White Guilt

In Vancouver, I went to the University museum of Anthropology. The first thing I saw were dozens of giant totems, sky lit, standing on square concrete slabs. Big and stern and incomprehensible. Museumized. I realized how long it had been since I'd visited a museum, or any place where things are so lifted out of context. Certainly in writing I find that when something is lifted from its context and placed beside some other entirely unrelated thing, I discover new resonances, new perspectives. But I was baffled here, maybe because I had come to find a certain type of answer. I found the whole place unsettling, with its strange thin mixture of "primitive" Pacific artifacts (including mid-Pacific and even some African artifacts) and a giant room filled with porcelain and China tableware and figurines from the earliest times to the last century. I'd walked through this last room and come out to leaf through binders of photographs of coastal tribes when I started overhearing a lecture. A class of teenagers had filed in and was being treated to a kind of angry diatribe on the decimation of the environment by white industrial culture. The instructor kept saying, "And where do we get most of our air? Where does our air come from? What produces the oxygen that we need? Where does ninety percent of or oxygen come from?" Someone tentatively answered, "Plants.." But they stood accused, abashed, reprimanded by this man for the faults of their ancestors, and this man was every bit as white as they were. It took me right back to my own years of college, my environmental studies classes, my U.S. History classes. "Not just plants," the man was saying, "But trees, not just trees but rainforests. Ninety percent of the oxygen we need to survive comes from rainforests," he went on. "They're all being cut down," and blah blah blah, and then "the salmon," and blah blah blah, "and so the tribes are coming to us and saying…"

Not that any of is wrong. But is seems so wrongheaded to me now, to make people, children, ashamed of themselves for something they don't understand and haven't truly done, at least not wittingly. It's like the antique impulse to whip the Devil out, that unthinking Christian acceptance of notion of Original Sin, that we are inescapably bad and doomed to be so, that we must be unredeemable and nothing we do or try to do will truly atone for that past and original evil, and that only some divine figure (now represented by the members of what Canadians diplomatically call First Nations) have the capacity or authority to forgive us.

And I have friends in the Native American church, but have always suspected that if I joined, it would be because of this desire for atonement by association with a religion I don't in any way understand, and might well not find congenial. That I would simply be seeking redemption from the only people who now (by this lecturer's construct) have the authority to redeem us.

But how can they redeem us, who now drive SUVs? Who fly in airplanes off to powwows, and book into rooms at Seneca Towers? (I talked to a woman on the plane, coming back from a powwow, who said, "Oh, no, my kids hate camping. The girls would never go, you know, if they didn't have a good bathroom." Her kids were diabetic from drinking so much soda. She ranked the sodas for me, by sugar content, and said which ones they couldn't drink. I didn't tell her that we lived in a one-room cabin with three kids, that we had no flush toilet, that we all ride horses, go camping, harvest oysters, that all of us think soda is too sweet.

How can they forgive us if we're all assimilated into one long gradation of sameness?

Anyway, the whole museum was impenetrable, with its trove-like atmosphere. The whistling climate-control changed to a roar each time the entry door slid open. The guilty children drifted with me through a Reconciliation Room (commissioned art and displays by coastal tribe members) that seemed as profoundly confused as we were, and much less honest. I couldn't get out fast enough, and hoped at least to go into the longhouse standing in the graveled side-yard. But it was padlocked.

Maybe my job in life is just to keep alive this old heart, that makes so many things seem strange and unsettling. Maybe my job is just to be unsettled, to see what must be missing, and to guess why.

Straight Lines of Roses

The house my parents want to buy is on a busy street. It is a low house painted tan, inside and out, the color of weak latte. Even the concrete steps are painted. Its current owners have a flag in the front yard and decorator flag accessories inside, a pristine oak kitchen, plate glass windows. The view is nice, the plan is open, and maybe it's just my own pre-election hostility, but it seems to me a repellent house. Beds with shams. It's hard to imagine my parents there. The yard has a small straight bed of roses. A uniform line of junipers intend to make a hedge out front. In the back yard are three red plum trees in a row. Along the driveway wall, a line of sea lavender flourishes in extreme uniformity. These people do not like surprises.

The garden bothers me--if I can express it--because it represents the kind of mind that hopes to control, to minimize the world's complexity. To impose such strict order on organic life seems a suspect impulse, on the order (though not on the scale) of extremists like Hitler, the Klan, like Mugabe, who would eradicate all they find threatening and disagreeable, rather than seeking to understand the infinitely complex, the interdependent nature of all things. My mother, I am glad, favors a more fertile and chaotic environment.

But to know both things, to remember to embrace the world of good intentions, of necessary failures: How can I learn to stop judging? I suppose only by continuing to ask questions. A question is an open and embracing approach to variation. Because these people with their tan house are good, honest people, who believe themselves to be good. A judgment is like a straight line of roses, foolish in its very definitiveness. A question offers the greatest of all human possibilities: further thought.

Who are you? Where do you come from? Why are your roses in a line?

Dysfunctional Narratives and Morality in Fiction

I'm reading Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House, his essay on dysfunctional narratives and deniability. He writes:

"We have been living in a political culture of disavowals. Disavowals follow from crimes for which no one is capable of claiming responsibility. Mistakes and crimes tend to create narratives, however, and they have done so from the time of the Greek tragedies. How can the contemporary disavowal movement not affect those of us who tell stories? We begin to move away from fiction of protagonists and antagonists into another mode, another model. It is hard to describe this model but I think it might be called the fiction of finger-pointing, the fiction of the quest for blame…. In such fiction, people and events are often accused of turning the protagonist into the kind of person the protagonist is, usually an unhappy person. That's the whole story. When blame has been assigned, the story is over. Probably this model of storytelling has arisen because sizable population groups in our time feel confused and powerless, as they often do in mass societies when the mechanisms of power are carefully masked."

My book (to my relief) is evolving differently from the narratives he describes, and reflects more accurately the nineteenth century moral climate as Baxter describes it: A Sudden Country is all about taking moral responsibility for actions. It says that taking responsibility is difficult, but that regardless of what has made us who we are, regardless of why we've done the things we've done, we are ultimately responsible for our actions. It's a morality that has always been a kind of standard military issue, and survives in the military today. The Hudson's Bay Company was based on a military model, and MacLaren, for all his faults, is influenced by the requirements of leadership, and would never fail to take responsibility for the safety and welfare of others. When he acts wrongly, he takes blame for his mistakes. He might not know what is wrong with him, but he knows when he is wrong.

As Baxter implies, in modern narratives like those he mentions, when the story arrives at the assignment of guilt (laying it on someone other than the protagonist), the story ends: redemption arrives as a sigh of relief. The protagonist can forgive himself because his mistakes originated with someone else.

But a narrative like A Sudden Country goes on. As MacLaren relives his mistakes, he experiences a kind of temporary relief--the kind offered by simple confession--but Lucy's forgiveness is not his own, and represents no atonement. The story must continue through his most difficult task--true self-forgiveness.

He has denied himself forgiveness, and has denied the value of forgiveness generally, until he accept finally that failure is necessary, is unavoidable. That it is, in fact, God-given. He sees how difficult it is to accept blame without the possibility of forgiveness. When that possibility exists, it allows for the freer admission of error (because err we will). It allows us to recover gracefully, to move on to the next step: reflection, learning, in which lies the chance for some actual, physical atonement. Because all we can hope for in this world is the chance to do better next time.

The story I learned in childhood was that there were good guys and bad guys in the world, and that we were the good guys. The story I learned in college was the same, except that the roles were reversed. (I took this new status very seriously.) And even though most adults are familiar with what we call gray area, we seem to continue to behave, as a population, on the basis of this simple dichotomized thinking. It was clear, as the twin towers fell, and as we now prepare to invade Iraq, that nearly everyone around me still holds the notion that we are either good guys or bad guys.

So the truth of the matter--of what moral place Americans occupy in their clash with other cultures, and what constitutes moral behavior--was the question that has become increasingly the center of this book. And my answer--not original, to be sure--is that we're all bad guys who mean to be good, or all good guys who often behave badly. That the most truly moral behavior in the world is to attend to others, to listen to their stories, to understand the basis for their actions. That understanding, that compassion, must temper every action we take. That uninformed action is irresponsible because the likelihood of error is so high. That when we see people committing uninformed acts, we have a moral obligation (as MacLaren does) first to sound a caution, and then to act in the name of prevention.

I can say that I didn't know, or couldn't have articulated, these things before embarking on this journey with these characters. Both MacLaren's and Lucy's transformations have shown me that the only truly moral choices are informed by courage, not fear; by love, not anger; by understanding, not ignorance or belief or convention or loyalty or suspicion.

In the case of a true moral conflict, of an informed dilemma, we must act according to our consciences, but accept that any satisfaction will be compromised by this moral expense. When neither outcome is good, when understanding cannot result in compromise, we can only act on our desires, and trust ultimately in the power of forgiveness.

Beware, writing teacher once advised me, beware the novel of redemption.

He'd written a lot of cutting-edge short stories. I smiled knowingly, baffled, so that I would appear to agree. I didn't know that I was writing one, had never thought about whether I should or shouldn't. So probably I'm out of step, but if the journey is my own, then it is true. Having committed the dread act, I'm happy to defend it.

Finally, while I think Baxter's observation about dysfunctional narratives holds true for much of modern literary fiction, I have to say that I think even some of the best modern fiction (books and movies both) generally represent the kind of fixed morality I so often see around me--portraying either a good-guy/bad-guy world, or, more cynically, a bad-guy/worse-guy world--where grit and determination in the face of great odds seems to be the only moral requirement for those with such flawed manners as to even consider the subject of redemption.

Ancestors

While I was writing yesterday, Dave was in the office helping Paula and Marcos put together some footage for their band. Much of the conversation was about ancestors, that being the theme of the lyrics. They had both brought pictures of some of their own ancestors to lay into the footage, and hearing them talk so lovingly of these people, and knowing what I do of mine, I said, wouldn't it be great to have an ancestor night, where we all gathered, brought an ancestor in pictures and stories, told about them? They liked the idea.

They went on working and tried to work too, but it was a little noisy and I ended up just thinking about what had happened to ancestors in our culture. Every non-Christian culture I know has a long tradition of keeping track of ancestors. The people of Asia, of the Middle East, Africa, the ancient cultures all over the world all have strong traditions of honoring ancestors, and holidays devoted to ancestor worship. My parents on both sides have kept some record of our ancestry, but most people I know have less information. Marcos thought it might be because, as Americans, our ancestors are so dispersed, so mixed in origin, but Dave draws a blank beyond his grandparents, (and his dad is not much more help), even though they'd all lived for generations in the same small region in the North of England.

Spanish Catholic cultures have Day of the Dead, and many stage elaborate funerals and have very ornate cemeteries. Christians, historically, didn't seem uniquely bad at keeping track of, and honoring, ancestors, though Protestants of course are the most restrained.

But then it occurred to me that the idea of honoring ancestors is fairly problematic for people who question the legacy they've been left, who feel they might well have more to atone for than to honor. When we don’t understand our ancestors, or don’t feel proud of them, when we feel ashamed in some way of how they've lived, of the things they've allowed to happen, then how do we know they deserve our respect?

The world has begun to change, in recent generations, faster than our moral capacity to adapt. The industrial revolution has allowed us, as a people, to make increasingly larger and more damaging mistakes, has given us (in Christian Europe and America) more power than we could responsibly wield. What became known as the generation gap in the '70's was actually a mass abandonment of ancestry, a rejection of those from whom we had begun to inherit the entire weight of generations of mistakes. A whole generation metaphorically or literally ran away from home. For the first time, significant numbers of people chose not to reproduce on moral grounds--refused to repeat those mistakes already made, refused to become ancestors.

The same thing happens in the briefer generations of family cycles, in families who abandon each other. If a parent fails, and the child cannot forgive, the parent is no longer honored. The wisdom of ancient generations has been that you honor parents, regardless of their deeds. Even if you fail to forgive, you must honor. By rejecting that old wisdom, by failing to honor, we can forget how to honor. By forgetting how to honor, we can forget how to be honored. And then we lose accountability.

When we forget to honor our ancestors, we end accountability. By not honoring, we implicitly state that we don't ourselves expect to be honored--we expect to be forgotten, in our turn, by future generations, perhaps despised. So why even try to behave honorably? Why try to make a life that will stand as an example to those who will inherit it? By forgetting to honor our ancestors, we have begun to create an end to history.

Holidays

Today, backfilling a ditch on the job-site, I thought about traditions and ceremonies. And it is an indication of what a secular life I have always lived that until that afternoon I'd never fully realized what holidays were for. They aren't so we can have a day off from work to spend as we please. They aren't creations of a consumer society to encourage us to buy more stuff. Holidays for me are always filled with guilt and performance anxiety, they are always about obligations not quite fulfilled, about disappointed children, about parking problems, about having to dress up.

But the reason I have this associated guilt is because holidays are meant to be mnemonics.
They help us stupid people to remember those things we shouldn't be forgetting: to honor life, and coming lives, and past ones, the harvest, passages and the sacrifices of great leaders, and our hope of some eternity. When people come together in a church, they are reminded every week of each other, of all their various lives and needs, of all their responsibilities to each other. It's so very obvious, except to someone like me, whose traditions feel so completely stripped of meaning, who never knew why people went to church, who thought that Easter was about bunnies, that Halloween was about candy, that Christmas was about toys. The only thing that retains any useful mnemonic value for most of us are New Years' resolutions--when once a year we think about all those things we shouldn't have let slide, and half the time what we decide is that we forgot to diet or exercise enough.

How did we go so wrong? How can we repair ourselves, and be good humans again?

After dinner I was looking with Grant through a book I had on Native American games. In it, the ethnographer commented that a certain game was played both as amusement and ceremony, and that he didn't understand enough to know where amusement ended and ceremony began. I think, for us, what used to be ceremony has been given over almost entirely to amusement.

Blue Beads

Revising the chapter Blue Beads, I see more and more the irony of Lucy's line, "By what morality do they temper their desires? I mean they are shameless, they do as they please." Speaking, of course, of the Pawnee she sees. In fact, most subsistence cultures are highly restrained, in their own ways, and, in fact, our own culture--her culture--was thoroughly intemperate in desire. The fact that they were ready to do whatever it took to assume ownership of the region they called Oregon was evidence enough. And increasingly, we suffer from an inability to temper our desire. We suffer from a shameless lack of restraint. Increasingly unashamed about our lack of shamelessness, we flaunt it, we ruthlessly export it, like large, spoiled children. Victorian Americans, with their many hierarchies, viewed all subsistence cultures in this way--their people, as immature adults, large spoiled children, lazy and self indulgent. So they slaughtered Indians. Muslim radicals view modern Americans as depraved and spoiled and immature. So we get our towers bombed. What crimes are committed from moral high ground?

Cynics and Positivists

I heard someone say today how tired she was of everyone's relentless positivism on this island. It is a difficult time for people here. Little knots of people gather each week to stand across from Red Apple with signs, protesting war. Driving back from town, it occurred to me that both cynicism and positivism have their roots in fear. They are Approaches, though which experience is filtered and arranged in such a way as not to alarm unduly. In cynicism, we manage fear by confronting experience with experience, so that nothing will shock or horrify, so that everything can be made fun of, generalized into a dry amusement. In positivism, we manage fear by deflecting all experiences but those that are approved and wholesome. In cynicism we incline to smugness, in positivism, to self-righteousness. A person’s dedicated positivism manifests itself in a devotion to scrap booking, and to the production of stridently triumphant Xeroxed Christmas Letters.

Endings and Circularity

I'm almost done revising the final chapter, sending the edit off maybe tomorrow. KJF speaks of liking books to be circular in some sense, and I marvel at how circular this book did end up. So it must be the finished form. Lucy’s opening (at least her second chapter) in Iowa is answered by her final chapter in Oregon City, and her walk through the grass to the Pawnee village is answered or bookended by her walk into the water of the Columbia. MacLaren’s first journey across the snow to a mission to save a child (which fails) is answered by his final journey across the snow to a mission filled with children. Almost exactly a year has passed, and he and Lucy have each changed as much as true humans are capable of changing in the span of a year.

Stones and Words

Last night we all watched Rivers and Tides, a documentary on Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, who is certainly a man far beyond the margins of convention. I laughed out loud when I first sat down to watch (Dave had started the movie before I got home). A man in rubber boots sat on a shale beach, breaking stones and laying them in a circle. The tide was coming in fast, he explained. Time was short. It seemed as ridiculous as a child building a sand castle, and he was a grown man with a neat white moustache. "So put down your camera," he said to the lens with steely urgency, "and do something useful." By which he meant bring stones to lay in a circle on beach gravel. How could I not laugh? But was slowly seduced by his vision, both its beauty and its originality, by the purity of the things he created. His art is not made, he says, his forms are not conceived of and created, but grow in a steady accumulation of small objects--stones or chunks of ice, leaves, wool, clay, moss. The shape of the material he chooses will shape, and sometimes dictate, the finished form.

So I wondered what happened if you thought of writing in that way, as a steady, slow, organic accumulation of words. If words were leaves or stones on a beach, if you only had what you found to work with, and the ones you needed weren’t there, but others were, how would you proceed? What meaning would emerge? I guess that’s why people like those magnetic poetry kits. It’s certainly why I've enjoyed the limitations and opportunities presented by nineteenth century vocabulary in writing A Sudden Country: the words themselves shape and order meaning. So many words were not in use, so many phrases did not exist. And others, in their place, reveal whole worlds of alien thought.

“What is under the surface affects the surface,” Goldsworthy says simply, as a drying clay wall reveals a pattern of timber and lath underneath. So he creates, beneath the clay, a design which is revealed as subtly different, yet apparently organic, as the next layer of clay slowly dries.

It is so evident and so truthful and so universal a statement that it seems both obvious and revelatory, as though surely everyone must know this, surely I already know this. I know how language does shape thought, by being under the very surface. It reminded me of the other day, when I noticed that the phrase “nothing is enough” can be read two ways, and describes two opposing approaches to the world. This understanding, now under my surface, certainly affects the surface: the acts I choose, the words I choose.

Languages of Record

Night before last in the bath I was thinking about Lucy Mitchell’s lines about the Pawnee: “Must they paint everything?” and what I'd just written in production notes about the importance of clothing as a form of communication in Native American cultures, and realized that every culture has what I thought of as a Language of Record, a preferred medium in which a culture’s history is recorded and transmitted. As Europeans, we have these these strings of words which have not been available to other cultures. The language of record in most Native American cultures was color and pattern: the painted robes of winter counts, the painted lodges, the adornment of clothing, of horses, of faces: it was a language of paint, and was read as a language, and understood across the barriers of hundreds of different spoken tongues. And that is why their painting was so superb, and why it was so valued. For the people of Zimbabwe and of Ghana and of Mali, people all through Africa, the Language of Record was music and dance, and that is why theirs is some of the best and most moving music in the world, and that is why people of African descent remain such fine musicians and dancers. For preliterate European Christians, I think perhaps the Church Calendar was the language of record, and that is why we have the mnemonic of holidays and feasts, of saints and festivals all linked to a calendar of days. With the printing press, the spoken word could be preserved and transmitted easily, and it became the Language of Record. In modern western-influenced cultures, increasingly in the global culture, film is becoming the language of record. It is how we remember who we are, what has happened, it is how we mark the passage of time, it is how we understand ourselves, it is how we unify our culture.

And, in cultures as mixed and sophisticated and cosmopolitan as ours has become, the Language of Record also varies from individual to individual more, I’m sure, than it ever has. My language of record, certainly, is the written word. For me, it is the clearest, most subtle, most expressive. My daughters’ is line and color. Dave’s language of record is numbers: how many and how much, how far and when. And film: the captured moving image. My sister’s language of record is the photograph. For people who collect objects--teaspoons, steins, ceramic owls--those objects form a language of record, a reminder of places, events, people. My father’s language of record is architecture, the language of buildings in places. No matter where he goes, he takes pictures of buildings, he paces out distances between things, squints at awnings, notices sills and doorways. My father speaks in buildings. In older rural landscapes, the language of record was plants and land. A whole record of human culture is stored in breeds of plants. Quilts are a language of record. Clothing.

Finding your own language is important. Until then, you cannot be active, engaged, cannot shape your life or understand it. Until you find your own language, you are passive, mute, a child who can hear but can’t yet speak, susceptible to persuasion by others whose powers of language are strong.

Homes speak the languages of their owners.

Until we look around, we forget how strange we are.

David Thompson's Words

Going through old notes, I found some I'd taken while reading David Thompson’s journal. I’d taken only the phrases unique to that idiom and beautiful. I thought it was a poem at first:

The river fast with ice these several days past
the line for the snowshoes is very bad, from the awkwardness of the women
A load of meat in horse bags
A fresh beat road, a common walk
Hereto tolerable good
A shoal river, full of flats and isles
A blowy afternoon
The bold river parts in two brooks
We put up among some aspen woods
An indolent set of men, they took care to cook and eat two large kettles full
They have eat at the rate of 8 lbs a day pure meat.

Made way again in morning dark
A smart walk
One broke the point and we followed on fresh beat road to a height of land
Here we must leave the horses as what lies further is unfit for them
Poor spiritless wretches, two are but little use

from whence comes my design

I could write my whole life and be happy using only such words.

In other notes, I find the phrase, sadly fallen out of my book, the gen d’esprit. “Around this fire sat on clean Epishamores all who claimed kin to the white man (or to use their own expression all that were gens d’esprit) with their legs crossed in true Turkish style,” wrote Russell Osborne. It is a very kind phrase, this one, "kindred souls". I always love it, in this world, recognizing a kindred soul.

Sex and Victorian Restraint

Reading Paul Woodruff's little book on reverence brings up memories of things I’ve half known, casts other thoughts in new light. In earlier notes, I've come again across my questions about Victorian restraint, the unwillingness to name or to discuss so much of life: pregnancy, rape, any aspect of sexuality. The insistence on hiding the body. All of this I had thought came from embarrassment, or postlapsarian shame, and I think this is the level of awareness most Victorians had. I know that restraint and "delicacy" was consciously and deliberately employed to signal gentility or social status, (I remember my grandmother's horror, to see a picture of me on a camping trip in the local paper with a jar of brandy, wearing very short cutoffs--"But you're a teacher!" she said. I had no idea why she was upset)...this discomfort seems absurd today, but I see more and more the source in reverence, and this is where its abandonment becomes morally critical for the Victorian woman. Only with reverence, Woodruff reminds us, is the sexual act a uniquely human one, and if the human loves without reverence, he or she is contemptible, is animal. Reverence implies and demands ceremony, and the ceremony of hiding the body is a powerful one, it is a reservation for the appropriate, the right (and, in Christian society, the sanctified) contact. A shameless woman is one who fails to revere the act of sex, which, to a Christian, is a holy and purposeful act, not the mere “pleasing of flesh.”

So to suggest, to tempt, to flirt inappropriately was not just bad manners, but was irreverent, and therefore contemptible. "Delicacy" was either a form of self defense in a world where men could not be trusted (and women were defenders of all virtue), or a manifestation of male suspicion and dominance, of a fear that women, if not bound by custom, might break loose like ungoverned children.

In our globalized, secularized, psychoanalyzed society, we have abandoned Eve's shame, and the belief in literal Hell. We have uncrossed our knees and must now resort to weedless lawns and expensive cars to signify social status. And what has happened to reverence? Today we can hardly conceive of how tortured the soul could be by irreverence. Of how desperately shamed one could be, by acting in contempt of God. To fail to honor the husband (the earthly representative of God), and to choose another instead, to confuse passion and reverence, was an eternally damnable offense. A virtuous woman should feel her natural desires aligning with those of God, and if she did not, something was out of joint.

And Lucy, as one influenced by her freethinking husband, is supposed to represent the beginning of these modern abandonments, by questioning the morality she was handed. But I cannot forget how profoundly influenced she would still have been by the religious conventions of her time. What Lucy fears, or is ashamed of: That she has mistrusted God. That she does not honor her husband. That her belief has faltered.

Instinctively, I have set up, in this novel, a progression, a kind of Heavenly Ladder of sexual intimacy, in particular for Lucy. Her first love, with Luther, was innocent, unconflicted, it was virtuous, reverent, her passion and her virtue were aligned in an intimate love that was literally heavenly. But when she marries again, her relationship is neither innocent nor passionate; her sexual intimacy is technically virtuous, but without reverence, it is soulless. In MacLaren, she rediscovers her passion, her soul, but knows there can be no virtue in physical union. Already doubting some aspects of the religion she was handed as a child, she is torn. God has presented her with someone in whom she might confide, someone whose soul is kindred in some way, someone above all whom she trusts (as she ought to trust in God) someone she honors (as she should honor her husband), someone for whom her passion gradually wakens. But because she does not understand him, she cannot truly love him. Because he cannot honor her, he cannot truly love her. Because there is neither love nor virtue in the first act, their meeting on Independence night is just that, it is independent of law or custom or of anything but a kind of raw and brutal desire. Here is neither a union of soul with God nor a union of mortal souls, it is pure bestial sin, and the consequence for both is that they feel themselves literally to be falling.

In their second act, after they have come to an understanding of each other, we have the opposite of what Lucy has with Israel: with her husband, she has virtue without passion, here now she has passion without virtue. She and MacLaren feel that what they are doing is wrong, but their mortal passions, of the flesh and of the soul, are aligned. The consequence is the condemnation of others: they are discovered, and the relationship must end.

But their third act is a holy one, and I wrote it to be so. It is reverent love, in which passion and virtue combine: they sense that the meeting was somehow destined, is sanctified--this one meeting, this one time, they are for each other in God’s eyes. Lucy believes that she is destined to redeem him on earth by bringing forth a child to replace those who died, and MacLaren begins his own awakening into true virtue. What happens here enables him to go on, at the end, and do the virtuous thing.

Women and Horses

I took my first yoga class last week. Someone asked for "hip openers," so we all (and all of us were women) ended up in this posture with our legs wide open. Lying there, I thought how far we'd come. My own grandmother would have been scandalized to know of a class where a group of young scantily dressed women lay spread in such postures all over the floor in the company of a (handsome) adult male.

I thought again about women riding sidesaddle, and understood (I had known before, but had treated too lightly) how significant a transition it had been, historically, for white women to go from riding sidesaddle to riding astride. To keep the legs (the limbs) closed at all times was the outward demonstration of sexual virtue. To open the legs and admit a horse (of all things!) could, (considering the woman's anatomy, of which men have always been perfectly aware) be considered uncomfortably close to bestiality. After all, a man, in order to relate bestially, must enter. A woman must only admit. For a woman to straddle a horse, to admit an animal freely between her legs, was nothing if not a giant leap down the slippery slope of depraved morality. If she admitted a horse, who knew what further freedoms she'd presume? And if she had found the experience gratifying, not only would she lose her moral virginity, she could easily lose emotional control entirely, governed, as she was, by the heart and not the head. It could easily turn her wild, even predatory. The woman, as the frailer sex, must be protected from this and from all other temptations to which she, like a child, was susceptible. The idea that a woman might progress no further than the simple and practical act of riding astride was (in the long view, evidently correctly) presumed to be preposterous.

But the fact that allowing a woman to ride astride did not have immediately dire repercussions meant that it was the first step in separating the notion of virtue from the notion of sexual purity. Riding astride, after all, was a necessary and practical response to living in the west, where wheeled transportation was problematic. Only affluent and well bred women had developed the skill (or had the equipment necessary) to ride side-saddle. I think it is safe to say that the more liberal-minded humans (men, at least) are generally the first to make a leap into the unknown, and were probably well represented in the west. Many of the men, like Israel Mitchell, were well-read and skeptical of conventional wisdom, and would have been the first to allow a wife such freedom. These first women literally pioneered the way, until riding astride was seen to be so evidently safe and necessary that men and women both overcame their scruples, and learned that no greater loss of virtue immediately resulted.

And the only comfortable way to ride astride, of course, was in a pair of trousers. Before any woman had thought of burning bras, or even abandoning corsets, she had stepped into a pair of pants, thrown one leg over a horse (or, in eastern cities, a bicycle), and ridden astride.

This is just one of the examples, I think, of how adapting to the demands of the frontier west helped to alter the presumptions that, for generations, had prevented women from achieving greater moral or legal privilege than children. Certainly it was no accident that Oregon and Alaska were the first states in the Union to grant women the vote.

So, when Lucy Mitchell does ride astride, it is, on many levels, a deeply transformative event.