The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (65 page)

Even smaller towns within the tri-city area made their contributions to American history. Rensselaer had been settled by the Dutch, as its quixotic spelling suggests, and it was here that Richard Shuckburgh, an English doctor, composed 'Yankee Doodle', the words of which ridicule the provincial hick's sartorial affectations. It became a popular fife and drum marching song during the Revolution and was the tune most associated with America in Europe.

(Apropos of patriotic music, the stirring and uplifting 'America the Beautiful' would surely have become our national anthem, if political log-rolling on the part of a senior Maryland senator in 1931 hadn't inflicted on us a pathetic doggerel written by a Maryland lawyer and set to the tune of an English drinking song.)

Watervliet (also Dutch... you can always recognize Dutch because it looks as though the typist's fingers slipped from the keys) was the modest town where Ben (you'll meet him later in this book) worked for awhile, digging drainage ditches. Watervliet's other claim to glory is its association with a remarkable woman, Ann Lee. Mother Ann, as she came to be known, was a religious phenomenon. Born to a blacksmith's wife in Manchester, England, at the age of twenty-two she joined the Shaking Quakers, and soon became a luminary in that exuberant throw-back from what had by then become the solemn and circumspect Quakers. In 1770, when she was thirty-four years old, she was thrown into prison for the vehemence of her anti-establishment preaching. While in prison Mother Ann had a revelation that led her to establish the cult known as the Shakers, or more formally, The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. She taught her followers that Christ had been the male manifestation of god's dual nature, and that she, Mother Ann, was god's female manifestation and she constituted the promised Second Coming.

In 1774 Ann Lee brought eight disciples to America to create her utopia. They settled in Watervliet where they established the principles and the routine of life that we now identify with the Shakers. Even in the colonies, Mother Ann was imprisoned for her pacifist doctrines and her refusal to sign an oath of allegiance. (It would appear that George III had his MacCarthyites.) But she continued to preach, to organize, to convert, and to heal by the laying on of hands. No figure is more representative of the religious fervor and millennial zealotry that swept over the colonies immediately before the War of Independence. By the time Mother Ann was recalled to union with the Father and the Son, the community had grown to several thousand converts; and by the 1820s the Shakers had expanded throughout New England and spilled out into Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana; and everywhere they were respected for their hard work and their unimpeachable honesty, as well as for the quality of their handicrafts. They were not only hard-working and honest, they were clever and inventive. Although they abjured the crass commercialism of applying for patents, the Shakers invented the screw propeller, the circular saw, a turbine waterwheel, a practical threshing machine, even the simple forked clothespin. They were also the first to market seeds in little packets. But they are best know for their furniture which, with its carefully chosen and aged wood, its painstaking craftsmanship, and its absolute functionalism was the most significant American contribution to domestic interior design.

The sect was known, not only for hard work, communal living, shared duties and possessions, scrupulous honesty, and its belief in a female second coming, but also, alas, for its commitment to celibacy, and this appears to have had a detrimental effect on their ability to go forth and multiply. They relied exclusively on converts to increase their flock, but as the spasms of mid-Nineteenth Century revivalist fever burnt themselves out, their numbers diminished and their communities grew older and unable to perform the tasks demanded by their hard, healthful living. In the 1850's there were more than five thousand practicing Shakers; by the opening of the Twentieth Century, fewer than a thousand; and although the 'Seventies brought in a handful of dazed flower children from the decaying hippie communes, the Shakers have now passed into history.

But Watervliet can claim to have been the home of Mother Ann, the feminine Christ of the Second Coming.

The eddies of history swirled around Albany.

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37. '...personal experience of the positive power of prayer' (p.222)

Her talk about the mystic power of prayer left me feeling embarrassed on her behalf. Typical product of Western thought that I am, my first impulse has always been to reject the superstitious, the otherworldly, the supernatural. And when I met somebody who believed in gods, ghosts, demons, angels, or spirits, I assumed that this person was either foolish, weak or damaged. I felt sorry for such people, but I was also embarrassed by them. Even when considering such relatively common events as telepathy, prescient dreams, and what have been termed 'psychic screams', I preferred to think that I was dealing with phenomena for which the explanation has not yet been found, rather than with forces or events that are extra-logical or sur-rational. I would rather admit that my understanding is limited than accept illogical explanations, this despite the fact that I myself have experienced the mystic transport that is the ultimate goal of Eastern meditation, and reliable, intelligent people have told me of events that can neither be explained nor explained away by our current understanding of physics or psychology.

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38. '...whispered into the darkness' (p. 227)

I am aware that these recollections of Father Looney and our down-market salvation stall have a quality of impressionistic caricature about them, but I have written what I find in my memory. This does not mean that I have written the truth, because, like all natural story-tellers, I burnished and gilded my experiences right from the beginning, when I came home after six-o'clock mass and told my mother over breakfast what had happened. I always shaped and embellished the moments so they would be more interesting. And it may well be these honed and polished versions of reality that have lodged in my memory, rather than the duller, more pedestrian events as they occurred.

The story-teller differs from the liar in that he tells you what he honestly remembers, but he should occasionally admit that his memories have been buffed and burnished.

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39. '...would do four months later' (p. 239)

We tend to forget that these four nations were members of the Axis, despite the fact that some of them, the Romanians for instance, were among the most enthusiastic in seeking a final solution to 'the Jewish question'.

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40. '...and chilling, too.' (p. 239)

The mention of Edward R. Murrow's grave, considered reportage brings to mind the contrasting cheap gimmickry and muck-raking of radio's most popular purveyor of news and facts in the late '30s and early '40s: Walter Winchell, whose weekly programs began with the beeps of a telegraph key over which came his machine-gun spiel, “Good evening Mr and Mrs North and South America and all the ships at sea, let's go to press!... Flash!” Then Winchell would swing into his particular blend of gossip, insinuation and snide innuendo that someone aptly labeled 'insinuendo.'

Most radio listeners had a 'favorite' news commentator, one whom they trusted more than the others. This was seldom a commentator who cast a fresh light on events, but rather one whose viewpoint confirmed and reinforced the listener's preconceptions and prejudices. Those who liked their scandal and smut mixed with liberal pro-Roosevelt inclinations listened to Walter Winchell or Gabriel Heatter; those who were anti-New Deal preferred Fulton Lewis, H. V. Kaltenborn or Boake Carter. But all future male newscasters would take Edward R. Murrow as their model, down to his chesty voice placement, his slightly precious pronunciation, and his wryly-knowledgeable tone (? HYPERLINK “http://www.trevanian.com/radio/radio.htm” ?explore this here?). The early radio commentators had had to invent a way to do what had never been done before: to speak out the news over the airwaves, arranging the information in time, not in space as print journalists arranged it, and to do so in tones and accents that would make them seem caring and aware. At the same time they sought to avoid alienating their nation-wide listeners who spoke in many local accents and idioms. It was these radio news pioneers who invented the neutral-but-kindly 'sound of the newsman'. With little to guide them but the clear, slightly artificial elocutionists of the Chautauqua and Lyceum circuits, they came up with that now-universal “accent-from-nowhere” which is also an accent-from-everywhere, the “mid-American sound” we hear to this day, with its mellow head tones, its heavily significant delivery, its assured and comforting baritone... the total effect being a faintly masturbative relationship between the self-involved speaker and his vocal cords.

Early television added nothing to this sound but a face, just as television news was little more than radio news with a hole kicked in the front of the set so you could see the reporter speaking into his microphone, usually a man in a too-tight, too-shiny suit and hair so gorgeously coiffured that he could pass for a television evangelist.

As television entered its adolescence, regional news producers eager to increase their ratings while performing their public service obligations decorated their news presentations with “color” personalities in weather and sports slots... cuties to do the weather and dummies to do the sports; and soon the real news was squeezed down to headlines, to save space for “human interest” clips and ambulance chasing... all fast, hot, and gossipy. When it dawned on television executives that information could be a saleable item, the tone of newscasts became lighter and more playful, and it was not rare to see a smiling, chipper reporter get two or three lines into the tragic death of a child before he remembered to frown and lower his voice to a solemn tremor.

In time, stations and networks added women to the news desk, and these women had to develop sounds and techniques for themselves, as Ed Murrow's avuncular “voice of sympathetic authority” would obviously not serve. Some of them succeeded in carving out niches for themselves beside the glib lads with the succulent 'FM voices' and the layered, lacquered haircuts; but many cultured listeners were repelled from electronic news drilled at them in the spiky, hard-charging tone that became the female newscaster's predominant idiom.

In the end, television news failed to build on the groundwork done by radio pioneers. The greed of the news packagers and the voyeurism of the mass audience combined to reduce television news to the trivial and the distasteful. News became another kind of entertainment, one capable of providing millions of stunned, staring viewers for the advertisers. Fortunes were made by information entrepreneurs offering networks that specialized in superficial, sensational, grass-fire journalism, and a democracy of intellectually lazy voters let its primary source of information be reduced to optical narcotics. The majority of our nation receives its information from entertainers, a fast-food variant of news that is trimmed and spiced and sweetened to be tasty and filling, but without intellectual nutrients. Then, stuffed to the ears with this superficial, ersatz information, they waddle out and vote. Look at the president you're voted in.

(Note: I was obliged to write the above note a month before the election, so I devised a last sentence applicable to either of the candidates.)

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41. '...I enjoyed privileged access' (p. 246)

To demystify quickly, let me describe a typical voyage to The Other Place. When I was in school, bored and yearning to be somewhere, doing something, but the teacher's voice droned on out there just beyond the limens of my attention; or when I was sitting on my bed, looking out onto the night street, worrying about money or my mother's health, or wondering if we would ever get off Pearl Street; I would sometimes become aware of a slight tingling in my chest followed by the sensation of rising up; then I was floating towards a small up-tilted mountain meadow flooded with sunlight. I would come closer and closer to the soft grass until I blended into that meadow. More exactly, the meadow and I inter-penetrated and I was of it and it was of me, as I became a part of everything in creation, and I understood everything in a wordless, pre-logical way that was not quite understanding but, rather, a comfortable and comforting acceptance that didn't require understanding. The feeling of total and eternal peace permeated me, and I would hover there (for it was a place as much as a state) safe and happy, the sun shining on and through me, the wind rippling through my grass, until something called me back, like a teacher's voice speaking my name, or a class-ending bell, or until my spirit was sufficiently refreshed; then I could come back, slightly dazed and dazzled by the hard-edged reality around me, but calm in my marrow and with the pleasant sensation of an eternal smile blooming within me. In real time this voyage could be anything from a couple of seconds to a few minutes... never more, although time didn't exist in The Other Place, or existed in some different form.

In formal mystic commentary, the nirvana state that I call The Other Place is more properly, called 'meditative ecstasy', but I find 'ecstasy' to be an unacceptably emotive label for what was, for me, the simplest, calmest, most natural of events, one that I had experienced for as long as I could remember.

In fact, I may have experienced this 'ecstasy' even before my memory began, for some students of mysticism maintain that this nirvana state exists in the womb and continues for some time after birth, lasting through that period when the deep violet, defocused eyes of an infant are described by Basque peasants as 'still seeing the angels'. This period of spiritual narcosis that all neonates enjoy is understood to be a sort of psychic cushion against the shocks of birth and the assaults of early sensory experience, access to The Other Place serving the spiritual being in a way analogous to colostrum for the somatic being, the one providing the balm of soul-silence, the other providing immunoglobulins. Then both defense systems dry up and disappear when they are no longer needed.