The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [81]
One thing that makes me suspicious is that everyone seems to have a different idea about what sort of mistake it was I made. Maharishi probably thinks my mistake was not doing my meditation faithfully. Lots of the nurses and orderlies seem to think my beard and my long hair were my real mistake. The other day they helped me out with that by holding me down and cutting it all off. I guess Freud would say I’ve repressed something. Some of my friends seem to think it’s that I wasn’t open and sharing enough. Others think I wasn’t eating the right kind of food. Lots of people are pretty sure it has something to do with drugs. One doctor here has it all figured out that I went crazy because I didn’t try to get a good job and make some sort of contribution to society. The whole reason I got into this mess is that I was throwing away my college education by trying to be a farmer out in the bush. The other morning someone came to the little hole in the door in my seclusion room and told me that if I could just accept Jesus Christ as my savior, everything would be fine. That Jew faggot, Jesus, I wonder where he thinks I blew it.
Well, I’m sorry, people. I must be the most perverse bastard going but I can’t think of anything I did that I can see as my big mistake. I was trying my damnedest to do the best I could and I don’t feel like reneging on any part of it. Love and kisses, Mark.
There wasn’t much to do in the hospital. Most of the time I just sat around and tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Oh, what rotten luck, a shitty break. There I was, going along doing the best I could, and then this happened. Such an impertinence. It’s like I was walking through the woods and a tree fell on me and broke my leg. Well, so much for whatever I happened to be doing in the woods. Now I got to deal with the fact that my leg is broken. Unforeseen, unplanned, a detour.
But it wasn’t like that. It had a whole other flavor. It fit in so well. My craziness had everything to do with what I was doing. When it happened, it was more like I was stumbling along a dark, deserted road trying to get somewhere and a huge mother limousine picked me up and took me where I was going at a hundred miles an hour, using short cuts I didn’t dream existed. In the end I decided I didn’t want to be there, but if it weren’t for the limousine I’d probably still be on that road, still trying to get there.
Had farming been what I was doing, things might have been different. Had clearing land or building a house or getting a place set up for goats and chickens, carving a home out of the wilderness, getting gardens ready to plant, been what I was up to, things might have turned out differently.
There was no way I could have been up to those things, much as I wished I were and tried to make myself be. Let’s face it, someone with a B.A. in religion from Swarthmore, raised upper-middle-class intellectual, living in British Columbia, twelve miles by boat from the nearest electric light, has got to be up to something weird.
Clearing land, gardening, building the house was all just a front. I was into being good, being right. Truth, beauty, and saving the world, liberation, enlightenment, and salvation. I was playing for the highest stakes I could find. I had been given all the breaks anyone could ask for and more. Generations had spent their lives worrying about money so that I wouldn’t have to. I didn’t have to do anything. So the only way I could do anything was to do something very, very much worth doing.
Worth doing. I was into something worth doing.
FAITH. If there had been less faith maybe I never would have gone nuts.
“I believe in you. Yes, I believe in you.” A chorus sometimes comforting, sometimes cruel. It was nice to be believed in but it also meant that all the awful things I thought might be going on were going on. People were saying “yes” to my worst nightmares.
“I believe in you.