“Jump or Fly” (unabridged)

 

Inferno

“…I saw Sisyphus enduring hard sufferings as he pushed a huge stone…up to the top of the hill.  But just when he was about to thrust it over the crest

…once again the pitiless stone rolled down to the plain. 

Yet again he put forth his strength and pushed it up…”

-Homer’s Odyssey

     It’s hard to find beauty on a military base.  The people – even those who conform to contemporary aesthetic canons – tend to resemble the architecture: imposing, cold, expressionless, and “operational”.  Every time I walk past door 154, “the gateway” which ushers all new recruits and officer cadets into the profession of arms, I wonder if the inscription above the mouth of the Inferno should not grace that portal as well.  At this university of state-sanctioned violence, veteran-instructors instill their sense of urgency about past dangers into the hearts and minds of hapless privates who march around as if hell is on their heels.  There they go now, resembling Viktor Frankl’s “long column of ragged human figures, grey in the greyness of dawn, trekking along” the jogging path which hugs the chain-link fence which guards the approaches to the “seven-story mountain”.

     As I arrived at the front gate a few moments ago, “J” the commissionaire welcomed me with a wave.  He’s a veteran.  The first time I stopped long enough to engage him in conversation, he provided evidence of a broken mind.  He can barely string two words together.  I have no idea what happened… Look at that, it’s 0750 hours sharp – my usual time.  Funny how I rushed to get here.  The fact is, it’s going to be a slow day – most people have left for the holiday break.  My first appointment is scheduled for 1400 hours with that young Padre; my time, for the time being, is my own.  Padres – now there’s a strange breed.  I’ve yet to meet one who wasn’t in it for the money; well, what money there is to be made in the military.  Whether they be priests running away from penny-pinching parishes or protestant preachers running from poverty (a.k.a. “ministerial sacrifices”), chaplains all seem to be chasing the hope of being able to provide for their families or that of finding greater camaraderie than that found in rural congregations.

     As I sit in the parking lot, I crane my neck and strain to see the summit of the multiple-story, (seemingly) mile-long Megastructure that houses my office and dwarfs the rest of this garrison town.  This enclave of society nestled amidst corn fields that stretch to the horizon seems to be engaged in a futile escape attempt as it stumbles away from the garrison and the airport which lies on its southern flank.  The town fans out eastwards towards the river, the natural boundary which reminds me of the divine directive delivered to the primordial abyss “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further”.  But perhaps it’s simply another reminder that “you can run, but you can’t hide” from observation posts which crown this monolith or from flocks of gliders cut loose mid-flight who desperately seek a landing strip as they lose altitude.  If the Devil had wanted to titillate humanity’s desire to fly, he would have turned people into gliders – earth-bound creatures whose wings serve only to break their fall, all the while frustrating their ambition to soar into the heavens.  Frankl tells us that inmates who believed death was preferable to life in Auschwitz would run into electrically charged barb-wire fences; here, some recruits jump out of windows.

     If it’s true that there are only volunteers in this army, it’s even more so in my case.  I genuinely wanted to come here.  After twenty years as a social worker at the Douglas, people told me to take it easy; after all, this had been my second career.  But I guess I just wasn’t ready to hang up my skates.  Donc, me voilà, as my seventy-second Christmas looms on the horizon like the concrete enormity in whose shadow my car sits.  It’s hard to be retirement age.  Some people don’t make it through boot camp.  As for me, I didn’t make it through one year as a retiree.  After a mere six months comme retraité, I took a job at this centre for military families.  Military…Centre.  Funny how life can bring you full circle.  Fifty-five years ago, I ran across the 49^th parallel to avoid being sent to Vietnam.  Funny how freedom always seems to lie northwards…  I had never intended to live in this country, but then again, I had never intended to become a social worker either.  Funny…

The roads I travelled

     I’m back.  Forgot my God-**** mask.  A very Québécois sergeant in a beret with a beaver crest castigated me in the langue de Mollière about my lapse in respect of the sanitary protocols.  That was the gist of what made it through his face shield, anyway.  Reminds me of my days as an American in Paris…  Oh well, the chapel isn’t available yet in any case; the Air Force reserve orchestra is conducting a rehearsal of their annual Christmas concert.  I’ll just wait here a while longer.  The chapel is the only place inside where you can hear yourself think.  Let’s get some heat going…

     It’s hard to be an exile, but it’s all I’ve ever known.  After my parents got divorced when I was six, my mom and I left upstate New York to go to Brooklyn.  All I wanted at that point in my life was to not be picked on.  In Brooklyn, I lived entre deux feux – the Catholic gang (“Chaplains”) would beat me up on my way home from piano lessons because they thought I was a Jew, and the black gang (“Bishops”) would beat me up if I dared venture into their territory to visit my black friends.  My sister had to intervene on my behalf since “it was too late for me to learn how to fight”.  She cut a deal with both gangs and got them to leave me alone.

     Once we moved to Connecticut, I would hang out with musicians at Yale who were several years my senior, since I didn’t fit in at my high school.  I volunteered with The Committee for Non-Violent Action and helped organize the freedom riders’ trips south.  I also spent time with members of New Haven’s Black Panther chapter, who were involved in race riots.  The local police chief was a hold-over from the McCarthy era, and I would feel sick with anxiety every time I stepped out the door.  I graduated just in time for the draft.  I had applied to several universities up here, so as to be safely north of the border when my number came up.  McGill accepted me into a liberal arts program, and in the summer of ’65, as President Johnson was doubling the monthly draft calls, I made my way to Montreal.  It would be five years before the nausea dissipated.

     My “Hell No!” to the draft was in line with our family tradition of non-violence (besides the fact that I’m averse to violence – remember Brooklyn?).  My father and his brothers fought in World War II, but they went out of their way to avoid combat by working as translators and drivers.  However, there was that time when one of my uncles killed a Nazi in a hand-to-hand duel.  My mom’s brother was decorated for habitually rescuing wounded soldiers from the battlefield at dusk (à la Desmond Doss, of Hacksaw Ridge fame) and his unit would later go on to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  As for me, I came into the world three years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a red-diaper baby – my dad and my uncles got involved in the union movement after the war and my mother was heavily involved in various social causes.  My father’s activism got him fired from his firm, and he was forced to strike out on his own as a freelance accountant.

     I remember being in the car with mom on 26 September 1960, when Castro’s speech at the UN was broadcast over the radio.  My mother was so moved that she pulled the car over, the tears streaming down her cheeks.  Would you believe that before the divorce, my mother worked for the State of New York as a vocational placement counsellor for disabled veterans?  Then she worked for the Tuberculosis Health League in Brooklyn and the Connecticut Association for Mental Health in New Haven.  At the age of fifty-five, she went back to school to do a graduate program in epidemiology!  Seems like mom’s penchant for health-related causes rubbed off on me…

Wolfgang Jellinghaus Signature

     It’s good to be inside the chapel.  What’s this, a guitar forgotten by the Air Force folks.  Ha-ha, they don’t have much of a sense of the sacred – they left it leaning against the altar.  Well, would you look at that, it’s a Wolfgang Jellinghaus Signature!  There was a time when this model of guitar, its accidents of wood and wire notwithstanding, was possessed of a substance that would make the blood dance through my body.

     I first encountered folk music during my sister’s “sweet sixteen”.  Meeting her musician friends marked the debut of my forty-year love affair with classical guitar.  When I was fourteen, I took the bus from New Haven to New York.  As I strummed folk tunes on my newly purchased six-string at the bus station, I was approached by a man who claimed to be a producer for The Tonight Show.  After undergoing an impromptu “audition” for this self-confessed intoxicated stranger, I found myself at NBC studios where I was offered a full-time gig, provided I was willing to move to the city that never sleeps.  Overwhelmed by the prospect of leaving home, I declined the offer and got back on the bus.  This turned out to be the first of four “choose your own adventure” moments which would determine the course of my life’s journey, the second moment being the decision to dodge the draft and the third being to marry my ex-wife.

     The fourth crossroads presented itself in the form of an offer to teach music at the University of Moncton.  I had been told that the only way to get an academic position in Montreal was to be offered a job elsewhere.  My wife had just received her doctorate and had begun teaching and had conscripted me into her tenacious campaign to obtain tenure.  This offer was a chance for me to finally have a stable income while working in the musical milieu, which was my life’s aim.  The only problem, besides the fact that compared to Montréal, Moncton is a back-water, was that our life had taken root far from Hub City.  Well, in the end, I turned down the offer and thus made the biggest mistake of my professional life.  Little did I know it, but I had just doomed any chances I might have had of a career in music.

     The 1980s saw me lecturing here and there, performing ici et là, and completing two graduate programs in music at McGill – despite all my efforts, I never managed to land a gig that would provide me with the income I needed to support my family and to provide my wife with the lifestyle she expected.  At the lowest point, I did the unthinkable.  I sold my Wolfgang Jellinghaus Signature guitar – and what felt like my soul – for a few thousand dollars.  As for my wife, she soon began pulling in a six-figure salary.  The whole situation really beat me down and I began to believe my self-doubts which insisted that I was a complete and utter failure – so much so that I was prescribed antidepressants.

     Choking on my pride, I walked into the McGill admissions office yet again and asked to speak to a guidance counselor.  I announced that I had three criteria for a new career – I wanted something that would require me “to do no harm, had nothing to do with sales and would come with a guaranteed pension”. I was told that my three best fits would be in law, advertising, or social work.  Lacking the time required to become a lawyer, and believing advertising to be fundamentally “harmful”, I opted to become a social worker.  J’étais de retour sur le banc d’école.  I continued to take medication all the way through my degree program.

The voices in my head

     The foundations of my marriage were beginning to crumble by this point, though my wife and I were only midway through our thirty-year partnership.  Pervasive emotional tension had become the norm.  We were getting by financially thanks to assistance from my father-in-law – talk about a shot to the cojones!  I definitely wasn’t good enough for his daughter.  I continued to mourn the death of my musical dream.  You cannot possibly fathom just how frustrating and gut-wrenching and soul-destroying it was for me to get rid of my guitar and walk away from music, which I had believed, for the previous fifteen years, was the point of my existence.

     Around the time that the writing appeared on the wall concerning my musical dream, my eldest son started to wrestle with his own demons.  What led me to finally seek help was having to break up physical altercations between him and his mother.  Enough was enough – I booked an appointment for the entire family at a mental health clinic.  Following the session, I was informed by the team of therapists that I was the one who was depressed and who was depressing our family.  When my wife and I went for a couple’s session, she concurred with the diagnosis and stormed out of the therapist’s office.  Despite the fact that I took antidepressants for six years, I have never reconciled myself to having been diagnosed as being clinically depressed.  I never noticed a change in my behaviour from the years leading up to the diagnosis, during the years I was taking the different medications, and up to the present day.  I firmly believe that I was, and am, the same person I’ve always been.  One therapist told me that I was the most highly-functioning depressive they had ever encountered.  Indeed, my workload didn’t decrease during those years, and I came out of that period of being medicated having continued to do my job, care for my children and completed a degree in social work.

     My son and I were each engaged in our own battles.  I have a fond memory of his rugby team bringing him beer and chicken wings during one of his stays in the psychiatric ward.  It was also during my son’s bout with depression that I began to hate the psychiatric profession and its biomedical approach to mental health problems.  Mental wellness cannot be conjured with pills; if it occurs, it will be the result of reconnecting people to others, to meaningful work, to sustainable values, to integrating childhood trauma in the context of a caring community, and to self-respect.  This is what we desperately need if we are to have any hope of wholeness.

Of hocus pocus and priests

“The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast.

On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib… ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary;

nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.”
–C.S. Lewis, ​Surprised by Joy

     As I sit here, my eyes finally focus on the eight-foot, starkly naked cross crucified, as it were, to the back wall of the chapel.  A massive cross without a corpus behind an altar flanked by a tabernacle – this must be the Padres’ idea of a Protestant-Catholic compromise.  Rarely in my life has the word “God” escaped my lips, besides the times when I make fun of right-wing evangelicals.  I mean, who can go in for unthinking obedience to the dated dogmas of a male-dominated, hierarchical, self-perpetuating institution who has a horrific track record of sexually abusing children and repressing women?  I had a mixed experience with priests in Brooklyn.  When I attended a parish event at the age of ten, the monsignor didn’t recognize me as being “one of his” and proceeded to perform a summary baptism with some holy water he had handy and without my mother’s consent.  Then again, a worker priest from la France stayed in our home as a boarder, and my mother enjoyed lengthy chats with him about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement.  I suppose Jesus is OK, insofar as he was socially involved.

     I’m not quite sure why we maintained any contact with the Roman Catholic Church, since my mother’s theology was more unitarian/liberal Protestant than anything else.  I could never buy into a monolithic, medieval, pre-critical, autocratic, (supposedly) sexless clerical superstructure that delights in suppressing free thought, scientific enquiry, religious pluralism and dialogue, and spiritual leadership by the laity in general and women in particular.  Also, by the time Vatican II was brought to a close, my mind had become shut against the possibility of anything that resembled Christian faith.  I grant that when it comes to an institution as ancient and massive as the Roman Catholic Church, one who takes the time to look at it closely will surely find plenty of vice, but also plenty of saintliness.  Despite the many crimes of the Church which the media have (rightly) thrown the spotlight on in recent years, it remains the case that the Church has produced many women and men who, in ecclesial lingo, have lived lives of “heroic virtue”, including many who have given their lives in the pursuit of social justice.

     All that to say that by the time I received my high school diploma, I had graduated from Church with a degree in agnosticism.  I had become convinced that talk of God reflected magical thinking – counter-productive and, in the hands of some, dangerous.  Now that I think about it, my reaction to organized religion was much the same as my reaction to those “duck and cover” drills they would have us do in elementary school.  I simply could not bring myself to participate in an exercise that I considered to be totally useless – if a nuclear blast occurred close enough to make us seek shelter under our desks, it would be close enough to melt the flesh from our bones.  What was the point?  In The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis (the otherwise intelligent Oxford-don-turned-Christian-apologist following a conversion experience provoked, among others, by J.R.R. Tolkien) makes a brilliant (albeit oblique) point – God should be kept in the realm of faerie, safely tucked away in magical lands such as Narnia, where children and fools can find Him, but well away from the real world of legislation and culture-making.  Marx said it best – the powers that be use religion to keep the people busy praying for pie in the sky while the bourgeoisie continue to exploit the proletariat (whether in ancient Rome or modern England).

     My eyes wander to the clock hanging above the shrine to the Mother of God.  Jesus!  I’ve got to get to the Padre’s office.  Let me just light a candle on my way out…

Purgatorio

“Whatever makes them suffer their heavy torment bends them to the ground

…according to the weights their backs now bore;

and even he whose aspect showed most patience, in tears, appeared to say: ‘I can no more’”.

-Dante’s Divine Comedy

     As I approach the elevator, the stairwell door swings open and out steps a short, pudgy fellow dressed in combats and a ruddy, bearded grin stretching from one flaming cheek to the other.

-“Hi B****!”

-“Hi yourself,” I reply, caught slightly off balance by this sudden apparition of the young Padre.

-“I’m glad I found you,” he says.  “The elevator is out of service.  I hate to make you climb, but I’m expecting a call on my office line.  You know how bad cell reception is in this place.”

-“No worries,” I counter, cursing myself for having spent the entire day on my ass.  I didn’t know PT was on the agenda.

Sam holds the door and beckons me to follow.

     As we begin our ascent to the seventh floor, he turns to me with an eager expression.

-“I’ve been wanting to tell you,” he says, “…did you know that the phrase ‘novus ordo seclorum’ on the back of the Great Seal of the U.S.A. is from a poem by Virgil, in which he hails the birth of Augustus – his patron – as ushering in a ‘new world order’?”

This is what I’m dealing with.  This Padre is a bit of a nerd, but he’s friendly enough, all the same.

-“Don’t tell the Left Behind folks,” I intend to sound coy, but the words come out as a gasp.

Sam goes on talking about this suicide prevention program he wants to stand up here at the base.  He takes my grunts of exertion as indications of me endorsing his ideas.  My knees are making me pay for each step…as we arrive at a landing, my eyes fall on a door bearing a large black number 4.  Half-way there…

-“Let’s catch our breath,” I announce to no one in particular.  Sam turns and leaps down onto the landing from his perch three steps up.

-“Sure thing,” he smiles.  “You know, we have an opportunity here to raise awareness…”

     His voice trails off as I lean against the cinder blocks and rest my eyelids… It’s hard to run.  I’ve done a lot of it in my time – running from gangs on the streets of Brooklyn, running from rejection at my New Haven high school, running from opportunity in Manhattan, running from the Black Panther revolution, from the Montreal revolution, from Vietnam, running from a career as a professor, abandoning my music, running from retirement, running from people to have peace of mind, running to people to escape solitude.  Well, let me tell you, I’m done running.

     I open my eyes and catch Sam staring at me.  “Did you hear me?” he asks.

-“Sorry, what was that?” I muster. 

-“We could start by offering a training session on being a peer supporter,” he says again.

-“Listen buddy,” I pant, “let’s get to the top of this thing and I’ll agree to whatever you propose.”  Who was I kidding?  I knew very well what I would say before I left the house this morning.  A chance to share my hard-won knowledge with Padres and Forces members?  From now on, the answer would be “Yes!”.

-“Brave man,” Sam says with a wink.  He turns and we resume our climb.

     J.R.R. Tolkien described history as “a long defeat”.  That sure resonates with my history.  I’ve always been averse to conflict and pain; of course, my aversion to it hasn’t spared me any of it.  God (assuming, for the moment, that said divinity exists) knows I’ve accused myself often enough of being a rotten f***-up; God also knows those who failed to contradict me on this point and who facilitated my self-hatred.  As I look back at my life, it seems to amount to a pack of problems and mistaken adventures.  Be that as it may, I keep trying my best to forgive myself and to do what I can to make a positive contribution to our broken world.

Paradiso

“…He that outlives this day and comes safe home
…Will yearly on the vigil…strip his sleeve and show his scars.
…From this day to the ending of the world,
…we…shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother…”

-Shakespeare’s “Henry V”

     We emerge from the stairwell onto the seventh floor and find ourselves confronted by a memorial to the fallen.  One hundred fifty-eight images adorn the wall of the lobby – it’s a shrine to the martyrs of the Afghanistan War.  As we contemplate the photographs of these young heroes, I realize that there are faces missing from this wall of remembrance.  The Globe and Mail confirmed in 2015 that 59 veterans of this thirteen-year-long war survived the desert but fell prey to the demons that followed them home.  Suicide victims who served in Afghanistan and died outside of the theatre of operations are indeed casualties of the mission.  It’s up to us to ensure that number doesn’t grow.

     I don’t suppose it’s ever too late to leave the dark wood.  Eventually you must emerge from the trees and climb the hill upon which you will die.  There comes a time when you must turn around and look it all full in the face – to hold life’s gaze and stand your ground.  In the words of Stephen King’s gunslinger of Gilead, Roland Deschain, you must “remember the face of your father”.  And so, I resolve to stare down this military machine, this monstrosity that crawls out of the abyss to chew up women and men and spit them out, broken and poisoned, onto the shores of a world that doesn’t want to hear about the trauma that lurks in the frozen depths.  The time that remains to me is not my own.  After all, it was never about me…

     Sam beckons me to the window.  We watch the sun set behind the skyline of the city that sheltered me from the jungles of Southeast Asia all those years ago.  We Americans spent twenty years in Vietnam; we have been in Afghanistan for about as long.  The war is not yet over – neither the one in the desert nor the one that continues to rage in the minds of those who have fought in that parched place.  Amidst the peace-talks following “the war to end war”, George Santayana reminded the world in 1922 that “only the dead have seen the end of war”.  Seems like there will be work a plenty for as long as I’m around. 

     Sam catches my eye.  “G.K. Chesterton told us why angels can fly,” he blurts out.

I decide to bite.  “Why?”

-“Because they can take themselves lightly,” Sam chuckles loudly (the only way he knows how).

Chesterton isn’t done yet: “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”  Ah, Padres… Then again, Dante’s Devil is frozen in an icy abyss at the bottom of the inferno, eternally flapping his wings and making hell that much colder.  Funny thing…

     Well, the tears can wait, I suppose.  I start to hum Bruce Cockburn’s “Laughter” with my inside voice…

I glance at my watch… S***!  She’ll have supper on the table soon. 

-“I have to fly!” I shout over my shoulder as I limp towards the stairs.