nationality in her background to be very nervous about being stigmatized as a hostile alien, the way Islamic people are today.  WWI was bad enough, but in WWII the nation had witnessed the Japanese being stripped of their lives and thrown into internment camps, too much like the fate of Jews in Germany to be comfortable.  Or moral.

The German nation, as a unified country for the first time, begins in 1871.  This is 21 years AFTER the major treaties with prairie tribes, assigning them reservations, were signed in the United States.  Before 1871 there was no Germany and therefore no Germans and therefore no German blood.   The idea of “Germania” as it is portrayed in Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” movie (loosely organized tribes) goes back to Julius Caesar.  I am almost accidentally learning a lot about all this by reading “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama.  I thought it was going to be about philosophy of place and it is, sort of, but it also explores a major north/south schism in Europe based on civilization versus wilderness -- or, as he styles it,  “masonry” vs. “vegetation.”   The constructed vs. the natural, interpreted as the sophisticated, educated, scientific versus the childish, earthy, mythic, primitive.  Which side you consider superior depends mostly on which side your ego dwells.  Rome (lingering on in England) or Germany (yearning for the Aryan paradise).

During WWII my brother-in-law saw some of the worst combat and was present at the liberation of the death camps.  He could not tolerate anything related to Germany, meaning to him Hitler.  In the Sixties a tourist family came through our Museum of Montana Wildlife on the Blackfeet Rez.  They were English-speaking with a German accent and we visited a bit.  (Bob had fought what he called “the Battle of Edmonton,” and had no particular feelings about “Germans.”)  After a while they were friendly enough to ask us why the Blackfeet were so cold to them.  They themselves had felt a great affinity, identifying Native Americans with the leafy and natural Germania tribes, a sort of Rousseaian ideal.  No one loves playing Indian more than Germans!  They were surprised to hear that many Blackfeet were, like Bob’s brother, veterans of WWII and therefore considered them enemies.   They had not known that the Blackfeet remembered enemies from centuries ago.  Though no doubt the Romans did, too.  And the tribes of Europe, the ones who eventually became Germany, remembered their rivalries, if not what they were about.

Lately videos about Mohammed have taunted the Islamic countries, who are lethally indignant and claim that all religion is sacred and must not be questioned or blasphemed against.  Then they go on to war sect against sect, north against south -- just the same as the Western world.  And in the Western world we claim we believe in free speech and yet people lose their jobs -- important people like the presidents of prestigious universities, because they took a “politically incorrect” position -- or so it seemed.  An English teacher was fired for using the word “niggardly” which means stingy, because it sounded like the forbidden “n” word. 

When my mother threw out “Teuton” (not German), she meant cold-blooded, technical, over-educated.  At that point she hadn’t gone back to school herself.  She returned to finish her junior and senior years when I started high school so she could put me through college.  But when I went to seminary decades later and paid my own way, she was incensed.  I was getting too big for my britches.  I was inviting trouble.  I didn’t tell her that most of the major theologians were Germans whose names started with B.  She was angry all over again when her good earnest Bible-based Presbyterianism didn’t match up with my high-flown Unitarian Universalist ideas.  I don’t know what she thought when she found my father’s carefully bound copy of his Master’s thesis:  it was about the price of potatoes.  Pretty organic.

These schisms and pre-judgings are insidious and come without being invited.  The north Blackfeet rez is prejudiced against the south Blackfeet rez and vice versa, but it is an old complaint and I can never get the straight of it.  I think it had to do with the Indian agents and the sequence of agencies as the reservation shrank.  It also seems to have something to do with the split between old-timey people and progressive people -- though that’s more of an east/west split -- mountains versus flatlands -- which also correlates with those who would like to subsistence hunt versus those willing to farm for profit.  If you don’t live here, you’ll never figure it out.  Cain and Abel are everywhere.

Back to blood.  There are two ways to overcome a two-split.  One is to emphasize the underlying unity of the issue -- after all, everyone has blood and the REAL dichotomy is not-enough-blood-to-sustain-life versus enough blood.  The other way to escape dichotomizing is to realize that there is a multiplicity.  Now we know that after you do the A, B, AB, and O sorting that everyone learned about because they were stamped on GI dogtags for the medic’s reference in battle, has had other variations added.  Rh factor was an early one.  At the level of organ transplants, the whole genome is necessary to get a good match and THAT proves every human being is unique.  The variations, which are tiny and influenced by another set of instructions in a kind of sleeve around the chromosomes called the epinome, are extremely small from one person to the next, but can have major consequences in terms of responses to environment and experience.

So what do we want?  Homogenized cultures where everyone is alike all over the world, or myriads of variations rich with the unexpected, the one-of-a-kind, the precious only?