by Howard Bloom
The women kind enough to host me were remarkably good students. Which gave them a lofty privilege. In those days, a hi fi system was a rare and expensive luxury. Instead of earbuds smaller then acorns and amplifiers on a chip the size of your toenail, we had speakers the size of refrigerators and amplifiers that demanded the total output of power from the Hoover Dam. The bigger your speakers and amp, the higher your status and the greater your manliness. Yes, fifteen-inch woofers hinted that your testosterone level was off the charts. So the Swarthmore authorities had built a dedicated hi fi room with elite speakers the size of armchairs. They’d stocked the room with a collection of the delicate and aristocratic items known as LPs—long playing records, vinyl platters of classical music that could be damaged by a single thumbprint on their fragile grooves.
These dishes of symphonic brilliance demanded a special ritual. If you were among the cognoscenti, you put your thumb through the hole at the center of the record and used your fingertips to hold the outer edge. Under no circumstances did you touch the surface. Your skill in this art indicated whether you were a true music lover or a member of the great unwashed, the ignorant masses who listened to “singles,” tiny platters of popular sewage with just two songs per record. Fail in the LP handling ritual, and you were bounced from the priesthood. You were revealed for what you’d been all along—a boor, a Philistine, a member of the ignorant illiterati who allowed their plebian disks to acquire scratches, pops, fizzles, and fingerprints. Just to show how lowly singles were, they didn’t even use the going turntable speed—78 revolutions per minute. Like IQs at half mast, they played at a lowly 45 rpm.
So being given a key to the hi fi room was considered the ultimate campus privilege. Only truly superior juniors and seniors won the honor. Truly superior juniors and seniors in a school whose admissions policy insured that even the poorest achievers in the place were on a par with your above-average string theorist. Yes, keys to the hi fi room were reserved for Swarthmore’s best and brightest. Oh, and for me. How in the world did that happen?
Despite the low-level criminality of my presence on campus, three of the most successful female juniors and seniors in the place had taken a liking to me. They were the crème de la crème. The marshmallow and whipped cream on the cocoa. The meringue on the baked Alaska. The caviar on the cracker. So through hard work and natural brilliance, all three had earned keys to the hi fi room. But their homework was so demanding that they didn’t spend any time there. They may have had a different reason for avoiding the place. Big speakers and amps that could burn out the wiring of an entire city were marks of virility. And none of these women were into male posturing. So one of them loaned her key to me. For a month. Lord knows what that says about my maleness. Which means that I went to the hi fi room daily to listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with its growling, angry, storm-inspired, androgen-charged musical portrait of winter. Apparently I needed an outer manifestation of something that never appeared in my visible behavior, my inner growl.
But my real job on campus was to study up on the Middle East. What did I find out? First off, there had been a people called the Nabateans, a folk who had worked wonders. Israel was the most unpromising promised land that a geographically confused God 3,200 years ago had ever bequeathed to a people, especially a people that He claimed to have chosen. It was a hell, not a heaven. Which makes you wonder whether the Lord had chosen us Jews for elevation or damnation.
Aside from an occasional rain of manna from heaven, the Holy Land was punishingly barren. Unless you had the good fortune to be an insect. In the north, the valleys between the hunched backs of the self-apologetic, low-level mountains were swamps. Swamps in which the plasmodium protozoa and the mosquitoes played, celebrating their good fortune on a daily basis. Which means that if you spent a few hours in this insect amusement park, you became the favorite ride of the day. Lines formed for tickets. You were a walking feast. You were injected with a plague by the proboscises of eager mosquitos taking their turns slurping up your blood. And you soon came down with the plasmodium’s gifts: muscle aches and fevers. Malaria. Which hints that the real chosen people of Northern Israel had six legs and possessed an epicurean appetite for human hemoglobin.
Then there was the south of the land that Jehovah had handed to us, his tome-toting, stoop-shouldered People of the Book. It was desert. Dry hills. Dry valleys. With rainfall that arrived perhaps twice a year, rushed down the slopes of the hills, gathered in the valleys, formed festive flash floods, and raucously rushed off to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving the land as waterless as a kiln-dried brick. Which is where the Nabateans came in. As I discovered by methodically pawing through Swarthmore’s library shelves, in roughly 37 AD, only four years after the Romans had tortured a nice, Jewish kid named Joshua of Nazareth to death on a cross, the Nabateans had made a discovery. The dusty desert sands of the southern deserts were not just any old mineral grains. They were loess soil. If they were moistened, they became rich earth in which to raise crops. The problem was this: loess soil doesn’t like to be moistened. When it’s hit with water, loess soil develops a waterproof crust, a tortoise shell that shuns the rains and sends the torrents of heavenly droplets rushing to the valleys and through the valleys to the sea. But if you can hold the water long enough, the puddles will soak through the water-repellant surface, and that surface will become your friend, not your enemy. Why? Like a plastic bag protecting a fresh croissant, the waterproof crust will hold the H20 and won’t let it evaporate.
The same slick surface that sends water running will also imprison water. It will turn a caked and drought-scoured hillside into a plumbing supply. But how in the world do you sucker the rainproof surface of the loess soil into working for you, not against you? How about terracing the hills with horizontal surfaces so the water is forced to stay in place long enough to soak in? And how about putting knee-high dams at the end of each terrace so the flash flood du jour’s surplus can slosh over the top to the terrace below?
The folks who’d researched this Nabatean trick with vigor were the Israelis, who were determined to make a barren territory (if you will excuse the following word) bloom. Ok, let’s be less egotistical; they wanted a barren land to break out in a rash of greenery.
That was the first discovery I made in Swarthmore’s involuntarily generous library. The second was more disturbing. While the Jews of Israel were trying to turn swamps and deserts into farmlands, the Arabs had a different obsession.
I’d made myself at home in libraries since I was ten. And all I’d noticed were the books. However, the Swarthmore library had something more, something I’d never registered before—squat file cabinets only two drawers high. What in the world could be in there? I dug into one and found out: pamphlets. Fliers too skinny to shelve. And among the pamphlets and fliers, I found one issued by the Arab League, the biggest military and political force in the Middle East of the 1950s and early 1960s. The Arab League included six nations: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. It represented the official views of these countries’ governments. And this pamphlet was official. It was not the product of some isolated crank.
The six nations of the Arab League had an important message to convey to you and me. We Westerners had been conned. We had been sold a false bill of goods about history. Remember World War II, with its death toll of over sixty million? Remember the Holocaust, with its six million sent to the ovens? Gassed in rooms designed to look like showers? Remember the nasty little man who started it all, Adolf Hitler? All of this was false. Baloney, phony, a delusion. A deliberate subterfuge. A plot.
Hitler was not an anti-Semite. He was a Jewish puppet. The Holocaust was a hoax. It never happened. And the war had not been a product of Nazi ambition. It had been a Jewish fabrication. All of it. Why? What were these insidious people, the Jews, after? They wanted to generate sympathy. They wanted to motivate Westerners to give them a plot of land. A plot of land on Arab territory. The
plot of land now known as Israel.
This was a bit of a shock. I had had the impression that World War II, Adolf Hitler, and the Holocaust had been real. One of my aunts had lost her parents and her six sisters and brothers in the Holocaust. That was in Germany. One of my cousins had lost her father and mother and her two sisters and brothers to the ovens. That was in Poland. My mother’s entire family, the Shebshelovitzes, had disappeared. That was in Latvia. And my father’s entire clan, the Wechelefskys, had been wiped off the face of the earth. That was in Belarus. The Holocaust seemed very real to me. Were the nations of the Arab League accusing Jews like me of hiding vast hordes of relatives in our closets so we could concoct a collective sob story? Perhaps disguising these mobs of uncles, aunts, and cousins as shoes? Really want to know the answer? Yes.
What’s more, I was under the impression that us Jews had had a continuous presence in Israel for 3,200 years. And that an imperialist, colonialist invasion of Muslims occupiers had arrived in 637 AD and wiped out forty Jewish cities, but had not managed to end the Jewish habitation of the land.
This pamphlet delivered a lesson: doing an Edna St. Vincent Millay means more than feeling the sufferings of every sort of person on planet earth. It means more than just a total immersion in the extremes of psychic pain. Different people have more than just different agonies. They have different worldviews. Different perceptual frames. Different lenses through which they see the world. Radically different ways of seeing reality. What’s good in one of these cultural frames is evil in another. So if you want to do a good job of Edna-ing, you have to do more than experience agonies. You have to learn to think and feel like people who see everything from headlines to history and from freedom to morality in a way that’s radically different from the point of view you take for granted.
Your way of thinking is not universal. Far from it. Not everyone wants the things you want—freedom of thought, freedom of speech, human rights, pluralism, and democracy. Some people loathe those things. They think freedom, human rights, and democracy are evil. Vicious fabrications of the devil. And that’s no exaggeration. It’s an understatement.
Yes, the Arab League pamphlet demanded an expansion of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Imperative. A big one. One that would expand my way of thinking for the next fifty years. Its bottom line? If you want to understand the world, if you want to see the infinite in the tiniest of things, learn to think and feel like those in alien cultures. Even learn to think and feel like your enemies.
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And, in fact, I would soon have enemies to worry about. But, fortunately, they were not fixated on genocide.
It all started when Swarthmore’s dean of men got wind of my presence on campus. He was apparently disturbed. How could you tell? He organized a search party to ferret me out. A posse. One afternoon, dozens of confused sophomores were told to smell my thumbprints on the library’s books and sniff my tracks like bloodhounds. There was apparently no room for a genuine canine in the school’s disciplinary budget. The plan was to hit the men’s dormitories (co-ed dorms did not exist in those days) and comb them thoroughly, room by room, looking under every bed, checking what was dangling from every hanger, rifling through the contents of every laundry bag, and pawing through the drawers of every desk. But my high-achieving female student friends got wind of the plot and warned me. So I cleared all traces of my existence from the men’s sleeping quarters. That wasn’t hard. My traces consisted of one sleeping bag, a white sweater, and a solitary Clorox jug. But where could I hide? That was easy.
The dean of women had gone into the city overnight to see the tryout of a new play featuring an unknown comedienne in the leading role. It was a variation on the old tale of the Princess and the Pea—Once Upon a Mattress. And the unknown female in the role of the prissily perfectionist princess was named Carol Burnett. Who did the dean of women recruit to house sit? Her most trusted acolytes, the most spectacularly diligent students in the school. The ones whose work had achieved such a stratospheric level that they had been given permanent keys to the hi fi room. And who did these students of extraordinary accomplishment treat like a dachshund, a Weimaraner, a schnauzer, a pet?
So when the dean of men’s search party penetrated every corridor, coat rack, and inner spring of the male dorms, I was helping out the dean of women, who had no clue to the contribution I was making to her life. I was keeping her kitchen in practice. Making sure it would still remember how to cook by the time the theater-hopping college authority returned from evaluating the humor that a playwright could pull from the plight of an ouchy, grouchy daughter of royalty and her encounter with a spherical green seed and an inadequately cushioned sleeping slab. I was baking a cake. A chocolate cake. In the dean of women’s oven.
No matter how many college boys the dean of men had drafted to catch my scent, it did them no good. The chocolate I used to create my culinary masterpiece totally masked the faint odor of my unshod feet. I may have been a failure in other departments, but I was working hard to show promise in at least one field—defiance of authority.
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My father splurged. To send me to Israel, he chose a luxury cruise liner. But remember, this was the early winter of 1962. Carnival had not yet invented cruise ships the size of five high-rise apartment buildings strapped together with gaffers tape and laid sideways on the waves. The deluxe ship my dad chose was about the size of a single banquet table at a bar mitzvah. But it had three different passenger classes. Hoity-toity, which bought you a stateroom twenty feet above sea-level with two portholes and a view. Not so hoity-toity, which bought you a bedroom with a single porthole. And beneath contempt. Which secured you a bed the width of a garden hose and just long enough for a small porpoise (though you could use it for any porpoise you had in mind). Your bunk was in a room the size of a highly exclusive broom closet, a broom closet designed exclusively for very slender brooms. You shared this sliver of space with five other gentlemen (or scoundrels, if the passenger had failed to check the box on the cruise application that asked if he had morals). When all of you were positioned for sleep, you looked like sardines packed in parallel in a pocket-sized tin can. Your spacious accommodation had no porthole. Sorry, you were below the waterline and an opening at your level could have seriously interfered with the vessel’s buoyancy. In other words, my dad had gone all out. Blown his bank account.
Funny thing about a 5,635-mile trip across the Atlantic and through the entire horizontal length of the Mediterranean Sea. Once you’ve waved good bye, exited the harbor, and gone out of viewing distance of land, once you’ve sufficiently rounded the earth’s paunch to see nothing but the sloshing of the sea, that is precisely all you see—sea. Grayish water. Yes, rippled. But still gray. Water. Nothing but. Miles of it. And sky. Suddenly you understand why Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner complained, “Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” But your problem is not a lack of beverages. It’s the very opposite.
Your eyes rapidly grow tired of the view. And your mind has a curious way of demanding something new to chew on. Preferably something to ogle, to scan, to visually scour. Like girls. But that’s out of the question. Once you’ve checked the faces and figures of all of your 200 fellow passengers, most of whom are retired and long past the expiration date of their looks, how do you amuse yourself? If you are one of the 199 relatively normal passengers, you head for the dining hall and eat your way across the Atlantic. You are like a polar bear prepping for winter. You work diligently to acquire enough spare body fat to carry you through a two-year stay on a an ice floe in the Arctic without a bite to eat.
If you are the oddest person on board, however, you take a slightly different approach. You learn how to go down the eight stairs between floors by reaching way, way down the railing, holding tight, and swinging from the top of the staircase to the bottom in one jump. Since everyone else on board is overeating and since the o
nly-slightly-bigger-than-a-message-in-a-bottle vessel is bobbing and dancing along to the merry rhythm of the waves, this turns the faces of all the over-forty passengers in view a color that runs like a long blade of grass through this entire book: green. Which finally lends a bit of color to the scene.
Near the ship’s rear on the aft deck, there is a tall mast with footholds. Passengers are strictly forbidden to scale it. So you climb to its top roughly every other day. The prow of the boat is off limits, too. So when a storm comes along with waves over sixty feet high, that’s where you go. You’ve dared death on freight trains. And you’ve mocked the helplessness of murderous waves trying to snatch and rasp you into paste at Big Sur. Now you hold onto a steel cable with all your might while waves rear a story or two above the bow, threaten to toss the ship on its side, then smash with malice across the deck, making it clear that, if you were not helped by your handhold, you would be swept away never to be seen by humans again. “I have heard the mermaids singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me,” indeed.
But you begin to notice something when the ship first sets out across the Atlantic, something that teaches you a lesson. A flock of seagulls (not the 1980s musical group) hangs out on the docks where the ship is berthed in New York harbor. On land, these big birds strut with cocky confidence and search for scraps of whatever they consider delectable. Half eaten hot dogs in the trash or discarded sushi rolls from pre-packaged lunches that were just a bit de trop. Then the ship slips out of its berth, and heads down the Hudson toward the open ocean. The seagulls come along. You get a mile or two out to sea, and guess who is still with you, having a merry time in the sky, landing on the waves from time to time and bobbing up and down in the water, or standing on the ship’s rear railings when that’s what makes them happy, and feasting on the ship’s garbage when it’s dumped into the vessel’s wake? Two hundred miles later, guess who is still hanging in there, regarding your swill as a movable feast? And guess who makes it through the storms with a tenacity even greater than yours?