The Shakers live again
Oct. 28th, 2008 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI'm interested in the Shakers today, because the last parallel Scotland I wrote for my Book of Scotlands unfolds a scenario in which an evangelical Scottish entrepreneur called Brent Shouter decides to use his influence and wealth to make Scotland go Shaker. He arranges exhibitions and launches a heavily-subsidized lifestyle chain called Shakestation which sells stark, simple furniture in the Shaker style. Shouter is so successful that Scots retreat from cities to self-sustaining, celibate rural communities, disconnecting from TV, radio and the internet. When the Shouter character dies, the government sends an androgynous "Government Christ" to beguile the Shouter-Shakers back to living in cities and reproducing. It's urgent, because celibacy is making the Scots die out.
Researching this story, I found a wonderful 30 minute documentary about The Shakers on the Folkstreams website. Made in 1974 on 16mm, the film (I'd recommend the Real Surestream version) mostly consists of interviews with Shaker women born in the 1870s. They've outlived all the Shaker males, and linger on, the last generation of a beautiful cult erased from history by their own fear of sex. As one of them sings: "Come light Shaker light come life eternal, come shake out of me all that is carnal". It's precisely this "shaking out of all that is carnal" that has erased the Shakers from history.
I'm interested in connections some observers have made between Shaker design and Modernism, and Shaker design and Japanese crafts. There does seem to be a connection to both (a big draw at the American pavilion in the Osaka Expo 70 was Shaker furniture, for instance), and it's something to do with modesty and simplicity, functionalism and avoidance of ostentation -- the kind of qualities we'd call "Protestant", basically, and which connect extreme practicality with a kind of micro-spirituality; which say, in other words, that functional things are also spiritual things, because God loves people who work.
Unfortunately, God also loves people who reproduce, and the Shakers... didn't.
Researching this story, I found a wonderful 30 minute documentary about The Shakers on the Folkstreams website. Made in 1974 on 16mm, the film (I'd recommend the Real Surestream version) mostly consists of interviews with Shaker women born in the 1870s. They've outlived all the Shaker males, and linger on, the last generation of a beautiful cult erased from history by their own fear of sex. As one of them sings: "Come light Shaker light come life eternal, come shake out of me all that is carnal". It's precisely this "shaking out of all that is carnal" that has erased the Shakers from history.
I'm interested in connections some observers have made between Shaker design and Modernism, and Shaker design and Japanese crafts. There does seem to be a connection to both (a big draw at the American pavilion in the Osaka Expo 70 was Shaker furniture, for instance), and it's something to do with modesty and simplicity, functionalism and avoidance of ostentation -- the kind of qualities we'd call "Protestant", basically, and which connect extreme practicality with a kind of micro-spirituality; which say, in other words, that functional things are also spiritual things, because God loves people who work. Unfortunately, God also loves people who reproduce, and the Shakers... didn't.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:45 am (UTC)Can we even call their existence with the menfolk endogamy? Did Shakers ever properly recognise marriage, if they forbade procreation? As with all cults that seem doomed to disappearance, I'm particularly interested in attempts to renew or reinvigorate their membership - this (http://www.jstor.org/pss/1185585) may therefore be of interest, but I sadly lack JSTOR access these days...
Ben
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:49 am (UTC)The coercive uniformity of mass culture and disruptive influence of drugs helped to kill a lot of these communities off, culminating in scenes like Jonestown (http://www.laweekly.com/2008-10-23/news/from-silver-lake-to-suicide/all) and the Branch Davidians.
Quaker meeting houses are still active in this area.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 06:07 am (UTC)i used to go one in bergen county every once in a while and play the open mic that they'd have at the end. it was all aging hippies reading poetry and playing guitar. and they made excellent pie.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-29 06:23 am (UTC)That said, I do have Quaker sympathies. Many of America's greatest naturalists, like William Bartram, were Quakers. This was due in part to their reverence for nature, and their belief that the word of God lay not in the Bible, but in his works.
Here is a local meeting house that dates back to 1775, made from the local red sandstone. The eaves are lined with bat houses, since they were shooed out of the attic at one point (Quakers like to tread lightly).
This is a typical Quaker graveyard. Originally the graves were unmarked, but eventually they began to use blank stone markers.
The Friends meetings down this way tend to be traditional, with little or nothing spoken, and long silences.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 09:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 02:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-29 06:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 01:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 09:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 10:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 10:51 am (UTC)No doubt those cerebral forms of intensity are replaced by intense love, though, and intense stress, and intense feelings of belonging to the community, and intense community policing... and, sometimes, intense annoyance. WILL YOU STOP CRYING?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 11:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 11:21 am (UTC)just joking
(sitting here listening to Woman's Hour)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 11:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 11:38 am (UTC)There's no way I could live the life I do with kids, just no way. This week I finished a new book, in two weeks I have a new album coming out, I have three articles due for ID magazine and one each week for the New York Times, I blog every day -- this would just not be possible for a father who was even halfway taking his domestic responsibilities seriously enough.
Now, you may say I do too much, that doing less might make me more effective, whatever. But life is short, and I want to achieve things before I die. I want to make more books and more records. I don't want to be forced to do work which just makes money to provide for a family and otherwise wastes my time. It's a choice, just like it was for those Shakers. A choice of intensities, if you prefer.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 11:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:06 pm (UTC)We're actually going to have a little test run this week, though -- we have my nephew Robbie staying with us for a few days! Let's see how it goes.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:21 pm (UTC)Didn't you announce your engagement on this very blog like two or three years ago? Long time to keep a girl waiting. Poor show, Momus!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:23 pm (UTC)Didn't you announce your engagement on this very blog like two or three years ago? Way to keep a girl waiting. Poor show, Momus!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:31 pm (UTC)You'll have to reveal your identity (currently hidden behind two different proxy servers) if you want to be invited to the wedding, though, Anon!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:08 pm (UTC)I should have said "One can just get the wife to look after the kids"
I feel all Russell Brand now. Jokes gone wrong and all that.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 12:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 02:02 pm (UTC)I used to be amused by the idea of craft gestation and its parallels with parenthood. A friend seemed to produce a novel for every child he fathered. His wife would get rather nervous when he started working on any new book and perhaps it explains his later move into poetry.
It ain't necessarily so...
Date: 2008-10-28 11:38 am (UTC)This man (the superior Orthodox theologian of modern times and a seer and mystic too) married Elena Ivanovna Tomkakova at the age of 27. His marriage was a happy one, and some of the deepest moments of his religious experience in subsequent years were set in the context of his family life (three sons and one daughter). He possessed a powerful intellect, wrote many seminal books.
But you Momus are a dilettante, a journalist. The words you write are the coin you conjure with to hide the modish vanity of your thought. But it's payment the stupid seem happy enough to accept. You evidently have neither an 'intense' spiritual life nor an 'intense' intellectual life to sacrifice. If by chance you would like a child and are not impotent, I would advise you to have one.
Re: It ain't necessarily so...
Date: 2008-10-28 12:04 pm (UTC)Aren't you worried about bringing more "vain modish dilettantes" into the world, though, when there are already far too many? Or are you figuring that they'll inevitably rebel against my values and become marketing executives?
Re: It ain't necessarily so...
Date: 2008-10-28 03:50 pm (UTC)Re: It ain't necessarily so...
Date: 2008-10-28 04:53 pm (UTC)Re: It ain't necessarily so...
Date: 2008-10-28 05:08 pm (UTC)Nite nite.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 01:38 pm (UTC)Pace Connolly, I suspect good art can survive even with a baby screaming in the hall, as long as someone else runs out to comfort it.
Parents like Picasso, Doris Lessing and Ingmar Bergman (who was only able to remember which year his children were born if he was told what he was shooting at the time) are the template.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 02:19 pm (UTC)I guess what I'm trying to get at is the difference between voluntary sublimation/repression and the kind which takes place in our larger psychic/social selves completely unbidden, and without our conscious knowledge. I think artists, writers, religious people and even athletes do the former all the time. Drew Bundini Brown taught Ali that he "had to keep the hard on" not lose it. His desire to destroy his opponent had to be more than his desire to bang the pretty blond sitting ringside. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that if you are still interested in fancy coffees (guilty) then you are not ready. Similar to what the sufi master said to the young ephebe who wanted to learn the sacred dance. Go and fast for three days, then have a sumptuous banquet prepared. If he still wanted to learn, more than he wanted to eat, then he could follow the way of the sufis. Some of the early gnostic (valentinus (http://www.cogwriter.com/valentinus.htm)) schools taught that the soul was basically a "slut" but once it joined with the divine, it spurned all other lovers. I think what attracts me to these traditions is the ancient recognition that humans are controlled by two main things, their stomachs and their cocks, which a part of me agrees with. Not that I could ever practice such asceticism - are you kidding me? My dick gets hard every time the wind blows. But I do think that there is a significant subset of intelligent people who resent the power that sex has over them.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 02:30 pm (UTC)But sex is not a very demanding master: you really can't be having sex all day long, after all, just as you can't be eating all day either. There are natural cycles of interest and disinterest in both food and sex, and during the down times you can be getting on with other things.
I was born to adore you
Date: 2008-10-28 04:30 pm (UTC)Re: I was born to adore you
Date: 2008-10-28 04:58 pm (UTC)But let's imagine our (male) artist having sex some of the time, and the rest storing up future sex in the form of art which will impress the girls (or boost his status and wealth in ways that impress the girls). Let us imagine him, In other words, sublimating, and let us define sublimating as a sexual activity which also postpones sexual activity.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 02:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-10-28 04:09 am (UTC)shaky business
Date: 2008-10-28 11:17 am (UTC)Stagecoach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach_Group)?
Soapy Brian Soutar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Souter)?
Like all good yarns there may be other threads in the fabric of this ideaspace.
Re: shaky business
Date: 2008-10-28 11:43 am (UTC)Shaking Momus
Date: 2008-10-28 11:42 am (UTC)There's a link between Momus and the shakers: R.L. Stevenson "Travels with a donkey". Stevenson was interested by the Camisards during this trip, who later moved to London where they were known as the "French Prophets". The French Prophets, through the writings of Elie Marion, deeply influenced Ann Lee and the early Shaker movement.
Gilles
Re: Shaking Momus
Date: 2008-10-28 11:49 am (UTC)There are two or three other reasons I blogged about them. The mixture of flowery housecoats and extra-terrestrial headgear appeals to me (they're very extraterrestrially focused, in fact, and their appearance just reflects that), their otherworldliness (and the 16mm film stock) recalls art films by
Sex and Religion
Date: 2008-10-28 01:00 pm (UTC)I've been reading about Ephrata (http://www.cob-net.org/cloister.htm), which was also a celibate (mostly) spiritual community. The idea is to project the physical needs onto a gendered spiritual plane (Christ and Sophia). Man was perfect and asexual before the Fall, so it is an attempt to get back to the Garden, so to speak, by denying all physical urges (apart from food and shit, though they also often fasted).
Other groups would take similar ideas in the opposite direction, a salvation through the sexual act, a sort of Christian tantric group sex magic worship thing.
have alook here (http://books.google.com/books?id=Yr-8FypJ7ekC&pg=PA301&lpg=PA301&dq=muckers+canters+buttler&source=bl&ots=7iPmr325yl&sig=67q1_VwXwYIoC5V65QKfA8PRR8s&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result) and here (http://www.sacred-texts.com/tantra/sas/sas27.htm)
These groups don't last long because they are persecuted by the locals. Though nowadays the Thelemites get up to such things with out too much notice.
God loves people who work.
Date: 2008-10-29 01:29 am (UTC)Conservatism can do that to.