This is Canada for sure, their new home, a vast country that looked good from the outside looking in. Once “inside” the family quickly learned that “opportunity” is a deeply ambiguous term. Back home in their urbanized village, some 65km from Bucharest, Romania, the Ilyanov’s would have called it a “class” concept. Low-income people, here as there, live in low quality apartment buildings; the difference here is that these buildings mainly house immigrants. Where you live plays a big role on the quality of life, here as there, with the good neighborhoods privileged with the best schools and social facilities.

“Opportunity” has different meaning for those with well-paying jobs and for those who don’t have work or who work in the countless fast-food franchises and convenience stores. The word “Opportunity” translates into a different meaning for those who have property and who hold “liquid assets”, thus allowing them to access and enjoy the natural and cultural richness of the country. Opportunities become real for the “haves”; for the others, they exist as quickly changing images on TV or in travel brochures of faraway places (excluding Romania). Opportunities are just unfulfilled promises, mere fiction.

For now, real life demands careful, often hard choices: what grocery items to buy, which brands to choose and which products to skip. The abundance of products shelved and lined up in the super-market only poorly conceals the fact that quantity and quality do not go together. If you buy the kids’ cereal on sale for $2.99, you get a big box of low nutrition, high sugar loops. The high fiber and nutritionally balanced cereal is never on sale: half the amount would cost you $4.69, more than a third of your daily budget. Buying meat is no different: pork and “regular” high fat beef is always cheap. Nobody informs you about the way this meat was produced or how many hormones were injected into the animals.

In the village back in Romania, no farmer could afford hormones. Although meat was not on the daily menu, when it was served up, it did have a healthy taste. Over here, fresh fish is unaffordable on a regular basis. So opportunity actually means that poor people in a rich country can eat plenty of tasty low quality food. But it is best not to think about the eventual health consequences. If people were only half-aware of the food-health relationship, they might decide to avoid growing overweight (more than 45% of Canadians and well over 50% of US residents are considered too heavy). They could also avoid having to wear ill-fitting clothes from discount retailers or used clothing stores. If the high carbohydrate diet makes people obese (and worse, given that a lot of processed food is saturated with hormones, preservatives and other chemicals) and leads to bad teeth too (dental plans are not easy to come by), at least people are supposed to revel in the freedom of choice between some thirty plus fast food joints on Merivale Road.

Another disgrace and insult to the poor is that pizza delivery drivers have to use their own, rusting and crumbling cars to do their underpaid jobs: jobs that so dearly depended on tips from junk-food consumers without dental plans. But at least, as long as they have cars, they can do more of their own grocery shopping at the cheaper, big supermarkets, avoiding the hefty price “premium” of the neighborhood grocery store. Nobody can explain what is convenient about those stores. Perhaps a pizza delivery guy can average $31.38 a day, minus car costs. Sometimes of course there is extra pizza to take home, but the kids no longer get much excited at the prospect of left-over pizza, five times a week.

Konstantin had promised to write home, by e-mail of course. He still does, bet less often than in the first two years since their arrival. It is hard to not be positive in his e-mails about how good he and his family have it here. If he’d describe the social and economic realities he has been thrust into, most relatives and friends simply would feel insulted. How could he, as one of the lucky ones who got away from the backwardness and bleakness of life back home, complain of hardship and lack of genuine opportunity? Of course, he has occasionally doubted himself, thinking it’s his own fault that he does not have a ‘good’ job, with benefits, and doesn’t own a nice little house (he is still under the illusion that being bound to a mortgage for 25 years, somehow equates to home-ownership). If they were given an immigration visa, all of his day-dreaming family and friends would come to join him here, ready to seize their ‘chance’ too.

In August, he will turn 50. If by 55 he can make a down payment on a semi-detached house, he would be 80 by the time he owned his abode; in any case, an old dwelling by then. He has begun to project his hopes for a better life to his children, the oldest now sixteen. For Konstantin and his wife, opportunity is just a lottery ticket away.

The Lotus Temple in New Delhi (for Kristina, who insisted that I visit)

While we wait in the temple courtyard, we are welcomed, first in Farsi, then in English. We will enter the Temple while the previous group is exiting through the front of the temple. It is important to move quickly because the faster we find our seats, the more time will be available for the service, as a new group enters every fifteen minutes.

Once we are in the temple, the doors will be closed and we will not be able to leave except in the case of an emergency. There will be hosts at all of the doors to assist anyone in difficulty. The prayer service will last approximately five minutes. There are to be no photographs, no recordings, and all cell phones must be turned off and kept in our pockets or they will be confiscated. At the end of the service we will be directed to the exits by the hosts and it is important that we leave quickly because the next group will be entering behind us.

What is not mentioned is that there have been terrorist attacks at several sacred sites popular to tourists recently in India, and this is one of them. Ironically, because they are a multi-faith organization devoted to peace among all peoples and religions, they are a target for extremists of every religion. But the Baha’is who built the Lotus Temple refuse to shut it down because they believe that it’s important to keep open a temple devoted solely to peace among all races and tolerance for all religions, especially when temples are under attack and people are killing each other in the name of God.

Young women with brightly colored silk head scarves and white satin saris patrol the aisles inside the temple, wordlessly directing people with an open palm, using mime to remind us to turn off our cameras and cell phones, drawing a finger across their lips to remind us to remain silent. Whenever one of them catches me watching her, she smiles and raises her fingertips to her lips and mouths the word Namaste (“I acknowledge the divinity in you as the same divinity in me”) and slowly bows. Then she smiles again, and turns away. Since I am doing the same thing, for a moment we become mirror images of each other—and for me it’s a gesture that’s never felt so natural or as light-hearted and joyful as inside this temple.

Bluebirds glide through the silence to nest among the rafters.

The service begins. A young black woman with a head scarf sings something from the Torah. A western woman sings a prayer from the Koran. An elderly dark-skinned Arab sings one of Solomon’s psalms, and the service is over.

I follow Bill and his wife up and out of the temple back in the sun. At the top of the steps he turns to his wife and says, “Well, that was a waste of time.”

Khajuraho Temple

New Delhi Airport Waiting Room

Our group is getting smaller again. We became six when we flew off to Nepal, and now we are down to me and Susan and her friend. They live in different states but they met on a trip to Morocco years ago and were good travel companions and now often travel together.

We are the last ones from our group in the New Delhi Airport, waiting in the main airport lounge for our different gates to be announced, about to say goodbye forever,. They are entertaining me with stories from the trip. In one, they use a nickname that I don’t recognize and I stop and question them. When they tell me the real name behind the nickname, it is so deliciously nasty and at the same time spot-on and smart that I can’t help but laugh and gasp at the same time. So then of course I have to find out all of the nicknames and each one is just as smart and true, but when they get to the end there is one name missing. “Okay,” I say, “What’s my nickname?” They look at each other and shrug. They didn’t have one for me. “Oh, come on. Just tell me. How bad can it be?” They look at each other and make a face and Susan takes a deep breath and says, “Well, for the first few days, before we got to know you better, we called you Bubble Boy.” “Bubble Boy!?” “Well, it was like you were in a world of your own. You’d get on the bus, you’d get off the bus, you’d eat with us, but it was like you were never really part of the group. But that was before we got to know you better.” “So,” I sigh, “Bubble Boy.” “Yeah,” she sighs, “Bubble Boy.” Then she reaches out and gasps, afraid I might get the wrong idea. “But we never called you that!”

Light Study, Khajuraho Temple

Modern Non-Classical Music of India, Volume V

Mohit Chauhan: Mai Ni Meriye

Mohit Chauhan is an Indian ballad and playback (film) singer who has twice won the Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer. He was born in Nahan in Himachal Pradesh. Although untrained in music, he has taught himself guitar, harmonica, and flute. He recorded two albums with the pop group Silk Route. Their album “Boonhein” (1998) debuted at number one in India and featured the hit “Dooba Dooba.” After Silk Route disbanded, Mohit continued to sing as a solo act until A. R. Rahman asked him to sing in his film “Rang De Basanti,” beginning his career as a film singer.

Bombay Dub Orchestra: Journey

Bombay Dub Orchestra is an electronica/orchestral group featuring Garry Hughes and Andrew T. Mackay.

Jasbir: Putt Jattan Da

Jasbir Jassi is a Punjabi singer and actor, born on February 7, 1970, in Dalla Mirjanpur Village, Punjab, India. He has a Masters degree in classical Indian vocal music from Apeejay College of Fine Arts (Jalandhar, India).

Ali Akbar Khan & Asha Bohsie: Guru Bandana In Desh Malhar

Ali Akbar Khan was born April 14, 1922 in Comilla, East Bengal (now Bangladesh) to a famous Indian classical musician and teacher, Allauddin Khan. He was a Hindustani classical musician who was taught by his father to play the sarod and other instruments as well. He made his first public performance at the age of thirteen, and first performed with Ravi Shankar in 1939, at the age of sixteen. With Shankar, he is credited with spreading Indian music throughout the world. He first came to the United States in 1955 at the invitation of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and moved to California. In 1956 he established a musical school in Calcutta, and in 1967 he founded the Ali Akbar College of Music, now located in San Rafael, with a branch in Basel, Switzerland. He was also a professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He scored Satyajit Ray’s “Devi,” Merchant-Ivory’s “The Householder,” and Bertolucci’s “Little Buddha.” He was the first Indian musician to record Indian music in the U.S., and the first person to play sarod on U.S. TV. In August 1971, Khan performed at the Concert for Bangladesh along with Ravi Shankar, Alla Rakha, and Kamala Chakravarty. He was nominated for five Grammy awards and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts’s National Heritage Fellowship in the U.S., and was awarded India’s second highest civilian award, and was known throughout India in the last decades of his life as Ustad (master). He is quoted as saying, “If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself, after 20 years you may become a performer and please the audience, after 30 years you may please even your guru, but you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist—then you may please even God.” Akbar died of kidney failure in California on June 18, 2009.

Asha Bhosle is a playback singer who has sung over 12,000 songs (by 2006) in 21 different languages in over 1000 films since 1943. She was listed as the “Most Recorded Artist” in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2009. She was born Asha Mangeshkar on September 8, 1933, in Sangli, Bombay to a father who was an acclaimed actor and musician. She has recorded with Boy George, Code Red, Kronos Quartet, and performed a duet with Michael Stipe for One Giant Leap. Cornershop’s “Brimful of Asha” is about her, and samples of her singing have appeared on tracks by Fatboy Slim, Nelly Furtado, The Black Eyed Peas, and Sarah Brightman,

Bombay Jayashri: Zara Zara

Jayashri Ramnath (known as Bombay Jayashir) is an Indian vocalist and composer, born in Kolkata into a family of musicians, and also plays the veena. She composed some of the music for Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” and received a Grammy nomination for one of her songs in that film.

Niraj Chag with Swati Natekar: Khwaab

Niraj Chag is known for his documentary soundtracks, including “One Night in Bhopal” (2004), “The Age of Terror” (2008), “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (2008), and “The Story of the Continents” (2013). He has also composed music for the “Sex and the City” TV show. In 2006, he was awarded the Asian Music Award for “Best Underground Artist” for his album “Along the Dusty Road.” In 2008 he created a piece of music for the official Olympic Torch event on London’s South Bank with opera singers, a 40-piece brass band, and 600 vocalists. I have no information on Swati Natekar.

Sanjay Divecha with Kailash Kher: Naino Sey

I have no information on Sanjay Divecha. For information on Kailash Kher, see the January 2013 edition of “A Poet’s Progress.”

Satish Vyas: Homeward Journey

Satish Vyas is a santoor player who was born into a musical family, including his father, Pandit C.R. Vyas, one of India’s best classical singers.

Susheela Raman: Nagumomo

Susheela Raman is a British Indian Bhakti and Sufi musician born in London on July 21, 1973 to Tamil parents. The family moved to Australia in 1977. Susheela formed a funk and rock and roll band in Australia, and began to sing both blues and jazz as well. In 1995 she moved to India, and returned to London in 1997, where she lives today. Her first album “Salt Rain” was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and one of her songs were used in the film “The Namesake.” She has recorded songs by Bob Dylan, John Lennon, the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, Jimi Hendrix, Can, and Throbbing Gristle. In 2013 she appeared at the Alchemy Festival at the Royal Albert Hall.

Roots

 Article written by Randy Roark

Newtopia staff writer RANDY ROARK worked with Allen Ginsberg for the last 17 years of his life, first as an apprentice, then as his teaching assistant, and finally transcribing and editing 28,000 pages of Ginsberg’s poetry lectures, currently available on-line through the Ginsberg trust. Following Ginsberg’s death, he worked with artist Stan Brakhage, producing art events featuring his films until his death. Since 1998 he has worked with Sounds True as a producer, where he has edited artists such as Alex Grey, writers including William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, and a wide variety of spiritual teachers, including Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, and Lakota Elder Joseph Marshall.

The first female in America to address mixed crowds at a public event, Frances Wright was one of the first American feminists, and female abolitionists, a champion of worker’s rights, and a sharp critic of religious institutions.  Frances was the first American to write eloquently of sexual passion as a wonderful pleasure, not a sinful shame.  She fought for birth control, divorce and property rights for women.  Her lectures attracted thousands. Jefferson, Lafayette, Monroe, Madison and Andrew Jackson advised her.  Her audacious attempt to cure slavery with an experimental commune scandalized America. When she matured and compromised, no one noticed.  Her fame remained a caricature of extremism, until she became a curiosity, and then was forgotten in her own lifetime. Estranged from her family, her only friends her lawyer and her carpenter, she died alone.

Walt Whitman saw Frances Wright lecture at the height of her fame, in New York City, where thousands thundered their appreciation of the eloquence with which she presented her radical ideas about freeing slaves and giving women equal rights.  That year a play Frances had originally written only for her friends and family was produced for the second time at the Park Theater on Broadway.  At Thomas Paine celebrations across America her name was the most toasted.  In old age, remembering her, Whitman wrote: “She was a brilliant woman, of beauty and estate, who was never satisfied unless she was busy doing good—public good, private good…we all loved her: fell down before her: her very appearance seemed to enthrall us…the noblest Roman of them all…a woman of the noblest make-up whose orbit was a great deal larger than theirs—too large to be tolerated for long by them: a most maligned, lied about character—one of the best in history though also one of the least understood.”

THE ORPHAN PRODIGY

On the southeast coast of Scotland in 1795, Frances “Fanny” Wright was born.  Her father James Wright Jr. adored his wife and children.  His career as a merchant suffered from his dedication to spending time with his family, practicing liberal politics, and collecting coins, which included advocating for coin designs featuring good honest work like weaving and mail coaches instead of royal profiles and boring coats of arms.  British authorities investigated James in 1794 for printing and distributing Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man.  His mother’s brother James Mylne was one of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment.  James had a reputation as a local hothead who admired the American and French revolutions.

Fanny’s mother Camilla was the niece of Baron Rokeby, vice chancellor of the University of Dublin and Archbishop of Armagh.  Camilla’s godmother the bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson Montagu defended Shakespeare from the witty attacks of Voltaire; Samuel Johnson nicknamed her “Queen of the Blues,” making her undoubtedly the first queen of the blues in English literary history, though she earned the title without having to sing or play guitar.  Not long before Fanny was born the Queen of England and her six daughters breakfasted with Camilla’s godmother.

Frances seemed destined for the comfortable life of a petty aristocrat.  Letters from Camilla to her husband record the depth of love these parents felt for their children.  With a grand uncle like James Mylne, Frances was assured that her life would not be the empty display of manners and conspicuous consumption practiced by so many of her class, but as a female intellectual all she could hope for was to host a salon, while attending to the responsibilities of a wife and mother, with servants and nannies, to be sure.

When Fanny turned two years old Camilla died in the winter of 1798.  Three months later her father died.  Fanny and her older brother and younger sister became orphans.  Her brother they sent to be raised by James Mylne.  Loving foster parents took in her sister.  But her grandfather and teenage aunt raised Fanny.

Major General Duncan Campbell of the Royal Marines had retired into a luxurious life of grand dinner parties with lords and generals at which ten courses of wine were served.  Opulent evenings at the opera interested him more than child rearing.  Once when little Fanny walked with Duncan through the streets of London she saw the plight of hundreds of mothers and children in tattered clothes, obviously starving, begging for any pittance.  Duncan told her they were begging because they were too lazy to work.

Later when Duncan refused a beggar at the door, a man asking to work for a little food, Fanny announced that she wished she had money to give the poor soul.  Duncan told her she was foolish.  So “she asked him why rich people who did not work did not become beggars, he answered that work was shameful.”  He also informed her that “God intended there should be poor, and there should be rich.”

In 1803 Fanny’s uncle William, a military man like his father, was killed in India.  He willed half of his property in Bengal, Behar, Orissa, and Benares to his nieces.  The other half he willed to his sister.  In 1806 Fanny and her little sister Camilla were reunited when their young aunt used her new wealth to buy a house on the coast of Devonshire.  The sisters became very close and for most of the rest of their lives Fanny depended on her sister named after their mother to handle the domestic side of her life.

 Lyme Bay

The twenty-room mansion called The Cottage offered beautiful scenery, including a view of Lyme Bay from the top of a hill.  Fanny could watch the English Channel flow into the Atlantic.  Apricots and peaches ripened in the kitchen garden.  Magnolia trees scented the ocean breeze.  Fanny would read Wordsworth’s poetry of the rapture of nature and experience it herself swimming and riding horses.  Fanny wrote that she was “surrounded at all times by rare and extensive libraries.”  But this idyllic interlude didn’t last long.

In 1809 Fanny’s brother died in a skirmish with the French, then Major General Duncan Campbell died.  By age fourteen Fanny had lost her mother, father, brother and grandfather.

Fanny lived in the world Jane Austen wrote about.  Women of marriageable age must have only one concern, according to local propriety; they must compete to marry the finest man available.  Fanny’s conservative aunt demanded conformity to local standards of behavior.  Tall, thin teenage Fanny had other ideas.  While others politely trotted their horses, she galloped past them.  When at high tea an eligible bachelor praised his hounds she might respond with a recent insight she had regarding a problem of higher mathematics.  When polite society chatted about the latest popular novel she quoted the smoldering poetry of the notorious Lord Byron.

Meanwhile the industrialization of England advanced.  Men of wealth and power began to buy enormous areas of land on which to build their noble estates.  Fanny saw the evictions of families whose ancestors had worked farms on that land before the Norman Conquest.  They would become workers in dangerous factories, beggars on the streets of London, or immigrants to America or Australia.  Lush lawns and gardens, terrain suitable for foxhunting, and opulent mansions replaced the farms.  Going to tea or dinner at one of these castles tested Fanny’s limits.  She could not understand how these men could have treated innocent people so cruelly.

Fanny came to think of her aunt as an enemy, or perhaps an example of “the enemy.”  The domineering woman told the children exactly how much food to eat, how to stand, how to speak.  Boys must wear gloves at all times.  Her fussy reign of terror predicated on what proper society would think went against the grain of Fanny’s every instinct.

FALLING IN LOVE WITH AMERICA

In The Cottage library Fanny found a book that began the most important romance of her life.  In her autobiography she described herself at this key moment: “While still a very young girl, she found by chance among some old books tumbled together in a chest in her aunt’s library, a copy of Botta’s History of the American Revolution…From that moment she awoke, as it were, to a new existence…There existed a country consecrated to freedom, in which man might wake to the full knowledge and full exercise of his powers.  To see that country was, now at the age of sixteen, her fixed but secret determination…She had absolutely devoured the Italian historian and was in the full tide of ecstasy when a sudden apprehension seized her.  Was the whole thing a romance?  What had become of the country and the nation?  She had never heard of either.  A panic terror seized upon her.  She flew to examine every atlas in the library.  The first was not of recent date and showed no trace of the United States.  She opened with trembling hands another and another.  At last she saw ‘United States’ marked along the Atlantic coastline of North America.”

In the preface to her Course of Popular Lectures she wrote: “I may observe, however, that from the age of seventeen, when I first accidently opened the page of America’s national history…from that moment my attention became riveted on this country, as on the theater where man might first awake to the full knowledge and the full exercise of his powers.”  Soon Frances was reading everything she could find on this daring experiment in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In 1813 Fanny though still underage forced a move to the household of James Mylne.  Daughters and sons were equal, and equally well educated in the Mylne family.  Mylne’s colleagues impressed by Fanny’s intellect since she was not allowed to study at any college instead borrowed for her any book she asked for, helping her along in her career of learning.

Gathering with a circle of like-minded friends of both genders Fanny began writing Byronic poetry.  She also wrote a play, and a precocious neoclassical examination of Epicurean philosophy eventually published as A Few Days in Athens.  Frances presented it as a translation of a Greek manuscript discovered in Herculaneum.

While her peers got engaged Fanny decided to move with Camilla to London.  Not only would they pursue a lawsuit against their aunt, who was unwilling to let go their purse strings, but Fanny would get a better sense of what might be accomplished to do some good in the world.  Instead she got a good hard look at the devastation of the poor as policies of protectionism and industrialization destroyed local economies that had been self sufficient for generations.  Soaring prices and unemployment caused rioting in the streets.  Fanny decided she must see America for herself, because she had no hope for England.

James Mylne was so alarmed by Fanny’s plan to sail across the Atlantic with Camilla on a trip to see the wondrous republic America he traveled straight to Liverpool hoping to talk her out of it.  But 22-year-old Frances Wright had made up her mind.  She was too much for England, perhaps in a country as free, brash, and modern as herself, she could find a destiny more to her liking.

On the way to America Fanny made a science of adjusting diet to support digestion at sea, sharing her know how with her fellow passengers.  Imagine her delight when she found that unlike illiterate British sailors the American crew could read and write.  They spoke eagerly and knowledgably of the history and laws of the United States.  In her journal Fanny described the voyage as uneventful, but she must have been thrilled with the anticipation of arriving in a republic to her mind like some new Athens, an outpost of a superior civilization.

In fall of 1818 New York was still a small town; Greenwich Village was a landscape of farms.  Though America’s economy was struggling to Fanny it seemed no one was too poor and no one too rich.  The famous New Yorker exuberance was already in evidence.  But a series of hustles and thefts by boarding house keepers and servants quickly taught Fanny that not every American was a sage.

Walking everywhere and taking touristy boat rides Fanny was the original Studs Terkel, interviewing everyone in her path about what was going on in America.  Her favorites seem to have been the gents from the Carolinas, with their polished manners, and the rugged honest men from the western frontier.  Despite her initial experiences with hustlers, Fanny wrote that New York was more honest than other cities.

Seeking citizenship Frances and Camilla were disappointed to find that five years of residency were required.

Wealthy and powerful new friends helped make life more gracious for the newcomers.  A possible romance with an American banker, son of a famous Irish revolutionary, led to an opportunity for Frances to have the play she’d written for her friends back home in Scotland produced at the ritzy Park Theater on the famous street that even then was known simply as Broadway.

Almost 2400 people filled the theater on opening night to see this new British production about Swiss freedom fighters.  Like Fanny’s family most of the lead characters died.  The play was credited to anonymous; a female author was out of the question.  So Frances sat beside Camilla watching the standing ovation.  She had to keep her seat as the audience chanted for the author.  She could not share the rave reviews she read proclaiming her play uniquely suited for the American stage because of its passion for freedom.  She could not correct the critics who were certain a man had written it.

Despite the exciting premier the play didn’t survive a week before closing down.  No secret can last long in New York City.  Word got out that a woman had written the play that got a standing ovation.  Fussy old ladies and conservative gentlemen were shocked from Boston to Glasgow.

Frances searched for a publisher as a new production of the play was prepared for a run in Philadelphia but no one was in a rush to publish a female playwright.

Frances and Camilla returned to their travels, two young women alone voyaging thousands of miles. They went north to Montreal, and west to Pittsburgh.  Frances relished her anecdotal research on Americans.  She met wealthy liberal expatriates from Great Britain and simple backwoods mechanics and merchants.  She found all of them eager to reflect her own enthusiasm about the republic.

But Frances also saw slavery in America for the first time.  To her such brutality and inhumanity, in a country devoted to freedom and composed of wilderness, became especially vivid.

America’s economic depression seemed an easy fix to Frances.  If the wealthy had not developed a taste for fancy European fabrics and other products of decadence, if they would be content with their own homespun, the prosperity of the growing country could be immediately restored.

  1818 map of Pennsylvania

Sick from her travels under difficult conditions, Frances missed the opening night of her play in Philadelphia.  Once again the audience responded with a standing ovation.  But the play closed that very night.  Frances gave away the few copies of her play that she had been able to get printed.  She sent some of the copies to Americans she admired, including founding father Thomas Jefferson.

Before returning home the sisters visited the future site of Washington D.C. where Frances relished the muddy roads and the boarding houses of nailed together fresh lumber.  She knew someday this would be a city of impressive official buildings but she wished it could always retain the innocence of its humble beginning.  She foresaw “a sumptuous metropolis, rich in arts, and bankrupt in virtue.”

FIRST OF A NEW BREED

Frances Wright

The England that Frances returned to had taken a turn for the worse.  While the sisters were touring America unemployment led to a mass march in Manchester, a protest of over a hundred thousand working people.  The swords and guns of their own troops were turned against them.  Blood drenched the field.  New laws were passed allowing soldiers to search any home or person without a warrant.  Political groups were limited to fifty members at any gathering.  There would be no revolution in Merrie Olde England.

Meanwhile a frisky new king, George IV, was busy trying to divorce his wife for allegedly having an affair with a servant.  Frances told anyone who would listen that America was the hope of humanity.  “Truly I am grateful to this nation; the study of their history and institutions, and the consideration of the peace and happiness which they enjoy, has thawed my heart and filled it with hopes which I had not thought it could know again.”  She began to work on a book about her travels.

She had faith in the American political system.  “The wheel of the people, turns noiseless, and unimpeded, watched by all and suspected by none.”

But she also criticized America for not living up to its potential.  The press used its freedom in shameful ways.  Many farmers could only just eke out a living.  Slavery was slowly poisoning America.  Vital young American girls all became withdrawn sullen wives.  Frances blamed exclusion from education and citizenship for the sorry state of America’s mothers.

And yet Frances also wrote: “The prejudices still to be found in Europe, though now indeed somewhat antiquated, which would confine the female library to romances, poetry, and belles-lettres, and female conversation to the last new publication, new bonnet, and parasol are entirely unknown here. The women are assuming their place as thinking beings.”

Then Frances received a letter from Thomas Jefferson praising her play.  In her response she didn’t mention her Broadway triumph.  She mentioned only “chilling disappointments.”

Views of Society and Manners in America; A Series of Letters from that Country to a Friend in England, During the Years 1818, 1819, and 1820 By An Englishwoman was published in London in 1821.  She wrote about natives, mail delivery, the famous pirate Jean Lafitte, Niagara Falls, Benedict Arnold, and the history of the federal administration.

“The Americans are very good talkers,” she wrote, “and admirable listeners; understand perfectly the exchange of knowledge, for which they employ conversation, and employ it solely.  They have a surprising stock of information, but this runs little into the precincts of imagination; facts form the groundwork of their discourse.  They are accustomed to rest opinions on the results of experience, rather than on ingenious theories and abstract reasonings… the world, however, is the book which they consider most attentively, and make a general practice of turning over the page of every man’s mind that comes across them; they do this very quietly and very civilly, and with the understanding that you are at prefect liberty to do the same by theirs…equally free from effrontery and officiousness…the constant exercise of the reasoning powers gives to their character and manners a mildness, plainness, and unchanging suavity, such as is often remarked in Europe in men devoted to the abstract sciences….wonderfully patient and candid in argument, close reasoners, acute observers and original thinkers.”  She says you can learn more from an American in half an hour than you could from an entire evening with the literary and diplomatic elite of Europe.

The great American novelist James Fennimore Cooper dismissed Fanny’s book about America as “nauseous flattery.”

James Fenimore Cooper

As for British critics a prominent front-page review claimed to have proof that the author was a “red-hot American” dismissing the book as “a tissue of impertinence, and injustice, and falsehood.”  The quarterly, which that year had published the review widely credited with having killed the poet Keats, considered Views of Society and Manners in America “impudent” and “ridiculous.”  Only The Scotsman, a Scottish journal, praised the book as morally sublime, “deeply felt, and so eloquently described.”

But the opinions of European critics mattered little to Frances.  The book became popular in America and two heroes of the American Revolution would soon champion her cause.

British philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham was an old man when he met Frances.  The story was told that Jeremy at age three had already begun to study Latin, being dissatisfied with the histories he was already reading in English.  His later attempts to codify the laws of England and the United States may have been unsuccessful but he established the trend.  In fact, he coined the verb: “codify.” All his life he fought for absolute equality for women, abolition of slavery, the repeal of the death penalty, a ban on physical punishment for adults and children, freedom of speech, the right to divorce, and the legality of homosexuality.
Jeremy shared Fanny’s sentiments about America, and her book supported his own arguments.  Jeremy believed the ultimate moral rule to be the greatest happiness for the majority.  He didn’t respect hereditary power and certainly didn’t credit it with superior intelligence.  He thought the prisons should be reformed, the ballots blind.  He argued that Paul had ruined the religion of Jesus.  Jeremy became Fanny’s mentor.  He also sent her to visit friends of his in France, to deliver messages that if intercepted by the British government could have caused him serious trouble.  She became acquainted with the elite political intellectuals of France.  Then in autumn of 1821 she met Jeremy’s friend the American Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette.

IN THE WAKE OF LAFAYETTE

Lafayette during the American Revolution

George Washington talked with tears in his eyes about the contributions to the American Revolution of the Marquis de Lafayette, a man who had shared the rough life of his soldiers, who paid them out of his own pocket, spending his inheritance to support the army Washington gave him, a shrewd tactician and heroic fighter.

Lafayette, the preeminent hero of the French Revolution, even dreamed up the tri-color flag of France.  The French idolized him.  In July 1789 when the troops surrounded the national assembly as the king prepared to dismiss it, Lafayette presented the assembly with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, approved by his friend Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.  Four days later the locals elected Lafayette commander of the Paris militia.  He saved many lives from the wrath of the rioters.

 Lafayette’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Men

Lafayette rescued the royal family twice.  Once when rioters broke into Versailles and with pikes and knives killed royal guards, Lafayette saved the Queen of France by taking her to a balcony over the central court and kissing her hand.  The French understood this generous and sentimental gesture.  They shouted long live Lafayette and long live the queen.

But on the next occasion of her rescue by Lafayette, Marie Antoinette sneered at him for being a traitor to his class, and refused to be rescued by him, choosing to die by the guillotine instead.  Yet because of his respect for the royals Lafayette was a constant target of radicals who wanted to send him to the guillotine with the queen.  When the leaders of the revolution issued warrants for his arrest Lafayette fled with 22 fellow officers, but they were caught in Prussia, and so began Lafayette’s five years of prison in Prussia and Austria, an ordeal of deprivation and hunger that damaged his previously robust health.

When Napoleon defeated Austria the French people demanded the release of Lafayette.  Napoleon didn’t relish a rival of Lafayette’s immense popularity so he negotiated his freedom but exiled him from France.  Lafayette snuck in anyway.  He wanted to go home to his castle on a thousand acres La Grange.  When Lafayette promised to stay there and keep out of public life Napoleon relented.

Later Lafayette

By the time Frances met Lafayette his days of swashbuckling freedom fighting were long over.  French realist author Stendhal wrote this unflattering portrait: “He took each day as it came; a man not overburdened with intelligence…dealt with each heroic situation as it arose, and in between times was solely occupied, in spite of his age, in fumbling at pretty girls’ plackets, not occasionally but constantly, and not much caring who saw.”

But Lafayette and Frances always insisted their relationship was platonic.  When they first met they talked long into the night about their greatest passion, America.  According to Fanny’s letter to her mentor Jeremy, Lafayette described an “army of brothers who had all things in common, our pleasure, our pains, our money, and our poverty…the virtues of that army…their fortitude, their disinterested, and sublime patriotism.”

La Grange dazzled Frances, with its park, five towers, moat, menagerie, aviary, and cider presses.  La Grange was the creation of Lafayette’s beloved wife Adrienne, who had died in 1807.  Adrienne had fought the new bureaucracy of Paris to regain what she could of her ancestral lands and wealth.  She had designed La Grange as a tribute and sanctuary for her husband, made it magical with her sense of decoration, she even wrote the music playing in the background.  She was gone but grandchildren, cousins and dinner guests meant setting the dinner table for thirty.  The halls and walls of La Grange were a museum of Lafayette’s accomplishments, including flags of historical importance, and paintings of great Frenchmen and Americans who had been his friends and colleagues.

Frances offered to write Lafayette’s life story.  He had a portrait painted of her that he placed in his study.  From the privileged position Lafayette provided, Frances watched the maneuvering of the French political parties in their legislative sessions.  Back home in London Lafayette’s friends visited Frances, she found herself surrounded by the famous liberal gray heads of the day.

Frances wrote Lafayette fawning, sycophantic letters in which she claimed to love him more than a daughter could her father, but she was merely imitating his own tone towards her.  He was the first to bring up the father and daughter quality of their relationship. While his letters to her seemed to stray into the area of romance, testing her reactions, Frances was careful to stay away from any affection except paternal, she emphasized his importance to her as a mentor and ideal.

Lafayette wrote of her: “—to know, to respect, and to love her, will ever be, in my sense, one and the same thing.”  Their close relationship first caused gossip then suspicion.  Observing the flurries of intellectual conversation Lafayette and Frances enjoyed, the general’s family began to fear that she had too much influence over him.

Frances had a simple suggestion to end all such interference.  Lafayette could adopt her, or marry her, as he saw fit.  Lafayette explained that he had promised his dying wife he would never marry again.   How could he adopt her when he already had such devoted children and grandchildren?

When Frances shared with Lafayette her unfinished work about Epicurus, he insisted it be published.  Finishing it turned out to be a chore for the impatient Frances, but the book was published in 1822.  Jefferson received a copy and gave it a rave review calling it a “treat to me of the highest order.” Excerpts from it filled seven pages of his journal. He wrote that “the matter and manner of the dialogue is strictly ancient … the scenery and portraiture of the interlocutors are of higher finish than anything in that line left us by the ancients… if not ancient, it is equal to the best morsels of antiquity.”

Frances became Lafayette’s agent as he schemed to support the army in Spain who had forced their king to accept shared power with elected officials.  But in 1823 the new Bourbon king of France came to his fellow monarch’s rescue, and the French army helped crush the rebellion, and then stood by watching in horror as the Spanish royalists took their revenge.  Frances dismissed the disaster as the result of supporting a man inadequate to the task.  The man in question’s last request was to have a lock of his hair snipped off and sent to the Marquis de Lafayette.

In 1824 President Monroe invited Lafayette to return again to the United States.  Lafayette considered this his farewell tour.  He wanted Frances to join him and she of course would not go without Camilla.  But the family would not allow them to travel together, by boat or carriage.  Still Lafayette loved to have the sisters accompany him to public events and he enjoyed introducing Frances to his powerful friends as the author of his biography.

Reunited in America, sucked into the celebration of Lafayette with artillery salutes, musical flourishes, cheering crowds and even a visit to the first of many towns named after him, Frances met Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson.  Congress voted Lafayette a gift of two hundred thousand dollars to help pay back his generous financial support of the American Revolution.

About Frances Lafayette wrote to Jefferson: “you and I are the two men in the world the esteem of whom she values the most. I wish much, my dear friend, to present these two adopted daughters of mine to Mrs. Randolph and to you; they being orphans from their youth, and preferring American principles to British aristocracy, having an independent, though not very large fortune, have passed the three last years in most intimate connection with my children and myself, and have readily yielded to our joint entreaties to make a second visit to the U.S.”

Thomas Jefferson

The beauty of Montebello, and the daring of the University of Virginia, America’s first institution of higher learning without affiliation to any religious body, charmed Frances.  She was moved by the reunion of these heroes of the American Revolution.  She described Thomas Jefferson’s tall upright figure but observing his weakened state she lamented that “the lamp is evidently on the wane nor is it possible to consider the fading of a light so brilliant and pure without a sentiment of deep melancholy.”

One female critic at the Jefferson soiree said of Frances: “to ladies she never spoke.”  Fanny’s future as a lecturer becomes obvious when this critic commented: “the Frenchmen told many instances of her masculine proclivities, on occasion she would harangue men in the public room of a hotel and the like.”

Frances both charmed and alienated Lafayette’s old American friends.  One woman in particular set her sites on Frances, outraged by her impudent demands on Lafayette’s time and reputation.  Mary, or Mindy as she was better known, was George Washington’s stepdaughter.  She soon convinced Lafayette to distance himself from these two young Scottish sisters traveling scandalously without family, despite his own inappropriate claim to be their protector.

Fanny welcomed the opportunity to see the country, becoming the most traveled woman in American history until that time, from the frontier outposts of the Midwest to the drunken steamboat races on the Mississippi River, all the way to mosquito infested New Orleans, Fanny and Camilla had the foolhardiness and courage to travel alone through the great frontier, astonishing and charming everyone they met.  But Fanny’s fond belief that all Americans were well read, and passionate about liberty, required revision.  She had seen some rough types along the way, none rougher than the men who practiced the business of slavery.

Reunited with Lafayette in the south Frances wrote of the dismay she felt watching slaveholders celebrate the Marquis. “The enthusiasm, triumphs and rejoices exhibited here before the countenance of the great and good Lafayette have no longer charms for me. They who so sin against the liberty of their country, against those great principles for which their honored guest poured on their soil his treasure and his blood, are not worthy to rejoice in his presence. My soul sickens in the midst of gaiety, and turns almost with disgust from the fairest faces or the most amiable discourse.”

Was this resolve regarding slavery a reaction to Fanny’s rejection by the slave owning stepdaughter of George Washington?  Or had she been influenced by the fervor of a social experiment? On the way to New Orleans, Fanny had seen the Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana.

JACOB RAPP AND THE HARMONISTS

New Harmony as envisioned by Robert Owen

Jacob Rapp declared himself a prophet to his thousands of followers in Germany so the Lutheran authorities gave him five days in jail to think it over.  Jacob never doubted his calling, but he did decide to transplant himself and five hundred families to America.  The Harmonists had a business: building towns.  First they built Harmony, Pennsylvania.  Then they built Harmony, Indiana.  After selling Harmony, Indiana made them wealthy they moved back to Pennsylvania to build the town of Economy.

Jacob was deeply influenced by the great German theosopher and mystic Jakob Böhme. Böhme’s extraordinary visions of spiritual dimensions of existence found harmony and geometry throughout the universe seen and unseen.  Jacob Rapp also found inspiration in the works of the great Swedish mystic visionary Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was a curious combination of pioneer scientist and spiritualist author.  Angels and devils are good and bad humans outside the temporary domains of physical bodies. Böhme’s heaven a shining vision of principles and ratios seems somewhat remote when compared with Swedenborg’s talkative angels and for the most part not really all that bad devils.  Swedenborg reassured loving couples that their sex lives in heaven would make the best sex they had ever known mere foreplay.

Since alchemical vessels and bottles have been found in the town of Economy historians speculate that the Harmonists may have practiced alchemy.  Their library included the notorious and spurious magical work Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and Opus Mago Cabalisticum, but they were more like Christian mystics than hermetic practitioners.

Jacob and the Harmonists expected the apocalypse during their lifetimes.  They prized celibacy; even married couples were encouraged to give up the practices that depend on the Adam and Eve world, instead of the Adam world, when he was pure, before the fall.  Babies were few and far between.  Sundays were for services and singing.  No chewing or smoking tobacco.  Harmonists lived five or six in each small house, not necessarily family members, but devoted to living as Christian brothers and sisters.

In 1814 the Harmonists moved to Indiana Territory.  That first summer and fall malaria felled over a hundred people.  So the Harmonists drained the swamp, then got back to the “hard labor and coarse fare” of building a town in the wilderness.  By 1819 the town boasted vineyards, a distillery, a brewery, a winery, and a steam powered wool carding and spinning factory.  The impeccable craftsmanship of the carpentry and masonry was matched by the beautiful symmetry of the architecture.  Because they worked in harmony with each other and with great pride in their work they outperformed their peers in these professions. By the time the Harmonists sold Harmony, Indiana they had two thousand acres under cultivation.  They manufactured peach brandy, whiskey, wine, beer, tin ware, rope, wagons, carts, plows, flannel, wool, and cotton.  But they didn’t like living so near Kentucky slave towns.  The Harmonists were strictly abolitionist.  They all became rich when Robert Owen paid them 150,000 dollars for Harmony, Indiana.  Robert renamed it New Harmony.

Robert Owen was an industrialist but also a reformer.  A Welshman who ran a model factory in Scotland, he tried to prove that treating worker’s decently, paying them well, and providing for their whole lives, instead of working them to death, produced not only superior workers with far fewer issues like violence and alcoholism, but the factory itself could make more money.  Sadly, no other industrialists seemed to care. British industrialism rolled on through child labor and matchstick girls with glow in the dark jaws eaten away by phosphorous. Owen had decided to think bigger.  He bought this town from the Harmonists so that he could create a model society.  Like Plato’s Republic, this community would prove the principles of its founder.

The vines of New Harmony

It took only ten years for the Harmonists to build the beautiful town of Harmony.  But Owen’s experimental community lasted only two.  Owen invited everyone who wanted to try life in a commune devoted to enlightened living to join him, but along with a few idealists he attracted hustlers and freeloaders.  So the “Constitution of the Preliminary Society” was drawn up.  Members invested not just their money but also their household possessions.  They would own a piece of an enterprise devoted to reform and equality.  Any services they rendered for the community would be paid in points redeemable at the town store, but cash was welcome there, too, for folks disinclined to work.

Soon New Harmony became a cacophony of bickering.  Overcrowded, poorly supervised and unproductive, the town floundered.  Within months the shortage of skilled craftsmen and laborers led to unrepaired breakdowns.  But Owen soon arrived with reinforcements.  He had recruited scientists and educators, and he had raised more funds, so his great experiment was given another opportunity to flourish.

The New Harmony Community of Equality was adopted as the town constitution.  Happiness would be the result of equal rights and equal duties.  All property would be held in common.  The constitution mandated cooperation, freedom of speech, kindness and courtesy, preservation of health and education.  What it would not do was provide rules by which these objectives were to be achieved.
America’s first anarchist, Josiah Warren was a member of the community.  He wrote eloquently of its failure: “It seemed that the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity. Two years were worn out in this way; at the end of which, I believe that not more than three persons had the least hope of success. Most of the experimenters left in despair of all reforms, and conservatism felt itself confirmed. We had tried every conceivable form of organization and government. We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. …It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us …our ‘united interests’ were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.”

To dissolve his New Harmony enterprise Owen had to spend another 200,000 dollars, at a time when you could buy a cow for twelve.  His fortune never recovered, and his ambitions became less grandiose.

Unhappily for Frances, she arrived in New Harmony in the first flush of its enthusiasm. She had heard Owen address Congress on February 25, 1825. Owen described what he called A New System of Society, a commune where everyone owned an equal share and shared work equally.  This experimental community would prove that cooperation is superior to competition.

Frances arrived in New Harmony before its first constitution, before the second chance of 1826, at a time when none of the participants would have believed their failure would become obvious by 1827.

By then Frances was mired in the failure of her own utopian experiment.  Like New Harmony, Nashoba would fail because of naiveté regarding human motivations and the complexities of communities.  The Harmonists who had flourished in the town they built were all German immigrants who shared a pious belief system that required constant practice.  New Harmony was a melting pot of radicals, crackpots, intellectuals, and opportunists, each with his or her own agenda.

NASHOBA

Frances and Camilla were thrilled when they learned they were eligible to become citizens of the United States of America, despite having spent much of the five eligibility years in Great Britain and France.  When they said goodbye to Lafayette on his 68^th birthday, as he sailed home from New York harbor on a hot day in July, Frances and Camilla were American citizens.

Now Frances combined the inspiration of New Harmony with her dedication to finding a way to solve the problem of slavery in America in a five-year plan.  She would buy or be given slaves, who would earn their freedom in five years.  While they were earning their freedom they would receive educations.  They would be prepared for life after slavery by learning trades and developing a sense of politics and history.  White members of the community, six of them, would supervise and educate.  Slaves and free blacks would do the work.  White and black children would receive the same education.

Frances worked the connections Lafayette had provided to get a chance to pitch her plan to President Andrew Jackson himself.  Jackson liked the idea.  James Monroe approved.  James Madison had serious reservations, however.  He didn’t think a promise of freedom would be enough to motivate a slave.  He pointed out Spain’s policy of offering slaves the opportunity to work for their freedom and how few slaves took it.

Andrew Jackson suggested Frances buy some recently cleared land in Tennessee.  Jackson had forcibly removed the Chickasaw tribe.  Tennessee was the most liberal of the slave states; abolitionist groups were allowed to flourish there.  The land was cheap and the population sparse, making local controversy less likely.

Jefferson offered neither public endorsement nor funds but he did encourage Frances.  “At the age of eighty-two,” he wrote to her, “with one foot in the grave, and the other uplifted to follow it, I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man, not even in the great one which has been through life that of my greatest anxieties. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object. That which you propose is well worthy of trial.”

Though Jefferson wondered if “moral urgencies” would be enough to motivate the slaves he also wrote: “You are young, dear Madam, and have powers of mind which may do much in exciting others in this arduous task.  I am confident they will be so exerted, and I pray to Heaven for their success, and that you may be rewarded with the blessings which such efforts merit.”

No one wanted to invest in her plan except Lafayette who offered her eight thousand dollars.  She refused to take it, not wanting to cause him further trouble with his family.  In October 1825 Fanny used her own money to buy two thousand acres of trees and swamp near the Wolf River.  She named her raw acreage Nashoba, the Chickasaw word for wolf.  She spent more of her own money to buy supplies and slaves.

Among the founders of Nashoba was Marcus Brutus Winchester, the eldest son of General James Winchester, President Jackson’s business partner, and his wife, a free black woman.  They had eight children, the oldest boy they named Robert Owen, and their second daughter Frances Wright.  His father’s gift of 420 acres in 1824 became downtown Memphis.  Marcus became a land agent, the county Democratic Party leader, postmaster, and when the town incorporated in 1826 he became the first mayor.  He built the jail and the courthouse.  His general store where Native Americans, backwoodsmen and townspeople mingled gave Frances an education in American frontier society.

Frances was 29 when Nashoba broke ground. In its first year about 100 acres were cleared, and primitive log structures provided shelter.

Frontier life at first agreed with Frances.  As Celia Eckhardt wrote in what remains the only biography of Frances Wright Fanny Wright: Rebel in America: “She wrote of forest land still full of bears, wolves, and panthers, and pictured herself galloping her white horse over rough, open country.  She slept in log cabins open on all sides, she said, and even in the woods with a bearskin for a bed and a saddle for her pillow.  She endured extremes of heat and cold and had never felt better or stronger in her life.  She could now ride forty miles a day without fatigue, and she did so often, going between Memphis and Nashoba, greeting the Indians who were her nearest neighbors as they came to sell their furs. She prayed God for a little rain, drank milk from her cow, ate venison from the Indians, and warmed herself at the great fire in her cabin.  She closed by saying…I begin to cherish life.”

The land was hard to work, and often flooded.  Bad weather made the work harder.  Supplies like lime and rocks had to be taken from the earth itself.  Despite the hardship by its first summer Nashoba seemed to be succeeding.  Visitors commented that the slaves worked with such devoted concentration just seeing them was enough to convince any skeptic that they could match or surpass white men.

In abolitionist newspapers Frances pleaded for stonemasons, carpenters, teachers, and investors to help the great experiment, but her pleas went unanswered.

Frances decided in December 1826 that she would write up a new deed for Nashoba.  No longer privately owned it would now be a true commune.  That way if anything happened to her the experiment could continue. New rules were written, as well.  Six thousand dollars was set as the price of freedom, plus 6% interest yearly.  No slave could become a trustee and they would not be involved in making community decisions.  Freed slaves would leave the United States. Slaves who deserved punishment would be punished according to the old slave system, including flogging, though only in extreme cases.

Camilla, and Robert Dale Owens, son of Robert Owens were among the trustees.  So was James Richardson, an enigmatic man who would care for the sisters through their life threatening fevers, but who would later destroy the reputations of Nashoba and Frances Wright.  Another trustee was George Flower, the only member of the community with farming skills; Nashoba had been his idea at first.  Frances and he worked together to realize their dream.  Historian Celia Eckhardt suggests that Flower and Frances had a passionate affair when they were alone together on a long trip through the wilderness, in the early days of planning Nashoba.  Flower was married with young children.  His wife didn’t keep secret her disdain for Nashoba and Frances.  Mrs. Flower devoted her self to nothing more or less than raising her children.  Camilla was eager to see her go.  But when she did go, she took her husband George with her,

In 1827 Frances visited New Harmony again, hoping to renew her optimism.  The dances, the bands, the marches, the organization, all the good intentions had fallen into angry bickering.  When Owen suggested everyone return to their beds to contemplate their animosities and mean thoughts peace reigned only briefly.  Anger ruled the day.  So Owen dissolved New Harmony.  Unwilling to give up the dream, Robert Dale Owen, Owen’s son, left New Harmony to join Frances at Nashoba.

 Robert Dale Owen

Nashoba was a mosquito-infested swamp the natives had used for hunting only, never for habitation. Frances became ill with fever. Just as Frances began to improve Camilla was struck by the fever, re-infecting Frances, who spent three months in bed near death.  James Richardson took responsibility for nursing the sisters back to health, and both credited his care for their survival.  The slaves continued to work devotedly, but supplies of rope and other necessities were running out.  The school had not yet been built.  They still had neither a skilled carpenter nor an expert at farming.

Dale helped Frances make the arduous trip back to Europe.  She suffered in a hammock in the back of a wagon bumping over uneven roads all the way to the port of New Orleans.  Her ship became grounded on a sand bank.  Nevertheless her health began to improve as the ship crossed the Atlantic.  On board a hired Scottish servant fed her a steady supply of oatcakes and porridge.

Mary Shelley noticed Fanny’s arrival: “a woman, young rich and independent, quits the civilization of England for a life of hardship in the forests of America, that by so doing she may contribute to the happiness of her species.”

Meanwhile back in Nashoba James Richardson for some reason decided details of his journal deserved to be published in a leading abolitionist newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation.  Two of the excerpts made shocking news.  Richardson described two incidents when he whipped slave women in the approving presence of Camilla.  He also admitted to be living outside wedlock with a free black woman.  Accusations flew that Nashoba was a “brothel.”  Richardson’s efforts to defend his position, which culminated in his declaration of atheism, only inflamed the controversy.

Frances and Robert Dale had enjoyed time with Lafayette and his now gracious family at La Grange.  They toured Paris and the surrounding countryside.  Dale assured his sister back home that his relationship with Frances was platonic.  He found in her his ideal intellectual companion.  But then the news from home arrived; their trip would have to be cut short.  Frances couldn’t return immediately.  The anxiety over the next month began to turn her hair white.  A chronic backache tormented her.

Before returning to Nashoba, Frances reached out to Mary Shelley: “If you possess the opinions of your father and the generous feelings of you mother, I feel that I could travel far to see you.”  The widow of the notorious poet Shelley, Mary’s mother was the English pioneer of feminism Mary Wollstonecraft and of William Godwin, friend to poets, author of Political Justice, he argued for the overthrow of all traditional institutions including government, religion and private property.  Mary had run off with her poet while he was still married to the mother of his children.  She had a child with him before she took his name in marriage.  Frances must have hoped she would find a kindred soul in Mary, one who might join her in Nashoba.

 Mary Shelley

To Mary Frances wrote: “While we endeavor to undermine the slavery of color existing in the North American Republic, we essay equally to destroy the slavery of mind now reigning there as in other countries.”  She described Nashoba as “an establishment where affection shall form the only marriage, kind feeling and kind action the only religion, respect for the feelings and liberties of others the only restraint, and union of interest the bond of peace and security.”

Mary was flattered and wanted to know more, but she wasn’t about to abandon Europe.  Frances wrote to her passionately hoping to convince her: “I have made the hard earth my bed, the saddle of my horse my pillow, and have staked my life and fortune on an experiment having in view moral liberty and human improvement.  Many of course think me mad, and if to be mad mean to be one of a minority, I am so, and very mad indeed, for our minority is very small.  Should that few succeed in mastering the first difficulties, weaker spirits, though often not less amiable, may carry forward the good work.”

Frances traveled south from London.  She spent seven days with Mary.  The author of Frankenstein understood Frances better than most.  She wrote of Frances to Robert Dale: “neither so independent or so fearless as you think.”  Mary’s son Percy said drily that Frances reminded him of “Minerva.”

When Frances returned to Nashoba she restated her mission in a letter shared with her friends and with potential colleagues.  Nashoba’s purpose was “to prepare the two colors for the coming change.  It is to kill prejudices in the white man by raising the black man to his level…not the mere theory, but the practice of equality…a first example of union and brotherhood.”

Mrs. Trollope, a friend of Fanny’s, needed somewhere to hide from her creditors so she joined the endless line of Fanny’s visitors in London eager to learn more about Nashoba, which included Leigh Hunt, who had been a friend of Keats and Shelly.  Despite approaching age fifty, Mrs. Trollope liked what she heard enough to pack up her servants and her children with a plan to spend one or two years in the woods.  The Trollope troop joined Fanny on her voyage home.

Mary Shelley came to see Fanny off.  She asked for a lock of her hair, which she kept near her for the rest of her life. Was tearful Mary reminded of her husband, another tall thin idealist with curly hair and a way with words?  Mary knew that Fanny was sailing into a storm of her own.

As the ship crossed the Atlantic, Fanny wrote a definitive response on Nashoba she wished to have published.  Trollope watched her read portions of the tract to sailors.  “Let us correct our views of right and wrong,” Frances wrote, “correct our moral lessons, and so correct the practice of rising generations.”

On the way to Nashoba, eating beside sailors and working men, Trollope quickly realized that Fanny had presented an idealized America quiet different from the rude reality.  She couldn’t keep her clothes clean in this world of tobacco spit and spilled alcohol.

When they arrived in Nashoba Frances found out that Camilla was now married, and both she and her husband looked alarmingly sickly.  James Richardson had already left; he had no apologies for Frances or Nashoba.  Food was limited to cornbread, pork and rice.  The farm was a failure.  The slaves had given up and were now as ineffective as any passive aggressive plantation slave, and the pestilential climate and atmosphere seemed a direct threat to herself and her children so Trollope borrowed money to make a hasty exit.  She commented that Camille seemed to share her suspicion that the fever may have somewhat deranged Fanny’s mind.

  Trollope

Trollope quickly relocated to Cincinnati.  But Fanny’s example wasn’t entirely lost on her.  In 1832 she published Domestic Manners of the Americans, beginning her career as a novelist.  Trollope’s anti-slavery novel influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Trollope had this to say about America: “How is it that the men of America, who are reckoned good husbands and good fathers, while they themselves enjoy sufficient freedom of spirit to permit their walking forth into the temple of the living God, can leave those they love best on earth, bound in the iron chains of a most tyrannical fanaticism? How can they breathe the balmy air, and not think of the tainted atmosphere so heavily weighing upon breasts still dearer than their own? How can they gaze upon the blossoms of the spring, and not remember the fairer cheeks of their young daughters, waxing pale, as they sit for long sultry hours, immured with hundreds of fellow victims, listening to the roaring vanities of a preacher, canonized by a college of old women? They cannot think it needful to salvation, or they would not withdraw themselves.”  Her sentiments here weren’t far from Fanny’s own.

When Frances published her Explanatory Notes, Respecting the Nature and Objects of the Institution of Nashoba, and of the Principles upon Which It Is Founded.  Addressed to the Friends of Human Improvement, in All Country and of All Nations’ she shocked her contemporaries by writing that sexual passion was “the strongest and the noblest of human passions…the best joys of our existence…the best source of human happiness.”  Virtue is not the province of self sacrifice and bitter discipline, virtue exists in anyone “in proportion as they are happy, and happy in proportion as they are free…ignorant laws, ignorant prejudices, ignorant codes of morals… condemn one portion of the female sex to vicious excess, another to as vicious restraint, and all to defenseless helplessness and slavery, and generally the whole of the male sex to debasing licentiousness, if not to loathsome brutality.”

But praising sexual passion wasn’t the most controversial of her points.  Frances no longer advocated relocation for the slaves.  She thought the races should mingle.  She predicted that once black Americans received equal educations miscegenation would no longer be controversial.  This and her attacks on organized religion only made her all the more notorious.  Old allies like James Madison were alienated by her adoption of views almost universally despised.  Disappointed, Frances hoped that in the future people would look back in disbelief that her thoughts were ever considered radical.

At this time many of her allies deserted her. The failure of Nashoba cost her half her fortune.  The whiff of the scandal haunted her for the rest of her life.

FRANCES WRIGHT: SUPERSTAR

Robert Dale returned to what was left of New Harmony, and Fanny soon followed.  She accepted his invitation to become co-editor of the New Harmony Gazette.  Frances became the first woman to edit an American newspaper since the colonial days.  Her eloquent articles and editorials argued against the death penalty, condemned religious intolerance, demanded rights for women, advocated equality by education, legal rights for married women, simple divorce laws, and access to birth control.

July 4, 1828, Frances as the featured speaker during New Harmony’s Independence Day celebration was probably the first woman in American history to address a large mixed gender crowd at a secular ceremony, or as her critics called it “a promiscuous assembly.”  The New Harmony Gazette became an important source of news neglected by the newspapers who at the time were the mainstream media.  When her first lecture in Cincinnati overflowed with a line wrapped around the block only the Gazette reported the triumph.  Another newspaper rebutted her ideas with the observation that unhappy marriages don’t exist, then reminded the reader of Fanny’s scandalous defense of miscegenation.

Frances was such a success she toured as a lecturer for several months.  She carried notes but seldom consulted them as she spoke.  She proposed the creation in every town of a Hall of Science or Temple of Reason, where citizens could see for themselves the fruits of science and of the republic.  She suggested correspondence committees create boarding schools, what she called Schools of Industry, to be attached to the Halls of Science so citizens could become skilled workers and educated participants in democracy.  Local leaders lined up to meet her.

Reactions to Fanny’s lectures were mixed, and tended to the extremes of admiration and disgust.  According to Trollope in Cincinnati the men cared only about money, and the women only about religion, nevertheless wealthy donors contributed to what they hoped would become the local Cincinnati Temple of Reason, but the chimerical location was never realized.

Then more bad news forced Frances to return to Nashoba.  A taskmaster who deserted the farm had stolen supplies.  Camilla was now six months pregnant.  Did Fanny put aside her ambitions to stay with her sister for several months during this anxious time, Camilla’s first birth, at risk in the primitive place that was Memphis?  Frances left her sister to fend for herself.  She took a risky trip over river and prairie, to lecture to bigger crowds, appearing in St. Louis, Louisville, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.

Fanny’s fame spread during an especially vicious 1828 presidential campaign between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams.  The Great Awakening gave America an evangelical preoccupation with sexual morality.  Mrs. Jackson was attacked in the press as an adulteress, and therefore as a threat to society, although the scandal in question was hardly scandalous and had occurred thirty years earlier.  In turn Mr. and Mrs. Adams were accused of having had premarital sex.  The ladies of the hottest new town on the frontier, Cincinnati, confronted a shopkeeper about his sign depicting a lady with petticoats showing her ankles.  He had to have the ankles painted out.  Women were scandalized if a man used the word corset in their presence.

Into this climate of overheated repression Frances delivered lectures praising erotic passion and advocating sexual liberation.  She not only ignored the current controversies of adultery and premarital sex, she questioned the institution of marriage.

What did Frances think of the evangelical spirit sweeping America, reaching even into New Harmony?  “By the sudden combination of three orthodox sects, a revival, as such scenes of distraction are wont to be styled, was opened in houses, churches, and even on the Ohio river.  The victims of this odious experiment on human credulity and nervous weakness were invariably women.  Helpless age was made a public spectacle, innocent youth driven to raving insanity, mothers and daughters carried lifeless from the presence of the ghostly expounders of damnation; all ranks shared the contagion, until the despair of Calvin’s hell itself seemed to have fallen upon every heart—.”

What Fanny’s admirers called “noble” her detractors called “masculine.”  She carried no notes, only a copy of the Declaration of Independence.  The press and the clergy were united in their opposition to her.  She was labeled the “female monster,” “great Red Harlot of Infidelity,” “Priestess of Beelzebub,” and “the whore of Babylon.” Her supporters organized to provide her protection. She traveled with a bodyguard. Once when a heckler yelled fire and her audience began to stampede Frances stood calmly on stage, soothing the panic like Apollonius silencing the riot.

Another opponent turned off the gas lines that lit the lecture hall lamps.  Frances finished the lecture by candlelight, earning a thunderous ovation she was carried out of the venue by her devoted followers.

In January of 1829 Camilla was suffering a terrible labor in Memphis.  She was bled three times by the incompetent doctor, and nearly died.  She named her newborn son Francis.  Frances didn’t see her nephew.  Instead she commenced a six lecture series at Masonic Hall in New York City, with an audience of perhaps two thousand each night.  The beaten down liberals of New York found in her words a refuge and hope for their cause.  Her lectures there and at the Park Theater brought together what amounted to a political party.  Then William Stone noticed her.

William Stone

Stone edited the New York Commercial Advertiser.  Though he admired Lafayette and was himself an abolitionist as Celia Eckhardt wrote: “Fanny Wright stirred something so deep and powerful in him that he lost his self-control: repeatedly he returned to the attack, with a rage and hatred so little suppressed that it seemed pathological.”

Stone admitted: “the sensation of the ludicrous, naturally suggested by its novelty…was entirely superseded.”  The novelty Stone refers to was perhaps best captured by Samuel Johnson a century earlier: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Thousands attended Fanny’s third lecture, at a gothic temple, decorated in what supposed to be Epicurean style.  Thousands were turned away.  Stone called Fanny “the Lioness of the day,” but he shuddered at the women who openly attended the spectacle.

At the fifth lecture a protestor set fire to a barrel of turpentine sending suffocating smoke billowing through the venue.  Stone blamed the victim.  “It is time we should have done with Miss Wright, her pestilent doctrines, and her deluded followers, who are as much to be pitied, as their priestess is to be despised.  She comes amongst us in the character of a bold blasphemer, and a voluptuous preacher of licentiousness…Casting off all restraints, she would break down all the barriers to virtue, and reduce the world to one grand theater of vice and sensuality in its most loathsome form.”

Other editors argued that she was no more than a curiosity who attracted big crowds because the tickets were free.  Many newspapers refused to take ads for her lectures, or to print letters or editorials written in her defense.  Famous poets lampooned her in verse; cartoonists had their way with her.

Undaunted, Frances relocated herself and the New Harmony Gazette to New York City.  The newspaper got a more modern name: the Free Enquirer, printed twice a week.  Frances also bought the Ebenezer Baptist Church for seven thousand dollars and rechristened it the Hall of Science. Here Frances had her office, printing facilities and a bookstore.  Lectures and debates were held every Sunday and sometimes during the week, at ten cents a ticket.

Frances asked Camilla to come join her.  Camilla was reluctant, she blamed herself for the failure of Nashoba, and for the scandal that so damaged Fanny’s reputation, but Fanny reassured her things would be different in New York City.  Fanny was planning to start a commune where men and women would live as equals.  Camilla was needed to be the housekeeper.  Camilla, still sickly, and now caring for an infant, hinted that she could use some help getting there.  But Frances told her the world was changing right before their eyes, requests for lectures were pouring in from all over America, she couldn’t abandon this historic moment that might change the fate of the nation.

April 26, 1829 Frances delivered the first lecture at the Hall of Science.  She wondered if it might “mark an era in the moral history of the republic.”  While Fanny’s self aggrandizing seems obvious, in a world where women were seldom heard or seen she had found a way to command a stage before an audience of thousands.  She became convinced that the people were with her.

Trollope wrote Lafayette with her usual dry wit that Fanny: “anticipates confidently the regeneration of the whole human race from her present exertions.”

Camilla traveled from Nashoba over frontier, and often alone with her child, until she reached Fanny’s side.  Camilla, happy to see her sister apparently in complete command of her talents, settled into the role she had always played.  Yet now she was truly a mother, proud of her child’s intelligent eyes.  When her son died of a sudden fever Camilla was devastated.  Poems of grief were popular in those days.  Like many other women of the time Camilla pined away for her lost loved one.  The serene optimism of Frances Wright didn’t have time to deal with Camilla’s grief.  In letters Camilla lamented that she just wasn’t that important to Frances anymore.

The Hall of Science became headquarters for New York’s liberals, and for curiosity seekers.  Across the street at the Bible repository the employees saw with dismay the bookstore window featuring Shelley and Thomas Paine.  Worse still, the bookstore was a modest success.  The Free Enquirer published exposes about the consequences of extreme inequality of wealth, and whistle blower looks at working class exploitation, like the seamstresses of Philadelphia forced to beg, starve, or practice prostitution.

An assembly she inspired in New York City, the National Association for the Protection of Industry, had begun to analyze the conditions of the working class and the poor.  Their first report revealed that twelve thousand children in New York City between the ages of five and fifteen had no access to education.

Trollope wrote after a lecture by Frances: “I knew her extraordinary gift of eloquence, her almost unequaled command of words, and the wonderful power of her rich and thrilling voice…all my expectations fell far short of the splendor, the brilliance, the overwhelming eloquence of this extraordinary orator… Her tall and majestic figure, the deep and almost solemn expression in her eyes, the simple contour of her finely formed head, unadorned, excepting by its own natural ringlets; her garment of plain white muslin, which hung around her in folds that recalled the drapery of a Grecian statue, all contributed to produce an effect, unlike any thing I have ever seen before, or ever expect to see again.”

THE RED HARLOT IN HER OWN WORDS

 Here are some passages from her lectures. Francis usually walked on stage with a phalanx of women who stood with her throughout her lecture.  Imagine a five foot ten inch woman with red curly hair and a Scottish brogue dominating a hall full of astonished listeners, many thrilled by her, and many deeply offended by her unladylike performance and radical ideas. Frances was so eloquent many a bigot admitted to having been inspired by her to reconsider timeworn prejudices.

Frances criticized organized religion as a waste of resources: “Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you! Examine the expenses of your present religious system. Calculate all that is spent in multiplying churches and salarying their ministers; in clothing and feeding travelling preachers, who fill your streets and highways with trembling fanatics…. I say, that Jesus would recommend you to pass the first day of the week rather otherwise than you pass it now, and to seek some other mode of bettering the morals of the community than by constraining each other to look grave on a Sunday, and to consider yourselves more virtuous in proportion to the idleness in which you pass one day in seven.”

“My friends,” she dared to tell audiences, “I am no Christian, in the sense usually attached to the word. I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mahomedan nor Theist; I am but a member of the human family, and would accept of truth by whomsoever offered — that truth which we can all find, if we will but seek it — in things, not in words; in nature, not in human imagination; in our own hearts, not in temples made with hands.”

She also said of religion that: “much of our positive misery originates in our idle speculations in matters of faith, and in our blind, our fearful, forgetfulness of facts.”  In all societies priest craft leads to persecutions.

“Your institutions may declare equality of rights, but we shall never possess those rights until you have national schools. Your legislatures may enact prohibitory laws, and laws offensive and defensive, protective or invasive, it matters little which; our liberties will never be secure, for they will never be understood, until you have national schools. Your spiritual teachers may preach damnation and salvation henceforward through all the eternity of existence, and we shall never be wise nor happy, peaceful nor charitable, useful in our generation, nor useful through our descendants, to all generations, until ye open the flood- gates of knowledge, and let her pure waters fertilize all the land.”

She spoke eloquently as the first feminist lecturer in American history.  “However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike, assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly. It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race. Are they cultivated? – so is society polished and enlightened. Are they ignorant? – so is it gross and insipid. Are they wise? – so is the human condition prosperous. Are they foolish? – so is it unstable and unpromising. Are they free? – so is the human character elevated. Are they enslaved? – so is the whole race degraded.”

When they banned her in Philadelphia, refusing her a venue, she went to the court to protect her right to free speech, but the case never went to trial.

On December 5, 1829, during a lecture at the Hall of Science, Frances had this to say about the plight of working people: “The industrious classes have been called the bone and marrow of the nation; but they are in fact the nation itself. The fruits of their industry are the nation’s wealth; their moral integrity and physical health is the nation’s strength; their ease and independence is the nation’s prosperity; their intellectual intelligence is the nation’s hope. Where the producing laborer and useful artisan eat well, sleep well, live comfortably, think correctly, speak fearlessly, and act uprightly, the nation is happy, free and wise. Has such a nation ever been? No. Can such a nation ever be? Answer, men of industry of the United States! If such can be, it is here. If such is to be, it must be your work.”

A GHOST IN THE WORLD OF BALZAC

Mr. Frances Wright, Dr. D’Arusmon

The Working Men’s Party candidates in the election of 1830 became known as “the Fanny Wright ticket.” Fanny gave lectures to support the party’s principles and candidates, sharing her staff and resources with the party to launch their newspaper.

But her efforts were cut short when she realized Nashoba couldn’t go on anymore.  The president of Haiti had once promised her when they met on his visit to America that he would help her.  Now she would ask him to take the slaves of Nashoba and make certain they were provided for.  She chose a path to Haiti that allowed her to lecture in areas of America she had never visited before.  Some citizens simply waited for her on the road to ask her questions, then invited her to meet their friends. When she was refused a stage by local authorities she gathered listeners in the fields.

Frances had the paperwork drawn up to free the slaves of Nashoba.  She traveled with them to Haiti, where she met with the president who personally arranged homes and jobs for them.   Frances travelled to Haiti with Dr. D’Arusmont.  He claimed to be a doctor though he never practiced.  At first he occupied himself with theories of education, establishing a progressive school.  Then he became a teacher at New Harmony. He had never been an important part of Fanny’s life.  He was a teacher at Nashoba but not a trustee.  He had followed her to New York to run the printing presses for the Free Enquirer.  But Frances took him on the trip because he was familiar with Haiti and the Caribbean.

The president of Haiti was good to his word.  He took in the slaves of Nashoba and gave them some of his own land, along with the help they would need to learn how to survive as free citizens of their new country.  He also wined and dined Frances and D’Arusmont.  He surprised her with a small sack of gold coins to repay her expenses.  Frances must have relished the quiet walks and lavish tropical meals, a vacation from her work in the political trenches back home.  Somewhere in the mood of intoxication she found herself attracted to D’Arusmont and they became lovers.

Upon her return to New York City editor Stone was ready for her.  He wrote a scathing exposé accusing Frances of shady dealing in Haiti, claiming that she pocketed thousands of dollars from what she trumpeted as a moral obligation.

Frances responded calmly point by point but won only a partial retraction from Stone.  Realizing she was doing more harm than good by having become synonymous with the struggle for workers rights Frances left for Europe with D’Arusmont and Camilla.  To the chagrin of her friends there when she arrived she disappeared into an almost complete isolation.  No one was to know of her pregnancy.  She knew a baby out of wedlock was just the sort of scandal her enemies in America were hoping for.  She had her daughter Sylva in secret.

The timing must have frustrated Frances.  Fed up with the renewed monarchy the French Revolution reared its head.  The people of Paris elected Lafayette commander again, effectively making him the leader of France. Incapacitated, Frances was reduced to writing short notes in which she advised Lafayette as best she could in flurries of jagged sentences.

Lafayette ignored her advice.  He believed promises of a new more enlightened monarchy, the younger generation of royals.  He wrapped himself and the new King of France, another member of the Bourbon family, in the tricolor flag, and once again his sentimental gesture moved the masses.  As Frances predicted, the new king betrayed Lafayette; the new boss was the same as the old boss.  Disappointed, Frances decided she would never write Lafayette’s biography, because he had betrayed his lifetime of devotion to freedom with the last act of reaffirming the hereditary monarchy.

When Frances appeared in Paris, making a rare public appearance at Lafayette’s reception, James Fennimore Cooper wrote: “She looked haggard and much changed for the worse.”  The women all shunned her.

A few months later, in Paris, Camille, who seemed to have regained her health, swooned into Fanny’s arms and died.  Frances had depended on Camille all her life.  Fanny’s grief sealed her isolation.  She married D’Arusmont.  Lafayette served as a witness at her wedding ceremony.  Mr. and Mrs. D’Arusmont had a second child, but the infant died.  From then on Frances used her dead child’s birth date as the birth date of Sylva so no would know her daughter was born out of wedlock. Frances lived a lonely life in France.  She avoided her family and her friends.  One of her oldest friends, the story is told, also a friend of Lafayette’s, asked him for her address.  The woman visited unannounced.  She found a shabby old apartment building.  A bleak, comfortless apartment up four flights of stairs revealed the shocked expression of D’Arusmont, sitting with his son by another marriage in the front room.

Asking for Frances the unexpected guest was dismayed to find a disheveled worn woman, tending to her naked daughter.  Frances wanted to know who gave up her address.  No, she responded curtly, she wasn’t interested in writing anymore, and the very idea of her old fame was painful to her.  How Lafayette must have been saddened by this revelation of a transformation no one foresaw.

Husband and wife engaged in lengthy conversations refining each other’s theories, and yet becoming ever more obscure and out of touch.  Frances developed a detailed counter history of the world based on her theories about money and the suppression of women.  She could still work up a passion over Polish freedom fighters but the troubles of the poor all around her she ignored.

When the French feminist movement found the heroines who would inherit the mantle of 18^th century French feminist author Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux Frances knew nothing about it.  Though in conversation and letter writing she was still a feminist she never became involved with them, or contributed in any way to their efforts.

 Thomas Carlyle

Her sense of urgent destiny had rusted into a brittle self-importance.  She told the great essayist Thomas Carlyle that he was wrong about his theory that history was made by great men.   No one is greater than another, she argued, and yet she portrayed herself as far more important than she had actually been.

How did Frances feel when she was told that her old partner at arms Robert Dale had fallen in love and married a young citizen of New Harmony: nineteen-year-old Mary Jane.  She showed no reaction to the news.  Mary had seen Frances lecture back home in America, so when she got the chance to travel with her husband to Europe, and to stay for a while with Frances, while Robert took care of family business, she had been excited about meeting her heroine.  But the household she found was not happy, and the help she tried to provide while being a guest was unwelcome.

Mary Jane described a bleak scene.  Seldom was there a day when either Mr. or Mrs. D’Arusmont enjoyed good health.  Often, they were both sick.  He was an arrogant, irritable control freak, over protective of his daughter.  She was a negligent mother unskilled at even the simplest household task.  Lafayette’s daughter in law brought the old grand general over for a visit.  Lafayette had arranged for D’Arusmont to become superintendent of an experimental garden, but D’Arusmont could not read or write because of worsening problems with his eyes, so he lost the job. If not for their cook, said Mary Jane, the D’Arusmonts wouldn’t have seen another living human being.  Mary Jane bravely dared the English Channel off-season to escape into the arms of her loving husband.

Fanny’s years with her aunt had taken place in the world, among the people, that Jane Austen wrote about.  Now she lived her life in France among the very people Balzac captured in his coffee driven stream of books: a new generation of unsentimental people dedicated to the pursuit of money.

When old friend Trollope’s humorous sketch of a much less glamorous America became all the rage in Europe Lafayette asked Frances to come out and fight.  Trollope was being used against him politically.  Frances could at least bear witness that the suddenly moral Trollope had fled to America to escape her debts.  Frances never responded to his request.

In 1832 Jeremy Bentham died.  He gave up his body for a public dissection, inviting his friends, hoping to demonstrate that material things, including one’s body, are unworthy of special concern.  His skeleton was preserved then dressed in his clothes stuffed with straw.  He intended that his mummified head be used to complete his surrogate, but the results of the process were ghastly, so a wax head stuffed with his hair, wearing his hat, completed what Jeremy called his Auto-Icon.  The mummified head sat in the cabinet between Jeremy’s feet.  The Auto-Icon was to be rolled in for any special occasion, on demand.  As the “spiritual founder” of University College London, Jeremy’s Auto-Icon eventually became the property of the school where it became the object of numerous student pranks. In 1975 students of King’s College, London stole the head and held it for ransom.  Another time it was stolen only to turn up in a locker at the train station in Aberdeen, Scotland.  When it was found on the soccer field the head was locked away to keep it safe from further mischief. The Auto-Icon anticipates in certain ways the darkly humorous and starkly realistic assemblages of Edward Kienholz.

FROM INFAMY TO CURIOUSITY

In 1834 Frances returned to London to lecture at Freemason’s Hall.  The radical press turned out to see her, a who’s who of forward thinkers from a radius of two hundred miles.  Attendance after the first night plummeted.  Fanny had never faced empty seats before.   Then the radical papers criticized her for being too obscure and vague.  Where were practical answers to the real problems of the day?  Complaining of sickness she went home to Paris, to the comfort of isolation.

A few weeks later Lafayette died.  She didn’t attend the funeral.  She left no writing about the loss.  She had no friend to bear witness to her reaction or her thoughts at the loss of her first and greatest champion, the man who had called her daughter.

In 1835 at age forty, Frances returned to America.  She claimed to be there on business.  She and her husband had left their daughter with neighbors in Paris to travel to New Orleans and then Cincinnati to check up on the brewery business Frances had bankrolled for her stepson. In fact, Andrew Jackson had inspired her.  The president was fighting the Second United States Bank.  She and the president agreed that the bank was the tool of the rich and powerful and a sharp golden knife at the throat of the republic.  Frances also thought the bank the tool of the Bank of England.  Her conspiracy theory included the Rothschild family.  If the old powers of Britain and Europe were not able to hold on to America by military force, she argued, than they would bleed it economically and put an end to this dangerous experiment in equality.

America had changed.  The president was a violent man, with a history of duels.  The country was violent, too.  Lynching in the south, a slave was slow roasted alive over green wood in the Deep South, the army fired on protestors. A riot by supporters of slavery lasted three days in New York City.  Civil War was only 25 years away.

America had not forgotten about Frances Wright while she was in France.  When the prosecutor of a blasphemy trial against a preacher who thought women should be able to divorce and to keep their own names and property wanted to sway the jury to understand the danger inherent in such ideas he brought up Frances Wright: “What too did Fanny Wright come here for, but to plant the standard of Infidelity, to raise an insurrection against Christianity, to make an open and gross attack upon our religious faith and our domestic happiness; to open a rendezvous to gather volunteers to enter upon a crusade against religion, marriage, chastity, order and decency, and the very foundations of civil society?”

In spring of 1836 Cincinnati suffered riots.  Though asked to give speeches along the way there, even on board the steamboat that took her up river, Frances refused.  But by May she felt moved to speak, at the very courthouse where her professional lecturing commenced a mere seven years earlier.  She believed she could help calm the town, and dispel the extremism.  She didn’t realize that she was the most notorious woman in America.

President van Buren, nicknamed “The Magician” as in political trickster

Most of Fanny’s listeners didn’t notice that she had reversed many of her old positions.  Her two lectures were devoted to supporting Andrew Jackson’s choice as his successor, Martin Van Buren.  Van Buren had a spotty record on free speech, having been involved in a ban on abolitionist literature delivered by mail.  Jackson was one of America’s biggest slave owners and a friend to the South.  Anyway how could the north talk about slavery in the south, Frances argued, when northern industrialists practiced what she called wage slavery?  But Frances believed the fight against the Second Bank of the United States superseded all other priorities.

The papers and the authorities didn’t notice her new platform.  She was banned in Philadelphia again.  So she lectured at a country fair to five thousand listeners who braved the heavy rain.

When she lectured at an abandoned factory near Laurel Hill Cemetery, Fanny and her small phalanx of two women walked onto the rickety stage in the dilapidated building to loud hissing and cheering.  Gentlemen outside urged street brats to hurl stones through the glass windows of the factory.  What an eerie scene it must have been, as the stubborn lecturer and her equally stubborn audience of a thousand sat through the spraying glass and bouncing rocks.  The local newspaper chortled that the audience had to suffer the “two-fold pain” of the stoning and the lecture itself.  Another newspaper warned: “Fears are entertained that she many not escape personal injury if she persists in her degrading career.”

When Frances returned to Cincinnati she found it uneasy after another riot.  Abolitionist printing presses had been dragged down the street and thrown into the river.  One of Cincinnati’s most respectable ladies, Catharine Beecher now set her sites on Fanny, establishing a pattern conservative women have followed ever since.

The good Christian lady wrote: “who can look without disgust and abhorrence upon such an one as Fanny Wright, with her great masculine person, her loud voice, her untasteful attire, going about unprotected, and feeling no need of protection, mingling with men in stormy debate, and standing up with bare-faced impudence, to lecture to a public assembly…There she stands, with brazen front and brawny arms, attacking the safeguards of all that is venerable and sacred in religion, all that is safe and wise in law, all that is pure and lovely in domestic virtue.  Her talents only make her the more conspicuous and offensive…”

But Frances had bigger fish to fry.  The Second Bank of the United States had to be stopped.  Using “promises to pay…they will appropriate American lands, mortgages on American real estate, shares in American internal improvements…the privileged orders of Europe, having drained their own peoples life-blood, may now gorge themselves…with the heart’s blood of America.

By now Frances and her husband had drifted apart.  They had not been sleeping in the same bed.  The fiery public defender of the glorious sexual passions now believed husband and wife sharing a bed unhealthy.  Soon distance settled between them.  Though the entire family had returned to America, D’Arusmont and Sylva were always together, and never for very long in any city where Frances arrived.

D’Arusmont had been bickering with Robert Dale over old loans and mortgages Dale owed his wife.  Frances chose to write publicly about the trouble.  She dismissed her former colleague Dale, even adjusting the facts to aggrandize her own accomplishments, such as describing him as an assistant editor she had hired at the New Harmony Gazette when in fact he had hired her as co-editor.  Dale forgave her in a public letter, hoping she would come to her senses.

Just before the election Fanny returned to New York in support of Van Buren and the Bank War.  The great newspapers of the city ignored her.  The minor papers reported the event with sneering prose.  “This disgusting exhibition of female impudence has no redeeming excuses.  One could very well afford to hear his own opinions of propriety abused by a woman if…from between a pair of pretty lips.”  The other described Fanny as “a great awkward bungle of womanhood, somewhere about six feet in longitude, with a face like a Fury, and her hair cropped like a convict.”  Pity was owed her husband.

 The new King of France

1837 was a rough year for America economically.  A $480 dollar lot in New York was only worth fifty bucks.  Cotton, nineteen cents in December was suddenly nine cents.  Two out of three merchants in New York went bankrupt.  Banks in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia suspended payments.  Twenty thousand people gathered in Philly’s Independence Square to protest the banking system.  Frances seemed to believe that if she could explain British history to the American electorate they would not make the same mistake.  The banks, she hoped Americans would realize, were nothing more than the new royalty.  The old king of France used to appear daily in his golden carriage wearing jewels and priceless fabrics; the new king strolled in a sober suit like any good banker.  The banks shared with the royals the goal of hording wealth while cheating the workers out of a decent living wage.  If Americans could realize that, Frances believed, the republic would be saved.

In Philadelphia Fanny’s lecture was jeered and heckled until she gave up.  She never spoke in Philadelphia again though she lived there when she wrote and published Manual of American Principles.

But Fanny was more useful to the opposition than to the party she hoped to promote.  Her name was used to discredit any liberal politician or platform.  The Cincinnati Chronicle for example accused her of “diffusing the worst principles of the French revolution through this land of the Puritan fathers…She has set in motion a train of causes, which will never cease to operate, until that day when God shall come to make inquisition for blood, and to destroy the wicked with the breath of his mouth.  Many a happy home has been rendered a moral desert by the trace of her footsteps, many a parent worse than childless, and many a wife more desolate than a widow.”

Some called her ugly now.  Her deeply furrowed forehead and dowdy dresses mortified her former friends.  The monotone of self-importance had crept into her eloquence.  She seemed the living embodiment of the consequences of having sacrificed the liberty she had once so fiercely idealized.

In late September 1838 Frances began a series of five lectures at Masonic Hall.  There she had first addressed the people of New York nine years earlier.  Her first lecture was uneventful except for bad press.  The second erupted when Frances and a phalanx of thirty women appeared on the platform: hissing, shouting, heckling, hooting and pounding hundreds of canes.  A local newspaper described Frances as a witch from Macbeth because she silenced the crowd with her pointed finger.

The third lecture was broken up by the uproar, more pounded canes and this time shouted obscenities.  The papers blamed her again.  “Riot and Revolution is the element she creates and breathes in.”

For the next lecture the mayor stationed police all around the hall, many in plain clothes.  When the tumult began inside police there got the situation under control. After the lecture a bodyguard of fans surrounded her as she walked up Broadway.  Small groups of young men insulted and taunted her as she passed.

The fifth lecture, on October 21^st was the worst.  Five thousand showed up to hear her.  Ten thousand gathered outside.  After the lecture the crowd outside surged towards her, threatening her, barely restrained by a double line of police.  Women leaving the lecture had their bonnets flipped off by bullies who called them whores yelling every obscenity at them.  The flotsam of the mob washed up at Fanny’s own doorstep.  She must have cowered as the boroughs all around her erupted into riots. Frances Wright, it could be argued, was the first riot grrrl.

She was now reduced to renting Clinton Hall.  Though only a few blocks from the Park Theater where twenty years earlier her play had its triumphant opening night, Clinton Hall was in a bad neighborhood.  She hoped to draw a thousand listeners to the decrepit building.  A woman named Elizabeth Oakes Smith left an eyewitness account after ignoring her family’s warnings and convincing her husband to brave the heavy fog.  “We went upstairs and turned into a very dirty, dimly lighted hall, filled with straight wooden benches, and only three persons in them.  The appointed hour had already arrived, and slowly, men, one after another, sauntered in—several women also, some with babes in their arms, and all bring an atrocious odor of tobacco, whisky, and damp clothing.  At length there might have been fifty persons, not more, present, and these began to shuffle and call for the speaker.  It was all so much more gross and noisy than anything I had ever encountered where a woman was concerned, that I grew quite distressed, and the bad atmosphere nearly made me faint.”  As for the lecturer, Elizabeth found her sound, earnest and wholesome.

Opposition and controversy she thrived on, but Frances could not face the boredom of curiosity seekers.  In March 1839 Fanny surrendered.  She announced her retreat to private life.  As her ship left New York a newspaper editorial commented: “Let her go home or go to the Devil, so that she never visits us again.”

PERILS OF ISOLATION AND THE DESCENT INTO OBSCURITY

As Celia Eckhardt wrote, Fanny’s final years “are both a study in loneliness and a lesson in the perils of isolation.”

Her return to Europe began auspiciously.  In England The National appreciated Fanny’s book Course of Popular Lectures: “The work is also invaluable as evidence of the power of a female mind.  We especially recommend it to the unprejudiced consideration of all those males, who yet, on the score of intellect, claim a superiority over their more moral sisters, enforcing such superiority by the argument of brutality—muscular power.

In 1844 Frances inherited valuable property and land from a cousin in Scotland.  She traveled there to inspect her new wealth.  But she seemed to find no relief from this inheritance.  A year later she was bedridden with nervous exhaustion in America again, as she turned fifty years old, without her husband, or her daughter.  They had traveled to Great Britain to try without her knowledge or consent to weasel some of Fanny’s inheritance out of her estranged relatives.

In 1846 Fanny’s papers mysteriously burned but she quickly reconstructed as much as she could from memory.

By 1847 Frances and her husband began a series of legal suits and financial maneuvers by which he tried to seize control of all his wife’s property, though he brought no wealth to their marriage.  D’Arusmont was clever and the laws gave wives few rights when it came to property so Frances found herself living on a stipend so meager she had to borrow money to survive.

Through most of the 1840s Frances had worked on her last book, England the Civilizer (1848) a pioneering, in some ways gender based, unconventional history of Great Britain that some leading intellectuals found admirable but which was utterly overshadowed by the publication soon after of Macauley’s beloved History of England.  In her final book Frances revealed that she no longer considered America the glowing ideal of her youth, like any society America was a “complicated system of errors…the most decidedly anarchic and supremely corrupt of any on the face of the globe.”

Frances had also changed her mind about religion.  She now believed that communities require religion, but she didn’t consider any of the organized religions widely available to be anything but societies for the enrichment of the few.

In 1850 Frances began divorce proceedings and asked the American court to restore her fortune of 150,000 dollars (in today’s money the wealth of a multimillionaire).  Her husband responded by circulating a condescending open letter her enemies shared and published.  Her husband accused her of falling into mental illness, the natural result of alienation so complete she treated her own husband and daughter as mere appendages. He described his attendance at her lectures as self-sacrifice, and claimed to have prevented their daughter from ever hearing her mother speak publicly.

Two winters at Nashoba, where a strong wind could blast open the door of her damp cabin, further damaged her health.  She began to lose her eyesight.  She was preoccupied with the idea that if she could take control of her estate she could win back her daughter.  In 1851 she won an important victory in court when the judge decided her husband had abandoned her.  But when her daughter came to Memphis, she refused to see her mother without her father in the room.  A month later the local sheriff gave Frances a writ informing her that her daughter was trying to take Nashoba from her.

Living at Nashoba, Frances made legal history when a judge granted the petition of the “infirm and aged” complainant to receive $800 from her own property while the court decided.  The judge made this poignant statement: “to review the history of two lives…that are closing in suffering and sorrow…a fearful picture…of ambition, disappointed hope, and lost happiness…what demon turned all this love to hate, and their home into hell?”

Fanny wrote to her daughter again but the five-hour meeting that followed was only an opportunity for Sylva to adamantly refuse any relationship with her mother.

So isolated had Frances become her friends were now her lawyer and the carpenter working on her house.  The carpenter was shocked by her way of life.  Her possessions amounted to a charcoal furnace, a writing desk, and a table with several chairs.  She ate crackers and boiled potato, egg, or beef.  She drank only tea or coffee.  At first the carpenter had worried that she would oversee his work, but she was more interested in talking about worker’s rights.  She always invited him to eat at her table.  He found her to be a walking encyclopedia and wonderful conversationalist.  He said she lamented that her aristocratic upbringing had never taught her the simple skills of housework, which he said, she still had not mastered, being inept at everything from sweeping to cooking.  He remembered her prediction that in fifty years America would be covered with railroads built on the backs of the poor, creating more large cities, and more millionaires, who would control power at every political level.  She was right.

In early 1852 Frances fell on the ice in her front yard in Cincinnati and broke her femur.  She spent two months in agony at the Hotel for Invalids, cared for only by a hired maid.  Her husband and daughter never visited her.  Her lawyer, who brought her the copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin she requested, thought she was improving and wrote to her friends at Nashoba that she would return to them, though she would be lame in one leg.  She seemed to believe she would recover.  She bought Prescott’s History of Mexico and a year’s subscription to a magazine she liked.  She had a dentist visit her twenty times to make her a new set of teeth; she paid in old gold coins.

The death of the first female abolitionist and feminist in America didn’t make the news. Frances did not follow Jeremy Bentham’s example; she had no Auto-Icon. She became just another grave at Cincinnati Spring Grove Cemetery but she did leave a powerful message carved into her tombstone: “I have wedded the cause of human improvement, staked on it my fortune, my reputation and my life.”

Fanny’s estate was still tangled in the courts but upon her death became the property of her estranged daughter, Sylva, as Frances wished.  When her father died three years later Sylva battled with her half brother over the estate.

As I write this a collection of Fanny’s unpublished letters is up for sale.  Nine letters, 32 pages in all, in quarto and folio, written as her fame began to spread from 1820 to 1823.  Written to a famous Irish exile in New York, the letters praise the free press as “the safety valve of a free Constitution.” She writes about the prison systems of England and America.  She explains why she favors life imprisonment over the death penalty.  She argues for universal education.  She comments on Bolivar and the revolutions in South America.  She observes that America needs more patriotic songs. She shares Thomas Jefferson’s complementary assessment of her play, and moments from her friendship with Lafayette.

The letters reveal young Fanny’s excitement about the political upheavals in Europe.  “Another revolution!” she wrote. “Naples free and all of Italy in insurrection! How wonderful has been the march of the human mind in these last thirty years…so may it be till the last link of the chains of slavery is broken and the banner of freedom waves over the whole earth!” Frances writes of America: “Is not an hereditary nobility inconsistent with liberty? I will ask more, is it not inconsistent with public virtue? Not only does it lodge authority with the unskillful but with those whose interest it is to abuse it. It does more– it degrades the minds of men, it corrupts their hearts and debases their understanding, leading them to attach honor and to yield respect to something else than talent and virtue.”  The collection is offered at 28,000.00.  A bookseller in Memphis is offering a small poem Frances wrote for a child during her first theatrical tour of the United States.  What would she have made of the asking price of 6500 dollars? 

TENUOUS LEGACIES

What is an atheist like Frances Wright doing in a series of blogs about American Metaphysical Religion?  Frances Wright’s religion was science and her mysticism her romance with the ideal of America.  With her confident optimism that science could only bring good things to humanity, she had no presentiment of Fukushima or Monsanto.  Like the intelligencers, and their inspiration, Paracelsus, Frances believed that all human suffering would find its cure in the natural world.  She did not expect science to produce more suffering.  Ignorance dictates the fates of individuals and nations, she believed.  Like any practitioner of American Metaphysical Religion she believed that knowledge cures all ills.

Once she wrote of how she and D’Arusmont had become husband and wife because of their interest in finding the truth of human society and the cure to injustice and unnecessary suffering, which they believed could be found in the analysis of history.  As she discussed this arcane secret she and her partner labored to discover one can easily imagine them, in the tradition of the alchemist and sorer, or mystical sister, together seeking the philosopher’s stone, often in disheveled poverty, chasing the revelation that revolutionizes individual lives and society.

Her science could be mistaken for Daoist alchemy, a theory of Eliphas Levi, or Blavatsky, or one can easily imagine the following passage written by Frances as an excerpt from a yoga book by Chicago’s favorite Yogi Ramacharaka: “We detect then, throughout the whole of things – in the operations of nature, of human society, and in those of our own internal percipient and sentient soul – two master energies.  These – while preserving equal forces and acting in conjunction – keep all existences in life, all bodies in place; impart and preserve to each and all their appropriate sphere of action or of movement; and tend, throughout the world of matter, as of mind – to order, harmony, and beauty.  Acting in disjunction – i.e. singly, or in opposition – these two principles are transformed into agents of disorder and death; producing variously, violence, inertia, confusion, stagnation, convulsion, decomposition, dissolution.”

Sylva became a devout Episcopalian Christian.  In 1874 the daughter of Frances Wright appeared before Congress to argue against giving women the right to vote.  Sylva inherited her mother’s unpublished papers.  She preserved them for her children but in their hands they disappeared.

Sylva sent her sons to get degrees and ordinations at a good American Episcopalian college in Tennessee.  Both became ministers of churches in New York City.  Both carried on crusades like the grandmother they never met, and each had a toned down version of grandma’s Hall of Science.  Kenneth had a Museum of Slavery in his church; he claimed his Neo-Platonist translations could improve the world.

Like his grandmother Frances, elder brother William rubbed shoulders with the famous, from Kahlil Gibran and Martha Graham to Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright; he also pioneered the use of Native American and other non-Christian but nevertheless complementary cultural rituals, and of dance and light shows in American churches.  But the grandkids had nothing on grandma.  She would have considered them weak tea, indeed.  Yet this extraordinary grandmother and her far from ordinary grandsons are an important and fascinating though almost forgotten episode in the neglected history of American Metaphysical Religion.

At the age of 83, in 1854, Robert Owen, whose New Harmony community inspired Fanny’s equally spectacular failure Nashoba, became a spiritualist; thanks to several sessions he had with famous American medium Maria Hayden.  Hayden was one of the first mediums to bring to England séances where spirits answered questions with knocks.  Owen claimed to have contacted the spirits of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.  After his death the famous English medium Emma Hardinge Britten said she received the spiritualist classic Seven Principles of Spiritualism from Owen himself.

Robert Dale, his son, the long time ally Frances later dismissed in print after bickering about property rights and loan paybacks also became a spiritualist.

Even the feminists she helped inspire had ambivalent feelings about Frances Wright.  Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton used her portrait as the frontispiece of History of Woman Suffrage, Frances soon became a less told story.  Nashoba was such a disappointment, and her outspoken atheism was only one of the ways she inflamed opposition rather than furthered the cause they were fighting for.

Was she ahead of her time or left behind?  Her naive enthusiasm for the cure-all of science fit better with the Enlightenment than the new world of industrialization.  Yet she anticipated many important reforms later adopted by societies worldwide.  The United States, and the globalized world community, all too often lack the fairness, liberty and justice Frances Wright so enthusiastically pursued and promoted.

Sources:

“The Utopian Visions of Frances Wright
Best, Randy
Ethicalmanifold.net, 2003

The Power and Danger of Empathy
Abzug, Robert
Reviews in American History Vol. 12 #4 1986

Course of Popular Lectures as Delivered by Frances Wright
Hall of Science, 1829

“Frances Wright”
Women & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century
Sanders, Mike, ed.
Routledge, 2004

“Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818–1826,”
Bederman, Gail
American Literary History 17 (2005)

Elliot, Helen
“Frances Wright’s Experiment with Negro Emancipation”
Indiana Magazine of History

Views of Society and Manners in America
Baker, Paul, ed.
Harvard University Press, 1963

“Frances Wright:  The Other Woman of Early American Feminism.”
Travis, Molly Abel.
Women’s Studies 22, 1993

Volume 2: Frances Wright
Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century
Sanders, Mike, ed.
Routledge, 2001

Francis Wright and the Great Experiment
Lane, Margaret
Manchester University Press, 1972

“An important collection of nine autograph letters signed to Dr. William James MacNeven.”
Wright, Frances
Luxury Catalogs
(Stevenson, MD, U.S.A.)

Fanny Wright: Rebel in America
Celia Eckhardt
Harvard University Press, 1983

Newtopia staff writer RONNIE PONTIAC is a founding member and primary guitarist of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War, Exile Nation, and the award winning animated short Cohen on the Bridge.  He associate produced The Gits documentary, and was art editor, then poet in residence for Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation . He’s a published author of works on obscure topics such as ancient Greek religion and the history of alchemy. Follow him on Twitter @AmerMysteries.

From Akhenaton, that granddaddy of all activist poets, through the ancient Greek legend of the murdered reformer and musician Orpheus, to the secret musical codes of Sufis and troubadours, throughout history poets have helped rally humanity to the cause of personal and social evolution. No wonder Shelley declared poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” But history had never seen such an explosion of poetic/musical activism as swept the world when rock arrived.

Activism in American music certainly existed before Elvis. One need only point to Woody Guthrie, for example, with his guitar displaying the phrase: “this machine kills fascists.” But Elvis was a turning point. Elvis transmitted to whites and other uptight types worldwide that it was okay to like black music; it was okay to enjoy sex and flaunt style. No matter how many gospel songs he sincerely sang, the hammer blow of his arrival cracked open the Puritan-Catholic-Protestant-Fundamentalist dam holding back the flood of American paganism. Elvis was the first bee in our hive to do the bee dance telling us it’s okay to be bees and do what bees do. But he was square compared to what was just around the corner.

The baby boomers produced a cultural renaissance in the romantic tradition the popularity of which was unparalleled in history. The Beatles bee danced an evolution from mop-top hand holders to trans-generational poets. The intentionally racially mixed Sly and the Family Stone tackled racism in hit after hit. Punk prototypes the MC5 with their White Panther affiliation burned flags on stage. Jimi Hendrix’s guitar imitated machine guns and bombs falling in Viet Nam. Steppenwolf performed now forgotten but once potent political epics like “From Here to There Eventually,” “Monster” and “Draft Resister.”

A wave of poets, including John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, challenged society concerning a host of crucial issues: the war, the draft, civil rights, sexual morality, recreational drug use. They assaulted the work ethic, cleanliness, church-going, the profit motive, corporate conformity, gender stereotypes, political parties, fashion sensibilities, and the cold war–even the sanctity of marriage and the enforcement of heterosexuality.

Although such breakthroughs are made up of individual commitments to activism, so profound was the upheaval we tend to think of it as a great wave of human genetic development, a confluence of such mighty vehicles of change as the portable record player, the birth control pill, LSD, and television. But most of these individuals thought of themselves as activists.

The following decadence was swift and certain, but nonetheless amusing and filled with interesting art. Once upon a time at the Whisky a Go Go three people used to sit together at a table and drink; they exemplified the change about to happen. They were the famous Jim Morrison and the as yet unknown Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop. Morrison may not have been all that different from what Alice and Iggy became: all three provided a mélange of sexual threat, androgyny and theater of cruelty, with glimpses of questionably sincere tenderness, out of control intoxication, and surprising savvy, but comparatively speaking Morrison’s interviews and lyrics were an education in cultural history and evolutionary perceptions.

Like the other progressives of his generation, Morrison’s artistic goals were those of the romantic poets Shelley and Byron, to bring enlightenment and reform to the world. Alice’s goals, hanging by the neck at the Hollywood Bowl, were more about beer and money. Underneath all his sarcastic gender bending nihilism beloved by the little brothers and sisters of hippies who could use it to torture their siblings, Alice was always a nice Christian boy, and today’s golfing Alice with his occasional Vegas revue tour is proud to have more to do with traditional show biz than social activism.

Iggy at the high school hang out burger joint scribbling bits of kids’ conversations, cribbing song ideas from his thirteen year old girlfriend, was a creepy older guy at twenty, after all, and however liberating the birth of punk rock in his effort to capture true teen male angst, he clearly rejected any attempts at social reform, and in many songs enjoyed sounding the death knell of its optimism. His later attempts at writing more positive songs have always sounded hollow in comparison.

Bowie belongs in this group of seminal Seventies artists whose penchant for outrage and flamboyance replaced activism as the cachet of cool, establishing a precedence for today’s lamentable indie underground where fashion cliques often outweigh art in the social hierarchy. With his Berlin cabaret sensibilities and carefully chosen thefts, Bowie nevertheless held on to his hippie ideals longer than most, as the original covers of his earliest albums prove. Lou Reed, who never had any hippie ideals, fits nicely in this group, too. However, you could point to all these artists and say that at least they, and even somewhat old fashioned Elton John, were furthering gay liberation, and that is activism.

Meanwhile, the much more popular seventies bands like Yes with their lyrical obscurities, Led Zeppelin with its blues bombast, Kiss with their rock anthems, Rush with their rock Sci-Fi novellas, The Eagles with their codification of commercial country rock, Bad Company with their bland classics, Jethro Tull with their neo-medieval literary affectations, along with introspective singer songwriters like Jackson Brown, Jim Croce, John Denver, and Paul Simon, plus a host of mostly inane one hit wonders, were all producing wonderful music with very little activism.

The glimmer of immortality seemed to hover around these stars for their young fans, for there weren’t any old rock stars yet. Elvis was still looking good, at least in the publicity photos. A few stars participated in activist ventures to save Walden Pond or other dear causes, usually with fundraiser concerts, but they all rejected what they now considered the arrogance and naiveté of the Sixties. Why? Perhaps it was because in the Seventies the activism sparked by the protest movement against the Vietnam War ended with the war. Jobs and families ambushed the college radicals as they almost always do. Whatever the reason, by the time Reagan took office the “liberal” media was having a field day ridiculing any and all things hippie, a prejudice now shared by most punk and rap loving people.

The split that occurred next was even more extreme, giving birth to a vital stream of activist art. Where did punk rock really begin? Artists like the MC5, The Stooges, Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground, can all claim credit, but what about The Sonics, or Question Mark and the Mysterians, the Rolling Stones, or Gene Vincent? Wasn’t Elvis’s sneer the same sneer that reappears as the definition of punk from Billy Idol to Rancid to Pink? And how about the New York Dolls? Or Patti Smith, even if Johnny Rotten dismissed her as no more than a tambourine-wielding hippie.

Of course, modern punks are most comfortable pointing to The Ramones as the beginning of it all. But it was The Clash who put a political slant on punk and sparked a small but potent rebirth of activism. From the Clash come almost immediately the Dead Kennedys, and later Minor Threat, and Fugazi. And even if the Sex Pistols perpetrated a cynical scam, when American music fans were first confronted with “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK” the nihilism seemed not only starkly sincere but activist.

By then conditions in the music business had changed radically. When the boomers’ explosion of romantic art flared up from London to San Francisco it caught the old music business unprepared. Most of the old school executives, hating the hippies and their music, saw no opportunity there. That sadly predictable state of affairs became a gold rush for hustlers, young lawyers, agents and accountants. The Beatles didn’t break up because of Yoko, they broke up because they didn’t own their own songs anymore. Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, no artist avoided the rip off. Even relatively fair deals turned out to be especially lucrative for the business savvy involved, and a new music industry was built from the resulting cash hordes.

For obvious reasons the new music business had little use for activism, instead they saw The Beatles in The Knack and punk rock was successfully repackaged as supposedly edgy New Wave acts ideal for ushering in the Reagan years. As cocaine covered mirrors everywhere, the clipped space age coifs and dashing costumes of the New Wavers evolved into the drag queen visual splendors of Motley Crue and their later cousins Poison, Warrant and the other hair metal titans who filled stadiums without ever bothering their pretty heads with a political thought. A sight that must have been ironic indeed to the surviving members of the New York Dolls who were less well appreciated when they pioneered the look and the sound with so much more style (it was even possible to imagine a thread of activism when they asked the musical question “with a Vietnamese baby on your mind. now that it’s over, what ya gonna do?”)

Of course, the Reagan years also spawned huge splashy multi-star events like Live Aid that raised millions for causes like world hunger. What could have been a yearly television fundraiser ala Jerry’s Kids is now all but forgotten alongside such charming anachronisms as Hands Across America and the Harmonic Convergence.

The same year as Live Aid, the legendary indie band Mecca Normal first hit the scene, and though they may not be as famous, as an influence on bands, and on how independent bands with activist and artistic intentions share their music, Mecca Normal is far more important than Live Aid. From the bands that were inspired to form at their shows to the bands that perhaps only unconsciously resemble what they initiated, Mecca Normal lent their inspiration to everyone from Bikini Kill through Sleater Kinney to the White Stripes.

Meanwhile, in the hands of fun bands like Van Halen, then brooding bands like Metallica, mainstream rock had become something of a reactionary force. What had been a refuge for freaks, outcasts and adventurers had become a jock party well stocked with models and/or strippers, so no status quos were challenged. Of course, simply advocating sexual exploration and intoxication retains perhaps the most powerful part of the rock activist agenda in its challenge to America’s stifling inheritance of religious guilt and conformity.

Rap broke through with Public Enemy in 1987, a quantum leap of musical activism in the mainstream that would all too quickly be replaced by gangsta rap and pop hip hop. But even in the 80′s there was hope for kids seeking activism in their music beyond U2′s white flag. Punk gave birth to niches of underground experimentation that satisfied diverse communities. Crust had Crass. Straight Edge had Minor Threat. Drunks had Black Flag. Indie had Mecca Normal. Even Aryan supremacists had and have their very own punk bands. In the best of these scenes a kid could sink his or her teeth into some political information, encounter forgotten heroes like Emma Goldman, and realize a commitment to activism against some injustice, perhaps the destruction of Hopi land by illegal mining operations at Big Mountain.

In the nineties worthy activist efforts like Food Not Bombs became popular in the underground. Food Not Bombs showed punks and others how to get food that would otherwise be thrown away by markets and restaurants, how to prepare it vegan, and then offer it to the homeless in city parks. Today Food Not Bombs is international. Co-founder Keith McHenry is conducting a Food Not Bombs tour in 2004 to contribute to the effort to register voters and raise consciousness. Keith has spent over 500 nights in jail for his peaceful protesting. He was framed under the California Three Strikes law. One of the first white people to face a 25 to life sentence, Amnesty International wrote letters and campaigned for Keith’s unconditional release. His case was taken up by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland. But however wonderful Food Not Bombs might be, and however dear a cause to certain types of punks and jam bands, it’s a stretch to call it musical activism.

So virtuous were the powers distilled in the political punk undergrounds that they exploded into the public arena with bands like Rage Against the Machine and Nirvana. However ironic that Rage Against the Machine would rail against oil companies in stadiums while their touring machine burned enormous quantities of gasoline, they nevertheless brought political awareness to the attention of huge crowds.

The band Nirvana and its corresponding scene in the Pacific Northwest typified the slacker rejection of the status quo. Grunge was hippie informed by punk, and it greatly assisted the rise of Rock for Choice and Rock the Vote. Although the majority of bands associated with grunge in the public imagination were as empty of political content as their hair band predecessors, it didn’t take much scratching at the surface for a Kurt Cobain fan to uncover the indie treasures of Kill Rock Stars and K Records, and especially, the rock revolution that was riot grrrl.

I probably played more riot grrrl conventions than any male on the planet except possibly Billy Karren. I’m deeply grateful that I was allowed to participate in these ceremonies of empowerment. I didn’t get there till 1994, when it was all but over. Even then it seemed like every high school and college was sprouting outspoken girl bands that didn’t let their inexperience stop them from expressing themselves. Wonderful bands appeared like L.A.’s (never recorded) high school band Foxfire, who sounded more like Black Sabbath than Bratmobile; they sometimes used a broiling pan instead of a snare drum. Most of these girls were zine writers, so their bands had brilliant lyrics, representing as they did the real thoughts of a class of Americans who have seldom enjoyed true freedom of expression. Thousands of notebooks had the band name Bikini Kill scrawled across them, and if you saw that written on a girl or boy’s notebook you knew they might actually be semi-intelligent and possibly civilized.

Girls suddenly awakened to their collective power. By the circulation of hand made zines, they began forming their own shows, and their own show circuits. I was lucky enough to get to watch one of these girls at work, Erin McCarley of the band Delta Dart. The founder of the first Orange County riot grrrl chapter, Erin teamed up with local anarchist show promoter Jae Lee for a series of events at Koo’s Café in Santa Ana that brought together communities in a new way. During those Sunday matinees riot grrrl bands would play alongside Black Panther rappers, Mexican deathcore bands, Asian poets, and Food Not Bombs crust bands. The area around Koo’s would become a small bazaar offering slogan patches, t shirts, information about important causes and concerns, and rare punk and hip-hop records you couldn’t buy in a store.

In zines, poetry readings, songs, raps, and in discussion groups people talked about saving Ward Valley before the hazardous dump planned there polluted the Colorado River, about American political duplicity, and about institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia. MTV and media in general, along with the cult of celebrity, were meticulously criticized. The ethics of animal testing or meat eating were debated. Mix tapes of new bands from other cities were eagerly circulated

Between bands, kids sat cross legged everywhere, poring over the latest zines, which would usually contain favorite quotes, blurry photos of Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy and other riot grrrl associated bands, and personal testimony, as well as links to suggested reading and listening. If you were lucky, there would be a tip on using a certain kind of straw to get free copies at Kinko’s. Popular zine writers had thousands of copies circulating, and many a father’s and mother’s office copy machine and paper supply were commandeered for the cause.

I witnessed riot grrrl transform awkward and inhibited young women silenced by abuse into confident artists, musicians, writers, and public speakers. I saw circles of hundreds weeping in workshops, making lifelong friends, traveling to stay with AOL IM pals in other cities, joining together in bands crammed into vans to tour America playing tiny all age clubs with names like Cell 63 and The Small Intestine, stopping off at Ward Valley along the way to drop off cans from Food Not Bombs for the squatters, returning home with boxes of zines and home made t shirts.

The truly inclusive, such as Los Angeles riot grrrl splinter group Revolution Rising, with their open wall art shows, and zine and music fundraisers with bands like Los Crudos and Spitboy, were striving to reach housewives, secretaries, strippers, and gang truce centers. Even cheerleaders and males were welcome and found themselves encouraged to be creative and ethical, conscious and conscientious. Here it seemed to us, might be the sort of spontaneous birth of community awareness unseen since the glory days of the baby boomers.

It’s always a treat to talk with Jody Bleyle of Team Dresch whose musical encouragement to gay people trapped in hostile environments has certainly saved lives, and achieved what the gender bending marketing of glitter rock only hinted at. My kitchen table overlooks the L.A. basin so conversations here seem to take on a special poignancy. I’ve been lucky to have conversations with Jean Smith of Mecca Normal here, and with Madigan of Bonfire Madigan, one of the earliest of riot grrrls with her duo TattleTale whose recordings still inspire activist musicians today. We all agree, we never would have believed that less than ten years later we’d find ourselves with another President Bush, and another war in Iraq, or that America’s male idols would be macho gangsta imitators and our female role models would be dancing Barbies and Bratz.

So what happened to riot grrrl? One female poet who was important in the scene suggested that when it began to function as a kind of dating pool for dykes, as she called it, any chance it had to reach a wider audience was lost; she was a dyke herself. A singer for a band that played many riot grrrl events once told me she thought riot grrrl disappeared because it was a movement composed mostly of abuse survivors, and ultimately they couldn’t resist abusing each other, a common symptom of post traumatic stress. I read in a zine once a theory that when Bikini Kill called a media black out, and riot grrrl stopped cooperating with the media, the media simply reported it as a thing of the past, and still does, a stigma that makes it hard to start new chapters. I would add that once grrrls began graduating from college and entering jobs and serious relationships their capacity to participate in riot grrrl chapters disappeared. That’s what happened to Revolution Rising.

Advertising and fashion pilfered riot grrrl imagery reducing once powerful symbols to accessories. When Spin magazine ran a glam photo of Marilyn Monroe version 9.0 Gwen Stefani with the headline “Riot Grrlie” it was easy to understand why many riot grrrls suspected a conspiracy against them. Now “riot girl” graces the merchandise of the teen idol band Good Charlotte whose song “Riot Girl” features lyrics like: “My girl’s a hot girl.I know my baby would do anything for me, yeah!” Said riot girl’s taste in music is described by the song but you won’t find Huggy Bear or Bikini Kill mentioned, just the all male bands Minor Threat and Social Distortion.

Consider Christmastime in the early days of rock and roll. If you were one of many whose families didn’t match the American ideal mercilessly trumpeted from every billboard, TV, and pulpit, perhaps your best hope for supportive camaraderie would be a rock show where local freaks and outcasts discovered they were not as alone or hapless as they feared. Back then rock was just about the only show in town for an outsider.

Today’s outsiders are more like insiders. We can choose from a generous array of activities that create feelings of community outside the Christmas/family conformity ideal so beloved by marketers. On cable we can watch South Park where Hitler weeps in hell for lack of his tannenbaum. We can sign on to hang out with others of our kind or argue with “the enemy” in chat rooms on the Internet; or we can go see the Return of the King at the movies. After all, in the sixties and seventies Tolkein belonged to the hippies. “Frodo lives” was as popular a graffiti then as “Chaka” was in the Nineties. Nice people didn’t read The Lord of the Rings, with its comments about the fine weed of the Shire, its ecological sensitivity, and a whole world of pagan details.

Indeed, yesterday’s novelists were as famous and influential as rock stars like the Beatles. Victor Hugo taking on the government, using his art and fame to defend Dreyfus, was the John Lennon of his day. Now it seems tomorrow’s rock stars will be as obscure as today’s novelists. Successes will be counted in tens of thousands of CDs sold instead of millions. In part, rock has dated itself by succeeding, by inspiring new media to serve the same interests. Rock, blaring from car commercials and sports shows, has taken on such reactionary connotations for many kids it has been replaced completely by rap. Might some artist come along and rock with such abandon, with lyrics so insightful, that rock activism will be reborn? Perhaps, but will anyone notice? The satanic spectacle of Marilyn Manson, the misogyny of rap and new metal, the morbidity of screamo and grindcore, are perhaps mistaken for activism. Fans find a wealth of emotional identification and anti-conformist imagery, but as for practical challenge to the status quo, little is to be found.

Post 9-11 fans of rock activism might have expected at least some sort of punk rock reaction, perhaps based on the perpetually popular assumption that the CIA is responsible, but no existing bands have picked up that gauntlet or anything similar, nor have any new bands shown up to restore the activist spirit to rock. The Strokes are touted in Rolling Stone (once the blog of the boomer activist renaissance) as the rebirth of rock but they are as devoid of political content as Journey. We all have post traumatic stress now. It’s hard to blame rock for avoiding activism

Of course, the activist underground continues. Kathleen Hannah, former riot grrrl firebrand of Bikini Kill, practices a more danceable activism with her band Le Tigre. The Butchies are holding the torch for gay liberation. Mecca Normal and Bonfire Madigan tour and record, as does former White Panther manager of the MC5 John Sinclair, long ago the topic of a John Lennon protest song, now a venerable jazz historian poet. The Anarchy Crust scene continues. The adventurous music fan browsing a merchant table can still encounter the likes of Emma Goldman. There’s even an occasional brave neo-riot grrrl, smart enough to understand the power that was shockingly, suddenly swallowed up by the void.

And there are new movements, perhaps most notably The Travelers. They hop trains and panhandle, existing in communities outside state sanctioned society as much as possible. Their bands don’t use electricity, they use acoustic instruments only. As well as playing originals, they cover songs by bands like Bikini Kill, Fugazi, and TattleTale. They have applied the principles of activism to every facet of their lives they can. By dropping out this way have they dodged their responsibility for co-creating our society, or with their spirit reminiscent of Thoreau are they incubating the next great trend of romantic liberalism?

Or are the flash mobs of the internet and of cell phones the future of activism, a future rock will have little to do with? Spontaneous public demonstrations and organizations that make powerful points, small communities huge when joined, ala Bolivia, these are potential gifts of the Internet. Rock itself is deeply compromised. Music downloading is crippling the parasitic music industry. Channels of alternative distribution are clogged with the efforts of amateur bands, most with little to say. TV commercials for the U.S. Army use rock. The Woodstock Generation are grandparents now, worried about Medicare laws. Punk is your father’s Oldsmobile. Of course rock will live on, with ups and downs of popularity, along the lines of, say, country music, both as a corporate sponsored Vegas-like entertainment experience, and as an underground current of mutations exploring every possible nuance including activism. The Internet should make it possible for those two categories to cross breed occasionally with potentially interesting results.

Perhaps the most fascinating development is the way the very means of distributing music now embodies its revolutionary force more than the music itself, slowly but surely shrinking the music industry. Digital music files, thanks to the RIAA, are the new porn: we tell the pollsters we don’t do that anymore or never did, then in the privacy of our rooms or cubicles we feverishly search for crushes to download, enjoying with a guiIty rush the fear that we might get caught doing something wrong. Music hasn’t felt so contraband since NWA’s arrival. Perhaps this technological advancement can’t be described as activism, but it is changing us and our culture almost as dramatically as rock did that eventful year exactly half a century ago when Sputnik, the Fender Stratocaster, Godzilla, Hank Aaron, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, The Lord of the Rings, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley stepped onto the world stage for the first time.

Article written by Ronnie Pontiac

Newtopia staff writer RONNIE PONTIAC is a founding member and primary guitarist of Lucid Nation, executive producer of the documentaries Rap is War, Exile Nation, and the award winning animated short Cohen on the Bridge.  He associate produced The Gits documentary, and was art editor, then poet in residence for Newtopia Magazine in its former incarnation . He’s a published author of works on obscure topics such as ancient Greek religion and the history of alchemy. Follow him on Twitter @AmerMysteries.

A lot of religious fundamentalists insist that all social traditions that prevailed in the time and place where their religion was born are essential to the religion itself. The family values and sexual roles from the respective holy lands must be imported into new lands, and must never be allowed to evolve. So I feel it’s a bit refreshing to see cases where religions showed enormous flexibility in response to new cultures. And one of the best examples I know of is the role of Chinese women in transforming Buddhism.

When Buddhism first appeared in China, it seemed to be an all-male cult of Indian monks. At first, this Buddhism hardly spoke to China’s family men, much less to its women. To most Chinese people, the early Buddhist missionaries seemed irrelevant. Popular religion in China was a family and community affair. Women did most of the work tending temples, statues, and ancestral shrines. They did most of the cooking for temple feasts or death anniversaries. Women were the most involved in divinations about health, marriage, or children. They were the main teachers of spiritual tradition to the next generation. Basically, Han dynasty China was a civilization where family, progeny, sexuality, and community had central importance. All of this, the celibate male emissaries of Buddhism seemed to reject. As a Confucian critic named Zheng Yi later put it, “Let us look at Buddhism from its practice. In deserting his father and leaving his family, the Buddha severed all human relationships. Such a person should not be allowed in any community.”

Making Buddhism Chinese

The Buddha reportedly affirmed that women were capable of reaching enlightenment. But most male monks presumed that all enlightened beings had to be male, since a soul had to evolve beyond a lowly female birth before it could possibly reach nirvana. This traditional Indian prejudice naturally found its counterpart in China. Even some Chinese women accepted it. So, in the year 550 CE, a seemingly high class woman named Tao Jung paid a scribe to carve her words of penance on a temple colophon: “Results are not born of thin air: pay heed to causes and results will follow. This explains how the Buddhist disciple and nun Tao Jung—because her conduct in her previous life was not correct—came to be born in her present form, a woman, vile and unclean.” Some Buddhist scriptures denounced this sort of pious prejudice, and claimed that all sentient beings have equal potential. But Min Jiayin observes, “Unfortunately, when Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese, the passages containing the doctrine of equality were left out.”

The early world-denying version of Buddhism encountered a major difficulty in China: it had to compete with popular Daoism. And Daoist cults generally appealed to the whole family, partly because they featured a pantheon of goddesses, teachers, and spirit mediums. Besides that, farming villagers were seldom interested in “renouncing the world.” They were more prone to worship deities of nature than to wish for salvation from the earthly realm. The Indian monastic practice of begging for alms was so repugnant to Chinese values that the practice basically died out among China’s Buddhists. To compete successfully in China, Buddhism had to change. And it did change, with almost amazing flexibility. One of the first clues we have of this, is an image of the Queen Mother of the West, found on a clay brick from the late Han dynasty. She is seated on the ground, in a pose resembling the Buddha. She faces the viewer directly, and wears robes like those of a Buddhist monk. Perhaps the artist sensed an affinity between the Chinese and Indian images. Both were lords from the West (the direction of death), and both were guides to eternal bliss.

The competition of Daoism and Buddhism was mainly a positive contest for popular appeal. But unfortunately it was also a contest of appeal to the rulers. Over several centuries, leaders or lobbyists for each religion tried to gain official backing from the government. The Buddhists sucked up to sympathetic royals, faking evidence that Emperor Sui Yangdi (569–618) and Empress Wu Zetian (690–705) were incarnations of the Buddha. Sure enough, Empress Wu justified her seizure of power by circulating the Great Cloud Sutra, which predicted the reincarnation of the Buddha Maitreya as a female ruler. Meanwhile, certain Daoist worthies tried to get the government to ban Buddhist institutions, and during the 440s, 570s, 840s they pretty much succeeded. It didn’t help when Buddhist leaders got revenge in the 1200s. They secured patronage from the hated Mongol conquerors, who let a Tibetan cleric turn the former Song emperors’ palace into a Buddhist temple. Things could get almost as nasty as in Western religions.

Fortunately, competition can also produce good fruits. And in seeking to shed their own liabilities while stealing the Daoists’ advantages, the native Chinese Buddhists made a series of brilliant moves. In Zhan (Chan, or Zen) Buddhism, a series of Chinese teachers shed the Indian context of world-renunciation, and recast enlightenment as an awakening to life’s wonder in the present moment. The Zhan monks also worked rather than begged for their food. Similarly, the Sanjie Jiao sect renounced monastic living, downplayed reverence for texts, and taught that all life was filled with the Buddha nature. Rather than cutting off relations with society and nature, these Buddhists sought a better quality of relationship. The founder of Pure Land Buddhism made it sound quintessentially Chinese: “Those who rejoice in the Way of the Buddha invariably first serve their parents and obey their lords”. World-renunciation and monasticism still appealed to some people. But the sects which spread most widely promoted practices that family people could do in their daily lives, like chanting mantras. And then came the important innovation of creating Buddhist goddesses—most importantly Guanyin (Kuan Yin), the goddess of universal compassion. Basically, Chinese Buddhists melded Buddhism with Daoism, the way Zen melded with Shinto in Japan. The result was an Oriental Buddhism, which was “anti-worldly” only in its aversion to the “worldly ambition” of warlords. The emaciated yogi-like Buddhas of Indian imagery began morphing into fat, laughing Buddhas, akin to the Daoist Eight Immortals.

The Female World Savior

According to historians, the name Guanyin is a translation from “Avalokitesvara,” who is a male bodhisattva described in the Lotus Sutra. Avalokitesvara could take any form to assist those who suffer. His name meant “The Lord Who Hears the Cries of the World.” But in China, Avalokitesvara (translated Kuan Shih Yin, or Guanyin) became female. It had to be a calculated response to popular demand.

In the Madonna-like image of Guanyin, the values of all Chinese religions could be honored at once. The Buddhist concern to relieve suffering through insight, the Daoist esteem for women’s spirituality, and the Confucian regard for social justice, all found expression in one beautiful female figure. This was an image the Chinese could relate to. She appeared in a white gown, which was the color of death, the West, and rebirth. Usually she holds either a scroll (the Lotus Sutra) or a lotus flower, symbolizing the flowering of mind and soul. Sometimes she is depicted with 1,000 arms, and the peacock’s 100 eyes are her eyes, the better to respond to all suffering in the world. Reportedly, Guanyin answers prayers for children, and the children she gives come wrapped in placentas white as snow. She is portrayed riding a lion-like creature called a hou, which in older myths was the mount of the earth’s guardian queen. And her switch of sex, from male Avalokitesvara to the female Guanyin, illustrates the wisdom of earlier Sutras. As a Chinese composition called The Precious Volume Amplifying the Diamond Sutra argues, “Do not ask about degrees of enlightenment; stop differentiating between those who remain in the household life and those who leave it, do not adhere to [the difference between] clergy and laity. One needs only to understand that in the mind there is fundamentally neither male nor female. Why must one cling to outer form?”

Even the emperor (Huizong, in 1119) officially recognized Guanyin’s sovereignty, appointing her as the goddess whose raft of salvation would bring all souls to safety. By the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) Buddhist temples across the country featured Guanyin as the primary focus of devotion. She eclipsed the Buddha, as Mary eclipsed Christ in cathedrals across Europe. As a recent visitor to Guanyin’s holy island of Putuo Shan somewhat inaccurately explained, “in India, Buddha was a man. In China she’s a woman.” Great Daoist pilgrimage centers, such as White Cloud Temple or Mao Shan made shrines for her. Images of Guanyin appeared in millions of homes and village shrines. These images in the places of honor showed a simple picture of what the villagers valued most.

Anyway, we can see how this melding of religious traditions created something greater. The spiritual tradition transcended the culture of its birth, and became trans-cultural. Other traditions have done this as well. Western Christianity shed much of its Middle Eastern context, though this took over a thousand years. More recently, Christianity grew yet more trans-cultural, and a Western version of Buddhism took shape in North America. Basically, there’s hope our religions can change and be better for it.

 Sources:

Cahill, Suzanne E. 1993. Transcendence & Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China, p. 23.

Ching, Julia. 1993. Chinese Religions, pp. 126–127

De Bary, William Theodore, Wing-tsit Chan, Burton Watson, editors. 1960. Sources of Chinese Tradition, volume I, p. 478.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley, editor. 1981. Chinese Civilization and Society: A Sourcebook, pp. 53–54.

Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. 1996. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, pp. 97, 116.

Griffith, Brian, 2012, A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization, pp. 200–204.

Hawkins, Bradley K. 2004. Asian Religions: An Illustrated Introduction, pp. 240–241, 249, 256–257.

Min Jiayin. 1995. “Introduction” and “Conclusion.” In The Chinese Partnership Research Group, Min Jiayin, editor. The Chalice & the Blade in Chinese Culture: Gender Relations and Social Models, pp. 596–597.

Muramatsu, Yuji. 1960. “Some Themes in Chinese Rebel Ideologies.” In Arthur Wright, editor. The Confucian Persuasion, p. 254.

Overmyer, Daniel L. 1985. “Values in Chinese Sectarian Literature: Ming and Ch’ing pao-chüan.” In David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, editors. Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, p. 225.

Written by Brian Griffith

Brian Griffith is an independent historian who’s interested in culture wars and cultural creativity. So far he’s written four books. The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History examines how environmental degradation has affected society across the center of the Old World from ancient times forward. Correcting Jesus: 2000 Years of Changing the Story and Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Cultures in Christian History reflect on the culture wars that have raged within Christianity from the religion’s beginning down to the present. A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization explores the alternative traditions and religions of Chinese women, which offer the world a powerful vision for partnership, health, and spirituality. He lives in a multicultural marriage in the multicultural hub of Toronto.

Palmer, Martin, Jay Ramsay, and Man-Ho Kwok. 1995. Kuan Yin: Myths and Prophecies of the Chinese Goddess of Compassion, pp. 4–5, 17–21, 38, 42, 100.

Ward, Tim. 2004. “Buddha’s Sex Change.” In Sean O’Reilly, James O’Reilly, Larry Habegger, editors. Travelers’ Tales, China: True Stories, p. 272.

The Master, 2012

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Writer:  Paul Thomas Anderson

Original Music By: Jonny Greenwood

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams

At first, I thought The Master was going to be a story about a man returned from war who, drowning in the terror of his own soul, becomes thwarted in his search for solace at the bottom of a bottle.   I thought this in spite of an opening aerial shot straight down into glistening blue water, white foam ruffled by a ship’s wake, set to crescendos of stabbing orchestral music. I missed what I should’ve known: director Paul Thomas Anderson’s intention to fling his viewers out upon the sea of life, at least for a few hours.

Freddie Quell (played by Joaquin Phoenix) embodies the wasted life, the one soaked in booze from morning to night. He is budded from an alcoholic father and a psychotic mother whom we never see, walking crooked and thinking even less straight, never finding rest. Freddie crashes from job to job and, hopefully, doesn’t take too many others with him into the depths of despair where he resides. He’s a hare-lip, a marked man who’s an over-sexed illusionist living in a dream world and waiting for the rejection that will prove he’s everyone’s worst nightmare. Freddie’s bungling and treacherous in his search for a place to rest his weary, wretched soul. We will come to know him as a paradox of misery to be neither embraced nor denied.

It is the Master himself (a jovial, virulent Phillip Seymour Hoffman) who literally wrote the book on the fulfilled life — and whose name we will not learn until he’s arrested by the Philadelphia police for fraud — who enters the scene with promises of rejuvenation to those in need such as Freddie. He’s a 1950’s American phenomenon; a healer evangelist who bases his techniques in a science of evolution yet proves their effectiveness by sheer force of personality. As surely as the harelip repulses people, the healer draws them in. People fete him and follow him. He’s a family man with a capital F, a character that alludes to an underbelly of sexualized impulses that go unnamed and unexplained. When Freddie climbs impulsively over the side of a brightly lit yacht on a dark night after escaping from yet another fight, it’s the Master who welcomes him aboard.

What’s the bond between these two men? The spirits Freddie concocts and carries in a flask wherever he goes. The Master and Freddie share a passion for homemade moonshine, the kind that eats the gut and sends the mind into the stratosphere.

As long as a match isn’t lit, the symbiotic pair step-stitch an emblematic, universal balance of good and evil in search of freedom. Their idea of freedom exists in the elusive space of a spiral where up turns down, right slips into wrong and coming reverses into going. The Master insists the past can be revisited and left behind, and Freddie defies him. Freddie’s feet are rooted in the concrete of his heritage and yet never touch the ground he walks on. He’s an absurdity of spirit, living in spite of the toxicity of the drink he consumes but lacking a life worth staying alive for. By contrast, the Master infuses his followers with energy, lives his impulses lavishly and moves forward without doubt.

Even when Master’s fraud and Freddie’s assault on the police land them behind bars, they’re hooked into one another.  In jail, side by side in two wire mesh cages, Freddie smashes his bed, his porcelain toilet and himself to smithereens, while the Master speaks words of salvation, a hand on his hip: “I’m the only person who likes you.” Freddie’s failures pump the Master’s bottomless physical energy and stimulate his mind. He languished in boredom before Freddie showed up. Freddie may be a madman, raging against the slightest iota of confinement, but he’s essential to the confabulist healer who does his best work in the realm of extreme make-believe.

It would be possible to speculate on repressed homosexuality as a driving force in The Master, but the sweeping embrace of the question of freedom proves more compelling. The original image of rolling foam patterned in a wake’s surf repeats at critical moments in the film. When the foam breaks and flies away from the crest, the unruliness of freedom in nature is sighted. So Freddie and the Master merge and break, embedded in a magnetic flow, searching for their moment. These two men hug and release until one disappears in the sand of a desert far from the ocean whence he came.

As the film comes to an end, Paul Thomas Anderson’s dream of mankind goes on. Freddie inspires the Master’s second book, where the teachings have been altered from ‘recalling’ to ‘imagining.’ Together, they usher in a new era — the 1970’s — and leave the next century to us.

Written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in theSan Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found at www.CinemaShrink.com.

July 1996, Boulder, Colorado. After Allen’s last class that summer, Kai Sibley, the photographer, surprised me by saying “Let’s get a photo of you together,” and Allen said, “Of course” and grabbed my hand to bring us closer—so we’re holding hands in this photograph of the last time we’d be together.”

Introduction

On its first anniversary, it seems a good time to revisit and expand on the central premise of this series.

As I mentioned at this column’s beginning, the central conceit of “A Poet’s Progress” is to test an idea presented in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (published in 1678) that the events of our lives follow a particular dramatic arc that we are unaware of at the time but that can be clearly seen in retrospect. His was the Christian model of a soul on its way to salvation. Mine is not.

In 2007, I made a list of adventures and associated areas of study that I’d like to explore before I died. I came up with twenty and—with what I estimated as ten good income-producing years left—that meant I’d have to take two trips a year over a period of ten years. Some of these trips were going to be expensive and lengthy, so I was going to have to do some careful planning and make some difficult decisions. I was going to have to change my way of living.

I’m now at the end of the project’s sixth year. There is less distance to the finish line than there is to the start. But I’m wondering if there’ll be a finish line at all. This project actually began as a one-year project, but at the end of that first year there was no reason to stop, and by then the pattern of study and travel and writing had become a habit. And then two years became four and five became six and now I’m about to begin the project’s seventh year (and deep into Goethe in preparation for sailing from Vienna to Amsterdam in Spring 2013).

The idea from the start was to write this story from its beginning to the end, moving only forward. I’m suspicious of memoirs written at the end of the story, looking backwards. I know from re-reading my journals how much of my life I’ve forgotten or misremember. And in older writing, like the following piece, I find the original versions of stories I tell quite differently now.

I decided to start this column at the beginning of the seventh of my pilgrimages—to Morocco—and intended to go solely forward. But in looking for something “special” for the first annual issue of Newtopia, I found an article I’d written about my apprenticeship with Allen Ginsberg for the Winter 1980 issue of the quarterly newspaper Naropa Bulletin. And I suddenly realized this idea of life as a pilgrimage toward a horizon that cannot possibly be seen at its inception actually began many years before.

I arrived in Boulder during a Thanksgiving snowstorm in 1979 at the end of a 2000-mile drive from rural Connecticut with my wife and our two screaming cats in a 10-year-old Datsun. I was going to study poetry with Allen Ginsberg and his friends, and there was a native Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche—Chogyam Trungpa—teaching there too. As someone who’s had a daily meditation practice since 1973, this seemed like the opportunity to tie the two most important aspects of my life together—meditation and poetry. My wife and I had an agreement—I would get my BFA in poetry and Tai Chi at Naropa in two years, and then we would return to Connecticut. What neither of us knew at the time was that the move was going to be permanent for both of us, but that the marriage wouldn’t last.

What surprised me most in returning to this piece written so long ago is the realization of how much of it would have been forgotten if I hadn’t been asked to write it down at the time, and how my prose style hasn’t really evolved much at all (except maybe I talk about myself a little less now). Can it be possible that I’ve learned so little after all this effort?

12 October 2012—Boulder

Apprenticing with Allen Ginsberg: The Object Is to See Clearly

Foreword, October 2012, Boulder, Colorado

In 1979, I drove to Boulder, Colorado, with the hope of apprenticing with the poet Allen Ginsberg while he put together his Collected Poems. At the time, I was a 25-year-old “poet” who had published exactly two poems—one in my high school newspaper, and one in one of those “competitions” where they publish your poem in a telephonebook-sized “anthology” and try to sell it back to you for $29.95.

When I explained to Allen why I was in his living room, he told me that he already had all the apprentices he could handle that semester. But he asked me in for tea and we talked about this and that. He explained that he was asleep when I knocked. He was quitting smoking and had slept for three days straight, which was weird because I had just done the same thing, and we’d both come up with the idea of sleeping through the withdrawal period on our own.

I had been a bit startled when he opened the door himself, especially because he was clean shaven. He’d given up smoking and cut off his beard under the advice of a Chinese physician who recently diagnosed him with high blood pressure. He was also cooking Chinese medicines and herbs in his kitchen, and he apologized for the smell.

He asked me what I did back in Connecticut and I told him I’d run an art center, and started a reading series, and audited literature classes at the university on Yeats and Frost and Eliot and Joyce, and worked for a local leftist literary press, Curbstone Press, with Sandy Taylor. But what interested him most was when I told him I’d been a medical transcription. What did I know about high blood pressure? Not that much it turned out, but on the way home I stopped at the library and later that night typed up my notes and put them in his mailbox in the morning.

The next night after he dismissed the first “Basic Poetics” class he said, “Is Randy Roark here?” I was startled and shook my hand in his direction. “Can I talk to you after class?” There were a lot of students standing around his desk, so I stood as out of the way as I could behind him. Suddenly he stood up, stumbling a bit. “Randy Roark!?” I put my hand on his shoulder to steady him and he put his hand on top of mine. “Do you have a car?” “Yeah, sure.” Then he turned to Susan Edwards, the director of the poetics program. “He’s going to be my apprentice.” Then “Can you give me a ride home?” That’s all I can remember.

                                                                                    8 October 2012—Boulder

When I arrived at registration, I was told that Allen wanted to interview me the following morning as a possible apprentice at his house on Bluff Street. But the next day when he opened the door and asked me in, it was immediately apparent that he had no idea who I was at all. When I explained why I was there, he told me that he had already chosen his apprentices, but he went about serving me tea and engaging me in polite conversation, the kind of conversation peculiar to people unexpectedly thrown together in a room. We searched for something in common.

He asked me where I’d come from, and I told him I was born in Uncasville, Connecticut, and he asked me if I knew that the poet Ed Sanders had been imprisoned in the Federal Jail there for rowing a boat out in front of a nuclear submarine when he was 21, and that Sanders had written a great poem on toilet paper that friends had smuggled out of jail and City Lights published as “Poem from Jail”? And when I mentioned living in Mansfield Center he said, “Did you know you were living across the street from Ann Charters, Kerouac’s first biographer, and the famous jazz producer, Sam Charters?” He knew they taught at the University of Connecticut so he asked me if I knew George Butterick (finally I could answer “yes” to one of his questions) who ran the Rare Book Collection at the university and was a great Olson scholar. And did I know John Clellon Holmes, who was living in Old Saybrook, the next town over when I’d lived in Mystic?

Then he asked me if I’d ever had a “transformative” experience related to poetry, and I immediately knew I’d had one, and what it was, although I’d never thought of it in those terms before.

The owners of the bookstore I worked for at the time started a cultural center and my job was to host a reading series. At the time I was working most evenings in Sandy Taylor’s basement, working his drum press, hanging the photographic plates from clotheslines, and later collecting the inked pages that would become Jim Scully’s Santiago Poems, so that book’s release seemed to be the natural choice to open the series.

I’d never met a “real poet” before and had no idea what to expect, but Jim was easygoing and plainspoken as I guided him through the crowd to the chair of honor at the end beside a pile of books fresh from the collating and binding party the night before.

I’d never been to a poetry reading before and had no idea how to set up the room, so I didn’t think of a sound system and rows of chairs and a podium. Instead, I took all the books off the sales table and covered it with a tablecloth and rented two dozen folding chairs, and arranged them in a circle around the table. Then I arrived an hour early and started the coffeemaker and waited. Fifteen minutes before the reading began I was the only person in the room, and then suddenly the entire room was full and there was a crowd of people on the sidewalk who couldn’t get in. By the time Jim arrived, we had to force our way through the crowd.

After Sandy introduced him, Jim picked up his book and began to read. The poems begin when he’s a young university poetry professor who’s studying the “people’s poetry” of the Quechua, a South American mountain tribe that spans several countries in their migrations, but who have a strong presence in Chile. After years of planning, Jim takes off for Santiago, only to land on the day after the C.I.A.-sponsored coup that murdered Allende. His plane was the last commercial flight they allowed to land before they shut down the airport. Santiago was considered firmly in the army’s hands, even though the government sector was still blockaded with barbed wire, fires, broken glass, machine-gun nests, and tanks.

On the cab ride from the airport, Jim drives through a dark, burned-out city, with bloody corpses stripped of anything of value lying in unnatural postures on the streets. After dark from his hotel window he watches shadows walking down the center of the street with their hands over their heads, and the nearly constant sound of gunfire, sometimes distant and sometimes nearby.

The national soccer stadium had become a detention center. The locker rooms were used as interrogation centers. After dark trucks arrived. Some were for the bodies, and the others were loaded with shackled limping men, who disappeared into the forest.

The next morning Jim walked past the bloated bodies that had gotten caught in the fronds at the edge of the river on their way downstream, and began his research as if nothing was out of the ordinary. He lunched with Quechua natives whose names he’d been given by the university. There was a curfew and no one was allowed on the streets after dark.

The one subject no Chilean wanted to talk about was what was going on in Chile at the moment—especially to an American who arrived mysteriously on the day after the coup. So Jim asked them about the traditional uses of poetry among the Quechua people, and he wrote down what they remembered.

In one home he recognized a photo of the poet Victor Jara and was told that Jara had been taken to the soccer stadium, “where torture became a national sport.” Jara had his guitar with him and the story is that he sang “Venceremos” at the stadium until the guards crushed both of his hands with their rifle butts. When he continued to play with broken and bloody hands, they cut off his hands, and then took his guitar and their guns and hammered his face until he was toothless. “Now sing!” they shouted. And he did. So “they killed him, they couldn’t kill him enough.”

One afternoon he visited Neruda’s wife. A few days before the coup, Neruda—suffering from cancer—had been imprisoned in a hospital, separated from his wife of nearly fifty years. Jim was let in by a servant and found Matilde sitting in a dark room beside an open window, dressed in widow’s black. He explained why he was there—he’d had an appointment with her husband and hadn’t heard he’d been arrested—and left as quickly as he could.

There were times during Jim’s reading when I listened so hard that I actually stopped breathing. I had no idea how much of this story I could take, or how much worse it would get. And what was transformative, I told Allen, was that his voice throughout the reading was so flat, so emotionless. He never looked up from his book, he never played to the audience. He just read the words as they appeared on the page from beginning to end. And because he wasn’t acting them out, I felt his fear and anger, I experienced his hopelessness and horror as my own. And I knew it wasn’t because he wasn’t feeling any emotion. I was sitting next to him, I could see his fingers tremble as he turned the pages.

As I told my story, Allen stopped me infrequently with questions or comments. Yes, he knew Jim Scully. They’d read together once at an anti-Reagan rally at the university. And Allen was very interested in what I knew about Victor Jara’s death. The story sounded to him like a folk tale, a ballade. “What actually happened? Surely there are eyewitnesses who have survived?” And he filled me in on what he’d heard about Neruda’s last days, that he’d died suspiciously three days after the coup, maybe poisoned by the government.

And then, after I’d finished my story, Allen told me that my story reminded him of an experience he’d had at a reading given by William Carlos Williams in the early fifties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the middle of describing Williams’ casual, chatty reading style at the time, Allen suddenly jumped up and began reciting from memory the end of Williams’ poem “The Clouds,” which ascends through a series of comparisons, ending with the lines: “lunging upon / a pismire, a conflagration, a …….”— and then he ended the poem with a gesture, his mouth open, his index finger tilted toward the ceiling, searching for the right word, stuttering into silence. Then he gave up and slumped down in his chair, defeated. Then he looked up and said, “And I realized he was talking, just talking.” Caught up in the excitement, I shouted, “Yes, but beautiful talk!”

“NO!” Allen threw his hands over his head and bellowed. “No! No, no, no, no, NO! Not beautiful talk. Not beautiful talk! Just talk! TALK-talk!” He buried his face in his hands. “You … missed … the whole … point!”

II:

Allen decided to accept me as an apprentice after all, and—as often happened—our second meeting never got around to looking at the poems I’d left for him to read the week before. When it was time to go he handed me the poems. “I wrote what I had to say about them on the poems themselves. You can read the notes yourself.”

I read them as soon as I was out of sight. One poem had a lightly-drawn “X” all the way through the second stanza. The poem was only three stanzas long to begin with and, reading it over and over again with and without the second stanza, I was certain that the poem didn’t work without the second and, in my mind, pivotal stanza.

So I asked him about it at our next meeting. He reread the poem and said, “Well, there’s nothing in this stanza. These other stanzas have THINGS in them; this is just some abstraction about … it’s just some abstraction about some other abstractions.” Then he got an idea: “What were you DOING when you thought this?”

He made me face the white wall of his living room and asked me to go back to the actual event and say whatever came to mind. Don’t think, he said, see. Each time the words stopped, Allen would prod me with precise questions about minute details of movement, placement, and color. Where were my hands? What was the color of the sky? What was she wearing? Did I know the names of the trees we were under? What happened next?

When he stopped asking questions, I turned and saw him bent over his desk, writing. Then he handed me the poem with his handwritten notes at the bottom. “Well, it’s not great,” he said, “but it’s better.”

He’d written down every detail I’d remembered. So now the poem was a collection of images, like a slideshow, presenting visually the afternoon tryst I’d tried to evoke in words alone.

But I was more excited that Allen Ginsberg had written a stanza in one of my poems. “I wish I could write like that!” I said, shaking my head and laughing.

Allen screamed, “I just wrote down what you said! I just wrote down what you said! That’s where the poetry is—it’s in everything you left out. This is the poem … this… I don’t know WHAT this is, but this is the poem.” Then he got very quiet and serious. “You’ve got to learn to be your own secretary. You’ve got to learn how to transcribe your own sense impressions.”

III:

Once I brought him a couple of ragged pages written the night before. I hadn’t even had a chance to go over most of it, except the first stanza, but Allen didn’t stop where I told him to, but continued reading until the end. There were uncorrected typos and I began to lose the structure in the middle of the poem—for entire pages the text wasn’t even arranged in lines, it was just gushes of language, thoughts, impressions, memories, emotions, events as I remembered them, but all out of chronological order, written down as fast as I could so I could get them out of the way and get ready for the next image, so it was all written without any sense of style and in a kind of shorthand where most of the references were too personal to be understood by anyone but me.

But he was actually more interested in this mess than anything else I’d ever brought him. Every once in a while he’d look up and ask me a quick, clarifying question—“Was Henry in love with you? What do you mean Craig overdosed on L.S.D? That’s impossible! Where did you get that image of the father sitting alone in the dark in the kitchen? That must be some kind of archetypal image because that’s an image I have of my own father, sitting in a dark kitchen, alone. Did Michael’s parents get back together after his suicide?”—and then he’d be back to reading before I’d finished with my answer.

“Well, I think you’ve got pay dirt here,” he said when he finished. But I continued to insist that it wasn’t a poem yet. “Think of all your questions! There’s lots of stuff in it that no one else can possibly understand but me. That’s not poetry. Yet.”

“But it’s clear.” And he began explaining events in the story and fleshing them out with secret longings and unacknowledged feelings that at first I thought were just Allen’s crazy projections but over the next couple of days I realized were absolutely true. My conscious mind couldn’t have written the poem because it didn’t have enough information. Or it didn’t have the right information. The real story was hidden from my conscious mind but still present in what I remembered because what I remembered was significant enough to me that I remember it. Now that I knew this was true, I would have to find a new way to write poems or stop writing poems at all. The process seemed to be to remember what I remembered in the order in which it was remembered.

Anyway, who cares if a story from ten years ago is rightly or wrongly remembered? Even if someone could prove to me that some of my memories and impressions are misremembered or wrongly re-imagined, what could I possibly replace them with? A blank? Someone else’s memories?

IV:

I’d written my first poem about a Chinook—one of those strange, sudden, powerful winds that rush across the western plains and crash into the Rocky Mountains every January, tearing the roofs off buildings, pulling trees up at the roots, overturning semis on the highways around Denver.

With the first big gust of wind, the curtains in my bedroom knocked over a vase, which splashed across the floor. I opened my eyes and saw something straight out of a Magritte painting. There was a Hershey bar candy wrapper hanging almost motionless in space outside my second-story window. It was both the outer and inner wrapper nested together, so the folds echoed each other like petals on a flower. I stared at it as if it would fall out of sight in a second or two—as it would any other day—but instead it hung in place for an impossibly long time, rocking gently back and forth and spinning slowly in a counter-clockwise direction.

I forget how I first described this image in the poem, but Allen wasn’t satisfied. We tried a couple of different ways and none seemed right. Then the phone rang and I waited, looking out the window, trying to come up with a fresh idea. I thought back to the candy wrapper floating past my window—the winglike folds, the sense of weightlessness, how it rested on the wind like a feather.

Allen got off the phone and sat down. “Well,” he said, moving papers around, “where were we?”

“I was trying to describe a candy wrapper drifting past my bedroom window.”

I pretended to think. Finally, in a downbeat and understated way I said, “Well, maybe “drifting past my window like a little bird.’”

I’d always experienced an extreme undercurrent of tension in these one-on-one meetings with Allen. I knew my work wasn’t worthy of his attention, and this was something that Allen himself had often made clear. “You seem like a smart-enough guy, I don’t know why you don’t get it” was a comment I remember. One day I even asked him why he chose me as an apprentice when my poetry was so bad and he said it was because I was a transcriptionist and he had tapes that he wanted transcribed. But then he said it was because I was sincere. “I can do more with a bad poet who’s sincere than I can with a good one who’s not.”

Plus, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of sitting next to Allen Ginsberg, discussing my poetry. The day would start with going over what I’d typed up since the last meeting, so we’d review transcriptions of his Blake lectures or go over any poems I’d discovered in his journals, and then he’d say, “Okay, what did you bring today?”

And add to that the constant fear that at any moment Allen would come to the same conclusion I’d come to during our first six weeks together—that I wasn’t and would never be a real poet. That I was wasting his time and only embarrassing myself. I wasn’t learning anything. Sometimes it seemed as if I was actually getting worse.

And at that particular moment this sense of anxiety was amplified by the fact that Allen was staring at me with a quizzical, hideous smile on his face. He looked at me as if I was completely exposed, as if for the first time he was seeing into the very depths of me, and that what he saw was ridiculous.

“You’re kidding.”

Never in my life has a phone rung at a better time.

I spent the first five minutes of the phone call going through an escalating monologue that consisted of equal parts of self-pity and anger, of variations on the theme of “I try so hard, you expect too much, can’t you see how hard I’m trying?”

The longer the phone call went on, the more certain I was that I wouldn’t be able to regain my composure or concentration and would probably say something that I regretted, so I picked up my papers and—without even saying good-bye—I left.

I spent most of the next few days immobile. I didn’t go to class. I didn’t eat. I didn’t answer the phone or leave the apartment. When I did get up, it was just to sit in the living room and stare out of the window at everyone passing by. How could I ever face them again, the “real poets.” I’d been exposed. I lacked a “poetic eye.” There was nothing I could do about it. I was a failure. An impostor. A fool.

After about a week of this, some part of me separated from my mood long enough to realize I was really bored. And the part of me that was bored was another me, like the woken up part of me. And it was always there, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it before.

It was instantly much more interesting to be bored than depressed, so I tried to listen to what else this other me had to say. But he didn’t have words, he had wordless things, and if I wanted to know what he had to say, I would have to translate it into words.

So I went to my typewriter and, trying hard not to think, I listened for something that was not words. And I typed without thinking, just like when I was transcribing—the words went through my ears and out of my fingertips while I was mostly thinking of something else.

It didn’t turn out to be much of a poem, and it was filled with a lot of embarrassing personal information that I began to censor as soon as I read it over in the morning. Then I “improved” certain bits, deleted and reordered things, tried to turn it into a “poem,” or maybe even a style. It had begun as the first words I’d ever written that came from some place deep inside my body, but by the time I was finished with it, I didn’t have a poem at all.

V:

We were going over some of the poems I’d transcribed out of his journals and we came to a line that went something like “Icicle branches on the other side of frosted windows but warm beside my dewy radiator.” He stared at the line for a long time and then looked up at me and said, “Should that be ‘but’ or ‘and’?”

I was surprised by his question and kind of panicked. I wanted to give him the right answer—the best answer—and one by one I went through the drawers in my forehead, but they were all empty. When I ran out of drawers, I heard a voice say quite clearly, “Well … read the line!” So I read the line. “Icicle branches on the other side of frosted windows but warm beside my dewy radiator.” “Icicle branches on the other side of frosted windows and warm beside my dewy radiator.” And I knew the answer.

“Well, if you use ‘and,’ when you get to the end of the line you have the whole picture—you have the icicles and you have the frost and you have the radiator and the warmth in your kitchen. But if you use ‘but,’ it’s like you cancel out everything in the first half of the line and you’re just left with the warm kitchen.”

Allen turned back to the page and read the line aloud in both versions. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said, and changed the “but” into an “and” with his pencil, and we went on as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.

VI:

For the last session of the Basic Poetry class, Allen brought in three guitarists. The idea was that we would go around the room, spontaneously composing blues lyrics for “fun.”

It didn’t sound like fun to me. I hated the whole spontaneous poetry thing so important at Naropa at the time because I was so bad at it. But after I realized there was no way I would be able to leave the room without being noticed, I began to compose a “spontaneous” lyric in my head.

Allen made his way up and down the rows of students, shouting encouragement, sometimes asking for something to be written on the blackboard, sometimes suggesting changes, then moving on to the next student.

After two hours of this, Allen was finally in my row. Then he was three students away, then he was two students away, then I was Next. Susan Edwards sang her verse and Allen nodded and then he was standing next to me, the guitar line coming around again, Allen’s fingers on my shoulder. Then he squeezed and I tilted my head and stared off into infinity, pretending to create a spontaneous lyric. “When people are unhappy, it’s you they criticize … when people are unhappy, it’s you they criticize  . . . um . . . but when they sing of beauty, the beauty’s in their eyes.” I’d done it. It was over. I’d passed. “No,” Allen said, “Do another.”

VII:

Our last meeting went long, trying to tie up all the loose ends, and I was burnt out and wanted to go home. But when we finished, Allen put his papers aside and said, with a great deal of enthusiasm, “Well, what did you bring today?” So we tinkered with my poems a bit and then he asked if I knew the work of Charles Reznikoff. I wasn’t very familiar. “I think he’d be a good model for you.”

He went to his bookshelf and pulled a chair beside mine in the dim light of the living room window. He flipped through the first few pages. Then he began to read, looking up occasionally as some line or image or word struck him as important. His voice was clear and his eyes were bright. He was speaking in his own voice—the same voice he’d been using in our conversation only a moment ago—but now he was luxuriating on the vowels, chewing on the consonants.

I began to shiver a little. There was something very strange about this. I found I could lean into what he was saying, and when I did I could hear a voice coming from a dark apartment in turn-of-the-century New York City. It was sometimes a young man, sometimes an old man, but it was always a Jewish man, and he was writing alone in his kitchen while his family slept. He didn’t know that what he was writing would be read one day from one poet to another, in a future he never imagined.

I closed my eyes and leaned forward and began to feel bursts of energy in my chest and forehead that were unpleasant in the sense that I was afraid of being overwhelmed by them. So I’d alternate—I’d lean into what he was saying and ride those waves and then, when it got scary, I’d back off. Sometimes I’d be able to go quite far; other times I wouldn’t get very far at all.

Finally there was a moment where I decided to see how far I could go and I quickly realized I’d gone too far—I’d gone past the point beyond which I could pull my body back under my conscious control and I was afraid that Allen would notice my hands shaking and my heels tapping the floor, then my head falling forward and the thought crossed my mind that I was in danger of falling onto the floor. But since Allen had pulled his chair so close to mine, I knew that if I fell it would be right into his lap.

And throughout it all there was the continuity of Allen’s voice and Reznikoff’s poetry of intense turmoil spoken in a quiet, understated, urban voice: stories of gray and off-white and deep, cracking black.

Allen read for about twenty minutes. During that time everything in the room was calm, clear, and very real: the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he read, the coming darkness. Then he stopped and brought the covers of the book together. “Well,” he said, “that’s it.”

Article written by Randy Roark

Newtopia staff writer RANDY ROARK worked with Allen Ginsberg for the last 17 years of his life, first as an apprentice, then as his teaching assistant, and finally transcribing and editing 28,000 pages of Ginsberg’s poetry lectures, currently available on-line through the Ginsberg trust. Following Ginsberg’s death, he worked with artist Stan Brakhage, producing art events featuring his films until his death. Since 1998 he has worked with Sounds True as a producer, where he has edited artists such as Alex Grey, writers including William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, and a wide variety of spiritual teachers, including Alan Watts, Krishnamurti, Jack Kornfield, Pema Chodron, and Lakota Elder Joseph Marshall.

The Wind Will Carry Us, 1999

Written and Directed by Abbas Kiarostami

Starring Behzad Dorani, Noghre Asadi, Roushan Karam

Truly one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. Despite taking place in a barren area of Iran, the gorgeous cinematography of The Wind Will Carry Us transforms its audience from simple movie viewers to privileged beholders of earth’s great splendor.  The film’s palpable sensation of a vast arid desert stimulates the imagination as only a master filmmaker can.  Before hints of a plot begin, before any human speaks intention, the visual grandeur of nature stirs the soul.

In the film’s opening scenes, our viewpoint rises from firm ground to open air looking out over an old SUV spiraling down a dirt road with rolling hills of golden grain spilling toward the horizon.  A patter of talk rises from the car.  The men inside debate whether they’re going in the right direction to a small town they’re seeking.  A tree standing alone in an empty wheat field serves as their only landmark.  For a moment, I turn off the subtitles to feel the effect of entering a foreign country with men conversing in a foreign tongue.

Images of Brecht’s play, Waiting for Godot, pass through my mind.  In particular, I recall two men on a park bench with a lone tree on an empty stage reflecting the deep inner waiting that is life apart from its events.  I turn the subtitles back on.  “We’re headed nowhere.”, I read one of the men saying.  I smile as I slide into a land where all transpires on a symbolic plane, only to be understood in reflection.

A young boy greets the men as they near the village, a village built into the side of a hill much like the ones built by Anasazi Indians, but smoothed and rounded.  Homes are shaped by hand out of the earth, connected and knit together by clay paths kept immaculately clean. The purpose of the men’s visit remains obscure.  The boy seems to know why they’ve come, but the men quickly swear him to secrecy.  One man emerges as prominent; his assistants will always be nearly invisible.   With a bit of a smile, he tells the boy, “If anyone asks you why we’re here, tell them we’re looking for buried treasure.”

The main man, dubbed the Engineer by villagers, asks the boy to show them where an old woman is dying.   And then he never visits her.  He asks others how she’s doing but he occupies himself with shaving, finding food and answering calls on his cell phone from a woman who also wants to know how the old woman is doing.  Every time the cell phone rings, he leaps in his SUV and races to the top of a hill for reception.

At the top of the hill, a villager digs a well in a cemetery. The Engineer often sits and watches him dig while he talks on the phone.  He tells the caller he has to wait for the old woman to die but offers no explanation about why.  While the woman is very old and not eating, the days until her end are in question because she rallies off and on.  To an unheard question, he answers it’s not a waste of his time. Death is clearly not a predictable event but one that must be waited for.  The calls lend insight into his presence in the village.  He’s on a deathwatch.

The Engineer seems certain he’s doing the right thing.  He will not interfere with the course of events.  He waits with patience and impatience.  Of course, while I wait, I begin to wonder who he really is and since I don’t know who he is, I begin to wonder who a man called the Engineer might represent?  Since the story gives no clue of his relationship to the woman, the villagers or the caller on his cell, I’m left to my imagination and I do begin to imagine.  The teleological argument for the existence of God proposes a designer – an engineer, perhaps – who directs natural things to their end (St. Thomas Acquinas).

While the Engineer waits and walks through the village and its surrounding countryside, he passes fields and valleys toward and through mountains alive with color and texture.  As he walks, we flow through stands of trees turned chartreuse green by glistening sunlight.  Is the Engineer acting as imago guide in the wilderness of life’s existential waiting?

He befriends the boy who, as he passes him, is always busy taking exams.  The boy’s schooling is central, his main pursuit.  He loves to study, to learn and take exams.  When the boy turns down a ride with the Engineer, he gets a lesson.

Engineer: Hurry up get in.
Farzad: I can’t come now.
Engineer: Why?
Farzad: I need one more answer for the exam.
Engineer: What is it?
Farzad: The fourth question.
Engineer: You don’t know the answer?
Farzad: No.
Engineer: Why?
Farzad: Because I don’t.
Engineer: What was it?
Farzad: “What happens to the Good and Evil on Judgment day? “
Engineer: That’s obvious. The Good go to hell and the Evil to heaven. Is that right?
Farzad: Yes.
Engineer: No. the Good go to heaven, the Evil go to hell. Hurry in and write that, then come back.

Is he every child?

A young woman who lives across from where the Engineer is staying gives birth to her ninth child.  One day she’s pregnant and stringing yarn on her balcony; the next she’s slim, no longer pregnant and back hanging yarn.  She’s given birth with the predictability of harvesting a field of grain in summer.

Is she every mother?

The man digging the well falls in and is almost buried alive while the Engineer is nearby receiving one of his calls.  He rushes the news of the accident to the villagers, saving the man’s life.  He’s rescued.  Not his time to die.

Is he every man?

As the Engineer watches a young woman dressed in red milking a cow for him, he recites poetry to her that elevates her task to a maid reflecting cycles of the moon.  She lives in two worlds.

Is she every woman?

The maid gives him milk as a gift.  The Engineer is recognized as an honored guest of the village though he does nothing substantial.  Somehow, everyone knows and accepts his presence.

But the hovering and wandering of the film prompt us to ask “Why is he here?”  We wonder what vision is being opened up for us. The Wind Will Carry Us leaves us to guess.

Perhaps we are following the angel of death, the one who engineers the cycle from beginning to end?

Perhaps we live amongst earth’s great beauty and do not see it as vividly as we could?

Perhaps we’re being urged by the film’s great beauty to see earth’s bountiful renewal, the way waiting for death is part of our learning and part of our knowledge?

Perhaps we scurry about, studying and working on the one hand while on the other, we move slowly, birthing, tending and dying?

Perhaps all is being overseen by the Engineer who is as ordinary as we are?

Perhaps The Wind Will Carry Us is making a call, a message of urgency requiring a race to the top of a hill repeatedly until time releases us?

The Wind Will Carry Us serves as a reminder, an assertion that we are critical observers of the earth’s grand mystery of regeneration so no one slips into forgetfulness.

Written by Dr. Jane Alexander Stewart

Newtopia staff writer Jane Alexander Stewart, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who writes essays about mythic themes in film, creates “Myth in Film; Myth in Your Life” seminars for self-exploration and travels a lot. Her film reviews have been published in the San Francisco C.G. Jung Library Journal, Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Los Angeles Journal of Psychological Perspectives.  Jane’s popular essay on “The Feminine Hero in The Silence of the Lambs” appears in the anthology, The Soul of Popular Culture, and in The Presence of the Feminine in Film as one of its authors. She’s also presented myth in film programs at Los Angeles County Museum, University of Alabama and C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. A collection of her reviews and other writing can be found atwww.CinemaShrink.com.

]]> http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/cinemashrink-the-wind-will-carry-us-1999/feed/ 1 newtopiamagazine sectitle-exseries Wind Will Carry Janephoto http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/archives-into-the-great-wide-open/ http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/archives-into-the-great-wide-open/#comments Mon, 10 Sep 2012 20:09:01 +0000 newtopiamagazine http://newtopiamagazine.wordpress.com/?p=2023 Continue reading »]]> (This article by Charles Shaw was originally published in the July 2002 issue of Newtopia Magazine)

The uncertain future and undeniable significance of skyscrapers in our culture

It was New Year’s Eve. I was sitting against the window on the west side of the signature room on the 96th floor of the John Hancock center with my guests for the evening, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a solitary bright light in the distance moving across the sky in a parallel direction to the building, an airplane circling off in the distance over O’Hare. The plane was the only aircraft in the sky, which one might consider abundantly strange considering Chicago has the busiest airport in the world. But there it was, one light that gradually seemed to be moving closer and closer to us. The bright wing-mounted spotlights intensified as the plane banked east towards the skyline.and us.

At some point I turned around and noticed that the entire west side of the lounge was staring out the window at the exact same point of light circling in the distance. Mumbles began to ripple through the crowd, and a few couples were seen headed for the elevators. My sister leaned in and asked, “Do you think we should go?” For a split second, I almost agreed with her. The panicked look on everyone’s faces was threatening to unravel the reverie of the evening before the proverbial clock had a chance to strike Midnight. In our mind’s eye, back in the deep recesses of our psyches, a voice kept reminding us that it would behoove us to be below the point of impact, or else we would be trapped. Before any of us could make a decision one way or another, the plane had banked sharply and descended into O’Hare.

The effect that few minutes of circling had on us, as a collective group, was unnerving, like a palpable stress fracture that ran through everyone’s face as not-too-distant memories of 9/11 came flooding back. We all remember where we were that morning, or more appropriately, where we weren’t, where we prayed we would never be. Three and a half months later, there we were, at the top of an eleven hundred foot tall building, feeling totally helpless and terrified.

Moments later we all felt like fools. But should we have? Probably. In this writer’s humble opinion, the days of using commercial aircraft as weapons are over, a one shot deal that scored a direct hit. As a long devotee of the skyscraper, one who used build scale models as a child, I was increasingly angered that the skyscraper had been vilified in the ensuing months after the 9/11 attacks. After all, the World Trade Center was not hit because it was a skyscraper, but because it was the World Trade Center, America’s financial hypothalamus gland. More money went through those buildings in the course of a day than the people of Afghanistan have ever seen. And after seeing a slew of speculative articles and news clips about the immediate future of these buildings, I endeavored to set the record straight. I went straight to whom I believe to be the foremost authority, Adrian Smith, Lead Designer for the Chicago office of world-renowned architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLP. (SOM), “a partnership engaged in architecture, engineering, urban design and planning, interior design, and graphics.”

Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill essentially wrote the manual on skyscraper design, to put it mildly. They have offices in four US cities, London and Hong Kong, and Smith’s first project, fresh out of UIC in the late Sixties, was to assist with the design of “Big John”, The John Hancock Center, arguably the world’s most recognized building, at least before 9/11.

Many years and many buildings later, Adrian Smith recalls where he was on the morning of 9/11. In what can only be described as sickening irony, he was with representatives of Donald Trump, preparing to go live with a press conference to unveil his new design for Trump Chicago, a roughly 125 story, 2000 ft skyscraper that would have finally repossessed the controversial title of “World’s Tallest Building” from the Petronas Tower’s in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But rather than showing the world his beautiful new model, he instead stared at it and realized that it would never be built.

This must have seemed to Smith to once again be the interceding of fate to thwart his noble quest to build the World’s Tallest Building (WTB).

After a career that every architecture student on earth would most willingly sacrifice one or perhaps two limbs to experience, Smith’s most recent major accomplishment was Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower, currently the third tallest building in the world. He is also the designer and tireless lobbyist behind two high-profile projects that have been mired in snafus and tumults, Trump Chicago, and 7 South Dearborn (7SD).

7 South Dearborn, a brilliant, innovative 2000 ft modern multi-function skyscraper, was to have been nearing completion right about now. But instead, it was not built, and now bears the sad and almost impossible to shake distinction of “proposed project”. Details on that particular debacle will come later, as it holds particular significance in the sometimes-shady world of the Skyscraper.

And then of course there is Trump Chicago, the biggest pre-9/11 hoopla to hit the city in a long while. Why? Because it’s Donald Trump. Because The Donald can build anything he wants. All one has to do is look at some of the travesties he has pulled over on the Manhattan skyline to confirm that notion (Trump World Tower at UN Plaza as the one notable exception). And because he can get it built, we knew the 125 story Trump Chicago would get built and then Chicago would finally get back what the Council on Tall Buildings took away from us in 1997 when Ceaser Pelli, designer of the Petronas Towers, lobbied to have the title.

All things considered, the World’s Tallest Building should be in Chicago. We not only invented the skyscraper, we perfected it. They are part of our collective identity, one so deeply ingrained that my entire generation grew up with the knowledge that just a few miles away was the tallest building in the world, something we saw whenever we looked towards the Downtown. To have this distinction removed on a technicality was reprehensible, and something we have neither forgiven nor forgotten.

It took a wholly benign attempt at pacification on the part of the Council on Tall Buildings to put the issue into some perspective. Their solution was to create four distinct categories of height:

HEIGHT: The height of a building is measured from the sidewalk level of the main entrance to the structural top of the building. This includes spires, but does not include television antennas, radio antennas, or flag poles. Height is listed in both meters and feet and is rounded to the nearest integer. This is the official criterion used by the Council in determining ranking.

OTHER MEASURES OF HEIGHT: In an effort to reflect other aspects of the statistical height of a building, additional information is shown for buildings ranked in the top ten. (All of the following measurements begin at the sidewalk level of the main entrance of the building.)

To Structural Top: Height to structural top of the building (the Council’s official criteria as defined above).

To Highest Occupied Floor: Height to the floor of the highest occupied floor of the building.

To Top of Roof: Height to the top of the roof.

To Tip of Spire/Antenna: Height to the tip of spire, pinnacle, antenna, mast, or flag pole.

(from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat)

But, here, you be the judge. These are the “big three” in order:

Petronas Towers: 88 flrs/1483 ft
Sears Tower: 110 flrs/1450 ft,
Jin Mao Tower: 88 flrs/1381 ft

A person standing at the window on the highest occupied floor of the Sears Tower will have to look down a couple hundred feet to see the people standing on the highest floors of both its competitors. Is this a valid distinction? For purists like Adrian Smith, the answer is “absolutely.” Ask which structure was actually built higher, which structure had the highest construction workers, tenants, even observatory. In each case, it is the Sears Tower. Just so you understand, the only reason the Petronas Towers even had a claim was because the tip of it’s spire is 33 feet higher then the top floor of the Sears Tower. The Sears Tower’s antennae are not included in its overall height measurement. If they were, the total height would top 2000 ft. Again, which is tallest?

I rest my case. Ceaser Pelli can fax me his disputes.

ORWELL AND ARCHITECTS

The Archetypal Connection

TO UNDERSTAND THE TRUE SIGNIFICANCE OF SKYSCRAPERS we need to approach them from the point of view of their two defining factors: Their symbolic value to a particular city or country; and the economic importance they hold for the present and future of commerce.

If you’ve never seen a Supertall building in person you can’t possibly understand what I am talking about, even if you have seen endless footage of the 9/11 attacks. You’ll pardon the cliché, but they truly are majestic and awe-inspiring. Here in Chicago, we are spoiled, but still we never cease to be amazed. They are more than just tall buildings to us; they are archetypal symbols of our power and prosperity, defying the very gravity that binds us to this earth. They are the most important and direct symbol of our advancement as a race, of our intellectual and practical evolution, and of our ability to think outside the constraints of our natural environment. And in one way or another we have been building them in our dreams, on paper, and on our soil for thousands of years.

We need to make an important distinction. Skyscrapers can be broken into two distinct categories: The “high-rise” is considered anything over 10 stories that possesses an elevator system; “Supertall” buildings are generally considered to be trophy structures over 1000 feet tall, of which currently there are 24 in the world and 6 in the US (3 in Chicago; 1 in NYC, LA, Houston, and Atlanta) with an additional 8 in the US within a few feet of 1000.

Chicago – 1. Sears Tower, 1450 ft, 3. Aon Tower – 1135 ft, 4. John Hancock Center 1127 ft, 10. 311 South Wacker – 961 ft, 13. Two Prudential Plaza – 915 ft.

New York – 2. Empire State Building – 1250 ft, 11. Chrysler Building – 925 ft, 14. Citigroup Center, 915 ft

Los Angeles – 5. Library Tower – 1018 ft

Houston – 6. Chase Tower – 1002 ft, 8. Wells Fargo Plaza – 971 ft

Atlanta – 7. Bank of America – 1000 ft

Seattle – 9. Bank of America – 954 ft

Dallas – 12. Bank of America Plaza – 921 ft

In today’s world, Supertall buildings are not built because they are especially practical. Most “monuments to our innovation” do not fall into this category, because they are built as extensions of the Human Ego (or perhaps, depending on your particular school of psychology, an extension of another prominent human organ). Some consider this idea hackneyed now, overplayed. But really, the condemnation towards “ego buildings” is only a recent phenomenon brought about by the September 11th attacks, as many decided to shame the skyscraper along with the enemies who attacked them. But nothing stands as a greater symbol to a society’s might than the structures they build as paeans to mankind’s power and ingenuity. Whether they be the Pyramids of Giza built to exalt the majesty of the Pharaohs, or the Lighthouse at Alexandria built at the forefront of a new age in sea travel, the Eiffel Tower, built as a testament to steel, or the Jin Mao Tower, built as a testament to the fact that a Communist nation can compete in a global economy, man will continue to build upward if for no other reason than to defy gravity. Like I said, we don’t build them to be practical.

Ultimately, they will become practical and commonplace to meet our ever-growing need for workable space. But before anyone really needed the space we still had the idea to build them. And despite what appeared at the time to be prohibitive factors, we got out there and built them anyway, and the world followed suit. So, despite the fact that Supertall buildings are predominantly phenomenal spectacles, they are becoming ever more beautiful, and ever more necessary to our modern existence.

Take for instance our “big three” listed above. Each stands as the pinnacle symbol of its respective society-Capitalist Culture, as espoused by the West; Fundamentalist Culture, as espoused by Islam; and Communist Culture, as espoused by China. Like the three Nation-States of Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia from Orwell’s 1984, our three Superpowers each posses economic and nuclear might, each competes for control of global markets, each is engaged in a war of both resources and ideology. And, of course, each has a Tower which proclaims the might and wherewithal of it’s particular Superstate.

When the Petronas Towers were completed in 1997, their main function was to herald the arrival of the Islamic-Fundamentalist state as a world economic power; China had similar intentions with the Jin Mao Tower. This power attained by Islam was achieved by the spread of the religion to the former Buddhist enclaves of the Indonesian/Malaysian/Philippine corridor, known, along with Taiwan, as the world’s manufacturing and assembly center. And it is no coincidence that the rise of the new Islamic “cell-based” terrorism, such as the two bombings of US Embassies in Africa, coincided with the completion of their Byzantine behemoth.

Of course, there was one structure that rose above even those three, standing proud for the whole world to see just how rich and powerful it could become. It transcended the notion of the Superstate and stood as the most recognized symbol of both the city and ideology of the world’s most powerful nation. And when it was attacked, not only did it announce the end of the brief age that saw the USA as the world’s only superpower, but it also took a part of our soul down with it. The World Trade Center was deeply rooted in our collective psychology and culture. Destroying the towers also decimated any notion of our being invincible. The gaping wounds from which the people and smoke poured was a visual metaphor not even Dostoyevsky could have conjured.

Ultimately, the birth of a skyscraper needs two essential ingredients: a favorable economic climate, and either the tacit or direct need for vertical space. In the 1990′s, there were two places on earth where the word “redevelopment” caused everyone to redefine their terms.

IN 1990, AFTER WITNESSING THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL AND SEEING THE IMPENDING COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN THE WEST, the Chinese government realized that the only way they could avoid the foibles of post-Marxist/Leninist government was to permit and foster free trade. They designated five areas as “special commerce and development zones”: Beijing, Shenzen, Guangzhou, Shanghai/Pudong, and in 1997, the territory of Hong Kong. They also opened their first world stock exchange to finance the redevelopment.

The “Pudong” district was an undeveloped, pre-industrial ghetto area of marshland across the Huangpu River from the Old Shanghai. The Chinese had designs to turn Shanghai into the banking center of the New Asia, so they needed to actually physically create a city in which to house this international banking community. The Old Shanghai had fallen deep into ruin as memories of the “Paris of the Orient” had long since faded. But, the Chinese people reminded their leaders that ejecting the West from Shanghai after WWII was a political victory as well. They didn’t want the Westerners, who they refer to in their language as “other”, crawling all over the city again. So, in an unusual act of compromise, they choose to build literally from the ground up across the river in Pudong.

To achieve the massive demand for quality residential and commercial real estate, the Chinese had to import an entirely Western concept.the Skyscraper. Facing huge ambitions and a dearth of knowledgeable modern architects, they were forced to cross their commercial divide and partner with International firms in order to have their plans realized. Over the next ten years 25,000 construction sites opened up all over Shanghai. Yes, that’s correct, 25,000. At one point, one quarter of all the steel, concrete and high-rise construction cranes in the world were in use in Pudong-Shanghai. An entire city of high-rises began to sprout like dandelions.

The Chinese Plan for Shanghai

Naturally, when you talk skyscrapers, you eventually mention Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Smith and his associates were approached by the Chinese Government to design the trophy structure of the Pudong development, the Jin Mao Tower (a rough translation is “Good Gold”). Although SOM is recognized as the world authority, the firm was chosen in part because the Chinese Government had very specific laws prohibiting collaboration with any Western nation that did not already have a valid business interest in or connection with China. By building the Jin Mao Tower,, the Chinese government was able to lure international investors to trade in their stock market, and subsequently build their new skyscraper city.

The late 1990′s were a similar time of redevelopment in America, if not in such Herculean measures. It is certainly notable in our two major urban centers of New York and Chicago. New York City was able to rebuild Times Square as a glowing conglomeration of mirrored skyscrapers coated with neon. And the economic boon of the Tech Age was particularly good to Chicago, which was already in the process of being completely overhauled from the industrial city of lore to the modern business center of the New Economy.

Mayor Richard M. Daley had a very ambitious plan to renovate and develop the three areas immediately adjacent to The Loop business district-the South Loop, River West/Near West, and the Near North districts—which had lost their identities when the railroads had left and the manufacturing plants relocated to the suburbs. The South Loop and Near West had become a wasteland of empty warehouses within spitting distance of what is arguably the world’s most impressive skyline. The River districts suffered from the consequences of using the Chicago River as a sewer system, which necessitated developers building along the river to design everything facing away from the riverbank. Once the riverfront revitalization campaign began in the early ’90′s, the city found itself with three distinct new zones upon which to develop top dollar property that interacted with the river, rather than hid from it.

Conversely, the Near North district suffered from negligent development in the area outside Michigan Avenue, fallout from public housing developments like Cabrini Green, one of the country’s most dangerous, poverty stricken areas, located adjacent to The Gold Coast, one of the three richest communities in the country. It was one of the stranger places on earth for a while as the polar extremes of society shared a common street. With the announced closing of Cabrini Green, and plans for a multi-billion dollar redevelopment of the area, the era of transition in Chicago began with a bellow heard in urban centers around the world.

The plan in Chicago was to capitalize on the ’90′s exposure of “urban living”, and redevelop all these old industrial areas into dense residential areas replete with high-rises and town homes. The result was a complete and total renovation. Mayor Daley, always being a man of impeccable class and integrity, led the charge by moving into the first new South Loop development. Around him sprang up the movement. By the year 2000, whole sections of the city had been brought back to life, and new skyscrapers sprang up alongside stalwarts like “Big John”, The Sears Tower, and the Aon Tower (formerly the Standard Oil/Amoco Building), as pleasant compliment structures that made those megaliths seem that much more accessible.

Today, as you stare across the Chicago skyline, you suddenly understand where all those cranes the Chinese were using ended up. In all three surrounding districts a total of 50 new buildings have been added since 1998 with 40 of these high-rise developments currently under construction. Of those 40, only four are major commercial developments-the new 55-story UBS Tower, the 39-story Dearborn Center, the 37-story 191 N. Wacker Drive, and the 29-story ABN-Amro Plaza. The rest are all residential towers. And they are big residential towers, with 7 of them topping out over 50 stories.

Here is a list of the more prominent projects:

River East Center (Streeterville) – 58 stories

Millennium Center (Near North) – 60 Stories

Grand Plaza (Near North) – 2 towers, 57 and 40 stories

Park Millennium (Illinois Center> – 57 stories

2 East Erie (Near North) – 40 stories

55 East Erie (Near North) – 55 stories

The Fordham (Near North) – 52 stories

The Pinnacle (Near North) – 49 stories

1111 South Wabash (South Loop) – 35-40 stories

Skybridge – (Near North) – 40 stories

400 N. LaSalle (Near North) – 45 stories

Museum Park I and II (South Loop) – 30 Stories

The Heritage at Millennium Park – 47 Stories

This period of development over the last three years has been closely (and wrongly) compared with the late 80′s construction boon in Chicago that resulted in a slew of commercial skyscrapers built as speculative stock and bond investments without secure tenants, which led to a commercial vacancy crisis as late as 1995 when most of the high-rise property in the Loop stood empty. But the late ’90′s economy not only solved that problem, it created a bit of a demand. The other major factor to consider was that these new buildings, as part of Daley’s plan, needed to be approved by the City Council on Tall Buildings, unlike the 80′s when Daley’s predecessors, Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer, let anyone build anything they wanted as long as part of the package ended up in their pockets. These days, in order to begin construction, half the building needs to be sold in advance.

How successful was this plan? Well, for example, the Millennium Centre in the Near North District was 94% sold the day the project was announced. This particular figure is comparable throughout all the new projects, and they are still trying to build more. The city has approved plans for another 20 odd 30-plus story residential high-rises. Another major factor to consider was the evolution of construction techniques which made it much more feasible to build huge residential towers than ever before.

But the argument against all this rampant vertical development, and the one held fairly strongly by Smith and other architects, is that these new breed of residential high rises offer little aesthetic value. For the pedestrian on the street navigating the long canyons of buildings, many of these structures have three blank uninviting sides, and one entrance, mostly because most follow an economical template that incorporates a parking structure for the first ten odd levels. Above this unsightly box rise the towers, and the towers themselves are built in the Trump mode, to be more pleasing from the inside looking out than vice-versa. The one notable exception are the three towers of The Fordham Group, who actually got together with the neighborhood associations to design aesthetically pleasing towers. These new residential towers also don’t lend much in the way of skyline enhancement, regardless of the fact that the will transform the look of the North half of the Downtown area.

It’s interesting, when I was a boy, the only tall building in the Near North was the John Hancock Center, and people were still asking why they decided to put it “up in the middle of nowhere”. Today, Chicago is just like Manhattan, supporting two separate dense clusters of skyscrapers on opposite ends of the Downtown area, each possessing a mixture of commercial and residential structures.

Now, 50 odd major tall buildings in four years are not exactly 25,000 in ten, but these were also distinctly different projects. The Chinese Government was starting from scratch and could do whatever it wanted because it owned everything. Chicago needed to sell, demolish, and redevelop land in the very heart of the city. That alone makes what happened in Chicago akin to a miracle. Also bear in mind Shanghai supports a metropolitan population of roughly 30 Million, as opposed to Chicago’s paltry 10 Million, and every last one of them could potentially be conscripted to labor should the Chinese government decide they need their services. Building in a Capitalist society is a distinctly more complex endeavor.

But the real comparison is that Chicago invented the skyscraper, and Shanghai gave us the chance to perfect it. Manhattan and Hong Kong belong to a different category of cities, those needing tall buildings due to lack of space. Each has only about 25 square miles of land to build on (most of Hong Kong is mountainous). Conversely, both Chicago and Shanghai have an abundance of flat developable space upon which each respective city can expand. Can you imagine a city with over 230 square miles of skyscrapers? The Chinese can. They have no choice; they have almost 1.5 BILLION people to feed and house. Chicago will follow suit someday.

What the cities of Chicago and New York did with the guidance of their respective mayors was lay the foundation for the new urban renewal movement across the country. Some care to call the practice “gentrification”, the removal of a low-income ghetto in favor of an upper-middle and upper class ghetto. This of course is an argument for another article altogether, but I will acknowledge that gentrification is an extremely heated subject in today’s inner cities. Admittedly many of Daley and Giulliani’s redevelopment tactics were tough, but ultimately when you drive through both cities what you see are two beautiful, modern urban habitats with clean streets and pretty buildings and people out enjoying their lives, no longer darting from building to building with their purses hidden under their shirts and coats. Life in the big cities is exponentially better than it was ten and fifteen years ago. How this will pan out in another twenty years, of course, remains to be seen.

THE REAL FUTURE AND THE HYPE

What is imminent is the completion of the Taipei World Financial Center in Taipei, Taiwan. When completed in 2003, this innovative design will stand 1667 ft, thus supplanting the Petronas Towers by over 200 feet. Again I must state that the Sears Tower still puts a human being higher than both.

But everyone with a public platform these days seems to be professing expertise when it comes to predicting the future of Supertall buildings. So, before I indulge you in what “might be”, let’s discuss what definitely is not to be.

Adrian Smith believes the immediate future of Supertall buildings, first and foremost is determined by economics. If it can’t be financed, it can’t be built. Any economic recession would result in a halt in major construction, and conversely any economic boon usually results in a glut of construction. But take a recession, coupled with the dot.bomb phenomena, and then add on top of it a cataclysmic terrorist attack on a Supertall building, and you have the makings of the death knell for the industry, if not a severe coma for years to come.

As it stands, the Empire State Building is a third empty. Can you guess which third is empty? Tenants in the Sears Tower are also grumbling about leaving, this after much of the ’90′s was spent trying to put tenants back into the building after Sears relocated to the suburbs. And even if the next WTB was to be built anywhere on Western soil, the wholly prohibitive costs of new “Anti Terror” insurance would make it impossible to fill with tenants. So, is anyone clamoring to build another WTB in America right now? Not even remotely. The title is lost for now and is not likely to return for many years. Many fear the days of the Supertall building in New York are over entirely. Personally, I think that’s rather shortsighted. This particular fear may last twenty years or so (which is in all truth a safe estimate), but eventually, unless the entire city is somehow destroyed, New York will eventually run out of room. And the only place to go is up.

But will an American skyscraper ever regain the title of WTB? Before 9/11 you’d most likely hear everyone say it was not only possible but also imminent. After 9/11.well, if anything, it leveled the playing field. I’d say good old-fashioned American stubbornness would be more of a deciding factor in whether or not to build the next WTB then the threat of another attack on a Supertall building. Like I mentioned before, that was most likely the terrorists’ one and only chance.

And of course, there will always be the prestige attached with building something so awe inspiring. The thing about the whole concept of The World’s Tallest Building is that it is immediate and free international publicity, so anyone with a design and a dream can get their face in front of the world. Of late, the WTB platform has been used to get a whole slew of other projects financed.

Case in point: the Korean “Lotte World Tower 1″ in Pusan Korea, a “proposed 2000 foot tower” project that was used to bring in foreign development money to finance and build the “Korean Unification Railroad”. Also-rans in the publicity or pie-in-the-sky genre are the Grollo Tower in Melbourne, Australia and the Olympia Tower in Brisbane, The London Bridge Tower/London Millennium Tower project, The Union Tower Project in Hong Kong, the various incarnations of the New York Stock Exchange Tower, and of course a certain development in Shanghai that goes by the name of the Shanghai World Financial Center.

Don’t Believe The Hype!

The Shanghai World Financial Center (SWFC) is a Supertall structure that was ostensibly planned for the lot adjacent to the Jin Mao Tower, but really is the greatest present example so far of this particular brand of Tall Building chicanery. As far as the world knows, this building is currently on the rise and will soon supplant the Petronas Towers as the WTB. It would be closer to the truth to say the SWFC is a well-intentioned publicity stunt designed to drum up financial interest in:

a) Mori, the enigmatic Japanese designer of the Shanghai World Financial Center

b) Design firm Kohn Pedersen and Fox (KPF), and Chief Designer William Pedersen

c) Pudong Shanghai.

In 1998, during the topping out ceremony for the Jin Mao Tower, as Adrian Smith stood astride his masterpiece, Mori was next door hammering four pylons into the ground to legally claim he had begun construction on the SWFC. Now, four years later, the lot remains vacant, as does the Chinese government’s interest in building the tower. Simply put, they don’t have the money to build it, and they don’t see how it will make money for them. But despite the fact that it won’t get built, KPF has assuredly used this practice of publicity-stunting to their advantage to help bring greater visibility to numerous KPF projects around the world. How could it not? As you read this, construction is nearing completion on the new 191 N. Wacker Tower in Chicago, a beautiful 37-story blue glass structure, the third building along the “KPF bend” in the Chicago River, right at home next to it’s curvilinear brother, the famed green-glassed 333 N. Wacker building, where Ferris Buellers’s father was seen dancing at the window.

It can be argued that for a firm as accomplished, KPF would not need to generate that level of publicity, that it might do more to tarnish their reputation than bolster it. But I imagine if you asked lead architect William Pedersen he might argue differently. Not every firm has the reputation SOM has enjoyed. Whenever plans for a new World’s Tallest Building are made, odds are SOM will be considered or, at the very least receive a courtesy call. Take Trump, for instance. Granted it was a short list, but he ultimately chose SOM because they still are one of the select few ever to design and build anything so high. Although KPF can make roughly the same claim, they are still “the new kids”.

Even mid-range and local developers use the WTB publicity machine. De Stefano and Partners in Chicago, hoping to bring in development money for a number of high-rise residential towers, a few years back unveiled their design for a WTB concept called “Project 2000″. What they ended up building was the mere 60-story River East Centre. Simply by saying they could build something enabled them to build something else. See how that works? But it is doubtful that they would have ever been able to build something that big. Unlike in the late ’80′s when developers Miglin-Beitler were thwarted from building the Chicago Skyneedle due to the impending recession, smaller firms just don’t have the credibility or clout to actually get the deal made. The reasoning behind it is closely analogous to why Hollywood only uses a handful of Directors to helm $100 million dollar action films: too much can go wrong, and too much money is at stake.

And when all is said and done, as Smith so deftly put it, it is 40% cheaper to build two 40-story buildings than one 100-story tower, because above the fortieth floor one runs into human-transport issues, a polite euphemism for stating that the damn elevator shafts take up too much room.

Frankly, I’m curious how many people call up SOM every year claiming they can build “it”. Now, at the professional level where SOM operates, you can pretty much guarantee that any proposal that hits Adrian Smith’s desk has undergone the 30-point inspection. What is almost unfathomable, and something Adrian Smith never considered, is that at that level of complexity in financing and construction, the two-bit con man still finds a way to slither under the door. One thing Adrian Smith never imagined was that he would be swindled.

CAN ANYONE SPARE HALF A BILLION DOLLARS?

The $500 Million Swindle and The Future as it Exists on Paper

In September of 1999 the people of Chicago erupted in a collective burst of jubilation and civic pride as the city announced it had approved SOM’s plan for 7 South Dearborn, the new prototype for the future of Multi-Function skyscrapers, soon to be crowned the World’s Tallest Building.

Uniquely designed to be built on a half-block footprint instead of the usual full or double city block template of most Supertall buildings, 7SD was to be a four-sectioned tower with Commercial/Parking/Retail in the lower section, a hotel in the second section, the highest condominiums in the world in the third section, and an upper section entirely filled with state-of-the-art digital communications equipment, topped off by twin HDTV broadcast towers that would bring the floor height to 1550 feet, a hundred feet taller than the Sears Tower, and the total height to 2000 feet. This would have unequivocally brought the title back to Chicago, in all four categories of height. And yes, it does still matter to us.

Remember, I said the city approved the plan. For those of you outside Chicago, what that means is they most likely went over the proposal with an electron microscope before issuing the stamp. The project was going to cost $500 Million. There was a hotel already interested in buying one of the sections. New dot.coms multiplying all over Chicagoland were clamoring for the commercial office space. Interest in “The World’s Highest Condos” threatened to turn the whole thing into a Sotheby’s auction. I mean dot.coms that didn’t even exist were reserving floors. (Jesus, did 1999 really happen? And why was I the only guy who didn’t get rich?).

And yet there was still more to sweeten the deal: A new building technique that would have shaved a year off the total construction time. This patented technique was also the reason 7SD would have been one of the safest Supertall buildings on Earth: this new design concept incorporates a dense 1550 foot tall “concrete silo” center, upon which the floors in each of the four sections would be essentially dropped like rings, unlike, for example, the World Trade Center, where the square floors were held to the structure by metal brackets, which proved to be the causative factor in the collapse. This would have made 7SD theoretically indestructible to wind and earthquakes, using the patented “Tuned Mass Damping” system of oscillating fluid used to stabilize tall buildings. And it would have been largely impervious to terrorist attacks using conventional means, even a commercial airliner, because the core would have been so dense, as Smith puts it, “an airplane would bounce right off.”

And then, of course, there were those nice foreign investors who were going to fund the project. It was the age-old “too good to be true.”

7 South Dearborn: The Future of Multi- Function Skyscrapers?

Less than a year later it was uncovered that the so-called financiers of the project were, you guessed it, only trying to drum up money and publicity. The actual $500 Million in financing never existed, nor was there any reasonable expectation of it ever existing. Our hearts were broken. Even the $30 Million judgment levied against the “investment group” for fraud was useless and ineffectual, as these people did not have even the proverbial two nickels to rub together. Many of us took this personally.

Then, in March of 2001, just as Smith announced he had obtained new financial interest in 7SD, the recession hit like the backside of Hurricane Andrew and suddenly there wasn’t enough money left to feed the meter much less build a 2000-foot Skyscraper. But, recessions end, don’t they?

Next came the summer of 2001 and The Donald, like the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson floating back into town with the World Series Title in his arms. Well maybe not. Public sentiment in Chicago was decidedly against Trump putting up one of his trademark gaudy Ivana-Glitz towers of the New York ’80′s. But when he said he would build the biggest and the baddest, we quickly changed our tune.

Trump Chicago was supposed to be the next undisputed heavyweight champ, Smith’s real shot at redemption. I mean, come on, it’s The Donald! It was going to get built! Then, three months later in September.well, we’ve been through that part. The original design won’t get built, and I think I’m one of the privileged few to ever have seen the model.

Smith takes it all in stride these days. Is he disappointed? Absolutely, wouldn’t you be? Not just because they were his designs. Both towers are worth building, and both are needed, regardless of any ill will towards the Supertall concept or the incursion of The Donald on Chicago.

7SD represents eventual necessity. Chicago will be an entirely digital media city by 2004. So, whether or not the new broadcast and satellite relay equipment and servers go into 7SD or not, they still need to go somewhere. I asked Smith if he would build 7 South Dearborn tomorrow if I gave him half-a billion dollars, and before I could finish the question he said, “you bet!” I had to admit to perhaps exaggerating my personal finances, but I think he understood the sentiment.

These days Smith is content to move forward with his revised design of the now 82-story Trump Chicago that would make it, upon completion, the second tallest building in Chicago, and perhaps the country. It is a joint venture of Trump and Hollinger, the parent company of The Chicago Sun-Times, and is planned for the most prominent riverside plot in the city, the intersection of Michigan Avenue and the Chicago River, where now sits the desperately ugly former Sun-Times headquarters. The tower would be sheathed in bright steel and glass, which would pick up the color of the neighboring Wrigley Building. It is designed with setbacks that allow a progression from a slender tower down to a broad base containing stores and a Riverwalk. A European health club chain has expressed interest in leasing 200,000 sq ft, which only leaves about 550,000 more to sell in order to secure financing. But if anyone can do it.

Smith claims it’s as simple as this: Trump Chicago will get built if Trump thinks it will make money. It’s the same reason the Chinese won’t build the Shanghai World Financial Center

The much-ballyhooed millennium/landmark/kowloon tower is a whole other scenario. Smith has been asked to help with the design of this massive project the size of two Sears Towers that has been proposed for a number of locations including Tokyo and Hong Kong. If completed it would stand over 2800 ft and house 50,000 people in an all-purpose vertical habitat environment that one need not ever leave. On any given day, 200,000 people might pass through the tower.

In March of this year the Village Voice ran a speculative article called “Sky City Fantasies” which claimed a number of these mega-tower/self-contained city projects were in development. Well, “development” can be defined in many ways, including a simple sketch, and yes this is where the whole concept of Supertall buildings is headed. But only the Millennium Tower concept has been put through the logistics mill. The rest are truly “fantasies”, like the 4,000-foot tall X-Seed Tower in Tokyo, existing only in the imaginations of their vanguard designers. But the concept of structures this immense is not that far beyond us. We don’t have even the slightest idea how to build them yet, but like electricity, nuclear fission and the genetic code before it, the mystery of defying gravity and building upward is close to being cracked.

The Discovery Channel produced an amazing documentary on the proposed construction methods for The Millennium Tower at the Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong site. When you consider the size of the project, you suddenly realize that nothing like this will be built anytime soon. (You can read about it yourself at Discovery.com.) Building the Millennium Tower would tap the entire steel production in Japan for a year, which is not a workable scenario at the moment. And although the Tower would be exponentially safer from wind, earthquakes, and terrorism than anything we now know, the sheer costs in time and materials make something this big possible, but highly unlikely. It would take an international effort, and frankly, these days it seems the International community is more interested in building planes and bombs than buildings. There is a distinctly different priority at hand these days. Besides, Smith told me the plot where the Tower was supposed to go just got sold. So, forget noble causes.the almighty dollar and the Supertall building are inextricably linked, at once each other’s best friend and worst enemy.

And still, life goes on in the skyscraper, because they are not just buildings or monuments or astounding feats of engineering, they are also our homes and our businesses and our places of recreation. Rick Roman, the owner of the Signature Room, talks with great pride about the thousands of world travelers who have made the pilgrimage to his restaurant. The double-entendre of their slogan, “The Restaurant The World Looks Up To”, is not lost on us. And think about the tens of thousands of people for whom the Hancock Center is a part of their daily lives. Myself, I couldn’t imagine a week without a Chocolate Martini in the Southwest corner of the lounge, staring across the city at the Loop at sunset. There is no more beautiful site on earth than that view, no mountain range or coastline or desert vista can even remotely compare.

So no matter what happens to them tomorrow, our fascination and love for building big things will always supercede our practical concerns. It’s just in our nature. The Adrian Smiths of the world will continue to envision beautiful towers growing and growing like well nurtured crops, and eventually, when the time is right and the problems have been solved and the space is used up, they will be able to shape their dreams in steel and glass, and in their own unique, symbolic way help us as a race continue to grow steadily upward, like their concrete creations, and the eventual progression of all living things.

Newtopia founder and editor emeritus CHARLES SHAW is an award-winning journalist and editor, author of the critically-acclaimed memoir, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics & Spirituality, and Director of the documentary, The Exile Nation Project: An Oral History of the War on Drugs & The American Criminal Justice System.

Charles serves as Editor for the openDemocracy Drug Policy Forum and the Dictionary of Ethical Politics, both collaborative projects of Resurgence, openDemocracy, and the Tedworth Charitable Trust.

Charles’ work has appeared in Alternet, Alternative Press Review, Conscious Choice, Common Ground, Grist, Guardian UK, Huffington Post, In These Times, Newtopia, The New York Times, openDemocracy, Planetizen, Punk Planet, Reality Sandwich, San Diego Uptown News, Scoop, Shift, Truthout, The Witness, YES!, and Znet. He was a Contributing Author to the 2008 Shift Report from the Institute for Noetic Sciences, and in Planetizen’s Contemporary Debates in Urban Planning (2007, Island Press). In 2009 he was recognized by the San Diego Press Club for excellence in journalism.

              

Part 4: Frames of Reference-Exploring our Differences

(Valerie Pierce: Copyright 2011)

“When we are born our peephole opens. When we die our peephole closes.” Kurt Vonnegut

(Valerie Pierce: Copyright 2011)

At the end of my last chapter, I talked about exploring the role the ego plays in thwarting intimacy and good communication. Here my method will be to explore the importance of the development of our personal point of view, i.e. our perspective on ourselves, other people, and life in the world. I will also attempt to explicate how our point of view can cause us to discount or devalue experiences, conversations, and situations that we take part in. I will then attempt to show how the frame of reference through which we view the world can cause us to redefine our experience when we communicate about ourselves to others. I hope to show how this can lead to confusion, obfuscation, and conflict in our communication. These matters all fall under the aegis of how what we believe, value, and prefer tends to create and structure our experience. As this construction of our experiences occurs, the defining vortexes and junctures of this process are just barely in our conscious awareness.

I remember very well sitting in my Epistemology class at the University of Wisconsin listening to Professor Hayes talking about an experiment Bertrand Russell would do in his beginning Philosophy classes. He would hold up an ordinary tea cup and show it to the class from a number of different angles. He would then ask his students to write a fairly detailed description of this cup, which they would then read to the class. To everyone’s amazement, no two descriptions of the cup were alike. I remember feeling doubtful that this was the case. After all, this was a very ordinary tea cup that Dr. Russell used for his experiment. This was my introduction to the complex matter of human perception, frame of reference, and point of view.

Many years later, when I read Kurt Vonnegut’s “peephole quote” I flashed back to my philosophy class, and realized what I had not understood fully then. No two people experience the world in the same way. But not only that, we are also only getting a glimpse of what actually exists. In two simple sentences Vonnegut reminds us that it is impossible for us to corner the market on reality. We are looking at the world through a “peephole,” which creates a particular perception that is actually our own formulation. We think that we know the truth about something from our perception of it. We believe that we are seeing, hearing, and thinking correctly, but what we are not aware of in any given moment is what is influencing our perceptions. This is the “bad news” that Quantum Physicists have been delivering for years. All of our perceptions are subjective. As much as we strive for an objective point of view, we cannot attain it. We are stuck to some important degree with our peephole view.

(Valerie Pierce: Copyright 2010)

(Valerie Pierce: Copyright 2011)

If we consider the kinds of conflicts that we have with other people, our relationship partners, our friends, our colleagues, our clients and customers, more often than not they are over who is right and who is wrong, who’s been good and who’s been bad. These categories are the product of the socialization that growing up in our families, our schools, our religious institutions, and our social clubs teaches us. From the Ten Commandments, to the Golden Rule, to the qualities of a good Scout, we have all been taught lists of virtues and qualities of character that make up a good person. As adults we all have formulated particular ideas about how someone in a loving relationship is supposed to act, how a good mate behaves, the qualities we admire in a person, etc. Some of these maps of how to be and how not to be have gone unconscious in us and are out of our awareness, while others are very easy to access.

For example, I still remember the qualities of a good Boy Scout, who is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. These all seem like good qualities for a young boy to learn and develop, but in reality these virtues are skewed towards paying much more attention to other people than to oneself. These qualities of character could be seen as part of the map of co-dependency, where what other people need or require is more important than my own needs and desires. So, if I expect that the people I meet as an adult will behave towards me like a good scout would, I am going to be disappointed or frustrated with any number of people. The truth is that when it comes to matters of good and bad and right and wrong, of how we should behave in the world, and who we are supposed to become, we each have been given a different map by the people who raised us. We have added to and subtracted from that map in a variety of ways over the years of experience that we have accumulated. So by the time we reach adulthood, we each have our own unique set of values, beliefs, and opinions that inform our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, and our communication. These values, beliefs, and opinions are actually the preferences that make up our frame of reference. They are the constituents of the point of view that partially creates our experience. If you throw our unique genetic makeup into the mixture of what makes us who we are, it’s easy to see why the truth is that no two people are alike. Dr. Milton Erickson would say to his patients, “You are as unique as your fingerprints. There will never be another person exactly like you.” This fact is both a blessing and a curse. The implication of our uniqueness is very challenging. In order to have relationships that are healthy and loving, we are going to have to get to know both ourselves and each other very well. Any assumptions that we make about each other over the course of our relationship, will be tested in the fires of our real experience of one another.

By the time we reach our early twenties, most of us have had the experience of falling in love with another person. We may go from having a “crush” on someone, to somehow letting them know of our interest in them, to actually spending time with them. Feelings of attraction and excitement may develop in us that indicate that this person is special and may become very important to us. If the person we are interested in feels the same way about us, a new “relationship” begins to unfold. However, what we do not fully understand is that we are going to arrive in this new relationship fully clad with the ideas, emotions, beliefs, preferences, opinions and prejudices that comprise our frame of reference. Part of the process of getting to know each other is our beginning to reveal this cluster of values that are very near and dear to us. For a healthy relationship to develop, we will need to reveal not only what we think and feel, but what we are invested in, what we value, what we think is best, right and good. If we find that we are in some kind of synchrony with each other as the process of self-disclosure unfolds, we will feel that all is well. Should we find ourselves in disagreement in any important areas, we will begin to feel some kind of discomfort in our bodies that our brains may register as either a problem or a threat. This is where our challenge to be authentic begins.

(Toby Landesman: Copyright 2010)

(Toby Landesman: Copyright 2010)

If the differences in our point of view were the only problem we faced in getting to know someone, the process of getting to know them would be easier. If it was just that I had been taught certain “truths” by my family and you had been taught different “truths” by yours, all we would have to do would be to agree to learn from each other. After all, we have strong feelings for each other, why shouldn’t we agree to be each other’s teacher? The problem is that we have each invested in our point of view and identified with it. “I” am this set of beliefs, values and opinions. I not only believe my beliefs, I value them as right and true. They have become part of my identity, part of my ego.

The notion of the ego that developed from Freud to the present is a very complex one, to say the least. In this chapter, I am interested in pointing to a particular aspect of the ego, the part of the ego that invests in and identifies with various values, traits, accomplishments, preferences, and beliefs. This conglomerate of what our egos invest in is a large part of our sense of who we are. In so far as we are happy with this set of investments we will feel that we have a “healthy ego.” In as far as we are unhappy about these aspects of ourselves, we will feel distressed about who we think we are. Simply put, with regard to relationship building, the better my sense of self, the easier the beginning of revealing myself to another person will be. The worse my sense of self is, the more uncomfortable I will feel about revealing myself to someone who is becoming important to me.

One of the rules of thumb with regard to the ego is that whatever is in synchrony with what I believe and am invested in will feel comfortable to me. Whatever is not in sync with the beliefs, values, opinions, and preferences I have invested in will produce discomfort. Whatever makes me uncomfortable, I am likely to discount, disregard or reject completely. The controversial, but brilliant psychotherapists, Jackie and Mo Schiff recognized that the process of discounting or devaluing a person, their importance, and their capabilities was a key factor in making people crazy. Each of us exists in the world. We are important, capable, and we can solve our problems. Each of us needs to have our existence, our importance, and our capabilities taken into account. In other words we need to be accepted and appreciated for who we are, but so often our experience runs counter to our need for validation and recognition.

Because of the lack of validation, empathy, and appreciation we experience growing up, we become insecure. How good are we? How successful will we become? How intelligent will we appear to be? Is it OK to feel what we feel, to think what we think? Whenever we experience that we are being discounted, devalued, or criticized, we are likely to feel diminished, vulnerable, and even ashamed of ourselves. Our egos are fragile and are therefore hyper-reactive to criticism, discounting, to not being seen for who we are.

This reality points to how the relative health or strength of our egos affects how we communicate about ourselves to our relationship partners. In a sense, the ego is our guide and compass to what is acceptable, what has been approved of, what others will like. Sigmund Freud recognized the ego as a kind of broker or mediator between our drives and desires and the requirements of the important authority figures in our lives. If our desires are in conflict with what is required of us, the ego, Freud says, steps in to broker a deal. You can have a small helping of ice cream, but you must not eat the whole carton! If we have had a relatively amiable relationship with our parents, we will likely accede to the wisdom of the ego. If our caretakers were absent, controlling, or rejecting, we are likely either to rebel and go with our drives, or we are likely to collapse in despair over our failures, whether we eat the whole carton of ice cream, or sadly put it away  feeling deprived.

If we extrapolate this simple example into a possible source of major relationship conflict, it would look like this. A new person has come into my life, whom I feel strongly about. She wants to get to know me, and begins to ask questions about my likes and dislikes. What are my favorite things? How do I spend my time? What do I really enjoy about my work? Is there anything about my life to date that I regret? How I answer these questions will be determined by how I feel about who I am and what I have done in my life. If I am ashamed or guilty about my identity or my past, I will feel a strong urge to withhold my truth. I may reveal partial truths about my failures or misdeeds, but I am likely to rewrite my story so that I appear in a better light. My last girlfriend was incredibly demanding and didn’t appreciate me. My boss on my last job was cruel. My teachers resented how intelligent I am and wouldn’t give me the recognition I deserve. In other words I may portray myself as a victim, or as the righteously rebellious, misunderstood hero, in the hopes that I may still gain the approval and understanding of my potential partner.

Many contemporary authors portray the ego as little more than an approval junky, who monitors our every word and deed, inhibiting us from telling the awful truth. We desire love and appreciation from the people we value and we will rewrite our autobiography, and redefine our motivations, so that we have a chance to gain their approval, appreciation, and love. Clearly, this tendency to lie about certain aspects of our experience in the world can be found in any number of us. Radical honesty about ourselves makes many of us cringe and tremble at the possibility of criticism and rejection. So what is to be done about this predicament?

Here is a translation by Brian Browne Walker from the Unknown Teachings of Lau Tzu, the “Hua Hu Ching” to enlighten us about this aspect of the ego:

“The ego is a monkey catapulting through the jungle: Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses, it swings from one desire to the next, one conflict to the next, one self-centered idea to the next. If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life.

Let this monkey go. Let the senses go. Let desires go. Let conflicts go. Let ideas go. Let the fiction of life and death go. Just remain in the center watching. And then forget that you are there.”

 (Valerie Pierce: Copyright 2011)

(Valerie Pierce: Copyright 2011)

Our first challenge, in beginning this process of letting go of the ego’s hold on us, I believe, is to become aware of our point of view. We need to take an inventory of the factors that shape who we are, our values, beliefs, prejudices, and preferences. Where did these aspects of our perspective come from? What role did our parents play, our teachers, our friends, the authority figures that we have had to deal with for most of our lives? Secondly, we need to begin to accept and even appreciate how important the people in our lives have been to the creation of the person we have become. Even if we rejected our parents at a fairly young age, they still had a dramatic impact on us before our rejection of them took place. The reality is that having a strong bond to our parents and family members is so important to our survival in our early years, that we will do almost anything we can to gain their approval. If, in spite of our adaptations, we fail to get the positive affirmation we need from them, we are likely to become depressed or to put all our available energy into winning them over to approving us as good and loveable. The second stage of this process of recovering a healthy sense of who we are is learning to accept and appreciate ourselves. This can be accomplished by allowing ourselves to be open to what we are experiencing and then allowing ourselves to experience whatever it is. (See my earlier article “Experiential Self-Acceptance,” Tools of Transformation: October 2011) Learning to do so will put us in touch little by little with who we really are and will begin to fuel our positive self-esteem. Once we begin to feel this emerging sense of trust and love for ourselves, we can begin to feel loving toward ourselves and others in surprising ways.

What I am suggesting here is not the self-affirmation of Al Franken’s character, Stuart Smalley: “I’m good enough. I’m good looking enough. I’m smart enough, and, gosh darn it, people like me.” Instead, I am recommending the process of fully taking myself into account, warts and all. I am an OK person with problems, just like everyone else on the planet. I can accept my strengths and my weaknesses, utilizing my strengths and working to improve my deficits.

From this point of self-acceptance and self-appreciation, I can feel more comfortable revealing who I actually am to a person that I am building a relationship with. I can affirm to them that I exist in the world as a person with real strengths and weaknesses. I recognize that my strengths are real and that my problems are solvable. I acknowledge that I have the ability to resolve my difficulties, and that if I am uncertain or lose my way; I can seek help from someone who knows better than I.

As the great Jewish philosopher and mystic Martin Buber once wrote: “If I am I because you are you, and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you, and we can talk.”

In my next installment, I will explore two contemporary communication methods that address the pitfalls and predicaments of the defenses and the ego that have been raised in my last two blogs.

(Toby Landesman: Copyright 2011)

(Toby Landesman: Copyright 2011)

My heartfelt thanks to Valerie Pierce and Toby Landesman, for their fine “points of view!”

Article written by Thomas Goforth

Newtopia staff writer THOMAS GOFORTH is a psychotherapist and pastoral counselor working in Chicago, IL. He was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1967 and served as Chaplain to the Cook County Jail and the Chicago House of Correction while working for St. Leonard’s House, one of the first halfway houses in the country.. He did draft counseling and community organizing during the Viet Nam War, and was one of the founding members of the Lincoln Park Therapy Collective, an all volunteer organization which provided free group therapy for people living on the North Side of Chicago from 1968 until the mid 80′s.He helped organize the first crisis phone line in Chicago, and later helped train the staff counselors for Kool Aide Youth Emergency Services and Metro Help. He was an actor in the Free Theater Company and Rapid Transit Guerrilla Communications, two groundbreaking political theater companies performing in Chicago during the late 60′s and early 70′s. In the 80′s he helped found the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Chicago and became its third president and a member of its teaching faculty. At the invitation of Charles Shaw, he became the acting “Pit Boss” of the New Poetry Collective, the poetry arm of Newtopia Magazine in its first incarnation. Follow him at Twitter @thomas_goforth.