* * *
—
If he had emailed me, I would have emailed him back, and though this was a few years before Gmail, there’s some chance I’d have a record of what was said. Instead, faced with the seemingly insurmountable prospect of finding a stamp and an envelope, I called him. We had yet another blowout, eventually coming to yet another détente. I kept my grades up, played the good son during phone calls and visits home as best I could, and sought transcendence and fought the class war on my own time. Dad did not visit Gainesville again until after I graduated: the summer of 2004. He picked me up in a Ryder truck loaded with all the stuff from our house in Miami, which had just been sold. To this I added two or three boxes’ worth of books, CDs, and clothes. We drove toward Nashville, stopping for the night in Warner Robins, Georgia, which Dad picked because it was slightly more than halfway there: We could light out early, hit Nashville by lunchtime. We couldn’t know this then, but just as the letter he sent me in 2001 became the model for the one I sent him in 2007, this drive in 2004 was the same one we would take ten years later, albeit in reverse, when I was tasked with getting him out of Nashville and bringing him back home.
* * *
—
Not long after that disastrous visit, I sent my father what would turn out to be his favorite gift I ever gave him: a paperback book called The Jesus Mysteries, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, a somewhat dubious work of pop history which seeks to prove that the historical Jesus Christ never existed, that his story was only a patchwork of pagan folktales and Greek mythology tacked onto a rumor and a political movement. He read the book several times and talked about it often: how the authors hoisted Christianity by its own petard of hypocrisy and bullshit. The only books on his shelf in his last apartment were the books that I have written or edited; an illustrated book of Jewish prayers, which he’d had since his own childhood; and The Jesus Mysteries.
I couldn’t tell him that I came across The Jesus Mysteries in the course of learning about Gnosticism, which—precisely because it was a heresy—seemed safer to admit I was interested in than Christianity as such. Eventually I moved on to the real stuff, and for a few years flirted with the prospect of converting.
My frustration with Judaism was not what it demanded of me, but rather with my perception that it did not demand enough. It seemed abstract and bloodless and life-denying and hopelessly bourgeois. I’m well enough read now to know that all these charges are more or less identical with those levied against Christianity by Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, among countless others. My critiques were not nearly as specific to Judaism as I thought they were at the time. They were, for the most part, an angsty, artsy teenager’s critiques of bourgeois institutions as such. You could press the same charges against any religion whose role as a vector of culture has over time come to supplant its original purpose, and thereby semi-secularized it, smoothing the faith out of “the faith” until you’re left with the spiritual equivalent of sea glass.
But I was enough of an innocent—and, despite my best efforts otherwise, enough of a Jew—to not know any of this before I left for college, where along with the usual things you expect college students to experiment with, I found the freedom to follow my spiritual instincts wherever they might take me. This quest became deeply intertwined with the aesthetic and political reinventions I was undergoing at the same time. I took a class on the history of apocalyptic thought where we read Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages and other works of Marxist historicism. These texts suggested a moral and historical continuity with the anarchist-activist-DIY scene that I had become involved with.
A lot of the people in that scene had dropped out of school, or had never gone in the first place. I thought about dropping out myself sometimes, but not seriously. I loved being a student. It never ceased to amaze and slightly stupefy me that I could just pick whatever I wanted to know about—from queer theory to Shakespeare, from modernism to creative writing—and some expert would show up and tell me everything he or she knew about it. It still blows my mind that the system works this way, and this perhaps more than any other reason is why I so love being a teacher. You never know which book on your syllabus is going to be the one that changes a mind or a life, but you always know that any of them can.
* * *
—
In a poetry workshop I took in my sophomore year we were assigned Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s Supernatural Love. I still have my copy of that book, so I can see all of my old notes. The most embarrassing and emblematic piece of marginalia is at the opening of the poem “Darwin in 1881.” Schnackenberg writes: “Sleepless as Prospero back in his bedroom / In Milan, with all his miracles / Reduced to sailors’ tales / He sits up in the dark.” The underlining is mine and next to it I have written “and Jesus was a sailor…” because I understood a trope was being drawn upon here but the only other text I knew in which Christ is associated with the sea was Leonard Cohen’s song “Suzanne” (Cohen himself having been at that time another fairly recent discovery).
Clearly, I was reinventing every wheel I came across. Moreover, my literary, spiritual, and political educations were functionally indistinct from one another. I was happy to abide in paradoxes. I devoured Chesterton’s Orthodoxy but also Bataille’s Accursed Share; Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam meant no less to me than Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone.
* * *
—
My novel, The Gospel of Anarchy, which came out in 2011, was my attempt to capture both the ecstasy and the entropy of the Gainesville years. One of the novel’s central ideas is that Christianity and anarchism are two streams from a common spring, because they both evince an ethos of radical emancipation. The novel also attempts to reckon with Kierkegaard’s exegesis of the sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling. I was for a long time fascinated by the argument that Abraham, obeying God, must nonetheless be considered a murderer, even though his willingness to kill his son is the result of his unshakeable faith. There can be no exception made for Abraham, insists Kierkegaard, notwithstanding that he obeys an order higher than the law, nor that the deed was never done, but only would have been done had God not commanded him to stop, even as He had first commanded him to proceed. The deed is in the will and so too the sin. The highest devotion, says Kierkegaard, is to break God’s own law out of love for God and then to suffer the consequences of having committed the transgression, so that the sanctity of God’s law is upheld even as it is violated on God’s command.
This reading is in keeping with the classical Christian notion that the God of the Old Testament is the God of Law, whereas the God of the New Testament is the God of Love. It’s not hard to see why Jews might resent the idea that their God does not love them, why they might consider such an assertion to be an anti-Semitic canard. Except I didn’t see it, not then. It was the experience of writing the novel, and then of having to live with having written it, that precipitated a different reckoning: I was forced to confront the fact that I knew next to nothing about the faith in which I was ostensibly raised.
I had, for far too long, blamed others for this blank spot on my spiritual-intellectual map: my parents, my Hebrew school, American Judaism’s understanding of itself as a primarily secular-cultural rather than religious-spiritual tradition. But the question of whether or to what degree my blame was justly assigned only served to obscure the fact that the act of blame itself was backward-looking and useless. I had invented a Christianity for myself when I’d needed one, hadn’t I? Why shouldn’t I invent a Judaism too?
The work is ongoing: Bellow, Ozick, Kafka, Scholem; Alter, Buber, Heschel, Paley, Cole. On and on. And whatever else it is or may become, this work is first and foremost a literary undertaking. In Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets, in a chapter called “The Theology of Pathos,” I find an exegesis of the Isaac story to rival Kierkegaard�
�s. Heschel writes that “Man is not only an image of God; he is a perpetual concern of God. Man is a consort, a partner, a factor in the life of God.” Therefore, “It was because of the experience of God’s responding to him in his plea for Sodom that Abraham did not question the command to sacrifice his only son.” For Heschel, the question of God’s law is secondary to that of God’s personality. Abraham knows God the way one knows a spouse or a best friend. He judges God trustworthy and it turns out his trust is well founded.
A factor in the life of God.
Isn’t that beautiful? I love it. I wish I’d known about it ten years ago, when I was writing my novel. On the other hand, the version of me who knew his Heschel ten years ago wouldn’t have needed to write The Gospel of Anarchy in the first place. He might not have read Kierkegaard at all, and he certainly never would have met the people who turned out to be some of the best friends he ever had.
It’s a pretty safe bet at this point that I’m not going to convert to Christianity, but the life, work, and example of Christ still have meaning and weight to me. His radical and boundless love; his politics of universal emancipation and inclusion; his belief that in order to fully understand what it meant to be human he had to experience not merely suffering, but forsakenness. That to know what it is to be us he had to know what we feel when we call out for him and he is not there. At a guess I’d say I’m as much a Christian as Leonard Cohen ever was. And I’m coming to understand something that I believe Cohen knew: Whatever else your Christophilia does for you, it will not relieve either the complexity or the urgency of the question of what it means to be a Jew.
* * *
—
“Knowledge increases unreality,” writes Gjertrud Schnackenberg in “Darwin in 1881.” It is the last line of the first stanza, just a dozen lines down from the passage I quoted earlier. I was smart enough, at nineteen years old, to underline the sentence. What took a long time was learning to read it.
* * *
—
Earlier, when I told the story of my trip to New York in April right after Dad died, there was one part that I left out, because it didn’t fit with the way that I wanted to end the chapter: that portrait of me and my sister walking off into the sunset in Central Park. Because life is not a story—it’s just what we make stories out of—there is no last page as long as we are still living it, and so it keeps happening after you stop reading the book, after the writer stops writing it. What happened after our walk was nothing special, which is another reason that I left it out. My sister and I went back to her apartment, ordered dinner, drank the whiskey my sister-in-law had sent us. We watched TV and griped about the president. My flight to Indianapolis was late Monday afternoon out of JFK. We woke up the next morning and had breakfast. My sister had taken the day off work, was talking about going to the gym, maybe cleaning her apartment. Getting back to her life, or at any rate starting to try. We said our goodbyes and I left, but it was too early to head to the airport yet. I took the subway to Fort Greene to get coffee with Anika.
Anika is two or three years younger than Eli. His cohort were juniors when she started at Pratt. I had Anika in my freshman writing studio and I was impressed with her right from the start. She was a smart reader and a strong writer. We were from the same part of Florida; she too had done a stint as a child actor. She seemed a little lost among her own cohort and I sometimes suspected she was having a rough adjustment, whether to New York or college life or the hothouse of the Pratt Writing Program, I wasn’t sure. But I thought she’d be a good fit with Eli and his crew. Also, to be perfectly candid, I wanted to work with her again before I left. For all these reasons, I asked the director of the program to give her a spot in my spring elective, despite the fact that it was already full and had a wait list.
If it could go without saying that I saw something of myself in Eli, and that our teacher-student relationship and subsequent friendship were both, at some level, rooted in this sense of recognition, it probably needs to be said outright that the same was true of Anika. For obvious reasons, it is more difficult for a straight male professor to mentor a female student than a male one without certain questions being raised as to the nature of his interest. And yet, if the professor’s response to this difficulty is to only mentor male students, he is depriving all those women of their chance to be mentored, to make a lasting connection with a writer in the generation above theirs. And not for nothing, he is also depriving himself of that same connection. To try to mold the minds of people whose minds you refuse to know seems to me an act of hubris, and bound to fail.
Eli’s cohort all graduated in 2015—they left when I did—but Anika was still in her senior year when Eli died. As I said before, she is the person who called me with the news, and from that point forward we were in regular contact. It sounded like the whole Pratt Writing Program was, understandably, in a dark place. People were traumatized, lashing out, hurting one another and themselves. Rather than relieved to be removed from all this, I felt guilty about being far away while people I cared about were struggling to hang on.
I would not, under normal circumstances, have considered a friendship with a student while she was still a student, but these were not normal circumstances (and she was no longer my student). We emailed a lot, sometimes talked on the phone. She told me about the funeral, about spending time with Eli’s parents, John and Dorothy, and about her own family. We talked about the things that families go through and the choices people make; what it means to love someone while still holding them accountable—in your own mind, if nowhere else—for the mistakes they made and what those mistakes have cost.
Honesty can accommodate anger but not resentment.
Love can be clear-eyed enough to include judgment but only if it also contains forgiveness.
In this way Anika improbably became the only person other than my wife, my sister, and a few close friends with whom I spoke about my father, during what turned out to be the last year of his life. As Amy Hempel puts it in “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” (a story I had in fact taught to both Anika and to Eli when they were each freshmen), we became “fluent now in the language of grief.”
* * *
—
I got off the C train at the Bedford–Nostrand stop, lugged my suitcase to the coffee shop near Pratt where we were meeting. We talked for about an hour. She gave me a crystal from her altar and a patch for Eli’s band, Luxury Condos. The patch is a black fabric rectangle with white screen printing: the band’s initials and a cracked martini glass whose stem is intersected by an arrow in flight. The band played hardcore punk and I’d always meant to make it to one of their shows but never had.
Back in Indiana, I took the patch and the crystal out of my backpack and tried to figure out what to do with them. I had a small wooden box that my mother had given me (it is carved to look like a book, the lid its front cover), which I had brought to hold my wallet and keys, only they hadn’t fit, so I had been keeping change in it. I dumped the change out, put the patch and the crystal in. Feeling that this was correct, but somehow not enough, I added a spent shell that I’d kept from my trip to the shooting range, the first round I’d fired, the one that had bounced off my glasses and ended up in my shirt. This trio of objects in the small wooden box became my own little altar, so to speak. When I came home to Portland in May it came with me. When I left again in August, I left the bullet behind but put the patch and the crystal into a small pocket of my backpack, and that’s where they’ve stayed ever since, except when I take them out to look at them. They’re on my desk beside my notebook as I write these lines.
* * *
—
I never felt as far away from New York as on the day of Eli’s funeral, which wasn’t in New York anyway, but in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he’d grown up. I remember talking to my father about this, telling him how much I had liked Eli, how much I’d admired him, as a
writer and as a person. How in light of the sheer randomness and stupidity of what had happened, I was torn between two mutually exclusive feelings: that I had betrayed him by not doing something—anything—to somehow get between him and his addiction, and that he had somehow betrayed me by overdosing.
Dad listened to me for a long time. He let me get everything out. When I was finally finished, he reminded me that what had happened to Eli had nothing to do with me. He told me that it was just as delusional to take Eli’s death as a personal affront as it was to imagine that I could have prevented it. The latter notion, he thought, was particularly pernicious, because it was at its heart a fantasy of my own self-importance, a version of Only I can fix it. “The fact is,” Dad said, “people are complicated, and sometimes you can help them out and sometimes you can’t. You can be there for them as much as they’ll let you, but in the end people have to save themselves, and they either do or they don’t.”
Dad calmed me down and helped me get a handle on myself. He helped me recognize that what I actually felt was helpless. I wanted Eli’s death to be a missing homework assignment, something he could make up for with a late-night cram session and some extra credit. I wanted to be his teacher again, to be able to say, “Listen, you had a bad week, but let’s not let this wreck your final grade.” Dad, of all people, was the one who had to tell me, “You feel helpless because you are helpless. You can pretend that that’s not true or you can admit that it is, but it’ll be just as true either way.” It was some of the best advice he ever gave me. I have often wondered whether he knew that he was also telling me something about how to deal with him.
Riding with the Ghost Page 14
