Volume 12 / Issue 2 / November 2000
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Volume 12 / Issue 2 / November 2000 |
I'm going to tell you a story. But in order for me to do this, I have to ask you to visualize some things— an entire world, actually. If you can't envision these kinds of things, then somehow you won't understand the story. It shouldn't be too difficult, though. The world I would like you to see is largely empty. We should start now.
If you are in a dark room, close your eyes; the darkness is expanded. If you tend to imagine, imagine the darkness as having depth, imagine that the darkness is space. This might be something beautiful for you to do. So much of what we humans conceive as beautiful is described by space; we stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon and find ourselves looking out over endless oceans. Perhaps it is just that we see something recognizable about the capacity of ourselves in all that boundlessness.
With your eyes still closed, stand easy in the space that you have created around yourself. When you are ready, imagine that the darkness is red — a dry, pale red that is as deep as the darkness that preceded it. Stain this red with the very occasional green. Somewhere in the middle, scrawl a horizon. Above it, allow yourself the deepest pitch-blue sky you can harness, and you are finished. What you have before you is called the Great Karoo. It exists; I have seen it. It exists in South Africa — an endless expanse of cinnamon-blonde dust and orange-red rocks. All that space, quantifiably related to silence and the way that your inner soul seems to unfold.
The Karoo is a vast, semi-arid wasteland that comprises about one-third of South Africa's total landmass. It stretches all the way from the Orange River in the northeast, to a series of coastal mountain ranges in the southwest. Think of the sun pouring down over all of it. Think of moments in the mid-afternoon that seem to last forever. Think of nothing moving.
The Karoo is as timeless as it is infinite. Long before the concept of South Africa or Jesus or strip malls, the Khoi-Khoi and San people were living in the Karoo, hunting herds of antelope and painting works of art on the sun-bleached stones. The paintings remain there to this day, many of them unseen or unexplored; the herds of antelope do not.
Because of this, and because there came a time when one group of people thought they had more of a right to own the land than other people, the San and the Khoi-Khoi have long since moved out — out of the Karoo, out of history. Today they have been replaced mainly by weather-worn Afrikaner farmers and their hired Xhosa shepherds. These are people that live and farm in a place that my battered travel guide describes as "dry, hot and inhospitable." These are people that spend their entire lives in that pale red place that opened up when you closed your eyes.
Somewhere in the midst of this barren martian landscape, there is a town called Nieu Bethesda. It is a small congregation of wooden houses and wind-worn fences probably not very different from towns that existed in the dying American West or the Dust Bowl. There is one general store, one Dutch Reformed Church, and one empty plot that used to be a gas station. None of the roads are paved. In the true South African tradition, there are a handful of shacks just outside of town built with pieces of corrugated scrap metal and dried cow dung.
In any other South African community, this would be called the township — the suffocating stretch of wilted land and consigned hopes where black Africans have been living even before the notorious apartheid system rolled around in 1948. Apartheid was officially extinguished in 1994, but the excruciatingly biased poverty remains, and the townships continue to grow all over South Africa. Except perhaps in Nieu Bethesda, where the shacks aren't numerous enough to qualify as an independent township, and no one new is moving in.
Are you still with me? We have this town, right? We have this town that has been largely forgotten by the rest of the world, a town that has changed very little in the past fifty years or so. I'd be willing to bet that some of the people that live in Nieu Bethesda have never left it, or at least have never ventured outside of the vacuous Karoo plains. Think of the sun pouring down over all of it. Think of moments in the mid-afternoon that seem to last forever. Think of nothing moving. And then think of this— an unassuming house and a small plot of land down a dusty side street, inhabited by the most beautiful, bizarre, mystical, touching creations you have ever conceived of in your most pleasantly misshapen dreams. We're getting closer to our story now.
It's called the Owl House, and it rises up out of the carmine dust like a mirage. Even with the modest nature of the house and the solid stone wall that conceals most of the side yard, one gets the feeling that something special is going on on the other side of the enclosure. Stars cut from sheets of tin are suspended on long, flexible rods that bend out over the wall, glinting in the white sunlight. These are accompanied by a glimpse of the occasional outstretched hand or odd-looking upraised profile. Indeed there is something out of the ordinary surrounding this house in Nieu Bethesda.
For a small fee of five or six rand (approximately one U.S. dollar) you can walk through the house and into the side yard. You could pass it up, but you would be stupid if you did. You would be forfeiting the opportunity to see an entire jaunty universe of deviant statues, a fervent elegy that stands and runs and weeps and laughs and reaches and asks only that you do the same inside of yourself. In this way, it is as broad as the unbroken Karoo.
So what is it like to walk through the garden of colour and statuary that throngs outside of the Owl House? It's like being in the company of dreams — Tim Burton's dreams, Jim Henson's dreams, Ray Bradbury's dreams of October and forms and creation. I can't take you through it with words, because I don't have that ability, if it exists.
I can only introduce you to some of my memories. I remember a giant cat with eyes fashioned from large car headlights. I remember slim women with shirts of crushed glass and billowing dresses made from old beer bottles; scaled-down replicas of the Great Pyramids of Giza and the mischievously grinning Sphinx; haunting, fragmented lines of poetry painted across ancient-looking arches or woven in wire into the chain-link fencing.
I remember a statue of Buddha sitting with his back to a traditional Christian nativity scene. Animals, beasts, creatures of all shapes were frozen in plaster as they meandered through the garden — elegant, blue-eyed cranes, laughing giraffes, somnolent sheep; and owls, of course — gazing, or bowing, or sleeping, some of them with eyes so big they appeared extraterrestrial.
Mostly there were things that were neither human nor animal, though vaguely resembling both: shapely mermaids, an elderly man with a head the shape of a rooster caught in the act of pulling up his pants (or perhaps he was pulling them down); something that looked like a profile from Easter Island, only with drooping rabbit ears and a Turkish fez on its head.
The far corner of the garden is designated 'east,' and a large host of prophets and seekers are walking or riding camels toward the self-created Mecca. Shepherds, bartenders, and wives; gypsies, mutants, and Adam and Eve. Unmoving, and very silent. Do you understand now why I asked you to close your eyes?
The story belongs to a woman named Helen Martins— brown-eyed, short-statured, conservatively framed. In 1897, Miss Helen was born into the generally patriarchal, ultra-conservative, racially obsessed 'white tribe' of South Africa, the Afrikaners. For nearly fifty years of her life, Miss Helen lived the perfectly appropriate Afrikaner life— she went to the Dutch Reformed Church every Sunday, she married a suitable husband, and she worked as a teacher in a local school. Very rarely, if ever, did she drift far from the still life of the Karoo.
As the seasons passed, however, things began to change. For unknown reasons, Miss Helen left her job at the school, and not long after that, her marriage ended in failure. In the late 1920's, Miss Helen moved back into the house of her childhood to take care of her ailing parents. She continued to attend church and live judiciously.
This went on for some time, until the death of her mother in 1941 was followed four years later by the death of her father. That was enough. Somewhere inside of Miss Helen, a page was turned or a match was struck. Employ whatever metaphor you choose, Miss Helen was visited by repetitious delineations of beauty and amazing visions. Miss Helen stopped going to church on Sundays. She had work to do.
She started with the house itself. She tore down walls and rebuilt them to let in more light, staining the glass with intricate patterns of suns and moons. She hung mirrors virtually everywhere she could. She began to experiment with what was to become one of her favourite mediums— crushed glass. She would collect old bottles and glass artifacts and grind them to a desired consistency in a home-made glass-churner that she kept behind the house.
When she was inspired, she would throw handfuls of the multi-coloured shards at still-drying plastered walls, where they would become embedded and catch and reflect the sun into infinite radiant prisms. When there was glass left over, she would store it methodically in her pantry, placing it in empty Mason jars according to colour.
When she was finished with the house, she moved on to her yard. To make real the visions that came to her, she had to employ a full-time assistant to help her with the casting and the sculpting. The ideas were always hers, however, and though three different assistants came and went over the years, the garden of dreams continued to grow. Miss Helen spent almost all of her sparse resources on paint, plaster, and glass. Other materials she gleaned from other people's refuse— cracked porcelain, pieces of bent wire, old tins and plates, rusted sheet metal. The cast of characters in her yard grew by the month.
The surrounding community could only watch as a playground of malformed creatures and celebratory plaster-cast creations rose in their midst. In the beginning, it was probably enough to content themselves by reassuring each other that Miss Helen was simply mad— that all of her dormant eccentricities had finally caught up with her now that her husband and parents were no longer around to lovingly guide her.
But soon enough, Miss Helen began to break the rules. The rules as such were easy enough to understand; they had been laid out clearly in the spectrum of legislation surrounding the rise of the National Party in 1948. Through-out the Fifties and into the Sixties, however, Miss Helen's work began to operate outside of these rules. Watchful neighbors began to notice that Helen's once-pleasant hobby was starting to encroach upon blasphemy— the cute little domed shepherds were soon surrounded by a labyrinthine graveyard of idols and godheads from foreign religions.
These things fell well outside of the conservatively-delineated borderlines that defined the Dutch Reformed ideology, an ideology that not only shunned indiscriminate creativity but also served to substantiate the claim that apartheid, and the Afrikaner peoples on the whole, were divinely ordained to live as custodians over their African homeland. There was no room in this legitimising belief system for Buddha or Mecca.
Perhaps even worse then this, Miss Helen's third and last assistant was a Coloured man— an individual belonging to one of those tenuous social categories that was created by the apartheid government to drive a wedge between black and white South Africans. Not only was Miss Helen working side-by-side with this man, but she was often seen walking to his run-down house outside the village, an act which amounted more or less to a form of gentle treason. Throughout the rest of South Africa, people had been imprisoned and beaten for less.
But Miss Helen was an aging woman, and although her work was abnormal and different, it was not immediately dangerous. Miss Helen was never officially imprisoned— but where the state drew back, the community of Nieu Bethesda moved forward. Helen's neighbors effectively ostracized her from the compact world around her. Most neighbors refused to talk to her as she walked to the market. Children made up stories about her and branded her as a witch; they would often knock on her door and run away, or pitch stones over the fence that surrounded her yard.
Miss Helen had something beautiful and unique to show the world, but the world was voluntarily looking the other way. Her passions and creations were received by only a few close friends and a handful of children who chose not to be afraid of her. As terrible as this situation appeared to be, it was soon made worse by a problem that could no longer be denied. Miss Helen was going blind. For months, perhaps years, Miss Helen had refused to see a doctor, but there came a time when her constant headaches and watering eyes left her no choice.
The doctor discovered that Miss Helen was gradually losing her sight, and that it was her own beloved work that was responsible for it. It turned out that all those years of fervent glass-crushing had been slowly wearing away her sight — microscopic shards embedded in her pupil were gradually tearing the vision out of Miss Helen's eyes. The doctor predicted that it wouldn't be long until she would no longer be able to see the extended family that populated her house and yard. Miss Helen was stricken.
A new creation soon appeared in her yard. It was entitled "The Passage of Time," and it consisted of an impressively-built thatch-roofed clock tower and two young, sexless figures. The youthful pair have tied one end of a length of wire to the clock's hour hand and they are straining at the other end, frozen in their positions of exertion, trying desperately to pull the hour hand back or at least impede its progress.
But it was not to be. Miss Helen's eyesight grew increasingly worse. She began to work faster, to race against the encroaching darkness and possibly finish her Mecca before the shadows in her head took over. For a time, it seemed likely that she would succeed. The free space in her side yard was almost completely occupied.
Without warning or explanation, however, Miss Helen's inner vision went the way of her sensory sight— that is to say, the multi-coloured muse that had been the driving force behind the garden abandoned Miss Helen for no discernible reason. The book shut; the spark was doused. Employ whatever metaphor you choose. It was over.
For one day, and then for six weeks, and then for eighteen months, Miss Helen was devoid of the inspiration that she had been carrying with her almost constantly for the past 30 years. She could deal with losing her eyesight, but not her mind-sight. This may have brought her too close to the Helen Martins that haunted Nieu Bethesda in the years prior to 1945.
Whether or not this was the case, Miss Helen could not live outside the dream. One night in 1976, she took one last walk through her garden and then returned to her glass-spangled candlelit bedroom, which was flickering a million times with a million shades of reverie. There she drank a bottle of caustic soda, otherwise known as lye. She burned herself apart from the inside. She took with her whatever was left of her unfinished universe, but left behind a kaleidoscopic gospel of plaster and glass written by the world's most unassuming prophet.
Imagine a town called Nieu Bethesda, standing quite alone in the middle of the vacant Karoo. Imagine a house in Nieu Bethesda, a magical house inhabited by testimonials to beauty, to a cry of difference in a world that survived on uniformity. In the kitchen pantry, half-filled jars of unused powdered glass line the shelves, arranged from the darkest purple to the whitest yellow. Outside there is a still commotion — fingers point, smiles bend, wings dip, claws extend.
In the middle of all this inert turmoil there is a small statue, a very plain one by comparison. It is a young woman with a porcelain skirt and plaintive dark brown eyes; she sits on the ground with one leg tucked under the other, and with her right arm she reaches out for you.
Can you see her? This is Helen Martin's vision of herself, nearly lost amid the legs of a herd of camels that are plodding towards the East. Think of the sun pouring down over all of it. Think of moments in the mid-afternoon that seem to last forever. Think of nothing moving. And when you are done, you can open your eyes.
Dennis Wilson directs this piece of advice only at those who are not ashamed of living: Leave. Go away. Here at the WAC, you have a wonderful opportunity to see another part of the world, and, subsequently, a least one thing that you never could have dreamed of seeing. You owe it to yourself, and to someone else in that other part of the world, who is also not ashamed of living.
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