Dad's Story: "The Garden of Eden Within"

THE GARDEN OF EDEN WITHIN

In the autobiography of his college years, “Ever The Winds of Chance”, Carl Sandburg quotes the chief of an American Indian tribe as saying to his Caucasian visitor, “My brother, you will never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death.”

It is late night. The thin moon slats through the Venetian blinds on the window of the hospital in which I am held captive. The other slaves -- I use that harsh term expressly -- are long since asleep, lined up in their beds on either side of the long ward. I am alone in the calm dark of the “day room”. As the moon moves through the night sky I set and reset the angle of the slats so that the light on the white linoleum floor makes long white bars, resembling the keys of a piano. By squinting my eyes and twisting my head to one side I can envision a piano. My father played the piano.

Reader, are you a dreamer? Have you had this dream described by Freud? In one variant of the dream one is walking aimlessly, relaxed, in a familiar park. One feels the need for a rest room. One enters the lavatory, lines up among others along the wall. Then inexplicably you are outside, surrounded by a loud crowd, pointing at your exposure, your sudden nakedness. The crowd laughs, mocks, threatens you. Such was my actual, living experience. From tranquility to slavery. Reaching for imagery of perfect peace, people describe heaven, with warm sunshine and drifting clouds, the background music of harps, the smiles of angels. Or they imagine a Garden of Eden, with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. And a river ran out of Eden to water the garden.” But there is a real and more powerful Garden in my memory. It floats deep in the central cortex of my mind. That memory envelops me – the dark, quiet warmth, the steady, pulsing, calming rhythm, the nurturing food without labor or search, exhilaration without effort, air without breathing. In those early, innocent days I had a sense of growth and infinite promise. Far better than walking in a familiar park, better than the Garden of Eden of Genesis, I dwelt in nirvana, “thinking of nothing and doing nothing,” as did the Indian of Robert Frost’s memory. I had been in my Garden since the beginning of time, since the singular point of our nascent universe before there was time. And this was not a Freudian dream but my actual experience. Then, the Big Bang. Motion. Change. Nakedness, Exposure. The mocking crowd. Captivity.

Imagine a gentle, African native walking a familiar path near his home village, picking berries and fruits. A steel trap springs around his body. Hidden slave traders, ferocious heartless strangers have come to tear him away from everything he knows and loves. Thus was I captured. A steel trap held me tight. I attempted to pull away but some harsh force held me fast and pulled, pulled, pulled me. I was in a new and harsh place. Through my closed eyelids brilliant light penetrated my head. My eyes burned. I was suffocating; I could not breathe. Gone was the river that ran out of Eden and watered my Garden. I gasped and screamed. With difficulty, fearful of death, I struggled to capture thin cold air into my mouth and lungs. I was slapped and beaten and flopped into yielding, suffocating flesh. In time I came to know this flesh as my mother. I detested her. She it was who led the slave traders who captured me. I was forced from the Garden not by God but by man. Yet I have not and shall never eat of the forbidden fruit. My mother’s flesh repelled me. She was large, all gross corpulescence. When she would shove me onto her pendulous breasts I would recoil in fear and repugnance, fear that I would suffocate, repugnance at the vulgarity of the flabby, hanging breasts and their great hard nipples pressed into my unwilling mouth. But more even than the inelegance of the process I resented the dependent relationship in which it placed me. Surely this repugnance and resentment must be shared by every person of aesthetic sensibility and independence. As a child, watching my father pump gasoline into the tank of his car required a summoning of will. Nowadays with our nation seemingly always at war somewhere, on television we see frightening pictures of small naval vessels heaving on a wild foreign sea, tethered to great fuel ships, a hose of the fuel ship pumping oil into a funnel of the dependent vessel. The sight sickens me. I am built like my father. He was a small-boned man, short of height, with weak eyes from excessive reading. My father wore thick, heavy glasses. He had a straight, military posture. He was a neat, orderly man, his hair combed back tight, parted in the middle. He wore a collar, tie, waistcoat and suit jacket. His shoes were kept well polished. My father had the thin, straight nose and high forehead associated with intelligence and strength of character. He was by profession an engineer, but unlike many engineers he was a cultured man of broad interests, a scholar, a student of history with a fine library. His was not a “show” collection of first editions and sets with matching, tooled leather bindings. His was a collection of carefully studied works, each book with pages of his notes, comments, and page references. (Where is his library now? Has my mother trashed it?) I have my father’s love of books and of learning. And like my father, I have a certain degree of skill and interest in physical phenomena. I wish I knew him now, although I am certain he would despise me. Of that I have no doubt.

I inherited my father’s love of music but failed to learn to play an instrument. This failing I attribute to my mother, who took no interest in my development, my schooling, or indeed in anything else about me. Truth to tell, my mother did not have an easy time with me. I hated her, of course, from the circumstances of my birth. She quickly tired of the novelty of breast feeding. From infancy I was closeted alone in my tiny room, the door closed, drinking “formula” from a cold bottle propped up in my crib. This was my mother’s way of rearing a child. It was also my preference. I dwelt in my Garden of Eden Within. As a child I counted the hours and minutes until my father would return from work. The sound of the key in the lock of the front door of our little walk-up apartment was to me like the ringing of great bells, or the scene in old movies of the roar of joy of the crowd at Times Square at New Year, when the big white ball slid down the pole and Guy Lombardo played his bouncy music. That is how I felt when my father came home. Then my mother “hurried” into the living room. I write “hurried” for it was impossible for her to hurry. She was overweight, given to back ache, bad knees, stiff legs, shortness of breath, flatulence, nausea, and migraine headaches. None of these illnesses could be diagnosed or abetted by the many doctors she went to. She spent her days between doctor visits and bed. Her house clothing was her nightgown, a bathrobe and slippers. The beds were unmade, the house un-cleaned. She did not cook. For this she claimed to be too ill. She never let up on my father for being both a failure in his employment and too cheap to provide her with the housekeeper to which a person of her upbringing and accomplishments was entitled. My father brought home supper but each night she met him at the door with a little meal of her own preparation. His appetizer was a recitation of his faults. The main course was complaints of her suffering, stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with an account of my inexcusable behavior that day. For these he was ordered to punish me -- after supper. After eating, my mother dragged herself, outgassing, into her bed. (They slept separately though in the same room. Mother complained that my father’s weight unbalanced her in her sleep. Father, ten years my mother’s junior, was happy to sleep alone with his head next to an open window.) While Father washed the dishes and cleaned up he told me stories. (My job was to put the dishes and eating utensils back in the drawers.) My father had the imagination of a poet. And he was a dreamer. Although physically he in no way resembled a bold adventurer, he and I knew that he was far more of a man than he appeared to be to the world. My father taught me history, but he also told me stories of Katmandu and trekking the Himalayas with Sherpa guides. Sometimes he was a crewmember sailing in the Whitbread Round-the-World ocean race. Lashing through a fierce tropical storm, expecting every moment a rogue wave to capsize or crush their yacht. Days later the storm would pass. Lost, a hundred miles from the course, torn sails flapping, the mainmast down, they were alone on the calm sea, fishing for food and low on water, fuel and battery power. In his mind my father explored the earth. He burned to go. And I would have gone with him to the moon, at that very moment, trusting, hand in hand, me in my pajamas and ready for bed. Our neighborhood was poor, crime-ridden and tough. It was dangerous to go outside, nor did I care to. Other than being with my father, above all things I preferred solitude. But on weekends my father would take me in his old car to a lakeside park where we would buy lunch, I would listen to his glorious tales, and doze off in his lap in the sun. I learned from my father the important lesson that dreams trump reality.

My father left us when I was nine.

School days. Our neighborhood school was dangerous. Mornings, my father drove me to a distant school. I cried, sullen, because he made me go to school. Why did I have to go to school? The System passes laws and children are required to go to school. School children are slaves. Of course, as a child I was unaware of the wide societal application of my complaint. I knew only that I hated school but had to go. I wanted to be alone, to be free. I ignored the teacher and her instructions. I spoke to no one. At my desk, oblivious to classroom and teacher, I abided in my memory, lived within my head, in my Garden. I was assigned to “Special Class” (So it was called then; today it would be the “Not Most Advanced Class.”) and there I remained until I was 16. Again I closed myself off from the teachers and the other slaves. And for all those years, both at home and in the classroom, I educated myself from my father’s library. Perhaps I am the only person to have ever actually gained an education in Special Class.

The school decreed psychological counseling. From the beginning I saw through the kindly-acting counselor. She worked for The System. Her method was to beguile me into trusting her. But I would not expose my history or my thoughts. Her goal was to win me over to like involuntary servitude, to believe in this cold, harsh, vicious, ugly world as “reality”. Circular reasoning! The lies of the victors! This is only the “reality” of those very forces I hate and fear. Or failing to convince me, her function was to have me committed to a harsher confinement. She ultimately succeeded. At 16, with my father gone and with my mother’s eager acquiescence, I was committed to a state institution, the Home for Defective Juveniles. Without access to my father’s books, my self-education ended.

When without sham or pretense I allow myself to examine my life, I am confronted with a recognition of failure, failure in all undertakings: promises unkept, responsibilities failed. But worst of all, great enterprises of revolution either failed or more often merely dreamed of, fantasized. To what can I attribute my wretched record? The reader will recognize that at this moment, in my misery, I am willing to be honest. I state, then, that I am not without capabilities. I am not among those poor souls, honestly and wholly incompetent, who fail because they are capable only of failure. My failing is of a different and less justifiable nature; it is a failure of character. When life challenges me, throws down the gauntlet and says, “Here, now, take up the challenge! Produce!” I turn within. In my inner state there are no gauntlets, no challenges, no stresses. I hear the pulsing rhythm, it is the beating of the blood in my veins. I feel the safety of the warm, dark, private place to which I retreat, in which I rest and grow without effort, eat without eating, breathe without breathing. Here, where there are no challenges, no gauntlets, I can conquer all challenges. I know that. Here I am a giant.

But I must be fair to myself. Two times did I attempt to organize rebellion. Both efforts failed. Religions must have their Bibles, Korans. We Americans had our Thomas Paine, his Common Sense, and his Crisis, with its magic “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Karl Marx’ power in the February revolution in France derived from his Communist Manifesto. Who can forget the power, the poetry of “A spectre is haunting Europe”? Marx writes on of “the holy alliance of Pope, Tsar, and the German police-spies to exorcise this spectre.” Even Hitler had his Mein Kampf, prosaic and unthoughtful as it was. I had to prepare our Bible. The logic had to be compelling and I wanted it to inspire like poetry. The Home for Defective Juveniles had no library; it had only a bookcase of donated magazines and pulp trash. I needed a library. An appeal to the Director brought back an inquiry, “Which books did I wish to borrow from a library? Perhaps this could be arranged for approved books.” I did not know which books I needed; I had to browse. How do you know what you need to know before you know it? “A guard could not be spared to accompany me to a library.” I asked for the Federalist Papers, the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglas, William Lloyd Garrison. At this point the exchanges with officialdom became crafty on both sides. I surmise that my requests now raised both suspicion and hope. On the one hand, these were clearly dangerous works. Why did I want them? This had to be discovered. On the other hand, my wanting something gave The System a hook into me. And I suppose they imagined that for the first time they were going to be able to inveigle me into revealing my secret self. No doubt the psychiatric staff reviewed my exchanges with the Director. I was called in for a meeting with an effusively friendly and sympathetic psychiatrist. I was told how much he admired my intelligence, my ambition, my literary tastes, how much he would enjoy discussing Great Books with me. Why had I chosen those particular works? Why Frederick Douglas? Had I studied The New Testament, the greatest of all writings? He recommended Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery. What did I see as my purpose and goal in life? Why in my opinion was I confined here? He could help me best if he knew me better. Would I be willing to take a Rorschach test? I gave up on the library project. Instead I asked for and was given pencil and paper. I was even offered a little desk where I could work and store my writings. Obviously I was now under surveillance. No Slave’s Manifesto could be written here.

The next and final attempt will take less time to describe and was even more a failure. In time, no longer a juvenile, I was transferred to my present prison, nominally a hospital. There is here an elderly woman inmate. For diversions he often plays the old upright piano in the main lobby. I found it calming to sit nearby and listen to her idle, wandering chords and arpeggios. Reader, have you noted the relationship between men and women? Men like to talk, to explain. Women flatter men by listening, or appearing to listen, in silence. Women’s cunning and men’s ego lead to many a miserable and unequal marriage. From day to day as I exchanged civilities with the player of the piano I imagined that we, the two of us, had certain common sympathies. There seemed to be hints of understanding. Little by little I explained to her our enslavement by The System. I told her of my intent to write The Slave’s Manifesto, to organize a rebellion from this very prison, to escape, to liberate prisoners everywhere. She told the guards. Now I am called The Bolshevik. The guards and the very prisoners my life was devoted to liberating know me by that mocking monicker. Thus ended my final weak attempt to emulate Jefferson and Paine, and the fiery Douglas and Garrison. I fancy myself like my father. I am fastidious of taste, mannerly in the European fashion. I speak as I consider that he spoke -- precisely, each word, each syllable clearly enunciated, no endings dropped. Walking, I turn corners sharply, one! two! as in military march. I maintain an upright posture and forceful gait and wear a stern, commanding visage. This is our – his and my, not my mother’s – German heritage. Since my father left without warning or clue, how many times have I heard my mother recount his villainy, his cowardice! She storms at this vile serpent of a man who robbed her of her tender innocence with his tales of romance and riches. The tales of how he left her, her of superior background, family, social grace, accomplishments, in this hovel, his baby in her arms, with nothing!

I construct a different history. I believe that my father, a naïve, inexperienced, young man, was enticed by the hideous sexual embraces of this wily, desperate courtesan. In his innocence, his virginity, my father would not have known those methods of avoiding conception practiced by the coarse and unruly, potions and devices hidden under drugstore counters. I am certain that my mother got herself pregnant and then, coaxingly, yet sternly and ominously ordered my horrified, trapped father, a man of honor, to marry her.

Those nine married years must have been hell for him as he reviewed a thousand times the unfolding disaster of his life. Here was a man of steely conscience. His Germanic sense of duty would allow no failing. His youthful desire to embrace the vast and varied world, its mountains and valleys, its oceans and deserts, forests and plains, must have been overwhelming. I do not, as will feminists today, condemn him for what he did. Far from it! I admire him. He chose life. He escaped. Therein lies both the similarity between my father and myself and the difference. My father, strong, escaped into the world. Except for those two miserable, failed efforts at doing something, I escape from the world. Yes, reader, I say that to you. I recognize my failing, my weakness. I do not hate myself for hating the world, for ugly and vicious it is. I despise myself for my weakness, my retreat into the Garden. Let us confess it: I am an addict, though not to drugs. The monstrous irony is that it is to her, to my hated mother, that I retreat. Why must my Garden be with my mother? We have bars and locks and guards to keep her out. It is my mind alone that brings me back to her. This is my final mortification. Here in the “hospital” my brain has been subjected to electric shocks. From the drugs that are forced upon me I have a facial tic, tremors, I stumble when I walk. I am lethargic yet cannot sleep at night. When I retreat into my Garden the “doctors”, like my first slave trade captors, drag me forth again into their world. But now I shall escape them. I have a plan. Hidden among the springs and slats under my bed I too have a garden, a Garden of Disease. I collect infectious material from the sickest patients. From the tuberculosis ward I have sputum from the night cans beside the beds. I have rotted meat cloaked in thick green-white mold. I befriended one old diabetic and salvaged pustulous blood from sores on his gangrenous toes. A patient died of pneumonia; I sampled the contents of his night can. Each night I water my garden with my sputum; my Garden flourishes. Tonight I shall devour the fruits of my Garden of Disease. Then, sick and deadly contagious, I shall retreat, this time willingly, eagerly, into my mother, into my Garden of Eden.

I shall find my father. Together we shall travel the earth, freeing mankind fromslavery everywhere. Then safe, free of my mother, he and I shall drift off into the great universe in its infinite, sublime expansion, and I shall remain at peace forever. Tonight my Garden of Eden awaits me.