WALKING WITH TOM AND THE LORD

 Tom Waits is always with us, and he’s especially with me whenever I walk in a garden and I remember his song ‘Way Down in The Hole’ with the lines that run,

‘When you walk through the garden

You gotta watch your back’

As close as I can get to a picture of Tom Waits in a garden.

 

I assume this refers to the Garden of Gethsemane but I think perhaps it applies to walking in many, perhaps most, gardens.

 

         Of course I knew that the Garden of Gethsemane was where Jesus prayed the night he was betrayed by Judas and where he experienced his ‘agony.’  But lately I discovered there are at least four potential locations for the Garden of Gethsemane.  All of them are near the Mount of Olives, but the Catholics reckon it’s the garden at the Church of All Nations built over the ‘Rock of the Agony,’ or maybe it’s by the Tomb of the Virgin Mary to the north. The Orthodox Greeks reckon it’s to the east.  The Orthodox Russians place it in the orchard adjacent to the Church of Mary Magdalene. I think I’ve got that right but I stand to be corrected by true believers.

Now, I don’t imagine I shall ever walk in the Garden of Gethsemane (though I gather there are plenty of bus tours), and for that matter I don’t think I’ll be following Waits’ advice that ‘If you walk with Jesus, he’s gonna save your soul.’ However, I have been walking among sculptural representations of the Lord, in the Desert Christ Park, on Sunnyslope Drive in Yucca Valley, and I have least peered into an artistic representation of the Garden of Gethsemane.  I shall explain.

      Now, one of the things I sometimes think about while walking in gardens, is what’s the difference between a park and a garden: and OK I agree its not one of humanity’s most pressing questions. However the Desert Christ Park had me thinking again.  

The name would seem to define it as a park, but their mission statement reads, ‘To provide a desert sculpture garden of hope, prayer and beauty; by sharing the Peace of Christ through art.’ So does that mean the place is simultaneously a park and a garden.  Maybe.

 

The Desert Christ Park was established 1951 when a single concrete statue of Jesus was placed there.  The statue was by Antone Martin, sometimes described as a sculptor-poet, who looked like this, which is pretty much the way you'd want him to look:

 

 He’d wanted to have the statue installed at the Grand Canyon but the authorities wouldn’t go for it.  However, the Reverend Eddie Garver who was pastor at the Yucca Valley Community Church, and had acquired five acres from the government to form what he hoped would be a Christian theme park (or I suppose garden), was happy to have the statue on his patch.  

 

Over the next decade Anton Martin made many more statues, most of them created in situ.  Jesus is consistently portrayed as a good looking feller, long hair swept back, a beard, mostly with very serious though a smile seems to occasionally to play about his lips. He does, of course, look very white.

 

Many of the statues are part of tableaux; Blessing the Children, The Last Supper, Sermon on the Mount, and of course the Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus on his knees praying, while the disciples Peter, James and John are asleep.  This kind of thing:

 

Though in fact you can’t get very close because of this stern bit of signage.

 

I’ve been going to the Desert Christ Park once in a while for over two decades now, and there was definitely a period when the place went into decline.  The concrete is formed around armatures of rebar.  Some of the ‘flesh’ on the fingers had fallen off in places off over the leaving Jesus with metal spikes for hands.  To be fair this did have a certain grim appeal.

But when I was there a couple of months ago, a lot of repair work had been done, though there was still the occasional chipped or missing nose, which seems forgivable.

     Contemporary and historic photographs show the Garden of Gethsemane to be dense with gnarled olive trees – some of them reckoned to be 900 years old.  And the Desert Christ Park has some glorious olives trees.  

Some of them are also bedecked with wonderful, architectural birdhouses, an idea I may steal for my own unreligious garden.

 

Now in some ways it’s hard to take the Desert Christ Park entirely seriously.  There is something faintly absurd about the enterprise. And Antone Martin is no Michelangelo. But then who is?

 

On the other hand, having walked around and among Anton Martin’s statues, I find it impossible to find the concept entirely ludicrous. The place is rich with belief, sincerity, spiritual commitment.  You emerge, or certainly you can emerge feeling good, feeling charmed and uplifted. I didn’t even feel that I had to watch my back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WALKING WITH WAITS

I would never say that Tom Waits is a fake: he quite obviously isn’t.  But he is a poser.  He's a man who knows how to adopt a pose and hold it for as long as required, which may be a very short time, say the fraction of a second it takes for a camera shutter to open of close, or for the length of a concert, or (as it is now) the length of a career that’s lasted more than four decades.

The fact is, it’s much easier to pose with a guitar in your hand, or at a piano, on a bar stool, or leaning against an old truck, than it is to pose while walking.  Oh sure some people affect a swagger while walking, or a strut, or a lope, but send ‘em on a good long hike, and ten miles down the road you can be pretty sure their stride will be revealing their true self.

There’s an interview Tom Waits did with the beloved Terry Gross on National Public Radio in 2002 in which she asked him whether, when he started listening to “older music” it affected the way he dressed or spoke or behaved.  Waits replied “Oh yeah, sure. You know I bought an old hat and drove an old car.  Yeah sure. I walked with a cane.  You know, I was going overboard perhaps but ...” And Gross interrupts to ask what kind of walking cane it was, did it have a silver top?  “No, no,” says Waits, “an old man’s cane from a Salvation Army.  Yeah.  And I carved my name on it and everything you know  ... It gave me a walk, I guess.  It gave me something distinctive.  ‘Oh who was that guy in here with a cane?  Did you see that?’ It just gave me something I liked identity wise.”

There was a time a few years back when I was suffering from all kinds of foot problems.  And the real problem was finding a doctor who knew what I was actually suffering from.  I got diagnosed as having tendonitis, bursitis, plantar fasciitis, all good names, all of which essentially mean that you’ve got a pain in your foot.  But none of the quacks I saw (and one of them was an absolute genuine quack) were able to do a damn thing about it.

Things got so bad that I could hardly walk outside the house, so I asked my wife to buy me a walking stick.  She found a place on Hollywood Boulevard that sold walking sticks with handles made of Lucite, with a spider set in them.  She bought me one of those.  It looked pretty sharp, and it was some help in getting around. 

And then after I’d had it about a week I realized the top screwed off, the cane was hollow metal, and there was a swordstick stick hidden inside.  That made it seem even sharper.  It seemed like the kind of cane Tom Waits ought to have used, and I could certainly see the attractions of walking along with a cane that contained a spider and a concealed weapon.  It was the kind of affectation a man might get used to.  But I gave it up once my foot got better (long story, I found the right doctor). I didn’t want to use the stick as part of a pose.  I reckoned that one day I might really need a cane full-time, and I didn’t want to bring it on by using one before I needed to.

There’s another interview with Tom Waits, by Robert Sabbag for the LA Times Magazine, in which he talks about Keith Richards.  Waits says, “He stands at ten after seven, if you can imagine that.”  (I can just about)  “Arms at five o’clock, legs at two o’clock” (and no I can’t imagine that at all) “with no apparatus, nothing suspended.  He’s all below the waist.  And if he doesn’t feel it, he’ll just walk away.”

Well yes, you can believe that.  Of course, some people find it hard to believe that Keith Richards is able to stand, let alone walk, but he still seems well able to put one foot in front of the other.  He doesn’t even need a cane, though he does have Patti Hansen for support.