Mathias B. Freese

Recent interactions on a family basis have caused me to reflect. I thought I knew that person and I thought I knew me and what I have realized, if that is the word, is that neither that person nor I really know one another. I am not surprised at all. We go along, I go along, in our human dufflebags thinking that we are coherent, purposeful and with intention and we proceed in our daily affairs on gross assumptions and gross suppositions that we understand, that we are understood and that we have a handle on who we are and who that other person is until we are told something that rattles the cobwebs we have spun. In this way I experienced an insight into the Other which I sensed all along but kept on a subliminal basis — and  that someone else was close kin. Teiresias had a rough time with Oedipus. I am a little sad if not depressed by what I heard. Disappointed is the better word. Clarence Darrow said that the first half of our lives is soured by our parents and that the second half is soured by our children. So true.

Here I am on the downward spiral toward extinction and I must work on myself and work on the other if I can ever get across my disappointment. We are so blind to one another. In part this only serves to fuel my feelings about the species which is a world-wide dementia; we alzheimer one another — missed responses to missed questions, emptiness to substance and substance bouncing off voids. I laugh at media-clowns like Dyer and Dr. Phil and Deepak Chopra who argue, in part, that we are in “control” of our lives which is horseshit, plain and simple. I am lucky if I can get through the idea doing simple things like buying a newspaper. Anything more complex is thorny, is it not, reader?

Questions like these are rarely asked: why do you do that when I am talking about me? why do you bring everything back to you when I talk about my losses? why is it that you act as a non-participant observer in our relationship, like a German in the fields watching trains rolling by with Jews on the way to Auschwitz? Why are you so unwilling to stand by me? How close do I have to be as a father or mother to get your commitment to me as a child? why are you so oblivious to yourself, for this makes you oblivious to me? and why do I pull my punches with you, fearful that if I tell you of my pain you will go away in a huff? I thought we were connected and I guess I deluded myself, once more, that we were. We are in effect disconnected. Is it solely my job to inform you that the tracks have broken off? you cannot see while I see. This is the conundrum. How do you help the “blind” to see especially if you are the aggrieved one? It apparently is double-duty, is it not, my close one?

I believe in my case only that I write to create solace for myself, to mend my wounds with the cobwebs of paragraphs and well-wrought sentences and completed stories and novels. I take my soul’s paw and remove the thorns and apply poultice to the inflamed sore. I do that because ultimately self-sufficiency rescues who I am although I’d rather have the other tend to me compassionately. I write to self-succor myself and that is nowhere as vital and alive as having the other apply tenderness, care and love. The cards have been dealt in my life and I play my hand as it is. And I will fold ultimately.

“Hell is other people,” Sartre wrote in No Exit. So true. What greater hell can there be than to be alienated not only from one self but others. Early on in my young adulthood I read the Existentialists. I found it appealing, brave, courageous and stoical. I liked the idea that we define outselves. Fads come and go but I believe Existentialism had it right about our very existence. It is cold out there, cosmically cold; it is lonely out there, very lonely; and we only have choices to make, often tragic ones. The story goes that in a Latin American banana republic a dissident was arrested and brought to the top of a mopuntain to be executed. Binding his hands behind him, the scaffold erected, the Commandante was not done with his prisoner. He brought his teen-age daughter and wife before him and as he began to disrobe and rape them before the man’s eyes, the prisoner turned around and leaped to his death. In this instance suicide was an act of courage as Camus has explained so well. He took power from the Commandante; he chose to die rather than to see such horrors. I wish I had that kind of courage, but since I have not been tested in such a manner, I try to be courageous incrementally, for the goal is an admirable one in my eyes. I choose. I must choose. I cannot leave that in the other’s hands. It is I who must stand firm, to confront, to take on, to point out. Not easy at all. I will do it.

Again I am at the keys. The urge to write, if that is the right word, is like a gathering of clouds, silky and serene high above. Thoughts flutter about in my mind,  Jordan,  my son,  Jane, her son Lewis coming in tonight from college. l know that within a few minutes a thread will appear to awareness and I will begin blathering. In the meanwhile I discuss the process as I experience it. Each of us does it differently. I feel as if my mind is magnetic and I am about to draw in pins. Here I go: “Cameras as Remembrances of Things Past,” which won a contest at Subltetea, was touched up and sent out to a magazine that publishes personal essays. I am about to work on the rough sketches of a few Holocaust stories so that I can improve them and submit to magazines to see if they have good bones. I finally broke through a personal resistance and began to collect and type out quotations about The i Tetralogy to be inserted into the front pages of the pending second edition of the book. Resistance is a phenomenon, and as a therapist I experienced it all the time. The rule of thumb is that you meet resistance from the first moment the client shows up. And when I was up on the literature, I learned that one of the better tacts to handle this was to join the resistance and not fight it. And that is how I handle my own resistances. I just wait until the glacier calves and I can see a way through the ice.

The cover has several swastikas on it crushing and breaking a red Jewish star. For some it is too much. Well, I am too much, and the Holocaust is too much. However, my son has asked to try another cover and quite frankly I have come across one woman who said she would not read the cover because it was emblazoned in such a fashion. She truly judged the book by its cover, and her dramatic loss. We agreed that railroad tracks might make a good cover for in many books trains are viewed as the symbol of the Holocaust. The beauty of POD is that you can, for a fee, dramatically change everything in the book. So one or two minor errors redone, new blurbs on the back cover, deleting the introduction which has not worked, and changing the cover as well as an opening series of pages that say: Praise for The i Tetralogy will be the second edition. I will offer that version for reviews once more and see what happens. I have gathered a small database of reviewers and bloggers interested in my work. I’ll start here. And while you are reading this, the tetralogy is available for review if you are so inclined.

And so the mental locomotive is gathering up steam, for I write and am moved cyclically by my literary efforts. You cannot expedite me, I bristle and grrrrr. While these fronts have opened up I launch another front. I will work on Sojourner once more. It has lain revised but fallow for a few months. Jane has a few corrections she wishes me to make and I will comply for she is an excellent reader. It was my first completed novel written in the eighties and it is good, even better now. So maybe three books within four years, not bad at all. I interrupted this blog to have dinner and dinner has satisfied me so that writing has receded, the energy dissipated. I bid you adieu.

At first I wrote a blog every few days. After awhile I chose to do it on a weekly basis. And here I am feeling the need to write something I am not aware of but feel its pressure upon me. The most recent blog was on Chicago and our stay there with my son, Jordan. And here I am looking out my office window at the Tucson light. I need both worlds, the warmth and rays here as well as the grit of urban life. Thoreau did return to “civilization.” We need time out. Here I am still struggling to make sense out of me and my place here amid the species. I think of the chicken whose head has been cut off and it still runs about the farmyard as if it had purpose in life.

I associate to an old adage: “We grow old too soon and smart too late.” What is to be made of this world, or my personal existence in this world, I philosophize. I try to get a handle on this but it eludes my best efforts efforts. Any life lived leaves shavings, like a whittled stick. Often there is so much waste and misdirection. One cannot, I believe, live a sleek life, Cary Grant as the arc of life, sophisticated and urbane. Tis a messy thing this life. The last 8 years of my sixties have been miserable and how many decades is one given to experience this waste, often not self-imposed, sometimes self-imposed. We make decisions with the best of intentions and they become dessicated, saharas of the self. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau opined. Is this conscious or unconscious desperation? In any case I am not desperate. I am consciously vexed, annoyed and pissed off. And so to fight off despair and the perfume of depression I have realized that I must exert my DNA, for if I don’t it will assert itself and leave me without rudder or a compass rose.

I recall an anecdote given to a class in education by an elderly psychologist who had much wisdom. I later incorporated this story into The i Tetralogy. It goes this way: a fly buzzing about a farm comes across a barrel of milk. Inspecting the milk and diving to sample a molecule of it, the fly gets trapped in the liquid and begins to choke. As his antennae and wings are saturated by the milk, the fly cannot move and take flight. In panic the fly just keeps moving as many parts of its anatomy as it can to avoid being drowned. In this effort he completes one orbit of the milk barrel. He is exhausted, fatigued and at wit’s end. All is struggle to exist. The fly tries to resume flight once more. He fails. He moves this wing, that leg, that antenna and finds himself moving in the milky current and in so doing makes another orbit of the barrel of milk. He doesn’t quit but he is near dying. The fly persists. Gradually, he observes in his panic state that he has made so many life-sustaining orbits about the milk barrel that he senses and he feels that the milk has acquired some substance to it. After one more final orbit, he has enough footing below to leap into space and remarkably he takes flight, for all his struggling and effort had turned the milk into cheese.

Some of us consciously struggle against the current and hope to soar or transcend, or to be viable; others have no awareness of this existence and flail about, leaving life shavings as waste. Personally I’d rather be aware of my travail rather than numb to it. I like my existence as raw meat. And so I muse, I opine, I write for clarity, I write for me, never for you, dear reader, for I am self-ish about this. I die, you die. I die alone. And so do you. The very most we can do for close ones is to hold the door open and to say a compassionate farewell. I’ll take that.

I want to share some of my impressions of Chicago since I now live in Green Valley, Arizona, a geriatric and retirement community which is comprised of somnabulists. Of course, being a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, any city is home to me. The visual verticality of skyscrapers and high rises as well as the individuality of Chicago streets make its appeal. The grunge of the streets, the panhandlers mumbling to themselves and to you for handouts, the boutiques that hawk fascinating and trendy wares as well as the places to eat are arrayed along the city blocks like faceted gems in settings. In four days we had rain, cold and light snow flurries — at night, sparkling against the street lamps. Weather like this is ornery and diverse and makes me feel in my bones what it is like to experience seasons and to wear seasonal clothes — boots, scarves, gloves, caps and jackets. We used the Chicago Transit System (CTA), effective and clean, to get around after cab rides soaked us. They provide heaters on the walkways for cold weather which is a sensible touch and very appreciated. At Clark and Diversey near the Days Inn that we stayed at stores jangled out — pancake house, Greek restaurant, vitamin shop, a high end ladies shoe store, Barnes & Noble, and a shoe repair store which is a very dying breed, except here in the city. Like charms on a bracelet, the differing stores kept us alive visually and engaged our interests.

We ate at the Russian Tea Time restaurant off Michigan Avenue, supping on lamb, stuffed cabbage, blinis and drinking vodka in a chilled glass served with pickles and brown bread — Russian Standard is the brand to get for home drinking; we also ate in a Chinese restaurant a Jewish Deli — brisket, pastrami, matzoh ball soup, kreplach soup, and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray (rugelach for desert); we had Italian food (Mia Francesca –not bad); we walked the streets after dinner in the cold, rain and snow and felt invigorated – I put on 4 pounds which I am working off once again. As to culture, we heard live music at the Chicago Symphony Orchesta, Russian works, visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Spertus Museum which had an intriguing exhibition on cliches and setereotypes. What was upsetting was a collection of “anti-Semitica,” made up of hand-carved canes whose tops were Jewish faces with prominent and grotestque Jewish noses; for the first time I saw the yellow star (Jude) Jews had to wear in Germany and had to purchase for ten pfennigs (about ten cents). You pay for your own labeling. A German flag maker stamped out these stars and upon closer inspection you can see the interrupted lines as a guide for cutting out the badge. I just love humanity. One other noteworthy display was a tape of Pacino doing Shylock — brilliantly. No matter how you cut it The Merchant of Venice is high end anti-Semitism. We went to the Spertus Museum because my i Tetralogy is in their collection; I am very proud of that.

While resting up in a Borders, Jane was reading some paperbacks and I was reading the New York Times and a black man with very dark glasses sits down near us and begins to read a large album of cartoon figures, often using a magnifying glass without a handle to read the drawings. I paid him no mind. After a while, he withdrew a large pad of newsprint and with a blue crayon began to sketch Jane as she read. I realized this and just observed. When it was finished he showed it to her and she was delighted and for a fin it was ours; only in a city. As we walked the streets, sometimes shivering, we saw the grunge and the dirt and occasionally the overfilled city wastebaskets, the urban detritus, the scruffiness and often we saw homes rehabbed costing up to $1,500,000 in places. The despair mixed in with the upscale, the apocalyptic poor and the well-to-do, we saw humanity in its gradations and I personally felt stimulated and alive. I like sand in my ice cream when on the beach. Here in Arizona we live amid the plastic smiles of McCain’s wife and the belief systems that this is the best of all worlds. The Arizona sun makes me feel warm, but it does not inspire nor make me reach for what I cannot, rather it makes many of us reach for what we can. How sadly desperate.

Jordan, my son, works as a computer technician and spends his real life taking art courses to study anatomy, making animation (go to Freezelab. com), photographing, trying to put his drawings on exhibit, experiencing and feels and knows that he needs city life to fluorish, to thrive, although the rough weather gets to him at times. The Chicago winters are severe. I visit him when I can. I try to absorb who he is once again. I try to salvage moments, watch him relate to me in the same old ways. And as I grow closer to my end I realize he is unaware — perhaps not — that I am on my way out. So these meetings are important to me, infrequent that they are. Separation is a loss of a special kind.

When I was about 12 or 13 I caught a film in the Oceana movie theater in Brighton Beach. In those days you  just went to the “movies.”  “Captain’s Paradise,” if I have the title right. It was in black and white, starring Alec Guinness and Yvonne DeCarlo. The premise was simple: here is a captain who had two wives in two different ports. In one scene he is observing number one or two from the side of a building with a chum of his. He is asked what he is doing and Guinness, in that impeccable and clipped English accent, seeing the possibility of wife one meeting up with wife two, unfurls the quotation that heads this blog. I always remembered that and years later I looked it up and committed it to memory. When David Herrle of Subtletea was a little late with the announcement of my having won his summer contest and offered his apology, my rejoinder was that the delay did not matter, giving him Chesterton’s words. His response: “Indeed.”

Of late a lot of things are brewing and I cultivate the faculty of patient expectancy. Seeing my son, Jordan, in Chicago in one week is a delightful concern, being offered two opportunities to review books on major websites, contemplating sending out another piece to a contest, re-editing my winning essay for submission to an ezine of worth, reveling in that I am down 26 pounds (Yes, I can, Barack), relishing Palin’s return of her “rags” to Neiman-Marcus, and disgusted by Hannity, O’Reilly and Rove twisting what they had said, sore losers three. The latter is proof of what a conditioned mind is, of how causes make you rigid. All three would be apt practitioners in the Inquisition.

What I want to do this year is to publish my next book, “Sojourner,” a quasi-existential book about a Chinese who comes to California during the Gold Rush to seek out his destiny.  It was the first real attempt at writing a novel in my early forties. I’ve revised it considerably, bringing to it all the expertise and smarts I have at 68. (Perhaps.) It is a “departure” from my last two books, but not really. Intention is always on my mind and the book dwells in that. I would like to publish a book each year as the years go by. I am inspired by Kazantzakis who after a lifetime of writing poetry began to write novels in his seventies and what novels they were — Saint Francis, The Last Temptation of Christ, Zorba the Greek. And his remarkable confessional, Report to Greco. What retirement!  What conditioned blather that is. One can never retire from life, but one can become blind to it and end up as a street light — there, but unseen, there, but unengaged.

Every day counts now. I try to eviscerate its marrow. “Try” is the operative word, for I know that serendipity is the secret hormone of attainment, that striving leaves rut marks. I “Columbus” my existence, sailing west in order to discover east. I relish in the self-knowledge that I control zilch, that my life is spume bursting above the wave, that helter-skelter is the sea I am on. I imagine that my secret fantasy is to “potter” life, taking the slurping clay into hand and molding an existence. The cliche is the defining moment. All my life, as I reflect and look back, has had a philosophical flavor to it, as if purpose is critical for me to live well. I imagine, once again, as I come to draw my last breath that my Rosebud might be: “Know.” 

So many of us go to our deaths like unmade beds. I do not seek answers, but I spend a lot of time speculating and asking questions: “What’s it all about, Alfie?” I have lived with and among friends and relatives who may have had the same questions I do but they never did share them. To go to one’s death unrealized and unknown to one self is to me a tragedy. Although “knowledge is death,” the philosopher said, I’d rather know that the stork did not bring me nor that I was bought in Macy’s. I’d rather see than to be blind to myself. The rest of life is work and love as Freud opined.

“CAMERAS AS REMEMBRANCES OF THINGS PAST” October - December 2008 Edition.

David Herrle, editor of Subtletea (www.subtletea.com) has selected the above essay as the winner of his magazine’s summer contest. I am particularly honored because David Herrle is a polymath of the first order.

When you access my essay, I urge you to peruse the contents of his excellent magazine.

The essay took shape as a blog!

I am quite elated.