Embedded Files
When I finally reached a resolution and stopped writing this in 2021 I was clueless about memoir writing and completely unaware of the concept of interiority. That decades of rewrites would emerge as a memoir chapter chock full of interiority astonishes no one as much as myself. The use of interiority was neither deliberate nor instinctive. Instead it was the culmination of an ever changing essay in which I was trying make sense of a nonsensical event that greatly influenced my life, External agonies were not just subordinate to my internal demons, they were ancient memories turned over, reinterpreted, and processed so many times that little vestige of original memory remained. Of course to write additional chapters I will need to make the same interiority themes the driver of the entire memoir. At this point there are two interiority themes; that I have experienced a relatively tragic life and that the world has been a disappointment. And if those are too cliché I can truthfully turn the full length memoir into that of a traumatized person who triumphs through an appreciation of absurdity.
As a story of unrequited love this chapter is horribly tedious. but as an exercise in dissection with interiority themes as the driver it makes a better tale.
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
Life Lessons, or...
The Not So Glorious Alice Crusade
Over the years when people have asked me why I never married I answered that I proposed once and was turned down. If they pressed me I would say that I have trust issues. No one ever pressed me further but if they had I would have told them that it is not that I don't trust women (although I probably don't), what I don't trust is my own judgment. I fell in love once, proposed marriage after considerable indecision, and my proposal was instantly and unambiguously rejected.
One of my best writing teachers used to ask her class, after finishing a novel, to go back and read the first paragraph for the ways in which it predicted the rest of the text, or in the most skillful cases, taught us to read it.
I suppose that my love expired at the same moment as it was conditioned on the belief that she loved me. Letting go itself was automatic once the huge gap between who she was and what I wanted became apparent.
The essential element to falling in love and staying in love is the belief that you are special to someone. You might in some cases be able to briefly suspend disbelief but once it is gone it does not come back - at least in my experience. Yet for all your rational analysis and ease of letting go the loss of this belief may create some trust issues. In other words you don't simply get over it.
Imagine that in your twenties you are offered a choice between an average life and having four months of rapture, which will then end suddenly and inexplicably, and will make the rest of your life (relationship-wise) anti-climatic in comparison. As a kicker at age 70 you will be granted a revelation that those months were largely imaginary, yet your takeaway will be that all things considered you would still choose to have experienced those four months.
Or put more abstractly; people can kill each other for all kinds of reasons - I guess they can fall in love for all kinds of reasons. You gotta take it when it comes, even if it is a girl like Alice.
Let me make an effort to be painfully honest (with myself and anyone reading this) with some basics about my first love. It occurred when I was 23 years old and stationed in England with the Air Force. It has been my only "unrequited" love, something to which I appear to be otherwise immune, if my initial romantic feelings about someone are not returned those feelings simply do not grow. And since then I have relentlessly tested my relationships, usually to their detriment. Those darn trust issues.
We had roughly a summer together from her arrival at the base and my departure, by midsummer we were spending most of our off duty time together. I was determined to not get seriously involved with her and she seemed to have the same idea although we did not spend a lot of time discussing it, we just enjoyed our connection and the time we were able to spend together. I believed at the time that under different circumstances things would have gotten quite serious and that my feelings were returned, so flying home was a mix of relief that I had escaped a romantic entanglement that did not fit with my immediate future and guilt over leaving her behind without some sort of commitment. My hope was that being back in the world after three years overseas would provide enough distractions to keep me from missing her. But instead I spent weeks of agonizing until I finally broke down and made a long-distance proposal. It was not your standard delusional dynamic of wishful thinking but simply the only course I felt was still open to me.
I didn't expect her to accept on the spot but I hoped that it would start us down the road. To the extent that I was thinking long term I imagined completing college on the G.I. Bill while she finished her assignment overseas, lending no sense of urgency to the progress of our relationship and commitment. Hardly ideal but it was all I had for her at the time.
And I can't be too hard on myself because my first girlfriend died in a car accident when we were 16 and consequently I had been terribly slow about forming romantic relationships. Alice was truly my first time falling in love. And because I was a bit late to the table it was inconceivable to me that the feeling was not a mutual one. Surely no one could evoke such an intense feeling in me unless they were feeling the same thing. It never entered my mind otherwise. I had no fear of rejection - the decision process was entirely about my choosing between acting on this now (when it was totally impractical) or taking a chance of there one day being someone else out there with whom I could make the same connection, and since no one before had done so that seemed like a pretty iffy possibility.
So, what you're saying is that even though you are an almost-paralyzed, multiphobic personality who is in a constant state of panic, your wife did not leave you, you left her because she... liked Neil Diamond?
I will concede that some degree of arrogance and a huge amount of simple naiveté was distorting my reality. The year before I had spent months in a hospital recovering from a motorcycle accident and learning to walk again - that accomplishment had put the finishing touches on a rebuilt identity and it is likely that the confidence gained had made me far more receptive to serious romance. There are a lot of definitions for romantic love but at least in this case it was based on my feeling good about myself when I believed that Alice approved of me; and proud of myself for being worthy of Alice's love. And as much as I admired Alice I also felt protective toward her, go figure! I cannot overstate how impressed I was with her at the time.
Wiser men than I have explained seemingly dysfunctional relationships as something that occurs because "we accept the love we think we deserve". Which in this case meant that for the first time I felt good enough about myself to be receptive to being loved by a good person. Of course it could also mean that on a subconscious level my self-image was still garbage and I perceived a lack of character in Alice; accepting the love of a horrible person because that was the only love that I deserved. Such uncertainty is likely what is behind my continuing need for a resolution.
This is a big story, much bigger than I could have imagined when it began as aspects of it have a certain universality. It has been the riddle of my life, something I could never make sense of because it just didn't add up. Yet I've always sensed that there was an answer and that one day I would discover it.
These are the subjects at hand. And we will deal with them for the next hour or so and hope that we draw no conclusions; else wise, the subject shall cease to fascinate us and, alas, another dream would be lost. There are far too few.
I now can see that 1974 was a major turning point of my life. I had positioned myself perfectly for an enjoyable immediate future, my self-esteem had never been higher, and I threw it all away for some girl who as it turned out had no special affection for me whatsoever.
Up till then my life had included at least two genuine tragedies during which I maintained my dignity and perspective. But with this I laid myself open to low tragedy; the mingy and dirty tragedy of making an ass of myself over a person who cared not the slightest for me. Ever since I have felt it essential that I find an explanation for my insanity or miscalculation or whatever.
The years roll by and in July 2000 I return to RAF Chicksands for a week long Air Force reunion, almost 26 years after I had left. One reason I returned was to reopen the Alice mystery, why had I ever fallen for a girl who within weeks of my departure became totally indifferent to me? It was a long shot that Alice would also attend although on the first night I went pub crawling with some of her friends who brought me up to date on her life, and they thought she might show up the next day. I spent a sleepless night in the warrant officers quarters on base as I realized that my coming was a mistake. I did not want to see her. I did not want to see what 26 years had done to her. I had been genuinely shocked to learn that the life of the extraordinary girl I remembered had been very ordinary. I wanted to retain the magic of my 1974 memories.
“Look here”, said Dexter, sitting down suddenly. “I don’t understand. You say she was a ‘pretty girl’ and now you say she’s ‘all right.’ I don’t understand what you mean-Judy Jones wasn’t a pretty girl, she was a great beauty”……….
“Lots of women fade just like that,” Devlin snapped his fingers. “ Perhaps I’ve forgotten how pretty she was at her wedding. She has nice eyes”.
A sort of dullness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was funny…. He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last-but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like a new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.
Thankfully my sleepless night was wasted as Alice did not make an appearance. I would include this paragraph about her on the reunion website:
"The next ghost was not unexpected as she haunted me for quite a while after leaving Chicksands. A WAF who I met a few months before I was to leave, let’s called her Ghost “A”. A short-timer, I was determined to avoid romantic entanglements that summer but found myself spending more and more time with her. Back in the world, I would decide that it had been a mistake to think that I had not gotten involved and to have not said certain things before leaving. To impress her I got an early out to enroll mid-year at Cornell – “High Above Cayuga’s Waters”. A mega-competitive academic situation that I was not prepared for and would not have dared attempt if I had been in my right mind. This did absolutely nothing to further my romantic cause but after a rocky first semester I got into the game and completed my degree. There is a saying that our aspirations are our possibilities. I found that I was not the smartest student at Cornell but somewhat surprisingly that I was smarter than a lot of them. Alice's intelligence and ambition had inspired me to want to impress her. That degree and the contacts I made through the school have been instrumental in almost every job offer and promotion since. So I did the right thing for the wrong reason. Credit that to “A”; if I had never known her I might still be drifting somewhere."
Home from the reunion I concluded from the depressing banality of her life since 1974 that she was an unlikely source of the answers I was seeking. I hated that reality had diminished my respect for her intelligence, creativity, and ambition although it was suddenly easier for me to objectively reconcile myself to my loss (see footnote #2). Most importantly I had found the first puzzle piece I needed to solve my mystery. For the first time - at least consciously - I realized that the girl with whom I had fallen in love was someone that I had at least in part invented. Someone who had never existed as I had perceived her. What I didn't have was any clue as to the template that I had used to do this nor any explanation for why.
The search for the next puzzle piece meant ignoring the traits that I had supplied my invented Alice and discovering what it was about the real Alice that had initially attracted me. Of course I had absolutely no idea how I was going to do that given that it had occurred 26 years earlier. Objectively there were real reasons for me to be impressed; she spoke six languages, she was almost as good as I was at card games, she had attended the University of Minnesota, and she had a charming mix of shyness and restraint which when coupled with her physical appearance nicely fit for my lifelong attraction to the repressed librarian type. But this would be enough because conditions were right for me to let myself fall in love, as my end of summer departure meant no long term consequences from such an indulgence.
That last point is important because I've always feared being trapped in a relationship, one from which there was no escape or from which a successful escape would mean a troubled conscience. Alice came with obvious deal breakers. Her physical type was unlikely to age well, she was Catholic, her family was very large, and her lack of class was occasionally obvious. Any one of these red flags would normally have signaled "run away". Yet in this case I had the luxury of ignoring them. At that point in time Alice seemed to nicely meet my plea for something to "deliver me from the mundane" while making progress in my quest to be normal. One of the rare times when there was no schism between those contradictory goals.
I was almost three years into an assignment where incidental contact with my wealthy landlord's teenage daughter and a friendship with a theater crazy dependent girl in the rec center had been my only exposure to interesting females.
"A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved."
https://austensaccomplishedwomen.omeka.net/
"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading."
Lizzy: "I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."
There would be other Alice attraction factors later, either supplied by me or personal preferences of which I was not yet consciously aware.
Any resentment I had from feeling tricked or cheated went away with the discovery of the second puzzle piece, which came to me a few years after the reunion with the introduction of Luna Lovegood to the Harry Potter series. I recognized some additional Alice attraction factors in Luna's off-kilter and slightly disheveled qualities, someone disarmingly out of step but processing a lot more than she was letting on. This was consistent with the personality type already mentioned and one to which it is natural to attribute the sharp mind of a distracted deep thinker. I could see that from the beginning I had viewed Alice as a genius of the faux-naif variety,
Of course off-kilter, slightly disheveled, innocent(?), repressed, and shy; with an absurdist sense of humor are key parts of my own identity. It seems to be an unusual combination. Meaning that in Alice I sensed a rare kindred spirit who seemed to really get me. If you find a kindred spirit it is natural to assume that they totally get you but they probably don't, more likely they only partially get you. And you make a lot of other leaps of faith in the direction of them sharing all your attitudes, values, and capacities.
Now I began to really grasp how much of the disconnect had been my responsibility, she had not played or deceived me, I had largely done that to myself. This was an important discovery which could not have been made without both puzzle pieces. Yet even together they only revealed reasons for a moderate attraction and not what had been behind the magical “once in a lifetime” connection process that I felt had taken place between us during the summer of 1974. I still lacked the “why” of my delusion but at least my new insights held out the promise of being able to recognize the final piece of the puzzle should I chance upon it at some point in the future.
The final piece of the Alice puzzle arrived in December 2020 when U-Tube's "up next" list inexplicably included the Godspell movie's "Day-By-Day" segment. U-Tube has algorithms which drive this process based on an account's access history. But there was nothing in my past viewing that would have prompted anything from Godspell, perhaps God took pity on me and finally cued up a resolution to end my torture. I had not seen Godspell since 1974 so I clicked the icon and within a few frames of the segment all was explained.
“Red hair is my life long sorrow.” ― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
The second puzzle piece had opened me to the possibility that I was pre-disposed to fall in love with Alice because she was a personality type for which I have a weakness - an "attraction to innocence", and a perceived kindred spirit. But the U-Tube segment created a rush of memories and now I am 100% sure that my Alice attraction 46+ years ago was mostly about Gilmer McCormack, a redhead like Alice (those cute Irish girls again) whose character I had fallen for when the "Godspell" movie played at the base theater a few weeks before Alice's arrival. I was so dazzled that I sat through the movie twice, the Gilmer character was imprinted on me and then forgotten a few days later. This is not an especially "creepy" thing as films intentionally connect the audience to the characters, the language of film is based on a two-way process which includes each audience member filling in the blanks of the characterization. Which is why huge efficiencies result from using stereotypes. And I was not the only person impacted by that performance as there is even some artwork available on the internet:
In this case the actress provided basic characterization and I as the smitten viewer subconsciously or with self-knowing whimsy expanded upon it during my two viewings, reflexively adding whatever details pleased me but were consistent enough to not require additional suspension of disbelief. Like 99% of these flights of fancy it was over and done within days of my watching the film and would have been of little note but for the arrival of a new Russian linguist on Able Flight.
Flashing back 46 years, I met Alice within days of her arrival and things began clicking into place between us unlike any romantic attraction I had ever experienced, each step forward that summer just felt right. Alice was about as counterculture as girls get in the Air Force, even back then. Yet she did not begin to approach the hippy waif of the musical which is probably why I failed to "consciously" make an association between them. I can now see from the timing and the striking physical similarity what should have been obvious at the time. In my eyes they had the same kind of innocence and it was that "attraction to innocence" thing again, with me unconsciously attributing much that had been Gilmer to Alice. An example of how transference can occur in everyday life. It would not have seemed so magical if I had realized why this was happening but I still might have gone with it as it was a wondrous thing to discover someone who so closely fits your subconscious ideal. Like having your dreams slowly come true before your eyes. Under such circumstances falling in love was inevitable, things just kept breaking favorably the more I got to know her. It was a series of validations of what I felt was supposed to happen.
And as this new reality began to take shape I recalled an occasion early in my acquaintance with Alice. I had just returned from playing golf in Stevenage and was transferring my clubs from Bob Scott's car in the airman's club parking lot as Alice was going into the club. She looked at me carrying my golf match gear and registered only dull surprise, making no inquiries. She simply had no frame of reference.
The incident set off enough internal discordance so as to be notable enough that I still remember it. In retrospect it was a tell that I was already seriously overestimating her and attributing a level of sophistication and breeding that simply was not there. As Dave Black had noted a year earlier, very few of these WAF's were girls that we would have dated in civilian life. And it is certainly possible that my failure at the time to take my relationship with Alice to a more serious level was because I sensed this disconnect on some level and was subconsciously backing away- I simply don't know.
Finding this final puzzle piece unlocked everything and my worldview totally unraveled. The process was not a before-your-eyes rolling transformation like you would see in a CGI segment, the joy and the pain were simply too old for all the memories to be instantly accessed and updated in the light of these new considerations. It would require days of mental processing, with mornings of lying awake as I slowly untied the ganglial knots in my head.
The irony of all this, in case you missed it, is that I started this quest for the purpose of learning to trust the validity of my romantic feelings and ended it with evidence that there are good reasons I should not trust my romantic feelings. So why do I feel so good about what I have just discovered? I guess that I feel good that I am blessed with such scope to my imagination - even though that can be quite hazardous without moments of clarity. And I feel good that Alice is largely absolved of responsibility - although at the cost of her being significantly diminished in my eyes as person - a tradeoff than until now I was reluctant to make. And I feel genuinely joyous that I have rediscovered Gilmer - that the transference is reversing and that going forward I can just play a clip from "Godspell" when I need to be cheered up.
Of course the other irony is that I would not have fallen in love had I not been determined to avoid serious romantic relationship because I only had only a few months left in England. This allowed me to relax and let down my guard. Had I had the time to aggressively pursue Alice I would most likely have been quickly rejected and moved on.
It's also nice to find that at that age I invested so much in such a positive ideal. I fell in love with Alice because I believed that she loved me and that I deserved someone like her, a leap of faith that I would not have made a couple years earlier when my mind was in a bad place. If it is true that “we accept the love we think we deserve”, then this is the earliest evidence I have of getting back my nobility of spirit. This discovery relieves me of what I only now realize has long been my greatest fear, that I would one day come to view the not-so-glorious Alice crusade as pathetic. I no longer see that as happening.
Logical or not, deep down most people believe that you only run into a person who is a perfect fit once in your life. So when you find the one you think fits you must grab on for dear life, no matter who she is or how much of her is your creation. Because none of that matters, only the holding on matters. Thankfully I sensed in 1974 that however things worked out I would feel better about myself 50 years later for having taken a chance.
I've come to view this as an unexpectedly good resolution; having preserved the essence of my feelings all these years I can finally rid myself of their unworthy object, yet still hold onto the feel good part.
A few more days of mental processing has me rather anti-climatically concluding that the long dormant and not so glorious Alice crusade of 46 years was finally imploded by the Godspell revelations. That is because when viewed in the light of those revelations all the alternate timelines flowing from the "what if Alice had loved me?" construct (with all of its alternate Jeffs and Alices from all of the different possible realities) have been rendered unappealing and in some cases quite horrific. I wouldn't trade my current reality for any of them. Perhaps Alice was more perceptive than I had thought.
It wasn't until 50 years later that I realized just how much of the shock of the rejection was rooted in my viewing my proposal as a favor to her, as a concession to someone toward whom I felt protective but did not view as worthy of me. I had been certain that she would welcome my proposal. I was only concerned about ultimately regretting that I had settled for her. Somehow I failed to grasp that what I had to offer might not be considered preferable to the alternative.
My point here being the huge incongruity between my claim of being so impressed by her intelligence and the reasons for my uneasiness about making commitment to her. Ultimately I think all of this can be written off by the concept of being able to hold to two conflicting beliefs at the same time. Apparently one can.
I have since been reminded of this:
This still is from the 1975 film "A Boy And His Dog", I saw it at a revival house in 1978. At the end of which I decided that if I could have made a film this is the one that I would have made. I suspect that the ending is what really solidified that evaluation in my mind, as on a subconscious level I took great personal satisfaction in what happened to the film's Alice-like heroine (Played by Catch 22's Susanne Benton - see link below). In the final scene Albert and Alice come back to find that his telepathic dog Blood has loyally waited many days for him. When Alice suggests they leave the near-death starving dog behind the film implies that Albert chooses to feed her to starving dog. They go out with Blood commenting: "Well, I'd certainly say she had marvelous judgment, Albert... if not particularly good taste".
Footnote #1. The concept of the truth as at best a half told story applies to my state of mind in this situation. Although my love for Alice did instantly vanish at the time of my rejection, I did not entirely accept the idea. After a phone conversation with her I found myself having to actively resist impulsively flying to London. That possibility was scary enough to make some counteraction prudent. So I typed up and sent her a relatively obscure Kurt Vonnegut short story called "The Long Walk To Forever". I did not claim or disclaim authorship although I intended that she believe that I had just written it about us. And except for the ending it matched our situation. To move on I needed certainty that she had no feelings for me and knew that if she did not respond (to the story) I would would have that certainty.
She did not respond but it is a cute story. It still hurts a little when I read it but in retrospect I have to say that it was an absolutely brilliant idea. So much that I am a little in awe of my 20 something self for thinking of it.
https://greenwood.wordpress.com/2013/10/long-walk-to-forever.pdf
“Long Walk to Forever” was originally published in Ladies Home Journal, which only made Vonnegut dislike the story more. In the introduction to the story in Welcome to the Monkey House, Vonnegut wrote:
“In honor of the marriage that worked I include in this collection a sickeningly slick love story from The Ladies Home Journal, God help us, entitled by them “Long Walk to Forever.’ The title I gave it, I think, was “Hell to Get Along With.”
Footnote #2. In the fall of 1977 I watched an episode of "The Fitzpatrick's" where the son Jack fell in love for the first time only to have the girl move away to fulfill her dream. She tells Jack that she has decided to stay but the next day changes her mind and leaves.
Jack is crushed, but begins to recover after a father-son session where the insightful father points out that there was never really a choice to be made. The qualities that made Jack fall in love with her were the very things that required her to follow her dream no matter what the sacrifice. The girl he was in love with could never have stayed nor would he have fallen in love with a girl who would have stayed.
I found this rather profound line of reasoning comforting and it may account for my long-time refusal to diminish Alice's intellect and capabilities in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Note: If you get off on this sort of stuff it continues in the "Romantic Meanderings" section:
https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/secrets-to-living/romantic-meanderings
and
https://sites.google.com/view/2013babyboomerblog/secrets-to-living/holly
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