Habitats of the heart
Aiken, William
O'Brien: "An American Catholic is a Protestant who goes to Mass." H.L. Mencken: "The Latin church, which I find myself admiring more and more despite its frequent imbecilities, has always kept...
...Although I still nail my Christmas tree to the living room floor, I am now generally free of remodeling necessities...
...The impressive catalogue that accompanied the show (Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art--A Bulfinch Press Book, $75, 712 pp...
...Their kitchen joists are not mere 2x6s which sag under appliances...
...Since I had no par- ticular skills, my opportunities were limited, but I had always enjoyed putting houses together, either from scratch or the long way back from general decay...
...I saw myself more as a knight errant, visiting buildings under siege, with screwdriver in hand rather than a sword...
...The headquarters of the organization is in Americus, Georgia, but there are twelve regional centers throughout the United States, and affiliates in every state in the nation...
...Such an organization was ideal for my eccentricities, providing a ramshackle structure out of which decent houses might emerge...
...There may be many people like me out there, veterans of their own private housing war, who have remodeled parts of their houses so many times they begin to have the air of ruins...
...And to be honest, my relationship to pipe and sheetrock is caustic...
...Habitat houses are better built than my house...
...It takes pride in having built an island of democracy, reason, and hope amid the turbulence of Western history...
...while a variety of cultural institutions had readings and lectures by and about personalities, movements, and the styles of Mexico...
...Habitat for Humanity is a nonprofit housing organization which builds houses for the inadequately sheltered...
...They don't tilt four inches to the southwest the way my foundation tilts...
...We worked together for two weeks, putting up siding and exterior trim...
...James Thurber: "He who hesitates is sometimes saved...
...We may still occasionally joust with joists, but we do it on our own field...
...In fact, my life had been one long confrontation with bursting pipes, rotting decks, and sagging floors...
...A tinkling cheeriness bothers me...
...John C. Tully: "If you want to find the most efficient way of doing something, give the job to the laziest person in your orga- nization...
...The country of George Washington traces its past to the manners, constitution, and civility of England...
...The reasons are political...
...The aesthetic delights of "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries," is so unique in its juxtaposition of Christian and Aztec motifs, so politically oriented, so revealing of the penury of those defeated by history, that the viewer is left with the feeling that it must have been a joke of God to place the United States and the millenarian Aztec descendants face-to-face...
...On a Habitat site one day an ex-professional baseball player, recovering from a stroke and stomach ulcers, lifted one end of a 4x 12-foot piece 38: Commonweal of sheetrock and said, "This is what I'll be doing for the rest of my life...
...Despite the fact that it has over four hundred affiliates and has built over four thousand houses in the last fourteen years, there are no insiders, no charter members, no "ground floor" to the organization...
...This was truly a grassroots organization, with no direction from the mountaintop, just a bunch of consenting adults who were, in the restruck coin of the day, quixotically active...
...Simultaneously, the Swedish Academy of Letters--after granting the 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Spanish novelist Camilio Jos6 Cela--announced that the 1990 prize would go to Mexico's foremost intellectual, Octavio Paz...
...Footnote 1: John C. Tully founded the Thomas More Association and eventually put Dan Herr in charge of it...
...Then he disappeared...
...REPORT FROM THE ROOFTOP HABITATS OF THE HAVE NAILS, WILL HAMMER have never wanted to be a "volunteer...
...You're allowed a folly in your fifties...
...My grandchildren have no set ideas on the way a guest room should look...
...The show was an amazing, unfor- gettable display of artistic energy, spanning from before the Conquest of Tenochtitlfin in 1524-25 by the Spanish knights to the painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), who has acquired the stature of a popular idol she did not possess in her lifetime...
...They must also pledge a certain number of work hours either on their own house or on someone else's house...
...The exhibit at the Metropolitan was largely paid for by Friends of the Arts of Mexico, a philanthropic institution that has Azc~rraga as its chairman...
...All the money is raised by private donation (no government funding) and 10 percent of the money in each locality goes to Habitat International, which builds houses in the third world, each of which costs about $2,500...
...There is no two-second delay before the message from the light switch arrives at the light itself...
...Footnote 2: The selections above reflect the acerbic side of Dan Herr's wit [see "Curmudgeon, with Heart," Commonweal, October 26, 1990...
...You just show up and see what materials are on hand to build with...
...Several years later, while he was the editor- in-chief of the literary magazine Plural, the Echeverria gov- ernment took over the offices of Excdlsior, the magazine's parent newspaper, and threw Paz and the entire staff into the street...
...Eventually Paz became a close friend of the current president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose whole political and economic program of openness and free markets is referred to as Salinastroika...
...Initially I was a little put out that no one was there at the building site to capitalize on my resourcefulness, but I saw the house needed housewrap, so I started in on that---during a snow squall with forty-mile-an-hour winds...
...As time went by I met other people who were involved with Habitat, and I realized that no one was really in charge...
...What I needed was an organization that could capture the quixotic element in me, some group that could accommodate young women who want hammers in their hands and old men who want to solder just one pipe before they pay up for past gaieties...
...It opens with his philosophical essay on the religious, social, political, and idiosyncratic roots of Mexican civilization...
...The catalogue examines furniture, engravings, trays, stamps, sculptures, ceramics, silver and golden gilts, embroidered silks, rare book editions, and clothing...
...He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia...
...Mexico is just the opposite: An example of European dreams gone sour, a mix of races and manners, an instinctive society in which art, once controlled by the state, is now a tool of public relations...
...As the poet says: Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling...
...He had other sides, as shown by, e.g, Thomas More: "A merry story exchanged with a friend refreshes us much and without harm lightens our minds and restores our courage and soothes our stomachs...
...Mencken: "The Latin church, which I find myself admiring more and more despite its frequent imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it that religion is not a syllogism but a poem...
...I preferred not to be called a "volunteer...
...To me there was something about the word that suggested energy without objective, or willingness without much wit...
...In addition, there was a brittle fellowship that didn't especially appeal to me in certain group-volunteer projects...
...The views propounded in the volume are Paz's...
...Those familiar with the poet's rhetoric will notice that most of his argument appeared 25January1991:39...
...The gap dividing them is abysmal, uncrossable--which might not be good for diplomacy, but-is a fascinating fact of life...
...But not long after I retired from teaching school, I began look- ing around for something to keep me busy...
...After a while a "community service" volunteer arrived, a carpenter, doing time on drug charges...
...Old and new masters of Mexican art, such as Jose Mafia Estrada, Gerardo Murillo Cornad6 (Dr...
...And I saw room for nostalgia in my future, when I could look back on my building days...
...Paz, the poet and essayist, is the author of more than forty books, including the landmark The Labyrinth of Solitude...
...has been prodigally illustrated...
...House payments are recy- cled within each local affiliate to build more houses...
...The houses (nor- mally one thousand square feet--three bedrooms, bath, kitchen, dining/living area) are sold at no profit, and with a no-interest mortgage, to families who can afford $150 (Appalachia) or $250 (Cape Cod) a month for their housing...
...But his dislike for Mexican realpolitik oscillated in the eighties to a more complacent, submissive attitude toward the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), Mexico's ruling party for more than seventy years...
...New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art recently exhibited an ambitious and expensive array of the arts and crafts from south of the Rio Grande, "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries...
...Atl), the three muralists mentioned pre- viously, as well as Francisco Goitia and Rufino Tamayo, could be admired...
...But, just in case, we'll mention that the whole of Just Good Reading is, indeed, ditto...
...Footnote 3: We don't think The Critic can sue us for stealing again what has been stolen so oft before...
...It is not a synthesis, but the exhibit itself, handsomely bound...
...IfI remember right, Don Quixote was in his .fifties when he set out to rescue damsels in distress, and on a lower level some of us still get excited by drains in disrepair...
...In general, I carry a lot of grievances toward building materials...
...An average Habitat house in the United States costs $25,000, though prices range from $20,000 to $50,000, depending on land cost and materials...
...That's the kind of thing I like to do...
...My children are gone away...
...Recipient families are chosen on a nondiscriminatory basis, but they must be earning enough ($600 a month in Appalachia, $1000 a month on Cape Cod) to pay off the mortgage...
...When the student massacre of Tlatelolco Square took place in 1968, Paz renounced his post as Mexico's ambassador to India...
...And although Jimmy Carter has been associated with the organization for the last eight years, there are no civil service tests to pass, no forms to fill out, no curious delving into back- grounds...
...I built and rebuilt my house until there was no room for further error...
...I soon came to think that Habitat must be one of the least proprietary organi- zations in existence...
...He also built a relationship with Emilio Azc~irraga, a millionaire who owns Televisa, Mexico's only private television corporation, and is the force behind Univision, the largest Spanish-speaking, mass-media chain in the United States...
...In the sixties and seventies Paz had been an outspoken critic of the regimes of Gustavo Dfaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverria...
...Ground floors just seemed to be going up all over the New River Valley of Virginia, where I live...
...Like me he had arrived at a final flakiness...
...MEXICO'S SPLENDOR THE POLITICS OF AN EXHIBIT A PIECE OF HONEST HYPE ith all its Eurocentrism, every now and then the United States submerges itself in the pleasures of the third world...
...To some it might appear that I have always been interested in low-cost housing, so when I heard that Habitat for Humanity, a low-cost housing organization, was looking for volunteers, it was only natural for me to grab my hammer and set out for the nearest building site, hoping to find a director of activities...
...As my family grew I moved the kitchen, put in a new bathroom, finished off the basement, enlarged and then demolished bed- rooms...
...Not since Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the three muralists invited to paint walls at Rockefeller Center in the 1930s, has there been such a craze for the United States' Aztec neighbor...
...At least fifteen New York galleries did variations on the same theme (woman painters, the young generation, etc...
...Working for Habitat involves abilities that many of us were forced to acquire in bitter circumstances early in our lives--nail- ing down shingles and siding, putting up partitions and gutters, mixing concrete and paint...
...Let me explain...
...After so long an apprenticeship, we now have the leisure to aspire to artistry...
...WILLIAM AIKEN William Aiken's essays have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, including the Washington Post and the New York Times...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 2
