DONKEY SKIN AND SELKIES

If I wrote a biography today, no matter who it was about, it would be entirely different from what I wrote about Bob Scriver.  At that time I structured the book by using the steps of the creation of a bronze sculpture, not what to do so much as how the materials feel, what they can become.  I included a lot of local anecdotes and the history of the Scrivers, how they got to the Blackfeet reservation at the beginning of the 19th century.  I didn't talk much about being a racial minority in an autochthonous place, but he would be a good example of wearing another creature's skin, since he tried to be tribal.  Bob didn't make it to the 20th century, dying in 1999.  In short, his life story fit the century, various as it was.  But place held him.  Dusty little Browning with Willow Creek running through it, the village was an anchor point on the vast East Slope Ecotone created by the Rockies.

In mythology there are stories about trying to capture someone but ending up only holding their skin.  Selkies, the marine people who sometimes take human form, are a good example.  Bob's mom and Selkies were Scots.  Of course, the stories are metaphors for human beings who are captured but finally must escape to exist, because they don't belong to the world of the capturer, no matter how much love is involved on either side.  

In a world this various and mobile, in times so confusing and places so changed, the "donkey skins" are still in existence.  This is a clip from the old fairy tale, as captured in a 1970 French film.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HysasPjF84I

Here's an American version --TRULY American, not European.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nXsCGyFuz8  This is Laura Grizzly Paws.

When a writer takes on a persona through whom to tell a story, they are wearing the skin of that being, which may not be human, but be inhabited by a human.  For instance, here's Chewbacca and the actor who wore his skin.  I don't know how a wookie dances, but Peter Mayhew (the actor who wore his skin) would.  He's part of an invented world that seems very real to us, particularly now that we're trying to capture more than the skin of the Empire that has been striking back at us.

Most of us who live a long time are still wearing the skin of the times and places where we grew up, whether France or Browning, and we think we know what the world is like, but as these stories attest, there are always stories within stories, some of them quite unknown.  Some are more "grim" than any fairy tale.  Yet we cling to our notion of what we thought they were like.  

For instance, Bob Scriver was a portrayer of worlds that he thought he knew in his youth, the cowboy and Indian mythology that overlay what was really a raw struggle to survive in a world where the land-fitting way of life was being destroyed by an empire from across the sea, not even just a Brit empire, but one dominated by a department store called Hudson's Bay, a pattern much diminished into the Browning Mercantile.  Scriver Studio and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were Bob's own expression of the 19th century anthropology, collecting, and labeling Brit way of understanding.  As soon as he died, it was dismantled, reduced to more mercantilism.

Then the bronzes of the even more imaginary world portrayed in bronzes was housed in a recreation of Fort Benton, because now that time has become myth and is admired, considered real.  It was only a few generations in the past.  The tribal people still dance, but the costumes are a flurry of modern flourescent colors mixed with echoes of deer tails and eagle feathers.  The tribes are PanIndians.  The dancing is as authentic a portrait of first contact dancing as bull-riding is an authentic version of moving cattle.

Above is just local observation.  Looked at world-wide, new phenomena have appeared, like crime-based systems that stash "money" or records of money on islands that have never been pulled into the Empire and therefore can stay hidden.  They have very little idea of what to do with that money, except hide its origin in swindles, predation, death, and competing families.  Not just a phenomenon of Sicily, it is a fungus that blooms wherever the conditions are right.  A corporation LLC is the hide they wear.

Some of the most interesting developments in the deteriorating Empire world are triggered by sex and gender, because the basic function of reproduction and nurturing have been badly damaged by war and poverty.  Examples of what modern technology has made possible include birth control, the empowerment of women (which is related), fluid sexual identity from enforced binary to situational, the relaxation of protecting children (esp, those stigmatized), and the reorganization of men in society according to their sexual gender preference.

Once suppressed by social criminalization and driven underground in various ways, this is not the same as modern medical intervention to change one gender into another.  But gender roles and morality have shaped a phenomenon that was once secret into a Empire-outlook. a hierarchical demographic that was once unified but now becomes many chambered and sometimes in opposition to itself.  Ostentation gets into it.  What was once disguised in the skin of the conventional is now wearing everything from tuxedos to speedos.

At first the permission to relate sexually in any way was the central key and the nature and expression of sexuality, freed from obligatory reproduction in the same way that birth control freed women.  It was a joyous celebration of sex-positive as an unalloyed good.  Of course, the same unlikeable nerds went without partners.  Soon AIDS brought death and crippling dependence on drugs.  Real life was again forced into performance, passing. 

We have not quite grasped that HIV affects every kind of person and is not connected to same-sex preference at all.  We have not quite grasped that jungle-born HIV, Chinese swine flu, and prairie herbivore wasting disease are, like ebola, merely waiting for a chance to strip our skins.  Whatever social category is vulnerable this time -- whether insulated by the religious belief that one should not eat pork or in danger because of subsistence hunting -- the gradual realization may or may not change us before the climate eliminates us as we know ourselves.  Maybe climate change will kill the cities rather than individuals, who already live on the sidewalks and may now die there, before they have a chance to dance.  What skin will they wear?  Or does death flay us all.

DIFFERENCES THAT UNITE US

Karen Black was in my cohort at Northwestern University School of Speech.  Not for the whole time, because she disappeared.  At the time I had no idea why -- some people may have known.  Some of us assumed it was because Alvina Krause didn’t like her.  Maybe AK didn’t like Robert Benedetti, her roommate at the time, either, but he was a big smart guy no one pushed around and he found a way around AK.  He was just the kind of man she always tried to press into heroic parts, but he resisted and some thought that was why she resisted Karen Black.

Sometimes you can find more insight into someone through their dislikes than their likes.  There’s a great deal of information about Karen out there now because of her recent death, and that includes the memorial in Hollywood which can be seen in compilation at this link: http://vimeo.com/75189301   The best parts of the video are the beginning, which is a montage of clips from ALL her movies (quite different from each other) and the end, which is a montage of still photos from birth to death, some of them shocking and most of them seductive.  

I was fascinated to see Karen’s sister, who looks much like her.  You get a pretty good idea of a well-loved extravagant sweet non-intellectual child-woman who loved sex, cats, and -- well, long walks on country roads, sunsets, kittens, and . . . other corny stuff.  She could sing and compose.  She wrote plays.  She also very shrewdly played scary roles in horror films and was often funny.  There’s a good deal of intelligence behind that, which would exasperate some people.  It’s hard to know how much she was watching herself.

My basic theory is that AK didn’t like Karen because Karen scared her:  she was a person who had abandoned all caution, while AK had staked her life on prudence and discretion in relationships, academic life, and  -- well, she wasn’t always cautious when she taught acting.  In some ways she was as instinctive and as able to pick up on undertow and subtext as KB was, and everyone says KB was an ace at it.  But KB always supported and appreciated those inner springs, while AK wanted to analyze and shape them, which is what she understood to be the task of the actor, especially a traditional realistic proscenium stage actor trained to address tragedy and heroism.  Big ideas, subtly expressed.

Personally, AK had to have respectability because that was her safety.  She was a small, ambitious woman who grew up the youngest in a big family on a Mid-West farm and survived with a sonorous voice, a vigorous erect body, and the singlemindedness of a sword.  If she had been labeled a lesbian, her career would have ended.  She never risked acting professionally.   It would be going too far to say that she had a German northern temperament while Karen Black had a Mediterranean Jewish soul.  But not much.

Karen was a voluptuous, generously sensuous, man-loving person whose salvation was innocence.  She didn’t cling or demand or try to prove anything.  So far the only complaint I’ve seen her make is that she was treated badly on the set of “Day of the Locust.”  It’s a bitter, punishing piece of madness and somehow that got attached to her.

The career of Benedetti was quite different.  I haven’t had anything to do with either of them until recently and then only read Benedetti’s books, watched his movies, emailed a bit.  KB is on Twitter. The two lives went in quite different directions and yet stayed together in friendship, which was always KB’s policy.  Karen’s husband released the story of why she suddenly disappeared from our cohort and why she and Bene stayed such close friends: they conceived a child together at Northwestern.  http://karenblackactress.blogspot.com  Both biological parents have embraced this woman, who is an artist with family.

It’s hard to imagine either one of her bio-parents considering abortion and in those days it was probably illegal if not life-threatening.  The stigma, lack of social support, and theatre dreams of both youngsters made raising a child alone impossible.  The two families were local, proud, and who knows how they felt?  Or whether they knew.   Adoption in those days was rigidly private -- the government SWORE it would be forever hidden information.  

There’s no such thing.  

The State of Illinois has opened their adoption records so that the child made right under our noses -- I suppose some of us might have known, including AK -- found her bioparents, Karen and Bene.  No doubt results are mixed and such an enterprise is not always well-advised, but in this case all three had known about each other and tried to find each other.  It turned out just fine.  The Benedetti family, generous and warm Italians that they are, pulled her in -- along with her children and grandchildren.  She and Karen painted together towards the end and she helped with Karen’s care.  KB refused morphine as much as she could bear so as to absorb this happiness.

Benedetti has a strong social conscience with a special concern for African Americans in the South.  Karen was more of a “mom” who took care of everyone, regardless of who they were.  Whether the social constriction the two shared as the price of love was part of creating their ethic or whether their natural character saw them through the ordeal, I see it as a triumph in the end.  Integrity.

I suspect that when KB looked at AK, she saw a path she could never take and wouldn’t want to.  All that caution, all that self-discipline and self-denial would have been impossible for her.  Conversely, I suspect that when AK looked at KB she saw a life she could never lead: all restraints dropped, all goals surrendered to fate and hard work.  I sat in the back of Annie May Swift auditorium, watching, and was more like AK than KB, but appreciated KB anyway.  Do we have to make choices? 

In some ways, AK’s choice betrayed her, because her fame and the emotional pressure she put on her students to break them out of their shells scared the corporate managers of the university apparatus so that they eased her out a little early.  She was wise to have the backup of Eagles Mere and then Bloomsberg where all the calls were her own and a certain amount of abandonment was part of the regime, so long as you got to rehearsals on time.  She and Lucy spent wonderful summer Sundays out in a little boat (it had to have been pea green) with big hats against sunburn. AK scribbled on a notepad, thinking furiously about the playwrights’ knots to untie for an increasingly savvy audience.  All the while Lucy in her faithful, rather stout way, rowed quietly along on the mirroring water.  KB’s idea of such intimacy might have meant stripping and plunging in, which would have ended local affection.  Except for the stalwarts who would heroically swim out to save her.

A writer’s game -- watching, making word pictures, passing judgment on people many have loved -- is a risky business.  Maybe more immoral that sharing physical pleasure when the opportunity arises.  Maybe more immoral than pressing youngsters against their own psychic thorns in hopes of awakening them.

In a way AK probably had something to do with KB’s development but I don’t know whether anyone ever asked either of them.  Sometimes it’s the people who wave us on who teach us most.  Like, not to waste our time on a fate that’s not ours.  Karen didn’t need Eagles Mere -- she was a natural film personality, not a stage presence, though she did well in New York.  It was the California climate that let her bloom, and we are grateful.