Mathias B. Freese

I cannot remember the title of the book by R.D. Laings, a well-known psychiatrist of the Sixties. It may have been called “Knots,” for that matter. What I dimly retain of the book was a series of verbal knots he presented to the reader, in verse, mind you, rather convoluted and brilliant I must say, just like knots. I associated to a knot or knots while musing about this blog and the issue of control.  I will just blather from here on in. Control is a kind of rigid inhibition, I imagine. It is Custer’s last stand. One goes down fighting rather than giving up control. It is the Great Wall of China (Kafka wrote a story about that) in that all walls keep in as well as keep out. Control for me is the fear of invasion, so dark and desperate that one feels he or she will be swallowed up, incorporated into some dark abyss of the world — or the other. I imagine doctors walk the walls in defense for they cannot abide a loss of control — death.

Perhaps, metaphorically, human beings create walls and install controls because we are corporeal entities walking through and into this world. What is outside our skin? Or, better still, what inner labyrinths do we have that equalize the pressure(s) of the outside and the inside. It may be argued that although we are individual units we are really part and parcel of the “out there.” All is flow, all is flux.  I suppose, I guess and I imagine that we create controls in what cognizance we own or are given as human beings as a way of differentiating ourselves, of differentiating out. If that is so, some controls define us as individuals. I don’t feel lost at this point, only curious. I will try to concretize.

Dealing with the purchase of buying this new house in Nevada we have complied with all kinds of requests, some remarkably anal and quite ridiculous. Only yesterday we were informed that essentially the house is ours — the banker is on track with us, et al — but that the title company has not delivered the “Docs” to move into closing; that we are six behind; in short, delay again. What has been churning within me is that poor management, poor and incompetent workers, poor everything is holding up everything for no good reason; that the conjunction of several “forces” are retarding the process and that as the buyer I am being kept on hold, on the back burner while idiocies flow.  Clearly it is like Hitler as the sole cause of the Holocaust; too simple. He did not befoul himself with the implementation of his “ideas.” I can go back into time and I will not discover who is holding up simple processing of a mortgage; in fact, I am not buying a house, I am, apparently, seemingly, buying a mortgage. And so controlling this imposition upon me seems beyond my grasp. I could cancel the whole thing, ask for my deposit back — that’ll show the bastards; I could discover one knucklehead along the chain of incompetency and lose my not inconsiderable temper; I could choose not to push the river and allow all time and space to marinade a bit more. I could choose not to act, not to do, to observe, to cede all control, to surrender, to be spiritually oblivious to what is really a minor iota in the flux of life. I could give up all control. I could go out and merrily exercise today in the fitness room or fritter away the day.

What I might do is what I often shared with clients over the years when they faced all kinds of personal hurdles or difficulties in decision-making. I offered an image. One is on a beach and we all know that water comes up at different places along the beach. Sometimes the water reaches your feet and stops; sometimes it passes your feet and runs on. And at times water stops short of your toes. The client easily grasped that. I offered a thought or proposition based on this simple observation. Perhaps life is like that. That is, life does not come up to us like a straight and horizontal line all along the beach. Life is fractured, splintered, stumped, and spastic as well as spasmodic. So, the client proffered, what are you trying to get at? What I am getting at is that we deal with what we have before us first, not being shattered by all the other spurts and sprints of life coming at us. We don’t become paralyzed.  In other words, we don’t wait for the toast to pop. We crack open the eggs, get the milk and butter from the fridge, take our morning meds and so on. We don’t stare at the toast and wait for its completion. We are not fixated, as we often are when faced with a hardship or a difficulty. In short, I will play a game. I will shift focus and move away from a control issue which beckons me to lose it, rage and do something immature and convulsive. Oh, don’t get me wrong. Control is there. I am being controlled by some foreign substance, and I don’t like it. I want to choose for me in ways that I am not doubly devoured, once by them, once by myself. The controllers love it when you implode.

And I not above holding someone’s feet to the fire if they are impeding a just response. It comes down to the self knot. I want something. I can’t get it. The person or entity is beyond my grasp — in Nevada; there is no corporeal corporate throat to rattle. All feelings, all control really is in me. However, one has to measure how much shit one can take — ah, there’s the rub. So I must go interiorly, ask myself how many inner frences have to be breeched before I respond in measured ways; or, how much control will I allow to be exerted upon myself by others — or, even by myself. In all this the serendipitous result is one gets to know a little bit more about one’s self.  Well, I don’t like control. And control is all about us, isn’t it? I question authority which unnerves others. I question myself which is unnerving as well. Within me is a tethered child who despises all the controls that were imposed upon him while growing up. Give me a shears and watch as I go about cutting through these cords. Judd Hirsch as the very humane psychiatrist in Ordinary People tells his client who wonders aloud why he need come twice a week that “control is a bitch.” I loved that line, still do. I can live without controls much less controlling others in very subtle ways — just check out your relationships for examples. It is frightening to be free, to be free of controls. The Hannitys, Cheneys and Roves of this world give it away if we just look as if for the very first time. They are pinioned to themselves by controls, static and inflexible inhibitions and lack the humanity or flexibility of well-rounded humane individuals. They are the end result of imposed and self-imposed conditioning — religious training, rearing, et al. They are  knots, a macrame of neuroticisms, causes, “ideas,” and religious injunctions, whatever.

I am even writing this blog, as is my wont as a writer, to subliminate my not inconsiderable anger at being controlled by what are apparently CIRCUMSTANCES. Dammit, I can’t even get the names of people to confront. My own impatience compounds control into an unsavory personal brew within me. When impatience and control come together, historically I have combusted in this way or that. Age brings modulation unless you are a human twinkie, which many of us are. So I am with modulation.  I am trying to see, a la Krishnamurti what this whole issue is for me. Wouldn’t it be loverly that I lose the house because of my anger but gain greater insight into who I am? Now that is someting to ponder!  I’d take the insight, he bravely barks back.

(Bullshit! False bravado. What I am crying out, like the child in me,  is that I want both — insight and a house. Crybaby!)

We are waiting, Jane and I, to hear final word about the closing. Hopefully, it will be in the first week of June. We are faced with obstacles because of the financial paranoid state this country is in. And I find it hard to endure fools or underwriters who assume that you are trailer trash or corrupt, unlike them! Everyone is livid about the state of affairs but if you raise your voice they are not used to it, and I raise my voice at times because I do not accept the role of victim. I will comply but don’t blame me if my compliance leads to other misadventures that have nothing to do with me. Meanwhile, the garage is loaded with cartons for our move and Jane’s piano rests in the living room, its legs off, like a giant latke.

During this waiting period, Jane and I go over in deep perseveration her relationship with her psychotic family. Finally separating out, she finds it hard but knows it in her gut how impaired her rearing was and how conditioned her siblings are with a mother who is dramatically disturbed. We are both preparing for another adventure in our lives, for the last 10 years have been pretty awful for both Jane and myself. I just want to knock out a few more books, travel, enjoy my son’s life journey and prepare (ha!) for the grim reaper. At this point I am in no mood for systems, Phil, Wayne and Deepak, the Oprahesque view of this world, this inane culture, the Hanittys, Roves and Cheneys of the world. Often when I watch TV I imagine what my take on the show might be if I lived in Peru or Bagdad or Sri Lanka; my take would be that America is obsessed with bling, ambition, competition and MORE. We are a gluttonous people. On HGTV, homes and gardens, et al, one show has a real estate agent and a decorator evaluate kitchens that  have been redone. The average renovation is about $50,000 in the U.S. In this case the renovations can range as high as $85,000. The skinny of all this is that the real estate agent evaluates the kitchen as if a potential buyer in the present market, applauding this, denigrating that. Marble granite tops are essential. The values expressed are appalling. Kitchens rated on the basis of what others might pay for them. The designer chirps in with color and cabinetry and offers what is in and what is out. The whole premise of the show is to have the families see what their efforts may have done to increase the value of their homes. It is all envy, following the herd, competitiveness and aggressive show and bombast. If I were a peruvian, I would leave my dwelling and smell the night air, free of all this shit.

I feel for parents who have to guide their children through this morass. Parenting may become as critical as being a pastor or being pasteurized. We will all muddle through, I suppose, but I am constructed unfortunately with that self-appointed task to say that there is an elephant in the room — does anyone see it? In fact, that is the task of a good shrink, teacher or parent. I most admire The Emperor’s Clothes! It is a reality story, not a fairy tale.

This will be an important week, for we find out if we are all through with the financial hagglings we’ve endured; what is the final amount of the mortgage; does my ex pay up on attorney fees? making preparations for a possible trip to Vegas for me to see a house I’ve never seen; tidying up details to get out of this dreadful neighborhood in which anomie reigns; to be rid of Jane’s maliciously cloying family; to feel that we are moving psychologically. I feel so encumbered by the drag of details that a kind of malaise has set in that I am struggling against. Things are on hold. An uncomfortable state of being but like Jujy Fruit, you finally get it past your teeth and down the gullet.

Farewell.

To quote Chesterton: “I am cultivating the faculty of patient expectancy.” In other words I am trying to deal with anxiety over the hassles that are occurring on getting out of this sealed tomb in the land of the dead. The moving men are here today to move Jane’s belongings into my garage so that we may leave as a couple in mid June. I have not seen the land of Canaan. Jane bought the house in Nevada after I searched homes in the area, a suburb of Vegas. She is quite the capable woman and I am relenting or giving up control to her which is all to the good since it is one of my major defenses and a wasteful one at that.

Yesterday I had dinner with my sister and her husband and it is hard to see her as 65 or me as almost 69. We celebrated her birthday and anniversary. She has had a hard life. I remember in the 40s when she was diapered on a bed. Sadly, she said to me at the table that she does not remember ever having a birthday cake. I hope that was not so but it probably was the truth, whatever that is when we deal with memories. She and my mother did not hit it off, in part because my mother put too many of her casino chips on her firstborn, me. It was a remark from out of the blue and thus very telling. I feel that these sadnesses we all have are just a condition of living imperfect lives as if there are perfect lives.

In the last few weeks Jane and her family have separated out completely; they are a group of grotesques, childish, narrow, low functioning, mean spirited and dimly aware of anything but themselves. Oh, just plain stupid. Get the drift? I am also that Jew that has taken Jane away from them. Here, at 51, the separation, on one level, is done. I wrote a blistering — savage — email to her sister after the family ganged up on her, diagnosing how I see all of them in harsh language; ideally I wish I had the chance to have said it in person. Jane is a fighter and we are both glad to be out of here, god-willing. In fact, I had urged Jane after a recent blow-up to go to Vegas for relief and to scout out a house as well. All impulsive, spontaneous and serendipitously splendid — look at where we are today.

At moments I feel drawn back to working on my new collection of short stories, but I do not pressure myself knowing full well that my unconscious is editing, emending and drafting new sentences and producing new ideas. i just channel my work. I would like to have 2 or 3 more works done before I plummet into that black hole. I feel I am as creative now as I ever was and with a facility I have that I never did have and with a style that is solely mine which I let Jane tell me about because it can become eely and repetitive as a writer. The new stories are free as I am allowing myself to be bizarre and fantastical; some stories are in the traditional mode and others are a kind of magical realism. I am having fun. I hope to come in at about 175 to 200 pages. I want to feel the thickness of that book in my hands; Jordan does the cover once more and the title is: “Working Through the Holocaust.” The stories deal with Holocaust deniers, Hitler’s underwear, Eva Braun and her sexual response to Der Fuhrer, and a caring Jew from the future visiting a concentration camp prisoner with dinner. My imagination is unleashed!

Until a truth commission is formed and all documents are laid bare about our response in the Bush administration after 9/11 and there is no whitewash but convictions as high and as low the totem pole of responsibility, this country will deserve to be damned as a democracy. I do not have faith in Obama. He is a politician. On our cultural scene which is as barren as an Arizonan desert, there are very few voices that speak to our moral response for what we have done these past 8 years. We are a lost people. Parenthetically, this is a depression, denial will get you no where, and capitalism has revealed itself as imperfect as any other system. Oh, what foolish trust we place in ideas, people and things.

Watch us as a culture with banks, mortgages, Wall Street, real estate sharks and you watch the repetition compulsion alive and well, twitching spasmodically in gay abandon. We will not learn much from all this except to tighten our sphincter muscles, for as Americans, as a culture, we are into bling; everything is temporary, an aberration, a wrinkle in time, and progress is ever ahead, a one-way street sign. Show Americans a vortex, an eddy and they shriek. I suppose that old saw that defines cynicism as the last refuge of an idealist might apply here — but not entirely. I am not an idealist, far be it. Can’t we get it into our heads that the Constitution was written by slave-holders? That historically presidents are generally a mediocre lot; that we are purveyors of poison as well as other nations; that when this nation makes a shit it stinks like every other nation; that we are not the democracy we think we are; that we lie and cheat and maim with the best of them. What is fascinating and scary about this democracy is that we have turned it into a Hollywood production. If you think that Ronald Reagan was a good or great president, you are as delusional as he was. In fact, he scripted his role. In fact, are you now scripting your own? After all, this democracy requires subliminally that one lives a role in a movie. “The Matrix” was a wonderful metaphor if you grasped what it was saying about all of us.

No more.

With my periscope I am seeing Cheney who Hobbes might have defined as “short, nasty and brutish,” Darth Vadering the TV shows, exhaling toxicity like some primal creature. We actually have a “debate” in this country, if you call it that, about what is torture, the equivalent of describing a chicken as if we don’t know what it is. It only confirms my belief that democracies are closet dictatorships unless held in check — oh, Jefferson! that government governs best which governs least. We find it unimaginable, citizens, that we can play the Nazi game — I was only following orders. Jessie Ventura expressed it well on Larry King, that dessicated man who reads index cards for a living, when he advocated that every person from the President down to the private who participated in torture be prosecuted. You and I will not see that, but it is a moral necessity. Hurrah for Jessie! We are such hypocrites that it is mind-numbing. We prosecute others and allow the fungal Bush and the crabbed-corpulent Cheney to walk free. At heart I am an anarchist and when I went to college and read about them and their philosophies they were laughed at. I revel now in the richness of their thinking, Goldman, Vanzetti, et al. This country reeks in shame at this point.

At this point let me quote from Richard Burton, no, not that constipated actor, but the world traveler and iconoclast of the Victorian period:

“Do what thy manhood bids thee do/ From none but self expect applause;/ He noblest lives and noblest dies/ Who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”

Good words for this shabby age.

I am writing now before I take off to see a doctor about getting scoped. Dreadful preparations for that, drinking a purgative water based brew that cleans you out so that a fantastic voyage can be taken by the gastro man. Last year he discovered a polyp or two and now he is back again to see if I have a coral reef somewhere; it is a do over just in case something else is afoot. They scoped Cheney recently and discovered a black tin box in which a heart mechanism was discovered.

The house has passed inspection and we need to attend to some minor repairs, all to the good. We are dealing with the Patriot Act in which all monies have to be vouched for in this paranoid period we live in. Banks, like the whores they are, made it too easy to buy housing a year or two back, remember! and now they are making it inordinately hard to process mortgage stuff even if your credit is excellent. And we have bailed them out. The moral and psychological mayhem going on in this country is like the ocean waves slapping 20 foot waves over a a 10 foot high pier. One has to be anal, hypervigilant to pass muster. And when Jane and I had to resubmit data on what we felt was an invasion into our privacy I associated to this event. Allow me.

In 1999 my daughter was in a horrific car accident. All her limbs were broken or splintered. She was put back together by terrific doctors in an Albany hospital. It took a week or two to stabilize her and then she had to be transported down to New York City for further operations and rehab. The doctors I dealt with informed me that she had improved for the ambulance trip down state, that she was ready to go but when I queried as to time and date they informed me that they did not have a release. In short, the doctors had done a great job but a bureaucrat was holding up the transfer for no apparent  good reason. The doctors were being water-boarded.

I was angry as hell. I got the honcho’s name and called and the “conversation” was simple: “I’ve been told by doctors that Brett is ready to be transferred to downstate and that you are holding it up. Can you tell me on what floor your office is? I want you to know that you should get some security down there because I am coming down right now and I am going to tear your fuckin’ heart out of your chest. You can believe that, you better believe that…”

Half an hour later the release was given. I didn’t realize in my fatherly rage that I could have been arrested.

As I have said for years to those who wish to listen, that if I were 6 feet tall I would have been jailed decades ago. The rage in me is considerable, but I manage it just as we manage reactors. I use words, thank god for sublimination.

So fuck the Patriot Act.

I get scoped next Monday. Of course, I hope all will be well. I am now on that slippery slope that leads to the eternal blackness, as Jane termed it some time back. Futile…resistance is futile…to beg, ask, plead, deal, bargain, barter, weep, pray, dicker for anyone up there, or down there, to extend life’s moments. I get the sense some times metaphorically that I am constantly shuffling cards before a hand is dealt and as I await the hand I am also involved with the shuffle, and I realize that I extend or take my time with the shuffling because I am deluded into believing that it may affect the hand. It may or it may not, but a hand is going to be dealt. And no use asking for a new deck, one can’t take time back or all the wasted years dribbling along the court to a basket that is not there. Take the fuckin hand and be done with it. Anxiety increases before the decision. Take the call and take a look at the hand. Do the best you can. Alas, few of us have mature people around us to show us how to live, or be brave, or courageous. It would have been nice in my case if I had a nurturer who would have explained trhe workings of life’s compass to me. I could manage the voyage, but I sure could have used help to find directionality. So be it.

This blog ends now.

Here is the plan. I live 5 to 7 miles away from the Strip. I get into my Honda with Jane and for lunch we go to the Vegas branch of the Stage delicatessen for pastrami on rye, Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, sour pickles and tomatoes, a round potato knish — we split that; deli french fries, crinkled on their sides and end up with pastry and tea; after that we stroll the shopping areas in the hotels — Lalique, et al. Or one evening we just walk the Strip itself, splashed by neon. I was at Vegas about 2 or 3 years ago and at night it is almost day, just like Broadway and 42nd Street at midnight which Jane and I experienced in 2007 on our way back from Spain.

Everything is now contingent on a house inspection which is at 1A.M. on May 11. If it passes or if what has to be remedied is minor, the house is ours, for many, many details have been attended to or will be attended to before we leave in mid June.  I reflect upon how many apartments, condos, homes I have had in my lifetime and being morose I wonder where these old Hebraic bones will find their rest — who knew Nevada for a boy from Brooklyn? When I was a little boy which is what most men are even in their seventies — that is all right; it doesn’t make you a bad person — I fell in geographic love with Cheyenne, Wyoming. I guess I was doing a product map, those cliched learning experiences in which you put salt or pepper, spices, et al into jelled capsules and glued them onto a map. In any case i received brochures from the chamber of commerce in Wyoming and was intrigued by the horses, country and rodeos. My son has visited Wyoming for a job and he thought it was spectacularly grand. So I may very likely be interred out west where Levi jeans cover the asses of those who dislike Jews, how fitting.

The whole concept of settling down for this wandering Jew is peculiar. How does one settle down? How many cartons have to be sealed and unpacked and distributed throughout the house before one settles down? Do I feel settled down with a driver’s license from Nevada, when my first mortgage bills are addressed properly to my home, when the cable is in and we are billed? Is it the first shopping at a Safeway? Or does settling down take the course of time, perhaps six months or a year. What can settle me down in Nevada? I imagine it comes after the first dust storm of getting all the services working, all the painting and hardwood laid, when the electrician installs our fixtures, when the new carpet from India is put down, or Jane’s piano is refinished, or my books are in book cases and my desk has order to it. All this non-Thoreauvian crap has to be seen to, we urban movers with comet tails of junk and jewelry, watches and computers, the Twitter and Facebook of cyber crap.

Perhaps we arrive at a kind of  inner peace when we realize that life itself, the flow we wade through every single moment, does not exist, for to have inner peace may be a kind of inner rot or decay; how does one manage, if that is the word, continual change, string theory wrapping each of us up into balls of thread? So because of my own needs I push myself into the river of change and I course forward to Nevada with all kinds of good feelings and uneasy trepidations but there is an excitement for the new, hopefully the settled down feeling of the regular and normal, as I age, as I see the end and determine to tap dance upon the devil’s head as he pitchforks into the grave night.

In between packing and labeling cartons “Office” and ” Books,” the air conditioning system broke down and I need a new compressor; the “For Sale” sign has been removed as I am renting the house for at least five years to an elderly couple who are in love with the house; I am writing a continuing story about the Holocaust dealing with fear and flight, working on sections as it pleases me; moving through the stages of buying a new home; and registering the many anxieties that well up in me. I am observing myself as the same old shit arises, swells and recedes.

Tangentially, I refer you to the last two comments on the previous two blogs; apparently I trigger responses in cyberspace. The comments deal with freedom and religion. One I disagree with and one I admire for the struggle revealed.

The last decade has not been a good one for me. I met with adversity of all kinds, legal and emotional, but I have endured. Sometimes I cry to the heavens about a need for peace but I know full well that life precludes peace. Happiness is a like a dog barking, quick, ferocious and short. And, of course, serendipitous. I believe, given what good health I can muster, that I have found my direction and I sail to it. It has taken me all my life, but I sail on — what is life if not rueful, tinged with sadness, dramatically despairing at times.

 I have been dipping into a book about the Kabbalah given to me by a real estate agent in Nevada. It is a system and I have real trouble with systems; it strikes me as it is a kind of Zen for Jews, for the parallels are similar. And like all systems it has “suggestions” to make as to how to live a good life, a fulfilling one. I often find that these systems are like AA, a systematic plan for the addictive; it helps the addictive. It does offer structure. However, I am not addictive, I am an Arabian steed, very wired and neurotically inflamed. I am also an artist, I pompously say, and there is no accounting for artistic behavior. Systems are not my fare.

I have no idea what you, the reader, feels would be the epiphany of a lifetime. Do you have an idea? If you give me ideas that are fibroid tumors of the brain, never mind. It can’t have anything to do with bling nor acquisitive treasures. It has to be substantial, worth a lifetime’s waiting. As you ponder, let me give you quite clearly what I would like to attain? arrive at?  I would like to have a series of awakenings — could be about me? or a significant other? about man? or woman? about existence. The thrill of coming to awareness, whether transcendental or not, would move me deeply. After that series of epiphanies, I would gladly kick off.

I have always had a philosophical cast to my thinking. So other than the pleasures of the body — good food for one, I am often satisfied by soul food. Other than being useful for creating free time and material pleasures of some measure and comfort, money does not control me. I am often generous. It is to be spent. I am also not good at making money, although others are very good at that. Money goes not to those who are smarter, brighter, quicker, cunning or conniving. Money goes to those who are lucky. Hard work does not a millionaire make. It is a grand mystery why jerks and morons are often wealthy — see any weekly New York Housewives to sample that. Or look at Aaron Spelling’s widow and her $150,000,000 house up for sale. A putz of the first order — and homely, to boot. Real wealth is not what we are about in this country — or most countries. Real wealth, in my opinion, is the awareness of self. I told you I don’t know how to make a buck.

As I age my needs grow few. I will end with this listing plucked out of my head: to have the awareness to create stories, novels, all kinds of fiction; to obtain insight when and where I can; to avoid becoming mellow or “wise,” but to stay the course, a thrashing crocodile, slashing away at life, unwilling to be tamed; questioning to the end; reconciling with loved ones alive and now dead; revising memories so that they carry more truth and honesty rather than the patina of prejudice and sweet caramel; to see ! The list is endless. I have been packing these for years into all kinds of mental cartons.

Adieu!