Little Boy Lost: Henry Darger, 1892-1973

It would be unfortunate to be remembered as a child molester and a serial killer. And thanks to art world gossip and posthumous psychiatric diagnoses, that’s how outsider artist Henry Darger will always be known. But it’s highly unlikely the unassuming loner ever touched a living soul.

Indeed, it’s probable that Chicago’s Henry Darger was the total opposite, a champion of the forgotten children, but sensation-seekers have sullied his reputation without careful reflection. Henry’s legacy was an extraordinary treasure that was never meant for us: a FIFTEEN THOUSAND-page fantasy novel and hundreds of accompanying watercolour and collage illustrations. The reclusive Henry Darger had only one friend throughout his bleak, impoverished life as a hospital janitor. Though he worked hard and was unkind to no one, he asked to be left alone if approached. He spent his nights in his rooming house hovel, talking to himself. Outside of work, he was only seen at mass, daily, sometimes several times, or rifling through the neighbourhood garbage in search of junk.

In the early 1970s, he took ill and was moved to a Chicago poorhouse to die. Henry’s landlords found his astonishing inner world in that stuffy room, thousands and thousands of pages of writing and painting, including the massive single-spaced epic, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Besides this opus was a five thousand-page novel about a twister named Sweetie Pie, and another five thousand pager, an autobiography, partially fictional, about a savage and lonely childhood. There was a ten-year journal of the weather. There was all manner of ephemera, magazine and newspaper clippings, endless balls of string and empty Pepto Bismal bottles, and a library of childhood adventure books.

The Vivian Girls adventure story was obviously something of an obsession, and a private one, never shared. Coupled with some disturbingly violent scenes involving children, with matching illustrations, this strange oeuvre led to sweeping assumptions about the meaning of Henry’s obsessive nature. To add insult to injury, Canadian art historian and psychotherapist John M. MacGregor wrote a book – a trifling 720 pages, called Henry Darger In The Realms of The Unreal, insisting Darger was a murderer. MacGregor studied Darger’s text and illustration for many years, and even lived within the writer’s Chicago room. He then concluded with great certainty that “Darger’s psyche is arguably the mind of a serial killer made visible.” He writes, “Posed on the edge of violent and irrational sadistic and murderous activity… Whether or not they were acted upon, these are the ongoing fantasies of a serial killer.” The therapist stated that in all his knowledge of art he had never encountered anything equal to “the defiant aesthetic of this monstrous vision, only in the psychopathology of the serial killer do we encounter such calm, such ordered madness.”

Because Darger collected snippets from the newspaper about injured, abused, missing, or murdered children, MacGregor assumed this fixation was indicative of pedophilic darkness. It’s possible instead that Henry was crushed by the violence against the helpless, considering himself one of the defenseless ones, or their protective force who did not do his job. Henry became very distraught over a the loss of a picture of one missing girl named Elsie, who inspired his entire Vivian Girls saga, whose murder

Elsie

remains unsolved. MacGregor goes so far as to suggest, ”the possibility that Darger committed the 1911 murder [of Elsie Paroubek…] should not be dismissed without examination.”

It may prove to be unfortunate that this writer’s sensationalism brought derision to the exquisite and innocent work of a deeply sad and isolated human being. Yes, there are watercolours depicting little girls being murdered by strange creatures, and scenes of battle. The epic is after all, about a battle between child slaves and evil forces, taking place on another planet. Perhaps the makers of Star Wars, the writers of the Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Lord of the Rings, David and Goliath, and all other good versus evil story writers are also sadistic pedophiles. I find it quite telling that Henry is written into his saga as a protector of the Vivian Girls, helping them battle dark forces. He was avenger of innocent children. He was crushed by violence against children, not the perpetrator of it.

The Vivian Girls story contains the usual fantasy elements: princess sisters, terrible overlords, unusual alien species called Bengigomeneans, strange planets, creatures who are half human and half alien, and a Christian children’s nation in battle with the evil regime of slavery imposed on children by the Glandelinians. Like his father, Henry was a Civil War buff, and many themes and illustrations take inspiration from this era.

Another work, Crazy House: Further Adventures in Chicago, is a ten thousand page handwritten novel about the Vivian Girls and their secret brother, Penrod, who investigate the disappearance and murder of children inside a house. The story line merges two childhood classic themes- mystery detection a la Nancy Drew, and the haunted house with a mind of its own. The Vivian Girls exorcise the rooms of the house until it is clean and safe.

But was Henry’s writing any good? Of course that’s open to individual interpretation, and I have certainly read very little of the 35 thousand page legacy. What I have read is strange, riveting, sweeping, ebullient, disturbing, dreamy, astonishing prose, riddled with more adjectives and adverbs than most English teachers would accept. I would say it’s marvelous, expansive, stuff. Though the themes and images are clearly inspired by the limited world around him, along with his interior experience, it is work of an incredibly original imagination.

As for his paintings, they are absolutely transfixing- sweeping tableaus in soft palettes, childish yet sophisticated, beautiful and tender, yet disturbing. Importantly, for the world of ‘outsider art,’ Henry was purely self-taught. He experimented with drawing, painting, collaging, and layering methods, solving his technical difficulties quite imaginatively. He devised systems of tracing and repetition, and he cut images from books or magazines and practiced their forms with his pencils. Sometimes the work has a primitive, simplistic feel to it, but along the way a confidence and mastery developed into his own style, totally distinctive, and completely recognizable to the audience- the audience he never intended to have. Jessica Yu’s 2004 documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, is a particularly exquisite tribute to Henry’s work, both narrative and visual.

It must be mentioned that the so-called slasher material accounted for about one percent of the entire oeuvre. The rest was occupied with the various adventures of the characters, with unusual alien creatures, with illustrations of buoyant and vivid fairy-type critters, with pretty wings and flowers and dragon tales and scales and rainbows. His work is obviously a classic contrast of innocence versus evil, as are almost all good children’s stories. Certainly, it’s disturbing to lay eyes on a scene wherein a child is being strangled by a creature or by a nun. It was also disturbing to look at Goya’s work of Saturn eating his Children. I would also concede that scenes of epic crusades or torture, coupled with themes of innocence and punishment are staples of Roman Catholic mythology and art, and Henry absorbed Catholic theology and imagery for his entire lifetime.

Now, much has been made of the fact that many of the children are naked, and even weirder, that the little girls have penises. We’re not talking about intricate depictions of genitalia here, but crude sketching. What kind of sick mind would place a penis on girl children in his illustrations?

An innocent one. Darger was very likely so isolated from life experience that he may never have seen a girl or woman naked, a suggestion reasonably put forth by his landlady. There are no sexual acts taking place in the depictions- just occasionally naked kids frolicking.

Everyone is welcome to their opinion, of course, and here is mine: the diddler and the psychopath walk among us. It’s far more likely that your brother or uncle is a child molester than eccentrics like Henry Darger.

But wasn’t Henry just an ordinary man, also, someone’s brother or uncle?

Well, yes, and also, no. He was deeply troubled, eternally isolated, and though obviously intelligent, he did not cope in normal relationships with adults. Nor did he hang around with children. He was alone. He had one friend, once, whom he talked with in the park on occasion, and he liked his landlord’s dog. Though he was functional enough to attend mass services and show up for his custodial jobs, he was hardly the type of man with enough emotional intelligence to get ahead. He tried to adopt a child, but like most single men, impoverished workers, and mentally unstable individuals, he was ineligible.

The question remains, of course, why his entire inner obsession was centred on children. It’s easy to attribute a sexual drive to this strange focus, but there is a rather illuminating alternative hypothesis.

First off, though Henry evidently wasn’t retarded- he required some intelligence to write a beautifully readable and interesting fifteen thousand-page epic- it’s clear he never really developed into an adult thinker. He occupied the world of his imagination the way a child does, lived in it every day, lived for it. He read incessantly, mostly kid’s adventure novels and fantasies. And I believe he had no trust in adults, believing them to be evil at worst and frightening at best. We can speculate but not know for certain what type of psychiatric diagnoses, if any, Henry would have: he spent a great deal of time talking to himself, often in various voices, and making strange noises with his mouth- the latter from childhood forward. This may or may not represent hallucinations and delusions, and Tourette’s Syndrome or something similar. That he recoiled at all companionship except canine, may well indicate mild autism or the similar Asperger’s Syndrome.

The answers to the conundrum lie firmly in Henry’s unfortunate childhood. He was born into the most destitute circumstances, at home in Chicago, in April of 1892. When he was four years old, his mother Rose died giving birth to Henry’s nameless sister, who was put up for adoption. Henry lived with his father, a cripple, whom Henry wrote of nostalgically as being very kind. But the boy was orphaned at the age of eight when Dad was taken to the Little Sisters of the Poor to await death. This very poorhouse is where Henry himself would later die.

Henry was put into a Catholic children’s home, but several years later was farmed out again to a centre for the ‘feeble minded’- a children’s lunatic asylum. Because Henry made “funny noises” and acted oddly, he was considered insane, despite showing fair intelligence in his studies. There is some evidence that the actual diagnosis from those wonderfully wholesome Catholics was ‘self-abuse.’ Let’s send every twelve-year old boy who plays with himself to the nuthouse and see what happens.

Though Henry said he had some good times in his childhood homes, asylum life was filled with hard labour and torturous punishment. He attempted repeatedly to escape, which he did by age sixteen. He walked from the asylum in Lincoln, Illinois, back to Chicago, and on the way witnessed a massive tornado which may have provided inspiration for the hurricane Sweetie Pie book.

He took menial work as a custodian in a hospital, the type of work he held until the end. The only interruption in this monotonous routine was a brief service early on in the army during WW1. All evidence points to the probability that during his service, he never left the United States.

Henry had one friend in his lifetime, named William Shloder, with whom he formed the “Children’s Protection Society,” a two-man operation that met for conversation in the park. The Society’s hopes were to run an adoption ring to fit neglected and abused children into loving homes, but this was of course, unrealistic as neither man was a social worker or citizen of power. Shloder moved away but the pair wrote letters until he died in 1959.

Though the details are muddled and unclear, to me it’s obvious that the fodder for Henry’s imaginative works comes not from a dark desire to hurt kiddies, but from the position of hurt, defenseless, abandoned child himself. If Henry escaped torture, abuse, and sexual abuse in the various homes and asylums he lived in, he was very nearly the only one who did. Indeed, the asylum he stayed in was investigated for child abuse, and it was the norm in orphanages to punish children severely.

Clearly, scenes depicting adults like nuns strangling children shows what Henry witnessed or feared in these circumstances. Because he was an orphan himself, who had lost his little sister and could not adopt a child in return, his work focused on vigilant defense of innocents against the dark forces of adulthood. That Henry collected new items about hurt children was because he somehow believed he could protect them with his heart, that he could give them the Vivian Girls world where all abandoned children banded together to conquer the forces of darkness. The types of scenes he depicted and wrote about reflect Catholic history, war, and children’s adventure epics. The gory parts of the fables are solidly in context of martyrdom, and gory art was the norm in Catholicism, where Henry spent his life.

There is no way ‘to be sure’ about Henry, but examining the full body of his astonishing and beautiful imagery and stories, not just the battle scenes, gives a clearer picture. Henry’s imagination was obviously a strategy of self-protection and healing from abandonment and abuse and loss. Sure, it is possible that he fantasized about little children- so may have Charles Dickens, who wrote about poor kids, too, and so may have the man next door. More likely, Henry is what he said he was: a helpless child himself who pretended he could protect himself and others, avenge lost innocence. He loved the scattered, maligned, lost, abused children because he was one of them.

It’s fair to note that Henry’s landlords, the couple who knew him better than anyone else, find no reason whatsoever to question his innocence. They consider his work beautiful, and tragic.

Now Henry’s remarkable paintings fetch millions of dollars and endless psychiatric diagnoses, but it seems voyeuristic to even study their beauty and horror. If Henry had intended to share his work with others, he would have. But this world was something he created for survival, a thing of beauty with battles he could win. Indeed, Henry was so private in his lifetime that only three pictures of him exist.

He died alone in 1973 and is buried, fittingly, in All Saints Cemetery, with a headstone that reads “Artist- Protector of Children.”

Lorette C. Luzajic writes from Toronto. She writes a column about spices and other food features for Gremolata.com, and has appeared in magazines and journals from Adbusters to The Fiddlehead to I Love Cats to Style Republic. But her favourite task is profiling interesting people. She writes a spin-off of this blog, called Fascinating Writers, for Bookslut.com.

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A Tremendous Blasphemy: the life of John Calvin, 1509-1564

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

Fittingly, it was Madonna who revived Christ’s teachings, 2000 years later during her Confessions concert tour, the quote emblazoned in lights above her stage.

Few churches, if any, have seemingly even heard or read the words of their King, or they have dismissed them outright. While some individual Christians have tried to adhere to Jesus’ commands of love and peace, the institutions and the men who run them have more blood on their hands then Pontius Pilate.

Indeed, we vastly understate the atrocities of both the Roman Catholic churches and the Protestant Reforms. The history of the faith’s penchant for headhunting, rape, torture, murder, and superstition should be core curriculum in all Sunday Schools and remembered from every pulpit.

I wanted to write about John Calvin, the great theologian for whom my brother is named. My entire childhood faith and family life is constructed from his interpretations of the Bible. I understood he brought remarkable reforms to the church, influencing the eventuality of the personal Bible, removing some of the power of the Pope or priest and giving it back to God, and giving priests the right to marry and uphold family life. Vaguely, I thought there was also something about abolishing slavery. I knew from the enthusiastic lessons in Sunday School that Calvin was so inspired to do the work of God that he desired no money for his work- he hungered and thirsted after righteousness, not gold. When he was sick, he did not stop his work, but was carried to the pulpit.

Eager to learn more about the Godly reformer, I read The Godly Life of John Calvin by Rev. Dr. Francis Nigel Lee. I learned how this 16th century figure preached 200 sermons a year, 200 additional Bible studies, and left us with 59 volumes of theology. Fascinated by how fearlessly Calvin spoke against the tenets of the Catholic church he disagreed with, and by his stunning humility, asking to be buried in an unmarked grave, I read on.

Oh.

I’m ashamed at how little I knew of this influential historical personage. For all of my voracious readings in psychology, feminism, theology, and history, the facts about this hate spewing mass murderer had eluded me.

Jean Cauvin was a prodigy scholar born in France to a deeply Catholic family in 1509, and his mother died a few years after his birth. His father, Gerard, was left with three sons, and he wanted all three to be priests. Jean, or John, had tremendous aptitude for academics early on, and began to study theology before he reached his teens. He began attending college by age 14, supported by an influential family friend who saw his potential. He studied Latin and philosophy, among other things. Then, at his father’s change of heart, John switched to law and studied some Greek as well. He earned the highest law degree possible.

In his late teens, he saw holes in the Roman Catholic faith and was reformed. “God by a sudden conversion subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one at my early period of life,” he said.

In the early 1530s, Calvin had an opportunity to share some of his theological opinions, and a dear friend gave a speech that suggested the need for reform and renewal of the church. This friend, named Cop, was called a heretic and forced to flee Paris. Somehow, Calvin was implicated also, and went into hiding. Both ended up in Basel, where the fledgling reform movement was underway.

Calvin served as secretary for a princess, but in 1536, with all the wisdom of 27 years, he published Institutes of the Christian Religion, expressing his interpretations of Biblical doctrine and of the reform movement at large. The book had tremendous influence then, as it still does today, a bulwark of the faith. Not everyone thought so, however, and heretics were given a timeline in which to reconcile with Catholicism.

Some unrepentant Reformed, Calvin among them, fled to Strasbourg. A detour in his travel landed him in Geneva, Switzerland. A fellow reformed begged him to stay there and deliver Biblical lectures. By 1937, Calvin was officially a pastor.

Calvin distributed theological treatises that dictated how churches should be, with detailed instruction on the frequency of the Lord’s Supper, formerly ‘mass’, liturgy, marriage laws, and the reasons and need for excommunication. Over a major dispute concerning whether communion should be served with leavened or unleavened bread, Calvin was exiled from Geneva. Penniless, he traveled on, until he was taken as a minister in Strasbourg, where he attained a citizenship, expecting to stay for life. During the next several years, he wrote many more books of doctrine.

His colleagues urged him to marry, and he became engaged to the daughter of a noble family. He backed out of that arrangement to marry a widow named Idelette. All the while, he wrote, and his work garnered the attention of the council in Geneva, who realized they needed him back to continue their reforms. He felt the Lord’s call and was officially escorted into the city in a wagon.

Idelette gave birth to three children, all of who died in infancy, and she followed in 1542, leaving Calvin heartbroken. However, during this time, his treatises were increasingly influential on the Geneva church, council, and government. Though Calvin’s popularity and authority went up and down, both celebrated by reformers and contested by his adversaries, Calvin became widely recognized then and still today as the great defender of the faith. When he died in 1564, at his request he was buried in an unmarked grave. Just as Calvin had learned from the great Luther, Calvin’s friend and disciple John Knox carried his work throughout Europe and beyond: Calvinism was born.

Add or subtract some dense details on ‘reform’- the revolutionary ideas Calvin had to improve the church and demand accountability for its excesses, and that’s the story we learned in Sunday School, repeated anywhere Protestant sects proudly worship.

Except the story left out a few things: Calvin’s malicious hatred of women, his bloodthirsty violence, his vandalism, his culpability in thousands of murders, his absurd superstitions, his self-imposed holiness, and his sick obsessions. Many biographers tactfully gloss over the facts, mentioning them in an understated way, careful not to draw too much attention. Many omit them entirely, and still others, like my childhood churches, blame the atrocities on the Catholics.

Where to begin? The ocean of abomination is so vast I nearly drowned in it while researching what I thought was going to be an inspiring story about faith. Instead, I discovered a vicious dictator who wielded his authority to commit endless torture and murder.

Calvin established a theocracy in Geneva, in which he acted as dictator, wielding tremendous authority with various councils and committees. Under his instruction, said committees banished rosaries and other Catholic trinketry, exiled Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and nonbelievers, forbade dancing, card games, theatre, luxurious clothing, anything he considered to be witchcraft, and even dictated the names allowed to be given to children (no saint’s names, nothing not in the Bible.) The press was censored, and no one was allowed to speak ill or question Calvin’s doctrines. Taverns and all entertainments were forbidden. Church attendance was mandatory. Punishments for these offenses included fines, torture, exile, and death. Children who were disobedient were sometimes hung from the gallows by their armpits or feet as warnings. Some children were also executed. Sometimes the decapitated heads of those Calvin had condemned were paraded victoriously through the streets to warn others.

While apologists of Calvin state that his influence was ‘minimal,’ let’s note that Calvin himself had a law voted that anyone who questioned his reforms be executed. Those who breached his doctrine were indeed punished or condemned. Most famously was his personal friend, Servetus, who questioned the trinity. “For if he [Michael Servetus] came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive,” Calvin expressed. And lo and behold, Servetus was sentenced to death. Reportedly, he asked that the execution be by sword, so merciful was he, but he reportedly build the pyre himself and watched gleefully as Servetus screamed and begged God for mercy, enjoying the spectacle for several hours.

In addition to damning the living, one of Calvin’s reforms damns also their souls to eternal hellfire. The predestination theory which he espoused so fervently, and which contradicts Christ’s invitation that all may follow, declares: “God preordained…a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation.”

And then there was Calvin’s favourite scripture, which he took it upon himself not only to interpret literally, but to carry out personally: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Of note is the fact that the early church condemned witch hysteria. Synod famously said, “A Christian who believes that there is a vampire in the world, that is to say, a witch, is to be anathematized; whoever lays that reputation upon a living being shall not be received into the Church until he revokes with his own voice the crime that he has committed.”

Embarrassingly, I bought the Calvinist rhetoric about the massacre hook, line and sinker: that the near genocide of women over centuries was a crime of the Roman Catholic church alone, something Protestants moved to reform. But upon delving into the issue, was horrified to discover that Calvinists were responsible for half of the numbers.

Indeed, every member of that unholy trinity of Protestant reform- Luther, Calvin, and Knox- were full advocates of the witch hunt. They believed that anyone who didn’t believe in witchcraft went directly against God’s word. Calvin believed the stories of his sick predecessors- that women made pacts with the devil, had sex with him and bore his children, and that they were shape shifters who could turn into animals. These women, and a few men, were ruled by lust for Satan and his demons. Proof of their sorcery was a bad crop, a storm, a disease, an implied adultery, a difficult birth, an easy birth, knowledge of herbal medicine, financially independent women, whores, the elderly, women with pets, those who reversed Biblical symbols, or any implication of insistence at equality with men. The last legal execution of a witch took place in 1722- an elderly woman who had cleverly managed to turn her daughter into a pony. As many as a quarter of sorcerers burned were men, many homosexuals. The Puritans took their blasphemous legacy to the New World, where the sad saga of Salem began.

The Good Book

There’s no need to diminish Calvin’s responsibility for the thousands of murders carried out at his bequest, or in his name: he was not at all ashamed and said, “The Bible teaches us that there are witches and they must be slain. This law of God is a universal law.”

Most witch burnings took place in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Countries where the Catholic Church was strongest- Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal tally very few of the victims of this gendercide. Interesting.

On a lesser scale than his thousands of murders, he publicly humiliated his brother’s wife for suspected adultery, insisting she apologize to him for making him look bad, and excommunicating her. He called menstruation a ‘foul disease’ and a ‘shameful thing.’ He abhorred the “pretend” chastity of nuns, claiming their sacrifice is “nothing before God, in comparison of that that he hath appointed, that is to say, that albeit it seem but a vile thing, and a matter of none account, for a woman to take pains about housewifery, to make clean her children when they be arrayed, to kill fleas, and other such like, although this be a thing despised, yea and such, that many will not vouchsafe to look upon it, yet are they sacrifices which GOD accepteth & receiveth, as if they were things of great price and honourable.” In this sermon, he condemned the few women who made a choice against man or children, the only choice women could make in that day to avoid their lot.

His view on wife battering was equally sick. In a letter to an abused woman who sought his advice, he wrote, “We have a special sympathy for poor women who are evilly and roughly treated by their husbands, because of the roughness and cruelty of the tyranny and captivity which is their lot. We do not find ourselves permitted by the Word of God, however, to advise a woman to leave her husband, except by force of necessity; and we do not understand this force to be operative when a husband behaves roughly and uses threats to his wife, nor even when he beats her, but when there is imminent peril to her life . We exhort her to bear with patience the cross which God has seen fit to place upon her; and meanwhile not to deviate from the duty which she has before God to please her husband, but to be faithful whatever happens.”

Though Protestants gloat over their very progressive difference over Catholics, their acceptance of contraception, Calvin himself was vehemently opposed to it. He believed that the popular withdrawal method, along with masturbation, were crimes akin to murder. A woman who protects herself from pregnancy cannot be forgiven.

“It is a horrible thing to pour out seed besides the intercourse of man and woman. Deliberately avoiding the intercourse, so that the seed drops on the ground, is doubly horrible. For this means that one quenches the hope of his family, and kills the son, which could be expected, before he is born. Moreover Onan thus has, as much as was in his power, tried to destroy a part of the human race. When a woman in some way drives away the seed out the womb, through aids, then this is rightly seen as an unforgivable crime,” Calvin explains in his Genesis commentary.

Calvin’s abject hatred of women is a tradition still celebrated, cloaked or straight up, in today’s churches. Thinking men like the Rev. William Einwechter are writing sermons today in this vein: “The task of reconstructing the family according to God’s Word will also require the church to faithfully teach what the Bible says concerning the family, and, in many cases, to alter the structure of their church and ministry (which has also been feminized) to support the family rather than to undermine it. It will require pastors and elders who respect the covenantal institution of the family, and who will stop lording it over the family and persecuting the man who seeks to de-feminize his own family. It will demand pastors and elders who are an example to the flock by de-feminizing their own homes. And it will take teachers and preachers with the courage and conviction of John Knox and John Calvin to expose the poisonous lies of feminist dogma and to declare and defend the biblical pattern for the family from the pulpit.”

He conveniently forgets to mention what the biblical pattern for family life is like- widely varied, including all kinds of incest, slave girl abuse, polygamy, concubines, and more. If he wishes to have the conviction of his heroes, the two deadly Johns, he’d better forget all of Christ’s teachings about love and tenderness and start building the pyre.

Let it also be mentioned that there is considerable speculation that the reason for Calvin’s excommunication from the Catholic church was something other than the mysterious association he had with the university friend’s speech: the crime of sodomy. Reportedly in 1551 the archives of Noyon, Calvin’s birthplace, recorded that he was condemned on that ground. He begged for clemency from death which the law demanded and received an order for exile. The records weren’t the only ones to show this long-forgotten tidbit: a rival and ‘heretic’, the Catholic Bolsec, wrote about the incident, claiming that Calvin’s alleged walk on the wild side was not a thing of the past. Bolsec claimed that in addition to throwing himself forcefully on any woman who walked by, he also engaged frequently in homosexual liaisons. To be fair, Bolsec’s words, though interesting, cannot in and of themselves be taken as proof of this possibility, for rivals often wrote about their colleagues in a defamatory way. Nonetheless, neither is that reason to completely dismiss Bolsec’s observations. Bolsec also wrote that Calvin was tedious and malicious and hung up on his own words.

Perhaps vandalism and thievery pale in comparison to the grave offense of murder. Nonetheless, I was devastated to learn that Calvin was behind the mass destruction of endless priceless art and artifacts. I don’t give a flying fuck if he thought paintings of saints were the spawn of the devil- would Christ have gone in to nunneries smashing stained glass windows, burning musical instruments and churches? (And don’t tell me it’s wrong to use the f word but it’s not wrong to destroy priceless historic artifacts, sacred objects, and lives.)

The Calvinists plundered and pillaged anywhere they saw Catholic rituals, burning statues and paintings they deemed ‘idolatry,’ desecrating pictures of even Christ with spit and worse, and destroying them. They danced around their bonfires- the deadly offense of dancing did not apply here. In Montauban, they dragged the Poor Clare nuns out into the mob and exposed them, partially naked, hurling insults and yelling at them to find a husband. That they were serving God instead of men was something these savages could not tolerate. Priests and nuns were scourged with whips. Graveyards were desecrated.

Shame on all of us.

All people capable of moral thinking will be horrified that our churches are built on the blood of witches instead of the blood of Christ. ‘Thou shalt not kill’ is obvious, and not open to interpretation. That said, apologists for Calvin defend him on two key points- note that neither defense was for the man’s innocence! One, that he was not the actual hangman, and hence not responsible for the torment and murder, even though he ordered many of them. Two, that we have to understand the larger historical context. Point A is utter rubbish: far too transparent to flatter with a retort.

Point number two does deserve some consideration, because yes, we must look at historical context of any situation. That does not, however, alter absolute morality. Yes, witches were burned left and right, and bloodthirsty chaos ruled all of Europe. One could say death was in vogue, and the whole of Europe was a sordid cesspool, an absolute bloodbath. But does collective guilt exonerate an individual of personal culpability? Considering Protestant Christianity’s debt in doctrine to Calvin, it’s too easy to ignore or reject his thirst for blood as a sign of the times.

Bullshit. The obvious sorrow here is that no church leader has ever actually been sent by God, but that the flocks, still fighting one another, and still fighting against other religions, have all been deluded by the deception of those who run our churches, complicit in covering up these crimes of history.

“Everybody’s doing it” isn’t going to fly here. Today the church is still obsessed with demonic abominations- such horrific offenses as a man loving a man, or a woman expecting equal air time at the pulpit. Far lesser sins do not qualify for the ‘everyone else is’ get- out- of -jail -free card. Everybody’s cheating on his wife. Everybody’s taking drugs. Everybody’s stealing from work. Everybody’s experimenting with orgies. I doubt the preacher would accept this statement from a parishioner, but yet he excuses the bloody legacy of John Calvin on the same ground.

It was a capital crime to dance or to masturbate under John Calvin’s veritable autocracy. Birth control was unpardonable. Yet the harrowing crimes he committed go uncontested, and he is heralded as a great leader and a godly man who lived his life for the Lord alone. Perhaps if he had repented of his sins, we could at least deem him human instead of demon. But he gloated gleefully over the torture and murder of people guilty of absolutely nothing.

John Calvin said himself, “There is little difference between manslaughter and the conduct of one who is not concerned about relief for another person in distress.” Let him be judged by God according to his own words.

Two thousand years ago there was a man who spoke for the poor, the sick, the lonely, the whores, the children, the duped, the frightened, the hopeless. He spoke against judgement, lying, violence, abuse, war, greed, power, torture, hypocrisy, corruption, and murder.

He said “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” No one was listening.

Lorette C. Luzajic writes about people, food, spices, pets, poetry and much more, but her favourite task of all is writing about interesting people. Visit her spin-off column, Fascinating Writers, at Bookslut.com.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

For Whom the Bell Tinkles: the Hemingway Legacy of Death, Dresses, and Madness

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Woman

We all know how it ended — the grand finale, the big bang, Ernest Hemingway’s teeth and hair stuck to the walls, his splattered brains dripping from the ceiling onto the floor.

Though his widow made a half-hearted attempt to give us the ol’ gun cleaning accident story, there was no fooling anyone. Indeed, not a soul in the world expected him to go any other way…

Read the latest installment in Fascinating Writers, at Book Slut:

http://www.bookslut.com/fascinating_writers/2008_12_013787.php

Lorette C. Luzajic lives in Toronto in her library with her cats. She loves to write about interesting people most of all, but she has two other blogs and writes regularly about food for Gremolata.com. She used to edit an arts magazine called The Idea Factory: an exquisite wheneverly. She is also a mixed-media collagist who shows her work around Toronto. And her poetry has been published in hundreds of journals and little mags.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

Stranger Than Fiction: Poor Little Rich Girl Danielle Steel

The girl lurks furtively outside the building, looking first one way and then another. Satisfied that the coast is clear, she opens the side door and goes in. Within a few seconds, she emerges back into the daylight, clutching something against her body, trying to look inconspicuous as she boots across during a lull in traffic. She hurries down a side street and disappears.

Well, sure, that might have been a scene from either Nine and a Half Weeks or from Traffic, but it was just me, stealing in and out of the library as fast as I could. I didn’t want to be caught dead with this book. I’m not averse to fluffy reading and own up to a sick addiction to OK and Us Weekly. But this? I’ve only ever read a small handful of romance genre novels, and that was when my 14-year old sister and I came across a gold mine of five-cent harlequins at a yard sale in North Bay, 25 years ago. This one is at least a hardcover, giving it a slight distinction. But it’s covered in flowers with a necessarily-posed heroine, head back, hand against his rippling chest, eyes closed, hair cascading into a tumultuous heaven of roses and butterflies.

It’s just so not me.

From my lengthy career in various facets of bookselling, I know that the romance genre is the biggest-selling genre of all. Despite my disdain for formulaic drivel, we might all give a nod to this part of the industry, which basically earns the bread that lets obscure poets and dead professors give their two cents worth. It’s my job as a writer to be amusing, and to give my ‘professional opinion’ on literature, but my back went up every time some guy rolled his eyes and told his wife to save her money and her mind from ‘that crap.’

I wasn’t allowed, of course, to say it then, but I’ll say it now, to every man who hoisted up his armload of history and science tomes and frowned as he fetched his wife from the bodice ripper aisle. Not only is your wife’s particular blend of dissatisfaction and loneliness funding these intellectual borefests you’re taking home, but she’s not the one blowing the paycheque on porn. You can’t criticize a woman for her banal but literate fantasy life when you are obsessed with hardcore sluts in action, the biggest industry on earth. I don’t want to ever hear again about the academic wasteland of your wife’s reading habits until you actually finish the books without pictures you just bought.

The parallel is absolutely founded: fantasy is different for men and women consumers, but the romance novel and porn are really very much the same. Men fantasize about no-strings attached sexual variety, and women fantasize about someone who is passionate about them and who does not expect her to be a long-haired, perfectly pedicured hardbody with giant tits when he’s got back hair, poor hygiene, long toenails, and a seven-year old undershirt on.

Now that that’s off my chest, I have to go back into that very bookstore and confess to some poorly informed snobbery of my own. I mean, it seemed obvious and rumours often insidiously inform our consciousness as if they were fact, so I forgive myself, but here’s some shocking news: Danielle Steel writes her own books!

If you subscribed to that “Caroline Keene” idea that different authors flesh out formulaic plots like all those Grosset and Dunlap series books, or the Steel Farm theory that has Danielle, in skintight riding pants with a crop at her secretary’s back, admonishing some poor peasant from the community college writing course to pump them out, you’re not alone. The idea that Steel’s impossible numbers of annual books are ghost written by groups of underpaid slaves while Danielle parades around with her billions is widespread. And false.

You just can’t judge a book by its cover.

It’s my theory that this idea was born because the sheer quantity of production seemed impossible, juxtaposed with Danielle’s reclusive refusal to give press since her earlier years. That led unimpressed booksellers everywhere to assume there was little to say for Steel herself, when the truth is so much juicier.

And the truth is this: Danielle Steel, and that’s her real name, is a madwoman who has furiously penned 65 published novels all by herself. She is the most popular writer in the world. Her books are available in about two dozen languages in nearly fifty countries. She is focused, driven, and obsessed; the woman is a machine. She is an eccentric who never sleeps, and besides staying up half the night to pump out novel after novel, stuff she works on two to five at a time, she has also pumped out nine children and gone through a handful of husbands.

Barely taller than five feet, this diminutive beauty (if you like that slick, cheesy, ‘tastefully’ dripping money look), Danielle Steel is quite mad. Many romance novelists write their victim and rescue fantasies for escape or money. They fully understand that their art is unrealistic, the same way a speculative writer imagines a world out of this world. But Danielle Steel is writing life- her life.

Yep, that’s right- all those rich socialite girls with lonely childhoods and sickly dispositions falling in love with unlikely heroin addicted heroes….umm, yep, real life.

The reclusive Steel doesn’t give interviews because it’s all right there on the paper. Nor is she a fool- it’s the age of paparazzi and she gives them nothing. In a sense, as long as I’m writing this without her comments, it’s my own fantasy and the private life of Danielle Steel is still private.

Still, the known facts, assembled together, form a fascinating portrait. Anybody this interesting has my respect, and anyone with nine kids who finds time to write 65 books is a person who makes no excuses. Sure, all that loneliness and turmoil that I relate to quite strongly may have been easier to swallow with endless riches. Maybe. I’d like to know if a few million would have made my private sorrows less sorrowful, give that a test run. But I think I know the answer: perhaps, but only marginally.

A person whose real name is Danielle Steel is destined for larger than life joys and pains, for undeniable strength and fortitude, for pedigree dogs and stiletto shoes, for several distinctive eccentricities (like typing on her 1946 typewriter). She is also destined to be born into money, by parents who don’t pay her too much attention. Perhaps she is even born to be the one permanent fixture on the bestseller’s list, a list that she has seldom fallen from, even for a few weeks.

Steel was born a socialite, raised with decent education and manners. But her childhood was sick and lonely. She battled polio, and at the tender age of 16, ovarian cancer. At 18, she married a millionaire banker, but took off for San Francisco with their daughter when she felt unfulfilled. She had plenty of money, born into some, and some from alimony, so don’t worry how she looked after the baby. She was young and precocious, but loved her role of mother from the get-go, just like any good little romantic novel’s heroine should. She was writing magazine articles and press releases for a firm called Supergirls, and met up with a few encouraging publishers who were happy to look over her manuscripts, which she produced consistently. They encouraged her to write books.

One day she was doing some writing research at a hospital, when she fell in love with Danny, who was actually a prison inmate hospitalized there at the time. She surprised the convict by penning him letters daily, sometimes as many as 17! He was a big bad bank robber and she married him in the prison where he was incarcerated. (I never dreamed I would describe Canadian literati Susan Musgrave’s madcap love affair with infamous bank robber Stephen Reid, whom she married while he was incarcerated, as ‘in the tradition of Danielle Steel.”)

Though initially it was whirlwind passion- Danny crassly told Steel’s biographers of one occasion that he had to take her to the hospital because they had done it too much – the marriage was problematic to say the least. Danny bragged to the same biographers of cheating on Danielle with a bunch of hos and a pimp he’d met at the airport, all eager to get with him and give him free blow. (Looks like we’re now veering from bodice ripper to the other zipper- this reads like classic porn, but hey, maybe it really happened to this guy!) Though Danny maintains his innocence in the matter, he was later incarcerated again for rape. The day after their divorce was finalized, Danielle wed the next in line, Billy. She had suffered several miscarriages while with Danny, but was pregnant with Billy’s child when they wed. Oh, yeah, and Billy was a heroin addict.

Sound torrentially hot?- not so much. That child, Nick, who was credited to husband four- or was it five- later, was allegedly Billy’s kid, and he grew up a bipolar drug addict who committed suicide by heroin at age 19. Danielle had more kids than the von Trapps- nine in total- but that couldn’t salve her open wounds. She penned His Bright Light, a nonfiction memoir of Nick’s painful depressions, in hopes of contributing knowledge and cash to the cause. Steel stepped into the spotlight temporarily through advocacy of kids’ mental health and drug abuse awareness. And despite this harrowing setback for a devoted mother, she continued on doing what she does best: writing about broken hearts finding happiness. Oh, she did also open an art gallery and launch a perfume campaign- but let’s forgive that particular slice of fromage- everybody’s doing it.

And so, with this bare bones sketch, it becomes clear that this woman’s life is stranger than fiction, or at least just as strange. And as a woman with my own share of drama, marketable or otherwise, and with the desire to learn from the masters, it was high time I picked up a few of the legendary books and checked them out. It’s hard to comment when you haven’t read them, though I was happy to do so in the past. For shame.

And that brings us back to the book with the roses on the cover. That was Danielle’s first novel, Going Home. Hmm. “Gillian must choose between two very different men- one who is wise, gentle and loving: the other, unfaithful, the father of her unborn child, a man who sends her heart racing like no other…” reads the dust jacket blurb. I’m okay with the book, for what it is, but still don’t really get the big deal. Nonetheless, millions disagree and treasure these stories. So I proceed to Crossings, which she once described as her most powerful book. It’s also okay, for what it is. It’s not that I don’t read pulp for pleasure: I do, but my favourite ‘easy reads’ usually feature ghosts or serial killers.

In the end, I conclude that these stories just aren’t for me. My fantasies are not so grandiose and they are seldom about love- I fantasize the opposite, that perhaps love won’t swoop me up and complicate my life with its madness. I do tend to fall, like Danielle, for tortured convict/addict types, and I relate to her methods of exorcism of pain- I also write to siphon off the well of sorrow that piles up along with life’s twists and turns. I would guess that this is one reason why most writers write.

I might do well to take note of her methods, however, if I wish to make any serious money from my work: any businessperson need only look to “Steel Enterprises” for the magic trick- focus, and produce. Easier said then done, for most of us, but for Steel, easier done than said. I give Danielle her due, for focusing and producing are the missing elements in many not-yet-success stories. If I learn from her of persistence, I stand half a chance to make it.

But aside from the brazen business woman who pounds the typewriter until dawn, filling ashtrays as she lays open a soul that seems solid but is just as broken as everyone else’s and a whole lot more, I take away more than a lesson in business success. I take away the affirming of my rather more fluffy beliefs in the mystique of fate. Anne Rice’s vampires were born after her five year old died of leukemia, as a way or resurrecting the dead and explaining the bloodthirstiness of the beyond. Rice’s fate was clear: she lived in New Orleans, populated with vampires, she was driven to write, and fate came together to make stories only she could. Not every woman who lost a child became this. It was what Anne was born to be, however cruel, however merciful. And being full of ghosts and sexy bloodsuckers, I’m way more drawn to Rice’s exquisitely detailed sagas then I’ll ever be to Steelian romance novels.

But now I have a huge respect for Steel’s particular madness and the healing touch her syrup is for her minions who down it with hunger and thirst. She is a woman who lived wildly and met her fate head on, while I’m still terrified of mine, and what it might bring.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Visit her column Fascinating Writers at www.bookslut.com.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

Please support my blog by shopping for any books through this link:

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The Magnetic Hypnotist: Dr. Franz’s Animal Magnetism

Maybe you’ve had arthritis or insomnia or blinding migraines, and you’ve bought yourself a magnetic mattress. You’ve read the claims about the changes in the earth’s magnetic field, and maybe you didn’t totally buy into them, but thought a noninvasive attempt to alleviate pain couldn’t hurt anybody.

Maybe you’ve found it works… like a charm. Have you ever wondered why?

Magnetic therapy has been around for longer than you think, and though it has largely been disproved, there are still academies of complementary medicine today that adhere to faith in its efficacy. The roots of the unusual theory came from alchemist, astrologer and discoverer of zinc, Dr. Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim Paracelsus, in the 16th century. But it was his admirer Dr. Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer who devoted his life and work to magnet theories, believing our bodies were filled with energy fluids and disruption of this field was the cause of all disease.

Today animal magnetism has a different connotation. But animal magnetism was the system of Franz’s late 1700s theory and literally meant magnetic.

“Good health, he concluded, results when this inner magnetic fluid is in balance with magnetic fluid that fills the universe. If the equilibrium got out of whack, order could be restored by pulling the fluids back into alignment with magnets,” wrote Dr. David Weeks in Eccentrics: a Study of Sanity and Strangeness.

Weeks says Mesmer was motivated entirely by belief and not by greed, the apparent hallmark of a true mad scientist or eccentric over a fraud or charlatan. To be fair, reports on Franz’s charlatanism may be unfair and unfounded. One patient reportedly said, “If I owe the health I enjoy to an illusion, permit me to make use of an agent that does not exist and yet heals me.”

Though his work’s power may have been largely placebo, who are we to argue with success? Patients flocked to Paris for his treatments, which involved sitting around in hot tubs with iron powder in the water and strange iron bars around the edges. Relaxing music played in the background. The groups of patients, relaxed, were encouraged to talk and get emotional and ‘release’ negative energies freely. Sound familiar? The good doctor’s work may have been the root of a wide variety of natural healing practices today.

Indeed, Franz also invented a kind of television set, complete with antennas and metallic tidbits. By touching the ‘bucket’ as it was called, patients would become hysterical, pee their pants, or laugh uncontrollably. Franz attributed these effects to the restoring of normal magnetic balance, by releasing insanity, otherwise known as magnetic fluid disruptions. There was some scandal surrounding this unusual therapy, not because the hopeful inventor was obviously nutters, but because some women were reportedly so healed that they were having orgasms. Franz insisted the effects were from electromagnetic physics, which later did form the basis of television.

The Austrian physician was originally headed for the priesthood and switched to law and then medicine. Not reassuringly, his dissertation in med school was on ‘planetary medicine’ or ‘medical astrology,’ which was fashionable at the time.

Eager to become a doctor’s wife, a wealthy widow married Franz Mesmer upon his graduation. The unusual couple was a major supporter of the fine arts and cultures of the era. The courts refused a new opera by a child prodigy, ruffling Franz’s feathers, who then announced that he would host the entire opera performance in his own backyard. Hence, twelve-year-old Mozart’s first opera, Bastien und Bastienne, was staged clandestino.

Though Dr. Mesmer’s belief in special fluids running through the body did not differ monumentally from the Chinese concept of Chi, or indeed from the absolute reality of the lymphatic system, perhaps his belief that his own body was healer and channel enough was rightly suspect. He eventually dropped most of the magnet use in his practice and flitted around the clinic in a silky lilac robe waving a magic iron wand. He could conduct the cosmic flow with his own charisma.

Though the magnetic baths were popular society get-togethers, being swaddled with magnetic devices and then ingesting lumps of iron was a little bit harder for the public to swallow.

King Louis the Sixteenth of France launched a scientific investigation into the Franz phenomenon. His conclusion? The imaginative powers of suggestion, not the magnets, were responsible for the powerful healings many received.

Was there a whole lot of faking going on? Mesmer said no. “I am accused of being a common cheat, and those who believe in me are taunted as being fools. Such is apt to the fate of new truths.”

Indeed, the power of suggestion and the law of attraction are all the rage once more today, and given our earliest manuscripts- from Sumer to the scripture, it is a frequently effective technique.

Encouraging people to relax and then to talk, share, get emotional, and release anxieties, along with absorbing their practitioner’s verbal directives toward health, was the root of Dr. Franz Mesmer’s success. This led indirectly but surely to later research into therapy and dynamic psychiatry, and it was also the origin of hypnotism.

Was the good doctor a crackpot quack? No. His patients were simply spellbound, enthralled…mesmerized.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

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The Other Adolf: a remarkable madness

It’s doubtful that anyone could have predicted that Little Orphan Adolf was a genius. And if he hadn’t spent 35 years in a lunatic asylum, he would never had the time or inclination to create his oeuvre, a sprawling, chaotic 25 000 page fantasy autobiography in text, art, and music. His remarkable production has given us a permanent visual record into the inner workings of the mind.

Born into extreme poverty in Switzerland in 1864, Adolf Wolfli was orphaned by age nine. Up until then, his mother, a laundress, supported her seven boys, because their father was an alcoholic and convict who was in jail much of the time. Adolf helped out by working on various farms in exchange for food and shelter. His mother took ill and they were separated from each other as he continued to work to help the family. When she died, Adolf was passed around to state foster homes and subjected to physical and sexual abuse and degradation. He also continued to work as a child slave, especially in farming, and later took odd jobs in construction, gardening, and digging graves.

After he was rejected by a rich farmer’s daughter- or rather by her family, because of his low social stature- Adolf became depressed and began exhibiting peculiar behaviours. By now an adult, his landlords noted that strange and aggressive behaviour. He had a few minor legal mishaps for petty theft, but the real trouble started when he tried to lure a 14-year old girl into the woods with him. Her friends intervened, and he was not charged for the incident. Later that year, Wolfli was arrested for attempting to molest a five year old, and he was imprisoned for two years.

After jail, Wolfli spent three years as a labourer, impoverished and socially isolated. But in 1895, he was caught red-handed again, this time with a three-year-old girl. He was shipped to a mental institution, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. He spent the rest of his life- 35 years- in the Waldau asylum.

Wolfli was violent and psychotic and had vivid hallucinations and delusions, so he was placed into solitary confinement. Here, he tore apart his bedside table with his bare hands and used the wood to break the door of his cell and the window of the prison. However, he did not attempt to leave the institution, and was found catatonic in front of the open window.

He spent about four years in chronic agitation, but became increasingly calm toward 1899, when he began to draw. His creations astounded all around him. Made with the plain pencil given to the asylum inmates, on regular paper or anything he could find, Adolf’s psychotic energy now went into his drawing, which he did morning, noon and night. His work was frenzied, detailed, and ornate.

From here until cancer took his life some thirty years later, Wolfli only had violent outbursts if his outlet of creative expression was taken away. Given limited pencils, sometimes they ran out long before his next supply ration was due, but his caretakers soon noticed that a pencil was even better than medication at calming the patient. Sometimes his doctors, especially Dr. Walter Morgenthaler, who documented his life of art and madness in a well-known book, gave him coloured pencils. Wolfli was perfectly content to work furiously day in and day out at his mad drawings. If he ran out of art supplies, he would work with pencil stubs or lead fragments that might be only millimeters long.

The intricate doodles, which often featured strange birds, round faces, musical notes, numeric calculations, and intricate swirling patterns in very detailed, rhythmic borders, resembled mandalas or tribal art. They were completely psychedelic, and many believe his art reveals the hallucinations or visions in schizophrenia. He called himself a composer, and made decorative and bizarre musical notations that he called polkas and mazurkas. These symphonies were assumed to be symbolic ornament, though Wolfli would roll up paper to make a trumpet and somehow managed to play the makeshift instrument, creating pleasing, brass-band sounds. He had no musical training, so his fellow madmen and the doctors alike were all astonished. But even more amazing is that today we know his musical scores are real. Though they are in their own code, not the musical writing we are classically familiar with, they are mathematical, consistent, and form whole pieces. Sometimes, he uses words and phrases to accompany the music, all of it composed of sounds and rhythms that complement the whole. Some of his compositions have been recorded by those who have deciphered his made-up, but totally functional, musical language.

To say that Wolfli’s production was manic is the understatement of the century. He made about 1500 drawings and just as many collages, plus the 25 thousand-page autobiography, his intricate and exhausting oeuvre From Cradle to the Grave. An intriguing blend of musical score, poetry, fantasy, mythology, and action adventure, the 45 volumes chronicle Adolf’s imaginary inner life- from cradle to the grave. Something of The Little Prince meets Around the World in 80 Days, his autobiography replaces childhood abandonment and abuse with world travel and cosmic adventures, complete with mom and family. He refers to his own character as Doufi, a childhood nickname, Knight Adolf, Emperor Adolf, and Saint Adolf, all part of his so-called delusions of grandeur. Whenever his character meets chaos or death, he is always brought back to life to continue on the journey. And oh, what a long strange trip it’s been….

Thanks to Dr. Morgenthaler’s patient notes, and fascinating book, Madness and Art, Wolfli became the poster boy of outsider art, intriguing artist Jean Dubuffet or Art Brut, and inciting a movement of self-taught, insane, visionary art. While it is clear that the art of the insane is nothing new- hell, nearly all artists were insane- nonetheless, as a movement, Outsider Art has allowed us a deeper experience of society’s fringe. Wolfli’s genius was also beloved by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Sure, he was never really the Captain of the Almighty Giant Steamship or the Director of the Algebra and Geography Textbook Production Company, or the inventor of 160 inventions patented by the Russian Tsar- a few of thousands of guises throughout the autobiography. But the profound imagination at work, visionary and protective illusions that clearly guard his fragmented soul, shows a fascinating window into the mysterious mind. His savant qualities in composition, mathematics, and symmetry are simply adjuncts to his brilliant imaginative cosmology. Adolf’s fictive world illuminated his true self.

Lorette C. Luzajic writes from Toronto. She writes a column about spices and other food features for Gremolata.com, and has appeared in magazines and journals from Adbusters to The Fiddlehead to I Love Cats to Style Republic. But her favourite task is profiling interesting people. She writes a spin-off of this blog, called Fascinating Writers, for Bookslut.com.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

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