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From above, Carson’s copper Volvo winds along the glittering black asphalt of a mountain road. It looks like the Rockies or the Sierra mountains, though it could be the Alps or the Cascades or the White Mountains for all I know.
A title card, in pointy gothic lettering: Christmas With My Brother.
“Like my sister, my brother Humphrey left the house after high school and really never looked back. And like my sister, he went through a period of shaking off every last remaining pedigree of my family. We didn’t hear from or see him for years.”
A few photographs of Humphrey, a lanky, blonde-haired boy, delicate, a little feminine with his arms crossed. But on his face a cold loathing.
“For all of Shannon’s excesses, Humphrey far exceed her. Addictions, lots of questionable sex, a plethora of drugs, riding herd with anarchists. This is a picture of Humphrey I took almost fourteen years ago, when I was in college and I tracked him down to a squatters camp in an abandoned warehouse in Seattle. He'd already spent about six years like this.”
The picture is blurry, but there’s Humphrey: leaner, tatted and pierced, no hair, waving a bottle of something, the only person standing in a graffitied, derelict structure. Surrounded by squatters indistinguishable from piles of clothes. Humphrey’s giving Carson the finger. He has a Rasputin-Manson mad ferociousness, with black little eyes and a gaunt, torn t-shirted nihilism. “He told me he wasn't interested in what passed for a political structure, even among the anarchists. He was their untouchable Lord of Misrule, in charge of nothing, letting anyone screw him if they wanted but fighting with razor blades if prodded. Their wicker man. The most fucked up member in the group, willing to do anything if it meant cracking a bottle over his own head to prove it.
“I tracked him down because of a postcard he mailed, out of the blue, delivered to my dorm one year, for my birthday. It came from Seattle. I didn’t tell my parents. Instead, I got in touch with the Seattle police and with city social workers. After a few months, they had a pretty good idea which camp he was in.
“Strangely, right after this photograph, he and I started to become friends. But that’s another story.”
Back to the copper Volvo, pulling into a gravel turnout of the winding road, carved into the side of a mountain. A man in a long brown coat, like a friar’s cape, sits on a log, waiting. When Carson emerges alone from the car, putting the still-running camera on the roof, you can barely hear “No, not long,” before the two of them hug. Sasha, or anyone else for that matter, did not come along.
Carson grabs a bag and up a path they go. A last camera glance to his Volvo almost looks like an advertisement for a slacker car brand: shot low, his wreck sits against sky and wind and other snowy peaks in the distance, condemned to afterthought.
“Today, I’m visiting him in the mountaintop monastery he's lived in for nine years, Mashipan. It’s not the first time I’ve been here, just the second or third. There’s no parking up there. They usually bring guests up by shuttle but the driver wasn’t around so I drove up. We’re up so high that when I make a final check on my car, it feels like saying goodbye to the world.”
Carson carries his camera with him on the walk, occasionally swinging it toward Humphrey. The pupil-less eyes are gone. He has a weathered, handsome face with eye wrinkles that expand into a sympathetic sorrow like El Greco’s, wide ripples from a happy kerplunk of his eyes. This gaze is what he was hiding in the other photos. It seems it’s all he needs now, a scrutiny both pitiful and wildly awake.
Over inserts of great granite peaks and his brother’s long-legged sturdy gait, accustomed to long hikes up a mountain, Carson explains: “My relationship with my brother, actually, is pretty good, better I think than the one I have with my sister.
“But Humphrey is determined to steer his involvement in this project himself. He will do anything to avoid being a part of memoirs, confessionals, or autobiographies because, he says, they are inherently narcissistic. Mendacious. Diversionary. From the truth, he means. He is not strictly an ascetic. Though I know it sounds that way.
“We’ve covered all this before, but now that he sees my camera, he reiterates his position on the long walk up. It’s his ideology he wants to share, not his personality. I tell him I’ll do my best, but as a person, he’s hard to avoid.”
Several boot steps up a pebbly and snow strewn route, around ice dusted boulders. A previous snow storm seems like old news. The path is often narrow and the way Carson keeps the camera by his leg, you expect a misstep any second: an out of balance scuffle and a pitch over the edge.
Where they’re going you’re not sure, until Carson raises the camera for a glimpse of a large, white stone complex dug into a shoulder of the mountain up ahead. Frosty blue sky shines above it.
“This is my brother’s home, Mashipan. A community on a rock at the top of the world.”
Letting his brother walk ahead, Carson pans slowly over the grounds: a three story main building, a few smaller stone buildings, a large fenced area with uniform snowed-over bumps: a sleeping garden. Black trellis archways, a snow cloaked statuary, and a shoveled walkway cuts across the grounds and heads to a boxwood patio with stone benches. The benches sit at the cusp of a slight fall off to another flat terrace that widens, then abruptly drops to the valley far below. On that terrace stands a huge graystone obelisk mounted with a wooden cross. The whole sculpture is latticed with scaffolding.
Up ahead, Humphrey greets a fellow Mashipanite with hands in prayer and a perfunctory bow. As Carson catches up, he passes faces: nodding, acknowledging, round and pink, long and withdrawn, white-haired or bald, smiling, indifferent, male and female.
“Having been here before, it’s good to see people I know. Most of them don’t seem to mind a kid with a camera. I already accept there are times and places for it. They have rules.”
We cut to an echoing arcade, following behind Humphrey. He climbs up narrow wooden stairs past two or three closed arched doors, then at the top swings his door open as we move past him into a small room with a bed, a table, a window. Carson carries us to the window, pushes it open with his hand, and there is the green and white mottling of pine forested mountains beyond. He tilts the camera down to where we just walked: the compound of Mashipan with its snow cleared walkways, benches, scaffolded cross, and robed people.
“The trick is working within the rules. To be honest, I wouldn’t have been allowed to bring my camera without Abbot Keating, Abbess Lamarcke and the prior Father Wilhelm agreeing to it.” The three of them stand together, robed in white or in the case of the prior, in beige, as solemn and weighty in their silence as a Greek chorus. “I’m allowed here in return for images of Mashipan for their website.”
“It’s not a trivial arrangement. They have never allowed a camera to visit before, but the changes underway at Mashipan, they tell me, make having one here for a few days worth the trouble. It turns out that my timing is pretty good, in more ways than one.” Two workmen inch their way out of a side door of the main building carrying between them a wooden crate with “UGANDA” stenciled in red on one side. A third man squeezes past, balancing a rolled up carpet on his shoulder.
“Of course, I wouldn’t even be here, or even heard about Mashipan if my older brother didn’t live here.”
Humphrey in his cell, pulling off the long friar’s robe, hanging it up meticulously and pulling on a sooty wool sweater. It’s a small room, big enough only for the bed, desk, a comfortable looking reading chair, a bookshelf. On the wall are the smears of color from drawings, I guess, by their nephews.
Carson also shows us, individually, a small collection of medieval icons inlaid with gold, hanging on another wall. And a little white ipod on a shelf. “Like my agreement with the abbot, I defer to my brother’s ground rules.”
“Over there,” Humphrey points, painting his finger along the floor and against the wall. With one hand, Carson dutifully unrolls his sleeping bag where Humphrey points. “And every morning, you can roll it up and keep it in the corner.”
“For instance,” Carson says, “I thought a cot was waiting for me, but Humphrey decided it would take up too much room.”
“You’ll be all right,” Humphrey says. “You’ll see.”
“Living arrangements aside, most of the rules basically involve his speaking and my listening. His answers to my questions are often on other topics he has in mind. Many hours were spent arguing about this.”
Unlike the footage of his mother and sister, Carson goes for more formal shooting styles with his brother. He cuts between one set up, a two shot, Frost-Nixon style, with the camera placed to the side and a second camera, trained just on Humphrey.
“I’d really like, Hump, to talk about – “
“Humphrey.”
“Ok, sorry. I think going back a little into your experience in Seattle helps give context to all this.”
Humphrey sits in his chair, sipping tea from a wide glazed cup.
“This,” Carson narrates, his taped self sitting still watching his brother sip tea, “is a Humphrey-sized pause. They occur frequently, coinciding purposefully with his breath, a generous period he gives himself to tend to his thoughts before dispensing them.”
Humphrey, concluding his sip, nods reflectively.
“This is just an example,” Carson adds. “I’ll edit most of them out, so don’t worry.”
“What I’ve learned here,” Humphrey offers, “is more to the point of your documentary.”
“Whatever you want to say,” Carson says on the tape. “Where ever you want to go.”
Another studious pause, over which Carson concludes himself: “Like the abbots, Humphrey has an ulterior motive other than acquiescing to his little brother’s documentary dreams. He has a formulated point of view and is deliberate about it. Fortunately for me, this point of view does in fact coincide with the points I want to make in my movie.”
From his chair, Humphrey nods, this time consenting. Contrary to Carson’s gentle insights about his brother’s pauses, Humphrey seems very much like a serious man suffocating impulses. Every moment a conquest.
Humphrey says, “I will say this – about coming to Mashipan....”
He holds up a finger, redirecting himself in mid-sentence. “I’ll summarize, so we can move on: What I was doing in Seattle could be construed as personally and socially destructive. Without question. I was outside of society on the one hand. But I was also constantly looking back at it, referencing it, regarding it. Involved in it from a distance.“
They don’t move on. Carson asks, “When did this start, with you?”
“I think about this. With little to offer. But my earliest memories were not – cheerful. Even or perhaps because of the comfort our parents provided. Though that’s no reason, being born into the bourgeoisie. I’m just satisfied my thoughts then were real.”
Suddenly the video careens off, followed by a shaky, tumbling series of clips of the march that turns into a riot at the hands of anarchists who descend like monkeys. Bottle bombs are lit and thrown, glass windows broken, black hooded Converse sneaker-wearing bodies jump up and down on cars, newspaper boxes thrown into the street.
Carson runs a clip of one of the monkey car jumpers, at first throwing blocks of concrete, then kicking awkwardly, prancingly at someone trying to pull him down. Then freezes. He doesn’t outright say it, but it looks like Humphrey.
“Thoughts such as?” Carson asks.
Though he’s off screen, you can hear Humphrey's willingness stretch thin. “Distress, disassociation. An intense aggravation against everything around me. Smells, colors, the way the world came at me. It was very instinctive, my reactions. Not rational. Like the reaction you have if you land in boiling water.” A unsentimental pause. “Except in my case, it was not, ‘Get out!’ It was – ‘hate!’ And it felt correct to extend that to myself. It felt like a kind of bravery.
A few more pictures of Humphrey and the squalor he lived in, assumedly taken by Carson after tracking him down. You wonder what Carson thought of discovering his brother in a trash strewn, lunarscaped warehouse, but the smudgy blacks and piercing silvery light from empty windows is all he offers: Humphrey barking at a chained pit bull, someone’s unhinged pet; a moment of repose: Humphrey carefully carving under his nipple with a pen knife; close up of Humphrey and his thin, tired, derisive face partly obscured by his large menacing hand grabbing the camera. Getting friendly with him, as Carson said he did, must not have been easy.
“I liked playing with it, that hate," Humphrey says. "It was electric and elastic. I could, I believed, remain in charge of my own destruction. It felt like a gift. Delivering my own destruction. A power I could deploy any time I liked.
“Which was often,” Carson suggests.
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| photo © by eschlabach |
/continued
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Next: Squalor, love
"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011
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