NOW EVERYTHING CHANGES
So far certain interests of the people who support the label of “metamodernism” have major appeal for me. Two that I value highly are thinking about erasing old boundaries that were once divisions between valued thought: secular/religious, nature/human, science/religion, technical/human, fact/fiction, fiction/lies, animal/human.
The other is an interest in what is between boundaries and next to boundaries: borderlands and interrelationships. This comes from both being so close to the Canadian border (on the Montana side) and having family history on both sides, plus being close to the Blackfeet rez and having a decade of participation plus fifty years of observation ever since.
So now I have a “pot-lifter” for understanding my intimate relationships from the past: family, Bob Scriver, Piikuni, ministry, writing, and boys doing sex work. Each of them is a relationship in tension because of the obvious impossibility of ever joining them.
This has meant changes in terms: for instance, Scriver never “loved” me but we were tightly attached to each other, so attachment became my new word for intimacy and shared work. Because I now understand an individual quite differently from the Christian “fated” single genius, and rather think of a human as a process of composite cells organized to have memory and a trajectory, it’s clear that the 47-year-old I first met became solidified into someone half-intended and interpreted by others to suit themselves. I can’t grasp his essence, as I thought intimacy would reveal, because there is none, except for the moment of each time/space.
In some similar way, I can never really grasp what it is to be Blackfeet because it is a process of “kettled” persons with memories and trajectories that I don’t know. One can only suggest possibilities. The white insistence on seeing a tribe on historical terms only helps to disperse them as a contemporary demographic, esp. since half have left. Whatever it is, I can’t share it. But I can report it.
Denominations are the institutional expressions of a general socioeconomic affinity among persons. UU’s are generally well-educated, Enlightenment, progressive sort of people. I thought I fit, but I don’t. There is no denomination I fit because my awareness of what some call the spiritual stands apart from gathering people into groups. However, I understand communities and I know how to form a liminal structure for the purpose of confirmation and renewal. This is not what denominations think that ministers should do: rather they should reinforce the denomination.
Ten years of awareness of boys doing sexwork has been a far more complex set of tensions. One is that I’ve gradually come to understand that one of my brothers was badly damaged by early sexual assault from other boys in the Forties. A dozen mysteries fell into sense once I understood what it is like to be a boy assaulted. This is not the same as doing sexwork in order to survive.
Every human cultural category has a high end and a low end. People who do sexwork are no different: they range from the tough, short-lived street walkers through various qualities of bordello or call-person, to quite sophisticated people with subtle awareness of how to affect people. The key point is that sex is not just an act of coitus, whoever participates, but many more factors of psychology, sociology, and neurology.
We could learn a lot from them, but I can never be one of them. It’s not because I’m old but because I over-think and never really understand my own body. I split and spectator, which one must also do for acting, which I’m not good at on a high level.
Now let’s look at these barriers between ideas, which many people may share without knowing it. Some of them come from education and some from media enforcing popular culture from the past.
These distinctions are no longer useful:
Secular/religious and science/religion
In history when religion lost its status as superior to nations and called by God to moderate among them, religious institutions fought to stay in power and attacked the “new” sciences of astronomy, math, and nations. To keep them from interfering with science, they were ruled to be from a different realm. Then in the days of Enlightenment when everything was ruled by logic and a new burst of science, religion was ruled to be emotional along with other humanities, and told to butt out. Theology was replaced by ecstasy.
Nature/human and animal/human were two dichotomies trying to privilege human beings, much damaged by thought about evolution and finally the research on DNA. Calling someone a monkey, a dog, a reptile, were slams. People who didn’t fit the restraints of their culture were explained as animals.
The division between nature and human was slightly different. Humans were said to be able to stand apart, to think about the world from a different place, unaffected by their humanness. Now we admit that humans are also part of nature. DNA stretches and varies through all of life from microbe to Einstein. It’s impossible to become a machine and, likewise, it’s impossible for a machine with no DNA to ever become human, no matter how much code we install.
Literary divisions, arbitrary as they are, have become a morality. Fact/fiction was a split imagined at a particular point in history, marked bu the advent of novels, which often claimed to be absolutely true, amazing as it might seem! Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels.
This idea for fiction, which improved sales, was soon attacked by the moral accusation of lies. If I wrote a book in the first person claiming to be a teenaged boy who enjoyed doing sexwork because it gave me control over men, it would be ridiculed when they found out I was an old small town penniless woman who had no control over anyone — just ten cats. I still run into people from my past who don’t believe I could write anything but sentimental memoir and have no consciousness that I even did that.
Metamodernism may be a way to keep order in chaos and skepticism, possibility and diminishment, extravagance and severity. But I wish it had a better name that didn’t require a lot of explanation. Reconfigurationism?
