SCRIVER BRONZES BACK IN MONTANA

SCRIVER BRONZES IN FORT BENTON

These are the bronzes that were held in Edmonton at the Royal Alberta Museum.  The collection is so large that it requires a good deal of space and so valuable that it must be in a secured environment.  Neither the Montana Historical Society nor the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum had the space, though the latter borrowed the collection to exhibit with the Scriver Artifact Collection, which they bought before Bob’s death.  It includes much material from Canada, including an overview of Mountie uniforms through the ages.  The “Medicine Bundles” have gone back to the Blackfoot tribes in Alberta.  

I was in Fort Benton last summer to remind them about the biography of Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out” (available on Amazon or any other good bookstore), and was given a personal tour of the new Bourgeois House and the Starr Gallery, which was not quite finished at the time.  It’s a remarkable space with authentic fireplaces (which will be useful this weekend since we’re in the Montana Monsoon season) and more modern windows and security systems.  I particularly  enjoyed the recreation of a Trading Post and the greatly enlarged historical photos of people I knew in extreme old age.

If you attend this ceremony, you could also drop by the Lewis & Clark Expedition monument at the leveee as well as giving that famous dog a pat.  Both are the work of Bob Scriver.

From the Great Falls Tribune,  May 23, 2012

DEDICATION TO BE HELD SATURDAY

The Bourgeois House and the Starr Gallery of Western Art will be dedicated during a public ceremony in Fort Benton at 1 p.m. Saturday, May 26. Admission is free to the public, who also can visit all other Fort Benton museums and historic landmarks that day for free, all courtesy of the River and Plains Society, which oversees the fort's restoration.

Funding for the reconstruction of the Bourgeois House and the Starr Gallery was provided by the Montana Office of Tourism's Tourism Infrastructure Investment Program, Fay Todd and family and the Starr Foundation.

Fort Benton "saw more romance, tragedy and vigorous life than many a city a hundred times its size and ten times its age" wrote historian Hiram Chittenden in his 1903 book on the Missouri River steamboat era.

The fur trappers, Native Americans, river boats, buffalo hunters, gold miners and whiskey traders who made Fort Benton a center of commerce and culture in the Rocky Mountain West have long ago faded from living memory. But next Saturday, May 26, a new addition to the museum complex at old Fort Benton will be dedicated, faithfully restoring some of the sights and imagery of what was once the innermost port in the world.

The public is invited to attend opening ceremonies for the Bourgeois House, a historical re-creation of what served as the headquarters and living area for the American Fur Company's chief trader at the remote Montana Territory outpost.

"That's what the American Fur Company called the chief traders at all their forts — the Bourgeois," explained Sharalee Smith, director of the River and Plains Society Fort Restoration Committee.

Built from brick modeled on artifacts preserved from the original 1850s adobe fort, the Bourgeois House is the first structure to be added to the Old Fort's re-creation in 10 years.

"When we first started out back in 1995, we built the trade store and then the warehouse and the blacksmith's/carpenter's shop," said Smith.

The old fort also includes the original 1847 blockhouse, the oldest building in Montana still on its original foundation. According to Smith, the original two-story Bourgeois House was designed to impress upon its visitors the wealth and prestige of the American Fur Company.

"The far left of the building's ground floor was the Bourgeois' office," she said. "The remaining two-thirds of the ground floor was a huge room they called 'The Council Room.' When Indian chiefs and other important people would visit, that's where the American Fur Company officials would entertain them.

"Upstairs, going up the fancy porch, was the Bourgeois' living quarters. Then the other rooms going down the other two-thirds of the upper story were apartments for the clerks. The educated guys got to live in nice little apartments, each with their own doorway."

While the re-creations of the Bourgeois' office and living quarters are impressive in their own right, the Bourgeois House is far more than simply an interpretive center for a bygone fur trading post. Also on the main floor of the Bourgeois House is the new Starr Gallery of Western Art. The inaugural exhibition for this important addition to Montana's cultural legacy is called "The Land, The People, The Artists' Vision."

Headlining the new exhibit are 18 statues by Bob Scriver. Cast during a 20-year period beginning in 1959, the "No More Buffalo" series represents some of the Montana sculptor's most important work.

According to a 1998 interview with Scriver by the Los Angeles Times, in 1959 the chairman of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council asked Scriver to create 12 statues illustrating tribal culture. The challenge prompted him to fashion 53 statues in bronze, plaster or fiberglass depicting 1,200 years of Blackfeet history. The Provincial Museum for Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, stored the works for more than a decade, and they have rarely been displayed publicly.

"The whole collection was returned to the Montana State Historical Society last fall," explained Smith. "Some of these statues are huge and weigh well over 700 pounds."

Over the coming years, the Starr Gallery intends to rotate through the remaining pieces of the "No More Buffalo" collection, eventually displaying all 53 works in the series.

Also on display starting Saturday will be a collection of rare Karl Bodmer prints detailing Montana's scenery and Indian cultures of the 1830s, and an original portrait of Fort Benton's founder, Alexander Culbertson, likely painted in the 1870s by western artist John Mix Stanley.

"The Stanley portrait is the only original work by that famous western painter known to exist in Montana," said John G. Lepley, executive director and curator for the River and Plains Society. "And the prints from Swiss painter Bodmer's travels with Prince Maximilian to the interior of North America still stand today as the most accurate and detailed pictures of Native American life during that era."

AN ENCOUNTER WITH "OTHER"

Too often I sit drinking coffee while planning, then jump into the pickiup and rush off someplace without waiting for the excess liquid to need off-loading.  Yesterday I did this when I went for groceries in Conrad, so I stopped at the laundromat to use their facilities.  The bathroom was busy.  I waited.  

Out came a man I didn’t know, but a type I know very well -- an anachronism.  In the Sixties there were many like him.  A high quantum Blackfeet afflicted with alcoholism, poor nutrition, poverty, and a particular style.  When I say poor nutrition, I mean childhood malnutrition bad enough to stunt and twist growth and development.  He looked to be in his thirties but might have been a little younger.  Coming out to find me there frightened him.  Clearly he expected a rebuke, possibly even an attack -- not words, blows.  He flinched away from me, stuttered conciliation, appeasement, while moving towards the door.  I thought of Gollum in “Lord of the Rings.”  

The shorthand for him in Browning has become “street person,” though they are actually more “alley persons” in the shelter of the board fences at the backs of yards.  Faces burned and pocked, bodies reduced to almost bone except for the swollen middle that gives away a failing liver.  In the Sixties we often hired them at Scriver Studio for day labor but also a line of them appeared daily for Bob to try as the city magistrate.  Their crimes were mostly public drunkenness, rarely anything that would rise to the level of felony.  I was the de facto bailiff, though an officer brought them and stayed with them.  “Stand over there -- keep your hands in your pockets.”

Few of them had been students I had taught.  They would have done their best to escape any institution and therefore were often illiterate.  That’s why they didn’t get the nutrition supplements distributed through the schools.  You could say they were “feral” except that they weren’t really wild.  Except that they ran and hid if they could.  (They don’t actually run because they know that can trigger the impulse to shoot them.)  They had no family except each other, so they were what I call “interstitial.”  That is, they lived in the spaces between families and they interpreted that as freedom.

Some of my students were also afraid of random blows.  They would flinch away from me if I walked down the aisle between desks, even if I were not angry.  These guys (mostly guys) were not just interstitial: they were pariahs, like the notorious “py-dogs” of the Third World that lurk everywhere even in Hollywood movies of the Middle East wars.  Explosions, gunfire, tanks rumbling, and quickly a bony mutt crosses the road.  Hollywood removes the carcasses.  We don’t like carcasses.  In fact, the whole premise of pariahs is that they are to be despised, excluded, even killed with impunity -- not where anyone can see it, of course.

Why do I get interested in these characters?  Why don’t I think of them as a danger, if not violent then thieving?  Is it a missionary impulse?  Or is that when we were working together in the shop at some tedious messy stinky job, we visited and I learned a little bit about them.  They stopped being “other.”

The whole idea of the “Other” is big in philosophical circles: animals as other than human, other genders or nationalities, and so on.  Maybe attractively exotic, maybe terrifyingly alien.  Not many people want to think about “other” in terms of pariahs, but “otherness” is certainly the definition of pariahs, who are not just different because they are different but also because they are deliberately excluded from the category of “human,” the category of “salvageable,”  the category of “virtuous.”  “Deserving.”  They don't get much help.

As I left town, the man was sitting at the side of the road, hitchhiking back to the rez, I assume.  I have an absolute and ironclad rule NEVER to pick up hitchhikers -- male or female, prosperous or not, maybe not even people I know.  So I went on by, but it’s still bothering me.  He rose eagerly when he recognized my pickup, his thumb up high.  Then sank back when I went on.

One very hot day decades ago I was sitting in a restaurant in Spokane.  The doors to outside were open not far from my table.  “Pssst, psst!”  It was a ragged thin man.  “Can I have five bucks?  I’m starving!”  I made him come in, sit at the table and order a meal, over the objections of the management who knew the guy (which was oddly reassuring).  He wasn’t rum-dumb, just way out there in moneyless land.  He didn’t stink of alcohol.  His dirt was road-dirt.  He was interesting -- I forget the particulars.  He was white and literate.  A little money and he would not be a pariah.  This was not true of the man along the road.  He was marked by his own body.

When I was living in Browning, I kept a can of soup by the door so that when the py-people came begging for “food money” which I figured they would spend on booze, I would give the soup to them with a cheap can-opener.  Then I found out they were selling my soup cans (AND the opener) for booze money.  I couldn’t get them to come in and sit down to eat soup warmed up.  Their eyes showed white all around -- they figured I might trap them, beat them or rape them.  Maybe it had happened before.  I was so “other,” this English teacher, that they were afraid.  They had no idea what I might do.

When all humans lived in tribes and were in turf wars with each other, this sort of thing was natural, even inevitable, so it must have grown into us, even into our genes.  People who claimed territory and defended it were, after all, the ones who survived.  But now?  Part of the trouble is that if a person begins to hand out soup to pariahs, pretty soon there is a line of them.  Then what?

Or the py-people themselves become jealous and punish anyone among them who is getting an advantage.  Or the other people, the Alpha ones, criticize and maybe suggest that a person who would help such people is probably up to no good.  But the strongest reaction is people who are so afraid that they might slip down into that category, that they split within themselves between hatred and terror.  They keep guns.  They watch for the people with targets on their backs, the untouchables.

WHO'S CRAZY NOW?

Now that I’m reading so much revolutionary theory about how brains work, what light does it shed on one of my preoccupying issues:  insanity?  The Diagnostic Manual for psychologists and psychiatrists is being renegotiated, as it has to be every year as though it were the National Budget, which it is -- in a way -- since it determines what insurance companies and the social agencies of governments will pay for.  Not that anyone takes it seriously enough to distinguish among the crazy people in jails and the crazy people who are in protective custody and the crazy people on the streets.  Let alone the sociopaths in office.  It’s as much economic and political as it is personal or theoretical.  

Is addiction a disease?  Is autism the same as insanity?  Can craziness be inherited?  What about cross-gender identification/same sex desire, which was only a few centuries ago criminalized and only a few decades ago decriminalized ?  If we go to war, what obligation do we have towards the soldiers driven mad by combat?  Is the insanity induced by brain damage from boxing or football justified by the profit and “pleasure” of the games?  Is sociopathy, the lack of moral awareness, a form of insanity?  (I would say yes.  This is an organic problem  -- even locatable in the forebrain --  quite apart from those who can tell right from wrong, but want to do wrong.)

The single most potent message I get from the research of Damasio and Gazzinaga is that mental/emotional process (mind) cannot be separated from the body and the body of the individual cannot be separated from the society in which it lives.  The three are inextricably enmeshed and interacting.  So corollaries:  cultures drive their populations mad by exposing them to polluting substances that alter their brains; potentially crazy infants can be kept sane by careful treatment; cultures vary broadly in their tolerance for craziness or the abuses that cause it;  a person who seems insane in one setting might be simply adapted for survival in another.

My old animal control boss used to tell vivid stories from his days as a young cop in Martinez, CA.  Once he was riding with his training sergeant to patrol for trouble.  They stopped a guy on the street who was defiant and argumentative.  (This was in the days before hoodies and Skittles.)  “Arrest him!  We’re gonna take him in for observation for insanity.” ordered the sergeant.  Mike, fresh from class, objected, “But he isn’t crazy and he didn’t break any laws!”  

“Son,” said the sarge.  “Anyone who argues with me is crazy.  Cuff him. Or are YOU gonna argue?”  

In places and around persons who have low tolerance for opposition, usually because of bad results from things getting out of control, the line defining crazy gets moved.  For a lot of people who grew up in orderly and comfortable surroundings, this can come as a big surprise.  Suddenly motives, intentions and apologies mean nothing at all.  Violence explodes before it can be predicted.  But people trained to detect and suppress physical abuse are often blind to mental crime like swindles and profiteering.  There are ways to slip around invisibly.  Ask the money people.

The conviction that a body and a mind are separate is hard to overcome.  We punish bodies without realizing that under the impact of pain the brain changes, re-organizing its categories and re-wiring its neurons, especially in children.  Those who learn how to tolerate, resist, and even welcome the pain are better equipped to survive.  You know what that means.  Street gangs know.  Soldiers for hire know.  Would we have mercenaries if the socially sanctioned armies didn’t create people fit for nothing else?  It’s not a decision but a re-shaping.  This is what humans do best: re-shaping themselves to fit their environment and, if necessary, re-shaping the environment, even if it means perpetuating war, bombing whole landscapes into obliteration to create the ecology they know.

Bodies/minds operate by taking in sensory information and then producing behavior based on it.  There are two ways the sensory information travels through the body:  molecularly in the fluids of blood and lymph and through neurons, which operate like wiring.  The two modes convert back and forth: if one feels pleasure or affection from the sensation of stroking or from emotional eye contact, that changes the person’s internal chemistry and registers in the neuronal storage of the brain as memory and expectation.  Parents, teachers, and the media are constantly creating memory banks in the hard drives of the mind that make people what they are as individuals.  It’s not always easy.  It’s not always intentional.

There are two short cuts.  One is the direct administration of molecules into the blood stream -- through IV’s or oral ingestion or maybe absorption through the mucosa.  We can make people crazy and we can make people come back from “crazy” so long as we maintain  the “meds.”

The other is trying to convert the newfangled genomic data into some kind of prediction map in hopes of being able as a society to just snuff all the troublesome people before they get started.  Imagine a mom being told “your fetus will be aborted because we see he has the gene for murder.”  (I hasten to remind you there is NO gene for murder!  Murder is situational.)  Isn’t it a natural distinction in a world where we abort for signs of Down Syndrome?  Will every pregnant woman have to submit a blood sample for genomic analysis and be forced to have an abortion if it has the wrong heritage?  Or will we simply sterilize everyone with the wrong genes, as we have in the past?  Don’t people who know they are carrying something deadly and inheritable -- say, Lou Gehrig’s or cerebral palsy --  make sure they don’t have babies anyway?

Is it different to abort a baby because the personal or social conditions are not there to support a healthy and productive growth pattern?  Don’t we justify abortion now by social conditions like poverty or poor nutrition or ethnic conditions -- or in China and India possibly gender?  Inside out from that, don’t we refuse to adopt any child not perfect or at least appealing?  

Or is it more rational to let the pregnancy complete, the child to be neglected, until crime, drug abuse, and disease kill him or her in the streets.  What are the ultimate consequences of “farming” kids for slaves, sexual or not?  Is adopting unwanted Chinese girls to affluent American families a form of slavery?  When is commodifying not trafficking?

These are the kinds of dilemmas that sci-fi addresses by making the familiar strange enough to be seen in a more objective way.  Consider the Borg, those dreaded hive-mind half-robots who are always afflicting Captain Piccard, even taking his identity.  We’re already there -- we just don’t recognize it -- or we couldn’t conceive of them.  So far, most sci-fi deals with bodies more than minds, though there is a sub-category that goes back to the medieval setting in order to look at the assumptions of our culture, the earlier state of our lives.  Highly idealized, of course, and often seeming more like the Sixties and Seventies of the Twentieth Century than, say, 1360 or 1370, before the discovery of a continental “New World” changed everything.  

Aren’t we in a virtual “new world” right now?  We can make a brain move a robotic arm at great cost, but can we create a culture that would protect children everywhere while making sure there are few enough of them to have room to grow?  We need an even newer world.

"SHE WHO WATCHES"

http://www.fishtrap.org/

When I first began to be serious about writing for publication, I attended Fishtrap Writers’ Conference in the Wallowa Chief Joseph country.  I thought it would be about my speed at that time (199?) and I was right.  It splits the difference between the sophisticated professional writer and the local writer who just does it for the love of doing it.  Not afraid to be local, not afraid to sit around the campfire and sing, not afraid of youth.

That’s where I met Willa Holmes, who was a little bit ahead of me, a little bit older.  (Ten years.)  Her first book, “She Who Watches,” was published by Binford & Morts.  This story is a classic referring to a petroglyph of a face that might suggest an owl or some say scary enough to be death or others claim is Bigfoot.  (They see Bigfoot everywhere.)  The official legend is about a female chief whose village was down below the petroglyph and when she died, she took this shape in order to watch over them.  The pessimists, as Ed Edmo says, suggest she watched the diseases come from the white people and wipe out everyone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gUHVlLLNho

This is Ed Edmo, a favorite Indian storyteller in Portland, telling the legend.  He and his family used to attend Rose City UU Church -- maybe still do.

Willa’s book cleverly evolves from a conversation between Tsagaglalal, who is a chief and an abiding figure, a “Stays Put Woman,” and Coyote, who is always “going along” because he is a Trickster figure and must keep going to escape from trouble.  (He gets into trouble anyway.)  The two figures could be seen as adversaries because they are so different, but in truth they are complementary or perhaps even two sides of the same coin.

People are always wanting powerful Indian old people to be shamans.  Maybe Tsagaglalal and Coyote are shamans and maybe they are not.  Technically they are not because a shaman goes over to the Land of Death and then returns.  Tsagaglalal never leaves her people and Coyote, though he constantly has narrow escapes, is never quite dead.

I got to thinking about Willa, the author, and Googled, of course.  But she was only on Facebook and I don’t “do” Facebook so I just called her on the phone.  She’s fine, as stable and clear-headed as always, still following writing issues in the writer’s magazines, but not so eager to write another book.  “She Who Watches” sold 6500 copies and Binfort and Mort were talking about another printing, but then things just faded away,  Willa has written another book, “Sodbuster’s Boy,” but no publisher has been interested.  Self-publishing is a little much at this point.

There are so many worthy books out there, sort of in limbo, neither published or not published.  Amazon plays games with the prices,  Originally published at just under $15, today at 4:30 PM from this location (that’s how specific their algorithm for pricing is) the price for a new copy of “She Who Watches” ranges from $2.59 for a used copy to  $69.21 -- with many stops in between.  The high-end seller is Brookebooks in Georgia with 9417 ratings that average out to 4.8.  (5 is perfect.) One buyer was pretty angry.  Blind transactions are kinda “tricky.”  

The problem of the angry buyer was with the quality of the book rather than prices but they say that prices like $70 for a 37 page book, even with color illustrations, comes from computer generated algorithm pricing.  The amount is determined as much by the characteristics of the buyer as the book, so I must be listed somewhere as a rich buyer of Indian books.  Prices are different for different regions, different times of the day, or whatever some Amazon manager stipulates as the percentage of the day.

Both Willa and I see clearly that there are two problems with ebooks:  “curation,” meaning evaluations by an experienced reviewer, and “distribution” meaning how on earth does a person know what’s out there?  How does a writer find the readers who would welcome, even celebrate, this book?  If you figure that one out, you will make a lot of money.  Forget stars and thumbs.  Amazon and Google are as close as anyone has gotten so far, though everyone talks on and on about “word of mouth.”  

But I don’t think that Willa, for all her reading “Writer’s Digest” and other paper mags, has run across the electronic practice of pricing by formula.  She IS boiling mad about the fight over who sets the prices at all, the publisher or Amazon.  It IS maddening that they keep experimenting so much: special deals for Walmart, different policies for ebooks that wander all over the possibilities, including ebooks for libraries.  There are electronic restrictions to a certain reading machine (Willa uses Kindle because her eyes demand big print now) or legal deals no one knows about until the print simply disappears.  They don’t seem to know that unreliability is bad for sales.

Binford and Mort were once the biggest publishers in the PNW and a service to the region since they specialized in history of the area.  I tried to google it, but they have no website and I could only find reference to a printing company which is no longer at the old printing plant.

Willa was savvy about the political situation when a white woman writes about tribal people and headed that off by consulting elders and hiring a Native American illustrator.  Both strategies were well-advised and effective, even enriched the final product.  The ethnic wars have died down a bit now, partly because the youngsters are busy trying to get jobs, the universities are quietly closing out all their ethnic studies programs, and -- now that “brown” people are just barely in the majority of the population -- they are less rare and exotic.

So much a writer deals with is NOT about writing.  But Willa says she took the writing classes offered at Fishtrap, benefitted greatly from them, and found the whole experience worthwhile, including the friendship networks.  She had not expected a sudden phone call out of the blue and was glad to know I still valued “She Who Watches.”  We’re both watching with our old eyes.  We’ve seen things like this before.  It will settle.  Maybe not in our lifetime. 

SUMMER SNOW IS FLYING

I’m thinking about changing my name from Prairie Mary to Cottonwood Mary.  I love these botanical names.  There’s another female Montana blogger out there who calls herself “Crabgrass Sally.”  I love it.  And I AM crabby.   In terms of family history, my grandfather on the Manitoba prairie sold quackgrass uprooting equipment, horsedrawn.  So maybe Quackgrass Mary.   There’s already a Joe Cottonwood, who lives in California and writes books.  (www.joecottonwood.com)   He’s a Unitarian!  Am I surprised?  

I am surprised there is no incorporated town called “Cottonwood” in Montana, though there is a “populated place” with that name in Fergus County.  It must be along the Missouri, since cottonwoods grow along rivers.  It’s a “popular” name for the poplar trees that send all that summer snow into the air in spring.  The one in my yard is a “silverleaf cottonwood” which is not native to Montana.  It’s only a cousin in a big family of trees here.

“Populus alba, commonly called abele, silver poplar, silverleaf poplar, or white poplar, is a species of poplar, most closely related to the aspens (Populus sect. Populus). It is native from Spain and Morocco through central Europe (north to Germany and Poland) to central Asia. It grows in moist sites, often by watersides, in regions with hot summers and cold to mild winters.”  It is considered a weed and is banned in Connecticut.  (I think I am, too.  Both.)  But Montana is such a tough environment that weed characteristics are often what it takes to survive here.

The newspapers in the Mid-West were advertising silver leaf poplar starts in the 1880’s, so the sellers no doubt were glad to move into the new town of Valier, incorporated in 1909, where trees meant bearable summers.  Now, of course, air conditioners have replaced trees and the cottonwood fuzz is a nuisance plugging up their intake grilles.  The graceful trees extend limbs way out to the sides -- obviously they didn’t evolve in windy places -- and drop the smaller growth down low so that they form a shelter inside.  They release bits of cotton that float in patterns something like those flown by fireflies back east.  

My tree is in the lee of the house, but even so one major high branch was bent back and forth enough for it to buckle.  It didn’t break off, but hung wilted through the winter -- then the next spring it came back to life and began to grow again.  The old man who used to mow the empty lot hated those low-hanging branches because as he drove his little tractor around they hit him in the face or even broke off and wreathed his shoulders.  The tree is right on the property line.  Aggravated, he whipped out his pocket knife and cut off all the low branches, leaving them in a pile on my side.  Enraged, I stormed out to read him the riot act.  This town divides into two groups: those who practically worship trees (me) and those who hate trees (him).  

Part of the reason I’m so protective of this tree is that I watch it so closely, a practice that will almost always produce attachment.  In winter it is full of downy woodpeckers.  Right now it is full of finches, some with rosy heads, others with yellow.  They are taking advantage of the sexy (literally) little pollen danglers that the tassels on belly dancers are no doubt meant to imitate.  There are an unusual number of them this year.  Research suggests that -- dismayingly -- this may be the result of the tree being stressed and making a last ditch effort to guarantee the existence of its tribe.  Diseased fruit trees are known to do that.  And societies -- orgies before death.

There’s no question the tree is stressed since I haven’t been watering it as much as I ought to.  The Baptists haven’t watered the empty lot for years.  Water is metered in Valier now.  I don’t care what color lawns are, but I would hate to lose my tree.  Silver cottonwoods have a tendency to rot from the middle.  One friend tells me he dreads to cut one down in the conventional way from the bottom because they can explode, sending wooden shrapnel into the woodcutter.  Guys with bucket trucks circulate through the small towns every spring, lopping off the winter’s dead branches from above.

In 1961 when I first drove through Choteau, its streets were shaded by huge ancient cottonwoods -- all gone now.  The pioneers were there early and so their material culture, vulnerable to time, ended early.  When the ecologists realized that the cottonwoods along the rivers, the venerable groves that had sheltered generations of wintering Blackfeet, were disappearing they figured out that it was the spring flood pulses that had been replacing the trees by washing seeds and new starts along to new places.  Since then controlled surges have “repoplarized” flood plains.

“A catkin, or ament, is a strand of tiny unisexual flowers, blooming on many species of trees in a form that brings to mind the graceful trees on a blue willow plate.”  (Wikipedia)  That’s interesting since I grew up eating off Blue Willow plates, believing those hanging clusters were wisteria blooms!

And here’s a REALLY funny reference entry, considering the struggle to try to make Wikipedia stop slandering people.  Why is there no warning on their entries?  This one below is protected by all the special terms only botanists know.

Warning! The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Ament 

(also catkin), in plants, a spicate, most often drooping inflorescence consisting of a large number of usually unisexual flowers that falls off after flowering (staminate aments) or after ripening of the fruits (pistillate aments). Not all aments are alike. For example, the pistillate aments of birch do not droop, and after fruit-bearing the axis of the ament remains on the plant. In alders, the ament does not fall off after fruit ripening. The inflorescences of willow, poplar, birch, alder, filbert, oak, chestnut, walnut, and many other plants are called aments. However, it is more correct to call the inflorescences of willow and poplar simple spikes, and the aments of birch a spike of dichasia.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.

Every object everywhere is wrapped in metaphor, opinion. politics and practices.  Strewn along our lives as though carried by river pulses, they implant in our muddy stream beds.  But sometimes the little finches in the silver cottonwood are just that and the drifting summer snow of the tree is a peaceful meditation -- no more.

WHY WON'T THEY COME IN OUT OF THE RAIN?

Why won’t they come in out of the rain?  We have people living on the street, in the woods, in the cracks and crannies of abandoned buildings never meant to be inhabited.  Some of them will NOT come into the shelters prepared for them with cost and effort.  This is particularly true of some religious projects.  Whether or not missionary do-gooders are predatory and will “capture” people when they are weak and needy, they are perceived that way.  Some will bow their heads and pretend to listen to a sermon -- others will not.

Out West we know about “Stay Away, Joe” who lived in a wrecked car on Hill 57 and Steve Solovich who lived in the Oregon woods and a host of people who have built hooches in Forest Park, a strip of comparative wilderness inside the boundaries of Portland, OR.  One winter an old bag lady lived in the public women’s restroom of the Portlandia building.  Another old woman lived in a condemned house with 65 chihuahua-mix dogs.  All of them could have accepted public shelter and, in fact, I did force that dog lady into a “safe house” which she hated because she said the others there were stupid and crazy.  But once she was pushed back into polite society, she did pretty well.  I’ve always wondered how well her “social worker” did, since that young man let her slip into a major mess, pleading an excessive work load.

In the animal control years of the Seventies I spent a lot of time talking to homeless kids, who almost always had a dog with them.  Over time they grudgingly put strings on them so they were “leashed,” but the truth is there wasn’t much trouble with the dogs who stayed right with their human partners and did whatever the kids did, which wasn’t much.  Sleep, talk, play the guitar.  They did their food searches at hours when I wasn’t there -- obviously.  They had NO intention of going into shelters.  What they wanted most of all was to be together, but on their own terms.

They said that once adults got hold of them, they would be back where they were in their families, reduced to pawns, confined, belittled, and victims of force.  This was in the Seventies, a far more innocent time than today.  There was sexwork and VD, but no HIV.  There was violence but no tasers.  There were drugs, but mostly low-potency pot.  A little heroin -- no meth.  The kids from rich families were sometimes stumped about what to do -- they could mostly go home if they wanted to -- but the kids from poor or abusive families said they were better off on the street.  Portland has a mild climate -- if you don’t mind rusting.  Montana is different.  2012 is different.  The culture is different.  Even the Mexicans are going home in spite of drug cartel mass murders.

But still the kids want to stay in the street.  Now many are likely to have lung problems (including drug-resistant TB), systemic problems (Hep C and HIV), skin problems and brain function problems.  Being gay is not a brain function problem or systemic problem, it is a family system function problem:  families still throw out male gays.  Not lesbians because they don’t really believe that girls can be gay.  They’re just considered stubborn.  But male gays “shame” the family and won’t be able to earn a living and won’t produce grandchildren -- so why be nice to them?  These parents cover their failure to love their children by claiming the Bible says gays are filth.  (They do not speak Aramaic, Greek or Hebrew so they don’t really know what the Bible says.  They’re pretty sure the translators of the Bible know, even if some of them were Elizabethan.  The rabid radio guys tell them.)

What if the skies parted and God personally spoke to them in Elizabethan English, saying,  “What you do to the least, you do also to me.  Nothing in the human world is foreign to me.  Take care of one another.”  They’d just find another excuse besides whatever might be the desire attachments of their kids.  It’s a plain raw case of not wanting the kid unless they can control him for their own ends.

This is the problem with religious charities who will accept gay kids because they are invested in the belief that they, rather than God, know what is best and that homosexuality is a kind of evil disease that they can figure out how to cure, thereby expanding their flock.  No biologist has convinced them that studies show that a percentage of male sheep (like all mammals) are naturally inclined to “ram” other male sheep.  This puzzled evolutioners at first -- why wouldn’t this preference die out?  But it appears that those “gay” rams contribute to the whole flock by adding to the group’s “armament.”  They horn in on coyotes.  Gay is not a lifestyle.  Gay does not mean narcissism.  Gays contribute.  It is the group that ultimately survives IF the group protects its individuals.

In the Fifties and Sixties closeted adult gays were major contributors to the lives of the whole society.  Over the years many of them have quietly come out.  Soldiers, teachers, artists, politicians, sometimes in “het” marriages and sometimes not, sometimes with children and sometimes not, they were often clean cut, honorable, and protective of outliers.  I am not lesbian but I’m definitely an outlier, not in any flamboyant way, but stubbornly, which is why I stay interested in oddball kids who won’t go in out of the rain.

What sort of shelter would outliers accept?  I think it can be minimal.  Even old couches in an abandoned warehouse would do -- though there would be no profit for middlemen building “perfect” places.  Providers have got to do more listening than explaining.  If providers listen carefully and digest what they learn, that can be significant for all of us.  I think the demonized drugs can be crowded out by good nutrition, enough sleep, safety, and proper medical care.  Call me naive -- it’s better than cynical self-fulfilling prophesy.  I don’t know about funding, where it should come from and who should account for how its spent, but I do know that eventually it will feed back into the larger economy in terms of people who are able to guide their own lives and motivated to contribute their talents.  The public schools, even at university level, can’t really claim that they always manage that.

Atypical kids are goats among the sheep.  One manages goats by going ahead with the flute or whistle -- then they follow.  In fact, sometimes they get to work to organize themselves.  The grownups can be stuck, squalling like babies, a role reversal of the generations.  Adolescence, full of courage and energy, is short.  Hurry up, please.  It’s time.  People are getting soaked.

BLACKBIRD HAS SPOKEN

When I wash the dishes, the window over the sink looks out at an empty lot owned by the Baptist Church next door.  My big cottonwood tree is on that side and the bird traffic level is high, partly because I keep a summer bowl of fresh water out there.  Yesterday I was noticing a big black bird, not quite so big as a crow, marching back and forth in the grass.  There was something it was looking at.

The bird would stop and gently peck whatever it was, then stand with its beak open but no sound coming out, then walk around it.  Looking closer, it appeared to be a prone black shape the same size as the live bird.  When the dishes were done, I went out to look and found that it was a dead bird, just like the live one.  I would guess they were a nesting pair.  There was nothing to indicate how the dead bird died.  It’s feet were clenched, its feathers slightly askew, its beak closed, its eye a little gray knot.  It was under the tree but I haven’t seen any cats in that tree since my own got too old and fat to climb.  Rigor mortis had set in, there were no leg bands -- I brought it in the house to the trash.  When I looked again the live bird was gone, but not from my thoughts.

Since I’ve been reading all this brain theory, specifically the work of Damasio who deals so much with feelings and emotion, the birds prompted ideas about what was going on.  Why didn’t the live bird simply leave?  Did it think its dead partner was asleep, and was trying to wake it up?  Or was it grieving, reluctant to abandon the body.  Or was it mindlessly obeying instinct to stick with a mate with no instructions about “dead or alive”?  If Damasio is right about brains working on all the levels they have in their skulls, involving all the parts evolved since the spine developed a knob at the top, love might be interpreted in the following way.  (This is NOT in Damasio.  I’m making it up.)

First, attachment located in the brainstem.  This would be necessary for survival because it would keep babies in the nest and parents coming back with food.  After that it would keep the babies following their mother, like “Make Way for Ducklings.”  Most of us know that birds just hatched will attach to whatever moving source of comfort is nearby, so that Konrad Lorenz was able to get them to follow him, Bob Scriver could find a Canada goose egg about this time of year and hatch it in his shirt front so it became his buddy for the summer (illegal); and a ranch woman once told me about her black lab who would hijack broods of ducklings and bring them home, inviting them into his dog bed where they tucked themselves close to his belly.  

There is a whole body of research about “attachment” in humans based on the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth.  “Ainsworth described three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment and avoidant-insecure attachment. Later, researchers Main and Solomon  added a fourth attachment style called disorganized-insecure attachment.”  (from “Psychology, about” on the Internet)  These styles seem to unfold through the interaction of the genome with the environment over the first year and a half.  There’s no doubt this poor bird was attached but it didn’t have the time or the brain parts to unfold a unique individual style, as a person would over a childhood and then, if the psych folks are right, integrate it into their lives as reproductive adults.  This is the basis of relating between humans “in love” and parents-and-children in families, clearly a foundational kind of love.  But no one knows whether birds on their nests “love” their eggs.

The next step up, which would be unavailable to the bird -- maybe -- is the ability to wrap the “other” in sensory metaphorical content until it becomes an “object” that can be remembered as though it were there.  People express distress when they are away from their loved one if the “object” that represents that other person begins to fade.  This psychological school of thought is called “object relations.”  It speaks of “transitional objects” like a child’s teddybear or a soldier’s letters from home as ways of staying connected to the object of their dearest attachment.  The bird doesn’t keep “transitional objects,” a little photo of its mate in a locket.  It has no reason to remember this mate since the next one will be much the same.  It is still only May, so the living blackbird will likely soon find another partner.

Mammals, especially domesticated animals, DO attach.  Since YouTube began to submit evidence of animal behavior everywhere, we’ve realized that this imprinting can get a little wonky, like the lionness that kept adopting antelope babies.  Dogs attach to humans.  Cats attach to -- um -- their favorite sleeping spot.  They might change their behavior under new circumstances.  A bird does not evolve different patterns of behavior towards its mate according to pressures and realizations brought about in the environment.  

About ten per cent of mammals develop a desire to attach to the same sex, but I don’t know of any studies of gay birds.  Even the most pair-driven birds seem to occasionally have a little side action, so attachment must not be absolute.  We don’t have any way of knowing how much enjoyment is involved in bird-pairing, but we know that mammals love the physical act of union, either for the sensory input or for the feeling of domination or both.  Humans often see bird pairs as a metaphor for human fidelity and even I, resistant to anthropomorphisms, feel sorry for this bird in the grass, imagining  it is at least puzzled and possibly mourning.

Human mammals respond to all sorts of ideas and suggestions, whatever ideas are going around.  These abilities and creations -- courtly love or a mother complex -- are mostly the products of later evolved brain parts, though probably not the cerebrum which is more available to the consciousness than what we might call “syndromes.”  If the notions cause trouble, the point of psychoanalysis is to get them up to the cerebrum for conscious consideration.

Love, after the first attachment, proceeds through memorizing of appearance, developing interaction patterns, and collecting of memories, all of them sensory and some specifically sexual.  If this goes far enough and is mutual, the pair enters into a state of fusion, each seeing the other as an extension of themselves.  Even other mammals capable of strong attachment don’t do this.  Maybe dogs and primates have the mirror cells that give us empathy so that when the other being does something, our own brain shows we’re doing it, too, in our imaginations.  But it takes a lot of verbal communication to really share experienced metaphors and meanings in the world: an unfolding over a period of time, maybe a lifetime.  Fortunately, this process is a delight.  It involves all the other levels of brain activity, regardless of hormone states including those relating to gender.  

Some would propose that in sharing another person’s inner life, we come to welcome knowledge of all people and the world itself, a fusion into transcendence that emerges from shared previous experience that allows us to expand consciousness into something we might call cosmic.  It’s a theory.  As far as it goes, I thank these two little birds in the grass for prompting these thoughts.

FICTIONS ARE THE BEST MEMOIRS

The most interesting memoirs are the ones that are fiction.  Like Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables,” which is almost transparently her own story when you know what really happened to her, except that it’s an idealized story.  In real life Lucy Maud had a long struggle with a deeply depressed Presbyterian minister husband and hated “being” Anne Shirley.  In the end she committed suicide, a fact withheld for a long time.  But if you just read her letters, strewn through time, the impact and meaning of it all is really contained in the “little” story of Anne.  Something similar is true of Louisa May Alcott.  

I wonder whether this isn’t true of men as well.  Isn’t “Two Little Savages” more revealing of Ernest Thompson Seton than his own real life?  Don’t you find out more about James Willard Schultz by reading his wild adventure stories about Blackfeet than by listening to the “facts” about him in the Browning “oral tradition”?  It’s an interesting question.

Even more interesting is the lengths people go to in order to find out what was “real.”  The woman who wrote “Fifty Shades of Grey” gets asked,  “Did that happen to you?” even though the story is about the sort of thing everyone agrees should be private.  “Fifty Shades of Grey” is labeled soft porn (which the hard porn people say shows the author is an amateur), so the mischievous ladies on “The Visit” tried to get Obama to render an opinion on the book.  He resourcefully claimed not to know anything about it and promised to ask his wife what she thought.  

Of course, his old girl friends had just sold a big story to “Vanity Fair” about what he was really like in his youth.  (Stuffy and earnest.  He hasn’t changed that much.)  And an actual trial at law is proceeding about John Edwards and what he really knew and when he really knew it and just where was he when he got his “loose cannon” mistress pregnant and . . . oh, we can’t ask that, can we?  There are rules.  But if he writes a novel, as so many of these guys do, we’ll know what he THINKS he was doing.

It’s a bit of a mystery why suddenly readers have major concerns about the “truth” of their lives.  No one ever tells the truth  -- simply because people don’t really KNOW the truth about their own lives or even the lives of their families.  When my female cousins and I found out -- long after her death -- that our grandmother’s first baby, premature, had died out there on the South Dakota prairie in her little homesteader tar-paper shack, it explained a great deal.  Knowing that he was named for our grandfather’s father explained even more.  There’s a lot more we don’t know: where that baby was buried, whether he was christened (could probably find that out), and whether he had red hair.  We do know that for the next baby, my father, she went to stay in town for the last month.  He was named Bruce, for the warrior who kept trying and trying.  If you’re a Scot, you’ll know the story and you’ll have hold of more of the truth.

Deconstruction, post-modernism, and all that has been the fashion for quite a while now, giving us a legacy of suspicion and inversions of what we hear.  It has become a weapon, once used against overweening authorities and too-knowing Viennese analysts, but now it is used against anyone who tells a story we don’t like.  As opposed to unreliable advertisers who are supposed to be believed in spite of Consumer’s Research and all those stars and thumbs, English teachers used to tell us unreliable narrators are often revealing.  Their failure to explain how to see through them has laid us wide open, gullible in our belief that we can ever know the truth, demanding evidence as though life were a murder mystery that could be resolved in an hour and a half.  

All those brilliant liberal arts majors who read “Three Cups of Tea” didn’t realize it was written in the same colorful rhetoric as Tim Cahill’s “A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg.” Cahill was a founder of “Outside” magazine, which has close ties with mountain climbers, forcing them to choose between Krakauer and Mortenson.  Perhaps readers didn’t realize that someone else wrote “Three Cups” and forgot to put “as told to” on the cover.  But please, they go to court to get the $15 for the book refunded because the facts were wobbly?  These self-righteous “liberal” people spend that much on coffee in a day.  Someone who knew them confided to me,  “They just don’t like Mortenson’s attitude.”  In other words, he snubs them.  I would, too.

When I wrote my “biographical memoir” of Bob Scriver, someone at the Montana Historical Society wanted to know how I knew such-and-such happened.  “I was standing there,” I explained.  “I was his wife.”  Another time someone else remarked,  “I didn’t expect so much of it to be about you.”  But I was STANDING THERE, I slept beside the man, we poured bronze together, we rode horses at dawn together, we . . .  use your imagination.  An old lady asked me bluntly,  “Was he really that good -- in the husband way?”  What could I say?  I just sighed.  Vigorous and resourceful as he was, the romantic exploits that have been told to me since the book was published would fill another book.

And bad things.  They especially like to tell me bad things, I guess to prove that they know more than I do.  Most of what they tell me isn’t true and I know it.  I was standing right there, sometimes right beside the guy telling me something he doesn’t think I know.  They forget entirely that I love the man.

So much of this “truth” stuff is about sex, as though people fake books the same way women fake orgasms.  I think it is because these days everyone is really quite flummoxed by the protocol of sex and they’re all watching each other out of the corners of their eyes to see what the neighbors do.  What can they get away with?  We hear flat assertions like Mitt Romney’s declaration that God and the Christian Founding Fathers believed that marriage is between one man and one woman, totally blanking out Thomas Jefferson who didn’t believe in miracles and owned the mother of his second family.  Also skipping over the Romney paternal ancestors who, like many Biblical figures, had multiple wives.

But why isn’t the reaction simply laughter?  Maybe a sigh.  I just stand here.

SNIPS AND SNAILS AND PUPPY DOG TAILS

It’s well known that boys like disgusting things, like the titular short list above.  Even little fellows seem willing to come into contact with all sorts of slime, pus, spit, scabs, stink, filth and muck, in spite of the scientific assertion that “disgust” is an emotion wired into brains.  These researchers even know where disgust is triggered:  the front part of the insula which is related to taste and smell.  It’s an “old” part of the brain from the animal level.  No doubt it’s somehow overridden by boy hormones because the need to explore, to impress others, and to do icky things is part of their assigned life role.  At least before we all got so civilized.

I only know where the control point in the brain is because of reading this Antonio Damasio book, “Self Comes to Mind.”  P. 125:  “a trigger point to a most important emotion: disgust, as an automatic means of rejecting potentially toxic food and preventing it from entering the body.  Humans can be disgusted not just by seeing spoiled food and the foul smell and taste that accompany it but by a variety of situations in which the purity of objects or behavior is compromised and there is “contamination.”   Importantly, humans are also disgusted by the perception of morally reprehensible actions.  As a result, many of the actions in the human disgust program, including its typical facial expressions have been co-opted by a social emotion: contempt.  Contempt is often a metaphor for moral disgust. 

Girls are encouraged NOT to do disgusting things until they’re adults when sugar and spice become commodities.  In the adult socially assigned gender world, the ick factor is reversed.  Now the women are the ones who do icky stuff like artificial insemination of cows.  (If you’ve watched it, you’ll know that the person reaching up the vagina gets a shoulder-load of cow poop as the cow’s instinct works to expel the intruder.)  Women are encouraged to tolerate such things because of children (the boys’ appreciation of ick does not extend to diapers or baby puke) and housework, let alone their own excretions.  By that time the men want to be clean, with maybe the exception of sweat, which may have once been because of the need for a hunter to not broadcast his presence.  Although in a bar a man might want a distinctive scent, which he is likely to have purchased.  Filth is low class and signals bad jobs, foreignness and lack of sanitary access.  But men of all levels of cleanliness may harbor contempt for women, considering them receptacles like spittoons.

Contempt is not only a social emotion.  Contempt is a dynamic of hatred.  In a situation where rewards or even raw safety are involved, contempt can act in the moment, but more than that it is a cause of broad prejudice: stigma.  It justifies punishment that would not normally be tolerated by civilized people and even is the means of torture, as at Abu Ghraib where prisoners (for whom the big blonde soldiers had contempt already because the prisoners were a small dark enemy), were forced to do things the captives considered disgusting as a way of breaking their self-respect.  The soldiers had no contempt for their own behavior, but most of the rest of us did.  They were surprised.

Disgust probably evolved as a food guide, meant to preserve the health of early peoples, especially pregnant and nursing women, and to isolate the latrine spots, has greatly expanded and become confused now.  We eat cheese that reeks, we cut people open for surgery in spite of the blood and mess, we ask people to break their skin barrier with needles for the sake of delivering medicine and to carry stool samples to their doctors for analysis and to produce semen samples in a closet with “dirty” magazines.  We allow the long snakes of laparoscopes to be threaded down our throats and up our bowels.  In the process we break taboos originally meant to protect us.  But we have no disgust for many modern chemicals harmful to us and, in fact, can’t detect them without instruments.

Antibiotics, birth control pills, and viagra mock cautious behavior, while latex barriers and douching are objects of contempt.  Sex and disgust have parted company.  Even the banks have thrown caution to the winds in spite of outspoken contempt by most of us.  Is that because contempt for “filthy lucre” has eroded?  Doesn’t seem like it, though people still refer to huge amounts of money as “obscene,” even as we tolerate people who must resort to dumpster diving and living on rubbish dumps as a means of survival. 

Is this where the defiance of cultural obscenity comes from?  Or is it advertising that has taken us so far into the realms of body odor and bathroom/bedroom behavior that now we rebel?   No “tough” movie is complete without showing people peeing, though normally we just see the stream and hear the zipper or the flush.  Whenever the plot gets stuck, the frat boy jokes begin, and it is considered very funny to kick a man in the genitals and watch him suffer.  The exception is a Chinese film in which the victim’s wife tenaciously pursues justice because she recognizes her husband’s testicles as what they are: the source of her future children.

Our disgust for bodies that don’t conform to the Hugh Hefner standard of appearance and behavior justifies all sorts of derision and exclusion.  Sadly, this is most effective in the case of immigrants or minorities or youngsters because of their yearning to be acceptable.

We are not approaching the catastrophe of overpopulation, we are already plunged into it.  In spite of guns, drugs, traffic, and subtle but lethal internal destruction by environmental contamination and political revolution.  We do not stop producing too many children.  We simply produce more who are defective and refuse to raise them in a way that lets them survive whole.

The evolution of the species proceeds at two levels, one being the individual and the other being the cultural group.  In the past in order to save the cultural group from what it considers to be disgusting or contemptuous, diseased or deviant, it has destroyed individuals.  We are doing it now, withholding education or medical care, making shelter unaffordable, allowing the contamination of food, and building structures that endanger whole communities but benefit corporations.

What does this have to do with snips and snails?  It is the boys who suffer and die first.  Even after they become men.  We expect them to save us at their expense.  Even their deaths.  Sometimes they do.  The body bags are pretty icky.