CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Peyton Place And Everytown, USA

I recently watched a documentary, called “Wonderland” (circa 1997), about the first Levittown in America in New York. After the Big War, Levittowns and other housing projects, or plats, sprang up all over in the East. They were a first of their kind marketing concept for housing. By mass producing homes with similar floor plans in large plats, developers made inexpensive homes available to returning GIs. In the “Wonderland” documentary, lifelong inhabitants of that first Levittown, named after its developer, William Levitt, describe their lives in that community after the war. They speak of barbecues and back yard parties and the camaraderie of the returning GIs. Wives tell of the closeness they felt to other wives who shared a common experience.

Strangely enough, wife swapping and rumors of wife swapping came up in the documentary. In those communities, combat veterans and their spouses, some with foreign-born wives, reportedly got into wife swapping while living in Levittown. This rumored behavior may have been the source of the wife swapping tales I read about as a teenager in the magazines at Harry’s Parkview Pharmacy in the late Forties and early Fifties. Though no one in “Wonderland” directly speaks of participating in those parties, more than one speaks with a knowing smile and a certainty that makes it hard not to believe that wife swapping did exist in those communities.

I don’t think anybody’s to “blame” for the human animal’s continued interest in sex and lots of it, except, maybe, those two wars, the recently ended hot one and the cold one which followed. Also look at the Roaring Twenties? The sense during wartime that “life’s short so why not go for the gusto” can easily slop over into any historical period in which continued stress leads to an awareness that life is short. So why not go for the gusto day in and day out, war or not?

Soon enough Vietnam, riots, burning cities, police violence against the young, racial violence in the South, the assassinations of beloved public figures would make us all feel that life can end any minute so why shouldn’t we fuck away while we can and make those progeny. I’m sure more than one man and woman got together out of the feelings of desperation and loneliness that violence and mayhem generated. Just like eating, sex is an evolutionary drive that seeks outlet, and it’s pretty well established that people are getting fat because we’re eating for the famine that may never come, yet which seems to threaten every minute.

And, speaking of anxiety, who says that famine and deprivation aren’t just around the corner? Things ain’t going so well for the wage earning folks these days (February 9, 2004) so maybe people are thinking, “I better eat up and clean my plate.” Heavy eating may be a sign most of us don’t think the days of American plenty will last. Maybe we all need to pork up a bit.

As for my own sex drive—as I entered my third year at U. of D. my sex drive was locked in high gear, and a little dance club Bev and I were a part of stropped the edge of my appetite. My old high school buddy, Bob, and his brother, introduced Beverly and I to these huge monthly dances. Bev and I became one of several couples who went to them to dance and who always sat together to drink from our BYOBs. We’d buy setups at the dances and mix our own.

These terpsichorean affairs popped straight out of our middle class lives and became our portable Levittowns. Soon Bob’s wife and I discovered we had the hots for each other, and why not? I fancied myself a handsome devil who any woman would find attractive, and she had a petite figure designed to be crushed in a man’s arms. She’d been Bob’s date on my first date with Beverly so we knew one another. We got to dancing together a lot during the dances, and we quickly began to cling together like passionate lovers every time we danced. My face buried in her perfumed hair as we rubbed together on the dance floor, my mind would race to my car in the lot where I wanted to take her to fuck her. I’d think about it constantly while we danced. When each twirl ended, our palms were wet with sweat, and the skin of her forehead would be wet where my chin touched it as we danced. Then came the agony of waiting a respectable amount of time before I could ask her for another dance!

More than one night my passion was so great for my partner in “rubbery” that, like so many times with Sue, I came in my pants. How could Bob’s wife not have felt the pumping release of my sperm? Of course she did. I pulled her so close to me as I came that our hips bones ground together. What woman wouldn’t recognize the release of such deep passion, but, in all those dances, through all those times, neither of us acknowledged our erotic feelings for one another, never said a word to each other except, “Wanna dance?” and “Sure,” and “Thanks”. How many times had I been in similar situations and never spoken aloud about what was going on in my imagination? No wonder we’re called the “silent generation”. My dances with Bob’s wife were sheer silent, ecstatic hell for me.

One night when Bev and I were dancing, I spotted Bob’s brother with another woman from our group. They were oblivious in a far corner of the ballroom. They were doing the grindy grindy too and that’s when I must have sensed our little band of brothers was just another Peyton Place or Levittown. Believe it or not, I judged them harshly which just goes to show how completely our moral sense can be separated from our own actions and directed toward others. Soon, the dance troupe broke up, and I think the split had something to do with someone’s husband dallying with someone else’s wife. My memory’s weak, here, but it may very well have been Bob’s brother and his dance partner of that night.

My memory may be lying to me about Bob’s brother because I can think of another reason why Bev and I stopped going to those dances. Maybe Bev and I stopped attending the dances because I had a mild sort of adventure with another dancing dame. My convenient memory’s faulty in this case too; the incident only surfaced a couple of days ago as I was thinking about my early college history. I can’t recall all the details. The woman was overweight, and I really wasn’t that attracted to her. Not like I was drawn to Bob’s hot wife.

I don’t recall the woman’s face, but she was as horny and lonely as Bob’s wife. In those days, so many women seemed horny and lonely. Or was that wishful thinking? Or was I influenced by the desperation I imprinted from my mother’s horny situation when I was an infant and projected onto every woman I met for the rest of my life? Anyhow... the chubby lady slipped me her phone number, and we talked several times on the phone. At last, we arranged to meet on a sunday afternoon at her house. Her husband worked weekends. He may have been a fireman or police officer.

I knew we were on course to fuck. Even though we never said we were meeting to fuck, we were acting so guilty and secretive, what else could we have been planning for? Then came the big sunday. All morning I paced the floor and grew ever more guilty and uneasy, hyperventilating like mad. Crazily, the more I stewed, the more I condemned the woman as a slut and whore and the less attractive she became to my imagination. I was capable of unbelievable hypocrisy in those days!

When it got right down to the final minutes before I was to leave, I couldn’t take it anymore and, full of sweaty-palmed guilt, in fear and trembling, I told Beverly everything about the rendezvous except who the woman was. Later I called the woman to tell her I wasn’t coming over, and, if I recall correctly, she told me to go fuck myself in fifteen choice words or less.

Most likely, my confession to Beverly caused the end of our dancing club days and not someone else’s unfaithfulness. Maybe I was a little uneasy myself: if I’m doing it and Bob’s brother is doing it, then who might be doing it with my wife? I never did tell Bev about Bob’s wife who I had dry humped like a window display mannequin, but I admitted the other which never amounted to anything.

If I really wasn’t attracted strongly to the chubby woman, why did I pursue the affair as far as I did? I’m pretty sure I was into a fling with this woman for the adventure of it. During this period of my college life, I was beginning to tell myself that writers had to have adventures so they’d know things to put into their books which others didn’t know. I felt always so damn naive! I sensed deep down that I really knew nothing about life like a real man should, and I was tired of being stupid. I felt silly and at a loss much of the time, and I ached with my ignorant needs. I know naiveté sounds so damn stupid as a reason for cheating on a wife, but my fear of seeming stupid, a status thing, is no small matter in the psyche of a male who’s competing in the world for power and status. The only thing different from me and most males is that I could never shut my mind down and just do a thing. Everything I did to break out of middle class sensibility cost me dearly.

So... I wanted to do something different and shocking and unethical. I’m sure I’d come to believe that the only way to learn anything was to jump in and do it. I think I imagined that unfaithfulness was expected of me, the writer me. At this time too, I was positively intrigued by the movies appearing at the Lemon Tree like “La Dolce Vita”, “A Taste of Honey”, “Georgie Girl”, “Lolita”, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”, “Sundays and Cybele” which hinted to me that I’d barely tasted life, that I knew nothing about human relationships nor about people, their intimate lives, and what makes them tick and go boom. Among those works were the creations of the French New Wave and those of Britain’s Angry Young Men.

Even as I admit these silly reasons I gave myself for cheating, I know that my reasons don’t make rational sense because I already had my woman and I would soon have a child. Why did I need more women? Only much later, in my fifties, did I come to understand in my own terms coming from my own experience, that I had inherited the male animal’s imperative, an impulse that informs the male psyche that it is the duty of a man to fuck women, that his status is tied up with fucking women. To be a man is to seduce women, to fuck them. It’s how a “man” intuits he’s really a man at the instinctive level.

Societies throughout history keep giving the male animal this “fucking” message. I’m not justifying my behavior by admitting that I’ve come to understand myself as a product of evolution, but this single irrational reason for my behavior is the only reason that’s true to my current state of knowledge and which makes sense to me. In an earlier passage in this Nobody’s autobiography, I explained that I’ve come to know that reasons are just what the left brain makes up to explain instinctual behavior and the emotional decisions that drive the animal. Reason doesn’t in the least understand the body. The brain makes up a life as it rides along with the body’s impulses toward and away from its likes and dislikes, from its pains and pleasures.

Now... all men aren’t cheaters. Some men are very comfortably nesters. That doesn’t make them superior moral beings; their faithfulness just indicates they are more amenable to the domestic life and comfortable with nesting than a more rambunctious male animal might be. And many males can be nesting males most of the time but still take a one time flying binge with a female other than their wives. The statistics bear me out. More to the painful point, we can’t hope to moralize our way out of a trait which is probably part of our evolutionary history. I think that a lot of religious morality is a way for less adventurous males and females to attempt to control the behavior of males and females who are more adventurous when it comes to the fucking instincts. Being a male animal with a deep sense of my worthlessness eating me most of my life, I can certainly see that I was frightened by more adventurous males who might threaten my supply of sex and, so, retreated into moral judgments to protect myself from feelings of inadequacy, yet, paradoxically, my wife and the wives of other males, even my friends’ wives, couldn’t trust me when it came to sexual advances.

Like so many people who live in their heads, I invented hundreds of explanations and excuses and rationalizations for my behavior in those days, none of which were true, but they served their purpose to keep me moving along in my youth, so I’ll return to what my left brain was telling me back then.

My left brain was telling me, as I said earlier, that I needed to taste life. I wanted to know life to its depths. I was hungrier and hungrier to suffer and live. I was not sure exactly what was going on within me, but I knew that those movies were speaking to me about things in my life and the lives of others that any grown man ought to know. My life was beginning to seem silly, shallow and empty to me. People might laugh, but the urge to become knowing and wise is not, altogether, a silly wish.

Plus, I began to crave a relationship with a mature and sexually knowledgeable woman. My sex life with Beverly wasn’t very exciting. She never seemed to be into sex as much as I was. I was coming to think of my wife as a passive Barbie doll whose body parts I had to arrange on the bed or couch before we could have sex. She wasn’t inventive or interested in taking the lead. She wasn’t very passionate and never lost control or made noises or talked to me during sex. She liked the lights off, her sex silent, and she worried about our son hearing us getting it on.

I was inexperienced myself, and maybe I could have helped her with a little more encouragement and patience, but I was curious, inventive and willing. I was, by this time, doing rear entry (Bev’s pregnancy got us into that position), and side by side rear to front positions as well as the old faithful missionary position. And I loved eating her pussy. She was slow to come herself, and I’d go down on her and tongue and kiss and slurp away until she came. I always tried to make sure she got her rocks off even if my tongue, neck and chin ached afterward. Kinsey, the books, told me that much, to satisfy my wife.

Beverly was always sexually her best after dinner, dancing and a few drinks. We’d dance close and I’d slip my hand low on her hip, and we’d both know we were going home to fuck. We ran up big credit card bills, preparing her to relax and fuck. Things got better as time went on, but in those first five or six years together, I don’t remember that we really got into the sex.

One thing I remember that she liked was my sitting her on the living room couch we owned all through our marriage, and I’d put one of her legs up on the back of the couch and the other foot would be on the floor. She was wide open that way, and I’d go down on her until she was breathing heavier than a greyhound chasing the mechanical rabbit. Then I’d climb on and the penetration was good and the coming too.

She never liked gobbling my cock and never let me come in her mouth. Sometimes I’d sit her on the bed and stand before her and more or less force her to take me in her mouth, but, as I said, she would not let me finish in her mouth. I can remember us taking baths together, and she didn’t mind lathering me up and hand jobbing my dick and balls until I’d go wild while I’d finger her snatch. We did those shared baths all through our marriage, and the hand job with soapy hands was always nice, but, still, I felt I was directing her like a porn star and moving her body around like a rag doll for sex. She was just another more lively mannequin than the ones in the Metropolitan's windows.

Believe it or not, I did once speak directly to Bev’s shyness about our sex life together, during a phone conversation many years after our divorce, very diplomatically, I thought.

“I always thought you weren’t interested in sex,” I said. “You didn’t seem to get much enjoyment out of it.”

“No. It was fine. What made you think that?” she asked.

God, I was a horny thing! At Savino’s, my station at the beer counter was opposite the front door, and whenever women came in with thin skirts and the sun was bright, I could see through their skirts. All day long, I’d glimpse the shadow of their naked legs striding within the thin cloth of their skirts. In summer very few women wore slips and, sometimes, I could even see the white outline of their panties. A few saturdays, on really horny days, I’d slip into the Savino bathroom to masturbate when the leg show became unbearable.

A very embarrassing moment happened because of my horny gawking at women’s legs. Tom, my old high school friend, came into Savino’s, the guy I double dated with on prom night the night I put my finger into Sue. He went on the design automobiles for G.M. I hadn’t seen Tom since high school, more than five years before. We were chatting excitedly, and he asked me how I liked my job. All day long I’d been specially horny and ogling the women who came through the doors. In fact, at that moment, one woman stood at a long rack just inside the door, looking at cocktail napkins and other party paraphernalia. The cloth of her full skirt was so thin and the sun reflected off the floor so brightly that I imagined I was seeing her almost without any skirt on!

“See that woman?” I asked my friend, pointing casually, planning on letting him in on my secret.

Tom turned. “Yeah,” he drawled. “That’s my wife.”

I blushed 30 shades of red and stammered out something about how attractive she was, and how that was what I enjoyed most about the job, the lovely people of all kinds and all races and from every walk of life, both sexes too, my job brought into my life every day... blah, blah, blah.... Did I ever talk fast. I don’t recall whether he believed what I was telling him. They never came into Savino’s again and the last I heard at a class reunion was that he was an alcoholic. I called him but he wasn’t interested in talking to me about his situation.

Bev had a not very pleasant sexual shock during the time we lived on Kenview while I attended U. of D. She usually wore baby doll nightwear or a very long cotton gown. I think the baby dolls were signals of her sexual availability which I just now figured out. The baby doll pajamas were made very popular by the movie, “God’s Little Acre”. In it, I think Sue Baker wore them. I think. Very sexy and frilly, the brief panty-like bottoms and the lacy top I could reach up under to feel Bev’s nice tits and hard nipples. I could also reach under the waistband of her briefs very easily to feel her cool ass underneath when she lay face down on the bed. Whew! Memory! Anyhow....

One night, Beverly came into the living room from tucking in our son. She wore her baby doll pajamas, and she had a very frightened look on her face. I immediately thought something had happened to our young son.

“He’s dead!” I thought. That’s how frightened Beverly seemed.

“What’s wrong?” I stood, ready to dash into the bedroom.

“A man was looking in the window,” she whispered. I ran immediately into the night to look for our peeping tom but saw no one.

We never closed our windows in those days. We didn’t have air conditioning, and Ohio summer nights can be humidly sweltering. You can break into a sweat just standing still. That night Bev, as usual, put our son into his crib, bending over the tall crib side to tuck him in. She said she thought she heard water running and wondered if our neighbor had forgotten to turn off his sprinkler. She spun from the crib and bent to peek out under the half raised window. She found herself looking into the eyes of a peeping tom. You can imagine the sight the tom had of her bottom peeking from beneath the hem of her short top. She didn’t recognize the face, and we called the cops. They came and gave us some tips, but there was little they could do.

I just remembered something else about our time on Kenview. For awhile, someone was calling Bev and talking dirty to her. If the peeping tom was a local man who knew our names and address, he might have also been the caller. The phone calls were a very hard thing to deal with. You feel so powerless to control things like that. Fortunately, the phone calls didn’t go on for long, and we soon left town for my first shot at graduate school.

///

OK, here’s my Kennedy assassination memory. Fall quarter of my junior year, I come home from school that afternoon, and as I walk in the door, Beverly says, “Kennedy’s been shot.”

She didn’t know if he was dead or alive. The news services didn’t yet know.

I immediately thought the worst case. “The bastards!” I yelled and flung my suitcase onto a chair. “They did it!”

Soon, we knew he was dead, watched Cronkite tell us so.

There’s so much I don’t understand about my politics of those days. It’s hard to say when I became completely radicalized but that moment had to be a big part of the process. I know my disillusion with American justice began earlier when I watched adults spit on tiny black girls in white dresses in Little Rock as they tried to enter and integrate schools during the Eisenhower years. That was the beginning for me, when my ideal America began to seem a less than perfect real America. Later, my awareness of who was keeping American injustice in place began to become clearer.

I noticed that the same ignoramuses who wanted to keep the schools segregated and who didn’t like uppity negroes also didn’t like uppity women or uppity youths. I noticed they opposed freedom of speech by any of these groups unless the speech agreed with their views. I noticed they liked to put poor people into debtor’s prisons, that they supported the death penalty, that they didn’t like poor people to have legal representation to resist their oppression of them. They hated black, soul and rock music as something alien. I noticed they liked secrecy in government and opposed the “Freedom of Information Act”. I noticed they supported the poisoning of our water and air and that they didn’t care if workers got killed working on unsafe job sites.

One by one, I added up the other political ideas of those who could hate black children. From that core of un-American hatred, their other beliefs rippled out as from a stone dropped into scummy pond water. To tie a short, straight line through those years for me, I noticed that those who spit on little black girls and who opposed women’s freedom also, almost universally, supported the war of the white people against the yellow people of Southeast Asia. Their set of beliefs were tied together by a string named conservatism, and they smelled bad, like a burst bowel.

There’s no doubt Kennedy made my spirit soar, helped renew my faith in America which had been buffeted by all that un-American stuff going on in the South where conservatives dominated. They were giving America a black eye before the world, but under Kennedy’s leadership, I felt that America would finally fulfill its promise for all Americans. I was elated!

Specially, I noticed that these bad guys controlled the political process during the election cycles from their smoke filled hotel rooms in the convention cities. The controllers were almost universally white, and they were male. I had watched those conventions for years, from opening gavel to closing, and, if I wanted any more proof that the political process was biased and unfair, I had only to look at those conventions with eyes finally unblindered. They were fully opened during the convention of 1968.

That convention was a wonder to behold because, suddenly, on the floor of that convention, black, yellow, and red faces came before the cameras to fill the TV screen. Women and gays and youths abounded. Those delegate faces actually represented the American populace, not just the faces of the WASP power structure. The Democratic convention of 1968 was, finally and truly, democracy fulfilled. Strangely enough, here I am, 35 years later, and the Republican party still hasn’t put together a convention with a truly democratic face like that of the 1968 Democratic convention.
Unfortunately that convention didn’t come about until long after Kennedy’s murder, and I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Kennedy was shot, who had given me so much hope for the oppressed citizens of America and in the world, I felt so powerless and so violated at that moment, it’s hard to describe. I felt as if my future and America’s hope had been snatched away. I think I lost heart again for American democracy when he died. Things turned very dark from then on, and the deaths of Robert and Martin only heaped on the ashes. I was not to emerge from my pain until the mid-Seventies.

I don’t recall being as political then as I became later, but I must have been. I know I immediately thought the right wing conspiracy in America, the southern hawks and racists, the antifeminists and conservatives, the right wing intelligence community, had killed him. They’re who I meant when I shouted, “They did it.”

I think of Lester Maddox and George Wallace and the men who waylaid the freedom rider buses and beat young idealists unmercifully as the kind of men who could easily kill Kennedy. I know that George Wallace once said he’d run over any youthful protester who dared lie down in front of his car to block traffic. Followers of men like Wallace and Maddox had been known to shoot down socialists who were peacefully parading in protest along the Main streets of small southern towns. Men like them were already mercilessly beating people who tried to integrate the South and open the polls to black voters. They were the enemy and Kennedy and liberals like him were fighting them to make the American dream come true for people who were still shut out, so, in my mind, they had to be the assassins. They and all conservatives like them were the enemies of freedom and, by association, Kennedy’s killers. That was my angry thinking about the assassination then.

Fourteen pages and I’ve written nothing about my education during my junior and senior years at U. of D. In those two years, I took Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Renaissance literature, Romantic poets, the American novel, the Victorian Age, and Creative Writing. For my history minor I had some wonderful teachers who taught me about the Renaissance & Reformation, Intellectual and Cultural History of the U.S., the Westward Movement, and the Expansion of Europe. I averaged a B+ to A- through those two years. I was lucky, working my way through college, to get the B average I earned for the four year term. I always wonder what more I might have achieved had I been able to concentrate solely on my course work.

I never mastered the term paper during those years. That didn’t come until later. Term papers and finals were always difficult and stressful ordeals for me and grew more difficult for the next few years until I almost stopped writing term papers altogether. I was a perfectionist.

I enjoyed my Shakespeare course though I struggled with the language, and I was critical of critical thinking. Those were the hay days of the “new criticism” which places its emphasis on the work alone and on a close reading of the text and language and which minimizes the biography of the author and the history of the times. From my own experience and analysis of other writers’ work, I believe I got deeper insight about the work of various authors by knowing their history than I ever did from textual analysis alone. I wrote term papers which analyzed Shakespeare while, at the same time, I mocked the intellectual and analytical process of writing term papers and praised an “emotional’ response to literature.

In fact, I wrote one term paper in iambic pentameter in which I mocked term paper language while analyzing the “Merchant of Venice”. I may have tried the poetry ploy twice before the amazed teacher, while complimenting my difficult poetic effort, admonished me to stop writing term papers that mocked the term paper process. In retrospect, I think I was too insecure to believe I could ever master any of the techniques of scholarship, and in a way, I was correct in my judgment. I got better, but I was never a “dry as dust” scholar as Carlyle called them.

Brother Bowles taught Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. We read from a text which faced a page of modern Italian with a page of English translation. We read the Commedia in Italian to hear the beauty of the language, then worked with the English to understand the work. I loved reading the Italian aloud.

Emerson’s essays moved me too, though I was still too shallow to get to the nub of him, and, of course, young and romantic, I loved the English, romantic poets:
“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” and “Weave a circle round him thrice and close your eyes with holy dread, for he on honeydew hath fed and drunk the milk of paradise!” Ah, yes?

I recall some important intellectual moments in those years. One came in my “Intellectual and Cultural History of the United States” course. In a prefatory comment, our professor, Rocky D., a great teacher, pointed up how technology could affect all sorts of ways of thinking. He gave us the example of lighting. Simple as it may seem now, I was amazed when he discussed how the candle and the light bulb changed culture in large and small ways. I recall the concept coursing through my mind for weeks after, thinking about it, imagining how technology could affect the lives of people. The same in my “History of the Westward Movement” course with Rocky when I imagined how people in sod huts on the American prairie lived with water dripping through sod roofs into their dirt floored and muddy hovels. Eye opening! I think I read Rolvag’s Giants In the Earth at the time as part of my research for a paper. Many years later, researching a novel based in 13th Century Switzerland, I could visualize clearly European peasants living with their domestic animals in their hovels.

Rocky was also the only teacher I ever saw, except me later, throw something at a student. The student asked a question (he was behind me so I didn’t see everything) and Rocky had begun to answer when, suddenly, he seized an eraser and fired it at the student. Seems that in mid-answer, the student turned from Rocky and made a comment to someone sitting beside him. Rocky was inflamed that the dude had the nerve to ask a question then not listen for the answer.

I never realized until my Physics course that the physical world is mostly empty space between atoms. I’ll bet most kids today know this stuff, and I may have heard it before, but until college, the information didn’t hit home. Kids today may not think about it much, but I’ll bet it wouldn’t hit them as strongly, out of the blue, as the knowledge hit me. I thought about it often after the physics prof. told the class. I was thunderstruck by the knowledge and turned and twisted it in my mind for a long time. Eventually, in my Ethics course, I developed an ethics based on materialistic determinism which said, that as long as everything in nature worked exactly as it should, there could be no evil.

It went like this. If someone’s jealousy causes a man’s fear mechanisms to act as they “ought” to, and his fear causes him to attempt to stab the object of his jealous fear, and his arm muscles move as they “ought” to move, and the knife penetrates the skin and heart of the victim as they “ought” to do (oughtness and isness were big terms in the philosophy department at UD), and if the consequences of the physical damage cause the victim to die of his wounds as they “ought” to do, then, philosophically, everything in the universe has acted just as it “ought’ to act, and there is no evil in the deed.

Everything in the whole chain of behavior, and I mean all the steps in the murder process which is almost infinite for any one act, is just as it ought to be, so how can there be any evil in it? From that example, I could generalize to the conclusion that there is no evil in the Universe at all. O, I was so proud of that bit of sophistry at the time. As I repeat again and again in this Nobody’s autobio, reason can make sense out of or make up an excuse or a justification for anything.

Milton’s “Paradise Lost” was a great read. His justification of the “ways of God to men” drew me in. The imagination of the blind genius who dictated that entire work to his daughter was awesome. Years later, I came across the work of critics who thought that Milton perhaps fancied the Devil over Christ since he made Satan such a powerful and tragic figure. I was drawn to the doomed revolt of the Devil, myself, and liked him much better than Mr. Jesus “Yessir, Boss” Christ. Imagine! Waving your fist in the face of an overarching, omnipotent, all powerful god figure and going down to certain defeat without surrendering—what a noble tradition, well and deeply planted in the psyche of Christian America! That posture fit perfectly the person I imagined I was becoming, though how far from becoming that person who defies authority I had no idea.

One of the courses that most involved my imagination was Victorian Literature. We spent a good part of that semester reading the great essayists. Dickens would come later in other courses, but this course brought in, among others, John Stuart Mill, Cardinal Newman, John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle.

I read Newman’s Idea Of A University, amazed at the clarity of his prose and of his method. I understood immediately its structure, how he worked through the book length essay methodically, defining word after word, each definition wrapped inside a previous definition. I had never experienced prose broken down and put together quite like that, and I marveled as I enjoyed it. When I finished, how could I argue with his conclusions? If one worked through Newman’s book, following each definition of each term and one accepted each definition, then one had to be persuaded of its conclusions. This was a masterpiece constructed almost entirely by the method of the definition of terms. University was a veritable prison house of inter-linked definitions.

I also took in the wonderful liberal ideas of Mill expressed with equal clarity and vigor but not so methodically. I’m sure my liberal roots were watered by reading his work. Ruskin’s ideas about art were powerful too, but, eventually, after a long deep soul kiss with the despair of Van Gogh, I came to accept the more playful dalliances of the advances of modernists like Picasso and Deschamp. The writer who took me by storm in that class was Thomas Carlyle. Thinking about him this morning, I imagine I see a connection between his compressed, exaggerated style and the style of Jack Kerouac.

I wrote my term paper on Carlyle, specifically on Sartor Resartus which fascinated me, the wild piled up connections of torrid words, like huge clouds from which shot lightening bolts. Liberal and righteous prose thundered from him to me, and, of course, Carlyle made fun of “dry as dust” professor types. He thundered and taught me to thunder my self-righteousness too. Old Scotsman, he was, self-righteous like us Welsh Nobodys, like my coal mining, union loving, workman fraternal grandfather and my rich, ignorant Scottish maternal grandpa. Right down my alley, Carlyle was, for I could never stand authority over me, starting with stepmom, through Navy officers right into the college doors and teachers in their black gowns. So, like Carlyle, like Satan, I thundered and trembled with impulses to run or fight (which dilemma I hadn’t heard of yet) and shook my fist in the face of all authority too.

That semester, I also took Romantic Poets. I had the serene Emerson to butt Carlyle’s angst against. I think another paper I wrote tried to contrast and compare Emerson’s ideas from his essay on “Napoleon” about great men and heroes with Carlyle’s ideas in “Of Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History”. I little recall the paper itself. It’s been forty years since I wrote it.

I also regret that I don’t recall the chief insight about life Carlyle gave me in Resartus which I carried around in my psyche for years. It’s fled my head now. The obvious one is not the one I’m thinking of. The obvious one is that we all wear clothing to hide ourselves from each other, but I took that too literally to move on to the idea that we all wear masks in our relations with one another. I had to wait to encounter Bergman’s movies to get to that point, though Carlyle may have prepared the way.

Eventually, through science and philosophy, I came to an insight that “blew me away”, as they saying went. When I first had it, it didn’t have as many philosophical synapses in my brain as it now has. I didn’t connect it to relativism or to projection or to so many of the psychological conclusions one has to accept if she accepts the initial premise. The insight may have come about when I was also developing my idea about the absence of evil in the Universe. Anyhow... I clearly recall walking along a crowded hallway at U.D. as classes were changing, a bustle of people all around me, and I was lost in thought, worrying the idea of the existence of evil in the universe in my head—I was probably taking the course in Ethics—when I suddenly realized what it meant to understand that the information my senses received were little more than sound and light waves, or physical sensations like touch and taste, which my nervous system then translated into a reality that I carried around in my head, a mock up of the real world. I stopped in mid walk in the middle of the hallway and leaned against the wall while the thought sank in. Wow....

I realized that the eye doesn’t actually see the world or the objects of the world; it only receives lightwaves dancing off the objects of the world which are then transmitted upside down to the back of the eyeball, and then the brain’s nerve cells must turn the upside down picture of the objects right side up. In short, there is no projector and motion picture screen inside the head upon which the world is projected right side up for some other “me”, separate from my body, to view and make decisions about. The brain tricks us into seeing the world right side up even though our neural system experiences the world wrong side up. The brain works so efficiently and swiftly to make every thing right that we’re not even aware that our eyeballs experience the world upside down.

This awareness was pretty fearful because I suddenly felt how shut off I was from my fellow humans. Their world might be totally different from my world, I thought. I felt I was a prisoner to my own senses in my own body. And worse, I felt fear that my eyesight might fail me, and I’d be trapped inside my head, not even sharing the same wavelengths with the rest of humanity. It’s ironic that I now suffer from steadily diminishing hearing, tinnitus, and I’ve almost always worn glasses. I was wearing my glasses when I had the insight. The impact of the insight, of course, faded, and I didn’t really make it a part of my whole picture until the late 20th and early part of the 21st centuries when brain research began to enter the literature available to the lay reader. Yep, knowing that you’re stuck inside your body permanently and irrevocably can be pretty damn scary.

By the time I graduated from U. of D., I was the thrall of literature. It was my religion by then and still is my religion. Authors were my priests and mentors as well as the creators of movies and drama. Artists too. For decades I sought all my answers to life in the works of art of the world. I didn’t need a single old dry as dirt Bible; my library was my Bible. I had zillions of books in my Bible everywhere I looked in a library. I began to defend art against politicians and against religion and psychology. I feared anything I thought might suppress literature and art. But I understood an important truth too which my life has convinced me is true. I knew that psychology had a thing or two to teach me, but I still feared and made fun of psychology because I could see that it might supplant literature as the best source of knowledge to the world, and, I think, I feared the day when I’d finally be ready to confront myself and face my fears and find out what truly made me tick. To this day, I realize that psychology is a powerful tool for self revelation. The Christians know it too because they fear psychology as much as they fear any science next to biology and physics. O, they use psychology but not before they first kill it by shoving it through the meat grinder of their Bible tenderizer.