OUR MICHAEL DORRIS

On the Sunday after Michael Dorris committed suicide, the news was announced,
gently and sadly, in a church here in the valley where he lived.

A bit of the story came out that Sunday morning.  Our neighbor, teacher,
favorite writer was separated from the woman we knew as the love of his life,
the even more celebrated author Louise Erdrich.  He was facing a charge that
could have cost him all contact with their children.  He had attempted suicide
a few weeks before.  Friends had been talking with him ever since, many times a
day, trying to help him find his way back into the light.  His desperation had
finally outwitted their care and concern.

Our disbelief at this burst of terrible news was expressed perfectly by one of
the parishioners, who burst out, "Is this MY Michael Dorris we're talking
about?"

My Michael Dorris.  It's astonishing how many people I've talked to in these
sorrowful days thought of him like that.  Some had never even met him; they had
just read his books, especially The Broken Cord, his passionate account of his
adopted Native American son, whose nervous system was permanently ravaged by
the alcohol his mother drank while she carried her baby.  To read that book is
not only to share Michael's outrage about the lot of Native Americans and about
fetal alcohol syndrome, it is also to see into his heart and to have a firm
sense that it was a heart of compassion and courage.

Since his death those of us whose lives intertwined with his in simple,
everyday ways have been pouring out to each other our memories of our Michael
Dorris.  The animated conversations he got into with the guy who picked up his
trash.  How as a teacher he so cared about his students that they came alive
and never forgot either his aliveness or their own.  How he wept one night
along with Dartmouth's great president John Kemeny, when, despite both their
best efforts, an ugly incident of Indian-bashing broke out on campus.  How he
brought Louise, pregnant with her first child, to the midwife and took care to
emphasize the preciousness of both the child and the mother.  "Remember, she's
a REAL WRITER!"

He asked my help when he was researching environmental problems on Indian
reservations.  He helped me find my way through the legalities of the
publishing world.  He called me whenever he especially appreciated one of my
columns, a kindness which, coming from a marvelous writer like him, would send
me sky-high.

In my memories and the others I've been listening to, there was something
shining about Michael.  He took on great burdens -- three adopted Native
American children, the fledgling Native American program at Dartmouth, the vast
injustice of fetal alcohol syndrome -- and he cared about them deeply but
carried them gracefully.  He was a fighter, but he fought for others.  He was
incredibly gifted and eventually famous and rich, but his consciousness was
centered not on himself but on those around him, above all his wife and
children.  Aside from a few who were jealous of him, I don't know a soul who
disliked him, and I know many who admired and loved him.

I hope his surviving children come to realize that.  Given what I read in
People and Newsweek, it will be a miracle if they do.  The more the press does
its thing, the more we are saying, "Is this OUR Michael Dorris we're talking
about?"

He was always suicidal, they say.  This comes as news to us, including those of
us who have seen him at other dark times in his life.  He was accused of
molesting one of his daughters.  We find that impossible to reconcile with our
Michael Dorris.  It could be true, of course -- how can we know? -- but it
could also be false.  He was never tried, but now the media have stuck that
accusation on him forever.  

They have even detailed for us, over and over, precisely how he killed himself.
 
I wonder if anyone in the news bureaus considered whether we need to know that,
or what that knowledge will do to his daughters, ages 13, 11, and 8, who are
bound to read it and who share a playground with schoolmates who have read it.

I suppose we never truly know anyone, even those closest to us.  We all map
ourselves onto other people, so my Michael Dorris is not the same as anyone
else's and is not the real Michael Dorris.  But my experience of him, however
filtered and limited, is real -- and hard to hold onto in the light of the
shallow, cynical picture coming from the media.  There it is, reproduced in
millions of copies, a heartbreaking picture of Michael, or even more
heartbreaking, of Louise and Michael at the peak of their happiness, and an
account that fits itself into an all-too-common media bias: if someone is
beautiful, talented, rich and famous, they must be hiding some terrible flaw.

All I can think to do in this sad, maddening time is to encourage those of you
who didn't know him to learn of Michael Dorris through his own words, in any of
his wonderful books.  He is worth knowing.  Those who treasured him, it seems
to me, need to celebrate out loud and for the record what we knew.  Our words
and actions concerning him need only to come from our own sense of truth and
love.  That is where the words and actions of my Michael Dorris came from.

(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at
Dartmouth College.)

Kedves Kornyesz Olvasok!

Az alabbi anyag tan erdekel valakit kozuletek.  Ugyan nekem kisse
magasreptu dolognak latszik, ugy nez ki, hogy komolyabb kutatok hasznat
vehetnek.  Bocsanat, hogy angolul van.

Tisztelettel,
Laborfalvi Benke Tibor

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV


The Info-Mac Archive is available at 50 public and private sites around
the world.  For the site list, request it by mail (address below), or try:
  <ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/help/mirror-list.txt>
Also accessible by ftp.  Help files and indexes are also in info-mac/help/.

Administrative queries & info: <mailto:>
Articles for digest publication: <mailto:>
Files for inclusion: <mailto:>

Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 15:42:25 -0700
From: 
Subject: [*] KnowledgeMiner

May 1st a revolutionary shareware tool for the Macintosh arrives in the
form of KnowledgeMiner. KnowledgeMiner was created by an international
team of experts in the areas of cybernetics, statistical modeling,
mathematics and computer science. Now more then ever better software
tools are needed to mine the mountains of information that are
accumulating in the world and available on the internet. KnowledgeMiner
transcends both neural nets (NN) a part of artificial intelligence (AI)
and traditional statistics using new techniques and based on GMDH
modeling theory that has already been very successful in decision
support in economy (analysis and prediction of economical systems, stock
market, sales and financial predictions, balance sheet prediction),
ecology (analysis and prediction of ecological processes like air and
soil temperature, air and water pollution, drainage flow, Cl- and
NO3-settlement, influence of natural position factors on harvest, growth
of wheat), and health (diagnosis of cancer in complex cases). The above
examples come with the free downloadable version of KnowledgeMiner.
Self-Organized modeling is quite new and KnowledgeMiner is the first and
only software tool of this type. Professionals in many areas can benefit
by downloading this tool and using it to mine in their field to tap new
discoveries.

KnowledgeMiner is based on the insights of the revered Ukrainian
cyberneticist, A.G.Ivakhnenko, who was discouraged by the fact that many
types of mathematical models require the modeler to know things about
the system that are generally impossible to find. In fisheries modeling,
for example, the modeler may be required to know the migration patterns
of certain species of fish, or the fertility levels of certain age
groups. If modelers are forced to make wild guesses at these variables,
they can hardly expect to produce a model with a great deal of
reliability as to prediction.

Past efforts of using the known tools of artificial intelligence were
not, in many cases, successful. That is, because previous methods of
artificial intelligence and statistics are based on knowledge extraction
using subjective and creative human skills for model building (called
the knowledge engineering bottleneck).

[Archived as /info-mac/sci/knowledge-miner-10-lit.hqx; 941K]

See our new WWW site: <http://www.pht.com/info-mac/>;, where you can find
all of this info and more!