Sunday, September 12, 2010

The End of My Catholic Boyhood: Chapter of my autobiography, "To Madness Near Akin"

Making peace with the Church. Why was that such a challenge? Because I had stopped being a believing Catholic at age 14.

Many details of my childhood help explain what sort of person I became. There are also many details that are utterly irrelevant. I must do my best to avoid the latter.

I am from a Catholic military family. My Catholic boyhood was not unique or even unusual—although looking back, I can see that the Jansenist sort of Catholicism I was indoctrinated with had driven me to the brink of suicide by age 14.

Both my parents were college-educated and were teachers at one time or another. However, my father, who graduated from West Point in 1939, was a covert operative for military intelligence—he would not have burdened a child with that knowledge even if he could have. We moved on average about once a year, usually by means of very long road trips.

I remember, somewhere in the Midwest, at about age 3, watching the barns and silos passing by, silhouetted against the horizon. Perhaps we visited friends on such a farm. Distant silos still call up a longing, as if for a safe, friendly place to go.

I remember long drives from Perris up to Pismo Beach, watching the rocking horse oil pumps, which looked much giant chickens pecking for bugs, along both sides of the road. I discovered that road again in the 1970s, driving up the switchbacks from Ojai to Highway 33; alongside it, almost up to Coalinga, the oil pumps still rocked, now mostly dressed up as dinosaurs and other fanciful creatures.

In the early 1990s I discovered there were still orange groves along the highway that cuts from Magic Mountain to the coast near Santa Barbara. I remembered visiting a ranch in Orange County—where there are no longer oranges growing—where the family was hastening to light the smudge pots to protect their orange trees.

I remember driving across Texas in late 1944, from Woodbridge, Connecticut, where my father had spent a semester at Yale, learning Japanese, to Fort Ord. There were few bridges in Texas. Instead, the car would plunge suddenly down one side and up the other of a gully. Each time, I would call out, "Dip!” so that my mother, in the back seat, would not hit my brother Bill with the spoon of baby food.

I remember watching my father board the troop train at Fort Ord in September 1945, on his way to Korea. After my mother, brother, and I had lived with a war widow, Gretchen Wagner, in Carmel for almost a year, my mother gave up on receiving a port call and drove us and her mother, who had come out to visit, across country to New York. Within a month we received the port call and rode the passenger train, in which I and Bill shared the upper bunk in our sleeping car, across the country to Seattle. I had strawberry shortcake for my sixth birthday on the train. Three seasick weeks on a troop ship in the north Pacific followed. I remember being inside the world’s largest statue of the Buddha when we stopped briefly at Japan.

During 1947, when we lived in Taejon, Korea, my father was given the former Bachelor Officers Quarters, a rambling Japanese-style mansion, to be our family residence. (The combat sergeants to whom I taught English and philosophy at Fort Lewis in 2002 assured me that was not how the army housed a mere major.) We had domestic servants and many Korean friends, both adults and children. The first thing I ever learned about Communists was that they controlled the power plant in Taejon and purposely turned off the power whenever an American wife was trying to prepare for a party.

I had started trying to sightread comic and other books when I was three. One day, when I was six, I stumbled over a word, and my mother showed me how to sound it out. I instantly got it and could thereafter read anything I could find, which was not very much in Korea.

Another seasick voyage in winter brought us back in the States, where my father did a third tour at the Pentagon, then was sent to Fort Sill in the middle of 1948 for a year of advanced training. Leaving Oklahoma in June 1949, we drove counterclockwise around the country, visiting friends in Little Rock, in Columbus, Georgia, and in Ville Platte, Louisiana. I remember reading Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, in their rich, difficult black dialect, in the back seat, looking out at the Spanish moss dangling from the trees in the bayous where critters like Br’er Rabbit might have lived.

We visited grandparents in Florida and in Brooklyn, drove up and across to Seattle, where we visited General Barney Oldfield and his family, then down to San Francisco, where we stayed with my maternal aunt Dolly and my uncle Wally Izzo (who was in Naval Intelligence) until my parents bought a house in the Rollingwood neighborhood of San Pablo. I did not then know how odd it was for an officer to have three solid months of leave time. In September he began teaching as a Professor of Military Science at the University of California for the next two years. For the first time, I completed two grades in the same school.

At the beginning of fifth grade, when I was eight, the teacher took us to the nearby public library. When I asked my mother why she had never told me about such a wonderful place, she said she had thought I already knew. I began reading about a book a day, a practice I continued for at least the next ten years.

The second thing I learned about Communists was from my father’s angry comments to my mother about Socialists who were passing out literature on Berkeley street corners. His words were, “As far as I’m concerned, a Socialist is the same damned thing as a Communist!” I wasn’t sure exactly what Socialists were, but now I knew they could be found in Berkeley.

After completing his teaching assignment, my father was transferred to Fort Lewis, but after a few months was suddenly ordered to Germany. We drove across the snowed-in West in December, arriving at my mother’s parents’ home in Brooklyn. Shortly after Christmas, my father left for Germany. I, my mother, my brother, Bill, and my sister Pat lived with my mother’s family for the next eight months.

Nana’s home, half of a duplex, was on Ocean Parkway, just below Avenue U. A friend at San Francisco State later exclaimed, “But that’s a Jewish neighbor hood!” It was also a very Italian neighborhood. My grandparents lived there because my grandfather, William Henry Kelly, was Jewish, given that his mother, Katherine Scheer, was Jewish. She had married an Irish cop, John Raymond Kelly, whose beat was in Central Park; was disowned by her family, as was the custom in the 1800s; and raised her 18 children as Catholics. However, she told them they were Jewish Catholics and taught them the traditions, which my grandfather passed on as best he could to his three daughters.

As a result, my mother, Marie Cecile Kelly, devoted to the Sacred Heart, knew how to keep kosher, although she didn’t; would swear under her breath in Yiddish, so we shouldn’t know what she was saying; made a wonderful sandwich spread for school lunches that I later learned was called chopped liver; and when asked, as occasionally happened, if she was Jewish, always replied, “Who’s asking?” She once told me, “Jesus was Jewish, his mother was Jewish, all his friends were Jewish; so for me being Catholic is just another way of being Jewish. I don’t know from Protestants, but they’re not my problem.” Well, that was Paul’s theology.

Seventh grade at Boody Junior High, P.S. 228, was intense and my first contact with Jewish culture, but I don’t recall anything of great significance for my intellectual history. My most pleasant memory is of getting a knish stuffed with meat and covered with mustard as I walked to the local movie theater on Avenue U with my cousin Tommy every Saturday.

Always before, being Catholic was merely something I did with my parents on Sundays, but in Brooklyn I began to learn the content of Catholic faith, taking catechism classes at age 11 in preparation for my confirmation at St. Patrick’s parish. The Baltimore Catechism seemed like a logical system. At least, each point of doctrine had to be true in order for the ones following it to be true, but I could not see how one could deduce the latter from the former. I was most struck by, and have never forgotten, the Catechism's first two lines: "Why did God make man? So that man could love Him." That is a genuinely religious concept, because it states a fundamental value, because it cannot be falsified by any conceivable fact, and because almost every other Christian belief follows from it. It is specifically the basis for free-will theology, which does much to justify God’s ways—not that I was aware of any of that at age 11.

In the 1950s Catholicism seemed (at least to me) to be all about sex or, more precisely, about not having sex. Jesus was a virgin, his mother was a virgin, all his friends were virgins, and all the saints were young women who had been martyred for refusing to have sex. We were taught to be pure in thought, word, and deed. Even thinking about sex was a terrible sin that God would punish us for. Nothing was taught about forgiveness.
One night I had an erotic dream, in which I was standing before a naked woman. On her right thigh was a tiny devil, on her left a tiny angel. They beckoned me, and as I stepped forward, one of them shoved me. I fell into her, exploded into a fire of ecstasy, and panicked awake. Afterward I wondered: Was sin such joyous fire? Should I have confessed for having such a dream? And which one shoved?

One day I found a copy of Abraham Merritt’s The Kraken Wakes lying on the sidewalk as I walked home from catechism. I read it, fascinated, certain that doing so was sinful, given how utterly different the world he described was from Brooklyn Catholicism. When I finished it, I threw it in the garbage.

My catechesis had long-term consequences for me. In my entire life, I have never had a wet dream, despite my high libido. That is how Catholic my conscience has always been. That is how deeply that programming penetrated. And during that period I suffered for weeks from the first prolonged depressions that I can remember.

Brooklyn at Eleven

What is more intimate than death—but love?
I dream of abandoning myself by night
And by day. The Spirit's siren song above,
The body's gut demands on left and right:
Greeley's left me half in love with God
Again as I was, at eleven, with Ozma.
Fascinated by evil: thus I read
Abraham Merritt's romantic phantasma-
Goria I found on a Brooklyn street
On my way home from catechism,
Terrorized by hellfire, sure my defeat
By sex was at hand. Grace's sweet schism
Would not save me from my self or the kraken
For years to come: Brooklyn, let me awaken.

On the troopship, the S.S. Barrett, going to Germany in August 1952, I read through Herb Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives and was quite appalled to learn that Communists intended to destroy America. When we joined my father, he was battalion commandant in Dillingen, a former episcopal seat, halfway between Ulm (birthplace of Albert Einstein) and Augsburg (of great significance to Protestants). We lived in the next village to the north, Lauingen am Donau, in a twenty-room mansion confiscated from a Nazi party member; it also had been the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. I played beneath the walls of the castle where Albertus Magnus was born (as I later learned), on the banks of the Danube where he had played as a boy. Almost every day we drove from Lauingen to Dillingen and back, across what had been the border between Catholic and Protestant Europe for several centuries.

I was very active as a Catholic during this period. I remember lying on my mother's bed during the afternoons, saying the rosary with her and my siblings. The post chaplain had a special mass for us kids on Saturdays and would not allow any adults at it. I don't remember any details of his homilies, but I felt very comforted by them.

I read all the church pamphlets that he kept in the lobby. One of them, intended to defend the Church against Protestants and other scoffers, seemed especially important. A passage in it, answering a question about how Catholics can believe in such strange doctrines as those of the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, asserted that Catholics are not required to believe anything by blind faith, but instead have all the doctrines of the Church proven to them logically. "Clearly," I thought, "one purpose of the catechism was to prove the doctrines to me, but since I didn't see how their logic worked, I will have to learn about logic in order to understand the proofs." I filed this pamphlet away for future reference.

In the summer of 1953 we did the Grand Tour of Europe; my father again had many months of leave. Being 12, I missed a lot. In the Louvre, I did not see either the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo. In the cathedral at Pisa, I did not know to look up at the chandeliers from which Galileo had deduced the pendulum law. Sliding toward the decrepit railing on the edge of the tilted top floor of the Tower is not fun if one is somewhat nervous about heights.

But I did get to meet Pius XII. My mother got us into a general audience.

My father never did get to see the Pope.
By the time he had found a place to park,
The guards had closed the gates;
So my mother took me and Bill in.
In the Sistine chapel my mother said
The paintings were by Michelangelo.
I had wondered if they might have been by God.

Soon he came in, rather frail and tired.
I knew nothing about holiness, but I know what I felt.
All the fat Italians cheered and clapped so much
He had a hard time blessing us all correctly.
(My mother said they were probably Protestants.)
I only pretended to kiss St. Peter’s ring.
I didn’t think it holy enough to not have germs.
He looked at Bill and asked, “Is he a good boy?”
(My mother said later, “He speaks seven languages.”)
“Oh, yes, Father, he tries,” she said.
Pius smiled and blessed him and passed on.
Outside in the plaza again, she said to Bill,
Triumphant, “See! He knew!”

As a result, I later remained aware of Pius’ career. I know he enabled Catholic scholars to participate fully in modern scholarship. I know he personally saved half a million Jewish lives during the war. And I know he set up all the machinery for the Second Vatican Council. All John XXII had to do was push the start button.

In the fall of 1953 we moved to Feudenheim, a suburb of Mannheim, and I entered ninth grade at Heidelberg American High School at age 12. In late October, I had a manic episode that lasted about two weeks, during which I believed that I understood the nature of the universe, the theory of relativity, etc. After a day or a week of logorrhea, in which I "explained" my discoveries to anyone who would listen, I wrote a paper of 1500 words on my understanding, but it made little sense later on; so I threw out the last copy of it in 1957.

One Sunday afternoon we went to see a Castle Frankenstein, somewhere near Mannheim. On the way there, I asked my mother if this was the castle that the story was about.

"No, dear," she replied. "Frankenstein is a novel by Mary Shelley, and it has nothing to do with this place. Frankenstein just means `the French castle.'"

I think I must have felt very ashamed not to have realized that already. It was a lot like thinking one could visit the Tooth Fairy's Palace.

I think now of Russell at eighteen
In the dark stone spirals of Cambridge.
He first hears "The Tyger" when a friend,
Descending toward him unseen, recites it,
And his mind, widening,
Reverberates among the walls.

The castle was on a mountain,
The mountain on a high plateau.
The air in its courtyard was so thin
That when I dropped a straw into my Coke,
Breaking its surface tension,
It erupted over my head: thus
The mountain air geysered in my eyes.
When I looked out across the landscape,
That air thinned all colors to pastels,
Making nearby farms see far away.
It curved the landscape up,
Horizoned it at eyelevel,
Making me and the castle seem bowled
In the bottom of the world, and excused from time.

Just as I knew the castle must have a history,
I knew the tapestried bowl before me
Must be an illusion of the air,
But drunk with breathing such thin air,
I suddenly sensed that there must be
A vision in some even rarer air
That would make sense of everything I saw,
Some other tapestry, everywhere at hand,
Disguised by its transparency,
That I could see by looking with my mind.

But as I looked, my mind denied my eyes
The outsight that would have visualized the air,
As if by some sin I'd lost the right
To understand. Had I sinned? What sin of mine
Could have been so mortal it condemned me
Never to make sense of things, ever to live
In a world of surfaces that refused to mean?
I wondered about my dream with an angel
And a devil as the guide began our tour.

As he marched us, Germans, American
Officers, wives, children, the occupied
And the occupying, down medieval halls,
Up spiral stairs, I heard him speak
(Although my German was still too weak
For me to understand what he was saying)
Of neither history nor Mary Shelley,
But of the creation of a monster, saying
Here this, there that, episode had happened.

Standing in the tower, in a stone spiral,
I looked down into a room where sunlight
Transfixed the dusty air from empty window
To empty floor, a floor smoothed by centuries
Of emptiness, a potsherd whose inscription
Had been smoothed away, a floor that Mary
Shelley, a monster in her mind, had never seen.

I looked at the guide standing below me,
His face in shadow, his hand, palm up,
Offering us that room, confusing us
For his own reasons, offering us
A kingdom of illusions, and I knew him
For an emissary of the Prince of Lies.
I wanted to cross myself, but was afraid
To give myself away; and then was ashamed
Because I was afraid; so I turned away,
And silently I cried, and prayed for help.

I looked at my parents and all the others,
Wondering why they accepted his lies,
And saw that they wore their faces as masks:
They did not care about reality;
Preoccupied, they were content to see
Neither the historic tapestry
Nor the fictive truth, but only
What their self-made masks imposed,
The masks they had bought with their souls.
The Baron Frankenstein's sin had been
That he could not give his creation
An immortal soul; so these adults,
Having traded their souls for a lie,
Were each both maker and monster in one self,
And bowed beneath the maker's guilt.

I realized then that I knew nothing too:
I had not read the novel, did not know
The castle's past. I knew only
That the ragged tapestry,
Which these adults did not even see,
Could not be all—but if I could not part it,
Tell the merely real from what might be,
Tell what things meant, then I would know
No more, and be no more, than they—and that
Was the most mortal sin I could conceive.

And having conceived it, at once
I was guilty of it: beneath my hair
My mind collapsed into a tarry ignorance
That glaciered down behind my eyes,
Blinding me to what any shape might matter,
Pitching every chasm of my soul.

And that was the state of my soul for a year --
In what would have been despair
Save that I never ceased to hope,
Without one idea to guide me,
That somehow I could learn to see.

In this way I rediscovered gnosticism for myself: it seemed intuitively obvious that for me salvation lay in understanding, in knowledge, though not merely in intellectual information. But at the time, since I lacked such understanding, this "Castle Frankenstein" experience began a period of cyclic depressions, which arrived every two or three weeks for a year.

In the fall of 1954 I took geometry. I also came down with pneumonia for six weeks, for the middle two being confined in Heidelberg Army Hospital. I’d brought my textbooks with me in order not to fall too far behind. One afternoon, I puzzled over a geometry problem. Are transverse angles always equal? They look equal. Why not assume that they are? Wait.

Angles A plus B are a straight angle, 180 degrees.
Angles B plus C are a straight angle.
Therefore angles A plus B equals angles B plus C.
Subtract B from both sides.
Then angle A must equal angle C.

That was a proof, not an assumption, not a guess. In a flash I grasped the nature of geometry as a logical system: given a set of self-evident axioms, the conclusions deduced from them had to be true also. Such knowledge was certain and universal; it did not depend on anyone’s opinion. When I returned to class, I had mastered geometry. I'm sure I was a burden to the teacher, whom I could now correct.

In December 1954 we returned to the States, in time for Christmas at Nana's house in Brooklyn. There my cousin Tommy taught me about masturbation, which was almost as great a revelation as geometry had been. In California we arrived at San Carlos, where we stayed with Aunt Dolly and Uncle Wally for two months, while my father began his final assignment at the Presidio, as second-in-command of the California National Guard. We went househunting every weekend. During those two months, I investigated the history of alphabets and invented a phonemic shorthand system that I used for note taking in high school and college. My father finally chose a house at the uttermost western end of Tamalpais Valley, the southern portion of Mill Valley. In March I entered Tamalpais High. I was too far behind in geometry to catch up, and I was rather envious of a guy named Alan Rein, who was the best student in the class.

The preceding merely sets the stage for what follows.

One evening in the summer of 1955 I was sitting at my desk in an alcove of the basement suite of rooms my father had built for Bill and me. The black moods had come and gone every few weeks; one was on me that evening. I was wondering why people, especially my parents, would so often say one thing but do another, why beliefs and actions seemed generally unrelated. I was wondering why my friend Ted Giesecke should have to go to hell for being such a happy atheist, but I could draw no other conclusion from the Church's doctrines. (It was Ted's throwing firecrackers at the workmen building the new Catholic Church below his house that must, I thought, have condemned him, for he certainly didn't have the respectful attitude toward Christianity that apparently let some pagans through the pearly gates.)

Especially I was wondering about sex. After Tommy had shown me how to masturbate, I did not at first realize that this wonderfully pleasurable activity was something that the Church forbade. It took me even longer to get up the courage to go confess it. When I did, the priest said what I had expected, what I had nevertheless hoped he would not say: that it was unconditionally evil, that I must stop it immediately and never do it again. But when I got home, I realized that it seemed an innocent pleasure to me, that I did not, could not believe what the Church said about it; yet I also believed that I should believe what the Church said. This seemed an insoluble problem for the moment; so I laid it aside.

Rummaging in a drawer, I came across the pamphlet I had saved, that nihil obstat et imprimatur official teaching of the Church. I reread the passage I remembered, and thought back to my catechism. Since I hadn't understood the logic of it, I wondered whether anything had been proved to me or not. Oh, but I had mastered geometry; and since geometry is the archetypal logical system, I now knew how a logical system worked; and so . . .

(The thought that would have risen into consciousness next would have been something like, "The axioms of any logical system must be accepted on faith, but since this pamphlet, which is official teaching of the Church, says that nothing need be accepted on faith, I now know that nothing has ever been proved to me, and that I am under no obligation to believe anymore." But, before that thought could reach rise up into awareness, the whole Thomist system in me, its bubble pierced by a paradox, all that bound-up psychic energy, layer upon layer of social conditioning, exploded; a ball of ecstatic, intelligent light filled my vision; and all ordinary, rational consciousness ceased.)

The Renunciation

I learn at this wooden desk
How dogmas pretend a triangle's sharpness,
But darken by degrees between unmeeting lines.
I read they need no belief unproved,
But feel their millennia weigh black behind my eyes
Until I cannot see the matter in a shape,
Feel it curse the stiffening between my legs.
The tickles in my brain think almost only black-robed words,
But one thought breaks the surface of my mind.
As if the sun has come to visit,
Mind bursts light before my eyes,
Speaking too fast to hear but not to know.
As dark degrees sublime to joying waves
Breaking within and out of me,
I am wind over mountains.
But from tickles to wind, my heart beats once,
And I fall with the Earth around the Sun.
At this wooden desk, where words boil out,
I chant the agony of fall into myself;
I wail release of waves until I sleep.

Thus the tower veil is parted,
From the other side,
For one lightning frieze
That still informs my eyes.

However long the experience lasted—it felt both instantaneous and eternal—when it ended I broke forth in a babble of praise and sorrow, a lamentation that I was merely myself again, a lovesong of thanksgiving that such a thing had happened to me. For it seemed that, since the Church and all its doctrines had burdened me into blackness, nearly into death, God Himself—although I no longer knew whether he even existed—had stepped in and removed that yoke from me, saying, "This is forgiveness"—and forthwith I was in heaven and have known ever since that I dwell in his kingdom, that I am safe and always will be, that ultimately nothing can ever go wrong. The torrent of words poured on and on, until I dropped asleep in exhaustion.

(When I later read Bill Wilson’s account in Alcoholics Anonymous of his own enlightenment experience, I was surprised by his also describing it as feeling like “wind over mountains.” As for “joying waves”: too understated. The essence of such an experience is its bliss; it is ecstatic, an order of magnitude more pleasurable than even the most intense orgasm. The beatitude of the angels is not a tranquil serenity. It is an uproarious, never-ending, uninhibited sensual delight in playing with the divine. The Witches are far closer to understanding that Mystery than most Christians are. I’ll come back to that.)

The next morning I examined myself curiously to see what had happened. I no longer believed in God or in any of the tenets of the church—I was freed from that burden—yet now I felt a new obligation: to go discover for myself what the truth about things religious might be, not to settle for what anyone else believed, not to depend on anyone’s authority or opinion, but to find out what could be known with the certainty of at least a geometrical proof. I have been carrying out that obligation ever since.

I did not understand what my experience had been, but I knew that it was precious, and that I should not speak of it—especially not to my parents—until I did understand it. I knew it had been a great gift, and it began a period of freedom from the depressions. I learned later that some have called this sort of experience “the gift of divine grace.” That seems not too bad a name for it. I was given a “state of grace,” a certainty that I live in a state of spiritual innocence that cannot be revoked against my will, no matter how much I fail. As Blake said, “The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.” But that certainty of my ultimate safety did not and still does not isolate me from the world, does not keep me from making mistakes or thus from learning and growing, does not excuse me from any of the frailties and foibles common to humankind. It is just there, at my center, to tell me who I am whenever I ask. It also keeps my failures of self-esteem, a major symptom of my illness, from progressing to termination. I did not know at age 14 how close to suicide I must have been; a sufficient reason for the gift is that it saved my life. Salvation, after all, means saving. And since I know now how many have struggled for even a touch of what was so freely given to me, I know even more clearly how great a gift it was, for what could have I done at age 14 to have earned it?

Ever since then, it has seemed obvious to me that our concept of ourselves as isolated individuals, separate from each other and the divine, is an illusion. I come back to that theme many times in my poetry. Finding an explanation for how and why that illusion exists has been an exceedingly gradual process.

More recently, I have thought about how similar, and yet how different, my experience was compared to that of Joseph Smith, Jr. We were both 14. We were both in a state of severe clinical depression. We were both asking a profoundly serious question about the truth of religion. And we both were given an experience so joyful, so extraordinary, that it is inherently almost impossible to describe to other people. But, with due humility, I do not believe my experience was as profound or as important to humankind as his was. I was given another question. He was given an answer.