POST MODERN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY -- SIGH!

Struggling through all this po mo stuff seems to be as hard on the writers as on me.  I’ve been downloading cheat-sheets from the Internet but they aren’t much help.  This is what I grasp so far:  in the 19th century when people took up sailing across oceans and then during the 20th century wars when Euro-Americans were stuck in foreign countries, there was a great awakening to the fact that not all cultures are the same.  This gave birth to anthropology, the study of all the various kinds of arrangements (some of which seemed like major improvements to some Euro-Americans!), and there was a lot of interest in ethnography, writing about exotic cultures.  The result sold well enough that ever afterwards the Blackfeet were convinced that writing about them was a way to get rich, though they themselves didn’t (a source of resentment though Percy Bullchild was about the only one who actually WROTE) and don’t seem aware that other cultures were also pretty interesting.   (Not even Sting’s fav tribe, the Yanomamo.)

At some point those Algerian rebel Frenchmen who question everything pointed out that much of the ethnography was pretty words about what the anthropologist wanted to see and not that different from ordinary travel writing -- though the pretense was that anthros were so formidably trained that Margaret Mead could not possibly have been looking in the mirror when she claimed Samoan girls had sex without guilt.  When women and minorities finally began to think about this, it was pretty clear that the inner mental templates of Brits in pith helmets were not picking up the realities of women and minorities in these various cultures.  Some of the women and minorities began to write what they took to be the truth.  At least it was theirs.

But it was only an exchange of templates.  In fact, slowly, everyone began to realize that it’s not possible to write or even SEE anything without having a template.   To be conscious, your brain must be using a template.  The U of Chicago insistence on knowing your “method,” is really a request to know which template you’re using.  This left all the purist writers in the ditch on their backs waving their templates in the air.  But some took heart and began to write “autoethnography,” saying, “this is who I am (my template) and this is what I saw, okay?  Make of it what you will.”  I see that I’ve been doing this, all unawares.

I understand “Writing Culture” -- this anthology of essays on the subject -- to be asking “now what?”  Stephen A. Tyler has an idea he calls “evoking.”  P. 130.  “The whole point of ‘evoking’ rather than ‘representing’ is that it frees ethnography from mimesis and the inappropriate mode of scientific rhetoric that entails ‘objects,’ ‘facts,’ ‘descriptions,’ ‘inductions,’ ‘generalizations,’ ‘verification,’ ‘experiment,’ ‘truth,’ and like concepts that except as empty invocations, have no parallels either in the experience of ethnographic field work or in the writing of ethnographies.  The urge to conform to the canons of scientific rhetoric has made the easy realism of natural history the dominant mode of ethnographic prose, but it has been an illusory realism, promoting, on the one hand, the absurdity of ‘describing’ nonentities such as ‘culture’ or ‘society’ as if they were fully observable, though somewhat ungainly, bugs . . .”

These guys have a real grudge against science, which they seem to consider a plot on the part of authority figures to force them into thinking things they don’t want to.  I suspect that in the past they’ve been bullied by people claiming “facts,” which were only convenient convictions (God, family, virtue) and not conclusions tested via the scientific method and willingly yielded to new evidence. (Is Pluto a planet?)  The po-mos talk about fragmented observations, which deserve fragmented methods of report since to integrate them into a whole -- the way one is asked to do in a college paper -- is to distort them (pound them into the Procrustean template), so they say their goal is to avoid representation.  It would be better to offer a collage of methods and contents and let the consumer figure it out.  I think this is what he means by “evoking.”

So.  How heartening.  It appears that Tim Barrus and Cinematheque (now The Studio) have plunged into the mainstream of post-modern thought, using video, paintings, music, writing of various kinds ranging from poetry and simple journaling to analysis by a trained person entirely outside (me -- amateur anthropologist -- but wait, amateur means “lover.”  Uh-oh.) all fragmented under the over-arching ethical principle of evoking compassion as a human unifier.  Of course, po-mo writers who claim to be standing aside from language and merely pointing like Wittgenstein, would object to “compassion” because it is unscientific, a source of bias.  In their contradictory way, opposing science, they insist on clinical detachment.  Yet, “clinics” require symptoms, don’t they?  Accurately described ones?

I think they are begging the question, which is an old religious one:  “What shall we do to be saved?”  I don’t think they believe the world CAN be saved.  They are very serious, even grim.  They forget that one way to go over the threshold into the liminal space where change happens is to play.  No science there.  No authority figures imposing “facts.”  No haunting past or terrifying future.  In the liminal space one’s brain is out of gear -- maybe you can use your “second brain,” the enteric neural web that people call “gut feeling.”

Some writers will suggest that this allergy to science that po-mo’s have developed is at root a resistance to the colonial Brit in the pith helmet who is at heart a Victorian bourgeois intent on getting the world in order for the sake of the empire.  All while the Brit himself, now dressed for dinner, is superior.  He also diminishes science because to him it is a technology merely: putting rockets in outer space is simply an extension of railroading -- big ships, you know.  NOT a way of reflexively seeing ourselves for what we are: trivial mammals on a small green planet we are quickly rendering brown.  Not a way of reaching liminal space where all existence is equal and the science of rocket ships meets the poetry of cosmic physics.  Say, is that last evocative for you?   Why else would the space station have a glass observation cupola?

OH, THAT'S SOOOOO DEPRESSING!

From the LA Times:  “Britain's Daily Telegraph — a conservative paper and that country's bestselling broadsheet — diagnoses [America] as a nation depressed, and cites polling data describing alarming percentages of Americans who expect their own economic situation to deteriorate further and that of their children to be worse still. As Toby Harnden, the paper's U.S. editor, wrote: "A country whose hallmark has always been a sense of irrepressible optimism is in the grip of unprecedented uncertainty and self-doubt. With the United States mired in three foreign wars, beaten down by an economy that shows few signs of emerging from deep recession and deeply disillusioned with President Barack Obama, his Republican challengers and Congress, the mood is dark."

The news people love all this stuff because it sells papers.  It means offering remedies for sale.  Big Pharma is not the only force that loves trouble because it is so easy to commodify.  So in the interest of not wasting money, I’m going to speculate a bit on alternative diagnoses.  One wouldn’t want to take the wrong pill.  Let us reflect on: disappointed expectations, confusion, anxiety, fatigue, culture-shock that one is subjected to by living through changing times  (Oh, isn’t that future-shock?  Remember that?), avoidance, preoccupation, and dementia (organic failure to compute).

Let’s go backwards.  Some dementias are subtle: forgetting, losing inhibitions, personality change -- as compared to thinking your wife is your hat and trying to put her on your head.  Quite different is Preoccupation, which is the absent-minded professor thing where one is thinking about something abstract so intensely that one fails to monitor what you’re actually doing.  Pouring boiling water over my coffee beans without grinding them first.  That’s me a lot of the time.

Avoidance can be either deliberate or unconscious.  You just don’t want to deal with something so you change the subject or go the other way or lose the papers or accidently delete them.  My cousin is an expert at the distracting question, which doesn’t have to be quite so blatant as the one I hit on Bing.com the other day.  I punched in a url and got the message:  “that url has been removed -- oh look, a puppy!”  Sure enough, there was a cute puppy photo. 

Future-shock is a toughy, sometimes terrifying and other times coming as rather a relief.  It’s not always generational, as some old people like new stuff and challenges.  Others of us still haven’t figured out that hotel rooms don’t have keys anymore and are humiliated once to think we’ve forgotten ours somewhere and then again when the desk clerk instructs us that the thing in our hand is the card that opens the door.  It can be as necessary as moving to the city or going to college or joining the military, which doesn’t mean it’s not totally discombobulating.

Fatigue is one of those tricky things that feels very real and that the medical profession (maybe because they don’t know what to do about it) treats with great suspicion.  Fibromyalgia is similar and often coincides.  Only with great reluctance will medical people classify these as a disability.

Confusion, flooding, choking, brain fag are sort of the same: too much stuff to process.  I had a good counselor once who was trying to explain something to me but stopped.  She said, “You’re looking at me as though I were speaking Chinese!”  No comprehension whatsoever.  The ideas were too new for me to grasp.  She taught me to say,  “Wait a minute.  I need a little processing time.”  I had not known that a person was allowed to say this.  Now that I’ve learned it, the simple request really helps.  And also she explained that one is allowed to ask for definitions or examples.

That takes us to disappointed expectations which is really what the lead paragraph is talking about.  It is a situation in which all the other phenomena, from confusion to preoccupation, can go to work to defeat clarity.  Expectations creep up on us subtly, maybe through one’s family (who expects you to be a genius and shower honor on them all), or through one’s neighbors (who expect you to at least maintain your lawn in some kind of orderly way) or through the media (where sitcoms demonstrate how your house should look, what you should wear and what you should look like).  

Most expectations are at least negotiable.  But when politics leads you to expect that your social security check will soon be cut in half, all the afflictions listed above will come into play.  There will be no pill, no brand of alcohol, no therapy, that will make a difference.  When you expect to be healthy and discover that you will no longer be able to walk -- THAT’s more than disappointed expectations.  It’s a real grief and mourning is entirely justified.  The same as if the loss were a person or a marriage.

People say to me all the time,  “Oh, that’s so depressing.”  I’m more likely to find whatever-it-is infuriating.  I’ve never been depressed, I don’t think, though when my marriage got absolutely stuck without any remedy except ending it, I had the “flu” for a while and slept day after day.

But this is what I really want to say.  “Being depressed” because one will never have a house with a bathroom for each bedroom, a double garage, and a wireless network for your electronics -- which one’s parents had -- is not the same thing as the yawning abyss at the feet of the truly organically depressed.  The latter is the darkness that engulfs and destroys, mocks with hissing evil every effort to act or to think.  Most of us cannot even imagine it and those in the grip can’t describe it until later and then tell us that every effort fails.  

To say that the ordinary set-backs and wrestling matches of the day are “so depressing” is to use a word to mean unpleasantness that can be addressed and resolved (possibly to excuse ourselves from doing exactly that) when REAL depression is demonic, catastrophic, nearly theological and beyond most medical help.  It is apoptosis of the soul, apoptosis being the formal term for a cell that orders itself to die.  

We can only pray for those suffering depression on that scale.  But we should also pray for those suffering in extremis from hunger, disease, trauma, slavery, because those people are BEYOND depression themselves and should be beyond “depressing” us.  NOT beyond our help.  

CAN THE TRUTH BE TOO VIVID?

In the anthology called “Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography,”  I’m reflecting on Vincent Crapanzano’s essay about “Hermes’ Dilemma.”  He says that “ethnography is historically determined by the moment of the ethnographer’s encounter with whomever he is studying.”  He offers an analysis of a study of the Mandan O-Kee-Pah or torture ceremony written and painted by George Catlin in 1841.  

So one of the “moments” is in 1841, part of a long trip by Catlin meant to record the American Indian tribes,  The next is in the 1850’s when David D. Mitchell, quoted by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, claimed that Catlin made the whole thing up.  In 1866 Catlin secured a letter of endorsement from Prince Maximilian of Neuwied, who had spent a winter with the Mandan.  Lewis & Clark (1804-1806) also knew this ceremony, which is now accepted as a real event, even one revived in the 21st century.  (Can anyone say it’s a “revived” ceremony if the life-way that gave rise to it is long gone?)  It was depicted on-screen in “A Man Called Horse.”

Crapanzano -- what a name! -- wants to seek the truth of the 1841 ceremony Catlin witnessed by analyzing Catlin’s rhetorical methods and personal style -- he appears to disapprove of them.  He says Catlin uses hypotyposis (a vivid description of an event), deiclic (relating what is said to the space and time in which it is said), ecphonesic (an exclamation), and apoplanesic (promising to address the issue but effectively dodging it through a digression) methods.  He adds more familiar terms:  extravagant metaphor, promiscuous use of the vocative (calling someone by name), hyperbole (exaggerating), pathopoesis (he may have made this one up -- which is the beauty of Latinate pop-it-bead particle words -- but it seems to mean the poetry of suffering), interruption, suspense, subjectivism (how he felt).  He is trying to make the case that Catlin was deliberately making this event as dramatic and shocking as he could.  Not that one could much overstate the actuality.

Where Crapanzano fails is when he tries to convince us that Catlin does the same thing in his paintings.  Catlin was the most careful and sober of depicters with his images.  But he needed to sell his paintings by using dramatic language emphasizing the uniqueness of his work.  He understood himself as a salvage artist, making records of disappearing people.  

Crapanzano is trying to make the case that Catlin is totally blind to what the ritual means to the Mandan themselves, but neither could any anthropologist grasp something that happened in sensory experience without any word-bound theological pattern for reference that arose out of a culture developed in that specific environment.  By using such fancy technical language Crapanzano is excluding the general public, including any descendants of these Mandan who have not had Crapanzano’s education.  The assumption is that it is “truer” and “more scientific” to use the kind of Latinate language conventional in the 19th century.  As though Catlin ought to have spoken that way.

Catlin himself made three of his helpers, Joe Kipp among them, sign statements that he had painted the accouterments accurately, got the dimensions of the earth lodge right, and described events properly.  Joe Kipp, half-Mandan and a Blackfeet progenitor, is a well-known historical figure, not least because he was a handsome man, but also a powerful entrepreneur who traded, built forts, sold alcohol, ran boarding houses, and meddled in politics.  His connections with the powerful were excellent.  So far as I know, his record-keeping was “sketchy” and did not involve art.

Being hung from one’s impaled chest and back muscles, which is the O-Kee-Pah spectacle that Catlin painted, has become an iconic s/m personal rite.  No Kipp I know has done it.  Usually it’s white boys from back east who might be depending on drugs to get through the torture -- more likely  hallucinogenics than pain-killers.  Reports from the Indian families of 19th century practitioners suggested that the men who survived were debilitated for the rest of their lives.  I have not read any reports by surviving modern adepts themselves -- just reports that it happened.

Crapanzano’s valid point is that no matter how accurate and vivid Catlin’s description was, no matter how inspired his guesses about what the meanings were, it could still NEVER mean to him what it meant to that man hanging in agony or what it meant to the man who ran up with a stick and made the sufferer twirl as he hung until the torture put him into a coma.  (Actually, he was probably trying to help the impaled man break loose.)  There are hints that Crapanzano secretly thinks he understands better than Catlin -- because he understands that no understanding is possible.

This happens all the time with Native Americans -- EVERYONE imagines that THEY know, even though they grew up in a city a hundred years after the buffalo-based way of life had collapsed.  But it’s not just a matter of history.  I remarked once on Reznet that I understood a contemporary Indian woman and some very smart and relentless Indian women went after me to convince me that I COULD NOT EVER know what she had experienced.  I thank them. One person cannot have another person’s experience.  I do not understand the members of my own family nor do they understand me.  Hard to admit.

Every summer pilgrims arrive here to share the consciousnesses of Indians, which they think are genetically determined.  They say, “Oh, but I’m deep and sensitive and open and I get it.”  Impossible.  One can be sympathetic or even helpful, if proper respect is paid, but to truly mind-meld?  Can’t be done.  In spite of a few opportunist tribal members who will assure you that they, only they, can take you into this other privileged consciousness.  Of course, it will cost money.

Most of scholarly discussion like those in this ethnography book about whether any human identity or culture can ever be captured by any art form or scientific protocol has gone right over everyone’s heads.  The concepts of “truth” have devolved into the aficionado’s belief that his collection of factoids and objects make him special or the Indian’s conviction, though the person in question maybe be urban and low-quantum, that the experiences of his ancestors are traced in the blood and cannot be accessed except through those who share his blood.  These ideas have enormous political impact. 

In fact, I would describe the word-wars about them as hypotyposis (a vivid description of an event), deiclical (relating what is said to the space and time in which it is said), ecphonesic (an exclamation), apoplanesic (promising to address the issue but effectively dodging it through a digression), extravagant metaphor, promiscuous use of the vocative (calling someone by name), hyperbole (exaggerating), pathopoesis (the poetry of suffering), interruption, suspense, subjectivism (how he felt).  The time-frame is roughly the recent past, like the last two decades.  So we are not wising up much.

THE ARRIVAL TROPE

I’m reading a book called “Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography” which is a collection of essays deliberately planned to be the product of an intensive meeting about 1985 where the participants would investigate some of the challenges to ethnographic writing, like what is true and what is scientific and so on.  What I want to pick out of this morass just now is the idea of the “arrival trope.”  It’s a little patterned event when the explorer, anthro, or castaway at the beginning of both fiction and serious science (almost always a white man) arrives on an island beach (usually) and the native people come out in a mob to investigate.  Sometimes it’s a happy trope and they bring nice things.  Sometimes there’s a rain of arrows or just scowls.  It’s a very old trope.

I got to thinking about my own “arrival tropes.”  One of the more memorable was my arrival at seminary on the south side of Chicago.  It was August.  All my worldly goods were packed into my F150 Ford Van.  The big throughways were traveling too fast for me to understand so I got off and went on the back streets which unfortunately took me right through the middle of the most dangerous housing projects.  Rolling up my windows to keep intruders out, which meant blinking sweat out of my eyes, and creeping along at about five miles an hour -- slow enough for men to walk beside the van -- because everyone was out in the streets and little kids kept darting out from between parked cars.  It seemed to take days. Then I came to blocks and blocks of demolished housing, looking as though it had been bombed.  Finally I got to Hyde Park, found the campus, but could not park because there was no space.  In the end I did find a place about six blocks away and staggered into the fine architecture of Meadville/Lombard (now sold).  Kiyo Hashimoto, the school secretary, small and lively, knew at once who I was and all but threw her arms around me.  I was so grateful.

When I came to Valier there were two “arrival tropes” because I came the first time with basics when I bought the house, then went back to bring a U-Haul.  I had only seen the house for a half-hour when I bought it so my mental picture was a bit foggy.  On the first return, driving from Portland, Oregon, I arrived at night in a June rainstorm.  I had insisted that the house be locked and the key put in a certain place in the garage.  When I opened the garage door, flashlight in hand, torrents of water were falling through the roof.  Staggering into the kitchen, I was shocked by what seemed to be a swaying man with a shining face.  It was a congratulatory helium balloon left by the real estate agent.

The second arrival at this house was with an eighteen foot U-Haul which the dealer insisted was the smallest they had.  My household filled half of it.  I had stopped overnight in Missoula so this time it was afternoon and I knew exactly where I was going.  I backed that mighty truck into the driveway so slick I was sure hoping someone was noticing.  They were.  My neighbors from across the street, two big strong men, were sent over by their women to unload me.  I had paid two men in Portland $400 to load that truck, which took them all day.  In Valier the neighbors unloaded it in an hour for nothing but praise.  Very SINCERE praise.

I’m old.  There won’t be many more arrival tropes.  But I enjoy thinking about my earliest and dearest arrival experience.  My mother grew up in Roseburg, Oregon, and her sisters stayed there to ranch.  Now and then after World War II when my father, who was a wool-buyer, had business down that way we would go to visit, driving down the Willamette Valley, Roseburg is a lumber town on a river, not particularly distinguished except that in those days there were teepee burners of sheet metal sending up showers of sparks and resinous smoke.  It was generally dark by the time we got there.

The aunts’ ranches were on South Deer Creek, so we went past Roseburg, then onto an unpaved country road redolent of skunk and new-cut hay.  The big old oaks were draped with Spanish moss and the creek itself was lined with trees and great billows of blackberry bushes.  The land was sunburned hills where sheep wandered.  Up behind them were timbered hills, some high enough to be given names and considered “mountains.”  In the daytime the buzzards cruised on the thermals, graceful and beautiful as any seabird.

By the time we turned in to the lane that approached the little square house across a rattling board bridge over the creek, my brothers and I were wild with joy.  Here was my mother’s youngest sister, Aunt Allie, as warm and innocent a young woman as ever was made and she threw her arms around us.  She had a distinctive voice, thrilled and considering at once -- I hear it now, as well as the sound of the gate weighted with horseshoes so it would swing shut, a distinctive clink and thwack.  It seemed as though we always got there just in time for homemade ice cream, richer than from any storebought milk, and distinctively scented.  Was it vanilla and nutmeg?

It was certainly home.  More significantly home than the one we grew up in, because we only knew the happy side of our cousins and their big roaring dad in bib overalls, his hair on end.  Our own experience was overlaid with my mother’s memories.  The smell of the blue copper sulphate kept to put in the chicken’s water to sanitize it, or hot oil on the farm machinery in the sun, or the nearly bread-like fragrance of the loose hay in the barn -- they were my version of a madeleine dipped in tea.  And part of the reason I moved to Valier.

FROM IS TO MAYBE

Some contemporary disciplines, like history, have developed a horizontal split which is not quite between professional historians versus popular historians, but sort of related.  There are professional historians (mostly academic) who land on one side of this split and popular historians (often local) on the other.  I’m talking about those who think of the discipline in terms of content versus those who think of method, and particularly those who question method because it alters content.  This split plagues groups based on a specific field that is defined by subject matter, like the many historical societies.

The same is true of anthropology or certainly religion.  How you go at it determines what you find.  The simple awareness that there is more than one method tends to be outside the experience of many aficionados.  There is another pack of semi-outsiders who are after the monetary possibility of what information and value is generated by either or both levels.  These guys do not like change, because they bought low and intend to sell high.  Changes that do not work in favor of profit are discouraged.  In any case new results roil the water of what was once considered a nice backwater pool suitable for a gentleman to fly-fish.  Then there is the politics.

We need an example.  How about bordellos?  One of aforementioned gentleman traditional local historians, much admired by his fellow townspeople, is now proudly publishing a book about the last whorehouse in his small town.  My rude question to him was how he knew it was the last?  What, to his mind, qualified as a whorehouse?  What were the larger forces at work?  He quickly discovered obligations elsewhere.  What he had intended was simply a biography of a specific colorful woman and her presumed activity -- no agenda but the titillation.

If I had been even ruder than I was, I might have asked about the bordello’s actual paper trail, the madam’s business methods, the status and fates of her “girls,” and what the modern equivalent is since I doubt that pay-for-sex died out -- just morphed into a new form.  The point is that -- probably in part because of the age of the historian, whom I suspect sat through many an episode of “Gunsmoke” in his youth -- accepted a template of prostitution in the Old West that was heavily influenced by Miss Kitty.  (Irrelevant factoids:  in the 1980‘s an ex-priest in Montana ran a chain of porn bookstores called “Miss Kitty’s.”  Amanda Blake, the actress who played Miss Kitty, died of AIDS.)  That is, a sort of zesty adventure in the West with fancy costumes and pretty women.  Buckingham Books, a used book dealer in Spokane, nearly sank under the weight of the remaindered books on prostitution by one local author, which did include a LOT of authentic photos and research.  To what purpose was unclear.

Old West prostitution is not the subject of this post.  Rather the subject is the radical rethinking of many fields because of raised consciousness, partly from post-modern radical politics, partly because of the entry to the scene of minorities, and partly because of a whole new understanding of existence that arises from physics, biology and the study of human perception.  So many things that were considered a unity, like human identity, now stands revealed as a shifting construct: genetics playing against experience in the context of an environment always in process.  Do we look through the glass of economics, spirituality, human relationships, empires, or ecologies ?   Who is the authority now?  Must the authority come from an institution or is genetic and cultural participation enough?  Where is the line between actual and constructed?  IS there an actual?

Well, we just don’t know.  Ambiguity has us by the nape of the neck.  Some will react with increased tolerance and curiosity while others want the doors locked and the shades pulled.

Suppose one took on a traditional subject, say bordellos, and treated it in a post-modern way.  (Oh, the French have already done that?  Okay.  Just pretend you don’t know.)   If it were a gripping fiction tale (lots of action, suspense and detail) it would sweep through the nation.  So long as it continued to be labeled fiction.  But the author would not be taken very seriously.  What is often at stake in these ambiguities is the prestige of the author, the expert.  Somehow we have the idea that one of the tests of reality is that it is colorless, boring, or happened some other place -- like another country, another time (wartime), or maybe in outer space.  In the case of local enterprises, a problem may be a lack of -- well, I don’t want to call it sophistication but maybe a lack of awareness or too narrow a context.  Or maybe awareness that you’re talking about someone’s grandmother.  

In arguments about religion I find over and over that small town quasi-Christians think the only relevant aspect is God.  It is a nearly impossible task to get them to think of religion in any other way.  The new concepts of reality as interwoven, shifting, and cosmic do not exist for them.  Telling them there is no God is like telling them that they have no mother.  Inconceivable. (Pun intended.)  Many people like history because they think that the names of the heroes and the dates of the events are immutable.  It comes as a great surprise to them that John Adams thought that Independence Day should come on July 2 -- not the 4th.  They do not like the current fashion of mulling over whether Abraham Lincoln was a good man who acted idealistically, or a dubious melancholic who acted in his own interests.  And it remains a joke that Benjamin Franklin thought the national bird should be a turkey instead of a self-evident eagle.

I’m sensitive to these shifts of method because no field (except maybe sex) has been so redefined and reworked and revisioned as that of the indigenous people of the North American continent.  They themselves (however defined)  have been partly successful in wrenching control of the subject away from the historians, but the split between NA Angel and NA Demon remains.  It will not end until NA Ordinary Everyman is established and no one really wants that.  Yet.  Anymore than they want Ordinary Boring and Banal Bordello Madam who was someone’s great-grandmother.  Can nothing remain predictably and securely sacred?  It depends on who you are.

ANOTHER OUT-TAKE FROM "HEARTBREAK BUTTE"

THE FORTY-NINTH PARALLEL

The chain of hills that runs approximately along the 49th parallel, including Milk River Ridge, determined the boundary of the United States.   Thomas Jefferson had "bought" from the King of France the whole of Louisiana, which was defined as the drainage of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.  Lewis and Clark were sent out on their expedition to find just how far north the drainage went.  Along  Highway 2 on the road between Browning and Cut Bank is the location of Camp Disappointment where Lewis finally realized that the headwaters did not reach to the fiftieth parallel as they had hoped.  These days the commemorative obelisk is much abused and marked with graffiti.  

On July 22, 1806, Lewis -- who had separated from Clark in order to go take a look north -- wrote in his journal:

"This plain on which we are is very high;  the rocky mountains to the S.W. of us appear but low from their base up yet are partially covered with snow nearly to their bases.  There is no timber on those mountains within our view;  they are very irregular and broken in their form and seem to be composed principally of clay with but little rock or stone."

Today this part of the east slope is called the "Lewis Overthrust."  Lewis was standing on what would become the Blackfeet Reservation.

"I believe that the waters of the Suskashawan approach the borders of this river very nearly.  I now have lost all hope of the waters of this river ever extending to N. Latitude 50º though I still hope and think it more than probably that both white earth river and milk river extend as far north as latd 50º."

After a few days of enduring a rainy and hungry camp, Lewis and his company moved on, encountering several deserted Indian camps with the poles of lodges remaining.  He noted,  "We consider ourselves extreemly fortunate in not having met with these people."  Then their luck ran out.  On July 26, a Saturday for what that is worth, they met a small band of young Piegan Blackfeet and cautiously shared a camp with them.  The American explorers were on Birch Creek, the southern boundary of the modern reservation.  On Sunday morning there was a ruckus which ended in the death of at least one, probably two, Blackfeet and so panicked the small party of explorers that they galloped all the way to the Great Falls over what had once been a seabed and is today wheat fields.  By the end of September the explorers were safely back in St. Louis, attending a dinner and ball.

The Blackfeet, for their part, were aroused to ferocious resistance against all invaders, whether other tribes or whites.  By acting strongly, they managed to postpone the breaking of their way of life until very late, almost the turn of the 19th century.  The last of the buffalo herds lingered around the Sweetgrass Hills.  

Relations with the Canadians went better, as had interactions with the early European traders.  The Blackfeet were not beaver trappers, but revered the beaver and organized their major Sacred Bundle around that creature and other water denizens.  Instead of trapping, the Blackfeet accumulated horses by stealing and breeding, and then used those horses for hunting buffalo and buying women for extra wives.  At first they acquired weapons and other paraphernalia by provisioning trappers with pemmican, which their women made.  Later they sold buffalo robes, which their women also prepared.  The real wealth of the Blackfeet was women and they knew it.  Lodges became much bigger and finer, and even a single woman could make a living by creating elegant beaded clothing and bags.  Today men still acquire ranches by sending their wives to town to work as teachers or shopkeepers.  Of course, now they are legally allowed only one wife at a time.

When in 1824 Jefferson laid out his topographical theory of the world, he started with the Blackfeet and then rhetorically moved East.  He saw the distance in hierarchical terms with the high slopes of the Rocky Mountain front as the paradoxical depths of savagery and his own swampy capitol as the height of sophistication and culture.

"Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast.  These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of beasts.  He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting.  Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns.  This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day."

Today we might be more inclined to see the romanticized Indian as the highest state while the swamps of Washington, D.C., represent the moral depths of civilization.

HIGHWAYS TOO SMALL TO BE BLUE

Something about the east slope of the Rockies makes it feel numinous, sacred, mysterious.  Maybe it is the altitude or maybe it is instinctive in humans from early grasslands times.  Many people find the Blackfeet Reservation spiritual -- yet dangerous.  It is not really possible to understand the Blackfeet Reservation without reflecting on the geography.  The topography, the climate, the soils and minerals, the fossils and wildlife, the transportation and communication networks are keys to both prosperity and institutional life.  They dictate where there is work, where you can live, what you can grow, how much of your life is going to be tied up in getting supplies and services and what school district your children belong in.  Occasionally, where you are becomes a life-and-death question.

If you drive north-to-south on Highway 89 from the Canadian border to Dupuyer (roughly along the Old North Trail), or east-to-west on Highway 2 from Cut Bank to the Continental Divide (which may have been the edge of the glacier for a long time) , you pass through Browning at roughly the midpoint of the Blackfeet Reservation, where the two highways run on top of each other.  This is the capitol of the reservation.  Main Street of the town is cut twice, once by the combined Highways 2 and 89 which swing around to get perpendicular, and once by Willow Creek which separates the Bureau of Indian Affairs Square from the town.  In the early days of Browning,  on the lawn of Government Square every spring Blackfeet girls in white dresses wound through a Maypole dance in the ancient British custom, though they probably did not realize it was derived from a pagan fertility ceremony.  

Today few tourists slow down enough to see that there is a Main Street, unless they need the post office or bank, which are still at the old town square alongside Willow Creek.  In the days of my in-laws' youth, there was a pond where the livery brought their horses for water.  

I CAN SEE IT FROM HERE

Some years ago I wrote a manuscript I called “Heartbreak Butte” about teaching in this remote foothills Blackfeet reservation town for two years, 1989-91.  Predictably, I was fired before I could get to the third tenure-granting year, and as predictably the manuscript was full of whining and resentment.  Now I’m revising it.  One of the things that I did RIGHT was to keep on thinking about the situation and looking for real solutions that weren’t just vengeful.  More about all that later.  

One of the criticisms from publishers (and there were conventional publishers then) was that there was too much geology, something like the criticism that Norman McLean got about his early logging stories:  “There are too many trees!”  The old split between city editors and country writers.  But I see that this manuscript is four times too long and I’ve composed other manuscripts that follow up on this geology angle.  Nevertheless, I hate to just throw out all those rocks, so this seems a good place and time to get them into print.

_________

One summer I attended a literary conference honoring Wallace Stegner after his death.  It was held in his boyhood town, Eastend, Saskatchewan, which is just to the north of Havre, Montana.  At about the same time, it was revealed that a complete skeletal fossil of Tyrannosaurus Rex had been discovered not far away.  It had been kept a secret for several years, because such a find is very valuable -- not just the fossil itself, but also the tourist value of the location.  Quickly, the organizers of the conference arranged for the chief paleontologist to come speak to the literary conference.  (And just as quickly, an enterprising ranch wife put her kids to work baking and decorating dinosaur cookies to sell.)

"What was it like here when the dinosaur was alive," asked someone.

The paleontologist scratched his head.  "Well, the first thing to remember is that there was no "here" then.  One hundred million years ago -- the dinosaurs died out around sixty-five million years ago -- the continents we know now were still together in one mass, Pangaea.  The whole continental mass was much closer to the equator than it is now -- or so we think -- and the weather may have been entirely different.  Quite tropical."  The audience was fascinated.  Prairie people live by the weather.

In the Sixties, the year after the Big Flood, Bob Scriver, his grandchildren, and I had been prowling around the bluff above the Cut Bank Boarding School, idly looking for arrowheads, when we realized we were standing over the complete skeleton of some kind of dinosaur:  head, ribs, legs and tail -- all where they ought to be.  Galvanized by our find, we rushed home to the telephone and tried to find out what we ought to do.  No expert or organization we could locate got very excited.  "Just leave it alone," they said.  "There are lots of dinosaurs."  Crest-fallen, we tried to just forget about it.  So far as I know, it eventually eroded away.

In the June 20, 1996,  Glacier Reporter,  an organization called the Blackfeet Human Rights and Sovereignty Coalition paid for an advertisement covering an entire page to accuse the current Tribal Councilmen of allowing a fossil to be sold for $25,000 which was then resold by a "Canadian firm" for $1,000,000.  Fossils large and small had been "rustled" off the reservation for years and in fact the Council had passed laws against it, but this was the first time anyone had gotten so aroused.  Nothing attracts attention like the words, "one million dollars."  

Much more than a million dollars has been pumped out of the reservation as a legacy of the Cretaceous Era.  Huge oil and coal fields in Alberta hint that there is still more oil and natural gas left under the Blackfeet lands.  As technology advances, resources that were left behind as uneconomical to recover have now become accessible.  Mining companies long to get back to the Sweetgrass Hills, sacred land for the Blackfeet and other tribes, in order to try cyanide heap leach mining on Gold Butte, where a conventional mine was played out decades ago.

But the most valuable legacy of ancient geology is still the Rocky Mountains, the upheaval of sedimentary ancient stone that was later carved by glaciers into Glacier National Park.  It is a major tourist attraction, but the value of the mountains is beyond visitor industries.  Because the clouds coming inland along the storm tracks and jet streams must drop their moisture on those mountains to lighten their load and rise over to the prairie, the mountains themselves constantly feed a myriad of streams that carry water down and out across the dry rainshadow on the eastern side.  The East Front of the Rockies has the fortuitous combination of sun and dependable running water that can create prime grass country.  Of course, because the air has risen, dropped moisture, and then compressed in descent, winds blow constantly -- warm winds that are called "Chinooks" in winter.  They can strip snow off the land in hours.

This is high country -- the prairie comes up from the east in a long easy-rising slope that is imperceptible unless you are watching an altimeter or driving a heavy load.  When the wind comes from the east, it is hot in summer or cold in winter.  Once in a while, a slow bubble of extreme cold drifts heavily from the Arctic and sits . . . and sits . . . and sits, until the foam seats of pickups are like blocks of wood and you must not touch metal without gloves.

The Rocky Mountains are relatively young mountains thrown up by tectonic forces under the continents.  Beneath the Rocky Mountains are other, older mountains, formed over many millions of years of colliding forces.  However the combination of forces worked, the mountains of Glacier Park were overthrown up from the Flathead Valley, so that the oldest stone is some of the oldest on the face of the planet, and the younger layers are on the bottom.  The stone is sedimentary, accumulated as limestone at the bottom of seas when tiny sea creatures died and their skeletons drifted down, as aeolian sediments blown in by the wind, and as volcanic dust, probably mostly from the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest Ring of Fire.  All of this has been compressed under great weight and heat in the past.

The prairie is also sediment, but moving and shifting whenever the cover of grasses is disturbed, and worn down into coulees and valleys where ever watercourses tumble down from the mountains.  It is estimated that the land has risen three times and been worn away into bench and coulee just as many times.    One more upheaval may be underway now.  No one knows for sure how many periods of drought have set the dirt free to blow or how long the rainy periods may have lasted, except that there have evidently been no trees for a very long while.  No water.  Prairie fires set by lightning or humans.

Huge structures best observed from satellites still persist from the thousands of years ago that glaciers crept down to cover the northern half of Montana, even scooping into the mountains.  Along what would become the United States/Canada border, volcanic action raised a line of hills which during the glacier ages became islands in the ice:  the Sweetgrass Hills, the Cypress Hills, Old Man Lying on his Back, the Bear's Paw Mountains.  Vegetation on the tops of these hills is ancient.  Deep in the earth, poking up through the sediments of the prairie, came blisters of lava that didn't surface, finding ways through cracks and forming what would be-- when the land was worn down again -- buttes and dikes of stone.

Plants and animals must have thrived along the southern edge of the glaciers, just where the climate was too warm to allow the ice to persist, so that there was always water.  And no doubt human beings found their way back and forth along this ice edge, just as they found their way north and south along the east slope of the Rockies until they formed the Old North Trail.  Travois marks are still visible on that trail.  No wonder the people thought of the four sacred directions when their north/south axis was the mountain ramparts and their east/west axis was a green edge along the blue glacier.  Human beings have been on this prairie so long that there seems to be a Blackfeet word for "mastodon."  It may have become the word for bull, "stumik."  

Ten thousands years ago the glaciers began to melt again and form huge impounded lakes, more like seas.  For centuries they deepened, until they found gaps in the hills and finally the gigantic glacial lakes of Montana swooshed down through the southern part of Idaho and through the bed of what is now the Snake River, pounding through lava in what is now the Columbia River and continuing to the Pacific Ocean.  This is how the rivers made such deep gorges through the volcanic rock-- with irresistible force and long-term erosion.

Long ago as this happened, there may have been witnesses.  To this day the Blackfeet don't like or trust water.  They have flood legends, which pleases Biblical universalists.  Their story about the origin of death involves a wager between Napi and his wife over whether a stone and then a buffalo dung will float or sink.  In the end, death wins and it is the woman's bet that makes it so.  So much do the Blackfeet distrust water, that even when they were starving they refused to fish.  An effective form of discipline was water thrown on a child or even up its nose.  Today some Blackfeet are assimilated enough to enjoy fishing from the shore, but few own boats.

A rancher on Milk River ridge, a glacial moraine, once showed me a place on his land where road-builders had dug for gravel.  Where the hillside had been trucked away, the layered remains of three glaciers were clearly visible because of the different colors and textures of the soils.  The rancher pointed out sorrowfully that the middle layer carried wonderfully fertile soil from what must have once been Canadian forest, but the top layer was full of rocks.  "If only the order had been different," he lamented,  "I could grow so much more barley!"  Yet they say that when the glaciers crossed a huge limestone deposit in Canada, ice carried limestone on down to Montana, powdering the stones nicely on the way, and scattering the mineral so that it enriched the grass.  

Sometimes the huge boulders called "erratics" were brought along by glaciers and left sitting solitary so that grass grew up around them, until the buffalo used them for scratching or shade and wore a dirt moat around the bottom.  Hawks perched on them and the Blackfeet found them full of stories.   Just as boulders were left, huge chunks of ice were left embedded in the land.  These melted, forming potholes or "kettles," perfect for ducks and geese.  Around the little potholes grew willow breaks and bush berries, so that humans and animals could stop in the shade or find shelter from the wind.

Along the old North Trail, north of the Sweetgrass Hills and Milk River Ridge, is a place good for scaring buffalo over a cliff.  A meadow nearby offers good grazing, and then an abrupt drop, so that buffalo falling over it would be killed or crippled enough for human beings to finish them off with a spear or a club.  Many of these places can be found.  Layers of ancient bone are interspersed with layers of charcoal where the hunters got rid of their offal.  These people were fire-users, setting fires to renew the grass or drive animals.  Some say the Blackfeet got their name from walking through burnt grass.

At Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, where today there is a fine provincial museum, the archeologists have sifted down through the layers of bone char until they came to the bottom.  They estimate that the jump is roughly the same age as the Egyptian pyramids.  This place near Fort Macleod got its name when a smashed-in human skull was found among the buffalo bones.  The archeologists envision a man running ahead of the buffalo, taunting them to make the thundering monsters chase him and leading them to the cliff-- but when it was time to leap aside, by accident getting swept over in the huge thunder of the herd.

No need for those long ago prairie people to build pyramids.  The outcrops of the land provided plenty of high places.  The land was their life and they fitted themselves to it inseparably, drawing from it not just shelter and water, but also their understanding of time, their sense of fitting behavior, and their endless stories.  The day, the month, the seasons, were their clock.  They watched the sky.  Generation after generation the babies came, grew up in families and cohort groups who taught them how to be human, went out onto the land alone to seek a vision, fought skirmishes that brought joy and grief, made love, talked about everything, sang often, sometimes danced-- until they grew too old and their voices shrivelled into silence.  Then they were wrapped and left on a ridge or perhaps high in a tree with all their material belongings.

This way of life has been described as "deep community," an evolved relationship among land, plants, animals and humans where everything fits together into an ecosphere that sustains lives disciplined by the good of the group and the inevitability of hardship.  Over thousands of years the sensory world becomes numinous, holy, so that everything has meaning in the sense of poetic depth.  The people dream in order to tap their deepest intuitions.  Today many yearn after this way of life. 

NATURE/NURTURE and ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

MARY:

I just watched the BBC David Suchet version of Freud’s life and found it packed with ideas.  For instance, one of the criticisms of Freud's landmark work, "The Interpretation of Dreams," was that it was not scientific, but rather a "NOVEL."  This exposed the origins of our mania about what-is-truth in the over-respect given to science in the last century (the twentieth).  Now we have given medicine the weight that was once allotted to magic.  The man in the white coat is considered infallible, allowed to go anywhere, to meddle in people's lives, so long as he/she is doing "science."  

Freud had to fight hard to assert that "Interpretation of Dreams" WAS science.  It has been hard to dismantle that and reveal that even science is NOT infallible, but a constructed world as much as others.  Just the same, it is a VERY sturdy construction.

TIM:

Yes. But HOW is knowing this relevant to WHAT. Let us pretend people become aware of this which they will not. But let us pretend. HOW does knowing this change what. The man in the white coat still has all the power. 1.) He's a man. 2.) The white coat is a version of the suit. Up one rung on the ladder. HOW is knowing that suits are disguises change the power structure. It doesn't. When the man in the white coat says take your clothes off everyone (well, not everyone) does. Or the power structure says: you can't play the game.

"We are only trying to help you," will be the structure's first response. The second response will be: "There are consequences."

It is a patriarchal culture in extremis. AWARENESS is, too, a game of words.

It assumes that if everyone is AWARE, then...

Then what.

Change will come -- how.

I'm not buying it.

Awareness is not enough. It is a spinning of wheels. In fact, it is reinventing the wheel.

By settling for AWARENESS (I so remember the arguments over safe sex education) we delude ourselves that awareness is part of the construct of human behavior.

The evidence does not support this.

The issue is not awareness. Awareness changes those already aware.

Behavior is the issue.

Awareness is like trickle down. In theory, it would seem that it should work as an agent of change. This theory is as misguided as Freud ever was.

Pavlov was on to more truth than Freud.

What changes human behavior. Other human behavior. And the issue does not end there. The evolution of the brain is very clear. One layer on top of another because it gives us advantages over other species.

What changes an entire cultural power structure.

Accidents and mutations.

Not awareness.  

MARY:

I’m also reading Harold Bloom’s “The Global Brain,” which pulls in many more ideas than Freud, mostly biological and historical.  He gives a detailed and amusing answer to the question of evolution.  The sequence goes "pain > awareness > communication (story/image) > common cause > alternative structures > new contexts present new opportunities.  Then there is an upwelling that overturns the status quo.

What everyone has neglected has been shifts in the environment which are mostly what compel evolution.  The climate changes and everyone must adjust -- possibly by evolving physically and mostly by evolving behaviorally (memes).  Nature and nurture interact always.

The subtext of this conversation is AIDS, a virus from a sequestered jungle in Africa that is undetectable for a long time, but ineradicable without huge changes in both nature and nurture, physical state and behavior.  So far we’ve made too little medical progress -- people can go on with life but only at great expense -- and behavior is deeply resistant even though countries and families are gutted.

TIM:

Who has AIDS.

He’s not gay and white and upper-middle-class.

He’s black and he’s incarcerated. He was already vulnerable. So were Africans with no health care because colonialism still lingers.

I think I got what I came seeking.

Am still seeking and getting what I seek. It is no longer awareness. No one in a million years of evolution can explain to anyone what I am aware of. It doesn’t mean anything.

What I do does. It’s behavior that counts.

If I tell the boys I work with that I love them, they will call me on it. It’s what they do.

It doesn’t matter what I say. They will hold my feet to the fire. It’s about what I do and what I do NOT do.

How is this advantageous for me. Easy.

It’s not that I sexually desire them or even that they keep me young. No one and nothing can do that. Nature or nurture.

Nature.

MARY:

Meaning homosexuality or at least atypical behavior that puts them at risk in a culture that does not want anyone to be atypical, because typicality is the basis of commodification.  Of course, gay, white, middle-class is a good “type” for sales but black, incarcerated, infected is not -- except to the degree that their involuntariness is a route to commodifying them: prisons and monitoring are major businesses.  Standards are low and no one minds the suffering of inmates except their relatives.  Until the day the incarcerated are released and carry AIDS, hepatitis C, tuberculosis and paranoid aggression into the community.  This could be addressed by awareness.

TIM:

Gestalt therapy focuses more on process (what is happening) than content (what is being discussed). The emphasis is on what is being done, thought and felt at the moment rather than on what was, might be, could be, or should be.

I was so glad to see that they actually used the word: awareness.

It doesn't work as awareness is hocus pocus.

If we were ALL just AWARE...

Right.

There are short term gains when I use this stuff but it all has to do with the individual getting some attention.

It's like addiction -- people lapse. It is a constant stream of what is advantageous to the individual. Here and now. I am most amused to see a lot of writing on the human brain that speaks of evolution as something that was a dynamic ten thousand years ago. Phooey. A hundred thousand years ago, we had the brains we have now.

What we were aware of was what was advantageous for us to be aware of.

When it comes to ideas, it was Darwin who actually had one. The rest of it is entertainment.

MARY:

We have created an AIDS sub-culture.  To cure the virus we must change that culture.  Men in white coats can’t do that.  People who write novels can.

BY THEIR CLOTHES YOU SHALL KNOW THEM

Once I saw a cape made of hummingbird skins.  I couldn’t touch it or turn it over because it was in a glass case but it had to have taken skill, patience and inspiration.  Beautiful as hummingbirds are, they are only the size of teaspoon scoops.  Might not peacocks or even China rooster pheasantss have been more practical?

Before I became a minister, I dreamt I was in Boston walking down Beacon street in a black velvet robe with stars somehow attached.  It was a Harry Potter sort of image, mixing ministerial preaching robes with wizard’s robes.  In the dream the black velvet went in and out of being night sky.  I told this to my mentor-minister, thinking he would be pleased but he looked grave and said,  “Be very careful.”  I’m not sure exactly what he meant.  That I was getting too full of myself?  That I was mixing magic with a scholar’s entitlement, the wizard’s robe with the academic gown?  That it was too much about the glamour of it all?  

His own Geneva gown was from Harvard, where the academic gowns are red.  It had black chevrons on the sleeves to indicate a doctoral degree.  Every intern minister craved to wear that robe instead of the standard black.  When I did my own internship I often wore my supervisor’s ancient black silk robe, half-rotted, and much heavier than one would guess because the inside of a good one is built like the inside of a bespoke suit: that is, it is meant to make the man inside look good with padding and lining and strategic little tucks. Beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there is also a vocabulary of collars, bands, ruffs, stocks, dickies and so on that evolved from ordinary men’s shirts with various collars, starched to stand up, turned down flat, with points or not, or maybe just the band or maybe a plastic collar with a fastening in the back, maybe strings with tassels or little crocheted balls.  

Most of this is related to the tensions and symbolisms between Catholic and Protestant with the Anglican tradition ambiguous about whether they should lean more to Catholic roots or more to Protestant modernity.  The reversed collar might have a little black tab like the gap in the front of a cassock.  Certain social activist ministers in the American Sixties put reverse collars on blue chambray workshirts to show their allegiance.  An early female minister trying to get access to a parishioner in ICU was turned away by sexist nurses until she went home, found a blouse with a high collar, picked the embroidery out of it, and wore it back to the hospital where the symbolism of it overcame gender and got her in.  Nowadays jolly Protestant ministers and chaplains can find clerical shirts with the familiar collar attached to nice wash-and-wear shirts in bright colors.

When I was actually ready to preach, the question of exactly what robe I would wear seemed crucial.  I had already bought a traditional stole green with wheat (for bread) on one side and grapes (for wine) on the other.  But I was unconscious of the symbolism (I got the communion part -- I missed the green which refers to the season of the year).  It did get through to me that by theologically stepping away from Christianity, I was also leaving their vestments.  But I had no access to hundreds of hummingbirds and would have been attacked by the Audubon Society if I had used them.

At some point I needed a banner for the Big Sky Unitarian Universalist Ministry, which was my first post.  Delving into my rag bag, I found blue taffeta for sky (I like the way the moire pattern shimmered) and tan corduroy for a prairie horizon.  The point of the banner was to be a kind of flag to signify that we were meeting in this place.  Bouncing off that, I bought nine yards more of blue taffeta and made my robe out of it.  (I was not conscious that the Yale academic gown is pale blue.)  A high collar band, puffed sleeves ending in a cuff and a band going across the bodice and over the sleeves to keep it from being too plain.  That’s what you see on my backyard clothesline above, airing out on a summer afternoon, dancing its own life.  No lining.  No shoulder pads.  No pockets (maybe a mistake).  Much cooler than the traditional robes.  

Many Unitarian Universalist ministers go ethnic, wearing a white linen alb with roots so old and various that they can’t be clearly identified, and over that a stole or other decorative strip with symbols on it.  For a while it was popular for women in congregations to applique elaborate stoles for their ministers at ceremonial high points, like retirement or being called.  My ethnic element, which I don’t generally wear with the robe, is a dark blue dance shawl with deep silk fringe.  Where the moths nibbled it, I added embroidered iron-on butterflies.  Sometimes I’ve used it for a fancy wrap on summer dress-up evenings and on the singular occasions when I’ve participated in Pow-wows, I’ve worn it.

At some point I felt my blue gown wasn’t elaborate or expressive enough, so I added my own version of a liturgical stole.  It’s black velvet with a beaded “earth” on one side and a beaded “moon” on the other, sprinkled with little crystal button “stars.”  My cosmological stole  I feel as though it needs something -- maybe more accuracy in the beading -- but children really like it and will stand in front of me counting the stars.

To some this is “play” and dumps out centuries of tradition.  To others it is “heresy” and mocks the clothing it imitates.  To some it’s just corny and to others it’s charming.  At least no birds were harmed.  And, like anything that is different but not TOOO much, it raises interesting questions.  What would "too much" be like?  Well, consider the drag queen priests in "Jesus Christ Superstar."