The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [121]
May 24. “I still want to live according to the Ten Commandments. If they don’t want it, I’ll live alone, period! They can all go to hell. I know I’m missing out on pleasure—eating, drinking, merrymaking, and all that stuff—but it doesn’t please my heart. I have met the world. I got disgusted with the negative ideals I found there.”
June 7. “I feel that everyone sees me now. I mean I feel I’m being seen, the first time since I was ten or ten and a half years of age. I feel there’s light of truth inside as well as light of truth outside.”
After the group meeting is adjourned, Miss Anderson asks Leon if he would like to see her. He replies: “There isn’t very much to talk about unless you want to ask some questions.”
She asks what it means for him to be “completely seen.”
“If it isn’t so,” he says, “I stand corrected. It so happens when there’s light on the inside, it’s a comfortable feeling concerning my case. There was an optic chiasma of trees in which I was squeezing out darkness and putting in light.” He goes on to say that he would not be seen if he had intercourse with a G. M., adding: “My wife protected me from their intentions. I’m thoroughly satisfied with my wife. As far as I’m concerned, I’m facing my problems.”
June 22. “You seem so angry,” Miss Anderson remarks.
“I’m always angry. You cannot have sanity without hatred of the evil ideal. I have love of hatred towards negativism. I have to have sound hatred—an outlet—if you haven’t got that, you explode. Sound psychiatry tells me that.”
“Isn’t is uncomfortable to be angry all the time?”
“No, it isn’t, on the grounds that it’s an incentive to go on.”
“You’re so hard on yourself.”
“No, I’m not! I know what I want, why I want it, what I’m getting out of it, which way I’m going, and I want to keep it that way. If a person can say that as far as he’s concerned the Ten Commandments is civilization, everything, that man can go and live alone anywhere and be satisfied, in the sense of inner peaceful conscience—that’s a man!”
She asks him whether he is so hard on himself because his conscience is perhaps not so peaceful.
“I’m not hard on myself, G. M. Anderson. I hate the negative ideal because I want to be sane. You have to have a goal in view at all times. My goal is to live with truth, and I stated if the society doesn’t want truth, I can tell them all to go to hell. I can live alone to prove that sound civilization is the Ten Commandments.”
The Final Break
Despite the tremendous amount of time Miss Anderson spent with Leon, it was to be of no avail. His tentative moves toward improvement were finally abandoned. Actually we had an inkling of this very early in his relationship with her—even before the blindfold episode, when we observed that Mondays were typically black Mondays, and Fridays, blue Fridays for Leon. Miss Anderson was away from the hospital on weekends and he apparently interpreted this as an abandonment—proof that she did not really care about him and that he could not really count on her. Regularly, every Monday, when her daily visits resumed, Leon sulked, refused to talk, was curt or withdrawn, walked out or was openly hostile. But, as the week progressed, his feelings would gradually thaw out—until Friday, when the meeting was permeated with his anticipations of an empty weekend.
At about the same time it became evident that he was also especially difficult on the two days a week when I was present; then, because I had conferences with Miss Anderson after the meetings, his eager anticipation of the post-meeting tête-à-tête with her was doomed to disappointment. As soon as I realized what was happening, I abandoned these conferences with her. This led immediately to an improvement in relations all the way around and eliminated an important source of frustration for Leon. Now he could at least count on seeing her alone every day except on weekends.
And