CHICAGO TYPEWRITER

The PATH to the RIVER STYX - MY STORY (PART I)

ISLAM - the word quite literally means ‘‘SUBMISSION’’. But that doesn’t truly convey the meaning. Just as LOGOS when translated as ‘‘WORD’’ or ‘‘THE WORD’’ doesn’t adequately define the concept. I’m an uncompromising believe in CHRIST - and that will never change. But I began studying comparative theology because I needed to understand phenomena I was experiencing - and had been experiencing since my earliest awareness of the world around me developed. When a comrade. long ago, explained to me to think of Islam as, ‘‘PATH’’, I began to understand things that I had to that moment been incapable.

This of course did not make a MOSLEM out of me. But it did cause me to begin studying Rene Guneon and Sayyid Qutb - and it completely changed the way in which I studied Heidegger and Aristotle. The latter brought me to full understanding of National Socialism, of the significance of race as a political concern and metaphysical quantity, and to the relationship of Theological questions and matters of Faith to the activity sphere of the POLITICAL. More significantly, it allowed me - this new conceptual horizon I had cultivated - to heal my mind. A mind which had been fractured since I emerged from my Mother’s womb.

My earliest memories are of being afraid. Not of imminent physical harm - my Parents were fine - although troubled - people who never hurt me intentionally. I wasn’t afraid of being beaten by my Mother or indecently assaulted by a neighbor or distant relative or of being bullied or terrorized by my Father. Nothing of that sort lived in my environment. The fear that was crushing me was both more total and more remote. I had nightmares constantly - and even as I entered adolescence, I felt as if I was enduring a lucid Fugue state. I couldn’t discern between dreams and waking life much of the time.

I had bizarre thoughts that didn’t seem to be my own. And by age ten, I was fixated on the concept of augury - specifically dream images or recurring symbols in my environment that led me to believe I was facing imminent danger. My worst nightmares early on involved nuclear war. I’d be looking out the large, bay window of the family home - or I’d be in our backyard, and then the blinding flash would arrive. In every instance, my Mother would try to shield me frantically. And when she did, a humanoid creature with horribly elongated fingers would crash through the door. It would be faceless, wearing a gas mask that obscured its features. Sometimes it would be silent, other times it would be screaming - but not like a person, rather, in a high-pitched monotone.

This War Beast would touch my mother - its fingers elongating several feet sometimes, and upon contact with its poisonous, probing digits, my Mother would wither and die. Other times, it would tear her clothes off - and I’d be horrified at the sight of her nakedness. Once I dreamed, in the dead of night, its mask-face visage appeared in the kitchen window - and I would try to scream but be breathless.

One day, in the summer of 1986, well after midnight, I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. My family was fast asleep, as I had been until a moment prior. As I walked back to the hallway and reached to turn out the light - I heard a discernible cough. A grunting cough. I turned to the kitchen window and saw a face staring back at me. I dropped the glass of water, and I tried to scream but couldn’t. I ran as fast as I could to my parents’ room, and I fell in the hallway. I sprang back up and finally yelled for my Mom - my Father was overseas at the time. All I could think of was retrieving a weapon from my parents’ closet.

As it was, the face in the window was not a demon born of nuclear nightmares made flesh. He was the mentally retarded nephew of a family down the street. The Colmars, to be specific. Mrs Colmar was soon lightly knocking on the back door abutting the yard. She apologized effusively, and my Mom was more than mildly annoyed. My Mother was highly territorial for a modern woman. And she had a tendency to look down on people. She couldn’t understand why I seemed so terrified - and I didn’t tell her. In my mind, the incident validated that dreams are premonitions, however distorted and imprecise, of future events. The horrors we confront in our mind are the same ones that stalk us in reality. This held implications that I could not face. I collapsed psychologically.

Around this time, I began having visionary experiences - which I could not determine were vestigial recollection of dreams or imperfect memories of things I had actually experienced. Many years later, when I was well into adulthood, I took to studying Karl Jaspers and Emil Kraepelin - philosophers of mind and early psychologists, before the field had been corrupted by Freud. I was inspired to do so by the fact of my younger brother having gone totally insane and committing suicide. Jaspers made clear that the mind is quite literally a place unto itself. Kraepelin documented the fact that people diagnosed as schizophrenic exhibit strangely altered speech patterns that are identical to people speaking in their sleep. I began to understand some aspects of what I had been enduring since I was first aware of my own thoughts, but my studies raised as many questions as were clarified.

As I aged and developed, I came to know my mind in ways I had not been capable prior to adulthood - yet I was still gripped with fear when I became lost in mental space. Heidegger referred to an underlying anxiety - a profound and in its most punctuated iterations paralyzing terror - when the shock of conscious Being comes over an individual who is susceptible to such experiences. I came to speculate that PRAYER - in part - developed to calm the suffocating terror that is sometimes emergent in this way. Those men most fragile in this regard are like a person who was born without skin - the protective psychic layer simply is not there - either it was never there owing to anomaly at birth or it had been somehow rubbed raw by the intensity of living within ones’ mind as the primary modality of conscious engagement with the world.