RUDIMENTS, pt. 95
Making Cars
When I was in the seminary, it was all
a disassociative environment for me. I'll
try to be careful here, so bear with me,
but realize, and ask yourself, what sort
of medieval organization would take 12
year old boys, sequester them, enforce
things around them, while claiming as
well to be 'educating' them (an absolute
misnomer), and yet deny the fact of, at
the same time, 'propagandizing' them in
articles of religion, faith and morals. By
all the same-sex blundering standards.
I leave the rest for all of you to read
between the lines if you'd like. Suffice
it to say that these are the very years
when boys' hormones take the most
flight, (frankly and hopefully) in a
heterosexual format (my perspective).
I don't know what exactly went on
in the minds of all the men-adult
priests and brothers who lorded over
us, but from the more normal point
of boys, we took flight just dreaming
about it all. The parting of the Red Sea
could have been no worse, as I used to
put it. We had sundered our lives for this
stupid cause, separated everything - all
emotions and boy-lust on once side, and
all the good things and high moral standings
of supposed religious lore, on the other
side, and WE were expected to march
steadfastly right down that dry middle,
hoping all the while that this horrid sea
wouldn't close back in over us. It was a
terribly difficult time. My ordeal, personally,
was made easier by getting heavily into the
theater and drama department, plays and
recitations, and all those intricacies of
the presentation : theater lighting, sound,
scripts, music accompaniment, etc. I admit,
much of the theater work was oriented to
the gay side of things, as much as was our
theater advisor, department head, etc. Wise
and winsome priests and brothers. I don't
recall them ever having us do musicals,
but close enough.
-
When you're a young kid, dutiful about
things, and far from home, everything gets
sensitive. I was never homesick in any way,
but I'd fairly say that my years there, in the
main, pretty much destroyed my character,
ruined me for a later-life, and left me with
a tandem sense of bitterness and cynicism
about many prevailing realities. Have you
ever understood what being 13 and having
nothing good left already, means? I should
have been left unhindered, without the
corrosive and meddling hands of 'authority'
foisting their illusions on me, but I wasn't.
What did I get for my time? Nothing at all
except what I made, and all that I sincerely
and authentically 'made' of my own - thoughts
interests and ideas - was constantly in jeopardy.
Under threat of being taken from me, after first
being proclaimed wrong and out of line. In
the night hallways of those dark years, we'd
get enforced study halls, until 10pm, with
a priest or a brother patrolling the silent
halls while they paced and read their breviary.
A Breviary is a daily, forced read, by a priest,
of a bible-like book, Catholic doctrine,
meditative material, etc. Also called
'The Divine Office,' it's an enforced Catholic
read, by its clergy, to keep the mind engaged
within the rigors of the Catholic practice
of thought and doctrine. Keeps them in
practice, as it were, and up to snuff. A priest
needs to find time each day to fit this in.
Probably an hour or so, though I'm not sure -
they'd walk with this little Bible-like book, it
seemed, for a long time. Some guys moved
their lips silently as they read. Others didn't.
Maybe they daydreamed instead. Pictures
of Lily. Maybe the guys whose lips moved
were just those kinds of lip-moving readers,
slow-learners. It was never spoken of, but
by those terms we were kept in place. Patrolled,
we'd do our Latin declensions and read our own
church history version of Charlemagne's days
and all that Holy Roman Empire stuff. Every
Catholic book, by the way, back then anyway,
had on its title page what was called an
'Imprimatur' - which was basically a
formal and official 'approval,' by whichever
church bigwig (their names and rank/offices
were always provided, along with a date)
did that particular book. It meant that there
was no sludge in there that would mess up
your personal faith, impart false information,
or otherwise discolor the perfect whiteness
of the room wherein your Soul lived. If it
didn't have an Imprimatur, you didn't
read it. So, at one level, we had our own
authority figures being forced to read their
own version of the likes of the church's
version of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book,
while at the same time all we were given to
read was the tightly controlled, censored and
fully approved material shoveled our way.
That, my friends, was the fess-up of learning.
-
The one saving grace to all of this, the only,
was that it, at least, was an agricultural-format
endeavor. Farm-fields, crops of peppers, a large
barn, pigs and a slop-house and pig-yard, cows,
hay, straw, seed and corn-crop. A few meandering
miles of dirt paths out, tracks of nice hard-pack
for running and long-distance track events.
Other kids did the sports angle, ball games, etc.
I was never much concerned with that, though
field events that included pole-vaulting were
pretty cool and I got intrigued by that. There
was always the glorious moment of fly-by,
at the top of the arc, when the pole has bent
just right, you've caught your speed and
stress-point perfectly, and you can sense that
pole just rolling you over for the big flip down!
There was nothing else much like that for me.
It was the best. I stayed with the farm angle
as much as I could. We had two German faculty
Brothers (it was a German Order) named
Brother Isadore, or Brother Sebastian, I kind
of forget which of those two was the farm guy,
but they were both curious creatures, not given
to much communication, maybe even living
in a vow of silence for all I knew. White
bearded, short, squat guys, always working.
It was the right side of things for me - these
two outdoorsy guys were the tough seed I
wanted. Always working, hauling, hammering.
None of that effete, walking-the-hallways
stuff for them. Seldom seen; I don't know
where they ate or even where they pissed, but
they were never part of the regular crew - the
priests and brothers who sat around pretending
to be our intellectual instructors while really
knowing nothing at all very practical. These
were more to my liking - with their work
and tractors.
-
Religion is good, but it's really got little to
do with the real world. The crux of the
seminary was their idea of somehow mixing
the two and producing a half-baked implementer
of belief and doctrine, someone able to then go
out into that world and help heal and lift the
souls of others, guide them along and bring
them the agreed-upon ideas of the afterlife.
Problem again was that this multi-leveled,
backwards facing, afterlife didn't exist at all
in the terms they peddled it. So the entire mix
was blemished. I realized that, after about a
month of this stuff, and just had to swallow
and accept it all for three more years or so,
if I was going to make a go of it. Nothing
worked out in that manner, so it didn't much
matter, but the lesson had been branded onto
my fleshy mental-ass like a rancher burns a
steer. There were moments, we had our conflicts,
I took the lash once or twice, got berated in
private meetings a few other times, and -
eventually, about 2 years or so down the
line, in lieu of actually getting the heave-ho,
of which I'd been forewarned, I left. One long,
dark, cold night, somewhere in 1966, I bid
adieu and got a ride out of that place - never
even saying good-bye to the cows and pigs
I'd grown so fond of.
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