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

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  We got a reply in about two weeks, one of those insulting “thank you for your interest” letters that makes a citizen feel like an intruder. Jack and I conferred and decided we had to acquire more signatories to our letter and especially more grown-up scientists. At the time, this was not an automatic conclusion. I was not in the habit of thinking of people in quantity, as in classes or constituencies, but quantities of scientists must certainly matter. The upshot was that I and to a lesser extent Jack, who was antsy to get back to the bench, now had to go from lab to lab, through the many buildings that formed the Rockefeller complex, soliciting new signatures. On a scale of audacity this ranks with a childhood experiment in making earrings—out of shells, from a kit I had received as a gift—and peddling them door to door, only now I interpreted my effrontery as a scientific responsibility. If something irrational was going on, something senseless and deadly, wasn’t it my job, as a young scientist, to point this out? Reason, dull quotidian reason, had not gotten me too far in the search for ultimate truth and sometimes even seemed to falter in science, but that was the banner I had to carry now, no matter how numbingly obvious it was, like IBM’s motto, “Think.”

  Our second letter to the president, although adorned with the signatures of some of the nation’s top men in biochemistry, phage genetics, and animal behavior, received the same brush-off as the first. The difference was that I had now, as a result of our lab-to-lab signature gathering, collected enough like-minded people to form a “committee”—the idea of a committee being a novelty introduced by a couple of Harvard graduates who were veterans of the early-sixties antinuclear campaign—and begin to plot our next steps. Word of our increasingly organized efforts must have reached Edelman, who took me aside to warn that my sudden turn into activism could lead to charges of “communism.” He himself would not sign our letters, nor would any of his immediate subalterns in the lab. His second in command, a gray, middle-aged, beaten-down biochemist, issued the order that I was not to associate with people from other labs, because this was a competitive business and they might be trying to pry secrets out of me—“secrets,” I suppose, about conformational changes in chymotrypsinogen.

  But it was way too late for me to go back to my original, apolitical state. The war had changed everything. Here we were, doing our usual things—designing experimental protocols, bickering over shared equipment, dashing in at all hours to meet time points—and meanwhile someone, off in a corner, just out of sight, was being kicked to death. We were beginning to get our first images of dead children on the ground, of burned villages and torture in “tiger cages.” Just a few months earlier, these atrocities might have inspired in me no more than the distant disgust I had felt when I read Zola’s The Earth a few years earlier. But now that I had begun to lose the protective armor of solipsism, there was less to shield me from accounts of bayonets cutting through the bellies of pregnant Vietnamese women or napalm-dispensing helicopters swooping down over children. Once the imagination learns how to construct an image of another person’s subjectivity—however sloppy and improvised that image may be—it’s hard to get it to stop. Anyone’s suffering is a potential emergency. Or maybe, as I sometimes thought, I had been hearing the thuds of boots against flesh and the muffled groans of pain in the distance all my life, and just figured out where the sound was coming from.

  My political instincts were, and remain, resolutely populist. Since the names of well-known scientists had no impact on the president, we had to get people in quantity, any kind of people who could be persuaded to take a stand. There was no strategic thinking going on that I can recall; our committee would draft a statement that a couple of us—often including my future husband John Ehrenreich—would then turn into a mimeographed flyer for distribution wherever there were people in the streets. Sometimes we would go no farther than the subway stop on Lexington Avenue, greeting the rush hour trains with our wordy, overcrowded leaflets and petitions to sign. Other times we ranged up to Harlem or all the way down to the Garment District, where the streets filled with brown people—Puerto Ricans and Dominicans—at the end of a shift. My approach was serious and respectful: Have you thought about the war? Can I offer you a flyer? Oh, your son is already over there? I learned that the approachability of strangers is demographically determined: A white man in a suit will brush right by you; dark people are usually more accessible; and black women—well, these appeared to be my natural constituency. They might stop and talk, even take some leaflets for friends. I don’t think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.

  There was an echo here of that delirious early morning in Lone Pine, where I first discovered that the space right in front of me was penetrable by the human body. “The world is plastic in a new way and yields to a look and bends to a voice,” I wrote at some point in my early life as an antiwar activist, continuing, more allegorically:

  So far the voice is alone from a high window, which one you cannot tell. The words are indistinct. It is clear what you must do. Must is a heavy word. One day you had to buy a rose on the corner and leave that same rose in a subway station. A rose in a tunnel is absurd and also necessary. Necessity meets you on street corners.

  I wouldn’t have put it so pompously at the time, but I was “stepping into history,” sensing, for the first time, that the power of people acting and speaking together could lift us beyond the status of victims or sleepwalkers, and, yes, I said “us.” I, the fledgling biologist, was just figuring out that I was a member of a species, part of some vast unfolding genetic plot to transform as much of the earth’s resources as possible into human flesh. Because that’s what we do: eat plant carbohydrates and animal proteins and turn them into glucose, ATP, and human proteins. Or maybe what I came to understand was more astronomical than biological: that this is a planet, meaning that all of us here are on the same fast-moving rock, suffering, at whatever unconscious level, from the same elation and agoraphobia as we speed through empty space.

  At the beginning there was no “antiwar movement,” not as far as we knew anyway, only our own do-it-yourself efforts. But as we moved out from the campus into what we called “the community,” allies sprang up almost everywhere. I was invited to talk about our committee with some activists in the teachers’ and social workers’ unions, who turned out to be far better informed than I was, and vastly more experienced about the city, its neighborhoods and networks of potential sympathizers. A group of us went to Columbia to meet with disaffected undergraduates and kept on working with them up to the point when a few of their most prominent activists decided to “pick up the gun” by joining the Weather Underground. I went door-to-door in what were then the slums of the Upper West Side, and when I finally succeeded in putting together a meeting of a couple of dozen residents, the one word I could understand without a translator was “imperialismo.” I may have thought I was “organizing,” but I was actually being educated and recruited. There were sides in this struggle, unsuspected numbers of dissidents who had been quietly biding their time all along.

  I don’t think I got nicer in any detectable way, more considerate to family and boyfriends, for example. The ducts that produce the milk of human kindness did not suddenly begin to ooze. Certainly, though, something long denied was coming into play, something for which there are not even good words in English—sociality, perhaps, or solidarity, or a sense of identity with the group. What it had to do with my prior self and her metaphysical quest I didn’t have any way of knowing. The conversation that was breaking out all around me was not the one I had longed for as a teenager, in which strangers would run up to one another on the streets and comment on the odd beauty of the world in the face of oncoming death, but it was maybe as close as I was going to get. Large numbers of people, most of them previously unknown to me, were at least willing to admit that something had gone terri
bly wrong and that the façade of everyday normality concealed ongoing, inexcusable cruelty. We might not be able to do anything about the existential futility, but we might, if we tried very hard, be able to curtail the epidemic of man-made misery.

  As other, more stereotypical versions of “the sixties” began to get under way, we drew nourishment from them. We took Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” as our anthem—“You ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose”—moving on from there to Otis Redding and the Rolling Stones. We began to use parties as a means of organizing: Invite everyone you can think of and dance, in any configuration except old-school heterosexual couples, late into the night. Or maybe we were using organizing as an excuse for parties, because we weren’t just trying to end the war; we were also trying to start a new and freer and more generous way of life—a goal that put us in some sort of vague spiritual alliance with the counterculture, even if we tended to find the haute tie-dyed and patchouli-scented sort of hippies annoying. I, for one, hated their lazy eclectic mysticism, which seemed to come straight out of the Church of All Religions in L.A. This was not the time to blow your mind with drugs or dissolve into resonance with the cosmic chord issuing from a Tibetan singing bowl. Nor was it, in my case, the time to muse about aberrant mental phenomena and what, if anything, they might mean. There was a war going on, and even we, so far from the actual fighting, needed to be combat-ready.

  To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire “war machine,” we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly—to us—applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the “War on Poverty.” More than two decades later, when I set out on a scholarly investigation of war, I was surprised at how familiar the ethos of historical warrior elites already was to me: the willingness to fight to exhaustion and beyond, the readiness to sacrifice all for the cause, even the faint impatience with “civilians.” We knew, in the antiwar movement, that no rest was allowed, other than occasional breaks for laughter or dance, because anytime we weren’t actively protesting or building the movement, the real war was continuing and we were implicitly acceding to the slaughter. The trick was to stay awake and keep on working—drafting new leaflets, planning new outreach campaigns—all the while keeping up with the lab and scanning the journals in the library. At some point, in the midst of what I described in my journal as “a muscle-bleeding, brain-drying tiredness which summons out of some hypertrophied gland—adrenalin—which raises a false spring-tide in the tissues,” I understood death in a new way. It was not necessarily a glorious climax; I was far more likely to die in the middle of things, without completing the task at hand:

  When working too hard, sleeping too fast to dream—rearranging things, sorting things, building things, and taking things down—and the things, or some thing, murmurs, “Not you is not-this. End of sorting, building, taking down. End whether finished. Foreclosed whether achieved.

  One day, probably in the spring of 1966, I was summoned away from the spectrofluorometer to Edelman’s office. This was the first time I had been in it, the public space of the laboratory having been adequate for any previous criticisms, comments, or instructions, and I had no idea what solemn communication might require this spacious, and from my point of view, almost majestic setting. His face was grave, with the gravity only slightly undercut by a little crescent of triumph around the mouth. “I know about your problems with your father,” he said, and paused to let that sink in.

  Naturally, my first thought was that there had been a second car crash, or perhaps some medical crisis arising from the last one, news of which had just come to Edelman on his personal office phone. I suppose I asked, but the unfortunate effect of his opening comment was to sabotage the normal process of memory formation. As he went on and it became clear that he knew nothing about my father or his actual problems, that this was all just part of some mind game that was being invented on the spot, I lost track of exact words and sequences. My father? What was this man doing talking about my father?

  So here was his insight: My “problems” with my father were the source of my “problem with authority.” Now, I will admit that I had not taken Edelman’s earlier warnings seriously. He was just an odd bird; he even smelled odd, like ozone, as if he were accompanied everywhere by his own personal cloud of ions. If I had been thinking clearly during this encounter, I would have pointed out that there was an upsurge of antiauthoritarianism going on worldwide, from Mozambique to Montgomery, Alabama, none of which had anything to do with my personal family dynamics. I can’t remember whether I said anything or whether at any point he explicitly ordered me to desist from my activism and settle into a nunlike concentration on the conformation of chymotrypsinogen. I do recall that he had a lot to say about my abject dependence on him, bolstered by the convenient, and possibly creative, revelation that other faculty members had recommended my expulsion from graduate school and that he was all that stood in their way. Maybe my face was failing to register the appropriate level of remorse and dismay, because what all this led up to was that if I didn’t shape up, my career would be over.

  The threat wasn’t empty, just uninteresting. I’d been in Rockefeller’s atmosphere of boiling ambition long enough to see what was actually meant by a “career.” It was a wind-up toy, a little drummer in uniform, marching ahead, leading you on, and making announcements like, in Edelman’s case, Nobel-worthy research on gamma globulin! Assistant dean of students! Surprisingly good on the violin! Did I need a puppet like this to accompany me everywhere I went, opening doors and doing its best to solicit applause? A few months earlier, when I was still committed to philosophical solipsism, I would have found the idea ludicrous, as if I were being asked to go around dressed in whatever spangles and rags other people judged to be my “achievements.” Now, however, I was so far from solipsism, so deep into the collective project of the “movement,” that the notion of a career no longer seemed to apply. Was I a scientist, an organizer, a street-corner agitator, capable, as I had recently discovered with great trepidation, of addressing strangers through a megaphone? There never was any “career” in my case, just a succession of things that needed to be done, defined in 1966 as whatever the struggle demanded.

  It was the part about my father that enraged me, though I still can’t explain why this seemed to be such a violation of normal decorum and boundaries. Surely it would have been much worse if he had done some sort of background check and actually knew something about my father—his drinking, his accident, his abandonment of science—and maybe even worse if he had invoked my mother, with whom I actually had “some problems.” The insult, insofar as I can pin it down, was the implication that I was a child acting out some primal Oedipal drama, in which Edelman got to take turns with my father in the role of patriarch. How angry was I? There is a poem on a loose sheet of paper tucked in with my journal entries, undated, but most likely arising from this incident:

  Knotted on my heart

  Insurgent veins

  Grasping most brittle wrists

  Invasion blushes to the fingertips

  Rage builds to flood

  And skin contains

  In shame restrains

  How long?

  How long irrigate with salt water this desert?

  When the dam breaks: a Red Sea.

  I offered no rebuttals and certainly no promises of future obedience. As soon as the fight-or-flight response resolved itself, sensibly enough, in favor of a rapid exit, I left his office, picked up my jacket from the lab, leaving behind the notebooks that contained all my results, since it is the law of the lab—any lab, I suspect—that your work belongs to the boss. Then I walked out of the building and kept on walking—not just away from something, but into something that had always been there, waiting to be acknowledged. The truth was that my “antiauthoritarianism” had come to me directly from my father, who as a boy had d
eclared himself an atheist in largely Catholic Butte, and even in his years of alcoholic decline possessed the most sensitive bullshit detector ever devised. And not only from my father. There was my mother too, whom I could no longer think of without pity and guilt, who risked ostracism with her own atheism and impatience with social pretense, who had sat in, or tried to sit in, with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And before them both was the great-grandmother who’d thrown the crucifix across the room, the great-grandfather who had refused a job as the mine owner’s carriage driver, because that was a job for a servant. So when the sides were drawn up between the powerful and the downtrodden, there had never been any question about where I stood. The flag that I raised in my early twenties had been passed down to me from one callused hand to the next, even if some of those hands were trembling from a hangover or were actually just reaching for a cigarette.