The Song of the Earth

by Hugh Nissenson

  I took a graphite 6B pencil from the top shelf of my locker. But had no paper. A pad of 19" × 24" parchment tracing paper, the kind I use for sketching, appeared on the bench beside me. Then the pencil vanished from my hand.

  I thought to myself, This is a dream! and woke up.

  From Jeanette Baker’s journal, June 6, 2052:

  Johnny’s made a pencil sketch of a Gaian guru from Omaha named Billy Lee Mookerjee who recently appeared to him in a dream.

  Johnny Baker to Mentor, June 6, 2052:

  Open a file on Billy Lee Mookerjee.

  From John Firth Baker’s computer file “BillyLee,” entry dated June 7, 2052:

  Gaian Consciousness

  By Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, during a record-breaking three-inch snowstorm on Dec. 3, 2020. My folks, Khadiram and Chandra, were poor Brahmin immigrants from West Bengal, who ran a Yoga school on Whey Street. They named me after my father’s American guru, Sri Billy Lee Bhairavi.

  Mother, in particular, was very religious. As an old-fashioned Indian womin, she worshiped the Goddess Parvati, who’s married to the God Siva and is the Hindu ideal of the devoted wife and mother. Mother lived up to that ideal.

  Portrait of Billy Lee Mookerjee, 2052, pencil on parchment

  My sister, Devi, is six years older than I. When I was about nine, Mother caught me peeking through the bathroom keyhole at Devi getting out of the shower. Mother, who spoke Bengali with me, said, “Once, as a boy, the God Ganesha tethered his skittish mare and whipped her on the neck with a knotted rope. Afterwards, Ganesha’s mother, the Goddess Parvati, showed him some fresh bloody welts on Her own neck, and explained: ‘All living femayles are part of Me and what you do to any one of them, you do to Me.’”

  I never looked at a naked womin again.

  The first ten summers of my life were the hottest ever recorded in the American West. And the winters were the driest. We were too poor to live in a keep. The dust storms gave Mother chronic bronchitis, which weakened her lungs and made her susceptible to a virulent new strain of bronchiolitis that broke out during the spring of 2027. Father couldn’t afford to buy her medicine.

  The day of her death, on February 3, she said, “Billy Lee, listen to me! Everybody in the world is crazy. Some are crazy for money, some for fame, others for power. You be crazy, my son, just for Her—our Divine Mother—She Who Is!”

  Now, I knew that the goddess takes innumerable forms, so I asked, “Which of Her forms should I worship, Mother?”

  Mother said, “She’ll let you know.”

  It didn’t happen. In the years to come, my soul cried out to the Divine Mother like a hungry kitten, but She never revealed Herself to me in any form. My soul starved.

  I won scholarships to the Phoenix Preparatory Academy and the Arizona School of Finance, where I graduated with a B.S. in accounting in 2041. I got a job at the Bank of China’s Phoenix branch and rented a small apartment for myself and my dad in Goldwater Keep. It was great to be out of the weather! I should have been happy but instead felt anxious and depressed.

  I spent my nights surfing the Net for a guru who could give me the answer to my question: “Which form of the Divine Mother should I worship?”

  Each guru pushed his or her favorite goddess. One answered, “Kali”; another, “Holy Mary”; a third, “Spirit-Sophia,” otherwise known as Shekhinah. I had a long talk with a Latino priestess of Cihuacoatl, the Serpent Womin.

  How to choose between them? I lost my appetite and couldn’t sleep. I thought about killing myself. Then, on the evening of April 21, 2044, I called the Gaian guru Srimaati Brianna Andrews and asked her my usual question: “Which form of the Divine Mother should I worship?”

  Srimaati Andrews said,

  I mother

  & devour life.

  I father forms

  that thrive and

  those that fade.

  I’m husband

  & wife,

  windpipe

  & knife.

  I’m the sheath

  that shields

  & rusts its blade,

  this patch of sunlight,

  that patch of shade.

  Then she asked me, “Who am I?”

  Right off the bat, I said, “Mother Earth.”

  “Well,” said Srimaati Andrews. “That’s your answer—Mother Earth, a.k.a. Gaia! She’s the one for you!”

  I cried for joy.

  All I knew at the time about Gaia was what I remembered from high school. I knew that she was the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. And that, at the end of the last century, her name was given to a scientific theory, the Gaia hypothesis, that says the planet Earth, a.k.a. Gaia, is alive.

  I wanted to know more. For $500, I enrolled in Srimaati Andrews’ teleseminar, Understanding Gaia, that met Wednesday evenings at seven for six weeks. Srimaati Andrews taught me that the Gaia theory is a fact. Gaia, the planet Earth, is the largest living organism in the solar system. Gaia’s atmosphere, oceans, climate, and crust function together as an open thermodynamic system regulated by feedback at a state kept comfortable for life by the behavior of living organisms.

  I learned that every humin, myself included, is a synergistic cell in Gaia’s evolving composite brain and reproductive system. We must reproduce Her kind by bringing other worlds to life.

  I understood Srimaati Andrews’ ideas intellectually, but that wasn’t enough for me. I yearned to walk on a lawn and feel in my bones that the grass under my feet is a patch of living tissue that lines the insides of the colossal being of which I too am part. In other words, I craved Gaian consciousness.

  I knew the only way to achieve that was to become one of Srimaati Andrews’ sheilas, a combination servant and disciple. Her eleven sheilas were bearded, big-titted she-hes.

  I stopped shaving and quit my job. My beard came in thick and fast. I borrowed $4500 from my uncle Abhayadatta and had a mastogenesis in an Acapulco sex reassignment clinic. My breasts began to swell. I bought a bra. On Earth Day 2047, I presented myself to Srimaati Andrews, hanging with two or three of her sheilas outside her ashram on Washington Street in Hoboken, New Jersey. I said, “Make me one of your sheilas, Srimaatiji, so I can gain Gaian Consciousness!”

  She sang,

  Think Gaia’s

  Thoughts,

  Feel both Her

  Joy and pain.

  Be part

  Of Her body,

  A portion

  Of Her brain.20

  I fell to the sidewalk and gained Gaian Consciousness. This happened to me in Hoboken, New Jersey, at 7:14 A.M. on Earth Day, April 22, 2047. It could also happen to you. Interested? Contact SriBilly-LeeMookerjee@Motherworld.com

  Johnny Baker to Mentor, June 12, 2052:

  Do Gaians believe in an afterlife?

  Mentor to Johnny Baker, June 12, 2052:

  Billy Lee Mookerjee writes, “Death is the necessary end for living humins who are but cells in the evolving combination nervous and reproductive system of our Motherworld. Death is the mother of evolution.”

  Anselmo Diaz

  The second Sunday morning in August, Johnny come by my Dodge Street squat in Omaha for a fast fuck. He stayed the afternoon. He called me “Daddy” and said, “Love me!”

  I went, “I do!”

  And I can’t forget that when he came, his sweat smelled sweet.

  Johnny was your typical teenager. He called farts “barking spiders” and picked his pimples. After lunch we smoked dope and listened to Hot Ice—I remember what album: The Face on the Barroom Floor. We talked about boys. Johnny brought the conversation around to Billy Lee Mookerjee. “Do you know him?” he asks me. “I wanna meet him.”

  Johnny was nervous about walking alone back to the subway stop on Gretchen Street because it borders the ghetto. So I walked there with him. The temperature was 107.

  “I feel faint,” says Johnny. “I can’t stand the heat.”

  I’m like, “So stay outta
the kitchen.”

  From then on Johnny and me called the world outside his keep “the kitchen.”

  Ben Shrapnel

  Johnny’s expression “the kitchen,” meaning the outdoors, outside a keep, caught on in his family, and then among his Cather Keep neighbors, like myself. After Johnny’s death, I popularized it among other keepies in my 2059 Keepsake article “Keepie Lingo.”

  Anselmo Diaz

  The temperature in the kitchen around Omaha that summer was in the nineties for thirty-one days. The heat kept Johnny at home till Halloween, but he called me once or twice a week to ask, “You love me?”

  “I do!” I says. “I do!”

  I never knew such a needy boy.

  John Firth Baker to Clorene Welles, September 22, 2052:

  I’m a tenth-grade student at Cather Keep High in Cather Keep, Nebraska. I’m writing a composition for my English class about your poem “The Song of the Earth.”

  You are my mother’s favorite living poet. She often quotes your poems to me. (The truth is, she suggested that I write you this letter.) She lent me her own precious bound copy of the first edition of your Collected Poems, one of the four printed books she owns. I dip into it every chance I get.

  I like “The Song of the Earth” best. I memorized it. How did you come to write it? I see where the Gaian guru Billy Lee Mookerjee quotes it in his essay “Gaian Consciousness.” Are you a Gaian? If not, do you mind that Gaians use your poem for religious purposes?

  Please answer me soon. My paper is due in two weeks. Thank you in advance for your help.

  Sincerely,

  P.S. I hope one day to become a professional visual artist. To prepare myself to earn a living when I grow up, I work every day after school as an apprentice hairstylist. You think it’s wise for an artist to make a living that way?

  Clorene Welles to John Firth Baker, September 26, 2052:

  Wrote “The Song of the Earth” between January & April 2021; was inspired by last words of 19-year-old Algerian Mina Bendjedda, who refused to sing country’s national anthem at 2020 political rally, Oran; she tore off her veil, told cop, “Wimin have no national anthems! We sing the song of the earth!”

  The cop shot her in the face.

  Began “Song” as elegy to Mina, but poem then took on life of its own—as poems often do; turned into something quite different.

  “Song” became my expression of immemorial & universal insight: life and death, creation and destruction are aspects of one process; notion many people have had over the years. Ancient Greeks, for example, worshiped Earth Mother, Gaia; wrote her sacred hymns, like the following, translated in 20th century by Apostolos N. Athanassakis:

  “Divine Earth, mother of men & the blessed gods,/You nourish all, you give all, you bring all to fruition, and you destroy all.”

  B.C. Greek hymn, my 2021 poem have same theme.

  Derived “Song’s” imagery and narrative technique from poem, “l’Heautontimoroumenos” (“The Self-Tormenter”) by Charles Baudelaire, which can be considered 19th-century French variation on Greek theme. Following verse most influenced me:

  Je suis la plaie et le couteau!

  Je suis le soufflet et la joue!

  Je suis les membres et la roue,

  Et la victime et la bourreau!

  (I am the wound & the knife!

  I am the blow & the cheek!

  I am the limbs & the wheel,

  the victim & the executioner!)21

  “Song” = modern American variation on immemorial theme.

  Even though planet Earth “narrates” my poem, I’m no Gaian; don’t for one minute believe our planet is living being, much less that our brains are its organs of self-consciousness and reproduction. Nevertheless, while writing poem I imagined how Earth would describe itself if it could: in that sense, Gaian ideas influenced me.

  Andrews’ popular vision songs owe a great deal to my poems.

  Bemused that Gaians use “Song” as mantra; wish I could collect royalties.

  Pleased though that nearly thirty years later, my poem strikes responsive chord in young people.

  What kind of visual artist are you? Fractalist? Manualist? Interactionist? Cooperatist? A little of each? None of the above?

  Anyway, I wish you every success in your career!

  Hope I’ve helped you on your paper.

  Sincerely yours,

  P.S. Yes, by all means become a hairdresser! Join the skilled working class! Supported myself as dental technician till retiring in 2039; nothing stimulates creative juices as much as a steady income. Let me remind you of my poem on subject.

  Poetry’s Potion:

  Money

  mixed with

  blood & honey.22

  John Firth Baker to Clorene Welles, September 26, 2052:

  I’m a Manualist. For some years now, I’ve been teaching myself to draw. I recently did this portrait in pencil of the Gaian guru Billy Lee Mookerjee as he appeared to me in a dream. Please accept it as a gift from me with all my thanks for your help and encouragement.

  Clorene Welles to John Firth Baker, September 28, 2052:

  Thanks for your drawing; will treasure it; you have talent.

  In a dream, you say? the drawing came to you in a dream? Spoken like a true artist! Dreams—our “nocturnal muse” (Proust)

  Stay in touch—with me and your dreams! Look me up if you’re ever in NYC!

  John Firth Baker to Clorene Welles, September 28, 2052:

  To tell you the truth I don’t come by my talent naturally, if you get my drift.

  Clorene Welles to Johnny Baker, September 29, 2052:

  I get your drift. Your secret’s safe with me.

  Polly Baker

  Jeanette boasted to me that Johnny got three letters from Clorene Welles. And though Jeanette tried to hide it, she was jealous that he gave Welles his drawing of Billy Lee Mookerjee. Jeanette felt that all of Johnny’s work belonged to her by right.

  From John Firth Baker’s English composition “My Favorite Poem: ‘The Song of the Earth,’ by Clorene Welles,” Tenth Grade, Cather Keep High School, October 6, 2052:

  Christianity teaches us that death came into the world because of our sins. As I understand Clorene Welles’ poem, “The Song of the Earth,” the poet believes that all creation is made up of both life and death and that each is an equal part of the whole. I think there’s a bitter truth in her idea, which I’m trying hard to accept.

  John Firth Baker to Frederick Rust Plowman, October 25, 2052 (unsent):

  Today was my 15th birthday. Mother baked me an imperial chocolate cake. Before I blew out the candles, I made a wish that someday we’d meet.

  Anselmo Diaz

  Johnny came back to the kitchen on Halloween, when the temperature in Omaha was in the mid-sixties. We crashed Billy Lee Mookerjee’s costume party at his Ames Avenue apartment. I went as a Fag Hag. Johnny, with a toy bow and arrow, was the naked boy god—what’s his name?—all painted gold.

  Billy Lee played host from a big chair in his roof garden. His costume was a knockout, but to this day, I don’t know who he was supposed to be.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  I’d gotten myself up as an androgynous tree-spirit, sort of Jack and Jill in the Green, or the King and Queen of the May.

  Anselmo Diaz

  Billy Lee was covered from the neck down with ivy leaves, sewed together to look like scales. His body was like the trunk of a tree overgrown with ivy—but a tree trunk with big boobs! His hands was smeared dark green. Over his head he wore a green mask carved from wood, the likes of which I never seen before in my life. It was a tree’s face, if you can imagine such a thing—a tree’s bearded face made out of leaves.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  My carved and painted mask, which cost me seventeen hundred bucks, was the work of my old friend Emma Torchlight. Emma, who in those days lived in Juno, came to Omaha for my party.

  From John Firth Baker’s interview in The Internat
ional Review of Manual Art:

  The mask knocked me out.

  Some guy at the party told me it’d been made by the Little Bo Peep sipping a glass of red wine at the bar. I asked the guy Little Bo Peep’s name, and he said, “Emma Torchlight.”

  Emma Torchlight! The Kwakwaka’wakw Carver! I knew all about Emma Torchlight from the ArtChannel show on her the previous spring. She was only eleven years older than me, but already famous!

  I stared at her work, the leafy, bearded face, painted different brilliant shades of green. My heart thumped. I suddenly understood the power that masks possessed long ago when they changed us into gods and demons.

  Then the god, or demon, in the mask gave me a knowing look.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  Eros smiled at me. Later I saw him at the bar, talking with Emma Torchlight.

  Anselmo Diaz

  Johnny left me in the lurch for some ginch at the bar. I thought, Fuck you, and went home alone.

  Emma Torchlight

  This tall gold Eros, naked except for red sandals, sidles up to me at the bar and goes, “Oh, Ms. Torchlight! I can’t tell you how much I admire your work.”

  I went, “You can tell me. Tell me!”

  Eros had a sweet laugh. He introduced himself and asked my inspiration for the mask I made Billy Lee. I told him I got the idea from a 13th-century wood carving of the Green Man in the choirstall of Poitiers cathedral.

  “Who’s the Green Man?” he asked.

  “An old, old god,” I said. “Much older than Jesus Christ, and one of Mother Earth’s many lovers.”

  “Are you a Gaian?” he asked me. I said, “Sometimes.”

  Then he said, “I want to draw your beautiful mask.”

  “Are you an artist?”

  He said, “I will be. Right now, I’m teaching myself to draw. Do you draw?”

  I said, “Every day.”

  He was like, “Someday I’ll carve a mask.”

  I thought to myself, Who is this kid?

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  Emma introduced me to Johnny, who said, “This is a dream come true, Sri Mookerjee.”

  And I said, “Call me Billy Lee.”

  Then he said, “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Billy Lee. I read ‘Gaian Consciousness’ last summer. I still think about it.”