SCENES FROM CHILDHOOD
Prelude
I must have been a contemplative child by nature, prone to day-dreaming, present in body but elsewhere in mind. My mother was forever contriving tasks whose purpose I now perceive was to encourage a healthy interaction with the outside world. She would send me to the grocery store with a shopping list I was to give to some gruff giant who, my mother assured me, would gather the requisite items and "ring them up" for me. I would panic, both fearful of the confrontation and unable to read my mother's handwriting, and choose, as best I could from the shelves, those items I thought she might desire: a large fish with one staring eye, a package of delicious chocolate cookies... I would be found out and humiliated, and in my distress lose my way on the walk home.
It's not that I lacked curiosity, it's just that experiences in the world stimulated reflections: for me life was a collision between external reality and imagination, between things and ideas.
I really haven't changed much: as an adult I'm more comfortable navigating in transcendent Gnostic realms among the blessed Aeons, the terrible Archons, than finding my way along the concrete highways of New Jersey. And if it's true that, after all these years, I'm no closer to solving those riddles whose existence lends living such charm, it's only because, as I now realize, there are no simple answers, despite what we are often told, and in spite of which
the questions remain beautiful, and the questioning essential. Does not the lily, accosted by spring's miracle, respond each year with gratitude and joy? Shall I do less?
Besides, this wondering keeps me warm, and, for the most part, out of grown-up trouble.
FIRST GRADE : THE DARK DOUBLE
My earliest memory of school is of sitting at my desk, lost in thought, engrossed in some intellectual exercise more stimulating than the lesson unfolding before me. Back then I was impressed, in a rudimentary manner, by the magnitude and diversity of the world, the apparent boundlessness of external reality. At the same time, the formation of my personality entailed the organization of subjective space into patterns of increasing sophistication. The tension between these experiences - of the chaotic world and the ordered self - found expression in the dream of miraculous coincidence. With silent intensity, as I sat at my desk, I attempted first to imagine a subject as obscure, as unusual, as I could, and then to fantasize a boy just my age, in another classroom, far away, who was thinking that same thought at precisely the same moment. In other words, I wanted to know whether repetition, hence form, is possible in the context of a virtually infinite matrix of choices. If it were, I thought, that might indicate the presence of invisible but powerful forces, like gravity, that would tend the world in certain directions in preference to others: this hidden bond I conceived as a secret connection between me and my unknown friend, whom I pictured, smiling complicitly, while an authority figure loomed behind him, shadowy, oriental, suspicious.
I remember as well the vaguely guilty feeling that the lesson was slipping by, that there was something I should have been attending to, along with the intuition that this wasn't the last time I'd find myself in that position.
The non-existent friend whom I imagined so clearly has been replaced, in my adult experience, by a host of people - writers and musicians - all of them real but more difficult to visualize. It's their ideas - their insights and philosophies, their themes and forms of development, I've encountered with a shock of recognition, delighting me with the revelation of an unsuspected affinity, even as they disappoint me with the proof I've nothing new to offer.
Meanwhile my obsession with finding finitude, with imposing form on an entangled world, rich in randomnicity, has evolved into something like the opposite quest: now I dream of many mes, of infinite selves, alive, simultaneously or consecutively, in worlds without end, each existence unique and unimaginable from the vantage of the others, all of them bound by the tiny, invisible indestructible force of a single, unifying human intelligence.
As for the feeling that my mind should be elsewhere, that I'm neglecting something practical and important, it has only grown stronger with the multiplication of those responsibilities that cause me, in turn, to betray and abandon my daydreams so that I'm ever torn, and never do justice to anything.
SECOND GRADE: BIRTH OF THE IMMORTALITY PROJECT
On the first Friday of every month my classmates and I were led from the school building into the church across the street to kneel in the pews and pray amidst a scattering of ancient parishioners who clutched their rosary beads as they mumbled fervently, eyes fixed on the
large crucifix suspended above the altar.
One such morning I found myself directly behind some lonesome octogenarian and, since he was seated, relaxing against the back of the pew, and I was kneeling upright, my face hovered within a few inches of the back of his neck.
I was astonished by the deep wrinkles, the sagging, leathery texture of his skin, and dismayed at the prospect of becoming old, decrepit, senile. I glanced at the faces of my friends, whose skin was smooth and without blemish. Was it possible, even inevitable, that each of us, with the passage of time, would be subject to such a miserable demise? I stared
again, more intently, at the old man's neck. If it were true that he once resembled us, youthful and spry, then I should be able to notice a process of disintegration continuing before my eyes. I realized, of course, that such a process, if it were at work, operates too slowly to be noticed, like the movement of the hour hand on the great clock in our classroom. But I reasoned, with juvenile logic, that if, from moment A to moment B, no change in physical appearance was perceptible, nor from moment B to moment C, nor C to D (as the rate of change, I assumed, was constant) then from A to D or to E or to any point in the future, however remote, would likewise present no noticeable change. All that was required for me to escape the vicissitudes of aging was a lifetime of vigilantly staring into the mirror, watching over my face.
Needless to say, half a century later I've got plenty of wrinkles, but thanks to recent developments in cybernetics there's hope that, before too long, I'll have a robo-neck, smooth and virtually ageless, along with cyber-arms and legs, cyber-heart and lungs, and anything else that might need replacing so that, after all, I might yet cheat time and death.
But with a cyber-brain, would I still feel the urge to paint, to make music? If robo-me never sleeps, how can he dream? And then what of the unconscious, seat of intuition? Will the birth of cyber-humanity mark the death of art? There is a tension between our infinite desire and our finite existence, and this same tension informs a work of art as the creative impulse encounters the limits of human perception and memory. If the past is perfectly present, and if the future is unanimated by hope, will we forever and literally be killing time, robbing it of both its mechanical significance and its subjective depth?
Or do these concerns only reveal my short-sightedness, the poverty of my imagination? Am I behaving like those skeptics who warned Columbus he'd sail straight off the end of the flat earth? For meta-humans why not meta-art? - for instance an open musical composition with indefinite extension, freed from the necessity of patterning. Did I not, as a boy, dream of an endless melody, devoid of those tedious developments whose appearances, impinging on
the natural beauty of the themes, would cause me, inevitably, to lose my way, to become distracted, uninterested?
Or maybe the future holds the antithesis of infinite extension: a musical work consisting a single tone, suffused with an superabundance of overtones, to beings like us an incomprehensible noise but to our descendants an elegant micro-counterpoint with a perceptible play of partials, an ecstatic, everything-at-once effect, perhaps even granting that transcendence art has always promised but never yet succeeded in delivering.
Or is there some activity beyond art and music and literature that I fail to imagine (as the clam, clinging to the stone on the sea floor cannot imagine Mozart), an activity appropriate to a new humanity, that will enrich their lives even as music does ours, even leading to the attainment of that which all the arts indicate symbolically through the senses?
But if art is the means by which we explore those mysteries without and within, and if art loses its relevance, then perhaps, in some bright future, all enigmas will vanish, all riddles dissolve in clarity, apprehended in a pelucid present that lasts forever.
THIRD GRADE: MY PARENTS ARE SPIES!
As a boy I shared a bedroom with two younger brothers, so for a long time I used to go to bed early. I would lie in the darkness, sometimes for quite a while, beguiling myself in my sleeplessness by concocting fantastic stories in which I was the chief protagonist. I was the orphan who, through his wiles and his courage, attained the love of a princess, I was the soldier passing through Jerusalem who rescued Jesus from the cross, I was the galley-slave, captured by a savage race and recognized as the king's lost son.
I even went through a period back then where I considered the possibility that my parents were Russian spies whose loving care for me, reaching back as far as I could recall, was an elaborate reuse whose purpose I could not discover though it was clear that the extreme lengths they had gone to in disguising their true intentions indicated the existence of supreme malevolence. The issue was how, without revealing that I was on to them, to extricate myself from the danger in which I found myself entangled. I would need to slip away and report them - but to whom? The police? The President of the United States? I would need solid evidence, considering my tender age and their solid reputations.
I was, in all these fantasies, the underdog, the outsider, the messiah with salvific gnosis: I was nuts. But my intuitions - that ours is a fallen world, that all creation groans for redemption, that our spiritual homeland is far from here - were a source of secret happiness and the origin of that beautiful Elsewhere that blossomed within me, strange and vast, and which I later recognized as the Land of Music and Poetry, an interior kingdom pressing out into the dull, deterministic world, enshrouding us in a spiritual aureole, granting us that subjective space we need in order to continue to believe and to dream.
For as we age the world presses in on us, piling up monotonous routines, entangling us in decay, dragging us along where it will. I glimpse my face reflected in the window of a crowded train-car that's shaking and clanging. I may be tired and hungry but there's a smile on my face: as I am drawn inexorably toward death there grows within me, effortlessly, the conviction that none of this is real, or rather that this present existence is one among many
times and places I've been or one day will be. And as the clamor of the moment softens and blurs, there takes shape in my mind a sense, almost palpable, of a mysterious Somewhere, both strange and familiar, looming, beckoning. I wish to capture this vision, to bring to the world, even to these unhappy souls crowded about me, like a Prince of Light from Beyond, this Gospel of Hope, to move from intuition to certainty, to know now what later will be...And I
realize, as the train screeches to a stop - my stop - that the moment of full remembrance will be the moment of my death.
FOURTH GRADE; HEAVEN IS A GERIATRIC WARD
In those days and in Catholic school, teachers didn't specialize in a subject of instruction. Whatever their particular aptitudes or interests might be, they taught the same group everything. Looking back, I suspect that our fifth grade teacher lacked either the requisite training in conventional theology or the dogmatic temperament to inculcate it in our stubborn heads. As evidence I can cite one interesting afternoon when, during "Religion Period," he
dimmed the lights and pulled the shades over those tall windows that looked out on the school playground and beyond to those grainy white boulders bulging from the ground that curious archaeologists would come to study - and began to speak, in the newly hushed atmosphere, of ways to understand heaven.
It might surprise you to learn that this was a topic we all found relevant in the extreme. Having become acquainted with the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body (in incorruptible form) and the promise of immortal felicity (on condition of good behavior), we were anxious on a number of details: Did our dogs and cats accompany us to the next world? (No, we were told: only humans have souls.) Did the hobo with the lame leg on the corner of
Broadway and 207th street hobble along in paradise for eternity or was he cured? (Cured, probably.) Swept up in the excitement of so many propitious prospects, and suddenly cognizant of another potential dilemma, I raised my hand and waved it vigorously to get the instructor's attention.
"Dad," I began - for in my enthusiasm I had momentarily become confused, and thought myself back home. "Sir," I corrected myself, "since most people live until they're in their seventies, it seems heaven must be filled with old people." My colleagues murmured in agreement: it seemed to us, suddenly, that the afterlife must resemble one of those gatherings of seniors we'd witness in the shuffle-board court of Inwood Park in those hours between dismissal from school and dinner.
I do not recall my teacher's reply, but as it seems to me now there are three possibilities.
1. If there is a heaven and I'm in it then it must be a certain version of me - the fifth grade me, or the handsome me of my twenties, or the current me (my momentary favorite). But whichever version it is would fail, inevitably, to satisfy all those other versions of me (whose claims to be me are equally valid) so that, in the end, the winner would be the "last man standing" - quite possibly some wizened old man after all.
2. If heaven is for eternity and eternity is understood not as time's infinite extension but as the collapse of time into a plenitudinous singularity, then all those mes, the sum of my experiences, is what I'd be. But all of me at once may prove to be none of me at all, for we are defined by choices made in the context of limitations imposed, under particular circumstances. Not heaven, then, with our aunts and uncles floating about girt in milky robes, festooned in clouds, but nirvana is what we're looking at, a kind of everything and
everywhere of the here and now variety, which perhaps amounts to nothing and nowhere and nevermore and no thanks (I'm thinking right now) to that.
3. But if it's me, really me, the ever-changing me, neither one of me nor all of me at once, but moment by moment me, still growing and changing, well, that wouldn't be heaven, but more of this. And I'll admit there's a part of me that would accept this gladly: to live on, in one place or another, in one or another form, but really to live, with all life's uncertainties and questions unfulfilled and unresolved, with no ultimate goal, simply to live, eternally risking toothaches, bankruptcy, heartbreak.
Of course the scientists may be right, insisting there is no afterlife and attempting to console themselves with the doctrine of the conservation of energy which holds that our essence is indestructible and will be recycled through the eons. When I was young I liked the way that sounded; I'm less keen on it now, but if it turns out I have to I can put up with it.
But it doesn't convince - and not for the reasons you might think. No, it's not from an excess of optimism I'm incapable of believing I'll cease to exist as an individual, quite the opposite: it's a feeling for karma, a guilty sense of unfinished business that inclines me to think there will be work for me to do, and time to do it.
And besides all this I find myself wondering (more and more of the time) : where does time go? Or if it's we who move through time, we who are a-going, then perhaps time - all time - is always here (or there), like a landscape.
Are such questions tossed into the void? Are the silly hopes of humanity silenced, over time, by a mute, indifferent universe? Or is such a universe called to account by the extravagant aspirations of the human race?
FIFTH GRADE: BIRTH OF THE LITERARY UTOPIA
Our recent literary efforts - essays in fiction, some poetry - having attained such caliber as to merit dissemination beyond the school's borders, our teacher one day announced that he'd be taking us to the urban campus of his Alma Mater to type, to print, to bind and to sell our fifth grade literary magazine.
We called it The Porpoise Floats in honor of Mr. Porpora, our mentor, who might be a descendant of the obscure Baroque musician Nicolai Porpora. I can still recall the giddy feeling we boys shared, standing on the corner of Convent Ave. and 135th St. offering our work to bemused passersby, and I think that it was then that there began to form within me the dream of a utopian community of authors bound by their dedication to high literary aims.
For there were in my midst, so it seemed, certain writers of talent, or at least of ingenious imagination. Richard Costello's short story, The Brillo Pad Monster from the Kitchen Sink proceeded, in a mere five pages, from tranquility to pandemonium, leaving the reader gasping, clutching his neighbor on the bus for support. And Joseph Burns, for all those years an undistinguished student, shocked his audience with the revelation, in the last line of his tale, that the brave astronaut, torn to pieces by the inhabitants of a planet he was visiting in the hopes of establishing friendly relations, was himself the jackal-faced alien, and it was we - we, who ripped his limbs asunder in xenophobic rage.
My own contribution was a modest, if quietly disturbing story, The Purpose of the Porpoise. I was especially pleased with the unresolved ending that seemed at once to point in several directions. But this was a last-minute substitution: I offered it in place of a bigger piece I had been struggling with for months - a futuristic tale in which life expectancy has been vastly
increased to the point where ancient, wizened wisps of humanity come to resemble helpless infants and ultimately fold back into the womb (I admit there are problems here) resulting in a crisis of diminishing population.
Two years later we started a school newspaper. Attracted to girls now, but afflicted with irremediable shyness, I thought to distinguish myself in their eyes through the indirect eloquence of the written word. I also wanted to appear tough. So I composed a scathing editorial on our teachers, a group of well-intentioned young men whose influence was benign, whose surprise I was counting on but whose dismay only now do I appreciate. Briefly I came to experience a hero's glory and a coward's shame.
Years later, while vacationing, I would institute for my children the habit of writing as a daily exercise after morning baseball and before afternoon swimming and nocturnal reading. In more recent years, the children being grown and gone, the old classmates dead or scattered, I concocted an imaginary band of personas under whose various names and in whose sundry styles I continue to enjoy something like a sense of a utopian literary community.
I think, over the years, I've gotten better (at writing, I mean). Anything I read now that I wrote long ago seems inadequate, and I'll probably die dissatisfied, glimpsing some bright work on the horizon I won't survive to finish, though what I hope to accomplish in any case has always been vague - there's just this urge to put experiences into words, and to share these words, and to be enlightened by the words of others, affirming at once our common humanity
and the irreducible uniqueness of the self.
CHAPTER SIX: ON THE VIRTUES OF KEEPING YOUR MOUTH SHUT
Our Saturday ritual consisted of breakfast, a few cartoons, and an afternoon in the park. Back in those days and in that neighborhood kids were outdoors much of the time unsupervised, which saved them from both the bane of obesity and the blight of organized sports.
The only thing that could interrupt this pattern was the occasional decision by my parents that we needed to purchase raincoats, or slacks, or some other item whose acquisition required our presence in order that we "try it on."
"I know you want to play hockey with your friends," my mother would say, with a gravity that allowed of no argument, "but it's important to take care of such business every now and then." It was the same tone my father would adopt every other year when he informed the family that we were "having the painters," and that we'd be moving furniture away from the walls and emptying closets. "For the next few days there's going to be a lot to do here, and I
need everyone's cooperation."
My parents were good and wise beyond reproach, but I could never comprehend this grimness, and as an adult I have stood by the promise I made to myself back then, that I would never require my children to sacrifice a day of fun at the altar of mundanity.
But such events were rare, and as a rule we were free to play most of the day: baseball in spring and summer, roller hockey in fall and winter. And with twenty five cents in our pockets, my little brother and I could buy cups if Italian ice, and enjoy them, seated on the concrete, leaning on a fence, warmed by the slanting sun. We weren't a perfect fit for those tough, working-class Irish immigrant streets, Joe and I, dressed in those fancy red sweaters our grandma knitted, and I must have sensed this for, in those early days I preferred to skate alone with my brother in a secluded part of the park by the river. But inevitably we were lured beyond this safe haven to mingle with our school friends in the basketball courts where, with that mixture of inexperience and intelligence, of shyness and opinionatedness, it was only a matter of time before I clashed with curious, street-savvy characters. Suddenly, to my surprise and dismay, I'd find myself in over my head, pinned against the wall by some snarling, freckled ogre, or encircled after school by bloodthirsty classmates, goaded to fight with Dennis McSomethingorother, lanky, intent, implacable.
This kind of thing happened to me more often than it should have, and I can recall, in the wake of such traumas, sitting at my desk at school the next day, exhorting myself henceforth to bear in mind that, in the interest of a smooth and safe existence, all I needed to do was learn to keep my big mouth shut.
Have I learned that lesson as an adult too well, and to my shame? Are my words circumscribed by the consequences they could beget? And is what's excusable in a child reprehensible in a man? They say most Nazis didn't really hate Jews; they just went along with the extremists in order to minimize their inconvenience. Am I afraid of offending some admiring reader by revealing that, alongside certain progressive tendencies in my thought, I cherish notions antithetical to his taste? And will humanity in the future, having grown, by
the brave efforts of others, more sensitive and compassionate, conclude that people like we were unwilling or unable to reach beyond the prejudices of our time and follow unwaveringly the implications of our convictions?
As, for example, on the topic of abortion. My concern for the unborn has nothing to do with an affinity for either religious fundamentalism or political conservatism. I despise rich Republicans and brainless Bible-belters alike, but I have as little respect for liberals who clamor for the rights of women, minorities and the handicapped while sanctioning the destruction of the defenseless unborn. I do not know when life begins, or even what that
means, but I do know when I see the powerful controlling the destiny of the powerless, the articulate justifying their actions upon the inarticulate. I recognize that legislation becomes necessary only when our conscience fails, and that at the core our society needs not laws but a change of heart. And of course it's true that to criminalize abortion would lead to dangerous situations for women. But every school child knows that you don't solve a problem by creating a greater one. There is a strain of hypocrisy that runs through our
culture whose distinctive characteristic is the facile, overly literal and simplistic division between acceptable and egregious behavior: terminating a fetus is perfectly legal, while choking an infant is murder; purchasing pornography in which the participants are 18 or older is legal (and increasingly "mainstream") while, if the participants are 17 it's criminal (and prosecuted with a show of outrage); participating in various increasingly violent sports is legal, no matter how badly the combatants are injured, while violent criminals are condemned as psychopathic misfits.
It seems to me that civilized human beings should stand in respectful awe before the mystery of life, be it old or young. And that pornography, degrading to women and trivializing to sex, is incompatible with love. And that violence, consensual or not, brings the beast in us and kills the nascent angel.
There: I said it. Now come and get me. You'll find, I'm sure, that I'm still unprepared for the challenge: with a few clever words some scholar-bully, ironic incarnation of those childhood toughs, will have me pinned to the wall yet again. But watch out: with the lessons I've learned from those early days I'll defend myself in a most unexpected manner, and if you find such actions hypocritical, well I'm no worse than you. I'll spit in your eye, punch you in the
nose, and send you running home, your fancy arguments tucked under your arm, to your mama (who, by the way, decided, years ago, despite the inconvenience, to bring your sorry ass into the world).
Postlude, written about ten years later…
I’m not very happy with those last three paragraphs. I’ve come to understand that only a woman fully can understand the dilemma involved in the abortion question, though of course inevitably men must be involved because they are fathers to the unborn. Still, it seems to me the phrase “a woman’s right to choose” is one of those euphemisms so popular today, that obscure the complexities of contemporary issues. The phrase stops short of articulating the nature of this “choice,” which is nothing less momentous than the fate of the fetus - a helpless creature, whatever status one decides to grant it. And the protection of the helpless is a sign of a civilized and compassionate society.
The source of my discontent, then, lies not in my position, but in my tone and attitude. I think that much of the violence and suffering we see comes from the perception of having been wronged, followed by the need to redress this grievance, to “get even.” It’s not that our adversaries are always right, but it’s for them to ponder their actions, while we’d be wise to consider their point of view, which probably has some merit after all. “Let he who is without sin throw the first stone.”
So I withdraw with embarrassment my threats of punching and spitting (admitting, as I now feel compelled, that I probably deserved some of the wrath I incurred from those nemeses of my childhood). The only revolution is compassion I recently wrote in The Spiral Conch, which is to say violence begets violence, and the world will improve only when we do better than was done to us. It’s the nature of a true sacrifice; the rest is self-serving sham.