THE SAME OLD STORY

At a recent conference when discussing publicizing of books, a publisher admitted that they sell books by promoting the author as much or maybe more than the books.  It's not just that authors are sent on tours as in the past, but that the private information of their lives are revealed, but shaped so as to make them sound enticing.

I admit that I can get interested this way.  When I found "Flicka's Friend", the autobiography of Mary O'Hara whose books ("My Friend Flicka", "Green Grass of Wyoming") where so beloved by me and so many others, I was both excited to realize that O'Hara was using her own life and daunted to see how much she had romanticized and excused a painful situation.  Something like the same was true of Lucy May Montgomery's journals and the truth of Louisa May Alcott's painful struggle.  Both of them were not lifted up by their books, which made money, but trapped in repetition of what would sell and in presenting a certain presence that probably prevented them getting help for their lives. 

In our cultural version of the tension between the group and the individual, we are always celebrating the individual, even when that person is crushed or evil, and we are suspicious of the group.  This is as true of politics as popular books.  We sort-of know this but still always want to know the person behind the organizations and institutions, imagining that we will know something key about Russia by investigating Putin's private life (which he KEEPS private) and something that might give us control over Trump as a representative of government when he's only a bingo caller.  The trouble with him is not that he's private -- he seems to have no private life -- but that he throws up a prefab ersatz imitation and we go for it.

What we WANT interferes with what we've got.  

In the days of O'Hara, Montgomery, and Alcott, the facts of sex were entirely displaced by "romance" and "love".  But today's "private life" is often code for sex, particularly if there is some hint of deviance in the specifics or blackmail-able departure from the mainstream.  As previous generation's scandal (gay?) becomes a merchandizing target (they dress so well, live with style, take care of their bodies) we move on to the shocks of torture-sex or pedophilia.  Both become connected somehow to being rich and powerful, though one would think that money and privilege might be used to avoid pain and exploitation, even to others.  But they are connected to secrecy and being above everyone else.  So you might not be able to handle the truth, but you could handle a little kid no one cares about.  One indiscretion leads to another and pretty soon one is being pumped of the secrets that protect the nation.

All this is in books, movies, conversation, social media.  It has even crept into the previously innocent and even "Christian" romance novels that throw back to earlier times.  Mysteries have suffered the same fate.  Life-threatening and impossible action as well.  High adrenaline, male-centered, and once an antidote for a boring gray flannel life.  No more.  Drugs give anyone entry to fantasy.

Major shifts have happened in our knowledge of the world.  We are radically embedded in existence as we know it now, not separated out by a Protestant Christian demand to scour one's soul for the sake of afterlife.  Our sins and even our sex lives, even our prosperity, are all conditional on circumstances and patterns we don't seem to take time to worry about.  Overpopulation, famine, oppression, constant war, pandemics -- to the set of people who used to read books, it's all just a TV show that no one can affect anyway.  

First people realized that even God had been personalized, and kept Him a person even as a corpse, like Lenin's corpse kept as a reminder.  Then they began to demonize and relativize the whole idea of "Theos".  But they never went on to admit that it is the existence of being itself that is the radical oneness, and that the terms of preservation might depend on the whole.  Nature bats last and she favors the simple and pervasive, like Covid19.

A Venetian mask

But we love a story, something dramatic and naughty like the tales of the Black Plague recorded by Boccachio, more fun than Chaucer.  Masks were big during the Plague.  I particularly like the one with the long beak that is the face of the ineffective doctor who brings death as much as wellness.  He echoes carrion birds and is part of a stock of old men who dedicate themselves to destroying young people's romances.  The mask is showing up again on media.  The storyline has always persisted.

Because of the change over time between the generations, particularly when marked by inconceivable catastrophes or transitions, are the mutations of culture, just like the mutations of living bodies -- they are the engine of evolution.  Our female writers now often take up imagining where the culture is going, whether Margaret Atwood or Ursula LeGuin.  Elizabeth Warren is not afraid of forced innovation; that's why she's able to say, "I have a plan for that."

Mentioning these names is a way of personalizing to escape the long-nosed old men who pretend the past -- which they know and have largely controlled even as it rewards them -- is the only way to go.  They are the force that demands stories be whatever it was that sold before.  That the politics be whatever it was before.  Jesus is a personalization of God.  Gaea is a personalization of the planet.  That's the way humans think, as though existence was about each other.  They talk about Republicans in terms of individual presidents when it is likely that there is no more Republican party now.  Empty rigged machinery.

Writers are sometimes a little shocked when they send out books under a pseudonym, because it is considered by many to be a crime, a deliberate deception, an attempt to escape control.  The books will be completely trampled by the rush to snipe-hunt the author, hoping to find enough scandal to be another book.  

The same in politics.  I see that the backup for hunting Hunter Biden is to harrow Biden Sr.'s brother.  Unaffiliated investigators say they're looking for money, but no doubt they will be pleased to find sex.  They do not think of society or the endangered life of the planet.  They only know one story.

A QUESTION FROM NANCY ABOUT FIRST BOOKS

The following came in as a comment on my blog, prairiemary.blogspot.com.  I don't know which Nancy sent it, but it must have been someone without my email address, so they took this route.

"I wonder if you have seen this extensive compilation of comments by women writers about the experience of publishing their first book. They are deeply embedded in the process and believe it has made them better writers, but, from reading your posts, I recognize that it made their books more saleable, which is not the same thing. I'm sending you the URL just in case you want to take a look. Will read with great attention if you decide to comment on it."

https://longreads.com/2019/07/24/the-first-book/

So now I've read the linked article about the first book and can comment.

1.  This is not about "women" writers.  It is about educated, connected, often free-lance or academic writers who have believed that publishing a book is something like a marriage:  a ceremonial marker of achievement that might turn out good or bad, but usually challenging.  Except that you need an agent, who functions like a doctor.

2.  The emphasis is on how surprising and difficult the book process turned out to be -- not the writing but the publishing.  Writing is difficult enough, but once the object is created, the rest is marketing and will take the writing out of the hands of the author.  Perhaps marketing will dictate what is written in the first place.  I've watched this closely twice, once in the life of Bob Scriver whose product was bronze sculpture rather than a book, and again in the life of a male writer who shall remain nameless.  In both cases, the factors described by these women were just the same.  

3.  Erica Jong's timeless phrase, "the zipless fuck" has now become sayable again the way it was in Chaucer's day.  That's the way many people think it is to write/publish a book.  The same dilemma of something that takes a lot of effort, attention, and compromise is in both sex and authoring.  And wickedness sells just a well as virtue.

4.  The internet has smashed open the system that developed after the invention of the printing press which produced these objects for sale, objects that had previously been unmarketable to many people.  Long blogging is a new medium that can be easily translated into print, varied to suit, bound if that's desired, passed on with minimal cost, but potentially unnoticed and ephemeral, just like books.

5.  None of this has anything particular to do with female writers, which is just a selling gizmo anyway, using a category to create a genre.

I think Nancy was already onto this.

I'm thinking about a category that really IS usually female: that of the muse.  What do you suppose Ghislaine Maxwell's book would be like -- but you'll never know because she was music played only through the medium of Epstein, whose commodities were money and little blonde girls.

BEACHED

On this atypical summer day -- clouded and cool -- I sit at my keyboard in my old flannel, red-plaid housecoat patched with leopard spots and wonder what I'm doing.  Am I creating a writer's legacy or am I just writing and erasing?  Or is it enough to just think about it?  Why should anyone leave a "writer's legacy" anyway?

Writing is like the wandering line of sea wrack along a vast flat sand beach, a jumble of lost things brought bacck.  At Seaside the main street ends in a circular cement promenade with rest rooms under it.  I first came as a baby before I could stand up.  My parents spread a quilt, put me on it and instructed me to never leave it, then rented a bicycle built for two so they could circle on the sand.  I couldn't see the water.  I could hear it.  Maaaauuuuooorrrr.  A living thing full of the hidden.

So, to be all cute about it, that beach is the result of the Columbia River washing sand along from land.  Sedimentary, "granular", cumulative. Like a life.  It also built nearby Long Beach which is big enough and stable enough for a town and a lot of beach grass and gorse.  Both communities feature Brit style carnival elements, permanent county fairs with shooting galleries, bump-em cars, and salt water taffy.  Seaside has an aquarium.  Long Beach has a museum of Chinook culture.

This is like literature, accumulations of all kinds of print production.  I had aspired to join traditional literature, but now I think I won't.  There are so many kinds of writing, each accommodating a different kind of person and inventing new forms.  I did not stay on the quilt.  I did not pedal a bicycle for two.  in time, I walked, hoping for places where there were no other people, dragging my stick to write in the sand.  This is no way to create a best seller.  But why is "selling" the criteria for what is "best" anyway?  I can't even tolerate an editor.  But I'm terribly vulnerable to the people I write about.  Yet I don't give a damn for the opinions of relatives and former parishioners because they don't occupy the same world.  They never read it, don't know it exists, so no problem.

There are five or six books in process now, mostly in bits on my long form blog.  prairiemary.blogspot.com.    I began self-publishing bits that could be grouped together a decade or more ago when I was still thinking about Montana as a subject, even as a brand.  Lulu.com is my printer -- not my publisher -- and listed the books on Amazon.com.  Then Amazon took all that down.  Now they just list the books they sell.  None of my Lulu books sell.  One must actively promote, aggressively press people to buy.  It takes venture capital that I don't have.  Probably I should create a scandal -- play into the prejudices and unjustified beliefs that people already have.  I did that for animal control.  Now I don't.

So these "proto-books" exist on sixteen or eighteen blogs: 
Former teachers ("Alvina Krause," "Alvina Krause, Eagles Mere", "The Silver Comb" which are all collected by the Northwestern University archives), 
Blackfeet ("Blackfeet Reservation," "Cross Cultures on the Prairie," "Early Browning News", Heartbreakbutte", "A Guide to the Blackfeet Reservation"), Family ("Robert Macfie Scriver and Art", "Swan River", "Strachans on the Prairie"), 
Animal Control ("Dog Catching In America"), 
Clergy ("The Bone Chalice, "Unitarians in Montana"), 
Location ("Valier Album", "Water Over the Dam"), 
Feral (Don't ask.)

One whole wall of my front room plus bookshelves in my "office" is 3-ring notebooks containing "Both Sides Now," "Prairie Gladiator," "12 Blackfeet Stories," "Blackfeet Trails," "Scriver Seminary Saga," "One Windy Day," and more.  Edmonton UU congregation, as Moosemilk Press, published a book of my sermons, "Being Where You Are."  It sold well.  I have enough for more "books," lines of thought in lines of print that could be put on pages and bound in multiples for sale.  Beached.

But none of these is the one deeply emotional preoccupation that would power a "real" book, one worthy but possibly pornographic if you accept that as a category; progressive in the sense of exceeding the present culture.  I'd have to stop blogging to do it, but even if I did, old age is affecting me.  Possibly it is editing my brain in helpful ways.  Certainly it is changing me, simplifying.  Bits of memoir show up, but they aren't important.

Lifelong, a problem has been that I'm too idealistic, that I only want the exalted.  I hate community theatre and high school productions because they are often shallow and silly.  But I know that there can be near-mystical moments of breakthrough.  I hate predictable church services where everyone only goes through the motions, but I know that they can occasionally rise to being life-transforming.  Most of my love for individuals, movements, places, and all the rest has been unrequited.  That might be sad if I weren't so resistant to interference.

Several ranch women in this area of the prairie are writing columns in local newspapers, one of them augmented by writing romances with cowboys.  They depend on humour.  They define "Montana" -- I choose high prairie ecosystem.  None of them reach the stature of, let's say, Sharon Butala, who adds nature mysticism and is published in bi-national best-selling books, which people in Montana may not know about. Sharon is a focused writer who helped save not only a ranch in Saskatchewan, but one that became a preserve of original grassland for bison.  That's beyond anything I can do.

Lately I've been trying academic online open journals like Academia or Researchgate.  They take essays, short pieces.  "Notes from the Summer Conferences at Piegan Institute."  "Memories from a CPE Program Years Ago."  A few people read them.

I write this partly in defense, since some people are baffled that since I say I'm a writer they don't automatically see books with my name in bookstore windows. (There are no bookstores closer than 80 miles.) But also in defiance in defiance, a  record for reference.  A lot of people out there write well, write hard, write daily -- but nothing comes of it.  That's normal and they need to know that.

READ IT AND WEEP

A great body of consumers out there wants to know "how to write" and keeps the advice coming from both people who know and don't know.  The most recent is a series called "MasterWorks.com" featuring big names who describe how they work, with the assumption that imitating them will make one's own self also great.  A number of forces interacting are the REAL reason why some people are praised and/or make a lot of money.  (The two aspects don't necessarily go together.)  

The first necessity for a writer is to go out there and LIVE.  Otherwise, you won't have anything to say.  But it's not necessary to do exotic or dangerous stuff, just to really absorb and reflect as things happen.  The way a brain works is by building circuits from experience.  It is closely paying attention -- while also considering possibilities -- that makes the brain able to build a circuit, which is not a conscious process.  It's electrochemical and entirely real. Organic.

Creating habits is also circuit building.  If a person does not have or know how to get to the "frame of mind" that allows them to write, then the rest is useless, sealed off.  Often a dependable schedule and familiar equipment will help build the circuit, but also reading, not necessarily any particular thing, because your brain will be recording and digesting it all.  You will begin to pull it into your circuit.  You will know without knowing you know, just feeling it.  Sometimes certain music helps, a fav food, lots of coffee, a little fetish about pencils.

Those who don't write think it happens when the marks hit the paper (or screen) but in truth the necessary part of writing is the thought world it comes from, which is probably quite wordless: diagrams, doodles, daydreaming, dawdling.  These not-yet-circuits, plus some others, like observations about life and what it all means, are the basic equipment.  But a person can use them exquisitely, produce regular or even inspired writing, and still not be a success.

The secret no one tells writers (though some figure it out) -- but publishers know very well -- is that writing is only half of what happens: there must be reading.  Those who read control the book.  If they "get" it, want it, want more like it, and experience the writing as though they had lived it, then the point of a book is achieved.  A book, closed, on a shelf, is nothing.  Paper.  Though it also exists in potential in the mind of the writer until there are readers who will "get" it.  But, for instance, indigenous people believe that white people have some advantage because they are white, but the truth is that white writers have readers because the READERS are white.  Or gay, or political, or feminists, or whatever.  Few people read outside their "lane."

Indigenous writers so far are mostly read by nice suburban liberal ladies -- white.  For the most part indigenous readers don't have the kind of income to buy many $30 dollar books.  So they don't go to bookstore readings.  And they don't critique and promote indigenous books.  Publishers know that.

The point of publishers is to figure out what people want to read enough to pay for.  They ask, "What is the mood of the buyers?"  Publishers gamble on their ability to guess this, because it's just a potential as well as not being something that can be measured.  But it can have a contagious potential and, if it works as well as measles, it can catch fire and pull dollars, lots of talk, and more books like it.  Publishers vary a great deal and will try to control writers to make them write what they think is more saleable.  Managing publishers and their apparatus, like agents and editors and publishers and critics, can consume all the energy a person has for writing.  And the publishers will try to bill the writer for the cost of it.  It only works because of the honor of it all.

At all levels it is important to make connections, to know people who know how to find things, to make introductions, to link you up with sympathetic and encouraging people, access research, and so on.  The dark side of this is that because no one teaches English in public schools anymore and many of the students don't speak English anyway, at least not as a first language, so reviewing and understanding books in English drifts over to trying to interpret and label the writer.  If you become popular, you and your friends and your grandmother will be ransacked, assigned nationalities they never heard of, and sometimes vilified, accused of dirty treasons.  These are what we consider interesting and worth reading about.  

This afternoon I briefly glanced at a paper claiming to explain why "Anne of Green Gables" is racist.  (Which the original is.)  But the dingos and hyenas still have not got gotten hold of the reality of L.M. Montgomery, her miserable marriage to a depressed minister and her final surrender in suicide.  Instead they promote her sentimentality.  It helped that she was in Canada a lot, where everyone is nice.  Even if you offer a colorful backstory you made up yourself, it may be torn apart to make room for the journalist version.

Publishing without thinking about money is possible.  That's often forgotten.  As the medias change, narratives go from being something told around a campfire, to being something written in a private diary, to being copies of something (Bible) penned by hand and then -- much later but by the same impulse -- to copies by xerox.  For a while and maybe still today there were what I call "backpack books."  Typed, xeroxed, stapled, maybe missing any kind of cover, often half-worn out and marked up by avid readers who rarely loan them willingly.  Some become "properly" published later. 

My "thing" is long-form blogs.  Accessible to anyone who knows they exist and can get to a computer but strangely double: hard to erase and, yet to a techie, easy to remove, and in fact sometimes disappearing for no reason anyone knows.  It has some resemblance to a campfire narrative, except that on any day it is read by two or three hundred people and on an exceptional day it can be read by a couple of thousand all over the planet.  If numbers are a measure, that's beyond books.  Good or bad?  No idea.

GATHERING THE GRASSLAND

Decades ago I had a poster on my kitchen wall that was a photo of a little girl with a kitten in front of a barn.  It said, “Faithfulness in little things is a big thing.”    I've never heard of anyone using an epigraph for a review before, but that’s what the poster quote is for this review of “Gathering the Grassland: A Plains Journal” by Linda Hasselstrom.

Her own epigraph for her book is :
“Thousands of us hurl ourselves into cities like nuts into a hopper, and there by grinding and rubbing against one another we lose our natural form and acquire a superficial polish and a little more or less standardized appearance. In the country, the nuts are not subjected to this grinding process.”
--Archer Gilfillan, author of “Sheep”

I like the quote on my poster better and now I’ll try to explain why.  I thought my “faithfulness” quote was from St. Francis, but Google says it was Saint John Chrysostom, a fourth century Archbishop of Constantinople.  I don’t know whether that’s better or worse, but the sentiment remains true.   Linda’s book is an accounting of daily things, as faithfully recorded in three sets of journals: her own, her mother’s, and her step-father’s.  The problem, like the problem of the four Gospels, is reconciliation.  Her mother wanted her to be pretty in pink, her step-father taught her how to run a ranch but refused to leave it to her, and she herself managed to save the ranch until today, when subdivisions threaten to overwhelm it.  This last is what her epigraph reflects, but there are more twists to this story.

I thought of my kitten poster because the most ghastly incident Linda tells is about moving to that ranch as a child, glorying in a lapful of kittens until a hired man named Leroy came up the walk.  One of the kittens had walked off and Leroy put his big foot above it.  “What if I just squashed this here kitten?” he asked.
Linda dumped the kittens from her lap, went like warrior Arya Stark and kicked him in the knee as hard as she could.  Losing his balance, he did indeed put his foot down on the kitten, crushing it.

Linda says she doesn’t blame Leroy.  I do.  What made him think it was funny to threaten to kill something sweetly vulnerable in front of a little girl?  It was torture of that girl.  In fact, killing pets in front of children is not an uncommon kind of child abuse, implying the ability to kill the child.  Some people would find a sexual motive, Leroy displacing desire for a pretty little girl in order to kill an improper emotion in himself.  I find it a good illustration of the dark side of rural culture that tries to toughen up people with gallows humor.  Linda claims that Leroy felt so badly that he brought her a puppy as compensation.  I’m not sure I believe her.  She accepts blame.  But I’m not Linda.

That’s the real meat of her story: her fight to stay in control, to accept responsibility, to struggle for her own justice.  She’s part of a circle of rural women who write about this, each in her own way, but with deep understanding of the twists of love and hate.  Mary Clearman Blew, Sharon Butala, Judy Blunt and a dozen others— for years I bought all their books.  I suppose it’s post-colonial writing, since the previous generation of socially entitled men, with the collusion of “their” women, used their children as domestic stock.  Linda, so far as I know, has never mentioned physical abuse other than Leroy.  In fact, she loved the work she did on horseback.

Aritha Van Herk, a Canadian, writes about prairie women and uses the phrase “sifting sparks from snow.”  arithavanherk.com if you want to follow up on the political angle.  This generational cohort of writers is nearing retirement age, but I haven’t seen obituaries yet.  There are still many valuable things to say.  Like indigenous tribal people, they have extended the conversation around the planet to women who live on grasslands in Australia, Argentina, Africa, the great steppes of Eurasia and so on.  Thank you, Internet!

One of Linda’s ploys for survival is the establishment of Windbreak House, (LindaMHasselstrom@windbreakhouse.com) which is a writer’s retreat on her South Dakota ranch.  The writers who come to work there are primarily women.  For Linda, and perhaps for some of them, writing is as grass, the sentences marching over the hills in rows and bunches, their roots threading deep into the sorrows of generations in search of spiritual water.  They are not writing romance.  They value faithfulness, reflection.

What Linda questions at this stage of life is whether she could have done better.  Should she have written more instead of responding to all the demands to speak or teach?  Should she have concentrated on ranchwork more? Or writing more?  Why did she fall in love the first time with a cheating husband just like her mother did?  Should she have had children?  What does it mean to be an achiever?  People can resent it.

Linda appreciates the Folk West:  Buckskinner’s Rendezvous  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nESxjfzMg4E  and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neLOwOjtQL8 (I know some of these people as individuals, but I don’t enjoy crowds.)  She has a steady partner who does metal and woodwork in his own shop on the ranch.  Now that there is freedom to write as she chooses, she uses her time quietly, warmly, leading us into each month and each day with a sky report, many dawns.  She’ll stay there in her home range until as close to the end as possible.

This book is part of a shelf of Hasselstrom books, a steady stream of life to share and ponder.  That shelf is part of many “rooms" of journals and diaries in universities and historical societies.  My own paternal grandmother, who homesteaded in Faulkton, SD, kept journals, two boxes of them.  I had custody of one box for a while, read them, typed off and xeroxed some sections to send to cousins.  Then I sent the box on to the only cousin who does genealogy, a retired man.  I made little booklets and offered them through www.lulu.com/prairiemary.  Not much reaction.  I have many of the same questions as Linda.  Maybe every generation has them, wondering if the youngsters can even understand what we’re talking about.

Linda finds metal artifacts on her ranch and puts them all up on a railroad tie wall.  There are hooks, home-blacksmithed for catches on gates and doors.  They often have a twist in the shaft, and Linda’s partner says they are for ornament, but might also increase ease in handling.  This book is like that, practical, but with a little twist in the shaft.

PULLING DOWN THE TEMPLE

SAMPSON

This is a confused and scary time.  I mean, more than usual.  There are many theories flying around out there.  Following are the things I think about, often statements by various experts and pundits.

Trump IS the Third Party we keep trying to start.  He only used the Republican machinery as a platform, but doesn’t fit into either of our binary political philosophies because he represents a true paradigm shift, one that happened without us realizing, but which is entrenched and strong.  It is advertising/marketing based.  He simply sold us himself.  Now we have buyer’s remorse.  Especially the Republicans.

We have left the Enlightenment and entered the Marketing world.  

Trump is not a rich man.  His wealth is a fantasy based on selling his name, which is a major source of his income.  His investments depend upon wealth and leisure (casinos, luxury hotels, and golf courses) and admiration of their prestige, which somehow persists in spite of the failures of his individual businesses.  As he sinks deeper into his dementia, his name becomes more valueless.  Now we hear stories about people taking the name off buildings to avoid stigma and possibly physical attack as people become literally dis-illusioned.  He will die impoverished, because his wealth is all moonbeams.  Investigators who have penetrated his secrecy confirm this.

The core of the shift to Trumpish values is also the core of the middle class: shop-owners, importers, inventors, and manufacturers who managed to break the tyranny of those who “own” land and those who are employed to do the work of it, which is the feudal system.  Trump’s idea of how rich people live is laughably nouveau riche, unsophisticated, crass and ugly.  Victorian, African potentate, a child’s idea of palaces.

War is bad for trade.  War is avoided by making written rules, treaties, agreements, and so on.  This gives enormous importance to writing, which leads to lawyers and judges because so much writing is clumsy, impenetrable, or outmoded.  That includes our founding documents, which grew out of the founding documents of the British Empire.  Which came in part from the great importance attributed to the Holy Bible, as though it were written by a deity.  In fact, the Bible is a collection of ancient fragments, the "New" part of it curated in 325 AD by the Council of Nicaea, a committee of old men invested in institutions.  This means it is a masterpiece of ambiguity which can be used to suit the purposes of institutions.

One could say that the church led the way into mercantilism when it began to sell indulgences and flatter kings in order to acquire land.  The law preventing marriage was not about sex — it was to prevent clergy from using their power to create dynasties of descendants.  (Just as Trump is trying to do.)  The feudal system IMHO is biological, land-based, and rooted in human fertility.  (Which connects to the feverish protection of human embryos — not infants.)  It's a default.

So, to review, by moving to the middle class that thrives between national-dimension privileged power and persisting abject wage-slave peonage, we use writing to evade war because war is bad for business.  This means a lot of people need to learn to read and write, and then the majority of people need to honor documents.  (We are not meeting these needs.) When business becomes paralyzed by the kudzu of venture capitalism (interest rates, borrowing as the norm, criminalization of debts, stock market derivatives) then war of some kind becomes inevitable as a way of clearing the deck.  

The covert Third Party of the United States and most of the other European countries is simply Business.  What doesn’t sell, doesn’t matter.  All this scolding about tariffs is an attempt to restore what ecologies once provided: limits, boundaries, things that can be bought for little money in one place and then sold for a lot of money elsewhere.  All this sounds rational and sensible to most people.  If the leadership stays within the assumption, they can rule.  But demand shifts and so does supply.

The trouble with the Third Party of Mercantilism is that it is not facing the Malthusian fact that there are simply too many people.  Not just too many people in one country rather than another, which causes people to migrate, but a population beyond the carrying capacity of the planet.  It becomes a little more clear all the time that this explosion of humans is going to lead to devastation when pollution, infection, and famine of various kinds end fertility.  (It’s not just a matter of amounts of food but also foods that are loaded with molecules like sugar.)  Proportions within populations also matter.  The mass elimination of females in China means there are unmarried soldiers leaning against the wall, waiting for something to happen.  Becoming more willing to MAKE something happen.  This is not intentional but it is probably inevitable, a consequence almost mechanical.

When Steve Bannnon, Trump’s covert self, says he wants to destroy the standing order, he is saying he is willing to bring on the apocalypse because think of the spending!  Think of the money in rebuilding!  (A major part of the USA’s gross national product is always responding to catastrophes like New Orleans.)  Think of the chance to get on the Security Council and learn all the nation's vital secrets!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-told-me-he-was-a-leninist.html

“Lenin,” he [Bannon] answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”  Sounds like Osama bin Laden to me.  Or maybe Sampson pulling down the temple.  No one pays attention.  Picture Bannon leaning on the counter by the light of neon advertising while the bartender considers whether he ought to cut him off.  It’s not hard.  We all know morose old men who feel passed by, who wear jeans to the Oval Office and don’t bother to shave — as though they were still in college.  

Most don’t find a power puppet to market.  Narcissism becomes relevant.  It’s only a concept, of course, and has somewhat drifted from the original Freudian/Greek myth of the beautiful boy who loves his water-reflected image so much that he falls in and drowns.  (That’s the state of the Democrats these days.)  When I was working on the concept in the early 2000’s, it was much simpler than it is now.  Building on the original idea of being self-centered, we’ve expanded to “grandiose narcissism”, “toxic narcissism,” “malevolent narcissism.”  I haven’t heard much about “benign narcissism”.  But there is now talk about “inverted narcissism” which is about people obsessed with having been damaged by narcissists.  Everyone is building sub-categories out of the original category named for one pretty boy.

But that’s another post.  

WRITING AS POLE-DANCING

Allan Reinikka

This is an exploration of the “conceit” that writing is like pole-dancing, not just because the pole itself is both a pinion and a point of support, not just because of the dancer being a spangled free-form nude meant to be erotic and arousing, not just because of the analysis of Eliade and others about the Axis Mundi (The axis mundi (also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar, center of the world, world tree), in certain beliefs and philosophies, is the world center, or the connection between Heaven and Earth. Wikipedia), but because that’s the way it feels: arduous and sometimes upside down, even screwed by dildos.

Using wicked and dirty metaphors is an old practice that persists because they are close to the center of human culture, fertile and innovative but dangerous.  We ban them and the writing based on them because they are disconcerting and upset us, or at least those who have volunteered to be the order-keepers: the politicians, the ecclesiasticals, the bosses, mamas and papas.

Pole-dancing is a disciplined kind of dancing, but the discipline comes from a strict necessity based on a center, not a dance company obeying a choreographer nor yet a wild Isadora Duncan surrender to the wind.  Gravity is a harsh dance master, but pole dancing does not require that one lift one’s partner over one’s head nor get in sync with the corps de ballet.

Yet the critics at a strip club surround the dance stage and reward good moves with practical cash, direct capitalism founded on sex as usual.  Not all pole dancers are female, though many amateur writers are female, particularly those writing romance, in love with the pole they hope is Mr. Good Bar.

When it became sort of semi-respectable to talk about sex directly and scientifically, and then even vulgarly, I still didn’t have access to the sequestered worlds of sex, which are many, but as they begin to speak out and claim legitimacy for something that was originally and deliberately illegitimate, defiant, and even criminal, a whole new understanding of what a human has been, is or could be has formed.  As we frame up words for the forbidden, we see things that had no name and therefore no identity, things that were forbidden in part because they were invisible and therefore censored by ignorance.  We are enticed, then enchanted.

“The use of pole for sports and exercise has been traced back at least eight hundred years to the traditional Indian sport of mallakhamb, which utilizes principles of endurance and strength using a wooden pole, wider in diameter than a modern standard pole. The Chinese pole, originating in India, uses two poles on which men would perform “gravity defying tricks” as they leap from pole to pole, at approximately twenty feet in the air, further information can be seen in the old vintage documentary series of mallakhamb, by yasho purush film on YouTube.^[6]

“In the 1920s, traveling circuses and sideshows would utilize pole dancing with a pole in the middle of a tent. Eventually the pole dancing moved from tents to bars, and combined with burlesque dance. The earliest recorded pole dance was in 1968 with a performance by Belle Jangles at Mugwump Strip Club in Oregon.. . . ^{. .} In the 1990s, pole dancing commenced to be taught as an art by Fawnia Mondey, a Canadian who moved to Las Vegas, USA. She created the first pole training video to use in fitness exercises.  Since then, pole dancing classes have become a popular form of recreational and competitive sport.”

What was scandalous becomes a norm, what was historical is presented as innovation, what was the use of something that just happened to be there (circus tent centerpoles) to something glitzy: poles with glitter or lights  in them.  And then, of course, there were contests, just like book competitions.  The theme of pole-dancing gets picked up by graphics and poets.

Though pole-dancing flatters men with the great big “pole” trope, perhaps it is the skill of the female entwining and depending that is the real importance: not the subject but the execution.  But there are male dancers and even pas de deux.  http://www.poleart.com  There are not many writing pas de deux unless you count writer/editor couples.  (Not publishers, who are the folks who run strip clubs.)

Forms of human expression are myriad and ingenious.  Those based on human bodies, like dance or sports, are closely allied with the arts of the senses that are crucial to making “love” as a part of bonding or sex as arousal.  The formal sport of arousal has not been invented yet, except by sex workers, but the writing of arousal is classic, esp. in the cultures that have escaped from the puritanism of ownership.

Puritanism, like asceticism, is a form of control, but unlike asceticism is meant to be in the service of ownership, particularly the ownership of children, esp. the oldest male child who is meant to perpetuate his patriarch.  The roll of the genetic dice that creates a new person also requires the progenitor to somehow guarantee that the genes are his own and not those of the “milkman”, but also to create circumstances that he hopes will not cause this new person to be weak and blundering or in some way different from the father.  This is the offence of the gay son, that he will not repeat this process with his own oldest son to extend the inheritance through more generations.

Those who will not inherit (females, gay males, flawed or excess sons) can be bought and sold just like anything else, because they dance with poles, they write books centered on issues that don’t concern the patriarch.  They mock the real purpose of sex.

Patriarchs have co-opted writers through the commodification of their writing into “codexes” of pages in a binding that can be bought in great quantity — enough variation that one always buys the next, but enough similarity to give the same satisfaction.  Some, of course, buy for the glamourous binding to put on their tables.  Art forms demonstrate prosperity.  Those that are a little risky demonstrate sophistication.  The irony is that strip clubs are supposed to indicate potency, but the poles are sterile.

Genre is a pole.  The real writing is in the dance of the human holding onto what may be an obsession, something they can’t leave.  Maybe another time I’ll try the trope of the swing or the trapeze, other devices that can structure creation.  There are many stairways to the stars, but some of them go down for other reasons.  Tillich always said that the axis mundi goes down as well as up, maybe down to madness, maybe to the center of the fundamental mundi.

AN IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION:

Sacredness is direct unmediated contact with the universe, not by-passing the senses but a chord, a symphony, a melody.  It is felt holistically.

Religion is produced by cultural evolution, beginning with hunting/gathering people.  Religion is an institution that claims the sacred but is NOT sacred.

“Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. The term "institution" commonly applies to a custom or behavior pattern important to a society, and to particular formal organizations of the government and public services.”  (By the secret author at Wikipedia — I always wish I knew who they are so I could read more of their thinking.)

So it begins with a superstition, a lucky hat, a little chant to call the prey but repel the predator.  Connected to the hunting grounds.  Maybe accompanied by a bribe, a sacrifice.

Then comes the beginnings of control: domestication, which means being able to locate and kill animals at will; and gardens or fields.  Swidden agriculture means clearing forest or jungle, growing crops that can’t be stored, like yams, or crops that need extraordinary preparation like sago palm pulp.  But grain agriculture means storage, surplus, value for trade, the necessity of guarding.  Math for defining territories.  The concept of “owning.”  Community/towns.  This is the root of institutional religion.

The social purpose of everything is survival, transcending individuals.  This means that individuals are subsumed, consumed, and even sacrificed physically and horribly for the benefit of the whole.  These are religious institutions, even if today they are thinned and paled, except in some places they are not.  Instead they have reverted to blood sacrifice.

If a religious institution becomes too cruel, too destructive, another institution based on resistance will begin to form.  Now we have “Game of Thrones.”  Except that there is an alternative, which is Asian Evasion. (The art of turning forceful oppression back on the oppressor.)  The appearance of some seemingly un-formed institution that carries the resistance.  (Guerrilla warfare.)  

Saturn eating his children -- Goya

Now we have the arts.  The arts don’t support institutions, but the culture can form institutions that pretend to say that the arts are marked by sacredness and therefore institutions should protect them.  These institutions are only pretending, providing ways to institutionalize free thought.  They are the opposite of sacrifice in their own instititional existence but often sacrifice the artists as a means of control.

Government, like agriculture, is territory-based, in terms of owning which is called “patriotism” which is a form of religion.  It is capable of inventing the equivalent of land, food, shelter, walls and wars and printing it all on paper called money or contracts.  Government is a religious institution.  It is not sacred.

Science is also a religious, community-based, resource-using institution.  Its walls are negotiable, its products are technological, and occasionally it touches the sacred.  Not the sacred as defined by the priests (though scientists can be considered parallel) but as defined by direct contact with the universe.  Awe, wonder, humility, exaltation.

Science tells us that our brains and bodies work according to code that can be perceived and measured as electrochemical pulses and molecular interactions.  They are the sum of evolution that began with eukaryotes, one-celled creatures, who in their hunger and willingness to discard (sacrifice) developed a gastro-intestinal tract capable of passing the environment through them in a self-nurturing way.  Because they were meiotic, that is, capable of code-exchange that produced varied offspring, producing enough variation for winnowing.  They kept morphing over the millennia.  Until now.

Having achieved consciousness and control, humans now institutionalize what is familiar and manageable.  They no longer discard what is not good for them, but try to hoard resources, swelling up their institutions and governments until they are paralyzed.  This will kill them.  Only the few, the nimble, the Asian evasive (turning the force of the oppressors back on them), the autochthonous, the indigenous, the artistic, will survive -- mammals slipping between the toes of the dinosaurs.  Maybe a predator drone has no pilot who is at risk because he or she is far away from deadly fire — but the global corporation fantasists who think they are greater than nations and entitled to all resources are doomed.  They cannot escape their own drones.

I can only wish this were true.  But maybe it is.  I now turn away from institutions except for my small town, which provides the infrastructure of water, fuel, food.  I’m a lousy gardener and don’t want to give up time away from the keyboard, so I need a store.  I’m a gluten glutton, adapted to grain and dairy.  I could easily take to alcohol except that it interferes with my thinking.

When institutions discovered writing, it was as though they had discovered alcohol.  I mean they stopped thinking and started wanting.  They didn’t have to memorize anymore.  (Too bad for Islam schools where the Koran is memorized, now the action is in schools that teach the reading of the Torah.)  Writing is such an aid to preventing change.  Now there can be law books.  But of course a new kind of priest is invented, to interpret what the writing “really” says or decide when it is too old-fashioned to use anymore.  But it’s hard to purge law.  And universities now study advertising.

Imagine an institution without writing.  No by-laws.  No instructions.  No record of boundaries to register down at the court house.  Birth, marriage and death all uncertified.  No diplomas.  No post office.  No texting.  No internet.  No list of in/out or who's in charge.

No treaties, no United Nation accords.  But what does it matter?  Even when they were signed, they were disregarded.  Writing is a tool and it can be a deception.  It’s arbitrary, a matter of social agreement.  Even the alphabet.  It’s a great revelation to some that different languages use different alphabets.  They don’t use different numbers, right?  They DO use different numbers, different bases, different symbols.  Consider zero.  Consider the algorithm.  Think about standard deviations.

To realize that symbols are not realities is to begin to step away from institutions as reality.  They are not sacred.  Even reality is not sacred, no matter how precious the bud, how glorious the sunrise.  Reality is the carrier of the sacred and not all humans can receive it.  

It cannot be defined in writing but only in experience.  It is a “felt” meaning.  Artists work with felt meaning.  A priest is an institutionally identified artist who works in a symbol system that is used by that institution, regardless of the ethics, the social consequences, the attempts to prevent change.  The task is to make people “feel” sacredness in a way that benefits the institution.  

If it crushes the individual, that is called a necessary sacrifice.  They are the animal on the altar with their throats cut before they are burned.  They forget that the sacred moment spared the child.

Abraham's ram