THE NEW BROWNING HIGH SCHOOL

Sometimes I think maybe I blundered when I moved back to Valier instead of Browning, which is where I’m really connected, but sometimes the best way to preserve intense relationships is by keeping a little distance. Today I went to the dedication of the new Browning High School in the gymnasium big enough to stage a rodeo. Rows and rows of chairs. I always sit in the back so I can watch the people, and the entrance was mostly at the back so people saw me and came over to give me a hug. People here used to shake hands solemnly but now they throw their arms around you. Except that I noticed the older men were very careful about hugging the cheerleaders who helped cut the ribbon.

There were a lot of “gimme caps” in the audience, only a few cowboy hats. Earl Old Person wore his splendid fanned-out Sioux eagle feather warbonnet and William Sharp, the present Tribal Chair, wore a brand-new straight-up Blackfeet-style headdress with red, white and blue down.

Everything was polished, vast and spare. The maintenance man for the school district right now is Joe Fisher, who is actually a very fine free-lance photographer. His father, Jim, was the maintenance man in 1961 when I arrived on the train with twenty whiskey boxes filled with books and the trunk my father had carried to college at the University of Manitoba many decades earlier. “I sure don’t know about you,” joked Jim. “Seems like you must do a whole lotta drinkin’!” He taught me how to get that high shine on the Scriver museum floor. Jim’s grandfather used to snowshoe down to Browning from St. Mary in the winter when the roads were closed. He’d bring down the mail and pack some necessities (coffee and tobacco) back up with him. It’s about forty miles on a steep grade with deep snow.

The new counseling department has a spacious glass-enclosed foyer and a star quilt hanging behind the receptionist counter. In the Seventies the counselor’s office was in the most distant boys’ bathroom, the only space there was in the crowded school, which gave all his phone calls a peculiar ceramic ring. They did take out the (ahem) fixtures.

The town bank, Indian-owned and where Eloise Cobell found the platform and power to challenge the United States government over their management of Indian assets “held in trust,” decided they would give the school some art. They bought several very large paintings by Lyle Omeaso, who is the son of Fern Omeaso, who worked with us in the Scriver Studio. They are quiet, pleasant, diligent people from George and Molly Kicking Woman’s family. In this place one hires a person, then if they work out and you need another person, you ask him to bring his brother or cousin. The paintings are portraits of George and Molly plus Bird Rattler, all of them traditional people who tried to pass on what they knew. George and Molly were more or less our sponsors for our own Bundle-Keeping.

I greeted Merle Magee Jr., who nearly shot us one cold morning on top of the Sweetgrass HIlls, first day of deer season. His daddy was on the board that hired me to teach in 1961 and froze my salary in 1965 because I was sleeping with Bob Scriver, then hired me back again when Bob divorced me. Browning has always had an almost solidly Blackfeet school board.

The change has come in gender. The present school board chair is a woman, Donna Yellow Owl, who has been both dynamic and peace-making. The school superintendent is also a woman, Mary Margaret McKay Johnson, who was married to Randy Johnson who was white and previously also the school superintendent. He died of cancer some years ago, leaving an inspiring speech that was delivered to the Browning kids at his funeral. I spent a summer working for his parents in St. Mary at their campground/restaurant. Iliff McKay, Mary Margaret’s father, was chair of the Tribal Council when he died suddenly from reaction to a penicillin. It was a major loss to the development of the tribe. Her brother, Tom -- tall, steady, handsome and brilliant -- was also there. Her other brothers, Joe the lawyer and Mike the humorist, weren’t present that I could see. I just want you to get an idea of what Blackfeet families are like: amazing.

One of the people who tickled me most was the student body president: Riel LaPlante. I went to find him so I could shake his hand. He spoke easily and intelligibly without notes, wearing a suit and a red politician’s tie. LaPlante’s are noted for being, well, pretty French because they were part of the dispersed Red River people who fled when their visionary leader, Louis Riel, was hanged by the Canadian government for treason. It was true. He was trying to secede. Fred DesRosier, who belongs to a family that arrived on the rez in 1896 or so, slightly ahead of the Scrivers (Thad came in 1903), told me that one of his aunts knew Riel because he taught school for a year or so in the Mission near Great Falls. We love history here because we are so conscious of being in it, living it out.

I copped a hug from Darrell Kipp and another from my biggest Hoyt fan from Methodist minister days there. She’s the secretary of the counseling department, a little gal with a big heart. Another of my students/parishioners was Gail Hoyt who said when she first spotted me in the Sixties, “Oh, I WOULD get a recycled Lucille Ball for a teacher!” She has been teaching for years but just finished a college-level writing class and is proud. She had brought along the new Methodist minister (an engineer who shaves his head!) and his lovely wife. He seems to have resolved the plumbing problems at Heart Butte -- for now.

I missed some folks. In mid-August some people are taking last-minute trips or, especially this summer, trying to harvest. The prairie is still green except where there is a purple haze of spotted knapweed, a nasty weed but very pretty from a distance. The mountains are bare stone.

The cafetorium is on several staged levels and has sound baffles hanging overhead to keep down the clatter. There was a big feed after all the thanks and awards. What I kept thinking of was the state administrator who lamented to me that “Indians never want to do anything they didn’t think of themselves.” No kidding. It took them ten years to think through exactly what kind of building they needed, how to finance it, and how to stage the construction. They never stopped thinking about it, they never backed off, and they finished the job. Even Louis Riel would be impressed.

I kept an eye on one little boy with the traditional three braids for a male Blackfeet. His hair was brown, not black. When Willie Sharp was in high school he wore the three braids until the basketball officials made him cut them. I’ll bet someone saved them, black and glossy as licorice whips.

A TRINITARIAN VIRTUAL REALITY

So now I come to another flash point in my saga of the unwritten thesis: the meaning of “virtual.” My interpretation of the “virtual” was that it is the internal, conditional, and revisable construct of the world that a person carries inside them as a “map.” My advisor, who was -- after all -- on the faculty of a theological school, wanted me to admit that there WAS a reality and that it was GOD and that it was knowable through faith. I wouldn’t. To me the reality was that the concept of God is unknowable -- all we have to go on is the map because there is no permanent terrain.

However, the map can be redrawn and we can realize the distortions innate to the kind of map, for instance the mercator system which allows maps to be flat instead of round or even something so simple as printing the map of Montana small enough to get it on the same-sized page as the other states. As my sister-out-law remarked, the distances are very much longer than one expects after relying on a map of, say, Oregon.

This is a Shaman versus Trickster issue. Shaman stays put. Trickster explores the map and points out where it's wrong. They are two kinds of “virtual reality.”

I proposed that an “operating set” of maps would include three separate sheets of horizontal narrative time: the first would tell one’s story of what one thought was reality, through which consciousness travels and illuminates only so far as the headlight can reach. Underground, inaccessible to consciousness, runs a scientifically verifiable, documentable account of where the train has tracked. That doesn’t mean it’s real.

Then behind the train, high above, trails a long stream of smoke (This is a “steampunk” metaphor with a wood-fired locomotive. You could make something of taking on wood and water.) The vapor writhes, disappears in wind, changes width -- is generally always transforming, because memory is like that. But what we remember is what gives us the energy to go forward through life. Some people only keep the good stuff -- that makes them “run out of steam.” Some people only keep the bad stuff -- that could cause the boiler to explode.

Metaphors are great fun. A novelist tries to record the steam trail. A poet might choose a momentary word picture of a huge machine screaming through rain or snow. I’m particularly fond of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi story of a time-wormhole that allows a knight in armor to confront a Victorian railroad engine.

The point is that what one does, what one thinks one has done, and what one thinks will happen in the future are ALL “virtual,” constructs created by method and experience -- so far as it has been recorded and one chooses to allow into consciousness. If life has offered nothing but darkness and punishment, one’s hopes of finding love and fulfillment seem dim. And yet, because of the human ability to imagine what is not actually present or even necessarily rationally possible -- like God or a color greener than green or infinity -- people can suffer to the brink of extinction, all the while envisioning another better life.

These three virtual streams can be totally revised. “A stranger comes to town.” Everything changes. A little kid at the parade says, “That emperor is wearing no clothes!” Everything changes. But mostly the changes are subtle and no one notices.

This is in opposition to what many people think of as religion, which they have been taught is dogmatic, invariant, carved in stone. If things change, they panic. Commentators have been remarking that the people who are currently going ballistic over government health care, not recognizing that Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration have been around for decades, are really reacting to a culture that is shifting too quickly for them. Suddenly they’re out of work, their house is financially underwater, they’re told their kid got A’s that didn’t mean anything, and their car is destroying the planet. The people down the block don’t look like the people who used to live there and they may speak a foreign language. Like two-year-olds, citizens are staging tantrums of protest. They don’t know anything about the “real” world -- they’ve been living in the virtual world in their heads. But don’t blame them: there IS no real world. The real illusion is that things wouldn’t change.

Ideally, artists, novelists and ministers would have been gently pointing out the changes all along. But instead the radio and the prosperity churches have encouraged the idea that there’s One Right Way and Only One. My Netflix “movie” for the last few days has been “Battlestar Galactica” the Reimagined Version. It’s a tale about the future that mostly pivots around the difference between humans and machines with the machines taking the One Right Way point of view and even talking about God and the need to surrender to him.

Before the several years of episodes were shot, there was a “spine” with certain basic plot points established ahead of time. The actual stories were written as scripts some months in advance, and in fact this series tried to think about making them “actual” on a set quite a while ahead of time so that the people who create the illusions could develop them without hurrying. This helped the level of detail and coherence that makes it seem real.

In the commentary the producers remarked about two contrasting directors that they used. (Each episode is directed by someone different, though a director might be employed more than once.) Both directors were very successful, but in opposite ways. One did a lot of preparation with storyboards that guided each shot, extensive notes, a detailed and unvarying script. The other director started with the same materials, but was very open to suggestion at the moment of shooting, so that if someone had a sudden inspiration, a clever ad lib, or a fortuitous accident, he could swing with it -- build it in. The producers said that the results were equally good, but put the emphasis on slightly different aspects of the story.

Youngsters now are fully aware of “avatars” and “sim cities” and the possibility of parallel universes so that quite different versions of reality may be proceeding in different galaxies at the same time. I would not have much difficulty defining “virtual” for them. They don’t feel the same need to pin everything down. Despite their literally close relationships with wearable electronic devices, they are not machines.

THE SACRED & THE PROFANE: Part Two

A FORMAL DECLARATION ABOUT MY POSITION ON GOOD/EVIL

This is my trickster position: good and evil depend on who you are and what the circumstances might be. Killing is the right thing to do sometimes and very very wrong other times. If your culture gives you a handbook, read it -- then burn it.

This is my shaman position: it has nothing to do with the universe. Good and Evil are constructs for and by people.

In the end both positions are the same position. Evil is something bad for humans. Good is something good for humans. Usually as individuals rather than as a whole. (They call it “situation ethics.”) The mountains do not care. Nor does the Milky Way nor the grizzly bear nor the earth worm.

This point of view, that humans are NOT the center of the universe and finally don’t matter except to themselves (there is no God and if there were it would not be anything like humans), is sometimes called Deep Ecology and -- since humans almost always find some way to put themselves in the center in spite of saying they won’t -- DEEP Deep Ecology. If there is no human to watch the galaxies or define the quark, are they still there? There’s no one who can witness. There’s no one to say it matters.

However, as a guide to what one ought to do in the world, the idea that probably works approximately the best is to do what humans CAN do (but usually don’t) which is to enjoy creation, which leads to its protection. That witnessing bit helps, plus some art. A little sympathy for fellow creatures couldn’t hurt.

Barrus and I essentially agree on all this stuff. Sometimes I’m a stand-in for a lot of imaginary readers out there and sometimes I’m myself, but only as imagined by Tim. He doesn’t really know me, though I give him lots of evidence, even a few secrets. I don’t really know him either, which is his point. He says the reader and I know nothing of reality. But the difference between most readers and me is that I don’t believe there IS a reality. It is not knowable. I agree that chaos is simply an unknowable order, perhaps on different terms than we can ever conceive with our little meat brains, electrochemical strands insulated with fat, one little bit that looks like a seahorse and another little bit that looks like a chambered nautilus and other little bits that are nearly indistinguishable to anatomists, except in terms of what they do to interpret the sense information we get from the world, which we discover only by destroying that bit in a mouse.

The strange thing is that a person who pays attention can FEEL the difference between the Sacred and the Profane, which is the title of a seminal book by Mircea Eliade because that’s exactly what he proposed, where he started. When you stand on holy ground, your impulse is to take your shoes from off your feet and stand there humbly barefoot as Tim’s grandpa did. The highest places, the lowest places, the places of transition -- you can feel the sacrality, even when it is metaphorical and emotional. No one knows what makes these “places” sacred or why we can feel them. One key seems to be extremeness, another is transformation, a third might be fusion with someone else, even for a moment. But you CAN feel them.

Liminal time and place, over the threshold, is where the musicians play, the children play, the people worship, and ceremonies transform. Is the overlap between Tim’s circle and my circle liminal? I would say yes. You’ll have to ask him what he thinks and what he feels. It’s high trust because it’s with guards down. It’s high risk because anything could happen. But we can feel it.

When I was working on my thesis, I spent a lot of time chasing the idea of “felt concepts” and I’m still after them. Suzanne Langer wrote the best stuff. I was trying to get at the thinking that is beneath ordinary perception, maybe accessed by dreaming. The way babies think just before they acquire language. I’m afraid of drugs (and other things). But I’m braver than most about thinking the unthinkable, so I write, which is sometimes more revealing than reading. Sometimes the concepts are like magma, under the earth, pushing it up. Sometimes they are like virga, the rain that evaporates before it ever reaches the ground. I don’t doubt their existence. Felt concepts. People call it intuition, gut-feelings, instinct, and other inaccurate terms.

When coming to good/evil through these concepts, one meets the necessity of rational thinking, what some call “moral calculus.” So many of our best stories are about doing something that “feels” wrong but is rationally just -- or maybe the other way around. They are as hard to bring into alignment as justice and law. Justice and mercy are not hard to reconcile: they interpenetrate. But Justice-and-Law or Mercy-and-Law do not even touch each other. They are completely different. And Evil doesn’t have anything to do with any of these systems.

Tim identifies Evil as Power and surely it has power and surely power with no restraints or mercy becomes Evil. Bad for human beings and other living things. Who is to say that timber and trees do not suffer. Can’t you feel them?

Tim knows more about suffering than anyone should have to. I know nothing about the level of suffering from bone destruction and implants. He has been posting footage from the end of WWII when the local Germans were forced to walk through the prison camps where the people had been reduced to skeletons. The faces of the bourgeois witnesses are stony but plump. If anything, the witnesses look stunned and a little resentful. The faces of the skeletons are skulls. There is no expression. They do not scream, not even when the well-fed man in a workman's cap scrubs out their butts.

But many would say that the true evil is that though Eisenhower forced the world to look, photographers documented the atrocity, and many have written books about it, there are still people who deny that it happened. They insist that no humans have walked on the moon. They claim that there is a God and they have a personal deal. They are mad. They are indifferent to suffering or reason or “felt concepts.” That is human evil. Rule-based. Faith-based. Power-based. Denying. And repeating holocausts every day.

The universe is indifferent. The universe doesn’t care. But some humans care a great deal. The difference is in the humans, not the universe. We cannot depend upon galaxies to improve human society.


TIM'S RESPONSE:

I agree and disagree. The universe does not care.

But that is different from arguing that there is evil in the universe.

This brings me, perhaps, closer to spirituality than I want to be, but here's the gig that prevents that.

I really, honestly, truly, sincerely believe that the universe is 99.99999999999% evil. Most humans into spirituality go the opposite.

That is NOT to say there there is some small fragment that is good because I have no idea what the antithesis of evil is.

Human are so insignificant in this that I would call them subsubsubmolecular. Even an electron has relevancy because without the electron, you have something utterly undefinable because I can't think of a substance that is devoid of electrons. Although there probably is one or several. The analogy is simply to quantum mechanics. Humans to the universe aren't even there.

I don't think it's evil that is the question. It's that tiny grain of sand somewhere that is not evil.

Humanity is as evil as it comes.

All of it.

As far as people go, there is no tiny fragment that is an opposite. This would be at the level of matter and anti-matter. Purely conjecture. Yet Hawking and Penrose come as close to it as any human has been able to go. The philosophical is stuff I reject out of hand. It's silly. Most of it is a waste of my time. Mainly because it's foundations are historical and history is a reference to the past (I think Mary has a romance with the past and I'm not saying that is good or bad but it only is) and no one has been there to examine it. The construction of black holes is relevant as is their behavior. We know so little. Humans are like duuuhhh. Not the brightest light bulbs in the universe.

A Brief History of Times barely skims the surface. It's the only book I've ever read that is slightly relevant (a lot of it is a waste of my time). Most books are just silly. Humans love silly.

History doesn't interest me much. It's just wrong. But we base all our values on it. The word we does not really mean me but if I don't include myself in that most humans become offended and when they get offended they mainly waste my time. Mainly, I go through life tiptoeing around what people believe in (I try not to laugh so they don't look in my direction because stupidity is what one has to endure 99.9999999999% of the time.

Stupidity and evil.

Now, there's a thought.

"Killing is the right thing to do..."

Umm... We differ on what is a right thing and a wrong thing.

Things only are.

But I believe the universe is fundamentally and basically evil.

I assume most humans believe it is basically good but I really wouldn't know because I am not that really all that interested in humans or in whatever they think good is. Or bad. Really. I am interested in how to survive them and their stupidity. That feels relevant.

But I just assume my reality and human reality are different. It only is. I rarely let them know this because then I get lectured and lectures are a waste of my time. I turn them off. I smile like I'm listening but I've heard all those tapes before. This means I am antisocial. To put it mildly. I would say I am social because I smile. I smile because I want to survive humanity. I feel like an alien who walks through a sea of basically stupid slugs who have most of the power. I don't know them but I don't want to know them. Most people (I think) spend their lives attempting to connect. Writing is the art of mastering human symbols. That is all it is. I have no romance for it or with it. It's only this one thing some humans do. I spend my life interpreting and attempting to get around stupidity. People think (from my work) that I am interested in connecting. I go out of my way to make then think that. The reality is that I am more connected than I want to be and I am usually interested in not being connected to humans because I find them stupid and a waste of my time and I would rather make things than know them.

My job is to interpret. But I do that to survive. Not because I believe what people believe or even feel. Humanity basically repulses me. Yuck.

Here's a secret. Human babies REALLY repulse me. Been there done that nononononono run, Tim, run. Children themselves have little brains. Adult humans are bad enough. There are VERY few children on the planet who would not waste my time. Their brains are just too small. We don't engage. I pretend to like them. Because if you don't, adult humans will punish you and punishment wastes my time.

"Stand there humbly..."

Ummm -- I am not so sure about the humble. But what I do with that is to say to myself when I see it (about a zillion times a day) is that: oh, this person sees a lot of nuance in life.

Not that I agree with it. But I can say that the fact that they see it is relevant to them if not to me. In other words -- I give you that -- but it doesn't mean I need it or that a thing is relevant to me. Humble schmumble. What I say to myself (really) is that whoever said that is probably a writer because they are so intent of expressing human emotion.

Which is very paternalistic. To assign emotions to other beings.

I am not saying it is good or bad or right or wrong. I am saying writers do that. I can do that. But it is mainly a waste of my time to do it.

Symbols. Humans are very involved in symbols. I am typing them now.

Reading and writing don't interest me that much anymore. I know those symbols.

At the moment (and this will change -- is changing but I don't really want to share it because it would drive most humans gaga) I am interested in what pixels do.

Television interests me but only the snow you see humans describe as static.

Actually, these are electrons scattered through the universe by the big bang. I find what humans describe to be static quite fascinating because THIS is history. It's evil. t

TRICKSTER & SHAMAN

What drives the commentors and critics crazy is that they want to know EXACTLY who Timothy Patrick Barrus really is. What category to put him in. What is his label? What is his pedigree, his class, his CV, his family tree, his job record, his antibody status, and so on until it’s no wonder he’s allergic to the topic. And it only makes him trickier. Journalists can make all the phone calls, interviews, investigations, computer checks, Googles, documentations they want. It won’t tell them much. The problem is not the availability of information -- it is their capacity to “get it.” As Tim says, “They see what they want to.” The category of “failed S/M porn writer” is in them, not him; and also the nurturing half-Navajo father called Nasdijj, to the same degree. Ambiguity, contradiction, paradox, metaphor, allusion and elision are his modus operandi. Check out his videos: now you see, now you don’t. Was that a blue heeler helping dog that just streaked by? Or was it a coyote? The human brain struggles to define and constructs an explanation: this is well-documented in the psychology literature. They call it “closure,” as in a closed mind. Trickster resists all closure -- Trickster looks for openings, whether they are porn, NA literature, or boys at risk.
In the end of “Trickster Makes This World” Lewis Hyde finally comes to a simple comparison of the two related archetypes of Shaman and Trickster. His way of thinking is that the Shaman is the one who had the extraordinary death/renewal experience that caused his guts to be replaced with quartz, which he can occasionally draw out crystal by crystal through his skin. (You can read this into Tim’s life.) But Trickster is Coyote, who says, “Sure, I can get something out of my guts, too!” And makes a big poop, with a lot of unnecessary sound effects and smells. He could as easily have made an ejaculation that was not verbal.


Trickster says, as in the title of that once-popular and always-relevant book, “If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” Because if you put all your eggs in one basket (Don’t you love mixed metaphors? Trickster does.) you risk trying so hard to protect them that you won’t have a life anymore. When Buddha leaves off wandering, settles down, grows healing herbs, and does elegant tea ceremonies, his role has changed. Now he’s Shaman with a mystical embeddedness in creation. I’m happy to claim that role. Tim can be Trickster. I’m the One Who Watches, Tsalgiglalal. The stars wheel over my head. All the salmon I have eaten (a LOT) leap in the river that passes me.

Hyde tells us (p.292) that in 1964 Mac Linscott Ricketts suggested that “tales locate the trickster in opposition to the practice and beliefs of shamanism.” The shaman “bows before the spiritual world and seeks alliances.” Trickster “recognizes no power beyond it’s own intelligence, and seeks to seize and subdue the unknown with wit and cunning. Trickster . . . embodies an experience of Reality . . . in which humans feel themselves to be self-sufficient beings for whom the supernatural spirits are powers not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.”

Continuing, Hyde says, “. . . trickster is an outsider. . . He has no friends in that other world” [the world of spirit] ". . . All that humans have gained from the unseen powers beyond -- fire, fish, game, fresh water, and so forth -- have been obtained by necessity through trickery or theft . . .” Unlike Shaman, Trickster “seems to need no friends: he gets along very well by himself.” “From the Shaman’s point of view, the rules that trickster breaks articulates the ideal world, but from trickster’s vantage point, if we think the ideal is the real we are seriously mistaken and won’t see half of what is right in front of us.”

But look closer at that Venn Diagram of two circles that is the friendship between Tim and Mary. In that overlap of the two identities is the shared Truth: desire for experience in the world, search for gates giving access to closed cultures, discovery of the plenitude and variety of what is there, and a lively flexible mind that can move among them. The story Hyde presents is that of Krishna as a crawling child cramming dirt into his mouth. When the baby’s mother looks in between his lips, she sees the enormous shining wheel of the universe and faints. This is spirit world, not a sci-fi or supernatural or magic world. Shaman knows this and surrenders. Trickster won’t.

Because the overlap between Tim and Mary matches the overlap between Shaman and Trickster (oh, the hubris of this idea!), we know that in Shaman there is a little Trickster and some healing Shaman in Trickster, like Yin and Yang. Physical distance and the difference in our pasts help us keep matters clear, but sometimes emotional intimacy and shared intensity bring us into a momentary embrace. Then I sit back down and Trickster goes merrily on down the trail. The moment is enlivening, even inspiring, but it passes. Still, I am faithful in my watching and do not leave. Trickster is as faithful in his traveling and will pass by again.

Why do you need so many facts? Why isn’t it enough to have the stories? The journalists scurry around in a scavenger hunt, looking in all the wrong places and finding all the wrong things. Or are they? Sometimes Trickster has left clues that are quite right, but deceptive in appearance. One of them is attachment to place. Another is the father. And then there's that Lost Son.

But don’t ask Shaman to explain beyond pointing to method, in the University of Chicago seminarian way. Shaman doesn’t do dogma, because she understands the shifting chimera of this seemingly real world. Tolerance of ambiguity, love of the search rather than the destination, deep appreciation of desire and the preciousness of its fulfillment are her hinge and her role as a gate, knowing there are many other gates in the articulation of the world’s bones. It is Trickster who suffers the pain of those joints.

TIM THE TRICKSTER RESPONDS:

Tim Barrus: The Sacred and Profane

I cannot tell you all my secrets. It would be like draining blood.

The difference between the two of us — the writer and the reader — is that I will tell you I have secrets. You dare not do it.

You pretend.

The bottom line is about who has the power.

Yet I am supposed to be the one so consumed with the enigmatic machinations of pretense.

I do not pretend not to see the world in different ways than you do. My experience informs me that if I were to share the things I see and know, you would be afraid, and out of that fear, you would attempt to destroy me. I do not trust you not to do it.

You speak of reality as if it were a given.

What you know of reality would fit inside the tip of a urethra.

And yet you pretend that your knowledge of reality is all-encompassing, absolute, unimpeachable.

There is a caveat to this assuredness. It is a nagging doubt, very small, a pinprick, hot as liquid metal, and it burns through you with the awareness that there is more out there than you can know.

You shove this away. You choose not to look at it. You swallow it. But you know.

I am easily dismissed.

I am supposed to care.

I know this: there is too much richness in the vast chaos to focus however briefly anything whatsoever — even the subliminal, the minute, the seemingly irrelevant — on what it is you know. You are the audience. It’s not about you. The chaos of what is reality, the breathtaking complexity of reality as a living thing, embodies such interpretations as chance and wisdom; leaves you as a pedestrian left behind in a wind of subatomic particles racing through the universe at speeds you cannot even imagine even as they pass through entire planets as if that solid mass did not exist. What the audience sees, what the reader knows, what the pedestrian asserts, is smaller in its context or a plethora of them than a neutron to its point of reference. A quark is even smaller. We are not even sure (no one has ever seen one) that the quark exists. We simply assume it might. We can find no shape or structure to the thing. And yet from this we surmise that a quark could be a point in time and space that needs no structure. You are shaking your head, yes. But another reality suggests the concept of something that significant yet that small is not, in fact, a reality the human mind can quite grasp or put its arms around.

What I know and what you pretend to understand is chaos. Even now, you are thinking of chaos as being that which is disordered.

You would be wrong. The obvious is an illusion.

Chaos is about an underlying order in what appears to be perfectly random.

Beyond God, the universe is utter chaos. Universality is and it isn’t.

From a distance, I observe Mary Scriver (http://prairiemary.blogspot.com) making assumptions about my life and person and then testing those assumptions against historical analogy.

There have been many times when I wish I could have given her a big bear hug and told her to stop worrying: it’s all ok.

My life is just a quark. It is a point in time and space. It has no structure. It can only be assumed to exist at all. It is a mistake to assume it has evolved from one determinism into another based on what can be measured. Determinism being the purely philosophical (since there is no structure to the thing) belief that every event or action is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions. Thus, in rationality at least, every event or action can be completely predicted in advance, or in retrospect.

But if time is measured in the number of rotations around a particular star, what is space if a quark can pass through the object (a planet) as it rotates. Let us assume the obvious: That these mathematical orbit equations are deterministic means, of course, that by knowing the initial conditions—-in this case, the positions and velocities of the planets at a given starting time—-you find out the positions and speeds of the planets at any time in the future or past.

I would argue that there is no such thing as the past. Only our ideas of it.

Of course, you reject that out of hand. Without the past, where would that leave the reality of the present. It is supposedly theoretically possible to obtain nearly-perfect predictions for the behavior of any physical system.

You only imagine the past. Making long-term predictions to any degree of precision at all would require giving the initial conditions to infinite precision.

You only imagine infinite precision. Your assumption that there is such a thing as the past assumes we can predict if not necessarily the future, then we can at least apply deterministic values to the present.

But what if one gets drastically different results each time. Thusly the separation between the human animal and his behavior. Even when we add up everything we know about the biology of the human animal, his genealogy, his genetic structures, his variable demographics, his sociology, gradually the smallest imaginable discrepancy between two sets of initial conditions would always result in a huge discrepancy at later or earlier times, the hallmark of a chaotic system.

Those quarks that travel through the planets, travel through the human animal as well.

None of this is hocus-pocus. All of it is basic physics.

What we think we know (and is thusly safe to assume) is sacred.

What questions the fundamental nature and structure of the above is the profane. Our brains can’t even build a template where something (like an electron) can exist in two places at the same time.

I would argue that I can exist in twenty places at the same time.

Not only are persons spread out through worlds, but they, like everything else, are quantized through time in any given world. Time is a series of moments, and a person who exists at a moment exists there forever in four-dimensional spacetime, rather than being transformed continuously through the flow of time. Such change and flow are mythical. The argument doesn’t strictly require the multiverse hypothesis, because deterministic physics since Newton has implied that the openness of the future is an illusion, and consequently that free will is an illusion.

So what is real.

Chaos is real.

Human existence as we know the animal — Homo sapien sapien — supposedly can be traced back in time 100,000 years. A mere blink of an evolutionary eye. I read Mary’s analysis of who I am and note she keeps it open-ended. Both of us can agree that reality is complex enough to be the trickster of all the tricksters. Personally, I just don’t buy the historical analogies to mythology not because they are too old and superstitious but because they are not old enough. Mary and I travel at different speeds toward some of the same destinations. Time travel is assured by Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which says that an observer who accelerates or decelerates will experience less time than an observer who is at rest or in uniform motion. This time dilation could make an astronaut’s flight very short and the duration on Earth very long, but such a trip to Earth’s future would be irreversible as “no amount of time dilation can allow a spaceship to return from a flight before it took off.” As for past-directed time travel, it is possible as a sort of sidestep from one universe to another, requiring a path between the two universes that is “hard-wired” into the structure of the multiverse. Whether such paths exist or not is an unresolved empirical question. What we know is safe. What we do not know causes us to regard both the past and the future with some amount of anxiety and fear.

I believe in evil. Mary doesn’t.

Power. Who has the power. It’s not about Mary and it’s not about me. It’s about you and who has the power.

What I believe about evil is that it’s simply another way of perceiving and seeing the universe. It only is. But it’s definitely there.

It’s you. That is how I see the universe.

Most of you as observers and not participants are evil. Your assumption that you are not participating is erroneous.

I am accused of employing smoke and mirrors. The reality is that I do not need them. Reflection is everywhere and it’s only information. It can be obfuscated at any point along the way toward recognition and that includes all the boxes and categories that you keep it in.

Mary believes that there is such a thing as good, practical, common sense. I believe that common sense is an illusion and that the human animal is capable of knowing very little of what is actually out there in much the same way a slug exists under a rock. The slug barely knows the slug exists. But what does it know and how much does it know about the rock.

A person should be grounded in good, practical, common sense. Both feet planted firmly on the ground.

A slug has no feet but it can wiggle.

Even as the ground spins through space and what we know is but a grain of sand in a urethra, and what we do not know is the rest of the bleeding universe. I reject analogy (especially to mythology) in the same way I reject the idea of the past.

You can’t go back and change anything until such time as you can fathom exactly what time is. You can’t go forward and change anything until such time as you can assume the physical attributes of a quark. A you in the form of a nothing but a you as a fixed point in time and space. All you are left to work with as best you can is right here right now this very moment. What is awesome about that reality is that you are responsible for what happens in it even as the rest of the organic and inorganic universe spreads itself out into endless and infinite variations of its kind, and flies apart into the vast unknown.

TRICKSTER GOES FOR THE JOINTS

The last time I worked with Lewis Hyde’s ideas was in 1982 when I was working on the thesis about the structure of worship that was supposed to earn me a D.Min. degree. I left without it because I couldn’t stand being away from Montana any longer. Now, so many years later, the ideas fit the life of Tim Barrus in a very useful way. Consider.

Lewis identifies carnival as one of those cathartic reversal blowouts that relieves the pressure of conformity, as Victor Turner analyzes in “The Ritual Process.” (Carnival reversals are as fascinating as “cargo cults” but I don’t know whether anyone has found a connection.) Connected to transitions from one season to another and often at a specific point on the calendar, they encourage the Dionysian side of life as well as Hermes. Lewis points out that the root of carnival is “carne” as in both “chili con carne” and “incarnation.” Those who speak Latin-based languages will recognize that carne means meat. This is a meat-eater’s festival. The Blackfeet would recognize the concept.

Lewis doesn’t specifically describe the agricultural phenomenon of the county and state fair, which often has a midway with a carnival aspect, but which is actually NOT a carnival but rather a competition that reinforces the standing hierarchy: the sorting out of good, better and best, the celebration of conformity. At one point in the US (no one wants to remember) the identifying of the best garden truck and domestic livestock was accompanied by a competition for the genetically “best” people, who tended to be tall and blonde.

Tim gets impatient and even indignant with my questions about his family tree, but he did volunteer that on the Barrus side of his origins his grandfather and great-aunt traveled with a carnival when they were young. Probably with one of those “test-your-skill” booths as in “Ride the High Country.” Maybe with a side skill of fixing the thrill rides. But the Stegenga side of the family loved the ag fair, the celebration of order and the endorsement of hard work as well as the arts. Fairs are Apollonian and carnivals are Dionysian, excessive and rude.

But the trickster is really about Hermes, the tricky one, and his relationship to both Apollo, his brother, and Zeus, his father who had his way with Hermes’ mother in the depths of a cave, hidden from the rays of Apollo’s sun-chariot. Much of what Hermes does is motivated by his desire to be part of the Olympian pantheon, recognized as legitimate even if he has to achieve his goal in tricky ways. He says, “If you don’t give me what I want, I will steal it.” Tim has yearned for recognition, but more than that for a trustworthy father/son relationship. He has “stolen” (gathered into Cinematheque) “other men’s sons,” from men who were unidentified or uncaring, and HE fathers them.

European village fairytales often begin “once upon a time” but trickster stories begin “coyote was going along . . .” because they are a road show. Trickster stories are the original picaresque, millenia-old and world-wide long before “The Pow-Wow Highway” connected them to American Indians. This ever-moving quality, characteristic of a carnival, takes Trickster to one walled and guarded community after another. His song-poems get him through the gate to ruck up the locals with news of the outside world. (Think “Picnic.” Lot of them this harvest time of year.) He’s the harrower bringing new seed, maybe human, bringing along his electric guitar. (One of Tim’s favorite devices is to integrate the lyrics of pop songs into his stories.)

Today the Tricksters are likely come into our lives through the glass screen-gate of television and computer, always accompanied with music. (The Cinematheque boys must master the math of timing the music they choose to the editing of their overlaid images.) Images that can be interpreted several ways are characteristic of their videos and also of Trickster ambiguity, which means to point to spiritual qualities (I know it sounds pretentious but it IS pretentious) and to offer translation between generations and places in a fragmented world. The lives of these kids can be unintelligible even to Tim.

A whole chapter in Hyde’s book, entitled “Trickster Arts and Works of Artus,” is about joints. As I write, Tim is struggling with a shoulder joint transplant and preparing for transplant surgery on the other arm. The first part of this chapter is entitled “Go for the Joints.” The idea is that gods and heroes are always most vulnerable at their joints: knees, elbows, and possibly Achilles’ heels can be counted. He cites several stories of invulnerability that have become locked-up preventers of change. The Trickster comes along and breaks them open at the joints, even kills them through joint wounds.

Loving word-play and roots, Hyde reminds us that “articulus” means both “a joint in the body and a turning point in the solar year." I’ll close this post with straightforward quoting from p. 254: “There are two words that can mean ‘joint.’ The first is ‘arthron.’ ‘The arthron connecting the hand and arm is the wrist,” says Aristotle. An arthron can also be a connecting word in language, an ‘and’ or a ‘but’ for example, as if the flow of speech required its own little wrists and elbows to become intelligible. [Consider the many joints necessary for keyboarding.] The second word ‘harmos,’ [harm?] also means a joint in the body (especially the shoulder joint), but more commonly it denotes the joints made by artisans: the mason [sic] building a wall, the shipwright fitting planks, the metal worker soldering a seam, the carpenter fastening a door -- all these craftsmen are making ‘harmoi.’ [Harmony]

“The two related nouns in Latin are ars and artus.” The roots give us artisan, artifice, arthritis, and articulate. It was “articulation” that interested me, the joints between the elements of the worship (song, prayer, sermon) and the articulation (speaking) of images.

There are two kinds of joints: the stiff and unyielding joining of things (so they won't buckle or leak) and the joining that allows movement. One might say that the first belongs to the traditional dogmatic sequence of liturgy with its prescribed words and the second belongs to a fluid, creative, improvisational mode of worship -- yet still carefully planned and joined. It’s interesting that Tim was a dancer he didn’t like ballet with its stylized version of French court dancing, but dearly loved jazz dance, esp. that from innovator Bob Fosse, an American form depending on loose joints and related to the break dancing of the streets -- the kind of thing that Conor is so good at in videos. It is one of those savage jokes of the gods that Tim should be “punished” or “challenged” by joint deterioration. But without his bone death, he might have just started a dance company instead of the multi-artus Cinematheque for stolen boys.

CAPOTE AND US

The movie called “Capote” really ought to be called “In Cold Blood.” At the heart of it is the question of how much Truman Capote wrote his book “in cold blood,” that “masculine” phrase, while he tried to write about Perry Smith’s cold-blooded murder of a nice, white, prosperous, well-loved family precisely because they were what he could never be. Perry was Cherokee, at least partly, and wanted very much to be a poet and artist but had no education. which led him into the kind of blundering pretensions that Capote finally could not stand and used against Perry. All along Capote used his own sad story to call out identification and trust from Perry, but was tripped up when the electricity ran in the other direction and he saw himself in this little murderer. Capote’s own jealous rage at not being part of a proper warm and nurturing family led him not to murder (the legal system took care of that part) but to a sort of suicide. He never finished another book. The two people closest to him, his partner and Harper Lee, his lifelong friend, saw exactly what he had done by lying. This movie doesn’t tell, it shows, with the help of a very skillful impersonation by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

It was a dangerous movie for me to watch last night because I’m writing about and with Tim Barrus, who was so flamboyantly “exposed” as a Navahoax, in a way that was mostly not factually wrong -- just so thoroughly incomplete as to be a hoax about a hoax, a compounding instead of a clarifying. Am I Truman Capote, so very interested in someone else’s life that I can’t see whether I’m exposing my own? Tim and I have moved from writing about Cinematheque to writing about Tim himself and the most obvious thing to do is what that sneering little LA Weekly journalist did: interview people from the past on the phone. At least those who would talk. Capote didn’t do that.

It is a major difference to be writing WITH Tim. Capote consistently withheld what he was writing, even lying to escape Perry’s suspicion about the title. Perry was excluded twice: once by his incapacity to understand what was going on and secondly by Capote deliberately treating him as only a case study. At one point he wished Perry dead because that was the only way he could finish his book. At the same time he was telling Perry that he was trying to find a lawyer to defend him -- which he wasn’t, though he had earlier when he needed a delay to get more interview time with Perry. The second killer, who turned out not to be the shooter, was a little smarter and had an idea what was happening. It was a classic tale of a seducer (Capote) working towards his own goal, while his opposite tried to seduce Capote into saving him. Both fell in love. It was a dead end for both, Perry literally and Capote a little more elaborately over time.

Tim and I are like a Venn diagram. (Academics love Venn diagrams.) In this case our two life circles overlap in rather strange and subtle ways, but we are both strong adults with most of our lives lived outside the overlap. We are self-aware and we share both actual writing and, where you don’t see it, considerable disclosure like that between friends. It is more like formal courtship than seduction, though one could easily argue that “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping” is a very seductive book. It sure worked on me. Not many could tell Tim much about seduction in the mental and physical sense. In our case, since we’ve never met, there is no physical seduction. But since most of my more successful seductions (on purpose & by accident) have been in the context of ministry with major moral safeguards, I have some clear boundaries. I’m saying there's a lot of dancing and no consummation. Most people enjoy watching a dance, but maybe only the porny want to see the consummation. Perhaps I’m being too cryptic and too risky at the same time. Let’s just say my specialty has been unrequited love on both sides. Headtrip romance for the sake of the action.

Tim knew Capote. I think that’s true but irrelevant. Tim is not in the least like Perry Smith nor Capote either. Tim admires Capote’s writing and so do I, but maybe our moral outlook (both of us) is more like Harper Lee, Capote’s lifelong friend and the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which is not so innocent a book as most readers think. She is unblinking. Capote’s eyes fluttered quite a bit.

I hadn’t really noticed until recently how many biographies are written about people who already have biographers, including God. Some of them have spoken for themselves (presumably, like God) and others have simply left an ambiguous legacy asking for interpretation (certainly like God). Some describe Caravaggio this way and others look at him that way. We seem to enjoy the varipelagic versions. (I love Hyde’s neologism! I’ll get back to Hyde’s theories about tricksters in another post or two. Gotta read more.)

This blog has morphed quite a lot, not unlike the way my column in the Glacier Reporter, “The Merry Scribbler,” began to change after a while. It started out to be a natural history and “American West” column but gradually drifted over into something else -- maybe muck-raking -- until I offended the mayor and got shut down. My biography of Bob started out to be a fact-finding expedition and turned into a kind of moral investigation as well, probably one I will eventually go back and finish in a second book. I’m talking about the secondary and tertiary levels of arts exploitation that has become almost feverish in the Western art world: the galleries, the museums, the curators, the collectors, the writers, the investors. And about how it corrupted Bob himself. Very parallel to the world of Native American literature, except that the Western art people exclude Indians almost entirely. It’s a mini-version of what has happened to publishing entire.

This means my readership is undoubtedly shifting as well and it ought to. Sort of like a church congregation changing when a new minister comes with a new message. The Blackfeet will probably stick with me because they say I “kick butt,” though the tin pot shamans will only be reading to see what I’m writing about them. (Which is a good reason NOT to write about them.) The bourgeois who take the arts to be markers of prosperity and “niceness” will veer off. Bye, bye. Publishers of the mainstream kind will see no money in it. Shrug. Bloggers don’t need publishers. My old friends and relatives never read my blog anyway. Tim’s readership has got to be bored to death by me and wouldn’t look for me in the first place.

So in what sense am I Capote writing about Perry Smith? Well, consider what it would have been like if Perry Smith had been capable of writing about Truman Capote with as much passion and elegance as Capote had. What if they had been equals? Both writing. It’s the process: writing is a river than runs through both our dreams. It's not what it's about, it's about the process.

SOMETHING ROTTEN IN. . .

WARNING: This is an adult subject.

I'm working through Lewis Hyde's Trickster book. Hyde’s second half of the section he calls “Dirt Work” is indeed about dirt, both earth and shit. He calls this chapter (#8 in the book) “Matter Out of Place,” because that’s the definition of mess, dirt, shit, and -- if you’re talking vegetation -- weeds. (Hyde doesn’t discuss weeds, nor does he talk in terms of ecology.)

HEAVEN’S PRIVY is the title of the first part.
This could have started with Martin Luther (the original) saying late in life that he was just an old turd waiting to drop through the asshole of the world, meaning that he was what was left of what was once fire in the belly. Instead Hyde goes back to his West African stories and then comes forward again, using Mary Douglas’ powerful work about “clean and unclean.” I haven’t read it for a long time and haven’t even read ALL of it. I’d better get to it. What is retirement for otherwise? I have at least one of her books on the shelf.

Then he goes to Carl Jung, a variation of Freud, who had a dream before he ever heard of Freud. He was twelve and dreamt of a fabulous ideal scene with a perfect cathedral with God sitting on his golden throne high above among the great sky castles. But there’s a hole in the throne. Suddenly God emits a huge turd that crashes into the cathedral.

I used to have a favorite “traveling” sermon entitled “Everybody Poops,” which was originally for a small fellowship that included quite a few little kids struggling with toilet training. They didn’t want to give up anything. The point was that if you don’t poop/discard/edit, you’ll swell up until you crush yourself from inside. The adults understood on a slightly more abstract level.

(At this point in my reading, Squibbie -- my tortoiseshell cat who is more than a little bit trickster -- climbed into my lap to be comforted for a case of diarrhea and my thinking became multi-sensory before it was interrupted to do the obvious.)

DEMOCRATIC CARNIVAL is the title of the second part.

There is a body of thought, well-represented by Victor Turner’s “The Ritual Process,” which suggests that carnival/festival/reverse rituals are a way of discarding the tensions of the usual order, esp. when that order is strongly enforced as in medieval villages. For a limited time, all rules are off and people go wild. In Valier the wife of the onetime village sheriff said that in the old days when the town was straining to build dams and ditches, there would be occasional blow-outs that left the streets ankle-deep in beer cans. Today we have “Homesteader Days” which are far more decorous; in fact, seen as advertising for ourselves. But I’ve written about Halloween at Heart Butte when there is a night of reverse-costumed dancing that is more powerful than pow-wow, entirely without alcohol. Maybe it's because the community is Catholic and Pentecostal.

At it’s most satanic extreme, the drive to purging becomes ethnic cleansing, an orgy of killing that leaves piles of skeletal human beings waiting for mass graves. They are the shit so the blonde, the powerful, and the uniformed can be clean. (The obsession with cleansing will kill the oppressors in the end, like the people poisoned by disinfectants, allergic to themselves.)

Society often identifies artists as unclean and in two cases that Hyde explores, the artists in question accepted and exploited that. The first was Andres Serrano, whose crucifix in a beaker of urine horrified the conservative nation. It was not explained by the media that there were other containers showing the same crucifix in milk and in blood, to make the point that Jesus was incarnate in real flesh with all its fluids. This is the theological shock that is supposed to be the heart of Christianity, but the parishioners liked their commercially produced communion wafers and grape juice better.

Hyde talks about working in a hospital ward for alcoholic, demented, and addicted men and how his job often included cleaning up shit and vomit. He says -- and not to make too big a thing of this, but Jesus might also say -- that this duty was a good balance for his daytime student work studying abstractions. When I did my Clinical Pastoral Care, our mighty leader thought it was demeaning for “professionals” like chaplains to act as orderlies and didn’t require us to do that, as was usual. Not only did we lose the chance to make real and physical contact with people, but also he turned out to be highly intolerant of any shortcomings in us, mostly because he obsessed so much about his own shortcomings. He flunked his own evaluation from his own supervisors and left the CPE system.

Hyde takes a surprising swerve here, identifying this denial of shit with the rise of Protestants like Calvin, so focused on order, compliance, pre-determination, the status quo. We are paying the political price now, this very insistence on the old order causing chaos in what were supposed to be reasonable town meetings. There has been no place for the rage and despair to get out, no place for the hope and renewal to get in.

The other big art case Hyde discusses is Mapplethorpe who photographed with great skill and elegance the acts of transgression most directly confronting shit: penetration of the anus, once with the handle of a bull whip and once with a whole hand and arm, which is called “fisting.” This art show went to court. The exhibition was protected in much the same way as Rodin’s nude statues were sequestered in a separate tent during the 1897 World’s Fair in Chicago. One paid to attend, there were warning signs, one couldn’t glance inside by mistake -- looking at these images had to be a deliberate act.

The jury was told that the law defined art as what the experts say is art and ALL of the experts said these beautiful photographs of outrageous subjects were art, explaining carefully why that was so. The jury acquitted, saying they didn’t like this kind of art, but they realized that’s what it was. Hyde then tilts the scales all the way over by pointing out that suppressed homosexuality and intravenous drug use were the social shit in the gut that had to come out into the open in order to understand AIDS. Beyond that, the USSR was collapsing of its own constipation, packed with pollution and infection.

In short, a people who do not properly deal with what they want to get rid of, either in practical bodily terms or in major social ways, will find themselves in trouble. Art can be catharsis that breaks the fever.

The National Sculpture Society magazine this month printed a photo of the ultimate comment on art as shit: canned feces of the artist. Worth a lot of money. You won't need your canopener.

SHAME vs. GUILT, According to Hyde

In my rereading of Lewis Hyde’s Trickster book, I’m now to the chapter called “Speechless Shame and Shameless Speech” in which he uses the idea of “shame-based cultures” versus “guilt-based cultures” which emerged from the work of Mead, Benedict, Leighton and Kluckhohn. He explains that a society that keeps order by using “shame” is different from one that keeps order by “guilt” and that these theorists thought of a “guilt-based culture” as more developed and “higher” than a shame-based culture, because they considered themselves to be part of a white, protestant, educated guilt culture. He gives as an example E.R. Dodds who places Hellenistic Greece above Homeric Greece, but I don’t know anything about that and my Internet connection is not working at the moment, which is a constant hazard in this part of the world. It will remain uninvestigated when I get back online.

The idea is that a “shame-based” culture is a small community where people know each other face-to-face, as in small town life or a church congregation where everyone is always watching. If you exceed the bounds of their propriety, you will be stigmatized and possibly ejected. Being stigmatized will mean the withdrawal of the kind of support the village gives to the weak, old, needy, and afflicted. Valier is very much this sort of culture and I sometimes forget at my peril. For instance, I was in the village library and saw that a woman I like very much, a cook and comforter of many, was checking out a stack of novels. I was feeling cranky and frustrated and hoping for a little comfort when I asked her, “Have you read the book I wrote about Bob Scriver?”

She was surprised. “Did you write a book?” (There has been publicity and the librarian keeps the book displayed.) I also assumed that she assumed I was talking about a local self-published book, which irritates me since I do have some conceit about my publisher being an academic press. “No, I haven’t read it,” she said.

“Shame on you!” From her face I could see that I’d gone over the line. She will never be my friend again. I had dragged something out in public (local ignorance and personal lack of awareness) that I should not have and I even named it. In a shame culture one does not say “shame on you.” One simply gazes and then shifts eyes away. If she reads my book now, she’ll hate it and interpret all my motives in the book with hostility.

Guilt is a private matter. Guilt, in Hyde’s view, is internalized conscience and will object to things you do that no one knows anything about. (Carter lusting in his heart.) I suspect that those anthros thought it was “higher” because it tends to be rule-based and from some other source than local opinion. This might be an example: if I set a mouse-trap and found a rodent victim in it, I might be moved by the creatureliness of the little animal and feel guilty for killing it, even though no one in this community would blame me for eliminating vermin. I might not even tell anyone about emptying the teaspoonful of carrion into the garbage, although one way to escape guilt is confession. (No thinking in this book links guilt to pity. But maybe I should look around. )

Mead is famous for trying to move the limits of shame about sex, proposing that in Samoa the young women enjoy the activity with no shame at all, nor guilt either. After the missionaries arrived and other white people who held sexual propriety by their standards to be a sign of virtue and civilization, the Samoans changed their story and said they’d just been putting Margaret Mead on, that they were actually very proper. Maybe. Knowing what we do about Margaret Mead’s life, we might guess that she was rather shameless but also a bit guilty about her own sex life, particularly her daughter whom she raised as a single parent with help from friends who took the girl into their families when necessary.

Perhaps sex is meant to be private -- and romance as well on its deepest levels, though some like to boast about it. Intense private relationship has so much potential for disruption because it makes defying village shame worthwhile. But it is also a potent source of guilt, because we don’t always like what is happening in that intimacy and have fantasies only we know about.

But Hyde is talking about tricksters and culture, a subject he enters through the lives of three immigrants: Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, and Allen Ginsberg, who are not moving from one country to another (their ancestors did that) so much as one internal culture to another. The stakes are high: death/insanity. Kingston speaks of reaching puberty and being told the big family shame-secret, a tale of an ancestor in the old country who became pregnant and drowned herself in the family well. Rodriguez is moving into the “country” of the intellectual and finds himself made ashamed and therefore guilty by his much-loved parents, who are still their warm uneducated selves. He is distinguished by his awareness of this and his boldness in telling about it. Ginsberg was shamed by homosexuality, but more by his insane and repellent mother, whom he loved but who caused much of his life to be hidden. This was broken, again, by telling about it -- witnessing. “I alone escaped to tell you.”

The original “shaming” culture will not recognize the trick of telling as the opening of a door. In order to protect their social order by pressure, they will define the trickster as a psychopath. This is particularly potent when the body is involved, whether because it is the wrong color, the wrong gender, or used in a transgressive way, as in sex or even simple exposure: nudity. Hyde says this powerful thing: “Trickster is . . . the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath will never even know such a door exists.”

There has been a lot of talk lately about bullies, who might be interpreted as “shame-based” people who try to force those around them into their idea of behavior, quite possibly because of their own inner guilt about something, probably not measuring up. They throw their guilt -- disguised as self-righteous shaming -- out onto someone else. And Hyde says, “All American high schools are shame cultures; advertising promulgates a culture of shame.” Perhaps shame is the name of Gus van Sant’s “Elephant.”

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY: A Reflection

David Samuel "Sam" Peckinpah (February 21, 1925 – December 28, 1984)

Mariette Hartley 21 June 1940, Weston, Connecticut, USA

Randolph Scott (January 23, 1898 – March 2, 1987)

Joel Albert McCrea, (November 5, 1905 – October 20, 1990)

When “Ride the High Country” was released in 1962, I was the same age as Mariette Hartley and Bob Scriver was just slightly younger (b. 1914) than Joel McCrea. If I’d been in this movie, I never would have given a second glance to the younger men -- I’d have gone like a bee to Joel McCrea. Bob and I met him at the Cowboy Hall of Fame when he received an award there and, believe me, it would have been the right impulse in spite of his long and faithful marriage to Frances.


I might have deserted McCrea for Randolph Scott. When Randolph Scott was born, the Great Northern Railroad had barely crossed the High-Line of Montana, and Bob’s dad, Thaddeus, was still not in Browning. (He came in 1903.) Peckinpah was born when Bob Scriver was 11. Both men are, let’s say, “storied.” Peckinpah’s father was very much like Joel McCrea, or at least his character in this movie.

I end up doing a lot of this time-line pondering because it explains so much about the American West where things happened just yesterday, and since then have been revised and revised -- sometimes by movies and books and sometimes by the people actually living in memory. It’s as though the terrain were eroded by storms and then again by the dust and sun. It’s revision by theory that does the most damage. I particularly despise what I call “pantywaist stuff” like what is on this DVD as voice-over about “Ride the High Country.” Four pretentious “experts” on Peckinpah peddle “ooohs” and “aaahs” about minutia without any reality-based notion of what they’re talking about.

Talk about white boys from the suburbs up north. They think the marriage in a brothel is “Fellini-esque” but to me it looked like Saturday night in a Cut Bank bar in 1962 when the oil boom was still on. I only went there once, but if I’d gone back, I’d have carried a knife in my moccasin top. The woman I went with thought it was great fun. Drunken judges are not so unusual around there either.

These “experts” who had each published a book on Peckinpah pointed out how “beautiful” and “sensitive” it was to show Mariette Hartley crossing the camp barefoot and flinching from the sharp things on the ground. “It shows that she can have pain,” cooed one. I would have thought it meant she didn’t have bedroom slippers with her, though she packed a nightgown. When camping in the high mountains, I wear socks and longjohns because cold is more of a problem then sharp rocks. Then there was the early “revolutionary” shot of her changing her clothes, thus revealing she was wearing no bra though we only see her back.

Western movies have always had the same problem as Western history, which is to say that they are a sort of “people’s subject” or were when everyone’s grandpa had been there. Many a local enjoys pointing out errors in paraphernalias and practices. In time a coulee developed between those who were operating on their own experience and those who were trained academic historians, conforming to frontier theory, documents and the like. Then along came a revolution in the way we do history: “the people’s history,” and everything began to be sliding shale underfoot. An avalanche from the feminists. Big boulders rolling down from the Chinese building a railroad up above. And where did those Indians go to? Lurking over the ridge, no doubt, cooking up some scheme for attacking white men. Try to ignore them.

Western movies and books are now seen as childs’ play, naive stuff not worth bothering with unless there were terrible blood baths involved or the characters were left over from NYPD Blue and talked like that and had sex like that. There have always been enthusiasts, re-enactors re-creating a landscape in the same way that the German Indian enthusiasts make careful copies of idealized artifacts and villages that never existed. This is where you want to locate those Peckinpah experts who will tell you on the one hand that the Coarse Gold mining camp is absolutely authentic -- “look at that detail! No one else got it so authentic!” -- and in the next breath point out that the snow is soapsuds and the tent canvas was left over from the sails of a sea-going movie made just previously.

But now the signposts are gone: the French/Algerian lit crit crowd has gotten to Western history and make their points in Latinate neologisms to ensure we get the precise meaning they intend. A puzzled veteran academic listserver reports that the Western History Quarterly recently addressed the sexuality and "homosociality" of Wyatt Earp”. (I guess they don’t want to say, “was Earp Gay?” so as a backup asked if he hung out with other guys.) Another recent paper was entitled "Pathologized Hybridities and Anthropological Provincialities." (Hard to tell whether this was meant to be sarcastic.) I know a writer of Westerns who used to wax eloquent about stuck-up fancy academic critics of genre Westerns, but it was all minor compared to this impenetrability. Makes one think of a snake oil pitch in one of those old Westerns where a quack comes to town with a decorated wagon to peddle what is essentially the same old booze given a fancy new name and -- with luck -- a new bottle.

So my summary is that “Ride the High Country” is a very fine movie with excellent actors. The commentary is self-important nonsense. But there is another “bonus” on the disc which is Peckinpah’s sister, gracefully and intelligently trying to explain how it was that Sam -- from a family of judges and legislators -- tried to compensate for being a tender artistic guy by being tougher than tough, the way he imagined his ancestors to be, and overshot into alcoholism and cocaine addiction. She remembers the idyllic days on the High Sierra ranch outside Fresno where she and Sam rode bareback through spectacular landscape like the one in this movie. She remembers her father’s rock-ribbed moral code and her mother’s over-attachment to Sam. Coarse Gold is still there, the family ranch is still there, but she says there’s no use in trying to return to the past. “Sometimes I think they should just burn it all down and let it be ashes.” But that’s no way to get rid of a ghost, a shimmering morphing mirage.

WOMEN IN LOVE: A "Hyde-bound" Review

So. . . the three basic ingredients for a trickster/artist are:
Insatiability, which is hunger in the original myths -- not just any hunger but hunger for meat, which is the proper sacrifice for the gods. That is, living, aware creatures (creations). Not veggies. The kind of craving that drives plotting and planning traps to get more.

Reflexivity, which is awareness of symbolizing, the ability to separate the real thing from the symbol of the thing. Just plain consciousness of oneself as an artist and therefore the creator of new things, not as unconscious expression but as deliberate forming. (This goes to my quarrel with Paul Schilpp about whether “art is an expression of the relationship between the artist and the universe” or a COMMUNICATION of that expression, which eliminates all the naive and untrained folks who express their hearts out, thinking that’s enough. And I would not argue that indigenous or “folk” artists don’t have “techne,” technique as much as school-taught technology.)

Ambiguity, which is awareness that a thing can mean one thing here and quite another there and maybe both at the same time. Variability, for camouflage or for show. Sophistication, experience of more than one culture.

That’s a pretty good Trinitarian check list so let’s try it out on “Women in Love,” which I just watched on the DVD three times: one as audience, the second with the screenwriter (Kramer), the third with the director (Russell). But let’s pretend we’re talking about Lawrence first, since he was almost always writing about himself, not just to portray himself but to present his deep issues.

He was certainly insatiable, both in terms of craving for experience and in terms of writing: he wrote every day, not just manuscripts but tons and tons of letters -- none, of course, on the computer. No doubt talking to him was much like reading him, esp. the dialogues between persons. In WIL, the two sisters and the two men are really there to continue debate about the purpose of life, what one needs and wishes for, what is really possible, and so on. But with actors, more than with the writing, it’s possible to see what is the “subtext,” that is, what they aren’t really saying in so many words but acting out and revealing through what they do. The avatar of Lady Ottoline seems so very sophisticated, but she is not communicating anything. But in defense of her, to whom is Gudrun communicating in her Isadora Duncan dance before the Highland cattle? She’s not yet above self-indulgence.

Most people are less interested in the two sisters than in the two men who think they are friends. Under their differences is constant competition as well as yearning for sexual fulfillment. They are pre-homosexual, not “gay” in the way we know gays today, and -- in fact -- Kramer later came out, writing frankly gay material and then becoming a major activist, demanding justice for AIDS victims. Acting UP.

There are many interesting stories about the naked wrestling scene in terms of the characters struggling versus the actors struggling. Alan Bates was an educated man who truly understood Lawrence and identified with him. Oliver Reed was far less sophisticated, a man who believed manhood lay in being well-muscled (if fat), stoic, drunk, and well-hung. As it turned out, Bates worried a bit about that, too. The double of one of them, clearly observant and smart, saw the difficulty and realized that therein was their real worry about the scene: not their bodies per se, but the comparison of their male equipment. Perhaps he had dressed with each of them and knew their worries were unfounded. In fact, he got them to go drinking beer with him and to take a side-by-side piss where they could covertly size each other up. Then it was fine.

Russell had planned to shoot the scene in the moonlight by the river if necessary, but Oliver (plainly trying to be sophisticated though he spent his spare time in the bars instead of reading) turned up a literary lady who INSISTED that it would be a naive desecration not to do exactly what was in the book. Oliver adopted this point of view. Since the book had been exempted from censorship since 1926, the main defense Russell and Kramer threw up was that since the book was acceptable, so was the screenplay. Such was the weight of Lawrence as a cultural icon that the argument carried.

The overtly homosexual character, who calls Gudrun towards a broader world, is shown as vaguely sinister and nothing is explicit between the two, though the symbolism is a bit blatant. In fact, one of the controversies about the film is that Russell ended WIL by beginning his next movie about Tchaikovsky. This tale finally ends with Lawrence and the avatar of Freida by the domestic fireside but in reality this was only the beginning.

Like Odysseus, the Lawrences were on the road almost constantly, which means learning to separate out what is local from the universal, not just what is sophisticated but also what is humanly shared. They were always penniless, at the mercy of “bungling hosts”(see Hyde) from whom to learn. I suspect Lawrence learned that there are many kinds of unhappiness besides the poverty of a drunken coal miner’s son or even the smothering love of an over-needy mother, embodied in Frieda, but that he knew these were just his own version of the problem. It is not in denying or just leaving those forces that make him a great writer, but rather his consciousness of them and his growing technical ability to explore them.

Quite apart from Lawrence moving through different cultures and becoming more sophisticated because of it, the times were moving. This was the modern/post-modern time period, responding to industrialization, particularly as it affected the British class system and the church. In the confusion of times changing the Oliver Reed character (as well as Oliver himself eventually) died because his powers became irrelevant, but the people who hungered, like Alan Bates’ character and Gudrun, found themselves released from the killing stagnant pond of the given order into a rushing sluicing torrent that filled them with oxygen, so that they could become Tricksters. By the time the movie was made, nearly fifty years ago, the book’s nudity and sexual frankness, nearly a hundred years old, modernity had broken up the old rules enough that even Britain’s tight censors were willing to allow full frontal real humans.

TRICKSTER: Notes from Lewis Hyde

“TRICKSTER MAKES THIS WORLD: Mischiefs, Myths and Art”

This classic book by Lewis Hyde (@1998) is one of the underpinnings of “Turning Trickster,” an account of the doin’s of Tim Barrus. Its argument is also the thru-line of my own life, from high school dramatics, college theatre, Blackfeet reservation, marriage to Bob Scriver, animal control, UU ministry, City of Portland bureaucracy, to my present decades of daily writing. I’m taking notes as I reread this seminal work.

INTRODUCTION

Begins with the story about “throwing eyes.” There are many versions, but all begin with coyote taking out his eyes and throwing them. In some versions the animals loan him their eyes, some tiny and some huge. In a feminist version a woman loans him “flower eyes.” The point is that with different eyes he sees things “differently” and he sees different things. To Hyde, this is how the artist can lead us to renewal.

The next trope introduced is the traveler, going to new places, seeing things from a different angle and at a different speed. He says when he travels it as though the “warp threads” on the loom are separated for the shuttle to go through.

A trickster is a creature of the doorway, always coming or going. The shaman has a hut and stays. The name of Hermes, the Greek Trickster, once meant “he of the stone heap”, the cairn, the altar for “spaces of heightened uncertainty and to the intelligence needed to negotiate them.” The Trickster might convey someone to or from death, but also can liberate and bring “qualities” like fire or forgiveness. He also illuminates internal boundaries of social behavior, what “should” be done, esp. in the face of our stubborn polarities like sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old.

Trickster is a boundary-crosser and sometimes he finds them by crossing them and suffering the consequences. “Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, Trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something beyond right/wrong that will get life going again.” Sometimes Trickster creates the boundary -- it was he who caused the gods to be removed to high in the sky, so it is only fair that he have to shuttle messages up and down.

He is the wise fool, the creative idiot, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. But trickster is not usually a woman, partly because trickster does not give birth. Trickster is not supposed to be lustful, though Napi, the Blackfeet trickster, is ALWAYS in a state of arousal. (In other books about NA thinking, it is said that the shaman -- who is commonly considered to be bi-form, both male and female, must not have sex with another shaman. Nothing was said about fertility.) Trickster is the figure who escorts Persephone back from death to Demeter.

Hermes is the god of “techne,” the technical means of making things.

The formal statement of Hyde’s thesis is on page 9: “I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and therefore disrupt the very things that cultures are based on. I hope to give some sense of how this can be, how social life can depend on treating antisocial characters as part of the sacred."

Hyde says that the Devil cannot be conflated with Trickster because Trickster is a polytheistic figure. Nevertheless, missionaries have confused the issue by teaching this conflation. He says Trickster is Amoral, not IMmoral and quotes Radin:

“Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself . . . He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social . . . yet through his actions all values come into being.”

I suggest this explains why women can’t be Tricksters unless they are barren, because women are commonly the carriers of the culture and teach the patterns to the children. In our drug-addled society, the children know no patterns.

So where is Trickster in modern life, asks Hyde. “If trickster stirs to life on the open road, if he embodies ambiguity, if he “steals fire” to invent new technologies, if he plays with all the boundaries both inner and outer, and so on --then he must still be among us, for none of these have disappeared from the world. His functions, like the bones of Osiris, may have been scattered, but they have not been destroyed. The problem is to find where his gathered body might come back to life, to where it might already have done so.”

He suggests the con man. These sentences sting: “We enjoy it when he comes to town, even if a few people get their bank accounts drained, because he embodies things that are actually true about America but cannot be openly declared (as, for example, the degree to which capitalism lets us steal from our neighbors, or the degree to which institutions like the stock market require the same kind of confidence that criminal con men need).”

He suggests that now we are ALL tricksters, that “’America’ is his apotheosis: he’s pandemic.” (My comment: probably a Republican hiding in a public restroom stall.) Native peoples watching whites arrive often called them “Napikwan,” tricksters. And that’s what they were. But sometimes the Native peoples were even trickier and they survived. They were polytheists.

Hyde comes back to that: “lacking that [polytheism], he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed.”

He goes on: “Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn’t a run-of-the-mill liar and thief.”

Then he quotes Picasso: “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” This is what the attackers of Nasdijj never understood.

SMALL TOWNS ARE NOT SIMPLE

The main assumptions about small towns that will get outsiders in big trouble are mostly based on the idea that “small means simple.” a refuge from all the “evils” of the big impersonal city.

But many small towns are as complex as much larger towns, sometimes in part because they have collapsed down from much bigger towns and kept all the structures (physical and historical), simply condensing and crushing them together without any sorting or editing. For instance, Valier was once a marketing town and then a boom town when Swift dam and the rest of the irrigation system was built. Merchants and hotels abounded, but when the construction was finished -- which in those days had depended on a great number of laborers and horses -- the people left and there was no need for so many structures. Some burned, some fell apart because they were temporary anyway. But the town has the idea they can return to the boom days and will if they can restore the remaining buildings.

Another example: when CRP meant that the government would pay dry land farmers NOT to farm and also because modern machinery meant one man could work enormous acreage and also because it took more and more acreage to make a living so that the smaller farms were consolidated into big farms, there was less need for houses out on the land. Often after some time standing empty, these houses have been moved into Valier and refurbished, leaving behind a square of windbreak shrubs and trees out on the farmland. Sometimes a cement slab. Older people remember where those houses were and who moved them. These ghost histories are invisible to newcomers, even the ones that live in those houses.

Another example: when the railroad wanted shippers and the Pondera Canal Company wanted farmers and the Jesuits wanted parishioners, the forces worked together to bring a whole Belgian village to a location close to Valier, close enough that it was in time absorbed into Valier. The feuds, family ties, genetic advantages and liabilities, ways of doing things, religious allegiance, and many other webworks all came along, nearly intact, and were thickened even more by the shared fortunes of starting over again in a much harsher place. These stories and genetic ties control much that seems otherwise inscrutable.

Another example: Valier is a border town, on the border between the Blackfeet Reservation and the State of Montana. Border studies is a whole academic discipline that studies the gradients and limits that are imposed by artificially created boundaries. Lately here this has included the founding of Heart Butte High School which siphoned off the Blackfeet students who had bused to Valier and then a counter movement of Blackfeet students back to the Valier school system, either because their families found housing in Valier (the population of the rez is growing steadily and quickly) or because of the belief that “white” schools are more orderly and “teach better.” The Valier schools are happy to have Blackfeet athletes. School funding is based on head counts.

More damaging has been a long history of neglect of Birch Creek water on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Quite apart from diverting the trust funds of the tribe, the BIA has notoriously ignored the securing of valuable water rights and the development of irrigation on the rez side. (Birch Creek IS the boundary in theory, though it has been known to change channels and certainly always has a flood plain which blurs the line.) So the Montana side naturally expanded to take advantage of a maximum of the water. Now suddenly, prodded by the tribe and internal awakenings, the BIA has set out to claim Blackfeet entitled waters. This coincides with drought (which may be easing a bit this year, though the loss of glaciers will mean less water flow, no matter what) which has stressed the Montana farmers to the point of bare survival. It is estimated that when all the lawsuits and agreements are finished, the Montana side will have “lost” 30% of their water. (It’s unlikely that anyone will think of the Montana has having “gained” 30% illegitimately over the past decades! Esp. since the Blackfeet side was not prepared to use it and it all just flowed on past down to New Orleans.) This is a death sentence for some farms.

Another example: Valier considers itself a resort town, though the “resort” is really the irrigation impoundment that feeds the canal system. But to them the “resort” idea justifies of the campground along the water body. It also justifies constant pressure to “look nice,” that is, to look like other towns as a sign of respectability and safety. (The kids will tell you that there are about three drug dealers in this town of 350. Statistics will tell you that 3% of humans are genetic sociopaths. Whether or not the individuals are the same is open to investigation. At least in a small town it’s pretty clear who they are.)

Infrastructure is probably one of the most crucial things about buying a house in a small town, but few ever think of it because it’s usually underground, historically created, not always mapped on paper, and rarely mentioned by a realtor. It’s all just pipes and wires, so how complicated can it be? The trouble is that the “pipes” (sewer tiles and waterlines) are often a hundred years old and the wires must support far more traffic all the time as “basics” in households include more electrical appliances. At the same time both fed and state keep imposing higher standards for water quality and septic disposal, as well as more training for the employees who must maintain everything. The problems are so tough and boring that NO ONE wants to be the mayor or on the council.

People are no longer so rural as they used to be, so laws that once allowed each family to have a buggy horse and a little flock of chickens is now offensive to newcomers because of smells and “germs.”

Lawn wars run all summer between those who insist they must have elaborate sprinkler systems in order to maintain a “decent” green yard and those who have better things to do than cut grass. Some people think the fact that they own a yard means they can pile junk in it while others think that only lawn ornaments have any right to be there. Town councils spend more time on this than almost anything else except barking dogs. Don’t even mention sidewalks, another hot button issue. And the council spent a couple of thousand dollars on new street signs in a town where you describe your location either by naming the person who used to live there or by saying something like: “It’s the pink house two blocks south of the school.” Only newcomers need signs.

The assumption of outsiders is that small town people smile and say “howdy” and wave because they are harmless and will always want to be friends. People who live in small towns know that appearing friendly is self-defense, although there are some truly friendly people. It’s wise to be wary of hidden agendas and unsuspected dimensions. It’s smart not to assume that everyone will want to let outsiders into their lives because they’re just fine the way their lives are now. The real estate people will not tell you this.