Interrupted in Gladness by Horror

It is Christmas season and suddenly late on Friday, when I have just arrived in Minneapolis from Duluth, comes the news about the twenty grade-school children in Connecticut killed by a deranged person with a gun from a trio of his mother's guns after he shot her to death at home. She is said to be a substitute teacher at the school where he burst in to kill everyone he could. This story is not making sense and all across the country we will wait for corrections to it, mainly clarifications of how such a travesty could happen to little children and the staunch, affirmative adults they were entrusted to. Why especially would a mother--a teacher herself?--with a son who must have had obvious symptoms of social maladjustment keep guns in a place where he could find them?

The Saturday and Sunday feature a holiday art fair in south Minneapolis, the show I'm now considering my most promising of the year. It is, like all art fairs, a festival of appreciation for special, personally developed skills and persistence in making works that glorify God and the world that's home to us, animal characters, creature quirks and feats of survival. Soup is served by Sisters' Camelot, which brings free organic food by bus around Minneapolis neighborhoods. Art gets sold and individual labors are rewarded in word and deed. Old friends and new friends enjoy one another and everyone feels like buddies, a most vivacious, purposeful weekend party.

In the background, surely, of many of our minds is the thought that anyone who knows we are gathered here could stride in with an assault rifle and riddle us and our handiwork with bullets in the name of some belief or little else but an urge. Everything could end for us all at once in a din, rubble and bloodbath. The question would come up: was there a link to some artisan or shopper with a furiously disgruntled husband, ex-partner, etc. There is nothing to prevent such a thing, nothing at all; we're just trusting in the overwhelming likelihood that it will not happen.

We hold that secret thought fleetingly, all or most of us, till the event is over and we can turn back to the news stories, learning more and getting past earlier mistaken details. The murdered mom was not a school employee at all but a businesswoman, a divorced mother of two sons; she had been prospering on an alimony settlement and was known for her generosity with money, her enjoyment of shooting ranges and her privacy about her younger son, the murderer, who appears to have instilled her with justifiably deep fears. Whatever he said and did to cause them appears to have felt too scandalous for her to reveal in time to save herself.

Then on Monday morning I am making that hurried, 150-mile drive up the freeway through the crisp, re-frozen snows back to Duluth, passing the billboards, some with holiday reminders on them, like the casino ad that says "fa la la la lots of loot!" Always on this route there is more acreage up for sale and old farmland getting subdivided, no end to the spread of people into wild countryside. Why do we do away with the beautiful open spaces that harbor us when we agonize with all that we inflict on one another, and that re-instill at least some people's joy in creation? It's because we observe too few limits to earth's livable space and resources, a maladaptive trait we share with what we consider vermin.

It is clear that we all hold in ourselves the germs of our own destruction, at many levels and stages, just as the vast humanity around us hides in itself individuals who are a menace, full of the potential to victimize anyone of their choosing. It's also true that history, and literature, bear many examples of odd persons mis-categorized and persecuted as a public menace when they were as benign as house pets. There is stigma, just as there are telltale symptoms that may never be apprehended for the hatred they explode into during a rude awakening like a shoot-out.

A Facebook friend posted a Huffington Post piece newly published under the title of 'I am Adam Lanza's Mother'; it exhibited the powerless desperation of a woman trying to rear a son whose personality profile seems a near fit with the murderer in this week-end's news from Connecticut. He's a boy who alternates between terrifying tirades in which he threatens her life and his own, and apologetic engagement with her like a proper son. She is at her wits' end, concluding very little in the writing other than the need for many more published resources to help families deal with mental illness.

On this theme of parents who are at a tragic loss for how to cope with children given to monstrous behaviors, I was reminded of the story long ago in Life magazine, about an elder son named Richie Diener. For reasons not made clear he withdrew as a teen into addiction, using and selling Seconal and other drugs, making threats both to his father and mother so regularly that the dad, a no-nonsense political conservative, shot him dead on the stairs of the family basement. Richie, aged seventeen, had stood there brandishing a kitchen knife at both the parents. George Diener was charged with murder but the jury refused to indict him.

Intervention at that time in families where the kids are caught up in chemical abuse may have differed from what's offered today; the Dieners' story dates to 1972. But despair over children given over to aggression and dishonesty knows no time boundaries. Typical parents may never give up all hope. We will go on striving for inter-generational failings to be brought more into the open, as already happens whenever the parties will it and social welfare agencies open the channels. Now too we have community via social media. 

As regards familial discord, it may forever be true that some children in effect are born to the wrong parents, or there is a mismatch in parent-child personalities that leads to vicious outcomes. There are well-intentioned homes that would function much better on the use of dialogue, whether it's story-telling, humor, or loud verbal drama where instead there's been silence, absence or chilling gravity. And too often a disparity between parents' and children's own timeline for maturation exists; pretty well everyone must grow up but there are children forced through the process much faster than their folks during the same time period.

As we long to believe that no problem is intractable, that at some stage a solution exists for any interpersonal struggle once it is talked of and seen and compared with similar examples, even the personality that is its own and society's worst enemy, exhilarating testimonies come to mind. A teenager in Toronto breaks through the mystery that is autism by telling her family and the world what autism is like via typing on the computer. In my own experience, art therapy works at a minimum for quieting the afflictions borne of a range of psychiatric disorders. And so, maybe, speaking as a member of the arts community in Minnesota, I offer the suggestion that new arts and entertainment-derived disciplines for segregating and treating seriously dysfunctional people deserve some practice.

Was Margaret Atwood, author of Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake terribly off-base when she conjured up a futuristic sport called Pain-Ball, used for confining dangerous assassins in a walled-in forest where they were free to stalk and slaughter each other? Aren't there a few shut-away people who find no greater satisfaction than killing other people? What if the very worst were allowed to eliminate each other? What about boys like Adam Lanza, so far innocent of any crimes, who fit a profile of derangement and threaten death to family and strangers alike and who will not, for decades or for their lifetimes, mature to a stage where they're no longer spewing danger signals? Could they be committed for their safety and for a study of outcomes, kept locked in a rooftop garden, let's say, able to blend with a few other living creatures there, live in trees, busy themselves with whatever is given to them, even something productive for themselves and the rest of us, just so long as they're isolated as they appear to want to be? And maybe some would be deemed ready, much later, to graduate to the outside. I'm daydreaming past the limits of my minuscule experience of course, but maybe it's a common daydream.

Experimentation with untried therapies takes some courage and a lot of resourcefulness. I worked for several months in 2010 in a state-run crisis home where some, though not most, of the clients were hitters and throwers, most of them young adults. Coloring with crayons and working jigsaw puzzles came easy as a way of socializing with a lot of them; confronting them in their behaviors while alone with them and saying no, you can't get away with that was something I lacked the courage to try. But the picture therapy quieted the behaviors to a minimum or dampened them out of sight. Some people are much better than others at policing. I wished then that I were more competent in the 'therapeutic intervention' we had been given in training; I would have liked to practice it at length with bigger people than I am so I could know my own abilities for blocking hits and taking down aggressors. But, at large, if we knew how to carry the disciplines of various art forms further into the realm of therapy for the maladjusted, therapists might be visual artists and musicians and dancers and writers, certified along the way in techniques for person-to-person combat and self-defense. In certain cases we might just wrestle horrific problems right out of each other and down the street, and more and more into the realm of despicable, seldom-avowed trash from the past.

Winter Season Liquidated?

As it rains here in Duluth, MN on this 6th of November, the American election day, I wonder again if we're going to see a rock-hard and snowy winter this year or if it will again be bare ground, frost and slush. As Bill McKibben of 350.org said in a recent taped interview, those of us who remember the four seasons for their older weather patterns are the true conservatives, not the people who promote business mega-growth-at-any-cost and refuse to believe that we are on track, in all our fossil-fuel-charged expansion, to make earth's atmosphere too hot and unstable for civilization to endure. After all, what is really worth conserving if not civilization and Mother Earth.

I always did love winter and outdoor exertion in it, warming my body by my own blessed inner workings. I grew up envying school athletes and Olympians just a little bit, heroes unafraid to push themselves and compete with others, though I forgave myself that I didn't have that kind of personal drive. At least, I felt, I had space and could travel it for hours without automation. A great, sweeping loss of public health, I am sure, has resulted from people growing up disbelieving that winter locomotion outdoors was any good for them, body or soul.

Somehow, for more than economic reasons,walking in winter feels like a waste of time for a whole cross-section of people. The prevalence of roads and cars and trucks is a relatively recent driving force--especially those mega trucks with molded curves like muscle, making up for shallow real muscle on many a sedentary driver underneath the clothing. Loud exhaust pipes  compare well with power-farts of pride and contempt.

In the first week of February 2012 I sat in soggy snow near the shore of an island at Camp Menogyn, at the top of Minnesota near the Canadian border, where I drew and painted winter spruce twigs with my fingers bare, the sun balmy on my head and hands, moisture soaking into my snow pants, a pair of snowshoes keeping me from sinking all the way through the snow pack. The iron grip of classic mid-winter felt to me tamed for all time in my remaining life, so that our crossing the lake ice and snow to that island on foot with sleds seemed in retrospect a marvel and impending risk. It was just past high noon, my waterlogged pants soon to hurry me back to the fire in the lodge, the painting of redpolls whirling from a traditional snowdrift bristling with tips of frozen-crisp spruce an outdoor accomplishment that shouldn't have been possible. Complacent at what I was making--pleased, too--I was and remain chronically troubled by what's happening to the boreal January and February. My watercolor of redpolls, winter finches of the northland, is now done, with reference to a published photo from the 1970s of what a snowbank in the North Woods used to look like. The present winter just didn't have any high, frozen-stiff snowbanks to offer; the snow on location was real but sinking in the broad light of day.  Blank Note Card: a Redpoll Explosion on a Winter's Morn at https://www.etsy.com/listing/110077614/art-card-redpolls-winter-scene-for

At a little fall festival in Hermantown, Minnesota this week-end we gathered, setting up displays despite early snow squalls, and so the families with children were slow to arrive while the artisans came to warm themselves repeatedly around a couple of fire bowls bright with rust and stamped-out crescent moon and star shapes. Near our display was a crab apple tree as apple-studded as any I had seen, not too far from the nearer fire. All hours of the show a quiet huddle of cedar waxwings, many of them young birds with rumpled brown plumage or the grey streaking that set them apart from the flannel-sleek adults remained in the tree. The apples looked a bit large for songbirds the size of waxwings to deal with whole but, except for a little pecking, I saw the birds mostly sitting like spectators, little or not at all noticed by the humans below, the birds blended into the center of the fruit tree. I wondered if the fire's warmth reached them or if the people and movement were an attraction for them just to watch us all. I think wild birds do a lot of people-watching. In winter the best rural birding is often nearest the houses with feeders and the windbreak and shelter offered by our walls fringed with plantings.

Because of the crisp weather and low customer flow I did a lot of sitting at work drawing fantasy birds of my own, an ivory-billed woodpecker providing a sort of sapsucker with intensive oral care. The idea had come to me at a recent stint in the dentist's chair. As a person little encumbered by formal scientific training in my approach to the birds, I deeply respect studied interpretations of their behavior but feel free to add emotion to my portrayals of birds. I don't much care if I'm anthropomorphizing, since I think the back edges of the human crowd are well-served by folk who project their personal feelings and daydreams onto the images of birds. It could be agreed by some people that no homo sapiens kiddies pictured in ads or wherever, and precious few adult figureheads, tribal leaders, business spokesfolk, etc. are as cute and as expressive of our souls or our  wish-fulfillment as the figures of roosting or foraging birds. See possible examples at   www.etsy.com/shop/EpiphaniesAfield