Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: March 18, 2021 10:43PM
There is a chapter in the Scarlet Letter that keeps Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel on my bookshelf. It's the chapter called the Interior of a Heart, and the jist of it goes like this:
The Scarlet Letter is a red letter A that adulteresses in early Puritan Massachusetts have to have stitched on their clothing for life. It signifies their shame. The woman in the story had extramarital sex with some unknown man and conceived a girl. The woman bears her "shame" with pride and in time comes to accept that this is her life and heals more or less from the trauma of the stigma, content to live on the edge of town with her daughter.
The man is none other than the young reverend who is a rising star in the church. Others of the clergy envy him, because he teaches the gospel with such passion such as they cannot conjure in their own sermons. The young Mr. Dimmesdale is beloved by the laypeople. The clergy wish they knew his spark.
This spark is that he is guilty and he knows it but no one else does. yet he's also a sensitive soul who loves truth but cannot bring himself to confess like he ought to, and so he lives in exquisite self-torment that keeps the gospel fresh to him perpetually.
"...the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life."
His fellow clergymen coveted his "tongue of flame," but did not understand from whence it came. "They would have vainly sought—had they ever dreamed of seeking - to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar words and images.Their voices came down, afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt." And to be frank, normal people are not interested in that liberal-elitest swag. People want something real, something down to earth, and for some reason Mr. Dimmesdale had it.
It was his thorn in the flesh that kept him real. It was his pain that gave him spiritual teaching power. "To the high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed,had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down,on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes,whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answer! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and perceived their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other heats, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence."
It reminds me of how people used to tell me I was going to be a bishop or an apostle of something someday. The Puritan laymen in this little village never dreamed that Mr. Dimmesdale was the one. If Dimmesdale had had the courage to come out with it, they would have frankly forgiven him, but he kept it in secret, not daring to say it outright, but hinting at it in his sermons with not-so-subtle digs at his own worthiness. And these self-deprecating pronouncements meant to be almost-confessions were mistaken as the purest form of piety and the people loved him all the more.
"It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public ven-eration tortured him!It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life.Then, what was he? — a substance?—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was."
But he could never spell it out in certain terms that didn't backfire.
"The minister well knew — subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was! — the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!"
Oh, he didn't just feel guilty. He lashed himself, in this case literally. I never harmed my body, but the part about the bloody scourge that Dimmesdale kept hidden in his closet at home under lock and key made me weep when I first read it. It was too real. This is not some fiction Hawthorne thought up; this is based on some real experience had by someone somewhere. It didn't work, for the pain and guilt I mean, so Dimmesdale laughed a bitter kind of laugh, and then whipped himself harder for laughing. He spent long hours in lonely introspection every night thinking about the people in his life, which to him in his emotional isolation felt like specters and wisps of smoke. He was so lost in his visions of what his life should be that all that actually was material became immaterial to him.
"It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false—it is impalpable—it
shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth, that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth, was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have been no such man!"
I felt all these feelings as a teenage firstborn son of a bishop in a godforsaken ward in Arizona. Those years were terrible and real, but they were unseen, so when they finally caught up with me years later and my facade broke down, no one understood what was happening. It must have looked like one of the angels of God suddenly withered in his presence as though the wrath of God for sin was so instantaneous. Who knew Satan could pluck one of the elect out from the flock and destroy them so utterly so quickly.
Objectively speaking, I was just a young boy who was taught a bunch of nonsense about his puberty and blossoming sexuality and was equipped with nothing but the tenets and buzz phrases of Mormonism to manage those emotions when they came. My "talk" was that I was about the get the priesthood, and that Satan was going to work overtime on me now. I said to my dad, well then I don't want the priesthood. And my dad said, but the penalty for refusing the priesthood and defiling the priesthood are the same, so buck up buttercup. I lied to the bishop when he asked me if I masturbated. I had to ask for clarification, because I'd never been taught what that word meant. He proceeded to explain, and I immediately lied, thinking of the possible humiliation of standing in front of my entire extended family in the foyer and having to tell them I would not be a deacon any time soon. And I carried that with me. I could never "buck up" and confess, especially when the bastards that run the church made my dad the bishop, so I was forced to turn inward for peace. The constant propaganda designed to eat away at the spiritually-independent got to me, though. They calculate their words to afflict your soul unless you run screaming to your bishop and give him that power over you. I could not do this, though, because of how visible our family was and how disappointing I thought my dad would be in me. So I searched the scriptures and tried repenting on my own. It never worked. I turned to the most self-abusive kind of self-narration in my lonely, miserable head that functioned little differently than lacerating oneself with a scourge.
People said I was the most spiritual boy they had ever met with wisdom beyond his years. They admired my almost-photographic memory of the scriptures, and told me that I was going places in the church. But all that was was my sensitivity and my love of truth and my knowledge of my sins and my desperate search for peace. Utterly desperate. I didn't have a friend the world. I knew at thirteen or fourteen that I was going to hell and then at best I would receive a lesser kingdom of glory. I thought about escaping church, but then I'd just go to outer darkness. This was my teenage life, and before I even turned eighteen, I was an old man inside who ready to die. I longed for my rest, as they say. I was so consumed in this, that nothing else mattered to me other than fixing this, and to some this must have looked like I was so spiritual that I was floating above everybody else.
I searched the scriptures, more diligently than most people do. I knew what they said. I learned the admonitions of the Book of Mormon painfully as I fastened them into rhetorical whips to use on my back in private. I've read the Book of Mormon so many times. They say a man will come nearer to God by abiding by its precepts than by any other book, but all I ever found in it was spiritual death and a dull, aching longing for a physical one. I watched my teenage years go by me like I was ghost. I was either a ghost in a real world, or a real person in a fake one. The realest thing to me were the torments always waiting for me in my head, and always for flirting with the sin next to murder.
So, not to get heavy or anything, but this time of my life was real and it left an indelible imprint on me, to say the least. I would eventually go talk to my dad-bishop, and he would tell me that the Lord had already forgiven me, but the damage was done by that point, the thought patterns were set. I don't get a do-over for my formative years. What I CAN have, though, is comfort in the knowledge that I'm not the only person who has ever felt this way, and better authors than I have articulated the feelings already. I can't describe the depth of my trauma or how embarrassed and used I felt when I figured out how common this was and how angry I felt in the aftermath of how this even happened to me. I trusted them. I trusted them completely. That's the only reason any of this happened. It had nothing to do with an appropriate amount of spirit-withdrawing-induced guilt to fit the gravity of a sin. It was all meaningless and stupid. It was all in my head. Mormonism is poison.
Mr. Dimmesdale dies at the end of the book. He couldn't take it anymore, and he confessed explicitly to his congregation and just died in the most Shakespearean way, meaning he had plenty of time to give his own eulogy explaining his parting regrets. I'm still here, but that's kinda how my testimony of God went out of this world. The woman, Hester Prynne, wore her Scarlet Letter on the outside and recovered and lived, whereas her partner in crime had kept his on the inside until it poisoned his soul beyond recovery.
We live in an era where "sexual sin" doesn't matter anymore. People who cheat after making vows are generally considered assholes, but it doesn't have the society-shattering impact it used to have when America was just a bunch of poor Puritan dirt farmers trying to exist under the eye of a tyrannically angry God in a modest New England. The part of this story that will live on and keep it relevant is what guilty isolation out of fear for taboos does to a human soul. We are social creatures. We need each other. We need validation from each other. As much as we like to turn our noses up at this idea, it is true. We can use our smartphones to shop for new communities now, but we can't run away from the need for community. We have to wield the power of taboos conservatively and be careful lest we condition a people, a community, to think that some normal behavior is unspeakably off-limits and then have to deal with all the goof-ass human hierarchical drama that comes next. It might be entirely nonsense, but human feelings can't be anything but real. There's no such thing as a simulated feeling: there are only feelings that we feel over things that matter to us in the moment.