Letting the story go

An alignment of three things:

1. A comment on Facebook on stories. The original poster was commenting on how hard it was for her to talk with a creationist. Someone linked to the XKCD comic here. My response to a few more comments on stubborn ignorance was:

Methinks, as the comic points out, the issue is really an issue when it comes to power. Which it always does come down to one way or another when dealing with parents. But I don't care what my postal delivery worker or the guy at Mr Tire believe about creationism; or if I do care, its in the sense that Ingrid talked about: because it makes a good story.

It's kind of how I've come around to being able to (mostly) deal with Christian religious stories: I was raised by my agnostic/atheist parents to hear Biblical narration as part of an effort to push me to an orthodoxy—to exert power over me, in the same way that jingoism, pursed-lipped grandparents, and social conformity are. And so it's been great to be able to (for example) hear Ingrid tell our son the Easter story "from the inside," where it can live as a big powerful story, not part of some attempt to make me or Roo or anyone else into what the speaker wants us to be.

2. in Meeting this morning, a Friend rose to talk about her experience with other people's stories, with other people's baggage they bring to hearing your story. Her husband had come out quite publicly as bisexual, and she was recalling the pain that other people's assumptions and baggage brought her in that experience. There is a sense that when you speak Truth, that Truth is released from you—it is no longer yours. I think most people don't get this; certainly the idea of intellectual property works against this. But really, to release an idea is much more powerful than holding it. To try and hang on to it is mostly a salve for the ego. Or an attempt to control income—not that the experience of "colonized" musicians, who sold their songs for pennies to producers who then made fortunes on them, is a good thing. No one should starve when someone else is feeding themselves from one's work. But the idea itself benefits from truly being free to roam.

3. Christa Tippet in this week's Speaking of Faith, talked with Alan Dienstag, who wrote this companion commentary about his work getting early-stage Alzheimer's patients to write memories as part of their comign to terms with their illness. Part of what he talked and wrote about is writing not as hanging on to memories, but as giving them away.

As she neared the end of her life, my grandmother seemed to understand that if you can give something away, you don't lose it. This, as it turns out, is as true of memories as it is of objects and is yet another aspect of memory that is often overlooked. Memories are, in a sense, fungible. Writing is a form of memory, and unlike the spoken word, leaves a mark in the physical world. As a form of memory, writing creates possibilities for remembering, for the sharing and safeguarding of memories not provided by talking. The writing group gave memory back to its members. They were transformed in the experience of writing from people who forget to people who remember. A member of the writing group once said that when the group was together "— we forget that we don't remember." This is a statement of cure, not of biological and cellular disorder, but of the human disorder, the disorder of loss of personhood brought about by Alzheimer's disease.

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There is a scary power in letting go an idea, a teaching, a word, a picture...anything that comes out of oneself. To put your name on it keeps it somehow tied to you. It is a radical idea, to create anonymously and remain anonymous so as to be able to let the idea truly go free. It's almost a painful idea. But I feel myself drawn to it. It is an act of submission, an act of saying "these things are not mine."

I have no idea if I could do it.

Boot! Reboot!

I'm feeling like it's maybe time to come back to the blog. Not that my workload is any lighter, but I do feel more fully settled in the new sets of questions that I dove into last fall.

And, perhaps not surprisingly, they point right back at some older questions from the blog.

As I've said a lot (and others too), I work in a field — cartography — dominated by Fact, and this field has been critiqued by those who feel that the world is too hemmed in by Fact, and not open enough to Feeling and even Fancy.

I also am part of a religious community that, while it uses the term "clearness" in its internal language, is very much interested in "movements of the Spirit" — hardly fact-based scientific understandings. And yet, serving on Ministry and Counsel the last couple years, I see us often called to help with very physical, practical challenges. And I've been surprised to find my own spiritual sense of things moving more and more unambiguously into the physical and practical.

I've done some light reading in cellular biology over the past bit — I think it requires somewhat more mental energy than I have right now, but the one piece I took away from what I did read was the sense that what defines life and living things more than anything else is the constant flow of energy through the living system. It's when that energy flow stops that life peters out... It's a simple, obvious observation, but looking at that energy flow on a cellular level really brought home to me how the stuff of life — the organism, the food, the juices and fiber and all the other stuff we look at — is the platform within which life itself — the flow of energy within the system — operates. Probably some actual biologist will correct me gently on this observation, but that's my takeaway for now.

And so the questions I've been carrying with me about our Friends meeting, and how we can understand it as a thing unto itself, and not just an association of people, is informed by this: that what makes it a thing is not a common fact or object or other graspable commonality, but in fact the social and spiritual energy that flows through it. And is there really a difference between social and spiritual energy? Is the difference, as in so many things, the direction we are willing to approach it from?

I had a really good thoughtful conversation last night with Michael and Jenny, about care and support structures within our meeting. He expressed his sadness that our care structures often do not include physical support, certainly not usually for folks who are outside of Meeting. We don't do a lot of charity. I wonder how we can approach (or allow ourselves to be approached by) strangers, particularly the marginalized — which as Michael pointed out was unambiguously Jesus' charge to his followers — and not be "sucked dry"?

Not much really new on maps in the meantime; but perhaps this will circle around. Time will tell.

Good to be back.

Over some kind of threshold

I've been getting the sense over the last couple weeks that I've stepped over some kind of threshold. The pieces of it I can see all look like "ideas", but they also feel deeper than ideas... I think maybe they're something else besides ideas too:

Parts of parts of parts: The idea that as we are made of parts, so we are also parts ourselves, The "bigger things," the "powers" that so permeate religious life are in fact those larger entities that we are part of, going all the way up to the unimaginably huge. That's really the heart of the place I'm sitting now.

Cells and communities: Analogous ways parts work together, forming entities that do different things than we or cells do as individuals. I am also mindful of the ways that those functions are often autonomic, not under any really Mindful will.

Steering and the cerebellum: Not every entity in the universe has a cerebellum or a medulla oblongata or even a vestigial nervous system. And yet the most basic bits of matter have this "tendency" to move this way toward each other or away from each other. To me this feels like the most elementary part of "will." If you steer a boat, some of the skill comes from knowing how to get the boat to do what you want to do, but part is also being aware of currents and the boat's momentum, things about the larger system of you and the boat that aren't really under your present will.

The ordinaries of Christian religious discourse and life that have made me itchy: prayer, scripture, miracles, sainthood, souls, afterlife, sacraments, communion... I get more and more convinced that I at least as a non-theist need to come to terms with as much of this as I can manage, and understand them from my own points of view. I've been taking baby steps here for a year or so, and I think this new place I've dropped into makes that more possible, if only because I have a sense of a larger entity I actually believe in.

The ill-fittingness of "non-theism": this term makes me itchy too—as I've said before— because it frames my sense-of-things as the shadow cast by the figure of theism. It's a negative space, a figure-ground problem, and I just don't see my path in these matters as shadowy or reactionary. I really try not to make them reactionary. So the question is, what is the figure, the positive space, that occupies the space that others call "non-theist"? Does it in fact matter what it's called, and if it does matter, why does it?

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Anyway, this is my 100th post on the blog, and I think I need to take a little break and explore the landscape I seem to have dropped in on. Nothing definite in terms of length; I'll almost certainly be back by spring. Maybe a lot sooner. I just need to get my feet a little more under me before I can write coherently.

I also am finding my looming regular-life schedule for December through March daunting at best, and need to focus on that for a while.

Feel free to drop me a line at "nat dot case at mindspring dot kom" (except spell "kom" as it should be spelled and replace the "at" and "dot" with the appropriate stuff).

Thanks for reading... talk with you again soon!

magic

We're working our way through the Harry Potter series; a few nights ago we reached the climax of book 6, the battle on top of the tallest tower in Hogwarts, with its unexpected conclusion. Our son has been very anxious about what happens next, who dies, who lives... and he is a kid who is pretty good about fact and fiction (I expect, when the time comes, that he'll take the unmasking of Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy pretty well). And he really gets riled up—and so do we all, when we let ourselves be taken over by a fiction.

A month or so ago, I picked up a great coffee-table book at a used bookstore in Duluth. It's called Faces of Fantasy, and the most fascinating thing about it, I think, is the degree to which some of the authors admit having magic invade their world, after having spent so much of their lives honing the craft of describing magic in fiction. Not all the writers; some are pretty blasé about what they write, if gracious at having been allowed to make a living having so much fun. And some are so into the sheer Gothicness of writing fantasy as to be laugh-out-loud funny ("Worship me, mere mortals, for I am the Bride of Jim Morrison!" Seriously.). But the authors whose books I most enjoy are thoughtful about the ways that their storytelling work remakes the world, unmasks secrets inside readers, tells stories about the heart of the universe.

As a child, I loved fantasy, and I never totally outgrew it. I think I've mentioned this before. As I grew up, I found ways to get "serious" about my interest, to justify it somehow, but... I recently re-read one of my early favorites, The Summer Birds by Penelope Farmer. I think I can finally admit that plain and simple I loved those stories for the vicarious experience of magic—a kind of hair-tingling, heart-pumping exhilaration. Just the idea that a kid could learn to fly. As I said a couple weeks ago in meeting, these were my miracle stories.

I wrote a couple of years ago about my time in the world of fantasy fiction as a young adult, and how I was kind of surprised to find the creators of these stories not to actually be wizards or Illuminati or whatever. But in reading Faces of Fantasy I see a sentiment among the writers I respect most that is a little like the Quaker line I keep coming back to, about how we abolished not the clergy but the laity. The point is that these writers are not trying to gather magical knowledge in order to empower themselves over others—they are trying to spread a sense of magic diffusely, to reintroduce it back into a culture that frankly doesn't know what to do with miracle stories. Which in turn reminds me of the interesting discussion on the Sheffield Quakers blog which eventually turned to the idea of magic in Quakerism.

Again, as I said in meeting, we Friends don't do miracle stories much. We try to be reasonable, and we try to speak truly from our experience. And I venture to say none of us has had experiences identical to the ones in miracle stories, old or new: literally walking on water, literally flying like a bird, literally returning from the dead.

When I've tried in the past to look critically at fantasy stories, I've tried to figure out what magic means in modern kids' fantasy fiction. Creativity, or aliveness to the world, maybe. Power, in some books. But what I'm seeing in revisiting the topic after some time away, is that fantasy books are, at heart, about Amazing Things Happening. How do Amazing Things change us? How do they pull us away from those who haven't experienced them? How do they push us to attempt Amazing Feats ourselves? How do they clarify the world, and how do they make it more confusing? And so on.

And here I go back to a line of questions I started asking when I first becoming a cartographer. At the time, I asked "Can a map be an independent work of fiction?" My conclusion is that while they can be used as part of a fictional game, or as an illustration to a work of fiction, maps can't stand on their own as works of fiction, because they don't stand on their own as works of fact. They need to refer to the real world in order to fulfill their purpose.

What about miracle maps? What would a miracle map be? I ask without a clear answer. But it's an interesting question.

Healing the Lowry Gash

I spoke in meeting today, about how places heal. In particular, I was thinking about the great gash in the ground in Minneapolis around the Lowry Tunnel. When looking at old maps of Minneapolis (here's one from 1900, and another from 1929), it seems like the city moved naturally from downtown into the Lowry Hill residential area. The Hennepin Avenue-Lyndale Avenue intersection was apparently simply known as "the bottleneck" (see Jack El-Hai's wonderful Lost Minnesota for a piece on the Plaza Hotel that once stood between Loring Park and what is now the Sculpture Garden)—it was an annoying part of town, but you couldn't really tell where downtown started and south Minneapolis began.

Then the interstate came through. I-94 was completed from St Paul through to Hennepin Avenue in 1968 (see a photo of construction at Blaisdell Ave, near Nicollet Ave here). There actually aren't many pictures of the construction in progress, but what there is, isn't especially exciting to anyone who has seen interstate highways under construction. There's an interesting piece about the tunnel here. The point is, the continuity was broken. It's especially dramatic if you look out from Hennepin Avenue south of the Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church, at the big gash in the ground that was dug to bring the highway down to tunnel-level.

So here's what the area looks like today, 28 years after the tunnel opened. And the thing I've noticed, over the 19 years I've been mapping the area, is how it's healed over. It's not that the gash is gone, but it's been built around. It was created in the midst of a city that was never designed for it, but as each new project and plan in the area was built, it was built with the knowledge that the big roaring river of traffic was there. And so the interruption to the city became part of what the city was.

All without a Master Plan To Heal the Gash.

What I said in meeting, was that, as I've been worrying over this and that discontent and conflict and trouble within meeting over the last few weeks, I've been thinking along the lines of "what can we do?" I've been hoping for some sort of Master Plan. I've been thinking about Liz's continued pain over the meeting not uniting easily to give the boot to a visitor who was preaching anti-gay bile, and the sense of a few commenters in that thread of "why can't we just..." And about pain around theist vs non-theists in our meeting.

But... we don't want a gash through our meeting. And there's the rub. Because we have theists and non-theists in meeting. And many on either side of that divide do feel strongly about their path to where they are, and while we at least say we are open to convincement, neither are we interested in being untrue to our personal experiences.

What can be healed then, is the pain around the divide. And it happens the same way the Minneapolis healed: one block at a time, one project at a time, one member and one friendship at a time. Now, we perhaps can build a Master Plan-type framework within which that healing can occur, and I'd argue we do that already, but we also just need time, and a long-term, low-level commitment to make that divide not a gash but just part of our city.

I want to say one more thing before I sign off, and it goes back to discussions last year about "the Grid," referring to the measured squares we impose on the landscape. As I said then, my conclusion is that the problem with this grid is not in is use as a tool for measuring, but in its imposition back upon the world being measured. It's when the ruler lines are cut back on the landscape with little regard for the shape of the land itself.

But what I'm saying here I think applies as well: once the cut is made, we can't go back and entirely un-cut it. What we can do (and sometimes have done) is to take this scarred land and make choices that heal around it. Like the mounds that dot the central part of the continent, we can let the grid become part of the land—because it is part of the land, however uncomfortable that makes us.

All in favor

This is, I think, version seven of my response post to the comments on the last post—not because they were hurtful, painful, or otherwise Bad. There was just a lot of there there in those comparatively simple responses, and it's hard to know where to start.

My earlier versions include ruminations on granfalloons and foma, on divine will, and on community. I will probably try these on as separate posts later, but Ingrid and I had a good discussion a little bit ago that got down to what to me is an even more nubby question:

Why is it hard to create a statement endorsing a fact that already exists on the ground?

To wit, our Friends Meeting already includes a number of non-theists, myself included, and has been welcoming to us since I've been around (and I know some of the others have been around for a lot longer). We also have a bunch of other "hyphenated" Quakers in our midst, from Episco-Quakes to Pagan Friends; Buddhists, Jews... we are a very welcoming place. SO (and I know this sounds like a rhetorical question, but it's not): why is it so hard for us to actually say that that is part of what we are, when it is in fact part of what we are?

Similarly, we care for our members. In the case of members with chemical sensitivities, we have agreed as a meeting to bend over backwards to make the recent meetinghouse renovation as clean of volatile compounds as possible. We have a standing statement asking people to not wear fragrance into the meetinghouse. So what is that makes codifying, issuing a minute to this effect, so hard? Seriously.

I have a few ideas.

One is our aversion to codification. Given the Friends' historic problems with credal statements, we feel the need to be really clear, extra super clear, about anything that says, "this is what we are."

Another is personal vs group differences. We are each willing to put forward the effort we feel we can make to support our Friends, to listen to them and accept them on their own merits. But group stuff? That is harder work, because we are submitting then to the will of the group...

And this gets to the heart of several of the comments on the last post: Quakerism is not bound up in submitting to the will of the group. It is bound up in the group submitting to the will of God. And we have a hard enough time getting ourselves around submitting to the will of God as individuals.

We educated liberal moderns deeply deeply distrust anything that puts itself up between us and the Truth. Echoes of Nuremburg rallies, lynch mobs, and blacklists come up when something does. It's like being afraid to swim (I can testify to this): the fear of not being able to find the bottom with your feet. It is a deep and systemic distrust of mediation of any kind. And going from individual care through a group to submission is really really scary, even more than simply submitting oneself to that will.

And I will add that Divine Will is an even harder thing to deal with when some of your membership doesn't believe in a God that possesses "will." I think it's not impossible (yet another upcoming post, sheesh), but definitely challenging.

And when am I going to get back to talking about maps?

We have met them, and they are us

Say you identify with a condition or a characteristic. You are blond, or left-handed, or have Schadenfreude's disease. This identity wasn't gathered lightly, and since you claimed it as your own, it has given you difficulty—plain old ostracism and nasty looks at the bus stop; doctors saying it's not a disease, it's a feature; grandparents saying left-handed people are the devil's spawn and making a big red X through your name in their wills and pointedly disinviting you to Thanksgiving. And sometimes worse.

But, you also feel a relief at knowing that this quality is really you and not a construct you've erected for the benefit of others. Just being able to say, "there's a word for what I am: blond" gives you a deep feeling of groundedness and, well, reality.

So, eventually you find a group who is accepting of you as you are, mostly. They believe you have Schadenfreude's disease. They think it's natural to be left-handed. A bunch of them have blond friends. Thank God, you think. I'm home.

It turns out this group has its own pre-existing culture. You adapt to it. You can live with this. In fact, after a while of living with this, you see just how much sense this culture makes. All decently-structured, several-generations-deep cultures make sense when you live with them for a while, and this one is no exception.

And there are a bunch of folks in this community with a similar sense to yours. Half the group is blond, actually; there's a Schadenfreude support group; community rituals have been adapted so the left-handed can participate equally. Mostly.

But there's a couple members of the old guard who, in fact, don't believe Schadenfreude's disease exists. One of them doesn't like blonds—a blond killed his red-head uncle in the war. One has real issues about the scriptural implications of left-handedness. They are willing to welcome you and your kind in, but with some hope and prayer for change...

Are these people the enemy? No, they are part of the community—in fact, they were members of the community before you were born. They are deeply learned in the heritage of this community—your community... Or is it your community? What makes it your community? Are they wrong? Are you wrong?

So you feel unsure. You want the group to say "Yes, blond people, left-handed people, even people with SD, all are welcome!" And there's resistance. Weird, surprising resistance. What the hey?

In a nutshell, the group welcomed you (and folks in your condition), but this is not a group for people like you. The group identity isn't the same as this identity you bring forward. That was never the community's purpose. You are welcome, but you do not speak for the group.

Ouch.

And that, Friends, is where a lot of liberal Quakers find themselves on a variety of fronts. Our meeting has, anyway. All are welcome, but that doesn't mean we're going to follow your lead. And it doesn't guarantee that all of us are going to like you as you are. Except that there are enough of us who have made the journey I described above, that it has in fact become part of who we are.

And if that in fact becomes a core of the meeting, being a refuge for the excluded and exiled, then doesn't it exclude those who haven't made that journey? The straight, Anglo, middle-class, raised-as-church-going folk?

As someone who feels somewhat like an outsider who found refuge (as a deeply agnostic rationalist with a strong, ornery taste for magical fiction), but also someone who inherited a fair amount of being-part-of-the-establishment, I am torn.