BEARS IN YOUR HEAD

The first year (1989) of the new high school in remote Heart Butte revealed a lot of kids who were returning to school after years of confusion, transferring, non-attendance and not passing.  Some of them had enrolled in but had not passed two or three “years” of English, which is meant to be a cumulative skill subject as well as teaching the canon of literature.  Students always distribute over a continuum of mastery, but the problem was complicated because they DID pass or at least attend parts of the normal curriculum, which added boredom from repetition to the lack of motivation in the first place.  Some kids were taking freshman, sophomore, and junior English in the same day, but I was the only English teacher.

In order to keep us all from going crazy, I decided to “theme” the four high school years.  Juniors conventionally do American lit; Seniors do world and British lit.  That was fine.  Then, Freshman would do "Lovers", and Sophomores would do "Bears".

I built a bear bibliography, buying as many as I could afford myself since the school had no high school library books and no budget for such a “frill.”  I read “When the Legends Die” aloud, a little bit daily.  (It’s about an orphaned boy barely surviving, mostly through rage, who partners with a bear.  There’s a lot of rodeo in it and there was a movie version.)  I looked for photos of bears to post — calendars were good.  We told each other true bear stories, some of them about the bears around the place that very day.  I told Chuck Jonkel, the bear researcher in Missoula, about all this and he sent a box of videos, including one about meerkats that was so seductive that everyone forgot all about bears for a while.  

Humans tend to take for granted anything common.  This was complicated by being a small reservation town whose culture was sneered at by the larger “civilization.”  There was no decent TV reception except for the few who could afford the big parabolic dishes and the movies presented either prosperous middle-class places, much intensified and glamorous, or the most sordid and decayed side of cities, equally distorted and glamorous.  

To the kids, their home village was a “nothing town.”  To them, being late to school because there was a bear in the yard (such as the yard was) was nothing — even a welcome excuse — but it interfered with the friendships that interacted before school and it kept them away from the school-provided breakfast.  They knew the difference between black bears and grizzlies but they didn’t give a rip.

They knew very little about the biology of bears but that Feds were best avoided by hiding bear shootings, which weren’t that rare.  They knew nothing at all about the world’s bear mythology or even what a symbol might be, except that they knew Napi stories about bears.  What they shared with the rest of the world was that they split bears in that either/or way that humans do: bears were looming shadows of destruction that carried enormous power as in a Blackfeet Bear Knife Bundle or a ripped apart carcass of a horse.  Or else bears were teddy bears, soft, pastel, nurture-fragments of plush and stuffing, child-substitutes.  But you had to buy them, they were white merchanizing culture, and somehow they were connected with death in the same way as flowers in white culture.

I made a silhouette with the dimensions of the biggest grizzly and fastened it to the wall alongside the door.  The boys, all basketball-obsessed, leapt to slap the top of every doorway they passed through, but the bear was bigger than the doorway so they slid their eyes sideways at my bear when they went by.  

One of the boys stood considering me one day.  “I sure don’t know where you got this thing about bears, Mrs. Scriver.”  Some of the constant criticism from the community included an accusation that I was white and therefore had no right to tell Blackfeet things about bears.  I was revealing proprietary knowledge.  I should observe their taboos.

The Bear Knife Bundle was something I had held, part of the Scriver artifact collection.  It is a large wide metal blade decorated with a cluster of brass falconry bells and other signifying small objects as pendants.  Scary enough in itself, the way of “transferring” it to a new keeper was to throw it at his head.  If he caught it, then he was legitimate.  If he didn’t, well . . .   I wrote a story about it for “Twelve Blackfeet Stories.” 

A person has to get pretty deep into anthro lit to find out about this Bundle because the community resisted telling about it and the anthros tried to respect taboos, but collectors had no such qualms, which meant that the value of such a thing was high, and indigenous people would sell them in an emergency.  Or, rendered defiant by missionaries who defied taboos, some stole the Sacred objects from their ancient relatives and sold them for whatever they could get.  Possibly thousands of dollars if you met the right German.

The actual parts of grizzly bears carry enough of an aura that their skulls are worth hundreds of dollars.  And yet the hobby hunters who brought in their kill to be made into a rug never grasped that the hide was glued onto a papier maché form with plastic teeth and a rubber tongue.  The skull would have made the rug impossibly heavy and the actual teeth were not attractive.  Bears have terrible teeth: worn, stained, broken, abscessed.  They are more designed for crushing than penetration.  Bob had a laundry basket of skulls sitting in a dark corner of the basement.  I’d bet they didn’t show up on the inventory of his estate.  

If you go looking online for a source of bear skulls, claws, hides and so on, you will find the search complicated by the popularity of “grizzly” or “bear” as brand names for everything from foods to machinery parts.  If one buys from an underground source, which is much more exciting, the problem will be the legality of such objects in terms of Federal, State, and Tribal laws.  If you try to take them through customs, they may be impounded.  Of course, underground folks are not sticklers for authenticity, so you may not get what you pay for.

A country road connects Heart Butte to East Glacier if the spring rains didn’t wash it out.  At the East Glacier end many small cabins have been built for recreation.  When the epic movie “Heaven’s Gate“  was filmed nearby, many of the crew rented the little cabins for the duration of the shoot.  When one production staff guy didn’t show up for work one morning, he was called:  “Gitcher butt down here!”  

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s a bear on the front porch!”

“Well, go out the window and just get in your pickup.  It won’t bother you.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“There’s another bear in the pickup.”  No bears hurt anyone during the making of this movie.

I bought a class-sized supply of McClintock’s “The Old North Trail” and made every kid read it or at least look at the many  old photos.  They covertly endowed every horse with a giant phallus.  One of the bear stories was about a guardian warrior who went with a raiding party across the Rockies on a war trail that began up by Looking Glass Pass and went across to the Flathead.  It was a high and narrow trail.  A party of Flathead Indians made a counter-attack and pushed the Blackfeet hard.  The heroic warrior took a stand in a narrow place to let the rest of his party escape.  Single-handedly he turned the enemy back, but in the end he was killed.

At that point he morphed into a giant grizzly boar and reared onto his full height, still guarding the pass.  The enemy fled.  When that bear finally died, it transformed into a giant dead tree.  In the Sixties people pointed out the very tree, but Bob said that in his lifetime there had been several of those big stark bear-trees because of a forest fire going through.   The reaching branches that were left did indeed look like a rearing bear.  Even so does reality become mantled by story.

When I told the story in class, I did my best bear imitation.  The kids didn’t do that very much.  Old people cautioned them that it might actually CALL a grizzly.  But, anyway, to them basketball mattered more.

SHOULD WE START A CHURCH?

Confronting Rothko from http://www.socialhistoryofart.com/

"The Conversion of Saul"

I quip that Pope Francis is trying to return Paul’s church to Jesus.  I hope he has better luck than Buddha did.  (The latter never quite succeeded in convincing people they should not worship HIM.)  What I’m saying in code is that Jesus was not “religious” in terms of institutions -- he had no institutions nor interest in starting one.  But Saul, who had a great transfiguration and was then Paul, kept more of the twisty stuff of institutions (chromosomes, if you like) and pushed what he knew from his previous life as a formal leader.  People who know the relevant documents and evidence will make fun of me, but I believe that it was Peter who was supposed to be the Rock on which to found a church.  It was Peter who tried to walk on water, who denied Jesus, etc. etc.  A much more human sort of guy.  This is all barnacles on the great ship of faith. It’s fun but I don’t take it seriously because it’s not the heart, the key, the root of being human.

For a little while I was in the business of founding and growing congregations.  It’s not very hard if you have a message that people really want and need.  If you don’t, nothing will work for very long.  

The next step, the building of networks among congregations until there’s a denomination -- a system big enough to have a name (nom) -- begins to feel a lot like advertising and corporations.  There must be a headquarters, a logo, and then someone issues formal materials, and no matter how democratic the elections, the leaders begin to think like Paul and tell all the little congregations what to do.  They might be right but piles of letters to this and that community takes the leadership out of the hands of locals and away from on-the-ground experience.  Once you get past the Gospels, that’s about all the New Testament is: letters from headquarters.  With a horror story (Revelations) tacked onto the end.  This is just the Middle Eastern kind of religion.  There have been dozens, not just three.

After all, I’m not very interested in religion.  I’m interested in human beings and their experience of the world and by world I mean something more like cosmic galaxies than like the United Nations.  It’s the “experience” part that I’ve been reading about in order to understand better how being human can be exuberant, creative, and thoughtful in a sharing way.  If a group comes together to be those kinds of things together, that’s fine.  If you want to call it “spiritual” or “worship”  or “ceremonial” and if you can resist Robert’s Rules of Order, then I am interested.  But I will maintain my solitude.

The Inter-Faith Chapel at the University of Nome by Robert Baldwin

Despite the necessity of the raw world and the cultivation of experiences contacted through exploration, some things are teddy bears -- familiar links to comfort.  But I wouldn’t want to attend a church where the pews are full of teddy bears.  Well, maybe once to see what it was like.  At the other extreme, I would avoid a church full of grizzly bears out of self-preservation.  The question is “what does it mean to attend a church full of humans?”  Or “what does it mean to attend a church at all?”  When is a theatre a church?  When is a circle of Blackfeet sitting on the ground, singing about the lives of familiar animals, actually a church?  

So is the definition of church in the content, the procedure, the nature of the attenders, the ecology of the community and the land where it is situated, the formal account the leaders can give of what’s happening, what a trained observer (anthropologist) might write about it -- ???   Jesus, Francis and Buddha might say it all depends on whether “God” is present.  So what makes the circle holy?  

I suggest three things:  1) Does it guide the people’s life-decisions?  2) Does it unite a community? and 3) Does it give life meaning?

Can a school be a church/can a church be a school?   Can a studio be a church/can a church be a studio?  I say yes, yes, yes.  Quoting Molly Bloom that way always made the older UU ministers (all male) laugh because to them it meant sex.  Can sex be a church/can a church be sex?  Yup.  (Molly Bloom as a cowgirl who gets the blues.)

MY BOOK HAS MORE BOOKMARKS THAN PAGES…RESEARCH BLOG BY CIARA MADIGAN, 

MASTERS STUDENT IN ENGLISH: MODERNITIES AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK

And you see what I just did?  Linked to a literary canon, both citations a little bit scandalous.  Can church be a scandal?  Can a scandal be guiding, uniting, meaningful?  Yup.  Can a group of people holding candles in the snow around the site of a murder, whether a beaten child, an unarmed black man, an historical massacre of indigenous people, be a church?  Of course.  The holiness is not in the event, but in the response.  Candles and singing are not enough, but only the beginning.  Did it show empathy?  Did it prompt giving of time and energy to the future?  Could you feel the meaning?

I’m going to spend the rest of the day building a bibliography for those interested in what I’ve been reading and as a reminder for myself, because I need to reread some of this.  prairiemarybibliographies.blogspot.com.  Not much there yet.

Gabor Maté, the MD who works with hard-core addicts in Vancouver, B.C., tries hard not to be arrogant or controlling.  In the interest of showing his vulnerability, he confesses that he is obsessive/compulsive.  (OCD or whatever) Luckily, his fetish is not chemically addictive in any obviously destructive way: it’s classical music, which he buys in complete sets of works, never satisfied, and not even listening to all of it because there’s not enough time in any day, though he performs his medical work, buys his CD’s, and then short-sheets his family despite their pleas and his promises to "pay" more attention to them.  By now he seems to have a bit more control over his obsession which he achieved by paying a fine to his wife and/or employer for each failure.  Money.  Hmmmm.  Merde.  Fertile if you have seeds.

Maté’s past is Jewish, haunted by WWII holocaust, and also affected by his relatively small size.  His first year was uncertain and chaotic, but then things got better.  (That infant is still in there somewhere.)  It seems clear that to him classical music is 1) civilization in the European style of mastery of intricate patterns, 2) high-brow, a sign of sophistication, 3) a sign that he is wealthy (superior) since he runs up bills in the thousands but doesn’t go into debt, 4) something that is just “his” -- not even anything to share with the family so long as he uses headphones, though his son said that as a kid he got tired of the blasting symphonies, 5) something that can go everywhere with him via iPods and car speakers, 6) basically a teddy bear, or speaking more formally, a “transitional object” that helps him maintain identity and safety in a world that constantly challenges all that.  It comforts him, distracts him, rewards him, which he needs given what he battles daily.  He was slow to realize that it was also an avoidance and hurting his family, but as soon as he saw that, he had the power to stand outside himself, make a diagnosis, and devise a cure -- the same as he would for anyone else.

In the end, that turns out to be what the rest of us should do as well.  It’s part of the Great Tango that is human life, an erotic dance with Hungry Ghosts and teddy bears. 

TEDDY BEAR SYMBOLISM

Even in the hard-boiled and cynical (supposedly) world of Swedish murder mysteries, the teddy bear -- a stuffed toy that looks and acts nothing like a bear, not even the original yellow teddy bear that got its name from Teddy Roosevelt -- has a clear symbolism: the child’s attachment to a nurturing caretaker.  

I have a photo of myself with my beloved king-sized stuffed panda with whom I took naps when I was hardly bigger than the bear.  In a sermon I once told the sad story of this first lover, how it got so filthy that my mother stuffed it into the furnace, badly searing my emotional attachment which she always underestimated. The day after I told the story an earnest older lady brought me a little stuffed panda.  I was 45 -- she was 70.  The bear was more about her than me.  So far no one has challenged my relationship with my mother except for myself.  I have to admit I got a bit of a shudder from reading a sci-fi novel in which terraforming on another planet included the planting of real live panda bears which in an unforeseen consequence became like ferocious man-eating polar bears, except that they traveled in packs.  

I guess some people see lovers as being like that.  It depends upon how you define lovers, which are as prone to being misunderstood and morphed into psychic categories as bears are.  Non-human species and human anatomy are useful metaphors for talking about “felt” concepts that are hard to define, because definitions depend upon social agreement.  A rousing essay that ought to be read by all pre-adolescent young men is at  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/hesaid-in-search-of-the-magic-pussy/  It’s by Dr. Adam Sheck, a marriage counselor who blogs at http://passion101.com/blog/about/   He’s one of those guys that Dear Abby is always recommending.  (She’s pretty much given up on recommending clergy.)  Dr. Sheck has great hair, but keep in mind that he’s in California.  On the other hand, he could be in Sweden.  Whether he works for you depends on where and who you are.

The “Magic Pussy” is a phenomenon that can actually cause pre-adolescent and adolescent boys to plunge into despair so deep that they kill themselves.  Because the Magic Pussy is their new teddy bear, the one that means they have graduated from mother to lover.  (If the lover they find is male, the magic anatomy will have a different name.  If we’re talking about girls, it’s obvious that the Magic Wand is not quite what it was in Harry Potter movies, but it’s similar.  When a Magic Bit-of-Anatomy takes the boy in and is effective, it returns him to the Eden that was Mother.  (Assuming she was a good mother, which is a prerequisite for the yearning metaphor.  Abused and neglected boys do not yearn for a magic pussy, though their physiological yearning may still be there and may transfer to the Magic Drug.)

I’m sorry to use blunt language but it’s time to give up the taboos and fantasies that keep us from coping with reality.  On the other hand, if I use Latinate medical terminology -- which is what my mother raised me to use -- I find that most people can’t figure out what I’m talking about.  They are not in the habit of using dictionaries, so they just stop reading.

We’re not really talking about vulvas and teddy bears and yet we are.  When a child has died, we festoon trees with teddy bears in the same spirit as lighting candles, which are a little more traditional in their symbolism of caring.  Men and boys can be reassured by coition and the clever-as-well-as-magic pussy will make the experience one that truly embraces them.  But even coition is really a metaphor for an intimate relationship -- or ought to be.  People are now writing about how “hook-up culture” and “rape culture” destroy intimacy -- actually make it impossible.  We’re in a culture that burns teddy-bears because it’s good for business.  They hope you’ll buy a new one, bigger and better with batteries so it will talk.  It’s an intimacy toy.  (Of course, sex toys are old news.)

Here comes the twist.  Intimacy, nurturing, and good sex are phenomena of the brain.  The ultimate Magic Pussy is the Magic Concept:  the idea that is so dead-center or so beautifully expressed that it fills a person with joy and confidence.  This is the goal of religious thought because it feels like spirituality.  It can also easily happen as a result of art or rational research and reflection or song or ritual or meditation.  Sometimes another person gives it to you and sometimes you just find it.  It can be pursued or it can just well up or come as a clap of thunder -- entirely unexpected.  Meaning.  Belonging.

This assertion about the Magic Concept might strike someone as a magic concept in itself, but more likely not, because it’s a function of time and place, context and readiness.  This is the great problem of religious institutions:  that they want their own Magic Concept to have meaning for everyone, but there can’t be the same Magic Pussy or Magic Wand for everyone all the time.  At best an institution or a book or a practice amounts to a search, a sharing of evidence.  

Strongly motivated searches can end up with false conclusions, such as believing that “child” or “virgin” pussy is more powerful than any other kind.  Resentment against the withholding of praise is a pretty good clue that the person is really demanding confirmation of his own possession of a Magic Wand,  which is not about the other person at all, thus eliminating all possibility of intimacy.  Intimacy takes two.

Surely this neglects our felt intimacy with pets, which is reciprocal, at least with dogs, or with imaginary (maybe remembered or made-up) people who are not us, a kind of internal reciprocity.  But the Magic is about something “felt” rather than pinned down and explained.  It’s what beloved stories like “The Velveteen Rabbit” or “Pinocchio” or “The Little Prince” are about, that felt relationship we find nurturing, reassuring, and therefore “intimate.”  If that felt relationship is intense enough, it can become transcendent.

The traditional stiff yellow tightly-packed rather species-accurate bear cub has gradually morphed into a soft, floppy, chubby-limbed, flat-faced creature.  I think it is meant to be easier to handle for a small child, which means that the youngster who needs a reassuring transitional object is becoming younger than Christopher Robin, whose Pooh Bear was like the early version.  These soft and floppy bears are meant to appeal to parents -- that’s who has a credit card -- and they are (to me) disturbingly like the no-stuffing dog toys that the pet is taught to shake and pull in a tug-o-war, not unlike the felt experience of a child of divorce.

This is how the Magic Pussy becomes the Toothed Twat.  It is the deserting mother, the double-crossing dame.  Still -- decades ago one of those old stiff yellow teddies floated around the gay community on the West Coast.  Someone had given it a full set of old-man’s dentures.  It was terrifying.  And symbolic.