The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [39]
Joseph had another explanation. “I get the feeling,” he said, “that England will not be invaded. Rex and Clyde sit near me. They help me to protect the stronghold. They are not against England. They are patients in the hospital, that’s all.”
CHAPTER IV
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
“I AM a born genius among geniuses and I want to be a leader among men,” Leon said. Through bilocation he could be in two places at once and through translocation he had the power to go instantaneously from one place to another. Leon also claimed to be able to perform miracles. He had once commanded a table to lift itself off the floor—and it had obeyed. When I expressed disbelief, he volunteered to repeat the miracle for me. He went into the recreation room and picked out a massive table. He then turned his back to it and, in a loud affirmative tone, commanded it to lift itself.
—I don’t see the table lifting.—
“Sir, that is because you do not see cosmic reality.”
Leon’s lack of insight into himself was reflected in his attitude toward his sickness. He said, on different occasions, three contradictory things about his condition. First, he was not sick; the duping was making him sick. He would be cured as soon as he was able to shake off all the interferences. Second, although Leon had feelings of grandiosity, he regarded himself as the weakest creature on earth. For this reason, he could not express hostility directly toward others, but instead had to have “uncles” to take care of him. He claimed that he hated no one, only the “evil ideal” in people. “If I hate another person, I rip myself apart. I undermine my own self. Hating because of hate is the yardstick they use in hell. It’s the negative form of love.” It was therefore necessary for him to assign those of “evil ideal” to his uncle’s “dung list.” I once asked him how many people were on this list. He replied that there were millions.
Finally, there was his deterministic, or fatalistic, interpretation, as expressed in his frequent references to the habeas corpus in front of one’s face. He claimed that he could not read the habeas corpus but that it told everything about a person. Whatever happened in life—and this included his stay in the hospital—was dictated by what was written on one’s habeas corpus. There was no way to escape from one’s habeas corpus. Even trees had a habeas corpus. “I know for a fact that each tree has a habeas corpus in front of it, telling how many dogs urinated on it, how many people made love under it, and so forth. The habeas corpus tells everything about that tree,” Leon explained.
Clyde too had feelings of omnipotence and grandiosity. “I can go through walls,” he said, “if I seen fit to. I can go straight through stone. I made the Bible and I am the Bible. I have two churches and if you go to Heaven there is two sides. Rome is quite a problem now; it fell once and I think it is going to fall again. My spirit—you can’t see it—stays around the water line in Palestine.”
Joseph, too, had immense delusions of grandeur that came out on many occasions. He claimed to be not only God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost, but other important personages as well. Once, during a discussion of the navy, he said he going to correct the situation at Annapolis. When asked what situation he referred to, he replied: “Oh, they’re my secrets. I don’t want to reveal my secrets. Stones and pebbles talk.”
Moreover, Joseph claimed to have been all over the world, including Shangri-La. Once he said he had talked with Adlai Stevenson. From there he went on to say that he was governor of Illinois himself.
—Were you governor