It was the biggest moon I ever saw and suddenly I realized that it was dangerously near the Earth.
At that moment, the Angel of Death appeared in the night sky, but off in the distance. It flapped towards me on huge bat wings, then glided overhead across the moon. The Angel of Death has a gaping cunt. That woke me up!
I’ve gotta paint her portrait.
Polly Baker
Emma asked me on the phone to be baby Jeanette’s godmother, and I said, “I’d be honored!”
She mentioned that Johnny was hopelessly in love with a straight Japanese boy, the other surviving arsogenic metamorph.
I said, “Birds of a feather,” and thought about poor Nadia Kammerovska dead in her grave these eight years.
Nat Glogow
Soon as Johnny and Yukio got back from Alaska, Johnny started painting The Angel of Death.
He told me, “Yukio and I are going nowhere.”
Unrequited love made Johnny mean. One evening, Yukio forgot to wash some expensive brushes, which got stiff with paint. Johnny, who’d been drinking, blew his top.
“You fail at everything you do! What the fuck good are you around here?” he shouted. “Go back to Japan!”
Yukio said, “I thought we were friends.”
“Nat here’s my friend, Irene’s my friend. I got friends to spare. Be my lover or go back to Japan!”
Johnny Baker to Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, June 14, 2056:
I’m studying the anatomy of the femayle perineum—clitoris, urethra, vagina, etc.,—for my painting The Angel of Death. Ugh!
Yukio and I are now lovers. I’ve taught him to suck me off. His heart’s not in it.
I’m trying to get him to see a shrink. He’s obsessed by the relief he felt at hearing of his father’s death. A teacher told him the news in the schoolyard on a blustery spring afternoon. Yukio wanted to shout, “Hurrah!” He happened to notice there was an east wind. It put the bee in his bonnet about his father’s ghost.
Maybe I need a shrink. I constantly relive my last words to Mother: “I never wanna see you again!”
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
At that time, Fritz was giving the Robert Pollack Actual Lectures at Columbia University, which kept us in New York. I saw quite a bit of Yukio. He told me that when he and Johnny made love, he fantasied he was an old-time samurai courting a young male kabuki actor who played wimin’s roles.
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
The last week in May I installed Johnny’s carving of Mamagon Gaia on the wall opposite the front door my church. Johnny’s work helped my congregation visualize our Motherworld as creator and destroyer.
The Mamagon Gaia became a favorite aid to meditation. One morning, I found a suckling pig with its throat cut, laid out beneath it as an offering. The pig was sprinkled with lavender and thyme.
From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s home page, June 2, 2056:
A dead suckling pig was left in my church yesterday as an offering to John Firth Baker’s carving of Mamagon Gaia. This pious gesture made by my anonymous congregant doesn’t surprise me. Since ancient times dead baby pigs have been offered to images of Mother Earth. Johnny’s art has miraculously reactivated long-dormant religious practices in the service of Gaia. His work is destined to have a profound influence on the development of Gaianism.
Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee
The practice of offering dead suckling pigs to Mamagon Gaia in my church caught on. I distributed the pork to the neighborhood noahs who camp out along the Emerson Canal. That led to the annual Emerson Canal barbeque—a feast held in honor of Johnny’s image of Mamagon Gaia, which is carried around in a procession.
Nat Glogow
Yukio and Johnny led separate social lives. Yukio hung with a bunch of pentojin [penthouse dwellers], rich Japanese kids who lived with their parents in the Nippon Towers overlooking the East River.
Elizabeth Hinosawa
I was one of Yukio’s girlfriends. He told me he worked for a famous artist. He was always broke. Yukio’s English was nonexistent. We spoke in Japanese with autotranslators.
Yukio seemed much older than he was.
When I said to him, “You seem much older than you are,” he was like, “That’s because I’m an arsogenic metamorph.” I thought that was his religion.
Yukio was what we Japanese-Americans call a “cherry blossom.” “Cherry blossoms” are Japanese who are hung up on the glorious Japanese Imperial past, when Japan ruled Asia. Yukio believed the Japanese are a superior race whose emperor is descended from the sun goddess. The last emperor’s assassination by Gynarachists drove him wild. Yukio was your typical Japanese chauvinist. He believed Japanese and American men are pussy-whipped and will lose the Gender War. The one thing he could say in favor of Chinese men was their subjection of Chinese wimin. The same for the Arabs.
Yukio sounded off in this vein all the time. But he was a gentle lover, and pleased me no end.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Arts:
The Angel of Death (Plate 6) is a combination cutout collage and painting done in both gouache and oils. I painted the ultramarine sky in oils. The fingers on the bat wings are badly drawn.
From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s home page, June 14, 2056:
John Firth Baker’s latest painting is a portrait of The Angel of Death. Like his other work, it is a Gaian vision. His Angel of Death has an open womb, which symbolizes the paradox, celebrated by Gaians, that death is the source of life on our Motherworld.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 16, 2056:
Good news since last we spoke: Billy Lee bought The Angel of Death today for $5000. Irene, who stopped by, agrees with his Gaian interpretation of the womb symbol.
She says, “Life can come from death. Look at you! You can’t deny that your mother’s death gave you new life.”
I can’t deny it.
Irene’s worried about her sick father. She’s off to Salt Lake tomorrow to be with him on Father’s Day. I’m celebrating here with my father. On Sunday Fritz begins sitting for his portrait.
From the Furies home page, June 18, 2056:
FEMINIZE THE HUMIN RACE!
The explosion which today destroyed the Mormon Temple and caused extensive collateral damage in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square was a BBU-97 FAE (Fuel Air Explosive) bomb detonated by the Furies, the armed resistance movement of the North American Gynarchist League.
We bombed the Mormon Temple because Mormons kidnaped, clitorectomized, and amputated the nipples of Sister Maria Lopez, the former Chairpersin of the North American Gynarchist League.
Wominkind! Rest assured that all your atrocious suffering at the hands of men will likewise be avenged!
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 19, 2056:
No word from Irene. I fear the worst. Her father wanted her to take him to the Father’s Day sacrament meeting in the chapel of the Joseph Smith Memorial on Temple Square, where, it’s reported, there are over 400 dead.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 20, 2056:
Clorene got a phone call this morning from Irene’s sister, Claudia, in Salt Lake. Just as I feared, Irene’s dead. She and her father were killed Sunday morning in the explosion outside the chapel. They were buried this afternoon.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 21, 2056:
Because I drew the bookplate on which Maria Lopez based the Furies logo, reporters have been after me for a statement about the bombing. I’ve refused all interviews. To tell the truth, it wasn’t easy—I could use the publicity.
I’ve given up on Gynarchism. The Father’s Day bombing shows that wimin can be as cruel as men. Both have a vicious streak. Fritz says it’s in the humin genome.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 25, 2056:
I’ve stopped work on Fritz’s portrait to paint Life on Mars in memory of Irene. She believed that huminkind will spread life from world to world. My painting must represent her vision.
Alex came
by. He’s dedicating a new composition to me, which will have a Sept. premiere at Juilliard.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 28, 2056:
Immersed in Lunartech-Interares VR tours of the Martian landscape. This afternoon I toured the western equatorial region around Mt. Dilemma, the eerie little two-horned crater about 12 kilometers SSW of Olympus Mons. Listed the amazing variations of red in the stony regolith: crimson, cadmium red (light & medium, deep) naphthol carmine, red, vermilion, etc.
At noon Martian time, wandering down Daedalia Planum, I spotted a scarlet boulder the size of our house in Cather Keep. On one side of a crater, I counted three shades of orange rocks in the bright sunlight—cadmium, hansa yellow-orange, and a rich cadmium red-orange. Never saw so many rocks, pebbles, and boulders in my life.
A sudden crimson sandstorm blew up in a 250-mile-an-hour north wind. The billowing clouds, through which a shrunken yellow sun shone, almost covered the blue-black sky.
But I’m not out to paint another realistic Marscape. I want to portray a scene from the Martian future, when the red planet starts turning green.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, June 30, 2056:
Blocked on Life on Mars. I haven’t the skill to paint the stony Marscape—or a convincing-looking metamorphic plant growing out of it. My conception of the work has collapsed.
Nat Glogow
Johnny panicked when he couldn’t solve an artistic problem right away. In order to paint, he upped his dope and booze. But paint he did—six, seven hours a day. I have a memory of his beard streaked with vermilion; some evenings, there was orange in his hair.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 3, 2056:
Today is Mother’s birthday. She would’ve been 47 years old.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 9, 2056:
It hit me today that if I can’t paint a plant growing on Mars, I can sculpt it. I’ve decided to sculpt the whole image in relief against a painted sky.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 12, 2056:
Made a plaster cast of the Martian metamorphic plant out of a ginger root. It looks quite unearthly. My Martian plant makes me think of my dead birth tree. Only this won’t die on me—and it’ll keep Irene’s memory green.
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
Life on Mars (Plate 7) is my first landscape. My ignorance of the roles of perspective led me to combine painting with a sculptured relief to give it the illusion of depth.
From Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee’s home page, July 22, 2056:
Today I saw John Firth Baker’s latest work, Life on Mars, which is destined to become a cherished Gaian icon. It pictures that moment in the near future when metamorphic life from Earth takes root on Mars—when our living Motherworld begins, through us, to reproduce herself by animating another planet.
Alex Thomas jr.
I dedicated my four-part choral invention True Believer to Johnny. It’s a theme and variation in D-minor—the saddest key—on the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child.” You may remember that my composition was inspired by Johnny’s grief for Jeanette. Now here he be mourning Irene. I thought he was due for some happiness in his life.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 24, 2056:
Fritz once wrote, “We scientists will eventually transform our species into a new kind of being; one whose mind will have the same relationship to ours as ours has to life and life to matter. The scientist can now say, with the poet: ‘Oh! je serai celui-là qui créera Dieu!’—‘Oh, I am the one who will create God.’”
My portrait of him will be called Oh, I am the one who will create God.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 25, 2056:
Fritz comes in every day from his summer rental in Conn. to watch me work. I listen to him talk.
Today, he said, “In my work, I ask a question, get an answer, and come up with a fresh question. You can’t imagine what this means to me as a researcher—what an intellectual passion possesses me. You can’t imagine the strange, colorless delight of my intellectual desires. They’re remorseless. Studying evolutionary genetics has made me as remorseless as evolution.”
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 26, 2056:
Fritz has a vivid memory of my mother meeting Yukio’s mother in an elevator at the Ozaki Institute on the day I was conceived, February 2, 2037. Mother was wearing a blue dress.
Yukio asked, “What was my mother wearing?” and Fritz said, “I don’t remember.”
Yukio flew into a rage. “My mother’s not important enough, is that it?”
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, July 30, 2056:
This morning at ten, I finished Fritz’s portrait, Oh, I am the one who will create God. Gave him red eyes.
Fritz said, “I look like Satan masquerading as Christ.”
I said, “You’ve read my mind!”
From John Firth Baker’s Interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
Oh, I am the one who will create God is my portrait of my father, Frederick Rust Plowman, the genetic engineer, who laced my genome with arsogenes. Like my picture shows, his pride scares me. The work is a composite cutout collage. It’s a takeoff on a Byzantine or Russian icon. The scientist who will create God looks to me like Satan posing as the savior of huminkind. (Plate 8)
Plowman—Fritz—bought his portrait for $4500. He, Nat, Yukio, and I had a drink in the studio to celebrate the sale. Fritz stared out the window at the Melville Canal and said that in the last twenty years, the oceans had risen almost three feet, and there was no end in sight. The melting polar ice caps are drowning the world.
Nat went, “God, who’s fed up with the humin race, decides to make another flood. He sends the angel Gabriel to the pope with the news, and the pope goes, ‘Hallelujah! We’ll sing the praises of Christ our Lord in heaven for eternity!’
“Then Gabriel’s off to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who goes, ‘Allah be praised! We’ll spend eternity in Paradise drinking wine served us by beautiful houris.’
“While in Jerusalem, Gabriel slips the bad news to the Chief Rabbi. And the Chief Rabbi says, ‘How much time we got?’
“‘Forty-eight hours,’ says Gabriel.
“So the Rabbi goes on the Net and says, ‘Jews! We got forty-eight hours to learn to live under water!’”
Fritz said, “I could design humin beings to live under water: Homo aquaticus. It’s not so far-fetched. I could give them gills and webbed hands and feet. Tough, scaly skin. Why, they could visually communicate with each other under water by changing their skin color at will, in individually colored patches all over their bodies, like squid.”
I imagined a guy with gills swimming around in the ocean. His scaly face glows with different colors, reds and blues, which communicate his feelings. He feels like me—amazed he’s a metamorph.
I portrayed him in a new work as open-mouthed at being himself. My painted collage Aquamorph (Plate 9) took me about a month. To tell the truth, it’s a disguised self-portrait. I feel I’m always in deep water, way down inside myself.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, September 10, 2056:
I gave Fritz my Aquamorph as a gift. We’re like a real father and son. This morning we shared our thoughts on love. Told him I no longer love Yukio, but still feel tenderly towards him; I pity him. He brings out the mother in me.
Fritz told me that when he was four years old he wanted to marry the boy next door in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Ronald had hazel eyes—like my mother, whom I loathed. But Ronald’s hazel eyes turned me on. Go explain love!”
The love of Fritz’s life was the world-famous Japanese metamorphic geneticist Yoshida Ozaki, who gave him a parrot that died. Fritz sure misses that parrot. I want to be Fritz’s parrot—his lovebird—and perch on his finger.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, September 12, 2056:
Last night, alone with Fritz, I got stoned and drunk and said, “Fuck me!”
F
ritz said, “No!”
I tried to bite his nose. He threw me on my bed and left. Saw myself for what I am.
Am working on new self-portrait.
Wakinoya Yoshiharu
Fritz gave a final lecture at NYU on the 13th and decided to return immediately to Japan. He wanted Yukio to go with us.
“You’re wasting your time here. Make a life for yourself in Japan.”
Yukio said, “I won’t go back to being a fucking apprentice lacquerer to a fucking portable shrine maker at fucking Torigoe in fucking Tokyo.”
Johnny said to Yukio, “You can stay on with me awhile.”
Yukio said, “Everybody pities me. God! I hate it!”
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, September 15, 2056:
Yukio and I made up and talk a blue streak. Today we compared notes on the terror we felt as kids at Nadia Kammerovska’s arrest and death. Her fate convinced us that being an arsogenic metamorph was a crime punishable by death. We both stopped drawing for over a year. Both still fear we must pay for our gifts with our lives.
Nat Glogow
Johnny sublet a tiny one-room studio with a northern exposure on the fifth floor of my building for $4800 a month. Yukio kept house. Johnny plunged into work. His new project was another self-portrait.
Sunday nights the two held open house. Billy Lee was always there, along with his crowd of rich Gaians. Alex brought four or five musical arsogenic metamorphs. Because of AANGA, they were scared to come out of the closet. Among them was a future world-famous conductor, who to this day swears she’s naturally gifted.
Clorene came too. She introduced me to Pierre Minuit, who’d recorded her poems. I also remember meeting the Manual Arts critic for The New Yorker, Philip Lustenader. Yukio got drunk and tried to persuade Lustenader to do a humin-interest story on him—the tragic arsogenic metamorph forced by his father’s ghost to renounce his gift. Yukio said, “I’m under a curse.” Lustenader looked at him like he was nuts.
The Song of the Earth Page 19