Mathias B. Freese

I am hard put  to explain Ann Coulter’s race hatred as recently expressed to a Muslim woman student in Canada in which she suggested if the student could not get a cab she should take a camel. (Of course, in a recent column by her Coulter wraps herself in the issue of free speech but does not mention her own vile words — Ann as victim.) The venom in this skanky woman is volatile and vituperative and she revels in it. To grossly generalize, I’ve observed on Fox News (Views?) a steady stream of very good-looking women who are often attorneys expressing the most conservative views imaginable; it is as if they feel their personal beauty can cover up their ridiculous positions. And it works. Is this something I need to learn about women and their sense of beauty and what it does and does not allow them to get away with? Is this a kind of entitlement? Is it to assume that only ugly thoughts come from ugly-looking people? How shallow of me.

I am hard put to comprehend Bill O’Reilly; he is smug, condescending, the classic high school history teacher who is insufferable, narrow and basically rude and who feels that riding roughshod with people is to “challenge” their positions. He tried his repertoire with Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York City, and it failed. Weiner maintained his composure, kept repeating that Billy-Poo had his facts wrong and then went on to give him a corrective with hard core facts and details; O’Reilly was annoyed and continued to interrupt him until Weiner pulled a classic response. He became dead silent, turned his face at an angle as if he were looking faraway and waited until O’Reilly finished fulminating. On the next day’s show O’Reilly in response to a viewer’s question about the Weiner go-to put a spin on it in his no spin zone, as he calls it, saying that if he was any harder in his questioning he would have been taken into custody. He is a blind human being. Reality is in the eyes of the beholder and Weiner treated him as the insolent little pup he was, yet O’Reilly wraps himself up in the flag and marches on. He is very much the street bully. Proof once again that education does not deter one from being a putz. In fact, it often strengthens the very rigidity it strives to liberalize.

It sustains my belief to always question authority, and not to be impressed with wealth, things, college degrees. et al. As a therapist I have met men and women brighter than myself, wealthier, shrewder, extremely gifted and essentially fucked up. So what good is it all? At a recent meeting with fellow writers one woman introduced herself and then told us that she was a college professor and I don’t know why but in her giving that data to me I felt at some level something I can’t articulate here, but it sounded to me intuitively as if she was blowing her own horn. I said, imp that I am, “Sorry to hear that.” I associate to another instance in which a PhD asked me what college I went to and what degrees I had. I told her I would not tell and that she evaluate me on the basis of what she experiences about me — on a vacation in Spain. I never took Dale Carnegie’s course — Americana 101.

Glen Beck who runs around in sneakers on his show, using a chalkboard to present his “ideas” and “associations” to his “ideas” is a highly conditioned autodidact who lives his life between exclamation points. He is the classic example of the individual who is only as good as the last book he read or the last quotation that tickled his fancy. I associate to a high school  principal I invited into my class, alas, to speak on any subject of his choosing. What was sadly startling was his observation that on his nightstand he had a compendium of famous quotations. (His practice was to read one or two  before bed. Oy!) He went on to share his favorites with the class. I thought to myself about the dire emptiness of the man — how about reading a book by Twain or Voltaire who amused your sensibilities, banal as they are?. In retrospect I was dealing with a male Sarah Palin

Beck opined that he chose to be a Mormon because one of his children felt comfortable in the church. Need I write more? He is amazingly conditioned by his rearing, his emptinesses, his opinions, so utterly outer-directed that his pose to the world is that he is a deep and reflective thinker which he is not by any means. In fact he does not think. What he does is digest data, reassembles data, avoids metabolizing data into coherence and then spews it out. Perversely, outlandishly, he is the master of the half-truth. The dust has to settle before one realizes it is all televised bullshit. He is the face in the crowd, the man who nestles beneath Hilter’s outstretched Nazi salute. He portrays himself as a feeling, selfless human being, a patriot, warning his fellow Americans about socialism and how we are slowly losing our freedoms. His greatest fear, I believe, is that Darwin is right on. He cannot accept that he is the end result of evolution. I don’t blame him. Apparently if evolution gives us this, what next?

I am also hard put by the “antics” of Sean Hannity who introduces Obama as the “annointed one.” I once saw Hannity give a priest (I’ve seen more priests on his show over the months than I’ve seen in a conclave) a difficult time because the priest was advocating the denial of communion over some issue. Hannity challenged the priest. In short he was asking beneath the words that if I am a good Christian, which he most likely is, that the priest had a lot of nerve to deny him communion (see Freud’s Totem and Taboo to discover what that’s about) if he disagreed with him. Hearing this, I felt for the moment that Hannity was capable of free-thinking. I was wrong. Immensely indoctrinated and conditioned by his church, dogma and doctrine, essentially there is generally a judgmental taste to his political opinions which smack of Christian or Catholic values.  Reeking of Aquinas, Paul, John, and the others, he cannot put away his theodicy and see clearly, but that is exactly what theology does — it blinds.

I once asked a friend if he believed in werewolves, vampires, ghouls, pre-destination, voodoo and all the rest. Laughingly, he dismissed all that and asked me what I was getting at. I then asked him if he believed in ghosts. He said no. Did he believe in life after death? He doubted that. I asked if he believed in resurrection and he froze. At this point there was no reasoning. It was an act of faith. To this atheistic Jew, religion is ridiculous, a monumental fairy tale told by mankind to delude mankind. Freud argued in a famous sentence or two that until a man or woman gave up this neurotic wish there was no freedom at all; that the mature human being puts away the exalted father as an illusion.

As I keep stepping back further and further from humanity, as I keep observing it, I fear I may trip and simply fall off the ends of the earth.

Many if not most of the stories in my present effort are told from first person. One or two are told from the omniscient point of view, author as all knowing, god-like, Jehovah, commonly known as third person point of view. Rest assured that there are library shelves heavy with teaching guides on how to accomplish first and third person, distinguishing all the literary aspects for the learning writer as to which is the best authorial stance to take. I am not particularly enamored of third person storytelling although a good part of me would like to be better at it. I see this as a “failing,” but I relish the first person tale because of its immediacy, its happening in the present, its “now-ness.” I have long accepted that I will never be a “significant” writer for too much of my life has been spent living the life of a worker, father, parent who had to put aside whatever creativity I had to take care of my family (boo hoo). I have no complaints about that; I wrote when I could. I was never an academic or a literary person but someone who had his song to sing and I have done the best I could at it. I came from lower middle-class shit and I did my best to emerge onto land where I spent too many years just croaking rather than moving on from the slime. I barely escaped being blue-collar.

I favor telling my tales from first person because the tales themselves are disguises for all the issues that have assailed me over these decades. Short essays are particularly attractive to me because I can exercise my philosophical bent of mind which after all these years I attribute to a romantic distortion of a kind — a search for answers, I suppose, rather, a search for better questions to ask. I like the epiphanous essay or story.  (Winesburg, Ohio readily comes to mind. Anderson was one hell of a writer.) As I look over the manuscript I’m working on I can detect some old flaws, a kind of ornateness of style, repeating images more than once as if the reader was a dunce and could not get it the first time around and a certain tendentiousness. So when I go about editing I try to cut out this dead wood repetitiveness. Unfortunately, as I am experiencing it now, the entire story may have to be thrown away for it lacks drive or life. The vibrancy has been killed by the need to advocate or “rub” it in.

My life has a strong dose of striving to it. For a while I thought it was a need to transcend, as I might sprout wings and ascend to a heaven I don’t believe in, don’t want and find ludicrous. It was striving, a need to overcome, to excel, to be intellectually ambitious — or in plain talk, a need to be loved or cherished. I think it is best that whatever insights I have into my childhood and young adulthood come to me now as I age and reflect, because at an earlier time I think I wouldn’t know what to do with these self-clarifications. At a time in my very early adolescence I thought nocturnal emissions were given off by street buses late at night. I was a child of benign neglect but reared in basic and honest ways — it was insufficient, alas. I struggled to learn, that is for sure, to get out of the economic morass I found my family in. I lived in city projects — they were relatively safe in the Fifties. I had no awarness that we were poor — I ate enough, clothes were good and new, I did not suffer from want. I suffered from a lack of mothering and fathering. I have made up for these emptinesses as best as I could, but second hand clothing is not as good as newly bought duds. In my writing is all of this, in my writing is empathy for me, perhaps sympathy for you, but essentially my tale of woe as I have lived it. No matter what I write I am deeply involved in it. And when I write about the Holocaust i really am writing, in part, about my life which to a degree has been a holocaust of a kind. Deaths and more deaths parade about me, estrangement from relatives and a child, loss of a daughter to suicide, divorces and personally unresolved issues that linger to this day.

It is mildly ironic that I favor first person, because I am the first person in my life. First person is tactile, in your face, authentic, present, here and now. At times as I revisit these stories for editing I am only burnishing their skins while a reworking or rearrangement of the structure of the stories might be more useful — but I resist doing that. Here the writer, me, is struggling with the writer, me, about adding another character or writing from the third person point of view. I see the resistance, it is palpable. Perhaps you have experienced this as well when writing a story, essay or paper. You just have had enough of it and to considerably rework it is a pain in the ass, regardless whether such an effort might improve the very story itself. I know as students we have all faced that, especially when new data for a paper upset the whole applecart which was your original theme. Consequently I am at the point with these stories that I may just have to let them cook a while longer.

The realization that most of these stories about the Holocaust are in first person is troubling, as if I can’t tell them from another perspective or unconsciously I choose not to do so. When you write about the Holocaust I believe that one must feel in ways that almost stretch or, in fact, go beyond empathy into some other telling — and compelling — space. At times I can walk in a survivor’s shoes, for my imagination is very good — very good at that. But imagination does not a story make. Here craft and art take over. Here I struggle to put the gem into facets.

So I fritter away my time tinkering at the stories knowing full well that in many instances they have not become realized. What is one to do? I will wait. And it will come to me or it will not.

I came to the garage in order to live deliberately. I brought out two boxes that contained manila folders filled with the efforts of years of writing, teaching, being a parent and father, as well as a husband. Here were data and sheeted papers that recorded several decades — birthday cards from Rochelle, a letter to my deceased daughter, Caryn, which makes me cringe because of its immaturities, emotional trinkets and trivia. I threw out tax returns more than 5 or 6 years old, sometimes hesitating about that as I am conditioned by Big Brother, but I fought that off. Amazingly, what control is inserted into us like squirting jelly into donuts at a bakery. Appalling to contemplate. I came across rejection slips with an occasional note by an editor which was encouraging so I kept that morsel, needy as I was as a young writer — The Paris Review, The New Yorker, to wit. I shiver at the lack of skill I had at that time and yet the bigger the magazine the kinder they were. I did not toss the rejections. Folders were dated, often with the time I had completed a story or essay as if I was preparing years ahead for my sashay into the garage to look over the passing years. If I came across six copies of a published story or article, I threw away three overriding the younger feeling that I need keep at least six copies. “Simplify! Simplify! Thoreau argued.

When Rochelle died on 3 July 1999 I kept the gruesome autopsy records by the coroner. I recall reading it then and it was horrific but I felt, I needed, to read it. I recall the coroner’s description of Rochelle’s “pendulous breasts,” and I remembered them as well; his description of a minor bruise on her chin which I observed through the window of a viewing room when she was covered by a sheet except for her lovely face. I tore the document up. I had no longer a need for that. This coming July will make eleven years since she died at the wheel on a perfect July day. She had fallen asleep. I thought about 1940 and I thought of 1951, for in those eleven years I had grown as a child, conditioned by culture and ethnicity, “reared” with benign neglect, untouched physically by both parents, never read to!! and within that time all the tracks I would follow for the rest of my life were laid down. And now it is eleven years since Rochelle has died and I realize how many lifetimes are in eleven years: learning to ride a two-wheeler, hearing my parents have sex. And yet her memory flourishes — when I am very stressed, when a critical medical examination is about to happen, I pray to the only god I register — Rochelle. I need no Pope nor rabbi. The documents are thrown away now because the fear that lest I forget was a false fear, for I will never forget. Perhaps authentic resurrection is the one in which we “die” in this mortal life and yet resume our living.

Observations of me as a teacher by administrators were kept, although I threw one away by my Italian principal who thought he was Don Corleone, as if I must kiss his signet ring. You don’t ask this Jew to do that. Jews do not bow. I kept the others as a testament to how very good I was at a job that I detested, although teaching an idea was always comfortable for me. I kept a small notebook in which students from the alternative high school I ran gave me their parting comments about their experience with the school and with me. I find it hard now to connect their faces with their names, for that was 31 years ago. Many of them are now in their fifties. I read personal notes and letters to me. One stands out by a student who went on to Harvard and who I had upbraided because he was a pompous ass, just out of junior high school, basted by his “teachers” about his writing skills, overly-praised. He couldn’t write shit and I told him so, in finer words — “Unacceptable” I had slashed across the top of his paper. And when he pestered me about changing a grade on this essay which got my goat, I tore off a piece of paper and wrote the title, Think on These Things by Krishnamurti, telling him to read it and then come back to me. He never did. Well, he kept that slip of paper and he began to read this book and other works that were existential and so on. One day he sent me a copy of the letter he wrote to the Admissions office at  Harvard. It recalled his negative experience with me at first and then went on to say how I cut down his hubris and moved him to really learn. The last line was a corker — he still carried that note I gave him in his wallet.

Time has settled upon the rummaging so what moved me years ago does not move me so much, although I can see all of it, or most of it, with equanimty and sometimes with pleasure for what I had accomplished. I see decades before me which contained so much struggle, some of my essays reeking with personal neuroticisms and surface rage without the control of the writer in charge of his material. Writing from the very beginning was a major conduit for my despair and depression. There were years of rage and now my writing is more of indignation — I associate to Kazantzakis: “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” The exclamation point says it all. Running my mind through all this memorabilia like running my hand through my hair, is all in the passing gesture, now silken for me, for time has eased some of my concerns. I realize I was always the recorder in my family. I was always the memorizer. I was always the observer. And it took therapy and working on myself — alone, to reach the point in which I act upon this world, I trust my self, I dread the paranoia of groups and collective responses; I revel in my own personal ornariness; I leave books and writings for my family and for those others who may find me of interest, or note. I excel at doing for myself what no other human being can or ever will or ever can imagine to do so. I chisel out those lucky moments of awareness by myself, alone, for I need only myself to reveal myself.

I pose special questions to myself: what would give you pleasure or satisfaction? what would make your life so much more meaningful for you? What can you say about that? Can you address that critical issue? Rummaging has brought this to me. I believe that material things, although fun and pleasurable, could not give me anything for they are ephemera. All that is temporary fun. I feel that if I had a moment of real awareness, an epiphany of a kind, this would give me the greatest satisfaction of all. How to go about that is a philosopher’s intention. There is nothing on this planet, Cabo, The Louvre, Vegas, a Rolls, a great love affair, a great adventure, getting into a size 34 pants once again, a child’s marriage, being a grandparent, nothing of that can give me what I need, which is to enter into a moment — I am not greedy — in which I feel and experience congruity with myself. The world can go to hell. I am the world, I fully am aware of that. I am the unverse to every goddam cell and vein in my overly complex body. I will never see my liver, gratefully, and my liver will never bring me fruit and bounty in obeisance. I have come and I will go. I am at the point in which I wilt. The glory of each day is in its being and for that I am joyous. All this is in rummaging. I advocate you do that after 40 years. I will stop here, perhaps to continue with this later on.