She struck back with surprising vehemence, her dark brown eyes going hard with reproof: It wasn’t just that atheists were immoral; they were “shallow” and trapped in the commonplace, while she and her fellow believers had access to some transcendent dimension. I don’t know what the exact words were here, but the point was that I was missing something, left out, just grubbing around among the superficial surfaces of things. Banality—that was the problem with atheists—and as she said this I could feel banality weighing down on me like some huge sodden pig that had draped itself over the roof of our house, over all roofs actually, and most of the sky in between.
I reached for the only weapon that came to hand—the flabby, soft-minded notion of the “spiritual,” which I at least had the good taste to acknowledge in my journal as a “poor word, but you know what I mean.” What I was groping for was a concept that would embrace both her religion and my adventures in perception—both the incense-driven mystery of the Orthodox rite and the stark beauty of the place that lay beyond words. There are spiritual insights, I told Bernice, that have nothing to do with religion.
Oh yeah, she wanted to know, what are they? Because for her, the “spiritual” was not just some delicate mist arising from the church steeples. It had a face and a name and could be evoked through precise ritual procedures. If I had these supposed “spiritual insights,” could I recount or explain them?
No, of course I couldn’t—later writing that “I could not would not shall not tell her.” And what would I have told her, if I’d had the courage or the verbal skills to do anything but stonewall? That the things we each held to be true—her religion as well as my atheistic, Latin-loving rationalism—were both capitulations to what might be, for all we knew, some monstrous hoax? That they were inventions of the human imagination with no obvious grounding in what I was increasingly, and despite my tenacious rationalism, coming to see as the “real”?
So I ceded the fight to Bernice, who went home in triumph, leaving me, still steaming, to ask my mother, who was busy in the kitchen making dinner: Could something be true but not explainable? Of course not, she said. If you can’t explain something it isn’t true and has no basis in fact, which I took to mean that in her view all human experience maps perfectly to Webster’s Dictionary. What isn’t in it isn’t there. Everything that humans can experience has already been named, alphabetized, and stored in a single volume, supplemented of course by the Encyclopedia Americana. I drew my own conclusion, which was that there is an entire category of experience that is not suited to intraspecies communication, so you are advised to keep it to yourself.
I attempted to sort things out that night in my journal, in one long, knotted paragraph on the human need to feel superior, written so impersonally that it’s possible to read it as either arrogance or apology. “Everyone,” I observed, “thinks he or she is unique and likes to think that he possesses great powers of perception and is of uncommonly profound nature.” For the religious, God was the ticket:
Man believes himself to be the special creation of his most alarming invention and servant, God. God is an extension of human personality brought into the world and enslaved as man’s glorifier. God is the final superiority that humans can conceive for their selfish delight.
But where did I get my edge from, my sense of being special, or, as we would later say (the word had yet to be invented), my “self-esteem”? Certainly not from being more beautiful, more athletic, or smarter than other people, although I acknowledged I was a little smarter than many. No, it was from the “very important things” I knew, or inferred, from my unique access to the world as it “really” was—things that even my genius father did not seem to know, and I was not going to share them with “any old clod” like Bernice.
This is embarrassing, but, objectively, also interesting. If dissociation/depersonalization is a symptom of a “disorder,” then you might expect the experience to cause some pain. Go to the “Depersonalization Community” at dpselfhelp.com, and that’s what you’ll find: one report after another of agonizing detachment, failed treatments, or long, slow slogs back to a shaky “normality.” A woman complains, for example, of “weird abstract thoughts like what is that fan/carpet/doll/plane made of and why the f@#k is it here?” and then goes on to ask, “Why do I have to be sick/why doesn’t anyone I know understand/how am I supposed to deal with this/do I go to a doctor for a health check-up or accept it as a mental disorder?” And much more like that, leaving me to conclude that self-identified victims of “DPD” have radically different reactions to dissociation than I did. Was I exempted from the menace of pathology simply by my ignorance about mental illness? I don’t know, but what they seek to be cured of—the “weird abstract thoughts” and so forth—I took as a special privilege. And even today, as an apparently sane and responsible grown-up, it seems to me that a person who questions the reality of objects and can ask why “the f@#k” they’re here is a philosopher, not a mental patient.
True, as a psychiatrist might have noted, my social connections were a little thin on the ground at the time when I started to dissociate. Bernice was not the only friend or potential friend repelled by my atheism; there may have been, in heavily Catholic Lowell, a conscious boycott for all I know. At the same time, my siblings disappeared, both from my journal and my sight, seduced by the arrival of television, which had the effect of making them seem dumber and me, no doubt, seem more priggish and aloof to them. I had had only one crush on a boy, and that had ended badly with him joining the other boys on the school bus in taunting me for my pimples and general oddness. In fact it was around this time that I started using “other people” as an analytic category, distinct from me and distinct from “things.” What I hadn’t been able to tell Bernice during our conversation about God was that it was hard enough for me to believe in her—that is, to believe that behind her face and voice and gestures there was a conscious being just like myself, or perhaps unlike me and alien in ways I could not imagine. Believing in her, or even my family members for that matter, as independent minds took all the effort I could muster. Cause and effect are not easy to separate here: Did I “dissociate” because I was estranged or did the dissociative episodes drive a wedge between me and all my kind? Logic favored the latter explanation. If I questioned the reality of physical objects, how could I so readily attribute mind and consciousness and feeling to other people, who were, in the most general sense, physical objects too, although of a cleverly animated sort?
If I needed anything from the grown-up world, it was not some concerned professional to interrogate my feelings and direct my metaphysics onto a presumably healthier and more productive track. I needed better teachers or perhaps a kindly librarian to point out that books are meant to be consumed in a certain order and not all at once. There are invisible lines connecting them: First you learn some physics, then you can daydream about quantum physics or antimatter. First Kant, then Hegel and Nietzsche. On the whole, despite family tensions, social isolation, the ongoing horror of puberty, and intermittent philosophical despair, I was not unhappy, or if I was, I did not see fit to write about it. There was too much going on for that, too much to find out and absorb, and emotions were not my natural beat. I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called “the truth,” whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane. At the same time, I was overwhelmed by the aesthetic runoff from adolescence—the shameless beauty of the world, regenerated each day as if by magic, without any help from me. Lowell, all coppery in the winter sunrise, looked “like a Sumerian city on the banks of the Tigris or Euphrates,” while the junior girls’ calisthenics class was a “dance of priestesses of the sun.” “These things fascinate me,” I wrote when I was sixteen:
bees, straight lines, the ocean, the idea that every word is an example of onomatopoeia (sp?), the music of Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Borodin, Ravel, Debussy, ancient Egypt, other planets, the
idea that the stars as I see them are not only trillions of miles away but are millennia ago and may no longer be there, Greenland, people and everything else. I like the line “alone, alone, all, all alone, alone on a wide wide sea.”
If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Chapter 4
A Land without Details
When my father revealed that we would be moving to California in early 1958, where he would have a new job with better pay, my overall feeling was: It’s time. “Lowell,” I wrote in anticipation of the move, “is the kind of city I like to go through on a train and think how lucky I am not to live there.” We’d been there for a year and a half, a longer stopover than usual, and a thin crust of familiarity had already settled on all the churches and buildings and houses. When a place gets all echoey like this, I felt, when everywhere you look you see residues of what’s already happened, the only thing to do is move on. The specific content of the memories does not have to be tragic; it’s just that no matter how you evoke it, the past is inherently always about death: what was and no longer is. My family had found a surefire way to escape the sickening accretion of memory, which was to pack up and move.
I understood too that the concept of home was badly in need of updating before it expired altogether when I reached eighteen, which was, as my mother had always made clear, when I would “age out” like a foster child and be released to the streets or, should I qualify, to college. This did not seem so harsh to me at the time, since I understood the family, my family at least, to be a temporary and unstable unit like one of those clumsily named elements down at the bottom of the periodic table, Berkelium or Rutherfordium, for example. In the new managerial gypsy class we had entered, the point was not to set down roots—or, in chemical terms, bond with other families or groups—but to follow the breadwinner as unseen forces drove him from one office, one company, one brand to another. And then, when we were no longer needed to provide him with the cover of suburban respectability, the family would undergo fission and we would head off in our separate directions.
By this time it was obvious that my father had given up science—which was the only white-collar occupation he deemed worthy of a person’s best efforts—for money. Given that he was over six feet tall, looked like Dean Martin, and could outdrink any competitor, maybe it had been inevitable that he would eventually be drafted from the laboratory into management and what was ultimately, at the time of his retirement in the 1980s, a salary in the upper five figures. Or maybe he fought for his various promotions—hiding the tattoo under neatly pressed white shirts and suit jackets, upgrading from boilermakers to martinis, developing a consistently below-par golf game and an enthusiasm for flying around the country to meetings. The fiction was that he did it all for us. Maudlin with drink one Sunday afternoon, he told me that, left to himself, he would happily have toiled away in the lab, but that he had a family to support, which meant submission to the endless, trivial, and demeaning demands of the company. It would have been easier on me if he had just waved toward the corporate hierarchy he had so much contempt for and said: See this pile of steaming shit? Well, I’m going to climb my way to the top of it.
But I was not too sure about his choice of California. I knew the stereotype, thanks to Life magazine, of happy, tanned people driving around in sports cars from one beach party to another. What if all this sunshine worked its magic on me and I turned into a teenager? Chronologically, I fit the description, but I knew the demographic group only as the “juvenile delinquents” of media paranoia or the dwarf grown-ups practicing mating rituals on American Bandstand. Adolescence I could handle and in fact might as well have been running through a checklist of approved adolescent activities. Read Dostoevsky: Check. Camus: Check. Escape into fugue states where the agreed-upon and shared reality of world evaporates: Check.…In Lowell, I could move seamlessly from school to family dinner to an evening immersion in The Underground Man without experiencing the slightest hiccup of dissonance. But who could read Dostoevsky in a subtropical environment or Conrad in a place where the major seafaring activity seemed to be surfing? I arrived in Los Angeles with my shoulders hunched against the threat of corruption.
It was different all right, but not always in the ways I expected. This was my first exposure to the “modern,” by which I don’t mean anything fancy and academic; that’s just the word my parents used to describe what they saw as the upgrade in our new environment. Lowell had been ancient and gnarly; in Los Angeles, or at least on the white west side of the city where we took up residence, everything was clean and smooth. Gone were the curlicues and doodads that adorned Lowell’s nineteenth-century building façades, replaced by plain, flat, pastel-colored walls that seemed to have no function at all except to reflect back the sun. I found this modernity immensely freeing, at first anyway: an invitation to fill in the blanks for myself.
Gone too were the churches; at least they were not prominent in the suburban scenery of West L.A. at the time. If I wanted to reflect on the glories and shortcomings of organized religion, there were no cathedrals to sit in quietly for purposes of observation, but I could walk just twenty minutes from our house down Sunset Boulevard to something called the “Church of All Religions,” which was my first clue as to the essential strangeness of L.A., apart from the climate. Here the religions were all conveniently on display together, each represented by its own shrine or plaque, and organized around a little freshwater lake, the only one in Los Angeles. Well, not all religions. Christianity and Hinduism were the most prominently represented, and each of them only in its softest, most loving form, suggesting that the essence of religion is one long swoon into the infinite All. Nothing like this “church” could have occurred in New England, of course, where the denominations bristled with mutual hostility and the realm of the sacred never bore any resemblance to an amusement park. The Church of All Religions had once been a movie set—perhaps for the filming of a version of Don Quixote, since the most prominent feature of the site was a windmill—and had later been taken over by a successful ecumenically minded swami. The most memorable aspect of Hinduism here was the plaque revealing that for weeks after his death the swami’s corpse had remained sweet-smelling and his nails had continued to grow.
Even the city’s sprawl delighted me, testifying as it did to an excess of space. Stores didn’t have to be crammed into the first floor of multistory buildings housing stacks of offices higher up. In fact, there were hardly any offices or office buildings visible at all, suggesting that whatever was going on here—the shiny diners, supermarkets, and shopping centers—had sprung up spontaneously and without any kind of administrative oversight. High school wasn’t a single grim box of a building, it was a “campus” of scattered bungalows, one for each teacher or class, and you could walk right on out to the parking lot and, if you had learned how to smoke, have a cigarette, with no one paying any attention. In my last few weeks in Lowell, a girl had been dragged into the basement of the high school and raped—a crime so awful it could only be whispered and then only by a determined “realist” like my mother. Nothing like that could happen at my new high school, where there was no basement or dark interstitial spaces to get trapped in.
I was right to be on guard, though. We arrived in March, the middle of a semester, leaving me scrambling to catch up in trigonometry, which as a result I never fully understood. What kind of person looks at, say, a piece of rhubarb pie and comes up with the notion of a cosine? What is the deep mysterious link between triangles and circles, sharp points and gentle curves? Even more threatening was a required course brazenly entitled “Life Adjustment,” since I knew that just by looking at me anyone could tell I fell short of “adjustment.” Most of my clothes were homemade by my mother, like the Black Watch plaid dress with the white appliqué collar and cuffs that I had been so proud of in Lowell, but that here, where the cool girls wore close-fitting sweaters and tight tubula
r skirts, looked like some kind of folk costume. On about my third session in this course we were given a “personality test” to fill out, featuring multiple-choice questions about our eagerness to spend time with friends (of which I had none at the moment), eventual interest in marriage, and general satisfaction with the status quo. I filled it out quickly and guilelessly, prepared to learn something about that mysterious doppelgänger, my “personality.” But no, as soon as we had finished the tests, the teacher instructed us to exchange papers with the person sitting across the aisle from us, so that the tests could be corrected.
I stuck up my hand to raise the obvious, even platitudinous question: How could there be “right” answers if, as had just been explained, each person has a unique personality? All the time thinking: What is this, communism? Because as I understood it, that’s what communism, our great national enemy, meant—the forcible destruction of the individual by the power of the state—and here it was going on right out in the open. I got some kind of patronizing answer about my being new to the class and how everything would be clear soon enough. So I stood up without saying another word, picked up my books, and walked out of the bungalow, taking my potentially incriminating test with me. The amazing thing, compared to what might have happened in Lowell, is that I could just walk out, without anyone trying to stop me.