Or is there?

Can a work be at once a work of fiction and non-fiction, or are the categories so ill-fitting that The Wolf at Twilight belongs in neither one – a veritable situation of being “neither wolf nor dog?”

These are questions that bear some discussion, because they underpin the dilemma that has confronted my two creative works about Native America, Neither Wolf nor Dog and The Wolf at Twilight, from the moment they first came out.

Let me tell you where I stand on the issue.

It is my personal conviction that we human beings are “believing” creatures.  Until we take something into our hearts and embrace it with conviction, we are seeing through a gossamer (and distancing) veil of analysis.  It’s true that the information we gather during analysis guides us toward belief — and one would hope that our information gathering is informed and educated – but it is not belief.  Belief is saying, “Yes, this is the way it is, and I will stand by it and defend it.”  It is a commitment of the heart.

I come from a long background in the study of religion.   One of the ongoing arguments in the intellectual field of religious studies was whether or not one must be a believer to understand a faith or a belief system.  After participating in this discussion for years, I came to the conclusion that the knowledge you gain is different based on whether you are a believer or an observer.  Each has its role:  sometimes it is better to stand on the outside for perspective; but to the extent that you can enter into a belief system and inhabit it, you come closer to the heartbeat of the spiritual experience that it expresses.

I came to believe – and I believe to this day – that the goal of any work of art that addresses spiritual issues should be to bring those who see or hear or read it as close to the experience of real belief as possible.   When I worked as a sculptor I sought to embody spiritual states rather than describe them.  When I turned to writing I sought to recreate moments of spiritual encounter rather than discuss them from the outside, and to walk my readers into them so they could participate in those encounters.

When I came to the unlikely calling of giving voice to the deep and complex spirituality of Native American people – a spirituality that has, I believe, much to teach us all — the challenge became more complex: how could I help you, the reader, enter into a complex spiritual experience not my own in a way that your hearts could be touched and your spirits informed by the richness of their belief?

I did not want you to be able to move to the distance of analysis.  I did not want anyone to leave my writing saying, “That’s interesting.  I’ll have to give it some serious thought.”  Yet I did not want you to think you (or I) could appropriate Native belief – a complex, multiple, language- and culture based-spirituality – for ourselves.  To encourage that would be to continue the long tradition of cultural appropriation that has been our way of dealing with the Native peoples since our arrival on this land, and I wanted no part of it.

What I needed was a way to bring you, the reader, into the presence of Native belief, just as I had been brought into its presence, without allowing you the distance of the observer or the false identification with it as if you were donning its mantle as your own.

This was no easy task.  But I believed that Native experience contained truths we needed to know, and I knew that I had to make readers believe what I told them in order for them to take it into their hearts.   I had to write in a way that would grab you at the level of belief; I had to bring you into the presence of Native experience so that you would participate in it, be inhabited by it, and leave a changed person.

A tall order, yes?  But that’s how important I thought the truths of Native American experience were to the shaping of an authentic American spirituality.  We as a people have gotten lost somewhere between dogma and agnosticism, yet we are a spiritual people who hunger for belief.  The Native way, with its tradition of granting each person the right to his or her own spiritual journey, while finding truth and meaning in the land, seemed to me to feed that hunger with an authority and authenticity that nothing else possessed.   I needed to find a way to lead you into its presence in a way that would invest your experience with the authority of belief.

And so I set upon the task of searching for a literary vehicle that would serve that end.  Neither Wolf nor Dog, and, now, The Wolf at Twilight, are the results of that search.   Though done as traditional narratives, they use aspects of the novel, oral history, mythology, parable, and spiritual homily, to bring readers into the presence of Native experience as participants and not as observers.

How I came to create that narrative form is a story in itself.   It involved learning from Native storytellers, the fortuitous accident of becoming involved with collecting Native oral histories, and long personal and scholarly experience with the methods and purposes of sacred texts.   It also involved exploring ways of using language to describe, evoke, engage, and transport readers to the physical and emotional places I wanted them to go.

The end result, as reflected in Neither Wolf nor Dog and The Wolf at Twilight, was a genre-blending, category-blurring literary vehicle that placed you, the reader, by my side as I walked into another world and handed you off to people whose spiritual reality was so integrated into their daily life that it could not be separated from it or reduced to homily, lecture, or teaching.  What I experienced, you experienced.  What I felt, you felt.  And by making myself and my responses as emotionally authentic as I could (readers can sniff disingenuousness a mile away) I convinced you to follow me, participate with me, and take my experiences into your heart as your own.

To do this, I used first person narrative – that magical, distance-destroying literary point of view — to bring you along as fellow travelers into a world that is populated by actual people (though often well-disguised), actual settings (rendered with as much physical and emotional accuracy as I could muster), real events (though often not experienced in exactly the sequence or the manner in which they are presented), all developed along time-honored, almost archetypal, plot lines and universal stories of the human heart.

But none of this would have mattered if the works had not been absolutely authentic at the places where they touched against Native belief, practice, and understanding.  The words spoken had to be captured and shaped with the fidelity of the best oral history, the conversations and sense of humor had to be pitch-perfect, the experiences of such places as sweat lodges and boarding schools had to be as carefully rendered and factually precise as if this were an historical documentation.   I could take liberties with the characters and their narrative, but not with the world through which they walked. You and the other readers, both Native and non-Native, had to give total assent to the possibility of what I presented.  Factually, culturally, and interpersonally, there could be no false notes.

And so Dan and Grover and Wenonah and Jumbo and I and everyone else – real people all, but well-disguised where necessary – set off to lead you to a place of absolute emotional, cultural, and, to the extent possible, spiritual authenticity.  We went into Native reality and made you part of it.   There were no lies in that world; no falsifications of cultural circumstance, emotional response, or historical event.   You met real people, heard real stories, experienced real emotions, and participated in real events.   To the extent that I was able, I took you beyond understanding into participation.

So, what was I creating — fiction or non-fiction?  I truly don’t know, and, for my part, I truly don’t care.  My job was to bring you into the presence of a people and way of life, not to pass a litmus test of factual accuracy.   For me, the question of “is it fiction or non-fiction?” was as irrelevant as asking if Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows is fiction or non-fiction, or if Bach’s Mass in B Minor is fiction or non-fiction.  My goal was to create something authentic, and to the extent that I was able to do so, I was not bothered that it did not fit neatly into standard literary categories.

To put it another way, I was creating works of spiritual encounter, not literary or historical documents, and the liberties I took were directed toward that end.  In so doing, I was working in a long and honored tradition of spiritual writing.  The Gospel writers employed contradictory narratives to communicate the spiritual richness of Jesus’ mission; Taoist teachers placed stories from many sources into the mouth of Chuang Tzu to help people apprehend the Tao; Kahlil Gibran created the character of Al Mustapha to give proper voice to his spiritual teachings.  Neither Wolf nor Dog and The Wolf at Twilight were my journeyman efforts to use the skills at my command to open people to the interwoven cultural and spiritual reality of Native America.

In the last analysis, I was following the guidance of the man who served as the primary model for Dan:  “People learn best by stories,” he told me,  “Because stories lodge deep in the heart.”   Neither Wolf nor Dog and The Wolf at Twilight were created as teaching stories meant to bring you into the presence of the rich, human, and deeply integrated spirituality of contemporary and historical Native life.   If they did so, they have served their purpose.  How they should be categorized, I leave up to you.

I am now watching a group of young people make the fascinating move into adulthood. There are new marriages, new families, infants, toddlers, college — all the experiences that are part of starting out in life. Some of these young people have good jobs; some are struggling; some are trying to live below the radar or off the grid. But they all have dreams, and they all are alive with the freshness of possibility. Their lives spread out before them in rich abundance, and I envy them. But I also fear for them. They are, with few exceptions, dancing on life’s tightwire without a net — they do not have and cannot afford health insurance. It’s not that they don’t want it. They can’t afford it. The simple cost of living — food, rent, college or college loans, daycare, cars and car insurance — are just too much. They scrape, they dream, and they survive. But one broken bone, one pregnancy, one unexpected illness, and those dreams are dashed. It is wrong and it is unfair. And there are, for reasons that are almost impossible to fathom, a great many people who seem to think this is just fine. And this is what has been keeping me awake.

It is not just fine. It is not fine that our young people cannot afford to get sick or have an injury; it is not fine that people in mid-life cannot change jobs or make any move in life because they would lose health coverage; it is not fine that older folks can have the savings they have worked their entire lives to acquire turn into a tiny joke in the face of some catastrophic medical bill. And I think most people of good heart believe this. Yet whenever the issue of health care reform comes up in America, some truly dark forces rise up to twist it, distort it, and kill it.

Who are these folks, and how does this always happen?

Well, we know who the folks are. They are the Wall Street-driven insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and various for-profit entities whose ox would be gored by meaningful health care reform. That they are venal and cold-hearted is unfortunate, but understandable. They are in business to make money, and they are responsible to people and organizations who have invested in them with the intention of making money.

Why they are so powerful is less understandable. But, accept for a minute that this is just the way it is and just the way it is probably going to be. The question then becomes, why do people of good heart get manipulated so easily and readily by these cold forces? And, perhaps more importantly, how?

The answer seems to lie in a core xenophobia that looks upon America as the best place and the best way in everything we say or do. This kind of naive “island mentality” allows those with the tools to do so to manipulate our understanding by creating a dangerous “other” out of everyone or every place that does things differently. We are not part of a dialogue of cultural options; we are “the last best hope” that must stand up against whatever bogeyman is currently pressing its face against our window.

In the case of health care reform, this bogeyman is “socialized medicine” or “government run health care.” Never mind that almost anyone who has ever been sick or injured in a country with universal health care comes home filled with wonderment at how smoothly their treatment went; never mind that most of the people thundering against reform are counting the days until they can get their single-payer government-run Medicare. These are conveniently disregarded in favor of fear stories about lines and rationing and now, absurdity of absurdities, government-designated dates and times of death. It is simply mind boggling how such stories and such narratives gain currency.

But this has been the broad method of the opponents of health care reform since day one back in the Truman administration: scare people rather than inspire people. Make change into something dangerous. Define the unknown as a dark and frightening place.

Now, here is where the disconnect comes. People of intelligence recognize this tactic and they recognize that it is driven by for-profit entities that cannot change the way they operate or think, lest they cease to exist. Such a situation is eminently understandable. But why do the politicians allow this kind of transparent manipulation to color their thinking? You can say it has to do with lobbying dollars; you can say it has to do with constituent pressure. Yet, none of that makes sense. When you look around you and see the young people and the families and the elderly living without coverage and living in legitimate fear of what this means, how can you not rise above your desire for reelection or corporate dollars and, instead, do the right thing?

I have said this before: one to one, Americans are some of the kindest, most giving people on earth. But something happens when we think as a collectivity. We are far too prone to become cruel, suspicious, and vindictive, all under some clumsily constructed guise of “individual freedom” and “choice.” We close our hearts, we close our pocket books, and we close our minds. We become moved by fear, not by compassion and hope. Look at this grotesque war in Iraq: our politicians could raid our children’s bank accounts because we were afraid. Look at our bailout of the banks: we wrote them a blank check because we were afraid. The lesson is clear — make people afraid and you can do anything in their name, whether it is to rob their bank accounts or close their hearts and minds.

I don’t want to make this into a political diatribe, because then I will lose my Republican friends in this monologic discussion. And though I must point out that it is primarily the Republicans and the odd Blue Dog Democrats who have started waving the banner of fear, my real sadness and my real source of sleeplessness is the Democratic response. The Democrats know that this is their chance to do something good for the country and for the children and families and elderly. They know this is their best chance and probably their last chance on health care, probably for a generation. Yet they are letting the opponents define the game.

First of all, and most transparently, they are letting the Republican and Blue Dog opponents define the battle. As with prescription drug reform, they have allowed the opponents to make it an argument over the size of a closet when the issue is how to rebuild the house. If you can convince people that the real issue is not health care reform, but a “public option” within the insurance company-driven game, then even if you lose, you win, because there has been no reform, only a reshuffling of the deck. So you draw the Democrats into this argument, make them deal with it as if it is life or death, then allow them a measure of victory, and everyone goes home thinking that we’ve got reform. No, what we’ve got is a different configuration of shelves in the closet. The structure of the house is still weak and crumbling and unsustainable. But the Democrats are trumpeting their success, though the success is precious little success at all. And the house continues to sink.

This brings us to the biggest failure — President Obama. What happened to the man who could inspire with oratory? Where is the bully pulpit? Why is he allowing idiotic arguments about his birthplace or government-mandated death dates to bring him down to the level of scratch-and-bite? This is a man who sailed above the ordinary with a rhetoric of inspiration. Why is he now not inspiring us with the possibility of good rather than arguing with those who are professional purveyors of fear? How can he have gotten bogged down in tactical battles while the strategic objective is slipping away? This issue, my friends, is his Viet Nam — not Iraq or Afghanistan. He’s become Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson trying to make arguments about the necessity of certain actions, while the whole war is slipping away. And, sadly, the casualties this time are the young people I see trying to make their way in a world that is pretty much stacked against them.

Let me say it clearly before I close. The Bush administration is being revealed as having been little more than a bad man manipulating a hand puppet. The Obama administration rode in on a wave of excitement that was made even greater by the failure of that previous administration. Obama had our hearts and minds. We were ready as a country to follow him anywhere, even though his opponents were vociferous and determined. The Democrats chose him over Hillary because they didn’t want a tactician, and the nation embraced him because he had a vision. Now, in the process of governing, he has found himself fending off an attack of political ferrets, and, as a result, he appears to have taken his eye off the ball. He is talking tactics, not strategy.

Perhaps he has a grander vision; I’d like to think so. But if he doesn’t, he’s losing. And if he loses, those young people struggling to raise families, pay for college, pay rent, and put food on the table, will be the biggest losers.

If I had his ear, here’s what I’d say. “Don’t let health care be your Viet Nam, Mr. President. If you do, no wall we build in Washington will be big enough to hold the names of all the casualties your failure will leave in its wake.”

But I don’t have his ear, and I’m not sleeping well these nights.

The first is Michelle. She has, from the outset, been adamant that family came first. She demanded it of Barack, and I think it was a sine qua non of her willingness to embark upon this shared political journey. I believe she will carry this commitment into the White House.

What this means is that we will have, for the first time in memory, a First Mother who has taken that role by choice. None can doubt her talents in other areas, and she will surely choose a social cause to champion, as all First Ladies do. But I truly believe that, shining through her involvement in whatever cause she may choose, will be her commitment to raising a healthy, well-grounded and well-rounded family without hiding them from public view.

You can already see it in the girls — they are not little smiling automatons or perfectly drilled political children. They are just kids, looking with wonder at the circumstances in which they find themselves, and sharing that wonder with us all. This is a reflection of strong and steady parenting: the children can be trusted to be themselves in a public setting without fear that the selves they show will be either ill-mannered or inappropriate. Like Barack, like Michelle, they are comfortable in their own skins. My guess is that the Obamas as a family will work their way into our cultural consciousness as an honest antidote to the juvenile abusiveness of laugh track TV families, and offer a model of civil behavior to us all.

At the heart of this, as it should be, will be the strong and powerful presence of Michelle. She will be almost a post-feminist figure, not balancing motherhood and a profession, but intertwining them in a way that shows the two of them to be complementary parts of a fully realized human being. If she can do this, she will advance the cause of feminism in a way that will be equally as significant as Barack’s contributions to advancing the cause of post-racial identity.

The second contribution is potentially equally as far reaching. With the arrival of Barack, we have the return of “cool” as a viable expression of personal identity. Between gangster aggression, television talk show screaming, and glowering athletes, we have become a culture that values “hot” in the McLuhanesque sense of the term. Especially in the African American youth culture, which serves as the vanguard for popular cultural forms and identities for almost all of American youth, the idea of a “cool” identity has fallen out of favor. In its place we have lionized a “hot” aggressiveness.

Barack appears to have the capability of changing this. All through the campaign, when attacked, he either embraced and then neutralized the attack, or calmly staked out his considered position and held to it without either aggression or rancor. He respected his opponents, laughed at his own shortcomings, and made civility a virtue. In short, he modeled a measured and worthy manhood.

If, through some bit of cosmic grace, we should have found at this moment in time a woman who can model a resolved and caring motherhood as well as professional excellence, and a man who can show that strength is in embracing rather than in posturing and confronting, we will be standing in a rare shaft of historical sunlight.

At least until shown otherwise, I choose to believe this is true. It will show an America that has come of age, not merely racially, but psychologically. The young country that has so attracted and confounded the rest of the world in its agitated struggling for an identity to match its sheer physical power, will finally be able to lead by example rather than by force.

I once wrote in Letters to My Son, “Strength based in force is a strength people fear; strength based in love is a strength people crave.” The Obamas raise the very real possibility that we will manifest a strength based in love. If this is the case, their presidency will reverberate far beyond the confines of political action and discourse. They will, in effect, redefine what it means to be an American. It is, to my mind, a redefinition that is long overdue.

Technorati : Michelle Obama, american identity, americanism, obama

First, my own situation. It has been a difficult winter. My mother died on Christmas day. A mother’s death is different from a father’s death. At least for a man, the father is the roof over your head, the mother is the ground beneath your feet. When they are both gone, you float free into the universe. As my wife puts it, you become an orphan.

This experience is worthy of an entire book, though it’s not one I’m inclined to write. Suffice to say that her death on Christmas Day had the unexpected consequence of giving the day a new significance, even sacramentality, that I will always treasure. It also reinforced the naturalness of the experience of death and made me wonder anew why it is that the human animal in its passing cannot mirror the passing of the day — moving into a glorious sunset followed by a gentle twilight that marks the closing of the day. However, I can report with authority that it does not.

So, anyway, I am sad. It is a deep sadness, far beyond any surface emotion. It is a sadness that is almost akin to peace — a quiet resignation in the face of a truth much larger than my own. Like the birth of a child, the death of a parent makes you one with the human family, and that, in the face of the deep sadness, is a great balm.

On the practical front, I am finishing a follow-up book to Neither Wolf nor Dog. I have been working on it for years, but have not spoken of it simply because I have not wished to do so. It will be called The Wolf at Twilight, and will be coming out in the fall. I will say more about it as it comes closer. But Dan’s story has been a conundrum for me in many ways, and I prefer simply to tell it rather than talk about the telling. So those of you who are curious will simply have to wait.

People have also been asking me about my take on the apparent economic crumbling going on around us. So, here it is.

Like everyone, I am worried for the financial well being of myself and my family. And my heart goes out to all of those whose fall has been harder and deeper than my own.

I am filled with righteous anger — anger that banks will be given money without accountability so that they can continue to be economically viable while the people to whom they loan money are allowed to sink and drown; anger at the misshapen world view and confused values that the car companies have shown by using their bail out money to provide low interest loans on car and truck models that cannot sell because they should never have been made; anger at the greed and blindness of corporations and industries who think that they should have money simply because they feel that they need it, while we as individuals feel the same need, but are given only vague promises that less will be taken out of our pockets.

Looking at it analytically, however, I just shrug my shoulders. We should have seen this coming. We are simply witnessing, after thirty years, the real fruits of Ronald Reagan’s paradigm shift in American thinking — that money and favor should be given to those who create jobs — no matter how menial and degrading those jobs are, and no matter how inequitable their pay scales and internal wealth distribution may be — on the curious assumption that corporate self interest, properly funded, will miraculously translate into public benefit and social good as the wealth trickles down to the individual.

An entire generation has grown up under this mirage, either unaware of the fact that it was accomplished by cutting the throat of the union movement and shredding the social safety net, or indifferent to the fact that those things ever occurred. A short-memoried public has been sold the story of individual greed and self interest as a noble narrative of self reliance and the American independent spirit.

Now this all is coming home to roost, and, in the short term, it will not be pretty.

Meanwhile, the pendulum is swinging back toward government involvement without the requisite structures in place to make that involvement work smoothly. The fig leaf will be ripped from our current way of doing the public’s business, and the reality of government inefficiencies and our hallowed history of pork barrel distribution of government funds will become frighteningly apparent as the amounts of government monies slated for distribution becomes ever greater.

But this inevitability notwithstanding, we will be well served by a shift in our national consciousness away from the belief in empire, both personal and political. What that shift will be to depends on the vision of governmental leaders, the reconfiguration of corporate values, governmental operational models, and the revaluing of goodness, kindness, and sharing in our own personal lives.

I have spent my adult life struggling with the hard truth that as individuals we are a giving and sharing people, but as groups, whether governmental or corporate, we are venal and self-serving. I would love to see corporate and government behaviors align with the principles of caring that most of us as individuals try to practice in our lives. But to do that we need to have leaders of vision who refuse to kowtow to systems that have become rancid by hiding greed under the cover of “sound business practices”. And we need to stop those who look for cracks in those systems — both individuals and corporate/governmental entities — that see every situation as a chance to serve their own selfish purposes.

As I said, I believe this will be a hard time. But systems reconfigure themselves only after they are irremediably broken, and many of ours appear to have reached that state. The people who are alive at that time of breakage draw a difficult card. But who are we to avoid suffering not of our own devise? Many other generations have experienced it; many alive now in other parts of the world have been experiencing it for years.

But I see two good things coming out of this disintegration.

First, it will give the young people something to believe in and a chance to demand change. Since the sixties, the younger generations have been forced to simply find their place in the machine. Now the machine is broken. They can help construct a new one with the help of those of us who have always been dubious about the one we inherited. It is a chance for all of us to link hands in pursuit of something larger.

Second, it will force us to turn to each other for help. For too long we have believed that strength resides in those who win, not in those who serve, and the goal of too many people has been to become “a winner.” This is going to have to change, partly because a society that operates on the model of winners and losers becomes a heartless beast, and partly because, in some measure, all of us are going to have to lose. Those who make the shift and decide that they must dedicate themselves to serving — and not the caricature of serving that says that by creating wealth for myself I am serving those beneath me — those people will survive and thrive. The echoes of our parents’ and grandparents’ words, that they think people were happier during the Great Depression when nobody had anything, will begin to have real meaning.

I, personally, think we are putting a good man in the White House. I think he understands what needs to happen. Whether he can make it happen, or whether the systems and mindsets are so calcified that they cannot be moved, remains to be seen. There is not even any proof that anything can set things aright. Perhaps we are simply reaping the whirlwind.

But individuals survive and thrive in the most barren economic and physical environments. They create lives and friendships and societies and dreams. They only fail to survive in barren spiritual environments. And we are not yet a barren spiritual environment. We are a big-hearted people. We are filled with love and compassion and the capacity to hope. Anyone who comes here from another country sees that. But the dissonance between our personal character and our public and corporate behavior has become almost too great to comprehend.

The question now is whether the government can become a mirror of our better selves and an agent of positive change. Personally, I think it can, and, more than any time in my life, I am hopeful. I had no problem with Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in a long time, she was proud of her country.

Overall, I think that this is a great time to be alive, because it is a time of great significance. For those who have come to believe that a life well lived means a fat 401K and a Lexus in the garage, it will be a bit of a shock. But beneath this urge for security and prosperity there has been lurking a feeling in those of good heart that we have been stealing from our children and putting our boot on the neck of much of the rest of the world. And we know that our strange position as magnetic north for the hopes of people everywhere has given us a unique opportunity to serve the better impulses of humankind.

For another brief moment in time, we can shape human aspirations and direct the world’s vision to higher values. This sounds grandiose, but I believe it is true. America is unique because, as a nation, we are founded on nothing more than an idea. The challenge before us is to define that idea — freedom — in a way that serves human good rather than individual greed. We’ve done it before; we can do it again.

We’d better, because a whole lot is riding on us. I, for one, would have it no other way.

Technorati : bush, economic situation, freedom, neither wolf nor dog, obama, us economy

We all know the obscenity of this incendiary “terrorist, Muslim” talk from McCain and Palin — mostly Palin, product of one of the strangest political gambits in modern history.

But I would ask you to keep an eye to something else.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are, ostensibly, supporting and working for Obama. But if you’re like me, you have sensed something tepid and almost subversive about that support. At first I thought it was just the cool, analytical nature of each of their demeanors when they spoke of Obama’s campaign. But a closer look reveals something that is more objectifiable and easily monitored: watch how frequently each of them uses the pronoun, “he” rather than “we” when speaking of the Obama campaign.

It is a simple equation: “We” equals support; “he” equals analytical distance. It is exactly this sort of political cunning that has been the Achilles heel of the Clintons since they burst on the national scene, because, in its own way, it is more enraging than the tub-thumping racism and fear mongering of people like Palin.

As an Indian friend of mine once put it, “Be more afraid of the snakes than the bears, because you can see the bears coming.”

For my money, the Clintons are acting like snakes.

Technorati : Clinton, Obama, Palin, election