In an article in The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” Jonathan Haidt mentions James Madison’s recognition that democratic societies can suffer from “the turbulence and weakness of unruly passions.” Haidt points out that to create a “sustainable republic” is to “build in mechanisms to slow things down” and “cool passions.”
Doesn’t nearly everyone want to slow down, lately? It seems so simple — even though to “slow down” means a lot of different things, any one of them feels, in the abstract, very possible. You might slow down your manic schedule by just taking some things out of it. Cancel some things. Tell your friends you need to postpone for a week. Take a day or two off work. Or you might slow down the manic pace your life has, somehow, acquired. Delete some bookmarks. Don’t open Facebook or Twitter for a day. Visit your favorite coffee shop but leave your laptop and your phone at home.
It’s easier said than done, though, isn’t it? And we haven’t even gotten to some more extreme possibilities. Start reading a book. A long book. Maybe a really long book. Books, I think, are a “slow art;” they’re usually linear, and your consciousness passes into and through them over a period of, usually, hours. There are two ways to engage the slow art of books though, and the slower choice is not reading; it’s writing. Authors can take years to finish a book. As an author myself, I think most projects like that involve intermittent time. You hit a fertile period of writing, then pause for a while to do more research, or let your thoughts evolve, or even tackle some other projects before coming back to the book.
But at least one author — or creator; he made the pictures for his books along with the words — must have persisted pretty steadily, and for most of his life. I’m talking about Henry Darger. He was a man whose life seems to have been dedicated to slow, steady progress on his creations. The biggest and slowest was his novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. It’s 15,145 pages long. He typed it himself, and added hundreds of pictures he created in his own unique style. His style was so unique, in fact, that it spawned a whole style, “Dargerism.”
I’m not sure anybody is ever going to read Darger’s longest book (he wrote others too, shorter, but also thousands of pages). But Darger didn’t seem to be writing for an audience. Hardly anybody even knew about his work during his lifetime; he lived a life so radically different from the sort that most of us want to “slow down from” that it’s hard to imagine. He was radically solitary; he had only one friend, and never had visitors to his tiny apartment. He was radically habitual; he lived in the same Chicago apartment for decades, and attended Catholic mass up to five times per day. And of course, he worked on his manuscripts and paintings. He bound his books himself; they all occupied multiple volumes. Some of his paintings were up to thirty feet wide — much bigger than would fit, fully unfolded, into his two small rooms.
If Darger was trying to contain “the turbulence and weakness of unruly passions” he may have felt, I think he succeeded. The Story of the Vivan Girls reportedly contains some violent episodes and horrific scenes, but Darger’s own adult life seems to have been entirely free of such things. His early life may have been different; maybe that opened up the strange path he followed.
While most of us are engaged in the manic quest for stimulus, though, Henry Darger went a completely different way. His physical life was a model of sameness and repetition, and his intellectual life was quite the opposite. I wonder if that’s behind some of the modern yearning for slowness. When our physical lives are so full of stimuli and events and just things happening, are we really wishing for a richer mental and spiritual existence? And is there some sort of universal constant at work here? Does clamor and activity in your physical life mean less of that in the other realm?
Henry Darger’s existence is more difficult to visualize in close detail than the life of most fictional characters. Picture any popular character from a completely unreal world — Harry Potter, Wonder Woman, or even Charlotte the spider. Their worlds are unlike ours, but their lives within those worlds are not so different, really. Darger’s life, though…it’s a strange and alien and radical case of slowness. Focusing on him for a time — not even on his works — might it be a way to find a solution to our personal versions of Madison’s “turbulence and weakness of unruly passions?”
