FAMILY BRANCHES

My parents, farm people at the beginning of the twentieth century, were not just the first-born.  They were smart achievers so, as the eldest, they soon were handed the duty of becoming high status people who -- because they were “gifted” -- were supposed to reflect well on the family and protect lesser members.  In spite of being female, I inherited this role.  I was eldest.  I had two brothers, one of whom was temperamentally averse to this role, and the other who was pretty much a free-wheeling youngest.  The older brother, who left at seventeen by joining the Marines, was still somehow obligated to be the manager of whatever riches might accrue to us, though they accumulated modestly in my mother’s school-teacher’s estate.  My father, after a good start, took a long slow glide into helplessness by the time of his death in his early sixties.  My mother was vigorous to 89.  The free-wheeling brother, victim of a closed-skull brain trauma, followed my father’s path.

Through to maturity, I followed the script, getting good grades, scoring high on the National Merit and Honor Society tests, shining in plays and so on.  But the ties to family frayed in college and broke at graduation.  My mother was bitter -- she (and a scholarship) had paid my way through on the expectation that I would contribute to the family.   By that time I had become convinced by my family that I was somehow faulty -- emotionally unstable and entirely selfish.  I think this came from misguided attempts to control me.  I had resolved never to have children because I understood my temperament to be inheritable along with my naturally curly red hair, a mixed blessing.  Of course, by the time my mother had married and moved to the city, she had been estranged from her father and to a much lesser degree from her sisters.  If you leave home, you become different, and you might not return.  Still, for ten years she had contributed much energy and a part of her salaries (bookkeeping) to her birth family.  It was the script she understood.

I did return twice over a lifetime, getting my mother’s hopes up.  Once in the Seventies and once in the Nineties, both times of economic collapse both personally and nationally.  She didn’t want me to come back -- then she didn’t want me to leave.  Both times I had become so different from my family that I was of little use to them.  My goals and methods were totally different.

Early in life the command to achieve but always to serve the family humbly without personal benefit fit very well with marriage to an older sculptor: I worked as hard my mother had, he walked in the glory (not that he didn’t work to his limits).  But he had the same conviction that I had about being “bad seed,” for much the same reason: family attempts to control him for their benefit.  The irony is that his true achievement and fame as an artist was invisible to them.  They never praised him for it -- always changed the subject to money, which is the Achilles Heel (I mistyped “hell” at first) of all artists. 

I don’t know why parents think that confronting their children with their shortcomings and mistakes evidently believe this will bind them closer, but parents and even teachers do it everywhere.   So do marriage partners and children.  On the other hand, I resist praise, interpreting it also as control, esp. since the praise is rarely relevant to what I do and am proud of.  Very few are astute enough to figure out the puzzle.  When they do, usually they have the same inner dynamics.

I repeated the script again by entering the ministry, which thrives on this scenario.  I’ve repeated it in other ways since, until now, out of rebellion, it brings me to this solitary writing without any expectation that it will improve my status and with such a dispersed family that it’s hard to know what I could do for them. A few still cling to the idea that I’m smart and therefore have an advantage, a “gift” that I didn’t earn and that they don’t have.  My seminary and denomination are dissolving out from under my feet, morphing into exactly what I was trying to escape, that materialist and institutional drive to achieve status and power through owning the “family” members.

For an artist/writer who is not writing escapist schlock, the struggle to belong without being owned becomes a preoccupation verging on obsession.  The movie called “The Bigger Splash”-- a loose narrative of David Hockney’s relationship with a young man named Peter [sic] -- wanders through the days and dilemmas of the artist “writing on water” at the boundary between the outer world and one’s inner construct of it.  The outer world, which includes the force of time, is uncontrollable, but Hockney ponders and records a painted version that can be regarded, felt.  This interesting movie records from the outside -- without taking sides -- the loose group of lifelong friends who generally support Hockney, trying to understand what might seem inscrutable, trying to understand how to fit in, and all the small memes and tropes that create relationship.  These people bring each other bouquets.  Peter, who is quite beautiful, is not a bouquet.  It is not clear whether he left or Hockney simply moved on, the splash now ended.  It IS clear that the gallery owner who tried to profit from Hockney had to close.  And the painting of “The Bigger Splash” remains, a moment made poignant by its indeterminacy.

The “fan groups” around art/writing have certain principles that they enforce by giving or withholding attention, prizes, reviews, attendance at shows and so on.  Rule one: You must admire us for admiring you.   Rule two:  Once you become famous for something, you must not change, but you must surprise us.  Rule three:  It’s good to do a forbidden thing so long as you do not close us out, but rather let us enter it safely.  Rule four: Do not have secrets.  Do not tell lies.  We want access to your reality.  These rules can be obscene, pornographic in their invasiveness and insincerity, the very thing that laws against public fucking and nakedness are supposed to oppose.  

And yet the enforcers feed off the creators at fancy patterned tea parties and receptions as stylized as were ever portrayed on the BBC.  Dressing up, jeweling, imbibing special beverages from special vessels (those fragile teacups, those champagne flutes!), they condition us and control our responses.  “This,” they teach us, “Is sophistication!”  I’m very naughty to talk this way on the eve of the auction frenzy in Great Falls, which is a kind of family event.  Except that there will be many small intimate encounters in motel rooms (the auctions are all held in motel convention halls), some of which may turn out to be fertile.  Well -- that’s family, too.

Society and family progress by branching.  Individual members go their own way, sometimes detach entirely.  There is an underground convergence of sources that is even more important than what supports the “leaves” of works on paper.  The internet “daylights” much of what was once hidden, disconcerting those who care to look, like the John Taliaferro (1996) bio of the C.M. Russells which stepped away from the usual assumptions.  Charlie stepped away from his own birth family to come West, the same as I did -- except that I had to go east in order to get to the same place.  Neither of us ever really went home again.

FEELINGS MATTER

At the end of this piece I’m posting the formal abstract for a paper called “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins” by Damasio and Carvalho.  The concept from their work I’m using is that:

“Feelings are mental experiences of body states that guide the responses to:

tissue injury

optimal function

threats to the organism

specific social interactions”

“Feelings constitute a crucial component of the mechanisms of life regulation, from simple to complex.  Their neural substrates can be found at all levels of the nervous system, from individual neurons to subcortical nuclei and cortical regions.”

The task I set myself in “The Bone Chalice” was to develop a theory of liturgy based on “feeling” -- specifically the feeling of the Sacred or Holy as defined by Mircea Eliade.  One central guide is that of Turner’s three parts created by envisioning the state of feeling this Holiness as “liminal” or over a threshold:  going over the limen into the special space, being in that special numinous space, and emerging from that space.  One value of the liminal space seems to be that it is a state that allows one to change or confirm deep meanings that guide one’s life.  Either undergo a conversion or sees more deeply into what was already accepted.  This seems to be somehow related to the necessary survival compromises between the individual and the social context.  They may have intense personal meaning.  While in this state, all humans are perceived as equal in value.  I take this as being the heart of justice.

Parallel to these feelings, which are derived from introspection and experience, is the new study of the neurobiological phenomena of neuron, subcortical nuclei and cortical regions.  Again, there are three parts:  the intake of sensory signals from the outer world, the processing through the subcortical nuclei, and then decisions at the cortical level that are meant to address the short list of four categories above, for the purpose of causing the individual to survive, which is what drives evolution.  Bad processing weeds out the badly adapted, not just the one’s not equipped but those who don’t “get it.”  The ability to grow and change when presented with new meaning is of enormous survival value, not just in terms of length of life but also in quality.

It has been established by now that animals are not different from us except that humans have more powerful and elaborate internal levels of processing, especially those located in the unique human prefrontal cortext behind the forehead.  Though some believe that animals perceive the Holy, it is not proven.  But it IS proven that animals -- even rats -- have a feeling of justice in the sense of sharing resources and providing compassion, based on understanding.  (I’ll have to nail down footnotes for these.)  For them the beginnings of problematic individual versus group quandaries are present mostly in terms of pecking order, turf ownership and sexual competition.  Animals do not appear to have ideas that let them contradict their instincts, but humans seem to affiliate in ways that suppress instincts like compassion and sharing.  Or maybe that’s not unique to humans: it’s well-known that dogs in packs will do things that none of the individual dogs would do separately.  It’s just that they probably don’t reflect on this difference, so have no regret nor plans for the future.

In a previous post I contrasted a god of compassion for the suffering masses against a godless world where events other than those of humans simply happen without purpose.  I asked, what is the missing element that connects a religion constructed around the first and a philosophy constructed around the second.  I think it is in our innate sense of justice:  not so much deserving or punishing as in an equity of moral standing, of dignity and significance.  We have essential feelings of Holiness which are accompanied by feelings of what is Justice to human individuals.  This is not the same as morality or rules laid out by an institution, whether a church or the law or any other cultural construct.  One might say that there is a gut-feeling of what is just.

Wikipedia:  “Studies at  UCLA in 2008 have indicated that reactions to fairness are "wired" into the brain and that, " ‘Fairness is activating the same part of the brain that responds to food in rats... This is consistent with the notion that being treated fairly satisfies a basic need".  Research conducted in 2003 at  Emory University involving Capuchin Monkeys demonstrated that other cooperative animals also possess such a sense and that ‘inequity aversion may not be uniquely human,’ indicating that ideas of fairness and justice may be instinctual in nature.

Perhaps our social embeddedness in institutions is what allows us to ignore and suppress our sense of “inequity aversion” (a fancy term for gut feeling) by saying that others “don’t deserve” whatever.  Or perhaps this is what allows us to force rules to persist long after their usefulness.  (Not many of those admirers of Leviticus note that they ought not to wear “mixed fibers.”)  Certainly group identity that erases “inequity aversion” makes war possible on the modern scale, especially that waged via satellite and predator drone instead of face-to-face where you can smell the garlic or haggis on the other guy’s breath.  But then, in the midst of so much destruction as there is in today’s world, there is so much accidental unjust death that conflict loses its social context.  Existential despair, as in war, erases the gut-feeling of what is just.

It is possible for very young human beings to “feel” justice BEFORE the social context and institutions begin to define and influence what should be done and why.  Is it possible for older human beings to change their minds about something like homosexuality, which varies from one culture to another?  We know it is and that it happens through intense (liminal) experiences that might have been organic to the moment or designed in an effective way, maybe in a movie.  That moment of meaning-shift probably felt “holy” because of its intensity and even purity.  Another element was probably empathy -- not sympathetic pity, but shared second-hand experience -- which gave new information to the brain: not just sensory input but also interpretive information about survival, even something so elementary as needing each other in order to get through an experience.

_________________

Nat Rev Neurosci. 2013 Feb;14(2):143-52. doi: 10.1038/nrn3403. The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins. Damasio A, Carvalho GB. Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, 3620 A McClintock Avenue, Suite 265, Los Angeles, California 90089-2921, USA. damasio@usc.edu Abstract Feelings are mental experiences of body states. They signify physiological need (for example, hunger), tissue injury (for example, pain), optimal function (for example, well-being), threats to the organism (for example, fear or anger) or specific social interactions (for example, compassion, gratitude or love). Feelings constitute a crucial component of the mechanisms of life regulation, from simple to complex. Their neural substrates can be found at all levels of the nervous system, from individual neurons to subcortical nuclei and cortical regions.

"NAPI'S LOOKOUT: THE STORY OF WILLOW ROUNDS"

Looking north across Birch Creek.

Willow Rounds likely just out of the frame to the right.

Over the years there have been many local historians who converted local history into small chapbooks.  Especially there were women who enjoyed this work of taking stories from talk to print, small cumulative interviews about the families who settled their area.  Among them were Helen West in Cut Bank, Dorothy Floerschinger in Conrad, and Olga Monkman in Choteau.  I knew all of them slightly, but didn’t really remember Dorothy Hamaker until Paul Wheeler sent me a copy of “Napi’s Lookout: The Story of Willow Rounds,”  (1967) which is just north-east of Valier and part of the Canal Company complex history, including the Conrad brothers’ ranch empire.  Seeing her photo jogged my memory.

Maybe a dozen or more of these historians of the local would regularly stop in at Scriver Studio to swap stories, rather like early trappers hanging around a trading post.  Some of them wrote about Indians, some wanted to check out details in stories formally published by George Bird Grinnell or James Willard Schultz, some had family histories entwined with Bob’s sojourn as a band teacher and justice of the peace or with the Browning Merc, and some wanted to write histories of their towns from founding to the present.  Charlie Russell had firmly established the relationship between story and art; Ace Powell never let us forget it.  The product of the talk-to-print impulse was self-publishing, usually printed by a local newspaper plant.  I suppose they were composed on a linotype and the photos were pasted in on layout sheets.

The concept of the Axis Mundi is that the location of the individual is a sort of picket pin around which the person organizes their understanding of life, both practical and spiritual, which is why these historians were clearly located where they wrote.  Usually that point is a town or ranch.  Not so common is what we might call “the Long Town,” which is built along a stream or possibly an important thoroughfare like the Old North Trail.  “Willow Rounds” is a place along Birch Creek, the southern boundary of the Southern Blackfeet or Piegan sub-group of the Blackfeet (Siksika) nation.  The Hamakers ranched there.

In terms of the history of the US, “town” as a compact settlement was a northern way of development, but “plantation” as a long shore-tracing string of locations was southern.  The Blackfeet reservation has three “resort” towns (East Glacier, St. Marys, and Babb), two “old-timer” settlements (Heart Butte and Starr School) and one hub governmental town (Browning).  But there are also several important “Long Towns” (Badger, Two Medicine, and Birch, which is shared on the south shore with Pondera county settlers).  Because they are based on ranches along rivers, their histories include a series of floods.

Hamaker notes several major floods: 1908, 1948 and the Really Big Flood in 1964.  A 1948 aerial photo in the booklet surprised both Paul and I by vividly showing that the “rounds” that gave Hamaker’s ranch its name was not the many tipi rings that are in that valley, but rather round clearings formed by camp circles of the lodges pushing back the brush.  The ranch had a number of owners through the years and that continues to be true.  In the early days, when timber and lumber were both scarce, the practice was often to convert existing houses to new uses, which was made easier when the floods moved whole buildings along to new locations.

This part of the country is formed by ancient volcanic eruptions in the Pacific Northwest that covered the area with fine dust, a very ancient seabed made of limestone, and the scraped deposits of glaciers only ten thousand years old -- all of it eroded by the rush of  water when the glaciers melted.  Hamaker lived in an area called “Bullhead,” because it contained “soap holes,” something like quicksand, in which a bull could sink so far that only its head stuck out -- barely enough to throw a rope on to haul it out.   “In the one map reference from The USGS (United States Geological Survey) the soap holes are in a closed drainage system. The water flows in and does not flow out. This has caused the shales, sandstones and limestones under the bentonite beds to have eroded away, forming depressions in which bentonite from the surrounding area can accumulate.”

Hamaker doesn’t take an anthropological approach to Indians and uses the old-fashioned terms “buck” and “squaw” that suggest they are a different species.  Also, to her all bears are fierce and must be shot.  She came to the territory in 1910 so this is not surprising.  She sees through the lens of local life, so the berries are described in terms of recipes:  “put rhubarb in your sarvisberry pie to give it a bit of tang.”  And yet she knows the Napi stories about buffalo berries, how Napi saw their reflection in water and kept trying to pick the mirrored fruit until frustration drove him to thrash the bushes and curse them with terrible thorns, which weren’t a curse at all, since then they protected small animals, tender plants and even a calving cow with a thick skin.

She describes “Napi’s Lookout” as a high point excellent for watching or flagging signals, and speaks eloquently of an old man who arrived up there without warning, sang mourning songs all day, then slipped away at nightfall.  She says that in the early days the trees were full of burials -- which were not buried but lifted up after being sewn into hide shrouds.  I always wondered what happened to them and she says they were poked down and cut open in search of artifacts, those emotion-laden and occasionally valuable bits of material culture.  She tells us that if you are looking for someone, you should go a little north into Canada and check the “guest book” at “Writing on Stone” where there are many pecked images as illustrated in the movie called “Meek’s Cutoff”.  Spopee (Turtle) was there, though no one is sure which Spopee.

Hamaker’s understanding of Blackfeet religion is as a sort of child’s version of Christianity, but then her understanding of Christianity is also the simplified and sentimental version of Edwardian times.  She writes poetry infused with it, careful to rhyme and scan.  Near the end of the book is a passage that illustrates her approach so I’ll quote it:

“It was on just such a mission [looking for a calf] that I had to tether my horse and creep into a thicket.  Stooping low beneath the thorns, I discovered a bed of glorious deep-blue violets, cleverly hidden in a silvery bed of leaf-mold.  “Cold Maker” had not yet completely left the valley, and it was delightful to see something bright, alive and cheerful.  One must bow humbly and very, very low sometimes if he would perceive God’s blessings and Nature’s wonders.”

Dorothy Hamaker has many heirs today.  Oddly, most of the ones I know are male singers.  Meeting the way the early trappers used to rendezvous, Jack Gladstone, Wiley Gustafson, Ken Overcast, and all the “cowboy poets”  travel through the “long towns” across the prairie.  They form temporary axles for the wheeling universe along the Long Road of Time.  How’s that for a metaphor?

CELEBRATING CELIBACY

Religion Dispatches   info@religiondispatches.org  is one of my automated email feeds.  This morning the superscript read:  “Defending Celibacy | Pussy Riot, Interrupted.”  I figure that’s the universe talking to me, so I’m going to respond.  (Actually, it was two article titles, which you can read for yourself since I’m only using the juxtaposition.)  As it happens, the Edge topic that also came automatically was about “disfluency.”    http://edge.org/conversation/disfluency   The Aussie explainer, Adam Alter, had just enough of an accent to require careful attention to this difficult topic, which is about “metacognition,” that is, the thinking behind or under the actual thought, or the thought that is the feeling of thinking about this subject.

Of course, I DO feel defensive about my celibacy since the surface social explanations are:

1.  That I’m a prude.

2.  That I don’t get any offers.

3.  That I’m frigid.

4.  That I’m judgmental.

5.  That I’m over-disciplined.

6.  That it would do me good to participate in a pussy riot.

7.  That I’m the only one in the room who is like this.

When I try to explain that in my twenties, which was the calendrical world’s Sixties, I had a wild, riotous, even legendary erotic life, though it was only with one man, their eyes and attention wander off to memory or movie fantasy, and that’s the end of communication.  They don’t want to hear about the care (and good luck) I took in choosing how to end my literary/imaginary sex life with adventures in a physical life.  It WAS exotic, it WAS romantic, it was not very secret, and some people found it disgusting -- not because it was outside marriage but because of the age difference between us, which was part of the safety element.  There was a time window: it was before HIV-AIDS and there was a blossoming sub-culture that felt there was no such thing as bad sex except in terms of limiting it too much.

All this in the past was much easier for people to understand (though some people -- both sexes -- interpret it as an invitation) than my present cloistered celibacy, and for some of the same reasons.  First, they haven’t really done it themselves.  Second, they don't get that I do NOT want interference.  I don’t want people “straightening up” my house so I can’t find things in the piles of paper, I don’t want my books reshelved in new places, I don’t want my cats to attach to anyone else, I resent any use of my time that is not for my own ends, I don’t want the drain on money that many invitations require in terms of getting there or properly dressing or returning the favor.  I don’t want people telling me what to read or insisting on washing my dishes for me without knowing my protocol or . . .

Most of the middle-class educated people who get interested in visiting assume that all my appliances will work, that I will remove cat hair from the chairs, that my doors will have keys, that there is plenty of hot water, that my pantry is stocked with standard things, and so on.  Some of the younger suburban ones will walk into the house, go straight to the fridge without asking to look for canned soft drinks or beer and be shocked that there is nothing there except a bit of skim milk.  (In summer, peanut butter jars of iced tea.)  The older visitors may be shocked by the strength of my coffee and my inability to remember where I put the sugar since I never use it.

That’s not about sex but it’s a way of explaining (maybe) that I don’t pick up the standard memes about intimacy.  It’s not the physical or moral side of it, but the assumptions in subtle ways, a kind of disfluency on both sides.  What gets me hot and excited is not even on their map, because it’s the intimacy of ideas.  When they invite themselves to look through my bookshelves and find some of the publicly censored things there, THEY go into “pussy riot” mode and allow themselves overdisclosure.  (Check out Adam’s talk.)  To them it’s permission.  They assume sharing.  They leap to fantasy.  Oh, sigh.

Disfluency is part of my counter-phobia, since mysterious, difficult things always attract me.  The same perceptions that has white city tourists rolling up their windows and locking the doors when they drive through Browning has me out crossing vacant lots to talk to guys sharing a brown-bagged bottle against an alley fence.  I have weak boundaries, which distresses some people.  Not every drunk wants some curious female approaching unless they’re bringing money.  So I’ve learned to create “rule-based” boundaries which sometimes fail me.  I mean, when people ask me to make a boundary (yes, they do), I don’t always understand or remember where to put it.  Cloistering is a natural boundary.  Like never drinking.

Disfluency is also what contributes to my fascination with the “mysterium” of religion.  Sadly, not the boring stuff about budget and housekeeping.  My idea of sharing is liturgical, patterned, Alter would say “distanced.”

The meta-experience of learning to read was erotic for me: physical, accessing a new reality.  This welcome response remains for difficult reading, but not for the predictable and cozy stuff.  Same with movies.   Alter suggests disfluency allows departure from reality to new realms of imagination and I don’t think I’m alone, which explains the popularity of sci-fi, though some of the fantasy tropes are beginning to be tiresome.  But teaching these days in small towns seems to be intended to reassure everyone that learning is safe, controlled by a workbook that leads the student along to the right answers so everyone has a good grade and parents are pleased by the uniformity.  They ought to be alarmed.  

How many times do we have to be reminded that it’s the PROCESS, the fishing, the necessity of designing the strategy?  No wonder that street kids -- once they have food, shelter, clothing, and health care -- are a lot smarter than the average honor society member. 

The actual Religion Dispatches article by Kate Blanchard notes Kathleen Norris’s book “The Cloister Walk” which discusses “‘vowed celibacy’ (along with vows of poverty and obedience) as embodied forms of ‘radical doubt’—a powerful way to question the assumptions of society, to challenge given norms.”  Abstention as protest.  Norris is a prairie writer, so people often assume that I admire her.  I don’t.  There’s a lot of difference between a celibate Montana retired non-theist minister and a married South Dakota theist writer who hangs around monasteries.  But in the case of celibacy, I’m in agreement, even though she’s talking about Catholic clerical discipline and I’m talking about a personal practice, no vows.  The point of discipline is to focus -- which is not the same thing as making boundaries because focus is going toward a center, not forbidding to cross the edge.  I guess we both do that.

Self-determined discipline is negotiable, but clerical obedience is not.  (Except in practice, as we note among some who find it optional.)  My celibacy, like the pussy riot of my youth, is organic, part of who I am in my ordinary routine life.  Changing it would mean a change in focus -- not breaking any vows.  It would be difficult, but that could make it more interesting.  So far, no fantasy suggests a good reason.

"BONK" by Mary Roach: A Review

I write about sex quite a bit because it seems to me it is one field of human enterprise that is reframing itself both morally and mythically, and that it relates sharply to other fields like economics and government in the present and practical reality -- but also raises provocative philosophical issues about the nature of human beings and their relationship to existence.  So I read all kinds of surprising and sometimes forbidden stuff and it seems that so do a lot of other people -- more than we suspect.

Most recently my book about sex is Mary Roach’s book, “Bonk,” which my brain keeps converting to “boink.”  (I think it’s the BBC influence.  I’m still waiting for an occasion to call someone a “gormless oik.”  “Oik” is like “uck.”  Or even “ick” which featured largely in D. Greg Smith’s guess as to why people squirm about gay sex.  Mary’s first book was “Stiff” and the one after “Bonk” is “Spook” which is a little risky given what it is slang for.  I wonder what she would entitle a book about racism.   Actually, the books all have subtitles.  "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers," "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife," "Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex," and "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void."  Most recently:  “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.”

Anyway, “Bonk” is so funny that I laughed loud and long enough to scare the cats.  Something about sex makes it ridiculous in the first place (as every little kid knows when trying to imagine the act that created them) and I sometimes wonder whether the close connection to cruelty and power isn’t a reaction to ridicule.  Roach works with a team that researches, follows leads, looks for illustrations, and pesters people for access to weirdo experiments that often yield crucial information.

More than that, she helps us to think about what might be unknown unknowables:  things we never suspected and ignored in spite of evidence, because it was inconvenient or shielded by political interests.  Sort of like war leaders ignoring the idea that indigenous people on the ground actually matter and have ideas of their own.

The bottom line was startling -- to her and researchers as well.  She doesn’t present it until the end:  excellent sex is two people who explore each others bodies with care and trust, without Woody Allen’s “spectatoring” (how’m I doin’? how’m I doin’?), with concern for the arousal of the other person, and without driving towards fantastic orgasms.  The people who knew this and were good at it were the same-sex couples.  NOT the macho hets who knew all about g-spots and could even find a clit.  I don’t know whether this helps prejudice or not.  Will people ask gays for advice or just find one more reason to be angry?

Like this principle, the fun of the book is getting there.  Of course she makes the stations of the couch: Kinsey, Master & Johnson, and dear old Van de Velde.  There’s no index, but a useful bibliography organized by chapters, and a less-useful “reading group guide,” to give the book a textbook air.  Very sober questions.  I doubt discussion in a group would follow the suggested pattern.  Nor should it.

Much of the book is about practicalities:  how do you figure out what’s going on between two partners whose bodies block sight-lines, whose movements won’t fit into an MRI tunnel, and whose subjective interpretations are unique?  In the case of the paralyzed subjects, the mysteries and difficulties seem nearly insurmountable, and yet the motivation for understanding is high.  Things like simple statistics of how many revengeful women amputate their husband’s penises reveal deep social and cultural differences.  SE Asian women living in houses on stilts where the domestic animals hang out in the shade underneath, generally throw the offending organ out the window.  It is more likely to be eaten by a duck than a pig.  (No reason given.  Maybe ducks are just faster.)  In cultures with plumbing, the penis may go down the toilet.  The outcomes of reattachment are certainly not guaranteed, but possible.

To some extent anatomy is destiny: if a woman’s clitoris is more than an inch from her vagina, special strategy is necessary to trigger an orgasm.  One woman, like the man who had a fistula that allowed the inside of his stomach to be observed, had a prolapsed vagina that allowed her cervix to be observed.  But it is much more possible than one would have guessed to surgically convert, augment, repair, and stiffen both male and female genitals.  It’s just that results vary, but the proportions of success are high enough for people to be optimistic.

The veterinary aspect of this mammalian subject yields one of the funniest chapters, all about how to get a pig pregnant via AI.  First, perfume is of the essence (pheromones, you know) so the boar equivalent of a Chippendale dancer is walked through the barn, though his charm is strictly species-specific (a lot of drooling and grunting). Second, a certain amount of knuckling or kneeing the vulvar entrance helps, and then there is the element of the boar’s weight on the back of the sow, which means that the men (it was all men in this account) must actually “ride” their receiver.  (There were no sheep jokes in this book.)  A curious young man wanting to know whether chimps have spasmodic orgasms went to work “digitally” and soon had his evidence in hand, or at least on finger.

I wonder how many people reflect on all this information.  I’m not talking about taboos or censoring.  I think we’ve gotten past that, at least wherever there is access to the Internet or daily newspapers.  Where we’re weak is in the social implications and where to draw the lines of criminalization.  I think the greatest force for freedom of information is commodification.  How can you sell vibrators if no one knows they exist?  Judging from the number of sex toys in the catalogues for health aids, a lot of people know exactly what they are and certainly want them.  I suspect they sell a lot more briskly than walkers with tennis balls at the end of the legs.  

But now that everyone has read “Fifty Shades of Gray” and found out about Ben Wa balls, I wonder if they are ready for the version in the last Dr. Leonard’s catalog, which have magnets inside and “soft” spikes on the outside.  The ones with soft chimes in them appeal to me more.  Mary Roach does not address this sort of balls (she does, the other kind), but it’s one of the few things she leaves out.  

This is meant to be scientific, so she does stick to the lab and clinic.  Any emergency responder could elaborate on more bizarre sticky practices, and she notes that.  This book was published in 2008, but it is already a classic.

RESPONSE TO SUFFERING

After working out my theory of liturgy, all based on “feeling” rather than dogma, individual human response rather than institutional imperatives, I find a crack.  It is the issue of compassion, defined as empathy with a suffering “other” to whom one responds  with attempts to help.   The problem arises when the help is offered on the terms of the helper rather than the helpee.  Usually on the assumption that the helpee doesn’t know what’s good for them anyway, so why ask?  

For years I saved a New Yorker cartoon about some men struggling with a piano stuck in a doorway.  A passerby comes along and generously helps them stuff it inside.  The only trouble is that they were trying to get it OUT.  It’s the whole phenomenon of helping old ladies cross streets through traffic when they didn’t WANT to cross the street.  When this happens to me I kick and scream, so I know firsthand how resentful and destructive the doer of the good deed can become if you resist “good.”

Somehow this is mixed into romantic love and parental care in many subtle and troublesome ways.  I’ll make an incomplete and probably confused list:

1.  Wishing to go back to childhood and therefore seeking someone to “help” one.

2.  Looking for the warm and merging feeling one got in childhood from comforting puppies and rocking one’s dollies.

3.  The amount of control that a suffering person has over helpers -- the Munchausen Syndrome reward.  Could be one’s own suffering or could be the second-hand suffering of one’s small dependent, like a child or pet.

4.  The panicky feeling as the receiver of help, esp. when docs, nurses, social workers, and clergy are out of sync with the need.  The old Vietnam trope of “ we had to burn the village in order to save it.”  Or the punishing parent who says “I’m doing this for your own good.”

5.  Enlisting the sympathy of others, esp. when the suffering is emotional.  Most people will be moved by obvious disease and trauma.  (Broken hearts not so much. People may disapprove of the emotional response and therefore welcome one’s suffering.)

6.  Knowing there is a need for intervention but being powerless to supply it.  A loved one is dying of cancer -- why can’t you cure it?

So the idea of “God” as the ultimate lover or parent or at least witness becomes very powerful indeed.

In practical terms, sometimes one is the helper and sometimes the helpee.  What are the principles? -- oh, before that, the awareness -- that must be in place in order to give and accept appropriate help triggered by compassion.  Many will be cultural.  Many will be circumstantial.  Some will be internal to both parties, only accessible by reflecting, which there may not be time for, or maybe overruled by the needs of the group/institution which no doubt wants trouble dealt with.  In jobs over the years I’ve done a LOT of emergency and nuisance complaint response.  The almost inevitable, though lamentable, practice becomes to “eliminate the complaint, not the situation.”  Worse than that, an effort to isolate and address the underlying causes of the recurring dilemma is difficult and maybe impossible.  How can anyone change the geological configuration of the planet that leads to economic inequities, that constant gradient between the haves and have nots?  So much depends upon whose crops are good that year.   Our willingness to use food for blackmail is even more evil than our withholding of drugs.

Then there’s the problem of what seems to be help that is actually a disguised means of making a profit, like the subsidies for high-priced drugs that keep people from banding together to demand more responsible pricing.  I found that hospitals hire chaplains in theory to help patients, but actually to keep order, suppress anger, convert action to obedient prayer.

Too big.  Too much to get one’s head around and still make it work.  

Here’s a weird idea.  Maybe the way to address compassion is not just amelioration, but the creation of pleasure, something liminal liturgy can do.  Not just a back rub but real and abandoned joy -- abandoned in the sense of letting one’s guard down and letting new things in.  We think of drugs in terms of constricting, limiting, but what if something like LSD or marijuana really DOES put the brain into a configuration that is accepting?  That’s often the reports of users, including those who use “theogens,” drugs that are supposed to “call God” as an awareness of joy, not judgment, punishment or even salvation.  Is that justification?

As long as I’m being Christian I’ll suggest the next weird idea as the “pick up your bed and walk” factor.  You remember that story about the paralyzed guy whose friends took him to Jesus, the specialist, to be healed.  When the crowd was so thick around the house (waiting list), the friends broke through the roof and lowered their friend, complete with bed, practically into Jesus’ lap.  His response:  “Pick up your bed and walk.”  No enabling here -- though the determined friends were certainly doing it.  The afflicted person picked up the bed and walked out with it.  It was a miracle.  Or something.  The point I get from it is that we should be our own doctors.  Why wait to be empowered?

We should be our own priests, our own liturgists.  Resist the idea of a specialized class with “magic.”  I don’t see any other way of guarding against the helper who assumes superiority and therefore justifies force, oppression, and hypocrisy -- or equally destructive -- from the helpee -- the wish to remain a child and let one’s powerlessness and dependency become an entitlement and then a demand.  But we should participate in our treatment.

With a friend who often discusses my posts “backstage,” this dynamic has been framed up in a triangle:  Mother Theresa, Christopher Hitchens, and the dying masses.  My friend says he appreciates both MT and CH and backs off from the masses but is glad if they are helped.  Regarding CH, my friend says, “He could be a hard nosed bastard. I think the main reason he didn't care for her was her propensity to toe the Vatican lines. If I were to create a tally sheet on both individuals as far as to what they left behind, Mother Theresa would be far ahead.”  This friend acts on his compassion and helps many.  

But I side with CH, fearing that MT is a step along the path to a bully Pope and a lot of bully priests who take out their frustrations by victimizing children, insisting it’s all an honor.  Until retirement I have not been one to avoid suffering masses, even those of other species.  Maybe I’ve shirked helpful interventions in specific cases.  I’ve walked off.  A hard-nosed bitch.  So I have to justify this at the level of looking for the causes of suffering, using this great retirement privilege of time to reflect.  It’s just that it seems to me that all of us should have the right to decide when or whether to cross the street and it would be a lot easier to ASK whether the piano is going in or out the door.

So what does my manuscript about liturgy need in order to discriminate between true “feeling of holiness” in the sense of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans and simply cultural warm-glow do-goodery?  

MINISTERIAL BATSHIT

The image of the saintly battle chaplain -- like the four who gave away their life jackets to the enlisted sailors and died on a sinking ship while singing hymns -- is pretty well destroyed by now, replaced by the evil old man who molests choir boys, the female evangelist in boudoir-wear with her arms raised and tears streaming down her face while she makes miracles happen, Elmer Gantry, Lucifer with a reverse collar and a tail hanging out his backside, etc.  Much informed by Satan in goat-foot boots with a cape swirling around him and a black leopard on a leash.  No wonder people go batshit!  Who wouldn’t like to strut that way?  (Although, I’ve always fancied a green wool Irish cape and a calico cat in my arms.  But no one respects that image.) 

By now you’re onto my fav juxtaposition of the wildly, savagely, mind-blowingly extreme against the homely humble detail.  Let me try it again.

Annual General Assembly for the Unitarians alternates between college campuses and major city hotel conference centers -- possibly resorts.  The clergy are always divided according to economics: the guys (always) who have big churches with generous budgets see the occasion as a chance to blow off steam and enjoy themselves, so they go for the city.  The ones who have the small churches (beginners and women), maybe with no travel allowance at all, beg for the cheap campus.  

This particular year the venue was a fancy hotel.  I walked into the little convenience shop with a personally wealthy female colleague who looked just like Cher.  She left Chicago seminary to avoid freezing to death in both the physical and emotional sense.  Her ministry (thirty years now) has been a huge success but not a political one.  In this shop was an old woman in obvious distress.  Her daughter, late middle-age, was desperate for help.  They had been on a tour and the box lunches had given the old woman uncontrollable food-poisoning.  Aside from nearly losing consciousness, she was gripped by diarrhea she could not prevent from streaming down her legs and pooling on the polished floor.  

“Cher” and I helped her sit on a stack of newspapers while the shop owner, also a woman, railed and scolded about not being able to sell them -- think of the money lost!  She had called the hotel manager, who was making arrangements with the daughter to put the old woman in a room where she could recover.  The daughter went to get the hotel’s wheelchair.  In those days there was no impulse to call EMT’s for help.  I’m not sure there was such a thing. 

So “Cher” threw down a twenty on the counter (more than the value of the papers), and we tried to think of comforting things to say about the utter helplessness, humiliation, and shock of the old woman -- about how it happens to everyone, that it’s simply not anything that can be controlled, that it’s unpleasant but not evil, and so on.  Gradually things resolved.  The mop and bucket came, etc.

What is still vividly in my mind is the memory of big-shot male ministers hanging in the doorway, laughing, mocking, making no move to help.  Over the next few days they teased Cher and I about how dumb we were for not just getting out of there.

I’m not sure whether that was the GA where the San Francisco minister -- a big name in a big church -- stood in the ministers’ meeting to face his Jonah moment.  He had been told about Jonestown before that congregation moved to Guyana but after the practice of victimization and sexual assault had begun.  In fact, earlier, Jim Jones had come to this UU minister to investigate whether he could get credentials in the UUA.  He couldn’t -- only because he had no BA or BS, a prerequisite for seminary.  It would not be until after the mass murder/suicides that the confessing alpha minister realized the woman who had come to him for help, relating incredible events, had been telling the truth.  But he just couldn’t bring himself to get involved by investigating.

In case you don’t know the Jonah story, it recurs several places:
Book of Jonah (Old Testament)

2 Kings 14:25 (Old Testament) Makes mention of him.

Matthew 16:4 (New Testament)

Luke 11 29 &;30 (New Testament)

The set-apartness of clergy was once taken for granted, though it could be used as much to evade ordinary life as for empowered intervention.  We used to let chaplains go into prisons and nuns counsel death row inmates.   The Red Cross was sacred because it was a Christian symbol.  It has become a target.  Now the tendency is to erase special privileges.  In the Sixties the clergy insisted they were entitled to be human -- that they could get divorced, hooked, insane, greedy just like everyone else.  And the people believed them.  The confidentiality of the confessional disappeared from the state laws.  (NOT the confidentiality of the lawyers -- who do you think the legislators are?)  Now clergy are just social workers.  There is no sanctuary.  There is no martyrdom, not even the Tibetan monks who self-immolate or the idealistic young tartars who strap on bombs.  They're just considered nuts.

The Pope is a joke.  Jesus is just another rabbi.  The shaman is a drug pusher.  All sacredness is emptied in a diarrhea of the soul.  We contaminate the planet.  People confess self-hatred and speak of suicide.

But not all of them.  If there is no separate class of priests, then we are all priests.  If there is no big Humanoid we can expect to set things right, then we’d better get busy ourselves, and we are.  But let’s be practical.  It costs, there will be clean-up, and some people will stand apart to laugh and mock.  

The Great Falls Tribune ran an editorial by a man claiming that there is NO hunger in America because poor people are fat.  He sees them buying food with their welfare debit cards.  Unless he sees skeletal people, he figures everything is okay.  He’s inside the Big Fish.  He sees nothing but fish guts.  He doesn’t go where the hollow-eyed, barely walking, sore-ridden poor live.  (If they can be said to live anywhere.)  I suspect that he DOES pass homeless people, but takes no notice.  He doesn’t help out at the food pantry or the Salvation Army.   He doesn’t walk along the railroad tracks or go into ghettos.  When he goes through the rez, he locks the car doors.   And he never reads National Geographic where he might see famine and refugee camps.  Or the squats where homeless kids hide out.

So we need photographers who DO go there.  Witnesses and testimony.  Not in court -- on YouTube.  Songs, dances.  And we need to own our own fish puke, our own bat crap.  You don’t see what you can’t name, so we need names, vocabulary, either written or spoken.   A new theology.   It used to be that this was the work of clergy.  Now it’s everyone’s job.   

(Wouldn’t want to leave you depressed, so I’m linking to a jolly song.)   http://www.godvine.com/In-the-Belly-of-the-Whale-Unique-Performance-About-Jonah-293.html

TRIBAL COHERENCE AMONG THE BLOODS

The most recent addition to my Blackfeet library is a double-monograph published in 1945 by the American Ethnological Society, Inc.  First monograph is “Changing Configurations in the Social Organization of a Blackfoot Tribe During the Reserve Period”  (The Blood of Alberta, Canada.) by Esther Goldfrank.  The second is “Observations on Northern Blackfoot Kinship” by L.M. Hanks, Jr. and Jane Richardson. 

Everyone’s fav “third force” psychology theorist, Abraham Maslow, he of the marvelous pyramid of “needs” with the cherry on top being “peak experience,” came out to the prairie to look around, possibly to help with this study, and soon concluded the land of wind and dust was not for him.  He withdrew.  The study made by Goldfrank and cohort was nine weeks long and included a Sun Dance, but no comment was made on whether it was a “peak experience” as many devotees in the Aquarian Age have thought.  (Pain endorphins work.)

The original plan for this set of monographs was that four small team of inquirers would do a study of each of the four main groups of the Siksika or Blackfoot Nation.  The instigator was the redoubtable Ruth Benedict but the plan was truncated by WWII.   Goldfrank consolidated what was available, mostly about the Blood.  At first everything seemed very open and agreeable in the collection process, though Goldfrank had worked with the Pueblo and had found them secretive, elusive, covertly at war.  Only back in New York City, when the Blackfoot oral material was compared to the written archives, did discrepancies turn up, often at the expense of the governmental authorities rather than the tribal people, who were being strategic in what they reported.  As would be predicted, the change in circumstances forced by the reserve had intensified an already competitive and individualistic sort of behavior.  What a male observer might not have noted was that the suppression of polygamy forced the women into harsher competitive relationships and allowed much less impact from women making common cause, possibly urging peace.

Esther Goldfrank came to the Blood Reserve in 1939, two years after Clare Sheridan was there, and after WWII had started, rather than just before.  She was from a different affinity group: the “left” German Jewish Ethical Culture socialists.  (In Canada, socialism and even communism are legitimate points of view, not demonized.)  Clare, though neither German nor Jewish but deeply Catholic, would have shared this. In Alberta the KKK had a strong foothold.  Neither Clare nor Esther would have had any sympathy.  However, Wittfogel -- Esther’s second husband -- named names for the political witchhunters in the Fifties out of disillusion with Communists.  These were tough, independent women. Esther died at age 100 in 1997.  http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/goldfrank-esther-schiff

When I come upon these seemingly dry old materials, I google everyone I see named, including the Blackfeet.  Sometimes I recognize the descendants of the named tribal people, or at least can find them in the Blackfeet census of 1907-08.  The scientists are all transient.  A few became famous.  Some have had impact on the larger world without becoming known, never famous in the way Benedict or Maslow are landmarks.  No one writes articles about Goldfrank and Wittfogel, but maybe someone should.  (They are at least in Wikipedia but we don’t know who wrote the entries or what the writer's point of view might be.)  It seems obvious that the writer, like the subjects, came from that company of highly educated German (and sometimes Marxist) refugees who brought so much high theory with them across the ocean to Manhattan.  Part of their value is that with their emphasis on subconscious forces they so challenge the other dominant American paradigm, that of English and Dutch order -- rigid givens fled by Edith Wharton and Henry James.  When we read about prairie indigenous cultures, do we take into account the culture wars among the investigators, their biases and assumptions?

Sometimes this stuff doubles back on itself in amazing ways, becoming suddenly relevant.  This quote is in the Wikipedia entry:

“Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, first published in 1957. Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India’s "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's sceptical view of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel came up with an analysis of Oriental despotism which emphasized the role of irrigation works, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that these had on society, coining the term hydraulic empire" to describe the system.”

The original premise of the American Department of Indian Affairs was that they would imitate  the Conrad brothers’ success to the south of the Blackfeet reservation (right here in Valier) by irrigation.  The scandalous Foley report is largely an account of the bungling unreality of what actually happened on the rez, expending huge amounts of money and effort to dig ditches that didn’t work, even though the headwaters of what is now the Pondera Canal Company is at Swift Dam, right on the Blackfeet Reservation.  If you think about Wittfogel’s theories, it’s pretty easy to guess that the reason for the failure is the Federal “hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" -- political rather than a fault of either engineering or geology.

But now change focus to the present.  Forget irrigation.  Think frakking, which is another use of water but far more industrial and covert, since it happens underground.  I wrote a version of the Pluto/Demeter myth that is a “Western,” in which Pluto is coal and Demeter is wheat.  A new version of the old story might re-cast oil as the force of evil greed, but this time contamination of the underground aquifers might mean more than wheat -- indeed, it could end human habitation as we know it, instead imposing “the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them” in a new “hydraulic empire."  

Plains Indians are genetically Asiatic in origin -- neither European nor African.  Who knows what difference that makes?  The Wiki author continues:  “To do this, the state had to organize forced labor from the population at large. This required a large and complex bureaucracy staffed by competent and literate officials. This structure was uniquely placed to also crush civil society and any other force capable of mobilizing against the state. Such a state would inevitably be despotic, powerful, stable and wealthy.”  This worked for Anaconda Copper Company, but not for the Blackfeet.

Both studies in the two monographs are about the Blood faction of the Blackfoot Nation.  The first, longer, one is an attempt to understand the internal conflicts and destructive competitions of the 20^th century reserve.  The conclusion is that what had held the people together in the earlier times, even into the horse days, was the need to cooperate in order to insure a food supply by hunting buffalo, either with piskuns or with guns.  Rivalry was always there, but it was held in check.  By “1939, these ‘turbulent’ Indians were still “exceedingly jealous among themselves”; they still had “frequent quarrels” which might “end in bloodshed or death”; and they still pursued the individualistic goals that had dominated their society for more than a century and a quarter.”  This conclusion is a disappointment for those hoping proof of the natural -- i.e. “close to nature” -- power of cooperation and sharing.  The conclusion is that today only governmental police can maintain order.  The pyramid is now upside down and the peak experiences must be underground.

HIV/SDD/HCV COUNSELING, TESTING AND REFERRAL TRAINING

Dawn got into the spirit with a shining red ribbon along the horizon under the eastern cloud cover.  Up at 4AM, I was surprised to see how light it had become when I left at 6AM for a workshop called “HIV/SDD/HCV Counseling, Testing and Referral Training.”  Sponsored by the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, it was only because of a story in the GF Tribune that I knew about it.  Since it was free and within my driving radius, I went and I’m glad.  I’m grateful that they allowed me to attend just one day of the three days.  In fact, the whole experience was kind of . . . well, unexpectedly endearing.

About twenty people attended, three-fourths women, all evidently in public health-type jobs with backgrounds in nursing or social work.  My impression was that maybe as many as half were relatively new to their jobs, they ALL seemed very young to me, and they were as nonjudgmental and attentive as any group could be.  This outreach effort is very specific:  to identify and contact people at risk, make tests available, and support their use with encouragement and information.  Then to help individuals deal with the consequences, by designing survival strategies, and scrounging for help however possible.  

Harm reduction is part of the plan.  That means stuff like finding safe ways to get rid of used needles.  (Accumulate them in a still half-full bleach bottle, for instance, or dispose of them through a hospital or pharmacy.)   Provide clean needles. (Many authority figures in Montana will resist this on grounds that bad behavior should be punished, though they wouldn’t put it that way.)  Alcohol swabs should be used when shooting up, to help prevent infection.  I take it these folks are not used to working with street people.

A lot of intriguing bits of info floated through.  The Hutterites have made an effort to hold onto their young people by letting them have a formal experimental year or so late in adolescence to go on wanderjahre.  They have learned that some will simply disappear and others will want to return home.  For this latter group, the elders now require for re-entry a doctor’s exam and certification that they are HIV and STD free.  It’s a bit of problem because the diagnostic test for HIV takes three months to wait for the antibodies (which are what the test detects) to build up enough to be measured.  But generally the kid is wanting to come back because of being in some distress and not really able to undertake a wait of months.  An elder will accompany him to the office and demand to see the test results.  State law might not accommodate this.

As with all groups thinking about sex, thoughts wandered and personal experiences came to mind.  The leaders did a pretty good job of keeping the focus.  This was specifically and only about HIV, though other issues like abuse might be hitch-hiking.  I had been told earlier than everyone in this state who needs HIV meds is getting them, but today I heard that the waiting list is eight to ten people long, which is so short compared to other states that people are moving here to get on this list.  The list is not for the meds directly, but for the money to access the meds, which comes from a variety of sources.  The meds are incredibly expensive (thousands per month) and the programs are essentially a pass-through for subsidies for Big Pharma.  There was no railing against Big Pharma.  There was considerable concern for toeing the line, plus quiet wink-wink advice about underground contacts.  No one spoke of sequestration consequences which presumably kick in today

It’s curious that in a state where there are so many ranchers and veterinarians who handle drugs and needles all the time (to say nothing of fist-fucking cows) that these rural people were never mentioned as a source of advice or actual paraphernalia.  Once again, HIV-focused services are almost all located in the major cities, except that it seemed every rez except the Blackfeet was represented.  I asked about Internet access to needles, but no one had experience with that.

Much of the workshop was role-playing with assigned roles.  I was assigned the part of a 45 year old man-who-has-sex-with-men.  We don’t say “gay” men anymore -- we say MSM, because these people don’t consider themselves gay, are usually the “bottom” (meaning the receiver and more at risk, but more likely to rationalize it as passive -- so they aren’t “doing anything”), and are often in sexual relationships with women as well, maybe marriage with kids.  

So I pretended I was a truck driver who was making a mint off the Bakken Formation -- REALLY good money -- but it meant being on the road four or five days a week.  My wife didn’t like it but she realized we would be able to put the kids through college if I could keep it up.  The trouble was that I had to really be sharp, even when I was exhausted by the hours, the weather, and the general tension of making sure maintenance on the truck was done, keeping the deadlines, and so on.  Sometimes I used speed, I smoked a lot, and I had a hard time sleeping on the road in the cab bunk.   I didn’t dare drink or use sleeping pills.  But if some guy gave me the right signals at a truck stop, an encounter was really relaxing.  It really helped.  But I didn’t know whether he used a condom or not.  What did I know about what he was doing back there?  I could smell lube, but . . .   I didn’t really want to know much.  At the same time my wife wondered why I didn’t want sex with her anymore and accused me of not loving her.  I assured her there were no other women. I couldn’t stand it if she left me.

“My” advisor (female) was inexperienced but earnest and expressed sympathy while pressing me to see that I must at least make sure about condoms, and to realize that if I gave my wife HIV, she would REALLY be lost.  The whole family would be affected.  So why not get brave and get tested?  Just as a little step in the right direction.

The keynote speaker and leader was D. Gregory Smith, executive director of AIDS Outreach to Bozeman.  47, gay, poz, handsome, partnered, formerly a priest trained at the Vatican, and now a certified Gestalt practitioner in both Washington and Montana, he sounded too good to be true, but he turned out to be a real Montana boy who had narrowly survived death twice, and returned from Seattle to his home state in gratitude, “giving back” as they say.  He’s big and resourceful now, but as a child he was bullied and trampled in the all-too-familiar way.  He’s kept a calm gentleness that I think did not come easily.

Over the past fifty years (not so much the past ten) I’ve attended so many seminars, panels, workshops, working groups, committees, etc. that I almost get hives walking into these motel rooms with their plaster facades and perpetual coffee urns.  My name (fibertip on construction paper tent) kept falling off the table onto the floor, like some omen.  But in the end, like the Seventies workshop Bill Haw organized for white teachers of Native American Head Start and kindergarten kids, the people themselves were interesting, focused, and open.  The consequences of a half-century of self-inventories, games, role-playing, reframing and redefining by various institutions have been subtle but they were nevertheless effective.  If it hadn’t been for all those years of work in so many places by so many people, we would never today be able to publicly and calmly discuss what people at risk for HIV could do about it, without ever judging them or blaming them for how they came to be at risk.  Just getting on with it.  In the Sixties HIV-AIDS was unknown and the very word “net-working” was new.  Most of the people in the room yesterday had not been born yet.