I have put into Pages a query letter for Gruffworld. You may find it of interest. The first story of the novel, “Covenant,” is also filed here as well. For some reason many of you out there selected my query for Down to a Sunless Sea to visit repeatedly. The composition of any query letter, believe me, takes as much effort and clear-thinking as writing a story. Read both queries and then be free of mine. Do not emulate. Cut down the brush for your own path.
In the eighties I was trying my hand at science fiction and science fantasy. “Covenant” was submitted to a very good mag, Owlflight, its editor Millea Kenin. She wrote me how she was taken with the natural history of my Gruff. Encouraged, during the summer I took out about a dozen or so manila folders and each week I wrote a story or two of the continuing adventures of my creature. By the opening of school in the early fall, in essence, I had a book.
Menanwhile, if memory serves me well, I was in a psychoanlytic training institute with a heavy Freudian outlook. I attended the school between 1984 to 1987. Inevitably, my learnings seeped into the fiction I was writing so that it reflected issues of loss, abandonment, attachment and separation,nurturance, all the analytic stew that I was learning about and dealing with in seeing clients. Additionally, I had been reading Krishnamurti. “Gruffworld” became a meeting of two major waters, Freudianism and Krishnamurti’s spiritual investigation into awareness.
Life, raising our children, work, made me lay aside my work except for the publication of “Covenant.” So, for all you writers out there, I return after a quarter of a century to Gruffworld. After Sojourner, the book I am working on now, it will be next. I am the tortoise. Gruffworld needs editing and polishing, but it still works. Read “Covenant,” for it is the opening chapter.
When it comes to writing, I will prevail, I never quit. Don’t ever quit — life does that to you, in due time – but continue in the rich cream of self-creativity.
The last Passover I went to was last year in Tucson at a local Jewish Center. The food was the standard fare for the night, but it was dreadfully prepared. Jane, my companion, took a dislike to the food and I could not blame her. . . (She loves brisket and sour tomato.) How do you explain matzoh smeared with schmaltz, that cholestrol-driven thickener rendered from fat or gefilte fish which is bland but takes on flavor with white or red horseradish, the white more terrifying to the palate? As a child I would have some Manischewitz wine, a heavy brew, that for some reason made the pulse joints on my arms weary and weighty. We were secular Jews so that the seder lasted not very long for the aromas of the food made us hungry and we wanted the words to end and the eating to begin. I will spend this week eating bread, noshing on a matzoh now and then in remembrance. I cling to some mild traditions, although I am not kosher, some gentiles thinking most Jews are kosher. And I recall how in the neighborhood the Jewish delicatessens and Jewish bakeries closed for the week, driving some gentiles to distraction. It was a hard week to do without bread, for both Christians and Jews. When I was growing up in the Fifties I even experienced resentment because in September and October the Jewish New Year falls as well as Yom Kippur. Of course, summer really ends on 21 September and by that time we were back in school. We had glorious weather and were mildy castigated for that, out of jealousy. Can I help it if some meshuge monk decided to celebrate Jesus’ birthday in the middle of winter? We celebrate, like the American Indian, according to the lunar calendar, not solar. It has its perks.
My son lives in Chicago, my daughter in Queens, and other than my sister here in Tucson, there is no family. I have Jane and hopefully one day we will have a very good passover — who knows? I do miss the Jewish environment I had in new York City, the kibitzing, kvetching, brilliance, the well-expressed riposte, the good-natured joshing, the occasional Yiddishism which in effect, is Jewish rap, argot used to keep the gentile world out, a linguisitic defense mechanism. I am very Jewish in my conditioned values. I am well aware of the gravitational pull my people and history have on me as well as the defects of that conditioning, the limitations of it. Deeply moved by our travail these past 20 centuries, I recall about a year ago in Spain, still in a post-Franco malaise, how I entered the Jewish quarter of Cordoba and having walked its winding and serpentine “streets,” I could sense how Jews sped through these paths in terror, in persecution. Memory is very vital to a Jew. In the States “lets put that behind us” is the empty cultural conditioner, the product of a culture with a short history.
I associate to being given two pamphlets by a pair of Jehovah Witnesses who stopped by my home yesterday, friendly, one carrying a bible in his hand, the other with a small briefcase –what is it with the briefcases? We entered into mild talk and I took the pamphlets without commentary because I have a mouthful I could give, but why do that? What is apparent, at least to me, is that anyone who proselytizes cannot be certain of what he is proselytizing? If you have to sell your religion to me, then you must be uncertain about it yourself. Jews, as you well know, do not spread a gospel of any kind, but we are still being evangelized, Pope Benedict still keeping a prayer that Jews have protested about which views us as in need of saving. Insufferable! Let us face it: other than the Jewish words embedded in our language, our comedians, the shared Jewish humor across the nation, jews in the arts and humanities, Christians know very little about Jews and, as for me, I like it that way. I don’t want it both ways. To complain and at the same time resent the lack of interest. But I know enough about Christian theology — consubstantiation and transubstantion, et al –to keep my guard up. Every minority must keep its guard up.
The brouhaha Bill Maher has created because of his remarks about Catholicism and the church has caused considerable dismay. I was taken, naive as I am, by the thrust at the jugular, with references to the “Nazi Pope,” the church as “cult’ and so on. I believe that the latest is that he may apologize for some of his remarks. Be that as it may, a priest was commenting on the Hannity and Colmes show about Maher and he opined that if this had been said about Muslims or Jews, there would be an uproar. And there it was again. The all powerful Jews who would have Maher’s heart and balls in their hands if he had gored their ox. And he went on to comment that the church was a lumbering presence, or words to that effect, and that it is an easy mark. Really! I harrumph.
if you read Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll, a former priest, occasional writer for The New Yorker, you will get the real scoop on what Christianity has done. I will reserve my compassion for Mr. Maher in this instance.
Note to the reader: The memoir on Mt. Lemmon was written about 5 years ago; I have been revising it as I go along, here on this blog.
Hot again. One area in the Catalina State Park which runs parallel to Oracle Road issues heavy dirigibles of smoke, bulging up, in slow escalator motions into the sky. No flames can be seen, too far for my sun-shaded eyes. Glare is all in Oro Valley. Without a sun-visor, one conceivably could grill a frank on the dashboard. Things heat up quickly, a steering wheel, to wit. Again with fountain pen in hand (yes, that retro), retro man is with words. I am reminded of an anecdote about Krishnamurti (”K”), who when asked if after all these years of spiritual teaching, if he had made a difference. He remarked simply that a rose must give off its perfrume. Mt. Lemmon must mountain, man must die, and I must write. It is my perfume.
For thousands of years man, in his grandiosity, has projected himself upon the heavens, anthropomorphized the natural world — talking mice, thinking trees, gods of the sea and air, all this psychic energy for incorporative ends, I imagine. If I can label the world, I own it. Grandiosely, we name the planets. What a fabulous ego this species has!
We love to describe, to digest, to name and label, to authorize, to symbolize our world in a manifest way to order our existence, and latently it is like a panic attack striving to reorient, to re-establish up and down, east and west, to align our inner selves like a compass rose. Only this species latitudes, longitudes its own sphere. We love loci, direction, spot and site. That which is non-inclusive or different drives us to distraction. We are a batty kind unwilling to accept battiness as a possible principle of the world itself. We glom onto our experiences like an intense epoxy, leery of the disparate, the unusual. If an alien asked me to describe the one significant characteristic of human kind I might well say our capacity to homogenize.
I’m writing in a Mead notebook tablet. I’d like to fill up the entire pad, a kind of goal, with my scribblings. I like input. I hope for encouragement — I need that. It is lonely here, expressing self, writing for me, writing for other — you. Money is never an issue for me, it is only a concern — one must get on with life and its exigencies. I quest for dialogue. My neediness takes the form of a comment or two about how I have expressed myself.
I need some stroking of the ego, I am not an atom unaligned with others. If I can engage the other, thou, perhaps I can receive rewards in terms of having been listened to, or of having touched another’s sensibilities sufficiently so that he or she responds, differs, reacts, all the verbs that show communication and an enhanced relationship. I write to show you in many ways I am connected to you. A mechanic works on an inanimate engine, makes the transmission run well again. Isn’t there something fascinating about it? A human being makes an object dead to itself perform all kinds of tasks, a mechanical resuurection, mechanic as messiah. As a writer responding to a sentient mind, my hope is to move you, to re-animate you; literature is the world wide web. Each writer spins his web, hoping that you will tread upon the silky spans of words he spins out. It is the writer’s hope as you bring weight to bear upon his threads you will sense the total design and purpose of his woven world. And the writer hopes to capture the trespasser, wrap him in silk, store him aft, make of him a later repast.
On primal levels all is incorporative — from the consuming of the sacrament, the blood, the body for Christians, to cannibalism, the eating of the flesh to enlarge our own spirits and powers. As I absorb you into me, you and I become more than we are alone. We are fused. Like chemicals bonding, we become a greater valence, a third entity. I share myself with you so thst we can simply connect. It is very lonely in this part of the universe; for the few seconds we have, let us strike our shared match and light up our cavern. In Plato’s cave analogy, men took shadow for substance. I would argue that shadows are often substance enough for many of us. Human beings can sustain monumental illusions — delusions — throughout their lives — god(s) for one.
I need a god like a hole in the head. I had a daddy. Once is enough — look how it takes a lifetime to come to terms with father! Remove god and one is free, I state dogmatically, no pun intended. One is free to suffer, then, existentially (you didn’t believe you were off the hook), but one is free. We know that even lava cools and forms stone. The inanimate world, the animate world craves coalescence, to be part of the herd, the group. All is merger. If we can be free of this animal magnetism, we might experience ourselves a bit better. Group behavior of any kind is a phallic salt lick.
Human beings oral sex the world, we take in, we slather, lest we feel insufficient. What is circumcision except an attempt to bring one into awareness. Ouch!
Were there ever in my febrile imaginings, primordial pools of semi-aware, almost conscious matter, milling about, striving, seeking some express way to arrive at form or shape, some entity that might give “voice” to all this drive? Cathected is a pseudo-scienetific word devised to make Freud appear “scientific.” In the original German Freud, I believe, used a word closer to attachment, a more expressive term laden with connotations. In the original Alien, John Hurt, who also played The Elephant Man, examines a field of eggs left by the aliens. In a frightening sequence as he peers closely down upon an egg, it leaps, whatever it was from the yolky effluent, a sloshing effect, and penetrates Hurt’s face and brain – grossly effective, terrrifically jarring. It is my feeling that the primordial ooze took a physical great leap of faith and leapt from within to without, without intention, just cathexis cold, chilly cathexis, and achieved awareness of a sort. (What is breast feeding but the bringing out into awareness.) The rest is the saga of evolution. Consequently I have more in common with the Sargasso Sea, that silky-slurry, sloshy swamp, then with my next door neighbor, Norm, the physical trainer.
When I see a puddle, I see a beginning.
We should form societies for the advancement of puddles. We should put puddles on the endangered species list. We should lobby our senators and congressmen for rights to puddle. And is our wont, we should set up commisions to study puddles. I can see the bumber stickers: Puddles, Schmuddles.
Honk once for puddle
Life is a bitch, then you become a puddle
My other puddle is a puddle
Puddle died for our sins
The Moshiach is a puddle
Over the rainbow is a puddle
A poodle is not a puddle
A puddle is a cathexis, not a dirty word
Ashes to ashes, puddle to puddle
Rest in puddle
Thou shalt have no other puddle before me
Did you ever go to Puddle University (P.U.)?
What a relief to be silly! What is humor but a human vent, the capacity to express what is so painful in terms that are often tasteless and apposite. If I couldn’t laugh at myself, I would turn to stone, the very coalescence I fear.
The expulsion of fire, smoke, cinder and ash on Mt. Lemmon parallels my own outbreaks - - wonderment, awe, bewilderment, sorrow, despair, depression, tainted hope, jaundice, and gloom. I am unAmerican to the bone.
I’ve come to Oro Valley in Arizona not to retire but to live and to die. I had no idea I would end up here. Isn’t that life?: I had no idea. . . The mores here are different, of course, and this 9/11 New Yorker takes no prisoners, is often insufferable; but like everywhere else, locals are locals — neanderthalish, whether in upstate New York or in Oro Valley. I’ve come for all kinds of reasons. I’ve come for the mountains, those rugged melancholic melodies that undulate in craggy shapes across the land, a run of musical notes.
I am red-green color blind which precludes an accurate description of the flora on Mt. Lemmon and the Catalinas. But it is also a metaphysical question. I do see colors, but not what you see. Your red is not my red. Think of it as an optical opinion-making. I see tone and texture, I respond to color, but differently than you do. Because of my “disability,” society denies me two things: I can’t be licensed as an interior decorator, and I can’t serve as a jet pilot. I am devastated.
So the mountains can’t be described accurately by me; however, their impact is another story. These knuckles across the horizon have a range of colors and textures that calm me, that are majestic in a low key way, like a palomino in a field — think that for a second. They grab me, I feel a neglectful solace, for they are without intent but their sheer beauty, their inheritance, causes emotions, rifles through my sensibilities like a gentle wind across a field of grain.
The inanimate has a beauty to it, if we allow ourselves to see it. I guess that sums up art. What is a painting if not a parallel universe, rather, what is a painting if not an illusion of an illusion? It is almost three a.m. I’ll stop here, for now, as Morpheus has come for me.
It’s 7:22, Arizona time, and I’m sitting at poolside, four or five rabbits are short-sprinting on the lawn; night draws nigh. It is dusk, my favorite time. It is the lull all humans need if they are dimly awake — and aware. The heat of the day is fleeing, a soothing breeze crosses my face, a clutch of birds are hobnobbing about. The water in the pool is becoming still and stiller. And there is a warmth in the air, dry, Sinaitic. Birds in the distance chorus. A couple, hand in hand, walk by. And I sit here, pen in hand, scribbling, as I must do. I am compelled to do so.
Given what I have already said in this memoir, there is no purpose for my writing. I write like my big toe grows nail. It is what it is. I feel the urge to urinate, as my prostate is enlarged — it does what it does — and I feel the need to pee. I go inside now, this interlude between interludes, broken by other bodily needs, everything doing what its designed to do. I feel restful tonight.
I can’t see Mt. Lemmon from my window, but it is still smoldering; it will take a few more weeks before it is extinguished. And by that time I will have also ended our relationship of late. When the fires are gone and Mt. Lemmon goes on, there will be no need on my part to engage in a dialogue. The mountain has spoken to me these past ten days. Upon rising I assessed the mountain’s impact upon my self. At moments it has made me reflective, meditative, rueful, disquieted and philosophical.
When the fires are memory, I may have some years further to smoke and smolder, as I have embers of my own which cannot be extinguished. At 63 medical problems loom more than ever, and although I put on a brave front, implacable death is a continuing issue for me, for I am curious how I will “handle” it. If, like my wife, Rochelle, you died in an accident, you never deal with it., But if it is a disease, and you linger, how do you deal with it? Maybe things are different now, who knows, but when I grew up the dying were not given the right to know that. We all know that dying can be painful and that death itself is so mysterious that we really can’t conceptualize it, except to theorize about it, or like myself, create self-parables to cope with it, parables just a defense against the gritty realities. I’ve noticed these past ten days a general anxiety about my self, so that I have not had a good night’s sleep. I pee, I eat, I read, i write, I drink seltzer and juice, I just can’t sleep. The boob tube is useless. I remember when TV was so good it put you to sleep. This newer TV keeps you awake, jarred by the nagging narcissism that the Bill O’Reillys spread like so much mulch.
I cannot imagine my own death and dying, but it is coming. Heaven and hell, constructs for the conditioned mind, I find abhorrent. Reincarnation is an idiot’s delight. Since I have been constructed at a molecular level, randomly, in an act of absent-mindedness on the part of the cosmos, so that I come from nowhere and will return to nowhere, what is there left to feel — or think — or believe? One blip in the vast oceanic void and then I return to the vast nothingness. When I saw my dead wife on a morgue gurney, her beautiful profile before me through the “viewing window,” I was given the vilest answer imaginable as a human being.
I refuse, as is my way, to draw meaning, or a lesson, from what I experience, contrary to conventional wisdom. The rarity of our beingness, the rarity of existence — how we are punched into life, does not compel me to be better, to live for the moment, to do good deeds — to see the world and life as a precious gift, for such Hallmarkian sentiments do not move me. I am frozen to all that. I may just be frozen. I may be beyond all numbness, an inadequate statement of a great fear of death. I don’t know.
I do know, like the clicking of an old Paper-Mate ballpoint, in and out, in and out smoothly, for thousands of times. I am here. I am not here. What lesson ( who needs a lesson) can be drawn from this? It is, what is.
The only respite I have are my senses. The heat of the day, the susurrance of deciduous trees, the smell of a perfect brisket, the nose-turning pungency of a good mustard, the near death experience of an orgasm, the oneness with the world as one freely ejaculates and anxiety ebbs, all the senses that I idiosyncratically enjoy. All this gives me pleasure. I should be grateful that when I die all memory, all remembering, dies with me. What more horrible destiny than to die and one’s consciousness goes on. Sleep is the universe’s only kindness, a quirk, at that, a wrinkle in time.
Death is the cosmo’s fly swatter, one less, to make room for one more. After all, who mourns for a mosquito knocked silly? I think the universe works in this way. What is frightening to the human race is the complete and total nothingness of it, that this wondrous, endless, eddy of universes within universes, has no design except to exist, or be, or run along. I can only estimate , based on the narrowly focused and prejudicial ideas I have gathered in 63 years, a gnat’s conclusion. . .(to be continued).
We’ve decided to stay indoors given the extraordinary temps outside. This morning i made arrangements for a consultation about a bladder obstruction caused by an enlarged prostate. It’s set for next week and I feel the anxiety fill me like a balloon blowing up. For nine years I’ve watched that PSA count diligently, been biopsied so many times that my prostate looks like chicken on a George Forman grill. After the trauma of a catheter inserted into my penis without anesthesia — and gone awry, I might add, I’m quite leery of anything medical going near my dick, including doctors who I generally view as techno-hit men.
It has been a very difficult year and coming to Oro Valley in Arizona and then to have a procedure makes me feel frozen, and that combined with my generally gloomy state of mind only adds to an overall sense of dread and doom. When it comes to pain and procedures, such as dentistry, I am an announced and fervid coward; put me in front of a group of fascists and I’d give them hell. Orally brave, ethically courageous, I am bodily craven and cowardly. There is only one good performance by Ronald Reagan and that is in King’s Row; in his hospital bed after an accident, he asks where are his legs. My fear is to wake up in Tucson and scream for my absent dick. And the way things have been going, why shouldn’t it happen.
I need a doctor to simply affirm my safety, to dispel illusions about the procedure with rational and compassionate bonhommie. I would sweep away volumes of distrust. When we deal with people professionally or personally, often the word is a sacrament, a holding mechanism by which we feel succored. When I meet this new surgeon next week, I’ll know in a nanosecond if he is a mensch or murderer of souls. I think of Mengele operating on men and women without anesthesia, the paradigm of Nazi “medicine.” I also associate to Freud who only took aspirin for cancer of the mouth; what will power! what stoicism.
We were at a jewelry store yesterday where I purchased earrings for my wife; I was New York kibbitzing and the saleswoman played along; she was cheerful and we became giddy, not a little silly as I wisecracked. All was going well. At the cashier another woman, somewhat lanky and thin, what I would call a native Tusconan, asked me quite seriously why I had migrated to her town. Dryly, I retorted, “I came for my prostate.” Her mouth dropped, what there was of it. She harrumphed, Dickens style,, and continued with her cashiering duties as if all this had not transpired, a strong denial. The saleswoman who had been with us for half an hour had her back to us, and we could see it heaving up and down as she was hilarious and probably tickled with her colleague’s death-like response. From one extreme to another, here in Tucson, from the dead to the living. Some people dig my humor and find it wholesome, a necessary relief, and others are recalcitrant, stiff, and reluctant to let go — I call these people, the suppositories.
I’ve also noticed that New York bargaining does not work here, It is frown upon. A price is set in concrete and there is no response to, Can tou do better? I find it a rigidity, a lack of flexibility sabotaging a potential sale. A savvy is missing; in one store we offered a fair price for a floor model sofa and were stonewalled, as if our counter offer was not the way the game was played. In short, instead of moving furniture off the show floor, as in this case, in terms of volume, an anal-retentive approach is exercised. The retention becomes more important than the sale. Reason gives way to staunch adherence to a policy — or a price. But I’m from New York — I’ll find a way.
Inflexibility, rigidity, mechanical responses are all humorous if you can distance yourself from their nasty little effects; in fact, you can toy with them, make play.
Culturally, American humor is not only Mark Twain! It is predominantly Jewish, forged on radio, TV, the Catskills, Vegas, et al. Hackett, King, Allen, Groucho, Brooks, Cantor, Burns, Bruce, Benny, Carter, Rivers, Berle, Youngman, Caesar, Kaye, Reiner, Mason, David and Steinfeld, etc, etc. it is barbed, acerbic, lacerating, wise, humane, Kafaesque, self-deflating, sometimes sentimental, oiften racy, with the edge of the ghetto in it; it assaults authority, sides with the victim, the schlemiel or schmo (Adam Sandler); sees the mother as vicitm or victimizer, sees the father as hapless but well-intended and sees sex as a necessary good, like food. Body parts are explored in detail, gasses and effluents worthy of commentary. By dealing with all this, it brings all of this into the ready realm of the basic essentials and ingredients for dealing with and discussing life. It is not high-minded; it deals with bowels and belches, it is Shakespearean for the groundlings. In Tucson, the very word “prostate” rattled this woman. Her majora and minora labia are in granite. Chisel. . .chisel.
I also tire of comments about my New York accent. No, I don’t say put “earl” in the car, nor “fillim,” nor “New Joisey,” but i hear, at times, the clanking sound. I imagine it more than a twang, and perhaps a jarring note here in Tucson. But it sometimes is a regional aspersion which I do not appreciate. That edgy part of me, that free-floating bristling hostility, oftens feels like saying, “Ok, I sound funny; but what is your IQ, buddy?” Or: “How many degrees to you have after your name?” Grrr. . . Grrr Love to regress.
I remember well in the 80’s Terms of Endearment with MacLaine, Nicholson, and Winger, and after a rude or snappy encounter at a grocery counter, one character says (John Lithgow), “You must be from New York.” New Yorkers cackle at that line. New York is not only a world class city, 9/11 made that clear, but as far as I am concerned it is another country worthy of its own government. I smell the saturated odor, jealousy and envy in all this, and so, in a way, I take it in stride, throwing out zingers if need be, although one salesperson wanted to visit New York and asked for things to see and do — I offered: the Met, the Stage Delicatessen, Chinatown, Little Italy, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, the Plaza, Tiffany’s, the Brooklyn Bridge, the River Cafe in Brooklyn, Austin Street in Queens, Zabar’s, Zagat’s Guide, and so on. of course, she ended our chat by saying that her husband did not want to go — I’ll sum it up: FEAR.
After all, I mastered that. In the very early 70s I drove a cab in New York City, spikes for teeth, metal goiters for eyeballs, balls of titanium, and the growling diction of a male medusa, with all those erect penile-snakes for hair. The image of New York here is stale and old, pre-Giuliani. It is an idol of the mind, and no changing that conditioning.
The fires in the Catalinas are better contained now, no new flare-ups that I can see. Smoke channels upwards here and there, but not the darkened clouds of a week or so ago. Containment, then break-out, then containment again. People began to be disappointed in the language chosen to convey the situation to Tusconans. Fire is feral — and amoral. The first great blaze to my mind was in Disney’s Bambi. The forest was in flight itself as fire swept through the woods. The sizzling, the crackling, the virulent hissing of this animated fire brought fear. We don’t know what fire is, like the bush in the Hebrew Bible that is aflame but not consumed, it is a mystery in how it works. Here I am as close to our ancestors in the caves who somehow tamed this beast without understanding what it is; I still don’t get it. Man’s mastery over things, machines and objects in this world is an eely one, for we really do not understand what it is that we have mastered.
No slave owner understands his slave, no lord understands his self. We run, control and operate machines technically, but we are as ignorant of them as early man was of fire. What do you call this way, this process, this happenstance in which human beings run their world in a way very removed from what they do? Driving a complex machine as a car can be done with little if any knowledge of the physics and chemistry involved. As a metaphor it bespeaks the way we live our individal lives, for we are often removed from them as well.
In short, we don’t know, we don’t own, we don’t grasp, we don’t understand who we are, much less the objects in our environment. What a concept to grasp, what a concept to internalize, and what are the consequences of it all? When I reach out to butter toast, so much is involved in this “simple” act that it befuddles the mind. Yes, I will butter the toast. I know toast, butter, knife, how to spread butter and how much to spread to satisfy my eyes and taste. All this I know and can do. In reality, I am a technician, a hit man in a way. I practice and live in programmable ways. I am rote. I believe the real meaning of things and our relationships to them is as mysterious as our connections to the concept of a god, or our relationship to our psychological selves as well as our relationship to our bodies. Even if there were no mind-body split, even if we believe both are a harmonius integral oneness, we still have no idea of what it is all about.
We live in a body that rules us, that masters us, that we really cannot alter — blood pressure, sight, panic attacks. We do not inhabit the reality of who we are because who we really are — bodily, emotionally, psychologically, and so on — runs by itself, without much conscious help by us. We lease our bodies for a lifetime. All that we are and all that we do is randomized and run by no one. Turn a rock over. See a worm there. Prod it with a twig. No meaning, no why, no reason — just life of a kind. The difference between a worm and man is that the worm has no self-pretensions. The worm has no awareness, but this does not make it less. Man lives his life pretending that his awareness makes him significant. It is a self-lie — magisterial in its narcissism. Awareness makes you aware that everything is an evolutionary wink in time, a mere wrinkle. No great shakes. To be aware is to know on some levels that the difference between worm and man is miniscule. Man has pretensions, the worm does not. Perhaps evolution, in fantasy, might run backward, from awareness to no awareness like the worm. Perhaps a state of unawareness is preferable, for it is much like death, and we all return to that.
There is a large photograph of my sister Harriet and one of me shot in the 40s. They were professionally taken, and shot outdoors at 222 Oceanview Avenue in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. We lived on a corner house in a basement apartment on Brighton 2nd Street. In Harriet’s photo she is shot at an angle with a long stemmed rose in one hand, very well done and very beautiful. Perhaps she was four. I was eight.
It is most likely i will never return to that address ever again, although the molecules shed from my family and I permeate the walls. I believe we leave spoor. So much happened to me here, and so much was done to me here. The first coats of neurosis were appliqued on my self. In the photo of me you can see the young pre-pubescent boy still innocent, still only mildly conditioned.
Before I moved to Arizona I had planned to return home, to capture in photographs the supposedly edenic state of my childhood (I never did.) In the photograph taken of me I am wearing a short blue plaid jacket, just to my waist, my hair coifed into a pompadour and parted to one side, my eyes vividly hazel, my front teeth in, but with a space between them — never attended to, and my face aglow with innocence, unclouded with worry and angst, an unraped soul. When I look at myself iI see a child not yet totally conditioned, more open than closed, aswim in life, presenting itself to me daily as a young boy. When I turn to my sister’s photo, she grasps that slender rose and is softly alive, untroubled, in repose. Both photographs capture more than who we were; they capture us before we were crushed by woe and wear. In my picture I see such opportunity for myself, a great and eager thoroughbred, frisky, pawing at the ground, itching to run.
As I look back time and event, what we call experience, has been corrosive. I have few regrets. it is what it is, it is what I have been given. I have used writing to take flight from out of that world, the one which makes us rueful, regretful — and rageful. Moreover, it is not by design, it is all happenstance or just bad luck or error that I was reared in ways that now limit me. Naw, not so much. My parents were as blindly ruled by the fates as I was blindly ruled by them. They did not live coherent lives. Come to think of it, who does?
I see parents, rearing, nurturing, more or less, as collectives — masses of dumb-blind and random actions that on a sub-atomic level, if you will, bombard and crash into one another, bringing about disparate energies: matter changes. I view my life in particular, and all life, in general, as aimless, random, mindless — and numerous, interactions. Frightening to contemplate, but at least it gives mom and dad a break, takes them off the hook. So, instead of blaming our parents for their malign influences, it might be less satisfying to consider that all is flux.
Most if not all of the individuals of my childhood, their gestures, incidents with them, their attitudes and ways of being, are all gone now, laid to rest. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, parents, cousins, family friends are all gone. A blizzard of feelings and moods about them are stilled. The ticker-tape parade of my life has turned the corner on the block and has dissolved from movie to a single photograph, a still! Gorgeously sad it is to contemplate all this. All that sound and fury, hurly-burly, thousands of influences, all gone — except in my one solitary mind, my experience. To remember all this, to remember the ALL of it, is to tremble at the face of time, that elusively rottten scoundrel that ulitmately lays us low.
Kane utters “Rosebud,” the emotionally-charged sled, with the gravitas of an entire childhood subsumed within it and I ponder what my “Rosebud” might be. What one word subsumes all my being. When my mother was weeks away from dying, her ovarian cancer traveling to her brain, she was visited by a woman cousin. The household shrouded in anguish and pain for my mother, in “conversation,” my mother now attenuated and sallow beneath her housecoat, just blurted out from the disturbed neurons of her brain, “Father Knickbocker.” Incomprehensible, agonizingly humorous, sickeningly inappropriate, these were her last spoken words. Speech and conversation had disintegrated into shards. She suffered terribly for a year in 1960. I was 20, my sister, 16, two babes lost in the woods, critically unprepared for life. Our father, sadly, was the third child. All her life had come down to “Father Knickerbocker.” Forty seven years have come and gone and I cannot metabolize that horrific event. So I stay away from it, much like the autopsy report of my wife, Rochelle, in which her body parts are clinically described, the coroner in one instance, referring to her “pendulous breasts” — the ones i had touched and made love to. I have seen, I have had too much trauma in life — and it persists. I have it now: “Enough!” This is my rosebud.
There is a dark, dark recess in me, a wizard place of newts, frogs, gristle and bone, that expounds the desire to just die. I am not suicidal, and not depressed. It is just a feeling that says life has been too much for me and that I wish to cede, throw in the towel. And yet I go on, carry this weight with me, Sisyphus on his knees, grieving and grief-stricken. For most of my life I was unaware of the depression; for most of my life I was unaware of my very tortured soul. I am now aware of the travail, and I have mercy for my soul, eaten up as it were, by the rats of time and event.
I will stop here, for the agony of it can be tasted by me; it is as if I have something to throw up but it only comes half way up my gullet, stops, then recedes. I have the sneaky suspicion that all my writing is but an eruptive metaphor. I weary of ingesting life. It has not been good to my system. . .I am feeling very distressed now. Writing is not only cathartic; it is purgative as well.
I am an equal opportunity disliker. I am underwhelmed by the species of which I am a part. Unimpressive, to say it mildly. I keep on learning not to have expectations — of any kind — of friends and family and the larger organisms that populate in masses all the continents. Many of us can’t see, in this country, the appalling administration that has ruled us; many of us can’t see the littleness, the brittleness, the nasty characterological make-up of the twit from Texas. We can’t see that we have put the Gilded Age behind us, to use the jargon, and have entered a new Roman age of satiety and excess beyond all glut. We can’t see that elites, particularly corporate ones, in effect, see after this nation for their own ends. Read the New York Times for a week and in its several sections you will be appalled as it reveals in calm prose the excesses of the very rich as if it were normal, although normal for them. When we read about excess in other times, we wag our heads and we can see, for it is static and discernible, but when you are amidst the sordid detritus of this culture you are blind.
Slightly misanthropic that I am — think of Gulliver’s Travels, The Misanthrope, Timon of Athens — I generally weigh what I see against the beauty of existence — the daylight I am now seeing in the office window, to wit. Well, existence always wins, but not by a large margin. We often can’t see motives, conscious or unconscious; we can’t see meanings, intended or unintended. We often can’t see ourselves clearly enough so as to determine what actions or directions we should take in life. I often experience some individuals as living lint, just clinging to daily life, unknown to themselves, unaware. When I clean out a dryer’s filter I think of masses of such people.
When I write about the Holocaust or those personalities who are “deviant and damaged’ to quote the introduction from Down to a Sunless Sea, I find it “easier” to empathize with them because I have no expectations, nor am I much surprised about what people will do. The Holocaust is about the Nazis and genocide, especially the Jews, but it is also very much about the species, and it is for this reason we do not pick at the scab on the species’ knee. We are afraid to look at who we are. You will rarely if ever have a secondary teacher explore the nature of man in a high school class — he or she has to be a moral genius to even attempt it. So we lacquer the students with the usual material, and if you think of Anne Frank right here, I hope you throw up. She is the Splenda used to pull punches about the Holocaust.
If you accept the basic premise I offer here, and not at all original with me, that we are an easily conditioned creature, then a new path is opened to you. It is to decondition yourself. Mind you, if you find a way or a book or another good person, to help you with that, you will open yourself to seeing. And if you see then “knowledge is death.” To decondition oneself is to be in jeopardy. Can you handle that? The great writers, philosophers, all the rest see clearly, struggle to decondition themselves.
It just tastes swell to be free of stagnation, conventional “wisdoms” and all the rest of a cholesterol-thickened culture. Although I have many conditioned selves, those selves that are free are in an insurrection against the others. Only a free person can bravely write bravely. I can go on but let me stop here.
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