[What follows is a section from “Autobiography,” excerpted from Larry Levis’ essay collection, The Gazer Within. The entirety of the title essay,“Some Notes From the Gazer Within”, is available online thanks to Blackbird.]

“First confession”

My mother, whose maiden name was Carol Clement Mayo, was Irish. I was raised as a Catholic, which is to say, raised to believe that such terms as mystery, spirit, and the Holy Ghost were real presences rather than abstractions. To be raised as a Catholic is to grow up feeling guilty for something but not to know quite what it is. At seven, like other children, I went to my First Confession so that I could receive, afterward, my First Communion. Like other children, I had to make up sins on the way to my First Confession, mostly venial sins, like lying or having "bad thoughts." I had made up about ten little sins, but I felt I ought to confess to at least one big Mortal Sin, just to get it down somehow, from the start. A mortal sin was serious business. If you didn't confess, do penance, and gain absolution by Communion, you would go straight to hell in the next life without a lawyer made of air at your side, without even an arraignment or hearing. I looked at the list of the ten mortal sins and realized right away that I didn't qualify as a transgressor for nine of them. The only one left was a word I didn't understand, and so I thought that must be the sin that I had committed, the one that applied to me. And so, at the age of seven, after confessing my little, imaginary venial sins, I confessed to adultery, I did it in a casual, offhand way, "And uh . .. I committed adultery," I said. The priest stopped mumbling to himself in Latin. There was, in the shadowy, screened, small space of the confessional where I knelt, a silence, a pause. I could tell I'd made some sort of impression. He asked "How many times, my son?" "Just once," I replied. And then he asked, "How old are you?" "I'm seven, Father," I answered. And so he then explained what adultery was. And after he had finished, I said, "Oh no. I haven't done that?” And so it must have been something else that I had done that I wished to atone for, though I didn't know what it was. I still don't. But Catholicism works its shrewd miracle in the seven-year-old psyche, or soul, before the mind can question it.

You feel guilty for something or other you've done or just thought about doing, and you can't remember what it was or know what it was, and it keeps you in line, for a while at least, off the streets and out of trouble. Sometimes it works for ages. What else could have coerced peasants to lug huge stones up a hill for a cathedral except a hope to atone for the only sin they had all committed, the sin of being mortal, of being born and knowing they were flesh, and flesh must die. They didn't do it out of altruism. It doesn't exist. I was eight or nine when I realized this. I was loitering around by my father's abandoned chicken shed, a long, low building that still smelled vaguely of chicken dung. I was trying to pray without any self-interest. I couldn't do it. St. Augustine knew this long before I did.

Besides, it was a world with a chicken shed in it. My father once had a going egg business. He hated it. He hated chickens, and he finally grew to despise even their eggs. "What was the happiest day of your life?" I once asked him. "The day I got out of the chicken business," he answered; there was more to the world than belief, or disbelief.

I wasn't religious and never have been. The Mass was in Latin, and the incomprehensible sound of it had a beauty, but going to Mass always bored me. It seemed like a complete waste of time. And catechism classes were worse. The nuns longed for any opportunity to punish us. They watched as if we were a group of suspects the police had rounded up. They knew we were guilty of something.

The Catholic Church understood Freud's concept of the superego centuries before he articulated it in 1940. The cathedral on a hill is its palpable and visible representation, or, in Freud's simile, the superego is "like a garrison above a captured town." In the case of the church, it is a garrison so effective that it doesn't even need soldiers. Its windows are beautiful. Its frescoes and painting and sculptures, depicting absence in enormous detail, are priceless. It enabled Dante to imagine hell, and it was at least the stepmother to a ninety-year period of Italian art, a period of corruption, betrayal, incest, assassination, intrigue, and unsurpassable art. The church knew beauty and evil were sleeping together, and gave both allowances to do it. Two thousand years of stolid, industrious virtue and Swiss peace perfected the cuckoo clock and the dairy cow. I suspect the Swiss dairyman had a good deal of placid self-esteem. Michelangelo hated himself. And a later figure, Caravaggio, was mean-tempered, an inadvertent murderer whose self-portrait, as Goliath, is full of self-contempt and despair.

In the Age of Therapy, First Confessions could be seen as a ritualized form of child abuse, psychological in method, permanent in effect. But you can't take the Vatican to court. The painting on the chapel's ceiling doesn't respond to a summons and is tricky evidence.

In my case, I would lie awake as a child, full of vague yearnings which were sexual, which I did not know were entirely normal. I was never abused nor molested nor violated as a child. I simply felt that I was a violation, that I was guilty of being alive.

But if it was a violation, it was a pleasure. Besides, how guilty can anyone feel, at seven or eight? I was a boy like other boys. I didn't rebel against guilt, I forgot about it.

Before I was born, a priest drowned in our swimming pool. He had a weak heart and dove into cold, fresh water. My mother came out with a tray of glasses and ice tea and saw him bobbing there. She felt terrible about it. I always thought it was amazing. Priests were full of a mysterious divinity. They had a little bit of God in them. They weren't supposed to die like other people. This one was a young priest from Kings-burg. His lungs were full of water. His body was heavy. My mother pulled him out and tried to revive him with artificial respiration, but of course it didn't work. I always imagined him floating face down in a robe and vestments, dressed for saying the Mass, and asked my mother about it once when I was still a child. "No, silly," she said, "he had on bathing trunks." God died in his bathing trunks, I thought then, for priests were the form He took on earth. Did He really die, I wondered, or did He just do it to show that he could do it too, flick It into the pool water like a fourth of July sparkler burning too close to the hand? He did a lot of things just for effect, I thought: Yosemite National Park, for example.

Thinking about God made me tired. I had trouble believing in everlasting life. What did it look like? It seemed more likely that one just died in the end, and that was that, I had begun to think. If the spirit rose off you like a mist, so what? I'd hunted quail in thick ground fog that broke up and parted like mist when the sun burned it off. I hunted without a dog and entirely by intuition and always found quail. My senses grew alive and sharp when I hunted. The quail would burst up around me. I had a twenty-gauge shotgun and would usually bring down four or five by the time I'd finished. It felt real. It was pointless to think about God. Heaven made me feel tired, baffled, resigned, sad as when someone tells you a lie, and you know it's a lie, and wonder why he had to do so. When I cleaned the quail they were still warm inside. Their feathers gave off a pungent, wild smell that was like nothing else. I neglected to cut their feet off; it didn't seem important. My mother hated cooking them. I'd have to break the thin gray sticks of their legs off before she was willing to.

People now confess to all kinds of things, in public, on television. I have a feeling they too make up the things they confess to, just as we did, at seven. But they enjoy it, they like confessing to things. If they've done something that can still shock an audience, they even get paid for it, or make money later by confessing it in a book. They are absolved of their sins by the show's ratings and by book sales. We were supposed to feel embarrassment, shame, and contrition over what we had done. We were just kids. But we tried. We'd shut our eyes and concentrate and try to feel each one of those things. We couldn't, and we would feel sorry when we couldn't. They should have paid us money for it.

"But God comes to see without a bell."