by Chris Martin
And Carson narrates, sometimes over himself while he concentrates on driving. Sasha, and the break she gives us from Hancockony, doesn’t seem to be on this trip, either.
“Like my sister, my brother Humphrey left our family after high school and really never looked back. And like my sister, he went through a period of shaking off every last remaining pedigree of the family. We didn’t hear from or see him for years.
“But for all of Shannon’s excesses, Humphrey far exceed her. Addictions, even more questionable sex, a plethora of drugs, riding herd with anarchists.”
A few photographs of grown up Humphrey: a lanky, blonde-haired boy, delicate, a little feminine with his arms crossed but on his face a cold loathing.
“He told me later he wasn’t interested in what passed for a political structure, even among the anarchists. He made sure he was their untouchable Lord of Misrule, in charge of nothing, letting anyone screw him if they wanted but fighting with razor blades if prodded. Their wicker man. The most unhinged member in the group, willing to do anything if it meant cracking a bottle over his own head to prove it.
“I tracked him down because of a postcard he mailed, out of the blue, delivered to my dorm one year, for my birthday. It said, ‘Education teaches the slaves how to make their own prisons.’ It came from Seattle and wasn’t signed. But I recognized my brother’s handwriting and his drawing style.”
The postcard has smudgy decaying edges, but features a smeary thickly pencil-leaded tableau, sketched with an adolescent’s careful perversity. There’s a hanged man dangling in rictus, a fierce dog baring its bloody teeth at him, someone in the background spewing a rain of vomit and a fourth man stabbing himself yelling HA HA HA HA HA HA. Heavy shading like Goya.
“I didn’t tell my parents. I wanted to see him myself. I got in touch with the Seattle police and with city social workers. After a few months, they had a pretty good idea which squatter’s camp he was in. So I went to visit.”
The picture is blurry, but there’s Humphrey: leaner, tatted and pierced, no hair, waving a bottle of something, the only person standing in a graffitied warren with clothes strewn on the floor indistinguishable from his fellow squatters. Humphrey’s giving Carson the finger. He has a Rasputin/Manson-mad ferocity, with black little eyes and gaunt, torn t-shirted nihilism.
“You wouldn’t know it but right after I took that photograph, he and I started to become friends. But that’s another story.”
Back to the rooftop of the copper Volvo, pulling into a gravel turnout of the winding road, carved into the side of a mountain. A man in a long brown coat, like a friar’s habit, sits on a log, waiting. Carson emerges alone from the car and crosses the still-running camera on the roof. You can barely hear “No, not long,” before the two of them hug.
Carson, now holding the camera, grabs a bag and up a path they go. A last camera glance to his Volvo almost looks like an advertisement for a slacker car brand: shot low, the wreck, condemned to afterthought, sits against sky and wind and other snowy peaks in the distance.
“Today, I’m visiting him in the mountaintop monastery he has lived in for twelve years called Mashipan. It’s not the first time I’ve been here, just the second. There’s no parking up there. They normally bring guests up by shuttle but the driver wasn’t around so I drove up. We’re up so high that when I make a final check on my car, it feels like saying goodbye to the world.”
He swings the camera toward Humphrey. The poisoning cherubic blonde hair is gone; it’s stiff, parted and short, canvas colored, on its way toward white. The pupil-less eyes are gone. He now has a weathered, handsome face with eye wrinkles expanding into a sympathetic sorrow. This gaze is what he was hiding in the other photos. It seems it’s all he needs now, a scrutiny both pitiful and awake.
Humphrey shakes off his younger brother’s camera and stops talking in mid-sentence. “Let’s keep that to a minimum,” Humphrey says, meaning, I assume, Carson’s ever present filming. Chastened, Carson says: “Ok, I can turn it off” – and drops the camera down to dangle over their boots, still furtively recording. Over the crunch of gravel, we get pieces of their conversation:
“ ... not going to be like some heartrending family confessional I hope.”
“No, god no,” Carson says. “At least I hope not.”
Somehow he still grabs shots of the distant granite peaks and his brother’s long-legged stride, sturdily accustomed to hikes up the mountain, even in a robe. But we’re still dangling from Carson’s hand, pretending not to film.
“My relationship with my brother, actually, is pretty good. Better than the one I have with my sister. But that doesn’t mean he likes it when I photograph him. He’s very suspicious of it.
“Still, Humphrey is determined to steer his involvement in this project himself. He will do anything to avoid being a part of memoirs, confessionals or autobiographies because, he says, they are inherently narcissistic. Diversionary, from the truth. I wouldn’t call him an ascetic, though I know it sounds like he is.
“Even though he and I have talked this out beforehand, now that he sees my camera, he reiterates his position regarding my project on the hike up to the monastery. He wants to share his ideology, not his personality, he says. I tell him I know. I’ll do my best. I also have to lie a little.”
The climb takes them up a pebbly, wind-bald route up the side of the mountain, around ice- and snowdusted boulders. The path is often narrow, fitting around the edge of the mountain itself, and the way Carson keeps the camera by his leg, you expect any second a misstep, an out of balance scuffle and a drop over the edge. More vertigo.
Where they’re going you’re not too sure until Carson stops and raises the camera. He’s panting heavily but knows he’s got a great shot: “Wow.” Out of nowhere is a white stone complex dug into the shoulder of the mountain. Frosty blue sky shines to heaven beyond.
“This is my brother’s home, Mashipan. A community on a rock at the top of the world,” he says, though on camera you can make out his prosaic, one-handed defense on the reemergence of the camera. “This is a nice shot,” he tells Humphrey and the camera frame jiggles a bit, getting it just right.
“Fine, fine.” Humphrey trudges on.
As his brother walks ahead, Carson pans slowly over the grounds: a three story main building with two wings backed into the mountain with a generous plateau spread in front sustaining a few smaller stone structures and a fenced area with uniformly snowed-over bumps: a sleeping garden. Black trellis archways, a snow cloaked statuary, and a shoveled walkway cuts across the grounds and heads to a boxwood-lined patio with cold stone benches placed at the edge of the plateau. They sit at the cusp of a slight decline to another flat terrace which yawns one last time before abruptly emptying over the edge of the mountain to the valley thousands of feet below. Before that happens, though, the terrace sprouts a huge gray obelisk mounted with a wooden cross. It is defiant against the gaping drop and the universe just beyond, though the entire thing is latticed with scaffolding.
Turning back to the snow-level grounds of the monastery, Humphrey greets a fellow Mashipanite with hands in prayer and a perfunctory bow. As Carson catches up, he passes faces: nodding, acknowledging, round and pink, long and withdrawn, white-haired or bald, smiling, indifferent, male and female.
“I’ve been here before. It’s good to see people I know. Most of them here don’t seem to mind a kid with a camera.”
We cut to an echoing arcade, following behind Humphrey. He climbs up narrow wooden stairs and we follow. He swings open his door and we move past him into a small room with a bed, a table, a window. Carson carries us to the window, pushes it open with his hand, and there is the green and white mottling of pine forested mountains beyond. He tilts the camera down to where we just walked: the compound of Mashipan with its walkways, benches, robed devotees.
“I already accept there are times and places for my camera. They have rules here. The trick is working within them.
“To be hone
st, I wouldn’t have been allowed to bring my camera without Abbot Keating, Abbess Lamarcke and the prior Father Wilhelm agreeing to it.” The three of them stand together, decked in white cloth or in the case of the prior, in beige, as solemn and weighty in their silence as a Greek chorus. “I’m allowed here in return for shooting images of Mashipan. For their website.
“It’s not a trivial arrangement. Though their archives abound with photos, they have never allowed a camera from outside up here. But the changes underway, they tell me, make having one visit worth the trouble, even for a few days.”
Two workmen inch their way out of a side door of the main building carrying between them a wooden crate with “UGANDA” stenciled in red on one side. A third man squeezes past, balancing a rolled up carpet on his shoulder.
“Of course, I wouldn’t even be here, or even heard about Mashipan if my older brother didn’t live here.”
Humphrey in his cell, pulling off the long friar’s robe, hanging it up meticulously and pulling on a sooty wool sweater. It’s a small room, big enough only for the bed, desk, a comfortable looking reading chair, a bookshelf, with a little white iPod resting on top.
On one wall, smears of color from drawings, I guess, by Humphrey’s and Carson’s nephews. On another wall, a small collection of medieval icons inlaid with gold.
“Like my agreement with the abbots, I defer to my brother’s ground rules.”
“Over there,” Humphrey points, pointing his finger to an area the floor near the wall. With one hand, Carson dutifully unrolls his sleeping bag there. “And every morning, you can roll it up and keep it in the corner.”
“For instance,” Carson narrates, “I thought a cot was waiting for me, but Humphrey decided it would take up too much room.”
Noticing his brother’s reaction, Humphrey says, “You’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
“Sure,” Carson replies. “No problem.” As if to get even, Carson swings the camera around aimed at Humphrey. His starchy authority and implacability seem unassailable. But facing his own implacable younger brother, Humphrey shrinks slightly, retreating into self-consciousness, maybe even fondness. “I have an extra pillow if you need it.”
We cut to two chairs placed in the small room, facing each other interview style. They’re getting right to business, it seems. Humphrey is busy off camera.
“Living arrangements aside,” Carson narrates, “most of my brother’s rules basically involve his speaking and my listening. His answers to my questions are often on other topics he has in mind. Many hours will be spent arguing about this. But he does help me set up and sometimes holds the camera himself.”
The interview begins. Unlike the footage of his mother and sister, Carson goes for more formal shooting styles with his brother. He cuts between three set ups: a two shot, in profile, Frost-Nixon style, a second camera trained just on Humphrey, a third camera on him.
“I’d really like, Hump, to talk about – ”
“Humphrey.”
“Oh sure, sorry. So I think going back a little into your experience in Seattle might help give some context to all this, your life here in Mashipan, what you’re doing.” It sounds like a question.
Humphrey sits in his chair, sipping tea from a wide, glazed cup.
“This,” Carson narrates, his taped self still watching his brother sip tea, “is a Humphrey-sized pause. They occur frequently, coinciding with his breath. He gives himself time, he says, to tend to his thoughts before dispensing them.”
Humphrey, concluding his sip, nods reflectively.
“I sometimes find them unnerving,” Carson says. “This is just an example.”
Humphrey places his cup down on its saucer, on his lap.
“What I’ve learned here,” Humphrey offers, looking around his room, “is more to the point of your documentary.”
“Ok. Whatever you want to say,” Carson says to his brother. “Where ever you want to go.”
Another studious pause, over which Carson adds: “Like the abbots, Humphrey has an ulterior motive other than acquiescing to his little brother’s documentary dreams. He has a formulated point of view and is deliberate about it. Fortunately for me, this point of view coincides with the points I want to make in my movie.”
From his chair, Humphrey nods, this time consenting. Contrary to Carson’s gentle insights about his brother’s pauses, Humphrey seems very much like a serious man used to suffocating his impulses. Every moment a conquest.
Humphrey says, “Coming to Mashipan....”
He shifts in his chair slightly, redirecting himself in mid-sentence. “Ok, I see your point. I’ll summarize, so we can move on. When I went to Seattle, I didn’t know or care what I’d find there – “
“Can we go back a little further?”
Uncomfortable, agitated Humphrey. “We’ve talked about this.” Short, alert sip of tea.
“I know.” That’s all Carson offers, acknowledgment. It’s stubborn. He holds on Humphrey working through tight-lipped deliberation.
“You mean growing up,” Humphrey answers, inhaling, preparing.
“You were very unhappy, as far as I remember.”
Humphrey licks the tea from his lips, without exhaling. “And?”
Carson continues, sympathetically. “Were you suffering... mentally? An illness?”
Surprisingly, Humphrey exhales, considering this. “I keep forgetting this age difference. You were probably pretty young and want to make sense of the behavior at home. Ok....” Another chair shift. “Mental illness is probably a helpful conjecture. But let’s move away from that. It’s not ...” he stretches his neck, “accurate.”
“But I thought ...”
Humphrey holds up his hand, wait for it.
“I was reacting to what I was perceiving and, especially, feeling. And I assume on that basis, I was taken through several rounds of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, what have you. Everything. Whatever was the new treatment of the season. Back then it was all new. And every time there were different opinions, diagnoses, cures. They just all cancelled each other out.”
“I remember that. To me, and you’re right, I didn’t know better, it was like you were sick, with some incurable disease, like cancer or polio, with all the pills that came into the house, and mom and dad fretting. But you kept walking around looking healthy. Just really really pissed off. So I just stayed away.”
“You might have learned something if you hadn’t been afraid of me.”
“I was eight years old. With glasses. And your door was always closed.”
“Well, maybe that was smart on your part. I don’t know. No one knows what to do with unruly boys. People either want to cure them or jail them.
“Any way, and I mean this as charitably as possible, there’s nothing my mother or father, our parents, really could have done. Either as being a cause or to help. I don’t blame them for anything other than being unlucky to have such a, for them, a difficult first child.
“I simply couldn’t make sense of anything around me. There’s no other explanation. All I felt was distress, disassociation. Aggravation against everything around me. Smells, colors, the way the world came at me. You mentioned sickness. I felt like I was the sickness, and everything around me were the antibodies, closing me in, trying to kill me. It was very instinctive, my reactions. Not rational. But right. Sane.”
Images of a protest march, circa late ‘80s, early ‘90s. Anti-capitalism, pro-environment, anti-globalism. Suddenly the video turns shaky, tumbling, as the march becomes a riot in the few hands of anarchists who descend like monkeys. Bottle bombs are lit and thrown, glass windows broken. Black-hooded, Converse-wearing bodies jump up and down on cars. Newspaper boxes thrown into the street.
“Seattle seemed like the furthest place to go. And the people I wanted to find – did find – were people I thought were really brave. On their own, ready to dispense hate and violence. The hate always at their finger tips. I liked that. It was energizing to me. A
nd something made me exploit these feelings further. To show off to them that I could hate more, hate purely.”
It’s stock footage, but in one shot, there’s a zoom onto one of the monkey car jumpers throwing blocks of concrete, then kicking clumsily, prancingly, at someone trying to pull him down. The zoom freezes. The figure is half-shaped, grainy. Carson doesn’t say it, but it looks like Humphrey.
“Hate was the clearest, purest expression I had available to me and when I discovered that I had that all along, when I met other boys like that, it was instant ignition. I could be alive. Alive with execration. It was breathtaking.”
Images of cars burning, store front looting, battling police.
“I liked playing with it, that hate. It was electric and elastic. I wanted to remain in charge of my own destruction, like a god. Delivering my own destruction. It was a power I could deploy any time I liked.
“Which was often,” Carson suggests.
“....Yes, as often as I liked.” A pause. “You’ve got me talking about this after all.”
“We can stop....”
With two fingers Humphrey swats the offer away. He sips his tea, then resumes. Turns out he’s happy to talk about this.
“Of course I had nothing in common with them. Most of them were abused as kids and were now all grown up. Wild, untamed and pissed. Smatterings of education. The truth is they were just the poor. Poor, unwanted, expelled, flushed away.”
Humphrey continues, over soundless images of industrial despair: a dead bird on the floor of a wide sad room with a broom dropped and abandoned nearby; shears of white plaster peeling from the brick wall of a hallway; gray-white matted pigeon poop on a railing; water lapping against a knuckled pier. The dead, empty spaces of abandoned buildings that look busier with destitution than when they were working and swept everyday.
“And I was bourgeois, through and through. I read. Some of them couldn’t read. But still smarter than most people I’ll ever meet. I wanted to undermine my privilege, myself, every chance I got, desperately. And they would be my audience.”
A few more pictures of Humphrey and the squalor he lived in, assumedly taken by Carson after tracking him down. There’s one of Humphrey barking at a chained pit bull, someone’s unhinged pet. And a moment of repose: Humphrey carefully carving under his nipple with a pen knife.
“It sounds pitiful now that I hear myself. I was an adolescent. You’re not very smart back then. But these boys were beautiful to me. They manifested everything I thought was beautiful.
“To fit in – and I had to do a lot to fit in – there had to be – and there are studies on this, it’s not unique behavior – I was compelled to perform public excoriations. Standing up and cutting myself, or just walking over to a wall and with great intensity smashing my head against it. They laughed. I laughed at them laughing. And that would shut them up.
“If a person made eye contact, in went a fork into the palm of my hand. ‘That’s what I think of you establishing a connection with me, asshole.’ “
Close up of Humphrey and his thin, tired, derisive face partly obscured by the menacing hand he uses to grab the camera. Getting friendly with him, as Carson said he did, must not have been easy.
“You did that,” Carson asks, by way of confirming.
Humphrey nods, dispassionately. “The interesting outcome of this was realizing that doing this, reacting like this, I realized, wasn’t very pure. It was effect, then affect. Like a tantrum. And that was a huge epiphany. What I had been doing was childish. It felt like the first lesson I learned by myself. Very very powerful. It was an education. I became addicted to education.”
“You say childish,” Carson says. “But they must have thought you were crazy. Dangerous crazy.”
“Some were scared. A few wanted me to go away. Some thought I was just the evening’s entertainment. But mostly they accepted what I was, just a fucked up creature who chose to be that way, but who didn’t threaten anyone. I didn’t steal or break any other social bond, so I was tolerated.
“But because of that epiphany, the hate I was reveling in suddenly seemed paltry. It didn’t do it for me any more. It was very up and down. One minute I was screaming, the next, nothing. I exhausted the pattern, or it me. Or maybe I didn’t have that much hate to begin with. But I still wanted to find that pure, constant level of expression. Vigilant contempt.”
He forms his hand into a pointed wedge. “I wanted to find that narrow line between hate for society of any level, groups, people, and still maintain a stoic, passive, even peaceable, disconnection to those around you. Some of the older boys not just around me but in other groups, they maintained this poise between outside hate and inner regard which again I thought was beautiful. That was the new goal.”
More industrial entropy and decay: hollow buildings empty of windows; stone facades draped with water stains.
“I found this alcove and made it mine. Just a closet really. And I would sit at the edge of this place, at the edge of my own murk and just watch.”
~ trash strewn lunarscaped warehouses, factory floors, barren facilities ~
“The place was always in twilight, echoing.”
~ walls flaring with graffiti; piles of tossed office furniture abandoned in the middle of vacated floors; faded directional signs in hallways ~
“People would leave, people would come. I became the one who was always there. And when they were there, I was in the back of their mind. Always there. Always a little on edge, always a little disconcerting. Condensing, focusing.