3/22/20
I'm writing a biography of Herman Husband, a mystic and radical that lived in the hills of the eastern woodlands in the eighteenth century. He had a vision of the New Jerusalem being west of the Alleghenies and that it would be ruled by the Divine as found within the hearts of the residents therein. This was the only way humans could survive -- by relying on this connection to the eternal within -- and by being honest with oneself and tuning into that inner voice, justice, peace, and plenty could indeed happen here.
Listening to some music of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis -- "The Mother" -- from the movie "The Road" -- evoked some feelings about North America that took me a bit by surprise as I sit on my perch reading Covid-19 news. I've been reading up on the history of Quebec and Nouvelle France, mainly in French, and this author, Laurier Turgeon, was talking about how the colonists made the environment their own through food, especially the codfish. And "Terre Neuve," AKA "Newfoundland," which encompassed more than what is referred to today by that term, was a new universe to the French fishermen, traders, and explorers. It was capitalism from the git-go with the investments in the tools to extract the fish and the competition to get the best price.
Anyway, I lived in St. John's, Newfoundland for a few months once upon a time when a moratorium on the fishery had just been declared because of centuries of overfishing. I was on foot, so I didn't get out of town really at all, but I pounded the turf pretty steadily during that time. I walked all over town, along the Battery Trail many times, up to Signal Hill, around to the lighthouse on the south side of the harbor. I never made it over to Cape Spear, but you can easily see it from the Battery Trail and Signal Hill.
So I'm thinking about all these things while Cave and Ellis invoke "The Mother," and I do not remember the context of that piece in the movie, but it brought up that sense of oneness with the other-than-human world. It's beautiful -- transcendent -- beyond the daily sillinesses of life in USA USA USA. I saw the main artery of the St. Lawrence River as seen from Cap Diamant in Quebec, near the old fortress, where Champlain, des Monts, Roberval, and probably Cartier stood in awe of the place. It's the upper reach of the tide -- Kebec is Iroquois for "where the river narrows," so that is laid out at one's feet. A three-hour train ride upstream - don't know how long by boat -- brings one to Montreal, la belle isle, where the Iroquois had a village called Hochelaga and the sand bars represent the fall line of the river. There, one finds Mount Royal and its sister mountains overlooking the St. Lawrence valley. Incredible beauty and a joie de vivre hard to find in the U.S.
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Looking north from Cap Diamante, one sees the beginning of the Laurentian Mountains -- geologically tied to the Appalachians but I can't remember the difference just now. Going north through that land of boreal forest, bogs, lakes, ponds, moose, bear, caribou -- you feel The Mother, for sure. After a couple of hours, one drives into the Saguenay fiord in the Chicoutimi area just below Lac St. Jean. A town is named after the French fur trader Roberval at that lake, perhaps the first European to set foot there. Again, I'm feeling a deep well of peace and love and calm that is beyond words -- experiential only -- that is The Mother.
I never know when The Mother . . . this Comforter . . . is going to emerge from the realm beyond logic, the senses, the quotidien, the cacophony of the monkey chatter. But I remember once on a Sunday morning when we lived on the outskirts of Lawrence, KS near the confluence of the Wakarusa and Kaw Rivers. It was the Wakarusa flood plain that I was admiring when The Mother -- The Comforter -- emerged. My psyche was suddenly opened up and I could sense the wonder if that valley extending to the Flint Hills and the Kaw Valley that extended via the Smoky Hill arm up into the High Plains to about the point where you just make out the highest peaks of the Front Range. Grandfather's Lap, I call it. Downstream, the Wakarusa flows into the Kaw which soon flows into the Missouri River at Kawsmouth, an old meeting spot from when the French had come this far south and west from Quebec. But because I'm a sucker for hills and mountains, my life journey has taken me to the south of Kawsmouth by quite a bit, although I live within ten miles or so of it today. On that Sunday morning when my thoughts turned to the east, I was thinking of my old home, the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri. That's where The Mother saved me from the False Self (The Mother becomes a male war god in her/his malevolent form, whom I call "Murgatroid") -- and left a sinkhole as a calling card -- on Johnny Morris's new golf course, The Top o' the Rock. But that's another story.
So when Herman Husband says he had a vision -- a way back in 1779 -- of the New Jerusalem in North America and the Allegheny Mountains represented the eastern wall, I take him seriously. I suspect he was touched by The Mother / Comforter, mystic that he was, and my brother.
