Loving to the Full:
Dave Dellinger's Autobiography Points Toward Moral Alternatives
Book review by Rod MacIver
After being somehow misplaced in the bowels of Random House for a year, Dave Dellinger's autobiography, From Yale To Jail, was recently released in paperback by Rose Hill Books. Dellinger is perhaps best known as one of the Chicago Seven, put on trial for "inciting a riot" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. During that trial, he was charged with Contempt of Court 33 times. His book is the story of one man's journey — of lessons learned and prices paid — through 60 years in the peace, civil rights, and social justice movements.
Dellinger's work for peace began before World War II. While studying at Oxford in 1936, he made several trips to Germany, often visiting anti-Nazi groups. At the time, the US actively supported Hitler's regime and major US corporations (including IT&T, Ford, and General Motors) were constructing manufacturing facilities there. Using diplomacy, the US encouraged Germany to attack and destroy the Soviet Union; meanwhile, Jewish refugees were turned back from US shores and sent to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. Upon returning to the US, Dellinger refused to register for the draft in protest, even though as a divinity student he was entitled to an exemption. For this refusal, he served a year in federal prison. Before the war ended, he served two more years for anti-war civil disobedience.
Dellinger's time in prison included frequent visits to solitary confinement and "the Hole" for acts of protest. On his first Saturday, for example, he was put in solitary for sitting in the Black section during the evening movie. In the book, he describes the impact of confinement:
"So now I was in the Hole for the first time, no light, no bed, shivering in the midst of summer in a cell that was damper and darker than the Swiss dungeon of Chillon that Byron had written about and that I had visited a couple of years earlier. 'You won't come out,' they had said, 'until you agree to obey orders, all orders.'...
"For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it mattered where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get there was right and somehow the longer I was there the better I felt. ... I felt warm inside and filled all over with love for everyone, everyone I knew and everyone I didn't know, for plants, for fish, animals, even bankers, generals, prison guards and lying politicians — everything and everyone. Why did I feel so good? Was it God? Or approaching death? Or just the way life is supposed to be if we weren't so busy trying to make it something else?
"... From now on, no one will ever frighten or control me, no one will stop me from living to the full and loving to the full, loving everyone I know and everyone I don't know, fighting for justice without seeing anyone as an enemy."
On one level this is a story of work for, as the book puts it, "moral alternatives to society's ceaseless wars between races, classes and nation-states." On another, it's the story of an unconventional life — and the price of unwavering devotion to beliefs and compassion rather than to financial security and compromise. The book also describes an extraordinary marriage, one that has withstood the tests of time, lengthy prison sentences, and material poverty.
After what he describes as "fifteen years of troubled, post puberty virginity, five of them after I had graduated from college," he met and, one month later, married Elizabeth Peterson. "The mysterious magic," he writes, "that had thrilled us at our first meeting never left us for long, transcending and seeing us through whatever personal strains and temporary misunderstandings we experienced. So my life was filled with love, joy and gratitude."
Dellinger's book covers a huge range of subjects and looks at his relationships with prominent civil rights and anti-war activists of the 60s and 70s such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Barbara Demming, Tom Hayden. and Abbie Hoffman. There are stories of hunger strikes lasting 40 days or more, of a grenade disguised as a bottle of scotch arriving in the mail one New Year's Eve, of being attacked by a man grieving for a son lost in the Korean War. Dellinger also describes dissent within the activist community: disputes, rivalries, and ego clashes between those working for the same dreams. But more than that, it tells the story of a man struggling to learn, persevering against odds that often seem overwhelming, and, simultaneously, raising a family in a loving home.
After reading his book, I asked Dellinger what parts had particular meaning to him. He mentioned three: the significance of the term "Beloved Community" in his life, the concept of "nakedness" in a society of pretense, and his pre-sentencing statement to Judge Hoffman at the trial of the Chicago Seven. Here is a book excerpt on the first of those subjects:
"I learned in prison, in struggles for human rights and in the anti-war movement that there is nothing more fulfilling than to work in a Beloved Community of people who are laboring to cure that illness (the competitiveness and violence of the military/industrial system) in ourselves and in the society, and to not demand a sterile conformity of ideology and action among those who share that goal. In such a community, the members are working, each in her or his own way, to create the 'proper circumstances' in which 'just normal people' will develop their 'innate capability" of living as sisters and brothers in a world in which everyone will be equal — a world in which people are really born equal and will never cease to he treated as equal, whatever their individual diversities and failings; a world that will not make a mockery of the US claim that we live 'with liberty and justice for all."
"Of course, the members of such a community are limited by a host of human failings that slow down the process of achieving that world. None of us is as sensitive or wise as we want to be, or knows adequately how to combine new truths with old truths, other people's insights with our own insights. But that is no reason not to keep working to become less and less a part of the problem and more and more a part of the solution. It makes it all the more important to learn from our mistakes, lapses and failings, while we 'keep on keeping on' — struggling, learning, and growing through participation in a Beloved Community of persons who are helping one another to struggle, learn and grow."
And finally, From Yale To Jail is about a spiritual quest. Dave Dellinger is a student of all religions, and the book explores his personal journey toward tolerance, humility, compassion, understanding, and Love. When I asked about his spirituality, he quoted George Meredith:
"A truly cultivated man is one who understands that the things that seem to separate him from his fellows are as nothing compared to the things that unite him with all humanity.’
There's more to it than that, but like a lot of things I can't put it into words. I can feel it, though — particularly when I am lying in the grass looking up at the sky and it takes my breath away. I melt into everything and everyone."
This review initially appeared in the magazine Toward Freedom, May 1997."
Excerpts from From Yale To Jail, by Dave Dellinger
82
Are you a mouse or a man? You can become either at any time, it is up to you.
So now I was in the Hole for the first time, no light, no bed, shivering in the midst of summer in a cell that was damper and darker than the Swiss dungeon of Chillon that Byron had written about and that I had visited a couple of years earlier. "You won't come out," they had said, "until you agree to obey orders, all orders."
83
Later I saw plenty of guys come out of there saying, "It was a vacation I could have done it standing on my head, the motherfuckers." But others were broken by it. From then on they had a haunted, hunted look that I'll never forget. It wasn't just that they couldn't look the guard in the eye, they couldn't look anyone in the eye, not even themselves -- like dogs that have been beaten until they are broken. That's what society calls "rehabilitating" them, making them good citizens who obey the laws and have proper respect for authority.
84
Then it began to happen. For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it mattered where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get there was right and somehow the longer I was there the better I felt. Maybe that wasn't it at all, but anyway I never felt better in my life, even if I was shivering and wished I had something to eat, or a cigarette. I was trying to sleep standing in a corner because it wasn't so cold that way and my hips ached from lying on the cement floor. But when I dozed off, I started to fall. If I wasn't careful, I'd hurt myself. If I cracked my head on the floor and knocked myself out, it might be hours before anyone found me....
Then, unexpectedly, for no reason at all, I felt good again and I didn't care how long it had been or would be. I felt warm inside and filled all over with love for everyone, everyone I knew and everyone I didn't know, for plants, for fish, animals, even bankers, generals, prison guards and lying politicians -- everything and everyone. Why did I feel so good? Was it God? Or approaching death? Or just the way life is supposed to be if we weren't so busy trying to make it something else?
87
I am in the Hole, thinking about such things. Something is happening to me and I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm not in heaven. Maybe I'm drunk: "Jesus Christ, mother of fine apples, I feel drunk all the time" (Kenneth Patchen). I've never been more possessed of all my faculties and it's better than being drunk. If you fight clean and hard people can kill you but they can't hurt you. They can do terrible things to you -- and probably will -- but they can't hurt you unless you do it yourself. From now on, no one will ever frighten or control me, no one will stop me from living to the full and loving to the full, loving everyone I know and everyone I don't know, fighting for justice without seeing anyone as an enemy.
After a while, I thought about going to sleep, not caring whether I was awake or asleep, alive or dead. Even dead I knew I would be alive, and if I weren't it wouldn't matter. Everything that happened was good. Life kept expanding inside and all around me, becoming more and more alive and making me part of it until I was floating in an ocean of live air. Really it was an endless ocean of music in color and there was no separation between me and the music. Where the color came from I don't know because that was years before color television. But I didn't know where any of it was coming from. It just came and swept me up in it, until everything was ocean and music and me.
102
The story of our meeting would be incomplete if I did not say that I was twenty-six at the time and lonely for a female partner. Shortly after I had broken my engagement to Sally, another young woman, one of fine qualities and a fellow member of our commune, proposed to me. I knew that she was not the answer to my search, but I was sorely tempted to accept her follow-up offer. It was that we should live together as lovers and "find out where it takes us." In the end I declined....I was still saddled with the sexual morality of my upbringing...
To add to the complications, another young woman asked if she could hitchhike with me part of the way to the conference. She said she wanted to visit an aunt who lived near Pittsburgh....She was a married friend who was a part-time volunteer in our community....We spent a night in a hotel in Pittsburgh and although I arranged with the clerk for separate rooms, she invited me to her room and then her bed....at the last minute I decided that for us to commit adultery would be unfair to her husband and unworthy of both of us....she told me that she wanted to leave him and marry me, this might possibly have made the act acceptable if I had been clear about being ready to marry her. But I was not. I loved her deeply but felt that somehow the chemistry was not quite right for a marriage. When she and I had dated before her marriage, I had felt less spontaneous sexual excitement from her than from a number of other young women....
My first meeting with Betty lasted only a few minutes, just long enough to arrange the time and place for the interview. But a few minutes after I looked at her, heard her voice and watched her walk down the aisle of the lecture hall to her seat, I called my married friend and told her that I had decided that I would not be able to marry her. "You've met someone else," she said, and I said she was right. To give you an idea of how much my friend, Betty and I had in common, the three of us were the closest of friends for the rest of her life. About thirty-five years after our trip to Pittsburgh, my friend died of a stroke. She never did divorce her husband, and, as far as I could see, they were happy together.
I don't believe that there is only one person who is destined to be another person's true mate, but that is my story of what happened to me. Something about Betty in that first brief meeting made my whole being want to get to know her whole being. I never doubted for a second that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. After fifteen years of troubled, post-puberty virginity, five of them after I had graduated from college, I finally had found someone with whom it felt overwhelmingly right to share the miracle of sex and the added miracle of bringing children into the world and becoming a family. I longed to spend a lifetime of all encompassing adventure with her, each of us helping the other to live the revolution now.
It didn't take long for Betty to let me know that she felt much the same. The conference lasted five more days and we spent almost every waking moment together....On February 4, a month and a few days after we had met, we married.
109
The mysterious magic that had thrilled us at our first meeting never left us for long, transcending and seeing us through whatever personal strains and temporary misunderstandings we experienced. So my life was filled with love, joy and gratitude.
246
I learned in prison, in struggles for human rights and in the antiwar movement that there is nothing more fulfilling than to work in a Beloved Community of people who are laboring to cure that illness, in ourselves and in the society, and to not demand a sterile conformity of ideology and action among those who share that goal. In such a community, the members are working, each in her or his own way, to create the "proper circumstances" in which "just normal people" will develop their "innate capability" of living as sisters and brothers in a world in which everyone will be equal -- a world in which people are really born equal and will never cease to be treated as equal, whatever their individual diversities and failings; a world that will not make a mockery of the U.S. claim that we live "with liberty and justice for all."
Of course, the members of such a community are limited by a host of human failings that slow down the process of achieving that world. None of is as sensitive or wise as we want to be, or knows adequately how to combine new truths with old truths, other people's insights with our own insights. But that is no reason not to keep working to become less and less a part of the problem and more and more a part of the solution. It makes it all the more important to learn from our mistakes, lapses and failings, while we "keep on keeping on" -- struggling, learning, and growing through participation in a Beloved Community of persons who are helping one another to struggle, learn and grow.
For me, the Beloved Community includes everyone who is working -- or did work when they were alive -- for that kind of transformation of themselves and the society. I am inspired by them whether I know them personally or not. It's what we used to call, in my Student Christian Movement days, "the Church Invisible." But it is not limited to people who identify with a particular religion or spiritual tradition.
418
Albert Einstein: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
428
I won't make excuses. Excuses are another way of hiding. Usually they don't fool anyone but yourself. So I'll just say that in our society it's hard not to hide and I hide a lot, even though I know it's bad for me. The best thing is to begin by being completely naked with one person. But it's easier to take your clothes off and "make love" than it is to be naked. Sometimes making love can prevent you from being naked, as going to church can prevent you from being religious, or giving to charities can stop you from being generous.
429
I used to quote George Meredith a lot. He said, "A truly cultivated man is one who understands that the things that seem to separate him from his fellows are as nothing compared to the things that unite him with all humanity.
There's more to it than that, but like a lot of things I can't put it into words. I can feel it, though -- particularly when I am lying in the grass looking up at the sky and it takes my breath away. I melt into everything and everyone.
456
So how should I have answered when people asked one variety or another of the conventional question? Should I have been less arrogant, rigid, shy (whatever it was), and given them a conventional answer? During these latter years I could have said, for example, that I'm a part-time writer and teacher, which is probably what they thought they wanted to know. Or should I have found a way of opening up an interchange in which we could have traveled together to the place where I might have told them something more important? Where I might have become foolish enough or brave enough to tell them that I look at people's faces on a subway or a street -- anywhere really -- until I'm full. Full is what Buddhists call empty: emptied of separation, full of unity.
457
Anyone who thinks s/he can believe in 100 percent of the Bible, with all of its contradictions, is fooling her- or himself, often out of a desperate yearning to belong to a loving community. Too bad these people get stuck in a narrow and self-righteous one.
To be up front about myself, one of the more sensible things that distracts me from saying what I do is that what most do for a living rarely tells who they would want to be in they hadn't become de-socialized -- another word I had better explain. To me, getting de-socialized is what some people call getting socialized: learning to fit themselves in without causing any trouble, even though the conventions people fit themselves into cause a lot of trouble. That's like saying that peace is the air force's profession, or that arms control is the way to disarmament.
460
Anyway, I realize that sometimes my inability to respond intelligently is a product of my shyness, a shyness that you wouldn't expect if you looked at my political history. But at some level I do know that whatever world or combination of worlds people live in, they have to start with something brief and simple when they meet for the first time. So why shouldn't people start by asking what I do? I often ask people that question myself. And why can't I simply and directly, while waiting for the right time to raise the ante just a little in that strange game of strip poker in which the object is for both people to win? The way for that to happen is for one of them to take off one of her or his masks -- and then for the other person to do the same. But once it starts I have to remember not to raise the stakes so fast that the other person gets alarmed and throws in the hand. Or that I do, when I see the frightened look in her or his eyes.
If we don't begin with a simple, introductory question and answer, how can we find out, step by step, if there's anyone there? Someone who is looking out at us from behind the eyes, listening with more than the ears, speaking with questions inside the answers and answers inside the questions. Someone letting us in through her or his pores and simultaneously entering ours -- all the ways in which two people can start to make love, if they haven't given up and are still inhabited -- in other words, if there are persons inside their bodies.
Is there life on earth? Is there life in the midst of death? Is there a person behind the mask, a flicker of the flame beneath the ashes? Am I still alive myself? How shall I find out? Not by hiding my nakedness, as Adam and Eve did when they drew back in fear from the prospect of sharing their ecstasy, ran trembling from the garden and blamed God for their cowardice. And not by rushing ahead pell-mell, enthusiastically telling neighbors and chance acquaintances more than they are ready to hear. It's no use trying to rise from the living dead, in the manner of Eliot's Lazarus, by impetuously telling all, "That is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all."
Making love may be the purpose of life, but it's not easy in today's world. Usually we have to work our way, step by step, through a smog of convention to an honest word or touch before we can surmount the social emphysema that prevents us from breathing freely together. Like countries, we are paralyzed by our defenses and afraid to relax them. Even people like me who work to get countries to lower their defenses find it hard to lower our personal defenses.
462
Whatever the circumstances, don't rush. The other person might be a hustler. Or think that you want to have an affair. If you get distracted from making love and have an affair, you may not get to know one another. Even if the Bible does say, "And he knew her." Maybe he didn't. Maybe all he did was put one part of his body inside one part of hers and they never met. You can't trust the Bible. It says, "And he knew her" even when it was a case of the male prerogative or move obvious rape. It never says, "And she knew him." How could he know her if she didn't know him?
Another reason to start at the beginning and move slowly is that it might be important for the other person to go through winter for a while even if we are in spring or summer. If the seasons can be different at the same time in different parts of the earth, they can be different at the same time in people too. Anyone who doesn't lie fallow when her or his winter comes, letting the seeds do what they are supposed to do beneath the snow, won't bring forth a good harvest when the time for it comes. As surely it will, if we respect the seasons in us.
It's not healthy to force the seasons. Or to stay always in the same one. Be wary of anyone who does. People expect you to stay in whatever season of growth or decay you were in when they first heard of you. The media probably didn't get you right in the first place. But even if they did, if you stay there you'll stop being yourself. If you keep doing things that aren't you, there's no telling where you'll end up. With a lot of power or money maybe, or some other kind of trouble. You may never meet anyone again.
464
I'm on an airplane, sitting next to a mystery who might be God but who could turn out to be a terrible bore -- with five hours ahead of us until we land in San Francisco. Am I up to it? Do I have the energy? How many layers of defenses does s/he have? How will I find out unless I am ready to surrender some of mine?
Luckily, while waiting for takeoff I read something that may help: "The practice of Zen mind is the beginner's mind. The innocence of the first inquiry -- what am I? The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities."
Can I answer from the innocence of a beginner's mind, open to all possibilities? If I can, there's no way that s/he will be a bore. We reap what we sow, and more than likely s/he will respond in kind, even if as haltingly as me. But if s/he not ready, or this isn't a good time for her or him, s/he'll reach for a magazine or look out the window. And I'll read some more.
Here goes:
I'm (gulp) ... I'm .. sort of a writer.
Or:
I'm active in the antinuclear movement and things like that. Right now I'm on my way to speak (humbly I hope) at a feminist conference for men that my son Ray helped organize.
Or:
I do a little of several things like writing, teaching and political organizing, but none of them as well as I would like.
Or:
For twenty-three years I was a working printer, but I have worked in factories, on magazines, as a truck driver and as a farm laborer.
I never know what's gong to come out. I have to wait to hear what my voice has said. It changes according to the season I'm in, the season the other person seems to be in and other messages.
