Radical Civility

The purpose of the business trip was to get some additional illustrations for a Halloween-related story concerning Civil War locales that were said to be haunted.

John and I got on the road around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, September 10, 1986. We took I-70 east, across Ohio, then West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and finally into Maryland. By the time we reached our first destination, Crampton’s Gap, a mountain pass not far from Burkittsville (where years later The Blair Witch Project would be filmed), it was well after midnight.

Crampton’s Gap [I wrote in late October 1986] is supposedly haunted by Union soldiers from the Sixth Corps who spent the evening of September 14, 1862, lugging cannon up the eastern slope of the gap. If you pause in your car at the foot of the mountain, switch off the ignition and put the car in neutral, you will sometimes find the car rolling inexplicably uphill. Ghosts.

The real explanation is more prosaic. Apparently the uphill roll, which seldom occurs, is a natural phenomenon owing to the area’s topography and its effect on the wind. Crampton’s Gap becomes, in effect, a sort of wind tunnel.

As we approached the gap, I could see in my mind’s eye a subject for a suitably spooky photograph. Six years previously I had spent several days backpacking on the mountain near Crampton’s Gap and remembered a monument to war correspondents erected at its summit. I also knew that near the monument were some street lamps that might provide some suitably spooky illumination. In the event, John and I found that the lighting at the monument was not quite good enough, but halfway down the eastern slope we found a barn and silo, shrouded in mist, that was lit perfectly. We took several photographs, then feverishly tried to get those ghosts to push us up the ridge. It didn’t happen.

Most of the locales we needed were in Washington, D.C. We reached the city’s outskirts around 4:30 a.m. Instead of getting a motel room — John and Paula’s little company operated on a shoestring — we just pulled the van over to the berm of a residential side street. We retrieved a couple of beers from a cooler, cracked them open, and talked amiably for a couple of hours. Then, as an edge of pink appeared on the eastern horizon, we subsided into beery slumber.

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 (coming)

As I have said before, “I plan to stick as closely as possible to what I wrote back then, but I’m going to omit or alter certain parts in the interests of respecting people’s privacy.” This next post therefore leaps over many pages of my 1986 account of the Damascus Experience. Material in block quotes is from October - November 1986; everything else is just connecting narrative.

On August 26, I stumbled upon a potential job when I met, socially, a man whose business could use the services of someone with a background in historical writing. Six days later he called to ask if I’d be interested in working as his assistant. The job did not pay much — $10,000 (a bit over $17,000 in 2005 dollars) — but that was $10,000 more than I had and, although I didn’t think much about it at the time, it offered at least rudimentary health coverage.

I talked it over with several people whose opinions might be helpful. Most saw it as a good opportunity to get a leg up on my writing; Dad, on the other hand, thought solely in terms of salary and was kind of disgusted with the whole idea. Only when I asked him, “If not this, what?” did he reluctantly agree that maybe I ought to take the job.

The next day I interviewed with John Howard [not his real name]. Neither of us was very keen on the other. I didn’t like the salary too much, although I doubted he could pay more, and although he was impressed with my background, John had had so much trouble with previous employees that he more or less expected the worst. But I agreed to take the job and began working the very next day.

(Continued)

From my original manuscript, written in October 1986:

When I flew home from London in October 1985, I felt mingled hope and wariness about the immediate future. I was hopeful because I had achieved much, positioned myself on the edge of a major breakthrough in my writing career, and fallen in love. I was wary because I knew all too well the letdown that must follow in the wake of an exciting year spent among the splendors of Europe and the wild vastnesses of Africa. In addition I was afraid to face yet again the everlasting skepticism of my father, who had never seemed satisfied with anything I accomplished in life and greeted each new achievement with the equivalent of, What good is that? Will it put money in your pocket, give you financial security?

Nevertheless I had a plan, calculated to minimize the inevitable depression and placate, at least to some extent, my father. I would write for six months, relying on savings, article commissions and my pay as a reservist in the Army National Guard to see me through until I could enter Officer Candidate School in April. After three months of that, I would receive my commission as a second lieutenant, go on to attend branch school and learn a particular specialization (e.g., field artillery), then return to Ohio for three years of graduate work. I figured my master’s degree in war studies from Kings College London would make me a shoo-in for both OCS and doctoral studies. I also figured that the five articles I had written, including a 25,000-word, specially-commissioned full issue on Robert E. Lee, would enable me to place historical articles with little trouble and perhaps land a book contract as well. In addition, incidentally, I figured that I had met the woman I would marry.

Nothing worked out as expected. The National Guard dallied about returning me to active reserve duty and did not finally cut my orders until January 1986. When I applied for OCS I was told that for some reason a security background check on me had never been conducted and that I must wait until one had been conducted and I received a secret clearance. (To date the clearance is still missing, for although I submitted the paperwork in January, a bureaucratic foul-up resulted in its return — eight months later — because the forms originally used by my unit administrator had been obsolete.

Of the six magazines on the market that dealt with military history, all either had editorial backlogs, pay on publication policies, or both, with the result that while I wrote four articles in a period of two months, I placed only one. Then too, with a kind of dreary inevitability, the girl I had wanted to marry, the girl with whom I’d had such a romantic, adventurous time in Africa and Europe, left me in favor of a bookseller. Swell.

(Continued)

I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, “Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain,which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself;sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, andsublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1782)

Come September 12 it will be twenty years since I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was then just shy of my twenty-seventh birthday. In the years since then, I’ve concluded that the actual onset of the disease was nine years earlier. Nevertheless, September 12, 1986, was the date when I received the brand I’ll carry the rest of my life.

It was also the day I had the Damascus Experience.

It is common for people with certain mental illnesses — schizophrenia and bipolar disorder prominent among them — to have intense subjective encounters with the divine. In theory, psychiatrists are supposed to respect these if they conform to the norms of a patient’s religious community. In practice . . .

Well, in practice it’s a different thing.

Over the years I have written a great deal about what happened to me then and what it has meant to me since, because I’ve chosen to regard the Damascus Experience as authentic, notwithstanding the fact that it landed me in a psychiatric ward. Only a few people have even seen a portion of these writings. It’s very personal stuff.

And yet I have never been able to shake off the conviction that at some point in my life I would have to write about it for an audience; indeed, that I was meant to do so, that it was in fact the whole point of the experience. I’ve delayed for a number of reasons: the timing was premature, I lacked the necessary perspective, I wasn’t yet wise enough to know how to tell the story gracefully. Other people are involved in the story. To tell it in a way that would be unfair to them or cause them needless hurt was something I wanted to avoid.

But mostly I was scared.

(Continued)

Britannus, shocked: Caesar, this is not proper.

Theodotus, outraged: How!

Caesar, recovering his self-composure: Pardon him Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and isle are laws of nature.

– George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

***

What if I heard another footstep there,
What if, some day — there is no one but God,
No one but God who could descend that stair
And ring his heavy footfalls on the stone.
And if He came, what would we say to Him?

That prison is ourselves that we have built,
And, being so, its loneliness is just,
And, being so, its loneliness endures.
But if another came,
What would we say?
What can the blind say, given back their eyes?

No, it must be as it has always been.
We are all prisoners in that degree
And will remain so, but I think I know
This — God is not a jailor….

– Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown’s Body

***

And as he thus made his defense, Festus said with a loud voice, “Paul, you are mad; your great learning is turning you mad.” But Paul said, “I am not mad, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth.”

– Acts 26:24-25

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 (coming)