ABSTRACT
From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, there were three Harry Smiths: one Harry Smith was the compiler of the Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music; one was the legendary animator (who had progressed from abstract, “visual music” filmmaking to esoteric, psychoanalytically-inspired collage animation); and the third was the unknown Harry Smith (only those really in the know about the goings-on in New York’s Chelsea Hotel or the Naropa University were aware of his existence), who assembled an archive of (seemingly random) sons trouvé and collected other evidence of pervasive states of mind (including paper airplanes floated into the streets of New York City by bored office workers, string figures, Seminole patchworks, Scottish tartan, and pysanky). Remarkably, those acquainted with one of these Smiths often didn’t know of the others: it was common for aficionados of avant-garde cinema to know nothing of Smith’s role in stimulating the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s or in recording the Fugs’ albums, while many of those who listened devotedly to recorded tracks by the Breauxs and Blind Lemon Jefferson had no notion that the compilation was made by a painter who was also one of the greatest experimental filmmakers ever.1 Though recognition of Smith’s important role in Amer ican culture after the middle of the twentieth century has grown, commentators still have not attempted to fathom the relations among the different aspects of his oeuvre. This essay is an attempt to initiate discussion of that topic. Certainly, Smith believed the work produced in these diverse fields all exemplify patterns (for the most part purely geometric patterns) that embody universal principles. The Neoplatonic, Neo-Pythagorean notions Smith adopted by reading Renaissance (primarily Elizabethan) writers claim these universal principles are Ideas in the Universal Mind. Smith’s interest in the Sephirot and the Tree of Life was also based in NeoPythagorean leanings. For Smith, the similarities between the geometric harmonies of Highland tartans and of the Enochian patterns testifies to the universality of these Ideas. But this is pretty much boilerplate Neoplatonism. Smith’s originality, I believe, is to have re-interpreted those Neoplatonic principles in a manner that was influenced by the new science of
electromagnetism. Theosophy helped him to do this. To show the interrelations of Neoplatonist ideas, Neo-Pythagorean principles, Theosophy, and the new science of electromagnetism is also a key purpose of this essay. Let us begin with the (now only relatively) unknown Harry Smith, and specifically with his recording of sons trouvés. In the 1960s and 1970s, Harry Smith assembled an archive of live recordings-comprising traffic noises, children’s jump-rope rhymes, and city birdsongs, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time). He continued this and related projects for decades. In July 1988, the filmmaker Stan Brakhage visited New York City with his new partner, Marilyn Jull. On July 22, he wrote me to report on the visit (which seems to have exhilarated him). Among his comments was,
We had long marvelous conversations with . . . Charles Boultenhouse . . . Sidney and Bernice Peterson . . . Allen Ginsberg and Harry Smith (Allen having just saved Harry from another ‘near death’, Harry having been over in The Bronx recording the dying statements of derelicts in the burned-out bldgs. and gutters, ending in the hospital with pneumonia himself ).
