At the beginning of 2056, I was serving my first term as president of the congregation of New York’s First Church of Gaia in High Bridge Island Park. I was part of the crowd that hung around Johnny’s studio, where I bought his Self-Portrait as a Young Manual Artist for $4000. The same week our guru, Sri Jaimie Tenorio, and his sheila, Gil, left our church and “went below,” as we Gaians say, to dedicate themselves to serve the underclass.
At my suggestion as head of the Search Committee, the congregation offered Sri Mookerjee a yearly salary of $200,000 plus housing and living expenses to become our guru. He accepted immediately.
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
I wanted to be near Johnny, who I felt was destined to make a unique contribution to Gainism as an artist.
Nat Glogow
Johnny’s growing celebrity made me jealous.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, January 14, 2056:
I’m painting Irene Winter’s portrait. Irene’s an exogenetic engineer from Salt Lake City, who works at the Dyson Institute designing plants to live on Mars. An ex-Mormon turned Gaian, she dreams of a future terraformed Mars (to be called Mari, one of the names of the ancient Great Goddess), which will be ruled by wimin.
I fell in love with her face at a lecture she was giving in Tokyo. It reminds me of those young, serenely beautiful brass sculptures of sacred Benin queens and princesses.
I see Irene as a Mar(t)ian priestess wearing a ceremonial headdress emblazoned with the Gynarchist symbol.
She’s visiting her 94-year-old father, the only African-American Mormon bishop, in Salt Lake. He’s got congestive heart failure and like Clorene is too old to be eligible for rejuvenation therapy.
Irene Winter to Johnny Baker, January 16, 2056:
Family business will keep me here over the weekend. Daddy’s sister Lorinda is broke and needs to sell her half of the condo that she and Daddy own in Chango Keep, under the Caribbean.
Daddy’s worse. He says, “I ain’t scared to die” and I believe him, because like all good male Mormons, he believes that after his death, he gets to be the god of his own planet where he’ll beget innumerable children on his innumerable wives.
Yesterday we had a terrible fight about Maria Lopez vs. TCOLAM, He’s scared of the Furies. Daddy of course is an American Christian Republican and backs Gov. Koyle in the coming election. In fact, Daddy is an important black supporter of the Seer Prophet & Revelator of the Mormon Church.
Daddy became a Latter-Day Saint in 1996, twenty years after the doctrine of the curse of Ham was recanted and black men were admitted to the priesthood. He was a used-car salesman and joined ward twelve on Salt Lake’s working-class west side. Daddy was among the first black temple workers.
The church was a big step for him socially. Mormons look out for their own. Daddy’s business took off. He bought into a used-car lot in West Valley City. His first wife, Rachel, died in 2018. He married Mom in 2025. She was a twenty-nine-year-old knockout, who married him for his money. Daddy married for sex. Our love of beautiful wimin is the one thing Daddy and I have in common.
Irene Winter to Clorene Welles, January 17, 2056:
I wrote Johnny a long letter yesterday. His talent, intensity, and personal history fascinate me, but I’m repelled by his hairy body. Do you suppose he shaves his breasts?
Johnny just called to ask me my hat size, which is 67/8. He’s making some kind of a headdress for me to pose in. Is he a good artist?
The Ground Beneath My Feet creeps me out.
Johnny Baker to Yukio Tanaka, January 23, 2056:
Sitting here smoking late at night thinking of you after working all day on a papier mâché black-lacquered headdress inspired by the Edo helmets we both admired that evening in the Nishimura Virtual Museum.
I understand Plowman wants to bring you with him to NYC. Come. Stay with me as long as you want. Fuck your father’s spirit!
Nat Glogow
One day, apropos of nothing, Johnny went, “I told my mother I never wanted to see her again, and she killed herself. I’m to blame.”
Yukio Tanaka to Johnny Baker, January 25, 2056:
Many thanks for your nice words about the relationship of my humble drawing and poor calligraphy. We Japanese believe the art of drawing consists of four elements: vertical, horizontal, combining, and scattering. If I say so myself, I scattered the kanji in my Thunder God drawing very well.
I humbly accept your kind invitation to stay with you in NYC. A doctor can’t help me. But—who knows?—maybe my father’s angry spirit won’t have such a hold over me in America. It’s a well-known fact that spirits don’t like traveling over water.
So you’re making a lacquered papier mâché headdress inspired by Edo samurai helmets. As you probably remember, I know a little about lacquer. What color are you using?
Johnny Baker to Yukio Tanaka, January 26, 2056:
Black.
Yukio Tanaka to Johnny Baker, January 27, 2056:
Ah, so! The ancient Japanese method of making black lacquer is best. Add soot from burning pine to the natural golden or reddish-brown variety.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, January 27, 2056:
Yukio’s coming to stay with me in NYC. Yummy!!! Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly.
Nat Glogow
I just had another memory of Johnny’s thoughts about his mother. One foggy winter morning on the west walkway of the Melville Canal, Johnny and I spotted a black cat stalking a half-grown pigeon with a stumpy tail. The pigeon was cheeping frantically. It was too young to fly. Johnny shooed the cat away. The pigeon fluttered along the stone wall, cheeping even faster and louder than before. Cheep! Cheep! Cheep!
Johnny went, “Poor li’l thing wants its mother,” and I saw tears in his eyes.
Johnny Baker to Mentor, February 8, 2056:
Assemble all audiovisual records of Mother in 2051, when she wore long hair, and prepare them for incorporation into MemoRX 2-A VR program.
Michael Salzman
In the winter of 2056, I programmed a half-hour MemoRX VR visit in her 2051 kitchen from the deceased Jeanette Baker to her son John, virtual-aged fourteen. It cost Baker $2500 to braid his forty-two-year-old mother’s hair while she said things like “You’re a good kid. I love you”—the usual stuff people pay to hear their dead mothers tell them.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, February 11, 2056:
Today Irene showed me her lab at the Dyson Institute. She and her colleagues are designing a lichenlike metamorphic plant for Mars that has thick stalks. It must survive high amounts of radiation in a frigid climate with long seasons. I thought of my little metamorphic birth tree, which couldn’t make it in Cherry County. It was like somebody walked on my grave. Then I took Irene back to the studio, where I gave her my Portrait of Irene Winter (Plate 3).
She said, “Am I really that beautiful?” I was like, “You are to me.” We had the studio to ourselves; Nat was at his stepmother’s in Brooklyn. Irene said, “Let’s make love.” I went, “You’re my first womin,” and she went, “I never fucked a she-he before.” But her pussy turned me off, and my hairy tits repelled her. Irene said, “Never mind, we’re still friends.”
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
My poor Irene! Tell you the truth, I can’t bear talking about my portrait of her. It brings back too many painful memories.
Nat Glogow
On Wednesday night March 1st, 2056, at Irene’s Washington Heights apartment, Johnny, Irene, and I gave Clorene her ninety-third birthday party.
Jesus! Ninety-three! Clorene started reminiscing about Martin Luther King’s assassination. “I was poor and black and five years old. We lived in Philly. It was raining.”
Then she complained of double vision, lost her balance, and sat down heavily on the blue sofa. She said her right side felt numb. She was having another attack. It lasted only a minute or two but scared everybody half to death. Johnny turned pale.
She said lots of poets wrote death poems. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote “Crossing the Bar” on his death bed, and Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his own epitaph in verse the night before he was beheaded.
Johnny and I saw a lot of Clorene that spring. We were with her the afternoon she was asked, as a distinguished American Elder Poet, to endorse 82-year-old “Granny” Smith for reelection as president. Clorene was thrilled! She relished playing the role of the grande dame of American Poetry.
Johnny said to her, “If Smith is reelected, I bet you’re asked to write a poem for her inaugural.”
Clorene said, “I’ve only got one poem left in me to write—my death poem.”
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
I commissioned Johnny to carve an image of Mamagon Gaia for my church.
“How do you see her?” he asked me.
I said, “Like the words to her song:
My womb is full
My tits are too,
The life I bear
I soon will chew.”
Johnny Baker to Emma Torchlight, March 27, 2056:
Billy Lee will pay me $4500 plus expenses to carve an image of Mamagon Gaia, our all-devouring Motherworld. I picture her as pregnant and hairy, with a beard and fangs. But I know nothing about carving. Can you give me a hand?
Emma Torchlight to Johnny Baker, March 28, 2056:
With pleasure. Come to my studio, 105-1 Orchard Street, Anchorage, Alaska, on April 15th.
Nat Glogow
Yukio, Plowman, and Plowman’s secretary showed up on our doorstep on the evening of April 2. So this was the world-famous Professor Plowman! He looked tired.
Johnny hugged Yukio, who also looked tired. I knew all about him—how his father’s ghost had made him quit drawing. Plowman said Yukio had an appointment the next afternoon with a famous neuropsychotherapist, somebody Nelson, who would help Yukio overcome his fear of the supernatural and get him drawing again.
Yukio said nothing. Johnny couldn’t take his eyes off him. His stare made Yukio blush.
Plowman and his secretary left for a hotel around midnight. Yukio sacked out on a futon at the foot of the dresser. Then he got up again because he forgot to brush his teeth. He went into the bathroom.
Johnny walked up behind him at the sink and said, “You got beautiful teeth.”
I saw in the mirror that Yukio blushed again.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
Yukio’s sharp, white teeth turned me on. That night in bed, while raising the dead, I pictured him biting my nipples. First thing in the morning, I began turning my masturbatory fantasy into a new picture called The Nip.
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
At the last minute the next afternoon, Yukio balked at seeing the neuropsychotherapist. Outside the office, he told Fritz, “Feel that wind? That’s an east wind. My father’s spirit! It’s a bad omen. I can’t go to the doctor today!”
Yukio Tanaka to Mariko Tanaka, April 5, 2056:
Dearest Mother,
I didn’t see Doctor Nelson because of a bad omen. Father’s vengeful spirit has pursued me to NY. I’m anxious from morning till night. What will become of me?
I’m posing with bared teeth for Johnny, who’s sketching me in pencil. I wish Father’s spirit would let me draw again. Make an offering to him at the family altar for me. I remember him constantly lighting one cigarette with the burning end of another. Sometimes, when he whacked me across the face, I smelled his tobacco-stained fingers. I’m paying a terrible price for that one moment of being relieved at his death. After all, I was only a little kid!
New York is full of hairy, bearded Jews who wear long black coats and fur hats in the warm weather. Chink tourists swarm all over the canals. New York is truly a floating world. I took a gondola ride. I thought we would be swamped by the wake of a water bus on the Broadway Canal!
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
Fritz dropped the idea of neuropsychotherapy for Yukio.
I suggested, “Get him a Buddhist priest.”
Fritz said, “Over my dead body!”
Science is Fritz’s religion.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:
The Nip is a kind of dual portrait of myself and Yukio—and a representation of my fantasy about us that inspired me. The work combines a scratchboard drawing of Yukio’s face with a nude self-portrait I painted in gouache, my first use of that medium. It was also my first shot at painting a naked humin body. I stumbled on the technique of layering the transparent gouache to capture skin tone. (Plate 4).
Nat Glogow
When Yukio saw The Nip, he went, “Ah! So!” and blushed again.
Yukio Tanaka to Mariko Tanaka, April 14, 2056:
Dearest Mother,
Johnny’s taking me to Alaska, where he will make a carving and I will pay my respects in the Aleutians to our brave soldiers who were killed there more than a hundred years ago.
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
I advanced Johnny the $1200 for a round-trip ticket to Anchorage for Yukio.
He said, “I’m in love.”
Emma Torchlight
The day after arriving in Anchorage with Johnny, Yukio took off for the Aleutians, where he stayed overnight. Johnny told me his story.
He said, “Yukio won’t let me touch him—yet. I’m working on it. We’re both lonely. Sometimes we talk all night. We discuss art, being arsogenic metamorphs, and our dead parents. We’re both haunted by the dead.”
Yukio Tanaka to Mariko Tanaka, April 16, 2056:
Dearest Mother,
I’m writing you from under a palm tree on windswept Lookout Hill at the east end of Attu island in the Bering Sea. Attu is where 2500 of our glorious Imperial Marines fought 11,000 American soldiers to the death from May 11 to 17, 1943. Refusing to surrender after a seven-day battle, our surviving warriors all died making a banzai charge, screaming, “Japanese drink blood like wine!”
They were men after my own heart. I too could drink blood like wine.
Sketch for Mamagon Gaia, 2056, pencil on paper. Collection Emma Torchlight
Johnny Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, April 20, 2056:
Yukio’s slightly sour smell makes me dizzy. His presence fills me with energy that flows into my work. This morning, following Emma’s advice, I made the enclosed pencil sketch of Mamagon Gaia in profile. It’s heavily influenced by Mexican devil masks, which are composed of simple geometric shapes. That should make it relatively easy for a beginner like me to carve.
I must carve the shape I sketched in a 3' x 2' red cedar log.
Emma says, “Find the volumes of the wood by carving in. Subtraction will slowly reveal to you the form you seek.”
Emma Torchlight
One evening after work, Yukio went for a walk alone. I confessed to Johnny my desire to have a daughter to love, and he said, “How about Jeanette’s grandchild?”
I said, “You mean it?” and he said, “Why not? Only, I can’t take any responsibility for raising her.”
“Naturally,” I said. “The responsibility’s all mine.”
We agreed to have a daughter named Jeanette. I said, “I’ll cherish her.”
Johnny said, “She’ll have a better life than Mother’s.”
Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, cc Teddy Petrakis, Irene Winter, Srimaanji Billy Lee Mookerjee, April 27, 2056
Congratulate me. I’m gonna be a father. Emma was artificially inseminated this morning with my sperm. She’ll have a daughter named Jeanette. Emma raised $50,000, which she paid to have Jeanette metamorphically enhanced with a cluster of Methuselah genes in an Anchorage clinic. Emma tells me many business-class Alaskans do it. Says that congressional exclusion of Methuselah genes from the genomic enhancement prohibited by the Created Equal Act is leadin
g to the creation of the first generation of rich Americans who’ll live 150 years.
What I wouldn’t give to live 150 years!
Johnny Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, May 4, 2056:
Yukio bandaged my blistered palm today and then for a moment let me hold his hand. Despite the pain, I love carving. With Emma’s help, it took me three days’ hard work with an inch-wide gouge to round the top of the cedar log into the sloping dome that will become the crown of Mamagon Gaia’s skull.
Yukio Tanaka to Mariko Tanaka, May 14, 2056:
Dearest Mother,
Happy Mother’s Day. I hope you received my red carnation. Johnny asked me what my gift to you symbolizes, and I told him that in the Japanese language of flowers, a red carnation given to one’s Mother on Mother’s Day is a token of gratitude for her precious love. He then got very sad because, as you know, his Mother committed suicide.
You’ve often said what a rough time you had raising me in this transient and beautiful world. I know how hard things were for you after father died. I’ve disappointed you both. Forgive me.
Emma Torchlight
Johnny, completely absorbed in carving Mamagon Gaia, lost interest in my pregnancy. I didn’t care. I had an easy first trimester: a little morning and evening sickness, sleepiness, sore nipples, constipation. Nothing I couldn’t handle.
Johnny literally made the chips fly. Mamagon Gaia’s hooked nose, her pregnant stomach and pendulous breasts emerged from the wood under his hands. He was a born carver. He visualized shapes in three dimensions and loved the feel of wood. Texture was his thing. He textured Mamagon Gaia with sculpted lumps of methyl cellulose paste he carefully added to the carved wood.
I’m proud Johnny was my student and am very sorry that Mamagon Gaia is the only wood carving he lived to make.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
Mamagon Gaia (Plate 5) was my first commission, a big event in the life of a young artist. I gained a lot of self-confidence from pulling it off. I now considered myself a professional.
Johnny Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, May 16, 2056:
Yukio and I returning Sat. to NY with your Mamagon Gaia.
Late last night, I found myself in my studio there, waiting for Irene to show up for dinner. We were going to order in sushi. She called to say she’d be late. I went to the roof to look at the full moon. I thought to myself, I must be looking into the past; there were no lights on the lunar surface. It was completely dead, like in the old days, and lit only by reflected sunlight.
The Song of the Earth Page 18