What you give up
A life story
BY THOMAS RAIN CROWE
Icarus Rising by Leigh George |
Twenty years ago as my lover, and the woman whom I felt was my soul
mate, prepared to walk out of my life forever
she
turned to me as she crossed the threshold of the door to leave and, as her
parting words, said, "You get what you give up," knowing that her act of
departure was, for me, more like desertion than destiny.
As I watched her go, an earlier soul-shattering experience was called
from memory. Something that, somehow, made the act of this leaving a
little softer, if not less painful, while seeming to verify her philippic.
I was 20 years old and beginning my second year of college. This was
the late 1960s and, along with a huge minority of my generation, I was
ensconced and entrenched in the hip drug subculture of the times.
College, at Furman University in Greenville, was little more than an
alibi and excuse for avoiding the draft while I waited for my draft board
to deny my appeal for status as a conscientious objector.
School had never set well with me, and my first year of college had
been a washout, with drugs, alcohol and "alternative living" along with an
active interest in the counter-culture politics of the day replacing any
semblance of academic interest or discipline.
This went along with the general psyche of the times that had embraced
the attitude that escape in the form of derangement-of-the-senses was
somehow as subversive in its activism as was the more obviously political
idea of actually overthrowing the government.
The drugs, the alcohol and the continuous "deranging," over a period
of years, by the beginning of that third college semester, must have
reached a plateau
as I
had only recently returned to the Southern campus of my alma mater
when all hell broke lose.
It began with the dreams, with nightmares from which I would awake in
the middle of the night shaking with fear. That was followed, quickly,
with anxiety attacks, coming first at night, then during any time of day.
After some weeks, and with the nightmares and attacks having rendered
me almost a complete insomniac, I was overcome with huge dark waves of
paranoia. Fear of death. Hallucinations. Thoughts of suicide.
What had been sporadic and mostly a night-induced alteration of my
sensibilities became a 24-hour ordeal, a waking nightmare taking every bit
of energy and attention I had to fight off the demonic threat of death and
insanity which had camped out on the doorstep of my soul. The onslaught of
the dark forces at work within (and what I perceived as also occurring
without) me was relentless if not overpowering.
It was at this point that I, for the sake of my sanity and my life,
sought professional help. No stone was left unturned in my desperate
attempts to identify the source of my condition as well as a means of
eradicating it: thorazine, psychoanalysis, spiritual counseling, diet,
drug rehab. But the symptoms only got worse.
Nine months had gone by and I was reaching the end of my physical and
psychic rope from the lack of sleep or any form of rest from the
relentless, and what I perceived of as quite literal presence of darkness,
that seemed to possess both body and soul.
After almost a year, and with death camped out at my door, exhausted
and with every possible outlet for the eradication of this "illness"
explored
I,
one day, found myself standing in front of the large window in my dorm
room looking out at an old maple tree which, even in late August was lit
up like a psychedelic Christmas tree. Or so my deranged senses perceived
it.
I had stood and watched the dance of extraterrestrial light of this
tree many times in the preceding months, even in rare moments enjoying the
flickering incandescence. But now the lights only represented the death
threats that came from every nook and cranny of my deranged and reclusive
life.
Despite being an avowed atheist, my fatigue and frustration on that
day cut a path through my rational mind and found me down on my knees in
front of that large window with the maple outside lit up like Christmas,
in a state I can only describe, now, as prayer.
The words that came from my lips in that moment of acquiesence and
surrender were shocking, even in my desperate condition, but I had come to
the end of my tether, and couldn't go on.
"If there is a God, anywhere," I heard myself say, "and if you can
hear me, I can't do this anymore, alone. It's too much for me, I am too
tired, and I give up."
No sooner (and I swear to any god this is true) had I said these
words, than the "lights" on the maple tree beyond the glass of the large
window I stood facing, went out. And for the first time in many months I
saw the tree in its natural colors and form.
As I admired and rejoiced in the transfiguration of the tree, I
noticed, too, that the fear and trembling that had been my constant
companion for the better part of a year had, also, disappeared. My body,
for what felt like the first time, was at rest. The heavy veil of
debilitating darkness had been lifted. And in that moment I knew that it
was gone for good. That the act of complete and unconditional surrender
had broken the spell of the undiagnosed dis-ease that had taken possession
of my life and almost ended it.
As I stood there basking in the moment of my release, I knew I was
standing in the middle of the moment of a "miracle." What countless
Christians called "being saved." The blinding light that came to Saul on
the road to Tarsus. The burning bush that spoke to Moses. The parting of
the Red Sea... and now my moment of surrender, that had brought me back,
like Lazarus, from the living dead.
"You get what you give up," she said, and left. I had yet to hear
those words as I stood in that moment of grace that felt like bliss and
would, ultimately, change my life.
I had given up ALL control over my condition and situation and placed
that control and, in fact, my life, in the hands of something outside and
greater than myself. And in doing so, had changed the paradigm of my
destiny from desperation and potential disaster to that of rest, clarity
and hope. Changed what would have been, surely, death, into life-like
water becoming wine with a simple act of surrender, with a single word.
Thomas Rain Crowe is a poet, translator and publisher of New Native
Press and Fern Hill Records. Having grown up in western North Carolina, he
returned in 1979, and now makes his home in Tuckaseegee.
As I stood there basking in the moment of my release, I knew I was standing in the middle of the moment of a "miracle." What countless Christians called "being saved."
