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Spirituality & Slavery Part II
By yielding, slave to Master Stern Over the course of 42 years I have developed and refined my system of doubt. The important part of the previous sentence is the first phrase. If given another 42 years, it’s likely that I will have honed to near perfection an even subtler set of doubts, and polished the vague uneasiness of my faith to a high gloss. Never knowing if I am right or wrong, I can only hope to gain some sense of serenity in my ignorance. I do not worship a god now. I acknowledge this thing I call god, and by my recognition alone, its awesome and fearful authority, which I have neither the competency to understand nor the capacity to embrace, are minimized. Like those I have condemned, I have simply created a god to fit my needs; I have glorified my own limited comprehension, typified and condensed it to the narrow field of my own vision, humanized and dehumanized it as though either could possibly matter, instilled it with compassion and vengeance, implanted in it my own values, and encouraged it to be my inspiration. Venerating this thing I’ve created is merely a veneration of myself. As arrogant as that is, do I have an alternative? The theory is that little girls want to replace their mothers in their fathers’ affections. It is a relatively uncomplicated, but universal stage of development; one that we Electras, at least in Freud’s opinion, never rise above. Somewhere along the line boys lose the desire to kill their fathers and they become men, but girls stay girls forever; always hoping to achieve the ultimate goal of having sex with, loving and marrying Dad in whatever substitute they are able to find. Freud isn’t taken very seriously anymore. Likewise, I suppose, his subjective ideas about developmental stages. Just as subjectively, I'm fairly certain he was right in my case. I never had sex with my dad, but my first sexual fantasy was about him. Or at least it included him. It was a BDSM fantasy, although I couldn’t have named as that at that time. I was in the back seat of the car the day it occurred, mom and dad up front, dad driving. I don’t remember my age, but I was very young. Sitting up with my back straight, my feet barely protruded over the edge of the car’s seat. “Nonsense,” my Jewish shrink told me. “Children so young do not have sexual fantasies unless they’ve been abused.” “Well,” I shrugged. “There you have it.” But not really. There is no evidence of that. There is an incomplete memory of an incident. A babysitter. We would call her a daycare provider now. A hateful, abrasive woman. A husband. A bed. A belt being pulled through trouser loops. Wallpaper. A half-opened door at one corner of the room. You see how my sentences have become choppy here. Fragmented. Like the memory itself. There is no substance; nothing decisive. Short, choppy sentences are the mark of an unreliable narrator. I have to remember this as I write, just as you have to remember it as you read. The words may be accurate, but good judgment is in question. Think of Hemingway. His broken dialogue conveys a separation from reality, an unresolved inner turmoil on the part of the speaker. Not one of Ernest’s heroes could accurately describe or pinpoint the source of his self-deceit. Couldn’t even come close. It was literary genius housed in a supercilious, misogynistic SOB. And what of my attempts right here, right now, to change the subject, to take you out of my thoughts and into Hemingway's? So there I was in the back seat of the car, thinking about my father spanking me over his knee and then placing me in a corner, my panties around my ankles and my fingers clutching my skirt up around my waist. In a room full of strangers. And in the car I began to tingle the way one does when sexually aroused and began to feel ashamed the way one does when feeling sexually perverse. I recognized nothing sexual about it. It made me feel good; so good I knew it had to be wrong. I toyed with this brief fantasy for the rest of the car ride, and in most subsequent car rides with my parents. For years I couldn’t reveal it to anyone, not even my shrink, who pressed. The shame was so overwhelming. And why? Why would a three, possibly four-year-old girl feel shame for anything? How could she already know the implications of her offense? This small revelation will elicit the “A-ha!” response in even a single-celled organism. No matter. The question of what caused my foray into perversity is one I’ve already pursued. I agonized over the reasons behind it. I sought therapy because of it. Never, though, did I ask myself why I considered myself perverse. Who told me that? Unlike God, no one had to “say the words” for me to understand. Before the age of five I recognized what was expected of me. Baby Puritan that I was, I viewed all pleasure with suspicion. My guess is most people will say that because I was spanked as a child, I misinterpreted the attention and turned it into a sexual deviation. My personal belief is that it is genetic. My father had his own “perversities,” ones I didn’t know about until many years after this first fantasy. I say, like long fingers and myopia, I got it from Dad’s side of the family. The search for visible and ongoing evidence. So what has this got to do with slavery? A little bit of everything. Faith, or the lack of it, in a Creator translated to faith, or lack of it, in myself. The desperate wish for the Creator to love and need me translated to the same wish I had for myself. ~~~© 2003 |
