The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [42]
On various occasions it was suggested that the three men discuss their earliest memories and childhood experiences.
“At the age of four,” said Joseph, “I loved to go to bed and think about geography and the New World.”
—Do you remember your parents at age two?—
“I remember the old man smoking a pipe. My father was six foot four, two hundred and thirty-four pounds. Has blue eyes, hair between blond and brunet, a pointed nose and two gold teeth. He was a farmer; could pick up a bale of hay to the top of his head. Died at three score and ten. I was nineteen. Mother followed him not long afterwards, and the farm was given to the town for a cemetery.”
—At six months?—
“I used to look at my fingernails and then up to the shoulder, to see how clean I was.”
—Do you remember any pleasant incidents?—
“My mother and dad used to sing together.”
—Do you have any unpleasant memories?—
“No. Everything was pleasant.”
Clyde, asked the same question, said peevishly: “What’s the difference? It isn’t any of your business. What’s it to you? It was years ago. I was happy. Just a bunch of little child foolishness asking one another.”
“I wouldn’t say it was foolish,” Leon interposed. “It’s self-psychoanalysis insight.”
“When I was four years old,” Clyde went on, “my father and mother were going to get some lumber at the sawmill, driving a team, and I was up front. . . . My mother and father were all right. My father wasn’t very tall—short and heavy-set, medium height. They lived quite a while, up around seventy years.”
Leon, describing his earliest memories, told of sitting in the womb, looking out, and dying the death. “We are hollowed-out ghost conceptions,” he said, “and when a person dies the death, the blood particles, white and red corpuscles, and every part of the body, are hollowed-out, get holes, cosmic holes. When you are hollowed-out, which means that you have no blood relatives, you go to a higher level of insight. Then the parents of that particular child become its foster parents. When the male parent passes away, the foster, hollowed-out child marries his foster mother, and the children they have are not abnormal.”
At another time Leon described an incident which, according to him, occurred when he was five years old: “It had to do with sex, due to the fact that the Old Witch did not have me circumcised as she should have. I had a tight foreskin and she used this to try to seduce me, and it finally came to the point that because of the pressure of the foreskin she sucked and blowed me off and I didn’t consent to it. She was trying to enshroud a child in darkness. She did something even worse. She fornicated with me on the merits of trying to deprive me of the friendship of God at such an early age.
“In Europe, duping caused me to degenerate with some boys in a clubhouse. I became an eighteen-inch disfigured midget kneeling down and—boy! when I looked I saw that his feet were enormous compared to mine. I did it twice in a row and he did it twice to me. I was going on eight, and I got so frightened that I ran out and my hair started standing on end and I said: ‘Good God, what did I do? What happened?’ It so happened that the Old Witch was fornicating with a man at the side of the house there. She tried to impose that on me, that I did it, and it so happens that a tornado occurred about twenty minutes later and the tiles flew off the roof. Excuse me, it was a cycle, a twister. It went right over the place. And talk about being frightened! I said: ‘Good God, never again will I do that.’ I had remorse of conscience for over ten years over that. I was eighteen or nineteen before I regenerated myself. I was at a seminary when I first tasted my ‘come.’ I was learning to be a priest but I found out there. In that clubhouse the second time I nibbled on that boy’s penis against my will, why, the earth started to move counter-clockwise under my feet and the opposite happened in the chapel. The instant I tasted of that seed of ‘come’ I again heard that sound of the deep and the earth started to gyrate