YOU CAN'T BAN BOOKS WHEN THEY'RE NOT BOOKS

My favorite hinge is the spine of a book.  One could wax lyrical about opening a book to a new world and I have, probably will again.  But to talk about book burning and banning today is to complain about the horse manure in the streets.  Now the stink is in the air itself and it is not fertile.  Civilizations will not be destroyed by books because they were only the carriers of the ideas that now stream through handheld devices.

Once it was true that Bible, Koran, Upanishads,  and other great synthesizing codexes and scrolls were the carriers of revolution and shock, but also salvation and devotion.  Now?  A throbbing song with a hard beat.  Once it was hopeless to discover slang for sexual parts by looking in a dictionary.  Now you can google a photo of it in action.  Hiding that information only created a sucking need for it — or so folks thought.  Knowing the name of any physical act, even seeing it enacted, is only the beginning.

The control of ideas is what paved the way for Trump.  Suppress people’s rancour and resentment enough and you build the legitimacy of lies and slander.  It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.  Authoritarians never know the tropes of oppression.  They’re insisting that boys take their hats off in school but not insisting that their fathers not beat them.  These days if you challenge a father’s right to beat his boy, the father will come up to the school and beat YOU.  Books or no books.

The invention of writing meant the possibility of control and preservation of thought and speech.  Law books.  The invention of cyber-screens meant the IMpossibility of control.  The mistaking of books for the thought they contain adds to their commodification, their value as markers of sophistication, rebellion or illiteracy.  One cannot ask a friend “have you read such and such” without them hearing, “if you haven’t read this book, you’re a dummy.”  Even if you just want to know if they have that information so you can talk about it together.

But you want to be careful what you leave out on your coffee table if people are coming over, be careful what you read on public transportation unless you put a brown paper wrapper on it.  Some people will assume that what you read is what you do.  That’s if you’re still using books instead of screens.  Screens still seem more imaginary.

I watch what people do when they come to my house and have access to my wraparound bookshelves.  Some books have their spines turned to the wall.  A certain kind of person will go right to them and take them out to see what they are.  One guest actually got down on the floor and crawled behind the furniture to see what I might be hiding.  If there is “sex” in the title, some people will grab it out and others will try not to look at it.  

Ken Wilber’s “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: the Spirit of Evolution” was near my “guest chair” but I finally moved it because people’s eyes kept going to it.  But it would take a certain amount of education to read.  No need to ban it, because it has a built-in fence.  I mean, do you realize how difficult it is to read James Joyce or Henry Miller?  Especially if you don’t understand irony and reversal, can’t tell what’s a joke or an aside, only read for plot.

But the idea that educated people can handle risky subjects and therefore if something normally taboo is written out in Latin only “safe”can people read it, has turned out to be an evil idea related to the class-based education systems of Europe, because now people associate forbidden things with being elite, which means to them entitled to — for instance — abuse little boys.  

Also it plays into the religious idea that only the institution’s designated high priests can read things, know things, own books full of juju and woowoo.  It helped to create the nasty chasm between academic anthropologists and the people who were living in a different system that had different taboos.  Eventually the human lab rats discovered they could get the Latin translated and were indignant at what was said — as indignant as any shopkeeper’s wife would have been if it had been originally written in “English.”  I’m not just talking about Ecuadorean tribes, I’m also talking about sub-cultures and niches of people right down the street.

Books are banned when authorities are afraid of them, when they symbolize that “mud people” can be empowered, when the authorities find they can’t understand them.  Banning is about controlling — whether the authority is a Roman Catholic Cardinal or somebody’s inexperienced but righteous mommy who gets hold of a shocking paragraph or a neighbor’s inaccurate account of it.

Books are not banned because of what’s in the book — they’re banned because of what’s in the people and their goofy ideas, often religious nonsense, superstition, or fear of the “other.”  The book is just a physical symbol from the material culture.  The idea itself is only carried by the book and might not even be in words.  The objection to the book might have nothing to do with the actual book, but really be about the author and fantasies about the author.

We’re at a fascinating and ridiculous point in the history of the world.  The sexual revolution, powered by the pill, has left housewives reading trivial nonsense.  The realization of the vulnerability of children has revealed abuse that some people crave to know about, but don’t know what to do about.  A huge percentage of the world’s population is insisting on their women going around in draperies while another “civilized” country is arresting women on their beaches for wearing too much clothing.  

A rich man is only presumed to be rich if he shows certain characteristics. If he can manage to talk like a redneck in a wife-beater undershirt sitting on his front stoop with a beer can in his hand, he is suddenly drafted to be the hero of the masses who can’t remember the rules for political correctness.  No better, a rich and powerful woman who has been at the table with the top of the top, must produce a cookie recipe to be respected.  And just who does she think she is with her entourage, anyway?

Not only do we not know what to ban anymore, we couldn’t do it if we tried.  The walls we try to put up to protect us are useless.  Now we must go back to building character, the internal compass.  Anyway, walls and prohibitions just don’t work.  Not even tunnels.  Human beings cannot be contained and banning books doesn’t contain them.  Not that there aren’t limits and not that we don’t suffer the consequences of knowing entirely too much, constantly wanting what we just found out exists, never having the discipline to choose.

And there I am, finger-waving, ever the school teacher and preacher.  I have a heckuva lot of books.  I had thought I would write them and be published and all that doodah.  But instead it’s blogging, a steady stream of ideas that shock a few, are appreciated by others, and never become monetized.  I can’t even sell my books since the really good bookstore got run out of Choteau.  Not because they are banned, but because the physical objects that are books cost money to store, to ship, to sell.

When you get right down to the core of the issue, banning books makes them a more valuable commodity in monetary terms.  But learning to read and think is where the real value is, which can just as easily be onscreen and just as conveniently be handheld.

WHAT'S SO SPECIAL?

What’s so special about humans?  How are we different from other animals?  Do the new neurology insights make it clear that there is no such thing as a soul, as a super-natural connection to another world, as magic?  Everyone seems to be abandoning “religion” so they can justify greed -- virtue as defined by income.  

What about spirituality?  It is irrefutable that people feel sacredness, whatever it is.  The circumstances and terms, like the environment and the previous experience of the person, appear to be wildly various -- not that they can’t be made “domestic”, pulled into daily life.  Even then the “wild” unpredicted experience of the sacred can burst upon us unexpectedly.

Human institutions are the way groups try to gain control and to guide arrangements and duties by defining “memes” (customs -- little sections of culture -- that people perform, mostly because of ecological factors like food, climate, transportation, the raising of children).  Institutions are constantly trying to capture sacredness for their own ends, partly in order to be exempted from accountability.   This may not be cynical -- may be sincere conviction and experience -- but no institution can experience the sacred because it is a human experience.   An institution is not itself human, only a product of being human.

But an institution, through memes, assumptions of reality, has an eerie way of pretending it’s a person, trying to get control in order to perpetuate itself, and even building a “super-meme” of laws that will protect its wealth and power.  It does not like variousness and competition, but without these, it will harden and fossilize until it is useless, or perhaps accrue so much resistance and hatred (emotional resistance) that it will be pulled to its knees with violence.

Institutions need infrastructure (buildings, transportation, storage, sources of power) but can be tempted to neglect them when they prefer memes that are empty, like luxury that is useless or toxic.  (I do not mean art.)  Both institutions and infrastructures must support memes that do not destroy the larger context -- the planetary environment and the beings of it.

The meaning and use of memes is to guide behavior at the level of individuals, organizations, and religions, which are organizations protecting meme-systems that work for the people and other life in a specific ecology.  If that ecology (system of interacting and mutually supporting symbiotic region) changes or the system is applied to a different ecology, it will break down.  This applies to communities, categories of thought, nations, businesses, corporations and religions.  Their authority, usefulness and boundaries will empty.  This will often cause them to resort to force and destruction.

New memes are always needed.  They arise from research that offers new ideas, new words to describe them, and the jostling for new relationships.  Right now, neurological and cosmological realizations are causing major reframings of understanding that were once the province of religion.  Religion, in the institutional sense of theologies and practices, are now “provincial” in the sense of limited to an area, even in the pejorative definition of “concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.”   It is sophisticated to presume that what one knows is smarter and more refined than what others know, even when there is no way of really knowing.  Until the sacred breaks in.

We need some terms and strategies to address the disconnect between the cities and the rest of the earth’s surface, since the city dwellers have lost touch with the “boonies” even for the practice of marketing.  I get questionnaires about my address that make it impossible to answer. Their own way of relating is either through “picturing” -- making distant and “artistic” the views of what is considered attractive but scary, like mountains or deserts -- or by statistics: GPS, temps, crop yields, miles between two points, house number, street name.  

Memes come from material culture.  The homogeneity of cities based on building materials, use of light, street grids, labor shifts, high levels of supervision and stipulation, noise, ubiquity of machinery, mean that to many people these are reality.  Their sense of sacredness is likely to be pushed aside for the sake of productivity, often expressed in numbers rather than in sensory metaphor.  Thus people go to the past or to the mock planet of a spaceship, sources jammed with images never really experienced (suits of armor, catapults, walled castles) or to “sets” invented by designers, closer to machines than art.  Religious institutions do the same thing: cathedrals or self-containment.  (I’d rather have dragons than angels.)

The hardest part of the environment to capture and systematize is other people.  There are a great many of them in cities and they are much more assorted than in rural ecologies.  In a small village, everyone knows everyone else and they all keep track of each other.  If someone is missing in a village, people wonder.  If someone is missing in a city, people shrug if they even notice.

In the city there are always a lot of excess people, maybe from some other ecology where they would have fit, or maybe because they were damaged or malformed early, or maybe got addicted -- anyway, they’re a drag on society. A meme that they ought to be just eliminated grows out of frustration and for lack of any other ideas. Resistance to the idea of just exterminating them begins to become more powerful but unexpressed and therefore unaddressed and more powerful in reprocity.   Taboos always intensify what they are trying to avoid.

People are shot in the streets.  Or roughed up enough and helplessly exposed to disease and violence, that they will die secretly.  Or be put into situations of hopelessness so deep that inanition and marasmus will kill them, either by active suicide or gradual fading.  

Sacredness can re-empower them.  It is an art of hope and vision.  It rests on and emerges from biology as much as the fantasy of other worlds.  It’s where the memes meet genes and the spiral chromosomes in cells empower the cramped body/minds to endure, think, and eventually rise up.  The genes teach the memes to do idea-judo, where the raw force of dictionaries and laws are met and deflected by reinterpretation, new stories, going for the joints and leveraging the weight of flesh.  It is the power of the under-power, the shadow world growing stronger because it is unexpressed.

Bill T. Jones

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_t_jones_the_dancer_the_singer_the_cellist_and_a_moment_of_creative_magic?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2015-05-06

It is the power of the particle, the granular accumulation of tiny bits, like one-celled animals building reefs that create and protect islands.  It is possible because of the universal sea in which they dwell and which conveys the forces of pattern that can change everything.  We must each do our tiny daily bit.

HANDHELD

If you go for a walk, you are likely to pick up some small thing: a stone, a feather, a leaf. A Blackfeet here on the high prairie might pick up an iniskim, a small fossil, a segment of the fossilized contents of a baculite, a squid-like creature of the deep past that -- with a little imagination -- looks like a buffalo. Especially if you have bison on the mind all the time, which Blackfeet did until a century or so ago. So you look at this four-cornered stone and the ghost of a tiny animal forms through it and then a story and who can resist making the little thing “gallop” ? If you’re an old-timey Blackfeet you begin to sing a song, the song that belongs to it. You’re bound to know it.

Consider the Middle Eastern preoccupation with beads, spheres drilled and strung (what skills must develop first, including carving wood into a ball or glass-making?) which captures number magic, one thing after another after another. Maybe grouped, like an abacus, so that the string of beads becomes a hand computer, keeping track of sequence. Mix that with repetitive prayer and you have a rosary. Arithmetical ecstasy, a ritual presumption.

When the book with pages was invented, owning and carrying a small volume of prayers was a mark of both piety and wealth, in short, privilege. Now it will be an iPad, not I but II or maybe even III. More magical, more technical, connected all over the planet and even outer space.

Times change, materials and skills change, meanings change, but religious connection through small objects is so rooted in human anatomy (grasping hands, scanning eyes) that I can’t think of a society that doesn’t keep them. If the people have no pockets, they wear the objects on strings or tied in their hair. When people have clothes, objects become attached, possibly as buttons or netsukes. They legitimate the invention of pockets.

When people are wealthy enough to have more than one set of clothes, one set will be newer, maybe better quality, maybe assigned to occasions, maybe signifying status. Then come the “possibles kits”, the sporrans, the briefcases, the backpacks. And after that the conveyance of goods: canoes, Red River carts, donkeys, trucks and cargo planes. Hands holding paddles, hands holding reins, hands holding steering wheels, hands pressing buttons.

Even creatures with no hands will carry things along, most notably birds and dogs and esp. bird dogs. The birds will stash their loot in nests, whether it is a magpie’s sparkly barrette or a dog’s smelly bone. But could we consider this sort of thing an animal religion? Do animals have fetishes?

Some small objects must be carefully protected: coins; rings of heritage, entitlement or betrothal; keys; credit cards; motel door cards; communion wafers. Objects of access, always a religious concern. Objects connected to other persons (who’s in that motel room?), objects of good luck. And if the object you keep is to others a piece of junk, who cares? If the object is slick, mass-produced, dime-a-dozen, if it’s your mojo connection then that’s what counts. In this context it’s no one else’s business. You might die with it clutched in your hand instead of a button off your killer’s coat.

In beach houses, even rented ones, people bring back walking sticks, some as big as staves and others that can be broken over the knee and added to the fire. Corners become stacked with these driftwood travelers’ aids, waiting for some impatient person to pitch them out so the accumulating can begin again, because it is the process that carries the magic.

People give lectures about small objects of material culture. There are journals. Museums of small objects. Innocent, pretentious, mislabeled, peculiar. Archeologist troves of bits and pieces. Costumers’ findings: useless (broken zippers) and elegant (silk frog kimono closings). The Custer battle was entirely reinterpreted according to the patterns of spent cartridge cases discarded in the grass. A single paper shotgun shell (not plastic, so it’s old) was run over flat by trucks in front of my house. Figurines with heads knocked off -- or not. Small clay tablets with marks that must indicate something.

My brother’s MFA project was suits of armor for small skeletons he found in the woods: a robin, a mole, all suited up in copper or aluminum. The best was a little creature, made like a clam, with no skeleton but instead the found guts of a discarded toy in it -- a friction motor. When you ran this feathered-helmet-with-no-body across the floor, its visor suddenly flipped up and two fierce yellow eyes -- nothing else -- glared out at you. Then the visor slammed down. But even non-motorized objects have an aura, an attitude.

A bone, a tooth, something specific to a creature or even a person. My ancestor, confined at the Andersonville prison, whiled away the time by filing a horn button into ring. I do not know where he got a file so small or why he had it. I have a single earring, pendant, that I don’t discard because of where I wore it when there were two. At different times I’ve held in my hand a live mouse and a dead bird and a hard-boiled egg, still warm.

The oldest fist-sized objects of interest seem to be a basic cork shape with even rows of dots on it, like a kind of rogue dice (er, “die”), and then a set of two bits just alike, one marked and one not, very much like the markers to be hidden in a Native American bone game, though they were found in an ancient African cave on the eastern coast. This is leaving aside the little Venus figures with pointed feet that can be stood up in sand or earth, markers of risk as potent as any with mere wealth at stake. And perhaps the objects with import that can be handheld include bits of the body, one’s own bits or those of another, the ones that are sometimes cut off, including hands themselves, but maybe not severed, maybe still attached. Ears, fingers, noses, toes and . . . I’ll stop there.

Does the word “tactile” refer to hands alone? It seems as though hands are nearly sense organs that deserve a name of their own, like eyes. Temperature, texture, squishiness, movement, hairiness, all are felt with hands -- though other skin surfaces might feel them. It is our hands that reach out, slide along, curve to fit, grasp, caress and cradle -- or curl to rake with nails.

COFFEE MUGS

In the Eighties when I was in the ministry, I was serving mostly fellowships who had no building, so committee meetings and so on had to be in someone's home -- like -- mine. Of course we had to have coffee, so I set out to collect blue and white coffee mugs, all different, so that people could tell which one was theirs when it was time for a refill. We thought it was ecologically unsound (and not very elegant) to use paper or styrofoam. To show how long ago this was, I bought the plates to be ash trays. There are a couple of ringers here. I had thirty or more blue and white mugs for a long time, but many of them have escaped by now.

My most recent acquisition really pleases me. I've been looking for a coffee mug that was insulated and this one is, plus it has a lid with a rubber gasket, it's steel so it won't chip, and it has a big rubberized handle plus a rubberized ring on the bottom for soft landings. The lip is nicely shaped to fit my lips and somehow cool so I don't burn my mouth. I like coffee that's really HOT, though I'll drink it cold. The manufacturer is Trudeau in Canada and I like both of those, too. (Pierre Trudeau tops any Kennedy in my opinion.)

For a while in the ministry I was going from one place to another: Clinical Pastoral Care for a summer, church internship for a year, conferences, workshops, training sessions for a week. I developed the habit of buying a new bar of soap (the first time because I forgot to pack one and the place we stayed didn't supply any) in each new town. If I had a lot of money, I'd get expensive name-brand soap at the perfume counter. If I was broke it was an off-brand at a 7-11. The most fun was local artisan soap like pine-scented with pine needles ground up in it. And alongside the soap, I'd buy a mug. Until I came to this mug by Laurel. For a long time -- until I got back here in Montana -- I wouldn't drink my coffee at home from any other mug because I loved this one so much. I don't suppose they're Blackfeet faces exactly, but they could be.

Now I hide this mug because if I have company this is the mug they head straight for and they use it before I can make sure they know it can't go in the microwave because of the gold on it.

Instead of my fancy mug, I got in the habit of using these big tin mugs in the summer for cold drinks. They're wearing out a little now and aren't very good for hot coffee. I have to tip in a little skim milk. They lose heat quickly.

At one point when I was feeling domestic and as though I ought to be more prepared for company, so I bought a set of china -- with Rupert Brooke's blue rings around it -- from Crate & Barrel. These cups have proper saucers -- four place settings. Never used. Well, maybe once.

My mother gave me this orange set which is like soap bubbles. Even my company asks for something else because they are so afraid of breaking them. Anyway, properly they should be used for tea, not coffee. I just enjoy looking at them.

I was telling all this to my biggest fan (literally) so he sent me a photo of HIS fav coffee mug. It holds an entire pot of coffee. I tell him it's not a mug, it's a tankard! He pulls into the McDonald's or whatever, asks them to fill it up but NOT to wash it because it has a "patina" he doesn't want to lose. He likes the taste. He says this monster will stay warm for a half day.

I figure if his hands get cold, he can put them in the coffee.

But it would be much more elegant to simply wrap hands around the mug, like this excellent and creative mug. It belongs to the librarian. You can see her in the previous post. Instead of a handle it has a sort of sleeve to tuck fingertips into.

As far as I know, Kathy is not a Unitarian, so I don't know what she would make of one of our fav mock-hymns sung to the tune of "Holy, Holy, Holy." It's from Chris Raible's "Hymns for the Cerebration of Strife." (The standard hymnal of the time was "Hymns for the Celebration of Life.") It goes, "Coffee, coffee, coffee! Early in the morning! Strong and hot and black as sin . . ." I don't remember the rest. Couldn't find it on the Internet.

BUY LOW, SELL HIGH

Imagine a gold candlestick: nothing fancy, just a single candle. One person figures it’s only brass. A professional evaluator sees that it’s gold and of very high quality workmanship. To another person it’s the candlestick his grandmother always had on the mantel. Maybe this turns out to be the candlestick that JFK always kept at his bedside at Hyannis Port in case the electricity went out in one of those coastal storms. What if it turns out to have been a holy candlestick on the altar of an early and famous churchman?

Now imagine that someone is selling the candlestick. If it’s the guy who thinks it’s brass selling to the guy who knows it belonged to JFK, the second guy has struck it rich. When what the seller knows and the buyer knows are quite different, it is the value gradient, dependent upon knowledge and expertise, that will make someone a lot of money. The last aspect, sacred, will only be valuable to the extent that the Holiness is recognized. Now you’re looking at the Indian artifact market.

The world is awash with what amounts to cultural detritis, flotsam and jetsam from people who move all the time, who build collections and then discard them, who outgrow one phase or enthusiasm while starting another, who travel and buy memorabilia, then die so their heirs must clean out the house. One of the most popular TV shows is about objects that people bring to an evaluator to see what they are worth, because every now and then something that seems mundane or simply curious turns out to be valuable, even VERY valuable. But to whoever let it go, it was nothing worth keeping. Everyone in Montana knows stories about an old painting stored in a chicken coop that was actually painted by Charlie Russell. In Europe that might be a Rembrandt.

This is probably more true of Indian artifacts than a lot of other categories, like books or art or china or silver. So many tribal objects have been created that were meant for tourist trade or for impressive decoration, that few people would be able to tell real antiquities or even whether the bead-sewing stitches were authentic or whether a buckskin dress were brain-tanned or chrome tanned or sewn with actual sinew or dental floss. And even fewer would be able to identify something particularly sacred or meant for ceremonial use. Many indigenous artifacts are made of humble substances, not diamond-studded gold.

Second-hand stores, “antique” stores, garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, used book stores, art auctions that attract side bazaars in nearby motels where each room is rented by a free-lance entrepreneur or -- more than anything else -- eBay keeps all these objects on the move -- losing some of their provenance as they go but also acquiring new legends meant to enhance value. The newspapers claim Brubaker, the book thief, made $500,000 a year on eBay. I’d bet you money that dozens of people in Great Falls, where he lived, knew he was doing it, didn’t exactly approve but didn’t get worried about it, because it was just “stuff,” not carefully promoted like the art work at the main CM Russell Auction or the materials displayed at the CM Russell Museum.

There is no free-standing Indian museum in Montana except the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning -- which has no budget at all, certainly no way of acquiring materials and no qualified anthropologist to evaluate them. The most persistent and detailed stories about Indian artifacts being stolen and sold by insiders come from this institution. The tribe refuses to take responsibility for it because it is a money sink. The flood in 1964 undermined one side of the foundation and compromised the storage. Much precious material was lost to water damage. They are so nervous about being investigated that they refused to allow Rosalyn LaPier, a highly qualified Ph.D. candidate married to an outstanding scholar, access to the collection and archives. She is a tribal member. The white scholar traveling with her was allowed in. Those controlling access were Blackfeet. Such confusion and anxiety mess up information.

Outsiders have little or no mental picture about these matters. They’re still back in the nineteenth century or maybe the 1950’s when whites still dominated the professions and administrations. Outsiders today would not be able to pick a living Blackfeet Indian out of a line-up, much less valuable NA artifacts. We’re in this strange time when Hollywood costumers and cowboy artists probably know more about NA material culture than the tribes themselves do. I don’t know of any high school that has an “intro to anthro” class nor do I know of any Montana tribal college that does, which is not to say they don’t exist.

The whole point of “wheelin’ and dealin’” is to buy low and sell high. ("Stealin’" is, of course, about as low as you can go, and so is representing a lesser artist’s work as a greater artist’s work as in the recent scandal of the purported Russell that turned out to be a Seltzer.) Finding objects, like arrowheads, is a bending-over sort of serendipity, but many people, esp. in the SW, have profited from removing pots or bones or more elaborate objects by digging them up. With backhoes. They do not care that they are losing value from these objects by taking them out of their context, because they won’t be selling to the people who would appreciate that sort of value, presumably scientific information.

What makes buying Indian artifacts on a reservation so profitable is that the people themselves are likely to be low income, which is to say “needy,” and may be impaired by substance abuse. Also, younger people may have lost the values of the older culture and those converted to the more Taliban-type versions of Christianity may have been told that ancient ceremonial objects are the work of the Devil, which ought to be destroyed.

My personal bias about everything in life is that education is likely to be at least part of the answer. This is particularly true here. Even if the younger people or more corroded people cannot resist selling their people’s material objects, they can at least be taught the real value of them. Diminishing the value differentials should slow down traffic. That would probably effectively curtail if not end much of the vacuuming power of the well-informed swindler.

I’m not even close to ending this series.

TRAIN CASES

Suddenly this afternoon “train cases” popped into my head. I don’t know why, except maybe I got a whiff of Sea Breeze, that sort of witch-hazel astringent. Here are the ingredients: Glycerin, Ethanol/SD Alcohol 40, Camphor, Eugenol, Butylene glycol, Sodium benzoate, FD&C Blue #1, Water, Clove oil, Eucalyptus oil, FD&C (or D&C) Yellow #10, and Peppermint oil. It was my mother’s standby for travel. We five camped in a folding trailer with only a small tank of water welded to the front which my father used for shaving unless it was frozen. (Sometimes we traveled in winter.)

In those days there was no AC, so in summer the windows were all open, and we drove back roads. Probably not that different from travel in early trains, only cinders were missing from our faces and hair. My mother and I rubbed dirt off our faces with Sea Breeze on cotton squares and then packed cotton into our hair brushes and saturated it with Sea Breeze so that when we brushed our hair, it picked up dust. Not only cleaner, but cooler.

We each had our own train case but strangely, I remember her dark green one better than I do my own. In fact, I can’t remember what mine looked like nor exactly what was in it. I Googled to see if that would jog my memory and was staggered. Train cases, which used to be a neat little box with a handle in the top, are now three-story roll-arounds with pull-out sections!

I think I stopped using a train case when backpacks came into fashion. In my bio of Bob Scriver I spent some time discussing the difference between hard-sided boxes and soft bundles, like backpacks, which is what Native Americans used except for parfleches, which were rawhide envelopes something like suitcases. There’s a different psychology between a box and a bundle. A box is a shell, like a house. You can’t tell what’s in it. It is protected. A bundle is more a part of you. It can change shape. It is “gathered up” but still vulnerable. I notice that the newest thing in “wallets” is a hard-sided click-shut sort of clamshell. Is that a reflection of our need to guard money? I remember little bags of silver dollars when I first came to Montana. Weighty. Bulky. These new clamshells only hold bills and checks, flat and smooth.

I must have carried my own lipstick, the memorable Tangee that changed color “to suit one’s complexion” after you put it on. I suppose it must actually have been responding to body temperature. Hairbrush and toothbrush and toothpaste, of course. The lid had a mirror on the inside but I don’t remember looking at myself much -- maybe to apply mascara, the cake kind in a little red box like watercolor paint. Judy Dixon went to Charm School and taught me about that little jar of Mum with a daisy on top. A train case was supposed to be a sign of being grownup, but I seem to remember toys in there. Still, they were a lady thing. Maybe most women kept their hair stuff in there: rollers, curlers, driers. My mother and I never did “do” our hair. Mine was curly anyway and brushed into sausages over a finger until I was nearly in high school. Hers waved nicely and was always just brushed back.

Not only haven’t I thought of a train case for a long time, I can’t remember what ever happened to it. Years ago, even before the present airplane protocol, I began simply dropping the basics into a ziplock bag and throwing that into a gym bag with some rolled clothes. The last time I flew was when I went back to Portland to drive the U-Haul of furniture to Valier. Driving the truck was easier than squashing myself into a passenger seat and barely surviving on 60% of the oxygen needed for life.

Once REAL travel was on ocean liners where “fitted” trunks had a little compartment or drawer for everything, which was possible because people had predictable generic things. “A place for everything and everything in it’s place.” One of my favorite sequences in the Harry Potter movies is when the werewolf teacher has resigned and is leaving: all his belongings pack themselves into their proper places where they fit exactly! For airplane travel, a hard train case doesn’t really work unless it fits under your seat. It’s easier to lift and squash something soft overhead.

There’s a very VERY thorough count-down for train cases at http://www.wikihow.com/Put-Together-a-Makeup-Kit
They recommend using a fish-tackle box. Not a bad idea. But the real action seems to be with vintage train cases, either as-is or funked up with paint or decoupage. One advantage of the old ones is that they are sturdier: the new ones tend to have one latch while the old ones had two. The disadvantage is that airport security makes locks problematic. And then there’s the musty smell of old stuff. Unless you always had a supply of Sea Breeze in there and like the methol/camphor/clove/eucalyptus aura.

I asked my cousin if she had a train case when she was young. She said she just took it to Good Will recently. It was part of a set her husband gave her before they were married. She said her mother had one that in her later years she used to stash her art supplies. Such a simple little ubiquitous box, it has gone many places in some of our lives.

Maybe we underestimate these small bits of our “material culture” that shift around as there are major changes in the world. Not just obvious changes like petroleum-based transportation and the way we could carry so much “stuff” with us when it was cheap. But also subtle assumptions about things like gender and families. I remember having a train case, being proud of it, sitting for the weeks of travel with my feet on it, but not where it come from nor where it went.