Carol Emshwiller

AL

SORT OF a plane crash in an uncharted region of the park.

We were flying fairly low over the mountains. We had come to the last ridge when there, before us, appeared this incredible valley…

Suddenly the plane sputtered. (We knew we were low on gas but we had thought to make it over the mountains.

“I think I can bring her in.” (John’s last words.)

I was the only survivor.

A plane crash in a field of alfalfa, across the road from it the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. An oasis on the edge of the parking area. One survivor. He alone, Al, who has spent considerable time in France, Algeria and Mexico, his paintings without social relevance (or so the critics say) and best in the darker colors, not a musician at all yet seems to be one of us. He, a stranger, wandering in a land he doesn’t remember and not one penny of our kind of money, creeping from behind our poster, across from it the once-a-year art experience for music lovers. Knowing him as I do now, he must have been wary then, view from our poster: ENTRANCE sign, vast parking lot, our red and white tent, our EXIT on the far side, maybe the sound of a song, a frightening situation under the circumstance, all the others dead and Al having been unconscious for who knows how long? (the scar from that time is still on his cheek) stumbling across the road then and into our ticket booth.

“Hi.”

I won’t say he wasn’t welcome. Even then we were wondering were we facing stultification? Already some of our rules had become rituals. Were we, we wondered, doomed to a partial relevance in our efforts to make music meaningful in our time? And now Al, dropped to us from the skies (no taller than Tom Disch, no wider and not quite so graceful). Later he was to say: “Maybe the artful gesture is lost forever.”

We had a girl with us then as secretary, a long-haired changeling child, actually the daughter of a prince (there still are princes) left out in the picnic area of a western state forest to be found and brought up by some old couple in the upper middle class (she still hasn’t found this out for sure, but has always suspected something of the sort) so when I asked Al to my (extra) bedroom it was too late. (By that time he had already pounded his head against the wall some so he seemed calm and happy and rather well adjusted to life in our valley.) The man from the Daily asked him how did he happen to become interested in art? He said he came from a land of cultural giants east of our outermost islands where the policemen were all poets. That’s significant in two ways.

About the artful gesture being lost, so many lost arts and soft, gray birds, etc., etc., etc. (The makers of toe shoes will have to go when the last toe dancer dies.)

However, right then, there was Al, mumbling to us in French, German and Spanish. We gave him two tickets to our early evening concert even though he couldn’t pay except in what looked like pesos. Second row, left side. (Right from the beginning there was something in him I couldn’t resist.) We saw him craning his neck there, somehow already with our long-haired girl beside him. She’s five hundred years old though she doesn’t look a day over sixteen and plays the virginal like an angel. Did her undergraduate work at the University of Utah (around 1776 I would say). If she crossed the Alleghenies now she’d crumble into her real age and die, so later on I tried to get them to take a trip to the Ann Arbor Film Festival together, but naturally she had something else to do. Miss Haertzler.

As our plane came sputtering down I saw the tents below, a village of nomads, God knows how far from the nearest outpost of civilization. They had, no doubt, lived like this for thousands of years.

These thoughts went rapidly through my mind in the moments before we crashed and then I lost consciousness.

“COME, COME YE SONS OF ART.” That’s what our poster across the street says—quotes, that is. Really very nice in dayglo colors. “COME, COME AWAY …” etc., on to “TO CELEBRATE, TO CELEBRATE THIS TRIUMPHANT DAY,” which meant to me, in some symbolic way even at that time, the day Al came out from behind it and stumbled across the road to our booth, as they say: “A leading force, even then, among the new objectivists and continues to play a major role among them up to the present time” (which was a few years ago). Obtained his bachelor’s degree in design at the University of Michigan with further study at the Atelier Chaumiere in Paris. He always says, “Form speaks.” I can say I knew him pretty well at that time. I know he welcomes criticism but not too early in the morning. Ralph had said (he was on the staff of the Annual Fall Festival), “Maybe artistic standards are no longer relevant.” (We were wondering at the time how to get the immediacy of the war into our concerts more meaningfully than the 1812 Overture. Also something of the changing race relations.) Al answered, but just then a jet came by or some big oil truck and I missed the key word. That leaves me still not understanding what he meant. The next morning the same thing happened and it may have been more or less the answer to everything.

By then we had absorbed the major San Francisco influences. These have remained with us in some form or other up to the present time.

I would like you, Tom Disch, to write a poem about this plane crash in an uncharted region, but really, you know, kind of alfalfa field thing. I’d like the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts (and literature, too, if you must) in it and SONS OF ART. I know you can do it, can do anything which is a very nice way to be and being twenty-eight too and having your kind of future which isn’t everyone’s, not Al’s either in spite of some similarities. Al is, after all, more my age, so even Al might be wishing to be Tom Disch though he wouldn’t give up his long hooked nose and very black hair even for a tattooed eagle on his chest. Tom is kind of baroque and jolly. Al is more somber. Both having had quite an influence on all of us already. Jolly, somber. Somber, jolly. To be shy or not to be or less so than Al? He changed the art exhibit we had in the vestibule to his kind of art as soon as Miss Haertzler went to bed with him. We had a complete new selection of paintings by Friday afternoon, all hung in time for the early performance (Ralph hung them) and by then, or at least by Saturday night, I knew I was, at last, really in love for the first time in my life.

When I came to I found we had crashed in a cultivated field planted with some sort of weedlike bush entirely unfamiliar to me. I quickly ascertained that my three companions were beyond my help, then extricated myself from the wreckage and walked to the edge of the field. I found myself standing beneath a giant stele where strange symbols swirled in brilliant, jewellike colors. Weak and dazed though I was, I felt a surge of delight. Surely, I thought, the people who made this cannot be entirely uncivilized.

Miss Haertzler took her turn onstage like the rest of us. She was the sort who would have cut off her right breast the better to bow the violin, but, happily, she played the harpsichord. Perhaps Al wouldn’t have minded anyway. Strange man. From some entirely different land and I could never quite figure out where. Certainly he wouldn’t have minded. She played only the very old and the very new, whereas I had suddenly discovered Beethoven (over again) and talked about Romanticism during our staff meetings. Al said, “In some ways a return to Romanticism is like a return to the human figure.” I believe he approved of the idea.

He spent the first night, Tuesday night that was, the twenty-second, in our red and white tent under the bleachers at the back. A touch of hay fever woke him early.

By Wednesday Ralph and I had already spent two afternoons calculating our losses owing to the rain, and I longed for a new experience of some sort that would lift me out of the endless problems of the Annual Fall Festival of the Arts. I returned dutifully, however, to the area early the next day to continue my calculations in the quiet of the morning and found him there.

“Me, Al. You?” Pointing finger.

“Ha, ha.” (I must get rid of my nervous laugh!)

*

I wanted to redefine my purposes not only for his sake, but for my own.

I wanted to find out just what role the audience should play. I wanted to figure out, as I mentioned before, how we could best incorporate aspects of the war and the changing race relations into our concerts.

I wondered how to present musical experiences in order to enrich the lives of others in a meaningful way, how to engage, in other words, their total beings.

I wanted to expand their musical horizons. “I’ve thought about these things all year,” I said, “ever since I knew I would be a director of the Annual Fall Festival. I also want to mention the fact,” I said, “that there’s a group from the college who would like to disrupt the unity of our performances (having other aims and interests), but,” I told him, “the audience has risen to the occasion, at least by last night, when we had, not only good weather, but money and an enthusiastic reception.”

“I have recognized,” he replied, “here in this valley, a fully realized civilization with a past history, a rich present, and a future all its own, and I have understood, even in my short time here, the vast immigration to urban areas that must have taken place and that must be continuing into the present time.”

How could I help falling in love with him? He may have spent the second night in Miss Haertzler’s bed (if my conjectures are correct) but, I must say, it was with me he had all his discussions.

I awoke the next morning extremely hungry, with a bad headache and with sniffles and no handkerchief yet, somehow, in spite of this, in fairly good spirits though I did long for a good hot cup of almost anything. Little did I realize then, or I might not have felt so energetic, the hardships I was to encounter here in this strange, elusive, never-never land. Even just getting something to eat was to prove difficult.

Somewhat later that day I asked him out to lunch and I wish I could describe his expression eating his first grilled cheese and bacon, sipping his first clam chowder …

Ralph, I tell you, this really happened and just as if we haven’t all crash-landed here in some sort of unknown alfalfa field. As if we weren’t all penniless or about to be, waiting for you to ask us out to lunch. Three of our friends are dead and already there are several misunderstandings. You may even be in love with me for all I know, though that may have been before I had gotten to be your boss in the Annual Fall Festival.

That afternoon I gave Al a job, Ralph, cleaning up candy wrappers and crumpled programs with a nail on a stick and I invited him to our after-performance party for the audience. Paid him five dollars in advance. That’s how much in love I was, so there’s no sense in you coming over anymore. Besides, I’m tired of people who play instruments by blowing.

I found the natives to be a grave race, sometimes inattentive, but friendly and smiling, even though more or less continuously concerned about the war. The younger ones frequently live communally with a charming innocence, by threes or fours or even up to sixes or eights in quite comfortable apartments, sometimes forming their own family groups from a few chosen friends, and, in their art, having a strange return to the very old or the primitive along with their logical and very right interest in the new, though some liked Beethoven.

We had invited the audience to our party after the performance. The audience was surprised and pleased. It felt privileged. It watched us now with an entirely different point of view and it wondered at its own transformation while I wondered I hadn’t thought of doing this before and said so to Al as the audience gasped, grinned, clapped, fidgeted and tried to see into the wings.

We had, during that same performance, asked the audience to come forward, even to dance if it was so inclined. We had discussed this thoroughly beforehand in our staff meetings. It wasn’t as though it were not a completely planned thing, and we had thought some Vivaldi would be a good way to start them off. Al had said, “Certainly something new must happen every day.” Afterward I said to the audience, “Let me introduce Al, who has just arrived by an unfortunate plane crash from a far-off land, a leading force among the new objectivists, but penniless at the moment, sleeping out under our bleachers …” However, that very night I heard that Miss Haertzler and Al went for a walk after our party up to the gazebo on the hill or either they went rowing on the lake, and Tom Disch said, though not necessarily referring to them, “Those are two, thin, young people in the woods and they’re quite conscious that they don’t have clothes on and that they’re very free spirits.” And he said, “She has a rather interesting brassiere,” though that was at a different time, and also, “I wonder if he’s a faggot because of the two fingers coming down so elegantly.”

I found it hard to adjust to some of the customs of this hardy and lively people. This beautiful, slim young girl invited me to her guest room on my second night there and then entered as I lay in bed, dropping her simple, brightly colored shift at her feet. Underneath she wore only the tiniest bit of pink lace, and while I was wondering was she, perhaps, the king’s daughter or the chief’s mistress? what dangers would 1 be opening myself up to? and thinking besides that this was my first night in a really comfortable bed after a very enervating two days, also my first night with a full stomach and would I be able to? then she moved, not toward me, but to the harpsichord…

I had much to learn.

Mornings, sometimes as early as nine thirty, Al could be found painting in purples, browns, grays and blacks in the vestibule area at the front of our tent. The afternoons many of us, Al included, frequently spent lounging on the grass outside the tent (on those days it didn’t rain), candidly confessing the ages of, and the natures of our very first sexual experiences and discussing other indiscretions, with the sounds of the various rehearsals as our background music. (Miss Haertzler’s first sexual experience, from what I’ve been told, may have actually taken place fairly recently and in our own little red ticket booth.) During the evening concerts I can still see Al, as though it were yesterday, in his little corner backstage scribbling on his manifesto of the new art: “Why should painting remain shackled by outmoded laws? Let us proclaim, here and at once, a new world for art where each work is judged by its own internal structures, by the manifestations of its own being, by its self-established decrees, by its self-generated commands.

“Let us proclaim the universal properties of the thing itself without the intermediary of fashion.

“Let us proclaim the fragment, the syllable, the single note (or sound) as the supreme elements out of which everything else flows …” And so forth.

(Let us also proclaim what Tom Disch has said: “I don’t understand people who have a feeling of comfortableness about art. There’s a kind of art that they feel comfortable seeing and will go and see that kind of thing again and again. I get very bored with known sensations… .”)

But, even as he worked, seemingly so contented, and even as he welcomed color TV, the discovery of DNA and the synthesizing of an enzyme, Al had his doubts and fears just like anyone else.

Those mountains that caught the rays of the setting sun and burned so red in the evenings! That breath-taking view! How many hours have I spent gazing at them when I should have been writing on my manifesto, aching with their beauty and yet wondering whether I would ever succeed in crossing them? How many times did my conversation at that time contain hidden references to bearers and guides? Once I learned of a trail that I might follow by myself if I could get someone to furnish me with a map. It was said only to be negotiable through the summer to the middle of October and to be too steep for mule or motorcycle. Later on I became acquainted with a middle-aged, homosexual flute player named Ralph A. who was willing to answer all my questions quite candidly. We became good friends and, as I got to know him better, I was astounded at the sophistication of his views on the nature of the universe. He was a gentle, harmless person, tall and tanned from a sun lamp. Perhaps I should mention that he never made any sexual advances to me, that I was aware of at any rate.

“After the meeting between Ralph A. and Al W.,” the critics write, “Ralph A.’s work underwent an astonishing change. Obviously he was impressed by the similarities between art and music and he attempted to interpret in musical terms those portions of Al W.’s manifesto that would lend themselves to this transposition. His ‘Three Short Pieces for Flute, Oboe and Prepared Piano’ is, perhaps, the finest example of his work of this period.”

By then Al had lent his name to our town’s most prestigious art gallery. We had quoted him often in our programs. I had discussed with him the use of public or private funds for art. I had also discussed, needless to say, the problem of legalized abortion and whether the state should give aid to parochial schools. Also the new high-yield rice. I mentioned our peace groups including our Women’s March for Peace. I also tried to tell him Miss Haertzler’s real age and I said that, in spite of her looks, it would be very unlikely that she could ever have any children, whereas I, though not particularly young anymore, could at least do that, I’m (fairly) sure.

And then, all too soon, came the day of the dismantling of the Annual Fall Festival tent and the painting over of our billboard, which Al did (in grays, browns, purples and blacks), making it into an ad for the most prestigious art gallery, and I, I was no longer a director of anything at all. The audience, which had grown fat and satiated on our sounds, now walked in town as separate entities … factions … fragments … will-o’-the-wisps … meaningless individuals with their separate reactions. Al walked with them, wearing his same old oddly cut clothes as unselfconsciously as ever, and, as ever, with them, but not of them. He had worked for us until the very last moment, but now I had no more jobs to give. Tom Disch had had a job as a copywriter for a while and made quite a bit of money, but he gave it all up for the sake of literature and I expected Al to give up these little jobs for the sake of his art as soon as he had some money. The trouble was, he couldn’t find another little job to tide him over and while the critics and many others, too, liked his paintings, no one wanted to buy them. They were fairly expensive and the colors were too somber. I helped him look into getting a grant, but in the end it went to a younger man (which I should have anticipated). I gave him, at about that time, all my cans of corned-beef hash even though I knew he still spent some time in Miss Haertzler’s guest room, though, by then, a commune (consisting of six young people of both sexes in a three-room apartment) had accepted him as one of them. (I wonder sometimes that he never asked Miss Haertzler to marry him, but he may have been unfamiliar with marriage as we know it. We never discussed it that I remember and not too many people in his circle of friends were actually married to each other.)

Ralph had established himself as the local college musical figure, musician in residence, really, and began to walk with a stoop and a slight limp and to have a funny way of clearing his throat every third or fourth word. I asked him to look into a similar job for Al, but they already had an artist in residence, a man in his sixties said to have a fairly original eye and to be profoundly concerned with the disaffection of the young, so they couldn’t do a thing for Al for at least a year, they said, aside from having him give a lecture or two, but even that wouldn’t be possible until the second semester.

Those days I frequently saw Al riding around on a borrowed motor scooter (sometimes not even waving), Miss Haertzler on the back with her skirts pulled up. He still painted. The critics have referred to this time in his life as one of hardship and self-denial while trying to get established.

Meanwhile it grew colder.

Miss Haertzler bought him a shearling lamb jacket. Also one for herself. I should have suspected something then, but I knew it was the wrong time of year for a climb. There was already a little bit of snow on the top of the highest of our mountains and the weatherman had forecast a storm front on the way that was or was not to be there by that night or the next afternoon. We all thought it was too early for a blizzard.

I was to find Miss (Vivienne) Haertzler an excellent traveling companion. Actually a better climber than I was myself in many ways and yet, for all that vigor, preserving an essential femininity. Like many others of her race, she had small hands and feet and a fair-skinned look of transparency and yet an endurance that matched my own. But I did notice about her that day an extraordinary anxiety that wasn’t in keeping with her nature at all (nor of the natives in general). I didn’t give a second thought, however, to any of the unlikely rumors I had heard, but 1 assumed it was due to the impending storm that we hoped would hide all traces of our ascent.

A half a day later a good-sized group of our more creative people were going after one of the most exciting minds in the arts with bloodhounds. A good thing for Miss Haertzler, too, since the two of them never even got halfway. I saw them back in town a few days afterward still looking frostbitten and it wasn’t long after that that I had a very pleasant discussion with Al. I had asked him out to our town’s finest Continental restaurant. We talked, among other things, about alienation in our society, population control, impending world famine and other things of international concern including the anxiety prevalent among our people of impending atomic doom. In passing I mentioned a psychologist I had once gone to for certain anxieties of my own of a more private nature. Soon after that I heard that Al was in therapy himself and had nearly conquered his perennial urge to cross the mountains and, as the psychologist put it, leave our happy valley in his efforts to escape from something in himself. It would be a significant moment in both modern painting and modern music (and perhaps in literature, too, Tom Disch might say) when Al would finally be content to remain in his new-found artistic milieu. I can’t help but feel that the real beginning of Al’s participation (sponsored) within our culture as a whole was right here on my couch in front of the fireplace with a cup of hot coffee and a promise of financial assistance from two of our better-known art patrons. It was right here that he began living out some sort of universal human drama of life and death in keeping with his special talents.