I didn’t start my journal with the idea of recording my progress toward the ultimate truth. I was nowhere near bombastic enough to think I had anything important to say, even to my future self. It had begun, modestly enough, as typing practice, undertaken to avoid taking a typing course required for all ninth-grade girls. In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we’d been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment. So it would be safer, I figured, to learn typing on my own, without the supervision of some middle-aged woman who had long since been defeated by the buildup of toxins. But what to type? “I’m beginning to dread these original typing practices,” I wrote about a month into them, a bit melodramatically, because no one was exactly forcing me. “I guess the trick is to write what I think as I think it and not worry about how it sounds.”
Most of the first, unpremeditated entries are desultory accounts of my first summer in Lowell, where I had few friends and no escape from the built environment unless my mother could be badgered into driving us to the beach. Aesthetically, Lowell was a tragic demotion for me—from the open spaces of Hamilton to the blocks of empty brick mills, from the frothy little Ipswich River, which a kid could almost navigate on a raft, to the dark, tired, overworked Merrimack. But Lowell had one big thing going for it—the public library, the same one, it turns out, that had been used by young Jack Kerouac just a few decades before me, where, as he wrote in one of his early novels, he’d “become interested in old classical looking library books, some of them falling apart and from the darkest shelf in the Lowell Public Library, found there by me in my overshoes at closing time.”
Those that did not actually fall apart in his hands probably ended up in mine, because the journal from this period is full of brief, embarrassing reports on what I was reading—Tender Is the Night, for example, which I found “confusing” and “improbable” since it was about “the love of an 18 year old girl for a 30-ish man who is already married and in love with his wife etc.” In a similarly dimwitted way, I judged an Agatha Christie mystery to be “very exciting with an excellent plot and interesting characters.” And what are we to make of this entry, which comes immediately after some gushing about the beauty and mystery of cellular mitosis, which I had also found out about in the library?
Another interesting scientific item was in the Scientific American. Namely the article on the discovery of the antiproton. The speculation concerning the meaning of this discovery was not news to me at all tho and came nowhere near my spectacular ideas in imaginativeness.
Yes, I was blown away by the discovery of antimatter, but did I actually think that the commentary in Scientific American should be judged by its “imaginativeness”? And what were my “spectacular ideas” about physics, which are not explained in the journal? The early entries are adolescent in the full derogatory sense of the word. Or to put it more kindly: A lot happens in fifty years. You learn to spell better; you would never commit a solecism like “unrevocably,” which shows up in my very first journal entry. Your writing becomes less stilted, so there is no way, for example, that you would compose the sentence, “I have lately been considering the utter futility of the lives of almost every living thing,” which is also from that first entry. More importantly, you would have learned to shut up about the “utter futility” and, as we like to say now, get on with your life. It’s normal to disavow your teenage self, otherwise how could we “grow”? Certainly in the 1950s, when I hit my teens, the “central developmental task” that psychologists had devised for this phase in the lives of young humans was gradually to put away existential angst and unrealistic ambitions for the benumbed state known as “maturity.”
After a couple of weeks, on about the fifth entry, I abandoned my original rationale for writing and switched without comment to longhand. Typing could wait. I had discovered that writing—with whatever instrument—was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do. You can think without writing, of course, as most people do and have done throughout history, but if you can condense today’s thought into a few symbols preserved on a surface of some kind—paper or silicon—you don’t have to rethink it tomorrow. You can even give it a name like “yesterday’s thought” or “the meaning of life” and carry it along in your pocket like a token that can be traded in for ever greater abstractions. The reason I eventually became a writer is that writing makes thinking easier, and even as a verbally underdeveloped fourteen-year-old I knew that if I wanted to understand “the situation,” thinking was what I had to do.
I got the idea from my father; at least he was the most insistent about it. What do you do when confronted with an inexplicable and alarming situation? Well, you can panic or give in to some other tyrannical emotion, like dread. Or you can escape into a book or a puzzle or, judging from the adults around me, a bottle of gin. But there is another possible response to the unknown and potentially menacing, and that is thinking. I suspect my father first came across it as a child, because he was exceptionally good at it, and it can be one of those little things, like being able to wiggle your ears, that gets you attention in a group. He had a photographic memory, among other superhuman capacities, and even the blurry version of it that I inherited was enough to make me stand out in games like “movie star” that I played with other kids on my grandparents’ block in Butte. The idea was to see who could list the most names in that category, and although I had seen hardly any movies outside of the Disney genre, I could keep producing candidates—Tyrone Power, Elizabeth Taylor—long after the other kids had exhausted their cinematic memories. No doubt my father could perform similar or much better tricks as a child, and maybe these helped him hold his own against the big boys, especially his brothers.
If he wasn’t already an experienced thinker, he would certainly have had to become one in the mines. You may think of mining as the application of brute muscle to mountains and rock—and it is that too, of course. Long after he had left the mines for laboratories and eventually offices, the mining experience was still recorded in the muscles of his back and etched into his left arm as a blue skull and crossbones tattoo, a dermatological remnant, as I saw it, of the rough world we had left behind in Butte, where death was not to be flinched at and sometimes even sought out. But mining is also an intellectual exercise, requiring the combined skills of a plumber, a carpenter, and an electrician as well as an explosives expert. You had to be able to judge the load strength of a beam or the friability of rock at a glance and do instant calculations in your head, because one false step or misplaced stick of dynamite could blow you into body parts or at least send a few digits flying off on their own. So this was the mental procedure, which even a little girl could learn: First, size up the situation. Make sure you have all the facts, and nothing but the facts—no folklore, no conventional wisdom, no lazy assumptions. Then examine the facts for patterns and connections. Make a prediction. See if it works. And if it doesn’t work, start all over again.
This, in the most rudimentary sense, is what science is about, and it was science that saved my father from the mines. He won a scholarship, possibly from the Anaconda Copper Mining Company itself, to attend the Butte School of Mines during the day, while continuing to work in the mines at night. There was no question of studying literature or astronomy in Butte; all the school had to offer was metallurgy and mining-related technology. Within metallurgy, what intrigued him was the crystal structure of minerals, the way the atoms stack up to form a tight-knit community, so intricately and multiply bonded to each other that the whole is almost impenetrable to a pick or other cutting device. I think he wanted to know what he was up against there in the mines—what it was that accounted for the hardness of matter and the difficulty of turning rocks into usable ore. On a good day, he would go through his mineral collection with me, pointing out the scaliness of mica, the greenish hue of copper-based rocks, the redness of iron oxides. Or he would bring home specimens from the lab, some benign, like a little chunk of bright yellow sulfur in a vial, and some not so benign, like a ball of liquid mercury I could roll around in my hand, blithely unaware of its toxicity. The lesson of all this was that every visible, palpable object, every rock or grain of sand, is a clue in the larger mystery of how the universe is organized and put together—a mystery that it was our job, as thinking beings, to solve. I was flattered to be included in this enterprise, but always on guard lest one dumb question or halting answer elicit a burst of biting contempt.
For me, never having had to swing a pick at a wall of rock or anything else, the original lure of thinking was only in part as a tool for problem-solving. The main thing was that it beat the alternatives—panic, for example, and terror. Way before puberty, before the journal, before the formulation of my life’s mission, when I must have been eight or younger, I had a rule: “Think in complete sentences.” No giving way to inner screams or sobs—just keep stringing out words in grammatical order. This was a way to keep from going under when the waters were rising, for example, on one of those pale winter Sunday afternoons that my father spent “resting” on the couch, drinking until the rest deepened into what we euphemized as sleep. Then my mother, who had absorbed the novel idea of “companionate marriage” from the women’s magazines, would start looking for a fight with anyone who was around and sentient. If I attempted to rebut her accusations or evade her demands—“but I did the dishes this morning” or “he hit me first”—I would then be liable to the charge of “sassing,” which was a speech crime punishable by slapping and invective, as in “you goddamned little brat.” It was at times like this that the complete-sentences rule proved its usefulness, so long as the sentences were silent.
You can think of it this way: Thought is electrical activity—a bunch of neurons firing up and connecting to each other—but all this mental circuitry has to function in a liquid environment that swarms with hormones and other small molecules whose levels can register in the mind as emotions. When the liquid starts turning into tar—or worse, going into whirlpool mode and threatening total disintegration—the only way out is to strengthen the neuronal scaffolding and try to keep the circuits dry. From “think in complete sentences” the rule evolved into “think.”
So I would get to the answers by thinking—not by dreaming or imagining and of course not by praying or pleading to imaginary others. “The situation” would yield to sheer force of mind. As I wrote to myself, I had decided on “an orderly plan of attack, systematic, geometrical.” If A, then B, and so forth. I was so confident that this method would work that when I raised the question of how we “can live happily knowing or thinking that our existence as individuals is so brief and futile,” I could go on to promise in the same journal entry that “I shall try and write the answer to that question when my present ideas are straightened out.”
The first problem was to identify the minimum of bare, incontestable facts that any philosophical inquiry has to begin with, and this brought me up immediately against the problem of the reliability of other people. Did they have anything useful to say, anything that could be built upon? All in all, school was not proving to be a reliable source of information. There was, for example, the science teacher who drew his biology lessons from the book of Genesis and exhibited a sneering contempt for anyone who imagined that rocks had been around for more than six thousand years. I entertained myself in his class by concentrating on developing an empathic relationship with the trash can that sat between his desk and my seat. It was gray and squat and humble, not a cylinder but a slice of a cone, hinting at the existence of an invisible person or people whose job was to empty it every night. Just as I could intuit the subjective state of every person I encountered, there was nothing to stop me from imagining that, in their own way, even objects were alive. What did it feel like, assuming that a trash can could feel, to be a receptacle for every bit of garbage that came your way? Did it choke on each piece of refuse that came flying into it, or did it take an austere pride in its silent self-abnegation?
Or I might mention the eighth-grade English teacher who kept me after class to accuse me of plagiarizing my paper on The Iliad, since it was obviously something I could not have written myself. Perhaps in an attempt to make me feel the wrath of Achilles pounding in my temples, right then and there, she announced that my grade for the paper would be F. Also in the eighth grade, Mr. Cummings, the kindly martinet who served as principal—or as he liked to put it, headmaster—of Moody Junior High School in Lowell, intercepted me in the corridor one day to inform me gravely that my IQ, so stellar a year ago, had taken a sudden dive. This was not surprising to me, given the other mutilations being inflicted by puberty. If my body was going to get all leaky and mossy, why not my mind? Although it occurred to me after a few days of reflection that the real sign of mental deterioration was that I had allowed myself to be dismayed even briefly by the news, because it was not my intelligence but the very idea of “IQ” that had been discredited by the latest test result.
Math, which had been a source of consolation when the subject was geometry or algebra, offered a fresh reason for wariness when the topic turned to imaginary numbers. Imaginary numbers? How could anyone introduce the concept with a straight face? Would a history teacher who’d been lecturing about generals and kings suddenly announce that the next topic would be pixies and elves? As it happened, I already knew about these odd creatures, probably from the science writer Isaac Asimov, and knew that they were an affront to human reason. Think about it: Imaginary numbers are defined as multiples of the square root of −1, but there can be no number corresponding to the “square root of −1,” because if you multiply −1 by −1, you get, of course, +1, which is why Descartes in the seventeenth century had derided them as “imaginary” and refused to accept their existence. And who could be more respectable than Descartes, the discoverer, or so it seemed, of the “Cartesian plane”—that infinite flatland on which abstract equations took physical form as lines and curves, soaring and diving across the paper like living creatures?
But for my teacher, a dowdy white-haired woman whose tired eyes suggested she went home by bus to an even more elderly mother, it was just another day at the blackboard, without the slightest threat of paradox. So I raised my hand, more or less as a public service, and pointed out the absurdity of “the square root of −1,” at least relative to everything we had learned so far in math. She blinked, I’ll say that, but just barely—acknowledging that it was an interesting point and moving right along. At least I had tried to warn my classmates, not that any of them appeared to be listening. If you accept imaginary numbers without raising a question, you’ll swallow any goddamn thing they decide to stuff down your throat.
I wanted to believe, and perhaps had believed when I was younger, that my parents were trustworthy sources. They both read copiously, after all, and liked to argue, discuss, and point out the multiple failings of the people outside our family, a dangerously high proportion of whom they classified as zombies, cult members, or morons coasting along on their sinecures. There were the young nuns, for example, novitiates actually, whom I walked past every morning on my way to school—girls not much older than myself wearing long gray habits, eyes downcast as they marched up the hill in chain gang formation, to what dark ritual I do not know. If there hadn’t been so many of them, and if they hadn’t been followed by two huge mothlike grown-up nuns, I might have attempted a conversation or at least a nod, but I never even succeeded in making eye contact. I just walked on by, thanking God or fate or whatever spirits arrange these things, for giving me the parents I had, who, whatever their faults, which were legion, would never think of offering a child up to God.
But could they be trusted, these rationalist, atheist parents of mine? You might think my father would have been a touchstone of truthfulness, with his insistence on logic, on always probing further with the question why, but on small matters he was a habitual liar, as we were reminded almost every day. My mother put great effort into the production of dinner, which typically featured meat, gravy, potatoes, and a home-baked dessert, like the butterscotch cream pie my father craved—everything cooked soft because his teeth were so bad. The food would be getting cold on the plates when he’d call to say he’d been caught up in a meeting, or maybe he didn’t call at all, and we kids ate alone while our mother fumed and lit one cigarette after another. We all knew the “meetings” took place in bars or possibly motel rooms, because he came back, if he came back early enough for me to still be awake, in a loose-lipped, goofy frame of mind, smelling of liquor. I don’t think he would lie about something like the specific gravity of mercury or the boiling point of water, unless, of course, it was the only way to win an argument against someone who was equally tipsy.
As for my mother, I had once trusted her enough to try to enlist her help with my quest, because she was after all a major source of information, an insatiable consumer of novels and magazines with no other regular confidante than myself. For months I had been observing adult behavior, meaning mostly my parents’, and decided it could be sorted into two categories. There were the things that they did primarily to promote their own survival, like eating, and there were the things they did for the sake of biological reproduction, a category that included putting on makeup and cooking for their children. If they were doing anything else with their time—like writing poetry or attempting to contact extraterrestrial beings—it was not in evidence to me. Just carry on those germ cells and populate the earth; that seemed to be the entire agenda.
I saw this as a remarkable simplification, almost a theoretical breakthrough. When I approached her with it, my mother was washing her nylons in the bathroom sink, which I recognized as another reproductive-type duty. Could this be all there is, I asked her—just trying to prolong our own lives while reproducing the species? And what was the point?
There are a lot of things she could have said then, if she’d had the confidence, if she’d straightened up from the sink and taken a deep breath, because certainly she’d read enough to know what the liberal, secular answers might be. She could have said, no, we are not just your run-of-the-mill terrestrial animals. You don’t have to be religious to see that we also live for love or, I don’t know, some other sentimental abstraction like beauty or justice or truth. But she didn’t even try to answer, just glared at me with that familiar combination of resentment and disgust, and then asked why I had nothing to do. It was many years before I realized that the question had been a grave personal insult, an attack on what she must have felt was the triviality of her own existence.
By the time we lived in Lowell she didn’t hit me so much anymore, for the simple reason that I was getting to be taller than she was—in other words, more of a reach. This had to have been a challenging adjustment for her, just as my brother’s growing strength would pose a problem for my father in a couple of years. Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around. Then new and subtler weapons have to be brought into play, such as insults and invasions of privacy, like the time I came home from school to find my drawers emptied onto the bedroom floor because she had peeked into them and found them unacceptably messy. I could have cried, and probably did just a little, although I knew this would make my eyes sting through the hours of homework and reading ahead. I picked my clothes up off the floor and put them away, but to this day I’ve never understood why the clothes you’re not wearing have to be hidden, and why, if you’re going to go to the trouble of hiding them, you have to first fold them in some precisely specified way.
But my mother’s worst, to this day most unforgivable crime was to accuse me of harboring incestuous designs on my father. I don’t remember what brought this on, if I even knew at the time. She didn’t use the word “incest,” which I probably wouldn’t have known anyway, nor of course did she offer any kind of evidence. She just announced as a scientific fact—“Freud said”—that girls are “sexually attracted” to their fathers, which is obviously why I favored my father over her. I managed to keep my face aligned in a disciplined expression of scorn and indifference, even as I crumpled inside. So every glorious moment in which I had said something that made my father laugh or at least snicker, every instance in which he’d taken the time to explain some natural phenomenon to me—all these were now revealed as evidence of a hideous perversity.
I didn’t write about this accusation in my journal, which was reserved for loftier matters; I didn’t even have a category under which to file it in my brain. Sexual desire for a man—or for anyone or anything? Sex was something that occasionally happened to women in novels, generally leading to poverty or death. I had read about sexual desire in psychology books from the library, where it was sternly represented as a “drive,” which seemed to involve being propelled by whips, and I occasionally received mysterious bulletins from unexplored parts of my body. My mother had warned me often enough about this drive, which is what she blamed for—or credited with—her transformation from a teenager into a housewife, and no doubt the same thing had undone my cousin Patsy Jane, one of my childhood companions in Butte, who was only two years older than me and already a mother. Apparently there was no honorable way out, because if you frustrate the sex urge, all you get is depravity, as my mother illustrated with the story she had read somewhere about a nun who repeatedly stuck a pencil into her vagina in order to warrant medical attention to the afflicted area.
As for the sex act itself—and recall that at this time sex was still an “act” known as intercourse—I had recently received some disturbing information from my best friend in Lowell, Bernice, who had a cousin who claimed to have observed her parents performing it. Bernice was Greek Orthodox, so we spent a great deal of time arguing about religion, but we generally faced the indignities of adolescence, like “monthlies” and the pressure to “develop,” as a united front. We were walking to school when she asked me if I wanted to know what her cousin had seen, and with some trepidation I told her I did. The words didn’t come easily to her because they weren’t the kind of words we ever had occasion to use. I kept on walking, trying to be cool about it, but she might as well have told me that the participants sprout horns out of their belly buttons and proceed to gore each other. It was beyond ludicrous. I said something intemperate involving “Jesus,” or maybe all the way to “Jesus Christ,” leading her to scold me for taking the Lord’s name in vain. But she knew as well as I did that the real horror lay elsewhere, in what she had just said. If this was what adults dressed up and put on makeup for, flirted and schemed for, even saw as a defining activity of their lives, then why had they been put in charge?
Somewhere around this time I stopped listening to my mother if I could avoid it, even in her gabby, confiding moods when she went on about books she was reading or the stupidity of the people she’d been forced to socialize with the night before. I noted in my journal that “she thinks I am cold and withdrawn,” which was exactly the effect I was striving for. She went on, on more than one occasion, to warn me that my “coldness” would make me permanently unattractive to men, meaning that I was, generally speaking, unworthy of love. But still I didn’t hate her, even for the accusation of illicit Freudian yearnings, because I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
I’d still like to know what she had against me. Was I a scapegoat for my father? Or possibly for my aunt Jean? Or was I some voodoo amalgam of both of them—people who were more self-confident than she was, quicker and funnier? The problem with families is not that you get stuck in the same persona for life, which is what everyone complains about, but that you’re always getting confused with someone else and end up taking the blame for them. You may think of yourself as a freestanding individual, a unique point of consciousness in the universe, but in many ways you are just subbing for absent family members or departed ancestors. You may even literally change places with them, like the night that first year in Lowell when I heard my mother calling for me from her bedroom, where I found her lying on the floor drunk, wearing only her panties and whimpering that she couldn’t get up. My father was asleep or passed out, so I had to turn into the mother—or at least the motherlike figure in this sordid drama—and haul her to the toilet like a big floppy baby.
Or possibly she didn’t dislike me in particular at all and had just absorbed the Freudian propaganda, so readily available in the middlebrow culture then, that little children are all hell-bent on fucking their parents. She had informed me once that my father had an unwholesome attachment to his own mother, and that this somehow explained his shortcomings as a husband, his failure to form a mature and responsible bond. In her version of Freudianism, the human world was fraught with illicit intergenerational longings—between her daughter and her husband, her husband and his mother—all of them bypassing her.
Contrary to her lurid imaginings, puberty had also driven a wedge between my father and me. Up till that point he might have imagined me as some sort of successor to him—a scientist of course, since that’s what “smart” people did—though I was not as smart as he was, nor could anyone hope to be, given that he claimed an IQ of 187, which put the rest of us at the level of insects by comparison. Still, he had always allowed that I was perhaps just capable of growing up to make a scientific discovery that would lead to some modest improvement in human life, a cure for acne being his usual example of a breakthrough that I might aspire to. But now that I was fourteen, it was getting hard to deny that I was on course to turn into a woman, and a woman couldn’t be a scientist without being some sort of chimera, part male and part female and wholly ridiculous. He got warier around me, not sure whether to praise me for a new outfit or growl at me for getting less than 100 on a math test. There was no way to be both a girl, at least a girl in any normal sense, and a junior version of Dad. Even modest success in one department inevitably meant failure in the other, and failure led regularly to mockery, as in, “Oh, Barb thinks she can cook too?” It was damned if you do and damned if you don’t, and best to stay out of the way.
If you can’t trust your parents and they are intelligent, apparently rational, and au courant, then you can’t trust much of anything, and that goes for science as well. Electrons, planets, genes—all these were made suspect, at some deep ontological level, by my parents’ endorsement of them. Had I ever seen an electron or even made a careful study of the reasons to think their existence is plausible? Had I gone through the steps to convince myself that a certain point of light in the sky is a planet as opposed to some other bit of space debris? No, of course not. I was completely dependent on scientists for my information about these hypothetical entities, which meant I was assuming that scientists were telling the truth about their observations and inferences and that they were not malign tricksters bent on propagating a massive fiction, nor, for that matter, were they cleverly designed androids in the service of some master trickster. And if I was going to be absolutely rigorous, no assumptions could be permitted at all.
The impetus to set down my first statement of the “facts” was the weekend I spent at a Baptist summer camp, or “resort,” to which I had been invited by a Baptist friend. There must be thousands of religious-themed camps like this in the country, aimed at enticing the young with outdoor activities while soothing the elderly with hymns and chicken à la king. This camp featured a dock reaching tentatively out over a light blue lake, or more accurately, pond—never mind that the name of the place promised an ocean beach—and an inordinate amount of prayerful gratitude for the turning of the earth on its axis: O Lord, we thank you for this day! I did my best to fit in, bowing my head along with everyone else’s and generally zipping my lips so as not to disappoint my friend, who had expressed some shy hopes of saving my soul. Little did she realize how thoroughly her efforts would be undermined by this brief exposure to her coreligionists, as I wrote in my journal:
As it turned out Ocean Park was no disappointment because I had already prepared for the worst. It was however pleasant swimming etc. but the place is simply run down with superannuated Baptists whose chief subject of conversation is last night’s sermon. I am always much more pleased with my family after being away with mental degenerates for a while.
But no sooner did I put down that word “degenerates” than I pulled back in instant remorse, conceding that the campgoers were “clean, honest, and kindly in general.” Who was I to judge? And who was really more dogmatic and closed-minded—the Baptists or my parents? In a matter of seconds, my arrogance collapsed into shamefaced humility:
Whenever I am like this, too critical of the ideas of others and too sure of my own I must remind myself there are only two things that I really know—one: that I exist. I could say I live and am a human being but those things are also matters of definition so I can’t be sure. Two: That I know nothing except these two things. One might say that this is being silly and extreme but I think it is best to start out with as few as possible things which you hold to be unquestionably true and start from there.
So there they were—the irrefutable facts from which the rest of the inquiry would have to proceed: I exist. And I know nothing.
It would have helped if I’d known something about philosophy beyond its existence and the names of a few notable practitioners, if I’d had any idea that a long line of grown-ups—generally male and wealthy or at least well financed by monarchs—had wrestled with the exact same questions that tormented me. Descartes, for example. I knew of his triumphant foundational statement—“I think, therefore I am”—but I dismissed it as a useless tautology. After all, “I think” means pretty much the same as “I am.” You can’t think without existing, and you can’t express the condition of existing without doing at least a tiny bit of thinking, if only as to which word goes where. What I didn’t know at the time was that Descartes had started from the same condition of radical doubt as I had, refusing to accept even sensory data among his “givens,” and, equally impressively, refusing to rule out the possibility that the whole thing—the entire universe—is a trick or an optical illusion. Somehow, despite all the peculiarities of my gender, age, class, and family background, I had tapped into the centuries-old mainstream of Western philosophical inquiry, of old men asking over and over, one way or another, what’s really going on here?
It would have been especially comforting to have all those dead white men by my side when the whole logical enterprise began to come apart, as I suppose it’s bound to when you confront the world with only “I” as a given. There’s simply no way to get from “I” to “not I” once you’ve boxed yourself into what I later learned is called Western dualism, with its perpetual divide between mind and matter. Several months into the journal, I began to complain about what I called “circular thoughts,” which are just the hall-of-mirrors effect you get when you try to reach the outside world from within the limits of “I.” One entry begins without explanation in something like despair:
If I was confused last time I wrote something I am lost now. I decided to stay calm and not get excited, think objectively etc. That was calming while it lasted, but then it was just another circular thought. I guess the thing to do is to get outside of myself and look in or look around. Of course that is impossible. So I am at an impasse again.
I tried to escape the straitjacket of “I” with a more impersonal formulation: There is Something, and there is Nothing, where Something included both the perceiver (the old “I”) and the perceived:
Any thing which either perceives or is perceived exists and qualifies as Something. Just how much the perceived thing exists is very important to know but I don’t see how I ever can. Therefore Nothing has to be just the opposite of Something.…Nothing is that which neither perceives nor is perceived.
But then the maddening challenge is to perceive, or comprehend, Nothing—at which point, of course, it gets absorbed into Something, and where are you then?
Even the desire to understand had to be questioned, because desire, when closely examined, makes no sense:
It seems to me that the principal psychological factor in living things is desire. Reason is purely intellectual (natch) but desire is so basic that it is never explained in any book about psychology I have read. The problem is: is the purpose, essence, of desire no desire (as it certainly seems to be) or is the purpose in the incompleted [unfulfilled?] desire? Is the purpose of life death—or is it in living? Desire seems to be an unsatisfied longing for its own absence, in fact it is.
Page after claustrophobic page of the journal is filled with these paradoxes, with the “real world” as my parents styled it, making an appearance largely as a background annoyance: “If Someone or Something set out to make a universe and I am given an instant in eternity to live in it why is there dirty snow in the gutters, or dishes to do, or homework or clothes or movies or any of this?” Maybe the whole logical enterprise was flawed, and you couldn’t really say “this or that,” “true or false,” “one thing or another.” In the absence of Hegelian dialectics, which I had not yet encountered, I experimented briefly with a kind of indeterminacy: “Nothing Is Absolutely True or Untrue.” But of course that didn’t work either, because: “If that is true then it must apply to itself also which means that something is true and its antithesis untrue. Which is right back where I think I started from.”
So this great project of thinking—where exactly had it gotten me to? The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses. I was a failure at the one unique task I had been given. I existed all right, but I existed only as a condition of constant desiring and yearning, because I knew nothing.
God saved Descartes from falling into a similar morass, or, more precisely, Descartes invoked God—in this case, a literal deus ex machina—to save himself. Confronted with the possibility that the universe might make no sense at all, that it might turn out to be a massive deception perpetrated by a demonic deceiver-God, Descartes said, in effect: Whoa, God is perfect, by definition, meaning also perfectly good, so he cannot be a “deceiver.” In his benevolence, Descartes’s God must have kindly arranged for our perception of things to correspond to their true inner nature, leaving us free to reason our way to the ultimate truth. I couldn’t understand the God part of this, but I had some sympathy for what Descartes wanted, and what he wanted was for everything, underneath all the chaos and contradictions, to just be okay.
For a period of four to six months when I was fourteen and fifteen, I too was soothed by religion, though not of the God-ridden variety. I had always been fascinated by religion—meaning the ambient Christianity—as a kind of prefab metaphysics requiring no intellectual effort on the part of the user, and I returned to the subject many times in my journal. Good daughter of atheists that I was, I rejected the part about the universe being administered by some distant parental figure, but I was drawn to the drama of Christianity, with its primal substrate of violence and sacrifice. In practice, however, Christianity was another matter. Whenever I entered its physical precincts, such as the Congregational church I had joined in order to play on its girls’ basketball team, I found the same crushingly bland aesthetic that prevailed at school, only with pictures of Jesus instead of flags. “Modern Protestantism,” I wrote, “is a social organization, providing basketball, badminton, bowling, dancing and a Sunday fashion show. The most incongruous thing I ever saw in ‘our’ church was a girl praying. I was startled, really.”
Catholicism, with its special effects, its stained glass windows and incense, was a little more intriguing. I understood that it aimed to transport its adherents to some alternative dimension above the dull brick surface of Lowell, but in aiming for the transcendent, it managed, for me at least, to achieve only the weird. I was trying to blend in at one of those sweaty CYO Friday night dances I occasionally went to with a girlfriend, where my goal was neither to dance—because I didn’t know how to—nor to be seen not dancing, when it occurred to me that this was a religion whose central ritual was an enactment of cannibalism. I formally renounced Christianity, in writing, on New Year’s Eve 1956:
Now I am sure about religion. Positive. Before I used to think that maybe there was something important in Christianity for me. Once I was impressed by a sign on a car which said “The Answer Is God.” Then I realized I had a choice between a life of faith, trusting always in a paternal guardian and submitting to a sort of parental supervision—or being alone. The latter is superficially more difficult, involving the knowledge that when one dies, one is dead, and that it is possible that life is purposeless. My decision, accompanied by much mental fanfare, was easy.…
How I came across Hinduism is not recorded. Certainly I had no Hindu friends, nor had the subject ever been mentioned in school, where the boundaries of the known world pretty much coincided with those of the Roman Empire at its height, with the addition of the United States. India, with its swarming beggars and bustling pantheon, its great nonviolent struggle for independence, its caste system and so forth, was not in the syllabus, and the word “curry” had arisen only as a verb. But somehow I acquired a paperback edition of the Upanishads, and within a few months after the above formal rejection of Christianity announced my “conversion” to Hinduism, at least in its most abstract philosophical form, minus all the lurid gods. If all this had happened ten or twenty years later, in the sixties or seventies, it probably would have been Buddhism that I found first. But Hinduism seemed to be my ticket out of Descartes’s nightmare of dualism, and fortunately it demanded not the slightest pretense of belief.
Hinduism offered me no epiphanies, only a temporary reassurance. First, it seemed to ratify and even honor my ignorance. “It says in the Upanishads,” I noted, “that truly blessed is he who understands the spirit of the words: ‘I am not even sure that I know nothing.’” Nor could I expect to know anything, at least not if “knowing” was conceived as an act of conquest in which some sort of mind-creature leaped on its prey. There was no “I” to stalk the “not I” with, only one infinite substance, the Brahman, from whom we were temporarily separated by the thinnest veil of illusion. I was sitting on the little closed-in porch between the kitchen and the back door, reading and half listening to my mother and sister working on dinner, when I laughed out loud—but softly, to myself—in relief. There was no more need to go after the truth like a madman attacking a cliff face with a knife: Everything was already here, complete, and I was coterminous with all of it. All I had to do was give up everything—ambition, desire, curiosity, even, if I were strong enough, dinner.
Naturally I told no one of this sudden “conversion.” Maybe I underestimate them, but I’m not sure that my parents’ acquaintance with Hinduism extended beyond Kipling, or at best Gandhi. What would I say to them anyway—“Oh, I’ve gone over to the side of religion, but don’t worry, there’s no God involved, or at least no single grand monotheistic god”? Since the Upanishads come with no list of instructions—no pujas, for example, to perform—I could practice my newfound religion in perfect secrecy, silently repeating “Om,” struggling to squelch the desiring self and lift myself beyond the limits of “I.”
Part of me desperately wanted to succeed in this project of self-obliteration, in a very direct and physical way. I would be walking back up the hill after school, cherishing the backdrop of bricks and pavement and tiny, ill-tended lawns, which in the absence of woods and fields was my entire exposure to the natural world for the day, when something would come over me—was it a mutant form of the famous “sex drive”?—and make me want to throw myself onto the ground, rub my face into the grass, and be absorbed back into the earth. Wasn’t I made of the same stuff myself, although a little heavier on the carbon than the silicon? Didn’t I have some kind of “right of return,” as the Upanishads seemed to promise? Abolish this flaw in the universe, this membrane separating me from the All, and restore the world to perfect One-ness!
But I never did have to be peeled off somebody’s lawn or shaken out of a meditative trance state, and the principal reason was hunger. I might promise myself to skip dinner as an exercise in desirelessness, and the encyclopedia entry on Hinduism had warned me of the travesty of beef. But the prospect of a good hamburger—a little pink in the middle, buns toasted in pan grease—was usually enough to banish all foreign religion. Then there was the other kind of hunger, seemingly issuing from a small shrewlike animal that had made its home inside my head and could never get enough books, ideas, or information to feed on. On the blessed day when Galaxy or Astounding Science Fiction arrived in the mail, how could I be expected to sit cross-legged on my bed muttering “Om”? And was I really willing to stop asking why, which as far as I could see would be indistinguishable from personal death?
There’s no point in the journal where I renounce Hinduism; mentions of it just fade away sometime in 1957. I had glimpsed the vast, glassy-calm, blood-warm sea of Brahman and refused to submerge myself in it. Yes, I knew I was “a part” of this universe, this Something, but also that I was “apart” from it. Beyond dualism and monism there was the inescapable dialectic of “a part” and “apart,” which I could not or would not extricate myself from. Besides, I didn’t fully trust the Brahman any more than I did Descartes’s “perfect God.” If consciousness was some sort of defect in an otherwise perfect One-ness, then I wanted that defect to go on a little longer, because without any effort on my part, and apparently independently of my conscious quest, things were beginning to get interesting in a way that nothing I found in the Lowell Public Library had prepared me for.