IT’S NOT THERAPY

Fifty years ago I had a conversation with my minister at the time who was explaining what a psychiatrist does. “He asks you questions until he finds something that makes you hurt and then he digs in until you are in agony and he gotten to the bottom of it. I know because I’m married to a psychiatrist.”

She divorced him. He was not cured so he kept getting re-married. She did not.

But no counselors or psychologists or psychiatrists came close to what made me hurt. The shrink who was finally told I’d attempted suicide said I couldn’t come back until I told him what I was hiding, but I didn’t know what he was talking about, since I wasn’t the one who told him I’d attempted suicide. Anyway, I had no money and was female, so I wasn’t the one who had any answers. I just didn’t go back.

Not long ago someone sent me a comment remarking that my blogging must be “good therapy.” I took offense, not because he was demanding secrets or making hurt, but because he had such a trivial teaparty notion of therapy and pulled my writing to that level. Therapy to many people is a kind of parlor game, a clone of childhood behavior when one’s morality is handed over to adults, qualified only because they are adult.

My blogging is not just a nice middle-class harmless “walk down memory lane.” I despise that phrase. What I remember in my life is destruction, injustice, criminality, death and, yes, suicide. Not always mine nor attempted. People read my blog as though it were a travelogue, the way Google, asked about “Indians,” always offered tourist sites. Tribal people were not people — simply colorful. Starvation, addiction, murder, humiliation, etc. were not included.

My cousins — all proper respectable people who disapprove of sex — love all the Scots dramas, even the ones that include terrible atrocities and perversions (being historically accurate). When I asked why they would read such things, they said they just skipped those parts, since Scots dramas were really about proper respectable people. Scotland to them was a tourism event, visiting the town for which our family was named.

This explains why they will not read what I write. Instead, they make a little display of my published book to show how significant and important it is — an object, not a document. An anomaly.

I was deeply offended by a former student who brought me a visiting white man who wanted to know enough secret stuff about Indian writers to claim he was an expert. First of all, the student thought I was a feature of his boyhood long ago. He knew nothing about my library or knowledge about the field of NA lit. Second, the now-adult student, enrolled, knew little or nothing about NA lit himself. He said, as a point of pride, that he didn’t read and I should know that.

Third, I despise the whole category of white men who know only “the Indian on the library shelf” which means curated by white men [sic]. Fourth, the former student had spent his entire adult life in “Indian education” and playing poker. Poker probably meant more to him, or he would have lost too much money to go on and he’s done quite well for himself.

When I was a theatre student no one ever said I had my head in the clouds, was unrealistic. Ever since then, the advice of cynics has been not to care so much. Being in the ministry did not leave them behind. Mostly, writing retired means I don’t have to listen to such opinions, except that Medium.com is constantly pushing for sales and what sells is not serious stuff except for attacks on favorite enemies. Constant nagging emails arrive about how many “hits” each essay got.

I’m no Marxist, but my age — coming to adulthood in the midst of Fifties contempt for middle-class conformist people — has controlled me. As I blog, I mourn how much time I’ve wasted doing middle-class Victorian things and thinking I was being real. Ballet classes that never went beyond buying the shoes. Piano lessons never practised.

Clever little paragraphs of description that got me high praise from old-maid English teachers who never explained how that was only a beginning and what a vast long way there was to go, only entered with rigor and courage. They weren’t hiding it. They didn’t know. It took me far too long to realize that though I considered myself an exceptionally good writer and so did my teachers, it was pure fantasy unless I actually wrote something.

The skill would not come to me in the way that the Holy

Dove inseminated the Virgin Mary, squirting it into her ear, but only through practice. Product! In those days, stuff on paper. And it didn’t automatically come out of a typewriter. When I tried teaching a class at the Blackfeet Community College, I realized many people think of “print” as a self-generating phenomenon that simply rises out of paper like a rash breaking out on skin.

Or maybe it was computer composing so there was no more tedious crossing out and writing between lines or up the margins that finally revealed that “writing” is packed with possibilities that do not arrive from the subconscious fully formed. Not that I don’t despise Grammarly — just the assumption that knowing proper English (meaning contemporary American) is worth anything in the real world of writing — far, far from filling out academic templates.

Nor do I mean writing “from the heart” which is largely “grizzling” in the Brit slang. There is no algorithm for honesty, clarity, reality (whatever that is), meaning for specific kinds of people. Those who run writing platforms don’t think anything counts except purchase and that people buy according to their, well, hobbies. Railroads, tulips, stoop labor, ghetto slang — whatever.

Alvina Krause, Method acting professor, wrote in my class journal over and over, “You must WORK!” What she meant, I think, though I didn’t think it at the time, is to attempt (write, act) over and over, trying different methods and skills, until you hit the right thing — something resonant, seizing, and worth transmitting. Exceptional and possibly profane. Therapy has nothing to do with it.