From Eight to Seventeen

During the six months that Mother was hospitalized at Firlands, I turned eight and found myself cast in the unenviable roles of housekeeper to my father and care giver to my baby brother. Burdened with the necessity of having to play 'catch up' in school, to say nothing of the extra homework and accelerated studying, I was also expected to 'chip in' and do laundry, dishes, vacuum and dust, take out the garbage, cook dinner (I had to stand on a wooden stool to reach the stove top), change Brant's diapers, and whatever else was required for the upkeep of the home. At first there were occasional calamities—I used too much detergent in the washing machine, I burned the linoleum countertop with a hot frying pan—but quickly got the hang of things and fell into a kind of groove. To my disbelief I discovered I actually thrived on the stress and pressure, did better in school than I ever had before (of course, this was only the second grade), and learned I had a real knack for housework and child care. Looking back, it seems odd to me now that no one thought it peculiar to saddle an eight-year-old with so much responsibility, to bear the brunt of familial expectations, but those were different times, the memories of wars and community hardships still lingering.

After Mother was released from Firlands and returned home, there was an unspoken alliance to resume the status quo and pretend that what had happened was a kind of bad dream. No one mentioned the horrors of the previous November or that Mother had even been away for six months. When she walked back into the house, everything was supposed to take up where it had left off, although this was easier said than done. Because Mother had lost huge gaps of her memory from her treatments at Firlands, she often times lapsed into a 'hundred yard' stare that would last for several minutes. Other times she couldn't remember how to do the simplest household chore, like turning on the vacuum cleaner or running the garbage disposal in the sink. In order to compensate for these short comings and, I suspect, an inherent guilt for what she had done—although it had been explained it was the medication's fault and not her own—she embraced the church and the Bible with unflagging new zeal (if such were possible). This meant that not only was her attendance at services and Bible study groups increased, so was the rest of the family's. My father, who up to this time had not been 'officially' baptized, was obliged to attend adult confirmation classes two nights a week before participating in a baptism ceremony (a necessary requirement if he hoped to escape the Wrath of God and the eternal flames of Hell). Every Tuesday and Thursday evening Father would go silently to his church classes to learn about expiation and redemption, Original Sin and consubstantiation, eschatology and justification through faith, then return home as quietly as he left. Being young, I was uncertain what all the fuss was about, although Mother explained that if Father would have died unbaptized during World War II (1) Brant and I would have never been born, and (2) Father would be spending the rest of eternity being punished in Hell. I couldn't understand the reasoning behind such a lopsided judgment, and was later to realize most thinking people didn't either.

After a few years had passed, no one mentioned the November incident or Mother's hospitalization. It was like it had never happened. I was still a sickly child and was taken twice a week to Doctor Woodward's to get gamma globulin shots, a treatment that lasted until I entered puberty at thirteen. Twice a week for five years I saw Doc Woodward and he never mentioned the November incident either. The message was clear from the adult camp: when bad things happen you suffer in silence then quickly put them behind you. If life could only be that simple.

Although I went to Sunday School regularly I never actually attended church services, an activity that was reserved for adults. All this changed when I entered the seventh grade and advanced into catechism/confirmation classes. In addition to attending classes twice a week that would prepare me for the 'mysteries of the church' (church doctrine) and to share in the 'Lord's Supper' (holy communion), I was also required to partake in regular church services with the adult congregation. It was during this time that I found myself bombarded with religious terms and theology that made little sense to me outside the circle of the church. Although only thirteen, it seemed to me the whole cosmic drama of sin and salvation hung solely on the assumption of Original Sin, the biblical story of Adam and Eve that I perceived as metaphorical and not as some literal historical event. By this time I was doing quite well in the sciences and pulling straight A's and no matter how I tried I couldn't find a way to integrate the story of Adam and Eve with the findings of science, with geology, cosmology, biology, and genetics. When I questioned my catechism instructor about it I was told I had a clear choice to make—I could either embrace the wisdom of the world (science, naturalism, logic, and rationalism) or the Wisdom of God (faith, supernaturalism, religious mystery, unquestioning belief) and that the fate of my 'eternal soul' hung on whichever decision I made. I might have been an intelligent youth, but I had not been educated in critical thinking or the intricacies of logical arguments and fallacies so did not know enough to undertand the flaws inherent in Either/Or conditional statements (a bit of dishonest sophistry that sways even most adult believers). Although I was being taught that my 'eternal soul' was at stake, I decided I needed more information before making such a black-or-white choice, even suspected there may be forthcoming information that could ally religion and science. Instead of jumping blindly into one camp, I elected to learn as much about both sides before embracing (and thereby denouncing) one or the other. I continued to attend my catechism classes and learn the subtleties of church doctrine and I continued earning A's in science. Eventually something would have to give, but in the meantime I decided I wouldn't rush to judgment.

In the ninth grade I 'graduated' from my catechism/confirmation classes and was now considered a full member of the congregation. This meant that I was permitted to partake in holy communion one Sunday each month. I had never been more proud then when called that first time to join the adults at the front of the church. Kneeling at the rail which separated us from our pastor and the alter, I anxiously awaited the wafer and the wine and the mystery of consubstantiation. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the Body of Christ was nothing more than a soda cracker and the Blood of Christ a thimbleful of Welch's Grape Juice! I was shocked and outraged. It seems for the sake of teetotalism they had debased and diluted the mystery of the ceremony. This was not the Body and Blood of Christ but a watered-down display of temperance and inhibition. I was mortified that no one else (apparently) was able to recognize what had been done to undermine the most inexplicable of sacred moments. If this were true of the Body and Blood of Christ, what more did the church diminish and adulterate for the sake of correctness? Although only fifteen, I was beginning to suspect there was more going on with religious tradition than meets the eye and vowed to look at every doctrinal claim and assertion not simply as a 'believer' but as someone who wanted to embrace the 'truth' whatever it might be and wherever it might lead.

In high school I continued to attend Sunday services regularly while excelling in school. In church I felt the 'presence' of God, but allowed these feelings to dissipate once I stepped out into the 'real world'. I was exceeding in the sciences with little or no effort and was planning to pursue a career in either marine biology or oceanography, although it was around this time I started showing a hidden interest in the humanities as well, especially classic literature and philosophy.

It was during my sophomore year that I discovered Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy and secretly concocted a persona for myself in which I was elevated above the rank and file of the rutting suburban classes. No longer did I have to be bridled to the modest legacy of being Craig Duckett, first born child of Gus and Jeanne Duckett, progeny of commonality, whose ancestors consisted of generations of farmers, loggers, sailors, liverymen, workaday laborers whose hands were permanently stained with dirt, tar, oil, or horseshit. In my hopeful juvenile fantasies I imagined myself Will Durant’s grand nephew or second cousin, kith and kin to his academia, heir to a noble tradition of learnedness and intellectualism. In order to preserve this private fiction, if only to augment the burgeoning bloom of my own self-importance, I started reading Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein behind closed doors. It was during this time I discovered, to my own incredulity, I had a penchant for philosophy. I understood it. I got it. It made sense. With a stack of books borrowed from the public library I’d confine myself to my room and, propped atop my bed like a lazing Turk, steep and stew in the itinerant musings of the world’s great thinkers.

There was a broad dissimilarity, I soon learned, between what could be said and what could be shown, although most people made no such distinction. When Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus ‘the world is all that is the case’, he was referring to the totality of facts that could be stated and shown directly or through direct negation (either an orange cat was in the room or an orange cat was not in the room). If a so-called fact could be spoken or written, but only existed in the construct of words and could not also be shown, then it was not a fact at all but simply a grunt or scribble and therefore meaningless in regards to the ebb and flow—the meaty stuff—of existence. The familiar phrase ‘god is love’ was one such example. Could any of these three words—whether subject, predicate, or object—be revealed in any context whatsoever outside the realm of language? How many people had dedicated their lives to clever combinations of words that were inherently empty and structurally meaningless? Perhaps most. Because Wittgenstein was canny enough to anticipate his critics, he knew that when sweeping pronouncements were made like ‘the world is all that is the case’ this too might appear meaningless since it too couldn’t be shown outright. Or could it? Unless one could point to something outside the world—and by world Wittgenstein meant the totality of things directly perceived—point to something metaphysical or supernatural, something that circumvented the laws of physics, space, time, and show it, then Wittgenstein’s statement was indeed a fact, at least, deemed more ‘factual’ by definition than the advocation of an unperceivable and absent noun. The world is all that is the case because nothing might be shown to suggest otherwise. But what about lofty metaphysical or supernatural statements, talk of gods, devils, miracles, an afterlife? Wittgenstein’s response was simple and to the point: what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Which, it turns out, is easier said than done.

It was in high school that I resigned finally to an intellectual disparity between myself and my parents. I understood they had no idea what made me tick while their interior workings seemed to me patently obvious. I was a voracious reader. I consumed fiction and non-fiction with equal zest yet I ’d rarely seen either parent with book in hand. Oh, Mother read ladies’ magazines regularly and stultifying religious propaganda and Father the evening paper after dinner—an evasive tactic, I suspected, since he’d screen himself from the rest of the family behind a protective shield of newsprint—but their interests extended no further than what I considered everyday ephemera: pie recipes, household tips, box scores, local politics, territorial skirmishes halfway around the globe. This was not to say that theirs was strictly a bovine experience, one of dull habit and routine. On rare occasions I would find myself startled after detecting sparks of pyrotechnic brilliance twinkling behind their gray eyes. I would’ve liked to have seen the whole display, the blossoming fireworks, the screaming pinwheels, but they were modest people, the product of more modest times, and would have considered such displays of intellectual acumen to be ‘showing off’. I on the other hand—whether to my credit or condemnation—did not. By the time I graduated from high school and Nixon was still president and Weinberg had already warned not to trust anyone over thirty, I ’d come to regard my parents both with sympathy and suspicion for theirs was a generation on the skids, of Republicans and warmongers, prayer meetings and fondue dinner parties, clearly out of touch and out of fashion, most certainly out of time.

Mother was the product of strict Scandinavian stock, mostly Finnish with just enough Swedish thrown in to pepper the pot. The youngest of seven siblings all impaired by an austere South Dakotan Lutheran upbringing, she was fairly intelligent, but hers was an intelligence that was unabashedly narrow, a tunnel vision rigorously restrained by hinterland dogma, unfaltering, restrictive, always threatening to turn and spoil into something bitter and desperate, the same affliction as befell Kierkegaard when he peered knock-kneed into the abyss. It was as an adult, and not too long ago, that I finally identified in Mother the underlying fear that prompted her rigidity and repression, denial and displacement, anti-intellectualization and wishful-thinking. She was simply afraid to die, perhaps not so much of the act of death itself as the idea of annihilation and its built-in sense of meaninglessness. She could not allow that everything was for naught. For her, life had to have meaning, represent something, adhere with purpose to some teleological raison d'etre so her own existence might prove meaningful. She could not understand we were meant to bring to life our own purpose, and not vice-versa. Because she was intolerant of the alternative—a state of fleeting transience she perceived as altogether cruel and repulsive—she dared not go it alone so embraced instead all claims that reinforced her parochial belief system and its promise of eternal reward, of flesh perfected, of life everlasting. Anything that threatened to topple this house of cards was dismissed as incongruous: practical reasoning, the scientific method, theory of evolution, cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, ancient history, comparative religion, empirical philosophy, et cetera. In other words, she’d occasionally read books by Billy Graham or Kathryn Kuhlman, even pseudo-scientific crackpots like Velikovsky, but would ignore anything espousing phenomenology, strict methodology, and hard science. This wasn’t necessarily her fault because she never attended college so never learned the invaluable lessons of critical thinking and diligent research. Yet, in spite of girding herself with such tutelary armor, she would, every seven or eight years, catch a glimpse of the void lurking behind the colorful façade and lapse into debilitating bouts of depression, paranoia, hysterics, sometimes full-blown dementia.

Father, on the other hand, had a Midwesterner’s mentality and a mongrel mix of Britannic and Teutonic blood. He was a dedicated worker, a devoted father, a man of medium intelligence, gracious to a fault, and prone to a verbal dyslexia that would sometimes swap letters in his words to endearing, albeit hilarious, results—for example,  Joseph would become Jophes. Because I was a precocious child and given to high scholastic sass, I thought it my duty to correct my father whenever he unwittingly made such an oral gaffe, not understanding that Father no more cherished the idea of being redressed by a croupy five-year-old than a wife who appealed to the Sweet Blood of Jesus at the drop of a hat. At such times, I can see, looking back, it would have been easier Father had he transmogrified into a chimpanzee that flung dung than remained a man pusillanimous enough to permit chastisement by son and spouse alike, who vacillated on some high Nietzschean tightrope with nowhere to go. For most of his life his sad brown eyes said it all—the chasm below never looked so inviting.

It was in the eleventh grade that I started feeling awkward and schizophrenic. Among my peers I was two-minded, certainly two-faced. Although I excelled in the science—chemistry, physics, biology—my heart belonged to the humanities—especially philosophy, history, and literature. I was unsure why I was hesitant to publicly pursue any of these unless I was apprehensive about my marketability as a 'red-blooded American male'. Reading books and then discussing them as a career seemed kind of epicene to me, not really a man’s work at all. Unable to conjoin my talents to my true longing, I was at-odds with myself and struggled, an internal battle that may have attributed to my adolescent misconceptions regarding the eccentricities I imaged philosophers as a breed exhibited, that they were all half-mad, wild-haired men, sartorially challenged, with blackboard chalk permanently dusting their sleeves. And what too of literature and historians? Back in the seventies society viewed the lure of books and writers—at least among the young men of my generation—as somewhat emasculate and sissified. You didn’t read because it was something you wanted to. You read because you’d been forced into it, because it was required for class, and you were expected to piss and moan about it all the way through. Such twaddle would be sent packing, of course, long before I earned my first degree but at the time I had no way of knowing.