Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  This is not an impulse I can claim to understand. Not only am I fairly fastidious about avoiding injury to others, but I’m afraid of loud noises and have been since early childhood, when a popped balloon could ruin a birthday party for me. Which probably explains why the next thing I said was so stunned and lame. Like a social worker who has just realized that the client sitting across from her is not only out of his mind but probably armed, I ventured to Dick that he seemed to have been a little “self-destructive” in his youth, which was stupid because of course self-destructiveness was not the issue here. The issue was depraved indifference to the lives of others, in particular those of my brother and myself, not to mention anyone who might have been on the highway at the same times as us or live near the fire roads in the L.A. hills. I had imagined that I was the consummate teenage solipsist, capable of deleting people at will from my field of consciousness, but he had apparently had no qualms about actually killing them if they happened to be in the way.

  However inept and patronizing my remark about being self-destructive, it didn’t deserve what came next. He blew up, like the chemical compound under discussion. How dare I attempt to “psychoanalyze” him? Who did I think I was? He hated that kind of talk, he hated Freud (although nothing even vaguely “Freudian” had come up), he hated people who talked that way, people who thought they were better than other people. Now he was even angrier than when he had gone off on “young people today,” suggesting that he had been subject to some unwelcome therapeutic interventions in the past, for which I was now taking the heat. There was nothing to do but thank him, in the obligatory, journalistic way, for talking to me, and hang up, grateful for the passage of years and the breadth of the continent that separated us.

  At least I found out from that phone call why we had spent the night in the car in Lone Pine. If we had driven straight home from Mammoth we would have passed Death Valley in the dark of night when it would have been impossible to conduct a search. Maybe Dick’s entire motivation for going on the trip was to get to Death Valley and the dynamite. Maybe there had been no incident with my father and Dick hadn’t been angry at anyone in particular at all; it was just that once he got behind the wheel he saw no reason to keep up the pretense of friendliness. If that was the case, I would have to say I at least admire his determination. I was on a secret mission and he was on a secret mission, and our paths just happened to coincide. My mission was to find the truth, the complete and absolute truth. His was to experience the maximum possible fireworks, even at the risk of being extinguished himself. You don’t need any advanced training in the detection of metaphors to see a parallel here.

  Chapter 7

  Breakdown

  Here is where I lose all patience with my younger self. She has come back from the mountains and desert, come back from being whacked by a power greater than herself, maybe even from the kind of epiphany that filled the biblical prophets with their prophecies, and, at least in the journal entry made less than twenty-four hours after her return, she has nothing coherent to say about it. This is the point where intellect should have kicked in, guided by science, inflamed by curiosity. What exactly happened out there? Has anything like this ever happened to anyone else? But what we find in that first journal entry after the events in question is an emotional meltdown, unleavened by intellectual curiosity: “I have suffered. I have crossed the shadow line. I have lost my youth. Now I am writing this on purpose so it will look silly to me and not be true.” It goes on in this blubbery vein: “The universe has no purpose.…Life is a joke in poor taste of which I am the brunt and which I am also expected to laugh at.”

  All right, perhaps this is an overly harsh way for an old person to talk about an adolescent’s weepy confessions. I hear echoes of my mother here. When I was a little girl she would yell at me for something, and then, as soon as I started to cry, she would yell at me for crying—a crime that quickly superseded the original transgression. An old fight goes on within me between the critical mother-self and the slovenly, needy child-self, whose tendency is always to crouch in a corner and whimper. It’s the psychological work of a lifetime to resolve this battle between superego and sodden id, or at least bury it under the floorboards, but when I read that first journal entry from the time I already understood to be “after,” as in “before and after,” and think of all the questions I have today, I feel like grabbing that useless girl by the shoulders and shaking her myself. What happened? What exactly went on in your head? Tell me everything even if it sounds crazy.

  But generosity compels me to acknowledge something more than self-pity in that first wretched journal entry: It is, if nothing else, evidence of trauma and possibly damage. Physically, the only damage was the sunburn that turned my face almost black, which was brought on by the sun’s UV rays at high altitude, but seemed also to have been emanating from an inch or so underneath my face, where important neural circuitry had been fried to a crisp. In the intervening years, I have formed the impression from my scattered reading that ecstatic states may be something like epileptic seizures, in which large numbers of neurons start firing in synchrony, until key parts of the brain are swept up in a single pattern of activity, an unstoppable cascade of electrical events, beginning at the cellular level and growing to encompass the entire terrain that we experience as “consciousness.” Maybe some similar cataclysmic cellular events could account for what I experienced in May.

  If there was a family precedent for late adolescent trauma it would have been my great-uncle Johnny, who had come back from World War I with the undefined psychological injury then called “shell shock.” I wouldn’t make too much of this analogy, because Uncle Johnny had actually been fired on, and reduced, at age nineteen, to a prematurely old man, barely capable of taking care of himself. He lived in a shack behind my paternal grandparents’ house, in silence and isolation, except for trips to the bathroom in the house. I think that the artillery just kept exploding in his head, hour after hour, year after year, and that’s why he couldn’t make himself heard. I was in far better shape than that in May 1959, of course, but, to be merciful to my younger self, I could no more be expected to launch a rational inquiry into unusual psychic phenomena than Uncle Johnny could have been expected to come home from the war and undertake a study of the Hapsburg Empire.

  But then, in another journal entry just two weeks after my return from the trip, I offered a very different interpretation of what had happened. It was not that I had lost something, like “youth,” but that I had found something there in the mountains that now I could no longer recapture. “Ever since that,” I wrote, with “that” serving as a marker for what could not be named,

  I’ve never known a moment’s calm or comfort or happiness. Having once contained all, having once suffered, having once looked about and seen and felt every object completely in its naked and purposeless significance, nothing less will do. No matter how comfortable the circumstance I am nagged by the remembrance of total perception beside which my present awareness is thin and vague.

  Maybe I was too stunned to sort things out. Or maybe the experience was inherently unclassifiable under headings like “good” or “bad.” What I really needed to know was what, if anything, I was supposed to do next. If I had completed my quest and found “the truth,” the moment of complete and radiant comprehension, then there was not much point in hanging around except for the occasional satisfaction provided by a good book or a surprising chemical factoid. And if I could not claim to have completed my quest, since obviously I was unable to report what I had found, then how was I supposed to proceed?

  Marina would have been the one to talk to, had it occurred to me to seek human counsel. She would have been familiar with mystical experiences or at least quick to claim one for herself, because when it came to shamanic prowess, there could be no competing with her. Oh yes, she would probably have chortled and said, “That happens to me all the time.” And probably nothing would have been better for me at the moment tha
n to be assured that what happened to me was a fairly common experience—if not normal, at least within a recognizable range of abnormal. But Marina had a boyfriend by now, an actual man in his twenties, as it turned out, a graduate student and a surprisingly preppy-looking one, who took up all her evenings and weekends. She was, in other words, going over to the other side, the grown-up side—a place I had vowed to stay out of.

  So at this point in my self-education, I had no way of knowing whether any other human being had ever experienced anything similar. All I knew from my reading was that a few other people, beginning with Dostoevsky’s epileptic prince, had also experienced things that did not lend themselves to verbal representation and that presumably occupied some alternative realm of being and knowing. Sometime in the spring of 1959 I had found Sartre’s Nausea in the same paperback bookstore near UCLA where I had first encountered Camus, and felt a thrill of recognition when his hero Roquentin exclaims, “And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.” But Roquentin, or Sartre, is revolted by what he sees behind the veil: “soft monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.” He is terrified of the world without words—sickened by it in fact—by its senseless writhings and, in his view, constant reminders of death and decomposition. If his place behind the veil was the same “place” revealed to me through dissociation, I did not want to go anywhere near there with queasy old Sartre as a companion.

  I also read, somewhere around this time, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which was my first literary encounter with an “altered state of mind,” and again felt a shock of recognition. He had taken mescaline, in a more or less scientifically supervised setting, and then stared at things like flowers and furniture, reporting that

  what [the] rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.

  But it got all weird and gaudy, Huxley’s mescaline trip. Flowers breathed, colors pulsated, walls did not always meet at right angles. This, I decided, was not about enlightenment but about chemistry—the action of a foreign molecule on certain sites in the brain. During my experience in Lone Pine nothing unnatural or physically impossible had occurred, objects had not moved on their own, and the laws of geometry had remained in force.

  When people run up against something inexplicable, transcendent, and, most of all, ineffable, they often call it “God,” as if that were some sort of explanation. I fell back on this semantic sleight of hand myself once in those first few weeks after the return from Mammoth, and instantly regretted it. My friend David and I were driving in L.A. when he asked me how the skiing trip had gone. I said something vague and hesitant, which naturally led him to start nosing around more aggressively, until at last, in a spirit of verbal economy, I blurted out, “I saw God.” I could see from the wolfish look that came over his face that I had made a terrible mistake, because of course he wanted to know what God was like.

  This was totally embarrassing, as if I’d been caught in an act of plagiarism or, more precisely, antiquities theft. Why would I want to apply the ancient, well-worn notion of “God” to that force or power or energy I’d encountered in Lone Pine, which bore not the slightest resemblance to anything in the religious iconography I had grown up around? There had been no soulful, long-suffering face, no accompanying cherubs or swooning Madonna—no face at all, in fact. “God,” in the prevailing monotheistic sense, is a curious bundle of admirable or at least impressive qualities, including omnipotence and cosmological creativity. As for the most highly advertised property of the Christian—or Jewish or Islamic—God, that he is “good,” in fact morally “perfect,” I had no evidence of that, either derived from epiphany or more conventional forms of observation.

  And what did God mean to David, who was as far as I knew a nonobservant Jewish atheist? Maybe his remote pastoral ancestors had had a sunstruck hallucination they called God, and maybe it even resembled the content of my own epiphany, but I doubted that David was familiar with any such entity or that it lived on in suburban synagogues. I told him I was only kidding, that I was as firm in my atheism as ever.

  And that much was true. It was not my beliefs about the existence of a deity that had changed, but the landscape around me, the sensory “given” out of which the world can be imaginatively constructed. The “epiphany,” if I may call it that, seemed to be best understood as an explosion, a calamitous natural process like an earthquake or storm, leaving behind it what is known in science fiction as a “rent in the fabric of space-time.” Something was broken. Things no longer cohered. Colors did not reliably attach themselves to flowers. Things retained the dark outlines they had first displayed in Death Valley, giving them a lurid, cartoonish quality. The world was becoming increasingly hostile, and still I had to try to make my way around in it.

  There was the fight with my brother not long after we returned from the skiing trip, for example, over the volume of the TV. The TV set was in the living room, just outside my bedroom, so if the volume was too high I had no escape from its strident banality, its mocking good cheer. One night I complained that I couldn’t read or study. My brother refused to lower the volume, and in fact seemed enraged by my request, so I foolishly marched into the living room and turned the knob myself—leading to a knock-down physical fight in which furniture fell over and a lamp was broken. When my mother got home from wherever she’d been, possibly the community college where she’d started taking classes, she was so infuriated by the mess that she slapped me across the face—me because I was the older child.

  I prefer to think that this couldn’t have happened. Or rather, like so many other things that summer, it “happened” only in the improbable new dimension I had entered, the hard dry ground of which seemed to nourish the grotesque and extreme. Not long after the fight with my brother, there was a drunken scuffle with Frank, the guitar player. He and Marina and I had gone back to my house after one of his performances because we knew that no one in my family would be coming home that night. There in the refrigerator was my parents’ handy pitcher of premixed gin and orange juice—a terrible idea when I think about it now, all that acid and alcohol leaching away at the plastic. But we were thirsty, and, urged on by Frank, I drank until I threw up, then passed out on the couch—waking up in darkness a little later to find him on top of me, trying to get his hand into my pants. Maybe Marina had been through the same thing with him in the other room or maybe she had gone home already. I felt some mild curiosity about where the hand intended to go, but not enough to pursue the question. I pushed him away firmly and repeatedly, using vomit-breath as an additional weapon.

  After these two “assaults,” I must have picked up on the new spirit of aggression in the air. If the world was getting more dangerous, I would have to get a little more dangerous myself. “Do you know that for the first time I hate someone?” I wrote in my journal. The novelty here was not that I was capable of such a hostile emotion, but that a person I barely knew, and had no reason to even try to imagine as a conscious being, could inspire it in me. He was a regular customer at the new diner I was working at, a low-tipping consumer of coffee refills:

  Suffice it to say that his every feature and mannerism was cleverly designed to arouse my desire to kill. He is bearded, wears an exotic cross, carries a dressed white cat, knows everything about anything, and is virtuous at the top of his voice. There are two things which need only to be announced to be destroyed; and they are silence and virtue. It is hard to describe my hate. Just that anytime he talks (about his honorable discharge from the army, his love of all people and animals, his good-christianship, his good citizenship, his prowess with the knife) I start breathing hard, I feel strong and efficient, I stammer, but I know I could
do it. Kill him. I hate him. I don’t know him.

  Ordinarily I might have been sympathetically inclined toward someone so eccentric and needy, but even at an age when I was innocent of political categories other than “communist,” the combination of blowhard Christianity and patriotism set my teeth on edge. The cat alone, with its felt-trimmed jacket and tiny cap, made me want to drag this man off his stool and smack him around.

  I was a 110-pound girl whose upper body was toned only by tray-carrying, but by the middle of the summer I had developed new powers. I could go all day without eating anything more than a few cookies. I could put out cigarettes in the palm of my hand. On days when I didn’t have to work, I took longer and longer walks, from our house down open hills to the beach, then south to the Santa Monica Pier, which was already sinking into seediness, and sometimes farther south all the way to Venice—impressed that I possessed the strength to exhaust myself. Once I got my sister, who was eight at the time, to go with me to the pier, where I sat her down with a cotton candy and told her that she could do anything—anything—that anyone could, if only they saw they had the power to do it. Maybe I said this in an overly fanatical way, because she declared she felt queasy and had to go home.

  I did at the time seem to have some unusual new abilities. There was—and still is, because I’ve seen it in recent years—a huge rock, maybe fifty feet high, on a publicly accessible part of the Malibu beachfront. You have to admire rocks, holding out as best they can against all the forces of dissolution, the wind and the sea spray, and I was determined to establish some sort of intimacy with this one. When the chance arose to borrow my mother’s car for a few hours, I drove up to Malibu, parked near the rock’s base, and started climbing. I had no experience at all and of course no sort of gear, so the only way to ascend was to grip the rock tight on whatever handhold presented itself and hope that the bonds holding together the rock’s internal crystalline structure were strong enough to compete with the gravity pulling on my body. One microfissure, one tectonic shift among the planes of atoms, and I would be set loose into the air for a quick flight down to earth.