Flunk. Start.

by Sands Hall

  As my knowledge grew regarding these base aspects of Church management and policy, which seem deeply and purposefully evil, it tainted in almost irredeemable ways the good things that can be found in Hubbard’s religious technology. It took me decades to appreciate that in those years I thought of for so long as squandered, I did learn much, and that there is much to be grateful for.100

  And so I ask my students to examine the roots of the word poet, as I know they’ll be at least surprised and perhaps delighted to know that it descends from “make”—and that they are, when they’re writing, makers. Their delight is palpable when they see from the roots of oxymoron (oxy, “sharp” + moron, “dull”) that the word itself is an oxymoron. Examining the roots of philosophy lets them know that its literal meaning is “love of wisdom,” and then they define sophomore. It’s great to see them look up, blinking, as they realize that there’s a point in learning when we’re all “wise fools” (moron, again, + soph, “wise”). They know that noun comes from “name,” verb from “word,” and that the name of the reference volume that I hope they’ll all keep using, thesaurus, descends to us from the Latin for “treasure.”

  And, of course, that essay comes from “try; to set in motion.”

  Just start. Especially after a flunk.

  Fail again. Fail better.

  afterword

  disconnection

  As I began to finalize this manuscript, I wrote to Skye, asking if he’d like me to change his name. He now lives on the other side of the country, about as far, geographically, as one can get from LA, and, by extension, from Celebrity Center and the Advanced Org. He’d written a kind note after seeing the documentary about my brother, and a congratulatory one when I sent him a copy of my first CD (a few of the songs were written in his company, back in the day), but otherwise we have not communicated.

  For about a week I did not hear back. Then an email arrived, not from him, but from one of those Scientology friends with whom I was now back in touch. The subject line was “Flunk. Start,” and it was CC-ed to those who’d once been our precious circle. Skye had clearly let them know about the memoir. I was disappointed; I’d wanted to contact each one personally.

  “You know if it is not positive,” the email said, “you are cutting the line to us.”

  I did know. Indeed, as the book moved toward publication, I’d stopped being chummy via email and on Facebook. It felt fraudulent. Since the memoir criticizes Scientology, I knew that as far as they were concerned, I could no longer be considered a friend; in fact, because of that criticism, I would now be a Suppressive Person. It wouldn’t be me “cutting the line”; that would be their choice, but I understood why, as good Scientologists (as Paloma had been when she wrote that Knowledge Report), they’d have to.

  All this was not unexpected, and so did not make me angry, but it did make me sad. Part of the sorrow was that I was already wondering if it was wise to publish the book. I’d begun to fret about the Church’s possible reaction. I was no Leah Remini, who, using her celebrity status, has effectively attacked and revealed—through memoir and television—the Church’s underbelly; nor was I a Marty Rathbun, who’d worked in the upper echelons of the Church and, after leaving, spilled management secrets in his memoir and his blog; nor was I one who’d made it up the Bridge, able to leak confidential data.101, 102 Still, would the Church, objecting to the memoir, come after me? One of the steps of the Enemy Formula, in Hubbard’s Ethics Conditions, is to “strike a blow at the group one has been pretending to be a part of.” This has justified, for Scientologists, every kind of harassment. Was I damning myself, in a horridly ironic way, considering how long it took me to extricate myself from the Church, to endless engagement with its most reprehensible aspects?

  For two weeks I actively wondered if I should call my agent and say let’s not publish; it’s not worth it.

  And then, early one morning, I had a dream—a waking dream, really; I was aware of having it, even of creating it.

  I am lodged within a small vertical cave. My feet are crammed into the narrow space that is the bottom of a stone fissure that widens as it rises into a kind of V, the top a little broader than my shoulders. About a foot above my head, a thick slab is settled into place that closes off any possible exit. I am aware—not panicked yet, but a dreadful understanding is growing—that I have been interred. Buried alive. Shut up. In stone.

  I can only stand, or rest upright, or slide into a sort of fetal position at the bottom of the V. In fact, I realize, the cave is vaguely the shape of a uterus, except that there are no portals—not to either side, nor at the bottom. Is this some kind of birth, then, or some kind of death in birth—a miscarriage? Like Antigone, I’m shut into a cave. But unlike Antigone, no one has done it to me. There is no one above that slab over my head—which seems only recently to have been put into place (it occurs to me that it is I who’s put it there)—who would hear me scream, if I decided to do that, or who would respond if I did.

  As I ponder scraping my fingernails hopelessly against rock, or yelling uselessly for help (hopeless or useless, I know that I will try, as to give up seems a horrible way to spend the days that will pass until I die of hunger or dehydration), I think about what this dream/vision means. Why am I manifesting it? What is its message?

  Is it that, if I publish the book, I immure myself in an endless battle with the Church of Scientology? That the repercussions of publishing will be so awful that I will feel as if I’ve shut myself into a kind of cave for the rest of my life?

  Or do I consider the Church’s totalitarianism so vast, so successful, that I am considering pulling the plug on publication, shutting myself up in this sarcophagus rather than risk the repercussions of criticizing it? I am struck, too, by the message of patriarchy represented by the stone uterus, its aridity, its lack of entrances and exits. If I don’t publish the book—if I allow the terror to keep me small, keep me from using my voice, keep me silent—do I condemn myself to being shut up in this dreadful place, a death in life?

  It’s in telling the dream to a friend and hearing myself say “shutting myself up,” “being shut up,” that I get the pun implicit in those phrases. I realize what the dream is asking me to examine, forcing me to confront: Shut up.

  I laugh aloud at the realization, and something powerful shifts in me. No. I won’t.

  Later, I look up the etymology of shut: from Old English scyttan, it means “to put (a bolt) in position to hold fast.” Shut up is probably a shortened version of “shut up your mouth.” I won’t shut up my mouth. Even though:

  If it is not positive, you know you are cutting the line to us.

  The Church denies that it encourages “disconnection” from those who are critical of Scientology, but I am certain these friends will, indeed, cut the line.103 I’m also certain they will not read the book. While I have, indeed, changed their names and identifying characteristics (in addition to protecting their privacy in a general way, I don’t want the Church coming after them for having been friends with me), I understand. Even though Hubbard says “what is true for you is true for you,” it’s difficult, if you’re a Scientologist, to read anything negative about Scientology. Not only because it might make you doubt, but because the next time you’re in session, the fact that you read/heard/saw anything against the Church will come up, and you will have to process why you read/listened/watched. What transgression made you willing to remove the blindfold, even for a second? And there will always be something. So one learns to continue on, mental fingers held to mental ears, keeping out anything negative so that you don’t have to go through that again. It’s a swiftly learned lesson; processing such “lapses” can be wrenching, in addition to expensive.

  This is one of the biggest reasons I had to leave Scientology. Exactly this: that I could not think as I wanted. That I could not read what appealed to me. That I corralled and controlled my curiosity because, if it to
ok me into territory that might make me question, that might make me think, that might make me doubt, that might make me critical, I would have to go, again, down a terrible rabbit hole—when I think about it, a rabbit hole made of stone with no exit except what I had done. I was touched when those old friends decided they could again be in contact with me, an “apostate,” but even then I knew that it was possible only because we’d tacitly agreed not to talk about the Church. Which in and of itself is fine; many relationships include agreements that certain topics—politics, e.g.—are off-limits. But though I deal as fairly as I can with the doctrines of Scientology, and acknowledge all it gave me (indeed, there may be those who attack the book for not being harder on the Church, who will insist that the things I found effective are so much psychobabble), the book is an advisory: not so much against the Tech, but against the organization that holds it.

  So I do sound a warning: If you are in, if you are tempted, get out as quickly as you can. Because you will soon be in thrall, wearing blinders of the kind I had in place for years, the kinds those friends (soon to be not my friends) still wear. If there is anything more damning, I don’t know what it is. This is what authoritarian regimes demand. It’s been tried at various times in our own democracy: muffling the press, limiting what can be read and seen and heard, damning critical reports as false or fake, punishing those who don’t agree, turning a blind eye to excesses and wrongs for fear of repercussion from those in power.

  spirituality is the vast vessel that holds religion in its multitudinous forms. The Latin etymology of spirit—spiritus—is “breath.”104 Inspiration (originally used of a divine being imparting a truth or idea) can be imagined as that intake of delight that comes with a realization; and things expire when they run out: a passport’s dates, or a body’s breath. I appreciate that we can be dispirited, with the sense of the drooping flag of a soul that word summons, and I’ve long been intrigued that the plural of the word is used for hard liquor, as if those fermented and distilled elixirs create a life force that may suffuse, inhabit, and even take over a body.

  And religion organizes around spirit: the holy version inherent in many systems of faith as well as the incorporeal one that each of our bodies, while alive, houses. In all the forms in which religion may be found—in all of its guises, in all the ways it binds—its essence is similar: a belief in a purpose, in a function higher than our mere selves and the lifetime we’re embarked upon; and that something called love, and the largely male constructs by which it has been labeled, permeates our existence.

  I yearned for a path that would reveal those truths, and for a while, with Scientology, felt I found it. What I actually acquired, in that seven-year dance with the Church, is an awareness of spirit that permeates my days, and a way to interact with words that is deeply satisfying. This is perhaps best illustrated by a moment in class the other day, as I introduced an incoming class of first years (no longer called “freshmen,” perhaps because “freshwomen” sounds really odd) to the idea of a liberal arts education. I spoke to the root of liberal, from the Latin, liber, “free,” drawing a distinction between the political sense of the word, which tends to mean “the party in favor of government action to support social change,” and its educational sense: intellectual enlargement.105 Part of what they’d be doing in the course, I told them, would be reading essays whose authors often contradict each other (sometimes nastily) and that the point of assigning such readings is to have them understand that just because it is written does not make it true. And that part of their task, as students at a liberal arts college, is to find their own point of view, which may or may not align within those of the authors they read, their parents, their friends, their classmates, their professors.

  Liber descends from the idea of a free man—one who had time for such pursuits—and it’s easy to see the monumental antipathy that could have built against those who were noble but extravagant (“free from restraint”); indeed, that very aspect of the word probably gave rise to the hues of meaning that slide from qualities most would find admirable—open, untrammeled—to those that sound increasingly dangerous: unbridled, unchecked, licentious, no doubt the meanings understood (and intended) by those who use the word as a pejorative.

  Such tramps through the landscape of language give me unbounded joy. It’s ironic that I was introduced to these ideas while involved with an organization whose stated goal is freedom but that places such barricades to independent thought. Still, it’s the gift I carry with me: words, and the animating principle within them—their etymological souls, if you will—which offer such deeply satisfying ways to observe and engage with the world.

  acknowledgments

  Sometimes I imagine composing an essay called “The Ethics of Rewriting a Memoir: Who Am I This Time?” The changes between the first shaggy draft of this manuscript and the book you hold in your hand are many, and the realizations had while doing those revisions profound. Along the way, a number of friends read sections and a few the entire manuscript and offered useful and sometimes essential perspectives. Leading the list is my beloved Bostick Trio, who encouraged me as I began: Christine Hemp and Lisa Schlesinger. Other essential insights were offered by Caridwen Spatz, Marilyn Jones, Rachel Howard, Laurie O’Brien, Kerry Sherin Wright, Joy Johannessen, Maggie McKaig, Diane Fetterly, Kelly Dwyer, and especially Steve Susoyev, not only for his fierce encouragement and editorial skills, but also for the example he provides of honesty, generosity, and deep loving kindness. Also freelance editors Beth Rashbaum and Roger Labrie, and attorney-at-law Lois Wasoff. And as the book neared its current form, I am especially grateful for very valuable ideas offered by Michael Mungiello.

  And where would I be without my sterling editor at Counterpoint Press, Jennifer Alton? It has been a privilege to work with such an insightful reader and thinker. I am grateful to everyone at Counterpoint, beginning with founder Jack Shoemaker, who decided to take on the book in the first place. And I am grateful to each and all of the talented and committed people who shepherded this book into print, and into the world, including the terrific publicity and marketing team headed by Megan Fishmann and Jennifer Abel Kovitz, and including Lena Moses-Schmitt, Sarah Baline, Dory Athey, and Dustin Kurtz; also deep thanks to Miyako Singer, Nicole Caputo, Olenka Burgess, and superb copy editor Oriana Leckert (any remaining errors are my own). And special thanks to Wah-Ming Chang for her fierce and generous editorial eye. There are astounding hearts and minds gathered at Counterpoint, and I’m more than a little stunned, and deeply honored, that Flunk. Start. found its way to this great publishing company and its stellar team.

  Further thanks:

  Franklin & Marshall College has been supportive in innumerable ways, especially the Provost’s Office and my beloved English department. Special gratitude is due to my wonderful colleagues; and I want to particularly acknowledge Judith Mueller, and the innovative director of the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House, Kerry Sherin Wright.

  Sunny Wilkinson, jazz singer and teacher extraordinaire: I met her in a Scientology course room and thought I’d lost her when I left the Church. When she, too, decided that Scientology was not for her, our precious friendship sprang back. Sunny asked me not to change her name, and I am grateful for the support her decision represents.

  Those friends from my years in Scientology: Although their names are changed, they know who they are (although I doubt they’ll read the book). That they were so dear and wonderful is a large part of why it took me so long to leave. I understand why Paloma wrote that Knowledge Report, weird though it was to receive. I love her for her faith, as well as in spite of it.

  Sunny also helped me reclaim my (singing) voice, and in that regard I also want to thank the brilliant Maggie McKaig and Luke Wilson, who were instrumental in helping me find my way back to my music. I am also deeply grateful in this regard to Randy McLean. Also to Murray Campbell, Louis B. Jones, Elena and Saul Rayo, and Caridwen and Gregory Spatz. Except
ional and beloved musical companions all.

  A number of warriors, beginning with Tony Ortega and his blog, The Underground Bunker: For decades, Ortega has written critically about Scientology and given many who’ve departed the Church a place to read information, share stories, express outrage, and find peace. Lawrence Wright for his superlative book, Going Clear. Mark “Marty” Rathbun, Mike Rinder, Jenna Miscavige Hill, and Astra Woodcraft, for their books and blogs. The many who’ve found their way out of the Church and dared to write and speak up about it, including Leah Remini, in her Emmy-award winning series, Scientology and the Aftermath, which does such essential work in exposing the Church’s outrageous policies and practices.

  Mary: Who lived with and loved Oak during the tumultuous years of the theater company, and endured the aftermath of his accident in ways that can hardly be imagined. Also their children, OMH IV and Elizabeth, with much love.