Gospel & Universe 🔥 Señor Locke
Campfires
The night sky grinds the day to dust and smithereens.
What was once so important — that way she looked at you,
that thing you said to her — will one day be lost
at the end of a voltage meter held by an alien whose name you can’t pronounce.
Together, on vacation, in love, all disperse in time into memory,
that skewed storage container of the self,
which once laughed like the fire roared
at some absurd thing your dad said around the campfire,
next to the pop-up Starcraft camper, back in 1971,
forest trails, creamsicles at dusk, and endless goodnights.
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My parents slept on one side of the camper and the four of us on the other. I always needed to take a pee about twenty minutes after the last goodnight was said (we were like a rolling Greek chorus, cheek to cheek). Because I slept at the far end, I climbed over everyone in the dark.
Meanwhile, the memory of laughing around a campfire and stumbling out into the dark finds itself next to the memory of a different campfire, around which counsellors are telling little boys about ghosts, walking on water, and burning bushes. The campfire is next to a path leading into a dark forest full of cabins.
Dante was 33 when he found himself in a dark forest, in una selva oscura. I was 11. Dante’s journey was epic and imaginary, and full of powerful Italian phrases: ma per trattar del ben che v’i vi trovai / dirò de l’altre cose ch’i v’ho scorte (but to tell of the good I found there / I’ll also tell of the other things I saw there). My journey, on the other hand, was ordinary and real. I didn’t meet God or Satan, and I didn’t get any insight into the world beyond.
Instead of inspiring me to sing “Kumbaya,” my experience at this camp made me want to listen to Uriah Heep and Black Sabbath, Queen and Led Zeppelin, or any band that promised to turn the sanctimonious world on its head. Let me explain.
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Here I am, at “The Camp in the Dark Woods” with my Little League baseball cap on my head. Our team was called “the Royals,” as in Kansas City. I was always ready for anything…
But I wasn’t ready for what camp counsellors might do to young boys.
I’m not sure where the paths of these counsellors will take them in the end, but I do know that they took us with them just as we were starting out on our own paths. I suspect that deceit played a large part.
First, the water drips from the cabin ceiling onto your sleeping bag and mattress. Slowly, you’re getting drenched. You complain that you’re getting soaked. The counsellor counsels you to come into his bed, which is conveniently dry. What he does there takes you decades to figure out. Suffice it to say that being fondled by another male doesn’t do any good to an eleven-year-old boy growing up in Alberta in 1971, back when the most common term of abuse was “faggot.”
Second, on a rainy day two or three counsellors line us up in the cabin and ask us to take off our clothes. All our clothes. They tell us that we may have ticks. They search everywhere, especially those tricky areas at the back of the legs. They pretend to help us.
Third, they take us skinny-dipping in the lake, which is right next to “The Camp in the Dark Woods.” They float in the water with their genitals on display. They talk about the naturalness of it all, encouraging us to let ourselves go. Despite being a competitive swimmer, I refuse to go into the water, and simply stand on the shoreline, disgusted by their display. Fuming, I refuse to even get into my swimsuit.
And then every night they preach around the campfire about Jesus and the many forms of love. “Higher forms of love” that society doesn’t understand. Then they get us to sing “Kumbaya.”
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I couldn’t so much as touch another male for years. By the time I got to high school, the very last thing on earth I wanted to do was join the wrestling club. I’d still rather not hug anyone, especially males.
You suspect that looking into neuroscience will help you get over this sort of thing. Some might even argue that memories are just traces of actions that no longer matter. Or perhaps a father’s love and a counsellor’s lust might cancel each other out. Perhaps your experiences are superseded by higher forms of love and forgiveness. Perhaps one day you’ll travel beyond joy and anger. Perhaps all dualities will dissolve into the fog-banks of the Infinite. Love in, love out. Ashes to ashes.
But what if you want to keep one memory (of your father), and throw the other out (of the counsellor)? The brain isn’t a computer, with specific files you can erase or specific circuits you can scrub. God knows I tried. At 13, I started binge drinking. At 14 I started in on drugs. Here, for instance, I’m impersonating a sailor, downing a beer in the woods near the Dijon Grand Prix, back in 1975:
And here I am several months later in a photo booth in Paris, lips compressed, about to explode — while my sister, by comparison, looks calmly into the eye of the camera:
At 14 I started in on pot, LSD, and finally Transcendental Meditation, which my mother hoped would calm me down and stop me from being an out-of-control maniac. But if what I was looking for was some sort of white blotter blank slate, some sort of absolutional samadhi beyond all the things that shouldn’t matter, I never found it. For how can you remain yourself and then say that your upbringing and your experiences don’t matter? The Absolute is a wonderful thing, but everything’s relative.
As with so much else in life, to cherish one thing you must tolerate another. As much as we’d like a perfect place to live, there are always neighbours. Perhaps this is why we want to believe in Heaven: to keep the riff-raff out.
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Next: Beneath the Aonian Mount
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