A Visit to McCormick's Creek State Park

I must have been about 10 or 11 when I made this visit with my family to a state park in Indiana:

I am in McCormick's Creek State Park. I am exploring with the aid of a map of the park, which shows all of the trails. I am wearing my usual summer outfit of blue jeans with no shirt or shoes. This park is one of my magic places. I have been examining a ledge above the stream that runs through the park. On the ledge I found a dusty area with little funnel shaped indentations, as though someone with football cleats had walked through it. As I watch, I see an ant fall into one of these funnels. As it tries to climb out something throws little bits of sand up onto it. This causes the sides of the funnel to give way and the ant slides back down to the bottom. After this happens a few times two pinchers reach out from the bottom, grab the ant, and drag it under the sand. I am astonished. I find ants and feed them to whatever it is that drags them under the sand. I feel a little bad as I watch how the ants struggle to escape. This must not be a happy time for them. But I do not feel bad enough to set aside my curiosity.

Actually I have been guilty of the death of a lot of other ants. We have a garden spider that builds her nest on the end of our porch. She is very beautiful. From time to time I go out there, grab one of the ants that can always be found crawling around on the floor of the porch, and feed it to the spider. As soon as she feels the ant wiggling around on her nest, she is on him. It’s fascinating to me how she wraps him up in a web just like we would wrap up a hunk of hamburger in wax paper to store it in the refrigerator.

I see a group of four people – two men and two women – enter the little clearing on the other side of the stream. One of the men signales to me. I come down to talk to them. All of them seem somewhat interested in me, but particularly this one man. I am not used to having adults interested in me. They know nothing about my world, and it has never occurred to me to try to tell them about it. Their world is hidden from my sight, but I don't mind because I have no particular interest in it. One day I will have to enter it, and I'm not sure that I like that. But this man seems interested in me and my world. So I ask him about himself. He tells me he's an entomologist and asks if I know what that means. I don't and he tells me that he studies insects at the university. I asked him how anybody could like insects. I have in mind mosquitoes and other pests. But he tells me that insects are very interesting. He seems almost hurt that I have discarded his whole area of interest as trivial or dull. I want to make it up to him. Then it occurs to me that I have something that I can show him. I tell them that I have discovered something really amazing up on the ledge on the other side of the stream. They follow me, hopping on the rocks across the stream, and climbing up the little hillside to the ledge. They watch as I feed ants to the pinchers below the sand. The entomologist tells me that these are antlions. I ask him about antlions, and he is able to tell me all about them. I think that this might be a man that I could learn from. Perhaps I could love him. Perhaps he could learn to love me as well. He seemed to like to look at me, and to hear me talk. Perhaps we could share our worlds.

But this is just a passing encounter.

They do not know how to find their way back to the parking area. I have my map with me and show them the path to take. The map takes him away from me.

We have no business together.

Still, he did seem to like looking at me.

HOW MRS. WORMS WENT TO HEAVEN

"How come you always get to be God?" I asked.
"Because I'm older," Raymond said. Raymond's my brother.
"Why's that mean you get to be God?" I asked.
"Because God is older," he explained. "God is older than anybody."
"I think we should take turns," I said. "Sometimes I should get to be God."
"Look here, Jimmy," he answered. "St. Peter was important too. He's the one who got to tell them which door to go through." He always calls me "Jimmy" rather than "Jim" when he wants to make me feel small.
"But God got to decide which way they went," I said.
"If you want to play, you got to be St. Peter," he said. I knew if I argued any more he wouldn't play the game at all.
"All right," I agreed. I'm St. Peter and you are God."
"Here comes the first one," he said. "You be him. He just got killed in a car wreck. There is blood and guts all over the place. You got decapitated."
"I got what?"
"De...cap...i...tated. That means you got your head cut off. I learned it on the news last night."
"Its gross," I said. I don't want to be anyone who got de...capli..sated."
"Decapitated, dummy. You're a spirit now, so it doesn't make any difference."
"Still, its gross. I won't be somebody who got de..., who got his head cut off."
"All right. Pretend you got squished instead."
"O.K. Here I am coming before God. Pretend I was bad."
"O.K."
Then Raymond spoke in his real deep God voice. "Welcome. What is your name?"
"Mr. Jones."
"Were you good or were you bad, Mr. Jones?"
"I was bad," I admitted. "I murdered people and robbed, and beat people up. In fact I was driving off in a stolen car when I got in the accident and got killed."
"O.k." said God. "You go with St. Peter there and he will show you which door you go through."
So then I became St Peter and we had to just settle with a pretend Mr. Jones because Raymond didn't want to stop being God even for a minute.
"Come right this way, Mr. Jones," I said.
Of course Mr. Jones wanted to know where he was going.
"You'll find out," I said.
"Send him through the silver door," God said.
"I know that," I answered. I mean it was obvious. In our game the silver door led to a deep shaft that led straight to hell. It was like the garbage chute in my grandmother's apartment house. The other door was golden and it went to heaven. "Of course someone who is a murderer and a robber has to go through the silver door," I said.
"Still, you got to wait for me to say it," Raymond insisted. "I'm God."
"All right," I agreed. And then turning to the imaginary Mr. Jones I said, "you go through the silver door."
God and I watched solomnly as he stepped through the door and fell down, down, down into that dark and terrible hole. I did his screaming for him. I always liked that part. I was good at the scream. Even Raymond admitted that.
No sooner had my scream faded away than Mrs. Worms entered our bed room. Maybe she had heard my scream. She was our favorite baby sitter. She was old and sort of fat, and didn't wear very pretty clothes. But she told us great stories about when she was little. In those days they had lots of tornados. She was always kind to us.
"Hi," she said. "What are you playing."
Raymond and I looked at each other, trying to figure out what we should say. We weren't sure what she would think of our game.
"God and St Peter," Raymond answered finally.
"Oh? And how does that game go?" she asked. Raymond explained the whole game to her.
She looked thoughtful for a minute, and then said, "Can I play?"
We both nodded uncertainly. "Sure" I said. Who do you want to be?"
"I'll just be me," she said. "Pretend I just died."
"O.K.," we agreed. This was awesome. I mean how many times do you get a chance to send your babysitter to Hell?
"O.k.," said Raymond, using his best God voice. "Were you good are were you bad, Mrs. Worms?"
"I'm afraid I was bad," she said. "I tried to be good, but I was bad."
We were stunned. We just couldn't make Mrs Worms walk through the silver door. I mean if it had been Jane Beamon, that skinny-faced teenager Mom sometimes got for our baby sitter, we would have jumped at the chance. Jane never let us play hide and seek outside after dark. But Mrs. Worms was our friend.
"But probably you only did little tiny bad things," God suggested.
"No, I broke some of your most important commandments," she insisted.
This was tough. What were we going to do with a woman who insisted she was very, very bad, but who wanted to be good, and one who we loved more than almost any other grown-up we knew except for Mom and Dad?
"Maybe if she is sorry for what she did we can go a little easy on her," I suggested finally.
"Are you sorry for what you have done?" God asked.
"Oh yes," she said. "I am deeply sorry. I never wanted to be bad."
God thought about this a while and then said to me, "I think we can let her go throught the golden door."
"What about the bad things I did?" she reminded us.
Why would she keep on asking embarrassing questions after we had the whole thing worked out?
"We'll have some punishments for you up in heaven," God assured her.
Neither Raymond nor I felt this really answered all the questions, but it was the best we could come up with at the time. In any case we were relieved that she seemed to accept this.
So Mrs. Worms went to heaven.
Mrs. Worms was old and that was one of the last times she ever baby sat with us.

What didn’t happen between kayetta and me

Three dreams last night:

One: I'm sitting on a hillside above the lake – it seems to be Big Deep Lake. I want to go swimming but when I look own to the dock I see that there are people there. I realize that I don't have my pants on. That's okay with me except that I'm sure the people on the dock would disapprove. I plan to go back to the cabin to get some clothes I can wear.

Two: The setting is unclear. Perhaps it's a fair. Many people are around. I have used some expressions or words from another language in talking with someone. It seems like it might be an Aztec language. Perhaps Nahuatl. A native speaker comes by and pushes me aside. He pushes me gently but I end up sitting on the ground. He demonstrates how the words and sentences should be spoken. He realizes he has been somewhat rude to me, and tries to make it up to me. He says “you're not stupid.” His suggestion is that it's not because of stupidity that I can't speak that language correctly, but simply that I am not a native speaker.

Three: I'm walking through a long hallway. They used to have some very excellent paintings in it. I liked them very much. They've been replaced, and now the walls are hung with a large number of Impressionist paintings. They're nice, and I like them too. I tell the decorator that he has done a good job.

I have always wanted to be able to speak another language well enough to sound like a native. The nearest I came to this was when I was in Greece, and studied popular, modern (Δημοτική) Greek. I came to a point where I was able to use the language moderately well, and carry on coherent conversations with people about everyday matters. However I have no natural aptitude for learning languages and never became truly proficient in any foreign tongue. I remember one of my deep humiliation was when I was on a trip through Italy on my motor scooter.

It is late – the sun is setting. I find myself in a small town. I need a place to sleep and I begin asking around. A small group of people who are curious about what such an unlikely foreigner might be doing in their town at this hour have gathered around me. I know no Italian, and nobody in that group seems to know either English or Greek.

Somebody asks me if I know French. I say I don't but that if someone knows Spanish I could speak it a little bit. My language skills are decidedly unimpressive to these people. Someone makes a disparaging remark to the effect of “some international traveler this is. . .”. A kind family takes me and puts me up for the night and feeds me breakfast in the morning. They actually seem interested in talking with me and we make do with gestures and my ability to guess a good deal of what they were saying because of the similarity between Italian and Spanish. I am grateful for their respect as well as for their hospitality. I try not to think about the humiliation I felt earlier.

The slightest faux pas followed by a raised eyebrow can be remembered for life. In my first dream I clearly want to be able to swim naked, and be with people who are also naked. But clothes are required.

I recall the beach at Hand Lake:

A grandson of Joe and Winnie Smith, a couple that are friends with my parents, is down on the beach. He is perhaps four or five years old. He decides to take off all of his clothes and play in the sand and water naked. The other children accept this with no special show of alarm, embarrassment, or even interest. I think it's very nice. I see Joe, his grandfather, coming down to the beach. Someone has reported his grandson. He takes him by the hand and sternly leads him back to the house admonishing him for his lack of appropriateness. He reminds me of the old grandfather in Peter and the Wolf bringing Peter back into the house and scolding him. It makes me feel sad.

Our experiences are clothed in language. In the second dream I am trying to express myself in a more primitive language – a language of which I have no mastery. I am put down (literally) by someone who is proficient in that language. This is doubly painful. It was like my experience in the Italian village, in that it was a humiliating. In addition though, I really did want to know reality through that language.

Paintings are also a kind of language. The hallways in my third dream were like the hallways in Robin Run.

I am visiting my mother at Robin Run. I find it to be a sterile and inhospitable environment. When the television is on at night I feel the need to escape. I say that I want to walk a little bit. I go out and walk up and down all of the halls on all three floors. They are all lined with prints of paintings. By and large the paintings are well-known. Most of them are Impressionist paintings. The painters when they did these works, were trying to say something new. They were trying to create new reality. But the paintings along the walls have been domesticated. They have been co-opted into something that is no longer dangerous or exciting. They are only pretty. Yet something of their old glory lingers and I enjoy walking up and down the halls. At least it's better than listening to the television in the apartment.

I remember when I was at Big Big Lake I once walked into Kayetta's room while she was changing clothes. I am very embarrassed but she does not seem to be disturbed at all.

She turns around and smiles at me. I think she was happy to be seen partially naked. I remembered years before that when we were swimming in the same pool together. It must've been in Pekin Illinois. I am pulling up my swim trunks which are a bit too big for me, and I pull them out away from my stomach. My penis can be seen if one looks in from the top. I noticed that she's standing near me and she looks down to see my penis. I find it rather exciting.

I remember baby-sitting with Huck (maybe 8) and Ginny (about 10).

I am sitting on Huck's bed, reading them a story. Huck is playing with his penis. Ginni tells him to stop. When the story is done, I tuck Huck in and am walking down the hallway past Ginni's room. She has left her door open so that I can see her naked from behind. Some years later I heard that Huck had killed himself playing Russian Roulette. I never did know what that was about.

I remember an incident that occurred many years later when I was living with Bill in Miami: I have to walk through his bed-room to get to mine.

I have come home from somewhere, and enter his room. He is standing with his back to me. He is naked. He turns and smiles at me. I apologize and go on into my room. He just smiles. Does not seem to mind at all.

How long it it has taken me to understand that, as a rule, people like being walked in on. Kayetta was older than I was. I thought that boys had to be bigger and older than girls for there to be any romance, or sexual interest that was mutual. In fact I think she was somewhat infatuated with me throughout my childhood and early adulthood. And I found her very attractive, but assumed that she was too old to have an interest in me. I remember once seeing her with a girlfriend of hers at a summer camp.

I am small for my age -- am maybe thirteen years old -- and physically immature. They both have well-developed breasts which are clearly visible through their T-shirts. I think they are very beautiful. I am surprised that Kayetta actually seems interested in talking with me.

Later I learned that she felt very attached to my mother, an attachment that was not entirely welcomed by my mother. As a young adult I visited her one day. She had married a black man. In those days that was unthinkable. She was also a breaker of templates. I liked that, but nothing that was interesting could have emerged between Kayetta and me as we grew older. Something about our mental templates would not allow such possibilities to come to fruition.  When we were little, the templates do not have so much importance. We skated in the basement, we played jacks, we played board games, we played Dr. in a playhouse made with blankets thrown over a card table, and we played show and tell in the woods.

She wants to see me pee. I show her and ask to see her do it. She doesn't want to show me that. But she shows me how she looks. She turns around so that I can see all of her. I tell her that she looks the same in the front and the back. She seems annoyed with me. But we like showing ourselves in the woods.

Our reality, and our desires were not at that point so thoroughly molded by the language that we would gradually learn. 

Whatever my inadequacies, I want to teach a new way of being. It's something I am only beginning to understand myself. I begin to live it and to put it into language, but  I am intercepted, incarcerated and isolated.

What could have happened in the shower

I am about eight or nine years old, in Peoria:

The basement is divided into two parts with a doorway between them. To my right as I come down the stairs I see Mom's washing machine and dryer. At the other end of this part of the basement there is a little room that is perhaps four feet by four feet, with cement walls. My father installed a shower there, because we have no shower upstairs. It's a bit primitive, but it works.

I recall taking a shower with my father:

I feel a little self-conscious, but I am fascinated by his hairiness and am excited to be naked with him.

At times my parents wanted me to shower down there by myself.

I take my clothes off outside the shower and look into the other section of the basement. I can see out a window there. I think it is possible that neighbors—maybe even girls—might be out there trying to catch a glimpse of me. They might see my penis.

I recall finding something terrible in the more distant section of the cellar:

In this part of the cellar there is a shelf formed by the walls of the foundation of the house. I am rummaging through some of the junk that is stored on this shelf. I find some pictures that my dad has stored down there. As I examine them I see something that horrifies me. It's a picture of a gnarled tree. Hanging from the tree are three dead men. One has had his arms and head severed from his body. His arms are hanging from the tree and his head is impaled on an upright limb. I know that this picture belongs to my father. I cannot understand why he would have such a picture. I cannot believe that people ever did such things as this picture portrays.

I am about the age when I went down in the cellar to find that terrible drawing. I am having a nightmare:

I see a blimp-like airplane falling out of the sky into the empty lot next to our house. Then I see it shrivel down into something very small. I think that the pilot may be injured or even dead, and I am worried about him. I go out into the empty lot and I search through the grass for the shriveled remains of this airplane. Then I see it, and can see the pilot. He seems to be injured, but not yet dead. I want to help him but he takes a hold of one of my testicles and begins to pinch it. It hurts terribly.

At another time, when I was about the same age, I remember looking through a bunch of pulp mysteries that my mother stored on the bottom two shelves of bookcases we had in the living room:

I am pulling small stacks of them out of the shelf, and looking at the covers of these books. I see pictures of skulls, bleeding hearts, daggers dripping with blood, people with knives stuck in them, and the like. With a combination of horror and fascination I study these various book covers. I am trying to understand why my mother would want to read about the kinds of things that are portrayed on these covers.

These memories of pictures associated with my father and my mother left me with three questions. Do these pictures represent things that people actually do to other people? Why would they do such things? Why would my parents have such interests? I now know that, yes, people really do things like that. The other two questions I still wonder about.

I have learned a lot since I discovered that picture in the cellar. Much later in my life I recognized a Goya print as being the one that my father had. While I still have no firm conclusions about why people do such things, and why my parents had these interests, I do have some tentative speculations. I think that for my father, it was his way of meditating on the same questions that puzzle me. He also was horrified. And then perhaps it became too much to meditate on, so he put the picture down in the cellar. And the pulp mysteries that my mother collected and read? She was a very civilized and decent human being. Why would she have an interest in such ugly things? When I first saw them, I don't think I had reading skills that were sufficient to actually read one of these mysteries.

Often I could not get to sleep at night. Sometimes it would be because I would think about how space had to stop somewhere because it was impossible to conceive of anything that had no end. But it was equally impossible for space to end because then there would just have to be something beyond that end. It was a terrible thought because it meant that the universe was impossible. It upset my stomach. One night when I was having this thought I got up and went to see my father, who was still awake. He was sitting in his easy chair reading. I asked him how the universe could go on forever. He couldn't see this as a good reason for me to be out of bed. I told him it made my stomach upset. I stood there in front of him. My head was just a little taller that his, when he was sitting down. I hoped he would explain this thing to me. Or just pick me up and hold me and tell me it didn't matter. Something. He went into the kitchen and mixed a little baking soda with some water and gave it to me to settle my stomach. Then he told me I should go back to bed.

I recall a time that must have been a few years later:

The novels are still there on the bottom shelf. I pick one up and I begin to read it. It's a Mickey Spillane novel. Its full of violence and craziness. I come away from it more puzzled than ever.

I've read a lot since then. I read Kessler's "Reflections On Hanging". Descriptions of the Holocaust. A book on the genocides of the 20th century. Foucault's "Discipline and Punishment." A lot of Freud. Still my questions are not answered. The obvious answer as to why we do such thing to each other is, of course, that we are killer apes. It's our nature to be violent. Only severe super ego figures can keep the lid on. Only by violence can violence be checked. In our heart of hearts we are Id, and Id is treacherous, ruthless and bloodthirsty. Perhaps. But if so, what is there to hope for? If the most we can do is to protect ourselves from our innermost natures, will it be such a tragedy if our species destroys itself?

A few days ago a saw the picture of an Afgan girl of maybe seven or eight:

I cannot see her face clearly -- just her arms and her dress. She is dead. One of our drones. Remarkable feats those things perform. Technology is amazing. No need to put American boys and girls at risk. Collateral damage of course. Too bad, but.... but... well, you know. Too bad. Collateraldamagecoll... ateraldamagecolla... teraldamagecol... damagecollateraldam... I try to soothe her with these words to wipe her forehead with them but I can't see it very well collateraldamage please collateraldamage but she won't be soothed.

I am sitting in a barber's chair in Peoria:

I am so short that the barber has to put a board across the arms of the chair for me to sit on. I love having the barber mess with my hair. A tingly feeling comes over my whole body. It is almost an ecstasy.

My father is cutting my hair:

He has gotten rid of those old hand clippers that kept pulling my hair when he cut it. Now he has a new electric set. It feels very good -- like when the professional barber does it. My father has me sit in a tall chair so that he can reach my hair easily. The same tingly feeling pulses through my body -- like a gentle current of happy electricity. Then, as he moves around me to do my sides, my front and my back, he brushes up against me. I can feel his penis through his pants and my shirt. It frightens me a little bit.

I go into a barbershop in Indianapolis:

I hope the barber will not put a board across the arms of the chair to prop me up. I am small for my age, but I am in the seventh grade. It would be embarrassing. He has me sit in the chair just like an adult would. I like the feeling of the haircut. Then he squares off my side-burns with a straight razor. I feel very proud. That must mean that I am getting older, even though I have no hint of any facial or body hair yet.

But what if the super ego is the cause of our violence, rather than its solution? I'm reading a book now called the "History of Corporal Punishment." It's by George Ryley Scott. It's not a great book. He doesn't seem to know much about anthropology. His image of hunting gathering societies is uninformed at best. But he offers a lot of information about the sadomasochistic practices of punishment through the ages. His thesis seems to be that it is specifically sexual repression that creates the sadistic impulse. Certainly this seems to be the case in many situations. I quote from the back cover of the book:

The renunciation of sex by those joining holy orders ensured its inevitable return in another form. The beating of the penitent nuns and monks of cloistered sects—often before bishops and aristocrats—established a powerful link between sexuality and corporal punishment.

In front of bishops and aristocrats, yes. Are economic exploitation and sexual repression the warp and woof of a single fabric, the fabric of war? The Germans stripped Bonhoffer naked before hanging him. Can one generalize from this to say that our whole society is built upon sadomasochistic dynamics—that we are programed, every one of us, to love the one who represses us? Could we even go so far as to suggest that in the innermost core of who we are, we want nothing more than to love and be loved, and to express this in physical as well as emotional and verbal ways? From Mark Russel's blog we read:

As the nation reels from the latest war atrocity, articles like "Robert Bales, Afgan Killing Suspect, Plagued by Money And Job Strife" attempt to explain why on March 11, 2012, 17 Afghanistan civilians, nine of whom were children, were allegedly murdered in the sanctity of their homes by U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, a decorated 38-year-old, married father of two young children with 10 years of honorable service.

Job Strife. Hmmm. Or could it have been deep rooted problems in his love life? It's an interesting thought. In some ways it's a frightening thought. But would it really have been so terrible had my father picked me up, and held me close, and kissed me while we were showering together?