BALTHAZAR (Fiction for a Sad Rainy Day)

Balthazar is not a real person.  I just made him up so I could write a dialogue, or think about one, anyway.  I intend him to be opposite to me but somehow overlapping like a Venn diagram.  I made him up because unlike me who spends time pondering about “sex” — at least what this culture calls “sex” which is pretty narrow and predetermined — Balthazar doesn’t think about it at all.  He just does it. He enacts thought with his body.

This is mostly fiction, made up, but other parts are real.  All writers draw from life, because what choice do we have?  Yet we two were not like that woman who has become famous for stories she found in old newspapers, sitting at tables with one short leg in the moldy basements of historical societies and small town libraries.  They reflect the interests of people who know little about the world outside their own, a defensive strategy in a world that has gone back to the danger of world wars with money meaning more than guns.  Why kill people when you can entrap them into systems that are more profitable?

Maybe you know about Edward Said’s book called “Orientalism,” which intrigued a lot of people.

“Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author developed the idea of "Orientalism" to define the West's historically patronizing representations of "The East"—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. Said argued that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern World, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies who produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power., 

“According to Said, in the Middle East, the social, economic, and cultural practices of the ruling Arab elites indicate they are imperial satraps who have internalized the romanticized "Arab Culture" created by French, British and, later, American Orientalists; the examples include critical analyses of the colonial literature of Joseph Conrad, which conflates a people, a time, and a place into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.”   (Wiki)

I try to apply the ideas to the autochthonous people of the rez.  (Not all of them.)  Actually, a lot of people (like my family) think of all people of color as belonging to this category — dark, mysterious, and probably dangerous.  To be avoided.  But I was attracted.  

The characteristic Balthazar and I shared most was resistance to attachment, both of us but for quite different reasons.  Mine was to preserve objectivity as I had been taught in seminary, to distance the intensely emotional so as to consider it accurately.  His was to walk through the experience, add it to the others, and emerge from the other side, knowingly.  My stance which in seminary we had called “standing outside the theological circle” — knowing but not believing — made him curious.  He wished to believe, but had not found anything worth commitment.  In truth, neither did I.  

I’m not sure we understood what “believe” meant. Most people seem to understand it as some kind of leap of faith, but we were thinking more along the lines of testing experience, endless and contingent on the nature and state of the believer.  Some interpret “believing” as a kind of dependence but we loathed dependence as just another entrapment.

So — sex, religion, and I suppose the next big category we shared might be called scientific knowledge, knowing everything and understanding it all.  Cosmic, molecular, atomic, “deep time”, “thick history” — the new understanding, a total renewal of “reading” without print that includes the isotopes of rocks, the magnetic capacities of bird brains, and what living things still manage to float in the ocean between scraps of plastic.

This new vision did not include a big parent in the sky who might or might not save us, but rather gave us the legitimacy of our own selves, soulless, wingless, harpless, but part of everything else, crucial to the minute unfolding of time that accrued to existence.

For a while Balthazar had been an opera singer, a tenor in small venues, vibrant but undisciplined, which is forbidden in opera since the plot lines hold the melodrama.  So for a while he ran a boy band where they were undisciplined as well as melodramatic, if not operatic.  That was more fun, he said, but everyone accused him of the major sin of the moment, which was sex with boys, though women having sex with important men soon became a more popular thing to condemn.  I suspect he actually did “sex work” as a definable occupation but we never talked about it.  How could we?  I knew nothing that wasn’t in a book.  (Not novels.)

My literary life, which I disguised by living on a rez, was of near-lascivious interest to him and that was a pleasure to me because I could explore so many things without being put down for not really understanding Wittgenstein.  In fact, we share contempt for PhD darlings who are mostly of interest to young men because young women didn’t care and stayed away, the same as they avoided the seedy bars where those arrogant nobodies hid out, thinking they were accepted by the working class and engaging in what some call “splitting hairs”.  By now the working men are in nice homes with four foot wide TV sets.  They don’t talk much.

So now we come to another interest: death.  There’s a famous literary book called “The Sense of an Ending.” by Frank Kermode. Forget the novel and the movie that used the same title.  I need to reread it, esp. since a new epilogue has been added and it has such timely relevance, but the Oxford publishing wing is shut down temporarily because of the Pandemic.  “Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit.”  The entry from the Oxford Press misspells “Burroughs.”  Education has died.  At least standardized spelling.

Balthazar doesn’t carry his books around — reads them and discards them.  I keep them on endless shelves, higgledy-piggeldy, sideways in front of properly organized categories or sideways because they are too tall for the place on the shelf though they fit with the shorter others.  That’s the trouble with concrete real stuff — it doesn’t always fit.

I’ll tell you more if there’s another rainy sad day.  He takes a pill or a potion on such a day.  I just get acid-minded.  I was raised in the rain.  It made Ireland acid. When I was little I read a fairy tale about an old Irish couple who lived in a vinegar cruet and when it broke, they took their door with them.  I wonder if I could find it again. It was disguised history.

THE FOURTH KITTEN

There were four kittens in the last batch. That’s the way the gestating wombs in a cat are arranged: a pair of pouches big enough for two kittens each.  The most recent Littles were Blue Bunny’s creations but Tuxie had two kittens just a little later.  I managed to remove them, so these Littles had a double mom.  It’s harder when there are two Momcats and they take turns guarding babies.  They get in the birth box and spread out over the kittens, sometimes both of them.  If they think there’s major danger they move the kittens to farthest away reading chair, but I bring them all back to the birth box in the closet.

Two viruses circulate among cats in this village: one that is a virus related to dog distemper except it's feline and one that gets in eyes.  Sometimes kittens survive so there are five Big cats: the two Momcats; Plushie, the soft and tolerant tomcat who gets hurt by meaner tomcats from elsewhere;  white Salt who once had a dark partner named Pepper who is still around sometimes; and Spot, renamed Mr.Lust after he kept mauling kittens and the Momcats ran him out.  Yesterday I was typing when a goblin face appeared from behind the screen: the Mooch is still showing up now and then.  He'd been sleeping in the back corner of shelves next to me.  It’s a colony, not pets.

I try not to name them but these were called by their coat patterns to monitor well-being:  Stripe, Streak, Splotch and Saddle.  I think it was Splotch who became sick enough to die, but all four are rangy, scroungy, fragile little specimens.  I haven’t kept track of gender.

Unusually, Blue Bunny this time had two kittens, then 24 hours later another two kittens.  I don’t know whether they were from different tomcats or which tomcats or whether they were germinated or gestated a day apart. It was unique that when I counted their knobby little heads to see where they were, one was always missing, the fourth kitten.  And it wasn’t the same one.

Sometimes the missing kitten was sleeping against Plushie while the others were dozing in the sunlight.  Once in a while the wanderer was enjoying an empty cardboard box that just fit him.  Maybe the little one was looking for remnants in the feeding bowls.  By now the kittens are SmallCats.  They are more different. 

(The spellcheck hates me to be atypical and constantly changes things, sometimes to new words.  This includes my email address which is disastrous.  I hate its guts, clearly programmed by some compliant, narrow, inexperienced, nonreader techie.  What happened to the literate app I had before?)

One likes to think that the missing kitten was “better” in some way: more inclined to explore, less in need of constant sleep, able to separate, more like a leopard that wants solitude than a lion pride lounging on each other.  It was a temptation to write a little story about that 4th kitten and romanticize it.  But dying all alone is not happy.

Not that this 4th kitten was alone.  The one who died slept up against my ribcage night before last, though it was very sick and I didn’t think it would last until dawn.  The kittens all have oozing eyes and clogged noses, but this one was sitting or propping with its face to the ceiling in order to get more air.  The similarity to Covid-19 was unmistakeable and quite possibly it IS a corona virus.  The best I could do was wipe faces with warm water on a cotton ball.  I had cat eye drops that were supposed to be soothing, but the kittens turned into razor machines because they hated them so much.  

In a previous generation, I didn’t quite wait long enough to remove Bunny’s new kittens.  She came back inside soon enough to see what I was doing, took one kitten down under the house because the trap door was open, and was in such a hurry that when she came back for the black kitten that turned out to be Tuxie, she grabbed the kitten by one leg and ran just ahead of me down the hatch.  Tuxie screamed horribly.  Bunny tucked the two babies in the barely dug-out part of the ground under the geranium window.  She didn’t tend them very often but they survived in the dark, hearing me and the radio upstairs.  One day Tuxie came staggering out of the hole, mewing.  Then the other kitten, the gray one that later had a damaged face so bad that I took him for the vet to euthanize him.

So Tuxie has always been a dependent, demanding cat who attached to Bunny more than to her own kittens.  Neither Momcat really focussed on babies and if they did give them attention, it was on their tail end to help excretion.  The front ends were neglected nor did the tomcats pay particular attention.  Tuxie takes a lot of rejection because she is so aggressive, handy with claws, ready to smack transgressors, even me.  I smack back. 

Whatever Bunny is doing, Tuxie wants to be right beside her doing the same thing.  This is not always convenient or even very possible.  I’m more indulgent with Bunny, remembering how devoted she was to Finnegan, that renegade destroyer of house interiors who peed in the geranium pots.  Bunny would sit alongside Finnegan and lean on him, something like the way the HalfCats now lean on Plushie, who is practically inert compared to what Finnegan was.  I figured that tomcat, who joined us as a kitten from outer space, might have been a “bengal” with exotic genes, but more likely was just from Butte where the weak don’t survive, not even if they’re human. 

But mostly, I don’t interfere with cat life except to run off intruder tomcats and to slip kittens from their beginning to their end, quickly and humanely as possible. If I fail at that, I pet them and cuddle them and keep the cat food coming.  Last night when it became clear that Splotch was breathing slower and slower, I found a box that fit, put a thick towel in the bottom, and focused a lamp to keep it warm.  When death came close, the kitten thrashed and turned over, its mind gone but its body still wanting to get air.  The other cats wanted to climb in, not because of concern for Splotch but because they all want to get into any box they see.

Memory from my early childhood was with me.  My first cat was dying in a box by the basement coal furnace where my mother put it to keep it warm. It was about 1944 and she was a farm girl.  No one took a cat to the vet.  It took a day or so for the cat to die.  I squatted alongside with my hands together — “Don’t touch that cat!” — and my elbows close to my sides.  It was not emotional.  I just wanted to know.

When my mother, one of a set of four girls, was the oldest of youngsters, their old horse died.  Their father pulled the carcass over the hill so it wouldn’t be seen but didn’t bury it.  The girls went daily to monitor the decomposition, dispassionately, not touching  It taught them to be careful about attaching to living beings, because they die.  But then there are new creatures wanting to attach and it all goes on.

CONFUSION

For people who watch this sort of thing carefully, I was nudged to see that I had posted the same essay twice, so I wrote a new one.  I'm discombobulated.  My mail application is not working.  A new modem is coming -- that may fix it.

LOCAL HISTORICAL PLAGUES

Two major epidemics have affected the history of the Blackfeet but are largely unknown, even by the People themselves.  One was an epidemic of trachoma that blinded many people and the other was a plague of mange that caused a great many horses to be killed.  it also affected dogs.

Alonzo Skunkcap lived in a log cabin two doors down from the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife.  He was very old and had been blinded by trachoma, (awkwardly related to STD) a disease that settles in tender sexual organs instead of eyes.  Wood stoves made eyes easy targets because the floating particulate irritated them.  So many people went blind that other tribes called the Blackfeet “the one-eyed people.”

“Trachoma is a contagious bacterial infection that affects the surface of the eyes. Over time, scar tissue or ulcers can form that lead to blindness. Currently around 1.9 million people worldwide are blind or visually impaired by trachoma, and it remains a public health problem in 44 countries.”

When the much-maligned Doug Gold came to Browning because his father was the Presbyterian minister in town, and became the superintendent of schools, he had a friend back east who was an expert eye doctor.  He arranged for the man to come to treat the sufferers and also to teach Gold and others how to treat the infection themselves.  It was simple.  One used a matchstick to roll the eyelid inside out and coated the underside with a medicinal ointment that killed the infection, which was not a virus.  These were the early days of antibiotics.

“Recorded knowledge of trachoma dates back as far as 1900 bc , with descriptions appearing in the Egyptian Ebers papyrus. Ancient Greek physicians were also familiar with the disease, and Galen described the rough inner lining of the upper eyelid that is symptomatic of repeated infections. Ibn 'Isa, an Arab physician during the 11^th century, correctly observed that chronic trachoma infection results in trichiasis, which is a painful condition characterized by infolding of the upper eyelid such that the eyelashes scratch the cornea. European experiences with trachoma were first noted during the French occupation of Egypt in the late 18^th century. During the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, trachoma emerged as a well-documented public health problem in England, parts of Europe, and the United States, with several nations forming eye hospitals whose specific aim was the treatment and quarantine of the disease.”

My “learning” horse was cheap because he was suspected of mange, which was an historical pandemic among horses. The cavalry simply shot hundreds of horses to stop it, though it meant the people lost their wealth.  I had remembered this as happening here, but now I think it happened more to the Nez Perce herds.  I can’t find historical confirmation online as Wikis tend to avoid such topics.

When I was hired to monitor Jr. Hi. study halls in 1988, I was also required to watch the school buses arrive to prevent bullying as well as catching those who saw a good chance to ditch school.  I sat on a parapet to watch and a dog would come to visit with me.  I petted him and saw he had a homemade collar that said, “Imitah.”  Blackfeet for dog.  But I didn’t register that this dog had mange.  I was dumb.

The boy who had collared the dog asked me why I paid attention to it.  Then he told his father and the dog disappeared.  The father knew mange and knew the definitive cure for it.  The boy told me his father had “taken my dog to the country.”  I’m ashamed to be so ignorant.

TB and polio were both once prevalent on the Blackfeet rez.  At one point in the Fifties, before the vaccine, tourists would be afraid to stop in Browning or if they had to, would stay in their cars and just roll down the windows a crack to ask questions.  Before I could teach in 1961, I had to have a TB test.  Testing as many people as possible was one of the ways TB was brought under control, though the bug still lingers.  

If one accepts the premise that living things are defined by nuclei with DNA contents (and a few other fragments of DNA in small bodies inside the cell) and that DNA fragments can float and move throughout the air, water, and soil, then we must also accept that DNA are bits of life instructions that can be either helpful or not, devastating or unnoticed. Diseases are only visible manifestations of the underlying and persistent causes, which are poverty, inability to wash up with soap. bad nutrition, decaying shelter and the like.  

There is a major collection of knowledge about viruses, esp. those of “colds” and “flu” that are capable of morphing quickly so they renew their potency.  Much of the work on Corvid19 is informed by SARS and MERS, other viruses that crossed from animals to create pandemics, though not as big or global as this one.  HIV comes closer, but is so stigmatized that scientists and media both avoid talking about it, which is not helpful.

“Two or 6 minutes of exposure to soap and water decreased the infectivity of HIV by more than 1000-fold, the authors report in the medical journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. When the virus was in a CVL-seminal fluid mixture, a stronger concentration of soap in water was required to reduce viral infectivity by 30-fold.”

www.natap.org/2003/nov/113003_21.htm

It’s impossible to scrub the body internally, so the virus is safe inside someone unless there are antibodies or some drug that can change its DNA/RNA directions.  But it is never emphasized enough that soap is a necessity and often not available to a victim of poverty or homelessness.

My intimate adventures were before HIV, so I worried more about pregnancy or poverty. I was more endangered by the latter.  Nevertheless, this household of cats today could easily bring in zoonoses from grassland rodents, like hantavirus, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, tularemia, and plague.  One does not normally wash cats with soap and water, nor do they wash the mice they catch.

There is a theory of health that talks about living in an alert and harmonious way, holistically.  This becomes relevant when challenges are so undetectable, omnipresent, and potentially devastating.  But there’s another angle which is nearly opposite, which is that the body’s protections “learn” according to exposure and if nothing is ever present, always disinfected or prevented, the immune system is dumb.  Its book has no pages.  This is also a point of view I accept, so that leaves me with contradictions.

A third approach, which I like, notes that the body produces its own preventatives as molecules that come from internal organs, generated by happiness and safety.  A contented and productive life often means good health.  As a culture we are not supporting this as much as we should.  One can only pretend to sell happiness; it’s not for sale. In fact, it’s not found through pursuit. It is an emergence from a lot of other things, including risk.

5 KEY BOOKS FOR MY LINE OF THOUGHT

The ideas I've been exploring for the past decades are hard to convey to anyone else because I came to them in small shifts over many years, sometimes not realizing how strange they may seem to more conventional people, even at seminaries where they should have been at home.  Maybe it would help if I offered a list of books that were milestones.  Each has one of five insights that add up to a new way to understand how to understand the world. I keep a longer list, but these five are a good start.  They are small books and not difficult.

1.  Mircea Eliade defends and describes the idea that sacredness can be felt in ordinary settings as well as the big visions.  It is a matter of feeling, not theology.

2.  D. W. Winnicott explains how a person develops with the help of older caretakers, building on childhood. This is not about discipline but about attachment, which is love.

3.  Robert Schreiter shows how under all our theories and requirements, humans share far deeper commonalities that can resolve the differences of religious systems. It's far different than catechisms or icons.

4.  Stephen Porges finds the evolved structure of the vagus nerve that makes mammals into caretakers of each other, because mammals that don't do that will die. Reptiles don't nurse their babies.

5.  Antonio Damasio maps out the long story of how we came to be ourselves, tracing mutations through evolution from microbes to the feeling creatures that we are in the midst of all these other beings.

“THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: The Nature of Religion” by Mircea Eliade (1957)  This book responds to Otto’s IDEA OF THE HOLY which I never really read.  Eliade’s office was in the Meadville/Lombard building when I was there and I often encountered him but never talked to him.  His book is foundational for me.

“PLAYING AND REALITY” by D.W. Winnicott  (1971)  The first “teddy bear” book I read that led me to Bowlby and Kohut.  This is one of the gentle and comprehensive English object relations people whose books I found late at night in the Hyde Park Powell’s bookstore. 

“CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES” by Robert J Schreiter.  (1985)  How to think about Christianity when explaining it to people who are not Christian or even Western.  Schreiter belongs to a religious order, The Society of Religious Blood, and was a professor whose course I took while at the U of Chicago Div School Cluster.  This book is meant for missionaries but is not focused on conversions.  Rather it draws on the deep meanings where the similarities are shared because we are all human.

“THE POCKET GUIDE TO POLYVAGAL THEORY: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe.”  by Stephen W. Porges  (2017)  Anchoring “feelings” in physiology, this anatomical expansion of the freeze/flee/fight/fawn responses to danger also notes our Frame of Expression (my term) and how we use it to create empathy which is the foundation of humans working together.

“THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures” by Antonio Damasio (2018)  A summary of what an educated person should know that dispels the conventional 19th century and even medieval ways of thinking that confine us and blind us. It throws open the future.

THERE IS NO BOTTOM LINE

Though I’m vitally concerned with the return of whole body elements of thought, there is still a place for logic, nearer to mathematical “if-then” thinking.  For instance, what if we replaced the Christian obsession with life after death with something more like “belonging to creation”.  The great harmony and enfolding that is described after someone experiences “mystical” deep experience might be a persuasive emotional matrix as much as some abstract goal like “progress”.  

These experiences, when they are claimed by “religion”, become just another justification for theories and organizations invested in self-perpetuation.  They are claimed as “founding” but they are more like “found and exploited.”  The Big Three (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have been particularly resourceful at enveloping deep experiences of individuals into pre-existing governmental and cultural structures, so that they provide vocations and fine buildings.  They have coped with competition by building what they take to be power. 

Most of the time they also frame reasons for responsible moral behavior, but occasionally they become perverted into sin and destruction, often because they are picked up by pre-existing greed for control. This is particularly enabled by the pattern of the patriarch, the monarch, the anthropomorphic god — because the imaging becomes exemplars of humans complete with their shortcomings.  Simply shooting the king so as to become him is a consequence.

Widening inclusion of concerns as far as one can is a better alternative to obeying “the highest”, which blurs into status, entitlement, and domination.  Turning a perversion of Darwin’s theory of evolution into Hobbs’ idea of survival of the bloodiest and most violent is not a path to a healthy society or a joyful life.  Domination as a key to relationship needs to be replaced by attachment, an evolved phenomenon basic to mammal life but not well explored except as human belonging, patriotism, loyalty.  This is partly because we see “attachment” in terms of sentimentality that is a cultural construct rather than the intrinsically evolutionary and physical foundation of survival, arising from the need to nurture babies.

We love what we know in a sensory flesh-based way, the way your dog loves you even if you’re mean to him. His expression of love is contact and protection, just as in the best of families who have shared experience over time, each helping the belonging to the whole.  We’re told (that’s my phrase for “scientific information based on research”) that the outside limits of our capacity to know individuals is probably about a hundred people, the size of an original tribe or an extended family.  About the number that a public school teacher has responsibility for in a year.  It’s a limit — not an ideal.

Few people know well a hundred places, but we tend to attach to them as we do to people, in that sensory way of naming, seeing metaphor and interacting.  Someone who can’t do this is limited at best and a form of, well, “sociopath” at worst.  The results of inability to attach to place are unhappy.  As reassurance, many have learned to attach to virtual people and places depicted in stories — writing, film, paintings, dance, whatever has this sensory narrative dimension.  We sometimes call it “church.”

Going back, one moral principle is that “good” is doing the best for as many involved entities as possible, including animals and land.  Maybe conceptualized virtual things like nations or books.  The difficulty is our not knowing enough, which explains our yearning for omniscience, and our “explanation” for why God lets bad things happen — bad things in our view which might be justified by a greater good somewhere else, though we don’t know what that might be.  

How do we make that concrete, felt?  This pandemic is good for viruses (bitter laugh).  It is breaking open pre-existing and fossilized systems and schools of thought that have been preventing growth or even justice.  (Incarcerating poor and stigmatized people.)  But the price is tearing open attachments around the planet, a high price in grief and confusion.  As the more steely among us suggest, the virus is the predator that culls the herd by killing the old, the infirm, and the unwary.  Part of the price is numbness, failure to reinvest, avoidance of future attachment.  

It will take generations to forget.  Already the deification of family is raised up without explaining that a family is not necessarily biological, genomic.  And yet the kernel of attachment is formed during gestation and the infant years afterwards when the mother/caregiver teaches the new being the sensory stroking, cleaning, cherishing that create a virtual world of communication between them.  This first experience of embrace is what becomes the ability to experience one's engulfment by Being.  

The funniest google I’ve run across is a list of “Disney’s Best Epiphanies” which are the sentimental plot changers and pay-offs of cartoon stories.  I shouldn’t sneer, but . . .  Childish examples include things like falling in love or winning a prize — happy immediate human moments.  I wish I’d kept a notebook with examples of the deeper, truly ultimate moments.  This is William James whom we did not study in seminary.

“In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which bring it about that the mystical classics have, as been said, neither birthday nor native land.”

Today’s Western attitude is “how can I make money off this?” (Disney?)  The preponderant Buddhist attitude has been, “sit down and be part of it.”  If we could maintain a consciousness of the stunning photos of the galaxies, an awareness of their melodic gyring through space, and the echo in our own blood molecules, we might accept the idea that we are minute participants — nevertheless messengers from the past to the future, links that are not broken but transformed.  Our grief over lost attachments is valid but not the whole story.
Yet not to attach is not to be human.

COME DOWN FROM YOUR SEAT OF SCORN!

Being an animal control officer was never a goal of mine. I just needed a job and civil service has always been desirable.  It IS service to others, and it’s hard to fire someone for not conforming.  I did not suspect the five years there would be a key experience, partly because of going door-to-door all over Portland and Multnomah County and partly because of the research and brain-storming that I shared there.  

The county was trying to whittle down its health department — always a target if there’s not an epidemic — and wanted to retire their public veterinarian, Dr. Watts.  But they didn’t want to just dismiss him — had no reason.  Burgwin, our innovative boss, saw that he could be a major advantage and we added Watts to the shelter staff. We began to have a definite scientific aspect. 

We got more than we bargained for since he was a conservative Christian. Wildly emotional citizens hurt and angered by our restrictions on their pets were passionately righteous in their attacks on us.  The first time one of these jumped Dr. Watts in his white doctor’s coat, the Doc drew himself up and launched into scripture.  “It is all very well for you to sit on the seat of scorn and criticize us,” he sad.  “Where were you when thus and thus and so and so?”  He did not neglect the moral aspect of the work.

Quite different was what I learned from being a sheriff’s deputy as we were when I was hired. Our trucks were on the sheriff’s radio so that we knew what they faced and they kept tabs on us.  In those days social conformity was more usual, but angry people can be dangerous.

As attention shifted to drugs, commissioners decided our work was not vital and we were moved to Environmental Services.  The good side was that we got our own radio frequency and kept our own transmission records.  Environmental workers were protocol people so I was authorized to develop a handbook for animal control officers and no one interfered with what I put in it.

Rabies was our great prompter when it came to zoonoses.  It is 100% fatal, not just carried by wild animals but by dogs in our homes.  The vaccine against it is 100% effective, so to make sure people got their dogs vaccinated, it was connected to dog licenses and recorded at the shelter.  Proof that a dog had been immunized meant that it did not have to be killed to have its brain analyzed for the virus.  Intervention could be effective in humans if begun right away, but it was painful and expensive.  We officers had rabies vaccinations, but no one knew whether they worked in humans.

Part of the research for my fattening textbook was about epidemics and pandemics.  Portland is a port city, which makes it vulnerable to ships, one of the most prolific vectors for disease-carrying vermin like rats.  Maybe you’ve seen the discs on anchoring hawsers that are meant to prevent rats from running down the ropes.  They must jump in the water and swim ashore.

Another predictor was population density.  The more rats, the more diseases in their fleas.  The more loose dogs, the more likely to be unvaccinated rabies carriers.  In spite of constantly euthanizing unwanted dogs, there were always more, more, more because they are gifted interstitial survivors, grouping and roaming and sliding in and out of households.  We began to talk about epidemics among dogs and Dr. Watts agreed that new viruses were likely to appear.

It did.  The name of it was “parvovirus.”  By now it is a scourge much like distemper, contagious and widespread.  Here are descriptions from the internet:

“Parvovirus CPV2 is a relatively new disease that appeared in the late 1970s. It was first recognized in 1978 and spread worldwide in one to two years. The virus is very similar to feline panleukopenia (also a parvovirus); they are 98% identical, differing only in two amino acids in the viral capsid protein VP2.”

“Canine parvovirus is a contagious virus mainly affecting dogs. CPV is highly contagious and is spread from dog to dog by direct or indirect contact with their feces. Vaccines can prevent this infection, but mortality can reach 91% in untreated cases. Treatment often involves veterinary hospitalization.” Wikipedia

Scientific name: Canine parvovirus 2

Virus: Canine parvovirus

Rank: Species

Higher classification: Protoparvovirus

Species: Carnivore protoparvovirus 1

Family: Parvoviridae

“Protoparvovirus is the name of a genus of viruses in the Parvovirinae subfamily of the virus family Parvoviridae. Vertebrates serve as natural hosts. There are currently eleven species in the genus including the type species Rodent protoparvovirus 1 for which the exemplar virus is minute virus of mice (MVM). This genus also includes canine parvovirus (CPV), which causes gastrointestinal tract damage in puppies that is about 80% fatal, and porcine parvovirus (PPV), which is a major cause of fetal death and infertility in pigs. The genus divides phylogenetically into two branches, one that contains many founder members of the family, such as MVM, CPV and PPV, which have been studied in considerable detail, and a second branch occupied exclusively by predicted viruses whose coding sequences were identified recently in the wild using virus discovery approaches, but whose biology remains minimally explored. This second branch currently contains two species whose members infect humans, called Primate protoparvovirus 1 and Primate protoparvovirus 3.”  (Wiki)

In Middle Eastern countries and other places that are undeveloped, populations of pariah dogs and scavenger pigs belong to no one and are hot beds for disease because in such places they eat garbage and carrion, even dead people.  I have not heard of pigs carrying rabies, but the dogs often do.  Certainly, those countries have taboos on eating pigs, with good reason.

Reservation dogs are often prey to distemper and parvo deaths, esp. among puppies, and they don’t always get rabies shots.  Technically they are not pariah dogs but simply a “tribe” or community that is interwoven with the people.  I have not heard of rabies outbreaks or individual examples though they exist in Mexico.

The point is that viruses and epidemic explosions of them exist everywhere.  To keep from being vulnerable, we must always be alert.  We are animals with coded genomes that we share with the rest of life.  It's a responsibility.

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD

This line of thought hardened when I tried to phone my brother and was told he died two years ago. When I called cousins to tell them, they reluctantly added others who had died without me ever knowing. My cousin said, "We didn't want you to feel bad." Bad is not the word.  These were not pandemic deaths.  We're just an aging generation.

Researchers are beginning to wonder whether Covid19 affects brains, maybe later after the original life-threatening episode is over, even if it was less dramatic — just flu.  This issue is very lively to me because of family experience, mostly on the paternal side.  To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a terrifying story that was in one of my media feeds today:

https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/?
utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

It is obvious to some, of course, that our President — even as he evades proper medical diagnosis and treatment — has this deterioration of the brain and that — linked with a devil’s disposition — he is killing people out of failure to perform his duties.  Do we forgive him for that because of frontal lobe deterioration preventing him from thinking? Not me.  "Bad" isn't the word.

In my immediate family there are three instances of brain deterioration because of trauma to the forehead which undoubtedly damaged that frontal lobe, though no one recognized it or understood it.  One was my father in a car accident in 1948.  One was my brother after a fall in the early Eighties, and one was my cousin after repeated motorcycle accidents.  We already knew about my mother’s uncle whose wife “had hardening of the arteries in her brain” so that she was in an institution.  The gentle rock-hound uncle never divorced her but occasionally had lady partners living with him in Oakland. My mother always liked them.

Of my aunts, the one on my father’s side and the two on my mother’s side all died demented, but not from identifiable frontal temporal lobe failure so much as global confusion.  I blame my mother’s sisters' failure on farm chemicals, fertilizers and particularly spraying for flies. My mother was clear-headed to the end. So was the cousin that grew up with her.

My family is in three streams because my mother’s sisters and cousin married brothers and a cousin.  They were from ag lives.  Two were sane to the end and one, a farmer, was not.  There is another brother who never married anyone because he was "paranoid schizophrenic" and mostly institutionalized.  No one names him or admits he exists.  I saw his photograph.

The most interesting case is my father’s only sister and her two children.  This aunt and her daughter both had a terrible case of flu when the daughter was in high school.  Both developed what was diagnosed as Alzheimers, to the extent that it can be diagnosed pre-mortem.  The aunt died, the cousin is at home.  The mother of this mother and my father, that is, my grandmother on that side, developed a severe goiter in the Thirties, thyroid disfunction because of living in northern Manitoba before iodine was discovered to be vital.  Knowing what we do about epigenetics it’s quite possible that my aunt’s and cousin’s “Alzheimers” are as related to the lingering cross-generational effects as they are to the strong flu infections.  Of the cousin’s two children, the girl seems stable, productive, and cheerful, but the boy has struggled with severe alcoholism since grade school years.  His own daughter is fine, an achiever.

Doubling back to consider the son of my father's sister, his own family -- I'm told -- struggles with autism.  He married a twin with autism tendencies and their only daughter who seems to have inherited them, married a man with those traits which passed on to three children. They don't find anything wrong.  I closed them out, so I don't really know.  Of course, Aspies -- high-functioning autistics   -- will claim they are simply an alternative and justified.

What I grasp from all this is that most families wrestle with mental and emotional issues without understanding or maybe even not coping very well.  Since there is sometimes no real scientific explanation and because the issues of attachment are so strong, a cloud of denial and excuses often moves the issues into moral judgement to justify excluding people.  Pain is evil, is it not?  There’s a price to excluding people who are evil, no? And unaccountability is always painful.

My father's family is particularly vulnerable to these kinds of issues because of their high valuing of intelligence and education.  This was their Golden Calf, a golden calfskin binding a book.  

One aunt who died in a nursing home was a nurse during WWII in a time of overwhelming air pollution.  In London she  said the smog was so thick one could barely see the counters in department stores.  She returned somehow changed.  The fog of war was a subtly killing mist.

Of her four children, one had the motorcycle concussions but was always strung tight, two were twins, one can’t hold a job and is obsessive-compulsive, and the girl became a nurse like her mother, the WWII nurse, who had a sort of Munchausen syndrome by proxy and became convinced that her daughter had some kind of brain problem which subjected her to medical scrutiny and invasion.  The son of this daughter was brilliant and became a scientist.  That daughter, who is now retirement age, lives in a culture of variant medicine that works on the edge of what is accepted.

What I’m saying and trying to analyze, is that humans are not at all the defined and identifiable standard individuals we assume, especially in the American culture of standing alone and resisting community pressure.  And then, secondarily, the attachment groups of family and community, try to stay safe from the ambiguity and confusion by denying and inventing, as often feeling motivated out of necessity and self-preservation, emotions that resist scrutiny.

My strategy has been high independence and sometimes invasive inquiry.  I want to know why.  I realize how much has been hidden.  When my cousins were clearly hurt and angry when I tried to talk about all this, I decided to simply withdraw.  It was ironic.  My mother’s side had already built a wall to close me out.  Now I closed the door on my father’s side.  My mother and brothers are dead, a final exclusion.

When I had the animal control job I got deeper into the physical expression of life in context — the dogs’ lives — and found the Unitarian Universalist movement which seemed invested in high thought and carried me to seminary at the U of C Div School.  Ironically, it was not the traditional Ph.D.-style education that had meaning as much it was the English psychological thought I began to find late at night at the Hyde Park Powell’s bookstore.  These thinkers were kinder, sweeter people than Freud, less inscrutable than the French.  No one in my family knows anything about these books.  But we’re many generations along now — I don’t know the younglings.  This fluid and erratic blog records what I do know.

On the news I see bulldozers burying the unknown dead in boxes closer together than recommended in life.  Their families will never find them, but maybe the families are dispersed.  It's a coming-apart time.

THE ETHOS OF THE DOMICILE

Behind the furniture on the bottom shelves were these books about houses, only part of a trove accumulated in the Seventies.  They were as much moral and practical, small houses, often craftsmen made or furnished, inexpensive and creative, probably impossible in places with tight zoning rules, like Valier.  If I had been male, energetic, belonging to the kind of community that came together for projects, I might have lived like this.  But I just bought the books and others like them.  Some of them are worth more than a hundred dollars on Amazon, where I got these frontispiece photos, though they are thin paperbacks.

I relate this way of living to the beginnings of the "class" that was created by education as wealth.  Not that they had a lot of money, but that they could get it through skills.  As one man said to me, "If I have money, I spend it.  When it is gone, I make more."  These people stayed in one place, not cities but small towns and a little ways outside them.  Some were academic in college towns.  There was a care for recycling and little interest in massive sleek appliances.

They say that the present predicament we're in is due to two forces:  obsessive hoarding by the people who got rich after WWII, often immigrants to the US from Europe, and the forces of the Internet which makes location "virtual" -- that is, you can be anywhere because you are always in the same place in a mobile culture.  No place is unique.

Along with the greed went ostentation and technical feats so that today movies show massive houses of stone and sheet glass with vast travertine floors and fabulous chandeliers.  Only recently have I been seeing Brit movies where people live in row houses with dining rooms or kitchens that open with sliding glass doors onto back gardens, walled and cultivated -- not for drying clothes.  Good for dogs and kids.  Maybe we're returning to the values of the Seventies, so that we have corners suitable for a reading chair instead of a four-foot video screen.  There are places in these houses where a cat could curl up.

Near Portland there was a piece of land along the highway where McDonald Mansions were built, some said too close together for fire trucks to get through.  This turned out to be true and there were losses.  We used to speculate about how they could be converted into multi-family units when that became inevitable.

Before I could move back here, I accumulated books by Mary Emmerling, a decorator who specialized in nostalgic cottages, each following a theme like a New England beach or a SW adobe.  She had a truckload of furnishings that were brought by a team who set them up in each place.  When I did come, I ordered blue and white striped wallpaper from Mary Emmerling's business. All my front rooms are peach-colored and my main accessory is books. 

I'm clearing things away now.  









No idea why this photo is upside down!