MY YOUTH IN FLAMES

Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, is a city with a lot of bronze monuments, not only political ones but also a fine portrayal of Sacajawea and her baby, a traditional one of Joan of Arc at the go-around near Laurelhurst and so on.  This is because most of the early leaders in the city came from New England where Boston is filled with the same kind of statues on their commons.  They were considered a sign of civilization, identity, and — truth be told — European-style entitlement.  I'm mostly Scots.

My high school was Jefferson High School, then considered one of the best in the nation and then gradually becoming Black as N. Portland became Black after the Vanport Flood destroyed the housing Kaiser had built when he recruited ship-builders from the rural South. When I was there ’53 to ’57, we were about one-fifth Black.  At a reunion later, a Black woman made a scathing accusation about how she was treated and how she was excluded from the “sororities” who aped colleges.  No one knew what to say.  A few individual men had gone the route of science or military and become outstanding.  One was a dancer who succeeded in Hollywood.  The school is now a “magnet” school that draws the student body from all over because of specialized programs like pre-med or arts.

https://www.wweek.com/news/2020/06/20/portland-man-describes-tearing-down-thomas-jefferson-statue-its-not-vandalism/

Our high school rival was Grant, with some upscale neighborhoods.  They would come over and paint the statue of Thomas Jefferson in their school colors, but no one in their wildest dreams thought of tearing it off its plinth.  I assume their school was named for Ulysses Grant, the 18th President of the United States and the leader of the Union Army that won the Civil War.  I’m not aware of any statue to paint or pull down, though we must have retaliated somehow.  I pulled them up on Google and they seem to use the rainbow as their symbol.

The surprising thing about pulling down Jefferson is that it was not done by Black Lives Matter to make a point about slavery, but was an almost random act by white people looking for some kind of excitement and importance.  One man who participated was not from Portland, but rather had been hanging out on the beach, living on unemployment.  He just happened to drive by and decide to help.

When I was a kid and the South Dakota relatives came to visit, we took them on a tour of the statues.  So when Bob Scriver came for our wedding, my mother took him on the tour.  We went by the elk in the middle of the street downtown and he was critical of the statue itself, which which he thought was anatomically inaccurate.  The sculptor must have been working from pictures — he’d probably never seen a real elk.  I’ve forgotten who he was.

The emplacement itself is a generous fountain designed for thirsty horses and dogs, a part of the Black Beauty impulse when there really were horses and dogs in the downtown streets.  More recently the mounted PPD officers would pause there.  I’m not sure there was still water at the time that recently young people wrapped the elk in the American flag, dragged it down and set it on fire.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2020/07/03/no-theyre-not-stupid-why-leftists-destroyed-a-statue-of-an-elk-in-portland-n603513

These seem to be misguided, incoherent, and random acts, but maybe not.  They turned out to be an excuse for Trump to take one of his revenges, using one of the few military assets directly controlled by the Executive Branch that was meant to be a security force to protect federal buildings.  He evidently has sent men in camo driving rented vehicles, all without emblems or ID, to seize people in the streets, put bags over their heads, and drag them off to federal buildings to be terrorized with questions.  Then release them, traumatized, to tell the story.  Another strategy off late-night TV movies.

https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2020/07/17/oregon-attorney-general-sues-to-stop-federal-arrests-of-portland-protesters/

Oregon, like Montana, is really two states, divided by mountains.  The east side is dry, economically based on ranches of wheat or beef.  The west side is either the artistic coast of fishermen (divided by another mountain range) or the lush Willamette Valley.  The cultures in each ecosystem are quite different from each other but also respond to trouble in quite different ways.  The east side does not shrink from guns.  The Valley is gentler, more urban, and more inclined to sue.  The coast may be a playground in some ways but the whites there in the early days were the most vicious in the ways they treated the indigenous people, so time can change the culture.

I spent the Sixties focused on bronze casting and preserving images of the interface between the original people and the first whites who came.  Bob Scriver was divided between both sides.  One neighbor said he was more “Indian” than the real people, because he was so in love with the 19th century.  This time of year to start the day at first light we took a horseback ride across the prairie.  One would expect that I would be devastated by the treatment of familiar statues.  I'm glad my parents never saw such a thing.

I have a novel about a fabulous and invaluable Chinese bowl in a museum and a woman curator’s effort to protect it.  The title of the novel is “The Bowl Is Already Broken.”  The idea is that as soon as something is made, it is bound to be eventually destroyed, like a living being whom we know will die as soon as it’s born.  Some people are so enraged and opposed to this idea that they claim they will come back to life somewhere else, but in the meantime they will prevent change.  What the Third World and the indigenous peoples of the planet have to tell us is that we can’t even persist forever as a culture or as a species.

It’s a compliment to the monuments that they are seen as icons that can be destroyed, because they illustrate this fact.  But those who are young and think they will live forever are only bowls that will be broken.  And, of course, some were too cracked to be useful anyway.

JUNIPERO SERRA: SAINT?

STATUE OF SERRA

In seminary we passed around a little comic book that joked about Jesus in the days of the transition from Judaism.  In one of them, the spoof was of Jewish mothers who dote on their sons, expecting them to top the other sons by becoming brain surgeons, thus bringing honor on their mothers.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, is saying to a neighbor, “Have you met my son, the Messiah?”  Beat that!

In Blackfeet culture the favorite child is called a “minipoka.”  It might be a father who makes a pet of a daughter, giving her special privileges and gifts and keeping her close by.  The dark side is that if the father is grieving, the daughter is expected to cut off her fingertips to show the pain of the loss.  The father needs his fingers for his bow.  She is an extension, a plaything but also a ritual object.

There is a “trope” -- a sort of cross-cultural metaphor -- about the “golden child,” the special one who is supposed to be the oldest, the inheritor, the head of the next generation who is an extension of his own patriarch.  It can be a burden, but this sustains the tribe or kingdom in the beliefs and practices that kept them strong.  But times change.  When they do, the stories then are about someone like Joseph, the youngest, different than the others, better able to survive.  Still he comes to the cultural apex of inheritance.

“Boys” are meant to become institutional and generational heads because inheritance is the key to continuity.  The boy is an extension of the father and the genetic line of fathers in a society that is built on ownership and conflict.  Watch “Wolf Hall” which is about breaking two cultural keys:  the Papa who gets to certify “legitimate” boys and the gender of the child who may inherit.    These are at the same time products of and causes of chaos.

JUNIPERO SERRA -- different sculptor

This means that patriarchy commands men to have sons and pass their power on to them while drawing as much preservation from sons as possible, imposing the terms of the father.  This is psychologically enforced by bonding between father and son, which can become a fusion of identity, and can also become a metaphor for an institution.  The Father and the Son and the -- oh, well, she’s just a ghost.  What’s important is the accumulation of assets and territory.

Thus Junipero Serra Ferrer, O.F.M., becomes an obligation for Pope Francis -- who took the name of his order (a fusion of identity) when he became the Papa.  Father Junipero must be sanctified because of his institutional achievements, not because of his compassion or intellectual brilliance, though he earned a doctorate in theology and was considered highly gifted.  Rather he was trying to “make them be like us,” so his statue shows him with a naked indigenous boy, a “son,” but one born outside the marriage or physical inheritance so that there is no incest taboo, but rather a suppressed erotic element that can easily corrupt fusion between mismatched identities.   As we know all too well. 

JUNIPERO SERRA -- a third sculptor

The obligation to understand and protect an “Other” is missing. Junipero indulged in self-torture: pounding himself with a stone, whipping himself, burning himself.   It sounds like a possible effort to suppress or displace the erotic, though it is defined by biographers as penance.  For what?

An early conquest came without war when King Carlos replaced the Jesuits with the Franciscans, so that Junipero’s official title was “Father Presidente.”  He went up the coast of California for the purpose of establishing missions but also to prevent Russians from claiming the territory.  He was also in conflict with local secular Spanish authorities.  These do not sound like tasks for a gentle person.

Today his sanctification is opposed by indigenous people on three grounds: that he punished the people harshly, that he used them as slave labor for the missions, and that he crushed their own culture, doing personal damage to their survival that has lasted until now.  This is formally called “enslavement theology.”

Still a mismatch.

Quoting Wikipedia writers:  “Serra's own views are documented. In 1780, Serra wrote: "that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.” Serra pushed for a system of laws to protect natives from some abuses by Spanish soldiers, whose practices were in conflict with his.”  The use of theology to justify oppression is in conflict with the use of military reasons to do the same thing.  Theology always claims superiority.  That’s its essence.  Theology is power lodged in the Theos, who is Papa.

It is high irony that his statue in the Washington, D.C., Statuary Hall is going to be sent back to California, replaced by Sally Ride!  Each state gets only two statues.  (One of Montana’s is Charlie Russell.)  The other California statue is of Ronald Reagan.  Consider the current anecdote going around is RR greeting a guest by saying,  “My name is Ronald Reagan!  What’s yours?”  The guest is his son, visiting him in the dementia ward.  God also forgets his sons, eh?  Theos Dementia.

Another quote:  “When the Kumeyaay sacked the San Diego Mission in 1775 — killing three Spaniards — the viceroy captured about a dozen Indians and called for their execution, said Gregory Orfalea, who wrote a biography of Serra. But Serra called for the prisoners' release and pleaded their case to the viceroy in a letter: "As to the killer, let him live so that he can be saved, for that is the purpose of our coming here and its sole justification.”

That sounds a little naive, but remember that in California right into the 20^th century the locals shot Indians on sight.  Ishi, the last indigenous tribal man, was in California.  On the other hand, conversions of the Indian people only amounted to about a fifth or fourth of the people.  Meanwhile the sheep and cattle of the missions and others destroyed the economy and starved people because their traditional foods were destroyed.  Then there was the disease. . .  And the industrialization of railroads and gold mining.  

Father Serra didn’t do those things.  But somehow a fully enrobed man waving a cross the shape of a reverse sword with his hand on the shoulder of a small naked Indian boy who is looking away is disturbing in its inequity.

Is the hand on the boy one of support or restraint?  Does even the man know?

This is a 1907 gathering of the patrons who helped pay for this statue of Serra.  They have come to dedicate it, and since the Indian boy has been left out of this portrait, 

they have brought their own sons, but they are not Indians.

This is Bob Scriver's echoing bronze, "Transition", just to make a contrast.  These people posed for their portraits: Chewing Black Bone, Mae Williamson, but the boy's name has been lost.  He is dressed for school in "white-man clothes", carrying his book.  Mae Williamson was an official interpreter.  Her dress is sewn with dozens of elk teeth and was acquired by Father Schoenberg in the Sixties.  He's dead and his museum is razed. 

 I don't know where the dress is now.

HUMAN, UPRIGHT

Persons are processes, burning flames, unfolding growth, accruing, expanding, transforming, collaborating.

So are families, communities, cultures, organizations.

And so are the sun and the planet on which we live -- swirling and blazing and withdrawing.

All is change.

Institutions try to push all that into a box, label it, hoard it, sell it, manage it, maybe crush it.

Slightly more than half of young Americans say they belong to no religious institution.  But most of them would probably say though they are secular, they are spiritual.  Secular to them means no institutions, and yet they go on wanting ceremonies of coming-of-age, of marriage, of death, of birth.  When they do those things, they want to do them “properly.”  Or sometimes they think such transitions should be an ecstasy of abandonment and drunkenness. They get their ideas from the movies, a mish-mash.  But they want transcendent experiences, so much that they will take risky drugs.

Part of their resistance to “institutional religion” and most other institutions, comes from their belief that they are individuals.  They feel their happiness lies in controlling their own future and thinking independently.  They are together in groups in guarded, conditional ways.  Dear Abby tells them that if things are not working out, best to move on.  Hook up culture meaning connecting bodies, but not emotions or thoughts.  What is the relationship between spirituality and institutions?

This photo is of women in the Trashi Yangtse district of Bhutan, one of the last relatively untouched places on the planet.  They probably don’t think of themselves in terms of whether they are members of a church -- their lives are seamless between inside and outside.  Their religion is likely Buddhist and they probably know few people who are different. Their place is “The Thunder Dragon Kingdom.”   The headquarters look like a square fort.

In 2006, based on a global survey, Business Week rated Bhutan the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest in the world.  In 2008, Bhutan made the transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and held its first general election.  It barely thinks of itself as a country, partly because it extends from the highest mountains to tropical lowlands, an “ecotone.”  And now in part what holds it together is throwing out all the ethnic Nepalese who have migrated into the country over the years.  These women stand on the cusp of natural organic spirituality and institutional, defining, and confining religion that justifies exclusion.  The women themselves are vivid, so obviously the same and yet so individual.  

I just now ran across the category of Archaic Greek sculptures called “kouros” if they are male and “korés” if they are female.  They are individual life-sized figures, different but the same.  The men are always nude and their heads are a little bit crude -- flat on the back, careless on the face.  The women are always clothed in what seems to be stiff clothing, with very elaborate and curly long hair that hangs down in a way that helps them form a column.  The women are painted bright colors.

Somehow, these figures seem to refer to gods: the men to Apollo or the Egyptian Horus and the women to Persephone.  Female figures like these were sometimes lined up as pillars to support buildings.  Then they are called caryatids.  There is much written about the symbolism of women who support roofs.  They suggest institutions. 

This woman stands between the two figures: strong, nude, female.

The style of the carving, especially in the treatment of the face -- but also in the nude men's bodies -- the muscle locations and definitions are treated in slightly different ways and in some periods certain muscles are omitted.  Archeo-anatomists note things like “there is a tension observable in this ground between the solid, architectonic quality of early styles and the expressive possibilities of a vigorous, fluid naturalism. . . The ear is carved in more than one plane.  A roundness of the eye is indicated henceforth.  Lips curve upwards and meet more or less at corners, the upper lip protrudes over lower.”

One comes to a concept called “the archaic smile.”  It’s almost a smirk that recurs again and again on the faces of these early sculptures.  Is it a convention or an attitude?  Or both?  A kind of ironic amusement at having to stand there, clothed or unclothed, weight-bearing or independent?  Ogas and Gaddam, authors of “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”, discuss at length the expression on the face of the Mona Lisa, which is very close to the “archaic smile.”  They feel it is fascinating because it combines a strict geometric shape with a blurred human expression, leaving the viewer caught between irresolvably seeing it one way or the other.

But this is the dilemma of being human.  On the one hand we are replications of a universal plan for a creature.  On the other hand we are negotiably in league with others and responsive to circumstances.  Institutions try to control that.  We are either in compliance with basics of anatomy or crippled; functional or struggling to compensate; mindfully in control or lost.  Archaic Greeks are the ones who developed the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who fell in love with his Koré so that it came to life.  

There is no ancient mythic story about a sculptor who fell in love with a living woman and made her into a statue.  But there is one about a wife who was turned into a pillar of salt as a punishment for looking back.  It’s an institutional story: conform to the rules.  There’s also the story of Midas, so greedy for wealth that he turned his daughter into a golden statue.  He was the King.  But he turned out to be human when he missed his human daughter.  There is one about a boy, a puppet who wanted to be human.  Is all this about love -- attachment to other humans in an intimate way?

http://aeon.co/film/34x25x36-a-short-film-about-the-perfect-body/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=4f5b98e45f-Weekly_Newsletter_28th_March_20143_28_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-4f5b98e45f-68600437

This film is about a modern version of the Koré -- clothing mannequins, nude as a Kouros but smooth, hairless, colorless, identical.  The modern expression is not the archaic smile but detached scorn, the runway model stalking along with a voluptuous mouth and blank eyes. “Fuck me -- I don’t care.”   No one makes clothing mannequins for size 44 women, grinning flirtatiously.  But paleo-sculptors made fat women to be fertile -- they weren’t sexy.  “Feed me -- I’m making babies.”

I watch Australian films where many old pot-bellied men are seen nude, almost always from the back and satirically.  They are not quite Buddhas, not happy and always fleeing.  Is this a sort of anti-kouros?  On their way to being satyrs, not-human?  Is it more human to show people in all their variousness or is it better to resolve them into an ideal, though even intended similarity seems to slip in small distinctions, if only the treatment of the earlobe?  Should we force conformity for their own good?  Send them to gymnasiums to shape up? 

Is this in Australia?

Even a painting can do a better job than sculpture of capturing the flaming process of the human being of constituent cells, united by the brain’s idea of who they are and what they are doing.  Rodin had a theory about movement, that he could make a statue seem to move by letting the different sides imply the change as the viewer moved around the figure.  In his lifetime he went from making a kouros that was ideal (“The Age of Bronze”)

to one that was moving (“John the Baptist”)

 to one that was a pillar (“Balzac”).  

Likewise, he portrayed one woman, Rose Beuret, throughout her life but never as a standing figure, an individual.  Always entwined, folded.  Would she rather have been a koré?  Is a koré just a human box?  A human with a "box"?

Eifman Ballet – Rodin – St. Petersburg

Aad de Gids, Netherlands poet and philosopher has this response:

The kore seems even more "natural" than the "kouros" whose musculature seemed so strangely overproportioned but in that, even weird, almost like feminin musculature on a man: wide hips, not a clear male posture. i find it interesting. then the indeed "smirk" on the faces,seemed to me to be a remnant (often overseen) of africanism in greek statuatory art. 

Then the strangest thing happened: the film you inserted didn't "clicked" so i watched it by micro-inching away with my cursor right to the "progressionedge". so it jumped parts of millimetres. i saw the strangest scenes, frozen cinematography. there were several things that struck me. to me it seemed a company in the making of mannequins.  

The boss looked to have walked straight out of napolis quarter "scampia", marseille du nord or palermos "Z.E.N." (Zona Espansione Nord) . yet greatest revelation was that all involved males (designers) seemed to have become sexless, effeminite in their faces (the darkskinned man), the white man kind of a morph  as if, in handling the human form had robbed them from their own characteristic or distinctive features. then,i assume bc it was such strange viewing, it more and more resembled in watching a snuff movie, in particular where one of the designers was watching a coffee table book with, indeed, newtonnesque, bourdinnesque, photos of women, lying, with heady red accents, lipstick, blood? it gave your text even more profundity bc you were writing about exactly the same matters. where does the human figure begin, has it ever begun, where does the puppetry end? plus the mystique of the mona lisa her perhaps, darker indistinguishability a forebodening of what would come later. 

And now,the "hordes" of similes,mannequins with the fuck-me look, shoes, titdress, yet totally numb ,empty, available for cocaine, commodification, profitism, exploitation, blaxploitation. rodin was a scorpio, sculpting is a scorpionic art. what is hidden in the stone, in the deep...... 

i enjoyed this "vernissage" very much. we seem to have studied in time muchly the same topics. where does the one end and the other begin. the force of institutionalization, societal pressure, conventionalism and of course anticonventionalism. pot-bellied men (embouchure) and the stone age venus.
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