EXPECTATIONS SHAPE POPE FRANCIS

A child, worried about his pet, asked a famous theologian whether dogs could go to heaven and whether they had souls.  The theologian thought for a moment and said there was really no way for us to know this, but we ought to act as though they DID have souls that went to heaven.  Then we would treat them with dignity and love.

There’s a second story.  The Hell’s Angels finally got to thinking about their image and resolved that they would improve it.  So they were roaring down the highway one day and came to a motorist stopped alongside, tinkering under the hood of his car, clearly broken down.  These guys were pretty good mechanics, so they stopped to help out.  The motorist, looking up and seeing these scary guys advancing on him, panicked, pulled out the oil dip stick and defended himself by slashing at them with it.  So they beat him to a pulp.

With those tales in mind, let’s think about the new Pope Francis presumably named for Saint Francis with all his associations, especially the Zefferelli movie “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” which was the favorite movie of Mother Teresa’s nuns.  There are three movies about Saint Francis but they won’t stream.  I’ve ordered the discs.

But what if the new Pope was thinking of Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral (1540 – 27 January 1596) who was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan Era, knighted by his queen in 1581.  He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the second circumnavigation of the world, from 1577 to 1580. He died of dysentery in January 1596 after unsuccessfully attacking San Juan, Puerto Rico.  

Or how about Francis M. Drake, an Iowa governor and Civil War veteran.  (Union officer.)   Or what about Frances Drake (1912 - 2000), an American film actress best known for playing Eponine in Les Miserables (1935).  She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Pope” is one of those jobs that changes people because it reveals so much privileged knowledge to them that it transforms their understanding of the world.  “Dear Abby” became far more tolerant and human after reading her mail for a few years.  Something like the same has happened to most of the Supreme Court judges (not Scalia or Thomas who remains cloaked anyway.)  Everyone is looking for small clues: Francis said “Brother Cardinals” instead of “Lord Cardinals.”  What shoes are he wearing?  (I haven’t heard.)  At meals he looks for a space among the others instead of insisting on a reserved special place.  Suddenly everyone is reading up on Argentine history, which is very mixed.  How does this Francis fit into that?  Did he oppose cruelty and corruption?  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-eisner-pope-and-argentinas-dirty-war-20130317,0,166222.story  It sticks in my own mind that the worst of the Nazi torturers and genociders were finally found in Argentina.  (But also a major population of Jewish refugees.)  I don’t even know the specific story of their indigenous population.  Only 25% of the population is observant Catholic.  (45% in the USA.)  

Here’s a friendlier version. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/14/opinion/ghitis-pope-argentina/?hpt=hp_c1

 He strongly opposes gays but rides the bus.  He fights poverty and inequality, but he opposes Liberation Theology, a great source of reform.  He is friendly and cooperative with Jews (says he will open the Vatican archives to discover what really happened during WWII) but no one knows what he thinks about Buddhism or Islam or indigenous religions.  His “in-house” charge seems to be double:  get rid of the predators of children and get the money straightened out.  We’re not used to this face.  Does he remind you of Gomer Pyle or Jonathan Pryce? 

In seminary there used to be talk -- mostly when the denominational people were around -- about the way that congregations shape their ministers through their expectations and reactions.  This was why internships were so important: would the “teaching congregation” have enough patience to tolerate blunders, maybe fairly serious ones?  Would they expect or even insist upon the qualities that people want?  We know how our media invents and feeds on quarrels, exaggerates honest differences into deadly rivalries, does its part to create martyrs because that sells books.  (Even though no one seems to read the very books they vilify or exalt.)  But do reporters really dig deep for facts and dynamics?  Any more than congregations examine their ministers closely?  

In the major professions where people have great power (medicine, law), the practice in the past has been to depend upon peers to govern each other, but technically at least, the Pope has no peers.  Until now.  How much will Benedict interfere with Francis?  His assurances don’t mean any more than they did when he had no peers, but now he has an equal, too.  What if Francis finds out that Benedict’s dear attendant, nicknamed “Gorgeous George,” is more than a helper?  At some points in history such problems are dealt with quietly -- the offender disappears.  We don’t do that anymore -- except in Argentina in the recent past.

What a cliff-hanger.  Slightly mishandled, this papacy could be the end of the Roman-style Catholic Church.  We already have the Anglican, Lutheran and Episcopalian shards from past controversies.  But they say the real rival in the Southern Hemisphere is the Evangelical church -- going directly to God through the Bible, discarding the machinery of earthly institutions.  Everyone is his or her own Pope, Archbishop, Cardinal and Priest.

The wild card is poverty.  Whether one considers it a cause or a result, whether one thinks poverty is waxing or waning or just changing shape, it is the marker for the effectiveness of religion in guiding us to survival, whether individual or en masse.  And the even wilder card -- indeed, the whole deck -- is planetary climate change and the accumulating pollutions and erosions of the Anthropocene Era which will certainly require us to be fewer and possibly force the death of billions on us.  It does now -- except that the dying are mostly anonymously poor.  No one misses them -- not really.  Will the Pope lift them up?  With a blessing or a scourge?

It seems to me that the people who demand equality assume that it will mean lifting everyone up to a middle-class American standard of living and education.  This is impossible: there are not enough resources on the whole planet.  We assume that everyone everywhere will live the same, but this is also impossible.  Some will live where there is plenty and some will live on the desert.  The way we think about this, including the way our expectations affect our leaders, will deeply affect how we act.

___________________

NOTE:  The four ancient patriarchates (splinters of the original Christian catholic church) enjoy the highest prestige.  Patriarch means the same as Pope.  These men do not meet.  As Popes, they do not require celibacy but are otherwise quite conservative and ceremonial.

Two among the many sub-groups still have some power.  In the Greek Orthodox Church: Patriarch Theodore II is young for a Pope (b. 1954) and seems altogether honorable and progressive, devoting himself to art and charity.  He doesn’t seem particularly political, coming to power because his predecessor was killed in a helicopter crash, and unanimously chosen.

Head of the Russian Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kirill, who has extended friendship and suggested collaboration to Pope Francis.  He is in the midst of a scandal over a $30,000 wristwatch and other luxuries.  He and Putin are buddies.  Kirill is the man who had Pussy Riot, the female rock band, arrested for demonstrating against him in front of the church.  The women were imprisoned for five months.

Read more: Orthodox Eastern Church: The Patriarchs and Churches | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/society/orthodox-eastern-church-the-patriarchs-churches.html#ixzz2NitJbK3T

MARCH IN MONTANA: Remarks

“March in Montana”, one of the Great Falls auctions that hitchhikes on the major auction in celebration of Charlie Russell’s birthday, is “featuring” sculptures by Bob Scriver and Earle Heikka.  There are points of similarity between the two men and also significant points of difference.  Heikka and Scriver both had backgrounds in taxidermy at museum levels where dioramas are the goal.  Both are local, Heikka born in Belt and Scriver born in Browning.  Heikka (1910 - 1941) was older than Scriver and committed suicide while Scriver was in the service in Edmonton, before the latter began serious sculpture.  They were not acquainted.  Both men did Western genre subjects: pack trains, cowboys and Indians, and stagecoaches, but Scriver’s work included many other subjects including portraits and a small group of religious works.  He's best compared to the French school of Beaux Arts sculptors who created many of our familiar monuments: men like Fraser, Procter, Saint Gaudens, and so on.

Heikka worked in a very difficult medium, “Marblex,”something like paper mache which cracked badly when it dried.  It required much patience to master and didn’t receive or hold detail very well.  As far as I know, Heikka didn’t cast them in bronze during his lifetime.  His pieces were one-of-a-kind, hand-painted.

In contrast, Scriver worked in plastilene, was a master mold maker, and built his own foundry, the Bighorn Foundry, in order to have total control.  The bronzes cast in those days were silicon bronze using the Roman block method and had a very specific patina meant to be like those of the Animaliers cast in Paris in the 19^th century.  They were numbered in small editions, certificates were issued, and sales were recorded in a master book that appears to have gone missing since the Montana Historical Society, who received Scriver’s estate, can’t seem to locate it.  Possibly it was intercepted before the estate was moved.

In the early days Scriver cast in hydrocal, a very hard version of plaster, and he kept a key casting of each piece in case something happened to the mold.  (Since metal shrinks when it is cast, molds made from previous bronzes will be slightly smaller.)  It appears that one of the pieces in this auction is one of those key castings.  If the mold was made from black tufy cold molding compound, it would leave the piece discolored this way.  It's hard to know how to value something like this.  We used to set the price of hydrocals as one-tenth the price of the bronze, but if it were the mold key, it would be worth far more as a production basic.  It's not much to display unless painted and could easily be broken if struck or dropped.  It ought to have been destroyed at Bob's death.

"Lone Cowboy, 1880".  Created in 1968, no edition numbers.  This specific piece was a companion to the original “Lone Cowboy” which was Bob’s trademark for many years.  It was also a “breakthrough” in a different way, the first of Bob’s work that was consciously designed.  It was the piece Warren Baumgartner, a master watercolorist from NYC, helped with in order to teach Bob composition.  Heikka never had the benefit of such lessons.

One of the most complex of these composed sculptures is “Real Meat”.  Created in 1964 , numbered 8.  Original certificate included.  The phrase is the original Blackfeet name for buffalo.  These animals are specific buffalo that Bob measured and studied at the Moiese National Bison Range.  The men were modeled by members of the Kicking Woman family and the horses are taken from Bob’s own horses.  This large piece is in a different scale, a different style, and a different composition from the Russell sculpture to which is it sometimes compared.

"The Hornaday group" is a famous remnant taxidermy group in the Smithsonian.  Since it was showing signs of age and needed some refurbishment, this bronze was created for sale to finance that work.  Inscribed "Special to Loran & Delores Perry" which means it was not numbered.

Other buffalo portraits include “Herd Bull” which is the study for the buffalo bull that once stood in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife.  This is #5 of 110.  It claims to be cast by the Proctor family in the '70's.  I know nothing about that.  110 is a large edition.

The “breakthrough into bigtime" notice came with the large rodeo series that developed out of the commission from the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association to do an heroic-sized portrait of Bill Linderman.  The Calgary Stampede bought a complete set of these bronzes.  These pieces have only recently begun to show up in auctions.  

The most spectacular  and graceful is “Paywindow,” the bucking horse on one foot.  It is nearly balletic.  This is numbered 17 and was cast in the Bighorn Foundry, Bob's own.  Original certificate is with it.

"Not for Glory" is the pickup men, one taking off the rider and the other getting hold of the horse.  This is copy #2, cast in the Bighorn Foundry, Bob's own.  Original certificate included.

"Headin' for a Wreck" is the steer-wrestling event.  Those in the know would see that the cowboy's timing is just enough off to make trouble.  This is the #6 casting and was cast by Powell Bronze Foundry, which was run by Eddie Powell, Ace's oldest son.

Later there were smaller “cowboy” pieces.  This one is old-timey and uses Bob’s longhorn steer, “Tex.”  He called it "When Cutting Was Tough."  #55 of 110.  Arrowhead Bronze Foundry.  This foundry used ceramic shell casting.  The high numbers were common with Bob in the later years.  There is no "law" -- not even business law -- that controls the number of castings in an edition.  Severely limiting the number was a convention in the early days when molds lost detail in every casting.  It was a gentleman's agreement that Bob came to despise as bad business practice since modern molds don't lose detail.

Bob liked to work in groups around a subject.  The Lewis & Clark monument commissions for Great Falls and Fort Benton were financed by the sale of smaller castings, sometimes replicas and sometimes on the same theme.

"Captain Lewis & Our Dog Scannon"  turned out to be misnamed.  The dog's actual name was "Seaman."  Arrowhead casting.  The dog that posed for this Newfoundland dog was named "Windsor."  This is casting # 26 of 150.  The dog (and the slave York) actually belonged to Clark.

"Capt. Wm. Clark, Map Maker."  #26 of 150.  Arrowhead casting.  Actually, he's surveying here and will record numbers from which maps can be constructed.  Since this casting has the same number as the one just previous, they were probably sold together.

"Lewis, Clark & Sacajawea", #25 of 35, is a small version of the Fort Benton monument.  Actually Pompey is in it as well.   Created in 1974. The Certificate of Authenticity that comes with it is issued by the Lewis & Clark Memorial Committee.

This “set” is a series of “collectibles” on the theme of coffee, suggested by an entrepreneur.
Coffee Break Series: "Coffee Break," "Batwing Chaps," "Wells Fargo Cargo," "Bull Durham Cowboy" and "The Sheriff."  Set #141/250.  Arrowhead castings.

A few other individual old-timey pieces might be commissioned or just be inspired by reading or conversation.

"Salute to the Buffalo Robe" is inscribed "Special to Loran & Delores Perry" so is not numbered.  Created in 1995.  Commissioned to celebrate the 150 anniversary of the establishment of Fort Benton and includes a certificate of authenticity from the Fort Benton Committee as well as being inset with a Fort Benton 150th anniversary medallion.

 "Defending the Mail" created in 1989.  #27/150.  Arrowhead casting.

"1861 Mail (Pony Express)" Created in 1991.  #7 of 100.

"Montana Trapper." #96/100  Created 1976.  Arrowhead casting.

Of course, Scriver continued with the animal pieces.  This one revisits the idea of two bull elks fighting over a cow, but uses a different composition.

"To the Victor"  #54/75  Arrowhead casting.  Late in life Scriver's human figures seemed distorted sometimes, but his animals always kept their anatomical accuracy.  One could look at the high number sold of this piece as either damaging its value because it's not very scarce, or could see it as an indicator of popularity, which is always good for sales.

More information is at the "March in Montana" website.  

THREESOME

Her worn-through red plaid flannel bathrobe wasn’t quite warm enough this early in the morning, but being a little chilly in spite of hot coffee was not unpleasant and kept her alert for writing.  Out the window behind her computer the sun gilded a branch.  Inside the window, under the lamp, curled the cat.  Who should she be today?  Who had she always wanted to be, way down deep, the opposite of an old stout woman who never got enough exercise.  

She blew her nose -- it dripped when she was chilly -- and stuffed the tissue back into a big patch pocket of the robe.  The name of the lover from “Ramona,” Helen Hunt Jackson’s classic romantic novel, came to her mind.  Alessandro.

________________

Alessandro had gotten into the middle of a long-standing feud between factions of his Indio family up in the remote mountains of Mexico.  He had killed his uncle, not intending such a thing, and was now afoot, going north, joining the streams of more intentional travelers headed for American cities.  Thin but with defined strong muscles, he was not finished with his coming-of-age.  People looked at him -- he had a handsome face.  When he washed naked in a stream, immodestly, people’s eyes slid down his sides to that fleshly arroyo at the top of the hip that leads to the brushy tangle of convergence.

Ten years later he had found a role in the SW states as a whore for men, but not an ordinary one.  One shoulder was tattooed with the Chinese word for War and the other side said Peace.  It meant nothing.  They could have said love and hate or yin and yang or left and right.  He just wanted the two-sidedness.  Also, he had asked the tattoo artist, who was very skillful, to color his ear lobes blue with a tiny orange butterfly on one of them.  Instead of earrings, he wore wide silver cuffs on the outer rims.  His hair was long, bleached white, and his skin was burned dark.   He wore chambray blue workshirts, open to his silver belt buckle, and loaded his wrist with jingling silver bangles, which oddly suggested the Navajo to people who didn’t know Indians -- even though Alessandro stayed in the SW where they should have known.  Bangles were actually more of a gypsy affectation he had seen in a magazine.  Some called him “Sidewinder,” after that sideways snake, but others just called him “Winder” because he wound people up.

He was a connoisseur of experience, which meant both sensations and drugs, the interior sensations.  He was a creature from a Coleridge poem (someone told him -- probably some overeducated female) but also -- far beyond opium -- like some shrewd amateur scientist in a rogue laboratory.  How far can arousal go before losing control?  What degree of tumescence can be tolerated before numbness sets in?  For himself, he liked to plunge into the unknown abyss, deranged hallucinations like whitewater rafting at spring peak flood stage, no guarantee of survival because he sought that uncertainty where the knife edge cuts into the fog, revealing that nothing matters -- not really.  After the tattoos he never allowed needles again.  Not out of caution, but because he wanted no injections, no piercing of his skin’s velvet surface.  That was his boundary, his conceit.

____________________

It was at this point that the writer always had to take a break, walk around, brew more coffee, let the image and possibilities build and swell into a story.  Should this tale have a happy ending?  Should she summon dragons or snapdragons?  It was time to add the next character.

________________

Then one day he realized he was just plain puking sick and had to find a clinic, in spite of his resolve to never intervene in his own life except to mess with others.  Pain he understood, even sought out -- the bruising, the cut of the whip, being tied into impossible positions until he ached, all taught him something though he could not have said what.  They gave him visions.   But nausea was different.  And he hated the smell and mess, to say nothing of the humiliation.  Diarrhea, worse -- he didn’t have easy access to facilities and fresh clothing.

The doctor was black.  That was a surprise.  And he was very big.  He took Alessandro in his hands, moved his limbs, tapped his joints, pressed his abdomen hard, slid his stethoscope lightly against front and back, and peered into his dark kohl-rimmed eyes with a tiny flashlight.  He said,  “You are very sick.”  Alessandro said, “I have no money,” which was true at that moment.  “No matter.  I will take you home,” said the doctor, and he did.  It was confusing, because this doctor lived in an old adobe with a walled yard, very spare and humble except for books.  “You have AIDS,” said the doctor.  Alessandro said nothing.  The doctor said, “So do I.”

From then on they lived together, slept together, ate together, had sex together but not in any conventional way.  Alessandro tried all his tricks of teasing, stroking, evoking emotions by singing or telling stories, pretending not to know what he was perfectly aware of.  But the doctor knew how to observe and always saw both the surface and the depth.  He had cut people open and knew that they were not filled with sofa pillows but rather drenched in blood and cleverly knotted.  Each man had a small wall cabinet, Mexican, carved of dark wood, one with legal drugs and the other with illegal.  Both categories of substances could alter consciousness and even identity.  They did not interfere with each other’s drugs.  But they were already changing each other.

_________________

The cat jumped off the writer’s desk and went outside, making the cat flap squeak.  The day was warm now.  What is the point of this story?  What does it say about life?  Or is it voyeurism and that’s all?

__________________

One day Alessandro was attacked by some men who had always used his services until he had disappeared.  If they could not have him, no one could have him, so their attack was savage and left him sprawled senseless in the street.  But they didn't rob him.  The doctor came looking for him and carried him back into the shadowed adobe, his dangling arm jingling, to the simple white bed.  Maybe he should have taken him to a hospital, but he knew that would only prolong the inevitable.  He thought, “Life is a trajectory, like an ejaculation.”   And he thought, “I am a healer, but I have limits.  Has this boy gone beyond them?”  He prepared a syringe with a glittering needle, like a tiny stiff viper.

____________

And the writer thought, “Is the protagonist the healer or the boy in this story?  Should I have the doctor lie down alongside the boy, dying with him?  Should the doctor intend to do this and take fatal drugs, only to have the boy wake, like Romeo and Juliet?  Would that change the meaning?  But what IS the meaning?”

It isn’t really possible to be a writer without having some kind of philosophical position.  What template is under this story -- the impossibility of real permanence even in relationships, the ephemerality of human life along with every other kind of life, the excruciating beauty of the moment and the gift of experiencing it?  What is the relevance of morality?  She thought,  “I can only answer the last question.  There is no relevance to morality in this story.  It just is.”

The cat, outside, was stretched out on the deck, idly watching birds, just letting birds cross her mind.  Whatever birds are -- besides playthings.  They were certainly not worth eating.  Not like canned tuna.  In a moment she would go inside and demand some.  

The writer sighed,  "Maybe I should write about something more in my experience."

More Thoughts about "An Unquenchable Thirst"

Convent politics are an old genre.  I remember reading them in high school when they tended to be intermixed with the issues of WWII, all the passion and debris of human aspiration and suffering.  They made great movies, esp. all those crippled and emotionally shattered men and the angels in white who moved among them.  And then, later, who can ever forget the evil nun of Louise Erdrich’s tales of the rez and their dueling sorcerers?

“An Unquenchable Thirst” about Mary Johnson’s struggle to survive in the religious order founded by Mother Teresa is interesting because it IS about Mother Teresa -- such a puzzle, that woman -- and because it’s against the backdrop of the modern crisis of the global Catholic church as it tries to hold its configuration in a molten world.  So many forget that the church is an institution:  the furnace and not the fire; the stove and not the heat; a means for managing something quite inhuman that humans seem able only to touch glancingly.  How does one “manage”  (MAN - age?) a community of good intentions without sliding into hardship, jealousy, political plotting, and self-destruction?  How does one prevent devotion from becoming narcissism?  Lying on a cold floor on one's face with arms extended doesn't seem to do it.  Anyway, for a temperamental loner like me, the looser the community, the better.  Imposed discipline?  Perish the thought.  It always comes back to individual versus group.

Mary Johnson was raised with biological sisters, loves sisters and shines among them.  This provokes an opposite and unequal reaction from certain others.  I share her predicament in one aspect:  she is too useful to be discarded, but too problematic to be wholly embraced.  A person in this teeter-totter position can strive to get in -- which is what Mary did -- or decide to leave -- which is also what Mary did.  In addition, one can make camp on the boundary, which is sort of what I do.

The dramatic Sister Cruella in this story -- surely Niobe is a pseudonym and her appearance is disguised -- ignores the community circle and draws her own bull's eye around herself.  If she were a man slamming women up against walls and forcing her tongue into their mouths, she might be arrested.  (Well, maybe not in Italy.  Or the military.)  Priests, some of them, do it neither physically nor sexually but by slamming anyone “lesser” with their institutional power.  By the time we get to the end of the memoir, we hear the cry of the rapist and child molester,  “Don’t tell!  Don’t tell or I’ll kill you.”  Mother Teresa, with a hidden dark heart, rather openly sucked up to all the popes and it worked.  I am deliberately putting this in near-pornographic language, because I think that’s what it is.  I think this book IS quite a bit like “Fifty Shades of Gray.”  Titillating.  Revealing little secrets that everyone knows already anyway.

Mary Johnson’s body fought her all the way through her career with excessive vaginal bleeding, mono, sinus infections, etc. so it seems only fair that her body, responding to what I must say is ordinary human affection (hugs), began to take her out of this constant circulating through Stations of the Cross.  But in the end it was her mind she valued and her talents she used -- exactly the aspects that took her into achievement and jealousy -- then took her out and probably will do exactly that all her life.  As it does with all of us.  In, out.  It moves.

Stepping out of Holy Orders doesn’t mean escaping into the world any more than Taking Vows was a safeguard in the first place.  It’s like marriage:  Sometimes the wedding takes hold and sometimes it’s the divorce that works.  What’s troublesome is wedding vows, heartfelt intentions, tenacity of dedication, that works but in a marriage so destructive of one’s identity that a technical divorce is granted -- but the heart won’t let go.  When I said, “But I vowed until death do us part!”, a minister counselor suggested,  “The death was the death of the marriage.”

The Christian claim is vegetative:  that there is no death, only transformation -- all corpses are compost.  Jesus is just the Green Man in disguise and vines will grow out of his torn open side, his half-closed eyes.  (If I’m Christian at all, it’s in a Celtic way, with a nod to St. Patrick.)  Is it possible to design an institution that is truly organic, that doesn’t chop and mutate and make Roundup Ready until machinery crushes all the poetry and dancing out of the wild seed?  It appears that there’s always an interplay: the pendulum goes one way and then the other.  One comes out of the other.  Mary’s next forty years will be produced by her past forty years.

One could easily accuse this book of being a drama queen’s account with very little in it about why people are poor, what society must do to prevent extreme poverty, what poor people are really like, what helps the poor here and now -- and yet the whole point of being a nun is supposed to be to help the poor.  What in this account helps the poor?  All that obsessing and confessing?  Aren't the poor the point?

Seems like it’s meant more to help over-romantic young women who haven’t really thought about the grit and grunge of nun-hood. If a priest said to me, as one said to Mary, that nuns should not be educated because then they will want to leave, I realize the same as Mary did, that in some ways she was no better than an 18^th century Mississippi slave and I would shed my chains, prongs or no prongs, just as she did.  (The sisters self-afflicted for penance by wearing chains with prongs that dug into their flesh.)  But Mary Johnson is now in the jaws of agents and publishers.  They don’t want prescriptions for helping the poor -- such books don’t sell.  It was easy to take a vow of poverty when someone else fed, clothed and housed her, no matter how poorly.

I still don’t understand how a shriveled and wrinkled little old Albanian woman with a heart laden with depression, a fetish for suffering, (and a LOT of money she refused to spend on the poor) can emotionally or spiritually seduce a woman like Mary Johnson.  Was it the fact of being on the cover of Time magazine?  Was it the prizes for peace?  I conclude the irresistibility wasn’t in Mother Teresa at all, that she was a construct of the culture for its own reasons, so nations as a whole need feel no responsibility for their poor as long as they can push that off onto religious institutions defined as sort of service NGO’s, like the Lions.  Then government can ignore the vital and moral demand of the Holy and Sacred by maintaining a separation between church (institution) and state (institution) and by defining virtue as obedience to institutions.  This is NOT meant to be a pitch for a theocracy.  It is meant to show that a theocracy is just another power play.

Two pop forces address this dilemma.  One is the real image of dystopian refugee camps, people heating cans of beans over little campfires in front of tarps rigged up as tents.  The other is the horror images: the zombies, the werewolves, the vampires -- the invasion of the “Other” smelling of brimstone.  A theology or a theologically-based institution that doesn’t bring misery and sin and the uncanny into the circle will not succeed.  So tell us something we don’t already know.  What WILL succeed?  I’m hunkered in this doorway thinking about it. 

WATCHING ALVINA KRAUSE TEACH ACTING

Over the past few days I’ve watched a set of DVD translations of videos made years ago in Yankton, SD, of Alvina Krause teaching acting.  Fewer than a dozen students are present, mostly aspiring young men.  They distract me -- they are "fullavit."  I mean, they are posing for the camera, thinking about themselves, for they are good-looking, smart, etc.  Presenting themselves as poetic, attentive, and strong -- worthy.  So is AK.  She was a remarkable woman and a crackerjack acting teacher, but now she is old and the path is worn.  Still, her posture is erect, her voice oratorical.   She is dramatic.

None of us really knew her personal lives.  She gives us clues:  the ring she has moved from the ring finger of her left hand and is now wearing on her index finger, same hand.  We knew then and know now that she had a lifelong relationship with Lucy.  Was this a wedding ring?  Does moving it mean they are differing, out of sync?  She tells us about the ring twice, at different sessions and says that if the students were portraying her, they would have to understand that ring.  

The same is true of a twicetold story about a young man’s mother, icy and commanding, who comes to her to demand that AK “make her son an actor.”  She compares this to Lady Macbeth trying to make her husband a king.  She fails and the boy leaves.  She is afraid of that mother.  Who are those sons?  I know nothing about any mothers who made demands, but I can think of many a son who tried to make a mother of AK.  So what is she displacing here?  She tells the story twice.  The details vary, but she claims this is true.

At one point she repeats and repeats,  “This means everything: that I am a MAN.”  Of course, at the period it was conventional that “man” was supposed to subsume both genders.  (We thought there were only two then.)  And that they were the pinnacle of evolution.  (Now we wonder what comes next.)  She seems to be saying that we as humans should stand up valiantly with erect spines and not accept anything less from life than full value.  But is there something more?  She could have said “HUman.”  It was a point in culture when Skinner was trying to reduce us all to stimulus/response, make lab rats of us.  Is this what she meant?  That being a man meant being more than being a mammal?   

At one point she made a strong point about an actor having to include ALL humanity and twice talks about the great value of being “astonished” (her trademark mantra) by the sight of entirely different human beings.  She twice uses the example of an Elizabethan seeing a Chinaman for the first time: pigtail, silk jacket, jade.  No mention of yellow skin or slanted eyes, but an eloquent demand to understand that person’s world:  what makes him what he is?  “If you are going to be an actor, no human experience can be foreign to you!”

As was conventional at the time (my high school teachers were the same age as AK, maybe a half-dozen of them in “Boston marriages”), certain Great Ages were considered to be determiners of character and style, a kind of cultural ecology.  (How they loved Edith Hamilton!)  So the Greeks, of course, were all about the gods;  the Elizabethans were all about the explosion of discovery, including books; and the modern plays considered (Pinter, Albee, Becket) were about the death of God and the ensuing emptiness and lack of meaning.  That last didn’t appeal to her much.  She talks about how the study of Chekhov opened the door to the culture of Russia -- a little risky given the times, but a way of sidestepping the Cold War to get to Stanislavsky with his humanistic version of stimulus and response.

In these lessons on video AK soon has the student actors striding around flaunting capes, gripping the floor with their feet, chests thrown up and open to receive life itself.  There are real capes and rapiers and when the men fence, it’s clear they’ve had lessons.  The girls have it tougher: she takes their hands, smacks them in the shoulder, pulls back their hair.  The girls are A-students who have gotten good marks because of verbal skills and she wants them to drop those -- go to the sensory world under the talk.  Use their own inner life because that’s where they will find the responses that explain what is happening inside them BETWEEN stimulus and response, that which “justifies” words and actions.  When the brain is processing, the body stops momentarily.  SLAP.  STOP.

There’s an oddly Victorian quality implicit in AK, declare as she might that she stands with Hedda Gabler and Shaw.  She may be rebellious and struggle against the current, but twice she tells about receiving a package in the mail.  Eagerly she tears it open and finds that it is a newly published book of poetry by a former student.  “He’s made it!” she cries.  “He’s published!!”   Well, she never did like the idea that God was dead.  Even less would she like realizing that publishing also died, but she didn’t live to see that.

She was aware that at in her time there was a great cry that Broadway was dead and Times Square was only a cesspool of porno and drugs.  And she was part of the push-back of repertory theatres like the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, who accepted the risks of defying the culture, and made a stand practically in her front yard where she gardened to keep her sanity.  She probably had not read about the Great Vegetative Principle, which is that if you tear a living thing -- for instance, a god -- into pieces and scatter it, the bits will spring up in a whole new version of the original force.  But if Joe Campbell had dropped by to explain, she would have grinned with glee.  In a sense, she herself has been cut up into potato eyes (to use a midwestern metaphor since she was from rural Wisconsin) and planted all over the planet.

All the articles talk about AK’s genius for making stars by teaching them the Method, but that’s the usual media distortion and the usual institutional greed for marketing by boasting about alumni and begging them for money -- all the time refusing the testimony and recommendations of alumni.  The bourgeois culture of curiosity, airs and graces (the silver comb), and the conviction that their world-view is true, was dying at the end of AK’s life, along with God.  “Good riddance”, she ought to say.  But she is aging, has just survived the attempted destruction of her work -- which had originally been evoked and sheltered by the same institution that now swept her away.  She is a “man” and she stands like Antigone against the carnage of greed-based culture, commodified fun, enforced mediocrity.

The limitation of these videos, valuable as they are, is that they are not the live presence of a human being with all the richness that “real” can provide.  AK’s methods (as many versions as there were students) worked very well for film, but the real heart pulsed on a stage.  Until she slapped you into responding, you were not breathing.  You had to STOP!   THINK!  WHAT IN TIME ARE YOU DOING?

"GROWING UP IN GLACIER PARK" Review

“Growing Up in Glacier Park” by Floyd W. “Bud” Lutz is mostly about the first half of the twentieth century in the little railroad town that is one of three Blackfeet reservation resort towns (the other two are Babb & St. Mary) or one of three Glacier Park towns (the other two are West Glacier & Apgar), depending on how you look at it.  In the distant past the town has been a sort of headquarters anchored by both the Park ranger administration and the primary Louis Hill huge log resort hotel of an east slope Glacier Park complex.  As events unfolded, like the completion of the Logan Pass “Going to the Sun” Highway that diverted summer traffic away from town and the contracting out of the hotel management, the town shrank until some might say it was a little too small for the egos in residence.

Certainly the egos were legendary and historical.  The children of Malcolm Clarke, whose murder triggered the Baker Massacre, established a ranch uphill behind where the Big Hotel is now.  Nothing was there then but a choice spot.  No one was surprised since Helen Clarke, the daughter, was in charge of divvying out the Blackfeet tribal property into individual homesteads.  She did manage to delay it for a long time, but in the end she, Horace, and Malcolm Jr. came to stay.  Malcolm Jr.’s son, John Clarke, was a deaf-and-mute woodcarver of considerable renown.  His daughter, Joyce Clarke Turvey, has run a gallery on the location of his studio until this summer, when a bad fall has put opening in doubt.

The town expands each summer to accommodate tourists, then shutters and hibernates to survive the winters.  Attempts to develop winter resorts have failed, in part because of the severe weather, not just sub-zero temps but also hurricane force winds.  But in winter you needn’t worry about bears climbing on the roofs to lick smoky grease off the chimneys.  This book is domestic, family-centered, and mostly about boy-stuff:  fun, food and romance in about that order.  There’s an exciting robbery at the end.

Very little in this book is about Blackfeet.  There is a “glass wall” between Park people and Rez people, even now, but more so then.  Even the white kids in Browning are invisible.  Bob and Harold Scriver went to the same school about the same time as Bud and Buzz Lutz, and relations between the two families were cordial but entirely unmentioned here.  In fact, there’s not much about Park rangers.  The only Blackfeet are the tribal elders who made a living over the summer by wearing buckskin and eagle feather parade outfits to meet the train, putting on “rain dances” in the evening, and living in tipis on the lawn.  They made very little impression on Bud Lutz.  He did admire cowboys.

The category of white-run small businesses is not explored much in most books about this area.  This may be due to so many of them having their roots in boot-legging -- not the scurrilous rum-running that undermined the Indians, but the Prohibition moonshine supply for insatiable tourists.  Glacier Park was an out-of-the-way spot with confused jurisdictions and locals poor enough to wink. That soon developed into quiet connections to people like Al Capone.  The boys ran a brisk business in recycled bottles.

A big part of the story is the horses and dogs, their names, life-histories and exploits.  Horace Clarke loaned the boys a horse and finally gave it to them.  Much of what boys were good for in those days was finding and bringing in livestock, so they valued good animal helpers.  Because of their gender and their participation in the castration of calves, they took a lively interest in prairie oysters and their unknowing consumption by greenhorns.

Much of the family history revolves around the three incarnations of Mike’s Place, a huge barn of a building on Highway 2 that burned down twice.  At first the venue for dances and skating rinks, by the Sixties it was divvied up into shops and the versions of restaurant that Buzz ran: a short-order counter, a hot dish cafeteria, and an upscale restaurant, all sort of connected and interacting, but only in the summer.  These were hard-working and thoughtful people who chose their mates carefully and put their children to work early.  Even in the later years the summer work in East Glacier moved in winter over to the west side where ski resorts were thriving.  Maureen Little Dog, Buzz’s daughter, became a world-class patissiere (pastry chef) but that was later than this book.

For persons interested in the development and establishment of a rising middle class in an interstitial environment, part entrepreneurs and part opportunists, this book belongs on the shelf with Ray Djuff’s insider accounts of the Glacier-Waterton International complex, the constantly useful books of Jack Holterman (hard to come by as they are), and other accounts like John Fraley’s “A Woman’s Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park from 1925 to 1990.”   Murton McCluskeys’ book “The McCluskey Boys: Adventures in an Indian Boarding School” (reviewed here 5-28-12) is much like the lives of the Lutz boys.  Many layers and aspects remain: the engineering of Going to the Sun Highway, which is now failing; the grizzly stories (Do not read “Night of the Grizzlies” at bedtime!); adventurous women in the Park like Mary Roberts Rinehart or the “lady artists” attracted by the Reiss brothers; the many artists that were subsidized by the railroad to create advertising art (Sharp, Fery.  Not Russell who had a cabin on the west side where he was mostly a private citizen).  

Most published material is to make money, rarely this kind of naive self-published account of ordinary kids, a good corrective to outsider’s assumptions.  I read this book with a growing stack of other books at my elbow, picking up relationships that were mentioned other places but never tied together until Bud told about them.  It’s a little like reading old newspapers from one area: events thicken until a multi-dimensional picture develops.  Names come up that I recognize from stories but also still see in the phone book.  Old feuds and catastrophes, not very significant at the world history level, have a sort of “butterfly effect” on how things have turned out a century later.

The problem of how to find local books is helpfully addressed by the used book market and categories via Amazon et al.  But the problem remains of knowing what to put in search engines when you have no inkling that it exists in the first place.  I put in <"Glacier Park"  bibliographies> and got a lot of interesting stuff.  I put <“East Glacier, Montana”> into Google and then hit “images” which brought up page after page of images, both sublime and banal, but I don’t know what they would mean to an “outsider” without the stories about who built the businesses or named the mountains (and then renamed them for political reasons as well as giving the town itself at least three names, not counting railroad sidings).  In the end a person just has to go there and spend time sitting around listening to stories.  

This year the sequester means Logan Pass will be plowed out late and the campgrounds will have fewer amenities.  But the waterfalls will be turned on again and the trails will be unrolled.  The layout of local businesses is different every year -- some come, some go.  Locals follow the cooks rather than the cafes.  The restaurant in what was “Mike’s Place” is scheduled to open again.  I don’t know who’s cooking this summer.  Buzz and Bud will be supping elsewhere.

Scott Company Publishing

PO Box 9707

Kalispell, MT 59904

1-800-628-0212

scott@scottcompany.net

$15.95 plus s&h

DATA IN A WORLD OF HURT

The BBC mini-series called “The Last Enemy”  purports to be about the future, but is actually now.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0966151/  It’s about compiled government info and how willing some are to use that info to control and eliminate us -- without any tiresome courts to review drone strikes on American citizens. I’m just paranoid enough that it doesn’t leave my mind.  

The series didn’t get the best reviews, but I’m still reflecting.  A wiggle of a pen and “sequestration” or some other strategy removes help for a lot of people, throws them out of the safety net.  I’m partly protected by living very low to the ground: I can’t fall far.  My best protection is that over the years, esp. the last decade, I’ve learned a new language I can best describe as “image jazz.”  Or maybe “affinity jazz.”  That is, there is a melody in there but it is almost florally elaborated by riffs and quotes and overlays and small fish-like leaps into the air.  Bureaucrats with databases sitting behind screens wearing headphones can’t interpret, even if they realize it’s interpretable.  Not even Edge or TED can explain how, though they give it a shot now and then.  It is experience-based -- not learned from books.  The kids know.  This is their first language.

If you (or a spy drone the size of a bird) looked in my back bedroom window just now, it would seem I’m sitting here at a screen with headphones, but I ain’t doin’ no stinkin’ databases.  I’ve done them enough already in my life.  I helped design the little formula (not big enough to be an algorithm) that identified slum landlords in Portland and typed the list.  But the difference is that I also lived in an apartment being squeezed for profit by one of those guys.  He failed to pay the security light bill for the walkways.  Someone was fencing stolen TV’s out of the basement under the apartments.  My bedroom window was directly over the outside stairs.  One night I sat up in bed to have an interesting conversation with a PPD officer, gun drawn, trying to figure out who in the hell I was.  He was about two feet away from me, but couldn’t see me through the curtains which was a good thing.  (No pj’s.)  The next day I nailed up metal mesh over all my windows and paid the light bill which I then deducted from my rent.  I hand-delivered my reduced rent check to Mr. Slumlord in his three-story colonnaded family house.  He was merely sheepish.  I’ve walked both sides all along, mostly by happenstance.  So I connect with images.  To me they’re not abstract.  Words are.

That’s what the database people can never capture.  The New York Times has been running revisionist stories about guns, showing that the answers you get depend upon on the questions you ask and that the questions asked are rarely relevant.  So it appears that U.S. gun ownership has actually been declining.  It appears that crime has been declining.  It appears that 60% of gun deaths are due to suicide.  (It appears that the next Pope may be a man of color.)  All counter-intuitive. People are beginning to say openly that the people who are governing us, who are designing our laws and controlling our lives, are nothing like us and do not understand us and do not WANT to understand us.  They only want what will give THEM power and control.

Tim, who works with boys who have HIV, said a striking thing today.  “We are not at risk for HIV.  He already HAVE HIV.  We are at risk of Death.”  That changes everything.  This applies to ALL of us.  We know about the ordinary precautions for “safe” sex.  What are the ordinary precautions for “safe” life?

There aren’t any.  There is no safety from death.  A flaming piano could fall on you out of the sky at any moment.  The task is no longer prevention:  it is to survive.  The scientists were saying,  “Oh, there’s very little chance of an asteroid hitting us.”  Tell that to the folks in the Ural Mountains.  And stand back from the windows.

At least 280 thousand US women and girls are known to have HIV right now.  They are past the risk of catching it.  Some are pregnant.  Some of them are not aware they have it.  Some of them know but are not doing anything about it.  Most of the general public is not aware that these women exist, because they still think HIV is a gay, depraved, stigmatized virus.  A virus cannot be any of those things.  A virus is a molecular code that lives in bodies and transfers in body fluids.  Some people think it is now curable.  They’re not quite right. Only under certain circumstances.  (And only two so far, one on purpose and one by accident.)

There are things that will postpone death:  enough money for consistent access to the right kinds of meds and enough personal discipline in conforming to the protocols of taking them.  Even so, people carrying HIV are different only in that they are more vulnerable than the rest of us to what might kill anyone: pneumonia, malnutrition, bacteria, cancer, flu, heart attacks, trauma.  Money for the right kinds of meds and the motivation to manage behavior are what will help ALL of us postpone death.  But life is a chronic dis - ease, always ending in death.  The trick is what comes before that.

If the government tries to eliminate categories of nonconforming people by exploiting their need for money, they will kill a lot of other people they didn’t expect to, because you can’t tell everything about a person either by looking at them or by inventorying questionnaires. A percentage is not a human being.  Once a person has gotten past the fear of death, they are full of wealth that’s quite different from money.  People who were mute become eloquent; people who were passive become tigers.  Power mongers tend not to see mute, passive people sitting at computers with earphones on.  Until they start revolutions.  

I wonder about our hunger for extreme this and that, our demand for ultimate experiences, our appetite for prying into the lives of people we don’t know.  It seems to me that the flip side of the power and safety the landlords think they can buy is the willingness to go straight to human experience through the image jazz we can access on computers.  Not in books.  Not by numbers but by actual faces, moving. 

Maybe there are two kinds of “extremophiles”: those who are armored in their protocols and dogmas and those who have had it with all that fear-mongering.  (Extreme can be on either end of the continuum, right?)  Now these latter are committed to adrenaline surfing, daring the odds.  You want testing!  I’ll show you testing!  Can you survive this?  If it kills me, it will be worth it!  Life is a parcours, vaulting over the abyss.  For some people, that’s not a metaphor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaopu5W8Ryg

"THE UNQUENCHABLE THIRST" BY Mary Johnson

This review could be called “The Erotics of Devotion”, or  “Fifty Shades of Self-Affliction.”  “The Unquenchable Thirst” by Mary Johnson was recommended to me by D. Greg Smith at the HIV-AIDS outreach workshop.  He is a personal friend of hers.  Johnson is a former nun in the order founded by Mother Teresa, where Johnson served for twenty years, rising in rank to Mother’s side.  The book is the account of that experience and I am in the midst of reading it, but I don’t think I’ll change my mind about it very much.  There are skid-marks on every page where I balked and resisted.  It looks to me very much like just another way to pattern human desire into institutional power.  I see that some define it as “extreme religion” which appears to be another way to say fundamentalist -- that is, unyielding and not necessarily reasonable.  

It’s not much like my experience of ten years as a Unitarian Universalist minister.  That denomination is a sort of mom-and-pop democracy struggling to be a modern cyber-startup corporation, much hindered by the independence of the membership -- when you can get them to admit they’re members or agree on what that means.  I think Smith thought I would enjoy the book because of Mary Johnson’s high energy level, clear-eyed intelligence, and willingness finally to resist the tide of peer pressure.  He meant it as a compliment.  But I don’t enjoy reading about pressure to create self-doubt and then finally surrender.  To me it amounts of a form of human trafficking.  I’m with Christopher Hitchens’ opinion of Mother Teresa, which is not flattering though in the end not condemning.

But I did have five years of experience with something not unlike Johnson’s work:  dog-catching.  (Spell dog backwards:  “god-catching.”)  Rather than going out to the poor of Rome to teach them dogma (ahem) and material icons, I went out daily in a truck with a canopy, clutching a handful of slips of paper with telephoned complaints about animals scribbled on them.  This was not the pious animal care of the humane society -- though there was overlap with their officers and sometimes a total conflation if they had the contract to enforce animal laws.  This was not quite police work, since we were unarmed and our offenses were rarely felony level.  But much of our work was “moral,” getting people to respect and protect the life around them.  The individual animals -- dogs and cats, canaries and the occasional horse or cow -- were incidental.

The more one could feel that this work keeping order, cleanliness and obedience was a kind of service to humanity and a universal given, the easier the work was.  If we were bitten or punched or simply insulted  (AC officers have been murdered), one could give it up to the Great God of Law Enforcement  (Our Lady of the Scales).   The compassion was for the animals; you could say we ourselves were reviled into humility, if we could accept it calmly and just go on.  Civilization has to push back against drug and poverty induced misery no matter who phones it in.  

I doubt that anyone in the public or doing the work thought of it this way.  Mostly complaint response feels more like the many levels of authority to whom Mary Johnson (Sister Donata) had to appeal for every small need (a pencil, some thread) and to whom she had to account for every deviation from the rules.  (How powerful it must have felt for the small authorities to say,  “NO, no new pencil.  You don’t deserve it.”)  Still, animal control has a mildly parallel sort of dynamics and it serves nicely to take the adolescent imagery of non-penetrative sex out of its religious version as well as its erotic version.  What’s the difference between allowing some kinky millionaire, no matter how handsome, to spank or whip one, over against encouraging young woman to smack themselves black and blue with rough ropes or wear barbed-wire armlets as a way of submitting to God’s love?  I hope that Jesus would have been shocked and repelled, affronted that anyone would do such a thing in His Name.

And yet wars are fought in the name of Jesus and I see the same pattern in the military:  the dogma, the youthful surges of electrochemical ecstasy from risk, the breaking down to mindless obedience, and then the acceptance of decision-making that is measured in death and destruction.  It’s something built into being human, maybe even into being mammal, something so plastic that it can be shaped by cultural institutions in many braided ways.

At this point in my posts I often change directions and introduce something new that might not seem at all relevant.   Last night my movie was “Certified Copy,” a “conversation movie” where two people talk through issues.  In this case it is marriage and certainty.  Blessedly the two actors are Juliette Binoche and William Shimell  (an English opera singer.  If you don’t know him, check out  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbhXzfMgps0   where he sings “Marriage of Figaro.”  In the opera he has the same narcissism as in the movie, but the tables are turned: in the movie Binoche is the postulant, the lover and yearner, he is the one who turns away, cold.  (Alas, he doesn’t sing in the movie.)  Everything is as ambiguous, as questionable, as unresolved, as Johnson’s experience of her Catholic order.  The religious grandeur of Italy saturates everything.  In the movie one might think,  “Oh, what a lot of fuss about nothing!  Why can’t this woman just give it up?  He’s just not that into you, honey!”  The Binoche character wants to know whether her marriage was a true one or not, the same way that Johnson wants to know whether her calling is a true one or not.  That’s the real thirst.

The director/writer of the movie throws in a curve ball: a son.  An independent, rather overlooked but lively product of this ambiguous marriage, he is portrayed as sitting in front of the statue of David, unwilling to walk beside his mother but unconflicted.  Here’s a YouTube review by a “kid” with the same haircut in case you are not of the generation or class that appreciates Wallace Shawn movies.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhNvLzL28cU  

It is an “intellectual contortion” to use this movie as a guide to a book about “nuns.”  (Which has a cover of a girl in a dress suitable for First Communion or marriage, while holding a purple flower just below her navel.) Johnson says frankly that she has trouble praying to either the Mother or the Son, though the Order requires it.  She seeks the Ultimate Engulfment of the Father.  But, geez, a girl would like a little better acknowledgement than a still small internal voice that triggers a serotonin flood.  

Short of stuffing nuns into fMRI’s -- which so far has been done mostly to figure out what their brains do when they pray -- we’ll never know what is going on without their introspection.  So far -- and I suspect eternally -- what we mostly know is ambiguous and as much a product of our own intentions as Response from the Universe.  We do know that the Universe is in our heads: we think it up.  Whether it can also be a transponder/receiver that transcends all senses, we don’t know.  The Ultimate Goal of sex, war and holy orders is supposed to be total surrender.  But that obliterates the surrendering entity, doesn’t it?  All for a few minutes of engulfing bliss?  A fleeting presence?

Abbas Kiarostami is the director of this film.  Abbas means father. (Sister Donato, Mary Robinson’s religious name, means Generous One.)  When the father at the end of the film steps away, is he refusing to fulfill his wife’s desire, or is he giving her an identity of her own?  She has been dealing in antiques, many of them copies.  Are human beings the real “original” beings, though we press them into categories and portraits?  Or does their own capacity to create make them little versions of God?

I might not finish reading “An Unquenchable Thirst,” except that I went to the website www.MaryJohnson.co and saw vids that tell me she fell in love with another nun and then with a priest.  That’s not in the part I’ve read so far -- it’s not a “shade of grey” I’ve come to yet.  So I guess I’ll go on.  After all, there’s a happy ending.  She marries a perfectly nice human being (male).