TAO + PORN

I googled this unlikely combination and found a wealth of valuable thinking.  Of course, I’m more a Taoist than I am Christian anyway, unless you mean expertise in Taoist writings.  I just mean I depend on “felt” concepts as much as books/authorities.  The head of the google list (after the paid entry) was  http://thetaobums.com/  where there are ongoing discussions.  Almost everyone posting is male.  Interestingly, one of the most vivid voices is a handsome man from Portugal, a most “macho” country.  I would not have expected a Taoist there. 

In ten minutes of cruising these are the issues relevant to thinking about porn that I found:

addiction

separation from other human beings

feeling bad about oneself

bad practices in the industry (victimization of the actors)

cultural pressure to feel badly about it

being out of control of oneself

bad karma

illusion

prevents satisfaction of the “real” hunger -- it’s a diversion, a symptom, a means

being controlled by underlying biology (esp. male/female)

The goal of Taoism, as I understand it, is both freedom and harmony.  “We” (Americans) tend to find these two mutually exclusive, to assume that freedom must amount to fighting our way out of confining circumstances, like being born, and that this struggle means foregoing safety because growth comes from risk rather than harmony.

There is nothing I saw in the Taoist discussion about “writing about illegal sexual activity” because the guide is not in written law.  Rather the guide is within the “felt” world of the person and its effect on that person’s behavior.  This is not about police coming to knock on your door and impound all your copies of Playboy or Playgirl.  This is about waking up in the morning feeling “icky” (their word), regretful, and sore.  It’s about being out of control, avoiding reality by settling for illusion.  

If one is happily perusing photos or videos or whatever even though they might shock your neighbors, then there’s just nothing wrong with it.  If one is creating it without damage to oneself or others, then it’s simply another art form.

These Taoist discussers do understand that porn is an aid to wanking.   It IS arousing.  That’s the POINT.   But what’s wrong with being aroused?  It’s the behavior that results that counts.  Maybe a guy is a sperm donor in a small closet, trying to get his wife pregnant in vitro, or maybe he’s a donor for commercial purposes.  In this use porn is more often images than words.  Top of the google list I got (you might not get the same list since it’s controlled by algorithms) was a Chinese company marketing a detector of image porn for the purpose of censoring.  The opium of the masses.  Male, anyway.   First: porn, second: control.

The omissions in this discussion are obvious: women and children.  Pornography, when it is illegal and based on illegal activity, includes the categories of women and children only as objects and victims -- not buyers and users.  Their experiences and opinions are ruled out. There’s porn for women (euphemized as romance) but few write about the eroticism of children, which can be extinguished and distorted by using them for the pleasure of adults, esp. when there is physical control and, inexcusably, pain and fear -- big oppressing little.  

The advantage of pornography as image or writing is that it eliminates the element of disease.  Disease makes the passive person powerful in a covert way.  The spirochetes and viruses that thrive in the sensitive tissues of a human being don’t care about motive or gender or strength or privilege.  All it takes is contact in order have revenge.  STD’s can be passive, undetectable, and a time-bomb.  But they add risk and some who pursue violent or commercial sexual contact find that an advantage, an added element.  The false friend of sexwork is the fatalistic conviction that one’s life is short -- that it doesn’t matter what one does.  Flirting with danger, adrenaline-surfing, is part of the deal. 

Danger is in opposition to porn, which is valuable because it is “safe.”   But a secondary thrill would come from secrecy, the feeling of privileged access.  No “skin in the game” if it’s a quiet exchange of money for paper stimulation, little risk of detection by disapproving significant others, like wives or parents.  No passing on diseases to them.  Displacement to writing, video, photos, the telephone, thus is safer but less stimulating unless -- like any addiction -- there begins to be escalation.  More outrageous, more secret, more strange tales -- like ordinary media stories -- are pursued because they keep the customer present and paying.  Part of that will be customers who try to make the illusion become reality by finding the person portrayed or writing -- even though they might not be living anymore.  Of course, some people might welcome hookups, either commercial or not.

The Tao attitude would be that porn is not essentially morally wrong, but that it can interfere with the reality of being in the world, of recognizing one’s relationship to all other existence.  It can prevent constructive intimacy with other people.  The judging of porn would require personal internal “felt” results within the terms of one’s own life -- not the scrutiny of laws that are written and rewritten to fit a whole category of people, and that require constant rewriting.  “Law & Order SVU” provides a steady stream of case studies in which written laws may or may not provide justice.  It’s harder to find dramatized narrative exploration of Taoist points of view outside of the therapeutic and self-improvement websites.  They tend to become exercises in the supernatural, like mind-readers or angels who intervene.  And then there are the bodice-rippers, hardly realistic.

Taoists have no difficulty understanding that sex is only part of life as a whole, even that humans are only part of this planet as a whole.  This reduces the need for porn, allows people to take delight in many things -- including each other -- without oppressions and exploitations.  The attitudes and structures of the rule-defined, power-based world allow the compartmenting of porn by stigmatizing and criminalizing.  Then it doubles back to justify confinement, punishment, exclusion and and even torture that increases the level of suffering in the world.  It supports rather than interdicting addictions like drugs or alcohol.  It ghettoizes polyamorous, same-sex relationships, and supports strange practices like body surgery, either on genitals or faces, or fetish objects.

Worse than that, so long as we obsess about porn with the idea of suppressing or eliminating it, the economic and political forces that push people into desperate actions in order to survive never get addressed.  That preoccupation is as much of an addiction as the porn itself.  Of course, smart porn purveyors know that if it becomes legal and accepted, the money will go out of it.  One of the uses of religion is to generate the kind of stigma that produces profit.

Interestingly, the generation born since maybe 1990 has already made a cultural shift towards Tao thinking.  There are some people who suggest that Jesus himself was an instinctive Taoist or Zen person whose ideas were captured by the Roman Empire and exploited into an instrument of control.  The impulses of Tao came back into the US through Transcendentalist and later “Aquarian” surges of thought.  They are always there, organic and immanental rather than dependent on “otherworldly” or supernatural sources as captured by institutions.  The Pope must always be on guard against the planet.

JESUS & PORNOGRAPHY

Since the issue of sex comes up so much and since the internet has changed the terms of pornography so much (so much more available, so much more vivid, exotic and scary) I thought I’d put in 1,000 word’s-worth.  In some ways I don’t believe in pornography.  In other ways, I see it everywhere.

www.apologetics.com has the motto “Challenging believers to think and thinkers to believe.”  Apologetics are a sub-category of theological thought that tries to reframe the previously writing-prescribed church theology when it no longer fits the reality of the present.  For instance,  this quote is from http://www.apologetics.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=67643

“The literal definition of “pornography,” comes from the combined meaning of the two components, pornea which means “forbidden sexual behavior,” (Biblically verifiable) and grapho which means “to write.”

So “pornography” is, literally, writings about forbidden sexual behavior. By extension it includes photographs and movies about forbidden sexual behavior. Let us be sure we understand: it is not “writing about sex” that is illicit; it is writing about “forbidden sex,” that is wrong. The Scriptures use the word "pornea" to define illegal sexual activity.”

This reflection on “pornography” uses this definition as a starting point.  There are two categories (porn + graph) at issue here.  I’ll take the last one first, though I’m a little distracted by the idea of “graphoporn.”  Isn’t there a kind of pornography of writing itself, elevating a common act like writing into something glamorous and privileged, which is the strategy of commercial sex porn?  Or otherwise illegal to publish, like government secrets?  At the heart is money, right?  Well -- we’re quickly taking the money out of writing so it’s less pornie all the time.

I googled “sex and Jesus” which brought up all sorts of things, including the apologetics site above and one I quote below:  http://www.religioustolerance.org/sex_jesu.htm#  

“Jesus is recorded as having made only four direct comments that might be interpreted as relating to sexual behavior.

Matthew 5:31-32 states:
“It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." (KJV)  

Matthew 19:9 states similarly:

"And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery."  (KJV)

Here, Jesus prohibits divorce, except in a case of sexual misconduct -- "porneia" in the original Greek. Various versions of the Bible have translated "porneia" as adultery, fornication, unchastity, unfaithfulness or marital unfaithfulness. Jesus here deviated from Jewish law, which said that a man could freely divorce his wife.

Mark 10:11-12 states:

"...Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.

Luke 16:18 states:

"Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery."

These gospel writers record Jesus as having taken a different stance on divorce. He said that it is unacceptable for any reason at all. 

These statements are about legal matters, normally the business of Caesar rather than the church, though today’s church in the Christian tradition claims parallel jurisdiction and “Caesar” permits it.  Let the church scribes keep the records and the responsibility for propriety.  Usually, Jesus doesn’t interfere, although later when he says his followers should “forsake all others” he defies the claims of church, state and family.  When he protects prostitutes, he acts on principle rather than laws.  He does NOT define them as porniea.  (Some would claim that prostitution protects marriage.)  He always seeks to protect the poor, the outcast, and the diseased, conditions which press people into sexwork.  There is enough evidence in the “gospels” that were not accepted by the church patriarchs (the Apocrypha) to persuade some people that Jesus had a male lover.  It is OTHER parts of the Bible that are quoted to condemn same-sex relationships and then only males.

  

It seems clear that “porniea” is a legal category relating to the state of marriage, which controls economics, lines of inheritance (the importance of a woman being inseminated by only one man so that his bloodline is continued), and -- in cultures that see wives as belongings -- property.  Fertile sex-acts outside marriage mess up inheritance, though many narrative plots (including the Old Testament) rely on regularizing what are technically bastards.  Any force that shakes up the legal status quo can be heretical and pornographic in its writing, even feminism.  (I’m not talking about same sex acts, but rather about stepping outside marriage.)

The biggest “porniea” now (and I think Pope Francis I would agree with this) is not prostitution but the challenge to ideas of conception and family patterns.  In vitro conception; multiple mothers; DNA proof of fatherhood; single or multiple or same sex families based on nurturing instead of biology or legal status; the definition of when a fetus becomes a person -- all these and more have challenged everything previously assumed.  Our understanding of homosexuality, gender identification, maturation, brain function and so on have also challenged the legal definition of marriage, which in view of the multiple religions in the United States, is less and less related to church views because of the problem of determining WHICH church.

Since the biological understanding and management of sex is so radically changed since two millennia ago, then we must go to Jesus’ principles of behavior rather than legal definitions, which is the brilliant shift Jesus made anyway.  This is why it’s so hard for the Supreme Court to define what pornography is -- it’s hard to define marriage.  It has become a category based on cultural proprieties instead of principle.  Common law marriage is literally common behavior.

What would I see as an alternative?   First, I would move the definition of “marriage” out of the legal realm and into the biological/psychological context since that is the origin of the confusion.  That’s what’s changed so drastically.  I would define “marriage” as something more like “bonding”, a state of commitment that doesn’t depend on gender, age, nationality, skin color, or even species -- though that last is taking it a bit too far unless you’re talking about swans.  Still, some people bond with dogs or horses.  It is a brain phenomenon that supports mutual protection and shared goals.  Excellent for the raising of families, but not necessarily even physical in the sense of coition.  I would reduce the legalities of marriage to the status of contracts, “pre-nups” about things like money management, residence and process of termination.   Enforce THAT and really do it. How then does one detect “bonds of marriage”?  Behavior -- what is loving and nurturing indicates a bond.  This is like the common law definition of marriage.

Jesus was addressing divorce, but I don’t know of any biological/psychological research that defines an end to bonding, which can persist even after death.  (There is a lot of work done on grief and trauma, which might be helpful.)  Clearly Jesus objects to anything that disrupts a bonded marriage, no doubt including economics.  He does not say whether lust interferes with or supports emotional pair-bonds.  He doesn’t address sex as a bodily act one way or another.  Nor does he talk about children.  If we’re talking about writing that challenges pair-bonds, one has to admit that Jesus himself recommends leaving one’s family and marriage partner -- Jesus as pornographer.  The pornography of the Gospels.

The main strategy of Christian theology is to separate human conventional phenomena from “higher” mystical participation in another world, a “felt” connection beyond any earthly terms.  One marries God.  (Of course, the Church claims IT is the bride, which is a kind of pornography because it reduces mysticism to a set of written bureaucratic rules.)  If one is in a predominantly Christian culture and committed to it, then this discussion and the other websites that relate to it (just google “Jesus + sex”) will be meaningful and possibly help to guide behavior without hurting other people or oneself.

  

So now I’m going to google “Tao + Pornography” and see what I find.  

DZHOKHAR AND TAMERLANE

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a name like a science fiction story where the nations become planets and the oppressors are monsters.  Those writers always go to the Eurasian Turkish steppes for strange names with too many consonants.  It’s  a genre in which things are barely recognizable as versions of what we know except with a skew that makes us see everything differently.  I’m going to postpone the post I had and see what I can do with a nineteen-year-old boy who comes from war, carrying it within him, and follows his big brother into a world of death.

Since I knew so little about Chechnya, I had to spend a bit of time on research.  I started with the map, which is mountain country -- the Carpathians, second highest mountains in Europe.  It is like here in Valier if you live on the east side of them.  They are the wall that divides the Ukraine from Europe.

Then I look at the names of these two boys, one 26, a boxer, aggressive and abusive -- beating his wife got him a police record that prevented him from becoming a US citizen.  Then the other boy, only nineteen.  That’s two years older than my brothers when they enlisted in the Marines, the traditional age for soldiers.  He became a naturalized citizen through study and swearing allegiance to the USA.  Noxchi Mott is a language of these Carpathian mountain people.  Dzhokhar is proud to speak it well.  Not just Chechans, the tribe is defiant warriors, brutally conquered by unspeakable means right up until the present when Putin had a go at them.  This family tried emigration to the US, but were not happy here.  Dzhokhar seems the only one who really fit.  Tamerlan stayed to be the patriarch, a bully, even the home his fight arena.  Dzhokhar was young and flexible enough to assimilate a new world.  Tamerlan was not.  He remained at heart a mountain guerrilla.

Tamerlan is named for Tamerlane AKA Timur the Lame, who was a conquerer on the scale of Genghis Khan in the 1400’s.  “Timur's armies were feared throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, sizable parts of which were laid to ruin by his campaigns.  Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.”   He was crippled by a shepherd’s arrow when he tried to steal a sheep and therefore earned his name. 

The name of Tamerlane is known to many of us because of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe.  “The main themes of "Tamerlane" are independence and pride as well as loss and exile.”

KIND solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme -
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell'd in -
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope - that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
. . . .

Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bow'd from its wild pride into shame.
O! yearning heart! I did inherit
Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again -
O! craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
Th' undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness - a knell.

. . .

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven - that dew - it fell
(Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me - with the touch of Hell,
While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o'er,
Appeared to my half-closing eye
The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder's roar
Came hurriedly upon me, telling
Of human battle, where my voice,
My own voice, silly child! - was swelling
(O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

. . .

My passions, from that hapless hour,
Usurp'd a tyranny which men
Have deem'd, since I have reach'd to power;
My innate nature - be it so:

I reach'd my home - my home no more -
For all had flown who made it so -

. . .

Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?

This is grandiosity and narcissism and the romanticizing of bloody hell.  We love it as much as the Carpathians do, though they probably have more words for it.  A mixture of the essential nature of the testosterone-governed male body, the love of one’s family, determination to make the tribe survive, rejection of all authorities, resorting to force instead of persuasion -- forever maimed by pride.  What makes us think that a diaspora can work if, based on such forces, it forms hard secret cadres in the heart of the larger unknowing nation?  What a great source of drama full of seduction and tragedy -- this story will persist, elaborate, morph with the times.  

But the truth is somewhat different:  a gentle boy with tangled hair bleeding to death in some middle-class American’s boat, firing back bravely from under a winter shrink-wrap, while a helicopter infrared camera illuminates his green, still-warm body and robots trundle up the driveway to sniff for bombs and to potentially tip the boat over, dumping him out on the cement. This is not the combat of warriors.

But then, the bombs were coward’s attacks on families and happy citizens, shredding their legs and killing their children.  Only a madman could think this was anything approaching combat.  The real pressure cooker was in their Chechen heads, mixing shrapnel of medieval war and modern subjugation into identity-destruction.  They have done their cause grievous harm.

Thinking about the research on brain trauma from boxing, which was Tamerlan’s success until he suddenly gave it up, I suggested to a friend that they should carefully autopsy his brain.  But the friend, who is a skilled cruiser of the dark parts of the Internet, reported that his brain was probably too destroyed by bullets to be interpretable.  The last small value of his body has been lost to violence.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a wrestler rather than a boxer.  His brain was not damaged, but his identity was at least double -- maybe more.  In one role he followed Tamerlan into Hell.  In the other he was a good student, a quiet friend to both male and female, a lifeguard.  Islam was his “world-view” he said.  His nationality was split between the old country, which he still visited, and his new one.

I imagine him lying in the bottom of a boat, the dregs, remembering the thump of running over his dying brother, and what else?  Which identity lay there in a pool of blood?  It could not have felt triumphant.  My guess is that he felt nothing, totally dissociated from thought, until the police found him and the last firefight was underway.  By then he could only find himself in confrontation, adversaries, the hypoxic heights of imagined heroism.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

KNOWING WHAT TO DO

One of the reactions to the Boston Marathon bombing was personal and practical.  Many people, having just seen legs blown off, realized that some of the people there knew they must prevent those victims from bleeding out in minutes and saw that people knew how to do it and did not hesitate to improvise and apply tourniquets.  A lot of them were medical people, emergency responders, cops with basic training, and so on who were there to tend the runners or were runners themselves .  Some of those present, not knowing what to do, promised themselves that they would learn how to help grievously hurt people.

This is not the same kind of reaction as those who respond to school shooting by trying to pass laws about guns or mental problems.  It is something specific and individual that THEY can do.  In the city people get used to calling some delegated -- even professional -- coping person to deal with trouble.   They call 911 on their cell phone.  In the country and small towns people do what they can on the spot.  They are used to physical work, they may handle big animals or big dangerous machines, and they deal with emergencies well.  It’s harder for them to figure out what to do with paper systems like grants for the renewal of hundred-year-old sewer systems, so then they stand back.  

Among the websites I’ve happened upon -- or maybe I was looking for without realizing -- is www.goodmenproject.com.    The founders say, “Guys today are neither the mindless, sex-obsessed buffoons nor the stoic automatons our culture so often makes them out to be. Our community is smart, compassionate, curious, and open-minded; they strive to be good fathers and husbands, citizens and friends, to lead by example at home and in the workplace, and to understand their role in a changing world.”  I found the website on Twitter first.  I’m a very bad Twitter user -- I hate all this social chitchat stuff, I hate being forced into categories, I hate having people prescribe stuff to me, I hate sophomoric arguments.  I never tweet. This is different.

For instance, this post struck me, so to speak:  www.menproject.com/featured-content/the-good-life-embracing-destruction/  It’s by a guy who teaches stage combat explaining why it was so hard for his urban educated acting students to learn it.  They were gentle, thoughtful, hip guys who avoided all violence and therefore didn’t know how to be forceful, had never taught their own muscles the kind of control needed when coming up against force.  They were wimpy, soft, couch-dwellers who thought about life instead of living.  Harsh?  Well, read it and see what you think.  We’re not talking about gang-bangers here.  We’re talking about guys who need to know how to read adversaries, block them, make and take controlled swings and impacts.

Here’s another story:  http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/marriage-20-tips-for-men-on-supporting-a-partner-with-chronic-pain/  This man’s wife was in a car accident that left her in chronic pain.  I know people in this situation and how debilitating it can be, how helpless you are, what a temptation it is to draw away.  But this guy stayed and figured out what would help, partly by doing the obvious thing: asking.  He learned how to anticipate a spike in suffering, what small moves and physical contacts worked, what supplies to have on hand.  This is not to say that what he figured out with his own wife would work with anyone else, because everyone is wired differently and has different damage.  Except that paying close attention and looking for small interventions helped both of them.  I cannot think of a better illustration of intimacy.  Physical intimacy, but not sex.

Here’s a real biggie:  http://truckersagainsttrafficking.org  The website teaches truck drivers what to do when they see kids forced to prowl truck stops in order to turn tricks.  It offers wallet cards with a hotline number:   1-800-373 -7888.  (Now you can make your own wallet card -- since you only need the number.)  This is what to do: CALL.  It tells you what information to scribble down: descriptions of girls and their transportation, license numbers, times.  It tells you what NOT to do -- like try to rescue the girls personally, drive off with them, confront the pimps with a tire iron.  The idea is not to be the kind of hero that gets himself put in jail and unable to find another trucking job -- the idea is to be part of a network of heroes, and also to internalize norms, what good guys should do.  No dithering, no shrinking.  No trying not to see, no compartmenting it into something that’s always there and can’t be stopped.  The Internet has made a major difference since many truckers carry computers and are online.  They often have smart phones that can take photos and transmit them instantly. 

As I type there is someone using the tiny grass Valier airport to practice touch-and-go landings -- that is, they aren’t staying on the ground very long, just coming and going because that’s the tricky part demanding practice.  Finding what to do about big risky stuff is something like that.  I mean, the need comes along and presents itself, and if you're prepared, then doing it teaches you about yourself as well as “how to do it.”  One of the lessons is that you CAN learn how -- once you think to find out about it. 

The good men that I’m missing in this website conversation are the Native Americans.  I know a lot of them around here: all ages, all styles, some of them online.  I’m writing about this website on my blog in part to alert them that they ought to be posting advice about how to be a good Indian man, how to help a reservation kid (besides sending him mittens at Christmas), how to have a conversation with your college roommate who turns out to be an Indian.  People want to help one another and to do the right thing, but they could use some instruction.  There are enough instructions online about how to make a pressure cooker bomb.  Not enough about how to survive the social and economic pressure cooker of human interaction.

Several commenters have said it was striking that when the bombs went off in Boston at the marathon, people ran TOWARD the location, not away in self-protection.  Of course, some of them were emergency responders who were trained to do that, but others were not.  Many people were grievously wounded and needed intervention immediately -- not fancy stuff, but just hands-on attention like those tourniquets on the stumps of blown-off legs.  The helpers literally took the shirts off their backs.  The on-the-spot helpers with no training learned from those who had it.  This is the opposite of stigma, which makes people leave, hide, preserve their own protection.  We can all learn more about what to do, so we can save each other.

ALL THE MOVIES ABOUT SAINT FRANCIS

The essential story of Francis of Assisi is deep in human beings everywhere.  Movies made from the bare outlines vary strikingly across a wide spectrum of styles and assumptions, choosing from a menu of events.  For instance, the 1950 film called “The Flowers of St Francis,” made in 1950 by Roberto Rossellini (while Ingrid Bergman, not yet his wife, carried to term his children -- a major scandal) and written by Federico Fellini, was in the style of Italian black-and-white social realism and a spirit of reform and return to origins that was close to the original spirit of Francis.

“The Flowers” were actually nine incidents chosen from many fables and novels, each with a moral like a parable.  The parts were played by actual monks except for the tyrant, who was a professional actor.  The film opens with the characters walking in the rain, a theme that shows up in all the movies.  As they go, they argue their message.   Since one of the 14^th century source novels was about Brother Juniper, he is a prominent character.   The vignettes are as follows: 

Juniper, the “Parsival” or devout fool of the tale, takes the idea of going naked too far.  A crazy old man, Giovanni, comes to join them.  In this version Clare is a proper nun who comes to visit with her sisters and is welcomed with a bower of blossoms.  Juniper makes soup for a brother who is ill but when the patient remarks that the soup would be improved by a pig’s foot, Juniper goes out and cuts the foot off a living pig!  Francis encounters a leper and embraces him, which is another basic theme very much evocative of the present plague of HIV-AIDS.  

Juniper becomes a problem because he wants to preach and keeps trying to devise ways to shorten up his cooking duties, like cooking everything they have into one big slumgullion that will last two weeks.  Juniper does indeed go preaching and gets into awful trouble.  He is nearly lynched.  In the next to the last chapter, Brother Leone and Francis discuss how to achieve perfect happiness, but Francis rejects all of Leone’s suggestions, which run along the lines of performing miracles, and proposes that being beaten up and suffering is the real perfect happiness.  His essential message is converting loss into gain, misery into pleasure, and failure into success through mysticism.  The last “flower” is Francis going out into the world to preach.

This movie is confusing to watch on a small screen.  There’s a lot of rushing around and since everyone is in the same brown habit, it’s hard to tell them apart, but there are often striking tableaus.  The scenery is mostly pasture and the building are little more than stone-walled sheds.

“Brother Sun, Sister Moon” (1972) from Zefferelli is at the extreme other end of the continuum and has remained a much beloved version because of the lush poppies-and-lilies treatment of the landscape, the beautiful childlike main characters, and the extravagant -- rather literally “operatic” since there are songs -- costumes and sets.  The final scene in the Pope’s cathedral is like “The Dark Crystal” as envisioned by Gustav Klimpt, a storm of gilt, glitter, brilliant silks, embellishment and strangeness.  Waaaay over the top.  The Pope literally steps out of all this and comes to Francis in a simple white gown. Clare does the same when her hair is shorn near a rocky waterfall.   Rebuilding of the old stone ruin is set against fields of snow.   Children, old people and animals abound as extras.  The movie is saturated with spiritual ecstasy and the ethos of the Aquarian Age: gentleness and kindness is primary.  Somehow the lepers are displaced by suffering cloth dyers, much more photogenic.

“Francis of Assissi”  (1961) with Bradford Dillman as Francis, Stuart Whitman as Paolo, and Dolores Hart as Clare is a group that often acted in Hollywood Westerns!  The usual sexual tension never allowing contact is strong.  This is a respectable version, not quite memorable.  Clare’s hair cutting is on a mountain ridge with the wind lifting the strands.

“Francesco” (1989) with Mickey Rourke as Francesco was the second Saint Francis movie made by Liliana Cavani, the same kind of social neorealist as Fellini, Rossellini, Paolo Pasolini but far more inventive. (Her first try was reviled and disappeared.)  An early scene shows the naked bodies of young men killed in battle being laid out for a mass grave.  Helena Bonham Carter is a feisty Clare who wears pantaloons under her habit, no veil on her frizzy bob: she is one of the guys.  The story begins on another windy ridge where the group is putting up a tent for a shelter while they write down the life of their friend.  The score is by Vangelis.

All the films begin with the two cherished children, Clare and Francesco, in a time of constant war and terrible suffering.  The Catholic church was afflicted by more than a dozen heretical groups.  In some versions the land is eroded and harsh, in others everything blooms.   In some, Francesco joins the Crusades as a knight, comes back, goes again as a pilgrim and actually tries to talk Saladin out of war.  (Saladin says he hates war, but must defend his people.)  In a couple of versions Francis is captured by the enemy and languishes in a horrific dungeon for a year, but while he is there discovers a vernacular version of the Gospels which he has not known until then.  Both youngsters, like Buddha, wake to suffering and dedicate themselves to sharing and ameliorating it.  The church mid-management tries suppression, companions object but are converted, and the Pope finally approves.  In some there is a sequence of sharing a pig sty.  In some versions Clare is confined to a convent, only noted and seen from a distance.

After watching for a while one can’t help wondering how a Saint Francis would be received today.   Forget the “saint” thing -- it’s just a Roman Catholic bureaucratic category.   What if a man went through life impoverished, owning no home, giving all his money away to those in the most desperate need (not many lepers anymore -- how about boys with HIV-AIDS?), dressing simply in today’s “habit” (jeans and a t-shirt from a thrift shop), begging for money, spending his days preaching via the Internet, and constantly suffering (that penitento practice of physical and moral pain) -- how would he be received?   I can tell you.  

Tim Barrus (He will wring my neck for saying so because he thinks virtue signals weakness.  But I have nothing to lose.) whose most expensive possession is his own replaced hips (now failing) and whose life is devoted to art -- which is not so different from religion -- has been met with suspicion, contempt, righteous indignation, skepticism and accusations.  Most modern literati (the ones who don’t read but write all the time) operate under a hermeneutic of suspicion.  They cannot accept that a St. Francis type might be for real.  Somewhere there must be an angle.  Money must be hidden in a Swiss bank account.  He must be after the fame.  It’s gotta be a con.

Then they try the smearing.  In San Francisco in the days of Act Up parades he ran naked through the streets.  (How is that different from Francis stripping?)  He was a Harley rider in black leather.  (How is that different from Francis in armor on a horse headed to the Crusades?)  He associates with diseased people.  (We’ve already covered that.)  He’s always asking for -- (Yeah, yeah.  He’s a mendicant.)  He hangs with a group of boy and men.  (I think there are a few Poor Clares around.)

In the end I like the “Mickey Rourke” Francis best.  Filmed in his pretty boy days when his mouth curled roguishly and his eyes were bright, even today he’s a real-life animal lover, with a special affection for his little dog.   But he’s a tough, wicked survivor.  In “Barfly” he portrayed Charles Bukowski, who may be Barrus’ version of St. Paul.  It’s a reach, but why not reach?  I defend it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjneQahhks0   If you don’t know Mickey Rourke, start here.  (By the way, “Mickey Rourke” is an alias.  I’m not even sure whether he’s Irish.)

JESUS THE HOMELESS STATUE

Jesus the Homeless

Timothy Schmalz specializes in “religious sculpture,” however you define that -- I mean, is it a mother nursing a child or a dying naked man on a cross or is it Buddha or a totem pole, or something else?  He decided he would create a contemporary image of an all all-too-common human condition and link it to “christianity” -- reputed to be the main religion of the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, its name taken from the title of Jesus the Christ who theoretically came to change the world two millennia ago.  Well . . .  we have park benches now.  Much better for the homeless people than sleeping directly on the ground.  The two main religious institutions located for possible placement would not accept the statue.  They were Catholic and their new Pope had just chosen the name of Francis who was deliberately homeless.  That’s “Saint” Francis.

The Toronto Star newspaper says:

“Despite the message of the sculpture — Jesus identifying with the poorest among us — it was rejected by two prominent Catholic churches, St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

“Homeless Jesus had no home,” says the artist, Timothy Schmalz. “How ironic.”

“Rectors of both cathedrals were enthusiastic about the bronze piece and showed Schmalz possible locations, but higher-ups in the New York and Toronto archdiocese turned it down, he says.

“‘It was very upsetting because the rectors liked it, but when it got to the administration, people thought it might be too controversial or vague,’ he says. He was told ‘it was not an appropriate image.’”

“The Toronto archdiocese tried to help him find an alternative location, including St. Augustine’s Seminary in Scarborough. But Schmalz, who describes his work as a visual prayer, wanted to reach a wider, secular audience. “I wanted not only the converted to see it, but also the marginalized. I almost gave up trying to find a place.”

“Now the sculpture stands near Wellesley St. W., outside Regis College at the University of Toronto. It’s a Jesuit school of theology, where priests and lay people are trained, with an emphasis on social justice.”

Here’s a video of the sculptor himself discussing why he made this life-sized bronze.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rAys_ON8rg

These archdiocesan “higher-ups” should fire their public relations advisors, since they have now managed through their rejection to make Timothy Schmalz famous, far more than if they had just quietly accepted the monument.   They look like fools.  They should hire some new theologians while they’re at it.  And maybe the Pope, instead of harassing nuns, should turn his attention to men in red skullcaps with empty heads and hearts.

It’s always true that the people who are on the ground, on the street, doing front line work in engagement with the people who need help, are open to the Jesus of the Gospels.  It is the people at the top who become invested in covering up, whitewashing, etc.  They don’t mean it’s too controversial or vague.  They mean it’s not good marketing strategy for the institutional corporation that makes their lives prosperous.  They have been selling the idea that being virtuous will make you rich.  (It’s hard to sell Heaven these days, when a McMansion seems so much more accessible.)  Churches get people to give them money with the argument that the giver will look generous and thoughtful, which will help them make better (sharper) business deals.

by Saint-Gaudens

Statues with drapery always intrigue me and this one is no exception.  They suggest the human form in an ambiguous way, quite unlike the opposite practice of portraying the nude body.  And yet what this draped homeless person (genderless to appearances) reveals is the wounded vulnerability of the feet.  There is room on this park bench for a person to sit alongside the feet and it must be natural to caress those bare feet.  The Pope has washed a lot of feet, and not just in Rome, though they were all no doubt carefully pre-selected for him.  Can he get through the layers of snobbery, collusion, and gate-keeping around him?  We’re all wondering.  He has hired a Franciscan to help him.

By now I’ve watched maybe a half-dozen film versions of the story of Francis of Assissi and his progression from wealthy son to homeless monk.  I began because of the new Pope to see why he chose that name and I’m not finished.  Some of these movies are on YouTube, both the pious ones and the inscrutable ones.   The entire sumptuously seductive Zefferelli version, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” is at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVG2r7TgMMw  There are others.  I’ll post more reviews tomorrow.

As it turns out, being a Franciscan is not at all like being a priest.  It is a self-identification that only means living in the way the Francis did.  One can be male or female, not even Catholic, cloistered or not, recognized by a community or not.  Francis wrote out some rules -- which are basically from the Gospels, principles of living -- and unlike the Boy Scouts, that’s the whole thing -- whether or not a person is gay or believes in God or not.  It’s a Tao, a Way, a bare footprint.

The Catholic church in the 12^th century had a problem:  their organization and protocols weren’t matching the experienced world very well.  Soon the Protestants would break away entirely, but in the meantime there were groups who diverged without the intention of being challengers.  Not quite heretical.  They were penitentes, humiliati, impoverati, mendicants, eremetical -- Franciscans.  Three hundred years later, they had their own internal schism in which Mateo de Bascio founded the Capuchins, the “hooded ones.”  (Mateo was not made a saint.) There were others, always trying to get back to origins and always challenging the formal Roman bureaucracy to think how to assign them to the realm of regulation and responsibility.   They must’ve had a helluva flow chart.   Some popes fought these groups and some popes engaged and certified them.  As the shrewd cardinal towards the end of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” confides to his colleague, “This man will bring the poor back to us.”  But since penitent, self-humiliating, begging, poor hermits are hard to bribe or punish,  they always elude the system, butterflies that can’t be netted.  They exist in every religious context on the planet as well as the secular, because they are not institutionally-based but anchored in the mystical context of the Sacred.

It looks to me as though Timothy the Sculptor is also defining “religious sculpture” as art that inspires the same behavior and compassion as that of Saint Francis.  The only problem is that a life-sized bronze is an enduring but expensive undertaking.  Possibly it might better have been made of bread, so that the homeless could eat it.  Maybe someone will decide to bake bread in the shape of a homeless person under a blanket and hand it out to the poor.  Maybe I should try it myself.  I could make some little feet out of Sculpy polymer clay that could be re-used for the next baking . . .  What a communion!

"OPPORTUNITY, MONTANA" by Brad Tyer

“Opportunity, Montana” by Brad Tyer showed up on a list of “best” books about small towns, but it turns out not to be that at all.  The sub-title is the real story:  “Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape.”  It’s the same carpet-bagger environmentalist account of the relationship between Butte and Missoula, the two towns that in my opinion are the LEAST like Montana towns.  The short version is that Butte, that rough and brawling big pit of minesmen and extractors, dumped all their poisonous left-overs downriver onto the humanities university town, which managed to make a LOT of money for William Clark, first by digging up the metal, then by getting the contract to haul it all back upstream and dump it on nearby “Opportunity” where it will gradually seep downstream into Missoula again.

Tyer’s website is http://www.bradtyer.com/Brad_Tyer_Portfolio/Front_Page.html

Mixed with this scandalous but hardly unusual or unknown display of opportunism are two other threads:  Tyer’s love of canoeing rivercourses and his attempt to love his overbearing and right wing father whose style seems quite like that of William Clark.  The father made his living by treating sewage.  “Shit Creek” is often mentioned in this book, though it’s mostly description and metaphor rather than geography.  The photo of Tyler on the dust jacket shows a man in front of a storm with a bunched-up, determined face.  A professional journalist, he has now gone back to Texas where he came from.  Group him with Rick Bass (also from Texas) and Richard Manning who writes this kind of book.  Manning’s wife, Tracy Stone-Manning also an environmentalist, was interviewed for this book.

So if I’m highly resistant to both Butte and Missoula for opposite reasons, annoyed by both their pride of being so rough and their pride of being so smooth, then why did I bother to read this book?  To be a good citizen in a little town like Valier, one needs to take an interest in both old sewer systems and new treatment lagoons.  Valier’s sewage lagoon just passed its water quality test without violations for the second month in a row.  We’ve had an aeration problem which will cost big bucks to remediate.  It takes a whole day once a month to work through the protocols for collection of samples to send the state for testing.  The penalties are severe and the standards keep rising.  It means money.  The other reason I pay attention is that I worked for the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings where my consciousness was raised to the point where I never see a settlement without wondering where things come in, where things go out, and what the ground is like.  Sustainability in small towns is often just a matter of pride rather than practicality.  People move here thinking it will be cheap.  Little do they know.

There is a tendency in America -- from the very beginning and probably even among Indian tribes in the old days -- to seek salvation by place.  “Somewhere a place for us,” the lovers sing.  Over and over the romantics imagine grand Montana, arrive, and are disillusioned.  The trope is Montana horizons painted on the sides of the screeching Chicago El cars.  Newcomers are good for Montana, since they bring money and skills -- unless they are moguls of extractive industries and their methods are ruthless.   It’s still possible to raid the land.  Heightened consciousness about grasslands to the east of the Rockies will take a while longer since soil erosion and drought are a little more subtle than hard-rock mining with dynamite.  The importation of muscle from Europe is not so necessary, so the ferment of politics is also a little slower.  But it’s there.  Brian Schweitzer, our former governor, is working on it.  Unclear which side he’s on.  Richard Manning’s book, Grassland, sketches it out.  Manning has no website, but he’s on YouTube  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xvyRd-uVqM

There’s also this parallel idea about “salvation by book.”  It’s not the same as writing “the Great American Novel,” but something more like progressive era pride in muck-raking -- in this case literal.  Tyer helps us with short lyric passages on the land or in the water.  Even so, there are sometimes moments when one just wants to roll up in a ball and deny the whole thing.

Also, there is an abiding notion of “salvation by future generations” which, of course, is followed by a desire to control because what’s salvation if it’s on some kind of foreign terms?  Or even a denial, like those of us now looking at the destruction of the Berkeley Pit and a landscape of “slickens”, poisonous sediments from mining, and cursing the memory of William Clark.  What good was the money?  Clark’s last heir was a reclusive old woman living in a hospital while her inherited mansions went empty and her fortunes were managed by lawyers, the chief beneficiaries.  At least Tyer, not inheriting any money, was sharpened by the conflict with his father into a willingness to look closely at ugliness and power.  His results will help us all if we can uncurl and think about it.

“Salvation” -- secular as well as religious -- is often defined by perpetuity, the idea that we can have things the same forever if we can just get control.  But now the idea has changed to participation, the evidence being that we exist as part of a complex, interacting whole.  We are not significant units of life that ought to be eternally preserved, but rather small forces that can influence everything to which we are connected.  Tyer doesn’t suggest what we ought to do.  It doesn’t seem as though anyone really knows.  Nor does he seem to grasp the idea that the earth cannot be destroyed -- just changed enough to eliminate humans.  It already makes us very uncomfortable.

Just the same, the evidence gathered into this dossier needs to be recorded and included by the rest of us: a salvation by book, place and generations as we all work forward in our persistent way.  In time the accumulation of the evidence may open the way we need to go before it is too late -- not for the planet, but for ourselves.

SAM STRACHAN, INVENTOR OF THE KOZY KAMP

A fancier of pop-up camping trailers -- a tent on a base with wheels -- asked for a short bio of my grandfather, Sam Strachan, who invented and sold the "Kozy Kamp."  Joel Silvey posts at http://www.popupcamperhistory.com .  This is what I sent him.

The Kozy Kamp, open and shut.

Sam and Beulah Strachan outside the folding house Sam built.

ARCHIBALD MITCHELL STRACHAN was born in Stevenston, Scotland, on June 17, 1850.  His wife, CATHERINE WELSH, was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, on January 10, 1852.   Stevenston was a closely associated community to Kilmarnock.  They married July 25, 1873, in Kilmarnock, Scotland.   They had four children: Samuel S. Strachan (b. 1875); Jean Gillis Strachan (b. 1877), Jessie Mitchell Strachan (b. 1879) and Thomas Welsh Strachan (b.1892).

“Gillis,” “Mitchell” and “Welsh” are all family names.  The S in Sam’s name doesn’t stand for anything.  He wasn’t given a middle name, so added the S. because many businessmen at the time used double initials.

While the Strachan family was forming in Scotland, the American prairies were being cleared of the indigenous people.  Smallpox did most of the work.  They say Archibald was a proud man who subscribed to the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson.  He wanted the pride of being a landowner, a “gentleman farmer”.  He was also a skilled finish carpenter, which was good to fall back on when homesteading wasn’t paying enough.

I do not know the date of their emigration to the US, but it had to be between the birth of Jessie in Scotland and the birth of Thomas in South Dakota, so it was in the Eighties.   The economy of Stevenston was dependent on coal mining, which tuckered out in the Eighties. By that time the Sioux were confined to reservations and their range was opened for homesteading.  In DeVoe and Faulkton, where the Strachans staked their claim, the Sioux band had been Brulé Teton, "Brulé" meaning "burnt", perhaps because of prairie fires.

Sam was well-educated in Scotland and became a Faulkton, SD, school superintendent.   His wife, Beulah Swan Finney (b. 1871) was a teacher born in Quincy, Michigan, which was platted in 1870.  She told about walking with her mother on a path through the great forests of the times.  They met a group of Indian men who stood aside to make way for them.  Beulah claimed they said, “Squaws heap brave.”  I don’t believe they said that, but I believe the men stood aside and it took a little nerve to walk past them.

Sam and Beulah married September 19, 1901, after proving up individual but adjacent homesteads.  They moved to Swan River, Manitoba, in 1919.  Their first child, Samuel Archibald, was premature and died. (b. 1902).  Then came Bruce Bennett (1903), Glenn Gordon (1905), May Alice (1907) and Seth Stevens (1910).  Sam named his boys with double initials, but not his girl.  Maybe Beulah chose her name.

In Manitoba the family raised potatoes and then become distributors of Kovar Farm Machinery, especially a cultivator designed to pull up crabgrass, which was shipped to them in pieces and assembled by the family.  This taught them the skills for both the construction and the marketing of the Kozy Kamp, which was often done at fairs.  The family moved to Brandon where they bought the house of Martha Ostenso, author of “Wild Geese,” a famous and favorite Canadian novel about a tyrant in a farming family and the school teacher who boarded with them.  In the movie version Sam Shepherd plays the overbearing patriarch.   The Strachan children took college training in Winnipeg at the very new Manitoba Agricultural College, which would become the University of Manitoba.  When Bruce finished his BS, he went to Oregon State University to earn his MS in agriculture.  The family followed to Portland.  By that time import tariffs on the machinery had destroyed the Kovar business in Canada, but the Kozy Kamp business seemed hopeful until WWII started and steel, rubber and gas were all rationed.  

True to their careful Scots heritage, Sam and Beulah lived quietly in Portland until his death in 1951 and hers in 1953.  All four of their children are gone now, and two of their grandchildren have died.  There are two more generations, all urban, mostly professionals.  

One of the fulfilling ways to work on these family events is in terms of world events.  For instance, the Industrial Revolution that exhausted the coal deposits of Scotland and supported the Victorian middle class and public education, or the sequence of the clearing of American indigenous people from the prairie in order to replace nomadic hunters with agricultural families, are macro-history that the world shares.  It’s impossible to overestimate the consequences of two world wars and the economic forces that fed them and followed them.  Seth, who began by pasture-hopping in an open fabric one-person airplane, was a bomber pilot at the very heart of WWII and then a TWA pilot in the dawn of overseas tourism.

Sam Strachan was of a class of worker (after his brief career in education) once called “mechanics.”  He constantly tinkered with inventions, not so much in order to make money but because he liked to have tools in his hands.  The Kozy Kamp, the folding tent trailer, was remarkably fitted for traveling the West in the days before the highways became so dangerous and commercialized.  The Strachan boys had set out on bicycles to make road trips when they were young, but as adults they took their families with them.  When Sam and Beulah were scouting Portland, they built a wooden version of this camper on the back of a “Ranger” truck, an early RV.  For a month (December) they lived on a parking lot in downtown Portland, where it poured rain constantly.  In the afternoon, for a little relief from the Ranger, they went to the reading rooms of the YMCA and YWCA respectively and separately.  Occasionally they went to a music hall or lecture. Others from South Dakota were there and also some business prospects had been made by mail.

I'll close with a quick twist.   https://vimeo.com/43939405   The Sam Strachan in this video is not my grandfather but I’ll sure claim the guy.  Same genes, I think.  (He’s a surfer!!!)  Maybe a bodyboard is a far cry from a crabgrass cultivator -- maybe not.  Maybe surfing is a far cry from homesteading on prairie -- maybe not.  Takes guts, vision, respect for tools.  Traveling.

"FELT" MEANINGS UNDER THE WORDS

In some ways it makes no difference that M/L seminary has moved out of the building created specifically for them.  They never really integrated with what was going on around the U of Chicago except for the Div School program and whatever forays individual students made.  For a cross-disciplinary person like me (teaching, psych, art, writing, natural science, anthropology, etc) this was too bad.  Through books, later on, I found my way to Carl Rogers and Eugene Gendlin -- part of a community of thinkers who were redefining culture and how to survive in it.  And then I found that their offices were two doors down from M/L.  I had lived across the street but no one mentioned them.

In a way, that’s good, because now there is YouTube, which probably gives me far more personal access than if I’d gone over and knocked on their door.  At that time (’78-‘82) I would have defined myself more as a client anyway.  (Certainly M/L saw me that way, as well as a pass-through for money -- they called it “tuition.”)  Now I am a better parallel thinker for this core group and their enterprise is also much farther along.  Take a look at these three vids from Eugene Gendlin’s “Thinking on the Edge,” which are very relevant to what I’m trying to say about using “liminal” liturgy to access the felt sense of the Holy.  (If these puzzle you, try YouTube for “Eugene Gendlin Focusing.”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wv7rXHHBXDU#!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QJB1Dttumk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=res946x5KlI

The Div School at the time was not inclined to be friendly to the phenomenological, considering it to be secular.  They disallowed my struggle to express what was just below the surface of words, because their work was based on the Word and the Book.  To them the Sacred could only be contained by the institutional church.  That’s who paid their bills and hired those graduates who became ministers, though most of the students became Ph.D. certified professors of religion.  Comparative religions were as close as anyone would go outside the faith circle. 

For my uses, Gendlin is still not as skilled in the language of metaphor and image as I would like to be.  What he knows is the process of helping people access the body-knowledge in themselves as an extension of psychoanalysis that doesn’t need words.  He pulls them across the threshold into speech.  Not unlike Gestalt and the red chair.

Most of what I have learned comes from watching Tim Barrus, a poet but non-academic who in the last half-decade has been developing concepts in videos made by boys who are so far out on the edge that no one can see them: boys who have been able to survive only by doing sex work.  Some have found ways to cope.  Some have simply died.  Along the middle are boys who can find their way if they can name it or frame it, even if not in words.  Maybe it’s an empty swing set, maybe it’s a bed of kelp, maybe it’s a road through a forest, but most of us will respond to these images in “felt” concepts.  Not in words.  Not even under words.  Apart from words, but possibly leading to words.

The great thing about images is that they are a language that crosses national boundaries among French-English-Bantu-Chinese-signtalk.  Computers are capable of a good deal of rough language translation for print (still far from perfect) but a long ocean shoreline, a laughing dog, a mug on a windowsill, all say something that anyone can understand.  Sometimes I think that our fascination with the most extreme images -- torture/sex/electronic microscopic images/cosmic star nurseries -- has to do with all our curiosities and varying willingness to confront things that cannot be put into words.

This way of communicating has always been possible through the arts, but now it has exploded in the way that the printing press exploded writing.  Beginning with music videos and porn, both of them deplored by “civilized” adults, the image-in-service-to-relationship and even narrative has swept the world the way film in theatres once captured hearts and, um, minds.  First on television, ballooning to four-foot flat screens, and now shrinking to inches on handheld devices, sometimes with only earplugs, letting your imagination create the visuals -- this material goes everywhere.  It cannot be copyrighted, it cannot make a profit, it cannot be sequestered -- it just goes like water everywhere people go, and along the way it sweeps ideas into the flood.  How else could American culture change so quickly?

These images are not formless and their interaction is according to a grammar that most narrative artists know.  Juxtapositions, gaps, overlays, surprises and sometimes long long long boring pieces -- ten minutes of watching a technician copy DVD’s, only his hands going back and forth among machines, adjusting a knob, moving a dial.  Even that makes a point.  Dry humor, Warhol-style.  For the past six years I’ve had the advantage of watching this shifting group of videographers, most of them kids, develop a vocabulary of photos and strategies.  They have something to say: something desperate but central to our larger culture.  It is NOT commercially developed nor from “standard” assumptions because it has been underground and counterculture, released by technology the way that uncovering ancient seeds and watering them will cause an irruption of growth. 

I would like Eugene and Mary Gendlin and their group to take this work seriously.  No doubt they’ve never seen it, so how could they?  It’s not QUITE invisible, but almost.  The University of Chicago has a long history of turning esoteric intellectual consideration to the local, the humble, the underestimated.  Young black men on street corners, for instance.  So I thought, why isn’t it perfectly respectable for me, a grad, to bring high principles to bear on these guys and their work?

So far it turns out that the academics panic, just like the bureaucrats.  Many scholars certified to work on underground or counterculture issues are from the same background themselves.  That means they have to be solidly irreproachable; they know that the people judging them will be middle-class and upper-class.  Those judges don’t watch music vids.  If they go to YouTube at all, it’s to watch lectures.  If minority scholars get too far out of the norm, they won’t be able to pay off their loans.

My profs at M/L, or at least some of them in their early years, identified with the working class.  They wore work shirts with reverse collars and were proud to know guys who sweat for a living.  But once the same men were faculty, that was all just nostalgia.   Two profs at U of C have worked with troubled boys.  One is Martin Marty who in his earliest years of ministry was the mentor for the Blackstone Rangers on behalf of his Lutheran congregation and the other is Franklin Zimring, a law prof now in California, who has done a lot of research on boys “in the system.”  Neither had a therapy background.

My church internship was in Hartford, Connecticut, which is a major therapeutic community.  I was in a group specifically for future ministers and also in a one-on-one, a very sharp woman counselor.  The issue was mostly authority: I didn’t respect my ministerial supervisor.  I empathize with bad boys.  In the earliest stories they are often a source of the Sacred.