FOUCAULT AS EXPLAINED BY KOOPMAN

Foucault

This post is selfish, because it helps me but I have a strong hunch it will be gibberish to most of my readers.  It is about philosophy, about which I know very little because it is complex, arcane, and turns human thinkers into adjectives — one studies these guys and then refers to them as shorthand for their main theories.  They are all constructs using rational methods, logic but not research.  Therefore in the end their ideas comes from their life experiences, their context.  To know their stories is always my favorite means of understanding their ideas.  

Their lives dictate their “point of entry” into the field of thought and since most of them enter through academia as invented by Europeans, the path markers are degrees, articles and books.  Few, if any, consider my fav philosopher, who is Suzanne Langer — her point of entry is feeling.  She is part of a tissue of thought that I take to include Eliade, the new neurology research, the actor’s “Method” thought to be justified by Stanislavski, and so on.  This lets me consider the thought of indigenous people, poets, and sexual nonconformists, whether based on biology or not.  Once, I was interested in the “structure of the subconscious” as pursued by psychoanalysis, but it is a dying art, outdated by lack of time and money though there are still people fascinated by their own dilemmas.  Luckily, Lakoff’s ideas — which have a literary dimension through metaphor — have come along and I embrace all that.

Doesn’t this sound pretentious and learned?  I assure you my grasp is weak, but sometimes this stuff is actually useful.  Here’s the “cheater” provided by Colin Koopman in his Aeon essay called “The Power Thinker,” which is showing up in several publications.

Plato = forms

René Descartes = mind

John Locke = ideas

John Stuart Mill = liberty

Jacques Derrida = text

John Rawls = justice

Judith Butler = gender

Jacques Lacan = the unconscious is structured like a language

Richard Rorty + Jurgen Habermas = ‘grounding the social sciences in a theory of language’

Foucault = power

“Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited figure across the humanities and social sciences. His two most referenced works, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" (1975) and "The History of Sexuality, Volume One" (1976), are the central sources for his analyses of power.”

“Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.”

Foucault is fascinating right now for several reasons.  One is that his topics of prison and sex are so “hot” in several dimensions.  Another is that he paid no attention to boundaries, moving from one formal “discipline” to another and ignoring the conventionalities of them all.  And maybe one of the most intriguing attractions is that somehow he managed to escape his dominating and punishing father, the preoccupation with morbid self-destruction that seems characteristic of a “queer” man trying to justify himself at adolescence, and the ordinary forces of conformity.  It’s hard to know how he managed this.  Probably through a series of intimate and admiring relationships plus a huge capacity for work.  Some will want to know whether SF gay culture, the study of Zen, his practice of kindness to others, or some other “defined” context or practice was the source of his final serenity.  He did contract AIDS and died from it in the early wave of SF infections at the beginning of the Eighties.  His partner’s reaction was to start an organization to address the pandemic.

“The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorise and stigmatise not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome.

— Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2004)”

It is a given among counselors that “power” in the sense of socially compelling people to behave in certain ways, believing that it is their only option, is not just a matter of forceful domination (sovereignty).  The underdog, the dominated, the co-dependent also have their power.  (Watch what happens on a rez, where sovereignty is being pursued on grounds of victimhood.)  An obvious example is that Trump, who seems so powerful and rich, is controlled by what Vaknin calls his praise stream, which to Trump is a product of media — mass sensational stories.  It appears this is also what creates the reality of the people who voted for him.

Foucault “queried” (as they say) hierarchy, its source and structure.  I take Trump et al as being driven by a desire for “status”, for being at the top of the hierarchy, but accepting indicators on the terms that North Korea would recognize: the power of weapons, inheritance, titles, and control.  Marked by vulgarity of display, poor persons' idea of sophistication.  In my life experience the hierarchical indicators of status my family accepted (education, helping others, and the middle class indicators: neatness, fashion, and possessions — matters of presentation) have been emptied by some social movements with a religious dimension, valuing simplicity and humility, living close to nature.  Hippies, granolas, Bioneers.

More painfully, my family’s respect for teachers, doctors, religious leaders, police, soldiers, has been challenged by removing the protection of secrecy over their mistakes and shortfalls.  The larger society now seems to value only power and status in terms of money and laws, esp. those controlling imprisonment and investigation.  The sexual revolution has meant not only that everyone is free to “sleep around” but also that things like abuse of children, hypocrisy among religious leaders, and betrayals of trust cannot be covered up.  I find all this so painful and confusing that I elect not to participate.  But not to deny the mess.  And not to become “a docile subject” in Foucault’s phrase.

Now the practice of data collection, the details of our ordinary lives, is becoming a surveillance with power.  One of the first studies, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” about the recorded sexual proclivities of people who used the internet to access pornography, was a challenge to realities of people who didn’t know much about conventional forms of interaction.  (Of course, those without access to computers remain unknown.) Recently, the makers of a device that translates telephone or computer code into genital stimulation were sued.  Each use of the codes was recorded — a little diary of where and how much stimulation with whom.  The lawsuit required the destruction of the records but there’s no way to use code without it being recorded.  And cyber records are never really wiped.

So the international use of code for spying has the same dimensions.  It’s a form of intercourse.  The conventional (weapons, money, oppression of the weak and needy) is right up front.  But what about “queer” intercourse among nations, especially the ones that are “deconstructing”.  Is the result disease?  Dissolving borders between nations?  Or is it an evolution towards a whole new reality, not yet negotiable because we can’t quite see it.  So far, we only feel it.


PS:  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124201-web-creator-tim-berners-lee-speaks-out-on-fake-news/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2017-1603-new-newtemplateGLOBAL&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS
This post discusses government use and misuse of data compiling.

WHICH KNOWLEDGE DO YOU LOVE, PHILOSOPHER?

Our “group mind” considers a “Ph.D”, a Doctor of Philosophy, to be the height of intellectual achievement, despite the hollowing out and rotting of that degree today.  Nothing like getting to know a bunch of contemporary Ph.D’s to dispel that particular indicator of superiority.  The “love of wisdom” dates back to a time when the Greeks and Romans thought that — reasoning it out — men were all missing a rib because God removed one to make Eve and women had more teeth than men.  Oh, and men are naturally superior to women.  Philosophy meant reasoning things out, which is fine except their original evidence was never collected from reality and there was always a strong tilt towards the status quo.  “Intellectuals” sat around thinking, ignoring the real world, and imagining categories of things that don’t exist.  

The taxonomy of animals (including us) named according to appearance was shaken up when genome research revealed that their category assignments were often mistaken.  (Most comprehensively when Euros renamed the North American animals according to their resemblance to Euro equivalents.  Including, notoriously, Indians.)  A revolution through science and direct experimentation has also challenged our understanding of human thought.  Not just the content but also the way humans are in the world, how they form and use their minds.  This short post is what I’ve managed to grasp so far, so I’m probably wrong in some ways, but I think my core understanding is reliable.

First of all, this radical anthropology is NOT philosophy, and philosophy is NOT knowledge of reality.  (One of the issues is whether there IS reality.)  It is a set of assumptions built up mostly in the academic setting, which has given shelter to peoples’ love of sitting around arguing.  They’ve used the time to invent categories and then hand them out to a world eager to enforce them, even criminalize them, if not build religious systems on them.  First was God, reducing all conversation about religion to focusing on a giant humanoid in the sky or some replacement.  Lately it has been defining desire, both sexual and wealth-defined groups.  Philosophy is a “holodeck” that makes virtual worlds seem real.

The Star Trek holodeck.

I’ll start with neurology, which has been focused on the brain.  Gradually we realize that the brain is only the dashboard for a creature existing as a skin-defined entity in the world.  Thinking -- as the accumulation of data, as decision for action, and for storage of memory -- happens all over the body.  

The first beginner’s mistake is to privilege the neurons that manage relationship with the out-skin world.  Even when I was in college ’57-61, everyone paid more attention to in-coming stimuli of the nerves (tormenting rats with shocks and sounds and isolating them until there was nothing to do but get addicted).  No attention to what the nerves told the muscles to do, which wasn't pretty.  Scientists tried to control what the rats did (conditioning) instead of observing how rats lived naturally, which was intensely social.  They could not see the flesh they themselves “lived in” any more than a fish could see the water it swam in.  And they tended to be cold fish.

Though dominated by how we know the world -- the senses -- to the philosophers or even the scientists not long ago were ONLY the five sense organs.  They had no suspicion that there were 200 different kinds of cells in the brain capable of sensing things like how close to a wall the person was.  The many information systems feeding from cells to the brain (both specialized cells using neurons and regulating molecules that use liquid circulation instead of neurons) — intricate and plentiful as they are — nevertheless are limited compared to an elephant’s feet (which pick up very low sounds from the earth) or the pigeon’s head (magnetic GPS).  

The striated muscles of an imaginary (virtual) being.

"Ganesh, is that you?"

Decisions and control over action can be automatic, nearly automatic, or hard-wired like an instinct that says “if-then” — if you lay an egg, sit on it!  Consider the diff between smooth and striated muscles.  “Smooth muscle is an involuntary non-striated muscle. It is divided into two subgroups; the single-unit (unitary) and multiunit smooth muscle. Within single-unit cells, the whole bundle or sheet contracts as a syncytium (i.e. a multinucleate mass of cytoplasm that is not separated into cells). Multiunit smooth muscle tissues innervate individual cells; as such, they allow for fine control and gradual responses, much like motor unit recruitment in skeletal muscle.”  No one works on developing their smooth muscles in the gym.

Which takes me to the most major ignored nervous system in the reflections of philosophers, at least those with Euro-mind sets:  the autonomic nervous system with its sympathetic v. parasympathetic reciprocality.  They're considered "just" emotional.  Many features in the body are paired: one kind of molecule balanced by its antithesis, one muscle working against the skeleton in tandem with a second contracting oppositely.  The gut, though smooth muscle, “thinks” because it is a kind of second brain with a neuron sleeve and a high response/production of the same molecules as the brain.  We say, accurately, “I have a gut feeling this won’t work.” 

A heart/lung casting made from the real organs.

Another crucial and neglected loop is the hydraulic pumping of the blood through the heart/lung so as to re-oxygenate the red blood cells.  Using the same tubing plus the interstitial fluid of the inner sea that bathes the cells, are the white blood cells.  AIDS has made us crucially conscious of those free-lance identifiers and destroyers of microbial invaders.  They recognize, they act.  Is that not “thinking” of a sort?

But not to academic philosophers who are obliged like lawyers (a side branch of philosophy, creating categories and dealing with them, forgetting they are invented) to rely on precedent and all the big shot thinkers before them.  When the Deconstructionists got to these folks and began to remove the pick-up sticks from their houses built of cards (I love mixed metaphors) they were hair-raising to big shots.  We still don’t know whether they were like Sampson pulling down the temple on his own head.  (Hair, heads, temples.  Such images.)   But there are now cracks in the pillars.

Sampson brings down the temple while in it.

The “thinking” systems within the body, those that maintain the homeostasis necessary for survival, are not conscious.  To philosophers (who were NOT scientists) they were therefore not interesting because they wanted to think about a certain KIND of consciousness which was enshrined in language and far more prestigious, “higher”.  What Ph.D.'s do.  That is introspection, reflection about one’s own convictions.  Anything less than that was “animal,” just flesh.  Subhuman.  Therefore they failed to confront the necessary homeostasis issues that kept them alive to think.  

In fact, they carefully avoided and denied much, to the point of cruelty and oppression.  Physical well-being, unless it is a matter of dominance, doesn’t seem to interest them.  And yet experiments reveal that thinking is dependent on attitude and blood supply, which is a matter for the in-skin body and its well-being, so as to produce actions that take it effectively into the out-skin world. 

Blackfeet at the beginning of the 20th century

The great survival skill of humans is the ability to create homeostasis out of multiple environments.  They can adjust to being peasants living on a lot of hard work and a minimum of high-carbohydrate food.  They can adjust (less successfully) to being uber-wealthy, devoted to rich food, alcohol, uncomfortable clothes, and sitting.  

In fact, our variousness saves us, weaving back and forth through the genome, annotated by the epigenome, and adjusted to suit the materials at hand, so that someone somewhere can survive whatever the environment throws at us, whether an asteroid or a drought.  Sometimes — make that “often” — I think we are most vulnerable because of our thinking in Ph.D. virtual terms instead of relying on our gut impulses.  Bodies know valuable things.

"THE MAYTREES" by Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard as a young woman

Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” (1974) was such a surprising and tenacious book that when it came out I longed to be able to write a book like that.  I still feel that way.  I know many people misinterpreted it as the report of a sort of maladjusted and solitary nature freak.  Or the blonde photo made them fantasize about wood nymphs.  I know many people thought of it as a book by the person Sylvia Plath would have been if she’d been able to get the Bell Jar off her head, and others were affronted by what turned out to be a woman who married a professor (among others)  and lived a normal life -- well, on university terms.

Then came “Holy the Firm” (1974) which I didn’t really understand until seminary, which was one of the reasons I went to seminary.  Her subject was often Evil and always as much full of local stories as Annie Proulx’s compilations.  But she is on a high intellectual plane, supported by husbands of great grasp and, evidently, sharing.  All the facts at her own website: anniedillard.com.  She rejects Wikipedia and other sources as false and misleading.

Dillard’s subject in these two books and the one I just read “The Maytrees” (2007), is the nature of loose communities in specially concentrated places (Tinker Creek, a Puget Sound island, Provincetown/Cape Cod) and the bonds of love.  The plot is simply the life-arcs of one little set through adulthood to death.  One man, two women, various babies.

Dillard is a genre-buster.  Let English professors weep and obsess over things like narrative, poetry, imagery, subtext, blah blah blah.  This book is short sentences, often aphorisms, sometimes approaching haiku, and then longer bits of memoir or documentary -- something like that.  Enough to let you reminisce if you are inclined or surprise you if you haven't known about East Coast enclaves.

I am of Dillard’s generation but not her social class, though I grazed it for a few years at universities in Chicago.  NU was the moneyed people except for the students of theatre, who were like the characters in this book; U of Chicago was the sophisticated people, the ones who knew things.  I didn’t fit with either group, but in my UU years they were almost always nearby.  When I was interning in Hartford, I rode my moped sixty miles to visit Dillard, but she was gone that day.  I looked at her desk (facing the wall) and her trunk.

Dillard is a note-taker, journal-keeper, which must have been pretty useful for this book.  Human beings are sensory reflective creatures and she knows that, uses that skillfully and with considerable impact.  I try to emulate her in my blogs when it comes to sensory detail and metaphor, but I don’t keep journals.  I don’t take notes.  I’m not sure why.  Maybe it’s about privacy.  People pry, mock, and even misunderstand so clear a writer as Dillard.  Writing is vulnerable that way.

But this strategy, on its less poetic end of the scale, is useful for writing about the small industrial ag town of Valier or the tumbled confusion of the Blackfeet Rez, both places full of images and tragic stories of Evil and endurance, artistic discarding of convention, and long arcs of people’s lives.  I’ve been here fifty years off and on, and see those tracks clearly.  Many have ended, all have left small changes and marks.  Always the surprises.

Cape Cod Dune Shack

Here’s a paragraph near the beginning:  “The Maytree’s lives, like the Nausets’, played out before the backdrop of fixed stars.  The way of the world could be slight, then and now, but rarely, among individuals, vicious.  The slow heavens marked hours.  They lived often outside.  They drew every breath from a wad of air just then crossing from salt-water to saltwater.  Their sandspit was a naked strand between two immensities, both given to special effects.”

People like these don’t usually write -- more likely, read.  Or paint.  Writing about them very much will introduce viciousness.  Scriver Studio when I first found it was a late summer afternoon calm with plenty of time to talk and paint.  When the Montana Historical Society came in 1999 with every U-Haul available in Helena to remove every part of the Scriver estate they could detach, one of the MHS staff told me he had never been in an atmosphere so thick with hatred.  Money.

But Dillard’s story is nothing like that.  There is no hatred between successive wives.  There is caring.  Money is incidental.  Sea dirge and star gyre are what count.  This is a reconsideration of houses built on sand, at least those that can last long enough for people who only build nests like birds anyway.  In the end they come back to be buried nearby.  Life is only an interval of temporarily organized cosmic gases.  The mistake is to try to hold the sand in place instead of reconciling to the swing of maintenance that prevents mice and snakes from sharing too much, coming in through the crevices between boards or the holes made by popped knots in pine.

Annie Dillard now

In a way, the account of Lou’s nature and fate, left alone through days swollen with time, could be seen as an explanation for Dillard’s life, or maybe more accurately as she would like it to be.  Or maybe what she has managed to partly be.  Once the media gets hold of a writer, that individual will have no real peace or excess of time.  Then it becomes hyena-writers against the peaceful notebook scribblers.  We don’t have enough vocabulary to distinguish between blood-mongers jonesing pop money and those who truly weave words for their own sake.  Instead we obsess about factuality, which we mistake for truth.

I should just end this with sentences to ponder, but I didn’t mark them as I went along, nor did I mark the four big words I didn’t know.  They were too big for my reading chair dictionary and I didn’t want to stop reading to go to the computer or the big unabridged.  You’ll just have to read the book.

I admire this sentiment:  “Throughout her life she was ironic and strict with her thoughts.”

Here’s a whole paragraph:  “Later he stood on the foredune’s lip and looked at the stars over the ocean.  A wider life breathed in him, and things’ rims stirred and reared back.  Only the lover sees what is real, he thought.  Only the lover sees the beloved truly, inwardly.  Far from being blind, love alone can see.  Watching the sky now, and forever after, doubled the world.  He felt he saw through Lou’s eyes as an Aztec priest, having flayed an enemy, donned the skin.  Or somewhat less so."

Provincetown, Truro dune shack art show at Seashore

ART21 NOT KIDS, NOT BEGINNERS

Having tired of explosions and fist fights strung along mindless plots and unwilling to sink into a morass of saddles and beaded buckskin in print, I’ve been exploring the documentary films available on Netflix.  For the last two evenings I’ve watched a half-dozen hour-long explorations of contemporary artists, grouped loosely into concepts like “structure” or “oppression” or “transformation.”  Very abstract.  Each artist explains their work.  Sometimes parents or children talk as well.

by Kiki Smith

Some are pretty well-known:  Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Memorial; Richard Serra who makes giant cor-ten steel shapes; Kiki Smith who makes body-centered images.  One has to go to specialty publications to find others, unless you live in New York City or Taos.  None of these works will ever show up at the Charlie Russell Auction, I guarantee you!

Gradually one becomes very aware of several aspects.  One is the materials, of course, which range from very elaborate electronic gizmos, like a wall-size segmented face that changes its expression by moving the parts via little servomotors that are guided by images on an old black-and-white TV that has a grid of suction-cup light-sensitive monitors attached to its glass.  A Korean man, lonesome for his parents’ timbered home where he grew up, duplicates it all in silk, an exact three-dimensional replica that can be hung up -- then folded into a suitcase.  A man challenged to fill up a huge space the size of a football field, creates inflated shapes captured in nets and then goes on to make them play music in the same way as a player piano (intervals on tape), using pressurized air.  Another man creates his work out of trash on the street which he brings home, piles up, then rakes through to find the shapes and colors he wants.

The artist explains the thinking behind it.  Paul Pfeiffer explains his wavering, tapered ladder by describing primitive ladders that were only a split sapling with rungs of wood or rope between the two halves.  There’s more but he doesn’t talk about the axis mundi of Eliade and the anthros which relates to the ladder that reaches down into a SW Indian Kiva.  He could.  On the other hand, it is absorbing just to look at the tapered floating ladder.   Vija Calmins explains her canvas of stars in terms of how it makes her feel, her hunger for the interaction while she makes it, sands everything off, then makes it again.  Some of these works are accessible to observers, but some of them are only interactions within the person, something they are working out neurologically or psychologically.

by James Turrell -- not the cow, a building attached to the crater.

James Turrell does earthworks and has been working for decades to get the sun to act on a constructed space next to an asteroid impact crater in order to demonstrate the rotation of the earth.  This is an ancient art form.  There are prehistoric works that depend upon sunlight piercing clefts or casting shadows around a circle, many more everywhere in the world than the famous Stonehenge.  Since he had to buy a huge swath of land in order to work on it, he raises cattle which -- in the better years -- pay for the art.

Marina Abramovic casts her own body and uses the molds to make a classic bust of herself in soap and another in chocolate.  She washes with the soap and licks the chocolate to blur the image.  At one point she is visiting a ranch with old bathtubs for watering troughs, so she gets into one to see if the cows will still drink around her.  In one photo the cow appears to be nursing from her, reversing the usual pattern.  Following this idea, she casts her body on hands and knees, takes the hide freshly skinned off a cow so that it’s still malleable, and drapes it over the form she made, tightly enough that it shows her body.  One cast foot sticks out at the back.  When the hide has dried stiff, she takes the form out “so both the cow and I are missing.”  

By Walton Ford

Walton Ford paints in conventional, colorful, realistic representations -- in fact, imitating Audubon’s giant double-folio books of birds, except that the birds are doing things that are QUITE unColonial: killing, screwing, dying in agony.  (When we look at Audubon’s elegant depictions, we forget that he acquired his models by killing them and they lay on his table grotesquely distorted until disemboweled, skinned, and mounted.)  Birds extrude eggs which are seized and broken by other birds, all crowded together as the 19^th century passenger pigeons were when they came in such numbers that they broke limbs off trees.  An avian Hieronymous Bosch.

by Maya Linn

Some of these artists work on an industrial scale so that they need industrial machines and a crew of people to create and place them.  Maya Linn’s Vietnam memorial was so memorable that she has occupied an ambiguous space between monuments and architecture, though in her video segment she was cutting up old atlases in see-through circles so that turning the pages directs one’s attention.  Every artist was a person capable of intensely focused attention on something not everyone even notices, and then somehow expands that point of focus.   

Asked to create a “monument” for the neglected corner of an old decade urban park, Lin began with the idea of the pre-existing ice skating rink and then added to “ice” the idea of water vapor and a pool -- the latter two as fountains among trees.  The new round ice rink was embedded with stars.  She had to work around requirements imposed by the city:  a rest room, a warming shed.  The sequence of development began with the reality, analysis developed the idea of the three stages of water, and then these abstracts moved back into existence through practical requirements.  In the end, skating at night on these stars among the trees and fountains is inexpressibly magical.

Kara Walker

The minority artists who had been sharply compressed by prejudice, poverty, militarism, and injustice, were often the ones with the more striking and vital works.  Kara Walker, beginning from “Gone with the Wind,” has developed a vocabulary of silhouettes that are shockingly outrageous: sex, infanticide, murder, torture and cannibalism mixing with bonnets and hoop skirts, top hats and handlebar mustaches.  Ranging around a room in a cyclorama, they are enough to give anyone nightmares.  Reread “Gone with the Wind” carefully.  The horror is there.

No one talks about prices or galleries or sales to individuals.  The context is always museums, spectacle and size, often spacious enough to walk through, sometimes with opportunities to participate somehow.  In these hour-long episodes we enter the worlds of the artists in that way people now seem to crave: intimacy with artist’s lives, though it can only disrupt their work, which is art at the level of obsessive painting deep in a cave, art at the level of primal constructs in the brain most people are unaware exist at all.

Art.21 turns out to have a website:  www.art21.org  where all the episodes are archived.  You don’t need Netflix.  Go to www.video.pbs.org/program/art-21/  There are some I want to see again and I want to see all of them eventually, but I’ll have to ration myself to one a day.  And now, inspired by Louise Bourgeois who cast her own forearms and hands and mounted the resulting bronzes on black stone plinths for a park in Chicago, I’m going to make me some miniature forearms and hands of Fimo, some pink, some dark.  Maybe some striped.

(It was difficult to find images that would download because following these names will take you many mysterious and image-laden places, often protected by copyright.  Use your search engine.)

HOW SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT LOVE?

It’s so much easier to write about sex than about love. Someone asked me, “do you love him?” and I heard myself say, “For me, the concept of love has exploded. It is so many things that it is like a dancehall mirrorball and I interrogate it so much that it constantly turns, partly to escape the questions and partly to answer them.”

I started with “unconditional positive regard,” which means simply accepting the other person, as is, no assembly required, just take what comes. But that has sometimes made me into a patsy, a punching bag, someone who can’t defend herself for fear of the consequences. Is there such a thing as “negotiated positive regard?” The positive part seems irreducible, a matter of hope and the reason for staying. The regard part is an open eye, really seeing what is there, not just some imaginary projection.

What happens when, like a photo in developer in the darkroom, the forming details reveal something conventionally considered reprehensible -- stealing or cowardice or some other kind of cheating or victimizing others? Do you stay, hoping to be a good influence? Or do you rationalize about why they do it? Or do you leave with tears streaming down your face? Is vengeance justified? It seems as though, before any decision, one has to look out from that other person’s eyes, see the world as they see it. But they don’t want you to. They are afraid it will give you power over them. They have learned long ago that the only real safety is secrecy, hiddenness.

So then it becomes a matter of unrequited love, no longer an interaction but a yearning. A loneliness that is specific and focused. It’s not just wickedness that can put up the glass barrier -- any number of relationships are impossible due to circumstances. But this is a time when we have access to the faces and hearts of people that fifty years ago we would never have even known existed, and the strange is always seductive.

Maybe it helps to read about the modules in the brain that support bonding, attachment, recognition, faithfulness. They are separate in their whorls of function, quite unlike the lumped-up portmanteau of daily terminology. If one module is missing, the person recognizes his mother, but believes she is an impersonation -- not really mom at all, because there is no apparent feeling about her. If a different module is missing, one doesn’t recognize her familiar face, but reacts to it warmly anyway. If a certain kind of ground squirrel, which is normally faithful to its mate, is genomically altered by knocking out ONE GENE, it becomes promiscuous, racing through the grass after new partners. Stick the gene back in (it’s not that easy!) and Mr. Squirrel sleeps at home.

What about the envirome, one’s personal history? The happy little person who imprinted you in second grade with the memory of a freckled face and curly hair, so that ever after people who looked like that made you smile, isn’t that a sort of shaping love? But isn’t the stiff, thin, red-headed, brilliant person who refused you so that it made you obsess about a close relationship, if only to find out what they were about, doesn’t that stamp you with a unsolvable problem that you will try to explore again with every stiff, thin, red-headed, brilliant person? And as you grow, your ability to figure it out also grows so that maybe this time, this time . . .

I find that people are far too binary about who desires whom: you’re this or you’re that, you yearn for this which puts you in one category or that, which puts you in the other. But in fact, desire waxes and wanes, not just physical desire, but the emotional and mental wishes and attractions, both sides of the brain, one rushing eagerly and the other saying, “Watch out. There’s danger.” Which may only make the yearning more intense. So many stories hinge on bad timing, not just “Romeo and Juliet” or “Summer and Smoke.”

Unrequited love is a category all its own, bittersweet: sweet in the swelling emotion of regard for the beloved, bitter in the knowledge that it can’t go further, can’t complete. But there’s safety in that tumescence, never climaxing, avoidance of risk, of not finding out what one doesn’t want to know anyway -- not really. It’s not exhausted by reality, but always alive in a hidden place. Others need never know. You can get hooked on that.

The eye searches for pattern: a profile, the boss of a cheekbone, a gesture like the tilted lift of chin, or a way of squaring the shoulders, or a particular gait. The ear listens for a timbre or an idiosyncratic pronunciation, and can separate it from every other voice in the room. Love from a distance never gets to taste, to smell, and yet an actor on a screen who embodies the object of yearning can be more real than actual persons in the same room. Can this be healthy? Surely it’s natural and universal? A kind of emotional practice for reality -- if it will translate, if the gauzy unreality is not lost entirely.

Love in relationship becomes something else. Bonding, the extension of identity to include the other person so that “me” is “we.” The best relationships are partnering for a goal, in order to prevent eating each other up in craving and demands. Is there a memoryome? (They’re calling all the internal inventories of guiding data and evolutionary forces the science of “omics.” Genomics, proteomics.) Surely sharing intense and unique emotional experiences is one of the components of love.

Investigators of morality have discovered that the instinct of not having sex with family members, avoiding incest, is not a function of genomics, but rather the experience of growing up with them that triggers a module in the brain that makes you love them in a different way. Likewise, an unfamiliar man in the house with small children should not be trusted, because until he has spent the time with them to make him instinctively protective and curb his impatience.

Love of lesser beings, children/animals/dummies, too easily leads to trouble, control and even violence, so it becomes ownership and abuse. Then the private love between individuals becomes the business of society and authorities may step in. But let’s not end on a dark note. The love to look for is the one that opens doors, is full of gifts, puts one on tiptoe, makes one sing. Keeps one’s identity.

RED CLOUD THE EDUCATIONAL MULE

One of my big categories of bookmarks is “animals” which includes an assortment of websites, blogs and listservs. There’s a LOT of action of many kinds: vids, biology, environmental studies, people who work alongside dogs, and so on. Boria Sax keeps trying to get people to talk about mythology and stories. HSUS always has someone on board to make a pitch for their goal of a perfected and vegetarian world where the money rolls into their coffers. Through all of these venues twines and twirls a kind of philosophical kudzu that says not only are all prosperous white men evil, but also among all the animals, humans are the most evil and express this by confining chickens in close quarters and eating cows.

This seems to come from having no contact with animals. Our housing is so inappropriate and our incomes so tight that only the poor people can afford dogs, because in that situation they fend for themselves -- just like the people. Religiously, we’ve given up on the existence of angels, so we need dogs to assume their characteristics -- except for the wings, of course. Or sometimes, when people hesitate to have babies, the dogs and cats occupy that cradle niche. Whatever the forces and circumstances causing these strange theories, they overcome almost all points of view and even interfere in ranching, causing Oprah to stigmatize beef, which badly damaged sales.

“Yogi Bera once said that in theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” -- via Taleb Nassim, the “Black Swan” guy. My mountain man friend, Paul, sent along a story that is an excellent illustration. I post it here as a public service and a pleasure.

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I've probably told you all my Red Cloud stories including this one, but a recounting will fit in with your current observations.

David wasn't one of the original land partners at the Garden [a commune based in the forested Northwest], but he was an early arrival. He hailed from Utah where he'd had an organic grocery store or something like that. David was always a go-getter sort of guy. From sun up to sun down he was busy with one project or another and was pretty good at encouraging others to join him. For a long time we changed his name to Manual, for manual labor. He would have spelled it Manwell.

When the animal liberationists started showing up, he easily fell in with them, asserting that manpower was all we needed to get anything done. Red Cloud and Kyrat the horse were visible lightning bolts for those folks that didn't understand that these animals weren't necessarily beasts of burden kept only to do our bidding. They liked to work rather than stand around watching the world go by. Red Cloud was especially enthusiastic. All I had to do to demonstrate that was to produce his harness and lay it out on the ground. He'd come running and willingly step right up to be suited up. I think it made him feel like a superman mule or something. He loved to show off his strength and challenge himself.

Red Cloud came already sort of trained to harness and riding. Anything I learned about it came from him because I had no prior experience other than a bit of riding. The first logging contract I got with him was interesting because he not only taught us how it was done, but also trained up the horse who became his work mate.

We didn't have much luck teaming them together for the most part. The differences between horses and mules became evident right off the bat. When the mule would be hooked to a drag and get hung up on a tree, he'd look back and assess the problem, figuring out what it was going to take to get loose and generally succeeding. When the horse got hung up, he'd just wait patiently for a human to come figure out things for him and free him.

Anyway, back to David/Manual... after observing the animals obvious relish for hard work and not having much luck in motivating human powered labor, he undertook to move some house logs with Red Cloud. He'd watched me long enough to figure out how to hook up the harness, but he was rough with Red Cloud. I don't recall what set it off, but he got frustrated with something the mule did and hit him with a 2x4. Not a good way to get a mule's cooperation.

Red Cloud was a patient teacher though. He waited until David wasn't paying attention and bent over hooking up the traces. Red Cloud looked back, took careful aim and let him have it with both feet. Heh, I laughed my ass off with the mule after I assured David wasn't seriously hurt and told him it was payback for the 2x4 incident. David took it pretty well and decided to watch how I got the animals cooperation rather than forcing them to do something they didn't want to do. Even then it was a long time before he turned his back on Red Cloud after that.

Red Cloud's educational legacy lives on. David went on to become a millionaire potato farmer here and made a name for himself raising and training Halflinger draft horses on his organic farm.

We didn't have much for dependable rigs in those days, A 36 dodge pickup that I can't recall the name of and Gus. the two ton truck from the 40's. Oh, and my trusty International travelall, but I needed that for getting back and forth to work.

I meant to tell you about the van we collectively leased. Named it Blue Star, it was big enough to haul us all around in comfort when we left the place. which was a much better option than riding everyone in the back of Gus.

That van was always getting stuck somewhere on the property and Red Cloud and Kyrat were all the time having to harness up and yard it back out. Looked funny to have to pull around a brand new fancy van with a mule/horse team. That's probably why Red Cloud always thought himself supreme.

Addendum:

Remembered the name of that old dodge pickup while reading your blog post. Aggie. Odd that only the really old rigs earned names for themselves, except Blue Star. I think it only got named because we felt sorry for it. My travelall was Faith. It got it’s name for getting us from a tree planting contract somewhere around Libby, all the way to Kalispell with no gas. At least that’s what the gas gauge said.

WHAT CAN WE KNOW?

Mythic subjects like much of my writing -- things like mountains, shamans, Blackfeet, horses, religion, prairie -- have acquired such towering, overwhelming, seductive, popular images that they are almost impossible to address as a matter of simple daily experience. “How beauuuuutiful the mountains are!” they cry. “Oh, I LOOOOOVE shamans!” “Grizzlies -- surely you never meet them or you’d be dead!” You can see the National Geographic images, the Jungian claims, the dances of homage, on the retinas of their eyes. To put it frankly, they’re full of shit -- idea-shit, which is to say what is left of processed and reprocessed raw experience, the first-hand and personal experience of the original phenomenon. All their Indians wear beads and feathers, all their shamans provide enlightenment, all enlightenment is life-enhancing.

How can a person push back against all this? Mountains are life-threatening and storm-making. They really are. Shamans can be very dark and even murderers. Grizzlies are shy. Jungians can lose control of themselves and roll around on the carpet with their analysands just like any other fools. The National Geographic loves Photoshop.

Revising the stubborn pigeonholes of the mind is hard work, demanding liminal space -- that neuronal workspace in the brain -- that just isn’t available these days. It’s already preoccupied with preserving safety and getting laid, or at least appearing to. Maybe keeping one’s job, marriage and children alive. What new info gets into people is likely to enter as videos, so maybe I’m wasting time on print. Nevertheless, it’s what I can do. So I can only try to use stories to disentangle me from Laura Ingalls Wilder and Black Elk. Can I wear my mariposa shawl (iron-on butterflies) without having to cure cancer?

Turning this around to the other way, what huge concepts have I been addressing, trying to grasp what they really are -- with about as much success as if I were throwing my arms around cumulus clouds. I see it, it disperses. Among the most frustrating are “gay” and “AIDS.”

Gay is the easiest to grasp in some ways, though locally it doesn’t mean sexual orientation at all. In this place it means a “loser,” weak and effeminate. Which is ironic since women around here are pretty tough winners. “Gay” to the average person here means a male pedophile, one who preys on pre-pubescents or even pre-schoolers. They don’t think it’s possible to prey on adolescents. Nor do they think it’s possible for a woman to be either gay or a pedophile. Everything is about big, dominant, maybe violent, competent males who own a lot of machines and make a lot of money. That’s THEIR cumulus cloud. And they all think that anyone who talks about “gay” must BE “gay,” because only Indians are allowed to talk about Indians and only women are allowed to talk about women, so only people who are gay must be allowed to talk about gay. (No one speaks for these local guys themselves. They wouldn’t dare. There’s nothing to say anyway. And they’re inarticulate.)

I’m not gay but many of my long-term (like half-century) friends are. (I don’t mean lesbians. I hardly know any lesbians.) When it comes to “gay,” my experience is that there is no such category. Every person’s sexual life and identity is unique and people cannot be herded into groups. SHOULD not be herded into groups. Every relationship must be individually negotiated. You may not agree. I may change my mind.

HIV-AIDS is a quick label for a hugely complex, constantly shifting subject packed with economic and political forces. My reference points are Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Spotted Knapweed -- all about ecology, habitat loss, parasitic invasion, pandemics of little teeny code frags that become human plagues and sheets of pretty purple flower mist that kills every nearby plant. My prairie is not “Little House on the Prairie,” long-grass prairie of incredibly fertile deep soil yielding to the plow, profitable producer of corn and soybeans -- but rather the short grass prairie: alkaline, wind-scoured, blasted by ultraviolet sunlight. Thickly interwoven under the ground but if that’s broken it blows away, dry. Adapted for grazing by immense herds that scythed through, then left for years. Now wheat and barley in a weather-lucky year. If there’s money for chemicals and gas.

The point is that different environments create different phenomena, so that AIDS in Africa/AIDS in cities/AIDS in Alabama/AIDS in China, are entirely different. AIDS is not just the little bit of code that gets into protective white blood cells and prevents them from providing immunity. It is what that vulnerability thrusts the person against -- his or her own nature, community, work, and all the possibilities lost and gained in the process.

The arts are also mythic, seductive, and too rarely a matter of experience. Not enough word-smithing and paint-smearing and string-tuning and plaster casting. It took me a very long time to understand that the only way to learn to write is to get up every morning and write -- an hour, eight hours, twelve hours, whatever -- until the “writing” braincells in my head are crowding out everything else and the cats have to come and tug at my cuffs to make me open catfood cans. It’s not “talent” as though “talent” were a sort of golden cloud that settles on one’s head, a gift, a privilege, a crown.

When I write about mountains, shamans, grizzlies, Blackfeet, I’m writing about what’s right HERE in my daily life, that I’ve known for a long time. Granted that the grizzes I put my hands on were dead or even tanned, granted that the Blackfeet are mostly assimilated students and businesspeople, granted that the mountains are a nuisance if you’re trying to drive across them -- I know that. What I don’t know is how to make the rest of the world discard the foaming ephemera of fantasy that wraps their heads. It will do no good if they come here. Even if they move here intending to stay. Their minds have been greased with fantasy -- they can’t take hold. In a while they make some excuse to leave and we’re happy to see them go.

They come to something drastic, obdurate, potentially lethal, and therefore significant, and reduce it to a product suitable for nice people to buy for souvenirs: a refrigerator magnet that says “The Big Sky.” Then their children some day say, “Oh, yes. I know all about Montana. Every morning I ate my breakfast looking at a magnet that said “The Big Sky.”

When I was little, I ate my meals looking at the spine of a book shelved nearby that was called “Over the Top” by Empey, which I sometimes mocked as “Empty.” I finally read it. It was about trench warfare in WWI. What does any of us know about anything? Especially each other?