48 Er

I had received the greatest intellectual experience known to man, it felt to me, and it had been dumb accident. I had stumbled through the signs, symbols, myths, and allegories as mystics had described.

At first I called it my enlightenment.

To some of my close Christian friends I said that I had been possessed by the spirit of Jesus.

My friend John Rutt told his friends at the time that I was possessed by the devil.

One day when I was out of town he and a friend rummaged through all of my closets and drawers in search of Satanic objects and other evidence of demonic possession and ritual, witchcraft, and the occult.

Other acquaintances were certain that I was under the influence of alcohol or pot or more powerful drugs.

I bought a big house and invited my friend John and his family to move in with me and mine. I imagined an arrangement like The Farm, the commune in Tennessee led by Gaskin.

My wife objected—

Flat refused.

"No!"

Leigh thought I had lost my mind.

Gone mad.

She asked our friend Rick to come to the house to speak with me and to assess my sanity.

He judged me sane.

My friend and colleague Jim thought perhaps some physical condition was to blame. A volunteer fireman and emergency medical technician, Jim strolled into my office one afternoon with his blood pressure cuff and though I laughed at his cajolery he insisted I submit to the procedure.

My blood pressure was normal.

The college president and the academic dean called me onto the carpet to inform me that a dozen persons had called their offices to inform them of my peculiar behavior and to ask if I were mentally ill.

Several demanded I be fired.

Immediately.

Now.

Paul, one of my best friends on the faculty, told me for the first time a year later that in the fall of 1975 he had announced to students in his classes that he thought I was schizophrenic.

Paul apologized.

"I shouldn't have said that," he said. "It wasn't true and I'm sorry."

Truth—

My wildest dreams had come true. I had begun to speculate upon the yinyang in the year 1969, on the symbolic nature of the name of Nixon, the double negative split by the homicidal x, the noxin reversal, and on the lunar landing, that achievement of man's most ancient recorded dream and yearning, the association of the moon with the stone before the lord's tomb, with resurrection, with light, with the cosmic sea, with the ocean, with woman, with fecundity, with egg, with mystic luminous egg, with consummation, and then as if even all this were still not enough the war in Vietnam ended—the war no more.

No more war.

I read mahayana into the big boats which brought Asian orphans to our shore, children never to know their parents, young Oedipi they had become, and how many unknown fathers might they one day slay in their travels and rages, the king's aides pushed aside, the bitter words, the hatred of wealth and privilege and rank, the deed done and forgotten, the unnatural return to the mothers, the nightmares, barren women, droughts, deserts stretching into the fertile kingdom, nam become man and man nam, everything topsy turvy, upside down, inside out, crazy, perverse, murderous, all traced back to war, all back to the killing, to Cain, and I had figured it out, yes, it had been shown to me, not just stated and described, but revealed and experienced, yes, just as the holy books had related, perfect, exact, detailed, all of the connections and interconnections exposed.

It was all killing.

All.

This was the truth of truths.

Reality.

The practice of zen had opened this to me.

God.

My own church had been fulfilled.

Peace.

I saw the crucifixion as if conducted before my open eyes.

Lord.

The hammering, hammering.

Nail.

The agony, prayers, sweat, cursing criminals, cursing soldiers, shouts, weeping.

Hanged.

It became one with my tenth grade insect collection—the beetles and butterflies that I had netted and chloroformed for my biology teacher Mr. Kelly and had then pinned and mounted each with its spike through its thorax; and the next day there they were awake, alive again, their legs and wings waving and stroking, crawling to nowhere, legs moving, waving, pulling the still, dead air on the academic sea of death, our scholastic exhibit walking in place on its slim, slender spike toward my A, toward my A in biology, for the record, like the crucified Spartacus and tens of thousands of crucified, mounted, exhibited slaves and then—

Jesus.

The tens of millions of victims of oppression, exploitation, killing, and war all assembled together in my head—the dead of slavery, WWI, the Russian Revolution, WWII, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Chinese Revolution, the famines in Africa, the wars in Southeast Asia, in Korea and in Vietnam, the Cambodian Revolution, the guerrillas and death squads of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in Latin and South America—the masses and multitudes numberless, numberless, nameless to me, their personal histories forever unrecorded, lost, still buried, erased, obliterated by the men many of whose names appeared on the tombs and plaques and civic buildings and stones and public monuments dedicated to the memory of war. Avoiding my direct route home I walked zen for an hour in the dark and cold and at home I couldn't sleep and lay awake all night in my bed.

Johannesburg.

Calcutta.

Mexico City.

"I don't worry about nuclear war," a woman at the party had told me as we fixed our drinks in the kitchen.

I did not respond.

"I feel like the major powers are smart enough to hold their war out in the middle of nowhere," she explained.

"You mean in Africa, Asia, or South America," I said.

"Yes."

Just a few minutes later her husband came into the kitchen.

"Hello."

I told him what his wife had said.

She butted in.

"I guess I just don't think very much about my integrity."

She smiled.

"I think about mine every single day," I said.

He smiled.

"It tortures me," I said.

He laughed.

In class the next morning I listed on the board some of the characters of my antihistory, the names of Er, Rama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao Tsu, Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Patanjali.

I connected Dante, Luther, Shakespeare.

Columbus.

I summed up for my students the modern era.

Malthus.

Darwin.

Marx.

Spengler.

But that night I was seized again by the damned who compelled me to visions of their horrors, tortures, görings—dead photographs, moving pictures—and to hear obsessive, unending tortures, horrors eternal.

Groaning growing, groans—

Ceaseless torment, immortal hurt, immortal unrest.

Corpses, undead.

Piteous interminable waves of moaning.

Agony.

Piteous groaning, interminable waves of groaning.

Weak, helpless multitudes—the millions.

Crosses, swastikas, the stars and bars.

Dusts, bones.

Hamlet 1984.

Me.

It ended.