The Song of the Earth

by Hugh Nissenson

Genres: Literary Fiction; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Even before his birth, Johnny Baker's life is in danger. His mother breaks the law when she has her fertilized egg endowed with genes that will give her son the potential to become a visual artist. Born in 2038, John Firth Baker is the first genetically engineered artist. At the age of nineteen, at the threshold of his career, he is murdered. Now, ten years after his death, Baker has become famous. An art curator has organized a show of his work, and his biography-culled from journals, e-mails, and interviews with those who knew him best-is published. The Song of the Earth is this "biography." It presents a powerful and haunting portrait of an artist as a young man in the twenty-first century.

Baker is born into a world transformed by technology: genetic profiles, space travel, and controlled housing communities are commonplace. Global warming has altered the environment. A planetary gender war is raging, familial structures are shattered, and new religions contend with the old. Yet human needs remain the same: the search for love, the desire for approval, the longing for fame, and the quest for knowledge. The Song of the Earth is a hypnotic novel about our desire to control our destinies, our yearning for immortality, and the very human impulse to create art. With prose, poetry, and images, Nissenson tells an original tale that brilliantly captures the experience of another time and place.

Release date: June 1, 2001

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 272

Sample

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 journal2 and Baker’s extensive correspondence, which was preserved in his central data storage system.3 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

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 window-panes. 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.

From a transcript of Roberta Friar’s recording of Jeanette Baker, March 23, 2033:

(singing)

I live in the land of drought and heat
Where the wind don’t sleep,
The Sand Hills creep,
And nothin’ grows for me to eat.

My daddy loved jokes about Nebraska: “How dry is it?”

“Why, it’s so dry that yesterday, in Holmes Park, I seen two trees fightin’ over a dog.”

Poor Daddy! He couldn’t afford to buy medicine for his high blood pressure and died of a stroke on 33rd Street two days after my twelfth birthday. They broke the news to me at school. I still dream about it.

Momma got religion. She joined the Second Methodist Church on North 33rd Street. Her pastor got her a job in a city soup kitchen for exodusters. The work wore her out, but she wouldn’t let up. Momma always said,

Good better best,
Never let it rest,
Till your good is better,
And your better’s best.

I earned a little money on weekends working for my Aunt Polly in her hairstyling salon. The three of us lived together in Polly’s five-room apartment on Sun Valley Boulevard. Just before dawn on June 28, 2022, all the tenants in the building were alerted that a Black Blizzard was blowing towards Lincoln from the southwest. About sixty of us holed up in the concrete storm cellar that was a sometime exoduster shelter and smelled of piss.

The temperature outside dropped fifty degrees in two hours. We watched what happened next on the web. Hundreds of birds landed on the roofs: sparrows, black birds, crows, swallows, wrens. I spotted a horned owl. Then, about 2 P.M. a huge black cloud appeared on the horizon. It blotted out the sun. The birds got quiet. The cloud rolled over the city like a wall of muddy water—but without a sound.

Static electricity in the cellar made everybody’s hair stand on end. What a sight! Sixty people sitting around in a cellar with their hair on end! The computer crashed. A sixty-mile-an-hour wind roared above us for sixteen straight hours. The silence at sunup was deafening. I went outside with Momma for a breath of air. The sky was a coppery red. A greasy coat of black dust, an inch thick, covered the whole street.

Momma said, “Fetch me my rubber boots, will you, honey? I’m going for a walk before breakfast.”

I fetched Momma her boots. She walked straight to a deserted part of Holmes Park, where she hanged herself with her panty hose from a branch of a dead spruce tree.

Polly Baker

Maggie was cremated on June 30, 2022. Next day, Jeanette and I took her ashes in a bronze urn out behind the broken-down frame house in Cherry County. I hadn’t seen the place since it got sanded up. The kitchen-garden fence, piled with tumbleweeds, stuck out of the dunes; it looked like a big backbone.

I scattered Maggie’s ashes; Jeanette recited the short poem “After Menamoto,” by Clorene Welles. I can never remember the words.

Katherine G. Jackson

To what shall I compare my life?
Streaking west,
above Bayonne,
a jet trail at dusk.4

Roberta Friar

Jeanette was a type A-2 unipolar depressive. She took 5 milligrams of Euphorol once a day. Euphorol doesn’t mix with booze, so I got her to go on the wagon. I loved looking after her. We were happy. Then on Christmas night 2035, exactly three years after we’d met, she announced, “I feel incomplete; I want a son.”

She knew I didn’t like babies. I told her, “You want kids, you’re on your own.”

She said, “You mean it?

“Make a choice,” I said. “Him or me.”

“Oh,” she says, “I choose you.”

That seemed to be that. Spring rolled around, then summer—the driest summer of the decade. Jeanette always felt blue on her birthday. To take her mind off turning twenty-eight, I took her to Paris for dinner at a three-star restaurant on the rue Louis-Ferdinand Céline called Chez Denis. Jeanette spoke French pretty well. I had two years in college.

Jeanette drank only Evian water. It cost $60 a liter. The French call Evian water le Champagne de la Sécheresse—drought Champagne. I ordered a special birthday cake, Jeanette’s favorite—genoise, with caramelized pears.

We caught the late show at Le Clit Club which was, like they say nowadays, a “rouser.” Jeanette’s birthday celebration cost me a bundle, but I didn’t care. I’d just been made a senior systems analyst at Lunartech-Interares. Jeanette was also doing well; she was almost finished with her thesis on Charlotte Salomon.

Things were great between us till late in September. Then Jeanette read a bestseller called Visual Arsogenes: The Genetic Basis of the Ability to Draw and Paint, by Frederick Rust Plowman. She goes, “Listen, Roberta. All my life I’ve wanted to draw and paint, but I can’t. I’ve no talent. It’s not in me. I haven’t got the right genes. The guy who wrote this book helped discover the ones I lack; he implants them in embryos. You know what that means? I could have a son born with artistic talent. That would mean a lot to me, Roberta. What do you say?”

I said, “I don’t want a kid. I want you, but no kid!”

Jeanette burst into tears. I took her for a walk. We headed for Seward Park. The wind off Lake Michigan stank of rotten fish. Those were the years when the lake was drying up. The mud it left behind was a breeding ground for eels, rats, roaches, and green flies.

Outside the park, Jeanette goes, “These flies are driving me nuts! Let’s go back to your place.”

She always called my apartment “home.” I thought, my God, she’s going to leave me!

“All right,” I said. “I’ll read the damn book.”

The opening paragraph got my goat.

From Visual Arsogenes: The Genetic Basis of the Ability to Draw and Paint, by Frederick Rust Plowman:

We scientists will eventually transform our species into a new kind of being; one whose mind will have the same relationship to ours as ours has to life and life to matter. The scientist can now say, with the poet: “Oh, je serai celui-là qui créera Dieu!” “Oh, I shall be the one who will create God!”5

Roberta Friar

How like a man!

Plowman’s whole book pissed me off; it purported to be an objective account of a scientific discovery but was actually a piece of propaganda for the repeal of the Created Equal Act.

I said to Jeanette, “Who is this guy?”

We called up his bio.

Frederick Rust Plowman’s 2035 biographical sketch:

Plowman, Prof. Frederick Rust (2008– ) molecular geneticist. b 30 Sept., 2008, Little Rock, Arkansas, s of late Dr. Duncan and Judge Gladys Christine (nee Payne).

During Plowman’s adolescence, he became fascinated by genetic engineering, particularly the successful experiments carried out on humin genomes in France to produce beautiful babies. Plowman attended Choate and MIT, where he earned a B.S., graduating summa cum laude in 2027. He received his Ph.D. in 2030 from the University of Nome for his work on the technical feasibility of supplementing humin genomes with arsogenes: genes that govern the development of artistic talents. The same year, Congress passed the Kenady-Kantor Created Equal Act, which prohibited the artificial alteration of genetically determined traits in humins except for reasons of health. Plowman continued his studies in Japan.

Late in 2030, he received a Nippon Fellowship and became Professor Yoshida Ozaki’s research assistant at Kyoto University. The late Professor Ozaki was the world renowned genetic engineer who in 2020 first used the noun “metamorph” to designate any organism that has been genetically transformed by a microinjection of purified DNA.

During 2030–31, Ozaki and Plowman identified 786 arsogenic alleles common to the genetic makeup of 615 graphic artists. Ozaki declared: “They are the genes that contribute to the talent to draw.” He and Plowman then analyzed the genomes of 321 painters and discovered 659 arsogenes, active in their visual cortices, which increase the number of colors they can see in the spectrum.

Ozaki wrote, “The possession of visual arsogenes—talent itself—is insufficient to make a truly original artist. . .