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Although John Updike called the Sixties a “slum of a decade,” each of us draws from the tree of life, savoring its juices idiosyncratically and  differently. For me 1968 and 1969 were memorable years in terms of pain, angst, high anxiety, acting out, being immature, growing, evolving, fucking up. It is very hard to consciously choose to grow up. One must will it someplace in the nether regions of the mind. It was my second childhood, having been infantilized by immature and undeveloped parents — so be it. I felt at the time that the period itself, those two magical and critical years, served as a lactating cradle for me, and I sucked deeply upon its teats. I am sure we all can remember when we acted as jackasses, and how we cringe when we reminisce about all that. Well, at some point we must give up that judgment and just dwell in a deeper understanding of our behavior at that time, that place. I was a child at 28 seeking, unconsciously, to be re-maternalized.

Metaphorically, my sentimental haze for the Sixties, my nostalgia, is rooted in how the times let me down easily, allowed me to relearn first lessons not provided earlier in my own childhood. I drank deeply at the font. Much like one’s first — and indelible – affair, it is often seen through a haze, always dramatically thrilling, always remembered, always recalled tenderly, especially when it didn’t work out. I felt macerated at the time

Allow me to  share an anecdote about myself that has much to say, I believe, about how I was affected as a child. I lived in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn in an era before the wave of Russian emigres came there and turned it into Little Odessa by the sea. It was a halcyon experience for me, for I knew the streets, lanes and courtyards about our rented basement apartment. I walked the neighborhood and I took in early and deep drafts of the experience of being a young boy, somewhat open to his observations and being. I recall a particularly lovely pussywillow tree in a courtyard which imprinted itself upon my memory forever. I recall crawling under his house with my Irish chum, Farrell, a very exciting adventure at seven or eight.

What is to be made of these “revelations”? I would often go to the local library across the way from the Tuxedo movie house on Oceanview Parkway just before the avenue turned to go into Coney Island. Here I took down from the shelves Harold Lamb’s book on Robin Hood. I plunged into it, deeply, profoundly, as its narrative swirled about and within me. Not one of the movies about Robin Hood contains what I am about to relate. Later in the book Robin Hood is wounded and is bled, which is a terrible mistake. Weakening, sensing his death upon him, he asks Little John to get his bow and give it to him. Lying next to a window, Lamb describes how this once physically powerful man who could string his bow in one move with one hand, with one strong flex of the bow, barely lifted it now and feebly shot an arrow through the window. It landed next to an oak and Robin tells Marian and Little John to bury him there. I believe the book ends with the bow draped across his marker with an epitaph. The death of Robin Hood told affectingly and with no schmaltz moved me deeply. I was very moved by the romantic sensibility of it all  – I associate to Don Quixote and his library of romances. Something seeped into me, at that time, at that age, that shaped a sensibility in me. I did not have that experience until the late Sixties. I allowed myself to be transformed.

Reading that book was like having my feelings kneaded by the powerful arms of a baker. I was touched, moved, wallowed in regret and sadness, sorrowed, very sorry for Robin, hurt deeply by the reading of his death. The power of his epitaph, the bow, his last words gnawed at me in glorious Technicolor. So, as I look back I see the Sixties as touching upon this early imprint at eight or nine, revivifying its capacity to let in, to absorb, to surrender, to give in to, to engage and be. And so I say to Jane who wrote a telling comment about my first blog about the Sixties, it was an amalgam of a childhood revisited, of the conscious and feeling substrates within us all that carry a magical perfume that no manner of disparagement can damage.

“Knowledge is death” — Nietzsche

Did you see that comment by Jane about the Sixties? I will think on these things. However, now you know why I am marrying her. How sweet is the scent of a free mind soaring through the heavens…”Her eyes would through the airy regions stream so bright that birds would sing and think it were not night…” Romeo and Juliet.

I just caught “Hair” on TCM last night. I had seen it in 1979 twelve years after it was produced on Broadway and, in my mind and experience, ten years after the close of the Sixties; for me the 70s were post-apocalyptic and a very drab decade, although I was married in 1970 and struggling to make my way while raising two children. I had summered at a friend’s home in Woodstock in 1968 and 1969 and observed the revolution in that upstate rural town. There were artists, and mock artists, poets, head shops (do you recall?), and the glorious music piped into the streets from garage bands. I would observe in the middle of town how downstaters would come up to Woodstock because they felt they were missing something, and indeed they were. I remember one zaftig woman in a white suit (stunning) get off the bus and appear quite frenetic because she did not know what to do, where to go. It turned out she was an editor and I almost started an affair with her but the age difference (stupid me) seemed too much. It was as if some of us in the straight culture knew something was happening — it was, but didn’t know how to grab on. Luckily, I was thrown right into it. I have viewed in retrospect the Sixties as a romantic revolution much like the era of Shelley, Keats, Byron; it is as if things cogitate and wriggle beneath the culture and go underground and erupt decades later. When Treat Williams does his Twyla Tharp dancing upon that huge dining room table with dozens of stunned guests, he tore my heart out at the very first lines of the song  —  the caption of this blog. What I associate to that is a willingness to be open, to all experiences. Woodstock put me into many situations in which I had to de-laminate myself of the layers of formica I absorbed growing up in the Fifties. I allowed myself to be softened, to be tenderized and the rewards were innumerable, and very personal. I felt. I did not get into the drug end of the Sixties but I did absorb the artistic and musical aspects of it, the freedom and openness. So when Treat says “I am life, mother” I knew exactly what he meant. The Sixties gutted me, left me anatomically open and for that I am grateful. I still believe it produced the greatest music of the century. In 1965 I had seen the Beatles’ “Help!”  that loony, merry, Marx brothers picture filled with joy and fun and I opened a  self-crack for it to invade my heart. Before that I was a stiff, tight-ass, too intellectual dude who needed to be massaged by life. Three years later my experience in Woodstock completed the emotional marinade.

I associate to many things as I blog — Nehru jackets, porkchop whiskers on men, women uncomfortable in their marriages now having an excuse to cut out as they took in the values of the moment, individuals experimenting in song and sculpture, attempting to allow themselves an inner freedom, young women saying they were not concerned about protection, women who did not use deodorant, a freeing, they believed, demonstrativeness, sharing, bathing nude in groups, trying new ways to relate, touch, affairs with themetracks by Simon and Garfunkel and the Beatles, bell bottom pants and long sideburns, acting out, acting in, allowing oneself to be, seizing the moment, living internally “On the Road,”on and on and on. I grew in the Sixties. To grow one needs to be not a little open to it — perplexing. I was ready, I suppose. I went for it. And it still shows till this day. I am defensive about the Sixties, as if a decade needs my support. I defend it because it was about living one’s life. In “Hair” Berger and Bukowski play out this culture conflict. It is fascinating to observe how one value system sees another and what is to be made of that; the values questioned are even more important at this politically correct,  constipated and militarily virulent moment in our national history. Watch Arthur Penn’s quasi-social document, “Alice’s Restaurant” made in 1969 based on Guthrie’s 18 minute song and between both movies you might smell the heavily intoxicated wafts of a bong pipe, the new social freedom, and Eric Clapton at his best.

I may come back to this because the film still moves me. I wept in 1979 when I first saw it, not for what was lost but for the remembrance of things past.

That impulse to lay down a few words is here once more. I try to leave a two day space between blogs just to let the unconscious percolate. in fact, it is my contention that books are written unconsciously and what we do is channel them. I say that because the first book of “i” was written in white heat in about seven days; what is remarkable to me is that it didn’t need much editing at all. So when I come to write I let it flow out and then I revise; I try not to censor myself, often giving birth to some handsome passages, sometimes not.

In correspondence with a reviewer who decided to read the Tetralogy after reviewing Down to a Sunless Sea, she has emailed that the book is “amazing, depressing, but amazing.” Now that is exciting for my sore eyes. In a few weeks I’ll be part of a reading in Green Valley at its library which is pleasing to me, and I’ll probably read “Mortise and Tenon” from the short story collection. While I go about haphazardly “marketing” the book, I generally don’t write except for these blogs which do serve to keep my hand in it. I will probably work on a finished novel that I wrote more than 20 years ago, Sojourner, a book about a Chinese who migrates to California, Gum Shan, Mountain of Gold, during the goldrush years. It is a quest novel — quite philosophical but grounded in adventure –that I thought was for young adults until not a few editors disabused me of that notion, saying that it is a serious fiction dealing with serious questions — purpose, meaning et al.

Jane will write another one of her lucid introductions and it needs only minor editing until the POD editor gets a hold of it. I feel insecure about Sojourner but Jane has reassured me that it is of substance. Ah, yes, substance — that is my characterological glitch. Why write dreck. So, reader, I don’t.

It seems that at this time of my life I am out there with  brush and dustpan gathering all the literary threads and detritus I wrote as a young man. Among the silt I am looking for substance, quality and redeemable work. An attribute of myself as a therapist and man is a quality of naivete; often in therapy it is useful to be naive, for in that innocence can be trust for the client. It is not necessarily a negative. The therapist can learn, he or she can be informed and in that honest exchange more trust accrues, the barnacles of a relationship. When the client chooses to leave, a reef should have been born out of trust.

Enough!

I’m surfing aross the net looking for directories of literary ezines, online zines that review books such as mine; it is tiresome. I have no publicist, no order to what I’m doing except an inner pulse that moves me in this direction and then into that one. Clearly books are a product, and clearly marketing is the purpose for distributing this product. Marketing is America’s gift to the world, I have written in the Tetralogy. Toynbee in a book I read in my twenties, The World and the West, argued that the West has its “bag of tricks,” that is, its technology to slap about the world. If I remember correctly he criticized this materialism as rather empty if we also did not have a bedrock of values. Fast forward to our conflicts with Islam. What can we offer them — Britney Spears, Michael Jackson’s landsliding face, George Bush’s intransigence, Las Vegas, Fox News and all the rest of our nauseating “culture.” We even market democracy. So I am sitting here with a ha ha on my tongue, as I attempt to get my book reviewed so that someone will read it. I think it is becoming apparent that I am wasting my time; the energy saps residual strengths that I could call upon to compose more fiction. Perhaps the way for me is to just invest in POD and create my “products” and hustle a little bit before fatigue sets in. I am in this for the long haul, my inner values versus the “values” of the market.  Khrisnamurti once said to a questioner that he just gives off his scent, like a rose, regardless of affirmation or applause. I think, given who I am, that is the way for me. When I get too absorbed in marketing I experience anxiety, the greed gene twists along the helix seeking egress. I don’t need this. I enjoy the good reviews, I enjoy talking about my book, I enjoy the people who comment upon it or who feel touched or enriched by what I write. I have my son’s respect and love, I have Jane’s love, what the hell else do I need? I assuredly do not need you reader, nor do you need me. It is best that we brush against each other and any psychological or emotional dander we kick up may be mutually satisfactory. If not, so be it.

Again, another day seeing the great Blur. And what might that be? The Blur, as I define it, is the passing not only of the natural world before our eyes — we rarely look up, rarely look down — but the peopled stream we find ourselves in. Day after day we go about our “business” blind to what is before us, and if I or you were to truly see it, what would we make of it? And then we die, all caught up in a blur. I find it troublesome, not a little strange, that today went by and I went with it, unquestioning, unasking, metabolizing nothing of it. Another day gone, done with, and as a child it had a different meaning and context to it, because we were immortal as children. The fantasy is that one day I squeeze that day’s essence until the pips squeak. I often feel, philosophically, I imagine, that I am half a biting snap away from rapture. I often wonder if I have the “tools” to make something of that opportunity if it was granted to me. So I feel parapalegic and meaningless at the same time. As I distance mystelf from these thoughts as I write them, I sense it is that old black magic again, that characterological structure of who I am as a person, as a soul. I don’t know when I became so infected, but I am. I feel I would like to become more purposeful with my life as the day draws dark, as the years close down before me, as I land in the sod of autumn, eternally stuck, never to see the spring again.

Melancholia on a beautiful and graceful and warm Arizona night. I’m allowed. The Blur  will pass until the new one begins on the morn.

In The i Tetralogy  I use a quotation from Kazantzakis’ Report to Greco in at least two places. It reads: “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” It all comes to rest in that sterling quotation mark. It is one of three quotations that Kazantzakis uses in the first pages of his extraordinary autobiographical confession, probably the best of the Twentieth Century, some ranking it with St. Augustine’s. The concept of transcendence inflamed my spirit for a long while, going as far back as the earlier 70s. So this genius touched me with his challenges for living a spiritual as well as earthy — not earthly — existence.

Often I share the following anecdote with writing classes and I did this with clients when I was practicing. Kazantzakis relates when he was a young boy, perhaps eight or nine, that he went out to see his grandfather on the veranda overlooking the Mediterranean. Here, his grandfather, a Cretan, not a Greek, was wearing a fez, eating black olives and feta cheese for breakfast. One senses that the grandfather was a canny, worldly-wise old gentleman who had observed the human race and had made some judgements about it. He had lived!

Nikos says to his grandfather that he has a question that has been nagging him for some time now. One must remember that he was very young. The grandfather told him to sit and to tell him his concerns. Kazantzakis relates how he told the old gentleman: “Give me a task in life, grandfather.” Without flicking one hair of his handlebar mustache, the grandfather listened intently — one must consider whether or not he was taken aback by such an astute question by one so young. He considered what was asked and then said to Nikos, “Reach what you can.”

Kazantzakis heard him well and left. During that night he relates how he was restless and could not sleep, as if a dog trying to shake off the wet after being in the rain. The following morning Nikos returned to his grandfather at the same place. “Grandfather,” I don’t like the task you gave me. Give me another.” Once again, we must consider what was going through the grandfather’s mind, what feelings, what impressions he had. Grandfather took in what Nikos said, and he considered again. “Nikos, reach what you cannot.” With that Kazantzakis writes that he felt congruent, that the injunction was right for him.

In Pages you can find the three prayers of Kazantzakis; however, I am reporting an experience that a genius had, a spiritual genius, who sought transcendence for much of his life — see The Last Temptation of Christ and St. Francis. I believe we need to clarify for ourselves whether we choose reach what you can, or reach what you cannot; that we choose up sides, figure out costs, choose (!) and act (!). Often we go throughout life without posing or asking ourselves telling questions. We are spendthrifts with existence, we use it badly. I struggle with reach what you cannot all the time. No, I will not end up transfigured on a cross, but the struggle, dear reader, the struggle has made my life richer — and dearer.

I am sitting here as the computer went dead and I lost the entire blog. You can’t do that with a typewriter or pen and pencil. Aggravating and annoying, the brave new world we live in, with the minds and bodies of our ancestors of the Stone Age all wrapped up in technology, “I am Borg.” Yes, we are hive creatures, swarming from IPod to Blackberry to XBox. I was attempting to say before I was rudely deleted that we go through the day often without checking in. We do not dialogue with ourselves. We flee the interior monologue. We don’t ask questions, opine, wonder internally, self-reference our value system, out intellectual gluepot. I sit here and questions arise: will my Ricoh Gr1s camera, a sweet point and shoot compact, arrive at the camera repair store and will the estimate come in at a reasonable price? will Jane remember our memorable love-making long after I am gone — I am 17 years older than she and could have held her in my arms when she was born in 1958? will Jordan, my son, now 31 (egads!) receive Lucian Freud’s Paintings in Chicago, as he is taking a course on anatomy and model-drawing? can I prevent myself from getting diabetes with the diet I am on, a continuing concern? Other thoughts that park here and there — The fear(s) I have about myself: is there time? will I complete my defined goals? can I reconcile with an obdurate and stubborn daughter? is my capacity to love deepening,especially with regard to Jane, as I observe myself caring more and more about her? Answers are irrelevant. It is these mental and emotional vapor trails that cross my cranial stratosphere that interest me.

In my Ten Canons (See Pages) I address these questions, trying to have my clients work on seeing themselves on a daily basis, perhaps moment to moment, to shut-up, say less, and listen to how the world impacts upon them, how mom or dad, if heard properly, are good people but not a little shaky. I often go on, like you, for days, like the Mississippi flowing into its delta, relentless, timeless, unrestricted. At times we need to grab on to a piece of driftwood, catch our breath, look about, look inside, consider and reflect, before we are cast further down the river.

When we watch all the nutty shows on TV, Cops, for one, we see people who cannot answer an officer’s question about their behavior, speeding, for one, because they are empty; they are part of that religion that genuflects and prays to the “Great Duh.” George Romero’s “obsession” with zombies in his movies, I feel, is a brilliant commentary on our materialism and on our emptiness. Indeed, the ingestion of other human parts in order to remain a zombie seems to me a sly way to describe how we deal psychologically, emotionally and intellectually with relatives and the species at large, sacrificing realness, authenticity and genuineness for coprophagous delights.

Once I asked a class to observe. To remove the anxiety I gave them all A’s beforehand. Now we could work free of the insipid conditioning of school and society. I asked them to open their refrigerators and to tell me what they could see. After the titters and discussing what their parents might think — Freese doing his vaudeville act again, they were to write down everything they saw. As predicted, I got lists like this: milk, horseradish, butter, oranges and so forth. I told the class that they were blind. I helped a little — Heinz’s ketchup; Goldman’s horseradish, etc. So, in their next effort I received lists such as this one: Glendale fat-free milk, Breakstone’s butter, a dozen organic eggs, 12 bottles of Dasani 8 ounce water et al. Still not satisfied, I said they really did not see: I helped again. One 15 watt GE bulb at rear of fridge, 2 ice trays, with 12 squares, one inch by one inch, the reg. patent number on the metal badge inside the fridge; the instructions imprinted on top of the “crisper,” and so on. At last, the lists became more and more specific. They were turned into paragraphs of detail, and the whole assignment became a source of humor for all of us. How much do we see in daily life? Do we try to see in daily life? I wished I had then gone on to ask them to log what they feel and think in one day. (See An Observational Clothesline in Pages.)

As I sit here in my squeaking chair, I feel this is my “curse,” my malady, and I don’t wish it on you. I am so constructed in this way. I have found it of worth, of value. The trouble with we mortals is that we often do not inhabit ourselves. So we act and behave globally as asses.

Having read my blogs of late,  Jane has decided to keep me honest; she has the brainpower and dry wit to see through cant. And she knows when I am being preposterous,  pompous as well as grandiose. That’s what I need, a built-in critic! So as she reads these blogs she cuts through the layers of fat, rearranges my thought processes and tells me I have delivered a baby by breech — shove it back in and deliver it properly, oh master of words and wit. You will occasionally, I’ve been told, see her comment upon these blogs — “The horror! The horror!”  So not only will I have to keep up a running commentary with you, dear reader, but I’ll have a terrier yapping at my feet. I look forward to Jane’s take on all this and I have the feeling you may suggest I leave the blog and let Jane take it over. I am not averse to that. She’s a creative woman, so saith the guru.

I know Jane for 23 months now. In that time she wrote a incisive introduction to Down to a Sunless Sea which grubby reviewers have ripped off to use in their reviews because they are too lazy to come up with their own language — at least give credit (one did). Jane has won third place in a short short contest run by the Society of Southwestern Authors; it should have had won first prize. My story was given honorable mention, the student outclasses the mentor. She just got her MLA, has applied to the University of Arizona for their MFA program. Jane is working on her novel based on historical family facts that deals with the Mormon experience — she is a renegade and a card-carrying atheist (love that girl). And she has completed a children’s book based on the wildlife in Madera Canyon (see links for pictures, et al) which will be out in the spring. Gifted woman, with a grand sense of humor and presently relishing her first experience with a Jewish man — don’t ask me, write her in care of this blog.

Given her talents and capacities, I’ve asked Jane to write an extended piece about her interests and new book, which I hope she will put up in a month or so. As I’ve said quite directly in an earlier blog, style is you. When you read her introduction to my book or her other stories, et al, there is a writing style that is keen, seeks clarity and does not take prisoners. Oy,vey! what will she say about this blog?

Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin