BEST LAID PLANS
In 1999 when I bought this house in Valier and began a writing life, I had a premonition that it would all end in 20 years. I would be 80, so that was part of the expectation, but I had a feeling of terrible troubles coming, an explosion of terror that couldn’t be survived — shortages, failure of services, and a turn of culture to destruction and suppression. And it’s happening. The world as we have known it and hoped for it has ended.
Leaving Portland probably saved my life. The city has been deliberately targeted for destruction. I saw the first little inklings from the Portlandia Building and now remotely witness war and defiance in the very places I worked and grew up. When I was a child, NE 15th and Alberta was our bus stop, not the rallying point for marches.
Staying off the rez was another good idea since hatred of whites becomes stronger as the People themselves become more white — or so they fear. It is not an advantage to have seen the last of the old-timers in the Sixties, but has become a source of rage from the younglings who weren’t there and imagine it to be different than it was.
Valier was not a particularly good choice because it is shrinking and now being invaded by people from other cultures — I don’t mean Afghanistan, I mean Texas. Once 9/11 happened, the underculture of the world was clearly revealed as a global mafia guided by the vicious remnants of the USSR ideaology and joined by the casual criminals of American business. Now 1/6 has proven the point that those most dangerous are the ones who seem friends.
My genetic family has dispersed. The parent generation that grew up rural and came to the cities full of hope, managing to survive two World wars and a major depression, have died with the 20th century, leaving a generation now grandparents who saw many individual challenges by chance and mistook prosperity for safety.
The education that promised me so much in high school — and even more by the time I graduated from college and came to the reservation — turned out to be a fabulous gift that didn’t fit the culture. The idealism, the romantic openness to humanity, and the true achievements of the Theatre Department were crucial to survival and did that, but the crisis we see with those eyes also means that the baby boom was seen for what it was, temporary and demographically limited. I was right to get out of teaching. The Sixties, which were so exciting and demanded so much from me and Bob Scriver, turned out to be unsustainable and Bob himself was changed by old age.
Then the U of Chicago, accessed in part by my pretense that I was attending the seminary of the Unitarians and that their devotion to the Enlightenment — and even the extreme understandings of the universe being achieved there — were the peak of intellectual evolution. What has drawn me back from despair and saved me through this past twenty years has been the simple sensory life of wind and grass on the prairie.
The physical facts that challenge us now — pandemic and climate change — can only be survived as individuals and as a species if we abandon the crimes that take too much energy and too many assets. The government of the country has been invaded, corrupted, and nearly destroyed. That has to be reformed, but we don’t have a clear picture of what to do or what it will be like.
I am not liking the shift in focus from the individual to the community. I’m not good at groups, am usually the victim of group-think, and just don’t trust people after what sometimes feels like a betrayal in ministry because the Enlightenment was corrupted by pop psychology and greed.
In the last few years I’ve been living with iatrogenic medicine; that is, illness caused by medicine. I’ve had diabetes II treated with metformin, which had become a source of misery until I became Dr. Quack and researched my own case online. Now I have a doc who replaced metformin with a happier drug. It’s been two weeks without daily diarrhea that one can’t even talk about in polite company and that keeps one at home.
It was both an advantage and a disadvantage to have had six months employment at the relevant hospital. The “medicals” are defending themselves and their status by blaming patients. The insurance juggernaut is dominant and the pharma drummers know how to bribe and court the females who inhabit the practices one way or another. These second level mock-docs do bad things for what they believe are good reasons.
My life and sanity has been saved by unlikely sources, one of which is a writer/artist who guides boys at risk and convinced me I was a writer who could take on ideas that defy community and their wrong assumption that conformity justifies destruction of anyone different or exploring. He gave me courage.
Key has been my brother’s daughter, now just past forty, who runs an artificial insemination business for ranchers from the heart of her family, which includes two sons. She’s in Oregon but came here once. In those days I was respectable enough for company. Not anymore.
The system that once claimed hierarchy and hegemony were the values that counted is now lying around us in pieces, charred and shattered. Nor is there a theory yet that can replace these ideas of what is important and rewarding. The Internet has changed the humanities forever and brought them back into interaction with science, and yet it is so fragile that a teenaged Chinese hacker can destroy a city.
Wind farms have replaced coal mines, except that we still think of them the same way and insist on pipelines that destroy our water sources. Mega-corporations still have our resources by the throat, but we begin to see energy sources specific to individual households that are not batteries, like solar panels on the roof. Electrical cars are in production. My little gas-burning pickup will probably be illegal by the time it stops working, though being in a small town makes me too dependent on it.
I keep getting questionnaires demanding to know what I want and who I am. The trouble is that they are all written by techies and bureaucrats who know only their own lives except that there are masses of alien displaced refugees they don’t want to think about, though some are living on their sidewalks. They have no images or relationship to land except as a place to vacation — if you have money. They never include categories that matter to my life.
At this moment Hurricane Ida is coming ashore in New Orleans. It feels as though there is a script somewhere being enacted by evil forces. But it’s just the planet doing its thing. We can only adapt until we too are transient. I’ll get as far along in skill and insight as I can. We’ll get some weather spin-off in a few days but it won’t be much. The legacies of jazz and Tennessee Williams remain. In fact, my new book, “The Evolution of Imagination” by Stephen T. Asma is shaped by the principles and experience of jazz. I’m finding it very useful.
