MAPS DON'T HOLD STILL

The Town of Valier is having an open house on March 9 to discuss our sewer and lagoon system.  We seem to need to expand it all the time, though our population is shrinking.  No one has ever kept a map of where the sewer lines run, so the town workers never know quite what to expect when they dig a trench.  Now the state is imposing a law that the underground pipes of sewer and water must be mapped and recorded on a computer, rather than carried around in someone's head.  Already we've had to call previous town workers for advice on where and what to find.

We have no storm sewer system which is a problem when deep snow makes sudden floods, though the water is absorbed quickly.  The system works by gravity, which means there are areas that were once knolls so remain undeveloped because the effluent has to be pumped along by a "lift".  Water is pumped up to a high reservoir, a "water tower", which is tall enough to drive the water through the entire system.

This link is to a geologic map of the Valier quadrangle. Cut and paste doesn't do it justice.

http://mbmg.mtech.edu/pdf_100k/valier.pdf

My own house is old, built on the main road down from Cut Bank which became the main crossroad with Highway 44.  It is old enough that part of the line to the house is made of orangeberg, an augmented version of paper mache.  The drains in the house didn't work because the sanitary stack, which is a pipe that lets air into the system, wasn't working despite being cleared.  Turns out the bottom makes a sharp turn to join the main exit and it accumulates fluid, so doesn't let air in.  The remedy is a valve under my kitchen sink that lets air in but doesn't let smells out.  It's at the far end of the system, so when the toilet is flushed, the sink at the other side of the house hisses with intake.

This is one way to think about maps, practical, immediate, and human.  Historians were trying to understand another kind of map, an old one, a bit sketchy, made by an indigenous man named Old Swan.  The first problem was realizing that the Euros were used to making anything on paper from left to right  but this description of the Rockies went from top of the page to the bottom, on the "margin" usually left there.  One only had to rotate the paper or one's assumptions.  The second problem was that it was not emphasizing the peaks, the landmarks, but rather the valleys and waterways that gave access to the interiors of the cordillera. These were what the nomadic peoples were looking for because they held water, grass and shelter.  Maybe berry crops or good hunting.  People can draw maps that record completely different aspects.

I used to subscribe to a magazine that always put a map on the last page, as different and surprising a map as they could find.  One of my favorites was a map of all the dogs in the neighborhood, which reveals a problem when the thing mapped changes -- leaves, dies, has puppies, acquires a buddy.  We think of maps as lines, borders, boundaries, but they might be areas, extents, territories, like the "beat" of a cat or a cop.  This link shows the standard and persistent problem with that.

The change of sea level over the millennia has meant that coastal maps expand and contract, now hiding and now revealing, now settled and now inundated.  We're about to find out what that means to us as the map of Antarctica shows that continental ice is about to convert to worldwide flooding.  

A second worldwide map challenge has been the continents themselves moving on the backs of tectonic plates.  Maps of Gaea show how the present continents used to fit together with each other.  Their separations are radical.  At the same time the magnetic north has left the previous north pole and is drifting under Siberia.  We don't know why, but it screws up GPS.  

https://www.farandwide.com/s/what-maps-get-wrong-5ac03541daa64ecc?utm_campaign=mapswrong-4055ef0bff9547a2&utm_source=twi&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=662714

There might be a map over time -- one's lifeline --which might relate to development or moving or even educational realizations and accumulating knowledge so the map is getting more complex all the time -- or is it?  Might it show forgetting?  Yet schools tend to teach both time and space maps as though they were permanent, unchanging.  This interferes with the ideas surrounding evolution, particularly affecting the development of hominins.  Even after admitting change, we want it to be linear, not a lot of rough drafts and dead-end attempts that can only be found in fossils or genetic evidence.  The products of the genome is now in fragments, but the genome itself is cumulative and often records a timeline.

This is a map of part of a fly's brain.

What all this means is that when we think about human life, it is necessary to think in terms of PROCESS rather than examples, which is much more difficult.  Music made a good medium until computers and video showed how math and images can record systems, variations, and interactions.  Every human does this in both their brain and their body.  On anniversaries of major events like birth and death, we often feel them without consciously remembering the original moment.  Every human contains a family, stories, ideas about what counts.  And can project into the future what might happen, what we are trying to get to, what magnet draws us, what trauma holds us back.

WHO MUST WRITE?

Medium.com was supposed to encourage and support good writing; indeed, revelatory writing that opened doors to new worlds. But the gate swung to the same old world. Writing in plain sight on a website exists mostly for a “type” who have been raised entitled, praised, and accommodated. It is no surprise to them that the website offers “the kind of internet you want”, as opposed to what’s good for you, what would improve you, or some such nonsense. The idea is that you’re “unique” and that your circle of friends, your circle of interests, are what make you incredibly precious and that the whole locked-up and boundaried (if not fenced) little knot will keep you captive — safe. So you can be sold things. And the website will make money.

This is very boring to read. It’s a circle fuck in front of a mirror. We’re used to it. Great TV series material. People rarely realize that praise is a means of control.

So the inevitable backlash came from the inevitable people who have always made their bones (balls) off such circles, know it well, and want to escape it. The message was “please, don’t write unless you have do.”

What does that mean?

One obvious compulsion is the need to make money. A related need is to have status, power, impact in the world, but there are more ways to do this second thing than by just buying it. We’ve been fascinated by politicians buying the presidency. The ones who get caught (going to jail instead of higher office) don’t seem to find it possible to do, but the ones who do succeed — we suspect — are many. The transactions are secret. It’s like murders: murders that are solved, murders that are unsolved, and murders that are never detected. “What ever happened to that guy who used to sit at the end of the counter?” “Who?”

Or murder by category. Demonstration today.  Compare the statistics of the “aggregate” between races, genders, or income levels. Is there a Highway of Tears for educated white men who drive nice cars? Only if they drink. (Why do they drink?)

So writing has somehow been equated with publishing and therefore if writing is not published, it doesn’t exist. Writing that is not published is huge. Why not pretend to publish it and make the writers pay for it?

Money is survival. One can murder many and never be blamed if the means is cutting off money supply for food and shelter. The elegant female artist who just came to visit me was amazed that AIDS wasn’t “over.” But then she and her husband are from the American South where the rising statistics mostly belong to the uneducated Blacks and these are very admirable white, educated people. They say they read a lot. I wonder what. I don’t suppose their local newspaper is exploring HIV around town.

Mike Madel, the grizzly management expert, is often told he should write a book about his exploits and narrow escapes and maybe he will. A publisher would be interested and assign him a ghost writer whom he will be obliged to pay for and who will keep making small alterations until the book is quite different, much more saleable. Naturally he feels compelled to tell these stories — can he?

Sid Gustafson has written three novels so far and a lot of short stories and practical information about horses. Is he writing because he must? I don’t know him personally very well, but my guess is that he’s absolutely compelled by irresolvable life issues to keep writing. It’s not therapy, it’s identity, existence. Enough of us share the issues to make his writing welcome and worthwhile.

Terrierman, woodchuck and terrier

So what about me? Many times I’m serving a practical goal and aiming for a target, maybe something like Terrierman who pursues a number of dog-related issues. Other times my drive to write is much more complicated.

This lady visitor and her university president husband came because of Bob Scriver’s connection to Dickinson State University, which was where he earned his bachelor’s degree in the Thirties and is now honored as an achieving alumni. They came to Browning expecting to be welcomed as friends of a Great Man, but ran into the buzzsaw of the opposite opinion, as explained to them by Pete Shea at the Browning post office. Pete is a white man who raised his family in Cut Bank and now lives bachelorhood in East Glacier. Until retirement, he taught music in Browning which means that he was shadowed by Bob’s short but powerful career as a musician/teacher. As they say, “legendary.”

He told them about me, so they came, expecting something quite different from me and my house, I’m sure. They didn’t know about the book I HAD to write about Bob, “Bronze Inside and Out.” Why did I have to write it? (It had to be published in Canada because of so much pushback from the Cowboy Art cartel.) I ripped it out of the hands of the University of Oklahoma Press when I realized their goal was, well, castration.

I loved the man. I knew him in a way no one else knew him (our relationship was surely sexual but it was work that united us); because he was access to a powerful time and place (Browning, Montana, just as the last buffalo people were gone); because it justified my wager that “throwing in” with him would not be wasted time; and because the whole sensory, emotional, and imaginative complex of that world would be the foundation of the rest of my life. But only the foundation. Writing it down made everything after that explainable. Kept it whole.

Writing about ministry is entirely different and mine is even different from anyone else’s because my understanding of the Sacred is anchored in the Blackfeet. Not just them because they’re only a trope for the many kinds of people who live on the Eastslope of the Rockies, both sides of the 49th parallel. Ministry meant I have an academic “card” that is not anthropology — much broader and even deeper, maybe geological. Hanna Holburn Gray, President of the U of Chicago, when she put one’s master’s hood over one’s head, said, “Welcome to the Company of Scholars!” She didn’t mean congrats for your achievement — she meant “now the search begins.”

Narcisse and Ryan

I’m writing a map, rather like the one Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavyhead made when they walked with a GPS down the east front, looking for the ancient tribal camps before the horse. Or like Ted Binnema taking Old Swan’s early hand-drawn map as a guide going down the side of the Rockies looking for the landmarks the first trappers used as trail guides. These enterprises are not abstracts of land, but experiences of land. Any paper maps might have to be set on fire right in the middle, simply because of paradigm shift — something is discovered that makes the rest obsolete. What the body has learned remains in one’s muscles and dreams.

I no longer fit into any academic setting or, indeed, into any institution, not even the town. But the internet has made it possible to be a “public intellectual,” something in plain sight based on thinking. Now commerce is trying to destroy that, a murder that is only noticed by some because it is so pretty. Thought is in manacles of bling, Helen Mirren’s pink feather handcuffs. See it, sell it. The virtual space may soon crowd me out the way sober techies have crowded out the spectacular and innovative peacocks of the street in San Francisco. Virtual AIDS is on the way. So is Bladerunner.

Makes it hard to keybaord

CHILDSCAPE

The Bullshoe Sisters: a force for education

when they grew up.

One of my chief pleasures and a driving reason for me to read is finding new ways to look at old things.  This is not widely shared around here.  People like to find the BP (“best practice” which is an interesting phrase linked to technologies, including health care and enforced by insurance) and then stick with it, even though new discoveries and goals develop.

Writing about historical indigenous people is often a matter of rehearsing the same old scripts and assumptions, some of them mistaken interpretations imposed by the oppressors of the times: missionaries, cavalry, railroad magnates, Euro adventurers and the like.  Even today the academics arrive with their heads full of romantic factoids which the local tribes are happy to exploit. 

So I’m pleased to be reading “Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory,” by Clive Gamble.  Gamble is English and thinks about the two major “revolutions” in the three million year history of hominid evolution: one is the sudden (in archeology years) explosion of creativity that created art, music, religion, language — the whole realm of metaphor that some believe is the real beginning of modern humans — the second is the development of agriculture and the relation to sedentary life.  (Not sitting down but settling in one place and building an environment that can be defined as containers, like houses.)

For instance, there is a lot of difference between a hearth and a fire.  A hearth is a place specially occupied by the fire, a “fire place,” which is related to crucibles, blacksmithing, and other technologies of metal that demand high heat over a short period of time.  This is different from the “fire place” that is used for cooking, even baking, because a camp fire can be improvised and baking can be done in a hole with a fire built on top of it, the way Blackfeet prepared camas roots.  People who do metallurgy are sedentary and repetitious.  People who only use fire as they travel are improvisers.  

This is one major difference between tribes.  The people of the Pacific Northwest lived in cedar plank long houses and built hearths, erected totem poles, created shell middens of considerable size.  The people of the prairie used technologies of tanning, cording, flintknapping, and left evidence of camps along streams where cottonwoods grew in predictable favored spots according to the seasons.  Since most of their materials were biodegradable, they are invisible to us now.  

Blackfeet kids at Heart Butte used to complain about getting more light-skinned as though it were yet another incursion of “pale faces,” but it was clear that they don’t go outside much these days.  This is windy country so it is a temptation to stay indoors by the TV, a kind of hearth, and they keep the light out for the sake of viewing screens.  In the days of lodge-dwelling, people were mostly outdoors, even maintaining a separate cooking and smoking fire outside the lodge.  They were good at rigging shade with pieces of tipi or leaned together leafy branches, but it was bright shade.  Photos that record skin ordinarily covered by clothing reveal much paler areas.  So having an “indoor hearth” has changed the people and what they do and what they think of themselves.  

Gamble talks about what he calls “scapes”, the environment one is aware of and uses, so there is a landscape of habit which for early Blackfeet would have meant trails more than “bushwhacking” which on the prairie would mean something more like “grass crushing,” the social landscape meaning how the people are distributed and connected, and the task scape which might mean hunting patterns or might refer to special sources of materials like the yellow clay used for paint.  He discusses the “childscape” as the territory and the pattern of knowing it through travel and work that shapes and limits the raising of children.  This is one of the uses of story which always includes the sky for Blackfeet children. 

When I was still teaching on the rez, I took a photo of the Rockies and used it to learn the horizon line of the peaks until I could “write” it like a cursive sentence.  I’d walk to the blackboard and “write” it or put it at the top of a page.  The kids always recognized it, but were surprised that it could be learned, which means that they had lost the map-drawing skills of their ancestors.  But there was a fascination with “white man’s maps” in Atlases and highway guides.  

Reciprocally, whites who come to the rez get very frustrated with the lack of street signs because people here (even whites) go by the social landscape and the task landscape, which are learned and repetitive, often anchored by landmarks like the location of community dumpsters.  People whose garbage is invisibly collected don’t register such objects or the logic of their location.

The Rockies at sunset

Anyway, white man’s maps are drawn as though from a satellite, looking from the top down. Indian maps, especially along the Rockies, are from the side and mark distinctively shaped peaks as well as the erosion valleys and canyons with uses.  The criteria for most things is experience — reacting to what one has learned through living with the sensory characteristics that translate to usefulness.  But other things known have been arrived at by analysis or implication, more often recorded as narrative than as abstract ideas.  

“Fittingness” becomes the criteria for something persisting unless it is an exceptional or "counter" practice or object that grabs the imagination.  The wheel was not invented by Blackfeet because it is mostly useless without roads, esp. in gumbo country where a “stone boat” — a wooden sled — or a travois can go places where a wheel would soon be bogged down.  In some ways glassified stone that could be knapped to an edge was more useful than metal.  But mirrors were fascinating, unique.

A childscape doesn’t just provide knowledge of materials and territories.  It teaches how to do things, how to learn, how to tolerate failure or even pain.  Missionaries and other Euro-taught and now-teaching people have pressed most rez kids NOT to rely on themselves but to ask for the “proper” way to do things.  They are punished if they do the wrong thing, which teaches them to do nothing without permission.  Guided by social opinion from the very beginning, they can be crippled by confusion and double-binds.  Pretty soon there is rebellion.

Since the Sixties, living territory has become even more treacherous because of political counterculture resistance to “best practices.”  In fact, the generation breaks introduced by new technologies and coalitions of same-aged kids — supported by music waves, the internet, and the media’s fondness for labeling — mean that kids don’t look to adults anymore but depend on each other, even when it comes to risky stuff like mind-altering substances, sex and reproduction, criminal matters, and precautions in a dangerous environment.  These are all part of the childscape, which patterns the child's thought into adulthood.

Gamble demonstrating how to butcher a sheep.

Clive Gamble is hard to read, partly because of anthropological neologisms for concepts that are uncommon and partly because of more classic jargon.   But far more than having to learn vocabulary, it is necessary to reframe one’s childlike from-the-outside perceptions -- as though “Other” people were dolls -- into the world-as-perceived-with-the-senses and the assumptions about them that are experience-based.  We are used to filtering, skimming, reducing to materials that can be marketed.  We are not used to being submerged in a landscape.  Sub- merged.  Land- scape.  Judging from computer games and videos, we want these experiences, but don't know we're IN them.

THE BRAIN: A COLLECTION OF APPS

Daniel Dennett is a philosopher and looks prophetic, which suits him fine.  He was the tie-off speaker on HeadCon ’13: What’s New in Social Science.  This is at edge.org, filmed last summer under a lovely awning on a California lawn.  Younger people had previously analyzed and organized amazing new research on what it is to be human.  Incredibly minute and specific work on the organic brain is meshing with the new understanding of culture and cognition.  Dennett’s startling way of saying what I’ve said here before, that the brain is community of cooperating one-celled animal, is calling it the “termite colony captured in the skull.”   

He’s talking about “non-Darwinian” evolution and economies, which I take to mean non-organic, the memes.  He speaks of “foible manipulation.”  One stumbles onto a gimmick and exploits it.  In my own terms, it’s being an energetic seventh grade kid who looks for crevices and advantages in all limitations of his behavior, from things to find out, to things he or she can make the body do, to ways of controlling adults.  In the latest form of computer metaphor, the brain is a collection of apps.

Now -- if that doesn’t make you feel too crawly -- I’m going to jump to another study that is “termite by termite”.  http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/2014/Mapping_Your_Every_Move_1_/#   By now many of us realize that there are many tiny structures in the brain that have different functions, like the hippocampus manages memory and the amygdala manages both fear and pleasure -- so on.  Now comes the entorhinal cortex, which contains the grid-cell navigation system.  This is a tool for both cognition and navigation, “where you are” in both senses.  

So it must be the source of all those diagrams in books that explain stuff like the structure of sentences as well as being the source of our love of treasure maps, as though we are always “seeking the way to the treasure.”  It also codes a map of one’s memories.  It is an early system that gets knocked out in Alzheimers, resulting in the first symptoms of forgetting and getting lost.  The connection to Alzheimers means it has a high priority for study.

One of the more interesting little exercises at retreats is to ask people to draw that map of “where they’re at” and the history of how they got there, and then to explain it to their neighbor.  This would be even more interesting if one could make it multi-layered by using a computer program or sheets of clear plastic to make overlay maps from different time periods or the interaction of different maps, say one of intimacy versus one of economic achievement.

It turns out that neurons as individuals are of different “kinds” of termite with different duties.  This linked article lists and explains (now that we can detect them) kinds of neurons, “apps.”

“Place cells” are in the hippocampus, GPS notations of where the creature is.  Over time this becomes a dynamic map, constantly updated and not dependent on landmarks, like the GPS screen in a car.

“Head direction cells” record which way your face is, well, “facing,” regardless of what your body is doing.

“Grid cells” are right next to the hippocampus and constantly triangulate location.

“Border cells” signal when a creature is next to a wall or edge.

Quoting the scientists:  “The collective significance of these findings is that the reactions of the neurons can be matched to what is found in the external world. It is still too difficult to trace other types of complex thinking to their sensory origins. Where information is combined across sensory systems, the firing patterns of the neurons involved are too diffuse for us to detect patterns and relationships to what is happening in the external world.”  . . .  

“So by focusing on something more accessible, such as the way space is represented in the brain, we can begin to understand how the brain computes itself, and how external inputs from the senses get into the primary sensory cortex.”

Navigation is one of the earliest skills of the “animal,” a skill a plant does not need since it cannot travel.  Now we have come so far that we are making maps of the brain from the outside, seeing what its topography is and how the electrical messages travel along it.

More quoting:  “The brain’s GPS—its sense of place—is created by signals from place cells to head direction cells, border cells, grid cells, and cells that have no known function in creating location points. Place cells not only receive information about a rat’s surroundings and landmarks, but also continuously update their own movement—an activity that is actually independent of sensory input.

Now the scientists are looking at “speed cells” that tell the creature how fast it is moving.  Also, decision-making cells.  “The neurons involved in this decision-making can be found in the prefrontal cortex, which connects to the hippocampus via a small nucleus in the thalamus.” 

Let me “ground” these ideas with homely examples.  My father grew up on the prairie where travel was via grid systems, dividing flat terrain up into squares like a chessboard -- and he was a good chess player because he understood the patterns that alternating squares present.  My mother grew up in Southern Oregon hill country in the headwaters of the Willamette Valley.  She understood valleys and ridges, landmarks like big trees or patterns of horizon or watercourses.  When my family traveled across the continent, sometimes my father knew where we were -- other times it was my mother.  He knew soils and learned geology.  She knew plants and understood art of a representational kind.  

When it was time for me to start kindergarten, I was escorted to Vernon School once, a checkerboard problem: five blocks up Sumner, two blocks north on 20^th.  I couldn’t remember when to turn north, so I sat down on the curb and wept.  Along came some “big girls” who rescued me.  The last time I went back, a half-century later, I was also confused about when to turn because the trees had aged out and died, the houses had changed, so my landmarks didn’t work.

My father liked to be “on the move,” and one of our favorite occupations on a balmy Sunday evening was to “go get lost.”  Because of his prairie childhood, he found all elevations significant and since Portland was a river valley with volcanic cones and the West Hills, he was pleasantly baffled by the roads that went round, up and over, plus the experience of looking out over the lit city.  The seduction of the “Other.”  If he became a little too confused, my mother knew where we were.  We could see from the top of Rocky Butte or from Skyline, what the layout was.  

When it was time to teach new animal control officers how to follow the maps of Portland so they could go efficiently to the addresses of complaints and emergencies, I found that some of them understood terrain and some did not.  Some only learned by rote, a serious handicap.  In fact, they were people who functioned by obedience rather than by figuring things out, which was a disadvantage in such a free-form job.

Note the love of landscape.

What I’m saying is that when one studies brain function “apps” one is looking at function in the world, how the termites build thought patterns that control everything, and then how their conclusions and actions create a new map overlay that adds depth to the genomes.  Those who have the REAL advantage are those who seek uncharted territories, regardless of what dragons may dwell there.  Those who stick to the maps only have one version of reality.  It might not work.