Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich

Author:Barbara Ehrenreich [Ehrenreich, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538733691
Amazon: B00ECE9OT8
Barnesnoble: B00ECE9OT8
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Breakdown

Here is where I lose all patience with my younger self. She has come back from the mountains and desert, come back from being whacked by a power greater than herself, maybe even from the kind of epiphany that filled the biblical prophets with their prophecies, and, at least in the journal entry made less than twenty-four hours after her return, she has nothing coherent to say about it. This is the point where intellect should have kicked in, guided by science, inflamed by curiosity. What exactly happened out there? Has anything like this ever happened to anyone else? But what we find in that first journal entry after the events in question is an emotional meltdown, unleavened by intellectual curiosity: “I have suffered. I have crossed the shadow line. I have lost my youth. Now I am writing this on purpose so it will look silly to me and not be true.” It goes on in this blubbery vein: “The universe has no purpose.…Life is a joke in poor taste of which I am the brunt and which I am also expected to laugh at.”

All right, perhaps this is an overly harsh way for an old person to talk about an adolescent’s weepy confessions. I hear echoes of my mother here. When I was a little girl she would yell at me for something, and then, as soon as I started to cry, she would yell at me for crying—a crime that quickly superseded the original transgression. An old fight goes on within me between the critical mother-self and the slovenly, needy child-self, whose tendency is always to crouch in a corner and whimper. It’s the psychological work of a lifetime to resolve this battle between superego and sodden id, or at least bury it under the floorboards, but when I read that first journal entry from the time I already understood to be “after,” as in “before and after,” and think of all the questions I have today, I feel like grabbing that useless girl by the shoulders and shaking her myself. What happened? What exactly went on in your head? Tell me everything even if it sounds crazy.

But generosity compels me to acknowledge something more than self-pity in that first wretched journal entry: It is, if nothing else, evidence of trauma and possibly damage. Physically, the only damage was the sunburn that turned my face almost black, which was brought on by the sun’s UV rays at high altitude, but seemed also to have been emanating from an inch or so underneath my face, where important neural circuitry had been fried to a crisp. In the intervening years, I have formed the impression from my scattered reading that ecstatic states may be something like epileptic seizures, in which large numbers of neurons start firing in synchrony, until key parts of the brain are swept up in a single pattern of activity, an unstoppable cascade of electrical events, beginning at the cellular level and growing to encompass the entire terrain that we experience as “consciousness.

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