The Song of the Earth

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Chapter One

This biography of John Firth Baker, illustrated with his work, is published in collaboration with The Virtual Museum of Modern American Manual Art, which organized and mounted the current Baker retrospective that commemorates the tenth anniversary of his death.

The book's title comes from the title of Baker's favorite poem:

The Song of the Earth

by Clorene Welles

I mother & devour life. I father forms that thrive & those that fade. I'm husband & wife, windpipe & knife. I'm the sheath that shields & rusts its blade, this patch of sunlight, that patch of shade.1

John Firth Baker was the first genetically engineered visual artist. A confluence of fundamental contemporary expressions of creativity--science, art, and religion--made him into a uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon.

A bound and printed book like this is a fit commemorative for Baker, who cherished bound books. Baker was a self-taught manual artist; his figurative images, always the work of his own hands, appeal to the sense of touch, as well as sight. They convey Baker's deepest feelings, his fantasies and dreams. The political and sectarian uses to which his art was put by others made him famous at nineteen; then he was murdered.

Baker was posthumously transformed into a myth, which continues to grow. His work is now given an iconic significance he never consciously intended. Gaians claim the images he made, particularly those they call "Baker's Dozen," are tangible visions of his quest for Gaian Consciousness.

John Firth Baker's inner life was more complex--far richer--than that. He died before he could fulfill his promise as an artist. Yet his handful of work endures. Baker was an American original. This book tells his whole story for the first time. I organized THE SONG OF THE EARTH around interviews I conducted with John Firth Baker which appeared in the June 2057 issue of The International Review of Manual Art. I was then a young reporter with a Ph.D. in Art History who admired Baker's work and was intrigued by his celebrity.

I have remained interested in Baker and his art. In the decade since his death I have edited and annotated his mother's journal and Baker's extensive correspondence, which was preserved in his central data storage system. I have interviewed his family, friends, and acquaintances. The text of THE SONG OF THE EARTH is made up of selections from all these sources, along with other documents pertinent to Baker's life and work. Whenever possible I have allowed the material to speak for itself, in the belief that it presents on its own an honest portrait of John Firth Baker. I regret that Dr. Frederick Rust Plowman twice refused my request for an interview; however, he allowed me access to his papers. I'm grateful to all those who graciously cooperated with me in the preparation of this book. Except where otherwise indicated, all of the art reproduced in this book was created by John Firth Baker and is in the collection of Polly Baker.

Katherine G. Jackson

May 19, 2067

THE SONG OF THE EARTH

From John Firth Baker's interview in The International Review of Manual Art:

To begin with, as everybody knows, I'm an arsogenic metamorph. Mother made me one. She wanted an artist for a son.

Polly Baker

John Firth Baker's mother, Jeanette, was the only child of Maggie Cobble and my older brother, Quincy Firth Baker. Quincy owned the Powder Horn, a thirty-five-hundred-acre cattle ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska. Jeanette was born there July 3, 2009. Four years later the drought loosed the Creeping Sand Hills.

Quincy's ranch got sanded up in the spring of 2016. So he filed for bankruptcy, and the county posted his ranch for taxes. My brother took it hard--the ranch had been in our family four generations. Quincy had even managed to hang on to it during the Great Recession. Now it was gone. He began drinking heavily. His blood pressure soared. In May, I helped move him, Maggie, and Jeanette into a two-room furnished apartment on the corner of South 84th Street and Pioneers Avenue in Lincoln. I lived nearby over the hairstyling salon on Sun Valley Boulevard that I'd inherited from my mother. That year the temperature topped ninety-six degrees for thirty-seven days running; there were at least a dozen blackouts. Everything in the apartment was hot to the touch--the toilet seat, chairs, tables, walls, and windowpanes. The dusty kitchen glasses felt as if they'd just been filled with hot water. Jeanette never complained. She kept to herself. She was a bookworm.

Roberta Friar

I met Jeanette Firth Baker on a blind date Christmas night, 2032, at the University of Chicago, where we were postgraduate Resident Scholars. A mutual friend fixed us up. She'd warned me that Jeanette was two years younger than I. I usually went for older wimin. I'd recently broken up with my thesis advisor, who was forty-two; we'd lived together for three years. I needed to get in touch with myself. There was something missing in me. I didn't like myself. I wasn't ready to get involved again so soon--certainly not with someone younger. But it was an icy Christmas night, and I felt lonely. Jeanette and I met at eight-thirty in the lobby of Bartlett Tower. She looked me over with those blue eyes and pulled off one mitten to shake my hand; I noticed she bit her nails to the quick. And she was pale--very pale.

She was like, "I'm broke. We have to eat cheap."

I thought, this girl needs looking after.

I bought her dinner in a pizzeria near Hyde Park called Liveware, which was a hangout for campus hackers like me. I was getting my Ph.D. in cellular automata theory. Jeanette was in art history. She told me about her thesis on Charlotte Salomon.

From Jeanette Firth Baker's proposal for a doctoral thesis in Art History at the University of Chicago, August 8, 2032:

I plan to write my thesis about the life and work of the German-Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). My thesis will analyze her autobiographical masterpiece Life? or Theater? as a compelling expression of a twentieth-century womin artist's creativity in the face of phallocratic oppression.

Charlotte Salomon was born in Berlin on April 16, 1917. Her mother was a hausfrau; her father was a typical bourgeois patriarch. Charlotte was named for her mother's sister, who drowned herself in 1913. Charlotte's mother jumped from a window to her death in 1926. Seven years later, the Germans elected the failed artist and ex-soldier Adolph Hitler as the head of their government. Hitler made anti-Semitism the basis of a new phallocratic tribal religion he called National Socialism, or Nazism for short. Another basic tenet of Nazism was the subjugation of wimin, summed up by its creed of Kinder, Kirche, Küche--Children, Church, Kitchen.

Charlotte showed a precocious talent for drawing and painting. She studied for a year in Berlin at the State Academy of Fine Arts but quit in 1935 because of the humiliations to which she was subjected by her Nazi teachers and fellow students. In 1939 Charlotte fled with her maternal grandparents to the south of France; there the old lady tried to kill herself. Charlotte pleaded with her, "Instead of taking your own life in such a horrible way, why don't you make use of the same powers to describe your life? . . . By writing it down you will be able to liberate yourself and perhaps perform a service to the world."

A few months later, Hitler plunged Europe into the second half of the Global Tribal War by invading Poland. Charlotte's grandmother committed suicide in March 1940. Charlotte wrote, "I cannot bear this life, I cannot bear these times." She thought about throwing herself out of a window.

Hitler conquered France in June. Charlotte chose to live. She described how she made this decision in one of the written texts that are integral parts of many of her paintings: "As if awakening from a dream, she saw beauty all around her. She looked at the sea, felt the sun, and knew she must sacrifice everything and vanish awhile from the world of men in order to create a new world for herself out of the depths."

During the next two years, Charlotte painted and wrote the story of her life in a unique work that she entitled Life? or Theater? Her narrative consists of 769 gouaches combining picture and text, which she entrusted to a French doctor late in the summer of 1942. The next year, Charlotte married an Austrian engineer named Alex Nagler. Charlotte got pregnant. She and her husband were arrested on September 21, 1943; sometime during the next month, they were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland and gassed.

Roberta Friar

I stared at Jeanette so hard while she talked that she blushed. Then I realized that she'd polished off a bottle of Chianti by herself. That worried me. My ex-lover drank. When she was drunk, she dropped her dirty laundry on the bedroom floor. I hated picking up after her.

At that moment, as though she'd read my mind, Jeanette went, "I drink too much."

We talked sports. Jeanette was a big Husker fan. We discovered we both loved playing softball and made a date to join the Saturday afternoon pickup game in the new Field House behind White Hall.

Jeanette and I were outfielders on the same team. We lost seven to nothing because our pitcher and catcher refused to talk with each other. They were both sleeping with the shortstop, a gorgeous redhead, whose name--so help me!--was Gwendolyn Turnipseed. I struck out twice. Jeanette hit into a double play.

The game was over about six-thirty. It was sleeting. The subway steps were icy; Jeanette took my arm. We went back to my apartment on Oak Street. Right off, she goes, "What do you like in bed?"

And I went, "How about you?"

And she went, "I like doing what I'm told."

She did, too. I got her to move in with me the same week. For over a year, Jeanette never mentioned her family or talked about growing up. I knew she was from Lincoln, Nebraska, but that was all. Her reticence about herself put a damper on our relationship. We were hot and wet for each other in bed, but we weren't friends.

Then, one night, on the web, we heard the folk singer Janie Hitchcock do "Home in Nebraska."

Jeanette said, "My daddy used to sing that." She hummed along. Then sang a verse. I never heard Jeanette sing before. She had a nice voice. I made her sing the verse again while I recorded her. That started her talking about her childhood. She was a little drunk and talked about an hour. It was an important occasion in our life together. I recorded her every word.

Copyright © 2001 Hugh Nissenson. All rights reserved.