At Arm’s Length: Elsa Gidlow and Introvert Anarchism
Imagine keeping others at arm’s length while also building community. That’s the surprising juxtaposition in poet Elsa Gidlow’s introvert anarchism.
In March, the service Poem-a-Day featured “I Must Be Far,” published in 1923 by Elsa Gidlow (1898-1987). The poem begins:
“I must be far from men and women
To love their ways.
I must be on a mountain
Breathing greatly like a tree
If my heart would yearn a little
For the peopled, placid valley.”
The poem captivated me, so much so that I read the whole piece half a dozen times. When I researched Gidlow, I became even more intrigued to learn that although the poem seems to express estrangement from other people, she had actually created and led a bohemian community in the Mount Tamalpais woods north of San Francisco. Called Druid Heights, this enclave attracted innumerable musicians, writers and counterculture icons over the years, including jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, folk singers Judy Collins and Neil Young, writers Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and pro-prostitution activist Margot St. James.
Those who lived there long-term, including Gidlow and East-West philosopher Alan Watts, built quirky wooden dwellings distinctly separate from one another in a style that resembled hobbit versions of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The ethos of Druid Heights struck a balance between individualism and autonomy on the one hand and non-demanding companionship on the other. It was not a commune, where people had explicit responsibilities to one another. Instead, it represented a refuge from the conformity of mainstream society, an alternate world where residents and visitors could engage in solitude with firm boundaries along with respectful, affectionate connection. In other words, it was a paradise for introverts.
I’m still soliciting fascinating, well-written personal essays about being an introvert or dealing with one.
See sample essays here and here.
Email your essay to innies@yudkin.com for consideration.
700-1500 words, please. Thank you.
From her twenties on, Elsa Gidlow wrote and lived as a lesbian. She advocated free love –non-monogamy. During the McCarthy era, her social transgressions earned her a spot in front of California’s version of the infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee. There she testified that she was an anarchist, not a Communist. This meant that she rejected the authority of the state, organized religion and traditional norms of sex and gender. She strongly felt she needed no permission from anyone on how to live her life.
Her non-conformity and fondness for solitude place her in the American tradition of Henry David Thoreau, whose two-year sojourn at Walden Pond and his night in jail as a conscientious objector remain classic. But Gidlow also felt a keen spiritual kinship with the Taoist poets of ancient China, who celebrated encounters with nature and with passing strangers amidst misty mountains. One of her poems, “Ecstasy,” laments that the rapture of pure consciousness was so hard for others to appreciate, ending this way:
“Stars, stars, stoop down,
Stars, turn from your courses,
Spill into my hands!
Stars, you are my kindred:
I am strong with a new loneliness
That no one understands.”
Druid Heights is currently owned by the US National Park Service, but much of the property is in disrepair and it’s not open to the public. Elsa Gidlow’s poetry lives on here and here. You can watch her on video in excerpts from the 1977 documentary “Word is Out” here.
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