What Has Gotten Into the Man?
I don’t know what has gotten into the man.
Here we are, retired as can be from wheat farming in the middle of Kansas, breadbasket to the world, at a time when we should be spending most of our time visiting the grandkids and taking some of those trips together that we had been promising ourselves, but what are we doing instead?
Modern art. Performance art. Conceptual art.
I blame it all on Jenny Walters, who, if truth were told, has always had a thing for Fred, from all the way back when we were all in grade school together.
Well, I got him, as I have nearly told her out loud dozens of times, and have otherwise conveyed by look and gesture many more, and she has never quite forgiven me for it.
As a result, any time that she can introduce some sugar into the internal combustion engine of our marriage she will do so, though I regret using either a metaphor or simile whichever this would be, and which is more, far more, the language and speaking style of Jenny Walters than myself.
I take a plainspoken style, I like people to know what it is I am trying to tell them, and not soften or blur the edges as with a sloppy brushstroke on canvas so as to leave room for interpretation as is true of so much of this modern art.
There I go again with the metaphor or simile, which makes me think this artistic and poetry mania, which is the only word I can think to call it, must be spreading, like some grain fungus that leaps from stalk to stalk and leaves them helpless in its iron grip.
There I go again.
You will have gathered by now that Jenny Walters, building on her base as the town librarian, also fancied herself the storehouse and hearthstone of all things artistic, be they poetry, drama, paintings, novels, and all such products of the creative mind.
Oh, does she have poetry readings every two weeks in the Community Meeting Room at the library? You can just bet she does!
Does she stage readings of the great plays, with Marge Anderson and Katherine Shaw and big Stu Shaw sitting on tall stools as though they were on a stage in New York City giving a new play a try, gesticulating I believe is the word to each other under her tutelage, and doing so far too grandly for the material to be conveyed, or at least that is my opinion?
You may tell from the way I state the question that this is exactly what she does.
I would be talking in circles I suppose if I mentioned to you that theater people are awfully theatrical, but perhaps I get my point across better than might be first apparent.
I would say too that these acting exercises loosen some of the standard, some might say normal, barriers to expression that anyone in the world at all keeps between herself and the rest of the world, and draws out hidden impulses and germinations that otherwise might not see the light of day, similar in this way to wheat that never “takes” in the soil for whatever reason, be that drought, disease, wind or incorrect plowing or planting technique.
There I go again.
You see, it was Jenny Walters’ idea that we are each made of up ‘bubbling internal cauldrons’ of ideas and emotions and things just dying to get out and find expression, which is why nearly all of her exercises and performances and play selection and field trips to the Kansas City and Wichita museums all seemed to revolved around some individual or other finding him or herself in some situation of a triggering or explosive or erupting or what was the word, epiphany nature, whereby everything that they had held to be true for their whole lives suddenly came under question and in the heat of the moment, they overthrew an entire lifetime of achievement of solid work as on a wheat farm, in pursuit of some typhoon-level emotion that they just had to get off their chest and which perhaps includes unraveling their whole lives.
Just remember, I’m the one that got him, missy.
Artists running away to tropical islands, novelists fleeing towns with their mistresses, poets dropping perfectly nice young ladies nearly at the altar after deciding to pursue their muse full-time after all, this is the bread and butter of these tales, the mother’s milk of this kind of anarchy.
“Don’t get carried away with the muse stuff, Fred Mitchell,” I said point blank on the ride home one night from the Community Center after we had all written poetry on the spot describing some aspect of our emotional life that not everyone had seen.
Well I had written a five-pager on the joys of marriage and grandchildren and how important a role a woman of the next generation up plays in that situation and how those souls are really more or less monuments to tradition and keep the world together you might say, but if I had expected something of the same nature from Fred, I was soon to find how sorely mistaken I was.
No, as he stood on the stage and recited, his had to do with the land, the way that the rain captured in pools in the field when the sun came out looking like spills of mercury from a broken thermometer, and how the hawks stood guard on the fence posts like Roman centurions, and how the fields were stitched together like squares of a quilt that have been….
“That reminds me,” I interjected here from one of the seats in the hall, if interjected is my word, it being somewhat unfamiliar being of two syllables more than I liked to use, “that reminds me that I am nearly done with the quilt we’re making for Sarah’s baby, and I need to stop at the dime store and get some more yarn while we’re in town.”
Well, did they all look at me as if I was the mean old reviewer that had shut down a promising off-off-off-off-OFF Broadway play, which by rights ought to take them west of the Mississippi with all those ‘off’s’ and were sore tempted to refer me to the rules whereby we were never to interrupt a poem in progress, and we were to keep all comments on point?
Yes they did!
And then Fred simply looked away from me and back down at his poem – which I had known nothing about by the way, nothing about – as though he had been interrupted by the baying of some pesky animal or other in the distance known for its offbeat and unpredictable behavior.
That was just one night, and when I tell you I didn’t like any of it – not the mime sequences, not the extemporaneous poetry, not the theater in the round, not the performance art whereby all these big husky farmers cowered under “tree branches” formed by the arms of all the women on stage – not me, thank you very much, not me – while they looked to the sky and the storm taking shape therein - you will believe me.
I was hearing a little too much about the Eternal Feminine and the Heady Sway of the Universe and the Mystical Ties that Bind Us All for my taste, a taste which runs to Legal Ties Sealed by a Minister or a Judge.
And I told him so on the next ride home from the Community Center, but it didn’t seem to take, like one of those grains of wheat that washes away in the cold spring rains, there I go again, for he was off and running on another subject still.
Wouldn’t you know that Jenny had passed around literature and photocopied stories of some daft man or other whose fields ran along the highway, who erected piece of so-called art right against the fence line, made of the ordinary tools and workings of the farmer’s life, or figures or faces carved from old fallen wood with a chainsaw?
Fred, who always had a way for craftsmanship, I cannot deny him that, looked at the photos and rubbed his chin, and had said “I like his concept and I can see what he is going after, but I think some of his intentions got lost in the execution.”
Concept!
What he’s going after!
Intentions lost in the execution!
“You know, Mary, I’ve got a barnful of old equipment and abandoned vehicles and old lumber, I think I can fix something up that can really take this to the next step. And,” – here he rubbed his chin again and since it was evening, I could hear the whiskers scrape against his hard farmer’s hands – “and that north field does run right along Highway 5. Hmm.”
And that is where we are right now.
He stands looking silently at all the tools and pieces he has stored away either in the barn or at the side, and then using his tractor he tugs them over to where he wants them, and yes, sir, where he wants them is right along that fence that borders 5 Highway.
He has stacked wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow upon wheelbarrow upside down, and when I challenge on that he will only say “I was after a commentary on our empty consumer culture, but I think you’re right, I don’t think I quite pulled it off.” Then he would say hmm some more and rub his chin.
He put an old harrow upright instead of flat on the ground like any right-thinking man would, and when I asked him the meaning of this he said “I like where you’re going with that, Mary, yes, yes, you’re exactly right, what is the meaning of this? And what if there is no meaning, doesn’t that make us just like a harrow that can’t do his work because he’s facing the wrong direction, in fact, in fact, he is in the wrong ethereal plane entirely?”
He was getting more and more excited the more this went on. “I see where I’ve gone wrong now, it’s in trying to make these pieces” – pieces I tell you! – “mean something, when in fact, I see now that my clearest way forward is to shoot right past representational art and simply let the inner chaos of the soul speak out loud.”
Then the hand rubbing the chin again.
Well I hadn’t seen nothing yet. Some of the things he came up with after that made me think of harrows standing upright with fond recall, that at least had some meaning to it, however remote.
Tell me though what is the meaning of hay bales with dots painted on the side as though they were pairs of dice?
Or old timber carved into people with cat’s faces or cows with people’s faces?
And tractors ‘chasing’ wooden horses, and spoons carved as large as a man and made to stand alongside perfectly fine pitchforks like a full dinner set?
These were a complete jumble to me and seemed to reflect a jumbled mind.
One night I made up my mind to have it out with the man and exited the screen door from the kitchen and made my way across the fields to see him standing there silently looking on his pieces, the only sound the cry of hawks from the corner of the field wheeling as they seemed to stitch together the sky and the land at the horizon line, there I go again, and the occasional car driving by, with that man wearing the same look, I saw now, the same that he had worn when Sarah and Janie and Charlie were born.
So I let him be and crossed back across the fields as quietly as I could and when he came home that night I had a nice meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans meal waiting for him, his favorite.
He seemed pleased, and came around to kiss me atop of my head after the meal to thank me, a most unusual Fred Mitchell gesture.
“I know these are strange and upending days, Mary….but they are glorious too!” He took his hands off my shoulder to grip them into fists, “I just feel these great things inside me, just waiting to get out. And, Mary, I think we only have so much time. We only have so much time, dear.”
And he seemed so sincere and so full-hearted and so clear-hearted that I told myself – and him too! – that I didn’t care if he built conceptual art from here to the moon, as long as he came home to his girl at the end of the day after he had done it.
That set him crying – another first, but it was a night of firsts – which did the same for me, and we stood sobbing together, like old sturdy pieces of timber propped up against one another, each supporting the other.
Though I am just as glad to not have seen that moment communicated in any representational or non-representational way or through miming or other playacting for that matter. Some moments are personal.
So I still go with him to the Community Canter but I feel a lot better about it now, even when he is on stage taking part in some piece of absurdist drama or other. As long as he is up there enjoying himself, and as I say, comes back home to me, it seems as homey as an old radio hour to me.
Which does not mean that I approve of all of Jenny Walters’s selection of activities and artistic exercises, or some of the more offbeat notions that she has introduced to these sessions, such as each of them pretending to be first a different fruit and then a different vegetable and then a different cooking spice, which seemed nonsensical to me, and I had to step in and take Fred off the stage when the exercise seemed to be heading in the direction of the spices (the men) aligning themselves closely with the vegetables (the women) as a demonstration of the Eternal Yin and Yang of The Modality of Nature.
“Don’t forget which one of us got him,“ I told Jenny, tugging that man off stage right as I believe it is called, and this time I said it out loud.
