Joseph’s Imagination
Many people have paranormal experiences. Some encounters with ghosts happen in broad daylight. Such communication can be so subtle a single word can convey a revelation. Or was it all a most improbable coincidence?
In sixth grade I was a runt. Raised by paranoid immigrants, beat up by classroom bullies, I found my only refuge in drawing and writing. Unfortunately, my poetry attracted my teacher’s attention. On Parents Night the school covered an entire wall in the auditorium with my poems, guaranteeing my future victimization in middle school.
My father never smiled at the wall of poems. He listened to the teacher’s compliments with a grim expression. In the hospital down the boulevard my mother’s life hung in the balance after a difficult surgery. As we walked across the dark playground, where I had been bruised so often, he took me by the hand, a rare occurrence. I thought he looked handsome in his gray delivery driver shirt. They allowed him to bring his truck home. He smoked a cigarette I wasn’t supposed to tell mom about. He explained that writing is a poor vocation, or “a hard piece of bread” as he put it. I’d never be able to earn money if I chose to be a writer or any kind of artist, so I shouldn’t make a habit of art, writing or music. What I had done was wrong. He had that steady gaze of a man who would climb until he owned half the company whose logo he wore on his shirt.
I tried to stop writing but it became an addiction as shameful and irresistible as masturbation. I soon discovered that if I wrote my parents trite poems for birthdays, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, I could write the rest of the year untroubled. I thought of it as tribute extracted by tyrants, but I paid the price to keep the freedom of my imagination.
As that tradition continued into my first driver’s license I wrote those poems because if I did not it meant weeks of arguments and resentment. I had tried before to substitute a simple card or a thoughtful gift for this outgrown childhood ritual, but lack of a poem outranked even my numerous acts of delinquency when it came to enraging the old man.
To rein me in he’d remind me. He’d show me the handful of various pills he had to take to stay alive. He’d tell me his stories again. At the beginning of the war, still a child, he almost died, dragged onto a train where anyone who lost consciousness smothered underfoot in human excrement. As a slave laborer he knew what it was like to be inside the factory when a bomb hit. Knocked unconscious, he woke to a soldier poking at him with a gun. Back to work. That saying over the fatal gates.
He knew the death march from personal experience. He stared at the open ditch. He meekly joined the line. He heard the machine gun fire. Before the bullets reached him he fainted. He woke among the bloody corpses, and crawled out to find no one around but a murder of crows watching from a nearby tree. A few feet away a crow picked at a human eyeball.
How did he survive in those death camps, one after the other? He tried to stay clean, to comb his hair, hoping the guards would understand his dignity. He knew that because he was so young he had to work harder than the adults. Some guards took pity on him so they snuck him moldy bread. He was referred to by number not name. His family of almost twenty they reduced to three. He knew he was lucky to have survived, but he had to live the rest of his life with memories of babies thrown in the air for target practice by laughing officers. His amputated toes bore unavoidable witness whenever he took off his left sock. They used no anesthetic. They dipped him bleeding into the barrel of disinfectant.
He understood why some had the numbers removed from their arms, but he wanted to preserve the proof of what he had suffered. His survival had defied the entire mighty engine behind that tattoo needle.
My father told a story about the day he was liberated. A medical officer named Irving gave him the Tissot watch off his wrist, trying to help him in any way he could. I still have that watch.
In a starved stupor my father joined others taking a train east, back to a nation and a town that weren’t there anymore. The train never made it. The engineer abandoned the locomotive in a wilderness of snow covered evergreens. Trying to stay alive my father shivered in the cold as he limped down the tracks. At last he stumbled upon a communist patrol. He showed the soldiers the numbers tattooed on his arm, hoping for a sympathetic reaction. But the soldiers scoffed at my father’s tattoo. One opened up his jacket and shirt to reveal his intricate tattoo of a ship at sea. “Now this is a tattoo,” he boasted.
Decades later, retired in sunny southern California, my father would chase crows away from his swimming pool. He could understand neither the American fascination with gruesome horror movies nor the Christian obsession with the torture of Jesus, having experienced worse. Halloween made no sense to him. The war had made him an atheist. He told me he didn’t care if the whole world died as long as he wasn’t singled out again. He refused any therapy for the horrific events he experienced and witnessed. He insisted on carrying them without help every day of his life.
Fear kept my mother and father from having their only child until late in life. Not long before he died my father confided that he and my mother had discussed it and they decided that they regretted the decision.
At first, I rooted for the good guys. I wanted to be an artist after spending days exploring a William Blake art book that somehow found its way into a dismal elementary school library in a decaying suburb of corner bars, car dealerships, pawnshops and stucco tract houses. Everything that I wanted to do with my life could be summed up in the word imagination. Art, writing, music, theater, film were a chorus of sirens I could not resist.
My father and I had bitter arguments about how hard my life would be. He believed I was throwing away my high IQ, and my responsibility to my family, and to society. Most importantly I was wasting the opportunities he could provide me. For instance he had longed to become a physician. I could with his help. I tried to explain that for me there was no more pressing necessity than serving the almighty imagination, the lighthouse of human evolution.
Eventually our arguments degenerated into catch phrases delivered with bitter sarcasm. My father always dismissed my optimism with a sneer: “I don’t have such imagination.” To him imagination implied delusion, effeminacy, laziness, self-infatuation, the weakness of dreamers, the border of madness.
Soured by my own comparatively meager suffering I found myself agreeing with the old man about a godless universe. This is what it means to be a man, I thought, to understand how hopeless and meaningless life is. But unlike dad, who added the necessary corollary that you work hard and live decently anyway, I preferred the role of spoiler, which proved popular.
Quickly notorious I was rescued first by love, then by friendship. I began to study the history of religions. I eagerly reported back to my father my favorite gems of wisdom, including various perspectives on life after death. All such “nonsense” he dismissed as wishful thinking for the weak minded.
Once he died in the hospital and was revived. I shared my own near death experience with him but it only made him angry. He insisted he had experienced nothing. Embracing nonexistence, he proudly proclaimed himself a hardheaded realist and dismissed my experience, and any other like it, as childish fantasy.
He had been sickly all his days, burdened with numerous afflictions caused by starvation and exposure in the war, exasperated by his stressful relationship with my mother, and me. After her attempted suicide, and her incarceration in a mental ward, he decided to risk a procedure. He hoped to buy enough time to make amends. However after long conversations in his hospital room I understood he did not expect to survive. Even there, taking his last few conscious breaths, he refused the comfort offered by spirituality. The sweetest thing he could imagine was an end to suffering.
Afterwards, trapped in a coma, he showed traces of consciousness only by moving one eye. Thinking of Poe, and Redon’s “Eye-Balloon,” I tried to prepare him for the bardo. I wiped his perspiring brow with an iced towel, while talking about what he might see, and what he should look for. I promised reunions and new horizons. His eye followed me, until they turned up the morphine. Deaths of loved ones remind us of impermanence. Loss causes us to cling to what we cherish. As Kōbō Daishi the founder of Shingon Buddhism wrote over a thousand years ago: “Although it is said that it is impossible to be disturbed by anything upon reaching enlightenemnt, I could not help but cry upon bidding farewell to a loved one.”
Exhausted and grief stricken, I found myself saddled with unexpected responsibilities involving bureaucrats, lawyers and accountants. I found that he had been generous to charities, sending checks every month. I was touched that he sent checks for years to support the Gorilla Foundation. I found a stack of their newsletters about Koko, the gorilla who used sign language.
Trying to do the best for my now mentally impaired mother, grieving for my father and for the friendship we might have had, I suffered a minor but painful back injury symbolic of the camel and the straw. The chiropractor suggested I visit a healer she knew who specialized in releasing trauma. How did she know I was traumatized I wondered out loud. She explained that my posture, breathing, and expression told her.
Feeling miserable I drove deep into Laurel Canyon where I met the healer in the closest thing to a cottage in an English garden that Hollywood could offer. He looked a bit like Christopher Walken. In his living room I browsed floor to ceiling shelves of art books. The therapy room had a window on a lush green backyard that looked more like a bit of sunlit Lake District countryside than southern California.
I told him only that my back hurt. He asked if I had experienced a recent trauma. I told him my father had died. Without further conversation he began working on my back, but then he stopped the session, and looked at me with a peculiar expression. “I am not a medium,” he said, “I do not channel. I never have. Yet I feel his presence so strongly. He’s repeating an important message for you. Shall I tell you?” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Sure,” I said, undoubtedly sounding cynical. “Your father wants me to tell you,” he paused for a couple of seconds. I could hear the birds singing outside as I expected to hear something trite. “He wants you to know, that he’s learning to enjoy his imagination.”
This is an excerpt from Spiritual Mysteries, a book in progress.
An earlier version titled If I Knew Then What I Know Now appeared in Exterminating Angel Press the Magazine.
