The Song of the Earth
Page 21
I placed Mother Earth on a high wooden table that faced the congregation in my church in High Bridge Island Park. Starting the very next Sunday, we used it as a visual aid to meditation while we recited Welles’ poem in unison. The verse has long been a part of our developing liturgy, which has as its sole aim the gaining of Gaian Consciousness. “The Song of the Earth” is my mantra, the foundation of my spiritual life.
(Recites)
I mother
& devour life.
I father forms
that thrive &
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.
On the first Sunday in March 2057, the combination of poem and Johnny’s image worked wonders. Two more people in my congregation, Leah Vogt and Sam Lee, gained Gaian Consciousness during my evening service.
From Sri Billy Lee Moorkerjee’s home page, March 5, 2057:
My ex-sheila, the arsogenic metamorph Johnny Baker, has gone on by himself to become the first Gaian artist guru. She has created thirteen works of art, which I call Baker’s Dozen. They are visions of his continuing quest to gain Gaian Consciousness and have the power to help others gain Gaian Consciousness for themselves.
From: A Naturally Gifted Manual Artist
To: John Baker, March 7, 2057:
Your 13 heathen visions called Baker’s Dozen came to you from hell, which is where you’re soon headed.
Signed, a Naturally Gifted Watercolorist
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, March 6, 2057:
I guess you saw Billy Lee’s latest home page. Don’t think I’ve joined the Church of Gaia after quitting yours. I’ve got my own religion—my work.
Baker’s Dozen, as Billy Lee calls it, is the end of a cycle in my development. I’m putting grief behind me. I’m brimming with new ideas. I want to paint from nature as well as my imagination. I want to study colors in the natural world and reproduce them on my palette. Right now, I’m excited by different hues of gray. I recently figured out that gray-green is composed of yellow, black, and a touch—just a touch—of blue.
Yukio leaves me cold. This evening, very stoned, he said, “Why are you the lucky one? You gaijin faggot! Remember, your mother committed suicide! Her spirit will avenge itself on you! You’ll see! Beware!”
Katherine G. Jackson to John Firth Baker, March 10, 2057:
Dear John Firth Baker:
I am a thirty-three-year-old freelance journalist with a Ph.D. in Art History from Yale. I write about young American manual artists, whose work seems to me to exemplify the mid-twenty-first-century zeitgeist. I want very much to interview you for The International Review of Manual Art. It seems to me that as the first arsogenic metamorph and a Gaian she-he, your promising early achievements would not have been possible without the confluence of contemporary science and religion.
I greatly admire Baker’s Dozen, which I am now studying. The thirteen widely varied and imaginative works, which include two images of metamorphs, seem to me to constitute a veiled autobiographical narrative. The technique is somewhat reminiscent of Charlotte Salomon in her Life? or Theater? Am I right?
I have a particular interest in narrative manual artists. With your cooperation, I’d like to get the story behind Baker’s Dozen and any other works you’d care to show me. The only drawing of yours I’ve seen is the one incorporated in the Furies logo. Though I deplore the political uses to which your drawing was put, I admire your draftspersinship.
I hope you let me interview you. I won’t put my words in your mouth. My journalistic ideal is to let my subjects speak for themselves, as you will see by my interview with the sculptor Ann Kahn, which appeared last March in IRMA.
If you are interested in being interviewed, please contact me at your earliest possible convenience.
Sincerely,
From John Firth Baker’s interview in The International Review of Manual Art:
Q: You are an utterly contemporary phenomenon: the first arsogenic metamorph whose brain is also partially the product of a postnatal experiment by the metamorph’s own mother. How do you feel towards her?
A: Mother gave me the ability to make images. Making images is my greatest pleasure. I’m grateful to her.
Q: You’ve been threatened by an anonymous naturally gifted water-colorist. What’s your response?
A: Fear.
Katherine G. Jackson
I interviewed Johnny at his studio over a period of three days. He constantly poor-mouthed Yukio. “Yukio can’t get his shit together, can you, Yukio?” Johnny said. “Yukio’s got a father complex.”
At first I was surprised at Johnny’s mean streak. Then I remembered his Self Portrait with Knife Blades for Teeth.
Johnny Baker to Teddy Petrakis, March 22, 2057:
Today Billy Lee commissioned me ($5000) to do a portrait of Srimaati Andrews. Agreed on condition that I work in her Seattle home. Then told Yukio that I’d be working alone in Seattle for at least a month, and that he ought to take this opportunity to return to his mother in Japan. He went crazy.
“You can’t get rid of me so easy!” “You made me a cocksucker!” “I’ll drink your blood like wine!”
I calmed him down. He wept.
I said, “Yukio, you’ve got to get on with your life!”
“I want to draw, but I can’t.”
“Well, I can’t help you!”
He raged again. And again I calmed him down. Finally, he agreed to return to Japan next Sunday, the 25th, the day I go to Seattle.
Johnny Baker to Polly Baker, March 24, 2057:
Dear Aunt Polly,
Yukio’s returning to Japan tomorrow. What a relief!
I’m off alone tomorrow morning for Seattle to do a portrait for $5000 plus living expenses!
Late this afternoon, I went to Manhattan Beach to look at the sea. I lingered happily with the setting sun at my back. The crests of the waves rising before me were yellow; those nearer the horizon reflected the light cobalt sky. The shadows of the low clouds rippled over the water, which looked metallic. For an instant, I was the sea gazing at itself.
Dearest Polly. I love you.
Any plans to come East? I miss you. Thought maybe I’d go out to Lincoln for a long weekend towards the end of April. Tell me when’s a good time. Let’s visit Jenny together! I want to be a good father to her—not like Fritz was to me when I was growing up.
I’m going to be interviewed in the next issue of The International Review of Manual Art. Fame—it’s wonderful!
Yukio Tanaka to Mariko Tanaka, March 24, 2057 (Delayed):
Dearest Mother,
Farewell! Don’t be sad. I found a way to appease my father’s spirit. The wind is from the east. Tonight I shall fall among these detestable Americans like a wild cherry blossom. Don’t grieve for me.
Nat Glogow
I was there on Johnny and Yukio’s last night. Sunday, March 25, 2057. We were smashed on Amae and dope. Yukio’s imminent return to Japan was very much in the air; that and Johnny’s departure in the morning for Seattle. The booze made Yukio weepy.
“Fuck all,” he said. “Everybody dies!”
“Not me,” said Johnny. “I’m gonna live forever!”
Yukio said, “Good luck.”
I went home about midnight. The cops woke me at six-thirty the next morning. They took me to Johnny’s apartment. He was face up on the floor in a huge pool of blood. I gagged at the sight of him.
The New York Times, March 26, 2057:
METAMORPHIC MURDER AND SUICIDE
Arsogenic Metamorphic Manual Artist Slain,
Metamorphic Roommate Kills Self
NEW YORK, March 26 (AP). The world’s first successful arsogenic metamorphic artist was stabbed to death here early Friday morning by his roomma
te, who then mutilated the dead body and killed himself.
John Firth Baker, 19, died of two stab wounds inflicted with a barber scissors to the back of his neck as he slept in the studio he shared with his Japanese roommate, Yukio Tanaka, 19, who was also an arsogenic metamorph. According to police, Mr. Tanaka then used the scissors to gouge out Mr. Baker’s eyes.
A short time later, the police said, Mr. Tanaka leaped to his death out of the fifth-story window of the studio that overlooks the Herman Melville Canal.
The authorities were conducting interviews today to determine what led to the killings.
Mr. Baker, Mr. Tanaka and a third arsogenic metamorph, Nadia Kammerovska, were created in an experiment by genetic engineer Dr. Frederick Rust Plowman at the Ozaki Institute of Metamorphic Genetics in 2037. Ms. Kammerovska was killed in Moscow at the age of ten by her father.
“The calamitous destinies of the first three humin beings who were metamorphically endowed with the genetic potential to become manual visual artists will not deter us from our appointed task of creating creative people at will,” Professor Plowman said today.
Mr. Baker had recently completed a cycle of thirteen works entitled “Baker’s Dozen,” which a spokesperson for the Church of Gaia in New York declared today were “visions of his quest for Gaian Consciousness.” A she-he and former sheila of Gaian guru Srimaanji Billy Lee Mookerjee, Mr. Baker also recently won notoriety for having made the drawing upon which the Furies’ logo used in the Father’s Day Bombing was based.
An interview with Mr. Baker conducted by the journalist and art historian Katherine G. Jackson will appear in the next issue of The International Review of Manual Arts.
“John Firth Baker was the world’s first successful metamorphic manual artist. He was created to create images and he did. I’m convinced his work will last,” Dr. Jackson said today.
Katherine G. Jackson and Sri Billy Lee Mookerjee, March 28, 2067:
KGJ: In the ten years since John Firth Baker’s murder, his life and work have been largely appropriated by the Church of Gaia, which interprets them entirely according to its own beliefs.
How did that come about?
MOOKERJEE: It came about because Gaians all over the world revere Johnny as an artist-guru, an eminent religious teacher. The American Church of Gaia, which owns most of Johnny’s work, is the largest single contributor to Johnny’s current show at The Virtual Museum of Modern American Manual Art.
KGJ: The Church of Gaia has turned Johnny into a religious myth. A cult has grown up around him in the United States, Japan, China, India, wherever the Gaian religion has taken root. Why was he mythologized?
MOOKERJEE: Religious teachers are often mythologized by their disciples; their identities sometimes merge after death with various preexisting myths. It’s an unconscious process, which is happening with Johnny. Eastern Gaian churches emphasize his androgyny. The New Sino-Japanese Church of Gaia regards her as an avatar of the legendary Lan Ts’ Ai’ Ho, the Chinese transvestite poet-painter of the Han Dynasty. Our rapidly expanding Indian Church, centered in Varanesi, identifies Johnny with the god Ardharnarisvara, “The Lord Who Is Half Womin,” and considers him a reincarnation of the late Shubha Roy, the graphic artist who served the goddess Kali.
Johnny’s importance for us American Gaians centers around his last work: Baker’s Dozen, images I call “tangible Gaian visions.” They are aids to our daily meditation on the Motherworld; they frequently induce Gaian Consciousness.
KGJ: Do you think Johnny’s work has artistic value separate from its religious implications?
MOOKERJEE: No.
KGJ: I hope Johnny’s upcoming retrospective at The Virtual Museum of Modern American Manual Art will appeal to a larger audience and secure his artistic reputation.
MOOKERJEE: In time, Johnny will be remembered solely as a Gaian guru who illustrated his quest for Gaian Consciousness. Johnny is a religious phenomenon. Scientific and artistic interest in her will fade. In the contest for influence among religion, science, and art, religion always wins, hands down.
From The Virtual Museum of Modern American Manual Art, “Thoughts about John Firth Baker on the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” April 17, 2067
Online Host: Katherine G. Jackson
POLLY BAKER: My thoughts today turn to Jeanette. I now think she was a criminal. Her crime was experimenting on Johnny when he was a baby. She made him into a thing. She crippled Johnny emotionally when she gave him “the lust of the eyes.” Thereafter, Johnny had trouble loving somebody other than Jeanette.
EMMA TORCHLIGHT: He loved Jenny.
POLLY BAKER: How true!
THE REV. THEODORE PETRAKIS: I’m pleased to say that Johnny loved me. And, for a time, the dear boy loved Christ. Johnny went from God to Gaia to art. Like all artists, Johnny was an idolater who worshiped images. He also allowed the images he made to be worshiped by others, and that’s a mortal sin.
Johnny was a sinner. God have mercy on him! God gave Johnny his gift through a miracle of modern science. But Johnny put it at the service of false gods. And now his work has been appropriated by a neo-pagan cult that’s turned him into a kind of minor deity. My poor Johnny!
NAT GLOGOW: Johnny had a run for his money. By hook or by crook, he was given the ability to convey his emotions with pictorial images. He had the immense gratification of making images that perpetuated his feelings in other people. And he was famous!
Above all, Johnny was committed to learning his craft. He wanted to be a skillful manual artist. He feared he had second-rate arsogenes. But who knows what he would have accomplished, had he lived.
WAKINOYA YOSHIHARU: I wonder the same about Nadia Kammerovska. As you know, her brain showed greater artistic potential than Yukio’s or even Johnny’s. Nadia’s visual cortices and prefrontal lobes were the most developed of the three—probably the result of her mother’s loving postnatal care. By all accounts, Anya Kammerovska was a real mamushka—a loving Russian mother.
POLLY BAKER: My question then is, Why did Fritz make a mother–artist-maker out of a depressive like Jeanette?
WAKINOYA YOSHIHARU: If you ask me, it was a heartless thing to do. I’m no psychologist, but I’ll bet it’s significant that both Ozaki-san and Fritz had deeply neurotic mothers.
I’m not surprised Fritz isn’t with us today. Fritz is no longer interested in Johnny. He’s totally absorbed in his five-year-old TOE-Heads. Thanks to him, all ten have greatly enlarged parietal lobes—the math center of the brain. He thinks one of them, May Li Chang, is another Einstein.
KATHERINE G. JACKSON: Emma, tell us about Jenny.
EMMA TORCHLIGHT: She’s a good kid—open, loving, very self-assured. She knows how to work a roomful of grownups. She’s bright, too, and imaginative.
POLLY BAKER: Tell her dream.
EMMA TORCHLIGHT: Dreams interest Jenny, like they interested her Daddy. Three weeks back, she watched a neighbor’s dog dreaming. Casey’s a grouchy twelve-year-old Welsh terrier with bad breath. Jenny watched her sleeping on her side in Liz Murphy’s kitchen. Suddenly Casey’s paws twitched, and she barked three times.
“What’s she dreaming of, Mommy?” Jenny asked.
I said, “I don’t know, dumpling.”
Next morning bright and early, Jenny says to me, “I know what Casey dreams, Mommy.”
“How, dumpling?”
She was like, “Last night, I dreamed I was Casey on the kitchen floor dreaming she’s a puppy again, chasing a butterfly across the lawn.”
“What a lovely dream! Your Daddy taught himself how to turn his dreams into art.”
Then Jenny said, “I’m sad Daddy’s dead.”
And I said, “Don’t be sad. His work lives. Art is stronger than death.”
PLATES
Bakers Dozen
The Ground Beneath My Feet, painted papier mache, textured with architectural modeling material, glass eyes, mounted on canvas, 20 × 16 × 3." Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee
Self Portr
ait of John Firth Baker as Young Manual Artist, acrylics, paper cut-out, structural paint, brush, paint can tops, painted wooden articulated hand model, on board. 33 × 16. Collection Doris Peel
Portrait of Irene Winter oil paint on plastic foam, paper cutouts, painted paper labels, on paper, 27 × 20." Collecdtion Gloria L. Cronin
The Nip, gouache on paper cutout and scratchboard, 18 × 16"
Mamagon Gaia, alkid paints, monkey skull, horsehair, boar’s teeth, glass eyes, textured with methylcellulose and water, on red cedar, 35 × 22 × 6." Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee
The Angel of Death, paper cutout, b/w photograph, gouache, oil, mounted on canvas, 25 × 45," Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee
Life on Mars, aklid paint on textured plaster mold, methylcellulose mixed with water, on canvas, 24 × 18 × 5." Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee
Oh I Am He Who Will Create God (portrait of Frederic Rust Plowman), alkid paint and gilt on colored paper, scratchboard, 26 x22." Collection Frederic Rust Plowan
The Aquamorph, painted paper cutout, colored paper, methylcellulose mixed with water, painted paper labels, mounted on board, 24 × 19." Collection Frederic Rust Plowman
Self-Portrait of John Firth Baker with Knifeblade for Teeth, oil on paper cutouts, Exacto knife blades, gilded latex caulk, 17 × 11." Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, painted latex caulk, mounted on canvas, 20 × 16." Collection Alex Thomas jr.
A Message for the Living From the Dead, huan skeleton hand and arm, painted cardboard, painted architectural modeling material, artificial ivy, 18 × 16 × 11." Collection The American Church of God
Mother Earth, painted human skull, artificial flowers, painted cast male human torso mounted with cast female breasts, gilt on cardboard, 25 × 23 × 5." Collection Billy Lee Mookerjee
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL