Buck Wondrous: One-Man Renaissance

1. Prologue: A Long, Strange Invitation
   Green Witch Village was not on any standard map of North Carolina. It existed in a realm slightly adjacent to ordinary geography, in the leafy hills just beyond Asheville. Technically, one might find it by meandering rural backroads, crossing a wooden bridge over a stream that changed direction every full moon, and arriving at a rickety sign reading: Green Witch Village — A New Avant-Garde to Come. It was an ecovillage, a gathering place of misfits, dreamers, and obscure geniuses. Locals whispered that it was a reincarnation of Black Mountain College itself, a phoenix rising from the ash of past brilliance. Passing through its handmade gates felt like walking into an ongoing festival of the mind.

2. Specters of History
   Legend had it that the ghosts of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and other daring artists roamed the perimeter at sunrise, humming in a cosmic jam session only connoisseurs could hear. Students fresh from the hustle of city life arrived expecting a sort of living museum. Instead, they found life abuzz with the crackle of real discovery—like the hum in the wires just before a neon sign bursts into color. No one ever left Green Witch Village unchanged, and many never left at all.

3. Enter Buck Wondrous
   At the heart of this vortex was Buck Wondrous. Part poet, part sculptor, part chef, part mystic. The sign on his modest wooden yurt read: “Buck Wondrous — One-Man Renaissance.” Tourists assumed it was some kind of grandiose joke. Locals knew it was a modest description, if anything. Buck’s hair was crow-black in some lights, silver in others; even the ends of it seemed to shift color depending on the breeze. He wore patchwork robes made from salvaged fabrics. There was a rumor that on special occasions, Buck’s attire actually glowed with an inner luminescence, as though the cloth itself stored starlight.

4. Recipe for Enchantment
   Tuesday afternoons found Buck in the communal garden, barefoot, giving a freewheeling lecture to whoever gathered: students, traveling buskers, wayward academics. He’d hold up a single seed—tomato, pumpkin, or a whispery tarragon—and launch into a diatribe on the essence of creativity.
   “Plant a poem, harvest a statue,” he’d say, solemnly dropping the seed into the soil. “Ideas pollinate each other. Don’t let them turn to dust.” Then he would gaze across the garden rows. “And use plenty of compost,” he’d add, for Buck believed that rotting scraps were the building blocks of vibrant new life in art and horticulture alike.

5. A College of the Air
   Green Witch Village wasn’t big on formal schedules. One might say its curriculum was like the wind: ephemeral, everywhere, at times invisible. Buck taught a course titled Improvisational Everything, where students tried their hands at painting, sculpting, chanting, tap dancing—sometimes all at once. In the evenings, the entire ecovillage would gather near a wind-powered contraption called the Lantern of Echoes. Fashioned from driftwood and copper wire, the device transmitted faint radio signals from a parallel dimension—at least so the rumor went. Buck claimed to catch transmissions of old lectures from Black Mountain luminaries: Josef Albers extolling the perfection of color squares, or Charles Olson chanting cosmic poetry. Whether real or imagined, the transmissions wove the past into the present, a living tapestry of creative voices.

6. Peculiar Happenings
   In proper Menippean fashion, Green Witch Village indulged in the improbable. The rooster in the chicken coop crowed Debussy preludes at daybreak. Pottery wheels spontaneously spun themselves at night, leaving half-finished vases that no one remembered shaping. A shy donkey named Clementine had taken to writing cryptic haikus in the muddy yard with a twig clenched in her teeth. Residents swore that once a month, late at night, they witnessed Clementine wander up the hillside alone, braying softly at the stars. In the morning, new lines of donkey-poetry awaited them in the soil.

7. The Grand Interspecies Salon
   At the end of every season, Buck hosted the Grand Interspecies Salon in the old barn—revered as the spiritual hub of Green Witch Village. People, chickens, donkeys, dogs, even the wild crows in the sycamores, all contributed something. There might be improvised dance among bales of hay, while overhead, a flight of crows arranged themselves into geometric shapes reminiscent of Rauschenberg’s paintings. Buck would greet each participant with a wide grin: “All are makers here,” he’d say. It was in these gatherings that a kind of joyful bedlam reigned, poking fun at every stuffy notion of who deserved to perform and who ought to remain silent.

8. Confronting the Outside World
   From time to time, the outside world encroached. A developer once arrived, armed with glossy brochures promising modern luxury. He wandered the village, politely dismayed by the compost toilets, the earthen huts, the bits of stray installation art that defied common sense. “I see the spirit of the old Black Mountain College here,” he said, “but can’t we modernize?” Buck only smiled, handing the man a chunk of mud. “Shape it,” Buck whispered. “See what happens.” Bewildered, the man tried to mold the mud into a perfect sphere, but the shape crumbled, reformed, and ended up looking like an ear. By dusk, he’d returned to his office with no new contract—just a small clay ear that he swore whispered secrets about living gently on the land.

9. A Touch of the Surreal
   There were nights—particularly under the full moon—when the barn seemed to expand from the inside, as if it could hold infinite space for creation. Visitors recount seeing entire orchestras materialize, playing faintly discordant music that branched into radiant harmonies. Others claimed to see time-lapse visions of the past: a flicker of John Cage quietly arranging stones on a piano, or Merce Cunningham dancing with ghosts. Buck walked among these apparitions serenely, as if greeting old acquaintances. He would exchange a dignified nod with each spectral artist, bridging the ephemeral gap between then and now, content to let them slip back into dream upon dream.

10. Coda: Dawn in the Village
    Green Witch Village woke each morning to a gentle chaos of possibility. One day, Buck Wondrous might lead a workshop in turning found objects into ephemeral sculptures that dissolved after sunset. Another day, he’d spontaneously choreograph a donkey-led opera. Some folks rumored that Buck was older than he looked, that he’d been a student at the original Black Mountain College. Others claimed he was younger than his eyes suggested, possibly a cosmic traveler. No one knew for certain, and Buck only responded with a knowing grin when asked.
    What was certain was the timeless spirit he brought to Green Witch Village. As the sun rose over the hills each day, illuminating the dew on the yurt roofs, the village seemed to breathe as one grand, living organism of creativity. In this place, new art was born and old ghosts found their next verse. Buck Wondrous, with trowel in one hand and paintbrush in the other, would simply wink and say, “Keep planting those seeds.”

Thus, in the hush of early morning—while Clementine the donkey composed her muddy poems, and crows fashioned shimmering sculptures in the air—Buck Wondrous reminded everyone that here, in this bohemian wonderland, the renaissance was not an era consigned to the dusty pages of history. It was a living, breathing thing, incarnated in every new thought, every untried experiment, every open mind. So it went, in the one-man Renaissance that was Buck Wondrous, and in the shared dream that was Green Witch Village.