mathiasbfreese.com

I walk around in this flesh, dying each day, containing bowels and brains, maggots and bacteria, sweaty pores and rectal exits and bypasses, behaving as if I know what I am about. It is a horrific joke, quite trying, to realize that not much is accomplished each day and what is accomplished is defined by the apparatchik of society, the molecular bullshit that drives each culture and conditions all of us. A truly free man might commit suicide, so bereft by his isolation, so apart from his kind.

Someone once said that a good psychotherapist is not a little naive, meaning, I think, that he is open to being lied to or betrayed, his innocence part of how he engages his client; that he is real and not suprahuman. I am naive, watching my innocence sullied and taken advantage of, yet it is a part of who I am, or who I think I am. I have learned to live with the little wide-eyed boy in me, the one who can be lied to, whose heart can be broken by adult betrayal and lies.

I am tainted with an ethic, and so I am capable of being hurt.

This living blur has attributes, how fascinating, given that we stumble through the day. I am forever in a state of naivete — amazement. I can’t grasp this existence I live, largely unknown to myself, unknown at large.

I can conclude that we are all of control, life as charade.

What is to be done? What is fire? I really don’t know. But you do see fire, don’t you? Yes, I do. So we can begin there, I imagine. After all, our DNA wakes, moves and shakes us into entering each day. Perhaps the unconscious is really what we live every day. We think it is real real, really real, and it is real, but sublimely unconscious; we are unknown to ourselves as we know ourselves each day — what a condundrum.

I almost shagged the fly, almost caught in words what I am feeling, this mental state of mind in which I float, lint in a pocket. — from Spending Time With Mt. Lemmon.

I’m feeling out of sorts, depressed, angry and hostile, pissed and peeved, fed-up, annoyed and aggravated. I don’t suffer fools, but then there are so many, I allow a few to enter. As I age I see that I am more intolerant of foibles, less empathetic, irritable, impatient, anxious that I can’t have my own way, bristlng and surly. I imagine parts of me are calcifying, shutting down, as characterological values are becoming arthritic. The inner rigidities I have borne all my life are as dorsal finned as any hidebound stegosaurus. I don’t want to stop this ever hardening of cranky accretions. I don’t mind being miserable. After all, all of this is a cartoonish depiction of who I think I am, but am I really this global image I have of myself? I am not letting myself off the hook; I am flinty, irascible and naughty. It is like slipping my hands into a sink filled with water; what that feels like, which is grossly idiosyncratic, is what I feel about who I am, surfaces slip-sliding across and into one another. I do not have a watery self, there is a self; but it is like a deck of cards folding betwixt and between itself, all surface slick. I am neither the 52 cards; I am neither the deck itself. I am the shuffle.

Today I told a tiler as we spoke about job to be done that I am much like Joe Pesce in “Goodfellas,” in that I am no he-man, but like Pesce, don’t mess with me. I’ll come after you and do what I have to do — relentlessly. I was enraged early on as a child and it is a pigment that has stayed with me into my early sixties. Like an American paint, I am dappled with what components make me what I am as a person. And what is that palette, that ghost in my machine, that phantom opera that I perform daily?

In short, the old cliche, who am I?

Whatever I will write, is the truth, is a lie, is a misperception on my part. What I have observed is for every facet I think I have in my character it soon becomes apparent that I can provide exceptions or discrepancies, so that I am both aspects at the same time, or both differences at the same time. I am and I am not this and that; I am a slurry of traits, a lving, vibrant blur of a human being. I am no ink blot. I am a blur.

I’m lying in bed now, tired, weary from the day’s tribulations, recovering from the Tucson blast furnace heat which saps and enervates your will while it bakes your flesh and microwaves your brain like speeding up the cooking of a baking potato. I like Arizona because it reminds me of Ancient Egypt and Canaan; the place from which this Jew came, millenia ago. Perhaps I can be mummified here, interred in a tomb, and wait until a gravedigger gets at my treasure, god bless him, the unlucky bastard.

Derek Alger completed an interview with me and I went overboard in my response. The piece will be published in June or in September. Edwin Turner, who recently reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea, requested an interview as well; his site is www.bibliolkept.com. Alger is an editor on Pif magazine which is a significant magazine in the field. The questions posed by both interviewers got me cooking and I’ve notice some answers are becoming somewhat stale; I’ll have to work on that.

I have a few more pieces from my ongoing memoir about the fires on Mt. Lemmon. I may have bored you, dear reader, but I am not bored, so I win. Sometimes, and this is curious, I hedge my bets and pull my punches believing that I have a constant audience rabid to bite into my next piece. And in so feeling that I offer you “sweets” instead of “tarts.” As soon as I clear that up within myself, I will do what I must, which is to listen to myself and act accordingly.

At times in life I have experienced a feeling of being intellectually malnourished. That is not exactly what it is. I will try again; it is a sense that I cannot go beyond a certain level of ratiocination, that I am not bright enought to see further or see beyond. I do not compare myself with others. It is just a self-observation, like knowing I’m not good with figures. I feel limited. It is not a self-limitation — perhaps it is. What is notable is the feeling of insufficiency to deal with a problem or concern. It is not a feeling of stupidness. It is more like I’m missing some essential ingredients. i don’t feel amiss. I don’t feel depleted. I feel ill-equipped, and not a little over my head. i am well-motivated, intentions are reasonable and well-intended. I just don’t have enough gunpowder to set off a charge.

I often, like you, know better, wish to be better, hope to be better and am disappointed that these ends are apparently unattainable. I feel as if I have fingertnails without the requisite fingers; the reach exceeds the grasp. I had a recent urological test in which a pencil-size (#2)) catheter was inserted through my penis tip; it was without medication and excruciating. After the trauma, whenever I urinated there was a second in which bitterly severe burning occurred and then the release of urine. Every time I went to piss the expectation of that burning was a boundary I had to cross, with agony. At times the confluence of expectation of agony and the agony itself merge and I feel confounded, mired in distrress. I mention this because at times in life what I need to do, or what I expect to do clashes with the inability to accomplish these urges and I am left reeling with my mental pecker in hand. Ouch!

When I think back to the procedure which went awry, in which the doctor was frustrated by his inability to exercise his vaunted expertise, I realize how much physical pain I endured, and yet when I contrast this to the deaths of my wife, and my daughter, I realize that emotional pain makes the greater wound, lingers in its effects far much longer. I am in the awful situation of having suffered both agonies. Again I ask, what is fire? I simply don’t know, I simply don’t get it. I feel spiritually and psychologically macerated.

From the condo I see Pusch Ridge behind which Mt. Lemmon festers. The ridge is smoking now, no flames. People are dismayed by the event. They care about the land, it seems. I see it as a personal omen. A million years hence when Mt. Lemmon is lowland all memory of this June event will be erased, for no mind had contained it. There apparently seems, the world tells me, that only sentient beings can record and remember. And like fire, what is remembering, purely the act thereof? Free of value, free of judgment, what is it to remember? It is a very curious artifice. I will not cloud it with the remembrance of feelings. Simply, what is it to remember Mt. Lemmon afire this dry June?

Perhaps one of the agonies of sentience, of being aware, as a human being is our capacity to simply remember. Mt. Lemmon does not remember itself. It will erode, it will pass, all events natural upon its surface, in its granitic bowels, are unknown to it. Mt. Lemmon stands. It is the human mind that gives it real substance. And so, as Krishnamurti said, the observer is the observed. What I remember of the fire on the roof of the mountaintop is what is known of Mt. Lemmon, in addition to the memories of thousands of others. And whatever import the mountain holds for each of us contingent upon what we remember of it. And Mt. Lemmon will evolutionally evanesce in its own time.

And so we can remember. We can record. And what purpose does this serve, if any? Along Oracle Road which runs parallel to Pusch Ridge, part of the Catalinas, some individuals observe, some use cameras. And to what end? I am personally tired of recording and remembering. Ultimately it is wearisome. I do not want, for the time being, to get bogged down with feelings, just the state of remembering. I am here seems to be the foundation of remembering. Animals remember, but they have other uses for it, I imagine, than we do. Fear may be an abhorrent memory for an abused circus elephant. Ruefulness, sadness, guilt are the more exquisite components of human remembering.

To remember gives a sense of self and self-importance, existence. And over the millenia we have enlarged and embroidered upon remembering so that it is enhanced by a plethora of feelings. (The artifacts of any culture are remembrances.) What is sad to me is that we are given a gift that is a monumental tease, for when we die all that memory is done with. Moreover, when a species is eliminated, the Neanderthal, for one, no one is there to remember. A paleontologist works at remembering, but he is involved with conjecture and supposition. He never really experienced a Neanderthal. His is a dysfunctional remembering. The nagging and wrenching we experience about Uncas is that, indeed, he is the last of the Mohicans and he is sadly-sickenly saturated in a remembrance of things past.

I remember my deceased daughter and wife. I choose to. It gives me considerable pain, it gives me a wiry sustenance, it breaks my spirit — my heart, and it may serve no purpose. It is awful. It is fire. I don’t know what it is — or what its motives are. I remember because, like my heart, I cannot control its beating. It is part of my biology, species-specific, genetically determined.

Sadder still, it is as if remembering has not progressed to another level of awareness. Is there a kind of extended remembering? Can remembering evolve into a kind of prescience? All conjecture. It seems remembering is like a gas-filled Cadillace without an ignition key.

Sadder still, I feel, is that like Mt. Lemmon, we are gone, in a shorter period of time as well. Remembering is like being domesticated, tamed and then the compliance is never really put to purpose. Why break a horse if it will never be ridden?

What I am asking is basic. What is life? And I scorn any answer. I get off on the detective work. The Charlie Chan movies of the 30s and 40s, the ones featuring Sidnery Toler, were essentially plot-driven B movies. It was the plot, like a good tweed suit, that grabbed my interest. I don’t need denouement. I don’t give a damn about resolution. I am more interested in the spikes, the atonality of life, for whatever pattern there is, I could care less. Patterns are what we crave; they are the signs of order we desire.

So, I am simply asking again, what is fire? And there is no answer; but the questioning itself creates a patina of a kind between me and the world, which I find significantly interesting.

Mt. Lemmon burns. It sends out smoke so blossomed in bloom that the sky is a corsage of roses of varying hues. It is volcanic as well. The Catalina Mountains are not rugged nor fierce to my eye, merely judgmental. Like fire, they simply are — unexplained. What I would give if I could see free of everything that conditions and blinds me?

I wish I could have spoken with Kazantzakis. I wish I could have taken on Jung for his anti-Semitism. I would have liked to have played with Jesus (an imaginary playmate) as a child. What larks, Pip, what larks! I wish I could have been with Krishnamurti when he began his metamorphosis into a greater spiritual self. I wish I could console myself. I wish I could give me solace. I wish I could spare myself meaning, or purpose; I’d settle for intent. I wish I needn’t have to wish.

I have it, I think I do. It is fleeting, like the heated air left by a hummingbird off to heliocopter elsewhere. What I experience, moment to moment, in this day, the febrile heat, the dryness, the glaring desert sun, the awful brightness, the steaming inside of the car, the lava-hot steering wheel, the furied air masses that on ground level configure my body as I go about daily business, is surface slick. I know this, I feel it, as if what I do or say is already prescribed — or mandated, much like a speeding zone — regulated, apparent, evident — yet none of these.

There is nothing on a daily human basis that really matters, for we neither have the control, design, or purpose to accomplish it. What we really do is shuffle images, and this gives us a false sense of assurance, as if we are responsible and accountable. This “reality” is so palpable and vital that we can live our entire lives within the walls of its castle, gratifyingly so. Like the courtiers in Gulliver’s Travels, we leap over thimbles. I live on a faultline and I live in a fault, and so my view of existence is angled, shard-like, askance, and anti-perpendicular, causing me all kinds of grief and internal vertigo. I live a mischief, a tell-tale self-misery, much of my own “doing.” Indeed, what I am examining is what “doing” is. I have no idea except to report back what you would relate as well. All is clearly manifest, but there is a latent world as well, one riven with derivative cock-eyed notions and clues we need to listen to with the third ear — if we are so inclined to do. My curse is that I am inclined to do so, the writer’s bane.

What is the knot I present to the world? In this fleshened knish of bone and blood, piss and sweat, I sally forth. Even when I speak it is spontaneous — perhaps all to the good — for I have no guarantee that what I say is what I mean. To speak to another is to perpetuate an unwilling fraud; to tell someone that you love them is more than a lie, it is without foundation. Any moving feeling is a nettle of thorns. We ambush one another in droves of warhooping Indians. Intentions, whether good or not, are fables. We are not about business because we have no real idea who we are or what petri dish we swim in. Fiction and films offer us order, edited versions of how to behave or act — even exist, under certain circumstances. And this is broken down into scenes, discrete and telling cinematic moments. If done well, we are moved; if not, it is so execrable as the “existences” we move about in. Robert DeNiro called it this miniscule moment we have to live in, this time between book ends, this sad sandwich served in sladash — if not — slapstick style.

Galling it is to recognize some glimpes of time whistling by and to feel enervated by the inability to order it into some configuration, some meaningful stab for completion. There is so much palpable DNA in a virus that it fights and mutates in order to survive man’s intrepid attempts to render it harmless, to make it go away. And then we see in each man and woman incalculable amounts of DNA that one can only stand back and be amazed at the species continuing struggle to endure, to go on. What is amazing is that we are terminal and within that parameter we struggle so very hard to define ourselves, to perfect ourselves, and in some singular instances to transcend — “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” Kazantzakis wrote in his Report to Greco. The exclamation mark says much.

So, what is fire? When I look at a relative stranger or make a new acquaintance, what do I have before me? We talk, we interact, we share frivolities, we gossip, but what is really going on here? I would say not much because two people are in a dream state, and very little is real. Krishnamurti argued that we should look as if it were for the first time. However, the first time may be impossible to achieve. It is the hardest thing to do — to see. We see and we are blind, that is the cliche — and the truth of it. We do not register others, because not only do we not register ourselves, but the world itself is seen but not seen, “experienced,” but not really taken in and absorbed.

Sometimes as I canoodle over all this, I feel I am going “mad.” In the summer of 2002 I went to a hospital in Arizona after experiencing a general array of symptoms — claustrophobia, difficulty in breathing, hypervigilance. I was diagnosed as having had a panic attack (my first ever). A medical social worker interviewed me and concluded after I shared the events of that summer and the last three years that my “plate was full.” Indeed, it was. To have a panic attack is to have the movie film of one’s life twist and turn, knot up, ornery celluloid in hand, crinkling slick, difficult to unravel and reel up. We are so fused to the film to be projected properly that an interruption bamboozles our senses. And so I experienced a disorientation, as if my body was not mine — it never is –as a simple cold tells us that.

Addendum: 2 may, 2008, 5 years later.

it is important to be free of others so in this way we can be free ourselves — equally axiomatic is that we need to be free of our conditioned selves so that we can be wholesomely free ourselves.

Errant Dreams gave me a smashing review (http://www.errantdreams.com/reviews/2008/04/30); Edwin Turner at biblioklept (http://biblioklept.org/2008/04/30 writes:”…for all its monsters and perverts and manic depressive, (Down to a Sunless Sea) is never cruel in its darkness or unsympathetic in its distance. Freese creates real people here, and if we laugh at their pain, we’re laughing with them. Highly recommended.” And Josette of Books Love me, http://www.booksloveme.com/2008/04/27/dom-to-a-sunless-sea-by-mathias-b-freese/says: “Like what I had mentioned earlier, this books gets you thinking and asking questions. . . .”

Additionally, Derek Alger, editor at Pif magazine has completed an interview with me, coming out in June or September; Edwin Turner after reviewing my book has interviewed me as well, all delightful. 

Days like the past few are most. What makes me feel even better is that I am receiving testimony to what I came to feel over decades; that I can write; that I write well; that I am a self-taught professional. And what is also so very rich to me is that some reviewers praise my capacity to be empathetic and feeling; that is worth all the riches for me, to be told that I am a mensch. But I know that; it just takes time for the feelings to catch up with the thoughts.