After the Saucers Landed

by Douglas Lain

  Charging ten dollars a head Rain could afford to quit his day job and work full time on preparation for the landings.

  What this proved to us, to Harold and me, is that it’s possible to miss or ignore inconsistencies in the world. That is, most of us see what we want to see and only question a given circumstance when it makes us feel bad or sad. For instance, when I flipped through time, I first found myself making love to two different versions of my wife in one moment, stroking first one and then the other of them as they writhed on the kitchen table, and then, in the next moment, found myself eating a snow cone on the boardwalk at Coney Island…

  Anyhow, Harold and I have our own technique for recovering Missing Time, and it has nothing to do with Mutoscopes or any other alien technology. What we use to remember, to find out what an abduction or sighting means, is a technique developed in Fluxus. What we stage in order to remember the aliens is a Happening.

  Right now, for instance, I’m setting one up for later. I’m strewing objects in the studio art building, in the studio Harold’s been using along with his students, with the hope that he and I might encounter these later and that these objects will help something happen. A Happening is when there is a dislocation or break in the usual flow of daily life, a dislocation of a kind that can’t be ignored. What I’m hoping is that something new will be born from a Laser Tag set, a pack of Black Jack chewing gum, a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots game, and a Mister Microphone. Harold says he’s willing to start again. These nostalgic trinkets are the best that I can come up with. It seems to me that these are the tools we’ll need. I store the toys in a paper bag from Kroger’s and open the pack of gum. The taste of anise is just what I need to settle my nerves.

  Back in the mid to late ’50s, back when Harold was just past his teen years, Buckminster Fuller and the Occult were still taken seriously, at least among artists and poets. That is, despite the great distance, the great emptiness that we’d discovered around our little world, despite the fact of our insignificance, there was still a glimmer of hope for meaning, for art. The Occult no longer made sense, but it did give artists a way to look past the surface of things, to find a greater reality even as they found themselves surrounded by the cruel vacuum of space.

  What people like John Cage and even Harold Flint liked most about Buckminster Fuller was this idea that had been around for a long time and that was expressed most directly in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

  The line was spoken by Michael Rennie at the very end of the picture, during the bit when Rennie delivered his warning to the people of Earth. He told them:

  “We do have a system, and it works.” Anyhow, Harold saw his first UFO while he was at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Black Mountain College was an art school steeped in Fuller’s mysticism, an alternative school most notable for producing influential poets and artists like Robert De Niro Sr., Robert Rauschenberg, and John Wieners, and that’s where he was when he saw his first saucer land.

  Harold was helping another artist—a delinquent kid named Ray Walker—build a geodesic dome out of twigs and branches, when a Pleidien craft hovered over the rectangular college, flashed its lights, and made him go partly mad.

  He said later that it was a help. Harold had reached an impasse in his art at the college, but when this pinball-style contraption, a sherbet ice cream cone covered in colored lights and emitting electric trills, appeared in the sky his whole life was reset. Harold and Walker didn’t fit at Black Mountain and were rebels among rebels. They didn’t fit well behind the walls of democratic experimentation, and Harold doubted whether pinecones, manual labor, and abstract expressionism were helping him. He’d fallen in with Walker not despite, but because of Walker’s insistence on working in the realm of bad taste. Walker was everything that Flint wasn’t: dramatic, undisciplined, and gay. Walker loved comic books and movies, and this thing called Pop. Pop Art. When the saucer appeared Walker saw it first. “Lovely,” he’d said. “It’s Las Vegas.”

  The geodesic dome they were building was falling to pieces, the twine they were using to bind the sticks together constantly unraveling, but Walker seemed to enjoy it. He said it was fitting and good that Fuller’s system should fall apart, but Flint was frustrated. He was attending Black Mountain not only because it was a smart move for an artist to be there, not merely because Willem de Kooning and John Cage were teaching there, but because he wanted that system, the system that worked. The idea was not just to learn to paint, sculpt, or to write powerfully, but to be made complete. The aim was to fully develop as a human. Flint wanted to be part of something bigger than himself while remaining free while Rain would settle for the latter on its own. Before he saw the saucer Harold was most interested in Mondrian and the Russian artist Lissitzky, in the promise of pure formal or geometric abstraction. He thought he wanted purity, but when he found it he couldn’t bear it. “It’s Las Vegas,” Walker had said. They stood on the dirt path down the hill from the rectangle, looked up into the afternoon sky at the ice cream cone spacecraft, and watched and listened as this spinning top above them distorted the sky. They watched as the lights blinked, as the air wavered, as the sound shifted from one low note to another, and they slowly became confused. Harold found he could read Ray Walker’s mind. What happened during his first UFO sighting was that the ideas in his friend Walker’s head, images from New York bath houses and Look magazine, bare-chested men and cigarette logos, flashed in the background of his mind. He was looking up at flashing lights, at an unreal merry-go-round, but the real motion was happening in the brain of his companion. He could feel it, this flux of Walker’s mind, and he couldn’t help thinking along with that flow. Harold thinks this psychic flash is more important than the physical fact of the extraterrestrial craft. He credits the flash, this momentary telepathy, for setting him on a new path creatively. This moment was the reason he left Black Mountain and why he later joined Walker and others as a part of Fluxus. Even after Walker committed suicide in 1966 and Harold moved away from the pranks and jokes that were Walker’s preferred form to formulate his own conceptual work, this psychic connection was still what lay behind everything Flint did. To connect, to know, this was what Harold always aimed at, and when he started working with UFOs and UFO experiencers he asked his subjects, these UFO experiencers, what they thought the saucers meant. He didn’t want to know what they were, didn’t care where they came from, but wanted to know what they meant to the people who saw them. He asked the witnesses to paint or draw what they’d seen and then expanded the range of art practices involved and had them collage, sculpt, make short films, record audio tapes. When none of this worked he turned to the Happening.

  A Happening is associated with theater but it isn’t a play. In the ’60s a typical Happening would be a non-narrative performance that incorporated other forms of art and that aimed at spontaneity and audience participation, but in the ’80s Harold’s Happenings were private affairs. He’d hold them in his apartment, in his loft studio. He’d set up various art objects and tools, usually an easel and paints, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a tambourine and recorder, add some odds and ends like tinfoil, confetti, and some kind of paste, and then ask his subjects to tell him the story of their encounters without mentioning anything that happened.

  “Metaphors only,” he’d say. That was his primary instruction. While researchers like Budd Hopkins and Allen Hynek were busy trying to find consistencies in the physical evidence, working to catalog correlations between the different eyewitness accounts, Harold set out to make sure there was no actual data.

  The problem with a Happening is that it can lead you anywhere, sometimes far, far away from the subject.

  For instance, take Harold’s relationship with Carole. It was, like most relationships between men and women, set upon the foundation of a conflict in perspectives. Both of them were artists, right? And they’d both had strange experiences with UFOs, but while Harold thought of himself as a skeptic, a materialist and anti-th
eist, Carole believed.

  She came to him the same summer I met him, back in 1984, and at first she was just another abduction case that he and I took on as a project. By this time Harold had left Fluxus behind. His art was more philosophical and less playful, not that he had ever found it easy to be less than serious. For Harold a joke is just a peculiar kind of contradiction. A game is just a system that people act out in order to keep their minds occupied.

  In the early ’80s Harold was more and more like himself I think. He studied the works of Escher and Duchamp and he drew Necker cubes, broken lines, and rabbits that looked like ducks or vice versa. What he liked about this kind of work, about the cubes specifically, was that the problem of perception, the problem of what is inside and what is outside, was so perfectly illustrated by these cubes that were really just flat lines. Harold hoped that he might be able to develop an art or a practice that would help illustrate how our memories and what we called the present were also flat. He thought life itself was like a Necker cube. He thought the whole world was a cube, or if not exactly the same as a cube, then the same kind of problem.

  When he started the abduction research Harold also started studying psychology and psychoanalysis. For him the problem of memory, of trying to figure out what had happened to an abductee, was the same problem as trying to figure out whether a Necker cube was protruding out from or indented into the paper. That is, discovering what really happened at a UFO sighting or during an abduction was a matter of sifting out the ideas and images that were really projections from the present, but conversely the problem of figuring out the present, the problem of what was really happening now, was also a matter of filtering. A person had to filter out what he remembered, get rid of his expectations, in order to figure out what was really in front of him.

  Actually, for Harold, neither approach would work.

  If you don’t let yourself fall for the illusion the Necker cube stops being interesting. If you don’t get fooled at least a little bit then all you’d see would be flat lines on a page. The trick was to try to see it both ways, not to eliminate one illusion or another, but to see both illusions at the same time. When it came to memories, came to UFO stories, the trick was to see the past inside the present while also seeing how the present was inside the past.

  The way Harold brought the two times together, the way he tried to demonstrate the way the past was always only in the present and the present is always just an experience of the past, was by making art. That is, not by making art himself, but by forcing the abductees to make art.

  “It’s a balloon,” Carole said. She looked directly into the camera, smiled at the lens, and then held up the rather intricate and polished sketch she’d made of a hot air balloon. The balloon was colored red white and blue in stripes that stopped at the midway point, while the top was flesh toned.

  Harold lowered the Super 8 camera, took a glance at what she’d drawn, and was disappointed to see that she was being so literal, that she wasn’t playing by his rules. He frowned and then hid himself behind the camera again. He scanned the room and filmed everything: the brick walls and cement floor, the full-length mirrors and oversized worktable, the stainless steel chair, and then finally the abductee, this woman with hair cut short like a man’s wearing a turtleneck and jeans.

  It turned out later that Carole wasn’t drawing the UFO she’d seen. She’d cheated. What she drew, her balloon, it hadn’t had anything to do with UFOs or with what she saw. The experience of seeing a flying saucer had not been in her mind at all. She’d figured that since she was barred from drawing or speaking about her UFO experience directly she would push it from her mind altogether. Her Happening, as it was called, would just be her reaction to Harold.

  “Where is it?” Harold asked. “Where is your balloon exactly?”

  “Well it’s all by itself, isn’t it? The balloon has drifted so far, always in the same direction, uncompromising about that, so now it’s alone. The balloonist and the balloon are nowhere. See?” She pointed to the empty space on the paper, to the blank space on the page, the blank space that surrounded the bulb and basket.

  Carole drew a few more balloons for Harold and then he had her record her voice on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “One, two, three, four,” she said. “Five, six, seven, eight.”

  Carole was an artist too. I think I’ve said that already, and she’d been to Happenings before, thought of them as primarily social events, basically parties dressed up and made to seem important. And when Harold asked her to put his loft to her use, when he’d told her his plan, she’d thought he’d been coming on to her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do about it either. She’d spent her time trying to make up her mind what she wanted.

  “You want to see what I’m doing?” she asked him. Harold zoomed in as she leaned across the worktable with a yardstick and a drawing pencil and made arrows. Actually what she drew were Müller-Lyer illusions: parallel lines with v’s on each end, lines that were of equal length but that appeared to be of differing sizes depending on which direction the greaterthan or less-than signs were pointing. She drew a few other simple perspective challenges too. One with equal vertical and horizontal lines, only the vertical line appeared to be longer even though it wasn’t. She drew a Necker cube, this time with the vertical and horizontal illusion filling the space inside the box.

  “Tell me a story,” Harold said.

  Carole decided not to give him what he said he wanted. Her approach to art was always one built on a certain frustration. That is, when she was involved in the avant-garde, when she hung around John Cage’s crowd, her art struggled toward something realistic and representational. At that point she wanted more than mere abstractions. But when she worked with more conventional types, when she was expected to create some kind of narrative in her work, what she produced was always spare. When she was supposed to make stories she would always eschew representation and produce purely formal works. She just didn’t like giving people what they said they wanted.

  So when Harold asked her for a story she made up her mind not to give him a story at all, but to give him something else. She decided that she knew what she wanted to do about the man behind the Kodak Super 8 camera, what she wanted to do with his clumsy advances.

  Carole picked up a piece of paraffin paper from the table and held it in front of her, blurring her image with the nonstick wrap, blocking her head from view. Carole held the paper in place, turned so that she was looking slightly away, closed her eyes, and instead of a story she started to sing. The song was written by Dan Daniels but had been made famous by Peggy Lee. And maybe Carole didn’t have a perfect singing voice, but she could carry a tune and sing with conviction.

  “I remember when I was a little girl, our house caught on fire,” she sang.

  The song was “Is That All There Is” and by the time she was done Harold realized that while something was happening, what was happening was not a Happening. He zoomed in closer, tried to focus the camera on her face and failed because of the wax paper.

  Carole would claim that the flying saucer people brought them together, but the truth was much simpler than that. Carole met Harold and saw what it was he needed, saw what was bothering him, and rather than solve his problem for him, to give him some kind of answer, she offered her own trouble over in exchange.

  Come to think of it, it’s a strange coincidence. Both Harold’s affair with Carole and my relationship with Virginia started that way.

  I wonder, when it comes to men and women, is that all there is?

  Turning onto 5th I’m stuck in traffic. I’m surrounded by rust colored sedans and Chevrolet taxi cabs, and we’re all moving very slowly.

  Neither of my wives care that I’ve started, that Harold and I have started, working on flying saucers again. It was her goal originally, it was the whole reason Asket came to us, and now it’s why she’s living in our house, but apparently writing about UFOs is the last thing on anybody’s mind.

  Virg
inia cut Asket’s grapefruit for her this morning. She made a special effort to separate every segment from the yellow skin. She sprinkled a thick layer of powdered sugar on the reddish orange fruit flesh and Asket appeared to be delighted by this.

  Virginia is still mesmerized, enraptured, by Asket. Even though her Virginia personality has faded, even though all that’s left is a vacuous and naive Asket persona, Virginia treats the alien as if she’s something precious. I guess she figures that Asket might reveal some new truth about her and she wants to be there if and when that happens again.

  Anyhow, when I left them they were sitting at the breakfast table and giggling over stories and memories and neither of them had bothered to get dressed. They just sat around all morning in nearly identical terry cloth robes (Virginia’s was orange while Asket’s was dark yellow) and eating grapefruit and some sort of healthy-looking cold cereal. They were eating Wheaties or Total or something like that, smiling, and it was like my life had become an advertisement from some alternative dimension where everybody’s lesbian. Virginia kept touching the alien, tapping her shoulder or stroking her arm, while I hurried about collecting my notes, double-checking my schedule.

  There’s a taxi keeping pace with me to my left and the driver, a man in a black cotton turban and with a grey beard, he’s looking at me like he blames me for the delay. The grey sedan behind me is revving its engine. Do they think I’ve stopped out of whimsy or malice? I turn to look at the driver through the back window, to make eye contact, when I spot the saucer. It’s hovering directly over the taxi behind me.

  The UFO is following me. Am I the target? Everyone thinks there’s going to be another conversion, that the saucer is going to open up and that I’m going to climb on board and leave my car behind and block traffic. They’ve all slowed down in preparation for my quick departure, but I’m not going anywhere. I honk my horn to indicate that I’m ready to go, to tell everyone to ignore the saucer and keep driving, and eventually the lanes start to clear.