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

by Ehrenreich, Barbara

  From the day I left Edelman’s office—and, it went without saying, my nascent career in molecular biology—you might say that I just kept on walking. Walking was the principal activity of my twenties, not only as a means of locomotion but as an expression of community, even a newly invented form of communication. I walked through Washington with twenty-five thousand other antiwar students in the spring of 1966, the largest number of people I had ever done anything in concert with, all of us polite and preppily dressed so one could mistake us for hippies or freaks. I walked down the middle of Fifth Avenue with another few thousand other people in July in a demonstration that I had, in some small way, helped organize. By the end of the decade, the walks were becoming more dramatic, sometimes turning into runs. I marched up a hill near Fort Dix, in New Jersey, linked arm and arm with a hundred other women who had been similarly selected for sacrifice—right into the waiting line of armed and armored soldiers. When we got within a bayonet’s reach of the men, the military police brought out the tear gas and I ended up rolling ignominiously back down the hill, choking and crying. We didn’t bother dressing nicely for demonstrations anymore and took to protecting our faces, bandit-style, with cotton kerchiefs.

  I even walked up the few steps to the podium at the Rockefeller commencement ceremony in 1968 and received a Ph.D. in yet another field—cellular immunology, thanks to Zanvil Cohn, who kindly took me into his lab after my escape from Edelman’s. But to Cohn’s chagrin, I took that scroll, which was written entirely in Latin, right out of the world of science and into the great unknown, as proof, I suppose, that I could complete at least one complex and demanding task. After that, the trail gets a little indistinct, leading through a “movement job” that involved editing and investigative reporting, and hence on to what I eventually understood was a new occupation as a freelance writer, which I still didn’t think of as a “career,” but income tax forms required me to list an “occupation.” My real job, as I understood it, was to be a sentry patrolling the perimeters of the human community, always on the lookout for fresh outbreaks of violence and danger, ready to sound the alarm. I became attached to the word “freelance” for its martial connotations.

  But the exit from science does not begin to suggest the extent of the transformation I went through in my twenties, a period of time in which, I had once imagined, there would be nothing interesting left to occur. At the beginning of 1965 I had been, except for the succession of boyfriends I depended on to refute my mother’s prediction that I would never be able to attract a man, a more or less solitary person. By 1970, I was thoroughly embedded in the affairs of my species—companionably married, a proud socialist and feminist, committed to the betterment, if not salvation, of humankind, always off to one meeting or another.

  And in what no longer seemed like a cringing surrender to the reproductive imperative, I became a mother. You may equivocate all you want about the autonomous consciousness of other humans, but when two of them arrive in your life out of nowhere, or out of what had seemed to be fairly inert material, two total strangers, and take up residence in your arms—well, the metaphysical question is settled. They were not notably human when they first appeared, more like fuzzy, pale nocturnal animals, lemurs perhaps, without language or loyalties, habits or traditions—entirely devoted to eating and processing raw sensory data as it came to them. I saw my opportunity at once, which was not to extend my biological self through some sort of dynastic imperialism, but to help them build up a coherent world from the scraps of data that present themselves: “Doggy. And what does a doggy say?” “Bell. Ring the bell. Hurray!” In other words, to rebuild the world for myself, only this time with a couple of brilliant and highly creative collaborators.

  So by the early seventies I was a parent and a breadwinner with an ever-expanding political agenda. You can’t get much more connected than that. If I were writing an autobiography, this would be the place to start it, with the dense human interactions of adulthood—the love affairs and marriages, the geeky political infighting, the books written and speeches given, the ascent of the children into their own dashing lives of adventure and achievement. Everything I have written here so far would be condensed into an introductory chapter called “Childhood and Adolescence.”

  But of course this is not the story of me or of that even more imaginative construct, “my life.” This is the story of a quest, a childish one, since surely as a grown-up I have not gone around asking, “Why do we die and what is the purpose of life?” But the quest did not end with the onset of “maturity,” and nor did its uncanny psychic traces. Short episodes of dissociation kept recurring, set off by familiar triggers like a sudden break in concentration or a compelling influx of light, although I was getting better at snapping out of these states and making my way back to the quotidian without any fuss. I was left, too, with the mystery of what had happened in Lone Pine and later that day in the desert. Did that have anything to do with the altered states increasingly reported by LSD users? Probably not, I inferred from the gaudy psychedelic aesthetic pervading the counterculture in the late 1960s. And why would anyone voluntarily provoke such a traumatic experience? I wasn’t brave enough to investigate or at least couldn’t imagine finding the time or the setting for a fact-finding “trip.”

  On the one hand, I was convinced that my perceptual wanderings were a distraction from my mission as a political activist and responsible human being, maybe even a “petit bourgeois” indulgence available only to people who had enough to eat and were not being bombed. (What I didn’t know but should have noticed is that the people being bombed in Vietnam were Buddhists, many of them perhaps well along on the route to enlightenment.) My own “epiphanies,” to overglorify them, had nothing to do with right or wrong, good or evil, kindness or cruelty, or any other abstractions arising from the human tribal life that I had only recently entered into. Paul’s blinding vision on the road to Damascus had come with instructions—stop persecuting Christians and start preaching their faith. My vision, if you could call it that, did not. Whatever I had seen was what it was, with no moral valence or reference to human concerns. The steps I had taken toward the morning light in Lone Pine did not lead, through any kind of path, however twisted, to the hill at Fort Dix. There were sides forming up on the great plain of history—the downtrodden against those who do the down-treading, the invaded against the invaders. I had been swept up in this struggle, and from my new perspective, all that was “ineffable” or “transcendent” might as well have occupied another dimension.

  There were moments, especially at the beginning of my transformation and before the children arrived, when I wrestled with the suspicion that my new life-among-people was itself a dodge and betrayal of the earlier mission. I had failed as a mystic seeker, or at least given up in mid-project, failed as a scientist, and was left now with nothing I could think of to do except to try to be helpful, soothe the pain, and pick up the pieces in the shared here and now. Ambivalence, maybe even bad faith, runs through the last thing I ever wrote to my future self, which happens also to be dated:

  A date, that is a new thing. I write these days against myself, hence briefly; against death, hence at all. The date is a signature I have been embarrassed to sign, to say, “by Barbara—now, or then, to [my future self], another dead one, one who by this time you will have betrayed in a new way, another one you abandoned in half-thought, fearing the other half.”

  I will leave finally a drawer-full of folded papers, letters from one time to another time—letters from a child I buried, and all these letters to it, saying I have not forgotten you, but did you ever think of me? (i.e., of April 5, 1966).…No, you buried me. Look, you had visions—they are my nightmares and noon terrors. Did you think of me when you practiced seeing, a seeing that sucked the light out of all your tomorrows? Well, you would answer (how well I know the words): such tomorrows are the imaginings of other people, and I cannot imagine “others.”

  I understood that by stepping out fully
into the world of other people, I had betrayed my child-self, abandoned the quest “in half-thought.” But a few seconds later I am accusing this younger self of dragging me down with her solipsistic madness: She had failed to imagine and prepare for me. For the next two decades, I stuck to the mental illness line, not that the subject ever came up in conversation: I’d had a bout of schizophrenia as an adolescent, or something like that. I was not sorry to have experienced these things, but I had no intention of returning to them. I knew what I had do. My work was cut out for me.

  Chapter 11

  Return to the Quest

  Somewhere in middle age I returned to the quest, or, in its stripped-down version, the question of what exactly happened there when I was seventeen. In the midst of so much that was grown-up and responsible—deadlines, campaigns, movements, scholarly undertakings, motherhood—some crucial late-night part of the ongoing mental churning regressed back to the events of my adolescence, which were just too strange, and I wish there were a better word, to be permanently buried under the label of “mental illness” or some kind of temporary perceptual slippage. “If you see something, say something,” as we are urged in train stations today, and certainly I had seen something. Yes, it was something inexplicable and anomalous, something that seemed, in a way I could not define, to be almost alive. But this had also been the case with the oscillations at the silicon electrode, and it was still my responsibility to report them and bear the shame, if necessary, of bringing unwelcome, perhaps even incomprehensible news.

  The circumstances of my return were not auspicious. The movement that had sustained me for more than a decade was crumbling under my feet. As my former comrades drifted away, to careers or, in a few cases, cults or prison, I could no longer imagine myself as a warrior. I was at best a soldier, sticking doggedly to the project of “social change” even when that meant serving in the most tediously compromised fragments of the left, where the idea was no longer to ignite the “masses” but to flatter, and thereby hopefully influence, people who were more influential than we were. More and more of my time was devoted to the feminist movement, but it too was often mired in useless discussion, such as attempts to determine our “principles of unity.” I got through the long meetings—often weekend-long meetings in windowless conference rooms—by trying to work out the prime numbers up to 200.

  Meanwhile, my father succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease, which replaced that brilliant and complicated man with a partially melted wax effigy whose speech was increasingly limited to random word-sounds and chirps. Or maybe it was the nursing homes, as well as the Alzheimer’s, that worked this change in him, because if you take away all printed matter, occupation, and conversation, you will eventually get someone who kneels by the toilet to stir his feces with a plastic spoon, or so it has been my misfortune to observe.

  Every few weeks I would fly to Denver to visit him, each trip a journey into the unbearable ugliness that humans manage to secrete around themselves out of plastic and metal and short-haired, easy-to-clean carpeting material: the airport, the interior of the airplane, the corporate chain hotel, predictable down to the free cookie offered to each arriving guest. And then there was the nursing home itself. Was I depressed because my father was dying or already dead, depending on how you evaluate these things, or because I had to spend so many hours in a place that made death seem like the best remaining option, if not something to be urgently desired? Moss green and salmon, no doubt thought to be an inoffensive, gender-neutral combination, made up the color scheme, except for the posters serving to remind us of the season—lambs and flowers in the spring, pumpkins in the fall, snowflakes in their proper time. And we needed those reminders, because fresh air was not allowed inside the nursing home, only air freshener.

  Earlier, when things were going well, when the movement was thriving and before my father became a shell or my children turned into teenagers, bent on individuating themselves from me as if I represented a potentially contagious condition, I could handle a world without transcendence or even the memory of transcendence. But in addition to everything else, my second husband, who I can say in retrospect was the big love of my life, got eaten alive by his sixteen-hour-a-day job as a union organizer and began to act like one possessed. I had been his eager helpmate—marching in picket lines, going to organizing meetings, welcoming insurgent truck drivers, factory workers, and janitors into our appropriately modest home—but now he was too preoccupied to reliably hear me when I spoke or notice when I entered a room. With my human environment falling apart, the repressed began its inevitable return.

  The story of the years leading up to my return to the old questions can best be summarized as a series of measurements and chemical assays: the increase in amyloid protein in my father’s brain and the corresponding decline of serotonin in my own; the uncertain tides of estrogen and oxytocin, the diurnal rise and fall of blood alcohol, caffeine, and sugar levels. Simmer all this together for many months and you get a potent toxin, which seemed to come at me in waves. I can remember the luncheon hosted by a countywide women’s organization, probably on a Saturday afternoon in late February. All very jolly and heartwarming, until I happened to look out the window of the Long Island catering hall where we were gathered and saw the imminent menace. There was a gas station and an intersection under a pearly gray sky peppered with factory emissions; there was a parking lot mired with the black remains of snow; there was no hope. The award ceremony itself was a mockery, because anyone could see that the people presiding over it were dying right in front of us, if not actually dead, and that rigor mortis had already hardened their smiles into grimaces. And I was not a passive or reluctant participant in this event. I was the one who got the award.

  The name for my condition, I discovered, was “depression,” which I learned from a 1989 op-ed column William Styron wrote about Primo Levi’s suicide. What surprised me was the term, “depression,” which seemed far too languid to apply—an insipid “wimp of a word,” as Styron himself put it, for “a dreadful and raging disease.” I went along with the diagnosis, therapy, and medications, but not without internal reservations. You can talk about depression as a “chemical imbalance” all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist—a “demon,” a “beast,” or a “black dog,” as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting, like that award luncheon or in a parking lot where I waited one evening to pick up my daughter from a school trip. What if her school bus failed to return? What if it had crashed somewhere? Even when I had her safely in the car, it was all I could do to get us home and rush into the bathroom for a fit of gagging and trembling over how close the beast was getting.

  It was despair that pulled me back, as a mature adult, to the ancient, childish quest. I could not go on the way I had been, dragging the huge weight of my unfinished project. The constant vigilance imposed by motherhood, along with the pressure to get assignments and meet deadlines, had trapped me in the world of consensual reality—the accepted symbols and meanings, the highways and malls, meetings and conferences, supermarkets and school functions. I seemed to have lost the ability to dissociate, to look beneath the surface and ask the old question, which is, in the simplest terms, What is actually going on here?

  Or maybe depression in its demon form awoke me to the long-buried possibility that there exist other beings, agents, forces than those that are visible and agreed upon. I wish I could draw some clear lines of causality here, but there are no primary sources to refer to, no journal or even any random notes to my future self.

  But when I did try to return to the old questions, very furtively of course, despair and a kind of shame followed me and blocked the way. The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist? In my public life as a writer and a speaker, I had always been a relia
bly “out” atheist. This was my parents’ legacy, and a deeper part of my identity than incidentals like nationality or even class. At some point in the eighties I published an essay-length history of American atheism that unearthed the stream of working-class atheism from which I was descended. I won awards and recognition from organizations of “freethinkers” and humanists. When the subject came up, which it was bound to in our largely Catholic blue-collar neighborhood, I told my children that there is no God, no good and loving God anyway, which is why we humans have to do our best to help and care for each other. Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.

  I was no longer the kind of scornful, dogmatic atheist my parents had been. When I read the book of Matthew closely in my forties I was startled by the mad generosity Jesus recommends: Abandon all material possessions; give all you have to the poor; if a man asks for your cloak, give him your coat as well; and so forth. If you’re going to help the suffering underdog, why not go all the way? But then, as the Bible drones on and Jesus fades away to be replaced by “the risen Christ” holding out the promise of immortal life, the message takes on a nasty, selfish edge. How can you smugly accept your seat in heaven when others, including probably some of the ones you love, are confined to eternal torment? The only “Christian” thing to do is to give up your promised spot in heaven to some poor sinner and take his place in hell. Far easier, it seemed to me, to profess atheism and accept the moral obligations a Godless world entails.

  As for the mortality that atheism leaves you no escape from—do not for a moment imagine that this was the source of my depression. I was old enough, in my forties, to sense the beginnings of decline, first announced by backaches and the need for reading glasses. What I feared was something more suitable to a depressive: the unthinkable possibility of not being able to die. Suppose that my brain had been excised by evil scientists and was being kept alive in a tissue culture medium, then subjected to electrical shocks that varied ingeniously so that my mind could never become habituated to the pain, and that this could be done for centuries, millennia, forever. Or that my body had survived some catastrophic disease, leaving me in a “locked in” condition, unable to move or communicate. If you can imagine these states, then you know that a kindly god would not promise “eternal life.” He or she would offer us instead the certainty of death, the assurance that somehow, eventually, the pain will come to an end. Why believers should forgo this comforting certainty, which is so readily available to atheists, is a mystery to me.