A SAMPLE FROM “A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 13, 2012

REFERENCE:

This is Chapter 35 on page 330 in this novel, the midpoint of the work.  It gives the reader a sense of the protagonist, Seamus “Dirk” Devlin, who prefers only to be called “Devlin.”  Interior dialogues carry the narrative.

FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL – LIFE & SIN

This is written when your father is thirty-one.  You are not yet ten.  We are in South Africa.  We have completed a safari in Kruger National Park.  On our way back home, you and Ruthie are especially silent after so much joy in the park. 

Your father counted the miles that took us out of the Hazyview Gate of the park and on to R536 to a place called Sabie, then down R37 to Dullstroom, where we caught R540 to Lydenburg, then N4 to Belfast and finally home to Rosebank.

There was reason for my anguish.  I’m writing this shortly after we have returned.  Your mother is sound asleep as are you, your brother and sisters, but my mind is full of drowning noise.  Writing synthesizes the noise and is therapy for my soul. 

My Irish Roman Catholicism finds my mind cut off from my body as if my soul were a dangling participle. I am forever the student, but not always a wise or prudent one.  Passion of late has taken possession of me like a thief in the night.  Pleasure is my master with my body longing for itself.  How so?

Your father never masturbated until he was a junior in college, and then only to quiet his tormented soul.  When that no longer worked, I thought of killing that angry snake by laying it in the dresser draw and slamming it shut to stop its relentless twitching.  I could not study.  I could not think.  I thought I was going mad.

The first time I masturbated I came almost instantly with a gusher that shot up in the air like a volcano, and covered me in its fishy milk.  I felt a relief that I couldn’t imagine.  Yet I had committed the sin of Onanism, but now I could study.  Thereafter, I masturbated every day before commencing my studies and the lazy snake stayed quiet. 

Why am I telling you this?  Your father was a poor boy of only adequate talent who wanted desperately to escape poverty and saw that only possible through the development of his mind.   

You could say I am a driven man, who has suffered for but benefited less for his passions.  Pride unfortunately entered the fray.  I came to believe myself smart, not from comparing myself to others, but by the freedom and pleasure derived from knowledge.  I felt sophisticated when clearly I wasn’t, intellectual when I was marginally informed, an elitist when I didn’t even belong. 

When my misdirected pride threw a wrench in the works, I would remember my da telling me who I was, what I was, and how I could never change any of that. 

 

Aside from having sex with myself, I lusted after no woman for I suffered from the Madonna Complex with them all, seeing them as superior in mind, body and beauty.  Odd, yes, but this was fed by the conflicted imagery of the church and my mother on the one hand, and my confused inadequacy on the other.  Any woman with brains was found attractive, delighting and terrifying me at once. 

Narcissistic and vain, I knew I was good looking and a good athlete.   Pride was a problem.  Yet, I was never tempted to do anything that would harm my body, diminish my concentration or blunt my control.  No one could goad me into doing something other than what I wished to do as my mother installed an internal governor in me, and my religion provided the rationale for its perpetuation.

Now that foundation is being severely tested.  I find myself wandering from that path, aware of what I am doing, delighting in aberrant pleasures.  This is nothing short of self-betrayal.

I am a suspicious person with a good memory.  Naïve in many respects, yet people don’t fool me because I study their chronic behavior, which they repeat over and over again, behavior that aggravates my greatest weakness, cold heartedness.

When that occurs, the driving force is not to do anything directly, but to allow the offending party to self-destruct.  If that sounds cruel, I beg to differ.  Your father has little tolerance for ineptitude when it is the product of self- indulgence, his or others.

I have discovered I cannot be corrupted with power, money or influence, but can be thrown into vertigo by betrayal.

*     *     *

Life is a river that serves us as long as we recognize its boundaries.   We wreak havoc when we exceed them.  To disregard limits is to invite chaos. 

Imagine yourself at the helm sailing down this river staying in safe waters and on course guided by the stars with the wind at your back urging you on to your destination.   

The winds are your passions collected by the sails.  You, as pilot, steer the vessel with the guidance system of the stars to your purpose, and your intended port of call.  Your will drives your life. 

The river can be turbulent, the skies overcast, the winds unpredictable, the stars not visible, safe waters not certain, the shoreline not clear, and yet you must navigate to safety on savvy and instinct. 

Were it not for our mind we would have perished long ago.  It is because of that mind that we have many problems.  Existence is complicated.  We like to cut through complexity with shortcuts, to simplify problems to manageable limits.  Problems simplified are not often the problems we face.  We have an urge to direct our mind to steer a course to the future denying reality, which often ends in shipwreck.  Modern psychology has given us an excuse for not growing up, not taking charge, and not facing what we are. One day I hope you read John O’Hara’s novel, “Appointment in Samarra.”  It is an appointment with death, which is the driving force of sex and life, with better psychology here than in most psychology textbooks I know. 

*     *     *

Modern psychology has worsened our mental composure and complicated our plight. It has betrayed our consciousness the way the church has betrayed our unconscious. 

Psychology has been reduced to explanatory discipline largely through the work of Sigmund Freud.  Good and evil, sin and redemption have been replaced by neurosis and psychosis, anxiety and hysteria.  Yet, neurologists to this day claim they cannot define consciousness. Freud’s talking cures have spread to a culture of complaining and explaining.  A mathematical genius, whose name I forget, claims it is a sin to confess a sin even to a psychotherapist much less a Catholic priest.

I am not a psychologist but find it difficult to consider the talking cures much more than paying a trained person to listen to you when most people you know are too busy or disinclined to do so.  

I am also appalled with the practice of electric shock treatments for people in so-called psychotic states.  Talking cures and electric shock treatment seem not far from witchcraft, while psychosis seems an invention of the ignorant.

I would encourage you to read psychology, read on medicine, and read on religion to gain a perspective of what makes sense to you.  Remember psychology, philosophy and religions, whatever they claim to the contrary come out of intellectual speculation.  They are inventions of man and flawed for the attention.

*     *     *

The world of 1968 is in a mess.  The mess is deepening.  I feel I am in the heart of darkness, changing and you are changing with me.  I am not sure what is happening to us, and I should know as I am your father, but must plead ignorance.   

Once I was above temptation secure in a world where there existed little variance and even less vice.  My passions were directed by reason.  Now they are my masters.  The moral law of my religion once guided my security in the physical laws of science.  Now I meander off the straight and narrow of both.  Incredibly, when I am looking for an anchor, I see science increasingly embracing explanatory models that resemble the dogma of the church.  Science and religion are not a happy couple.

By the accident of my birth, through hard dedicated work, and supreme luck, your father has experienced power at a young age, but wonders if lust will doom him, and by extension, doom you and your brother and sisters.

If I can leave you with one thought with these ramblings, it is that you are never safe from the dangers of desire.  The mind can be duplicitous.  The mind provides the rationale to do the right thing, but the corrupting itch of the will is always present to do the wrong thing.  Never take comfort in the idea you are in control.  If you do, the mind will finesse the will before you know it.

Passion trips reason and can drive one to despair if one is not vigilant.  Don’t lock love out as your father has, and then become gluttonous to it.  Treat your sexuality with the same respect you do your mind.  Don’t buy into the new age thinking that there is such a thing as free love.  Advocates translate free love into happiness when love like everything else is never free, as happiness, too, has its price.  Your father is struggling with all this now, as you will one day.  I hope you are kinder to love than I have been.

*     *     *