Faith as Landscape in Laramie, WY

With the exception of the Interstate, when you drive into Laramie, Wyoming from any other direction, the first thing you will probably see cresting over the horizon is a church steeple pointing to the heavens.  It's St. Matthew's, the Episcopal church which sits like a beacon on the corner of 3rd and Ivinson.  Its undressed sandstone tower and red archway doors basically define the whole of downtown Laramie.  A lot of the locals use it as a navigation point for newcomers: "Turn left at the big church there, that's Ivinson Avenue..."

Landscape was something I really started thinking about this time when I was in Laramie.  We talk about Laramie as an outlaw town in the popular imagination-- you know, Butch Cassidy, Big Steve Long, the territorial prison and all that-- but the strongest visual cue for that past is the territorial prison and its Wild West reenactments, and it's tucked away in West Laramie.  You can't see it until you get past the overpass at Snowy Range Road.  That might be the image you get in your head if you've never been here, but when you stand in the very heart of the old Downtown and turn your face to the hills, you get a very different impression.  This is a landscape dominated by faith, and now that I see this, it's no wonder that Tectonic Theater would have focused on faith as a major player in the Laramie drama.  Tectonic is very aware of Laramie's landscape, I have always thought-- and if they were, the landscape of faith is a part of Laramie's topography you simply cannot ignore... 

Laramie in Pictures: The Road to Laramie

While I was in Laramie, I took literally hundreds of photos from Vedauwoo to Centennial, and I'd like to share a few with you over the next couple of months as I continue to write through some things. The first series I would like to share with you isn't Laramie proper-- rather, the vast chunk of land between Laramie and Casper.  These photos, taken on that lonely, beautiful drive, stretch from the Shirley Basin, to Medicine Bow, Rock River, and just north of Laramie. 

So, here are some of the most iconic images from the road to Laramie: wind turbines, antelope, and fences.  Oh, and mosquitoes, but they don't photograph so well.

Enjoy! 

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Why, yes, I am sitting down in the middle of an active highway...
This is the road approaching the Shirley Basin.  

Medicine Bow, WY's newest additions, which aren't producing power just yet.




These are snow (also called "drift") fences, which keep the snow off the roads in winter.

Back to Laramie

[This is the first of several posts about my recent visit to Laramie, Wyoming to visit my brother and do a little informal research.  I hope you enjoy it!]

As I write this post, it is the beginning of July and I am sitting in the self-proclaimed "Home of Edgy Coffee" just a couple blocks off of campus, drinking an iced coffee with a wedge of lime in it.  Some crooner from the fifties drifts out a lazy melody over the radio.  In fact, this new branch of Coal Creek Coffee Company is about as "edgy" as a paperclip on a quarterly report, but, hey-- I guess they can call themselves whatever they want.  At least it's not Starbuck's.

How does it feel to be back in Laramie after at least six years?  Pretty darn good.  I started out for Albany County from my in-laws' house on the first and took a leisurely drive through the Shirley Basin in the early evening and crossed into the prairie just ahead of a huge set of thunderclouds brewing on the horizon.  It's as green as far as the eye can see right now, just starting to get its earliest tinges of gold as the heads on the grasses ripen and dry.  In a few weeks, if it doesn't rain much, those oceans of rippling green will turn into a golden, waving sea. 

My brother Coyote walked me around the downtown my first night here to introduce me to the new Laramie.  He's in school here now, sort of, trying to walk that delicate, fine balance between school and starvation.  Right now he's out of a job, but he's also out of school, so he can eat.  He looks more gangly than starved-- a little like Shaggy off of Scooby-Doo, with his wavy red hair he never cuts until he donates it to Locks of Love and a chin patch that should be on a saxophone player.  On the way he introduces me to a good portion of Laramie's fringe culture: a bouncer called "the hippie" and several real hippies, one of whom got in trouble with the city for living in a wigwam by the river.  As we walk he chats about his friends, most of whom don't fit in to the mainstream in one way or the other: punkers, rebels, gays and lesbians, bluegrass guitarists, hippies, artists, philosophers, troublemakers.  Coyote knows all these people because he's one of them, and their company suits him well. 

Has Laramie changed much since I lived there?  Yes and no.  Most of the downtown looks virtually identical to my high school days except that the names of the stores have changed.  The restaurant where my sister Sparrowhawk worked when I was in high school is now an Italian restaurant, and the downtown now houses two yoga centers, an honest-to-goodness sushi joint, and an oxygen bar.  (An oxygen bar?  Really?  That's just over the top.)  The major change is that the old Fox theater, which had stood as an abandoned piece of Laramie Americana for generations, was finally so dangerous that they were forced to tear it down.  Now an empty lot stands next to the Cowboy bar, its glaring, yellow sign no longer oxidizing in the Laramie heat.  Farewell, ye vintage pigeon haven.

The major changes are all east of town.  The little strip mall I'm sitting in behind War Memorial Stadium is entirely new, as are the big hotels clustered around it.  It used to house a couple of old rain barrels in an empty field.   In fact, there's a set of "Cowboy Condos" going in right next door, too-- as housing for Wyoming football fans, I suppose, which will overlook the pitiful cinder-block married housing for college students that should have been torn down when I was in college.   Out towards Cheyenne around Sherman Hills there are hundreds of gleaming, new houses all stamped out with a Technicolor cookie press.   Coyote tells me this is all just a few years old.   Little Laramie is growing up pretty fast, it seems, though I wonder from the numbers of houses whether or not the population has grown to match. 

And yet, for all this growth it doesn't really seem to be that much bigger-- nor does it seem to have a different character.  I almost had to smile when I pulled my car over a few miles north of town and a black cloud of mosquitoes made the windows go black.  Some things never change, it seems.  It's been one of the wettest summers on record, and the mosquitoes are getting so big and so nasty that I'm waiting for them to run for political office.  The Public Health office is handing out cans of Off to help the poorer residents deal with the bugs.  Laramie has never had much of a mosquito abatement program, and it looks like that hasn't changed at all.  Scratching the bites on my ankles with my pen as I type is a good reminder of the not-so-good side to the town.  

As we wandered around town last night towards the railyard, I looked up at a deep blue sky edged with purple and sighed.  "I would really love to come back here," I said.  Coyote gave me a fuzzy look.

"Seriously?"  He asked.  "To be honest, I'd give anything to get out."

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PHOTO CREDIT:

2) The old Fox theater in Laramie, from awkwardindeed's Flickr photostream. available through a Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Big Gay Jim's Bigger, Gayer Blog

One of Matt Shepard's friends, Jim, still livesthere and runs a personal blog.  His blog's name makes me crack a smile every time I see it:  "Big Gay Jim's Bigger, Gayer blog."   As you can tell by the photo on the right, he was an Angel Action angel, and he's been deeply, deeply involved in Wyoming and GLBT activism since then.

I barely knew "Big Gay Jim" in college-- he was actually my boss at one point-- but he has about the quirkiest dang sense of humor of anyone I've ever met.  But that's beside the point.  His blog has some great first-hand stories about what he's been up to since 1998.

But it's a personal blog, y'all.  If you don't like personal blogs, it's probably not your cup of tea.  But he has a great perspective on the GLBT community in Wyoming and how it's been developing over the last ten years.  If you want a quick link to the relevant posts from the 10th anniversary of Shepard's death, just go through UW's online archive of Shepard materials, permanently linked and archived here.

Laramie and Tectonic's Codes and Power

Read more at Amazon.com

So, as a Christian who studies medieval literature, it's no surprise that I just love the writings of CS Lewis.    Sure, he was a bit of a stodge and didn't "get" how women worked until he was in his late fifties-- but for a conservative, stuffy old Oxford dean, he doesn't get enough credit for taking on and dismantling the linguistic codes of oppression of his own day.

For instance, in the sci-fi book Out of the Silent Planet, he basically takes on the entire linguistic power structure of white imperialism and rips it to shreds.  In the book, an interplanetary explorer named Weston tries to justify his attempted takeover of the planet Mars (which is a silly, pathetic attempt) in the name of white human imperialism.  This is how Weston justifies his murder of a sentient being (called a hnau in Martian) to the ruler of Mars:

Your tribal life with its stone age weapons and bee-hive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilization—with our science, medicine and law, our armies…  Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower. (85)

Weston's adversary Ransom has to translate all this colonial-ese into Martian so that everybody can understand.  Here's how he does it: 

He says that, among you, all the hnau of one kind live together and the hrossa have spears like those we used a long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats small and light and you only have one ruler. He says it is different with us. He says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it. He says we have very many bent people and we kill them and shut them in huts. He says that we have many ways for the hnau of one land to kill those of another and some are trained to do it… Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people. (135-6).

 Oppression sounds completely different when you strip it of all the linguistic codes and speak it plainly, doesn't it?  The little linguistic codes of Weston's set about survival of the fittest and right to supersede (and elsewhere, the white man's burden) really are just a power play.  They separate the 'us' (that is, the elites) from the 'them' and make that outsider vulnerable to violence.  And Lewis' alter-ego Ransom, from his position of the Martian convert, cannot translate their nonsense into sense.  As the person with a foot in both societies, all he can do is expose Weston's brutality for what it really is. 

I hope you can see why this interests me.  Sometimes the little cliques and social boundaries we set up (which Lewis called "Inner Rings") only exist to render others powerless.  Others have are much more well-intentioned but eventually lead to the same thing, and language is nearly always one of the principal tools people use to do it. 

So, do Laramie residents have language codes to build barriers between themselves and who they have deemed outsiders?  Of course they do.  Everybody does to some extent.   But so does Tectonic Theater, as it turns out, and that's what I'd like to look at today-- how such languages of belonging and exclusion can be exposed for what they are, and who gets the benefit and who suffers the consequences.  

A short primer of Academic code

So, all this talk about code switching has got me thinking...  what are the verbal and non-verbal codes of the humanities?

I mean, I know pretty clearly what things make a person's speech "western" or "conservative" or "evangelical" (which has a vocabulary entirely its own).   But, what about the world I spend most of my time in anymore-- the humanities?  What codes do we use here?   So, I've just been listening to people talk for the last couple days to see what short-hand people in my environment use in everyday speech.  What I found is pretty interesting, and highly amusing in a weird sort of way.

Okay, so here are some words I've heard used to code disapproval or rejection:

Fox News / Glenn Beck/Bill O'Reilley
black-and-white thinking; binary oppositions
NASCAR
bumper sticker logic/sloganeering
speaking in soundbites
speaking in code  (ironic...)
framing/ frames/ framed discourse
essentializing
Wal-Mart
fanatical
brain-stem
Bubba
paternalistic
Imperialist/Capitalist
Othering
objectify/objectification
marginalizing
monological
tendentious
literalist/fundamentalist
shrill

Here are words we use to code approval or congratulate ourselves:

provocative
polyvalent
synthesizing
subtle thinker/subtle thinking
hermeneutic
semiotic
measured/thoughtful
critical
meaty/deep
performative
intellectual
humanistic
measured
postmodern/posthuman/post-Christian
self-referential
has gravity/gravitas

Words we use to sound smart and identify with the academic club:

dialectic
abject
agency/being an agent
queering/queer (especially as a verb)
deconstruct
slippage
Foucaultian
gender (as a verb)
ecriture
linguistic turn
hybridity/ hybrid
interstitial
dialogic
discourse/discursive
historicize
signifier/signified/signifying
Bakhtinian (quoting Bakhtin is like academic gold.  The same goes for Slavoj Zizek.)
meta-anything
base/structure/superstructure
fetish/fetishize
Oedipal
sublime 
Lacanian
post-colonial
Other/Othering
paternalism
subaltern
subjectivity
langue/parole

Okay, so our words-- those we use of others, and those we use to describe ourselves-- can tell us a lot of what we think about ourselves.  The funny thing is that a lot of things in the first list is classist, and it's demeaning specifically to intelligence or social class.  Everything in the last two lists are, for the most part, come from a very useful and interesting critical language that has clear benefit in the intellectual arena.  But that's not how we use them in coffee-shop conversation.  They're our codes of belonging, our secret handshake.  Nothing makes you part of the smart set like puffing on about "subaltern identites" or "the sublime," especially if you can work a little Burke or Habermas or Zizek into that conversation, too. Besides, how much fun is it to say "Slavoj Zizek?"  Tons. 

In a sense, I have no problem with the presence of this "club" per se.  That's the way society organizes itself, to be honest.  People with a common association share a common language.  But it's good to take a shot of our own medicine, apply some of that Lacan and Foucault to ourselves, and realize that our language is a tool that we use to manipulate the social order around us, too-- not just the people we don't like.  We use it to get a leg up on that other guy, the person with different political or philosophical beliefs that doesn't share our special vocabulary.  And that impenetrable wall of "discourse" that we erect can keep out those who have the brains and can argue back but don't know the lingo.  

So, perhaps we need to be wary of our motives when we employ the specialist language of our trade outside of the classroom: for unless we deconstruct our Oedipal tendencies and queer our postmodern  discourse, our phallocentric essentializing of the gendered postcolonial ecriture may threaten to objectify the Other into an abject body, subverting their subjectivity and historicizing them into a subaltern who cannot speak.  NASCAR.

 And ya know what's really funny?  That sentence almost works, in a bizarre, mind-bending sort of way.  *giggle.*


Oh, and if you have some free time, check out the Postmodernism Generator to see these codes put to work... in a really fun sort of way.

The Religious Codes of Tectonic Theater: Using Your "Inside" Voice

When people speak about certain issues, they always do it from within a limited point of view: are they looking from without or within?  Each perspective is useful in its own way, but they're not the same thing.  Whether or not you consider yourself (or your conversation partner) inside or outside of your community can really affect the way you explain your view of things. 

Religious dialogue, for instance, is one of the places where the play has the hardest time breaking into, so to speak.  This is something observed by a "bench coach" for the original TLP, Stephen Wangh.  As I pointed out in a previous post, Wangh wonders a little bit whether or not Tectonic Theater found themselves unable or unwilling to address that society's "holy protagonists," and more often than not I find that I agree with him. 

But that's not entirely up to Tectonic Theater to decide; after all, those "holy protagonists" have a say in the matter, too.  For a variety of reasons, from doctrinal to social to political, each of these people can make a choice about where to align themselves in regard to Tectonic Theater.  If we look at how different people speak about the religious community-- Unitarians, Mormons, Baptists, and Catholics-- can we see where they see themselves fitting in?  

As for me?  At one time, I was an insider in The Baptist Church.  And now, where am I?  Do I speak now as an insider or an outsider of that community?  Well, just look above for your answer...