The Geometry of Good and Evil
Cassie Premo Steele
“Thus we see the emergence of Pythagorean dualism:
On one side were the qualities of goodness, oddness and maleness;
on the other, the qualities of evil, evenness and femaleness.”
— Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers
I fully fit the Pythagorean idea of femaleness as a child: I was most comfortable in nature, which is also considered female, and spent much of my time outside of school among wild rhubarb patches or in the laps of trees or next to a pond.
My favorite number was 2: it was even.
I also was familiar with evil: for years, I had dreams of an evil witch who came on horseback to torture me, and these dreams eventually became the voices of that witch and the devil who spoke to me as I walked down the street with my best friend.
“They’re here again,” I would whisper to her.
“Hold my hand,” she would say.
And like a witch, I knew how to fly. There is no way to prove this (I recently heard the physicist Neil deGrasse-Tyson quip that for a human body to take flight would only be possible with a great amount of flatulence) but I distinctly remember hovering behind a shed in my aftercare program, maybe five feet above the ground, when I was in elementary school.
It was not difficult. It was a letting go and a letting of some other force other than gravity hold me.
I needed to be held.
–
I first learned about suffering from the Catholic Church.
As I looked out the window from inside the warm bus carrying me and the other kids home, I saw nothing but snow covering the rolling Minnesota hills on a Good Friday afternoon. It was April, 1974.
I looked at that snow and asked myself why Good Friday was called “good.”
It seemed bad to me. It seemed to me that people should call something what it is.
I was seven.
The Church calls this “the age of reason.” It is the age at which a child is considered reasonable enough to understand transubstantiation –that the bread and wine at Eucharist is, quite literally, Christ’s body and blood that we eat and drink.
They wait until a child’s reason is developed, but not her body.
I was a little kid growing up in a tiny Minnesota village with a population of 300. My sister, who was two and a half years younger, attended a half-day of public kindergarten in the little village where we lived and went to a neighbor lady’s house after school.
My parents, though, sent me on a bus to the town over the hill, with a population of 30,000, where they worked at a Catholic college, so I could attend a Catholic Elementary School—Saint Mary’s.
I loved that school. I loved my teacher, Mrs. Wolf. I loved the nuns who ran the school. I loved the cathedral next door where we attended Mass together every Wednesday. I loved the little garden between the school and the church and its life-sized statue of Mary.
But no one else who went to Saint Mary’s lived in my village. So, I was alone on that bus.
Alone with my very Catholic body and very reasonable mind.
I came from a very good Catholic family.
And good, in my mind, was connected to truth.
I hadn’t yet read Plato, but Catholicism’s version of the Platonic ideal had already taken root in me. The good and the true and the beautiful were not only connected but were the same thing.
So, as a kid on that bus who felt and thought deeply about things like these, it seemed to me that Good Friday should be named for the truth of what it was.
Bad. Killing. Death.
In naming it Good Friday, it is as if people were trying to skip too quickly to the happy ending. I was in the middle of a kind of Bad Friday phase of life myself, and I knew enough to know that the happy ending doesn’t come all at once.
–
We attended Mass every Sunday that winter in the little village where we lived. It was held in a cafeteria for the local people because the snow was often too bad to drive over the hill to town.
During Mass one day, my mom got sick – it was like a kind of heart thing – like a spell, like fainting — I didn’t know exactly. At seven, I was old enough to reason through my thoughts about Good Friday but I didn’t not yet have a hold on the human body.
We were standing up and praying, and then my mom was down on the cold floor, unconscious. An ambulance came and took her away.
From the perspective of the woman I am now, I can see that being in church may have been the only place my mother could completely let go into all that was happening, then.
Let herself go in the presence of God and allow herself to fall and to be picked up and taken away.
–
I also wanted to be good.
I loved Saint Mary’s Elementary in Winona, Minnesota, where I attended school during the worst part of my parents’ marriage.
I tried hard in school and excelled at reading. The math was harder. Outside of the alligator mouths of greater than, less than, nothing mathematical was intuitive to me, whereas words, spelling, grammar, stories, and writing were a language I knew by heart.
The first words I read out loud were a headline in a newspaper that my grandfather was reading in 1971. I was four. It said POWs Released.
I pronounced it “pows.”
We were visiting my grandparents in Florida, where they’d moved from Detroit after my grandfather worked for Henry Ford since he was a young man.
Devout Catholics (she Irish, he Czech), a priest who also lived in their complex would come to their condominium to say Mass.
I loved Mass. I loved the rhythm and the incantation of the words. The back and forth of prayers that coincided with movements of the body. The physicality of this, extended even into the transubstantiation where, once I turned seven, Jesus became a body that I took into my mouth.
Seven is the Age of Reason for the Catholic Church. It is, remembering Pythagoras, an odd, and therefore male, number.
–
When summer came the year that I was seven, my mother went away for a longer time than her brief fall in church and subsequent hospital stay could allow. She attended a philosophy seminar in Berkeley, California, and my sister and I were left with my father, who mostly left us alone in the house with a teenage girl who lived in the neighborhood. Our mother was gone for eight weeks.
And while I do remember vaguely missing my mother, what I remember more is my hunger.
There was no food in the house. My father was often gone, for days at a time, and Molly, the teenager from down the street stayed with us, from morning to night, tucked us in our beds, and went to sleep in her own house (“I’m not being paid for nighttime,”) and then came back in the morning.
My mother, who had told us she would come back at the end of the summer, had promised to pay the babysitter for every daytime minute she stays with us, so Molly recorded the hours, counting our care as a savings account, and we were not unhappy.
We went barefoot. We listened to music on slim black records like big plates. John Denver. The soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz. No one fought. It was a better childhood than we had known.
Except for food. No one had left Molly any money to buy us food, and we were hungry.
One day there was nothing in the house but two slices of bologna and half a carton of cottage cheese. Molly divided this into two portions and served it to us, taking none for herself, knowing she could go down the street to her house and eat later, while we watched TV.
My sister was the first one to notice.
“Yech!” she yelled. “What the hell is this?” She was five.
“What?” Molly asked.
“There is something weird about the cottage cheese,” my sister said, and I tasted it, too. It was sweet, like candy, and sour, like lemonade. It tasted horrible, in that way food tastes horrible when you are a kid and you’re not used to the new sensation in your mouth.
“I put sugar on it,” she said. “To make it sweet. I thought you’d like it.”
“No,” said my sister, always the stronger, angrier one. “We don’t like it. It’s terrible.”
Looking back on this now, I realize that Molly may have been trying to give us extra calories by adding the sugar—or perhaps, she smelled that the cottage cheese had gone rancid and she was trying to cover up the taste. I feel more compassion for her than I do for us—hungry and angry children who could be quite mean.
“We’re not eating this crap,” my sister said.
“Dumb bitch,” I whispered to my sister, and we both rolled our eyes at her stupidity.
We ate one slice of bologna each, and this was our lunch, and our snack, and our dinner, our only meal of that day, and the only food I remember eating that whole summer without my mother.
–
Democritus came up with the concept of atomos , or uncuttable solids that, when rearranged, created change.
The atoms, though, did not change.
He would have been an unwelcome guest at our kitchen table that day.
He might have said to my sister and me, the cottage cheese is still cottage cheese even if it is rancid. Even if the grainy sugar makes its texture unusual to your palate.
My sister would have told him to fuck off.
–
“Shhh,” I heard, in the dark. “Cassie’s awake. She’ll hear you.”
I had been sleeping. I was not sure for how long, but my mother’s words had awakened me.
My father was above us, reeling around the room in boxer shorts.
“She had a bad dream,” she was saying to him. “She was scared. She wanted to sleep here.”
“I don’t care!” he hissed. “We haven’t had sex in weeks!”
All of a sudden he was on top of her, I could hear his tongue clicking in his mouth, and then spreading out to her mouth, licking her cheeks.
“No!” she was saying, and then suddenly, again, I was asleep.
–
It was the deep winter of my parents’ last year of marriage. I was eight and my sister was six.
They were fighting, in their bedroom. My sister charged in. This had become the pattern: they fought, my sister intervened, did something shocking, and made them stop. Or if this didn’t work, we did something directly to incite his anger, and he hit one of us, and the anger got discharged, and the fight stopped.
This time, my sister announced, “Cassie’s gotten fucked.”
And for a split second, even this did not stop them. For a split second, they ignored even this.
And then they looked at us.
“What did you say?” my mother asked, her dyed copper hair wild, her eyes red. She had just turned 33 that month, and she was barely over a case of pneumonia during which our father left and neighbors brought food and we ate better than we had in months.
“Cassie got fucked,” my sister repeated.
For a moment no one spoke.
Finally my father, sitting down on the bed in his boxer shorts, said, “At least someone around here’s getting some.”
I could not believe this. I did not even have to deny it. No one even asked for my story. They did not even stop fighting.
This, even this terrible truth, did not stop their cruelty.
I was only eight, and I could not believe that this was my life.
–
Socrates said that there was only one good, and that was knowledge.
There was only one evil, and that was ignorance.
The Church said eating of the Tree of Knowledge was the root of all evil.
Eve did this.
Eve, the first woman.
I was a woman, or would be, one day. Like my mother before me.
And so somehow in my little girl brain, I reasoned that Socrates was right: I could be both good and at the same time have knowledge.
So I figured out a way to get raped.
–
I never used this word for what happened, though. (Evil, evenness, and femaleness.)
How would you feel if I told you that I knew what I was doing? That I wanted to do it? That I thought it would somehow help my mother?
Would you cry if I told you I looked in my urine for signs of a baby? Would you be shocked if I told you I knew it took nine months to make a baby, so for nine months I watched the bubbles in my pee and stole mothering magazines from the pediatrician’s office and read them secretly so I would know how to care for a newborn?
Would you be able to calculate the angle of how desperately I wanted to be good, do good, make something good out of my childhood and how deeply I carried the belief that I was evil?
–
You can’t step into the same river twice, famously said Heraclitus, a philosopher from the fifth century BCE.
Yet over and over, over the course of my life, I have stepped into the river of the winter I was eight.
And it is always the same river.
My parents are fighting.
I want to help.
I hear about sex.
I think if I know more about this thing, I can help.
I get raped.
–
I honestly wanted to help my mom. I knew she wasn’t happy, and I knew that as a girl, I had the same kind of body that she did, and perhaps, as Jesus did, if I allowed my body to experience what someone else was experiencing, there would be some kind of redemption in this.
None of this added up, however.
None of the philosophers or mathematicians or theologians had a formula for me.
There was no way to come to understanding.
There was no good outcome.
Until I learned to factor in the pain.
///
Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is an ecofeminist poet, novelist, and TEDx speaker. She has published 16 books and audio programs, and her writing has been nominated 6 times for the Pushcart Prize. Her writing has recently appeared in the Gay & Lesbian Review and Sinister Wisdom, and her most recent book is The ReSisters, a #1 bestselling LGBT YA novel. She lives with her wife in South Carolina, and her website is www.cassiepremosteele.com.
