PONTIFICATING ON WRITING BIOGRAPHIES

LINDA HASSSELSTROM

Reading on a computer screen is not normally my thing, but I agreed to review Linda Hasselstrom’s renewal of her book about her South Dakota ranch family, and it seemed practical and time-saving to just do it entirely on the computer.  This particular book — if you check Amazon, you’ll see Linda writes quite a bit — is an account of a year in which her own journal as her basic text is running alongside the journal of her mother and that of her step-father.  All three were hard-working, colorful, and sometimes problematic people.  The mother was a “high-strung”, high maintenance woman who went frankly psychotic for a while and the step-father was wonderfully protective until Alzheimers invaded him in old age.  Then he was hostile, selfish, and confused.  Linda has seized sanity and gripped it by the neck.  She saved the ranch partly by establishing “Windbreak House,” which is a writer’s working retreat on the ranch that includes coaching by Linda.

“Ground-testing” is a scientific term used by people who make satellite maps from very high.  It means that no matter how accurate a photo might be, someone eventually will need to go down there and walk the terrain to confirm that what seems like it’s there really exists and is as it was identified from up high.  There can be surprises when you look from a slightly different angle or in closeup.  But being “grounded” is a good thing, esp. if you love the land and it’s inhabitants.

Biography — and I suppose even autobiography — is a sort of mapping.  There used to be a magazine that published a map at the end, but quite differently from Rand McNally.  One was a map of all the dogs in the neighborhood.  One was a map of the water and sewer pipes under the streets of a neighborhood.  One was an ethnic map of a city.  Some biographies, including those of the Hasselstroms, are folded into an ethnography about the kind of people who are involved; in Linda’s case South Dakota farmers, some of them second generation immigrants.  There are no Native Americans because of history, not Linda. There are no owners of ranchettes because who wants them?  Not Linda.

Since a bio or autobio is about a life, it must include the dimension of time.  Linda has the advantage of dated diary entries.  Once I kept a Progoff journal which is begun by identifying “stepping stones” which could be (for the left-brained sorts) the practical cultural markers like graduations, marriages, moving to a new house, a new job; or for others maybe a list of major turning points: a time of illness, a relationship, a new skill, discovering a new identity.  Taking all this into consideration, a person’s life might fit into a larger context of history so that something like WWII, the Seventies, the exploration of outer space, could be a pattern for the exploration of inner space.  Or, particularly in the case of autobiography, the writer might choose free-association, counting on his subconscious to link episodes, ignoring the calendar.

Different kinds of biographies are produced by different kinds of biographers.  Linda’s writing has been about her location, rural South Dakota, so her main ordering principle is the farmer’s almanac, the seasons as they develop through one year.  Her parents’ lives are told entire, at least as much as she could, documenting with those journals plus letters and remarks from other people.

Erik Erikson and Justin A. Frank have written psychoanalyses of famous people, Frank most recently offering “Obama on the Couch” and now working on “Trump on the Couch.”  These fit real lives into schematics used by shrinks as diagnostic means, attempts to provide skeletons for formless flesh and — as you might imagine — controversial both because they can be invasive and because it’s problematic for any one person to really know another.  On the other hand, psychoanalysis can create a kind of strict poetry like a sonnet, vivid images contained in a pattern.

The problem is that these schematics go in and out of popularity or even suitability over time.  The kind of insights provided by Lytton Strachey are not impressive now.  We are more friendly to something like “Lincoln in the Bardo,” almost only a flight of fancy.  (Would anyone write something like “Teddy Roosevelt in the Bardo”?)

On the other hand, the strength of Progoff’s “Intensive Journal” thinking is the constant challenge to come up with a metaphorical image for stretches of one’s life or for the turning points.  Was it being swept over a waterfall?  Was it being in a tall tree and seeing all around?  Was it slowly blooming when sunlight came?  Or was it a drug trip?  Whether or not the actual subject of the “graph” would accept the shape of his or her life, would they recognize the forces at play and how they were moved along?  Or resisted?

The kind of writing about one’s self that shows up in venues like “Medium.com,” tends to be anguished or transcendent — highly emotional and often both ingenious and gorgeous because they are written by dramatic, sensitive people, the kind of people we think authors must be.  They have a bit of a tendency to watch themselves write.  (We call that narcissism.  Is it?)  Progoff ran very prescribed workshops to combat mental wandering and self-indulgence.  One sat in a room with others and wrote in timed intervals, tracked by a sort of monitor.  Such a Germanic classroom sort of atmosphere — traditional in our schools — would shut some writers down, hardly helping to get into the mood of free spirits who ditched school early in life.

I like lists and used to pursue sanity by writing life lists in block print, sometimes not even in sentences.  It was the time of fountain pens with those little cartridges of ink and I chose green.  At least I didn’t dot my “i” s with little hearts.  On a computer I go for strict legibility, plain fonts, and I number my list elements.  It’s pleasant to fiddle with them — add and subtract, print out so I can write in the margins.

Autobiographers have the problem of getting out of their own way.  I still haven’t abandoned revenge.  Or at least self-serving explanation and rationalization.  Then there are the problems that come with being read.  Now that old enemies from the Sixties are dying, I find that when I nail them for how I know them, the family hagiographers of those opportunists and thieves will fight back.  None have sued me yet, but it has happened to others.  What do we do with our secrets?  Readers expect revelations.

This is not the review of Linda Hasselstrom’s book that I will write when I finish the whole manuscript, but she’s welcome to take blurbs from it.  That's part of the game.

THE CATTLE ARE LOWING

The first calf has arrived locally.  It was supposed to wait until after Christmas, but biology is never exactly in sync with the stars -- only approximately, even with carefully planned AI (artificial insemination) and known pedigrees.   Across America most people don’t worry about it, since their key interaction with cows is to eat them.   Around here, where cow topics are relevant to just about everything no matter what you eat, two topics have come up in the recent Prairie Star ag rag.  “Placentophagia” and “navel dipping.”  I feel I should bring you city readers up to speed.

Last first.  “Navel dipping” is about the proper disinfection of a calf’s navel after the umbilical cord is severed.  The umbilical cord is an extension of the placenta, which is plastered against the inside wall of the uterus as the gizmo that draws oxygen and nutrition from the mother cow’s blood stream.  It’s not very attractive.  Just a blob of tissue.  The last placenta I saw was a clue on “Law & Order, SVU.”  It was human. Where there’s a placenta, there must be a baby.  

An important thing about a placenta is that when it’s all through with its thousand tiny fingers of connection, it should let go of the uterus wall.  If it doesn’t do that in a cow, the rancher has to reach in there and tease out whatever bits hung on, then put in a bolus of antibiotic.  On “Law & Order SVU” no one did this for the girl who had a baby all by herself, so the detectives -- after finding the baby -- ended up with a feverish mother who badly needed hospital care.  (Human docs use instruments and deliver the antibiotics via IV.)  If the cow gives birth without a rancher and things go badly wrong, the cow becomes wolf food.  And beetle food.  And . . .  oh, sorry.  TMI.  Actually, same for all mammals.

Back to navel dipping, which I suppose is also done for humans in hospitals.  A calf’s umbilical cord contains a tube leading to the calf’s bladder, two arteries, and a vein that connects to the liver and thus the bloodstream.  That accounts for the twisted ropey look of it.  If it’s cut, it might need a clamp or tie to keep blood in the baby.  But navel dipping is about keeping bacteria out.  Since places where there are a lot of cows contain a lot of cow manure (in nature, out on the open grass there’s much less of it), there are a lot of bacteria.  Studies show that calves with non-dipped navels have an 18% death rate compared with calves with dipped navels at 7%.  You know all that stuff about boiling water in the movies about frontier births?  The hot water is for thorough soapy cleaning of baby and environment, more than just navel dipping.  On “L&O SVU” the blood-and-shit-soaked sheets were part of the evidence.

The article I’m drawing on for all this calf info quotes Bethany Fisher, who is a specialist with Purina Animal Nutrition LLC.  (The more cows that survive, the more cow food one can sell.)  Bethany recommends “double dipping” -- once while the calf is still wet from birth and then again after the calf is dry.  What you need is first a navel dip cup.  I looked online for a photo but the ones on Amazon were for dipping potato chips and the ones on eBay were for sailors who were dippy coffee drinkers.  Luckily, a paper cup will do.  Then you can just throw away the paper cup and use a new clean one.  You can also use a spray but don’t miss any spots.  7% tincture of iodine.

The other tip I have for you is that if you leave the iodine out where the calves are being born, be sure to put it at the base of the same fence post every time, because after a while calving you will be so sleep-deprived that you won’t remember it otherwise.

Now on to placentophagia, which is the mother eating the placenta.  Some do and some don’t.  I’m fairly confident that we won’t have to hear about the princess of England indulging in placentophagia, though we’ve been given quite a bit of info about her hyperemesis.  On the other hand, some humans do find it a spiritually encouraging practice to bury a human placenta in some sacred place, like under a sacred tree.  So far “Law & Order SVU” has not dealt with this, as far as I know.

No one knows why cows eat their placentas.  Are they just practicing good housekeeping by getting rid of coyote attractions?  Do they crave some kind of postpartum nutrients that are stored in there?  Even very well-nourished cows will do it.  Is it just an extension of licking the calf, getting started and not being able to stop?  Is it a bonding thing, a way of imprinting the calf?  We already know that smell (molecular detection) is key to bonding.  (Another rancher tip: sometimes if you need the cow to smell herself on her calf, WD-40 on both animals will work.  Why wouldn’t it?  It works on everything else.)

But cows don’t always chew their placentas so a rancher probably needs to just remove the placenta before the cow gets started.   First-time mothers in particular have been known to choke to death.   A dog could be helpful at placenta removing, just as at castration time if you don’t want to serve Rocky Mountain oysters to your friends and neighbors. (No need to wait for a coyote.)  As far as I know, no one has marketed cow placentas.

This time of year there are many stories connected to cows and though the baby Jesus seems to have had more ovine than bovine witnesses, on New Year’s Eve animals are said to be able to talk.  Deep winter is a time when we blur humanness back into our animalness.  The point of Jesus being the Son of God is that humanness can also blur into godliness, the supernatural.  We can be fairly confident that no one dipped Jesus’ navel in iodine, but maybe he was divine enough to repel germs.  

Some of the more literal may wonder what happened to Mary’s placenta, though -- again -- I’m fairly sure she didn’t eat it.  What if someone claimed an angel told him or her where the placenta was buried?  Would it become a shrine, marked by a monument?  Of course, Jesus’ predators were human and they had names.  Luckily, the evidence of the birth escaped them.