BEWILDERMENT IS COMPREHENSION

Bewilderment is the true comprehension.

~Martin Luther

It’s not the bewilderment -- it’s what you do about it.  It’s being aware that you are bewildered and admitting it, even liking it.  Look at the root of the word:  “be wild.”  Wild is potential.

When anthropologists started realizing that other groups in other ecologies (desert, jungle, Chinese cities, African pastoral tribes) organized things differently for the sake of their survival, they talked about “structure.”  The social rules and economic arrangements.  But as soon as one recognizes a concept, it’s interesting to turn it inside-out:  non-Euclidean geometry, non-Newtonian physics.  So what would non-structure be like?  Would it be madness or would it enable a leap in “growth” -- i.e. a better adjustment to the conditions of life?  We're finding out.

 http://alexoneill.net/Liminality
All following illustrations are by this photographer.

This is partly what “liminality” is about: a way to escape structure for an interval.  There is a great deal to read about these theories but it is best to start with Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner who wrote before our trivializing society turned it all into “birthday cards.”  A person like me wants “religion” to be raw, re-structuralable, open to renegotiation, surprising and intense.  Many people find this disconcerting.  I was disconcerted to realize that my cousins do not want their boat rocked.  (Not that they have escaped the waves, but that risk is something they want never to repeat.)  I will not judge them.

Some of the aversion to change, danger, new information, and so on is probably physiological, which is why I look at my cousins so closely.  At the level of brain neurons (temperament), they have core assumptions about a rightly lived life.  Interestingly, they are not church-goers.  They will not talk theology.  They are domestic family women and one does not go white-water rafting in a nest.  It’s not just a matter of marriage, since I have cousins who never married but express domesticity through teaching and the like.  But even spinsterhood is not definitive, since I am hunkered down alone in a house (15 years now) where I change very little.  The difference is that the quote taped up over my computer is “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."  I think as wild as I can.  But I feed the cats on time.

Liminality is something like being “through the looking glass” where things are reversed, but also unpredictable.  It is also like being homesick, where the formerly loved and familiar has not yet been replaced by attachment to a new context, even one that was chosen and wanted, maybe better suited than the previous home.  There’s something wired-in, physiological, about confronting difference.  

The research on brain organization and function seems to suggest that some kinds of neurons are clustered like computer documents in folders, which can be nested in other folders, deeper and deeper layered.  What I find suggestive is the idea that a “deep” experience can reach the deepest and most inclusive pre-suppositional folders of neurons in order to open them to change.

This photo is an exception -- not O'Neill.

The original thought about liminality was related to coming-of-age ceremonies in indigenous tribes, a way of “killing” the child who was dependent and incompetent, in order to “create” the adult who would now be reliable and productive.  Or at least try to be.  I don’t know whether anyone has written about “boot camp” as a way of making a random bunch of teenagers into warriors.  Probably.  I recently watched “Blood Diamond” in which it was demonstrated how a good boy could be made into a vicious renegade who would turn on his own father, simply by forcing the son to do things so repugnant that they tore him out of his identity.  

The human ability to re-form psychologically is part of our great success in so many ecologies.  It is the heart of adaptability.  But there are other forces trying to hold us into groups on many scales, trying to keep us committed to some ideal loyalty.  Preventing any different in the profitable status quo.  So white “Christian” “American” people try to send brown Indio children back to their gang-ridden deaths rather than letting them be admitted to the US.  

Somehow in some minds, burning a boy alive (Muhammad Abu Khdeir, 16) was equivalent and justified as revenge for the deaths of three boys on the “other side.”  But horrific acts, like the death of Mathew Shepherd, can force us into the wilderness of true comprehension or at least make us seek it.

Or sometimes they don’t.  One school shooting after another does not pry the fingers of the NRA off gun triggers, but only makes them strengthen their commitment to arming everyone.  The symbolism is obsessive, locked, a kind of repetition madness.  Could liminality ceremonies move such people into a new context -- make them understand the world differently? What is it they see that makes them believe they are under attack, in danger of being destroyed, forced to take extreme measures?   What is our fascination with the “extreme” about?  Does it indicate power?

Such madness has got to be physiological, inscribed in the neurons, connected to identity, beyond the reach of rational thought.  Some have suggested forcible ingestion of Ecstacy, the drug, or at least LSD.  But it is also possible to evoke auto-secretions of mind-opening drugs.  Sweats.  Retreats.  Yoga.  Snake-handling.

Sunday morning services can’t always be major experiences, life-changing at some deep level.  It would just exhaust us all.   But most ministers who are effective preachers have had someone burst into tears or even cry out, reacting to something that was said or possibly just released by the experience of a peaceful place with music and people of good will.  They only needed a trigger.  Possibly there is some kind of reverse-parallel with a destructive shooter’s sudden paroxysm of violence, willingness to cross a line, a compulsion to do so.

I do not think obsessed people are bewildered people, but rather over-committed to their own preoccupations without realizing anything outside that bubble.  But Luther, compelled to go into the wilderness by his broken trust in the Roman Catholic bureaucracy, discovered that there was a plenitude to comprehend.

In a completely different metaphor, I’ve heard people talk about feeling that they were going to drown unless they kept struggling in the only way they knew.  But when they surrendered and relaxed, they found that the water was holding them up -- they were floating.  There’s a suggestion of suicide about this idea, which makes it scary, but it IS a kind of suicide to let the old self die so that a new self has a space in which to form.  Waiting for a guarantee and preview of that new self is not possible.  You have to “become” into the terrifying future, only partially glimpsed.  But sometimes all you have to do is to stand up -- you may be standing in shallow water.  A Sunday morning service can get us all on our feet.

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interview with the photographer at http://cargocollective.com/savikuruppu/Photographer-Alex-O-Neill

LIFE IS A BUFFALO JUMP

The conventional pattern for action in a narrative is vertical: a starting point, a number of points on ascent (base-camps as it were), eventually a climax/crisis of a peak turning point, and then resolution coming down the mountain on the other side.  This might be a jackandjill story -- not the ascent of Everest, which is as dangerous in descent as in ascent.  On the other hand, J+J did tumble down.

A good place to process buffalo carcasses.

Anyway, here’s an alternative based on the layout of Head-Smashed-In buffalo jump.  First there is a grassy plain where the buffalo graze up on the top.  They are gradually moved towards a cliff, gentlygently at first and then in greater panic and confusion, until they fall over the cliff, which is not meant to be so high that it kills all of them but cripples many.  (No refrigeration, so the longer they stay alive but captive the better.)  Then the hard work gradually processing meat, hides, bones and fat -- some of which must be boiled out of the bones.  Maybe this kind of plan for a book or tale would work better for nonfiction, but at the core must be a cataclysm:  9-11, Krakatoa, the AIDS pandemic, a pinch-point that shifts everything into a new pattern.

Maybe it works for a compilation of short pieces, each one a bison with a head and tail, guts and legs, metaphors waiting to be unpacked.  

The theory of deep experience I’m exploring works pretty well with this pattern:  the first part, the grazing, is the gathering of the sensorium and life itself, going along.  The cliff is the moment of plunging, changing, out of control, over an edge.  Then the space below near water is where the experience is sorted, invested with meaning, translated into action, processed.  “Parted out.”  So the people of New Guinea spend the whole year preparing for their climax ritual in small ways, but then in the burst of energy for a week they participate in what they believe (a liminal time), and afterwards they have the courage to survive in one of the toughest environments on the planet.  It feels right and whole.  Same for the Plains Indians.

The pattern works pretty well for the process of writing itself:  the gathering of detail, the gradual movement towards the discovery of the essential conception (a kind of gestation leading to delivery), and then the working out page-by-page and the consequences in feedback from readers, the eaters of the words, the wearer of the robes.  

There is another difference from the usual pattern of Western lit, which is that in traditional stories there is generally a protagonist and an antagonist -- a hero and a villain (and maybe a lover or two) that conflict.  It’s that debate agonistic structure meant to preserve rationality and clarity about what’s happening which is the basis of our law system and often our governance.  But this other buffalo jump pattern I’m talking about -- what to call it?  “the hourglass” with it’s implication of time passing? -- is about a whole people interacting with a whole people, a situation (grazing as usual) grabbed by a massive event (going over the cliff) and then the elements of developing a new complex as the shift of focus goes from buffalo people to human people.  This is more like the pattern of scientific inquiry:  gathering evidence, forming a more-or-less committed hypothesis, challenging and opening up that hypothesis.  It’s also the pattern of discussion.  And harvest.

The agonistic Middle Eastern Manicheist black-or-white way of thinking has dragged us into political gridlock, both between parties and within parties.  It eliminates options and resists the shifting of frames.  This or that -- me or him -- often based on concrete, circumscribed thought and evidence meant to keep people from finding out the limits of the assumptions, rather than realizing finally that the earth goes around the sun and evolution is real.

But the changes just keep coming and we keep going over the cliff:  drugs, stigma-based poverty, the Internet, various pandemics and social shifts.  “The Pill” was a cliff.  The Vietnam intervention was a cliff.  We thought we had a clear idea of what was going on, but then we found out the world had changed into something else, and we’re still struggling with what to do about it because they all interact.  Social dissection is much more difficult when the whole economic system challenges class and education, when black is legally as good as white skin (but what about red and yellow?).  Parenthood might mean almost anything, genetics only being the beginning.  The old biological taboos don’t work:  we need new taboos.  There’s no such thing as not having taboos, not having stigma.  We should have taboos against cruelty and neglect, stigma for greed.

Such complexity.  We wouldn’t be motivated to keep working on this re-assorting and re-programming if it weren’t so painful, so joyful, so technologically powered.  We thought that the Internet meant that individuals were empowered and the chorus of their voices would change the world.  Instead the big tech providers are re-creating network television, dominated by the opinions of the nameless corporations who hide behind them.  The work is a lot harder and will take a lot more group effort than we thought.

Most people think in terms of centuries, partly because around here most of the white people came about a century ago.  Some people think in terms of the Declaration of Independence.  Other cataclysmic markers are Protestant Christianity, the devising of agriculture/towns about ten thousand years ago, the invention of writing about five thousand years ago -- emerging out of bookkeeping (numbers) intended to be mnemonic devices for gains and losses, winning and losing, a way of defeating arguments about whose land, whose harvest, whose profit, the credits went to.  Agonistic.

Early story came from a different place -- spoken or sung, with rhymes and rhythm as their mnemonic aids, with story lines that varied to suit the audience or the teller -- and also, thirty thousand years ago, with art -- repetitiously stuttering sketches towards the truth of horses, aurochs and mammoths.  Story versus numbers.  Testimony of witnesses versus scraping data.  Novels versus spreadsheets.  The poetic possible versus concrete verifiable.  Two sides of the brain.

But now we see that the whole brain -- plus the body which “thinks” with tension, pulses, secretions, sensory information: the chords the feet of the organist play while the fingers work the keyboards above -- is a flexible instrument, a both/and operator that can look on both sides, even fifty sides, and play out the symphony of life itself -- here the grass, here the panic, here the falling, here the boy who got caught in the stampede so that his head was smashed in, here the man whose stone maul killed the bull bison and split its head so he could scoop out the good fat brain to eat.  Here the man and woman, replete and nourished, find a patch of grass and lie down together to make a new boy.  Plenty of time later for the scientists to sort bones, estimate amounts, carbon date the fires, calculate the calories and nutrients in bison carcasses and what impact they might have on Blackfeet genetics.

There are two ways to resolve conflict: the first is for one of the forces to dominate and "swallow" the other.  The second is to break the situation into so many different smaller factors that no two forces are strong enough to oppose each other and all must depend upon coalitions, compromise, and mutual interests.