On Anselm Kiefer

 On Anselm Kiefer

To there

comprised of: The Advice of a Poet – A Young Man takes a Fall – False starts and Tai Chi – Now, an Old Man Falls – “I’ve Fallen and I can’t get up!” – And yet another Fall – “All crippled up” as they say in the Country – Another Blizzard delays a Departure – A Snow Drift Indoors – More Delay cause by Bad Weather – A small town Lothario, thought to be dead, is resurrected on the most “existential” Night of the Year – Godzilla, the King of Monsters – Hamlin Garland’s Grammar School – Unspeakable Beauty – The Physiognomy of Central Iowa and Northeastern Missouri – “An Aged Man is a Paltry Thing”

1.

A poet-friend told me that he had seen an exhibition of recent work by Anselm Kiefer in St. Louis.  He suggested that I travel to see this show.  My friend, the poet, is very wise and cultured.  If he makes a recommendation, it is best to consider it closely and, if possible, take his advice.  

2.

It seems wildly self-indulgent to travel a long distance to see art.  Like most Americans, I was raised to regard art as a luxury and not a staple of existence.  And traveling to see Anselm Kiefer’s work was questionable for another reason that cast a shadow over the trip.

One of Kiefer’s first important exhibitions in the United States was in Chicago at the Institute of Art between December 5,1987 and January 31, 1988.  Although I had little money at the time, I resolved to make the six-hour drive to Chicago to see the retrospective.

I was 33 at the time and had lost my way.  My wife had filed for divorce and I was facing criminal charges, as well as under a restraining order.  There was a challenge pending to my law license and, it seemed, that I was about to lose everything.  But, in the midst of these troubles, I had the quixotic impulse to take a couple days off-work and drive down to Chicago to attend the Kiefer retrospective.

On the evening before I planned to depart, I walked to my car across the sidewalk at my law office.  Ice glazed a part of the sloping pavement and, suddenly, I was flung into the air.  I didn’t merely slip and fall, but, instead, was thrown by some force skyward, levitating from all points of contact with the icy sidewalk.  I was buoyant and, for an instant, felt like a winged being, but, then, I crashed to concrete, slamming down hard enough to knock the wind out of me.  I rolled over on the pavement, animated by an impulse to rise as quickly as possible, and, all at once, I was on my feet, limping slowly to my car.  

This sudden fall, probably on a bright, cold day during the second week of January, exposed the folly in my mission to travel to Chicago to see the Kiefer paintings.  My back hurt and my hips and coccyx were bruised.  When I sat down in my car, I winced and wondered if I could endure the long drive.  At my apartment, I took some Tylenol for pain and, after eating soup that I heated from a can, I went to bed. Lethargy seized me. It seemed that there was no hope for me. My troubles were overwhelming and it was best, I supposed, to contend against them and not flee through the Winter to Illinois and the art show.  So, after being struck down on my own law firm’s sidewalk, I decided that I couldn’t afford the excursion.  

I didn’t go to Chicago.  A few months later, I bought the catalog to the show.  There was, I thought, trouble associated with Anselm Kiefer and some of his works, most notably the huge landscapes scuffed with char marks and incised with leaden furrows to which the fairy-tale substance of gold straw (like the blonde hair of Margarete in Celan’s Todesfugue) was glued, seemed to me objects of ill omen and evil portent.  Simply put, Kiefer was associated with a fall, literally and from grace as well, and so it was best to keep my distance.

3.

Now, to accomplish a trip, you have to make a start.  And making a start can be difficult for me.  I always pack as if the place to which I am going is without stores, without pharmacies, with no amenities of any kind. It’s best to be prepared and wholly self-sufficient if you are attempting a 360 mile drive in January.  

I remember one time that I drove to Chicago for work.  I was in a hurry and started toward the freeway but, then, realized I didn’t have much cash.  I made a u-turn and went to the bank for money, then, recalled that I had forgotten an important part of the file at my office.  I made another u-turn and, at the office, picked up the exhibits that I intended to use in the next day’s depositions.  I started down the road to the interstate and, even, traveled the distance between two freeway exits in town before turning around, hurrying to my office once more to pick up my cell-phone that I had left in the cradle of its charger.  It was as if a hundred complications were exercising some sort of gravitational force to hold me in place in town.

In a studio, above an abandoned bank, a class was practicing Tai Chi.  My secretary was in the class.  The instructor said that the students should express beneficent intentions toward one another and the world at large.  My secretary, who had seen me return to the office several times, said that the members of the Tai Chi class should pray “for John Beckmann to be able to leave town.”

4.

A blizzard wracked my town and tore black branches as long as cars out of the trees.  The ends of the street dissolved in white funnels of spinning wind-borne snow.  It was Thanksgiving weekend and the city street crews were not on duty and so the roads were buried under white and grey drifts of blowing snow. The sidewalks vanished under the stuff and temperatures plunged.  On the night of the storm, with the wind knocking on the walls of my house, I rose after midnight.  My back and left hip felt inflamed and the pain woke me up.  I thought I would limp into the toilet where I had several ibuprofen waiting for me next to a bottle of water (that I had re-filled from the tap).  But my wife was in the toilet and, so, I decided to go downstairs to another cache of medications.  As I have become older and more feeble, I keep bottles of pain relievers stashed in various places so that I am never more a few feet from analgesia.  As I came down the steps, I missed the last couple treads and fell down on my back, so that I slid onto the hardwood floor at the base of the carpeted stairs.  I was stunned and couldn’t get up.  My body was inflexible, splinted by the shock and pain, and I was squealing with astonishment, making sounds like a stuck pig.  My wife heard my cries and she came down the steps to where I was lying.  She tried to raise me off the floor but I was too heavy.  Using my heels I shoved myself about nine feet across the floor to a couch.  Then, I pushed against the couch until was able roll back onto its cushions.  I got up and limped to and fro.  I could still walk and, so, I supposed that I hadn’t broken anything.  I took four ibuprofen and went back to bed, but adrenalin kept me awake for most of the night.  

The next day, when I limped over to my car, I felt as if someone had shoved a hard pillow between my lower back and buttocks and the upholstery of my car seat.  This odd sensation was swelling from the injuries that marked my backside.  Fortunately, I couldn’t see the bruising but my wife gasped when she saw what the fall had done to me.  She took a few pictures and showed them to me.  All around my withered ass there were midnight-black bruises, injuries that looked like craters with purple rings wrapped tightly around them.  As the day’s passed, the bruises were dragged by gravity downward to the back of my thighs and, then, at last draining downward to pool around my calves and ankles. 

5.  

A day later, I took my dog for a walk.  The blizzard had left three-inches of ice, tire-polished at the intersections.  I thought that if I keep my tennis-shoes on the snow (which made a companionable crunching sound underfoot) I would be reasonably safe.  But ice in Minnesota’s winter is like the bullet that kills you on a battlefield – you never see the deadly shot coming.  Suddenly, I was down again, fallen on my side in the middle of the snowy street.  It was 6:30 in the morning and no one was abroad.  The streets were silent.  My dog scrambled to my face and licked at me.  I pushed the dog away, found my glasses were pillowed in the snow, and tried to get up.  It was hopeless.  My left leg wouldn’t bend normally under me and I didn’t have sufficient strength in the joints to lift myself out of the mire of ice and snow where I had fallen.  

No one came along.  I knew it was three below zero.  I crawled about 18 feet to the curb, dragged myself over the concrete lip and, then, crawled another eight or nine feet to a utility pole.  I wrapped the pole in a bear-hug and tried to get up but found that I could only get halfway to my feet before sliding down the cold side of the pole.  After four or five efforts, I steeled myself against the pain weakening my left leg and, exerting a supreme effort, was able to claw myself to my feet.  I walked a hundred yards to my house.  The cold had forced tears into my eyes.  I told my wife that I had fallen again and didn’t think I could walk the dog this Winter, at least, not when the sidewalks and road crossings were all feral with ice.  

6.

The next morning, I was very sore and my left hip and knee were full of hollow spots that the pain occupied like a dismal, warm fluid.  As I came down my back steps, my left foot suddenly sprung out from under me and I fell again, crashing down heavily on the hard edges of the steps.  Again, I felt my breath knocked out of me, a ghost mold of my lungs, I suppose expelled into the icy air.  I scooted myself on my bruised buttocks backward and, then, inched up the steps to about the third or fourth riser.  At that point, I could fold my body enough to sit on the step.  My breath wheezed in my throat and there was a swirling, rushing sound in my ears, agitated blood, I thought.  Gripping the handholds on the railing to the steps, I rose and carefully, step by step, dragged myself to the back door.

My wife was alarmed.  “What is happening to you?”  I said that I did not know, did not know...

7.

The falls made me limp and, when I rose from sitting, my left leg felt stiff and painful.  I was all inflamed.  A week passed.  I regarded stairs as serpents coiled to strike at me.  I saw the sea of ice surrounding my house and filling up all parking lots and the trenches of the sidewalks as a grinning, abstract peril, first bone-white, then, gone blue, then, blue striated with veins of filth.  This was the worst and most cruel winter that I could recall.  I went to the indoor track and walked the quarter-mile path around the field.  I was limping badly and the limp affected my gait and caused my hip to ache.  A local chiropractor was running with a majestic stride, circling the field with 60 second splits.  When he came near me, I asked him what he was training for.  The chiropractor said he was planning to run a marathon.  His breath came in short thuds from his chest and throat, a sound like someone chopping wood on a cold morning.  I was in training too – for my trip to St. Louis that was now complicated by the fact that I could scarcely walk.

8.

I planned to leave Austin on Monday morning, drive to St. Louis, and, then, see the Kiefer exhibition on the next day.  After looking at the paintings, I planned to drive back to Iowa, with the intent of stopping for the night at Fairfield where I thought I would inspect Maharishi University, the world center for TM (that is, “transcendental meditation”).  From Fairfield, I would drive back to Austin.

But weather intervened.  A blizzard with sixty mile an hour gusts dropped six inches of snow onto the ice from the Thanksgiving storm.  The blizzard began with heavy snowfall on Sunday afternoon and continued until three or four in the morning on Monday.  It was a very bad storm.  At midnight, the county pulled the snowplows off the highways because visibility was said to be less than a car length.  The Highway patrol reported 109 wrecks between Owatonna and the I90 junction at Albert Lea.  According to the news, Freeborn County had opened its armory for stranded truckers and travelers to take refuge there from the storm.  This was unprecedented. 

I35 was closed between Owatonna and Albert Lea.  Around dawn, the air filled with rivers of blowing snow, currents twisting and turning above the drifts and vortices spinning where roads intersected.  It would be fatal to attempt to travel in the aftermath of this blizzard and, so, I thought I would delay the trip for a couple of days.  The freeway south of Albert Lea was now closed as well, impassable due to white-outs and blowing snow.  I35 was shut all the way south to Ames, Iowa.  If the freeways were closed, it seemed obvious to me that the two-lane country roads that I would have to use to reach St. Louis (CSAH 218 the so-called Avenue of the Saints – that is Saint Paul to Saint Louis) would be far worse and more treacherous.

9.

The wind bullied the houses and filled up their open porches with snow.  In my entry way, snow sifted in under the door and there was a little six-inch high drift on the hard-wood floor, pressed up against a corner like a thick, pale spider-web.  

10.

I wasn’t able to leave until New Year’s Day.  By that time, the weather was calm enough for me to drive without too much angst.

11.

On New Year’s Eve, I watched TV with my wife.  A singer named Robyn talked with Anderson Cooper, the news anchor on CNN, and Andy Cohen, a comedian.  Robyn said that New Year’s Eve was the most “existential” of all holidays.  My wife asked me what I thought Robyn meant by those words.  I said: “I think she means that the whole holiday is about time and mortality and loss.  It’s about our existence being subject to time.”

Then, my wife’s cell-phone rang.  Someone left her a voice-mail.  The message was: “This is Jim Budd here.  If you get this message Kevin please give me a call.  Would like to see you.”

This message surprised me because I thought that Jim Budd was long dead and gone.  When I first came to Austin in 1979, I spent a lot of time in the bars.  It was there that I encountered Jim Budd.  

Jim Budd was an unsightly fellow, a stout man with a haircut that looked like it had been formed by shaving around a bowl mounted on his skull.  Budd had a broad caricature of a face – he looked like a slightly malign and puffy Fred Flintstone.  He was known to be a great lady-killer, something that seemed odd given his unattractive appearance.  But who knows how women think or what they find attractive?  Budd was said to have a fuck-pad with a round waterbed and mirrored walls and ceilings and a remote controlled video camera installation so that he could film his encounters with the women he seduced.  At least, this was what people maintained.  He had a cabinet full of video tapes documenting liaisons with girls that he met in the bars.  I think he was reputed to have murdered several of his conquests.  For ten years, I never went downtown without seeing Budd cruising the bars, swiveling his head that was without neck back and forth like the turret on a tank.  Then, he was gone and everyone said that he left for California or maybe Denver and, then, if anyone ever mentioned his name, it was to remark on the fact that he had died in some sort of miserable and abject way.

But, apparently, Jim Budd was not dead for he was now calling my wife’s phone number (query: why her phone number?) and asking about someone named Kevin.  My wife asked me if she should return his phone call.  Discretion is the better part of valor and I discouraged her from making the call.

12.

I couldn’t sleep and, so, I left for St. Louis about an hour before dawn. I made reasonable time, although my stomach was unsettled by wine I had drank the night before.  I felt slightly feverish.  The roads were clear and, although it was cold, there was no wind.  The fields were smeared with snow and ice.  Flat tongues of white extended along fence-lines and hillsides, drifts that the wind had planed down to smooth ramps of snow.  

South of Austin, crossing the Minnesota state line into Iowa, the land along the highway is flat and I could see various installations on the plain: a white grid of lights formed a bright scaffold supporting bulb-shaped columns of smoke – this was an ethanol plant.  Far out on the prairie, spikes and ladders of lights climbed into the sky (TV and radio transmission towers) and, on the south and east horizon, a multitude of wind turbines were blinking rhythmically, ruby red lights announcing the presence of the great towers that were otherwise invisible in the dark.  The wind field was vast, too many lights to count, a maze of intersections it seemed marked by pulsing aerial red lights.

To the south, a grain elevator along a railroad siding was roasting soybeans and corn.  The steam plume from that operation rose five-hundred feet above the plain and was clearly defined – it looked like a kaiju stalking the prairie, Godzilla or another monster of that sort, with a blunt forearm protruding from the main steam-column.  (From another angle, the pillar of steam loomed over the plain like a immense cactus - the top and edges of the cloud were incised into the cold air giving the apparition the character of something solid, clearly defined, and monumental.) 

The dark plain with little centers of industry brightly lit in the darkness opened up before my car.  The farmsteads sleeping on the prairie were dim and gloomy, mostly lit by the single bulb, glacial blue, of a yard-light.

                                                                       

13.

Coming into Osage, Victorian mansions reared up along the road.  A block south of the intersection, a historic building with elaborate cornices and gothic, pointed windows (shaped like praying hands) stood offset from the roadway passing through town.  This is the Cedar Valley Seminary, an alma mater to the “son of the middle border”, Hamlin Garland. A shapely Christmas tree, slender and fragrant-looking stood in one of the tall windows above the front door.  The building gives the impression of being very heavy but, perhaps, that is merely a result of my knowledge that the structure was, in fact, moved from somewhere in the country into town.  I recall seeing pictures of that process with the structure unsteadily perched on double-wide trailers with house-high tires, men on hoists riding alongside the vehicle on the highway shoulders to raise the powerlines where they might interfere with the transit of the structure.  I would not have considered the weight of the building but simply taken it for granted if I had not known about the seminary being uprooted and, then, pushed and pulled to its present location.

The roads were empty: New Year’s Day still an hour before sunrise.

14.

If sunrises were like eclipses, phenomenon available to the eye only once every twenty years, the wealthy would pay a hundred-thousand dollars to see the spectacle of the sun climbing out from under the horizon amidst gem-cut facets of violet and pink radiance.  To the East, the clouds covering the sky were slit open along the horizon.   A sliver of sky, two or three finger’s width from my vantage, was visible along the horizon and the blue zone became pink, then, rose-colored, and, at last, a brilliant, exuberant red creating the optical illusion that the sun was drenching either the surface of a body of water or the white canvas of snow drifts with a dense scarlet infusion, a color that seemed unnatural like neon.  Again and again as I glanced to the East, I saw the dawn flaring across what seemed to be vacant waste of snow or caught in the lens of a mysterious body of water – in fact, the effect was merely the rising sun tinting the breadth of sky visible between the snow-edged horizon and the leaden clouds covering most of the heavens.  The cloud-fabric split open and, in the fissures, the sky was glazed with salmon-pink and green and a fluent wash of pale blue.  In a previous sentence, I characterize the effect of dawn as “merely the rising sun”, but the word “merely” is a misnomer for something that was colossal and profound, the rays of dawn striking chords on the horizon and clouds glowing with a synesthesia of deep resonant tones edged with delicate evanescent mists, pentatonic scales delivering colors such as one might see on Japanese ceramics, earthy green and brown crowned with reds all fused with purplish froth.  The horizon sky-swath sprayed horizontal rays across the land and, for an instant, the palms and fingers of snow glowed with an unearthly radiance and,then, the show was over, the auroras departing as if sucked back into the cold, frozen earth.  The day looked exhausted and had a leaden aspect.  The highways flowed away from under my tires.  Above a Godzilla monster of steam and smoke flowing  as a torrent into the sky above an ethanol plant, the clouds were striated, frayed into a skylight overhead – the effigy was no longer shadowy but now sharp-edged, boiling with ribs and blisters of heat bulging into the cold sky.  

15.

The snow and ice were burned away south of Waterloo, Iowa.  The earth was black or brown with scuffed fields, and dense tangles of charred-looking woods divided the landscape into plots of cultivated land.  I thought that the shattered thatch in the fields, the drizzle of hay and golden straw, the withered clusters of trees alongside railroad tracks were assembled into a sum that resembled one of Kiefer’s big dark canvases, a world carbonized by acetylene torch with molten lead drizzling out of the strangulated sky.  It seemed as if I were driving through a Kiefer painting, although, in fact, the artist’s late style is something close to a repudiation of the effects in his early and mature paintings.  I would learn this in St. Louis, a fact repudiating any facile equation between the wintry world and Kiefer’s recent paintings.

Central Iowa’s industrialized core beats in two elliptically shaped hearts – there is the Ames to Des Moines corridor and the built-up commercial sector running for about sixty miles from the first light industrial factories and trucking firms north of Cedar Rapids through Iowa City and, then, south another fifteen miles where the freeway passes through nondescript office parks for insurance companies, engineering and architectural consultants, and high-tech headquarters.  Beyond the influence of the Cedar Rapids to Iowa City corridor, the highway seems to ascend to a flat plain, above the ridges and valleys dissected by rivers.  This plain is broad and featureless, populated by big farms located among their shelterbelts and small cities.  The freeway here is relatively new – the first few times I drove this way, two-lane state highways connected the centers of villages and towns, the road proceeding point by point to Hannibal, Missouri where a four-land road ran south into the west suburbs of St. Louis.  Some time in the last 25 years, a new freeway has been built to bypass the small cities and towns and the road runs flat, fast, and unobstructed over the terrain to link with the high-speed thoroughfare at Hannibal.  The new freeway is dull – the small towns are merely specks on the horizon and there is nothing much to see in the foreground but barren soybean and corn fields.

Missouri’s border in this area is the Des Moines River, an ancient-looking and turgid body of water that looks more like a lake surrounded by low, clay and loess banks.  After passing vast sheds of fireworks on the state-line, the freeway runs parallel to the old river-road in this area, a curving two-lane blacktop highway that winds in and out of low wooded bluffs marking the west boundary of the Mississippi River plain.  Among the bluffs, there are old, embattled dairy farms, some half-hidden trailer houses, and small churches of indistinct denomination, sheds with white steeples tucked into the hills.  Tributary streams to the Mississippi flow down through the hills and the freeway crosses many narrow ravines in which these rivers flow.  The country seems deserted and remains mostly empty until the freeway stalls out among the five traffic lights controlling access to (and past) Hannibal.     

Somewhere a little north or south of Hannibal, a sign points the way to Eolia.  Near the turn-off to Eolia, a big billboard shows three birds black as crows with bright cartoon eyes.  The sign reads: BLACK VULTURES HARMING YOUR LIVESTOCK? We can help!  The vultures look eager and friendly, like hunting dogs about to be unleashed.  

16.

The suburbs of St. Louis form a half-circle extending far to the West of the downtown city under the arch on the Mississippi.  There are no suburban areas immediately to the East of the river – the once vibrant city of East St. Louis in Illinois has completely collapsed into green fields mapped by a grid of rubble-filed trenches that were once streets.  Accordingly, any growth in the area must flare out to the West as towns that become increasingly rural and diffuse where the freeway passes through Lake St. Louis and, then, angles east toward downtown.  It takes an hour to traverse this zone.  As the interstate approaches the river, the neighborhoods deteriorate and, at last, the freeway is a groove sliding through a vast residential city comprised of tiny brick houses, like ovens or mausoleums, set side-by-side on postage stamp lots.  There are two things to notice about this city: the houses are revised slave cabins, uncomfortably small and crowded together and everything is built from brick.  At the turn-of-the-century, St. Louis was famous for producing millions of tons of fine brick in its river-side kilns – this building material is responsible for the city hall in Milwaukee and its dark castellated breweries as well as well as innumerable houses and public buildings throughout the Midwest.  The mansions in St. Paul on Summit Avenue are made from this material  

At the heart of the slave city, I exit the freeway and drive for several miles through an urban wasteland where even the churches have been burned to brown shells of ever-enduring brick, the stuff of eternity so long as eternity isn’t more than 3000 years,  ruins interspersed among ghostly ragged cemeteries and abandoned foundries.  Then, the University district is on-hand and, in the course, of six blocks the neighborhood becomes funky with retro buildings decorated with neon signs: tuxedo rental, a miniature golf course, upscale ethnic restaurants and Asian noodle places where there are broad lawns ascending to the Parthenons of Academia.  My hotel is here, a new highrise displaying a 20 foot sphere on its roof shaped like the moon turning on its axis.  It’s two in the afternoon when I park my car and hike through a tunnel cut through the building to the registration desk of the Moonrise Hotel.  No one seems registered at the hotel and the lobby and restaurant are empty.  My legs hurt from being flexed for eight hours and I am limping badly.  There is a black woman at the check-in desk who greets me.  A row of big silk screens of the moon line the wall, craters and mountains grinning at me as I pull out my wallet to find my driver’s license as identification for my reservation.

For some reason, my hands feel numb and I can’t slide the license out of my wallet.  I’m trembling.  The clerk notices my discomfiture.  “I got you, honey,” the Black woman says.  “I got your back, honey.”

I’m sure I look disheveled with purple bags under my eyes and hair all disarranged and my hip aches so that I walk with a decidedly asymmetrical limp.  My duffel bag has slipped out of my hands and lies entangled around my ankles.  I smell bad and feel disoriented.  My posture is stooped, undoubtedly bad with my head rolled forward over slumped shoulders.  Fifty years ago, the poet told me that the royal road to health and self-esteem was a good, erect posture.  He said this could be achieved by tightening the muscles of one’s belly and squaring the shoulders.   I should perform this exercise except, I fear, it is too late for me.  

Someone said: “An aged man is a paltry thing / a tattered coat upon a stick.”

Being there

comprised of: An enthroned Slaveholder –A vanished neighborhood – The Atrocity Exhibition: “they are eating the dogs!”– Medicinal marijuana – Khylan, the budtender – Pearl products – A beggar outside the Moonrise – Joint pain – Hemp: Staff – Anselm K. – Cass Gilbert’s “The Sculpture Rotunda” – The blessing of ruins – The empty and headless Women of Antiquity – “These Fragments I have shored against my ruins” – The King levitates into the sky

17.

I visited St. Louis with my daughter Angelica in August, that is, about four-and-a-half months before my trip to see the Kiefer exhibition.  On that trip, we walked around the Missouri Botanical Gardens and my left leg became very sore – from knee to hip and into the small of my back, I felt pain and mid-afternoon had to return to the hotel, the Moonrise, to take a nap.  I wasn’t capable of implementing my plan to tour the Missouri Historical Museum, located about 18 blocks from the hotel on the edge of Forest Park.  This troubled me and, so, the first thing I did after reaching my room was to drink some tap water and, then, hurry down to my car so that I could correct this deficit in my earlier visit.

The History Museum presents the facade of a Greek or Roman temple to the boulevard skirting the park.  The peristyle is three stories high with the spaces between columns knit together by big panels of glass.  Administrative-looking wings flank the portico and there’s a new wing at the building’s rear elevation, a stack of modernist floors under a flat Bauhaus roof sutured to the main building by blue-tinted skyways. 

The grand marble steps leading into the building’s peristyle are obsolete, too hard to maintain in Winter and not handicap-accessible, and, so, the museum is entered from the rear.  This leads to a puzzling first impression.  The path into the building passes over elaborate mosaic floors into a space supported by flowery Corinthian columns that support a grandiose barrel vault lined with bands of more mosaic.  A huge figure looms over the visitors, enigmatic and seen from the back as a throne surmounted by a figure’s head and shoulders.  There’s an Egyptian aspect to the figure, a naive, hieratic representation of a ruler – it’s like a sculpture of Memnon or some forgotten pharaoh, weathered to a faceless heap of ruined rock beside the sleek muddy Nile.  In fact, the statue is a monumental representation of Thomas Jefferson marble seated on a marble throne – the thing looks a bit like Abraham Lincoln as he appears in the Memorial at the nation’s capitol, a benign figure atop a huge featureless throne.  Of course, Jefferson is now a controversial figure because of his singularly hypocritical attitude about slavery.  Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and 1804 and, therefore, his figure is associated both with St. Louis in general, the so-called “Gateway City” to the West, and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition that was held in Forest Park, the huge urban reserve surrounding the History Museum.  The laudatory text on the sculpture’s plinth has to be corrected by a new, more politically correct, explanation as to Jefferson in his role as slave-holder.  In fact, there are several new signs posted around the base of the figure reminding viewers of the man’s perfidy.  None of this touches Jefferson himself who rises above the controversy with bland, unwrinkled features, a neat, gentle giant under the high barrel arch. 

Nine-years after the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, profits of the fair were devoted to the construction of the Jefferson Pavilion that is now the core of the History Museum.  The figure weighs 16 tons and was carved by an Austrian sculptor named Karl Bitter for the marble and colored glass pavilion that opened in 1913.

18.

The Museum itself is about what one would expect.  Lucky Lindbergh’s plane, “The Spirit of St. Louis” hangs like a big, battered kite over the entrance. (It’s a replica, just like the aircraft at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport – the original graces the Smithsonian.)  An exhibition about an African-American neighborhood called Mill Creek explains how urban renewal destroyed a poor, but vibrant community.  The show is technical, addressing questions involving gentrification, slum remediation, and restrictive racial covenants and I thought it was fascinating, but a little disheartening.  (There were many maps, deeds, architectural diagrams and the like - most of the documentation is photographs of Black folk going about their daily business: church choirs, jazz bands in honky-tonks, small businesses and schools).  The inhabitants of the ghetto were just displaced to another more remote slum. Some of the residents ended up in the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, a notorious failure that was blasted into rubble in 1970 – these were racially segregated skyscraper apartments: Pruitt was for Blacks; Igoe was for White folk.  

There are halls full of artifacts: guns, elaborate dresses, Lewis’ telescope and Clark’s long gun, a sledge that was pulled by ponies to the North Pole, radioactive teeth, political memorabilia and the like, all of this junk displayed in well-lit, neatly labeled cases and dioramas.  Marvin Perkins of the Mutual of Omaha show Wild Kingdom, a staple of my childhood family viewing (it was on Sundays just before  The Wonderful World of Disney) has an exhibit dedicated to him – and the great zookeeper’s huge Mexican wolf, rears up behind a picture of Perkins cradling a baby baboon.  It’s all very enlightened, informative, and politically progressive.  But I haven’t really come to see these things.  My interest is focused on the big exhibit about the 1904 exposition (April 30 to December 1, 1904).  You can hear the exhibit singing to you from within the recesses of its long gallery: Judy Garland intones “Meet me in St. Louis, Louis / Meet me at the Fair” as well as “Have yourself a merry, little Christmas” on video displays among the artifacts.  Under a dome, as if in a chapel, a model of the fairgrounds, almost 1400 acres, is studded with small numbered kiosks and pavilions.  People are peering into the three-dimensional map as if it were a deep, shadowy crater.  There are innumerable photographs of the baroque-styled buildings and pavilions comprising the fair as well as the central basin into which crystal rivers cascade over marble steps, a high range of cupolas, towers, and temples forming a luminous backdrop to the falling water.  (Scott Joplin composed a famous ragtime number in commemoration of the artificial waterfalls; it’s called “The Cascades”) At the fair, you could buy ruby-red chalices and goblets personalized with your name engraved on the glass – millions of people must have bought these souvenirs because cases are full of them, tiers and tiers of deep red glass vessels, alongside engraved silver spoons, and commemorative plates.  There are posters everywhere and paintings, everything serenaded by Judy Garland in the melancholy Vincente Minnelli musical “Meet me at St. Louis”.  The young actress and her boyfriend stand at a graceful marble balustrade and survey the spectacle – the first time in history so many electric lights were deployed – and in the blue distance, colonnades and waterfalls and classical statuary adorn a hillside promenade where a thousand elegantly dressed people are strolling.  “It’s so beautiful,” Judy Garland says to the boy, “So very beautiful.”

19.

J. G. Ballard wrote a group of short stories called The Atrocity Exhibition.  The bulk of the History Museum displays on the 1904 Exposition fall into the category of documentation (and criticism) of so-called human zoo aspects of the Exposition.  The Fair occurred during the controversy over Darwin’s theories of evolution and at the height of the Eugenics movement.  Accordingly, the public was interested in viewing so-called “primitive” people, that is, racial specimens embodying a less evolved kind of human being.  For this reason, the Exposition featured a number of enclaves where visitors could observe tribal people confined within exhibits simulating their “natural habitats.”  Some Apaches, including the renowned Geronimo, were on show in twig and root wickiups in a so-called “Apache Village”.  You could see Arabian bedouins, so-called “Esquimaux” (“Eskimos”) in fake igloos – the heat was sweltering – a Japanese and Chinese village, and most notably several large-scale Filipino encampments featuring tribal villagers kidnaped in the remote mountains in that archipelago.  The Filipino tribesman were a very popular and acclaimed exhibit – the United States had recently been involved in a genocidal conflict with indigenous revolutionaries in the Philippines prosecuted between 1899 and 1902.   It was important to justify atrocities committed against the rebels, including wholesale massacres, by establishing that the tribal villagers were a sub-species of humanity, that is, less than fully human.  In the exhibit, the tribesmen were invited to interact with visitors; guides said that in the jungle, the people lived in trees and ate dogs.  In the Museum, there is a picture of a well-dressed, buxom lady teaching a handsome boy wearing a floppy hat how to perform the cakewalk.  Both the boy and the White lady are smiling and the couple hold hands.  It’s noteworthy that the woman is teaching the teenager the “cakewalk” (a “prance” as it was called by Scott Joplin) and not a polka or waltz.  The “cakewalk” was a companion dance performed in formal clothing and a mainstay of minstrel shows.

It is worth pointing out that, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase exhibition, Manila, the capitol of the Philippines was a Spanish-speaking Catholic metropolis with more that 500,000 people and extensive trading partners both in the West and China.  No one was living in trees there or eating dogs.  However, the White Supremacist ideology articulated at the fair had a long afterlife – one of the curators writes that, when she was growing up in the fifties in Milwaukee, many of her classmates believed that Filipinos lived in trees dining on dogs.  

At the time of the great Fair, Chinese immigration to the United States was banned.  In the Chinese village, dominated by a great Imperial gate, women flittered around mimicking the painful, mincing gait of concubines with bound feet.  When the fair closed its gates on December 1, 1904, the inhabitants of the Chinese village were lined-up, counted, and, then, put in handcuffs so that they couldn’t escape into the general population.  The people were boarded on trains, sent to San Francisco, where they were promptly deported.  The Japanese were treated a little better because they were thought to be more closely related genetically to Caucasians.  Specimen Japanese managed a tea garden.

20.

The most famous human in the Fair’s captivity was Ota Benga, a Mbuti tribesman exhibited as a Congolese pygmy.  Benga was captured in the rain forest in a slaver raid in which his wife and two children were killed.  Benga’s teeth had been ritually filed to sharp fangs and, so, when he smiled, his appearance was grotesque and startling.  The slave traders sold Ota Benga to a impresario named Verner and Benga’s proprietor, as it were, made lucrative contract with the Exposition to display the young man as an African cannibal.  At first, Benga enjoyed the attention lavished upon him by fairgoers, but, later, he soured on the exhibition – he displayed a considerable degree of agency in that he would not open his mouth to display his sharpened teeth without being first paid a nickel for his services.  Similarly, he charged for photographs.

After the Fair, Benga lived for several years at the Smithsonian Institute in which he inhabited a diorama with some stuffed animals and a mannequin representing a Pygmy infant.  (Benga was four foot eleven inches tall and weighed 103 pounds) During these exhibitions, there were protests, including a number sponsored by African-American clergymen.  Reading notices about those protests, it’s difficult to measure whether the ecclesiastical objections were founded upon the racist exploitation obvious in these exhibits or the implied endorsement of Darwin’s theories.  After about six years at the Smithsonian, Ota Benga was sent to the Bronx Zoo where he was hired to manage some of the animals.  The Zoo quickly learned that it could exploit the little “cannibal” by displaying him in the orangutan cage.  Benga liked the orangutans and got along well with them.  There is a photograph of him cradling a baby ape in his arms.  The staff at the Zoo didn’t lock the cage and Benga was free to promenade all around the zoological gardens.  He was also given a small bow and arrow with which to demonstrate his hunting skills.  Benga’s behavior was erratic and he began shooting short sharp-tipped arrows at zoogoers.

When the situation became unsustainable, Benga was sent to an asylum for colored orphans.  A rich man adopted him and paid to have his teeth capped so that he would not present such an outlandish appearance.  Benga learned enough English to be employed and he began work in a tobacco factory in Lynchberg, Virginia  In 1913, Benga had raised funds to return by ship to the Belgian Congo.  But before he could embark, World War I intervened and ship travel to Africa was impossible. On March 20, 1916, Benga knocked the dental caps off his teeth, lit a fire and danced around it before shooting himself in the heart with a borrowed pistol.  He was buried in an unmarked grave.  Nonetheless, someone uprooted the grave and stole his body.

21.

My brother-in-law has suffered for many years with Parkinson’s disease.  He told me that his gait, deranged by his illness, is much better, more direct, and fluid, when he smokes marijuana.  This led me to decide that I would try marijuana for sleep and to manage the pain that I feel when I have to walk any distance.  (I am uncertain as to whether my current difficulties walking are the result of arthritis and age or stem from the three falls that I experienced around Thanksgiving.)  Before I fell, I was able to walk my dog, a large and rambunctious Labrador Retriever, about 30 blocks a day.  Ice everywhere has kept me from venturing out with my dog.  But, when a thaw encouraged me to walk Mishka, my dog eight or nine blocks, I felt crippled, afflicted by significant hip and knee pain, ambulating, it seemed, with joints hollowed out by arthritis.  There is a cannabis dispensary directly across from the Moonrise Hotel and, so, after returning from the History Museum, I limped up from the parking lot behind the hotel and dragged myself across the street to the dispensary.

The dispensary operated by SWADE occupies what seems to be an old church building.  The place has narrow windows drawing to a gothic point at their top and the facade is made of dignified courses of brown and reddish brick.  A white marquee casts a little wan light on the sidewalk in front of the place.  A miniature golf course is crammed into the storefront next to SWADE; there’s an animated marquee that shows a man in golf togs putting.  The holes are plush and green and arranged in front of a long, fully stocked bar.  On the other side of the dispensary, there is cupcake shop only open after nine o’clock pm.

I hauled my aching legs up the steps to the door of the dispensary and went inside.  After a short anteroom with white-washed walls, the corridor ended at a security station.  Behind glass, a gangster -rap sort of guy with flat menacing face glared at me.  The security glass around him was threaded with green and blue reinforcement wires and a panel of monitors flickered in front of the man.  To the side of his cage, a big placard four feet by four feet announced in small type the regulations that apply to cannabis sale in Missouri.  I perused the placard and saw that you can not purchase cannabis in Missouri except for medicinal purposes and that all patrons must present a picture ID and a doctor’s prescription before being allowed to enter the shop.  Obviously, I don’t have a script for marijuana and, so, after reading those requirements, I paused and began to back away from the security cage in which the menacing Black bouncer was located.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I guess you have to present a prescription to you before entering,” I told the man.

He shrugged.  “Do you want to buy weed or not?”

I told him that I wanted to buy weed.  He said he would buzz me into the dispensary.  

22. 

The buzzer on the door was loud and it announced my arrival, although no one, it seemed, turned in my direction. The door was heavy and fought back and so, for a moment, I wrestled with it, my wounded gait ungainly.  The place was bright white with some flowers on end tables, a couch, and a framed picture of a man with a pointed red Van Dyke beard putting his long arm around Cheech Marin.  Three African American dudes, probably all about 26, were standing behind short pulpits, giving advice to the customers.  The lay-out was like an unimpeachably clean delicatessen with the merchandise on some steel shelves behind the clerks at their podiums.  I suppose there were cameras watching from the walls.  A depraved-looking couple, who seemed already high, were volubly bickering with one another and the clerk.  The woman had olive skin and was wearing military fatigues and her teeth were bad.  A few other couples were aimlessly walking around the display room.  Apparently, people who buy dope are thrift oriented and I could see that there were all sorts of bargains on offer: “Weed Wednesday” when no other discounts apply but all wares are thirty percent off, first-timer discounts of up to 22%, and a customer loyalty punch card promotion that earns the customer 3 ounces of primo weed absolutely free after 20 punches.  I stood in line behind a kid carrying a backpack who looked like a college student.  I was 40 years older than anyone else in the dispensary.

When it was my turn, the young man at the podium, henna-dyed dreadlocks draped over his shoulders, asked me what I wanted.  I said that I needed something for sleep and dope that might help with chronic pain .  I said: “My hip is all fucked up” pointed to my left lower extremity.  The kid was conscientious but seemed a little puzzled by my request.  Nonetheless, he said that he could help me, left his station, and came back with several triangular boxes labeled “PEARL”.  He asked me more about the pain.  I said it was a hollow feeling arthritic pain that made me limp.  He clucked his teeth sympathetically and asked me how experienced I was with marijuana.  “Not too experienced; it’s been thirty years or more.”  This concerned him and he departed from the podium, removing one of the prism-shaped cardboard boxes.  “This is not for you,” he told me.

The young man with the dreadlocks came back with another triangular box, the color of raspberry, and, also, labeled “PEARL.”  On the side of the box, one of PEARL products was called “Sleepy”, a bit like a dwarf in a Walt Disney movie; the other box said: “Relax.”  The kid took my ID, carried it off-stage, and, then, returned.  He didn’t try to sign me up for the place’s loyalty program punch card.  He told me to take one “Sleepy” an hour before going to bed.  With respect to the “Relax” gummies, he said that I should eat one when I wanted to relax and have near me plenty of water “to stay hydrated” and some “healthy and nutritious snacks for the munchies.”  The two packages of gummies cost me $44.95.  New Years day was also “Tasty Thursday” with 20% off all products.  I didn’t get the “first timer” discount.  On the receipt, I noticed a couple of St. Louis city taxes totaling about $3.25.  The kid showed me the receipt and, then, displayed it to the other clerk to his side.  Apparently, the clerks are under continuous camera and co-worker monitoring.  From the receipt, I learned that the clerk with whom I had done the transaction was labeled a “Budtender” – Khylan was my budtender on January 1, 2026 and the transaction was booked at 5:25 pm.

If you want to avail yourself of this dispensary, Dear Reader, you may go to the place in Delmar at 6166 Delmar Blvd, St. Louis, Missouri.

23. 

My budtender courteously asked if I wanted a small bag for my two purchases.  “Yes,” I said.  He put the Pomegranate Pearls and the Blackberry Lemonade Sleepy Pearls in a white bag that he handed to me.

I went out onto the cold street, crossed mid-block, sighing with relief that this transaction was completed and, apparently, successful.  My pain now would subside and the dope would drive the aches and limp away from me.  I felt optimistic.  But my gait was wrecked by hip and back pain and I limped to the center of the street where the concrete was grooved for a street car that sometimes rattled up and down the avenue.  I thought that it would be unfortunate if I caught my heel in that furrow holding the metal rail and fell in the middle of the avenue.  But I made it across the street and, then, hitching up my trousers, hopped toward a Pho place that was brightly lit and full of small families, graduate students, it seemed, husband and wife couples with one or two badly behaved children.  When I got into the brightly lit restaurant, I stood in line at the counter to order.  The sharp-featured woman ahead of me seemed vaguely angry and she told the kid behind the cash register that she was a vegan and wanted to make sure her pho and spring rolls were suitable for her to eat.  The kid behind the counter also had dreadlocks and would not have been out-of-place across the street at the cannabis dispensary.

I went to my table in the crowded restaurant.  It smelled of ginger, old frying oil, and garlic.  When I sat down, I looked at the little bag in my hand.  The world “MARIJUANA” was printed seven times on the white bag in 3/4 inch red letters stacked on top of each other.  The fourth iteration of the word was printed in very bright red so that the word seemed to shout out its contents from the front of the bag.  In smaller letters under the last “MARIJUANA” printed on the bag, smaller red block letters said “Have a Nice Day”.  The white bag was as conspicuous as possible and I nervously looked around me at the little families enjoying their broth and noodles.  No one was paying any attention. We always think we are more interesting than we are.   

24.

A little later, coming from the noodle restaurant, I encountered a beggar.  It was dark and the lights around the door to the Moonrise Hotel were dimmed.  On the side of a building, perhaps forty feet above me, a mural of Josephine Baker flashed her dazzling smile at me.

The beggar emerged from an alcove near the entry, calling to me as if he were an old acquaintance.  It took me a moment to understand him and, by then, I was engaged with the man.  He told me that he had just arrived in the City and that it was colder than he expected – there was something, he said, wrong with his shoes.  The whole encounter was strangely blurred.  I think the beggar, who I couldn’t exactly see, was importuning me for money to buy new shoes.  

Of course, I felt resentful.  My left knee and hip were aching and I thought of an activist who told me that you should never give money to beggars – it’s the collective responsibility of the State to care for the indigent, the activist said, and that duty should not be deflected onto private citizens.  Gandhi, I think, once remarked that there’s no point in contributing to hospitals for the poor: “Why would you obstruct the paying of a debt?” the holy man said, referring evidently to the laws of karma.  So I was armed with objections to the beggar’s plea, but, felt, nonetheless, that these were merely excuses, arguments in which I didn’t at all believe.  And I had driven all the way to St. Louis to see an art show, was staying in a hotel that cost me $150 a night, and was carrying a bag crumpled so that the legend on it couldn’t be clearly seen, $46.98 of marijuana in hand and the poor man standing in the shadows didn’t have proper shoes or, so, he said.  I was well-fed, curry chicken from the noodle place, and had just purchased a book (for thirty dollars) about the 1904 exposition and its zoos for non-white humans.  The non-white human standing in front of me was clad in darkness – only his eyes glinted a little.  I felt guilty about my ghastly self-indulgence and, disgusted at myself, handed the man a twenty and a ten.   

“Bless you,” he said, as he scurried away, dark to dark in the deep shadow.

25.

I slept poorly, afflicted by joint pain.  When I woke at 3 in the morning, I was warm, sweating, with burning eyes.  I thought to myself that I had left my Minnesota Driver’s License with my budtender at the  SWADE dispensary.  The rational part of my consciousness told me that I was raving, that, surely, the license was in my wallet behind a plastic sleeve – of course, there was no reason to check my wallet.  But...what if my identity had been stolen?  What if Khylan had assumed my features and personality?  What, if even now, he was budtending at the dispensary, selling weed to people who stepped nervously into that well-lit room.  What if he and I were the same, indistinguishable?  Had there been something just faintly sinister in Josephine Baker’s face beaming from the high side of the building.  I thought it would be a wretched capitulation to neurosis to rise and stagger to my trousers cast off on the floor to check my wallet.  A glowing digital display showed me that it was 3:15 a.m.  I succumbed, got of bed, and checked inside my wallet for the license embedded there.

26.

About 200 pavilions and kiosks and display palaces comprised the Louisiana Purchase exposition in St. Louis in 1904.   The structures were quickly erected on wooden frames that were covered in roofing paper.  A substance called “staff” made from plaster-of-paris mixed with various kinds of vegetable fibers, mostly hemp and jute was the primary building material.  The material is thickened to the consistency of molasses and, then, can be sculpted like terra cotta.  The baroque finials and colonnades and the figures of deities and great men were all shaped from this substance that was applied like adobe to the lathe and tar-paper armatures of the pavilions. (I wonder whether you could get high smoking this stuff.)

Staff was invented in Paris for the 1878 exhibition there.  It was used in all major expositions and world fairs around the turn of the 20th century.  The so-called “White City” of the Chicago Columbian exposition in1893 was made of this material.  Like adobe or terra cotta, staff is ephemeral – rain erodes it and, by the end of the St. Louis fair in December 1904, many of the structures in Forest Park were decaying, cleft with fissures, and slumping into dirty white puddles of melted staff. 

The only surviving exemplar of the beaux arts extravagance of the Exposition is the St. Louis Museum of Art housing the Kiefer exhibition that I had come to see.  That heap of a building, with an immense classical portico upheld by five Corinthian columns that further, supports a barrel vault with clerestory windows as a sort of crown, was built of marble, for the ages, as it were.  The two wings flanking the portico are windowless like a marble mausoleum or a great blind sarcophagus – it’s also stone and, in 1904, would have crowned the crest of the hill above a glistening white colonnade arrayed over the famous step-cascades and the fountains in the basin, broad as a lake below.  

The basin is still there, and, when I stood on the ridge before entering the Kiefer show, I saw the white water spurting up in pale pillars over the gloomy lake reflecting a cloudy and heartless sky.

27.

Five vast Kiefer paintings line the walls of the imperial chamber at the top of the marble steps reached by climbing up the pediment to the doors that open into the museum.  The room extends from front elevation to the back of the building, perhaps eighty feet to another three glass doors that would open if they could onto a sere and wintry lawn, hedges, a blasted garden. The paintings, an inadequate name for these cosmic landscapes, are identically sized, probably 30 feet tall and 20 feet wide.  Each painting occupies one of the barrel vault recesses from which this great space, like a Roman basilica, is comprised.  The works radiate an imperial splendor commensurate and, even, exceeding the space in which they are displayed and, in fact, the canvases are site-specific – the shape and size of the paintings fit perfectly into the rotunda-like entrance foyer; they seem proportioned to the space, more like mighty frescos than things hung on a wall.  These are recent works – made in 2024 and 2025.  A retrospective of earlier work, as well as several majestic recent paintings is beyond the entrance into the Max Beckmann galleries, occupying big rooms deeper in the museum.

Kiefer has been fantastically prolific.  With his studio of assistants, he has been able to turn out monumentally sized landscapes by the dozens, seared and blasted and gravid with great tongues of molten lead spilled all over the canvas surfaces   His signature works are field paintings in two respects: first, they are often literally images of landscapes or fields that have been tortured with acetylene torches and metal lava; second, the paintings have an aspect like Jackson Pollock – that is, they are “all over” paintings, presenting impasto surfaces of dense congealed paint, sometimes limned with gold leaf or pale bone-ash or bronze reefs and shoals of straw.  The paintings, often referring to a malign Deutsch history of nationalism, fascism and two world wars, are allegories for the destructive energies inherent in German philosophical idealism – that is, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger.  The names of these thinkers are scrawled in labyrinths of char and excoriated paint – in one huge canvas in the retrospective part of the show, a sort of ashen rainbow extends from grey fields of an eerie Elysian aspect, still waters and monochrome meadows into what seems to be a hurricane of dark wind and rain, the sky blackened by the storm of the Nazi-Zeit.  These objects are, at once, sublime as well as profoundly rebarbative.  You have the sense that if you brushed up against the surfaces of these things, you would be flayed, skin left dangling from your raw flesh in bloody ribbons.  

For more than 30 years, Kiefer had gone about his hermetic work, really a kind of alchemy involving metals and gold, at immense studios that he has decorated with cocoon-like bodies plane fuselage, teetering 60 foot towers representing kabbalistic aspirations toward the heavens, vast quarries and crypt-like underground tunnels.  These are artworks that cover several acres, erected around studios like airplane hangars, where Kiefer and his helpers make the pictures.  He produces series of sculptures, for instance the “Women of Antiquities” series, plaster dresses with emblems on headless shoulders– a whip for a saint that was flogged to death, Duerer’s angular stone signifying melancholy, bundles of twigs, or piles of lead-forged books prickly with broken glass.  His metier is the sublime, immense hellscapes that show signs of fire and abrasive death.  Ordinarily, these images have a single-minded intensity – this mirrors the railroad tracks that Kiefer obsessively portrays, iron-rails that converge at a horizon where soot, slag, and ash spill upward into grim, decomposing skies.   All lines rise up the wall of solder and dripping molten lead to converge at the concentration camp.  

So this show raises the question of whether Kiefer has mellowed or, even, sold out.  The artist is 80 and his recent work, most particularly the monumental works on display in the rotunda (they are called “Becoming the River”) are ravishing, brightly colored with greens and blues and, lit from within, it seems, by square yards of gold leaf.  The dense encrustation of gold gives the huge paintings something of the aspect of sacred icons, although the precious metal is applied profusely, as an impressive display of wealth.  Similarly, the acidic and metallic greens, not vegetal but the color of oxidizing metal are made from the sediments of copper that have been electrolyzed.  These sediments, the result of chemical processing, are vivid and menacing at the same time.  Has Kiefer gone soft in his old age?  Has he renounced the volcanoes of history and become, god forbid, a kind of landscape painter?  The St. Louis Museum of Art is free, always free and doesn’t even charge for special exhibitions like the Kiefer retrospective.  When I came up the steps, passed through the heavy entrance doors, I found the lobby full of people most of them conversing in awed whispers.  Kiefer has been a bit out of favor for the last twenty years.   His trademark painting are too ubiquitous – even mid-size art museums own one or two of them; for instance, there are a couple of very large apocalyptic landscapes in Des Moines.  He’s too prolific and facile in a way.  Therefore, I would guess that most of the people in the foyer didn’t know much about the artist and, surely, weren’t conversant with his private mythology of Wagnerian Rhine maidens, World War Two battlefields, and recondite allusions to German poets like Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachman.  At least three-quarters of the people in the entry space had just wandered into the museum on a whim, concerned that, perhaps, the sky was darkening to leak snow onto the brown landscape.  The St. Louis zoo is a few hundred yards away – an iron aviary is the only  other artifact remaining from the 1904 exposition. Some families seemed to have come up the hill from the zoo and they stood in little baffled groups, gobsmacked by monumental paintings.  Many of the visitors didn’t seem to be art lovers – people were wearing sports jerseys or hooded sweatshirts and brassy-looking Black girls were typing messages on their phones.  Everyone was impressed by the size and sheer beauty of the paintings.  People whispered as if they were in church, alternately approaching and retreating from the densely painted surfaces of the canvases, looking, I think, for the proper, definitive range or focal length from which to view the picture – it’s a futile exercise: at six to ten feet, the canvases are entangled ridges and ropes of thick pigment, a maze of paint; at twenty feet, the surfaces coalesce and tower over head and the thick facture of the painting coalescing into a kind of cathedral.     

28.

The five works dominating the rotunda of the art museum are based on the artist’s concept that the great hinge between the Missouri River and the Mississippi, that is, the landscape of St. Louis correlates to the Rhine River in Germany.  The works are aquatic, watery; they flow, although not with turgidity of molten lead, but as backwaters, channels half lacustrine, entrenched between tall trees. Two pictures cover one wall of the basilica-like rotunda; three pictures face those paintings. 

“Am Rhein” appears to be two fifteen foot panels joined in the center.  A life-size figure that is recognizable as Kiefer looks out of green, blue, and black gloom at the viewer.  Kiefer is not an old man but stands facing us in the full pride of his youth.  He wears a sort of dark tunic and his skin, revealed at throat and breast and face is extremely pale, a startling white that is the brightest part of the picture.  The figure stands in reeds on the edge of a tarn that looks furrowed and black.  In the upper panel, a great luminous pool of gold leaf signifies twilight, framed by huge trees that make a kind of graceful parenthesis around the gilded sky.  The trees are deep and dark, enmeshed in shadow and there is a dim lake beyond fringed with more reeds.  The painting’s formula derives from Claude Lorrain, a glowing central void above a landscape comprised of trees and shadowy water.  Kiefer seems to hold a flowering tree in his hand, raising the tree’s slender trunk as if it were Siegfried’s sword.  Beyond the entry leading into the great elliptical chamber – at least this is my impression (it’s likely oblong) – lined with Beckmann canvases, another painting rises, also consisting clearly of two panels stacked one on of the other.  The lower panel shows a mottled deep green sea, patched and turbulent with oxidized copper that impetuously charges a rock-girt coast.  Above the sea, on the pedestal of cliffs, five bunkers stand in a row, laconic concrete structures slit with embrasures that are full of gold leaf simulating sunset which glows against the horizon in abraded splendor.   The higher panel is a map dominated by a nude woman in bas relief, sprawling over the high plains States – her legs fit into the delta where the Mississippi and Missouri join, that is, at St. Louis.  The great lakes are pools of congealed green copper and lettered captions show us where St. Louis is located, New Orleans, and, further, caption the two rivers.  The river nymph is like the figures that one sees in Rome, torpid, languorous gods lolling in the basins of huge fountains.  The relationship between the upper panel with its stylized river goddess (so I assume) and the military bunkers arrayed like futile fortresses on the ledge above the turbulent sea is hard to work out, iconographically obscure – are these structures memories of the defensive bunkers along the Normandy coast or are the concrete walls, roofless, it seems, some sort of abandoned relics of a lost faith?  (In fact, catalog notes tell me that the bunkers are a lock and dam system on the Mississippi just upstream from St. Louis.) This picture is called “Missouri - Mississippi”. 

Facing the shore and the personified map, on the opposite wall, is a canvas labeled “Anselm fuit hic” – that is, Anselm made this.  Dressed in a early 19th century waistcoat, a Rueckenfigur gazes into the gloaming.  The shape of the figure suggests Caspar David Friederich’s “Wanderer” surveying clouds from an aerial perch on the summit of a peak – the painting is in Hamburg, probably Friederich’s most famous composition.  Here the silhouette of the figure is rimmed with glints of gold leaf.  Again, the central void in the picture, brilliant with gold is reminiscent of Claude.  An elegant tapestry of trees frames the glowing traces of the sun that has set in glory – the trees branches are all interwoven and they cradle the twilight among their boughs and leaves.  Next to this picture, the chapel of a high barrel vault cups a dark painting of ink-black waves rolling away from the lower frame to a horizon that is a line beset by reddish yellow flames – it looks like a prairie fire, except the prairie here is the heavy, molasses-colored sea.  Overhead, hanging in the sky like a big, irregular moon, there is a naked boy who seems to be riding on a giant turtle.  The boy looks down from his celestial vantage into the dark sea with its tense, oily waves.  A long caption handwritten in cursive over the boy reads: Fuer Gregory Corso – Spirit is life like a river unafraid at becoming the sea.  (I don’t know what you need to understand about Corso: the poet was a homely old man who died strangely enough in Robbinsdale, Minnesota in 2001.  He was a tough guy, served time in prison where he ran errands for confined mafia bosses, and lived by his wits on the streets.  Although he wasn’t gay, Corso met Alan Ginsberg and flirted with him to cadge beers.  He became one of leading figures of the so-called Beats.)  The last picture in the set of five is very beautiful.  An old iron and steel span has caught the dying sun in the magic hour; the spans of the bridge are dark black, shown as perspective studies with crossing girders and a shapely overhead truss – the spidery assembly mounted on solid dark pylons set in a brilliantly green river.  Gold is profuse in this painting.  The entire upper part of the picture is brilliantly illumined in gold leaf that represents either the first or last light of day.  Standing forth in sculptural relief are three figures, each the size of a man, suspended mid-air in the flood of gold light.  The figures are nude below the belly and their features are enigmatically concealed by swirling, wing-shape cloaks of heavily encrusted copper green and leaden shadow.  Each figure is labeled “Lupegruin (?: the handwriting is unclear), “Cigue” and “Animiki” – the cloak of Cigue is imprinted with a noble face that peers out of the chaos of cape and masked head; maybe, the head is there, maybe it isn’t – it may be an example of a paraeidolic image, just blotches and stray strokes of paint that the eye interprets as the features of one of Plutarch’s noble Greeks or Romans.  The span over the water is the old Clark Street Bridge (named after explorer John Clark of Lewis and Clark fame) – Kiefer saw it from the river during an excursion in 1991 when he was in St. Louis supervising the installation of works in the museum.   The bridge in its steel truss form was demolished in 1994.  

The site-specific suite of works mirror and comment on one another.  Motifs and ideas flash between the big paintings.  Kiefer insisted that they be installed without any barrier between the viewers and the work – there are no stanchions holding people back and away from the enormous pictures that are simply set on the terrazzo floor of the so-called “Sculpture Hall” of the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM as it is called locally).  The intent is to afford access to the paintings so that the viewer becomes immersed in the images, lost in the subtle interplay of subject matter in dialogue with itself.

29. 

Anselm Kiefer was born in March 1945, a month or so before the end of the Second World War.  He grew up among ruins.  In an interview with the BBC in 2024, Kiefer says that he likes ruins.  To him, they are hopeful.  He tells the interviewer that he purposefully ruins his paintings.  For Kiefer,  a ruin is a field of possibility  – it’s not the end of something but a beginning, an emblem for rebuilding.  Kiefer takes a painting and leaves it outside to exfoliated by the rain and snow.  When the painting has been destroyed, it is, thereby, resurrected.

30.

I toured the six or seven large galleries of the retrospective of Kiefer works. The artist is so prolific that the show was nothing like a catalog raisonne of the artist’s work – but it was informative, rife with majestic art works, and provided context for the site-specific “Becoming the Sea” works in the Sculpture Hall.  It is clear that Kiefer’s works from the last decade are much brighter, vibrant, and more colorful that his earlier ouevre.  He makes far more use of gold leaf and the verdigris copper patina.  In one painting, the artist seems encrypted within his work, flat on his back in a cocoon of mummy-colored impasto.  Over his head a bucket can be seen, tilting to pour out a rainbow of colors.  My spoiled joints caused me pain and I let myself down heavily onto benches in the halls remote from the beginning of the exposition.  Sitting didn’t help that much because, after all, I had to drag myself to my feet after resting and, then, limp through remaining galleries.  I spent two-and-a-half hours with Kiefer and didn’t tax myself with viewing other art in the museum.

31. 

Kiefer said that reads lots of poetry and fragments or sherds of verse keep him afloat.  “I desperately cling to those words like a shipwrecked sailor seizes a spar of wood in the sea.”  This is another way of saying what William Carlos Williams insisted upon in “Asphodel that greeny Flower”: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

32.

I had come to the museum early before the lots were full.  My car was parked near the equestrian statue of King St. Louis, close to the entry.  On his regal horse, the King seems to be riding up into the sky.  

I flexed my ruined leg, squealing a little, got in the car and drove out of Forest Park, passing by the zoo.  On the hill above the zoo, I found the exit for the freeway crossing St. Louis and its many suburbs westbound in the direction of Kansas City.   I drove west to Lake St. Louis, the most remote of the suburbs before open country.  At a derelict shopping mall, I exited the freeway and drove north by northwest on Highway 61, the Great River Road.

From there

comprised of: Distances – A Lost Village – Trail not taken – Cigue, the Thunderbird – Another Ghost Town and a man with an axe – The Battle of Athens – A family affair – American Gothic – Fairfield and a Tour of Inflamed Joints –Maharishi U – Yogic Flyers – Transcendent v. Immanent – Complaints – Ice – Levitating

33.

Hannibal is 115 miles from St. Louis.  It’s another 70 to 75 miles from Hannibal to the Iowa border.  

34.

The border between Iowa and Missouri along this route is the Des Moines river.  Before reaching the river, I turned to the east to look at a historic site marked by sign on the freeway.  The county blacktop ran across the flat delta terrain between the two big rivers.  Far away, a grey smudge above some belts of charcoal-colored trees marked the Mississippi.  The blurred grey was river bluffs in Illinois, hills dissected by ravines where lead had been mined before the time of the Civil War.  This is an odd part of the world, haunted by the past.  Among the bluffs stands the white temple rebuilt by the Mormons at Nauvoo, a gleaming alabaster spectacle crowning the hilltop upheld by might pilasters with sun stone effigies on them – the sun stone carvings look like they might have been made by Indians or bronze-age artists at Troy or Hissarlik, big savage faces frowning down on the town erected by the saints, then, abandoned by them, when the LDS pioneers went west.  French-speaking Icarians, then, colonized the empty city, followers of the utopian theorist Fourier who curing cheese in caves dug into the river-bluff hillsides.  The Icarians vanished as well and, then, the place was a sort of ghost town, forlorn except for the occasional Mormon pilgrim.  I was there before a new generation of Mormons bought up all the real estate and set to work raising a facsimile of their 19th century temple complete with a tourist kiosk espousing the importance of family life.  The river-road north winds along hilltops past expensive houses and horse-farms and, then, ends at a crossing near Fort Madison.  The bridge hovers like a gaunt kite over the 19th century towers and sandstone walls of the penitentiary on the Iowa side.  In the Illinois farmland, several roads intersect at Carthage, the town where Joseph Smith and several other prophets were murdered when a crowd stormed the Carthage jail where the Mormons were in custody.  The river-towns are old, much older than the farming villages on the flat land, and they are slung like hammocks across narrow, deep, and wooded ravines with their mouths on the Mississippi.  

Gravel roads run north from the county highway, right-hand intersections among fallow fields left unplowed so that the crop stubble can fertilize the fields.  Turn right, turn left, turn right again and, then, the destination: the Illiniwiek historical site is beside the road, marked by a small parking lot rolled flat in the weeds.  In July 1673, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet encountered a large Indian village on a terrace above a east-west running slough, apparently, an estuary of the Mississippi that was cut off from the main channel and landlocked.  Marquette was a Jesuit missionary; Joliet was a French philosophy student turned fur trader.  Embarking from St. Ignace at the head of Lake Michigan in May 1673, they explored along the rivers, reaching the Mississippi and, then, driving south to what is now Arkansas on a four month tour of exploration.  

The village was large, three-hundred wigwams and longhouse lodges stretching along the terrace overlooking the marshy oxbow lake.  It was apparently an orderly place: the dwellings were laid out in well-regulated columns above the slough with couple of streets running between the procession of  wooden huts above the stagnant water.  (Swampy water is a good neighbor for a village – you can catch frogs and water-fowl for food and weave the marsh reeds into baskets or building materials; the great cities in the valley of Mexico were built on islands and shorelines of shallow lakes and one of the Nahuatl names for city was “place of the reeds.)  The place had probably been founded around 1640 and, by 1683, it was abandoned – by that time, the people who lived there had mostly perished from disease.

“Illiniwiek” or “Illinwek” or “Illiniwe” (from which we derive “Illinois”) – spellings differ.  These people were Algonquin-speaking immigrants from the forests to the east and formed a confederation of about 12 tribes.  They fought the Sioux and Ojibway but were destroyed by their contact with Europeans – in the excavations at the village site, archaeologists have found some glass beads, Jesuit crosses, and other trade items.  There aren’t reliable accounts of what these Indians were like.  By 1834, the Illinois had lost their tribal identity through intermarriage with European settlers and traders and other Indian groups.  The population remaining was deported to Kansas in 1851 where they, more or less, vanished.  

35.  

Marquette and Joliet counted 8000 people dwelling in the village on the slough.  (We don’t know its name.)  This seems an exorbitantly high number when it is considered that the entire confederation probably didn’t exceed 12,500 people, most of them living around Kaskaskia.  My guess is that the number of people living in the town was two or three-thousand at most.  

The historic site has a small dirt parking lot, a kiosk enclosed under a shingled shelter describing the history of the place and a map of the hiking trail.  The path is 1 and a quarter miles looping along the low bluff above the oxbow lake.  When I was at the place, the afternoon was far advanced and my ruined leg was throbbing and I knew that it would be twilight when I returned to the car since I would have to navigate the path very slowly.  I walked out about a third of a mile to ghostly palisade of sticks and poles pounded into the terrace top.  The longhouse reconstruction wasn’t much to see – it reminded me of a forlorn grape or raspberry arbor, some rods stabbed into the ground to support vines.  Inconsequential stands of trees stood along the edge of the bluff and, in some cases, tilted down to line the pond rimmed with reeds below on the flood plain.  The main channel of the Mississippi was a mile or two away to the east where more dense shelter belts seemed to have coalesced along the river.  The level flood plain was scarred here and there by craters where gravel and sand had been mined.  The mighty Mississippi bearing on its bosom stones and pebbles and sand has buried that bounty in the plain and amidst the low hills.  

I paused for a long time, wondering what to do.  The light was glum, without scintillation.  Nothing was moving on any of the roads criss-crossing on the plain.  I heard a dry rubbing sound, like leathery membranes abrading one another.  Some withered red sumac stood in clumps along the trail.  Nearby, I saw a bush with long, plantain-like leaves, all freeze-dried and mummified – the leaves looked like gloves made from leather and the wind was making them rub against one another.  

I had another destination in mind, the Battle of Athens historical site and, so, I turned around and walked as quickly as I could to the parking lot where my car was waiting.

36.

Not a lot remains from the Illinois Confederation, but a few things have survived. There is a deer hide, scraped and prepared like vellum, on which a stylized bird has been painted.  The bird is slim with an arrow-head skull and its wings are neat “w” shapes.  The design is modernist.  It looks like the kind of pattern that one sees in the stained glass of a Frank Lloyd Wright building.  Some narrow lines emanate from the bird.  This a representation of “Cigue”, sometimes spelled “Cigwe” – that is, the mythical “thunderbird”.  One of the figures in Kiefer’s painting of the old Clark Street bridge is labeled “Cigue” or “the Thunderbird.”

37.

Iowa extends a little toe down into the delta between the Des Moines River and the Mississippi.  Some country roads in Missouri brush up against the river borders.  The area feels not just empty but abandoned.  Probably there were people here once, but the small farms all failed fifty years ago and the hamlets emptied out into the larger towns in Iowa and Illinois, places where there are light industries and hospitals and nursing homes.  The light is failing and the narrow, frost-bitten roads are empty.

A marker roadside tells me that I have reached the Battle of Athens historical site.  The narrow road becomes even more constricted, asphalt tilting down into what seems a dead end.  A couple small white buildings, nondescript houses, stand at haphazard intervals in a meadow of four or five acres bounded by trees and thickets.  Overgrown roads are reduced to parallel tracks in the grass.  I can’t figure out the lay of the land which seems slight tilted toward the wood-lots bordering the old town-site.  On the upslope, I see the universal sign for a Civil War battlefield: two small cannon on iron wheels and a rough-hewn fence that encloses nothing; this is a split rail fence sometimes called a “buck and rail” fence.  If you see a couple of toylike cannons and a hundred forlorn feet of split rail fence, you will know that you have come upon a battlefield from the War between the States.  

This battlefield is a ghost town and my impression is that the shadows have gathered here so that nothing can be seen clearly.  It’s all overcast in the gathering darkness.

I drive over some gravel tracks crossing the mown fields and, then, along a ravine full of fallen leaves and dead trees.  In the gloom of the woods lining the ravine, nothing is visible and I can’t see the bottom of the declivity – and the ravine seems unmotivated geographically, a rift in the terrain that doesn’t make any sense.  The park headquarters consists of a garage and a small shed containing an office, closed apparently by a padlock-latched screen door.  A pickup is parked on the gravel in front of the gravel.  I get out and limp toward the nearest door, an opening into the shingled garage.  When I am about three feet from the garage and reaching for the door, it’s flung open suddenly and a small, wiry man steps out, brandishing an axe.  I’m slow to react and, so, I just stare at him for a moment.  The axe-handle is shiny red and the blade of the axe looks sharp and is the color of lead.

“Do you want to chop some firewood?” the apparition asks me.  “I’d probably cut off my foot,” I reply.  He has now justified his gesture brandishing the axe by suggesting that he wants me to take it in my hands and cut some wood.   “I was just going out to chop some firewood,” the man says.  He has a grey beard and is wearing a stocking cap over what I suspect to be a bald head.  He gestures with the axe and I follow his motion, looking to the side of the garage where there is a big heap of neatly stacked brown and grey logs.  

No one is at the site except the man with the axe.  It doesn’t look like anyone’s been at the place for several days or, even, weeks.  The park ranger and superintendent is on vacation at Cancun, the old man tells me.  He asks me if I’ve seen the “Cannon-ball House.”  

“No,” I reply.

“I’ll take you to see it,” he says.  “You can’t come here without seeing the ‘Cannon-ball House’.”  

He tells me to follow him and gets into his pickup.  Then, he backs up and I trail along over the bumpy dirt paths crossing the meadow.  We come to a white house, a bit like a New Orleans shotgun shack – it’s narrow, consisting of a couple rooms divided by a breezeway that seems to cut through the middle of the structures.

The man points to a plexiglass panel where there is square hole knocked through the outside wall.  We go around to the other side of the structure where another panel of plexiglass protects another tear in the facade.  

“Went right through here,” the man says.

The house sits on the crest of bluff that overlooks a broad, black river.  The river is partly frozen and, more than a hundred yards wide.  Some floes of ice are sullenly drifting in the slow-moving dark syrup of the river.  Below the house, there’s a big wall of field-stone boulders, built on the river bank.  I can see a couple of cell-like enclosures surrounded by heaps of broken rock.  The principal wall is high as a house and a massive thing.  It reminds me of blast walls that I saw years ago at the DuPont gunpowder works in Delaware.

“What is that?” I asked.

“What’s left of the mill.”

“What kind of mill?”

He shrugs: “Sawmill and grist mill.  Owned by the people who built the house right here above the mill.”

“It must have been an impressive structure.”

“Stood five stories tall,” the man says.

He takes out his keychain, knocks open an electrical junction box, and turns a key in an ignition in the box.  This disables the intruder alarm.  He, then, uses the other key to open the door into the house.

The old wood floor feels like the deck of a boat, a bit unstable and irregular.  The house is freezing cold and there’s no electricity.  This is one of those places that you encounter from time-to-time where the inside seems much larger that the space subtended by the exterior walls of the building. The ceiling is lofty and several large rooms flow out away from where we are venturing into the shadows and, on the walls, there are some large hand-tinted photographs from the 19th century, a man looking vain in his impressive patriarchal moustache and beard and a severe woman with lips pressed tightly together.  Big beds stand as sculptural presences in the rooms; they have meticulously lathed finials looming above the white mattresses and quilts.  

I think the official entrance to the house is at its center where a corridor decorated with more 19th century portrait photographs divides the structure.  The man tells me about the town and its people.  It seems that he grew up a few miles from here.

“We call it ‘Aye-thens’.  Most of my life I worked up in Iowa, Fairfield and was a machinist.  The Iowa guys always said to me ‘You’re from that town where they don’t even know how to pronounce its name.’ I say this ain’t Greece.  ‘Well, it should be if you’re gonna call a town Athens.’ “

Shadows were gradually assembling and filling up the entry hall.  I shifted uncomfortably on my feet.  My left leg and hip were hurting.  The man told me to sit down on a bench, apparently placed against the wall so that people attending a tour of the house could sit during the orientation.

The man told me about the history of the park.  He explained to me wildlife that lived in river thickets.  Once, there was a bear rambling around these parts.  I mentioned the billboard showing the black vultures and he told me about the various buzzards in the area.  He talked about his female boss whom he admired and said a few things about the battle fought here in August 1861.  It was apparently a confusing affair, because I didn’t exactly understand who was fighting whom.  Probably accurately, the man described the skirmish as a family affair: members of the same family were on different opposing sides and longstanding local feuds and grudges played a part in the fighting.  

“Was it conflict over the battle that turned this place into a ghost town?” I asked.

The man seemed offended by the very thought.  He hastened to tell me that the village was cut-off when the railroad passed through these parts and, gradually, the hamlet simply withered on the vine.  

A couple years before, during the Summer, a group of Civil War re-enactors came to the park to stage the battle.  The blue forces and Johnny Reb set up different campsites in the campground and cooked stew to eat with their booze.  The smoke from the campfires and cooking was sweet and aromatic.  Soldiers were singing old songs. When the moon rose and cast its shine over the shallows of the Des Moines river, at that time of the year a string of potholes like the beads on a rosary strung together by a narrow channel flowing between pale sand ribs.  The next day, the troops were setting up their battle lines and arming their cannons when one of the organizers called a parley between the two forces.  It seemed that the insurance providing personal injury protection to the participants hadn’t been issued.  No one was covered and the State of Missouri was exposed if one of the re-enactors were to be injured.  The battle had to be canceled for want of insurance.  Fighting with bayonets and swords with muskets armed with blanks is dangerous business and, so, peace had to be made.  The re-enactors were disappointed and got drunk and some of them ignored the prohibition against swimming in the river where, shallow as it was, there were unpredictable currents.  Fortunately, no one drowned.

38.

Accounts of the affair at Athens are muddled.  There are no official regimental histories about the fight because the battle occurred between irregular units, that is, paramilitary local militias.  The Union forces were Missouri Home Guard, about 500 men from extreme northwest Missouri who were all anti-slavery and anti-secession.  The so-called State Guard was comprised of Confederacy sympathizers – this was a larger force, but one that was poorly armed: about 1500 to 2000 troops wielding shotguns and small arms.

During the second half of July 1861, the Union Home Guard, under the command of Colonel David Moore, skirmished with the much larger, but ill-equipped Secessionist State Guard led by Colonel Martin Green.  The two militias chased one another around the Northeast corner of Missouri, engaging in two inconsequential encounters at Etna and Edina, Missouri.  Moore’s men were pro-Union farmers and small businessmen and war, which is mostly waiting in camp, was foreign to them.  Moore’s troops had crops to attend to and goods to sell and, more than a few of them, were politically confused – some of his soldiers expressed open support for the State Guard that had been harassing them.  Debates about the validity of slavery and secession led to fist fights among the men on both sides.  Encamped on one of the branches (the Horseshoe Bend) of the Fabius River, a “chute” or tributary to the Mississippi, Moore drilled his 500 men who were becoming increasingly restive.  In order to quell discontent, Moore led his men cross-country to Athens.  Many of his soldiers had family living on farms near the town and, so, Moore maintained morale by allowing troops with farms nearby to go home for a few days.  

Green’s two-thousand man militia was pursuing the Home Guard.  Aware that Moore’s force was suffering from poor morale and reduced by the number of troops granted home leave, Green besieged Athens by setting up picket lines on the three land sides of town.  At the time of the fighting, Moore had only 333 men in Athens, tents and provision wagons occupying the center of a town that was, then, about fifteen blocks square.  An artillery barrage was fired by State Guard (Confederate) cannoneers.  The State Guard had three pieces: one six and one nine pound cannon  as well as a weird mortar made from logs.  The log cannon promptly blew apart injuring several artillery men.  The six and nine pounders shot some balls at Athens.  One of them was aimed too high and sailed over the village, crossing the Des Moines River and knocking down a wall in Croton, Iowa, a village right across the stream from Athens – the two villages were connected by a ferry that continued to operate until 1913.  Another cannon ball landed near a scout on horseback and the animal reared knocking the soldier to the ground.

Several desultory infantry attacks were mounted on Athens, State Guard militia advancing cautiously through cornfields and woods around the village.  The men in Athens had plenty of cover and were mostly equipped with government issue long guns with rifling to better control the trajectory of bullets fired.  These guns were effective at 500 yards and, after a few State Guardsmen were hit, the attackers retreated out-of-range.  A sally was mounted in the thickets around the deep ravine, the so-called Stallion Branch of the Missouri.  But the terrain was difficult and the attack broke up in bushes and thorns in the woodland.  

In August, the Des Moines River is easily forded.  A large contingent of Moore’s State Guard troops crossed the river downstream from the village, hustled along the Iowa banks of the Des Moines and, then, mounted an attack splashing through the shallows of the sandy river bed.  Green saw the men mustering for the attack across the river and ordered a group of his troops to fix their bayonets for a charge.  The State Guards troops heard Moore’s command and were disconcerted.  Fighting with bayonets seemed barbaric to these men who were neither well-trained nor well equipped and mostly just opinionated farmers and townspeople.  They didn’t have bayonets and were appalled at Moore’s order so they hesitated.  Moore’s infantry swarmed forward and the State Guard took to their heels in panic; a couple men were killed and more than twenty captured.  

The fighting, then, subsided into long-range sniping.  A couple more cannonballs were launched and with that, the Battle of Athens was over.  It was 100 degrees and the fallen soldiers rotted quickly in the sun.  Three of the Unionist Home Guardsmen were killed and eight wounded.  It’s estimated that as many as 20 or 30 State Guard troops were killed.  Every account of the battle has different tallies as to dead and wounded.  

The Battle of Athens was the northernmost battle fought in the Civil War.  

39.

Colonel David Moore, the victor at the Battle of Athens, was said to be a hard man.  As a young man, he fought in Mexico with Ulysses Grant.  After that war, he moved to Missouri where he farmed and ran a store.  Moore had five sons and a daughter with his first wife Diademia.  He was tyrannical and mistreated his sons to the extent that two of them left home when Moore declared that he was a Union man and joined the Missouri State Guard.

On the August day when the Battle of Athens was fought, Moore’s boys were among the troops attacking the town.  As the two young men forded the Des Moines river shallows toward the puffs of smoke and fire burning in the town, they heard a familiar voice: it was their father shouting commands in the same voice with which he had bullied them.  One of the boys heard Moore command the troops in the besieged town to fix their bayonets for a charge at the troops crossing the stream.  The eldest son turned to his brother and exclaimed: “Dad is ordering a charge.  He’s mad as a hornet.”  The other boy crouched on the rib of sand bar.  Bullets skipped over the water and kicked up little spouts of sand and mud.  The younger son said: “It sounds like Dad means business.  We’d better skedaddle.”  The two Moore boys turned away from the town and began to splash through the water in the direction of the Iowa river bank. The other troops in the attack were alarmed and, seeing the Moore boys taking to their heels followed them, 

The man who had been chopping wood told me this story.  I doubted it.  But upon researching the battle at Athens – the best source is the short book Skim Milk Yankees by Jonathan Cooper-Wiele  – I now conclude that the legend is, at least, partly true.  Moore went on to lead Union forces at Shiloh where he was shot three times and, due to his injuries, had his right leg amputated.  His wounds didn’t stop Moore from remaining in the fight, and, after three months recuperation, he was back in command.  He led men in a dozen more desperate encounters and, then, returned to Athens, a local hero – he was elected to the State Senate as a Liberal Republican and had a long political career.  When Diademia died, shortly after Moore had mustered out of the Federal army, he remarried and founded a new family – his second wife bore him three daughters.  Moore led the Grand Army of the Republic Athens chapter and was a Master Mason – he died in July 1893.  Civil War portraits show him as a man with a heavy square face, a jaw like a cudgel, and leonine mane of greying hair – he looks like an Irish prize-fighter.  

40.

The sun had set.  Clouds to the west were dipped in chilly pink-orange pigment, some ridges of color decorating the sky.  The ravines were full of darkness and the river flowed eastward into the night.  My interlocutor warned me not to take any county roads since there was an abundance of deer abroad at this time of the evening, hungry and restless and, often, walking in single file along the rural roads.  He urged me to stay on main thoroughfares and listed the highways I should take to reach Fairfield, Iowa.  I caught the first part of his directions and thought that I understood them, although I quickly found that what he told me didn’t make sense once I reached the State highway.  This is alien abduction country – tiny impoverished farms, stubby hills like domes dark against the horizon, villages where the road changed directions in a muddle of old brick commercial buildings and elaborate white-washed houses, stick-built with gables and porches from which swings were suspended, arbors marking side-yard gardens.  Flying saucers hover over the blank spaces in the world. 

The dark was intense.  About every ten miles I encountered an official sign at the roadside marked with a white arrow pointing to “American Gothic House”.  The house was somewhere in the country between the grid of roads that I was traversing because I kept seeing that sign although with the arrow pointed in different directions.  (The sign refers to a small Carpenter’s Gothic cottage in Eldon, Iowa near Ottumwa.  The house forms the backdrop to the famous painting by Iowa native Grant Wood called “American Gothic”.  The painting was intended as satire on tight-lipped provincial yokels, but most people, particular folks from Iowa, didn’t get the joke.)  I wondered if it would be worth my time to detour and take a look at the house.  After all, I had traveled 700 miles round trip to see paintings by Anselm Kiefer and I’m a Midwesterner myself with a sneaking, shameful admiration for the work of the plump, bespectacled artist, Babbit, it seems, in suspenders and with a paint brush in hand.  But it was supper-time, and the roads were black so that on straightaways I drove astride the white hatchmarks on the concrete and, if you lingered out here, among the dismal rivers and overgrown shelter belts, you were prone to be abducted by space scientists in their flying saucers.

I crossed the Des Moines River at Keosauqua.  The villages on the highway were abandoned.  Some of them had biblical names.  Then, I saw a scatter of lights on the flat prairie – this was Fairfield where I would spend the night.

41.

The town square at Fairfield was adorned with a fountain and a small bandshell.  I found an Indian restaurant on one of the sidestreets.  The sidewalks were empty and there were no cars parked in the diagonal spaces provided along the square.  A bitterly cold wind was blowing and making the traffic lights toll like bells.  The Indian restaurant was also empty.  A woman sat at a table at the back of the café writing in a ledger and using her phone as an adding machine.  Sometimes, drivers entered the café, setting the door bells jingling.  The drivers were picking up bags of food for delivery and, most of them, seemed to be Africans.  At another table, a younger woman with a man and a small baby were having their family supper, obviously a son and daughter-in-law with grandchild of the lady reckoning profits and losses.  I imagined the son and daughter-in-law standing resolutely in front of the American Gothic house: salt of the earth On the TV, a soccer match was underway.

When I reached the motel, I locked the room door and ate a gummy from my stash of marijuana edibles.  I didn’t feel much of anything and, after reading for awhile, went to bed.  The marijuana embarked on a tour of my inflamed joints, pumping, it seemed, a hot, acidic fluid through each of my joints, although one at a time.  My left ankle felt bloated, as if full of fluid.  Then, after a minute or two, the fluid migrated to my right ankle, then, up to my knee joint and hip.  Then, the wet, sticky pain moved to my left hip, left knee, and so on, rotating slowly as if my body were a clock and each joint the number of an hour.  The tour continued, lighting up one joint after another, until I passed-out.  

42.

Around dawn on the next day, I drove out to Maharishi University located at the north edge of town.  The University buildings were mostly built around 1994, replacing the old structures of what had once been Parsons University.  (Maharishi had migrated to the Iowa location twenty years earlier after the school was founded in 1971 at Goleta, California.)  The school buildings are bland and all very similar in form.  The ensemble of structures resembles a neat suburban office park on the edge of a city – frame buildings with white facades and conventional shingled roofs for law firms, real estate brokers, and insurance agencies. There are lawns around the structures, plenty of green space although its now brown with snow accents.  On a low ridge, a little above the campus and its parking lots, two white domes, more or less, the color of PVC pipe stand near a parking lot between them.  Each dome is about a 100 yards in diameter mounted on a low pedestal, a single story building with windows pointed at the top, a kind of cloister under the dome with a vaguely Moorish appearance, but stripped-down, functional, without adornment.  All of the buildings on campus have cupolas on their ridge lines and the domes are nippled with identical protruding structures – the cupolas remind me of miniature stupas such as one might see in Nepal or Kathmandu.  The technical term for these finials is kalashas – that is “pottery for offering”; each of them consists of a couple inches of platform on which there is a graceful form like a slim-hipped jug under a knob pointing skyward.  To my surprise the parking lots are full of cars.  I see a couple older fellows with canes navigating the wet and slushy parking lot.  There must be some kind of community service underway – it seems as if many of the townspeople have come here to meditate.  

Guru Maharishi Mahesh was an Indian teacher and counselor to the stars: the Beatles and Beach Boys were among his clients.  Maharishi taught his apostles the meditation technique called “Transcendental Meditation”.  The practice is not difficult.  In fact, Maharishi’s doctrine is like religion with all of the obligatory stuff about sin and grace and the immortal soul omitted.  According to his teaching, twice daily, you are to sit in a quiet place, upright, with your legs folded under you tightly in a lotus posture.  You can hold your hands upright in your lap or let them fall limply onto your knees.  You are to sit in this position without speaking, eyes closed, and motionless for 15 to 20 minutes.  This practice lets “the mind settle” – it withdraws, it is alleged, into itself and its own sources of energy and power.  The spirit is thereby refreshed and revived and emerges from meditation enlivened.  People who have studied the University say that it is functionally similar to a well-run church school – students attend chapel daily by meditating and they are supposed to exhibit qualities of compassion, mindfulness, and loving kindness as a result of their practice.  

I drive past the two domes to the crest of the hill where there seems to be field house beside a community swimming pool.  The field house is windowless building, a white shell.  Next to the field house, I see a conventional yellow school bus that has the words Maharishi University painted on its side.  

The domes have names, Maharishi Potanjail and Bogamben.  One is for male disciples and the other for women.  Oprah Winfrey once broadcast a show from the dome provided for female disciples.  Pictures show that polyethylene domes were once sprayed with gold pigment that caught the sun’s light and reflected it brightly.  The domes aren’t golden on this morning and the rising sun illumined white scuffed surfaces, peeling and utilitarian.  A little downhill, the white Moorish Tower of Invincibility stands on a concrete pad – the building is labeled in big letters, without windows, rising about four stories to a top pierced by several windows with floral grating – the inmates in the tower can look out but we can’t see into the structure; it’s the same principle used in Turkish harems.  A small step pyramid surmounts the “Invincibility Tower” rising to a modest kalasha cupola.  From college information on-line, it seems that there are about a dozen Maharishi Universities around the world – located, for instance, in European cities, north Africa, Asia, and South America; everyone of these places has a similar Tower although the other structures seem to be about twice as tall as the structure on this campus.  

I get out of my car to take some pictures.  The sun is rising and the domes cast long shadows.  For some reason, I can’t align my camera to take pictures of the “Invincibility Tower” without portraying it as tilted and about to fall over.  

44.

Students who persist in their TM meditation evolve into beings that can fly.  Promotional photographs show crosslegged men in white robes hovering over the green meadows of Iowa.  This is misleading.  The practice of levitation is called TM-Sidhi or yogic flying.  There are videos on You-Tube that show this phenomenon – the disciple is said to enter a very deep state of meditation and, then, spontaneously hops upward, somehow flexing knees and back to spurt about 18 inches in the air.  Of course, gravity prevails and the Yogi drops back down to earth.  However, images show Yogic Flyers with beatific expressions on their face bouncing up and down either in place or moving forward.   The meditation domes are equipped with mattress-like mats and yogic flyers, always young men, hop along pathways delineated by the mats, enthusiastically advancing thirty or forty feet in this peculiar form of locomotion.  Sometimes, there are several white mattresses stacked on top of one another.  The Flyers are able, in those cases, to hop up high enough to reach the upper mattress level – this is considerable feat since it looks to me that those bounces are 3 or, even, four feet high.  One video made in Holland shows about twenty Yogic Flyers bouncing up and down as they move forward through what seems to be a large gymnasium.  The meditating men have their hands hanging limply in front of them and don’t push off the ground.  They have their eyes shut which begs the question of how they can fly without banging into one another – but this seems to never occur.  The sight of an assembled group of Flyers rhythmically bouncing up and down is grotesque and uncanny.  The action seems to involve some sort of coiled, spring-like energy in the buttocks and lower spine, but I’m not sure how it is generated.

If the number of Yogic Flyers assembled to perform the practice is greater that the square root of one percent of the local population, flying induces brain wave coherence – it’s like the wave-particle function of the brain has been brought into coordination so that it can lase.  This laser energy, in turn, radiates out from the flyers and produces beneficial effects in the community.  Scientists at Maharishi have studied the so-called “extended Maharishi effect”.  This effect induces serenity and mindfulness among anyone within the radius of brain waves emitted by the Yogic flyers.  In turn, this has led to measurable reduction in crime, domestic violence and, reportedly, has ended several wars.

I walk down the sidewalk to the perimeter of windows under one of the domes.  But I’m afraid that it would look gauche to peer into the building and, so, I retreat back to my car.  It’s time to drive home.  

44. 

The gist of TM is that mind creates the world.  The landscape around us is made by our imagination.  Mind is pure, bright, and empty.  By meditating on our inner essence, the world dissolves and we are brought into an encounter with the gem in the lotus, an experience that, as the name tells us, transcends the world and reveals its true nature.  

Anselm Kiefer’s work, by contrast, is not transcendent but immanent.  It’s heavy, earthbound, prone to collapse and break apart.  The rivers nuzzle at the earth and cut into it.  The furrows of the fields converge at the lightless point of greatest density.  Escarpments of lead rise over the gallery floors and, I think of Kiefer, like a child in a sandbox, grubbing at the dirt and digging tunnels and crypts at his studio (now abandoned) near Barjac in the south of France.  God knows what those immense paintings in the SLAM sculpture hall weigh.

45.

My wrecked hip and left knee are pulling me down.  I’ve been wounded.  I would like to rise above frailties.  Perhaps, I should meditate.

46.

North of Waterloo, Iowa, snow fills the fields and roadside ditches.  Austin is sheathed in ice.  The alley and sidewalk at my house are paved with the stuff. A light dusting of snow conceals the boneshattering ice.  No progress with respect to a thaw.  

47.

I can’t cross my legs because of hip pain.  So my meditation posture is “lotus rooted in the mud” – that is, a posture in which I am seated on the edge of a chair with my legs, like roots, extended down onto the floor.  My spine is as straight as I can make it and I suck in my belly and square my shoulders.  With my right hand, I reach below my waist and touch the mattress – this is the Earth Witness mudra (the Bhumisparsha mudra).  I close my eyes and let the mind settle.  At first, the monkey mind gibbers and chatters and, then, ideas are falling in a waterfall through sunbeams so that each of them sparkles like a freshly minted coin before it vanishes.  They are all poured-out, swept away downstream.  My body feels light.  It seems that I am floating away.

February 6, 2026