When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour:

Hammy –

The Lord is in his holy temple. Let all the earth be silent before him. Didn’t Habakkuk say that? Inwardly a Jew, circumcised in spirit. Silence is worship – to quietly carry Isaac’s wood. In reverence for the Son of God unveiling his will beyond human tracing. Heaven all around, silent. In the council of the holy ones, God is greatly feared. To quietly, reverently, rejoice in life, unsealed now.

When I was a child I thought as a child, looked on silently at life, shy passenger on an ocean liner, not grasping the voyage.  Unable to read letters on life preservers attached to walkways above my short eyes.  Later, tripping silent too, for different reasons. Tongue-tied, numb. Aging we ask for unsealing.  Oracles – a revelation from God, his purposes, his plans. The caustic corrosive revelation – the naked lunch. Stop eating the news from a long newspaper spoon. Think you see it all. That’s a perspective too, half-steps from bedlam, chaos. In a naked world, in the pandemonium – one moment flashing stars, galaxies splashing along eons, kaleidoscope flowers. Next stop, dark thoughts, throats graves, tongues lie, poison the language. Then the dream train, crystal visions, boarding at track O. Escape out, run anywhere. On half-open streets curses the greeting, misery the marker, peace the stranger.  Zero the number.

Dreams, unburied. Bursting startled, articulated.  Night-bound words, drowned words, returned in sable images. Stone dreams, could not speak. Dreams of my mother, in a maze. Floating, flying, running, trapped in solvent, glue, paralysis. Criss-crossed coasts, in two places, in no places, wandered deep-shaded city streets, furtive thrills. Returning to high school, talk with my brother, midnight diesel engines, spiraling stars and freight cars. Conversing with birds, my mouth a mirror.  Garden dream tree.  Vivid summons unheard awake. Invitation moved from phantasms of dharma, duty, task, from wu and k’ung and climbing secret somber mountain to empty cave opening onto a vacuum-abyss. Now to a meeting altogether unseen –  storm-scarred pine speaking.  Gathered mist, pregnant word.  A ripening fruit.

Bondage of the will. Relentless introspection finally quieted in trust. Cemetery silo-walls giving way, dissolved, unsealed. Efforts, resolutions, some well-meaning, well-intentioned. Some mirror-defeated – just getting high. Hopeless on the best days, helpless on the worst – futile efforts to reform, to change my life. A young king, leering – shaking his fist at a storm not understood or to be escaped.  Forlorn, disinherited, disarmed.  Cursing events, cursing the emptiness.  Angry swords swung at ghosts, closets of shattered lances.  Futile tools applied to broken rusted engines at dead ends – their disassembled parts scattered, strewn like broken hearts.  Mocking-inscrutable highway signs, declaring north and south, crossroads of two easts then two wests, thrusting always toward blank horizons – dragon-stretched to grey nowhere. 

To escape ditches, find trestles over low-road snares – the just man to live by faith.  No fruit in the fields, no cattle in the stalls.  Yet I will climb to the high places.  Hemmed by shadows from tenements long disappeared, vague Fourier-Owen ideals, shaped by kibbutzim hopes and pogrom fears colliding years before I was born, vines of water hemlock circling while a child – until Venus fly-trapped no more. The Lamb opens the 7^th seal – Maestro of future history. Ecce!  Behold the Anointed – look to live!  Himself history-to-be.  He opens the 7^th seal, mysteries unwrap, days come and go. The Seal-Opener remains fixed in being united in being with God.  I will be silent in the presence of my God – holy and righteous. I will praise his holiness forever.  Holiness the flawless shield, the fixed rock, the staff, the beguiling flute in the distance. 

Parents. Cohen – David & Esther. Jewish, secular educated idealists. Named their first son Jayden Benjamin, named their second Isadore Hampton. Socialists, utopian, not radicals, egalitarians. Sojourn in Israel for that reason – egalitarian life. Return to Israel program.  Time spent in school, met there, teaching hospital;  coffee dates joined to earnest cafeteria debates. Energies poured in, sincere, courageous, tireless – yet somewhere the utopia went south. The return was to America. Father a physician, M.D., six foot six, black curly hair. Mother a nurse, a foot shorter, red-streaked hair trimmed, direct, all business. Aunts, uncles, cousins, family gatherings, Bar Mitzvahs for some, but not for me. Parents still determined humanist-idealists. No synagogue or seder, no Hebrew school, religious learning or education.  Long dinner-table ethical discussions about medicine, philosophy, treatments – moral obligation to announce or to conceal bad news to patients.  Jayden would join in, I would listen.

In kindergarten I was on the bus from school and got sick and threw up on myself. I didn’t say anything. Jayden was sitting close by and he told the bus driver. It took me time to speak well – at three and four spoke with a lisp – a blond cherub – but if a relative wanted to ask the two young Cohen boys a question, they asked Jayden. I didn’t shed my lisp, didn’t start speaking clearly until I was seven or eight – Jayden knew what I meant anyway. My mother, careful in details, student of nutrition and vaccinations and warm clothes and homework assignments and parent-teacher conferences. My father busy, worked long and late hours, talked to patients and other doctors at night on telephone calls behind a closed, paneled office door. Jayden didn’t talk down to me  – he knew I knew things from reading. But the rest of the world saw me, if at all, as Jayden’s little brother, a shadow at his heels.  I grew slowly in secret cocoons, happiest at home.

School was not all bad. Oak wooden chairs for right-handers, classroom construction paper pastel-decorated, cubbyholes for lockers, the smell of historied stone Quaker buildings.  First graders, your own pencils, crayons, large-letter workbooks stacked under a desk top, led like ducklings through the school day in a tall world.  Teacher Mrs. Osbourne put us in primer-reading circles, called Robins and Jays. After a few weeks, she told me I was moving from the Robins to the Blue Jays. She seemed to think that was important but I didn’t know why. When I got into the new group – the Blue Jays read out loud quickly, fluently. A child’s day is a universe.  Hours, minutes, days, melted and merged like recess and lunchtime and school and bus rides.  There was just childlike being, each day unrolling, unraveling without any particular or important beginning or ending – until marching years and grades brought deadlines and assignments and marking periods and class rank and achievement tests – timeless being not to be recovered until the Lamb unsealed it once again.

The gentle silence of a weekly Quaker meeting for schoolchildren. The odd belief that a child might have something worthwhile to say – to be heard attentively by a room of older children, adults. Rounded stone walls to divide playing fields and bursting recess-frenzy.  Not always frenzied myself – quietly I nestled, quietly I read, an underground stream, content unto myself, sometimes meeting contentment in others.  I didn’t mind if it rained. Occasionally people understood, other children saw. Jaydon met the world headlong, a charging comet. I was a patch of green grass, soaking up rain-words, each book a cloud. And there is an invisible world the hard-chargers, the extroverted, the award-achievers, never see.  Things are still on the outside but they shimmer on the inside.

Jayden the tall.  The athlete, the star, the captain of everything. Image of father, graceful, handsome. Me,  except in my books and secret fantasy-kingdoms, average, average, average. Never separated from my silver-framed wire glasses. I followed him around, played kickball, baseball when he did, didn’t mind when my clumsy game ended. In first grade too shy to speak. Had a crush on a neighbor girl, never said a word. If Jayden liked someone he went over, clasped a hand – if a girl, he went over, started a conversation. The distance between us more than age or height – my parents talked to him like an adult, a third parent.  I was a tunnel-lair child. Big blocks, toy figures, cars, to build spectral child-cities, stretched across my room where I burrowed holed up.  Pint-sized, four-eyed bandido in retreat. Jayden got into a fight with a neighbor boy, won, bloodied his nose. When I was picked on I froze, waited in fear until I could run, until Jayden would find me. A little older, my world internal, imagined dunes on distant planets, ringworlds, Foundation and the Mule, swords and sorcery, dungeons and dragons, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Adventures in lost mines, mars-fantasy, middle-earth.  Where I was captain.

I heard my father talk to my mother, saying I might be a success, but Jayden would be a success. Jayden raced off on his bike leading his friends. I walked nearby railroad tracks, balanced on one rail, dreaming. It was a small town, our parents let us go our own way – they trusted America, America’s politics, its ideals.  They trusted us in America.  Little talk about Israel, their time there, where they collided with something – not to be brought up.  Palestinians? Ultra-Orthodox?  An ethnic-religious state? Whatever drew them in, whatever sent them out, not discussed. American politics was, but only in an abstract sort of way, like a discussion about characters and plot after a theater performance. My father upset about medical malpractice lawyers, not about taxes. My mother decorated in monochromatic colors, clean lines, glass tables, natural light through large windows, uncluttered living spaces, elegant, sparse vases.  Our living room could have been a magazine cover for Swedish furniture. Prices got her voice up a decibel, perhaps even if we could easily afford it.  Clutter was not acceptable. Once they discussed staffing at the hospital – then got upset, angry, although I couldn’t understand why.

My parents visited my grandmother every month, living down in Pleasantville. Jayden and I spent days at the beach around Atlantic City.  He could swim out far and deep – I brought books to read in the sand. My grandmother Sarah’s house had rented rooms. An elderly Jewish man, an even older Jewish woman, rented upstairs rooms from her, lumbering up and down the stairs no more than twice in a day. The house had a smell, an aroma of matzoh-ball and Campbell’s mushroom soup and old people and their clothes – their photographs, their sequins and neckties and sorrows deposited into closets of the past.  Grandmother’s decorating style was a jumble, full of chintz fabric, knick-knacks, ceramic figurines of fairy princesses, ballerinas and swans in glass display cases, furniture cushioned and uncoordinated.  Her home was like an antique shop – to move around we negotiated carefully to not knock anything over. Outside was safer -the thin soil was sandy with little round pebbles in Pleasantville but nothing was breakable. Our parents brought bikes for Jayden and I – we rode around on bright, sunny New Jersey afternoons, past liquor stores and nail salons and hairdressers and pizza shops and offices for insurance agents and tattoo parlors and martial arts studios and bait & tackle shops and retail branch banks and the grocery store with its sprawling parking lot, kept company by a few squawking sea-gulls, past salted homes 60 years old wearing faded pastel clapboard, mottled roofs, drooping gutters, in need of caulk for shaded windows and patchwork mortar for cracked concrete front steps.  It was a nice town for two boys on bikes sent out to play.

Our Philadelphia suburban home neighborhood had walnut trees lining back yards by the alley cutting through to garages.  Green walnuts fallen from the walnut trees had a smell too – I liked it, would chuck them into a nearby pond, sometimes for hours. Plunk – plunk – plunk, a splash and the ripples moved out in concentric circles, every time. If Jayden came by on his bike and asked what I was doing, I shrugged, could never answer. But he was checking on me  – saw I was content, whatever I was doing – and would ride off to his next adventure. When I was in fourth grade I had a crush on a girl named Bettina with a very German last name, like Mensch. Bettina was slender, with light freckles, an aquiline nose, clear eyes and light eyelashes. She could run faster than me. I never said anything to her, but sometimes I thought about her when I was chucking walnuts. Before I threw the next walnut, the water was still – the pond like black glass after the last concentric ripple quieted.  The tree was still, the walnuts laying on the ground were still, the sun was still in the sky – I held the green-black rotting walnut in my hand with its nearly overpowering smell – the smell was still too.  I liked those moments, when the world was poised at full stop for me.  All its motion was at my introspective, soon-to-be-adolescent command.

All those books I first read because Jayden read them and left them sitting around on coffee tables and nightstands, where I would inspect them unobserved – O’Neill, his Long Day’s Journey into Night, On the Road, madman stuff of Holden Caulfield, Naked Lunch, sally out to Zen, eastern religion, Ashrams.  If he saw me reading one, he might say something evocative, something to make me think. The days changed although I only slowly noticed. Jayden changed and I had to notice that – but there was little for me to say. He was in conflict now, even if I didn’t know why. His world was a battle-field. I was a sapling in a peach orchard, watching the soldiers scramble and race about me, not understanding the terms or point of their warfare or how my brother got involved. If he saw me reading on a window seat he would still say something, but now it was provocative, a boy who was becoming a man by getting ready for a fight.

I had a friend with two first names, Amy Beverly – she and I would find a corner to read and wonder why anyone wondered at us. They teased we were hiding out together, but we only wanted a quiet place to read. Libraries have a certain smell, the isolate repeated tick of a single clock on the first floor a distinct echo, the black spindle-back chairs with their certain feel on the buttocks, the fluorescent light a certain flicker – that was our world. In it we found no fault, no shortcoming. To us, the stacks were rich with words, like walls erected against missiles whose purpose or anger we couldn’t grasp. Amy Beverly would twirl a black knappy hair in her fingers as she read – and other than turning pages, be stiller than stone for hours.

Idealism meeting reality, like an 18-wheeled truck meeting a herd of deer. Not all the deer die at once, but the herd is never the same.  Jayden wasn’t much talking to me anymore. Jayden was gone from the house for days at a time. My parents were lost as to what to do or say. They were passive-frozen, paralyzed in fearful indecision about their man-sized adolescent. They were alternatively resigned, philosophic, dismayed, wishfully-confident, then helplessly agonizing over what to do.  Inept, flaccid in the face of Jayden’s determined, misguided will and their own unwillingness to be disciplinarians.  They wanted it to be all okay again – didn’t know how to act if things weren’t okay – had little way to tell the difference and few tools to employ. Nothing in Jayden’s head, whatever it was, was anything like what had been in their heads, in their adult lives or even when they met in Israel.  It didn’t occur to them that Jayden was taking his ideas from elsewhere – they were under the impression that their own ideas were of their own making.

Older brother Jayden – one day, nodded, made a comment as I was reading Autobiography of a Yogi – next day, gone. Dead of an overdose. Accidental or deliberate. The news was crushing, an avalanche of grief. My business-like mother collapsed shrieking, sobbing.  My father’s face fell into a place I had never seen, spiritually collapsed. Jayden, gone like Allie in Catcher in the Rye –– Hammy, younger brother, carries on – reads Franny’s Jesus Prayer – Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Parents have the heart-stabbing, grief-strangled duty of making arrangements. Identify the lifeless body of their son. There are no worlds to hide in, no words to hide behind. A person beloved at the very center of their lives – so anointed with hopes – their engine of hope – had become a corpse, bluntly a slab of meat.  All too familiar to them, to be tagged here. Moved there.  Autopsied.  Placed in an outrageous box to be buried in some insulting dirt piled in advance under a mocking outdoor canopy.  Warlocks, if I couldn’t see them I felt them, warlocks and witches everywhere at his burial, standing at the crowd’s edge, handing out weedy flowers, holding sharp-pointed shovels, with their gargoyle-green faces making sympathetic noises, shedding a conspicuous tear to wipe away with a claw, to pretend, mock and mime at the grief upon which they demonically feasted.

Parents never got past Jayden’s death. Not in the first year, not in the second, not in the third. Perhaps some religious belief would have helped them to get past the corpse of their son, but they didn’t have that. Whatever dignity or comfort such beliefs might have held was lost to them. Jayden’s room preserved like a museum, a mausoleum. Books still sitting on shelves, school pictures, his smiling face. Excruciatingly sad to go in. After a while, no one entered his room. Parents shell-shocked.  Left to go my own way. We walked around his memory in the house – Jayden disappeared, converted into a grief-spirit in some absurd play where the characters talk to a ghost they never see but are always conscious of and never forget. If not for a bare veneer of rationality, they would have put out corned beef and kugel for him on a neatly-set placemat. But off-Broadway ghost plays are funny and this was just unbearably sad.

Change came to me too. Jayden’s death walked through my reading room, knocked over the shelves, scattered my books. Implacable grief entered, announced – ‘You knew I was always here. From when you were four. Everyone knows.’  I had no answer – that was the story, we all knew it. I drifted into my own scene, wandered away from a life of books at home places. No one came chasing me. The users and the losers were my high school teachers – until they drifted away too. Once in a while Amy Beverly and I would have a sandwich, but something had taken down her soul too. The only black and white she was interested in were black letters on a white page but the world wasn’t giving her that choice. I had choices too, but my choosing didn’t count for much. I would get high and make a different choice the next week but all the choosing wound up the same choice.

I drove west across Pennsylvania for college – the path of least resistance. If I had been another person living another life, I might have found something starkly beautiful in the rural pines, red maples, chestnuts, walnut, oaks, even the brown bears rooting around midnight garbage.  The campus and local town were carved out of the surrounding woods like two handfuls of sand taken from a beach. I found a local park with wild grape arbors and benches underneath, and that was my spot for reading, the sun spackling through the vines onto the pages of my book. Two years as an art history major in a place where deer season was the major holiday and convenience stores the major shopping outlets. Then I transferred further west, waved goodbye to the campus dorms, town sports bar, convenience stores, outdoorsman’s hunting and bait shops along the highway. I had applied to an obscure place for arcane studies, thinking a few hundred miles of the Pennsylvania turnpike was far enough from the entombed séance of continuing sorrow, chiseled into every telephone conversation with home.  After two years, I wanted three thousand miles of Interstate 80 between us.  I wanted the raw edge of a distant ocean that said apply here. 

West-coast living quarters were a series of haphazard communal student arrangements until I arrived at a real urban commune. By then I was finished with a degree that enabled me to talk at length about Botticelli, if anyone asked. My commune mates were older, two filmmakers, psychologist, entomologist, writer turned coffee house barista. Robbie, intellectual, giraffe-like, was the guide. This group wasn’t casual about their psychedelic adventures – they were organized, purposeful. Role play was highly organized – we got costumes – Frosty knew where to get them. We got high quality drugs – Vermy knew where. The interpersonal relationships could be intense or casual – or in the case of G-Lucky, wishful. Meals were prepared – we took turns – I learned to cook for six. The house was not far from Glen Park, canyon in miniature, and I would walk our dogs there, sometime with Weezy and her service dog. California fir, pines, cypresses, ironwoods, some palms with that fresh green aphrodisiac aroma. There were poetry readings, script readings in the commune, a chessboard, round telephone-cable drum coffee table, music scattered around four-foot Bowers & Wilkins floor-standing speakers. An oversized roll of brown butcher’s paper unwound to hang broadly for posting front hallway notes to each other. Tripping on outings – to movies, plays, planetarium shows, picnics on nude beaches, hikes up Mt. Tam – part of the ritual.

Our house was stenciled with green curling vines around doors, decorated with posters from old movies, framed impressionistic art of Monet’s flowers, Picasso’s Guernica, elegantly-framed charcoal sketches of nude models, pastel super-sized flowers cut from construction paper hung high about.  There was an open kitchen cornered with nooks and crannies, stocked with spices, herbs, nutritional supplements and condiments neatly stored in rows on hand-crafted built-in shelves.  There were framed still photos from Robby’s films, x-rated movie scripts from Frosty’s on coffee tables, an oversized glass display of three dozen butterflies with wings spread for display, a colossal water filled hookah with elaborate gilt & coloring.  There was a chessboard with ornately carved chess pieces, a board for playing Go with its black and white stones.

The built-in bookshelves were stocked with metaphysical philosophy, Plato’s Republic, psychology of Freud, psychology of Jung, of Otto Rank and Ernest Becker, pharmacology, biology and chemistry textbooks, field guides for entomologists, handbooks of California birds, still photography reference books, technical manuals on cinematography, political biographies, treatises on eastern religion, the I Ching,19th century novels, Stendhal, Balzac, volumes of poetry from every century, Ginsburg’s Howl, Burrough’s Naked Lunch, confessions and true crime nonfiction of various sorts, Capote, a whole shelf of international erotica and one-dollar grimy paperback porn, Candy, pulpy detective novels with covers of languid blondes and tough private detectives, oversized photographic books of Hollywood comics, Chaplin, Keaton, of silent movies, of geographical wonders, of the oversized photography of Ansel Adams balanced precariously, too large to tuck neatly on a shelf.

In the house sometimes chatter, even extended conversation.  But often a kind of silence -the silence of users – intellectual users, but users – like waiting at a Dunkin Donuts, descending into the Velvet Underground, waiting for your man. Even when users are well-supplied, studded with open drawers of well-labeled concoctions like a home pharmucopia – even when there’s superficial talk at the dinner table, a user’s silence persisted like fog at the curtains. It was supposed to be intellectual, hip, but intellects were melting away.  If there had ever been purpose, a vision for this commune, it was swallowed into the silence of neon at an all-night diner, a cup of coffee never finished, waiting for a connection.  For very smart people, they never quite got that drugs eat up arts, thought, culture like a fire eats up wood. So talk was usually empty diversion – the reality was silence when the needle hit the arm, the vein, the sting, the blood blossomed and appeared like a rose at the top of the bulb. No one talked then. You watched in silence. The rush is going to come soon, upon the instant. Silent seconds, open round waiting eyes really seeing nothing, images turned inward pregnant with unfocused death. The crystal ship being filled noiselessly, dropping human petals overboard as it glides. I am glad we have here come to a different kind of silence.

My soul ached for more than one reason. I walked the streets of the city late into the night. I ached, walked more. Wore out on the psychedelic trips, wore my eyeballs out looking through windows turned to waving transparent jelly, wore out floating in a crystal sea, waves breaking, reforming, breaking. Wore out on steady decay where psychedelics and smoke came out every evening like cards from a blackjack dealer.  Wore out on the subterranean tides we swam, tropical fish darting around reefs of wasted introspection. Wore out on ever-reshuffling tarot cards, affairs like fireworks, one-night stands pursued blindly through caves. Wore out on the sexpassion-drama with its pseudo-suspense, gossipy emotional vandalism recurring but never resolved.  There was a bout of repentance after our escapade at the planetarium but it was the repentance of Nineveh – dramatic, but it didn’t last.  We lapsed into further episodes of the cycling opera bouffe.

My futility was like surrounding flocks of sea gulls – I chased them off but they came back single, returned in groups.  Charged arm-flapping to shoo them, read fervently about gull removal, engaged falcons for intimidation.  Introspected in so penetrating a way it would have done the chief Gull, Sigmund Freud, proud – still found myself surrounded in the same spot with the same flock one year to the next, bird-droppings of pointlessness, laced with vacuous uric acid, etched in my hair.  A day came when I said to myself – too many gulls.  Repeated, unrelenting frustration accumulated in feathered layers.  When I said goodbye to my communal mates, no one was surprised – no one said ‘wait’ or ‘stay.’  Perhaps Weezy was sad, but she was sad about so many things. She put the leash on her service dog without a word and went for a walk. I packed in a few days and left as silently as a shadow.  

I had been away from home.  Ghosts waited in Pennsylvania – at least I stopped the ghastly process in California.  Hoping I was ready to talk with my parents about Jayden.  Anticipating, maybe it would be something of comfort, of purpose, maybe just a long silence.  In the teeth of grief, I found out something- if anything hurt that much, it was important.  I wanted to say it to them to say it to myself.  A dead brother laid into a box is more serious, more worthy of thought, than yet another drug fantasy.  If life with intellectual hippies was a useless band-aid, because the wound was so deep and no answers were ever provided, just mystical platitudes – I had to have some real soul-wound bleeding on the inside.  We all did – the entire human race – something inside more than a clever, insouciant, insolent appetite for thrills, for grandiose fantasies, for a kaleidoscope of deep insights that barely lasted a day, to the next trip, another day at the amusement park, another ride on the merry-go-round. 

Driving back was silence, reflective as snow on surrounding cliffs, accepting pain like lightning strikes, feeling imaginary forests crash.  My emotional redwoods absorbed the jolt, the sound of their stately irresistible fall reverberated, put motion to swaddling cradles of interior mountain lakes, shimmering crystal-icy, startling birds, painting ripples onto shocked blue mirrors of water – then there had to be something inside, deep, to start. We were not squirrels, not even clever, educated squirrels, could never be sedated enough – even perpetually-introspective psychology-reading squirrels couldn’t have so much pain.  Loss is a stern teacher – the symbols on her butterfly wings signal dread.  Silent grief did that much for me.  Melancholy in the night, the sadness of long highways, of the sparse, distant taillights of the isolate trucker far ahead.  Driving across country was time to think.

I arrived home in Pennsylvania, fighting stark-evil thoughts – alternating with ephemeral lightness. Blind prodigal Isaac, carrying wood, repenting of I knew not what.  Didn’t understand why or where to point the wheels, only to a place well known once, alien now.  Flocks of starlings rolling over storm-billows. Nightingale singing under a shroud.  I brought along bone changelings, shadows I could not peel away or shed. Unpacked for my empty corridors, deserted bunk, incorrigible dreams in nightmarish lodgings fashioned like a hospital ward. 

My anonymous rented room, laboratory for tattooed flaws of my mind – hex symbols drew themselves across my walls – I scrubbed out invisible pentacles on throw rugs.  Pushed away clutching dreams, naked on broken bottles in the alley.  Sordid self now in revolt – madness not hidden, emerging in majestic delusions, stretched naked across linoleum floors, roped to blandly drawn blinds.  The cup, the plate, the single setting for a chair sitting alone against a pressboard table.  Vacuum of the soul, voluntarily self-committed to bare walls.  But then – if the room was cheap and sordid, if the soul was empty, filling was possible. If demons stalk the night, if pain is great, they can be dispelled, it can be ended.  Wasn’t there grief because something, someone, was lost?  If my visions were estranged, only horror and nothing else, half the landscape had to be missing.  

In the midst of death-story, sunline of morning – not prayers, not yet – but something. Reading Job and the Psalms. The silence of God spoke.  Job put his hand to his mouth in silence before God.  Almighty God, Holy and Righteous – in wrath, remember compassion.  I wasn’t the only one returning to a confrontation, returning for a meeting whose purpose I could feel but not understand.  I stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord.  Remember mercy, when you visit me in judgment.  Plague goes before you, O Lord. Your silence measures my travels. You scatter fire-line scarred mountains – the cedars crash, the perpetual hills bow. The ways of God are everlasting.

I saw many tents of America in affliction, and my own. Why was it, O psychedelic sea, that you fled? O pseudo-Jordan, impersonating, disguised, why did you turn back when your mask was removed?  You unmoving stone mountains, why did you skip like lambs – if there is only empty?  There was trembling at the presence of the God of Jacob.  He could turn rocks into pools, hard rocks into springs of cleansing water.  After a few weeks, I calmed down a level or two.  And yet  – 

There’s something Jewish about carrying grief around with you – luggage you can never unpack and never find a locker to check it into.  I couldn’t process it emotionally, I couldn’t process it intellectually either.  Isn’t God in charge of things?  Couldn’t Jayden have been influenced by better friends, waylaid by benign thieves, arrested pre-emptively by diligent cops, counseled by mysterious strangers, smitten with the flu, tempted into other diversions by some prostitute, on his way to the drug mart to buy the dose that killed him?  Arguments about free-will seemed absurd to me.  If Jayden had free will to kill himself with a drug overdose, what happened to my parents’ free will?  Where did that go after Jayden died?

What happened to my free will? Where did that go? Jayden crashed that too. Suppose someone had asked me, on the day I was born – would you like to live in a house with a ghost – or not at all? Is that a free-will choice? One death ripples so. To run around and chatter away about free will – it seemed like astrology, like attributing to the stars our characters, mates, lives, fates – an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition at the charge of a star. And what if our dispositions are not only goatish – but tragic, self-destructive, laced with despair? What if our dispositions are just what’s left over, after the idealism dies, after the deer of fond and foolish hopes are left as carcasses by the side of the road?  O mighty free will.

I read Isaiah.  Lord, you were angry with me – isn’t the affliction of grief the most severe form of God’s anger?  Has your anger turned away?  You have comforted me. What was this comfort, that I could feel, but not explain? Surely God is my salvation. I could not make head or tail of that, but it reverberated too deep within me, not to mean something. I will trust and not be afraid.  The LORD, the LORD, is my strength and my song. There were no songs for a long time – what was the new song? He has become my salvation. What is this? Why does my salvation help with Jayden’s death?  With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

And in the midst of my stark visions, I had a dream about a tree, the very tree that stood in my front yard. The tree and I dialogued, as if I were Chuang Tzu exploring the inner chambers – but purified, sealed. The pine tree had its own mission – included me and more than me.   There was a reality I turned to mush, now trying to recapture. If drugs turned thoughts into wild flocks of birds beyond capture, then something else recaptured, re-centered those visions, might extract out of a strange dream a word true or useful. There was coming a wind to take the tree away, but held back for me. The tree was posing questions to me. And who was I, to have a tree in a dream pose riddles to me? 

Sing to the LORD, he has done glorious things. Now I was in a world with no road map, no explanations, but something was here that made me dream.  My only job was to ripen – like some fruit.  And if all of this seemed bizarre, it was so vivid, so powerful. It was a message, a directive, a direction – that didn’t depend on me at all.  No one told me to stop mourning for Jayden. I had many pictures of God – some drug-fueled, some sober. But I never had that picture of God. I wasn’t supposed to do anything at all. Just listen and ripen. While dream angels sealed many, including me – and dream trees spoke to be carried off by great winds – where being and un-being went to fight some battle of ontology.

I went into Valley Forge one day to walk. It was Palm Sunday – although that did not figure in my calculations of the day. The Holy Spirit came over me, gently, comprehensively, experientially. My mind was changed for the time period of a two-mile walk – its forward orientation was reconfigured – as if one took a north-south bar magnet and turned it, faced it east-west. God was omnipresent at all times, ever-where, everywhere – as if I were having a direct perception of God. God’s being was being – the being of God was, is the being of Jesus.  Flowing Father, Receiving Son. I walked and there was a family picnicking near the macadam path. Playing mildly, they kicked a peaceful, errant ball in my direction. I retrieved it and threw it back in shimmering, palpable peace. As I crossed Gulph Road, walking along a stone lane that ran parallel to Joseph Plumb Martin trail, I was passing as if through a door. I realized I was going to be a religious man. This was not what I had expected of my life. I’ve had many experiences but the kindness of this experience was different – drug experiences have an element of being harsh, make your head big (Grace Slick sang go ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall).  This experience made me feel vulnerable, small, condescended to, not out of meanness but only because of the enormous difference between me and the Spirit who loved, protected, descended over me. It was as if I were a young boy playing baseball and Babe Ruth came to visit me. I was a small child being tenderly touched with fingers of the Spirit, spiritual, spread open, gently descending. Peacefully, like a summer ocean tide, the experience – God at all times, ever-where, everywhere – receded.

It wasn’t long after that – I just showed up at a church, chosen more or less at random. I said, ‘Will you baptize me?’ And they said, sure. They asked why and I said I felt as if I had an experience with God. The pastor asked could you tell us more and I said, no. And the pastor, a nice young man, said, well, okay, next week. They baptized me on a quiet Sunday morning in a church with a small congregation and not a lot of discussion. The rite and ritual was out of a green book and the pastor followed the book. Not without some trepidation, I repeated the words he prompted. (All that renouncing stuff – I was hopeful but not overwhelmingly confident). I got water poured on my head three times and the Trinity was pronounced – baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The pastor made the sign of the cross on my forehead. Like my experience in Valley Forge, it was both comprehensive and gentle. The congregation came around to shake my hand afterwards and invite me to lunch at the church picnic. I didn’t really know them or even the type of people they were -as a social, cultural group, we were far apart – but they were warm and inviting and they seemed to think I was one of them. Things started changing in my life after that.  The human experience is an interaction with God.  Later on, I had a conversation with my parents about Jayden. I’m not sure it did much for them, but I think the effort was worthwhile.
___________________________

Quasimodo –

Silence. The silence of the opening, the unveiling of the mystery, breaking of the code. The coronation of the Prince. The child of Mary asserts his position, his power, his authority, omnipotent, omniscient, ascending to that throne from which all light emanates as the seals are broken, to the very last, even the hushed 7^th – to the outermost reaches of his Father’s ordination of time, destiny, life and peace. Rejoicing saints inherit an overwhelming gift.
Totum venerabile, sanctum silentium.

I had a child’s daydreams in Bel Air, nestled between metaphorical castles of the Army – Antonio Brendan Quasimodo – little-league nicknamed Quasi to all friends. My Italian father, Pietro, swarthy wrestler build, Petey to all, my Irish mother, Kathleen, slender, looked frail but wasn’t. Two older sisters, Mimi, frail, lightly-freckled and wan herself and Lizbeth, dark ringlet curls, copper-skinned.  One younger sister, short, glasses always until old enough for contacts, lithe, eventually a model, forever known as Chuckie.

Parents started out intensely religious, devout, regular at Mass, loyal to our parish, devoted to the sacramental life of the Church, to all mysteries joyful, luminous, sorrowful, glorious. Later on, quieted somewhat, pull of events, friction, disappointment of life, but neither did without last rites. My father had been a machine operator, made good money, got his right arm chewed up in a CNC machine. Worker’s comp checks and the product liability settlement. My mother worked for the defense department at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Didn’t say exactly what she did, probably wasn’t allowed. Her passion at school was mathematics, a passion which did not transmit to me. Spacious ranch house, breeze room, two-car garage, gazebo surrounded by red and purple azaleas, rhododendrons in back yard. Played summer badminton on the lawn. My father played good badminton with his left arm swinging the racquet like a windmill, his right arm dangling, his injured Italian pride emerged in sending the shuttlecock into orbit.

Some of my daydreams revolved around my friend’s sister. We were children, eleven years old, religious children, Catholic children – but Brigid pulled her skirt up over her knees to show me in the basement. In the dim light, unseen by that cloud of witnesses that always seemed to hang around a Catholic life, I touched her hand. I rested the tips of my fingers on the palm of her hand. She held her hand open for me. We were both shocked by the moment – the electricity of the touch – no one really explained this reverberating sexuality – you experienced it. It ended quickly – somehow the cloud of witnesses re-appeared and we ran up the stairs. Her brother was still in the backyard digging up something. In the kitchen I asked if I had to go home. I don’t know she said and ran into her room. I went out back and her brother asked if I was going to help – there were tunnels, some burrowing creature in the backyard he wanted to hunt down. I helped dig for a while but my mind was elsewhere – not just on his sister, but on some element of life that didn’t seem accounted for in the expansive, well-organized universe I inherited, inhabited.

There were undercurrents in our house that were difficult to understand, erupted without warning. One Saturday morning in late December, for inexplicable reasons, my father decided the cars had to be washed. It was near freezing outside, our neighbors didn’t care, no one cared – everyone’s car had road salt and cinders from melting road-snow and looked grimy. Ours weren’t any better or worse-looking than anyone else’s. My father insisted, shouting that we were all going to wash the cars, especially the wheels and wheel wells. All four of us had to go outside with buckets of water, sponges, soap and rags and get down on our knees to scrub out the wheel wells. My mother was distressed, or ashamed, or angry or sorrowing or retreating into her own feelings whether of guilt, anger, self-pity, righteous indignation, I knew not what – she could keep an inscrutable poker face and I was trying to read everything in her eyes. But she didn’t object so we spent an hour with our hands in near-freezing water rinsing away road grime and salt. Chuckie was crying. We were all miserable, our hands hurt and none of it made sense. But there was never an explanation.

I was riding with my father one day from a little league game and he announced, without preamble, that he wanted to go to confession. So we took the short detour to our church and he did – he had me wait in the car. I waited patiently enough, it was a summer day, I rolled down the window, contemplated my at-bats in the game – on base four times. When he returned he seemed calm, unburdened and we carried on. He didn’t say anything to me, didn’t ask me not to say anything.  I had no reason to talk about it either.  There was something I think my father expected me to get – if you were a man and you did something wrong, you dealt with it. Didn’t cry, didn’t complain, you navigated it. That’s what the Church was for.

When we came in my mother was reading a book by a woman, Jane Wilde, whose name matched her disposition, collecting ancient Irish legends and mystic charms. I remember they were both pretty generous pouring out wine at dinner that night. Near the end of the evening, I thought I saw my mother give my father an evil eye – but like everything else in our family, things happened like unseen riptides.  If something died in our house, be it a pet or a certain feelings among us, there were no headstones marking the grave.

Age 12, my world was expansive, well-ordered by the Catholic Church, by our parish and parochial world, by nuns, priest, deacons, our lay teachers, by a bishop and archbishop and Cardinal somewhere, by my swarming, chattering, exuberant classmates, by the physical building of my school, its playground and ballfields and central standing crucifix, by my baseball team and Catholic lay coach and my father in the stands, by the crucifix on a slender silver chain around my neck never removed.  My world was further defined by mother-demanded diligent scholastics accompanied by religion classes in school with regular questions from her about my progress with special attention if any aspect of Irish literature was in view; by regular Mass attended by both parents and my sisters and generally on Saturday evening and its haunting mysteries and family gatherings where every aunt and uncle and cousin was Catholic, by our priests (always addressed with the title and first name as ‘Father ___ ‘) with their vestments and Our Fathers and Hail Mary’s, by organized prayers and novenas, by a world that presented itself in broad physical display but held also within it a mysterious unseen life and presence.

This sacramental life at age 12 was not altogether lost on me hidden from visible sight though it was.  Even precocious 12-year olds may attune to the central mystery of the Real Presence of our Lord and Savior in the Mass who was raised from the dead and instituted Peter as the first Pope, to the Easter celebrations of the Resurrection and the Ascension of Christ, to the Immaculate Conception and Marian devotions and prayers for the intercession of selected saints for selected problems, by a calendar of feast days and observances for these saints and important events in the life of the Church. Further, there were relics and statuary of Jesus and small groups of people who met who had great interest in such things. 

There were physically detailed white alabaster depictions of the Crucifixion and crosses or crucifixes everywhere, by regular recitations of ancient creeds, by a tension with the world at large which never went away but never got too out-of-hand, by a superintending structure leading right to the Pope, Christ, God, by surrounding Catholic cemeteries with large impressive monuments which seemed just as connected to the entire structure as anything else.  There were spontaneous interactions and informal talks from priests and nuns and deacons because they perhaps sensed I was a bright boy and they always seemed to want to talk to me about something without always being exactly candid as to what that was but they seemed to be sounding me out about my future life interests. It was a very complete world.

In a few years I started fantasizing. No one talked to me about that. My fantasies grew quickly like well-fertilized weeds until they were monstrous, beyond the pale. They swept over me. I didn’t have any way to compare my imagination to anyone else’s – instead, I was restless and sick. I conducted precocious orgies in my 14-year old mind and loathed myself. I was a baseball-playing Orioles sports fan, top student Catholic adolescent in one world – and engaged in gargantuan, deformed sexual fantasies in another. My sexual imagination stretched the limits of reality – or at least I thought so.

My two worlds were not to cross – kept at a distance, until an echo in the brothel of the imagination burst images into my thoughts while sitting in class, or on a dugout bench waiting for my at bat, or while sitting in my living room watching the Orioles. For 60 seconds, for a few minutes, every image of my heart was showered in lust, in physical contortions and penetrations. It went on during Mass with my parents. The ornate tapestries of the church, the singing as we entered, the commencement of the responsive liturgy, the candles, the robes and vestments, the stained glass, statuary and the images, were cardboard backdrops – props in a raunchy theater for one-act porn dramas. My attention separated into compartments; the priest’s words of institution – and lewd performers strutting impudently across the nave – the visible evidence of the grace of God – and corrupted, licentious ghosts carrying on at the altar, invisible to all except me. Inflamed visions never doused – I hid my erections under hymnals and church bulletins. What could I possibly explain to my parents? What would I confess to a priest?

I was filled with shame, in a state of mortal sin. My fantasies were defiled, brutish, orgiastic, humiliating and surely all too satisfying. At night I would bring them to a masturbating conclusion in my bed, guilt-ridden and stained. In my imagination was a baffled, prowling beast, obscene presences moved irresistibly, subtle, murmuring.  One hour a boy becoming a man, taking my at-bats, eating pizza with my team, talking about curve-balls and catcher’s mitts, then in silent, sporadic fantasy and then despair. Life darkened, was a maze of narrow, dirty streets intersecting with whatever was normal, customary – where each succeeding sin accumulated guilt – and then I would re-emerge onto a sunny baseball diamond, to a classroom where I knew the answers, knew who Yeats and Swift and Joyce were and what their major and minor themes were.

Repeated sermons on sanctifying grace did not make one drop of it penetrate to my soul. It made me think more about actual grace, but actual grace was hopeless. I was too ashamed to pray at night. I had neither analytic or theological tools to address any of this, so I concluded that my soul lusted in a rage to seek its own destruction.  And my contact with my world, divided into two distinct pieces, started to drift. My spirit was on a sunny baseball diamond fielding my position, filled with chatter for our pitcher, signaling with my fingers how many outs, where the play was if the batter hit a ground ball to short and the runner on third took off, and hunting whores in a slum for degraded acts.

All this, at the age of 15. And although there were many people around, there were none to say – it’s okay. You’re 15 years old. We get it. We were 15 once too. You don’t have to explain. But nobody said that. I tried a couple of conversations, vague, indirect, with pious, religious people I knew. What I heard was that Mary was the refuge of sinners. She would feel sorry for me. I should pray to Mary. Seek her intercession. Recite the rosary. The glories of Mary would make it better. You were not supposed to question the glories of Mary. People didn’t yell, but their eyes narrowed, the tone of their voices got a little firmer. If you did that, questioned Mary, you were not only not really being Catholic – perhaps you were no longer a nice person – their suspicion was you might be a mean, fundamentally unpleasant young man. You didn’t believe in Our Lady. What kind of person doesn’t like Mary? A rhetorical question with no answer but a very clear point. She’s at the tender heart of our faith. Not even James Joyce questioned Mary.

My two worlds separated wider. The bridge between the two became more slender, tenuous. I was developing some sharp, caustic edges, learned how to mock quietly under my breath while nodding my head reassuringly and saying what my listener expected to hear. You could lay words in front of people to lead them along.  You could hide things.

None of that, at the age of 15, did anything for my imagination run riot. There was no balm in Gilead. Concocted images spun up, lewd cotton candy. While the litany of saints was recited, I had questions. Fear, terror, death, judgment, words blew like a harsh desert wind, like a corpse, feeding rats. A confrontation with a child’s vague notion of God turned into a sinner’s more studied concern. The Judgment Day of God Almighty did not seem so remote.

Where would my imaginary jewel-eyed, scantily-clad harlots flee on that day? Would I carry them with me in my mind to heaven? Would my phantasm paramours squeak like mice in terror and flee?  People in my family, mother, father, even my elder sisters, may have intuited what was going on with me – but they didn’t have a means to recognize, acknowledge, communicate with me either – both our larger culture and family culture imposed a kind of omerta, a law of silence, on sexuality in practice or in thought.

Hell started to take on a more palpable form. Darkness, horror, stench, torment, fire, the company of the damned, mocking devils – deprived of gracious Light, separated from God’s affection, loathing myself. Would I feel sorrow then, too late? Because I would not abandon my unspeakable, polluted, degraded, defiled, vivid but nearly entirely imaginary teenage sins? I began to acquire an interest in the afterlife. An Irish gene inherited from my mother’s literary soul began to perk up at this line of thought. If the Church wasn’t providing a direction perhaps Yeats or Jane Wild would.

Eternity! And hell. A great ticking clock – ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven. I had learned the religious doctrines in the Church in the same way I learned to conjugate Latin verbs – the teaching was engraved in memory but I had little prior need for it. I had much, but not trust. And trust is not so easy for an adolescent – trust takes time, maturity, slow, accumulating experience. As useful as the sacraments might be, they never resolved my imaginary orgies or developed in me any trust that God got it, understood the problem, intended to fix it, wasn’t going to strike me with immediate lightning bolts, had been gracious for a long time to other adolescents who had the same problem and that the solution which might be impossible for a 15-year old would gradually emerge over years and in the meantime it was okay if I continued to play third base and bat clean-up as long as I kept my grades up. I learned that useful message, but later, in a harder school.

My interior landscape was bestial, reeking – convulsed in sex, nauseated in excess – and simultaneously, could be arrested in a moment when I stood up from the bench to get into the on-deck circle. I developed and improved my melodramatic exaggerations –  how my degraded imagination was assuredly ravishing my soul. Who are equal to the Irish in floridly describing their misery? I rehearsed woeful speeches, composed pages of lavish words chastising my incorrigible moral collapse. I resolved to confess – transports of lurid imaginary sin were well-suited for excesses of lurid, emotional guilt.  A poet was born.

Following my father’s example, I resolved to use the resources the Church provided to deal with my problem. But I needed to find an anonymous place to confess my lecherous exploits with squadrons, platoons of nubile, long-legged pornographic actresses. I certainly wasn’t going to expound sordid details in a litany with our home-church priest who knew me, my family, my teachers, my baseball coach, my teammates, for years – Father Jim even came to see our games.

In our Bel Air church there may have been a vow of silence or penitent’s confidentiality – I needed an audience with a confessor who had taken a vow of amnesia. So on some inventive excuse at age 16 I traveled to a more-or-less randomly chosen Catholic church halfway between Baltimore and Washington near Bowie, for a recitation of my licentiousness. That was one advantage of being Catholic – spiritually speaking, the same lineup & batting order are provided nearly everywhere. Even driving down, preparing to confess and repent, to make a clean break with my porn-licentiousness, to cleanse the poison from my spiritual well with a sincere, yet poor/naked/blind wretch’s account, to throw myself on the sweet mercy of God being sacramentally offered to me purely out of His grace, images of lithe young women poured into tight sweaters and very short skirts came into view.

To confess everything! It occurred to me that if word leaked, no matter how improbable that was, my coach would find out, would take me off the starting team and bench me. That would be completely humiliating, soul-crushing. I re-applied my intelligence and resolve – this was important, it was critical to my eternal soul – and there was no way the coach would find out. But how does one start? I was ready to weep for the childlike innocence I thought I had lost. I was still an adolescent – if all my bestial, imaginary sins, my demonic dreams, leading down to the black, cold wasted void, generally took place in 45 minutes, then my confession and repentance, ushering me back into a state of heavenly, radiant grace, so dear to God, should take 45 minutes too.

Long, slow movements of God, soul-measured over decades, were still far beyond me. The acorn was ready to wait 45 minutes to become a mighty oak, halfway between Baltimore and Washington. It never occurred to me that my sexual fantasies were symptoms of something that was both more problematic and more promising – an interior spiritual life is not a game or a joke. I needed to interact with God on another level. Going four-for-four at the plate does a lot for self-esteem, having lurid sex fantasies is negative to that self-esteem, but there are some things that neither of them touch.

I approached the confessional meek and humble of heart. I confessed my sins, Masses missed, prayers not said, lies. Then I began with my sins of impurity. It was quite a list, a lengthy narrative of fantasies, erotic adventures in the mind, couplings, triplings.  Even summarized, it took some time to go through. But I wanted to say everything, to confess the worst. I thought that if I could say these things, I would acquire power over them. I had never previously used hyper-sexualized and indecent language, vocally described such acts in detailed, audible words before, so I stuttered a little – uncharacteristically, as normally I can scatter words, talk to people – the captain of the team giving the pep talk. The priest listened patiently.

I daresay the fact that the priest had never heard me before was not lost on him, that he knew he wasn’t going to hear me again. I blushed at providing descriptions so graphic – but it didn’t work if I didn’t say it plainly. Being vague and general and circumspect was one of the reasons my previous discussions had not been useful – my listeners didn’t really hear me – didn’t really grasp what I was saying. Instead my points and problems were declared explicitly to the young, unknown confessor-priest of the Bowie church, right down to the last-act windshield-appearing, phantasmagorical clinging blouses and skin-tight short-shorts of my ubiquitous imaginary companions.

When I finished the priest did not respond to the lengthiness of my confession. He directed me to an act of contrition, told me to give up my sins. He told me to pray to Our Blessed Lady. He asked me to make a solemn promise to God, not to intentionally repeat my sins. The priest spoke the words of absolution. Then the priest asked me in a calm and serious tone, as part of my penance, to pray also for him and the entire Church, from priest and bishop to Pope and to do so for seven days.  I felt as if I had entered the confessional as one person, but left as another.  I didn’t immediately leave the church, simply found a corner in a back pew to sit.

I completed the prayer for the first day, kneeling, praying in a corner of the dark nave of the church – I felt my prayers ascending from a cleansed heart, like perfume streaming upwards from the heart of a cleansed soul. When I went out, I found the streets glad, even in the dark. I drove home, conscious of grace suffusing through me. I was pardoned. My soul was made fair, holy and happy – it reminded me of being a toddler and my mother reading out loud to me from some Irish writer – I had become a young Dubliner of the spirit.

It was beautiful to be alive in a state of grace, to have and to hold a life of peace and virtue, even forbearance with others. I came home and entered quietly, from happiness. My life had come back, and lay open before me without the interior warfare. I planned to attend regular mass, to lead a life of greater piety. Over the next months my sisters noticed some change in me, observed my altered conduct – they were in a state of some surprise, but since I was less irritable than usual, it was okay with them. If I weren’t snapping at them sarcastically, curling my lip as they claimed – then praise God for that. Every part of creation expressed God’s power and love – and I saw that creation beyond the confines of a baseball field. I made real efforts to resist my uncontrolled fantasy life. Even frequent and violent temptations were proof that my soul was still in God’s grace. I was fighting the good fight.

I could not free myself altogether from a restless feeling of guilt – but I didn’t understand why.  If I conquered my obscene interior fantasy life, didn’t that right all serious, or at least mortal wrongs? Why would there be anything else going on, other than whatever had to do with sexuality and the struggle against that monster?  Someone in our parish life, whom I knew, but not well, Monsignor Stephanos Doudulus, asked me to meet him in his office. Monsignor Doudulus was well into his eighties, frail, slender, a living window into a world that was either entirely past or not past at all, depending on your viewpoint. I was consumed with the thought that some sin of mine had been discovered, ironic now that I had made so much progress overcoming them.  Some anachronistic challenge was going to be presented to my piety.  Even now, my confessions had not been adequate, my sorrowful repentances not sufficiently sincere. Young men can set very high standards for themselves.

Underneath my zeal, I feared the announcement that I had fallen short. How can you amend your life when your sins, even restrained, were escapades into fantastical orgiastic daydreams? It wasn’t just a problem of what I did or what I imagined – it was a problem of who I was – a problem I was far from solving. Perhaps the Monsignor was going to assist. Because I was 16, I did not fully understand that other people were observing me – I did not fully understand that other people had plans, that they were more observant of others than I was, that my self-preoccupations, whether with fantasies or battling them, my self-evaluations, were not everyone else’s perception of me.  Adolescents discover themselves – it takes time to discover others.

Monsignor indicated he wanted to speak on an important subject. His tone of voice was sober, but not angry. His movements inviting me into his office to have a seat were slow, dignified, fragile.  There was a large crucifix on the wall behind him, along with framed mementos of his achievements, awards, honors. Of course I answered respectfully and waited. Have you ever felt that you had a vocation, a calling to the priesthood? he asked. I was floored. I was just barely over, if at all, the most bizarre and grotesque fantasy life. I never thought of becoming a priest, any more than I contemplated growing gossamer wings and flying to the moon.

I was stunned, but one is supposed to answer a respected elder, an ordained, holy priest, so I stammered ‘n – n – n – no, sir.’  Momentarily a stutter had returned. If I had been more alert – if I had paid much attention to what anybody else was thinking and spent any effort trying to understand that – I might not have been so shocked.  But one non-sexual consequence of my interior life was that, without meaning to be selfish, I was entirely preoccupied with myself.  I never saw anybody’s signals.  So Monsignor’s question dropped me. I should have read the perceptions of others better – another way of saying I shouldn’t have been 16 years old, but I was.

He spoke quietly – sometimes there is a boy whom I observe, who it may be possible, that God is calling to the religious life. When I see a boy marked off from his companions by his piety, by his intelligence, by the good example he sets for others, I pay attention. I have prayed for you – did you know that? (Of course I did not.) I have prayed for your vocation and God’s direction life. Perhaps you are that boy, a young man now, whom God designs to call to Himself. To receive that call is a great honor.

I could not connect, not even in the remotest reach of my imagination, me, taking confessions, celebrating the mass, instituting the eucharist, invested in priestly robes, calling the congregation to prayer, dismissing them. I would know the sins of others, hear them in the confessional. I was being considered – I was being invited. Would that mean I had to stop playing baseball? And what if I became a priest, and had a bad day, a bad week, of sexual fantasies? I had just struggled to climb across one imposing cliff – celibacy would be another.

I was confronted with something else, not sexual, not even Monsignor’s invitation to consider a religious vocation.  I stopped being a boy on that day, although it would be years before I became a man – what kind of person was I?  A phrase came to mind out of an old book, one that became an indecent movie – a clockwork orange.  I did not know who or what I was at that point but I knew that the answers being provided to me were superficial. I was not a clockwork boy. That much I saw – with the shock of having been blindfolded and walked up to a great cliff and suddenly having the blindfold removed. All of it – baseball – school – raw unbridled fantasy sex – the invitation to consider the priesthood – all of it, was like a saddle being fitted on me, one saddle after another – but the horse wanted to know what the rider was like, without the saddle.

But you have to be quite sure, the Monsignor told me – you must be sure you have a vocation. It would be terrible to be mistaken. Once you are ordained as a priest, you are always a priest. When I left his office I felt flattered, but escaping like a bird flying from a cage, a rabbit outrunning the fox exhilarated by the near calamity.  If his question seemed to him an invitation – something to consider – it appeared to me, astonished at his apparent judgment of me, the jaws of a trap.

Not having religion was dangerous – demonic fantasies took over your mind.  But having religion was dangerous too – people might lay heavy burdens, enormous obligations onto your back. I felt nostalgic for just being a kid – wanting to be ten years old, with nothing more important to do than field some grounders, shag a few fly balls hit by my father in our back yard. I began to be guarded, seeing snares in every direction – ropes on all sides. I started looking for a new way out.

I took a survey of my interior life and for once, dropped sports out. My mother was the intellectual one – she was the one who tutored in me analytic geometry, who knew every Irish writer’s biography, who dropped their books casually around the house which I read equally casually. Math was not my cup of tea and I knew by then the Orioles were never going to draft me for their farm team.  Where to go?  And then the answer seemed obvious and natural, the way I casually picked up every book around the house to read, without giving it any importance, just something to do between baseball games and school.  I was going to be a writer, a poet forging a new being, myself, soaring out of the sluggish dirt of the infield.  Right or wrong, smart or dumb, it was mine – my direction.  No one handed that to me. 

Wild ambitions passed through me. I was floating, soaring in new air. I would escape incorrigible imagination and the straightjacket of obligations, trudging penances, rites, dawn prayers, the must, the should, the ought.  I was keenly aware of how undisciplined my imagination was – I was not yet aware how undisciplined my conscience was.  So at 16, making serious decisions for the first time in my life, not simply handing up my ticket to be punched by someone else, I came to my own conclusions and consulted no one. I would flee the vengeful oversight of Catholic conscience, marking and indicting guilty sin, beating the drumbeat of duty.  Whatever remedies there were to life, I would discover them elsewhere. I would create and self-create instead.

With a wild new song in my veins, something different, an anger, lurked in my heart. Soon after I had a confrontation with my little sister Chuckie over trivia – borrowing my team jacket and throwing it on the floor in her room. I lashed out at her and called her a stupid little twat. It wasn’t just the words – she cried because of the truly hateful tone of my voice, the contempt leaping up and out to hurt. The family was outraged at me – I was grounded for a week. My older sisters were going their own way too, for reasons not identical to mine, but related. At the core of our family, some things were cracked. I started writing poetry and submitting it to literary journals – it was always rejected, but occasionally I got some encouraging notes and my English teacher handed me top grades and personal accolades. When it came time for teacher recommendations on college application forms, she wrote a lengthy, sincere recommendation that discussed several of my poems – as if I were a real writer.

There were other elements of my character to be discovered. Teenage boys purloin alcohol – generally, as long as no one is driving around drunk, a misdemeanor, a venial sin, not a felony.  An appetite, a taste on my tongue, a thirst, emerged.  Not altogether shocking – not the first of Irish descent who lifted a cup and didn’t stop. I had a new highway now, saw a new road sign – poetry, artistry, creation. I would be a writer – a title held in high honor. It did not occur to me that the problems I was having with Catholicism, with its looming duties, with my own imagination, with family fissures never surfaced, with a stillborn spiritual life, related to anyone else.  I did not know and did not think to ask whether anyone else may have had such problems. Nobody knew what was going on in my mind and I didn’t say.  What transpired in my interior life might be misguided, naïve, but it wasn’t childish – some problems are, indeed, hard.

My exit from family and home to enter college was short in geography, long in psychological distance. I  quietly prepared during my senior year – took the largest financial aid package offered by a nearby college without murmuring or lengthy consideration, because I thought it peripheral anyway – I had another direction in view.  Come away, o human child! To the waters and the wild – with a faery hand in hand, for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. So said Yeats and conjured for me a parting song. Christian religion made an insensate foil for passions, fantasies, Irish legends – my mother’s occasionally strange Irish nationalism, buried for years, erupting in a moment, extended into a plan.

On leaving home without my baseball gear, my father resorted to a kind of paisano, barefoot Italian boy identity, fueled with wine, lost in space staring out a window like a man staring at the Abbey of Monte Cassino after it was bombed to ruins. Just as in the battle, his enemies were hiding in the rubble, more fortified and intractable than ever. Dark folk were gathering in my soul like bats in dead trees. Yeats would lead me out to Tara, where faeries danced under the Druid moon to tunes danced in an enchanted circle. Ireland was the excuse, not the reason – the point was escape. Yeats wanted to escape In the Beginning, wanted to leave the Nicene creed behind. His everlasting Voices called. I heard them too.  My fertile imagination took off running in a new direction.  Partial poems, shards of lines, emerged unbidden.

A silent man with a hazel wand came forth out of the past to change me.
In the darkness I met the Boar, grunting,
rooting out the sun and the moon,
bringing in the end of the world like a suicide pact.
The Horses of Disaster plunged into the clay,
shadowy, clinging, creeping, weeping,
sighing as the West passed away.
Yes, it was possible after all to enter the twilight of another world,
the Valley of the Black Pig.
Unknown spears. Fallen horsemen. Perishing armies. Seen through a flaming door.
The most drunken were the most blessed.

Dreams were defeated and reborn, reignited –
the stars blown about by enchanted vapors.
The only thing holy was the wine-vat.
Red dew flamed in a windless world on a grey shore.
I could pass by Christ, an immortal passion in mortal clay,
could bend down to loosen my hair over him,
a lily of death-pale hope, rose of a passion, but I wasn’t going to stop there.

Spiritualism loves playing the tourist with the Gospel.  Death was more than an invitation, it was romance, it was command. Were you but lying cold and dead, rhymed Yeats to his beloved, and lights were paling in the West.

I knew of leafy paths that witches take – knew their secret smile.
I knew of the soul-swans, coupled with golden chains,
the hopeless king and queen, wandering, deaf, blind.
I sailed in a shroud and steered from a gaudy stern.
I saw the crowds on the shore running nowhere
as I left them in a wooden ship.
I cried in the glittering sea, searching in ecstasy for Death.

I was fickle, I needed no constant or guiding star. I was free, I could drift in and out of life, in and out of the church, or faith. I looked for a light beyond the grave and hoped to find something to replace what was lost. I could drink with whatever poet-girl was there at the moment. We could get sloppy drunk, fall into each other’s arms, pass out after a short fiery passion, find ourselves queasy in the morning marinating in raw smells with not much to say and little reason to speak. There were no rules – not in my Ireland-of-the-imagination – more unconstrained than ever.  As it turned out, actual sex was never quite equal to my previous fantasies, but I had moved to different realms anyway.

I wanted to change the tune, to turn my flesh to its native-wild state, on the galloping horse of spiritualist poetry, defiant, unconverted, pagan. Sent out naked on the roads, punished, stricken by the injustice of cold heaven. Uncontrollable mysteries to find, secrets to peer into, crypts pried open to gain hidden knowledge.  I was learning to hate life.  Life was noisy, life was filthy. The cradle was an insult, an accident. Everything I once held of value was but a pissing post for dogs. I pissed on life, a perfumed silk purse of filth – or at least, that’s what I thought I did, at the ripe old age of 21. And I drank. Drank myself sick, drank myself nearly blind. I expressed anger by getting drunk and cured my sorrow by staying drunk.  Remarkedly, my intoxication did not affect my grades.  Even hung over, I showed up in class, made a few comments, asked a few questions, which compared so favorably to other students that my grades were stellar.

Gone drunk, I straggled onto barren ridges past the goat trails where daemons convened.  Sober, I was depressed.

Long wavering bodies on the moon,
crone-witches, centaurs, Irish giants, as fantastical as ever,
came, dissolved, all vanished.

Left was a bitter headache, a sick stomach under a timid, ignorant sun.  Life was wanton, its flailing end the repository of knowledge of its pointlessness. Ghost-alone, I haunted a sandy bank. To be a poet, Irish-American, awakened from the common stale dream to dissipation, occult legends sketched with gargoyles – presented in loquacious, highly ornate words of despair, a spired and collonaded tower for poetical goblins.  

I called out to mysterious persona, my imaginary double,
walking wet sands, whispering poetry, hidden like night raptors.
Floating on whiskey, I crossed bridges where a tower cast a shadow,
images delirious under shifting phases of a spell-cast moon –
heard a rat splashing under rushes,
my destiny.
Each phase of the moon filled with cryptic significance –
creeping, crawling, unveiled eyes reflecting in the slime.
Dark moons, full moons, new moons, crescent moons –
arcane knowledge kissed on a spectral channel.
Death I courted, death I chose through phases of the moon.
Walking corpse bearing Cu Chulainn’s hero’s crescent –
then helpless, then frenzied,
still falling into the labyrinth of self.

I was too strange, too lonely for the traffic of my college life, cast away beyond the pale of evening coherence. Properly drunk, posted between a tower of Jamison and a pint of Guinness, I was the voluble and colorful poet in my isolation.  In the morning, the body was coarse, the body was a drudge, a deformity dragging down free flight beyond the verge.  A few pills helped.

Somewhere dark I cried out, a cave-bat.
Changing my body in dream after Tarot dream.
The last crescents of the moon were the hunchback, the saint, the fool.
I dealt the cards, I spread them out, read them to find
the Major Arcana, the Minor Arcana,
my card, the magus-hermit.
Yeats led me to the castle door, I saw the light in the tower extinguish.
I was burning, raving, broken on the wheel.
Obedient to the hidden magical breath of his poetry.
I saw a dead girl dreaming, dancing.
I saw the sphinx lash her tail, eyes lit by the moon, gazing.
We spun like tops, time overthrown.
My body was meat with a beating pulse,
caught between the dark moon and the full.

I lived willfully in my self-ruined house. On and on it went – I published first poems, graduated, obtained a Master’s, was hired as adjunct faculty in Binghamton NY. The next year, Knoxville, the year after that a position in San Jose, where I stayed longer. The itinerant non-tenured associate professor-writing instructor, have resume, have publications, will travel.

While dragons sheltered within a foul world,
screaming, terrified, invisible beasts or birds,
alcohol fueled nights, pill-driven days.
A spider spinning webs, laying stinging traps for pain,
creative paralysis, death of the poet.
Anything I loved too greatly was to be taken away.

My life, falling – my center could not hold – lacked all conviction, my worst impulses empowered a passionate intensity. I saw a different Second Coming – not the Son of Man, selfless love, motived to self-sacrifice, his blood for purification –

I saw the beast of this world, disjointed head of man,
bleak, pitiless in his expression, ponderously approaching.
Indignant, desert birds screeched – darkness dropped for me.
Electro-shock sleep, convulsed nightmares,
advanced to announce another rough beast.
Its hour finally arrived, slouching toward me and all that was mine –
the second waiting to be born of the first.

I drank more, collected Egyptian books of the dead, gathered grimoires to myself, read the incoherent nonsense of Nostradamus, tutored myself on crystals and the astral plain, probed deeper into the knowledge of death.

Still, I was writing poetry. I was going to conferences to listen, read my own poetry, network, drink. For a couple years I had no teaching position, lived in various places in Wyoming, supported myself doing odd jobs in sparsely-populated locations set in the foreground of astonishing mountain ranges, and concentrated on writing poetry, drinking nightly and studying the occult. Conferences could be fun, until they closed the bar and lonely I had to go back to my hotel room. I met Lenny at a conference in Reno and had some fun with him.

Trumpets play – no country for old men,
the derelict song – no refuge for young men either
where every fantasy begotten, dies.
The gin-kamikaze gnosis insatiable, a tumescent chase
never satisfied.

Always one more salt wet fetish to pursue,
one more occult-erotic image to capture.
Yet another ghost in fishnet stockings,
platform shoes, nine-inch heels, cherry lips, imperious eyelashes
calling.

Statuesque, she beckons, thanatosis-Kilimanjaro secrets
across the dune-guarded coast highway,
down to the freckled beach,
to dark water, rolling ribbons of moon-colored dancing whitecaps.
down.

Cultivate the Mor-Rioghain nymphomanic,
lipsticked crow-smile across her grimacing skull,
floating across breaking waves,
swimming away to a thrumming drumming metronome, deeper.
Always deeper.

Peek. The next occult secret was hovering, peering
from behind a half-closed illuminati door.
The first-promised apple, yes.
She entices, further reveals her curled, intimate privacy to the initiated.
Disrobing, yes.

Old men go under the ocean.
Young ones are called too – yes, now,
go down, fool – yes,
go under.

After my adventure with Lenny I wrote that poem. As it turned out, my communications with Lenny were going to outlast any conference.

After my sojourn across Wyoming I found another teaching position at a second-tier university campus in Colorado, then in Florida the next year, a continuation of house-sitting in a series of professor’s homes left empty while they took sabbaticals.  I liked rambling around in towns with undergraduate bars, tucked-away clever coffee shops, a few sophisticated restaurants, admissions offices, multi-purpose gymnasiums, field houses, classrooms in old buildings, new classroom buildings for the science department, buildings under repair for liberal arts or being constructed within sight of new student dormitories.

My labyrinthian perches of solitude went with me. I was in a polite rage to murder the swans, but in a sensitive, literary way, a mockery of everything. Street-light shadows sketched me across moonlit alleys that provided the rear, parking-lot exit from whichever blue-collar bar was the current choice.  For all of that, I didn’t mind teaching freshmen about American lit and poetry – if I got to move the topic and talk about Yeats or Joyce, I really didn’t mind. Life wasn’t all bad, even with the hangovers.  I kept writing my own poetry, perhaps obscure, perhaps unread – satisfying anyway.  That gave me pleasure too.

For reasons that have no clear explanation, I decided to visit a Pentecostal church one Sunday evening. I was thinking of poems and wanted to throw the Pentecostals in as characters, foils.  I was searching yet unwilling to admit what I was doing. Whatever the combination of motives, I played the tourist, the poet-anthropologist visiting a distant and obscure tribe.  True believers were hidden in a cultural jungle whose ways and customs were grist for my poetry mill.  I could be intellectual, analytic, condescending – and what is more fun than that?

I encountered a mass of people about 75, that appeared to me to be all related, some of whom had extraordinary voices (apparently their arcane customs included musical training). They were being led in song from old hymnals – they used two different sets so the number of the hymn had to be identified in the two separate hymnals, with a brief discussion if the stanzas didn’t perfectly match. The worship space, a rambling 19th-century home converted to church uses, was loaded with children, strewn across couches and up stairsteps, infants in arms, teenagers listening, kicking from behind my chair until I had to politely ask her to stop, which she equally politely did. They were led by a pastor in his mid-sixties and it appeared his parents, based on the visible family relationship, was looking over a clan that might equal Abraham’s.

A chair was quickly found for me, a book handed to me, and I started singing too, quite astonished at this family’s musical sophistication, the participation of so many different ages and stages of singing people, the infants being held in many arms. On some printed material appeared the name Overcoming Church of El Shaddai, our Rock and Core.  I was sitting on a folding aluminum chair, had put my hymnal down for a moment, they were dancing in a circle in front with the pastor joining in.

Instantly I was overwhelmed with the presence of God. !Fear! of God.
Fear-awe, fear-dread, fear-raw in its power turned me around –
I knelt.  Faced toward the chair, my back to the altar and the dancers, my head bowed.
Praying in abject Fear with my folded hands on the chair seat.
I had no thoughts, searched no explanations, a man struck and driven by a tsunami.
I could not bend my head down far enough –
the seat of the chair stopped me from bending my neck down any further.
If there had been room I would have fallen flat on my face prostrated.
I don’t remember the words I whispered in prayer – whatever the form or content,
all they really expressed was !Fear, raw, overwhelming Fear of the Lord
who had shown Himself spiritually revealed, exposed, to me,
to me, emotional, spiritual presence-power that permitted neither comparison or explanation. The experience could not have lasted longer than two or three minutes. The wave of emotion passed, my head bobbed up like a swimmer coming up for air. No one was paying attention to me.

I gathered myself, stood up, turned around, and reseated myself on my chair, trembling. After a few moments I picked up the hymnal again but I had no idea what hymn we were singing. The dancers hadn’t stopped. I sat there, quietly stunned. Again I looked around – no one around me seemed to think anything unusual had happened at all.  The lack of attention was almost as astonishing as the experience – as if an ethereal grenade went off which was perceived nowhere, touched no one, except to blast me.  I had the sensation that my mother stood next to me, observing curiously, sympathetically, with a touch of parental satisfaction, but offering no comment or explanation.

At the end of the service I shook a few hands, accepted a few invitations to return, and made my way back to my rented off-campus house. The effect of this experience on me was more subtle, slower, than one would expect from such an onslaught. The experience quieted my soul. I didn’t immediately join a church, but I began drinking less. I didn’t, legally or illegally, refill my prescription of wake-up pills. I began to read different books – some books on the philosophy of religion. I still drank, but with less compulsion to drink myself into oblivion. I became a quieter person. The raw fear of God woke up something or somebody in my soul. I read the Bible at times, the Gospels, rather as if they were literature – but literature which now interested me, different than the mandatory reading from the lectern at a Sunday service.

At one point I read Jesus’ words, “fear God, who can destroy both body and soul in hell.”  Of course I’d heard those words before, was familiar with them. The idea of having my body destroyed was acceptable – of course that’s what death was, the destruction of the body. That’s where I’d been going with alcohol anyway –  I rehearsed for the event every night. But the destruction of the soul captured my attention – I’d more or less expected to drink myself into one last stupor ending in eternal unconsciousness – my little life rounded with a sleep.  But if my soul were being destroyed – how did that work?

It seemed as if my soul continued, if it continued being destroyed.  And instead of discouraging or angering me, oddly, it created a kind of hope. Perhaps death wasn’t the end.  Perhaps the dialogue with God continued.  I’d rather not have my soul eternally destroyed, but the eternally continuing nature of this dialogue, with this Lord whom I had just met, had a personal experience with, intrigued me.  Without making any giant decisions, my visits to barrooms decreased from once a night to once or twice a week – and I began visiting churches, picked at random. I was no longer the poet-anthropologist studying the peculiar customs of the local indigenous tribes – I was a worshipper too.  An obscure worshipper, stepping into and out of the church like a shadow, but there was nothing wrong with that.  It was the same way I wrote poetry.

I visited the local Catholic church too, so familiar to me. Of course I knew my way around and I took the sacrament, celebrated the Eucharist too. I was glad, it was comfortable. But it was a group setting – the Host was consecrated for the group, the priest invited us up as a group, we were blessed as a group. The experience was a group, a collective activity. I fully credited every word and declaration the priest said, every song, every confession, accepted every blessing, made my offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, thought the people were warm, the service was holy.

But something had happened to me – to me.  My connection with the Lord was personal, fearful but intimate for that reason.  The fear of God was a communication in a breakfast booth for two, not a ceremony in a great conference hall with hundreds gathered for a great feast.  If I had the bacon and eggs of fear of the Lord, sitting in a small breakfast booth, then it was the two of us, face to face.  He was communicating to me, with me, no one else, me – and the continuation of that unique, deeply personal relationship was implied in my soul and declaring itself in my mind.

Although I was a kind of mysterious stranger in various small independent churches, I began communicating with distant people via email based on posts they made, things they wrote I read. My religious discussions were always via electronic communication – that’s how Lenny and I started communicating. He had questions to ask, was affected by our mutual drunken adventure seeking out the afterlife on the astral plane in the Pacific Ocean. I thought the whole thing was a caustic lark, an elaborate practical joke for which he was the perfect foil.

But he started asking me questions as if I had answers.  In answering him, I was answering myself.  So I carried on in question and answer with him. I visited tiny little churches and heard a broad variety of sermons, participated in a wide assortment of worship practices, bowed my head for many prayers. I missed sometime the universality of a large church with its sacramental life with a fixed liturgy and fellow congregants all around the world.  I remembered my visit to Bowie for anonymous confession there. I read my thought-provoking, eclectic philosophies of religion.  I wrote poetry that was mine, unique, not in imitation of others and made new applications for other non-tenured literature instructor positions. And I treasured the fear of God – who in one instant shocked and frightened me, turned me around to kneel in a room of people who paid no attention – to call me out of my highly-individualized, poet-of-the-latter-day-Yeats coffin.

From there I arrived with a new position in San Diego and found gone-for-sabbatical temporary housing in extraordinarily scenic La Jolla.  After some period of visiting churches I found a large evangelical church which seemed to fit. I didn’t talk to anyone about my experience of the fear of God. It was an experience beyond words, without words.  This church organized its activities – they had a baseball team and they let me try out without asking me a lot of questions. They asked if I ever played before and I answered some and they asked what position and I said third and they said well here’s a glove go ahead we’ll hit you a few grounders and directed me toward third. It was a well-equipped church – they had a nice field with real dugouts and even some bleachers. They hit me a few easy ones, then they kind of looked at each other and hit me a few harder ones. After about ten of those they said, okay, third, and I was on the team.

The left fielder was one of the associate pastors of the church named Brooks, from Little Rock and still had some of his Arkansas accent. We would come a little early before games and loosen up with some throws from left field to third and back. One day when he came back in I asked him what was involved in getting baptized in the church. They did baptism by full immersion a couple of times a year and once a year in August they did it in the Pacific ocean. I asked him if it was a problem that I was already baptized. I didn’t say Catholic but my last name probably gave it away. He said no because the point was my adult commitment, my confession and declaration in public now.

I told him I wanted to think about it. Not only was I taught that one baptism performed by the church was the right baptism, but it was the only baptism. But I didn’t want to have a theological disagreement in my head. This wasn’t a theology debate. My experience at the Overcoming Church of El Shaddai had changed me.  I didn’t have words for the change, but I wasn’t on a first name basis with any bartender in San Diego either. I had stayed out of baseball for a while, years, but when I was ready to try out for the team, then I did so. If you’re going to play for the team, you get a glove, you walk onto the field.

I didn’t wait for the ocean baptism experience. After a couple of weeks I told Brooks I was ready and I got dunked on a Sunday morning and made my profession of faith. Brooks performed the baptism and asked me as we were beginning, with me standing in front of the congregation, why I wanted to be baptized, to make this public confession of my faith. My answer was my own, maybe a little surprising, even to Brooks.

I fear God, I said loudly for people to hear, with no stuttering. Who can cast both body and soul into hell.  Jesus is my Lord and my Savior too.  Brooks nodded and smiled, the way he did when he first saw me trying out for third base. Then he did what he was there for as a called and ordained minister and I presented myself to be publicly, maturely and volitionally acted upon, which is what I was there for.  This was full immersion, three times, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost – all the way under – Brooks made sure of that.

After I was baptized I told a couple of people, including Lenny, still unmoved from his mountaintop or jail or nest in Cornfield. He started to ask some questions from time to time which were a little startling, at least out of my area. He asked isn’t everything we do the product of our minds? Why is rational thought different than what you call revelation? I struggled to answer that. Another he asked – why wouldn’t my set of feelings about my religion, whatever it is, be fundamentally any different or better or worse than yours? I decide for myself, you accept what someone else says – is there really any difference? Aren’t we all limited by our sense data anyway? Another question – Doesn’t language define or constrain reality? Or at least what is possible? Then he asked – do you think there are forms? Like ideal forms – you know the form of a cat, which all cats share? Or do you think there are forms in language, so it makes sense to say Socrates is a man, or Socrates is mortal, or even Socrates is my pet cat – but it doesn’t make sense to say Socrates is an isosceles triangle – because the interior structural forms of reality and language are shared?

He asked if I thought Plato’s experience in the beginning of The Republic, talking with his friends about an ideal city, was like Moses’ experience in the desert at the burning bush. At least I had some answers for that, had a personal experience I could relate to. All I can say is I did my best to answer him – but more important was for him to articulate the question, to ask. My answers weren’t that important. He was working out answers in his head. He asked if I agreed with John Stuart Mill about liberty and freedom of speech and development of the self. Then he asked about the death of Mills’ wife – and although I can’t remember my answer, I remember thinking he was digging deeper into his own questions, questions we mortal beings all share. At times he was like an inquisitive 8-year old, asking his questions non-stop, like a phase my sister Chuckie went through, just to hear me answer, without much concern for the content of any particular answer. He asked if there weren’t some single, moral categorical rule we should all follow. He asked if I thought that such a rule would make an ideal society. He asked what was wrong with Thomas Jefferson crossing out the miracles in the New Testament.

When he asked questions about poetry I was better at answering. He asked me if I thought Walt Whitman loved America. He asked the same question about Allan Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. He asked if Holden Caulfield was supposed to be a Christ figure. He asked what it meant for some literary figure to be a Christ figure – why did we keep seeing that? Why was it important? He asked if I liked Faulkner, asked if I read As I Lay Dying. He didn’t ask anything about Hemingway. He asked if I liked Charles Bukowski and I remember struggling to answer that, not because I didn’t understand the man or his poetry, but because I understood it too well. He asked if I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry – another one I struggled with, because of my associations and curiosities about things occult. Giving him answers that separated the poet from a spirit of death or despair or unbelief was no small task. He asked if I liked Edgar Lee Masters and Spoon River Anthology with its cast of characters and theological speculations, and William Carlos Williams and his book Paterson and mixing poetry and prose together. I mentioned Louise Glueck.  Lenny wore me out with questions.

One day he asked again about my baptism. Whatever answer I made, then he switched topics and announced he was going to be attending a conference in San Diego in August and asked if it were okay if he stayed with me. And as it turned out, he was baptized that August. I was still working out some things on my own, about my own poetry, my own career. I had some questions too and occasionally talked them over with Brooks. Some of them had to do with small churches, and big churches, and a universal church. The Son of God, who saved me from the wrath of God by means of the fear of God, was unwrapping a scroll. I didn’t have all the answers I wanted either but I had enough to go forward and step out onto the field, ready to handle my position.
_________________

 

Lenny

     One.  The Midwest.

Silence rises over the horizon, over the corn fields, wheat fields, over the barley, over the soybean. Silence over the Ohio river, silence over the Scioto and the Wabash. Silence over the field corn stretched in stalks across acres, aprons to catch the yellow sun. Silence over the silos silhouetted by the dawn. Silence when the Son arises, holy, to open the Seventh Seal. We will see the end of death – and be silent in our thoughts.

Leonard Manasseh Cutler, third of three sons and one daughter. Child of an engineer and an educator. Began playing piano at three, reading at four, could add columns of numbers in my head at five. Corn fields, grain silos, equipment rentals, church steeples, laid out in squares across the horizon from my miniscule hometown – restaurant, hardware store, gas station-convenience store, Methodist church, hair salon, pizza parlor, insurance agent, used car dealer perennially flying an enormous flag, one stoplight and not much else. Columbus sixty minutes away. Bus ride to elementary school, half an hour, to the high school, forty-five minutes the other way. Late summer afternoon clouds laid across an unbroken horizon, free and plentiful. If you could ignore the gnats, summer nights were the size of the whole universe – when I was a child, the summer evening went on forever.

Preeya lived on the same block. She was two months older than me. Her father was an engineer, worked for the same company my father did. Her family was a multi-generational clan from India, going to the Methodist church, setting up fireworks and eating hot dogs on the fourth of July with little American flags planted up and down their driveway, singing the Old Rugged Cross around a piano on Sunday nights. They were the most visibly patriotic family I knew. As children, Preeya was about my size, rather quiet in public, but even as a five-year old, if I wandered out toward a corn field to look at the fireflies, she would soon be wandering around too. When she caught up to me we caught fireflies, trapped them in cardboard dixie cups, then let them go after inspections.

We marinated in the culture of the Midwest. Being in a hurry was like being disloyal to Ohio State’s football team – it wasn’t done. In second grade my teacher, Mrs. Deeter gave the class tests in the fall. Right before Christmas, she gave me a note that asked my parents to come to a meeting. Although my brothers were 10 and 12 and sister was 14 and might have watched me, they decided to get a babysitter, named Gerri. She was nice and let me stay in the bathtub, playing with plastic toy frogmen and planes, for a long time. After the meeting, my parents came home and told me they met with Mrs. Deeter and they were going to keep me in second grade. This was surprising. I liked my teacher and school. I didn’t know anyone was thinking of me not being in second grade. Instead, they were going to give me an extra class in after school. They told me I did very well in the tests. This didn’t make sense – if I did well, why did I have to go to extra school? But when we started, I understood better – in the afternoon class I did harder things that were more interesting in math. So it was okay after all. Monday through Thursday my mother would come and get me so I didn’t ride the bus home anymore. Her first question was always what we did in school. If I had a good answer, then she played the radio, whatever was on the classical station. If I didn’t have a good answer, she would get a concerned look on her face and say something like you want to stay caught up with your work because I’m sure you’ll be moving on to new material next week. You wouldn’t want to fall behind. Falling behind was apparently a grave sin, ominous and irrecoverable. Once when I gave her a non-descript answer two weeks in a row, she said maybe I’ll call your teacher. My mother and whatever teacher I had always seemed involved in some conspiracy about me, which seemed odd, because even apart from math class, I did pretty well. My teacher would casually give me bigger books to read than the other students, as if it were just some afterthought, some book laying around on her desk that fell out of the library by accident, but my mother seemed to know that this was going to happen in advance.

On Friday my father would come get me and we would go bowling – I liked that a lot. There’s a peculiar and special smell in a bowling alley and the hollow echoing sounds of the balls bouncing on the lanes and into gutters and the pins getting knocked over and reset. We went to a bowling alley which had those old fashioned pinball machines in a big room next to the lanes with flippers and flashing lights and ringing bells when a player hit the target with a good flip and they made noise too. My father would sit there and keep score, calm, impassive, and calculate my average score over three games at the end as seriously as if he were designing an experiment for aerodynamic performance in a wind tunnel. When we finished he would buy me a coke and some treat from a vending machine with the precisely identical warning each week: don’t tell your mother. I never would tell because I thought it might change something that I didn’t want changed. I didn’t tell my father that I could keep the scores and do the averages in my head because I liked it when he was there and keeping score with his stubby little pencil, filling in strikes and spares when I got them and telling me how I did. And I never told my mother about the soda and the vending machine snacks he bought me at the end but I think she knew anyway.

My father, Michael Manasseh Cutler, blonde, baby-faced, solidly built, was from a line of Cutlers in Ohio going generations back so far that different streets were named Cutler Road in three counties. He was an only child. He looked like he could play linebacker on the high school football team, but high school was difficult for him, socially and emotionally. Maybe because he couldn’t play linebacker. But he learned to play trumpet and trombone and got on the high school marching band and for whatever reason, that was a big emotional boost for him. He remembered it fondly and gave money every year to the local high school band. He went to Ohio State and then Naval ROTC, came out, flew on P-3 aircraft as one of the flight officers, looking at instrument consoles for telltale evidence of submarines when we weren’t at war and weren’t at peace either. Told me he spent hours flying over empty oceans out of bases in Florida or Hawaii. The only thing dangerous was when his plane had to land with the landing gear not operative and still up in the belly of the plane – everyone survived the landing but the plane was a total loss. Got his job with an avionics contractor and worked his way up to V.P. of marketing, so he traveled.

While he was at Ohio State he met my mother, Tracy Cosby, as blonde as he was, which was their first joking conversation. She was from Polish parents, still had some family in Poland she visited once every five years, who claimed they were distantly related to Lech Walesa, got her master’s in education and foreign languages, could speak fluent Spanish, Italian, Polish. She got another certification and spent years teaching English as a second language to the children of migrant farm workers and Spanish to Amish children in elementary school, both through special programs the school district arranged. There were a couple of large Amish communities in our neck of Ohio – Amish farms sprinkled everywhere and an Amish furniture store on every highway within fifty miles of Cornfield. Finally the school district recruited her to become an administrator and she spent the last couple of years of her career as the principal of a middle school. Also, about once a year at Christmas, my mother would drink a couple of glasses wine, get tipsy and become outspoken about the misdeeds and mistakes of the school board she worked for – my mother, voluble, was impassioned about whatever educational malpractice was being committed at the time as the expense of her children, meaning her students. My parents were lifetime ticket holders to the Ohio State football games and were lifelong Republicans.

My oldest brother, Jack, graduated from Ohio State with a PhD in chemistry. He wandered out to Colorado as part of some post-graduate program, then did an about-face in life. He got involved with a local HVAC business in Denver and wound up buying the business and running it successfully for decades. At first he came back to family gatherings with his first wife, Jackie, who was petite and pretty and smart and sociable. Everyone liked her and they made a perfect couple. For whatever reason, that fell apart. A couple years later he found a second wife, who only came once to a family gathering, in a tight, low-cut dress and spiky heels. She had a couple of children by previous relationships. That marriage lasted and my brother Jack raised her children, although I heard from my mother, who managed to stay somewhat in touch, they lived exciting, dramatic lives with no shortage of emotion. Jack got cancer and died in his mid-sixties in Colorado.

My brother Scott got a PhD in mathematics and joined the faculty of Kent State, where he taught mathematics for years and ended up as head of the department and then dean of some sort. His first marriage also did not last, but his first wife, Ellen, went on to become quite active and finally prominent in charitable activities which benefited thousands of children in Cleveland, her home town. She passed in her fifties, still carrying the Cutler name and got a full-scale obituary because she was so well known for her charitable work. Scott’s second wife, Susan, was slender, smart, quiet, from Chicago and went about the business of having four children with Scott and raising them all without any more fuss than is unavoidable in nurturing growing children. If any discussion began around Susan which threatened to become controversial, an argument, she skillfully entered into the conversation and redirected the topic.

My sister, oldest child, Anne, was businesslike about school, so as to give no complaint about her grades, and otherwise had little interest in being at home. She was always sleeping over at a friend’s house, going on vacations with the family of a friend from school who would invite her because she was so charming and social with them, and spending a maximum amount of time away from the family without ever giving any explanation. She got along well with my father, didn’t get along as well with my mother, but there was a mystery about my sister – it may just have been Cornfield, it may have been feeling that she was supposed to be the junior mother for her younger siblings in my mother’s absence and she didn’t like that. Maybe it was Ohio and a tiny community organized around agriculture and the gnats that ate you in the summer and a sky largely devoid of the lights of surrounding civilization that could be a warm canopy if you liked it but a lonely, isolated shroud if you didn’t. Somewhere she heard a different drummer and ultimately would marry and move out to southern California, just north of Los Angeles, have her own children and show no great nostalgia for anything Midwest, including us.

My brothers were socially paired up, my sister was older, so I didn’t interact a lot with my siblings. Apart from my extra schooling, my young educational life involved every kind of gifted program, pull-out program, enriched program and so forth. I had an IEP every year and my mother attended these annual meetings with eight or nine other educational professionals to discuss my learning curriculum. When we got school books at the beginning of the year in each grade, I usually read through all the books they handed out, cover to cover, by the first month of the academic year. I didn’t misbehave in school but I tuned out after about ten minutes in any class since I knew where the teacher was trying to go. I did an enormous amount of doodling in elementary school.

I wasn’t totally isolated socially though, because I could go hang out at Preeya’s house with her large family whose exact population at any particular time was dynamic, including her parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, more distant relatives, who sometimes came from India, stayed for some time, bought Dunkin Doughnuts franchises or purchased and operated local motels, financed always by family loans, never borrowing from commercial banks – returned to India for extended visits, came back with brides, concluding with still more infant cousins, so the house was always in a state of colorful flux. My corn shock Cutler blond hair was a source of endless fascination to whichever toddlers were temporarily housed at Preeya’s.

The Patel house was busy. Pankaja, Preeya’s mother, told me her family was from Gujarat and spoke Gujarati and they were unusual, being Christians, Methodists capable of a deep dive into the English language Methodist hymn book and Blessed Assurance. It didn’t matter to me, I think I was six years old when Preeya’s mother told me, but it seemed important to her and important to tell me. Maybe it was a little important to Preeya, but she could be quiet. The Patels had a large swing set in their back yard and she liked swinging high and liked it when I did too – we would go back and forth, up and down. Preeya’s father, Prabhu, was highly educated, fluent in English, Gujarati and German too. So later, when I started reading philosophy he would quiz me on whether I understood the differences between the German language philosophical concepts and their clumsy translation into English. He never explained but I assumed his knowledge of those topics was part of his graduate education, either in India or the U.S. He had a booming voice when he sang, was the very model of the large family patriarch and could be engaged at any time in discussion on potential careers for his children, avionics, airwing shape, wind tunnels or windshear, or the prospects of further changes in the federal reserve interest rates, but had little interest in domestic politics or other topics. He seemed to regard politics generally with the same distaste which he had for British rule in India, the only topic on which I ever saw him exhibit a negative and disapproving facial expression.

     Two.  Preeya

I was hanging out with Preeya when we were about eight. We hopping over swales and storm water drainage ditches and wandered in and out of some neighboring cornfields, looking for praying mantises. Then we wandered over to their swing set, but were just standing around. It was cloudy, overcast August Saturday afternoon. For no particular reason that I could discern, Preeya turned to me and said, you know, we’re from Ahmedabad and Surat in Gujarat. They are very important cities. They’re cosmopolitan. Then she stopped speaking and looked at me, as if waiting for a reaction or reading my eyes. I knew what cosmopolitan meant, but I didn’t know quite why she said it or what reaction she wanted from me. It reminded me of when her mother announced to me that the family was Christian – something she heard at her dinner table. Preeya repeated these geographical and genealogical facts me as a solemn and significant announcement, something about her I should know. These were treasured facts of her family background and heritage. I had a Cutler family background and heritage too, although I couldn’t recollect announcing it to her, but perhaps Preeya wanted to balance out family histories. Otherwise, if there was some message Preeya wanted me to receive, a conclusion to be derived from these historical facts pertaining to her family’s background, at the age of 8, it still escaped me. I said oh and nodded.

Then we went to play some video games in her living room, which we had to extort from her older brothers who had been hanging out there all day. When I announced this conversation to my mother, educator that she was, she found out more about the history of Ahmedabad and Surat to instruct me. What I remembered from her tutorial was that Surat in particular was a busy place, where they cut and polished diamonds. It had a history with lots of people trooping through, some armed with swords, some with money, some with ships and trading deals. Everyone who trooped through had something – a Bible or a Koran, to advance their culture. Arabs, Portuguese, Turkish, Armenian, English, British, French and Dutch traders, Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Catholics, and all sorts of Indian dynasties, empires, sultanates, warlords, raiders, missionaries all came pouring into Surat. A guy named Alaud-Dīn Khaljī beat off the Mongol invaders from Surat in the 13^th century, a fact I’m sure everyone around at the time appreciated, as my mother explained with pedagogical glee. My mother’s eyes would twinkle when she summoned these ancient historical facts and tried to draw a mental picture for me of fierce warrior-king Alaud-Din Khalji and the terrible, bloody battle of Surat.

The next time I saw Preeya I mentioned she was right about Surat. The time after that I saw her, her mother let me into the house, telling me to wait a minute for Preeya to get ready so we could play. Preeya came down the stairs wearing a traditional Indian saree with embroidered silk and intricate stitching in bold pastel colors which almost eclipsed her, since she wasn’t very big. My reaction was a bit mystified. It wasn’t what I had in mind – those clothes weren’t going to work well if we went traipsing around in cornfields looking for praying mantises and avoiding corn snakes, which Preeya absolutely hated. I more or less indicated this by my facial expression – roughly, I’m a kid and I’m coming over to find another kid so we can go out to play and so what is this? – and Preeya said okay, wait – and she went back upstairs and changed into one of her long, everyday skirts that she wore pants underneath and didn’t care if they got dirty. Preeya’s mother, who could be quite vocal when she didn’t like something, was as silent as the sphinx and as dead-pan as a poker player while I waited for the necessary change of clothes in their living room. I was eight years old and although very tuned in to some things, if you could read them in a book or my mother taught them to me in one of her lessons or my father explained it by drawing some sketch, was rather oblivious to things which occurred outside books. I had already catalogued four different types of praying mantises in our local cornfields and as far as I was concerned, this expedition was serious business. What was the point of a long, fancy, embroidered dress?

I did notice that her dress was rather nice – I had never seen anything that intricately stitched or colorful around my family. Years later, I would still remember that dress and her descent down the stairs. Preeya was in my grade in school at that time. In fourth grade they decided I could skip 5^th grade and go right to middle school, which meant we were not at the same school, with Preeya just one grade behind of me. They had me skip 8^th grade too, so when I entered into 9^th grade, I was in two class years ahead of Preeya. I was two years younger than my classmates in 9^th grade – they were mostly fourteen and I was twelve and that started to have an effect on me. I wanted my classmates to like me, I wanted to have friends – but they wanted, at the age of 14, to be cool. Hanging out with me, a 12-year old giant brainiac (their name for me), was not cool. Girls started to make fun of me and giggle when they saw me – and I didn’t even look 12 years old – I looked like a blonde-haired oversized and pudgy ten year old who somehow got lost and was wandering around in the halls of a high school where he didn’t belong, trying to avoid getting run over by swarms of older students moving in the halls between classes. If I answered every question teachers asked to show I was the smartest kid in the class, that didn’t help – and if I played dumb and pretended I didn’t know who was buried in Grant’s tomb, that didn’t help either. Smart or dumb, I was ostracized and isolated. Preeya had to negotiate her own life in middle school with her own issues, so she was in no position to assist, even though the middle school and high school were co-located at the same sprawling location, surrounded by athletic fields and two separate tracks.

     Three.  Adolescent Boy, Adolescent Girl

There were some good things that happened around this time though, when I was entering high school, no longer a boy, not yet a man, alone in a crowd. I started some new reading interests, in poetry and philosophy. What was boring and too obvious for words in a classroom, which left me doodling absent-mindedly, wasn’t true of poetry or philosophy – it was challenging, it made you feel, it made you think, those writers were really trying to say something. If I could get where the author was going, could hear them and feel them, then my world expanded. For the first time I was meeting intellectual challenges which were really challenging. It didn’t matter if no one talked to me at lunch. If I had a book, I didn’t even see them – and for the most part, after a while the other students were willing to enter into that informal deal – they pretended not to see me either. We were still in the mid-west, this was still Ohio, even the teenagers didn’t go out of their way to be cruel. I was like furniture, like the assistant coach at the football game, always around but not critical to anything.

My childhood friendship with Preeya had faded as we went through middle school, our informal jaunts into corn fields for praying mantises were shelved. I wasn’t wandering over to her house to hang out with her and her brothers to play video games. In the later fall of my junior year in high school, on a Saturday after Thanksgiving, Preeya showed up at my house early one evening, with no particular agenda except that we should socialize, just have a conversation, on our screened-in, movable sliding-glass all-season back porch. The girl who had been my good childhood friend, distinctly quiet with a few notable exceptions, now had more to say, had become much more verbal. Preeya could be vocal too – more like her mother – in fact, she and her mother were at some level of conflict, and Preeya was going through some phase of rebellion. Preeya would smoke cigarettes on our back porch, which my parents, to my surprise, made no effort to interrupt or to snitch to Preeya’s family. My back porch became a kind of safe space for teenagers – Preeya liked to make use of it, came over and knocked on our door and regularly made herself at home there. I didn’t know that I needed to make use of such a space, but probably I did, although without smoking cigarettes. Preeya learned to blow smoke rings, which she demonstrated for me with all the aplomb of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. My parents were not intrusive people anyway, but it was notable, in recollection, how much time and space we were given on that back porch.

Preeya started talking about her family, their relations, their extended family and their relations, which is how I found out about the far-flung business adventures of her extended family and all their relations back in India and who was coming and who was going and who was getting married and who just had a baby. She talked about her church and her pastor and her questions, although she was fairly firmly fixed in her Methodist faith which traced a straight family line of parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, right back to missionary activity in India in the 18^th century. She talked about school and novels she read (I remember her talking about a novel called Boys and Girls Together for an hour) and it was all a little unexpected from somebody whose word count in the course of an afternoon had once been rather subdued and was now flowing like a waterfall. She talked about school, especially about girls at school and the various relationships, friendships, confidences, betrayals, cliques that she went through or was subjected to. Like her father, she almost never spoke about politics except to mimic, when it came up once in one of her monologues, the negative impression her family carried (jointly, apparently) of British colonialism – which was indeed negative, but not outraged or even that resentful. I pointed out to her that we had been British colonies too, a fact I was particularly aware of because part of Cutler family history dated back to some differences of opinion over the prospects and wisdom of our revolutionary war, leading to a set of Cutlers making their way into the Ohio valley. Preeya liked to draw or paint and from time to time would bring over sketches, sometimes of her family and one as well of my parents which she gave me and I kept for years.

It wasn’t necessary for me to do a lot in these conversations, which was good because emotionally, we were still in different places. I was an adolescent boy of 13 with a big vocabulary but generally a boy’s emotional life – Preeya was also an adolescent 13 years old, a girl, not yet a woman, but closer to adult concerns and observations than I was. Those conversations continued for almost two years – her just showing up at our door in the evening unannounced, sometimes twice a week, especially in the summer, sometimes not for a month. With the passage of time and the changes coming – I was going to be going to college – the bridge between us started stretching too far, once again too far to cross. I was confronting my entrance into college which was daunting to me – I knew well what it was like to be two years younger than everyone else entering high school. I still looked a couple years younger than my age; had as yet no real reason even to shave regularly. If I didn’t shave, after two weeks, a little blond shadow of a mustache might appear, a few wisps of hair on the chin might arrive. I didn’t get bullied because like my father, I was not small – he was 6’2” and by fifteen I was almost his height and 180 pounds – but the never-ending masculinity contest adolescent boys go through was a dead loser for me. I hid quickly and took lightning showers after gym to avoid silent humiliation – I had no visible hair around my groin. I was intensely self-conscious about that.

     Four.  Walden Pond and a Car Accident

Intellectually, 13 years old, I read Thoreau and marched around Walden Pond, trying to be inspired by whatever lay about me. I tried to elevate my life with conscious endeavor. I aimed at high things. On failure, I would not acknowledge I was beaten. I wished to live so the commonest events might inspire me – to dream of no heaven, but only that which surrounded me. If the ground was burned black, I resolved not to despair – seedlings would return to sprout up. I was determined to recover my own innocence – which for some reason I thought I had lost, but I acquired all that through reading, not experience. I read and therefore believed that there were whole continents and worlds within me to explore. Chastity was essential to this – my channel of purity had to be left open. I wanted the animal in me to die out, so the divine being could be established – all of these ambitions acquired through the thoughts of others. I thought my inner self was being made turbid by contact with the world. My inmost man was but a sour and turbid pool – I read those word and so internalized them. My efforts at this high and enlightened state were not successful – not surprising, since it had never been a reflection of my own experience, but that of written words from a man long dead who was different than I to begin with and lived in a different world. So it was like trying to apply the rules of chess to a game of checkers. I redoubled these efforts in the second half of my freshmen year at high school, but without intellectual or emotional success and was not able to recognize that my social isolation, and the fact that I was two years younger than my classmates, was a bigger problem than solving intellectual puzzles.

I kept a journal devoted to thinking good thoughts – after all, my thoughts would determine my fate. In this journal I recapitulated my reading. Like some Buddhist I tired to be at one with the universe. If I wondered, then I would expand into immortality. Poverty, chastity would connect with the divine. Self-help was the answer to All. Sickness was weakness, to be rejected by an act of the will. A disease of the body was due to troubles and defects of the spirit. Be simple! Be independent! Be trusting! So that I could be a still lake of purest crystal, reflecting all the world in my own deeps. I was of the sun; I was of the earth. I awaited no future. If the stars lived, then so should I – and I should do so alone. Wanting help was a sign of weakness. Then I would be intoxicated with the divine nectar of the spirit of the universe. No one would tell me of God – I would find God in nature. I would find God in any frosted bush and never trust in anything except my own armor. Perhaps when these words were written in the 19^th century, they had some originality and sincerity – for me, it was a step in the growth path of a teenager, a phase a young intellectual went through.

Walden Pond, Thoreau, transcendentalism and everything connected with it was a phase. Positive thinking in all its varieties and subcategories was a failure for another, more prosaic and unpleasant reason. My mother was involved in an automobile accident – not her fault and at first it looked as if it caused considerable property damage, totaling the family car, but otherwise without serious medical consequences. This evaluation – of no medical consequences – turned out to be premature. Within a few days her back problems began and would require several operations, lengthy rehabilitations, long and determined efforts on her part to recover fully and suppress or ignore her pain. This auto accident severely impacted her career as an educator, and that impacted her own self-confidence and self-image, which never really recovered, even after the physical consequences of the accident were alleviated over an extended period of time. There was a lawsuit and eventually a settlement too, but whether that helped my mother’s self-image was more questionable. How could this happen to me? Why did this happen to me? – are questions my mother asked in a non-verbal way without ever articulating them. How could that happen to her? Why did that happen to her? – were questions that I also had, again, never articulated, but floating underneath the surface. One minute you are bouncing along, and the next minute, in a car crash and someone is calling an ambulance. How does that happen? Why does that happen? The sudden unexpected randomness of it is disturbing and as disturbing to an adult as to a teenager. If life is nothing but a die roll which culls out some unlucky people who happened to be at the wrong stoplight at the wrong time, what does that say about life?

We all had to learn to help more around the house, but my sister was gone from the house in California and my oldest brother was already almost finished at Ohio State and my brother Scott was in his senior year and about to go. So my father and I had to do a lot of things for or around the house like shopping, cooking and cleaning as my mother rehabilitated. No one in our house expressed the idea that it was all in her head, something to be transcended, or that wanting help was a sign of weakness, or that she could become intoxicated with the divine spirit of the universe and magically overcome her injuries, or that this was all about her channel of purity, or mine, exasperated and then plainly angered me. That was the end of Thoreau and Walden Pond in my thought life. I surely did not know what a channel of purity had to do with any of this. Whether or not I was a lake of pure crystal, transcending this turbid world and finding God in any frosted bush, seemed to have no useful connection at all with my mother’s obvious physical pain. Telling her that she was a lake of pure crystal would have been cruel and stupid and although no one in our house or that I knew said that or thought it – that was the synopsis of what Thoreau apparently had to say about the world. The reality was not Walden Pond – the reality was the undeniable requirement to assume my mother’s duties around the house so that we could all have dinner on a reasonable schedule.

After tossing Thoreau, I read some poetry, Dylan Thomas, Basho, Carl Sandburg, even Blake. That helped – I felt better about the whole thing – my mother, high school, philosophy. Life wasn’t all bad. Mathematics was a kind of escape but it invoked a completely different part of my mind anyway. I told Preeya on one of her visits and she listened, carefully, intently, blowing smoke rings – which looked so odd on a girl from India who from time to time still dressed rather traditionally with lots of bracelets, rings, decorative elements – when I interrupted her narrative of her umpteenth fight with her mother and poured out my pains and problems one May night at the end of my junior year. It wasn’t like me – I tended to take things as they come. Later on, near the end of the school year, she gave me a book of collected American poetry, which included a long excerpt from Walt Whitman. She wrote on the inside cover – To my friend Leonard Manasseh Cutler – Be who you are. It will get better. – Preeya. Not long after that she was off to North Carolina and I was off to the Ohio State, so that worked out to be a kind of goodbye for some time.

     Five.  Plato and Divorce

I took another pass at philosophy, Plato this time. I was struggling with isolation in high school – so an extended discussion about justice, administered by philosopher-kings in an ideal city was a couple steps out of my area of immediate concern. But it did involve people relating together, it wasn’t just a man wandering around a pond by himself, which I thought entirely unreal. If there was a discussion it involved people, a society, some shared language and standards and ideals – maybe assuming them all to exist was presumptuous (where did all this come from?) – but the metaphysics I was interested in was part of Plato’s forms too. So I gave Plato a shot – justice, in all its facets, would be my guiding star. I was a sponge soaking up influences, a young intellectual gathering words, looking for a guiding star. Of its own accord, my mind was looking for a place to stand and impose some order and explanation on the world. Tally – ho!

Plato’s Republic starts out with Socrates making a trip to say a prayer to a Thracian goddess as part of a Greek city-festival, which included a parade. Then a bunch of guys gather for a discussion at someone’s house. There’s an immediate discussion about youth and old age and old age’s threshold, which is death. The older men long for the lost pleasures of youth and want to reminisce about sex, drinking, feasts and they rest. The alternative argument is presented, that old age brings peace and freedom from all that, those appetites. There’s a discussion about how people inherited or earned their wealth. Plato started things start in the middle of life –skipping the preliminaries can be a positive or negative, but I was willing to give him his running start. A discussion followed of Hades and punishments after death – which are effective to get old reprobates to think about whether or not they’ve been unjust to anybody. Sweet hope was available to anyone who lived a just and pious life – hope, the captain of the every-twisting mind of mortal men. Being an adolescent, carrying around hope like water in a bucket was natural to me.

I took this seriously and events corroborated the message. My mother’s health started to improve and she got back to teaching, to a more normal life. I got in with a couple of friends and we played video games, shot pool, played basketball, talked about girls(but not the way they depicted in Hollywood movies, we were more shy and less flippant) and played monopoly and Texas Hold’em poker, where I usually lost because I never fooled anyone about the cards I was holding. My mother’s lawsuit over her auto accident was settled but neither of my parents thought the outcome was fair or the settlement adequate. My father left the company he worked for to go out on his own, which didn’t work for reasons that again, seemed not fair to him and not his fault. But he got rehired by the same company and the shortfall in our income didn’t make any real difference in our lives, although it worried him a great deal. I stopped taking special math classes after school – my teacher seemed to feel we had gone as far down the road as we could or he could. Near the end, there were a couple of times where I was explaining things to him about analytic geometry – he was working through spatial concepts in his head, step by step, that I saw right away.

What seemed very unjust was when my father and mother called all of us down to a family meeting, when Jack was home from college, before Scott had left, sister Anne in California, to announce they were getting divorced. There was no pre-amble to this, no notice, no warning. It wasn’t clear why – my mother was crying, my father was stern and serious, but there were no explanations. They didn’t seem angry at each other. The emotional sense was as if two business partners, two bridge players, decided they didn’t want to carry on together. It was emotionally shocking, it was inexplicable, it was – I ran out of words, up in my room, trying to process this announcement. I paced in my room but I ran out of words. My emotional apple cart was turned upside down and my apples were spread all over the road.

Applying Plato’s directives to my new emotional situation was perhaps an unfair test. Emotional shock, betrayal is not too strong a word. Adolescent emotional trauma didn’t match up well to dictums about political justice. I wasn’t in a position to be just or unjust to anybody – I was in a powerless position, an isolated teenager whose parents were divorcing. Plato’s discussion about who would be willing to rule assumed people who were already at or near the top of society’s hill. Plato was hierarchical – at the top were wise philosophers, and traveling down the hill were artisans, workmen, soldiers, farmers, women, slaves, children. I wasn’t necessarily against hierarchies – you wind up with them anyway in any social organization – but Plato had no sense of personal rights at all. Nothing Plato said helped – if philosophy was supposed to do something about your life, direct it, then it wasn’t working – or at least not that philosophy for that situation. My world was swapped out – a kind of benign and comforting foundation to everything I did or saw or experienced, now had a sharp, caustic undercurrent. I was suddenly a mile further away from my friends who were not having that experience – and I certainly did not have enough experience to understand that other people, even my friends, might at some point in their lives have similar experiences. Any pain, emotional pain, is shocking to begin with. It doesn’t help to rationalize over it. If an idealized social structure was good for Plato’s model of a city, then an individual had no right to object. If the social organization of Cornfield was benefited by the freedom my parents had to divorce, wasn’t that a necessary benefit that made for a free community? If I objected, so?

     Six.  Kant, Idealism and Metaphysics for the Pain

After my parents’ announcement I told Preeya on her next unannounced evening visit to sit on our porch and smoke. She realized it was something I didn’t want to talk about at length or couldn’t talk about at length because I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe my emotional pain. So Preeya switched gears and talked for an hour about all the problems in her extended family, highlighting in particular every marital problem in her household. I found out more about the Patel family’s interior and personal lives in an hour than I had known from my previous years of frequent acquaintance with the family. But I wasn’t listening that closely to the details – I was overwhelmed with my own situation and grateful that Preeya wasn’t making me talk about it and instead was offering up her own family’s troubles to join me in my suffering. I suppose the only positive to come out of it all was that, if ever I doubted that Preeya was my friend, I never doubted it after that.

I was still laboring with Plato. Plato concluded that the gods were the cause of only a few things that happen to human beings. Plato wasn’t taking the interventions of the gods very seriously. If the paltry intervention of a few gods into a few human events did not raise ethical questions – because men were capable of just or ethical conduct based on their own values and anyway who cared about the gods – it raised metaphysical and personal questions. For any application to my life that was remotely helpful, I was still struggling to get out of the circularity of Plato – something – what a person deserved – was good and just because Plato said so, and Plato said so because it was good and just and what that person deserved. But his assertions didn’t seem to be anchored anywhere. Emotionally that was what I needed. It was driving my reading and thinking – where was an anchor in the storm? You can resist being driven by the winds if you have a direction to go in – but if there is none, then there wasn’t much point in resisting whatever direction forces outside my control were taking me. And my parents’ decision to divorce was a force outside my control and it caused emotions in me that were outside my control.

People react differently to emotional shock and pain. My brothers did not discuss much of this with me, but their reaction was much more along the lines of – let’s get along with our lives, we were getting ready to leave anyway. Without taking a step, I was emotionally distanced from Cornfield. These were distances you couldn’t measure using geometry. My father was soon out of the house, moving not a great distance away. I was often then in the house with my mother with no one else about. We rattled around the place, which felt empty. I began to look more seriously at philosophy as a guide to my life to answer questions I could not ignore. Plato seemed both ancient, and quaint, more like a hobby than a serious guide to life. Some movement was necessary for me, an intellectual motion toward something solid. After some exploration, I began found another philosopher, Immanuel Kant, and a Critique of Pure Reason. Pain drives us to principles of life. What I had wasn’t adequate to address my experience. My emotions were kicking in a small corral until the rails were in splinters. Kant was telling me reason itself was the answer, found within myself. So I made an adolescent and unrealistic pledge to myself – I would live according to pure concepts of understanding.

Kant’s simplicity was attractive. There were necessary laws which reason would seek and acquire. I should not grope blindly to live my life. Kant asserted that my reason and knowledge was not to conform to the objects of my world, but rather the world’s objects must conform to my knowledge. Experience itself was a kind of knowledge that required my understanding, and that understanding existed first within me before any experience. I should adopt principles of pure reason first – the objects, the world, would conform. I was encountering a breathtaking idea. Even space and time were only forms of my own senses and intuitions. What I really wanted was the ability to make emotions about my parents’ divorce, and my loneliness, and the absence of my father from our house, and my mother’s obvious pain, and the absence of my brothers from our house – the entire complex of emotions – sit down and sit still and shut up. When things break, you want to put them back together, but as I was finding, the world did not always allow that.

This led to a kind of fantastic thought – my own will, in and of itself, had another existence – not as an appearance, an object of observation, but secretly as it were, beyond experience, beyond appearance or perception. My will, in and of itself, was free even from the laws of nature, not even determined by time or space. I was hypnotized, preoccupied by these ideas – not only was I escaping the emotions of my parents’ divorce, my isolation and confusion in life, I was even escaping death. I was traveling where there was no time, no space, no death, (and no divorce, no disappointment, no confusion) even if I did not, could not, perceive it. Morality and nature separated away, like discarded stages of a rocket. Reason was my guide to all things practical, and I wanted to live in an unknowable reality on another plane altogether. It was my young man’s intellectual pride to do so – and so I attempted to float out of my problems on an intellectual bubble. I was good at bubble-building though. If the effort was doomed to failure, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Idealism was out, at least psychological idealism. Thinking that there was some objective reality to our intuitions was out. Accepting the existence of anything from outside of us, from revelation, on mere trust, was out – proofs were necessary at every step. Reality, whether experienced through my youthful senses or unknowable at its core, was distinct from imagination. The statement ‘I am’ relied on a sense of inner experience which formed before I had any external experiences. There was something real in the world and real in me, even if I couldn’t know that reality – in the meantime, discarding my experiences meant discarding the emotions I felt about my parents’ divorce. Determining my own existence could be done by altogether dispensing with my parents – they were existentially unnecessary. There’s nothing like metaphysics to dull the pain of life.

Kant held out a temptation. A young intellectual, I wanted to ‘never be wrong.’ There is a kind of brittle fragility about being a young intellectual, an unspoken insecurity, a fear – as if the entire house of cards of my mental life would collapse if I erred on even one point. You have to grow older to understand being twice as dogmatic and twice as strident doesn’t make you twice as safe. It did not occur to me that the word ‘trust’ came into play here, except in the negative sense of thinking, as Kant did, that anyone asking for trust did so because he had no proof for his points. The complexity of human trust, as a more serious answer to Kant more serious intellectual concerns, had not yet occurred to me. It didn’t occur to me that the loss of trust was as much a problem as my emotional pain. I was going to be a transcendental thinker, not a big goofy teenager with big goofy ideas. I was internalizing Kant just as I had with Thoreau and Plato – I knew objects and where to draw the line between expanding reason beyond experience and limiting reason to that which is knowable before anyone’s experience. The disconnect between these thoughts and my actual, social life in school and at home was deep and broad, but in the teeth of pain and puzzlement and loss, that was the point.

     Seven.  Ohio State

I would make random statements to people if they asked what I was thinking, why I was talking to myself. It was my understanding which made judgments possible, would be my reply, which did not lead to a vivid conversation. It never occurred to me at that time that someone was trying to get my attention. My conversational meetings with Preeya were becoming more infrequent, but when we did meet and talk, she listened patiently. She occasionally interjected some thoughts but I was processing ideas and not inclined to listen in a real dialogue. I started to use words in a specialized way that made communication difficult. ‘Intuition’ meant for me not some idea arising out of no prior fact or sense data – I wanted to use it in a Kantian way, the process by which I gatherer knowledge of objects, the end of the process of thought about those objects, which I called representations, since I wasn’t seeing the objects for themselves, but only my mental shadows of them, my mental representations. Kantian objects were only appearances in so far as I perceived them; it was my mind that had a prior notion of all such objects. I thought my representations were pure if there was nothing in them that belonged to sensation. Then I would have pure intuition which existed nowhere but in my mind. This was my transcendental aesthetic. Understandably, this did not lead to extended conversations with Preeya or anyone else.

I wanted to subject all my intuitions and all my experiences to a set of laws which gave rise to judgments, even judgments of taste and opinion. The way to be right all the time. The way to live was to determine an irrefutable philosoophy which would give rise to unimpeachable judgments. Then, I would be right. Then, nothing could hurt me. It was beyond my scope to see that a search for the laws of correctness might itself be a problem. Having correct judgments based on philosophical laws might not be a remedy for human pain, confusion or distress at all. In my own way, I was like a political radical – if only you had the right politics, then the problems would go away. Doctrine was the right way to hammer down life. To hammer down life, you needed big words, a vocabulary with words like transcendental and aesthetic and pure reason and intuitions and a priori and analytic and synthetic and you mixed them up with words like understanding and knowledge and representations and concepts. Older and more stable minds might assemble such pieces in a more productive way, but being a young intellectual is just another way of being young. Life is frightening, a little overwhelming, and you come out of hiding slowly.

I was accepted and entered Ohio State. Central was starting with the idea of myself, the center of the metaphysical universe, and then working my way outward. Being at the center of everything in his study in Konigsberg in the 18^th-century was critical to Kant; his theory you could deduce everything from there. My theory was now that I could deduce everything from my freshman college dorm at Ohio State, and bring my everything-that-is knowledge back home with me to Cornfield, Ohio. Knowledge like this was more than knowledge – it was a portable suit of armor. What was true in Columbus was true in Cornfield. Geometry worked the same everywhere because it worked first in my mind. That made it transcendental. Two things were going on within me at the same time – emotional pain – and I was someone who thought my way through things. Metaphysics doesn’t address emotional pain but thinking about things may, indeed, land on ideas which go somewhere.

I carried around ideas with me like a magical ring kept in my pocket – the possessor of superior knowledge. So if I were not invited to a social gathering, depressed about going home for a visit, heard the tone of voice in a telephone call with my mother which indicated her distress, had little to say to my father, that didn’t matter. I had an intellectual secret, a power. What I was not excluded from was my ability to read metaphysics and most of the people I was in contact with couldn’t do that. There was a philosophy club at Ohio State which I wandered into, but they were all as socially inept as I was, so a couple of visits was all I could stand. I was lonely and I thought I was lonely in a highly unique way that no one in the world had ever experienced before. It did not occur to me that everyone’s loneliness operates in ways that are both highly-unique and common-to-us-all. To individualize Tolstoy’s comment about families and turn it on its head: each lonely person is lonely in a nearly identical way.

     Eight.  The Freshman Intellectual

We move through time. 18, and the passage of time meant by the end of the academic year I was going to be 19. Find the trailhead at the bottom to start – many things did not occur to me which would have been good to know at the age of 18. It is not possible to assert that reality is nothing but a set of appearances without introducing doubt into the performance or appreciation of the simplest tasks. I was already feeling self-doubt, social awkwardness at a large university. There was no stable foundation, a man trying to stand on moving fish in a rapid stream. Relationships with other human beings were also in some sense, unknowable. Even my relationship with myself, my own self-consciousness, was in some sense unknowable. I was using my mind to intuit my mind; the circular problem was obvious, like using one ruler to measure the accuracy of others. Doubt as to myself – a problem under any set of circumstances – multiplied. The result wasn’t independence of thought. The result was after being unwilling to accept my own perceptions at face value, I was unable to accept simple things.

At Ohio State I was taking classes which were oriented toward science without having determined yet what my final academic destination. I was determined to employ transcendental logic. The accumulation of human experience was out, no good, was to be disregarded. Knowledge must agree with its object, logic had to furnish rules for truth. I needed a transcendental analytic, my logic of truth. Concepts had to be pure. I borrowed a table of Kantian concepts to cover the whole field of pure understanding. Underneath was an emotional posture that thinking was good and pure, whereas life with its disappointments, embarrassments and uncertainties was an infiltrating contaminant, adulterating pure thinking. So friendships were difficult.

My table of concepts was supposed to act as a look-up chart – confronting a difficult situation? Look up the situation on the table of concepts and apply transcendental logic to resolve. In retrospect it is obvious I was running from life, not solving it. I wanted to connect everything into a system. Kant was great for that. He loved logical systems and tables of concepts – a black box for life that you just plugged facts and conditions into and out came an answer. Nothing was beyond the scope of my black box of transcendental logic. I would be my own Moses on the mountain, my own Einstein composing a theory, not of relativity, but of life conduct according to standards of which I was the judge. I was minnow in a big pond, but my disease was not uncommon. Intellectual doctrines are developed to react and respond to unruly events. But there are currents in a pond that you can feel but not define. I was drifting away from the sciences – they began to seem inadequate, as did logic itself, but I wasn’t ready yet to say why. I had not yet found another direction to move in. I was chafing at limitations I could not yet articulate.

I saw Preeya over Spring break; it was a now-we-are-college-students-how-about-that lunch. I was dressed casually but not quite blue jeans, at least had shaved and wore khaki slacks with a grey knit sweater. She came colorfully dressed – in Gujarat traditional Chaniya Choli, full-length flared skirt in vibrant red, blacks and greens and fitted Choli blouse embroidered with intricate designs, with a dupatta shawl-type scarf, visible sparkling earrings and necklace. She brought the faint aroma of saffron and sandalwood. We had our avocado and sprouts lunch together in a place that had flowers all over the walls and depicted on the menu and big windows for natural light. We talked for some time, about our classes, roommates, our experiences on campus – her campus being smaller than mine – about our families, about this and that. It was a relief to talk to her – our lunch lasted about two hours. After we separated and went back to our separate college campuses, the question arose in my mind – well, why was it a relief to talk to her? If everything was logic – why was it easier to talk to one person, than another? If time was an abstraction why did time pass so much more easily and quickly with one person than with another?

     Nine.  A System of Thought

I was looking for answers to metaphysical questions – those questions were not a game to me, they were important – and the movement of time was part of my set of questions. To say that the objects of our lunch were in some sense unknowable, that all we could know were our representations, seemed to miss something essential – why then, was a lunch in the cafeteria at school eating by myself so different than lunch with Preeya? Was this all about objects or representations? Did the table of categories – which theoretically explained everything – change between Columbus and Cornfield? Kant liked to throw around the word ‘pure.’ When you had lunch with a friend, and it was different that eating alone – what was pure, and what was not? Kant had points to make about the work of our minds before we gathered any sense impressions – but I didn’t live in the foundations of my metaphysical house, I lived in the living room. A philosopher’s life wasn’t supposed to be easy – if the problems were easy to solve, they wouldn’t be asked. I wanted ideas not contingent on the report of my senses. Preeya and her fragrance of sandalwood was an interruption I thought to overlook, but as it turned out, I couldn’t and didn’t. Interruptions challenge ideas and systems of thought are not supposed to collapse at the first suggestion of perfume.

Looking for a system of thought, it did not occur to me that systems of thought themselves might be interruptions. That would raise the question – what is it that was being interrupted? I wasn’t yet ready for that question, did not know that question was rattling around in my mind. I thought that if I acquired a transcendental analytic then I would have a self-sufficient intellectual unity. I would need nothing from without myself. The point of an intellectual system was to be founded on one central idea – a root giving rise to secondary roots and to an entire intellectual system like a tree. This system, when I found it, was supposed to branch out into different ideas all relating back to the correctness of the system and its elements. A transcendental analytic would hold together by transcendental logic, composed of pure concepts. Other people’s minds may not work that way, but that’s how mine did – and to a certain extent, still does. Then sandalwood and perfume wouldn’t interrupt me – my system, my senses. My core ontological being had to be my own creation.

I wanted to arrange my sense impressions in accordance with concepts. It wasn’t enough for me to walk in the rain, or hear someone say ‘it’s raining’ – I had to assemble the impressions of being wet, of feeling cold wind blow on my skin, to feel the dampness in my sleeves and on the back of my neck and to put all that together in a systemic appreciation of the very significant fact that it rained on me while walking from first-year Calculus to the cafeteria. There was an odd sort of neurotic compulsion about all this. It was as if I were judging the rain(!)- by assembling various perceptions into a set of sense representations and from there forming a judgment which gave rise to knowledge. The awkwardness of all this was one reason why I didn’t engage in small talk with my fellow students. Judgment united my representations. Then I could announce to myself that I understood the mental mechanism, has stepped through the chain of logic inch by inch. The quantity and quality of my judgments was terribly important to me – I was determining my own success in life in accordance with borrowed interior mental standards. There was no intellectual rest anywhere in this effort. I furiously paddled a river of sensation and then derived by self-conscious steps my conclusions which had to be tested. I never just floated on my back and let the current carry me. If someone had thrown me off a cliff, I suppose I would have tried to invent gravity on the way down.

Kant had categories for relations – categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive. He didn’t relate them to anyone else. I almost reached the point where I permitted no one to talk to me. Apart from professors presenting material, why would anyone in my campus universe have anything to say to me? Accepting what someone else said would be to admit a collapse and failure of first logical principles. Pure concepts of understanding needed and wanted nothing from any fallible, erring human being – Kant’s solution was a really good table of judgments. That would be my philosophy of living. In retrospect, there was something almost comically stilted about my thinking and my approach – I was my own self-parody. But the only way to get to be a 19-year-old intellectual is to be an 18-year-old intellectual first – and there were some observations floating in the back of my mind which would prove later to be more persuasive and substantial.

     Ten.  Shouldn’t You Live the Way You Think?

Kant did criticize the proposition that the world exists by blind chance. He thought that conclusion so demonstrably wrong it was clearly a false road. That was one observation which survived many intellectual iterations of my thought life. Blind chance was seldom useful – if the mind was the product of blind chance, why bother with philosophy? If answers are only tumbling dice, why ask questions? I was confronting something interior – having questions at all meant that I existed, that answers were somewhere. Wanting a philosophy to live by meant one existed. To describe a ‘youthful mistake’ implies a substantial intellectual structure. If my first additions were wrong, later I might do them right. It did not occur to me that what people immediately around me had to say might be significant. I was an adolescent and adolescents are self-preoccupied. Logic was a word I carried around like a magic power ring. It was beyond question, reproach, or serious consideration. One had to be logical – it never occurred to me to question that. Even a transcendental concept was subject to logic. It was stifling. The general effect was that something inside me was being suffocated. Not only were my relations with others stilted – there was some element of my own being, my relationship with myself, that was being starved. My imagination was chained. No matter how you lecture a butterfly, it will not fly around a logic table. Kant had a table, a menu appropriate to the soul – my soul looked for more.

I had a professor in moral philosophy who had a physical disability. A brunette woman in her early thirties, glasses with thick black frames, and she hobbled into class with difficulty using a cane, managing her textbook with her other hand. She appeared to have cerebral palsy or something equivalent. Her speech and thinking were clear; she delivered her classroom material in a businesslike way, with no reference to her disability. I spoke up in class once, giving my views on some issue which she received as part of the discussion. After class, a girl came up to me to continue the discussion – it did not occur to me that her interest was partly philosophical and intellectual, but she might have other interests as well. It did not occur to me that functioning with a visible disability as a university professor, noticeable whenever she came haltingly into class, was a type of courage. Moral philosophy ought to reach that also – we weren’t covering the field until we reached that boundary too. It wasn’t a question of politicized equal rights – as if we were perpetually in some courtroom – but interior quality that existed in her, in part because that quality stood in relation to others. If she had been in the privacy of her own home, it wouldn’t take much courage to walk with a cane. Walking with a cane and visible difficulty in front of a classroom of young, healthy students, to hold their attention and conduct a discussion for 50 minutes on issues raised by Bentham or Mills, or Adam Smith or Hobbes, took some determination.

I had some lecture hall courses in math, physics & chemistry which weren’t difficult. A lot of the material I’d covered in high school. I had a seminar-type English class taught by two professors, both very friendly and engaging, both somewhere socially between political radicals and peace-and-love hippies, depending on the day and the material. One day you’d be talking about taking a psychedelic trip, the next class, about violent political revolution and the next class, about climbing Mt. Everest to contemplate the sayings of Buddha. The only thing they weren’t interested in was Ohio State’s football team. We read Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and it was interesting to me how much they liked the book and how casual they were about the fact that he died of alcoholism. It seemed to me there ought to be some connection, some relationship between the beliefs he held, that he was pursuing in this nearly-autobiographical novel, and the way he lived. I was still transfixed by Kant and the transcendental deduction, but willing to listen to other views. What was the point of developing an intellectual system, if you didn’t actually live the way you thought? We read a Chinese poet named Du Fu who was encountering a lot of suffering because of a civil war in China during the 8^th century in the Tang Dynasty – a kingdom smashed, its hills and rivers still here, he wrote. It seemed to me, the way Du Fu focused his thoughts on suffering, that he was challenging the prevailing wisdom of his age – he didn’t seem very satisfied with the answers he was getting – he was swept violently and painfully along in the turmoil of the times – conscious not only of his own suffering but the suffering of vast numbers of people around him. The way my professors bounced around their attention span, it seemed they wanted to have the appearance of challenging the wisdom of the age, but were pretty comfortable in their lives and places in the faculty lounge.

     Eleven.  A Thought-Provoking Frozen Puddle

There was a sense in which my first year at Ohio State was peaceful. I pulled straight ‘A’s’ – which made my parents happy. I was separated from my family frictions, which made me happy. My parents sent money whenever I asked and the seventeen hundred-acre campus was an expansive backdrop to my troubadour thoughts. It was the first time I had ever been away from home for an extended period – just seeing the world without anyone’s implied supervision was a new experience. There was no one to report to – no one I needed to tell if I were coming back late. My relationship with myself deepened. There was something called the Olentangy Trail – I walked it a lot, lost in introspective rumination, talking to myself. Perhaps the only permanent conclusion I reached was that I was a son of the Midwest. If I walked it late at night, I think I may have intimidated other people by my size. But they passed by on one far side of the trail and I on the other, and the peaceful Ohio night remained unruffled. There was a repose there, a question from the last-surviving crickets – are you really in a hurry? The river and stars would answer – apparently not.

One night I walked late into Columbus. My self-searching questions must have been written across my face. I stopped in at a diner, one of the routine type, silver and white dining car style that stay open all night to serve truck drivers, people coming off the swing shift, drug dealers, students, insomniacs, the usual suspects. I walked up to the counter – the waitress, about 35 or 40, brunette, probably had been a pretty girl at 18 but was a little overweight and touch haggard now, with a glint in her eye and penciled-in eyebrows, looked up at me in her standard-issue waitress uniform. “Coffee?!” I said, so wrapped in thought I nearly lost the power of speech. “Why?” she asked, looking at my bewildered face and laughed out loud, catching my endless interior questioning mood perfectly, laughing caustically both at me and maybe a little with me – perhaps she had some questions about life too, while slinging coffee and pie in an all-night diner, and recognized my symptoms – to the amusement of the two or three customers sitting near us at the counter. Abashed and discovered, I had no answer to make.

When Kant said laws had their origin in my understanding – okay, where did that go? Even the categories, concepts of understanding – is this something which originated with me? If it didn’t originate with me, not only was there a question of where it came from, but a question of what other people were synthesizing. There was a question of who I was – what was my identity in this mass of categories, data, synthesis, intuition. If Kant were right, I was never going to assert anything unique about myself. Everything transcendental in Kant was supposed to be a kind of law (from wherever originating) for everyone identically. My empirical intuitions of a house might be identical to everyone else’s – how could you tell for sure? – but my interior identity was not. Of that, I was sure.

I was walking across campus in December after a cold snap and there was a frozen puddle which attracted my attention. It was rather large, to be just sitting in the middle of the lawn of the commons. I had to have categories of sense organization in my head before I ever saw the puddle of ice to perceive, categorize, understand and form judgments about the puddle. Was the ice puddle objective, subjective, phenomenal, noumenal? If so, did natural laws, about the freezing temperature of water or the crystalline structure of the ice or the ragged and random shape around its edges, inhere in the puddle – laws attached to the puddle somehow – or in my mind? Who imposed the order? I stepped on the ice hard and cracked through it – the ice was thin, the water underneath only about an inch deep. When the ice showed random streaks of cracks at the edges, was that orderly? It looked as if the ice cracks expanded under the pressure of my stomping foot in a Fibonacci series – one hairline crack, then another, then two, then three, then five, spidering out. Was the important fact the orderly/disorderly appearance of cracks on ice? Or the man who decided to make some test of metaphysics, by stepping hard to break ice on a random puddle? Did I have a story to tell about the fracture mechanics of crystalline structures or one to tell about psychology? Who did I tell my story to – who was the audience here?

Kant didn’t like the idea of some divine being arbitrarily implanting ideas in us, but he didn’t explain why his categories weren’t arbitrary as well. I had applied all sorts of mental categories to my experiment in cracking an ice puddle with my foot. Buddy, your categories are mere illusion – is an indictment which can be leveled in any direction. Was I in a courtroom to adjudicate them? There was some motivation within me to be a judge, to examine something and apply all sorts of mental categories to it. The world could be a scientific laboratory or a courtroom or a psychiatrist’s couch. For some people on campus it was a necessary discipline, an auditorium to hear a political speech, a sports team rally, a trade school, a singles bar, the culmination of their parents’ ambitions, or a fraternity party. For me, it was a black box, a monolith silent and ear-splitting, stark and unexplained – I had many questions to pose.

     Twelve.  Ariel

I decided to stay on campus over Christmas break, which disappointed my family. I expressed perfectly rational reasons to do so which I used on myself, but the real reason was my emotional distress over my parent’s divorce – to distance myself from further wounds and to retaliate. I received a lengthy letter from Preeya about not coming home for Christmas, uncharacteristic of her. Notwithstanding her disappointment, it was clear she understood why. Her letter didn’t intend to make points of argument, but it did anyway. Logic apparently was not applicable to my dawdling around, being incapable of framing an answer or writing her back. The application of my rules didn’t answer her letter, didn’t answer my emotions, didn’t answer any questions. Rules could be shadows – as if I heard someone screaming for help in a dream, not knowing who – it might even be me – and responded by starting a chess game. Transcendental judgment encountered other people – what I was and who they were mattered. When I cracked the ice on a puddle, whatever reason there was, had something to do with rules, but also with identity. I became dissatisfied with philosophy. As it turned out though, I wasn’t quite as finished with philosophy as I thought.

I picked up a book of poetry called Ariel, by a poet named Sylvia Plath. I didn’t have an extended background in poetry at that point or about Sylvia Plath. The book was sitting around on a bench near the library, looking discarded. But there it was, so I began reading. I found out later that Sylvia Plath took her own life and that her book was more well-known than I realized. She began with a poem about her own child – I dropped into the poem like I was the infant, getting my foot-soles slapped, making me cry, taking my place among the elements of the world. Whatever else you could say about Sylvia Plath, she wasn’t Kant and her poetry wasn’t an attempt to resolve life by logic. A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief, said Sylvia Plath. Someone was communicating something – maybe it was a sad something – maybe a despairing something – maybe something that gagged us. We all share at least something in human experience. Was my voice being torn off? Plath had a different set of questions. I sat on the bench for two hours reading her book like a man reading a new language, an archeologist finding a tablet of hieroglyphs buried in an otherwise nondescript sand dune. After two hours I wasn’t finished with Plath either.

There are not many who mold emotional pain so dramatically as Plath.  My isolation over Christmas break would have been useful even without reading Plath, but she certainly knew how to move emotions across mountains and make of them something so changed – however disturbed it was – as to be nearly unrecognizable.  Not only was the campus quiet, Columbus was quiet, Ohio was quiet, the Midwest itself sat quiet in winter and sheltered under distant stars in a blue nightscape and demonstrated no compulsion to go anywhere or do anything.  I started to deal with my emotional pain as if I were applying a Fourier transform, decomposing its intensity, its amplitude and frequency into various simpler functions, as if you could make a sine wave out of being hurt – and if you broke it down into components, that made it better.  What Plath was saying – at least in a sense – was that you really could go elsewhere.  You could build a mountain out of a book of poetry, a witches castle on top of a barbed-wire covered hill, or a hospital bed out of mathematical symbols.  We had a light snow around Christmas that year and the light covering on the ground made a chaste and tactful point – let’s cover things over.  If it didn’t help enormously, it helped a little. I benefited from the temporary relief.  Quiet was okay.  Philosophical puzzles were still rattling around in me too. They were subordinated for the break, as subdued as a book you’ve been reading but put down on a nightstand where it has rooted with a bookmarker sprouting out like an unruly weed.

    Thirteen.  A Very Large Chessboard

Shortly thereafter I went into the student union building and wandered over to watch the chess players playing speed chess, banging on their clocks to stay within the allotted game time on checkered roll-up soft vinyl boards. I watched as their boards grew in size and their pieces grew in number until they were very big, very complex. I saw Kant’s chessboard materializing in an interior vision – extended onto multiple levels, three-dimensional attacking and defending pieces moving horizontally and vertically, a grid extending into four dimensions where pieces disappeared and re-appeared elsewhere. There were transcendental pieces creating structures, kings castled with rooks, little fortresses for each king, their owners moving one hand gripping a piece madly across the board and smacking their clock with the other. All taking turns rapid-fire, like a gunbattle at the OK Saloon. This four-dimensional chessboard composed of its elemental chessboards took over a huge chunk of the student union building, absorbing the players, the pieces, the clocks, the tables, gradually drawing everything into its set of structured relations. I was drawn into this four-dimensional chessboard too.

Noumenal pieces were moving around in categorical propositions and the structure of the board relied on these a-priori noumenal categories. The voracious multi-dimensional chessboard hovered above, around, below  and even inside them. The board gathered intuitions and empirical sensations and data. The phenomena unified together in large collections of unities of apperception, white and black. One manifold of white unities of apperception marched out in conflict with the black manifold. All were objects of some sort – all were things that categorized five senses or went bump against the five senses. On different levels of the board there were experiences and determinations, cognitions and judgments. But none were loose, no one piece seemed completely disconnected to any other, the mad random assortment manipulated by frantic hands was mysteriously linked, a kaleidoscope of moving parts and perceptions, threats and responses, advances and retreats, that assembled at some level into a congruent whole. Cutting across the horizontal spread of chessboards on tables were other chessboard at right angles to the first set of boards. Pieces were moving at right angles. Concepts attached to the objects and unified them into judgments and one judgment moved against another judgment and when the judgments collided the players moved reasons in behind them to support their judgments.  All this was happening on imagined chessboards and on these boards everything was universalized and their were always two armies of objects, white or black.  They were always at war, in every dimension. Time clocks showed how much time the players had left and these players punched space clocks too, to show how much extension into space they were using.

Then the reasons on the board abandoned their pieces and escaped their boards and their judgments and started hopping all over the tables.  The ideas joined and melded with the concepts, then separated and rejoined in new combinations, like balls of mercury rolling around in a gigantic Petrie dish.  The players were intent, but they never looked at each other, only at the boards and calculated furiously to find new reasons and new concepts to attach to their hands to move their pieces. And I saw four-dimensional space as clearly as if it were a dazzling chessboard used for a set of rooks and queens and knights, colored objects of plastic or wood, hopping around along four imaginary poles in four dimensions starting with the x-axis, each orthogonal to the other, hopping into and out of confrontations and escapes and captures.  And the z prime axis was naked and visible as pieces appeared and disappeared into it and out of it. 

This vision of Kant’s chessboard was overwhelming me. I was fascinated, then terrified of having a nervous breakdown and everyone seeing I was having a nervous breakdown.  My fingers were drumming nervously. So I sat down on my hands and calmed myself and acted as if I were watching the chess games but I was composing my own emotions and organizing my thoughts. This vision receded slowly and my ability to directly perceive four dimensional space receded.  I began to think about whether out of this multi-dimensional chessboard I could construct some rules for life. But exotic as it was, it didn’t seem to include everything.  All the pieces were just objects – as dramatic and complex as they were, as intriguing and mysterious as the chessboard was, as brilliant as the moves – just objects.  As mentally deep as the logical manipulations were and as calculated and farsighted as the movements of the pieces were – they were all only objects. None of the players talked to each other and none of the objects talked to anyone or anything. A vast metaphysical chess-board presented itself to me, and this vision was perhaps even shared with the actual players, perhaps not.  But apart from the clacking sound of wooden pieces being slammed down on large unrolled plastic chessboards set up on cafeteria tables and the clicking of the time-clocks as the players urgently punched them immediately after each move – even in four-dimensions, it was only colored and carved figures of wood gathering and separating in different combinations. Things were being manipulated.

Wasn’t there a limitation as to how the manipulation of objects could teach me how to live my life? Even if you called it metaphysics, even if you called it a Critique of Pure Reason, were we dealing with the truth here?  Or just a subset of principles, applied to symbols, to reach a conclusion that was only meaningful because the players – who were so competitive and engaged and eager to play and win – thought that the conclusion was meaningful? Kant’s chessboard was very large, very complex, but the only hopping movement was the movement of the knights hopping over other pieces and they were being manipulated by the players. There were things going on in the student union building that pure reason, critiqued or otherwise, could not reach, not even in four dimensions.  Living things hopped on their own, not because they were manipulated by others. 

     Fourteen.  A Transcendental Deduction Says You’re on my Chessboard and a Poetic Delusion Replies No I’m Not.

While I was sitting there, composing myself, ignored by the chess players, I began thinking about Sylvia Plath. I was thinking about her book of poems Ariel and about her poem about Medusa, a demonic, oppressive specter haunting and suffocating her. Medusa did not extend into space or time but only in Plath’s inner psyche. There was no place on my imagined multi-dimensional chessboard, in all its complexity and logic and demands for reason to be the ultimate judge of all moves, for Medusa. She would not cooperate, would not appear. It was easy enough to assert and agree with Kant and philosophers everywhere that Medusa was a symbol or a delusional folly, a bizarre illusion inviting medical intervention. Charitably, perhaps a useful literary device or even a demonstration of literary power. But that raised a question – why were the chess pieces, inanimate symbols themselves, real, but Medusa was not? What had a greater effect on someone’s life – a principle of a priori transcendental conclusions, worked out in a logical system as methodical as a collection of intersecting chessboards? Or Medusa – apparently so real to Sylvia Plath that she took her own life?  And not only did Medusa refuse any entry onto the Kantian chessboard, but Plath’s entire book of poems didn’t seem to fit anywhere on the board.  If I were going to run around in my own mind, assigning reality to some things but not others, why assign reality to chess pieces or logic or systems of thought or reason, but not assign reality to grotesque literary symbols? You can’t hit a demon or a transcendental deduction with a hammer.

There was a whole interior mental process of me assigning reality, or importance, to some things but not others. If Plath’s book of poetry didn’t fit at all, did Sylvia Plath herself? Plath was communicating something with her poetry. It was a violent, emotional and grotesque something, but it was not a nothing. If the point of having rules for life meant grounding them on ontological reality, on things which really exist, didn’t Medusa, Ariel and Plath exist? Plath communicated all this in poetry. That was another kind of symbolic manipulation – how did Kant’s symbols and manipulations become serious, discussed as a possible ground of reality, but not Plath’s? There were two kinds of idealism at work – but one type of idealism said to the other – you don’t exist. Was there any reason to assign reality to Kant’s transcendental deduction, to grant it a serious audience as metaphysics, but not to Plath’s delusional poetry about her father, about rabbit-catchers stalking helpless rabbits by means of cleverly-laid traps, about her ghastly presentations of deaths and resurrections?

I thought that Kant had thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Rules for life had to address objects like bowling balls and barking, unfriendly looking dogs, but also had to address interior, psychic space where we encountered sinister figures that were not dispelled into dust merely by asserting that they didn’t exist. Sylvia Plath’s father wasn’t really a Nazi, but it didn’t help Sylvia Plath much to tell her – she already knew that. Her use of a gruesome, insulting label for her father was addressing something else. I was sitting there, having a vision about chessboards and chess pieces that extended into the fourth dimension. I couldn’t show anyone what I saw.  I couldn’t test or prove that in a laboratory. The square root of negative one didn’t exist anywhere, but we used it in math and physics formulas all the time. Medusa laughed at the chessboard with its apparatus of reasons and logic and deductions and senses and systems and causation and sequence and the stern indictment – you’re not real – and would not appear but wouldn’t go away either. I could pick out and assign a fundamental reality to all sorts of mental constructions, but was that any different than deciding which flavor of ice cream I was going to pull out of a freezer?  There that demon was – destructive, irrational, senseless, stalking her victim, and laughing at the ontology that could neither grasp nor dissolve her. The chess players didn’t care, they were deeply engaged in pursuing an entirely intangible goal of checkmating an opponent’s king, by whatever set of arbitrary rules determined when that event occurred.

I couldn’t reconcile Sylvia Plath with Immanuel Kant or my inability to write back to Preeya. I was frozen, the proverbial deer in the headlights. I had a different thought – a paranoid thought – was there a Rabbit Catcher, this demon of Plath’s, trying to catch me? If you think the world is a blank slate of logical principles, you don’t think about the Rabbit Catcher. Malevolent motives don’t exist in metaphysics. I would reject paranoia – it didn’t fit my personality. But Sylvia Plath opened up the world for me in another dimension – a negative dimension, a haunted and destructive dimension – but it was different.  Did the Rabbit Catcher exist?   Was he skulking around concepts like quantity, quality, and relation while he gathered trapped and shredded souls?  Would it mean anything to judge that there was no such figure?

Dark amputations crawled on, appalling and appalled in their world of dark half-brained luminosity. Or – happy day – rational, orderly world, governed by a neat table of concepts prior to any sense data, resting on a transcendental power of judgment. A Table of Categories or a world of jammed-on rubber breasts and a rubber crotch? My thoughts were racehorses pulling against each other and the result was a distressing silence. If all these dead people were marching around, should they lay down? I was failing. I felt myself to be a failure – it was an intellectual failure, an interesting failure, but it was a failure. It seemed to me that everyone around me knew who they were, were banging away happily at chess pieces of their lives and goals, except me.

     Fifteen. Talk Therapy

I was emotionally conflicted, so much so that I began a wrestling match with myself one evening in my solitary dorm room, like Jacob wrestling an angel I could not see. What I was wrestling with, I could not articulate. I called up Preeya and asked how she was doing and had a bland, innocuous conversation with her, which, coming out of the blue, I’m sure baffled her.  But she was a good sport, so we had how-are-doing-I’m-doing-fine conversation for ten minutes, and that was that. I traveled in a black mood around the campus. There were no answers, I said to myself. The usual experiences and images were available to me – I had no emotional connection with them. I trudged off to classes, ate slices of pizza, took showers at 2 am., periodically fed a clothes-washing machine with a few week’s worth of underwear. There was no unity of understanding to apply. The moon over the campus at Ohio State was bald and wild. I thought I might be interested in psychology, maybe I needed a good psychiatrist.

I found someone, a psychologist, to engage for a weekly talk therapy counseling program. I took various tests including the MMPI to assess my personality characteristics and diagnose me for possible depression, schizophrenia or anxiety. My weekly conversations were fairly pleasant, not all that penetrating, not all that conclusive or effective, but perhaps I underrated them. My psychotherapist, named Carey, about 35 years old, fairly tall, light brown beard, looking like someone who hiked trails or went kayaking, was professional and sympathetic. He told me that my MMPI score and related tests disclosed I was high in intelligence and unusual in my anti-social tendencies – he commented that my scores looked like someone from an inner-city ghetto who made their way to college. My sessions with Carey were off-campus in Columbus at his home in his large, comfortable kitchen, surrounded by tall windows streaming daylight, the walls decorated with oversized, hanging copper kitchen utensils and bright posters of fruits and vegetables. His partner Marsha wandered in and out, mildly distracting us in her pleated and pastel maxi-skirts and embroidered floral blouses, fluffy at the upper arms and bare at the shoulders. There were always baked sweets on a plate in the middle of the kitchen table. I looked forward to my weekly conversations with him.

I talked some philosophy in our kitchen table sessions but my metaphysical questions only drew polite observations from Carey. His lens on life was emotional, psychological, sexual – at times our conversations were thinly-veiled monologues on his relationship with Marsha. Intellectual conclusions were secondary with Carey; he had a nearly limitless appetite for the nuances of his relationship with Marsha – probably why she wandered through the kitchen so regularly – she wanted to listen too. It was nice to talk to somebody but it didn’t strike me that Carey’s world was the only place to live. I started walking over to Union Cemetery and circumnavigating that quiet place while I assembled my thoughts. How big was my scope of conscious experience – or anyone’s? As big as dead ghosts lingering in a cemetery named for a civil war? Or not so big – what was there? Nothing but mowed grass lawns and markers and bluejays and cardinals who didn’t care. The curling macadam drives wound around markers and tombstones and memorials. When your walk was done it was all over, there was nothing else. If you were going to find rules to navigate life, you needed to have a map that at least told you that – how big?  Maps tell you how to get somewhere, but they also lay out four corners of a geography.

Winter left, spring left, summer came. I took a summer session poetry class. The adjunct professor leading our class told me that if I liked Sylvia Plath, I should read Rainer Maria Rilke. Summer session was ending. There was no alternative to going back to Cornfield and living at home for at least a couple of weeks, until I could return for the fall. Rilke had a more pertinent question to ask – who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? That was Rilke’s first question and my professor was right. I was on point with Rilke, his question was my question – like Rilke, even if some angel pressed me suddenly to his heart, I’d be consumed with his stronger existence. It was a question about angels and a statement about how big life was. Rilke had my full attention. That was the first Elegy and there were nine more. I brought the Duino Elegies back with me to occupy the home fort, like a soldier rotated back to the eastern front and hoping he wasn’t going to get nailed by a sniper of the emotions. Physically, my mother and father were there, living in two separate homes within a mile of each other. My siblings were not there, and there were emotional spaces that were enormous. I had dinner with one parent one night, and dinner with the other parent the next night and I kept personal questions in a box. I answered all questions directed at me like an adolescent captured in bad behavior – vague deflections, terse denials, a turtle shell of short sentences and one-syllable responses.

     Sixteen. A Late Summer Lunch

Preeya had also taken some summer classes and also returned to Cornfield for a brief stretch before returning to her prestigious school in the modern, sophisticated, post-bellum south. Since our mothers communicated regularly, I knew she was back; she knew I was back. The first question was – who was going to call to meet? I knew she wanted me to contact her first – she had written me the unanswered Christmas letter. I couldn’t act like a sulky adolescent with her -she was my friend – she would expect me to chatter away about my philosophical reading jaunts and endless series of questions. If I didn’t do that, she would poke to find the wound. Her interrogation of my silence would probe. I needed to borrow something from Rilke. Stimmen, Stimmen, Horen, mein Herz – there are voices, there are voices without words. So listen, childhood friend, to my heart. My Freund aus Kindertagen – Ich kann nicht sprechen. Worte sind tot.

One morning bright and early I gave Preeya a call and said why don’t we meet for lunch. She said okay and named the place, a 1940’s-themed fancy-hamburger restaurant  decorated with retro nostalgia for WWII and big bands – in a telephone conversation lasting not even thirty seconds. We met and she was dressed in blue jean cut-offs, fluorescent pink flip-flops and a college sweatshirt, Duke navy blue with a Blue Devils logo with a deliberately ragged fringe around the bottom. If she had on make-up, it wasn’t much. Her hair was wound around on top of her head in a bun with a pink decorative ribbon. It was an I’m-already-pledged-in-the-sorority-casual-and-confident look. We sat down to order – ‘Where or When,’ written by Rodgers & Hart, sung by Peggy Lee, was playing on the sound system.  We had been there before, the waitress was familiar and we knew the menu. Preeya looked at me for about 30 seconds and, for whatever reason, didn’t ask me a single question. She just began talking. Preeya started talking about herself and where she was socially, where life was taking her. She talked about where she had been as a child, what had changed, her aspirations of career, of plans for success, her plans for becoming a parent, how she was going to raise her children, her interaction as someone with a heritage from India and her family coming to America, her Gujarati heritage, her church at school, her interest in political science as maybe an entry into the law – she covered a lot of ground in a non-stop monologue. I hardly had to say a word. We munched our way through our hamburgers – I finished mine much sooner than she finished hers.

Preeya gave me an extensive picture of her life at Duke. She was in a four-person dorm room called a quad and she liked her roommates and they got along. Apart from being roommates, they were friends and did social things and went hiking, camping and canoeing together on weekends. Of the four, only one was from the south, one was from California, the other from upstate New York. She made no mention of dating anyone. She and her roommates were already making plans to rent off-campus housing together when they were seniors and stay together as a group for all four years. When they went to parties, they went as a group and there was a certain sense of chaperoning – if anyone got too drunk, the others would rescue her from an upstairs room. Preeya didn’t exactly say it this way, but I inferred that apparently the rule was you could make out heavily at a party, but only downstairs in a corner within the sightline of some other members of the group. She was expected to make an effort so you didn’t fail anything. The rules weren’t written down, but there they were. Duke boys were okay, Preeya said, but – and she let the sentence drop, indicating that whatever standard applied, she wasn’t in a corner with any of them.

Preeya wanted to talk about how different it was being in the south, away from Cornfield Ohio. She loved her family, she loved Ohio, but it was different in North Carolina. The people in Ohio were not in a hurry, the people in North Carolina were not in a hurry, but it was a different kind of being slow. In Ohio, people felt like they were in the middle of America. There was no place they were going and no place they needed to go. You were right in the middle, dead center already. You can’t leave for a city when you’re already there. In North Carolina, you were in no hurry because you already lost the war – were already shunted off to one side by the unseen moving hand of powers up in Yankee land somewhere. (I thought of Union Cemetery). That was okay because all the nice people were there with you anyway and had already rebuilt this new Southern society that was more sophisticated and intelligent anyway – so there! Preeya said she liked the experience, she liked feeling the difference in the two cultures, she liked the travel and the exploration. She said she wanted to go to Manhattan and live there and feel what that was like. Preeya had a the-world-is-my-oyster feeling, she was full of self-confidence about her ability to go here or there, to meet new people, do new things. She was thinking about different career paths, sat in on lectures on topics offered for free, not for academic credit – on political science, botany, epidemiology, philosophy, history, astrophysics. She liked these lectures – the school offered a series of various topics. She loved her family and they were very intelligent but there were a lot of things in the world beyond the four corners of Cornfield.

Preeya started talking about her childhood. She said she was extremely shy as a child, but divided the world into two starkly different camps. One world was her family and close friends. I was in that first world. Her Methodist church was in this first safe world. The second world, the outside world, was everything else. As a little girl whose family was from Gujarati and now in America, and obviously because of her appearance from somewhere which wasn’t Europe, she didn’t wander aimlessly in that second world. You planned your trip, knew your steps in and out before you started. That included school, elementary school, middle school, into high school. Preeya said she talked only as needed, didn’t interact unless it was required, was almost trembling until she started to grow a little older, feel a little more confident, a little less concerned about being from somewhere else, of having a family who spoke a language other than English at home. Her mother spoke volumes in Gujarati when she was angry. Preeya would have been mortified if she had brought home an elementary school friend and her mother broke out in Gujarati epithets. So Preeya didn’t make schoolgirl friends as a child to bring home. Because I was in the inner circle without knowing, our family was on the same block, I didn’t realize. As Preeya got through high school, she realized no one was going to bite her head off. It was okay. Slowly she started to feel better, started to feel she could fly further from the nest. Preeya started making new friends by her junior year in high school. And when she went to their houses, she realized that everyone’s family is a little bit funny, a little bit different. That was life, that was people, it was okay to be from some gigantic cultural grouping in India. You could celebrate it without being dragged down – didn’t have to make it into a jail sentence, a fortress to hide behind.

Preeya wanted to be a mother, she wanted to raise children. That was part of her life plan. It would have been anyway for cultural reasons, but that was one part of her culture she embraced. She had all sorts of observations to make about raising children, what she was going to teach them, when they were going to be introduced to books or pre-school or daycare or even when they were going to learn to swim. She was firmly in favor of breast-feeding and told me the reasons why, notwithstanding that it had never entered my mind to have any opinion on that topic. She had opinions about different kinds of formula when something was necessary to supplement breast-feeding, what you did to prevent a toddler from developing allergies, like to peanut butter. She had clear ideas about how many days a week a four-year old should go to kindergarten and what should be taught and how much time should be devoted to extracurricular activities like soccer. She was already preparing to be a soccer mom. Preeya thought that music lessons could start very early for a child, even though her music lessons didn’t start until she was in fourth grade. If she had girls, she thought dance lessons could start earlier. There was a very definite overlay and schedule of future life activities that Preeya had. I was slightly amazed that anyone could be so foresighted and detail-oriented. Of course I had nothing to say. I was working out much more basic issues about life. Preeya talked non-stop as we polished off our French fries, which was uncharacteristic. When we were four-years old, she had followed me around in corn fields almost silently. But at this lunch when we were rising sophomores in large prestigious universities, Preeya seemed to be enjoying her monologue along with the fries. She was careful to put a tablespoon of ketchup on one side of her plate to dip her fries in. I, on the other hand, smack-dumped a load of ketchup on top of mine.

Even after finishing our food, Preeya talked on. This was reminiscent of our social sessions on my parents’ back porch, when she would come over to sneak cigarettes and keep a conversation going for two hours. She spoke about being friends or acquaintances with other girls from India at Duke. Regardless of the fact that everyone spoke only English, it was obvious to a mixed group of university undergraduates, who was from Bengali, or Gujarati, or Punjab. I didn’t know what Dravidian was until she explained it as a language used in South India, although I knew of Tamil and Sri Lanka. Preaya talked about the conflict between the Brahmin who were Hindu and the Christian community in Gujarati. This started her talking about her church in Cornfield. The Methodist Christian heritage coming from India could be strong – they withstood social pressure in India from Hindu sources and they brought those bonds with them to Ohio. When Preeya was in church, she was on home ground. Blessed assurance, I commented, one of the few times I interrupted her, but Preeya smiled and kept on narrating. Her family went to church and that was important to her – if there had been friction in the house, whatever it was, they went together. Dinner on Sunday afternoon was everyone together and she wanted that when she was a parent. Somewhere in her family’s past there had been a riot and someone’s house burned down and physical injuries in India because of their beliefs. Preeya’s religious belief structure revolved around family and social bonds.

Preeya started telling me about one of the lectures she attended in political science. This particular lecture concerned an exchange between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison over Washington’s Neutrality Declaration, called the Pacificus-Helvidius debates, and Preeya gave me the full rundown. She had an appetite for the history of our revolution. She recited a list of fun-to-know facts about Washington, France, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, privateering on the open sea and how it affected warfare in the 18^th century etc. She was just as wound-up to talk as she had been an hour or so earlier, when we had just seated ourselves. It was good that I did not have to keep up my end of a conversation on 18^th century, privately authorized naval warfare on British commercial shipping, because my philosophical inquiries had not yet extended that far. But this topic engaged Preeya and she spent five full minutes explaining it all to me, neophyte that I was in this important area of knowledge. As Preeya advised, you could hardly understand the American revolution without it, and I was duly instructed. Briefly, it reminded me of a historical and explanatory lecture from my mother, who also enjoyed educating me, or anyone else whose time and attention were undefended by another activity.

Preeya had developed an interest in the law as a profession. I did not envision my childhood friend, with whom I wandered around in cornfields looking for exotic bugs, as an attorney, but Preeya articulated her new ambition, Constitutional law in particular. I heard about the importance of judicial review. She also talked about the difficulty of getting into a top law school and what you needed to get on the LSAT and whether or not you could get a judicial clerkship from a good but second-tier school if you didn’t get into the top three or four law schools, obviously Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford. I may have mentioned something about the tuition at this point, but Preeya assured me that if you were accepted at one of those schools, there was a lot of scholarship money available, and high-paying positions at big law firms came afterward. I was impressed with her ambition – but also thinking that people like me didn’t want to go in that direction. Not only did I lack the academic interest, but I didn’t know what they would think at a big law firm about my long walks in a cemetery. I had a feeling they wouldn’t have much time for me if I were too daydreamy or too concerned with metaphysics. Something I understood even then, which Preeya did not, is that when people gathered because there was a lot of money involved, there was not much time allocated for interior explorations of poetry or philosophy. They repelled each other like two sub-atomic particles with the same negative charge. There was no reason for me to comment on Preeya’s career interests – Preeya mapped it out in draft mode and delivered it stream-of-consciousness to a friend.

Hey, Preeya, I said and she knew I was ready for lunch to come to a stop. Tell your family I said hello. She said the same thing to me, greetings to my family. The bill had already been paid with us more-or-less splitting the tab, the tip was on the table. I made a movement to push back my chair. Her face changed at that point, softened – it hadn’t been hard before, just wound up. As we stood she looked up at me. She didn’t step toward me, but she didn’t take the usual step back people do when getting up from a table. Me being taller, Preeya tilted her head back slightly. She went to say something and then she said nothing – but just waited. She was waiting to hear what I had to say – she realized that I had spoken very little in a 90-minute lunch. Thanks for having lunch with me, I said, and the thank-you was sincere. My eyes carried a message. Thank you for not making me talk. Thank you for carrying the conversation when I wasn’t in the mood – my thoughts are not as assembled, my plans not as organized, as yours. Thank you for having a vision for your life when I hardly have any. It was the silent exchange of childhood friends. If you could plant words on thoughts, then we were communicating telepathically – I know you don’t have any plans formed yet about your life, Preeya said in thought-talk, but I do. I’ll tell you all about them and you can share mine. I think Preeya knew about my long walks in a cemetery without being told. When somebody is a friend, no explanation is required.

My lunch with Preeya had a marked effect on my thought life but not in the direction of personal relationships. She had plans for her life – why didn’t I? It seemed to me that I had been hopping around on one foot, and then another in connection with my search for life rules lifted from philosophy, Kant’s in particular. I resolved that I was going to stop flirting with Kant. I was going to take in his ideas in one big meal, not just piece-meal my way through them like hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party.

     Seventeen.  A Valiant Intellectual Effort

I moved out of the dorms and found a rented room in Columbus. I took the recommended set of classes, including some multivariable calculus and linear algebra, and spent much of the year absorbing the Critique of Pure Reason. I had questions not to be ignored.  If knowledge began with experience, did it arise from experience? There were unavoidable questions – God, freedom, immortality. My empirical judgments were synthetic – take ideas, add experience – at least that described my mathematics classes, where it was easy to see. The concept of radian depended on the concept of radius – a radian was abstract, a method to count and measure degrees, a radius was a line segment in the real world. Kant said that reason preceded any metaphysics – so if I was going to develop rules for life, plans for the future, they had to be developed by pure reason – that’s how I would get to my working transcendental philosophy, something that I thought which could be handy-dandy, portable, to be applied everywhere, ketchup for every kind of French fry. I had to skip over Kant’s views of space – four-dimension space was beyond his regime. And so was time, which he thought entirely subjective – a point upon which Einstein would not agree. But for the sake of his transcendental aesthetic, I was willing to give it a try. What is truth? Kant asked, and not the only one to ask that question. I was going to isolate transcendental logic into its own compartment to find a rarified, purified understanding. I needed unadulterated concepts – not based on anything my senses reported. I needed those concepts to comport with understanding and a system. My concept table had to be complete.  A broken or incomplete system of thought was unacceptable, because I was 19 years old and 19 year-olds think they have to have a complete system or none at all.  When I was working through this, I felt I was getting back on the chessboard of my vision in the student union building – not a happy result –  but I was determined to push through. This idea of understanding was supposed to be purified from experience, a goal once achieved to redeem me from muddling through life – so it had to be purified of inexplicable visions and the delusions of poets. I was looking for a self-sufficient unity and quieting my doubts while I went about this self-initiated discipleship.

I sat in my room surrounded by many thoughts but no people. Concepts and judgments were to be arranged, organized – that was my business, my task. I ploughed into Kant’s table, his Quantity of Judgments. There were twelve categories, starting with concepts of the universal, the particular, the singular. And his Quantity of Judgments table was accompanied by his Table of Categories. There was an obvious element of rigidity, artificiality, of arbitrariness, about selecting a dozen concepts, putting them into a few tables, and asserting this organized all life. But Kant was insistent that the world did not exist by blind chance – his mental organizations spoke against that – and so I labored on. Even if Kant wasn’t entirely satisfactory on his own, I thought I might learn something additive. It was like determining an integral – you added tinier and tinier slices until you got a sum. The sum of the sums would reach a limit and that limit would be my set of rules. It wouldn’t be necessary to discard Sylvia Plath and her disordered book of genius-demonic imagery – I could add that in too, like a small slice under a curve. I made my way to Kant’s transcendental deduction, ground I’d been over before, but this time determined to master it, to integrate it – and the pun was deliberate. My transcendental unity of self-consciousness was in high gear.  If I had no clue what I was going to be doing in my life, at least my representations of the outside world belonged to me, one and all. It was a small and perhaps ridiculous victory – a man claiming he owned his own intuitions and sense impressions and they were unified in his consciousness.   Not much of an insight – but I was willing to start there. So I stood on the ground of the synthetic unity of apperception. All designed to connect understanding, logic and philosophy. All intended to be a reference to objective reality.  I was willing to bend Kant’s notion of objects producing representations to open it to include a larger set of experiences, a larger field that started sooner and dove deeper and extended further, that captured more than Kant’s view of objective reality. I wanted to assemble, to sum up, different theories of life, different sets of operating symbols – really different – to converge on a limit.

None of this gave me any plans for the future or rules for life, but I was working away at an intellectual project and that was enough – if you give a beaver a tree to gnaw down, he doesn’t need more. Pure imagination, including literary imagination, was a fundamental faculty of my soul, a disconcerting fact I tripped over from time to time. As I worked my way through Kant, it was clear my synthesis was going to run into opposition. Kant wanted to say things like all intuitions are extensive magnitudes. But Plath’s Rabbit Catcher, sinister and murderous figure that he was, didn’t extend into any magnitude, any more than her Medusa did. To start looking for magnitudes in space or extension in time, whether they were subjective or not, missed the point. Medusa and the Rabbit Catcher were not a priori of anything – certainly not any experience or sense perception I had.  Someone had to tell me.  Then the Rabbit Catcher and Medusa were added to my caste of characters. There were no necessary connections between representations and objects – that was Plath’s neurosis and her genius. I wanted to get away from the chessboard or add to the chessboard, but it became progressively clear that I was distorting Kant to do so. The apprehension of the manifold of appearance was always successive – so Kant said – because he wanted to advance the law of causality. But that was the problem – there was no causality when Rilke started talking about angels. What is required for experience is understanding – so Kant told me – because it rendered the representation of objects possible at all. But Rilke and Plath weren’t representing objects. And they weren’t requiring appearances – at least not in the way Kant meant.

So I was laboring intellectually and not for reasons which were my fault. If we couldn’t decide on the field of play, we certainly couldn’t decide on the rules. Near the end of my second year at Ohio State I was stuck again. I was striking out on rules, I was striking out on a method, I was striking out on future plans. I was sitting in my rented room more or less the way Kant sat in his study in Konigsberg in the 18^th century – looking out a window and trying to organize the data. But he apparently was happy about his system, and I was not happy about mine – or the lack thereof. Kant told me that understanding could never go beyond the limits of sensibility. I thought he was wrong.  All I had to do to demonstrate that was to start a kind of artistic-psychological integration process, with the initial starting point before he would allow and the ending point ending after he would allow – both beyond the limits of sensibility, beyond his tables of judgment or categories. My imagined integration formula went easily beyond his implied limits of calling everything an object, as if the world were made up of stuff, not people who did unpredictable things and had unpredictable things to say. Maybe there was no immediate solution to the problem, maybe the integral never resolved. But it made no sense to say it couldn’t exist. To say a set of symbols don’t resolve just means you haven’t solved the problem yet. I could start integrating from an imaginary number – a guy named Cauchy told me that and it was taught every semester in upper-level math. My metaphysical train was coming to the last station stop on the line, and I had no immediate ticket for anywhere else.  The principles were floating up into the air, the symbols were hopping around but none were obeying any set of rules except those so arbitrary and mechanical that they led nowhere. If I had another lunch with Preeya, I would still have nothing to say, and that would be even more depressing the second time than the first.  Nothing to report, nothing to conclude – yet the world did not exist by blind chance.  Somewhere between a mechanical box and a throw of a million crazy dice which didn’t even hold their cube shape, I was reaching in the dark.