The Song of the Earth

by Hugh Nissenson

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, October 11, 2055:

  Tonight Srimaanji took me to a service for Mamagon Gaia. She personifies the devouring aspect of our Motherworld, who eats us up alive. Mamagon Gaia is perpetually hungry and thirsty. Her rites are secret. I worshiped her.

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, October 13, 2055:

  For the last three nights, I’ve had the same nightmare. I’m climbing a mossy hill—more like a huge mound of earth—under a blue, cloudless sky. A stiff wind is blowing; I hear leaves rustling in the distance. The hill is much steeper than I thought. The moss underfoot is slippery. I have to watch my step. But instead, as I climb, I keep my eyes on the bright blue sky. I reach the top and stand still, legs apart.

  I dread looking at the ground beneath my feet. I know if I look down, I’ll see something horrible coming out of the earth. But I can’t help myself. Mother’s living face, covered with moss and dirt, stares up at me. But her eyes are no longer blue. They’ve turned greenish-brown, and she has a bloody nose. I wake up panting, in a cold sweat.

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, October 15, 2055:

  Last night my nightmare woke me at 3 A.M.

  When I was ten, Mother taught me to rid myself of a bad dream by drawing it. I know I will never in my life be free from this new nightmare until I draw it. I woke Srimaanji and told him I must do like Mother said and open my gift. He told me if I did that, I could no longer be his shiela. I said good-bye. He wept bitterly.

  Teddy Petrakis to Johnny Baker, October 16, 2055:

  I’m grateful you’ve split with Mookerjee. He’s nothing but a contemporary idolater. Gaia is his idol. Like all idolaters, he believes his idol is alive. Mookerjee’s so-called church is an ancient idolatrous iniquity in a 21st-century guise.

  Yet I’m also grateful to Mookerjee for awakening your religious fervor. I pray that you will now turn it to Christ.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  I’m only humin; Johnny’s open repudiation of our relationship was humiliating. Twice in my life now, I’d failed to keep a sheila.

  Clorene Welles to Irene Winter, October 26, 2055:

  My aged brain seems okay: no dizziness or blind spots in nearly a month; how’s your Dad’s palpitations? Better, I hope.

  “If only, when you hear old age approaching, you could bolt the door!”35

  What’s the word in Utah on America’s Prophet, Seer & Revelator, the great Gov. Koyle? Will the little prick run for Pres.? Ghastly thought.

  You came up in my conversation yesterday with eighteen-year-old Johnny Baker; bearded, bedraggled, appeared on my doorstep because I once wrote him: Look me up if you’re ever in NYC. I’m letting him stay with me awhile.

  Complex creature: she-he (keep this quiet):arsogenic metamorph/wannabe manual artist; 3 yrs. ago sent me a pencil sketch he made from a dream he had of his Gaian (now ex) guru, Billy Lee Mookerjee.

  Johnny’s the son (by artificial insemination) of your colleague, F.R. Plowman. He heard your Mars lecture last summer in Tokyo; couldn’t take his eyes off your beautiful face, which he wants to paint.

  Johnny arrived here from D.C., only $29.70 to his name; mother a recent suicide; says my poem “In Memoriam: Vita” is helpful to him in his grief.

  Katherine G. Jackson

  “In Memoriam: Vita”

  by Clorene Welles

  Grief and rage besiege me.

  I begrudge the world its joy,

  & crave its power to destroy.

  Saw your sister Saturday.

  She looks like death warmed over.

  We rubbed each other raw

  with the age-old questions:

  “What’s it all about?

  How do we bear it?”36

  Polly Baker to Johnny Baker, October 25, 2055:

  Happy Birthday!

  Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, October 25, 2055:

  Thanks. It’s a big one!

  I’ve left Srimaanji to fulfill Mother’s last wish for me and open my gift. Please send me my set of oil paints, which you’ll find on the top shelf of the hall closet, c/o Clorene Welles, Apartment 44A, Asgard Spire, NYC 10024-89.

  Polly Baker to Johnny Baker, October 27, 2055:

  Congratulations! Your oil paints are in the mail, along with assorted other art supplies I found in your old room—paper, pens, pencils, scratchboards, three steel etching needles, and Jeanette’s barber scissors. Use everything in good health!

  How are you fixed for cash? I’ve credited $1000 to your account as a birthday present. You have $21,071 coming to you from Jeanette’s Last Will and Testament, which will take another 6–8 mths to probate. Minus $1808 she owed me. In the meantime, against the $20,263 net amount, I’ll loan you $900 a month. You can’t live on that, of course, but it should help.

  Take care of yourself, Johnny. You’re all the family I have left.

  PS. Is that the poet Clorene Welles? Your old pen pal? She must be nearly 100. I read somewhere she’s very sick.

  Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, October 28, 2055:

  Thanks for the art supplies—and $, which is a godsend!!!

  My old pen pal, the poet, Clorene Welles, is ninety-two. She suffers from a wrinklie brain disease called “transient ischemic attacks.” It gives her dizzy spells and blind spots. She’s two years beyond the cutoff for her insurance to pay for a telemerized arterial replacement, so the disease will eventually kill her.

  Clorene’s got all her marbles. She hopes to write one more poem before she dies.

  I made a little scratchboard sketch of her this afternoon while she was taking a nap. I was happy to draw again. All I think about while drawing is the work at hand. Mother would be pleased.

  Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, November 1, 2055:

  Clorene introduced me to a 23-year-old visual artist named Nat Glogow. He’s a fractal symbolist, who doesn’t draw manually but, like me, is interested in integrating words and images. He does good work. Here’s something of his that Clorene bought for $1500.

  Portrait of Clorene Welles, 2055, scratchboard drawing

  Nat likes the sketch I made of Clorene sleeping. Our mutual passion for words and pictures made us immediate pals. We got high together. Told him the story of my life—everything. Have decided to be myself from now on—all that I am.

  Nat Glogow, A fractal symbol of the humin mind, 2055, digitally generated image. Collection Herbert Welles

  Nat Glogow

  So Johnny was a visual arsogenic metamorph! I said he was lucky to know for certain that he had talent. He confessed he was worried that he’d been given second-rate arsogenes.

  Johnny told me that his mother had committed suicide in October and that he suffered a recurrent nightmare about her. He said, “It’s driving me nuts.”

  We talked for hours. I told him I’m straight and he was like, “I’m sorry.”

  Johnny mentioned he needed a place to live. I offered to rent him a room in my studio on the ground floor of 112 Melville Canal for $1250 a month. He jumped at the chance.

  Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, November 9, 2055:

  The peeling walls of my new studio smell of mildew. At high tide, waves in the Melville Canal lap under the windows.

  Nat Glogow and I get along fine. He was born in Pocatello, Idaho, where his grandfather, who was a rabbi, was murdered by skinheads during the exoduster riots of 2018. Nat tells Jewish jokes: Mr. to Mrs. Goldberg, “If one of us dies, I’m not getting married again.”

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, November 10, 2055:

  Had the nightmare again last night. Today I tried and failed to paint Mother’s face coming up at me out of the ground.

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

  I worked a week without making any progress. My painting technique was nil. I didn’t know how to create the illusion of volume or depth on a two-dimensional surface. I knew nothing about perspective. What to do? I was desperate.

  One morning I ha
ppened to think of Emma Torchlight, who got me thinking of masks. Then I thought: Why not use a mask instead of the painted image of a face? I pictured a papier mache mask of the face in my nightmare, pasted face up on a canvas.

  That was the moment I conceived The Ground Beneath My Feet (Plate 1), which took me about a month to make. I stumbled on a new style. I introduced color, texture, and sculpted relief into my work.

  Johnny Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, December 12, 2055:

  Dear Srimaanji,

  I conquered my nightmare about Mother by capturing it in this image called The Ground Beneath My Feet.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee to Johnny Baker, December 13, 2055:

  Would like to buy it. Will you take $2000?

  Arriving NYC Saturday, 9:45 A.M., staying rectory First Church of Gaia, High Bridge Island Park. Can you have dinner with me 8 P.M. that night at the Imperial? We’ll celebrate the sale.

  Johnny Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, December 13, 2055:

  Thank you for buying The Ground Beneath My Feet.

  I need the money. I earn my a living at night by hustling—“sniggling the gig,” as it’s called in NYC slang.

  You’re on for dinner. The Imperial is imperial but will cost you a bundle!

  Come here 11 A.M. Sunday for brunch. My roommate Nat and I are having a few people over—Clorene, Irene Winters, and Alex, who’s still at Juilliard. Teddy can’t make it. He just got accepted at Harvard Divinity School for an M.A. in theology. He’s spending Xmas in flooded New Orleans at the Episcopal Home for the Indigent Aged.

  Polly Baker to Johnny Baker, December 17, 2055:

  This locket, which belonged to Jeanette, holds a lock of your baby hair. I came across it going through her things the other day—stuff I’d put away right after her death and didn’t have the heart to examine till recently.

  Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, December 17, 2055:

  Eerie. I recently read about the locket in Mother’s journal (Feb. 8, 2040). Mother’s words, her locket, and her barber scissors are all that’s left of her to me.

  Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee

  The Imperial was expensive, but the food only so-so. Afterwards, Johnny and I walked north along the East End Canal. He begged me to take him back to the rectory and make love to her, but I refused.

  Sunday morning at the brunch, I bought The Ground Beneath My Feet. I felt I had taken possession of a tangible Gaian vision.

  Nat Glogow

  Johnny was in a funk at the brunch. He got stoned. I overheard him say to himself, “Poor Mother!”

  Alex Thomas jr.

  When I got home, I couldn’t get Johnny’s sad face outta my mind. He made me think of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” The melody, in E-flat minor, kept going through my head. Next morning, I began work on my choral piece in four parts, entitled True Believer, which celebrates Afro-American spirituality.

  Teddy Petrakis to Johnny Baker, December 24, 2055:

  Merry Christmas from New Orleans, which is suffering its worst flood in twelve years. Salt water from the Gulf 110 miles away has backed up the Mississippi to the city, where fishermin now catch sea trout off Bourbon Street, and the local freshwater fish, gasping for air on the muddy banks, are devoured by hogs.

  Drinking water in the city mains has gone bad, and stagnant pools everywhere spread nasty new forms of waterborne diseases like hepatitis, E. coli infections. They’re the breeding ground of a mutated parasite called neo-Cryptosporidium that eats mucous membrane.

  Our 213 Episcopal wrinklies (average age 94) are a handful. About a third have become raving “Revoked Covenanters,” converts to a sect sweeping the South that claims global warming with its rising seas is a sign that God has revoked His covenant with Noah (Gen. 8:22): “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

  The Revoked Covenanters believe daylight will soon cease. Yesterday evening, in preparation for the “Coming Long Night,” Nessa Porte, 95, tried to blind herself by splashing her eyes with rubbing alcohol. The shock gave her a fatal heart attack.

  Such is my Christmas. How you doing?

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, December 24, 2055:

  Not so hot. Xmas is sad without Mother.

  Burying myself in work. I’m making my self-portrait as a young manual artist. It’s a collage construction, in primary colors, composed of palette-shaped cutouts and various artist’s materials: an articulated hand manikin ($488!) and hog bristle paintbrush ($81.40).

  After hours of painting today, the primary colors mixed in my head and I caught flashes of their composites—orange, green, and purple—on my walls and ceilings.

  Nat Glogow

  Johnny often came home at dawn covered from head to toe with mosquito bites, which he infected by scratching. He said he hustled on the bridges, where all year long, swarms of mosquitoes buzz around the lights.

  From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s home page, December 26, 2055:

  Johnny Baker, mourning his mother Jeanette who died in October, has left my service as sheila to pursue a career as a manual artist. Johnny wants it publicly known that she is an arsogenic metamorph—and proud of it! He feels she can no longer deny his genetic artistic propensities. I took one look at her first work in color, The Ground Beneath My Feet, and agreed.

  Johnny may have given up being my sheila, but The Ground Beneath My Feet shows that he’s unconsciously continuing her quest to gain Gaian Consciousness on his own as a manual artist.

  The Ground Beneath My Feet is a tangible Gaian vision. It says: The ground beneath our feet is alive!

  I predict that John Firth Baker will become the first Gaian manual artist. Gaians interested in buying her work can contact him at JFB@wksp.com. Her prices start at $4000.

  From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:

  I lost a guru but gained a patron.

  From: A Naturally Gifted Manual Artist

  To: The Arsogenic Metamorph John Firth Baker

  December 28, 2055:

  God Himself, as a sign of His favor, gave me a natural gift for painting in watercolors. I’m a new Winslow Homer! But I can’t sell my work for shit.

  Your unnatural talent was forged in hell by the angel of the bottomless pit. You think it will make you rich and famous. But beware! The Lord God is jealous of His bounty and will not be mocked. Nadia Kammerovska’s death was God’s will!

  Alex Thomas jr.

  Johnny admitted to me that the letter from the new Winslow Homer scared him. It scared me. Nadia Kammerovska’s fate haunted all us “arsogenic metamorphs,” as we were coming to be called.

  Johnny’s coming out, via Mookerjee’s home page, took guts. I decided to admit publicly at Juilliard that I was a musical metamorph, artificially equipped in France with absolute pitch, an acute intervalic sense for harmony and scales, and auditory brain lateralization, which gives my brain auditory dominance.

  Next day I told four of my friends in Advanced Musical Composition.

  They looked at me funny. They said, “It makes no difference to us where your talent comes from,” but they looked at me funny.

  Yukio Tanaka to Johnny Baker, December 29, 2055:

  Forgive me for intruding on your grief. I recently read about your esteemed Mother’s death on Mookerjee-san’s home page, posted here by the Online Japanese Church of Gaia. My heart goes out to you. We have a new thing in common. We now both mourn a beloved parent.

  With one big difference—you’ve returned to art! If I do so, I’ll die. My father’s spirit warned me of this in a dream on Christmas Eve.

  Wakinoya Yoshiharu

  Yukio Tanaka put me onto Mookerjee’s home page about Johnny, and I told Fritz, who then learned that Jeanette had committed suicide.

  Frederick Rust Plowman to Johnny Baker, January 2, 2056:

  I’m sorry about your mother. I blame myself. She’d be pleased to
know you’ve gone back to work as a manual artist.

  I’ll be in NYC around April 1 for a lecture series, which I’m forced to give protected by bodyguards. I’m regarded by many religious people in the States as a devil, possessed by Satanic pride. They’re right. I’m fiendishly proud to be humin, a member of a species finally able to direct its own evolution—to become the Lord of Life.

  I’m bringing Yukio with me to New York. I’ve made arrangements for him to see a psychotherapist who specializes in treating blocked artists and writers.

  Johnny Baker to Frederick Rust Plowman, January 2, 2056:

  Yukio is welcome to crash with me.

  I wanna paint your portrait.

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, January 5, 2056:

  Two days ago, high winds and a 3.5-inch rainfall lasting four hours flooded a leaky houseboat tied up on the Canal Street Canal. Two sleeping kids, four and six, left alone by their parents, drowned. The mother later hanged herself. News of her death gave me a flashback of Mother’s funeral on the dunes.

  I’m using Mother’s barber scissors to make a cutout collage called Self-Portrait as a Young Manual Artist. When the steel gets warm from my hand—as it did from hers—I feel close to her.

  Thanks to Billy Lee’s 12/26/55 home page, I’ve become the darling of the rich local Gaians—including four Beautiful People, high-fashion models, all aged nineteen. They were made in Switzerland by a genetic engineer who went to MIT with Fritz. The two Americans among them are scared to admit they’re metamorphs for fear of incriminating their parents.

  Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, January 6, 2056:

  This morning, I finished my Self-Portrait as a Young Manual Artist (Plate 2), which, on Billy Lee’s advice, is for sale at $4000.

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

  My Self-Portrait as a Young Manual Artist, which is a cutout collage, also incorporates textured images painted in color.

  The work proclaims my vocation. The oval thumb-hole in the center of my self-portrait’s palette-shape head contains three primary colors in place of the Gaian tattoo I would have worn had I gained Gaian Consciousness.

  Doris Peel