DON'T GET CLOSE

Once a woman in a congregation I served decided she was going to come live with me.  She claimed that because I talked about myself in sermons, that was an invitation, so she was only accepting something I proposed.  Even after I had left the ministry and returned to Montana, she clung to the idea.  Of course it was fantasy and of course she knew that, way down deep.  What she really wanted was not a lover but a mom: safety.  I think after her own kids grew up, she figured it out.  I don’t want a lover, a mom, or kids.  I want to belong to myself.

How is that justified in a world that wants to know all about each other, revelation after revelation, none of them particularly useful?  Some of them not even interesting.  This is a double valence:  knowing others vs being known.  One of the reasons for keeping one’s distance is to prevent hurting other people, and the obvious converse is keeping people from hurting “me”.  Sometimes people will come close because they believe you can protect yourself or they don’t believe they really have the power to hurt.  And sometimes that’s because they have been very badly hurt in the past, as long ago as childhood.  Both by authorities and by peers and even by, well, victims.  Even children can do damage.  Retaliate.  Rat you out.

I’ve been watching Law & Order SVU a long time.  I’m up to year 9 now in what is a 14 year sequence so far.  (The series is still running.)  I’ve just become aware that there is a Russian version, which is not quite available yet.  The series has a life of its own, but I don’t read about the kind of conventions that, say, Star Trek has evoked.  The best of the programs are intense and private -- not so much erotic as presenting puzzles.  I mean, Olivia has gone to high-necked blouses at least some of the time, while Elliot now wears the occasional muscle shirt -- both have splendid bodies.  Munch still has to keep up the side for geeks.  Very often the plots slide up and down the range between “enfold me” and “I hate you,” discarding safety on both ends.

In the old tribal or village lives there were only a few hundred people to deal with, half of them children and most of the rest assigned formal roles.  The opportunities for exploring each other as we do at college or military service or in big cities just didn’t exist.  The opportunity to do online “social networking” didn’t exist.  There’s a lot to worry about regarding “hooking up,” online stalking, and the invasion of privacy when so much is stored in cloud databases.  There are too few matchmaking Yentas to interface.

We do have this category of people who are in the “helping professions,” often covertly something like cops, trying to force compliance with social expectations.  Some are pretty good at setting their clients free and others can’t even manage their own lives.  “Unhealed Healer Syndrome,” the attempt to help others in order to avoid one’s own difficulties, was brilliantly explored in the series called “In Treatment.”  There are whole categories of people who are sent to “anger management workshops” and “sexual addict rehabilitation” though no one understands whether it works or will even release statistics about what succeeds -- whatever success is.

We know there are tight connections among poverty, sex, work, slavery, trafficking and public health but there are STILL no well-developed legal or political structures or assumptions that deal with them.  Everything has shifted, bulged.  So far we haven’t even got the social permission to make accurate numbers public, much less figure out what they mean or allocate the funds to deal with them.  Anyway, all of us understandably worry that therapists and researchers will play “Lucy-and-the-Football” with us.  Maybe you’re old enough to remember that notorious episode of “Soap” in which a friendly therapist coaxes a gay man to disclose his secret and then leaps to his feet in a crowded lunchroom to shout out his disgust and contempt for anyone so perverse.  Self-appointed “enforcers” can be killers.

Blogging is right out in the open.  Once in a long time someone will materialize from that world and so far, for me, the results have been happy.  One couple who live close enough to visit once in a long while are very welcome and helpful.  Another person has family connections in town.  Of course, the whole reservation has ties to my life some way or other, even if only indirectly, and as more of them come online we make contact.  People from long ago, like the AK acting students or even my eighth grade class, are out there.

A very few people stir up my old yearning for someone who really understands and accepts me and for whom I can return the favor.  (Do not think you are one of them!  You’re NOT!)  But if they turned up on my doorstep, I would be terrified:  afraid they were different than I had imagined, afraid they would find me not at all what they expected, and -- most of all -- terrified that I would have to make room for them in my ordinary life or have to give up my ordinary life in some way -- maybe moving.  This is always reciprocal.  And it is always shadowed by suspicion because even the people you know best, love most, can turn out to have unsuspected sides in different circumstances.

But if you don’t want to gamble, you can’t really play cards.  You’re restricted to being a voyeur.  What fun is that?  If you’re a writer, fun doesn’t come into it.  Writing is the ultimate fetish, the part that stands for the whole and finally replaces it, so that one would rather watch and write than waste time on what people call “having a life.”

As far as I know, no one is writing about me.  When I entered the ministry there was the usual psych interview/report rigamarole and I read them -- sometimes because I was offered the chance and sometimes covertly.  It’s not so much that they got facts wrong (they did) but that they had no insight.  Surfaces are safe.  Nothing is more unsafe than Sacred Ground.

I wrote about Bob Scriver as honestly as I could.  (“Bronze Inside and Out,” available through Amazon, etc.)  It was only after the book was published that the deepest secrets were told to me, and only to prove that I didn’t know everything.  But who ever knows everything?  Why do we need to?  Writing about Bob was one way to stay connected and I have always cherished that connection.  I won’t give it up.

COME OVER HERE

How do we get information on the level of deep insights across to another person?  I’m talking about paradigm shift, the deep changes in the framework assumptions that are part of identity and therefore protected from change.  We know it happens -- people “convert,” they “realize,” they “transform.”  But most of the time this is because of something they didn’t ask for: war, terrible loss, a shift in the environment that is huge.  The really painful experiences seem to be very effective in what is sometimes called “consciousness raising,” which is “seeing” something differently, finally.   It was a phrase used a lot when women were trying to get down off their pedestals in the last wave of feminism.  New results in George Valliant’s longitudinal study of Harvard men shows that good things can cause change in basic thinking.  Several men were “redeemed” by happy marriages.  For them the world seemed to change, and -- in fact -- it did, because their happiness made them interact with it differently.  Reality is always an interaction.  We evoke the world.  What we expect is what we get.

As I work with the Alvina Krause notes about teaching acting, I see that many of them are simply descriptions of concepts that need to be internalized and accounts of improvisations or “exercises” that will get the person to “own” the skill.  Sometimes they don’t KNOW the skill, can’t even recognize it in others, much less feel it in themselves.  The success of teaching/directing the play is determined by the resourcefulness of that lead person in getting the concept across, but it is apparent again and again that explanations in words just don’t do the job.  So a person too dependent on words might be asked to act a scene without speaking.  Someone wooden might be asked to dance their action.   These exercises might appear idiotic and the prospective actors who had previously envisioned acting as an easy way to fame and fortune might balk.  If they want the job badly enough, they will persist -- not only growing new skills, but also shifting their paradigm of acting life.  Maybe changing their values in the process.

Empathy is a way to shift paradigms or at least stereotypes and stigmas, Social change can result from an effective play or novel that “puts a spin” on prejudice against homosexuals (“Tea and Sympathy”) or cruelty to animals (“Black Beauty”) or slavery (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”)  If the stories are only emotional outbursts against unfairness or immorality, they will not be effective, but if they can enlist the empathy of the audience, it is as though they vicariously lived through the experience and were changed by it.

Lesser realizations aimed as loosening up the imagination might result from pretending you’re a tree or an animal as some acting teachers require.  But much greater changes might result at a far deeper level if a Gestalt psychologist asked you to sit in a chair across from a second, empty chair, and to talk to an imagined person from the past who haunts you so that you can “see” them and take away their power.  Then you pretend you are the person, by changing chairs, and try to respond.  With luck insightful people who watch will help process the emotions and convictions that usually come to the surface.

What I am after with my focus on liturgy is the kind of shifts that cause people to surrender old deep cosmic frameworks in order to receive new ones.  (The dominance and privilege of Christianity, for instance, given over to a shared understanding of other ways or even returned to the original message of Jesus.)  Liturgy can confirm the validity and intensity of commitment to a continuing faith.  AND it should also support the state one endures when between those deep frameworks: the state of doubt and seeking.  In this limbo the “holding community” is vital so that the daily routine of maintenance can go on getting the person through life.   It’s a good time for a retreat.  Week-long conferences that really get into the depths of people may take two more weeks for assimilation.

The hardest situation is when someone’s survival has depended upon blocking all new information, when there is simply no energy to spare for processing.  Again, a “holding community” or even a “holding person” can help, but often this kind of situation has taught the individual NEVER to let anyone hold them.  Never to confide, never to trust, never to expect anything but betrayal and misunderstanding, to always maintain total control.  In such situations, trying to model by confiding incidents from one’s own life will backfire into accusations of only being concerned with the listener’s own selfish life.  The internalized voices that have provided past protection will shout, “Dependency!  Needy!  Childish!!”  “They’re a drain -- lose ‘em!!”  Deep abuse and violation will leave their imprint in the very muscles so the challenged person is aching, suffocating, crushed -- it’s not imagination, it’s not acting, it’s the reality returning.

This is so deep in the mammalian brain that a person who works with animals sometimes comes up against it and has to devise little strategies to build trust and relationship.  Usually, this is done by getting into the creature’s mind, using one’s own empathy of what it means to be an abused dog or a terrified horse.  Familiarity, reassurance, and quite real physical holding will help.  But one can be bitten.

With humans, as a “holding person” gets close, the relationship may trigger a past buried relationship.  Freud called this a transference and suggested it usually went back to childhood, an old deep pattern.  He also found it useful as a map to the deep structural framework of the identity.  He spent less time figuring out how the “holding person’s” resulting transference of their own deep structures might be helpful in diagnosis.  The helper may find them hard to manage which is why an analyst needs a training analysis.

In some kinds of theatre, certainly the kind of scripted realistic plays that AK most often directed, these dynamics are at the heart of the tale, embedded in a culture or a situation that exposes inhuman maladaptions or even the impossibility of ever finding a reconciliation of issues.  Who can reconcile Oedipus?  Why should it be done?  But surely everyone would like to reduce the burden of old assumptions and stereotypes so as to find with joy that their actions do indeed respond to their intentions.

MORAL AUTOIMMUNITY

This is going to be a highly metaphorical essay (what other kind do I write?) comparing human morality to the human body’s immunity system.  I would justify this by observing that social systems often mimic physical systems.  After all, a human body is a colony of eurkaryotes that have developed in highly specialized ways.

When intruders get into the body, white blood cells are assigned the duty of getting rid of them -- by eating them!  First engulfing them, then digesting them.  They learn to recognize intruders by little signs on their skins, differently shaped molecules sticking out from the skins of all cells.  The white blood cell makes a key that fits the cell’s lock.  The white blood cells keep those keys in case of needing them again.

Sometimes cells of the person’s own body go rogue and begin to over-replicate (cancer) or malfunction.  White blood cells clean them out, too, Assuming all goes well.  Sometimes it doesn’t work.  Maybe the white blood cells are disabled somehow or they can’t seem to make a key that will fit the lock.  HIV appears to infect the white blood cells themselves so that the guardians die.  On the other hand, the white blood cells may go crazy and become terrorists, attacking the cells of the body that are perfectly healthy.  We call that an autoimmune disorder.

Society at large has similar sorts of specialized groups that repel intruders and keep order by suppressing the damaging criminals -- sometimes by killing them and sometimes by confining them.  (Rarely by eating them in a direct way, though they might be entities that suck their sustenance.)  And those polities that are hypervigilant may be deranged if the culture changes too quickly so that they can’t tell an intruder from a creator.  They begin to erode and destroy what they were meant to protect.  Though I do see the reality of terrorists and I worry a LOT about the private corporate armies around the planet, I don’t think we’ve put enough thought into the right-wing Taliban-like forces in our society that erode our energy, health and growth by constantly trying to damage or even kill anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of proper order.  Part of the problem is that they only see the skin of the cell rather than its contents and never register that they need to try a key.

But there is another way I want to look at the metaphor and that’s through the eyes of the Internal Family Systems counseling assumptions.  The idea is that all of us have inside the voices and personalities of our families and friends, esp. the ones we knew earliest.  This isn’t fancy stuff like ids and egos that Freud suggested, but it is parallel.  In there is the over-strict grandmother, the indulgent aunt, the crazy old uncle, the bully brother, the needy sister.  The worst are the voices of abusers, because with them comes the muscle-memory of beating and violation, as painful as ever. 

Not all the voices are conscious.  They sometimes need an accepting listener to get them up to where they can be recognized for what they are and gradually erased or countered.  According to the IFS people www.selfleadership.org , the inner voices fall into three categories:  those that  protect you, those that try to “straighten you up,” and those that are yourself at various stages and situations.  Each of the three categories can be multiple. 

It’s easy to understand that the voices that are supposed to be guiding a person (“uh, oh, don’t do THAT”) and the ones that are “autoimmune” (“you little bastard, I’m gonna kill you!”), will cause the huddled group of inner survivors to close down, hide, and become wounded.  This will be part of one’s deepest inner assumptions about life, even deeper than the rules of the culture that say uncountable (and unaccountable) things about how people must act.

The result of autoimmune inner-voice systems is deadly.  This form of thinking came out of working with women who were starving themselves to death.  They were so convinced that they were worthless that they tried to purify themselves down to being bones.   The culture supports this with skeletal Paris models.  The therapist finally asked one woman if he could speak to the inner person who was so frightened -- and he could!  

Thinking about one’s inner voices this way can account for how a person can be punishing and critical in one situation, and then turn around to be generous and protective in another.  Or how people can turn against themselves.   It depends on which voice has their ear.  The situation can be the trigger and this election has touched off every maladjusted autoimmune opinionator in the country (“Never trust a black man-- they’re not like us.”  “And his poor dog up there on the roof of the car, so scared that he shat down the rear window!”)

The question is who is listening to this cacophony in our whole nation and why aren’t we listening to each other?  Indeed, why aren’t we listening to ourselves -- not us but the voices we carry around in us?  “You’re taking up too much room.  Why are you so selfish?  Why can’t you ever finish what you start?  No one will ever marry you.”  That’s my mother.  What’s interesting is that these voices are repetitions of the voices she heard from HER mother.  Her mother got them from a hypercritical step-mother.  They’re memes.  Sometimes as powerful as genes.

Many of them are based on times that don’t exist anymore, assumptions that have been discredited, desires that were unworthy in the first place.  So why do I still hear my mother’s voice every time I sit down to sew or when I neglect my kitchen.  (She did those things, too.)  One of the pleasant things about academic work is that she can’t follow -- the only voices are from seminary and since I was forty by that time, they didn’t exactly go to my heart.  (Seminary is meant for “nice” young men.)   The main one was “if you REALLY want to be a minister, you’ll do what I say.”  But what they said was “don’t make trouble.”  This is an Human Immunological Deficiency Voice that renders people powerless to defend themselves.  

One from my student teaching is still with me:  my supervisor said,  “You’re a lot smarter than you look.”  He meant it to throw me off base.  He had a deep, rich, resonant voice -- he sometimes answered the phone by saying,  “This is GOD speaking,” and one tended to believe him.   Over the years I’ve turned to his voice and argued with it.  “Ah, but that can be an advantage, Brer Fox!  It’s an excellent disguise for a guerrilla thinker.”  God is SUCH a fox.  But rabbits have their defenses.

OPPOSING SLINGS & ARROWS

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on out there in the larger culture, but I’m getting a lot of hits to an old post called “Adult Oppositional Defiance Disorder.”  It’s not supposed to be possible for adults to have this.  In kids it means the incorrigible ones who will face you down no matter what you do to them.  This is assumed to be bad and to justify forceful punishment.  In adults it just marks you as a sociopath and to some people every nonconformity is the product of sociopathy.  In other words, fight authority and you’re out.  (Or jailed.)

I depend on the blogger who posts as therawness.com or therawness.tumblr.com to keep me up to date on this stuff.  He’s been discussing “grandiose narcissism.”  Here’s his definition:  The types of things drug addicts and alcoholics are driven to do for their substance of choice (lie, steal, betray, etc.), are the exact things a narcissist will do to get narcissistic supply.  In fact, one of the best ways to undestand how narcissists work is to study drug and alcohol addiction. This is because all narcissists are addicts (for narcissistic supply), and all addicts are narcissists (addiction makes people self-centered and lose empathy). Much of what I’ve learned about personality disorders came from reading about drug and alcohol addiction and mentally replacing the words “addict” and “alcoholic” with “narcissist” and the words “alcohol” and “drugs” with “narcissistic supply.”

But that’s not the whole story.  For every narcissist -- especially the kind who are grandiose enough to be called geniuses -- there is at least one co-dependent, someone who attaches by supplying the narcissist’s praise.  This is really dangerous territory because it is so culturally embedded that almost everyone can catch themselves in one role or the other -- and well-rewarded for it.

When I was working on my bio of Bob Scriver ten years ago, I went exploring the concept and found  http://samvak.tripod.com/  written by Vaknin who is one and unabashedly defiant about it.  Why shouldn't he be?  It’s so USEFUL !!  Sam goes over this idea with so much energy and verve that a person is soon persuaded. He’s against abuse.  But that’s YOUR problem, isn’t it?   I mean, who else is THERE?  So deal with it.  He has lots of advice about how.  The trouble is that there are so many variations on the theme, there is such a mix of good, bad and ugly, that just having a label for it is not all that helpful.  Anyway, good old Sam (Originally Schmuel  -- his mother is so proud!) was more fun before he turned himself into a business.  Now “Narcissism R Samvak.”

When I google “grandiose narcissism” I get “Obama.”  Seems to me that Bill Clinton was also accused (it IS an accusation).  But if you’re the President of the USA, that by definition IS grand, forget the suffix.  As for narcissism, Obama’s symptom is that he is aloof, private, cool -- while Clinton’s was that he was gregarious, public, took up too much room.  What that tells me is that “narcissism” is whatever is shutting out the person using the term, which I suppose is Republicans in both these cases, which -- using Freud’s idea of “projection” (was it Freud?) means that one sees in others what is a denied feature of one’s own self -- meaning that it is Repubs who are Grandiosely Narcissistic.  The Grand Old Party.

Last night I watched “Welcome to Sarajevo.”  It make s pretty good case study.  Which is the grandiose narcissist?   The megalomaniac tyrant war criminal?  Oh, yeah.  He’s a TOXIC grandiose narcissist!   But what about the narcissism of the people who could not be bombed into leaving Sarajevo because they loved their city and were determined to save it as THEIRS, a grandiose response if there ever was one since they had no means of resistance.  

Among the journalists which was the greater narcissism, the Woody Harrelson character who walks down the street to pull the victim of a sniper into a church, exposing himself to death but knowing that the act is being filmed by his fellow journalists, or the journalists who protected their own lives by merely filming?  The journalists themselves couldn’t agree about it in the movie.

Isn’t it narcissistic to pick out one child whom one cares about and adopt her to give her a new life?  Isn’t that pretty grandiose?  Are the only journalists NOT being grandiose narcissists the ones operating cameras, totally absorbed in capturing images?  How grandiosely narcissistic to decide to make a movie about Sarajevo, a city the world decided not to save !  How GN is it to stand up in a high place in order to play an exquisite and much-loved piece of music, assuming it will comfort people?

I guess my point of view is clear.  GN is not a bad thing necessarily when it gives people the focus and energy to be productive, oppositional, protective of what they love.  The trouble comes from toxicity and that in itself depends on the uses made of other people.

Recovering co-dependent that I am (not very recovered, actually, but at least far more conscious), I do see the need to draw the line against abuse, but I also see the great difficulty of defining abuse.  Physical striking or anything else that takes a person to an emergency room is over the line.  All the passive aggressive stuff that co-dependents are so good at -- Impatient comments, ignoring, accusations, promises not kept, flattery, disclosing secrets -- can be abuse, vengeance for abuse, or an excuse for more abuse.  Toxic.

How does a person go close to grandiose narcissistic achievers who have become famous and admired?  Or what about the same sort of person with the same effectiveness and genius but who is scorned by the general public?  That’s one breach in my armor.  

Another is the stubborn belief that if people are properly explained, they will be understood, so that I can become an instrument in that cause.  (I am a camera?)  People read the bio of Bob Scriver expecting it to be a hagiography of a “great man.”  But because I -- in the manner of the New Journalist -- included myself in order to provide context, some people were scornful.  “I didn’t expect it to be so much about YOU,” they said.  Writers who intrude themselves are breaking up the fantasy of the relationship between the reader and the grand genius of the subject.  How narcissistic.  How co-dependent.

Double-binds and ambiguity all the way, baby.  Nothing is more addictive.  The brain just can’t leave it alone.  Neither can the public stalkers, accusers, apologists, scribblers.  Ask Shakespeare.

CONFABULATION

Confabulation is a term invented by psychologists to describe stories told by persons “that inaccurately describe history, background, and present situations. Confabulation is considered ‘honest lying,’ but is distinct from lying because there is typically no intent to deceive and the individual is unaware that their information is false.” Sometimes it is an attempt to account for information that cannot be assimilated, like the woman who told the psychologist in his office that she was at home. Her brain mechanism for determining where she was had been damaged. When he asked her why there was a row of elevators outside his office (she came up in one), she said, “Why, doctor, you wouldn’t believe how much it cost to have those installed!”

My brother, who was brain-damaged, could not get welfare because when the interviewer asked him about his work (he had been an MFA metalsmith), he told her he was an undercover agent for the FBI working to reveal the drug use of a specific judge. When she pressed him about this, he said he was a sworn deputy and couldn’t tell her anything. For a while this woman was going to have him arrested for impersonating a law officer. He was also called for jury duty but didn’t make the final panel. He told us it was because the lawyer slapped a witness in the face.

Lately there have been huge controversies over writers exaggerating either exploits or suffering, with the cynical assumption being that they were lying in order to make a personal profit. They were the “cons” in confabulation. But fabulizing is at the heart of writing. We all love Garrison Keillor’s preposterous scenarios which are really an excuse for sound effects. Holly Black, author of Black Heart and the Spiderwick Chronicles, writes YA fantasy in which her hero is a con artist. She says the most important thing she learned from writing about con artists is that writers are all con artists. “And all readers are their marks. Not all readers, of course: just the right readers. . . The mark has to want to be conned.”

Much depends upon the purpose of the con, of course. Religious confabulation (“God is watching you!”) is meant to be taken as literal so as to encourage good behavior (and conscientious tithing) among the faithful. Political confabulation is meant to persuade voters. Journalistic confabulation is meant to demonstrate the superior insight and detective skills of the reporter, while increasing the circulation of the newspaper with a dimension of scandal. Kid confabulation is meant to cover for incidents that would get them into trouble. Persons who are abused confabulate to others outside the family out of shame and to their abusers out of fear. Sherazade confabulated to save her life.

Videos reveal that when people were interviewed, the interviewer often unconsciously gave clues about the answer they wanted, triggering the confabulation. This had tragic results in the hysterical cases of suspected pre-school abuse a few years ago that had children reporting satanic rituals and horrific sexual abuse, though they barely understood what those might be. Psychologists design clever experiments to trick people into confabulating, in hopes of discovering what it is the brain does -- under our conscious monitoring. Sometimes, of course, startling things are quite true. Whatever that is.

For a while, when research about the memory organ, the hippocampus, it appeared that fMRI’s could distinguish “true” memories from fabulized memories even if the remembering person couldn’t tell the difference. The clue was supposed to be whether the brain pulled up sense memories, which showed on the instrument. It turned out to be a false promise, something like believing that hypnotism would reveal the truth, though hypnotism subjects are notoriously susceptible to suggestion. It’s well-known that memories that seem real can be derived from familiar photographs.

“Confabulated memories of all types most often occur in autobiographical memory, and are indicative of a complicated and intricate process that can be led astray at any point during encoding, storage, or recall of a memory. This type of confabulation is commonly seen in Korsakoff's syndrome, a neurological disorder caused by a lack of thiamine (vitamin B1) in the brain. Its onset is linked to chronic alcohol abuse and/or severe malnutrition.” (This is from Wikipedia which does not report the authors of entries, so we are forced to assume their qualifications. We do not know whether they are confabulating.)

What we know about secretive underground groups or foreign cultures is highly shaped by fictive imagining. When I was an animal control officer in the Seventies, an old man claimed that the neighbors’ barking dog annoyed him. He agreed to take this charge to court, where it became apparent that he was nearly stone deaf, so his testimony was discredited. In the process of testifying, he told a long elaborate story about the marriage of the young couple who owned the dog, claiming that the woman was abused. It turned out to be the plot of a soap opera he watched regularly. He wasn’t lying, but that vivid media story had filled the gaps in what he knew about his neighbors.

So let’s go back to Holly Black saying that a person conned by fabulizing has to WANT to be conned. Maybe that suggests why people who believe a story become very angry when it is proven inaccurate. Maybe they are reacting to more than just being fooled. There’s something about a need to control, to be in charge, to trust their judgment, to feel virtuous, that makes them over-react. New facts may discredit their judgment in hiring or rewarding someone, let alone believing a wild tale that shows them there are huge areas of reality they really don’t understand. We insist on a distinction between “journalism” (which is supposed to be a “gotcha” that reveals the “facts”) and fiction which is supposed to be unconfined, and yet fiction often gets to human truths that are much deeper than anything journalists reveal. I take it that’s what Oprah calls “truthiness.”

To tell you the truth, I have never read a story about me and mine written by a journalist that got all the facts right, even the spelling of names. One woman in the Sixties reported that Bob made his sculptures from “Petrolane” (the name of the energy company) instead of “plasticine” (a form of clay) and then baked them directly. (They would burst into flame -- plasticine is oil-based.) Maybe she thought explaining molds was too hard, or maybe she thought molds were cheating and so she should hide them, or maybe someone had explained what the ideal material would be. (It was invented later.) Maybe “no journalist ever got the facts right” is an exaggeration. Is that a lie?

This blog post cannot do very much beyond sticking a flag in a dilemma where we are flooded with information, unsorted, variously motivated, often seemingly fabulous, and yet sometimes a real truth that we need to hear but just don’t want to. Follow your heart, but question it closely.

RAW NARCISSISM

I don’t sign up for RSS on many blogs but one I’ve kept up with since I was reading 2blowhards years ago is “the rawness.” (http://therawness.com) As I understand it -- and I may be way off base because I don’t really know -- this is written in New York City by a half-Haitian (black, I guess) man addressing the many many young and youngish men trying to make it in the city. They are obsessed with “game” and though they seem on the surface to mean by that scoring with women, in fact this guy (who signs himself “T” or Ricky Raw) gives advice about “human nature” and how to be a better person. He’s pretty damn solid.

The big recent topic? Narcissism. Both in terms of those alpha guys who elbow a milder man away from the bar and in terms of the histrionic female vampires who can eat a man alive and unpeeled. The main argument of the moment is that people learn narcissism from narcissistic parents -- too busy, too self-absorbed, too incompetent -- to raise the children they have been too narcissistic to prevent having. What this teaches the kids is to look out for themselves (replicating narcissism), although sometimes with a crippled, needy parent, they end up being sucked into taking care of them. Then they are a “parentified child” or “co-dependent,” always more comfortable when taking care of someone. Narcissism and codependence are reciprocal, often playing off against each other and leading to grandiosity, control issues, and other miserable stuff like borderline personality disorders. But when a narcissist finds a codependent and they’re a good fit -- hey, it’s intense. And some people really want that. Others do not.

This blogger-man reads book after book and is shrewd and dependable in his opinions of them. He’s not the male equivalent of a Helen Gurley Brown “Sex in the City” game player, but rather someone looking for the real thing: trustworthy and lasting relationships that support a meaningful life. I have three responses.

One of my tests is whether these ideas work with same sex relationships. I think that narcissism/codependency dysfunctions do indeed work as useful concepts in that context and I can think of examples among the people I know. Another of my tests is whether these ideas are a useful way to think in terms of ministry relationships and, again, I find that they are. A third context is in parent/child relationships and in this case the dynamics of identity formation are very relevant. The whole point of the generational boundary -- that the party with greater power and control be careful to protect the vulnerable instead of using them for their own ends -- is illuminated clearly.

Going back to the first context, let’s look at Yves St. Laurent (the Paris fashion designer) and Pierre Bergé (his partner in business and at home), so I can talk about same-sex relationships without getting into trouble. (When you look up Valier on one of those community analysis websites, they will tell you there are NO gay or lesbian couples here. How do they know??) So -- in terms of the Paris fashion world, this was a long and productive partnership. The two men were not “equal” -- one could argue that St. Laurent was a child while Bergé was the adult, but it was equally true that St. Laurent was creative in a way that Bergé was not. They had an asymmetrical but reciprocal relationship. Probably you could say that St. Laurent was a narcissist and Bergé was co-dependent, an enabler. It worked because it WAS about work and I believe that’s a key stabilizer. In all these discussions of “game” there is never a hint of the people involved collaborating to do something they feel passionately about. Everything is devoted to the two people’s relationship. Everything is face-to-face instead of side-by-side. Each other is the only thing they feel passionately about. A major and consuming mistake IMHO.

In the best of conventional worlds, the “something” the two adults would feel passionately about protecting and growing would be children. Conservatives feel this is the point of sexual relationship. But two adults could also join in other enterprises, like business, arts, a cause of some kind, a garden, military life, a ranch, or public service. The goal needs to be something compelling enough to supply the discipline capable of curbing the excesses of grandiose narcissism and toxic enabling. In my experience, men are better at finding this uberprinciple than women are, but only slightly. And it is a mistake to let the guiding cause justify excesses of power. A complexification in the case of two same-sex people is the stigma. If there is enough money or fame, the stigma is erased, but not the curiosity, unless people have seen enough, as in a liberal community.

Next we get into the accepted stereotype of the charismatic and admired church leader and his little supporting hen of a preacher’s wife, uncomplainingly raising the children alone and overlooking insults and trespasses for the sake of the greater good. Female ministers walk into a confusing mix of requirements based on gender stereotypes instead of practical roles. (Is she Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, or Ingrid Bergman playing a nun?) Ministers attract codependent people in droves, both genders, not always based on sex. If these needy people are frustrated, they can be vengeful. If the religious conviction is strong enough to be a governing discipline, that helps.

Back to the parent/child cathexis: how does one wean a child from the natural dependence of babyhood in an emotionally healthy way? First of all, attention must be paid to the child. Second, a child is not a puppet and must be trusted to do his or her own growing in his or her own way but without letting him or her play in traffic. Third, listen to the stories. The great strength of “The Rawness” is that he offers story after story. Mostly, in resilient families, the members go in and out of narcissism and co-dependence, learning as they go where the balance is and how to feel it. Every kid is different, times are different, unexpected things happen. Either it’s fascinating and increases the amount of love, or everyone goes into lockdown and gets drunk, or there’s some variation in between. Hopefully without violence.

And hopefully these ideas are interesting and useful enough to avoid all the pointless obsessing about “stress.” There’s too much “game” in stress, mostly coming from pharmaceutical companies. It gets very boring.

NODDING AT STAGES OF LOVE

There’s been a challenge to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of dying which have been gospel dogma for decades. The heretics say that not everyone grieves in the same way and it depends upon the circumstance anyway and, in fact, once the original documents are investigated, it turns out she was talking about GRIEVING, not dying. This sort of thing happens all the time. A big strong theory, everyone signs up to it, courses are designed, it’s taken as fact, then some day someone looks at it closely or from a different angle and the whole thing falls apart. That’s Kuhn’s classic paradigm shift or something like it -- because Kuhn’s theory hasn’t come apart yet but it might.

So I thought I’d whip up some stages to think about, with the understanding that they’ll fall apart some day when the fatal flaw becomes apparent.

These are degrees of relationship from meeting to fusion.

0. There’s evidently a stage called “meet and greet” which means more or less random face-to-face contact. A handshake, if that. Maybe there’s such a thing as online “m&g” which would omit physical contact. In fact, one of the interesting questions is how much physical contact is involved at every stage. So I’m going to exclude physical stuff (sex) on grounds that it complicates everything and might have a whole set of stages of its own, though today’s young ‘uns seem to think of “hooking up” as a one-stage event. Maybe a one-event stage.

1. Affinity. This is the one that the dating services like. Some believe in sociology: class, education, ethnic affiliations, etc. An interesting but here ruled-out (because it’s physical) theory is that people can be sorted by their immune systems (what about “lack of”) or by pheromones. The first time I ran across this was as a teen when I read a story about an Italian “stallion” who kept a kerchief in his arm pit where it soaked up his natural perfume which overwhelmed women with desire. But it’s really more like the kind of coincidental similarities between myself and a new correspondent who is a small-congregation minister, lives where my grandparents homesteaded in the Twenties, took classes at the U of Chicago from the same profs who impressed me, uses object-relations psych theory, and loves writing as much as I do. He’s younger and married, so that’s not like me but quite like most of my other fav correspondents.

The stage theory that he likes was developed by a woman I’d never heard of: “Nel Noddings.” http://www.infed.org/thinkers/noddings.htm School is her church; the dinner table is her communion. She begins with the care she has received from others, which begins with attentiveness. Those who loved Carol Gilligan’s thought will like this. Those who run screaming when they think of the kind of bossy, possessive moms that Philip Wylie wrote about in the Fifties will leave the area. Me, too.

C.S. Lewis said that the best friends are those who disagree with you on the same subjects -- that is, same affinities, different takes. I like that.

2. Affection: My big dirty dog theory leads us from Noddings to affection. The idea is that if there is a big old dirty dog hanging around and you feed it because it is starving and then it comes to you when it’s hungry, it stops being a generic dog and becomes “your” dog for which you have concern because you know it. I’ve always been struck by someone’s observation that goats “fall in love” with whomever nurses off them. Dunno if it’s true. But this is physical. To retreat back into my head, I will say that I develop considerable affection for some blogs and books, esp. if I benefit from them and visit regularly. Maybe this is the same as “attachment,” which can be approached as a psychological phenomenon.

3. Intimacy: I guess this is where the issue of reciprocity arises. Intimacy requires access and access must be granted. I would rule out a one-sided relationship in which only one person does all the disclosing and accommodating. The worst thing about gender inequality (maybe) is that a relationship of equal reciprocity is difficult if not impossible. Even if the stronger party is protective and adoring, it’s never going to be more than a parent/child relationship. But isn’t that intimate? I’m not convinced.

At the other extreme is the intense temporary intimacy of some situations, what we might call “trapped-in-the-elevator” or foxhole syndrome. I mean, a desperate common goal, strong understanding and cooperation, can lead to intimacy. But maybe this is because of adrenaline and therefore is physical. Some similarity to successful sex, we’re told. (NOT unsuccessful sex.)

4. Love: People have gotten so evasive about this that they use a heart: “I heart you.” Or they are so profligate that they use it as a one-size-fits-all term. "I love peas." So what term do you use when you don’t just admire or enjoy or want to be near, but really have a strong, abiding, protective, yearning, deep delight in someone not part of your family? Falling-in-love love. Romantic, sacrificial, completely faithful love?

5. Bonding: At some point two people become one. Both my grandparent sets were like this. Not my “parent set.” The grands were a team, never unfaithful, devoted, mindful. This may have had something to do with economics as well as parenting, their task in common. When one of the pair died, the other was nearly unhinged, lost, mapless. When my father died, we were relieved.

6. Inseparability: Bonding seems to have a lot to do with being physically together as marital pairs have more usually been when both worked together. Now, many simply can’t afford to be inseparable, especially in upper classes where professions are practiced in such a peripatetic way. Even if the official home is in one place, one’s duties may be all over the planet.

But there still is such a thing as emotional inseparability and there are many ways of staying in contact so that one doesn’t drift away, changed by a different set of circumstances. It just takes intention and attention. I wonder what Nel Noddings, who rised ten children and was married for roughly fifty years, thinks of this. I'll have to read more. We may have useful differences in our attention to love.

FRONTIER SADISM

Don’t go thinkin’ I take a hostile attitude towards Westerns. I was born in 1939 -- I keep reminding people -- so I grew up with WWII, the movie combat and Western films, and then the network Western series, all of which I see as continuous. In those years I was thoroughly invested in the heroism, the patriotism, the romantic understanding of the land, and all the other leathery equipage wrapped around the steel of pistols and bayonets. But then in college I saw “The Seventh Seal” and recognized the same morality play of the knight, his sidekick, the vulnerable women and children, the terrible aftermath of violence whether war, disease or inquisition, to any human context. My new idea was universality instead of exceptionalism, that only Americans have this pattern.

Still, I went to teach in Montana in the Sixties which I semi-consciously understood was really the last of the 19th century. The white men were just pulling out of the Blackfeet rez, by surrendering the BIA to Indian preference, closing down businesses started in 1945, and beginning new housing and Headstart. When the changes came, I bought into them but Bob Scriver did not, so that was the end of the relationship with him and I had to leave. But I did not leave the situation, the puzzle, the Braveheart, Robin Hood, Rawhide dilemmas of this kind of change.

That was before all the fancy theory about deconstruction and post-colonial thought, which I’ve never really been able to grasp anyway, so I moved towards psychology and theology in a story kind of way. I was full of Greek mythology and even Greek theatre, so I found that archetypal psychology was a natural language. Coming back around now through Netflix and the vids of Cinematheque, I reach out again to archetypal psychology in order to match Tim Barrus’ Fritz Perls Gestalt psychology.

The cases at hand are a trail that starts with Asa Carter, a racist sunnavabitch who gave up speech-writing for George Wallace and produced two template-driven Westerns: one of almost unbelievable sweetness called “The Education of Little Tree” (book 1976, movie 1997) and the other called “The Outlaw Josey Wales” (1976). At that point Carter dies in his fifties and Clint Eastwood (once that green and impetuous Rowdy Yates in “Rawhide”) picks up the template and puts it to work again with an astringent Italian twist. He makes the movie of “Josey Wales” and moves on in his thinking through “Unforgiven” (1992) to “Gran Torino” (2008). Wry humor and outright irony abound.

There are a few different things you can do with a narrative template. One is to fulfill it, maybe in a Procrustean way by making the action fit the pattern exactly. One is to break the template entirely or partly, and one is to play with it -- move in and out so it teases the people who really know it, even live it out. My guess is that Carter had this inner template so deep in his flesh that he didn’t know that’s what it was, which is why he was able to go from being a racist defending white rights to a former Confederate raider operating as an outlaw. All he had to change was the names: the attitudes remained. Eastwood is a little more sophisticated. And smarter.

A certain demographic theory holds that the Scots and Irish of Britain were as tribal as any Indians and when they emigrated to America (because they were oppressed and starving) they took with them their red hair, berzerker guerrilla fighting skills, and implacable vengeance for wrongdoing. Also, their acceptance of hardship. These advantages may have won the Revolutionary War. In fact, George Washington was a great big dude with red hair and the same contemptuous attitude towards kings and landed gentry. Today these guys (no matter their racial or ethnic origins) gravitate towards outfits like Blackwater. Some say the original Irish immigrants, once they got pushed on over the Appalachian mountains, just continued west, pausing only to fight the Civil War and the Indian Wars, then crossed the prairie and the Rockies until they hit the Pacific Ocean, could go no farther and became the Hell’s Angels.

How are nice civilized grade-earning grad school students supposed to understand this? Thomas Moore suggests -- you ready for this? De Sade. “Dark Eros” is an archetypal psychological theory base that can cope with the darkest stuff you’ve got. The basic idea is simple: that light and dark, good and evil, innocence and cruelty, young and old, male and female, are best understood as interplaying, interpenetrating, reciprocating qualities and that getting too far over into one will call the other complementary force into being, maybe below the surface until it erupts. Don’t think the cool Marxist theories of some coffee house philosopher -- think William T. Vollman living with corruption and death, then trying to describe it. The Eastwood character comes out in reaction to the smug townspeople who want order and cleanliness, however it’s necessary to get it.

So in “Gran Torino” the Eastwood character knows he has an abcess in his heart because of what he did in Korea, but he has coped by marrying a woman who is a moral compass and by keeping busy doing “man things.” This is the American Way. (We’re discovering that it’s also the American Way to wake up screaming with PTSD, trying to strangle that wife). It is not righteousness that calls out his violence, though it has kept him from confessing so that he could heal. Instead it is vulnerability of women, the old, the young, that forces him to turn back to violence. There is no choice, so now he is a hero like Josey Wales. (The Indians this time are Hmong.)

The template is the hero capable of violence, who has to use it to protect the vulnerable, but gets no real benefit himself. The justification is not personal satisfaction, but political righteousness, which is no different than the Gene Hackman version of the sheriff who is sadistic but is made legitimate by his badge as well as his dominance.

My favorite character in “Rawhide,” aside from Monty Wooley who could sing “One-eyed, One-armed Flying Purple People Eater”, was not Rowdy. It was Mr. Favor, that calm, thoughtful leader who worked the angles to bring about peace. (I’m having to bite my tongue to keep from saying Obama.) Eastwood, the actual person, has moved a long way in that direction. But the template is still there. John Ford was Freudian -- Clint Eastwood is Jungian. But that's another blog post.

"THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE:" A Reflection

“The Education of Little Tree” (1976) is one of the most notorious of the faux Indian identity books but I had not read the book (still haven’t) and just saw the movie last night. The movie the night before was “Gran Torino” about a cranky old white man who hates minorities. I had not understood the connection between the two when I started reflecting on them in my attempts to get a good grip on the psychological and religious scheme of analysis used by Thomas Moore and James Hillman. Their system is derived in part from Jung and works as interacting binaries: sometimes male and female, sometimes dark and light, sometimes sadistic and masochistic, sometimes as senex and puer (which is roughly old and young), and then good and bad. The key is INTERACTING.

“The Education of Little Tree,” the movie (the book was published in 1997), is a cross between Hallmark Hall of Fame and “Walton’s Mountain”. This is because the director Richard Freidenberg was indeed a writer and director for the shmaltzy Hallmark series and Earl Hamner, Jr., who adapted the book for the screen is the original “John Boy,” who created “Walton’s Mountain.” What they ended up with is more of a picture book than a movie. The images of the Appalachians are stunningly beautiful. Outside of that, Little Tree briefly experiences a government Indian residential school with a check list of horrors. The movie has a PG rating because of “traditional discipline,” i.e. the obligatory cute but deprived little girl gets whipped with a belt and Little Tree gets put into solitary confinement. The key to Asa Carter’s thinking is quite direct: poor whites are like Native Americans in their virtuous instincts drawn from the land while the government, like every authority figure, is fat and punishing.

Part of this underdog thinking is easily traced to the South where Asa Carter, aligned with George Wallace and actually ghost writing his speeches, thought that the original KKK had gone soft, so organized a more potent sub-category that wore gray sheets because they stood for the Confederacy. This group was not soft: they castrated a black man, randomly chosen to be an example. Carter was not with them at the time. In fact, things got out of hand and Wallace went out of power so Carter departed the context, transferring his loyalties to the American West where (as illustrated by “Firefly”) the Confederate losers and raiders (like the Conrad brothers who settled the country where I am) used their skills to be outlaws. Thus, Carter’s other big selling book was “The Outlaw Josey Wales.” Clint Eastwood took a liking to it and made the movie. Chief Dan George and Will Sampson are the representative Indians.

Peter Kaufman, a brainy U of Chicago/Harvard writer, was supposed to be the director but wasn’t tough enough for Eastwood, who took over. (Kaufman was at the heart of development for the Indiana Jones series, then worked on a Star Trek movie, and later made a movie called “Henry & June,” partly because of friendship with Anais Nin.) Eastwood’s own scripts since then have centered on the same vengeance-for-loss themes. (I haven’t seen “Josey Wales.” There’s always a lot of catching up to do.)

“Gran Torino,” written by Eastwood, is about another war survivor, this time Korea where he committed an unforgivable act. Now he is an aged widower in a neighborhood populated by Hmong, pushed out of Vietnam by that later war. A mediator and commentator is the local priest since the unifying umbrella is the Catholic religion. Now the plot has slipped from vengeance to atonement and the Indians are Asian. (Blacks don’t come off so well, evidently because they have no math skills.) The main diff between vengeance and atonement seems to be that the motive for the latter is idealistic (protecting his new friends from their evil relatives) and results in the death of the hero, who talks racism but doesn’t act it out.

These plots and their dynamics are beloved by much of the population of this country, which is why both movies and books earn pots and pots of money. “The Education of Little Tree,” despite being mauled by critics, continues to make millions for the University of New Mexico Press, which now owns the rights and continues to publish the book as fiction. The two best articles that I found about Asa Carter are Alan Barra’s essay in Salon.com in 2001 and a New York Times article by Dan T. Carter in 1991. Carter, who may be a distant relative, was “outing” Asa. Barra’s piece is more reflective. He suggests that the enormous financial success of “Little Tree” is what led to the whole Native American Renaissance of literature, which had an Icarus-like arc of success over ten years or so. Ironically, no NA author grabbed the heart strings of book-buying and movie-going America like this black-hearted racist hooked on violence. He also suggests that Carter’s “arrow” pointed the way for Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.”

In a time when our president accepts the Nobel Peace Prize directly after escalating war, we need ways of sorting moral confusion. For those who choose the Victorian prettifying and sentimentalizing approach to Christmas and ignore the persecution of Jews and Herod’s slaughter of babies, see the movie of “Little Tree” and enjoy the cookie face of the little boy as he does what is expected of him and his three mentors hug each other. At least there are no guns: the deaths are natural.

For those who’d like to have something a little more complex to think about, try “Gran Torino” where the sentimentality is reserved for Detroit cars. Eastwood is the rotten guy who can’t even stand his own family (and no wonder) but he has a heart of gold and works by opposites, affectionately maligning his barber and friends because that’s the “man thing” to do. He has a manly weapon (old-fashioned rifle) while the bad guys have outlawed machine guns. Perhaps there’s something here about the transition from war to civil disorder (terrorism).

What I’m after is the central principle that being “too goody-goody” and too confident of one’s deservingness in the world, to the point of taking whatever one wants by force, is an effective way of inviting evil and tragedy. But that within evil and tragedy lie forces for good.

ZOMBIE GRIEFERS

The most horrible thing is not death -- it’s being stuck between life and death, not being able to die and not being able to get better. People in this situation are called zombies. The American culture likes zombies because they make money. Just in the movies alone they are box office gold, although not quite as good as vampires who are also stuck between states.

Also, real people who are only partly dead lie in beds with a lot of equipment attached to them and suck up money -- not for the minimum wage people who keep them clean (hopefully), turn them and remember their names, but for the corporate investors who own the place. In the old days people just died. It was called survival of the fittest, but now we are forbidden to say that anyone is unfit. (I might say that corporations are mock-people who are unfit.)

I got “griefers” wrong in my Monday post, says Lance, and he is right. When I used to say stuff like the paragraph above, one seminary classmate used to tell me I had the mind of a troll. When someone on an early bulletin board accused me of being a troll, I thought he meant attacking sentimentality by doing what Thomas Moore calls “uglification.” But no. He meant I was trolling in the sense of fishing for reactions, trying to get people riled up. Which is a form of griefing, giving people grief.

So I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that their definition of the term is pretty much a description of THEM: WIKIPEDIA!

Griefing as a gaming play style is not simply any action that may be considered morally incorrect. . . . An act of griefing involves the following three types of actions to be considered grief play:

* The use or abuse of a game mechanic that was not intended by the game's developers.
* The inability of the victim to exact some means of retribution beyond utilizing similar unintended game mechanics.
* The intended purpose of an act of griefing must be to negatively impact the gameplay of another person.

Griefing shares much in common with laming, another term in online gaming, though the former tends to have stronger connotations.

The Wiki site includes examples in case you need to attack your playmates. For example, outside the game show format, “on March 2008, malicious users posted seizure-inducing animations on epilepsy forums.” The main way that Wikipedia griefs is by character assassination, posting accusations and rumors as though they were truth while suppressing positive information about the person’s life. Accusations of deception are handy, since the only defense is to disclose material that may cause unrelated others grief. Journalists love it.

In the sci-fi series called “Firefly,” a horde of zombies called “Reavers" were not only zombies but also cannibals, a lot like the old Iroquois Windigoes, who were solitary monsters who were always starving and pursued people to eat them. The Iroquois ecology was a tough one and no doubt some people did resort to cannibalism, but in modern times our cannibals tend to be more products of insanity, like David Bar Jonah in Great Falls who killed and cooked up little boys and fed them to the neighbors. The case was never taken to a jury. Bar Jonah died in jail. He could not be convicted of his worst crimes because the mother of the main boy in question insisted that the child was alive somehow. She thought denying evil would make it go away. Denying that evil and griefers exist will only cause them to grow bigger, stronger and more common.

So we end up half-knowing and half-not-knowing which is very much like being half-dead and half-alive, not being able to clear things up and not being able to walk into the full horror and dispatch it. Griefers always assault the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent. Because they consider them to be losers, so they probably can’t hurt back. We have a funny thing about losers in this country: we consider them fair game. It didn’t used to be like that. We used to talk about the stuff on the Statue of Liberty. We thought that was part of being American. Jesus also defended such people.

There’s an old man in town who is hooked on horror films. He doesn’t watch anything else. No one else wants to watch with him and they don’t understand his love for them. The only explanation I can see is that horror films constantly obsess on the half-dead. I think he thinks death is like losing and that maybe zombies are able to keep the game from ending. I think he’s looking for survival tips.

Some say science is to blame, the Frankenstein factor, where “electricity” can create a monster. (Nowadays it’s DNA fiddling.) Also, the “monster from outer space” that can’t be stopped. (“The Thing,” filmed not far from here.) Then there’s the end of the world (Cannibal griefers on the road in Cormac McCarthy’s latest film) and the political oppressors (so many . . .) or the invasion of madness from within the body (“Psycho.”)

It’s interesting to know that the basic dynamics of “Firefly” came from despairing aftermath of the Civil War. “ style="font-style:italic;">">Whedon developed the concept for the show after reading The Killer Angels, a novel chronicling the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. He wanted to follow people who had fought on the losing side of a war and their experiences afterwards as pioneers and immigrants on the outskirts of civilization, much like the post-American Civil War era of Reconstruction and the American Old West culture.” In short, the people who populated much of Montana. They knew that to lose is to starve, and so did the Indians, because they DID starve. Still do.

One of the newspaper’s biggest advertisers here is the hospital. They send a constant barrage of ads about preventing cancer, strokes, heart attacks, diabetes (never AIDS and not hospital-created antibiotic infections) -- scaring everyone half to death. (They don’t mention money.) They are griefer/reavers who scare us, then promise that if we buy their “protection” they will prevent our deaths, only eat our money. They think we are losers.

And we are. We all eventually lose when we face death. That’s just a natural reality, not horrible. Horrible is stuck half-way dead. We can be kept halfway dead for a long time. If you can pay for it. Of course, we could pay for a lot of healing and the prevention of starvation, if we had the political will. But needy guys are losers. So is this a zombie culture? Afraid to let the past die to make way for the future? Stuck halfway?

SHAME vs. GUILT, According to Hyde

In my rereading of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster book, I’m now to the chapter called “Speechless Shame and Shameless Speech” in which he uses the idea of “shame-based cultures” versus “guilt-based cultures” which emerged from the work of Mead, Benedict, Leighton and Kluckhohn. He explains that a society that keeps order by using “shame” is different from one that keeps order by “guilt” and that these theorists thought of a “guilt-based culture” as more developed and “higher” than a shame-based culture, because they considered themselves to be part of a white, protestant, educated guilt culture. He gives as an example E.R. Dodds who places Hellenistic Greece above Homeric Greece, but I don’t know anything about that and my Internet connection is not working at the moment, which is a constant hazard in this part of the world. It will remain uninvestigated when I get back online.

The idea is that a “shame-based” culture is a small community where people know each other face-to-face, as in small town life or a church congregation where everyone is always watching. If you exceed the bounds of their propriety, you will be stigmatized and possibly ejected. Being stigmatized will mean the withdrawal of the kind of support the village gives to the weak, old, needy, and afflicted. Valier is very much this sort of culture and I sometimes forget at my peril. For instance, I was in the village library and saw that a woman I like very much, a cook and comforter of many, was checking out a stack of novels. I was feeling cranky and frustrated and hoping for a little comfort when I asked her, “Have you read the book I wrote about Bob Scriver?”

She was surprised. “Did you write a book?” (There has been publicity and the librarian keeps the book displayed.) I also assumed that she assumed I was talking about a local self-published book, which irritates me since I do have some conceit about my publisher being an academic press. “No, I haven’t read it,” she said.

“Shame on you!” From her face I could see that I’d gone over the line. She will never be my friend again. I had dragged something out in public (local ignorance and personal lack of awareness) that I should not have and I even named it. In a shame culture one does not say “shame on you.” One simply gazes and then shifts eyes away. If she reads my book now, she’ll hate it and interpret all my motives in the book with hostility.

Guilt is a private matter. Guilt, in Hyde’s view, is internalized conscience and will object to things you do that no one knows anything about. (Carter lusting in his heart.) I suspect that those anthros thought it was “higher” because it tends to be rule-based and from some other source than local opinion. This might be an example: if I set a mouse-trap and found a rodent victim in it, I might be moved by the creatureliness of the little animal and feel guilty for killing it, even though no one in this community would blame me for eliminating vermin. I might not even tell anyone about emptying the teaspoonful of carrion into the garbage, although one way to escape guilt is confession. (No thinking in this book links guilt to pity. But maybe I should look around. )

Mead is famous for trying to move the limits of shame about sex, proposing that in Samoa the young women enjoy the activity with no shame at all, nor guilt either. After the missionaries arrived and other white people who held sexual propriety by their standards to be a sign of virtue and civilization, the Samoans changed their story and said they’d just been putting Margaret Mead on, that they were actually very proper. Maybe. Knowing what we do about Margaret Mead’s life, we might guess that she was rather shameless but also a bit guilty about her own sex life, particularly her daughter whom she raised as a single parent with help from friends who took the girl into their families when necessary.

Perhaps sex is meant to be private -- and romance as well on its deepest levels, though some like to boast about it. Intense private relationship has so much potential for disruption because it makes defying village shame worthwhile. But it is also a potent source of guilt, because we don’t always like what is happening in that intimacy and have fantasies only we know about.

But Hyde is talking about tricksters and culture, a subject he enters through the lives of three immigrants: Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, and Allen Ginsberg, who are not moving from one country to another (their ancestors did that) so much as one internal culture to another. The stakes are high: death/insanity. Kingston speaks of reaching puberty and being told the big family shame-secret, a tale of an ancestor in the old country who became pregnant and drowned herself in the family well. Rodriguez is moving into the “country” of the intellectual and finds himself made ashamed and therefore guilty by his much-loved parents, who are still their warm uneducated selves. He is distinguished by his awareness of this and his boldness in telling about it. Ginsberg was shamed by homosexuality, but more by his insane and repellent mother, whom he loved but who caused much of his life to be hidden. This was broken, again, by telling about it -- witnessing. “I alone escaped to tell you.”

The original “shaming” culture will not recognize the trick of telling as the opening of a door. In order to protect their social order by pressure, they will define the trickster as a psychopath. This is particularly potent when the body is involved, whether because it is the wrong color, the wrong gender, or used in a transgressive way, as in sex or even simple exposure: nudity. Hyde says this powerful thing: “Trickster is . . . the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath will never even know such a door exists.”

There has been a lot of talk lately about bullies, who might be interpreted as “shame-based” people who try to force those around them into their idea of behavior, quite possibly because of their own inner guilt about something, probably not measuring up. They throw their guilt -- disguised as self-righteous shaming -- out onto someone else. And Hyde says, “All American high schools are shame cultures; advertising promulgates a culture of shame.” Perhaps shame is the name of Gus van Sant’s “Elephant.”