Jonathan C. David at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia – © 2024 Lloyd Wolf / lloydwolf.com
“And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume?” T.S. Eliot has his fictional character, J. Alfred Prufrock, ask these questions in his highly esteemed poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Any opinions of T.S. Eliot aside, I give him credit for stating in as evocative a way as possible questions that dog many of us throughout our lives. How do we sum up our lives? And for whom, other than ourselves, do we bother? Here, on this website, I will try to convey to readers the gist of my own disjointed life. And also the gist of my thinking. Also, I will endeavor to explain why I am deluded enough to think these might matter to anyone.
I grew up in Westminster, Maryland, in beautiful Carroll County, Maryland, a dairy-farming area of rolling hills west of Baltimore, and in the foothills of the Appalachians. My father taught political science at a small college there, and my mother was a social worker. I attended the county public schools, starting out at the beginning of the civil rights movement when local African American churches were brimming with political activism, but when public schools were segregated. I did well in school, but it never occurred to me that my many ideas could have any impact on the world. I passed passively from one week to the next, one month to the next, one grade to the next. In nineth grade, my father took a sabbatical leave from teaching and took our entire family to India, and I became smitten by the enormity and kaleidoscopic nature of the place and have remained passionately interested in South Asian history and culture since then. I returned to Maryland, and completed high school, started college in Beloit, Wisconsin, graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, haltingly came out of the closet, returned to India several times to study South Indian music—particularly the instrument called a “veena,” went to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, became part of Philadelphia’s gay community, finished a Ph.D. in the Department of Folklore and Folklife, bought a house, worked in the Penn School of Social Work, then taught as an adjunct at various colleges and universities in the area. I worked then at for the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania until my boss yelled at me so vehemently one last time that I felt I could no longer work there and keep my dignity. Thus, I walked out. So much for fame and fortune.
I have not spoken yet about the real story of my life, which is also the reason that I am offering the content of this website to others who might have similar experiences. The real story, the experience that defined my life began at age 19 when I fell into a deep, deep depression and dissociative disorder that has since then defined my life. The primary problem, that is, the problem that was usually the first thing I talked to any therapist about, was the disturbing erotic fantasies focusing on sexual violence that, no matter how it started, eventually ended up being done to me. I began to feel removed from everyday life, and feel that the world around me was somewhat unreal and what others thought of reality was based on falsehoods. I thought the American political system was democratic in name only. I searched for truth through revolutionary politics and Buddhist and Hindu influenced spirituality. I did time in several psychiatric hospitals.
These inner preoccupations, not the outward trajectory of my life, have defined my time on earth. At first, I attempted to contain the profound unrest by immersing myself in the study of the music of India, as mentioned before. South Indian music contains within its practice and music theory much of the philosophies of India, so I was not just learning an amazingly beautiful form of music but was also quietly thinking through my more philosophical preoccupations. All the while I was isolating myself from the political and social realities of the United States, of which I wanted no part. Yet when my mother was dying of ALS, and HIV was tearing through the gay community, and I remained deeply unhappy, Indian music seemed less and less relevant. It was a beautiful, precious little closet for me. Yet the entire time I was practicing, studying, learning, I was also searching for a damn good psychiatrist who could help me figure out what had happened to me that I felt this way.
Things began to change for me. I stopped immersing myself in the music of India, and instead began to research a type of African American religious song service in the Chesapeake area that turned out to be overlooked, but highly significant in the development of African American culture. I loved the people and they in turn were kind to me. I wrote one book on them, I am putting the finishing touches on a second, and my work with them continues to this day. I met a therapist—a damned Freudian psychoanalyst to boot—with whom I could talk and hash through the past that had brought me such misery. And I began to explore the world of gay, bdsm which had so excited me and repelled me at the same time.
Gradually, I began to feel better. And when I look around, I find precious few who have delved so deeply into their own psychological garbage, and fewer who have written about it. I am now familiar with the traumatic childhood experiences that made my libido take the direction it took, and I am familiar with the sources of my depression, and the antidotes to these same obstacles. I remain committed to progressive political politics and will write about it here. For what is life really for but the striving for greater levels of liberation, psychological, economic and political and finally, spiritual. My life continues to be a struggle as all of ours are, but whatever I have learned, I will offer to others who have found their way here and who, after reading about my story, remain interested.