I admit that I was curious about the film, "In the Realms of the Unreal," through the papers that praised Henry Darger as an outsider artist and troubled recluse. But I felt uneasy about going to the theatre and watching a limited release film that featured a grown man obsessed with drawing and painting pictures of little girls with tiny penises. It just seemed odd and perverse.
But catching the film on YouTube, I became fascinated by the lonely life of this sad, little man and how his obsession with his illustrated novel became the focal point of his entire life.
It really hit home when I began arranging my sketchbook pages into Mylar sheets and I started ordering and numbering the pages to scan into my website...I had a lot of pages. There were many that were too primitive and badly drawn that I scrapped, and there were the full page ones, the spot illustration pages, the inked pages...things that had characters I would pull out for future reference. There was a lot my brain was tinkering with. I began to feel that I have led an isolated, solitary life and that these pages were the legacy of that isolation.
I began thinking of poor Henry Darger, alone and abandoned at an early age, returning to his shabby little apartment after a day of scrubbing floors at his job as a janitor, returning to his one solace: writing and illustrating a book where he was leader of the Gemini Squadron, protector of the innocence of children, enslaved by evil forces in an unjust, un-Christian realm. He spent his entire lifetime writing over 15,000 pages of this novel, complete with hundreds of full color and black-and white illustrations done with a self-taught, naive hand.
That is a body of work. It is painful to watch the film and listen to narrator read the words that are gibberish and overwrought with the emotion of a novice writer. It is painful, too, to look at the pages and pages of missteps it took to achieve his finished art pieces. All those years, alone and searching to perfect his vision of his perfect and divine fantasy world, where all children were free and allowed full expression in a corrupt, deceitful adult world.
I think, somehow, that this is the steady decline towards a sweeping madness. This type of obsession starts little by little, becoming a daily preoccupation, and then a necessity, and then it merges into compulsion. This seems the way that the cat fancier slowly drifts into multiple cats and then finally to "crazy cat lady"...loneliness and compulsive need take over. This is probably the digression into most pack-rat behavior.
But, still, I can't help but feel that when Henry Darger died and his landlords finally entered his apartment and found thousands upon thousands of pictures, most beautiful, some disturbing, that they were like the first archaeologists unearthing King Tut's tomb. Such a visual treasure of papers and art and books and art supplies scattered in his tiny studio space. Here was a man who spent his entire life obsessively writing and drawing the visions in his head and no one saw his work or heard him speak of it at all, like the proverbial fallen tree in the woods. And now his apartment is a shrine to this lonely venture, his art depicted in books of outsider art and visionary thinkers.
I look at my collection of hundreds and hundreds of pages under Mylar protectors, and there are still more to shake loose from my brain, and I wonder if the isolation and the seclusion is really worth it all.
Here's the link to the first installment on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PMBVxJnoPw
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