“If they ever put that Healing Machine on display again,” Phil said, “I tell you how I’d do it. I’d drive up there to Sheboygan and get me a hotel for three days; not the fanciest hotel and not the cheapest, but a decent one. Then I’d spend every day just staring at it.” We were sitting on the back porch of the little garage apartment where he was spending the summer, smack dab in the middle of a blank spot on the map of Tennessee. Below us was a thickly wooded slope plunging down into a hollow with a shady little creek running along the bottom of it. Three or four years ago, Phil had seen a PBS documentary about The Healing Machine, and he’d been longing to see it in person ever since. Now you could say that The Healing Machine is a piece of installation art, or an art environment, and it’s true that’s what it has become. But I believe it’s more than that; it was originally created to be a functional system, somewhere out in the gulf between engineering and spirituality. Emery Blagdon, the man who created it, was born in 1907, spent his youth roving around, and in 1955 inherited a piece of land in Nebraska from an uncle. Deeply affected by the experience of seeing both his parents die painfully from cancer, and not caring much for farming, he spent his time studying electricity and creating a system to channel the earth’s energy into a healing force. The components of this system, which he called his “pretties,” eventually filled up a shed, hanging from the walls and rafters and stacked on the bare ground. He rearranged them daily to follow the phases of the moon and perhaps other natural cycles, and the whole arrangement was known as The Healing Machine. It was only after his death in 1986 that the pretties and some of their surroundings were taken from the barn and, after decades of care and restoration, made their way to the only kind of space we have for such a thing: an art museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The last time it had been on display for the public was back in 2013, and Phil had been patiently waiting for its return.
A few days later, while Phil was mowing the grass of his family’s old cemetery, I decided to call that museum. “I’m calling about The Healing Machine,” I said. “When will it go back on display?” “Oh,” said the woman who answered the phone, “it’s on display now at the Art Preserve. Emery’s got a very nice space there.” I thanked her and hung up, and immediately a scheme started running through my mind. If I skipped my flight back to North Carolina, there might just be time… After Phil had loaded up the lawnmower and gotten back in the van, and we had bounced down the treacherously eroded dirt road back to the pavement, I sprung it on him. “This might sound crazy,” I said, “but what’s stopping us from going up there now?” His thoughts weren’t far behind mine, and pretty soon we were working out the timing and the logistics. Phil added on the idea of driving me back home to North Carolina afterward, and since he’d been showing me around where he’d spent most of his life, it seemed only right to show him around the place where I’d spent most of mine. He was used to driving all over the country in a variety of vehicles, often leaving on the spur of the moment when the urge struck him, a style of travel he calls a “hillbilly holiday.” So it only took him a day to prepare: a bare minimum of packing, changing the oil, rotating the tires, replacing the brake shoes. In the late summer dusk, when he would normally be in bed, Phil came out to pace the porch and smoke a cigarette. “Sheboygan!” he said, throwing his arms out. I’d never seen him so excited.
And just like that, we were on a pilgrimage north to see The Healing Machine. On the first day, we camped at a fishing spot in Indiana, on a quiet pond surrounded by soybean fields. We carved up a cantaloupe on the picnic table and watched the water birds paddling around, a big heron hunting, and the fish rolling and jumping with a splash. Phil talked about the sorts of things he and other folks had made and sold at the flea market, how you can sometimes take two things that aren’t worth a nickel, put them together in a creative way, and sell them for twenty-five dollars. He said he’d always mostly made practical things, but maybe he ought to consider leaning into the more decorative end. “Decorative art is practical though,” I said. “It gives people a certain feeling. It brings a little bit of your life into theirs, and maybe they need that.” He told me a story about when he’d been logging cedar off a couple’s land, and he took some stumps that the sawmill couldn’t use and carved out a rustic table and chairs with his chainsaw so he could sit down and eat his lunch. When he had finished the logging job, the woman who lived there just had to have the table and chairs, and as far as Phil was concerned they were made out of her trees and they were hers already; he wouldn’t take the money that was offered. She put them on her patio, sealed them with resin and invited him back a few weeks later to sit and have coffee. Now certainly the table and chairs gave her a place to sit, but any generic set of patio furniture from a big box store would have done that. I think the reason she was drawn to the carved cedar stumps was that they brought into her life just a hint of Phil’s simple existence and the way he thinks about things. Maybe it’s a small thing, but that little influence could add up day by day, and even be life-changing in its own way. These days I can’t see a clear line between the practical and the decorative; on the one end is the very little we really need, on the other end is what purely feeds the soul, and most everything else falls somewhere in between.
The next day took us into Sheboygan. We walked along a sandy beach and looked out over the brilliant blue waters of Lake Michigan, and then we checked in at a hotel, took showers, and spent the rest of the day doing what Phil likes to call “vegetating.” I’d never gone to a museum exhibit that felt this important, and it seemed only right to cleanse the dirt of travel from the body and mind. We were preparing to enter a temple of sorts. The next morning, the museum didn’t open until ten, and we were up long before, eating breakfast and passing a few hours at a local park by the side of the Sheboygan River. Then we drove over to the museum and spent the remaining time looking at its architecture and exploring the grounds. The Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is a brand new museum that had just opened the summer before, built to house the work of visionary outsider artists. You might recognize the name Kohler from seeing it branded on toilets and other bathroom hardware, and the bathroom fixture company that gave rise to the Kohler family fortune is still a major industry in Sheboygan. So in both the downtown museum and the new Art Preserve, each bathroom is a work of art in its own right, with elaborate custom-made tiles and hand-glazed toilets and sinks. On the outside, the building’s modernist style was tempered with some lovely naturalistic touches, like the forest of laminated beams leaning at odd angles in the entrance. The large fanciful whirligig out front and the two rusty scrap metal birds said good things about what was inside. Phil joked about taking one of the hanging sculptures he makes, which he calls dangly dinglies, and leaving it as a renegade addition to the museum’s collection, but since he always gives them away freely there weren’t any in the van.1
“I don’t have too much of an art thing,” Phil said as we approached the entrance to The Healing Machine. “I can’t recall a piece of art ever making me cry, but this one might do it.” There was a catch in his voice, and I felt it too. We had traveled across a lot of time and space to be there. When we entered through the opening in the wall of rough barn wood, Phil’s first remark was to say that the documentary he’d seen hadn’t captured it at all, and I said it would be impossible to do that with a camera. I know I can’t do it justice with words either, but I’ll try. Most of the pretties were made from steel and copper wire, aluminum foil, yellowed masking tape, and wood, many hanging from above, spreading out in radial or square geometries, evoking chandeliers or metallic jellyfish. On the walls and rough tables, wooden slats were formed into frames and armatures and enlaced with gleaming strands of fine copper. One shape reminded me of something between a bird and a plane with cut-out magazine photos of human hands on its tail fins, another incorporated a bundle of metal tubing into a wire superstructure, like the inverted hull of a futuristic ship, and others looked like organ pipes, switchboards, filaments, coils. Steel fence wire was bent, twisted, wrapped, and joined meticulously into dense structures, evoking cages, engines, and tornadoes. And among these hung talismanic paper bundles, beads, ribbons, painted shell casings, colorful mosaic disks, glass jars of minerals, and tiny bottles of colored sand. Cryptic markings were painted on the wall boards, some like electrical polarity diagrams, others like strange ideograms, calendars, or astronomical charts. And standing among this density of sparkling and ethereal artifacts, I could feel the force of their creator, a man who had witnessed the age of electricity sweeping over his world and had woven this spell, this technological ritual, to harness its mythic power.
I don’t know whether the earth’s electrical currents still flow through The Healing Machine in the way they were meant to. There’s bound to be quite a difference between an old shed planted in the soil of Nebraska and the third floor of a brand new art museum. Emery Blagdon isn’t alive to rearrange his pretties every day, and now they sit still wherever the curators have put them, all the jars with radioactive elements carefully detected and removed. It’s become a piece of art, and I think the job of art is not to redirect electricity, but to redirect the course of human lives. Sometimes this is subtle: a feeling brought to the surface, an aesthetic nudge that slightly alters our direction. But other times it can be strong and deep, inspiring a new way of experiencing the world, a new direction, sometimes striking suddenly and other times growing slowly like a seed. When Emery Blagdon was looking for elements to put inside the hanging jars of his healing machine, he went to his local pharmacy. The man behind the counter was named Dan Dryden; he got curious about what Emery was up to and went to visit the shed. Inside it, he was affected so profoundly that he decided to follow his wildest dreams and go to New York City to become a sound engineer. When Emery died in 1986, Dan returned and bought the piece of land the shed was on so he could dismantle, catalog, and pack up the components of The Healing Machine. It’s as if this breathtakingly complex assemblage of wood and wire had directed living creatures to preserve it, to extend it into the future long after its maker had passed on. When an inanimate object can influence the human heart, isn’t that a kind of magic?
And to me, the source of that magic can’t be in the raw materials, but in the totality of the life that led up to them being arranged the way they are. A lifetime of experience, such a long unfolding of circumstance and choice, is something that can’t be replaced or duplicated, bought or sold, given or taken. But just as the world around it influences a life, a life can influence the world around it. We can absorb a little bit of a person’s spirit by spending time with them, or by spending time with something they made. We can tune into their frequency and receive just a hint of how they see the world, like a TV broadcast from a faraway planet, strange but somehow familiar. As I spent time inside The Healing Machine, and inside the rest of the museum it sits in, what came to me was a message about the power of faith and commitment, the power of following a deep inward journey without reference to how it might appear to others. I wasn’t sure what to do with this though. Part of me wanted to get a shed of my own and start making some kind of visionary sculpture. Or maybe I could just lean into writing whatever makes my own heart sing. After the museum closed, as we hung out by the van in the hotel parking lot, Phil told me that the only word that came to his mind was “overwhelmed.” And even though I sat there writing down my impressions of the physical objects we had just seen, I was just as tongue-tied when it came to the real point, the meaning of it all.
After our first day of driving back south, we made camp in another part of Indiana, not far from the Ohio border. It was a little township park, with a runway for radio-controlled airplanes, an astronomical observatory, and a small arena for barrel racing and tractor pulls. The fee to camp there was unusually low, so it drew in drifters, misfits, and oddballs from all over, all quite friendly and welcoming as far as we could tell. Phil helped get a woman’s truck running, we looked at the planes, picked apples from a loaded tree, and watched the sun go down over the fields. The next morning, a neighbor came over to talk. His name was Bobby, he had a long gray ponytail and was staying in a van with a big tent next to it. He said he’d been in the painting trade for a long time before travelling the world and becoming a yoga instructor. I told him about our pilgrimage, and he seemed to echo my own thoughts on the way art redirects life, but with a twist. “Just by going to see it,” he said, “you’ve already been changed. Nothing else has to happen, there’s nothing you need to do. A lot of people want to do something, to give the world hope or something like that. But really, you are the healing machine, and without that it’s just junk, you might as well toss the whole thing into one of those thousand-dollar toilets. You can heal yourself, and maybe that just means realizing that you’re already healed.” Later, as we drove across the plains, I stared out the window, mesmerized by the shifting geometry of windmill blades and endless striations of tasseled corn. Isn’t the whole world like The Healing Machine? Aren’t we ourselves intricate bundles of odds and ends, constantly rearranged in a mysterious order? All that day the muddy waters of my heart were stirred up; I lost myself in the hills that rose up around us, in the trees with their endless variety of color and texture. Words failed me, and I thought that maybe Phil was on the right track, and that sometimes it’s exactly right to be overwhelmed.
Actually it turned out that one of Phil’s creations might already be on display in the museum. A long time ago, he made some shelves out of scrap wood and empty thread spools and eventually sold them at a yard sale, and an identical-looking item was in the collection of Ray Yoshida, who bought pieces from flea markets and antique shops.
I keep writing songs, my attempts to capture the overwhelming muchness, the ephemeral mysterious and amazing, heartbreaking and lovely, mundane and sublime experiences of being alive. My own healing machine...
Another good chapter in the book of deep lore.