BALM (Born Again Labor Museum) is / was two things (or more). 1) A failed attempt to map a multiverse of gravediggers. 2) A failed attempt to record a social apokatastasis – the rebirth or reanimation (depending on who you ask) of all the toilers and diggers of every century — past, present, and future.
In September 1942 Mr. Robert Feature-214 found a large seemingly abandoned crate in the basement of a tavern in Granite City, Illinois. Intrigued by the find, Mr. Feature-214, an amateur historian, paid the tavern owner $9.50 for the crate. He then hired three tavern patrons to help him move the crate to his garage across the river in St. Louis. Once there he tried to open the crate but was initially unsuccessful. He hired two metal workers, William and Jack Person, to use a blowtorch on the crate. When they successfully cut the crate open a swarm of what looked like locusts flew into the garage, bored their way into the ceiling, floor, and walls, and disappeared.
What seemed like a winged space-alien to Mr. Feature-214, or an angel of God to the Person brothers, appeared to the three men. It did not speak — and disappeared within moments —but the three men all “heard” the same message. They were to go into the world and collect the records of all the lost performances of the enslaved, exploited, and oppressed; including all the hidden dreams and nightmares. William Person asked the alien-angel what they should do about the millions of records that had been lost to the vagaries of life and inevitability of time. The alien-angel told the three men to re-create the lost stories. As it disappeared it instructed Feature-214 and the Person brothers to share their discoveries and creations with the world.
There was one other thing in the box – the first artifact displayed by BALM. It was the bones of an opossum infused with the spirit of a women who died in the Triangle Fire. Unfortunately, in 1968, the bones were stolen during a traveling BALM exhibition in Toledo, Ohio.
From 1942 to 1949, Robert Feature-214 and the Person brothers travelled across the industrial Midwest and northeast collecting artifacts in a large truck. Jack and William had been aspiring artists before the Great Depression turned them into factory workers. They made drawings and paintings inspired by their investigations. Robert Feature-214 devised a complicated and nuanced questionnaire attempting to map the universe of each gravedigger they met. But, over time, they abandoned the questionnaire.
The three men created a dream stealing device (which they called TIM). They used this for a number of years, but, by 1948 they became paranoid that the government might take their invention and use it for nefarious ends. They destroyed TIM in a field outside Lincoln, Nebraska. Unfortunately, some of the notations for the device were eventually found by government agents. That research was used, in part, to help create ARPANET – the foundation for the modern-day Internet.
By 1949 the three men felt they had collected and created enough artifacts to open BALM. However, by this time they had run through Feature-214’s inheritance (his grandfather had once held the patent on sentimentality). To get funding to open their museum they approached a union official, Mr. Billy What-Are-You-Gonna-Do-About-It-Anyway?, who had been friends with the Person brothers in the 1930s. Billy skimmed some money off the Syndicate mob payouts being squeezed out of the union. The three men used this money to buy a second truck and big top tents. BALM began as a traveling museum. Their first exhibit was organized on a farm at the edge of West Frankfurt, Illinois.
In 1953 Jack Person met Jennifer Human – the daughter of a white Arkansas sharecropper. Jenny Human’s dad, “Big Bill” Human, had been involved in the multi-racial sharecropper’s union in the Missouri panhandle before being driven out of the area for “communism.” Jenny convinced Feature-214 and the Person brothers that, by focusing largely on the industrial regions of the country, they weren’t fully living up to the alien-angel’s mandate. BALM started to tour the southern states, collecting artifacts, and recording dreams. They were, of course, driven out of many southern towns by knight riders. Jenny realized they had to be more covert in some regions of the country. So she began recording stories with the intent of reading or re-enacting them in more favorable locales.
They started to include locals as performers wherever BALM had set up their temporary exhibitions – and expanded the BALM troupe. Jenny Human’s cousin, Claudette Human, had played Nora in her high school’s production of A Doll’s House before she started working for the telephone company. Jenny convinced Claudette to quit her job and help organize the BALM performances full-time.
Claudette got frustrated when people didn’t connect with the stories BALM collected and performed. Having once read, many years ago, about Hugo Ball and nonsense poetry, she decided BALM needed to draw attention to what she called “the impossibility of representation.” She claimed to have heard this particular phrase in a dream that “came from the future.” The BALM troupe divided each re-enactment/reading in half. They would do a straight reading first. And, then, they would read several stories all at once, so that they were almost impossible to understand. Claudette believed that this would communicate the vastness as well as the specificity of the gravediggers’ multiverse.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s BALM expanded its traveling museum and revue – west to California, through mining towns of Colorado, north into Canada, and south into Mexico. By 1974 their collection was so vast the majority of BALM artifacts had to be kept in a warehouse outside Indianapolis. During the explosion of social struggle during the “long sixties” BALM relied on donations from the growing socialist movement. As the struggles waned in the 1980s BALM fell on hard times financially. The BALM organizers were unable to pay the rent on their warehouse. Its contents were seized. Most of the artifacts were sold at auction. Many artifacts were destroyed. The bulk of the collection was scattered. Feature-214, the Person brothers, and the Human cousins, realized that, even if they had the means to track down the artifacts, they would be almost impossible to find. They had been decisively separated from their social origins. The factory bells? The hard-hats? The telephone operator headsets? The burlap sacks? They were no longer to be found in the basements and attics of gravediggers. They were in a sterile parlor somewhere. Or burned.
In 1984 Robert Feature-214 died in Cahokia, Illinois after a brief respiratory illness. Claudette Human died the following year from breast cancer. In 1987 Jenny Human was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was put in a rest home and succumbed to her illness two years later. Jack Person was despondent at the conditions in the home. He secretly sold remaining BALM artifacts in an attempt to put Jenny in a better facility. This led to a falling out between the brothers. In 1992 William Person passed away while sleeping alone in the back of the one remaining BALM tuck. The truck, no longer operational, was parked on a side street in Peoria, Illinois. By the time Jack made it to Peoria the location of the truck and its contents were unknown – and presumed destroyed. Jack Person spent the last decade of his life as a Wal-Mart greeter in Paducah, Kentucky.
In the late 1990s Jack and Jenny’s daughter, Emma Human-Person, wrote a small memoir about her parents and what it was like growing up in a travelling museum. The book, Em-Balmed, was self-published and mostly ignored — and not at all flattering to her parents. But it was the only substantial accounting of the aforementioned history. In 2017 one of the current BALM organizers, First Person Deceived Husband, found a copy of the book at the Charleston Outlet thrift store in Las Vegas, Nevada. At first, First Person thought it was fiction. He later decided it was simultaneously non-fiction. He showed the book to his partner, Joy Happiness Gleam, who convinced First Person that they should, together, bring BALM back to life. Deceived Husband began collecting artifacts and making drawings and paintings. Gleam wrote stories, made puppets, and drawings. Together they are tyring to recreate certain lost artifacts described in Emma’s memoir.
Perhaps being somewhat more sensible than the original BALM organizers, or, perhaps because times had changed, or perhaps because all imagination has been destroyed, Gleam and Deceived Husband decided they couldn’t immediately launch a traveling exhibition. But they knew the BALM artifacts and stories needed a voice. And they knew they needed help collecting more artifacts and stories. They contacted, using the government’s dream stealing machines, a writer named Protector Ticket, a philosopher named Evergreen Flame War, and a poet named God-Like Rope Weaver. Together the five of them started Locust Review, a parallel but independent project, to, once again, explore the gravediggers’ multiverse.
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