This choice may not be necessary but it has become clear to me what I simply cannot tolerate and remain something I recognize as myself.

This is good to know.

via Wimp

As I fly past these coastal lands I see the ocean and below the surface a great many ovoid shapes that I know to be creatures. Whales probably. I get no sense in the dream that these are sharks or other killers but that they are dangerous simply because of our relative size. The fact that they may kill me after I drop amid them would be a matter of impersonal circumstance. I am stoic about this possible fate. This is not something I want but at least falling into the water is not necessarily fatal as falling to the earth would have been.

And then the young man and I are in the water and the point of view changes. I can no longer see the beings below, the water is dark, the grey-brown-green of the sea. I also cannot see the land. I cannot control what may happen in the sea. All I can do is swim. So I turn back toward the way I have just come and begin.

I have worked with dreams since I was a young girl and because it is such a long time, my working with them goes in great arcs.  At the nadir I obsess, write down every image, sensation, colour flare in my sleeping. I list all the elements, translate them into narrative. I compare the symbols to past dreams. Turn them into poems, drawings, song, movement. Interpret.

At the zenith of my psychological bow, I surface inside the dream and it stays with me, gently.  Like balm on sore hands the images remain mostly invisible but work nonetheless. Often – acknowledged but left alone – a friend that needs a period of respectful silence before speaking – the dream will resolve into meaning and present itself as something so obvious, so crystalline and ordered, that one wonders how something so obvious was necessary to be spoken.

But it is necessary and, from experience, there is another, and another, layer of insight that will present itself when the initial action of the dream has been played out in waking life. So for this one, the swim is what I am being called upon to do and once I reach sight of land, or landfall itself, the dream will reappear and I will understand more.

Welding dreams to waking life is an act of art. Interpretation always is. The world has no meaning intrinsic to it, at least not any meaning in the human sense of the word. Meaning as we know it is our creation. Yet despite this, a good meaning, one that works for us in our lives must be linked to the actual world. Meaninglessness has at least two components. One is the obvious fact that humans are the source of human meaning and so there is no outside resource by which we can ascertain the Truth. Humans are not interlocutors between heaven and earth. We are in a dyadic relationship with that which is our source. The earth and its patterns are sometimes the nadir and we the zenith and other times we are beneath our own feet.

The dream I had told me a few things. I am finally out of prison, but I am still not in control. I have been shot out of that terrible place and I am passing over that which was for me. In other words, my job is over and I am temporarily immersed in Rez war and politics. And this has dumped me back into the sea of feeling.

I am not an emotional person and there are whale-sized unresolved issues that swim in my unconscious. I am in pain a good deal and of late I have felt despair, and an understanding of how people wear out, how pain can cause even a strong woman to lie down to die. But here in the dream, despite my lack of personal control – my life’s lack of a apparent navigation device – my natural stubbornness has been restored. Often in my past, in a dangerous situation, my mind narrows, and my focus remains locked on getting to safety. This is the feeling I am left with in the dream. All those dangerous huge creatures below me – there is nothing I can do about that. I may be killed by the vasty size of that which I cannot control. This is true – but meaningless since it is not mine to write. All I can do is swim.

This is key in the dream but so too is direction. At the very end of the dream I am in the water beginning the swim to shore, resolute, fear harnessed to forward motion, but where exactly is shore? And what does it represent in waking life?

The question to be answered by subsequent acts of interpretation: Where in waking life does safety lay?

And what I would really like to know – can I stop being shot out of other people’s guns?

I leave this morning for Spokane. Court on Tuesday and in preparation I have been reading some material from the Washington State Institute for Public Policy of problems inherent in providing educational services for the deaf and hard of hearing in the state.

I’m looking forward to the drive. I like the basin terrain, seeing the plants as they respond to sun and rain and warm weather. I suspect it won’t be as warm as it was a couple of weeks ago when I was here last since it has been raining, which I view as a good thing since I don’t much enjoy heat.

I have a room booked at my favourite motel in Spokane, but apart from the necessary conversation to pay for the room, this will be a day spent in silence. Bliss.

I think I should have been an anchorite – well except for the necessary religiosity, of course. I wonder if there is a way to make this propensity of mine pay?

It’s the same thing as the cicada video I just posted. It’s so non-human that I feel as if I am just a part of things – a small, non-important part – and not the center of the universe. I find the switch from center to periphery deeply reassuring, a stunning pleasure.

This center of the universe thing: that’s the problem with cities, they lead you more deeply into the delusion that the universe is about being human, that our measure is also the measure of the rest of eternity, and of course it isn’t. The most horrible thing is that while the feeling of centrality persists, not only is it simply wrong, it is also deeply disruptive. I mean how can one actually attend to what is in fact the case when blinded by one’s own reflection? I mean it would be like assessing the possibilities of the world outside the home if all one’s widows were mirrors.

This film is a visual reminder of both our belonging and of the non-human nature of reality. I am deeply glad that Herzog was granted a pass to the base because, I suspect, this film is the closest that I will ever get to that booming silence.

Woke up at 3AM again. Being an efficient woman, I decided to do some chores and so went out to retrieve my laundry. And came face to face with a skunk. Luckily for me the skunk decided to play nice and gave me safe passage. So I was able to deal with my clothes and come back into the house with just the normal human stink.

My heart rate is more-or-less back to normal but I am oh-so wide awake now, hence the computer browsing and blog posting. In the process of having a look-see I found this new photo posted on peardg’s flickr page. The first thing I thought was “oh cool that’s the turn to home.” Bleh.

The photo represents one of the turns close to the edge of the reservation where I have recently been for Thyra’s funeral services and where she is now buried.  Work has been terribly busy of late, and as of yesterday, got even busier. I actually had my head in my hands at the end of the day feeling as I did the long long hours to come if I’m to keep up with the pile. I haven’t really thought about Rez and family things much and I’ve been doing pretty well I thought.

The weather in Vancouver has been absolutely gorgeous. Yesterday peardg and I (she works in the same office as I do, at least for the next couple of weeks) walked over to the art museum and had hot chocolate and tabouli (odd combo huh) sitting outside in the sun. We had a really great waitress which made things even nicer. It was delightful bit of time and despite the hullabaloo at work, I went back with a sense that I could survive. But the picture has set off a wave of “can I run away” questions.

I don’t like being pulled to places I cannot go.  I mean I really don’t want to live on the Rez again despite missing the people there. I’m not sure there is a good solution to it, but perhaps I do need to visit more – more than the weddings and funerals that another sister gently chastised me for when I got there this last time. Perhpas it is as simple as that.

For now, skunk fear somewhat abated, perhaps a hot bath with lavender? Then a bit more sleep.

I haven’t thought about it for a while, but on leaving work today, the knowledge that the coming dark was a turning point in the solar movement along the horizon, the clear sky and the waxing crescent of the moon in my southern sky, brought the memory sharply to the surface. The thing about that moon map is that it measured the passage of time in a way that made it seem a geographic phenomena. Many decades later when I learnt that some people conceive of time as something that retreats the further one travels from home, I understood it instantly. Time is a spatial phenomenon.

We are so reliant on the linear representation which our calendars and clocks provide for us that it seems difficult to grasp what time is like to those who map it on bone and through standing circles of stone. It’s not, I think, as simple as wanting to know when the next season is coming. It has to do with wanting to know where and when you are.

In one place I used to live, the winter solstice sun rose just between two tall cottonwood trees in an otherwise low-growth field across the road from my house. The first year I was there, when the sun rose that day, it was if I had been given a map that had a big golden X saying “You Are Here!.” The thing is that it didn’t map the earth, nor even my place in the universe. It mapped time, laid it out flat for me, so I could understand the dips and curves that had rolled me into this time. It located me “now;” not in splendid isolation, but like an asteroid that inhabits a location because of the various positions, trajectories and speeds of all that is around it.  This is what I mean by knowing where you are — it is knowing one’s movement patterns in relationship to all the other patterns that impinge upon yours.  This is what I felt in that bone that mapped the moon’s time.  The bone mapped by relating the moon’s movements to a specific bit of horizon, to a specific bit of land known deeply by the woman who gathered the bone, and who day after day, went out stand in the same place and watch time rise a little further along the horizon and then swing back on itself, marking time as something curved and sibilant.

With the sun, such a map is a simple arc, moving south in winter and then north in summer. It works well as a guide for groups of people because of that simplicity. The sun can locate us all at once. But with the moon the movement pattern it describes is far more complex and more difficult to track.  We can do it with our tools of course, but what happens is that we map it against something outside ourselves. This is our 3rd person sense of locality and its that sense of things that gives us the perception of time as an arrow — a movement even simpler than the sun’s year-long arc. The consequent maps, whether of space or time, locate all of us simultaneously, and all of us are placed against a rubric that stands outside our individual selves. This is the beauty of 3rd person reasoning, but by its very nature, it is not something that can give us that personal shot of feeling that we need to locate our 1st person selves in the time we move through.

To do that we need something that can map things in relationship to our particular selves in motion, our particular bit of lived on land.  That’s why the bone map works so well in evoking a sense of personal immediacy that includes the world. It’s a feeling of immanence, yet there is no transcendence to balance it because there is nothing else. So it isn’t really a “dwelling within,” so much as a simple “dwelling.” This “dwelling” is something that exists simultaneously in each object in the world and, most importantly, in the resonant space that defines the “between” that makes distinct objects possible.

The little grooves on each side of the s-track of holes on the bone marked some specific location, some rock or tree perhaps, in that long-ago relation’s world. When she stood there, had the marks lined up to her reference points, she knew exactly where the moon had risen the day before. By virtue of that she also knew that in this one spot where her feet pressed against the earth, she was also in that time past, and she knew she would be in that future time, when the next day the moon would rise again. The map of the rising points, her sense of intimacy with the particulars of the land, must have crafted an experienced world which welded her sense of space to her sense of time. Quite literally, she stood at the center of all time and space because it was mapped based on her particular location within it.

What I have been wondering is what it must have been like to have that sense of time and space be the predominate measure by which we guided our actions. Because we must live almost entirely with 3rd person concepts and maps, it seems nearly impossible to credit 1st person locality as a true measure of what is, yet really, our bodies must do this all the time. Every time we swing along the road on the way home our bodies are mapping time and space in just the way my relation did. The difference is that since bodies do it unconsciously, and we have largely lost the art of bringing this into awareness, for us, learning to map reality in the 1st person sense, and do it consciously, has become a kind of mysticism.  All my relation really did is find a way to share the intimate map of her individuality with those that would come to hold the bone. The thing is that part of what the bone said about her was that she had a specific place and a specific time and that these were as much a part of her as the hands that drilled the holes and the longing to represent what she had come to know. She was a woman, I think, that must have really known where she was.

The mad policemen, the unnamed narrator, the police building inside the walls of a dead man’s house, the bicycles and rides around the countryside and the fact that the book ends almost exactly as it opens: I loved the book, but then I was born to a situation where oddity was bound to be something I came to understand and welcome.

The book’s vision of the world is deeply skewed: O’Nolan not only wasn’t on the playing field, he wasn’t even close. It’s more like he was hunting butterflies on a bog somewhere far distant, while the intellectuals and artists of his day were holding deep conversation on the pitcher’s mound some thousands of miles away. I imagine him, though, wanting to take part. Probably shattered by the rejection notice saying “too fantastic.” I suspect he went down into death feeling, in part at least, a failure because he just couldn’t be what it took to be at the central mound with all the others. I suspect that his “bogs” called to him, and he answered, but he couldn’t find a way to share what he had found. Or at least he couldn’t share it in a way that gave him the emotional and writerly resources to mount more trips, to find curiouser and curiouser examples of odd life.

Odd people: butterfly hunters in a dangerous bog. Many, if not most, of them drown without the rest of the world having the chance to see what life they have captured. That’s why I dedicated this post to the writer of The Third Butterfly, because, if it was ever written, The Third Butterfly never made it off the writer’s sideboard, at least not until it came time to consign it to the evening fire.

I suppose the internet offers a partial solution to the problem of the lost butterfly hunters but I cannot help but wonder about a species where oddity is so essential to innovation and yet where those that are actually odd are so deeply disdained or at best, uncomfortable to be around for long. That damn oddity – you think you’re passing and then – WHAM – you see the “look” and you know you’ve blown it.

So Dear Sir or Madam, you who are the author of The Third Butterfly, I can offer you no solace except for my acknowledgment of your existence. May you find the most wondrous specimens of life and may you, someday, be lucky enough to have someone else share in your marvel – even if you don’t live long enough to be its witness.

Owens writes the most gloriously beautiful worlds that are nevertheless coloured over by sadness. His narrative worlds are living, earthy things and his characters are damaged, serious, powerful in a quiet way, and funny. Indian in other words.

By genre the books are mysteries but are also considered fantasy. This last is largely because the stories are based on American Indian reality, which includes forces like dreams that cross time, history as a living energy that directly effects the present and shapes the future, and most importantly, the narratives include living people who can see and interact with the past in ways that influence the progress of the present as it becomes what will be.  What makes this “fantasy” is that these forces are presented and understood as (for example) long-dead gamblers (bone game is a kind of gambling game) who want to reclaim their riven world from those (in this case a sadistic Spanish priest) who destroyed it. Such spiritual beings are active participants in the worlds that Owen creates.

Genghis Blues is about the meeting between musician and singer Paul Pena and musician and throatsinger Kongar-ol Ondar. What I found immediately compelling about the story is the ease of the fit between Pena and Ondar. Both are men of grace and humor; both are men who seem to inspire love and deep admiration and despite the vast differences between their respective worlds, they are, in fundamental ways, the same.

It’s this familial sense: this recognition of an interior private world that is nevertheless based on deep and constant human connection; a world that is grown in the medium of inextricably linked laughter and sadness, story and music as expected, as a public expression of what it means to be a normal person in the world, and a fluid sense of the aliveness of time and space. This is common between Paul, Kondar-oh and Louis.

There are also the cultural links between the Tuvan world and the world of American Indian cultures.  There are many similarities and these resonated for me while I was watching the film. One thing that stood out for me as a connection was the ease and honesty by which Tuvan’s dealt with the necessity of death as part of human life. There is a scene where a sheep is killed. It is to become food for the group. The killing, the death, isn’t hidden away, but is something that happens in the middle of the group; the death is both a simple ritual and a mundane part of how-it-is-to-be-us. This kind of practice tends to keep people connected to the costs of how they live.  A good thing I think.

But really what made the connection for me between the Indian world that I know and the Tuvan world, was how they took Paul in and how they treated him.  All through the film there are the hands gently touching and guiding. That’s so Indian I can hardly contain myself. And the scenes of strangers: the faces, non-threatening, happy to accept someone new, welcoming, interested, calm, simply happy and contented. They gather round Paul, he is asked to sing for them, and they just stand and listen – attentively, calmly, happily. And then they laugh and clap and let him move on.

All the neediness that is celebrity culture seems absent. Not that there aren’t celebrities in Indian country or in Tuva. Clearly Kongar-oh is a celebrity, for example. As was Louis Owens.  It’s what that means that is so fundamentally different. In the dominant parts of non-Indian North America, to be a celebrity means that you have people salivating after you. It means that you have what others want. It means that you are both idolized and despised. You become your character instead of your self. Such deep human disconnect tends to be forestalled within cultures and groups that are founded on intense and wide ranging connection — where no one will ever forget (this is not about forgiveness, by the way – another big cultural difference) how you have behaved in the past and to whom you are connected.

Let me see if I can explain that. Take Owens’ books.  His worlds are based on the inextricable connections between what was done in the past and what will become of the present and future. They are based on the connections between people – it’s as if family members (in the broad sense) are really a single organism; like aspen trees they appear distinct, and in some ways function separately, but are really extensions of the same being, the same root. The books are all based on the idea that human beings live as part of and within the living world that is the environment. (Think of us humans as aspen leaves (along with all the other the animals), the plants as the branches and the air, rocks and waters as the trunks of the aspen colony and the earth as the whole colony/tree.) When your phenomenological world is based upon such structures then there is no escaping the recognition of history and no way not to belong – no forgetting – and whatever hell or heaven you find yourself in, you belong to it.

This can work wonderfully well to support human beings when the cultural and environmental systems are functional and largely intact. Even in the face of much depredation, such as experienced by American Indian people both past and present, if enough of the people and land remains, the tendency is to adapt, to come together again and laugh as well as cry, to keep going. Such tenacity is to be admired I think; it is the core of what makes us such an evolutionary successful species, so adaptable to stressors. Nevertheless, such cultural predispositions mean that you are changed by the past. You can never simply “get over it,”  because history doesn’t simply vanish even if one closes one’s eyes to it. The consequence for a survivor in a culture where the acknowledgement of and respect for the power of the past is central is that laughter is forged with grief.

Imagine aspen trees as sentient. Now imagine all are destroyed but three lone trees. What it is to be those three trees would be devastating because so much of what it is to be an aspen is the colony. Now imagine that the destruction was reversed, yet those three trees retained the memory of what had been done. It would change everything, for everyone, even the trees that don’t remember what was done. That’s what connects Paul, Kondar-oh and Louis. It’s also what makes their various arts luminescent, enlivening and deeply moving.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.

Living out is a completely different sensory experience than living in.  When you live in a van, you know the weather without the internet. You know it because, dry and curled under blankets on the foam bed, your face feels the cool sting of winter. Your nose always knows whether it has rained in the night. The crimson leaves flying past the windshield, which you can see from the nest in the back, tells you how fast the wind is moving. The thing about living out is that you always feel a part of the world; you receive constant signals of inclusion from everything around you.

There are hard things about living out of course. Police is a big one.  Acquisitiveness as security is another. You have to be flexible, ready to move on, you have to keep only those things that really matter to living well, you have to have a realistic view of what people will actually do when confronted with difference they don’t understand. And perhaps most importantly, you have to have enough anger to fight back and enough self-discipline to know when to keep quiet and run. These skills are based on knowing that other people really do exist and upon the fact that world was not created for you, in fact not even “created” but, like you, in a constant state of on-the-fly creation. In other words, living out is not for the mentally ill, not for the victims of the world and not for the self-obsessed.

My life right now is mundane. I have a job, financial responsibilities, a commitment to heal.  What this means is that I spend a good deal of my time inside.  Still, before getting sick this last time, I used to go out after work to someplace where I could sit or walk outside. I like to take my car, for example, to the beach, walk for a bit then curl up in the back seat under my blankets with the windows open and read.  I also like to sit outside at the cafe, watch people and animals move around in the world, drink tea and read. Sometimes I go to the dog park, watch the dog wander excitedly from smell-spot to smell-spot, sit near the lake and read. When it gets cold here in the winter, I like to sit at those restaurants that have the propane outdoor heaters, have lunch outside watching the rain and the grey quilted sky and yet be warm and dry. And yes, read.

My head is a place of frequent residence. I am not a person to enjoy exercise for its own sake, and if I go with someone out to the “wilderness” I’d rather make camp and then sit by myself just inside the edge of the trees and watch all the things that go on around me. So you’d think I would be a shoe-in for the day spent at the library or something. But I’m not. If I had a choice between reading in and reading out, I would read out, and even more radically, if I had to choose between watching the world do its thing and reading, I’d choose the world. Luckily, I haven’t had to make the choice.

The swirling confusion that is the world of life, air, water, earth and fire gives me something that underpins everything else, including reading.

For example, I am current reading Jeffrey Foss’s book called Science and the Riddle of Consciousness A Solution. A read-in book, you’d think. But no. I read the first three chapters when I was in the hospital and I have to say (along with a novel by Lewis Owens) it was the solace of my time there. I am now reading the last chapters of the book and those are being read between the coffee shop sidewalk and the beach. And somehow, it’s a different (even better) book — but of course that isn’t really the case. What’s true is that I am a different reader under different circumstances.

What makes the difference in me is that swirl of sensation that being out provides. Without even paying attention, just having an eddy of air circle my wrist, tells me something extraordinary about what it means to be a human being. The blare of colour that is autumn and the red rain jacket that just walked by. The crow call and the rain blat blat on the canopy above me. The braided stream pattern washing the sidewalk. The splat of a four-year-old’s yellow rain boots as they simultaneously hit the puddle at the edge of the road. Her mother’s hand pulling her across the street with the walk-light. The wet chrysanthemums in pots, the decaying Japanese maple leaves, the sodden bamboo and wet earth, mixed with coffee, curry and just-out-of-the-oven cinnamon rolls.  All this is happening to my senses while I read Foss and given what he is talking about (more on that in another post – it’s a great book), the sensory experience of being outside a controlled environment can’t help but augment what Foss is speaking about. A critical piece of that is what he calls the manifest system – that is the body and how it makes meaning and models the world – as I read Foss my manifest system is busily linking the whole world together and making it personally meaningful in ways that incorporate constant change, inclusiveness, belonging and sensuality.

My body/brain and all its systems were designed to happily chug away at the sensations that are rain and wind and light and smell, and because of how my life has been, the world and its swirl is not alien to me. I am not a feral child with respect to the earth and its social habits. All those things I learn and consistently reinforce just by being out — that I am part of the world, that I am at home where ever I am, that I am mortal and that I am alive right now, that I am a creature alongside myriad other creatures, that I am moving through my life inside the life that is the world — I learn just by being outside and paying attention. So of course, those lessons impact whatever particular lessons are coming to me from the pages of the book.

Living in just doesn’t provide the same resonance. Think about the lessons still air provides — enclosed spaces, light that has nothing to do with the sky, senses cut off from what’s happening on the earth, these are lessons too. The question is what do they teach? Using my emotional system as a reference grid, they don’t seem to teach about belonging. That’s the thing I have been missing while being ill, it’s the sense that I am here, now, and that I belong to the world. Oh how I wish my hospital bed could have been parked at the beach.

Anyway, I’m going back out now. More lessons to learn. See ya.