NAPI'S FINE HOUSE

When a Blackfeet has ideas about writing a book, which they have no doubt will be published and earn lots of money, they almost invariably say they’re going to write the true version of the Napi stories, which they learned from their grandparent (usually about my age by now).  Though the stories were originally oral, there must be a dozen versions of printed Blackfeet Napi stories out there floating around, not counting other tribes. Why add to the pile?   When I ask these would-be authorities, they just look confused.  In their minds it is clear that a book about Blackfeet should have Napi stories in it, that there are definitive versions that are more valuable than the others, and that everyone in the greater world will fall on them with great delight and tons of money.  (They have not gotten the news about the collapse of the publishing industry, but that’s beside the point.)

If you speak to a white person over sixty about a book about Blackfeet, their minds will turn to James Willard Schultz -- dramatic horseback adventures of hunting and war.  If the white person is a little younger, the book will be about post-colonial misery and injustice: alcoholism, lousy housing, drugs, broken families.   If the white person is female, it will be about a cross-race romance.  Everyone thinks of their little sub-category as representing the whole.  They never question this, never investigate, and even if they come to the rez, they will see it on those terms.

Star Boy

Let’s go back to Napi stories.  The anthropologists like Wissler, Ewers or Kehoe had a great interest in them and scientists recorded them as accurately as they could in the early days of contact, hoping to understand the culture better.  Anyway, in those days it was salvage anthropology: save what they could.  At the same time the missionaries were looking for equivalents to the Christian stories so they could say, “You see?  These are universal elements.”  So Starboy or Blood Clot Boy became versions of Jesus.  And there WERE correlations, but they became an argument something like genetic purity: kill all the buffalo that have domestic cow genes.  (An old Aryan idea: variation as pollution.)  

The general public saw Napi stories as more like Aesop fables or the Greek myths.  Entertaining.  Suitable for children.  (Which they were, since they were meant to socialize the tribal children with tribal values like generosity, courage, and willingness to experiment.)  But trivial, non-threatening.  So James Willard Schultz, Frank Bird Linderman, George Bird Grinnell, the Demings, Walter McClintock did pretty well selling the stories.  None were Blackfeet.  None got rich.

In the Sixties local people began to pick up the idea of Napi, Natoosi (Sun), and others.  For instance, Napi's Lookout; The Story of Willow Rounds by Dorothy M. Hamaker (1964)  (A white rancher’s wife.)  And not long after that the Blackfeet themselves were chiming in.  Percy Bullchild’s “The Sun Came Down,” was commercially successful.  

Napi and the Bullberries (The Indian Reading Series Stories and Legends of the Northwest, Level II Book 17) was by Joan Kennerly, Carmen Marceau, Doris Old Person and June Tatsey (1978)  (Four Blackfeet sisters, “the Bullshoe girls,” who were all involved with education.)   Darnell Doore  (Rides at the Door) (1979)  Blackfeet Heritage Program, Browning Public Schools, put another turn on the wheel.  There are others, I’m sure.

Loki

Brer Rabbit

Napi is a trickster figure and a universal in stories around the planet.  Here he’s Brer Rabbit and there he’s Loki.  He’s the guy that thinks he’s so smart, but gets carried away.  On the other hand, because he’ll try anything, he’s creative and makes contributions. 

A few years after I left the reservation for a while, I earned a degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a focus on anthropology.  There I learned about revising sacred stories or writing parallel new ones in order to make a point. 

Windigo

In part I learned this in a dark way from a student who combined the Baker Massacre with Dracula, a figure from European vampire lore, very much like the cannibal figure of the Windigo, the woodland tribes’ starvation horror figure.  (There’s a modern movie version spelled “Wendigo.”)  On the other hand I tried playing “what if” with traditional teaching stories of the Gospels.  Sometimes this was pretty enlightening.  What if Jesus had turned all the wine at the wedding party into water instead of the other way around?

What Napi story might I invent for the situation of today’s Blackfeet?  I’ll give it a try.

______________

Napi’s neighbor, Striped Skunk, was experimenting with the white man’s way of building a house.  First he wove one of grass, but the wind soon got rid of that.  So the next one was made of logs, which stayed and looked good.  

Napi was jealous, but he didn’t get upset until he looked over one day and saw that Striped Skunk even had lights on in his cabin.  How did he manage that?   

When he went over and demanded to know the secret, Striped Skunk showed him that he had captured a Farting Horse, which emitted a gas from under his tail that could be set on fire, making a pretty good light.  It was warm, too, which is a big advantage in a prairie winter.  So Napi went over one night and stole the Farting Horse.  

Indeed, the gas burned bright and warm, but Napi kept Farting Horse picketed next to his lodge so it wouldn’t run away.  Pretty soon the horse had eaten everything nearby and stopped farting.  This made Napi very indignant and he decided to find out where in the horse the farts were coming from, so he cut the horse open.  It didn’t work.  No clue.  

Napi was pretty sure the horse was getting something from the ground -- it was always going along in the grass with its nose down.  So he went to look for whatever it was.  All he found was horse dung, which would burn, but nothing like farts.  However, he did find a lot of shiny black rock, something like obsidian.  Thinking about Striped Skunk’s log cabin, he decided he would make a house of this black rock, which would be very beautiful and strong.  So he did.  In it he burned buffalo chips and horse dung, because there was never enough wood on the high hilltops where he liked to live because of the view which made him feel important.

Then came spring and the thunderstorms.  Lightning struck everywhere.  Striped Skunk was always careful to open his Pipe Bundle at that time and to give away what he could to his family and friends.  One day in spite of this his cabin was struck by lightning and would have burned but all his friends and neighbors came quickly and put the fire out.

Napi’s lookout house up there so high was also struck by lightning, but he had thought,  “Ha!  Nothing will happen to me!  I don’t need to do any ceremonies because this house is made of stone.”  Alas, it turned out that the black shiny stone was coal and it burned very well.  The tribe tried to get up there to help, but it took a long time to climb such steep slopes and the house burned completely.  Napi spent the rainy season huddled in front of his smoking, smelly fire of dung.  He couldn't even afford a canvas lodge.

________

I tried to get oil into this story but failed.  Maybe you can do it.  This is a creative story -- anyone can add to it or change it.  Just like life, especially tribal life.  I don’t recommend this music, but it IS very windigo.  Maybe it is sound from a windigo who thought he could eat oil. Or was that drinking frakking liquid?  http://tiktik.bandcamp.com/album/windigo-psychosis

COYOTE WAS GOING ALONG

Trickster stories begin “coyote was going along . . .” because they are a road show. Trickster stories are the original picaresque, millenia-old and world-wide. This ever-moving journey takes trickster to one walled and guarded community after another. His song-poems get him through the gate to ruck up the locals with news of the outside world.

The chiarascuro of Tim Barrus’ life is drawn in the dazzle of spotlights and the dusk of backstage and back alley life. He travels by motorcycle cross-country with no headlight. The strangeness is that it is the spotlights that are deceptive and the shadows that are true. Moonlight reveals everything. But on the darkest moonless starless night the heart is felt. A decade into the 21st century, Tim has spent a half-century redrawing society from a counterculture and subversive point of view. He doesn’t try to overthrow the government. It is the culture priesthood he targets, those who sit in Manhattan skyscrapers planning to lunch, signaling “heels up” and “heels down” over the fate of lives they do not know, killing small furry animals with stilettos. The educated tweedy men are gone.

Tim is a trickster, determined to undermine, blast apart, even destroy the standing order of cultural institutions, including the family. He himself has been cut apart at his body’s hinges, his hips and shoulders replaced by surgery. He blew his own guts out. He’ll tell you about it. It’s no secret. These are circumpolar shaman markers, but he aspires to be a Meso-American nagual. He needs enough sun to maintain a tan. He likes to take his shirt off.

He survives only because he is a trickster, that world-wide pattern (coyote, Napi, raven, hare, B’rer Rabbit) that introduces the future by slipping through the gaps in the walls around the cities, charming the youth (the Pied Piper, Peter Pan, the Beatles), and then teaching them to speak their hearts anew. He’s not just San Francisco in the Eighties, he’s not just Key West or Santa Fe or the Village or even Paris and Amsterdam where he lived in the catacombs making poetry of bones.

Vilified for saying his mother was Navajo, Tim is not half-Navajo or Irish or Dutch or male or female or young or old. Neither is he everybody. He slides in and out of roles, like an actor who is always different and yet at the core is always the same, always recognizable, even in drag.

Mary Scriver is the opposite. Rosy-cheeked, once red-haired, always barrel-shaped, Stay Put Woman in a prairie village, she looks like someone’s granny. That is a disguise. No one notices grannies. They are everywhere, but they have no significance.

Her motto is Flaubert’s: “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” People who take her for granted can be disconcerted. She is straight, celibate, dependable, abstinent, and interested in everything -- but she’s a lousy housekeeper. She is a person of place, the east slope of the Rockies on the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation, where the combed golden fields of grain bump up against the pine-cloaked wilderness of stone ramparts. She is rooted. Ordained in the UU denomination after the requisite training at the University of Chicago Divinity School she owns a small Minerva shield, emblazoned with the snakes of Medusa, but hangs it in the closet.

I’m interested in the scandalous Ulysses-type voyager that Tim is and not surprised to find that we like each other, understand each other, and can interpret each other to our constituencies. His Lewis Hyde trickster fits with my Thomas Kuhn paradigm shifts. Paradox, ambiguity, labyrinth. Don’t expect answers or recipes or rituals. But they might show up.

The natural milieu of Tim Barrus is a group. Many times when he begins a post that is a story, he starts out, “We see . . .” and then paints a word picture, because he is an artist. But sometimes it's a vid from Cinematheque, his group of boy artists, overlaid, paced to music.

He likes impromptu audiences on public steps, more formal audiences at a poetry reading, a party, a theatre company, a dance troupe, or a ship crew. His group of boys make a kind of shifting family, free but bonded to the protected intimacy of the group. They can go, but they return. Tim likes the art loft, the photography dark room, the library. Wherever he goes, he forms affinity groups.

The kinds of groups Tim does NOT like are the kinds I know best: church congregations, public school classrooms, school cafeterias, office cubicle floors, hotel conference rooms. At this point I don’t like them anymore, but I no longer like any groups. I’m happy in a restaurant only if I’m at a table with friends or a book, not in a banquet hall. Is the difference that I’m ten years older than Tim, that I’m aging? Or is there something else? Distrust of consensus, fear of mobs?


The larger world describes Tim as a kind of madman. In my smaller world I’m considered a “character,” which in Montana means an eccentric of whom one is fond but wary. Maybe troublesome. To each other we seem quite sane. Why is that? Is it about trust? Or is there something bigger? A cause, a life position?

Maybe it’s that I used to be coyote going along, living in a van like a hippie while serving four Montana UU fellowships of intelligent, funny, dedicated people who tried so hard to be inclusive and helpful but only succeeded a little because they knew so little about the truly outrageous. Now that I live in one place, I remember travel. Why don’t I go along anymore? I say it’s because the cats won’t let me. They watch for coyotes and growl at dogs. Danger, danger!

All yesterday afternoon the electricity was off. Big machines working everywhere to beat the weather had cut something. In the clear luminous day the first yellow leaves drifted softly down. This is generally a quiet place, except for the lawnmowers, but yesterday was truly silent. I stopped everything to sit watching, liminal. My guardian cats were sleeping, narcotized.

Where Tim was, he went to the walled and guarded airport to meet one of his boys because the kid is part of what keeps him alive. The kid is also a coyote, going along . . . When the electricity comes back on, I’ll get an email song-poem.

UNCANNY BEINGS

Certain figures of philosophy, story and poetry in all their glorious forms will return to basic domains of human concern again and again, giving them flesh in semi-human bodies such as the nagual, the shaman, the werewolf, the windigo, the sorcerer, the messiah. Incarnation means “in flesh form.”

Let’s do some sorting. The umbrella that includes ALL these forms is our human ability to think of inhuman or superhuman powers. We all live in societies where there is a continuum of skills and awareness, where some people have more skills and power or even awareness than other people. This is worrisome, because it affects one’s ability to eat -- not just in the practical nutritional sense, but in all the life-sustaining dimensions including healing. When one of these forms with special powers is imagined, they are often anthropocentric, that is, about human concerns.

Some are even institutional, supported and funded, for instance, as a priest or a doctor or -- in a tribe -- a medicine person or herbalist. They are meant to be able to join two realms: that of special knowledge and that of the person needing help.

Because good and evil are human constructs, different in different contexts whether that context is culture-wide or simply an atypical exceptional event, many of these go-between roles are anthropocentric. It is a matter of concern whether the role is an evil one or a benign one -- good for people or bad for people. Because “good” and “bad” when taken beyond simple rule-based morality are often ambiguous or even have unknown ultimate results, the stories about them are meant to help people reflect.

But some of these go-betweens have no concern with good or evil. They are from some other dimension, somewhere beyond human knowledge, and break through unaccountably. In our times the pseudo-scientific beings called “extra-terrestials” come in their flying saucers. Many who interact with them pull them down to human dimensions, often medically which is the only way many ordinary people interact with science. The aliens give them “examinations,” often sexual which is the deepest and most worrisome aspect of medicine for many people.

Today’s sci-fi, like Battlestar Galactica, addresses science in a different way, the relationship between human and machine, especially in terms of robots, who in this storyline are able to get pregnant by humans. We know from experience with animals that this is the test of relationship: can the meiosis that separates chromosome pairs and then rematches them with another set actually form a new creature? (We get nervous when there is mitosis, the simple breaking apart of one creature into two. That’s what plants do, and what scientists do when they clone.) Might we end up with a chimera, something half one animal and half another, half animal and half human: a centaur, a minotaur, a mermaid?

In older times the troubling relationship was between humans and animals. Humans tried to say they were NOT animals, not vulnerable edible meat, but rather something superior whether through mind or soul. Or magic. Or trickiness. BUT it was then possible to conceive of someone who could shape-shift in and out of being an animal or someone like Circe in the Odyssey, who could force people to shape-shift in and out of an animal. Some cultures, like Native Americans, enlist the aid of animals and identify with the qualities of one sort of animal, taking dream guidance from them. These stories are still in the realm of good and evil.

Concern about animal-being gives us the werewolf or possibly the vampire. But these shapes are flesh-eaters, humans who have taken the form of predators. (Strange to think about our love of predators, our sexualization of being consumed.) A little farther out are the windigo (the personification of starvation/predation) and the skin-walker. The only story I’ve ever heard of a windigo turning good was one Joe Bruchac told the junior high in Browning years ago. It was about a loving young mother who fed the windigo enough soup to make it human. A female Messiah whose power of good, defined as nourishment, was able to convert the windigo into a human. Another figure on the “evil” side is the skinwalker.

Do you doubt the reality of the windigo? Consider the case of the bus passenger in Canada who decapitated and ate the man next to him. Consider the cannibal in Great Falls who ate little boys. Consider the recent story of the mother in the paper recently who killed and ate her own baby. There is something in the human brain that can lose the category of “human being” and go entirely outside any human context.

More recent than the tension between human and animal, or human and machine, is between the human per se and the human mind, the struggle to tell “reality” from “illusion” regardless of whether they work anthropocentrically for good or evil. Pogo’s principle, “we have found the enemy and it is us,” is one thing. Now I want to bring up the possibility of parallel universes, the reality of insanity (we do not hold insane people accountable morally in the usual way) and the idea that in the cosmic scheme of things we are just a bit of fuzz on a tiny planet far from the center. This what the crawling baby Krishna reveals when his mother looks into his mouth. Infinity.

Some people have been so endangered in their lives, sometimes beginning in infancy, that they feel they must constantly fight to keep their existence alive, like fighting to keep a flame burning or fighting against a shrinking habitat niche. They are so aware of temporariness and smallness and possibly have seen so many people snuffed by deprivation, starvation, that they yearn to call down the power from that other realm. They may become tricksters in an effort to elude destruction. They do not purposely do good or evil, do not seek power over others, evade all institutions that seek to capture them, and often work as poets rather than scientists, though if a person gets far enough out into deep ecology and theoretical physics, it’s hard to tell poetry from the logic and math. It’s hard to tell madness from insight. It's not about good and evil. It's about being and nonbeing.

TRICKSTER & SHAMAN

What drives the commentors and critics crazy is that they want to know EXACTLY who Timothy Patrick Barrus really is. What category to put him in. What is his label? What is his pedigree, his class, his CV, his family tree, his job record, his antibody status, and so on until it’s no wonder he’s allergic to the topic. And it only makes him trickier. Journalists can make all the phone calls, interviews, investigations, computer checks, Googles, documentations they want. It won’t tell them much. The problem is not the availability of information -- it is their capacity to “get it.” As Tim says, “They see what they want to.” The category of “failed S/M porn writer” is in them, not him; and also the nurturing half-Navajo father called Nasdijj, to the same degree. Ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, metaphor, allusion and elision are his modus operandi. Check out his videos: now you see, now you don’t. Was that a blue heeler helping dog that just streaked by? Or was it a coyote? The human brain struggles to define and constructs an explanation: this is well-documented in the psychology literature. They call it “closure,” as in a closed mind. Trickster resists all closure -- Trickster looks for openings, whether they are porn, NA literature, or boys at risk.
In the end of “Trickster Makes This World” Lewis Hyde finally comes to a simple comparison of the two related archetypes of Shaman and Trickster. His way of thinking is that the Shaman is the one who had the extraordinary death/renewal experience that caused his guts to be replaced with quartz, which he can occasionally draw out crystal by crystal through his skin. (You can read this into Tim’s life.) But Trickster is Coyote, who says, “Sure, I can get something out of my guts, too!” And makes a big poop, with a lot of unnecessary sound effects and smells. He could as easily have made an ejaculation that was not verbal.


Trickster says, as in the title of that once-popular and always-relevant book, “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” Because if you put all your eggs in one basket (Don’t you love mixed metaphors? Trickster does.) you risk trying so hard to protect them that you won’t have a life anymore. When Buddha leaves off wandering, settles down, grows healing herbs, and does elegant tea ceremonies, his role has changed. Now he’s Shaman with a mystical embeddedness in creation. I’m happy to claim that role. Tim can be Trickster. I’m the One Who Watches, Tsalgiglalal. The stars wheel over my head. All the salmon I have eaten (a LOT) leap in the river that passes me.

Hyde tells us (p.292) that in 1964 Mac Linscott Ricketts suggested that “tales locate the trickster in opposition to the practice and beliefs of shamanism.” The shaman “bows before the spiritual world and seeks alliances.” Trickster “recognizes no power beyond it’s own intelligence, and seeks to seize and subdue the unknown with wit and cunning. Trickster . . . embodies an experience of Reality . . . in which humans feel themselves to be self-sufficient beings for whom the supernatural spirits are powers not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.”

Continuing, Hyde says, “. . . trickster is an outsider. . . He has no friends in that other world” [the world of spirit] ". . . All that humans have gained from the unseen powers beyond -- fire, fish, game, fresh water, and so forth -- have been obtained by necessity through trickery or theft . . .” Unlike Shaman, Trickster “seems to need no friends: he gets along very well by himself.” “From the Shaman’s point of view, the rules that trickster breaks articulates the ideal world, but from trickster’s vantage point, if we think the ideal is the real we are seriously mistaken and won’t see half of what is right in front of us.”

But look closer at that Venn Diagram of two circles that is the friendship between Tim and Mary. In that overlap of the two identities is the shared Truth: desire for experience in the world, search for gates giving access to closed cultures, discovery of the plenitude and variety of what is there, and a lively flexible mind that can move among them. The story Hyde presents is that of Krishna as a crawling child cramming dirt into his mouth. When the baby’s mother looks in between his lips, she sees the enormous shining wheel of the universe and faints. This is spirit world, not a sci-fi or supernatural or magic world. Shaman knows this and surrenders. Trickster won’t.

Because the overlap between Tim and Mary matches the overlap between Shaman and Trickster (oh, the hubris of this idea!), we know that in Shaman there is a little Trickster and some healing Shaman in Trickster, like Yin and Yang. Physical distance and the difference in our pasts help us keep matters clear, but sometimes emotional intimacy and shared intensity bring us into a momentary embrace. Then I sit back down and Trickster goes merrily on down the trail. The moment is enlivening, even inspiring, but it passes. Still, I am faithful in my watching and do not leave. Trickster is as faithful in his traveling and will pass by again.

Why do you need so many facts? Why isn’t it enough to have the stories? The journalists scurry around in a scavenger hunt, looking in all the wrong places and finding all the wrong things. Or are they? Sometimes Trickster has left clues that are quite right, but deceptive in appearance. One of them is attachment to place. Another is the father. And then there's that Lost Son.

But don’t ask Shaman to explain beyond pointing to method, in the University of Chicago seminarian way. Shaman doesn’t do dogma, because she understands the shifting chimera of this seemingly real world. Tolerance of ambiguity, love of the search rather than the destination, deep appreciation of desire and the preciousness of its fulfillment are her hinge and her role as a gate, knowing there are many other gates in the articulation of the world’s bones. It is Trickster who suffers the pain of those joints.

TIM THE TRICKSTER RESPONDS:

Tim Barrus: The Sacred and Profane

I cannot tell you all my secrets. It would be like draining blood.

The difference between the two of us — the writer and the reader — is that I will tell you I have secrets. You dare not do it.

You pretend.

The bottom line is about who has the power.

Yet I am supposed to be the one so consumed with the enigmatic machinations of pretense.

I do not pretend not to see the world in different ways than you do. My experience informs me that if I were to share the things I see and know, you would be afraid, and out of that fear, you would attempt to destroy me. I do not trust you not to do it.

You speak of reality as if it were a given.

What you know of reality would fit inside the tip of a urethra.

And yet you pretend that your knowledge of reality is all-encompassing, absolute, unimpeachable.

There is a caveat to this assuredness. It is a nagging doubt, very small, a pinprick, hot as liquid metal, and it burns through you with the awareness that there is more out there than you can know.

You shove this away. You choose not to look at it. You swallow it. But you know.

I am easily dismissed.

I am supposed to care.

I know this: there is too much richness in the vast chaos to focus however briefly anything whatsoever — even the subliminal, the minute, the seemingly irrelevant — on what it is you know. You are the audience. It’s not about you. The chaos of what is reality, the breathtaking complexity of reality as a living thing, embodies such interpretations as chance and wisdom; leaves you as a pedestrian left behind in a wind of subatomic particles racing through the universe at speeds you cannot even imagine even as they pass through entire planets as if that solid mass did not exist. What the audience sees, what the reader knows, what the pedestrian asserts, is smaller in its context or a plethora of them than a neutron to its point of reference. A quark is even smaller. We are not even sure (no one has ever seen one) that the quark exists. We simply assume it might. We can find no shape or structure to the thing. And yet from this we surmise that a quark could be a point in time and space that needs no structure. You are shaking your head, yes. But another reality suggests the concept of something that significant yet that small is not, in fact, a reality the human mind can quite grasp or put its arms around.

What I know and what you pretend to understand is chaos. Even now, you are thinking of chaos as being that which is disordered.

You would be wrong. The obvious is an illusion.

Chaos is about an underlying order in what appears to be perfectly random.

Beyond God, the universe is utter chaos. Universality is and it isn’t.

From a distance, I observe Mary Scriver (http://prairiemary.blogspot.com) making assumptions about my life and person and then testing those assumptions against historical analogy.

There have been many times when I wish I could have given her a big bear hug and told her to stop worrying: it’s all ok.

My life is just a quark. It is a point in time and space. It has no structure. It can only be assumed to exist at all. It is a mistake to assume it has evolved from one determinism into another based on what can be measured. Determinism being the purely philosophical (since there is no structure to the thing) belief that every event or action is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions. Thus, in rationality at least, every event or action can be completely predicted in advance, or in retrospect.

But if time is measured in the number of rotations around a particular star, what is space if a quark can pass through the object (a planet) as it rotates. Let us assume the obvious: That these mathematical orbit equations are deterministic means, of course, that by knowing the initial conditions—-in this case, the positions and velocities of the planets at a given starting time—-you find out the positions and speeds of the planets at any time in the future or past.

I would argue that there is no such thing as the past. Only our ideas of it.

Of course, you reject that out of hand. Without the past, where would that leave the reality of the present. It is supposedly theoretically possible to obtain nearly-perfect predictions for the behavior of any physical system.

You only imagine the past. Making long-term predictions to any degree of precision at all would require giving the initial conditions to infinite precision.

You only imagine infinite precision. Your assumption that there is such a thing as the past assumes we can predict if not necessarily the future, then we can at least apply deterministic values to the present.

But what if one gets drastically different results each time. Thusly the separation between the human animal and his behavior. Even when we add up everything we know about the biology of the human animal, his genealogy, his genetic structures, his variable demographics, his sociology, gradually the smallest imaginable discrepancy between two sets of initial conditions would always result in a huge discrepancy at later or earlier times, the hallmark of a chaotic system.

Those quarks that travel through the planets, travel through the human animal as well.

None of this is hocus-pocus. All of it is basic physics.

What we think we know (and is thusly safe to assume) is sacred.

What questions the fundamental nature and structure of the above is the profane. Our brains can’t even build a template where something (like an electron) can exist in two places at the same time.

I would argue that I can exist in twenty places at the same time.

Not only are persons spread out through worlds, but they, like everything else, are quantized through time in any given world. Time is a series of moments, and a person who exists at a moment exists there forever in four-dimensional spacetime, rather than being transformed continuously through the flow of time. Such change and flow are mythical. The argument doesn’t strictly require the multiverse hypothesis, because deterministic physics since Newton has implied that the openness of the future is an illusion, and consequently that free will is an illusion.

So what is real.

Chaos is real.

Human existence as we know the animal — Homo sapien sapien — supposedly can be traced back in time 100,000 years. A mere blink of an evolutionary eye. I read Mary’s analysis of who I am and note she keeps it open-ended. Both of us can agree that reality is complex enough to be the trickster of all the tricksters. Personally, I just don’t buy the historical analogies to mythology not because they are too old and superstitious but because they are not old enough. Mary and I travel at different speeds toward some of the same destinations. Time travel is assured by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which says that an observer who accelerates or decelerates will experience less time than an observer who is at rest or in uniform motion. This time dilation could make an astronaut’s flight very short and the duration on Earth very long, but such a trip to Earth’s future would be irreversible as “no amount of time dilation can allow a spaceship to return from a flight before it took off.” As for past-directed time travel, it is possible as a sort of sidestep from one universe to another, requiring a path between the two universes that is “hard-wired” into the structure of the multiverse. Whether such paths exist or not is an unresolved empirical question. What we know is safe. What we do not know causes us to regard both the past and the future with some amount of anxiety and fear.

I believe in evil. Mary doesn’t.

Power. Who has the power. It’s not about Mary and it’s not about me. It’s about you and who has the power.

What I believe about evil is that it’s simply another way of perceiving and seeing the universe. It only is. But it’s definitely there.

It’s you. That is how I see the universe.

Most of you as observers and not participants are evil. Your assumption that you are not participating is erroneous.

I am accused of employing smoke and mirrors. The reality is that I do not need them. Reflection is everywhere and it’s only information. It can be obfuscated at any point along the way toward recognition and that includes all the boxes and categories that you keep it in.

Mary believes that there is such a thing as good, practical, common sense. I believe that common sense is an illusion and that the human animal is capable of knowing very little of what is actually out there in much the same way a slug exists under a rock. The slug barely knows the slug exists. But what does it know and how much does it know about the rock.

A person should be grounded in good, practical, common sense. Both feet planted firmly on the ground.

A slug has no feet but it can wiggle.

Even as the ground spins through space and what we know is but a grain of sand in a urethra, and what we do not know is the rest of the bleeding universe. I reject analogy (especially to mythology) in the same way I reject the idea of the past.

You can’t go back and change anything until such time as you can fathom exactly what time is. You can’t go forward and change anything until such time as you can assume the physical attributes of a quark. A you in the form of a nothing but a you as a fixed point in time and space. All you are left to work with as best you can is right here right now this very moment. What is awesome about that reality is that you are responsible for what happens in it even as the rest of the organic and inorganic universe spreads itself out into endless and infinite variations of its kind, and flies apart into the vast unknown.

WOMEN IN LOVE: A "Hyde-bound" Review

So. . . the three basic ingredients for a trickster/artist are:
Insatiability, which is hunger in the original myths -- not just any hunger but hunger for meat, which is the proper sacrifice for the gods. That is, living, aware creatures (creations). Not veggies. The kind of craving that drives plotting and planning traps to get more.

Reflexivity, which is awareness of symbolizing, the ability to separate the real thing from the symbol of the thing. Just plain consciousness of oneself as an artist and therefore the creator of new things, not as unconscious expression but as deliberate forming. (This goes to my quarrel with Paul Schilpp about whether “art is an expression of the relationship between the artist and the universe” or a COMMUNICATION of that expression, which eliminates all the naive and untrained folks who express their hearts out, thinking that’s enough. And I would not argue that indigenous or “folk” artists don’t have “techne,” technique as much as school-taught technology.)

Ambiguity, which is awareness that a thing can mean one thing here and quite another there and maybe both at the same time. Variability, for camouflage or for show. Sophistication, experience of more than one culture.

That’s a pretty good Trinitarian check list so let’s try it out on “Women in Love,” which I just watched on the DVD three times: one as audience, the second with the screenwriter (Kramer), the third with the director (Russell). But let’s pretend we’re talking about Lawrence first, since he was almost always writing about himself, not just to portray himself but to present his deep issues.

He was certainly insatiable, both in terms of craving for experience and in terms of writing: he wrote every day, not just manuscripts but tons and tons of letters -- none, of course, on the computer. No doubt talking to him was much like reading him, esp. the dialogues between persons. In WIL, the two sisters and the two men are really there to continue debate about the purpose of life, what one needs and wishes for, what is really possible, and so on. But with actors, more than with the writing, it’s possible to see what is the “subtext,” that is, what they aren’t really saying in so many words but acting out and revealing through what they do. The avatar of Lady Ottoline seems so very sophisticated, but she is not communicating anything. But in defense of her, to whom is Gudrun communicating in her Isadora Duncan dance before the Highland cattle? She’s not yet above self-indulgence.

Most people are less interested in the two sisters than in the two men who think they are friends. Under their differences is constant competition as well as yearning for sexual fulfillment. They are pre-homosexual, not “gay” in the way we know gays today, and -- in fact -- Kramer later came out, writing frankly gay material and then becoming a major activist, demanding justice for AIDS victims. Acting UP.

There are many interesting stories about the naked wrestling scene in terms of the characters struggling versus the actors struggling. Alan Bates was an educated man who truly understood Lawrence and identified with him. Oliver Reed was far less sophisticated, a man who believed manhood lay in being well-muscled (if fat), stoic, drunk, and well-hung. As it turned out, Bates worried a bit about that, too. The double of one of them, clearly observant and smart, saw the difficulty and realized that therein was their real worry about the scene: not their bodies per se, but the comparison of their male equipment. Perhaps he had dressed with each of them and knew their worries were unfounded. In fact, he got them to go drinking beer with him and to take a side-by-side piss where they could covertly size each other up. Then it was fine.

Russell had planned to shoot the scene in the moonlight by the river if necessary, but Oliver (plainly trying to be sophisticated though he spent his spare time in the bars instead of reading) turned up a literary lady who INSISTED that it would be a naive desecration not to do exactly what was in the book. Oliver adopted this point of view. Since the book had been exempted from censorship since 1926, the main defense Russell and Kramer threw up was that since the book was acceptable, so was the screenplay. Such was the weight of Lawrence as a cultural icon that the argument carried.

The overtly homosexual character, who calls Gudrun towards a broader world, is shown as vaguely sinister and nothing is explicit between the two, though the symbolism is a bit blatant. In fact, one of the controversies about the film is that Russell ended WIL by beginning his next movie about Tchaikovsky. This tale finally ends with Lawrence and the avatar of Freida by the domestic fireside but in reality this was only the beginning.

Like Odysseus, the Lawrences were on the road almost constantly, which means learning to separate out what is local from the universal, not just what is sophisticated but also what is humanly shared. They were always penniless, at the mercy of “bungling hosts”(see Hyde) from whom to learn. I suspect Lawrence learned that there are many kinds of unhappiness besides the poverty of a drunken coal miner’s son or even the smothering love of an over-needy mother, embodied in Frieda, but that he knew these were just his own version of the problem. It is not in denying or just leaving those forces that make him a great writer, but rather his consciousness of them and his growing technical ability to explore them.

Quite apart from Lawrence moving through different cultures and becoming more sophisticated because of it, the times were moving. This was the modern/post-modern time period, responding to industrialization, particularly as it affected the British class system and the church. In the confusion of times changing the Oliver Reed character (as well as Oliver himself eventually) died because his powers became irrelevant, but the people who hungered, like Alan Bates’ character and Gudrun, found themselves released from the killing stagnant pond of the given order into a rushing sluicing torrent that filled them with oxygen, so that they could become Tricksters. By the time the movie was made, nearly fifty years ago, the book’s nudity and sexual frankness, nearly a hundred years old, modernity had broken up the old rules enough that even Britain’s tight censors were willing to allow full frontal real humans.