DIALOGUE: THIS ONE ABOUT TEACHING READING

X:  Is there such a thing as a “dive coffee shop”?  

Y:  If there is, this must be the place.  It sure ain’t Starbucks.

X:  I made a big mistake when I first came back to Portland.  I took my Sunday NY Times to the nabe Starbucks without realizing that the point of that establishment was for  middle-aged divorcees to make friends.  People kept trying to borrow sections of the paper, but I HATE having people mess up my paper.  Pretty soon I was as indignant as the people I was rejecting and they won — I stalked off.

Y:  That must have been a while ago.  I read all rags on tablets now.

Y:  So how is your memoir coming along?

X:  Memory is tricky.  I remember the incidents well enough, but they reconfigure as I write them down.  The hardest part is the guilt for falling short so many times.  It’s so much clearer what was going on when I look back.  This is sort of like doing therapy without any therapist to comfort me and explain it all.

Y:  Example?

X:  All my life I’ve tried to be virtuous, you know.

Y:  I know.  Very boring.  But it’s a bit of a challenge to try to corrupt you.  That’s enough to save this relationship.  Curiosity works.  You will always have curious friends because you yourself are curious and that corrupts you.

X:  Thanks.  But when I write out the few little incidents full of triumph, they kind of go inside-out.  And now I can see that I didn’t really come through, that I was play-acting and watching myself instead of really being there.  I just had an idea of what good girls did.

Y:  So you lost confidence and have had a fine time accusing yourself, which is just as narcissistic as thinking you’re saving everyone.”

X:  My mother used to call me “Meddlesome Mattie.”

Y:  But she’s the one who always declared she was going to get to the bottom of things.

X:  She was always diagnosing instead of really getting my vibe. 

Y:  Hmmm.  Sounds like you.  Must be hereditary.

X:  I thought we were all perfectly normal, even above average.  Then as I wrote and recalled and compared with all the other people I’ve known, even thought I was intervening to help, I began to realize how much real pain there was — even suffering — and wickedness.  Not only did I fail to help others, I could only get through some of it by going numb and denying the whole reality.  We weren’t nice at all.  We weren’t exceptional, above average.

Y:  You came down off your high horse.

X:  Yes, then I began to understand that no one so nice and irreproachable.

Y:  Oh, yes.  For instance, you should watch out for me!  I love poking you this way, but don’t look for comfort from me.  Your first job was teaching English, right?

X:  On an Indian reservation — that’s what we called them then, none of this fancy search for euphemisms.

Y:  Put that aside.  What was your worst failure.

X:  I didn’t know how to teach reading.  This was high school English.  You’re not supposed to teach reading at this level — it’s literature-based, always has been.  But how can you teach what was supposed to be the American canon of important books or the English canon of important books, if the kids can’t READ?

Y:  Did you look around for ways to learn how to teach reading?

X:  More failure.  But in my defense, no one knew how to teach reading at that level.  There were no materials.  The other high school teachers didn’t know.  The truth is that most of the non-readers just left school at the end of 8th grade anyway.  It was a fiendish circle:  the kids who couldn’t read left, so there were no materials to teach the kids who had left.

Y:  What would you do now?  

X:  This morning I had a brilliant idea.  I’ve been using YouTube to find videos about home maintenance and it’s great — I can fix stuff that was a total mystery.  So this morning I tried YouTube for “how to teach reading.”

Y:  Did it work?

X:  I was blown away.  There are vids for teachers  — where to begin, where to go, what’s a dead end — there are vids for adults who must teach themselves.

Y:  So anyone who gets their hands on an access gadget, even just a smart phone, can have a teacher right in their pocket.  How did you learn to read?

X:  That’s part of the problem.  I just taught myself and I taught myself by sight, which can be a problem.  These vids mostly use phonics and the vids that show kids in classes provide something like support, cheerleading, a little prompting, that it’s okay to blunder.  

Y:  Permission to blunder, make mistakes, is very hard to find if you’ve been punished or struck every time you didn’t meet the requirements of a bullying teacher or parent.  In fact, some people have been so threatened with catastrophic consequences every time they make a mistake that they have decided to do nothing at all.  I don’t mean a conscious rational decision — I mean that their bodies won’t let them risk it anymore.

X:  I accept that, but I have no answers.  The culture factor was always there.  Residential schools are a monster image that rears up and claws over small things.  I discovered the kids were calling that seat with stirrups that you put on the back of a horse a SATTLE.  I told them that was wrong, that it was a SADDLE.  They said they were the ones who rode horses, that  horses were their heritage and therefore all knowledge about horses was theirs.  They rode on “sattles" and any attempt on my part to spell or pronounce it differently was an attack on their culture.  They said if I tried to beat them until they said “saddle” instead, they would get me fired.  Even if they had to frame me.  It had been done before.

Y:  (laughing)  I guess the only thing to do was laugh.  

X:  Until a rock is thrown through the window.  But most of their pronunciation drift was with consonants.  I’ve been watching “Shetland”, a BBC series about the Shetland Islands and I have to turn on the sub-captions because all the vowels are different than standard American.

Y:  There is no standard American.

HORIZONS OF HUMAN CREATURES

"Sweetgrass Hills" on the Canadian border

“Horizon” is a term of terrain, which has been pulled by metaphor into other human experience.  It is the limit of what we can “see” and that doesn’t mean just by looking, but also by comprehending.  The limit is set by experience and the acceptance that there is an edge, and beyond that edge sometimes assuming there is at least nothing of much importance.

From here I see the 49th parallel marked by the Sweetgrass Hills, the Continental Divide marked by the Rockies and a swell of land about a mile to the east, probably pushed up by the glaciers that once covered this land, although the Sweetgrass Hills stand as a refugia where some animals and plants were able to persist in a sea of ice.  A glacier is something that moves, a horizon that approaches and recedes, basically a frozen ocean.

To many people here, even Native Americans, “history’s horizon” is the arrival of white people because they brought written history, the “real” history, so nothing happened until maybe Columbus or Lewis and Clark or the Conrad brothers.  Montana had to pass a law to require schools to teach Native American history.  Or maybe the beginning was Montana becoming a territory, which happened in receding stages, smaller and smaller areas, until it solidified into a state.  Parallel with that, the reservations were created (closer to the coalition of Italy and Germany into nations back in Europe than I would ever have guessed) and then their horizons closed in.  Writing meant boundaries on maps, not the ridges and rivers of reality.  "Belgium" was created in 1830.

Probably the glaciers didn’t arrive so quickly that they could be seen moving, as in “Game of Thrones.”  (“Winter is coming.”)  But they must have pushed the humans and animals south, slowly enough for even the plants to move along, growing a little farther south every year the way they are moving north now.  When the ice left, melting back, it created great torrents of water that hydraulically carved the land, but in the gentler times there would have been at least a summer greenbelt along the edge as the plants, animals and people moved back toward the north.  

In the past it has been assumed that Native Americans got to this continent by walking across the Bering Straits, imagined as a sort of bridge like the gangplank to Noah’s ark.  But now the geologists — and history is becoming geological so that horizon can be about land again — say that Beringia was more like Bangladesh, just above sea level, a broad and marshy land where mammoths roamed, enticing the humans with their spears and dogs.

Some evidence of human occupation of the Americas precedes the withdrawing of the glacier that blocked Beringia and probably sank it with rising sea level (a kind of horizon) when it melted.  Along the coast of South America, the evidence suggests, people came by boat on the ocean current gyres from South Asia.  Even jungle debris rafts from SE Asian cyclones wash up with creatures riding them.

But wait!  There’s more.

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

“Written history,” meaning decipherable traces of the past, can be found in the structure and vocabulary of linguistics, the gene and epigene records in cells, the isotopes and structure of molecules, the lines and shapes immortalized in stone, and so on, each providing their own horizons of events in the deep primordial past before there were humans — before there was life of any kind.  We've become fairly used to thinking about Pangea.

No one has thought much about what people were on the North American continent before the last glacier.  There has been little consciousness about people who did not move out of a territory because of a wall of ice but because of drought, abiding dryness that couldn’t form ice.  Slowly new suggestive evidence arises and converges, not so much a horizon as a valley.

“. . . all Native Americans stemmed from a single group that later diversified into two branches: one that included Amerindians, who occupied North America south of the ice sheets and also Central and South America, and one that included Athapaskans, Paleo-Eskimos, and Inuit in the far north.”  To my eye the people around Lake Baikal look like Blackfeet, said to be Athapaskan.  In the past some have gotten interested in a globe with the Arctic, an ocean, as the center instead of the equator.  At some points the Arctic has been open water.

A little girl’s “pinky finger” has revealed far more.  Though 40,000 years old, she left enough DNA to reveal a whole new branch of our species, one named “Denisovian.”  Not like Neanderthal.  Like Australians.  Like the SE Asian people who would have set out on boats for horizons along the coast of South American.  But wait — there’s more.

(First I want to interject an irrelevancy which is that in Blackfeet country a special tie between little girls and their fathers existed by custom.  If the father were grieving, it was sometimes the practice to displace his pain onto the daughter by cutting off a joint of her finger.  After all, a man must be able to fight and hunt and if he loved the child, it was still a sacrifice.  There’s a poetic connection with the Denisovian fossil — isn’t there?)

The “more” is that investigation of far north Eurasian populations revealed Denisovian genes like those of today’s Native Americans.  There is talk of “ghost populations,” paleopeoples who no longer exist but can be implied from evidence.  In terms of the big glacier event, these people at the limits of early habitation seem to have been more in eastern and northern Eurasia, in a great area of desertification rather than glaciation that could have driven them onto the barely connected American continent, both east and west, only to confront glaciers. They had gone “over the top” as we imagine the world.

“The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the last period in the Earth's climate history during the last glacial period when ice sheets were at their greatest extension. Growth of the ice sheets reached their maximum positions in about 24,500 BCE. Deglaciation commenced in the Northern Hemisphere gradually between approximately 18,000 to 17,000 BCE and in Antarctica approximately 12,500 BCE, which is consistent with evidence that it was the primary source for an abrupt rise in the sea level in about 12,500 BCE.”  (Wikipedia)

“According to one theory, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans are all descended from the ancient human Homo heidelbergensis. Between 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, an ancestral group of H. heidelbergensis left Africa and then split shortly after. One branch ventured northwestward into West Asia and Europe and became the Neanderthals. The other branch moved east, becoming Denisovans. By 130,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis in Africa had become Homo sapiens—our ancestors—who did not begin their own exodus from Africa until about 60,000 years ago.”  https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/

Horizons, even time-horizons, when they are crossed, make us realize the possibility that there are worlds on the other side and we get curious about what they are like.  We have mostly thought about re-population in terms of animals, who are now repopulating the cities (coyotes, raccoons and hawks) and will one day repopulate the great ecosystems where we raise grain as long as there is precipitation.  It’s not likely to be glaciers bearing down on us, but rather drought.  

The grizzlies are pushing, leaving the high horizon of the Rockies and coming into the river valleys, because water is life.  But indignant humans want pushback.  It’s water all living things emerged from, compete for, and must keep contact with.  It is one of the crucial edges of biological homeostasis.  We cannot live in dust storms, but we might need to try.  Think “Dune.”  Think about ghost populations.

THE MUDDLE CLASS

An East Hampton home

People talk about financial planning.  I just blundered along passively, never making enough money for savings, considering myself Class X — a person not defined by economics, vocations, and safeguards.  Almost by accident, I left guaranteed incomes, “followed my bliss”, and just trusted — as a friend of mine used to say, “trusted the art gods” who protect creative people in the context that’s now called “the gig economy.”  My main strategy was not having children and living close to the ground in substandard housing.  My main debits were being female, sometimes argumentative, and, well, “following my bliss.”

I confuse salespeople because some of them pick up on my education level and my only marriage which was to a man considered a wealthy success.  Others pick up on my old clothes, bad hair, and ancient pickup.  They depend upon class clues and none of mine are reliable.  It was fascinating to watch this video:

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-mozilla-003&hsimp=yhs-003&hspart=mozilla&p=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DtamC-M8TxtY#id=0&vid=b5ec3fcad6e265aa01f545ce7f122daa&action=click

Neil Gabler is writing another book, but testing the waters with an essay in the Atlantic.  He has the chops and the contacts to use the remnants of traditional publishing to get another book out there.  He is effectively promoting it, probably hoping to ride on the media’s fascination with the subject of the shrinking middle class.  If you check out on a search engine what the response to this promotion has been, it’s negative, along the lines of “you ain’t suffered like I have.”  

It’s true enough of both Gabler and myself that we have active and effective thinking lives, which is a huge asset, but we are living in a time that is anti-intellectual — even incoherent.  Somehow the rules for what some call “the chattering classes” who shepherd books and politics have changed, so that to some of the people rationality and tradition are what count; to others it is justice and compassion; but to new third and fourth and fifth categories of people the whole understanding of the world has been recreated on a different set of facts, a different definition of what a fact is, a different set of principles of existence that only part of the culture even knows exists.  Not just the boundaries of nations have been challenged, but also the very cell-walls of our bodies, the nomenclature of planets.

Looking back at my own life, my first good fortune was the generation of dynamic women who went into teaching because WWI meant no marriage.  They were just retiring in the Fifties.  Second was my choice of dramatics instead of English, which gave me focus on exploration.  Then I applied only to one college, that of my dramatics teacher, Northwestern University.  If I had gone to Reed, wildly intellectual, or Portland State, steady and practical, in order to save money by living at home, my identity would have been quite different.  It was a scholarship and my mother’s new teaching job that gave me NU.

Next turning point was teaching in Browning, MT, the Blackfeet Rez.  Then getting deeply involved with Bob Scriver, who made it a point to never pay alimony though it was his wives that were much of his energy.  After that, the five-year animal control job was civil service and earned a little nugget of money that I could use for another go at the University of Chicago.  The bridge was Unitarianism, which suited me at that point and got me access to the U of C, but shifted out from under my feet by 1982, becoming political and psychological in what I now consider trivial and self-indulgent ways.  But ministry got me back to the prairie where I wanted to be.

A couple of years teaching in Heart Butte was followed by another civil service stint, this time as a clerical specialist for the City of Portland in the Bureau of Buildings.  Animal control and city planning/permitting are the bedrock of my understanding of democracy.

In 1999 a wave of gentrification made my mother’s house valuable enough for my third of it to buy this house in Valier, MT, for $30,000.  I had ignored many urgings, esp. in the Unitarian years, to build up equity in a house in order to retire.  It was lucky that I didn’t.  Buying a shabby house with cash was the result of reading my grandmothers’ books about former housing collapses and depressions.  I should have had a second $30,000 to renew the roof and individual infrastructure, but it would not have solved the problem of shared town infrastructure collapse and a shrinking and aging local population.

The time-line for white High-line communities is about a hundred years long, dependent on the industrial revolution reaching out along the railroad tracks and irrigation canals.  The building practices, streets, trees, aquifer developments, laws, and cultures have now reached their limits and even interfere with the next wave of technology based on data-collection, conservation, and energy shift.  World War I and II, divided by the Great Depression, provided a story about character overcoming all challenges and the safety of the familiar that has kept us from understanding that our children are nothing like us and that weather is planetary, including the ocean.  Now all people are voyagers again in a sea choked with plastic.  

My weakness has been never committing to one job nor tolerating any dominator, no matter how well-known and loved.  My strength has been the same thing.  It’s true enough that Neil Gabler is in a pinch.  As he says, to sell his house he would need about $100,000 to fix it up.  This is only assuming that he stays and that the new owner doesn’t just demolish it because the real value is in the land.  He’s actually trying to keep everything the same.  

I doubt that he’ll get an advance big enough to do the job.  Publishing no longer works that way, even for guys like Gabler who have had repeat best-sellers.  Now authors accept a share of the profits or accept some other inventive terms, hoping the publisher survives long enough to pay out.  But authors don’t make money; publishers make money.  They are venture capitalists of the purest kind.  The art gods don’t know their names, much less their addresses.  Yesterday’s sinecures are today’s eviction notices.

DETECTING REALITY

At the moment Netflix and I have settled into a truce.  There are films I actually enjoy, esp. my BBC mysteries.  I dole out the serieses one episode at a time unless one really grabs me, like “Luther” or “Jack Taylor.”  I like the intense near-underground exceptional-male ones, but there are milder stories now:  “Shetland,” “Doctor Blake”,  “Midsomer Murders” (it can get a bit silly -- but I like the dog), “Poirot”.  The only female lead that was intriguing was in “The Fall.”  Sub-genres are appearing: four or six part mini-series that are all one story and can feasibly be watched at one “sitting,” versus on-going casts that chug along for years, adding more outrageous characters and getting sillier by the year.

Lately I’ve been interested in “Father Brown” and (less so, since it’s not on Netflix which is my only paid provider) “Brother Cadfael.”  Until I looked up “Father Brown,” which I vaguely recalled was not just a period drama but also the series of C.K. Chesterton mysteries and three versions of them over the years:  1934, 1974, and the current one from 2013.  I think there may be standalone movies.  The mysteries themselves are often philosophical questions — maybe even spiritual which change over the years.

A few days ago I found a fascinating discussion comparing “Father Brown” with “Sherlock Holmes” but I failed to mark it and it disappeared back into the algorithm-driven swirl of clues on Wikipedia.  (I had to go to IMDB to pick up the dates of the early “Father Brown” versions.)  The gist of it, as best I can recall, was a juxtaposition between the two detectives as they reflected an historical schism still very much alive today: technology vs. humanity.

Sherlock is seen as a technological and reasoning man, one who picks up trace clues and extrapolates (always accurately) about what they mean.  He is a Doctor Spock of detection who is not moved by emotional motives -- only circumstances, timing, and material culture as indicators.  This would reflect the interest in archeology and growing criminology at the time of writing.  Watson is then the man on the cusp of this Aspergergian style vs. a traditional doctor with warm human connections.  Doctor Blake is similar, but it gets him into trouble.

“Father Brown” was originally a mouthpiece for Chesterton, who is wonderful to quote, still timely.  "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”  Coming from a Unitarian family, he kept the value of reasoning but factored in what some would call the supernatural as he backed himself through High Church Anglican to Catholic.

He is not above giving classic advice to the villains. He entreats the character Flambeau to give up his life of crime: "There is still youth and honour and humour in you; don't fancy they will last in that trade. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it. Many a man I've known started like you to be an honest outlaw, a merry robber of the rich, and ended stamped into slime.”

Father Brown’s skills are said to be the product of hours and hours in the confessional, listening to troubled people and trying to understand what would help them, as well as days filled with observations of how people interact.  One could say he had an earned gift of “discernment” which is defined as follows:

1 the ability to judge well."an astonishing lack of discernment”

2 (in Christian contexts) perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction and understanding."without providing for a time of healing and discernment, there will be no hope of living through this present moment without a shattering of our common life"

My seminary is now very concerned with how to discern discernment, esp. when it comes to vocation, which is whether a person is suited for the role of congregational minister.  In the end it must be determined experimentally by giving it a try.  The problem is that congregations and ministers are so assorted that one mismatch doesn’t tell you much — it takes a series of them.  But the pressing need is that the model is emerging from a previous idea of a near-demonic exceptional and powerful exemplar to something more useful, less dramatic.

So far as detectives go, discernment is also a product of experience and that means the formerly wicked and violent may become persuaded of the value of a quiet helping life.  “Brother Cadfael” is thus able to become potent when the situation can only be resolved that way, and he is vulnerable to romantic love.  “Father Brown”, who carries a sword cane in the original version, now carries a furled umbrella.

The story lines tend to be illustrations of the necessity of tolerance for those who are different, even if they’re a little below the respectability standards of his two watchdog ladies, one Irish and one Gentry — both Victorian.  The mildly wicked reprobate who drives for the Father is useful for plot-lines.  And there is a refugee, though she’s a beautiful Polish woman willing to do scutwork.

Returning to the snipe hunt of search engines, I locate a whole “field” of discussion based on the study of Sherlock and Brown, including fiction in which both are present.  I guess this is “fan fiction,” unless it’s seen as a form of debate, which I gather is the origin of the characters in the first place.

http://www.batteredbox.com/PasqualeAccardo/SHmeetsFB.htm

“During a century of diverse Sherlockian studies, close detailed attention to the almost contemporary Father Brown stories of G.K. Chesterton remained in its infancy. Brownian researches have begun to appear sporadically in the last two decades. The purpose of the present volume [see cover above] is to collect some of the fruits of these infant researches in order to stimulate a greater appreciation of the significance of Father Brown to the history of detective fiction as well as one aspect of the subtle and often underestimated fictional art of GKC. . . .

“Comparative studies on both Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown are especially apropos given the friendly relationship between their creators, Arthur Conan Doyle and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Indeed, Father Brown was a composite of both an homage to Holmes and of a criticism of his more restrictive methods. Situating Brownian criticism in direct contiguity with the paradigmatic Sherlockian model opens a whole new area for Holmesian studies.”

Whatever we “discern” about each other is always a construct, always a fiction, always a mystery.  We become ever more aware that our law system doesn’t work anymore, partly because the laws were never meant to address phenomena so deep as social change and scientific revelation, and partly because we realize now that all law is political, based on control and profit.  Privileging individuals or classes has become less pressing than reconciling the future of the planet with the intentions of the human masses.  But it’s useful to ask “what would Sherlock Holmes say” or what would Father Brown see as the crux of this dilemma?

To tell you the truth, I’d rather sit down for coffee with Luther or Jack Taylor: modern, gritty, experienced.   I’d probably start a political firestorm if I invented a Blackfeet detective who has an ambivalent relationship with the FBI.  As Father Brown would say, "hmmmm."

IT'S NOT WHAT YOU THINK

A profane rhetoric in which “fuck” is only the beginning.  A grammar that eats its own structural bones.  Liquescent viscera turning florescent through decay.

All the people who try to nail down writing by nailing the writer to the floor according to the category square that is thought to define them will be baffled because socio-economically based categories won’t work this time around.  The unity is in the whole floor and the nails, the hammer and whatever paint or ink was used to draw the squares, which writhe and evert anyway.  The grid.  Sometimes a power grid.  Other times the grate over the sewer entrance, which does not block vapors.

The question that unites us is what it means to be made of flesh and to contend with the biofilm of cultures, both the ones that kill children and the ones who object, esp. if it’s their children, and anal-mouthed bigshots who exploit the deaths.  But we don’t share the same outlook, the same vocabulary, the same life-paths, our arrogances and expectations.  

I deal with the flesh by holding it at arm’s length as print.  To him “arm’s length” is the distance to which you can force a fist, until you can feel the heartbeat.  To me arm’s length is the distance I try to push away the half-grown cat so I can see the computer screen.  His numbness comes from overload.  Mine comes from wanting to sleep because, as a friend said, “you have a kind subconscious.”  She meant my dreams are comforting.  And childish.

His portrait of me is about his mother’s consciousness.  That figure of me is easy to construct because we’ve never met and because an auto-didact can never get access to the reflection process that a proper grad school would provide.  It is indeed a deconstruction in preparation for a new schema, but he knew Foucault for reals, met him and maybe more.  That’s not the same thing.  It's flesh.  On the other hand, my print passage through this gauntlet did not give me real world contact.  His has taught him how dangerous it can be to deconstruct one’s own genesis.

At seminary I often did pulpit supply in nearby towns.  In one of those places an older divorced woman came to me for advice.  She had been using a “dating” website and was involved with a young university student who seemed very needy.  She wasn’t sure what to do.  I recognized him, which neither of us expected.  He was in one of my classes, a singularly arrogant young man.  We never told him we knew about his double life.  He had assumed that the woman would never tell anyone, out of shame.  But the ordeal of divorce had deconstructed and reconstructed her understanding of sexuality: she had no shame about the relationship.  He did.  Philosophy is a great way to evade reality.  But she hadn’t abandoned her maternal impulse.

So much vice is held in place by the grid of presumed virtue that enables blackmail, extortion, and pimping.  Sometimes it’s all about money as a metaphor for flesh, but money doesn’t die.  It was never alive.

“Rubus armeniacus, the Himalayan blackberry^[1] or Armenian blackberry, is a species of Rubus in the blackberry group Rubus subgenus Rubus series Discolores (P.J. Müll.) Focke. It is native to Armenia and Northern Iran,”  “ Himalaya refers to a mountain range in Asia separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau.”  Rubus means it is related to the roses and apples.  Not so appealing as either.

Between the two strips of pavement on Interstate 5, a route straight up the lush green prosperous Willamette Valley, the highway people wearied of rebuilding barriers to accidental deadly cross-overs by vehicles.  They planted Himalayan blackberries, a tough thorn-daggered entanglement that becomes a strip forest, a refuge and a dumping ground.  Now and then the skeleton of a boy and his bicycle will be found in the embrace of its bracts.  No one contacts CSI.

The passage meant to simplify, make speedy and expedient, holds at its heart a dark channel of death, concealed by a bellicose jungle imported from a primal part of the world.  Nor was the highway itself innocent.  The mayor of Portland once remarked that a gangster could strike in Portland, take a fast car down the Interstate and be having breakfast at a pancake house in LA before anyone realized a crime had been committed.  Of course, some crimes are never detected and some are not quite defined as against the law.  If a corpse is simply tossed into the blackberry brambles, identity is erased, let alone autopsy.

Adrenaline as a drug powers the trip and the effects of it over time are more deadly but less detectable than, say, fentanyl, which will kill you quickly.  It’s a puzzle why people try to keep users alive.  (Love is a puzzlement.)  There is no law in biofilm function that says any one small part has to live a certain length of time, so long as others in the “film” reproduce.  It’s not morality — it’s survival.  But adrenaline surfers have a tendency to take others with them, and then there’s always the inconvenience of people only partially surviving.with broken necks and exploded minds.

It’s much safer as an adrenaline junkie to explore second-hand adventures through art.  Advertisers are giving up on romance and turning to various versions of bungee-jumping — explosions, murders, fires.  A fancy car has a voice that dares you to be different, to take risks, showing a winding mountain road.  A president fires a barrage of rockets and the television show runners feed on the trajectories of their vapor trails until the egghead commentators protest “haven’t we had about enough of that?”.  

Making art is done with flesh, real-time, and a matter of the connectome, not the auto-generated chemicals.  Those who can manage focus and function of neuron connections get there with paint, shape, movement, sensory awareness.  It’s interesting — sometimes thrilling — to look at the paintings of people who are wired differently, like van Gogh, but it’s also interesting for some people to look at the paintings made by elephants, who have a connectome wired for a different sensory array.  For a human, the MAKING of art, creating a new connectome pattern, can be salvific.  It is tantamount to becoming a new person, changing the terms of existence.

But it will still be flesh-based since that is the source and home of all neuron connections, all sensory life.  Even biofilms.

HOW ARE WE TO CONFRONT ATROCITIES?

Terrier and Terrierman on badger patrol

Terrierman asks on his website:  Would you prefer your kids and family be killed by a Russian barrel bomb, an American JDAM bomb , or Syrian gas? Asking for a friend.

I've been struggling with this sort of thing.  Is it better for a child to be immediately choked by sarin or to die over a longer period of time because of deregulation of industrial effluent or to be blown apart rather than smothered?  Why are we more moved by the death of a child instead of the death of a mature person with the investment of many years of study, training and worthy contributions?  Is our response to our children purely biologically driven or is it ecological/evolved because people who don't protect their children die out as a group?  Was it cruel of Assan's parents to let him grow up?  Was it cruelty to his nation to teach him to kill children?  (Don’t tell me it’s “Islamic” religion because it’s not.)  Is it okay if they're not one's own children?  Would it be better to keep a suffering child alive than to smother him or her?  But what if they would have a miserable life in a destroyed country?

Is it better to be a gormless president who hangs onto ideas from the Fifties -- but is consistent -- or rather a president with "neck-snapping reversals"?   Oh, look, a squirrel!!!

We were taken by surprise so we couldn’t interfere with opinions and delays, but then we discover that the persons concerned had known this was going to be done for weeks, maybe months, and they carefully prepared — like arranging to be out of town.  Or in the case of Xi, at the table in the open air situation room.  

There have been previous sarin attacks just as bad but US authorities — both Trump and Tillerson — said it was none of our business.  https://thinkprogress.org/state-department-syria-sarin-gas-attack-trump-white-house-4a3dac311346  In their opinion, it was all Obama’s fault anyway.

If one steps aside from human animosity, competition, greed and cruelty, and looks at all this as if it were some kind of insect battle for territory, would it tell us more or guide us as to what to do or even justify the dynamics?

I do think there is no use in blaming individuals and keeping up the fantasy that a simple assassination would change the world.  In fact, it can boomerang with enormous power, not in favor of the killers.  Consider Jesus.  Of course, today’s’ far right Christians have the values of Roman elites.

Just now looking at Reuters, I find the story framed in terms of “market volatility” and the reporter says,  “We are used to American armed attacks on this area of the world and I doubt that it will have much effect.”  In other words, it’s okay to kill kids so long as it doesn’t perturb the great gambling machine that we call investment.

We were anxious to know whether Xi’s presence had any influence on Trump’s decision but all we know is that Trump ordered the strike before going in to dinner.  The reports I’ve seen so far claim that only six people at the airstrip were killed.  No report on what happened with the bunkers of sarin gas that would have been released by a strike.  We’re told all aircraft were destroyed and the buildings are burning still.  But other sources say that the runways are intact, the airplanes had been removed for the event, and they are bombing again today.

Is there a computer program something like the weather-tracking systems that can reveal macro-changes and their biological consequences across the planet?  Probably weather needs to be factored in, because that’s the platform for food, and famine is both a cause and result of war and governance changes that trigger revolution.  At my ground level, unknowability is part of the ethical equation at my ground level, but a man who shuns daily information and takes the advice of a Leninist is an ignoramus.  Everyone around the president is invested in cooking the books, stroking the ego, finding the angle.  No wonder he trusts no one.

Our charge then, is to examine the numbers, stay out of reach of bad temper, and spot the angles.  If we can.

Discovering the identity of leakers, the identity of those spied on, and now the identity of any Twitter Tweeters who badmouth Trump, should put us all on notice.  Because the next step will not be tanks coming down the streets — rather they will be predator drones making a nighttime visit.  Militarization of police enforcement is a way to destroy democracy and Trump was not the first one who thought of it.  

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-01/connecticut-set-become-first-state-allow-deadly-police-drones

In the Sixties we used to worry about federal agents coming house-to-house to make lists of the guns we owned, so that if there were signs of insurrection, they could collect them all.  This was a favourite John Birch Society scenario.  But what does a predator drone care about your hunting rifle?  We’d better keep bazookas under our beds.

“North Dakota is the only state that allows police to use weaponized drones, but limits the use to "less lethal" weapons, including stun guns, rubber bullets and tear gas.”  These are the weapons used on the Native American demonstrators.

Another innovation is “micro-drones” which operate like mosquitoes with ESP, so that they can perform group actions.  Sarin is deadly in such trace amounts that they could be delivered by these tiny bombers, who could then disperse so quickly, or even self-destruct, that they could never be traced.  It’s the sort of thing that nice people think is bad to think about, as it is only distressing.  Anyway, it’s better not to warn kids not to put beans up their noses, or they might try it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI--wFfipvA  A nice boy and his professor rigged a drone so it could fire a handgun.  Nice people thought this was terrible.  I’m not very nice.  In fact, in the Nineties in the house where I grew up, a nice neighborhood in Portland, OR. that became ghettoized for a while, there was shooting every night and always unaccountable.  We did not shoot back.  We turned out the lights and sat on the floor.  What turned the tide was that gas became so expensive that nice people who commuted to downtown Portland began to buy up the low-rent houses because they were close to their jobs.  In short, gentrification trumps [sic] crime housing.

Last night I sat up late to watch the unfolding news.  At 3AM I had a nosebleed — a sign of high blood pressure.  Tonight I’ll stick to my BBC gentrified murder series, the ones written before there were smart phones.  But then I'll go back to confrontation of today's more slippery atrocities.

MORTALITY AND ART (fiction)

One of Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" paintings

He didn’t actually KNOW he was going to die pretty soon, though he had a pretty good idea.  No doc had said, half sombrely and half sort of joking,  “Well, you’ve probably got about six more weeks.”  They both knew that docs always say “you’ve got six more weeks” even if the truth was somewhere between day after tomorrow and maybe a year or so.  It’s a timespan a person can get their mind around.  He and his doc were on the same page.  In fact, he had once wanted to be a doc just like this one.

His girl friend, inevitably a couple of decades younger but keeping company with him — because at least he was “het” — was quite different.  Neither tomorrow nor a year meant anything to her.  There was right now and there was eternity.  The rest was up for discussion, or rather, argument.  She fought with time, but both of them knew that was nonsense, a waste of energy.  

“I’ll die long before you do,” he said.

“You don’t KNOW that!  I might get run over by a truck tomorrow!”

“No truck would dare.”  She hit him with a pillow.

Behind her back he began quarrelling with all his friends to get rid of them because he had the deranged idea that it would be easier for them to bear his death if they were angry with him.  It had always worked that way for him.  If he wasn’t already mad at them beforehand, he got doubly enraged when they died without warning him, without asking him.  It was surprising — almost, but not quite worrying — that it was so easy to run them off.  But cynicism had always helped him cope and it did not fail him now.

No, that’s not the way it was at all.  That’s not honest.  The truth was that he needed help and she was just enough compliant with the gender role stereotype to provide it.  He was a painter and the paintings didn’t sell all that well, so in the end — if she could stick it out — she would end up with the paintings.  His agent was very aware of this dynamic and watched her carefully.  But no one could get the artist to draw up proper documents to make a guide for justice, fairness, contingency.  He said, “Whatever happens, just happens.”

She painted her own works and there was a possibility that because of her closeness to him, her work would pick up value, like something sticky acquiring lint.  She hated that thought.  She hated all thoughts, but she lived by thinking.  

Sometimes she hated him as well; certainly his agent.  That older woman had a fetish for very high heels until she had broken her ankles so many times that she began to wear boots, high boots — not high heels, but high leather uppers, to hide steel braces inside them.  Then she discovered cowboy boots and wore them with long denim skirts.  This became the agent’s trademark.  A mockery of something that was once real work done in the dust.  At least that’s what he said, to be cynical.

Suddenly he fired that agent and the companion was both relieved and a bit worried.  As she had feared, then he turned on her.  What did it mean?  Late stage dementia?  A desire to spare her grief (though, of course, it only compounded sorrow, gave it a sharp poisoned tip).   

Then she noticed shadowy figures slipping into the studio.  They seemed to be male and rather young, but she didn’t recognize either customers or fellow artists.  Casually dressed, faceless.  When she asked, he denied they even existed.  And when she objected to the way he was treating her, he wept and said he needed her.  Couldn’t make it without her.  But if he was going to die anyway, what did “make it” mean?

Was he covertly gay?  She wouldn’t have cared except that she didn’t know that language, those social rules.  When she consulted a gay friend, he said it didn’t seem likely.

Was there some kind of criminal connection?  Dangerous people?  She slipped into fantasy and thought maybe the figures were his past selves, his young selves.  She knew a lot about them from his stories, so maybe it was HER fantasy, not his at all.

Some artists keep a secret body of work, like Wyeth painting and painting that neighborhood woman, trying to do something inscrutable, which society assumed was about sex because they always assume that, but which may have been something else, like mortality which the woman was sturdy enough to embody.  The companion looked, but did not find, a secret body of work.  Was she herself embodying mortality?  Is that why the subject of their arguments was often who would die first?

She sometimes said that she had the power to keep him alive forever simply by remembering his life and by “curating” his work, pointing out the best and explaining how and when it was created, the incidents that led up to the paintings, their embodiment, so to speak.  

He said this would destroy him.  That one who looked at his works should only respond with the whole self, that it was dishonest to prompt viewers and lead them to expect certain things.  In fact, that could destroy his whole career by limiting the framing of it to the opinion of experts since experts shift, argue against the just-previous expertise, and discredit whole categories of work.  Most people are afraid or even unable to react in a thoroughly genuine and unique way.  Every time his work was confronted by an honest person with real reactions, it was renewed.

She said this was cynical.  He shrugged.  She said he was still interpreting everything in terms of his youth, that revolutionary period of the Sixties and Seventies.  He pointed out that he wasn’t even a painter then.  Not even BORN.  She screamed.

In the end it was all very prosaic.  He died in his sleep.  She went home with one of his best friends and in their hurt and loss, they forged a new intimacy that included the painter.  It turned out that the shadowy figures were his sons by a very early wife he’d never told her about.  She never could find a painting of that woman and neither of his sons painted or would talk to her.  One night she went by the studio and found everything gone.  She assumed it was the sons.

Without their assistance or permission, the companion and her new partner wrote a book about the painter that was highly influential, much respected because of its “Truth.”  It sold moderately well.