The Confession
On madness, atonement, and healing power of old words
I am by genes and time and bad luck a madwoman. A madwoman is shut in her own mind, but she can speak more freely than a sane one about a good many things. She can expend herself as she wills, and lately I have been spending freely, and borrowing strength I never had.
I spent the bulk of myself for the past months writing a book about God and theocracy and America, more of myself than I could afford, and in too short a time: I wrote, and didn’t eat, and read, and wrote, for months without stopping, on a deadline that meant if I failed to deliver I’d be bankrupt, in hock to the publishing house. I stopped eating and went crazy, gripped half by zeal and half by melancholia at cross purposes, and couldn’t level out except by putting out words in tens of thousands, which I did, in a very short time, because I had to.
These aren’t the salad days of writing, when you can turn around and find a dollar-a-word job to pull yourself out of the hole; the only things you have to sell are your words and yourself, if you don’t have a big-name publication behind you, and the doors of the big-name publications are closed to most. It’s a hard time to find a job selling words, and you can’t sell them door-to-door like cookies or Tupperware. They’re not things you can sink your teeth into or put your supper in. They’re just words, like life is just life, or oxygen is just oxygen.
So I wrote myself into a fire, writing about Christianity, listening to a lot of voices from a lot of people hurt by a particular cruel brand of it, and I wrote about its whys and its wheres and its whos and its demons, which are legion. I got burned — not by the big holy fire of religion, but by the dark heart of what I was writing, and other people’s pain I swallowed willingly and disgorged back in little stories, chapter-sized packages full of ravages, and heartbreak, and the hard bright hope of the righteous for a subjugated world. Then I couldn’t write anymore. Not one word.
So I took two weeks just to be mad and in my agonies. A luxury I can’t afford, as mentioned above. I’m a shabby personage, I’ve been told I dress like a maidservant hard on her luck, new shoes are an occasion for me; and the loneliness of being an unattached writer can harden into other things. A lot of writers go crazy trying to keep their minds cracked open and record everything they see — the inner watchman is never still. I was crazy before I started writing for a living, which makes me lucky; writing just made it worse or gave it purpose or both.
Agoraphobia is the clinical term for my compensatory ills; no booze or barbiturates required. It’s an isolation that is near-complete, a parasitic attachment to my street corner, a sense that I am a ghost haunting my own life, one that doesn’t deserve human attention, and can’t truly accept it. My madness is, at least, usually a quiet sort of madness, the madness of fear let loose like a wild dog and marking the whole world as its territory, and mine as nowhere at all. I wish I had the genius to merit such a surfeit of madness but all I can do is go on writing words and hope they are sharp and beautiful and rich and true — all the things I’m not — can never be — won’t ever ripen into.
I am large physically but I slump my shoulders so I look even shorter than five-foot-three, and try to disappear as often as I can. I chain-smoke on street corners in the rain and have a range of motion like a wounded bird. I feel hollow inside and ugly outside and have thought myself for a long time to be irredeemable; and after the book was in I spent two weeks reading and not eating and spending my life on the big brown couch I sleep on and pretending it was the whole wide world, and I wasn’t missing anything at all. I read myself into a stupor — all noir, complex murders, car chases, Raymond Chandler’s elegant phrases and cruel empty heart, and better writers still: Hughes and Cain and Macdonald and Millar and Hammett and Highsmith and Himes. Books written from ‘36 to ‘63 full of night streets, bad cops, cruel and beautiful blondes empty as sketches in lipstick. I read because all the words I had were emptied out of me and I couldn’t write and that is the worst thing of all.
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No matter how bad it gets I can always write, but for two weeks I couldn’t write a word. It was like having a leg amputated in my sleep and waking up swaying and hopping. No tall grass to sway through, just rutty sidewalks; the rats, my night companions, flitting under the fenders on the street, a man practicing opera in a clear baritone in an apartment, repeating the same phrase over and over; the green leaves going brown; the cool creeping in everywhere telling me a story about winter; my own gargantuan inabilities chattering at me with big yellow teeth and lush wet tongues.
You cannot imagine, unless you’ve known madness, the effort it takes to walk to the busy intersection two blocks away, the careful measuring of my steps toward it —purple house, friendly stoop, stoplight, ten seconds counting down, the little electronic figure of the walking man fixed in metal and waiting, as stuck in place as me. Panic disorder illustrates quite beautifully the way the body and the mind braid together, making a mockery of Descartes. It is bad lightning in the spinal cord. It never loosens its hold on you. It’s inherited, but distilled in me, an evil liquor I have instead of blood. It seems a shame that all that ancestral fear amounts to nothing but a dumpy figure transfixed with terror, frozen in amber except for a rabbiting heart and a sweat-beaded brow. All I have is the ability to turn out words and when it deserted me I thought I was done for — really the ghoul in the corner I imagined myself to be, really hollow now, really a nothing woman, so relentlessly self-focused I’d eaten myself alive and simply forgotten to die.
Queerly or perhaps neatly enough, it took God to shock me out of my god-stupor. For me Christianity is supping at a strange table, one that isn’t mine, will never be mine because I never want it to be — too many forced conversions, too many slaughters blot my family’s past, and for me interest in Christianity has always been a matter of self-defense. In writing a book about it I had eaten too much from that strange table, I was drunk on the wine they say was drawn from God’s own veins. I had spoken to prophets about demons, and to men and women about rapes and beatings, and I was more tired than I knew. In the interim I’d tried to read my way back to the heart of America, through its literary underbelly, the literature of the curdled dream and the blood on the gold at the end of the rainbow. All of it left me feeling separated from the world and cut off even from myself — the only thing any of us has at the end of the day — lost even to my meager little self.
In such straits I betook myself to the synagogue.
It was the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. The holiest day of the year. I have always dodged God; I left him on purpose, walked out after a pious childhood, tried never to look back. After storming out it is hard to creep back in even a little. You can be a Jew without God, so many have lived their whole lives that way and set the world aflame with fierce goodness in the process. The last time I felt the breath of God on me was eleven years ago in a foreign country I was living in, and it was a simple thing: I helped a hunched old woman carry a heavy basket up a hill. I heard a sighing in my soul telling me it was right. I felt a holy stillness in that moment; I never learned the old woman’s name; the hill was icy, the basket cut into my arm, I was warm with the exertion and the secret sense of divine approval.
Still, I didn’t turn back to God. I just kept going. I have spent the decade since dredging words up from a secret font and spilling them out for the first willing buyer. My childhood was smothered with religion like a sofa in a plastic cover, and it didn’t save me from any of the pain that has turned me into what I am. I spurned God after that day eleven years ago, I felt Him reaching for me and turned away; and for the following decade it didn’t even feel like spurning God. It felt like staying low in a trench to avoid a sniper. Like Jonah I thought if I kept going he wouldn’t spot me. I never took ship, I just hid, and built myself a cave, a carapace.
It was my own fault I got so vulnerable. I was used up, chewed up, done for, and it was the Day of Atonement, and by my own feet I got into the synagogue. At the great prayer that opens it all — Kol Nidre — the little prayer that dissolves your oaths and bonds, sung in a grieving treble that scrapes at the bones — I fell to pieces and sank to a stone floor, on my knees for a minute. It was badly sung but I didn’t care. I needed the old, old words to remind me who I was.
I needed them so badly I went out at night in the rain and clenched my teeth against that rabid rush of fear that wanted me to stay on the brown couch where nothing bad could happen to me. I wanted to see the faces of strangers turned toward a pulpit; I wanted the words of my youth; the great words, ancient in Aramaic, draped in sad song, I wanted them in my blood. I got them and left like someone leaves a fast-food restaurant. I let the rain whip at my hair til the cab home arrived. It was cold as I was, it reached even into my fear-coiled mind, that bright racked place very little can touch til the fit passes. It passed and the words hummed in me with their weight of centuries.
The part of this story that implies I got to the synagogue under my own power is a lie. As ill as I am, to go anywhere more than a few blocks away I have to be escorted, like a dowried Victorian ingenue, and there are people who love me who will allow me to inconvenience them from time to time. I followed like a dog to Neilah, the closing of the gates, the last part of Yom Kippur: the final sealing of fate until the book opens again next year. The prayers are old — a composite of liturgy and poetry like a varicolored rock shelf, with the fossils of centuries in it, the ghosts of poets turning their faces to heaven in acrostic compositions.
It was a dim room, no windows, a rented space for the great day when the great prayers are loosed once each year. Three steps forward, three steps back, a curt bow of reverence, the begging for mercy, the unfurling of praises. We tell him he is our father and our king, though I have never revered either fathers or kings very much; still I repeated it again and again. I took the edge seat in the back row — I always have an escape route planned — and in the stale air composed of four hundred people’s exhalations I waited and prayed as I had not since I was a teenager.
I could still read Hebrew and I prayed to the forgiver of sins, the resurrector of the dead, the bestower of prosperity, shield of deliverance. I was twitching like a rabbit and making compulsive little braids in my hair, I was retying my sash, doffing and donning my jacket. I had skipped vidui — the confession of sins, with its ritual beating of the breast — so I rapped my left breast ten times; hard knuckles on soft flesh in a big hushed room. At this time I felt a rupture in myself. God didn’t speak to me as he didn’t speak to me eleven years ago. But all of a sudden I felt gathered up in a big fist, bigger than the room, bigger than Manhattan, bigger than time. It struck my middle like a bullet and I made my excuses and went out into the rain.
When I came back they blew the ram’s horn and I closed my eyes and felt it down to the root of me. I knew I had roots then. I wasn’t a nothing woman closed to the world, I wasn’t hollow, I was a severed-bone horn waiting to be filled with a great sound. The big fist had me and wasn’t ready to let me go yet. I had shown my head above the parapet and been sniped precisely. I had come into the synagogue to be struck and received my desire from the high place the great prayers had opened. The congregation intoned God’s name seven times in one great voice and nothing existed outside that room, not even the city. I had stolen in before the closing of the gates of heaven and been picked up like a broken little bird.
And then the street and the cab and food and bed. The city hadn’t vanished, after all; it was still here with its pizza joints and people. Conversation jangled at me; love jangled at me; I wanted to be alone and write a canticle to God or the wind, some acrostic poem in exquisite Hebrew; as if an encounter with the sacred could be undone by the slightest touch of the mundane, even kindness.
One of the things you ask forgiveness for on Yom Kippur is a hardness of the heart. My fear had made me harder than granite. To be ill and weak as I am makes you bitter; to need ravenously is to hate your need; self-loathing and self-pity are black shallow water that can drown you easily if you fall into them face-first as I so often have; you hate loving and needing and weakness all alike even if they’re what makes you human. Still I felt the fingers of God on me to be powerful and fragile things: I could talk myself out of them as I had talked myself out of many feelings before.
Was the hollow woman hearing herself in her echo chamber and convincing herself it was God? Was it the armature of centuries, the dusktime ceremony inviting God in, that convinced her he had kept his appointment? As if he could be summoned to supper even by hundreds of voices — thousands of voices across the city, tens of thousands, at the closing of the great gates? Isn’t it embarrassing to admit an encounter with the divine — something too close to madness for a madwoman to confess to?
The hand I felt wasn’t kind or gentle or welcoming; it was the smiting hand that felled its enemies and brought plagues to their thresholds so long ago and had since been engaged in inscrutable errands. It cracked me open. I can feel the armor of fear and hate and need shake off me in shards. Leaving nothing, or a woman, behind. The gates are closed. The fist has been retracted. I had kept my appointment with God and been dismissed after, back to the solemn little wreck of my life. To the suspended animation of a mad hermit getting prematurely old in cheap clothes, living on grudging kindness. But there is time even for me; there is time beyond time, even for me.
All my life I have thought things can change, must change, with the right words and actions. With the fingers of God still on my belly I can even believe it. I am small and dull as a copper ingot in a hill and above the hill the great wide sky is open and smells of winter and a holy thing stirs in the clouds.
Oh, Talia. I felt this so deeply. I want to (and am going to read this over and over. It is devastating.
Chased down by the Hound of Heaven. God bless you.