Vachel Lindsay’s Germ Theory

Vachel Lindsay’s Germ Theory
by Lorette C. Luzajic

It’s hard to say whether hip-hop mavericks like Eminem or Biggie Smalls ever heard of Vachel Lindsay, but this peculiar and passionate poet foreshadowed hip-hop, spoken word, slam and dub poetry. He told his mentor Yeats that he was hoping to bring ancient Greek musical qualities like singing and chanting into his work. As it turned out, the deflections and intonations, the rhythms, the gesticulations, the whooping, the whispering, and the performance aspects of his poetry were highly suggestive of the hip-hop that would become all the rage over half a century later. Indeed, the Illinois boy was known as the Prairie Troubadour, because like the blues singers after the turn of last century, he drifted from town to town to perform his art in exchange for food and lodging.

Critics denigrated him as a chanting vaudeville act or wandering minstrel. The New York Times called him a buffoon. Teddy Roosevelt Jr allegedly called him “crazier than a bedbug.” Like a street preacher, Vachel waved his arms about him, his appearance was occasionally disheveled, and he engaged his audience to sing and recite together with him. None of this sat well with the hoity literati, and it was hard for Vachel to swallow their critical cruelty. Nonetheless, many audiences were enthralled and entertained. His poetry was, after all, not that of dusty university libraries, but a populist poetry for the average American, not for scholars, but for the masses, who worked like dogs all day. These were  people whom Vachel considered quiet heroes.

Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was born in Springfield, Illinois. His mother kept baby Vachel decked out in white dresses and tumbling blonde curls until his grandfather put a stop to it. (Incidentally, Ernest Hemingway’s mother also dressed little Ernie up like a girl.) The family was not poor: Vachel’s father was a doctor. But family life was not without tragedy- three of Vachel’s sisters died of scarlet fever. Dad blamed himself for bringing home disease from his patients, a guilt he was never able to shake. He became obsessed with germs, a fate which would fall upon his son in later years. To some degree, Vachel Sr. drew into himself, and into his work, and Vachel was raised mostly by Mom.

Vachel was still in high school when the pejorative insults began. He was sensitive, shy, a bit of an oddball; his features were more beautiful than handsome, and he wrote poetry. Vachel was also quite talented at drawing, a skill some teachers recognized in his biology sketches. He was taunted as “Rachel Lindsay” but perhaps his masculinity was salvaged because he excelled in the walking sports of high school track and field. He became known as “Champion Walker” instead of just “Rachel,” and he said that he “walked myself into a kind of ‘intoxication.’” While this affinity may have seemed inconsequential, it became integral to his future art, when he logged thousands of miles on foot as the traveling poet.

He continued to write poetry, but Vachel headed to Ohio to study medicine, following in Papa’s footsteps. It was what his family wanted, but the young man wanted to study art. His parents told him to draw pictures in his free time, but invest his future in a decent living. While this is tremendous and useful advice, it is never what an artist wants to hear, for man cannot live by bread alone. So the youth headed off to Chicago to study art, and then to New York to study pen and ink, and Egyptian art history. His drawings would often accompany his poetry throughout his life.

From time to time, Vachel began to publish his sketches or poems in the “little magazines” of the literary press. Near the end of his art studies, he began hawking copies of his poems on the streets of New York. He self-published a chapbook called Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread.  In the spring of 1906, Vachel walked for 600 miles, stopping to read and sell his poems. His audience saw him as a traveling evangelist, a circus act, or a carnival barker. He played with words by substituting sounds, or creating rhymes in an almost Dr. Seussian way. Vachel’s act was early performance art, and he engaged the crowds, big or small, to participate and play by chanting or clapping and stomping. He tramped from Florida to Kentucky. In 1908, he trekked again from New York City to Ohio, exchanging poetry for food. And in 1912, he walked from Illinois to New Mexico, preaching the gospel of poetry, as he saw it.

“Then, with due art, I offered to recite twenty poems to the solitary man, a square meal to be furnished at the end, if the rhymes were sufficiently fascinating,” Vachel wrote in his musings, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.

In his hopes, he wanted to awaken people to the beauty of nature and the pulse of life around them, even if their lives were difficult or laboured.  His themes were of nature, of midwestern life, of the average Joe’s working life, and of the various racial differences of American life at that time. He was also very much a Christian, albeit with orthodox interpretations of faith that didn’t always fly at the time. He saw himself as an itinerant preacher of the gospel, a creedless member of “the church of the open sky.”

After traversing several thousand miles on foot, Vachel finally landed a shred of respectability when “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” and “The Congo” were published in an exciting new literary review, Poetry Magazine. This put him in peerage with the likes of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. (A “shred” is really all he got: he is still not recognized by the Academy of American Poets.)

The Congo was to be Vachel’s most famous poem, or rather, infamous poem. Much to the poet’s horror, the three part celebration of African rhythm was widely seen as racist, even in the standards of the day. The first part of the “Study of the Negro Race” is called “Their Basic Savagery.”

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
[A deep rolling bass.]
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
[More deliberate.  Solemnly chanted.]
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.

Reading this out loud several times, it’s easy to get a feeling for its joy of rhythm and rhyme, easy to see the hip-hop within. But it’s also easy to see why some people, including civil rights’ activists were upset with the poet.

Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you

The second sequence is called “Their Irrepressible High Spirits.”

And the black crowd laughed till their sides were sore
At the baboon butler in the agate door,
And the well-known tunes of the parrot band
That trilled on the bushes of that magic land.

In the third verse of stunning rhymes, Vachel gives advice on reading the lines:

The Hope of their Religion

A good old Negro in the slums of the town
Preached at a sister for her velvet gown.
Howled at a brother for his low-down ways,
His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days.
Beat on the Bible till he wore it out
Starting the jubilee revival shout.
And some had visions, as they stood on chairs,
And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs

As mentioned above, the poem did not meet with favour of the NAACP and activists such as W. B. E. DuBois.

Other poems suffered similar embarrassments. From “The Booker T. Washington Trilogy”:

They are playing poker and taking naps,
And old Legree is fat and fine;
He eats the fire, he drinks the wine–
Blood and burning turpentine–
Down, down with the Devil.

“ Vachel Lindsay knows two things, and two things only, about Negroes: The beautiful rhythm of their music and the ugly side of their drunkards and outcasts. From this poverty of material he tries now and then to make a contribution to Negro literature,” DuBois wrote in “The Looking Glass: Literature” (The Crisis, August 1913.) “Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.”

Lindsay was stymied by the reaction from his African-American peers. “Mason and Dixon’s line runs straight through our house in Springfield still, and straight through my heart,” he once wrote. Furthermore, while growing up, his dad was a special kind of doctor- the kind who treated black people for free. He charged white clients regular fees, but treated the sick and the poor blacks  in his neighbourhood pro bono. Indirectly, this generosity may be how he brought home scarlet fever, to which the family lost three girls. Certainly the language of The Congo is patronizing to black people, but the poet defended himself, having meant no offense.

“My “Congo” and “Booker T. Washington Trilogy” have both been denounced by the Colored people for reasons that I cannot fathom. As far as I can see, they have not taken the trouble to read them through. The third section of “The Congo” is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any race, and the “John Brown” is certainly not an unsympathetic poem; and “King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba” is a prophesy of a colored Utopia,” he wrote in a letter to the NAACP.

Joel Spingarn replied that there was a difference “between a poet’s pageantry and a people’s despair. No colored man doubts your good intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes. You look about you and see a black world full of a strange beauty different from that of the white world; they look about them and see other men with exactly the same feelings and desires who refuse to recognize the resemblance. You look forward to a colored Utopia separate and different from the hope of the white man; they have only one overwhelming desire, and that is to share in a common civilization in which all distinctions of race are blurred (or forgotten) by common aspiration and common labors.”

To be fair, Vachel was way ahead of his time. Some intellectuals were still debating whether or not African-descended people were even human. (Disgustingly, some still subscribe to such notions, but thankfully it’s changing, however slowly.) Not everyone was a bigot, no, but black people were afforded few rights and no privileges, and the words of a “well meaning” white person, while bewildering and condescending, were certainly part of the education process of other white people who were staunchly racist. Vachel also helped to get African-American poet Langston Hughes’ talent noticed.

Furthermore, it is impressive in and of itself that the poet knew something of the Congo’s holocaust, 1885-1908, under the Belgian King Leopold. Under a bogus NGO, of which the King was chairman and sole shareholder, the tyrant plundered the ivory and rubber and people of the Congo, getting filthy rich and killing TEN MILLION (possibly 13 million) people. He was especially fond of chopping off the hands of those who didn’t produce enough product for him every day.  Even today as Rwandan and Congolese genocide repeats history, many of the educated among us are not aware of this first massacre, twice the size of the Nazi holocaust.  That a Midwestern poet would write about it, even in passing, was incredible.

A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
From the mouth of the Congo
To the Mountains of the Moon.
Death is an Elephant,
[Shrilly and with a heavily accented metre.]
Torch-eyed and horrible,
Foam-flanked and terrible.
BOOM, steal the pygmies,
BOOM, kill the Arabs,
BOOM, kill the white men,
HOO, HOO, HOO.
[Like the wind in the chimney.]
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.

Critic Gary Lehmann notes in “Vachel Lindsay: A Madman Who Burst His Rivets on a Head of Steam” that “it is a complete mistake to dismiss Vachel Lindsay as a mere nut case. His “Kallyope Yell” is an example of his most mature and fine work. In it he sings the song of the Republic as seen from street level.” He notes that “Lindsay was always rejected by the poetic establishment of his day and a newspaper reporter did slander him by calling him a poetic calliope, by which we can suppose he meant a noise maker and not a poet at all.”

I am the Gutter Dream,
Tune-maker, born of steam,
Tooting joy, tooting hope,
I am the Kallyope

Gary says that to “vanquish the enemy, we must sometimes become the enemy. Here he transforms himself into his own effigy. He sees himself as they see him, and, in their image, he sees something of virtue. The calliope is the noise making steam driven instrument of circuses and by implication he becomes the transmuted calliope, a right fine singing poet called the Kallyope.”

Listen:

I am the gutter-dream
I am the golden dream,
Singing science, singing steam

and:

I will shake the proud folk down…Popcorn crowds shall rule the town

The best line in the poem is “all hail the popcorn stand,” which fiercely roots for the populace, taking poetry out of the anal retentive halls and giving it to the commoner. For do we not all need art and music? From high brow to mass culture, from fresco art to graffiti, we all need creativity to survive the banal moments that likely make up the majority of our existence.

This  insight from Gary into the poem is particularly astute: “It is worth noting that the America of Lindsay’s dream, c.1906 to 1931, was dominated by steam engines: steam tractors, steam factories, steam locomotives, steam circus music. Steam itself is just a machine sweating. It’s perfect! … It’s the populist paradise where all the wild forces of the world are confined and their energy is redirected to the betterment of mankind. There, at the center of the ring, the gaudy drum major of the whole parade, is Lindsay himself. “I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!””

Vachel wrote many more poems, publishing a handful of volumes of his work over the years, but continued to struggle financially, accepting support well beyond manhood from his father. He also fell madly in love with two women, and wrote passionate poetry for them, including his beloved piece “The Chinese Nightingale.” In a letter to Elizabeth Mann Wills, he said, “Please let me say once, clearly, that you are the essential discipline of my mind and body and blood and heart.” He also wanted to marry her. On September 18, 1923, he wrote, “I keep wondering, and struggling with the idea that you are the elected goddess of my songs. I am utterly and completely concentrated on your beautiful body and to no other body will I surrender.”

By all accounts, including his own, he surrendered his body to no one until he was in his forties. When he was 45, he met a young teacher named Elizabeth Connor, 20 years younger than he. In a letter, Vachel wrote, “We were not engaged but married by spontaneous combustion the minute we got acquainted.” The pair married the day after meeting, in the poetry room of the hotel Vachel lived in at the time. The newspapers made much about a word omitted from their vows: “obey.” This speaks beautiful volumes about the heart of Vachel, and of their consuming, egalitarian love. Elizabeth was and remained the love of his life.

Yet from here, everything went downhill. The birth of two children was a wondrous celebration, but a poet’s wages are usually pretty much nonexistent. He couldn’t accept enough from his father to live comfortably. Vachel forced himself back into frequent performances, which he found exhausting. The family was deeply in debt. He went touring, and was constantly embarrassed by the paucity of earnings and public response. It was one thing to struggle for your art in solitude, but three mouths were hungry and Vachel couldn’t even keep a roof over their head. The family had to move back into his childhood home. He tried to write new material that would revive interest in his work, but he was unable to create under the stress. He was also wounded by a reading he’d done in which several hundred people had walked out of the auditorium. This marked with great certainty, in his mind, that his life’s work was finished- if indeed, it had ever meant anything at all.

Perhaps it was the stress that triggered his descent, or perhaps it was fated to take place one way or another. But not long after marrying and welcoming two children into the world, Vachel began to rapidly descend into madness.

His moods had always veered from one end of the spectrum to the other, and he had always entertained notions and ideas that other people found somewhat unusual. These eccentricities complemented his vivid, passionate poetry. In one moment, he would be filled with zeal for life, and in the next, the pits of despair would swallow him. Today many are certain he was bipolar, and if one must put a label, this one certainly fits.

Perhaps because Vachel had become so accustomed to his own routines, he had difficulty adjusting to family life. It was impossible to write with children clattering around and the massive debt incurring over his head. He was also losing his mind, and fast. He developed an exaggerated terror of germs and venereal disease, a spectral vestige of the germs that killed his sisters. He was quite certain that germs were obstructing his creativity and he blamed them for writer’s block. Poor Vachel also thought his wife was having affairs with the express purpose of exposing him to sexually transmitted diseases. Yet at other times, he cried that he was unworthy, a pauper, who had nothing to offer, an old man who was used up before he married her. He told Elizabeth that he had stolen her youth, and he told her to go out and explore life and love, for he could not stand in the way.

The poet was unable to sleep despite taking barbiturates to help him. Edgar Lee Masters writes in Vachel’s biography, “He was having auditory hallucinations. He thought he heard voices on the porch plotting his death and the death of his wife, and blackmail.”

After a spell of deepest depression and madness, the poet was suddenly cheerful and hopeful again. The doctor warned Elizabeth that this was an abysmal portent for people like Vachel, referencing what we now commonly know, that people who have decided on suicide seem “better than ever” in their last days. Once they have reached that determination or resolution, they are able to let go and appear quite happy.

The family, doctors, and newspapers of the day initially reported what happened next as unexpected “angina pectoris” and even fabricated some stories about recent heart troubles. It was 1931, and Vachel was 52 years old. In 1935, however, Vachel’s widow couldn’t bottle up the truth anymore, and she told the whole story to biographer Edgar Lee Masters.

On the eve of his death, Vachel lit into Elizabeth for a host of imagined sleights. Edgar writes that he accused his wife of being a “tyrant mother” and the “scarlet woman who took his virginity.” He said he wanted to go back to being 21, back to college, and start over.  For three hours, he spun fury and manic, pressured talk, then retired to bed in exhaustion, leaving his wife understandably distressed.

During the night, Elizabeth heard some noises downstairs and went to investigate. She found her husband sifting through photographs and newspaper clippings. She asked if he was okay and he was calm. “Yes, dear, I’m quite alright.” But shortly after, Vachel pulled himself up the stairs on his hands and knees, screaming. When she put him to bed, he told her he had downed a bottle of Lysol.

The doctor arrived too late to save him. The poet’s last words were, “They tried to get me. I got them first.” Whether he was referring to his critics, the enemies on the porch, or the germs, we will never know.

 

goodbye, Billie Jean: the meaning of Michael Jackson

goodbye, Billie Jean: the meaning of Michael Jackson

fifty-one writers, curated by Lorette C. Luzajic

Handymaiden Editions, 2009

316 pages

$27.95 (shipping approx. $6 to Canada, $9 to U.S.)

to order, pay with paypal.com- direct funds to thegirlcanwrite@hotmail.com- include your mailing address and note that you want MJ book!

or contact Lorette at thegirlcanwrite@hotmail.com.

book will also be available shortly online at Amazon etc.

Dearest friends, I am thrilled to announce the project that has occupied the last four months of my time. Please join me in celebrating the most fascinating person of all- Michael Jackson. I am honoured to have worked with fifty amazing writers to bring this book to you, a collection of thoughts, opinions, ideas on the meaning of Michael Jackson. These very interesting contributors range from therapist to Pulitzer-prize winning journalist to bestselling author to friend of Michael himself to monk to drag queen, and so many more. In addition, I thank internationally renowned pop artist Iaian Greenson for the custom cover commission. And I thank Toronto’s premier graphic designer, newly branched into fashion- designing shoes- Gonzalo de Cardenas for cover design.

The Writers

Jason Bourner
Russell Bowers
Coline Covington
Kevin Craig
Michael Davidson
Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Antony Di Nardo
Joseph Dispenza
Donnarama
Sherman Fleming
Eddie Ford
Timothy Gabriele
Stephen J. Gertz
Andreas Gripp
Andy Guess
Rohin Guha
Stan Guthrie
Chris Hedges
HiScrivener
Obiwu Iwuanyanwu
Reuben Jackson
Pat Kane
Jamyang Khedrup
Willie James King
Jeff Koopersmith
Kimberly Krautter
Raymond Lawrence
John Lee
Lorette C. Luzajic
Jonathan Margolis
Ralph Martin
David Masciotra
Angela Meyer
Rev. Irene Monroe
Georgianne Nienaber
Jess Nevins
(O)CT(O)PUS
Onome
Dion O’Reilly
Carolyn R. Parsons
Samuel Peralta
Michael Hureaux perez
Javad Rahbar
Dr. Pamela D. Reed
Lauren Reichelt
Ralph Remington
Steven Rybicki
Tara Stevens
Edwin Turner
David R. Usher
Uwineza Mimi Harriet

Thank you to all of these amazing contributors. This anthology would not have been possible without you.

xoxoxoxo Lorette

Battle of the Alamo: Inside Pastor Tony’s Twisted World

Battle of the Alamo: Inside Pastor Tony’s Twisted World

by Lorette C. Luzajic

The self-professed “strongest fundamentalist Christian in the world” looks more like Disco Stu than your average evangelist. At least, he used to. Gone are the rhinestone jackets and the pimp hairdo, the stardust and the glitter. The past 45-yrs of court cases, prison time, and defending his ministry against countless bizarre allegations have taken their toll. “You have to decide who you’re going to believe–this government … proven to be socialistic and communistic, or Pastor Alamo …Either you believe Pastor Alamo or the homosexual Pope.”

The New Jerusalem, Tony Alamo’s Christian Ministries, boasts, “The Alamo Christian Church provides a place to live with all the things necessary for life to all those who truly want serve the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

But the reverend’s story may be the strangest of them all. Earlier this year, the septuagenarian was found guilty on ten counts of child abuse and molestation, and those charges were the tip of the iceberg. The least lucky of the little lasses were actually his wives- one was married to him when she was eight. But Tony the tiger denies any wrongdoing, even as he sits in prison facing 175 years of hard time. His legal defense? That the Pope was behind the charges.

Bernie Lazar Hoffman, born of Jewish and Romanian descent, changed names a few times before deciding on Tony Alamo. He hoped the name would land him success as a crooner.

After a stint in prison for a weapon offense, and a few years as a singer, Tony married Susan Lipowitz, a Jewish actress who had converted to evangelical Christianity. Tony got saved, and the two of them became street preachers in Hollywood in the ‘60s, early proponents of the Jesus Movement. A former “drug den” became a church. In ways that aren’t clear, this humble ministry, providing clothes and shelter for riff raff and other lost souls, grew rapidly and expanded into a gas station, a hog farm, a grocery store, a trucking industry, and a clothing design firm. The famous Alamo jacket, a glitzy denim and rhinestone affair, sold like hotcakes. The ministry claims their clothing line was so popular that they designed clothes for Elvis and James Brown. (Tony also claims that his management skills were so in demand that The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, and Lena Horn all asked for him to represent them.) The duo also had a syndicated gospel TV program. Their mission was to spread the gospel, to shine the light, and their getup sure helped them glow in the dark.

Tony was all about the show, and before becoming a preacher, he promoted himself as a musician by driving around in a fleet of black limousines rented from a funeral parlour!

It was all very big, very bountiful. But something was clearly wrong. Tony had had some troubles with the law, and in fact those denim jackets landed him in prison for tax evasion. He didn’t much like the government, and he started to think the IRS and the FBI and the CIA were after him, persecuting him because they were the anti-Christ. When someone starts talking about hidden cameras and seeing the FBI following them, we might see a warning sign.

But as the saying goes- just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t following you. In this case, Tony’s shoddy business habits, which included juggling the books with various “charities,” fudging the numbers, not paying employees, and dodging the taxman, meant the FBI most certainly was following him. Throughout the decades, he was constantly charged with finance related offenses. But even though Tony was clearly guilty, with umpteen witnesses, he blamed all of it on the devil trying to persecute God’s prophet.

Meanwhile, his ministry became more and more cult like. When he faced criticism from the wider realm of evangelical faiths, he declared they had been brainwashed by the Pope, who represented the true cult of the ages. While no one could disagree that the Church of Rome’s history is indeed filled with the atrocities that Tony railed against, it was impossible to seriously believe that the Vatican cared one whit about the Alamo ministries. Though widely listened to on radio, television, and from within, the church of the Alamo was small fry. Tony was clearly delusional, or at least seriously kooky. Those from outside dismissed him as a crackpot nutjob and didn’t pay him any attention. Those within became more and more enmeshed in his commandments, and as members of the church began moving into his compound, they became more and more isolated from outside influence.

One of the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenia or related conditions is delusions of grandeur, along with other unusual religious perceptions. The claim to special powers, or special appointment by Jesus Christ or Buddha, along with bizarre magical perceptions often goes hand in hand with mental illness. Then again, said powers and charisma usually accompany greatness: Michael Jackson felt like he was God’s vessel for music to help heal the world; Mother Teresa felt she was a hand used by God to care for the sick; Dostoevsky believed God saved him from a prison sentence and execution to be His scribe. Tony’s charisma and conviction convinced a faithful audience that he was the real deal. His followers were called “Alamos.” The merely curious watched his story unfold for sheer entertainment value.

Ultimately, everything would come undone, and a horrific web of domineering control, brainwashing, punishment, neglect, child abuse, polygamy, rape, pedophilia, child marriage, wife beating, babies having babies, illegitimate children, violence and worse would finally come to an end in 2008. Tomorrow, Alamo will be sentenced- probably to more than a century of prison. At 74, that means he’ll spend the rest of his life in jail, which isn’t nearly enough.

Outside the cult, we can sit on our laurels with smug certainty that we’d never be taken in by the greedy lies of a crackpot. Yet millions are, and if we faced facts, we’ve all been “had” somewhere along the way. We may have “let ourselves” be emotionally or physically abused in a relationship, and years later can’t imagine what we were thinking or why we couldn’t walk away. We may have given money to a person or causes we were sure of, and now know we were hosed. we may have voted for Bush, believing he could save us. Who hasn’t bought into the teachings of a charismatic guru or master, only to see later how transparent the tenets were? And each and every person reading this, I’m willing to bet, has at one point been completely sold on the “truth” found in some self-help book: The Secret, perhaps, or Think and Grow Rich. Nothing wrong with advice on positive thinking and money management, none whatsoever. But there is something human about wanting to believe with all our hearts, especially if we are lost or poor or recovering from trauma. We cling to hope, and we like to wash our hands of personal responsibility when we don’t feel strong enough to contribute or think clearly. We put our trust in someone or something, usually with a few good reasons. If

Tony and Susan working the crowds

we’re particularly vulnerable and our source of inspiration is a sham, we might be in real trouble. Remember that there are millions involved with cults, and that all of us have our own views as to which faiths and interpretations of faith constitute a cult.

The signs of trouble were showing in Tony Alamo’s testimonies long before anyone really clued in that he was a wing nut, and years before we stopped dismissing him as the harmless kind of nut. In his own words, talking about his ‘60s conversion from secular Jew to born again Christian, he described the psychotic break in which God told him to follow Jesus. (He doesn’t call it a psychotic break, but a “visionary experience.”)

In the middle of a major business deal, “Suddenly my ears went completely deaf. I could not hear any noise from the crowd in the room. We were only one floor up, yet I could not hear any noise from the street. I looked at the people in the room. Some of their mouths were moving, but I could not hear anything they were saying. Suddenly I heard a voice, a voice that came from every direction. It was all around me. It was going through every fibre of my being. My head, my arms, my legs; it was all around me. The voice said, “I AM THE LORD THY GOD. STAND UP ON YOUR FEET AND TELL THE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM THAT JESUS CHRIST IS COMING BACK TO EARTH, OR THOU SHALT SURELY DIE.”

In his account, Tony says he questioned whether he was tripping or going crazy, because, “People had told me I was a genius, and geniuses often cracked up.” (Need I point again to those “delusions of grandeur?”) Tony told his colleagues that he was ill and had to leave. “As I did, God started playing with my soul like a yo-yo. He would pull it half out of me, and then put it back. My heart was palpitating so hard it felt as if it was going to jump out of my body, and suddenly a revelation came to me, so real I was astounded that I had not always known it. I knew there was a Heaven and a Hell…Again He started pulling the soul out of me.”

Of course, the associates thought he had lost it, but Tony headed into the streets to find a church in which to pray. Tellingly, he says that after visiting many churches, “I felt that I was the only person in the world that knew the truth, that Jesus was really coming.” He picked up a Bible and prayed. “I cried out to God to forgive me of my sins. My life had been so filled with sin. I asked Jesus to come into my heart and make me a new creature. God gave me a vision of Hell. I cried out, “God, don’t let me go there.” Then He gave me a vision of Heaven. I saw myself little, naked, kneeling before God. I was so peaceful I never wanted to leave. There I was, at His feet. I was afraid to open my eyes. I knew if I did, I would be looking into the face of Jesus, and I was afraid to look Him in the face. Then I saw a large illuminated cross and stars bursting, thousands of them, and angels singing. The Spirit of God entered into my body, and I knew beyond any shadow of doubt I passed from death into life. God broke my heart into a million pieces, and I lay on the floor with tears streaming down my face, and my body rocking in sobs, but I knew I was saved.”

Well, Reverend, I received a message in a vision I had: Jesus says, “Take your Thorazine.”

No, seriously- in later sermons and writings, Tony talked about hearing voices in fields when he was a kid. “When I was walking through the field, I heard the sweetest voice in the air calling my name. It happened every few seconds. There were no people around at all. There was a farm and three other houses, including my grandmother’s house, far away in the distance, all with storm windows and storm doors still up. There was nobody in sight.” As disgusting as this bastard is, proper treatment may have helped him before his darkness took over him.

The reverend constantly mentions visions, signs, and so on over the years, and has no qualms about calling himself a prophet. He even encountered UFOs, but because he was Tony, there wasn’t just one flying saucer, but hundreds. “…A squadron of flying saucers began approaching us very quickly from far in the distance. They descended from way up high down within a fraction of an inch of the windshield of the car with a speed as fast as lightning. First one came, then two, then three. Then another three followed in a “V” formation. Two more, then one more came in from a far distance, and in less than a second were diving at our car windshield missing the windshield within a fraction of an inch as we moved forward. They just kept coming, six, twelve, two, and one over and over again. I could look out the back window and see their lights behind us, disappearing miles away in the night. They were all the same size, lit evenly and thoroughly both within and without. I couldn’t see anything in them. They were like frosted lights. They didn’t look as though they were made of metal or any other earthly substance, and they didn’t look like clouds or vapor. They all were perfectly round. They made a whooshing sound as they neared the car, letting us know they were made of some kind of substance. There were at least one hundred of them.”

Of course, there is the chance that God really did choose Tony to follow Moses and Abraham as prophets. Maybe Tony really did see UFOS and not a hallucination. But seeing things that aren’t there and hearing voices telling you what to do can get very dangerous. If you are a paranoid, constantly feeling persecuted, and you also believe God literally speaks to you, you’re a danger to yourself or others right then and there. At any moment, God could tell you to start raping children. And that’s what happened here.

There was almost no time in which Tony was not convinced of government conspiracies, and not coincidentally perhaps, no time at all in which he was not under fire for various money laundering and tax evasions. The couple moved from California to Arkansas, where they had a church. (Sadly, there are Tony Alamo Christian Churches all over the world.) In the ’70s and ‘80s, some who came in and out of the church referred to it as a “compound” and reported that it was more like a cult. Tony immediately began blaming the Vatican for loss of religious liberty, saying that Cult Awareness Network was a Catholic conspiracy against the true church and religious freedom.

He still claims today that deprogramming initiatives that purport to help un-brainwash cult victims are kidnapping conspiracies of the FBI or the antichrist. Deprogramming, he says, is mind control, where victims are tortured, starved, kept awake, and forced to denounce their passion for God or leader. (Substitute “denounce personal life” and you’ve got the exact scenario inside Tony’s compound.) In a brochure called “Conspiracy in the United States” Tony gives several examples of persons who “suffered” at the hands of government deprogramming. Interestingly, they are members of his church.

Amazingly, victims of degradation and abuse continue to stand up for him, a testament to how easily it is to cling to a belief, even if it unequivocally wrong. But on December 8, 2008, thirty-two children were removed from Tony’s compound and at long last the ring of child brides and violence, of mind control and megalomania was broken.

Sort of. Tony and his most devoted are still certain it’s a conspiracy against him. Citing that he was not convicted of previous child abuse charges is presented as proof of his innocence. He blames paid snitches and corrupt “child molesting” police officers for all the counts against him. He mentions that those involved in the case are “mentally unstable” and that some have committed suicide. Further proof that he is not supposed to be in jail comes from a press release, which bizarrely features a “letter” from the father of one accuser. This man’s 17 yr old daughter allegedly begged forgiveness because “the government did not keep their end of the bargain.”

Apparently the FBI threatened, pointed guns at, and listened in on conversations of said daughter, Desiree. “Desiree didn’t leave the church because of any physical or sexual abuse, she left because she knew I was coming to town and didn’t want to be confronted about her disobedience and unruliness.” Riiiiiiiight. Heartbreakingly, a love letter from young Dez to Tony is included, saying she didn’t want to “do this” to him because “I love you.” She confesses she can’t deal with getting beaten by her dad, and cried out, “I love you from the very depths of my heart and you don’t seem to really care…I didn’t want to do this, because every time I thought of leaving, my heart would break and I would start weeping uncontrollably. I love you, I always will.”

The brochure also includes, inexplicably, a diary entry from this Desiree about wanting to marry Eminem. If this was supposed to show Desiree’s “unruliness” or “instability” that’s just plain sad. The diary entry is from when she was twelve.

Indeed, many family members of victims, including parents, are still convinced Tony is a “holy man of God” and believe God  “told his followers God instructed him to marry younger and younger girls.” (From a court report. Tony denies, however, that he married or slept with children, or even that he had multiple wives, though there were at least seven. He claims he told followers that the Virgin Mary was elevenish when she met God, so puberty was the age for marriage if a girl was otherwise helpless against her voracious need to fornicate.) Experts say these people are just as much victims as they are suspects, and the whole mess now unraveling is atrocious. The mother of one victim, for example, testified joyously on behalf of the defense, attesting to Tony’s true love for them. What remains a mystery is where her four other missing children are.

Others testified that Tony controlled them by providing love and shelter, and then when they were most vulnerable- pregnant, unemployed, whatever- he would threaten to throw them out or make them disappear if they spoke up against what they saw. These witnesses say families and children were starved, abused, and brainwashed. They say they were terrified of going to hell if they tried to escape or cross him. Before we pass judgement on “gullible” people, remember that many of these people were born into the church, and from the beginning they were taught that all outsiders were possessed by the devil.

For example, one child was hit with a board 140 times when his father tried to escape the compound. Tony uses this case to “prove” he was innocent, but in fact, he wasn’t found innocent. The charges were simply dropped because at the time he was already in prison for tax fraud.

Authorities are still looking for up to one hundred children who may be in danger of abuse. Amazingly, some parents still dole out Tony’s commands to batter and beat, even as he rots in prison.

And though the unspeakable world of the Alamos is already sick enough, many former adherents are just grateful that there was (so far) no mass suicide, for apparently Tony was so compelling and skilled at mind control that even experts feared it could be the next Jim Jones. (Jim Jones, by the way, according to Alamo, was not a cult leader who committed mass suicide with his followers, but a sacrifice by pagan Rome. “Jim Jones, a Roman Catholic Jesuit deacon posing as a Christian, was sacrificed (not with poisoned Kool-aid), murdered, along with his flock, by the Vatican to make the world look narrowly and suspiciously upon innocent Christian retreats.”)

Former cult member Diane Bach spoke out after Tony’s arrest. Though she wasn’t sexually abused, she still has posttraumatic stress disorder 23 years after leaving the church. She told Oregon Live’s Michelle Roberts that she wasn’t allowed to make any decisions for herself, not even the smallest one, and that she still can’t function as an adult in the ‘real world.’ She was forced to labour in Tony’s businesses without pay, believing sincerely that she would go to hell if she didn’t do this for God.

Indeed, somehow this man had enough charisma and bully in him to convince his Alamos to believe and do very weird things. The group delusion or hallucination is a bizarre phenomenon, yet paranoia IS contagious, and minions believe even today that their prophet is unfairly imprisoned. The Bible does support polygamy, of course, and the case can be made that it also supports child marriage. Followers of the Alamo believe that if King Solomon could have so many concubines, why would Tony not be allowed?

It wasn’t just Tony who got the peaches fresh off the tree. Tony also dictated who should marry whom within the compounds where he reigned supreme, and many weddings took place, giving child brides to old men. Children were also prostituted, and incested. One eyewitness told jurors earlier this year that Tony had so many sex partners he had to schedule it in to keep it all straight. When he began describing to her what he wanted to do to an eight-year-old girl while she held her teddy bear, some light finally flashed on in her eyes. This witness was third generation Alamo, meaning she’d been born into the compound life.

By now, with someone wives, you are surely wondering what happened to dear Susan. Susan died of cancer in 1982. Tony kept her body, on a mountaintop, with his servants constantly around it praying, for he told them she would be resurrected! It was half a year before he placed her in a sealed coffin, and then only at the behest of the state of Arkansas. Tony told her son and his Alamos that God told him she would come back to life. Susan’s family didn’t get her back until nearly a decade later. When Tony went on the lam for financial fraud- and these charges were no small fries, this time it was for 19 million- Tony’s followers hauled Susan’s massive casket along with him. Tony disappeared, and he was even on Unsolved Mysteries, having seemingly completely vanished from the face of the earth. Ultimately, he was put in jail, and she was laid to rest at last. (But he hid her body throughout his prison term and beyond, and it didn’t get to her family until 1998.) And the story wasn’t over. He kept right on lording it over his people, even from prison. Ex-Alamos say he phoned constantly with orders on how to administer his advice, sermons, and commandments.

In his trials this year, several recorded tapes of current phone conversations were presented, of him letting his people know that he is still boss. And while he claims to be innocent of polygamy and child abuse, he concurrently attests that as a follower of God, he must take any woman or child who stirs his loins.

“Anyone who would believe that polygamy, according to God’s Holy Scripture, is dead, would believe that God is dead, and that the Bible is meaningless. I, Tony, just as Paul and the twelve disciples of Jesus, was not called into the ministry by man, but was divinely called, supernaturally and directly called by God Himself…not ashamed to preach the full truth of God’s Word, the rewards for believing, and the eternal damnation for disbelieving.” He correctly points out that all of the prophets- Moses, Abraham, etc had many wives, but I would hope we’ve come a long way from the entitlement of the patriarchs.

Born into the cult, it would become second nature to trust in the religion, the way we all trust the religion of our childhood, at least until we’re older, and usually still then. My fundie family was sure the unholy Church of Rome was evil and Hindus and Muslims were going to hell, too. Of course, criticism and knowledge of errors or moral issues in faith is perfectly valid, but it doesn’t usually sound like this:

“The Vatican is posing as Snow White, but the Bible says that she is a prostitute, “the great whore, … Because of her age-old desire to control the world government and church, the serpent-like Vatican has infested the world and the U.S. government with so many of her zealous, highly-trained and dedicated Jesuit devotees, that she now controls the United Nations (which she created), the White House, Congress, every state, federal, civic, and social government agency, including the U.S. Department of Labor, the IRS, the FBI, the Supreme Court, judicial systems, the armed forces, state, federal, and other police, also the international banking and federal reserve systems (called the Illuminati and Agentur), labor unions,3 the Mafia, and most of the heavyweight news media.”

The thing with cults is that there is a fine line between their theology and the theology of the dominant branch in that belief system. The ridiculous notions within that cult, and even the systemic abuse, are just offshoots of theology and behaviour that is widely accepted as permissible.

For example, bullying congregations into submission through our natural terror of death by threatening hell- eternal torture- is still a regular tool in the majority of pulpits’ arsenals today. Controlling women by reducing them to sex and baby making machines only, making contraception a sin, is still widely bought. Using the Bible to justify whatever it is that particular sect of Christianity wants to justify is the oldest trick in the book, and we have about 100 000 branches of Christianity, all with varied beliefs, all sure theirs is the correct interpretation. There’s a verse there somewhere to condemn or justify whatever behaviour or philosophy you want. So, yes, you can argue- as Doug Wilson does- that slavery is approved of in scripture. You can argue a case, as Tony Alamo does, for beating your women into submission.

Thing is, though, that no matter how deeply entrenched the beliefs you were born into, or converted into, become, in most churches you are free to come and go. Ultimately, you can seek, or you can backslide. You are not, at least today, not literally beaten, raped and tortured and forced to stay.

One ex-Alamo reported in Los Angeles’ Press Argus, “The living conditions were disgusting. We slept body to body in sleeping bags on the floor. When I was there, I never saw a real bed. At the time I left though, I was sleeping on a cot. We loved it when the weather warmed up, so we could sleep outside where it wasn’t so crowded. The bathroom conditions were worse. The toilets were always full because we were told that if we flushed them, the leaching field wouldn’t hold it all. So about every two or three days they were flushed. There also wasn’t no more than three toilets per 50, 60 men [sic]. I do not know how it was for the women or the children. Showers were very seldom. We either never had time or the water was always cold. I took a shower about once a week.”

Of course, for Tony, every single critic, accuser, law enforcer, or suspicious citizen is Satanic. His writings and statements would read like hilarious satire- sicker than South Park- if the whole story was some sarcastic joke instead of tragic truth.

“The late Honorable Judge Hudson, is the judge who decided to have one hundred different law enforcement officers raid my church, office, and home, as well as all the homes of my church members throughout the US, then had me arrested on false charges, then put me in jail. He also ordered that all the Christian children of my church should be taken from their parents and be adopted out to homosexuals, lesbians, child molesters, and numerous other wicked and satanic, obnoxious people,” he says. There’s those evil homos again!

“The FBI paid all of their tuition to go to a place called Wellspring, which is a “deprogramming center.” Deprogramming is a nice word for hypnosis, brainwashing, mind-control, voodoo, black magic. Their testimony is not to be believed because it is not true, and they are not in their right mind. They are under a hateful spell of witchcraft. They (in court) have all said that I, Tony Alamo, said, “The Lord said you are to marry me.” This is all a lie. I never told that to any one of them. Their testimonies cannot be believed because they are all uniformly brainwashed. They (the young women) never contacted the FBI; the FBI contacted every one of them and gave them thousands of dollars and many gifts to lie for them. The FBI is against the Bible, Christianity, God, and all Christian churches.”

Then there’s the other stuff that’s just plain weird:

“Also, we should all remember that angels don’t have sex organs. “Now going back to “angels don’t have sex organs,” you should know that when we get to Heaven, neither will we. The reason I am teaching this is so you will be able to identify certain false teachers who say angels (the sons of Seth) had sex with the daughters of men, producing a race of giants. Again, God never calls angels sons. This is very false doctrine.” Obsessed much, Mr. Alamo?

“…Democracy, which is human rule rather than God’s rule, it is an ungodly purpose. This is why God is against democracy and the United Nations.”

“Remember how they murdered, burnt up, the Christians at Waco, Texas! They are demonic.”

“It’s too late for earth day. Earth day is just a trip the devil is putting all of you deceived earthlings on. God is going to keep messing up the environment, and those who despise wisdom are going to spend trillions to unsuccessfully clean it up.”  (I guess our waste and garbage has nothing to do with it at all, then? Hmm.)

“Then, to the woe and dismay of everyone in the world, Jesus, who is commonly and falsely today known as “sweet Jesus,” will abruptly, without notice, turn the world upside down in a moment and literally tear it to pieces. Again, one-third of this world’s population will be annihilated, then millions upon millions more will be killed in the most dreadful ways, ways that could never be imagined or dreamed of by the human mind.”

“The devil incarnate and his church-state are telling the world they have the true message of love, peace and safety. It is now revealed how utterly hateful their profane message of fantasy is. It is nothing more than a cleverly devised fable and pure fiction. This fable, when believed, sends its believers to Hell forevermore (I Thes. 5:3). These satanic beings are the very ones who howl that the true prophets of God preach hate. The true message of love is God’s message of salvation through Christ. God demands that you renounce every other religion or savior other than Christ, that you reject Satan and sin, and that you fear God and keep His commandments. If you don’t, there will be His judgments, His wrath, and Hell.”

“Using these fruitless, demonic tactics and pretending to cast out devils is a tactic used by a particular large, political, and unscriptural religion for the purpose of convincing people that God’s power is within their religious order.6 Their doctrine forbids their congregations’ reading of the Bible because if they do, they will know the untruths their false religion has taught them.7 This religion teaching the satanic word and act of exorcism, both dictionaries state, is connected with other satanic practices such as “divination, astrology, clairvoyance, augury, sortilege, necromancy, thaumaturgy or wonder working, alchemy, jugglery, legerdemain, and the trickery ascribed to demons.” All the aforementioned are ascribed to demonic powers. Incantation is “the recital of magical formulas, the pronouncement of a word or words (as the name of a deity) of magical power [demonic powers], or the performance of a magical ritual procedure.” This is occult power also called “charming or enchantment.” I hope you will agree with the Bible and both the Webster and Oxford dictionaries that such practices are not of God but of the devil.”

Let’s all hope this lunatic monster is behind bars until his death, though he gets off easy, having spent most of his life rich, and in bed with young girls.

His wife Susan’s daughter had a few words to say earlier this summer: (Christhiaon Coie, Susan Alamo’s daughter, at tonyalamonews.com)

“I want to thank Federal Prosecutor Kyra Jenner for having the guts to finally bring justice to this coward who has hidden behind a Bible for decades. She introduced truth and justice where no one else (other then IRS) had the chutzpa to tread. Had she and Special Agent Harris and Bishop not brought this evidence from this den of iniquity Tony would still be raping, beating, and starving these victims…To the victims, especially the ones who took the stand, I do know how hard it is to take the stand and relive being violated. You told the truth and you guaranteed that he will never put his filthy hands on anyone again. You are my heroes…I have spent almost 40 years of my life trying to stop this. Please stop and think, you have a chance to show your families that you have a brain along with that soul. Call the local authorities and tell them where weapons, documents, etc are hidden. Don’t let Tony destroy anymore of your lives. Remember what the Bible says. When you know the truth the truth will set you free.”

Please visit Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

The Silver Stories of Caroline Bacher Goldsmith

The Silver Stories of Caroline Bacher
by Lorette C. Luzajic

When Caroline tells me she is moving away from the city, I can’t help but picture an old mansion shrouded by twilight and mist, or a crumbling castle in the moors. Maybe it’s the way she floats in red velvet around the room, pale and luminous and mysterious, or the way the ruby sangria in her hand catches the waning light. Or maybe it’s the stark silver vertebra, her signature ring, dwarfing her soft hand. For whatever reason, my mind drifts to gothic suspense novels, to stories where maidens find untold riches in spooky mansion attics, a world of long lost sisters and ghosts in mirrors. I can picture Caroline in these stories, stories with strange visitors, and hushed secrets about aunts and madness, drowned lovers, and dark blue satin gowns, stories where the moon perpetually hovers over murky waters and the dark outlines of trees.

There’s also something exotic in a different way altogether, something of the geisha in the contrast of the blackest hair against her white skin, and in the way she tells so many stories with her eyes. Her earrings further suggest the Orient with their kanji structure, stunning silver dangling below the sensual curve of her jaw. But then, from other angles, it seems obvious that Caroline stepped out of Hans Christian Andersen, as if she might have been a mermaid, or the Princess and the Pea.

My perception that Caroline Bacher Goldsmith embodies these disparate mythologies won’t likely surprise her. This artist’s work is all about mythologies, about the personal imagination and the cultural and historic imaginations as well. Her paintings, sculpture and jewelry are absolutely informed by fairy tales: they are whimsical and macabre. They’re made of the stuff of dreams and of Jung and Bosch, of Magritte and e e cummings, of Henry Darger, the stuff of Neil Gaiman, of Teletubbies and Tarot, of Shel Silverstein and of Dadaism. But for all the fantastical phantasmagoria of Caroline’s creativity, all of her work is the stuff of the body. Even as her colourful fancy flits dreamily above the world, it is grounded in the earth where it is born. Caroline’s characters, however surreal, have an organic physicality. They suggest the cellular and the plasmic, the amoebic perhaps, even as they cheerfully summon the possibilities of life outside of our universe.  The mysteries of regeneration and degeneration are at the heart of these mythologies. How the psyche explores and assigns meaning to time and memory and birth and life and death is what’s essential here.

Caroline’s jewelry design is essentially sculpture, stunning silver embodiments that the physical is complexly interrelated to the mythical.  Her designs imply stalactites, organs, bones, amoeba, sea anemones, uvulae, vulva, geology, cytology, clams. A round shape with delicate tentacles floats from the earlobe like a botanical jewel. The rings hug the finger with shapes like pelvic bones, then flail fluidly above the hand just as the anemone moves in the ocean lull. The iconic vertebra ring is that piece which will become imprinted in the public imagination when Caroline Bacher Goldsmith becomes a household name. The skull has had its fifteen minutes of fame- Caroline’s bone is distinctive and original, yet so simple, a treasure from our own spine.

Examining our relationship with the body we inhabit, with other bodies, with our earth, it seems obvious that the perfect medium would be jewelry. Metal and minerals and sculpture would have a direct relationship to the body who wears it, reenacting the very essence of the art’s symbolism.  Jewelry design is now Caroline’s focus, but that’s not the direction in which she set sail.

From northern Ontario, Caroline came to Toronto to study at the Ontario College of Art and Design. “My ambition was to illustrate children’s books,” she says, and given the exquisite whimsy of her graphite critter drawings, she probably still will. “I’ve always had a special fondness and natural talent for drawing; creating two dimensional narratives and my own worlds has been a strong, definitive link between my childhood and adult life, the real and the imaginary, the concrete and the ethereal.” But OCAD had some mandatory requirements that she had not expected, and Caroline found herself immersed beyond her original scope, exploring sculpture. “I became particularly interested in relationships between the permanent and the fleeting, the effects of time, and a being or article’s relationship to others and its environments. It seemed a natural progression to pursue jewelry as a form of art; intimate sculpture that can have direct contact with its audience,” she says.

And like her own vertebra ring, Caroline says that her “greatest desire is to create pieces that not only speak to the wearer, but become an integral part of the body, adopting and encompassing new dialogues along with the development and life-long journey of an individual. I’d like my pieces to be permanent fixtures on the very-changing landscape that is the body—a rock entangled within the massive roots of an oak.”

Hardly five years of part-time silver-working, Caroline already has a growing fan base eager to see what new pieces may become their own private permanent signature. Caroline’s value is true value, lasting artistry that should marry metallic beauty with your soul. It’s so personal to take something from the mythic imagination, give it physicality, and then fuse it with a wearer. “It’s important that the wearer of my work has a personal interpretation and relationship with what I produce. Through my work, I’d like to share a special bond with, and in some sense, a physical relationship with the wearer – a vessel of sorts to be filled with stories.”

Showing again that bond between mythology and the physical world, Caroline says, “I approach my finished pieces as personal talismans for the wearer that will take on a life of their own.”  She tells me that this constant tension of birth and death, of the physical and the mythical, of the body and the unknown requires such talismans, which humans have always used for comfort. “The dichotomies between the familiar and the strange are of utmost importance to me as a creator. The human experience is comfortable and alien. This tension, this imperfect understanding is what really defines us, both collectively and individually.”

Caroline says that art has always sought to find, but never found, and science has defined much but not all. Mystery is the heart of existence, and it is what fuels the human imagination. “The imperfect is perfect, and this is very celebratory. My work has a subjectively definable space open for mystery, acceptance, progression and diversion. Often my work has slight imperfections or asymmetry. This is what makes it real.”

Caroline sells primarily through her online studio, www.carolinebacher.com. As her business grows, she’s in dire need of more studio space, and so after ten years in Toronto, she and her husband are moving north. Her partner and best friend is artist Oli Goldsmith, and with his hundreds of massive canvases and her manic productions in mixed media, they’ve decided they need more space and more peace of mind.

“Living with another artist encompasses the best and worst aspects of life. In a nutshell, I never lack for top-notch inspiration or feedback on my work, but my home is currently a gigantic studio circus, and I haven’t seen my dining room table for many months.” Though Caroline feels it will be a serious adjustment period getting used to a quieter life and pace, they’re both looking forward to the new adventure. “Oli and I will be very soon relocating to a new home with ample and separate studio and living spaces. We’re very excited about these new living and working arrangements, but I think that we both really feed off of each other’s creativity, support and artistic differences. There are definitely turf wars and battles of ego, but Oli is truly my best friend and my greatest inspiration. Again, the rock entangled within the roots of the oak.”

We conclude the formalities and summon another round of sangria. It’s been fascinating getting to know the woman who illustrated my book, Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world). We had never met when the book’s designer, Gonzalo Cardenas, chose her for her ‘weird’ illustrations that went perfectly with the tone of the stories. Now I think about everything she has just said about the mythical world’s relevance to the physical world. The monologues and essays in my book were more than just reviews or commentaries- they were revelatory windows into my very personal joys and nightmares. Somehow, without ever connecting with each other, Caroline’s world had merged with mine. Now her work is permanently enmeshed with my dreams and nightmares, at least those I revealed in Weird Monologues.

And maybe that’s why the first time we met, at an opening party for her husband, none of us felt like strangers at all. That day she had an aura that was less geisha and more John William Waterhouse. She’d had that spectral yet flushed look of the pre-Raphaelite artist’s Ophelias or Ladies of Shallot. But when we met again to celebrate the book’s launch, the crisp yet curvy tailoring of her dress somehow conveyed her as anime or manga. She walks through these worlds, from the heather mists of castle moats to Tarot archetypes to cartoon, resplendently transcendent.

And the one permanent fixture of Caroline, aside from her impermanence, was that vertebra ring, like a massive knuckle bone grounding her to the here and now even as she floated through time.

And so after the drinks arrive, I ask her about it. Why that piece, out of so many beautiful works? How did it define her? “The Vertabra was sculpted from a Grey’s Anatomy illustration, and once cast in silver, I wore it for many years as a symbol of myself,” Caroline explained. She told me the piece illustrated the aspects of her that her husband calls “soft and mean.” It holds a very special personal significance for me. Soft and mean, that’s about the permanent and the fleeting, the spiritual and the corporeal. It’s my interpretation of a rendering based on actual physical specimens, but it’s also a celebration of the commonplace. The vertebra is a component of every human body, so it bonds me with everyone else.  It’s a symbol of strength and evolution in all senses of the word.”

And now as ever, the vertebra will be solid and constant as she picks up the decade spent in Toronto and heads for the hills, clueless about what the next environment will be like. There are many things Caroline says she’ll miss about Toronto. The sushi, for one. You just can’t eat sushi in small towns- it’s never, ever good. Blue cheese. Rare beef sate, dim sum, falafels- all the best foods from around the world. And the Henry Moore room at the art gallery, where sunlight plays on mammoth bodies that transport us to prehistoric, Paleolithic times.

But a whole host of things that she loves about the city aren’t there anymore: The Bamboo, Queen Street’s long running institution of reggae and Jamaican good eats. Casa Café’s Open Mic Nights and the caramel brownie cake. The Eglinton Theatre. And Ben Kerr, the bristly old guy with knobby knees who sang his heart out at Yonge and Bloor, day in and day out. David Mirvish’s art bookstore. McCaul Street’s Penguin Music Store, and the Yonge and Eg Fran’s Diner.

That’s just it, that’s the whole concept that fuels her work. Everything- every idea, every person, every era, every structure is in flux. Nothing is constant. Everything is transient- well, it is, and it isn’t. Only impermanence is permanent. And yet, our role, however brief, is connected to the whole of it, the whole great inexplicable history of mystery in this and other worlds.

 

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

 

The Orchid Dancer: Cora Pearl, 1835-1886

The Orchid Dancer: Cora Pearl, 1835-1886
by Lorette C. Luzajic

The Emma Crouch story begins and ends in lonely anonymity, but in between, she was Cora Pearl, the world’s most spectacular courtesan. The cockney peasant milliner rose to the pinnacle of France’s 19th century demimonde to become the Queen of Paris.

Emma was born in London, England, probably in 1835. (She claimed 1842, but was using her younger sister’s birth certificate.) Her father was a cellist and a womanizer who peppered the UK and America with his progeny- an estimated twenty plus children. The girl’s mother pronounced him “dead.” Emma hated her new stepfather, so he shipped the girls to a convent school in France. Little did she know that later, the deportment and the French she learned would become major assets.

As a young woman, Emma moved in with her grandmother to take work at a London hat maker, with hopes of pursuing work as an actress. She was vibrant, fiercely intelligent, funny, and had a killer body, so naturally she attracted the attention of men. She also found millinery work utterly boring.

What happened next is not clear. Though Emma claims she was raped on the way home from church, it is believed she may have used this story to justify moving out of her grandma’s home into her own room to take up prostitution. She couldn’t stay, as she was no longer “pure.” It’s not a question of not believing “the victim” in this case: Emma was an independent freethinker who may have fabricated the story to explain or justify the shocking idea that she wanted to live on her own. Being “tainted” could be something of a relief when ridiculous societal and emotional investments were made on one’s “reputation.” Emma was always a bit outrageous and her desire to work in theatre was considered scandalous.

There is a parallel myth for this story, and that is one of a consensual night of amour. In this version, Emma’s lover left some money for her on the night table as an indulgence for her to buy herself something nice. If it happened that way, it would not be the first time a girl who longed for the stage saw a way to support herself. Eventually, Emma would command all of Paris as her stage.

Either way, or if it happened another, Cora had a deep mistrust of her stepfather, and there has been much speculation of why she was sent to boarding school. It is, of course, not uncommon, for a teenage girl to be abused by her mother’s new partner, and Cora’s lifelong refusal to devote herself to one man may have had roots in this version of the story. Of course, she may have simply seen from her father that not all men were faithful, and rather than end up with a pack of babies, poverty, and possible desertion, she decided to remain her own woman. She continually stated that independence was the most important drive for her. She also said she “detested men too much to ever obey one of them.”

In any case, she took on the name Cora Pearl and began “entertaining” men in a humble room. She may have “detested” men in the role of keeper or jailer, but free of the burden of reputation, Cora found she quite enjoyed men: the attention, the company, the sex, and being able to pay her rent. Aside from her apparent enthusiasm and skill in the boudoir, and her spectacular body, at once athletic and curvy, Cora had other considerable charms. She was charming and funny and flamboyant. One of her clients was named Robert Bignell, owner of a popular dance hall. She became his mistress, and he took her to Paris. Cora loved Paris so much that she sent him home alone.

Paris was certainly the cultural centre of Europe- maybe of the world- in the mid 19th century, a world that was called the Second Empire. Society revolved around creative values and spectacle, making art, music, literature, theatre and more of focal importance. Cora felt herself to be part of this world. But culture wasn’t free. Though she couldn’t afford the indulgence of fine lingerie and the fanciest garments, she began wearing them anyhow, certain that if she advertised her worth, she would attract the richest men. She famously began to wear gowns by Charles Worth, the first designer to put his name label in clothing.

Cora was right, but I’m willing to bet that many of her rich lovers weren’t just attracted by her fine clothes. Her companionship was much sought after. She was fun to be with, attentive, and witty. Biographer Baroness von Hutten wrote, ”She knew how to make bored men laugh.” Victor Massena, the duke of Rivoli, became her “amant en titre” or official lover, but Cora belonged to no one and made that clear. She kept the company of whom she wished, when she wished. That company included businessmen, dukes and princes, exotic ambassadors, including the Prince of Orange, heir to the Dutch throne. He gave her the black pearls that became one of her trademark accessories.

Not everyone understood the phenomenon. In 1892, memoirist “Zed” wrote about the Parisian courtesans. About Cora, he wrote, “I humbly admit that hers was a success I never understood, that it must be noted, as it did exist, but there is no justification for it. To me, she represents a stain on what was, taken all in all, a scintillating group, refined and aristocratic, of the gallant women of her époque and from whom she differed absolutely in every respect. She was a personality apart, a specimen of another race, a bizarre and astonishing phenomenon.”

Zed was not the only one who was puzzled by others’ attraction to Cora Pearl. Many refined, humourless stick-in-the-muds found her coarse and vulgar, and did not appreciate her loud jokes and pranks. Julian Osgood Field called her “an amiable, but very stupid woman, and very fond of playing coarse, silly monkey tricks.” He recounted that she had once pulled a meat cutlet out of a bowl and placed it on the head of her date, shrieking with laughter. She was known for many such foolish, silly pranks, and did not fit into anyone’s model of refinery.

Whether Zed liked her or not, countless did. Her boyish and horsy lust for life made her fun to be around and enthusiastic in bed. She was lavished and indulged and spoiled in the finest linens, gorgeous clothing, luxurious dwellings, gourmet dining, wines, parties, and most important of all, horses. Cora was a talented horsewoman, and at one time, she had a stable of sixty horses.

“All Paris knew Cora Pearl. She was a centauress; she created the Amazon…She was the first to appear in our elegant promenades on a real horse which she rode with unequalled distinction and skill…For Cora Pearl, the horse is not only a luxury, it is an art; it is not only an art, it is an enterprise,” wrote admirer Nestor Roqueplan (quoted in Virginia Rounding’s Grandes Horizontales.)

What must be understood about the courtesans of this epoch is that they were the face, the display of the spirit of the Second Empire. This age of France was about art and literature, but its spirit was not serious: it was heady, frivolous, lacy, indulgent, feverish. The courtesan Marguerite Bellanger wrote in her memoirs, “To have fun, fun and more fun was everyone’s preoccupation.” Virginia Rounding, in her book about French courtesans, Grandes Horizantales, said, “There is a sense of glitter-of poudre d’or- about Second Empire Paris at its zenith, accompanied by an underlying disquiet that all that glitters may not really be gold.” Virginia says, “The ethos of the Second Empire was itself grounded in the importance of display, of showing its grandeurs to the world.” She points out that words like trimmings, frills, frivolity, froth, and flashy set the tone of the age.

Cora’s showmanship and belief that the world was her stage was her ticket to the big time. She commanded the attention of all around her with her theatrical maquillage. Other courtesans claimed she used rouge on her nipples, which looked like “wild rose petals.” This may or may not have been the case- tales of Cora’s spectacular breasts abound from many- they apparently didn’t need any help whatsoever. She died her hair yellow or pink and powdered herself with various glittering metallics. Her hands were assets Cora was especially proud of, beautifully shaped and elegant, and she wore a ring connected by chain to a bracelet. She wore flowers in her hair, and bracelets jangled up and down her arms.

Once she appeared on stage as Cupid in an operetta. She’d had no vocal training for the singing role, but the Illustrated London News didn’t seem to mind: “She was one blaze of diamonds- diamonds in her hair, round her neck, on her tiny cloak, round her arms, round her waist, and round her ankles.” She knew the value of advertising her beauty in a horse drawn carriage, posed in crinolines. Sometimes she dressed only in white gowns and diamonds everywhere. Her luxurious homes were decorated in exotic treasures of the Orient, animal skins, mirrors, armour, and art.

Legends abound from Cora’s sometimes-embellished memoirs and from the demimonde she starred in. One of Cora’s claims to fame was bathing nude in a silver tub filled with champagne, the centrepiece of her fabulous banquets. She was also said to strew the carpets with orchids and dance naked upon them, bewitching all who watched. She spent loads of money- one bill came to more than eighteen thousand pounds- on fine French lingerie. That Cora took delight in her sensuality and pleasure in pleasuring bewitched those around her. She was adventurous and fun in bed, or so they said, with a special penchant for doing it on horseback.

Cora’s homes were never-ending feasts of glitter, champagne, buffets of splendid food, and music. She boasted that there was dancing in the morning, noon, and night. She displayed dozens of varieties and cuts of meat, and fruits on beds of rare Parma violets.

Unfortunately, Cora had other thrills that she picked up from her suitors, and she became a voracious gambler. Though she kept ledgers of her transactions, income, and expenditures, her extravagance and her gambling addiction devastated much of her wealth, leaving her ill-equipped for a future in old age- a time when even the most beloved courtesans were no longer desirable. Even during her height, she said, “How many times I’ve ended up without a farthing!”

Cora’s reign as Queen of Tarts came to an end after an unfortunate incident with one of her neurotic consorts. The January 5, 1873 edition of The New York Times reported a rather unusual act of obsession on the part of Alexandre Duval. Duval was heir to a butcher’s fortune, which he had thrown away. His foolishness was blamed on Cora, for in addition to horses, horses, and more horses, “her banquets were of a character to recall the legends of declining Rome.”

The Times’ blames the dissolution of the couple’s affair on the fact that Duval’s diamonds and horses ran out. But Duval was stalking Cora, threatening her, and breaking into her house. He kept insisting that she see no other men, and that she marry him, simply not playing by the rules agreed upon in such a relationship. The young man had also squandered much of his fortune before he was with Cora, and he felt that he was unable to sustain her because of this, when in reality, she cut him off because of his dangerous threats to commit suicide if he could not win her love.

His obsessive harassment was too much to bear, so she ended the affair with a finality he refused to accept. He appeared on her doorstep, made his way inside, argued, and then pulled out a revolver and shot himself.

Cora’s terrible “cruelty” grew in legend after this episode. The Times’ reported that Duval was “carried to a chamber, and help was sent for.” But today, it is widely told that the frosty bitch left him lying in his own blood and went back to bed. If true, this would probably mean some kind of criminal negligence charges for Cora, so it is almost certainly a myth, unless the New York Times was lying. Nonetheless, the Times clearly indicated a pervasive belief that Duval and all other men who choose to hire expensive hookers are somehow victims, using the word “victim” half a dozen times. There is no mention of whether or not men who choose to waste large amounts of money on lesser delights like fine cars and fancy ties or sports betting are also victims. “There is no telling exactly the number of fortunes helped to dissipate in a few years’ time, but it was well known that her victims were many,” the reporter wrote. “…He had been the victim of a drolesse. He would be laughed at by all the world and hence resolved upon suicide. He could not bring himself to take his place in line in order to watch with other victims for the catastrophe which must soon overtake his successor.”

Curiously, the New York Times asks how so many could fall for the oldest trick in the book when “her character is perfectly known and has been advertised for years.” Ummm, because men are responding willingly to that advertisement! Because men want sex, and some women make themselves available to fill this need, that’s why. The reporter wonders why no inquiry was called for by law to “examine into the charms which can thus lead the young men of France to forget their duties, their family, their honour, and their God.” Say what?

In any event, Cora was expelled from France and forced to return home to London following Duval’s suicide attempt. “They talk of sending me out of the country,” Cora said. “But what has happened to me which would not happen to any other woman under similar circumstances? Suppose you said you wanted to live with me and I declined your offer, should I be to blame if you shot yourself? It is not true that I wanted to get rid of Monsieur Duval because he had no money left…The truth is that, during the ten months I have known him, he has constantly implored me to marry him. Now, as marriage is not the thing for me…I have always refused him, and as my refusals only make him more obstinate, I resolved to cut matters short by telling him that although we should remain good friends, all must be at end between us…He forced his way two or three times into the house…”

After being stalked, threatened, and harassed, Cora had to witness Duval’s attempted suicide and then face expulsion from her home. She told the press that the estates she owned were given to her by Prince Napoleon and that Duval’s problems began before they met, with his squandering money already, family troubles, and emotional instability.

But it is always the woman who bears the brunt of the shame and spectacle in society’s feigned disapproval of the original commerce. Somehow, the “reason” for prostitution is always a woman’s low self worth, childhood abuse, or wanton evil, and never the fact that there is an insistent demand that will not disappear no matter how much self-esteem women grow up with. Somehow, grown men who own businesses and empires and run families and farms are not capable of making a decision without a whore’s vicious manipulation or seduction. We rely on counts and kings and tycoons and even just the average joes of this world to make decisions in politics and business and manufacturing, but we assume they cannot make a decision on what to spend their money? Indeed, to have one’s own courtesan was a status symbol, particularly in the Second Empire. To show her off to the world, you showed that your wealth was limitless and your virility was powerful. This was a very ostentatious way of showing to society that for you, money was no object. Powerful men wanted to most expensive, glamourous courtesans possible.

When will we discard our prudishness and acknowledge that sex is important, and that the oldest arrangements in the book exist because they are necessary? Let’s stop infantilizing men by pretending they couldn’t “help themselves” and start accepting that lust is natural. If all women who willingly sold themselves stopped tomorrow, what would happen to the millions of men seeking service? Would they magically stop needing the service? No- there would be anarchy.

Obviously, no kind of regulations in any culture in any society, moral or loose, ever in the history of the world has been able to stop the market. There is prostitution in Saudi Arabia- despite the risk of death- simply because there are men in Saudi Arabia. There’s only one reason why women become prostitutes- it is the same reason why women take on any other kind of job. Money. If she loves her job, that’s simply a bonus. If she hates it, well, there are all kinds of people who hate their jobs. I’m not sure people who manufacture plastic crap love their work or find it meaningful, but someone’s got to do it if there is a market for it.

Perhaps it’s time to accept that the oldest arrangement is an excellent model. At it’s best, it fills a need for both parties. At it’s best, it is consensual and discreet. At it’s best, it is one of the most dignified and honest way for men to fulfill their needs. Until that need disappears, there will always be a need for the Cora Pearls of this world. And while not every lady of the evening earns on such a grand scale, it is unlikely that kings will hire cheap hookers. As with everything else, there is a range of prices scaled to taste.

Cora Pearl was not a victim, and nor was she insatiable and immoral. She sought out her work, enjoyed her work, and did it well. That she was rich seems to be the reason for which she is hated. Had she died of syphilis on the backstreets of London, like thousands of other women who worked on less savoury rungs of the ladder, we might forgive her for falling victim to her voracious immorality. Cora’s reputation would have been the same if she became a more conventional actress, a disgraceful job at the time, not one step above prostitution. Should she have stayed in hat-making, and subjected herself to marriage and misery if that is not what she wanted?

Cora’s exile from Paris and the fickle nature of popularity meant she struggled to work afterwards with the dead weight of Duval’s histrionics on her reputation. Cora lived for years on what she had, and eventually that ran out. She died of intestinal cancer in relative obscurity, alone, in squalid poverty at the age of 51. But according to her memoirs, she accepted the way things were and said she’d had a very happy life.

“I have never deceived anybody because I have never belonged to anybody. My independence was all my fortune, and I have known no other happiness,” Cora said.

Dying for Attention: the Strange Story of Christine Chubbuck

Dying for Attention: the Strange Story of Christine Chubbuck
by Lorette C. Luzajic

“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living colour, you are going to see another first — attempted suicide.”

Anyone whose ears pricked up during this segment of small-time Florida’s news back in 1974 was unwittingly witnessing the famous last words of reporter Christine Chubbuck.  What they witnessed next was unforgettable- the dark haired journalist reached down to pick up a gun, then held it behind her head and fired.

It was business as usual- for a few seconds. The segment ended in a fade to black, and the ubiquitous chirp of commercials jingled. Christine’s boss was furious about her gruesome little piece of performance art. She’d been protesting the industry’s blood thirst for a while, but this kind of hoax was just plain sick. It took Chris’s coworkers a few shocking moments to register that they were looking at a real gun, at real blood. Christine had committed suicide live on air.

It was no secret that Christine was bitter about the salacious, sensationalist nature of the media, and furious at how hard it was to be taken seriously. Christine’s statement was stark and determined. There was no room for margin of error- the reporter had researched her story well. Apparently, she’d been at the cop shop asking questions about the most certain modes of exterminating yourself for a “story” she was working on about suicide. Her death was written into the script, complete with after-story written down in case her colleagues didn’t know what to say after the incident.

Chris was born in Ohio, and came to work for a small cable station in Saratoga, Florida. At work Chris was competent, confident, and attractive, though her coworkers also described her as intense and moody. Chris carried the heavy burdens of the human condition on her shoulders, distressed by how the world worked and how people treated each other. The fact that no one really knew her is telling- apparently, she’d always been isolated, and had no lasting friendships or romantic relationships. In her youth, she had formed a club for girls called The Dateless Wonders, and perhaps the tongue-in-cheek feistiness of said group already belied a distress at being forever dateless.

Christine was just shy of her thirtieth birthday when she died, and she made much ado about her spinster status. No relationship went beyond two dates, and by all accounts including her own, she’d never been touched by a man. In the months before her death, she had bravely asked a few men out to dinner, turning the tables instead of waiting in vain to be asked out. Though the men accepted, they didn’t show up for their meeting.

Chris’s coworker Andrea Kirby said Chris often lamented her alienation, saying that she would love to be loved, if only for a day or a week. And though camerawoman Jean Reed appreciated Chris’s macabre humour and “great sense of the absurd,” Andrea admitted that she felt Christine was very intense, that she “came on so heavy.” Her mom said she felt profound loneliness and threw herself into her work to escape her loveless life. She felt disconnected. While no one particularly disliked Christine, no one really liked her, either. The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn quoted Chris’s mom saying, “She felt…if you reach your hand out to people and nobody takes it, then there’s something wrong with your drum beat, and she felt she really couldn’t register with anyone except her family.”

The possibility of Christine having her own family to love  one day was nonexistent- while you can’t hurry love, the option exists to conceive nonetheless. But Christine had had an ovary removed and was told her chances for childbearing were nearly nil.

While Christine’s unprecedented statement was absolutely political, her dissatisfaction at work likely just gave a forum for a dramatic exit from her depression, one she knew the news would be all over. It was a bold fuck-you, but the woes of work were just a vehicle for expression, not the driving force behind it. Chris’s mom confessed that she had been seeing a psychiatrist, and Chris had previously attempted suicide, unsuccessfully. Sometimes she joked roughly about the attempt to people she had barely met, and this is no doubt part of the difficulty people had getting close to her. Sally Quinn reported that Jean Reed felt Chris was almost selfish. Her work ethics were precise and thorough, but she was greedy for compliments, needy and desperate. While everyone tried to be proactive to that need, Chris was not very supportive of others, very critical, very demanding. Reed said she could cut others down “without flashing an eye.” Another camerawoman said she was standoffish and sometimes showed off with crude language.

Yet beyond her social awkwardness, fierce intelligence, and depression, Chris was otherwise not much different from anyone else. She had a chocolate coloured poodle, and a yellow Volkswagen. She enjoyed baking cakes. She took care of her luxurious straight curtain of dark hair. She was a sharp dresser. She was a strong swimmer and enjoyed the beach. According to Sally Quinn, she had written some biographical notes when she was fifteen, expressing that what she wanted most was “to become a lady with a little spice, a housewife, and a mother.”

Christine was cremated and sprinkled into the ocean, but if she’d been buried, she would be turning in her grave at today’s gladiatorial surreality TV, un-news, and paparazzi-driven fluff. Some believe that in a world where Jennifer Aniston’s haircut is more important news than the Congo holocaust, Christine Chubbuck is better off dead. Others feel that in dying so publicly, she was rightfully, even heroically, vindicated in a manner of her own choosing.

But her family felt the act was her most selfish one. Her mom felt Chris had no right to bring gore into people’s homes. Her brother Greg told Sally Quinn, “I can think of nothing more grotesque than seeing a beautiful young woman blow her brains out on TV.”

sabbatical

Folks, I am still here, though I haven’t written a new installment for you in a shocking amount of time. Do stay tuned because this collection of fascinating lives will resume again with gusto. I have been concentrating most of my time the past several months on a huge project about a very fascinating man: Michael Jackson. The anthology is almost ready and my part of it is almost done. So you will see a new FP soon. Forgive me, but I know you will all enjoy the spectacular compilation on the meaning of Michael Jackson, coming soon.

love

Lorette

No Reservations: the Interior World of Joseph Cornell

No Reservations: the Interior World of Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was the kind of fellow that no one noticed. He was quiet and unassuming, seemingly average in every way.  Born in Nyack, New York at the turn of last century, the shyest man in America had no intention of becoming an artist at all. Rather, he was an archivist, a collector, a person who documented his bird’s eye view of the world. He found it profoundly soothing to gather visual snippets and ordinary objects, and sort them into categories.

Joseph had learned appreciation of culture from his parents, who lovingly shared ballet, opera and literature with their children. Evenings were spent gathering around the piano or Victrola, or watching magic shows and vaudeville acts. His imagination roamed freely through the universe on the wings of these arts, but Cornell was tethered permanently to the ground. For his beloved younger brother Robert had cerebral palsy, and was confined to a wheelchair. Joseph was only fourteen when he became the man of the family- his father died of pernicious anemia, leaving the boy to care for his disabled sibling, his mother and his sisters.

And so it was that Joseph’s days were long and tiring for as long as he could remember. He had a sort of nostalgia for nostalgia, looking back at his brief youth and bygone eras as if he’d really been a part of them. For these reasons, he would carefully mine his surroundings, books, catalogues, streets, bookstores, thrift shops, for scraps of imagination. Then, after his sick brother was asleep, he would stay awake late, sifting through, sorting, categorizing these objects and images. He had over 150 themed dossiers in which to store his clippings and discarded treasures. Soon, he reportedly began putting together his trinkets in pleasing fashions to entertain his brother.

As his passion for tinkering grew, Joseph began ordering and organizing the images and objects into pleasing assemblies. His groupings would tell quiet stories about the world he imagined. From early on, Joseph was drawn especially to bird motifs, and to references of journeys- oceans, constellations, maps, compasses, and so on, as if he were a ship passing in the night. It is easy to see the artist taking flight through these symbols, traversing the dark emblems of the psyche as a ship passing in the night.

Cornell never attended art school- he did not set out to make art, or to become the father of assemblage or a surrealist artist. As a young man, he worked in textiles. This made him miserable, but he was committed to contributing to Robert’s medical expenses. The family wasn’t poor at the outset, but the years and the cerebral palsy meant dwindling resources as they plunged into the Depression. By this time, the family lived in a house on the poetically named Utopia Parkway, and after work, Joseph would care for Robert, then dive into his imaginary journeys after tucking his brother in. He had little other social contact- he hated working, mostly because he had to speak with other people and found it painful to do so. This got even worse when he lost his job during the Depression and had to take on door-to-door appliance sales work. He also worked in a defense factory and a greenhouse. One day, his mother’s friend helped Joseph secure a job designing textiles. Eventually, he was designing feature layouts and covers for magazines of some repute, such as Harper’s Bazaar.

And so it was that Joseph was simply plodding through life, with his grim daily grind muted only by his rich fantasy life- fantasies that were benign and mundane, for the most part, sentimental for discarded beauty, for sweets and forgotten B-movie actresses, for laundromats and pigeons and rivers and moons, for books and birds. By constructing shadowboxes, by juxtaposing arcane objects with leftover Victorian bric-a-brac and old drawings torn from books, he sublimated all that was dull and ordinary in life and created a beautiful genre of art, the assemblage.

As a collage artist myself, I had long been a fan of Cornell’s work, but nothing could prepare me for their strange and stunning impact when I saw them in person. The Art Institute of Chicago has an impressive collection of his work, but I hadn’t known so before I dropped in unexpectedly on the last day of a rush visit in the Windy City. My last minute itinerary was dropped, and I dashed to the Institute without checking in advance what to anticipate. And so I was taken aback when there I was, in the presence of not one or two or three but dozens of Cornell boxes. Peering into these curiously spare yet cluttered worlds was transcendent. I could feel isolated parts of my own childhood rising in the back of my throat, in full exquisite intensity, and then I was sailing, too, into that great beyond.

Those who ask what the juxtaposed assemblies mean should be damned for all time- these could only be spoiled, ignorant voices with no imagination, whose every whim was catered to, people who never had to examine the dark recesses of injury or the transforming fantasy of dream-worlds. Those without empathy, those with profoundly superficial concerns might not instinctively grasp the fact that Cornell’s constructions map the realm of human interior, capture snapshots of the great mystery for which we have no words. As I peered into dozen after dozen of little boxes, at birds and constellations and balls and alabaster dolls and parachutes and apothecary bottles, I was transported into the symbolic realm.

Some sharp observers have noted a kind of autism in Cornell’s obsessive love of objects. Outside of his Robert’s special needs, Joseph had serious difficulty relating to other human beings, and he communicated best by letting his found items do the talking. Some find this at odds with his peculiar faith in Christian Science- which teaches that all material objects are illusions.

But upon careful contemplation, Cornell’s spiritual philosophy more likely FUELED his constructions. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the faith, famously eschewed all drugs and medicines for true healing that came only through the spirit. Interestingly, these beliefs did not interfere with Robert’s obvious needs for wheelchairs and medicines. It was a profoundly personal religion, not an evangelical one. For Joseph, the teachings that the body, and all things in the material world, are illusory constructs merely symbolic of true spirituality, complemented perfectly his idea that his boxes were symbolic of the real, not real in and of themselves.

No, his works were not real, they were…surreal. Well, in the sense that they revealed the unconscious secrets of the soul, they were. And though from his early shows onward, he was lauded as the first American surrealist, he decried this from the get-go. Sure, like Marcel DuChamp, he championed the objet trouve. And he portrayed dreams. And he loved the juxtaposition of the bizarre. But Cornell said, “I never had any real sympathy for the movement and what it stood for.” What he meant was simply that the surrealists’ defiance at church and religion and their sick fixation on sex were distasteful and bewildering to him. Cornell thought the ism was simply an excuse to throw in strange lusts and elevate it to art.

Nonetheless, on most philosophical merits, Cornell’s work best fit with surrealism and many of his early shows were advertised as such. Cornell also made movies using the same techniques in his art- he spliced pieces together seemingly at random. From some old films he found discarded, and some old tape, he created a short film featuring pictures of his idol Rose Hobart. Cornell asked his representing gallery to host a viewing, Though most of his audience yawned and shifted with boredom, the event turned out to be pivotal in Cornell’s small, pending fame- for Salvador Dali was in the audience.

Dali erupted during the film into a raving lunatic, shoving the projector crashing onto the ground and hollering furious blue murder. Apparently, the film-collage was Dali’s private copyright, and he told the gallery owner, “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I WAS GOING to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made…I never wrote it or told it to anyone but it is as IF he had stolen it.”

The thundering Salvador, a world-famous artist, drew monumental attention to then-unknown Cornell. But Cornell seldom showed films again because of this incident, though he made them. This primitive, early work to which the humble Cornell beat the megalomaniac Dali was a precursor to the experimental film movement. Dali forever afterward was both purposefully and inadvertently advertising Cornell to the art world, and his boxes grew in popularity. The demands, even of mild celebrity, on Joseph were exhilarating but exhausting. It was extremely draining for the artist to interact with people. For this reason, converged with his strict adherence to the sexual ethics of Christian Science, he did not really date.

You can imagine what people thought of a shy, reticent artist who lived with his mother, mooned over silent film stars, and Lauren Bacall, and fancied opera and ballet. The obvious seemed obvious to everyone around him, and it was widely assumed that Cornell was gay. Indeed, one of the few lasting friendships he built, and one of the more frequent guests to his Utopia Parkway home was an out homosexual, and tongues wagged.

But Joseph was not gay. He simply was no good at approaching women, and if he was, then what? The complicated rituals of courtship that make the rest of us dizzy made him sick to his stomach. It was a game he couldn’t possibly take upon himself. And if he did, then the maintenance of a partner would mean unthinkable levels of interaction of which he was simply incapable. He did take to women, quite enthusiastically, ordinary girls from laundromats and diners, plus, of course, fantasizing endlessly about film stars and poets and anyone else who was at a safe distance. For these women, he made boxes, shrines. “He built boxes for Emily Dickinson,” writes Sheila O’Malley in The Sheila Variations. “Her ghost haunts those boxes … But he didn’t build them as gifts FOR Emily Dickinson (who, of course, was long dead). He built them as spaces that she might inhabit. It was like “preparing a place” for her. That’s why so many of the Emily boxes are empty. With open windows. Which is interesting, too. He always wanted to make sure that Emily had a way to escape.”

Deborah Solomon writes in her biography, Utopia Parkway, about a workmate who captured Cornell’s dreamy obsession. He saw her in the time-card line and spent the next few months musing and mulling over the 20-year-younger Anne Hoysio, whom he described as having “such gracious qualities of serenity.” They did have lunch at work, and he left flowers on her desk, but he didn’t so much as ask her to the movies. Anne had no idea of their vivid, intense relationship happening in Joseph’s mind. He gave her a shadowbox- she gave him a Christmas card, signed with her name and the name of their company. As Solomon said, “…she considered her friendship with Cornell so insignificant that she thought she had to remind him of who she was. Cornell kept the card for the rest of his life.”

Cornell also loved another girl, someone more of a wild card, who betrayed his trust by stealing some of his art. He insisted on helping to bail her out, despite that the crime was against him. She conceded that she hadn’t known the value of their friendship, but Joseph knew how troubled she was and loved her still. But one day she was found murdered in her cheap hotel room, and Joseph never got over it.

No, Joseph’s secret was not that he was gay. It was that he lived his entire life without a lover. There were a few chaste squeezes and pecks here and there, but the closest he came was with one woman who noted that his needs differed from those of most men. They enjoyed a naked bath, and she offered him a blow job, but he did not ask to consummate what they’d started. He said sex would destroy his art. Joseph Cornell lived and died a virgin.

Nor did Joseph experience the heady thrills of giddy intoxication- not once did a drop of liquor pass his lips. His only vice was his penchant for sugar, which would put Homer Simpson to shame. At some points, he subsisted entirely on doughnuts and candy.

Yet Cornell’s life was not loveless, however unorthodox and solitary it seemed: the love of his life was his brother, Robert. Surely on occasion he resented Robert’s illness, but his dedication was unwavering and it much more than “duty” that propelled him. Robert asked nothing of Joseph, was a gracious and thankful patient, and listened endlessly to the artist’s explanations of his work, provided an audience of one- as much as Joseph could handle. Robert was, against the odds, extremely cheerful, and funny. He occasionally had success in making Joseph laugh. Though his illness was a tremendous burden on Joseph, it was also a gift, an intimacy that exists in few other partnerships. Robert couldn’t leave the house and so was incapable of forming much in way of a social life. And Joseph couldn’t relate to many people, but he was comfortable with his brother from day one. And so they had a unique, deep bond that was unbreakable. Once Robert died of pneumonia in 1965, Joseph’s descent began.

On December 29, 1972, Joseph left the symbolic world of the body and his objects and went into the spiritual realm to be with Robert. In a sense, he’d spent his entire life nearly as housebound as his disabled brother, rarely leaving even his neighbourhood. Yet some part of Joseph had never been tethered: glancing through the symbols of his work, we see endless witness to the flights of his imagination, theme after theme after theme: hot air balloons, constellations, globes and maps, birds, ballerinas, moons, compasses, ships, oceans, tides, bubbles, and owls.

Though he’d been fine days before, when a friend called and got no answer, she’d sent her husband to Utopia to check in. Through a window, he saw Joseph fully dressed under a blanket, peacefully dead.

And though his art freed him from his earthly constraints, clearly he still had some regrets about his experience in the physical realm. In a phone call that morning with his sister, he spoke his last words. “You know, I was thinking, I wish I hadn’t been so reserved.”

Lorette C. Luzajic

Lorette C. Luzajic is everywhere. The only one with her name in the world, a quick Google will turn up a lifetime of reading. Writing about interesting people is her favourite kind of work, and you can find more at www.bookslut.com, where she writes Fascinating Writers. She also writes a column called A Matter of Life or Myth for www.thepaleogarden.com. Lorette is the author of The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, and she just released Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (irreverent ramblings from the end of the world.) She is currently working on an anthology about the meaning of Michael Jackson, and  a short story collection. These, and the sequel for Weird Monologues, will be available by the end of 2009. Follow her at www.thegirlcanwrite.net, or visit this link on Amazon to purchase her books.

Falling Short of the Glory of God: Leo Tolstoy

No bookshelf is complete without those massive Russian tomes, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Many say Leo Tolstoy authored the greatest novels ever written. The size of these sweeping epics was rivaled only by the writer’s formidable beard. Each novel pondered those questions that plague man most — the meaning of life, the struggle with lust, political freedom, union with God, death. His books were highly moral, yet they were often censored by the Russian government, for the mere mention of adultery and suicide and war that kept those pages turning.

(read the rest of July’s Fascinating Writers column at Book Slut)

Speaking with the Tongues of Angels: Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1821-1881

Before Starbucks took over the world, I spent my youth in the kind of coffee shops that played Ella Fitzgerald, talking over the finer points of existential angst with my cohorts. Dostoevsky’s work, filled with all the big questions of God and madness and free will and exile, was pressing stuff. So pressing, indeed, that we stayed up half the night at Chez Cappuccino, mulling over Notes from the Underground. You couldn’t be literary; you couldn’t be a writer, if you didn’t dissect every minutiae of meaning (or meaninglessness, as it were) from the Russian writers. I recall that one of my colleagues, an African, shook his head wistfully over Crime and Punishment. “Dostoevsky ruins it for all the other novelists,” he said. “How can you read anyone else’s work after these masterpieces?”

Well, maybe Tolstoy would make the cut- the two Russian writers are widely considered the best novelists of all time. Intellectuals have been gathering at cafes the world over to discuss Dostoevsky’s notions of suffering or suicide or freedom of expression for a hundred years. “The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture,” Virginia Woolf wrote. James Joyce said the writer had “created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens…”

Indeed, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s dark whirlpool changed the face of literature irrevocably. His themes of human suffering, madness, sin, exile, guilt, redemption, evil, God, corruption, power, poverty, and the limits of human nature resonated deeply in circles far and wide, and every generation to follow. Inside the volatile thunderstorm of man’s search for meaning was truly “something for everyone.” From pop reading groups to the highest academia, Fyodor’s novels are on the ‘best of all time’ lists- at least one of The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov- and usually all three. Every oeuvre painstakingly pries apart the soul and mind of humanity, swimming into the furthest depths of human behaviour. The writer’s explorations and explanations analyze human psychology brilliantly from every angle. Nietzsche would later call him “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.”

But Fyodor didn’t become the bulwark of world literature by dropping a few well-mapped characters into winning plot formulas. He earned his bragging rights the hard way- through Russian political repression and oppression, through imprisonment and torture for defending freedom of expression, through a volatile relationship with his father who was murdered, and through madness, which he cherished above all else.

It was 1821 when Fyodor was born in Moscow. His father was a famously temperamental alcoholic, a retired military surgeon. Work doing gruesome amputations was not exactly ideal for a man prone to depressions and rage, and most biographers note that Mikhail was also exceedingly religious- likely to the point of delusion, as he was certain he was a special chosen one of God, and that his tribulations had special significance, like those of Job. Though Dad was a harsh master and jealous husband, his relationship with his children was not loveless. And Fyodor’s Mom was very nurturing and quite the opposite of her spouse- she was cheerful and loving. She taught Fyodor how to read early on, sharing stories from the Bible with her sons.

Fyodor’s environment was influential, of course, to the work he would do later on, contrasting human temperaments and beliefs. He was drawn to people’s stories early on, devouring the strange and beautiful and gory Biblical narratives. Contemporary struggles were even more fascinating- the boy prowled outside and spent hours listening to the stories of the poor and sick. There was plenty of fodder in his neighbourhood, among the worst in Moscow, located near a criminal cemetery, a lunatic asylum, an orphanage and so on. The boy was forbidden these travels, but more often than not failed to heed the rules. His curiousity got the best of him, and he craved sunlight instead of being indoors at all times.

In any event, both senior and junior Dostoevsky may have had more in common with the poor and crazy than Senior cared to admit. Exactly the nature of Dad’s headaches, rages, addiction and depression are unknown, but Junior had epilepsy and was prone to seizures and religious visions from his youth.

Though the hospital neighbourhood was squalid, the family was not poor. Far from it. Indeed, Fyodor was around ten years old when his father bought a hamlet and a village. This was the era of Russian serfdom, when rich landowners owned the peasants who lived there. Mikhail was a brutal landowner, but Fyodor did not take after him. Instead, as in the city, he listened eagerly to the stories of the lives at the lower rung of society’s echelon, and concluded that the poor were the truly nobility.

Country life was a short stint, however, as Maria died of consumption when Fyodor was fifteen, leaving dad to fend for a handful of young children and his broken heart. He sent Fyodor and his favourite brother, Mikhail, to boarding school, and took out his grief on his peasants, beating them whenever he wished.

And so it was that the motherless became fatherless a few years later- Dad was found dead on the path between his two villages. His horse and driver were reportedly missing, as were several of his serfs. The seemingly obvious explanation that he met his fate at the hands of his furious underlings has never been proven, though it is widely believed. It may have been a stroke. Some reports suggest suffocation by the carriage cushion, and still others suggest a bizarre murder method: drowning by enforced vodka administration. The latter derives, perhaps, from our insistence at reading Dostoyevsky’s work literally, for it appears in Notes from the Underground. Regardless, murder is very likely, for motivations abound, including reports that Dad was diddling the prettiest young peasants, sadly common among those with power then and now.

In any event, Fyodor was an orphan at sixteen. His troubles had just begun.

He completed studies at an academy of military engineering, but was far more interested in reading and writing. He was a lieutenant but escaped his work by reading obsessively, and obsessing about death. Both would be lifelong fixations. It’s not hard to imagine Fyodor, hunched over Pushkin in the late light of afternoon. He left the army in 1844 to write fiction and hang around literary and intellectual circles, including the St. Petersburg Petrashevsky Circle. Mikhail Petrashevsky was a follower of utopian socialism and organized a discussion group of writers and poets and other free thinkers, and they talked about books and politics. Most were opponents of the tsarist autocracy.

Fyodor was 24 when his first novel, Poor Folk, was published. Somewhat unexpectedly, he was hailed as the “new Gogol”- Gogol being a writer who satirized the corrupt Russian bureaucracy. And so the writer became a minor celebrity and he began to bravely publish political essays, even though he knew it was dangerous and illegal. He also decided to establish an underground press. He spoke out loud against censorship. Perhaps he was certain he could effect change, or perhaps he believed he should suffer for his art. And suffer he did. In 1849, Fyodor was arrested, along with other members of the circle, and taken to a maximum-security prison reserved for the most dangerous criminals. He was charged with owning an illegal printing press, and plotting to murder the tsar, among other things. The murder plot was outrageous- Dostoevsky was a revolutionary of ideas only. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The writer was sentenced to death.

It was October 1849 when Dostoevsky and his partners in crime were marched toward the gallows, where they would stand in shooting range of soldiers. An order was given to lower the hoods over their faces. After an excruciating silence, the soldiers were commanded to shoot.

By now we all know that nothing happened- this mock execution is one of the most famous in history. A staged execution is among the most effective methods of psychological torture. While torture in general is, well, torture, this particular form usually makes you a basket case for life. Indeed, at least one and reportedly two of Fyodor’s friends went stark raving mad. Fyodor felt he’d been given another chance at life, and praised God for it. The torment led to later religious experiences while serving the next eight years of his sentence. Half of the sentence was spent doing hard labour in exile in Siberia, and the other half in the army.

Of his experiences in prison, Fyodor wrote, “I consider those four years as a time during which I was buried alive and shut up in a coffin. Just how horrible that time was I have not the strength to tell you…it was an indescribable, unending agony, because each hour, each minute weighed upon my soul like a stone.”

Yet Dostoevsky had never before felt so alive. He wrote in a letter to his brother, “When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul – then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness.”

In those moments before he was to be shot to death, Fyodor had a revelation that “unconditional love” was the only salvation for humanity, something God had for the world, manifest in the gift of Jesus Christ. The writer committed to spending his life sharing this kind of love. These thoughts brought him tremendous strength through the continual hardships of his life, yet in eventuality, he despaired at the fruitlessness of convincing others of life’s joy.

We’ve all had the writing teacher who tells us, “Write about what you know.” And Dostoevsky did- so much so that we too often surmise it happened exactly as it had in his novels. Nonetheless, the events and emotions the writer described, sometimes decades later, often came from his personal suffering and redemption stories. Following his release from prison, he wrote The Insulted and the Humiliated, followed by House of the Dead and Notes from the Underground. House of the Dead showcased tales of murder and suffering among hardened criminals in a labour camp, for example. It was nearly a decade after Fyodor’s release that his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, was manifest, in 1866.

Fyodor had married- during his army sentence, he courted a married woman who was miserable with her abusive husband. She didn’t marry him until her husband passed away. Their happiness was brief- Maria took ill and died a few short years later, in 1864. The profound emptiness and despair Fyodor felt was multiplied when his life’s anchor, brother Mikhail, died shortly after.

Fyodor descended into a deep pit of depression and crippling debts. In honour, he committed to caring for his brother’s widow and children, yet he didn’t have two dimes to rub together. This deadly combination of debt and despair led him to become a hopeless gambling addict. Anything he earned, he’d throw on the tables, hoping his luck would change. It did not. When he was penniless and in danger to his debtors, his publisher came to his aid and promised to give him a formidable advance if he could produce a brilliant novel in a month. And so, we have The Gambler.

Crime and Punishment was also to be generated quickly to meet insurmountable debts. It began as a short story, and then took on a life of its own. Though Fyodor had to deliver by January, he wrote to a friend confessing he’d burned the novel the previous November. “I didn’t like it myself. A new form, a new plan excited me, and I started all over again.” Fyodor’s unyielding perfectionism paid off, and Crime and Punishment turned out to be one of the greatest books ever written.

But Fyodor’s punishments were not over yet. In his mid-forties, he fell in love with a 21-year-old stenographer, and they married. With Anna, he had four children. The first died a few months after birth, and the fourth, his favourite, was three when he died during an epileptic seizure. Dostoevsky’s misery was now at its absolute peak, for he believed he had killed his beloved child by passing on his disease.

For throughout all of these trials, Dostoevsky was also ill. Since boyhood, he also had epilepsy. He had to endure humiliating fits, seizures and headaches. He was haunted for life by horrifying dreams of evil and terror. Yet the transcendence he experienced in the seconds prior to the attacks fueled his writing and his will to live. (The writer reported that the fits began after the staged execution. Many historians believe he’d had similar issues since childhood, age nine specifically, when he had some kind of seizure.)

“For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life. I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don’t even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.”

The writer records similar passages in The Idiot and his other works that feature visionary spiritual people- epileptics. These brief splashes of paradise in the grisly misery of existence were understandably cherished. Dostoevsky seemed certain that God was really coming through him. In fact, he referred controversially to the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, as epileptic.

Scientist Clifford Pickover writes: “Dostoevsky, another famous epileptic whose works are filled with ecstatic visions of universal love (and terrible nightmares of uncanny fear and radical evil), thought it was obvious that Mohammad’s visions of God were triggered by epilepsy. “Mohammad assures us in this Koran that he had seen Paradise,” Dostoevsky notes. “He did not lie. He had indeed been in Paradise – during an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered, as I do.””

What’s fascinating is that Dostoevsky knew that his visions and ecstasies were caused by his illness. And yet he was still dead certain that the symptoms revealed something real. It’s also interesting to note how interwoven religious delusions are in mental illness. Though human beings are hardwired to faith- atheism is rare and always has been- it’s undeniable that extreme religiosity and visions, delusions, voices, and so on are linked with schizophrenia. It’s common for mental health patients to report, and to believe in, messages from angels, Jesus, God. These messages are often beautiful and sometimes terrible, and they may come out of a hair dryer or out of the words of the newscaster or show up in a wallpaper pattern. It’s also a fact that most cult leaders are enigmatic, charismatic visionaries.

There are arguments over organic mental illness- epilepsy, for example, which produces electrical impulses that push against the brain- versus “mental” mental illness, or emotional instability. But the body is the mind is the spirit. Indeed, science knows that schizophrenia and depression are in fact imbalances of brain chemistry that CAUSE emotional problems, just as weak bones might cause knee problems. Are they the same as epilepsy, a seizure disorder? They aren’t the same, yet effective treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar are the same medications used for epileptic patients.

When big shot headshrinker Sigmund Freud came along, he lambasted Dostoevsky’s work as simpering sentimentality and wrote at length about how the writer’s particular form of epilepsy was hysterical, not organic. It was caused by his hatred of Dad, apparently, and that’s why it showed up most after stressor situations like a mock execution. (To be fair to the good doctor, he was certain that organic epilepsy was incompatible with razor sharp intellectual faculties, and so he assumed Dostoevsky had something else. Today we know that mental illness is often arm in arm with brilliance and creativity.)

Today we are coming closer to understanding that chemical and emotional are two sides of the same coin- each is causal of the other. We also know that high stress situations understandably involve severe emotional response- and that the cascade of motion in the brain’s network can ignite dreams, visions, fit, episodes, depressions, hallucinations, ecstasies, manias, whatever you want to call them. Sex, drugs, physical pain, and other triggers of emotions and endorphins can indeed incite a range of pleasant or terrifying effects, often both.

As modern science delves further into the unknown reaches of the brain, things get more and more astounding. The link between epilepsy, mental illness, religiosity, and creativity grows, as we enter the age of the God machine. Neurobiologist Michael Persinger has created a helmet and various scans and probes that are causing and examining religious experience networks in the brain. The science is in its infancy, but there’s already considerable evidence to show that déjà vu, ghosts, and other similar spiritual phenomenon goes hand in hand with electrical seizures in the brain- and diminishing oxygen brings on the white tunnel of near death experience. It’s the same reason kids hold their breath to get high and why some people prefer the strange practice of asphyxiation, by which they apparently experience visionary sex.

Atheists are quick to jump here on proof that God is all in our heads. Yet this “sickness” fueled the brilliance of Dostoevsky’s work, and gave him courage to endure unbelievable hardship. And he, for one, perceived it as God within us- is that the same thing? For millennia, the visionary was doped up and caged, or else he was the special shaman of society. The world over, humans ingest all manner of plant and pill in order to glimpse this world of paradise Dostoevsky describes- and then we wonder why it’s hard for the addict to give up drugs? Recall that the writer would give ten years of his life for that slim second of peace and harmony before his seizures.

And so, it can be understood why so many schizophrenic and bipolar patients prefer to avoid medication, the single biggest obstacle to treatment. But the light may disappear with the dark. Many schizophrenia patients report that they like the voices, feel close to or comforted by them, or of course, they are dead certain it’s ‘real’ and that they are afforded special insights that others can’t see.

The religious or supernatural connection to these kinds of visions extends way beyond Dostoevsky and his opinion about Mohammed. Fyodor writes in The Idiot about epileptic Myshkin, who is a Christ-like figure. But what about Jesus himself? What about Oral Roberts, who saw a 900-foot Jesus in the sky, who believes he raised people from the dead? What of The Book of Revelation, just one of hundreds of apocalyptic books that didn’t make it into the Biblical canon, all describing wonderful and terrible religious visions? What about Ezekiel and the chariot of fire? And what of Saint Paul, and the vision that inspired his conversion?

St. Paul spoke of a bodily affliction, a thorn in his flesh. Theories on this have abounded- was he gay? Deformed? Migraines? It was common before we had cures for infections for high fevers to damage the brain, and Paul had had malaria.

Of course, one accepts the prophecies and miracles of their own faith as God manifest, but prophecies and miracles of other faiths are surely mere insanity at best, and at worst, the devil incarnate. Joseph Smith receiving the golden tablets that only he could interpret is sheer lunacy to most of the world- yet millions of extraordinarily intelligent people called Mormons base their faith on this idea. Many Christians or Muslims would consider reincarnation beliefs heresy, yet millions of Buddhists are convinced and comforted when their leaders recount visions of their past lives. Yet paradise is sometimes hell- children are more often than not murdered by well-meaning parents, not by pedophiles- God was telling them to do it, to rid the child of demons or some such parallel.

Alien abductions and astral projection are an historically consistent fascination. Then there’s déjà vu, and jamais vu- the feeling you’ve never before been in your own house or yard. What gives?

Molecular biochemist Dr. Clifford Pickover says, “Temporal lobe epilepsy is caused by unusual electrical activity in the brain’s temporal lobes A significant proportion of people with TLE report that their seizures often bring on extraordinary experiences of transcendent wonder, luminous insight — or, at times, harrowing, uncanny fear.”

In The Vision of the Chariot: Transcendent Experience and Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, he says, “(Alien) abductees feel mild, epileptic-like symptoms just before they are ‘captured.’ Some abductees feel heat on one side of their faces, hear a ringing in their ears, and see flashes of light prior to an abduction. Others report a cessation of sound and feeling, or an overwhelming feeling of apprehension. All of this is typical of certain kinds of epileptic seizures.”

Whitley Strieber is arguably the most famous alien abductee in history, and he has written several books about his experience, most famously, Communion. He runs a website called Unknown Country, a support group for abductees. Pickover observes that Strieber documents TLE symptoms when describing the abduction- jamais vu, formication (crawling bugs on skin), “vivid smells, hallucinations, rapid heartbeats, the sensation of rising and falling, and partial amnesia.” Strieber was in fact diagnosed with epilepsy, but he refutes the diagnosis because polygraph and brain tests show that he isn’t lying- yet you’re not lying if you believe it was true! Just like others who have had visionary experiences, Strieber cannot be convinced the experience didn’t happen. In his case, it was not just a ‘window’ to the other world, but literally took place.
Mohammed shared the alien abduction theme in his vision, particularly the medical experiments that most abductees report. “Two men in white raiment came and threw me down and opened up my belly and searched inside for I don’t know what,” the prophet told his foster parents when he was five years old.

In Varieties of Religious Experience, psychologist William James warns us not to dismiss mystical events just because they came from electrical impulses. He reminds us that every single thought, however rational, anyone has, comes from the body.

Indeed, about a third of us have had religious experiences- can this be accounted for by some misfiring of the brain? Or is this exalted state actually the real deal, the divine, whereas the normal states are earthly ones, just as the visionaries profess?

September 7th, 1880, Dostoevsky’s journal reads: “This morning at 8.45, interruption of my thoughts, transported into other years, dreams, dreamy states, dreaminess…” It was the same year that his favourite child died, the final burden the writer would have to bear. The novel The Brothers Karamazov was underway, and much of it examined epilepsy, though the work was overall a culmination of the great psychological questions Dostoevsky wrestled with. Reason versus faith, doubt, the spiritual struggle, the question of free will, belonging, murder, family, fate -and indeed, the validity of epileptic experience, whether spiritual or organic- all the questions that science and psychology is examining today.

Dostoevsky said he’d be happy if he finished his book before he died, having great difficulty in writing it after the tragedy of losing his son. However, he wrote his son into the book by naming the hero after Alyosha.

A few months after The Brothers Karamazov was published, Fyodor Dostoevsky died of epileptic hemorrhaging. It was 1881. The novel was a supreme masterpiece, the writer’s crowning achievement.

It’s a gorgeous spring day, 128 years after Dostoevsky’s death, thousands of miles from political oppression and turmoil. Sitting on a Starbucks patio with The Brothers Karamazov and a friend, I wish the great writer were here today. We’d like to discuss a few things with Fyodor- one of them my central belief that mental illness isn’t mental illness, but what I like to call mental is-ness. Anger, delusion, sorrow, fear- just because something is unpleasant, doesn’t mean it’s sick. And conversely, the deep religious convictions we’ve had, and indeed the deep psychedelic experiences we’ve embarked on, are not sick just because joy doesn’t usually extend so far.

I’ve long believed that the chemical soup of which we are made is not a reduction of the human spirit or soul, but that it IS the human spirit or soul. My own bipolar life means torrential creativity even as it means frustration for idea cascades that never see completion. As a writer, I am, like Dostoevsky was, attached to my experiences of beauty, and accept the dark damnation that often follows in long depressions. Like most manic-depressives, I fear losing the exalted states and though the despair is hell, it teaches me the truth about the world.

Moreover, my benign and delightful belief in the magic of objects and the presence of spirits gives me profound connectivity. My grief is assuaged toward certain losses, when I feel my dead friend’s presence through an object he has left for me. How could I be a writer at all if it weren’t for my beautiful unquiet mind? I can’t shake the feeling that the meaning of life is indeed imbedded in the mystery of the mind, and the most intimate contact I have with a mind is with my own.

Dostoevsky suffered to show us a mirror to ourselves, to those sleepless nights inside us where the heart cries out to God for love, where we struggle with the big questions on the nature of man. And yet, sometimes, we glimpse the heartbeat of beauty and love and it keeps us going, whether or not it is a delusion.

If you like art, literature, madness and interesting people, you’ll love Lorette C. Luzajic’s books. Her first book is “The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos.” Her second is “Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life (Irreverent Ramblings from the End of the World.)” Her poetry and her collected blogs, musings, reviews, memoirs, notes, eulogies, requiems, interviews, profiles and more both devastating and hilarious romps through one woman’s wild mood swings- proving there’s life after death, even for manic depressives. “Think Courtney Love meets Margaret Atwood,” says Donnarama, Toronto’s premiere performance artist.

Visit the author’s link at Amazon to order your copies today!