GRASPING THE THIRD RAIL

A certain kind of person seems almost compelled to grasp the third rail of a culture, by which I mean taking hold of the most controversial, emotional, and possibly dangerous idea or social stance that will give them attention and energy.  A mild version of this is something I called earlier “kissing the sea anemone” after reading about a daring young man who liked doing exactly that.  Not the big “flowers” whose bright petals are stinging tentacles, but the smaller green/brown ones along the shore, not so enticing but still capable of a jolt.  It’s a rousing experience, but the “third rail” in a subway, which is the source of the metaphor, will kill you.  Yet, flirting with death — the risk alone — powers daredevils and writers.

In seminary, in animal control encounters, on the rez, and while clerking for building regulation, guys (rarely women) hooked on the adrenaline complex provided good examples.  We thought of them as angry and emotional, outliers who selfishly wanted their own way, but their numbers seem to increase, which justifies a little deeper reflection.  I’m offended by efforts to suppress them, which are often presented as “virtuous,” preserving the greater order.  But the suppression is based on freezing the status quo, since it benefits them.  

One of the ways of defending the mainstream is to label and stigmatize such crusading indignants as having personal issues verging on the crazy rather than idealistic motives.  This is much more practical when the whole concept of the Theos and social notions of “Big Men” who can save us all are in play, but it cuts both ways, challenging both society and rebel.  If there really is a justification for a crusade and especially if it decisively wins, then the world is changed: the American Revolution has created a new country.  But if fails, then we have martyrs, like Louis Riel whose Red River nation of Metis is only now emerging into public memory.

When these Third Rail Graspers are met with complacent acceptance, like the Neo-Atheists, because everyone sees the point, the electricity fails.  They are put on their back feet, unable to detach from their original issue but also unable to find something new.  Global warming, world domination, the status of women — those issues are scary, depressing, difficult, pathless (or maybe just multi-pathed) struggles that don’t lend themselves to demagoguery.

There are two other social forces that resist crusaders.  One is simply not legitimizing people who take on social categories other than their own.  In particular racist and sexist issues are seen as demanding participating identity.  This is emotional and comes from inside of the group.  

The other is appearing in the social sciences quite a lot recently:  the problem is that if something doesn’t fit one’s categories of experience, it is invisible.  Thus, one of the major problems of getting Native American history taught in Montana was that too many white people truly thought there were no such thing.  They believed that nothing happened until they arrived and put all the Indians on reservations where time was frozen at the point of contact and it became no business of white people.  This is an incredible idea, but in conversation I run across it a lot.

Milo Yiannopoulos

What started this whole line of thought was a recent “Sightings” essay about one of the U of Chicago Div School adjunct faculty, Rachel Fulton Brown, taking up the subject of Milo Yiannopoulos, a flamboyant young (32) man evidently on the far alt-right Breitbart spectrum.  (“Yiannopoulos was born and raised in Kent in southern England.  His father is of half Greek and half Irish descent, while his mother is British.”  It was a confused marriage.)  Brown’s consideration legitimizes him.  This was objectionable to some people in that community — in spite of their formal declaration that nothing is ever to be excluded from reflection.  Brown was asked to explain and she responded with this essay.

https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/why-milo-scares-students-and-faculty-even-more.  

Here are the first two paragraphs:

“On Wednesday, February 1st, there was a riot at the University of California, Berkeley. The College Republicans had invited Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos to campus for what was supposed to be the concluding event of his year-long “Dangerous Faggot Tour.” Over 100 UC Berkeley professors signed a letter saying that Milo shouldn't be allowed to speak, but the administration let the talk go ahead, acknowledging that the First Amendment prohibits public universities from censoring speakers on the basis of their views.

Protesters began assembling outside the venue hours before the talk was scheduled to start. University police were present, and the administration issued a traffic advisory warning of expected large crowds. Before the doors opened, however, a group of black-clad rioters arrived, and within minutes the potentially peaceful protest had gone up in flames. The rioters lit fires, overturned police barricades, smashed windows, and threw fireworks, while students in the crowd, middle fingers held high, danced to the tune of “We Found Love in a Hopeless Place.”

One can either laugh or cry at the contradictions and paradoxes.

This is Brown’s formulation of the root cause.   “Weary of quarrels among the various Protestant denominations, universities shifted the emphasis of their courses on religion from theology to morality, while “unsectarianism” became a guiding institutional ideal. Students were expected to learn what religion they needed from Sunday school, while religion as such ceased to be a required subject at the university level. As a consequence of this self-secularization, religion became an object of academic study considered only from the outside, not tested intellectually or experientially from within. Universities, particularly public universities, became places for the purportedly neutral exchange of ideas, not for conversion to any clearly articulated and tested faith. Religion was a matter for the heart; education a matter for the head.”

Brown is no renegade or atheist, whether neo or not.  I very much agree that churches have moved problematic theology over to dogmatic morality.  (Also, to psych issues.)  They believe that positions that are not dogmatic are not religious.  It’s a way of pushing out scientific method.

“Author, Rachel Fulton Brown, is Associate Professor of Medieval History, Fundamentals, and the College at the University of Chicago, and Associate Faculty in the Divinity School. Her research and teaching focus on the intellectual and cultural history of Europe in the Middle Ages, with an emphasis on the history of Christianity and monasticism in the Latin West. Her book Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2017.”

The Sightings solution to handling the electrifying Milo is to put him into a lineup of opinions, a set of essays.  The reader must sort out what they mean and their validity.  It dilutes the legitimization without starting a riot.

I haven’t read the various pieces for an array of reasons.  One is that I don’t really care very much because I’ve moved my marbles out of that ring and am not informed enough to support any opinion.  Another is that the same predicament presents itself in arenas that I DO care about and I save my energy for them.  I always search for the deeper dynamic.  Milo is trivial.

Another is that often the hidden reason for notoriety is “ad hominem”, really based on whether the provocateur is lovable or not.  Who seizes the flag and shouts “follow me”?  Do they really have a cause or do they just crave the mic.  The ultimate end of the Berkeley rioting objection is assassination.  He who carries the flag is the most obvious target.  (Trump didn’t know that.)  If Milo falls or fades, his prospects of martyrdom aren’t that good.

AMERICAN BLACKFEET IN THE SIXTIES

When I landed in Browning, MT, in 1961 which pleased me very much, I had two notions.  One was that I wanted to live on an Indian reservation about which I had many fewer preconceptions than most people; and the other that I would “come of age” in a relationship with an artist/writer sort of person.  The two merged in my decade with Bob Scriver.  He was much older than one would expect but he was about the only action in town; that is, the only unattached and educated man who reciprocated.  

Almost immediately he developed herpes keratitis which nearly cost him his eye because there was no effective treatment; and he began a lifelong feud with the Federal Fish and Wildlife people because of a belligerent marshal who tried to close the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, thus eliminating his third income stream besides the art and taxidermy.  It looked as though at fifty years old, his life was ending.

The art was barely starting.  In fact, the whole concept of Western art was just developing.  There were no Western auctions.  The Society of Animal Artists had just formed, including Bob as a founding member because he had intended the Museum to be a resource for animal artists.  The contest for the statue of Charlie Russell had just ended badly but brought Bob the attention of Charlie Beil who lived in Banff.  Beil had been a protegée of Charlie Russell, so was one of the judges, and he took a liking to Bob’s misshapen but promising statue.  The Whitney Gallery of Western Art was just beginning its development into the present “Smithsonian of the West.”  Dick Flood was the precursor of wheeler/dealer Van Kirke Nelson and was supplying Russell works to the still-small museum in Great Falls.  There were no bronze foundries west of the Mississippi and ceramic shell casting had not been invented.

In that decade everything transformed.  I knew nothing about Western art or even Charlie Russell.  To me the center of the world for all the arts was Manhattan, a conviction I shared with the major glossy magazines.  The one gallery there that promoted Western art was the Kennedy Galleries.  (Chicago had the Mongerson and later the two were linked by marriage of the owners.)  In college, majoring in theatre, I had been taught to read the New York Times arts section — which was fat — thoroughly and critically.  In Great Falls was one news shop, “Val’s”, that carried the New York Times, out of sync but complete.  Every time I was down there, I bought it.  Naturally, now I read the gallery arts as well as the theatre section.  Bob had only thought “local,” but I was aggressively “national.”  We were told that there was only one sculptor doing work comparable to Bob’s — that was George Phippen.  We hadn’t heard of Harry Jackson.  The SW had not caught fire over art yet.

So I interpreted Bob’s work in terms of figurative bronzes in the style of Malvina Hoffman, whose Hall of Man I knew well.  This worked and despite his own scepticism, he was included in the National Academy of Design show, the National Sculpture Society show, and a few others.  Nothing sold, but the clippings persuaded uncertain buyers that they should pay attention, that he wasn’t just a whittler.

Pretty soon the Cowboy Hall of Fame was being built and the Cowboy Artists of America formed, and then the heroic-sized portrait of Bill Linderman was commissioned which led to the spectacular rodeo series.  The momentum of all this was swift and intense.  We were invaded by speculators and wannabes.  There was no time for sleep, much less relationship.

Bob’s reaction to the pressure was a series of dreams which were interpreted by John Hellson and Blackfeet elders as a call to become Bundle Keepers.  Blackfeet ceremonies include wives.  No young Blackfeet were involved except the little kids always present everywhere.  The ideas of intellectual property, indigenous entitlement, political claiming back of empire and so on were not developed yet.  We ourselves were detached from any of the drug-enhanced New Age access to magic.  Bob grew up with these Blackfeet, went to school with them, taught them, played in bands with them, hired them to work in the shop.

There was another stream, which was political.  T.E. Scriver had come from Quebec as an Indian trader in 1903.  Reservations are each unique with the presumptions of the times of their founding which dictated their organization and expected futures.  Blackfeet rez floundered a bit but finally gelled as a “corporation” with the enrolled persons as shareholders.  This was a finance-based system rather than a land-ownership base.  Though the Blackfeet were a gambling people, they did not understand that holding shares means gambling through bookkeeping.  They saw ledgers as paper for images.

The understanding of holding shares based on entitlement through genomic and registered family provenance is based on concepts that have dramatically shifted.  Many of the concepts, like “race”, are questioned today.  Healthy populations need genetic diversity and take in new members from outside the group (the “cousin” problem), so it would not be possible to look at the genomes of the registered members to see whether they were or were not Blackfeet, depending on which genes they inherited.  But it would be possible to prove descent from specific persons.  (Maybe a surprise.)

The Blackfeet were endowed with several sources of wealth, three notably coming from the industrial revolution:  Swift Dam, the Great Northern Railroad and the major oil patch which I haven’t heard named.  Tourism was an income fed by the railroad, which was made possible by Marias Pass.  The reservation did not understand the monetary potential of the pass.  Everyone understood oil.  Some knew the value of irrigation which depended on Swift Dam and was subtly diverted through canals to the south side of Birch Creek, as also was the land on that side.  Livestock was a strong source of income, dependent on grass and water, then alfalfa.  Small grains came a little later, another byproduct of the industrial revolution when chemicals and major machinery arrived.

Most of the writing about Blackfeet is either anthropological, often focusing on beautiful objects or the strategy of equestrian warfare, which arrived with the horse a few centuries ago; or romantic understandings of a people trapped in international passionate love/hate at a time when the terms of everything were shifting, this time trapped in passionate greed/justice.  Great terms for a novel, if the novel had not become antiquated, a preoccupation of the bourgeois Middle Class that the Blackfeet just now begin to aspire to in a time when it is dwindling, even in the small white prairie towns.

THE GYRES THAT SHAPE US

That this onslaught of chilling news about what used to be the Republican party should come in a Spring when night-snow alternates with sub-zero temps seems somehow connected, but I’m told that other places had an early Spring, as early as three weeks sooner than normal.  Lit crit folks sneer at writing that uses weather as a metaphorical background for emotions, particularly sexual emotions that aren’t supposed to be discussed openly, so that it rains on sadness and orgasm is an earthquake and insights happen with lightning striking nearby.

But this weather is not metaphorical.  It is causal, two-ways.  We have caused global warming and global warming is causing political impact in some places but in others devastating new droughts, wildfires, permafrost breakups, and antarctic shelf disintegration that will eventually drown Manhattan.  These things are not happening on a millennial or even century-long cycle.  They are quicker than a human lifetime.

The emotional impact on human beings is enormous.  Clearly, a lot of people are going to die, especially the coastal cultures on every continent but esp. the North Americans are the ones who have been rich, pleasure-seeking, and a little careless about relationships.  And facts.  They like the idea that there is no reality.  And politics is just preening.

“Ocean Motion” is a rhyming website (lit crits object to rhyming, but I like it) that comes from NASA, explaining and exploring the ocean gyres that take warm water along our land.  http://oceanmotion.org/html/impact/conveyor.htm

A sample:

Ocean circulation is comprised of a global network of interconnected currents, counter-currents, deepwater currents, and turbulent eddies. From this complex circulation, an underlying transport pattern emerges. Water cycles from surface currents to deepwater currents then back to the surface again in what scientists liken to a giant conveyor belt. Scientists call this global conveyor belt the meridional overturning circulation.

There are two major forces driving the meridional overturning circulation. First there is the wind. The wind, in combination with the Earth’s rotation, generates the gyres that circle the major ocean basins. Turbulent swirling packets of water called eddies, many of which are hundreds of kilometers in diameter, spin out of these wind-driven currents and carry the water trapped inside them to other parts of the ocean.

The second force is tied to differences in the density of water. Temperature and salinity independently affect water’s density. The colder and saltier the water, the denser it becomes. As water becomes denser, it sinks.

There’s no use grieving over the lack of this info in your original long-ago education, because no one knew this stuff then.  Even so, as soon as there were ocean-worthy wind-ships, they rode the water gyres and their accompanying winds around the planet.  Much, much earlier Denisovian sailors from SE Asia rode their much, much smaller outrigger canoes to the coast of South America, preceding the drowning of the plains of Bering, which was not a narrow strip, but (I fancy) like a very cold version of Bangladesh, so close to sea level.

http://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/bering-land-bridge-first-americans/?utm_content=buffer394cf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Those who work with Deep Time and hominins know that the land, water, air, and living creatures make each other possible and forcing them to constantly change.  Evolution happens when there is variation in the genomic and developmental nature of the animals, which are then pressed to survive by circumstances.  If animals cannot respond to change, they cannot survive.  If they are all the same, they live or die as one.

So this is what the USA political systems are facing at the moment.  Too many have refused to change — or maybe just don’t have the ability — and are being extinguished.  And it appears that virtue, honesty, integrity and all that other meme-y stuff is not going to help survival.  In the short run.  Not politically.  In the end survival is defined by reality.  In the past it has helped to trust each other, help each other through the rough patches, and tell the truth.

These virtues are enshrined in stories, but many of our stories are broken: the Christian one about Papa watching from the sky; the creation one about how we’re the best there will ever be, the sex one enforced by fertility, the economic one about the land itself as as the source of wealth.  The stories have fizzled out.  Now we figure the good die young, plagues happen repeatedly, crime is inevitable, and money is wasted on the poor.

I was disappointed that seminary was about the past and that pre-existing religious institutions are rigid to the point of being self-destructive.  There was a kind of apology that amounted to fatalism.  I snuck off to take writing classes and that helped.  Richard Stern’s post-WWII interest in narrativity was leavened by his work as an interpreter, esp. an interpreter of poetry.  Norman Maclean wasn’t teaching anymore and his mind was beginning to slip, but his dignity and protectiveness was intact.

The real visionaries were sort of psych/anthro people and Lakoff was at the center.  I sort of knew about them, but had no idea that they had the potential to give us new hope about the vision of the world that we need now — though I hope it doesn’t get frozen into some institution.  At the time the Unitarian seminary of Meadville/Lombard was constructed to house the future leaders of the movement.  But almost right away it was crippled by the conflict between the two main geniuses who were supposed to be the prophets,  Recently the building was sold to the U of Chicago to house the Neubauer Collegium, a far-seeing visionary group.  The house where I lived is no longer “Fleck House” but now a Chabad Center for Jewish students.  The remnants of the formal seminary are housed in a Jewish space in the Chicago “loop”.  So institutions must follow the money — those are the human gyres.

Script-writers also follow the money but in the process of courting change and innovation — quite the opposite of a religious institution — they are constantly considering modern moral dilemmas, not in terms of rules but in terms of projected consequences.  So far their contribution to climate change has been apocalypse scenarios and fantasies about other planets.  But even “Bones” with its corny scenarios and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” premise, sometimes manages a pretty good insight.  So far there hasn’t been a lot about ocean gyres and hominin fossils, but I suspect there’s part of the writing team who’s reading up on it, looking for the dynamic human gyres that shape our fates: warm or cold, fresh or salty.

At the moment the weather forecast notes two inches of snow last night and reduces the estimated high temp of the day by ten degrees.

WAKING IN THE DARK

Waking in the wee smalls of what is theoretically Spring — or close enough that Daylight Savings Time is bearing down on us again and soon my kitchen wall clock will show the right time, except a little slow because this “world” is so cold (zero this morning) that battery-driven clocks are low on juice which is part of the reason I don’t bother to get the little red stepladder and correct it — as I say, waking in the dark I check my umbilicus to the world.  (That’s a figure of speech.  I’m discovering metaphors are a foreign concept to some.)

The medical news directly contradicts what it said yesterday.  All the things that are supposed to make your life longer (not better) have been discredited by newer, more scientific, research.  It’s a little ambiguous which studies were sponsored by which entities and whether the government studies are less self-serving than those by corporations.  Of course, there are always plenty of outliers, whether quacks or geniuses.

The political news is similar but lately more hair-raising.  I’m sticking with Rachel Maddow, who is a new discovery for me, and she explains frankly that she and her team have become clearer and more trust-worthy lately because they have stopped reacting to what all the players say.  They want only to think about acts and facts that can be traced, dated, and studied for connections.  I take this to mean that they actually confer and discuss whatever arrives.  It’s encouraging.  (Literally.)

Daily the media reports terrifying, immoral, inconceivable stuff that doesn’t quite rise to the level of proven fact but becomes more and more emotional and inflammatory.  Everyone calls for investigation, recusal, resignation, and impeachment.  Cancel laws, revoke permissions, and — most of all — enjoy the opportunity to be a smart aleck insulter.

Nothing happens.  

Meanwhile, it’s so cold that all the spooky feral cats have moved into the house.  Three were hugely pregnant but I can’t find any kitten nests.  I provide soft boxes in dark corners.  The pressure is high on the litter box.  Commercial litter is more and more effective at clumping and preventing stink, but it is expensive.  At least someone besides politicians and comedians knows how to make money from shit.  The cats themselves revel in a new container of this stuff being put in their box and come to watch so they can critique how I’m doing it.  Then they christen it.

The irony (rhetorical device) is that Valier is built on the volcanic gumbo that is the source of cat litter.  At one time it was explored for development commercially, but turned out not to be viable because of transportation.  The stuff is heavy.

At bedtime I make it a habit to watch Steven Colbert and a couple of other comedians in hopes that I’ll dream about funny stuff.  Instead, because YouTube knows I like BBC mystery series and suggests them, I end up dreaming about English countrysides and vintage transportation.  That’s okay.  I’ll settle for that.  I don’t need to watch cute kittens because they are already sleeping through the night at the back of my knees and the point of my shoulder, though they’re more cat than kitten now.  Still, they’re comfortingly alive and warm

It seems important to keep perspective, so I go on working slowly through Frankopan’s “Silk Roads” which is the first account of the millennial politics I can really follow because it is about the economy of marketing around the planet in terms of material culture:  blue and white porcelain, silk itself, spices, gunpowder and guns, etc.  Sequestered populations who are suddenly put in contact with the rest of the world because of the domestication of camels or the development of sailing ships, always destabilize the power structure of nations so that suddenly England and Holland are at each other’s throats and the peaceful Vermeer paintings become ways to promote those material culture objects, and — oh, yes— tulip bulbs from the high grasslands of Eurasia.

We still haven’t figured out Eurasia, that barely civilized composite called Russia or USSR, according to whatever stage of consolidation or decomposition they’re in.  They don’t seem to want to exist.  Consider alcoholism, sterility, bad diets, and predatory intentions.  Better to have stayed tribes on the steppes, riding small shaggy horses, than to do a bad job of imitating Europe.

My twitter feed is jammed with paleoanthropology, which causes me to wonder whether Denisovian genes account for the styles of Eurasia and then China plus the SE Asia peoples who populated Australia and rode the sea to South America where they founded major “civilizations” that worshipped water and may soon go back to that, irrigating the land with the blood of the indigenous because can.  (This is all hypothesis — not quite thesis.)

As Frankopan points out, the most profitable commodity is still owning human beings.  And we have so many of them now.  Not that they’re really shaped into a useful form: they seem to lack humanities, by choice.  We are fascinated that the indigenous have so many vegetal forms of entheogens.  (An entheogen ("generating the divine within") is any chemical substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context that often induces psychological or physiological changes.)  At the moment it seems as though that’s where the real money is, esp. since we can take molecules apart like pop-it beads and fiddle with them to evade the law.

Oh, the law.  All our fiddling and redefining comes to bear on laws, even though the fact that they’re written down is supposed to be a steadying core of basics we can agree on.  They continue to decompose into regulations, which are fungible, at the same time that they become more encompassing and lethal.  Our half-millennia-old principles from Europe appear to be unenforceable because of semantics, public opinion expressed by mobs, and situations never imagined before. 

Impeachment only amounts to a “do-over”.  Who is waiting in the wings who WOULD be a deserving and capable president?  Darned if I know.  I don’t even know what the description of such a person would be, specifically.  I don’t think Ivy League education or fine families qualify anymore.  To see them up close is too often to despise them.  It becomes clear that much of what we thought was “law” is merely “gentlemen’s agreements” in a world where only fools are gentlemen and I’m not talking about North Korea.  Meritocracies don’t seem to do any better than oligarchies.  Descending from gods doesn’t work anymore.

This is what surges and seethes through my head when I first get up.  But then I discover that I still have some delectably steamed new potatoes left from last night’s supper.  Then I hear screams from Duckie, who keeps being afflicted by Finnegan because he gets bugged by her pestering, so I have to go stuff him out through the cat flap.  Then I have to figure out why my printer is not printing.  And this is what it is to be human, even as privileged as I am to sit here in a warm place and post nonsense — at least until Trump ends my social security checks.  This warmth costs money.

THE YELLOW SLICKER (fiction - re-post)

JANUARY 31, 2016 ~ PRAIRIEMARYBLOG ~ EDIT

At first the horseback Indian thought that the patch of yellow on the prairie was just flowers, but it wasn’t quite the right season for that size and color of flowers, so he went a little closer in order to investigate — though not close enough for the patch to be dangerous. It was some kind of garment. Sprawled. No sign of a person. Had it been discarded? Was it a trap?

He got off the horse and let it graze while he hunkered on his heels and scanned the situation. No signs of a person — footprints, other objects. He wished for a long stick to prod it. Maybe there was something underneath. There had been a rain shower earlier in the day and little puddles sat on the material, not soaking in as would happen with normal garments. If it were valuable and someone had merely lost it, that person would return and they probably would not be Indian.

Yellow was a valuable color. Only important lodges were painted yellow because the color came from a fungus that was hard to find. Therefore, this garment must have significance.

He took his horse to the top of a nearby ridge and sat watching for the rest of the day, but no one came. When it was nearly dark, he went carefully back. The yellow garment had not moved. He grabbed the cuff of one sleeve and jerked. Nothing leapt out. Nothing was underneath except a dry patch of grass. His horse snorted and pulled back, then leaned forward to smell. It seemed sceptical, but unafraid.

He counted coup on the garment, yelping. Then grabbed it and jumped on his horse, which panicked from all the flapping around and took off for camp at a run. By the time they got to the circle of lodges, the horse had settled and was content to graze with the others. By now the Indian was also more confident and rolled the garment up as though it were any robe. Except that it rustled and crinkled and had a strange crisp texture and smell.

His wife was very curious about the garment but he forbade her to touch it. They had been hoping for a baby — they had not been married long — and he was afraid that the garment would somehow affect her fertility. He asked her to make a rawhide case, cylindrical, to keep this mysterious thing in and she did a good job. Then he painted a design on it and kept it hanging at his place, across the fire from the door.

One day when he had been hunting, he returned to find that his wife was in the lodge and had put on the yellow garment. At first he was very angry, since she should have more respect for his belongings, and he went to her, grabbed her by the neck and intended to choke or shake her — but then the feel of her slender neck, the pulse in it, her delicate ears and sliding hair, all moved him so that his fingers slipped up to cup her skull and his thumbs rested more gently on her jawbone.

Then he realized that she was not wearing anything under the garment and that she had been singing a song: “Oh, pollen-colored garment, make me bear fruit.” Responding, he made love to her that afternoon while she rustled and crinkled in the yellow stuff. Now and then after that, they would take out the garment and she would wear it while they made love. When the baby was born, in the fall when the aspen were the same color as the coat, she cut a strip off the hem of the garment and sewed it onto the baby’s carrier.

Now the garment seemed to be a part of their marriage, a key to fertility. Others heard about it and asked to borrow it. At first they were reluctant, but finally they had pity and agreed to let others make love wearing it. Nearly always, it worked. The wife, who now had several children and had made space in the lodge for second and third wives who did most of the work, beaded the garment with red stripes and attached small round pocket mirrors to the front.

One day she realized that one pocket had something deep in it and pulled out an envelope with a letter inside it. Neither her husband nor anyone else could read a letter or had even handled one, though they knew what it was. They felt that it was part of the power of the coat and put it back in the pocket. The wife sewed it shut and attached duck feathers to it. Ordinarily, water animals were not used to decorate, because they are too powerful, but this material seemed to bead up water in the same way that ducks did, so there was a harmony, a relationship of function. Over the years the coat became quite splendid with embellishments.

When the oldest son of the couple was about eighteen, he was badly wounded in a rash attack on enemies. Though he was brought home, his life was in serious danger. His parents pledged that if he recovered, they would offer the yellow garment to the Sun at the annual ceremonies. Both came to pass and, with the healed son watching, the coat was attached to the big main forked trunk at the Sun Lodge, so that everyone saw it up there, bright yellow and winking with light from the little mirrors. It was not tightly wrapped and the strange waterproof material waved in the wind. Everyone agreed that it was a highly significant and efficacious sacrifice. When they went on their way at the end of the ceremony, they looked back over their shoulders to get one last glimpse.
Years later a Metis guide was accompanying a cowboy who was looking for a place to establish his own small ranch. Build a house, find a wife, start a family. That’s what life was about. “Look down there,” said the Metis, as they topped a ridge. “You see that framework, that round circle of poles with rafters tied to the center?”

“What is it?” asked the cowboy, who had grown up in New England and came to the prairie partly in search of his lost father, who had gone West and never returned.

“Sun lodge. It would have been covered with leafy branches to make shade for ceremonies. Very holy.”

“Let’s go down there and look.”

The Metis didn’t much want to — he was superstitious — but he went along, a little behind the cowboy whom he considered reckless. The cowboy was waiting for him alongside the center pole. Up in the top was something yellow.

“Look! It’s a slicker, an old yellow slicker, with a lot of stuff attached to it.”

“Better leave it alone. It’s an offering. Bad luck to disturb it.”

“Aw, I ain’t afraid.” He stood on his saddle, which made him tall enough to drag the slicker down. Then he had to jump for the ground because his horse was afraid of it. “Look at this thing! Amazing! Pretty tattered, too.”

He spread it out on the grass, properly, with the shoulders at the top, sleeves out to the sides. “Kinda short. Been cut off at the bottom. Maybe so as to be better for riding.” He saw that one pocket was torn, showing a corner of paper. The material was so rotten with age and weather that he could easily tear the slit open and take out an envelope.

The Metis noticed the cowboy’s face go white and his hands begin to shake. Looking around for lightning or a predator bird and seeing none, he asked, “What’s the matter.”

“My father’s name is on this letter. I think the handwriting might be my grandmother’s.” Slowly, he wiped the envelope on his shirt front, though it didn’t need wiping. Carefully he reached inside the old yellow envelope and drew out a sheet of folded paper.

“What does it say?”

He read slowly. “Dear son, I hope by now you have received your father’s old fisherman slicker. He won’t need it anymore since he is sick in bed and will never rise. Sure do wish you were nearby so you could be with him just one more time. But we must all seek our destiny. Please write. We’ve heard nothing from you but will send this with a man who says he’s going to the same territory. Be careful of Indians.”

The cowboy stood holding the paper to his chest. All these years it had been kept dry in the slicker pocket, but now the paper was spotted with tears as its holder sobbed.

The Metis tactfully rode off a little ways and got off to let his horse graze and to let his friend have space for his grief.

________________

On a blog I often read (2blowhards.com) there has been a discussion of creativity and where it comes from, so I thought I’d just make a record of where this story came from (as nearly as I can tell) so that others might be able to pull up a story as well.

First, I do have an authentic fisherman’s raincoat (actually, a jacket to be worn with pants) that I used to wear every day in Portland but only rarely here. So I have that sense memory in me. Second, because of the recurring controversy over NA artifacts, I’ve been reflecting about material culture in general and how one person’s ordinary object becomes something strange and therefore possibly magical/powerful to another. I’ve also been thinking about the relationship between generations and how material objects make links.

Bob Scriver and I used to have a continuing joke about Western artists whose theme painting is a yellow-slicker-wearing guy on a horse in the rain. It’s a great recipe for a striking picture. Then I began to see in the Western art mags paintings of old yellow pickups, yellow taxis, and yellow school buses — all in the rain. So I began with the idea of this yellow object alone on the prairie and what an alert, ground-scannning Indian would make of it.

Bob’s own Holy Lodge was a yellow lodge with a badger on it. When we were composing the ceremony and songs for it, the old-timers who helped us spoke of the continuity among yellow tipis. For instance, the lodge of Old Jim Whitecalf was yellow with a black buffalo jumping over the door. Of course, we didn’t have to go find fungus — we just used paint.

So, first the man would find the slicker, he would bring it home and try to protect it, stumbling onto the idea that it would make his wife fertile. The community would accept that and use it. Eventually the slicker would be sacrificed, because that was so often a theme of sacredness among Blackfeet.

But there had to be some kind of clue about where that slicker DID come from, so I invented the letter in the pocket (a hidden meaning) and the cowboy, not so different from the Indian who began the story. That created a kind of parallel, but from two points of view.

BUT I left a lot unsaid, so the reader must still guess or might (in a classroom) discuss what else the story means. Will the cowboy decide that Indians killed his father? Will the slicker end up in a museum? Anyway, what DID happen to that man with his father’s slicker? Was it just lost off the back of his saddle when he tied it on carelessly after wearing it through the rain shower? Or did he die some way and the slicker get dragged or blown some distance away? Or maybe it never got to the intended — was discarded with the letter by the messenger. Well, I love a mystery. I’ll leave it at that.

But I’ll probably embroider this story a little more as time goes on.

"THE NATIONS" by Thomas F. Sheehan

In spite of what the academics say, there is a whole community of Western writers who still spin traditional yarns and get them published.  For a while I was writing that kind of stories and sending them to Rope and Wire (www.ropeandwire.com) until I got a little too racy for them.  Scott Giese, whose spread this is, will accept violence but not sex.  Anyone can read the Western stories for free on the website.

In the process I discovered Thomas F. Sheehan.  Among the books I’ve boxed to give away is his book called “The Nations”.  But I keep pulling it back out.  It’s one-of-a-kind, an early Western anthology by him, so naive that he keeps saying “squaw, buck, papoose”, words that would get you punched out in a lot of places.  He calls a female sheep a “yew.”  All his stories are kind of dream fantasies, not just the ones about Native Americans.  But I can’t imagine what the Canadians who are breaking up friendships over Joseph Boyden’s “The Orenda” would do with these stories.  They’re more like Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” than anything else I can think of, if Longfellow wrote pulp fiction.  They’re from a boys’ world.

In sonorous poetic prose the tales unwind from a main character with a remarkable name, the Euro ones as much as the supposedly Anglicized tribal ones.  Hides-Inside-Rocks meets Varden DeNoncoeur.  Jed Bolyx and Adam Flinkfelt interact with Twisted Water, Broken Feather, Tall Answer and So Sioux Said.

Tom has a unique vision full of caves and turtles.  White men keep finding Indian babies to raise and Indian men capture white babies to raise.  The tales are plainly meant to be inspiring but sometimes they’re just corn-ball — then again, a few sentences later, they are transcendent.  They are outrageous clichés and somehow unique.  I’ll use space to give a sort of sub-story which is inside a longer version.  The idea is that “I”, a first person narrator who is unaccountably omniscient, is about to be hung unjustly.  He is an “Indian.”

“But this man, this hangman, this stolid executioner, does not come pompous.  He does not wear his vestments the way some of the lawmen do that hold sway in the region.  Slowly he moves, patient, making no circus of his deed.  He must value life, this hangman, in the most obvious conflict of deed and duty.

And as I look down upon him, I am caused to lift my eyes and there lies my mountains rising against the great sky, green and white and fiery red and orange in a sunset, with red slashes in steep stone faces, and the lines of ridges showing where the trails and paths are secret to the Sioux and the black mouths of the caves where some of the gods take to rest, where I chased my puma and met my maiden and high above, past the tree lines I see the snow lines where the sheep have tried in vain to hide from my arrows.

At this time, as the hangman rises slowly and somberly up the steps to reach me, I am visited by memories borne upon the mountains so sweet and so swift they rush through me like the wind in a long cave, and the sound of music comes along on that wind and quick breath cuts off corners like erosion itself is taking place at my ear.

His eyes are sad eyes as he looks at me.  They peer out from the slits in his black mask, so blue I think of a tarn up high on the mountain where I swam as a boy with Red Eagle and Chosen Hand who have gone on long before me in the wars.  A bit of hair sits on his face and his chin, some of it gray and some brown as yet, and the sadness also sits in the corners of his mouth where those lips say sadness is about us this day, as if he makes convert announcements at his tasks.

No hatred fills me about him or his task, but only the hurrying sense of innocence that rushes through me trying to be found, but I cannot cry it out or shed tears to gain an edge for my innocence.  His shirt is neat.  He wears no badge or sign of status, nothing to say what he is, what he has come to do.  But only the sadness in his eyes.

“Son,” he says to me, lightly, almost a whisper, “I don’t have any hate for you or any Indian who does me no harm, though I have been subject to great pain in my past.  I have forgiven all things done unto me and unto mine.  I don’t know if you did the deed or deeds they have said came of your hands, for I am not a judge.  I only come to finish the work of the trial.  It is the way we do things. . . .”

Then in an almost silent gesture, a bare whisper, he slipped a prairie flower inside my shirt and said, “I have brought you a part of the great grass, to carry with you, to know the odor of the plains.”:

There’s another page to the story, but the upshot is that when the hangman goes to adjust the narrator’s collar and fit the rope under it, he discovers a mark that reveals that the man being hanged is his son.  The hangman is white but his son was captured as a child and raised as an “Indian.”  All Sheehan’s stories end with this sort of twist.  They’re like a murder mystery in which one last clue makes all the others fall into place.

This sort of writing is almost like a child’s, or a conscious dream, or an internet fanfiction — the set of parameters is so personal it can’t really be considered a political pitch and yet it comes from a deep set of convictions — religious meaning, in fact.  Sheehan’s experience as a soldier in Korea taught him a lot about strategy, bushwhacking and shooting — he’s an American Sniper.  But he’s not a redneck fighting PTSD.  Instead he makes a quiet pitch for peace, using the Old West as a set of chess pieces and board.

I just don’t want to give the book away.  I want to keep it.