The Emergence of a Butterfly

The Lonely Scientist

“What the caterpillar sees as the end of the world, 
  the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”
                      - Lao Tzu

Northern Montana. It’s winter, and the first cold front of the year has just blown down from Canada. The ice-encrusted wind whipped the last of the leaves off the trees and cast a rush of snow over the landscape so fine and cold that it blows across the roads like finely frozen dust.

I’m staying in a drafty, renovated chicken coop on the edge of town that’s heated only by a cranky, old kerosene stove that goes out every hour or two. The sun sets at four in the afternoon after traveling mostly horizontally over the top of the mountains west of town, and when it gets dark, the cold outside the door feels empty and vast.

Fortunately… there is a brewery in town. With fireplaces. And friendly people. And beer

Cold winter. Harsh wind. Insane beauty. Friendly, quirky people.

That was Helena, Montana where I spent a winter doing an artist residency¹ more than a decade ago. Last week, that winter came rushing back to me when I heard about the passing of someone I met there.

Connections to other people are a funny thing. They are quite literally one of the things that define us as humans. For most of us, they are the very foundation of our lives. They are the glue that holds our communities together, and more often than not, they are the keys to our future. And yet, they’re almost impossible to predict.

Connections to other people exist in such mind boggling complexity that we spend our lives trying to figure them out. Sometimes you meet a person that you are certain you’ll get along with only to find out that the inner sanctum of their dreams or morals or ideals doesn’t fit well with yours. And sometimes the unlikeliest person ends up impacting your life in ways that you could never have foreseen.

I think it’s this unpredictability that makes personal connections endlessly fascinating. It’s why we read books and watch movies and gossip with our friends. We love that we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t even know how we’re going to feel when someone leaves this earth until it actually happens. And that’s what happened last week, when I heard that David Spencer had passed away.

Ironically, this summer I traveled to Bozeman, Montana to visit a different friend who just turned 90 and wasn’t doing well. Now, in hindsight, I wish I’d thought to drive up to Helena to visit David and share a beer with him while I was in Big Sky country. But, the reality is that my connection to David has always been the barest thread of a personal tie – a thread as thin as those gossamer strands of spider silk that you sometimes see floating on the wind. And yet, despite the fact that our friendship was only slightly more that passing, something about David’s death reached deep down into me and touched a deep sea of emotions. I hadn’t expected that.

David was one of those people who live right along the border of what we like to consider ‘normal.’ If our society is a balloon, David was happily meandering around the surface gazing at the universe outside the latex while the rest of us just bounce back and forth around the inside, trying not to bump into each other.

I met David when I was living in that remodeled chicken coop at the Archie Bray Foundation on the edge of town. The meeting happened because Ryan Rebo, a local musician, had written a song called The Lonely Scientist, and had asked me if I wanted to make a video for it. Ryan knew David and wanted him to act in the video. So the three of us met, and I knew right away that I had take the project on.

David was quiet, warm-hearted, and a bit soft spoken, and he always carried around a paper bag filled with books. You never knew what you’d get when you talked to him – he might start a conversation on theoretical physics, or quote Lao Tzu, or dissect a Sanskrit poem, or talk about a particularly important piece of history he’d just read. David Spencer was a living, breathing embodiment of curiosity and warm creativity.

I shot the entire video in and around the abandoned brick factory on the grounds of the Archie Bray Foundation², a gritty, old compound of buildings turning to skeletons and filled with the kind of fascinating ancient machinery that whirls to life in your dreams. It was a perfect backdrop for a perfect character.

I left Helena not too long after I met David. The video was shown at the Holter Art Museum, but by that time I was in Africa. But that tiny spider web of a connection held for years. David kept in touch with me faithfully long after I left Helena, writing me short notes on Facebook that were like little visual poems - a mix of small and capital letters and symbols tossed together with wordplay and unexpected or obscure quotes. He even liked to send my wife, Rachel, who he never met, a regular happy birthday message.

So you can get a feel for David’s messages, here’s one he sent to me for a recent birthday:

Hey/Yo, YoYo :: There's a Gulchside rum☼r here in MontanaGondwanaland tHAt t☼day's Your B-Day, so don't forget to Celebrate with Jouissance, with percHAnce 'eVe'n a Visit to a Hot Spring in Your DoWn-'n'-☼ut-in-Contrarian TeXas pArts{!}

It’s hard to really understand someone like David if you don’t interact with them in person. You can’t do that anymore with David, but you can see a little of the real David at the very end of the music video below. I caught this little bit of him when we were taking a break. I’d kept my camera on, hoping to get a bit of David being David, and that was when he quoted Lao Tzu. It was so beautiful and so perfect.

I think I felt David’s passing so strongly, because he was so unique, and I worry that our country is becoming less tolerant to people we don’t understand. As I write this, our society seems to be lurching in a direction of being less understanding and less sympathetic to people who live outside the norm. David was odd and quirky, but he didn’t just live in his own cloistered world. He lived in the world of everyone who met him.

Right now, as everything around us is careening towards the unknown, Lao Tzu’s thousand year-old quote seems timely. I don’t know where our world is going, but I do know that tonight I’ll drink a beer to David and to the butterfly that he gave to all of us who knew him.

The world needs more David Spencers.

1. If you are an artist of any kind (visual, music, writing, whatever), and you’ve never done a residency, I really encourage you to look into it. The few residencies I’ve done have been amazing. I’ll do a post sometime about residencies.

2. The Archie Bray Foundation is an amazing ceramic arts foundation in Helena, Montana. They have a lot of residencies of various lengths. Very worth looking into if you do ceramic arts. I’ve done a little ceramics, but I pretty much lucked into my residency there.