CyberSomatics

My sister sent me this joke and it made me laugh out loud, so I’m reposting it.

Is there life after death?  Bob and Marion wanted to know but were worried about what it might be like. They agreed that the first to die would make a heroic effort to contact the living partner, and if possible to share the good (or not so good) news.   It was Bob who died first, and true to his word, he made contact with Marion.  ”Is that you, Bob?”

“Yes, Marion.  I’ve come back to tell you there is life after death.”

“Oh, Bob!  What is it like?”

“I get up in the morning and have sex, then it’s off to the golf course.  I sit around in the sun and have sex a couple more times.  I eat a green salad.   I have another romp around the golf course and have more sex.  Dinner, sex, sleep, sex, back to the golf course …”

“Oh, Bob!  Are you in heaven?”

“No.  I’m a rabbit in Arizona.”

Years ago, when journalists wrote copy on typewriters, my editor told me, “When you come back from a trip and start telling me about the story, the first thing you talk about is your lead.  It’s what you instinctively find interesting.”   The first thing I talked about on returning from the Grass Roots Radio Conference in Garberville, which was last Wednesday through Sunday, was that I met the man who has Parkinson’s, and who was being taunted and abused by Tea Party members protesting the passage of a bill to expand health care coverage and regulate the insurance carriers.

The reason this was in the forefront of my experience was that it took something sent to me by one of my Facebook friends, which I viewed with a mixture of disbelief and disgust, and personalized it.  It is axiomatic that the political issue is one thing and personal experience is something quite different.  This is why when one is trained to kill other people the one thing which is verboten is humanizing the person to be killed, or even allowing any thought of their humanity to intrude on the action.  The central training of a warrior is to always know what to do next and do it by reflex.  At the more esoteric levels this involves two combatants exhaling, with the one who needs to take a breath first being at a severe disadvantage.  There is a moment of unconsciousness at the bottom of the breath.

“At the bottom of your breath the hunter calls you.

At the bottom of your breath the hunter calls.

The politics of the Tea Party takes on a life of its own, dividing every issue into “us” and “them.”  The movement is the spawn of FOX News, which advertises itself as “Fair and Balanced.”  They present both sides, though from a single vantage point.

We were in a workshop on community journalism, chaired by two young women.  One of them was extremely intense and spoke loudly.  The other was more studious and modulated, so that the energy in the room would roar upward like a fire fed by gasoline, and then as suddenly die down and burn with a steady warmth.  From this either disturbing or fascinating interaction (depending on how stoned you were)  came several good points on how to get the story and be fair about it.  But there was, repeatedly, the use of the phrase, “both sides of the story.”

Doctor Bob  asked, “Why are there presumed to be just two sides?  There can be many sides to a story.”  This was quickly acknowledged, but I didn’t think it was given more than lip service, because I suspect it’s hard for a journalist to think in terms other than the larger political frame of an issue.

Having, as yet,  no idea that Doctor Bob was the guy in the Youtube video I’d reposted on Facebook, I engaged him at the lunch hall and told him I agreed that there are many sides to a story.   One of the issues that had come up in the workshop was of someone who said he could not vote for a black man, and this was seized on as one side of a two sided coin.  “If you stop there,” I said, “and label this guy a racist, you have nothing but a black and white issue.  But if you let him talk, and ask more questions, you begin to get a more complete picture.  Who is he other than a guy who can’t vote for a black?  I have a lot of relatives in the South who couldn’t vote for a black person, but I doubt if they know any black people whom they don’t consider socially inferior.    It’s axiomatic that you can’t argue with ignorance.”

We engaged this idea of moving back, and reporting without imposing morality on the situation, and agreed it is much harder to do than the alternative, of dividing things down the middle with a sword.   When King Solomon proposed dividing a child with a sword the absurdity of fighting over who owned the child was obvious.  Some things can be handled by the sword but some cannot.  They belong to the realm of feminine power, the earth, the body, and the alternative symbol to the sword:  the Ring.  This is why it is a mistake to allow the politics coming from the top down to frame the local story, in community journalism.  This point was made very eloquently by Iranian American journalist Malihi Razazan, who co-hosted with Shahram Aghamir a workshop on reporting on the Middle East and North Africa.  If you try to use what is coming down to you from national or international reporting, instead of using those resources you have locally — for example interviewing people in the local Lebanese community if you are writing about events in Lebanon —  you are in danger of adding to the confusion instead of shedding some light on the situation.  Community journalism reaches downward, not upward, for what is both true and good.

The issue of “top down” versus “bottom up” journalism is of course tied to a much larger issue in the world:  that of democracy versus a kind of chess game by the oligarchs.   If an oligarchy is rule by a collection of very powerful and rich families, who pass along power to their chosen heirs, and if the modern corporation is an individual under the law, with carte blanche to pour unlimited money into the political process, then the front lines of the battle to retain a democracy  are more clearly seen.   Immortal giants given the rights of individuals is a new twist on oligarchy:  it is oligarchy by Avatars.

Barack Obama was a community organizer, and a champion of grass roots, bottom up, government.  To see why much of the base of the democratic party is having some problems with him, one might use the analogy of what is now happening with the Facebook social networking site. The power of the site derives from the membership.  As more and more people joined together, there was more and more potential for our having a huge amount of power to effect change.  The battle to retain power from the bottom up, in the face of having become a commodity for Mark Zuckerberg to sell to marketers of all types, reflects the predicament of the society.

At the grass roots level of journalism, profits are not the driving force.  The driving force is the Good, with a capital “G.”  This is not simply a vague concept, like “be nice to people,” it is that which counterbalances the tendency of thoughts to just connect with other thoughts, and become a form of madness, having lost connection to the body.   If it feels bad to the body, it’s like the “eat or don’t eat” instinct.  You dine at your peril. And when we gathered together to hear a tribute to Earth First activist, Judy Bari, who was blown up in her car in Oakland, in 1990, there was nobody in that hall who could have argued that there was any goodness in such an act.  She was blocking the cutting of the old growth redwoods, and the issue from the top was not whether it would be good to plant a bomb in her car, but rather the chess game of how to eliminate “radical” opposition to cutting down these trees.  If you have ever walked in a grove of these trees and loved them,  you, too, might guard them from some super rich investor coming in from outside to cut them down and truck them away.

It took a long time for justice to be done, but the FBI and Oakland Police were finally found guilty of violating Bari’s first amendment rights to free speech in 2002.  A jury awarded her estate $4.4 million.  She died of cancer before the verdict came in.  But the chess game from the top is chilling.  From the moment of the explosion the media was taking their information from the police:   the spin was that Earth First was a radical organization of terrorists, who were transporting a bomb which blew them up.  There was virtually no attempt to look at in whose interest it was to kill Bari and the Earth First movement, planning “Redwood Summer,” and the blocking of logging old growth redwoods.

There was a tribute to Bari in film, poetry, and music.  The people standing up for the earth, first,  are the first layer of  journalism.  They  do what they can with what they have.  There was even an old bus which runs on cooking oil, like Willie Nelson’s, and has solar panels to power radio broadcasts.  Govinda Dalton and Christina Aanestad had just come back from Ecuador, if my memory serves, where they were showing  people how to set up radio stations for their community.   They go where there is a need for helping people at the community level, such as recently to Haiti, to show the power of community radio.  Govinda said that in one place he had set up, he returned and found at the church entrance, opposite the iconic figure of Jesus,  a representation of the radio transmitter.

Setting up a radio station is easy.  Getting a license to broadcast from it is much, much more difficult.  Everything is set up for profit, for the benefit of the top down powers to siphon the money upward.  In the new FCC legislation there is not even an exemption for these community stations on music royalties.  They make no money and have no money.  They are grass roots, community forums.  But at one workshop they were being taught all the meticulous little rules being put in place governing what music they can play and how often, in what sequence, etc.  One possible exception to the poor community radio is KMUD, which is the station in Garberville, and which hosted the conference. It is hugely popular in the community, and is famous for broadcasting government strikes against pot growers if it gets the information in advance.  This could have some bearing on it’s being gifted with resources. Pot drives the local economy, and there are pickup trucks with fit young men and bulldogs around town buying supplies.  They have some strong women helping them with the farming.  Three of them formed a group called the Resinaires, which performed on Saturday night, doing parodies of girl group songs, turning them into songs about marijuana farmers.

Being in the emerald triangle forces a change in consciousness.  For one thing, you assume that anyone you talk to or do business with might be stoned.   At one workshop, there was an audio feed from an expert on the FCC rules changes, and this was supposed to be in concert with a power point presentation.  The presenter could never get the computer to work with the projector.  And to be fair, neither could anyone else.  After it was over I went up to him and said, “That’s always a problem in Garberville.  The pot smoke gets into the processor and it forgets which port to use.”

He wasn’t sure whether I was serious or not.  But the signature of the Left is political correctness, and he assumed I might have have a tinfoil hat squirreled away for when I wanted to pull in a more esoteric signal.

This is interesting.  I got rid of the television and found that anything I want to watch is on the computer, without all the ads and by the segment I want to see.  Right now I am watching the coverage of hearings on Goldman Sachs and picking a guitar in a sort of absent way.  And because I’m watching this on my computer now it has moved into the background and my relationship to it has changed.  I can now watch the hearings and simultaneously write text on a shared screen.  You might ask how I’m writing this and picking a guitar at the same time.  I have my shoes off and am typing with my toes.

I am watching Tom Coburn,  Republican of Oklahoma.

This guy is like a hawk fluffing up in front of some chipmunks.   He has them nervous; the timing changed and the yuppie royal pacing went to hell.  I think it was when he told one kid, who was venturing into believing he’s as smart in front of these old men as in front of the man in the mirror,   to quit assuming they’re ignorant, and it hit home because it was already home.  It was a zen thing, where the arrow has already hit the mark congruent with the release.

Now it goes back to Levin.  It’s like tag team wrestling.  Levin has a really big head and he needs it for the brain.  Coburn slapped them around and now they have a different look about them.  It must be hard for these guys to get millions in bonuses and not think they are actually smarter than people who make a half million.  I remember watching the Watergate hearings, and there was no theater on Broadway with a more entertaining lead and supporting cast.

Levin is like the king who is visiting his gold.  He is rich in evidence that these guys were taking care of the company and not their customers.  The idea is to make money, not to have any particular ethical relationship with the society or even the American economy.  It is all about the firm, and these guys are  in a corporation so large it has its own culture.  Watching these hearings is like going on a  safari through corporate culture.   I remember when they released the tapes of the Enron traders celebrating the cornering of the utilities market.   The first step is always hiring some ex cops and paying off the ones on the beat, whether it’s the neighborhood or the nation.

Tourre is getting his ass kicked.  He was in the structured products division.  In a way I empathize with him because he feels that if he can give more context it won’t sound so bad as it does the way Levin presents it.  I suppose that’s like kids trying to explain things at the door of the woodshed.

This is interesting, to have the television on the screen with the word processor.  I can tune in and out of it because anybody with a computer and internet can do the same thing I’m doing, and pull them up on the network website.  I’m watching them on MSNBC.  Sometime before I go to bed I’ll go to Comedy Central and watch Stewart and Colbert.  I not only don’t miss having television separated off from the computer, I’m wondering why I didn’t see the central issue sooner.   No matter how many channels or how big and pretty the picture it renders the viewer passive.

Move the television back into the computer and it is just one more program running.  That works the way I watch it anyway because mostly I am interested in things like these hearings, which I can monitor while doing something else simultaneously, like this … writing at the same time on a page beside the picture.  Colburn is working one of these guys over again.  He’s the bad cop.  When he’s smacked them a couple of times it passes back to Levin.  Good cop.  And very smart cop.

What I like about this is watching really good lawyers … actually I think Coburn is a doctor so I should say, interrogators … work without resorting to torture.  They don’t need it.   Sam Ervin was 76 when he chaired the Watergate hearings, and he took Nixon’s boys to the woodshed.  He was the patriarch, like Walter Brennan,  and James Baker was Luke.  Peppino?  That was Lindsey Graham.  There was not a Hatfield left standing.

Got to go to In N Out Burger now.

Julian Jaynes (Princeton) wrote a book called “The Evolution of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral MInd,” in which he presented a theory on how bicameral consciousness operated.  He believed that people actually heard the voices of the gods in a right brain language center, now atrophied but still in evidence.  And when did they hear these voices telling them what to do?  When they hit an unfamiliar situation, in which the existing patterns of behavior and choices shut down.

There’s a great scene in the movie, “eXitenZ,” (David Cronenberg) where the two viewpoint characters are inside a game based in organic computing.  It is very real until one of the other characters seems just unable to say anything in reply.  One of the players says, “He’s caught in a game loop.”  The character had to be properly cued to know what to say or do next.

With the breakup of the old bicameral kingdoms, there was an evolutionary premium on being able to find some other way to make a decision than by waiting on it to come from magical voices.  Presumably, that led to people having to make laws and learn to govern themselves.   And in fact the first known code of laws was the Hammurabi Code, from about 1750 BC, named for the King of Babylon.

This Code was given by the god Marduk, who is shown face to face with Hammurabi, and the same size.  They were equal in stature.  Just 500 years later, following the disintegration of Assyria and its transformation into a brutal and violent regime, Tukulti-Ninurta the Tyrant of Assyria, commissioned a stone alter which marked the beginning of religion as we know it.  The interesting thing about the depiction of King Tukulti is the depiction of him in a beggarly pose in front of an empty throne.  The deity was gone, and he was trying to regain the correct relationship through what Monty Python called a dreadful toadying.

The voice of the gods was gone.  The throne empty.  And when did this happen?  Following the ability to codify law.  Law can be used to distribute rules which have to be followed under threat of violence or incarceration.   When the power of writing became the power to distribute rules and enforce compliance, the “god” went away.  The reaction then, as now, was to make the god into a more and more powerful entity, under the theory that the magical voices  could be enticed back through supplication

Under the theory advanced by Jaynes, the language center in the right brain had ceased to be the arbiter in moments when a decision had to be made outside the existing patterning.   The event which caused this was the beginning of trade between cultures which had different gods.  If you had to trade with people you had to be able to pretend their gods were your own.  Otherwise their gods would just say, “Kill him.”  And they would obey.  If you wanted to survive in a bicameral kingdom you had to fool them into taking you as like them.  This required the development in the human brain of a censoring function, like the slight delay in a broadcast during which anything which costs money or reputation is edited out.  It’s not hard to see how popular this became as evolution selected for it.

In this space, things could be compared to other things, or more accurately could be substituted for other things, which is the essence of metaphor.  The new consciousness, which was built over the top of what Don Juan called the place of silent knowledge, exists entirely in a metaphorical realm.  This is what Don Juan called the abstract.  When you can create metaphor you are essentially dealing with a kind of pattern creation much like weaving.  Gurdjieff would have his students weaving and weaving, and they thought it was so odd that this was supposed to make them more conscious.  But weaving does combine working smaller patterns into a pre-existing larger and encompassing pattern.  This working together of the two sides, each with a different operating system and location in time, is reflected in the man and god in equal exchange, or by the Navajo myth of the Twins who when they ride together are invincible.

I recall seeing a piece of Maori carving in New Zealand.  It was very old, and as I looked at it I saw that it was alive.  There were newer carvings around that were well done, but they were not alive.  I realized that these carvers worked from intention.  The part of the mind that is always in the moment has no sense of time passing.  It can put together the pieces of a puzzle and only when it’s done feed it to the conscious mind.  This cooperation between the part that knows the entire piece, and the part which is focused on the process, puts spirit into the objects it creates.  Something else which looks the same may be perfectly constructed and utilitarian and even beautiful, but it isn’t alive.

(I am reprinting this; it was written some time back when I was analyzing some of my spontaneous writing.  I am starting a final rewrite (I hope) on the series mentioned in it.)

Today I’m looking at how unconscious material becomes conscious through analysis.  The process of writing a story without plan or revision is like being in analysis, where the unconscious material comes out unexamined.  The analyst listens, and helps make the material more conscious.  I’m looking back at what came up and trying to make sense of it.   While flying back from Arizona to Oakland, I figured out what cousins in love is all about.

I am in a spiritual group which meets for five days four times a year, and between times we communicate on a web site, and of course some of us email each other privately to facilitate our growth and understanding of the material that comes up.  When I tell somebody I am in such a group one of the first questions often is, “What do you believe?”

“We believe in heart centering,” I say.

“And what else?”

“Nothing else that I know of.”

In the group I am part of there is a sense of community and of privacy, so that anyone in the group can talk about anything, no matter how personal or difficult, with the assurance that it will stay inside the group.  The group is led by a medical doctor who moved his focus to spiritual health, and who has a grasp of pattern level psychology.  Like all practitioners he is in a practice, and it deepens and changes as he practices over periods of time, and with different people.

I wasn’t sure why I was in the group this year, other than that I felt the need to be in a group because I’ve spent too much time alone for awhile.   One day I was talking to Clay, mentioning this guitar luthier who was looking for help with his web page.  He grinned, because he is a picker and grinner, and asked, “You get the feeling he’s one of these guys who’s spending way too much time alone?”

And I knew just what he meant.  It’s a kind of spooked look when he’s having a conversation with another person, and the way he crowds the conversation into what he knows for sure, which is doing setup and stringing and repairing on a guitar.  There’s a background feeling of anxiety about joking around or expanding the conversation.  The guy feels brittle.

There’s nothing wrong with it and I appreciate the information, but it reminds me of someone who can’t cook without a running documentary about growing anxieties around how the meal is going to come together, so you realize you’re holding your breath only after an internal investigation into why you’re about to pass out.

Others cook dinner and you hardly notice they’re doing it.  They might engage you in conversation or play, or you might just do what you were doing and feel no guilt, as you would if you had to listen to somebody struggle with the potatoes.  No matter how absurd the dragon, when the bell rings you’ve got to joust it or sneak off into your cave.  So one cook drives you into a cave and another one leads you back out into the light.

The luthier looked like he had been in his cave for a long spell.  And I know I had been in my cave for a long spell.  It’s like with Gollum,  you go mad hoarding the ring down there.  “A man can talk to himself but he has a madman for a companion,” Asturius wrote.  Sobering thought.  I had to get out more.  I figured that for someone who’s being reclusive the shadow is a very sociable person, so I began to connect with my shadow.

If you aren’t familiar with the shadow, it is the part of you that you are but don’t know you are.  It is the you which you have rejected, the same way the sculptor discards what does not fit into the image he or she is shaping as finished art.  If you try to conform to some outside social code of behavior,  you are rejecting the non-conformist.  So in your shadow you have a non-conformist.  This shadow energy is often taken on by one of your children, much to your horror if you have disowned the shadow.  Your impulse will be to disown the child’s behavior while insisting that you love the child, as if the two things can be separated.  You are in reality demanding the child’s conformity, which is to say, you are trying to force the child to reflect your ego.  And there you have Snow White’s mother.

Somehow some of us survive, torn between the opposites, wearing little depictions of a crucifixion around our necks to remind us that we are not the only ones torn between the patrilineal and matrilineal arms of the cross.

Which brings me back to cousins in love.

When I started writing Ash Fork this last time I got uneasy.  I was writing about little people and the obvious parallel was children.  The conscious analyst in me said that was some hidden desire or Freudian thing, and when the midgets had sex, though they were cousins, I asked myself, “Can’t we do a gunfight or disembowelment or something that’s more of a guy thing?”  But that was what was coming through my fingers and my head just had to put up with it, though I did get to have the gunfight and enjoyed it thoroughly.

But I did not know why I was writing what I was writing, in the sense that I was looking at it for the underlying pattern but could not see it yet.  You may have seen those books where you look at a pattern, and gradually, when you look long enough, you see a picture come through it that was hidden to the cursory look.  Things are not always as they appear.  Sometimes there is underlying complexity, and this is the fish I am trying to catch.

We are beginning the shadow work in the group and in preparation for this I was reading some selections form C.G. Jung while on the flight from Phoenix to here.  The book is, “The Practice of Psychotherapy,” and is mostly about transference.  To my surprise I opened the volume to a discussion of cousin marriage, and quickly grasped that the pattern for marriage in the first social groups, extended families, was the symbol of a circle containing a cross.  A sniper sees it every time he sights in on a target.

The two arms of the cross are the patrilineal and the matrilineal.  You have your descent through the line of the father and through the line of the mother.  This is your position in society.  In the original structure of marriage, the male could not marry into the same line as his father.  He had to marry into a different male line, so he could marry the daughter of his mother’s brother, and his sister could marry her brother.

This arrangement of marriage of cousins was required as the most basic building block of community, and even if we think we are far removed from the problem, we are simply not conscious of dealing with it.  It has become an archetype in the collective unconscious, and has tremendous energy.  The fear of incest is behind a lot of marriage breakups, though the two people involved might fight about any number of things, they do not know the secret cause.  The fear of incest is behind a loss of libido in some relationships and the reveling in incestuous fantasy drives libido in others.

At least that’s my understanding.  I might be sexing up the intelligence.

What was exciting for me was seeing that this basic pattern of cousin marriage was repeated in what Jung calls a “peculiar psychologem” in Alchemy.   Instead of the cross marriages of brothers and sisters to brothers and sisters, the cross moved into a spiritual realm from a sociological realm.  The need for new blood put the original pattern into the background, and led to the development of culture.

(The alchemical pattern shows the cross marriage in the spiritual realm as Soror Mystica, or mystical sister, connecting to Rex, the animus, and the Adept connecting to Regina, anima.  The symbols of Rex and Regina are king and queen.  The Adept’s unconscious projected self cannot be his conscious self, which is male.  It is the feminine form, or queen.  The female connects to the King, which is her unconscious, projected self.)

The cross within the circle becomes also a St. Andrew’s cross contained in a rectangle.  St. Andrew’s Cross is also the national flag of Scotland.

Jung is pretty complicated and I’m explaining what I understood of it as best I can, and any corrections are welcomed.

When family groups began joining together to create larger groups there was still a feeling of relatedness, but what Jung calls the “exogamous” system began to drive the original incest impulse of the “endogamous” system into the background, which means that the original family clan system was replaced by a more complex social arrangement.

The stronger the consciousness of the people in the exogamous system, the more the endogamous system was driven into the unconscious, until it became dissociated, or an autonomous complex.  When this happened it moved first to the realm of great men, who were allowed incest, such as royalty, and then to the realm of the gods, so that people who were possessed by the complex took on supernatural lovers.

In this context it is interesting to see the complex at work in the stories of sexual relationships between gods and humans, which was common with the Greeks, and integral to Christianity.  This becomes more understandable when the displacement of the incest drive by taboo in the expanding exogamous system is grasped as forcing it to play out unconsciously.

So the incest taboo on the outside drives a dissociated, inner desire for incest, which is experienced by a man as relationship to a goddess, or anima, figure.  She represents an object of desire that has long ago been sacrificed.  It is the longing experienced in the dissociated endogamous tendency for the mother or sister relationship,  projected into the spiritual realm, i.e., for “mother” Mary or the “father in heaven.”

There are a lot of other elements in the story which I am analyzing as I look back at it.  Brugh told me a long time ago that you can read what people tell you the same as you read a dream.  If somebody describes where they have been and who they met and what they did, the pattern will show through just as it shows through in  a dream, if you can see the picture inside the picture.

I remember the first time I was studying the structure of fairy tales, and read that the structures are perfect mathematical models of patterns in the psyche.  I thought that wasn’t likely, because they were just children’s stories, and who would have been smart enough to think of how to do them in some underlying model?  We’re talking James Joyce here, and he’s a rare model of storyteller.

Now I understand that people didn’t think them up and then tell them.  Most likely they began as dreams which were felt to have some special significance, and so they were told as stories, and the intelligence behind the dream was hidden inside the story, as an integral mathematical pattern.  Or, they told them spontaneously, and the same intelligence was hidden in the deep structure.  Because back when fairy tales began, there was no conscious mind as we think of it today.

Wherein we get to drive 100 mph with a textile designer, his Chinese wife, and a designer of containment rituals.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:30 — 3.0MB)

Today I took dad to Cottonwood to his cardiac fitness class and then to lunch.  There was a problem with the car — a hose came loose and spilled coolant onto the engine — and we had to wait together while it was fixed.  Dad began to tell the story of his prostate cancer, and I marveled, as usual, at how the construction is modular, and each module is fitted  to its appropriate slot, like a Rubic’s Cube seeking an entropy free state.

Sometimes I feel trapped in the story because I’ve heard it so many times, but on the other hand I can’t just tell him that, because at his age he might need to repeat these stories as a way to maintain the patterning function of his brain.  He does seem to maintain a relatively sharp mind.  It’s his feeling side that’s somewhat inexperienced, having found lodgings in his wife for more than sixty-three years.  He’s 92.

I recall Don Juan telling Carlos that he needed to find the  stories from his life which have a universal application.  I am wondering about the prostate cancer story.  It seems to lack universal application, and be more locked into memory because of the simultaneity of strong emotion:  fear.  I think of other stories which seem more worth saving, such as one in which he and a friend used trotlines to recover the body of a young girl who’d drowned in the Tennessee River, while the bread was being cast on the waters by larger boats.   They brought her up and  propped her upright in the boat, a snow white corpse, while they  rowed back to shore.  They had aboard with them a minister, who behaved as if he was afraid of putting his hands on the corpse.

Ministers often play a shadow role in his stories, when they appear, though there are also good ones.  He tells of his grandfather’s funeral.  In earlier days, he and the old man walked all around their little Tennessee town together,  dad packing the tools.  While great grandfather Euton  was a master carpenter, he couldn’t read, and his schoolteacher wife would read the paper to him in the mornings while he had his coffee.  He was a man who was not trifled with for fear of the consequences.  Dad loved him fiercely, and after he retired as a surveyor, dad returned to fine woodworking.

When the old man died, according to dad’s story, the Baptist preacher was there to preach the funeral, because the women in the family belonged to that church.  Dad’s father was Scottish Presbyterian.  But great grandfather did not go to church and had no interest in going.  So the minister called this to the attention of his family, and, sadly, informed them that as he was not a member of the Baptist church, Brother Euton would not be allowed into heaven.

There was a stunned silence, broken when dad asked the bearer of these bad tidings if he could have a private word with him on the porch.   He relives,  with great satisfaction, that moment, which is the climax of the story, when he said, “If you open your mouth I’ll kick your ass all the way back to whatever rock you crawled out from under, and if you ever see me again you cross to the other side of the street.”   Dad was prone to fits of violence after he came back from combat in the Pacific theater.

The ending of the story was that he went back inside and called on a retired minister and friend of the family to speak a few words over Grandpa Euton’s remains.  He wisely opined that the old man would make it into Paradise.

I don’t know for sure which of dad’s stories have universal application.  He has to choose his stories, as I have to choose mine.  If they are universal, then they are built over an archetypal pattern, and will hold energy when the vessel is gone.  One hopes so anyway.  Don Juan said that a sorcerer is an empty man except for this collection of stories, each with an archetypal core.

Sometimes he needs to talk about mother.  When he does I can feel the pain that’s in him.  It’s the pain that caused his breathing to go wrong and left him wheezing.  He spent two nights in the hospital last week, getting breathing treatments to clear his bronchial tubes and was sent home with supplementary oxygen.  He wears a nosepiece when he’s sleeping or driving or just sitting in his recliner.  Today he seemed much improved.  Maybe he’s over the worst body shock.

A friend told me that after her mother died she felt her there, very close, but that after awhile that feeling went away.   “Enjoy it while it’s there,” she advised.   What I feel now is less intense than last week, and it is still not painful.  It is more like process.  I don’t feel a need to hold on to anything.  I just experience how different it is to be in the house when she’s not there anymore.  Dad and I relate differently, because it’s just two men hanging out together.

When mom was there I had to pay attention all the time.  If I coughed she would pounce on it as a symptom of illness, and if I was going to drive home she would try to locate by what means I would be killed on the way.   “Aren’t you afraid it’s going to rain?”

“I fully expect it to rain, and the roads will become slick and dangerous.  Normally that would be okay but I am high and my reflexes are slow.”  And I would exaggerate it until all she could do was laugh at it.  And if I stayed overnight she would fret about how many blankets I might need.  Would I be too hot or too cold?

She wanted to take care of me, still, and me an old man.  She was a mother … my mother.  As dad said, “She’s the only mother you’ve got.”   Now I have no mother but I had one when I needed one, and long afterwards.  The neighbor who helped look after her didn’t approve of my often calling my mom by her first name.   It was a way to set Ruby free, so that she could find the rest of her story.  She and a sister  close to her in age seemed to be opposites, though in some way they were very much alike.  What was on the surface in one was often hidden beneath it in the other.   My older sister said that when mom died, she saw Ruth come to get her.  She saw Ruth’s face appear in mother’s face.  It was the return of what had been lost.  What was whole and was split apart was whole again.

There’s nothing to do, really, but accept the nature of things, and remember what Satchel Page said.  Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.

I’d heard about Reverend Jenkins, who was just as often referred to as Preacher John.  I didn’t pay a lot of attention except when dad mentioned he rode his bicycle across the United States when he was in his fifties.  His wife went along the route in a camper or motor home — the details would make a more clear picture but you’ll have to settle for an abstract — and now, he is eighty … snow white hair and eyes made kind from seeing clearly.

He could see the spirit moving on the faces, some stricken, some observant, of those gathered to witness the return of the body to a hole in the ground.   There are silent watchers over the graveyard, and while some may be angels, skittering in and out of existence, one that never flies away is a backhoe.  It comes to life only when you maintain it, fuel it, and fire it up.  Then you have to develop a touch for making it an extension of your hand.   Scooping delicately beside the graveled trail through the old Pioneer Cemetery,  Preacher John gathered some dirt in his hand.  He put it on the casket and pronounced, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

He had checked with dad, first, to make sure there was no objection to his doing the closing ritual releasing dust back to dust.   Dad said, “That’s the way we always did it.  We had to lay the body on a cooling board and then dig a grave and bury it ourselves.”

You bury the body yourself so as to not let death get too far removed from the gravedigger.   Preacher John mentioned that we all have to pass this way, that he was eighty, and Ruby was eighty-eight.  Eight years behind the death on this day is Preacher John, who ritually tosses the earth onto the casket —  suspended there — above the grave.

The cemetery is small, and surrounded by a rock wall.  The two plots reserved for Ruby and George have a rock wall around them, about a foot and a half high.  The air smells fresh because it is the first clear day following a series of storms.  The sky is clear and slate blue.  The air is cool but the sun is warming it up.

Around a big black hearse there is a three man crew of funeral directors.  They are respectful and efficient, though a constant dealing with death strips it of the natural solemnity of rare events.  Death is not a rare event at the mortuary.

Around the grave there are flowers, in bunches and sprays.  Gradually the flowers will die and the containers will be thrown away.  The backhoe operator will come over and bury the casket.  And I will be at home, drinking wine, when the feelings I have held back are given permission to congregate freely.

What else was there?  And of course it was Ruby, but not old and enfeebled, looking around her in baffled wonder at those cheering her on toward nothing they could define, beyond another day like today.  It was Ruby younger and more filled with life.  I tried to explain what I was feeling, but Linda already understood it.  She lost her mother many years ago, when she was fairly young.  ”You get your mother back,” she said.  ”But the way she used to be, when she was young.”

One of my clients wrote that we all have to face death, and he asked if I am ready.  I said, “Sure; just let me use the bathroom first.”  And he wrote back he was serious, whereupon I replied so was I.   He wrote back with a quote from Woody Allen:  ”I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Amen to that.

Later in the afternoon dad wanted me to drive him over to see John Jenkins.  He wanted to give him a card with some money in it.  I knew he was needing to take care of things, stay busy with what needs to be done.  And when he’s done with the details he will open to find out what else is there.

(From “The Gates of the Forest,” by Elie Wiesel):

“the body has time; it moves slowly and prudently, step by step, in obedience to laws of gravity, but the soul brushes time and laws aside; it wants to push forward, regardless of the cost in pain, or intoxication or even madness.  that is the only way it has of raising itself to god.  on your way through life you’ll meet men who cling to reason, but reason gropes like a blind man with a white cane, stumbling over every pebble, and when it comes up against a wall it stops short, and tries to tear it down brick by brick, quite ineffectually, because an invisible hand builds it up again, higher and thicker than ever.  We on the other hand, believe in the power of faith and ecstasy, and no wall can stand against us; with our fists and our songs we bring it crashing down.  Gates do not frighten us.  because, my child, listen to this:  other people can open their eyes wide to see god but we close them.  yet these others attract darkness while while we laugh at it, until it follows rather than precedes us.”

Yesterday we drove in the rain down the main street of a one horse town.  The highway has bypassed it but there’s a business district with a grade school, cafe, a couple of trading posts,  shops where nothing is very expensive, and the little tendrils of insurance giants.  Toward the end of the main drag there’s the nicest restaurant in the valley.  It has been closed down for years so it’s just a vacant place with windows opening onto a view to the north, and San Francisco Peaks.  It used to have a bar with a band and a steakhouse.

We drove alongside the ghost of a good time,  past small houses,  to a mortuary which, dad said, had been fixed up and looked really good since the new owners took over.  The mortuary director was named Ben, and he was big enough to be half a defensive line all by himself.  He was showing us caskets, headstones, and packages.  He had just come from church, he said, and he provided his family bona fides in Camp Verde.

There really isn’t much you can do when somebody dies, other than handle it yourself, and bury the person within the time limit for non embalmed bodies, I think 24 hours, or turn it over to a funeral director.  Once it’s being handled by a funeral director it’s just a matter of choosing times and products and services:  working out the details so the director can make it work smoothly for you.

For example, Bueler showed dad the kind of stone, or brass, the Veteran’s Administration will provide for his grave, which he is quick to point out he’s in no hurry to get into.  “You see here where you can put the rank you achieved …”  He was showing how mom’s stone could be matched to it, and what would go in that space.

“I didn’t achieve much rank; I was in the guardhouse too much,” dad said.

“He was in the war,” one of my sisters offered.”

“A machine gunner,” I said, poking dad in the leg.  “A cleaner.”

The other sister said my name aloud, as if I needed to be called back from where I had ventured.  The moment passed.  But after we left and went to the local cafe for lunch, for the first time I heard him say out loud what Paul Harvey would call, “The rest of the story.”  He’d mentioned pieces of it.  Japanese troops put ashore at the wrong place.  Somebody made a mistake about where the Japanese line was.   And they were all blissfully unaware, on the beach, in the gunsights.  And they were all mowed down by machine gun fire, until the beach was a sea of corpses.  Now dad finally stepped into the scene as an actor and not an observer, describing how they had just started at the outer edges and worked inward.

It was something new for him to own what scared him so much when he was still worried about heaven and hell.  I think he’s past that now.  He’s showing emotion openly, there in the space where Ruby is missing.  It is a space which produces surprises.  For example, my older sister irritates the hell out of me with some of her lame jokes.  But as we were driving away from the mortuary I mentioned how big Ben Bueler is.  “Nobody’s gonna give him any grief,” she said.  It was brilliant.  What in the hell was going on?  Dad finally owning what had always weighed so heavily on his mind, and — even more astonishing — Pat making a joke I found brilliant?

Back at the house, I pulled out my guitar and began to play and sing a song without being self-conscious about it.  A black cloak slipped off my shoulders and onto the floor.  There it writhed around animated by whatever dark lord it calls master, then formed itself into a small black dog which went to the front door, sat down,  and looked back as if waiting to be let out.

The doctor was slender and very black, his accent suggested he is African.  He seemed hidden behind thick glasses and his doctor’s smock.  “I know you want to have her in the hospital for three days so medicare will pay for rehabilitation,” he said.  “If I can find something that qualifies under the Medicare guidelines I will admit her.”  But he didn’t find anything.  The old woman had been unable to get out of bed or stand so she was brought to the hospital.  Now she had to be carried back home and put in diapers.  It was a week after that when we realized she’d had a heart attack.  Somehow he missed that.  And the blood infection.  He missed that as well.

“I would like to admit her, but there’s nothing I can do under the Medicare guidelines.”

He seemed a nervous little doctor, and  spoke as if he was reciting, like a telephone solicitor who is told to stay to the script and not leave any air in the conversation for questions.  On his chest there was a tight grouping of .38s from my father’s eyes.  This was the same doctor who had tried to send her home because there was nothing wrong with her awhile back.  Another doctor came in, fortunately, and swabbed her nose.  She had a particularly virulent case of flu.  Now the nervous little man with the shifting eyes was once again sending her away, but there was nobody else on duty to countermand it this time.

The old woman being shuffled around was my mother, not an unwilling participant in the death process, her health having failed steadily since a stroke left her unable to walk without a walker about five years ago.  She took physical therapy and was almost walking again when she got the flu.  As she was recovering from the flu she was left in an examining room and told she could sit on the table.  She climbed up, on to the covering of slick paper, then she slid off, badly slashing her leg on a protruding metal part.  After that she was mostly confined to a wheelchair, watching reruns of Bonanza and Gunsmoke, or doing crossword puzzles.   “I’m just waiting to die, now,” she said, “but you can’t just make it happen.”

She died last night when no family was there.  The report was that she died peacefully, in her sleep.  My sister wondered aloud if they might have put something in the drip, like a muscle relaxant.  I had wondered the same thing.  A little valium maybe.  Just enough to ease the heart into stopping for the last time.  Maybe or maybe not, but we hope it is true that she passed peacefully, in her sleep, because that is how she wanted to go.

After my little sister arrived, we had a coffee at Starbucks, and shared our feelings of confusion and even guilt that we are not more upset by mother’s dying.  We both feel it was her time and she was ready and even eager to leave.  We are aware that others around us might find us unfeeling.  Her death is no tragedy for us, but what should be at this time.

Maybe we will feel differently later, at the funeral, when mother’s body is there, and we  have to say goodbye.  But now we both  feel curiously proud of her for living her life until it became untenable to sustain it, and then exiting in peace.  I saw what her body had become, the one that died.  It was in pain.  The lumbar spine was compressed and  her legs were in pain.   The heart was weak.  The skin was blotched and bruised from blood thinners.  Her upper back had humped outward.  The digestive system wasn’t working well.  And finally she was unable to stand, and had to wear diapers.

That was what died.

What remains is relieved of that leaky old vessel, and the spirit fills me at times with energetic memory of when she was young, and hopeful, and though she could not use  many of her gifts,  was limited by her status and gender,   she gave some of them to me for safekeeping.  She gave me a sense of joy and fun and irreverence.  I passed them along to my daughter.  What is denied in women is passed along to new generations of women.

I do not miss mother, because I do not find her missing.  If anything the escape from that broken body brought her more fully and delightfully into my awareness.  I am thinking of what my friend and client, Letticia, said on Thursday, after the doctor had called me and told me my mother was dying.  Lettie said, “I think of my dad every day, Dan.  And you know, I didn’t think of him every day when he was alive.  But now, I do.”  I started back on Friday morning.

While I was driving,  I talked to my dad and he said mom was doing better and had been talking and eating.  The crisis had passed he said, and she would be moving to a nursing home soon.  That was just four or five hours before he called me again and told me she passed away.  His voice was often overwhelmed by emotion.

Sometimes emotion comes which freezes me in time, waiting for enough composure to continue a thought.  I am in no hurry.  I will stay in that space so long as it holds me.  Interestingly, it was in that moment of knowing death had come, that life, also, asserted itself.  Linda and I spoke of the children and of the grandchildren.  We agreed that our son is amazing to us.  We both see him as having an extraordinary blend of qualities.

We spoke of each child, each grandchild, in turn, and we shared our joys and our fears as regards them.  It is a time of blessing, and one of those rare moment in which one can bless, and be blessed.  And above the blessing there is a spirit, now free.  We will ritually deal with the remains, and celebrate what is contained in a life, in its time.