Arrive at Orgonon, Wilhelm Reich’s estate and museum.
I suppose since I’ve done the reader a disservice by alternating sleeping and claiming wakefulness through WR that I should take a moment now to explain about Reich.
This is the second part of what Laura calls the Equal and Opposite Sexual Utopias Tour Summer 2010. The first part was Sabbathday Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. Shakers believed—believe, I guess, since there are still three of them—that each human could find God within him- or herself; they were—sorry, are—celibate to the point of separating the sexes; women worked inside and men worked on the farm, they bedded down in gender-segregated dormitories, and ate and worshiped on different sides of the room, as though church leadership thought there was a serious case of The-Cooties-On-The-Loose. Within the church hierarchy men and women were equals; as one ascends the ladder of religious hierarchy in the United Society of Believers – the actual name of the Shaker religion – one cleanses oneself of the Cooties. Other Shaker things they had to do included: confessing sins, striving towards perfection, separating themselves from the non-Shaker world. Their no-procreation policy goes a long way towards explaining why there are only three of them left. The other source of possible converts – orphans – dried up in 1960 when Federal laws prohibiting adoption of orphans by religious groups forced Shakers to stop plucking the low-hanging fruit.
You may be surprised to hear that there are any Shakers still, such are the archaic notions attached to them. They belong to a time before Gore-Tex and cup noodles, a time when cutting-edge technology was germ-free milk. But three are alive and they are kicking back at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village. The ladies that do the tours and manage the gift shop make it clear that YOU WILL NOT MEET THE SHAKERS during your visit at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, while at the same time repeating, insisting, really, that it is a working village even though the Shakers are too old to do the work, because the Shakers have always hired out help from the community to do the work that they cannot perform. There are hired hands performing farm labor, ergo it is still a functioning farm. If you are really determined to Shaker-gawk, the meetings are open to the public, so you could worship with them on Sundays, but you cannot say hello to them on the tour. Both Christian and I are surprised that there aren’t more aging hippie divorcées joining up, since it’s all like communal and pastoral and everything. Kids had their own dormitory and their own work where they grew flowers and made bouquets and stuff.
Shakers were into equality and having their primary relationship be with God. They weren’t into getting down and dirty with each other; Reich on the other hand, was into equality and super-way into getting down.
The first thing you need to know about Reich is that he is out there. A look at the local promotional materials in the cabin’s Welcome To Rangeley three-ring binder, you’ll learn Reich was a “researcher” who was doing “energy experiments.” This leads one to wonder whether he perhaps invented the electric car. What it means, in fact, is that he thought he had discovered the primal life force—seriously—the cosmic energies of all life, which he called orgone. Much like the midi-chlorians that make a Jedi, orgone charges all organic matter and is present in the very atmosphere. Reich fled Europe in 1939 and moved to Maine in 1942, which is when he built Orgonon, an observatory, library and lab on 160 acres amidst Rangeley’s lakes to study the cosmic life energy. He also started building orgone accumulators—to collect the stuff—boxes that layered metal against organic matter, with wood on the outside and metal on the inside. The accumulators could pull down orgone from the atmosphere and, well, accumulate it into concentrated energy, like a bullion. The idea is that if a person sat in an orgone accumulator everyday for a certain amount of time they would be cured from cancer, illness and become generally more healthy and revitalized. When we showed up the next day and asked to sit in some accumulators the staff member who greeted us told us that the orgone accumulator is not a magic box, you have to sit in it every day, thirty minutes to an hour for weeks at a time to see results and that everyone thinks they will sit in the accumulators for a long time but they always leave after five minutes. The four of us scoffed at such lackadaisical treatment of the orgone accumulators. He left, we sat in some accumulators and after about five minutes of sitting in silence all of us left our boxes. While we tried to exit quietly, we were stopped by the same staff member who turned out to be the assistant director of The Wilhelm Reich Museum and Infant Trust. What followed was an intense conversation, where we first convinced him of our genuine interest in Reich, after which he admitted that he didn’t use his box, he made a blanket that he sleeps under, using steel wool and sheepskin for the layers of metal/organic material., it would boost the immune system, cure illnesses like cancer and stream the positive life force directly into the body.
The other thing you need to know about Reich is that he is really important. W. Reich worked with Sigmund Freud and was a well-respected psychoanalyst in his early working years in Austria. He hightailed it out of Germany in 1933 to Scandinavia, settling in Oslo until 1939, when he came to the U.S. Reich connected Freud and Karl Marx, postulating that a person’s neurosis came from not just their relationships with their mothers, but from all aspects of their life – the physical, sexual, economic and social conditions that shape the lives of individuals. Essentially, a poor rural fisherman is going to have a different set of living conditions and neuroses than a city-dwelling wealthy shipping merchant.
Then there is transference. Freud’s description of a psychoanalyst is someone who acts as a blank slate so that, ideally, the patient will project their own neuroses onto the analyst, shedding light on the therapy that needs to be done. At the same time, this dynamic fosters patients to transfer strong emotions – from a relationship with a significant person – towards the therapist: the patient falls in love with their therapist. Freud thought he could make use of this phenomenon by analyzing the transference. Reich came along and said Hey, if we are getting love transference from our patients, we’re also going to get hate transference, as well. Our patients friggin’ hate us. No one had considered that yet.
See? This was a really smart guy. He influenced lots of people like Saul Bellow and Yoko Ono and psychological developments like primal therapy.
OK, so maybe even his important ideas were way out. Reich’s work had always been concerned with human sexuality and he believed that good sex was a fundamental part of the healthy life. That’s not a mind-blowing statement today, it’s a generally accepted truth. But to get specific: Reich thought that pent-up sexual energy could cause physical blockages in the body – in muscle fiber and organ tissue – and he called these blockages “body armor.” Of course, a super-strong orgasm could shatter body armor because it would release lots of sexual energy. Theoretically, a person that could regularly release enough sexual energy through orgasms could keep themselves healthy. On the other hand, if a person denied themselves orgasms, the armor would become hard and stiffen, causing neurotic and physical illnesses. Reich isn’t talking about your workaday orgasm here, he’s talking about skin-meltingly transcendent orgasms that pulse throughout the entire body. He sets the bar pretty high for pleasurable orgasms.
One could be forgiven for thinking that Reich’s enthusiastic praise of orgasms is addressing only the ladies. After all, women and their desires – or lack of them – did capture the interest of psychoanalysts from early on. The tumescent penis seems to take care of itself, its demands are simple, and ejaculation, even in the most unpracticed of hands, is all but guaranteed. Reich flipped the concept of frigidity on its ear by saying that what passes for the male orgasm – ejaculation – is a pale version of what men could have. Sure, Reich thought that most women were frigid, but that wasn’t exactly news since most Freudians took that as given. But Reich thought that most men were frigid, too, and this mind-fucked his male colleagues, who thought they had one up on the ladies.
What Reich really wanted was for all people to be free, non-conformist, totally in touch with their genitals (sorry), able to have teeth-knocking, eye-crossing, body-throbbing orgasms that kept them healthy and happy. (He totally preferred the boning cure to the talking cure.) Reich started tracing sources of repression and realized that repression starts in infancy and childhood. While he could coach an adult into therapeutic sex as a kind of analysis on the fast-track, W.R. really wanted to find ways to not repress children to begin with, to prevent the initial body armoring that laid down the pathways to neurosis.
Reich left Europe because at some point it became a less than welcoming place for Jews, even less for horndog Jewish psychiatrists. The road through Rangeley has signs for the turnoff to The Wilhelm Reich Museum and Infant Trust, the symbol for which deserves a dedicated page on accidentalpenis.com, but wouldn’t get it because the symbol is purposefully phallic and to date there is no penisonpurpose.com.
8/5/10 1335h
Tour begins. Tour guide takes us to a small room to watch a film on Reich. I fall asleep as soon as the room darkens and the electric waves of the television roll over me.
8/5/10 1336h
Christian presses his leg against mine to wake me up. I nod vigorously to show I am alert.
8/5/10 1337h
I fall asleep again. Repeat the above entry.
8/5/10 1338h
Christian gives up trying to keep me awake.
8/5/10 1400h
Video ends. I feel the damp spot on my shirt where I drooled and become embarrassed. Tour guide collects us to go into the house.
8/5/10 1615h
We’ve seen the observatory, office, nap room, library, the paintings that Reich made as well as his paints and brushes. We’ve heard about his efforts at cloud-busting, by which the Wilhelm Reich Museum and Infant Trust actually mean rain-making, and have seen some of the cloud-busting equipment, which employ orgone energy to work. Reich saved the Maine blueberry crop of 1953 with his cloud-busting technology.
The tour has ended but we dither still. I ask one of the tour guides if there is an orgone accumulator we can sit in. She says that there are some boxes down in the Student Laboratory, which is now used for staff offices. If we go there tomorrow at ten am and ask nicely, someone will let us in and we can sit in the accumulators. We drift over to the W.R. gift shop where a woman who must have been past retirement manned the cash register. I ask her what she thinks about W.R. She smiles shyly and says “oh, he was before his time. He was right about a lot of things.” I nod and she nods. After ten seconds of nodding she adds “like about cancer and cloud-busting and all.” Christian buys a book and a postcard. When he hands the cashier his credit card she smiles (again, shyly) and says “sometimes I steal these by mistake.” He signs the slip and after a small hike to WR’s tomb we all pile in the car to head back to the cabin.
8/5/10 1705h
As we turn out of Orgonon Laura spots berries. We pull over and the four of us practically run to pick wild blackberries and blueberries. The hills around Orgonon are loaded with berries, and no one minded us there, picking and eating until our tongues turned blue. I had a Feeling I’d never had before, some simple happiness in the serendipity between our human needs and the lands’ offering in a place that still feels wild. Because that part of Maine is an Old New England, all forests and beasts and witches. It feels unknown by man¸ unknowable. And still, there is this happy moment.
We pick almost a quart of blackberries and blueberries. We stop at the Rangeley I.G.A. to buy Grape Nuts ice cream on the way home.
8/5/10 1745h
Arrive back at cabin. We all change into bathing costumes to swim in the lake. Except I do not swim in the lake as I had been recently tattooed and fear there might be something in the water that could make the tattoo infected. I tend to err on the hypochondriac side of health issues, suffering from the variant of hypochondria that causes me to think I may have horrible diseases but will never admit when I am actually ill.
The three swimmers report that Rangeley Lake is dark but clear and warm. I take some notes on the porch and wave at them from time to time. We drink some cold beer and watch the sun go down. The Ducks return for their evening visit but leave quickly. I suppose we are more of a morning spot for them.
8/5/10 1955h
Chowder-making begins. Christian does some culinary magic and produces one of the best fish chowders of all time. We all agree: it is awesome.
8/5/10 2230h
After a lengthy discussion to decide the evening’s movie, we watch “Wanted,” mostly because I told everyone I really wanted to watch it.
Despite my best intentions and after thirty minutes of demonstrating my commitment to watching the full film, I fall asleep.
