NOW WHAT?
What’s missing in the church shell is the congregation and what’s missing in the false front town is the population. We’ve got our signifiers — the women, the young man, the dogs, the goats, the spring — but the people have come, done their jobs for a film, and left. They were acting on behalf of a presumed people who came to towns and what they did will be seen by an invisible throng who watch closely to see how people act, right or wrong.
The paleoanthropolosts say that the cooperation necessary for hunting and gathering, whether pointing at prey right at the time or describing where to find them, began as gestures, continued as concepts, and became vocabulary. It was this shared ability that led to the first people able to work together to build houses, cultivate crops, and celebrate the good times with dance and song.
Even the pastoralists, who persist today with their herds, and who gave us many of our zoonoses, who don’t mix much or maybe even come into town, are part of the larger community that shares the surface of the planet. Some people think that when agriculture became the forming principle of human culture, many of our most troubling dynamics were formed. Family and neighborhoods; storable/hoardable food; the forming of religious institutions; governmental forming of laws, borders and military enforcement began to dominate well-being and discarded the obligation to help the vulnerable.
Pooling large amounts of wealth to create fabulous buildings, transportation webworks (including communication like mail, radio, tv), dams and bridges — all these convenient and “modern” things were seen as “progress,” compensation for the stigma, the penitentiaries, the corruption and collusion. But none of these things are in this story about a little movie-set town for Westerns. So now where do we go.
1. A helicopter lands with a small team who are scouting locations for making new old-fashioned Western in hopes that such a thing will “sell” again.
2. Rogue, the blue heeler, needs a story line of his own.
3. The premise that the saloon will burn down needs to be elaborated and justified. How did it happen anyway?
4. A family of tourists arrives and run wild, waving cameras.
5. A cougar stakes out the waterhole and kills goats.
6. More about music, both Clara’s grand piano (does it burn?) and Greta’s tin whistle.
7. There’s a break in “time” and people arrive from the past.
People who read what I write, think at first that I’m creating what they expect, which in many cases is a bit of entertainment, possibly with a bit of history to make it more “authentic.” They want it to be full of little loops of affection and attachment between people or maybe rivalries that will be happily resolved. That’s not what I do.
Maybe it’s because ministry — if it’s properly in contact with all the people — is a great way to confront everything in people that is weak, conspiratorial, diseased, deceptive, controlling, and needy. Of course, this means that the minister — if he or she is any good — will be forced to face all those things in his or her self. The idea of the congregation as an entity is to help each other with these design flaws left over from all our predecessors among the hominins, mammals, and OMG snakes.
This idea about a town that is only a set has no congregation. There is no body of townsmen to resist wannabe dictators or bad guys suddenly riding into town. No need for a posse. But death will come anyway. In fiction characters can be added or subtracted at will, as long as it seems reasonable. But is death ever reasonable.
Of course. Living things are not meant to be immortal, but to pass their lives on to new living things. The reason for this is a bit of stutter, flaws, little molecular changes that are called mutations and that are the source of evolution. Not necessarily progress.
Democracy, as a principle of governance, depends upon a Christian idea that every human has a soul and is equal before God. But now that such notions are passé, what do we do? This little town can’t answer that. The central idea here is empathy for each other which leads to the “extended mind” being accessible to everyone, so that we share life experiences, which is one use of stories.
Democracy’s problem is that we’re not equal. Some are dumb. Some live in a place where it’s almost impossible to stay alive, not least because of human attempts to dominate each other, but also because the climate is opposed to life things — nothing to eat, no shelter, no water. Some have been so mutilated and distorted from conception and early life that they cannot muster empathy or good will. Yet — for the good of all — we must help each other.
Even in penitentiaries or prison camps or migrant refugee tent cities people will form alliances and share ideas. This is where our hope and wellspring arise. This phony little town needs more hardship to bring them together. I guess that’s why the saloon fire, replacing symbolic booze with actual flame.
