Minnesota 16.6.93 (2): Ruined Barns and Dancing in the Ruins

I thought of all this yesterday when we walked to the K. farm, a little paradise that once functioned as a virtually self-sufficient “monastic” community complete with workshop, beehives, smokehouse, etc. It’s now lived on by Glenn and Linda, who have a trailer and teach at the local community college, and who farm with Louis. And by Joseph, who pursues an almost eremitical existence in the old K. house, where he has kept everything virtually as it has been from the late 19th century.

Minnesota 16.6.93: Opera on the Farm and Marcel Waves

Writing all this on the day of the opera performance. What an experience so far. Here’s this American-icon opera being performed at the farm of a gay dairy farmer. This farmer lives in a two-story late-19th century house he got for free when he saw an ad in the paper saying the house could be had for the taking, if someone would haul it away.

The farmer has renovated the house completely, has built a porch on. He has sewn poofy floral curtains with valances and flounces and curls. He has painted the rooms bright outré colors, furnished them with male torsos of store mannequins and other kicky, kitschy knickknacks bought at garage sales and resale shops. He jokes—half jokes—that one day he’ll open a gay b and b for Red Lake Falls.

Red Lake Falls: a French-Canadian, German Catholic settlement in a sea of Norwegian Lutherans. Families up to the 1960s of 10, 12, 23, 4 or 5 of which always became nuns or priests. A European Catholicism with a strong German-Austrian choral tradition, a focus on liturgy rather than ironclad morality, especially in the sexual area.

But nonetheless American, and intensely so, as the assimilationist impulse took over between the two wars. Mot people of our generation had grandparents who grew up speaking French or German, parents who grew up hearing and understanding the old language, but ashamed to speak it. The children now learn their ancestral languages, if at all, in college, and/or when they travel or live in Europe for a while.

It’s in this community, on this farm, that the opera is to be performed. It’s directed by a gay director, the chair of the music department at -----, a senior professor, married with a child. The lead male vocalist is a stunning handsome young gay man who grew up on an organic farm in North Dakota and who plays a heterosexual love role in the opera.

The music department chair at -----, who got the opera for Louis’s farm, is also gay. The Chronicle for Higher Education has sent a reporter to cover the story. Soon after the reporter met me, he told me he had once fallen in love with a waiter named Chuck in Little Rock. He sports two earrings in his right ear.

The local area has contributed a cast of supporting singers, dancers. These are predominantly short, stocky, marcelled French Canadian women in prim-flowered aprons of bright colors clashing with the exercised, larger floral patterns of their frocks. This is the 1940s look the opera demands. One wonders what they would think if they knew that all this culture is transmitted to them by faggots. Do they know and choose not to? If they knew, would they accept and affirm, as long as one was not in their face? Would they turn disdainful, become righteous?

What it feels like is being on the cusp of a cultural revolution of epic proportions. The arts languish for lack of money; Reaganonomics have pulled the plug on them, and their economic life ebbs away, pulse-beat by pulse-beat.

So the Minn. Opera Company has decided to take its show on the road, bring music to the people. And the people—bless their little homophobic, heartland souls—want it, love the party, seem ready to sing and dance.

Minnesota 14.6.93: Sweet Honey and Lilac Nimbus

Just north of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. It’s 9:30 P.M. An extraordinary sunset. We were listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock sing a love song, “Sometime,” and the sun began to move to the horizon, coming beneath the heavy cloud cover.

Through most of the state, it has been darkly overcast, with a strong northwest wind, cold and almost snowy looking. When the sun broke through clouds, the effect was indescribable. A strong rose glow where the sun itself was, but as we went downhill and lost the sun, a lilac, purple, mauve radiance thrown up onto the cloud cover, and shining in a nimbus over the hilltop, silhouetting dark firs, lighter deciduous trees, none of which every fully lost their green color.

This happened over and over as we mounted hills and drove down to vales. To say it was like one of those guidepost magazines one sees at Easter would be to cheapen it all. But In a way it was—although no photographers’ tricks here. It just was that way, air so pure it picked up and helped illuminate every ray of light.

Beside this, how trifling and even petulant all I wrote today in this journal. People fail one, but the land and the earth . . . . It makes me feel so still inside, the song, the sunset. I wept as I drove.

I try to understand, analyze (control) too much. I need just to let it be, to let it speak.

Yes, this is a time in my life, and I can’t evade it. But understanding it won’t save me, or make me do the “right” thing. And yes, in some sense my whole life is bound up in what I decide now, because playtime’s over—we live once and then die.

And yes, I’ve had a destiny laid on me which I barely comprehend.

But it must come to me, keep coming to me. I can’t make it happen, or happen my way, via some cheap magician’s trick. I have to place myself interiorly and exteriorly where it can come to me.

Minnesota 14.6.93: Exotic Normalcy and Squares Within Squares

Just north of some little town as pretty and poisonous as a Norman Rockwell picture, called Charles City, Iowa. One passes dairy bars named Kum and Go, antique shoppes, rows—never any other planting configuration—of stiff, spiky peonies.

Growl, grumble. The Midwest fascinates with its straight lines and squares, and its exotic normalcy lived within those squares. Land laid off and sold by grid in the period when sections were offered for sale; the whole state of Iowa is practically a square, with little square counties all over the large papa square.

Squares within squares. Would anyone dare plant those omnipresent, drab and gloomy evergreens that surround upper Midwest houses in funereal rows, in anything but a straight line? Or peonies in a semicircle?

The people who live in this square world have so little curiosity about the Other. We ate at a café in Moscow, Iowa: would you care for coffee (!) with lunch? Homemade pie? Steve says he felt unscrutinized. I, too, but I think it’s because the squared existence and wintry climate make people so intensely private that they simply lack curiosity, imagination, about the Other. Not just the exotic traveling-through Other, but one’s family members and neighbors.

I suppose at some level I resent people’s luxury to retain such “normalcy” in a culture of rapid change, where the Other intrudes everywhere. I know, of course, people here now have t.v. They travel. Their children go off to college, then to live in exotic places like Belmont, NC, in exotic arrangements like gay marriages.

But, still, all’s so repressively neat, ordered, same. And yet full of that dark brooding insanity that eats at America’s heart, inside the black-blood crevices of it. All Jane Smiley did in A Thousand Acres is take snapshots of what’s around her. That's the genius of her work: snapshots of exotic normalcy. If people want to understand the real America, the place where we live and move and have our being, let them come to the Midwest.

Minnesota 13.6.1993: Marauding Wind, Bowls of Sky

En route to Minnesota for the performance of Copland’s “Tender Land” at Louis’s farm. We spent the night in Knoxville, and are now a few miles south of Mt. Vernon, Illinois. A journey from dark, misty, tree-shrouded hills to more and more sky, land so flat the sky can only be a bowl over it, the sun an imperious lamp-lord, the wind a fierce, prowling marauder.

As my purple prose may hint, I want to read. Suddenly, hungrily, as I write this, Willa Cather. But also a whole self-indulgent spate of English novels from the early 1900s, like Zuleika Dobson (again)—froth to drug and dull me to the world’s pain. And for some reason (again) Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. Dare I try it in French this time around?

Minnesota 22.7.02: Famly Reunions and Wheedling Devil

Lots of thoughts these days of Mother’s last years and death. I feel great sadness. Obviously it’s always with me, bubbling inside. She lived less than a decade after Simpson’s death, something I foresaw and could do nothing to change. If anything, I prolonged her demise. Had I not taken her to live with us, she would have certainly died in 1995-6. That’s what she wanted.

I feel guilt about putting her into a nursing home. Yet the doctor insisted. . . .

But I feel I failed. That was the predominant feeling when I placed her there. I failed to redeem . . . something: her, our relationship, both of our lives. . . .

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The sermon at Steve’s family reunion at Pearl Lake was by Fr. George. He talked about how his Uncle John and Aunt Mary, Steve’s great-grandparents, took him in and raised him as their own when his parents died. Told stories of how Steve’s great-grandmother fasted every Saturday for priests.

Then he launched into a hair-raising sermon about how the devil tempts us to lose our Catholic faith, and how we must resist and be countercultural. To whom was that sermon addressed? The younger members of the family who perhaps need to hear it (in George’s view) weren’t there, don’t go to church anymore.

It’s not the world and its values that are the problem. It’s the church, which is fossilized in a cultural system that is simply beside the point for most of these younger family members. They can’t return to that tight-knit rural ethnic world the sermon implicitly idealizes. But that’s all the church can imagine for them.

The church of our days fails to be church. Its failure to be church is most evident when it’s most intransigent, most nostalgically countercultural. There’s nothing at all really countercultural about the church in that reactive mode. That church is like any other rigid male hierarchy that plays power games and keeps secrets—no different than the Pentagon, the CIA, or a smoky backroom filled with corporate board members.

Minnesota 21.7.02: Idyllic Farmland and Catseye Glasses

Idyllic farmland and ugly people with horrific secrets hidden under the guise of holy family: but that theme’s been done to death.

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Last night, in Hutchinson, Minnesota, I watched a man and wife eating dinner, never saying a word to each other. They were at a small square table, but sitting catty-corner from each other. She had badly dyed hair, coal black, in a tight wavy frizz across the top of her head. Her eyes were rapacious, curiously vacant and at the same time fixed greedily on her feed. He was nondescript, a beefy-faced aging farmer, iron-gray hair slicked back from the forehead.

They ate and ate, meat and potatoes, methodically sawing at the meat, putting forkful after forkful into their mouths, never saying a word or showing the slightest interest in their surroundings. She would occasionally cut a forkful of meat, raise it into the air, and look at it and sigh, as if it daunted her.

Then they stopped eating, exchanged a word or two about the quality of the meat (she was displeased), and prepared to leave. She put on those catseye glasses in silver frames that seem always to have a chain on them, wrote a check, and they left.

Minnesota 26.5.02: Nature Is as Nature Does

Steve’s father, as we pass a farm with a row of newly planted trees today: I don’t know why they planted them trees there. They don’t do anything.

There is an almost ruthlessly utilitarian approach to nature here: nature is what does, not what is. Yet that approach stops sharply at reproductive life: there, nature decidedly is. Interesting, the difference, and much commented on by theologians.

Minnesota 25.5.02: Buckle Up Blvd., A Gallon of Blood

Drove to Grand Forks, North Dakota, today. Along the way, in a ditch—rather, on the side of the ditch facing the road—a large American flag. Above it, Mickey and Minnie Mouse cavorting and pointing down at it.

Midwesterners tickle the hell out of me. In any other culture, this “patriotic” display would be considered ludicrous, or playfully subversive and ironic. But I feel absolutely certain those who created it intended it as a serious and attractive display of patriotism. Not an ounce of irony in these bones, no siree.

In Grand Forks, we saw a restaurant on the main highway (Buckle Up Blvd.) called Fire Island. I told Steve I was quite sure the owner had no clue what Fire Island was all about—perhaps, had no inkling a real Fire Island even exists.

Steve later asked some of his relatives about the place. One who is gay told him that at a recent conference about being gay in the rural upper Midwest, a number of attendees went there, assuming it was gay-owned or gay-friendly. The owner had not a clue.

+ + + + +

Sentences you don’t hear every day: Steve’s mother today, “I have a gallon of blood in the freezer. Should I cook up some blood sausage?”

Mary Ann also said today she and John had been good to accept Louis’s partner “into the yard.” This reminds me of the German word Hof, which I’ve heard used in much the same way. In fact, I wonder if Mary Ann’s use of “yard” here is one of those many Germanisms that linger in Steve’s family’s speech. I can recall one of her Schindler cousins in Germany who lives in the house and on the farmplace from which Steve’s ancestor emigrated referring to when their common ancestor Vity Schindler established the Hof there.

The image I get when I hear it used that way is of the enclosed inner courtyard many German farms have—the yard—where house, barn, and work buildings form a kind of enclosure private to the farm. Something very primitive in this use of Hof/yard: our little space, a guarded one, that we open to strangers only with some forethought.

Minnesota 21.5.02: Bright Blond Babies and Menacing Signs

Crudely stenciled billboard sign coming into St. Cloud from the southwest, bright red letters: If you think no means yes, then no, you won’t go to prison. No context for the statement; just the bold assertion. Make what you will of it. If the shoe fits, wear it.

What kind of social nexus produces such vaguely menacing signs? We threaten folks with prison when we feel things are out of control, about to spin wildly in directions uncertain or inimical to us? Is it a warning about date rape? If so, how can anyone know this, with no context for interpretation?

We’ve entered few small towns in Minnesota without seeing right-to-life signs, many of them combining kitsch with guilt: pictures of bright blond babies and the slogan, Choose life; your mother did.

I asked Steve if abortion is such a problem in rural Minnesota towns. No, he thought. It seems the good burghers and farmers of Minnesota want to outlaw other people’s abortions.

Minnesota 20.5.02: Vexed Shimmies and Go Go Gas and Groceries

In New Ulm, in the car outside the Schell brewing company, Steve and I having just taken a walk in the park nearby. Raucous talk radio-cum-country rock station playing loudly in the brewery. As we drove up, an extraordinary thing, a peacock in full display.

When we got out of the car carefully and stood watching, he turned around, insolently, slowly, one foot then another, back to us: an act of aggression? He remained that way, turning slowly at an angle as we tried to retrieve the frontal view, determined to shun us.

Then we approached slightly—aggression for aggression—and he righted himself again, displaying his eyes and feathers, those little spring-like tufts at the nether end of each pin, with a vexed shimmy. The eyes stood out, glaring and moving like the eyes of some menacing predator—as nature has obviously designed them to do in order to protect the male peafowl.

+ + + + +

Now gassing up at a Little Dukes On the Go Go Gas and Groceries. More music blaring on loudspeakers—“Sugar Shack.” When we arrived at the Holiday Inn last night, it was also pouring out of speakers into the parking area, country music fitting incongruously with the kitschy Fachwerk and German flag flapping in the breeze outside the hotel.

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Expressions I’ve heard: Steve’s cousin Beverly’s husband calls Hutchison a “spendy” place; Steve’s aunt Josephine says, “He was natured that way.”

At the restaurant last night, two American Indians were ahead of us in line. When the hostess finally emerges, she looks at them and says, “You want a table?” Then pauses, “Or?” What the hell else could they want, standing in a queue in a restaurant foyer? And what does “or” mean in such a context? The question itself, re: wanting a table, is either-or.

At first, I thought this linguistic subterfuge was her way of coping with anxiety at the presence of wild Indians in Perkins’ Family Restaurant. But no, I think it’s just that way people have in MN—an absolutely maddening way—of pulling the linguistic rug out from under any direct statement. God forbid we should ever express an opinion, reveal a true feeling directly, take a stand, put a foot forward.

This drives me up a wall. The night we arrived, Steve and I talked in the car about how nice it would be to have a Vietnamese meal. After we sit around having a glass of wine and chatting, Glenn proposes going out to eat. He asks what we’d like. Steve asks about Vietnamese places. Glenn says there’s a Vietnamese restaurant at which they’re regulars.

Shall we go there? he asks. Steve says, Anything is fine. And didn’t you mention Greek? And a fish place? Glenn enumerates. Another question: What would you like? Steve: Anything is fine. Glenn: Vietnamese? Steve: We like anything.

I was wild with hunger after a day’s travel in which we had eaten half a sandwich in the Memphis airport. And we’d agreed on Vietnamese ahead of time! But Steve was determined to do all in his power to side-step, duck, evade, avoid commitment, field a direct question, provide a tangential answer. It’s deep in this culture, and I simply cannot comprehend it.