Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
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Date: September 15, 2022 02:40PM
I was recommended a book a while back called the Drama of the Gifted Child that explains a phenomenon where an intelligent kid overachieves to compensate for his or her parents' unmet emotional needs and win their love. This may happen subconsciously on both sides, and a codependency is forged that favors the parents more than the child. The child is thus deprived of a normal childhood, normal opportunities to socialize and develop, and thus normal abilities to cope with the ardors of life. It seems very relevant book in my case, and although I forget who recommended it, I wanted to thank you.
The author cites a German named Hermann Hesse who wrote a book shortly after the First World War called Demian. The couple of quotes she used were enough to convince me to go get this book and read the whole thing for myself, and I am astonished at how much I relate to this protagonists' drama and style of articulation, especially considering the book is over a hundred years old.
I am not all the way through the novel yet, but I want to share some parts of it that are special to me so far.
The protagonist describes his early childhood as consisting of two worlds. There was the world of his parents and his siblings and church community, the world of light, and there was that other world, the darker world, from which his family life sheltered him. The momo curtain is felt just like this at the level of the home when you are still inside it and subsumed by it, trying to be obedient and learn all the rules. Neither the church or your parents or anyone in stewardship over you ever really prepares you to be part of the real world, to be an adult someday. Instead they shelter you from it as long as they can, expecting, perhaps, that if there are some complications with this tactic these will come to light soon enough and they can be managed.
But what if you don't come forward right away? What if instead when you commit some heinous act, as you've been taught to see it, that disturbs your innocence and upsets your naive balance of how things are supposed to work, you stew in secrecy, afraid of the social consequences of confession? You have neither the knowledge of the world you need to think for yourself nor an ability to justify yourself with the doctrines you've been taught are the truth, and you just slowly lose your sense of yourself in your own head as you become an exile to everything heretofore familiar and comforting in your parents' house. This is what happens to Sinclair in the novel.
Foolishly, Sinclair makes up a story about how he stole a bunch of apples from a grove in order to fit in with his two friends and new boy his friends were trying to impress because of how large he was. He didn't really steal anything, but when Kromer, the large boy, confronts him about his white lie, Sinclair doubles down out of sheer social anxiety. Kromer believes him, but immediately uses it to blackmail him and control him. For the next several weeks, Sinclair who is only ten years old, suffers on the rack of this bully, uncertain what will happen if he doesn't give Kromer everything he wants. Kromer said he knew the man who owned the orchard and would love to narq on Sinclair for money. Sinclair was under his power, and he abused it.
I can relate to that social angst, and the feelings that Sinclair describes in this state of secret damnation hit me where I live. He says the first time he came home after realizing what being under Kromer's aribtrary and selfish power meant, as he looked at the objects of his family life strewn about him at his familiar home "domesticity and tenderness radiated to me from all those objects, my heart greeted them beseechingly and gratefully, just as the prodigal son greeted the sight and smell of the old rooms in his home. But now all of that was no longer mine, it was all part of the bright world of my father and mother, and I had sunk, guilt-laden, deep in to the strange waters, entangled in intrigue and sin, threatened by my enemy and prey to perils, anxiety, and shame." He says it was all "dearer, more gentle and precious than ever, but it no longer spelled consolation and solid possession, it was nothing but reproach. All that was no longer mine, I couldn't participate in its serenity and tranquillity. There was dirt on my shoes that couldn't scrape off on the mat, I carried shadows along with me that were unknown to the world of my home. I had had plenty of secrets in the past, and plenty of anxiety, but that was all a game and joke in comparison with that I was carrying with me into these rooms today. Fate was hounding me, hands were reaching out at me from which my mother couldn't protect me, of which she shouldn't even learn."
I resemble that. I resemble that pretty hard. My family raised me in a "world of light," and I was not prepared to have anything to do with that "other world." But sooner or later, you begin to have your encounters with it. These encounters, you sometimes lose, and it taints you in ways you were not expected to be tainted, and this is what it feels like to suddenly feel secretly estranged from all you have known so far on other side of the holy narrative. Before some TBM lurker quotes that passage in the BofM to himself about "you would be more miserable to dwell with the just souls in heaven than to dwell with the damned souls in hell," consider how silly it is to be feel this way over a boy's tall tale told at the age of ten to fit in with friends. While this novel is fiction in some parts, it is partly autobiographical of the author's own experiences. When such powerful feelings such as Dante might see only in the circles of the fiery pit can be triggered over such childish minutia, it gives you a glimpse into how cruel religious indoctrination really is and how traumatic it can be.
Utah has a con-artist and scam problem. It has a multi-level marketing problem. Utahans apparently are uniquely susceptible to being sweet talked by sleazy salesmen. It's a Mormon problem, but more broadly it's a problem experienced by fundamentalist religious cultures. Our culture does us no favors by sheltering us as much as it does from that "other world". This does not need to be taken as a sinister thing. It is usually meant as a righteous thing, but the effect it not always benign. It makes us naive, unfamiliar with the reality of human devils, and incapable of defending our own hearts from the worst sorts of manipulations. Think about how a certain someone I can't name overtly without being blocked from posting was taken hostage not at the point of a gun but by the way the Word of God was quoted to her. It was so complete she policed her own mind from forming the possibility of running away. Likewise, in the story Sinclair delivers himself up to his tormentor for fear of what would happen, not knowing enough about how the world worked and too scared for his own sake to think of a way out of his predicament.
Sinclair's parents noticed his emotional distance, but were puzzled by what it meant. They themselves were too part of the "world of light" to know how to help their son in any way. They were not bad parents, but their faith made them stupid concerning the "other world" they usually made a habit of avoiding. One day Sinclair's father was on his case for something very minor relative to the lead secrets Sinclair carried around in his heart. His heart cried out with indignity inside of him:
"'If only you knew!' I thought, and I felt like a criminal being interrogated about a stolen bread roll whereas he could have confessed to murders. it was an ugly, repellent feeling, but it was strong and had a profound attractiveness; more than any other notion, it chained me more tightly to my secret and my guilt. Perhaps, I thought, Kromer had already gone to the police and turned me in, and the storm clouds are gathering over me while I'm being treated here like a little child!"
Feelings like these age a young soul. I, myself, remember feeling like an old man by the time I was eighteen with my own internal dramas. This Kromer character could be fulfilled in my own life by a number of candidates. God was to me like Kromer was to Sinclair. I was afraid that if I didn't confess my own sins to my bishop, which terrified me because my bishops was Dad, I was afraid God would tell on me through the Holy Spirit. I thought my Dad could read minds as God willed it, and sometimes I thought God had already told him about me, but I was too cowardly to breach his pride in me by telling him how awful I really was. Sometimes when I was confronted by too much righteousness in my father's house than I could stomach, and my heart threatened to condemn me, I would take a very similar consolation in the experiences I had with the "other world". When the day finally came that I did confess my sins to my Dad for the first time, my own father became a sort of Kromer to me. For years, I was very much against giving him such power over me, but the great difficulty of living in my own skin as a secret stranger in his house was at last more than I could bear. And the church was a sort of Kromer to me, constantly winding me up to think the worst things would happen if I maintained my secrets and promising me the hand of providence and inner peace if I would spill the beans and give them that power over me.
But I persisted in my own silence for a number of years before I ever confessed anything to a bishop, and it hurt me. It hurt me the same way that Sinclair's initial silence hurt him on his way out the door on his first secret rendezvous with his bully: "It was as if the wall clock and the table, the Bible and the mirror, the bookshelf and the pictures on the wall were saying good-bye to me; with a heart growing cold I had to watch my world, my good happy life, becoming the past and detaching itself from me; I had to perceive that I was anchored and held fast outside in the unfamiliar darkness by thirsty new roots. For the first time i tasted death, and death tastes bitter because it is birth, it is anxiety and terror in the face of a frightening innovation." Yet mine was drawn out over many years, and I wept when I read that his was only a matter of weeks. Lucky for him he made a friend named Demian who knew things and had a powerful way of articulating reason to Sinclair. I never had anybody but myself, because I was the most Demian-like character of all the people who made up my childhood social life. There was nobody there to play the role of Demian for me when I needed it the worst. I was often a pro-Mormon sort of Demian for others, but I could not save myself from the worst feelings in my own soul and nobody could help me, even after I confessed to a bishop for the first time.
Sinclair encounters a strange phenomenon a number of days into this torments by Kromer, he felt "a peculiar urge" to "play childish games of earlier years once more; to some extent I was playing the role of a boy younger than I actually was, a boy still good and free, innocent and secure." I think I know the feelings to which he is referring. Mormons commonly run into this problem as they hit their teenage years. They are never adequately prepared for what puberty does to their minds, and I don't just mean sexually. With a growing sex drive also comes a more mature discernment of social hierarchy and a desire to be a real part of the world they live in. But to Mormons, such things are forbidden, and the way we are wound up since childhood means we view our loss of that innocent asexual state of total loyalty to the precepts of the church means, like Sinclair, we find consolation in clinging to a prolonged state of childlike naivety even after we know we are more mature and acquainted with the other world than we are letting on with our behavior. Such are the impositions of being part of that "world of light," and such is why I hate my father's house these days, because I am uniquely susceptible to that pull. Mingling with family means everybody puts on a face and an act much more infantile than anybody really is. We call it "living in the world but not being of the world." It's a coping strategy; healthier ones were never taught to us, and our culture rather frowns upon taking the time to learn better ways.
"My condition in that period," says Sinclair reflectively. "was a sort of insanity. In the midst of our household's orderly, peaceful existence I was living as frightened and tormented as a ghost; I didn't participate int he life of the others, and rarely took my mind off my troubles even for an hour. With my father, who was often irritated and questioned me, I was cold and reserved."
There was a moment Sinclair had with his father early on in the secret Kromer captivity where "for the space of a moment I had suddenly seemed to see through, and to despise, him and his bright world and wisdom!" He felt for a moment that his secret mark of shame "was no shame, but a distinction, and that through my malice and wretchedness I ranked above my father, above good and pious men." Mind you, the speaker is ten at the time he was feeling such feelings. They were brief, he says, but they were the beginning of an ability to think critically that he would develop more in later years. I know what he's talking about. My own sins, my increasing ok-ness with the "other world", while it filled the pious and childish half of me with dread and despair, gave me a sense of maturity that my religion was would have kept back from me if it had had its way. For Sinclair, there was pride to be had in this, and I think there was pride in my version too. It's one form the process of individuation from one's parents can take. Mine was very slow to take root, but when it finally did the roots were deep with years of experience trying things out my father's way and failing to get the results he promised me.
Demian. The book is called Demian. Demian is this other character in the book, not the speaker, but a sort of savior to the speaker. Initially, Sinclair's attraction to him as a friend is curiosity of the mythology the other boys were weaving about this strange loner, but Demian quickly teaches him how to think and reason and criticize and analyze things for himself. Demian teaches him, basically, how to be a man in all the ways his father was failing because of Christian piety. My own father failed to teach me anything about being a man, or being assertive and defending my own heart and my own interests from predation by others who didn't care for my mental well-being, although they would have said they did. When one learns how to reason for himself without having a shameful reaction to the fact, and he lives in the midst of sheep, that is a very powerful feeling. You feel like you could be a wolf if you wanted to be, the wolf they warn everybody that dissidents are, but you choose not to be, only in your own defense perhaps, because all you want is your own peace and to be left alone. I've had many Demian-like tutors in my life, but they all came too late to matter in my teenage years. Yet they finally did come, and they taught me much needed skills and gave me much needed perspective.
There was this man on my mission to Iowa who lived alone. He was retired. He was pen pals with many people on Illinois's death row, which I found to be a strange habit, but part of me admired him for his quirks. We were welcome to try and come teach him, but he was more interested in finding ways to teach us things in a nonthreatening way. He was quite good at it. I think he was my first window into what atheism actually was: it was lonely, apparently, but it wasn't all that bad. He spent his days consuming intellectually and morally stimulating material and was at liberty to participate in any cause he found just, befriend anyone he found interesting, and talk to any stranger he liked about any topic he wished inasfar as they were comfortable listening to him. He seemed to have some new fascination with some new thing every time we dropped by. He was a joy, and he was like a Demian to me. At a time on my mission where I felt pinched between a growing awareness of the church's falsity by my more reasonable mind and a growing self-condemnation coming from more pious mind, not helped by a threat of disownment my mother had made to me shortly before I left, this man showed me that even if Mormonism did it's worst to me, there was life afterwards, even if the transition sucked. A strange life, to be sure, but appealing in its own way.
And there were others who showed kindness to me here and there. I met the host of the My Book of Mormon Podcast once. He was kind to me. Most Mormons were not kind to me unconditionally like that, especially the ones who knew my secrets. I understand my Mormon friends were afraid of what it meant if someone like me could come to the honest opinion that the church wasn't true, so they needed to crucify me unto themselves. I understand, but it's hard to empathize with my own slow rolling spiritual and social execution at the hands of a cruel and myopic puritan society who never let me experience anything else in my formative years. It's hard to "let them have their religion," when what that means in practice is allowing them to burn me in effigy to everybody I might have had healthy relationships with otherwise.
I'm loving the things in this novel, and what' s more amazing is that this book is a century old and was once a best-selling book in Germany for a while.
Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 09/15/2022 02:48PM by Cold-Dodger.