Clyde Forsberg’s Entrance and Exit

Long Post

The Persecution of the Professors
in the New Turkey: A Facebook Book
(Clyde Forsberg, 2017)

One day when Rebecca was going to University, she came home to tell me that there was someone in her class who thought the way our family did. 

I thought she was speaking of a member of an Institute class, but now she tells me she was in some kind of religion class at the University, perhaps "The Church in Feudal Times", or some such title.

I didn't know who this person was that had been speaking to her, but I told her to invite him over sometime. 

He was pleasant, quick-witted, open, and it seemed that he had had fun the day he came, and why don't you come back we asked. And he did.

This was about at the same time as my kids were refusing to go to regular Sunday School class. 

They said those classes were a waste of time.

Kelvin was teaching the investigators class.

There were no investigators, so since he and I were stake missionaries, and the regular missionaries came to our class, that made 4 of us in the class. Somehow being in the Investigator Class with us, seemed to be better than the other alternatives on Sunday for them, so we set up the class in the cultural hall.

Clyde came along.

Playing It By Ear
(Clyde Forsberg 2010)

He was in Religious Studies at school and a lively participant in the class. There was no classroom per se, with walls for us.

The course of studies that year was the Doctrine and Covenants. Kelvin was interested in all four versions of the first vision.

He made copies of them, and in class we put them side-by-side and talked about their similarities and their differences.

Kelvin liked to do the text on a page so that the right 1/3 of the page could be used for notes. That side was completely blank to begin with.

Everyone had a book, everyone put notes in the empty third of the page, or they didn’t.

We were having quite a bit of fun.

Class had to end so that all of the students went off to the other organizations that had the last hour of the 3-hour block of meetings. 

Our kids didn't want to go but wanted to stay and keep working on the projects that we had in class, so the next Sunday we told our kids that after sacrament meeting that we would just all take the five-minute walk home. 

Equal Rites:The Book of Mormon, Masonry,
Gender, and American Culture
(Religion and American Culture)
(Clyde Forsberg, 2003)

That way we could just work through the two-hour block of instruction time with no one bothering us to go elsewhere.

I didn't have to worry about the other part of my family staying at church, because Richard was happy in his class and Mary could make her way home on her own.

By the time those two came in the door, I had a meal ready, and so we cleaned off the table, shut down our Sunday School Class, had our Sunday meal, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and those who wanted could stay and talk about anything they wanted and usually the topic was religion. 

I would probably make bread dough after the meal, so that in three or four hours I could have a couple of pans of cinnamon buns ready for the evening and that would tide people. 

So, I remember myself as only peripheral in the group. 

A Most Extraordinary Family Story
of Coming to the New World.
(Clyde Forsberg, 2019)

Most of the time I was making sure the table was clean, that there were pens and pencils there, that everyone had a drink, watching that everyone had a chance to talk, seeing my kids go in and then out of the conversation, taking care of Mary and Richard if they needed something.

The  kids and their friends came to the table and left the table at will. There was no reason for any, except the very interested to stay.

Clyde’s life began to unfold for us. 

He and his wife, Spring, and one adorable child whom she dressed like he had just stepped out of a Vogue magazine. 

I think she told me that she was good at thrift stores. Not just good! But Spring was only there on a few occasions. That little boy needed a different kind of Sunday School.

Divine Rite of Kings
(Clyde Forsberg, 2016)

Kelvin had an open style of teaching. 

He thought that anything that was good and true was circled, bounded by Mormonism, and that there was no data and no information that we should fear. 

He always said there are no bad questions. 

He didn't even make the joke afterwards, only bad answers. 

He treated everyone around the table with respect. No bad questions. No bad answers.

By this time, I was working at the University Library and taking a few classes myself every semester. 

Sometimes, I would ask Clyde if I could read his papers. 

I spent many lunch hours in the university book stacks, reading all of their Dialogues and Sunstones. I was so hungry for religion. Clyde had written a paper, trying to figure out the etymology of all the names of the characters in The Book of Mormon and trying to find those names, trying to find the roots of those names, seeing if they were variance of something out of the Bible or mixtures of something out of the Bible and other Hebrew texts.

Savageries of the Academy Abroad :M
y Life Among the "Headhunters"
of Presbyterian Taiwan &
Narrow Escape from a
Saudi Arabian Prison Thereafter
(Clyde Forsberg, 2014)

I had never thought of doing a paper like that. I can just remember thinking well, I wouldn't have had that question, where did Joseph Smith get all these names from. But I was glad to read what kind of arguments he could make.

Clyde continued on with his scholarship at the University, eventually leaving to do a PhD in Central Canada. 

My other kids began to leave home, get married, and some of my kid had jobs that interfered with their presence with the family on Sunday.

Clyde disappeared.

He would send me a chapter or two of what he was doing and I would read it, put my comments in the margins, pick up small typos, but there weren't many of those.

He was forthcoming about his childhood. 

I heard that story from his lips, and then read it again, not quite able to believe that a family of children could be so neglected. 

I was horrified to learn how Virginia, his mother, had treated her children. And there is no honour to go to their father to be honest.

All the King's Horse and
All the King's Men:   Love, Alienation,
and 'Reconciliation' in a Big
BIG Mormon Family
(Clyde R Forsbert, Jr, 2001)

I didn’t know what to do with the story of his childhood; the horror of it hung heavy on my heart. 

Over the years, I've read a lot of Clyde’s work. I'm interested in my Mormon faith, and in its beginnings, and I am interested in how the world around Joseph Smith inflected his teachings. 

I was not interested in how Joseph Smith’s participation in Masonic rituals were reflected in our church, but reading Clyde, I just had to learn all of that. Not that that was new. My father had told me that the temple ritual was similar to Masonic order ceremonies. Doral’s best guess, he told me, is that both might be some order of Godhood. Maybe Joseph Smith was taught, about those rituals, through another order. Doral didn’t know, and neither did I.

Clyde, Kelvin and I did have a fabulous time when we went to a Sunstone Conference in Seattle. 

Clyde was giving a paper. Kelvin and I thought this would be a grand holiday for us, which it was. 

And maybe that only reflects how limited Kelvin’s and my idea was of fun. I have one lingering memory of that trip, which has nothing to do with Sunstone. 

It is the fact that on the way home, we stopped at the cabin to sleep. A nice free bed for all of us for the evening. 

And the ride home was too long to make it in one stretch. We stoked up the wood fire. As the house warmed up, the insects begin to come out of the wood. I've never seen such a gathering of black flies nor heard them buzz so much during the night. For some reason I was apologetic to Clyde as though the flies had been my fault. Clyde reminded me of how lucky I was to have such a resource, a cabin, some land, a view of the water and the chance to live in a little grove of trees.

My other strong memory about Clyde has to do with going back to University. I had taken a course called Philosophy and Women. There was no prerequisite required but it was an upper-level course. The readings were difficult for me. Ontology. Oncology. Teleology. Historiography. Self-abnegation. What is essential? What is sufficient? I didn't know the meanings of all these words or understand how they could just be thrown in sentences so that the people who were listening could figure out what was going on. I will always remember the class held one day after Montreal Massacre. The professor, Petra von Morstein, came to class quite disarmed-- the horror of the death of all those engineering women. What to make of incidents like this, philosophically?

I held my textbook in my hand that year, reading aloud from it, walking back and forth in my front room so that I could stay awake. Hoping that I could learn something from the sound of my own voice. Clyde knew how difficult the class was for me, I wrote the exam with trepidation. At some point Clyde asked me how the class had gone, or maybe just in general how I was doing at University, since he knew I was going there part-time. I told him about this B-. I had some shame about it. It's one time when Clyde chastised me a bit. He reminded me that I hadn’t been to school for 25 years, and that I'd been raising a large family and had very little spare time in those years to think about the larger problems in the world. He told me that I should be proud of that B-. He thought it was an outstanding mark for me to get, maybe even the mark I should be most proud of. I stayed in school longer. My marks rose. Looking back, that B- is the mark I am the proudest of.

After that I mostly had an online life with Clyde. Still, he feels present, the sound of his voice always hovers over his text, and I can hear the inflection in his words sending the pause, that pregnant pause, the one that might even be full of self-recrimination given the argument he has made.

Years later, Clyde sent me a poem which I did not keep. I am the protagonist of the poem, and trapped in a zoo. Too bad that I do not shine as a keeper of poems. If I were, I would insert it here. Still, a person never knows what's in that pile of papers they have kept forever at home in that cardboard carton on which is written “to be filed”” or maybe “to do next”.

Clyde was 75% right in the poem. What he couldn’t have known is how to stand i circle of love that I stood in, the circle that softens the vagaries of the zoo. My leash is much longer, to use Andrea Dworkin’s metaphor, than he could see.

I can never read Clyde’s work without shifting the place that I'm standing on. This is also true of some pages he wrote that were mostly for his children, his detailed and methodical research into the lives of his parents, and his grandparents, and to those beyond that. I read the book as though it were mine, fascinated for on every page I could make a connection to those dear old souls.

I hadn't expected that to happen, since his genealogy is about the lives of another family not mine. Yes, when I turned the last page, I knew I felt differently about my own connections to my own past. I hoped that someday I would be able to write as clearly and honestly about my forebears as Clyde's did about his.

I was heartbroken when his first family dissolved for him. A dream lost. Clyde had told me that there wasn't a day when he wasn't aware Spring’s goodness, every meal she cooked, every beautiful thing she constructed created at the home, his lovely children, all rare treasures to him. I think this was especially true when he measured that idyllic life against the memory of his own childhood.

Mine is not to judge. Clyde wrote to me about his inner life, asking if I was wondering about his going to Russia, about him being beat up one night, by three other guys who left him for dead. He told me about Cholpon walking by. picking him up, taking care of him.

I'm so happy that she had 15 years with him, because she probably gave him a second of life. I wasn't very often involved in the fractious side of Clyde’s later life. He could take his pen and foment so much trouble. In similar circumstances, if it were me, I would have probably kept the cap on my pen. I didn't ever read his writing when I couldn’t hear Clyde asking why?

An accident happened to one of my sons. By phone call, I was told he was hurt very badly and on his way to the hospital in an ambulance. I went straight to denial. I could not even let the idea crossed my mind that Richard might die. He lived but when he was well enough, I made sure to tell him all the things I would have wanted to tell him when I thought he was dying.

I went around to all of my children and did the same thing. I didn't want any of them to die without me having made my peace with them and hopefully them with me. That might be what's stopping me from letting Clyde be at rest. I haven't made my peace with him yet. I'm actually afraid to ask him to come back for an exit interview. The reality of that would be too much for me. What would I want to say if I could just be sure that he would not respond?

I would want to tell him how much I loved his search for the truth, I would tell him I loved him for his power to inspire. I would thank him for all the many months he spent at our arborite table, generating ideas with my children and my husband.

I know he saw me doing the dishes on the side. The rest of the family were busy in academic study, exhilarating to some of them. I chose to keep the meals moving, managing the cleanup which barely got done before it is time for food preparation again. I do remember being alone at the kitchen sink, listening in while everyone was at the table. I was happy. Then I heard Clyde say, “Stop Arta. I can't stand it anymore. Please come, sit down. be with us.” I did for a while. But the person who lives in a zoo knows that setting and re-setting the stage is what is really important to her, and that kind of work was what I wanted to do.

I think that is all I would have to say to Clyde, except to let him know that it is easy to pick up his books and have a visit with him. 

For me, it is still well worth the time.

Arta