Mathias B. Freese

 I have just completed a light edit of the book in manuscript. It is at least 25 years old. It may never see the light of day, all 325 pages or so. it doesn’t work. It doesn’t fly. At the time I tried to bring together my learnings about psychoanalysis and my readings of Krishnamurti, stressing awareness, the awakening of intelligence and the primal motions of our interior lives. All this was presented on a bereft planet in anomie, a planet that was experiencing a downward spiral of evolution. Call it a Bildungsroman  which the dictionary defines as a novel “that details the psychological development of the principal character.” In this instance the “hero” was a gruff, an apocalyptic creature, fiercesome and grossly feral.

The tale ends with an apotheosis as I had gruff experience a variety of events that moved him from instinct to awareness; ultimately he becomes a stranger in a strange land, ends his life as an artist in his world, all surrounded by a bestiary of animals in a planet that is decaying and rotting. It is an allegorical or philosophical effort with a science fiction fantasy backdrop. And I believe it doesn’t work — not enough pacing or speed. To save it I might have to have it edited by a pro, for I find it very hard to rearrange chapters or structure my efforts differently. In short, I resist. The editing I do is important but it does not advance the story. I believe, of course, it has value and is quite different, but like Brave New World it may be more essay than novel.

I’ll be patient with this one as I feel a good part of my soul is in it, as I sought as a young man to stitch together some of the major intellectual and psychological seams in my life, having been in training as a psychotherapist at the time and continually reading Krishnamurti which flies in the face of most methodologies. I struggled with this for some time. I still read Krishnamurti from time to time to keep my internal gyroscope functioning; he is my compass rose without my being a disciple. (Name one healthy disciple of Jesus.)

I believe it was a summer in the 70s that I began to write at least two short stories each week which later turned into this novel; it was a very creative summer. The issues were philosophical and I endeavored to cast them into a book. One story, the opening chapter of the book, in fact, Covenant, was published in a major science fiction magazine and the editor encouraged me to go on so taken she was with the concept. The issue is this: Do I “betray” who I was in my thirties or early forties when I was trying to learn my craft, experimenting in order to find my “literary voice” by shunting aside an earlier effort? Perplexing. I am more empowered and skilled as a writer now and the gravitational heart pull of this novel still exists. I will let it lie fallow for a while and then decide if it can endure the light of criticism.

Sojourner which I wrote about in an earlier blog has a similar status — a book written decades ago. However, it is not in the league of Gruffworld but holds its own as a historical fiction rooted in meaning and purpose. Both books reveal the issues I was experiencing and feeling as a man decades ago. Sojourner awaits a reading by Jane, my “editor” and support. I respect her judgment. We have agreed that I will accept her “truth” without fuss. I can do that. And I may have to put aside both books and get on with it. What is curious to me is all the years and effort in these books and that life has put some “English” on me so that late in life I can now turn to them — but I have changed, the world has changed — there is Wordpress to learn (argh!). You know what, reader, it may very well be that I halt to repair an old jacket rather than invest in a new one. I wonder if I am dealing with fear — fear of writing the new, fear of beginning a new work, fear. . . Perhaps. On the side is a growing group of short stories dealing solely with the Holocaust, tentatively titled Tales of the Holocaust, about 4 or 5 are in varying levels of completion. Again I will send them out into the cold world and see if acceptance occurs or the cold winds of rejection; it is one measure of their worth. I did that with Down to a Sunless Seal, but that took 30 years. Time is running out.

This digression is not a digression. One day ago i went to an optometrist to examine my left eye in particular. I had an anxious event in which my left eye seemed filled with a gray matter which appeared and then broke up and for a minute it seemed as if I was losing my vision. If it hadn’t cleared up in about six or seven minutes, I would have gone to the ER. In any case it turned out to be a “floater.” As was explained, we age; the eye loses its elasticity. Parts of the eye’s structure collapses upon itself and pieces break apart; not very serious, but frankly annoying and for the first time rather shocking. All is well, but I share this ( don’t many bloggers feel it is a requisite to divulge their bodily experiences as the cyber-ego-trip for being a blogger?) because it make clear that another marker has occurred — I am aging and time is shortened and the body responds to all this: how much time is left? and what will I do with it? Interestingly about 30 years ago the gruff in my fantasy deals with this very subject — how to live in time? how to experience it? Well, the same issues in that book are the same issues I face now. Ah, Ah…Ah…I must keep the faith. Well, I’ll “see” about that. I hope gruff makes it into covers.

It was 1960 and I saw La Dolce Vita for the first time; it was the only movie in my experience in which patrons got up and left their rows. The movie was complex to my mind. I didn’t get it, nor did I understand that Fellini was educating us all in how to see without a straight narrative. I sat through it once more because I was challenged by it; when I had seen it twice I realized how it held together and mostly what it was all about. Since that time audiences are used to discontinuities, rapid editing and all the artifices of disjunctures introduced in the 60s and on MTV. I saw the movie last night. I wanted jane to see it. And I saw new things in the film that I appreciated. A cut was also made in the film which irked me but did not detract from the total treasure before me. I remember it well.

In one scene at Marcello’s friend’s home, the intellectual played by Alain Cuny, the poet, who later commits suicide and slays his two children as well (I just detest that lunancy in real life; kill yourself, leave the kids alone), all kind of ideas and behaviors are portrayed in front of the viewer, as the camera stays pretty fixed. In two sets of windows that are on one wall searchlights cross the skies at night. And then I realized that our auteur put that in as a metaphoric touch about the inner searchings bruited about in the scene. If you have never observed that and made the connections as I did not at 20, the movie in no way suffers. It only enriches it now. It is movie candy like knowing the stats for Honus Wagner.

The movie is notable for what it contains — the introduction of paparazzi for the first time in cinema; savage depiction of a “miracle” ( children see the virgin mother) in which the herd tears apart a tree in which she supposedly appeared, down to its leaves for relics — the nauseating spectacle of the “religious”; a rather sedate but at that time provocative orgy; nymphomania; the use of spatial distance to delineate alientation, disaffection, loneliness( think Kane with Susan Alexander as she works her puzzle); depictions of outlandish gays, nymphomaniacs, the morally decadent and others on the way to hell. However, as I look back at the film it does leave me cold; perhaps that is its point. The only moving scene, for me, is the one involving Marcello and his father, for the sadness and alienation is evident, for they have nothing to talk about; they are running on two different tracks.

The ending had me confused as a young man/child. It involves a grotesque sea fish pulled up on the beach by the very same aristocrats who had spent the night in orgy and an angelic young girl who Marcello had spoken to perhaps a few months back. Clearly the fish is his own decadence, but what is clever is her calling out to him over some water and his inability to hear what she says or to understand; Fellini makes his point and Marcello is off to whittle his penis for the next conquest.

For me the test of a movie’s greatest is to move me emotionally, at least psychologically. It is that old Aristotelian catharsis I’d like. La Dolce Vita is a savage indictment but given the decades since I have become desensitized. I might rally to action if Dick Cheney is discovered eating human flesh. Suprised no, for he has done so metaphorically. Neither great novelist nor great auteur has stepped forth to satirize this bloated whale we are. Ironically, Citizen Kane has been labeled a “cold” masterpiece (Pauline Kael). Perhaps. What is infallibly magnificent about that film to me is that I feel for the sled itself. As Rosebud burns in that furnace what it symbolizes, what it has so condensed in a psychologcal way (like a dream), is the total life of a man. In that way I ache, more than i did when I saw his life march before me as it did in the newsreel.

I went on to see Amaracord which is Fellini’s charming and rustic film memoir of his own growing up in Italy. It may be his masterpiece; one feels, and one laughs one’s head off.

As to the newly discovered floater in my eye (oh, dear, how precious!), I will write about that next time, for Fellini has shoved it off the screen.

After writing a book of short stories and a Holocaust fiction, what I write now weighs on me. It reminds me of that writer’s cliche of having to come up to the parity of the first published book; the second novel, I suppose, is a killer. The irony about Sojourner is that it emerged from a short story of about 30 pages and evolved into a 200 page book. I remember finishing it on or about 1980, Yet I threw everything I knew then into the book on a manifest level, revealing on a latent level my own discontent about the meaning of my circumscribed life.

I have changed, and my attitude toward the book has undergone a significant change. Here I am, a much better and improved version of who I was at 40. What I didn’t know then I feel I understand now. In short, I have grown.  As I work on this book written by myself so many years ago I meet the man I used to be ( what a curious realization, fiction as biography). The question for me at this point is to reassess Sojourner — does it work? Or is it a stale remnant of who I was at that time so far ago in an emotional and psychological frame of mind no longer mine. It is a revisitation of a self.  Of course, our character is a constant, although we change here and there, modify this or that behavior through conscious will (ha!), or life simply macerates us so much that we are no longer recognizable. I am the man who wrote Sojourner, and I am no longer that man. The “dilemma” is to see if what I wrote — it was my first try at a novel, therefore, I do have a loyalty to it –has any merit at this time. I really can’t say, although I feel that there are large parts of Sojourner that do not carry the gravitas that I am capable of. And this nags at me.

I weary at the thought of redoing the book dramatically, structurally, a kind of writerly perseveration, trying to endow it with strengths that it may not have. I weary at the thought of deepening that, broadening this, developing that theme, introducing this sub-plot. The potential effort fatigues me. In a mildly corrupt and self-lying way, what I associate all this to is trying to put  blush and rouge on the corpse so that it looks presentable for showing. I am hard on myself, I know that. Good Jane feels it has merit and she is the observer and intelligent reader of my writings. I wait for her opinion as the book is in her hands, newly revised. You need only read her introduction to Down to a Sunless Sea to realize what a careful reader she is.  

Yes, I have tightened this, eased out this, reinforced that, rephrased, rewrote, yet I feel I have only done cosmetics. Unlike earlier works in which I dug deeply, excavated, dug new shafts, ripped out ores for refining. With Sojourner I feel I have not done enough to it, feel that I only want to give it a carwash and not repair dents or abrasions or give it a good Simonize job.  The hope is that I am allowed to take a break between heavy books. The irony is that I have reached back into time and geeked out an original book and reinserted it into my life now. How can I say this better? Can it measure up to the standards that I now own as a writer? I think not, but the book is not garbage and has worth. The real questrion is that I need to relent, give up being the superego of my work — and how hard that is! I will see. After all, I am done with it now.

The book rests on Jane’s nightstand. It will be read. I am enduring the interregnum between literary efforts. I am preparing to go to short stories or another book from the past. What I am doing is going back to the often rejected fictions of the past which I felt had worth then, for I did spend years on them. They taught me my craft.  Was it the writer Tillie Olsen who wrote how she spent over 25 years doing housework and all that dreck before she could focus on her creative selves? I identify with her. I feel I have shot my load, that all that I have written in the past while struggling to eat and feed the family is all that I have to work with — perhaps not. From such clay so many pots can be thrown. I could write original material and I am doing that with a potential new book with the working title of Tales of the Holocaust. Several stories are in utero, one close to mailing out for the world to judge. It is as if I must obsessively, compusively clean up after myself. I will get to my point. I would like to see on my bookshelf in the next five years the following works: The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea, Sojourner, Tales of the Holocaust, Gruffworld (sci-fi fanasty), a collection of previously published essays.

All this is a patrimony for my children, Jane and grandchildren if that happens. However, it is also my self-patrimony, and for that I am very grateful. I have proven to myself that I am not bereft, that I am not empty, that I can give, that I am an artist, that I write fairly well, that I feel intensely, that I listen equally as well, that I am a good person, that I am dark, that I am sad and depressed, that I obsess, that I perseverate, that I am a livable entity, that I have done my best or at least close to my best, that I can forgive myself, that I can back off being so hard on myself, that all my books are statements of my inner life, for others to pore over or to cherish. I have no more to say.

February is a bleak month for me. I light a candle for Rochelle, now dead for nine years. On February 11 she would have been 71. On February 15, 1970 we were wed. And on February 14 is St. Valentine’s day, consumer mischief day. So February was a combination of events for us and now I light a candle and remember. I think of Our Town and a bit of dialogue in which 50,000 dinners are mentioned in a couple’s life. February 15 would have been our 39th anniversary. Being young and exuberant, I remember at the marriage license bureau asking the clerk if I could have the page of the calendar that read February 13, 1970. I still have it. It was a very lucky Friday for me. We had 29 years together.

I think that the sound of her voice emptied first from my mind, and I hear only faint notes now and then. I remember her slender hands that changed from wear and tear as a spouse and mother over the years. I remember the pride I had in her appearance, quite the beauty. I bathed in her calm and personal serenity. And it is all gone now except memories which come and go and age and fall into disrepair and breakdown; sometimes they even start up like the last nagging growl of a broken down car. I have gone on. The children have gone on. I have made marital mistakes of an almost tragic kind. I stutter and spit my existence. It is an untidy life I lead with the complicated knowledge that I am not in charge, never was, never will be. I don’t like to play pretend –nor should you.

I am more and more convinced that the body and the mind are one entity and if we imagine we are in parts, like that religious and psychotic trinity, we lose the shifting grasp of things; that we are indivisible. We inhabit our minds and bodies; our minds and bodies inhabit us, and we fuss along the supposed seams that separate them. Stay with me as I reflect and consider, if you have a moment, reader. I wade through life having lost my sense in all directions. No matter where I move in the water I am lost. Life makes me move, not so much personal intention. I think I am doing meaningful things — writing, publishing books, thinking, being in a relationship, being with my son but when one comes down to it, we are aimless creatures in the larger span of things, for it all ends.

Trying to find purpose, intention or meaning in life may not be the question to ask, for it all comes to nought. Perhaps just being, and how hard that is to do! Perhaps people scurry about, fret, worry and work because they are inhabited by something other than themselves, perhaps the very dos and don’ts of society, what we call the shoulds. It takes many of us a lifetime, if that, to come to the realization that it all really doesn’t matter. Why should it matter? I am really beginning to simply perceive that meaning is not all it is meant to be; that being aware tops that; that meaning after an observation or learning is just so much dead meat. That awareness of the moment or the one after that is about all this old man wants at this point in his life. I am working — by not working — on being spot on — love that phrase. A pastrami sandwich and a good pickle and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda is an epiphany for me if I am aware of it. You say it has no real meaning in life. I say to you: Fuck off. I know what I am devouring and you know nothing about anything if you are that much into meaning. In this universe, cosmically speaking, there is no meaning; it simply is, and you brother or sister have no sense of that, for your geocentricism is so far up your ass you are blind.

So what if the arc of my life reveals an untidy life “lived.” Life is profoundly messy. We don’t even have nature’s fractals — or perhaps we do, but I have not seen them. I seek no order, although that might be pleasant like arranging chess pieces on a board. Although I have no choice in the matter, I go on like you do, but I am contemplating about living my life in untidy fashion, to continue with the mess. I look for no meaning in this mess. I look to live in this mess like an infant squirming pleasantly in his cuddling feces. I imagine how it might be to live without meaning. I struggle to savage with a stick that ugly thing when it rears up. Try living without meaning ,and I don’t mean the moron next door who thinks life is a six-pack and a self-made oil change with Castrol. I self-advocate contemplation without a scorecard, without a purpose, but as Krishnamurti said it, the “awakening of intelligence.”

A few days ago a student wrote me after being in my English class in ‘94-’95. What you have to understand about me is that I’m no Mr. Chips. I viewed my teaching years with abhorrence; however, I gave my best knowing full well that I did not belong in this unhealthy environment. I went out and got retrained as a shrink because I didn’t want to come to my death being only a teacher, not what it is in this culture. In any case, she writes: “Your class was a bright light in the mind-numbing bleakness of my four years at HHHH East. I always looked forward to English class, and left feeling challenged and hopeful that there was a world beyond the hills of Dix. Your raw honesty, integrity, and willingness to say what was, sans sugarcoating, was exhilarating. This has remained with me, and will continue to inspire me.” Earlier in her e-mail she says: “You changed the way I experienced literature, art, and life. You taught me to pay attention and to always question, question, question — an invaluable gift.”

If she could transcribe this into another language, the one I am speaking now in this essay, it might move me more to know that she has become aware. Awareness for her and for me is so much more. Her letter had its moment, in me. And so I continue to live episodically, asymetrically — as if i can do anything else, except to enter the flow of it all. I am also very convinced that life is, in fact, a dream. As Krishnamurti might say, “think on these things.”

PODBRAM is a POD review site offering legitimate book reviews to deserving print on demand, self-published, and small and large press authors and their readers. The i Tetralogy  has won for fiction. An essay I wrote on this blog was read by editor, David Herrle, of Subtletea and he requested that I submit it to him. It has just been published: SubtleTea - February-April 2009 Edition Online Now. It’s called “Personal Posturings: Yahoos as Bloggers,” and is my take on that phenomenon grounded in my efforts to have my books reviewed. I take no prisoners.