I AM A MUFFIN !

Since some readers appear to believe that a writer IS what they write about, today I’m going to write about muffins, because these same rule-makers say a person should write about what they know.  I am a muffin because I eat a LOT of muffins.

There are three kinds of breads: those that are leavened with yeast, those that are leavened with baking powder, and those that are not leavened at all.  A muffin is leavened with baking powder.  

One can bake any bread in an oven or drop it into hot fat.  “Indian” frybread is either baking powder or yeast-leavened dough that is cooked in hot fat and is generally made all over the world where there are no ovens, because of poverty or because of moving around all the time or because some people just like it better fried.  It’s suited to campfires or small stoves, though it’s possible to improvise a “Dutch” oven or reflector oven to bake on a campfire.  (The first being of cast iron with a rim on the lid so hot coals can be piled on, and the second generally sheet aluminum that folds conveniently flat.)  One can cook dough in one blob (loaves) or in a lot of little blobs, which is faster (buns and biscuits).  I’ve never tried to deep fry muffin dough.  One bakes them.

Here’s my basic recipe:  a cup of rough grain like oatmeal, All-Bran, corn meal, or any “cracked” porridge sort of stuff like cracked wheat or mixed grain or Roman Meal.  (I’ve never tried Cream of Wheat.)  Put it in a big bowl and pour in a cup of milk.  (Whole milk for growing kids, skim milk for old fat ladies.)  Let it soak while the oven warms to about 450.  Baking time is usually about twenty minutes or a little more.

While that’s happening, put some kind of vegetable oil in a measuring cup -- a quarter to a third of peanut, olive, or other healthy oil.  Break in two eggs -- most recipes want one, but I like two -- and stir it briskly with a fork or wire whip.  When the basic mush is soft, mix in the egg/oil.  

Using the now-empty cup, add a half-cup or more of some kind of fruit.  Since I’m diabetic and apples or oranges make my blood glucose go up, I prefer berries.  When fresh cranberries are on the market, I freeze some bags of it.  Before throwing it into my mix, I generally run them in the food processor to break them up and then store them by the half-bag in the freezer.  Blueberries, raspberries, and so on are very good.  You can use scissors to snip up dried apricots or prunes.  I tried a third of a cup of sugarless jam (raspberry in this case) and it worked fine.  There are recipes that use applesauce or banana, but even sugarless applesauce makes my blood sugar go up and I like my bananas with peanut butter as an open-faced sandwich on “store bread.”  Dried cherries are great if you can find any that aren’t full of sugar.  Maybe dates?

You could probably include peanut butter.  Certainly a half-cup or so of peanuts or any other kind of nut is desirable.  How finely cut they are is up to the consumer, but it if using big chunks of stuff, it might be a good idea to go to a paper baking muffin cup liner.  I like chopped walnuts with cranberries, sliced almonds in oatmeal, chopped filberts in anything, but have never tried pecans or macadamia nuts -- they probably would work.  Coconut would work, but might trigger glucose.  Poppyseeds, lovely.  One important inclusion for us oldsters with (ahem) internal traffic issues is flax seeds, which are supposed to be more effective as a source of vitamins if they are whirled in a coffee grinder.

Then add to your big bowl a cup of flour mixed with two teaspoons of baking powder.  Fancy people use a sifter.  I spread the flour on top, then sprinkle on the baking powder.  I hate washing dishes.  Fold rather than stir.  As little as possible.   I use no sugar or salt.  Other people may want Splenda or -- if no sugar problems -- honey or molasses.  I like to add cocoa powder and hot chocolate powdered mix would be sweet.  Liquid flavorings, including vanilla, are fun to experiment with.  Rum, brandy, hazelnut, lemon.  I suppose the kind of stuff they put in coffee would be good and, in fact, coffee itself is lovely flavoring.  (I like to tease the barristas by asking for coffee-flavored coffee.  Only some of them laugh.)   I can get a little crazy with the pumpkin pie spices.

Some people put meat in a “savory” muffin.  Fry up bacon and crumble it into the batter, or cut up cooked sausage or hot dogs into tidbits and after the batter is put into the muffin compartments, stick them into the batter.  Nice to put hot dogs in cornmeal mix.  If going the “savory” route, one could replace fruit with grated zucchini or chopped olives.  Good for packed lunches.  Grated cheese?

I used my mother’s “heritage” muffin tin which was sticky until I wised up, dumped sentiment and bought a new nonstick pan.  I use cooking spray in addition.  I haven’t tried silicone yet.  The tin will need to cool before it’s easy to get the muffins out in one piece, but I always take the first one with a spoon into a dish with butter as a kind of test case.   No butter on my muffin after that. I never eat more than two or three a day -- widely spaced -- and refrigerate or freeze the rest in a ziplock with a paper towel folded up in it to soak up any moisture that would encourage mold.

Obviously the advantage of muffins is their tolerance of inclusions in the batter. I like being able to vary it all the time.  Diets can be a big bore.  If an idea goes badly wrong (licorice muffins?), there’s no big loss and it doesn’t take long to start over.  You don’t have to read a can to tell what’s in a muffin you made yourself.  I’d really like scones or fry bread more, but those are rare treats now, like a lot of other stuff.  

For an absolutely maniacal set of suggestions, go to:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tcR19y7GPM    People who eat muffins are not cupcakes.

The web is full of muffin recipes.  The grocery stores have a lot of pre-mixed and boxed muffin mixes.  I used to like a cornbread mix that came with an actual foil pan in the box but I haven’t seen it around for a long time.  Read the labels.  You might be shocked.

What I do is not cooking by recipe but rather by principle and practice, which is the way it’s been done since meat was first skewered to hold over a fire and tubers were baked in a pit with a fire burning on top.  But some people enjoy “proper” cookbooks.  So what kind of muffin are you?

GENDER TRAVEL

The first transgender person I knew about was James-to-Jan Morris, who is nearly ninety now -- cheerful and gentle as any granny and making it all seem rather natural that she went from being a soldier, adventurer, solidly married father of five (one baby dying in infancy) to being quite the same person except female, still married to the same female though they have to call their relationship a “civil union” now.  All along the way she shared her shift of hormones and her 1972 surgery with the same interest in vivid detail as when she was writing about cities and history in dozens and dozens of books, all praised and mostly still in print.  She’s “queenly” only if you are referencing the present Elizabeth II.  ''I've always understood incest,'' she said. “It is about love and loneliness.''  She points out that her children are perfectly matched to get along with each other.  She does not justify her nonconformity by being wicked, but by making wickedness sensible.

With wilder hair than Stephen Pinker or Margaret Atwood but always with a string of beads and a “jumper” (Brit for sweater), she smiles broadly for photos.  I haven’t found a photo of her wife.  She says the image of herself she liked the best was when she was ambiguously androgenous, which is cheering since old age makes androgenists of us all.  But then, she’s Welsh/British where irony is appreciated.  She says Americans lack irony and my experience bears this out, though I think Canadians are even worse.  No mischief.  (Except in Quebec.)  Two good links:

http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/books/reviews-and-news/interview-jan-morris-travel-writer-1-2553980   and http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/22/books/dinner-with-jan-morris-writer-with-favorite-theme-reconciliation-opposites.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

When I write about something, everyone assumes that’s what I am, so writing about sex caused one misguided local man to make advances after a town council meeting, and writing about HIV-AIDS causes people to wonder where I caught it (I do not have it), and now I suppose people will wonder whether I’m “really” a man.   Some -- after a spoof on the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment listserv -- are still convinced that I’m two gay men who built a straw-bale house near Bynum and who hunt big game for a living.  Sometimes I’m cautious in choosing subjects and sometimes I’m not.  This time it’s kind of a moot point -- I’m quite like Jan Morris except for the pre-change gender (I’ve always been female), and I can only aspire to being as good a writer.  If writing about her would mean I became like her, so be it.  In the meantime, it’s the hairdo I’ve got down pat.

One last book is to be published posthumously.  It may include her autopsy to finally satisfy curiosity about her body.  I hope it will include her genome, which seems to contain a formula for sturdy endurance and a gift for intimacy.  Of course, her “real” genome will be in her books for those who know how to read in a way that reveals the writer.  Over the years I’ve read a lot of articles by Morris but no books.  Maybe it’s time to acquire them -- I’ll start with “Conundrum” when my next Social Security check comes.  Since time slips over us all that web of slowing and squinting and forgetting, I should pay attention now.

Classically, the god of the sex change is Tiresias, who was transformed after striking a blow to two copulating snakes protected by Hera, the Wife-God.  As a woman he was said to be a famous prostitute and also to have the gift of prophesy.  Later, he was blinded by Athena, the Justice-and-Knowledge-God.  Of course, you know that two snakes entwining a staff are the symbol of medicine.  Of course, you know that all this is ancient myth and therefore no living person has these characteristics.  “Tiresias is presented as a complexly liminal figure, with a foot in each of many oppositions, mediating between the gods and mankind, male and female, blind and seeing, present and future, and this world and the Underworld.”   

Tiresias, “T” for short, is quoted many different ways over the centuries, but in one place it says:  “Tiresias in Hades is asked "what is the best way of life?" and his disconcertingly modern response, translated from high-flown diction, is "the life of the ordinary guy: forget philosophers and their metaphysics.”

“In Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto XX), Dante sees Tiresias in the fourth pit of the eighth circle of Hell. (The circle is for perpetrators of fraud, the fourth pit being the location for astrologers, sorcerers, soothsayers, diviners, and false prophets who claim to see the future when they couldn't.)”   Over the years writers and wannabe writers have not been able to leave Tiresias alone and their resentment at not being taken into his circle has been their Hell.  

But none of this touches Jan Morris.  Not because he spurns it, but because he knows what’s important to tend to.  As a world traveler, he just doesn’t go places without carrying a decent British marmalade and a hot water bottle.  The big risks and small comforts of life are important, but he has always come home to the same partner.  Some day their stone house will be a graveyard headstone that says “Here are two friends, at the end of one life”.  So one of the ironies is that in an unfaithful world, constantly pursuing new sexual thrills, what Jan has valued has been deep constancy.

Is a life like Jan Morris’ possible today?  Given terrorists and insidious diseases, I wonder.  Another famous travel writer averse to gender categories, Bruce Chatwin, more than a decade younger, was an art expert until trouble with his eyesight pushed him over into archeology and then to travel writing, though he was accused of fictionalizing.  This recurring accusation against people who have exotic lives is so persistent that it’s got to be rooted in the accuser.  That Hell of being excluded again.  Perhaps this informed his most famous book, “The Songlines” which they claim mixes fiction with “fact.”  Then he moved to specified fiction.  A handsome and charming man of polyamorous sexuality, he died in 1989 of AIDS, aged 48, nursed by the wife he had married in 1965 and with the help of the wife of a former male lover.  His writing is much valued, though he was always trapped between accusations of making things up and raging from people who thought they were being portrayed. Probably some were upset at NOT being portrayed.

Morris and Chatwin intrigue us and terrify us, because we might yearn to be able to live and write like that -- but never be able to fulfill the desire.  All anyone can do is follow what unfolds before them.  The best advice is the ancient Buddhist command:  pay attention.  And as Tiresias noted, make that attention to the “ordinary guy,” because he may be far more extraordinary than you think -- and not because he or she went to college or is a media darling, ironic as that is.

GOING TO AND FRO

"Where have you come from?" 

"From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it."

This is at the beginning of the Book of Job.  God and the Devil as circuit-riders. Once I roughed out a book to be an account of my un-godlike circuit-riding as a Unitarian-Universalist minister between 1982 and 1985.  At the time I was the only full-time UU minister in the state.  All six Montana congregations were “fellowships,” meaning they had no full-time minister.  Two fellowships opted out.  The four who remained were Helena, Great Falls, and the two university towns, Bozeman and Missoula.  The idea of the book was going to be assigning a dimension of ministry to each town: social action, ethical reflection, spiritual growth, organizational development.

I lived in an old Ford F150 van.  It had no windows, only the two front seats.  I built two plywood boxes, one across the back for a bed and one along the side for a desk.  The sides were open so I could stash stuff. (Actually, I had a little backup studio apartment in Helena but I wasn’t there very much.)  It was news to the congregation that I was there for board meetings, classes, discussion groups, counseling, and interfacing with the larger world.  They hadn’t thought much about pledging either.  From the denomination’s point of view, I was there to enlighten them.  From their point of view, the idea was to make them feel good on Sunday morning and then get out of the way. I came to one town on Thursday, preached there that Sunday morning, drove a hundred miles to another, preached an evening service, and stayed until Tuesday.  On Wednesday I slept.  Then repeated.

Each community was like an on-going play in which I had a part, but was not the director.  My first job was to understand what the play was about and then to coach the cast as they interacted.  Each town had its own “script” though there was a lot of room for improvisation.  The “cast” was liberals, outliers, artsy types, and stubborn individuals, who are generally who “auditions” for Unitarianism.  

Great Falls is a working class place. The Falls themselves, which once supplied energy for a copper refinery, and the railroad that fed it, had become less important by 1982 -- in fact, economic reconfiguration was the theme in all groups.  Paris Gibson himself, the Universalist from back east who founded the town, had changed careers several times and was sheep-ranching when he laid out Great Falls with stakes, string, and a compass.

Military was strong, both the presence of the Malmstrom Air Force Base and the missile silos scattered through the wheat fields, but it was the wheat fields themselves that really counted.  I can’t think of a livestock rancher in the group.  There was an interesting sub-group that craved culture, many of them wives of military or of ag sons who happened to be back east when they felt the impulse to marry.  We met in the YWCA.

Missoula is the humanities town -- as the bumper sticker has it, “only thirty miles from Montana.”  (West of the Rockies.)  And about three thousand miles from its self-image, which is Ivy League Wannabe.  Effort has been made to line the streets with familiar hardwoods.  The fellowship had bought Leslie Fiedler’s house when he left and kept his spirit alive in it.  Except there was a counter-current of New England abstinence and control, hierachy and status.  The fellowship had nothing to do with the timber-and-sawmill crowd and nothing to do with Native Americans.  They thought of the fellowship as a kind of faculty club.

Bozeman is the cowtown, the ag school, highly athletic.   One Easter eve I got snowed in on the parking lot of the Student Union, slept there overnight, and went in for breakfast.  I was surprised to see a hundred students, all male, clearly minority and probably Islamic. Enrolled for engineering and science, they normally weren’t obvious.  This UU group was adventurous, open to difference, and had a couple of members who were also liberal Lutherans and quiet lesbians.  The fellowship met in the quite liberal Congregational church and could talk French deconstruction.

The Helena group kept flickering in and out.  At the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century, there were so many New England engineers and bankers -- to say nothing of copper millionaires -- that the town built an elegant Unitarian church.  Since then, the church had become a library and then the Grand Street Theatre.    This group met in the chapel of the progressive Methodist church.  Once, memorably, we met in one of the grand mansions where I spoke standing on the staircase in the wide hallway while the hymns were accompanied by a man playing a grand piano in the upstairs balcony hall.

The spine of of all these dramas was “change,” not opposing it but bending to it and transforming over time -- becoming multiple and yet finding coherence.  Some of the energy came from the local social ecology. But these were coalitions of atypicals who sometimes paid a high price for their marginality, not least in terms of getting along with each other.   My wages and expenses came mostly from a pot hidden by Midwestern small-town Universalists when their denomination became so small that they were forced to merge with the larger urban Unitarians.  They did not trust city slickers.  In the end they thought that Montana UU’s were a legitimate use of their hoard, so I spent it.

The commonality between the two “U” groups was their rejection of Calvinism, an intolerant and punitive understanding of God that the Taliban would approve.  Both U’s kept the concept of God at first, but the Unitarians gradually went over to humanism/atheism and the Universalists put their trust in Jesus the person.  Both have always had a mystical strain, something like Quakers.  Part of my task as minister was to bring this history to the groups, but most of the members only felt that their group was “people like me” whom they could trust.  Sometimes they were not.  So then there was drama.

And much going to and fro between God and Devil or whatever other forces in the Cosmos one chooses to personify. The old binaries don’t work anymore.  Now we begin to see the continuums and interactions everywhere, the boundaries that can be moved or made permeable, the nations redefined, the oceans opening into outer space, the Chinese dust falling on the high Montana prairie, the water sinking away from us all.

We go to and fro over the landscape of thought much as we cross the realities of land, each of us in our own little F150 van bodies with a box for a bed and a box for a table -- only surfaces, each with an open side.  The point of the congregations is not destination but fellow travelers.  I’ve dropped out.  Now I am clamped in place, an anchorite.  But the fellowships go on.  It’s a road show, a touring company.

When April with his showers sweet

The drought of March has pierced to the root

And bathed every vein in sweet liqueur

Of which virtue empowers every flower,

When breezes also with sweet breath

Inspires every grove and heath,

Tender crops, and the young Sun

Has in “the Ram” his half course run

And small birds are making melody 

That slept all the night with open eye,

So awakens nature in her courage; 

Then folk long to go on pilgrimages.

THE EXTENDED HAND

More reflecting (even obsessing) over the issue of helping each other.  Not particularly useful, only a bit of sorting.  You probably already thought of all this stuff.

KINDS OF NEED

1.  Basic physical existence: without these basics, the life of the creature is either ended or greatly diminished:  food, water, shelter, safety, clothing, meds.  This could be one person or it could be a group of persons, perhaps a large population caught in a catastrophe or in war.

2.  Epidemic (when something like disease is in outbreak, more than usual).  Pandemic  (when something has spread everywhere).  Syndemic (when pandemics are interweaving into a complex that reinforces itself with loops and expands throughout the demos, people -- often powered by simple poverty).

3.  Disease entities: microbes, viruses, parasites, vectors, mutations (cancer), malfunctions (diabetes).

4.  Conditions that cause damage: toxins, harsh weather, shortages of the basics like fuel or certain food elements (vitamins), bad water, no cleanliness, no sunlight.

5.  Brain failure in individuals

Failure to develop

Traumatic damage -- both physical and psychological (they interweave)

Psychological programming gone wrong’

Environmental (the village of cretins in China because of lack of iodine)

Social practices that defend brain trauma, i.e. football, boxing

Operator error

6.  Justice shortfalls

Allowing stigma and stereotype to interfere

Unjust laws

Lack of thorough procedure

Adversarial system

7.  Predatory human beings

Theft

Murder

Cooking the books

Blackmailing countries with commodities and meds

Greed

THE VULNERABLE

1.  Children

2.  Old people

3.  Those lacking social skills 

4.  Those lacking marketable skills

5.  Those with uncontrollable disorders and addictions

6.  the hurt and traumatized

SOCIAL FACTORS

1.  Believing that people who are vulnerable should be discarded, destroyed.

2.  Believing that predatory people should be discarded, destroyed.

3.  Letting people be discarded and destroyed daily and before our eyes.

4.  Personal insecurity and fear so heightened that people have no peripheral vision.

5.  Fear of change

Why help individuals?

Because you might need some help at some point in your life.  Infants who aren’t helped simply die.  Same with old people.  No one is born 21 years old with a college education in their backpack, and the only way to avoid the weakening of old age is to die young.

Why help groups?

Because none of us lives alone.  The aggregate fortunes of groups, whether ethnic, vocational, class-based, whatever their gender, interact to create our polyculture out of which eventually develops a kind of identity, a “person” ality made up of persons who develop the laws by which we must live.

Economically, what happens is determined by groups.  The foods on the store shelves are there because people will repeatedly buy them -- otherwise they are removed and no longer available.  The highways are drive-able because the great majority of drivers stay within practical parameters.  Groups produce complexity which offer niches where each person might find a way to survive comfortably.

How do we find out about groups?  Or individuals?   

http://peabodyawards.com/2013/03/72nd-annual-peabody-awards-complete-list-of-winners/

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

A few days ago I heard a discussion of why the number of people receiving social security disability checks has quadrupled.  It has become clear that when ordinary welfare rolls were under pressure to clear out clients and people were forced to get training and jobs, some were moved over to disability.  Originally meant for the blind, the crippled, the physically unable to work, or possibly mentally unable to hold a job, the category became more and more extended until now it includes people who were disabled by their inability to conceive of themselves as “abled.”  

That’s one unintended consequence.  Another is that steady checks began arriving while supervision and social worker field visits diminished, because that’s how money was saved, by diminishing salaries and training for “support” workers.   A small, possibly family-based ecology grew up around the single mother, the aged parent, the blind grandfather or whoever else could get their feet under the table.  This little group might be unstable, but it might also settle into a pattern of working the system in order to keep their lives inside the circle of survival.  Since they tended to gravitate to the same neighborhoods, the many little circles became a culture, legitimizing whatever practices worked and hardening the barriers against the larger society that might not approve and might endanger the flow of checks.  Pretty soon it becomes justified by a political defense and demonstrations pointing to the incomes of the outrageously wealthy, who can be blamed but not affected, thus preserving the situation.

BIG PHARMA, WAR, AND OTHER SCAMS

Corporations, particularly big pharmaceutical companies but also the many other intermediary sub-contractors that form to dispense federal money (including tribes), soon discovered that subsidies for meds or housing or insurance or security in housing projects would mean that prices could be raised with impunity.  The needy became pass-through devices to transmit federal money to profiting corporations.

One strategy is to identify a medical need, assure the public that a specific medicine (that they sell) will help this need so that the public will demand that the government subsidize it.  This strategy helps avoid what happens when prices are set at the amounts people can pay or are cost-based.  (It’s separate from the practice of paying competitors to stay out of the market or making tiny variations in existing meds in order to claim they are new, since previously they have lobbied-through legislative protection for new drugs.  This is called “evergreening.”)  In other countries governments and corporations, notably in India, have gone the other direction, lowering the prices so that money is made on quantities sold and by the improvement of social costs.

The constant training and equipping of soldiers for the many wars around the planet means that Soldiers of Fortune and contract armies have a steady supply of qualified employees (prepared on the public dime) and possibly weapons, etc. -- as well as the need for them, while escaping any civilian or govenmental oversight and basically arming corporations.  They may represent themselves as peacekeepers but they obey whoever pays the bills.  This violates the democratic principle that the People should oversee the military.  Private security firms are growing the US.

As we all learned during prohibition, if there is an irrepressible need and desire on the part of the citizenry, their search for satisfaction will soon mean alternative hidden economic systems whether for loans, drugs, diamonds, or sex objects.  Most bureaucratic attempts to identify and suppress these underground systems will only increase the demand and, as well, create another system of “revenooers” and “homeland security” bureaucrats while losing potential tax money from transparent citizen commerce.

CULTURE

In the end what has to change is society itself so that the shifting circumstances -- something as simple but boggling as the invention of the birth control pill or walking on the moon -- can be matched with new understandings of human beings and how to make lives not just more survivable, but also far more equitable than we seem able to manage now.  What both complicates and liberates the task is that so many cultures with many different and conflicting understandings of what human life means are now interacting and struggling over whose version will prevail.  The great advantage is that while they fight it out one way or another, they may not notice that some of us are quietly inventing an entirely new way to live and finding the ways to tell about it.

I sort of hesitate to make a recommendation that may push you into a for-profit enterprise, but the posts at goodmenproject.com have been pretty interesting.

BOYS AND OLD MEN

Even the president is now interested in the black box of our brain where things happen whether we want them to or not.  Or whether we even know they just happened/are happening, which could be an advantage.  I wanted to speculate a bit about “ethology”, the study of animal behavior, and I wanted to focus on young males in the transition between childhood and sexual maturity -- not complete maturity because I’m not sure that’s a state that’s ever reached in humans.  

The latest twist on that category is that these days we are said to have two middle-ages:  early and late.  (They always choose inspiring names, eh?  At least they’re easy to remember, unlike the 19^th century practice of using Latin.)  I guess it’s a recognition of something like mid-life crisis, in which some men have either earned the basics or have passed their physical prime -- or given that they are human, the culture around them has changed enough that they may have to change jobs or the way they do them.

Let’s go back.  When male children of any species begin to be sexual, their behavior is not yet useful to the group because they can create progeny that they can’t defend, so they’re in a sort of limbo, a drain on the rest.  In most species, including humans, they will clump up into a group of young bachelors, who have adventures while they learn skills and try to dominate each other until a pecking order emerges.  For males, pecking orders are emotionally crucial.  For evolution, pecking orders are key.

Let’s go back again.  Plants are the ultimate prey, the base of the food chain -- algae and grass.  But next up the food chain is the animal prey: the grazers who always form groups and herds and prairie dog villages, which have populations that turn over all the time as some are devoured and others mature.  They don’t usually die of old age. The weak or ill or malformed or simply different (white crows) sometimes get thrown out or at least crowded to the edge where they are easy to stalk.  The ones that are speedy, stick together, eat-fast/digest-later, and sleep in the middle of the day in some secret place, survive longer.  But their real secret of success is to breed and breed and breed until they have eaten Australia.  Also, they have bulgy eyes and look out the sides of their heads like birds.

Now the predators who eat other animals.  They tend to be loners (big cats) unless they are hunting herds on grasslands where it helps to have a pack (canines and lions) that can cut individuals out of the mass.  Cats have binocular vision because their eyes are in the front of their heads like apes, which helps to climb trees and judge distance, so they can drop on their prey.  Lions are whole families and cheetahs are fast.  You could build a workshop for humans around that.  ("What’s your cat type?")  Because humans, like grizzlies and pigs, will eat anything and so it helps to have a variety of types within the species.  The more animals can exploit a variety of prey-niches, the more the species is likely to succeed.  In fact, under some conditions, predator animals will eat each other.  Hoofed animals do that only when they have given birth and are ingesting a placenta.

But prey animals, like horses or buffalo, will kill their rivals without eating them.  The rivals who suffer are those that are lesser endowed. (However that’s defined -- always remember that gorillas have small “packages” and their work is protecting the group, which they do mostly by making an intimidating hullabaloo.) Youngest males and oldest males are easily discarded by the group.  Old males often become solitary and hide out for their own protection.  Cassowaries in the New Guinea jungle and bison on the federal Moiese, Montana, bison range both do this.  On the buffalo roundup, riders are told to use caution around the brushy coulee bottoms and, if they see an old bull there, just note him and leave him alone. They’re bad tempered -- what do they have to lose?

Old male humans also find places to lay-up and can be cranky if disturbed.  My great-grandfather, widowed, tried to live with my grandfather’s family but made so much trouble he had to be asked to leave.  He died in an SRO hotel in Minneapolis as though he were alcoholic or an ex-felon when his only crime was a bad temper.  He was a skilled and educated man.  His wife, when she was diagnosed with cancer, had gone to her sisters in Oklahoma who took care of her and tolerated him.   I don’t know why it is almost comforting to think about family matters in this abstract, analytical way.  Nor do I understand why there is a strong taboo in most families about ever admitting anything of the kind when the patterns are clearly so natural in the most literal sense.  

Much of modern urban human vulnerability seems to come from the loss of the extended family that was natural in previous economic arrangements.  It’s a loss of social habitat.  Often extended rural families had room for immature boys and troublesome old men.  There was space on land for them to keep busy away from each other.  I’m impressed when I stop at a Hutterite colony to buy vegetables.  The communities have a strong sense of order and roles.  When you park, an old man or two will come out to meet you, to see what you want.  Always there are satellite boys who might boldly accompany the old man, or might be hanging around the edges of buildings so they can step back to be hidden.  Evidently it depends on the personality of the old man and how much your appearance makes the boys curious.

Once one of these boys took refuge with two alcoholic old men in my neighborhood but the boy’s father came to try to make him go home.  The ruckus of shouting and slamming attracted me and I went to see what was happening the way a cat will attend any commotion in case of mice running out.  The mice were emotions between the boy and his father -- there was no violence -- waves of desperate defiance and accusation on the part of the boy and helpless yearning on the part of the father.  The deputy sheriff came and took over so I don’t know what finally happened.  I suppose I can make it into a short story, because writers are always predators.  (Sometimes prey.)

If I were writing it as a short story and wanted to make it realistic, I would tell how the boy left walking on the highway, ended up in the underworld of Denver, got hooked on drugs, was killed in a holdup at a convenience store where the clerk was not much older than he was, but the clerk was from a foreign country where waves of war had taught children about lethal defense. So he was alert and armed.  Neither boy would ever have a middle age, let alone two middle ages.  Who’s fault is it?  Why is that relevant anyway?

TEDDY BEAR SYMBOLISM

Even in the hard-boiled and cynical (supposedly) world of Swedish murder mysteries, the teddy bear -- a stuffed toy that looks and acts nothing like a bear, not even the original yellow teddy bear that got its name from Teddy Roosevelt -- has a clear symbolism: the child’s attachment to a nurturing caretaker.  

I have a photo of myself with my beloved king-sized stuffed panda with whom I took naps when I was hardly bigger than the bear.  In a sermon I once told the sad story of this first lover, how it got so filthy that my mother stuffed it into the furnace, badly searing my emotional attachment which she always underestimated. The day after I told the story an earnest older lady brought me a little stuffed panda.  I was 45 -- she was 70.  The bear was more about her than me.  So far no one has challenged my relationship with my mother except for myself.  I have to admit I got a bit of a shudder from reading a sci-fi novel in which terraforming on another planet included the planting of real live panda bears which in an unforeseen consequence became like ferocious man-eating polar bears, except that they traveled in packs.  

I guess some people see lovers as being like that.  It depends upon how you define lovers, which are as prone to being misunderstood and morphed into psychic categories as bears are.  Non-human species and human anatomy are useful metaphors for talking about “felt” concepts that are hard to define, because definitions depend upon social agreement.  A rousing essay that ought to be read by all pre-adolescent young men is at  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/hesaid-in-search-of-the-magic-pussy/  It’s by Dr. Adam Sheck, a marriage counselor who blogs at http://passion101.com/blog/about/   He’s one of those guys that Dear Abby is always recommending.  (She’s pretty much given up on recommending clergy.)  Dr. Sheck has great hair, but keep in mind that he’s in California.  On the other hand, he could be in Sweden.  Whether he works for you depends on where and who you are.

The “Magic Pussy” is a phenomenon that can actually cause pre-adolescent and adolescent boys to plunge into despair so deep that they kill themselves.  Because the Magic Pussy is their new teddy bear, the one that means they have graduated from mother to lover.  (If the lover they find is male, the magic anatomy will have a different name.  If we’re talking about girls, it’s obvious that the Magic Wand is not quite what it was in Harry Potter movies, but it’s similar.  When a Magic Bit-of-Anatomy takes the boy in and is effective, it returns him to the Eden that was Mother.  (Assuming she was a good mother, which is a prerequisite for the yearning metaphor.  Abused and neglected boys do not yearn for a magic pussy, though their physiological yearning may still be there and may transfer to the Magic Drug.)

I’m sorry to use blunt language but it’s time to give up the taboos and fantasies that keep us from coping with reality.  On the other hand, if I use Latinate medical terminology -- which is what my mother raised me to use -- I find that most people can’t figure out what I’m talking about.  They are not in the habit of using dictionaries, so they just stop reading.

We’re not really talking about vulvas and teddy bears and yet we are.  When a child has died, we festoon trees with teddy bears in the same spirit as lighting candles, which are a little more traditional in their symbolism of caring.  Men and boys can be reassured by coition and the clever-as-well-as-magic pussy will make the experience one that truly embraces them.  But even coition is really a metaphor for an intimate relationship -- or ought to be.  People are now writing about how “hook-up culture” and “rape culture” destroy intimacy -- actually make it impossible.  We’re in a culture that burns teddy-bears because it’s good for business.  They hope you’ll buy a new one, bigger and better with batteries so it will talk.  It’s an intimacy toy.  (Of course, sex toys are old news.)

Here comes the twist.  Intimacy, nurturing, and good sex are phenomena of the brain.  The ultimate Magic Pussy is the Magic Concept:  the idea that is so dead-center or so beautifully expressed that it fills a person with joy and confidence.  This is the goal of religious thought because it feels like spirituality.  It can also easily happen as a result of art or rational research and reflection or song or ritual or meditation.  Sometimes another person gives it to you and sometimes you just find it.  It can be pursued or it can just well up or come as a clap of thunder -- entirely unexpected.  Meaning.  Belonging.

This assertion about the Magic Concept might strike someone as a magic concept in itself, but more likely not, because it’s a function of time and place, context and readiness.  This is the great problem of religious institutions:  that they want their own Magic Concept to have meaning for everyone, but there can’t be the same Magic Pussy or Magic Wand for everyone all the time.  At best an institution or a book or a practice amounts to a search, a sharing of evidence.  

Strongly motivated searches can end up with false conclusions, such as believing that “child” or “virgin” pussy is more powerful than any other kind.  Resentment against the withholding of praise is a pretty good clue that the person is really demanding confirmation of his own possession of a Magic Wand,  which is not about the other person at all, thus eliminating all possibility of intimacy.  Intimacy takes two.

Surely this neglects our felt intimacy with pets, which is reciprocal, at least with dogs, or with imaginary (maybe remembered or made-up) people who are not us, a kind of internal reciprocity.  But the Magic is about something “felt” rather than pinned down and explained.  It’s what beloved stories like “The Velveteen Rabbit” or “Pinocchio” or “The Little Prince” are about, that felt relationship we find nurturing, reassuring, and therefore “intimate.”  If that felt relationship is intense enough, it can become transcendent.

The traditional stiff yellow tightly-packed rather species-accurate bear cub has gradually morphed into a soft, floppy, chubby-limbed, flat-faced creature.  I think it is meant to be easier to handle for a small child, which means that the youngster who needs a reassuring transitional object is becoming younger than Christopher Robin, whose Pooh Bear was like the early version.  These soft and floppy bears are meant to appeal to parents -- that’s who has a credit card -- and they are (to me) disturbingly like the no-stuffing dog toys that the pet is taught to shake and pull in a tug-o-war, not unlike the felt experience of a child of divorce.

This is how the Magic Pussy becomes the Toothed Twat.  It is the deserting mother, the double-crossing dame.  Still -- decades ago one of those old stiff yellow teddies floated around the gay community on the West Coast.  Someone had given it a full set of old-man’s dentures.  It was terrifying.  And symbolic. 

A PURITAN POPE?

From the Wikipedia in Spanish:

El movimiento nació originalmente como un grupo de estudiantes llamado Gioventù Studentesca (Juventud Estudiantil), todos alumnos del liceo clásico Berchet de Milán donde Luigi Giussani era profesor de religión; a partir del año 1969 empieza a llamarse con el nombre de Comunión y Liberación. El nombre indica la idea que tiene el movimiento acerca de que el gran acontecimiento cristiano concentrado en la figura de Jesús, vivido desde la comunión, es el fundamento de la auténtica liberación del hombre.

Martin Marty, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, in his weekly online column called “Sightings” says:  “I've been warned, and will heed the warnings, to expect a hard-liner on some controversial Papal Teachings and practices . . .  I've been in the company of Those Who Do REMAIN suspicious of his ties to Communio e Liberazione, which in our company of scholars studying fundamentalist movements deemed a rare Catholic Fundamentalism.”

So I went to Google to find out about “Communion and Liberation.”  I’m leaving the links in, but they might not travel.  

“The movement was originally born as a student group called Student Youth, all classical lyceum students at Berchet Milan where Luigi Giussani was a professor of religion.   From 1969 the group begins to be called by the name of “Communion and Liberation.” The name suggests the idea that the movement is about the great Christian event focused on the figure of Jesus, lived in Communion, as the foundation of the authentic liberation of humans.” 

The founder of “Communion and Liberation,” Luigi Giussani, born in Desio, near Milan, Italy. His father, Beniamino Giussani, was an artist and anarchist who instilled in him a love of beauty, particularly in poetry, painting and music, and a desire for justice. From his mother, Angelina Gelosa, he received his religiosity. Giussani entered the Milan diocesan seminary at a young age, where he discovered a way to understand "secular" works of art (such as the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi and the music of Ludwig van Beethoven) as expressive of the religious sense and as unconscious prophecies of Christ's incarnation.”

“From its beginnings as Student Youth (1954), the life of the Communion and Liberation movement is centered in the liturgy, prayer, charity, and song. It also pays particular attention to the culture, art and music.”

“Under the new name Communion and Liberation, the movement Giussani founded attracted university students and adults in addition to high school students. Members of the movement, which Giussani led from 1969 until his death in 2005, became influential not only in the Church but also in politics and business.”

“In 1983 he was given the title of Monsignor by Pope John Paul II.  Giussani outlined his views on politics in a famous address to an assembly of the Italian Christian Democratic party at Assago on February 6, 1987.  “Giussani died in 2005. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI, delivered the homily at his funeral.”

One of the principal characters in papal intrigues is a man named Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan, another who once headed “Communion and Liberation.”  (This group is quite different from the Liberation Movement, which is one of the reasons that Francis I speaks against Liberation Theology.)  “After the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, Scola was considered to be among the papabili as the only man who might reverse what Vatican insiders see as the decay of European culture. The conclave elected Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.”

“In a review of Cardinal Scola's 1996 book, The Nuptial Mystery, Luke Timothy Johnson writes in Commonweal magazine about Scola's "condemnation not only of abortion and of genetic engineering, and of birth control, but also of feminism, of homosexuality, and of cultural traits Scola associates with feminism and homosexuality, namely individualism, libertinism, relativism, narcissism, and even nihilism.”   According to Johnson, "the cardinal's logic, in fact, seems to be that feminism is responsible for homosexuality, because the more women act like men, the more men are likely to want to have sex with other men."

“In 2013, Scola was a front-runner candidate to become the new pope, and one Italian representative even mistakenly announced Scola's victory.  (Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, S.J. was elected, and took the name Francis.)”

Wikipedia links this movement to “Agnus Dei”, to which the far right Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia subscribes.  It may be that in its struggle to pull back from licentiousness and greed, the Catholic church may have chosen a broom so stiff that it will sweep away some of our civil liberties.  If Francis I insists that Communion is the heart of the Catholic Church, what will happen to all the people who are technically prevented from accepting it?  Will he go the way of his namesake saint (forgiveness and inclusion) or will he reveal an affinity for John Calvin, who constricted and darkened so many lives for centuries -- even now?  It appears that the road forks towards the right.  

Americans -- and remember that they are about half minorities now, just as they are about half female -- both of whom in a time of financial distress are far more likely to accept the ideas of a man who lives modestly and eschews Prada red slippers -- if he will take care of them.  Churches are wise to be charitable, because it creates loyalty.

People do things for various reasons, but it is not clear that Francis I was an alternative to Benedict and Scola.  He may, in fact, have been collaborating with them for his own reasons but, on the other hand, it may have been easier for Benedict to retire knowing that Francis would succeed him since he hasn’t got the image problem that Scola does, mostly because Francis is still largely unknown.  Scalia was much admired by conservatives until he landed in the Supreme Court as the Great Dissenter, hamstrung by his own recalcitrance but able to block liberals so long as Clarence Thomas shuts his mouth and agrees.

On the other hand, there is part of me that admires anyone who stands for something clearly defined and acted upon in his own life.  If Francis is foregoing all the pomp and circumstance, the reason may be that he needs the time and energy for far closer scrutiny and disciplining of other realities.  Clearly there is a pressing list of issues that need attention and reform.  Which items get priority and what curative actions may be taken is where the Devil enters with His Details. 

In an effort to think about all this, I ordered movies about Saint Francis from Netflix.  They’re quick and lazy ways to understand the Saint’s life, but also a way to see what the appeal is.  Just looking at how many movies there are tells you something.  The first two I’ve watched were both Italian, church-approved, each three hours long and including the same facts, but reconfigured to suit different tastes.   “Saint Francis” (2002) and “Clare and Francis” (2007) surprised me when I looked at the dates of their filming because it is “Clare and Francis” that is a sort of Fifties romantic version and “Saint Francis” that is poetic: fire, water, wind, flesh and stone with a better wolf, though it’s sure not a big old Montana timber wolf.  Both the Zefferelli version and the version with Mickey Rourke and Helena Bonham Carter have long waits attached.  The attraction is, well, love without consummation:  spiritual tumescence.  Sounds like high school stuff used to be and romance novels still are.  More Mother Teresa.

ALL THE BLACKFEET MARYS

The retirement of Mary Margaret McKay Johnson has me thinking about all the Marys on the reservation whom I’ve known over the last half-century, many of them as students of high school English.  Mary Jo Bremner, Mary Jo Brown, Mary Lynn Lukin, Mary Lee Rosenburger, Mary Kay Ward, Mary Ellen Johnson.   Mary Kay Ward, the superintendent’s daughter in 1961 when I came, died young of cancer.  Mary Lee Rosenburger was the school board chairman’s daughter.  I haven’t heard about her for a while.  Mary Margaret, Mary Jo, Mary Lynn and Mary Ellen -- all about the same age --  became school people of a certain kind: dependable, warm, determined, poised, capable.  They weren’t flashy.  They were never mean.  They are almost like an unofficial order of nuns.  

In those days (the Sixties) Mary Ground was still a dynamo and the Mary Mittens I knew was an excellent beader.  I’m probably overlooking some of the Marys on this reservation, but not on purpose.  A history of all these Marys would be a pretty good guide to the early development of the Piegan.  Not all of the “Marys” were named that -- one was Eloise. I often wish I had a genealogical spreadsheet of the first half of the 20^th century, which I think would show that these women were often cousins.  Not all of them married and had children, but they became “aunties” who kept track of everyone in the next generation.  In the Blackfeet tradition, as in other tribes, the mother’s sisters are also considered mothers.

Mary Margaret McKay Johnson carries the best qualities (and there were lots of them) of both her parents, Iliff and Lucille McKay, as well as those of her husband, Randy Johnson -- also a superintendent of School District #9, who died of cancer far too young.  She is not just intelligent, she’s a good politician and demonstrated that by leading a tumultuous School District through a long comparatively peaceful time. She makes me think of Helen Clarke, the first school superintendent of Montana, who was half Blackfeet, the daughter of Malcolm Clarke whose murder precipitated the Baker Massacre.  In the midst of the violent attack on Malcolm, Helen and her sister escaped out an upstairs window and over a roof.  They went to the Clarke family in the Midwest and were educated there.  Like all the other Marys, she was beautiful -- even for a season toured as an actress in Europe with Sarah Bernhardt.  Another of this kind of woman was Natawista Culbertson, who accompanied her fur trader husband on a boat up and down the Missouri all summer, acting as interpreter, and in winter occupied a fine house (a mansion, really, with a lawn that ran down to the river).  In that season she wore a red silk dress and carried her eyeglasses on a gold chain.  

We don’t know much about these women.  History is written by men about men.  But that was an advantage in Edwardian times when these women were go-betweens, diplomats, interceders, who could quietly throw on a shawl in the night and go to parlay with people who couldn’t afford to be seen consorting with rivals.  The work of those times was not red versus white so much as it was among the various internal forces, the ones described in Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912-1954.”  As a Canadian observer remarked, the elimination of polygamy lessened the power of multiple wives joining together to persuade their out-numbered husband.  But their capacity for learning new ways and translating among languages was a new kind of power. Mae Aubrey Coburn, known to most of us as Mae Willliamson, married a lawyer and became the first woman on the Tribal Council.

In the index to Rosier’s book I see Joseph Brown, Brian Connolly, John Ground, Leo Kennerly, Henry Magee, Iliff McKay, George Pambrun, Walter Wetzel, all familiar names to me but only the beginning of a list of the fathers and grandfathers of the “Marys.”  And yet the similarity of these daughters is not so much a matter of genes as of education and temperament.  There were others with same genes who went off the rails.  The women I’m talking about were the ones who did the school yearbook (Etaikasi) and the school newspaper (Etumoe), joined the National Honor Society, played basketball, and mostly lived in town where their parents had bureaucracy jobs or ran small businesses.  They liked to read.  (In the days I’m talking about, there was no television.)

Mary Margaret says she hasn’t planned what to do with her time now.  Maybe she’ll learn to act or play the piano, but I’d love for her to write the story of the Marys and of her own family.  After all, her brother Tom McKay is a firebrand lawyer and her brother Mike McKay is a much-loved standup comedian.  These sibs rock!  But the last half of the twentieth century has seen both deep change and a stubborn interlocking set of problems for children that appear impossible to resolve.  The specifics have changed since the early 20^th century, but the dynamics are the same.  I suspect she knows some of the keys better than she realizes without having time to reflect.  If she undertook a memoir, it would be a great contribution.

The two major achievements she claims are the building of the high school and the acquisition of Adolf Hungry Wolf’s four-book heritage-in-a-box, “The Blackfoot Papers,” both of which are truly major achievements.  Maybe the building the most obvious, but everywhere I go, I watch for Blackfeet books, both history and fiction, and I’ve been in a LOT of libraries and museums.  In every place Adolf had been there a year or two earlier -- his name was on the checkout cards.  “The Blackfoot Papers” are not so much original writing as they are the raw, uninterpreted, on-the-spot records that Adolf found and included.  He was wise not to filter them. They are primary sources rather than scholarly work (though Adolf has a scholar’s training) but scholars will be using them for reference forever, and now ordinary people also have access around the world.   The public school district is the proper place for them to be preserved as a source of learning.  Many of the little chapbooks (Heritage books) the district has produced are also available to buy online.  

http://www.blackfootpapers.com/heritage  They make excellent gifts for graduating students, Blackfeet or not.  For video go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yi3JW3YpPkQ#!  

Some day I’m going to see a little girl with an iPad sitting on the bank of Willow Creek with her fishing line in the water while she reads the online “books” of School District #9.  Maybe she’ll be named “Natawista.”  More likely, “Mary Natawista.”

(PS.  I put Blackfeet historical time-lines and other notes on www.lulu.com/prairiemary/

Some are for sale but the ones most useful as history guides are set to be .pdf’s for free.)

THE DARK END OF THE SPECTRUM

Holding down the dark end of the spectrum of ideas about human life is not easy.  The problem is not that evil and suffering does not sell -- it sells a lot better than virtue and glory though no one cares to admit it.  The problem is that to REALLY describe the end of the continuum that continues on only into Hell, you have to go there and take notes.  Some go there but can’t remember, never write anything down.   “I alone escaped to tell you” is the phrase of the witness, not the real victim.  

What does death feel like?  We look at ravaged bodies and wonder.  But death doesn’t feel like anything.  When you are dead, you don’t suffer because you are gone.  Suicidal people think they will go somewhere else, but they are wrong.  They simply won’t be anywhere anymore, ever again.  They will not be looking down from Ghostville.  Nor will they be, as Mary Roach in her book “Stiff” suggests we sometimes think, dressed in their best, lying peacefully on padded satin while pretty music plays, destined to sleep peacefully that way underground for the rest of time.  Death is not the darkest thing.

Rather it is suffering that is so dark as to be almost inconceivable, because real suffering is in the brain, not the tissues of the body and leaves little room for understanding.  It is often the idea of the damage, the emotional content, that is the real torture.  So in African heart-of-darkness soul-destruction, it is not hacking off the forearms of children that is most painful to them -- it is forcing them to kill their family members.  South American drug-cartel torturers specialized in the ingeniously inconceivable -- such as the important man whose punishment was the delivery of his daughter’s corpse who seemed to be pregnant, but whose abdomen really contained the head of her fiance.

In a way, with a desperately resourceful mind, one could transform that ghastly metaphor by reframing it to be the woman’s visceral embrace of her lover as though he were their child, their joy at being so intimately merged in death.  This thought would likely be beyond the ability of the father of the woman.  Reversal on that scale might be a phenomenon that is addressed to those whose brains have been rewired to interpret pain as intimacy or who have become numb to anything less intense.  Or so I would guess.  The most effective torture is not the obvious pain, but rather the creation of emotional involvement through personal confrontation and shrewd story-telling, role-playing at a psychodynamic level, twisting the knife in the living brain, fisting dreams. 

The suffering of empathy, forcing one to watch the suffering of another, especially a loved one, like the mother confined in a cell just out of reach of her infant as it died of starvation, is so horrific as to render her into a zombie -- but without ever physically touching her.  This is the darkness imposed on Jesus, his family and his friends.  It is not the nails in his hands, the wound in his side, the crown of thorns or the gradual suffocation -- it is his empathy for those who -- sharing his suffering secondhand -- still do not turn away.  And yet the sharing of the darkness was the entering edge of light.  Theologians say.

In acting class I once took on the role of the messenger in the Greek drama who comes to report to Medea that the poisoned cloak she sent to kill Jason’s princess bride has done its work.  I never reached an adequate portrayal of witnessing and testifying, because really understanding what it would be to confront that writhing young woman in agony would have mean activating my own real empathy.  It’s not just a brain response, but the kindling of the autonomic nervous system into a shared tissue-deep revulsion: not just screaming, but gagging, puking, skin-crawling, cramping total reaction.  In fact, an actor should “go there” only in rehearsal in case one is seized by actual excreta ejection as is part of the fear/flight/freeze complex.  Onstage in performance, a convincing imitation is good enough -- but how can one know what that’s like without going all the way at least once?  Or remembering having done it.  Or watched such a messenger. This is the heart of the theory of “Method” acting.

When writing or painting or sculpting, there is at least the distance of interpretation that any art media requires, so that Guernica doesn’t realistically show the splashing dismemberment caused by bombs and is stronger for it.  Even films meant to promote indignation and political action, and therefore intensifying the closeup details, run the risk of making us callous, curious, and maybe even unbelieving of anything less cruel.  We cross over from the pity for children bombed to the near-hilarity of cartoons, unreality.  Just now we are beginning to question the humanity of killing people without ever seeing them -- WWII bombs fell where they would, on friend and foe alike -- but today we kill accurately little figures on a green screen relaying satellite or drone info, maybe as infrared heat images, while onlookers in an office in Indiana sip coffee and express satisfaction.  Actually moral alienation.

Artists have been trying to restore us to horror and consciousness by exhibiting the literally carnal, wearing dresses of meat, keeping pickled sharks in formaldehyde aquariums, and showing alien monsters whose multiple fangs drip with KY jelly.  It doesn’t work.  At a certain point we say,  “Oh, that’s fake.”  We snort.  We laugh.  We go make a sandwich.

The poetry and politics in the artistic portrayal of darkness in human life depends in part (alliteration is a way I make a little distance, thank you for noticing it) on admitting that joy and beauty exist somewhere else.  Otherwise, doubt is cast on the observer, as a hopeless cynic, a fanatic Cassandra, even if that person is also a victim of all the suffering they describe.  It’s necessary now and then to “go out of one’s mind,” even if you have to use chemicals.  Dionysus begs you.

In the course of the American prairie clearances the indigenous people suffered deeply and darkly.  Two strategies keep distance:  one is demonizing them as sub-human and non-Christian so therefore not worth any sympathy.  The other is romanticizing them as impossibly noble -- figures of myth -- more purified and poetic than any human could be.  Strangely, in the way that cultural group-brains work, the two polarities were then mingled, entirely pushing out the actual, truly existing, humans living on the next block.  To witness THEIR suffering would demand action, so we try to just not know.  But then we use the same strategy on criminals and addicts.  They are the devil; they are saints -- both at once.

“Not knowing” reality is euphemizing the euthanasia of compassion, eliminating the meaning and shared witness that people can create by changing things.  It is a paralysis, a denial, a hell on earth.  The alienation of meaning can be the worst torture of all.  But the only way to get to the new meanings is to suffer -- some will even die.  It’s hard to bear.