S. P. Dinsmoor and the Garden of Eden

“ . . . when I was building [the Garden of Eden] they accused me of being bughouse on religion. I am bughouse good and proper, but not on religion, perpetual motion, or any other fool thing that I cannot find out one thing about.” From Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden by S. P. Dinsmoor

The Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas is full of quirky goodness. I first toured it more than thirty-five years ago, and have remembered and talked about it since, so it seemed like a good idea for me, my son,and my parents to take a road trip. I even took my camera – which hasn’t been used in several years. (We are not a memorializing family – a few photos, no scrapbooking, so if the collecting of 30 odd years worth of plastic butter tubs doesn’t count, we are not very outwardly nostalgic.) So the photos are just so-so, but the trip was a treat.

This is Lucas, a small Kansas town, 40 miles west of Salina, and another 15 miles north and west around Lake Wilson.





Samuel P. Dinsmoor, a civil war veteran, a former teacher and farmer, built an eleven room cabin there, after he retired. The logs are made of limestone.



No two windows or doors are the same size, and a lot of the interior woodwork is Dinsmoor’s:





After he finished the house, he created a sculpture garden around it.




Here’s Eden, Eve with an apple and the serpent leaning over her, Adam stepping on the snake he’s holding. The little head over the N in the sign is the devil. Some of the trees you see are made of concrete; some are live.



On the platform below, Abel dies, while his wife grieves and an angel – with an eye of God above her -- watches and points. At the corner, Cain’s wife, with suitcase, is escaping.




In the far right in the next picture, Cain – who you really can’t see well –sorry!—carries a hoe and a dead possum for lunch.

In the middle of the picture, under the American flag with a turkey – Dinsmoor agreed with Franklin that the turkey should be the national bird --a “trust” has its tentacles into everything. Think Monopoly or corporate conglomerate. According to Dinsmoor, “the flag protects capital today better than it does humanity.” At any rate, one of its claws reaches into a soldier’s backpack, another grabs a kid, another holds bonds and another a sack of interest. One tentacle wraps around a woman who is chasing a soldier. The soldier is aiming at an Indian—not in the picture -- in the next tree. The Indian is shooting at a dog who is after a fox, who is stalking a bird eating a worm eating a leaf. As for his depiction of the world, Dinsmoor says “If it is not right I am to blame, but if the Garden of Eden is not right Moses is to blame. He wrote it up and I built it.”



Dinsmoor gives us his ideal version too -- on the far side of the garden gate we have Liberty spearing the trusts while a man and woman with the ballot are sawing off the limbs.



On the back of the lot – opposite Adam and Eve, Labor is crucified, surrounded by accusers: a doctor, a lawyer, a preacher, and a banker.



Several of the accusers remain unfinished. And, as Dinsmoor died in 1932, he won’t be finishing them anytime soon, although he still contributes to the garden. The price of admission gets you entrance into his mausoleum, where he is mouldering in a concrete casket. No pictures are allowed inside, but here is the outside, a step pyramid, just beyond the pyramid of flowerbeds.




Here’s a closer view of the entrance to the mausoleum—with the concrete flag in front. Dinsmoor attached a number of concrete flags to his sculptures and argued that they wear better than cloth and the government might follow suit. These flags are atop ball bearings, so they can move in the wind (supposedly), but the flag in this picture was removed from the top of the mausoleum, because it might have been hazardous, had it fallen. It’s adorned with the turkey, like other flags in the garden.



For those who’d like to see some better pictures than mine, here’s one website, although there are others too:

http://www.garden-of-eden-lucas-kansas.com

As if Dinsmoor were contagious, Florence Deeble, a neighbor in Lucas, felt impelled to follow his lead by creating a concrete miniature Mt. Rushmore (with other scenes) in her backyard.



I understand her impulse. Visiting the Garden of Eden, I want to go build my own mud sculptures in my backyard, or become an expert on fungi, or dive for treasures in the South Pacific, or in some other way express myself and tap into that great flow of creativity that keeps us buoyant here on earth. Amy says go for the sculptures. She wants to build monuments in her backyard too. I have no chosen subject yet, as mine will look like a blob whatever I intend, but since Amy can really sculpt, she'll have to think about it.

Dinsmoor wanted to bury his first wife in the mausoleum in his yard, but when the city fathers refused him and made him place her in the cemetery, he dug her up in the middle of the night, brought her home, encased her in concrete in the mausoleum and there she is forever after. Or so the story goes. Legends are made of less than this.

At 81, Dinsmoor married his second wife. She was 20 and together they had two children. His son is the youngest surviving child of a Civil War Veteran.

The devil is in the details, and in this place, that's a literal statement too. While God is everywhere represented by All-Seeing Eyes and pointing hands, Dinsmoor bemoans that "these are the only things that I know of that we have to represent Deity. The heathen beat us on ideals. They have got more of a variety and better lookers." But he has no such trouble with the Devil. Dinsmoor got electricity to his property early and lit up his sculptures, so people on the passing trains could view his property at night. While there are bulbs in various spots in the garden -- a snake's mouth, I think, for one -- the devil is lit from within. And I imagine some one-time passenger in the 1920's, maybe a flapper, maybe a farmer, traveling by and being astonished at the phantasm arising out the window, a light on a hill, a beacon on the prairie.

I Had A Dream

I want to break a big fat water balloon over Glenn Beck’s head, not just in anger or frustration, but to wash away all the loopiness, all the anxiety. I want to freshen him up before his big TV event, so he’ll be bright and clean to sell gold to the minions.

I want the Goddess to break through. Beck wants to channel the Spirit, so I say Yea! May you hear and not just react away from what Sophia, Wisdom, is telling you. May She break through!

Whatever She says, may it break like dawn over the assembled hordes, converting two self-centered billionaires to the ideal of social justice – the REAL kind, not the fabrication of repressive regimes – and calm the fears of the rest of the crowd, breaking their stereotypes and their conventional wisdoms, so they smile and say to one another (perhaps repeating Beck, perhaps not), “If our great-great grandchildren are biracial, Spanish-speaking Democratic Muslims, it will be all right. They will carry our DNA, and our hope for greatness, and fond memories of our children and grandchildren if we only care enough to be hospitable to the stranger as if he were Christ come again.”

And so, as in a great story retold by Kathleen Norris, may we say with the monk, weary of the visitors to the monastery, and seeing yet another traveler approaching, “ Oh Jesus Christ, is it you again?”

And what comes out from Glenn Beck may not be the words, but just a gladness that cannot be misunderstood – at least not for another decade – and then only playfully by future generations who’ll say “That poor fool, if God can come and claim him, even him, if She can embrace him in love, we are all children of God . . . Let us open our hearts and feast.”

And I see Pam’s blog as the new Book of Revelation as I chronicle the working of the Spirit, breaking like an infinite balloon of fresh and compelling joy over the earth.

This is the next lesson: Beyond love, joy.

A little rant and a little Kathleen Norris

Looking to verify the subtitle of Kathleen Norris’s Dakota a couple of weeks ago, I ran into a quotation from that book – picked up several years ago in O magazine and attached to various other Quotation websites as well:

“Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.”

While Norris is talking about how Dakota residents responded to the farm crisis of the 80’s, what she observes – blaming the victims, conspiracy theories, willful intellectual blindness, increasing xenophobia as former neighbors and friends become dangerous “outsiders,” and a desire to retreat to some idyllic past –seems particularly apt in the current political climate.

Some of us want to “take the country back,” which looks like the way to “disconnect from change.”

Whenever I hear anyone wanting to take the country back, I always want to ask “from whom?” and “for whom”? For the sake of some heretofore invisible majority that didn’t vote in the last election? From me and people like me? (If so, I’m not giving up that easily!)

The recent concern about immigration looks like an attempt to “take the country back.” Immigration is a real issue, but it suddenly exercises people who are not affected by it, are nowhere near our borders, and know not one single illegal immigrant. The dangerous outsiders: illegal aliens, Muslims wanting a community center several blocks from ground zero, terrorist babies, Kenyans pretending to be Hawaiians, or other more fantastical political conspirators, are everywhere. Fortunately, the UFOs seem to be off visiting some other planet, but there’s plenty of paranoia to go around.

Sometimes “taking the country back” seems to mean retreating into the past. (Hence the nifty quotation from Norris.) How far back do we go? 20 years? 50 years? 250 years? It’s as if Eden is only around the corner, either just back in the recapturable past, or in an alternate historical universe where changing the single element will turn this hell into Heaven . . . if we could deport all the aliens . . . repeal every recent piece of legislation . . . or reincarnate Ronald Reagan, as long as he does not come back as an “anchor baby.”

Since even most of the obtuse seem to have a prickly awareness that it’s not good form to want to enslave another race of people, however nice it might be for some of us, we don’t publicly fantasize too much about the antebellum South, but the American Revolution and the founding fathers seem to be resurgent in our mythologizing. With much flag waving, the Constitution is invoked – with very little analysis – and the founding fathers are dragged by their dead hair into the 21st century and show up as simple-minded shills for some politician’s argument or TV ad.

Such easy patriotism turns America into a cardboard parody of itself, as if we can only love the Barbie version, not the difficult, imperfect, complex, infinitely more interesting and valuable reality.

However wonderful the creation of America, it was not Eden that was created here. However brilliant, the founding fathers need not be our holy icons – or our advertising icons either. They were not saints. They were not perfect. They owned slaves. They completely missed the boat on women’s suffrage, and they didn’t know how to tweet.

So I am not rallying around with teabags hanging from my hat.

And today when I find the current political discourse too shrill, acrimonious, and divisive, all creative thought and tolerance squashed, all political choices reduced to fight or flight, I keep re-reading Dakota, finding some peace with Kathleen Norris among the Benedictines on the prairie. I recommend it for anyone wanting a poet’s take on the spiritual life, or a reprieve from the national loopiness that seems to have seized us.

Vegetation and Metaphor

The volunteer cantaloupes growing in the compost heap have ripened and fallen off the vine. I rescued them in time, but the pumpkins – also a compost bin surprise – have been attacked by something invasive that turns them to mush before they are fully orange. Ugh. I am not crazy about bugs, worms, funguses, and the general process of decomposition, although it makes some good dirt.

The pears are ripe – more or less. We have two pear trees, and I have been harvesting the one with the earlier crop. I can only get to the lowest seven feet or so of the tree and there’s lots more fruit above me. There’s plenty of windfall on the ground too, in various stages of decay. Pears collapse into slime underfoot, and two more drop as I move around the tree. And I notice the smell. Our dog, gone two years now, used to roll in the stuff and return to the house, fur sticky and matted, on an aromatic wave of rotten fruit.

The South, I think, is hot and smelly. This is my Northern prejudice, of course. I still have a bit after twentysome years in the South. When we first moved here, after five years in North Dakota, I noticed the dead armadillos, the carports, the big hair, and a frequent odor which I assumed was the Decay of the South. It made sense to me – plants grew in such profusion and the arc of their growth seemed so accelerated. One moment it was spring and almost instantly after, it seemed, we had overheated summer, early harvest, and the swift movement from ripe to rotten. I later discovered it was a local paper mill I was smelling. Arkansas, after all, is not really the Deep South.

Still, a lush, semi-tropical area – smells included – is the perfect garden for the literature of southern decadence: earthy, sultry, florid, and overripe. I imagine Faulkner, drunk on magnolia and swamp water, springing indigenous from the Mississippi ground. A heavy vapor by the crape myrtles coalesces into Tennessee Williams, complaining about the heat. Arkansas produces something a little different: not so much decaying aristocracy, a lot more redneck eccentricity.

Geography defines us. Having grown up a Midwesterner, I still feel a bit of an alien here, although I like living where I am. We have roots and fruits here – literally (apple, pear, pecan, cherry, blackberry) and metaphorically. Our son is Southern. This is his landscape.

It is not exactly mine. Kathleen Norris writes about the high plains of South Dakota as her spiritual landscape. I understand that. It resonates for me. It’s no wonder I’m more abstract and monochromatic. My spiritual homeland is still Kansas, and even though I grew up in a city, it’s my grandparents’ farm that feels like my real center of geographical gravity. This may work better in metaphor than in reality, I tell myself. I don’t live there; my grandparents are both dead now, and the land has been sold to strangers.

But that is my aboriginal landscape: the native tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills. Because the soil is rocky, there’s more ranching than farming. I can remember standing behind my grandparents’ barn where, like many places in the Flint Hills, the view goes on for miles, with only the occasional line of scrubby trees indicating where the water washes into rills after rain. There is nothing but moving grass and moving air. I am held up and belled out by prairie wind. At twelve, behind that very barn, looking out on prairie, I had a vision of eternity. I could not hold it; it seemed something like a moving mathematical architecture, as if a galaxy might be a cathedral, and akin to perfect perpetual motion. But obviously I can’t reconstruct it. It was as if I’d understood, in a flash, quantum physics, but had no vocabulary to keep that understanding.

So there’s my spiritual anchor, for what it’s worth. I’m a girl of the arid plains, but when I come in from my hot Arkansas backyard, sweating, with bags full of pears, I smell like the South.