Mathias B. Freese

I came to the garage in order to live deliberately. I brought out two boxes that contained manila folders filled with the efforts of years of writing, teaching, being a parent and father, as well as a husband. Here were data and sheeted papers that recorded several decades — birthday cards from Rochelle, a letter to my deceased daughter, Caryn, which makes me cringe because of its immaturities, emotional trinkets and trivia. I threw out tax returns more than 5 or 6 years old, sometimes hesitating about that as I am conditioned by Big Brother, but I fought that off. Amazingly, what control is inserted into us like squirting jelly into donuts at a bakery. Appalling to contemplate. I came across rejection slips with an occasional note by an editor which was encouraging so I kept that morsel, needy as I was as a young writer — The Paris Review, The New Yorker, to wit. I shiver at the lack of skill I had at that time and yet the bigger the magazine the kinder they were. I did not toss the rejections. Folders were dated, often with the time I had completed a story or essay as if I was preparing years ahead for my sashay into the garage to look over the passing years. If I came across six copies of a published story or article, I threw away three overriding the younger feeling that I need keep at least six copies. “Simplify! Simplify! Thoreau argued.

When Rochelle died on 3 July 1999 I kept the gruesome autopsy records by the coroner. I recall reading it then and it was horrific but I felt, I needed, to read it. I recall the coroner’s description of Rochelle’s “pendulous breasts,” and I remembered them as well; his description of a minor bruise on her chin which I observed through the window of a viewing room when she was covered by a sheet except for her lovely face. I tore the document up. I had no longer a need for that. This coming July will make eleven years since she died at the wheel on a perfect July day. She had fallen asleep. I thought about 1940 and I thought of 1951, for in those eleven years I had grown as a child, conditioned by culture and ethnicity, “reared” with benign neglect, untouched physically by both parents, never read to!! and within that time all the tracks I would follow for the rest of my life were laid down. And now it is eleven years since Rochelle has died and I realize how many lifetimes are in eleven years: learning to ride a two-wheeler, hearing my parents have sex. And yet her memory flourishes — when I am very stressed, when a critical medical examination is about to happen, I pray to the only god I register — Rochelle. I need no Pope nor rabbi. The documents are thrown away now because the fear that lest I forget was a false fear, for I will never forget. Perhaps authentic resurrection is the one in which we “die” in this mortal life and yet resume our living.

Observations of me as a teacher by administrators were kept, although I threw one away by my Italian principal who thought he was Don Corleone, as if I must kiss his signet ring. You don’t ask this Jew to do that. Jews do not bow. I kept the others as a testament to how very good I was at a job that I detested, although teaching an idea was always comfortable for me. I kept a small notebook in which students from the alternative high school I ran gave me their parting comments about their experience with the school and with me. I find it hard now to connect their faces with their names, for that was 31 years ago. Many of them are now in their fifties. I read personal notes and letters to me. One stands out by a student who went on to Harvard and who I had upbraided because he was a pompous ass, just out of junior high school, basted by his “teachers” about his writing skills, overly-praised. He couldn’t write shit and I told him so, in finer words — “Unacceptable” I had slashed across the top of his paper. And when he pestered me about changing a grade on this essay which got my goat, I tore off a piece of paper and wrote the title, Think on These Things by Krishnamurti, telling him to read it and then come back to me. He never did. Well, he kept that slip of paper and he began to read this book and other works that were existential and so on. One day he sent me a copy of the letter he wrote to the Admissions office at  Harvard. It recalled his negative experience with me at first and then went on to say how I cut down his hubris and moved him to really learn. The last line was a corker — he still carried that note I gave him in his wallet.

Time has settled upon the rummaging so what moved me years ago does not move me so much, although I can see all of it, or most of it, with equanimty and sometimes with pleasure for what I had accomplished. I see decades before me which contained so much struggle, some of my essays reeking with personal neuroticisms and surface rage without the control of the writer in charge of his material. Writing from the very beginning was a major conduit for my despair and depression. There were years of rage and now my writing is more of indignation — I associate to Kazantzakis: “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” The exclamation point says it all. Running my mind through all this memorabilia like running my hand through my hair, is all in the passing gesture, now silken for me, for time has eased some of my concerns. I realize I was always the recorder in my family. I was always the memorizer. I was always the observer. And it took therapy and working on myself — alone, to reach the point in which I act upon this world, I trust my self, I dread the paranoia of groups and collective responses; I revel in my own personal ornariness; I leave books and writings for my family and for those others who may find me of interest, or note. I excel at doing for myself what no other human being can or ever will or ever can imagine to do so. I chisel out those lucky moments of awareness by myself, alone, for I need only myself to reveal myself.

I pose special questions to myself: what would give you pleasure or satisfaction? what would make your life so much more meaningful for you? What can you say about that? Can you address that critical issue? Rummaging has brought this to me. I believe that material things, although fun and pleasurable, could not give me anything for they are ephemera. All that is temporary fun. I feel that if I had a moment of real awareness, an epiphany of a kind, this would give me the greatest satisfaction of all. How to go about that is a philosopher’s intention. There is nothing on this planet, Cabo, The Louvre, Vegas, a Rolls, a great love affair, a great adventure, getting into a size 34 pants once again, a child’s marriage, being a grandparent, nothing of that can give me what I need, which is to enter into a moment — I am not greedy — in which I feel and experience congruity with myself. The world can go to hell. I am the world, I fully am aware of that. I am the unverse to every goddam cell and vein in my overly complex body. I will never see my liver, gratefully, and my liver will never bring me fruit and bounty in obeisance. I have come and I will go. I am at the point in which I wilt. The glory of each day is in its being and for that I am joyous. All this is in rummaging. I advocate you do that after 40 years. I will stop here, perhaps to continue with this later on.

I’ve read Wakefield’s book twice, for I “grew up” in the Fifties. I purposely did so to refresh my memory of the times. In 1950 I was 10 and by 1960 I was 20, when I first saw La Dolce Vita. I can go many different ways with this blog but I will simply immerse myself into my associations and remembrances. In 1957 I went with Stan Edelman, both of us about 17,  to Greenwich Village. I recall that I picked up Finnegan’s Wake in a book store and was put off by the gibberish, it seemed to me, that ran for pages — who knew I was interrupting a dream? We roamed the village and I especially recall going into an artist’s quarters who had posted a sign at the door that he was having a showing of his photographs. To go upstairs, to have cheese and a cracker, to browse, sublimely innocent and feeling sublimely safe, reflects upon a time in which riding the subway and being invited into  an artist’s home was not unnatural. It is a very pleasant memory of a different time and sensibility.

When I was in the village we caught a performance by an eccentric monologist called Brother Theodore; he was strange, bizarre and ranted and raved about Quadrupedism if I recall correctly — that man should go on all fours. Much later, very much later I learned he had been ransomed from Dachau for about one dollar for giving up the rights to the family fortune which was in the millions. Years later he got the public’s attention with visits to David Letterman — imagine Lenny Bruce doing standup in a death camp and you have Brother Theodore. At 17 I imagined he represented the offbeat and eccentric part of the village. In 1957 he was way out there. It was a good day to see him — just on a lark, my first adolescent outing to Greenwich Village.

I was too young, naive and immature to haunt the streets and crooked byways of the village at a time in which psychoanalyis was the predominant treatment for artists and painters, when jazz was laying down its New York roots, Mailer was writing about the “white negro” and Salinger’s stories were avidly looked forward to in the New Yorker. I missed Ginsberg and Kerouac, the Beats and Leroi Jones, later Imamu Biraku, writing his poetry and plays. I was in a dream state, emerging from but not engaging my world. It was the period of Eisenhower, panty raids, the 1955 Chevrolet Impala, the astounding Studebaker Golden Hawk — priceless styling to my eyes; it was a period in which there was silent passing in hallways in high school (!) and a white stripe down the corridors that you could not cross over. Air raid sirens warned us to crawl beneath our wooden desks and protestors were arrested in Times Square for not taking cover in assigned shelters. All this was around me but I was not a participant. It was a period in which people refused to sign petitions lest they be thought of as agitators or Commies — it was the McCarthy period.

Conditioning and conformity were all about and I was saturated in it.  The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  spoke to that period. It wasn’t until the rapturous Sixties that I roused myself from slumber. Each one of us must know what it is to be asleep in life and then what it is to become aware. We are amazed at how we slumbered while fully awake, whatever that is. I went to a highly stratified high school, Jamaica High School, in fact. You knew your place in that school; we had tracks such as academic, commercial and general and in subtle and overt ways were reminded of that. Grades above all. The gifted were fawned over and coddled, principal and teacher pets.You just knew you were less or lesser than. I only recently discovered that Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Savage (he had another name, then)  were there between 1955 to 1958.

For me it was the golden age of cars — the DeSoto, the heavy beetle-like Hudson, the Nash Rambler, the wraparound windshields and fins, the 1954 Pontiac Bonneville that I drooled over,  the sleek and futuristic Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy; the Chrysler Imperial and the early Ford Thunderbird; the movies of the Fifties had the latent undercurrent of doom — “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Them!” — ants changed into monsters by A-bomb blasts, “The Forbidden Planet,” “Ivanhoe,” “Demetrius and the Gladiator,” “East of Eden,” “Giant,” “The Ten Commandments,” “It Came from Outer Space,” “The Searchers,” “The Unforgiven,” and so on. In movie houses at the time Duncan yo-yo contests were held;  maestros performed amazing feats with this ancient toy. Duncan was the best yo yo, Cheerio came in a close second. Jeans were called dungarees and crew cuts were in. If you saw a rare instance of a black man and a white woman on the street one gawked. Mother-of-pearl cufflinks were fashionable as well as charcoal gray suits ( the Windsor knot  was for ties)  and one always wore leather shoes — Regal or Florsheim, to wit – London Character if you had the bucks. I recall leather shoes for $18 in a shoe store window and I couldn’t afford them. We wore “sneakers,” then, either Converse or Keds. One resoled shoes and did not throw them out.Taps on the heels and tips prevented wear and made a melodious sound on pavement. Choices were limited, which as I look back, was a good thing: in reasonable doses, abstinence creates character.

As I recall, I sensed a kind of ennui, a kind of boring stasis was in the air. That is why Kennedy was met with such pleasure for he was one of the first “pop” presidents, although very much of the Fifties himself. The story goes that Mr. Clean was modeled after Eisenhower — I found him terminally dull. Sputnik in 1957 announced a new age and I recall seeing it in the afternoon skies after school with my friends.   At 4 p.m. I’d go into the house and see Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and envied the young people of my age who were not shy enough to have girlfriends and knew how to dance. On Saturdays I stayed in bed watching cowboy flics from the thirties — Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Ken and Kermit Maynard filled airspace on TV; The Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials held me enraptured — the Clay People, Emperor Ming, the Merciless. Films saturated my frontal lobes — forever.  Amid the constancy, conformity, regularity of that world the seeds of the Sixties were being sown. Ferment was in the Village, that was for sure; psychoanalysis was on its wane, giving way to the Primal Screams of the Sixties.

Wakefield was in his mid-twenties, living and working in the Village while I was emerging — he had 10 years on me. I awoke in the Sixties and acted out as well. So I was a transitional young man who could not or who was not aware enough to see the world about me; it takes a long time to grow up and we often end our years still immature, still yearning, still wishing, wanting and often still unaware of ourselves first, and of course, by definition, unaware of those close to us. No man goes to his grave fully aware. We couldn’t handle that. It is not valued. Not in this culture in any case.

Here in Las Vegas a secondary school teacher told her class that claims about the Holocaust were not so, the usual mouthings of someone out of control on primary levels of who she is. The whole discussion about deniers involves many layers of disquisition and analysis. In any case her inflammatory comments did not belong in the classroom. Word spread and the event hit the papers, here in Las Vegas, really a pretentious boonie town. I associate to Miss Kitty’s bar in “Gunsmoke,” all kinds of riff raff. When you read the local papers you get a stringent conservatism that is not quaint, but primal. Glen Beck is their man.

One thing led to another and the ADL and the school district got together to give a presentation to the students and staff. (Hey, how about reworking the curricula or courses for the staff? — not on your casino chip.) Needless to say, some students sided with the teacher who was transferred out of the school; her fate to be determined at a later date. They invited Stephen Nasser, a Holocaust survivor, who published his own book on his travails. I have met Mr.Nasser and I have read his book which was ghost-written. Mr.Nasser and I exchanged books; he never contacted me which I sense is because my book, in his eyes, is aberrant. In any case he gave me his business card which stated he was a Holocaust survivor and that phrase itself riled me. I had the sense that he was merchandising his book, himself and his memory; no doubt he means well and believes he is doing good deeds. Perhaps. He is a witness. For me he had turned it all into Shoah business.

I was unnerved and within a few weeks had written a short story for my book dealing with his approach and new venture in life. I truly believe he has no idea of what he is doing. I put the story away as it was heated, but fair, and I may go back to it again, given recent events. I came across a blurb which gave a website for the Las Vegas Review Journal’s video of Nasser’s school presentation. It did not give it all but enough for me to know exactly how he presented himself. A clue to all this is that upon our initial meeting months ago he gave me the exact number of lectures he had given on his life — perhaps a thousand or so; in that is all you need to know to extract a truth about him. He is not a teacher, he does not know, I believe, how to deal with young students.

Below is my letter to the editor of the newspaper about his talk:  see the video at: http://www.lvrj.com/holocaust

Recently, I viewed on your web site Stephen Nasser’s talk to students at the Northwest Technical Academy in response to Lori Sublette’s remarkable dense statements about the Holocaust. I have read Mr. Nasser’s book and I have met him in person, in fact, we exchanged books — I read his. At that time I was considerably put off by his “business card.” It read, in part, Holocaust Survivor. I could not find that title in the Directory of Occupational Titles. Unfortunately, Shoah business continues.

I have written intensely about survivors in my fiction and I have worked with a few survivors in my psychotherapy practice. Unwittingly the traumatizing experiences Mr. Nasser has endured have led him astray. What I found remarkably obtuse was that he asked students at the close of his remarks to say after him, “Never Again.” Does it all come down to this clumsy use of a trite and hackneyed phrase?

Indeed, my talk on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2007 at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona before survivors and their families as well as servicemen took a completely different tack [See "On the Holocaust," under pages]. Examining the Holocaust mandates more than showing slides of victims in boxcars; it is man’s nature that is on trial here. Apparently it is the species that creates willing executioners. Mr. Nasser had a chance to assist his audience in comprehending their own deficits, to look inwardly. Shoah business merchandises platitudes, capitalizing on the inherent horrors of the Holocaust. In the words of Holocaust scholar Robert Langer, we “sweeten” it. Quite unsettling to observe staff, speaker and opportunity squandered on sanitizing it. Nothing has changed. Curricula merrily goes on bereft of insight.

Holocaust denial has to be dealt with on a more profound level than evinced by this school district. (Indeed, a different kind of denial is in place.) The audience heard another talk on the Holocaust, a survivor came in to assuage their consciences, and everybody collectively colluded in making nice.

–As of this date, it has not been published, but you get a look at it.

Back Story: The particulars — Jane is studying to become a librarian, all of it done through distance learning, library-speak. She comes to this with degrees in liberal arts and teaching, a children’s author as well as a former journalist. Having grown up in a Mormon family she is what is now known as a “Jack Mormon,” divesting herself of what was a deleterious conditioning by this cult founded by a charlatan from upstate New York.  In my interactions with her now and then I see,  detect and sense, the inhibitions and self-imposed restrictions which are the traces of her “religious” upbringing. A reader of Darwin and a reveler in evolutionary biology, our morning conversations are often intense as we explore each other’s ethnic and religious background. This blog is a reponse to this morning’s “chat.”

As conditioned as she is with my own brand of secular — atheistic –Judaism, for I am immersed In Jewish gravy, ethnicisms, enjoying the cultural values, lore and wit of the Jewish mind. I share with her that as a student teacher many decades ago a group of us visited an elementary class in a Catholic parochial school as well as a class in a Hebrew school. What stood out to me was that in the Catholic school students were in a receiving mode, well-mannered, taking in; in the Hebrew school, which a few of my college students found “disorderly” the children were raising their hands, making sounds as they struggled to get the teacher’sattention. Their eyes had betrayed them.  I had experienced that same environment in Hebrew school — in short, I have no fear if I ask you a question, indeed, it is expected of me, although I could never bring it into awareness at the time, being shtooped with the latency period. The contrast to this one Catholic school was, to my mind now, the conformed acceptance of that which was conditioned and foretold, that to question was not as critical as to receive and take in.

Jane heard this and quoted a verse from John in which he says, to wit, go ahead and seek the truth and do not be afraid. What Jane liked about this was the air of freedom which said question — however, in her religious upbringing it was expected that you do not question. Imagine, Jane says, if Joseph Smith went to all the different religions and asked a pastor or priest if their religion is true – that the minister would shoot that down by saying, of course, it’s the truth; however, living with me, Jane went on to say that if she went to a rabbi and asked the same question about the validity and truth of Judaism, there would a variety of responses: 1) do you need an answer? 2) or, why are you asking? and the question itself would be accepted as appropriate as the rabbi might be vexed if an answer was given, for answers are doorstoppers of the mind.

Jane and I explored this further, my suggesting that it is highly unlikely if there have been many articles on librarianship that take on an analytical point of view. I suggested for her to take a mental ride with me: Imagine a documentary in which the camera establishes the opening shot of a library; that a close-up is made of the plaque that usually contains who the architect, construction company and citizens were that made it all happen for the communty. Finally the camera pans up to an inscription above the arched doorway. It reads: “Knowledge is death.”

I further queried Jane if that would keep people away; would some people feel annoyed by that? would librarians rush to get through the entrance or would some hold back? I suggested that we seek to become aware, but that most of us do not want that; we want to have our senses and pleasure principles sated — and why not? However, I imagined that upon entering this “strange” library, there were five books under glass, their pages opened to specific pages of note, and one had to pause here before going any further. I asked Jane what the five books might be: I offered a few titles — The Interpretation of Dreams, Origin of the Species, the Bible was definiely excluded — I might suggest the greatest play ever written — Oedipus Rex, and then I stopped. Jane was asked — you are asked — to supply the other two, the condition being that this work had to make you thoroughly aware, decondition your mind-set, shake you to your foundational roots. After this first challenge, I suggested to Jane that these brave new librarians might go ahead to one other glass case and here would rest the greatest of all works on awareness — I weakly suggested, The Flight of the Eagle,” Krishnamurti, but I was not sure. Only after this challenge is met would the librarian receive his degree.

Jane had opened our conversation with her observation that she noticed that people tend not to ask questions of the librarians as much but now went directly to the web for answers. She felt there was something similar to her own feelings as a child when she had the distinct feeling that to ask a question was to be shot down, or to vex the adult or annoy the authority figure at the time. Although she fully realizes that the librarian with the “answers” has no idea of what is being projected upon her or him, nevertheless, human beings live in, live out, in these projections. We are made up of projections — just try transference with your therapist. The point is that we place our hand above our eyes, for we dread the light more than we dread the dark, a good definition of humanity. I remember well as a kid walking into a movie theater on a very bright July day and having been blinded until my eyes adjusted to the interior darkness; I also recall the adverse effects of coming out of the darkness into the light of the summer day after the movie. I feel the dark into light is harsher. Perhaps the entrances to libraries should be enshrouded in black drapes and the inviting, more motherly, inscription might read: “Ignorance is bliss.”

Grossly speaking, generalizing, why does one become a librarian on more than superficial levels — job, salary, percs, order and regularity, constancy, job security? Is one participating in a greater good, that is, amassing knowledge, dispensing it, sharing insights, impacting on others — that is, is the librarian entering the occupation to condition or not to condition, to enslave with knowledge or to emancipate? For example, the library system that censors a book is revealing a reaction-formation, denying to others that which one finds of prurient interest. Recently, a library system in Virginia took The Diary of Ann Frank off the shelves because the newest and unexpurgated edition had Anne Frank speak of her vagina. Of course, the good libarians do not have this organ. And the old argument that they are protecting very young minds from “awareness” goes back to totems and taboos (See Freud).

The radical librarian does not salt and pepper his treasure trove. He neither conditions nor deconditions; this is not neutrality but the highest advocacy one can offer as a free human being. The radical librarian dwells in the soft light, fig-laden palm trees of the Question. Answers are anathema if doctrine and dogma, dicta. The free librarian is the caterer of a huge buffet. Isms are never served, religions kept off the tables. In that scary, sometimes shaky feeling we have when we enter, for rare moments our lives, the sacred arena of not knowing but willing to know, in Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country,” the librarian’s duty is just to simply pull the drapes aside.

I’ve put Freud away for a while — Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism , his trilogy swan song at the end of his life, but not for too long. In their place I am rounding up the cattle in my new work, trying to incorporate major changes, which are always difficult, you know, spreading the width between paragraphs to inset new revisions as if a dentist asking to say open wide; it is my recalcitrance to revise with new material or better material, when I feel it is all over with. I may have about 20 or more stories, all new, all untried; however,”Archipelago,” was reviewed by David Herrle, editor of Subtle Tea, to his pleasure, so I feel I still have the chops. Probably by mid March I will hustle up the dough to send it out for publication by Wheatmark, my self-publisher. Jordan will do the cover and I will have completed my  third book in five years; after that, I haven’t the slightest notion of what I will write, not even glimmers on the horizon. I have a plethora of short essays that are very good but who reads books of essays any longer; for me to publish such a collection would truly be vanity publishing. I may go back to science fiction fantasy, or I may try my hand on a kind of Siddharha variation in which I spew “wisdom.” I may buddha myself.

The i Tetralogy is now in my hands with its spanking new white cover with a profile of a German officer on it which my son designed to the pleasure of the publisher editorial staff and to father freese. It is terrific. All white and sparkling severe. Jane and I have worked on the publicity release for the book which has been edited again, a preface deleted and endorsements now included. Working over several months I have come up with my own database which is over 4,000 e-mail addresses here in the the U.S. and overseas. I expect about 1,000 to kickback dead and perhaps maybe 20-30 possible purchases to be made. I am resigned to the book’s fate; I am pleased that it is my own statement of indignation about the Holocaust. I live not for posterity; I live for now and for what pleasures I rake in from what creativity I can muster for kith and kin. The second book, “Working Through the Holocaust,” will build on the same database, I hope. The ironic fact, but not dispiriting to me, is that I cannot give the book away, although I and others consider it a powerful novel. In a very grandiose way I’m in the company of Whitman, Thoreau and a host of others who had to invest in themselves for publication and who sold few copies;  Freud only sold 300 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
 What is criticial for me, what is dead on crucial, is that I write as best as I can and to remove myself from the fray. In fact, the fray doesn’t know me, nor does it need me. In this remarkably decadent culture in which lines wait in the rain for the ghost-written effort of Sarah Palin, in which fewer than 10 people were at the tacky funeral of Orson Welles, the writer-artist must be more than brave — he should revel in that he is not corrupted. Sam Goldwyn once offered Freud a sum for a script to be made in Hollywood; Freud’s answer was brief and direct — a stoic’s response. No, I won’t share what he said. After all, why buy into publishing for the all, the rest, for them, as opposed for writing for oneself in an attempt, admittedly useless, to adumbrate the major themes of one’s life, to lay bare the skeletal anatomy of one’s experience on this species-sad planet. Recent visits to my doctor have made clear that incipient threats to my well-being are active and waiting and my rush to dissect who I am is my defense against the dimming of the light. I write not an awful lot, but what I do I write with the feverish attempt to do as much as I can, mortal soul that I am, before the scythe cuts through my navel.

As I struggle within this mortal coil, beset with new health concerns, anxieties, fears, much the same, worries, I persevere, for I only feel alive when I write and when I make love, both libidinous intensities which are up there with wonderful vistas, perfumes, breezes off the sea and pleasures of being a father. I doubt I will have grandchildren which has never been a concern; I have a son and a daughter and that is all that matters, having lost one daughter, Caryn, at 34, by her own hand. I grab for the testicles of living, I squeeze the orange until the pips squeak. I struggle with age-old neuroses which are the shadows of one’s self, and hopefully dwarfed in later years by my shrinking size. Serenity is not in my future; who wants serenity? I don’t. I like pauses. Stays at oases. Give me existential acts — life spurts, life spasms in which I define myself rather than mystical curlicues wafting up my ass. I am always better in mind than I am in fact. And that is why I write, I think: To excel in my own living, to record the experiences and then to be done with them.

From a literary friend and editor of an online mag a response to “Archipelago,” one of the stories I am working on now for my next book. Beyond the pale, beyond good or bad taste, it just exists, a written splat thrown up into the sky, hanging there insolently. As I try to hit the literary nail dead on in these stories I know I am not hitting them right on, for all is oblique and indirection. I am “field testing” some of them by submitting to journals online and off. The best time is at this moment as I seize the day in revision. No one story in this impending collection has shouted success; I feel as if I am missng something and perhaps I am. I go ahead in any case, what else is there to do if the subject matter is the Holocaust. The editor friend is not indifferent to the subject nor to my story and for that I am grateful. Otherwise I will face indiference which is the rancid secretion of the species at large. I am not complaining, just offering an observation. When I see blubbery and blustery Beck and vacuous Palin, she who wed the living harpoon, I am only convinced of the tragic experiment which is Homo sapiens. Reading Freud of late has only reaffirmed my take on mankind. Watching Haiti on the tube in the grip of anomie, fecklessness is rampant in our technological response — logistics, etc and  bereft of proper priorities. All this catches my eye. Does anyone see the grotesqueness of George Bush (”You’re doing a great job, Brownie) as a participant in assisting Haiti?

Rummaging through my mind is anxiety about my doctor’s appointment after a blood glucose test I had last week. Nevada is in a sorry state with its medical doctors, almost third world in attitude and skills. Often I feel I am in some Roman century while the empire gradually corrodes, deteriorates and mewls. When the Republican party does not lend a hand for the larger goals of a health plan for a nation at this time in history, you can taste the bullshit of conquistadors, rugged indivdualism, Hoover, pre-Roosevelt years and the flinty hardness of the Republican mind which is saturated in the capitalist way of life. We are an inordinately hard and stubborn people who wrap ourselves in the flag, preach the American way and are as intransigent as Southern plantations owners of the pre-bellum South. One election in Massachusetts could upturn the health plan now in congress; it is a slow-winding disaster and I for one can identify with Haitians, for there is no one truly governing. What do you tell the young? I, for one, would share that all societies are essentially corrupt and leave open to them what course one chooses if this is a fact –which it is.

When I examine and explore the Holocaust as I feel and sense it, at times I barely get a glimpse of the complete anomie that it involved. I will try to share this feeling I have knowing beforehand it will be a lame effort. There are strong elements of this now going on in Haiti, a demoralized people with a demoralizing event on their backs, bereft of leadership, making do each day, corrupted and corruptible, with a bleak history to its past. As I slither into the awarness of what it was to have no one come to rescue you, to save  you, to give you food and water, to be herded together and shipped like cargo to unknown destinations, to be despised, hated, decimated with ovens and shooting parties by paramilitary forces, to be asked to wear badges, to realize that the world is indifferent to your plight, that the world does not care, that the world is a hapless mess too busy taking care of its own and that all this horror — and terror, is the by-product of conditioned minds and psychotic national states which only serves to bring home that the species is remarkably wretched, haggard in attitude and quite abusive and vicious in nature. When this feeling coalesces, when this feeling can be realized in some kind of individual awareness, the true existential moment is upon him or her.The sad thing about “humanity” is that we can’t quit — who gets your resignation? And so what is one to do in such desperate mental and psychological straits?

I occasionally wonder about how all our ambitious efforts to acquire wealth, to make a buck, to wage war, to accumulate, to hoard is not some collective monumental displacement of the pre-conscious knowledge that we are a defective species. So that if we shift the burden from awareness of our pock-marked faults we can invest in exterior doings, as if if to reduce the slime we really experience about our existence. I avidly believe that we are working in a collective darkness, if not psychoses, as we muddle and pollute, waste time and effort on a world of externals. I imagine that the Holocaust was a time in which every human characteristic was tested and strained, collapsing morally, ethically and in every which way we call human; that words and teachings and religions proved worthless if not useless; that venality ruled; that brutal behavior became king because it afforded power which is really what this species is about — national, psychological, religious, personal and individual. For me the Holocaust represents not only  the lowest level at which humanity could sink, but reflected what we truly are, given that conditions present themselves to allow the actor to remove his mask. I will not be fooled by the Sistine Chaperl, by the Mona Lisa, by the Bible, by great architecture and great songs and magnificent prose; beneath it all is the pallor of a death-giving species. And in the Holcoaust all this came to the fore, that is why we cannot — thank god– wrestle it to the ground, make it digestible, “sweeten” it. And that is why weaker minds must deny it! The revelation is apocalyptic.

As I have said in the blog about Freud’s pessimism, one cannot walk around with that without drawing sustenance from other sources –family, work and love, is a nice triad to become invested in. With writing I define myself but no one definition can hold any one of us within its parameters. It is re-defining that helps me, at least, to keep steady –” Damn the torpedos, Gridley, full speed ahead!” And there is paradise in the drinking of a good and cold chocolate malted served in a metal server across a marbled counter in a candy store, circa 1948. In the pleasures of life — food, sex, travel, a luxuriant bath we can attain some grip on ourselves, for there is much to despair about. As I learned in my training with clients, try to support the ego if you can. For mental disease is as horrific as a personal holocaust, an internalized self-destructive and abusive horror show — cruelly relentless as a migraine, a protracted neuralgia of the spirit, constricting hope, devastating purpose, crushing intention and devouring self.

I believe that on some levels my writing about the Holcoaust is a sublimated way of writing about the despair I feel as an existent.

Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (Freud  A Life for Our Time) has provided me with the sweeping arc of the man’s life and especially articulated his often abstract if not abstruse theories in lucid prose. I was a mere lad in my twenties when I picked up Beyond the Pleasure Principle; I don’t recall much of anything about the book except that it did excite my intellectual interest, that life is an elliptical journey back to the womb, that the organic returns to the inorganic, the death wish, etc (leave it to me to pick one of his most dense works). Over the years I went on to read Moses and Monotheism, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Leonard da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. In any case I nibbled at Freud  by reading his most accessible books first, although the pleasure principle was like chewing through teflon. On some level I was hooked. Years later I went on to become a therapist. Perhaps serendipity is a kind of repetition compulsion (huh?).

I entered a psychoanalytic institute  in my 40s. I recall a young woman student having a conniption about Freud — mind you, this was a course and school that focused on psychoanlytic psychotherapy — going after his attitudes on woman. What was interesting to observe was the dismissal of what he had written as if his sole life was dedicated to writing about women. The telling thing to mention here was when the instructor asked her if she could share with the class what books she had read that provided this information, she was stopped dead in her tracks. (She never read Freud!) She was sharing partial truths, and “truth”s about Freud without really having read what he did say. The instructor was also bemused by the fact she entered a school that had to focus on Freud to accomplish its end. The point here is that we often share our ignorances about Freud without having read him (think Sarah Palin).

One can dismiss Freud, and one can accurately portray his Victorian and bourgeois attitudes but like Darwin he will not go away. I tend to favor the old man. What I find, rather what I identify with, is his take on people in general, his atheistic approach to Christianity and Judaism, his stoicism — 15 years of cancer in his mouth and the use of an often ill-fitting prosthesis to keep his jaw in place, his relentless pursuit of the truth no matter how it might hurt or repel, his cheerful pessimism on life which is dead on and his scholarship. His knowing and being a Jew in  anti-semitic Vienna yet celebrating Easter and Christmas in secular fashion in his household; however, mind you, he didn’t go and get himself baptized so that he could make his way in the world. (And what can you say about a man who mastered 7 languages by the age of 17.)

As a student I found his theoretical works difficult to absorb; he constantly, I recall, had to be reread; his prose is a series of tied together firecrackers and his writing clear but in some fashion so knotty and intense with such far-seeing complications that I had to work on not being frustrated. His works on theory and technique fit  into a small paperback yet they have to be studied more than read for their implications. And yet he can write terrific prose. He is the first one to use psychoanalytic techniques in assessing art. His take on Michelangelo’s Moses is fascinating and riveting yet accomplished in a short essay. Sir Kenneth Clark shared Freud’s insights about the idealzed women in Leonardo’s paintings. I just had a wild association to Pollack’s painting style as he shits all over the canvas. I am not being reductive here, but it is a kind of intellectual delight, a madeleine, if you will, to apply Freud’s precepts to the world at large and especially to the human race. It is a worldview (Weltanschauung) and one needn’t be rigid about it. It is a context from which to see, such as one’s ethnicity or nation. It is a kind of truth, a kind of seeing, if one keeps one’s eye on not being conditioned. We live in an age and time, Auden called,  ”a climate of opinion” which is esssentially Freud-driven and we take his early truths for granted and oedipally attack big daddy when we can. But he will not go away.

Enthused by Gay’s biography which I highly recommend, I went to EBay and scouted for hardback editions of particular works. I no longer can abide paperback print especially when you are reading Freud. Since I was in therapy between 1968 to 1972 I recall the complete standard edition of Freud’s works in my shrink’s office. At that time all 25 volumes cost about $500. On EBay used and beaten versions can be as high as $1700. There are some individuals no doubt who have read the edition more than once, bless their souls. I decided to select hardback versions put out by decent presses, what else do I have to do as I age into molecular dust. I bought Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo, books that would stoke the bonfires of the Nazis. (The Future of an Illusion  and The Interpretation of Dreams are next. )Two of these I have read, two I look forward to. The books he wrote in his last ten years are a summing up, applying the tenets of psychoanalytic thought to group behavior, mass psychology, religion (a favorite of his) — his Moses book which posits that he was an Egyptian, that there were two Moses, one murdered by the tribes of Israel (are you hooked?) and gives a superior spanking to Christianity on levels it does not want to examine — the Oedipal struggle between the father religion (Judaism) and the son religion (guess who) and what the son needs to do unconsciously. Does anti-Semitism stem from all this?You betcha.

Since the state of Nevada will not allow me to practice my craft without taking state tests and being supervised by those with fewer years of experience than myself, I decided to take a nap and just let it pass me by; America, I love thee. How many times do you have to prove you’re not a virgin? So I will revisit the realms of the master and have masturbatory fantasies. While on the subject if you want a tiny sip of the analytic approach (couch free) I will share an anecdote from my training. An experienced therapist juiced in Freud encounters a young male adult who proceeds to remove his penis from his fly and begins to masturbate; the therapist is a woman if that makes any difference. I heard the tale from her. In any case as he works himself up, she says to him: “Can you try to put that into words?” Words! Yes and yes and yes again. One more anecdote to die for: In a kind of halfway house for “wayward” youth as the old term states it, one of the young teenagers decided to visit the school therapist at her campus home. He knocks on the door and he is invited in; he is asked if he would care for some tea and cookies. He is invited to sit down and talk. All the while he is agitated and unnerved, for it is a response he is totally unprepared for. For, you see, he is as naked as a jay bird. He makes his excuses and leaves. Like Adam with hand over crotch, he exits Eden. Agreed, of course, not all shrinks would handle things this way — nor I. However, there is much to be said for the analytic approach. All of life is an expression, our expression, to put things into words or to act upon the world. Choose your flavor; I became a writer, others harpoon whales. We all need to make the unconscious conscious, a working definition of psychotherapy that has Freudian salt in it, like a good lox.

Since I am beginning to have medical issues, I am working on my fears, my anxieties. Freud provides me with some courage and substance. He had a dark view of humanity, yet he enjoyed life; he did say once that life is essentially two themes — work and love: not a bad assessment.  In fantasy I can only imagine what telling, riveting and perspicacious essays he would have written about the Holocaust — he lost several sisters in the concentration camps. He was not jaded about men and women, nor did violence in the Great War take him back; nor did the Nazis surprise him with their barbaric viciousness. He had learned all he needed about humanity with an analysand and a couch, quite remarkable.You can make the case that his pessimism was a defense, if you choose to; be reductive if you wish. I believe he was, like Darwin, a great observer and humanity reveals itself very well if you are silent and look as if for the first time. After all, as he states in his autobiographical study  childhood sexuality has been around since Cro-Magnon but no one took a real look ( except, as he would grant, the exceptional artists)– human beings do not want to know! Given what he has taught, our inhibitions may very well fray and there goes the planet. I remember a cartoon that has stayed with me for decades. An infant is in a crib with a mobile hanging over his mattress, and In his chubby little hand he has nuclear missiles and he is waving them to and fro. The species is in arrested childhood. Good luck!

His pessimism took no prisoners, no expectations were made and especially no judgments on behavior were given — his theories were not religions. I like his pessimism  because it makes me aware as Freud rubs my eyeballs with sandpaper. I’d rather be shaken into awareness.

It is 8:15 or so, Nevada time (Tuesday). I’m dressed, and Jane is “getting ready.” Cameras are at hand, papers for signing at the chapel are about. We need to pick up her corsage at the florist before we head out to the Chapel on the Corner, a nondescript little hut on a nondescript Nevada street near a courthouse. What can you say about the street’s name, “Basic”? (How did I ever end up in Nevada?) Jane, as always, is in good spirits for she is a very optimistic person and given her neanderthalish family it is always remarkable how individuals manage to surmount their adversities without even being aware of the malignancies. Who of us ever realizes the real context of our early lives or our present living? An imaginative old age seens to be an answer in which one reflects back. This morning I am thinking about my 69 years and the circumstances that have made me. No methodology and no analysis can do it justice. I am not bewildered by my life but I am not a little astonished at what I have and what I have not made of it. As I wrote to my son, Jordan, last night, who is about to quit his job and enter a risky journey to reclaim his young life and to precipitate a personal adventure, for he is fed up with the grind and how this culture, any culture, drives you mad, he is entering “the unexplored country” (Hamlet).

It is Wednesday. The marriage went off without a hitch, although jerk forgot to put film in his retro camera (just love that old man anxiety); however, enough shots were taken with Jane’s digital and we videotaped ourselves at the chapel as well as interviewed one another when we got home which is hilarious to watch. It has been a kind of tradition since we toured Spain and Portugal in 2007 to end our day with a mutual interview about the day’s events. It reminds me now since I’m up to my throat in reading Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (really good, masterly, and very lucidly presented) of the “day’s residues” which serve to make up the manifest aspect of dreams. In any case a few comments about the minister and ceremony.

Kathy, the woman minister, made a simple non-denominational service free of most cant and religiosity which is what we asked her to do. Bright, intelligent, a Southern woman, she was going to helicopter to the Grand Canyon after our ceremony. A 45 minute trip, eight hours round trip by car, she has been performing marriages there for several years. We paid for a witness who was from the East coast and so I spoke East coast to him and we got along. We both miss pastrami sandwiches. It was a light hearted ceremony, brief, short, friendly with good cheer among us all. As is my way, I kibitzed with Kathy which is my way of bringing people into my circle so that we interact in a more friendly way and it worked. Kathy who performed the service and Sheila the florist who made Jane’s delightful corsage made the day smoothly flow by like a meandering, lazy and bucolic river.

We spent the late morning at a local casino losing money, my most recent vice, and having dinner out at a local eatery which we favor. We will honeymoon at the new CityCenter on the strip which is a light year away from the other theme-based hotel/casinos — New York, New York, Excalibur and the like. We will be staying at the Aria for a few days, relishing the magnificent shopping and the resplendent art work interlaced throughout this hotel and the entire complex — Henry Moore, Maya Lin, et al. Imagine Fifth Avenue shopping and the Plaza and you have a taste of it all, 8.5. billion worth. Jane and I spend our days writing, computing, her preparing for the next semester and my rewriting  a book of short stories to be published this spring. I married a very special woman who has the graceful elan vital of a gazelle and she has married a grumpy, ornery but not a mean-hearted bull elephant. And they lived happily ever after — Jane has mentioned to me that in fairy tales we never have a look in or at or an eyeful or earful of what those days between the prince and princess are like after they wed.

I’ll keep you posted.

I think I know, rather, I believe, how my writing mind works, which really means I know shit about it. In any case it goes like this: sink into books about the Holocaust or just this one and let it all percolate and seep through my unconscious filters until it fills up the acquifer. I had read Clendinnen’s book several years back and included a few terms into The i Tetralogy and returned to it for a second read. An Australian historian whose books mostly deal with the Aztec experience in the Americas, for her own reasons she began to study the Holocaust and in so doing brought an “outsider’s” (her own words) take to the leviathan which is Shoah. She is rigorous when she examines ideas, like a garlic press getting at the clove. And does not humor fools, calling Bruno Bettelheim “fatuous” in one instance, which he was. She honors Gitta Sereny who did remarkable interviews with Albert Speer and SS Unterscharfuhrer Franz Suchomel. Her bibliography is expansive, acute and recommendations for further reading very apt.

Presently I am sweating out the final selection of short stories for my new book on the Holocaust, “Working Through the Holocaust,” with its analytic allusion to the therapeutic process. Again I am wrestling with issues, trying like a fool to get at the “why.” A telling comment about that is in the off-hand comment by an Auschwitz guard to a prisoner when asked about an ugly incident in the camp: “Here there is no why.” I accept that, but I plow ahead trying to get at the victim’s mind-set, although I have had the experience of imagining seeing things through the eyes of the killers. Clendinnen argues well that we need to understand both. At length she writes of Primo Levi and others who have explored profoundly the victim’s experience, very well indeed; what has nourished and nurtured me while my book exists in the deserts of mind and matter, an isolate stuck on a stylite, is that on unconscious levels I was emboldened to work through the eyes of the murderer. (Goddam it! my fellow writers, trust your gut.) And Clendinnen makes her case that Nazis were not aliens, but variants of each of us. Again it is rewarding, alone with my own book, on my mental lap, in my own time, that I have struggled with this. And so in my new stories I try to see it both ways, the victim, and the victimizer. I seek no why. When I was a history major I enjoyed and relished reading the bibliographical essays of major historians who gave us the sources of their themes or motifs and generously commented on the idiosyncracies of their fellow colleagues; often the essay at the back was better than the book itself. I mention this because it is my belief it is in the accrual of detail, in the miniscule accretion of detail that we come upon insight and substance. Clendinnen’s book is such an example.

And so for a book I hope to have out in late spring, I am assiduously going line after line, tightening up sentences, providing intricate detail, using my own garlic press to get the most out of the fewest words possible, for as I hone my stories like a razor on a strop, I become clearer about what it is I need to attain or  say. Style is me, who I am, so I just go about my business in sentence-making, using images, which I tend to favor very much, to make my prosecutor’s case. I must share with you the joy or personal pleasure to have one’s own manuscript before one’s eyes — the collection of detail, thought and image. And my task is to “simply” order the stories so that the reader is taken in, massaged and then amazed or struck dumb by my intellectual tinker toys, my orientation and prejudices. I sit before the manuscript and revise and revise and revise and then will all this to stop. I give it to Jane who hopefully I will marry this weekend and she uses her acute eye to excise my often tendency to reiterate, to perseverate all in a sentence. I think my need to say things three different ways is probably my own arrogance that the reader will not get it unless I write it three different ways or it is my own sense of not being heard or being underestimated. In any case she takes the lawn mower to it and my vanity about words has relatively eased so I can take it. Wasn’t it the editor, I forgot his name (Gordon Lish?), who made James Carver the writer he is; he pruned the hell out of his works and now his heirs are barking unfair. Perplexing, is it not? However, don’t each of us need an editor for our own living, other than death who is the grim and final reaper?

Perhaps we should consider perennially revising our existence, less is more, says the cliche; but I favor that common scold, Thoreau: “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!” I sit with a text of stories trying to imagine what it is to be the victim and several stories of what it is to be the victimizer. At times I go into surreal fantasies as my attempt to say indirectly but very concretely the unheard scream I feel. In my legerdemain I write of golems, a retarded child destined to be gassed, a doomed cantor in love, survivors, Holocaust deniers, lovers of quirky Nazi memorabilia, cannibalism, an interview with a camp “doctor,” and Jane’s personal delight, an interview with the nondescript Eva Braun who revels in Hitler’s defecating on her firm abs. I take risks. Whenever I take a risk, I give up that internal censor that mottles amd brutalizes our very safe and corseted lives.

At this juncture let me say that a new version of The i Tetralogy is at the printer. New cover, the first few pages with commentary about the book by bloggers, reviewers and the like and internal tweaking here and there. The book stands as it is. If you want a free book for teaching purposes or the Holocaust is of significance to you, you can reach at ifreese@hotmail.com. And since I will be e-mailing hundreds informing them of the book’s availability, if you have a suggestion and e-mail address of a librarian, scholar, college instructor, or rabbi, let me know — that would be a kindness.

I will be spending our honeymoon at CityCenter in Vegas — the Aria: New York in the desert.

Anything about Welles I am attracted to, perversely so. His treatment at the clammy hands of the boors and philistines of his time continues to this day. The twin morons of his time, Hedda Hopper and especially Louella Parsons, gossip columnists, went after him —often at the behest of Hearst and his caged canary, Marion Davies –and savaged Welles. Their malign influence went on for decades. What I find perverse in me is the satisfaction knowing full well how this culture goes after its artists, how we always fear and dread intelligence of a high order. It has been so for centuries; it is in the fabric of Homo sapiens. Watching “Me and Orson” brought back all the movie trivia and mental memorabilia I have about Welles. Interestingly, the movie is based on a fiction by a New Jersey English teacher, “Me and Orson.” I imagine it to be a delightful conceit.

One scene that touched me was Welles reading Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” while riding in a New York cab. Reading passages that touched him, for Welles lost both his father and mother before he was sixteen, foreshadowed the movie that was to be made. What is little known was that Welles read two books a day, or so the legend says; wrote theater reviews in England by age 16 and was proclaimed a genius very early on, his alcoholic father and artistic mother not imposing reasonable parental controls on him. In an interview he once said that he was so used to being adulated as a genius while growing up that it was normal for him to assume so. In the movie his petulance and arrogance is brought out all the while we esteem his genius, an interesting dilemma for any individuals in relationship with him. In a memoir by his daughter Christopher Welles, just released, she mentions that he decided to call her Christopher because he liked the name; she describes his frequent absences which she resented but when he appeared he charmed her socks off and what a charmer he was. On a long ago TV show talk show he told the exceedingly overweight Oliver Reed words to the effect that as an actor he filled  space in film, meant as a compliment. It depends on how you take that. Outlandish and endearing in the same moment, I have a sweet tooth for the man. I firmly believe he had the purest integrity as an artist and for that I admire him. After all, how many times do you need to write “Hamlet”? His achievements continued long after his early masterpiece. I run to his defense. I need not.

I went to Google and discovered his daughter’s recent book, and  I came across a real fascinating fact. He had an older brother, Richard, diagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized; Welles sent him a stipend for as long as he lived. Ten years older than Orson, he was released years later and seemed to get his life in order. So here is the Welles family, one son a genius and one diagnosed as schizophrenic, a mother who was a pianist with artistic leanings and a father who was an inventor and alcoholic. The conundrum of two sons so vastly different must have been not only puzzling but demoralizing for the parents and one wonders if the “other” played a subliminal part in Welles’ cinematic and theatrical productions. I wonder what it might be like to write about Orson from the point of view of Richard — Welles would put him to work at the back of the theater at times. What are brothers except our other selves in different semblances, our doppelgangers. It is the same womb. I wonder if he had the same deep voice as Orson. I am now wondering a lot about Richard.

The movie reveals fictionally the manipulative and cunning Welles, a prick, exactly, but it also captures that which is redeemable and majestic about the man. Part enfant terrible, genius, how is one to deal with that? How do we all deal with geniuses or the exquisiitely gifted in this culture? I am pondering that as I write. I believe we tear them down for they represent on many levels what we have not allowed ourselves to become or what we resent for not having — or just human envy and spite. Teachers do this regularly in schools; religious “leaders” shut down the dissenters like stepping on a biblical snake’s head. I really do feel that it goes beyond the artistic to something deeper which is only an intuitive conviction based on no known empirical facts and consequently I believe it to be true — human beings are fearful of the light, preferring the dark and shadows; human beings are threatened by that which is gifted or exquisitely intelligent for it creates an unwanted awe. Rather than sheltering one self beneath the overhead leaves of the tree next to an annointed one, we dread to sidle up to genius and we flee instead. I have sidled up to one or two great minds in my life and I found the human ambrosia wonderful — I actually grew as a person. Adopt an artist and bathe in the juices.