DISSECTING RELIGION

Religion etherized upon the table.  I’m finding parts and putting them in Pyrex containers, but expect to relabel them.  This is equivalent to those crime scene walls where they pin up photos of the victims, criminals and suspects, drawing lines and arrows with comments.

Ritual

The earliest evidence (gotta have evidence) of ceremonial actions connected to something resembling our modern sensibility is the strewing of flowers in Neanderthal graves.  Elephants are also known to cover the bodies of dead comrades with boughs, which suggests that such ceremonial actions are deep in our mammalian ability to react to grief with patterned and symbolic actions. 

Artistic expression

Nearly as old are the cave paintings, which have persisted a very long time in their hidden locations, but I suspect that the first painting was on the human body and it persists today as tattoos.  In fact, we seem to be in a renaissance of bodily ornamentation and alteration.  We do find jewelry in graves and commonly there is red ochre paint almost everywhere.  Maybe because it suggests blood.

Morality

It was a great revelation to me in seminary when Don Browning explained the various ways people derive and maintain their ideas of right and wrong.  The list includes rules (the Ten Commandments), principles (the Golden Rule), obedience to authority, according to origin, according to goal, imitation of a great example, reasoned greatest good for the greatest number.  Often morality means clinging to the status quo (from Is to Ought) but it can also mean the defiance of society in the name of justice or love.  Or direct clashes between two groups with opposite standards.

Theory of existence

Trying to figure out where we came from has undergone a massive a change.  Little clay dolls brought to life (man made first and woman made from his rib), dropping down from outer space, rising up from a world within the planet, scrambling out of a clam shell -- survivors, intruders, or evolved animals?  Now we’ve gone even beyond “monkey” evolution to see that we are code: each body a colony of coded cells interacting.  The nature of a human being is not a set-in-stone identity, but a kind of dance of molecules connected to everything else but holding identity long enough to intend, to act, to be dissipated.  Hard to grasp -- not yet registering in “theology.”

Identity

Belonging.  Self-presentation.  Confidence and self-esteem.  Motivation.  Self-control.  Maintenance of the body in a healthy state.  Or self-hatred, self-destruction, fleeing.  Or possibly, again, caught between two groups.

Guide for human arrangements, a framework for practical daily living 

How do we take shelter?  Who prepares the food and cleans the abode?  Where do we sleep and with whom?  Must we come home at night?  Do we sleep the day away?  Should we take the seventh day off?  Must everyone know where you are?  What are the uses and rights of children?  How should we dress?  Should there be prayers at the doorway, beside the bed at night, at a household altar?  What possessions can be kept private?  What about bathing?   

Hierarchy

The struggle to keep order.   Who is the boss of whom?  Which authority takes priority, church or state?  Within the church how to keep order.  Descent from the founder, authorization by a founder, authorization from a supernatural source, written authority, democratic process, internal inspiration, crowd-sourcing?

Economics

The source of sustenance, kinds of work.  Attitude towards the very rich and the very poor.  How much is enough.  At the heart of profit is inequality: people want what someone else has.  But what about those who cannot pay?  At what level does the society as a whole become responsible for those who suffer?  What are the limits of luxury, the evils of investment and credit as a source of profit rather than direct action, the dynamics of what is craved but destructive.  When is it justified to buy and sell people themselves or parts of them or to assign values as insurance companies do?

Physical ecology 

This is in part the source of the above: what natural resources, what social interactions, what inventions and elaborations will add up to a living?  If there is coal, there will be coal miners -- but will those miners go underground with picks or will they drive humonguous trucks in a giant pit?  How does the individual then interface with social bodies?  What is the role of organizations in mediating between profiting corporation and individuals damaged in the course of exploitation?  What is the proper protection for the earth itself?  How much can we remove and destroy before we hit limits?  Are we stewards or is this all put here for our use?

War

When is violence, force, embargo, poisoning, and other forms of defense justified?  What does war do to those who fight and what does the whole owe the subgroup that fights?  How do people believe that war is justified when all that is at stake is ideas or identity?  What is the difference between war by remote control and war fought in one’s own collapsed house next to the bodies of one’s family?

Material culture, science, and metaphor

Humans can only access what is outside themselves through their sensory apparatus which is far more subtle and yet more limited than five senses.  We know now that brain is “built” by its experience -- in terms of the actual cells, their interactions, sub-organs, and memories.  The potter who makes clay into containers is not different from technicians who design electronics except in terms of their experiences.  The science of art, the art of science, are interwoven.  What gives it sacredness is its meaning to the maker and to the user.  A burning candle or a time-lapse photo of star birth in deep space both have meaning -- but not to the same people.

Goals some consider “religious”

Pleasure

Immortality

Participation in life itself

Privileged status

Contributing to one’s human community 

Reaching an internal sense of the Holy  

Coming to terms with death  

Sex in service to intimacy and devotion

Birth

Enlightenment

Meaning

Obviously this is only a beginning and when one gets really “into” it, “religion” that is not owned by an organization or by historical continuity or by written material or by traditional story, dissolves into human life in all its aspects.  It has become conventional to speak of religion stripped of its organizational husk as “spirituality.”  But that is uncomfortably close to the idea that “religion” is a matter of something supernatural, that the impossibility of really capturing and controlling the Holy Spirit comes from its superiority, immateriality, and entirely Other and Greater power.   It is alien.

This point of view misleads individuals into trying to capture some of that “magic” for their own uses.  Our recent helplessness as the world tries to integrate -- a task that took Europe thirty years to approximate -- and the recurring sporadic eruptions into violence, has made Superheroes more appealing than they’ve been since WWII.  The struggle to understand how economic forces really work and how to keep them from shifting so suddenly and radically that thousands of people are suddenly impoverished and homeless has made us search for magic formulas, whether they come from scientific think tanks or from obsession with ideologies.

In the background lingers the growing understanding that we are destroying our only planet and thus will disappear ourselves.  Sacred meaning has to be defined as that which will make us confident in finding better ways to live.  This not a matter of organizing something.  It must be a shift in how to be human.  There’s not time to grow a new organ, but there is time to change the code and the way the human brain sorts and enforces it.  “Religion” is too narrow a concept.  The whole planetary culture must let what is Sacred well up from within.

THE RUBBLE OF RELIGION

I’m working on an essay for a science fiction magazine about how scifi relates to religion.  I’m writing it in chunks, which is a natural way for me to consider a series of issues, and with Dzhokhar and Tamerlane still on my mind, claiming the destruction they caused was in the name of some proud mountain tribe’s religion (Islam rejects them), it seems timely to focus on young men, usually the major sci-fi fans.   (I’ve got 74 hits on that D & T post by now.  Usually I get about thirty.)

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

First of all, religion itself is a composite of several categories: ritual and artistic expression, morality, theory of existence, guide for human arrangements -- mostly fitted to the physical ecology through material culture, economics, science, hierarchy and war.  Different cultures organize these categories in different ways.

There has always been science of a kind (an accumulation of information about how things work) from the very beginning, as in hunting.  Only ten thousand years ago humans moved to agriculture and settlements, which allowed the development of math, writing, and an accumulation and sharing of knowledge by specialized persons.  “Religion” was quick to claim all that, including dedicated property.  In the specialization of roles, they relied heavily on mysteries and secrets, but in the best of situations they provided a framework for practical daily living plus an “ultimate” goal, such as achieving immortality, participating in life itself, attaining privileged status, contributing to their human community, or reaching an internal sense of the Holy.  Often there was special attention to death.  Or sex and birth.

All of this was built on a mammalian substrate of physical function, including the brain and its management of the body.  Evolution, defined as persistence through survival of individuals and groups, has only recently reached the point of being able to observe its own operations on a molecular level.  New technology has taught us how much beyond our senses there is a cosmos and how unconsciously our bodies proceed without us.  But also it has taught us how our senses deliver information to our brains and how it is processed, censored, elaborated, and resolved into identity which is shared and embedded in human relationships.  Bits of the brain, evolved before there was such a thing as a human being, still control our actions regardless of our beliefs.

Exploring these interrelationships and speculating with vivid illustrations what would happen, if there were changes in the actual body or in the culture-sphere that includes “religion”, is the work of science fiction, launching the imagination instead of magic.

ALL RELIGION IS ROOTED IN LAND 

If the land in question is desert where the skies are wide and crammed with stars, the religion will focus on that, as well as the practices that are necessary for desert survival.  The metaphors of the texts, the management of birth and death, the over all moral “style” will be those necessary for survival in the severe desert.  That means chieftains, polygamy, abstinence, control, and rivalries among tribes.  In a coastal warm-climate place where there is plenty of food, there are likely to be elaborate arts and religious mechanisms for distributing plenty or even destroying some of it, as in the Pacific Northwest ceremonies of breaking and throwing away “coppers,” sheets of embossed metal, sometimes of great beauty.  Order will be kept by family circles, who share.

BUT ALSO BY HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

For a religion to form protocols in one ecology and then move to another, is problematic.  Those that are more detached from the land and dependent on human relationships are more likely to make better transitions -- as the Christians who depend on the father-mother-son nucleus -- but even they are now being challenged by the social deconstruction of families caused by economic shortfalls: so many men out of work.  It has been suggested that the new patriarch is simply the government -- issuing the checks and making the rules, even providing the habitation -- so that the essential family is only mother and children with no place for a father.  Insemination is random, childbirth is unclaimed, and yet the inseminator can be identified even if he was introduced via a turkey baster or through violent rape -- without anyone being able to explain what that means in terms of the male role.  

Males without families are often males without any religious patterns in their lives, vulnerable to substance abuse, crime, and depression.  Young males -- no longer children but not yet adults -- are in limbo, accumulating incredible amounts of information without enough sorting mechanisms.  In their drive to find an anchor point they might attach to young women, to their own mothers, to powerful men, to religious leaders, to military contexts, to gangs, and to exo-cultures.  The most interesting ones are the more daring ones, signaling their status on the boundary by exotic ornamentation and secret signals.  Sometimes flirtation with death.  Interesting is not the same as safe.

THERE IS NO GOD

It’s tough for theists to get their head around the Death of God.  They’ll talk about how they’re atheists, but then they start talking about God again in some roundabout way.  Pretty soon you realize they’re talking about their father and then pretty soon it becomes clear that they’re talking about all the male authority figures in their lives and how they have failed -- deserted them, attacked them, turned out to be weak fools.  They talk about how some big strong man should take hold of the situation and make everything good again.  They’re wrong.

The real problem is not the death of God, who in the end is only a minor character in a very long and complex story in which his Son finally outshines him.  The real problem is the death of religion itself, because religion is a made-up category, the general term for an assortment of forces in human life  See above:  Ritual and artistic expression, morality, theory of existence, guide for human arrangements  -- mostly fitted to the physical ecology through material culture, economics, science, hierarchy and war.   They’re related, but they’re not the same.  Somehow we’ve been lumping all these things together and calling them religion and then assigning them to organizations (corporations) that we call religious because they integrate the forces into dogma.

But we are in a time of radical paradigm shift -- we are deeply questioning what life is about and it’s hard to tell who the “good” people might be.  It is religion itself that has died.  This is called “nihilism.”  It’s a good thing if you can stand it.  Some of us remember blackboards and how even a felted eraser left a gray cloud of dust.  To get that board really black again took a wet cloth -- rain, tears, saturation.  Then you can find the chalk and start over again.  Don’t push hard or the chalk will snap -- it’s only a frail little metaphor.  Not justification for a bomb.

Old-fashioned?  Okay, look at this:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8TssbmY-GM  This is real Science.  Wringing out a washcloth in space -- what will happen?  So what does THIS metaphor mean?  I think it means that even something as natural and ever-present as water behaves entirely differently when the paradigm shifts.  If the religions we know developed out of all the different places on the surface of the planet, what is the religion for space, the planet seen whole?

THE DOWNTOWN CHICKS SPONSOR A BROTHEL TOUR

I haven’t heard how the big Brothel Tour in Great Falls went this past weekend.  It was sponsored by the Downtown Chicks (businesswomen) who rented the GF Historic Trolley for the tour after the group gathered at a no-host bar.  According to the GF Tribune, Michelle Chenoweth (don’t know whether she’s related to the Idaho Hen -- er, Chick) said, “We’ve done lots of research in the last several months.  It’s an amazing amount of unheard stories that people are going to be thrilled to hear.”  Chenoweth estimated that at its peak, Great Falls was home to between 40 to 50 brothels, although she said it’s hard to pin down an exact number.

“We really encompass this historically and also bring it up into the modern day,” she said, “(But) we want people to understand that we don’t condone in any way what has taken place.  it happens and it’s a neat history that needs to be told, and that’s why we’re doing it.”  Tickets are $25 and there is a waiting list for the next tour.

Right.  What can she say when the fairly recent former mayor owned a “Really Windy” bar with a “private room” in back.  But it was outside the city limits, so not on the tour.  He and Ms. Chenoweth will be disappointed to realize that the federal government will not give grants to anyone who supports prostitution in any way.  Not Planned Parenthood or any programs to help people with HIV-AIDS or all that other stuff.  The churches can do it, if they want to, and the government will give THEM money, but -- I assume -- only if they aren’t of a faith system that includes temple whores.  

I was in Fort Benton when their historian patriarch mentioned he was writing a book about the last whorehouse in that town.  “How do you know?” I asked innocently.

He was startled.  “What do you mean?”

“How do you know that was the last one?  How do you know there’s not someone doing business now?”  The women present all laughed and agreed.  Finally, I took mercy.  “Oh, it’s probably not a red plush love nest now -- more likely a phone number on a business card.”  He still looked confused.  To him prostitutes were Miss Kitty who never so much as kissed Marshall Dillon.  (Amanda Blake, the actress who played Miss Kitty, died of AIDS contracted from her openly bisexual husband.)  “Soiled doves” were a phenomenon of history like stagecoaches.  Not the Asian massage parlors on today’s Tenth Avenue.

I’ve never asked around Valier about prostitution.  I wouldn’t know how to define sexworkers in a small town.  There are girls who “put out,” and couples that kind of trade around, but nothing very formal, I guess.  Once someone thought it would be a good joke to put my house on Google as a “whore house.”  No one was stupid enough to come knock on the door but if they had they would have found a very limited selection and a bad-tempered one at that.

But seriously, the US government is saying that no NGO dispensing funds for HIV-AIDS is allowed to use money to help prostitutes.  This is like saying you can go swimming so long as you don’t go near the water. Who do they mean?  I presume they mean people who allow intimate access to their bodies in exchange for profit, not necessarily profit for the person with the body.

Do they mean the little undocumented boys of color who will either clean your windshield or (ahem) an alternative for $5?   Do they mean Polish teenaged girls kidnapped and trafficked or do they mean the ones from a Minneapolis mall pimped after running away?  Have they considered guys for hire?  Do they include “walkers,” the suits who “make nice” for old ladies with small dogs and diamonds?  What is sex work and what is sex play and what is not sex at all anyway?

In 1961 in Great Falls I was attending my first Montana Education Association meeting.  I couldn’t afford the Rainbow Hotel, which was the high end in the those days, but at day’s end after all the meetings, as I passed the “Silk and Saddle,” which was the lounge of the hotel, a man stepped out of the shadows and peed on my feet.  Indignant but not afraid, I told him off and marched squishily on my way to my cheaper hotel.  The shoes were tennie runners and went into the washing machine.  It never occurred to me to report the incident.  It was NOT sex work.  It was perversion, but I didn’t even figure that out until years later. 

Twenty years ago a tribal person told me that a prize-winning author (now dead) who had stayed with the family fifty years ago while writing a book about her ancient grandfather had molested the children of the household.  That was NOT sex work.  It was not literal pedo-philia in the sense of loving children.  It was sexualized abuse of the vulnerable.  Including the very old chief.

Occasionally one runs across women who are living with men they don’t love, cooking and cleaning for them and sleeping with them though they don’t enjoy it, because they don’t think they have any other way of earning a living.  It’s an ancient situation but not necessarily illegal.  Is it sex work?  Does it depend on whether or not they are “married”?  What about Clinton’s intern who wasn’t doing him for money but surely expected rewards?  What about Prince Charles’ two women: one for heirs and one for comfort -- which one was doing sex work?  Is it all right if one is important enough?

What is the difference between sex work that is paid for as a frank transaction of two people and sex work that is enforced by a third party?  Is sex work inside marriage or some other legal arrangement (harems) different from free lance?  Then what about Thomas Jefferson’s two families:  one legal because of Christian marriage and the other one legal because of American law (slavery).

Or does it all hinge on male dynamics: something men pay for so they won’t owe anything except money and presumably won’t get emotionally involved, because to them sex must be separated from falling in love.  For a lot of women it’s the romance that’s the compensation and what divides sex work from freely given intimacy.  What an American idea.  In Africa the custom had evolved of little circles of voluntary sexual relationships that included both men and women, married or not, children or not, all of them necessarily sharing the same HIV virus.  No money was exchanged.  Was this sex work?  

We are totally confused about all this, particularly in terms of the larger social context and the obligation of the government to guide and protect citizens.  We want prostitutes to be punished by just letting them die, but some are thriving better than the norm.  We want prostitutes to be “other” and exotic, or maybe distanced by the past, but we want them to be accessible on demand and not powerful.  Most of all, we want everything to be their fault, even as we beg them to tell about their customers.  We very rarely prosecute the customers.

The Downtown Chicks would not like to be mistaken for Downtown Chippies, but they like to dress up like dance hall girls.  They know Charlie Russell loved to hang out in brothels, but they skip over the part where he and Nancy were sterilized by VD infections and loyally claim he was only a friend to his ladies.  Tickets on the Trollop Trolley are $25.  Don’t expect a government subsidy.

WATER WARS IN PONDERA COUNTY

“That to which you are blind, will bite you in the behind.”  That’s the motto I commend to the climate change deniers.  A few people are feeling teeth marks right now.  It’s not JUST climate change but also deniers of the past in many of its aspects.

My two outbuildings, a double-garage that is half-shop and a little “hired man” bunkhouse, were trucked thirty miles to this town lot after the rebuilding of Swift Dam, so they’ve been here about thirty years, the last ten with me in residence.  They were built to be temporary and show it.  I was in Browning when this flood hit and have told the story on other posts.

“Swift Dam (National ID # MT00581) is a dam in Pondera County, Montana, on the southern end of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

“The original dam at this location was originally constructed around 1910, with a height of 157 feet. This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed and sent a 30-foot wall of water down the creekbed. The nearby dam at Lower Two Medicine Lake also failed, and at least 28 people were killed.

"The current concrete-arch structure was completed in 1967, with a height of 205 feet, and a length at its crest of 573 feet. The reservoir is also contained by a secondary earthen dike (National ID # MT00580) with a height of 53 feet and a length of 457 feet, also completed in 1967. The dams and reservoir are owned and operated by the local Pondera Canal & Reservoir Company."

This past Sunday the Great Falls Tribune (April 21, 2013) front page story was about this same Company.  ponderacanalcompany.com/  If you go there, you will find the bare outlines of the founding story.  The names are local names (Stokes, Wheeler, Christiaens, Connelly) and so is the name of the family who has brought this system to crisis, Gene and Cheryl Curry.  The originators of the company were the Conrad brothers, young survivors of the Civil War who came to this area to get rich and did, earlier with open range cattle.  I’ve posted about the flood, about the Conrads, and about some of the history of the Town of Valier.  I’ve even posted about the Foley Report, which itemizes the many ways that the US Government was supposed to be developing irrigation on the Blackfeet Reservation but didn’t.  Ivan Doig has written a novel about the building of the dam (“The Whistling Season”) and Sid Gustafson is writing about the actual flood in a novel called “Swift Dam.”  Both men have local roots.

Bob Scriver (my deceased ex) used to say “people will do whatever they can do.”  So the Conrads built Swift Dam without asking permission, didn’t bother with the rights of the Blackfeet, made their money, sold to Cargill and got out.  They are now an international, bi-coastal, sophisticated family -- not because of the money, but because the money let them find elegant and educated wives.  Think “Downton Abbey.”  

A clerk at Curry’s, the only grocery store left in Valier, is a retired ditch rider from the Canal Company.  I asked whether he started his career on horseback, but he’s not THAT old.  He said the real change came with the big “circle” irrigating systems, huge wheeled industrial-scale pumps and sprays that are far beyond a ditch that a guy goes along on a 4-wheel all-terrain vehicle with a shovel and some plastic tarp dams.  But he’s only half-right.  The real change came when enough Blackfeet had gone to college for the tribe to read its treaty rights and to pencil out the profits from circle pump irrigation.  The first reservation irrigation canals had been dug with horse teams and “scrapers” -- sometimes even by married couples with hand shovels trying to get water to their garden patches.  Since then they had slumped, been invaded by brush, and the proper paperwork was lost.  One of my own favorite sayings is “to get something done, first you have to think of it.”  They did.  Suddenly they saw that their half of the water rights in Birch Creek were literally going south.

The Curry family is known as aggressive and political.  Sometimes they just fired up the heavy machinery and took the water they wanted, and other times they went to court.  If the original Conrads had been involved, there might have been a shooting war, but now it just means nasty dynamics among people whose best chance for survival is to get along.  Of course, the lawyers are doing well.

What we’re really talking about is the remnants of the great North American glaciers of ten thousand years ago that built this land, carrying in soil and gravel from far to the north, building up unimaginable amounts of ice in the Rocky Mountains, and then melting so quickly that it dug waterways, including Birch Creek which is the boundary between the Blackfeet Reservation and Pondera County.  That’s the real canal and irrigation system.  Every year the farmers watch the snowpack levels, hoping they will provide enough renewed run-off to fill Lake Francis and water the fields.  Every year, regardless of rainfall or snowfall, the glaciers that have been the backup systems since the Blackfeet were dog people are a little smaller, a little higher, a little thinner.  The huge aquifer under Montana that holds whatever glacier melt sank underground gets a little more depleted every year.

The only way to renew it is to bring back the continental glaciers.  That will probably happen eventually, but there may not be any humans here to witness it.  We are creatures of the earth’s surface and have developed to fit it, but that means that since the crust shrugs and shrinks and splits on a scale far beyond our control, that we occasionally come to grievous harm.  Sometimes its fast, like an earthquake or volcanic eruption, but other time it’s a slow change like this one we’ve brought on ourselves with our emissions and irrigations.

We humans keep trying to find strategies:  we divvy up the territory into districts, we issue shares to companies and describe rights, we delve into history and tell stories about who did what, we try to exclude some of the parties involved -- but always the driving force is control, profit, like a consuming fire generating black-hearted smoke.  People think they can move to Valier and find a calm, safe place to live next to a pretty little lake.  Illusion.  Always the illusions.

I had the idea that my little bunkhouse would be a fun place for company to sleep.  They find it too primitive by half.  I thought I might develop a kind of studio in the big building, but the roof is caving.  Always the plans.  Always the potential.  

TAO + PORN

I googled this unlikely combination and found a wealth of valuable thinking.  Of course, I’m more a Taoist than I am Christian anyway, unless you mean expertise in Taoist writings.  I just mean I depend on “felt” concepts as much as books/authorities.  The head of the google list (after the paid entry) was  http://thetaobums.com/  where there are ongoing discussions.  Almost everyone posting is male.  Interestingly, one of the most vivid voices is a handsome man from Portugal, a most “macho” country.  I would not have expected a Taoist there. 

In ten minutes of cruising these are the issues relevant to thinking about porn that I found:

addiction

separation from other human beings

feeling bad about oneself

bad practices in the industry (victimization of the actors)

cultural pressure to feel badly about it

being out of control of oneself

bad karma

illusion

prevents satisfaction of the “real” hunger -- it’s a diversion, a symptom, a means

being controlled by underlying biology (esp. male/female)

The goal of Taoism, as I understand it, is both freedom and harmony.  “We” (Americans) tend to find these two mutually exclusive, to assume that freedom must amount to fighting our way out of confining circumstances, like being born, and that this struggle means foregoing safety because growth comes from risk rather than harmony.

There is nothing I saw in the Taoist discussion about “writing about illegal sexual activity” because the guide is not in written law.  Rather the guide is within the “felt” world of the person and its effect on that person’s behavior.  This is not about police coming to knock on your door and impound all your copies of Playboy or Playgirl.  This is about waking up in the morning feeling “icky” (their word), regretful, and sore.  It’s about being out of control, avoiding reality by settling for illusion.  

If one is happily perusing photos or videos or whatever even though they might shock your neighbors, then there’s just nothing wrong with it.  If one is creating it without damage to oneself or others, then it’s simply another art form.

These Taoist discussers do understand that porn is an aid to wanking.   It IS arousing.  That’s the POINT.   But what’s wrong with being aroused?  It’s the behavior that results that counts.  Maybe a guy is a sperm donor in a small closet, trying to get his wife pregnant in vitro, or maybe he’s a donor for commercial purposes.  In this use porn is more often images than words.  Top of the google list I got (you might not get the same list since it’s controlled by algorithms) was a Chinese company marketing a detector of image porn for the purpose of censoring.  The opium of the masses.  Male, anyway.   First: porn, second: control.

The omissions in this discussion are obvious: women and children.  Pornography, when it is illegal and based on illegal activity, includes the categories of women and children only as objects and victims -- not buyers and users.  Their experiences and opinions are ruled out. There’s porn for women (euphemized as romance) but few write about the eroticism of children, which can be extinguished and distorted by using them for the pleasure of adults, esp. when there is physical control and, inexcusably, pain and fear -- big oppressing little.  

The advantage of pornography as image or writing is that it eliminates the element of disease.  Disease makes the passive person powerful in a covert way.  The spirochetes and viruses that thrive in the sensitive tissues of a human being don’t care about motive or gender or strength or privilege.  All it takes is contact in order have revenge.  STD’s can be passive, undetectable, and a time-bomb.  But they add risk and some who pursue violent or commercial sexual contact find that an advantage, an added element.  The false friend of sexwork is the fatalistic conviction that one’s life is short -- that it doesn’t matter what one does.  Flirting with danger, adrenaline-surfing, is part of the deal. 

Danger is in opposition to porn, which is valuable because it is “safe.”   But a secondary thrill would come from secrecy, the feeling of privileged access.  No “skin in the game” if it’s a quiet exchange of money for paper stimulation, little risk of detection by disapproving significant others, like wives or parents.  No passing on diseases to them.  Displacement to writing, video, photos, the telephone, thus is safer but less stimulating unless -- like any addiction -- there begins to be escalation.  More outrageous, more secret, more strange tales -- like ordinary media stories -- are pursued because they keep the customer present and paying.  Part of that will be customers who try to make the illusion become reality by finding the person portrayed or writing -- even though they might not be living anymore.  Of course, some people might welcome hookups, either commercial or not.

The Tao attitude would be that porn is not essentially morally wrong, but that it can interfere with the reality of being in the world, of recognizing one’s relationship to all other existence.  It can prevent constructive intimacy with other people.  The judging of porn would require personal internal “felt” results within the terms of one’s own life -- not the scrutiny of laws that are written and rewritten to fit a whole category of people, and that require constant rewriting.  “Law & Order SVU” provides a steady stream of case studies in which written laws may or may not provide justice.  It’s harder to find dramatized narrative exploration of Taoist points of view outside of the therapeutic and self-improvement websites.  They tend to become exercises in the supernatural, like mind-readers or angels who intervene.  And then there are the bodice-rippers, hardly realistic.

Taoists have no difficulty understanding that sex is only part of life as a whole, even that humans are only part of this planet as a whole.  This reduces the need for porn, allows people to take delight in many things -- including each other -- without oppressions and exploitations.  The attitudes and structures of the rule-defined, power-based world allow the compartmenting of porn by stigmatizing and criminalizing.  Then it doubles back to justify confinement, punishment, exclusion and and even torture that increases the level of suffering in the world.  It supports rather than interdicting addictions like drugs or alcohol.  It ghettoizes polyamorous, same-sex relationships, and supports strange practices like body surgery, either on genitals or faces, or fetish objects.

Worse than that, so long as we obsess about porn with the idea of suppressing or eliminating it, the economic and political forces that push people into desperate actions in order to survive never get addressed.  That preoccupation is as much of an addiction as the porn itself.  Of course, smart porn purveyors know that if it becomes legal and accepted, the money will go out of it.  One of the uses of religion is to generate the kind of stigma that produces profit.

Interestingly, the generation born since maybe 1990 has already made a cultural shift towards Tao thinking.  There are some people who suggest that Jesus himself was an instinctive Taoist or Zen person whose ideas were captured by the Roman Empire and exploited into an instrument of control.  The impulses of Tao came back into the US through Transcendentalist and later “Aquarian” surges of thought.  They are always there, organic and immanental rather than dependent on “otherworldly” or supernatural sources as captured by institutions.  The Pope must always be on guard against the planet.

JESUS & PORNOGRAPHY

Since the issue of sex comes up so much and since the internet has changed the terms of pornography so much (so much more available, so much more vivid, exotic and scary) I thought I’d put in 1,000 word’s-worth.  In some ways I don’t believe in pornography.  In other ways, I see it everywhere.

www.apologetics.com has the motto “Challenging believers to think and thinkers to believe.”  Apologetics are a sub-category of theological thought that tries to reframe the previously writing-prescribed church theology when it no longer fits the reality of the present.  For instance,  this quote is from http://www.apologetics.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=67643

“The literal definition of “pornography,” comes from the combined meaning of the two components, pornea which means “forbidden sexual behavior,” (Biblically verifiable) and grapho which means “to write.”

So “pornography” is, literally, writings about forbidden sexual behavior. By extension it includes photographs and movies about forbidden sexual behavior. Let us be sure we understand: it is not “writing about sex” that is illicit; it is writing about “forbidden sex,” that is wrong. The Scriptures use the word "pornea" to define illegal sexual activity.”

This reflection on “pornography” uses this definition as a starting point.  There are two categories (porn + graph) at issue here.  I’ll take the last one first, though I’m a little distracted by the idea of “graphoporn.”  Isn’t there a kind of pornography of writing itself, elevating a common act like writing into something glamorous and privileged, which is the strategy of commercial sex porn?  Or otherwise illegal to publish, like government secrets?  At the heart is money, right?  Well -- we’re quickly taking the money out of writing so it’s less pornie all the time.

I googled “sex and Jesus” which brought up all sorts of things, including the apologetics site above and one I quote below:  http://www.religioustolerance.org/sex_jesu.htm#  

“Jesus is recorded as having made only four direct comments that might be interpreted as relating to sexual behavior.

Matthew 5:31-32 states:
“It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." (KJV)  

Matthew 19:9 states similarly:

"And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery."  (KJV)

Here, Jesus prohibits divorce, except in a case of sexual misconduct -- "porneia" in the original Greek. Various versions of the Bible have translated "porneia" as adultery, fornication, unchastity, unfaithfulness or marital unfaithfulness. Jesus here deviated from Jewish law, which said that a man could freely divorce his wife.

Mark 10:11-12 states:

"...Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.

Luke 16:18 states:

"Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery."

These gospel writers record Jesus as having taken a different stance on divorce. He said that it is unacceptable for any reason at all. 

These statements are about legal matters, normally the business of Caesar rather than the church, though today’s church in the Christian tradition claims parallel jurisdiction and “Caesar” permits it.  Let the church scribes keep the records and the responsibility for propriety.  Usually, Jesus doesn’t interfere, although later when he says his followers should “forsake all others” he defies the claims of church, state and family.  When he protects prostitutes, he acts on principle rather than laws.  He does NOT define them as porniea.  (Some would claim that prostitution protects marriage.)  He always seeks to protect the poor, the outcast, and the diseased, conditions which press people into sexwork.  There is enough evidence in the “gospels” that were not accepted by the church patriarchs (the Apocrypha) to persuade some people that Jesus had a male lover.  It is OTHER parts of the Bible that are quoted to condemn same-sex relationships and then only males.

  

It seems clear that “porniea” is a legal category relating to the state of marriage, which controls economics, lines of inheritance (the importance of a woman being inseminated by only one man so that his bloodline is continued), and -- in cultures that see wives as belongings -- property.  Fertile sex-acts outside marriage mess up inheritance, though many narrative plots (including the Old Testament) rely on regularizing what are technically bastards.  Any force that shakes up the legal status quo can be heretical and pornographic in its writing, even feminism.  (I’m not talking about same sex acts, but rather about stepping outside marriage.)

The biggest “porniea” now (and I think Pope Francis I would agree with this) is not prostitution but the challenge to ideas of conception and family patterns.  In vitro conception; multiple mothers; DNA proof of fatherhood; single or multiple or same sex families based on nurturing instead of biology or legal status; the definition of when a fetus becomes a person -- all these and more have challenged everything previously assumed.  Our understanding of homosexuality, gender identification, maturation, brain function and so on have also challenged the legal definition of marriage, which in view of the multiple religions in the United States, is less and less related to church views because of the problem of determining WHICH church.

Since the biological understanding and management of sex is so radically changed since two millennia ago, then we must go to Jesus’ principles of behavior rather than legal definitions, which is the brilliant shift Jesus made anyway.  This is why it’s so hard for the Supreme Court to define what pornography is -- it’s hard to define marriage.  It has become a category based on cultural proprieties instead of principle.  Common law marriage is literally common behavior.

What would I see as an alternative?   First, I would move the definition of “marriage” out of the legal realm and into the biological/psychological context since that is the origin of the confusion.  That’s what’s changed so drastically.  I would define “marriage” as something more like “bonding”, a state of commitment that doesn’t depend on gender, age, nationality, skin color, or even species -- though that last is taking it a bit too far unless you’re talking about swans.  Still, some people bond with dogs or horses.  It is a brain phenomenon that supports mutual protection and shared goals.  Excellent for the raising of families, but not necessarily even physical in the sense of coition.  I would reduce the legalities of marriage to the status of contracts, “pre-nups” about things like money management, residence and process of termination.   Enforce THAT and really do it. How then does one detect “bonds of marriage”?  Behavior -- what is loving and nurturing indicates a bond.  This is like the common law definition of marriage.

Jesus was addressing divorce, but I don’t know of any biological/psychological research that defines an end to bonding, which can persist even after death.  (There is a lot of work done on grief and trauma, which might be helpful.)  Clearly Jesus objects to anything that disrupts a bonded marriage, no doubt including economics.  He does not say whether lust interferes with or supports emotional pair-bonds.  He doesn’t address sex as a bodily act one way or another.  Nor does he talk about children.  If we’re talking about writing that challenges pair-bonds, one has to admit that Jesus himself recommends leaving one’s family and marriage partner -- Jesus as pornographer.  The pornography of the Gospels.

The main strategy of Christian theology is to separate human conventional phenomena from “higher” mystical participation in another world, a “felt” connection beyond any earthly terms.  One marries God.  (Of course, the Church claims IT is the bride, which is a kind of pornography because it reduces mysticism to a set of written bureaucratic rules.)  If one is in a predominantly Christian culture and committed to it, then this discussion and the other websites that relate to it (just google “Jesus + sex”) will be meaningful and possibly help to guide behavior without hurting other people or oneself.

  

So now I’m going to google “Tao + Pornography” and see what I find.  

DZHOKHAR AND TAMERLANE

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a name like a science fiction story where the nations become planets and the oppressors are monsters.  Those writers always go to the Eurasian Turkish steppes for strange names with too many consonants.  It’s  a genre in which things are barely recognizable as versions of what we know except with a skew that makes us see everything differently.  I’m going to postpone the post I had and see what I can do with a nineteen-year-old boy who comes from war, carrying it within him, and follows his big brother into a world of death.

Since I knew so little about Chechnya, I had to spend a bit of time on research.  I started with the map, which is mountain country -- the Carpathians, second highest mountains in Europe.  It is like here in Valier if you live on the east side of them.  They are the wall that divides the Ukraine from Europe.

Then I look at the names of these two boys, one 26, a boxer, aggressive and abusive -- beating his wife got him a police record that prevented him from becoming a US citizen.  Then the other boy, only nineteen.  That’s two years older than my brothers when they enlisted in the Marines, the traditional age for soldiers.  He became a naturalized citizen through study and swearing allegiance to the USA.  Noxchi Mott is a language of these Carpathian mountain people.  Dzhokhar is proud to speak it well.  Not just Chechans, the tribe is defiant warriors, brutally conquered by unspeakable means right up until the present when Putin had a go at them.  This family tried emigration to the US, but were not happy here.  Dzhokhar seems the only one who really fit.  Tamerlan stayed to be the patriarch, a bully, even the home his fight arena.  Dzhokhar was young and flexible enough to assimilate a new world.  Tamerlan was not.  He remained at heart a mountain guerrilla.

Tamerlan is named for Tamerlane AKA Timur the Lame, who was a conquerer on the scale of Genghis Khan in the 1400’s.  “Timur's armies were feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, sizable parts of which were laid to ruin by his campaigns.  Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.”   He was crippled by a shepherd’s arrow when he tried to steal a sheep and therefore earned his name. 

The name of Tamerlane is known to many of us because of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe.  “The main themes of "Tamerlane" are independence and pride as well as loss and exile.”

KIND solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme -
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell'd in -
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
. . . .

Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bow'd from its wild pride into shame.
O! yearning heart! I did inherit
Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again -
O! craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
Th' undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness - a knell.

. . .

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven - that dew - it fell
(Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me - with the touch of Hell,
While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o'er,
Appeared to my half-closing eye
The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder's roar
Came hurriedly upon me, telling
Of human battle, where my voice,
My own voice, silly child! - was swelling
(O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

. . .

My passions, from that hapless hour,
Usurp'd a tyranny which men
Have deem'd, since I have reach'd to power;
My innate nature - be it so:

I reach'd my home - my home no more -
For all had flown who made it so -

. . .

Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?

This is grandiosity and narcissism and the romanticizing of bloody hell.  We love it as much as the Carpathians do, though they probably have more words for it.  A mixture of the essential nature of the testosterone-governed male body, the love of one’s family, determination to make the tribe survive, rejection of all authorities, resorting to force instead of persuasion -- forever maimed by pride.  What makes us think that a diaspora can work if, based on such forces, it forms hard secret cadres in the heart of the larger unknowing nation?  What a great source of drama full of seduction and tragedy -- this story will persist, elaborate, morph with the times.  

But the truth is somewhat different:  a gentle boy with tangled hair bleeding to death in some middle-class American’s boat, firing back bravely from under a winter shrink-wrap, while a helicopter infrared camera illuminates his green, still-warm body and robots trundle up the driveway to sniff for bombs and to potentially tip the boat over, dumping him out on the cement. This is not the combat of warriors.

But then, the bombs were coward’s attacks on families and happy citizens, shredding their legs and killing their children.  Only a madman could think this was anything approaching combat.  The real pressure cooker was in their Chechen heads, mixing shrapnel of medieval war and modern subjugation into identity-destruction.  They have done their cause grievous harm.

Thinking about the research on brain trauma from boxing, which was Tamerlan’s success until he suddenly gave it up, I suggested to a friend that they should carefully autopsy his brain.  But the friend, who is a skilled cruiser of the dark parts of the Internet, reported that his brain was probably too destroyed by bullets to be interpretable.  The last small value of his body has been lost to violence.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a wrestler rather than a boxer.  His brain was not damaged, but his identity was at least double -- maybe more.  In one role he followed Tamerlan into Hell.  In the other he was a good student, a quiet friend to both male and female, a lifeguard.  Islam was his “world-view” he said.  His nationality was split between the old country, which he still visited, and his new one.

I imagine him lying in the bottom of a boat, the dregs, remembering the thump of running over his dying brother, and what else?  Which identity lay there in a pool of blood?  It could not have felt triumphant.  My guess is that he felt nothing, totally dissociated from thought, until the police found him and the last firefight was underway.  By then he could only find himself in confrontation, adversaries, the hypoxic heights of imagined heroism.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

KNOWING WHAT TO DO

One of the reactions to the Boston Marathon bombing was personal and practical.  Many people, having just seen legs blown off, realized that some of the people there knew they must prevent those victims from bleeding out in minutes and saw that people knew how to do it and did not hesitate to improvise and apply tourniquets.  A lot of them were medical people, emergency responders, cops with basic training, and so on who were there to tend the runners or were runners themselves .  Some of those present, not knowing what to do, promised themselves that they would learn how to help grievously hurt people.

This is not the same kind of reaction as those who respond to school shooting by trying to pass laws about guns or mental problems.  It is something specific and individual that THEY can do.  In the city people get used to calling some delegated -- even professional -- coping person to deal with trouble.   They call 911 on their cell phone.  In the country and small towns people do what they can on the spot.  They are used to physical work, they may handle big animals or big dangerous machines, and they deal with emergencies well.  It’s harder for them to figure out what to do with paper systems like grants for the renewal of hundred-year-old sewer systems, so then they stand back.  

Among the websites I’ve happened upon -- or maybe I was looking for without realizing -- is www.goodmenproject.com.    The founders say, “Guys today are neither the mindless, sex-obsessed buffoons nor the stoic automatons our culture so often makes them out to be. Our community is smart, compassionate, curious, and open-minded; they strive to be good fathers and husbands, citizens and friends, to lead by example at home and in the workplace, and to understand their role in a changing world.”  I found the website on Twitter first.  I’m a very bad Twitter user -- I hate all this social chitchat stuff, I hate being forced into categories, I hate having people prescribe stuff to me, I hate sophomoric arguments.  I never tweet. This is different.

For instance, this post struck me, so to speak:  www.menproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-embracing-destruction/  It’s by a guy who teaches stage combat explaining why it was so hard for his urban educated acting students to learn it.  They were gentle, thoughtful, hip guys who avoided all violence and therefore didn’t know how to be forceful, had never taught their own muscles the kind of control needed when coming up against force.  They were wimpy, soft, couch-dwellers who thought about life instead of living.  Harsh?  Well, read it and see what you think.  We’re not talking about gang-bangers here.  We’re talking about guys who need to know how to read adversaries, block them, make and take controlled swings and impacts.

Here’s another story:  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/marriage-20-tips-for-men-on-supporting-a-partner-with-chronic-pain/  This man’s wife was in a car accident that left her in chronic pain.  I know people in this situation and how debilitating it can be, how helpless you are, what a temptation it is to draw away.  But this guy stayed and figured out what would help, partly by doing the obvious thing: asking.  He learned how to anticipate a spike in suffering, what small moves and physical contacts worked, what supplies to have on hand.  This is not to say that what he figured out with his own wife would work with anyone else, because everyone is wired differently and has different damage.  Except that paying close attention and looking for small interventions helped both of them.  I cannot think of a better illustration of intimacy.  Physical intimacy, but not sex.

Here’s a real biggie:  http://truckersagainsttrafficking.org  The website teaches truck drivers what to do when they see kids forced to prowl truck stops in order to turn tricks.  It offers wallet cards with a hotline number:   1-800-373 -7888.  (Now you can make your own wallet card -- since you only need the number.)  This is what to do: CALL.  It tells you what information to scribble down: descriptions of girls and their transportation, license numbers, times.  It tells you what NOT to do -- like try to rescue the girls personally, drive off with them, confront the pimps with a tire iron.  The idea is not to be the kind of hero that gets himself put in jail and unable to find another trucking job -- the idea is to be part of a network of heroes, and also to internalize norms, what good guys should do.  No dithering, no shrinking.  No trying not to see, no compartmenting it into something that’s always there and can’t be stopped.  The Internet has made a major difference since many truckers carry computers and are online.  They often have smart phones that can take photos and transmit them instantly. 

As I type there is someone using the tiny grass Valier airport to practice touch-and-go landings -- that is, they aren’t staying on the ground very long, just coming and going because that’s the tricky part demanding practice.  Finding what to do about big risky stuff is something like that.  I mean, the need comes along and presents itself, and if you're prepared, then doing it teaches you about yourself as well as “how to do it.”  One of the lessons is that you CAN learn how -- once you think to find out about it. 

The good men that I’m missing in this website conversation are the Native Americans.  I know a lot of them around here: all ages, all styles, some of them online.  I’m writing about this website on my blog in part to alert them that they ought to be posting advice about how to be a good Indian man, how to help a reservation kid (besides sending him mittens at Christmas), how to have a conversation with your college roommate who turns out to be an Indian.  People want to help one another and to do the right thing, but they could use some instruction.  There are enough instructions online about how to make a pressure cooker bomb.  Not enough about how to survive the social and economic pressure cooker of human interaction.

Several commenters have said it was striking that when the bombs went off in Boston at the marathon, people ran TOWARD the location, not away in self-protection.  Of course, some of them were emergency responders who were trained to do that, but others were not.  Many people were grievously wounded and needed intervention immediately -- not fancy stuff, but just hands-on attention like those tourniquets on the stumps of blown-off legs.  The helpers literally took the shirts off their backs.  The on-the-spot helpers with no training learned from those who had it.  This is the opposite of stigma, which makes people leave, hide, preserve their own protection.  We can all learn more about what to do, so we can save each other.

ALL THE MOVIES ABOUT SAINT FRANCIS

The essential story of Francis of Assisi is deep in human beings everywhere.  Movies made from the bare outlines vary strikingly across a wide spectrum of styles and assumptions, choosing from a menu of events.  For instance, the 1950 film called “The Flowers of St Francis,” made in 1950 by Roberto Rossellini (while Ingrid Bergman, not yet his wife, carried to term his children -- a major scandal) and written by Federico Fellini, was in the style of Italian black-and-white social realism and a spirit of reform and return to origins that was close to the original spirit of Francis.

“The Flowers” were actually nine incidents chosen from many fables and novels, each with a moral like a parable.  The parts were played by actual monks except for the tyrant, who was a professional actor.  The film opens with the characters walking in the rain, a theme that shows up in all the movies.  As they go, they argue their message.   Since one of the 14^th century source novels was about Brother Juniper, he is a prominent character.   The vignettes are as follows: 

Juniper, the “Parsival” or devout fool of the tale, takes the idea of going naked too far.  A crazy old man, Giovanni, comes to join them.  In this version Clare is a proper nun who comes to visit with her sisters and is welcomed with a bower of blossoms.  Juniper makes soup for a brother who is ill but when the patient remarks that the soup would be improved by a pig’s foot, Juniper goes out and cuts the foot off a living pig!  Francis encounters a leper and embraces him, which is another basic theme very much evocative of the present plague of HIV-AIDS.  

Juniper becomes a problem because he wants to preach and keeps trying to devise ways to shorten up his cooking duties, like cooking everything they have into one big slumgullion that will last two weeks.  Juniper does indeed go preaching and gets into awful trouble.  He is nearly lynched.  In the next to the last chapter, Brother Leone and Francis discuss how to achieve perfect happiness, but Francis rejects all of Leone’s suggestions, which run along the lines of performing miracles, and proposes that being beaten up and suffering is the real perfect happiness.  His essential message is converting loss into gain, misery into pleasure, and failure into success through mysticism.  The last “flower” is Francis going out into the world to preach.

This movie is confusing to watch on a small screen.  There’s a lot of rushing around and since everyone is in the same brown habit, it’s hard to tell them apart, but there are often striking tableaus.  The scenery is mostly pasture and the building are little more than stone-walled sheds.

“Brother Sun, Sister Moon” (1972) from Zefferelli is at the extreme other end of the continuum and has remained a much beloved version because of the lush poppies-and-lilies treatment of the landscape, the beautiful childlike main characters, and the extravagant -- rather literally “operatic” since there are songs -- costumes and sets.  The final scene in the Pope’s cathedral is like “The Dark Crystal” as envisioned by Gustav Klimpt, a storm of gilt, glitter, brilliant silks, embellishment and strangeness.  Waaaay over the top.  The Pope literally steps out of all this and comes to Francis in a simple white gown. Clare does the same when her hair is shorn near a rocky waterfall.   Rebuilding of the old stone ruin is set against fields of snow.   Children, old people and animals abound as extras.  The movie is saturated with spiritual ecstasy and the ethos of the Aquarian Age: gentleness and kindness is primary.  Somehow the lepers are displaced by suffering cloth dyers, much more photogenic.

“Francis of Assissi”  (1961) with Bradford Dillman as Francis, Stuart Whitman as Paolo, and Dolores Hart as Clare is a group that often acted in Hollywood Westerns!  The usual sexual tension never allowing contact is strong.  This is a respectable version, not quite memorable.  Clare’s hair cutting is on a mountain ridge with the wind lifting the strands.

“Francesco” (1989) with Mickey Rourke as Francesco was the second Saint Francis movie made by Liliana Cavani, the same kind of social neorealist as Fellini, Rossellini, Paolo Pasolini but far more inventive. (Her first try was reviled and disappeared.)  An early scene shows the naked bodies of young men killed in battle being laid out for a mass grave.  Helena Bonham Carter is a feisty Clare who wears pantaloons under her habit, no veil on her frizzy bob: she is one of the guys.  The story begins on another windy ridge where the group is putting up a tent for a shelter while they write down the life of their friend.  The score is by Vangelis.

All the films begin with the two cherished children, Clare and Francesco, in a time of constant war and terrible suffering.  The Catholic church was afflicted by more than a dozen heretical groups.  In some versions the land is eroded and harsh, in others everything blooms.   In some, Francesco joins the Crusades as a knight, comes back, goes again as a pilgrim and actually tries to talk Saladin out of war.  (Saladin says he hates war, but must defend his people.)  In a couple of versions Francis is captured by the enemy and languishes in a horrific dungeon for a year, but while he is there discovers a vernacular version of the Gospels which he has not known until then.  Both youngsters, like Buddha, wake to suffering and dedicate themselves to sharing and ameliorating it.  The church mid-management tries suppression, companions object but are converted, and the Pope finally approves.  In some there is a sequence of sharing a pig sty.  In some versions Clare is confined to a convent, only noted and seen from a distance.

After watching for a while one can’t help wondering how a Saint Francis would be received today.   Forget the “saint” thing -- it’s just a Roman Catholic bureaucratic category.   What if a man went through life impoverished, owning no home, giving all his money away to those in the most desperate need (not many lepers anymore -- how about boys with HIV-AIDS?), dressing simply in today’s “habit” (jeans and a t-shirt from a thrift shop), begging for money, spending his days preaching via the Internet, and constantly suffering (that penitento practice of physical and moral pain) -- how would he be received?   I can tell you.  

Tim Barrus (He will wring my neck for saying so because he thinks virtue signals weakness.  But I have nothing to lose.) whose most expensive possession is his own replaced hips (now failing) and whose life is devoted to art -- which is not so different from religion -- has been met with suspicion, contempt, righteous indignation, skepticism and accusations.  Most modern literati (the ones who don’t read but write all the time) operate under a hermeneutic of suspicion.  They cannot accept that a St. Francis type might be for real.  Somewhere there must be an angle.  Money must be hidden in a Swiss bank account.  He must be after the fame.  It’s gotta be a con.

Then they try the smearing.  In San Francisco in the days of Act Up parades he ran naked through the streets.  (How is that different from Francis stripping?)  He was a Harley rider in black leather.  (How is that different from Francis in armor on a horse headed to the Crusades?)  He associates with diseased people.  (We’ve already covered that.)  He’s always asking for -- (Yeah, yeah.  He’s a mendicant.)  He hangs with a group of boy and men.  (I think there are a few Poor Clares around.)

In the end I like the “Mickey Rourke” Francis best.  Filmed in his pretty boy days when his mouth curled roguishly and his eyes were bright, even today he’s a real-life animal lover, with a special affection for his little dog.   But he’s a tough, wicked survivor.  In “Barfly” he portrayed Charles Bukowski, who may be Barrus’ version of St. Paul.  It’s a reach, but why not reach?  I defend it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjneQahhks0   If you don’t know Mickey Rourke, start here.  (By the way, “Mickey Rourke” is an alias.  I’m not even sure whether he’s Irish.)