"LIVING WITH A WILD GOD" by Barbara Ehrenreich (review)

The first Barbara Ehrenreich book I read was “The Hearts of Men.”  At the time, which was 1983, just after I left seminary, it was a defense not heard often and full of resonance.  Now, after reading “Living with a Wild God,” the earlier book is clearly recognizable as a defense of her father.  That’s not a slam.  The lives of theologians always foreshadow their eventual theories of God.  In fact, the lives of scientists also can shape their theories.  How can we be other than what our pasts have made us, since even rejection of them amounts to a development from them?

It is often suggested that science is a kind of religion with its own leaders and morality, its own way of being in the world, but that’s backwards.  Religions are early versions of science, rough drafts composed of the knowledge of the times.  The differences in religion, once one learns how to look, are the differences in the evidence offered by the environment, the ecology, of the place the religion evolved.  To understand this, then, means accepting the ideas -- the grand principles -- of both ecology and evolution.  Both are about how things fit together and can vary radically but finally come down to survival.

To get closer to the universal forces beyond ecology, one must go to genetics, neurotheory, and quantum theory.  In our times we have gone beyond the observational science of the centuries leading up to the 19^th century nose-counting and notebook sketches to highly technical investigations requiring complex machines of enormous expense and the education to operate them.   

People shaped by infinitely differing conditions are now mixed together into circumstances that can provoke war or simply maladaptation that imposes enormous suffering to masses who are displaced from everything they believe and can do.  And yet the primal questions persist.  The two that preoccupy us now are whether there is any reality outside our perceptions and whether our capacity to make contact with it (which we now begin to understand is only symbolized by our brains, because we turn out to think with our guts and muscles as well as our neurons, and which is limited as much by our capacity to organize what comes to us through our sensorium as it is by the acuteness of our perceptions.

The Holy Land

Those people whose roots came out of the Middle East, which offered the Abrahamic religious positions, were based on the nuclear family and the tribal chieftain, especially the father/son connection that was the means of passing down power and wealth in a shrinking ecology.  Erosion, land exhaustion, diminishing rainfall, the invention of agriculture and irrigation that pushed away hunting/gathering, walled cities and the invention of chariots for the purpose of war.  These are the stories of the Old Testament and the Koran and the advice for how to deal with them.  Where the influence of the New Testament came from -- Buddhism from India, Celtic goddesses from the tribes to the north -- is up to better minds with more resources than mine.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, “Living with a Wild God: a Non-believer’s Search for the Truth About Everything” is confined by our obsessive conviction that GOD is what religion is about, in the same way that FATHER is what family is about. “The Hearts of Men,” is now clearly about FATHER, her father and what she experienced while witnessing the life-arcs of her parents.  These were closely related to the furor about Communism and Marxism and the demand for economic justice.  

Butte mine accesses

Ehrenreich is about the same age as I am, took her undergrad work at Reed in Portland, and proceeded through a technician’s career under the guidance and oppression of respected scientists.  Her brilliant father began in Butte (a bit of European coal culture transplanted to the high mountains of Montana) digging below ground, and somehow by patronage from “fathers” and support from wife, managed to rise so high in the resource corporations that he finally transcended to management.  (The priesthood.)  He was admired and well-paid but not happy and eventually fell apart into alcoholism.  Divorced, his wife lost control of her life as well.  Their religion was “atheism” which I do not see as a cause so much as a result.

Ehrenreich has always been scrupulously honest about her thoughts and in this case was investigating her personal development through “lab notes,” i.e. a journal she kept throughout her youth.  She is also honest -- but not disclosive -- about her relationships, even her two children, one of which died.  What comes through is a lack of empathy, a distrust of intimacy.  As she moved into journalism, her strength was investigating other people’s lives, understanding them in a kind of ecological way, but then leaving.

This specific book is based on a risky disclosure: a mystical experience that caused the world to “burst into flame” with meaning and inclusion.  As a young adult she and her brother, plus a friend, had gone skiing on Mt. Shasta, were sleep-lagged and famished, when she walked alone into her vision.  It is indecipherable.  Through her life little gleams of flame would return, but never that engulfment.

To complicate it, the “friend” guided them to Death Valley so he could retrieve a cache of dynamite he had found -- old, sweating, unstable, explosives which they took back to his home.  She claims she had no idea at the time but realizes in retrospect that in many alternative scenarios they could have blown up the car or his house and family.

Ehrenreich says, “My agent Kris Dahl pressed me to turn was was originally conceived as a history of religion into a personal narrative.  At first I resisted, but I think that, as usual, she was right.”  She also lets us know that she was hurting financially, since in one of the many hurricanes she had lost a New Orleans home with all her accumulated papers and since the collapse of traditional publishing had removed the practice of offering advances.  In fact, the entire ecology of publishing had collapsed, hurting her as much as anyone else writing.

Today agents do much of the shaping of a book that was once undertaken by "house" editors.  Rather than the reputation of a publishing house, profit is the guide.  The overwhelming concept is that “immersion” sells.  That is, sensation and adventure, but also intimacy with the author.  “How did you feel?  What was it like?”  Somehow, the paradigm of the sexual encounter has become our key to the meaning of life.  Orgasmic saints, both those who are virtuous and those who were wicked, seem to be our epitome of humanness.  We’ve been here before:  Zeus was very resourceful about being a swan, a shower of gold, a bull.  We see erotic love as an overwhelming -- even consuming -- force that takes us out of our skins, even out of our minds.  Of course, back there in the trunk of the car is always that sweating dynamite, liable to “blow” us to “kingdom cum.”

A dynamite explosion.

Like myself, Ehrenreich was open to Hindu ideas, though she doesn’t seem to have had access to the classes I was taking in my parallel years at Northwestern where several strong atheists and comparative religionists had found a niche.   They were the same ideas that seduced the Transcendentalists in New England.  But my “god-prob” was not the nuclear atomic “Shiva” that coincided with her and my primary school years.  Mine was “Deus Absconditus,” since my father was a traveling man who had a prefrontal cortex injury in 1948 that erased all empathy.  Of course, alcoholism and divorce are also "flights from commitment."  Maybe the right phrase is "from engagement."  So we're similar there, too.

Neither parent of Ehrenreich seems to have those little spindle cells that bestow empathy.  This lack was considered an advantage in the Cold War worlds of science labs, corporation management, and sexual carelessness.  These detached frigid contexts may be the background emptiness that creates our craving for intimacy with people we will never meet.  We're trying to come in from the cold.

"Coming in from the Cold"  (a movie)

The title of Erhrenreich's book, like the titles of many books, is meant as enticement.  It has nothing to do with the content.  There's no such thing as a "wild god" -- all gods are domestic.  (Some of them are feral.)  The heart of the book is about direct mystical experience of existence -- God has nothing to do with it.  Ehrenreich's search is not for God -- it is for meaningful relationship.  She believes in the search.  She was gifted with epiphany.

MARY MACLANE, BUTTE AUTHOR

Mary MacLane’s whatever-it-is -- a chant, a declaration -- is a necessary and welcome antidote to the male devotees of “Deadwood” and Butte, Montana, two frontier mining communities.   At 5,500 ft in altitude, Butte is higher than Deadwood (4,500) and on a mountain ridge rather than in a valley.  To Mary MacLane it was a desert, both environmentally and socially.  Now, of course, it is famous for its huge poisonous lake.  But in MacLane’s girlhood (1900) it was a teeming anthill of miners killing any men it didn’t enrich and abusing every woman, rich or poor.  The time was just before WWI, that Edwardian period we so love, but MacLane doesn’t see herself as Anne of Green Gables in a dress with puffed sleeves.  She sees herself as a kind of Anne Shirley on meth, except that she hardly knows how to be wicked in the modern sense.  She gives us her metaphor: the row of toothbrushes in the family bathroom (they HAVE a bathroom in 1900) in which the other brushes are ordinary but hers has a silver handle.  There are too many sibs and they are riding down into poverty on the coat-tails of an incompetent step-father.  Until fifty years ago (MY childhood) most families were dependent on the success of the father.

So Mary walks the sandy alpine ridges where little grows and fantasizes escaping from this trap while “I Await the Devil’s Coming,” the title of her first book, written when she was 19.  It could as easily have been written by a modern suicidal Goth girl convinced that her salvation will come from fucking the Devil Himself.  Or Herself.  And yet Mary MacLane, proud of being Scots, says her only beloved is “the anemone woman,” her gentle and ladylike English teacher.  Of course, the Devil is a devious fellow but pretending to be a nurturing angel is not the usual strategy.  More likely the demonic Al Swearingen would slap her face, tear off her clothes, and put her to work.  I do not think this was what she had in mind.  Something more like Lily Langtry exchanging barbs with Oscar Wilde, maybe.

There is no information about how Mary was be able to waltz with the Devil without producing any “spawn,” but clearly part of the entrapment of the women of the time had to be the unavailability of birth control: it’s hard to imagine Al Swearingen tearing open a new packet of Trojans.  She starred in a silent film:  “Men Who Have Made Love to Me,” but it has disappeared.  

Her second book, published after the First World War, was “I, Mary MacLane” which one gathers is a more rueful account of the decadent life and less appealing to book buyers who just wanted to be peaceful.  At the age of 48 she was found dead of TB in a cheap hotel.  She had been back to Butte to live with her mother for a while.  She had managed a year in Greenwich Village.  There’s no mention of ever leaving the continent.  (She was born in Winnipeg.  Do you know Winnipeg?)  

She was marked and marketed as BUTTE.  Sensational lecturing supplied her main income -- not prostitution, at least not officially.  She really WAS a beautiful woman but used it to lead girls astray, not to seduce men.  Of course, the men probably appreciated it.  Both the looks and the other.

The genres of biography, autobiography, memoir and so on -- all mostly mis-defined anyway -- are by now pretty well abused to death by incoherent but incredibly emotional teen girls on the Internet.  What seems to be trendy at the moment is “interpretation” or even “reinterpretation.”  The “Bookslut” bloggist, Jessica Crispin, salutes our heroine as carrying the flag ahead of womankind whilst they parade their declaration of ignoring all limits, to be as wicked as they like.  But another interpretation is that MacLane was simply caught between two forces: the respectable Midwestern religious propriety in which she was raised (and which taught her she needed a male to be fulfilled) and the desire to bust-out, to find something more, more, more and far more distinguished.  The trouble was trying to find out what the “more distinguished” thing really was.  

L.M. Montgomery did not tell the truth, which was that she was raised by hard-bitten cold grandparents because her mother died and her father ran away.  She didn’t tell about being used as a servant by her father’s second marriage nor about marrying a respectable Presbyterian minister so crippled by depression that she had to front and cover for him to keep him employed while raising their two sons.  Her family didn’t acknowledge her suicide.  Likewise, Louisa May Alcott kept up the front while her family nearly starved and she herself considered suicide.  She really WAS a feminist and at least ran in a high brow crowd before dying of either mercury poisoning from misguided medicines or from an autoimmune disease like lupus.  

Mary MacLane does not write at all like either of these women.  But she sometimes does sound like a dark version of Anne Shirley, who succumbed to the hell of the English classroom.  In modern times, Mary MacLane would only be able reach the acme of wickedness with the help of a lot of specialized equipment and substances -- or maybe with the help of a transgender operation she could BECOME Al Swearingen.  It’s tough to keep from being pressed back into the role of “anemone lady.”  Today it’s not enough to wait for the Devil’s coming -- one must become one’s own Satan.  Many did even then.  According to David Milch and Edith Wharton, the anemone ladies were laudanum addicts.  

Today by Mary’s age, 19, we are assured that most girls have at least acquired sexual experience -- along the lines of sucking off the whole football team -- and yearn for a peaceful homebound mom-life baking cupcakes.  If MacLane was the result of the collision between a moribund, paralyzed and confining life for women in bourgeois families and the desire to fly free without knowing quite what that means, then maybe some new best seller will respond to the collision between way too much waltzing with Lucifer and how one becomes a mom when the needed biological equipment has been so hard-used.  Or maybe it will just explain to us finally how we escape both gender-bullying and good-bad dichotomies.  Or are we still trying to come to terms with European class structures and privileges versus the uncertainty and hard-labor of the hard-luck masses?  Does the Devil still have his hard-on?

Here’s a modern-sounding sample of MacLane:  "I should like a man to come, I said calmly to myself today as I walked slowly over my barrenness -- a perfect villain to come and fascinate me and lead me with strong, gentle allurements to what would be technically termed my ruin. . . 

"I would then jerk my life out of this Nothingness by the roots. . . The man would be bad to his heart’s core.  And after living but a short time with him my shy, sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted.  The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life.  And so everything within me that had turned toward that too-bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death."

As far as anyone knows, MacLane never married.  But the Demon Lover lives on everywhere -- now a vampire or werewolf.  That hints that the contemporary dilemma is about what it means to be human.  Even in Butte.