Quitting the Cult, Part II
In the Attic with The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis
Welcome to the conclusion of “Quitting the Cult,” the third chapter in my house-built, book-driven, autism-fueled memoir, At Home with Books.
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*Please excuse the interrupting lawnmower and the ebullient children. This vibrant life doesn’t stop, even for audio recordings!
“Don’t you think that’s taking it a little far?”
Several years after I had or hadn’t been the instrument of the devil, a grad school seminar turned up a poem that raised old memories. It was Seamus Heaney’s translation of “After Liberation,” and I couldn’t get away from the words:
To have lived it through and now be free to give
Utterance, body and soul–to wake and know
Every time that it’s gone and gone for good, the thing
That nearly broke you– Is worth it all, the five years on the rack,
The fighting back, the being resigned, and not
One of the unborn will appreciate
Freedom like this ever.The fight against rule-bound faith had felt worth the pain, despite the relational hurt, despite being called the instrument of the devil. Despite hearing later that my name was spoken in whispers by the group, as though I had died. Rebecca, they intoned with grief. Rebecca, shaking their heads. But I was alive; I had survived; Heaney understood.
Then a friend from those years questioned my assessment—“Isn’t that taking it a little far?”—and I questioned everything. Had the group actually been that bad? What if, after all this time, I was wrong about it?
Cult membership dies hard. In all the houses and apartments that came between college and the Asheville attic room, I assuaged those questions with new rules, often arbitrary. They were my recurring clutch for a desperate sense of rightness: the temperature of the thermostat, the food I would or wouldn’t eat. Nothing was off-limits for zealously guarded restriction. It was superstition built around beam-hopping.
Sure, I was no longer digging miserably through the evangelistic haystack, but I was still locked in a tower, afraid that if I looked truth too directly in the eye, I might have to admit that I was a failure at life, career, friendship, love. I might punch my foot through the floor and fall to the depths below. I could feel the dissonance, a host of hard peas under my mattress, but I couldn’t catch a clear view of what was wrong.
But then I left my previous twenty-eight years behind in a southerly state, and Lord knows that when that blue pickup deposited me and my small cache of earthly belongings on the cement stoop of that little house, I was at the end of my rope. I came into Asheville dense with shame from failing to walk through life in an ordinary way, dense with fear that what I believed about God and myself was still wrong and that I was leaning over the edge of a precipice. Not much longer, that multi-cornered, dormered and casement-windowed room whispered as I placed my spindle-framed bed under one set of windows and my writing desk and bookshelves in the eaves of another.
It spoke the truth.
“Finding a needle in a haystack” isn’t actually a fairy tale plot, but a popular saying, a phrase that appears, like folk tales, across cultures. Its significance lies in the land of impossibility, refusing its protagonist the chance at a happy ending, at any ending at all. It keeps the hero trapped in her tower, no chance of escape, only day after unhappy, task-driven day.
That’s a cult for you. That’s a misdirection down to the bones of what it means to be human, and no mere refuge, no safety-net breather for any space of time, will undo the chains that rumble and drag. Something different is needed to break the dark enchantment.
In the end of The Magician’s Nephew, Polly and Digory stand in the dawn of a new world. Narnia wakes up around them, stars singing and trees flinging themselves into being, and the children are amazed–but the thought of saving his mother’s life won’t let Digory go. More than anything, he wants magic from this fresh dawn of time to keep her in the land of the living.
The creator lion Aslan has other ideas. Instead, he sends the children up into a high garden, where an apple tree awaits alongside a worse enemy than mad Uncle Andrew. It is the White Witch, and she offers Digory something both better and worse than what he wants: Take this apple to your mother instead of back to Aslan, she promises, and you and your mother will live forever.
She sings a message that sounds like freedom but is really imprisonment, that seems like love but is really control. The cost is betrayal of Digory’s very self.
Despite the warning in his gut, he half believes the message. Who wouldn’t? If only wholeness could be as simple as following precise rules: do this, and that won’t happen. Share your faith every day, and you won’t go to hell. Digory stands on a precipice. What will make him believe what he actually knows to be true?
The answer is what was waiting for me in the next house, the Asheville home of my heart. The answer is relationship. Real belonging that is freely given, that can’t be bought by measuring up to what someone else expects or wants from you. In Digory’s case, the answer is his friendship with Polly. The witch finally misspeaks, assuming that, for the sake of saving his mother, the boy will abandon his friend. Only leave her behind, she tells him. It is the final straw.
In an unfamiliar land where everything is different than he has previously known, Digory hears the lie in the witch’s words and has the wherewithal to tell her, “You’re wrong.”
In my attic bedroom in a new town, strange and away, I looked back and then forward, and the fact of new friendships and an entirely different vantage began to do the trick. The various rules that had hounded me for years suddenly looked like what they were: control, not love. Not real selfhood. Not true belonging.
I have never traveled between worlds like Polly or Digory or Christopher Chant–but I also have. Lewis finishes his description of attics and upstairs indoor silences, adding that he was also a product of “endless books.” The same is true of me, and all those fictional worlds are as real in my imagination as the steady stream of homes I’ve lived in.
It is also true that I have lived in houses with attics: what else was the unairconditioned, finished upstairs space in the first home my husband and I owned? It ran the length of the small house with the compass-point kitchen, narrow stairs ascending to a sunlit dimness. My writing table overlooked the red autumn leaves of a dogwood next door, planes ascending and descending from the little local airport in the distance. I met Davita Chandal up there and nursed my first baby. It was a sanctuary meant for finding my way with words, my way as a mother, my way altogether–for finding myself.
What else was the suite at the top of Staircase Seventeen during a graduate summer abroad in Oxford? The other students stayed in modern rooms, but my desk overlooked rooftops toward a steepled view of a nearby college tower. The clock lit up at precisely 10:00 pm, my signal that it was time to stop schoolwork and join friends at the pub several cobbled streets away. I watched for the spire’s sudden brightening each evening while I toiled at my papers. It stretches meaning to call that Oxford study an attic, but I was high in a certain heaven there. When I went to my class the next day, my tutor would exclaim at the insights in my papers, and I began to believe I had good ideas–that I was good at something.
A taste of freedom, of actual-selfness, awoke in me that summer abroad–that can only awake in the liminal times in our lives, when we find ourselves away from home, like Polly and Digory in the Wood Between the Worlds. In a different country altogether, I caught a vision beyond the secret, nagging questions I still held about the veracity of my cult assessment, which never fully went back to sleep in the intervening years until my first Asheville house opened its right-side attic bedroom to me.
When I wrote and read and rested and dreamed up in that Asheville room–the only safe space to me in all that loud house packed with key-bearing boyfriends, angry fiances, and one-night stands across the darkened hallway–something separate from the rocky world outside the door was happening inside me.
Distant from everything I knew, the rules I still feared were bearing up my being began to fall away. In swooped the sense, in that treetop space, that I was standing on a different brink. I began to feel slowly, steadily disentangled from I wasn’t sure yet what.
I remembered the minister’s words from a decade before. “You are the instrument of the devil.”
I remembered all the words of criticism across my life, the furrowed brows and confused looks at my particular ways of seeing and being. “You’re not doing life right,” they said. “You’re a little strange,” I heard.
For the first time, I turned on my heels, looked my accusers in the face, and answered:
“No. I don’t believe I am.”
And I stepped through a door into the dawn of a new world.
Fifteen years after moving away, I traveled back to West Asheville in search of that old attic house of mine.
I walked the root-cracked summer sidewalks as though I’d stepped through a time portal, turning the corner of my current real life to recognize some of the houses as though I’d seen them only the week before: the roof-peaked, rounded door I’d fictioned into a witch story every time I strolled past; the wide gray house around the corner I’d imagined I might live in one day.
Then I arrived at my old home. It was surprisingly ordinary and small. After a pause on the street to collect myself, I passed under the same white plastic archway that stood just as leaningly sixteen years ago, covered in the same scrappy rose vine. The smell caught me, and I knew: this is the place. The stoop was low and wide, the same cement landing from which I waved off my best friend. The shabby casement windows were cranked open. Still no central air.
I knocked. The young woman who opened the door could have been one of my old roommates: mid-twenties, bleached hair cropped short. Plenty of piercings.
“Yes?” A frown on her face.
The stairs running up to my old bedroom behind her were nearer and narrower than I’d remembered.
I explained that I used to live here.
The young person’s face remained a question mark. She didn’t smile. This middle-aged woman looking for a piece of the past wasn’t an important or desired element in the narrative of her day. She glanced back to the living room where I once blogged and binged on the T.V. show Lost with new friends. I sensed I’d interrupted an argument with another young woman sitting on the corner of a sofa.
“Might I see it?” I tried not to gaze too longingly up the carpeted steps.
“I’ll have to ask my roommate,” she told me. Cryptically, “She’s the one in charge of things.”
Good for you, I thought, for going paced and careful, slow and safe. For thinking. It isn’t how I would have responded at her age, when I allowed any person, stranger or not, to enter my thought and say how things should be. I gave her my number. Good for you.
I didn’t expect to get a message during the rest of my weekend in town, and that’s exactly what happened: I never saw the inside of the place again. I didn’t need to. I carried the vision of that time, the experience of living in and then leaving the attic, inside of me.
When I left that little house so long ago, there were years yet of trying to meet other people’s expectations. But I had snicked open the lock on the attic door. When I left the tumultuous roommates behind, I was ready to cross a threshold into new possibilities.
After eleven months in that house, I crammed my furniture, books, and clothes into the back of another truck and followed it across town to the house that held the family I loved. I didn’t yet know it, but the only expectation for belonging in that home was to be my unique self.
It opened its door wide.
See “Quitting the Cult, Part 1” for the first half of this essay.
I love that you have stories of attic spaces that are rich with self-discovery and always with the concrete object of a writing desk to ground that journey. The many attics in my life have always been dark and dirty spaces to fear and avoid. I feel like I have missed out on some essential rite of passage as a writer. I guess we each make our way in the spaces that open up for us.