Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays

A LOT OF EXPLODING HEADS

ON READING THE BOOK OF REVELATION

I did not have a religious upbringing, and for most of my life I’ve considered that a good thing; I’ve since come to know people who felt nurtured by their religious families, but for a long time, for me, religious upbringing meant the two little girls I once walked home with in the fourth grade who, on hearing that I didn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, began screaming, There’s a sin on your soul! You’re going to Hell! Religious upbringing meant my friend who, as a kid, was repeatedly exorcised in her mother’s fundamentalist church and who still had nightmares about it at forty-five; it meant a thirteen-year-old boy who once told me he believed that God would punish his sexually active classmates by giving them AIDS. When I watched The Exorcist in theaters when it first came out and saw adult moviegoers jump up and stumble toward the exits, retching and/or weeping with fear, it was to me yet another example of what a bad effect a religious upbringing could have.

My mother, to her credit, told me that God is love and that there is no hell. But I don’t think I believed her. Even though I have very little conscious religious anxiety, since childhood, I have had dreams that suggest otherwise: dreams of hooded monks carrying huge, grim crosses in processions meant to end in someone’s death by fire, drowning, or quartering; of endless liturgies by faceless choirs to faceless parishioners in cavernous dark churches; of trials, condemnations, sacrifices, and torture. When I wake from these dreams, it is with terror. Such things have actually occurred, but I still have no idea why they are so deeply present in me. Horror movies and creeping cultural fear are obvious sources, but my unconscious has taken these images in with such kinetic intensity and conviction that suggestion and vague historical knowledge don’t seem to have been the cause.

When I was twenty-one, I became a born-again Christian. It was a random and desperate choice; I had dropped out of high school and left home at sixteen, and while I’d had some fun, by twenty-one, things were looking squalid and stupid. My boyfriend had dumped me and I was living in a rooming house and selling hideous rhodium jewelry on the street in Toronto, which is where the Jesus freaks approached me. I had been solicited by these people before and usually gave them short shrift, but on that particular evening I was at a low ebb. They told me that if I let Jesus into my heart right there, even if I just said the words, that everything would be okay. I said, All right, I’ll try it. They praised God and moved on.

Even though my conversion was pretty desultory, I decided to pray that night. I had never seriously prayed before, and all my pent-up desperation and fear made it an act of furious psychic propulsion that lasted almost an hour. It was a very private experience, one that I would find hard to describe; suffice to say that I felt I was being listened to. I started going to a bleak church that had night services and free meals, and was attended heavily by street people and kids with a feverish, dislocated look in their eyes. And, for the first time, I started reading the Bible. For me, it was like running into a brick wall.

I was used to reading, but most of what I read was pretty trashy. Even when it wasn’t, the supple, sometimes convoluted play of modern language entered and exited my mind like radio music—then, of course, there was the actual radio music, the traffic noise, the continual onrush of strangers through the streets I worked, the slower, shifting movements of friends, lovers, alliances, the jabber of electricity and neon in the night. All of which kept my mind and nervous system in a whipsawed condition from which it was difficult to relate to the Bible. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light. I couldn’t even appreciate the beauty of the words. The phrases seemed like big dumb swatches of form imposed on something swift-moving and endlessly changeable. The form was mute, huge, and absolutely immobile. It made me feel like I was being smothered. One clergyman after another would quote from it so intensely, as if its big, majestic opacity was meaningful in and of itself, and I would try to at least feel the meaning if I couldn’t comprehend it. But all I felt was that persistent sense of truncation, the intimation of something enormous and inchoate trying to squeeze through the static form of written words.

This feeling became most intense when I read Revelation. Next to Job, Revelation is the most cinematic and surreal part of the Bible—it’s a little like a horror movie, which is probably why it was relatively easy for a modern teenager to take in: There’re a lot of explosions. It seemed terribly real to me; I would walk out into the streets, amid the big buildings in which commerce ground forward, and I would feel the violence, the lies, the grotesque pride, the filth, pitching and heaving under the semblance of order. The air would crackle with the unacknowledged brutality of life, and I would feel acutely all the small, stupid betrayals I committed daily, against both myself and others. The angels with their seven stars and their lamps, the beast with his seven heads and ten horns—the static imagery was sinister and senseless to me, and yet all the more convincing for it. I could imagine angels and beasts looming all about us, incomprehensible and invisible to our senses the way the images in a photograph would be incomprehensible and invisible to a cat. Their stars and lamps and horns seemed like peculiar metaphors on the page, but, I feared, when the divine horses came down, with their fire and teeth and snake tails, their reality would be all too clear. I lay in my bed and prayed, trying to convince myself of God’s love, but my prayers seemed a rag in a typhoon.

Besides, I couldn’t help but think it was awfully harsh. Malignant sores, scorpions, fire, men gnawing their tongues with pain—I knew people were horrible, but even in my youth I could also see that most people did the best they could. Even as angry and fearful and disappointed as I was, I knew I wouldn’t torture people like that, and I didn’t see how I could be kinder than God. I was moved when I read, in 1 Corinthians 13: Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But I also remember thinking, And Love is not pathologically cruel, either.

The rage of Revelation sometimes made my compassion feel weak and mealymouthed, but my reservations were not only humanitarian. I was more perturbed by what to me was the mechanical quality, not just of Revelation but of the whole Bible. You had to worship God in exactly a certain way, according to certain prescriptions—and Revelation hinted that the rules set out in, say, the Ten Commandments were only one tiny piece of a vast schema in which human ambivalence was simply not a factor.

—

During this time I had a dream that was not about the Bible, but which embodied my consternation about it. In the dream I lived in a house with several other people. We could not get out of the house, and our relationships with one another had been preordained, regardless of feeling. Our actions were controlled by a master whom we never saw. One day a man came to visit us, ostensibly for lunch. He was very polite and even friendly, and we were also friendly with him. But it was understood that he was one of the people who controlled us, and the atmosphere was one of pure dread. During lunch, when one of the men of the house seized and killed one of the household cats, we knew it was because our visitor had somehow made him do it. I couldn’t hide my horror completely, and our visitor looked at me a moment and then said, referring to the mangled body of the cat, That’s what I’m going to do to you one day. I understood him to mean that he was going to rape me, and I said, But I’m married, not because it mattered to me, but because I knew that the only thing that mattered to him were his laws, including the law of marriage. Then I became too angry to go along with this and I added, Even though I don’t respect my husband. Very threateningly—after all, it’s part of the law that we love our spouses—the visitor asked, Do you have sex with your husband? I answered yes, and it was clear from my tone that I did so in order to obey the law. That’s good, said the visitor, because your husband is a very intelligent man. Even for a dream, this was a strange moment: There was such a sense of approval for the fact of my husband’s intelligence, but it had nothing to do with the man he was; rather, the approval was all for the idea of an intelligent man and a dutiful wife paying him the homage of sex. The hellish thing was, within the dream, it was true. Even though I didn’t love my husband, I considered him intelligent. And so I said, Yes, he is very intelligent. I said it for complicated reasons. Partly to please the visitor, whom I was afraid of, but more to make some emotional contact with him by invoking a concept he had codified as law, and making him see that I respected intelligence, too. The way he looked at me when I said this was also complicated. It was a look of respect for my miserable loyalty to my husband, for my detached admiration for his mind. It was a look that appreciated my humanity but would give it only a tiny space in which to live, a look a torturer might give a victim who had just expressed a sentiment the torturer considered noble, but that would not prevent the torture from taking place.

The prison house of this dream seemed to me to be a metaphor for our human state, the circumstances of our birth into families not of our choosing, and our inability to free ourselves from a psychological makeup learned before we can decide for ourselves what we want to be. The visitor seemed like the God in the Bible, who is kind only as long as you adhere to the rules, and who will sometimes decide to punish you anyway. God famously doesn’t afflict Job because of anything Job has done, but because he wants to prove a point to Satan.

—

Twenty years later, I am sympathetic with my first assessment; to me, in spite of the soft, radiant beauty of many of its passages, the Bible still has a mechanical quality, a refusal to brook complexity that feels brutal and violent. There has been a change, however. When I look at Revelation now, it still seems frightening and impenetrable, and it still suggests an inexorable, ridiculous order that is unknowable by us, in which our earthly concerns matter very little. However, it no longer reads to me like a chronicle of arbitrarily inflicted cruelty. It reads like a terrible abstract of how we violate ourselves and others and thus bring down endless suffering on earth. When I read And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pain and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds, I think of myself and others I’ve known or know who blaspheme life itself by failing to have the courage to be honest and kind—and how then we rage around and lash out because we hurt. When I read the word fornication, I don’t read it as a description of sex outside legal marriage: I read it as sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of honor or even real playfulness. I still don’t know what to make of much of it, but I’m inclined to read it as a writer’s primitive attempt to give form to his moral urgency, to create a structure that could contain and give ballast to the most desperate human confusion.

I’m not sure how to account for this change. I think it mainly has to do with gradually maturing and becoming more deeply aware of my own mechanicalness and my own stringent limitations when it comes to giving form to impossible complexity—something writers understand very well. It probably has to do with my admittedly dim understanding of how apparently absolute statements can contain enormous meaning and nuance without losing their essential truth. And it has to do with my expanded ability to accept my own fear, and to forgive myself for my own mechanical responses to things I don’t understand. In the past, my compassion was small—perhaps immature is a better word—and conditional. I could not accept what I read in the biblical book because I could feel the truth of it in my own psyche. Now I recognize, with pain, a genuine description of how hellish life can be, and that it is not God who sent us to this hell.

To me, these realizations don’t mean I have arrived at a point of any real knowledge, but they are interesting as markers of my development. I imagine that twenty years from now, when and if I read Revelation, I will once again see it the same, but differently. I will look forward to it.

Communion: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, EDITED BY DAVID ROSENBERG, 1994

THE TROUBLE WITH FOLLOWING THE RULES

ON DATE RAPE, VICTIM CULTURE, AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

In the early 1970s, I had an experience that could be described as date rape, even if it didn’t happen when I was on a date. I was sixteen and staying in the apartment of a slightly older girl I’d just met in a seedy community center in Detroit, where I was just passing through. I’d been in her apartment for a few days when an older guy (he was probably in his mid-twenties) came over and asked us if we wanted to drop some acid. In those years, doing acid with strangers was consistent with my idea of a possible good time, so I shared a tab with them. When I started peaking, my hostess decided she had to go see her boyfriend, and there I was, alone with this guy, who, suddenly, was in my face.

He seemed to be coming on to me, but I wasn’t sure. LSD is a potent drug, and on it, my perception was just short of hallucinatory. On top of that, he was black and urban-poor, which meant that I, being very inexperienced and suburban-white, did not know how to read him the way I might have read another white kid from my own milieu. I tried to distract him with conversation, but it was hard, considering that I was having trouble with logical sentences, let alone repartee. During one long silence, I asked him what he was thinking. Avoiding my eyes, he replied, That if I wasn’t such a nice guy, you could really be getting screwed. This sounded to me like a threat, albeit a low-key one. But instead of asking him to explain himself or leave, I changed the subject. Some moments later, when he put his hand on my leg, I let myself be drawn into sex because I could not face the idea that if I said no, things might get ugly. I don’t think he had any idea of how unwilling I was—the cultural unfamiliarity cut both ways—and I suppose he may have thought that white girls just kind of lie there and don’t do or say much. My bad time was made worse by his extreme gentleness; he was obviously trying very hard to turn me on, which, for reasons I didn’t understand, broke my heart. Even as inexperienced as I was, I could see that he wanted a sweet time.

For some time after, I described this event as the time I was raped. I knew when I said it that the description wasn’t accurate, that I had not said no, and that I had not been physically forced. Yet it felt accurate to me. In spite of my ambiguous, even empathic feelings for my unchosen partner, unwanted sex on acid is a nightmare, and I did feel violated by the experience. At times I even elaborately lied about what had happened, grossly exaggerating the threatening words, adding violence—not out of shame or guilt, but because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts. Every now and then, in the middle of telling an exaggerated version of the story, I would remember the actual man and internally pause, uncertain why I was saying these things or why they felt true—and then I would continue with the story. I am ashamed to admit this, because it is embarrassing and because it conforms to the worst stereotypes of white women. I am also afraid the admission could be taken as evidence that women lie to get revenge. My lies were told far from the event (I’d left Detroit), and not for revenge, but in service of what I felt to be the metaphorical truth—although what that truth was is not at all clear to me, then or even now.

—

I remember my experience in Detroit, including the aftermath, every time I hear or read yet another discussion of what constitutes date rape. I remember it when yet another critic castigates victimism and complains that everyone imagines himself or herself to be a victim and that no one accepts responsibility anymore. I could imagine telling my story as a verification that rape occurs by subtle threat as well as by overt force. I could also imagine casting myself as one of those crybabies who want to feel like victims. Both stories would be true and not true. The complete truth is more complicated than most of the intellectuals who have written scolding essays on victimism seem willing to accept. I didn’t even begin to understand my own story fully until I described it to an older woman many years later, as proof of the unreliability of feelings. Oh, I think your feelings were reliable, she replied. It sounds like you were raped. It sounds like you raped yourself. I didn’t like her tone, but I immediately understood what she meant, that in failing to even try to speak up for myself, I had, in a sense, done violence to myself.

I don’t say this in a tone of self-recrimination. I was in a difficult situation: I was very young and unready to deal with such an intense culture clash of poverty and privilege, such contradictory levels of power and vulnerability, let alone ready to deal with it on drugs. But the difficult circumstances alone do not explain my inability to speak for myself. I was unable to effectively stand up for myself because I had never been taught how.

When I was growing up in the sixties, I was taught by the adult world that good girls did not have sex outside marriage and bad girls did. This rule had clarity going for it, but little else; as it was presented to me, it allowed no room for what I actually might feel, what I might want or not want. Within the confines of this rule, I didn’t count for much, and so I rejected it. Then came the less clear rules of cultural trend and peer example, which said that if you were cool, you wanted to have sex as much as possible with as many people as possible. This message was never stated as a rule, but, considering how absolutely it was woven into the social etiquette of the day (at least in the circles I care about), it may as well have been. It suited me better than the adult’s rule—it allowed me my sexuality at least—but again it didn’t take into account what I might actually want or not want.

The encounter in Detroit, however, had nothing to do with being good or bad, cool or uncool. It was about someone wanting something I didn’t want. Since I had only learned how to follow rules or social codes that were somehow more important than I was, I didn’t know what to do in a situation where no rules obtained and that required me to speak up on my own behalf. I had never been taught that my behalf mattered. And so I felt helpless, even victimized, without really knowing why.

My parents and my teachers believed that social rules existed to protect me and that adhering to these rules constituted social responsibility. Ironically, my parents did exactly what many commentators recommend as a remedy for victimism. They told me that they loved me and that I mattered a lot, but this was not the message I got from the way they conducted themselves in relation to authority and social convention—which was not only that I didn’t matter but that they didn’t matter. In this, they were typical of other adults I knew, as well as of the culture around them. When I began to have trouble in school, both socially and academically, a counselor exhorted me to just play the game—meaning to go along with everything from social policy to the adolescent pecking order—regardless of what I thought of the game. My aunt, with whom I lived for a short while, actually burned my jeans and T-shirts because they violated what she understood to be the standards of decorum. A close friend of mine lived in a state of war with her father because of her hippie clothes and hair—which were, of course, de rigueur among her peers. Upon discovering that she had been smoking pot, he had her institutionalized.

Many middle-class people—both men and women—have learned to equate responsibility with obeying external rules. And when the rules no longer quite apply, they don’t know what to do—much like the enraged, gun-wielding protagonist of the movie Falling Down, played by Michael Douglas, who ends his ridiculous trajectory by helplessly declaring, I did everything they told me to. If I had been brought up to reach my own conclusions about which rules were congruent with my particular experience of the world, those rules would’ve had more meaning for me. Instead, I was usually given a set of static pronouncements. For example, when I was thirteen, I was told by my mother that I couldn’t wear a short skirt because nice girls don’t wear short skirts above the knee. I countered, of course, by saying that my friend Patty wore skirts above the knee. Patty is not a nice girl, replied my mother. But Patty was nice. My mother is a very intelligent and sensitive person, but it didn’t occur to her to define for me what she meant by nice and what nice had to do with skirt length, and how the two definitions might relate to what I had observed to be nice or not nice—and then let me decide for myself. It’s true that most thirteen-year-olds aren’t interested in, or much capable of, philosophical discourse, but that doesn’t mean that adults can’t explain themselves more completely to children. Part of becoming responsible is learning how to make a choice about where you stand in respect to the social code and then holding yourself accountable for your choice. In contrast, many children who grew up in my milieu were given abstract absolutes that were placed before us as if our thoughts, feelings, and observations were irrelevant.

—

Recently, I heard a panel of feminists on talk radio advocating that laws be passed prohibiting men from touching or making sexual comments to women on the street. Listeners called in to express reactions both pro and con, but the one I remember was a caller who said, I’m an Italian woman. And if a man touches me and I don’t want it, I don’t need a law. I’m gonna beat the hell out of him. The panelists were silent.