Southern California, it turns out, is much like the stereotype. This stretch of coastline does indeed covet that lifestyle of sun, sea, sand, smoothies, fish tacos, and effortless yet immaculate fashion. Image-conscious and health-conscious, Southern California--like other coastal Mediterranean and subtropical cultures--prizes the body that is radiant, bronzed, athletic, and slender. This is particularly the case for the female body, which is almost perpetually called upon to expose itself to sunlight, ocean breeze, and the critical gaze of the onlooker. This body has become a reified thing, crystallized and reinforced (enforced, even?) by every image Southern California uses to speak to and about itself.
Therefore, I find it fascinating to note the existence in this same geography of female religious communities that purposely flaunt these images and, instead, envision a female body that is multiplicitous and diffuse, often finding in the ‘deviant’ female form a perfect expression of divinity. The goddess-centered neopagan communities of the southern coast locate the feminine divine in such culturally and chronologically diverse figures as Isis, Diana, the Virgin Mary, and Kali. They find divinity and power in bodies that are menstruating, pregnant, obese, aging. The feminine divine (particularly in Wiccan circles) can also be more diffuse, becoming what the famous San Franciscan witch Starhawk has called “the great forces of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that move through the universe. …[the Goddess] is immanent within us as well as in nature.” This boundlessness and multiplicity has meant that neopagan communities have created their own conception of the female body that mirrors this fluidity and shatters the restraints and boundaries imposed by majority culture.
Thus, the neopagan body, like the Goddess, is diffuse. Aniitra Ravenmoon of the Temple of Isis in L.A., for example, asserts that she can become dozens of goddesses in the span of a day, depending on her emotional, spiritual, and physical needs at any given time. Cathleen, also of the Temple of Isis, writes:
Well, we’re threading through togetHER, Moving in
and out and ‘round,
Weaving with COSMIC EARTH.
We’re growing all togetHER, Sowing underground,
Seeds about to give BIRTH.
Who are we WILD WORLD-WOMEN weaving
blood-red c(h)ords,
Cosmic Co-Creating FEMININE DIVINE.
The poem creates a linguistic and imagistic space where worshippers, in their spiraling movements, can actually create the body of the Goddess by weaving their own bodies together with fertile seeds, soil, and what seems to be the red blood vessels of living flesh. Here, the feminine divine, although diffuse, is not in the least abstracted—rather, it is actively ‘co-created,’ manifested, and embodied by the assembled bodies of the faithful.
The neopagan body, therefore, by expanding its boundaries and drawing inspiration from a variety of cultures and periods, seems to transcend the limitations imposed by majority culture and even time itself. For example, despite what many sociologists have identified as a stigmatization of the obese body in contemporary society, neopagan communities instead often locate in the obese female form a perfect expression of the feminine divine: they celebrate largeness as largesse, as abundance and fecundity. Such a body can, perhaps, be thought to be in a perpetual state of pregnancy.
Closely tied to this is sexuality, wherein neopagans celebrate voluptuousness as transcendently sensual and supremely powerful. Witness the popularity of ‘bellydancing’ in neopagan communities as well as the ubiquity of the prehistoric ‘fertility’ figurines.
Voluptuousness becomes, almost, a reclamation of a woman-centered sexuality: here, notions of the erotic radiate from within—and are not imposed upon—the embodied self. Feminine power arises bodily, through fertility, voluptuousness, and sheer monumentality.
For example, at a women’s retreat in the Santa Monica mountains, a priestess portraying (rather, embodying) Diana during a ritual drew her ‘goddess essence’ from her physical size. One participant in the ritual remarked: “Other images of Diana are all sexualized from a male point of view, kind of a scantily clad Playboy bunny in the woods. . . . [But] this was a female who radiated power with her body and costume. Her unselfconsciousness about her body was powerful and the way she walked was almost majestic. I’ll never forget it. This was the Diana I want to relate to.” You may notice that, according to the observer, the priestess/Diana drew her divinity from her “unselfconsciousness about her body”—the embodied feminine divine was powerful precisely because it defied the critical gaze that elsewhere permeates majority culture.
Elizabeth Reis has argued that accusations and self-affirmations of witch-hood (from the 17th c. to the present day) rest on a “fear of women’s power.” Contemporary witches largely define themselves against popular conceptions of acceptable femininity, proudly flouting expectations and transgressing boundaries, even with their own bodies. This is where a “fear” (or, perhaps, awe) of women’s power rests: self-affirmed witches often testify that rituals can shock them, surprise them, and catapult them into realms of female power they can only dimly comprehend, let alone control. By using their own bodies as tools of this power, they, I suppose, embody their own empowerment as a way to make it manifest.
Sociologist Tanice Foltz has argued that women come to Goddess spirituality “to heal their identities as female ‘others’ in patriarchal society.” Glory Vernon, for example, holds her Long Beach “Introduction to the Art of Spell Crafting” workshops for “those who wish to take a more positive approach to empowering their lives.” The Circle of Aradia, a Dianic community in L.A., pledges to “heal and empower women in their personal lives.” This empowerment goes hand in hand with the divinization of the female body. The female body is wrested from the realm of commodification--torn from the magazine page, the billboard, and the movie screen--and carried into the realm of the sacred. Neopagan women, through ‘magick’ and alternative conceptions of the body, ultimately acquire power precisely because they transgress, ignore, and destroy boundaries and expectations through the multiplicitous embodied self.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Monday, March 24, 2008
Migratory Beekeepers
In the second half of the 19th c. and the first few decades of the 20th, hundreds of Basque sheepherders roamed the Sierra Nevada. Trading their native Pyrenees for California’s monumental mountain range, they spent their days in solitude, tending to their flocks, fending off coyotes, and following the seasons’ fluctuating greenery. Much of the great mountains of the West received their first human footprints from these wide-ranging wanderers.
Southern California, it turns out, has its own heritage of what one might also call wandering pastoralists. In the 1920s and 30s, the fragrant coastal hills were home to a vast number of migratory beekeepers. In Ventura and L.A. counties in the mid-1890s, beekeepers discovered a way to deal with erratic rainfall and lengthy dry spells: they would mobilize their hives and follow the flowers wherever and whenever they bloomed.
Although migratory beekeeping was not new or unique to Southern California, it was here that it attained great significance. Southern California’s climate facilitated a wonderfully long flowering season, with blossoms cropping up in different areas as the season progressed. Because some plants only secrete nectar for a brief length of time (and nectar yield can vary sharply from year to year), and some are indigenous to very small areas, beekeepers would haul their colonies onto special horse-drawn wagons, trains, or automobiles and follow the wild sages and buckwheats for dozens or even hundreds of miles.
By the 1930s, California had become the leading honey-producing state in the union, with an estimated 2,000 migratory beekeepers, most of whom resided on the southern coast and took advantage of that region’s native pungent flora. Although fields of cultivated plants such as alfalfa, lima beans, orange, and pear did provide the colonies with nectar (indeed, fruit growers were dependent on beekeepers for pollination), these were only plan B, in case the sage crop failed. For the most important and the most prized plants were the indigenous black, white, and purple sages. Black sage was the chief producer of honey, and, in fact, had been dubbed Salvia mellifera, or honey-bearing sage. But many other indigenous plants proved valuable, for nectar as well as pollen: buckwheat, acacia, willow, cottonwood, black walnut, oak, and the many flowering ephemerals that bubbled up after spring rains.
Few other industries could boast such an intimate dependency on and vulnerability to Southern California’s climatic whims, frequent wildfires, and hardy yet finicky native flora. These migratory beekeepers, like Northern California’s wild salmon fishermen, had placed their livelihoods in the hands of forces completely beyond their control. Certainly, they had to learn to surrender to California’s natural fluctuations, but they also had to become keenly perceptive, learning to sense favorable climatic conditions and discern where and when the next and most nectar-laden field of blossoms would arise.
In 1932, Clifford M. Zierer characterized the migratory beekeepers as “amateur naturalists [who] enjoy outdoor life….The successful migrator is always a keen observer; he must be resourceful and frugal; he must possess unlimited hopefulness. For the migrator fortune lies always just beyond.”
Southern California, it turns out, has its own heritage of what one might also call wandering pastoralists. In the 1920s and 30s, the fragrant coastal hills were home to a vast number of migratory beekeepers. In Ventura and L.A. counties in the mid-1890s, beekeepers discovered a way to deal with erratic rainfall and lengthy dry spells: they would mobilize their hives and follow the flowers wherever and whenever they bloomed.
Although migratory beekeeping was not new or unique to Southern California, it was here that it attained great significance. Southern California’s climate facilitated a wonderfully long flowering season, with blossoms cropping up in different areas as the season progressed. Because some plants only secrete nectar for a brief length of time (and nectar yield can vary sharply from year to year), and some are indigenous to very small areas, beekeepers would haul their colonies onto special horse-drawn wagons, trains, or automobiles and follow the wild sages and buckwheats for dozens or even hundreds of miles.
By the 1930s, California had become the leading honey-producing state in the union, with an estimated 2,000 migratory beekeepers, most of whom resided on the southern coast and took advantage of that region’s native pungent flora. Although fields of cultivated plants such as alfalfa, lima beans, orange, and pear did provide the colonies with nectar (indeed, fruit growers were dependent on beekeepers for pollination), these were only plan B, in case the sage crop failed. For the most important and the most prized plants were the indigenous black, white, and purple sages. Black sage was the chief producer of honey, and, in fact, had been dubbed Salvia mellifera, or honey-bearing sage. But many other indigenous plants proved valuable, for nectar as well as pollen: buckwheat, acacia, willow, cottonwood, black walnut, oak, and the many flowering ephemerals that bubbled up after spring rains.
Few other industries could boast such an intimate dependency on and vulnerability to Southern California’s climatic whims, frequent wildfires, and hardy yet finicky native flora. These migratory beekeepers, like Northern California’s wild salmon fishermen, had placed their livelihoods in the hands of forces completely beyond their control. Certainly, they had to learn to surrender to California’s natural fluctuations, but they also had to become keenly perceptive, learning to sense favorable climatic conditions and discern where and when the next and most nectar-laden field of blossoms would arise.
In 1932, Clifford M. Zierer characterized the migratory beekeepers as “amateur naturalists [who] enjoy outdoor life….The successful migrator is always a keen observer; he must be resourceful and frugal; he must possess unlimited hopefulness. For the migrator fortune lies always just beyond.”
Monday, November 5, 2007
The Incorruptible Sister Irenita
In 1931, Sister Irenita, a young nun of St. John’s parish in Fresno, died from appendicitis. One person remembers her last words: “I don’t want to die.” For some years thereafter, Sister Irenita could still be spotted by nuns and students in St. John’s Catholic School and the nearby cathedral, lingering around the rectory and flicking lights on and off in empty classrooms. She did so until a special mass was said for her soul.
Apparently, in 1936, her coffin was unearthed and opened by vandals. Upon investigation, the story goes, the Monsignor discovered something very strange: he found that the corpse was uncorrupted--the body was free of all decay even though she had been dead for years. Sister Irenita’s story was recently published in a Halloween edition of the Fresno Bee; journalist Tom Bisson included her story with other “spooky tales” of “those phantoms who hoot and gibber and drag the clanking chains of mystery down the stairs of our collective unconscious.” This is how the tale of Sister Irenita is remembered by local residents: as a creepy ghost story, an uncanny brush with the horrific.
But let me just say this: had this story been told 700 years earlier, Sister Irenita might have been called a saint. Medieval narratives of sanctity--hagiographies, the lives of the saints--abound with tales of incorruptible bodies, that is, saintly corpses that prove resistant to decay. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s eleventh-century Vita S. Wihtburge (The Life of St. Wihtburh), for example, tells us that upon the opening of Wihtburh’s tomb, everyone was amazed by the radiance of her undecayed body: “her face glowed for the Lord with rosy cheeks, animated with the breath of life; her breasts are firm and upright in their incorruption, her unwedded limbs blossom with the loveliness of paradise.”
When the papacy began to crystallize an official canonization process in the twelfth century, incorruptibility was seen to be one of the strongest recommendations for the deceased’s legitimacy as a saint. Incorruptible bodies, to medieval peoples, signified purity, sanctity, loftiness. A body that was radiant though in death reflected a soul that was rejoicing among the blessed in paradise. Indeed, an undecayed body could even represent the union of flesh and spirit the saint had achieved while alive.
St. John’s parish did not, of course, begin to whisper about the possibilities of beatification and ultimate canonization. There are no altarpieces, festivals, or medallions commemorating Fresno’s local saint--only an entry in the mysterious annals of ghost lore. Why? First, one may realize that, around the 16th c., the Catholic Church lost its obsession with discovering and creating new saints. Furthermore, the New Code of Canon Law (1983) abandoned most of the complex and subtle criteria--including incorruptibility--for determining sainthood. But this does not explain why Sister Irenita has, failing saintliness, in fact become ghostly. To explore this, I might leave behind ecclesiastical law and look instead to intersecting folklores.
Mexico has a lively and deeply entrenched tradition of “folk saints,” those luminaries (such as deceased curanderos) who are followed, revered, and summoned for healings but are not formally recognized by the Catholic hierarchy. This practice has often caused strife between local believers and the Church, for the Church feels that its monopoly on sainthood--almost a thousand years strong--is threatened by folk saints. And indeed it is: as cultus develops around such folk saints as Nino Fidencio, Fidencistas threaten schism. The Church has responded by frantically discussing the possibility of canonization in order to regain control.
With the wave of Mexican immigration in the first half of the twentieth century, California’s Catholic parishes decided to take an active role in the Americanization of the new immigrants. Although their flocks were largely hispanic, California’s Catholic hierarchy, at the time, was predominantly Irish-American. Irish-American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century, traumatized by the potato famine and rebuked by ecclesiastical reform, de-emphasized the presence and power of the saints. It also found less value in the bodily aspects of sainthood--medieval traditions of saintly healings and paradisiacal bodies (still present in Mexican folk Catholicism) gave way to a strictly liturgical experience of the divine. Perhaps the story of Sister Irenita and her incorrupt body as ghost story, then, became another means of acculturation for Mexican immigrants. The story would, of course, enforce the Church’s grip on the manufacturing of saints by infernalizing Sister Irenita’s miraculous body. But it would also ensure an acculturation to Irish-American forms of folk Catholicism, in which saints were far less quotidian and were, instead, more likely to be disembodied, abstract, and antique.
Apparently, in 1936, her coffin was unearthed and opened by vandals. Upon investigation, the story goes, the Monsignor discovered something very strange: he found that the corpse was uncorrupted--the body was free of all decay even though she had been dead for years. Sister Irenita’s story was recently published in a Halloween edition of the Fresno Bee; journalist Tom Bisson included her story with other “spooky tales” of “those phantoms who hoot and gibber and drag the clanking chains of mystery down the stairs of our collective unconscious.” This is how the tale of Sister Irenita is remembered by local residents: as a creepy ghost story, an uncanny brush with the horrific.
But let me just say this: had this story been told 700 years earlier, Sister Irenita might have been called a saint. Medieval narratives of sanctity--hagiographies, the lives of the saints--abound with tales of incorruptible bodies, that is, saintly corpses that prove resistant to decay. Goscelin of St. Bertin’s eleventh-century Vita S. Wihtburge (The Life of St. Wihtburh), for example, tells us that upon the opening of Wihtburh’s tomb, everyone was amazed by the radiance of her undecayed body: “her face glowed for the Lord with rosy cheeks, animated with the breath of life; her breasts are firm and upright in their incorruption, her unwedded limbs blossom with the loveliness of paradise.”
When the papacy began to crystallize an official canonization process in the twelfth century, incorruptibility was seen to be one of the strongest recommendations for the deceased’s legitimacy as a saint. Incorruptible bodies, to medieval peoples, signified purity, sanctity, loftiness. A body that was radiant though in death reflected a soul that was rejoicing among the blessed in paradise. Indeed, an undecayed body could even represent the union of flesh and spirit the saint had achieved while alive.
St. John’s parish did not, of course, begin to whisper about the possibilities of beatification and ultimate canonization. There are no altarpieces, festivals, or medallions commemorating Fresno’s local saint--only an entry in the mysterious annals of ghost lore. Why? First, one may realize that, around the 16th c., the Catholic Church lost its obsession with discovering and creating new saints. Furthermore, the New Code of Canon Law (1983) abandoned most of the complex and subtle criteria--including incorruptibility--for determining sainthood. But this does not explain why Sister Irenita has, failing saintliness, in fact become ghostly. To explore this, I might leave behind ecclesiastical law and look instead to intersecting folklores.
Mexico has a lively and deeply entrenched tradition of “folk saints,” those luminaries (such as deceased curanderos) who are followed, revered, and summoned for healings but are not formally recognized by the Catholic hierarchy. This practice has often caused strife between local believers and the Church, for the Church feels that its monopoly on sainthood--almost a thousand years strong--is threatened by folk saints. And indeed it is: as cultus develops around such folk saints as Nino Fidencio, Fidencistas threaten schism. The Church has responded by frantically discussing the possibility of canonization in order to regain control.
With the wave of Mexican immigration in the first half of the twentieth century, California’s Catholic parishes decided to take an active role in the Americanization of the new immigrants. Although their flocks were largely hispanic, California’s Catholic hierarchy, at the time, was predominantly Irish-American. Irish-American Catholicism in the late nineteenth century, traumatized by the potato famine and rebuked by ecclesiastical reform, de-emphasized the presence and power of the saints. It also found less value in the bodily aspects of sainthood--medieval traditions of saintly healings and paradisiacal bodies (still present in Mexican folk Catholicism) gave way to a strictly liturgical experience of the divine. Perhaps the story of Sister Irenita and her incorrupt body as ghost story, then, became another means of acculturation for Mexican immigrants. The story would, of course, enforce the Church’s grip on the manufacturing of saints by infernalizing Sister Irenita’s miraculous body. But it would also ensure an acculturation to Irish-American forms of folk Catholicism, in which saints were far less quotidian and were, instead, more likely to be disembodied, abstract, and antique.
Friday, November 2, 2007
BN: Dr. Bronner's Mystic Prose
“Passions that quicken your senses, fulfill; quench the thirst of lonesome years! Yet the sun has shadows, learn to control your will; to enjoy life long happiness, not tears! Wait! Rise to the stars above and thrill! Arouse the very flames of life! Sweetheart, kiss me: Hold still, hold still! Listen to God’s reward for strife! Rosebuds, slowly woken, break budding open! delicate, sweet, so on soft fingertips; shivering up your spine, red pulsing blood; in lightning speed through your pure body’s lips! Caressing deep, searching, way out of sight; oh beautiful spirit of God’s eternal Spring! Heat of passion in a warm moonlit night! Ecstasy to be buried in heaven, within! Relaxed then to long, dreamless sleep; body and soul join close in life’s most brilliant bliss! Revealing clarity-beauty-harmony-peace, sailing on far away sun-laden ships! Yet-what-cunning-feminine touch can draw new desire to pulsing lips! When-soft-hands wander-casually-such, deftly down near lingering tips! Who else but God gave man Love that can spark mere dust to life, the Moral ABC uniting All-One, brave, all life.”
By Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997), from the label of Dr. Bronner's Hemp Almond Magic Soap. Compare to the writings of such Spanish mystics as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.
Bronner was a soapmaker, visionary, and former mental patient whose all-natural soaps have become ubiquitous in natural foods stores across the country. Apparently, in Bronner's adopted homeland of California, spiritual seekers in the late 1960s would remove the labels of his wholesome soaps and frame them. One such seeker testified: "Your label is my bible."
By Emanuel H. Bronner (1908-1997), from the label of Dr. Bronner's Hemp Almond Magic Soap. Compare to the writings of such Spanish mystics as Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross.
Bronner was a soapmaker, visionary, and former mental patient whose all-natural soaps have become ubiquitous in natural foods stores across the country. Apparently, in Bronner's adopted homeland of California, spiritual seekers in the late 1960s would remove the labels of his wholesome soaps and frame them. One such seeker testified: "Your label is my bible."
Monday, October 15, 2007
The Billiwhack Monster of Ventura County
In 1964, the LA Times published reports of a strange beast haunting the abandoned concrete structures of the old Billiwhack Dairy in Aliso Canyon, Ventura County. The beast of Billiwhack had reportedly been seen several times by local high school students, who seemed obsessed with undertaking valiant quests into the monster’s territory. One youngster said that he had encountered a “snarling, hairy man in a hole,” and other reports unanimously described a tall, furry, muscular hominid with claws and ram-like horns. He was said to be half man and half sheep, and to be extremely aggressive.
Reports have largely been confined to the 1950s and 60s, yet people are still discussing the beast to this day. How can one account for this very time-specific legend that continues to have significance? Perhaps a bit of background is in order. The second half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the notion of the government as ‘mad scientist’: according to popular culture, the secret bureaus of our nation since WWII have been sponsoring programs and experiments meant to change the very makeup of the human body.
Part of this is based on reality. Our government has indeed created programs that furtively transgress the body’s boundaries, such as the fluorination of tap water or the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. And in popular legend, ‘anti-governments’ like that of Communist Russia have, in turn, made a move to poison the American water supply. Postwar thought was highly suspicious of government in all its incarnations.
The decades following WWII sprouted a deep mistrust of our own government’s military and scientists in particular. The legends surrounding Roswell since the 1970s and the Billiwhack monster from the 50s and 60s are only two examples. Before the war, the government was lambasted for idiocy, backwardness, or outright oppression. After the war, many of the citizens of the United States began to suspect that their government was keeping from them earth-shattering secrets. This was perhaps most evident in the West, where vast expanses of open desert facilitated the creation of military and nuclear complexes whose exact activities could not be easily discerned.
I see the Billiwhack monster to be very much a product of this. According to legend, the creature had been created by the old owner of the Billiwhack Dairy, one August Rubel, during the war. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had an outpost training camp on nearby Catalina Island, had supposedly commissioned him to undertake experiments in the underground tunnels below the dairy. He was directed to create a “super soldier.” The beast of Billiwhack was apparently an escaped experiment gone wrong.
When the war enterprise industrialized in the twentieth century, and each individual soldier seemed to become a machine (or, perhaps, cogs in a much larger machine), the notion of the supersoldier was born. The “Captain America” comic series, whose first installment was published in 1940, was one such supersoldier: according to the story, a secret, government-administered serum had transformed a weak young man into the ultimate fighting machine. Captain America was what happened when these governmental experiments turned out right. The Billiwhack monster was what happened when they went horribly awry.
This is only the most popular explanation for the beast of Billiwhack. In addition to this legend, some have dismissed it as the product of the adolescent imagination (most eyewitnesses are, indeed, high school students), and cryptozoologists suppose that it is some form of deformed bigfoot. But here, I’m not interested in origins. What I’m interested in is memory. What this story throws into high relief is another aspect of our memory of WWII. On one side, we have the so-called “Greatest Generation.” On the other, we have a deep-seated uneasiness about and suspicion of wartime governmental activities. We look back on the war years and see a time of secrecy, deceit, aggression, and, ultimately, monstrosity. The embodiment of this memory has, apparently, been lurking in a dilapidated dairy surrounded by Southern California’s sunny orchards.
Reports have largely been confined to the 1950s and 60s, yet people are still discussing the beast to this day. How can one account for this very time-specific legend that continues to have significance? Perhaps a bit of background is in order. The second half of the twentieth century has seen the rise of the notion of the government as ‘mad scientist’: according to popular culture, the secret bureaus of our nation since WWII have been sponsoring programs and experiments meant to change the very makeup of the human body.
Part of this is based on reality. Our government has indeed created programs that furtively transgress the body’s boundaries, such as the fluorination of tap water or the 1932 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. And in popular legend, ‘anti-governments’ like that of Communist Russia have, in turn, made a move to poison the American water supply. Postwar thought was highly suspicious of government in all its incarnations.
The decades following WWII sprouted a deep mistrust of our own government’s military and scientists in particular. The legends surrounding Roswell since the 1970s and the Billiwhack monster from the 50s and 60s are only two examples. Before the war, the government was lambasted for idiocy, backwardness, or outright oppression. After the war, many of the citizens of the United States began to suspect that their government was keeping from them earth-shattering secrets. This was perhaps most evident in the West, where vast expanses of open desert facilitated the creation of military and nuclear complexes whose exact activities could not be easily discerned.
I see the Billiwhack monster to be very much a product of this. According to legend, the creature had been created by the old owner of the Billiwhack Dairy, one August Rubel, during the war. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which had an outpost training camp on nearby Catalina Island, had supposedly commissioned him to undertake experiments in the underground tunnels below the dairy. He was directed to create a “super soldier.” The beast of Billiwhack was apparently an escaped experiment gone wrong.
When the war enterprise industrialized in the twentieth century, and each individual soldier seemed to become a machine (or, perhaps, cogs in a much larger machine), the notion of the supersoldier was born. The “Captain America” comic series, whose first installment was published in 1940, was one such supersoldier: according to the story, a secret, government-administered serum had transformed a weak young man into the ultimate fighting machine. Captain America was what happened when these governmental experiments turned out right. The Billiwhack monster was what happened when they went horribly awry.
This is only the most popular explanation for the beast of Billiwhack. In addition to this legend, some have dismissed it as the product of the adolescent imagination (most eyewitnesses are, indeed, high school students), and cryptozoologists suppose that it is some form of deformed bigfoot. But here, I’m not interested in origins. What I’m interested in is memory. What this story throws into high relief is another aspect of our memory of WWII. On one side, we have the so-called “Greatest Generation.” On the other, we have a deep-seated uneasiness about and suspicion of wartime governmental activities. We look back on the war years and see a time of secrecy, deceit, aggression, and, ultimately, monstrosity. The embodiment of this memory has, apparently, been lurking in a dilapidated dairy surrounded by Southern California’s sunny orchards.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Japanese Internment Camp Gardens
Recently, I went to a wonderful exhibit at the Japanese-American National Museum in L.A. It was a one-room exhibit dedicated to Japanese-Americans and gardening. I found much of it fascinating, but the most fascinating part of the exhibit was really the smallest part: a brief mention of sagebrush styled as bonsai in the vast prairies east of the Sierra Nevada.
During WWII, when Japanese-Americans were torn from their homes and relocated to internment camps in the great deserts and open country of California and beyond, men who had previously found work and pleasure in gardening turned their creativity and their talents on the native flora and fauna around them.
At Manzanar in the windswept Eastern Sierra, the men gathered Joshua Trees (a remarkable feat) and created fantastic and beautiful Japanese-style gardens for the new community. They moved boulders and massive amounts of earth from the surrounding area, and transplanted sagebrush, willows, cattails, and native grasses.
And over in Minidoka, in southern Idaho, Yasusuke Kogita was amassing magnificent and beautiful stones to display as sculpture in his native rock garden (see, perhaps, the Japanese art of suiseki). There, he transplanted sagebrush and carefully pruned them into gorgeous specimens of fragrant bonsai.
Were Kogita, the men at Manzanar, and the men of many other internment camps creating Japanese gardens? Japanese gardens use a set of aesthetic building blocks to create scenes that are unified in style and philosophy but individual and idiosyncratic in execution. The men in the internment camps used these familiar building blocks to create gardens that approximated these stylistic conventions. But where the approximation failed is, perhaps, the most interesting aspect of their endeavors.
For instance, it is difficult to tell whether Kogita was truly creating bonsai. If his plants were merely sagebrush shaped into pleasing forms, then he could not have been creating true bonsai. Bonsai is necessarily nature in miniature, it takes expansive vistas and focuses them, distills them. This usually involves some sort of shrinking, taking a plant that would usually be much larger and constraining its size; this results in a miniscule sculpture-of-sorts that recalls something much more vast. Unfortunately, Kogita’s sagebrush creations were life-sized. Aesthetically pruned plants, no matter how beautiful, can not be bonsai if they do not, somehow, capture in miniature the essence of a landscape.
And yet, wasn’t Kogita capturing the essence of a landscape? What better way to communicate the essence of sagebrush country than with its namesake plant, pruned to capture the way the rushing winds twist and flay every living thing that dares to show itself in that expansive land? One must remember that bonsai is not really mimesis; in its best forms it does not seek to copy or imitate. Rather, it attempts to manifest, to embody and express a landscape’s pith and substance, its being. Kogita’s sagebrush were bonsai, then, in that they embodied the spirit of place in concentrated form.
Kogita’s sons have said that their father created his garden to take control of his world, a world overturned by forced relocation. This sounds simple enough. But couldn’t the gardening impulse have been much more nuanced? Without daring to state that I know exactly what went on his mind, let me speculate. Perhaps, by taking the plants of his new environment and encouraging them to display their true natures more fully--to express their roles as distillations of place--he was not so much controlling his world as attempting to immerse himself in it, to flow along with it.
The Japanese virtue of gaman, upon which the internees relied, stresses endurance, self-discipline, and dignity in the face of hardship. Kogita’s sagebrush demonstrated gaman, as did the gardens at Manzanar. Forced removal from their homes and internment in strange locales may have focused these men’s attentions on the importance and the power of place. By creating gardens and bonsai that expressed the vastness of their new locations on a human scale, the men may have been miniaturizing their world to embrace it, not control it.
Monday, August 27, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
