The group-therapy session starts up
From 2005, a visit to the Zendik commune:
Lunch at Zendik is, like much else at the commune, more than it appears to be. Long before the farmers finish scraping their bowls, the group-therapy session starts up. A thin, blond woman in her mid-20s garners attention with an “Ahem, everybody” and tells the table that Helen has something to share. Helen’s a short, stout woman who “realized everything was bullshit,” dropped out of Harvard, and moved to Zendik. (She has since left the commune.)
Helen shares that she has “a date” with a guy at the table named Talon. She plans to get pregnant. Talon drops his fork, then goes back to eating lunch.
Helen’s declaration of intent to get knocked up leads to a drawn-out group analysis of her personality. Is she using pregnancy as an excuse to act out her natural desire to hump random men, which has been repressed by her strict Catholic upbringing? Does she want a child because she’s ready to be a mother, or because she has other emotional needs to fill, such as a feeling that she is not accepted by the group or that she hasn’t found someone to love? After a bowlful of tears, she decides that it’s not time to get pregnant, though the random sex will continue. Talon looks relieved, and the group moves on to the next farmer.
Another session on another day:
“I don’t know,” said a guy near the center of the table. “I think it’s his attitude. His attitude’s just got to change. He brings me down, man.”
I found an empty chair against the wall and pulled it in toward the table, where a friendly-looking Laotian-American guy, Vong, slid over to make room.
I eventually gathered that they were in the middle of the all-too-familiar scene that ends many reality-show episodes. The group was discussing dumping one of its members. The bad vibes didn’t last for long, though; someone demanded a change of subject.
Are you twitching yet? Or is that just me? I have a terrible attitude.
A new woman started to join the commune, one with a long-term girlfriend.
The gentlemen on the farm, when her arrival was discussed, tended to focus on her sexuality. They doubted that she was a “real” lesbian and were convinced they could overcome what they saw as a minor barrier.
She told me how excited she was to be in a place where she could focus on her art. I had been there long enough by then to know that she was in for a rude awakening. Very few of the members do any actual art—there’s no time; everyone’s working—unless you count work as art. The Zendik philosophy, as articulated on its Web site, refers to “Life Artistry,” which “takes the rigors of Art—the workmanship, the daring, the objectivity and intensity of focus—and applies them directly to the problems of Life itself, providing a framework of critique and self-awareness that is woefully absent from our common day-to-day reality.…In this way, Life itself becomes the Art, an object of endless fascination, where there are no limits on the potential of imagination and creativity.”
Three months after my first visit to the farm, I got a call from Welsh in Milwaukee. “They kept telling me that I was only a lesbian because of the influence of the Death Culture, and now that I was in a loving family I should embrace my hetero side,” she said. The line didn’t work.
Though she was disturbed by the incessant advances, she said, the real reason she left had more to do with the lack of revolutionary zeal on the farm. “They advertise themselves as revolutionaries, but they’re nothing but a bunch of dropouts…who couldn’t hack it in the real world. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, and I wish them the best, but they shouldn’t try to recruit people who are actually interested in making the world a better place.”
And they probably shouldn’t try to push lesbians to turn straight, either.
This. This is why I can’t just say fuck society and run off and join a commune. It’s still dealing with shitty people and the same oppressive power structures. But with less bathing and privacy.
I see they shut down in 2013. Not a great loss.
Except for all that home-made farming.
Re Becky, ‘it’s still dealing with shitty people and the same oppressive power structures. But with less bathing and privacy…’
Having grown up in a small town, where everything everyone did was everyone’s business, this is pretty much my vision of hell. Ugly things breed in those. And not even in the dark corners. In the town square. There’s a line (from Watterson? Or quoted by him) that people who romanticize childhood must never have been children. Likewise, those who speak too fondly of small towns, I suspect, never lived in one.
Cities have their various issues. But in one way, especially, they’re awesome. Being able to sit down in a pub or coffee shop where no one knows you or cares who you are, this is a minimum quality of life requirement for me. Neighborhoods where people care about each other, sure, these are a good thing. But you have to be able to get away from that, too, and just have that freedom to be no one in particular, now and then.
When people were taking about the internet as an electronic village, I used to get nervous. Great. Village. Oh, but what could possibly go wrong.
Lately, I’ve been nostalgic for having merely been nervous. As opposed to actively alarmed. Nosey neighbours checking up on you? Check. And now they’re spread across several time zones.
OB @ 3. Yeah, I’ll agree about the farming. This post sent me down the rabbit hole to the Dark Playground. I’ve just been pulled back out by the Panic Monster (see Wait but Why – procrastination, if that means nothing to you). It’s tragic funny how so often people form sub-cultures that try to rebel from the super-culture and instead replicate it. i guess that was my point above.
This. So much this. I moved from a small town to a medium size town to a large city; now back to a small city. I miss the anonymity of the city, where I could walk out of my house and take a walk around the neighborhood without bumping into a student or colleague who feels it is their right/responsibility to police what I am wearing, what I am doing, who I am doing it with, and what sort of dog I am walking. Walk 10 steps out of my house wearing my Friendly Neighborhood Atheist t-shirt, and start a major scandal.
I know one thing – I would hate being a goldfish.
AJ Milne @4: I also always loved the commentary on small towns given by Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. The underlying nastiness that arises when you know all your neighbors well enough to breed really strong contempt, the secrets everyone knows but won’t talk about, and so on.