Shock Therapy killed my memory. More about that later. For now, it is enough to say that when I was asked my name, I said Johnnny---Something. I couldn't remember my last name.
The extra n? Later.
Fear.
The screaming was endless and brutal. The Hand-Falls, I felt them, but not as much as Anne, my Mom, as she suffered the Hand and the Fist. And Mom cried, not only when my father, Popeye (a nickname he acquired when he was a boxer in high school), hit her or was in a rage. I had been gestating for about 3 months when I first noticed the YellingCryingChaos waiting for me.
A month to go before..., well, I had no intention of coming out.
Coming Out, the First Time.
So many ways to come out, but birth is one of the more elemental and vital and bloody coming out parties. It can be happy. Mom said she was in hard labor with me for 24 hours. She was more than glad to get me out. You know my opinion on the matter. It was worse than I imagined.
Popeye was pitiless, defensive, and angry. Today he'd be diagnosed as a narcissistic, low-grade sociopath. Oh, and an alcoholic. His mother and father, Queenie and Randolph, warned Mom he was dangerous and that she shouldn't marry him. She thought this bourgeois German family was trying to scare away the poor Irish girl. She was wrong. They were dead serious.
On her deathbed, Queenie said Popeye was a bastard, if that's the word. She was separated from Randolph in 1921 and was date-raped - not the words she used. Popeye was the result. Its not implausible, but I look a lot like Grandpa Randolph, I think. And Queenie did lie, all the time. But would she lie about this, on her deathbed?
Electric Redemption.
In the second decade of the 21st century I had 17 ECT treatments to bring me out of a severe depression. ECT is shock therapy. Dr. Milton had to turn the power to max to get me to convulse. He stopped after 17 because it was not working.
Within a few days of the last treatment, though, I began to wake. I started to discover what being awake is. I realized that I had actually been awake since my birth. Mostly not very awake. Sometimes, though, very awake. Sometimes.
This is the story of what I found, created, carried, and threw or let slip away as I travel to this moment, no, this moment, no, this....
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Nota bene: Everything you read here is true, though, sometimes, facts are scattered, rearranged, amended, and created from whole cloth.
Virginia Woolf wrote, In a Room of One's Own, that 'Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact." (this in the first paragraph of the story. To understand the quote, it is helpful to read the context to see what she means by "here.")
Tim O'Brien discusses the truth of fiction and the emptiness of accuracy in the The Things they Carried. The section, "Good Form," is especially compelling.
Caveat lector: I review and alter this memoir to bring it closer to the truth. And you know what that means.
Coming out the Second Time.
I am in St. Nicholas Catholic Church with my mother. I am 8. The priest at the pulpit is saying they need to raise money to renovate the Church. The roof and some walls need repairing and the whole place needs painting. I ask my mom, Why doesn’t God do it? She says it doesn’t work that way; people have to do it. It’s God’s house, I think, so I ask, Why don’t workers do it for free? Well, she says it doesn't work that way. People need to be paid so they can live. I am about to ask why doesn’t God pay them, but I am pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.
I realize, at that moment, that the Church is not at all what it seems. Or, rather, it is exactly what it seems. It is building like every other building. My beliefs in God, Jesus, saints go away. I am an atheist. But I don't like the feeling of the word. It's harsh and accusatory. But, I don't feel harsh and accusatory. It just seems obvious that God does not exist. I'm not out to judge others or convince others. I'm comfortable with the truth.
This revelation percolates for a few years, and when I am 12, I come out. When I tell my mother, and other people, I am an atheist, they convince me that I am unsure, and so I’m an agnostic. After all, can I prove God does not exist? I couldn’t. I was swayed towards agnosticism partly by this logic, which I later realized was fallacious. You don't have to believe something is possible, and certainly not probable, just because you can't prove it's false. If I tell you that human beings are controlled by invisible people living 1000 feet beneath the surface of Mars, no one could disprove that. But does that mean you have to hold it as a serious possibility? Or, worse, a probability? Of course not. And no one would; well most people wouldn't.
The other reason agnosticism appealed to me was because it seemed more humane than atheism. I thought atheists were asswholes, telling religious folks they were stupid and weak. I didn’t want to be an asswhole. My father, Popeye, was an asswhole – a card-carrying atheist who derided the religious because they couldn't face the real world. It took me a long time to realize that his "real" world was much more vicious, and certainly more heartless, than mine. And more vicious and heartless than the world itself. Ironically, he used atheism to avoid the real world.
Much later, I came to understand that a church can be a sacred place. If people gather to stand in awe of the mystery, the joy, and the pain of life, it is a scared place. Religion can give people ways to connect with each other and with mystery. These spaces are sacred because we make them so, and all the more valuable because of it.
I believe that religions exist. Religions, like every other human institution, do good things and bad things – well there are exceptions: some human institutions do only bad things, but religion is not one of them.
I understand at least one tendency to believe in God. We have moments of transcendental ecstasy, of connecting with everyone and everything. We lose ourselves but at the same time are more ourselves than we could ever imagine. But why? Are we connecting with God? Or are we using God to explain our transcendental ecstasy? My best guess is the latter. A much more coherent discussion of this can be found Between Godliness and Godlessness by Sam Harris. A good review is here.
David Hume argued that the greater and more unusual the claim, the greater and more convincing the reasons we need to believe it. If somebody tells me they saw Fred in the diner, I believe them. If somebody tells me they saw Fred taken up to heaven by God in the diner, I will need a lot of more evidence, or a lot more something, before I believe it. Why would I treat burning bushes any differently? For more, see David Hume, Section X of David Hume,An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding or click here for a Wikipedia entry.
My non-theism is not a matter of being a skeptic. It's a matter of treasuring myself, which mean being careful of what I believe. What I believe makes me who I am and how relate to others and my communities. Religions get a lot of things right. One of them is to treat yourself as sacred. That's what I'm trying to do by being careful about what I believe. And, yes, one can believe in principles espoused by a religion without believing in the religion itself. This is what Malcolm X did when he left the Nation of Islam. (For more, see The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: One World; Wikipedia entry is here.)
So I'm not an atheist – that word carries way too much baggage. I prefer non-theist.
I am a non-theist who believes in - because I see their expression and feel them myself - love, compassion, mercy, and all these incredible human traits before which I willingly prostrate myself. I also believe in hatred, disgust, and loathing, but i'm not focusing on these here.
I have no idea how love and hatred happen in a world of tiny particles as they move about in space. I don't have to understand it to know that love and compassion exist. I don't have to know the physics of how planes fly to believe that they fly.
I can't help venerating love and despising hatred - well, mostly. That is how I am built, at least for now. I may need to work to keep it that way.
Nietzsche's phrase comes to mind: Human, all too Human.
And Bishop Butler, too: Everything is what it is and not some other thing.
The Last Surviving Member of the Alexis de Tocqueville All-Star Rock and Roll Show Band and Review
For a while, Johnnny---Something wanted to be, or thought he was, The Last Surviving Member of the Alexis de Tocqueville All-Star Rock and Roll Show Band and Review.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a curious Frenchman, traveled through the United States in the in 1831 - 1833. He found a paradox that he believed was at the heart of American society.
People in the United States are fiercely individualistic.
People in the United States are fierce joiners.
Fiercely individualistic and fierce joiners, US.