A Sick Gray Laugh, page 13
Very well then, let’s set “Desiderata” aside, just for a moment, and look at some other works in Mr. Ehrmann’s oeuvre. One day, while strolling through my local library, I stumbled across a book from 1935 titled Indiana Poets: an Anthology of 48 Living Writers.
Ehrmann has four poems in this anthology. Two of these poems are worth our attention in the matter of Grayness. The first is simply titled “Indiana” and the second “Terre Haute” (after the Hoosier city of the same name).
Join me, if you will, in examining the first stanza of “Indiana”:
The pioneers lie in their earthen beds.
Still lives their dauntless faith to do and dare,
In cities that lift high their lofty heads,
In busy towns that prosper everywhere.
Bear in mind, those words were published in 1935, when twenty percent of the labor force was unemployed. Gray Literature avoids the uncomfortable. It seeks to cover the human emotional experience with a film of sticky Gray book-snot (not true literature, but the Gray, infected snot thereof). With that in mind, please indulge me as I translate the first stanza of “Indiana” into Gray-Speak.
It’s not the worst thing in the world
to live in one of the coiled-up, congealed, heavy places
in the Midwest.
Don’t scream
at funerals, or in the mirror, or at morons, or even
just for the sake of screaming,
Only scream
at sports teams and children.
Sixty cents
on the dollar is really awesome.
Really, it is.
Pretty fucking spooky, eh?
But that’s just the beginning. It goes on for five more stanzas. Again, I won’t burden you with a translation of every stanza. But, in order to further develop my case against Ehrmann, I need to share one more with you (the third stanza):
A toiling, peaceful life this people leads,
Not moved by red rebellion’s scarlet leer,
Nor whirlwinds shouting out sophomoric creeds
The turmoils of the world touch lightly here.
I trust that particular glob of poetic snot needs little in the way of translating. In this stanza, Ehrmann is taking a victory lap, celebrating the Gray Ascendency. As we’ve seen, “sophomoric creeds” such as the New Israelites, Harmonists, Shakers, and Brides exerted an influence on the settlement of the state. But, by the time Ehrmann is writing, they were all tamed. Likewise, the “turmoils of the world” touched more than lightly on Indiana during the onslaught of the Spanish Flu. And even in Ehrmann’s time, the calamity of the Great Depression wreaked its havok.
But, as Shakespeare may have observed if he were living today, the Gray mentality is uniquely equipped to absorb “a thousand natural shocks.” And to paraphrase Thoreau, Grayness will allow the emotion of desperation, so long as it remains quiet desperation. (Despair is allowed to silently swirl in the eyes of Gray children, but it never escapes their mouths. It must remain coiled up and heavy inside of them.)
Which brings me to the last of the Ehrmann poems I’ll be discussing here, “Terre Haute.” Now don’t freak out. I’m not going to quote multiple stanzas of this one. I’m just going to quote the first line, which is presented in the form of a rhetorical question. Here goes.
“What place is lovelier than Terre Haute;”
At this point, Ehrmann is just trolling us. When he refers to loveliness, what he really means is an absence of publicly acknowledged disruption or pain. That’s the only way his opening line makes any sense.
A Gray Life is like a ride on a city bus. You move along slowly, you feel cramped (that is, coiled up) in your tight seat, and you’d probably rather not be there. But the ride is a relatively smooth one (and, better yet, affordable). So you stay put.
Now I know some of you may be saying to yourselves: what about Naumpton? What about the Brides? The fishermen? What happened to them? Why are you going off on this tangent about Max Ehrmann?
Because if you visit the website of the Naumpton Chamber of Commerce you’ll find a link to Camp Heverin, a Brides complex that includes a fishing lodge, cabins, campgrounds, rowboats, and a pier. And if you click on that link, you’ll see an unsophisticated Wordpress blog template emblazoned with the title “Camp Heverin: The turmoils of the world touch lightly here.”
You may think this is mere coincidence. How would the Brides know about Max Ehrmann’s poem? Nobody reads poetry these days (except, of course, a handful of aspiring poets). Moreover, you really have to make a conscious effort to dig into obscure works of regional literature to discover “Indiana” and “Terre Haute.” If the Brides were suddenly going to get the poetry bug, they surely wouldn’t want to get too involved with a fellow like Ehrmann (he of the flexible definition of deity in “Desiderata”). And yet, if you go online and look for yourself, you’ll see the connection.
I do not think it can be explained using ordinary logic. I think this may be a sign, rather, that Grayness is sentient; that it stretched out two of its slimy gray tentacles—one seizing Max Ehrmann and the other, Naumpton. The website for Camp Heverin is Grayness’ way of making the two embrace (in the same way that a little girl can hold a Barbie doll in one hand, a Ken doll in the other, and make them kiss each other when they say “I do” at the altar).
Perhaps I’m beginning to go a bit too far with all this. Perhaps I’m seeing PATTERNS, PATTERNS, POETRY OF PATTERNS. But tell me, have you any better explanation? One that accounts for this subtle but undeniable link between the Ehrmann poem and the Brides?
This link is all the more tantalizing when you look at the history of Camp Heverin and see how it is inextricably linked to the Graying of Naumpton.
You see, Henry Lincoln Talbot was nothing if not persistent. In May of 1919, after flu and floods and winter had all finished having their fun at the expense of Hoosiers, he returned to Naumpton. This time he was not alone. He brought with him an “alienist” from the state hospital in Madison.
According to a letter Hannah Scott wrote to her mother in New Jersey, Talbot stated that the authorities had heard rumors of certain “murderous mutilations” occurring in the village of Naumpton, perpetrated by the Brides of the Holy Ghost.
Alas, it would seem that Eliza Carter was so wrapped up in disarming demonic sperm bombs that she didn’t notice a teenage boy in a rowboat who was passing by the riverfront. Nor was she cognizant of just how she must have looked at that moment, to anyone who didn’t realize the bodies were already dead when they washed ashore. Furthermore, she lacked the insight to realize that there was already no small amount of wariness about Naumpton, owing to tales of the unhinged misfits The New Moses had unleashed on the wilderness and the Brides’ own unconventional ways. Gossip being the only thing spreading quicker than disease, the story of the “Murderous Maids of Naumpton” and the “Brides of Heresy’s Host” passed from lip to ear with enthusiasm.
Fortunately for Eliza, the bodies of the offending “dormant demons” had been burnt on a pyre, and their bone shards and ashes cast back into the river so that they would not pollute the mass grave with their diabolical nature. So, even if law enforcement had wanted to exhume bodies for evidence, the mutilated ones wouldn’t have been found.
Honestly, though, I suspect Talbot didn’t care all that much about the mutilated bodies. His investigation was nothing but posturing. If anything, he may have been glad to hear the rumors, because they gave him ammunition to assail the Brides’ sanity (which, in all fairness, was legitimately assailable).
According to Brideism: The Cult Behind the Charity, Talbot threatened to use the incident as ammunition in a suit alleging Ms. Howard was not of sound mind when she transferred her property to the squatters. Back then, the Brides had little in the way of wealth to fund such a legal battle, and knew they were unlikely to receive a fair hearing. They were also aware of the very real possibility that most, if not all, of them could end up in Madison State Hospital if they didn’t play their cards right. They did not wish to have their practices examined under the harsh light of court proceedings.
Raynor admits there is no paper trail documenting a series of quid pro quos, but makes a convincing argument that the Brides only managed to survive by making a number of shady deals with Talbot.
For starters, they made a major doctrinal shift by deciding that they’d been mistaken in their criticisms of “earthly matrimony.” They denounced Wild Irish Rose as the chief propagator of this dogma and reversed it, explaining that “the Book of Acts clearly shows that the Holy Ghost fell upon men, infusing them with Its power. Therefore, we sinned when we prohibited earthly matrimony, as marriage to a saved man is the easiest route for a woman to be filled with the Spirit.”
The change was announced by Emily Hermann, the acting leader of the Brides, during her sermon on Pentecost Sunday, June 8, 1919. On July 4th, Catherine Naumpton Howard announced she was engaged to Henry Lincoln Talbot and that, furthermore, she would be leaving the Brides. Concurrent with her departure, the Brides transferred all their property along the Naumpton waterfront (and the area that would later become downtown Naupton) to Talbot. Talbot then donated a swampy parcel of land about three miles away to the Brides. It lay alongside a creek that made erratic, varicose-vein twists and turns inland from the Ohio River. Today it is known as Tobias Creek. As you may have already guessed, Camp Heverin rests on its shore.
Why did Talbot stop short of having the Brides locked away in Madison? Raynor believes it was not out of any sense of mercy, but because he knew the Brides could do him a favor more established religions most likely would not: shady income tax deductions.
You see, federal income tax was a relatively new beast in 1919, and the tax deduction for donations to churches and other charitable institutions had only been introduced a couple of years earlier. You could say that Talbot was a pioneer in working this system to his own advantage.
He knew that he could coerce the Brides into surrendering their land free of charge by using the very real threat of institutionalization against them. And in case that proverbial stick was not sufficient, they could be convinced by the proverbial carrot of the donated swamp land. Thus, he would not only possess the riverfront property he wanted for his shipyard, but he could write off the swamp land donation for a huge deduction the following year.
Raynor believes this next era of the Brides’ existence can be explained by the compromises they were forced to make to keep Talbot at bay. He was the one who pressured them into taking a subservient approach to men. (Many of them ended up marrying the fishermen, who then took control of the land and its business, relegating the Brides to unglamorous poverty relief work.) He was the one who maneuvered them into a location where their commercial enterprises would be limited. He was the one who leaned on his friends in the newspaper business to rehabilitate their public image. He was the one who kept them alive, some say, just so they would readily supply a receipt documenting all manner of contributions. The way the scam worked is that the Brides’ receipt would exaggerate the amount of the donation or make it up out of whole cloth. He knew that it was most essential, in those days following the War Revenue Act of 1917, for a wealthy man to have compliant hands in the pulpit.
And so it was that, over the course of decades, the corpse mutilation was gradually forgotten. Perhaps the young boy who had sworn he’d seen it even forgot it, or so doubted his own sight that he may as well have forgotten it. The Brides became integrated into the patchwork quilt that is southern Indiana fundamentalism.
Indeed, if you are a Baptist or a Pentecostal or a member of one of the various non-denominational holy roller churches, you book your church picnic at Camp Heverin. You may even rent space to host an old-fashioned summertime revival meeting out there. You undoubtedly fish up there. Hell, even the handful of Catholics who call Naumpton home have been known to set aside their discomfort with fundamentalists and launch their boats from the Camp Heverin pier. Some days, catfish overrule the catechism.
***
At this point, I have written over forty thousand words. Some of them may have led you to consult your dictionary. For example, very early on I took the risk of throwing “effluvium” at you. That is probably my favorite word of all time, with “desultory” coming in at a close second. I’ll admit it: I love the sound made when the consonants in such words jangle against their vowels. But I didn’t use either of them as mere decoration. Both were necessary to describe certain properties of Foulness.
That said, I promised you far more than a description of Foulness. I said I would explain why Grayness arose. And to explain why it arose, I don’t need any ten-dollar words. I can sum it up in a single, simple one: “compromises.”
Yes, I’m beginning to suspect that compromises are the fertile ground in which the seed of Grayness grows. When did Naumpton start to succumb to Grayness? The seed hovered over the town after the deforestation bubble burst, but it didn’t land until the Brides compromised their faith and joined the mainstream.
And that was only the most dramatic of the compromises. There are a hundred and one other compromises that followed on the heels of it. There are the compromises that individuals must make simply as a result of dwelling in close proximity to others—the subtle compromise of self-consciousness about how our appearance and actions impact others. (Even if someone dresses in a manner intended to shock passers-by, the very act of guessing how others will react is a compromise of true individualism.) There are also the compromises that the human spirit makes when molded by an established cultural infrastructure. That is, molded by civilization.
As Naumpton developed into something other than a frontier town, something with institutions and stability and proper land titles rather than the flimsy claims of squatters, the population swelled. As more children came into the area, education became compulsory.
Newspapers, radio shows, pulp magazines, and dime novels began to define the boundaries of what was thinkable, believable, sayable, and doable. It’s as if the variety of human experience was suddenly (radically) condensed into three or four stylized types. People stopped defining themselves by their instincts and began to define themselves in reference to pop culture.
This is, of course, a trend that continues unabated up to this present day. People fill out online surveys to find out which member of the Golden Girls (or the Beatles, or the Scooby Doo cast) they are. Some of you are probably annoyed at me for bringing this up, as you hold that these surveys are harmless fun.
But (here comes my pessimism again) I see it as a sign of our distressing neediness, of our deference to popular entertainment. We don’t want to do the work of finding our identities through trial and error. We want to be told who we are. Can I really be the only one who finds that mildly servile?
And isn’t servility an ingredient in Grayness? There’s a sort of Servile Gray Restlessness (S.G.R. for short) that never dares to admit that it’s restlessness. When people experience S.G.R., they feel a coiled-up, heavy boredom, but are powerless to even so much as dilute their suffering through action. It’s as if they’ve been brainwashed into believing that taking action isn’t even an option; as if the very concept of “taking action to break one’s restlessness” doesn’t exist in their minds.
I blame schools for perpetuating S.G.R. Their whole raison d’être is to encourage submission to boring, coiled-up heaviness. I blame the churches, too. The government chooses not to tax them, therefore they are dependent on the maintenance of the status quo.
Undoubtedly, there are those Hoosier houses of worship where people get up and scream and holler and roll around on the ground and foam at the mouth. But surely, even while they are in the midst of such gesticulations, they remain firmly in the grasp of Grayness. I’ve seen film clips of such shenanigans. If you look beyond all the flailing and pay close attention to the worshippers’ eyes, you see how bored, coiled up, heavy, and Gray they are. You see how they’re simply going through the motions.
Talbot tames the Brides.
The Brides build their Bible Camp.
The Brides offer flood relief.
The Brides reform their doctrine on sex relations and begin to think that a big part of their mission is to prepare teenage girls for marriage to godly men.
Talbot gets his shipyard started and lands a government contract for small naval vessels. (In the wake of World War I, the nation anticipates involvement in more conflicts overseas. Conflicts = Color, yes? Sadly, no. In Naumpton, the military build-up = factory drudgery. But finally, there’s a stable employer in the area!)
Talbot and his cronies work hard to get all the men (and, eventually, their wives) registered to vote, so that he’ll have a solid core of electoral support to draw from.
A one-room schoolhouse is established.
The Brides soon merge with a tribe of Baptists and become something of a ladies’ auxiliary for them.
A local newspaper is established, a great Gray enterprise that tells the populace how great Talbot is, and how great the Talbot Shipworks are, and how great the Brides are, how great the school is, and how great Indiana and America are. I once found a stack of these early Naumptonian newspapers in an antique store in Madison (a little town about an hour east from where I now reside).
It was a dry summer afternoon when I spotted them. It hadn’t rained for weeks. But when I picked them up and saw they were from Naumpton, I felt a snotty humidity about them. I felt the Grayness thick and slick and foul all over the papers, and I tossed them down in horror. (Had I noticed the name of the rag—The Naumpton Gazette-Recorder—I would not have picked them up to begin with.)
But I digress! I need to refocus on my epidemiological mission. I need to list my scientific conclusions.
