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D: In an interview with Tracy-Jane Newton you have said, “I am Talmudic without being an exegete.” Care to gab about that provocative statement?

 MATT: All psychotherapy is essentially Talmudic. The response to the question, “Nu?” should also be “Nu?” An answer ends it all; and like a down note in music we just can’t wait for that. For real awareness to develop, we need to reasonably frustrate the client. Therapy is not answers, nor advice-giving. I recall a supervisor in training who told me the anecdote about a client she had who began to masturbate in front of her. Granted, there are a plethora of responses to this by a well-trained therapist; however, I found hers, although bathed in Freudian sauce, quite apt. She said to the young man, “Given what you are doing, can you put that into words for me? I believe the ideal teacher, not to be attained in reality, would finish a dialogue with the student without answering any questions, but would have taken the questions posed andf refashioned them into better questions. At the end of questioning we come through a larger window and again more questions are posed about the newer vistas before us. In this culture, frustration has become almost taboo. But if you experience it in reasonable doses, “What larks, Pip! What larks!”

As a writer I beset myself with questions; I have a simple rule of thumb: I need to go through the “layer cake,” assuming it is a five-tiered one. Only after I am down to the fifth level do I feel I can unearth a literary geode of some value. I probe with questions, they are my snout. I said it best in an essay: “What I really do know is that fearlessness makes for authenticity in writing.” When I am threatened by confrontation, by merciless intellect, when I have to face the world bravely, I switch to a remembrance of my dead wife on a gurney in a hospital morgue; nothing after that can stop me. I know no fear. I am a curmedgeon with a heart. I know that about myself. And i share with Freud, without being grasndfiose. his passion of the mind. Endless literary chatter I abhor, so exegesis is not of interest, a defense against feeling. I am not a Scholastic counting the number of angels on the head of a pin, theological jerking off. I question which is critically Talmudic. If, in fantasy, Jews gave up the Jewish star as a symbol, I would rush in with a question mark. That is the best symbol of Judaism for. And I am damn proud of that.

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D:. . .What’s your take on resurgent and popular Jew hatred? I don’t pretend that Jews, Israel, and so-called Zionists are blameless, but do you feel, as I do, that there is a media bias inf avor of disgruntled Muslim theocrat-warriors againsts Jews and Israel? Feel free to expand the focus.

MATT: I chuckle over an anecdote in which a grandfather is asked to comment about Hanukah by his young grandson. In effect, he says, “They tried to kill us, they didn’t kill us; so let’s eat.” Oh, yes. Are you laughing, David? So much cultural savvy in that response. Your question is a difficult one, so I begin with humor to defuse it for myself. And now I’ll deal with it. Hold my  hand, as we go through the layer cake.

i feel (note that verb) that in some unconscious construct the Jews have come to represent in Western civilization a nether, dire and collective memory that is reprehensible on several levels. Let me struggle with this, which I am doing right now. I think that intelligence, of any kind, goodness of any kind — I associate to Reich who wrote a book whose title escapes me in which he posited the thought that in each generation there are the murderers of Christ — that human beings seek to destroy that which is good. I believe the Jew, for whatever fractal reasons, has come to signify that. Jews threaten by their very existence and so they must be eradicated. Do I have proof for this? Oh, I can go on and on, but for the moment, now down to my own layer cake level #4, I feel it to be so. Thus, everything flows from this perception, intuition or conception. If you see Borat’s film, he scratches the surface ever so slightly and there it rears its scabrous head. In Tucson, where I live, he went into a bar wearing cowboy gear and began to sing a “western” song, “Throw the Jew into the well.” In 10 minutes the whole crowd was singing it. In the Borat movie he asks a gun dealer what gun would kill Jews best and without a blink of an eye, the dealer says this one, and gives it to him. On and on.

The Jew is an unconscious pariah now made conscious, the gift of the United Nations, fellow Semites in the Middle East and a media that takes sides; it is uncomfortable for the world to observe the people of the book become warriors, yet my reading of the Hebrew Bible was replete with battles waged by Jews. Two thousand years of encrusted stereotyping hinders us all. Of course, I do feel there is much wisdom oedipally in that Christianity, a son religion, rises up and overthrows, the father, Judaism. On his desk in his Victorian office, Freud had dozens upon dozens of pieces of statuary that he collected from his trips to Rome over the years. He understood full well that Moses was an Egyptian prince, and that that culture modified in so many ways how Moses behaved and acted. (Freud also did not know what a menorah was.) He was a secular Jew, but he well-reasoned he could not escape being a Jew in ant-Semitic Vienna, and so he wanted Jung to represent psychoanalysis to the world as a Protestant because he knew how revolutionary it was. Jews have had to adjust, assimilate, change, alter, amend and emend their behaviors for centuries. And what we have learned from this psychic an arduous effort is “to eat.”

D: You said in an interview with Norm Goldman: “I believe that chaos in itself has order to it.” Though this was in reference to how you didn’t obsess over structuring your novel,, it seems to refer to an overall concept. if so, can you explain?

MATT: When I look into the heavens at a Tuscon night sky relatively free of earthshine because of local ordinances, I cower for a nanosecond. The immensity of it, the chaos, unnerves me. When I observe this phenomenon free of labeling, free of conditioning, I sense something that eludes me. I tire of religious and spiritual associations, because there are tethered to mind sets; as Krishnamurti suggested, Can I look as if it were for the first time? I used to try that with clients. . .who is this sitting before me? It is murdeorusly difficult, but sometimes there is a glimmer. I would use a metaphor to help. This client is a trie, that one a crashing car, that one a mouse and so on. It helped and it didn’t help. But one tries to encapsulate this presence before one self. So it is with the chaos within me, without me and the chaos in the heavens. If i can keep myself free from postulates, axioms, mental geometries, the teeth-chattering of the mind, perhaps I will come into an understanding. . .perhaps. I have felt as a child that there was more to me before I was born and that there will be more to me after I am gone, that truly the present existence is a dream. I feel this deeply down and deeply so, without evidence. However. I give it no connotation or denotation. I will discover that. Last night about 5 a.m., no pun intended, I was dead asleep. In that state we have no sense of self; it is as if we are dead. perhaps the real horror of dying is not so much the dying process but the fearful conception of having no awareness. Well, each of us will get our bowl of porridge. The chaos signifies to me that patterns do not apply nor hold; that chaos may very well be, by definition, a pattern. I feel this is like a man trying to lasso a steer, to rein him in. However, at moments, I feel it would be braver of me if I could give up the desire to give order to chaos. That is human hubris

TO BE CONTINUED