Chapter X.
Leaving: 1955
To some, the world has disclosed itself as too vast:
within such immensity, man is lost and no longer counts; and there is nothing
left for him to do but shut his eyes and disappear. To others, on the contrary,
the world is too beautiful; and it, and it alone, must be adored. - Teilhard, p.45
Everything possible to be believed is an image of
truth. - William Blake
I HAVE AN UNCLE who created a scandal
once by asking for three eggs for breakfast. He became a family legend. He was
often offered to me as an object lesson in extravagance and selfishness. I come
from a frugal family. In my childhood, everything was carefully measured out -
food, words, approval (even toilet tissue: when I got married, my mother's
advice to me was "Don't buy two-ply. People will use as much as if you
bought one-ply; they won't be able to tell the difference"). Everything
was carefully measured out - except tears. We are a family that cries a lot.
The women in my family were not ascetic and not, after the Depression, poor;
but they had a strong conviction that there were invisible boundaries you
didn't step over unless you wanted to join the company of the wasteful (who
were also slothful, bad), that everything had its appointed limits
("decent limits," the would have said); and goodness was equated with
restraint. It was always too cold in the houses I grew up in, and too dark. Conservation
was regarded not as deprivation or as dreary self-denial, but as a way to
enrich oneself. Love didn't, in their view, multiply and expand; it curled in
on itself, fed itself, was kept within "decent limits."
I once got a beating for telling "the
Jews next door" what we were having for dinner. That was the kind of
information you didn't give away: you hugged it to yourself; you didn't give
anything away. And if that was meanness, it wasn't calculated meanness: it was
like an Arab's not wanting to have his picture taken for fear that his soul
would be stolen away. We hoarded everything, so that we could remain inviolate,
so that nobody could steal our souls away, or know our souls; we kept
everything locked and secret and hidden. Maybe it was the centuries of Moorish
blood in our Southern Italian veins, and our second-generation fears that they
("the Americans") would find us out - find us wanting.
Frugal and insular and suspicious; the
outside world was full of menace. And
when I became a Witness, it was the same story all over again: frugality
and insularity and suspicion; the outside world was full of menace, and a
niggardly Jehovah kept us safe by keeping us from the light and the heat of the
world. He was a chilly and genteel God who didn't like ardent or extravagant
gestures (and I got Him and my mother all mixed up).
He was the kind of God who regarded
both Oxford and the Cathedral at Chartres as extravagances, the adoration of
the saints and the "pursuit of worldly knowledge" as vulgar excesses,
show-offy and flamboyant self-aggrandizing and uncircumspect, wicked. (I asked
Him to forgive me for loving stained glass and incense; I kept a copy of Letters
to a Young Poet hidden in my laundry bag.) Once someone gave me a
kaleidoscope. It was my favorite present.
One Sunday summer morning, as I left
Watchtower headquarters to go out preaching from door to door, a member of a
tightly huddled-together group of fellow Witnesses, I saw two young women and
two young men piling into a yellow convertible. They were all laughing. They
carried picnic hampers covered with red-and-white-checked cloths, very full.
One of the young men turned on the car radio - a Mozart quintet. I wanted to be
with them. I wanted to be them. I longed for their world of color and
light and sound. My longing was so acute it was like a physical pain; and it
was followed by an intolerable ennui: I didn't know what I was doing holding a
satchel of Watchtower magazines, or why I was going to preach, or what I
had to do with the Witnesses or they with me. I wanted to run away. I didn't,
but I knew at that moment that someday I would.
The
four young men and women had come out of a house on Pineapple Street, an
old wooden house, white, with a forest-green door and forest-green shutters and
dimity curtains and chandeliers that seemed to be lit even in the daytime. The
garden of the house, with its cherry tree that had blossoms like crepe paper,
was surrounded by a high white wooden fence, and set in the garden fence was a
lime-green door with no doorknob on the outside. For days I imagined that if I
knocked at that door, they would recognize me and let me in and we would sit in
the garden under the cherry tree and I would never have to go back to the
Watchtower Building again.
Later that same week, on an impulse, I
went alone to Birdland. Basie was playing, and Joe Williams was singing the
blues. I had two rye-and-gingers, and I
felt scared and exhilarated. I came back with my hair smelling of cigarette
smoke: "Dirty," my roommate said. It was the first time I had trouble
falling asleep.
On the Saturday of that week, a Witness
I knew and loved died. And the circumstances surrounding his dying made me
understand that when I left (as I knew I would), it wouldn't be because I
preferred yellow sports cars and summer picnics and Mozart or jazz to God; it
would be because God didn't live in my religion. If He lived at all, He lived
somewhere else (not in my heart).
Mike died at a party at a Witness'
house. Unlike most Witnesses, he never seemed to give a damn what impression he
created on other people. He was funky and loving and flamboyant. He was an
iceman; he drove an ice truck. When I was younger, I'd had a temporary job at
the UN bank. Mike used to drive me up to the Secretariat building in his truck.
We laughed at the incongruity of driving to the UN in a Sicilian-decorated
truck, and he never used the occasion to preach about the evils of the
"beastly United Nations" (which ranked second, in the Witnesses'
chamber of Satanic horrors, only to the Vatican). He may have accepted the
Witnesses' belief that the UN was the "desolation of desolations, "but
that didn't deter him from driving up gaily and irreverently to its portals.
The fear and loathing such "devilish" places inspired in the Witnesses'
hearts, and the repulsion and fascination, seemed entirely lacking in his.
But it was his heart that killed him.
He'd had two heart attacks; on morning of that party, he'd been out preaching
for the first time since his convalescence. He was talking about his delight in
being able to go from door to door again, talking with gusto about his pleasure
in "sharing" (other Witnesses might "give the truth"; Mike
shared), when he clutched his chest and began to gasp for air. He took the
diamond ring he wore off his finger and gave it and his wallet to his wife (he
knew he was dying; his thoughts were for someone else). A few Witnesses went,
spontaneously and generously and compassionately, to his wife to support her. A
respected elder from Watchtower headquarters launched-as Mike's gasps began to
sound, horribly, more like the final rattle of death-into an interminable story
about the people he'd known who'd been taken unaware by death (I knew someone
else who died like that," he said, looking at Mike). Three-quarters of the
Witnesses present set themselves to clean up the room in order to "give a
good witness" to the police when they arrived. Mike was pronounced DOA.
The cops were given a speech about our hope in the resurrection. Mike himself
was ignored (except by the police, whose attempts to resuscitate him were
heroic); grief was shelved (Mike's wife was sedated). The Witnesses
congratulated themselves on the way the police had seemed to be impressed by
their decorum and their calm; in their zeal to "give a witness," the
actual fact of Mike's death seemed almost forgotten. I can't remember anyone
crying out in love or horror - or praying.
The task of telling Mike's young
daughter that he had died was delegated to me. As an elder drove me to her
house, he recited all the Scriptures I might use to comfort her. He might have
been reciting the Guinness Book of World Records. (The rest of the
Witnesses stayed behind; when I left, Mike's heavily sedated wife lay on a
couch while, around her, Witnesses talked about what a pleasant change it must
make for the cops to come into a "decent" house, how much nicer than
having to break up a drunken fight.) I looked at the elder in a vain attempt to
find some trace of sorrow or anger on his face as he continued to offer
memorized words of comfort. He had already buried Mike in some recess of his
mind; his concern was how to keep Mike's daughter from "going overboard
with immoderate grief" (his words - she was 12 years old). I have hated
very few people as much as I hated that man, then. "See if you can take
Mike's daughter out preaching with you tomorrow morning," he said.
"It'll keep her mind from selfishness.
Nobody had cried. Mike's daughter
cried, and I couldn't find it in my heart to read a single Scripture to her.
I came to live and work at Bethel -
Watchtower headquarters - in1953, when I was 19. I left early in 1956.
I had had over the years, since my
baptism in 1944, little niggles of doubt (and a constant conviction of sin). My
doubts terrified me.
Nobody ever told me that all believers
doubt, or that the logical consequence of the possession of free will is to
question, or that even mystics have at times felt abandoned by the God they
adore; what a lot of misery it would have saved me if someone had told me. But
the Witnesses couldn't tell me that, because they themselves didn't acknowledge
that it was true. To them, faith is total, unquestioning, uncritical,
unwavering, and undemanding.
I regarded my irritable intelligence as
a kind of predatory animal which, if not firmly reined, would spring on me,
attack me, and destroy me.
Since to doubt at all was intolerable,
the only solution that seemed possible was to submerge my doubts (to submerge
myself) completely. I wanted to be eaten alive, devoured by Jehovah, to spend so
much time in his service that my peevish spirit, humbled and exhausted, would
no longer have time for querulous doubts. Women are good at turning their
desolation to their advantage (or to what they think is their advantage); and what
I was doing by entering Bethel was making spiritual capital out of spiritual
despair, quelling my restlessness by giving it a death in a new life.
And I had other (baser) motives too:
There was, for a woman, great spiritual prestige in being admitted to Bethel.
It was both glamorous and holy. Men outnumbered women 10 to 1 at Bethel
(although, among rank-and-file Witnesses, women outnumbered men 3 to 1). I had
nothing against being surrounded by men. Part of the inner circle, circled about
by men; I thought that part would be nice.
And I wanted to please my mother, whose
standards I knew I never lived up to (I was never sure what they were) and
whose ambition for me was boundless, at the same time that her competition with
me was fierce. Simone Weil's mother is reported to have said once, with a
mixture of exasperation and tenderness, "Thank God you don't have a
daughter who's a saint." I had a mother who was thought to be a kind of
saint - the Bible Lady of Brooklyn, they called her. It was a foregone conclusion
that all my boyfriends would be more charmed by her than they would by me, by
her sacrificial gravity, her seductive saintly gaiety, which were all the more
alluring because she was beautiful, with wide blue eyes, a mouth that turned
down just slightly - just enough to suggest ineradicable sadness (which
everybody tried to eradicate). Viewing me as a spiritual extension of herself,
she would be pleased, I knew, if I went to Bethel; she would feel validated and
enhanced by my choice. And I would be making up to her for having failed to
make her happy. I believed, at that time, that I held the power to make her
happy. It was not a good thing, I know better in retrospect, to feel. I wanted
to make things good for her, to make up to her for all the things she didn't
have, for whatever it was she wept for in my bedroom every night. I wanted to
get away from that weeping, and from the acrimony that bound her and my
unbelieving father together more closely than the most enduring affection.
I wanted to allay her pain, and I
wanted her to stop passing her pain onto me. I really did believe that I was
the agent of her happiness. I don't know through what subtle instruction or
self-delusion I came to believe that. (But I do know that when, years later, I
read, in one of the works of the saints, that God wants us, obliges us,
to be happy, my first angry reaction was followed immediately by understanding:
of course He does, because if you're unhappy, all you can do is make someone
else responsible for your unhappiness and pass along your terrible pain. It
makes perfect sense to me that God forbids us to despair.)
And I wanted to get away from my
father, whose bewilderment took the form of rage, who wept for me (not for
himself), and whose tears I rejected and despised. I was in an alliance with my
mother against him - an unnatural alliance: my inclination, till my mother and
I joined forces against him, was to find him irresistible. It was an unholy
bonding; and while, at the time, I dismissed my father as negligible or feared
him as a monstrous "Opposer of The Truth," there must, I think, have
been part of my nature that recoiled against the pitiless, hard person I was
when I was with him. I wanted to get away from all of it - the fights, the
yelling, the tears, the recriminations, and the whispered secrets. I didn't
want to hear my mother's whispered secrets; I didn't want to be her girlfriend,
her "sister" (She signed her notes to me Connie. And when she
was mad at me she mailed her notes to me - though we shared not only the same
apartment, but the same bedroom - and then handed them to me when the mailman
came, with a hard suffering face that I feared more than I feared the judgment
of God.) If my mother insisted on going out preaching Christmas Eve, I didn't
want to be around to entertain my father's rages and then to defend her when
she returned. I didn't want to fight with my father with her holding my hand,
urging me on; I knew there was something sick and unholy about what we were
doing. (When she introduced herself to my friends, she said, "I am
Barbara's relative." She never called herself my mother.)
I took the only escape route I knew.
But if you had asked me then, I would have said, "I came to Bethel to
serve the Lord." And I would have meant it. Many of my motives were
obscure to me. But I did want to love God. (I didn't understand that the will to
believe is not quite the same as belief itself.)
I thought I loved God. I loved the idea
of loving Him. I knew I loved Arnold; I had loved him since I was 15,
when he was my high school Eng1ish teacher who had held my hand in school
assembly when I didn't salute the flag. Being at Bethel prevented me from
walking down his street every day, hoping for an "accidental" meeting.
But it didn't prevent me from fantasizing about him - from dreaming that he
would be converted that we would live together happily ever after in the New
World.
I told Nathan H. Knorr, then the
Watchtower Society's president, about Arnold - which was pretty stupid, because
I must have known what he'd tell me, and I must have guessed I'd disregard it.
He told me never to see Arnold again. If he had told me that I could never see
my mother or father I might have obeyed him; but Arnold was my mother and
father, and I couldn't not see him.
There were three public telephone
booths at Bethel, unventilated and airless and smelling of the sweat of 500
bodies; like all the doors at Bethel, these
had no locks; and I'd call Arnold from one of the booths when my craving
couldn't be denied, and we'd arrange to meet. Once I got to his living room and
I heard his beloved Schubert Trout Quintet or one of the Beethoven
quartets he always played for me, there was only joy. A guilt hangover the next
day took the form of headaches, a steel vise around my head. (And the guilt had
nothing to do with sex - there was no sex; I was guilty for loving him.)
So I carried all this baggage to Bethel
with me - my love for Arnold and my doubts; but I went, nevertheless (I really
believe this), in good faith. I meant to stay forever. Before I had been there
two years, I knew I would have to leave.
One afternoon, as I sat working in the
proofreading department of the Watchtower plant at 117 Adams Street, a sudden
black storm blew up, and two of the men with whom I shared proofreading tasks
raced to the plate glass windows and said, "Oh, boy! Maybe it's
Armageddon. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it was Armageddon? Do you think it's
Armageddon? Wow!" I laughed and laughed and laughed, because they sounded
so much more like Batman and Robin anticipating a caper with the Joker than
like decently awed men awaiting God's final judgment. And of course, my
laughter infuriated them. Their little-boy glee gave way to sententiousness and
censoriousness, and they silenced my hysterical laughter with glares, demanding
to know what, exactly, I found so funny. Perhaps my laughter had made them
aware of their own foolishness; I doubt it, though, because they took both
Armageddon and themselves very seriously (never for a moment doubting that the
Storm of Storms would leave 117 Adams Street, and them, unscathed). I quailed -
anything male and angry had the power to subdue me - and said in a voice I
didn't recognize as my own (it sounded like the voice of a petulant
9-year-old), "I don't want Armageddon to come."
It was the first visible crack in my
defenses.
I covered myself very quickly, and very
transparently (that was the kind of remark, I knew from experience, that was
not likely to go unreported to higher authorities): "I don't think enough
people are saved yet," I said. It must have sounded as hollow to them as
it did to me; and I felt hollow, as if the storm outside had blown through me,
leaving my soul as dry as a whistle.
Then I began to cry.
Margarita, the Spanish translator who
shared the room with us, gave me a grave and quizzical look. (Laughter is
threatening, tears are frightening when you are supposed at all times to
reflect the joy of the Lord and the modesty and the decorum of a woman. Grief
and raucous laughter are forms of aggression; they are the companions of doubt,
of "wrong thinking.") "I'm tired," I said. "Sometimes
when I think I'm going to have to get up for work at six thirty six days a week
for the rest of my life, I just don't think I can do it." "I do it one
day at a time," Margarita said sternly. "I do it because it would
kill my mother if I didn't," I said. Margarita thought that was a joke;
but the moment I said it, I knew it was true.
I stayed at Watchtower headquarters -
where I'd worked first as a housekeeper, then as a proofreader, for two and a
half years - six months after that outburst. It had been temperate compared
with what I was feeling; but it was the first time that I had revealed my
spiritual duplicity nakedly, or heard myself say something unguarded.
I had been frightened enough before,
for myself, when I felt that my faith, never entirely sure, was on the point of
breaking; now that I had exposed my feelings to others, judgmental others, I
was terrified.
(My diary for that day has one entry: I
am afraid, afraid, afraid.)
At night I went out preaching, or to
study classes in the Bethel residence. I smiled, talked, walked, sang hymns,
conducted myself like a real person in a real world. But I didn't feel real. I
felt as if everything were happening to someone else-as if I were both a
character trapped in someone else's story and the person who '~read" the
character; I was both inside and outside of my own life (which was someone
else's life). Nobody noticed. The most appalling thing of all was that I had
perfected my own part so well that nobody noticed.
At night I tried (as usual) to pray,
and (as usual) could not.
Somewhere I'd read of an order of
contemplative sisters who prayed till 5:30 every morning, to lessen the
violence done in those dark hours after midnight. I thought of them when I
couldn't sleep, which was most of the time. (I had traveled a long way in my
mind since I'd been taught that nuns were whorish, wicked representatives of
the Vatican - but nothing in the way I behaved reflected the way I was
beginning to think.) There was some comfort in believing that they were keeping
vigil during those long nights, when, for some reason, I always fell asleep at
exactly 4:10A.M. (I never knew why). I lay in bed picturing my body floating
above itself; and my skin felt thin and crusty, like something dangerous and
tender stretched across the mouth of a volcano. I felt as if my body were rent
with enormous fissures, and that my skin was inadequate armor, no armor at all.
(The best thing anyone could have done
for me then would have been to tell me I was going crazy. I envied crazy people
because they acted crazy, and because there were names for them. I could
not assign a name to the pain I felt. I smiled a lot. At one of my meetings with
Arnold, to whom I did not confide my troubles - I confided in no one - he told
me of a group of disturbed kids he was
working with who screamed and flailed around and blindly struck out at things.
I cried. He thought I was crying for them. But I was crying for myself. I
thought they were lucky. My screams never got screamed; my rage was neatly
contained.)
When I fell asleep, I dreamed. It was
always the same dream: I am a little girl in a walled garden, full of
old-fashioned flowers-freesias, sweet William, climbing roses, bachelor's
buttons, and (with no regard to seasons) white and purple lilacs. At the end of
the garden stands a creature of indeterminate sex, resplendent, dressed in
cloth of gold, who extends his/her arms to me in a gesture both maternal and
elegant, nurturant and magisterial. Will-less, I am drawn to the creature, who
calls to me in a voice that is at once supplicating and commanding. And as I
enter into its embrace, the voice, (which I yearn for and fear) becomes tactile
- it exists inside of me and outside of me; it becomes like molten silver
pouring through my veins. Paralyzed (bloodless), unable to resist, I am swept
away by the creature, who assumes various guises, some malevolent, some benign.
Held tight in that icy embrace, I am swept out and over the garden walls,
hurled into an empty sky, where, a Humpty-Dumpty of scattered parts, I hurtle
through the void-and nothing puts me back together again.
I
not know the meaning of the dream. The bells wake me at 6:30A.M. (they
are like an extension of the dream), and, pregnant with the dream, cold and
aching, I shower in the communal shower, while the voices around me intrude on
my nightmare. I put on the face and the demeanor I hope will see me through the
day, and I rundown three flights of stairs to the artificial light of the
yellow dining room, where I take my assigned place at a rectangular blue-metal
table, waiting for the Bible discussion that precedes our breakfast to begin. I
feel drugged; but even in this state - which is like sleepwalking through
someone else's dream - I will myself to have control. I try to behave like
other people - insofar as I can see other people: People lack definition at
this time; faces blur. But objects are harshly, clearly defined, like objects
in a hallucination. (I will never forget that dining room, its metal-topped
surfaces, cold and slippery to the touch.) I prepare myself to spend a day
among people who hate me.
New Yorker journalist Richard
Harris spent some time at Bethel in1955;he was later to write [June 16, 19561,
after sitting through a breakfast service, a description of "the women, a
number of whom resembled 4-H Club beauty queens, in simple cotton dresses. All
in all, they seemed a sprightly contented-looking group." I was one of
those women. So far from being contented, I had to resist the temptation to go
up to him and whisper (or shout), "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters!" I wanted to exchange a signal with an emissary from the
outside world.
I say that I spent my days among people
who hated me. I don't think that's a crazy perception (though, God knows, I was
not what could be called normal in those final six months). What was
crazy was that they would in a flash have said (did say) that they loved
me; and if asked why, they might have responded, "Because the Watchtower
Society says "We are a family and we must love one another." (Words
all lost their meanings: good, bad, crazy, love - they meant different
things in different mouths; and one was never sure whom to trust.)
Lara, the pretty girl who sat next to
me at table, hated me. (The eight men who sat at the same table more or less
ignored me, but I felt no ill will emanating from them; the worst they could do
was make me feel lonely, and I was lonely already.) The first day I sat at that
table, one of the men said, "Pass the coffee cream." So later I asked
Lara to "pass the coffee cream." She said, her fork moving without a
pause to her disdainful mouth, "It isn't coffee cream, it's
milk." Maybe she thought I was trying to endear myself to the brother whose
remark I'd parroted (and maybe she was right: I was a great mimic, of
necessity, in those days; I thought the way you invented a life for yourself
was to copy bits and pieces from other people). She chose from that moment to
dislike me. The only other sentence I can remember her saying directly to me in
the three years we sat together was "Your perfume makes me sick."
We were 450 men and 45 women at that
time, and only a handful of the women were under 35; so to be intensely
disliked by one young woman (who was herself cool and pretty and popular) was
no small thing. I never knew exactly what I had done, what I was, to
have incurred her displeasure. I could not believe anyone could be so unbending.
I almost admired the constancy of her aloof and critical disdain. My gratitude
was always there, waiting, ready to spill over her if she ever once smiled at
me. She never did. I could only imagine, from the way she looked at me, that
she believed I was always on the point of committing some outrage (and perhaps
her instincts were right). "Too smart for her own good," I learned
later she had pronounced me; "too goody-good." What an irony! I am
so ignorant, I wrote in my diary at night; and if she knew how bad I felt
myself to be, I doubt if she'd have liked me any better. I did the worst
possible thing anyone can do under these circumstances: I tried to model my
personality on those of successful people - a most unprofitable and ridiculous
undertaking.
I can't think of many things more awful
and more corrupting than having to wake up each morning to the sure knowledge
that you will be spending your time in intimate association with people who
despise you. Every day was like the first day of nursery school, knowing you
had some invisible deformity that would make everyone shun you. (When my own
children went to school for the first time, and were immediate social
successes, and casual successes at that, I said seventeen Hallelujahs; I'd
seen, in my imagination, their schoolrooms populated with Laras. I felt
triumphant - and also vindictive: I recited a vengeful litany. I hoped
everybody hated Lara's kids; hoped they picked on them; I hoped they were the
most unpopular girls in school; I hoped their stomachs ached every day from 9
to 3; I wanted Lara to know what it felt like. It is corrupting to be hated; I
didn't know I could bear so much malice for so many years.)
Lara; and Stan Russell and Tom Whiting,
who both felt that I had usurped their place in the printing plant and never
let me forget it. They snickered and gossiped with each other and came all over
pompous when I tried to talk with them. I deferred and deferred and embarked on
long windy paragraphs to justify my putting a comma into copy they had edited.
Which did me no good at all; they just muttered about women who had unbecoming
ambition, and laughed at me for trying. I always felt as if I were the object
of obscene teasing.
Stan punished me according to the means
he had at hand: he had me dismissed from the small preaching cell of which he
was the elder, because, he said, I didn't spend enough hours preaching. It was
a great humiliation to be dismissed from a preaching cell; and Stan saw to it
that my shame was bruited about. Whiting contented himself with telling me how
the "brothers" thought I was becoming sick with pride, that they
preferred the housekeeping sisters who made beds to me; and once, when someone
in the proofreading department left Bethel abruptly, with no explanation, he
said it was because I had "unmanned" him by red-penciling his copy
and that I might be responsible for his loss of faith. (Satan had used women
before to undo good men.) The man who left had later, Whiting alleged, tried to
hold up a bank I was given to understand that if I hadn't told him he'd let a
dangling participle go by, he might still be hale and hearty in the faith.
Actually, it strikes me as funny now:
Could I really have prayed to Jehovah to forgive me for being presumptuous
enough to undangle a brother's participle? I did. No wonder I'm superstitious
about words: I spent two years thinking my eternal salvation depended on my
approach to commas and split infinitives and dangling participles. It wasn't
funny at the time.
The truth is, there were people who
loved me, too. (Well, I say love: is it love if it can be - as it was,
the moment I left - so easily aborted?) There were women who loved me. There
were men who asked me to marry them. I never entertained the idea of marrying a
Bethelite. I must always have known, on some unconscious level, that I was
going to leave someday, that I would not stick it out. The men I was attracted
to were not the men who cared for me; I denied physical attraction (if a man
kissed me and it felt good, I immediately found reasons for not loving him). I
chose men who hadn't the remotest inclination to choose me - which is not so
uncommon; women do it all the time. My perversity, however, was extreme:
the impossible object was always the
adorable object. Some of the men who sought after me were sweet and kind. I
think about them sometimes; I want to call them up in the middle of the night
and ask them if they still remember me with affection (I remember them with
affection). But I tried that once, and I felt as if I were being rejected by a
computer printout; he quoted the Bible at me, with special emphasis on Gehenna,
Judas, and dogs returning to their own vomit. He had run his hands up my thighs
once, and introduced me to his mother, and confessed his own doubts; but he was
still in and I was out, and "What is there to talk about?" he said.
"You've divorced yourself from Jehovah's organization; you
blaspheme."
(My friend Peggy, an ex-Witness who has
survived, keeps telling me, whenever I announce my decision-usually late at night
and after several glasses of wine - to call someone who once said he loved me,
that I might as well go on a rescue mission to the Snow Kingdom. They can't
allow their hearts to thaw out, she says; and she's probably right. Peggy knows
my secret - which is that in my heart of hearts I believe that anyone who was
nice enough to love me then might be good enough to like me now. Having once
been cherished, however meagerly, I entertain the illusion that I will be
cherished still. It's hard to believe that everything is lost: it would be good
to believe that people can still connect.)
I'm talking about my life at Bethel as
if it were one of unrelieved gloom; and that isn't true. There were times when
I felt absolutely high - stoned on God-talk (which, as it happens, can be a
powerful aphrodisiac, among other things). Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
with my friend Walter, holding hands and talking about God; learning to dance
the tango with Walter and Peggy and Walter's roommate, Norman; dancing all
night on the Society's missionary yacht in New York harbor; picnicking under
the George Washington Bridge - there were easy, good times. And the best times
were when we were in other people's homes, teaching them the Bible, and they
offered us the intimate details of their lives and we felt enhanced and enriched and part of a loving community
serving a higher cause.
But in the end, none of that was
enough. In the end, my decision to leave had very little to do with people who
loved me and people who didn't, with good times and bad times. In the end, it
had everything to do with my feelings about the world, which I had been taught
was reserved for destruction and which I nevertheless obdurately loved, though
my ignorance of it was profound. It had to do with my feeling cramped and
lonely and frightened; leaving was survival.
All of this is in the diary I kept the
last six months I was at Bethel. When I read these diary notes now, they seem
to me grossly self-conscious, not to say narcissistic (but I was, after all,
writing as if God were peering over my shoulder-and it's hard to know how to
play to that audience); and they are full of Nichols-and-May 1950s joke words,
like "evolve" and "aware" (I was reading Camus, and I was
feeling like Columbus, discovering new continents of thought and hoping against
hope that the way West was the way East - and that I would blunder my way out
to the riches of the world). They sound like the writings of arrested
adolescence (I was an arrested adolescent).
When I read these diary notes now, they
seem not only florid and naive, but coy as well: I was afraid of revealing
myself even to myself; I played mind tricks. Words that were too heavily
charged for me to commit to paper - words like leaving religion - I
wrote in shorthand (under the assumption, I suppose, that neither my roommate
nor Jehovah knew Pittman). The diaries abound in sentences, I'm sorry to say,
like "I believe" -or, "I don't believe" - "in
happiness"; "I think I can love spring again." I'm leaving them
out; as, for the sake of this record, I'm leaving out all sentences of the
"I - feel - I - can - stand - on - tiptoe - and - embrace - the -
sun" variety.
They were, at the time, deeply
felt-which is, unfortunately, no guarantee that they sound authentic twenty
years later. (Authentic is another 1950s word; I suppose that if I had
left the Witnesses in the '60s, I would have fallen in love with geodesic domes
or used a political vocabulary in which to couch my despair. As it was, I
borrowed from the existentialists - which may not have been a bad thing. I
still love Camus, Salinger, Brando-the-wild-one, and the rakish skinny Sinatra
who faced the world, or so it seemed, with showy grit more than I love Abby,
Jerry, Tom, Rennie.)
I can barely decipher these notes, they
are written in such a wild, erratic hand; and the urgency and pain that are
missing from the words are in the handwriting. (There are, as a friend of mine
says, no inanimate objects.) It looks like the handwriting of three different
people; and I won't labor the reason for that.
God can't kill Arnold. How can God kill Arnold? Arnold
sends pepperoni to all the New Utrecht High School hoods in jail. The other day
he bought three bikes for the kids of the Chinese laundry-man. He spends his
evenings listening to Beethoven quartets. (I wish he would kiss me.) He used to
excuse us from English homework if we went to see a Marx Brothers film. Also he
brought us chocolate-covered ants when we wrote good compositions. (Does Jehovah
have a sense of humor? Why doesn't God ever laugh?) Once Arnold read an
Archibald MacLeish poem to me in class. To me:
'Not with my hands' strength nor with difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn
line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember
(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man's voice but a distant or vain affirmation
Like dream words most)
Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of
leaves on your shoulder
And a leaf on your hair
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths
broken
Look! It is there!'"
And why, for that matter, should God kill Archibald
MacLeish? How come all the people I love are going to be killed at Armageddon,
and I'm going to have to live forever in the New World with Russell and Tom
Whiting and Lara - who are mean? Brother K. says I'm presumptuous
because I'm making myself out to be more compassionate than Jehovah. Is it
presumptuous to like people who like you? And to want them to be saved? If I
were God I'd want everybody be saved. (And if I were God I guess I could love
Stan and Tom and Lara, but I don't - so maybe I am presumptuous, after all.) I
don't have the energy to be an apologist for things it's difficult for me to
accept or understand: Why were the Israelites so merciless? Why did they
stone sex-offenders and delinquent children? (Poor Onan.) Why - as my father
keeps asking - did Jehovah send bears to rip apart the children who mocked Elijah's
baldness?
I love going out on Bible studies and teaching people. It
feels so good, I feel so elevated. But does this mean that this is the Truth? It
may mean only that when people are not dignified by exclusive devotion to a
cause that demands more than their normal natures can supply, they are not
extraordinary. And I'm afraid of ordinariness. At Bible studies we meet on the
highest plane - we see each other in the most sympathetic light, as humans
admitting our frailty and striving for beauty and order (for good? for the
Divine?). But the relationship deteriorates when the mutual search is ended and
we resume our daily lives. Then everything becomes flat. And off I go to new
relationships, drawing strength from them. I feel like a parasite, battening on
other people's needs and living off their hunger (I love their hunger); and
teaching what I don't even know to be true. I don't feel lonely when I'm
preaching. This wonderful thing that sometimes happens between me and another
person, this interchange of love, this empathy-like hands held out in the
darkness of our common suffering . . . I wouldn't have it any more if I left. I
have a terrible fear that I would go around begging people, asking them to
share their suffering and their need, to let me see them. Is it because I love
them? Or am I using them? to enrich myself? I don't know the difference between
giving and taking any more . . . I'm not a successful proselytizer. I can't
credit myself with victories for the faith, or even, lately, with propagating
the faith. If I have victories at all, they're personal and human victories. They
don't have much to do with God, and they have lessto do with Judgment. I'm
successful in establishing beautiful relationships, not often in gaining
converts. One time a companion brought to my attention that I'd remarked to a
couple with whom we were concluding a study, "We have to feel free to talk,
to share. We can't be afraid of offering our feelings. We can be friends. Our
religion doesn't matter." This was heresy. I hadn't even been aware that
I'd said it.
Their only reality is otherworldly reality. They deny the
world, and that denial is contrary to my nature. I can love Christ. but not
Jehovah, and not the end of the world. Is that possible?
I can't judge or condemn - or be God's agent for condemnation.
I can't bear to belong to a group that considers itself favored. I can't accept
the destruction of a child. I can't exclude from my love all the people who
cannot believe. "He who loves the world is an enemy of God." I love
the world. I will not allow my friends to be chosen for me: "We must love
one another and die."
Brother K. came back from a round-the-world trip today.
Told us about it at meeting. Said he was bored on airplane - not enough
magazines
to read. I'd be bored on airplane too. But I'm not a spiritual leader. Isn't
God's spirit supposed to un-bore you? If you were really full of the Holy
Spirit, would you be bored? Why couldn't he think? Or pray? Or meditate? Or
contemplate? What would he do on a desert island? How can I trust a spiritual
leader who would be bored on a desert island . . . Why am I so harsh? . . .
(Can a spiritual leader of limited intelligence and compassion be qualified to
lead the starved and suffering to God and to shepherd the flock of God?) Also
told us that he sat behind Brando on airplane. (I.e., Brother K. travels
first-class. So how can he rant at priests' "living off the fat of the
land"? I don't see him practicing poverty.) Said Brando "behaved
well." Suppose he expected him to wear torn tee-shirt and scratch armpits.
Said he mentioned Brando because he'd heard one of the sisters had a crush on
him. He meant me. Nobody knew whether to laugh or not, because nobody knew
whether I was being reprimanded for having a crush on Brando, or whether
Brother K. thought it was funny. So there was an embarrassed silence. (Anyway, I
was embarrassed - nobody looked at me.)
I can't give myself to a religion unless it is completely
and without reservation. (I may not.) This religion demands complete
dedication, submission, acceptance. I have reservations. I have always had.
Fromm says that the story of Jonah and the whale shows
that Jonah had a strong sense of order and law, but no love. But we say Jonah
did not do his duty, was not obedient to God, because he didn't go to Nineveh,
where he was sent. We stress duty and obedience to authority rather than love
for man. Fromm says the whale was a symbol of the isolation and imprisonment
that results from lack of love and solidarity: the whale is hell, the hell of
not being able to love. I don't want to live my life in the belly of the whale.
. . . I don't want to be contemptuous of weakness (including my own).
I've been sneaking into guest rooms to read, late at
night: Emerson. Thoreau. Dead men are my comfort.
Why should intellectual curiosity be condemned and feared,
and intelligence be regarded as an obstacle to overcome?
This is what I want: To be able to follow my thoughts
wherever they lead me. Not to accept ready-made answers, easy, all encompassing
solutions, panaceas. To be able to make my own connections. to read my own
significance into relationships, to make my own meanings . . . no fetters. Not
somebody else's ideas of what god's will is for me.
We escape the anguish of making decisions. We don't have
to feel guilty or responsible when we see people starving because we are part
of a movement that tells them how to escape their condition. We discharge our
responsibility by offering a road to salvation they may - but probably won't -
take advantage of. For those who turn our brand of salvation down, we have no
pity. They reject the way of happiness; but we can tell ourselves we've done
our part.
I can understand the nature of the Living Being without me
only through the Living Being which is in me.
They despise everything they can't understand. I cannot
comprehend their inability to feel for those in anguish and doubt, who are
seeking to understand - through means other than theirs - man's condition. They
are ignorant of that which they condemn: "Philosophy is of the Devil."
They are so ignorant, and so repulsively arrogant in their assertion of
superiority over the "worldly wise." They are proud of not knowing.
How dare they?
I can't accept their rationalization for segregation:
"It might offend people of good-will if we integrated." Cowardice. Is
a loss of membership worth this wishy-washy approach? They can accept bigots,
but condemn activists. Even JWs who are Negroes accept it because the whole
religion denies the freedom of the individual, and stresses the submergence of
the individual for the good of the glorious whole.
I can't love only those whom God loves.
Last night at meeting, talk about the symbolic meaning of
Deborah's camels. More energy brought to bear on the symbolic
meaning of Deborah's camels (I fell asleep) than on capital punishment. I can't
accept capital punishment or their reasons for espousing it. Also: Refuse to be
told what I must feel and believe about artificial insemination, intermarriage,
etc., etc., etc. Can't follow a party line.
I could never marry someone who has never had a doubt. It
would have to be someone who has not arrived at a fixed state of mind, someone
without an attitude. I will never be; I will always be going toward. But
it really isn't important whether I marry or not. I think - feel, which is more
reliable - that I won't.
What scares me is how good I am at dissembling. I've
learned to give back to others the view of themselves they ask for. I keep a
central core of disbelief, but I act as if I believe. I don't know what
to do, how to stop.
Sometimes I do love them. They transcend themselves.
That's beautiful. But then they become rigid and dogmatic. The love they
inherit from the teachings of Christ is narrowed and limited by their rejection
of the world. Many of them were attracted by love and goodness to a life of
giving. But their goodness is contradicted by their hatred of the world, their
relegating all who will not listen to destruction - the "goats" who
are against them. Their work satisfies the need to express themselves, and to
give. It is better to give than to receive, and their need to give is fulfilled
in their preaching work. But so stern and inflexible. (Why do I say they?
If I say they, what am I doing here? They think I am one of them. Them.)
I'm here; I go to meetings; I preach - and a lot of it
gratifies me. How can it gratify me if I reject all their (our?) premises? Find
myself thinking almost constantly in alien patterns of thought. Do I do what I
do because I am carried away by momentum (inertia)? terror? habit? Can't think.
Very tired. Mind is paralyzed. Can't carry thoughts to their logical conclusion
- afraid to. Escape in daydreams - dreams of a life completely different from
mine, lovely lovely dreams. I can't accept any of the old answers. I seem
unable to find new ones that satisfy me. I don't know what to think anymore. I
don't know who I am anymore.
I don't remember where I copied this from (Nietzsche?):
"The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely cease
being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at
him: 'Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring, that
is not really you.' " My roommate found it written on an index card;
handed it to me without a word.
This is what I think about good acts: They're like
sandbags piled up on the shore against waves and waves of evil. And every time
somebody does something good - even if it goes unnoticed, or seems futile -
it's another sandbag added to the barricades that stop evil from overcoming us;
so the evil never completely conquers the good. Nothing is futile. (Sandbags.
Or beanbags? Tossing beanbags against the Monster, so the Monster is always
bruised by one good act - which can be a playful act, play is good.) But the
Witnesses think everything has to be measured in terms of its immediate success.
(Prefer the mentality of people who went off to the Spanish Civil war,
myself.) And it has to be a total success: Armageddon, the new World.
There are good, beautiful, anguished people out there; I
know there are. I can't despair. I know they are there. Their strivings
maybe futile; but they are beautiful. . . . Anne Frank: "I know it's
terrible trying to have any faith . . . when people are doing such horrible . .
- But you know what I sometimes think? I think the world may be going through a
phase. It'll pass, maybe not for hundreds of years. but some day . . . I still
believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart."
Everything must be questioned. No complacency, no repose.
I'd like to see things clearly, for what they are - like a
child, or a poet. Yesterday, out preaching with C.H., passed a
fruit-and-vegetable stand, which prompted a homily on God's abundant harvest in
the New World, Israel's jubilee, on and on - he never even looked at a
single peach. Saw nothing. Everything exists in the future, or exists as an
object lesson; no delight in the present. . . . The other day, some visitors
came to Bethel, made some remark about the harbor view and the skyline (Oh, I love
it: What kind of King Kong God would want to gobble it up?). L.F., who was
shepherding them around, said (with that smile that's supposed to be
razzle-dazzle, actually it's more phony than the smiles on pink-plaster
Madonnas), "Oh, we keep our eyes firmly on God's New World; we just don't
have time to admire worldly scenery." I was mortified. (Not supposed to be
mortified.) Then L. pointed out all the furniture in the lounge that had been
made in our carpentry shop, which, even I can see, is ugly. Something
has to be done about the plastic flowers. Is good taste an attribute of the
Devil? Is it a mistake to want God to have some class? I know that the people
in Brooklyn Heights laugh at us, and I know I'm not supposed to care, but I do
care. . . . Like when Arnold said Awake! mag. sounded as if it were
written by reasonably intelligent junior high school students.
Self-denial without a self: If I am to deny myself, I must
first have a self to deny.
Reading Fromm on the distinction between universal ethics
and "socially immanent ethics." Love thy neighbor is a
universal ethic and valid for society today and for us all. But Jehovah also
commanded the Israelites to stone sex offenders and disobedient children
without compassion. Maybe that was a social ethic necessary to perpetuate the
society and cultural structure of that time. (Tho you'd think God could have
found a better way.) So I don't have to accept that as good, or justify it. But
the witnesses make no distinction-they accept both the loving and the stoning
as equally valid, both issuing from God. I'm not sure I can love such a God. .
. I wish there were someone I could
talk to. Someone who loves God.
Courage is the result of calm consideration of what I risk
and what I am after.
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy. We never pray for mercy, we always
pray for justice. Perfect justice-what a horror. In the name of the Father
and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen. I'm not supposed to say that. I can't
hate the Catholic Church. Maybe my Catholic baptism "took." I don't
know if I believe in God. I love Jesus. Nothing I say or feel makes sense.
When we go from door to door, we urge Catholics and Jews
to "read for themselves" what JWs have to say, not to take someone's
word for it. ("Investigation never hurt anyone. Read our
literature.") Yet JWs are warned on threat of spiritual death not to read
the "poisonous" literature of other religions, or secular literature
that advances another point of view. Which stems from conviction that we have
the only truth. (Or from fear?) Everything I know about other religions, I know
from them. Everything I know of God I know from them.
Brother Knorr wears terrible suits. . . . Also ties. . . .
I got my $60 yearly clothing allowance today. Spent it on books and plants. So
now will have to darn stockings, or ask my mother for money for clothes. Stupid,
stupid, stupid thing to do. (Don't regret it.) Also bought tickets to Death
of a Salesman. Three. Don't know whom to take.
If "The Truth" is so overpowering, why should it
not be able to withstand the attacks of higher education?
Took Esther and Mike to see Salesman. A mistake.
They wanted to leave. . . . Bro. Franz says all "worldly
entertainment" is equally bad - My Fair Lady just as
"distracting" as Death of a Salesman, therefore just as
"obscene." Told Arnold this; first time I've heard him curse: Said to
tell Franz to get a copy of Hamlet and shove it up his ___. Which, he said, was
already accommodating his (Franz's) head, and, speaking of heads, when was I
going to start to use mine? Said a little brute force would do me good,
unfortunately he wasn't the man to apply it.
Went for a walk in Greenwood Cemetery. Very comforting.
The dead are very nice, like children, they can't do anybody any harm. Wouldn't
mind being dead.
I believe that doubt is an indispensable part of the
search for truth. I do not believe there is anything greater than I am; except,
perhaps, all men. And I know how to serve all men only by respecting
myself, fulfilling myself, being true to the truth within me. I am part of all
men. . . Is God more important than man? Is reason ridiculous? Logic may have
its drawbacks, but it's still the best thing we have. Isn't it?
I can't be bent by laws that others have made.
My mother cowers before life - just as she turned her back
and ran up the subway steps when my brother walked dangerously near the tracks.
She draws life from this religion. Negative meets negative (= positive?). Life
overcame her. This gives her power over life.
I may be mediocre all the rest of my life. My whole life
may be mediocre. But that's the chance I take, and I think it's worth taking.
I've been living a split-level existence. Can't. I've been telling people for
over ten years what life means, but I don't know myself. (And what is the meaning
of my own existence, and are those two separate questions?)
My favorite sentences in the Bible: "What is
truth?" (Jesus never said.) And, "Jesus wept."
I am so ignorant. My father should have stopped me. He
tried. Not hard enough. Arnold, too. The men I love never force me to do
any thing. I wish they would. I wouldn't thank them if they did. I want
somebody to make this stop. Afraid.
Clearly, something had to give, break,
bend: me. Inaction had become intolerable (I couldn't, in honor, stay). Action
seemed impossible (I was as afraid to leave as I was afraid of the psychic
consequences of not leaving) - physically impossible, as in those dreams
where you try to escape and your legs refuse to carry out your commands; you
are all motion and no movement, stuck. I couldn't tread water any more without
eventually drowning in my own contradictions. I was very, very lucky (what I
mean to say is, Providence was divinely good. But that understanding came
later; I'm anticipating): I shuddered and shook and cracked, but slowly and
quietly, and not explosively; I broke down in stages, not all at once. And
picked up the pieces as I went along. Everything that happened was terrible,
but the terror went on for so long, I learned to live with it familiarly; I made
pain my ally. Like an amusement-park horror-house ride: every time you turn a
corner, you say, Well, that one wasn't so bad, and you steel yourself for the
next one and think that maybe that one will be easier, and you know there's an
end somewhere, if only you can hang on.
The first thing that went was my voice.
Which probably got sick of itself: it had told so many lies; it was so many
voices, all fighting for equal time. Toward the end, when I rang doorbells to
preach, I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Nothing. As effective a
paralysis as if God Himself had severed my vocal cords. Out of everything wrong
and terrible and bad, something good: I stopped going from door to door. The
decision had been made for me; I had been rendered mute. Long, lazy Sunday
mornings in bed: for the first time in almost fifteen years, Sunday mornings in
bed. Doing nothing. Looking out at the harbor. Waiting. The passivity that is
supposed to be woman's greatest enemy, a boon: too passive even to feel guilt.
Then, next, the thing with the stairs.
I was still going out in the evenings to Bible studies. Only I didn't talk to
would-be converts about the Bible anymore. I don't remember what we talked about
(everything here gets blurred); I remember being fed a lot, plates of food
and cups of tea, and holding children on my lap. (How good people were! I wish
I could remember who they were, to repay them. This is the part of the horror
ride where the tunnel is dark; I remember only their kindnesses. I don't know
what they made of me. Did they think I was sane?)
But that, too, ended. First, I couldn't
walk down stairs. Every house had stairs; the stairs were always narrow. After
the doors were shut and the voices and the warmth were over, I hugged the
banisters and edged down sidewise like a crab. Sometimes it took me an hour to
negotiate a flight of stairs. Stood paralyzed and nauseated at the top of the
stairs - a void at the bottom of the stairs. Once, this is funny, I bumped my
way down three flights on my ass; couldn't trust my legs. (No; not funny.) Then
(this is funny), I couldn't walk up stairs. The paralysis was spreading.
(I told Arnold, making light of it. He said, "Fear of going down
stairs is a death wish. Fear of going up stairs must be a life wish. You're
making progress.") I stopped going out at night to Bible studies. (I never
said goodbye to any of those people. I forgive myself for this. I can't regret
any thing anymore.)
Meanwhile, during the day, nothing had
changed. (Everything had changed.) Except that I kept falling asleep. Every
time I sat down, alone in my room, my eyes closed, and I slept, for what seemed
to be five or ten minutes. Small blackouts. I didn't resist them. Delicious
little secret deaths.
Then, one night, I was in the subway.
(I don't remember what I was doing there, where I was coming from. My diary
doesn't tell me. I'd stopped making notes in my diary, too enervated to write.)
It was late ay night. There were tracks on either side of me that seemed to
stretch into black infinity. Marooned. I remember the subway walls-blistery
with ugly wet patches - and a dim, sick light. A train pulled in, and I
couldn't walk to it. And then another, and another - and I couldn't make myself
walk. Will didn't enter into it at all. If I thought of anything at all, it was
rats. In the damp, underground, there are rats. Waves and waves of nausea. I
began to think I was hallucinating this. But the sweet-sour smell of vomit,
mine, was real. (As was the unlovely fact that I had wet my pants.) At 6 A.M.,
as if a spell had been broken, I walked to a train. I had been standing there
for seven hours.
I got to Bethel in time to shower.
Doused myself with perfume (Lily of the Valley). I remember the morning text
for that day: "What are these wounds in thine hands . . . Those with which
I was wounded in the house of my friends."
That night, I began to write in my
diary again. I began to rehearse the speech I would give Brother Knorr when I
told him I would leave:
Dear Brother Knorr: I am not equal to demands, fatigued in
mind and body. Can't think. Don't have proper motivation. No go-power. Need
renewal, refreshment, need to overcome my own moods and sensitivities. Not fair
to Jehovah, his organization, or myself if I stay. Feel close to breaking.
They will think this is the easy way. To them it means no
responsibility, no doorbells, not having to submit to authority. I know it is
the hard way. To fight my way to my own truth, accepting nothing easily, to
make my own decisions, to accept my aloneness and my loneliness and to have no
one at night to thank for joy or to ask respite from pain, never to be really
sure-always struggle and uncertainty.
They'll say rest is the answer. I know it isn't. I know
this instinctively, just as I know I must leave. I know if I am ever to become
whole again, it must be in my own way. They'll tell me to work at the
Watchtower farm - they send cuckoos to the farm. But I know that if I'm going
to find God again, it has to be myself - not fourteen hours of work a day and
cows for two weeks and no time to think. Different fetters. I need a broad
margin to my life now - room to think under circumstances that make thinking
possible. Slowly. I can't afford to get lost in a world of rushing and whirling
and falling exhausted into bed every night, waking up knowing that everything
is dry and gone.
I must leave a spiritual vocation because I have lost my
spirituality. I know that I must leave to find myself. If I do not, nothing
will ever be right again. In destroying myself, crushing myself, submerging
myself, I am destroying my faith. In finding myself, I may find God. If I can
just have the courage to take one step at a time. I must not panic. If life is
mean, then I must accept it on my own. No artifice, no illusions. What is there
left to bear? Mediocrity, futility, the nothingness of life without God? If
that has to be my daily bread, so be it.
And still I couldn't leave.
Now this is where the fairy Godmother
(God/Father?) steps in. In the guise of a balding optometrist (charlatan or
scientist or saint, he may have saved my life), in Greenwich Village, across
the street from St. Joseph's Church (where now I sometimes go to Mass). Why did
I go to Greenwich Village to which I had never been, for eye glasses? The Lord
knows. (I assume, so much have I changed, that He does.) I don't remember the
name of that eye doctor; his shop is no longer there.
He took an inordinately long time
examining my eyes. He said: "I don't know your life or who you are or what
you're doing. But whatever you're doing, you have to stop it. I've never seen
anybody so rigidly controlled, and I've never seen so much strain. You're
seeing things that aren't there, and you're not seeing things that are there.
You may last six days or six weeks or six months, but you're headed for a
breakdown, and it won't be pretty when it comes. "Then he said, with a
flash of insight that frightened me with its acuity, "I sometimes have to
tell priests to take six months off. I'm telling you to take the rest of your
life off, if that's what you have to do. If you want to live."
It was all I needed.
I ran down the subway steps. No terror.
Somebody had finally told me I was crazy, or as close to it as made no
difference. I told my roommate not to wake me up for breakfast, overriding her
protests almost gaily (the release!): "The doctor says I'm killing
myself." Also slyly (and merrily): "He thinks I'm cracked."
All I'd needed was someone to tell
me. Another voice, a voice outside my own head.
I slept, on and off, for three days.
The resident chiropractor stuck his head in once in a while and offered me cans
of soup. (I was not particularly enchanted with the resident chiropractor: his
main approach to all physical ailments was a vibrator, which he applied to body
parts we weren't even supposed to know the names of.) He sat there with his lap
full of Campbell's, urging me to get out of bed to receive it. I nodded my
thanks. I didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't want soup or voices or vibrators
or sympathy.
My roommate looked frightened and
didn't ask any questions. She prayed ostentatiously. The only complete sentence
I can remember saying in those three days is "Mary, for God's sake, stop flopping!"
Margarita came in once to ask me if I wanted anything. "An apple
turnover," I said.
When the three days were over, I made
an appointment to see Brother Knorr. I was taking in great greedy drafts of
air; I felt buoyant.
Brother Knorr thought I needed a rest.
He suggested that I transfer the Society's farm in upstate New York: manual
work to bludgeon my brain cells into acquiescence. He addressed all his remarks
to the Statue of Liberty. Or so it seemed: he sat with his broad back toward
me, facing New York Harbor. His enormous desk between us. More than that
between us. Worlds (the world) between us.
I said No, no rest. I didn't trust
myself to say anything more.
He swiveled around in his chair (made
to order in the carpentry shop.)
"Weren't you high school
valedictorian?"
"No."
"But you were smart."
"Yes."
"That's your trouble."
I was dismissed.
(I was glad he didn't offer to shake my
sweaty hand. I thought, on the way down in the elevator, how long it had been
since anybody had held me or touched me.)
I packed my suitcase. I called my
mother. She came with a friend to collect me, my suitcase, and a driftwood lamp
(my only possession. I dropped off my key at the front desk. It was snowing. We
drove back to Bensonhurst in silence. Back to the bedroom I shared with my
mother and to a silence that has remained unbroken between us: she has never
asked me why I left.
I would like to be able to say that
that was it - clean and finished and a final door slammed; courage exercised
and rewarded. But I was back in the bedroom with my mother's weeping; and
another charade began.
(I was 22; 1 had no money and no job. I
could have gone to Arnold, perhaps, but I was afraid to ask. I didn't want to
go to him as a waif and a stray; and suppose he refused to take me in? And I
was in love with him. I always had been. I didn't want him to bring me chicken
soup. I was beginning to think about sex, and about his sexuality, which was
ambiguous, and I felt stubbornly that I had to do what I was going to do alone
- and that in any case, my passion and my pain were beginning to frighten him.
He would always be there to offer me his hand; he would never really take me
on. I wanted him, however, to ask. He didn't.)
I went to local congregation meetings
with my mother. I didn't know how to take the final step out. Three meetings a
week. Was this what I had left for? I enrolled in a course at the New School.
The course was on a Friday evening, a meeting night. Only two meetings to go to
now. No explanations to my mother.
But I never said out loud: I don't
believe.
I wrote in my diary.
I am burdened with guilt. My mother acts as if I had
robbed her of joy, and I have no way to replenish it. I am guilty of a terrible
theft, and can't think how to atone, except by contradicting my own nature.
There are constant irritants and daily humiliations, and I am compromising
myself so much I can't find myself. I am sorry for her and sorry for myself,
and don't see how this will end. I can't stand being the instrument of her
pain. I grieve for her (and for myself). What can I do?
She speaks in a voice of relentless weariness. Her sadness
- the feeling that I'm responsible for it. She averts her eyes from me,
silently reproachful. I frighten her. . . . Even to read of violence repels
her. She runs away from suffering, and I'm a constant reminder to her that her
religion is not the lifesaver she chose. She has never been able to contribute
her energies to anything she didn't regard as a sure winner. She can't bear
defeat. I am her failure.
I am afraid.
When will I find my voice?
All I do is daydream.
My mother listens to other people's troubles with her
body. Her pores seem to absorb the words as she leans forward, drinking it all
in, like a sponge, absorbing it into her being. Am I like that? She gives
advice. But not to me.
Priests always look so self-conscious.
Having gained my freedom, what do I do with it? Was it
just freedom from a place? Not enough. I'm just beginning to learn the world,
to learn how to live. I wanted freedom from that authority so passionately; and
yet I'm not freed. I'll never be free till I can think, not dream, until I have
the courage to work my thoughts out, and act in accordance with them. The
moments that are wasted, the days, the time! And I'm so afraid. (I'm thinking
of Arnold.) I can't think as they do, but I can't cut myself off from them.
Why? What am I afraid of? God? Destruction at Armageddon? Loneliness? Alone,
cut off, alienated. But I can't take the final step. So many people would be
hurt. My mother. But my life is a lie; and I hurt. There is more than one kind
of destruction. Not just Armageddon. I am diluting myself, compromising myself.
I don't believe anymore. But all I know is what I don't know. I've been
trained to believe in the wickedness of the world. But there is beauty in the
world. I believe it. And I believe in freedom. I believe that no one-not God-can
tell me how to live. I believe that if life is ugly I have to find its ugliness
for myself. I believe that no one-not God-is greater than I am. . . . I can't
say any of this out loud.
Is it right to be happy when others are unhappy?
I never noticed the obscenities on billboards and subway
ads be-fore. Now I do. (Why do they always look as if they were in my father's
handwriting?)
No vitality. I'm afraid of being alone. And all the going
to meetings, what nonsense. All the people I call my friends (the friends,
they say, as if there could be no others) speak a language alien to my deepest
and truest feelings. To keep their friendship I mouth things I no longer believe
to be true. This is a great trouble.
Why can my mother accept my brother although he doesn't
conform to her standards? She still smiles at him, never at me; he gives her
pleasure. But I'm such a disappointment to her. Her religion has taught her
that if I'm not religious, in the way she understands religion, and she
interprets this to mean if I'm not an active JW, there is "selfishness
present." (How they simplify and ignore!) This chills her love and saddens
her. Her voice is flat and dull, only alive when it's peevish. I have to learn
not to let it frighten me. I can't goon needing her approval. She knows how
important it is to me; is that why she withholds it? But it's wrong to accuse
her of this cruelty-which is only a reflection of her pain. She is hurting very
much.
I'm just beginning to realize how real money is-as real as
all the other things, like pain. She hands me a dollar with such a hard,
immobile face. I've got to go to work - and she's been hinting. But I don't
know what to do . . . I'm getting bitter (how stupid not to have thought of
money), and I'm ashamed of it. It would be easier if I had somewhere to go.
Went to meeting last night. Didn't listen to C.'s speech.
Always the same. Also people look at me peculiarly - and look at my mother
consolingly. Little Karen cuddled next to me during the Watchtower
study. How can anyone have the courage to have a child? Only affirmative,
deeply religious, happy people. What would I teach a child?
I feel as if I'll drift aimlessly always. I am so afraid.
To live a purposeful life must be the greatest of blessings. . . . Wasn't that
what I had?
Maybe the person I think A. is existed only in my mind.
I'd like either to forget him or to define him and I know that neither is
possible. Does he love me? Was he happy that night at his house when he was
play-acting that I was his wife? I wish I knew. Sometimes I'm sure he loves me,
and other times I feel I've made it all up.
How much of this am I doing for A.? Did he give my
struggles meaning? And how much is reaction against my mother?
"Whoever loses his life for my sake will find
it." I gave God my life when I was 9 years old. I was giving Him a gift I
didn't know the value of. Not much of a sacrifice. If I didn't find fulfillment
in religion, where will I find it?
Called A. He has retreated into light witticisms. He can
be no refuge.
I began to withhold part of myself, until, little by
little, I became two separate persons. And I didn't know which was real . .
. I’m doing it again.
If only they could be moral without condemning those who
do not meet their standards of morality! If only I could translate idealism and
values into deeds and actions. But I don't know what my values are. I am
destroying myself by trying to accommodate one set of actions to another way of
thinking. . . . What are other people like, I often wonder.
Masquerade. Two worlds. Play-acting. The face I wear for
them to see has nothing to do with my inner reality. The only world in which I am
at home. The other day on the subway suddenly realized I could see everybody's
face but my own. Suddenly terrified to realize that they could see my face, but
I couldn't. Also understood that this wasn't sane - real, but not sane.
Also felt giddy, and superior. Superior because I knew - absolutely knew
- that someday I would die; and didn't think anybody else on subway knew it the
way I knew it. Got off subway to find a mirror. Looked at myself for along
time, learned nothing. (Somebody, however, caught me making faces at myself;
the next step is talking out loud, muttering to myself like the old ladies -
like the colored lady who unbuttons her blouse and does a shimmy on the BMT. My
God! . . . Remembered the man who exposed himself to me when I was 10, on
subway; I couldn't believe he was playing with it, so convinced myself it was a
rubber-toy substitute. Wondered why he would want to do such a silly thing. Now
nothing surprises me; and I keep thinking of disgusting things.)
How pathetic the way they keep insisting on their
happiness - "We're happy, aren't we? Happier than other people?"
Went to a concert at the New School with Cathy. Alexander
Schneider - Bach, Hayden. Wondered why C. had agreed to go with me - or, for
that matter, why I'd asked her. (I guess I still want the people I've called my
friends to be my friends.) During the intermission, I said, "It's a
pity R. gave up the violin. He shouldn't be operating a clothes press, he
should be making music." C. spat out, "Yes, but he'll live in the New
World, and you won't." So they are all talking after all, because I don't
go out preaching. (We were overheard by woman sitting behind us who teaches my
writing class at the New School, who also saw me crying, and was especially
tender to me at next class - which had the odd effect of making me feel brittle
and irritable. Don't think I know how to respond to kindness anymore.) On the
way home, Cathy said, "You're breaking your mother's heart." What
about my heart? (I know why that tenderness upset me - because I feel
myself giving in to self-pity; and am afraid I'll never stop crying if I begin
in earnest - my eyes are so dry I can hear a little clicking noise when I
blink. I can hear my eyes not crying.)
At the meeting, talk about "filth" of the world:
Excerpts from some sensational tabloid about rate of nervous breakdowns among
UN members and clergy. So what? How about the rate of breakdowns at Bethel?
Also quoted obscure Staten Island paper attacking Tennessee Williams and Arthur
Miller for decadence. Brother who gave this talk has never read Tennessee
Williams or Arthur Miller. They'll use any quote, any statistic, any crackpot
crank to bolster their arguments. Went to bathroom during all this nonsense.
Remembered once at convention, Witness in next stall making strange gurgling
noises in her throat and sighing: she was masturbating (though I didn't realize
it at the time) while they were talking about God and destruction. . . I don't
like masturbating - makes me feel lonely.
I turn into the people I'm with. Which is scary. I have a
fantasy that twenty of my "friends" will come to my funeral, and
they'll all think they're in the wrong place, talking about someone else. One
corpse - and twenty different versions of me. . . . I am myself with Arnold.
I don't understand how I can have resigned myself to
destruction at a battle I don't believe is coming, at the hands of a God I
don't believe exists.
Somewhere Nietzsche says, The greatness of the deed was
too great. I took this step . . . was not able to follow through . . .
could not rise up to what I had done.
When they use words like compassion, tenderness,
gentleness, kindness they always sound as if they're scolding.
Unhappiness is boring.
Spring came. "Breeding lilacs out
of the dead land, mixing memory and desire," Arnold quoted - nourishing,
indoors, old wounds and humiliations he would never share with me. But for me,
a different alchemy: a thaw, a release. The winter's hibernation was over
(years of hibernation); there was an end to all the squirreling around in my
own brain - and a beginning: I felt open to nothing but pure feeling. I felt
happiness rising up irresistibly, fiercely; why? Is it too simple to say that I
had indeed grown bored with unhappiness? That a basically sanguine temperament
had at last asserted itself? Of course it's too simple; but I don't know why
the change came, except that I had youth and its regenerative powers on my
side, and determination to choose happiness, to throw everything bleak and
wintry away.
(Years later, when I visited a
psychiatrist, briefly, he said that given my history, he would have predicted I
would be catatonic by the time I was 30; he regarded me as an interesting
"specimen. "But there are many such specimens walking around; one
either dies of bereavement or moves on to other things - and very few people
die of bereavement.)
I wanted to run away from the past. And
in fact, that April, that May, I did literally run all over the place. Through
Prospect Park; the Botanic Gardens, where the cherry trees were in bloom; up
and down city blocks, as if some great source of energy had been unleashed. I
spent long afternoons in the Gardens; sunlight had never seemed so sweet - not
since I was a little child, a happy little pagan (before Jehovah came), hiding
inside the overhanging branches of my grandmother's mulberry tree, loving the
aqueous light filtering through the leaves, hugging myself in joy. A single
cluster of lilacs was enough to intoxicate me, to send me into private raptures
- and to send me running. (Sex, Freud would say; and he would be wrong. The
thing about that time - when my love for the world was justified by the beauty
of the world - was that nothing was a symbol; everything, simply and
clearly and sweetly, was. And it was good.)
In the mild, disturbing air of that
spring, even pain was an ally, an exquisite plaything. It was my pain.
It belonged to me. And it cruelly excluded everyone else's pain. I fell into
bed limp and exhausted every night, drunk on the beauty I saw everywhere; and
my mother's tears moved me less than spring rain. They were her tears,
not mine. I hardened my heart against them. And slept well.
There was still Arnold:
An afternoon at the Botanic Gardens. I lay down on pine
needles and moss. Pink leaves from a cherry tree floated around me . . . a rosy light. . . . Nothing is anchored. .
. . The next time I see him I will tell him: I love you. Why should it
be so hard to say! ("And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it
have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have
squeezed the universe into a ball, To roll it toward some overwhelming
question, To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,'. . . If one . . . should
say: 'That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.' ") But it
will have been said. I must. I can make him mine -by magic. Even if he doesn't
know. I can become A. I can listen to the same music he listens to, hang the
same picture over my bed that he has hung, so that it will be the first and the
last thing I see each day as it is the first and the last thing he sees.
("Each day I salute the sun, the ocean and the land for your dear sake, my
love.") The same Picasso print he has - not dishonest, I love the Picasso
with the knowing, despairing, wise eyes. And frame it in white with a blue mat,
as he has. I'll buy the records he loves, read the books he reads. If this is
the only way I can have him, I want him. To be part of his life. Not even
loved. Some people walk in and out of his living room casually - as if it were
not enormous to be with him. Just ring the bell and sit near him; I envy them.
I'm not a filling part of his life; I have a walk-on role. I could look at him
forever. I don't require that he be in love with me. If only he loved me and
let me be an active part of his life, why not? I know I'm not as smart as his
friends are. But if I could only be with them. No one could love him more than I
do. I would like to hold him forever, protect him, be a mother to him, a child,
a wife. "You said you might not want to see me again after your
soul-searching," he said. So quietly. Why didn't I tell him then?
The words are fake; the feeling wasn't.
One has to be a greater person than I was not to make the truth sound like lies
on paper.
The day I called him, to say the words,
and hear the words (so foolhardy, also gallant), he didn't answer his phone.
I loved him till he died. I still do,
and miss him very much. And Frequently feel the irrational anger of the child
abandoned by death, as if death were something done to me. And I have thought
until recently that all the passionate loves of my life were somehow grounded
in my love for him, that all the intensity I have brought to other
relationships derived from my unspoken love for him.
I feel now that my love for him was
rooted in something greater (but that is another story); and I learned from him
that men are both attracted to and frightened by the intense love of intense
women, and that men do not require women to be passive so that they maybe
aggressive (it is not simple as that, foil, counterfoil). They require women to
be passive because passion/suffering frightens and alarms them. We see
passionate, intense women as freaks, marked. We can only bear to read about
them in books; in real life they make us uncomfortable.
Which is why, though it may not at
first seem to follow logically, there is nothing so tender and thrilling as
seeing a man in the posture of prayer and devotion; not at all because it gratifies
women to see men humbling themselves, but because it offers us the sight of men
who do not flee in manly false pride from passion and suffering, and because in
houses of prayer (which are so often women's houses, places where women bring
their passion), men in attitudes of devotion take the risk of belief and make
themselves vulnerable - they share the climate of risk and vulnerability in
which women live, and for which women are so seldom, in worldly terms,
rewarded.
Knowing finally (I "knew"
everything by instinct in those days) that Arnold would never be my lover - or
never fully explain himself to me - saddened me. But not with a crushing
sadness. With a dreamy bittersweet sorrow that cast only a faint shadow over my
life, not an oppressive mass. (The truth was, I was in love with my sadness
-with everything that belonged to me; I loved my mysteries.)
I have a snapshot taken at that time in
my life: I am wearing a black leotard and a flared quilted skirt that ends
mid-calf in delicious, provocative waves, my feet are shod in Capezio ballet
slippers; my mouth is fixed in a Tangee (orange-in-the-tube, pink-on-your-lips)
grin; my hair is tortured in an improbable arrangement that has even less to do
with art than it has to do with nature; oversized five-and-dime gold hoop
earrings graze my neck. It is my Greenwich Village uniform. But Greenwich
Village is still largely a country of the mind; and my beauty-parlor perm and
my Tangee Natural and my screw-on earrings mark me as ineffably Brooklyn. Everything,
in fact, is hopelessly out of sync. (How Diane Arbus would have loved me!) I
have created myself in the image of my fantasies, fantasies drawn from movies
and novels of the Bohemian life; I look like a child's energetic drawing of
something he has never seen - crude, imaginative, and unfinished. The look on
my face, bewildered but insanely grinning, is the look I have seen on men's
faces two seconds before they've fully understood that their flies are open in
public.
Decisions began to make themselves.
(They had been making themselves, darkly and mysteriously, in my soul; but when
they happened, it was as if I were being acted upon, not acting. I did not
understand that all decisions are made this way - a slow ripening.) I stopped
going to meetings, with no explanation to God, my mother, or myself. I got a
job in Greenwich Village, that finishing school for my generation of energetic,
imaginative, bemused young women. And my eccentric upbringing was in many ways
a perfect preparation and a passport for my being alive-and-aware (we used the
word aware a lot) in the Village of the 1950s. I fitted as sweetly into
that decade as a nut fits into its shell. Because the thing about the 50's was
that everybody - everybody being the people one knew or emulated or loved -
felt out of sync with his time, and glad of it. We all cherished our
idiosyncrasies and our neuroses; we would have laughed est, AT, Esalen, and all
the '60s/'70s psychic-smoosh therapies to scorn. In spite of the somewhat
paradoxical fact that practically everyone one knew spent his or her time on
the analyst's couch, we couldn't imagine where we'd be without our disfiguring - but interesting -neuroses.
Narcissists worshiping our own
singularity, we seldom thought that there might be public or group solutions to
private problems. We had been teenagers during the McCarthy, HUAC horror; but
neither that cruel nightmare nor the Cold War nor the Korean War - so unlike
the children of the '60s were we - served to "radicalize" or
politicize us. (In my case. of course, these events had passed over my
Jehovah-filled head. I fitted right in
with the crowd. And the most interesting problem for people of my age - people
who grew up in the '50s - remains how to unite the personal and the political,
how to be in the world and of it, but not to be bent out of shape by it.)
Occasionally, it's true, we went to
meetings of the Young Socialist Party, and we heaved sighs over our country's
racism or America's intervention in the affairs of the banana republics, but
mostly we took refuge in the rich interior lives we all believed we had; we did
not know, or think to figure out, how our personal lives could mesh with public
concerns. It was In to be an Outsider. To bean Outsider was to be of the elect.
People were nice to me! I was
constantly amazed by the goodness of people. I had repudiated everything I'd
been taught: I had left Bethel and left the Witnesses precisely because I
couldn't believe that "worldlings" were wicked." But every time
I saw evidence of kindness, it was with a kind of gratified amazement: I'd been
right after all. In my need and innocence and egocentricity, I made the mistake
of thinking that to be pleasant was the same as to be good - and I thought that
everybody who was nice to me was "good." (I still, to some extent,
do.)
After a day at work, and on the
weekends, I sat around in coffeehouses and bars, talking about Salinger and
Camus, talking about "anguished awareness" - conversations that might
have been tailor - made for my own concerns, my own hungers: Camus said "a
subclerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is
common to them" (comforting words for a fledgling secretary); Salinger
said that the Fat Lady sitting on her porch in the unendurable heat, swatting
flies, cancer eating at her insides, was Jesus Christ. Where one registered God,
the other registered human; for both, everything was hallowed by one's
awareness of it. They both inclined us to regard pain as a sacrament. Knowing,
or feeling, that there were no victorious causes, both loved lost causes,
causes that required "uncontaminated souls." Both conveyed the message
that the discipline of awareness led, inevitably, to creation: poets and
artists were the true seers, the only seers. Both seemed to be living on the
dangerous edge of the world. And we said, Whoopee! We'll go live there too.
So we did. We went looking for terrible
beauty and beautiful pain, in search of
holy fools and noble absurd men.
And if, in our coffeehouses and bars
and jazz clubs, we found not poets and
artists, but dilettantes and poseurs, men who managed to be thoroughly
absurd in the vulgar sense - that is, silly - without being at all noble, we
did find plenty of lost causes. Women found men, that is, who spoke the
language of despair and the language of ecstasy, and took them to their bosoms
and to their beds.
What it amounted to was that we would
accept any damned nonsense from a man, provided that it was haloed by poetic feeling.
If our men were struggling and in pain - not to put too fine a point on it, if
they were losers - we brought them cups of consecrated chicken soup.
What we extrapolated from both Salinger
and Camus was the message, perhaps unintended, that we were meant to be handmaidens
to the gods. To the god-in-men. Camus regarded Don Juan as a great wise man who
lived bravely without illusions of eternal love, a man for whom loving and
possessing, conquering and consuming, were ways of knowing, means of provoking
a nonexistent God. What good and faithful pupils we were! We invested every
fast - talking faithless womanizer we knew with noble qualities. We lived to be
loved, possessed, conquered, consumed.
I had left a consuming God - and fallen
right into my generational trap: I longed to be a long-legged, cool, innocent
young woman with an undiscriminating heart - a Salinger/Camus woman, to set off
an ideal man's saintliness or heroism, to mediate between him and the harsh
world, to console - to provide a backdrop for the essential deeds of an
inspired lunatic.
And was nevertheless still a virgin, my
search for an inspired lunatic frustrated by the fact that I lived at home. I
had scruples about offending my parents' sexual morality while living under
their roof and enjoying their protection. Leaving religion, while it had caused
my mother irreparable grief, was for me a matter of survival; but going to bed
with a man for the sake of going to bed with a man seemed capricious and
dishonorable. To say nothing of the fact that I didn't want to go to bed with
anyone I wasn't in love with. My sexual scenario was all in my head. I talked
about sex all of the time, as did everyone I knew; and I waited.
My poor father: He had welcomed me home
like a prodigal; and here I was confounding all his expectations all over
again. Was I never to be a dutiful daughter? Head in his hands, he awaited my
return every night (hymen intact; but how was he to know that?): "How can
a pretty girl like you do these things?"
"I want to get my own apartment,
Daddy."
"Don't say that - I'll
faint."
"But Daddy, I really have to . .
."
He fainted. My father fainted the way
other people sneezed: often, and at the slightest irritant. (I was his
allergy.) As soon as I left the Witnesses, my father - his daughter returned to
him - expected me to conform to his idea of what good Italian girls did (which
was very little of anything). Good Italian girls didn't leave home, God forbid,
except to get married.
Who was getting married? My mother,
whose hatred for Arnold had previously been as intense as her dedication to
Jehovah, took it into her head that I should marry Arnold. Even Arnold (now
that I was a hopeless apostate) was preferable to the fleshpots of Greenwich
Village (in which she had never set foot). But Arnold - whom I still loved, who
took me to concerts and the theater and kissed me chastely on the lips when we
parted - was never going to marry me; or anyone.
Are our lives determined by a single
throw of the dice? If I hadn't had Arnold to teach me to doubt, would I have
learned how to doubt? (I think so.) If I hadn't gone to Mintons one night
almost a year after I left Bethel, would I have found a reason to leave my mother's
house and find my own, chosen life? (I think so.)
But that one night at Mintons
determined the shape my life was take for years to come. And it got me out of
Bensonhurst in a very quick hurry.
Mintons was a jazz club on 128th Street
in Harlem. Charlie Parker had played there; Billie Holliday still sometimes
came in, after hours, with her phalanx of young men, her gardenias and her
poodles, and her broken, heartbreaking voice. In 1956, it was still a place
where two young white women could go unaccompanied. The night I went with my
friend Rosalie from Queens, I fell in love with the sax player. In about the
time it takes to say, "Will you have a drink with me?"
Now, at that time, when all the girls
from Brooklyn and Queens who wore leotards and dreamed of moving to the East
Village were in love with (men's) suffering, jazz musicians - if they were
black - were high in the hierarchy of sufferers. I'm not saying that it was my
Florence Nightingale temperament that made me fall in love with M.; but I'm not
denying that was a contributing factor. Chemistry did the rest. I went to bed
with him in about the time it takes to say, "Yes, thank you, I'll have a
drink with you."
He was wonderfully appealing: witty,
wry, selfish, bitter, self-mocking, poor, married, a libertine who demanded
total commitment from his women, a good and generous lover (when he was there).
A perfect person with whom to break all the rules. And I was of course
determined to break all the rules. Black jazz musicians were the inner circle
of the Outsiders. Proximity to him guaranteed a place in that privileged
circle. I joined a world celebrated by Beat poets. Paris had its existential
chanteuses; I (and women like me) had the real thing: we lived next to the real
cry of the heart.
Those musicians: they used women to
sustain them (both sexually and financially); and we, I am afraid, played our
part in this dicey game. We objectified them by loving their suffering better
than we loved them. The truth was, most jazz musicians wanted with all their
hearts to become safe studio musicians and to live on Park Avenue with German
maids. It was we, their romantic camp followers, who thought the secular
equivalent of the Holy Grail could be found at the Five Spot or Mintons or
Birdland, we who thought their poverty was a mark of their noble not-belonging.
Told to drain life to its dregs, where better could we do it than in smoky
clubs, illegal after-hours joints, with wounded men who had lovers in other
towns? Everything in that world gratified my hunger for experience; it was like
being plunged into pure feeling unsullied by thought. We were chained to men we
regarded, not without reason, as rebels and martyrs. The fact that these rebels and martyrs burned us up in the
furnace of their own needs made everything all the more dangerous, hence all
the more exciting. (And I was used to furnaces.)
That world was full of joy-those men
were, after all, true creators, and they
laughed a lot. But it was never really happy. To live in and for the
moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort.
In her younger days, M.'s mother had
been madam of a brothel. "A home for young ladies," she'd told me it
was, one morning when she was sipping her cognac (also telling me that I was
the "bluesiest" white lady she d ever met. She was hiding me, at the
time, from M.'s wife, a much-put-upon woman given to sudden raids). All
the "young ladies" wore red taffeta This was my introduction to her:
M. and I had been seeing each other for about six months when he took me to
Dayton, Ohio, where she lived When we arrived, she was out, running numbers. M.
and I went to bed. Sometime in the middle of the night, I felt the covers being
pulled off me, and I awoke to find an enormous woman, dressed like a mountain
on fire, peering over her son's naked body to examine mine. "B plus,"
she pronounced coolly; and she patted me on the head and sailed majestically
out of the room.
If I'd wanted a baptism of fire into
the world (and I did!), I couldn't have made a better choice. (I've never
regretted it.)
I had by that time been living in the
East Village for four months. (I don't know what the actual geographical
distance is from Bensonhurst to Dayton, but the psychological distance could
have been measured in light years.) I had moved, not only because there was a
limit to how much I was willing to outrage my family's sensibilities, but
because I talked in my sleep. The morning my mother said (in the voice she
reserved for the most awful i.e., sexual, offenses), "You said terrible
things in your sleep last night" was the morning of the day I began
apartment-hunting in earnest.
What amazes me most about the two years
I spent with M. was the total absence of sexual guilt. I never for a moment
thought what I was doing was bad. If I had any twinges of conscience at all,
they had to do with M.'s faraway wife - and those twinges were few: love, I
thought, created its own rules, transcended ordinary definitions of right and
wrong.
The time I spent with M. burned (I
thought) the past away. A year after I left Bethel, it was as if all those
years had never been. M. was my exorcist, well chosen. I compressed a lifetime
of learning and feeling and sexually loving into one year.
And so the Jehovah-less 1950s went.
When my affair ended (I got tired, really), I tried on other lives. Another
man, another life: I became a devoted practitioner of serial monogamy (and gave
God not a thought), seeking nurturance and a way to live. I did not think of
myself as marked by my religious experience, or as singular, or different from
any other women I knew. The past had died without funeral rites. (I sometimes
exhibited the corpse at parties: "I used to be a Jehovah's Witness."
Calculated to amuse. Like saying, "I used to be a Teen-age
Werewolf.")
A lot has been made of women's
masochism. The women I knew inthe'50s suffered from another disorder: we all
had multiple personalities. When I said good-bye to M., I said good-bye to the
jazz world. And hello to the Cedar Bar, hangout of Pollock and Franz Kline,
home of Abstract Expressionists. The next man, you will have guessed, was an
Artist. A Poor, Struggling Artist. So I tried on that life. Saturdays outside
McSorley's - Lower East Sidebar which did not then admit women to its sacred
saw-dusty precincts - sitting on a camp chair, knitting argyle socks for the
Artist (those sensitive watercolors!). And after that, it was a Writer.
A Bold, Uncompromising, Anti-Establishment Writer who hurt a lot. Blood on the
page, and Would you please correct my proofs? Sundays at literary
salons.
And so on. I'm not saying it was
altogether bad, that multiplicity of personalities. It was, if you didn't
forget entirely who you were, exciting. If you did forget entirely who you
were, you could have a'50s identity crisis-after which you usually got married.
I got married.
I had two children.
Dorothy Day has said that the birth of
her daughter was so joyous convinced her of the existence of God. My births
were joyous too - orgasmic; I did not, however, as a consequence praise God.
And I thought of God only when my
husband, in casual conversation stated his beliefs; which were that he didn't
know if there was a God, but God existed, God had to be good. Which provoked me
to rage: I thought it was stupid, sentimental rubbish and maddeningly devoid of
logic, and somehow smug (I couldn't bear his taking the word God
casually in his mouth, along with his martinis and his gin-and-limes). How
could one infer from the fact of God's existence the fact of God's goodness? It
didn't follow.
It particularly didn't follow in India,
where my husband had gone to work and where we lived. Where was the evidence of
God's goodness? In the poverty and degradation that forced one either to
cauterize one's senses or to curse one's own impotence every day of one's life?
In the rats that bit off the deadened fingers of lepers while they slept? In
the deformed beggars who dogged our path every time we set foot in the bazaar
with our fat American purses? In the bland carelessness of the very rich who
pronounced blessings over quadruple amputees on their way to tea parties where
they discussed endlessly whether it hurt a fish to be pierced by a hook? In the
bloated bellies of children who stuffed their mouths with mud to satisfy their
hunger? In the blind saddhu who died outside our kitchen door, naked and erect?
Once, when my husband came back from an inspection tour of a leprosarium, I
taunted him: Do you still believe that if God exists He is good?
This is the worst fight I ever had with
my husband: My son (born in Libya, where evidence of God's goodness didn't seem
too manifold either) had been diagnosed (incorrectly) as having leukemia. We
were living in Bombay; we got the diagnosis on Christmas Eve (and lived with it
for thirty-six hours); I was eight months pregnant with my second child, my
daughter. My husband said that he would pray for our son. I flew into an
earsplitting rage, wild, demented: he had never, in good times and in fair
domestic weather, prayed; how dare he pray now? My husband, in his great grief
over our son, hardly knew how to answer the fury I had become. He said, mildly,
"Do you mean you're not going to pray for Josh?"
"Never," I said. "I wouldn't ask a crumb of Him, that
bully."
My rage should have taught me
something. I persisted in believing that a11 my ties to God had been severed,
that my feeling for God was as moribund as I believed Him to be. I didn't
understand how fraught His absence was, how significant.
When I lived in Tripoli, I loved to
hear the high sweet call of the muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer.
On frequent visits to Rome, I spent
most of my time in churches, some of it on my knees.
When I lived in Guatemala, I surreptitiously
made the sign of the cross when religious processions passed.
Once, in Warangal, in central India, I
entered (as a sight-seer - Eastern religion had little appeal for me) a temple
no longer used for worship, set in a
wooded hollow in a dry plain. The cool, dry temple smelled of bat dung, a
sick-sweetish odor, and of old flower offerings and of centuries of bodies and
time. I approached the Shiva altar and immediately felt what I can only
describe as a presence - like the rushing and reverberating of great wings. I
fled to the Land-Rover outside, words of self-mockery already forming on my
lips.
But what was all this but aesthetics,
architecture, and aberration? It had nothing to do with God. I would have been
outraged at any such presumptuous suggestion.
I was lonely, and purposeless. I was
not in love with my husband. (I remember, just before I married him, thinking,
"I will never love his body" - and marrying him nevertheless. I
thought marriage would be restful; I thought he was good. I was tired. We
wanted to love each other; I thought that would be enough.) My children,
nourishment and joy, did not provide what I felt I lacked: a central core to my
existence. But, I told myself, most overseas wives were purposeless - unless
they were able to regard a series of distractions as a life; and most,
uprooted, were lonely - unless they were very much in love with their husbands
(and sometimes even then).
I remember sitting in the ruins of
Leptis Magna, tracing my fingers over mosaics thousands of years old, sitting
under a bougainvillea tree (thousands of glorious purple clusters), gazing at
the blue-green-turquoise Mediterranean, everything fresh and clean, ancient and
formal - and feeling that nothing could ever dazzle or surprise me again.
There is an amphitheater that rises out
of the desert in Tunisia, larger than the Colosseum at Rome, and a traveler
comes upon it unprepared. It suddenly, breathtakingly there. Except that it
didn't take my breath away. If I had read about it in a book, I would have been
thrilled and enraptured. When I saw it, it seemed unremarkable. Everything
seemed unremarkable.
When people ask me what I did in India
for four years, I say lightly, "I arranged flowers in vases." But of
course I did, and felt, much more in that vast, maternal landscape, which is
not so much a country as a state of mind. I was loved by two men, and I loved a
third - all loves ephemeral, but forcing a wedge between me and my husband. A
tangled but banal story (and a story for another time). I was busy. India
defeats busy-ness, as it has defeated travelers, seekers, conquerors. I drifted
into and out of experience (changed, in some deep emotional way, by India itself
- in a way it will no doubt take me years to fully understand). I drifted.
India is not a country to which one gives, or from which one wrests; one can
only give in - and for the vulnerable, passivity seems a voluptuous form
of action. India happens to you. But: "What did you do in India? Did you
like it?" "I arranged flowers in vases." One doesn't like
India; one either loves or hates it, and it is frequently hard to distinguish
one emotion from the other and surprisingly easy to entertain both at the same
time. So much happened there; but on my 30th birthday in Hyderabad, I thought,
This is what they'll write on my tombstone: "She had lovely friends, she
gave good parties, she arranged flowers in vases. Thirty; and I had no reason
to suppose that I'd ever have more than I had; and it wasn't enough.
I wanted to go home, to America:
Listening to Martin Luther King say, "We shall overcome" on the
U.S.I.S. overseas radio wasn't quite the real exciting thing; deploring the war
at cocktail parties in Guatemala City (where the Embassy's First Secretary
considered Senator Fulbright a traitor) was an exercise in shrill futility. I'd
acquired a taste for political activism. I wanted to go home.
We came home. I kept up with the times:
came to New York, bought a Brooklyn brownstone, got a divorce, sent my children
to a progressive school. It was 1966: civil rights, protest marches,
consciousness-raising.
My life was centered around my work, my children, my friends, and
an occasional (but never enduring) lover.
What more could one ask for? I had
gotten more than I had bargained for when I left religion. I no longer engaged
in puerile discussions with myself about whether it was "right" to be
happy; I had experienced highs and lows and struggles and uncertainties and joys.
Enough joy, always, to redeem the muddle. I reminded myself, occasionally, to
prize my sexual and intellectual freedom; it had been bought at very great
price. I never ever regretted the decision to leave the Witnesses - which
seemed to have been made, in any case, by a very different person from the one
I had become. I knew that it had been an act of great courage (or necessity -
they are frequently the same thing). I didn't know whether I'd ever be able to
find that courage again; but then, I doubted whether I'd ever need it again.
I cherished the intensity I brought to
and found in friendships. It sometimes vexed the patience of other people; but
it also resulted in friendships that were lasting, sustaining, and sometimes
sublime. My work gratified me. (I still haven't recovered from the surprise I
felt when I first realized that other people wanted to read what I wanted to
write, and I still feel like an impostor. Maybe all writers feel like this;
certainly most of the women writers I know do.) My children rescued me from
frivolity and tied me to the world in the most healthy and sanguine way. The
lesson I learn and relearn from them is that while pessimism of the intellect
may be here to stay, optimism of the spirit is still possible. They give the lie
to a society that tends to regard children as impediments, devourers of psychic
time and energy. They nourish, they replenish; complex human beings, they bring
one back to a simplicity that is beyond sophistication. They ask the questions
adults find embarrassing to ask, which are the only questions worth asking: Why?
and What is good? (They're also fun.) I love their flesh, the words they
speak.
Words: I once had an almost
encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. After I left the Witnesses, I could
remember only two Scriptures by heart. One of them was the first verse of the
Gospel according to Saint John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God." It seemed to me that no novelist
could be capable of such a dense and thrilling sentence. (The Witnesses
vitiated and removed the mystery from this text in their New World
Translation of the Bible: "In the beginning the Word was, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was a god.")
There is a Welsh hymn (I didn't for a
long time know it was a hymn; I thought it was a love song, which of course it
is) that I sang over and over in moments of elation:
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.
Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dew fall on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness, where His feet pass.
Mine is the sunlight
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light Eden saw play
Praise with elation
Praise every morning
God's re-creation of the new day.
Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing
Praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the Word.
My life was a chosen one; I was luckier
than most. It would be a betrayal of my children, of the men and women who have
loved me, and a betrayal of self, not to say that it was a good life. But the
impulse to praise when there is No One to praise makes the heart sore. I did
not, could not, praise the Lord.
My experience with the Witnesses - more
accurately, the experience of leaving that stale, dry religion (which
was a form of servitude) - had created a hunger for words unsatisfied by a
secular society; unfashionable words: good, evil, love. As we progressed
into the1970s, love became a word one heard on soap operas or read in
gothic romances - or in poetry, of course; but so many poets are more infatuated
with death and madness than concerned with love (and every poem that had the
word vagina or tampon or uterus in it automatically became
a Brave New World "woman's" poem, boring). One could talk about any
variety of sexual experience without fear of being thought uncouth; love
became a closet word that seldom saw the intellectual light of day. So cool
were we (and so intent upon having multiple orgasms), we confused love with
sentimentality and eschewed them both. The 1960s, when everybody
"loved" everybody indiscriminately (which was the same as loving
nobody at all), and everybody was "beautiful," put a curse on that
word; love became as California-tacky as groovy.
Freud didn't satisfy that hunger for
words; neurotic and healthy were poor, weak substitutes for good
and evil, reductive and shallow.
"I want what is good," I said
to my analyst.
"What is good for you,"
he reproached me gently.
"Why do you join protest
marches?" he asked.
"Because the war is evil," I
said.
"Now let's talk about the real
reason you march," he said.
"Why are you ten minutes
late?"
"Because my baby-sitter was twenty
minutes late, and I have a sick child."
"Now let's talk about the real
reason you're late."
"Why do you work with poor
people?"
"Because they're poor."
"Now let's talk about the real
reason you work with poor people."
We spoke different languages. Our
association was short-lived.
Marxism, with its tension between the
idealistic and the pragmatic, came closer to satisfying my hungers, but it left
unsatisfied the desire to praise.
(Falling in love, to which I was prone,
helped: an elevation of consciousness, a temporary state of grace.)
The sloppy pseudo-spiritual panaceas of
the '70s spoke to me not at all. They all seemed gaudy and ephemeral and banal
and narcissistic as well as politically reactionary - Werner-wastelands of
garbage-language and second rate ideas, as gritty as processed cheese and about
as nourishing. Who wants to jabber endlessly about "experiencing one's
experience"? (that's est-talk); and who wants to pretend, as do all our
spiritual/assertive-happy gurus that economics and Hiroshima have nothing to do
with the way we live now? I can gaze at my own navel without anybody's
assistance.
(If I've not mentioned the Women's
Movement, it is because I think it's implicit in everything I've written that
I'm a feminist; I fail to understand how any responsible human being can not be
a feminist. And I hope it goes without saying that I could not have begun to
understand my past, or to live with any measure of honesty in the present,
without the help of the women's Movement, which, if it has taught us anything
at all, has taught us the dangers of interpreting our experience through the
distorting lens of conventional wisdom - although I must say I resisted the
Women's Movement for a long time, my experience with the Witnesses having
inclined me to the mischievous
idea that there can never be a public solution to a private problem. I shied
away from Marxism for the same, stubborn, prideful reason: my way, alone. Until
I understood something very simple: everything is connected. It is helpful to
me to understand that I was a victim of the Witnesses' institutionalized sexism
and that, ironically, many of the women
who choose now to be Witnesses do so because they are casualties of a
sexist society seeking desperate remedies.)
There are certain words, as there are
certain passages of music, that move us without our knowing why. I cannot tell
you why Let us sit upon the ground
and tell sad tales of the death of kings moves me to tears - any more than
I can explain why I find solace in walking through graveyards, touching the
tombstones of people long dead (or prove to you that there is more of
tenderness and quietude than of morbidity in these wanderings).
I have always, however, understood the
magic of one Scripture I carried in my heart when I left the Witnesses; this
one, from Isaiah (32:2): "And a man shall be as an hiding place from the
wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the
shadow of a great rock in a weary land."
When I left the Witnesses, it was to
discover the world, which I was prepared to find beautiful. I found what
everybody finds: It's as good a place as any to work in, beautiful and ugly in
equal measure; there are moments of transcendent joy, and times when the world
(like one's heart) is dry and weary.
There are temporary refuges; there are
(it seems to those who live without God's grace) no "covert from the
tempest," no refreshing river in the dry places, no shadows in which to
hide.
Sisyphus, rolling the stone up the
mountain, knew the dryness and the weariness and the harshness of the world;
poised at the top of the mountain, for one brief moment, before he took up his
intolerable burden again, he experienced the joy and exaltation of the free man
who carries his burden alone, loving not only the moment of respite, but the
burden itself, because it was his burden. That moment of intense awareness
made up for, justified, an unending struggle against an appointed fate:
His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his
passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is
exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for
the passions of this earth. . . . One sees merely the whole effort of a body
straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred
times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone,
the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh
start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted
hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time
without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush
down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up
again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.
It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests
me. . . I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward
the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a
breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of
consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and
gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is
stronger than his rock. . . .
Sisyphus, . . . powerless and rebellious, knows the whole
extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.
The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his
victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it
can also take place in joy. . .
When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when
the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises
in man's heart: This is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These
are our nights of Gethsemane. . .
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a
man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
"I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and
that remark is sacred. - The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert
Camus, (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp.120-23
When I left the Witnesses, I told
myself that if I had to spend the rest of my life alone (believing that in all
the important things, I would always be alone), the leaving would still have
been worth it. I could not foresee the consequences of leaving; but I knew that
the act itself was necessary, that I must not try to anticipate the
consequences, and that the consequences of not acting would be worse than
anything that might happen to me afterward. In all the years that followed, I
never found reason to regret my decision, even through all the inescapable
desolations and humiliations, the hurts and wounds that life inflicts upon us
all. I vowed to accept as truth only that which I knew to be true, and to live
- "convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human" - with
only that which I knew to be true. I expected to live and die without
certainty, without the absolute, and without absolution.
(Sometimes there was pure joy in
remembering why I had left. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge at night, seeing that
skyline burning hot and icy, the skyline that defined and was a symbol for the
world - "This is mine, all mine" - I rejoiced; I had chosen it; I
loved it (I love it). And sometimes when making love. Or decorating the
Christmas tree with my children - squabbling, hassling, but alive and juicy, in
love with whatever was human and whatever was magic. At those moments, I
remembered the years of deprivation, but only to exult in the riches of the
present. The past was like a bad dream. The nights of Gethsemane were lived
through; there was always a morning.)
I was (am) often false, frivolous,
silly, negligent. I read, when I was 35, the diary of a 17-year-old girl who
swore "never to compromise," and I loved her: I was that girl, and I
had compromised, and had been compromised. But I had never expected it to be
easy. And I could tell myself that I had performed one tremendous, courageous
act: I had left a religion that was small and peevish and meretricious to take
my lumps and my joy where I found them. Where I found them. Nothing further I
might ever do would equal that one deed; but it had been done. It was the
source of my pride, and of my self-love.
And there were lovers and friends and
comrades, brothers and sister, along the way.
I learned to live with periods of
self-loathing, self-doubt. I understood that my nature was too passionate and
too intense for comfort - my own, other people's - and that I had nothing and
nobody to bring that passion and intensity to. But that was the price of
being fully human: I had learned to
live without God. Cynical and charming (and hungering), luckier than most, I
made my way.
And that is where the story ought to
end.
I thought, in fact, when I began to
write this book, that (barring pleasant, but not earthshaking, surprises) the
story had ended.
I was wrong.
Some thaw, some
release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the
. . . hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. - William James,
Varieties of Religious Experience
If God does not exist,
why isn't the universe all dark brown? -Louise Bogan, What the Woman Lived, Jean
Limmer, ed.
Batter my heart, three
person'd God . . . for I except you entrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever
chased, except you ravish me. -John Donne, Holy Sonnets, XIV
This is the hardest part to write.
Perhaps the best way is just to set down the facts.
When I began this book, I was a
theological illiterate.
Words like redemptive and sacramental
crept into my vocabulary, nonplusing my friends and vaguely disturbing me. I
couldn't find their secular equivalent. I loved saying them.
A magazine asked me to interview
Dorothy Day. In the course of a phone conversation, she talked about the Hell's
Angels outside one of her Houses of Hospitality and how they were raucously
threatening her peace. She said she was going to pray for them at Vespers; and
would I join her? I said I was afraid I was unable to pray. She said,
"Well, then, dear, I'll pray for you and for the Hell's Angels at
Vespers." It tickled me to be thrown in with the Hell's Angels; I thought,
You wouldn't catch the Witnesses praying for Hell's Angels; and I loved the
word Vespers.
Later that week, a friend sent me a
crucifix - a tiny pewter Jesus, warm and soft with age. "Why did you do
that? I'm not religious." "Guess again," she said. (I'm not
claiming to have seen the hand of God in this; one of the things I despised
about the Witnesses was their ability to make supernatural hullabaloo about
every natural occurrence if they were involved in it; I am saying that I
cherished both the call and the present; and I began to carry crucifix with
me.)
Halfway through writing this book, I
had a bitter experience with a man, the long and short of it being that I grew
to hate him with a hatred so corrosive I felt I could not survive its toxin.
I did not know what to do with these
feelings. I did not feel I could live with them. No admixture of pity - just
pure, venomous hatred. I couldn't bear myself. (I have spoken of my mother in
terms that are less than endearing. But I want to say: I have always wanted to
love her; I have always wanted her to love me. And in fact I do love the person
she was before she became what it was perhaps impossible for her not to become.
It grieves me that what I've written will grieve her, that my necessities
overcame my scruples. Where he was concerned, I had no grief, no pity, no
scruples.)
Obsessed, I wrote him letters every day
for six months, calling him everything vile and hateful and loathsome. I didn't
mail them. They did not act as a catharsis; they made me hate him all the more.
(For what it's worth: When we were happy together, he frequently sang - at
my request, in a clear Irish tenor - Gregorian chants. He recited the liturgy
to me. Anglo-Irish, he'd gone to a Benedictine public school in England; he
hated the Church; he - and I - loved to hear the Latin words roll off his
tongue - ancient, calm, and formal.) "And she offered her pain up to
God." I'd read that in a novel. (What one learns from characters in
books!) In desperation, without calculation, I asked God - in Whom I did not
believe - to take my hatred away, to exorcise it.
I do not believe in magic.
I woke up the next morning, and the
hatred was gone. From which I drew no conclusions.
I was a theological illiterate. I was
faced, some time after the incident I have just described, with the task of
comparing the doctrines of the Witnesses with the teachings of traditional
Christianity. Providentially, I read Teilhard de Chardin. And fell in love with
Teilhard; and - even I could not escape drawing the conclusion this tine - with
God.
Not with the idea of God, and
not with the little, punitive Jehovah of my youth. With the Triune God of love
and mercy who calls us to Him in spite of our callused hearts, "unto whom
all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are
hid"; with that God Who is "the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land," "Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of light, Light
of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made"; with the God Who asks
us not to desert the world, but to join our works in the world to His, to be
co-creators of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. I fell in love with the God Who,
made flesh, bore the anguish of man (by virtue of which nothing is profane);
with the God Whose love brings us back to the things of this world, Who,
knowing that the world can be terrifying, blind, and brutal, nevertheless
commands us to be happy; with the God Who invites us to believe in the
communion of saints and to share in the mystical totality of Christ.
(And don't ask me about the origins of
evil, or about rats and bloated bellies and earthquakes and why He permits
them. I don't know. When I was a Witness, I had the answer to all those
questions, or thought I did. What I did not have was faith in the ultimate
goodness of God. Now I don't have answers; I have faith. "For now we see
through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then
shall I know even as also I am known." I only know that I will know. And I
know that that leap into belief was not an escape into passivity or resignation
or withdrawal from the world; it was the beginning of a truly human struggle to
realize God in the world.)
Why not, then, secular humanism? Why
Christianity? Theologian Hans Kung says:
Christians are no less humanists than all humanists. But
they seethe human, the truly human, the humane; they see man and his God; see
humanity, freedom, justice, life, love, peace, meaning: all these they see in
the light of this Jesus who for them is the concrete criterion, the Christ. In
his light they think they cannot support just any kind of humanism which simply
affirms all that is true, good, beautiful and human. But they can support a
truly radical humanism which is able to integrate and cope with what is untrue,
not good, unlovely, inhuman: not only everything positive, but also - and here we discern what a humanism has to
offer - everything negative, even suffering, sin, death, futility.
Looking to the crucified and living Christ, . . . man is
able not only to act but also to suffer, not only to live but also to die. And
even when pure reason breaks down, even in pointless misery and sin, he
perceives a meaning, because he knows that here too in both positive and
negative experience he is sustained by God. Thus faith in Jesus the Christ
gives peace with God and with oneself, but does not play down the problem's of
the world. It makes man truly human, because truly one with other men: open to
the very end for the other person, the one who needs him here and now, his
"neighbor."
By following Jesus Christ man in the world of today can
truly humanly live, act, suffer and die: in happiness and unhappiness, life and
death, sustained by God and helpful to men.- On Being a Christian (New
York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 602
Fair enough; but more telling cases, it
seems to me, have been made for secular humanism - Camus, for example, is more
thrilling to read than Hans Kung. In the end, whether or not one is a Christian
has almost nothing to do with persuasive intellectual argument: it has to do
with whether one has experienced God; it has to do with the grace of God - a
mystery. It as little to do with how "good" a person is:
Some . . . seem more inclined to affirm man than to deny
God. Again, some form for themselves such a fallacious idea of God that when
they repudiate this figment, they are by no means rejecting the God of the
Gospel . . . Moreover, atheism results not rarely from a violent protest
against the evil in this world. - Vatican Council II, The Church in the
Modern World, No.19
It is the believer's conviction that many seek God - and
find him in the depths of their being - without realizing it: some through
their unrelenting pursuit of truth, justice, the good of the community, or
another humanitarian ideal - and many through their insatiable thirst for love.
. . . Through their total commitment to a transcendent ideal, they are, to the
believer, reaching the absolute we call God. . .
Sometimes, perceiving no end to their quest, they lapse
into a seeming cynicism, take refuge in flippancy or strike out against the
believer - but to the discerning believer their reaction is only the measure of
their unknowing love, a love that might be far greater than his. The believer
must always pray, "0 God, some know and serve you as truth, honor,
integrity, service . . . as well as I, and perhaps better . . .
God is truly inaccessible and incomprehensible; we are
totally dependent on his revelation of himself and can never take for granted
that we know much at all about him and his will for us.
The committed believer and unbeliever then have much in
common. Both are dedicated seekers of truth. Both seek in darkness - to both
God is an absence, one who is not there, for he is not an object to be found.
Yet he is there, for both believer and unbeliever have an objective in their
lifelong striving-though called different names, conceptualized differently, by
each. To both, then, God is a presence and an absence, one who is there, and
one who is not there.-Anthony Wilhelm, Christ Among Us (New York:
Paulist Press, 1975)
I could not believe in a Church, or in
a God, that required me to believe that the goodness and the idealism of the
believer surpassed the goodness and the idealism of the nonbeliever. When I
left the Witnesses, I said, "God can't kill Arnold." I am not required
now to believe that Arnold is damned. I am not obliged to believe that anyone
is damned. Which is not to say that evil is not given the name of evil: Blake
says, "To love thine enemies is to betray thy friends/That surely is not
what Christ intends." That is something to think about: the Church demands
that we think and that we listen to the imperatives of our conscience, even
when, especially when, the imperatives of our conscience go against the
authoritative teachings of the Church. The law is not written on stone; it is
written on the heart; that is something the Witnesses - in their literalism -
do not understand.
That summer, the summer I read Teilhard
and fell in love with God, I had an absolute conviction that He was present,
that He was adorable, and finally that His wish to be known was as great as my
wish to know Him. That is what I mean by "experiencing" God. I was
not, like Paul, blinded by a sudden light, nor, like Saint Teresa, pierced to
the quick by the arrows of His love. I did not swoon. My conversion, if it can
be called such, did not feel like a sudden fall or a sudden flight. It didn't
feel "sudden" at all. It felt like a coalescing, a culmination, a
unifying, a knitting together of everything that had ever happened to me; and
most of all it felt like a sweetness, sweeter than anything I had ever
experienced before. It also did not feel like the end of a road; it felt like
the beginning of a walk out of a tunnel into light. It was rapturous. The tears
I cried that summer were tears of release, as if something frozen had shattered
into a pinwheel of kaleidoscopic light.
I was living at MacDowell, an artists'
colony in New Hampshire. I am an urban person; when I think of
"Nature," I think of it as something other people do, involving
mosquitoes and unidentifiable objects and gibberish noises in the too-dark
night. Given a postcard-pretty New England green, I register "lovely"
- and feel homesick for a New York bag lady and a bopping Puerto Rican with a
transistor radio. (When I was young, there was a ladder leading up to my loft
room in my grandparents' country house; it had been built by Bruno Hauptmann,
with whom my grandfather had worked. Noone could convince me that the
scrabbling noises I heard on the roof were chipmunks or field mice or whatever
creatures are supposed to inhabit the Country: I waited, every night, for
footsteps to ascend the stairs, the ladder, for someone or thing, foreign and
malevolent, to come and get me.) Every time I 'd spent a summer on the ocean,
I'd felt obliged to stand on the shore at night before going to bed, to see if
a tidal wave was coming. I never gave any thought to what I'd do if I saw a
tidal wave on the horizon; I just needed to reassure myself that the ocean was
behaving itself. And I'd never spent a night in the Country without all my
clothes on, in case of emergency. As far as I was concerned, the Country was a
permanent state of emergency, incompatible with the needs of civilized humans.
But that summer, for the first time,
the Country held no fears for me. The physical world had lost its menace, its
threatening and overwhelming other-ness; it had never looked so beautiful.
There was this paradox: I felt a
heightening of all my excited senses; I felt a profound peace, I entered a deep
rest - and I felt a quiet power. This is what I knew: that I would never feel
abandoned again. I knew, too, that the rapture would not last, but that all the
things that were healed and better would stay healed and better.
Unable to contain my feelings (blasting
Bach's B Minor Mass on the library stereo, hearing Eliot's solemn dry
voice intoning And let our cry come unto thee wasn't enough), I talked
to my fellow colonists about God. An embarrassing topic of conversation.
Responses ranging from "Explain earthquakes" to "All those years
I didn't eat meat on Friday, what a waste". . . and one woman's voice
saying, "But if you did it for the love of God, it wasn't a waste, was it?
That's the point of God: nothing is lost." And another voice saying wryly,
"Welcome to the struggle. I'll be glad to know how you manage to reconcile
your feminism with your Catholicism. I'm having a rather hard time of it
myself." Lectures, mostly from atonal composers, on the venality and the
contradictions and the iniquities of the Church (by which they meant the
hierarchy). A contrapuntal voice saying, "God's Church is a terrible
Church. Nevertheless it is God's Church, God help us."
The response I encountered most often
was that I was in the throes of a summer romance. Which wasn't far off the
mark. I had surrendered, without a question or a qualm. The questions, the
qualms, were to come later. (I do not understand this mystery: faith precedes
understanding.) I was later to quarrel with my lover/God; but, having fallen in
love/belief, I had established a loving relationship within which to quarrel.
So different from the Witness days: my doubts did not terrify me. To try to
pray was to pray. To surrender was to lose nothing, but to be immeasurably
enhanced. This to me seems the greatest mystery of faith, and the mark of true
religion The believer is enriched; sacrifice is not self-effacement.
When I compare the Church with the
Witnesses, I think: The Witnesses explained everything, and explained
everything legalistically. The Church does not attempt to explain everything:
triumphant, militant, glorious, it is humble enough to get on its august knees
and say "We do not know"; "We have committed grave errors."
(I do love the paradoxes of the Church.
With all the great art and music of the world at its disposal, the church in
Peterborough, New Hampshire, alarms the Sunday-morning air with recorded
electronic bells - which drives the local good - taste Episcopalians wild, and
which I think is funny.) The Church has room for everything, including, God
knows, vulgarity. That is what I love about it - that it is catholic,
universal.
I sometimes wish, with the nostalgia of
all recent converts who revere what they have never known, that the Church
would return to its ancient, formal aesthetic ways. The vernacular does not
thrill me, nor do folk masses; and - while I know I am guilty of hopelessly
objectifying them - I wish that contemplative nuns would go back to
contemplating and praying for me instead of throwing pots (there are enough bad
potters in the world, and there is not enough prayer); and when my son said to
me recently after a nun had visited us, "Since when do priest - ladies look
like California stewardesses?" I found myself agreeing. But I know that I
am being silly. Because along with all the changes in the Church (some of which
I can't help deploring) has come a great openness, an embracing. The Church is
in ferment, yeasty and alive. To enter the Church now is to become part of a
living organism; choices are required of us all - and to choose prayerfully is
harder than to worship by rote.
Mostly when I compare the Witnesses
with the Church, I think: To be a Witness meant not to give, but to give up;
whereas the Church says that not to use one's talents to join one's efforts to
God's is "a serious wrongdoing." The Church says that to be godly is
to be fully human, and to be fully human is to be godly.
What I fell in love with was the Mass,
the mystery of the Sacraments, the liturgy. What I love is God.
I alarmed people in New Hampshire by
being religious in what they perceived to be an unreligious way: I tried to
steal a Book of Common Prayer (the beauty of that language - And let our cry
come unto Thee!) from the local Episcopal church (which was beautiful, and
where I attended Communion). I didn't think God would mind; my fellow colonists
thought the minister would. (It is interesting tome how people who profess not
to be religious are always telling people who profess to be religious how to be
religious.)
I alarmed my friends at home more
seriously: When the passage of time had convinced them that this wasn't an
aberration, they expressed fear, bewilderment, cynicism ("Are you looking
for an ending to your book?") - and worst and most painful, betrayal. They
thought my intellect would take a vacation. They thought all my moral values
would change (they have not; they have just been given a context). I found it
difficult to convince my friends that I was still a feminist, still politically
radical, only something had been added: God. In which case, they invariably
responded if nothing has changed, why do you need God? The answer is, of
course, that while nothing has changed, everything has changed. I know what the
internal changes are; the external changes are still revealing themselves. And
when one's conscience propels one in the direction of the Church, there is
little one can do about it; nor would I wish to do anything about it.
It is a source of great joy to me that
praise and doubt are not mutually exclusive; that I can question the hierarchy
and not be regarded as a reprobate or a bad child; that I can engage in loving
arguments with members of the Church and still be part of a loving family, a
living community whose voices frequently clash with one another's, but who are
united in love of God, united at the Mass. (And at the same time, I do not want
to fall into the trap of making things too easy for myself, of accepting only
that which is palatable and rejecting out of hand all that is difficult. I have
my confessor's help in this - dear, holy man, he got a handful when he got me:
and I pray that I have God's.)
Some of my friends say that what all
this is about is a return to ethnic origins, a desire - inspired by my
association with the Witnesses - for community. They are, of course, partly
right. And others, less kindly, ask me why I need a "crutch." (That
question usually comes from people in analysis; tact prevents me from asking
them the obvious question.)
I do not feel that I have given up
intellectual or moral responsibility for my life. I have questions that have to
be answered. But I think the answers are to be found within the framework of
the Church, and the struggle has to be fought within the framework of the
Church - which does not despise questions or questioners. My New Hampshire
friend was right: to be a Catholic and a feminist and a leftist sometimes
appears to be a fantastic juggling act. I think of the hierarchy's position on
abortion, and the Church's statements about sexuality, and of the position of
women in the Church - all vexing and painful issues. I am not concerned with
the gender of the Deity - Who seems to me to be a living flame, and that takes
care of that - and furthermore, if God had come to earth as a woman, no one
would have listened to Him/Her. When I learn more about the historical context
in which Paul, that maddening, saintly man, wrote, I will be able to come to
terms with him, talking about female submission in one breath, saying "In
Christ there is no slave, no freeman, no male, no female" in the next. That
can come later. In the meantime, I am patient. I have never been so patient in
my life. Which is not the same as passive. But the thing about this juggling
act is that the balls seem to float gaily up to heaven, from where a smiling
God, Whom I cannot help thinking of as tenderly amused by the antics of His
children, floats them down gently into their noisy hands.
(The last time I went to St. Patrick's
Cathedral, a child's red balloon had floated up to the very top of the altar's
canopy and affixed itself there. It did not look at all out of place.)
My father says: "Oh, my God,
you're doing God-talk again."
I say, "It's different this time,
though, isn't it?"
"We're not enemies this
time," he says; and, "you're happy." Then he says, "Explain
to me why God sent the bears to rip the children who mocked Elijah."
"I can't."
"When you were nine years old, you
knew all the answers. And the answers separated us. It's different now."
Everything is different now.
FATHER, part of his double interest
Unto thy kingdome, thy Sonne gives to
me,
His joynture in the knottie Trinitie
Hee keepes, and gives to me his deaths
conquest.
This Lambe, whose death, with life the
world hath blest,
Was from the worlds beginning slaine,
and he
Hath made two Wills, which with the
Legacie
Of his and thy kingdome, doe thy Sonnes
invest.
Yet such are thy laws, that men argue
yet
Whether a man those statutes can
fulfill;
None doth; but all-healing grace and
spirit
Revive again what law and letter kill.
Thy lawes abridgement, and thy last
command
Is all but love; Oh let this last Will stand!