Day: June 3, 2015

I’m reading a wonderful biography of Joseph Mitchell, a New Yorker writer and one of the great literary journalists of all time. It’s called Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell Of the New Yorker,  it was written by Thomas Kunkel. In 1940, Mitchell wrote one of his most famous profiles, it was a portrait of Jane Barnell, the bearded lady known professionally as Lady Olga. “Barnell,” wrote Mitchell, “has spent almost the entirety of her sixty-nine years barnstorming the country with one circus or another.” But the main point of the story, Kunkel reminds us,  is the effort Lady Olga makes to try to achieve something resembling normal domesticity.

Her greatest desire, related Mitchell, is to work as a stenographer, even as she concedes it probably is not possible. I am a great lover of Mitchell’s work, it has never, in my mind, been surpassed.  His work was a great inspiration to me, even though he stopped writing before I started. The profile of Lady Olga ends in one of the most famous and haunting lines of Mitchell’s glorious writing career:

“If the truth were known,” she told Mitchell, “we’re all freaks together.”

I loved the line, it sent chills up my spine, but it never occurred to me that it was really true, I thought it was a poignant yearning. Day by day, I begin to understand what Barnell meant, and why Mitchell thought it was an important enough thought to end one of his most powerful profiles with.

I used to think I was different from other people, inferior to most, superior to some. I  used to think that I was unique, that my sorrow and suffering, my ups and downs, my losses and triumphs,  belonged only to me.

I have always been obsessed with freaks, I went to every sideshow that I could find, stared at the sword swallowers, the bearded ladies, the goat man, the man-child, the fire-eaters, the world’s tallest man and the world’s shortest, the lizard people, the grandmother with three eyes, the tattoo lady, the mermen and mermaids in their tanks. In our world the sideshows are gone, the freaks are online, writing on their blogs, sending angry messages, celebrating their eccentricities and obsessions. In our Puritan and increasingly Orwellian culture, it is no longer appropriate to pay to see the strange people any more than it is permitted to see the stupid tricks of the elephants.

In the joyless and so-called sensitive world, magic and wonder is forbidden.

I’ve always had a life long and innate connection to the outsiders, the disaffected and the fallen, they always called them freaks, and for many thousands of years, people paid to see them, the world has always been fascinated by them.  I usually paid a dolalr to see them, I remember a bearded lady who winked at me and told me I was good-looking. No one else ever did, I looked for her for years.

Like Mitchell, I always looked at the freaks with love and compassion. I never pitied them or felt sorry for them, nor did they ever feel sorry for themselves. It was always the normal people who banned them and sent them into the normal world.  I always felt I understood them, I was not conscious enough to know I related to them.  I think I have only recently begun to understand why so many people were fascinated by them, and why I was.

Lady Olga understood,  and she told Mitchell why. We are all freaks together, we are them, and they are us.  When we look at them, we see our own reflections, our own faces in the mirror, our worst fears and phobias. Something about the human experience separates us from one another in our minds. It is no longer acceptable or politically correct for the freaks to work in sideshows. Like the elephants and the elephant trainers, they have been banished in the name of being good. Many of them  struggle for work and identity, miss the sideshows. Some loved the community and camaraderie, the sense of belonging. They found the “normal” world was colder and crueler and even more dangerous.

A few years ago I read a memoir of a bearded lady, after the sideshows vanished, she spent her life in a warehouse, working in an office alone, gluing stickers onto cardboard boxes. “The irony was this,” she wrote, “in the sideshows we had jobs, we could live a normal life. In the outside world, we never could.”

Lady Olga loved the life of the freak, even as she yearned for normalcy and romanticized it, just as people sometimes romanticize freaks.

I think most of us yearn for normalcy at times, I used to think I knew what normalcy was, but I don’t think so any longer. There is no normalcy really, life finds its own path, and it sometimes runs right through us.  I suppose I am a freak, I do not yearn for the life that most people have, I do not share the American idea about security – spending much of one’s life in a new kind of slavery so that other people can get rich off of what we are told we must need to be safe and healthy.

I supposed I have always envied and admired the freaks, as hard as I know their lives often were. To be a freak is to be authentic in some ways, and it is to be free. Freaks can have the identity many people struggle so hard to find. Mitchell told an interviewer later in his life that he was certain Lady Olga would have hated the life of the stenographer, been destroyed by it’s mundane routineness, it’s anonymity. She was, for almost all of her sixty-nine years, a star. There are no star stenographers.

Lady Olga always had her own show, Mitchell said, he could not fathom her spending her life writing down the shows and words of other people. I am coming to understand that we are all freaks, and we are all freaks together.

I think the people who lined up to see Lady Olga and the other freaks knew it, why else would they come?To stare at a freak and laugh at one is to elevate  yourself, to feel normal and accepted.

A freak is a person or animal exhibited as an example of a curious or “strange” deviation from nature, who lives outside the normal social system. I define it more broadly. Most of my friends are freaks, even those who look quite normal. A freak in our world can be an outsider, living outside the circle, outside the tent, beyond the pale. I favor the freaks of the world, we tend to understand one another.

Choking on the tyranny of the normal, we gather to stare and laugh and jeer at the freaks. Freaks cannot run for Congress or President, they cannot be on cable news, or give sermons from fancy pulpits, or become CEO’s of giant corporations, or host their own TV shows or sing at Carnegie Hall or run for mayor. They do not make wars or lead armies.

I wouldn’t care to romanticize the freaks, but look who is in Congress, who can run for President, who is on cable news, who preaches from fancy pulpits, or runs giant corporations and tosses workers in the trash like garbage, or hosts TV shows or runs for mayor?

Lady Olga took a defiant pride in her work and she even accepted the labels others applied to her and her sideshow friends. She had a powerful connection to the disaffected and downtrodden, enormous empathy for other human beings. I imagine she might have done very well as a member of Congress, as a preacher with a pulpit, as a commentator on cable news. We might care for the poor and learn something about the true nature of life.

To me, it is a symptom of our time that the freaks are all pushed to the margins, like the animals, and taken out of sight. Perhaps they, like the animals, are the ones we need to see and hear.

Lady Olga was right. We are all freaks together, some of us do not know it yet.

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Man In Profile: Joseph Mitchell Of The New Yorker, is written by Thomas Kunkel, and is published by Random House, and is available anywhere books are sold. You can also order it from Battenkill Books, my very wonderful independent and local bookstore, they take Paypal and ship anywhere in the world, and they are awfully nice. You can call them at 518 677-2515 or order the book online.

In all of my years of going to school – 12 years in public school, two of college – I never once got a good report card, I was never able to focus on learning. I imagine if I were evaluated, I would have some sort of learning disability, or perhaps someone would notice that I am crazy.

I still cannot do math of any kind, I always could write.

Today I finally got a good report card, and it was an important one. I am two weeks away from the first anniversary of my open heart surgery and I told Maria I have no idea,  really, whether i should celebrate it or forget it. I went to see the cardiologist for my first-year check up, had an EKG and other tests. I remember last year’s EKG, it landed me in the hospital.

This one was different. “This is wonderful,” said the cardiologist, and he said my heartbeat was wonderful also. He is not given to enthusiasm or hyperbole, so I was pleased. He said I was doing great, we talked briefly about medications like statins and blood thinners, which I will be on the rest of my life. He said I was on track to live a long time in a healthy way. He congratulated me on my learning curve and my attitude and determination to get well and stay well.

It felt great to get a report card like that, I wish I’d gotten more, it’s good for the ego. I have been working hard to stay healthy and it was gratifying to know it was turning out so well.

I am writing a lot about mysticism this week, and I recall that my surgery was very much a mystical experience for me. I remember after the surgery – Pamela Rickenbach reminded me of this – that I felt I was transported to another place, a place with golden fields, a different place. I felt that I had left my body and been transformed, and then I woke up in the ICU and I was attached to so many tubes and wires, and I said “let’s take a walk,” and I did and I have been walking every since.

When they stopped my heart and took it out of my body, I died in a way, and was then reborn. I suppose it doesn’t get too much more mystical than that.

I thank the doctor, and we shook hands. He said I didn’t need to see him for another year. I feel a bit like the other kids, only this time, the ones with brains. I got my first good report card in 68 years, and it was a good one.

It is important for me to say, since I have not said it before, that Paul Moshimer’s death hurt me deeply and touched me even deeper. That was the gift of it. Men often need to be shocked into opening up. I just needed to say that, I am not a sorrow thief, this is not my tragedy, that belongs to Pamela and his children.

But it is my loss and, I see this week,  the loss of many others who knew him, loved him, depended on him.

Every man or woman has the right to their own life, no one can take it from them or live it for them, yet there is something profoundly wrenching about suicide, because it does not seem like chance or fate, but a conscious act of the human spirit. It is easy to see suicide as a profound act of selfishness. Any of us can fall it, be struck by lightning,  hit by a car. Few of us can take our own lives.

Yet it cannot really be true that Paul was selfish, because  Paul was as selfless a human as one will ever meet. If anything,  he thought of others to a fault, he thought of Pamela, his many friends, his daughters, the horses every minute of every day.

Reading Thomas Merton and the Kabbalah and the writings of the prophets these past few years, I have come to understand that mysticism is a part of me, it weaves through my life, my work, my photography, my consciousness. I suppose I deny and suppress it, as I do most emotion.

Mysticism connects with me more than any other idea or tradition, that is why I am drawn so much to Blue Star, it is stunning to find a mystical place in our greedy, angry,  and distracted world.

Mysticism is a part of my love for Maria, it shapes my pictures and words, it connects me to the dogs and the horses, to my farm. It was my connection to Paul.

Mysticism is a galaxy, a constellation of practices, connections, discourses, traditions, institutions and experiences aimed at human transformation. This transformation is sought by almost every tradition on the planet, defined differently by many of them. Blue Star is a place of human transformation. People come from everywhere to be transformed by the horses, to experience what we have forgotten, but which every ancient culture in the world knew: the animals are essential to human existence and to the future of Mother Earth, man cannot live in healthy ways or in harmony without them.

Paul was a mystic. I almost called the Fabulous Old Men’s Club the Fabulous Old Mystic’s Club, but I was afraid that might make the others nervous.

I knew Paul was a mystic the first time I saw him and spoke with him, all you had to do was look at Pamela and at his life.  I told him that, and he smiled, and said it was a compliment, he mumbled something humble and glancing. I think it might have embarrassed  him, which a good thing to do to a friend sometimes. But then he wrote me about mysticism, he said we needed to talk more about it, he asked to read what I had written about it, which was almost nothing. No one has ever asked me to talk about mysticism that I can recall. Paul and I never got the chance to talk about it, at least not in this world.

In Paul’s kind messages to me, I often heard the voice of Rumi:

“I will soothe you and heal you,
I will bring you roses.
I too have been covered with thorns.”

What is a mystic?

I believe a mystic is a person who seeks transformation. A human being who searches  by contemplation and self-surrender to find unity with his or her Deity, or with the universe, or with the animals, or with the absolute. A mystic is a man or woman who believes in the spiritual apprehension of truths that are beyond the human intellect, beyond casual conversation, beyond the news of the day or the interests of political leaders and business.

A mystic lives outside of the normal boundaries of life, he or she is neither better or worse than anyone else, he is just different, his mind works in a different way. He or she can never really fit in, except perhaps in the company of their tribe, the other mystics. More than anything, the mystic seeks human transformation, which is the essence both of mysticism and spirituality. Mysticism is, in fact, the art of the spiritual life. But transformation is personal and individual. Some seek God, others resurrection, some are looking for wisdom or truth or revelation.

I think Paul was looking for redemption, as I am, but he never said.

If you go to Blue Star Equiculture, your mystical radar will hum, as mine does, they are everywhere there, people and animals, poets and painters, lost and found souls,  in the barns, the kitchen, out in the pasture. More than any other animal, the horses are believed by spiritualists to be mystical, to connect most deeply with the human spirit. I think it’s strange that the horses talk to me, the Native-Americans laugh at me and at the shallowness of Western culture. Their faith is full of mysticism, they talk with horses, their long-time partners,  all the time.

This, perhaps, is why Paul was so drawn to them, as Pamela is, it was something they shared together. It was something I shared with both of them.

The Kabbalah says that mystics search for human transformation all of their lives and rarely, if every find it. The life of the mystic is in the search, not the resolution. Mystics are always searching in contemplation.

This was Paul, in my mind, what made him special. He was almost continuously surrendering himself to seek unity with other beings,  and especially the horses. He sought the absolute, he believed in the apprehension of truths and sought them every day. He searched for answers that were so often beyond human intellect and conversation, beyond the news of the day.  This, I think, was a sad and difficult thing for him, as it is for mystics.

I’ve written a lot about Paul this week, more than I intended, and it surprises me, what has come pouring out of me. I am grateful for my writing, for this blog, because I think I otherwise would have gone mad long ago, my head spinning right off of my body. It just needed to come out, it is a buried part of me.

How do you make sense of it when a friend leaves without saying goodbye? I believe when Paul chose to leave the world that he had embarked on a great transformation, in search of the absolute, something beyond the intellect of people like me. That is a good place to go with it, I think, a place that makes sense to me, and explains what might otherwise seem to be an irrational, even unfathomable, journey.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me,” wrote Meister Eckhart,  (the Sermons Of Meister Eckhart,) ” my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

I think that’s what Paul was looking for. I hope he found it.

Spring has brought a new landscape, a new paradigm to our farm. Fate is unlike any other dog, Chloe, a pony, is unlike any other animal. She will fit in well her, once she stops trying to run off the sheep. She comes running when she sees Maria, she and I are bonding, she is genial, responsive, beautiful. She loves people and reminds me of Simon in her love of carrots, apples and the people who bring them.

Fate and Chloe will both be visible at the Spring Bedlam Farm Open House on June 27-28. The second Open House will be held over Columbus Day Weekend. Chloe will be happy to meet you, Fate is crazy about people. I had a couple stop by yesterday morning when I was writing – I have to admit that drives me a bit crazy, I wouldn’t do that to my closest friends – they said they just wanted to go out and check out the animals.

I cordially invited them to check out the road instead, Maria and I were both working, we don’t do unscheduled tours of the farm, and it is never a good idea to drop in because you are passing by. This has happened many times before, I suppose it is a natural consequence of being open. I’m sure they were lovely people, I wish I had an aide who could conduct tours.

At the Open House, there will be art sold, poetry readings, Pamela Rickenbach of Blue Star is coming up with her draft horses to offer demos and give carriage rides, I told her she doesn’t need to do that she told me that she does. There is no force I am aware of that will stop Pamela.

Still, it is a good place to visit. Flo the barn cat loves visitors, the chickens don’t mind them, the donkeys like their treats and Chloe is Simon-level media whore. I love the farm, but I especially love the look on Maria’s face when she sees her pony, and the face on  the pony when she sees Maria. That alone is worth it. And I like the new photo opportunities. This place is rocking with life.

It began with a mistake as these things do, the pasture gate was open – I was sending Red in – and Red and Fate both slipped before I saw her. She ran alongside of Red, I loved the way she moved, but then she got excited and started running on her own.  I called Red back and she came back in with him.

If we are going to be near sheep with a border collie like this, with so much instinct and someone like me , who has learned a lot about training herding dogs, then we might as well learn something about it and make certain Fate knows how to behave around sheep. Herding is their destiny, but it does not keep them from being loving pets and companions – witness Red. Fate is a high intensity dog with a lot of instinct and if she gets in with the sheep – it seems inevitable – I don’t want her running them to exhaustion or worse.

It’s my job to show her how to live her safely and sanely.

We are developing alternatives for Fate and she is loving them, but she has some wonderful breeding and instincts and I just had to take her out on a long lede and see what she is like out there. I know I said I would never do it, but I just couldn’t help it. She is an amazing dog and she deserves every opportunity I can give her to live her life.

I walked her to the sheep, and started marking  behaviors – “walk up” when approaching them steadily, and then, “sit” and “lie down” before she gets to go near them. She must always sit or lie down to get to move closer to them and she must be calm around them or she will be removed quickly from the pasture.

She did remarkably well – Maria and Scott Carrino were her and they were amazed, so was I. I got her to sit, then walk up slowly, and then repeated this a dozen times. Then I began teaching her a lie down. When she lay down naturally I praised her, sometimes I tapped my food on the lead a foot from her face and she got the hint and dropped down while I praised her.

She will not be off leash around the sheep for six months to a year, that is the discipline I have to adhere to, not until she is completely under control, has mastered her own excitement and proven that she can be calm around them and responsive to me, even in a herding fever. Then we will start work on marking her outruns and directionals. That will be long hard work, I think I will try and do it. Fate is doing beautifully, she is beginning to sell, knows her name well, comes when called, sits when asked. The lie down becomes more critical now.

One of my training values is to find something the dog loves, and then you have them. Border collies will do anything to work. She will have to sit down, lie down and stay for three minutes before she gets to do anything like work. That is easier said than done. But this will help focus her responses and will ultimately calm her, done right.

She did really well, I was quite amazed. She has all of the tools to work with the sheep, it is up to me not to mess it up.

Maria was laughing, she says one of the things she loves about me is that after saying a thousand times that Fate will not herd sheep, I just decided this morning that she should and perhaps will. I am glad Maria loves me for that, because that trait has driven many people in my life nuts. Stay tuned.