Living With a Wild God

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  By the end of the day, this seemed less like a moment of glorious resistance than a narrow escape. I understood that my test answers were seriously wrong, off the scale, possibly insane, and that I would be exposed as a deviant with no place in this sunny, superficially friendly new world. When I got home I went to my room and broke into tears. It’s too late now to perform a chemical assay and determine how much these were the hot tears of a fresh hurt and how much the familiar balm of childish self-pity, but there was definitely hurt involved. I had come to believe, especially as the acne subsided in the last year or so, that it was up to me to decide how much to be involved with the growing category of “other people,” with Joseph Conrad weighing in heavily on the side of involvement. He had convinced me, in story after story, that tragedy awaits the person who fails to reach out in love, to make a commitment to other people or even just a connection. There it was in Victory: “Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to love, to hope—to put its trust in life,” to take the plunge, in other words, that Conrad’s hero takes far too late. In my journal, I had chided myself more than once for my aloofness, even finding it “deplorable,” and promised to correct it someday when the opportunity arose to develop “emotional involvements.”

  But now the personality test raised the possibility that the choice might not be mine to make. Maybe I had been in the wilderness for too long and developed some rude odor that no one expects to find indoors. What with all that reading, thinking, and staying up late to make notes, I had let myself go, failed to keep up my credentials as a human being, and turned into the kind of freak who had to be ejected from human society lest the general consensus be undone. I did not belong here, as sooner or later the school officials and everyone else would realize.

  I dried my eyes, went back downstairs, and cautiously announced to my mother that California was not working out for me; it was obvious that I didn’t fit in. What was I expecting—pity? California wasn’t working for her either. My father was rarely around and she had left all her civic attachments in Lowell, where by the end of our stay she had risen to the presidency of the citywide PTA. So she just smacked the iron down hard on the handkerchief she was ironing for the sole purpose of enabling it to stick neatly out from my father’s breast pocket and told me that I had always thought I was “special” and that was what was wrong with me, because I wasn’t special at all. I was just like everyone else and I might as well get used to it.

  Nevertheless I managed, with no help from my parents, to transfer out of Life Adjustment. The next day I went to the administration office, housed in a bungalow of its own, where I announced to some adult at a desk that I could not take this course, that it went against my most fundamental principles. She kindly allowed me to switch to typing, which I had failed to learn when I went from “typing practice” to longhand journal-keeping. Possibly she took me for some kind of hard-line Christian who found Life Adjustment offensively secular by virtue of its inattention to the afterlife.

  After that I stopped worrying about being a deviant and began to think of myself in a new way, as a rebel, and no one, however psychiatrically or politically conservative, should hold this against me, because at least it was a halting step toward social connectedness, an acknowledgment that there were other people and that I existed in some kind of relationship to them. I fit into the human enterprise after all, even if my role was to overthrow it from within. I laid this out a few months after our arrival in Los Angeles, in an entry I submitted to a newspaper essay contest on the theme of “the role of youth in our society” or a similar abstraction that could only have been crafted in an era when newspaper editors suffered from an excess of job security. Unfortunately no copy of my essay survives, but the general idea was that “society” tends toward stagnation and conformity unless continually challenged by the young. That was it: no complaints about racial injustice or nuclear war, neither of which loomed large in my metaphysical scheme of things, just a general exhortation to stand up, question everything, take nothing for granted. I comforted myself when I lost with the fact that I would not have accepted the prize anyway, which was a date with the young actor who had starred in a movie called The Restless Years.

  What I was rebelling against? Well, of course the great collectivist project of high school, which was to transform us all into interchangeable units capable of occupying the interchangeable houses that made up Southern California suburbia. I learned to smoke, which I didn’t have to go outside of the family to master, since my beloved aunt Jean, on a rare visit, introduced me to her menthol-flavored Newports, from which I graduated to stealing my parents’ Camels. Smoking came in handy for waiting out high school’s most fascist institution—football “pep rallies” at which attendance was mandatory. Kathy, one of my first California friends, and I would hide in adjacent stalls in a girls’ restroom and pass a cigarette back and forth while the sound of brainwashed chanting poured in through the window. We thought that if we stood on the toilet seats no one would see us by looking under the doors. It did not occur to us, at that point in the history of American public health, that cigarette smoke had a detectable odor.

  Or you could say that I was rebelling against banality, but only if you understood by banality the near-universal refusal to recognize “the situation,” including the impending deaths of all of us. It made me almost frantic that everyone could go on doing what they were doing without ever acknowledging what was going on—the steady turning of the earth and passage of days, leading, as far as anyone could tell, to the absolute darkness of Nothing. That first summer in Los Angeles, while I was taking physics in summer school and polishing up my French by reading Gide’s La porte étroite, I wrote:

  Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, “What difference does it make?” Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others. Being constantly subjected to it at school, at work [I had a phone-answering job for a TV repair service], I feel like screaming and throwing things.

  In school I made a few friends that first semester, mostly bright, studious, college-bound kids like myself to eat lunch with and occasionally see after school. It was easy to make friends here, where people did not sort themselves by religion, and where no one was impressed, one way or another, by my atheism, or intent on converting me. A school of this size even offered a small selection of fellow misfits like Kathy, who was rich and self-assured enough to giggle at the monstrous expectation that we fit into some Hollywood teenage norm. I lived not far from David—poor, chronically morose David—who would have been my boyfriend if such a concept had ever arisen between us. We got together at his house after school, where there was an actual bar in the living room, and if no one was around we would sit cross-legged on the floor and sample his parents’ liquor while we talked about something like furniture: What did it really add to anything? Why did people submit to such an obvious obstruction and burden? There was my first-ever “political” friend, Dina, a Zionist who had spent a year in a kibbutz and glowed with an incomprehensible zeal for agrarian socialism.

  Mostly there was Marina, who daringly wore peasant skirts and hoop earrings to school, and introduced me to the nascent concept of bohemia. I spent more time with her than any other friend, often at her house, which featured an enviably jolly mother and bright, crude, folkish weavings on the walls. Sometimes we studied chemistry together, or at least laughed about it, gleefully naming the day of a major upcoming test—it fell on Friday, April 26—Black Faraday, we called it, in honor of the nineteenth-century chemist Michael Faraday. It was Marina who located the first coffeehouse we ventured out to in Venice, ostensibly in search of folk music. Sometimes someone would take out a guitar and make sounds that I would strain to appreciate while Marina nodded along rapturously. What impressed me most about these places was that nothing was for sale. Hot water and instant coffee were available on a table near the entr
ance, and you could leave some change in a jar if you felt like it. Contrast that to the diner where I now waitressed on weekends and evenings, where in principle every sugar cube had to be accounted for.

  My parents didn’t know about our forays into L.A.’s emerging “beat” scene (which didn’t call itself that—or anything), and this was a good thing since the newspaper seemed to think it was a hotbed of “narcotics” and sexual “deviancy.” Actually there was more so-called deviancy at the diner I worked in, where the ultra-butch middle-aged fry cook had begun giving me long inquiring looks, especially around closing time. I admired her proficiency as a cook, but if she had another life to go home to, a smaller and possibly more squalid kitchen of her own, I did not want to know about it.

  Drugs, yes, there were no doubt some drugs in the coffeehouse culture. Marina and I became friendly with Frank, a guitar player who was our age and went on to become a rock star in the sixties—as I realized years later only when I saw one of his album covers. I was driving my mother’s car when Marina, in the passenger seat, opened the paper bag on her lap to show me that it was filled with a flaky brown substance she identified as Frank’s marijuana, which for some reason he’d asked Marina to hold on to for him. I insisted, over her baffled objections, that we pull over and dump it down a storm drain—before the police caught us, or before we were tempted to try it and descend immediately into delinquency and ruin.

  The real danger of the nascent counterculture was nothing more than the spectacle of grown-ups openly shirking their grown-up responsibilities, sitting around for hours without any visible connection to jobs or offices or factories or families. This was immensely reassuring to me, like finding a pocket of people who’d survived a deadly disease I had just been diagnosed with: Becoming an adult at, say, age eighteen didn’t have to mean giving up everything you cared about and getting press-ganged into a life of domestic service. You could sit in a coffeehouse all day and late into the night if you wanted to, smoking, chatting, drinking bitter coffee, and maybe playing a game of chess. Though there was always the question of what sustained these people in a material sense—whether they had homes and self-renewing bank accounts or slept on the beach. There was no way to judge by the way anyone looked.

  I admired Marina, more so than any of my previous friends, because I knew that of the two of us she was the true Nietzschean, the one who understood better than I did that hilarity is the best response to absurdity. Tell her that we live in the detritus of the Big Bang on some two-bit planet in an undistinguished galaxy—not that I ever put it in quite those words—and she’d roll her eyes and smile as if this tragic circumstance might offer some possibilities for fun. Tell her that we are each individually doomed to death and she might get inspired by an ad on the bus for an attractive and moderately priced cemetery. “It’s never too soon to start thinking about these things,” she said loudly enough to make our fellow passengers squirm, “and what a reasonable price!” If I could control my giggling, I would respond with a riff into what would happen as the city ran out of space to contain the steady onslaught of the dead. Would it become necessary to start digging up lawns? People looked away and once or twice changed their seats. No one ever joined in.

  But she was slippery too, a “phony” was how my mother put it, though my mother was not privy to any actual evidence. If I asked Marina about something she’d told me the week before, she might deny it or say she’d forgotten it or never meant it anyway. She told me with a certain amount of pride that she had fashioned three distinct personalities that she adopted to suit the setting, which was of course one way to beat the “personality tests,” but it left me to guess which Marina I was dealing with from one moment to the next—the good schoolgirl, the prankster, or the fledgling young artist. I had been convinced that she was some sort of creative genius until the afternoon she showed me a poem she had written—something about the moon and soft breezes, I think—which, my limited French and Latin suggested, was the same poem, only in English, as the one in the Spanish textbook that lay open on her desk. When I asked her about this, she shrugged in a way meant to make me feel like a dolt for failing to grasp some obvious principle of poetic convergence.

  Was it really possible to communicate with anyone—at least about anything important? In that first summer in Los Angeles I reported in my journal:

  It was lunchtime at school. I had been reading, apart from my friends. Then I looked up, saw that the grass was green, the sun was warm, and was happy. I rejoined my friends, who were engaged in the most abstract of discussions, abstract because it was so trivial as to be completely unrelated to reality. [They were probably talking about grades and upcoming tests.] So I spoke. I told them, smiling, that it made no difference, none at all, so be happy. They laughed, not from enlightenment and relief, but from surprise. I looked around at the faces all around and realized again what a wall there is between me and them, them and them.

  Or I might be on a bus, studying my fellow passengers for signs of independent conscious existence. “Some read,” I noted, “some look out the window, and I look at them. I would like to say, ‘Here we are, you people, this time and place and us in it will never be again. Wake up!’ But the bus has already moved, and some people have to get off.”

  What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, “Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here?” I wanted them to come pouring out of their houses and cars calling out, “Look at this! Just look at this! Do you see what I see? The strange juice rising in the grass and the trees, the great freely given, unearned beneficence of the sun?” In my fantasy some of them would buttonhole strangers for the first serious conversations of their lives. Others would throw their arms out and their heads back and scream at the sky in alternating terror and ecstasy. Passersby would hug. Tears of recognition and amazement would be shed. It would be the end of loneliness and falsity and the beginning, after all these wasted years, of whatever it is we are supposed to be doing here. And if they didn’t want to respond so demonstratively, then all I asked was a wink here and there, a carefully folded note. “People,” I wrote, “why don’t you make some sign?”

  I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, but I was becoming Prince Myshkin—a holy fool—though with flashes of Zarathrustra, meaning that my grip on the ordinary was slipping away. I studied, read, kept my clothes clean and ironed, showed up for work on time, first at the TV repair place and later as a waitress. But something was pulling at me, something that now seemed so unstoppable, resounding, and obvious that I was no longer reticent about it in my journal. The episodes of dissociation, which had subsided in the gloom of Lowell, were increasing in both frequency and intensity, meaning that I was again seeing things as they actually were, without, as I wrote, “the superimposed fantasy”:

  Often I have sudden jolts when the realness of things is lost. Then things are as if I was just born and had never seen them before. It is an adventure [although] I am delighted when the ground I step on turns out to [still] be there and the sunlight doesn’t materialize into a clashing noise or stream of liquid.

  But now gradually a new philosophical doubt took hold of me. How could I know these glimpses of what seemed to be an underlying reality were “real” when they too were products of my “mental processes”? “My ignorance is unfathomable,” I wrote, “infinite. If I sat down, if I was capable of sitting down and doing some logical reasoning, and followed each circular thought, and figured it all out, I would be desperately unhappy. For the truth which comes from logic is bitter. Everything I do or think is mocked cruelly by that which I cannot alter—the fact of my death.” Or as I put it somewhat more elegantly a few months later, “This is a difficult time. I am Nietzsche’s rope dancer and the rope is imaginary. If I look down for an instant and see that there is nothing there, I’m lost.”

  When someone wanders so far from the flock, people, in their collective vanity, tend to blame the flock. Any
one who wanders off must have been actively pushed away—by family dysfunction, social disappointment, sexual rejection, whatever. Or maybe it was the wanderer’s fault, and, like one of Conrad’s characters, she lost her way because she failed to cultivate the appropriate intraspecies bonds; she forgot about love. Either way, the idea is that what happens to people is all about people; no other factors merit consideration. Try telling a therapist or other member of the helping professions that you are menaced by hazy sunlight or that the sumac trees growing like weeds along railroad tracks fill you with dread, and he or she will want to hear accounts of childhood abuse. This is the conceit of psychiatry and unfortunately of so many novels, even some of the best and most riveting ones: that except for the occasional disease or disaster, the only forces shaping our lives are other humans, and that outside of our web of human interactions there is nothing worth looking into.

  Of course we are shaped by our mutual dependency, and to a degree that is almost embarrassing. I have no argument with that. Other than certain insects, humans are the most social of animals. Infants who are not cuddled or held die of a syndrome called “failure to thrive.” Seemingly successful adults can be driven to depression or suicide by a lover’s rejection or an accumulation of professional slights. Which is to say that we are “hive” animals or—to invoke a more extravagant biological metaphor—we are the individual nuclei studded throughout a syncytium of shared protoplasm, utterly dependent on each other for structure and nutrients. To be pinched off from the main body of the community is to risk real damage, and one form the damage can take, I’m willing to concede, is an inability to enter wholeheartedly into what is socially defined as real.

  So yes, I was a product of the peculiar dynamics of the tiny group of humans I lived with, and the fact that we moved so often only amplified their impact. As a family, we were designed for frictionless mobility with no competing long-term bonds—to friends, for example, or community institutions—that might have diluted our dependency on one another, as either antagonists or potential allies and sources of approval. And it was clear, a few months into our stay in California, that our little encampment was in a state of advanced disrepair. My father had withdrawn to a point where I had to wonder why he had bothered to bring us along with him from Lowell. Maybe he had already taken up with the secretary who was to become his second wife, because when he was around, he appeared to be in the grip of a vast and terrible thought, leaning on one elbow, smoking and staring off in silence. His withdrawal further tormented my mother, who in turn spread the torment around. But I’d been watching this asymmetric power struggle for as long as I’d been able to take mental notes, and it no longer held any interest for me. What had changed for me with our move to California was not the family dysfunction but the physical environment.