New Harmony Indiana
| Thursday
January 26, 2006
9:55AM
34 WC33 Bright, sunny
I've visited New Harmony twice by myself and once with Kate. It works for me for a variety of reasons: Paul Tillich's buried there; Phillip Johnson designed an open-air Episcopal church for the town, Richard Meier designed the visitor center. Plus, there is the wonderful history of the Rappites, German Lutheran communalists who founded New Harmony, and the brief utopia of Richard Owens, the Scottish industrialist who packed up scientists and scholars and bought them New Harmony for a socialist experiment. It failed, but out of the "boatload of knowledge" passengers the United States Geographical Service was formed, right there in New Harmony. Finally, New Harmony is in Indiana, and gives me a different spot from which to view my childhood, lived a couple of hundred miles north and east of there, but still in Indiana. |
| Monday
January 23, 2006
11:38PM
36 WC34 light snow
As I searched for both a title and an image to sum up my website, I found the labyrinth plan for New Harmony. The image fit. Just fell into place. Clink. Also, it made One Pilgrim's Progress make sense as a website title, too. At first I went to the images for Pilgrim's Progress, I liked some of them, but they just didn't feel right. Too bleak and too Christian. The labyrinth calls to mind the spiral, the eternal journey from the darkness of the womb to the darkness of the tomb. As it began to ricochet around, I realized the labyrinth and the spiral share the property of returning to spots left behind, but at a different point, a changed perspective, a point further on on the journey, yet still, also close to its beginning. And, to use the labyrinth analogy, we can go from birth into the center of midlife, come out to death, and, yet, find ourselves at the labyrinth's beginning once again. This does not hold a terror for me, or a weariness, as it seems to for Hindus and Buddhists, rather, it seems to offer richness, second chances, hope. Point here is that New Harmony as a place has come to symbolize, for me, a return on the labyrinth near home, yet a spot from which I can see home in a changed, enriched perspective. So I can assimilate my childhood and young adulthood without rancor, in fact, with some joy and depth. |
June 15, 1999
Cool air last night blew in through my balcony screen door. I slept like a baby. My energy level's not been so good this am though and I have to say I think it's not following the Zone. I'm eager to get back to that part of my life, to learn it, integrate it into our life at home and know how to take it on the road better next time.
I'm abuzz today with the Last Druid idea. Diviaticus Jones would have loved Owens' New Harmony. As soon as I get home, I'm going to look on the Internet for the publishers I wrote down on the Walker's Guide. Then, I'm going to start learning 19C engineering, natural history, geology, zoology. Also, all the subject areas I listed in the mind-map. The monk/scholar will work at those, perhaps visit Bakken, too. I'm also ready to go to work on Liminal Zone, too. I believe both of these books will require long research and study before I'm ready.
I'm going to leave with only six hundred words or so done for today, but I do have the photo record of gardening here, and the notes in my book for this trip.
The New Harmony Journals Over Dinner at the Bayou Grill 6 14 99
I ate away from my diet—chicken fried steak and blueberry pie—but this is the last for this journey. Two men, older than myself, sat down beside me. They spoke of farming, but not of chemicals and grain prices and the livestock problems, but of love of the sweetgum tree, the best ways to move hay, the potential problem of pasturing a horse in a field full of grass—Moose, the horse, might eat the bark on trees. To hear these old men speak of planting trees, pasturing horses, of their love for their land and their hopes for trees they would yet plant, "willows, black locust (a mistake in my opinion), burr oak" delighted me, made me glad to be a man, especially a man who cares about land.
May each of us who speak in public places glow with the love of our work.
After, I walked the streets, trying to unburden my colon from this unusual assault. I tried to repeat the wonderful rain soaked firefly ecstasy, but the calm sky and my familiarity spoiled the scene. Tonight the town and its Rappite cottages, the Granary, the markerless cemetery, Bruderhouse #2 seem to have lost the patina of my twilight entry yesterday. I am sure were I to stay a week depths would emerge that my casual examination of the surface cannot yield. Perhaps another year.
I am grateful to God for the birdsong, the flights of the lightning bugs. The fountains and mazes leave me stunned, calmed.
