prairiemary

LITTLE THINGS ARE A BIG THING

2012-03-19T09:31:00.002-06:00

At my last eye exam my eyes were unchanged in spite of several years with Diabetes II, which was diagnosed by an eye exam. The life of my eye doctor, however has been turned upside down, not by medical conditions but by the health business. He has left the big clinic where he practiced for years, just as my previous eye doctor left that same clinic and then left the town. This is not unusual. I have only a dim understanding of what is going on, but I don’t think I’m far wrong. Being a physician is no longer a profession: it is a profit-making enterprise and the docs are being squeezed and managed with the rest of us.

Obamacare is beside the point. Doctors have made a devil’s bargain to get rid of the burden of paperwork and other management chores. They have lost their autonomy. Some have lost their morality. Whether they have lost their skill is irrelevant since that’s not what counts anymore. In fact, the nature of disease and the protocol for handling it is has changed, esp. in the case of something chronic like diabetes. One monitors with tests, notes the results, and runs one’s finger down the list of prescriptions indicated, and that’s it. No wonder people are disintermediating their doctors by simply going to the lab for the tests. If the doctors didn’t have control of the prescription pad, why would we need them?

The science of “omics,” which is the goofy name for the study of how operating genetics run the body, happened upon something very fortunate. Their main “lab rat” is a Ph.D. whose entire genome is recorded and studied. Not just that but also an integrative Personal "Omics" Profile, or iPOP. The word "omics" indicates the study of a body of information, such as the genome (which is all DNA in a cell), or the proteome (which is all the proteins). Michael Snyder's iPOP also included his metabolome (metabolites), his transcriptome (RNA transcripts) and autoantibody profiles, among other things. They saw that he had a vulnerability to diabetes though no one else in his family had ever been diagnosed with it.

Then one day he caught a virus and that actually GAVE him diabetes II. file:///Users/maryscriver/Desktop/omics%20&%20viruses ScienceDaily (Mar. 15, 2012) The team watched and learned.

When I was at seminary, one of my classmates (a woman in her twenties) caught the flu and then she had diabetes I. That meant injected insulin and constant monitoring. I’m happy to report that she’s maintained well and -- thirty years later -- serves a church happily. One does not have to die of diabetes IF one can maintain the protocol, which is rigorous.

I’ve only been diagnosed a few years but thanks to Internet contact, mostly Dave Lull (the cross-pollinating librarian) and Jenny Ruhl http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/bio.php I’m able to stay in control with one metformin a day plus food changes. Since I live alone, I cut my intake way back, lost fifty pounds, eliminated sugar, most carbs, white bread, corn fructose, processed food, and so on. I’ve always eaten a lot of veggies, salad and nuts. I read a newsletter about foods that convert to sugar slowly -- it comes out of Australia -- and another sort of rah-rah column about getting exercise. (I don’t do well on that one.) The point is that I’m in charge of myself, though it has meant major changes. This town is in a place where people interact through food: benefit barbecues, pie socials, candy on desks, coffee and cookies after church, and so on. Restaurant meals are high sugar, high process, big portions. But I’m a solitary anyway.

Most people who have lived here all their lives and who are diagnosed with diabetes, esp. on the rez, either become dependent on meds or simply sicken and die. Changing the way they eat, the way they cook, the way they interact with family and neighbors is too much. They find it impossible to lose weight. The ecology is changing too fast for them to evolve.

When I went for a refill on one of my two prescriptions (my high blood pressure med), the big Medicare website said I could not have any more until April 4. The local pharmacy records show one more set of meds was sent to me than I evidently received. We can’t figure out where the error is. I’m going to take advantage of this to run an experiment: I’ll not take any pills until April 4 and I’ll record my blood pressure every day. Today it’s 134/79. If it starts getting too high, I’ll buy enough pills out of my pocket to last until April 4. Assuming I have the money.

The point is not my blood pressure. The point is that our ailments have become very differently envisioned. Dr. Snyder’s diabetes onset involved 40,000 genes, all interacting in unique ways. A look at the names of the researchers reveals many countries of origin and the study itself was supported by Stanford University, the National Institutes of Health, the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the European Union, the European Research Council, the Korber Foundation, the Fundación Marcelino Botín and Fundación Lilly and the Breetwor Family Foundation. Snyder undoubtedly caught his trigger-virus from his small children who interact with the other children of the Stanford academic community, people who constantly travel and host other academics.

Many of us know and admire medicins sans frontieres. Now we have (we always did) diseases sans frontieres with frequent flier miles. Most are not dramatic. (Fatigue, malaise) Many are antibiotic tolerant. Some have been triggered by our constant invention and ingestion of peculiar molecules never seen in nature, much less in bodies. So far our water here is nearly pure, off the Rocky Mountains and traveling underground about thirty miles to our aquifer. That may not last since frakking means injected unnamed chemicals into the ground. Our wheat crops, which are grown right up to the town limits, are genomically altered to be Roundup Ready, meaning high levels of herbicide can be applied. The pigeons that hang around the granaries in town are all gone. No one will say how they were eliminated. Our cancer rates are high.

Years ago I used to have a poster in my kitchen that said, “Faithfulness in little things is a big thing.” It’s attributed to St. Francis, who advocated being as basic and interwoven with nature as possible. I wonder whether there’s a gene for that. It would probably take more than a few.

WE DON'T LIKE THAT ATTITUDE

2012-03-18T08:35:00.004-06:00

"THIS AMERICAN LIFE" BROADCAST:

MAR-16-12

RETRACTION

"We've discovered that one of our most popular episodes contained numerous fabrications. This week, we detail the errors in Mike Daisey's story about visiting Foxconn, which makes iPads and other products for Apple in China. Marketplace's China correspondent Rob Schmitz discovered the fabrications."

___________

I just listened to the story described above which happens to be aired just as the Greg Mortenson trial is in the news. Truth is a hot topic. My newspaper has stopped running a feature in which they analyzed “what is the truth” in the Republican candidates’ claims. I suspect they were overwhelmed. Or maybe they discovered that people want to believe what they want to believe and facts ARE whatever you want to believe. We don’t want to hear differently. We all know how statistics can be made to lie.

Ira Glass and his crew pretty much screwed “Mr. Daisey” to the wall in terms of him exaggerating numbers, displacing events, and embroidering realities. Then they turned to another reporter from the New York Times to give them the “real” facts about Apple in China. (Thus, getting two programs out of one.) This reporter said there were two kinds of accusations. He called them two “buckets,” one of them life-threatening events like dust explosions, and the other one harsh conditions, like long hours, crowded dorms, and repetition injuries. Then he said, “We would not tolerate these conditions in America.” Which throws his credibility into doubt. Hasn’t he ever read stories about underground sweatshops in the US? (I won’t ask whether he’s ever worked under “harsh conditions.”) What about conditions in mines? And about the dust -- how much does he know about grain elevator explosions? Does he think protective laws are actually enforced?

A lot of my experience in life has been in two shifting contexts: an “Indian” reservation and JudeoChristian religion. Weeks ago a New York Times reporter called me to talk about reservation violence. I soon discovered that he knew nothing at all about reservations, not even the fact that they are entirely different from each other both because they are in different ecologies and because they were organized in different time periods with different politics, paradigms and populations. He could only assimilate what I told him through a filter of what he thought he already knew. To him -- self-evidently -- a reservation was a reservation, and an Indian was an Indian. All Indians are helpless downtrodden virtuous victims. All violence happens because the whites let it happen, maybe want it to happen. These were the categories he had in his head because was young, raised in the city, and anxious to be a revelatory hero so his story would be popular. It strikes me that Mike Daisey’s point of view was not so different. And what about Ira Glass? Isn’t he always looking for the piquant, the surprising, the revealing detail that will show how discerning he is?

As for fact-checking, what IS that anyway? Someone’s word? Glass’s New York Times reporter says that the Chinese can bring 87,000 “engineers” into a factory on short notice. Who says so? Who counted them? When I was doing temp work, I was placed with an electrical company that had “engineers.” Turned out they had no degrees -- but they were “as good as” engineers. Is a Chinese “engineer” the same thing as an American “engineer?”

The trouble with trying to determine the truth is not with the teller but with the hearer. NOT WITH THE TELLER BUT THE HEARER. Ira says to Daisey, “I don’t think this is credible.” “I have trouble believing this really happened.” What makes him the great lie detector? Has he been to China? Questioned factory workers there? What makes anyone think that young Chinese workers from the provinces trying to make as much money as they can are going to stop to explain life to a white male journalist pretending to be a businessman? Risk offending the bosses? Risk standing out from the others? Getting behind on quotas and deadlines? The person who disproves Daisey’s story is his interpreter, a young woman. What are the pressures on her? Daisey disguised her by giving her a wrong name and said she couldn’t be contacted -- what if he was trying to protect her from people who might be displeased by what he wrote and hold her responsible. If so, maybe she did a smooth job of reversing herself. She IS a translater.

The above was radio. See what your eyes tell you about Daisey. Do you believe the man in this vid could go into a Chinese iPod factory, interview people, and be told the truth?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXxAiBu7waQ

In case your crap-detector is broken, let me tell you that this vid is satire -- NOT truth. My opinion. Could this man tell what is truth and what is not? Why would Ira mistake him for a serious investigative reporter? He says he’s theatre and he is.

After you watch this vid below see whether you believe that James Frey would have a hot affair with Mike Daisey. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEWL8GjPQho

Now listen carefully to what Ira Glass is saying in this vid and factor that into this situation. Does he sound as though his values are that different than those of Daisey or Frey? Are they any different from American values? Or just plain human values? Hyping a story is a great American pastime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW6x7lOIsPE

I think this is a stupid issue. We have journalists who lie, we have novelists who tell the truth, and -- as Ira says -- we value a good story above all else. Why else would we hang onto our Bibles so tightly? Expectations, affiliations, intimidation, definitions, marketing and simple wariness affect the facts of stories all the time. That’s why we have crap detectors, a heritage from our ape ancestors so we can figure out who’s the top banana.

Someone from Greg Mortenson’s home town said to me, “You know, no one cares about his books. We just don’t like his attitude.” If in this American life, adults cannot or will not decide for themselves whether a book, a performance, or a radio show is fiction or fact -- and let their prejudices interfere -- what hope is there for a national election? I don’t like the attitude that we have to be told what to decide. But -- can we?

A WALK IN THE DARK

2012-03-17T08:32:00.002-06:00

Friday night and I watched “Munich,” which was tense enough that I kept stopping the disc to go get something to eat. By the time the end rolled around (It’s almost three hours), I was over my limit, so I went for a walk to knock back my glucose level. Two very bright “stars” were hanging at the end of the street. Not stars, really, because they are the planets Venus and Jupiter, but extra bright and there’s no moon. I don’t carry a flashlight though I walk around the little park on the next block. It’s dark but the street is dry and I know the way. The dogs are used to me by now and don’t bother to bark once I speak. I should do this every night. I should walk farther. I always feel lifted up when I do, but I forget or it’s late or the wind is blowing too hard. After watching the ambiguities of “Munich,” I really needed to relocate myself in this little village in sight of the Rockies, a relatively safe place.

I’m glad I watched the movie. The first half more-or-less sticks to reported facts (whatever facts are) but the second imagined half is pretty clearly a chance to humanize both sides while paradoxically showing how dehumanizing murder is for the murderers. (It appears that the handlers and politicians were not very human in the first place.) Every murder triggers the necessity or accident of another murder. There is no way to know for sure whether the right people are being killed. The assassination team members become targets themselves and die, if only from the simple risk of bomb-making. It’s an old repetitious story. The last shot frames in the center the twin World Trade Towers, far away, but recognizable. The real damage was not the lives lost there but, in my opinion anyway, the panicky loss of freedoms and confidence. I suppose most people don’t much feel the loss of freedom to go back and forth into Canada but we do here, particularly since it is not Canada but the USA that prevents us.

One of my little email groups remarked on David Brooks’ review of “Religion for Atheists” by Alain de Botton. Brooks was critical. He should brace himself, since another reviewer was critical of an earlier book by de Botton and found himself embroiled in a feud as intense as any Israeli/Palestinian confrontation, though confined to words. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/5712899/Alain-de-Botton-tells-New-York-Times-reviewer-I-will-hate-you-until-I-die.html Maybe de Botton’s friends will restrain him this time, but last time he said, “You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that's two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review." Not that this is inaccurate or has never happened before, but it appears that de Botton has also killed any chance of a kind review from the NYTimes. I have a movie for him to watch.

Not that I have any intention of getting involved in these “God wars.” At least not unless you can bring back Christopher Hitchens, whose thinking is always worth following no matter where it goes. I mean, what makes arguments about things like God and righteous revenge worth illustrating is not whether they are right or wrong. What counts is how much illumination can be generated about being human.

Tolerating ambiguity without being paralyzed by it seems to me vital. I do not share nor do I understand this constant insistence on KNOWING THE TRUTH and being on the right side and having things settled definitively. There’s a cautionary true tale about early Calvinist times near Boston when everyone obsessed over whether or not their sins would send them to hell. One day a woman staggered into town exhausted and crazed. She blurted that she’d settled the matter once and for all by throwing her baby into the cistern. The neighbors rushed to the woman’s house and, luckily, the child’s instincts had taken hold and it was paddling around in a circle down there in the dark water. What an image for noncomprehending but salvific struggle! Note that it was innate.

What’s wrong with saying, “I don’t know!” Or “I need more evidence.” Or even “this is an unknowable thing.” What makes people think that any God is knowable except one we made up ourselves? There are many kinds of knowing and some of them are more like feeling than rationality. Out there walking in the dark I could see a lot of stars. If I had instruments I could see far more. If I were a big satellite camera I could see zillions, so many that they practically overlap. And I’m part of it. I can feel that. I’m no star, more like a speck, but I’m here with my spiraling molecular code for receiving and it works well enough for me to write this, which feels good. Maybe important.

While I was going along, the Valier team bus came back to town. I never keep track, so I don’t know where they had been, who they played or whether they were likely to have won. They were blocks away but in this quiet town sounds carry well and I could hear boys shouting as they got off, still wound up, joking, slinging their bags out of the luggage compartment. It’s not quite freezing, highways are dry. The worst worry for the driver would have been sudden deer but a deer won’t take down a bus if the driver can stay on course.

One of my seminary classmates who had been in the army used to talk about combat decisions, meaning that then you have to do something and usually with incomplete information. It might turn out that you were badly wrong. You might not be around to find out. The old French Resistance fighter who is Spielberg’s voice in this movie about Munich says, “We’re living at the intersection of secrets.”

All through the plot it was unclear where anyone’s allegiances were: Mossod, CIA, KGB, PLO -- which factions of which nations? Where is God in such a mess? Surely He is leaning on his knees, His face in His hands, weeping. Spielberg, characteristically, finds salvation always in the act of love with a woman who provides forgiveness. But it was Golda Meir, saying “we must show that we are strong.” who ordered the vengeance for Munich.

DISSOCIATION, AVOIDANCE, HYPERAROUSAL

2012-03-16T09:33:00.003-06:00

It’s what -- sixty years? -- since Kinsey asked men about their sex lives and rocked everyone with the news that many of them had sex with other men? This in a time when they were well-advised not to admit it? And now we’re barely getting around to surveying children about whether they’ve ever been sexually abused. They have. In such high proportions -- a third admitted it which means many unadmitted or even unrecognized or repressed victims-- that we’re rocked all over again. And yet why are we surprised when our whole culture mixes sex, power, money, ownership over and over. Now even JonBenet Ramsey’s father is saying maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to dress a little child up like a seductive grown woman and put her on display. Ya think?

Now the research has gotten far enough along to identify three traumatic consequences of sexual abuse for both boys and girls. These consequences re-impose the trauma over and over.

(1) highly distressing intrusive thoughts of the sexual abuse,

(2) avoidance of thoughts, emotions, and situations related to the abuse,

(3) hyperarousal.

Pretty understandable even in terms of ordinary trauma, but with the added element of sex, stakes go up because so much of our idea of morality is bound to sex of any sort. We don’t worry about the morality of money or even about the morality of killing civilians in war, but sex is to us more powerful than religion, indeed it has become a religion with priests of its own. Not that differently than in the most backward shiria law countries who kill girls to rid themselves of dishonor.

In fact, I would say that our whole culture is showing these same three symptoms. To review:

(1) highly distressing intrusive thoughts of sexual abuse,

(2) avoidance of thoughts, emotions, and situations related to abuse,

(3) hyperarousal.

Check out the plots of our media, take a look at our newspapers or the behavior of politicians as zealously reported, listen to the imaginary life of right wing radio hate-mongers. They use the abusive language, they describe and exaggerate behavior, they express distress and scorn, but all the time in the midst of their obsession they insist that we should repress (avoid) such thoughts, emotions, and situations. Good counselors know that repression is a great way to remain attached while pretending not to be. Hyperarousal -- yes, I’m surprised that so many of them need viagra since they so easily rise to rage. But most of them are old men.

These intrusions, often thoughts (eg, self-blame, self-loathing) are then avoided through:

dissociation,

substance use,

or other avoidant-coping strategies.

“This avoidant stance, in sexual situations, can be hazardous as it interferes with the ability to confront risk, negotiate safer sex, and assert safety behaviors. Hyperarousal, chronic activation of the alarm response, interferes with the person’s ability to distinguish safe from unsafe situations. In sexual situations, the symptoms of hyperarousal impede the ability to make accurate and realistic sexual risk appraisals. This may lead to a loss of self-efficacy (or other important social or cognitive variables integral to self-care), as one doubts one’s ability to identify risk or one’s ability take steps to offset it.” (J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 59, Number 4, April 1, 2012 www.jaids.com | 331Editorial J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr Volume 59, Number 4, April 1, 2012)

Erik Erikson wrote two books that speculated about how some individuals can be representative of their times: “Young Man Luther” and “Gandhi’s Truth.” If a person can epitomize patterns in the culture, why can’t a culture personify the structure of individuals? Are we not now in a period that doubts its self-efficacy, it’s ability to take care of itself? Don’t our politicians doubt our ability to identify risk and take steps to offset it? Don’t we go back and forth between being obsessed with sex and trying to deny every trace of it?

What are the traumas that threw us into this? Pretty clear that 9/ll was a double-phallic cataclysm, two towers destroyed by two airliner jets in a from-nowhere coup. What about the spectacle of a president who got his semen on a dress whose owner flaunted it on television? What about the neglectful and confused destruction of a major, even iconic, city, New Orleans with its promises of blue-hot nights? But maybe it started with the twentieth century wars, for which some of those old men are nostalgic. They were important then.

Looking at these events in such a “high culture” way is a little fanciful but no more so than post-modern thought. In fact, maybe it IS post-modern thought. But it has no particular value unless it suggests some way to address it. Dissociation (a changed consciousness that eliminates awareness of the problem) and substance abuse are rampant but seem ineffective. Projection is the one we like the best -- it’s all the fault of the “other.”

The usual ways of addressing trauma include talking -- which can mean testifying about what happened, which requires a convincingly protected place where the talking can happen. (A court setting is hardly safe but stories written under a pseudonym might work. Or the Internet.) Art is a kind of “talking,” an expression of emotion that resolves the pressure and, given the acquisition of skill, can provide a healing sense of accomplishment. (Our schools are eliminating the arts.)

What about the content of the secrets? Research is demanded because it has become clear that our assumptions are wrong. What we think is true and happening is only a comforting fantasy that describes a set of forces and practices that don’t exist anymore, if they ever did. Family, dependable jobs, homes, retirement funds, investment.

Supply of basic needs (housing, food, medicines) is woefully lacking for too many people in this culture. It’s not uncommon for a troubled family to choose one person among them, often a child or maybe a woman or the darkest person, to be the scapegoat, heap them with blame for whatever happens, and throw them out. The whole culture does this, identifying children to send into the labyrinth where the minotaurs of combat, commerce, and cupidity lurk. We make sure the young have no guiding thread, no map, no GPS, by underfunding schools and indulging in as many wild theories about education as we have about diet.

Young people run from us. Who can blame them? Why are we surprised?

MORE FOLLOW-UP: MARIE HEAVYRUNNER

2012-03-15T22:29:00.001-06:00

from the Great Falls Tribune, March14, 2012

by Kimball Bennion

A second person has been charged in relation to the murder of a 71-year-old women whose body was discovered on her property months after her death, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Great Falls.

Thomas Charles Marc Heavyrunner made an initial appearance in federal court Tuesday, where he was informed of a felony charge of accessory after the fact in the murder of Marie Heavy Runner, who was allegedly killed by Mark Saint Storm Heavy Runner on July 1. Her body wasn’t discovered until November.

A federal indictment that was unsealed this week charges Mark Heavyrunner with one count of second-degree murder. the same victim, identified as “M.H.R.,” is listed in both charges. Mark Heavyrunner pleaded not guilty to the charges last week.

The trial date for mark Heavyrunner was set for April 17. He is on a federal hold in the Cascade County detention center while awaiting trial.

Details of the case are sketchy, as portions of it still are sealed. The prosecution in the trial of Mark Heavyrunner has a deadline of April 3 to file a trial brief, which generally outlines in more detail the legal authority behind the charges in the case. The defense may also submit a trial brief, but it is not required. U.S. District Judge Sam E. Haddon will preside over the trial.

Thomas Heavyrunner is expected to make a plea to the accessory charge April 5.

Thomas Heavyrunner is released on special conditons and has been ordered to report to federal probation officers in Missoula County. He is not allowed to travel outside that area.

At Thomas Heavyrunner’s initial appearance Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Keith Strong added additional conditons that Thomas Heavyrunner undergo a mental health evaluation and completely substance abuse treatment.

A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

2012-03-15T06:04:00.002-06:00

Below is a part of a manuscript I’m calling “The Molten Chalice” which is a bit of an paradox because a chalice is supposed to be an unchanging container, like a crucible, and the contents rather than the container are supposed to be molten. The title is an attempt to capture what happens in the human brain (a bony chalice) when one is feeling holy participation in the universe, which some call meaning. It is not meaning in the sense of a dictionary definition, but rather an experience, a shifted consciousness, that can be perceived and even measured by outsiders with fMRI, fine electrodes, and blood analysis. The idea of a “god” may or may not ever be provable, but the state of the participant in worship is. The key mechanism may be in the neuronal platform that coordinates brain function, allowing sensory information from subsidiary neural networks to shift consciousness. I suggest that liturgy is the art of that shift.

A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

Abraxas was an admirable experiment in re-invigorating the medieval models by reaching out for world-wide words and practices, something like the New England Transcendentalists realizing what Buddhism and Hinduism had to offer and pulling it into their Christian thinking. But Abraxans are never going to kill roosters in church even though Santeria might do that. They are never going to use Plains Indian Sun Lodge ordeals in which their chest muscles are torn. And they are not likely to throw up their hands and speak in tongues and fall on the floor. Worship styles are almost always class-based and so are denominations. The UU Abraxans are upscale.

My approach is so new as to be shocking, but it does not contradict anything above. Two anthropologists (Von Gennep and Victor Turner) are my sources for a three-step process of going over a “limen” (threshold) into a state called “liminal” and then returning back into the secular world. I am matching that with the research on “neuronal brain platform” function (see Gazzinaga) to insist that “liminal time or place” is a true brain state in which previous assumed thought categories can be questioned and either changed or confirmed. This “liminal” state can be seen in electrical recordings, hormonal changes in the blood, and fMRI tests. It can also be felt by the person and is either identical or close to what Eliade called “the sacred.”

The first essay in the Abraxan Worship Reader is an excerpt from “Art and Religion” by Von Ogden Vogt. It’s not long or elaborate, but this essay is the source for what I call “the Dilation of the Spirit,” a change of dimension in the scale of thought to respond to what Tillich called “Ultimate.” Perhaps this is what some people feel when they take LSD, opening their previously settled minds to new possibility. “Go cosmic.” No more wishing for personal prosperity. No more fellowship mornings devoted to what has been called “City Sewer System Syndrome,” the crowding out of religion by politics.

In terms of liturgy, the idea is first to bring up to consciousness what is sinful, painful, dreadful, terrifying and most humiliating in a world full of such forces. (One only has to recall the latest news.) This is “The Confession of Sins.” Then comes the “Assurance of Pardon.” The question in our era has been without an all- powerful God, what can salvation and forgiveness possibly be? I see human intimacy, connection with the beloved place in creation, and participation in the entangled universe, no matter how minute that participation might be. Since you are included, you share its dimensions. On that scale, what is human trouble? (This is related to the literary concept of the “sublime,” but that is a different discussion.)

Vogt was a humanist and honored human cultures in their grandest dimensions, but the industrial revolution was still as far as his mind could reach. He had no notion of quantum mechanics or the birth of stars. He knew nothing about the Higgs boson and neither did anyone else. The powerful marriage of physics and poetry had not quite happened yet.

The Eucharist has been powerful in societies where bread and wine are the most basic of meals, taken for granted. When missionaries went to totally different parts of the planet, especially those whose people were still hunter/gatherers who depended on meat and roots, the bread and wine just didn’t work. In fact, the Jewish culture’s pattern of communal meals like the Last Supper where talk mixed with food, and also prayer (at one historical point one was supposed to say a prayer of gratitude for each bite bigger than a tablespoon) doesn’t work in a context like Blackfeet where meat was always simmering over a fire to be dipped into as was convenient, except for major feasts. One whole band was called “Eats Alone” because their chief preferred to take his food apart from the camp. But at ceremonial communal meals, prayer combined with food, notably sarvisberry soup or buffalo tongue.

I’m proposing that entering or leaving this state of liminality and merger with the universe is deeply entwined with sensory cues and that they touch something real in the person that can’t be accessed in other ways, not even words. They are emergent from the ecology that has created the local culture. Which images of which senses evoke the liminal -- a mix of sound, smell, space, and so on -- will test the skill of the liturgist, both in their choosing and in their arranging: both their “beats” and their “arc.” It should be obvious that the liturgist must truly know the worshippers to achieve the kind of intense experience that people find poetic, quasi-sexual, life-changing. This is not to discredit the daily small rituals that order our lives or even the great patriotic spectacles that can unite us en masse. They are not quite the same.

But I’m pleased to have found something useful and fitting in the dim recesses of UU archives. Sound theory from an old-fashioned humanist liturgist in a polka dot bowtie. I grieve that the tower of Vogt’s cathedral has been taken down due to deterioration. When paradigms shift, by definition priorities change. But the underlying process and structure persist.

EVERY LITTLE THING HELPS, EVEN STATISTICS

2012-03-14T11:38:00.003-06:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXZgSnKfN5U

This video is a quick way to catch up with the content of a book I just read, “The City That Became Safe.” (Thanks to the terrifically valuable Interlibrary Loan system in Montana and the willingness of the Valier librarian, Kathy Brandvold, to use it.) Franklin Zimring was one of the professors for whom I typed in 1981-82 at the U of Chicago Law School. Another for whom I have the same enormous respect was Norval Morris, who worked closely with Zimring. They probably had as much to do with my growth in those years and since as did the Divinity School faculty. Both of them worked to understand the marginal, the discarded, the misunderstood people whom the law often grinds down into the chaff of injustice. One importance of major universities is that such men are in proximity so that they can form friendships and conduct conversations that most of us never overhear.

This book is not a pop law book but rather a part of a major conversation in this country about prisons/crime/allocation of resources and so on. Another voice is in “The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1p6vtVlmB

Here’s a quote:

“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”

Zimring’s book is not directly about the nature of incarceration but a statistical study of the massive decline in crime rate statistics across the US in the past decades and, more than that, the VERY steep decline in crime in New York City. The idea is to figure out what made crimes decrease in some kind of orderly and analytical way instead of the uninformed gut reaction of most people.

Gropnick mostly leads with another book by William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published. It’s not just that we have a grotesquely large number of people in prison, it’s not just that the cost of doing that is a huge burden nor that the population is mostly people of color, nor that it’s ineffective, nor that the bulge is probably due to the panicky criminalization of drugs, esp. marijuana. It’s also that the system of hard time constant lockdown in solitary concrete cells makes people literally insane: they lose the ability to hold their identities together. This is a different kind of torture than the Honduras practice of packing men into cells so tightly that they feel lucky to be pressed up against the bars where they might get a little air. And it is different from the more endurable prisons in the US, dorm-style with basketball courts, where older men teach the newcomers how to do a lot of things we’d rather they didn’t do.

That’s all very colorful and exciting to see acted out in TV shows that turn into popular series on DVD, like “The Wire.” But what really counts is steady, determined, gathering of facts and what they imply. Zimring notes that young male minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, are most likely to be the perpetrators of crimes, but also that the victims are largely in the same demographic. Most of these guys do not leave the ghetto in order to prowl for old ladies, or even men in tassel loafers. A finding that “stop-and-frisk” laws have a real impact on crime rates of minorities-on-minorities is not going to please defenders of minorities, but Zimring defines it as a necessary “tax” that the category must contribute to law and order.

This book would endorse the point of view that a high proportion of crime is opportunistic and that whatever drives down the opportunities -- which would be a lot of little things -- can have impact. This is not different from the opinion of Mike Burgwin, my old boss at Multnomah County Animal Control, where I was before the U of Chicago. His view of crime (and he had been a beat cop) was based on the idea of a continuum with safety at one end and crime at the other. Both ends were pre-existing, but the idea was to do anything that would push the conditions at the safety end towards those at the crime end. The problem is to figure out what changes will do that and the way to know is to keep statistics. Try something, see what happens. (I was the graph-maker.) A few percent here and a few percent there -- pretty soon you have real change.

So Zimring lays out possible causes for the major improvement in New York City. It was the time of Comstat, a program of daily statistic keeping and the constant re-delegation of forces to address hot spots and find patterns, and also the time of the “broken window” policy, which proposes that small disorders lead to big disorders.

The truly revolutionary proposition that Zimring puts forward is that we need to get rid of the idea that some people are inherently evil, no-hopers who can be dumped into those concrete prison hoppers that we would define as torture if a foreign country confined our soldiers like that. Certainly there are some people, sociopaths, that should be locked up for our protection. But when prison officials sat down with a list of their solitary hard-time people and looked at each case one by one, they found that 80% were hard to justify as deserving of such treatment. In a time when marijuana appears to be less dangerous than alcohol, sentences are radically skewed. The possible ways to diminish crime are scattered among legislature, courts, parole and social workers, police, media, incarceration practices, international agreements and probably some as-yet undiscovered contexts.

Zimring’s bottom line: “Finding as we have that the operating forces that produce epidemic level serious crime in the city are relatively superficial, that they are not essential elements of urban life, provides a decisive response to one of the deepest fears generated in the last third of the twentieth century. We now know that life-threatening crime is not an incurable urban disease in the United States.”

Now what I want to know is who is keeping statistics for reservations?

NO JOKES FOR CEBULL

2012-03-13T11:15:00.002-06:00

Since Federal Judge Cebull has set the standard for what can be joked about on the Internet so low that almost anything can pass, I might as well take advantage.

I’ve had this story about bestiality floating around in my “to blog” file for quite a while:

White House press secretary Jay Carney fielded a question about bestiality during the daily press briefing:

Q: The Family Research Council and CNS News both reported a 93-to-7 U.S. Senate vote to approve a defense authorization bill that, quote, "includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, but also repeals the military ban on sex with animals, or beastiality.[sic]" Does the commander-in-chief approve or disapprove of bestiality in our armed forces?

In short, have you soldiers stopped fucking your camels? (And don't put any beans up your nose, either.) Of course, clever PETA never fails to jump on any issue that involves animals.

In watching last night's news briefing, we were upset to note that you flippantly addressed the recently approved repeal of the military ban on bestiality. With respect, this is no laughing matter. Our office has been flooded with calls from Americans who are upset that this ban has been repealed—and for good reason. As we outlined in the attached letter sent yesterday to the secretary of defense, animal abuse does not affect animals only—it is also a matter of public safety, as people who abuse animals very often go on to abuse human beings.

Colleen O'Brien
Director of Communications

I’m amazed that so many people think that such a law has anything to do with real events. I assume they were raised to believe that a law immediately changes everyone’s behavior. What Mama says, goes. So where are the statistics about military animal rape? I’m sure there are vids on YouTube of species boundary violations, but where are the numbers? Or the theory about why such things happen? But the post-modern thinkers are as alert as HSUS. This call for papers arrived via an academic listserv about animals.

Call for papers for Carnets de Géographes

“Towards a ‘humanimal’ geography”

«Ironically, both the pleasure of bestiality for the practitioner and the horror/humor of the shocked observer rely upon this projection of humanity onto the animal. This calls for thinking of potentially other relationships to animals in which we seek not to exploit human-‐animal difference but pleasure in exploring the breaking down of this boundary [...] Such a queering of the boundary between human-‐animal may serve a valuable role in reconsidering our ethical relationship to animals,which has previously hinged upon human-‐animal difference and hierarchy. This ontological certainty must be undermined to establish a nonhumanist approach to animals in particular and to otherness in general.

(Brown and Rasmussen, 2010)

I’m nearing the end of the first volume of the magisterial overview of the history of the novel by Steven Moore and have finally come to my mother’s favorite childhood novel. “The Tales of Genji,” the Japanese Sheharazade. (It’s very much a novel of adolescence, the struggle to come to terms with sexuality.) On page 551 I come to this story. A man “yearns for an unobtainable woman, so turns instead to her cat: ‘To relieve his powerful feelings the Intendant. . . called the cat and cuddled it and with its delicious small and its dear little mew it felt to him naughtily enough like its mistress herself.’”

“. . . So he had the cat at last and he got to sleep with him at night. By day he caressed it and fussed over it. Soon it was no longer shy, and it curled up in his [kimono] skirts or cuddled with him so nicely he really did become very fond of it. He was lying against a pillar near the veranda, lost in thought, when it came to him going Meow, Meow ever so sweetly. ‘My we are eager, aren’t we!’ He smiled and stroked it, then gazed into its eyes. . . .

“‘How odd of him all at once to take such a liking to a cat!’ the old women muttered. ‘He never cared about such creatures before.’

“The Heir apparent sent for the cat, but the Intendant never returned it. Instead he kept it to whisper sweet nothings to all by himself.”

Hello, kitty! Once a person is alerted to such phenomena, they are clearly everywhere, though often in diluted form and especially in history. Are we to forbid people to love their animals? Or even other people’s animals? We aren’t having much success in getting folks to love each other in any sense except entwined with violence. We are having such a hard time understanding how humans as a species are different.

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, OR, we generally got two or three bestiality complaints a year and no one ever knew quite what to do with them. One was a public event about which PPD asked for advice: a stripper had two Great Danes in her act. Was it cruelty? Resorting to French philosophy, we said it depended on the reaction of the dogs -- mutuality as a principle. Of course, it’s an open question whether any animal can give informed consent, so that would mean the act was statutory rape whether the dogs like it or not. I think the stripper simply moved to another city. Evasion can be a good law enforcement strategy.

I would recommend it to Judge Cebull, but earlier in the sequence of events. Evade friends who want to send you dirty jokes at work, esp. if they demean the very context that makes one’s work dignified. If they fail to get the hint, use your delete button. Everyone in Montana knows a lot of sheep jokes and no doubt they are problematic for sheepherders, but their jobs do not depend on social respect -- only respect from their dogs, which insist on respect from their sheep, even the black ones.

If a judge damages his own dignity and that of his position, who can trust him with their camels? Is this joke of Cebull’s not an abuse of human beings? Ruptures of social conduct are sometimes seen as the private privilege of esteemed persons, the enforcers not having to enforce the same rules on themselves. It is a major mistake, but hardly a rare or unusual one. Making a law against it cannot prevent those who enforce the law. Which implies a certain level of contempt for law. Can a contemptuous man serve the law?

COLIN FIRTH LEADS THE WAY

2012-03-12T10:38:00.004-06:00

Here are two Colin Firth movies that rhyme nicely: “A Summer in Genoa” (AKA “Genova”) and “A Single Man.” In both movies he does us the enormous service of showing what a 21th century mensch is like. He doesn’t do it alone, of course. Michael Winterbottom directed and Laurence Coriat wrote “A Summer in Genoa.” Tom Ford reworked and directed Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single Man.” Both Firth heroes have just been bereaved of their beloved companions, both are teachers, both are upscale, both are entirely reliable. Well, perhaps the Winterbottom character is slightly more reliable since he has two daughters. (One, Kelly, is a teenaged gazelle who in my opinion should eat more pasta but in the opinion of the local young Italian stallions is just right. The other, Mary, is in that eight/nine-year-old time of growing identity when one is vulnerable and not quite in control.) The Ford character in “A Single Man” drinks too much and is planning his own demise. Everyone is flirting with death. Aren’t we all? All the time?

In these small intense films Firth is able to show intimacy without a sexual act. When his distraught daughter wakes in nightmare, he holds her tight, surrounding her physically but with no hint of anything salacious. With his older daughter he is physically very careful. He is aware that his older daughter is exploring sex, but manages (barely) to stay out of it. It’s not that he’s not attractive (female colleagues, students, friends rush to help him), it’s that he accepts the full weight of responsibility. As the character in “A Single Man,” he enjoys the hustler and the student who approach him, but as full human beings, not just encounters. He loves his woman friend, dances with her, kisses her lightly. But that’s it. In the present.

Lucky that Firth is a strong swimmer since both movies use scenes in the sea. In fact, “A Single Man” is haunted by his dreaming nude body twisting underwater. He manages to be competent but never exaggerated into a superman -- this is not father-as-.007. When in Genova he swims out to check on his nubile daughter who is sunning on a boat, it is an effort. The Genova film is dominated by the trope of the labyrinth because of the narrow medieval streets, so confusing and illogical, so sumptuous and sinister, so confining and yet traveled quickly if one follows them, chute-like. At one point the small crew and cast were mistaken for a family on holiday and a local woman came out to urgently warn them that the area was dangerous and they should leave immediately.

“A Single Man” was a little tricky to market except for the inclusion of the female character “Charlie” as a sort of beard to put on posters, but she is a full participant in the plot. With delight I recognized the sort of boy who is tenderly protective of adults. These types are new to film, I think.

“Summer in Genoa” never had a theatrical release, going straight to DVD. Both films are intense but demanding in terms of attention and reflection. They are made possible in part because of video filming with small steadicams tolerant of low light and able to go into very confined spaces. This in turn allows small intimate casts who bond on the set and creative crews who work together from film to film. The difference from conventional Hollywood sets and cameras is so great that it amounts to a different media, demanding both a different kind of story and a different kind of audience, much closer to the BBC repertory system that produced Colin Firth in the first place. His “breakout” role was “Mr. Darcy,” a model of intelligent restraint and private affections.

So is Mr. Darcy a 21st century mensch role-model? It bears thinking about. Colin Firth, whose acting is of the sort that works by being transparent to the underlying actor, is not unlike President Obama, though his sympathies seem farther to the left, more like Bono or Sting. He has funded the kind of brain research that interests me, like a study of conservatives versus liberals that tried to discover differences in which of the small structures of the brain dominates each: the amygdala for the conservatives and the anterior cingulate cortex for the liberals. (I don’t think that’s the end of the story since some liberals are as stuck and resistant to change as any conservatives and some conservatives are open to evidence that would change their assumptions.)

When I was a kid, gazing worshipfully at Audie Murphy in cowboy movies, I blurred the line between the man and the actor just as everyone was meant to do. He was, after all, a war hero. But we never knew much beyond what the studio wanted us to read in publicity. The stories were predictable and patriotic. Now here’s Colin Firth and we know everything and he is a world figure who speaks out about and acts out issues that are on the edge. But somehow he manages to convey the same earnest integrity that amounts to courage.

Mostly human beings guide their lives (and often their loves) by watching those around them either directly or through the media. When the media is dominated by selling and by sensational big-mouths, we are tipped in that direction. These two films about personal and domestic issues that preserve dignity and grace draw us quite different maps. Not easy ones, but coherent ones.

Though Tom Ford’s film, “A Single Man”, is about a professor, it is also luxurious in a highly aesthetic way: an architectural gem of a house, fine cars and guns, and so on. Yet he runs to the store around the corner like an ordinary guy. His relationship with his partner is about dogs and books, relaxing together with music. Maybe the message is that part of the secret of a moral life is good taste rather than flamboyance (like Charlie's life).

Winterbottom’s “A Summer in Genoa” is also about a professor but one who cooks and nurtures, who waits up for his teenaged daughter and respects the quite moving drawings of his younger daughter. He protects without invasion. So maybe this message is that part of the secret of a moral life is responsible and intimate family relationships. Colin Firth is an effective messenger.

PASOLINI'S "GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW"

2012-03-11T12:33:00.003-06:00

“The Gospel According to St. Matthew” is the earliest of the four gospels included in the New Testament (there are quite a few more that were left out). It is also a movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini, a film auteur I didn’t know in my cine-years (1957-1961). Anyway, “St. Matthew” was made in 1964 and by that time I was in Blackfeet country. I was grateful when in the past few years a sophisticated friend turned me on to Pasolini, though I started at the other end of Pasolini’s reputation with “The 120 Days of Sodom” from a novel by de Sade. This sensational 1975 film is what sticks in people’s minds. I haven’t been able to look a cocktail sausage in the eye ever since.

But Pasolini is one of those disconcerting people who refuses to stay in his “platform” (box, category, genre) as the marketing geniuses recommend these days. Even in his most intimate life he was confusingly loved by women but actually loved men. Even in his death, which was murder by his own vehicle running over him, the culprits were believed to be either a hustler, or an extortionist, or anti-communists, or -- you guess.

When people say to me, “I’m not religious” they fail to realize that religion at its core is not a platform either. When one attends a good seminary, it is a revelation to understand that the four gospels (all of them written long after Jesus and not in the language Jesus used) are different from each other because they are different kinds of writing, ranging from straightforward accounts to poetic revelations. Most people have assumed that religion is institutional and that institutions believe that the Bible is literally and immutably true. What these people mean is that they don’t go to church and they don’t believe in God. They consider that a sort of mark of sophistication, a defiance of authority. But that’s far from all there is. In fact, that’s just the foam on the beer. For the real stuff you have to drink much deeper.

Pasolini was much impressed by Tolstoy and shared with him a love of peasants. Though I’m far from being informed about Pasolini, my guess is that he’s an immanentalist -- that is, he sees true sacredness as something that arises from the land, life on that land, and the people who live closest to it. The rest is all speculation and prone to corruption. So “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” is his depiction of the simple people and a man who came among them in a difficult time, giving them ideas about how to live.

The movie is black and white, each frame shot with glowing composition worthy of a master painting. The sound track is a mix of classical symphony and Odetta singing gospel. The people are local and the land, though it was actually Italian is clearly not different from the eroded, rumpled landscape of switchback pathways, square stone buildings, and shallow fishy seas of Jesus’ life.

It’s always a puzzle what sort of person should be cast as Jesus. This time it was a nineteen-year-old Italian/Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui, His unibrow tops the knife-blade nose of a Sioux. Jesus’ mother in her older version was easily cast: Pasolini’s own mother, her face luminous with pride and love. The younger role was played by Margherita Caruso, hardly the soft little non-threatening figure of many incarnations, but rather a fierce dark-eyed woman with a voluptuous mouth. Like many of the actors, she was locally cast or drawn from among Pasolini’s circle of friends. One thinks of Caravaggio using his friends for models when he depicted some of these same events. Pasolini’s angel is a barely adolescent boy/girl who simply delivers the message without wings, without trumpet, without flying.

This movie is disconcertingly simple. The dialogue is what Matthew reports Jesus said and nothing more. The draped figures simply walk through the land, talking to people. There are many close-ups of attentive faces, as eroded and creased as their surroundings. There is none of the guiding, manipulating, weighting of events through cine-trickery that we’re used to. It’s as though we were there ourselves and trying to understand this revolutionary news. Because of that, it could be shown anywhere, even in a non-Christian land. But these words and events are so familiar that you begin to believe you understand Italian. The movie is on Hulu for free. It’s an excellent Easter meditation.

Now I’m going to switch over to thinking about evolutionary brain theory. It is asserted that perhaps the strongest evolutionary jump forward came from the creation of a little structure in the brain that is attracted to the human face and seeks to understand that other person. An infant will react to a face, even a simple drawing on a paper plate and will rejoice when it sees the face of its mother. This may be why some long so much for the “face of God” and look for faces everywhere. We know this little brain whatsis exists because if it’s destroyed by trauma or infection, the result is a man who thinks his wife is his hat. Perhaps the success of Christianity is due to Christ providing a face for an unknowable God. (Theological writers speak of the masks of God.) People want to see faces like their own -- maybe black, maybe female, maybe gay -- but those who control the institutions are the ones who are usually able to commission the portraits -- until recently.

We are so used to masked actors -- made up, coated with latex, digitally altered, perhaps even totally cartoon -- that it is shocking to see the real and deeply worn faces Pasolini is recording. He was not at all portraying a projection of himself: handsome, well-dressed, swinging along the wide ways of a built environment. Not that he didn’t earn his skills by exposing himself to scorn and danger.

Wonderful as the great cathedrals are, appealing as some actors portraying Jesus can be, powerful as religious institutions grow, contentious as dogma, absorbing as rites, in the end few do not believe in the faces of their beloveds or the shores of a well-loved land. Only those are not religious.

SO WHAT'S YOUR GAME?

2012-03-10T08:22:00.002-07:00

Since I’m reflecting on media matters, I might as well take a look at the latest Rush Hudson Limbaugh III scandal. How is it that a grown man with as much general experience as this man has can call a highly respectable, educated student who testifies before Congress (and looks like a Madonna) a “slut” and a “prostitute” and claim she wants us all to watch her having sex? (Nancy Keenan was in the same crosshairs.) This seems to me totally irrational, even if you’re baiting the lower instincts of some pretty retrograde listeners. I mean, I think it’s a serious enough discrepancy for Limbaugh’s doctor to take an interest. More than channeling Archie Bunker -- close to psychotic. Seriously. But maybe he’s reacting to the fact that women like Fluke or Keenan would never have any relationship to him except mercy friendship.

Rush’s Viagra was impounded at the airport because he had no prescription. Assuming he has one now, does that mean he wants us to watch him have sex -- well, assuming we don’t mock his you-know-what? With equal disregard for consistency, he rails against drugs but got a jail sentence for abusing hydrocodone.

Beyond that, I do recognize Rush’s frame of reference. I did not expect to find a guide to how to be like him. http://manhood101.com/principles101.pdf This showed up on www.therawness.com where the writer is focused on “game” which is supposed to be the relationship between men and women who are looking for mates, mostly in Manhattan. “Ricky Raw” is a good deal more sophisticated than Rush would appreciate. I’m not quite sure why he likes “Manhood 101” but it’s dead on if you’re looking for a description of the Limbaugh mindset. I had a hard time reading it, partly because sometimes I laughed so hard I had to go do something else for a while. (That remark would be exactly what the pseudonymous authors of “Manhood 101” would define as a typical feminist reaction, equivalent to making fun of the size of his penis.)

The assumptions -- those described as characteristic of men as well as women -- are familiar to me. I’ve spent a lot of my life alongside working class (redneck), under-educated, homophobic, day labor guys, including those of “color,” and have even taken “men’s jobs” like being an animal control officer. I was friends with some of them and not out of mercy. But I do feel a certain amount of mercy for the group as a whole. The ideas come from the experience of older white men (like WWII or Korean Era) who’ve had a culture shift imposed on them late in life. Only a few kids think like this now and most of them are in backwaters where they can’t find jobs and get drunk for fun.

These older guys -- the grampas now -- are the men who made sacrifices in order to obey the rules early in their lives, but now find themselves disadvantaged all over again. (Even before their retirement funds were savaged.) The tide is against them, their virtue is threatened, and they don’t know what to do about it. They often conclude, as does this set of principles, that the answer is order and control, enforced by whatever it takes short of being arrested. (That line can be elusive.) Manhood 101 approves force, especially against women and children, but not against other men. I’ve seen this enacted, heard what it did to family life, so many times. They take a point of view they understand to be military, but do not realize that the military has moved on. No longer is the military’s object to dominate, to regiment, to show physical strength. Ask ‘em. (Limbaugh’s father was a jet pilot but Rush himself was classified as 4-F because of a Pilonidal cyst. Do not look at the photo of one on Wikipedia.)

Ask Limbaugh’s four wives about domination, regimentation, taking care of baby (Rush). Serial polygamy, of course. He’s not bin Laden. (Although recently it is suggested that it was bin Laden wife #1 who actually ratted him out because of jealousy of wife number three -- the most recent one, quite a bit younger.) You can’t ask Limbaugh’s children anything because there aren’t any. No wonder he gets all upset about abortions and contraception.

Two statements in Manhood 101 brought me up short. “The government is responsible for making its citizens happy.” How on earth did that get into this discussion of tough, competent guys and how they control everything? Then “you must impose restrictions but remember they make you responsible.” Like, locking people into the house but making sure they don’t starve? Or beating your children and then wondering why they aren’t happy? Very strange. This is a website, by the way, where you can download the pdf for free -- brightly illustrated with droll clip art.

The dilemmas these guys wrestle with are a strange tangle of sex, control, status, and health. Health looms big in these principles: brush your teeth, take showers, get exercise, don’t get fat, don’t smoke -- these are all the things that women would tell them! Half the time the idea is to find the blonde babe who’s normally unattainable for nerds like you and to make her love you, and the other half is to find a mom who will make you go to bed on time and keep the house immaculately orderly. Very confusing. Although I have to admit I had one parishioner who had solved the problem: he attracted a mother and daughter combo. I wouldn’t count on that solution. He was kind of a Brad Pitt type and very wealthy.

This sort of thing is very vulnerable to mockery. Here’s one youngster take on the ideas:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IQjV-1WeLA&feature=related

And while the guys are fooling around, this is a vid about what the girls are doing.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/africas-girl-power/

I’m sure they are as capable as boys of spotting cheesy scams and rackets. Their idea of "game" is not tick-tack-toe -- it's LIFE.

FOLLOW-UP: MARIE HEAVYRUNNER

2012-03-10T07:22:00.001-07:00

Reprinted from the Great Falls Tribune

Written by KIMBALL BENNION

A Browning man appeared in federal court Friday in Great Falls on a homicide charge connected to the November death of an elderly woman on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

A second defendant in the case is set to appear on similar charges next week.

Mark Saint Storm Heavy Runner, 44, pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Blackfeet Tribal Law Enforcement Chief Greg Gilham said Friday that Heavy Runner had been jailed in Browning in connection with the death of Marie Heavy Runner, whose body was found in her home Nov. 4. Gilham said he was not sure whether the two were related. A 2002 obituary for Marie Heavy Runner's husband, Melvin Heavy Runner, lists a Mark Heavy Runner as one of his sons.

Mark S. S. Heavy Runner is one of two suspects listed in a federal case that alleges first-degree and second-degree murder. Heavy Runner was only charged with second-degree murder.

An indictment detailing the charges against Heavy Runner remained sealed Friday because the second defendant had not yet made an initial appearance in federal court, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, which did not release the second person's name. That person is scheduled to make an initial appearance some time next week.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating Marie Heavy Runner's death after the 71-year-old's body was found in her home. Throughout the investigation, the FBI declined to release any information on the circumstances of her death other than to confirm that the death had occurred and that the FBI was investigating it.

Court records indicate that Mark Heavy Runner was arrested Thursday by federal officials. He is in the Cascade County Detention Center on a no-bond federal hold.

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Kimball Bennion at 791-1462 or kbennion@greatfallstribune.com. Follow him on Twitter @GFTrib_KBennion.

STUMBLING INTO KONY 2012

2012-03-09T11:11:00.003-07:00

It was one of those accidental juxtapositions that my post about the Rwanda genocide yesterday, prompted by a series of movies I’d ordered from Netflix a year or more ago, and then a comment in the form of a url from a friend who’s more alert to social networks than I, has involved me in thinking about Kony 2012. This publicity event sets up opposition between some handsome young “millennials” and a “heart of darkness” warlord who hijacks, mutilates, and murders youngsters as part of his terrorism against villages while claiming to be a freedom guerilla. It’s a confrontation of video against guns and machetes. (Just google to save me from listing ten url’s, please. Or consult the New York Times. Even the Great Falls Tribune has picked it up now.

I began this post with ideas about the warring YouTubes and blogs trying to figure out why Kony 2012 went viral, whether it will do any good, whether to contribute, whether these filmmakers are just getting rich, and the true nature of Kony. It’s a much larger and more dramatic version of things like, for example, the quarrel over Mortenson and his teacups. (Friends in Bozeman say forget the books and money -- some people just don’t like Mortenson’s personal attitude.) The arguments range all the way from the highest political philosophy (Why is the white West once again trying to step in and solve African problems versus only a few years ago begging the West to send troops to resolve the Rwanda genocide) on down to Millennial name-calling which is strangely low-class sexual (cunt, douchebag).

It’s one of those situations that can either be an opportunity to learn or a mudfest that can damage philanthropic efforts for decades. “Invisible Children,” which is the name of the idealistic organization, is taking the high road, making everything “transparent,” meaning disclosing their money sources, expenses and salaries. (This is as much political as factual. And whether $80,000 annual salaries sound high or low to you will be relative.)

I’m going to do my usual attempt to come in from the side, horizontal drilling, you might say. First of all, the REAL money is in the harvest of email addresses that “Invisible Children” is compiling -- not just a select group of YouTubers (young, prosperous, educated) but also the fan lists of every celebrity involved. These addresses are worth BIG money and are the main way that social networks can monetize their web presence. A big adversarial issue inflates that list beyond understanding. These lists are power and they are going into the hands of international corporations who do more damage than Kony could do in a lifetime.

Which takes me to my second point. Humans see danger in terms of individuals. The superintendent when I taught in Heart Butte kept a list of ten kids he wanted to get rid of, no matter how he had to do it. When the boy at the top of the list tried to fight adults, he was arrested and removed in handcuffs. No attempt to counsel. This is the heart of rebellion. That superintendent also had a list of trouble-making teachers: I was on it. To him I was Kony. He did not grasp that getting rid of me only replaced me with others, maybe more powerful and resourceful than I.

My conviction, experience, and training is that rebellion arises out of the structure of the situation (often unjust), not from the orneriness of disaffected individuals who simply get pulled into alignment by the circumstances. In short, I would say that Kony is the product of whatever complex situation exists where he is (and in the six years since the Invisible Children film was made he has moved to a different area with a different government). The Rwanda genocide was an opportunity to identify many of those forces, many of them the debris of the colonial era and the excesses of the post-colonial decades. I suspect that Kony is part of that as well.

My point is that if someone managed to murder Kony tomorrow (the bin Laden solution) he would soon be replaced by another smart handsome ruthless fellow who has found the formula. It amounts to a big game of whack-a-mole unless the ecology is changed to eliminate mole-ness. Otherwise, the game of predator/prey simply continues with the younglings merely “mushrooms” as some in the drug wars call them. Collateral damage.

But we react to babies with their lips cut off. We don’t react to corporate machinations or the internal politics of African nations. So why not use this point of entry that the Millennials can understand? If Invisible Children is willing to take the issue to the level of Jason Russell’s small son, they do it because it works, but also it is an irritatingly smarmy use of sentimentality to oppose reptilian opportunism. (That child is amazing and MUST be getting offers to be in the movies.)

Everything we do in this culture is monetized. Even Romeo Allaire, whose true bravery SHOULD be celebrated, can be opposed by Belgian senators who want to attract voters by using dissension. By choosing social media as their means, Invisible Children is in danger of making the heart of darkness into a “like” issue with thumbs up or down buttons. (I never get over the echo of the Roman coliseum in those thumbs.) Idealism is a precious commodity and should never be discouraged, but it can be twisted into a new excuse for domination.

The United States IS part of this problem. “Occupy” is responding to systemic forces in the same way as African guerrillas and Israeli politicians and Canadian resource developers crossing Montana with their big pipe-lines, electrical transmission lines, gigantic hauling loads. The same as the environmental citizen groups increasingly organizing and hardening to push back against a multitude of invasions. The same as mayors determined to make their towns centers of profit. Personally, I thought “The Constant Gardener” did a better job of lining out the forces and the price of opposing them, but that was a big-time movie -- not three guys and a camera.

I was interested to be able to watch Kony’s face as he was questioned. He was concentrating hard to mind-read these white boys who had come to confront him and play with his guns. What do they want? Can they come up with money or arms? What would happen if he just killed them? I’ll say this for sure: if Kony kills those handsome boys now, the stakes will be entirely changed. But maybe the stakes for a child in Africa are the same.

THE RWANDA PROMETHEUS

2012-03-08T05:31:00.002-07:00

Sort of by accident (is there any such thing?) over the past few days I’ve watched these films: Trime, Blackhawk Down, Shake Hands with the Devil (documentary) and Shake Hands with the Devil (re-enacted). These last two are accounts of the Rwanda genocide told from the point of view of the General sent by the UN to pretend to suppress it. He was criminally unsupported, not at all to blame, and yet he was the man so assailed by guilt and trauma as to need intervention to keep from killing himself while the responsible politicians went blithely on. Rwanda was the true Heart of Darkness of Africa.

Romeo Allaire is a human Prometheus. I’ve just watched the documentary Shake Hands with the Devil three times so as to pick up all the voice-over commentary tracks. And I’ve watched the re-creation, which walks through the steps of strategy that failed. The actor was good, but it was nothing like looking at the face of the real Romeo Allaire. The documentary is unsparing. The re-creation is only a little more bearable. Allaire himself is eloquent.

Prometheus, in case you’ve forgotten, gave fire to the humans against the wishes of Zeus and because of that Zeus chained him to a huge rock where an eagle tore out his liver and ate it every day, but every night the liver grew back, so that the next day was the same torture. When Rwanda blew up, a foreseen genocide exploded that killed 800,000 people in 100 days. The numbers mean nothing. Watching men with machetes kill other men, realizing that a little boy corpse is not dead when his eyes roll to look at the photographer, peering across a sea of dead and decaying corpses fallen over the benches that had served as pews in a church -- that’s the sort of thing that means something.

When I composed a piece about religion needing to move away from anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism -- the whole religious obsession with human beings being the entire purpose, focus and center of the galaxy -- I forgot the crucial importance of our caring for each other. I suppose one should call that humanism. But Allaire was a devout Catholic.

We struggle all the time to understand how humans are different from other primates. The evidence converges, not on speech, not on tools, not on souls, but simply on compassion for each other. Not for our pets, not for the charismatic megamammals or figures from history, but for each other as we present to each other daily. We can sink back into our pre-human sources very easily. Allaire speaks of the gaieté of murderous violence, how excited people get, how celebratory that they just slashed someone’s penis off or just ripped a baby out of someone’s belly. It is a release, an ecstasy, an escape from one’s own self. Only later does the emptiness hit.

Allaire is not just Canadian. He is Quebecquois, from the province of Quebec, bilingual. His people are the source of the voyagers who were in Blackfeet country long before Lewis & Clark. I wouldn’t be surprised if in his genetics he had a little Iroquois, those worst possible torturers of Jesuits. But the Jesuits kept coming.

Allaire had a decency and steadfastness in him that simply would not let him flee with the other whites, that forced him to breathe the stench of horror, and then to fight himself over the guilt of not doing more in an impossible situation. His contempt and hatred of the Belgian quitters is obvious. They should not have ever been sent in from the beginning, but they were the only armed and trained forces available. Rwanda had been a Belgian colony and deliberately divided the people against each other to make it more manageable, just as Americans did on reservations. The radio recordings (much of the documentary version is footage taken in the actual time and place) sound like Rush Limbaugh. HATE, HATE, HATE. Black on black hate.

Of course, Belgium is one of those lingually divided nations (French/German) and Quebec is also divided between Anglophone and Francophone. The truly educated and upwardly mobile are bilingual like Allaire. I think it gives them a vital flexibility of sympathy. My in-laws, staunchly Anglophone, were from rural farms near Montreal where Allaire grew up in a working class family. His father had fought in WWII to liberate Belgium.

There are always fault lines in any society and the work of the religious ought to be prevention of genocide, not its encouragement. It is blatantly apparent that white Catholic church authorities fanned the flames of Rwandan genocide. One apologist suggests it was because the church felt the majority ruled and they would be wise to side with the majority, who turned out to find the minority inconvenient and easily eliminated. Thus, a sanctuary inhabited by skeletons in rotting rags. I hear the same dynamics around here: winner-take-all, no mercy for losers. Even if it’s Indian on Indian.

The US government at the time was headed by Clinton and had just taken a big hit as portrayed vividly in Blackhawk Down. The consequences to sending in the Marines stationed a half-hour from Rwanda (which would have stopped the killing) were politically dangerous, so Clinton basically put a bag over his head and claimed not to see anything. Afterwards he and Hillary came to express lip-biting sorrow. I wonder how often she thinks of that now as she tries to head off Iran.

Because of the genocide in Rwanda and the many others -- the Nazi holocaust is far from unique -- young people begin to hate humans, to think that humans are despicable, esp. humans in power and their self-preserving institutions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Churches are not always based on schism, but can be about joining and harmony. The devil is a product of schism. And the evil entered Allaire by tearing him apart. He cut his thighs, he drank, he went into the river to drown -- all those things. The re-creation includes the stoic female psychoanalyst who says nothing, her episodes all filmed in disassociation gray green.

Whatever worked, whether religious or scientific or simply personal morality -- maybe his wife had a lot to do with it -- Allaire came back to himself, drugged, sometimes gripped by the past for long frozen moments, but eloquent and determined. He is a soldier to the core in the very best way.

One of the reasons it was so easy to write off Africans is that they are black. Let’s be honest. This causes most whites to see them as “other.” The Devil is black, Evil is black. The great service of this sequence of movies is to make black people real and good. The corpses are terrible -- not even human, but the faces of the living are symmetrical and beautiful. The intelligence in their eyes is laser-focused. Their bodies are tall and lithe, swaying under the bundles balanced on their heads. In several places they are outlined in a frieze along a dark horizon, against a bright sky. They dance and sing. This must be what people are supposed to be like, what they were in the beginning. What they were and are in New Orleans.

There are two sequences in the documentary that were acted. Very simply, a man walks down a country road towards us. He is alone, carrying a machete. In that country everyone slashes cane, butchers meat, carries a machete or a cudgel. He is potential. And potent. But it is Allaire whose liver is torn out over and over.

As it happens, I also watched a tribute film about Allen Ginsberg in the middle of this very dark sequence of films. Many people mentioned a simple act he took in the middle of the violent Democratic convention in Chicago when the crowds and the cops confronted chaotically, emotionally. Ginsberg simply chanted “OM” and walked through the crowd. As if magnetized, the idealistic young joined him, chanting and walking as he led them out of the park to safety and sanity. He did not pay the terrible price of General Allaire. He was deeply Buddhist and not afraid of death, but in the midst of life. It is not always necessary to be so dramatic, or as Allaire himself puts it, “so romantic.” Several times Allaire used his voice to save the situation, he also walked through crowds, bringing the fire of idealism. His witness and testimony are profound. And yet so many of the politicians we are hearing -- even federal judges -- cannot absorb it.

CAN YOU SAY THAT IN ARAMAIC?

2012-03-07T06:13:00.001-07:00

In December of 2011 the Bishop Edward Braxton forced the resignation of the 72-year-old Rev. William Rowe of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill, because Rowe deviated from the exact words dictated in the Roman Missal in order to better echo the Gospel message of the day. Instead of saying, “Lord our God that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart,” he said, “We thank you, God, for giving us Jesus who helped us to be healed in mind and heart and proclaim his love to others.”

Of three experts on liturgy from within the Catholic bureaucracy, Monsignor Kevin Irwin, professor of liturgical studies at the Catholic University of America, came closest to the point of view of my manuscript, “The Molten Chalice.” He said there were some prayers said by a priest at Mass in which he is “beholden to the structure not the words.” And I’m also asserting that the structure emerges from the human brain interacting with the immanence of meaning in their world. Not from Rome.

Why would the church be upset enough to fire a priest for paraphrasing when there are in existence authorized multiple translations of the missal anyway, some of them in different languages altogether? First of all, this is a challenge to the top-down authority of the Catholic church, which is -- after all -- modeled on the Roman Empire. One could argue that the purpose of the Pope is to prevent the “mission drift” which affects every human organization. If the Pope does not need to take contraceptive measures, neither should you. However, the grasp on the supposedly faithful over the years has been loosened so people don’t do what the Pope tells them to, even inside the bureaucracy. Rowe had been creative with the Missal for 18 years before he was found out and thrown out of an establishment that badly needs priests.

The Pope daren’t excommunicate all the people who use contraceptives -- which would be the natural remedy for such disobedience to the rules of that church -- because he would have few parishioners left, so he tries to get secular authorities to enforce his ideas by criminalizing them. In the meantime, one priest of retirement age can be a good example of what happens to disobedient people, though saying he was “crucified” would be an exaggeration. He is retirement age.

When the Protestants left the Catholic establishment, they took the structure of the liturgy with them and sometimes even the words. Most people are not very aware that they are using this pattern because it is so natural. What could be more inevitable in any human event than a beginning and an ending? Even fewer are aware that it grew out of Jewish patterns: a group studying scripture followed by a potluck which evolved into a formal evocation of Passover and then Communion. So if the Pope doesn’t insist on the “right” words, how will people know they aren’t at a Lutheran mass?

On the other hand, invariant words imply a dimension of magic, having to perform an alchemical formula exactly, in order to kindle the magic. The Roman Catholic church, esp. since medieval days when people thought that the Communion bread actually turned into Christ on their tongues, has always had a strong strain of this. Why else would someone steal the mummified heart of Saint Laurence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin from Christ Church Cathedral and leave the gold and silver chalices behind? It’s Harry Potter stuff, knowing the right words to put the monsters back in their places. “Eye of newt, toe of bat, heart of Saint!” That oughta do it.

In fact, the Roman Catholics have always asserted that the priest must mediate contact with God, no matter how rotten he is, because he is the ordained conduit of the truth’s connection to the original Apostles. THEY have the franchise, the key to the Kingdom. Evangelicals pick up this point of view. It’s a rather shamanic view, labeling a special sort or class of people to have privileged access. Among Unitarians there are always individual ministers who claim the privilege of doing what they like because they are of a different class (more educated maybe) but Unitarian parishioners are vigorous levelers and administer their version of education more quickly than Bishop Braxton. The scientists among the UU like the owls but not the wands.

At heart, I suspect, what this incident enacts is the same clash between the Baby Boomers who dearly admired the Aquarian Revolution and Pope John Paul, the ones who unscrewed the pews, put them in circles and sang guitar-accompanied hymns, as opposed to those who have gotten where they are through simple longevity and loyalty. Also, KA, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to be TOO disrespectful. Just enough to provoke thought. But they are human despite irrational claims to other possibilities.

It IS a tightrope walk. But I would suggest that the balance depends on taut structure rather than trying to control exact wording of formulas. I would locate the power of the liturgy in the relationship between the priest and his people and I mean the priest as a person, though that can lead to a certain amount of variation. But that which is not open to change will die.

Once at seminary I had a friend who was a Franciscan monk. A big lively fellow, more Friar Tuck than his supervisors might have liked, was open to discussions so I asked him how on earth he managed a vow of obedience. (I was hoping for helpful tips, since I struggle with it.) He said, “We’re into creative obedience.” Not much of a tip. But useful. In some places Jesus advises obedience to the spirit of the law rather than the jot and tittle stuff.

The Pope seems to like jots and tittles, probably also beer and skittles. (That’s a joke. He’s German.) In fact, “jots and tittles” are little marks in Hebrew alphabets and even English (a tittle is the dot on an i). The reference is in Matthew 5:18. According to Wikipedia: “In the Greek original translated as English "jot and tittle" is found as iota and keraia. Iota is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, and was used as a small diacritic below other vowels (the hypogegrammeni in ancient Greek texts. Alternatively, it may represent yodh, the smallest letter of the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets. "Keraia" is a hook or serif, possibly referring to other Greek diacritics,” Of course, Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic, so unless we can speak that language and have access to a written version in Aramaic, we are obliged to change the words no matter what the Pope says.

THE RUSSELL IS COMING !!

2012-03-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

Around here the surest sign of spring is not the groundhog but rather the birthday of an old cowboy artist named Charlie Russell who created a archetype while meaning only to live in the West. The Great Falls Ad Club decided to organize a celebratory art auction on the weekend closest to his birthday every year and that proved to be a magnet for a number of intersecting forces. In the immediately past years the forces have collided and reconfigured. Now there is an auction, but the Ad Club has nothing to do with it, while the “shadow” auction called “March in Montana” continues unchanged. You can peruse the offerings of both online: http://cmrussell.org/the-russell and

http://www.marchinmontana.com/ Jay Contway http://www.jaycontway.com/

is also continuing his simultaneous show (Jay Contway & Friends) but doesn’t put a catalog online.

Lots of people speculate about what’s happening, especially behind the scenes where the CM Russell Museum has just united their two Boards of Directors, one local and one national. All the drama of horse rustling and backroom gambling deals! Of course, buying art IS gambling, esp. at an auction. Bob Scriver has been completely eliminated from the remuda of the Russell. Previous directors would have liked to get his little skulls off the door pulls and even dispense with the big portrait of the artist that Scriver made. He afflicted them while alive and bugs them even more now that he’s dead. I try to help.

There are Scriver bronzes in the “March in Montana” auction, the smaller ceramic-shell castings he made late in life to sell through entrepreneurs who were fond of series so as to encourage collecting the whole bunch. These pieces are # 322, a bucking horse at rodeo; #223, a standing mountain man; #324, a trapper on showshoes; #325, a prospector panning; #594, a mountain man on horseback; #617, a standing elk. This last might be the one sold to help acquire the painting of an elk that Charlie made for the Elks Club so it would stay in Montana. #489, an Indian woman on a horse with a travois, children, and two dogs, is identified as a Joe Beeler bronze but I think it’s actually a Scriver. As the staff gets younger and more separated from on-the-ground Western life, they make more mistakes.

Of the works by people I knew and liked who were connected to Bob Scriver, there were fewer than usual works, but some persist. Ned Jacob http://www.nedjacob.com/ has a nice little sketch (#333) of an Indian head with a bandanna. Paul Dyck is represented by two remarkable paintings: #342, a circle of lodges (tipis) and #342, some kind of ceremonial bird. He is an abstract painter using classical techniques, very haunting. If I had money to spend, I might buy #415 which is a Russell Chatham stone lithograph, also haunting.

Ned Jacob is my age, but Russell Chatham was born on the very same day. We are an age cohort and over seventy now. When I came to Browning we were the younglings. Ace Powell, alcoholic and garrulous, energized us with his predictions of the future and he is well represented in the March in Montana auction because Van Kirke Nelson took him -- well, under his wing would be the nice way to put it -- and accumulated a LOT of his work. But there really are not a lot of Montana homegrown artists that I recognize.

There are two categories of objects that should be thoroughly researched before bidding. One is the Native American artifacts which are controversial in terms of politics and very often were stolen at some point between their creation and acquisition. In addition, many artifakes are out there and some of them are so well-done that they are nearly undetectable as phony. Of course, if they’re that good, why worry? Why not just accept them?

The concept of pedigree is not well-known but it is relevant to artifacts and also to bronzes. With modern methods and materials, it is probably easier to make an undetectable but unauthorized phony bronze casting than to make a solidly-beaded vest. In fact, some of the glamorous ceremonial shirts that occasionally come through auctions sell for thousands, more than many bronzes. Originally, back in the days of Rodin and the perfecting of lost wax casting the process was so exacting and risky that Bob and I nearly killed ourselves and our crew in the Sixties learning how to do it. Now you can just buy a low-risk kit for ceramic shell casting. There’s a definite difference in the quality, but most people can’t detect it.

Western art is an interesting category because it combines high, sophisticated works attached to high income crowds in erudite circles, very curated and controlled, with wild-ass popular creations done from the heart for personal satisfaction. Then there are the cross-overs, which would be Charlie Russell from a relatively high-toned bourgeois family in the mid-west who barely managed to catch the tail of the big open range life. In fact, he missed the bison and the pre-rez Indians. He did his best for the Metis/Cree-Chippewa people who had no rez and often visited the reservations. Some of his drawings are sharp social criticism.

Now it begins to be realized that he was considerably more sophisticated in technique than people think. He spent time in New York City, learning, and artists from back east came to visit, bringing their advice and techniques with them. The same happened with Bob Scriver. So now there are two directions of influence traveling between the “grassroots” spontaneous art and the sophisticated circles. Maybe it’s time for another book that isn’t focused on how much money can be made.

In the meantime interested parties should at least educate their eyes on the catalogues of auctions and, if possible, look carefully at the original works with as much coaching as they can glean from publications or from websites like www.askart.com which manages an index of artists and information about them.

For a reality check, here’s a blog about the planetary art world:

http://www.artsjournal.com/realcleararts/2012/03/art-by-the-numbers-a-new-report-on-the-market-in-2011.html

IS THAT A MANIOC ON YOUR PLATE?

2012-03-05T07:14:00.004-07:00

My flippant take on things get me into trouble all the time. This time I put a little zinger on Michael Marder (“post-everything”) and he went “ouch.” But I am triggered by analyse de haute kinds of world where people get paid to think about matters such as the following:

Michael Marder (2012)
Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements
Peace Studies Journal

Michael Marder (2011)
Vegetal Anti-Metaphysics: Learning from Plants
Continental Philosophy Review

Michael Marder (2011)
Plant-Soul: The Elusive Meanings of Vegetative Life
Environmental Philosophy

Maybe I would change my mind if I read them. These subjects don’t really suggest “post-ness.” In fact, I have no idea at all what they mean.

But I’ve been piqued. Frankly, reflecting on how dumb I am. First of all, I looked up geography, pursuing the Basque context of the Rodopi Press. The Bay of Biscay is a big scallop of the Atlantic Ocean shared by France and Spain. “Green Spain” -- which sounds a little like the Pacific Northwest where I grew up -- is the Spanish part of that coast, encircled by low mountains rather like Oregon’s coastal range. It’s very wet and now shelters a major city, Bilbao, which has become a manufacturing and supply center with exploding population. We know it mostly as the location of the Gehry Guggenheim. It appears that Ikerbasque, which is meant to be a research center, shares the city’s taste for innovative architecture -- the headquarters is housed in a huge curved glass structure. These people are pouring money into technology -- mostly hard science on climate change and brain research. I’m not sure where vegetal philosophy enters into it.

The GF Tribune this morning printed a small story about cassava plants (manioc, a source of tapioca). It’s a productive shrub with roots that are a good staple source of carbs IF they are processed properly. There is one problem, which is that they have to be processed quite thoroughly to keep from causing the eaters to die of cyanide poisoning. (It doesn’t have cyanide in it, but a substance that becomes cyanide in the body.) Richard Sayre, a professor of plant biology at Ohio State University, and his colleague Dimuth Siritunga, a postdoctoral researcher in plant biology at the university, have created cyanogen-free cassava plants. So this is the opposite of “Roundup Ready” wheat that can survive herbicides. This is Human Ready cassava. The plant is very tough, “the Rambo of the food crops,” which becomes highly relevant when one thinks about climate change raising challenges to plants because plants can’t migrate as quickly as animals.

Genomic meddling in plants is certainly something that needs to be addressed. I can think of many other issues: the spread of noxious weeds, exhaustion of topsoils where crops like wheat are grown. Around here, at the intersection of plant and animal crops, we must think about the difference between using grain for human consumption directly versus feeding to animals, esp. when those animals are evolved to eat grass. But these issues are practical, part of our ordinary daily lives, which is what I tried to suggest by starting yesterday’s blog with coffee and sweetgrass.

Maybe Marder is in fact using the rhizome theories of Deleuzeguattari or maybe he’s going to the many Biblical bits about sowing and reaping. Then there are the vineyard tales. After all, the Bible is very much about the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the enabler of cities and the cornerstone of human life. We still haven’t finished figuring out this shift and I’m not sure we ever will. But the culture shift was major and smaller political shifts have been powered -- indeed, compelled -- by the erosion and desertification of wide parts of the world. As our population gets bigger, our productive territory gets smaller.

I’ve been thinking about liturgical uses of plants in terms of incense and entheogens (stuff that makes your brain see God), but as the privileged “foodie” elites proliferate, there is plenty of protocol and ceremony to observe in searching out blue potatoes and yellow tomatoes -- innovation balanced against preservation of heritage stock. “Seed savers” as a philosophical and political phenomenon ought to be worth reflection. What I’m trying to do here is to knock out the walls of our assumptions about what is vegetal. I hope Harder is doing the same thing but I’d feel better if he were less magna cum laude and more Rodale. Not that I’m much of a gardener. But then, it IS seed catalogue time and I’m very good at reading them.

If I were developing a plant philosophy for our times, I’d go straight to Wes Jackson and his ideas about the prairie as mixed perennials, deep rooted, tolerant of pluralities, working in synergistic ways. (Well, if there’s no spotted knapweed around!) For a while in the Saskatoon Unitarian Church there was a cutting edge organic ag group that met in our building, so I’d go sit in, just to soak up their enormous powerful energy. I learned a lot. They experimented with crops from around the planet, which meant having to hunt for and invent ways of harvesting them and also meant locating land of the proper size and soil characteristics. The assumptions of the machinery marketers were always a few years behind the needs of the experimenters.

I’ve never forgotten a man telling about finding a promising Middle Eastern legume of fine nutritional qualities that grew quickly into a great big entanglement of twining fronds. When he went out to harvest, he discovered that not even the deer could get into it. He said it was like a giant bed springs and if he took one side in his hands, shook it hard, the waves traveled down the field to the opposite edge. The small mammals and birds loved it. Is there a social equivalent to this?

My father’s roommate at the University of Manitoba was Rudy Peterson, who had a lot to do with the Green Revolution in India. It was the beginning of the chemical era of farming which has not ended yet. Better seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and a whole lot of entangled unintended consequences. Less starvation meant more people.

Of course we always come back to humans. Cyanide-free manioc is great for Africans who are used to eating it and may be relieved of terrible sickness. But will they ever serve it at McDonalds? On the other hand, everyone likes blue potatoes and blue corn. Who would have guessed?

"If your life's work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you're not thinking big enough.” Wes Jackson

THE MEANINGS OF VEGETAL LIFE

2012-03-04T08:23:00.002-07:00

This morning I made my usual coffee (cone filter, dark roasted, pre-ground) and then threw some sweetgrass strands onto the hot stove burner. Nothing fancy -- just the long blades the cats scattered around when they started sleeping in the box of drying sweetgrass. I pick the strands off the carpet to make this daily smudge. It’s an ordinary habit, a small household act. Then I go to the computer and find this on an academic listserv.

Manuscripts and proposals solicited for "CRITICAL PLANT STUDIES: PHILOSOPHY, LITERATURE, CULTURE" BOOK SERIES (RODOPI PRESS)

Series Editor: Michael Marder (IKERBASQUE / The University of the Basque Country, Vitoria)

The goal of the Critical Plant Studies, a new book series at Rodopi Press, is to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue, whereby philosophy and literature would learn from each other to think about, imagine, and describe, vegetal life with critical awareness, conceptual rigor, and ethical sensitivity. Literary works featuring plant imagery may be analyzed with reference to philosophical frameworks, while philosophical discussions of the meanings of vegetal life may be enriched and supported with the tools of literary criticism. Another dialogic dimension of the series entails a sustained engagement between Western and non-Western philosophies and religious traditions, representative of the human attitudes to plants. This “cross-pollination” of different fields of knowledge and experience will become possible thanks to the fundamental role plants play in human life, regardless of their backgrounding or neglect.

Ethically stated, the aim of the book series is to encourage an incremental shift of cultural attitudes from a purely instrumental to a respectful approach to vegetal beings. This is particularly important at the current time of the global environmental crisis, when massive de-forestation, seed patenting, and profit-driven agriculture threaten the very future of life on the planet. Not only will works included in the series shed light on the being of plants, but they will also assist us in critically thinking through the crucial issues and challenges of the contemporary world. Bioethics and genetic engineering, of which plants were the first examples; the role of spirituality and holism in the techno-scientific age; the reliance of our imagination and creativity on elements of the “natural” world; global food shortages and sustainable agricultural practices; the roots of our thinking and writing in other-than-human, vegetal processes, such as growth and decay, germination and branching out, fecundation and fruition—books included in Critical Plant Studies will, in one way or another, touch upon these and related themes central to the philosophy, literature, and culture of the twenty-first century.

Thus, we are looking to publish a mix of specialized manuscripts and introductory texts on the theory, literary criticism, and religious or aesthetic appreciation of plant life. Each title in the series will combine at least two of the disciplines listed above, with preference given to cutting-edge methodologies in comparative literature, comparative philosophy, comparative religious studies, etc., and trans-disciplinary approaches. Analyses of plant-related writings and artworks from any historical period and geographical area will be welcome.

Please, forward all queries and proposals to michael.marder@gmail.com

Ikerbasque Research Professor

Department of Philosophy

The University of the Basque Country,

Vitoria-Gasteiz

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I was okay with this until I got to “cutting edge.” I can even handle “trans-disciplinary” approaches. I mean I can talk about sweetgrass as incense, as ceremonial substance, as locally growing plant, as rhizomatous and therefore tied to the theories of DeLeuzeguattari about social action, and I can talk about it in Blackfeet life and as a tourist promotion. I could even mention the little home company that sells sweetgrass perfume. But is that what they want? I could contrast it with the culture of wheat, the rows and rows of genome-addled plants that cannot grow without human intervention and support. Sweetgrass grows where there’s an opportunity -- like soil disturbance or where there’s been a fire, like the little ones along the railroad where “hot boxes” (stuck wheels that scrape instead of turning) start them, and where the soil is wet, like in barrow pits along highways. You have to find it strand by strand, which makes it tough. So is that a difference in degree or kind?

How does local sensory information key into philosophical discourse and what does this particular plant, sweetgrass, have to do with being Basque? You could ask any local Basque sheepherder, I guess, since they’re likely to know it. In fact, being able to find sweetgrass in June sort of separates outsiders from insiders. I cheated. I ordered a “plug” from a nursery in the midwest and planted it in a box in my yard so it couldn’t escape. In a couple of years it has filled the box and I’m ready to give away plugs. Or should I sell them? Is it right to sell a kind of grass that has religious associations? How much should I explain about smudging?

Sweetgrass smells that way because of coumadin, the blood-thinning drug that in excess kills rats. (They die horribly, thrashing. No one tells you that.) MANY people take coumadin to prevent clotting. It’s in sweet clover, the yellow airy near-alfalfa that’s all over Montana roadsides in June, as well as in sweet pine which is really the balsam fir that the Sweetgrass Hills should have been named for. Is this the kind of stuff that this publication wants?

What about an article on sarvisberries and how they are used in pemmican? Then there’s ceremonial sarvisberry soup. What about tobacco: ceremonial substance, bundle-preservative, and social lubricant? I wonder whether any Christians will write about the meaning of unleavened bread and/or fermented grape juice, AKA bread and wine. Is this ethnobotany?

I looked up Michael Marder. He has THREE Magna Cum Laude degrees. He’s one of those rarefied philosophers spinning off of post-everything. Would he pay attention to a grounded old prairie thinker like me? I thought I’d find out for you so I sent him a copy of this. He said, “Thank you for your email. If you wish to propose a book for the series I would be happy to consider it.” Then he thought for a while and asked, “P.S. I am not sure how to take your characterization of my work as "spinning off of post-everything." My book on Jacques Derrida had 'post-deconstructive' in the title; other than that, I fail to see how you could reach this conclusion. It would be helpful, if you could clarify this point for me. Having said that, I will be looking forward to a potential book proposal from you, in case you are interested in submitting one to the series.”

In short, “if you come onto my turf, you will have to play by my rules.” Fair enough. Maybe one of my readers would like to propose a book. I don’t understand Marder’s rules and he never laid them out in rows. He DID respond to my email quickly and did NOT take my bait. In fact, this is one of the more intelligible calls for writing that show up on the academic listservs. I’ve always had a soft spot for Basques. I don’t think he is one.

RAW NARCISSISM

2012-03-03T09:00:00.002-07:00

I don’t sign up for RSS on many blogs but one I’ve kept up with since I was reading 2blowhards years ago is “the rawness.” (http://therawness.com) As I understand it -- and I may be way off base because I don’t really know -- this is written in New York City by a half-Haitian (black, I guess) man addressing the many many young and youngish men trying to make it in the city. They are obsessed with “game” and though they seem on the surface to mean by that scoring with women, in fact this guy (who signs himself “T” or Ricky Raw) gives advice about “human nature” and how to be a better person. He’s pretty damn solid.

The big recent topic? Narcissism. Both in terms of those alpha guys who elbow a milder man away from the bar and in terms of the histrionic female vampires who can eat a man alive and unpeeled. The main argument of the moment is that people learn narcissism from narcissistic parents -- too busy, too self-absorbed, too incompetent -- to raise the children they have been too narcissistic to prevent having. What this teaches the kids is to look out for themselves (replicating narcissism), although sometimes with a crippled, needy parent, they end up being sucked into taking care of them. Then they are a “parentified child” or “co-dependent,” always more comfortable when taking care of someone. Narcissism and codependence are reciprocal, often playing off against each other and leading to grandiosity, control issues, and other miserable stuff like borderline personality disorders. But when a narcissist finds a codependent and they’re a good fit -- hey, it’s intense. And some people really want that. Others do not.

This blogger-man reads book after book and is shrewd and dependable in his opinions of them. He’s not the male equivalent of a Helen Gurley Brown “Sex in the City” game player, but rather someone looking for the real thing: trustworthy and lasting relationships that support a meaningful life. I have three responses.

One of my tests is whether these ideas work with same sex relationships. I think that narcissism/codependency dysfunctions do indeed work as useful concepts in that context and I can think of examples among the people I know. Another of my tests is whether these ideas are a useful way to think in terms of ministry relationships and, again, I find that they are. A third context is in parent/child relationships and in this case the dynamics of identity formation are very relevant. The whole point of the generational boundary -- that the party with greater power and control be careful to protect the vulnerable instead of using them for their own ends -- is illuminated clearly.

Going back to the first context, let’s look at Yves St. Laurent (the Paris fashion designer) and Pierre Bergé (his partner in business and at home), so I can talk about same-sex relationships without getting into trouble. (When you look up Valier on one of those community analysis websites, they will tell you there are NO gay or lesbian couples here. How do they know??) So -- in terms of the Paris fashion world, this was a long and productive partnership. The two men were not “equal” -- one could argue that St. Laurent was a child while Bergé was the adult, but it was equally true that St. Laurent was creative in a way that Bergé was not. They had an asymmetrical but reciprocal relationship. Probably you could say that St. Laurent was a narcissist and Bergé was co-dependent, an enabler. It worked because it WAS about work and I believe that’s a key stabilizer. In all these discussions of “game” there is never a hint of the people involved collaborating to do something they feel passionately about. Everything is devoted to the two people’s relationship. Everything is face-to-face instead of side-by-side. Each other is the only thing they feel passionately about. A major and consuming mistake IMHO.

In the best of conventional worlds, the “something” the two adults would feel passionately about protecting and growing would be children. Conservatives feel this is the point of sexual relationship. But two adults could also join in other enterprises, like business, arts, a cause of some kind, a garden, military life, a ranch, or public service. The goal needs to be something compelling enough to supply the discipline capable of curbing the excesses of grandiose narcissism and toxic enabling. In my experience, men are better at finding this uberprinciple than women are, but only slightly. And it is a mistake to let the guiding cause justify excesses of power. A complexification in the case of two same-sex people is the stigma. If there is enough money or fame, the stigma is erased, but not the curiosity, unless people have seen enough, as in a liberal community.

Next we get into the accepted stereotype of the charismatic and admired church leader and his little supporting hen of a preacher’s wife, uncomplainingly raising the children alone and overlooking insults and trespasses for the sake of the greater good. Female ministers walk into a confusing mix of requirements based on gender stereotypes instead of practical roles. (Is she Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, or Ingrid Bergman playing a nun?) Ministers attract codependent people in droves, both genders, not always based on sex. If these needy people are frustrated, they can be vengeful. If the religious conviction is strong enough to be a governing discipline, that helps.

Back to the parent/child cathexis: how does one wean a child from the natural dependence of babyhood in an emotionally healthy way? First of all, attention must be paid to the child. Second, a child is not a puppet and must be trusted to do his or her own growing in his or her own way but without letting him or her play in traffic. Third, listen to the stories. The great strength of “The Rawness” is that he offers story after story. Mostly, in resilient families, the members go in and out of narcissism and co-dependence, learning as they go where the balance is and how to feel it. Every kid is different, times are different, unexpected things happen. Either it’s fascinating and increases the amount of love, or everyone goes into lockdown and gets drunk, or there’s some variation in between. Hopefully without violence.

And hopefully these ideas are interesting and useful enough to avoid all the pointless obsessing about “stress.” There’s too much “game” in stress, mostly coming from pharmaceutical companies. It gets very boring.

ENCOUNTERING THE FUTURE

2012-03-02T07:24:00.001-07:00

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/blackfeet_encounter

This is a movie (about an hour long) that shows where I live and some people that I know. To watch it for free, you’ll have to sit through some advertising, but you can buy the movie as well. I thought I would post it in contrast to yesterday’s review of “Heights.” This is not about “depths” but about ground level and a little history that happened just north of here.

Many of these people speaking, especially early in the vid, are people I’ve known for fifty years: Curly Bear Wagner, Terry Whitwright, Darrell Robes Kipp, Cyn Kipp, and others. I’ve taught them and their children, taught WITH them, taken classes FROM them, attended their funerals, quarreled with some, worked with others, laughed with most. We’re all about the same age. I don’t agree with everything they say here, but for the most part, I do. When I met them, them were about the age of the kids speaking at the end of the film. They are the people who made those kids the way they are. (I know nothing about the white people in this film, though I’m white. They are not from here.)

Nassim Taleb talks about achieving “robustness” and “antifragility” by being resilient, persistent, and capable of recovery after grievous harm. He speaks of a barbell model for life in which one end is strategies so basic that they just won’t change -- they are dependable and “robust.” On the other end of the barbell is risky stuff that might yield a big gain, but also might also mean a major vulnerability -- real harm. He developed this idea in terms of money, so at one end is savings and investment in solid classic strategies. (Like land?) At the other end is dubious stuff like derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, and bundles of unexamined and undocumented debt.

This barbell idea could also be applied to culture, the way we live our lives. Blackfeet have endured and persisted for thousands of years, partly because their strategies developed in the face of headwinds both literal and social. Even as the fragile people -- like drunks or diabetics or the reckless -- are pruned away, the core group persists. To be practical, when the infrastructure of progress fails, which it often does here (I’m talking about electricity, gas, telephone, paved roads. Oh -- and internet.), life goes on because we keep alive the skills and adaptations that pre-existed all this modern stuff. It’s only about a century old, after all. I refuse to replace my gas floor furnace with a modern forced-air ducted furnace because when the electricity is off, the modern one won’t operate. Besides, a modern furnace takes a lot of maintenance. When it breaks down a trained person has to fix it at considerable cost. (Good for the economy!) I also have a wood stove in the garage in case the gas fails, though it never has. Not that I don’t use an electric foot-warmer under the computer and a portable electric heater in the bathroom -- when there IS electricity which is, to be fair, most of the time.

In the beginning the Blackfeet were braced against education because they understood that it meant assimilation: giving up the old assumptions and accepting the new ways that are good for the economy. Ranching and farming and selling your land. (Oil, coal, trees, grass.) More recently they have thrown their energy to rekindling the old knowledge because why not learn BOTH? Those who try to enforce a policy of “only one way: MY way” are creating fragility in Taleb’s terms. A double or braided culture is robust so long as it doesn’t go to war with itself. And that’s the danger of the middle of the barbell, the bar part. That it will turn out to be neither/nor. Muddled. Stranded. Paralyzed.

Valier had a town meeting last night meant to set priorities for future strategies. It was moderated by the person who had contracted to design a questionnaire, hold a series of meetings, and derive from that some basic principles. The first problem was that the handout AND the overhead projection were unreadable: the print was impossibly tiny. Objections about that were brushed aside. The second problem was that the moderator was using Powerpoint projected onto a screen instead of good old tried-and-true fibertip on newsprint easel. She wasted time and attention struggling with the machine though she remained bouncy and upbeat. Only what would fit on the screen could be seen. With newsprint, you can line the walls with everything as it accumulates.

A strange thing happened. The two dozen or so people present, mostly older, talked themselves into discouragement. In previous meetings they had gotten euphoric over the prospect of an influx of workers because of the new oil well drilling. (Though it’s bound to be temporary -- a decade of men looking for work rather than families.) Now they had heard of the problems “over east” where the “man-camps” of trucked-in dormitories (we see them on the highway) are served by above-ground cesspool tanks that occasionally must be pumped out. My whole table boasted that since that jogging school teacher was grabbed and killed by two floaters looking for work, they made sure their guns were loaded and ready. That incident was a day’s drive away.

One man grieved that the baseball complex he had proposed previously was thoroughly rejected on the questionnaire. He was convinced this was because the town was so age-ist that they would do nothing for kids. (No one dared say it was because his partner in the project is thoroughly disliked and distrusted.) Somehow this slipped over to blaming the kids themselves for not being dynamic and not wanting to individually excel, and how they were ruining their chances for scholarships by not being of service to the community. And then, of course, it all came back to the schools.

At no point was the group provided with even the basic information about the town that a person can pull off the Internet. How many houses do we have? How many are rentals? How many are substandard? (The eight that are still on septic tanks WERE mentioned.) How many have been built recently? Only one of the key town merchants was present. Where were the missing others, family men? The opinionated real estate brokers were not present. There are supposed to be 85 small enterprises in town -- no list, no analysis of whether they were ag-related, family-based, artists, county/state/federal employees (like fed/co/state law enforcement who live here). People said there was too much work to do, not enough energy or people to maintain the volunteer fire department or EMT’s. No one wanted to talk about the booming churches or the dynamic library. They don’t do that stuff. One person criticized the architecture of the library. (!!??)

The moderator kept trying to steer the discussion into how problems could be converted into opportunities, but it didn’t work. People looked stubborn and defeated. Some left. The meeting broke up. Fragile. Gotta think about this. I think they believe their only route to power is negative. And they learned it from the politicians. There’s an education problem here, but it’s not the schools.

"HEIGHTS": Manhattan Ecorchée

2012-03-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

“Heights”, an Indie movie (albeit Merchant/Ivory) about young people trying to get to the top in the arts in Manhattan, was developed and shot by young people actually in the struggle. Originally it was a one-act play about interaction among three people: a young woman photographer who is getting married but has doubts, a young male lawyer who is marrying the young woman in order to have a “normal” life (he’s gay and evidently doesn’t think that’s normal), but also loves a young male actor who is gay and that’s his norm. The triangle confronts, realizes, and resolves in one scene on the roof of their apartment building.

This kernel was lifted out of the hands of Amy Fox, the playwright, and expanded into a movie by the director, Chris Terrio, with participation by the actors through discussion and improvisation, particularly from Glenn Close, cast as the mother of the photographer. She takes the show away from the youngsters without excluding them. Many of the actors were from the same circles (two young men had been Close’s “sons” in “The Lion in Winter”) and all the places were familiar to them. In essence, this is a movie about their own lives as presented by themselves reflecting on their lives. They are extremely privileged, emotionally stripped in order to do their work, mostly held together by circumstances: work, friends, social pressure, and -- with luck -- mutually cherishing relationships. The young ones are very beautiful, not particularly expressive, reactors, unformed. There are a lot of potential dark shadows here that are not explored: go read about Mapplethorpe.

This is a world that I’ve revolved around at a distance, first as a classmate (these are mostly college-educated characters) and later as one of the older onlookers -- always outside -- sometimes a rescuer, a consoler, simply continuity, or sometimes I’m thrown out. It seems to me that when my “crowd” was young -- so voluntarily ecorchée, supersensitive to everything -- we weren’t so skinny. Those were the days of early Marilyn Monroe when a little flesh was valued. Of course, we also over-reacted and over-acted a lot more. It was the style, though we were deep into all the same mostly foreign movies that influenced Terrio. He talks “craft jargon” a lot: camera on sticks, bounce lighting, the uses of split screen, the French film implications of one door closing jump-cutting to a second one opening and so on. In the voice-over he identifies scene after scene as an homage or in-joke. I got most of them, thanks to NU and Netflix.

In the Northwestern days we talked intensely all the time about what-is-talent, the need for self-discipline, who was truly great. No one lived as well as these people in the movie. I don’t mean the supposed Glenn Close apartment in the Richard Meier glass skyscraper. Few of us had enough resources to live as couples or alone. We were more like the contemporary dance films where the corps de ballet bivouac on each other’s floors.

When I got to Browning in 1961, the talk -- now about Western art -- was not so different, but at ground level. No one was at the social (or architectural) heights of the people in this film story. The glamour on the rez is quite different -- the shadows more obvious -- but people who came through from the Broadway or Hollywood worlds never really saw it. We were just ethnic novelties to them.

On the other hand, “Heights” hints that one source of reality and an escape from this hermetic, compressed little world is social action, taking one’s camera into dangerous foreign territories, rather than just flying over. As I listened to the director talk on the voice-over (Glenn Close was there but didn’t get to say much), I wondered how much of the actual content was pretty unconscious even to Terrio. Towards the end of the film the outsider character from Wales kicks in a roof door and discovers an ancient wooden water tank that supplies the building, still dripping in a cathedral vault of brick. Any Jungian would smile, but the director claims it was just there and interesting.

Many of the shots are on rooftops with people balanced precariously on the parapets or even at the top of high staircases, perched on bannisters, but no one falls. No one worries about falling. No one threatens to jump. When I went google-hunting for acting classmates at NU at the turn of the Fifties into the Sixties, I found one -- Ron Dobrin -- who evidently went off the top of a tall building. Possibly on purpose. Just a terse obit. My most vivid memory of him was when a group of us went down to Rush Street to see Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et le Beast” and were so moved that we walked home along the lake. (Miles!) Much of the time we were shadowed by the police. Some of the time we were jumping along discarded tombstones used for riprap. Without drinking, we were all high on fantasy and singing. This movie is pretty controlled by comparison. Very urban. The shots of Manhattan are gorgeously luminous. No hint of danger until the end.

At some point in the last year or so I wrote a little riff about being onstage in an empty theatre with only one cleaning lady out there working among the rows of red seats. The point was that writing from a literary context (which someone suggests is mostly journalism, history, and analysis) is quite different from writing from theatre training, whether film or stage. One risk is over-reflexivity, where the mirror shows you watching yourself and behind you another mirror shows you watching yourself again until the infolding replications suck you down your own navel. The other risk is dissociation, schitzy splitting off into parts -- all quite authentic but dispersed. Both dangers affect not just the actors but also the directors and tech crews until reality -- always a little iffy anyhow -- is lost somewhere in the costume racks.

Pushing back against all the fabrication and rummaging is the Shakespearean “passion” that Glenn Close’s character advocates in the beginning of the film. The driving force of human aspiration can go wrong (“Macbeth”), but it is essential both to a play and to a real life. When that is captured by whatever art form, it will not become outdated. It is worth the pain of being ecorchée,

DECODING PROPAGANDA

2012-02-29T10:03:00.003-07:00

When I taught high school English in the Sixties, the “English” textbooks included a section on propaganda, which was a list of errors in logic that are often used to persuade people. Like “glittering generalities” that try to skip over the smaller facts that undercut a statement. For instance, all that raving about the pipeline that some people thought would provide jobs is ALREADY BUILT! It’s merely too small and the last part from Oklahoma to Houston was never built, so -- small or not -- it ends in a tank farm -- hundreds of them -- where years of too much oil has been stored waiting for refineries, which is where the real bottleneck is. So where’s the roadblock? Not in Canada or Montana or the Dakotas, etc. etc. but in the pro-oil state of TEXAS. Are they building new refineries? No, they are closing the old ones down. And (I'm guessing) trying to force relaxation of regulations or maybe subsidies.

Another lapse of logic often came up at seminary. It was “misplaced concreteness.” Elaine Pagels has a fascinating book out at the moment that’s an analysis of the Book of Revelation. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/february-24-2012/elaine-pagels-on-the-book-of-revelation/10372/

Not only is she able to distinguish among the several “Johns” (John of this and John of that), she is able to decode the whole book in terms of the politics when it was written and the actual events being described were happening. The exploding mountain was simply Vesuvius and “666” is the numerology code for Nero. You can read her book to find out the rest. As she says, this is not an intellectual New Testament book, but an emotional one. (I’m prompted to think of getting a dragon tattoo -- a small red one with one head. Seven head with horns seem excessive, but a crown might be a nice touch.)

Another major thinking error is called from “is” to “ought.” This is going to be a tough one through the approach to the presidential election because the wrestling between keeping everything the same (to the advantage of some people) and changing everything (to the advantage of a different set of people) is already ferocious and will get more so. Everyone is always wary of change. (Better the known enemy than the unknown good -- which might turn out to be even worse.)

More than that, what is familiar -- whether a lifestyle or a phenomenon -- always seems “right” while everything else strikes us as out of whack. I once read a brilliant essay about this in terms of environment. One always wants the landscape to be the way it was when first sighted. So to someone from elsewhere who came here when the spotted knapweed was in bloom might find the huge mists of purple very beautiful and worth preserving, not knowing about the plants this invasive weed has managed to strangle out, plants that were good food for animals, which spotted knapweed is not. (Goats might like it, but you know about goats -- they’ll eat the laundry off the clothesline and used to be pictured eating tin cans!)

Most propaganda against Obama is plainly straw man stuff, attacking him for being someone he’s factually not at all. They claim he’s not American, that he’s Islamic, that he’s a robot, and on and on and on. Every characteristic that would be seen as praiseworthy in any context -- patience, reflectiveness, poise, and intelligence -- are construed as either an evil plot of a character defect.

But I hardly know what to call the phenomenon among the Repub candidates where some exhibit behavior that is marginally criminal and certainly immoral but it just doesn’t stick. The phrase “the Teflon president” is not really about propaganda but about a willfulness on the part of the people listening. How is it that a man who abandons dying wives, lies about his sources of income, changes his position on political matters to the point of being erratic, and has a wife/former mistress (with hair no one likes) can come out of all that being considered brilliant and fit to run the United States?

I googled to look for lists of propaganda techniques and found them easily, but it surprised me that they were rather clearly from conservative, right-wing, “from is to ought” sources. All the examples of over-promising things that couldn’t be delivered, forcing issues into black and white polarities instead of leaving them the tangle of gray most real life is, urging people to stay with the crowd (get on the band wagon), changing policy to fit what will get a candidate elected and so on were examples from liberal ideas.

One of my little truth tests is reversal, turning the accusation back to test it against the accuser, because people’s ideas of what is painful and wicked are created by their own experience without any awareness that the same thing might not hurt their victim -- in fact, might not even come across as an attack. So old fat mean and vindictive people will accuse me of being old fat mean and vindictive because to THEM those are terrible offenses. They pride themselves on being young, thin, kind and forgiving -- or so they think.

There is a whole series of quips based on this reversal thing. Legend has it that a statement on the wall of a biffy at Reed College in Portland (notoriously brainy but unruly and liberal): “God is dead, signed Nietzsche.” Under it someone wrote “Nietzsche is dead, signed God.” And under that was a whole series of bold assertions turned on their heads: “Religion is the opiate of the people, signed Marx.” “Marxism is the opiate of the people, signed ?” (I forget who. Surely not the Pope, though he’s a bold Capitalist.) Particularly vulnerable are all the hoary bearded prophets of the Victorian era that produced so many patriarchs. (Some would like to have them back -- the return of Daddy.)

We are in a time of tumultuous change, which is not so unusual, but we can see it all day every day, even photograph it ourselves on our smart phones and send the snap to the media where it might or might not be presented out of context. Politicians trim their sails to suit the wind but then the media plays tape of them doing the opposite days earlier. And the greatest thinking error of all is that money counts. That money can save us. That the source of our troubles is not enough money. That money is any kind of indicator of value or virtue.

A recent study asserts that rich people are more greedy than poor people, suggesting that having a lot makes you want more. It seems obvious to me that the way some rich people get rich in the first place is by being greedy. It's a circle. We could call it the 666 effect.

TRACED ON THE RETINA

2012-02-28T10:52:00.002-07:00

About a month ago around suppertime I got a phone call from my eye doctor. This was so disconcertingly unique that I couldn’t hear what he was saying for a few minutes. Even then, it seemed simply a call to see how I was doing because of having precursors to glaucoma: diabetes, a skewed visual disc where the optic nerve attaches to the eyeball, a mother with glaucoma, ocular migraines, and marked nearsightedness -- plus the fact that I developed holes in my retinas while I was in Saskatoon. Several years ago this was the doctor who could see I had diabetes because in the eye one can see a tiny sample of the circulatory system traced on the retina.

But I was alerted that something more was going on. I made an appointment which was yesterday. A week ago I got a phone call from office staff (which is not unusual) to confirm my appointment and also to tell me that the doctor had quit the Great Falls Clinic and would be found at a new address, a far more modest building than the GF Clinic’s architectural monstrosity. (You can see my bias already.) When I got to the office, it was in a state of chaos.

The doc had moved out sooner than he had expected, so he was in a small suite while waiting for a larger suite to be remodeled for him. The computers had not been delivered. A quick walk up and down the hall (looking for the ladies’ room) revealed suites in every state of deshabile -- newly vacated, half-rebuilt, and one or two actually occupied. The doc’s waiting room at that point (lunch time) was empty but the small space behind the check-in window was crowded with staff. I settled down to read magazines while the waiting room filled up with older rural guys, mostly overweight and full of quips at the expense of Democrats. This doc’s practice is crammed with people whose eyes have been damaged by constant outdoor exposure to intense sunlight with a high UV component. The best plant catalogues will list the UV resistance of the various plants because the high clear air lets so much of it through.

Again I had to INSIST that if they put lidocaine in my eye to put the glaucoma instrument against it, they must be prepared to wash the stuff right back out again or my eyes will swell shut. The allergy is on my file folder or should be, but most of my records are still back at GF Clinic. The tech again argued that I was wrong, I was being unreasonable, there was no record, etc. but in the end she did what I said. The exam was the fastest on record, done with handheld instruments, and showed that my eyes were unchanged. Perversely, I always feel as though I’ve wasted time and money when there’s no change!

BUT, in the past in other places, I’ve always asked for my prescription to carry in my wallet as a safeguard against smashed glasses. I also carry a spare, but I feel better if I have my prescription. Besides that, it is possible to order glasses through the Internet for a fraction of what oculists charge. As well, the selection of frames is much broader than any oculist could carry and what the oculists DO carry is always trendy, what will sell, so attuned to fashion-conscious young people. What I want next is “Harry Potter” glasses: round. I’ve been wearing an old pair of big-lensed glasses which is fine, since fashion is not a concern. The big lenses make enough area for “graduated” bi-focals so I can read and work onscreen without having to get a crick in my neck. The GF Clinic refused to give me my prescription. My doc, now making his own judgments, wrote it out for me on the spot.

This is all trivia. I am far more interested in what’s going on with these doctors and the Great Falls Clinic. Everything in Great Falls is driven by money and most of the money is concentrated in Malmstrom Air Force Base, education, and medical care. The aluminum and copper refineries are long gone as is the railroad. However, there’s a strong nexus of cultural centers: the Russell Museum, the History Museum, the Lewis & Clark Museum, the Children’s Museum, and many smaller groups. There is also a undertow of crime, though nothing like the major Canadian cities close to the border or, say, Butte, or increasingly Missoula. So far there is not the sudden influx of violent opportunists that are plaguing the northeastern oil patch, but there are way too many murders in the newspaper, too many child abuse cases, too much underground (sometimes literally) deal-making going on.

March is the month of ice breakup and often other shifts as well. Malmstrom is going from fighter planes to transport. That means the streets will be safer and the bars will not be quite so boisterous. (I always joke that Tenth Ave S is dangerous because half the drivers are jet pilots and the other half think they are.) The legal status of things like the big electricity generating dams is changing.

But medical is where there is always action, not least because of the McLaughlin Center for mouse research which does crucial work with knock-out genetics -- the protocols where mice are bred to be mutated and then tested to see what the knocked-out genes did.

At one point there were two major hospitals who competed against each other. Involvement in both the hospitals and local higher education was strongly based in religious orders which have shrunk over the years and finally found they had to sell out. In theory steps were taken to restrain monopoly, but the buyers soon found ways around that. A large pool of aging people with rich land-based estates, and absentee progeny who never came back after being sent to all the best schools, is a cash cow, as the lawyers have known for decades. Now, with mineral leases acting like cocaine, predators who can figure angles are thriving. Not so many are doctors as are medical administrators. I couldn’t prove it, I couldn’t point to individuals, but it’s just under the surface all the time. The newspaper is dependent on the huge advertising stream of the hospitals and clinics.

I interpret my eye doc as moving out of that context. He looks enormously stressed. His staff, operating practically out of each other’s laps and without the computers they need, was cheerful. They know something. They are looking at a bit of the economic circulatory stream.

INTERMITTENT FOG

2012-02-27T05:39:00.002-07:00

On one of the listservs I follow, there was a brief flurry of discussion about paradigm shift. In the course of it I said something about religion, maybe referencing my education. Immediately several people reacted -- religion is a hot button issue, as they say. Everyone has an opinion and everyone is absolutely convinced that they know all about it and that it is POSSIBLE to know all about it. No one is allowed to argue or reason, either one. To put it in a fancy way, none of them were in the same religious paradigm as myself. Most of them were working with 1950 at the most recent.

To these people religion is about God and a physical local church. That’s it. Nothing about theodicy (the problem of how God can be good and all-powerful given the world as it is), nothing about Biblical translations (none were right wing people), nothing about world religions. I think to these people Islam is not a religion, not even a cult, just a delusion. Only Christian denominations count as anything. And these are folks who are pretty well-educated. But they don’t realize how much they assume. (Paradigms ride deep in the subconscious.)

If they had been of a slightly more recent era, they would have referenced what they fancied to be Native American or Buddhist ideas and completely discounted anything having to do with Christianity as corrupt, misleading, and old-fashioned. Just myths and curiosities. I think that most of the people born since 1990 or so simply don’t think about religion at all. It’s just “out there,” someone else’s problem. THEIR problem is finding a job.

I have a Blackfeet friend who is a ceremonial traditionalist and a Christian evangelist. Pretty much Pentecostal Christian. Ecstatic. Charity-based. Rule-driven. Assuming pervasive evil in the world. Dramatic.

I have a lot of Unitarian friends left over from when I was serving congregations of the UU kind. Their idea of “religion” is pretty much liberal culture, a way of eating (Thai), a certain kind of literature (edgy) and a strong overlap with Democrat political ideas. They are outraged by anything oppressive and make rhetoric about it, but no particular effort to read in depth or do anything. Local unchurched people here in small town Montana think in the same terms, but flipped -- to them it is Obama who is the devil impoverishing us all.

These are outrageous stereotypes, easily refuted, just making a point. They are paradigms, I guess, but maybe something else. I cannot explain my own assumptions very easily because they are ever-changing in the first place and in the second place assume acceptance of a lot of arcane science: cosmic, molecular, evolutionary, brain-exploring -- which is also changing fast these days and in my case is juxtaposed with the results of formal comparative religious study. I begin to leave the notion of “mind” as conscious thought and go to “mind” as simply physical brain function, much of it unconscious. And identity as well. My understanding of possibility is vast -- a little too vast. Sometimes I remember the schizophrenic lady I used to visit as an animal control officer in order to take away her excess cats. She’d come to the door and tell me, “I’m not myself today! I’m just not myself.”

People sometimes seem to think that I know something that they don’t and that if they found it out, that would somehow empower them. I guess it’s shaman stuff, the wish for a formula, a magic substance. If I tell them they wouldn’t understand something I’m working on, that enrages them. My mother used to get VERY angry. She thought that religious subjects were in a certain category (blind faith) and that I was implying that she didn’t know her Bible. But at the very end she changed her paradigm: “I hope the next planet is as much fun as this one was,” she said, as though it were a tour. Maybe she was right. But right or wrong is not the point.

So many things can’t be stated in a hundred words or less but must be more or less “lived” into, step-by-step. It’s not so much that the subject changes as that the way one looks at it changes. To see things differently is to become a different person and then you see even more. If their “paradigm” tells them that there is something hidden and powerful, that they are being excluded as though they were children and “too young to know,” no wonder they get angry. But there are many unknowable things and what I already know is plenty to digest. There is nothing to tell anyone else unless they think the way I do. I mean, I’m not holding anything back. It’s all in plain sight if a person has eyes to see.

So what hope is there for publishing or even conversation? Will my stuff be read and understood after I’m dead? What difference would it make, since the paradigms will just go on shifting and shifting, like sand dunes, the same but different.

There are a few people in my life whom I would like to save, to comfort, to go on loving if they would allow it. This is outside my powers. One or two have built their lives on opposition, secrecy, elusiveness, unknowability. Bob Scriver did. The only thing I can do for them is to go on not-knowing, persisting in opposition, continuing the same strategy that has been there in the past. Being no different. No conversions. No sudden revelations. No handing over the key to the cabinet with all the secret papers. Persisting -- acceptance of what has been.

To some degree this is strategy meant to continue after death, but that event can’t help but change everything. Whether it would be big enough to constitute a paradigm change, I don’t know. For all I know I myself might crash on the way to my routine eye checkup today. But there’s not enough time to go deeper, swear allegiance, break through to another paradigm. All lives are unfinished. We go forward on blind faith.

A NEW "THEOLOGICAL" DIAGRAM

2012-02-26T04:08:00.001-07:00

In the eighties when I began doing the research and reflection necessary for this manuscript, I was in a seminary that was not exactly doctrinally Christian but at least a part of Christian culture. I had to come to terms with the quadrants produced by working with a Cross. The explanation I liked best was Paul Tillich’s because he spoke of the horizontal crossbar being extended experience on this earth surface (history and geography) versus the vertical timber as being aspiration to the transcendent and possibly rootedness in the deep interior of the person. I used to have a little riff about how the transcendent strikes through the ordinary again and again, not just once, so that the symbol ought to look like a whole lot of verticals and one horizontal.

But soon I went to the idea of a dot in a circle -- the dot being that which is most centered in the person and the circle as the most distant conceivable awareness that person has. I added the idea of the vertical at the middle of the dot: the person’s “axis mundi” or “umbilical attachment.” Then a life story seemed to be a matter of traveling on that schema from what is most central to what is most distant. But what starts out as the edge of the unknown can become the limits of what is allowed.

I had the assumption that a person is an instrument of mind/heart, the source of observation, the collection and integration point of experience. Thus the crucial importance of both sensory access (data) and brain function (theory), one informing the other in both directions. I thought about the many ways of extending one’s senses (microscopes, telescopes, various recording devices and intensifying strategies) to things that no human being alone could sense plus the strategies that make circumstantial evidence or testimony from others fairly reliable.

At that point neither I nor anyone else knew anything about “mirror cells” which allow one person to access the experience of another person, a phenomenon usually called “empathy.” When one sees a hand laid gently alongside the face of another, one feels it on one’s own face. I had done acting exercises in which one persuades someone else to copy one’s posture, expression, and -- ultimately -- emotion. So now I wonder how to make my little dot in a circle add some symbolism for empathy. Maybe a lot of circles with dots in the middle, with arrows going back and forth. Wireless. Bluetooth technology.

All along I’ve been quarreling with two common and stubborn Christian ideas. One is the concept of God. I do not believe there is a big humanoid in the sky and I do not think it is helpful to anthropomorphize the concepts of creation or love. The other is the pesky problem of the congregation, particularly when it becomes institutionalized, bureaucratized, and begins missionizing to capture others. So often this is a source of evil. Both of these problems are helped by considering empathetic sharing with others instead of the constant fortification of one’s own self-understanding. It is a way to escape both narcissism and anthropocentrism.

In fact, I think empathy was built into my liturgical structure (unawares) at the point of what I call “Dilation of the Spirit,” which is very much a matter of being conscious of others. (We say “raising one’s consciousness.”) To experience the Confession and the responding Assurance of Pardon “properly”, one doesn’t confess one’s own personal sins but acknowledges the tragedies of all people -- maybe all entities. To exist is to be limited, even broken. We all die. The Assurance of Pardon is really an Assurance that the greater whole continues, which can be a source of joy through belonging and participation. It can be powerful to sit with others and face these two extremes, sharing the experience.

V.S. Ramachandran is a brain researcher who is able to explain -- or begin to explain -- how the human brain, that three pound blob of jelly, works. Research shows that the brain is in a sense rhizomatic -- it is a network where cells (rhizomes) are connected by tendrils. At first it was thought that each cell contained the information for one function or thought or memory or sensation. Now we see that there are regions with specialized functions (face recognition, sense of time, attribution of importance) each with connections to other parts. In a living person the whole brain is engaged in a dynamic and constant dance of processing.

Something about this allows “recursive embedding” which I take to be the ability to think about ourselves thinking, so that I can not only invent a theological diagram, but go back later to see that it is too limited and to devise an addition. Then to reflect on the implications of this addition. Not only are we aware of other’s consciousness, but we are able to stand apart from ourselves, observing. We are our own guardian angels.

Over the years I’ve been criticized for being narcissistic (self-contained, uninterested in other people, more concerned with my own goals than theirs). This is reflected in my diagram of just ONE circle and ONE dot, so that it was about my own inner world and not about sharing with others. It might be suggested that my circle boundary is too hard to penetrate, that I’m isolating myself, don’t want to share. Or it might be that I’m keeping my boundaries high because otherwise I am too EASILY penetrated by other people and find myself dominated by their needs and ideas. I suspect that boundaries are situational: we string barbed wire to keep some people and ideas out, but quickly open doors for others and even find that some people can fly over our walls. (Sometimes we bond or even fuse with others, which is a different kind of problem.)

Boundary disorders can be either organic (the bit of brain that works with mirror neurons isn’t functioning) or psychological (you just don’t want to know -- maybe are afraid). If the resulting disorder is a problem, both possibilities need to be explored. Ramachandran does much work with people who have phantom limbs: an imagined limb that persists after the flesh has been cut off. He set up a screen to hide the amputated arm and a mirror so the amputee could see “both arms” -- one of them being the reflection. Then the amputee made movements with his good arm, “saw” the missing arm do the same things in the mirror, and his brain erased the phantom. (You can see videos of Ramachandran explaining on Edge.org, TED, or Charlie Rose.) It is possible that autism is due to missing or malfunctioning mirror neurons, which would cut the person off from empathetic connection with other people. They are not ignoring, but emotionally blind.

Sharing minds, emotions, visions, in a group is at the heart of congregational liturgies. At its most transcendent, it seems a participation in the cosmos. Not control, not protection of oneself, but joining in the ongoing dance. But for many people the key to the boundary is lost and they are isolated, lonely, unconsoled. An ordinary church experience does not reach them.

What are the keys that will open up boundaries? What screens and mirrors? Singing and dancing? Words? Sex? Danger? Drugs? What if a person outside the boundary has an accurate understanding of what is inside some person's boundary and presents it through the arts, whether talk, painting, pantomime? Will the barricaded person feel the empathy and open the door? This may be the real effectiveness of psychotherapy. But it might also be a salvific use of liturgy, to embody a phantom life.

FEINTS AT SPRING

2012-02-25T07:48:00.002-07:00

This time of year I’m always a little confused. Like the weather. Like the long skeins of geese that have been sculling the skies, looking for open water. Today it’s here, tomorrow it’s there. It may be only folk legend, but it seems as though many old timers slide away about now, so that the obituaries are listing ranchers more than a hundred years old, which means they were born before World War I.

This year the farmers are checking their winter wheat without a lot of hope since there has been so little moisture, so little snow to cover it with insulation. Last year was so wet and now this year is so dry. The great scythe of weather swings back and forth, changing everything and confounding any sense of whether the global weather is warming or cooling or simply chaotic. We watch the sky for signs of the jet stream.

I have a cardboard box of sweetgrass I cut from the bed I grow in my back yard. Originally I brought it into the house to dry, putting it up high where the heat collects, but then I forgot it except for occasionally noticing the sachet effect. Then last week I had occasion to give a handful to a friend and send another handful to my cousin. I meant to make conventional braids, the way one buys sweetgrass in a shop, but I never got around to it so I just bound the clutch with yarn. There were a lot of things I never quite got around to this winter. I’m not domestic in the best of times and when distracted, I let things slide. Squibbie, the tortoiseshell cat, has taken to sleeping in the box of sweetgrass, maybe dreaming of summer. Crackers, the yellow cat, likes to chew what sticks out over the flaps. I pick up the strands the cats leave on the carpet and throw them onto the stove burners to make smudge when I boil water for coffee.

The librarian explains to me why people like to ice fish. She says you can see the fish down there. The little perch like to rest on the bottom on their fins but then you see a boil-up cloud of dust (underwater?) and they’re all gone. In a second the menacing shadow head of a really big fish (I don’t know the kind) comes along like a shark. This is the kind you catch by using a mouse for bait. The man who was once in Special Forces and who was writing a book this winter just for fun has stopped writing because, he says, he must get ready for fishing season. (He doesn’t fish for ice. Jokes.)

My friends are watching this season’s “Downton Abbey” but I don’t have television. When it’s on DVD, I’ll catch up. In the meantime, I forward them the many peripheral articles because they don’t subscribe to culture compendiums. A recent one of these said that in the huge house where they film, old things constantly turn up in drawers or at the backs of cupboards. They just now found an entire staircase. I suppose it had been walled up or the access door had been locked. This is supposed to be a classic woman’s dream: a hidden space revealed, especially the one the girl ascends to find the old woman spinning. The girl becomes the sleeping beauty. George Macdonald, writer of fairy tales, added the catacombs of ancient mines in the mountain under the castle. Down there the trolls jostle Curdy, the miner, who knows he can defeat trolls by stamping on their tender toes.

When I have this dream, I’m in a grist mill where flour is ground and the stairs are open, going up among the timbers, all laden with chaff. The sound of the mill is so vivid that I wake up. It is a diesel truck idling across the street, warming up for a day of hauling. It has snowed a few inches that will be gone by noon. One cat behind my knees, the other on my left arm. One snores, the other purrs.

The dregs of February. Do we leap this year? No Marching yet. The calves and lambs are coming. It’s a little past shearing season. In Portland, where I grew up, it’s spring with pussywillows and forsythia. In Chicago, where I was educated, the red cardinals have changed to their pairing-off songs. Here in Montana the ground squirrels are pregnant but rolled up sleeping in their burrows. The bear cubs have been nursing but maybe their eyes are still closed. Their mother shifts a little now and then.

I have a friend to educate. “What is a rhizome?” he asks. “What is a minotaur?” “How do you find sweetgrass?” He’s Rip Van Winkle, newly retired, his eyes wide.

Those are not the questions I’m asking. I’m wondering, “How does a person manage desire? How much of it is history?” “Why are people comforted by denial?” “Why do people in dire straits want to be alone?” (I would.) “What is gender really?” “When is spring? Not just the angle of the axis of the earth, but as a subjective experience, that realization of having made it through the winter?” My questions are complex and always lead to new questions.

I should do some housekeeping. Vacuum. Pay some bills. Wash the dishes. Straighten the pictures on the wall. Reshelve books. Wash the cat dishes. Sort and file the toppling stacks of paper.

This morning the sky was blue and the sun was bright gold. Now it’s back to gray and the mountains are shrouded again. Mardi Gras followed by Ash Wednesday. I did not want to wake from winter dreams, oblivion streaming desire and and elaboration. I grasp at the dreams to keep them but they are resentful, clinging to the knowledge that I still want them but nevertheless trying to cut the connections. Their knives are dull. I’m only bruised, though I sting with awakening. I just won’t open my eyes yet.

"TREME" and "TEMPEST": An Accidental Juxtaposition

2012-02-24T09:24:00.002-07:00

Now I’ve finished “Homicide” and the “The Wire” and have begun “Treme,” which is pronounced Tree-May. It includes some of the actors from “The Wire”, Melissa Leo from “Homicide” and John Goodman because he lives in New Orleans and this is a movie about New Orleans -- more specifically about New Orleans music (this generation thinks with music more easily than with words) which is framed (loosely) with the Katrina disaster: the storm, the failures of the engineering, and the failures of the people. At least three plots wind along, in and out, like a parade in the street.

The central concept is the performance societies called “Indians” which have little to do with Indians and much to do with community that is so committed to its members that they speak of their songs as “sacred.” The model is what they think of as Native American tribes, but under that -- barely consciously -- are African tribes. The main plot line is that Clarke Peters is a “Big Chief” of one of these societies which dress up in outfits more extraordinary than real Native American competitive fancy dancing contestants and dance as a group during Mardi Gras. What makes this portrait of a Chief both possible and remarkable is that Peters, who was a revered character on “The Wire,” is actually and truly a stage song-and-dance man with moves like a leopard. His fight to gather and renew his “tribe” is the counterpoint to government empty talk.

Interrupting my “Treme” disc delivery was a movie I had ordered almost a year ago when I was watching a lot of Indies. It’s Derek Jarman’s “The Tempest”. Jarman is GBLT, unlike the “het” but edgy New Orleans mainstream, but that is no kind of indicator of his unique work. It’s just that his fantastical and visionary view of the world is totally unlike the gritty reality of the "Treme" crew. "The Tempest”, if you’ve forgotten, involves a terrible sea storm that lands a ship on an isolated island where a magician is surviving with his daughter and two spirits. In this version Ariel is a slender man in a white jumpsuit, white face makeup and white gloves like an art gallery curator. Caliban is a Beckett character as interpreted by Charles Adams. Miranda, the daughter, has a hairdo that is a cross between dreadlocks and dew drops, with jewels hanging from the tips of corkscrews of hair. She’s like a child who’s gotten into the dress-ups box. Prospero, the magician, is not so extraordinary, simply bushy-headed.

The cast and crew, with typical dedication, camped out in a huge Paladian ruined abbey with tall doors and massive fireplaces. “For exteriors, [Jarman] chose Bamburgh Castle, which for centuries has towered over the Northumberland Sea, rising above the barren sand flats in aloof splendor. Interiors were shot at the labyrinthine Stoneleigh Abbey, near Coventry, Warwickshire in England. It is a rambling, fire-gutted Paladian mansion with corridors which seem to stretch to infinity, and rooms opening out of rooms like Chinese puzzle boxes.” (http://jclarkmedia.com/jarman/jarman03tempest.html) Everything indoors is gilt furniture with threadbare upholstery, piles of straw, and crystal chandeliers -- that mix of decayed luxury that strikes us as so romantic. The choices throughout seem aimed at portraying England as a failing nation. (This was filmed in 1979.)

The first episode of “Treme” ends with outdoor darkness. Something almost science fiction emerges from the night, unfolding into an extraordinary explosion of yellow maribou and rhinestones inhabited more than worn by Clarke Peters in his role as a “Chief.” Stately, startling, absolutely controlled, this vision barely gives us time to realize who he is before he speaks his piece to a member of the group reluctant to re-enter that Mardi Gras world, given the destruction and despair of Katrina, such a terrifying storm. He is persuasive. Then he fades back into the dark, as though returning to another planet.

So how does the movie “Tempest ” -- also about a storm connected to a criminal government (murderous kings) -- end? It breaks open to become a stage show! This time the black performer is a woman in an extraordinary yellow costume, Elizabeth Welch (she posted this to YouTube) sings “Stormy Weather” backed by a chorus line of sailors from the stranded ship who are all young, handsome and talented. She looks enough like Clarke Peters to be his sister. The grand and forgiving larger world is evoked as harmony is restored.

The smashed, fungal remnants of New Orleans illustrate the incompetence and corruption (once again) of our formally civilized world, which can only be redeemed by determination, organic connections of family and friends, and a strong sense of justice. The nudity that shocked some in “Tempest” is taken-for-granted in “Treme.” The innocent daughter figure who provides contrast is now much younger, taking piano lessons, and Prospero is John Goodman, vast and roaring English professor, speaking the speech on YouTube with Falstaffian force but language that is cursing.

Let’s see -- the DJ, Steve Zahn, as Ariel? Or is he Caliban? Depends on your point of view, I guess. We can take this stuff too far. But after the first five episodes I’m not spotting bad guys who are not politicians or lawmen. Clearly bad guys exist and we see the damage they’ve wrought, but they have no faces yet. Instead we’re being educated about a performance culture where parades are meant to be joined instead of watched and funerals are ornate, high-stepping events. Shakespeare would have loved it.

Many, but not all, show biz folks who make money will then risk it to do something close to their hearts. Derek Jarman managed his hat trick by falling back to Super 8 to reduce costs. (How he would have loved video!) Those who are constantly going on about the crash of full-scale culture, the good old days, are not taking into consideration that Jarman managed to stage a respectable Ziegfield Follies number in a ruin. Those who have insisted that sex and explosions are the only way to make a movie are having to admit “Treme,” more of a concert than a cop show, is no less absorbing.

Comparing these two, one a series and one a classic play, was an accident. The common message I get from thinking about them, both the content and the creation, is the human value of a group that works together as repertory, both the actors and the characters they portray. Society, miserable as it can be, is vital, but it is the tribal performance group that is the source of human expression and achievement. This has been true through time on every continent. Consider Mardi Gras!

FERAL HORSES: fiction

2012-02-23T04:52:00.001-07:00

Tang looked around the dark. cluttered studio apartment of Vesta Clotilde. “No cat?”

She shook her head. “Feral cats move on.” She plugged in her electric kettle and got out two mugs.

Tang sat. “I’ve been thinking about the difference between feral cats and feral horses. Cats are solitary animals and are more likely to attach to place, they say, though this one didn’t seem to.”

“Every animal has its own personality. One can generalize about a species but it won’t always be true for the individuals.”

“Yes. Nevertheless a feral horse will seek other feral horses and try to be part of a group, a herd. Even if it is a male horse and the stud of the herd drives it off, it will try to join a peer herd of bachelor horses or maybe become a satellite that follows the main herd at a distance.”

“Are your feral boys horses or cats? Do they want to be solitary or in groups?” She offered the canister of teabags to Tang.

“Mostly they would like to be in groups, I think, which urban law enforcement people know. Boys run in the night streets like bands of horses.”

“Yes, I’ve heard them go by. Even though they don’t wear metal shoes, their sneakers thud on the pavement, especially when there are many. More silent than that are the ones on bicycles, but I hear them as well. Swishing.”

“There’s another difference.” Tang arranged his teabag so the string dangled its tag to suit him.

“What’s that difference?” She put the shortbread Tang had made on a blue and white plate.

“Cats are predators. Horses are prey.”

“So predators hunt alone, at least cats do. Horses group up to lessen the danger for any one animal. Both have great big eyes.” The kettle was steaming. Vesta poured. There was a moment of silence while they watched the tea steeping in their mugs and nibbled on shortbread.

“I’m named for my dynasty, you know. Tang Dynasty, the greatest in China.”

“I did NOT know!” She was genuinely surprised though, of course, she’d always known he wasn’t named for the orange drink.

“My people come from the great steppes of the China west, horse country. We were great riders and sometimes prowled in bandit gangs. You can see them in Chinese movies today. Very romantic.”

“Ah. My own family has a branch that was in the American West on the prairie where we knew mustangs, not such different horses from Mongol ponies. My grandfather used to tell me a story when I had a temper tantrum. It was about a horse that bucked all the time. One day the herd was in a place where there had been a forest fire and there were many fallen old dead trees, silvered and broken. This little horse jumped over a deadfall and its belly was ripped open by a sharp staub that stuck up. It began to buck because of the pain and its back foot got caught in a loop of intestine. It just bucked harder and basically tore its own guts out. The smell of the blood convinced the rest of the herd that there had been an attack and they galloped off, leaving this defiant and violent little horse to die in the tall grass. When I was so angry, my grandfather would say, “Don’t buck your guts out.”

“It’s a violent story -- like the American West!” Tang was smiling, but serious.

Vesta turned away. “Someone asked me once what it was like to ride a good horse. I told them it was like having wings, like having one’s powers magnified greatly, like being connected to something magnificently powerful. And a little like sex.”

“A horse does go between one’s legs.”

“They say for many girls it is the first lover. Probably for boys as well. I was so impressed by ‘Equus.’” They were quiet, each with memories of Equus. Then Vesta asked, “Do you think that for a boy with a man who is very close and loving -- I don’t mean a sexual lover -- is like a rider with a horse? Maybe the man is a father, or a teacher, or a mentor -- well, I guess one can’t exclude a gay lover if the boy is gay.”

“I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose it depends on the man, whether he’s a predator, whether the boy is prey.”

“What would be the safeguards against that?” Both thought and sipped, then brushed off crumbs from their fronts, and looked at each other.

Vesta said, “Genuine intimacy, meaning protection of the inner uniqueness of the other person. The grown man also making himself accessible to the younger one.”

Tang said, “No separation from the peer group, no isolation, no alienation from the proper pursuits of a boy, which are often sought in a group, like sports.”

“What about no violence?”

“Define violence.”

“I think it is situational. Provoking a little horse into bucking his guts out would be violent.”

“What if it were the man who bucked out his guts? Tore himself apart?”

“Is that possible?”

“Oh, yes. Boys are resourceful. They can find pulse points and threads of vulnerability in the strongest and most wary of adults. Especially boys who have been abused and have acquired sensitivity that way, as well as accumulating the motivation. In fact, I think some don’t learn compassion and forgiveness until they are adults, if then. ”

“What is the equivalent to a bridle with a bit, reins, a saddle? All meant to control a horse.”

“I think the law is those restraints. Social opinion. Maybe the church if it would stop being a horse’s ass.”

“And as long as I’m being fanciful, what about a centaur?”

“This is against tradition, but I think a boy who does not grow up remains half-horse, if not half-goat or maybe a half-goat is an old man!”

“An old goat! How do you account for Chiron, the teaching centaur?”

“An exception. At some cost to himself, since he devotes himself to the young but has no partner of his own who is like him.”

“And Pegasus? A horse with wings?”

“Ah. That is an artist, a poet, a dancer. There are no limits, there is no thought, there is only transcendence.”

Both laughed with delight. Then sobered. “What good is this kind of thinking?” asked Vesta.

“Maybe it’s a source of courage.”

WHAT'S THAT YOU WRITE??

2012-02-22T05:49:00.002-07:00

Working on my assigned chapter of “Landscape and Legacy,” the book that John Vollertson is editing, has me surveying writing and writers along this east slope of the Rockies. Partly I’m wondering whom to include. There are the usual suspects, of course, Guthrie, Walker, Howard -- but there are also a few I’d like to set fire to, like R.L. Lancaster, that reprobate whose book everyone loves in that unreasonable white-man [sic] way because it fulfills the stereotype they cherish. (If I say more, I might be sued for libel even though he’s dead and what I say is all true.) Then I look through my bookshelves and begin to realize how many small homemade local books there are, and I come up against the question of whether I myself should be in this chapter. If I put in Lancaster’s “Piegan,” don’t I need to put in “Bronze Inside and Out: a Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver” who was very much an east slope person all his life?

In the book I tell the stories of Bob and I hunting up Blackleaf Canyon and on Two Moons, Guthrie’s ranch. Guthrie divorced about the time I met Bob and remarried about the time Bob divorced me, so there’s an inverse relationship of some kind. When we were hunting on his land (chaperoned by a lawman) Guthrie was in a very bad patch and might not have cared if he’d known. I once had the task of helping out some videographers who wanted to get Guthrie on tape -- this was in the mid-eighties -- and asked me to be the stooge who asked questions from off-camera. They gave me the questions. But Guthrie and I chatted a bit and when he realized who I was, he had some eye-brow wiggling about how Bob got any sculpture done when he was busy with so many women. I told him the truth: Bob put us all to work on the sculpture. Or sometimes a little writing. The first real lesson about writing, the hardest one I ever had, was composing the captions for the miniature wildlife dioramas in the museum. They had to be vivid, factual, simply said, and memorable. Not quite poetry. I don’t suppose they survive.

I always wanted to be a writer but never understood how a person went about it. Ivan Doig, who was in my class of ’57 at Northwestern, chose journalism and history but somehow that didn’t work for me. I went for theatre. I kept a journal for Alvina Krause, intense and effective acting coach, and wrote in it that I was never bored. She was outraged! She said that when she read that, she was so incensed that she threw my binder against the ceiling! Not being bored meant that I had nothing to DO !! Why didn’t I get BUSY?? I paid no attention to her. I’m not a doer. I watch. (I got a bad grade in acting class, but I really learned a lot.) Part of it is a matter of not revealing myself, but even more is about so much going on in my head that I didn’t want to be distracted.

When I bought this little shanty in Valier and moved here to write, I had very little notion what that meant, except that I’d saved boxes and boxes of material I thought might be useful. Tear-outs, manuscripts, scribbled notes on café napkins, old albums, paper in many forms. What I thought would ensue eventually was “being published,” which I took to be some mysterious process that would leave me rich and honorable.

Forget it. In the next decade the Brit/European/Jewish Manhattan yoke was shattered. Suddenly no one knew what to do except make money. NOW who were the people who called the shots? Scramblers who lunched. The publishers, their attending agents, the newspapers that supported critics, the academics who tucked extra feathers into their nests by saying who was good and who was bad (which had a mysterious relationship to “naughty and nice”), the bookstores (the big chains that had just gotten through destroying all the local indie bookstores) -- and even the readers-- vanished without leaving so much as a pile of rubble.

Now that our eyes are beginning to adjust, we see a whole new world in which authors deal directly with readers -- if they can find each other -- and there are what claim to be publishers everywhere, but we’re all sort of feeling around in the dark with little ebook flashlights, except for those who long ago jumped ship for sophisticated videos with music and links. (There was a momentary period of time when we talked about “vooks,” which were supposed to be books with vids in them, but, whish, they zoomed on by.)

And we’re going crazy over content. What is “true?” What is “obscene?” What is privileged? What is good writing now? Talk to me, baby! You’re audible! Tell me some secrets! I want to be shocked!

There was another moment when people were writing extremely short stories, the equivalent of haiku. I’ve forgotten what we were calling the category. The Asian ones were very emotional. Mine were little juxtapositions of shifted consciousness. On the computer I printed up about a hundred quarter-page, yarn-bound sets of them. One cousin bought a dozen to give as Christmas presents. I made some other home-printed and bound booklets -- one about iniskum (buffalo stones) but they did NOT sell. It was an organic funky-looking little half-page buckskin-colored pamphlet that only an anthropologist could love. Those guys don’t come around anymore. Tourists want bright and slick.

I bought a $350 wire binding machine and made 400 copies of a computer-printed short bio of Bob Scriver with a slick photo cover. They occasionally show up on Amazon and so does the book of prairie sermons called “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke” published conventionally by the Moosemilk Press, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton. Then my binding machine broke and I discovered Lulu.com.

THAT’s when I found out what publishing is about: money. Lulu.com is print-on-demand which solves both the problems of needing manufacturing money up front and the problem of storage. But Lulu.com is NOT a publisher, which is a selling endeavor: locating readers, pitching to them, distributing, building up a clientele and a platform as though selling Popeil universal fishing rods. Lulu.com expects the author to do that. Or contract with someone. Money up front. All my Lulu.com books show up on Amazon and Google, but that is not enough to make money from writing. So am I or am I not a published writer? The public thinks publication is like a college degree: a certificate of achievement of some kind. But they have no idea what publishing is. The writers’ associations always considered having published a book as the dividing line between professional and amateur. Not any more.

And no one can figure out blogging. Especially long-form blogging. You’re lookin’ at it, baby. It’s up to you to decide whether it’s “good” or not. Even what the proper context might be.

POST-EVERYTHING

2012-02-21T08:29:00.002-07:00

I’m developing a meta-theology which has to be either a philosophy or a cosmology since I don’t accept a theos. Not even one defined in abstract terms. God is dead. There is no such category in my thinking. All you people who think that since I’m a “nice lady” -- whatever that is (I suspect it means that you think I’m like you and would approve of you) -- I must deep down believe that god is love or the ground of being or some other abstract thing. Some master principle that unifies everything.

Why do we need a master principle? Why isn’t everything simply itself? Whatever it is. If no one can really conceive of it whole, why should we trouble ourselves? A recent correspondent was worried about the idea that there is no reality, but it has long been established that each of us takes from the universe what we can perceive and then -- with a little guidance from the culture and our genetic endowment -- maybe a little cultural input -- we set up our categories. Some will never vary over a lifetime, preferring to ignore any evidence that contradicts their favorite ideas, esp. those that put a crimp in our egos.

I’ve entirely missed some ideas that come from the language of popular cosmology, taking the “felt” issues to music. The U of Chicago Div School’s Monday essay was about “Death Gospel.” There has been some debate over the religious relevance of the genre's title. In February of 2012, “Professor M. Cooper Harriss of Virginia Tech published an article about the genre and its connection to modern culture. In it, he concludes that "‘Death Gospel’ offers an interesting rejoinder to a culture that denies death and decay, insisting instead that particular individualities require a universal point of convergence; it addresses a generation of young adults (and their elders) who, despite their spirituality and electronic connections, feel alienated from their traditions (religious or otherwise), from their humanity, and from one another. "

Surely we all see the world collapsing around us, the young more sharply than those of us who have already survived a lot. But these guys seem to have a craving for the end days, a “Jones” for apocalypse which they see as a kind of cleansing that will let them live. In the meantime, they are energized by the excitement of all those explosions, all that suffering, death everywhere, the skulls and swastikas that have so symbolized the holocaust and Pol Pot’s killing fields. If that’s what it takes to get our attention, they’re up for it.

The roots of this seems to come from the South, from country Western gospel, and Bob Dylan whom Harriss claims once said the message of his songs is “Good luck, I hope you make it.” And you should spend your last time and energy in a consuming, tragic, super-intimate, fusion of love. I’m handicapped by not knowing pop music, but isn’t there a Japanese tradition of melancholy and ill-fated love: the archetype for the “Blue Willow” plates off which I ate my childhood meals in the Forties?

I’ve said again and again that sin is a human construct (“dark matter” in space is neither good nor sinful) and pop genres do not shy away from that. The music analysts claim that rap music is the most moral of genres, demanding accountability by reporting in the snapshot way of smart phones, not extended reflection. In an essay called “Cultural Approaches to the rhetorical analysis of selected music videos” by Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, the claim is made that music videos are not seen for the commercials they are. (“The world economy has been shaken -- quick! So shopping!”) “With nary a reference to cash or commodities, music videos cross the consumer’s gaze as a series of mood states. They trigger nostalgia, regret, anxiety, confusion, dread, envy, admiration, pity, titillation -- attitudes at one remove from the primal expression such as passion, ecstasy and rage. The moods often express a lack, an incompletion, an instability, a searching for location.” Too often that location is either the mall or the dangerous urban streets, “using any number of techniques in order to appear exotic, powerful, tough, sexy, cool, unique.”

But now the tide seems to be changing. A call for papers for the Modern Language Association in January, 2013, asks for “Environments in Science Fiction: Beyond Dystopias.” Science fiction, a genre of writing that thrives among roughly the same demographic as rock music, is asking for what amounts to a religious vision of sustainable life on the planet, a melding of desiderata and the world as cleansed by fire, brimstone and horseback angels.

Harder than you might think, when one takes a viewpoint that includes the whole continent, the planet, the solar system, all possible conceivabilities. One begins to think that the only hope is just to wipe the board clean and start from scratch. We cannot destroy the world. But we can eliminate ourselves by failing to adapt to new conditions, even the ones we’ve caused ourselves.

We may have to give up our conviction that all this is for us or about us. I’m convinced that the next religious step has got to be leaving anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. It is not about us. Everything is in play, including all our behavior, and we certainly have ideas about how we want it all to turn out, but on the scale of eternity we cannot persist. To survive is to transform. Too much transformation and we don’t recognize ourselves anymore (do we recognize ourselves now?) and that’s the same thing as death, which is only physical, only means that this specific arrangement of molecular community that supports my identity is going other places for other reasons.

It’s unthinkable, insupportable for many people. Maybe most of all for the generation just a little older than myself that has had the idea that they could earn the future, if not for themselves then for their children, their nation, their kind of people. It took a long time for the UU’s to find new hymns that weren’t all about God or Jesus taking us for a walk in a garden of love. I’m not sure what music expresses surrender to the inevitability of change that is felt as loss. For me, it’s neither “Death Gospel” nor rap. “Space music?”

"HOMICIDE" -- GET THE PHONE!

2012-02-20T05:43:00.002-07:00

Now I’ve finally come to the end of all the seven years of episodes of “Homicide.” (Still not the movie.) I had read all the episodes of “The Wire” previously and seen a few episodes of “Homicide” randomly as broadcasted. Watching a long series like this is like reading a huge book and one comes to the end with mixed feelings. It has constructed a virtual world with a lot of reality to it, and yet the inventiveness of the writers, the parameters of the premise, the extent of the location and the personalities of the actors begin to wear. What makes this double series -- considering “The Wire” as developing out of “Homicide” with “The Corners” (haven’t seen it) as a transition -- interesting to reflect on is the tension between local, connected, reality-based people who are offering these serieses and the industrial bi-coastal business models who have no sense of any life but their own and their stubborn convictions about what will sell with sufficient return to support their own “lifestyles.”

The creative team did a good deal of fancy footwork to mollify NBC, but they were also hard on their own team-members. One actor, who began to buck and balk, was simply fired. I’ve done this myself on a very petite scale when I was teaching high school dramatics. I wrote plays for the kids who wanted to act and if one of them became uncooperative, the script was rewritten to kill him or never let him exist in the first place. I was not so sophisticated as this team, whose script-creation was many-layered.

First came the idea, the premise of a homicide squad in Baltimore and the idea of focusing on the effects on those persons rather than the excitement of the crime itself. The fact that the originating book came out of real life experience meant that they were actually aware that homicide detectives HAD lives and reactions. (This concept has since developed quite a bit. In the BBC mysteries detectives are human to the point of eccentricity.)

What NBC knew was violence and glamour, both very stylized. And big name stars. What “Homicide” knew was stories rooted in true life closely observed. They also knew about ensemble acting by committed and resourceful people. The end was obvious: the critics loved the show, NBC withdrew their money, and the creators of this show simply made some adjustments and took the same formula to a friendlier context which was open to the future. Money is only control up to a point, the “tipping” point. Content wins in the end.

The panel discussions at the end of the series and the comments that ran on top of the action in the actual episodes revealed what most people just can’t grasp about such productions: that they are the result of a melée of ideas that finally throws up one focus point that is translated into “beats” or scenes or points of plot development. Then someone goes off by themselves to write an actual script which is likely to be long. The script is given to an experienced second writer who cuts, slashes, reframes, adds, asks questions, and so on. Back to a small group which wrestles the different points of view on the table until a far more intense script emerges. This is what I’m guessing got lost towards the end of the series. The writers hit the beats, but no one was invested enough anymore to sharpen them.

Casting also had a lot to do with the creative energy of the scenes. It was anti-star, anti-big handsome hunk, and anti-glamour girl. But if the actors began to take their own input too seriously, they got bounced. Melissa Leo was too much for the good-old-boy writers and too real for NBC. Out. On the other hand Reed Diamond, who’s a hunk with his eyes too close together (like Lloyd Bridges), was hired to be a pretty but weak guy and fulfilled that role, but attracted enough affection to save his life. Erik Delums’ version of queenly crime mastermind sort of seduced those creative guys, and NBC had to force the writers to shoot him. (The writers defiantly made it a “bad”-- unjustified -- shooting and then sort of reincarnated him as his sister.) John Polito smarted off early and got bounced. I don’t know what kind of earthquake could have dislodged Yaphet Koto, Richard Belzer has made himself a cross-series fixture as a Yiddish Greek chorus, though NBC nearly fainted when he was hired, and Clark Johnson is (I strongly suspect) the character that most of the writers fancy they are. Michael Michelle and Giancarlo Esposito -- late additions -- were NBC’s dream come true, but they were always out of sync. Not a lot.

I’m interested in this sort of narrative “cultural criticism” that is in layers and labyrinths with the personalities and histories of a lot of different people interacting through a concentrated enterprise like a television series. It is no longer a transient medium since probably far more people watch the show on DVD over the years, repeating, watching the people age naturally, seeing the stories in entirely different cultural cycles and historical shifts, so that they become far more like a long book that is read and analyzed both for the story portrayed and for the dynamics under it. Some dynamics were as disrupting as personality wars and some were probably as accidental as a location not being available at the last minute. The producers set themselves the goal of hiring different directors, often feature film directors, but forced them into a high-pressure, moving camera mode which freaked some and made others shift to a higher plane. This was a conscious source of new energy.

“Homicide” was the first big experiment, beginning twenty years ago. “The Corners” and then “The Wire” proved that people would watch black actors and revealed a whole motherlode of experienced but nationally unknown people, as vivid and indelible as any movie stars. The next series by some of the same people is “Treme,” which is next up on my Netflix queue. They’ve brought back Melissa Leo. Hooray!

COMMUNITY LITURGY

2012-02-19T06:16:00.002-07:00

“ . . .that which can be expressed only in ritual is not trivial. It is, I think, crucial and because of it I take ritual to be THE basic social act. I will argue, in fact, that social contract, morality, the concept of the sacred, the notion of the divine, and even a paradigm of creation are intrinsic to ritual’s structure.”

--Roy Rappaport

For a person or organization to persist (survive) it must manage on two levels: survive short term environmental fluctuations by adapting (drought) and survive long term by transforming themselves (glaciation). Crucial variables (food, water, shelter) must stay within a range of variability that is survivable. But as variables continue over years to the point of evolutionary change, at what point is this a new organism? (My great-grandfather’s ax has had the head replaced three times and a new handle attached five times. Is it the same ax?)

If the Blackfeet tribe come from the Great Slave Lake, as some anthropologists claim, and then moved to the East Slope of the Rockies on the high prairie where they learned to be buffalo hunters by using piskuns, or buffalo jumps, were they still Blackfeet? When they acquired horses and did their hunting that way, with guns, were they still Blackfeet? When they accepted reservation life and are by now intermixed with other people and make their living like any modern American, are they still Blackfeet?

Immutability: which is the crucial part that cannot change without ending the organism as itself? Rappaport suggests that liturgy can repair a people’s sense of themselves. This has proven to be true for some of the enrolled tribespeople who still perform a “Bundle Opening” every spring, inventing and bridging over as necessary to adapt, but still sitting in a circle of relations.

Because human patterns of behavior are not much specified by genetics, people can change quickly by adjusting memes instead of genes. The terms usually used when stepping away from blood quantum and tribal enrollment are “Indian-identified” or “white-identified,” that is, the self-identity sense of the person as expressed in participation in liturgy like “Bundle Opening.” There is much more resourcefulness in this kind of identity but also more chance of chaos. The controller is VALUES or what Rappaport might call SANCTITY, which he defines as values that are never questioned, beyond questioning. At the high level of values, vagueness is adaptive because it is more inclusive. Most Bundle Openers see themselves as also good Catholics because they consider the values to be the same: compassion (often called “pity” in early translations), dependence on the Great Spirit, personal honor, and family.

Rappaport suggests that such primary process thought is largely metaphorical, which is good because that helps resist heresy (erosion) and hair-splitting. Ultimate sacred postulates are almost beneath (or above) conscious reflection. They are in the mind (“heart”) as the most basic givens. “Even metaphor’s grasp is exceeded. . . . All distinction and all likeness may dissolve into a sense of non-distinction or unity. Ultimate meaning is sometimes called by such names as ‘pure being’ and ‘Being-Itself.’ . . . “ the objectification of self and the world, and the concomitant language, may be overcome for the nonce by the sense of identity with self and the world . . . that constitutes highest level meaning. This is mystical.”

One distinction between religion and “magic” is that religion is shared by a community while magic can be manipulated by an individual, maybe for dubious motives. This becomes important among the Blackfeet because so many outsiders come seeking what amounts to magic for their individual benefit rather than sharing an endorsement of the community values, much less participation in daily lives. Native American Indians have acquired a cultural attribution of high prestige and purity, but that makes those among them who have “fallen” even more stigmatized, guilty of a religious apostasy in addition to the affliction of alcoholism or whatever.

The Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Ceremony (which I don’t know as it is organized today except second-hand, since I have stepped back from these circles, but did know in the Sixties) is an in-gathering of the Beloved Community and also an in-gathering of the spirits of many creatures of the northern prairie. It is not mysterious, or was not when it grew up within the lives of the People centuries ago.

How many years ago? No one really knows, but the Thunder pipes that I’ve seen have brass tacks, brass falconry bells, satin ribbons, and occasionally exotic birds that were once mounted by a taxidermist (they have glass eyes) and that are not local (a parrot, a rooster). The stem or calumet, three feet long, has been drilled by technology similar to that for rifle bores -- in fact, the stem is about the length of a “long gun.” All this suggests post-contact. In fact, the pipe may be the kernel of a liturgy meant to adapt and integrate the new material culture, acknowledging and claiming its power. It may be a source of the mystique of the “peace pipe.”

The stone bowl, where the tobacco burns, is not normally put on the stem because this kind of pipe is not smoked except in times of extremely intense need. The most striking element of the pipestem is a pendant fan, an entire set of colorfully quilled eagle tail feathers, usually from a young golden eagle, not a bald eagle. Bald eagles are fish-eaters found around water. Golden eagles live on the prairie and along the mountains where thermals lift them soaring across the sky. Many ermine hides (winter weasel pelts, which are white with a black-tipped tail) hang with other objects, maybe a Metis assumption sash. There are beads and sometimes the red wool cloth manufactured for trade in Stroud, England.

There’s sometimes a secondary pipe, similarly decorated and called “the woman’s pipe,” which is really a length of gun barrel that had been taken off a “long gun” the way a shotgun is illegally shortened today. And there’s a smoking pipe, maybe not kept in the Bundle. In those days a pipe for smoking tobacco was something like today’s coffee pot, always hot to pour for guests. It was a kind of structuring device: the guest comes, the pipe goes around while there is talk, at some point people have had enough and the guest leaves. It also makes spaces for people to consider what they are saying while they puff or re-light or refill the pipe.

The People gathered according to the seasons, coming from far and wide across the prairie to meet when there was enough grass for the horses and fresh meat for the People. Some think they used the stars as a calendar and others guess they went by the same kind of natural indicators that a farmer might use to decide when to cut hay. The Thunder Pipe Bundle is associated with the spring storms that sweep across the vast grasslands, booming and flashing as they move, and sometimes striking lodges, people and animals. Prayers are made that storms will not do damage, but will water the grass and make the sarvisberries flower, for this is the beginning of the berries that will end up in berry soup.

Berry soup is the ceremonial food, not to symbolize someone’s death, but to work by affinity to encourage a good crop. When handed one’s bowl of soup, one picks out a big fat berry to hand forward to an altar where they are dedicated as examples of what is asked for. If Christian Communion is interpreted as a sharing, a plea for salvation, then maybe berry soup is the same. If Christian Communion is about the Crucifixion of Jesus, then berry soup is not the same thing.

Berry soup is not normally a store-bought food though in desperation blueberries could be improvised. Usually dried sarvisberries are used, the last of the previous year’s crop, so they are more like seed grain than bread. Many different people might donate berries. In the old days they might have been cached somewhere, the way a marmot hoards grass underground among rocks. If you want to be funky, in the old days the seeds of the berries the People ate were returned to the land in the same way that the seeds eaten by birds and animals go back to soil, so sarvisberries grew thick near the accustomed campgrounds. Such elements of the People’s lives traveled through natural feedback loops much in the way that our bodies stay stabilized by metabolic feedback loops in the blood.

Besides the People and the berries being gathered together, there is another in-gathering within the Bundle, the skins of lesser creatures of the land. Anthropologists and aficionados are always dazzled by big bright objects like the spectacular calumet, but often the stronger meaning is in the humble, scruffy sub-bundles. These might include the skins of an owl, a duck, a loon, a spotted fawn, or a muskrat. Each is wrapped in cloth the way a baby would be wrapped, with the head sticking out. They are harbingers of spring, such as owls being especially vocal because of looking for mates, the ducks coming back and pairing off, the fawns being dropped by the deer. Blackfeet didn’t eat these creatures except in some kind of emergency, but they watched them carefully to see what they could learn. The land was their text, the animals the writing on it.

At the Bundle Opening Ceremony, the men choose one of these little sub-bundles to hold as they dance, imitating the animal’s movements as closely as they can. Each animal has its own song. If a person REALLY wanted to be a Bundle Ceremony participant, the right way to go about it would not be reading the complete notes of Clarke Wissler or John Ewers, but walking on the land daily in pursuit of natural history.

ADULT OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE DISORDER

2012-02-18T05:26:00.002-07:00

This is some quick brain-storming about ADULT “oppositional defiance disorder,” which doesn’t show up on Google lists. ODD in adults: short fuse: impatience, rage, frustration, fear, confusion, contradiction. BUT sometimes visionary, idealistic, willing to sacrifice for a higher goal. Outlier in terms of emotion: too sensitive or overloads easily. Pain: thrashing to escape.

I’ve been throwing around the phrase “oppositional defiance disorder” too much and thought I’d better stop long enough to reflect about what I mean and why it’s coming to mind. When I google, all I find is stuff about children and promotions for “magic cures,” discipline “systems” to make all resistance to parental control go away. How to make your child a zombie.

Not far from this town was a private “school” for such children that was closed down because the magic wand was a stock prod. You see? That’s my attitude right there -- braced against authority figures, assuming that they will resort to punishment, even torture.

I remember being in faculty meetings where the principal was reading his latest list of edicts -- the same ones he had already handed out to us earlier in the day in printed form -- with me sighing, rolling my eyes, and kicking the chair in front of me. I was fired, of course. The students had the same attitude with ME being the stupid authority figure. But I couldn’t fire them, strike them, or even criticize them, One of those “magic system” teams came in to give us a lecture on how to set up detention, time-delays, elaborate systems of record-keeping that took up teaching energy and time and became an absorbing game for some kids.

Most of us know the developmental phase that all children go through when they oppose everything. “Would you like some ice cream?” NOOOOOO. It appears to be a kind of brain growth stage when some little processing station is either not quite online or is not properly connected up yet. The cooperation bump. It is frustrating for the parent -- and sometimes legitimately dangerous for the child. (“Look out for that car!” NOOOOO. Thump.) I wouldn’t be surprised to see that unaccounted-for child death stats spike at that age. A few children never get past that stage, especially if trauma is the suppressor the parent chooses to use to resolve the conflict. Intimidation is paralyzing.

Sometimes, I believe, the child, the teen, and the grown-up have this so-called “disorder” thrust upon them by the situation. Something is wrong -- anything from molestation to broad social injustice. The incorrigible kid, the freaked-out shooter, and the self-immolating nun seem different when considered from their own points of view, which is not the point of view of the authority figure or even society as a whole. These miracle discipline systems the snake oil salesmen invent are to sell to the authorities, not to those who defy them. Authorities have resources, like money. Oppositionally defiant individuals usually have nothing but their own minds, bodies and emotions.

In my own mental and emotional life, I see that my defiance of authorities is usually fueled by contempt at their incompetence, frustration that they can’t seem to understand what appears obvious to me, and indignation that they refuse to even talk about problems. This same dense principal was forcing us to write new curricula for the school and he wanted it in grade stair-steps. I wanted to write mine in strands: a reading sequence, a writing sequence, a listening sequence and so on. This was because kids who flunked English ended up taking three grades at once so I wanted to run a sort of one-room schoolhouse strategy. He couldn’t understand the concept so he opposed it. I don’t just mean he opposed the idea -- he could not understand that learning is not necessarily chunked up into grades.

When something like health or income is involved, I escalate, sometimes beyond reason. I mean, the first diagnosis of my marginal diabetes was made by a woman doctor who seemed to think she was entitled to dominate me like a popular high school girl looking for acolytes. I told her off before going to a different doctor, which is risky. After all, a doc can write things in your chart that contaminate how you are seen for many years. “Unstable, non-cooperative.” It can affect one’s access to care and cost a lot of money when the doc orders tests or writes prescriptions.

Clearly, a key issue is trust when one cannot have control. There’s little wonder that we have such a political trust crisis on our hands when so much of our compliance is based on force instead of willing consent. When there is a twenty dollar penalty for not having enough money to pay a bill, the temptation to play “uproar” is hard to resist. Surely there are better ways.

When I forget to cover my reactions and obviously bristle, some people come in closer and reach for control. Those fearful of sharing my punishment back away. Solidarity is threatened, which is hard on visionaries and idealists trying to force change. Did I say “force”?

By isolating myself in a small village where population density is thin, I can be far more of an outlier, a nonconforming person who is supersensitive about some things, easily overloaded by obligation and guilt. I have time to ponder and tease out the threads of something like oppositional defiance disorder. One thing I see is how easily an ODD person is controlled by their own automatic reactions. If you want them to go left, tell them to go right. The more subtle and alert will realize they are being controlled. But then they will tell even sympathetic persons the opposite of what they mean. They say they are fine when they are not and become enraged if you can’t tell they are NOT fine. It’s the confusion and automaticity of the strategy that keeps it from working better.

In the end the opposition and the defiance can either become exhausted disengagement or a thrashing desperation to escape the trap, to force someone else to take hold and resolve an intolerable and unjust torture. The best of all outcomes might be when the global situation shifts enough to open the jaws of the trap. That might mean a medical breakthrough, an economic reframing, or a social revolution. I have heard of schools or nursing homes where a team of concerned persons convene with the suffering “acting out” individual to evaluate and redesign terms. Isn’t that like a family? Sometimes they include family.

I don’t get into fist fights, but I’m hypervigilant, a compressed spring, tenacious, and waiting. Taking notes. Always writing as a way of getting at the truth. Stubborn.