Characters and Places — Tesserae

During my summers at Woodstock I met some interesting characters, went to some interesting places. What made them characters was that they were different from the usual people I had met and often they were artists. Someone wrote that the neurotic is a failed artist, that is, this very day, he wishes to accomplish in the moment everything he wishes or dreams to attain but because of his neurosis he fails at attainment or achievement. So the neurotic fails. The neurotic could very well be an artist if he chose to, but he cannot. I have also observed that people envy artists, as if they have their days off, futzing with paints and canvases, sculpting clay, chiseling and taking inordinate amounts of time off.  A dislike of a man or woman at play.

What is envied is the durational time the artists lives in, for him there is no night and day, for him it is whether or not his creation is moving along to completion, 24/7.I taught myself to write over the requisite 10,000 hours it takes to reach a level beyond competency. While I taught high school, I always wished to have the time to write all day. Well, it did come. It is called retirement. However, the authentic artist chooses early on and enters early his artistic path without waiting for retirement. Of course, if you are alive there is no such thing as retirement. You can’t retire from life unless you are mass man, conditioned  by a six-pack, sports, 401 Ks, Fuks News and all the other dreck of this materialistic society.

When I came across and indeed, experienced artistic characters during my twin summers, I learned how they lived their lives, how they might experience something of the world, and especially their freedom, or so it seemed, from the clockwork of American industry. They had fled the workplace. One painter once told me that he would rather starve than hold a part time job that would take him away from his art and I have no doubt that he came close to that at moments. It wasn’t until decades later that I uncomfortably but happily took on the title of author, artist, and wearing that hat has given one of the few great pleasures – and distinctions – of my life.

Clarence Schmidt was such a character.  He had become a pop icon in Woodstock, and so did the priest who lived in his wooden house made up of timbers with its chapel within and tapestries given to him by Marshal Field of Chicago. Or so he had told me. Schmidt was a sculptor and if you Google him all kinds of trivia comes up and basic facts. When I Google Schmidt or Zaidenburg I am simply filling in blank spaces, but at the time my experiences with them were conquistadorial, invading private spaces and undiscovered territories for the sheer self-serving needs I had, to experience the world and its inhabitants.

Schmidt “lived” on Ohayo Mountain somewhere in Woodstock and what I have found out is that from 1940 to 1972 he worked on erecting his home, “Miracle on the Mountain,” he named it. The house itself burned down in the winter of 1968 to 1969. I was told that it had covered an entire side of the mountain, that it had many levels and glass windows, and mirrors as well, for in the sunlight the total house flashed. When I first came upon it the house was in shambles, fit for Miss Havisham. He is now labeled by the art community as part of the found-art movement, and here we can think of the Watts Tower built by Sam Rodia, and parts of the buildings built by that Barcelonan genius, Antonin Gaudi. In the Sixties Schmidt was in a documentary about him which I have never seen, nor choose to, for he stands out beyond celluloid.

I was told about him by Hal and I decided to take a look. I was also told that the price of admission to his property was a six-pack of beer, so Woodstock. Unfortunately I was slow on the uptake and thought that a bottle of beer was sufficient; it proved not to be. Walking through the brush and spring time flowering saplings and scrub, I came upon a circular place that had been cleared. In this space was a “nest,” a kind of interlocking contraption that a child’s brilliant mind might devise. As I dimly think back I recall that beer bottles and beer cans elaborated themselves upon every surface of this house in orderly fashion. Indeed, I learned later that Schmidt slept in a casket-like part of his “nest.” So he had made another piece of found art to substitute for his destroyed masterpiece on Ohayo Mountain.

I gave him one bottle of beer (schmuck!) and he commented about my niggardliness which was apt. Schmidt had a long and scruffy beard and he was clothed in carpenter’s overalls. I asked if I could look around and he agreed. By this time everyone from down under flocked through Woodstock and perhaps he had tired of the notoriety. I had no idea what I was looking for, but I found it. As I browsed through many yards of trees and shrubbery, it hit me: Schmidt had broken off legs, arms, torsos, and faces of every imaginable kind of children’s doll and had painted them in a dull silver paint. I wouldn’t call it eerie; it was like a bad night in The Shining. I’d walk a foot or so and another grotesquerie popped into view, silvered and weathered. Schmidt apparently was a kind of Johnny Appleseed, seeding his woods with “art.” All was random and happenstance; it was a “happening,” to use the term coming into the American lexicon. It was not a Dantesque hell, but more of an outer expression of an inner artistic “disturbance.” I will not label it. I will not place it into some movement. It was Clarence Schmidt tip-toeing through the tulips with a sculptor’s palette. Certainly different, outré, I took it in without interpreting it, which was a better response than any other I could think of.

After my look-see I encountered Schmidt once again.

“Mr.Schmidt,” I said, “why did you paint everything silver in the woods?”
The question was as stupid as I could conceive at the time.

Gloweringly, he replied, “Why are you wearing that colored shirt? Why those pants?”

I slinked away as I should have. At that time, as I look back, I had no inner compass from which to determine direction.  I had no inner map from which to draw on with other human beings; I was bereft of a functioning inner directedness, ergo, my general stupidity for most of the Sixties.

Another character I had met was a catholic priest. His name escapes me after 46 years. Again someone suggested that I go meet the father on a nearby mountain. Woodstock was alive with connections, and hints of possible experiences. His home was on the left of the dirt road mid way up the hill. In the front was a wobbly wooden footbridge with hand rails that led slightly down to the front door. It was not a hovel, but nondescript in its functionality. I introduced myself to this old man, hair white, not gray, and we talked. I have no memories of what pleasantries we might have exchanged. Inside the house was a chapel with stained glass to the rear and roughly hewn  pews. The father made a point to say that several of the tapestries within were a gift from Marshal Field of Chicago. I did not ask nor do I now know if they were friends, but he was exceedingly proud of that gift, perhaps feeling that the tapestries gave an uniqueness to his Thoreauvian home.

For some reason young people came to see him, those on a quest, Joseph Campbell folk on a journey, the seekers, New Age Aquarians craving purpose if not intention, perhaps Iris if she knew of him. People visited the father for the wisdom or advice he gave them. I asked for neither. Both Schmidt and the good father must have relished the attention before it paled so that they became pop icons in the village. During the two summers I was there I brought up my lover and a summer girl friend to meet the priest. It reminds me of an old soldier bringing his family to see his valued battleground. I never did learn much from the priest but he was a kind soul and perhaps that was his appeal, for he made no deep impression upon me although I remember him as inoffensive with a soupcon of sweetness to him. In short, he was non-threatening to young people. I associate to the young people at that time needing a place to lay their heads down; the priest was the group lap.

About a decade later I went back to Woodstock with two psychotherapists who were partners in a counseling center way out in Hauppauge, Long Island. I worked there as a part time therapist from 1979 to 1982. For me the move into the 70s seemed an uninterrupted extension of the Sixties, at least for the first few years. I was readjusting to a different time and climate of opinion, Kent State was to follow. In a different way the times were changin’. The mood, as I experienced it, had dampened as if we as a nation took a very deep breath because we went through what John Updike labeled, “a slum of a decade.” Yes, it was a schizoid period, filled with ferment, but not Updike’s sour assessment

David, Steve and I camped out near Woodstock. I wanted to see if the good father was there, but I knew he was most likely dead. In my sturdy Nova we managed to get up the hill once more, although boulders smacked the undercarriage and transmission box, spitting out stone shrapnel. We made it. When we all crossed the now rickety and very old wood bridge all seemed to be in order, the home of a priestly recluse. It was February or a wintry month, I don’t recall, because there was more than a dusting of snow on the eaves, window ledges and the roof. The snow that passes “packing” is frozen hard, and had a slight bluish light to it from the refraction of sunlight.

Inside told me everything. The church had been abandoned. Windows were left open and the wind was strong. As we wandered about I reached the rear of the church and came into what must have been the father’s study. Books and bibles were strewn about in the rigid air. The back door had been blown back. The snow had blown in over time so that not a few of his books and errant papers became framed by the now itself, like a white hi-liter pointing out apt biblical passages. No one had seen to his personal effects. Oh, they buried the frail man but for some peculiar reason no care was expended, apparently, to his personal things. I thought that was grossly unkind and insensitive – still do. As to his prized tapestries I don’t know if they were there or had been retrieved. Like all of us, he had come and he had gone. Perhaps his most prized possessions remained in the minds of individuals he had encountered.

The abandoned church saddened me then, as it does now, for it was a metaphorical reminder of how my twin summers had come and gone. I felt somewhat sad but I was still inarticulate. I see it better now through the passage of time. The passing of anything or any person, the passing of such an intensely compacted, concentrated and passionate decade is cause for lamentation. The electrifying Sixties had waxed and waned. And although it had lost its electricity and had loosened its grip on me, its glow remained unrequited like a northern sky aurora. After this visit, I was no longer a “groupie.” I had changed. What had passed left an indelible and burnished array of associations in mind, memories and remembrances that have endured a life time, romantic that I am.

As romantic as my sensibilities are, I draw nurturance from the Sixties, my two summers especially. The Sixties lactated and I sucked. By the end of the 70s I had been thoroughly weaned. The adjustment, as with a young child, is difficult and necessary but, of course, we all get through it. I moved away from my transistional object and reached out to human beings, not things. However, mother’s milk stays with us for always, latently. We are immunized.

Now and then a place became a character, not realizing at the time that memory would cherish it in reflection.  As I drove outside of Woodstock, past Hal’s summer house, the woods thickened, and I left behind the scrub and flatness of the town and its outlying areas. So many streets, such as Tinker Street, fed into the main avenue; Woodstock reminds me of Greenwich Village, schizoid streets fractured here and there, dissociative strands of blocks. In Woodstock per se one backed into pleasures. So, I drove north but what did I know of directions, urban man?  What I discovered off the road was a large building of much substance. I drove up the hardscrabble road. No one was about and in those days I felt free, many of us did, to just go about, to scout and if confronted to explain our mission as non-threatening to the inhabitants. Like the words of the Fifties: “I come in peace.” But this time I meant it.

I must add that this was part and parcel to my experience at Woodstock; that to engage people in a different way, to be consciously,  not inadvertently, friendly, to engage, attach and endeavor to create a new space for more than one to exist in.

Later on I discovered that I had come upon a Catholic religious retreat built in the early 20s. Decades later it has been transmogrified into a Buddhist retreat, spa, tatami mats, and all the rot of another religious organization. I’ve seen pictures of it on Google. I don’t recognize it at all. When it was built that part of upstate New York was the boonies. I walked about the building and peeked inside and everything was massive, from the eaves to the doors to the window frames. As I approached a door and grabbed the handle I was taken aback by the surface materials. The working men of the time apparently found a measure of artistic joy as they fashioned in metal representations newts, turtles, crickets, frogs, dining needles and lizards and had affixed them in random order. I felt I was before a Romanesque church door with the stories of the Bible and its religious denizens in varying poses, stories in stone.

At the front of the building which sat kitty-cornered to the main road, the rafters came to an apex out of which was a carved  native American chief, a joyous gargoyle if you will,  its colors vivid at the time but dimmed by age and weathering by the time of my visit. It was as if it were the prow of a whaling ship, jutting out, in advance of the ship itself. Circulating about this immense and stolid building, I did not come across any other features that I remember, but the overall presence of it was substantial. Off to the side of the retreat was a large expanse, one could play a good game of softball on it. Here and there were small bungalows that probably served for guests or travelers. About six years later I brought a group of high school students to sleep over at the retreat. I wanted to share with them my own personal experiences in Woodstock.

Between 1974 and 1979 I was the director of an alternative high school in Half Hollow Hills in Suffolk County, Long Island. The school came late to this affluent suburban community. The alternative school movement had its roots in the Sixties and Summerhill, A.E. Neil’s school in England was a significant influence and forerunner. Dewey had laid out his progressive ideas, especially in Experience and Education  in the early decades of the 20^th century. In short, all education was student centered rather than imposed. Orson Welles went to such a school run by the Hill family (    ). And Paul Goodman wrote a damning indictment in his Growing Up Absurd about public education.  When the Sixties arrived all these influences came somewhat together into a loosely held federation and it was with this “spiritual” background that I landed a job as the director an alternative school. I was asked to create one, and I feel the Superintendent wanted to be au courant, rather than have any real commitment to this kind of education.

Essentially the school was for the emotionally and intellectually disaffected and discontented. I rarely had discipline problems. I dealt mostly with clever acting out. I handled that as best I could at 34. We had mini courses, and I offered one of Freud’s less “difficult” books. I had no staff so I did a little social work and acquired a student intern from Stony Brook’s School of Social Welfare as an assistant. I made outreach to the school psychologist and he became a significant member of the school. Other than that I placed students in outside internships – dentists, lawyers, and the like. I made individualized reading programs with students, and one student read at least 30 books in one semester. I would discuss the books he read with him, one on one. I could not teach physics, mathematics and other courses beyond my ken, so students spent time meeting school course requirements outside the alternative school while I offered something else. I issued no grades and in 1974 that was nirvana for both students and me. Pressure off!  I recall that the major hurdle for the students as well as myself was to structure our time, to manage our freedom, which to me is a reasonable definition of life.

As I have mentioned before about the envy of the artist, what freedom I had was immense.  I had no periods to mind, I ate lunch when I wanted to and I had no study hall to go to. I was an emancipated teacher within the factory schedule of a public school – free of bells, periods and the like. I think this was annoying to some of the staff, as if I was being paid to do nothing in that mysterious room that had students and an outré personality and had the temerity to call itself a school within a school. In fact, as I was opening the bottom drawer of my desk, lined with manila folders setting out the activities of the day, month and the philosophies of the school’s structure, Mr. Roth popped in to say hello and looked down at the opened drawer. His response was priceless: “Gee, I thought you were so unstructured.” And here was proof that within freedom there is order, within freedom there is an innate genetic code to follow. Roth would bring up his new awareness about me and the school from time to time. Put it another way, he now respected me.

Give me Dali, Pollack, Gaudi, Wright, Klimt and Man Ray and I give you creative order. The very fractals of our physical order are order of an amazing kind.

In the years at the school which had a short run, in the spring and the fall I would take a small group of students up to Woodstock, very much for myself as I have said, but also to introduce them to a fading world that I had I known and found creative, stimulating and vibrant. It had changed my life. I feel certain that some of the events in Woodstock are sweet memories for them. I took them to my old haunts, the bakery for that miraculous bread with raisins and cream cheese; I took them to a local lake and we munched our food in the cold of winter in our cars and in the sweet breezes off the lake during spring. At that time there was a store that specialized in butterflies, typical of Woodstock: here were bookmarks, T-shorts, pencils and erasers, kites, paper napkins, butterfly themed books, mobiles having the butterfly as its escutcheon. Shopping in the village was really fun and an eye opener for some.

I hoped one of the delights I could offer them was to visit a woman art dealer somewhere secreted in the woods of Woodstock.

In the summer of ’68 I had visited her, again serendipitously, which was always much more eventful and exciting. She was in her early sixties and her residence was a sight to behold. It was a museum in that she sold what she had collected from her house and what she could not sell she used to adorn her home. Imported wooden doorways, wooden scrims and screens, urns, wooden arches, stone statuary and rondos and oils populated the walls of her home, in which she had established her bedroom in the center of it all. I recall she pointed out to me with pride a painting of Fairchild Porter who I did not know of. As I wandered her intensely furnished home, as if an expanded reliquary of a pharaoh, she shared her thoughts.

“You know, Matt, when I was a young woman I used to visit the galleries on Fifth Avenue. I had no money to buy anything but I wanted to see and maybe someday buy what I had admired. On occasion a feeling gallery dealer would give me access to other parts not shown to the public. I imagine he saw something in my eyes .And it came to past that I became an art dealer and just you look at all the things I have here; they are worth more to me in the evening when I take my nap, and in the dying light of day I can survey all my cherished art works.”

I said nothing. There was nothing to contribute to that heartfelt sentiment. Only now do I associate to Bernstein who tells the inquiring reporter the poignant tale of a young woman with a parasol who he saw only once but who he cannot expunge from memory given all his years in Citizen Kane. We are all haunted by the past.

“And I made a promise to myself, I swear to you I did. I said that if I ever amounted to anything, if I had my own gallery or became an art dealer, I would always welcome young and old to my home free, without any pressure to purchase. And so here you are. Please see if it were for the first time.”

I still see in mind’s eye her rooms. And when I brought these young people to visit her and she graciously once again allowed them to browse and to have their minds, perhaps hearts, open up a bit to the riches herein, I kvelled – Yiddish says it best.