BEAUX ARTS BRONZES -- MY FAV GENRE

Say you’re an unvarnished sort of person who is now in a position to think about art.  If you want a short art history course, you could do worse than going to www.askart.com and reading down the list of “Styles of Interest.”  The "askant" website began as mostly an index to American artists but now includes some “quik-hits” as guides and memory joggers.  My tastes are not very elevated when it comes to painting -- mostly forms of impressionism, esp plein-aire and tonalist (Ah!  Russell Chatham!), and including abstract expressionism.  I’m a color eater.

The sculpture of the period around 1900 has a deep appeal for me, esp that identified with the Beaux Arts of Paris.  It was a time when the medium of sculpture was just moving from marble to bronze and when a return to the classic was countered by a defiant opposition which motivated Rodin, that passionate sexual bacchanalian but disciplined studio control freak.  Figurative sculpture is almost necessarily about people and animals, therefore sensual but also responsive to the skeleton, the structure.

There’s another reason, which is that I grew up in Portland, OR, which -- like Boston -- is populated by many monumental bronzes of the Beaux Arts school.  To my eye they are as familiar as family, not least because of my deep relationship to Bob Scriver’s work.  Plastilene is as familiar to my hands as flesh (all species) and molten bronze is a living embodiment of passion, its fumes the breath of spirituality, its process an illustration of risk -- both what’s at stake and what the reward might be.

Saint Gaudens -- monument to a sculptor who died young

Just now I found a little money to resubscribe to the National Sculpture Society’s magazine, the National Sculpture Review.  www.sculpturereview.com.  I have the same almost sweaty heart-leaping response to seeing it in the mail that I suppose some people have for porn.  It used to be far more expensive than it is now: $25 a year, four issues.  The issues are grouped around themes and the writing is always insightful.  This is NOT like the Western art mags, which tend to obsess about value, popularity, personality, and what would look well in one’s parlor.  It is the substrate and matrix for the work done by Russell, Remington, Schreyvogel, Phippen, Beeler, Beil, Dallin, Proctor, Jackson, and a host of others now dodging in and out of the Western art auctions.  In other places I’ve talked about the special difficulties of addressing three-dimensional art -- which is ironically related to the ease of duplication -- so I’ll not spend time on it now.

Another aspect of the Beaux Arts period is that it was the beginning of the admission of female sculptors to the active world of art.  Malvina Hoffman and her friend Joy Buba connected Bob Scriver to the larger international context, which is the main difference between his work and someone like Evelyn Cole.  It’s not just a matter of skill, but of vision and discipline (armature).  Both Cole and Scriver grew up on the Montana High-line but Scriver saw a larger world.  Part of the reason for that was the Reiss brothers’ school on the border of Glacier National Park and Canada.  They were generous and inclusive of women.  For instance, Hans Reiss taught his wood-carving skills to Clare Sheridan, who carried them back to Ireland.  This interest in the huge Western parklands and ranches extended to the Whitney family so that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s portrait of Buffalo Bill was the precipitating crystal for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming.

Other women in this context were Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, and Harriet Goodhue Hosmer.  They tended to come from prosperous families, so maybe the three names was a way of smuggling in credentials or expressing dignity.  But the convention for sculptors and writers of this period has been three-named.  Because they were women they often portrayed children.  Many of the pieces are garden ornaments given whimsical or Greek mythological names.  Babies and toddlers had always been included in religious sculpture, disguised as cherubs and putti.  Now there was a great interest in the “straight-sided” children -- the age of adrenarche (8 to 11) before secondary sexual differentiation.  At the time they were seen as expressions of Rousseauian nature, not at all shocking, but today’s viewers may see them quite differently. 

This piece by MacMonnies was in the Portland Public Library.

This one is in Washington Park in Portland.

My favorites from this period include the key people:  Daniel Chester French, Frederick William MacMonnies, both Gutzon and Solon Borglum, Herman Atkins MacNeil, Cyrus Edwin Dallin, James Earle Fraser, Augustus Saint-Gaudens -- maybe this last is my favorite, as much because of his personality as because of his work.  He was one of those colorful, temperamental, red-headed, fascinating Irishmen that rich people often like and support.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t8K7Aisx8U  This is a PBS story about the bas-relief of the Shaw Memorial which I used to be proud to say was across the street from the UUA headquarters at 25 Beacon Street.  Now they, like Meadville/Lombard, have sold out.

The whole Boston Commons is studded with Beaux Arts monuments.  In some ways, like the Unitarian movement, these monuments are the product of the Civil War challenge to the country’s ideals plus the prosperity that seems to come from war.  The need to commemorate met the ability to pay for it.  Both are also connected to the industrial development of the American West, a connection that begins in Butte copper and continues through the popularity of cowboy and Indian art.  This is another irony since the main monumental bronzes were about the romance of life on the landscape rather than the underground mining by Europeans or the near-slave labor of Chinese immigrants building the railroads, both of which were key to industry.

Speaking in terms of English markers, this period between the Civil War and WWI, was Edwardian, our beloved “Upstairs, Downstairs,” “Downton Abbey,” period.  My in-laws, Bob’s parents, and my grandparents were from this period and carried most of the assumptions of the times into my early adulthood.  They have been useful and sustaining in unexpected ways.  Those were times of radical self-contradiction, high and low, risk and guarded sinecures -- same as now.  There are American stories that still remain for someone to develop, like the story of the ranch of the Marquis de Mores in North Dakota, an elegant little chateau based on the economy of slaughtering cattle, or maybe the Conrad brothers semi-legal empire that is now challenging the water laws of the West.  

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER: Part 5

RESPONSES TO OPPRESSION:  some of them good ideas and some of them contemptible or laughable.  Brainstorming rules:  anything goes.

1.  Join someone else’s fight, like someone blameless or much more powerful.

2.  Go so subversive that you don’t even know when you’re doing “oppositional unconscious defiance”.  On second thought maybe that’s the problem.

3.  Write.  Doesn’t matter what.

4.  Learn any form of art, including dance or martial arts or gymnastics.  Dazzle ‘em.

5.  Find a role model, maybe a shocking one.

6.  Invest in what the oppressor hates and fears:  sex, poverty, dirt, low status, “femaleness” or “maleness”, drunkenness, drugs, babies. 

7.  Become a psychologist and invent experiments about oppositional defiance disorder.

8.  Go live on a mountain top.  Rise above it all.

9.  Achieve enough to get respect from authorities, though maybe not the authorities respected by one’s oppressor.

10.  Find someone to truly love you for who you are.  (I hope you love them as well.)

11.  Develop a disease or trauma that will demand careful attention because you are a victim and therefore entitled to righteous indignation.

12.  Plunge into paralyzing depression to protect those around you from your rage.  

GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS IN ODD

1.  The oppressed mother whose son witnesses her helplessness in the face of abuse but cannot save her.  Two varieties.  

One: when the mother makes a little husband out of the son, showers him with love, supports him in his endeavors, and makes him into a superstar full of oppositional defiance of the father.  (Avoid the aspect of sex or you’ll get pulled into Freudian templates.)

Two: when no amount of effort is enough to get admiration and support from the mother, who is so in love (addicted? enabling?) to the alpha male in charge that she makes it clear the son is not enough.  She chooses the adult male.  (Where’s the Greek play for this?  When the King’s wife kills the son?  Is it Hamlet?)  Then the boy defies and opposes her rather than the father.

2.  Again two varieties:

One:  The dominant alpha male who wanted a son but who will not allow the boy enough room to grow into someone as strong as his father, and then blames the son for being weak or inadequate.  

Two:  Or the same man who has only a daughter and must either load her up with his expectations or use her as bait to attract a son-in-law, passing her over.  Both varieties of them can oppose their father.

NON-GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS

1.  Peers who bully.  Defy them by surviving.

2.  Joining peers who are beneath contempt, whom the society as a whole rejects.  Defend the group, defy the larger society.

3.  Peers in competition with each other to an unhealthy degree.  (What degree is that?)  Defy and oppose competition.  

4.  Sell-outs and tattletales.  Don’t even bother to notice.  They WANT defiance.

5.  Genuine “blood brothers” who provide resources, stand together, act as scouts.  Discover solidarity.  Dissolve defiant opposition.

6.  “Lord of the Flies.”  ‘Nuf said.

THE USES OF OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE

1.  To keep hope alive.

2.  To test how much one is valued or loved.  If they persist in the face of opposition, they must care.  But if one is in control of the level of opposition and keeps ratcheting it up, and the tested one finally fails -- then it’s still their fault.

3.  To avoid blame, esp. in the case of persons who secretly have accepted the blame.  Or in the case of people who have been blamed and punished so severely that they nearly died.  Blame arouses in them an uncontrollable terror which they will try to hide.

4.  There are many situations in which a group is pitted against an individual unjustly.  Oppositional defiance can be then an explicitly moral stance to take.

WHAT IS THE OPPOSITE OF OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE?  I don’t mean what will make a person stop being defiant, I mean what will let a person continue to be defiant in a useful and skillful way?

1.  Empathy.

2.  Objectivity.

3.  A larger frame of reference: an awareness of a greater good, an awareness of the long trajectory of time in which today’s issues are turned upside down tomorrow.

4.  A voice: the ability to say things clearly and passionately so people will get it.

5.  Examples from real life.

6.  Backup and a place to rest.

7.  Experience, memories of success.  EVIDENCE of success.

WHAT ABOUT THE PHYSICAL SUBSTRATE?

1.  We know that some hormones (testosterone, adrenaline) and some tumors or trauma (in the forebrain) will make people aggressive, argumentative, violent.  There seems to be genetic substrate for this. 

2.  We know that some animals are killers and there is no reason to think humans are different.

3.  It’s possible that oppositional defiance is the default position in all humans, but suppressed by later evolution and mutations or epigenomes or even proper gut bacteria or toxoplasmosis parasites (it works on rats).  If one of those mechanisms fails, the result might be unwanted aggression or paranoia.  Behaving in a more positive way may not be the result of progress towards the natural but evolutionarily improved attitudes of people.  Evil may be the result of loss of restraints, social or physical, the default.

4.  A person who barely survived the Dutch WWII starvation said to me that no one really knows what their breaking point is until they are living it.  She ended up collaborating for bread.  Then she had to accept shame or be defiant.  She chose the latter.

5.  Human beings’ bodies have never included so many strange and manmade chemicals at any point in history.  Manmade molecules and the use of psycho-affective drugs, legal or illegal, have entirely unknown cumulative effects without even considering interactions or means of ingestion.  We do know that some of them will throw people into unreasonable, unstoppable rage.  That’s NOT the same thing as oppositional defiance.

Resolving oppositional defiance is different in every situation.  It is a response, maybe an enlightened and brave one, but still a response, therefore unique.

STORIES, WITNESSES, TESTIMONY

Sometimes technology is a game-changer and this is true of the dimension of observing, either through imagination or through video depiction or through eye-witnesses.  Now, with smart phones in the hands of so many, satellite surveillance from far away, drones invading by surprise, GPS locators and ankle-monitors -- things are not just seen but also recorded.  So far I haven’t read in the papers an account of a kid who managed to nail an abusive parent with a “teddy bear camera,” but it’s probably already happened.  Gizmos make what was inconceivable completely incontrovertible.

Whether in terms of oppositional defiance in the name of justice for a stigmatized group or as oppositional defiance in an individual context where the defiant person is trying to understand whether they’re just being reflexive in resisting and questioning or trying to convince the other person that they SHOULD be opposed, it helps if you’ve got evidence.  (I’m not saying “truth.”  There are usually several truths.)

If all else fails, resort to laughter.

OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE PT 4

This post is dedicated to the prisoners at Guantanamo Prison:  uncharged, unheard, unrepresented, unconvicted -- the whole thing is unjustified.  Their lives are dependent on the ability of ordinary citizens OUTSIDE the prison to intervene.

Oppositional defiance -- that is, defiance of authority -- is something that I know from both sides, in marriage, teaching, law enforcement, politics.  If there’s another person involved, you’re bound to have an occasional need for them to do something or they will need YOU to do something.  What you do about it rather depends upon the cause, nature, and other details of both the opposition and the means of defiance.  Mostly what I can do at this point is generate questions.

1.  Is this demand something you really cannot do?

2.  Is it something you can do but just don’t want to?  Because maybe you’re the one who will take the consequences -- not the other guy.  Or your morality won’t allow it.

3.  Is the other guy just plain wrong?

4.  Is the opposition coming from outside you both?

5.  Is it a false opposition that might stop if it were reframed?

6.  Is there a competition going on?  Maybe for vital resources?

A recent opposition of mine was with a doctor.  He wanted me to be inert, compliant, quickly dealt with, not a trouble-maker.  I wanted time, focus, reassurance, and a report of what he found.  The defiance took the practical form of moving to a different doctor.   I evaded by being polite in the moment, then sending a letter.  There’s a political component to oppositional defiance, a need to demonstrate that one is right.  As it happens, the doc I left opposed the law permitting assisted suicide.  Plainly, he thinks the lives of patients belong to the doctor.   

But the hell with the fancy dynamics of it all -- change has to happen.  The revolution must be completed.  Why should a person have to defy and explain their defiance?  Why isn’t it self-evident that the one who is demanding something should have to justify that demand?  And if it’s a reasonable demand, why not comply?  Is it because it’s a demand instead of request, open to negotiation?

Why must some people be rapists in order to respond to sex?  Because it’s not really about sex, but about the addiction to force and control.  I’m watching “Damages” in which one plot thread is the teenaged son of the Glenn Close dominating and controlling character.  Their relationship is entirely controlled by strategy.  (I’m not recommending these, just listing them.)  I observe the following controlling strategies:

1.  Prepare options ahead of time so you have the advantage of surprise.  The boy is out of control so he is seized and sent to a prison-like “school.”  He pretends to comply.  He also expresses a desire for freedom.  His mother agrees to spring him from the “school” and gives him the papers for emancipation.  He doesn’t sign them, but returns home now that he’s escaped the school.  On the surface he is compliant.  We know better.  He is also very good at predicting his mother’s behavior.  But his mistake was being out of control.

2.  Use rule-based laws and consequences:  legalities, moving the individual from one category to another (emancipation, mental health diagnosis).  Society makes this easy by defining trouble-makers as either crazy or criminal.  Join your labor union; defend civil service.

3.  Hire muscle and confine the individual.  (arrest, boarding school, asylum, chemical restraint)  Some will go so far as murder, at least in the movies.  Prepare escape routes and stay alert.  Study maps.  Sit where you can see the door.

4.  Use behavior modification.  This one really makes me scream.  It only drives the defiance underground where it is far more dangerous.  Or it can break people so that they are dependent for the rest of their lives.  But it can work in both directions.

5.  Don’t involve people or things that could be hostages.  This one is hard.  One doesn’t want to be inhuman enough never to attach to others or even things, but it only makes sense to protect what you care about. I was careful not to have children.

6.  Test for reality constantly.  Don’t be bluffed.

7.  Never trust flattery.  Accept it as a possibility and test it.  Same with threats.

8.  Frustrated or enraged or drunk etc. people can lash out without knowing their own strength or even intending to do it -- they surprise themselves.  Don’t you be surprised -- watch closely.  Practice on animals:  what signs does this cat make that it’s about to jump?  (Freeze, stare, lick nose, GO!)

9.  Counter-diagnosis:  what is making this person insist on domination?  Ego?  A higher boss? Maybe S/HE’s the defiant one.  Maybe s/he’s scared.  Address that.  Don’t get so wrapped up in yourself that you can’t see the other person.

10.  Is it coming from the social role: doc, cop, or whore?  Use that.  Students know exactly the constraints on teachers in public schools:  no contact, grades justified, protocol observed, no hint of sexuality -- those conditions force vulnerability on the teacher while trying to protect the vulnerability of students.

11.  Hoard your energy for the long haul.  Play the long game.

12.  Role play in advance so you have in mind some strategies.

The goal of the strategies below is to shift the frame of reference in the brains of these bossy people away from the side with checklists, protocols, indicators and categories, over to the side where they see you as a person like them.  Some will say this is from the left brain to the right brain.  My list below is kind of silly.  You can probably do better.  But sometimes being silly is disarming.

1.  “Please tell me your name.” (Surprising how many caregivers don’t do this when any waiter or even receptionist will do it.)

2.  Wink.

3.  “Would you hold my hand for a minute?”  

4.  “What were you like when you were my age?”

5.  “Would you give me ten minutes to tell you about myself?”  (You might need to carry a timer.)  If they say they don’t have ten minutes, ask for five or two.

6.   Write or draw something funny on your skin.  Something the OTHER guy will think is funny.

7.  “What’s your favorite . . .  “  color, TV show, etc.

8.  Give them a piece of candy or a poem.  (You don’t have to write it.)

If this backfires on one person, try it on the next.  Do a little adjusting and inventing.  Try to read body language.  Make this sort of thing a hobby.  Read Eric Berne’s “Games People Play,” and even better Claude Steiner’s “Games Alcoholics Play.”  (They’re often three-handed, which confuses oppositions.) You don’t have to learn any fancy theories to understand these books: just pay attention.

In any prison, the guards and the prisoners begin to get acquainted and to understand each other, even to like each other.  A culture grows up between them.  Someone didn’t like this at Guantanamo and replaced the former guards with much harsher new ones.  The biggest mistake the “government” has made is not understanding their prisoners.  

When the price is too high, the oppressor cannot win.  They cannot force people to live, as jailers on reservations know.  At Guantanamo no strategy, no intervention, will make a difference now.  It has become inhuman.  The place has become predatory while refusing to kill the prey.  This country is being run as though it were a kennel, an agribusiness, a corporation based on profit.  Guantanamo is another Abu Ghraib.  Those people in Washington DC are NOT the government -- they are a sideshow.  We should oppose and defy “them”  But we don’t know who the real authorities are.  We’re dealing with a “black” ops system that excludes our black president.

More to come that’s not so political.  Maybe.

PASTORAL COUNSELING (CPE)

Teruo Kobayashi was a fellow student at seminary.  He was a Konkoyo priest, which meant he was a genetic descendent of Konko himself who had founded the religion, which was a conflation of Christianity and Shinto.  Teruo could never understand pastoral counseling.  He said that in his tradition, he went to a certain location in the temple and sat down on a cushion.  Then troubled people came to him, brought him a gift and sat across from him to explain their problem.  He would think about it a bit, tell the person what they ought to do, and then the person would go away to be obedient.  This approach would only make sense to a conservative Fundamentalist Christian.  A liberal, particularly from the UU or Ethical Culture traditions, would laugh.  Defiantly.

Clinical Pastoral Care is a formal course, usually ten or twelve weeks long, in which prospective ministers are put in relationship with people in serious situations, as in prison or a hospital.  They are asked to be useful to these people for part of the day and then the rest of the time they are asked to sit in a group and address what feelings arose in them.  FEELINGS, not rules.  And the point was to listen, which meant to open up enough for those feelings to be triggered.  Then the group would address how to handle those feelings, which were often profound, often disconcerting, and always a challenge to any faith position that would cause a person to become a minister, even a free-thinking atheist hedonist anarchist.  It was really about one’s identity while being in relationship to other people.  

The point of doing this in a hospital or prison was that one couldn’t choose which people to help.  It meant intimacy without sex.  The chaplain does not crawl into the bed, no matter how much the counselee wants it.  Luckily, very sick people don’t want it very much.  It’s much more of a problem in a regular congregation.

There are two aspects that define this intimacy as professional.  One is the time and situation limit.  The chaplain doesn’t go home with the patient or prisoner.  And the job IS a job that ends.  The other is the requirement of confidentiality.  In a CPE group confidentiality applies to the student chaplains, just as though they were attending AA meetings. 

Not too long ago I got interested in what happened to my CPE group.  It’s been thirty years now so I didn’t expect to upset many applecarts.  There were six of us.  I had my notes but discovered only one name.  Thanks to google I now know that he did indeed achieve the primacy in his tradition that he wanted and he did pursue the issues that he wrestled with at the time, but as a professor, not as a minister.  I don’t know what happened to the handsome boy with cancer of the testicles or the other handsome boy who was seduced by a priest on the first night of his student priesthood nor the sturdy and stoic young woman who found herself crying uncontrollably in the arms of a family that had just lost a member.  You know what happened to me.  The sixth student was pretty laid back -- he played in a bluegrass band.  Our advisor left CPE.

Confidentiality has been a major issue for me.  I know too much and too little at the same time.  I have to guard others, but as many books and movies have illustrated, that might mean not making public something that would save them, respecting their right to decide what is known about their lives.  It’s a kind of torture to see injustice based on ignorance, whether that is a stupidity of thinking or simple ignorance of facts.  All a person can do is to stand by the accused and wait for the situation to change.  But if that person begins to worry about intimate things told at unguarded moments, then the relationship may disintegrate.

The hardest persuasion is to assure the armored person who is guaranteeing rejection by not disclosing the truth that they can safely give it up.  People can get invested in the stigma against them and accept that definition because it is a familiar and dependable source of identity.  In truth, there is no guarantee that the “truth” can set anything free -- not people and not ideas. 

Another curve ball that comes my way is that I have guarded some secrets for decades, only to discover that everyone already knew that and didn’t care very much.  In small towns and church congregations, people know everything.  Just about the time I left one congregation, someone finally let it slip that one of the members was suicidal -- had made repeated attempts while I was there.  I had been friendly with this woman, stayed at her home overnight, found her cheerful and well-balanced.  No one told me.  She succeeded in killing herself after I left.  She didn’t tell me because I was an authority figure and that meant she projected all sorts of fantasies about what I might do if I knew.  I have no idea at all what I would have done.

Counseling is seen by many in the same terms as Teruo’s tradition:  a big authority tells a little needy person what they need to know.  Maybe even intervenes on their behalf.  If there is NO big authority (God, minister, doctor or parent), then the little needy person will just have to figure it out on their own terms.  A whole flowering of “Third Force” psych in the Seventies comes from acting on this assumption.  The task of the counselor is NOT to tell the counselee anything -- just to listen and try to “become” the counselee in some sense.  It helps if both are from something like the same background.  Eugene Gendlin asserts that the second person doesn’t even need to be a counselor but merely a witness.  They don’t even have to say mmm-hmmm at intervals.  They can even be on the telephone.  To some extent they can even be there as a known figure who is only imagined at the moment.  (To find out more, what you want to google for is “Focusing.”  There are YouTube vids.)  Kids can do it for each other.  A dog, maybe.  (Forget cats.)

Outside of a professional relationship, it’s confusing to know what rules apply.  It might reassure people to know that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reading about this issue of intimate confidentiality.  Every time I’ve stepped a little out of the conventional line, there’s been trouble, whether I told too much or told too little.  The whole society seems to be wrestling with this.  I have a friend who does not want to KNOW who is gay and who is not gay.  (She can’t hear me say that this is a binary distinction that’s not useful anyway.  She thinks it’s like male and female, which she thinks are mutually exclusive.  She bristles at the idea of me knowing better.)

But I’m a writer.  That’s quite a different profession.  When I wrote the bio of Bob Scriver, I didn’t tell everything I knew.  Afterwards people came to tell me things I hadn’t known.  Some of them made me cry.  Bob himself never suspected anyone knew.  Inevitably, someone who reads this will ask me what information made me cry.  Forget it.

MY TAKE ON DEMISEXUALITY

At last a sexual category I can identify with!  DEMISEXUAL.   Like all the other categories, someone just made up the word so they get to define it.  They say,  “A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone. . .  When a demisexual is emotionally connected to someone else (whether the feelings are romantic love or deep friendship), the demisexual experiences sexual attraction and desire, but only towards the specific partner or partners.

. . . “Demisexuals are not choosing to abstain; they simply lack sexual attraction until a close relationship is formed.”

I don’t know what this theorist would make of the pattern in which a person has had a deep, physical, complete relationship with someone that can never be duplicated again, often because of never being that young again.  It does discourage more relationships that don’t seem likely to ever duplicate that intensity.  I don’t think that’s demisexuality.  Also, getting a little buzz out of someone who is reminiscent of that first love is not demisexuality.  

I really don’t like the word very much, but it does usefully distinguish between two stages of intimate relationship, and I’m grateful that the “primary” one is the one given attention, that the physical is secondary.  I confess that I’m lacking in the capacity for instant desire.   I mean, I might note approval of a big handsome hairy powerful man, but that would be no reason to hop into bed with him, no guarantee of having any affection for each other.  If I did progress to the point of real intimacy, it would rip me apart when it ended.  Which is another good reason not to get involved again.

But I’m grateful that now I have a label and a “letter” to claim:  LGBTXD.  Until now I was merely an X.   I’m also pleased that there are more points identified on the continuum that is sexual desire, not even mentioning gender identification, because surely a person could be LGBT and D at the same time and surely whether one thinks of oneself as male or female has little to do with it.  One can have emotional connection of considerable intensity and depth with a child, a very old person, a disabled person.  It wouldn’t even have to be in words: it could be in terms of music or art.  D’s, as I understand them, could easily accommodate an epistolary relationship based on the exchange of letters or even a relationship with someone who is dead but who left a written record that may trigger a strong emotional connection.  Our society completely ignores this.  Victorians did not, but they had many occasions to be connected only by letters.

An intense connection in terms of emotion and thinking, which is quite common in an academic setting but certainly not confined to it, can be innocently public.  The delight and intensity of it can please people nearby.  People referring to overheard dialogue with my close friends along these lines have called us “the two philosophers,” not the two lovers.  I haven’t experienced many others wanting to butt in or feeling jealous about it.  But when we came into the same space, I could see the other person light up and feel myself become incandescent at the connection.   I get a little rush from spotting their name in my email.  There is none of the dominance or exclusiveness or ownership that gets into physical sexual relationships, maybe because these talking friendships aren’t a basis of economic dependence or governed by the laws that are necessary when children or property ownership are involved.

The only “problem” with being a D is that no one has figured out how to commodify it, unless you count old-fashioned romance novels -- as contrasted with the contemporary bodice-rippers about hook-up culture where you go straight to bed and then get to know each other.  People conflate sex and love so much that it’s hard to describe a love that isn’t physical, much less orgasmic.  You can pay for sex, but not for Demisexuality.  It happens at a deep level, below consciousness, in “felt” concepts rather than words.  Part of it is the product of prior experiences and part of it is a matter of something sought, something yearned for, a kind of meshing.

Adults having explicit sex with children is problematic, partly because it is forced, partly because it is often physically damaging due to the mismatch of size and strength, and because it requires emotional capacity that can be exceeded or distorted.  It rewires the brain in ways that may be crippling for the rest of life, dropping out necessary steps of development.  It can’t help being one-sided -- but there are exceptions.  I don’t know whether this might be true of D-sexuality that has not become physical.

In fact, I don’t know enough about how D-sexuality (being technically A-sexual until a deep emotional and intellectual connection is already established) eventually becomes overt physical sex.  Is it at a point of crossover to kissing and embracing?  Or must there be full-on fucking to change from demi- to full?  What if one wants to move to the physical and the other doesn’t?  That might apply to an adult relating to a child.  Is it a failure if the friendship just stays a friendship?  Why would it be?

Demisexuality is often a matter of long-distance relationships -- in the past on paper and now via electronics -- that CAN translate into a desire to make real body contact.  Again, if one person feels a strong emotional and intellectual connection and the other is only after some fucking, the asymmetry renders it immoral.  So I would add the requirement of emotional/intellectual equality to any legitimate demisexuality.

That means people need to be really developed in terms of their brain and heart life; children are not likely to handle such a relationship without some risk being involved, not least the grief of an ending.  The adult or dominant half of the relationship must take responsibility for that.

Most people might guess that a relationship based on the exchange of ideas or even shared affinities would be dry and formal.  But I’ve had ecstatic conversations -- even in writing -- about theatre or art.  Ideas can be deliriously Dionysian and if we recognized that more clearly, people would demand more education.  But it’s still not necessarily some kind of foreplay for going to bed.  It can be complete in itself and it can persist without the two people even being in proximity.  It’s not fantasies about lust;  it’s something real happening in the mind.  

The product will not be children but maybe a book, a symphony or a painting.  Even more likely, and closer to my experience, it might be progress in a cause, a new way of seeing, a genuine cultural advance.  Such rewards are not needed as justification for a relationship that exists for itself, as its own reward, which is a wonderful thing -- I sometimes worry that it is getting lost.

WHAT YOU GET IS WHAT YOU SEE

This post considers two movies about Native Americans interacting with whites.  The first one is “Wind River,” (2000, PG)  “The 1854 Wyoming historical drama is based on Tom Shell's adaptation of the true life memoirs of Pony Express rider Nick Wilson.”  “It would be an appropriate film to show as part of the fourth grade curriculum in California schools.”  (Dr. Brad Bryant, IMDB reviewer)

The second one is “The New World” (2005, PG-13) about the Jamestown Colony and the legendary story of Pocahontas.  Now this ill-fated colony has been returned to the news because of the newly discovered proof of cannibalism in the "starving time" of 1609–1610.  Only 61 of the 500 colonists survived the period.   The eaten person was a fourteen-year-old English girl of good family who had died earlier and was dug up to be butchered.  

Historians were not surprised.  They had already read shocking stuff.  “During these first years of the colony, many of the people lived in cavelike holes dug into the ground, and in the winter of 1609-1610, they were  ″...driven through insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian, digged by some out of his grave after he had laid buried there days and wholly devoured him; others, envying the better state of body of any whom hunger has not yet so much wasted as their own, lay wait and threatened to kill and eat them; one among them slew his wife as she slept in his bosom, cut her in pieces, salted her and fed upon her till he had clean devoured all parts saving her head...″  

“Wind River” is PG and “The New World” is PG-13 because it is “sexy,” I guess.  The latter is unsuitable for many grownups, as it will challenge their ideas of the founding of the United States, the nature of indigenous people, and the real moral core of English gentry, even though the movie spares them any scenes of cannibalism or shit-eating.  Tom Shell, who directed “Wind River” appears to be a “utility director,” while Terence Malick, who conceived, wrote and directed “The New World,” is widely considered a genius.  “Wind River” is a kind of “utility movie,” where expectations are fulfilled and the standard marks are hit without any particular challenge.  To most people, this is what movies are supposed to be.  They like the fight scenes.  There are some great stunt horseback fighters in this film.

“The New World” is a philosophical treatise in images: what IS the nature of human beings, what is our moral obligation to those who are different and so on.  Malick uses the script only as a guide to accumulate a lot of images which he edits into a more direct way of conveying “felt concepts.”  In that sense, I’m with him.  I write with words, he writes with film clips.  I revise, he revises.  We both have fancy educations, his far more advanced than mine.  We like the meta-story.

It’s interesting that there is a pool of NA actors and since now the whole “truth and authenticity” thing has become so literal, they are the only possible casting choices for some movies.  But in “Wind River” both Russell Means and Wes Studi are cast against their natural personalities.  Means is a violent and self-important man playing a wise old chief.  Studi plays a war-like rebel but is actually a thoughtful and generous person.  Studi is in both films.  He was particularly invested in learning the original language in “The New World.”  He is a growing man with a broadening awareness. 

Both films have an element that must trouble the pedophile-phobes.  The actress who plays Pocahontas, Q'orianka Kilcher, was twelve when cast and fourteen when the movie was shot.  We pretend kids this age are not sexual and, in fact, relations with them are unlawful, but historically a woman this age would be considered adult, just not a free-range person -- very much confined and supervised, not because of her age but because of her gender.  Studi said he worried a little about Kilcher but she was “tough, very tough,” and her mother shadowed her.  In real life the mother/daughter team are politically active worldwide for autochthonous issues.  Q’orianka had a tribal Peruvian father but was raised in Hawaii by her mother.  I thought of Obama.  In the movie she is freedom and delight “personified,” exactly that which the Eden-seekers expected to find in the land but couldn’t see.

Blake Heron plays a little older adolescent when he sort of semi-voluntarily gets trafficked into a boy-man relationship with a middle-aged Indian (actually a Californian with an hispanic name, A. Martinez, who’s been acting since 1968).  If you look at it that way, the older man tying the boy onto a horse and then cutting away the pants from his crotch when the friction of riding rubs the inside of his thighs painfully bloody . . .  well, you see what you’re looking for, don’t you?  Wes Studi’s character claims he wants to buy the boy to ransom back to whites, but is that all there is to it?  Martinez supposedly captures the boy to replace sons who died.  Both of the “mothers” in the story are idealized. 

In some ways “Wind River” is more revealing than “The New World,” because “Wind River” is so unconscious, as we say.  Malick is fully aware of longings, sexual and otherwise, and human vulnerability to grotesque darkness.  Shell is just sticking to the script, which is meant to present a family story in a family way, but sometimes is transparent to the underlying history which -- true or not -- potentially has the same elements.  Isn’t the teenaged rebellion of the boy against his older brother both sexual and Oedipal, in the absence of the father?

There are several specifically NA movies about to break into publicity.  Arnaud Desplechin, a French auteur admirer of Truffault, is about to release “Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian.”  This is based on a book I’ve had for a long time:  “Reality and Dream” by George Devereaux.  I bought it from the Hyde Park Powell’s when I was in seminary, thinking that the author as well as the analysand was Blackfeet, since Devereaux is a common local name.  As it turns out, Devereaux was the analyst.  He cleverly disguised the analysand by using his tribal name.  As it happens, that’s also a familiar name around here.  The part will be played by Benicio del Toro, who is Puerto Rican with Spanish citizenship.  But the ground of analysis is both reality and dream, identity and deception, mix and match.

“Reality and dream” is a pretty good category for any movie that’s supposed to have Indians in it, whether or not they are played by “real” Indians.  I suppose that “reality and dream” might be a description of any movie with humans in it, whether or not played by “real humans”, whatever those are.

PS:

http://winterinthebloodfilm.com  seems to be about finished.  Lovely website to visit.

"GUUJAW AND THE REAWAKENING OF THE HAIDA NATION" By Ian Gill

So many of us long for a special place, sometimes once know and lost and sometimes only envisioned and occasionally literary.  A land loved by many is called “Earthsea,” the homeland envisioned by Ursula LeGuin.  Fewer know that this is a real place called by geographers “Queen Charlotte Islands.”  Which always makes me think of the dessert.

My mother told me I was conceived in a thunderstorm on one of those islands.  She and my father had gone to visit a family that included the woman my father almost married.  Neither my father nor my mother had red hair, but I did.  My mother claimed it had something to do with that red-headed woman on the island, either that thoughts of her strayed into my father’s mind or that my mother seized the copper hair from her -- or both.  Sci-fi is just a way of talking within given parameters about a reality so it becomes a story but sometimes the world creates parameters that allow the same thing.  They are always slightly menacing, like that small dark knot in the corner that haunts Jed in “The Wizard of Earthsea.”

The Queen Charlottes include the Haida Gwaa which is the main location of the Haida people.  What you need to know about this collection of islands along the British Columbia coast is at first geological:  These islands were once roughly where Hawaii is now, but were moved along on the tectonic plates until they bumped up against North America.  They are connected by contiguity and origin to rhyming islands near Japan and they are rich in copper piped to the surface by volcanic action because they are part of the Ring of Fire that subduction zone that shakes the land violently now and then.  There is a deposit of argyllite, a soft flat black kind of stone good for carving and polishing.  (The Sioux use red argyllite for their pipe bowls.)

But beyond everything else there is cedar.  As buffalo are to the Blackfeet, cedar is to the Haida.  Some would say salmon was a better icon, but others would classify a salmon as a forest animal: they are conceived in the cold streams coming down from the mountains that were pushed up by the tectonic plate action, the mountains that scrape water out of the clouds.  The salmon grow in gravelly headwaters first, then go on their long journey around the sea and back as though someone had slipped them a copy of Joe Campbell’s mythology.  Where there is water, there is life, connected.

The huge cedar trunks, hollowed out with fire and adzes, made possible ocean-going “canoes” so that the Haida were kings of the sea, ranging far and far, Vikings of the Pacific.  They lived in board houses made of split cedar and carved beams and their harbor villages were marked by carved totem poles that told the stories of families in terms of animals: frogs and thunderbirds and otter.  If you didn’t mind rain and smoke, and enjoyed seafood, the life was a rich and comfortable one.  Then came smallpox.

And then came the timber companies and then came poverty.  It’s an old story.  But the awakening came, partly through artists like Bill Reid and Gary Edenshaw, and eventually created a man called Guujaaw, previously Gary Edenshaw.  It means Drum.  Of course, there’s a book -- how else would I know?  “All That We Say is Ours:  Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation,” by Ian Gill. The “Aquarian Age” called to the indigenous people of the Queen Charlotte Islands, renaming them Haida Gwaii, “Islands of the People”, Xaaydlaga Gawaayaay, “Islands at the Boundary of the World”.  Reid is famous for his giant carving of Raven calling the People out of their origin in a clamshell.  Now Guujaaw, carver/storyteller/dancer/actor/singer/politician -- acting as Raven in a proper mask -- set about prying the People out of the mindset of the Euros, which was intent on cutting every old growth tree they could.  To do such a prying thing, first you have to think of it.  Guujaaw, in the traditional human way of talking late at night with the likeminded, began to think of things the rest of us are still only gradually realizing.

First, they thought of meeting Canada as equals, not as dependent victims.  To counter British law based on the granting of authority to a king, they raised Haida law based on the self-evident ecology of the land.  (A shift from Creator to Creation.)  To add the endorsement of “first users” which is a traditional element when dealing with land and water, they went into the forest and found ancient evidence of cedar-based occupation: trees that had been modified by ancient people, logs that had been cut but left for some reason, boxes and house foundations.  Always the places were haunted by the ghostly totem poles, so mystically portrayed by Emily Carr and now standing in front of museums.  Part of Guujaaw’s preparation was going to the secret places marked by the poles and by the bleached bones of the People in order to bury them before the souvenir hunters found the skulls for mantel ornaments.  He slept there and their spirits came to him.

The friends sat late at night with maps and drew lines.  Euros understand drawn boundaries.  When the laws of the cedar were developing, the Haida realized that timber brokers and politicians only planned for tomorrow -- get elected, make the profit, and get the hell out.  So they developed a time-line based on the life span of a cedar -- about a thousand years until maturity, much longer until natural death -- inhabited by the lifespans of the totems.  They worked out the intervals of birth and death and showed that the land could only be sustained by this ecology.  Otherwise the government was looking at a cliff: big money soon -- eventually nothing but rocks and seabird guano.  Reality forced a paradigm shift.  The Haida were ready: in the interval tribal women had attended law school and could elegantly address the courts in their own Haida language.

Call it “post-colonial” if you like.  The Brit Empire reconvened transformed, indigenous peoples united to resist the German/British monarchy-based systems, reaching back to pre-discovery days for their identity.  Now the Australian and New Zealand aboriginals, the Japanese Ainu, the tribes on the southern parts of the American continent, began to talk to each other.  The idea is not to choose between two binaries, but to find either a balance or a blend that saves the land because that IS the way to save human lives.  

The arts are always a major part. http://www.bruceruddell.com/?page_id=49   This is a clip of “The Spirit of the Haida Gwaii Oratorio” that Ian Gill describes in his last chapter.  You are hearing it because of the new level of cyber-networking on the planet now -- if we can keep it out of the hands of the government and predatory corporations.

What follows is a little poem by Jenny Nelson, mother of two of Guujaaw’s children. (I do believe I have seen an ancient movie of this scene.)   Then a video cartoon that is described as “Haida Manga.”

Kjusta

for Naanii Ida

The canoe came,

Long-prowed and slim-paddled it came;

slipping through still water,

and the bear danced.

The bear danced in the prow

bringing the princess in.

Old women cleaned chitons by the fire.

Drank strong coffee.

Made good pan bread

Told the stories.

Children moved

in and out

of the women's circle.

Until the boat came in.

Then faces painted,

Dancers robed

Drums sounded,

Songs sung,

And the bear danced the princess in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi5u7A9DRAc

Haida Manga:  The power of the hummingbird.

AIDS FROM THE OUTSIDE

Though I do not have HIV-AIDS and am not at risk because: I am 74, sex is only a dim memory, I don’t use IV drugs, I don’t work in a lab or a hospital, and the pool of carriers in Montana is pretty small.  In spite of all this I spend quite a bit of time thinking about the problem for one over-riding reason:  it’s interesting.  Diseases are always interesting because they connect to so many dimensions of being human.  Here’s a list of things I ponder:

1.  How is HIV like smallpox?  In some cases smallpox was deliberately spread to the Native population, but for the most part the disease spread quickly with deadly but convenient consequences for white Euros, because the Natives had no immunity.  Whites caught it, some of them knew to be vaccinated, and most survived.  But Indians did not.  Jefferson had Lewis’ expedition carry the vaccine and offer it, but for the most part the NA people didn’t understand the concept.  A natural susceptibility combined with the demonization of a whole people, so that when they died, they were not mourned, nor were white Euro people very aware of their suffering.

2.  The timing is crucial.  Gay people had just begun to assert their humanity and to flower into a kind of SF climax culture based on freedom, the arts, and unconstrained sexuality.  Just as it was beginning to resolve into something permanent, the AIDS epidemic struck.  There were two results:  one was demonization again, so that Gay and AIDS were conflated in the public mind and AIDS was seen as the natural punishment, supernatural.  The other was the response of the HIV survivors as they nursed and buried their lovers and friends.  Horror was mixed with compassion and intimacy.  Their openly acknowledged love for each other meant organizing to care for each other.  What had been sex deepened into something more, but terrifying.

3.  In fact, HIV is not particularly linked to circumstances: any class, gender or education-level can catch this virus through blood exposure.  The IV drug route has not been as publicized as the anal sex route (which is not confined to one gender) or mother/child contagion.  But educated, prosperous, well-placed gays often want to avoid all stigma and they can afford the drugs to keep HIV contained.  They are NOT interested in the plight of sex workers or trafficked children.  The younger ones have NOT gone through that massive lesson enforced by the deaths of a generation of gays.  These young men want marriage, children, prosperity and to be priests -- they don’t want barriers.  Or any limitations at all.

4.  Third world (including the internal ghettos and reservations or whatever) HIV people are caught in a tangle of diseases enforced by stigma.  HIV is just one more disease among TB, Hep C, malaria, and ordinary infection, exposure, malnutrition, and violence.  They constitute a reservoir of contagion that strangely has a magnetic attraction for two opposite types of people:  those who like to flirt with danger -- partly because of what some call “low self-esteem” and others call a death wish -- and those who are do-gooders.  (The dynamics of “doing good” are mostly outside this discussion.)

5.  Those who try to improve the world are again of two types:  hands-on who plunge into the streets and soup kitchens, going one-on-one; and those who try to understand the social structures and economics that enforce ghettos and poverty.  The first kind tends to burn out (or to remain, but so hardened by experience that they are hostile to the people they originally came to help) and the second kind gets bought out.  This latter is a kind of mission drift:  the fund-raising activities and the world-class conferences eat up their lives until they replace the original problem.

6.  This second dynamic is entwined with government in the same way as corporations, because NGO’s that become consumed by producing papers and attending seminars ARE corporations.  They become self-perpetuating economies that put the money into salaries, travel, and theories rather than field workers, localness, and practice.  The result is that they become so separated from the actual problem that they are little more than advertising agencies.  There’s no more research, no more insight.

7.  Which brings us to the Big Pharma vultures who use all these dynamics on an international scale for profit.  They offer false cures, useless testing, double standards, overpricing, and a host of other strategies that they pretend are medical when they are actual economic profiteering.

8.  And governments find this all very useful.  Buying necessary meds for Third World Countries at reduced prices, they tolerate high prices for their own citizens.  Offering or withdrawing support for meds is an excellent way to control other countries.  Maybe better than predator drones.  Letting people die is much more covert than killing people.

9.  Even Third World countries cannot afford to simply let the infected die.  The most contagious state of infection comes BEFORE they know they are infected.  Stigma is so high that they have every reason to conceal their status.  Two commodities are in high demand in poverty cultures:  sex and secrets.  Together they are explosive even without disease.

10.  If the number of people on the planet declines in the long run, that may be a good thing.  But in times as short as generations, it means the hollowing of nations, diminishing institutional and financial resources, and the loss of cultural order and hope.  Humans who live long enough to reproduce but not long enough to raise their children are not producing human beings because humans are as much culture as flesh.  A child without protection and support becomes, as the popular metaphor would have it, a zombie, staggering along, craving identity and meaning.  Or a vampire, living off the vitality of others.

Native Americans have been rebuilding their cultures and rehumanizing their children for a hundred years now.  For fifty years I’ve been close enough to watch.  It’s an emotional rollercoaster, but deeply absorbing -- more at the heart of humanness than most religion.  In the end and in addition, I also think about HIV-AIDS because of friendships with people I cherish: those who have died of it, those who live with it, those who are gay but not infected, and even a few street kids or memories of them.  

But all this stuff is social dynamics.  The scientific angle is even more absorbing.  The genome, epigenetics, histones and methylization, heredity winding its way through identity, and identity like a flame dancing through the cells.  They say that the silver side of war is the advance in technology and medicine.  When AIDS is figured out, it will be like a searchlight going on.  A true game-changer.