THINKING AHEAD: Creating Maine, forty years ago. |
A Maine native and longtime resident of Belfast, Bern Porter died there in 2004 at the age of 93. His life and its creative output — ranging from art, science, and poetry to literature, publishing, and economic planning — read like a map for a road nobody else would notice, let alone imagine following. But here we are now, stepping right along it as he imagined.After college, a budding career in physics got young Porter drafted to work on the Manhattan Project. The Hiroshima bombing made him aware of the fruits of his labors, so he quit. As Cold War minds divided the planet, Porter was at work probing and inventing connections between all manner of creative endeavors, from art and science to the poetry he felt certain would bind them. Many of these pursuits didn’t have names for themselves yet, but soon would: Mail Art, Sound Art, Found Poetry, and Concrete Poetry — he played a role in all of them.
He also found time, in 1968, to get himself hired, thanks to his research background, as a consultant to the Knox County Regional Planning Commission to write their master plan for economic development.
But soon, the commission and the State Planning Office in Augusta realized they’d made a mistake. The idealistic Porter imagined nothing less than the total reinvention of the world, beginning in downeast Maine. His draft came in at 700 pages — the commission would later cut it down substantially and use almost none of it.
But that didn’t stop Porter from treating it as a magnum opus, laboring over the minute details as well as their overarching arguments. He mailed it to dozens of major libraries throughout America with a note on the title page: “Written by Bernard H. Porter, but extensively cut up, mutilated, re-edited to point of uselessness by the Commission members.”
His plan was prescient and freakish at the same time. It saw that New England’s towns were slowly deteriorating as they gradually lost the ability to govern themselves. Control over local economies, he warned, was drifting away from local businesses and politicians in the direction of larger business chains based in big cities where executives cared only about profits. In addition, he argued, Maine was losing control over itself because of the rising number of wealthy outsiders who were buying property and flocking to the state in the summers but whose financial engagements and investments (apart from property taxes) remained elsewhere.
This, in Porter’s view, put a split between money and government and also dramatically widened the gulf between a smaller group of moneyed Mainers and a burgeoning “underclass.”
