Two

I am trying to explain myself.  Not that I am anything particularly mysterious.  But just as I believe that every person is explicable, I believe that every person is worth explaining.  There are a few prominent, outstanding people who have other people enough interested in them that someone else does it, but most of us have to do it for ourselves if it is going to be done at all. The problem is that as I search my memory for what would account for the particular of what I am, and why my life went the way that it did, I find that nothing particular to me comes to mind.  I land on the most obvious truths about people in general.  That children will believe anything.  That young men are dominated by their desire for sex.  These blatant abstractions are what seem at all relevant, are all that come to mind. In looking for the concrete person that I actually am I am faced with an absence.

As a younger person I was a Cartesian when it came to self knowledge.  Everything about myself seemed transparent and immediate; there was nothing about my mind I could imagine to be hidden from myself.  And now I don't think I know myself any better than anyone else knows me.

But I'm not sure I really want to know.  People are very casual about the matter of exploring themselves, while I have come to believe it is a hazardous business.  Finding the truth about yourself can ruin you.  I'm not saying exactly that remaining in error about yourself is better, but you need to have your eyes open about what self-discovery can actually do to you.  It's not always a happy ending.

Imagine all the people you know who would be devastated if they had to admit the truth about themselves.  You're not all that different from them.

I discovered this during my second or third go-round with Alcoholics Anonymous.  They encourage a step-wise process of self-scrutiny meant to lead the alcoholic eventually out of his despair.  It wasn't that I was doing the steps,  there was never any real chance of that.  But I did for a while attend a weekly "step meeting" in which the twelve stages of the process were read aloud and discussed.   What courage it would take, I thought, to admit your wrongs to another person.  What courage to apologize to all the people you had harmed.  And it rubbed off to the extent that I actually began reflecting, perhaps not on my self as I am now, but on my past and the kind of person I have been, on how I actually lived my life.  

The outcome of this reflection was that I realized I had been a dangerous person, that I had been a danger, not to strangers or the community at large, but to the people who were close to me, the people who loved me.  I was a dangerous person to be close to.  I really think this was true, and that maybe it still is.  

But that way of putting it--"I have been a dangerous person"--was not the straightforward way of putting it, not the honest truth.  That I couldn't accept, at least not at first. Because the really honest way of putting it was not that I had been a dangerous person, but that I had been a bad person.

In trying to describe this thought that I arrived at I see that tense and aspect are the crux of the matter.  Whether we are speaking of something past or present, something completed or continuing.  These choices are fateful, not just because you want to get at the truth, but because it is very close to being maudlin, saying something like that, that you are a bad person.  But that is either what I am, or was, or what I have or had been.  

I think that I was only able to realize that about myself when seeing it could no longer be a shock.  It was just a slightly more conscious awareness of something I had suspected for a long time.  Guilt is like any handicap.  If you live with it for decades it's possible to gain a detachment from it, to see it from both sides--as something that you know will never leave you, but something too you know very well how to live with.

One

 I live on the southern border of Center City Philadelphia, on the south side of South Street, so that if I am looking out of my living room window the whole of Center City is in front of me and South Philadelphia is at my back.

The southern border of Center City is South Street, the northern border is the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.  The eastern and western borders are natural, set by the Delaware and Schuykill rivers.  Across the Schuykill to the west is University City; to the east across the Delaware is New Jersey.

These borders are pretty firm in my mind, though I suppose there is nothing official about them and so nothing backing them up but my own intuitions.

I have my roots here.  I am not aware of any intermediary on either side of my family between Philadelphia and Ireland, the country my ancestors left.  My mother and father both came from Southwest Philadelphia, where they referred to their neighborhoods as parishes.  My father came from MBS (Most Blessed Sacrament) and my mother from St. Francis de Sales.  But my father's family, at least on his mother's side, were from South Philadelphia, which at one time was largely Irish.  As a child on New Year's Eve he would stay at his grandmother's house at 15th and Porter near South Broad to see the parade the next day.

When my mother was eighteen she moved with her mother and father, her two sisters, and her little brother from a three bedroom house on Florence Ave. in Philadelphia to a three bedroom house in the suburb of Drexel Hill.  My parents both told stories of their youths in the city.  They had both been poor, though I think my mother was unaware of it, while the poverty of my father's family was public knowledge.

I believe that my father's parents remained in the city on Springfield Ave. until about 1970, since I remember visiting them there as a young child, by which time he and my mother were married and had the house in which I was born in Lansdowne, Delaware County.  It was not a bad place to grow up.  If I try to return to the way it looked during the earliest time of my childhood it has the glow that a child's perceptions give to everything.  It is just that the place, and my early life, I cannot separate from the pallor given to it in my memory by a troubled and dysfunctional adolescence.

Because of the intellectual quality of my parents, because there were books in the house, and my mother was involved in leftist causes like Cesar Chavez's Farmworker's Union and the nuclear freeze, and because my father had been a college philosophy teacher, I felt, in our suburban community, like a kind of alienated aristocrat.  Looking back on it, a pattern was set for me, psycho-socially if you wish, very early on.  In some ways this was an obvious advantage, and is responsible for what is best in me, and in others this sense of assumed superority was a trap.  My family was not really superior or unique, even within that tiny suburban community, and neither was I.

I only know about my ancestors some of their names--Touey, McLaughlin, Carlin, Mount--and that they were Irish and poor and that they were city people, people of this city.  It is hard for me to extrapolate from the relatives I have actually known to the ones who picked up and left their homes for a foreign country.  They came to Philadelphia and they stayed, perhaps only because they could survive here, which is all they did for many a generation.  It was only after WWII that they began to have larger aspirations.

There was a great lifting-up in America that occurred with my parents' generation.  Something as simple as raising a family in a house where every child had their own bed was a real change.  My parents lived in a material comfort that was much greater than anything they had known in their youths, and they lived in a culture, too, that they knew had advanced and liberated them from the narrow world they had grown up in.  But in everything they said about that world there was a tinge of loss.  It was hard sharing your bed with your sister or a couple of little brothers, it was hard being disciplined by the nuns or having to get up on a winter morning to serve Mass as an altar boy.  But there was a quality of experience in all of that that they could see had a value that was gone forever.

"Gone forever."  Everything when it's gone is gone forever.