Word Blur

Voices from the Farm

As communes go, The Farm is interesting. It’s interesting because it’s still around; interesting because of the incredible influence it’s had in fields such as midwifery, agriculture, and philanthropy; interesting because of some of its more controversial aspects—the quasi-religion espoused by erstwhile leader Stephen Gaskin, the standing offer for women considering abortion to have (and leave) babies at the Farm, and the decision to move from commune to collective in the 1980’s (members no longer take a vow of poverty and live off of shared assets; they earn they own way, own their own stuff, and pay monthly dues), which resulted in a significant dwindling of member numbers. Voices from the Farm is very much a product of the Farm, but the voices really are plural. Thoughtful questions are posed—about what it was like to raise the children that were left behind by ‘sanctuary’ cases and about whether or not the social work being done by members caring for the runaways, drug addicts, and individuals struggling with mental illness who showed up at the Farm’s gate detracted from the commune’s real mission. And there are incredible stories, from Farm members working with earthquake victims in Guatemala to the satellite group who operated an ambulance service in the South Bronx. It’s impossible to read this book and not feel like The Farm, through both its successes and its failures, has learned something most of us at the beginning of the 21st century need to know. Thanks to Robert Dean Arnold for the tip!

The Welcome Table

I’ll be the first to admit it; I’m flailing around with this middle-aged stuff (I’m 39). There's not much new in that.  I’ve been flailing around for so long that it should feel like second nature, but the constant state of uncertainty is beginning to wear thin; its frenetic charms seems less and less honorable. I’ve lost the tenuous swagger and confidence of my youth, but the ambition lingers, a little like gasoline fumes (not that I can afford to buy gasoline!).

So here I am trying to learn how to write fiction, trying to make performance work that splits your heart in two and puts it back together again, trying to figure out how to raise two girls in a way that will save them from eating disorders and self-loathing, trying to move from assistant library professor to associate library professor, trying to feed my family real food grown and raised by real people on a very real budget, trying to keep my possibly splurging disc (I’m talking about you, L5-S1) from re-impinging on nerve endings so that I can remain upright, and I have to tell you, I’m not having fun, I’m not having much luck cheering myself on to leap these inconsequential hurdles in these splintered races towards distant finish lines, when any progress I make can only be measured with the smaller increments of the metric system.

And I realize, most of the time, what a great life I have, and that I probably sound like a whiner or an ingrate, and I’m sorry, but, you know, if the brain worked like that so many, many things would be different (e.g. David Foster Wallace would probably be alive).

Perhaps you’ve had days like this, where the bigness of everything you are trying to accomplish gets laid out against the reality of whatever it is you’ve actually accomplished and it makes your stomach hurt. I think I have the reading material for you.

Spend a few hours with Margaret Hollenbach’s Lost and Found: My Life in a Group Marriage Commune and your perspective will be restored. You’ll be so glad you didn’t join a commune in New Mexico that called itself The Family. You’ll be so relieved you weren’t forced to call your fellow communards Lord and Lady, or Mistress and Sir, depending on their length of stay. You’ll be ready to jump for joy that you weren’t expected to sleep with the barely charismatic, clearly messianic ‘Lord Byron’ more or less on command. You’ll be downright enthusiastic that the people you live with don’t have the authority to call a group gestalt session to critique and process your behavior at any time, day or night. You’ll be grateful that you aren’t constantly expected to bow to plans that are clearly misogynistic.  You'll be over the moon when no one greets you with the observation that it would be nice to get you pregnant. In short, you’ll feel a lot better.

 If I sound exceptionally hard on this particular iteration of family, who were probably just trying to find a way to make a better life, just as we all are, I’m taking my tone in part from Hollenbach, whose story fails to conform to the standard arc of communard memoir. She never seems to have experienced the elation and devotion that fueled the golden years of so many commune dwellers; she describes a deep and constant uneasiness with the events and practices she witnessed. It’s fascinating stuff and it’s interesting to note that she, like Laffan, was trained as an anthropologist and wrote a thesis (or dissertation?) about her experience with The Family, but because I’ve become so well versed on the aforementioned narrative, it feels as if the heart of the work is missing. I’m a sucker for dew-eyed optimism and it’s a little harder to swallow the story of someone who willingly admits she was just lost.  Because therefore before the grace of...

Well congratulations to me!

Regular Wordblur readers (and there are two or three of you out there!) should know that Wordblur ranks fourth in a Google search for "lipstick and chicken feces."  I know this because a reader stumbled across the site after running just such a search.  Hope you left satisfied!  Now, how should we celebrate?

Twin research

I’m reading books on twins separated at birth for my futures project and I have to say, I’m crazy loving it. Remember in the 1980’s when that was such a hot topic in the mainstream media: all the uncanny similarities, like both twins loving obscure Swedish toothpaste, or naming their childhood dogs Toy, or marrying people with the same names? It’s completely weird to think that events in any of our lives that seems like pure coincidence or chance could actually be the result of genetic imprint. Also, it’s unnerving, explaining why some cultures view twins as taboo. Much more on this to come, I’m sure. I feel a streak of obsessive interest coming on.  For now find your own books on twins separated at birth.

Stumbling on Happiness

I recently got a grant to start working on a series of improvisational movement forms based on the history of the future management exercise. As part of the process, I promised to do a parallel investigation, through extensive reading, on how we engage our imagination to envision future scenarios. So, I started looking for books to read in my library catalog, thinking maybe I could find something sort of scientific written for a lay audience on the topic. I constructed an awkward search (keywords “imagination” and “neuroscience”) hoping merely to smoke out some relevant subject headings and got only one result: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. This is what the publisher says: “Using the latest research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, Gilbert reveals what we have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there, and why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.” See, everything about this project is meant to be. I know that because when I sat down to work on my most recent grant application "Under My Thumb" came on the radio immediately.

 

Party Girl

We were home from Michigan for a day before our water turned all grey and unusable and we had to call the well pumping people who have since informed us that it’s going to take days worth of drilling and thousands of dollars to restore that pristine drinkable water I always rave to visitors about. Don’t let anyone convince you otherwise -- country living sucks. Also, my youngest daughter has a horrible, horrible cold. She’s only three months old and she’s coughing up huge chunks of yellow mucus. So after a week of staying at my partner’s mother’s house for the holidays, we’re now staying at my mom’s house so we can take showers and do laundry and boil water. I’ve spent literally one day at home over the past two weeks, and instead of going back to work full-time as planned, I‘m doing what I do best -- sitting on the couch all day nursing. Don’t feel sorry for me though, shed not a tear, because instead of reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma as originally planned yesterday I read my mom’s copy of I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris. At first I didn’t take to this book, because it seemed rather arch, but on closer inspection it’s pretty fabulous. The discussion of food in particular is quite earnest; early on Amy states “I don’t like joke cookbooks.” There are scores of recipes that all seem like things one would actually eat, many are attributed to family and friends and reprinted as recipe cards. I’m particularly keen to try Colbert’s Shrimp Paste, which, if it tastes as good as it sounds, I intend to make my party/potluck dish of 2007 (last year I did a modified Food & Wine salad of spinach, olives, oranges, and hearts of palm). The book itself is beautifully designed, like a tiny window into Sedaris’s kooky mushroom and squirrel-obsessed crafty aesthetic sensibility and though it appears its intent is to be funny, even silly, I ended up taking it pretty seriously. It’s such a welcome change from all this Martha Stewart, Food Network, elegant entertaining stuff that’s come to dominate our sense of what a party should be (surprisingly prevalent with the aging hipster set -- not that I get invited to, or manage to attend a great many parties). Amy Sedaris reminds us that good times are just a “fuck it bucket” away (fill bucket with candy, write fuck on the outside). So until I do make it through Michael Pollan’s big fat treatise on why we’re eating all wrong, I intend to whip up a batch of pink-frosted sprinkle-adorned brownies for my husband’s upcoming birthday, with little animals cut out of paper and glued to toothpicks sticking out of them.

The Next Big Thing

My physical therapist has assigned me to read a book called Chi Walking, in hopes of improving my alignment during what has become by and large my only form of exercise.  This is the kind of book that is incredibly seductive to me, because it holds out the promise that if I just pursue this one thing, my life will be overhauled and everything will suddenly feel perfect.  I'm always somebody's target audience.  I'm planning to engage in chi walking every day on my upcoming trip to Michigan, because I imagine there will always be someone to hold my baby.

The Sunset Closet

A couple of nights ago I was having dinner with a friend who was telling us about her grade school mate’s mother, who it turned out had left her kids to go live at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon with Bhagwan. Before she disappeared she had a closet with all of her sunset-colored clothing arranged by hue, from red to peach to orange to yellow to magenta. My friend said that she had been invited to go visit the ranch, but that her parents wouldn’t let her. I said I was very glad she hadn’t gone because of all the crazy things that happened there. And, largely thanks to the Rajneeshpuram chapter of Frances Fitzgerald’s Cities on a Hill (a book about intentional communities that I read earlier this summer on my Bhagwan trip), I was able to spin a story of embezzlement, phone tapping, attempted murder, salmonella-drenched salad bars, voter fraud schemes involving the import of thousands of homeless people, false AIDS diagnoses, silent gurus, power-hungry secretaries, and so on. How would two eighth grade girls have fared there? They probably would have had the time of their lives -- free reign and plenty of distracted adults to exploit. Still, I’d almost forgotten about my fleeting obsession with all things Rajneesh, and it was nice to be able to share…

More Bhagwan

Finished reading Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined a Cult, Marion Goldman’s study of women residing at Rajneeshpuram, the Oregon communal living experiment of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers. It did little to quench the voyeurism that usually drives me to such works, in large part because Goldman uses the controversial method of creating composites of her subjects, weaving the experiences of many women into three discreet stories and changing facts to protect anonymity. So the whole time I was reading it I was acutely aware of the fact that what she was describing never actually happened as such. I’m not sure why this was such a deterrent for someone who ardently believes just about any snippet of celebrity gossip I read on the internet (Angelina Jolie is not pregnant though, my gut tells me that). Also, I guess when it comes to religious cults, I really prefer the insider’s perspective. That’s what I’m hoping to get out of Bhagwan: The God that Failed by Hugh Milne, next on my list.

For your viewing pleasure, check out these pictures (such as the one above, copyright 2003, Samvado Gunnar Kosstaz) of red/orange-y sannyasins in happier times at the first Rajneeshpuram festival: .  BONUS:  Musical interlude, El Dorado.  WARNING: More infectious than Curly Oxide.

Bhaggers: I've Got You Under my Skin

I recently finished reading My Life in Orange, Tim Guest's heartbreaking memoir about growing up with the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.  This is exactly the kind of book I love, although it's hard to put a finger on why that is.  Stories of people trying to create new, better worlds and going to extreme questionable lengths have always fascinated me (I also like reading about the SLA and the Weather Underground).  It's a train wreck/you-can't-look-away book (although technically speaking, I fail to see the appeal of train wrecks).  And I can almost imagine that in another life that could have been me -- leafing through color cards telling me what sun-drenched hues I was allowed to dress in, pounding pillows with my fists to break down social conditioning, and chanting my little heart out.  In my youth I was a very zealous type.  I'd like to imagine that I would have been willing to give up the ghost when my guru and his inner circle resorted to bioterrorism, wire tapping, and attempted murder, but you never can tell really.  Anyway, most people would call it quits after reading this and move on to the next book-club-approved memoir.  An obsessive type would go to her library and check out a whole bunch of other books on Bhagwan and his sannyasins.  Guess what I did.