New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
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by Larry L. Dill
For all the misery and mysticism I’d gone through to get into seminary in the spring of 1968, it just didn’t work out. I completed the summer session of Koine Greek (the language in which parts of the New Testament were originally written), but half way through my first full semester in the fall it dawned on me that I was more interested in poetry than prophesy. I’d had some interesting experiences there but the spiritual rebirth I thought I had had when Martin Luther King was killed, turned out to be little more than a kind of psychological flash-back to memories of a simpler religious ritualism of childhood. My respect and admiration for Dr. King remained as strong as ever but over the course of the three or four months I spent as a seminarian, it became clear to me (and even clearer to most of my professors and fellow students) that even though I possessed and could articulate a clear moral code that was essentially compatible with the teachings of Jesus Christ, I had a problem with the supernatural aspects of religious tradition that would make it impossible for me ever to become a Christian minister. I came to understand then (as I do to this day) that once the genie of secular enlightenment is out of the bottle, you can never again get him to go back in there and stay. Since 1969 I’ve had a couple of religious flash-backs similar to the one I had back then, and each was associated with a physical, social or psychological crisis. Freud’s idea was that these episodes of religious belief were psychological defense mechanisms that transformed one’s actual experiences of infantile dependence on adult care into the imaginary omnipotence of benevolent gods. Evolutionary psychologists are only just now beginning to talk about how religion might have arisen as an almost universal element of human experience.
Knowing that within weeks of leaving the seminary, my draft board would be notified and I would be re-classified 1-A, I was once again faced with some very tough choices: I could just stay in seminary and fake my way through (which was actually the advice several of my classmates gave me), I could go back and try to re-claim my original marriage deferment (even though I was no longer living with my wife—that would be faking it, too), or I could go to Canada or just go to jail. These last two choices seemed the only authentic choices left to me after the resolute moral stand I had taken before my local draft board in defense of my position as a conscientious objector. But every time I thought about either one of them it made me want to throw up. Jail made me nauseous for the obvious reasons. I honestly can’t remember why Canada seemed so unattractive other than it was a step into the cold unknown, fraught with logistical uncertainties as well as being both illegal and irreversible (it never crossed my mind that within less than a decade an American president, Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate and nuclear engineer, would grant a general amnesty to Vietnam war resisters who fled to Canada and other countries.
I did, however, feel that I had some time (perhaps as much as three to four months) to make up my mind about Canada. So I took off hitch-hiking from Austin to New York City, a place I’d never been in my life, but felt was the Mecca to which all aspiring American writers, artists and intellectuals must at least make a pilgrimage if not relocate permanently. And like Mecca, the Wailing Wall or other holy shrines, there was magic to be had there. Grace. Transformative power. It was a superstitious, narcissistic and nihilistic enterprise that was to become the model for my life-long habit of picking up and moving suddenly to a different place, purely for aesthetic or emotional reasons with little or no regard for the details of how I would survive, but always guided by a murky vision that a change of scenery would someday spawn a literary masterpiece. It was my first vision quest. I wanted to be a troubadour, a wandering poet, a man of the world. But unlike Bob Dylan or Jack Kerouac I had no reputation to precede me and, as I said, only the murkiest of visions to guide me. I don’t know if it was bad luck, naivety or cowardice that kept me from seeking out my own kind and demanding early on in my incarnation as a poet, that I immerse myself in the bohemian art world where one could receive the necessary feed-back and inspiration one needs to learn, to understand and to produce. I didn’t feel ready. 35 years later I still don’t. The few times when I have forced myself to get involved with other poets, I have found it to be tedious, un-inspiring and counter-productive. Being in a room full of narcissists is as nerve-racking as being a cat in a room full of cats in a room full of rockers. Rather than the raucous lifestyles of Dylan, Kerouac, or Ginsberg, whose writings I loved, I preferred the reclusive emotional inspiration of Emily Dickinson and Dostoevsky where the writer is not only inventing an imaginary work of art, but somehow actually living an imaginary life. Such underground imaginary realism can easily lead to madness as it did for Dostoevsky, a suffocating seclusion as in Dickinson’s case or a depressing lack of discipline as it has in mine. Unwilling to ask for or take advice, I’ve made the major decisions in my life unilaterally, like a reclusive artist, creating a secret work. My choices have often been based on my emotional reactions to the writings (and sometimes what I knew about the lives) of the writers I’ve read. Not always able to distinguish between the facts and the fiction the results have often been disastrous. Before I left Austin, my friend, Lew Dunn, who already had a masters degree in English and was almost finished with a PhD in German, told me that he had given up the idea of becoming a writer. It was as if he was telling me (and I was learning for the first time) that there was no Santa Claus. I had thought of Lew as a kind of formalistic Thomas Mann to my emotional Herman Hesse. He would finish the PhD and go on to get a law degree and become a judge in a small town in east Texas but somewhere back there in the 60’s he had already understood the irony of our youthful romanticism. I never did.
The last night I spent in Austin in the fall of 1968 I moved from my dorm room at the seminary to the St El-Motel (the name a pun on the fact that the motel was located in south Austin near the intersection of South Congress and St Elmo Drive.) Seedy though it was the St. El-Motel had exactly the kind of Kerouacian atmosphere that was appropriate for my new-found bohemianism. I went there so that I could invite my estranged wife, Melba, to meet me for one last good-bye kiss. And to spend the night if she would--and she did. St. Elmo is the patron saint of sailors. I had begun my 60’s adventure grounded in the belief that I would define my career endeavors as a minister to sailors. Now, as I embarked on the first great voyage of my lifetime, I was neither a sailor nor a priest. Melba drove me out to an exit ramp on I-35 in north Austin on a crisp November morning. New York was 1800 miles away. The dusty wind blew down hard on me from the gods and from the passing cars and 18 wheelers. The twin emotions of hope and despair were my angels then (as they are today) and I can remember how the tears streamed down my cheeks and blew away as I stood there with my thumb in the air, army duffle bag on the ground beside me, wondering who would stop to pick me up and what on earth or in heaven was to be my fate.
Chapter 4: Geronimo Tears
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