Mathias B. Freese

It has been some time since I have blogged, oh dear. The gravitational hold of the cyberspace audience awaits my every word. I have become quite bored with Facebook and Twitter is ridiculous — see Coppola’s The Conversation.  I find it strange that part of my cortex is telling me that too much time has passed since I have written another short essay. Of late I have begun to cut ties — to organizations, to others, and perhaps to Arizona. I am planning to move to Nevada if many things fall into place and I am working on making that so. I weary of the mindset here in this morgue called Green Valley. I am an urban man and the brain dead are everywhere, the condition of humanity, but, at least, let me have a good deli sandwich sitting across the way from an urban jerk.

Time is running out on this old man who has the spirit and mind of a psychological athlete. The marathon is into the last lap and I don’t hear the parade passing by, the fools waving pom poms or the culture which extols being politically correct. I read recently a few poems by Edward Field who got me all righteousl;y aggravated once again, his railing at the war ciminals — Cheney and Bush; at the pompous moral turpitude we present to the world — “Mission Accomplished,” indeed. And writing this blog is another one of those so-called “mandates” we self-impose upon ourselves. I may very well close down this shop, “Gone for Lunch” posted on the site’s doorway.

I have chosen of late to focus more on my writing and publishing what I have to say all the while reasonably cutting back on “pushing” my literary efforts. All is sand running through the hourglass. Thoreau said it best with lines that suggested each of us should “shave close,” to thin out our belongings as we near the end so when that difficult moment comes along, we have less to take away with us. And if you believe this only applies to a 68 year-old, let us stroll down the cemetery to the place where poor damn luck gives us the gravestone of Natasha Richardson. Perhaps the only real lesson in schools is to realize all instruction should be directed to comprehending our mortality.  We may then  consciously decide not to fritter away our lives in detail, Thoreau again. Recently a well-intended person inquired about my interest in death and I responded kindly that death is my brother and if I grasp that deeply I will live a better life. He looked at me with some grasp of what I told him.  I am not being morbid, I am trying to squeeze the pips in the orange until they pop.

As all of the above was floating about within me, I was also working through many different short stories all related to the grim topic of the Holocaust. In that effort is life. In studying the Holocaust, in working it through, I become alive. Ask a survivor and he will tell you he or she loves life intensely. No one has to be sold on life. When you have your existence sandpapered in the camps, to have survived makes you want to sandpaper yourself in life. Within a week I had knocked out at least 5 short stories of varying lengths and quality. I am in the throes of creativity. I will spend months revising but that does not concern me now; for me revision is slow-making excellence, smoothing out the clay, retouching the color with oil on the painted hand. Delightful! Another book wends its way out from me. So, I resent even the slightest whisper of getting back to the blog.

I am too old for self-imposed assignments. This essay is an attempt to work through this nonsense that I have a commitment to you. Surely, I don’t. The blog serves only one purpose as I see it: not to sell myself, not to merchandise myself, not to intrigue you with my life, nor pose creative and existential riddles for you, nor hambone myself, nor juggle ideas, or hustle, or huckster my self, nor entertain you. The only reason I should ever sit down and write like this was stated in my very first blog — all my writing is a personal examination of my self and if you don’t care for it, try on another pair of shoes elsewhere. What I have to work on is breaking away from this “slavery” and write only when I will it. I will see you whenever, as I cut this tie to you as well. I am free, Oh, Lord, I am free. I am no longer the plantation or house slave.

I have been away working on a new book of short stories dealing with the Holocaust. In part because it demands much more of me as a person and writer. I have to dig deeper into myself and I like digging into myself. It is not painful — it is, at times, enlightening or purposeful or just fascinating if not damn interesting. Some of us build castles in the sky –neurotics; some of us live in them — psychotics. I like to excavate. Ah, the symbolism of holes, ports of entry and good old-fashioned tunneling. The new work has the tentative title of “Working Through the Holocaust.” In a series of remarkable essays written after the turn of the century, Freud wrote about the practice of psychoanalysis. If I remember my studies, he wrote very few essays on methodology, the rest metaphysics and examinations of his failed cases. He defined “working through” as really an attempt by the analyst and analysand, to use the terms  at that time, to resolve a major issue or issues that permeate the client’s soul. By doing so, the Sysyphus boulder is shunted aside — alas, there usually is another one after that. All this is worked through — supposedly.

The short stories are an attempt, in fact, to work through issues that strike me as essential to myself. The dawning realization I came to very slowly is that The i Tetralogy  and this new book are an attempt by me to grasp the ineffable, which has been my characterological ‘bad habit” for most of my life. I want to know, how  culturally Jewish of me. And as I  began to compose some of these stories I stepped back and perceived how I was in struggle, and as a writer I began to use that specific struggle as the spine of each story and have progressed within the last few weeks to churn out at least twelve stories, some composed months ago, but all now in reasonable good expressive and artistic shape if not completion.

The quotation above I came across serendipitously. It may very well end up being the quotation I use  on the front page of this new book. So much is contained within it. Others feel it has been the key to Winicott’s theory, which is that there must be an empathetic witness to the pain of this traumatic loss, that the person who suffers this loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working-through or processing this loss, and that finally certain “transitional” or “intermediate” objects (persons) might be necessary in order to move from the state of dependence and reliance on the Other to a renewed state of self-sufficiency after the traumatic severance.

This brilliant geode refracts so much about our inner lives, about the Holocaust itself — -how to understand its impact, about the need to bear witness and the healing aspects of that as well. And it explained to me what I was doing. I had the small insight that I was working through in these new stories. It rang true and so I titled it. Metaphorically, whether we realize it –or we know it — or if we happen upon it in our lives, in one way or another, we are the road to working through. Dead souls, I affirm, are totally blind to working through anything!! However, Winicott in the above quotation for this blog affirms that we need empathy or we will go mad, and I think he only mildly exaggerates. There are parts in my stories in which the characters are mad, or are going mad which means I am going mad as well. “Jupiter Thitch” is one such story.The survivor must be heard. We all need to be heard, one definition of human beings.

I thought it might be fascinating if I could get into the shoes of a young Holocaust denier after finding a page on myspace which reeked with venom. This young adult could write well his Hitlerian screeds; alas, perhaps on unconscious levels, I lost the page. I wanted to reference it. Perhaps it is best it is now lost in cyberspace for I had to conjure up this corrupted soul on my own and not crib from myspace. So I created Jupiter Thitch.  Joop, as I name him, is a different kind of Holocaust denier. He does not deny the ovens. He denies the Holocaust because it threatens who he is. He is fearful of seeing. Projecting upon the Jew, he hates the Jew because he asks him to look at what man has done, to examine his own behaviors and proclivities. Using this tact, I hope I have taken a different approach, hating the Jew because the Jew places a great deal upon inner awareness. So an outer-directed young man feels threatened by an inner directed people, speaking with hyperbole. And so the tale deals with his “adventures” at home, in a synagogue, in a jewish cemetery and  within his own mind. I am working through what it is to deny the Holocaust. I believe, on one level, that hatred of the Jew has to do, here and there, with the awakening of intelligence. Human beings do not want to see nor know. We are more fearful of the light than the dark. We do better in the dark. And so this is one of the stories I am at.

The other stories are a series of reflections within several stories by a survivor, how he experiences his life at this time, how he remembers the camps; two stories deal with golem, one called “The Disenchanted Golem,” which has become a personal favorite. A golem speaks with a tzaddik about his past adventures throughout the centuries and what he makes of the Jewish requests to seek vengeance for them; it explores the tzaddik’s conflicts over invoking the golem because of an ongoing pogrom in his shtetl. The Jewish Frankenstein is helped to seek out a better way for himself by the old reb, a kind of working-through. It is an exploration of the hatred of the Jew and how the Jew dealt with that doing the Diaspora.

Some stories are fantasy such as “Food” in which a prisoner in the a camp is visited by a Jew from the future (my wish fantasy);  an encounter between a Jew buying a piece of Jewelry in Nazi Germany and being refused service and the dialogue that ensues; “The Tea Table” a fictionalized reminiscence of an event in my childhood regarding what I believe to have been a survivor but unknown to me at the time; and other stories dealing with a survivor’s reminiscences that repeatedly flashback upon him even at 80. One can argue that Post Traumatic Shock Disorder is a cliche for understanding Holocaust behaviors after the event. And since I am not driven by Madoff lust nor the engines of capitalism, I will publish it because I have to publish it.

As a coda, on Sunday I went to the Tucson Festival of Books. I met a mild acquaintance and his wife who published a book on Jungian dreams. We both had our books published at Wheatmark which had a table at the event. The first thing out of his mouth was how the book was selling. I answered that as a Jungian he should realize that for me it was a creative act and that although I am certainly not adverse to coin of the realm, I was not overly concerned with that. He looked at me as if I was his arch enemy, a Freudian. I am not a Freudian; however, I’ll take vaginas, anuses, holes of any kind, sex and sexuality over gnomic little creatures running rampant in the Black Forest of Germany led by that alchemical anti-Semite, Jung, who called psychoanalysis the “Jew science,” while practicing under Nazi rule. By the way, it is the jew science — it is competely Talmudic.

Allow me to graze into this piece as it is 6:44 AM here in Green Valley. It is first light in the sky. Rarely do I know what I will write about, letting my unconscious percolate until I feel compelled to say something. I always count on the unconscious because it is a felt-truth for me that most of my written work and behavior is designed and set out by forces unknown to me. I can go through stories and point out when the unconscious spoke for there was no conscious intent to it or design. As a writer I view myself as a spigot, controlling the flow, the off and on, perhaps the direction of the well of water below. At this point, here, right now, I haven’t the foggiest about what will be written. I feel a kind of innuendo flowing about in the crinkum-crankum of my cortex, and I will try to give it voice.

I have made two tough decisions of late regarding two books that occupied a fair share of my thirties and forties, Sojourner and Gruffworld. I’ve decided to part from them, shelve them. An attempt to resurrect them only reveals that they reflect an earlier self, a less-skilled self. I am no longer that person. I am no longer that writer. The feeling which I suppressed was that both works lacked a kind of depth that I now own. I can do better now. I feel that I am embalming these works rather than going on with new efforts. I also experience the resistance, the need not to pursue new work, to linger around like a loiterer at a bus stop. Both of these works, in effect, helped me to learn to write; after writing Sojourner, going beyond 100 or 200 pages was no longer a problem. One taught me how to write a novel — in part, that is. The other book helped me to struggle with thought and thinking processes. Short stories over 30 years instructed me how to compress, condense and get at the heart of feeling or passion within a few pages. The i Tetralogy brought all my skills together for it is the best work of my life, wild and woolly, intense, passionate, ornate and distilled and very, very feeling.

And so my old friend has returned…What is that line from Simon and Garfunkel, “Hello, darkness my old friend…” Or some such thing. I am revisited by fear. Do I have the psychic wherewithal to produce another literary work? Can I churn from out of my gut work worthy of previous efforts? In short, how many triples or homeruns do I have within me? Like all fears I have seen come and go, I have to face them, go into them for there is no other way, at least for me. How do you handle it, reader? If you run, the worst alternative, your life becomes shit. So I heave on my armor, reach for my lance and go forth, shaky and insecure, but you’ll never know that from the look on my face: I will endure; it all will pass. Only in the moment do we define ourselves. As we define ourselves as we tremble, perhaps transcend our fears, metabolize them and feel brave about the whole thing, until the very next cycle comes by: loss of a spouse, nearing one’s end, disablement by disease.

As the days slip by like WD 40 on one’s fingertips, I ask myself what is it that I need do for time and life is precious. Men of my age are dead. What can I ask of myself that will not be narrowed down to happiness, although I do not dismiss that pleasure. I ask myself continuously about how to measure and mark time, that scoundrel; how best to revel in my own creation, this existence I think I “live.” If you stand back and look at the world at large — Facebook, Octomom, Cheney and Bush, Ann Coulter, Ipods, digital cameras, pixels, pop culture, recession, more like Depression, mental illness, H bombs, terrorists and their misogynist heaven, the lunacy of an oil change, the lunacy of making inordinate sums of money, one may realize how nauseating and ridiculous all this is. If you move further back in distance, let us say to the moon, you may come to a kind of personal realization that earth needs to take an extended nap, perhaps a month or so. Imagine all the earth’s population put to sleep for a while: how grateful fowl, beast, plant, air and existence might be. Enter the fray and your life is what it is now, a nettle of burrs and stings; move away from the fray and perhaps, only perhaps, you might march to the sound of a different drummer. I watch and observe the days go by and I struggle heartily to give each moment a personal kiss of affection; I struggle wholeheartedly to define a purpose or intention. Above all, I try not to struggle, which is a bitch, for it implies control, to exists. How very hard it is to be. How lucky the creature that knows no past and no future, who dwells only in the present. Man has been trying to attain that for centuries.

Adieu, for I falter.