INTIMATE TOUCH

Here’s a little poetic study all about intimacy and produced by AEON in an essay and then comments, which I edited.  I won’t post the essay, just a link, but I will re-post some comments.  I hope I'm not breaking rules.  I do it in the interest of promoting AEON and because these thoughts are so remarkable.

https://aeon.co/essays/it-takes-neuroscience-and-poetry-to-map-the-tributaries-of-touch?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=a259d0ad84-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-a259d0ad84-68600437

Can we experience true intimacy without the sense of touch?

jacques lcvl  quotes:

You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there with

his golden feet?

I reply, the ocean knows this.

You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent

bell? What is it waiting for?

I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.

You ask me whom the Macrocystis alga hugs in its arms?

Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.

You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,

and I reply by describing

how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.

You enquire about the kingfisher’s feathers,

which tremble in the pure springs of the southern tides?

Or you’ve found in the cards a new question touching on

the crystal architecture

of the sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?

You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean

spines?

The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks?

The hook of the angler fish, the music stretched out

in the deep places like a thread in the water?

I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its

jewel boxes

is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,

and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the

petal

hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light

and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall

from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.

I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead

of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,

of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes

on the timid globe of an orange.

I walked around as you do, investigating

the endless star,

and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked,

the only thing caught, a fish trapped inside the wind.

- “Los Enigmas” by Pablo Neruda

(also included in the 1990’s film ‘Mindwalk’ with direction by Capra)

Nicola Williams comments:

This is probably my favourite essay that has been published on Aeon, and I do read all of them. Thanks very much to the author for his searing honesty, and for the patience that it takes, as with all poetry, to find the words to articulate deeply felt emotion. As well as its elucidation of how that kind of emotion can be felt so physically, I think it also points back to why we bother to study the body through science in the first place. So often we lose sight of why we scan and chart and record. It struck me that this is why that drive feels insatiable, because as with the greatest poetry, it seems that there will always be parts of the body (and the brain) that will remain unknowable. The thing, the spark, the essence, some kind of completeness, is always just out of reach, and it demands that you return. There’s an excellent article on the unknowability/‘unknowingness of poetry’ in the latest Poetry Magazine, but also a fascinating interview on their free podcast, which I really recommend. Somehow I feel that there is something running in parallel there.

These lines from your essay, in particular, will stay with me:

‘Maybe we can blame it for the way a life can throb like a bruised bone. In such fully felt moments, the experience of time dilates. Perhaps insular activity explains why one can remember, a decade later, the positions of two people in a room, one seated, one standing, their conversation strained; a pause’

They reminded me, although this moves away from touch now and to a different kind of perception, of these lines from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. I feel as though they have something in common with your lines about the bar feeling suddenly noisy and something shifting between you, the way a room can change…

‘I don’t want anyone else but sometimes, surprisingly, there’s someone, not the prettiest or the most available, but you know that in another life it would be her. Or him, don’t you find? A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind. Nothing intended, and a long way from doing anything, but you catch the glint of being someone else’s possibility’

Steven Phelps  says:

. . .The discussion of time dilating – that has two sources outside of lived experience. The first is a beautiful essay by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker called “Speed.” It came out in 2004, and I was so fascinated by it that I spent some time outlining and dissecting it. (It’s available to subscribers in the New Yorker archive.) The other is a fascinating, speculative and now very influential review of the insular cortex by Bud Craig in 2009. Much of the paragraph on the insula is derived from this wonderful review. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can watch a lecture of his on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/8170544   [There is a book and articles if you Google Craig.]

for Stephen Hawking

When we wake up brushed by panic in the dark

our pupils grope for the shape of things we know.

Photons loosed from slits like greyhounds at the track

reveal light’s doubleness in their cast shadows

that stripe a dimmed lab’s wall—particles no more—

and with a wave bid all certainties goodbye.

For what’s sure in a universe that dopplers

away like a siren’s midnight cry? They say

a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train

will explain why time dilates like a perfect

afternoon; predicts black holes where parallel lines

will meet, whose stark horizon even starlight,

bent in its tracks, can’t resist. If we can think

this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?

This question was already answered by the author. Everything that we experience is purely mental, even physical pain is simply a mental experience, therefore it is entirely plausible that we could experience true intimacy without any touch at all, especially when you consider that the definition for an intimate relationship is an interpersonal relationship that involves physical or emotional intimacy. While it can be only in your mind, that doesn’t mean it isn’t “real” because the mind makes it real.

Andrew Robinson comments:

It sounds like the same thing to me. Your terminology of the “naked stream of neurons” is what I would call “the circuitry of the brain” and that circuitry is inherited, not learned. Damage those neurons and you damage the ability to experience intimacy. Intimacy therefore is a purely mental (or if you prefer, psychological) phenomenon, preprogrammed to “feel” intimacy for bonding purposes.

THE CENTIPEDE'S SHOES

It’s hard to get up in the morning knowing that by noon there would be another piece of betrayal, avarice, brutality from the very people who were elected because they promised to break up all that.  They have found their enemy and it is us.  

One of the recent presidential declarations — so toxic that it was signed privately, giving up that childish flourish of the felt tip and presentation to the camera that Trump so loved at first — is permission for ISP’s to sell all your private information.  The shoe dropped on a pile of socks already shed quietly and without anything to do with government.  I speak of subcontracting: one’s ISP subcontracts the evaluation and training of their technical employees, subcontracts the “nanny” function of running a “block list” (“black list”) that swallows all transmissions they consider unacceptable or are paid to block, and so on.  My IP's nanny is called "Barracuda."  I have shut it down to the lowest setting and I probably shouldn't tell you that.

Go to <whatismyipaddress.com>  An IP Address is your little thread of identity that connects you to the internet.  You’ll find this website very interesting, because it educates you about a lot of sub-contractors to sub-sub-contractors built on the need to get yourself off a blacklist that is interdicting your messages.  Only by using sources like this one can you discover that you are even blocked.  Otherwise, some indignant relative wondering why you don’t respond is likely to call you on your phone or send a letter, or in the recent case of a friend, send the sheriff out to make a welfare check in case you aren’t answering because you’re dead.

The justification for these blocklists is that people hate getting SPAM and, indeed, it’s miserable stuff (I remember eating the canned glob the metaphor comes from, a wartime food my mother covered with cloves and mustard) and sometimes dangerous, invasive or offensive.  Though I have a hard time getting all upset by naked people.  There are worse things.

One blocklist entrepreneur simply blocked as many IP’s as he could and then demanded money to turn them back on.  I don’t know how it is possible for people to do this without one’s provider knowing, but of course, blackmailers have to tell them where to send the money.

Whole countries can shut off internet service.  Electro-magnetic coding means layers and layers of inscrutable semi-math that only an expert can sort out.  “Pinging” means that anyone can be notified about anything, words, photos, maps.  Then “steps” can be taken because the IP will tell authorities whose door to knock on.

My understanding of all this is primitive and second-hand because I hate having to take the time to check blacklists or complain to my provider, which is a rural telephone cooperative.  They say I’m the only person in Valier who complains so much anyway, so why don’t I get a life?  Meaning their kind of a life.

The real reason I’m the only complainer is that most of the users have alternatives now that there’s a transmission tower alongside the grain elevator.  You can make a smart phone work, most of the time.  There are internet access turnouts along the highways here, not to discourage texting while driving, but because there are only certain sweet spots where transmission works.  Anyone taking an iphone into the mountains and counting on it for rescue had better hope they get into trouble in a high place with a clear line of sight.

There are other problems.  Many of the software operating programs of our computers give access to the designer for purposes of monitoring and updating.  Sometimes they might be interested in other things and they do have the capacity to turn your computer on and manipulate the drive if there is electricity, so I unplug mine at night.  In fact, I keep really personal writing on a second computer that is never on the internet.  The problem is that if I take something from this computer, where I am writing at the moment, on a “thumb” over to the private computer, that program will not have been updated and sometimes will not longer recognize the same program if it’s more recent.  

Sometimes I suspect that there is malware that is reading my thumb before letting it be removed.  Sometimes I wonder if the two computers are talking through the wireless feature. (Which is turned off on every device since I found myself suddenly reading my neighbor’s computer screen — though they tell me that’s impossible.  Oh, yeah?  I haven’t forgotten that in Portland we could sometimes hear the control tower transmissions with airplanes flying overhead in order to land.)

The whole thing is like those parking lots with spikes that come up if you try to drive out without paying.  It’s a use of socially approved force to get compliance and “ta dah”! make money.  Things like the “boot” put on the wheels of your car by law enforcement.  And worse.

There is a kind of malware that has nothing to do with computer code and that’s legal code.  The two are entwined.  Trump’s law cancellation will probably make legal things that are already happening illegally.  But laws can’t be enforced without motivation, monitoring, consequences and so on -- all of which cost money.  Trump knows that and knows that the budget is key: bookkeeping code is the most effective of all.  

But all these codes can be backed out — once the parking lot spikes and the wheel boots are detected and shut down.  I suspect that at the moment there are specialized people backtracking these codes in protected spaces, and finding the trails of betrayal, avarice, cheating.  Trump himself is a cyber idiot, but a social predator, which is why he has no computer on his White House desk, but he DOES run an old-fashioned iphone.  It can be monitored and it probably has GPS.

In a coded world there is no will to chase all this stuff.  The missing element is human conscience, which in the Modern Euro-derived world has been severely challenged.  There is no imaginary papa to scold us, but there are vivid depictions of suffering and depravity.  Many people crumple in the face of those images, so they have to be warned to turn away lest they faint.  They learn not to see anything disturbing, so they step over people living on the sidewalk, maybe dying.  

This is not code, but it is social malware.  Our children are watching.  I hope they are thinking. Maybe they and others read “A Billion Wicked Thoughts” and realized that if two mild-mannered data-gatherers could find out they were hooked on tentacle porn, then the really dangerous tentacle was their ISP.

THE ACADEMIC SQUIRREL CAGE

The reference in this post, in case you don’t follow the Chronicle of Higher Education is to behavior standards on campuses.  http://www.chronicle.com/article/Eyewitness-to-a-Title-IX-Witch/239634?cid=trend_right_a

My undergrad degree is from Northwestern University, a “BS” in Speech Education which was a cover for what I was really taking: theatre and some religion courses.  My biggest failure was getting along with roommates, a flaw in my character finally solved by avoidance, living alone most of my life.  That solution gives me plenty of time to read and enough room for plenty of bookshelves.  It’s a bonanza for computer work, providing security and freedom to work at all hours.  Even so do we shape ourselves.  Nearing eighty, I’m glad I live this way in a small Montana town close to the first place I taught: the Blackfeet Reservation.  

Actually, I’ve only taught in one off-rez place, a “white” town not far away where I resigned in a few months.  I could have been sued for this breach of contract but it would have meant making public some embarrassing conduct on the part of a student who was a valued athlete.  Teaching was not the core of my lifepath, which I can see quite clearly in terms of what I’ve “done”, which was mostly what I had to do to make a living.  The meaning of life is no clearer in analytic terms, but I feel it and I mean it.

One of my former roommates sent a letter after a long gap.  A poet, she had made a living by editing, the same job since graduation.  Now she was retiring and provided a little essay about herself.  She wanted to brag about her highest undergrad moment: being regularly schtupped on the floor of a faculty office by a famous professor.  She wanted me to be impressed, and when I couldn’t even recognize the professor, she was irked.

There were three of us rooming together in university housing.  The third, a woman with an IQ of 180, got pregnant and left.  Women who got married were automatically expelled.  There was another occasional roomie who was the poet’s lover, female.  The poet was notoriously AC/DC and required by university authorities to get therapy from a female university psychologist who turned out to be sharing a male lover, VERY handsome, with the poet.  The house mother had been told to get this room under control and used “bed checks” after the technical curfew of ten PM.  Men were forbidden to come in farther than the parlour even in daytime.  I don’t know what kept my roomie from being expelled.

It’s curious how we think people only interact surreptitiously at certain times and places.  Crossing back and forth over these boundaries was considered intellectual entitlement.  Not only did the defiant wear black turtlenecks, my roomie wore black underwear. 

I was busy doing other things, going places in small groups bonded by our work in the theatre.  We didn’t want private lives — we wanted access to human experience on the grandest and most dramatic terms, always governed by truth.  Grandiose narcissism, but it mostly kept us out of trouble.  The concern was not about sex, but about enough talent and discipline (yes, discipline) to carry us through a lifetime of acting.  “What is the spine of this character?” we asked and in order to answer we had to identify our own spine.

Therefore this roomie, her lovers, her shrink and our housemother were all pretty much irrelevant.  A wall of tolerance and disregard kept me from wasting time on them.  Therefore, the most recent scandal over Title IX issues (what is the proper sexual relationship between faculty and students) was to me quite laughable.  All about the amoeba theory of personality, I guess.  Unless vengeance is a spine.  So much furor over basically nothing but stupidly acting out television series behaviour.

When I was actually teaching high school in the Sixties, a baby-making craze swept through the girls.  On a trip somewhere for something I recall sleeping in the same room with three students, female, including one in the same bed, so I could grip her wrist all night to keep her from sneaking out for sex.  (She had announced she was going to.)  I would not even consider sleeping in the same room these days, since the assumption would be that I was the authority figure having sex with her.  (She got pregnant anyway, but not on that trip.)  Restraint and interference are now as much of a crime as the original misbehaviour, ignoring the chaos and emotional pain of going outside the guidelines at the expense of an innocent child who will need lifelong support.  This is justified on philosophical grounds.  Clever arguments.  No reality.

Going back to Northwestern in the late Fifties, the investment was in at least the appearance of propriety.  By now, if you look at the website  https://www.communication.northwestern.edu 

you’ll find daring architecture, Broadway extravaganza, reduced course requirements, a young faculty that includes dark people (as long as they are exotic) and courses of study very much influenced by Foucault, Derrida, et al.  Few people around here could figure out what they are really about.  That includes me.

I have a very strong suspicion that there is so much emotion at NU around sex that it is hiding something, like Trump being outraged at whistle-blowers to keep people from thinking about Russia.  (Look!  A squirrel!)   I think that “higher” education at this university and probably many others (U of Montana?) the scandal is really about corporate wealth.  Someone else will have to chase that fox because I don’t have the right skills or any interest.  I just smell rank musk.

When I got to seminary, I was forty.  (’78-82)  I’m shocked to realize that was thirty-five years ago.  Again, I was outside the pattern that formed later.   Sex had nothing to do with it.  Philosophy and denominational prestige were the focus at the Div School and in the smaller seminaries.  Philosophy was the pelt and sometimes the source of the sheepskin, and the denominations were the flock.

Philosophy insisted that minorities should be honored and included in political opposition to the old white men who dominate organizations of all kinds in “modernity.”  (Some like this term better than “Western Culture.”)  Okay.  But the next step was that quota hiring, minority preference — esp. if the general population of the territory belonged mostly to that supposed minority — meant that positions with power (or imagined power rather than service-obligations) MUST be given to people in those minorities.  We have that law on the rez.  It has produced a whole new array of problems — and some improvements, to be fair.

This justice-based claim, like claims of sexual freedom for everyone (even those who can get pregnant), has mostly resulted in confusion and a President of the USA with no moral boundaries but an avaricious appetite for control.  This lack of character was evidently invisible to people caught up in social revolution, claiming virtue.  But what a fertile source of drama, writing, research, and laughter!  I just think philosophers should be excluded unless their feet touch the ground.

SPUTTERING BRAIN CONNECTIONS

So many interesting ideas have come from the investigation of the pre-frontal cortex that the rest of the brain is almost neglected.  But maybe it was the enthusiasm for lobotomies, which shoved a knife through the eyehole in order to destroy that pre-frontal cortex with devastating and inhuman consequences, that kept researchers from looking at those other parts.  The fact that the two halves of the brain could be separated by severing the corpus callosum, a band of tisssue that connected them, was kept quiet, though it was a surgery sometimes used in desperation to treat uncontrollable and life-threatening epilepsy.

Then it was realized that there was a cohort of the people who had separated brain hemispheres and that they could be studied to understand what difference it made.  The people seemed to be functioning well-enough, but the main discovery was that their two half-brains became two people or rather two aspects of the person.  Our culture so dearly loves binaries!  More carefully designed experiments revealed that the right side, connected crossover-style to the left hand, had a different “style” from the opposite side of the X — left side to the right hand.  Somehow involving “handedness” and literacy, the right brain was artistic, based on image, while the other side was logical, fact-based.  Immediately the people who want to explain everything in gender binaries decided the artistic side was “female” and the rational side was “male.” 

The more scientific folks were still pondering “fabulation.”  The two hemispheres, when presented separately with different input, would construct fabulous little conflations that accounted for both sides.  These stories were like those of early dementia sufferers who encountered things they could not reconcile without inventing a cover story.  This research by now is extensive and fascinating (look for “split brain studies”), but it has distracted from getting down to the actual organic and discernible operation of the corpus callusom.  What does it DO?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3163989/  is technical, official, and uses acronyms.  Like all the other names based solely on observation, the parts of what seems a whole have Latin names based on shape:  “spenium” is the thicker part (it means “bandage”) and “genu” is a part that looks a bit like a knee.  (I recommend Google.  My medical dictionary was soon outdated.)  The areas form and elaborate at different rates, beginning right after birth and continuing into adulthood.  

“By 11 years, both the anterior and posterior callosum have reached 90% of their maximum fiber directionality, and by 20 years they have 90% of their maximum external axonal structures “  (Harumph!)  In short, these connections are still developing in the years a person (esp. a boy) are most exposed to damage from sports or abuse.

“There is evidence that callosal microstructure correlates with cognitive test performance in adolescents (ages 16–18 years). Specifically, FA in the body of the callosum (∼middle third) correlated positively with copy accuracy of a complex figure. FA in the splenium was positively correlated with processing speed, expressive vocabulary and single-word reading. Regression analyses confirmed that visuospatial performance was associated with FA in the body of the CC, whereas language performance (expressive vocabulary and single-word reading) was associated with FA in the splenium (Fryer et al. 2008).”

FA does not stand for “fuck all” but rather for “Diffusion tensor fractional anisotropy of the normal-appearing seven segments of the corpus callosum in healthy adults and relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis patients.”   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15906348  

Problems of this kind are called AgCC, meaning “agenesis of the corpus callosum”  (It also stands for Abundant Grace Community Church.)  Here’s the bottom line, which is a whole paragraph.

“Taken together, the neuropsychological findings in Primary AgCC highlight a pattern of deficits in problem solving, processing speed, and the social pragmatics of language and communication, which may result in significant complications of daily life. Parents report that children with AgCC and intact early motor development (i.e., sitting and walking within normal age range) are significantly likely to display clinically relevant behavior problems by the 6- to 11-year-old age range (Badaruddin et al. 2007). These include exhibit somatic complaints, attention problems, aggressive behavior, social problems and thought problems. The frequency of psychiatric diagnoses in AgCC is unknown, however diagnosis of learning disabilities, developmental delays and/or psychiatric disorders appear to be common (Brown and Paul, unpublished observations). The social impairments in AgCC are remarkably similar to those seen on the autism spectrum. In a sample of sixty-one 2- to 11-year-old children with AgCC, 34% of the sample met criteria for at least one item in the social interaction domain (with maximum of 46% who had impaired peer relationships). In the communication domain, at least 30% met on one item (with a maximum of 51 who had difficulty sustaining conversation).”

This subtly organic brain structure problem, whether developmental or caused by trauma, can be interpreted as being stupid, deficient and balky, thus adding more of a burden on a youngster who is by definition perhaps unable even to understand his problem, much less what to do about it.  And the adults around him or her are probably not much better equipped.  Their response can be an attempt to control behavior by punishment, maybe violent.

The following material is from “Medpage” and was written by Kristin Jenkins  (pub. 3-17-17).  Mercifully, she provides the origin of the acronyms.

“    A new biomarker that shows promise as a predictor of outcomes in children who sustain moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (msTBI) may help identify which youngsters could benefit from more aggressive treatment.

    Note that the study found that early measures of interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT), the time required for signals to traverse the cerebral hemispheres through the corpus callosum, can predict which children will recover after msTBI and which will continue to decline neurologically and cognitively more than a year following injury.”

“The Recovery After Pediatric Brain Injury Study (RAPBI) demonstrates that early measures of interhemispheric transfer time (IHTT) can predict which children will recover after msTBI and which will continue to decline neurologically and cognitively more than a year following injury. . .”

“Demyelination of white matter is commonly found post-TBI and can have adverse cognitive repercussions, the researchers noted. This gets compounded in the maturing brain, since "myelination continues well beyond age 30.”

Myelin is the white insulation that protects individual neuron axons.  If it is missing or too thin, the result is short-circuits and failure to transmit, just like a household extension cord.  If I were an artist, I’d draw a brain in two halves with a corpus callosum throwing off sparks, maybe starting fires.

GATHERING THE GRASSLAND

Decades ago I had a poster on my kitchen wall that was a photo of a little girl with a kitten in front of a barn.  It said, “Faithfulness in little things is a big thing.”    I've never heard of anyone using an epigraph for a review before, but that’s what the poster quote is for this review of “Gathering the Grassland: A Plains Journal” by Linda Hasselstrom.

Her own epigraph for her book is :
“Thousands of us hurl ourselves into cities like nuts into a hopper, and there by grinding and rubbing against one another we lose our natural form and acquire a superficial polish and a little more or less standardized appearance. In the country, the nuts are not subjected to this grinding process.”
--Archer Gilfillan, author of “Sheep”

I like the quote on my poster better and now I’ll try to explain why.  I thought my “faithfulness” quote was from St. Francis, but Google says it was Saint John Chrysostom, a fourth century Archbishop of Constantinople.  I don’t know whether that’s better or worse, but the sentiment remains true.   Linda’s book is an accounting of daily things, as faithfully recorded in three sets of journals: her own, her mother’s, and her step-father’s.  The problem, like the problem of the four Gospels, is reconciliation.  Her mother wanted her to be pretty in pink, her step-father taught her how to run a ranch but refused to leave it to her, and she herself managed to save the ranch until today, when subdivisions threaten to overwhelm it.  This last is what her epigraph reflects, but there are more twists to this story.

I thought of my kitten poster because the most ghastly incident Linda tells is about moving to that ranch as a child, glorying in a lapful of kittens until a hired man named Leroy came up the walk.  One of the kittens had walked off and Leroy put his big foot above it.  “What if I just squashed this here kitten?” he asked.
Linda dumped the kittens from her lap, went like warrior Arya Stark and kicked him in the knee as hard as she could.  Losing his balance, he did indeed put his foot down on the kitten, crushing it.

Linda says she doesn’t blame Leroy.  I do.  What made him think it was funny to threaten to kill something sweetly vulnerable in front of a little girl?  It was torture of that girl.  In fact, killing pets in front of children is not an uncommon kind of child abuse, implying the ability to kill the child.  Some people would find a sexual motive, Leroy displacing desire for a pretty little girl in order to kill an improper emotion in himself.  I find it a good illustration of the dark side of rural culture that tries to toughen up people with gallows humor.  Linda claims that Leroy felt so badly that he brought her a puppy as compensation.  I’m not sure I believe her.  She accepts blame.  But I’m not Linda.

That’s the real meat of her story: her fight to stay in control, to accept responsibility, to struggle for her own justice.  She’s part of a circle of rural women who write about this, each in her own way, but with deep understanding of the twists of love and hate.  Mary Clearman Blew, Sharon Butala, Judy Blunt and a dozen others— for years I bought all their books.  I suppose it’s post-colonial writing, since the previous generation of socially entitled men, with the collusion of “their” women, used their children as domestic stock.  Linda, so far as I know, has never mentioned physical abuse other than Leroy.  In fact, she loved the work she did on horseback.

Aritha Van Herk, a Canadian, writes about prairie women and uses the phrase “sifting sparks from snow.”  arithavanherk.com if you want to follow up on the political angle.  This generational cohort of writers is nearing retirement age, but I haven’t seen obituaries yet.  There are still many valuable things to say.  Like indigenous tribal people, they have extended the conversation around the planet to women who live on grasslands in Australia, Argentina, Africa, the great steppes of Eurasia and so on.  Thank you, Internet!

One of Linda’s ploys for survival is the establishment of Windbreak House, (LindaMHasselstrom@windbreakhouse.com) which is a writer’s retreat on her South Dakota ranch.  The writers who come to work there are primarily women.  For Linda, and perhaps for some of them, writing is as grass, the sentences marching over the hills in rows and bunches, their roots threading deep into the sorrows of generations in search of spiritual water.  They are not writing romance.  They value faithfulness, reflection.

What Linda questions at this stage of life is whether she could have done better.  Should she have written more instead of responding to all the demands to speak or teach?  Should she have concentrated on ranchwork more? Or writing more?  Why did she fall in love the first time with a cheating husband just like her mother did?  Should she have had children?  What does it mean to be an achiever?  People can resent it.

Linda appreciates the Folk West:  Buckskinner’s Rendezvous  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nESxjfzMg4E  and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neLOwOjtQL8 (I know some of these people as individuals, but I don’t enjoy crowds.)  She has a steady partner who does metal and woodwork in his own shop on the ranch.  Now that there is freedom to write as she chooses, she uses her time quietly, warmly, leading us into each month and each day with a sky report, many dawns.  She’ll stay there in her home range until as close to the end as possible.

This book is part of a shelf of Hasselstrom books, a steady stream of life to share and ponder.  That shelf is part of many “rooms" of journals and diaries in universities and historical societies.  My own paternal grandmother, who homesteaded in Faulkton, SD, kept journals, two boxes of them.  I had custody of one box for a while, read them, typed off and xeroxed some sections to send to cousins.  Then I sent the box on to the only cousin who does genealogy, a retired man.  I made little booklets and offered them through www.lulu.com/prairiemary.  Not much reaction.  I have many of the same questions as Linda.  Maybe every generation has them, wondering if the youngsters can even understand what we’re talking about.

Linda finds metal artifacts on her ranch and puts them all up on a railroad tie wall.  There are hooks, home-blacksmithed for catches on gates and doors.  They often have a twist in the shaft, and Linda’s partner says they are for ornament, but might also increase ease in handling.  This book is like that, practical, but with a little twist in the shaft.

POLITICAL DISSENSION IN THE UUA

“I’m against this sort of thing!” says the placard carried by a nice lady in a New Yorker cartoon.  I used to joke that if someone at coffee hour in a UU church declared they were a cannibal, someone else was bound to say,  “Oh, have you met X?  She’s a vegetarian!”  Thus demonstrating that they had not gotten past the idea that if people were both interested in food, they had a lot in common.  

But nice people are even more confused about what a religious denomination should be, or even a congregation.  There are two kinds of churches:  parish churches that define themselves by geographic boundaries, like Catholic churches, who technically include everyone in that area to be of concern to that church.  They date back to the centuries when the only religious choice was a parish church because it was part of the structure of the state.  There was no alternative.  Someone remarked about Switzerland that each “canton” (or whatever they called their basic area) should have either a priest or a policeman in charge.  Both were meant to preserve order by their vocational means.

The other kind of congregation is called “gathered” and came into being with Protestant schisms over doctrine.  People sorted themselves by their convictions.

But always in the background is the Nieburian observation that the primary force of gathering is socioeconomic level.  

"The social sources of denominationalism".

If you were wealthy and fancy, you went Episcopalian.  If you were principled and austere, you went Quaker.  Like that.  So one of the key discomforts of the UUA — since it “doubled its U’s” in 1961 by merging with Universalism — was that socio-economic break between Unitarians who were urban, educated, rational people (“God’s frozen people”, if you want to be pejorative), and the more rural, Jesus-friendly, not so fancy Universalists.  I don’t think most newcomers to UUism know about this.  

It’s a chafing, not unlike the difference between the “Americans” and the Canadians, which never merged.  In Canada it is the UUSC that is known and admired.  Breaking the CUC ties to the UUA was seen as liberation.  But there’s no reason why American UUA congregations should have to repeat the demographics of all the citizens of the United States. They are “gathered” congregations and more than that, are governed by congregational polity.  That means that each congregation governs itself and can do what ever it likes.  The UUA organization itself is NOT a congregation and has no polity, except the rules for being a corporation.  

Harlan Limpert interned at “my” church, so I knew him rather well.  We’ve both changed since then.  He ought to be a competent interim administrator and “neutral” though he's another old white man.  People say profit is the great equalizer, so it's an advantage that he's spent much of his career at Target stores.  Profit in the context of the UUA is membership numbers.  Theoretically, the UUA serves the various congregations without imposing rules.

In the past the Unitarians have been accused of claiming every outstanding figure with humanist leanings as “a Unitarian without knowing it.”  We loved prestige and the implication that all members were brilliant to some degree.  So it’s an interesting variation that people of color want to be included because they are also brilliant and want that marker.  Though I haven’t heard about many Asians petitioning to become UU ministers and serve on the UUA board.  They’re already considered achievers and maybe Buddhism tops Unitarianism in mystique.  Some people claim both.

There has always been a streak of rebellion, or at least alternative thinking, in the Unitarian movement.  Emerson was a good example.  He made trouble by refusing to offer Communion.  In fact, the Transcendentalists were technically heretical in the beginning though everyone is happy to claim them now.

UU’s would like to think that their denomination is meritocratic, but that doesn’t seem very American.  Everyone knows — though they pretend not to — that all organizations are pretty much a matter of networks — usually “old boy” networks.  There IS a black “old boys” history which has been recorded by Mark Morrison-Reed.  (I was at Meadville/Lombard with him.)  I’m not aware of any “old girls” or Chicana/Hispanic networks.  

But the denominational style varies markedly according to geographical sociology.  The sophisticated tell jokes about “hot tub” California Unitarians.  That’s quite aside from Garrison Keillor’s gentle mockery.  Which is usually pretty accurate.  Unless you’re talking about Goldwater Unitarians in Utah, which are way off to the Right instead of the Left.  UU’s are generally just “different” from the mainstream, but the local mainstream might be different from the rest of the country.

All this is a little too much for most young reporters who are asked to interpret religion, which they think of as "like" Christian, as presented by generations of film writers.  The real dynamics are family in the most bitter and intense terms of yearning for inclusion.  Even in Unitarian terms, this is not necessarily rational.  In Universalist terms, anyone should be included.  Everyone should be included.  UUism is NOT a religion.  It's a coalition of like-minded actual people who have formed congregations.

I remember one Sunday morning decades ago at the West Hills UU Fellowship in Portland, OR,  a gentle group of artists and thinkers in a Thoreauvian sort of church.  I attended occasionally.   One Sunday service was about falconry, and the “falcons” were there — flying free and perching in the rafters.  It was wonderful, but that’s not the Sunday I mean.  

On this occasion a man blundered into the sanctuary without understanding what sort of congregation it was.  When it came time came for announcements, the man went to the front and began to testify in the Pentecostal style.  

This group did not have a minister, but it had a president.  She went to the man, stood by him, took his hand, and suggested that his story was impressive but it would be better to tell it during coffee hour when people who were truly interested could listen to him without it interfering with the scheduled program.

He didn’t quite understand where he was, but they understood pretty much what was going on with him.  He didn’t fit, but they didn’t want to just throw him out.  If he had become violent, they would have met that challenge and tackled him.  But he broke his trance and left on his own.

It’s a nice little feel-good story and a true one, but it’s JUST that and not much more unless people take it to heart.  And I mean all colors of people.  This guy was lucky he'd found a mellow group — some big fiery male ministers might be less tolerant.  A formal church might have caused the ushers to hustle him out.  A rude one might have shouted him down.  A co-dependent congregation might have sat there for the next hour listening to the fellow rave while they secretly fumed.

Peter Morales simply left. 

PONTIFICATING ON WRITING BIOGRAPHIES

LINDA HASSSELSTROM

Reading on a computer screen is not normally my thing, but I agreed to review Linda Hasselstrom’s renewal of her book about her South Dakota ranch family, and it seemed practical and time-saving to just do it entirely on the computer.  This particular book — if you check Amazon, you’ll see Linda writes quite a bit — is an account of a year in which her own journal as her basic text is running alongside the journal of her mother and that of her step-father.  All three were hard-working, colorful, and sometimes problematic people.  The mother was a “high-strung”, high maintenance woman who went frankly psychotic for a while and the step-father was wonderfully protective until Alzheimers invaded him in old age.  Then he was hostile, selfish, and confused.  Linda has seized sanity and gripped it by the neck.  She saved the ranch partly by establishing “Windbreak House,” which is a writer’s working retreat on the ranch that includes coaching by Linda.

“Ground-testing” is a scientific term used by people who make satellite maps from very high.  It means that no matter how accurate a photo might be, someone eventually will need to go down there and walk the terrain to confirm that what seems like it’s there really exists and is as it was identified from up high.  There can be surprises when you look from a slightly different angle or in closeup.  But being “grounded” is a good thing, esp. if you love the land and it’s inhabitants.

Biography — and I suppose even autobiography — is a sort of mapping.  There used to be a magazine that published a map at the end, but quite differently from Rand McNally.  One was a map of all the dogs in the neighborhood.  One was a map of the water and sewer pipes under the streets of a neighborhood.  One was an ethnic map of a city.  Some biographies, including those of the Hasselstroms, are folded into an ethnography about the kind of people who are involved; in Linda’s case South Dakota farmers, some of them second generation immigrants.  There are no Native Americans because of history, not Linda. There are no owners of ranchettes because who wants them?  Not Linda.

Since a bio or autobio is about a life, it must include the dimension of time.  Linda has the advantage of dated diary entries.  Once I kept a Progoff journal which is begun by identifying “stepping stones” which could be (for the left-brained sorts) the practical cultural markers like graduations, marriages, moving to a new house, a new job; or for others maybe a list of major turning points: a time of illness, a relationship, a new skill, discovering a new identity.  Taking all this into consideration, a person’s life might fit into a larger context of history so that something like WWII, the Seventies, the exploration of outer space, could be a pattern for the exploration of inner space.  Or, particularly in the case of autobiography, the writer might choose free-association, counting on his subconscious to link episodes, ignoring the calendar.

Different kinds of biographies are produced by different kinds of biographers.  Linda’s writing has been about her location, rural South Dakota, so her main ordering principle is the farmer’s almanac, the seasons as they develop through one year.  Her parents’ lives are told entire, at least as much as she could, documenting with those journals plus letters and remarks from other people.

Erik Erikson and Justin A. Frank have written psychoanalyses of famous people, Frank most recently offering “Obama on the Couch” and now working on “Trump on the Couch.”  These fit real lives into schematics used by shrinks as diagnostic means, attempts to provide skeletons for formless flesh and — as you might imagine — controversial both because they can be invasive and because it’s problematic for any one person to really know another.  On the other hand, psychoanalysis can create a kind of strict poetry like a sonnet, vivid images contained in a pattern.

The problem is that these schematics go in and out of popularity or even suitability over time.  The kind of insights provided by Lytton Strachey are not impressive now.  We are more friendly to something like “Lincoln in the Bardo,” almost only a flight of fancy.  (Would anyone write something like “Teddy Roosevelt in the Bardo”?)

On the other hand, the strength of Progoff’s “Intensive Journal” thinking is the constant challenge to come up with a metaphorical image for stretches of one’s life or for the turning points.  Was it being swept over a waterfall?  Was it being in a tall tree and seeing all around?  Was it slowly blooming when sunlight came?  Or was it a drug trip?  Whether or not the actual subject of the “graph” would accept the shape of his or her life, would they recognize the forces at play and how they were moved along?  Or resisted?

The kind of writing about one’s self that shows up in venues like “Medium.com,” tends to be anguished or transcendent — highly emotional and often both ingenious and gorgeous because they are written by dramatic, sensitive people, the kind of people we think authors must be.  They have a bit of a tendency to watch themselves write.  (We call that narcissism.  Is it?)  Progoff ran very prescribed workshops to combat mental wandering and self-indulgence.  One sat in a room with others and wrote in timed intervals, tracked by a sort of monitor.  Such a Germanic classroom sort of atmosphere — traditional in our schools — would shut some writers down, hardly helping to get into the mood of free spirits who ditched school early in life.

I like lists and used to pursue sanity by writing life lists in block print, sometimes not even in sentences.  It was the time of fountain pens with those little cartridges of ink and I chose green.  At least I didn’t dot my “i” s with little hearts.  On a computer I go for strict legibility, plain fonts, and I number my list elements.  It’s pleasant to fiddle with them — add and subtract, print out so I can write in the margins.

Autobiographers have the problem of getting out of their own way.  I still haven’t abandoned revenge.  Or at least self-serving explanation and rationalization.  Then there are the problems that come with being read.  Now that old enemies from the Sixties are dying, I find that when I nail them for how I know them, the family hagiographers of those opportunists and thieves will fight back.  None have sued me yet, but it has happened to others.  What do we do with our secrets?  Readers expect revelations.

This is not the review of Linda Hasselstrom’s book that I will write when I finish the whole manuscript, but she’s welcome to take blurbs from it.  That's part of the game.