JOSEPH, JESUS' STEP-FATHER

I’ve been asked to ponder Joseph, the step-father of Jesus, as a figure capable of restoring qualities of fatherhood that would help us in our scrambled times. The rules of work and relationship seem to have gotten into a new juxtaposition that is destructive to us all. We are confused about who is and who is not a father, what a father is supposed to do, how we should think about good and bad fathers.

Joseph is a figure of the Gospels, which are the enunciation of a new religion focused on resurrection. The Ultimate Father for the first time promises to restore life after death to everyone who believes in His Son. The Old Testament is patriarchal at a particular point in history. The patriarch who had been the head of the tribe (think Afghanistan) was just at that period transitioning into being the head of a family and the mayor of a town (think Tony Blair -- oh, all right, think Corleone). A man’s duty was changing from hunting and fighting to accumulating and managing. Sacrifices were changing from blood (even sons) to bread and wine from the field and vineyard.

In the New Testament Jesus tries to get these men to have compassion on the weak, the poor, the dispossessed, the outsiders. Otherwise the fathers may get so focused on protecting their crops, their homes and their walled cities that they become corrupt. Yet to survive as agriculturalists, they must be hoarders. They must save enough seeds for the next crop (resurrecting the plants) and they must teach and protect their sons because that’s how the life of the family is continued (resurrected generation by generation). This pattern continues today in Valier. I don’t get so much the feeling that individuals yearn to be immortal or resurrected, as they seem to want their family and their land to continue on into the future. And yet prosperity appears to demand that the sons must become educated and that means leaving for the city. Not just one new lifetime job but a sequence in order to follow the job market. Their lives will be full of trade-offs and adaptations, always moving -- hopefully up. Probably in intimate relationships as well as work.

In order to certify Jesus as the Redeemer who was predicted in the Old Testament, his provenance had to be stipulated begat by begat, because he had to descend from Joseph. His father, of course, was God, but Jewish heritage is traced through the mother. Yet she had to be married and the tradition of Gods is that they don’t bother with weddings. So it is probable that Joseph the husband of Mary who stood by her through her pregnancy, delivery and at least the first twelve years of Jesus’ life, was largely developed in retrospect. Our understanding of the figure mostly responds to three crucial aspects of fathers: their family roots and locations (Jesus had to collect on all the predictions of a coming savior), their conferral of legitimacy (otherwise Mary would have been stoned to death for having a baby out of wedlock), and their economic viability. Joseph is described as a “tekton.” A technician or craftsman. This is usually translated as an artisan, a carpenter rather than a peasant or a prince.

He’s pictured as an old man, a widower, so that we’d not think about him going to bed with the mother of Jesus, though Jesus is described as having brothers that might not have been metaphorical, maybe from Joseph having an earlier marriage. The rather lovely story about how Joseph was chosen to be Mary’s husband has the walking staffs of all the widowers collected and laid out together. To indicate God’s choice, Joseph’s walking stick burst into flower, another sign of dead wood being resurrected. (Of course, an artist might like to think of resurrecting wood in a carving, but no one suggests that Joseph was an artist.)

It occurs to me that not all men are suited to being townsmen or even carpenters, though my agriculturalist grandparents were also carpenters, one of them capable of paneling a finely-finished library for a modest mansion in South Dakota and the other a contractor whose family built the big Dutch barns of the Washington dairy country that have now collapsed of old age. My sculptor ex-husband did a lot of building but in the end his heart was out hunting. I mean, I think a lot of men never really made the transition from hunting to farming and towns, never accepted having a patriarch boss them around to make them into images of their fathers. Maybe these are the men who can teach today’s youngsters who must leave the ag world (some call it God’s country) to become techies roaming the globe from contract to contract, free-lancing as hunters did, like artists, writers, musicians inventing survival all over again. We know that Jesus would approve -- it was, after all, his lifestyle. But what would Joseph tell these people?

It appears that Joseph is no longer on the scene by the time Jesus is crucified. A different Joseph (of Arimathea) has to supply His burial tomb so He could be Resurrected out of it. Every wandering artist needs a patron. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent one’s patron from being one’s father. But in the end maybe the figure of Joseph is more of a comfort for the patron than for the dead prophet. The trouble with many charities is that they become all about the patrons: we multiply the image of Mother Theresa instead of looking at the dying paupers. And we are distracted from analyzing the social conditions that create dying paupers in the first place. There are societies for the veneration of Joseph.

It’s interesting and even useful to look at the humanness of Jesus through our own lives of relationships and to see the relevance to us. But in the end perhaps we would be more true to the issues if we observed the Islamic prohibition on images, which always lead to the problem of misplaced concreteness, taking metaphor as real and insisting that real-ness means what WE know and not what the other guy lives through. The consequence is quarrels about what race, how tall, what gender. We must not reduce Joseph to a little figure in a dimestore creche. Or anyone else either.

STRANGE COLLABORATIONS

A human being forms physically inside another human being. From the beginning the enclosing person influences the development of the cradled interior person. Something like that happens -- except outside the mother -- after the infant emerges. To form the personality and talents of that child, one might say they install the programs in the tiny smart-phone-sized computer they are except that then the child begins to write its own apps, explore it’s own internet, and . . . you get the idea. But from the very beginning there are always two in relationship, even if one is the child and the other is the world.

The body of theory called “object relations” or sometimes “teddy bear psych” is about the relationship between two persons. The publishers like to put plush bears on the covers but they could use a “blankie” or “binkie.” The teddy bear is a kind of mother surrogate when the youngster begins to break away from the real physical mother, a courage talisman. The image that sticks with me is one I’ve often seen: a group of women sitting and talking at a ball game or a church event and a toddler still gripping his or her mother’s skirt, getting brave enough to venture out onto the empty vast floor after something, but panicking and rushing back to bury his or her face in his mother’s lap. I know you’ve seen it, too. That child is Columbus sailing to the edge of the universe, then returning to safe harbor with, um, Queen Isabella. The theorists I read were D.W. Winnicott (Lady Di uses his theories on her princelings), Piaget, Kohut, and Bowlby (who talks about attachment) but there are others.

The takeaway I valued was the idea that two people, whether mother and child or therapist and client or two lovers, create some kind of virtual world in the space between them. It is not a physical object but one can see it on film, that construct spun of glances and gestures and possibly the moving of objects or maybe even touching, embracing. It is best when the partners are equal, or at least focused on the same goal, because then that unholy struggle to control in the name of virtue is absent. So much in our lives, at least those of us living in media-dominated world, is about sex and so little is about intimacy in the sense of emotional or mental sharing. We’re so busy figuring out how our bodies work (seen the latest fMRI studies of the pre-frontal cortex?) that we’ve lately been neglecting our minds and imaginations. I think of Anne of Green Gables, so starved for affection and interaction that she made friends with her reflection in the glass of a bookcase. Now maybe the glass of a computer screen.

Now comes Joshua Wolf Shenk whose article in Slate, the online magazine, explains how he is going to create a work about partnerships by throwing open the doors of the comment section so we can all share. (Shenk’s name has always stuck in my mind because in his previous book, “Lincoln’s Melancholy,” he speculated on the erotic potential of Lincoln’s long pale shanks.) Shenk has some interesting anecdotes, like the one about Tiger Woods’ caddie, Steve Williams, manipulating Tiger’s performance by lying about distances, but he strikes me as a person making checklists off Google rather than a deep thinker reconciling concepts.

Still, I often reflect about the dynamics of my own dyads, partly because the Sixties with Bob Scriver were so wildly dramatic that it’s been hard to settle down for the last forty years. At seventy I have finally found someone who can collaborate intensely -- while all the time letting me live quietly with my cats because it is a writing relationship. My fantasy is that we sit across the table from each other with old-fashioned straight pens as syringes, mainlining ink into each other’s arms while a stack of manuscript accumulates on the table. In reality we’ve never met and have communicated for more than three years through keyboards and the Internet. We don’t stick to print: Tim Barrus uses video and we both use sound and image. Sometimes the product is near-liturgical, certainly a binding together as in the root of the word.

At first we were simply keeping something like a journal. Then one day. rereading, I saw that we had created a kind of document and set out to organize it, create transitions, and find the narrative “spine” of a year. The theme is always survival: Tim’s, mine, and the boys of what was then called Cinematheque. And the theme is art, which is a form of survival. (Think of the productive shared worlds of art therapy, especially with children.) This became “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs,” the beseeching song during the passage underground and the inability to bring back those we love. At first we just had a lot of dramatic stories about boys, both Tim’s and “mine.”

Then we ourselves began to change as we wrote. Our writing deepened and intensified as we challenged and explored. In this time period Tim’s shoulders had to be replaced, extremely dangerous surgery since he carries HIV and is a recovered morphine addict since the replacement of his hips. My ministerial education was worked hard to supply courage, especially since we are both post-Christian, living in a construct mostly supplied by physics and wilderness, searching for talismans of courage. I kept trying to use my strategy of analyzing the family past. Tim has a huge taboo on this. Tim kept trying to explain the criminally sexual underworld and its enormous power now. Even after five years doing law enforcement, I had a hard time getting my head around exactly what that meant to individual victims. I was amazed to realize how complex and philosophically-based were the American gay world of San Francisco, Florida, and Fire Island and how many gifted and wealthy people have been doing good in ways that began while quietly carrying casseroles to brilliant loved ones, dying in SRO hotels.

This country still suffers from two huge pandemics: the tuberculosis that devastated the Transcendentalists and the AIDS that wiped out so many in the arts and that has allowed tuberculosis to return. What I never thought about was the loss of real-life partnerships, not all of them sexual. My first AIDS loss was a ministerial colleague.

Writing with Barrus is deeply satisfying, but I would never have considered such a thing before he proposed it. If it had not been for AIDS, he would not have lost his earlier male co-writers. If it had not been for the collapse of publishing, we might both have found collaborating editors. If I had not been so stiffly independent, I might have been subsumed into another relationship like the one with Scriver in the Sixties where collaboration made me so invisible that some Montana people still can’t see me. Barrus treats me like a man, with dignity and equality. This is revelation I was seeking. This is work I can do. As for Tim, he has found a circle of poets who are peers in a way I am not, but he does not abandon me.

FORKED INDIAN HISTORY

A person who writes and speaks about Indians from the conventional Western History Association and Western Literature Association http://www.usu.edu/westlit/ point of view, meaning a basically white point of view (whether or not the originator is Indian), called to ask me for my notes from the Piegan Institute August history seminars over the years. I’ve tried to take careful notes because after I write them up I put them into the books I sell on Lulu.com/prairiemary. Because these seminars are organized by Rosalyn Lapier and Darrell Kipp and the scholars are also academic Blackfeet, usually from Canada, they draw from a body of knowledge that is quite different and mostly invisible to white aficionadoes who as teenagers fell in love with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.” In short, the whites like being on the winning side but sympathizing with the noble victims, not that they mean to do anything practical about it. It’s the dream of a boy against adults, looking back, sadly reconciled to what “had to be.”

The same division is there in “cowboy” art versus “NA” art which is often abstract, maybe on objects like pots, blankets, jewelry. The NA or Aborginal view is best illustrated by a painting I saw that I wish I owned: buffalo going over a jump, tumbling to the scree below, then leaping to their feet unharmed and thundering up the cliff opposite, stampeding off across the prairie again. That is, Indians realize that the the prairie clearances were an interlude, a break in a long continuity that has a future.

There is another split that is within the WLA and WHA, not between red and white. This is between the professional historian within the academy and the amateur enthusiast who reads freely and widely, but “popularly.” As a possible illustration, consider James Willard Schultz who wrote for a popular audience with maximum whizbang, largely ignored by proper historians who work in an entirely different footnoted, peer-reviewed manner. Indians so far have not generated a very notable body of history books because publishers simply don’t believe in that point of view if they know it exists at all. In fact, much of what some local Indians tell interested inquirers comes from books written by whites, often the 19th and 20th century authors who really DID profit from raking off the Napi stories from the rez to sell in Manhattan.

This is why Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana, is so phenomenal, such an indicator of sea-change. Though their main focus has been restoring the Blackfeet language and though their immersion school has been running for twenty years and has successfully produced fluent speakers, one of their side activities has been finding and accumulating copies of all the master’s and doctoral theses that have been written about the Amskapi Pikuni without their writers ever bothering to return copies to the people who supplied the information. Only lately have people like Paul Rosier responsibly come back to explain what they learned doing research.

Partly the problem was finding a way to return the materials and to find a proper occasion and setting for discussing them. Recognizing this, Piegan Institute has for ten years organized a history seminar in August. The notes from the seminar have been posted on this blog as long as I’ve been writing it, but since I’m aggregating the notes by request, I’ll put them on lulu.com/prairiemary in book form, both separately and then as part of the book called “Blackfeet Trails.” I’ve taken notes every year that I’ve attended. The only year I missed was the History of the Women, which was too scary for me!

I attended these years and still might be able to locate notes, though I wasn’t blogging yet.

2001 “APATOHS-OHSOKOI” Blackfeet history and places along Apaatohs-ohsokoi. (The Old North Trail)

Ted Binnema, Scott Carlson, Sally Thompson, Bill Farr, Lori Falcon, Narcisse Blood.

2003 “Aakawattop’a” A Gathering

Darrell Robes Kipp, Dorothy Still Smoking, Paul Rosier, Richmond Clow, Bill Old Chief

2004 -- 2005 “Aki iaks” The History of Blackfeet Women

(One of those years was skipped and I didn’t attend the other.)

I attended the following years and have typed up notes that will appear in a “book” on www.lulu.com/prairiemary. They are also included in the book called “Blackfeet Time-lines,” which is also available on Lulu.com/prairiemary.

2006: “Innaihtsiiyi: Examining Blackfeet Concepts of Peace (and War)

Theodore Binnema, Hugh Dempsey, James Dempsey, Nicholas Vrooman, Narcisse Blood and Cynthia Chambers.

2007: “Aka” The Ancient Past

Hugh Dempsey, Eldon Yellowhorn, Wilena Old Person, Brian (Barney) Reeves

2008: “Sinaake” Images of the Blackfoot People

Dave Beck, Bill Farr, Darnell Rides at the Door, Valentina LaPier

2009: “Kiippippoistoyi” One Hundred Winters

Shawn Bailey, David R.M. Beck, Joe Gone, Louis S. Warren

2010: “Imitaiks” When the Spirit Moved with Us

Kaawa’pomaakaa Society, Martin Eagle Child, Eldon Yellowhorn, Tom Shawl

For much more information and background, go to http://www.saokioheritage.com

“Saokio is a Blackfeet term that describes the prairies as a space that is large, open and flat. At one time the Blackfeet called themselves the Saokio-tapi or the prairie people. On the prairies they used their creativity to change this wide open space into a unique place.

“Saokio Heritage was created to enhance the appreciation of the wealth of prairie peoples creativity. Our goal is to stimulate and preserve the history, language and traditional knowledge of prairie peoples.

“Saokio Heritage acknowledges the U.N. definition of traditional knowledge which encompasses cultural, technological, scientific, and artistic knowledge that originated from a connection to a specific territory or place which is transmitted from generation to generation within a group of people. “

Ironically, perhaps some of the most unaware Americans are some of the Native Americans themselves, whose grandparents and great-grandparents were forced into assimilation so harshly and thoroughly that they’ve felt that even learning the old languages was dangerous or “backward.” In contrast, the young ‘uns have become enthusiasts, hungry for information.

And then there are the bureaucrats, passing and sporadically enforcing legislation, trying to sort out claims and indignations and compensations against a great tide of re-assessments and realizations. Much of what seems highly theoretical turns out to have real-world consequences, sometimes unintended and unexpected. The tension between the abstract and concrete can be intense.

THE EMPEROR'S NEW UNIVERSITY

When I was an undergrad at Northwestern (1957-1961) pretending to be a harmless speech ed major when I was actually cramming in courses in theatre, Angna Enters (1897 - 1989) came to campus. She was performing as a mime, though she was a pan-artist, half Isadora Duncan and half Yoko Ono. This was not Marcel Marceau pretending to be in a box or pestered by a fly. This was the transformation of ordinary movement into gestural dance.

One of her bravura pieces was the enrobing of a pope -- or was it a dauphin? At any rate, it was a pantomime of putting on layers and layers of medieval clothing, each more elaborate, voluminous and magnificent than the last until it was topped with a mitre or crown. Rather like the enrobing of Elizabeth II for her coronation, which made her advisors worry that the weight of the vestments (the crown weighed something like thirty pounds) might press the eighteen-year-old down to the ground. The Japanese have a tradition of brides assuming layers and layers of kimonos, but they are silk and relatively light.

Angna Enters was capable of a sort of mass hypnotism so that when she finally stood wearing no more than she had begun with, we could “see” her emperor-worthy clothes, just as in the myth. I am not going to hold up this metaphor (you know it too well) but the reverse: a situation in which all the robes and trappings and prestige are actually present, but the clever emperor, in naked authenticity, has dodged out the bottom and escaped. This is a riff about our institutions: church, university, court, hospital -- all those situations where the priest, professor, judge, and doctor -- who once wore simple black or white gowns to show their prestige and role -- have been so over-layered with additional garments that they have been paralyzed. Pressed into services of all kinds, buildings of pretentious significance, regulations of labyrinthine intricacy, and endless insurance oversight, these institutions now require mammoth endowments and barely have the energy to inspire, teach, judge, or heal.

This is a long blog but a short essay, so I’ll single out universities. One can take such little tales too far into metaphor, but perhaps now that the universities are getting ready for their coliseum seasons of homecoming gathered around the stadium where cheering former students watch ghetto recruits give each other head injuries so they can afford their drug bills, children can point . . . but that’s sensationalism. Surely classes meet and research proceeds, even if international industrial corporations control the curriculum and the teacher is a graduate assistant instead of a tenured professor. No doubt replacing the dusty books in the library with shiny new computers is more than justified. Foreign students who write and speak better English than those from our own country are simply more selected (and more able to pay the tuition). Still, at some point, one has to ask whether universities still educate in the classic way of guiding hard thought to sound conclusions.

People keep fussing about the radical (root) changes in human knowledge brought about by research on DNA, fMRI, particle physics, nano-technology, extra-terrestrial geology, and particularly the internet. U of Chicago's Randel, quoting Readings’s history of the modern university says:

"In general the modern University has had three ideas. The story begins . . . with Kant, who envisioned the University as guided by the concept of reason. Kant’s vision is followed by Humboldt’s idea of culture, and more recently the emphasis has been on the techno-bureaucratic notion of excellence. The distinguishing feature of the last on this list is that it actually lacks a referent. (p. 54)

". . . With the decline of the nation-state and its replacement by a transnational economy in which capital pursues profits across all boundaries . . . The economic counterpart of the hollowing out of political subjectivity that accompanies the decline of the nation-state" is 'consumerism–which is correctly perceived as the most pressing threat to the traditional subject of university education in North America’ (p. 48).”

http://iotu.uchicago.edu/randel.html

I’m a terrible snob when it comes to universities. In my NU undergrad years, I was very elitist about the arts, defining their initiated adepts as more gifted, more “real,” and more penetrating (go ahead, make a pun out of it) than others. But I wasn’t good enough for Broadway (the only possible destination was Manhattan) so I did a reverse (it was the days of Peace Corps) by going to the Montana reservations. After twenty years there and also back in Portland (long story), I had a chance to attend the U of Chicago through the back door by enrolling at one of the small seminaries in the “Cluster” around their eminence. I earned a master’s in the U of C Div School and have gloated over it ever since. In fact, armed with new confidence (possibly unjustified), I’ve returned to my beloved Montana reservation.

It works, you see. Because it’s not about content, it’s about process, it’s about learning how to learn no matter where you are or what the circumstances. Forget prosperity, forget recognition. Forget even the great networking and name-dropping potential. Books -- well, everything becomes a book. Most brilliantly of all, it’s no longer necessary to be on a campus because the Internet has replaced the need for adjacency, as my little cluster seminary now recognizes in its plan to sell the building and leave Chicago.

The problem, for both the university and myself, is monetization. My degree is useless here. I send no big checks back to either alma mater. I do work for which there is no certification, just satisfaction. My scholarship is social security. I’m not the only one. The aging former student body has become a planetary diasphora.

Is that good or bad? Dunno. Mostly just unrecognizable. What will it do to the traditional vested (invested) investment-wearing university? Dunno. Somehow it was the university education that returned me to the naked world of aging hunter-gatherer, gleefully capering over the horizon with a laptop under my arm, proud of myself as any bare-assed three-year-old. Think of it as a pantomime. I hope it would make Elizabeth II smile.

SURVIVING THE HOLOCENE

In an effort to decipher our own social and planetary trajectories as they intertwine -- possibly to bring us down -- we’ve become very interested in things like dinosaurs and Roman empires. I’ve been fascinated to watch the dialogue about what the discovery of agriculture (and then walled cities which led to organized armies) have done to our humanness, which developed much earlier (in some kind of brain explosion) into a kind of thinking we now call “art” or “humanities” or even “religion” -- when people began to paint on cave walls and strew burials with flowers.

Lately some people are getting impatient with the use of the word “culture” because so many use it in a personal way to justify their “life-style” and prevent change, so let’s just say that people began to responding to circumstances in a new way. Indeed, they began to manipulate their perceptions (or vice versa) so that a simple object carried an aura or penumbra: dreams, symbolism, meanings outside time and place, poetry.

The time-line seems to be something like this: the Paleolithic (ca. 35,000-10,000 BCE) when people continued to respond to things as they were, even with the extra dimensions, by being nomadic, hunting, and gathering. Then as the glaciers withdrew and the climate stabilized, the Neolithic era began (ca. 10,000-2,000 BCE) in which humans became stationary, raising animals, planting crops, inheriting wealth within lines of descent. In short, there was a transition from adapting to conditions to trying to hold the status quo stable. The line between the two is the beginning of the Holocene.

When the glaciers began to recede, changing in particular the way water acted in the world, the art of irrigation developed, then surveying and writing (recording). For a while there was a sweet spot -- but now the interglacial period, partly due to our attempts to control, has gone beyond to something scary, the anthropocene, when humans began to change climate.

It’s not a smooth graph line. The five chronozones of the Holocene are:

The preboreal: 10,000 to 9,000 years ago before the trees came back and when humans spread over the world, including the Americas.

The boreal: 9,000 to 8,000 years ago. I assume from the name that the great forests began then, at least in Europe.

The Atlantic: 8,000 to 5,000 years ago. I presume it refers to the ocean.

The subboreal: 5,000 to 2,500 years ago, which would be when the Mediterranean religious trinity of Judaism/Christianity/Islam began, all three centered on “the book,” and governing classes.

The Subatlantic: 2,500 to the present. Does this mean the Pacific is “under” the Atlantic in some Eurocentric way? My guess is yes. The divisions were devised for north Europe by north Europeans not connected to Asia or America.

These divisions depend upon what one uses as indicators. Those above are vegetal: plant remains. Using animals is not so often done, except perhaps in the Americas where the mega-mammals are of major interest. Using humans depends on their technology, largely metallurgy, thus: the Bronze Age, 5500 years ago starting roughly from the current site of war in Iran and Iraq.

This point in time accompanies the earliest human civilizations in Asia and Africa, which then cools to the Neoglacial, sort of like today. From the 10th to the 14th centuries, it heated to the Medieval Warm Period and then cooled from the 14th to the mid-19th century in the Little Ice Age. Possibly it was the cooling that drove Euro exploration. Predictions now are that we are heating rapidly past any previous level in the Holocene.

We know that climate is affected by the atmosphere (including water vapor) and the circulation patterns of both oceans and atmosphere (the Japanese current, etc., in the thermohaline circulation of the oceans, moving both horizontally and vertically). When water is in the form of glaciers, it holds the land down and makes dams. When the glaciers melt, the land rises, pouring water into the ocean, diluting salinity. Plants and animals must evolve (if they have time) or move or simply die. A source of instant and possibly catastrophic change is “bolides” -- intervention from outer space in the form of meteorites or comets. A source of catastrophic change from the core of the planet is volcanism. I see it simply because I'm largely uneducated about the technical complexities.

Because I read so eclectically -- having evaded academic monitors -- I read Paul Shepherd with his longing for hunting/gathering alongside Peter Gay, “Education of the Senses: the Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud.” No one is as interested in preventing social change as the “Bourgeois.” In order to maintain their comfortable and righteous status quo, they criminalize, stigmatize, imprison, and even kill. They insist on monogamy for others while keeping mistresses and patronizing brothels.

I love this quote from Gay. (p. 31) “The need to live by secure, sharply etched classifications is buried deep in the human mind and one of its earliest demands; simplicity allays anxieties by defeating discriminations. Real situations are rarely clear-cut, real feelings often nests of ambivalence. This is something the adult learns to recognize and to tolerate, if he [sic] is fortunate; it is a strenuous insight from which he will regress at the first opportunity. That is why the liberal temper, which taught men to live with uncertainties and ambiguities, the most triumphant achievement of nineteenth-century culture, was so vulnerable to the assaults of cruder views of the world, to bigotry, chauvinism, and other coarse and simplistic classifications.”

I’ll suggest this: the Holocene is the geological period when climate allowed the responsive human to stay in place, developing domestic animals and dependable storable crops. This stability allowed a highly productive and hierarchical culture that supported science to an incredible degree, but abandoned the whole for the sake of the specialized part. By now the masses of individuals who are unsheltered, exposed to disease, starved, bombed, confined, excluded and drowned have calloused the compassion of late Holocene global society. Even those who remain responsive are severely tested by the exhaustion (literally) of natural resources and overwhelmed by the Hobbsian prosperity ethics of international corporations.

The difference between Tim Barrus and myself is that his style is nomadic: he is a hunter/gatherer in the jungle of society. My style is domestic: here I stay in grain and cattle country. Where we share is that towering internal cumulus of vision (sometimes stained by diminishing light) that preceded the Holocene and defined humans as we know them.

Call it art, call it the liberal temperament, call it creativity; it is quite different from the bourgeois class-ridden use of art for status and wealth. It despises the status quo and reaches for the beyond, the as-yet-unimagined, the edge of the cosmos. A global movement in this direction started in the Sixties and Seventies. Let’s go back to resume this wave of energy, rudely interrupted by the bourgeois. I live here because of the Blackfeet who were so recently hunter/gatherers. It is just under the surface in them. They are remembering how to be a tribe instead of a chief.

DON MARBLE (1938-2010)

Church congregations always have a kind of penumbra of not-members, people who are in sympathy but don’t attend except possibly for special events. They’re like cousins who were raised elsewhere, the same but different. Sometimes those people are in a position to do the group a Great Good, but not all of them take advantage. Don Marble did.

The First Unitarian Church of Helena, Montana, was built at the beginning of the twentieth century (1901) when the city was one of the most progressive and wealthy communities in the West, full of men whose fortunes were founded on copper and gold. Since they were largely educated bankers and engineers from the Boston area, they were likely to be Unitarian. Anxious to prove they were respectable church-goers, they built a solid stone church. At the time the church needed finishing, pledges lagged. So the minister offered moral support to the moguls being put on trial for some of their practices by showing up in court to sit beside them. They had their checkbooks with them. A unique feature of this church is a Tiffany window that is a memorial NOT to that minister, but to his much beloved wife, who was the founder of Helena’s first kindergartens and the hostess of an ecumenical leaders’ group -- priest, rabbi, pastors, no imam that I know of. (Eventually the Catholic church bought the synagogue, which is right behind the cathedral.)

In the Thirties the congregation dwindled and failed. The last remnant leased the building for a purely symbolic amount to the City of Helena in perpetuity with the proviso that it always be used for some valid and cultural civic purpose. It was converted to a library after its raked seating floor was leveled and the stage covered. In the urban renewal days decades later, the library was able to expand to a state of the art building on Last Chance Gulch which was converted to a mall. The destruction and rebuilding of Helena was now supervised by a group not in the least Unitarian. They did not read the contract concerning the old library and were inclined to sell it to a company looking for a classy building for a restaurant suitable for a capital city where it was necessary to wine and dine politicians.

Don Marble is the man who saved the First Unitarian Church from being converted to an eatery by pressing the enforcement of the lease. He was not living in Helena and he was not a Unitarian. Rather he was a Methodist pillar of the community of Chester, up on the “highline” where politicians dread to go, a model town full of cultural enlightenment. If I had to name an honest lawyer in Montana, I could have named Marble until he closed his office.

Now the stone building has become the Grand Street Theatre with the raked seats restored and the stage intact, a worthy part of the vigorous amateur theatre scene in Montana and a proud consequence of Unitarian foresight, buttressed by a Methodist with a sense of what is right and graceful.

When I was ordained in 1983, we asked to borrow the church back. The set onstage was “Death of a Saleman,” and the proscenium had no curtain, so I was given my vows in front of an old-fashioned kitchen and two unmade beds. I was proud. The attendees brought pillar candles for footlights and banners for the walls. No need for a cross. The bigshot ministers who came to do the ordination/installation wore their robes, red for Harvard, blue for Princeton, and standard black. It was world-making. We borrowed the theatre a few times more, but then the theatre’s board became nervous that we might try to claim the church back. They needn’t have worried. We couldn’t, we wouldn’t, and if we had tried it, I think Don Marble might have intervened to protect them.

As I’ve moved around the state over the last half-century, I’d run into Don Marble at cultural events in unexpected places, and sometimes embarrassed myself by not recognizing him. He wasn’t particularly tall or fat or bald or otherwise remarkable. But he was incredibly intelligent and just, which are internal qualities. He made a huge difference in the quality of Montana life.

From the Great Falls Tribune:

CHESTER -- Donald Marble, 72, of Chester, a former attorney and Liberty County commissioner who was active in numerous community and environmental organizations died of pancreatic cancer August 22 in Tucson, Arizona. The memorial service was held at the Chester United Methodist Church.

Donald Raymond Marble was born April 10, 1938, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the son of Jack and Mona Marble of Kalamazoo. He graduated from Richland (Michigan) High School in 1956, and received a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering in 1963 from the University of Michigan.

During his unviersity years, Don was a summer employee of the U.S. Forest Service in Idaho and Montana, primarily working as a smokejumper. After college he was employed as an engineer for NASA in Mountain View, CA, and worked on landing gear for the moon mission.

Seeking a simpler, rural lifestyle, Don moved to Montana where he attended law school at the University of Montana School of Law, graduating in 1967. While in Missoula, Don met Harriet Pirkle, whom he married in June, 1965. Don’s legal career began in Havre, MT, with the Legal Services program, through which he provided legal aid to people iin Liberty, Blaine and Hill counties, including the Rocky Boy’s and Fort Belknap reservations. In 1970 Don joined the law first of Paul Bunn in Chester, MT. He practiced law in Chester until 2002, when he closed his private practice after being elected to the Liberty County Commission, on which he served for six years.

Community involvement was important to Don, and he served the state and his profession through a variety of board positions, including the Montana Committee for the Humanities, the Montana Commission on Practices and the Montana Board of Environmental Review. He was a longtime member of the Montana Wilderness Association for which he served a term as vice president. He also was actively engaged in environmental groups, including the Sweetgrass Hills Protective Association, Montana Environmental Information, Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, the Montana Audubon, and Friends of the Missouri Breaks Monument.

THE FOLLOWING SECTION WAS INCLUDED IN THE GLACIER REPORTER BUT NOT THE GREAT FALLS TRIBUNE:

Don used his legal expertise to assist in the many contexts in which he served. In their remembrances of Don, the Montana Environmental Information Center said: "Among the many important victories, Don represented the grassroots citizen groups Red Thunder and Island Mountain Protectors on Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation in their attempts to prevent the wholesale destruction of the Little Rocky Mountains by open-pit cyanide heap-leach gold mining. It was Don's legal work that resulted in the U.S. Department of the Interior's decision to halt the expansion of the Zortman and Landusky mines, a major factor in Pegasus Gold's bankruptcy and ultimate demise."

Don was instrumental in the building of both Prairie Homes and the Sweetgrass Lodge in Chester. He served several terms on the board of Liberty Arts Council. He helped bring public television to Liberty County. During the past few years, Don enjoyed doing the research and development necessary to bring wind power to the hi-line. Don represented the County Commission on the Liberty County Hospital Board, and he chaired the Liberty County Mental Health Board. For many years, he helped to lead the Adult Great Books Discussion Groups as a part of the community's adult education program. He was active in the Chester United Methodist Church and served faithfully as mission chair. He led the church's efforts to support El Pouvenir and traveled under this group's auspices to Nicaragua to help build sanitary facilities in remote areas there.

Don enjoyed being outdoors. His favorite pastimes included gardening, hiking, river floating, camping, cross-country skiing and the development and maintenance of a bluebird trail. Don was an avid reader. He could usually be found with reading material at hand, whether it was a newspaper, a favorite book -- ranging from spy and mystery novels to books about archeology or western/Native American history -- or one of the many magazines he loved. He also enjoyed writing poetry. Don loved quality literature and music. He and Harriet enjoyed their regular trips to Great Falls to hear performances by the Great Falls Symphony.

Don is survived by his wife Harriet; sons Justin (Vanessa) of Gaithersburg, Md., and Jay (Myrla) of Tucson, AZ; granddaughters Ivana and Alejandra’ brothers Charles of Munisine, MI; and Phillip of Galesburg, MI; and sister Judy George of Sturgis, MI. His parents preceded him in death.

Contributions are directed to Friends of the Missouri River Foundation, 224 W. Main St. Suite 202, Lewistown, MT 59457; or Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance, PO Box 181, East Glacier. MT 59434.

FOR A BOY CALLED FLARE WHO IS IN MORTAL COMBAT WITH HIV

What can you do when you’re facing death and that death is your own? Of course, we’re ALL facing death, we ALL die, and some people will say life itself is the illusion and we should just shrug and go on. But what if you’re not a very good Buddhist.

First of all, there are strategies that I would NOT recommend.

1. Denial.

2. Crawling under the bed to hide among the lint bunnies.

3. Crying and whining.

4. Blaming.

5. Asking why, why, why or what does it mean.

6. Begging someone to make it better.

The religious strategy (prayer, meditation, asceticism, penance) might work for you but if it does, you don’t need my advice.

This is what I recommend, but not all of them at once and only an angle that really works for you. This stuff is highly personal, even though death is universal. (The only reason an HIV virus itself doesn’t die is because it was never alive in the first place -- it’s only replicable.)

1. Personify death, the way Ingmar Bergman did (“You old cloaked death’s head, I will make chess moves that keep you at bay!") or the way the Westerns did (“Draw, you sunnavabitch! I’m gonna plug you full of holest!”). Talk to Death, tell him/her you know who else he’s scythed down and how you hate him for it and will not buckle in front of him.

2. Personify the universe and ask to be forever part of it, which is a request bound to be granted since once we exist we can never un-exist, no matter how dead we are, because our impact on time and place will go on down the centuries like the reverberation of a struck gong. Even if it was modest, even if it was only occupying space, your body had breathed in molecules, transformed them and breathed them out. That’s not even mentioning food. Think of how that monkey sold at market for someone’s dinner has now changed the fates of entire populations.

3. Stiffen up and play a role for the sake of your comrades. “Take away that blindfold! I don’t need it. Gimme a squib of marijuana -- I don’t want your tobacco.” Head high, shoulders square, defiant and gallant. And what else could you do while you still can? Write a letter? That counts.

4. Think of a hero (book, movie, real life person, mythology) and do what he would do. (“She” will also work. What would Sheena, Queen of the Jungle do?) When I get a little closer to the end, I intend to channel Sean Connery. At present, I’m settling for Christopher Hitchens who is meeting his prospect of death with amazing moxie for an atheist -- but wait, just what the heck IS he at this point?

Nothing wrong with “being Tim.” What would Timo do? What would Timothee say? You know, of course. Just got to ask yourself to bring up his image in your head.

5. Start with your own deep identity. “I am Flare!! I burn brighter than a volcano! Deep inside is a core of magma that can light up eternity and consume small towns! Death is an inconvenience. I am a comet in your sky!”

6. Invent the other side of death. My mother, dying, said, “I hope the next planet is as much fun as this one was.” She was faking it, trying to get us to laugh, and it worked. If reincarnation turns out to be a true story, what will you come back as? Tell us, show us. Make us laugh.

7. Get someone to help you by sitting beside you, maybe asking questions or maybe even holding your hand or even all of you, if necessary. Then sort your guts and plumb your heart. Tell it out, testify, witness, story, narrate, sing, draw, act it.

8. If you’re really tough, you could just write it out alone. But then you could write out what you feel, leave it until the next day or change colors of ink or turn the journal upside down, and then answer yourself. What would you say to yourself if you were someone else?

9. Never give up hope. Lots of people were told they were going to die and then they didn’t, which was awkward since they had given away all their clothes and had failed to pay the rent.

10. Death is not what hurts. Life hurts. When you get to death, you’ve won. You’re THERE. Not that there’s any particular hurry, esp. if you have comrades who love you.

Here’s a prayer. Sorta. It’s for me, but you can use it.

“Hey Cosmos! Hey Dark Matter! Hey Wormholes and Strings and whatever else you’ve got lying around out there in space! Pay attention! Here I am in this corner of the universe with my tiny fleshly life. I know that I’m basically a stack of muck worth a few dollars as chemicals but temporarily organized into something capable of sustaining a flame of consciousness that dances in my head and a drumhead heart that beats in my chest. There’s nothing wrong with temporary, but I’d like it to be a long temporary -- if you don’t mind.

“When my flame goes out and my muck drops to join the ground and the beat of my song has been silenced, know this: I was here. I counted. I saw the world and parts of it were good, parts of it were bad. I laughed and cried and fucked and kissed and did all that stuff. I saw the sun come up in the morning and go back down at night and I knew it wasn’t really gone -- just the other side of the planet. When I’m ‘over,’ think of me as being on the ‘other side of the planet.’

“Hey Rings of Uranus! Hey Pluto even if you aren’t a planet anymore! Hey Double Stars and Red Meanie Stars and planets with or without life. I was here. Once Time lets you happen, there you are -- always a part of Time. Time is forever. Don’t believe me? Well, I’m coming to see about that! Make some more space!”

"END THE UNIVERSITY AS WE KNOW IT"

People, in particular readers, are so busy obsessing over the aesthetics of reading from an electronic device that they never even inquire about what electronics has done to books. They never had awareness in the first place of how books were published. Books just materialized as objects on a shelf with no history at all, unless you’re talking about the biography of the author. But in fact, the internet has completely remade publishing. One does not print out a manuscript and send it (return postage included but not glued to the return self-addressed envelope) to be stacked in a slush pile. There is no slush pile. Publishers have laid off their editors, who are now agents and acquire possible manuscripts by reading the first three pages of an email submission. Then delete. Actually, a smart agent reads small journals or self-published books with good sales figures, which may or may not be related to the quality of the writing. More likely the drive of the author to sell. Or the recommendation of the marketing department.

There is no warehouse, no shipping dock, no book returns (did you know that bookstores can send back to the publisher all unsold books?), no remainders, no pulping. In fifty years how many used books? Recently the Pentagon bought the entire 10,000-copy first edition of a book critical of them, in order to prevent readers from getting it. But printing that many paper books is old-fashioned. Next time there will be no physical stacks of books to buy. The Pentagon negotiated for a second printing to be made, with the changes they want, which can be easily done since since the type-setting is on the computer. Soon there will be no second or third or fourth printings, but a publisher could supply unique editions of any book to fit any stipulations. One version for the Pentagon, one version for you. Censorship is already preparing to move online.

Universities are also still largely unconscious of the difference the internet makes. If one can get the lectures on YouTube and books on Amazon, why would one want to go pay huge amounts of money to a university? (Of course, my cousins went to university to find prosperous husbands, but online dating services could be made more upscale.)

One could interpret the original colleges as a development of monasteries where books were written out by hand in a community sequestered to concentrate on theology and medicine. Gutenburg was the troublemaker that time, releasing books to the masses. Because books are so transformed by electronic technology, so are all book-based pursuits, particularly theology, medicine, and law.

This is also driven by economics. Universities become more and more burdened with the need for money in order to maintain the status quo, which craves endowment for both expensive buildings and libraries. Rules have been made to protect the professors (tenure) but demographics mean that sometimes there are too many of them and other times there are too few. Emphasis has moved from the classroom to research. Suddenly one must acquire a “quality” education by going profoundly into debt at the same time that the usefulness of the degrees is questioned, the validity of those highly paid occupations is challenged, and the high status has gone through a trapdoor. Science, due to new insights from computer-enabled analysis (DNA, physics, climate) is also quite transformed. Humanities, now required to be global instead of the elevation of British tradition, has become hell-raising as post-this-or-that or hides behind the door of a million footnotes relevant to nothing.

Mark C. Taylor’s Op-Ed in The New York Times on April 27, 2009, gave a quick summary of his newly published book, “Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities.” (You can get it on Kindle.) This man is like Bertrand Russell on steroids, an old-fashioned polymath but internet-hip friend of Derrida (what a troublemaker) who grips things like religion and cuts the crap. He’s the head of his religion department at Columbia and publishes at the U of Chicago Press. Now he’s on my list of people to follow. He’s even handsome!

This too-short list of his ideas, all strike me as absolutely on-target. “Cloning” by requiring students to conform to their advisors and burnish their tenured careers is over. Departments, divvying subjects up in the medieval pigeonholes, are over. Using students as slave labor (in grad school or as adjuncts) is over. Black box research beyond the purview of anyone is over.

Here’s the positive version:

1. Restructure the curriculum so that it is a complex adaptive web, a network that clusters around issues like “the role of religion in society” and has a care for method. (Martin Marty undoubtedly knows this guy.)

2. Departments should have sunset clauses and be renegotiated every seven years, like Old Testament debt. This moves the emphasis from the status quo to process, which makes study far more responsive to actual issues like water in an age of warmiing.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. He seems to mean crossing international boundaries for university partnerships. I can see collaboration between kinds of institutions.

4. “Transform the traditional dissertation.” Publication at present is simply waste and the scholarly certification is a mockery. Why must dissertations be in print? Why can’t they be cross-media?

5. The PhD as teaching certificate is obsolete. What else can you do? Business, NGO’s, art, government?

6. Mandatory retirement with tenure replaced by seven-year contracts.

Bottom line, a quote: “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”

Terrifying. Necessary. It will happen anyway, even if a gun is held to our heads, because life is a process. There is no tenure in life. There are no books so brilliant that they change lives . . . Hey, wait. There are. The problem is finding them, which is why I’m pointing at this one. Some are not print, but images. After all, if someone is out there who really understands Derrida rather than interpreting him as a weapon of mass destruction, I want to spread the news. (I still don’t understand Derrida myself in spite of a U of Chicago master's degree.)

I used to speak in sermons about “harrowing,” meaning both a frightening experience and the literal ground-breaking that we in Valier know well as the planting of seeds. It’s not comfortable. I wish it weren’t done in such straight lines -- good conservationists know to contour their plow lines to prevent erosion. I wish they didn’t poison out weeds and ground squirrels or use chemical fallow (kill EVERYTHING in the plot so no moisture will be drawn out of the ground). I wish that commercially owned seeds were banned. It was grain that made cities possible, cities that made universities possible, and now the internet has made something entirely new possible. I can sit here in my back bedroom and -- hey, I wonder if Mark C. Taylor is on YouTube!

NOT! What the . . .

THE GEAR JAMMERS CONVENTION

It really wasn’t fair. The worst weather so far this fall -- and we’ve had spates of pretty uncomfortable weather (worse that than if you’re trying to harvest)-- hit just as the Glacier National Park Gear Jammers convention celebrated the Centennial anniversary of the Park itself in East Glacier. Ray Djuff was there -- usually it snows when Ray gets to the Park -- once so badly that he woke up to discover he was the only one left in his motel. Even the owners had gone, leaving him a note and a shovel.

This time Ray was an organizer and had asked me to speak about Bob Scriver, specifically in terms of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, which had been on the Park tours for the last fifty years. Since I couldn’t remember what time I was supposed to be scheduled, I went up in near-dark to get there by nine AM. I was a little daunted to drive through the underpass and confront the Big Hotel with a giant white marquee tent -- the kind used for weddings in the Hamptons -- pitched in the middle of the putting green out front of the grand old log hulk of the lodge. The famous English border garden along the front path was only a little raggedy but the footing was uncertainly slick.

Leaving everything (including the bronze of “Lone Cowboy” I had brought for show and tell) in the pickup, I went up to the lobby, seething with masses of middle-aged to outright elderly former Gear-Jammers and their wives. The majority of attendees were being loaded into the famous Thirties open tour buses, now proudly rebuilt and restored to their bright red glory, to cross Logan Pass in the fog. In a way they wouldn’t even notice because their heads and talk were so full of stories from the past: embarrassments, near-deaths, pickles and triumphs. As one man said, “That summer job as a Gear Jammer opened up the world for me. I was never the same again.” He became a geologist. (Also a Unitarian.)

These men (no women) were carefully chosen for good judgment, mechanical savvy, person skills, and (I suspect) good looks. Most of them seemed to have hung on to those qualities. The oldest Gear Jammer was in his nineties. Some wives had been maids at the complex of hotels, or waitresses (there were also waiters) who were given preference if they had musical or theatrical skills. The performances at Many Glacier were seedbeds for many careers, great and small but always proud.

The original pattern for this complex of hotels was European with hiking paths connecting lodges. The idea was for the Great Northern to be the feeder for the destination. Since the headquarters of the railroad was in Minneapolis, at first many of the employees were healthy Scandinavian descendants of Minneapolis railroad employees, but the advertising leaned heavily on the mythology of the American Indian, specifically Blackfeet, among whom the conviction had taken deep root that Two Guns Whitecalf was the model for the head of the Buffalo Nickel. Ray has been investigating this claim along with his other treks through archives and stacks. For a while Blackfeet in splendid buckskin parade suits and full Sioux headdress met all the trains and presenting evening programs.

But ordinary rez folks were not welcome, including Bob Scriver and I. The idea was that this was an elegant resort and people should be dressed up, which we weren’t. Then in the days of Red Empowerment it occurred to the tribe that employment in the Park was a no-brainer and they forced the issue, so almost every clerk and maid was Indian. Now the tide is running towards Europe again. Brownie’s, which admittedly is not the Big Hotel but houses many kids for the summer in the Youth Hostel upstairs, employs SIX Lithuanian women (young and beautiful, oh yes) who return year after year. In the winter they go to ski resorts. They are, quite simply, resort professionals. Now once again after supper the Blackfeet come to the lodge to give talks in front of the giant fireplaces, but they are the likes of Jack Gladstone, CD’s available, professional Blackfeet troubadour.

Not many people attended my talk, maybe twenty, but they held their focus while slowly freezing and didn’t leave quickly. My own breath was coming in a plume. They did remember and they had stories to tell, though many were retired and it was clear that the world had passed some of them by -- sometimes in ways they were not aware of, like all the computer access. “Where can I get this?” “Go to the computer.” “Oh, I never touch those things.” “Get a twelve-year-old to help you.” I thought twelve was not too embarrassingly young. Actually most five-year-olds are fairly competent now.

The Great National Park systems were brilliant in several ways. First of all, they really were cathedrals to a lot of people, though I get sick of hearing them raved about just because they are steep mountains and you can see a long way. Second, for the people who work there in summer -- often returning year after year -- they are a reservoir of friendship, experience, and testing that is quite comparable and maybe superior to a classroom. Third, for the local people who actually interact with these folks, they are access to the “outside.” When you live in “God’s Country,” as we arrogantly claim, it’s easy to ignore the rest of the world.

But I could NOT get my audience to understand who Indians are, as various and unaccountable as any other group. I could not get them to see writing as anything but a clever bourgeois pursuit rather like needlepoint, best devoted to friendly subjects. I didn’t even try to get them to see (and did not try) that the “glaciers” are nearly gone and that it is near the end of whatever the warming period of the planet is called. But I think that the man to whom plate tectonics came as a thunderclap in the news while he was driving a red bus full of Minneapolis matrons over Logan Pass -- that man understands without me having to tell him. I said, “Geology is nearly theology,” and he nodded.

OUTLANDER

Maybe I’ve mentioned that my cousins were fans of “Outlander,” not the properly sci-fi novel about an off-planet creature that has been made into a movie, but the best-selling bodice-ripper about a woman who steps through a split stone in a standing circle like Stonehenge and finds herself in the midst of the Scots borderland wars just before the uprising for Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1755 which ended the power of clans. So far there are seven novels in the series which is rapidly becoming an industry. Written by Diana Gabaldon (a Latino woman with a biology degree), the tale is told again in a graphic novel called “The Exile,” drawn by a Vietnamese artist, Hoang Nguyen. This time the redoubtable Murtagh is the hero. This will seal the deal with my cousins, since Murtagh echoes my uncle Murdock.

What I want to talk about is not that, but rather about genre. Lately it has become fashionable to flog writing as being “brainy” and “intelligent.” This morning I read about how one writer of mysteries has been hugely boosted by a review that said the book was what [fill in name of famous best-seller mystery] would write “if he were intelligent.” The beneficiary has not hesitated to hand out copies of the review to good effect. So “Outlander” is discussed in terms of being an upscale “romance” or a genre-melder historical novel. Certainly, Gabaldon is a competent researcher who has chosen a time/place packed with possibility. So far as writing goes, it’s not brilliant, but it’s clear and friendly. Davina Porter, who is not Scots but married to a Scotsman, adds so much elegance and atmosphere that one soon stops fussing about cliches and how many times a person can say “wee drap” and “whul naw” and not be kitsch. It is very immersive.

Where Galadon shines is plot. She’s of the “Lord of the Rings” school of plotting (one damn thing after another) but throws in plenty of history and local knowledge (esp. the botanical) and a bit of philosophy where it fits pretty well. In fact, the whole plot line is meant to exploit the problem of whether a person who loves “forever” and exclusively can really do that in the face of time travel. Claire the time traveler is on her honeymoon, madly in love with Frank in 1945 near Inverness when she steps through the portal to the same place in the past. In 1744 she falls totally in love with Jamie, mortal enemy of her Frank’s ancestor. Now, does she try to get back to 1945 or not? Which man wins?

If you hate spoilers, stop reading now.

Others have imagined people falling madly in love with a true love’s ancestor but not with his enemy. I had been worrying about shocking my cousins’ delicate sensibilities but after reading this first novel in an apparently endless series, I won’t worry. First it was the sex scenes (one cousin doesn’t like them and skips them but she's not shocked), then there was the violence, and finally the climaxing torture scene and its re-enactment in the name of healing.

Gabaldon is good at reversals, so Claire is a nurse who has just made it through WWII, an experienced woman who quite pulls her weight. She is also older than Jamie and has to teach him, the virgin, how to make love. Frank is an historian, which is often very helpful to Claire so long as events were actually recorded and she can remember them. She also keeps Frank’s genealogical chart vividly in her mind. We know what doom is coming for them at the Battle of Colodon and there is some worry that Claire has witnessed the death of her husband’s ancestor, the villain, before he could reproduce -- so what does THAT mean? He’s not supposed to die until the battle, which is the next year.

It also develops that the villain, Black Jack Randall, is gay, madly in love with Jamie whom he sexually tortures in excruciating detail, and profoundly jealous of Claire. But in the midst of his sexual frenzy it is the name of his youngest brother he cries out -- a man who became a cleric. Whuuaaa? Throughout the tale Jamie absorbs an incredible amount of rending and pounding and fevering, all addressed by Claire and soon interwoven with more bouts of vigorous intercourse, described in detail -- rather skillfully in my opinion. Just the right amount of euphemism. Everything is limned in golden light from candles or the sun or firelight. There’s a lovely hidden hot springs lake in a cave. Along the way Claire manages to kill a wolf with her bare hands (Murtagh sends her the skin afterwards, completed with yellow glass eyes) and discovers that her best friend is a witch who also came through the split stone portal in 1967, so she possibly knows Claire’s future.

But let’s go back. Black Jack Randall has captured Jamie at last, smashed his hand with a mallet, nailed that hand to a table, lashed his back with a carriage whip, sodomized him, forced him to fellate, slashed him across the chest and smeared his own cock with blood which he forces Jamie to lick off, burnt him with a poker and then his heated insignia ring to brand him, tormented him by forcing him to describe intimate practices with Claire, etc. etc. When Jamie is rescued (by driving a herd of cattle into the castle and past the dungeons -- I’ll remember that strategy), he’s in really bad shape and is transported to France for healing in a monastery. Seasickness when crossing the channel just about finishes him off. Claire and the monks do their best to save him.

This is where Gabaldon plays her most wicked and inspired card: Jamie is in such deadly psychological knots of rage and humiliation that Claire decides the only way to bring him out of it is to re-enact the torture. Re-imprinting. (Is this current Post-traumatic Stress Dogma? It works for her.) So she strips them both and gets to work, impersonating Black Jack by using all the little sexual tricks she learned from Frank, plus what she could deduce had been done from Jamie’s wounds. From the writer’s point of view, she gets to use the same material all over again. Um, narrative incest? Just a tiny bit more sophistication and grace in writing, and this could have broken over into being serious literature. Couldn’t it?

But, gee, isn’t it? I mean, all this intensity and everyone loves it -- isn’t this Dickens ripped from the headlines of Psychology Today? Later she and one of the multiple monks have a nice chat about whether she is committing a sin in the eyes of the church by being married to two men at once, if not quite at the same time, and whether she ought to be worrying about destroying her own husband of 1945 by saving her own husband of 1744. The monk basically says, “Why worry about something over which you have no control anyway. You’d have no more control in 1945 than you have in 1744.” And as long as you’re properly baptized and married . . . that’s all God wants. (Well, the church anyway.)

HOW TO RUN A VILLAGE 101

Last night’s Valier town council meeting, was displaced from Thursday to Tuesday in order to accommodate the newest council member, fearless sheriff’s deputy Shannon Gabbard, because he had a schedule conflict. Of the two remaining vacancies, one was filled last night by Velda Loch, the previous mayor. No one applied for the last vacancy. Reluctance to serve either on the council or as mayor has been at the heart of the difficulty. The biggest problem is getting everyone “into the room.” Though there were more people present than usual, not all factions were represented.

The regular meeting was preceded by a “training session” led by two men: Dan Clark of the Local Government Center at MSU http://www.msulocalgov.org/ Dan Clark (daniel.clark@montana.edu). In 1993, the Montana State Legislature formally established the mission of the Center to "strengthen the capacities of Montana's local governmental units to deliver essential services efficiently and to provide training, technical assistance, and research to local officials" (MCA 20-25-237). Dan has been the mayor of Choteau, a bigger, more prosperous and more sophisticated community nearby. His background is teaching and agriculture. He was the carrot.

The stick was, Alan Hulse from the the Montana Municipal Interlocal Authority. He can be contacted through the website:

http://www.mmia.net/about_admin_staff.asp The MMIA explains itself this way: “The availability and affordability of insurance is cyclical. In the mid 1980’s, the cycle hardened. Government agencies across the country were experiencing incredible rate increases or were cancelled all together. This “hard market” was driven by unfavorable loss experience and a sour national/international economy.

“This crisis hit Montana hard in the mid 1980’s. Many of our cities and towns were cancelled or unable to obtain affordable liability insurance. In response to this crisis, the Montana League of Cities and Towns Insurance Trust (MLCT) was created. Conventional insurance markets were unable to help. After researching the options, the evidence suggested pooling provided a device whereby government could take back control of the management of its insurance needs.”

Hulse’s background seems to be law enforcement education. The bottom line is that either town councils go by the “handbook” (the Montana Code) or not, but if they do anything illegal, the “insurance” will dump them out. Both men admitted that there are many decisions that are in gray areas or where the law is unjust or where it just doesn’t fit or give enough detail. If the state judiciary reviews the situation and finds the town council at fault according to the law, again they are dumped out. NOT insured. This begins to explain why sensible businessmen are home watching television.

If brave people come to serve their community in spite of the risks, this is the way it works.

1. Montana has a constitution which governs all else. It is, like every good constitution, based more on principle than detail. This constitution is revised every thirty years and we’re almost to the deadline to convene a new convention. This is necessary because values change, the world changes.

2. We are now operating under a constitution that was written in 1973. Since then it has accumulated many commentaries and legal precedents. (This practice goes back to Torah, people!) Often one sentence in the constitution will have 35 pages of explanation, comment, and definitions. (Watch those definitions!)

This is online or can be acquired on paper as a bound book or on a CD. http://data.opi.mt.gov/bills/mca_toc/index.htm Title 7 specifically addresses town governance.

3. The Montana Legislature also has things to add or change or explain.

4. Administrative rules add another layer of guidance and interpretation.

5. Montana Supreme Court decisions develop over time, particularly arising from communities where there is contention. (Butte, Troy, Libby, Missoula)

In short, there is a handbook for managing towns but it is a living document that breathes and grows and keeps all the lawyers busy (at $200 an hour) as well as costing the taxpayers huge amounts of money if the council steers them wrong. For instance, one town quarreled over whether to pay their water upgrade contractors, which meant they were sued for the original payment plus every kind of damages and necessary recompense the contractor could think of. (Valier is in the middle of just such an upgrade project. It is contentious, partly because of the switch-over to a metered water bill system.) Again, if the town is at fault, the MMPI will not pay for lawyers or insure the damage award.

The town council handbook does not provide one-size-fits-all patterns, but gives one big choice (whether to accept one of the provided systems or to devise one creatively) and seven small choices. In the specific recipe Valier has chosen, the mayor is elected, appoints officers with the consent of the council, but can fire without consultation. The council cannot fire the mayor nor can the mayor fire the council members. Most MMPI claims arise out of employment: unjustified dismissal, hostile workplace environment, unsafe conditions, working outside one’s scope and so on. This explains why the three-person Valier employee force is so interested.

Dan’s basic message was that the executive/legislative/judicial separation of powers is MEANT to allow friction (politely called tension) and it should, BUT that friction should be creative rather than destructive or paralyzing. Finding that vibe is not easy, but clarity of goals (especially when budgeting), appointment of committees (politely called task forces) who can spend the necessary time (often years!!), and operating as a Body Politic with inclusion, diversity, and transparency will build the kind of trust that makes a town livable. (Title 2 contains the Montana Code of Ethics, which speaks to such matters as conflicts of interest, nepotism and so on.)

This sort of thinking is crucial because as populations move around the country and the economics of the whole planet change, the small towns who operated by the seats of their pants (everything going smoothly because everything stays the same) are disrupted by people moving into their communities who do NOT share the same values, who do NOT understand the systems, who want to do everything the way they are used to doing it. (The formerly Seattleite mayor wants to “post” meetings by putting them on a website and “distribute” minutes by emailing them. She is unaware of how few people in this town use computers for daily business.) The local people WANT growth, but they wrongly assume that new residents will want to conform to what’s already there.

After the trainers had left, the regular meeting did the usual thing but a number of people were there to find out specifics about the water system. The “trouble shooter” for the contractor gave us mixed messages, which was the theme of the evening. Bottom line: we’re doing the best we can, but there are no guarantees.