First Love, Part 2

In high school I heard a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Kaddish and had memorized the first section and recited it at a school speech contest in Indianapolis, along with Ferlinghetti's "Junkman's Obbligato":

“Let's go
Come on
Let's go
Empty out our pockets and disappear.
Missing all our appointments
And turning up unshaven years later.”

I was picking up the beatific beat, the derangement of the senses, the clarion call to turn on, tune in, and drop out. I read Baudelaire, then Apollinaire, starting to teach myself French from the bilingual editions. In Alcools I was amazed to discover a Mennonite woman, although presumably a mythical one -- I don't know that Apollinaire ever visited Texas -- named Annie:

“Comme cette femme est mennonite
Ses rosiers et ses vêtements n'ont pas de boutons
Il en manque deux à mon veston
La dame et moi suivons presque le même rite”

How excellent to find a buttonless bohemian likening himself to the Mennonite woman who didn't wear buttons! I treasured this obscure image; at this stage I thought of Mennonites as uncultured boors and philistines, and presumed that was how they were viewed by sophisticated city people. Of course, all the Mennonites I knew nowadays wore plenty of buttons. It was the Amish or conservative Mennonites with their distinctive "plain" clothing who attracted with their downhome exoticism the attention of the tourists and the artists.

Thus inspired by Symbolists and Beats I started to write poetry, and had some published in the student paper. In a fine arts course with Mary Oyer I selected surrealism and dada as my
special project, and read Eluard and Aragon:

“Winter over the meadow brings on mice!
I saw youth herself, naked in the folds of blue satin,
Laughing at the present my lovely slave!”

In Chicago the Art Institute was featuring a Surrealist retrospective, complete with a life-sized reconstruction of Dali's "Paris Taxi", antique automobile with its dripping mannequins and seaweed. I saw the furry tea cups, and discovered DuChamp and Man Ray. Christo was in town and had wrapped a small museum – inside only canvas, and the requisite fire extinguisher.

Gwen Miller, a Goshen College art major and 1967 grad, was studying art in Chicago and showed me around. Her most notorious piece of work at Goshen had been a sculpture titled “Whorrible Lady.” I imagined myself in love with this sophisticated older woman, and imagined her my muse. (In New York I had seen Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses”, in which the young Antoine is seduced by the proverbial older woman, and was in some vague way hoping for something similar although I was too young to know how to go about it and Gwen already had a boyfriend.)

Then, at the beginning of 1969 I suddenly fell in love for the first time. A girl named DeAnne began school in the spring semester. She had run off to San Francisco during the Summer of Love and had been living the hippie life in the Haight-Ashbury. But her Mennonite parents from Kansas finally laid down the law and whisked her away to Goshen. She was 17, just my age,just as wild, just as sophisticated, albeit in a West Coast mode.

--Amos Stoltzfus (to be continued)