Valhalla House is a voice, a place, more voices, a smell, a sanctuary, more smells, shufflings of men to and fro aching with blistering neglect they have accrued and sometimes caused over the years. It is the underbelly of a national landscape in a jewel point construction on the outskirts of a college town.
It is a house. It is walls and roof and innumerable insulations between walls and the outside. It is a warehouse of psychoses. It is both temporary and permanent—an active structure from the wants and talents of young, open-minded, non-judgmental social workers of the 21st century in Ohio Valhalla House?
It was dragged into the need of existence via the terrible actualities and perpetual machinations of war time in this country.
It is a House strengthened by the last vestiges of community participation. It is a house whose residents are men of this American soil, a desperate and at times beautiful olio of the lost and dying, sighing and fighting; regretting and distracting themselves-- a home for men with no home-- no home and wounded. No home yet alive--Blood still pumping--Dreams still twisting themselves like knarled apples into the belief that a new day, a new year, a world with a center is possible.
A place for those voices--those un-televised exhortations of torment and fervor and fury and bewilderment; of love for women and food and warmth. All that was found and lost and grasped at—all that would never be recovered—(And it is swarming all of America
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