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

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  When I got to the top, or as high as I could go, I seriously debated whether to twist my head around to take in the view that I had earned. This seemed to me the only human thing to do, or the only noble and heroic thing anyway—to see what there was to see even at the risk of death. Maybe the colors would be deeper from this height, maybe I would spot seals out at sea. As for dying, I was confident that after the sudden rush of flight, the end would arrive totally unnoticed. Still, I did not turn and look. For no good reason I can think of, I put my cheek up against the rock for a few seconds, absorbed its cool gray strength, and then let it guide me safely back down again.

  My powers had to extend far beyond the physical. It was my job, since there was clearly no one else around to do it, to try to put the broken world back together again. “Yesterday,” I wrote, “being deadly tired and disgusted, I decided to be God and be responsible for the whole thing.”

  I took this responsibility very seriously, as a matter of survival, which of course it was. I had to take the raw materials, whatever they might be—a pile of laundry on the floor, the drone of an airplane, my face reflected in a bus window—and try to figure out whether there was some pattern or arrangement they needed to achieve. This was not a matter of imposing a pattern, as a writer or filmmaker might try to do. In fact I understood that it was my duty to “erase” imagination, and with it memory, because they get in the way of perceiving things-as-they-really-are. No matter how disparate or chaotic the data, there is always an emergent pattern, and you know it when you see it because this is where the beauty comes in, like an aftershock from the events at Lone Pine. Take the elements of an ordinary moment—a line from a pop melody, a flash of sunlight from a door swinging open, a rush of human motion, the confused onset of color from a retail display. Let these elements fuse and intermingle until something shockingly fresh arises from the mix. “Then make of the instant a beautiful, profound and therefore eternal experience,” I wrote, in a gust of adolescent fervor. “That is the Now, the perpendicular instant in the directional flow of events.”

  But I could not reliably achieve these brief bursts of glory. The morning might go well enough, but in the afternoon there was a good chance that the sunlight would turn rancid and I would glimpse what Sartre had seen—the sneering faces of unnamed, unmanaged things:

  Wednesday, I think it was, I looked over the edge of the cliff and into the abyss where snakes writhe and devils laugh. Yes really. I felt as if I were slipping deeper and deeper into chaos. I laughed hysterically, put out cigarettes in my hand, paced, and wept.

  Where was the beauty, then, or even the memory of beauty? I was a failure. I could not fulfill my assigned task and hold the world together. I was too weak, too stupid, and thinking did not help. In fact, I wrote, it made things worse:

  Any profound thought is true because its opposite is true…because any profound thought contains utterly meaningless words, which being meaningless, have all meaning, which is nothing, which is everything, and which door can I take to get out of here?

  I had to face the possibility that the “fabric of space-time” was doing just fine—that the problem might be more localized. There could be something wrong with me. In August I began for the first time to use the word “madness”—not because I acknowledged any external point of view from which I could be judged that way, but because I just could not do this anymore. It was too exhausting to keep building up the world from raw materials only to see it disintegrate again within hours or even minutes, the fragments of sensory data flying off in all directions. Hence my lifelong avoidance of LSD, even when that drug was widely available and eagerly promoted: For some of us, at some times, participation in the dullest, lowest-common-denominator version of “reality” is not compromise or a defeat; it is an achievement.

  Of course I always knew there was a way out, an exit door. With a quick and forceful intervention, I could kill myself and thus bring the entire universe to a sudden halt. This is one of the great advantages of solipsism: Someone else’s death—my darling little freckle-faced sister’s, for example, to pick the one person I unreservedly loved—would be tragic, but mine would be incidental, since the death of a solipsist is necessarily the end of the world, and can be experienced only as nothing, which is the same as not experienced at all.

  One late summer afternoon when a slight haze was making the sunlight even more malicious than usual, I decided to make a dash for the exit. My chemistry set, with its collection of slow poisons, had not accompanied us on our latest move, and the medicine cabinet offered nothing more belligerent than aspirin, but then

  I remembered that mother told me once about some plant in the front yard whose berries are poisonous. They all left me alone and I cried to think that so close, so convenient, was the switch to turn it all off with. But there are lots of plants out there. Finally I found some complacent, fruitish globes which might be berries. When I broke one off a thick white pussy fluid oozed out lasciviously. This I tasted. It was unbearably bitter and I couldn’t finish the whole thing. Nor could it [finish the whole thing] because here I am.

  This was not a serious suicide attempt of course, just a “suicide attempt,” undertaken in a spirit of ruefulness and, I will admit now, even a tiny bit of curiosity.

  How crazy was I? Over the years the question has arisen again and again, often taking on an edge of maternal concern. When I review the events of that summer as recorded or recalled by memory, I cannot deny a certain amount of symptomatology that it would be terrifying to detect in any child of my own—“self-destructiveness,” to fall back on that lame term again, and a level of social detachment that would probably be considered pathological today. I managed to hold on to my waitressing job, but I lost a job as a clerk in a dry goods store because I hid behind displays of fabric whenever a customer approached. I attended the one and only party of my high school career—a Coke-and-potato-chips kind of event at a classmate’s home—and spoke to no one at all until my school friend took pity and attempted to draw me out.

  As for my one real friend: The last time I can remember seeing Marina she actually broke into tears as she confessed that she’d just had a “miscarriage.” Her face, which I had never seen before without a complicitous smile in some stage of development, got all blotchy, and still I could think of nothing to say, not even bothering to ask what a miscarriage was, since I could tell it had something to do with the dark, swampy side of female existence (and was, I now realize, probably not a miscarriage at all but an abortion). It was stunning to think that sex, even with the innocuous fellow in question, could bring a proud girl so low, and my impulse was to get away from her before I was somehow implicated myself. I can’t remember how the evening ended, but, even more than getting drunk or risking my life on a rock, this was not good behavior.

  I knew something was wrong; otherwise I would never have used the word “madness” to describe my episodes of self-dissolution. All I knew about “mental illness” came from magazines—Life, Ladies’ Home Journal, and, at this, the pinnacle of my family’s upward mobility, the New Yorker—and there were very few diagnoses to choose from. Autism and bipolar disease had not yet achieved their current popularity among mental health professionals, and “anxiety,” the most common disorder at the time, thanks to the introduction of pharmaceutical tranquilizers, in no way matched my “symptoms.” That left “schizophrenia,” which in the 1950s had not yet distinguished itself from its terrifyingly archaic-sounding early-twentieth-century progenitor—dementia praecox—in which the mind just crumbled into a pile of moist little particles. As I understood it, other mental illnesses involved inappropriate moods—sadness, fear, etcetera—while only schizophrenia featured a general cognitive deterioration, manifested as a loosening grip on reality. All of my “symptoms,” I realized—dissociation and the occasional excursion into mystical grandiosity—could be subsumed under “schizophrenia.”

  And though I wasn’t sophisticated enough to see this at the time, so co
uld just about anybody’s symptoms, since “schizophrenia” pretty much boiled down to “abnormal patterns of thought.” As a historian of psychiatry observed in 1952, “If anyone were to take the trouble to summarize the descriptions of childhood schizophrenia by various authors in the past fifteen years, they would find every symptom ever occurring in abnormal psychology,” and the same could be said of adult and adolescent schizophrenia—labels that could be applied equally well to unhappy housewives and to juvenile delinquents, people who heard voices no one else did and people who ignored the voices of those around them, anyone, in other words, who was confused in any way about what constitutes “reality.”

  What was different about schizophrenia was that it was serious and at the time pretty much a ticket to a lifetime in a locked ward. I would have readily owned up to milder problems like “maladjustment” or “alienation,” but I knew that with schizophrenia a line was crossed into the nightmare territory of “psychosis,” inhabited by sociopaths and clowns. This was where the psychotherapeutic big guns came out—the shock treatments, lobotomies, involuntary institutionalizations, the antipsychotic drugs that could leave you permanently drooling. If I wanted to live among other people—and my attempt to live alone in the abandoned world of my long-running post-apocalyptic fantasy had not been promising—I would have to dodge any such diagnosis. If only to keep the supply of food and books flowing in, I would have to fake some sort of participation in a human environment that had never really made much sense.

  I can say now though, with complete confidence, that I did not have schizophrenia, if it is even a single meaningful disorder you can “have.” When I read subjective accounts of schizophrenics’ experiences, I am struck by how thickly populated the world of the schizophrenic is: Voices issue from inanimate objects, conspiracies arise among people unknown to you, demons emerge from the darkness. The schizophrenic, and especially the paranoid schizophrenic, imagines conscious beings everywhere, most of them apparently hostile. She makes her way through a landscape so crowded and noisy that she may start gibbering nonsensically herself just to gain some sense of control over the din. And this obviously was not my problem.

  Would religion have saved me, if I had one or could have adopted one? Years later, as an adult, I read in one of the women’s magazines I wrote for at the time an article that actually dealt with the subject of “mystical experiences.” These could be unhealthy, even shattering, the writer averred, unless a person had a religion in which to “house” them. This was the function of religion, in fact—to serve as a safe storage space for the unaccountable and uncanny. You were to carry your mystical experience back from the desert or wherever, and place it on, say, your improvised home altar, along with the images of Ganesh and the Virgin of Guadalupe—a little personal sample of the sacred. Better yet, you’d have a whole church filled with other people who did not find you crazy. And when I read this article, sometime in the 1980s, I thought, Ah, that’s what I needed during my post-epiphany crack-up! I should have been whisked off to a Buddhist nunnery, or maybe a fourteenth-century order of Beguines, where I could have meditated and discussed the undiscussable with like-minded others. I should have been debriefed by the mother superior—so superior to my own!—and filled my days with simple chores, punctuated by outbursts of group song.

  So yes, those last few months in L.A. would have gone much better, from a mental health perspective, if I’d had a religion in which to house the epiphany of May 1959, and a god, preferably a benevolent one who did everything for some ultimately kindly reason. In fact the whole world would be a far better place if everyone subscribed to a belief in a good, just über-being, who punishes malefactors and rewards the pure of heart. Best of all, of course, would be a universe that is actually ruled by such a being, where even cruel or inexplicable things all happen “for a reason.” But I doubt if such a universe—one run by a good and kindly god—would bear much resemblance to the one we have, this scene of constant carnage, where black holes crouch in the center of galaxies and feed on stars and planets, where an asteroid could wipe out the earth’s most advanced reptiles just as they were beginning to nurture their young and hunt in packs, where babies die every day.

  Besides, if I was not ready to attribute consciousness to other humans, how was I going to attribute it to the far dodgier category of “God”? Maybe it’s possible to be both a solipsist and a theist; in fact a combination of the two may help explain the long history of religiously motivated persecutions and massacres. But I knew that, outside of fairy tales and religion, there were no gods and no spirits, and I was not prepared to see my experience in May as a possible refutation of that obvious fact. My “epiphany” could not have been an encounter with some other mind or intelligence, because there was no firm evidence that such a thing existed. It was just a mental breakdown, internal to myself, best thought of as a kind of equipment failure.

  A few days before my departure for college, I reflected, disjointedly, on the coming transition:

  I am trying to understand the situation. Not The Situation, but the immediate exigency of going away to college. Sometimes I get a grip on one or two wispy filaments, but I cannot hold all the elements of this change at once. Right now mother is in the kitchen crying because my tuition will so painfully drain her resources. That is an element. Daddy looks at me thoughtfully and fancies he understands me and wishes we could talk. Diane is simpler. She wants me to stay or her to go with me. Benny? He has enough to think about without me. The ponderous problems of puberty are his. I am sorry to take so much of their money.…Something had to happen though.

  I thought I should feel excited, but I knew that anything important that was going to happen to me had already happened, and that the rest of my life was a purely optional excursion. I had been reading Proust, which led to the question of whether anticipation wasn’t just a by-product of memory anyway. Was I anticipating the coming years of study and “irresponsibility,” as I put it to myself, or was I, through some odd temporal aberration, already looking back on them?

  In fact I am very mixed up as to sequences. All we have, truly, is the past. Hope can be constructed only out of fragments of past happiness whose recurrence seems likely (or, at least, advisable). Isn’t the aesthetic sense only a delicate selective nostalgia? This week I think Proust was right that beauty occurs when present dim reality is mnemonically connected to some lost past experience.

  Clearly I am dodging something here, spinning out speculations to distract myself from something painful. That I was leaving my family, which had always traveled as a unit before? That I had failed in my five-year-long quest for “the truth”? Well, not entirely failed, since I knew something that I hadn’t known before. But as my mother had said years earlier, after my theological argument with Bernice, if you can’t say what you know in words, you don’t really know anything. Then I ended this entry on a note of self-mockery, attributing my “spleen” to the late summer haze that had been leaching color out of the sky. “When the weather is better I can be a Nietzschean superlady—becoming, every day, in every way, better and better.” The truth was that everything was over—and everything was just beginning.

  Chapter 8

  Anomalous Oscillations

  I was saved by institutionalization, medevaced out of the family home and delivered from my solitary fugue into a crush of new people. No more smoking alone in my room while pondering the toxicity of my mother’s plants; now I shared cigarettes and giddy conversations with a few hundred other people who had been similarly plucked out of their natal environments and forced to create some sort of society among themselves. For a few months anyway, every hour was densely populated, from my 8 a.m. chemistry class to midnight bedtime in bunk beds shared with my old high school friend Kathy, also a freshman, who was so exuberant about our new freedom from parental oversight that she wanted to gossip and whoop into the morning or just lie there shouting “Fuck!” because for the first time she could. Think of it as an “in
tervention” staged by wise and invisible caretakers: In this institution, most of the inmates were pretty much like me—former high school misfits who aspired to knowledge, or, in case that took too much effort, at least to freedom.

  But what really saved me, temporarily anyway, was the simple meteorology of the situation. I had a choice between Stanford and Reed, the brand-name eastern schools being deemed too expensive, and chose Reed for its bohemian reputation and its proximity to Mount Hood, where I imagined I would spend all my weekends skiing, or, in other words, reliving the last hours before everything came apart. The other big difference, though it had not entered into my decision, was that Stanford would have left me under the California sun, whereas Portland, the site of Reed, offered only multiple shades of gray—ranging from fog and drizzle to rain and sleet—for the nine months that corresponded to the academic year. Outbreaks of sunshine were unnatural and disturbing, as on that last bright day of the fall when I sat out on the great lawn in a knot of other kids and could see clearly what a foreign place I had come to. Here we were in this Gothic estate at the apparent northern end of the world, where the authorities—because surely there had to be someone in charge—never revealed their faces or their secret reason for bringing us together.