LIFE IN THE MIDST OF DEATH

In this part of the world we don’t have spring.  One day we’re getting desperate over the severity of the winter and a day or so later we’re dumped into early summer.  Or sometimes people say that winter is when the really bad days outnumber the good days and summer is when the balance tips over so the really good days outnumber the bad ones.  Because tongues of Arctic air lick us and blasts of Mexican air wash over us, all the while waves of wet Pacific air drench us -- left-to-right on your weather map -- we have “seasons.”  They’re just more mixed than in other places.

Nevertheless, at the post office yesterday the little lady (she’s very short but always impeccably groomed) who occasionally comes to the door to convert me to Jehovah’s Witnesses (a hopeless task, but it’s nice to see her) told me that the apple tree in her yard had hung on to its withered fruit and is hosting robins at last.  Others are saying that the gophers are up and the rangers say the grizzlies are moving around, scowling over whatever they were dreaming.  The geese are reconnoitering and the kids are having to be sent back to their rooms to put on long pants and proper shoes instead of flipflops which they will actually wear in the snow while they sprint to the warm car.  Their systems are attuned to spring break in Florida before they even get out of eighth grade.  The forecast for today is forty-five degrees which means that the mountains of snow in town will be converting the streets into trout streams.  Night before last the temp was below zero.  It snows every month.  NO flip-flops yet!

A big fat book has accompanied me through the winter:  “The Education of the Senses” by Peter Gay, a reflection on the relationships between the genders and their arrangements through the “bourgeois century” that still haunts us.  Now I’m switching over to a different big fat book:  “Landscape and Memory” by Simon Schama.  My thoughts are going out of the house and into the terrain.

I subscribe to a number of listservs, academic exchanges of information, and rarely say anything on them, though often I end up laughing at their absurdity (most of the people are very young and urban) and -- less often -- very much intrigued or informed.  Recently someone wanted to know how the practice of Native American religion had been changed by the forced relocation of tribes.  I think they may have been thinking about African religions being changed by being brought to a whole new continent, but it’s an interesting concept and probably pretty enlightening.  I suggested that even Christianity had been radically changed over the centuries by its relocation: moving it from indigenous villages along the Mediterranean into the court of the Roman Empire and then north across Europe made deep changes in assumptions and practices.  All denied, of course.

Some religious practices are so deeply human that they persist, coming up again as green as grass through the old snow of winter.  It’s Ash Wednesday.  If I were in the pulpit on Sunday, I would talk about the natural fasting of spring, reinforced by social rules to keep people from eating the seeds they must plant soon or the newborn domestic animals or even the milk that feeds them.  A liberal pulpit would find satisfaction in the congruence of nature and ceremony.

But the listserv did not post my remark.  One literary association and one historical association have begun to ignore me.  They don’t want to hear anything about nature unless it agrees with their assumptions, which are curiously distant from actual nature or any other kind of reality.  They are almost hypnotized by rules, not the nature-based rules of the past but near sci-fi or magic realism of an imagined or possibly computerized future.  The future is not spring, but spring break, derived from the academic calendar.  Academics control one’s future success, they think, so one must conform to it, go in debt to it, nearly worship it.  (Churches are passé.)

Part of this strange world-view might be an overdose of “cute” nature -- all those baby bunnies and kittens, fawns and lambs.  Soon enough that preoccupation with sweetness goes to commodification.  (Easter bonnets.)  And that is joined by rather acid cleverness, so that the University of Chicago student body indulges in competition among “Peeps” tableaus -- tiny marshmallow baby chicks arranged as social commentary.

Ash Wednesday means that people in Valier will wear marks on their foreheads.  No one will have to ask what the ashes mean.  It was a winter that encouraged contrition, humility, and a consciousness of vulnerability.  We are perhaps too little prepared to push back against the bureaucracy that caused the Crucifixion at Easter, too admiring of centurions, but we have our renegades.  There were a lot of deaths this winter, not just humans but also domestic animal herds that died of starvation.  The grizzlies, of course, will be grinning at the amount of ungulate winter kill from the deep crusted snow.  And spring has brought media images of deaths in riots of people craving release from tyrants.

Simon Schama begins his book by locating and describing cemeteries in Europe, often mass graves from WWII but also tumuli from ancient times.  We have them in North America, but he hasn’t gotten to this continent yet.  He speaks of going to a burial ground connected to his family and discovering that the marker stones themselves were being buried in a sea of crowded dandelions, lichen, and accumulating soil.  He says it was becoming a geological layer.  And he says this memorable thing:  “the heart of one of our most powerful yearnings: the craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality.”  

So many youngsters find their consolation in denial.  People in media do not die.  They are a tape loop.  One can still watch childhood worlds if you grew up watching television with your feet sticking straight out in front of you, your blankie in your hand.  There is another stage when young people trek the mountains seeing only glorious vistas, never parsing the ecology into its mesh of life and death.  The occasional urgent person, often female, will decide to war against all death, all immorality, all suffering, all meat eating, all use of nasty words.  Everything must be beautiful.  God must be love.

I think I will use what I learn from this book to identify and reflect upon the burial grounds of this place.  But I’ll wait until summer.  Spring is when people die, just when the green grass comes, and there will be people standing in clusters among the stones -- the living among the dead.  Not all of them will want to be converted into media.

GAME ON

Sitting here looking at my reserve list of blog ideas and my long list of emails from friends (some of which suggest links and subjects of interest) and even considering the Great Falls Tribune which I just snatched out of porch mailbox, hoping no one would see me au deshabile, which is probably hopeless (by now everyone knows every nightgown I own),  I was trying to think what the common thread is running through all this stuff.

It is GAME.  

That clicked when I read through the latest post from http://therawness.com.  This absorbing blog is written by a young half-Haitian guy in New York City who is plenty intelligent and working his way through the classic systems of psychology and psychoanalysis -- the same ones I found so helpful in the Sixties and Seventies.  My times, like his times, are highly turbulent.  The issue at hand is two-fold:  dyad success (BIG subset about sex) and career progress (BIG subset money).  Myself then and this guy now badly need maps, strategies, insights, etc.  We have lots of energy.  Not always much clarity.  

But our contexts are totally different, quite apart from me being older, probably twice as old.   I was on the Blackfeet rez and then back in Portland which was my hometown.  He’s clearly an metro-urban animal with Caribbean connections where I had rural assumptions.  Our deepest sensory lives are probably from those assumptions, though technically I grew up in a quiet neighborhood.   Our genetics must be pretty different, if only because he’s male and I’m female.

So I’m going to try to map out some game principles, working from what I think, because he has invited feedback.  Mine won’t be terribly useful to others, but maybe.

STACKS OF CARDS:

What is the context of this game?

Who cares anything about it?

Which is more important: goals or process?

What skills do I, the player, have?

What means of communication do I have?

Where are my protections?

What are my markers for success or failure?

I’ll try this list out in backwards order.  My over-riding marker is survival.  If I wake up every morning and stagger out here to the computer, I’m winning.  If the computer is dead and I have pencil and paper, I’m still winning.  If I sit here blank, I’m losing.  If I became a drunk and woke up hung-over, that would be losing.

My main protection is good will -- people around here are well-disposed to tubby old ladies because there are a lot of them -- and camouflage -- the assumption is that I’m like the other old ladies and I’m not.  I don’t think I even fit into a sub-category though there are overlaps with other old ladies.  My life-trip is pretty eclectic.  I seem to fit with men in their fifties.  Sons I never had?

Means of communication are email and blogging, obviously.  I thought that if I blogged this much and this long, people I knew would understand what I was about and realize some things I thought they were ignoring or misunderstanding.  (I want to write -- I don’t care about ANYTHING else.  All things are measured in those terms.)  I was wrong.  Some people, the ones who know me best, simply will not READ my blogs, much less take them seriously.  They don’t have time.  But all the people I wave at (most of whom I don’t know) on the way to the post office, are completely confident that that what they see is what I am.  Cheerful, poor, old, mild, discarded.  I know the right chatter.  ("Cold enough for you?")  But  at least two old dittos in this town are ENRAGED with me because I will not sit around with them having snarky regrets and obsessing about the fates of their descendants.  To them this IS communication. 

My skills do not include housekeeping or making money.  I don’t care.  Those are crucial skills in this town, but they have nothing to do with my goals.  I suppose writing intersects with keeping order in terms of the writing and something that I don’t quite know what to call.  “Nesting,” maybe.  Routines and arrangements for creature comfort.  My worst problem is keeping warm enough.  So: heaters, fleece, hot liquids.  I keep wishing for a nice deep bathtub.  (I replaced the rusty shallow old tub with a shower.)  Visitors say, with surprise, “your house is so COLORFUL !!”  So I’m a bowerbird.

I get very exasperated with people who don’t understand writing (anymore than they understood sculpture or taxidermy or ministry -- people don’t understand skills).  They’ll say,  “Oh, I’d love to be a writer, but I flunked grammar.”  The FIRST thing they don’t understand is that there are many different KINDS of writing.  The collapse of business publishing was preceded by a collapse in a kind of writing.  “Literature” doesn’t quite describe it.  “Meaningful writing” is a solipsism.  Writing out of the molten heart of driven necessity, that’s the kind I care about.  NOT blogging.  But blogging helps me get to it.  This kind of writing is what I share with Tim, though he throws up a constant smoke screen that most people never see through.  It has nothing to do with publishing.  

One part of writing that DOES have to do with publishing is preparing a manuscript, editing.  I don’t mind that, which is an advantage.  Another part of publishing is agenting and I’m just dead in the water on that one.  People think that females who can type are naturally going to be able to agent, but not me.  It’s like standing on a street corner asking all pedestrians if they’d like to go to bed with me.  NOT.  Not on  EITHER side.

Where I am bound to win is that my goal is my process.  Short of losing my mind I can’t lose.  Every day I get this blog out, I win.  Then I have lunch and write stuff related to Tim’s work, and that’s the same thing.  In the evening I read or watch a movie and that IS part of the process.  Not just print flow, but idea flow.

Who cares?  Individuals here and there.  My contexts are quite separate so they don’t know each other:  Blackfeet, Western writers and artists, liberal religionists, some environmentalists, other remnants of my scattered past.  I don’t go looking for them.  They just show up.  This is not a marketing project.  Tim cares.  My Strachan cousins.  (You don’t have to rush to tell me you care -- that’s pretty gamey.  Control is not a game I relish.) 

A wild card -- VERY wild -- is the demographics of my blog readers.  I have no idea who’s out there and am sometimes startled when they drop their Harry Potter “Cloak of Invisibility.”  

In the largest context maybe I’m playing a game with a lot more people that I would estimate and they might be totally different from what I think.  The reader maps show Russia and Argentina (they go on and off), the US and Canada always, France and Britain, maybe Germany.  (It's hard to see on the teeny map.)  The hit graph (Blogger shows how many people open specific posts) is insane.  It simply makes no sense.  All I know is that “Naked Young Men” is a big hit, but “Anal Sex is not Unisex” is evidently not read by anyone at all.  It’s not even on the list.  There is insatiable curiosity about sexy suspenders, earwax and Michael Kitchen.

But I don’t care.  I’m not writing for readers.  My game is solitaire.  Not even the unending search for a partner that preoccupies The Rawness.  

THE BEST OF TEACHERS, THE WORST OF TEACHERS

During my more-or-less ten year career (divvied up into five/two/two spans, plus one) I was the best of teachers and the worst of teachers.  It depended on context.  Administration, location, demographics, goals, methods, texts, families and even -- to be blunt -- race.  If those aligned in one way, I had impact for the good that lasted a long time.  If the same skills and intentions were put somewhere else, I was a disaster for all concerned.  But most of the time I was great for some kids, demonic for some administrators, and confusing for parents.  Sometimes I was in pain myself.

Take race.  When I taught on the Blackfeet reservation (1961-66, 70-73, 89-91), I knew people, had high hopes for the kids, and could bring to bear a lot of history, both personal and tribal.  When I taught in the white town next door, I was a renegade, only hired out of desperation bossed by a principal who had a personal vendetta.  She was out-of-control, a former English teacher who interpreted that subject in a way I despised, with a style based on conservative and controlling religion.  Over her head was a town often deadlocked in power struggles, quite prepared to sacrifice kids’ health and futures in order to have winning athletic teams.  (Hazing, alcohol as bribes, long bus trips, strutting coaches, considerable interest in drugs like steroids, covert approval of extreme fighting in alleys, and a general aspiration to be like the people on sit coms.)  They didn’t fire me -- I quit in November.

On the rez the story was quite different:  a percentage determined to excel, confusion over what that meant, political clashes with historical roots, athletic teams that DID win, and all the probs of poverty:  unplanned pregnancy, alcohol, drugs like meth, floaters who came and went.  The administration (both races) was sometimes there for plunder -- kickbacks and rake-offs, high salaries justified by “the difficulty of the job.”  This was just before a generation of dedicated female Blackfeet administrators arrived and just after the highly idealistic male white superintendents I started with had left.  (I’ll name them:  Ward, McKeown, MacLaughlin,)

Probably the most powerful factor in my success or lack thereof was rarely even recognized by most people.  In the early years the basic assumption was that we were educating people to be janitors, cooks, store clerks, and maybe nurses.  That is, being Indian was conflated with being capable only of service jobs.  Like Mexicans, who are -- of course -- Indian.  Then gradually there was a switch-over that was political -- and should have been -- that insisted that Indians had a separate and valuable body of culture which ought to be accessed and respected and that they should be judged by the standards of that line of thought.  (Whatever the heck they were.  Often whatever was convenient.)

For instance,  grammar and usage were early casualties.  Who were we white outsiders to insist on what was proper?  Pidgin is a proper language.  (It IS, yes!  So?)  Grammar and usage were taught  by rote and without goals, so there was little defense except that people should speak “properly” because that’s a marker for success in a “proper” world.  And people who had struggled hard to train themselves were not willing to give it up, but since they had not progressed much beyond office jobs and low-level management, their votes were thrown out.  (I made a little effort to learn Blackfeet grammar but it’s a LOT harder than it seems at first.  Not like learning another romance language -- more like learning Chinese.)

No one ever learned this stuff anyway or they learned it in a truncated and dogmatic way.  All the kids would chorus “a noun is a person, place or thing.”  Of course, it is NOT.  A noun is a name.  Persons, places and things have names.  That’s different.  Some grammar needs to be memorized at first so my early classes had to learn the linking verbs and the prepositions by heart, the same as I did as a kid.  But memorizing was greatly scorned after the Sixties and Seventies, as was diagramming which was too much like math.  What was it FOR?  Rhetorical grammar, the use of grammar to sort and manage sentences, was unheard of.

Then the old English canon went out, so there went literature.  The Indians insisted they wanted a Native American canon but it didn’t exist.  The admin was delighted to jump on the idea that there should be a looseleaf canon because those heavy-slick-bright textbooks cost a hundred bucks each.   But they hadn’t thought it through.  The copy machine ran itself to death.  Teacher time went to search and staple.

I saw a loophole and dashed through it:  the kids’ writing for reading.  REAL stuff.  They could write for sure and even the janitor read it, but it wasn’t “proper.”  For bourgeois capitalist administrators it disrupted their declared missionary goal of making Montana Indian kids into small town Indiana white kids.  The community was happy to point out all the satanist signs the kids smuggled into the school newspaper.  THEY knew better.  That’s the trouble with education:  everyone knows better, but “better” means it puts the prestige in their corner.  There were always the lonely kids, usually girls, who wanted a little tiny rez school to be just like the big schools they had attended in Minneapolis or Seattle.

In the end kids only learn what they want to and mostly they will want to learn stuff because of their relationship with a teacher.  They’d come to me to complain that Mr. So-and-So had it in for them and was preventing them from getting good grades.  My advice was always, “if you can’t learn because of them, learn in spite of them.”  Educate yourself.  Take it into your own hands.  Stop being a bad consumer, putting all your energy into evading the very thing you want.  Even home-schooling isn’t always enough.  Some parents aren’t capable of much more than coming up to the classroom and threatening to beat up the teacher.

Self-educating is much easier now that anyone can get to a library computer and join a world context.  Kids who can play computer games can be tech-proficient almost overnight.  BUT there will always be kids who would rather sit under an apple tree with a book and a dog, and that is also a perfectly effective route to achievement.  And there will be kids, many times female, who would rather read people, and they deserve support.  One learns to be a cowboy from cows, if you can be confident that you’ll always be with them.

Who knows how to educate tomorrow’s adults when we have no idea what tomorrow will be like?  Our biggest failure has not been teacher education (though I think it largely stinks) or curriculum development or testing.  We just don’t know where we’re going.  So we’d better teach the kids how to steer and sail and adapt, and do it with them -- because we’re all in this together.

CLERGY ON THE REZ

Violence, in particular violence against women, is a topic often visited by journalists.  The February Harper’s includes an article called “Tiny Little Laws: A Plague of Sexual Violence in Indian Country” by Kathy Dobie.  (Thanks to Dave Lull for tipping me to the article.)  It’s about Sioux in Dakota, a tougher rez than the Blackfeet in Montana where I am, but to some degree reservations are alike.  Canadian indigenous women have fought and fought to get official attention for the problem of disappearance of their sisters.  I wish I could remember the title of a knockout Canadian movie about it filmed in Vancouver, B.C. with Tantoo Cardinal.  Was it "Tales of an Urban Indian?"

The whole time I was reading this article by Dobie I kept thinking something was missing.  Clergy.

If it weren’t still winter here, remnants of official snow emergency still hanging on, I’d drive around a little bit and interview some present reservation clergy but it will be an excuse to return to the subject later.  I should say up front that when I came in 1961, I attended the Browning Methodist Church and in 1988-89, the year after I withdrew (with honor -- I have a letter) from the Unitarian Universalist ministry, I served as the unofficial interim for the Methodists.  Their “called”  minister unexpectedly couldn’t come for a year.  The Bishop, whose task it is to assign ministers to churches, always struggled to figure out what to do about the rez parish, which includes Browning, Babb and Heart Butte.  Lots of stories to tell, but that’s not what I’m after this time.  Anyway, he settled on me.  I spent the year very happily preaching creation instead of creator.

I need to provide background since there are Europeans and Asians reading this blog.  A reservation, from the beginning, was an ambiguous enterprise and they were set up differently from each other as they were invented from the first efforts to push all the Indians to the West and let them have Oklahoma and the prairies (“Indian country”) to the late “rancherias” in California.  

The US and Canada had contrasting approaches even on the prairie.  On the Canadian side, a reserve was meant to be like a wildlife reserve with white people excluded to protect the indigenous, who were totally different from the immigrants.  On the US side a reservation tended to be “wasteland” provided to stop war.  When the lands turned out to be valuable, like Black Hills gold, the war immediately proceeded.  Blackfeet were lucky to have their backs up against the Rockies and to have delayed long enough for the War Between the States to have slaked some of the appetite for war.

In the beginning the Euro-based  US government was white (with black slaves), though it was a mix of countries, and it was Christian in the broad sense.  (One of the three Abramic religions, the one filtered through the Roman Empire and split by the Protestant reformation.)  The assumptions were that religion was a matter of dogma, big buildings for worship, bureaucracy with all the trappings of grandiose authority, threatened but impalpable rewards and punishments in an afterlife, and documents, especially very old ones like the sources of the Bible.   Some of this might have been more familiar to the south in the mighty empires of the Mayans and Incans, but not on the northern prairie.

For the northern plains tribes, religion was simply an aspect of everything.  The emphasis was on propriety, right behavior, with two major sources of discipline:  good fortune in war and hunting or vengeance through family and clan affiliations.  Their culture was seamless, immediate, and deeply derived from their relationship to the land.

To Christians the Indian religion simply did not compute as religion.  Therefore, the people were pagans, barely removed from being animals and therefore, in Catholic terms, souls for the harvest but in Protestant terms, savages to eliminate.  Of course, as always, when individuals became familiar with the indigenous people, many of them realized their personhood.  As always, some of the people back East romanticized them to the point of near-sainthood.  

You know all this stuff.  

The first missionaries were mostly Jesuits who used schools and gardens to soften their determination to convert.  Today there are long-time parishes  in Browning, Heart Butte, Babb, East Glacier, and Holy Family which is the remnant of a mission residential school.  As everywhere, there is a shortage of priests but the churches are packed.  

At some point the reservations -- they were corrupt from the onset -- were assigned to various denominations which were supposed to reform but who were immediately drawn into war with the Jesuits.  The Methodists have tended to be a church for what was a sort of colonial enclave of white shopkeepers and administrators but now is more mixed-blood nurses, teachers, ranchers.  The Baptists and Pentecostals are truly grassroots, self-governed and led by inspired but Bible-based clergy.  They are highly emotional, often very conservative, and definitely indigenous.   The original Blackfeet and Cree ceremonies persist and are sometimes friendly to whites -- for a price.  No one persecutes them and bits of their ceremony slip into Christian worship.

Putting aside these issues of history, style and sociology, what would I like to see these clergypeople address when they mount into the pulpit?  Here’s my list:

The nature of justice:  the importance of principles even if there are many “rules” in terms of law and in conventional behavior.  Some might call this prophesy or even witness.  

The removal of stigma: discouraging the blaming of victims (not labeling anyone as deserving of abuse), encouraging repentance and reform.  This is the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament and ought to be the defining characteristic of a Christian.

Finding courage and faith to persist over years, decades, centuries and millenia in what many call “the Good Fight,” the struggle everywhere for good people to find better ways and to insist on them.

Practical strategy for dealing with bureaucracies.  Church people KNOW about this stuff.  Don’t tell me any clergypersons are innocent about it.  

Personal salvation, of course, however you define it.  There’s a lot of variation here, but private piety should not justify evasion.

The most important one is forming the community, constantly reminding them of the good of the whole, the power of the saving remnant, the need to protect the least of these, and all the other human ways of setting the norm for what the people can be.  We’ve got to move from “winner take all” to “protection of the minority.”  The most erosive force on a reservation is the idea that Indians are “like that,” that bad behavior is to be expected on a reservation, that there is some kind of curse that hangs over the whole population, that forces from other places have done this to a captive people and therefore all change has to come from the outside.

I will be returning to something like this subject for months.  Clergy or not, female or not, Indian or not, it is our lifework.

ANAL SEX IS NOT UNISEX

Ever alert to subjects that I’m not-quite-forbidden to discuss and aware that some new readers may be turning up in hopes that a naked young man will appear (NOT), I decided to take on the subject of anal sex in my own school-ma’rmy way.  (The real initiates tell me I’m hopeless.  Oh, well.  I’m used to it.)  There is no similarity between male-on-female consensual anal sex and male-on-male anal sex, consensual or not.   Anal sex is not unisex.   This is true on a number of levels.

Physiologically, moving from anal penetration to vaginal penetration is problematic because fecal contamination of the vagina is troublesome.  The top of the female tract, past the cervix, opens directly into the abdomen, which is why things like douching with shaken carbonated beverages as a contraceptive can be deadly.  The tract is meant to be welcoming in order to promote fertility.  Therefore it is less defended against micro-organisms.  The ick factor of the vagina may be based on an aversion to menstrual blood, which is meant to be a sluffing and discarding of the uterine wall.  

Historically, among people who understand that intercourse is the source of fertilization and among whom the males wish to guarantee the blood line of the family, controlling access to the vagina has been a means of controlling their descendants for purposes of inheritance.  Castration of guardians of harems is not meant to prevent sexual interaction but rather fertilization by another man.  Anal sex is therefore a way of evading unwanted fertilization.  It might be quite welcome, but this would not involve carrying fecal traces from anus to vagina since the vagina would go unused.  (This aspect was high in my consciousness because of watching an episode of “Downton Abbey” in which a handsome Turkish prince may have resorted to this means, not to protect fertility but to preserve the woman’s hymen in a culture that highly values virginity.  Of course, the screenwriter punished him by immediately killing him with a heart attack.)

I’m bouncing off an article in Slate  http://www.slate.com/id/2270622/pagenum/all//#p2 about how to get women to accept anal sex.  It  points out that this protection of virginity along with demanding other nonstandard practices can be seen as a way to exact proof of absolute love and trust on the part of the woman.  (See “game” at:  http://www.therawness.com)    In an age of HIV-AIDS, not using a condom would ask for even MORE absolute trust.  Young women in our culture are taught that love means giving the guy ANYTHING and many men seize on that.  This sort of guy will sometimes be proud of a child out of wedlock, but now that paternity is easy to prove with genetics, he can’t evade financial obligation so a man may be happy to avoid pregnancy.  The article also mentioned that anal intercourse may be more satisfying for men with rather smaller penises, so I suppose it follows that it works better for women with rather large loose vaginas, maybe after childbirth.

Culturally, we are still dominated by two religious forces.  One is the Reformation/Protestant attempt to evade the Pope by going straight to the Bible and lifting it up as the absolute authority.  The problem then is dealing with a text not written in a modern language or in a modern context, plus the fact that it is an anthology filtered by a male committee in the 4th century with an ancient agenda, and it contradicts itself on every side -- even apart from the total difference between the Old and New Testaments with the extra confusion of the Apocrypha.  In contemporary times the Bible has been used to condemn masturbation (onanism), fornication (sex out of wedlock), and sodomy (variously defined as same-sex unions or cross-species unions, also called bestiality).  Because most animals, esp. those we commonly see having sex, enter from behind, this position is probably the source of confusion over sodomy and insistence on the Missionary Position.

The Catholic church has approached these things from a slightly different point of view, which is the moral error of “from is to ought,” the idea that if something exists, it ought to be that way because God created it that way.   Fertility and the obligation to suffer the results of multiple pregnancies and large poverty-burdened families, are also seen as “ordained,” and thus anything that suppresses or evades fertility is seen as sinful, a way of withholding souls from God, because God is the Soul Collector.  He owns us.

Some conventional and conservative Christians, let alone those who cannot handle change (esp. changes that would diminish their power and ownership) use these religious ideas as weapons to control others.  They are selective and ignorant about what they claim, but collaborate to make a great racket and often have a lot of political clout.

Rape of any kind and particularly anal rape and esp. rape using objects to penetrate can become weapons of war, “proving” that the victims are weak, controllable, and easily terrified.  Their suffering deaths terrorize others.  There begins to be publicity.  The taboo on discussion is coming off a lot of things.

Okay, total change of gears.

Personally, bodily, accepting part of another human being into one’s own parts (tongue or penis or finger into anus, mouth, vagina) can be a merging, a fusion, with someone desired and beloved.  Or it can be an act of contempt, showing that the intruder means nothing.  The difference is in the persons involved and can’t be codified into a rule.  To entice and invite someone, then treat them with uncaring contempt is a potent punishment that might not just be about that person but also about their “kind.”   This carries over into social classifications:  all whatevers become objects of contempt.  Some aggressors won’t care -- it might add to the experience for them to cause suffering.

“Making love” is a euphemism for sex but most people would agree that having sex is a matter of tumescence, sensation, distention, and so on.  Making love has a strong and positive emotional context.  Both are about the management of consciousness but in quite different modes.

Then beyond that, there is a political dimension to everything a human being does.  Anal sex might be a matter of defiance or a sign of affiliation.  It could mean “fuck the pope” or “shove your laws.”

In addition, any act can have huge significance as an experienced metaphor, a personal emotional construct and source of energy.  In this aspect the potent force, possibly key to the person’s sense of self, drives art, especially the ultimate art that is life itself.  This is not “cured” by counseling or even “true love,” because it is wired into the brain.  The brain is changed by all experiences, especially early and intense ones, and both ecstasy and trauma actually change the cells.  If we respect identity, we must respect this because identity is as much physical as “mental.”

THE FROST-HEAVE METAPHOR

When I made my monthly run to the county seat yesterday, I fiddled around until it was a little later than I’d intended because the Montana highway report said there was frost on the road surface.  That means slippery.  It will soon be time to watch out for frost heaves as well, which means humps of broken pavement that soon deteriorate into potholes.  I’ve always been curious about frost heaves, so I went to Google which sent me to Wikipedia.  I don’t like this much, but I trust it on a technical subject more than I do on anything about people or issues.  

What I found was about something I’m beginning to call to myself “gradient theory.”  That is, when there is more of something in one place and less of it in another, it causes movement across the boundary.  There must be a more formal name for this and maybe a school of study because it is so useful, on the scale of fractals or chaos-theory and in the dimensions of simple physics like water diffusion, but also socially.  (I’ll think about that later.)  But this time, when I read about frost heave and other temperature-gradient phenomena, the action was microscopic and introduced a lot of intriguing new concepts.

I knew about capillary action -- that liquids get drawn into a small narrow space -- but had not thought about what happens when liquid water is drawn by capillary action into soil and then frozen, expanding into “needle ice.”  I'd thought more in terms of seepage from the top into cracks.  Water can also be drawn up plants (that’s how sap works in trees) but when these tiny columns of water are frozen they can be extruded into “frost flowers” of considerable fanciful filigree.  I’d love to see some but most of the plants around here are dried out by frost time -- on purpose, I’m sure.

Closely related to needle ice are ice lenses which form when there is a source of water that “feeds” the lens and grows it, maybe because there is ground water or because the soil structure lets water travel to the lens.  Water tries to migrate to just under the freezing level in the soil where the ice stops it, holds it down and adds it to a lens that exerts a powerful upward force.  (The freezing level moves up and down according to air temp.  I never understood people saying that it “sinks” when the ground warms again.  Have to think about it.)

There’s this thing called “Gibbs-Thomson effect” that is about very fine pore ice having a curvature.  The higher the curvature and the more confined the lens the more likely it is to have water colder than freezing but still liquid.  The surface of the lens might also have liquid water on its surface, but only a few atoms thick.  

This morning on “All Things Considered” there was a story about the discovery of huge ice lenses UNDER the snow burden of the mountains of Antarctica.  http://www.npr.org/2011/03/04/134229249/its-bottoms-up-for-antarctic-ice-sheets   I don’t see an explanation of WHY there is water moving around under the ice burden.  Volcanic?  Springs?  Warming produced by pressure?  Why on mountains?  They figure these lenses push the overburden ice up by meters in spite of what must be enormous weight.   They also erase by melting the sedimentary layers which form a log-book of climate conditions, so the core-collectors will have to find places to drill that are not on top of lenses. 

These phenomena, tiny as they are, might not move mountains, but they separate the mountains from millenia of snow.  The results on ordinary terrain are familiar enough in places where water is frequently crossing the gradient from ice to liquid or even to vapor and then back again -- places like the polar caps or at the edges of winter or on other planets.  The resulting geographical phenomena acquire names:  palso, pingo, lithalsa.  They are often geometrical -- circles, polygons, stripes -- that are so unorganic that people suspect alien intelligences created them.  The photographs are fascinating, worth chasing on the Internet.

I’ve book-marked this website.  It’s on the same trail as I am.

http://knowgramming.com/metaphors/frost_heave.htm

“A crowd swells as people stream in from all directions to some place of interest. If the place of interest is a concert, the members of the audience will expend great amounts of time and energy to afford the ticket; and a change of  time, energy and distance will be required to locate oneself at the event horizon. After all these energy-draining expenditures, the crowd will have accumulated - colonizing in this one place in a process strikingly similar the formation of an ice lens. 

"Cool" makes for a big "draw".

The northern plains of Montana are dependent on highway systems, so construction of roadbeds that will not accumulate or micro-shape water is vital.  Therefore I’m delighted to have found  “The Idiots' Guide to Highways Maintenance  http://www.highwaysmaintenance.com/drainage.htm    Much more useful than the standard practice of cursing the maintenance guys.  Basically, it depends on making sure there is as little water as possible, especially from underneath, and constructing the roadbed of non-porous and therefore non-capillary-action materials.  (Valier streets are mostly dirt and our water table -- since we're next to a lake -- is high.)

I thought Faraday only studied electricity -- indeed that’s a matter of electrons moving along a gradient -- but he looked at water as well and spoke of “thermal regelation” [sic] which is that supercooled water within the lens goes across the teeny temperature gradient from “warm” to “cold” which tends to extrude soil particles to the low side and thicken the ice on the high side, so the lens rises sort of like a bubble would in water.

So now I’m thinking about social “lenses” that tend to attract some kinds of people (rich or poor, immigrant or native) and then to show signs of these same micro-migrations, person-by-person or family-by-family.  I’m thinking about concentrations of people caused by boundaries, like reservations or languages or geographical barriers.  I’m thinking about (I’ve been trying to think about this for quite a while because of reading history of the rez) the “lenses” of people that form around new ideas or specific people or particular opportunities and often have enormous power to support or disrupt.  Like the Pentecostal movement, or Indian Preference, or the assignment of the more full-blood Blackfeet to the more remote Dawes allotments.  (It was their preference because that’s where the hunting, firewood and water were.)    Specific individuals or families have formed powerful social “lenses” -- the Sandoval brothers are one of my favorite examples.  Or what about the “capillary action” of the Piegan Institute which draws in children of a certain kind and propels them upward to “higher” education?

I gotta go back and look at that website about metaphors again.  It is specifically for writers and teachers.   What about the capillary action of the Internet and its website lenses?   Or the power of simple curiosity about some pesky thing like frost.

SORTING BOOK RUBBLE

Sorting the rubble of the electronic book revolution is a daunting task because it’s clear now that there are a lot of small but crucial aspects that we have to rethink.  Like, how does a library check out ebooks?   Some mechanical way, like on a thumb or DVD?  Or does one simply download from the library’s hard drive by using a password.  Shock waves are now traveling the library world because some publishers are selling access to the library to “loan” ebooks to their customers, but limiting the number of viewings per book.  After two dozen “borrowers,” the access is canceled.  What if the publisher goes broke in the meantime and no longer maintains its hard drive?   A big part of some authors’ income is contracts with publishers to supply the kinds of books that libraries like, including big-print books, on a near-automatic basis.  What happens to big-print books when ebooks can adjust the size of the font?  

What the used book and remainders market discovered was the “long tail,” which means that there will be a few people who are interested in material long after it’s created, whether or not it’s popular in the moment.  I watched a Charlie Rose vid last night on which Charlie remarked that he was amazed how much viewership there was for his old program vids.  Of course, if people are watching his videos, they are leaving behind their internet addresses and creating marketable lists of “the kind of people who watch Charlie Rose.”  I’m getting offers for lists of what the computer thinks might be my customers.  (Pretty coarse-grained at present, but possibly valuable in the future.  Since it's cheap to send emails, one only needs a small proportion of responses.)  

It looks pretty clear that most of the intermediaries (agents, editors, publicists) between authors and readers are going to be evaporated by electronic publishing.  This makes everything cheaper, but also disperses it among a variety of modes: electronic readers, print-on-demand, audible, mixed media (inclusion of music and video) to the extent that most authors will want to hire a new kind of intermediary who can keep track of all this stuff as it develops.  A book keeper sort of person.

In recent years publishers have required authors to do as much personal selling of themselves as is decent.  They call it “platform.”  Or “branding.” This, of course, used to apply to the publisher.  If it doesn’t, who needs ‘em?  As publishers have dropped their identities in order to keep up with sales, they’ve gone to a “whaddya want?” mode and asked for surveys of what is successful or maybe advice from their sales reps, what's left of them.  “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog” is an old answer.  Today?  I’m afraid to guess.  “The Sexy Teenaged Robot Vampire?”  It won’t be “literary” in the traditional sense.

Another “sign of the times” is that though I’m small potatoes I’m getting mail from publicity companies wanting to sell me contracts for promotion.  What could a guy in New York City who knows nothing about Western art or bronzes do to promote “Bronze Inside and Out?”  The more specialized the material, the less helpful publicists are unless they inhabit the specialty and most of them don’t.  They’re just in line for author money.  If the authors are doing the "branding," then they have the mailing lists.  And who’s responsible for maintaining author websites?  Many of the ones I visit are outdated and dormant.

I think I’ve already talked about how “peer-reviewed journals” have crashed.  First, because they are too slow when times are moving the way they are now; second, because the previously defined “peers” of defined traditional disciplines are often dinosaurs by now; and, third,  it’s easier to just blog and let the comments roll. Fourth, because when things get into specialties, regions, sub-categories, suddenly there is a small enough group to see who the peer-reviewers are and realize new thinkers are in competition with them -- NOT collaboration in the interest of something objective.

Electronic books seem to be slowing down the trend to “Espresso” instant one-copy print-on-demand, but not printing services online like Lulu, particularly when bulk orders are wanted (for a classroom, or to take on the road and hand sell).  Both the POD printers and eBooks are opening up a great flood of new subjects, new writers, material once below the horizon of ordinary publishers.  Prestige is going up as the original class of vanity writers fall away, but also because the vanity presses are competing with so much free or low-cost service that don't need traditional presses or bindings.  How can they charge someone a LOT of money for a thousand copies of a story that interests only the author’s family -- destined for basement storage -- when the story can be put online at Lulu.com and only printed when someone really wants a copy?  The copies are quite nice.

Or why not just blog the same material?  It’s simply a matter of being indexed on Google instead of Amazon.  There are companies that will make blogs into printed books if someone wants them.  It’s easy enough to download and bind.  Blogging is “publishing” in the sense of making the material available to the general reading public.  It is NOT publishing in the sense of having a book entrepreneur (publisher) investing money in your text in order to print as many copies as they think they can sell.

I noticed when I went to add a post to my blog www.scriverart.blogspot.com it had not had any of the upgrades that www.prairiemary.blogspot.com has enjoyed.  I’m sure this is because my readership for Prairie Mary is over a thousand hits a week and because I post a thousand words every single day.  I haven’t used any of the gimmicks: twitter, Facebook, et al, except that I do repost to enewp.com  when I think the subject is of interest to a national audience.  I have not figured out the global audience.  One day my Blogger stats “hit map” shows Argentina, then it drops Argentina in favor of China.  But Clustrmaps (on my website) shows no readers in China, no one in Madagascar and someone mysteriously floating in the China Sea.  And someone is evidently reading my blog daily to find a "hook" to put on my highest Google entry.

I’m getting email from people who want to post to my blog and then link it to their own.  Often they're selling something.  They’re reacting to advice from people who know how to sell “stuff.”  I do not write “stuff.”  I write the highest quality content I can manage, though I choose topics that might not interest everyone or even appeal to the same people from one day to the next.  I’m convinced that in the end what counts is CONTENT.  That’s always what has counted.  Except that the guide to content used to be tied to the publisher, a business that could deteriorate or simply evaporate.  Now the content is tied to the author.  The new problem is match-making between authors and readers -- directly.  The question is whether one intermediary can serve both authors and readers, which is the “inter” part.  More questions than answers.

SMALL VILLAGE, BIG SNOW

Today the temp is supposed to rise to 28 degrees (fahrenheit) and the Montana roads map shows clear and "green" all the way to Great Falls, but many of the rez roads are still closed and a formal state of emergency has been declared.  There are a lot of daunting statistics and I haven’t begun to look at the road cams.  One could do as well by looking at a sheet of white paper.  Great Falls gets less snow than we do but they have five times more than usual this winter.  When I was with Bob Scriver in Browning, we used to say that if we could make it to Valier, we could get “out,” meaning to Great Falls to a major airport.  That was in the Sixties when snowmobiles had just been invented and people were giddy with the ability to move around locally -- esp. during calving, which is pretty well along now.

In the cities snow causes traffic snarls, school closing, and mountainous heaps of snow but there’s even more to it out here on the prairie.  We’ve gotten into the habit of driving long distances; delivery systems come in over a hundred miles of highway daily.  The newspaper gets here okay but the delivery person sighs.  I hope my peanut butter (large jars of Adams because of low sugar content, crunchy for, um, texture) made it.  Nevertheless, all the Homeland Security planning and systems are getting a workout which is a good thing.  Heavy machinery is coming from other places, crews are checking homes.  Sometimes the weather is the worst terrorist of all.

There are subtle long term consequences and some violent short term consequences.  After the deep snow of the early Seventies, very like this winter, it was worthwhile to take big earth moving equipment to cut down the Y (2 & 89) where a ten-foot-tall V-plow got trapped and snowed under, marked only by the small round blackened hole in the snow the running motor left when the resourceful driver climbed out the window because his door was wedged shut.  People will die of carbon monoxide if they stay in a buried vehicle with the exhaust plugged.  The Fitzgeralds and their roomer died in a lesser storm than this one when a drift covered the chimney of their house in the Sixties.

On the other side of the ledger, the fortunes of the east side hinge on water and since the previous decade’s drought has been pretty well caught up by now, the recharged ground water will mean wells will be full (the water is much softer now, much less dissolved mineral), the creeks will be full (good for trout), there will be persistent snowbanks (not quite glaciers) in the mountains, and there will be a little more time before the re-allocation of the irrigation source water puts alfalfa growers out of business.  (The Blackfeet Nation is claiming rights to water that they have not exercised since the beginning of the reservation.)  It may change the formal plans of the Pondera Canal Company, which is the linch-pin of the Valier economy though we take it for granted a lot of the time.  In fact, I don’t think we talked about it at our long-range planning meeting.  Nor the wind farm you can see from town.  The red lights on the snow at night must be visible from satellites.

The emotional and social consequences of a winter like this can verge on trauma.  This is not a community of youngsters who see snow translated immediately into skiing.  Rather we are one of those towns where the kids think they need good educations because they intend to leave.  The population in July 2009 was 452, which is a nearly ten-percent drop since I came back in 1999.  The median age is 42.7 years, which is five years older than Montana as a whole, though this is an “old” state. Household income is about $33,000 which is ten thousand dollars lower than the rest of the state.  Estimated per capita income in 2009 was $20,436, but I’m thinking that’s in town.  What is not acknowledged by demographers used to city density back east is that much of the population is in the webs and wagon-spokes of people outside the formal town limits.  Their incomes might not be high, but their assets are formidable.  The town, like the Pondera Canal Company, exists because of them.  Another factor is that as soon as native people see a way to come back, they return in a rush.

Those who are still hearty are generous about digging out the frail.  The EMT’s are heroic in getting to people who need help.  Our streets get cleared with some dependability and the mail gets through.  But in a year that we are snowed in a lot, older people sit by their television, drinking coffee.  Here’s where my snob aspect kicks in:  when I visit such households, they are most often tuned to the right-wing scare monger stations because they identify with older, more conservative values and because they self-identify as Christian.  But those stations provide a steady stream of kidnapping, atrocities, allegations of terrorism, accusations against the president, and predictions of world collapse even as they deny global warming.  Between caffeine and adrenaline -- with no way beyond shoveling the front porch to work it out of their systems -- a little liquid self-medication seems like a good idea.   

I’m a snob because I listen to NPR: classical music, quiet jazz, much analysis of politics but usually in calm voices.  Just the same, maybe because of the left wing, I’m far more aware of what Nassim Taleb calls “fragility in systems.”  Because much of my work is on the internet, I’m far more dependent on systems that are in collapse due to technological shifts:  publishing is rubble, schools are a shambles, churches are winking out, food has been industrialized to the point of poisoning the population.  When I look out at my bermed-in driveway, trudge to the post office with my face burning from the cold, get up in the dark with torrents of wind pounding the house or sheets of snow flapping against the windows, thoughts go wild.  Then it’s better to write than to read or listen to media.

I remember 1972, how Bob Scriver could only get into his house through a tunnel with a garbage can lid for a door to keep dogs out.  On the inside one fell into the shed around the back door.  Dogs played on the roof.  Browning dogs are pretty adapted to this kind of weather: part sled-dog, part-wolf, maybe part bear.  Things are so different with this much snow that the world has a sci-fi feel, like those end-of-the-world movies that are always showing Manhattan, not a little village out on the prairie.  (Though there is one of the latter named Manhattan.)  

That was the winter I could see I’d better leave because as a single woman the only way I could stay was by depending on the kindness of those who knew me.  They didn’t all feel that kindly.  March is the snowiest month of the year.  We can hope that March came in February this year.  Or we can get braced.  No reason we can’t do both.

NAKED YOUNG MEN

If you came in hopes of porn, you’re dashed.  if you came in hopes of photos of handsome naked young men in the physical sense, I’m sure you’ll be able to find them somewhere.  What I’m after is the minds and souls of young men, far more naked than their bodies.  After all, I’ve been talking to young men who sold their bodies -- at least parts -- so that kind of nakedness means about as much to them as it does to a Playboy bunny.

I mean self-revealing intimacy sort of nakedness.  My specialty in romantic encounters has been old men of achievement and competence. esp. the difficult ones.  Now that I’m old, I turn to young men but not romantically, nor as brothers, nor as sons, but as inhabitants of a foreign country that exists on some metaphysical plane that is occasionally accessible from mine, terrifying and rewarding as foreign countries always are.  Now I am interested in old men as a way “in,” asking them about when they were young men in quite different times.

There are two ways to look at old age in women.  One is that they’ve spent themselves in service to others or devotion to something and now they’re entitled to protection, sheltering, and help in shoveling out their driveway on days that the temp only rises to zero.   (Today.)  The other is that an old woman is free.  She’s no longer accountable.  Her thoughts don’t matter, she’s expendable, and she might be a witch anyway.  She carries all the sins and shortcomings of a generation that sees old people in general as either an encumbrance or a nuisance -- always wailing and complaining -- but she’s seen a lot and can say what she thinks about it.

So I’m taking this second option.  I can be as daring as I want to, risk my very existence as much as I care to, say what I think is true.  At seventy I’m really a little young for this, but I want to be able to write with my wits about me.  I don’t care whether it gets published or not.  The crucial tipping point is NOT publishing.  (This IS publication.  "Publishing" is about making money.)

The conventional understanding, which is still alive out here in rural America, is that men are obligated to take care of women.  Once I headed from Portland up to Tacoma to preach and got caught in a huge ice storm that put me into the ditch twice.  Finally the road closed.  I holed up in a motel and watched Westerns for a day -- then two days.  It was a cheap motel.  It was lucky I don’t drink.

I called my mother to let her know where I was.  You’re always supposed to let people know where you are.  I had done this once many years earlier in even more dire circumstances and her reaction was, “What do you expect ME to do about it?”  We had a blowup about this -- years later, because sometimes things go unresolved a long time -- and both learned from it.  I had expected emotional support -- you know, sympathy and recognition that I really was in danger, that those might be my last words to anyone, someone to listen with understanding.  This was news to her.

So this time -- though her natural mode was to abandon me until it was over -- she did her best to provide emotional support.  But she offered the services of my brother, who had a four-wheel-drive and loved to rescue people.  I snapped,  “There’s nothing he could do that I can’t do for myself.”  On the other line he heaved a big sigh of relief.  When I got off the phone, I went out and dug through the debris in the back of the pickup until I found the “traction devices,” put them on the pickiup, and drove home.  The roads were open by then.  It’s the sort of conveniently ambiguous ordeal that makes a good short story decades later.

What I’m learning now is about men much younger, far more naked. far more vulnerable.  There aren’t many around here.  (The young men around here mostly don’t reveal themselves without drinking and I avoid those places.)   These “eBoys” read what I write and take it in ways I never could have imagined.  They “write” with their bodies -- not whoring anymore but dancing and climbing and running and doing backflips.  I “read” them in videos.

Christian Bale just won an Oscar for being a fighter hooked on drugs.  Hard to get more trendy male than that.  But I hadn’t really connected him with the boy in “Empire of the Sun” which is one of my key “texts.”  An educated boy is thrown into the chaos of war, so young he doesn’t distinguish between proper/improper, friend/enemy, legal/illegal.  He’s doing what I call “zero-based morality,” meaning that he has to develop everything from scratch, look at everything raw.  Not that the character is alone.  Part of the problem is learning from or resisting the people around him.  But he’s a “boy” in the sense that boys have always been people who did scutwork:  hall boy, stable boy, paper boy, copy boy, errand boy.  “Boy!  Boy!  Where are you, boy?”  They are the Jack Russell terriers of the population.

The main characteristic is energy.  What hurts boys is what takes their energy, either because they are so angry that they explode in every direction, uselessly; or because they are caught in a trap of self-correction or fear or unrealistic expectations or . . .   who knows?  If they knew, they’d do something about it.  How do we offer emotional support when they are facing situations that are life-threatening?

One might think it’s a matter of telling them something, but Tim shows me that the real need is for listening: careful attention.  They’ll hide, they’ll be shocking, they’ll lie, they’ll attack.  But you just have to wait until they trust enough to quietly tell the truth.  That is so powerful that they -- this is serious now -- are capable of bringing down the Pope.  Not that priests sodomizing boys (or impregnating women) is anything new.  What is new is that the modern priests were carrying HIV, that the Pope forbade condoms, and that the boys therefore received death sentences in the confessional.  Where’s the screenplay?  Would Christian Bale, “Dark Knight,” take it on?

We live in times that are hollow.  I have nothing to say yet.  I’m watching.  I’m listening.  I’m learning how to look at naked young men and see them as they really are.