Bigfoot and the Virgin

Bigfoot, the gigantic hairy hominid that roams the forests of Northern California, can often be seen carved out of wood and keeping watch over the doorways of many a business and residence along the old redwood highways. Standing serene yet stern, he recalls the Virgin Mary herself, who also guards portals as faithfully as she guards her virginity. But Bigfoot and the Virgin have more in common than mere statuesque functionality.

Willow Creek has designated itself the capital of Bigfoot country. It has erected a huge, twenty-five-foot-tall statue in Bigfoot’s honor. But in fact, Willow Creek is not the only community to take Bigfoot as its special emblem. Bigfoot can boast as many commemorative statues as can the bears of Yosemite. His hulking form can be seen everywhere, greeting tourists and visitors with his less-than-friendly face. But here’s the catch: it is still uncertain whether or not he exists. What is most interesting about this little complication is the fact that communities take him as their totem whether or not certain individuals within that community believe he’s real.

It is clear that the Bigfoot legend grows scientifically. That is, it acquires detail and specificity through a correlation of eyewitness accounts and other such evidence (footprints, bits of hair, his distinctive screams and odor). In contemporary discourse, there are no equivalents of the fairytale or the myth to illuminate specifics about behavior, personality, or history the way one can investigate, say, the trolls of European folklore. There are only eyewitness accounts, or “memorates.” Bigfoot ‘hunters’ (specialists, really) collaborate various memorates to construct a profile of the creature that is often rather precise in its naturalistic detail.

In recent years, memorates have surfaced connecting Bigfoot to UFOs. This has coincided with the creation of a new legend about these creatures’ extraterrestrial origin. According to this legend, Bigfeet are emissaries of an advanced race and possess highly developed technology and even psychic abilities. For the moment, this sits uneasily with the current legend that emphasizes Bigfoot’s terrestrial animal nature, in which he eats roots and rodents, is afraid of electric lights, and is shy and sometimes aggressive toward humans. Linda Milligan has shown that the two legends may sometimes even coexist unchallenged in the same person.

What is the significance of this new legend? UFO religions such as Southern California’s Unarius Academy of Science often hold fast to a sort of flying-saucer eschatology. Unarian devotees stand waiting for the “Space Brothers” to return to earth and establish universal peace and a highly advanced Atlantean civilization. According to the new Bigfoot legend, he is sort of like one of the Space Brothers: enlightened, benevolent, even sublime.

This brings us back to the Virgin. As a conduit of the divine on earth, she is uniquely placed to aid the communities that invoke her. Simply recall the near-political role of La Virgen de Guadalupe in many Mexican-American communities. And in medieval and early modern contexts in which Christianity came into contact with other faiths (in Spain or the New World, for example), the Virgin became the prime protectress of her ‘friends.’ As such, she came to symbolize and embody the Christian community as it related to other communities. She was Christianity’s standard-bearer, at the forefront whenever culture conflict took place, because God had infused her earthly flesh with divinity and she had kept that flesh tightly enclosed, fortifying her virginity against attack.

Thanks to the new legend, Bigfoot is also now a meeting point between the terrestrial and the celestial, with full eschatological implications. Bigfoot is now regarded with affection, even devotion. The statues of powerful serenity that keep faithful watch over the rural forest communities of Northern California, therefore, may serve to invoke his higher authority. Although statues such as the one in Willow Creek often become tourist destinations, the stoic unfriendliness in their faces and foreboding monumentality may belie their original intention: they are called upon, perhaps, to actually guard against outsiders, or even ever-encroaching urbanity. This may be one reason why he is always placed at doorways and gates, or standing sentinel facing the highway.

But affection never completely replaces fear. The Klamath River Resort Inn beckons to tourists--“it is a great place to stay while on vacation or doing research”--but simultaneously invokes the region’s fearsome guard: “Many times we have walked or hiked in the local forests and have gotten that primordial chill down the spine or hair standing on the back of the neck due to a[n] instinct that we were being watched.  It may have been a deer, mountain lion, or even a bear - but what if it was something more...” Potential visitors, it implies, may wish to think twice.

Even the original, terrestrial legend demonstrates Bigfoot’s significance to rural communities. Bigfoot belongs to the forest, he seems to embody it, or even to embody the fluid boundary between the human and the wild. And yet few can attest to actually having seen him; because he is supremely elusive, he is also untouched, and untouchable. His liminal, ambiguous nature, like the Virgin but unlike Yosemite’s bear, lends him the supernatural ability to embody communal or regional identity and guard it against the outside world.

BN: Earthquake Prayer

BN is short for "Brief Notice," the blindingly clever way I will now designate little bits of randomness I wish to document and/or share. So here's the first, an early Californian prayer for protection against earthquakes:

"Dios, nuestro Señor, nos bendiga,
Mi casa y este pueblo
Y todos los que en ella estamos y habitamos,
Y á ellos y á nosotros nos libra
Del ímpetu del terremoto,
En virtud del dulcísimo nombre de Jesús. Amén."

(God, our Lord, bless us, my home and this pueblo and all whom therein dwell, and preserve them and us from the violence of the earthquake, by virtue of the most gentle name of Jesus. Amen.)

From "Antepasados" (1977), the publication of Los Californianos, which I picked up in a used book store in Eureka.

Monterey Colonial

This was written from a room in the Motel 6 in Auburn, CA. Well, something occurred to me recently. Many of the old 19th c. houses from Mexican California have a common structure. They are two-tiered, but in lieu of interior hallways, they have a covered walkway and a line of railing running along the upper level with doors opening out onto it (see this picture from historic Monterey, on the top). They are made of stucco and tile, and usually adobe. Rancho Los Cerritos, in my hometown, is a beautiful example of this architectural style, and is one of the few remaining structures of its type in the state. Developed by Thomas Larkin in the first half of the 19th c., the style known as “Monterey Colonial” blended Mexican and American architecture to create a style that was uniquely Californian.

Now, as a part-time resident of New England, where wood and red brick prevail, I’ve noticed that Californians almost instinctively turn to stucco and tile when building anything from garages to strip malls. There is a deep-rooted affinity for these two quintessential materials of California’s Mexican past. In the same way, Californians seem to turn to the two-tiered, porched style of rancho architecture, the Monterey Colonial style. I see it being used for private residences, shopping centers, and office buildings. And, interestingly, almost every Motel 6 in the west, or perhaps the country. See the image on the bottom, from Tucson, AZ.

Motel 6 was founded in 1962 by William Becker and Paul Greene in Santa Barbara. Since the 1920s, Santa Barbara has made a very conscious effort to preserve the architectural flavor of its hispanic heritage. The first Motel 6 that was built, which is actually still running, followed a Monterey Colonial structural template. Subsequent Motel 6 buildings throughout California and the rest of the country, until very recently, continued to follow this style. I find it fascinating that this indigenous Californian architectural style may have so worked its way into the psyches of Becker and Greene that the birth of America’s first chain of budget motels was infused with such wonderful regionality.

As more and more Motel 6 buildings take inspiration from the architecture of the luxury hotel instead of the rancho, the older buildings with their regional specificity may eventually go the way of the original 19th c. Monterey Colonial ranchos. Whether or not we designate these motels historic landmarks like Rancho Los Cerritos is, perhaps, a matter of debate.

The Visionary Art of Dov Gertzweig

I have come to consider ‘New Age’ art as the latest addition to the rich corpus of self-taught visionary art, which includes the work of such luminaries as Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Shaker sister Polly Collins. Like all visionary artists, New Age artists construct alternative worlds detached from yet intrinsic to our own. These worlds are homiletic worlds, created to instruct, admonish, and enrich the world of the mundane; in no way, therefore, are we to imagine these worlds as merely autistic fantasies created for the artist’s own delectation. Although the worlds created by New Age visionaries are often incomprehensible to those on the outside, their images must nonetheless be read as texts, as visionary literature meant to communicate truths thought worthy of universal comprehension.

Gary “Dov” Gertzweig of Southern California is one such New Age artist. Born in North Hollywood, Gertzweig recalls how a visit to Yosemite in his youth awakened the environmental consciousness that would come to permeate his work. Initially trained as a musician, he has found outlet in the visual arts as well, in murals and "cosmic paintings;" thus, to Gertzweig, art and song seem to spring from the same visionary impulse, much as they did to Sister Gertrude Morgan and the Shakers.

Indeed, this intertwining of art and song seems to imbue his paintings with a distinct rhythm, but it is neither as frenetic and feverish as in the work of Ody Saban nor as jubilant as that of Sister Gertrude Morgan, two other self-taught visionaries Gertzweig's work recalls. Instead, his paintings seem to shimmer with the pulsing electricity that trickles through the veins of living plants. It is no wonder, then, that he imbues his paintings with heavy doses of vibrant greens and shimmering blues.

Gertzweig incorporates realistically rendered animals, archetypal human figures, swirling stylized plants, and the ubiquitous deep blues of sea and sky into his teeming compositions. He plants these Edens with botanical forms evoking redwoods, coast live oaks, and tropical plants, recalling California’s native landscapes and the exotic pastiche of the luxurious SoCal gardens all around him. Perhaps in response to the expansive views off the California coastline where sky and sea become one, the air and water in Gertzweig’s paintings often flow into each other, creating an uneasy sense of horizon loss and collapsed perspective. This results in works that are simultaneously flat and vast, as if the viewer is gazing in upon the moment of Creation. Asserts Gertzweig: “art can make a moment become eternal.”

Out of Southern California’s brown and brittle chaparral and L.A.’s smog and congestion, Gertzweig has created an alternative world filled with gardens of green, living things and sparkling air and water. Where tired urban postmoderns isolate themselves, trudge, and kvetch, the beings in Gertzweig’s world are radiant and harmonious. “Imagine our world,” the dolphins of the Astral Ocean told him, “where there are no possessions, no countries, abundance and no greed. This is our gift, our consciousness, and we wish to share it with you.”

Gertzweig’s response to his Southern California homeland, therefore, is the same as that of every other visionary artist dissatisfied with sin or vice in their communities. Where the Shakers recorded the whisperings of angels and spirits and Sister Gertrude Morgan captured visions of the New Jerusalem, Gertzweig has here created an alternative world that seeks to demonstrate both how our own world was and the way it could be. Collapsing perspective, time, and place into images of concentrated meaning, Gertzweig has created potent yet seemingly innocuous polemics against the political, social, and biological status quo.

(Image: "Cosmic Egg." Dov Gertzweig, begun 1990)

Bloody Mary and La Llorona

When I was in elementary school in Long Beach, CA, the girls I knew would sometimes talk about Bloody Mary, a specter who would appear in the mirror of the girls’ bathroom whenever her name was chanted a specified number of times (I don’t remember how many). You would go into the bathroom, stand before the mirror in relative darkness (the bathrooms had no lights that I can recall), chant “Bloody Mary,” and she would appear in the mirror and scratch your face. If you looked directly at her, she would scratch out your eyes.

After having done a bit of research, I came across other variants throughout the U.S. in which the chant runs something like “Bloody Mary, I killed your baby.” I have also found that this ritual is usually associated with girls and bathrooms, much as it was in my childhood. Although many folklorists connect her to England’s Mary Queen of Scots or Queen Mary I, what I find interesting about her is her similarities to Southern Californian variants of La Llorona.

La Llorona, the Crying Woman, is a ghostly figure well-known to many hispanic families of California, the Southwest, and Mexico. There are many variants of the legend (just Google her); one version, collected by Terrence L. Hansen in Riverside in 1956, takes place in colonial Mexico: according to this version, there was a beautiful young Indian girl who had fallen in love with a wealthy Spaniard. She had three children by him, but he refused to marry her because of her lowly status. However, he told the girl that he would reconsider if the children weren't around to embarass him. In order to win back his love, she drowned her children one by one in the river. But even after this, he wed another, and she went mad with grief. Now, she wanders the waterways searching for her children. Her appearance is said to be a harbinger of death and misfortune.

Ghosts in California and the rest of the United States are, as a rule, indifferent or generally helpful towards the living. A very meager percentage are as malevolent as Bloody Mary and La Llorona; this prompts me to ask some questions about these two figures. In almost every variant of La Llorona collected thus far, she is some kind of distraught mother searching for or lamenting her dead offspring. Whether she killed them herself or not, she wanders the waterways tormented, along beaches and canals; she has even been spotted wailing and drifting along the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River.

In 1968, Bess Lomax Hawes noticed a gendered element to La Llorona folklore in her study of the female ward of the Las Palmas Juvenile Hall in L.A. Although most United States ghosts are male, she found that of the 31 ghost stories she collected, 28 were of female revenants, most of whom were actively hostile according to variants on the La Llorona theme. La Llorona, she argued, “wildly revenging herself upon men, upon her children, and upon herself, [is a] multifaceted, loving-hating ghost-mother [that] seems the explicit embodiment of the emotional conflicts of the adolescent delinquent girl.”

What are the connections between the hostile and feminine worlds of Bloody Mary and La Llorona? Well, for one thing, in many versions, La Llorona is given a name: Maria. Bloody Mary’s connection to mirrors and bathrooms seems to echo the watery associations of La Llorona. In many versions, La Llorona no longer has eyes because they have dissolved in her tears, and her face is somehow deformed. This is why looking into her face usually means certain death or disfigurement; in the versions Hawes analyzed, La Llorona attacks girls’ faces because she is jealous, or because they look like her dead daughters. The Bloody Mary of my childhood would scratch out your eyes if she caught you looking at her. La Llorona searches eternally for her dead children, and you can summon Bloody Mary by identifying yourself as the murderer of her baby. Two teen-age girls walking along L.A.’s Sunset Strip in the 1960s told a journalist about “La Harona,” a woman who had killed her children in a haze of syphilis-induced insanity. “If you shouted ‘La Harona!’ five times, she would come to you,” one said. The girls were still terrified by this story from their childhood. “They said she came through mirrors.”

Perhaps, La Llorona and Bloody Mary stem from one bundle of folkloric motifs lost in the mists of time. What may be more interesting, though, is this prospect: in Southern California, the United States’ Bloody Mary and Mexico’s La Llorona may have begun to intertwine as their communities of origin mingle and cross paths. And this cross-cultural dialogue is not happening in the grand sweep of politics or the media’s riddled mansion but the intimate and troubled female realm of adolescent girlhood.