Works
That meeting with "Hermy"prefigured the cavalcade of mystery, imagination, sexuality, danger, humor, and transformation that would mark the 23 books and 23 films Broughton produced in a life laced with travel, teaching, self-analysis, and rich and prickly friendships.
This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That
His work is quintessentially Californian – exploring and engaging the polar frontiers of wildness and civility, male and female, body and spirit—with the crash of Pacific Ocean waves echoing throughout. "Ultimately I have learned more about poetry / from music and magic than from literature," he wrote.
Broughton was kicked out of military school for having an affair with a classmate, dropped out of Stanford before graduating, and spent time in Europe during the 1950s, where he received an award in Cannes from Jean Cocteau for the "poetic fantasy" of his film The Pleasure Garden, made in England with partner Kermit Sheets.
"Cinema saved me from suicide when I was 32 by revealing to me a wondrous reality: the love between fellow artists," Broughton wrote. This theme carried him through his 85 years. "It was as important to live poetically as to write poems."
Despite many creative love affairs during the San Francisco Beat Scene, Broughton put off marriage until age 49, when, steeped in his explorations of Jungian psychology, he married Suzanna Hart in a three-day ceremony on the Pacific coast documented by his friend, the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Suzanna’s theatrical background and personality made for a great playmate; they had two children. And they built a great community among the creative spirits of Alan Watts, Michael McClure, Anna Halprin, and Imogen Cunningham.
In 1967’s "summer of love," Broughton made a film, The Bed, a celebration of the dance of life which broke taboos against frontal nudity and won prizes at many film festivals. It rekindled Broughton’s filmmaking and led to more tributes to the human body (The Golden Positions), the eternal child (This Is It), the eternal return (The Water Circle), the eternal moment (High Kukus), and the eternal feminine (Dreamwood). "These eternalities praised the beauty of humans, the surprises of soul, and the necessity of merriment," Broughton wrote.
Indeed, Broughton repeatedly explored the temple of the human body – the "Godbody" – as a taproot for healing and peace, both for the individual and society.
Come forth unabashed
Come out unbuttoned
Bury belligerence
Resurrect frolic
Only through body can
you clasp the divine
Only through body can
you dance with the god
In every man’s hand
the gift of compassion
In every man’s hand
the beloved connection
Trust one another
or drown
He developed a great following, especially among students at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught film (and wrote Seeing the Light, a book about filmmaking) and artistic ritual.
Despite his poetic and cinematic explorations throughout his career, Broughton was drowning in his own unresolved mother-issues, which translated into impotence:
Had my soul tottered off to sleep
taking my potency with it?
Had they both retired before I could
leaving me a classroom somnambulist?
Why else should I at sixty-one
feel myself shriveling into fadeout?
As poet Jack Foley puts it in All: A James Broughton Reader, "In Broughton’s moment of need, Hermy appeared again in the person of a twenty-five-year-old Canadian film student named Joel Singer:
Then on a cold seminar Monday
In walked an unannounced redeemer
Disguised as a taciturn student
Brisk and resolute in scruffy mufti
He set down his backpack shook his hair
And offered me unequivocal devotion
He dismissed my rebuffs and ultimatums
He scoffed at suggestions of disaster
He insisted he had been given authority
To provide my future happiness
Was it possible he had been sent
From some utopian headquarters?
Broughton’s meeting with Singer was a life-changing, life-determining moment that animated his consciousness with a power that lasted until his death." In 2004, Singer wrote of their long relationship and collaboration in White Crane.
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Great works constructed there in nature’s spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.”
—Hannah More (1745–1833)