A Perfect Union of Contrary Things

by Maynard James Keenan

  Ramiro had begun to struggle with the tenets of his Catholic upbringing, and Maynard’s memories of the Ohio churches had led him to abandon organized religion altogether. But mysteries remained, and they visited tarot readers and studied cults ancient and new age, doubting there was such a thing as a spiritual path in the first place. And they found in Campbell a gentle guide.

  They spent long hours discussing—and arguing—Campbell’s views on various belief systems, but found common ground in his more practical theories. The ultimate goal, Campbell insisted, was not to discover the meaning of life, but the experience of life, to listen to one’s heart and to fearlessly follow one’s passion.

  I came at Joseph Campbell from a “fuck Christianity” perspective. I was really into what he had to say because I loved the idea of undermining the fundamentalists. It was an interesting jumping-off point after being in the middle of all that shit as a kid and watching people make decisions based on what seemed illogical.

  But Campbell turned out to be somebody who could actually give me the facts about mythology and archetypes and break apart the dogmatic views of religion in a way I could understand and appreciate. Professor McCaffrey really pushed us to see beyond the obvious and see the things that connect cultures and different peoples rather than set us apart.

  Only after proving competence in the basics were Kendall students allowed to experiment and bring personal expression to their work.

  Maynard generally ignored his instructors’ preoccupation with classical elements. Rather than concentrate on vanishing points and shadowing and negative space, he preferred to embellish assignments with creative twists and to work beyond the exacting boundaries to discover approaches and interpretations all his own.

  Ramiro would later recall spending an entire week on the self-portrait assigned by instructor Sandra Stark, a project she’d explained must contain specific elements: a horizontal orientation and the presence of a mirror within the frame, the entire piece done in graphite. The night before the assignment was due, Maynard assembled his drawing tablet and charcoal. He managed to incorporate most of the required elements but departed from the assignment just enough to produce a portrait that unmistakably reflected his unique style.

  During the class critique, Stark pointed out the areas he hadn’t drawn according to her guidelines, but even she admitted to the quality of his piece. “There was always that rebel side to Maynard,” Ramiro would recall. “It was part procrastination because he was busy with music, but also part ‘I’m not going to do it exactly your way.’”

  Drawing instructor Deb Rockman understood Maynard’s dilemma. “The portrait studies Maynard did for my class were excellent, but he was very, very conflicted about what he wanted to pursue,” she would recall. “I could see his talent and could see that he was struggling to decide whether to focus on art or music. I certainly didn’t try to sway him one way or the other. I just listened.”

  He transferred that spring to Grand Valley State University, a few miles west of Grand Rapids. GVSU offered a course in printmaking, a less traditional program that would allow him the freedom to push conventional boundaries. “I liked the process of taking blank pieces of copper and getting an image on paper,” he would recall. “Including all the things I could do wrong.”

  His enthusiasm was short-lived. Art, he thought as he drove home late one night from Top of the Rock, must unite the practical and the purely artistic, a combination his new school stressed no more than his old.

  If I was going to do art, I was going to do some kind of functional art. If I’d stayed in the military, I would have probably been the guy going, “No, no, this backpack is all wrong. Let me design this more ergonomically so that when you reach your arm back, your hand lands on whatever you need without your having to think about it.”

  I would have designed vehicles or gear to be utilitarian.

  He thought of how his landlord managed to balance work and leisure and his awareness of manual labor as an investment in after-hours enjoyment. Perhaps an evening with him was just what he needed to help put his priorities in order.

  He replaced the cassette in his tape deck as he neared Bill’s house. Crickets chirped from the grasses along the roadside, their song a chant-like chorus filling the silence between Kraftwerk’s rhythms.

  Staying in school wouldn’t be the end of the world, Maynard told himself. He could, if he must, conform to the status quo, stay in the safe cocoon of Grand Rapids and live out his career designing ergonomic office chairs and easy-to-open filing cabinets. Or he could take time out to regroup, step from the downward spiral of academic disappointment and financial insecurity.

  His time in the Army certainly hadn’t prepared him for the economic juggling act required to live on his own. The military had provided his wardrobe, a bed to sleep in at night, and a wakeup call every morning. If he’d spent his stipend on the latest releases of Violent Femmes and REM, his meal card had still guaranteed him dinner until payday. Since returning to civilian life and with only a rudimentary understanding of budgets and interest and late fees, he’d used his credit cards to finance C.A.D.’s nonpaying gigs and to purchase recording equipment and the Chevy Sprint, running up balances he was in no position to pay.

  He relied on the car to travel to and from the Grand Valley campus, but the bank didn’t take that into consideration. One afternoon, he returned to the apartment to find the Sprint gone.

  Maynard had been uprooted often enough. He knew the essentials he must pack and the things he could leave behind. And Boston wasn’t so far away; he could be there in no time, and the fold-out foam chair in Kjiirt’s living room would be comfortable enough until he found an apartment of his own.

  In theory, the energy of the universe wants to go in some direction. You have a goal, and the push and the pull of opposites is what gets you there. Grand Rapids is a Garden of Eden where rents are cheap and family is nearby and most people aren’t motivated to leave because it’s so easy to stick around.

  Here in the Garden, everything’s cozy. One school of thought says we’ve reached our goal when we have everything we need and there are no distractions pulling us toward anything more. Keep all the conflict and the darkness away and life is perfect. Then you have the other school of thought, which is, No, get out of the Garden. Go into absolute chaos and struggle, and force yourself to accomplish something. In essence, Lucifer, or the serpent, is actually a necessary disruption, a motivation to get us moving toward our goal.

  “I didn’t really think he would actually leave,” Ramiro would recall. “And then suddenly one day, he was gone.”

  Boston’s distinct neighborhoods were still intact in that summer of 1988. The homogenization and gentrification that would come with the end of rent control was still far in the future, and the most struggling of artists could easily afford a walkup in the North End or a spacious room in a Somerville triple-decker.

  Maynard arrived in early August at the peak of a crippling heat wave. Brownstones and cobblestones remained unbearably hot long into the night, train tracks warped into hazardous heat kinks, and children splashed in the welcome coolness of the Frog Pond on the Commons.

  Mike and Jan were perplexed by his move. At last, they’d believed, he’d found his calling at Kendall. They’d driven to Grand Rapids to attend a C.A.D. show and to admire his drawings, and they interpreted his sudden departure as an abandonment of his art, a denial of his talents.

  “Art school seemed disconnected from reality,” Maynard would recall. “I didn’t see how I could ever create art and be compensated for it.” He most wanted to make music and paintings and sculpture, but he realized it made little logical sense to dash madly from class to rehearsal to performance in a spiral of diminishing returns. “I went to Boston looking for structure,” he explained.

  The move was a chance to set aside for a while his plan and to discover a way he might alter hi
s story. It was time, he knew, to step from the predetermined path, to establish a routine that would allow space for the synchronistic accidents that might determine his course. And with Kjiirt to share his exploration, the search might prove easier.

  The blue fold-out chair in Kjiirt’s living room was comfortable enough, but certainly unsuitable for the long term. After only a few restless nights, Maynard was ready for a room of his own, and when a Somerville apartment became available, they packed their bags. It took only an afternoon to transport their few belongings to the house on the back side of Winter Hill, a neighborhood of young families and Tufts University students, towering shade trees, and sprawling nineteenth-century homes. Maynard lugged his black trunk up the front steps and to his room and then stepped out to decipher the transit system and explore the city.

  Damiel and Cassiel looked down upon a black and white Berlin. Maynard sat back in the air-conditioned chill of the Nickelodeon and watched them go about the silent business of guardian angels: comforting the fretful subway rider, encouraging the frustrated poet, consoling the dying man sprawled at the curb. From the first soft-focus aerial pans of the city, Maynard was lost in the rhythmic narration, the agonized longing of the angels, the visual poem that is Wings of Desire.

  Breathless, he watched as the angels, creatures out of time and of all time, observed and witnessed and took nothing for granted. He watched as they took out notebooks and documented for eternity the smallest raindrop on the most obscure raised umbrella, recorded humanity’s story even as it endlessly unfolded. Maynard yearned with Damiel as he drew from the rock the spirit of the rock, ached with him to feel its coolness, its sharp edges. And when Damiel discovered the portal to the human world of taste and color and raucous punk clubs, of love and at last of loneliness, Maynard rejoiced.

  Being an only child, I’d listened to my inner dialogue all my life. Suddenly, I was watching characters on the screen doing essentially the same thing. They were immediately comfortable sharing their thoughts with this angel, not realizing they’d been speaking to him forever. No matter what they were going through, someone—whether they could see him or not—had always been there to offer nonjudgmental support, to listen to their story. It all seemed so familiar.

  And I understood the commitment of that eternal being when he took the plunge into the polarity of existence. For the first time, he was living within the ticktock of time, something precious and expendable. Every choice he’d make in this world of time would have its benefits—and its consequences.

  The lights came up and the theater doors opened to admit the humid rush of Boston afternoon. Maynard looked across the street toward Boston University, its rooftops in sharp relief against the cloudless sky. The sidewalks shimmered hot beneath his shoes, and the smell of car exhaust reached him from the curb. The taste of salt and butter still sharp on his tongue, he started at the taxi’s blare, heard a Led Zeppelin riff drifting from an open window not far away.

  In the distance, he knew, were the punk clubs along Lansdowne Street. Further still, whole lambs hung in the windows of North End butcher shops, and beyond lay the salt spray beaches of Rockport and Manchester-by-the-Sea. He was anonymous here, free to walk about in receptive uncertainty, to be anyone he chose—or no one at all.

  An aura of expectation and hope permeated the city. For a long time, headlines of global unrest, hostage taking, and armed combat had lulled too many into apathetic indifference, and the time was ripe for a backlash, a collective quest for heightened consciousness and a more authentic life. The PBS series aired that summer had brought into the most no-nonsense of living rooms Joseph Campbell’s theories of universal archetypes and the power of myth. Artists and poets and New Agers had embarked on heroes’ journeys of their own, convinced that embracing Eastern thought and whole grains and natural fibers would encourage a pendulum swing toward peace, love, and understanding.

  Boston hummed with the contagious energy. Maynard found the streets confusing at first, their meanderings so different from the Midwest grid pattern that had determined his direction for years. But there, all squares and rotaries and diagonal paths converged at lively cafés or opened to sudden surprise: a mural in the narrow passageway beneath the overhead expressway, the lone sax player in the moonlit concrete canyon of City Hall Plaza.

  He walked among the purposeful crowds on their way from yoga lessons to the herbal supplement aisle in the organic market, to adult ed courses that promised to teach them psychic skills. He passed contemporary gypsies, their bright, gauzy skirts billowing as they stepped over steam grates, healing amethyst and carnelian strung on silver chains about their necks. He paused at the window of Seven Stars bookstore and its display of incense and tarot decks and brass likenesses of Hindu goddesses, their many arms battling the many forces of evil.

  As skeptical as he was of the ability of the hierophant and the hanged man to foretell his future, he entered into a sort of Pascal’s wager with the gnostic: Even if magic were humbug, he’d lose nothing by believing. And if a nugget of alexandrite in his pocket really could increase his creativity, he’d choose to trust its powers. “I know on some level, most likely all that is bullshit,” he’d later admit. “But I’ll buy into it because it puts me in a headspace that anything’s possible. If you’re an artist and don’t believe in some kind of magic, your art probably sucks.”

  Collectors relied on the shop in Union Square for the handcrafted frames and acid-free mats that would protect their fine paintings and photographs. A short bus ride through the Somerville morning took Maynard to Stanhope Framers and his first full-time job. A sweet-smelling haze of oak and cherry dust hung over the woodshop where Maynard’s coworkers cut and finished the custom frames and then delivered them to his worktable.

  He determined their proper alignment and hinged a lightweight scaffolding to their backs. He fitted the glass and cleaned from it every streak and speck before wrapping the finished Monets and Sargents and György Kepes prints for shipment to homes and galleries throughout Boston.

  You see the artistic and the utilitarian colliding right there in Stanhope Framers. I had to put the right angles together and follow a structure and package it. We were containing and bringing structure to whatever happened in the minds of these crazy artists.

  The work was more difficult than he’d expected, but the steady pay was a chance to eliminate some of his debt. Besides, he realized, an honest week’s work was a small investment if it meant free hours to keep to the plan he and Kjiirt followed, their plan of no plan at all. They would live for experience only, their radar ever trained on possibility, their senses tuned to the invisible energy crackling in the summer air.

  At 5 o’clock, Maynard replaced his brad puller and stapler in the cubicles above his table and spread across it a fresh sheet of white paper. In the morning, it would begin again: the focused concentration, the precise fitting and polishing, the battle against the most imperceptible fingerprint and the tiniest mote between print and glass. Try as he might, smudges and dust remained. Maynard was good at his work, but an upscale shop like Stanhope required an attention to detail that he knew he lacked.

  And then he saw the flyer advertising a position at a pet shop. He’d watched baby opossums in the bathtub thrive under Mike’s care and had recognized the bond between his father and the wild birds that had fed from his cap. He’d raised Harpo from a helpless chick to a healthy, happy bird, and he gathered his internal advisory board to weigh the pros and cons of a career change.

  “My bliss was not cleaning glass with ammonia and alcohol,” he would recall. “My bliss was with birds and animals. I was drawn to working in a pet store, where everything around me was breathing, flying, crawling, living, and dying.”

  Boston Pet Center, a privately owned shop in the Lechmere section of East Cambridge, specialized in saltwater fish—bright angelfish and clownfish and dottybacks. Beyond a glass door in one corner was the aviary
where finches and cockatiels fluttered from perch to nest, and parrots followed with their beady eyes the customers who came to admire their plumage.

  It was Maynard’s task to take up broom and mop to keep the place tidy, and he soon came to recognize the birds’ individual personalities. He reassured the boldest, whose loud squawks, he knew, were merely compensation for their fear, and interacted with the timid until they became brave enough to light on his shoulder when he entered the room. He befriended Bobo, the shop’s hyacinth macaw, who in no time bonded with him and never refused to perform for customers, falling trustingly from his perch into Maynard’s outstretched hands.

  “Maynard would call me late at night and tell me about his job,” Deb Rockman would recall. “We’d talk about music and what he was doing in Boston, but the main thing I remember about that period was how he was really grooving on the birds.”

  He’d indeed found his passion in the bird room, but at Boston Pet, Maynard discovered skills he’d never known he had. One afternoon, he watched as a coworker knelt in an aisle assembling a display of puppy toys. He placed box after package on the shelves, duplicating the same uninspired pattern arranged by countless stock boys before him. Maynard had never set up a retail display, but it seemed to him that the squeaky balls and plush monkeys could be more attractively positioned. “You know, if you arrange this differently,” he suggested, “maybe by shape and by putting similar products together, it could be more logical.” His coworker glared, resentful of the newcomer’s intrusion, and responded with his own suggestion, that Maynard be off with his mop to sweep up the bird droppings as he’d been hired to do.

  Maynard hadn’t noticed store manager Debra Alton, who stood just out of sight behind a nearby endcap. But she’d overheard the exchange. “She came up to me and said, ‘Seriously, how would you do that?’” he would recall.