Mathias B. Freese

I’ve put Freud away for a while — Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism , his trilogy swan song at the end of his life, but not for too long. In their place I am rounding up the cattle in my new work, trying to incorporate major changes, which are always difficult, you know, spreading the width between paragraphs to inset new revisions as if a dentist asking to say open wide; it is my recalcitrance to revise with new material or better material, when I feel it is all over with. I may have about 20 or more stories, all new, all untried; however,”Archipelago,” was reviewed by David Herrle, editor of Subtle Tea, to his pleasure, so I feel I still have the chops. Probably by mid March I will hustle up the dough to send it out for publication by Wheatmark, my self-publisher. Jordan will do the cover and I will have completed my  third book in five years; after that, I haven’t the slightest notion of what I will write, not even glimmers on the horizon. I have a plethora of short essays that are very good but who reads books of essays any longer; for me to publish such a collection would truly be vanity publishing. I may go back to science fiction fantasy, or I may try my hand on a kind of Siddharha variation in which I spew “wisdom.” I may buddha myself.

The i Tetralogy is now in my hands with its spanking new white cover with a profile of a German officer on it which my son designed to the pleasure of the publisher editorial staff and to father freese. It is terrific. All white and sparkling severe. Jane and I have worked on the publicity release for the book which has been edited again, a preface deleted and endorsements now included. Working over several months I have come up with my own database which is over 4,000 e-mail addresses here in the the U.S. and overseas. I expect about 1,000 to kickback dead and perhaps maybe 20-30 possible purchases to be made. I am resigned to the book’s fate; I am pleased that it is my own statement of indignation about the Holocaust. I live not for posterity; I live for now and for what pleasures I rake in from what creativity I can muster for kith and kin. The second book, “Working Through the Holocaust,” will build on the same database, I hope. The ironic fact, but not dispiriting to me, is that I cannot give the book away, although I and others consider it a powerful novel. In a very grandiose way I’m in the company of Whitman, Thoreau and a host of others who had to invest in themselves for publication and who sold few copies;  Freud only sold 300 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
 What is criticial for me, what is dead on crucial, is that I write as best as I can and to remove myself from the fray. In fact, the fray doesn’t know me, nor does it need me. In this remarkably decadent culture in which lines wait in the rain for the ghost-written effort of Sarah Palin, in which fewer than 10 people were at the tacky funeral of Orson Welles, the writer-artist must be more than brave — he should revel in that he is not corrupted. Sam Goldwyn once offered Freud a sum for a script to be made in Hollywood; Freud’s answer was brief and direct — a stoic’s response. No, I won’t share what he said. After all, why buy into publishing for the all, the rest, for them, as opposed for writing for oneself in an attempt, admittedly useless, to adumbrate the major themes of one’s life, to lay bare the skeletal anatomy of one’s experience on this species-sad planet. Recent visits to my doctor have made clear that incipient threats to my well-being are active and waiting and my rush to dissect who I am is my defense against the dimming of the light. I write not an awful lot, but what I do I write with the feverish attempt to do as much as I can, mortal soul that I am, before the scythe cuts through my navel.

As I struggle within this mortal coil, beset with new health concerns, anxieties, fears, much the same, worries, I persevere, for I only feel alive when I write and when I make love, both libidinous intensities which are up there with wonderful vistas, perfumes, breezes off the sea and pleasures of being a father. I doubt I will have grandchildren which has never been a concern; I have a son and a daughter and that is all that matters, having lost one daughter, Caryn, at 34, by her own hand. I grab for the testicles of living, I squeeze the orange until the pips squeak. I struggle with age-old neuroses which are the shadows of one’s self, and hopefully dwarfed in later years by my shrinking size. Serenity is not in my future; who wants serenity? I don’t. I like pauses. Stays at oases. Give me existential acts — life spurts, life spasms in which I define myself rather than mystical curlicues wafting up my ass. I am always better in mind than I am in fact. And that is why I write, I think: To excel in my own living, to record the experiences and then to be done with them.

From a literary friend and editor of an online mag a response to “Archipelago,” one of the stories I am working on now for my next book. Beyond the pale, beyond good or bad taste, it just exists, a written splat thrown up into the sky, hanging there insolently. As I try to hit the literary nail dead on in these stories I know I am not hitting them right on, for all is oblique and indirection. I am “field testing” some of them by submitting to journals online and off. The best time is at this moment as I seize the day in revision. No one story in this impending collection has shouted success; I feel as if I am missng something and perhaps I am. I go ahead in any case, what else is there to do if the subject matter is the Holocaust. The editor friend is not indifferent to the subject nor to my story and for that I am grateful. Otherwise I will face indiference which is the rancid secretion of the species at large. I am not complaining, just offering an observation. When I see blubbery and blustery Beck and vacuous Palin, she who wed the living harpoon, I am only convinced of the tragic experiment which is Homo sapiens. Reading Freud of late has only reaffirmed my take on mankind. Watching Haiti on the tube in the grip of anomie, fecklessness is rampant in our technological response — logistics, etc and  bereft of proper priorities. All this catches my eye. Does anyone see the grotesqueness of George Bush (”You’re doing a great job, Brownie) as a participant in assisting Haiti?

Rummaging through my mind is anxiety about my doctor’s appointment after a blood glucose test I had last week. Nevada is in a sorry state with its medical doctors, almost third world in attitude and skills. Often I feel I am in some Roman century while the empire gradually corrodes, deteriorates and mewls. When the Republican party does not lend a hand for the larger goals of a health plan for a nation at this time in history, you can taste the bullshit of conquistadors, rugged indivdualism, Hoover, pre-Roosevelt years and the flinty hardness of the Republican mind which is saturated in the capitalist way of life. We are an inordinately hard and stubborn people who wrap ourselves in the flag, preach the American way and are as intransigent as Southern plantations owners of the pre-bellum South. One election in Massachusetts could upturn the health plan now in congress; it is a slow-winding disaster and I for one can identify with Haitians, for there is no one truly governing. What do you tell the young? I, for one, would share that all societies are essentially corrupt and leave open to them what course one chooses if this is a fact –which it is.

When I examine and explore the Holocaust as I feel and sense it, at times I barely get a glimpse of the complete anomie that it involved. I will try to share this feeling I have knowing beforehand it will be a lame effort. There are strong elements of this now going on in Haiti, a demoralized people with a demoralizing event on their backs, bereft of leadership, making do each day, corrupted and corruptible, with a bleak history to its past. As I slither into the awarness of what it was to have no one come to rescue you, to save  you, to give you food and water, to be herded together and shipped like cargo to unknown destinations, to be despised, hated, decimated with ovens and shooting parties by paramilitary forces, to be asked to wear badges, to realize that the world is indifferent to your plight, that the world does not care, that the world is a hapless mess too busy taking care of its own and that all this horror — and terror, is the by-product of conditioned minds and psychotic national states which only serves to bring home that the species is remarkably wretched, haggard in attitude and quite abusive and vicious in nature. When this feeling coalesces, when this feeling can be realized in some kind of individual awareness, the true existential moment is upon him or her.The sad thing about “humanity” is that we can’t quit — who gets your resignation? And so what is one to do in such desperate mental and psychological straits?

I occasionally wonder about how all our ambitious efforts to acquire wealth, to make a buck, to wage war, to accumulate, to hoard is not some collective monumental displacement of the pre-conscious knowledge that we are a defective species. So that if we shift the burden from awareness of our pock-marked faults we can invest in exterior doings, as if if to reduce the slime we really experience about our existence. I avidly believe that we are working in a collective darkness, if not psychoses, as we muddle and pollute, waste time and effort on a world of externals. I imagine that the Holocaust was a time in which every human characteristic was tested and strained, collapsing morally, ethically and in every which way we call human; that words and teachings and religions proved worthless if not useless; that venality ruled; that brutal behavior became king because it afforded power which is really what this species is about — national, psychological, religious, personal and individual. For me the Holocaust represents not only  the lowest level at which humanity could sink, but reflected what we truly are, given that conditions present themselves to allow the actor to remove his mask. I will not be fooled by the Sistine Chaperl, by the Mona Lisa, by the Bible, by great architecture and great songs and magnificent prose; beneath it all is the pallor of a death-giving species. And in the Holcoaust all this came to the fore, that is why we cannot — thank god– wrestle it to the ground, make it digestible, “sweeten” it. And that is why weaker minds must deny it! The revelation is apocalyptic.

As I have said in the blog about Freud’s pessimism, one cannot walk around with that without drawing sustenance from other sources –family, work and love, is a nice triad to become invested in. With writing I define myself but no one definition can hold any one of us within its parameters. It is re-defining that helps me, at least, to keep steady –” Damn the torpedos, Gridley, full speed ahead!” And there is paradise in the drinking of a good and cold chocolate malted served in a metal server across a marbled counter in a candy store, circa 1948. In the pleasures of life — food, sex, travel, a luxuriant bath we can attain some grip on ourselves, for there is much to despair about. As I learned in my training with clients, try to support the ego if you can. For mental disease is as horrific as a personal holocaust, an internalized self-destructive and abusive horror show — cruelly relentless as a migraine, a protracted neuralgia of the spirit, constricting hope, devastating purpose, crushing intention and devouring self.

I believe that on some levels my writing about the Holcoaust is a sublimated way of writing about the despair I feel as an existent.

Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (Freud  A Life for Our Time) has provided me with the sweeping arc of the man’s life and especially articulated his often abstract if not abstruse theories in lucid prose. I was a mere lad in my twenties when I picked up Beyond the Pleasure Principle; I don’t recall much of anything about the book except that it did excite my intellectual interest, that life is an elliptical journey back to the womb, that the organic returns to the inorganic, the death wish, etc (leave it to me to pick one of his most dense works). Over the years I went on to read Moses and Monotheism, The Interpretation of Dreams, and Leonard da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. In any case I nibbled at Freud  by reading his most accessible books first, although the pleasure principle was like chewing through teflon. On some level I was hooked. Years later I went on to become a therapist. Perhaps serendipity is a kind of repetition compulsion (huh?).

I entered a psychoanalytic institute  in my 40s. I recall a young woman student having a conniption about Freud — mind you, this was a course and school that focused on psychoanlytic psychotherapy — going after his attitudes on woman. What was interesting to observe was the dismissal of what he had written as if his sole life was dedicated to writing about women. The telling thing to mention here was when the instructor asked her if she could share with the class what books she had read that provided this information, she was stopped dead in her tracks. (She never read Freud!) She was sharing partial truths, and “truth”s about Freud without really having read what he did say. The instructor was also bemused by the fact she entered a school that had to focus on Freud to accomplish its end. The point here is that we often share our ignorances about Freud without having read him (think Sarah Palin).

One can dismiss Freud, and one can accurately portray his Victorian and bourgeois attitudes but like Darwin he will not go away. I tend to favor the old man. What I find, rather what I identify with, is his take on people in general, his atheistic approach to Christianity and Judaism, his stoicism — 15 years of cancer in his mouth and the use of an often ill-fitting prosthesis to keep his jaw in place, his relentless pursuit of the truth no matter how it might hurt or repel, his cheerful pessimism on life which is dead on and his scholarship. His knowing and being a Jew in  anti-semitic Vienna yet celebrating Easter and Christmas in secular fashion in his household; however, mind you, he didn’t go and get himself baptized so that he could make his way in the world. (And what can you say about a man who mastered 7 languages by the age of 17.)

As a student I found his theoretical works difficult to absorb; he constantly, I recall, had to be reread; his prose is a series of tied together firecrackers and his writing clear but in some fashion so knotty and intense with such far-seeing complications that I had to work on not being frustrated. His works on theory and technique fit  into a small paperback yet they have to be studied more than read for their implications. And yet he can write terrific prose. He is the first one to use psychoanalytic techniques in assessing art. His take on Michelangelo’s Moses is fascinating and riveting yet accomplished in a short essay. Sir Kenneth Clark shared Freud’s insights about the idealzed women in Leonardo’s paintings. I just had a wild association to Pollack’s painting style as he shits all over the canvas. I am not being reductive here, but it is a kind of intellectual delight, a madeleine, if you will, to apply Freud’s precepts to the world at large and especially to the human race. It is a worldview (Weltanschauung) and one needn’t be rigid about it. It is a context from which to see, such as one’s ethnicity or nation. It is a kind of truth, a kind of seeing, if one keeps one’s eye on not being conditioned. We live in an age and time, Auden called,  ”a climate of opinion” which is esssentially Freud-driven and we take his early truths for granted and oedipally attack big daddy when we can. But he will not go away.

Enthused by Gay’s biography which I highly recommend, I went to EBay and scouted for hardback editions of particular works. I no longer can abide paperback print especially when you are reading Freud. Since I was in therapy between 1968 to 1972 I recall the complete standard edition of Freud’s works in my shrink’s office. At that time all 25 volumes cost about $500. On EBay used and beaten versions can be as high as $1700. There are some individuals no doubt who have read the edition more than once, bless their souls. I decided to select hardback versions put out by decent presses, what else do I have to do as I age into molecular dust. I bought Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism and Totem and Taboo, books that would stoke the bonfires of the Nazis. (The Future of an Illusion  and The Interpretation of Dreams are next. )Two of these I have read, two I look forward to. The books he wrote in his last ten years are a summing up, applying the tenets of psychoanalytic thought to group behavior, mass psychology, religion (a favorite of his) — his Moses book which posits that he was an Egyptian, that there were two Moses, one murdered by the tribes of Israel (are you hooked?) and gives a superior spanking to Christianity on levels it does not want to examine — the Oedipal struggle between the father religion (Judaism) and the son religion (guess who) and what the son needs to do unconsciously. Does anti-Semitism stem from all this?You betcha.

Since the state of Nevada will not allow me to practice my craft without taking state tests and being supervised by those with fewer years of experience than myself, I decided to take a nap and just let it pass me by; America, I love thee. How many times do you have to prove you’re not a virgin? So I will revisit the realms of the master and have masturbatory fantasies. While on the subject if you want a tiny sip of the analytic approach (couch free) I will share an anecdote from my training. An experienced therapist juiced in Freud encounters a young male adult who proceeds to remove his penis from his fly and begins to masturbate; the therapist is a woman if that makes any difference. I heard the tale from her. In any case as he works himself up, she says to him: “Can you try to put that into words?” Words! Yes and yes and yes again. One more anecdote to die for: In a kind of halfway house for “wayward” youth as the old term states it, one of the young teenagers decided to visit the school therapist at her campus home. He knocks on the door and he is invited in; he is asked if he would care for some tea and cookies. He is invited to sit down and talk. All the while he is agitated and unnerved, for it is a response he is totally unprepared for. For, you see, he is as naked as a jay bird. He makes his excuses and leaves. Like Adam with hand over crotch, he exits Eden. Agreed, of course, not all shrinks would handle things this way — nor I. However, there is much to be said for the analytic approach. All of life is an expression, our expression, to put things into words or to act upon the world. Choose your flavor; I became a writer, others harpoon whales. We all need to make the unconscious conscious, a working definition of psychotherapy that has Freudian salt in it, like a good lox.

Since I am beginning to have medical issues, I am working on my fears, my anxieties. Freud provides me with some courage and substance. He had a dark view of humanity, yet he enjoyed life; he did say once that life is essentially two themes — work and love: not a bad assessment.  In fantasy I can only imagine what telling, riveting and perspicacious essays he would have written about the Holocaust — he lost several sisters in the concentration camps. He was not jaded about men and women, nor did violence in the Great War take him back; nor did the Nazis surprise him with their barbaric viciousness. He had learned all he needed about humanity with an analysand and a couch, quite remarkable.You can make the case that his pessimism was a defense, if you choose to; be reductive if you wish. I believe he was, like Darwin, a great observer and humanity reveals itself very well if you are silent and look as if for the first time. After all, as he states in his autobiographical study  childhood sexuality has been around since Cro-Magnon but no one took a real look ( except, as he would grant, the exceptional artists)– human beings do not want to know! Given what he has taught, our inhibitions may very well fray and there goes the planet. I remember a cartoon that has stayed with me for decades. An infant is in a crib with a mobile hanging over his mattress, and In his chubby little hand he has nuclear missiles and he is waving them to and fro. The species is in arrested childhood. Good luck!

His pessimism took no prisoners, no expectations were made and especially no judgments on behavior were given — his theories were not religions. I like his pessimism  because it makes me aware as Freud rubs my eyeballs with sandpaper. I’d rather be shaken into awareness.

It is 8:15 or so, Nevada time (Tuesday). I’m dressed, and Jane is “getting ready.” Cameras are at hand, papers for signing at the chapel are about. We need to pick up her corsage at the florist before we head out to the Chapel on the Corner, a nondescript little hut on a nondescript Nevada street near a courthouse. What can you say about the street’s name, “Basic”? (How did I ever end up in Nevada?) Jane, as always, is in good spirits for she is a very optimistic person and given her neanderthalish family it is always remarkable how individuals manage to surmount their adversities without even being aware of the malignancies. Who of us ever realizes the real context of our early lives or our present living? An imaginative old age seens to be an answer in which one reflects back. This morning I am thinking about my 69 years and the circumstances that have made me. No methodology and no analysis can do it justice. I am not bewildered by my life but I am not a little astonished at what I have and what I have not made of it. As I wrote to my son, Jordan, last night, who is about to quit his job and enter a risky journey to reclaim his young life and to precipitate a personal adventure, for he is fed up with the grind and how this culture, any culture, drives you mad, he is entering “the unexplored country” (Hamlet).

It is Wednesday. The marriage went off without a hitch, although jerk forgot to put film in his retro camera (just love that old man anxiety); however, enough shots were taken with Jane’s digital and we videotaped ourselves at the chapel as well as interviewed one another when we got home which is hilarious to watch. It has been a kind of tradition since we toured Spain and Portugal in 2007 to end our day with a mutual interview about the day’s events. It reminds me now since I’m up to my throat in reading Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (really good, masterly, and very lucidly presented) of the “day’s residues” which serve to make up the manifest aspect of dreams. In any case a few comments about the minister and ceremony.

Kathy, the woman minister, made a simple non-denominational service free of most cant and religiosity which is what we asked her to do. Bright, intelligent, a Southern woman, she was going to helicopter to the Grand Canyon after our ceremony. A 45 minute trip, eight hours round trip by car, she has been performing marriages there for several years. We paid for a witness who was from the East coast and so I spoke East coast to him and we got along. We both miss pastrami sandwiches. It was a light hearted ceremony, brief, short, friendly with good cheer among us all. As is my way, I kibitzed with Kathy which is my way of bringing people into my circle so that we interact in a more friendly way and it worked. Kathy who performed the service and Sheila the florist who made Jane’s delightful corsage made the day smoothly flow by like a meandering, lazy and bucolic river.

We spent the late morning at a local casino losing money, my most recent vice, and having dinner out at a local eatery which we favor. We will honeymoon at the new CityCenter on the strip which is a light year away from the other theme-based hotel/casinos — New York, New York, Excalibur and the like. We will be staying at the Aria for a few days, relishing the magnificent shopping and the resplendent art work interlaced throughout this hotel and the entire complex — Henry Moore, Maya Lin, et al. Imagine Fifth Avenue shopping and the Plaza and you have a taste of it all, 8.5. billion worth. Jane and I spend our days writing, computing, her preparing for the next semester and my rewriting  a book of short stories to be published this spring. I married a very special woman who has the graceful elan vital of a gazelle and she has married a grumpy, ornery but not a mean-hearted bull elephant. And they lived happily ever after — Jane has mentioned to me that in fairy tales we never have a look in or at or an eyeful or earful of what those days between the prince and princess are like after they wed.

I’ll keep you posted.