Performed at B3 (Ave B. & 3rd St., NYC) SOLID HANG Presents / For Better or Worse : A Saucy Ode to St. Valentine's by Dodd Loomis February 14, 2005.

Intro

Tonight we’ve heard a lot of stories about love. Stories about falling in love, being in love and first loves…but we haven’t heard a story about breaking-up. “The Break-Up” is a very real possibility for those in love or in relationships. Not a certainty, by any means, but yes, a possibility. So it does seem appropriate to include it in the night. Now, it seems no one’s written the breaking-up story…including myself. But, what I did find is some research on a young man named John Duncan and a young woman named Bethany Rose.

I find their story, as patchy as it may be, pretty fascinating.

They were both born in 1907, both had a passion for the Arts and were born on the same day. John was from a tiny town in Georgia named Tifton and had a membership to the Tifton Public Library. His library records reveal that John began borrowing books at age 7 and stopped at age 25, marking his departure from Tifton and his subsequent arrival to New York City. In those 18 years though, that John WAS in Tifton, he checked out over 4000 books. That’s almost a book every single day. Needless to say, John was a voracious reader and had a subsequent desire to become a writer. John also had a buzz cut and large pointy ears, revealed by the 3 remaining black and white photographs of him. John left Tifton, moved to New York City and would never come back.

In 1932, a lease was taken out on a small studio in Queens, with a publicly shared bathroom down the hall, under the name Jonathan S. Duncan. In early 1933, John pops up working as a fact checker on an inter-borough newspaper called The City Daily Journal. Even as a pee-on in the company, John wastes no time making submissions of his poetry, short stories and what one office memo referred to as “Back Brain Rambling”. The Journal published none of his submissions.

Bethany Rose…was also from a small town, Percher, Vermont, where she grew up in her Uncle’s glass shop; “The Cosmic Eye Looking Glass”. By day, she was surrounded by primitive telescopes, looking glasses, spectacles and constellation maps; by night, she and her Uncle gazed endless hours up at the stars. She was home schooled and her Uncle taught her Astronomy, Astrology and Numerology. When she turned 18, for a dramatic change of pace, Bethany joined the local Vaudeville Troupe, La Boite en Bois, and performed a fire breathing and fire twirling act. Fire would prove to be a life long passion for Bethany.

When she was 26, she left Vermont, moved to Brooklyn and soon there after was working at The Brooklyn Glass Factory. Bethany had found her calling as a glass blower.

In 1934, John and Bethany were introduced at an artist’s party 2 blocks from Bethany’s flat.

John and Bethany immediately fell in love and within 3 months, Bethany’s lease was terminated, implying she moved in with John. John’s writing almost immediately changed. He becomes even more prolific than he already was and the themes of his writing become totally saturated with a previously un-characteristic intensity of emotion and the concept of immortal love. These themes will dominate his work for the rest of his career.

Bethany continues at the factory; habitually singeing her hair and burning her knuckles, as intimated through occasional post cards to her family in Percher, but she also, begins to stay late and blow her own glass. Not cups or bowls, as requested by the factory, but personal pieces that came out of her passion and experimentation with the art form. This would become her life’s work. There is record, through Bethany’s 1 remaining journal, that in late 1935, she began shopping her “mysterious and un-named pieces”, as she describes them, to New York vendors, but does not sell a single item…during her entire life time.

1938 marks the beginning of a major lapse in historical information on the whereabouts of John Duncan. He pops up in London around 1945 as an editor for a literary publishing house. John never returns to America and never sees Bethany again. The exact time John Duncan and Bethany Rose were together as a couple, in love, living with one another, is not known, but it is between 4 years and 7 years.

In 1941, Bethany is fired from The Brooklyn Glass Factory and subsequently moves back to Percher, Vermont. In 1947, she died at the young age of 42 and was buried on the family plot. The last line of her last existing journal gives an indication of her state of mind at or around her death. It reads “In my lifetime I have learned that to fall in love is easy and to stay in love is even easier, simply to ward off the fear of loneliness and isolation…but what’s truly difficult is to maintain a relationship that make you a better person.”

It wouldn’t be until 7 years after her death, in 1954, that Bethany’s entire glass collection would be displayed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, donated by a wealthy European journalist, John Duncan. The Museum named the collection, “Constellations”, at John’s request, sighting that all the pieces together looked like hundreds of little stars.

“Constellations” was both a critical and public smash hit and on the eve of show’s World Tour, the following poem was published in The New Yorker, under the name J.S. Duncan.

It was then republished in 2004 for the re-assemblage and 50 year reunion of “Constellations” at The Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Heavenly Bodies
A Poem of Cosmic Proportions

It started with two heavenly hearts in close proximity.
A gravitational force tugging from their insides engaged it.
A cosmic journey fusing two souls was launched.
And it birthed a love so intense it melted them whole.

The love was pure, young and completely naïve…
Naïve to a degree of perfection.
It was also overwhelming, incomprehensible and impressed the stars;
“How can such small bodies pump such bright, banging, hot hearts?”
The Stars thought.
Only Quasars and Super Novas got it.
But the Universe nodded respectfully at their impressive production of liquid love.
Enough to stifle a Black Hole.

The tug of their heavenly hearts set them in centrifugal motion,
A circular path bringing two separate entities to a singular point.

Eyes locked in a Milky Way Tango,
They began to gain momentum.
Their speed quickened,
And their hearts rushed,
Soon spinning their own Constellations,
And inventing their own Heavenly Bodies.

With each chest throbbing its steamy organ,
Their center heat spread to their frame.
Their cores began to gush molten magma
And they lit the sky.

Whirling in a cosmic cyclone of everything soft
Their proximity closed
And they combined like moons in crushing convergence,
An explosive expression of union,
Creating an ethereal embrace,
A molecular combination of idiosyncrasies,
Imperfections
And yes.

Their hearts burned so piercing hot they melted one another.
They lost their grip.
Their atoms split.
And they fell a part.
Giving away and falling in to whatever lay inside the other.

Splayed open,
With unraveling insides,
And particles and parts spewing from their eyes,
They tumbled in to a storm of sacrifice,
A blizzard of anarchy.

And there they spun.
As one.

Tight and hot.
Each atom racing the other,
Burning every molecule in its path,
Pulling their core to diamond tight fusion.
A psychotic beautiful bloodbath frenzy of true love
Burning blue
And pouring like molten Earth.
Raging so madly they even melted themselves.