terrshee's Diaryland Diary

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Requiem in Pace Henry Darger

I am disturbed by a documentary I watched on DVD last night. I suppose it is a Good Thing (TM) to be disturbed by a documentary since on the whole they are meant to make you think.

Anyway, it is called In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger. It is about a poor janitor in Chicago who was born in the early 1890's and died in the early 1970's. He lived a (presumably) sad and reclusive life, having suffered from appalling losses of family and institutional misplacement and neglect very early in life.

He had never had a discernible friendship except one that was almost certainly one-sided. There are only three photographs of the man over the course of his live. Those who met him could not even agree on how to pronounce his last name.

He left behind hundreds of paintings on both sides of butchers' paper, thousands of pages of journals and at 15,000 page "novel." And all the time no one knew what he was doing.

From what I can tell, his painting, which did not lack talent if it was completely untutored, possessed a weird primitive innocence in spite of its obsession with little girls. The fascination seems to be symbolic rather than sexual. The paintings are colorful, instinctively well composed, sometimes creepy and look like precursors for the art of the 60's and 70's except that they were never seen.

Darger's writing could easily be dismissed as silly and self-involved, yet it did strive to make sense of his world and find his place in the eternal struggle between good and evil. I don't know if he could be said to be a good Catholic, but he was certainly a regular one. He went to mass daily, sometimes more often.

What strikes me is that in a lot of ways he was a contemporary and echo of J.R.R. Tolkien. While I doubt Darger was as intelligent as Tolkien, and he perhaps suffered from mild schizophrenia, the ruin of Darger's life seems to have been lack of educational opportunities and even a little kindness at critical points. It was easier to label him as mentally feeble and warehouse him along with the insane and disabled during most of his adolescence. Who had time or expertise or even the basic understanding of child behavior to unwind the acting out of a troubled boy left behind by a pauper father?

That he was able to find an outlet and interest in life through his art is something of a tribute to how even a broken human can find purpose and seek meaning. That so much of it was ultimately trivial except as a psychological study is depressing beyond words.

Again I am wondering how much of what we do actually survives us by more than a little space of time? Darger's last landlords were people of compassion and luckily also were artists who could recognize what they found in his room. They preserved it until around 2000 when the room was dismantled. I have no idea what happened to the Darger papers after that, but I expect they are preserved at some university now. That's something, at least.

7:12 a.m. - 2006-01-29
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