1.
Many people, and many of those who lived in houses on my road, in the small still rural town in Western Massachusetts, town of 900 people and 600 dogs, have attempted, sometimes without, and other times, with, constraints of little money or skills, for domestic grace and beauty. Still, the people on the road are the privileged few. The privileged few of the world of increasing war, homelessness, poverty, deprivation, and disease. The world of the others, the rest, the most. The others whose land has been taken away by various methods and means, by multinational corporations, by government, by plan and policy. Those who live in structures built of whatever they can find, paper, cardboard, wood scraps from overflowing dumps. Every day, every year, continually, undisguised greed, increasing consumerism under the guise of multi-nationalism brings more and more poverty to most of the world.
But the people on this road, in this rural town in Western Massachusetts, some whose families have been here in old farmhouses for generations, many others who came from the cities and suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, New York City, Long Island, Albany. They all live a world away from cardboard houses. In the houses of the people on this road, in the houses of the lucky more wealthy, lucky more fortunate, lucky visionary, lucky artistic, lucky skilled, lucky with sharp minds and piercing intellects, lucky with family inheritances. In the house where the artist once lived and painted (and his paintings still remain on the walls of the others), one sees many beautiful objects. In the house on her road are house plants from the world over, objects bartered, made from stones and seashells, 19th century paintings and sculptures from dead parents and grandparents, the art of mothers and grandmothers, photography, weavings, beautifully crafted furniture, carpets from the far east, antique commodes and tables, musical instruments — guitars, violins, mandolins, an oud, charanjo, zither, flutes, trumpet, percussion instruments from countries spanning the globe, in one house a cherished antique baby grand piano, — ceramics functional and sculptural, and in more than one house, the fine crafted cabinetry and wood turnings built by The Man. A few of these houses on her road were even built, wisely, into the landscape, in architectural styles which at the very least do not stand in harsh and ugly contrast to the land around them making some of the homes look like more than ticky-tacky Malvina Reynolds boxes sitting on parcels of cleared land.
Alas, she knew, The Woman, in more and more of the world the sacred land was being desecrated, raped, logged, drilled, blasted, bombed, the secondhand subject of wars between men. Once she had cried for a year, knowing, imagining, the animals murdered. Finally, she had justified her impotence over the suffering of the animals by coming to terms with death, the swiftness of life, the misdirected ignorance of many, ego and pride soothing her despair. In the end, for all, is nothing more or less than oblivion of ego self.
Here, in rural Massachusetts, still, the land itself, in the countryside, the remaining relative wilderness, the remaining relative wild animals, provides more than simply a backdrop. It gave “game” to some, a place to live, work, marry, raise children, hunt for animals, away from cities. To others of The People, it gave a sense of history, of time, physical, emotional, and spiritual sustenance. Transport any of these houses from here to suburbia, or by the sea, to the desert, to the mountains, each would be a different entity altogether. Place these houses on this road in the ghetto, they would provide homes for hundreds. Without a lot of money to maintain them after not too long they would fall into ruin, would eventually cease to be altogether. Place the people who live on this road in suburbia, the city, by the sea, in the mountains of Nepal, in grasslands, scrublands, forest, they too would begin to conform, take the shape of the environment around them, slowly, like a tree growing around a cable, an inch or so in a half dozen years. Until, by the time of their death, they will have begun to sprout branches, untrimmed beards, barnacles, bottles of booze, bigger and bigger SUVs, eyes that gaze into the distance horizon.
2.
Why didn’t anyone tell her there was this architectural grandeur a sixteenth of a mile away from Her own home, this house, which invokes such appreciation, and various historic architectures of which she was aware? One neighbor, mile down the road, years ago, had casually mentioned The Man’s house was “very masculine, you know, the kind of house a guy would build…” This is all She had known about The House all these years. And yet all these years She had wanted to see this house, intuitively, unconsciously, somehow clairvoyantly aware she could not do this casually. She knew when she did see this house, The House by The Marsh designed and built by The Man, and The Woman with whom he lived, had made his life; The House would be far from ordinary. Her response would be equally extraordinary. Perhaps this was why she’d waited seven years? Going there was not something casual. It was like going to a remote village in Italy or The Sea of Galilee.
3.
Waxing February moon, full in a few hours time. Kerry had been dead for nine months, for nine months as the seasons changed from spring to summer to fall to winter, alone, a frozen form, buried underneath a deep winter snowfall in “The Hebrew” (still called this on even most current maps of the area), graveyard in Hatfield. The bizarre fact of a Native American buried in a Jewish cemetery had not stopped haunting The Woman from the moment she was convinced by Kerry’s unaware friends and Born-Again Christian family to make this decision, to honor Kerry’s recent religious conversion as opposed to her spiritual past. Her ex-lover’s death had become The Woman’s daily barometer of living. Even though Kerry was an ex from almost fifteen years ago; The Woman never fell out of love with anyone she’d fallen off the edge of rationality into love with. And she never forgets. The body. Anything, which falls open to her under her hands. Touch. That extraordinary kind of opening The Woman had with Kerry, into the deepest terrain of the heart and body known to humankind.
That night it was a bitter cold winter night, the temperature hovering around zero Fahrenheit, so cold and dry that car tires squeaked on the snowy driveways sounding like what, a flock of geese flying overhead? Thousands of mice unified in voice? Nails on a chalkboard? What is that sound of dry dry dry wetness? What is the color, texture, and smell? Color, White. Texture: all textures. Smell: like air from the frozen Alaskan tundra, too cold to smell if there are not fresh polar bear remains, a seal perhaps, dragged up onto the icy frozen ocean, but what would cause a polar bear, the true king of the earth, to leave anything uneaten? An uneaten seal with a polar bear nearby as inconceivable as Kerry’s dying was to Her last April when she heard that Northampton police officer through the cell phone saying to those standing by her front door, “she’s expired”. Expired!! What the hell, “expired”, as if Kerry had lost air, like a deflated balloon of course (is this some sort of police enforcement jargon used for decades of which She had never simply been purveyed to have never heard before?) God would Kerry have laughed, shook her literary head, tried to roll her beautiful enormous soulful brown eyes in the fashionable thirty-six-year-old-six-year-old way The Woman use to do when She and Kerry were lovers.
Everything comes back to death. How is it that so much life can happen in-between these two points, first breath and last? This egotistical sense of immortality humans cultivate, was most of the time contemptible to Her. Except when the beauty of life, the irrefutable magnificence of a bird or animal, of a painting or sculpture, of a tree or hillside, the bliss she sometimes felt toward another or others, the deep sense of wholeness, connectedness, love, removed Her momentarily.What was incomprehensible to Her that night was how She could be so deeply, profoundly, moved by architecture? How easy it was for Her to fall in-love with a house, a sculpture, a painting, a literary work, as it is for Her to fall in love with a sentient being, an animal or person. Granted, she was excessively limited in Her experience of architecture: had simply not been in any other “grand” domestic architecture (“domestic architecture”, is this even a word?) She considers Her neighbors to be “common folk”, like Herself, like Her other neighbors on The Road, like Her friends, Her family, all the people with which She surrounded Herself in Her life — all both ordinary and brilliant in their own spheres. Yet the fact that someone can express themselves in this way, materially, embodied, literal, by the structure of the building which surrounds one’s daily life she perceived as awesome, awe inspiring, an unconscious refusal to give in, to despair, to succumb to the horrors and meaningless of modern times. As a woman, one knows that so much of life within the home involves the mundane, the tenuous, the boring and repetitive, but O so necessary realms of home life, of domestic life, a life which supports and allows much of the rest of what we do outside the house; the fact that one can surround oneself with such a powerful presence, that one can eat, sleep, shit, bath, make love, create, argue, laugh, be sick, live and die, within great architectural beauty, within a well thought out space elicits the mythic, mystical, historic, beautiful, wondrous in daily life. It brings the quest for connection to things bigger than humankind, religion for example, music, art, literature, spirituality, into one’s daily environs, into one’s immediate surroundings. Living in this way, on an expanse of land, such as The Man’s one hundred plus acres, at the foot of a marsh, was so opposite of the impulse behind the architectural (if one can even call it architecture) conformity of suburbia, which She had deplored since childhood, contrary to modernity in the west. So, being in this house was, for Her, a lover of form, of sculptural form, of art, as much a religious experience as walking between two black bears in the woods, of coming upon that moose, gargantuan, in a nearby field. The house was almost mythic, form follows functionalism at its most magnificent and the person who designed this house, and who built this house, was, quite obviously, an architect and builder, conceiver, of heroic proportions of domestic architecture, of vernacular architecture. She imagines, although could not say for certain, this house, built like a barn, was built along the same lines as ancient, prehistoric European barn designs… To say it was a post and beam house with a marble masonry fireplace, hemlock beams the width of second growth trees (and are they?) cabinets, bookcases, curved counters, turnings and banisters, endless built in cabinetry, a collection of woods built into and scattered about the house The Woman longed to stroke like she longed to stroke, nestle her nose into the fur on the back of an angora rabbit (once K had gifted The Woman with a pair of mittens made from the fur of Angora rabbits), Geometric architectural turnings, applied ornamentation, textural patterns formed from wood and painted in earthy muted colors, greens, blues, above indoor windows, reminding Her of what, the exterior of the apartment in Brookline Her grandmother rented when She was a child… the church across the road from Hannah’s building, something from Her past, this life or another… designed as if it was a huge barn, with high ceilings, wide plank wood floors of what wood She could only guess. On the outside gray aged cedar siding reminiscent of the houses along the coast of Maine and on Cape Cod where the salty seawater peels paint from wood like the houses are grapefruit, oranges, lemon and lines, only waiting for the hands of human beings, the paws of bears, the dexterous fingers of raccoon, to peel them back and reveal the interior flesh. With a wave metal roof, an unusually wide wooden entrance door (hard to see in the darkness) made from planks and forms. Then, The Man’s house filled with sculpture, art, totems, books, music, fire, and light…. The exact qualities of light and texture impossible for Her to ascertain at night and in the darkness, as well as the exact directionality and placement of the house on the marshlands (although, it must be lengthwise facing East? Southeast?). Entering this house felt like walking into a labyrinth, a cave opening into a secret hidden canyon… The landscape behind (in front?) of this house She could almost imagine was in Northern coastal Maine. When dawn broke, she felt she would see the ocean around the corner to the Southeast. This house, invoking a few other famous architectures of mythic proportions of which She was aware— the poet Robinson Jeffer’s “Hawk Tower” built for the woman he loved, Una, and his adjacent Tor House. How important to his finely crafted poetry his apprenticeship to the stonemason who set the granite bounders in the Carmel Point construction site, how the house itself, and of course the landscape in coastal California, in Point Sur, inspired Jeffer’s most beautiful, prophetic, resilient poetry…The first naturalist American poet, some say about Jeffers. “If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:/ Perhaps of my planted forest a few/ May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress,/ haggard with storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils. / Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the / art / To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. / But if you should look in your idleness after ten thousand years: / It is the granite knoll on the granite / And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the/ Carmel / River-valley, these four will remain / In the change of names.” *
She thought of this poem she loved. But She did not want to think about how easy it was to fill in a marsh. How Boston and New York City were built on the sandy plains found by the Oceanside. How one day there would be nothing left recognizable here, by the edge of this march, of the earth or sky. Instead, she thought of the Workshop on the first floor of The Man’s house and his collection of old tools, hundreds of tools, lining the walls of the stairway as one walks up to the entrance of the living space. She thought of Diego Rivera’s massive stone house and mausoleum at Anahuacalli (so different was Diego’s house from Frida’s house of glass and light at Casa Azul, so perhaps one can argue for a feminine and masculine architecture?). Diego’s house he built for himself, to house his 60,000 small Aztec stone sculptures, and with walls large enough for his to paint his magnificent murals. Then there is Frank Lloyd Wright’s “fallingwater” in Mill River Pennsylvania, built over the river, an impossibility of construction and recently needing millions of dollars of engineering ingenuity to keep it from literally, structurally, falling into the waters below. “Fallingwater” is almost opposite of The Man’s immense practicality, intense functionalism, but still, the placement, so close to the edge of the land, by an expansive vista, the constant presence of water, warrants comparison. Although The Man’s house was far more practical, not as grand as these palaces, not as risky, in its barn like form, reflecting the simple geometric architecture so familiar to rural New England, an architecture brought here from across the seas, like barns built in Europe, even as far back as the first millennium BC. Perhaps The Man’s “barn” was innovated, more modern; nevertheless, it was an architecture, which somehow manages in its ordinariness, in its tie to the past, to speak to the highest ascetic in the human soul. The Woman thought this comparable to Muir’s experience of the wilderness. How for some of us, being in the wilderness is so much more about spirit, the spiritual, and the religious, than being in a grand cathedral or spectacular ancient synagogue.
The Man’s house is a cathedral to the world of domesticity, elongated along the marshland, and comprised of elements from earth, sky, water, and fire. A place, at least for now, of relative permanence. One knows, as surely as did Jeffers, who built a bed to die in (and he did lay down in this bed, by the window, to die, thirty years after building Tor House), and Diego, who built his house as home and mausoleum, The Man will live in this house as long as he is alive. The Man will die in his house. How could it be otherwise? And that The Woman, the “I” in this story, will move on. Further away from encroaching human constructs. Until she too is surrounded by hundreds of acres. At the center of it. At that place where life and death, water and earth, meet and part ways again.
@ Susan Gesmer
In Process, March 2003/Winter-Spring 2024
* (From Tor House by Robinson Jeffers, 1938)