Issue #11, Summer 1997
Voice Over by Rod Clark
Conversing with imaginary beings is a trait that crops up in our family now and then, but since our branch of the clan consists largely of skeptics and non-practicing Unitarians, such behavior is considered unseemly, and is something we tend to hush up. Many people have had at least one "imaginary" friend in childhood. For some of us, conversation with imaginary beings trickles on into adulthood with unpredictable consequences. In my case for example, it has been both a wonderful tool for writing dramatic dialogue, as well as a considerable source of embarrassment for myself and my scholarly father.
What did you say? When did this start? My earliest experience of conversing with beings no one else could see was at the age of three, when I lay in a hospital in Berkeley, California, with my arms and legs in splints, being needle-fed for several months as I recovered from intestinal gangrene. When I was removed from the ghostly hush of the oxygen tent, I weighed only fifteen pounds and was in constant pain. Once, when my mother arrived to visit, I startled her by asking where "the lady with wings" had gone. She assumed I was speaking of the elderly nurse, a Seventh Day Adventist, who spent a great deal of time caring for me, and wore a winged cap, but I remembered someone young and beautiful, and a rippling of satiny plumes...
Almost every day at the hospital, one of my parents would come to read me literary classics, in particular the works of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. "The book! Read me the book!" I would cry as soon as I saw my mother or father enter the room, and then within moments I would be able to close my eyes, and become transformed into Jim Hawkins picking his way among the trees of Treasure Island, or the lost child Kim, wandering across the mysterious landscape of India.
By virtue of Kipling, that elderly nurse's prayers and the new scientific miracle of tetracycline, I survived and carried much of the dreaminess I had developed in sickbed with me when we moved to Wisconsin in 1950, including a tendency to stare off into space for minutes at a time, and periodically to hold conversations with people no one else could see. My father, by this time a confirmed social scientist with limited tolerance for spirits either pagan or sacred, did not see this as a terribly promising sign in his offspring and set about firmly to correct the situation. I soon discovered that other children were being similarly urged by their parents to reject "imaginary" companions. I remember, in one instance at the age of six, introducing a young playmate to several of my ethereal friends. "Yes, I see them too," she told me, "but Mommy says we're not supposed to talk to them-they're not real."
As a young Canadian scholar entering academia, my father had abandoned Calvin for Darwin, so it stood to reason that the subject of "imaginary" beings was rarely raised at those summer faculty parties, hosted by my parents, where, as a child, I would sometimes raise on tip-toe to steal a cracker plastered with anchovy paste from a passing tray. Since my father was a geographer, the traffic of ideas that passed overhead was only about real people and real landscapes. Sometimes, in order to find relief from the thunder of adult voices, I would grab a cracker, and the copy of National Geographic that was always displayed on our coffee table on such occasions, and retreat to a corner where I would pore over the pictures of exotic places and faces with wonder. But even as I marveled over these visions, I realized there were fantastic worlds that would never appear on these pages, worlds that not everyone could see.
Over the years, I gradually discovered that my father had a special reason for being frustrated with my "otherworldliness." His father, my grandfather Jeremiah, it turned out, was cut from much the same cloth as myself. Although Jeremiah was a fine country doctor, earned a good living, and never drank or chased women; he was viewed with some disparagement by my Grandmother's relatives and friends. Her family had been merchants, but his had been farmers. He was a Deacon of the local Baptist church and very proud of his Scots/Gaelic roots. She preferred to think of herself as "British" rather than "Scots," and did most of her tea drinking with well-bred Anglican ladies. As time went by, other differences emerged between them which were even more serious, and helped my father come to share my grandmother's view that Jeremiah was eccentric and irresponsible. At around the age of thirty my poor grandmother went blind and, increasingly, stayed indoors; struggling to identify and bill Jeremiah's many patients. As the only doctor for Brandon, Manitoba, the nearby Ojibwa reservation, and outlying areas, Jeremiah's services were in great demand, and he was constantly on the move. He often forgot to collect fees, especially from poor patients, and when he died in the late '40s, he was owed more than twenty thousand dollars by the poor people, red and white, of the Brandon area.
Jeremiah loved the outdoors, and raised eyebrows in the community by spending a great deal of time among the local Native people, cultivating an intense interest in Indian religion and customs. He loved imaginary beings like the Wendigo, and saw parallels between Jesus and the Micmac magician and necromancer Glooscap. He wrote and published reams of (mostly) dreadful poetry, often using an Ojibwa or Micmac word to complete a rhyme if he could not find a word in English. After Jeremiah's death, my father read his diary and discovered that Jeremiah had believed that he had conversed with the Almighty on a regular basis. At any rate he took religious responsibilities seriously. In the '60s my cousin showed me a deed for two acres of cranberry bog that my grandfather had bought from a farmer on Prince Edward Island. What's that? Why had he purchased it? Because local Indian legend identified the spot as a spirit lake through which Indian medicine men could travel to other worlds, and Jeremiah wanted to make sure that this particular spiritual terminal remained in responsible hands
As a responsible social scientist, My father was terrified at the possibility that one of his sons might turn out like his father. In vain he struggled to redirect me, throughout my early life, into a career of plumbing or possibly welding (anything down to earth and mundane) as opposed to the abstract literary pursuits I was set upon. But mundane existence did not appeal to me. Growing up as I did, in a wooded suburb at the edge of town, I felt an energy and beauty in the world around me that could not easily be explained by fact or science. At an early age I would spend hours wandering in the yards and undeveloped wood lots between houses, talking to trees and imaginary people, inventing bad poetry -- and, in general confirming my father's worst fears. Since then, I have wondered if that intense response to nature is not, like my father's heritage, essentially Celtic, the vision of the divinity implicit in nature as envisioned in the British Isles by St. Patrick and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Having been raised as a skeptic, I could not impose a mystical or religious explanation for what I felt as I walked among trees and grasses that were soon to make way for more houses, but I knew there was a power that smoldered in the beauty of the landscape. And even if I couldn't identify the fire, I could feel the flame.
An irony of my father's life was that, although his intellect had defected to Darwin, his soul remained attached to Calvinist virtues, and the discipline he believed necessary to enforce them. In this spirit, he practiced not the loving Celtic Christianity of St. Patrick, but the more severe doctrines of the Roman St. Augustine: per molestias eruditio, "true education begins with physical discipline." Sadly, this severity had no tempering effect on me at all. I never became a plumber. To this day, I am frequently to be found wandering in our woods, talking to my dog, to birds, to trees or the breeze. Anything that will listen. I make no apologies. My kinship with trees I inherit from Emerson who said: "I nod to them, they nod to me" My conversations with the air I owe to Whitman who told us of "invisible beings in the air all around us, that we know not of"
When my father fell ill with cancer in 1975, long unresolved issues of his spirituality surfaced to trouble him. At the age of sixty-five he checked into a hospital and did not come out. During some of his final hours, my mother heard him holding conversation with the air above his bed, speaking for intervals, and then listening attentively to a voice my mother could not hear. At one point, she thinks, he may have been discussing the nature of a journey he was about to undertake. For a moment, at the edge of the unknown, he struggled to comprehend the nature of his destination:
"What did you say?" he inquired "Where? But I'm an agnostic!"