Adam Has a Full Scale Panic Attack (1965)
From the Complete History of Adam Panflick. A Semi-fictional Memoir
It's Chicago. April. 1965. The Panflicks - Adam, Ganya and the two kids - are settled in at 2422 North Orchard. Adam has sometimes wondered why they have had seven residences in the five years of their marriage, but the idea of remaining nomadic seems far-fetched. They are more settled now than ever.
Night falls.
Adam is lying in bed reading TIME. He and Ganya playfully fight over who gets first read. Adam flips to the religion section to see if he is quoted this week. In the 1960s Protestant and establishment are synonymous. Despite the late JFK. Yes, there Adam is in a TIME story on urban churches. Don Benedict is quoted too.
A recent lunch at Jacques French Restaurant. Some pearls of wisdom passed to TIME's Miriam Rumwell. Her notebook. Then this.
Time to sleep.
Ganya is still reading Joseph Campbell. She raises the name of John Dee, a genius of yore. Adam knows where this is going. He is not interested.
Night.
He lies there. Suddenly he feels a constriction in his chest. His heart? Oh.
He is filled with fright. Pressure in his chest. His heart is racing. That would scare anyone. The rate feels double what's needed for an aerobic effect. This is desperate.
Adam feels everything slipping away. Everything. Vacancy beyond. Ending. Going away.
He felt some of this in Birmingham in '63 climbing the hill to Mountain View. The girl at the counter where he stopped in the middle of it said he needed to pay a dime for a cup of water. That bit of reality cured him on the spot.
Adam knows nothing of fight or flight. That elucidation of panic attacks will become common knowledge as more and more episodes register on the national radar. In 1965, Americans are not as saturated in drugs as they will be. Angst is not yet the default body language. Speech has not morphed into incomprehensibility.
Dylan will eventually say it's not dark yet but it's getting there. Adam will never forget this attack. No pain beyond a slight constriction. But that feeling of everything slipping away. Of his heart trembling involuntarily, like a rabbit in flight. No way to end it or stop it or break it. To keep it from flying.
A doctor assures him his heart will go on. But he has become afraid. What if it happens again?
Wrong career? Wrong marriage? Fear of fame? Destiny angst? This is hardly the birthday present he wants in 1965.
Adam toys with getting therapy. The doctor prescribes something for anxiety. Adam does not like the way it makes him feel, He stops taking anything.
There are sporadic repetitions. He waits them out. His sanguinity has been spoiled. He grows less and less happy. He does not know why.
Meanwhile he is turning out article after article, not only for "Renewal" but for "Christianity and Crisis" and "Christian Century". The Century has a new editor who does not, like the recently retired one, think Adam is not a gentleman. He writes for a number of other publications strewn across the landscape of religious journalism. His articles question the ministry, the seminary, parochialism, church structure, relevance. He goes into his study and works on his book. He readies a collection of "Renewal" articles for what will become a widely-circulated paperback called "Who's Killing The Church?"
Our hero is still playing his Martin D-18 and learning at the feet of Frank Tate at the Old Town School of Folk Music.
The doings at St. James United Church of Christ have tailed off. George Ralph is doing a drama program in another church. The effort to find a new minister has gone off on a tangent that holds no interest for Adam. He is busier and Ganya seems happy these days to mind the kids and read her books. Her brother George has moved to Evanston and is now a professor of history at Northwestern. He is friends with the likes of Robert Bly, Eugene Genovese and Christopher Lasch. Adam is intimidated by such a lineup. He has no confidence in his capacity to measure up intellectually.
*
The most amazing event of Panflick's life came one cold winter evening in the depths of early winter, 1966. He was coming home on the Ravenswood and walking the few blocks to Orchard. He entered the building lobby. .
"It's not that nothing is true," he exclaimed to himself. And then immediately out loud, he yelled: "There are too many truths!" And he pounded the wall above the postboxes.
We shall have occasion to return to Adam's plethora of truths problem as we watch him achieve a unique pychology beyond the ken of Freud and even of Roberto Assagioli and as he propounds a theology so apt that no publisher has deigned to touch it. We shall get there, my friends.
*
You will recall that earlier in 1965 Adam agreed to expand "Renewal" and that resulted in the advent in Chicago in the fall of the magazine's New York editor.
Adam and Jim McGraw hit it off. McGraw was highly intelligent, a graduate of Northwestern and Yale Divinity School, close to Adam in age and point of view. He was matter of fact gay, but it was never an issue.
McGraw looked like a central casting 19th Century New York ward politician, with a portly gait and bushy black brows, he brought to "Renewal" a productivity equal to that of Adam and seemed to know everyone. He was a Methodist reverend and a believer in the Gospel in a way Adam sometimes envied. Not that Adam lacked belief, but his was a mite rarified.
The first issue on which they collaborated dealt with youth. Were they pests or prophets? Adam's reflective article "Bob Dylan As Theologian" appeared in the Oct/Nov. 1965 "Renewal" and was later referenced in an extensive collection of Dylan materials called "Absolutely Dylan" by Patrick Humphries and John Bauldie.
Adam had sat light to Dylan when his career began in 1960. He had Dylan's earliest albums and saw connections back to Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music". But he was just as happy to listen to "Henry Lee", "The Fatal Flower Garden" and "John The Revelator" from the original Smith tracks as to "Blowing in The Wind".
But Adam conceded that he was wrong to be so cavalier.
In March, 1965, Dylan brought out "Bringing It All Back Home".
Two songs in particular signaled to Adam that Dylan was an incipient theological thinker "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". The texts of these songs formed the heart of Adam's article. The next album "Highway 61 Revisited" followed. "Desolation Row" echoed Adam's underlying sense of things.
Dreams may speak truth. Vault the vault. Sexless patients are trying to blow it up. Find your way.
A few weeks after his article appeared, Adam received a handwritten card postmarked Hibbing, Minnesota. It was from Abe Zimmerman. It said, "Can you please send me a copy of your article on my son 'Bob Dylan'."
Something was percolating underneath in Adam. It would soon take him by surprise.
Published by Stephen C. Rose
Founder Editor Renewal Magazine, Chicago. World Council of Churches, Geneva Editor RISK. Albert Schweitzer Center, MA. UNICEF DOC NY, UNDP NY. Editor Choices. View profile
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1 Comments
Post a CommentRetaliation is a terrible thing :)