Distant in Place with Koreshanity
There is a “library” down the hall from my apartment with two levels, leather chairs and sofas, books that have been painted and glued together to match the room decor, and contemporary, abstract art to be ignored all over the walls. A large chandelier hangs over a communal marble table in the center of the first level. Normally, this library is empty of people like many of the community spaces in my building. If the majority of residents here happen to be remote, they seem to mostly stick to their quiet apartments. Occasionally, I walk down to make myself an Americano from the coffee machine and to sit and work at my hobby: cobbling together personal essays—my own investigative spiritualism—before getting into remote work.
What is it to work remotely? Remote, an adjective from the mid-15th century, means ‘distant in place’ or ‘not near,’ and comes from the Latin word remotus, which means ‘removed.’ Remotely, an adverb, means ‘without physical contact.’ I am distant in place without physical contact. My only contact is with a computer mouse, built by Douglas Engelbart and Bill English in 1963, a bluetooth keyboard, and a Macbook Pro. Beyond that, I am on my own—an island of a man like Hugh Grant in About a Boy.
This morning, a book club of retired women were meeting over coffee and donuts at the communal table in the library. The book, which I later learned was The Allure of Immortality by Lyn Millner, follows the rise and fall of Dr. Cyrus Teed, a religious leader from upstate New York who led a group of followers to Estero, Florida, a town just up the street, in the late 19th century. Dr. Teed, after an accidental alchemical shock, woke with an utopian vision of celibacy (even though he had a wife and son), immortality, communal living, and the shape of the universe…
“The surface of the earth is not convex. It appears to be so because of optical illusion…the earth is a hollow shell about eight thousand miles in diameter, and about twenty-five thousand miles in circumference.” (Cellular Cosmogony)
The earth, says Teed, is concave and that we humans live on the inside surface of a hollow planet with the universe at its center so that we’re looking out—well, inwards actually—at the stars. One of the women from the book club, Patty I think she said her name was, fumbled with the coffee machine. A red light was glowing, indicating that it was either out of coffee or broken. She complained as I approached. We introduced ourselves.
“I just can’t get this damned thing to work.”
“Maybe there’s no more coffee,” I offered.
She wasn’t having it. She was a lawyer previously, retired, a little pushy and irritated without her coffee. She stepped aside so that I might give the machine a try. I removed a tray, found a lever in the locked position, unlocked it, and then we had coffee. We talked about social activities and opportunities in the area, pickleball mostly, and eventually the Koreshans, Dr. Teed’s group of followers.
“Did you know that most of his followers were women? In fact, most of them left their husbands to join the Koreshan Unity.”
“Why was that?” I asked.
“He believed in equal rights for women, which back in those days, was unheard of. We’re talking late 1800’s.”
As the United States was becoming more industrial, many people, especially those in cramped urbanized areas, were searching for meaning, community, and a touch of God. That sounded like me. Perhaps I would have been a Koreshan. But what about that celibacy bit?
“The greatest of all the causes of mental depletion, premature mental decay, and degeneracy, is sexual excess. This is the great and damnable source of physiological dissipation, and the resource of satan’s power over the human mind.”
(Mnemonics or the Science of Memory)
Never mind. After coffee, the best part of my day was over—all things decline post-coffee. The day ahead looked as follows: emails, notifications, meetings, move some pixels, emails, notifications, meetings. Dr. Teed, dead now on December 22, 1908, sat in a tub for five days as his followers awaited his resurrection. His body began to decay and Koreshans, including the children, were brought in to witness his hopeful transformation to immortality. They awaited along the Estero River, watching the sunset for five days in the Eastern Time Zone.
My Personal Time Zone has four blocks of time. Block One starts at 6am and ends at 10am. This block is dedicated to meditation, breathing, cold showers, writing, exercise, and for a hint of vanity, sunbathing to keep the paleness away.
The last of Teed’s followers died in 1981. All that remains at Koreshan Historic State Park are a handful of Victorian influenced cottages, a bakery that produced around five hundred loaves of bread per day, a couple of machine shops, a “planetary court,” and a dinner bell in the center of the pathways. A PBS documentary plays in one of the reproduced homes. There are chairs to sit in and older folks, coming in to escape the heat and to take in some history, who talk incessantly while you unsuccessfully try to watch.
Blocks Two and Three, from 10am-2pm and 2pm-6pm respectively, are mostly distant, in place. They contain the aforementioned routines (emails, notifications, pixels, etc). Around the beginning of Block Three, an unidentifiable form of anxiety begins to stir. It might be from too much caffeine, maybe from isolation, even a tangled web of thought patterns, lodged in the subconscious from past experiences and traumas, never dealt with in the moment they occurred and now offering only a low and continuous hum of irritability. Most likely it would be from all of them. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Thiền Buddhist monk—who died last week at midnight in Indochina Time—said that anxiety “comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.” That might be from the apprehension of Block Four.
Most think it was the practice of celibacy that wiped out the Koreshans. That may have been the case had the group lasted more than a handful of significant years. Dr. Teed and his followers became involved in local politics in Estero. Arguments ensued and eventually a fistfight broke out with the sheriff who gave Teed a thorough beating. He never fully recovered. After he died, slowly, the Koreshans began to disband.
Block Four, 6pm-10pm. The evening, from the Old English æfnung, “the coming of evening,” a synonym of even, also from the mid-15th century, is the “time from sunset to bedtime.” What to do in Block Four? This is where the anxiety forms in Block Three. The uncertainty of Block Four arises and the sun begins to set. There are a number of streaming services, series to binge watch, to turn to in Block Four that will temporarily relieve anxiety.
The three hundred acres of land that Teed purchased, had been previously full of Koreshans busying themselves with music lessons, planting mango trees and Japanese bamboo, killing snakes, mosquitoes, and alligators, and working towards the construction of a “New Jerusalem” that would accommodate up to ten million people. Communal living, a thing of the past. Now we have Nespresso rather than the coffee house, laptops in place of libraries, and TikTok instead of church.
Eventually, it became clear that Teed was nothing more than a pile of leaked enzymes and the county health officer intervened. Teed was properly buried in Fort Myers, somewhere, apparently, too close to the ocean. One of the two dozen hurricanes in the 1920’s eventually swept his body out to the Gulf of Mexico and that’s where his remains lay, somewhere near Havana perhaps, his bones distant, but in place.
