ramblings of a fevered brain: II
Anyhow - I’m deviating - back to hobbies, obsessions and mania.
A few miles from here there is a small roadside house, the otherwise modest frontage of which has been covered entirely in shells. Around fifty years ago, the owner seized on the heinous notion of pebble dash, munged it up with traditional mosaic design, went beachcombing, and came home armed to make a statement. This house is different from the others in the terrace; the owner even spelled it out. Above the door jamb, although the colours of the shells have faded and weathered, if you look closely between the muted browns and greys, as with an Ishihara Colour Blindness Test, you can still pick out the words, ‘The House of Shells’.
The pattern is wonky, the arrangement rather amateurish and the shells are decidedly grubby now, but in its own way, this is a frontage which says, ‘I am a piece of outsider art, love me or hate me, here I am‘.
I love it - and I hope they don’t knock it down. It’s a testament to freedom of expression and eccentricity, and there are many other equally bizarre and individually unique pockets of human endeavour up and down the land. But even as you pass them and smile, don’t you ask yourself if what lies behind the choice and positioning of the hundredth gnome is not simply a channelling of excess time and energy, but something more disturbing?
Imagine the spouse. A hobby?
‘At last. Now you’re done with those bloody shells you can wipe your feet and come in for your tea.’
An obsession?
‘Shells, shells, shells, that’s all it is with him. He’s up there again, on his bloody ladder with his tub of grout, swinging his bucket of shells without another thought in his head.’
Or mania?
‘It’s a bit short notice, mother, but she wants to move again. No, she’s not pregnant. It’s the shells. Yes. We’ve found a house with a nice flat frontage, twice the size of the old one, we just need…’
Which reminds me of the Coral Castle.
As you know, I like quirky museums. When we were in Miami a few years ago, I read about a lesser known attraction on the outskirts of the city on the way to the Everglades - The Coral Castle - and one hot afternoon I decided we had to go there.
Although it draws small numbers nowadays - what’s to see? - a bunch of old rock? - where’s the shop? - the Coral Castle has been compared in scale to another testament to lost love, the Taj Mahal.
When he was twenty-six, and his sweetheart just sixteen, Lithuanian immigrant, Ed Leedskalnin, was engaged to be married. The day before the wedding, his child-bride, Agnes, called it all off. Ed never recovered from the loss. His love had turned to stone.
It is said that Ed staked a claim on his unusual coral-coloured patch of America years later, in 1936, and single-handedly spent the rest of his life sculpting and refining the entire structure of the peculiar, other-worldly habitation of the Coral Castle in almost total isolation.
The afternoon we visited, the sky was cloudless, there was no wind, and we were able to explore it virtually on our own. There were: thrones, one for him, one for her; sundials and little gardens; shaded arbours and corners which caught the sun at the perfect time; baths and grottos; it was a fortress but also a prison, open, yet oddly claustrophobic. The sculptures reminded me of the paintings of Marc Chagall - primitive representations of suns and moons - strange and haunting - and clearly echoed back to the myths and fairytales of Ed Leedskalnins childhood. It also felt oddly lifeless, like a salt mine.
Ed had dissected the chassis and mechanism of a model-T Ford to create an impressive array of levers and bits of equipment, including an oven. What struck me most forcibly, though, were two areas in particular; Ed’s living quarters, which were austere in the extreme, and an area set aside called - if I remember correctly - ‘punishment corner’ - with seats facing the wall - for his imaginary wife and child.
In some contexts, unrelenting sunshine can be as bleak as moorland gloom, and as I moved through the spaces inside the Coral Castle, it became more and more clear to me they had been created by a man in the grip of a deep, unheathly, but utterly compelling mania. Whatever else it did, the Castle saved and sustained him.
A psychologist would have a field day at the Coral Castle; to be inside it was a fascinating and moving experience.
What sparked all this off, then? Remembering stone carving? Recalling the Minack Theatre, I think. The woman who built it, Rowena Cade, was another driven obsessive with a fragmented, troubled family background. There’s something in that.
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