Mathias B. Freese

I decided a few months back to “celebrate” my 70th birthday with my son in Chicago. I have no idea what 70 is except it is vexing, annoying, troublesome and has arrived as predicted on the wings of tempus fugit. I humorously detest even saying the age out loud, as if to do so would immediately lead to my being Miranda-ized. One thing for sure is that internally I live the cliche that I am really 40 or so; yes, that is true; the character remains the same. The body decays, the spirit is alive and well. The curmudgeon still lives. The greatest sadness of my life is the estrangement between my daughter and myself; I have not seen nor spoken to her in 7 years. The reasons are too complex to go into here and quite frankly none of the reader’s business. I state the fact because it would have been significant for me as a father to be surrounded by my son and daughter at a family gathering, and such a small family we are. I will deal with that anguish as I have dealt with anguish all my life, by the ways and means each of us deal with individual pain. My pain, reader, and how I deal with it, I will not share here, either. It is only a blog. I can only say as I schlep off this mortal coil it would be of meaning to me to have hearth and kin about. My daughter’s ungrounded rage for me  will not abate, for change itself frightens her. I move on.

We spent four days in Chicago, visiting my son’s apartment, seeing his workplace, a digital production studio which is highly complex and varied — we played ping pong, Jane and I, as Jordan finished up a task, staying in the oldtime but very well situated Palmer House (Monroe Street), a block’s throw from The Art Institute of Chicago (splendiferous); the Adler Planetarium which is on a spit of land jutting out into Lake Michigan, affording a striking view of Chicago, although the show itself was a bore, alas; the Rookery, a small gem designed by Frank Lloyd Wright which is an entranceway and staircase to a granite made skyscraper encrusted like a Tiffany stone in a Tiffany setting within one of the oldest skyscrapers of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art which had a spanking new exhibit of stabiles and mobiles by Alexander Calder all  spritely, refreshing and not at all somber and beautifully set out in a large exhibition hall; much of modern art turns me off as I feel it is pretentious, showy, consumed in the artist’s narcissism and not pleasurable, joyous or giving to the beholder; we have a six-foot mobile hanging from our living room ceiling which gives us pleasure and is called “Archeopteryx” named after that transitional bird-mammal fossil. When I was 17 or18 I fashioned  a mobile out of wire hangers for a school project and so even then Calder had entranced.

Walking Chicago’s streets within the first or second day made me very aware of the panhandlers and the disabled if not deformed trying to cadge money from pedestrians. One man in a wheel chair had legs so thin that they looked like my wrists were attached to his groin; he skittered along the street and I returned and gave him a dollar as it was too much for me. I will not go into a rant that speaks to begging or the helpless in our streets and the failure of this society to deal with that; more than that, I was trying to imagine what he ate for lunch, if he had money for lunch, where did he “live,” and what were his  quarters like. I imagined all kinds of things but what I didn’t do was dismiss him out of mind. One man came up to Jane and I while we waited for a downpour to subside and gave us a complicated spiel in well-articulated Americanisms from which we extracted ouselves; one young man asked us and others to give him money to buy a hamburger at the McDonalds behind where we were sitting on a street bench; some woman took him up on that and escorted him to the store. It rolled about in mind to what degree I would beg or panhandle for food and I came up with no good answer except the feeling that I would not like being so pressed  and so destitute in a country so abundant in food. I just had a virulent association: I Hate Republicans, for they represent to me the callousness, the indifference, the coldness, the lack of charity as a group; and the second association had to do with good old capitalism, that of Adam Smith and Charles Dickens; and then I associated to people in general and that association I share not.

So, architecture, sights, street people, imprinted themselves on my mind’s eye. On the last day of the trip we had lunch together in an Italian restraurant (not bad) and we all talked for an hour or so, my hearing Jordan slightly open up and discuss his life, his art, his movie in progress, sharing his self, humoring me at times (all fathers are apparently dodos), revealing his worries, and so on, all for my knowing and not yours, reader. We left hours later for the airport out of Midway and it was delayed by two hours and finally we arrived in Vegas in that supercharged heated and very grumpy air, flopping into our beds about 3 A.M. As I flip back through the new memories I see jane and I videotaping our responses in the hotel room which we now do as a new  marital tradition, our sense of place, restaurants, people we encounter, our overall impressions of events. We will complete that half hour tape today; it is a surprisingly good technique for we unburden ourselves of all things fleeting and memorable — such as losing our luggage for a an hour or so until it arrived in another plane and how I was suprised by Jane’s having put her camera and best earrings from a trip to Portugal in her luggage rather than in the carryall for the plane itself; no, I did not have a fit (or did I?) but I am 70 and I should behave and act my age — fuck that!

All is well, all is safe, and the trip was very, very good; if you have a child, it is always poignant to see them do so well — apartment, income, spiffy new car, goals, ambitions, desires as you know you are in maximum fade. Children cannot abide thinking about their parents having great sex — and they cannot abide thinking about the increasing mortailty of a parent as he ages (but they must). Love and death, the great carousel of life. Stretch up and out on the stirrup as the horse moves up and down gracefully and go for the brass ring!

I’m breaking the weak rule I keep for myself, no more than one blog per week. When the unconscious percolates up into awareness and the brewing bubbles burst revealing an idea or feeling to write about, then there’s no stopping that. The heat of the Nevada desert is insufferable; one runs errands and then beats it back to the air conditioning. Unlike a more temperate climate, it goes for months without rain, of any kind. As a new Yorker I could easily describe the varieties of rain in the big city between the East and Hudson  rivers — light drizzle, heavy downpour, trickle, impending rain, threatening rain, fog-ridden moisture, dew on the tips of one’s shoes; torrents and then buckets, all knowable to  the average city slicker. Jane wakes up to the stark and glaring sunshine and speaks to the climate gods for a cloudy day, one in which she can dwell in the shadows. Shadows and inclement weather make for good writing, no doubt.The trouble here in Henderson is that there is no adversity climatically speaking, it is all the same and interminably boring which reflects something of the human population hereabouts. (Readers of this blog will understand my seemingly interminable rant against the species.) What is missing is variety. I wonder if the lack of climatic stimulation may impact upon the citizenry, creating a dull, flat affect.

Sometimes as the heat broils my cortex I wish I were in some Caribbean or Latin American country, to spend the rest of my years gazing out on the BP free sea. After all, at 70, what do I have left,  10 to 15 years at the most declining into decrepitude, hearing loss, cataracts and macular degeneration? Since many of my peers — celebrities, newscasters, actors, Ringo Starr at 70 — are aging I try to ask myself what is it I need to do to prepare for my great swan dive into existential nothingness.Three questions in a row and I confirm my Judaism. As I wrote to someone recently, I hang between carpe diem and tempus fugit. (If I could say that in Yiddish, it would have an earthier and more graphic effect –anyone out there  who can supply me with the equivalent?). I was fantasizing about Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador for a week or so but I was informed that Medicare cannot be used there. That was an eye-opener, for apparently many well-intentioned ex-pats find out that pension and social security checks can be forwarded, but not Medicare, That is to be found in U.S. territories or protectorates — the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, whatever. So now I am limply gathering info about Puerto Rico. I chuckle at Americans — and their “tastes” on such a show as International House Hunters, who venture into Mexico and fall for the beauty of the land, disregarding cartels, and the lack of an infrastructure (we call this well-schooled dentists, doctors and surgeons). It is a kind of blindness in search of pleasure. So what else is new? Perhaps we stepped off the curb into oncoming traffic when Jefferson offered us “the pursuit of happiness.” He should have known better; to pursue happiness is to end up with your nose up your butt. Silly founding father — take that, Glenn Beck.

And sometimes as the heat broils my home and this Jewish lobster within, I think about going back to my practice as a therapist, that is, part time. All the conflicts and issues that creates is something to behold — but I do miss the intensity of a session, the search for a better question on my part, the struggle to understand the other self a few feet away, that taxing of one’s feelings and emotions, the stretching of one’s reasoning powers, the ability to offer choices and show the client how to use choices as a way to humanly go on in life, the need to have after some years of practice a kind of wisdom, a good nature, a supportive and encouraging self, a goodness about one’s self; of being brave and courageous as a therapist, to share that knowledge; to metabolize depression that pours from the patient and to change it into  a kind of feeling talc, gently falling to the floor, and a whole host of other feelings and sentiments and emotions. I think about that and then I go take a nap. It passes.

However, I am clear to myself about why I think this. It is a giving; it is challenging; it makes for growthbetween patient and therapist — it is growth; it is existential; it is meaningful; it is real and most of all, if you have guts and grit, it can be authentic! I feel I am at the peak of my creative powers but there is no call for this. Indeed, Nevada puts up all kinds of barriers to practicing, since I am from another state. The credentialing process is a pain in the ass; all the credentials that testify to your professionalism are disregarded here, in this rather stupid and arch-conservative state. I bridle at the thought of being supervised by a 35 year old. A former instructor of mine is 87 and he is still practicing in New York City, recently writing me for information as he is working on a new article. To practice psychotherapy is to keep one intellectually alive, for it is the impossible profession and because of this endlessly fascinating, much like fiction writing. It is the best defense against dementia. I get all worked up about this “unjustness” but then I take a nap and it too passes.

What I just observed in this self-moment is that most if not all my wishes are not retroactive or attempts at repair or reparative; I seek not to go back, although I have my rueful and remorseful moments.  Whether I did or did not do my best as a father and husband and human being is lost in the folds of time cascading through the voids of space, evermore. I wish for things and opportunities in the present, for time instructs me that I have no future but this very moment. Sometimes I wish I could “shape” the immediate present into something I would not have to siesta through. And I think I know what that is. It has been given to me the need in this autumnal part of my life to just write — believe me, blogging isn’t writing; blogging is practice for the real writing that lies ahead or — perhaps tomorrow or the next day. With that, adieu.

 I don’t know if you have observed but we have become shabby as a country; the American people absolutely deserve what they are getting, for they have voted in the rascals. Indeed, we are the rascals. I have no faith in politicians but I have a greater lack of faith in the American people — and a great fear of them as well.

White men, lawyers, WASPS wrote the Constitution and it is a perfect lawyer’s document which protected economic vested interests (See Charles Beard’s The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution )– and racist: the slave is three-fifths of a white man for purposes of representation, etc. Yeah, yeah. I know the come back lines. I don’t read the books Glenn Beck reads and only a decade or two ago he would never have been allowed to drive a Good Humor truck much less preach his Mormonisms filtered through his racism and ignorance. There are those who learn history from him, who esteem him and they are fast becoming in charge, as far as I am concerned. If I had the werewithal I would leave this country, for it reeks of things foul and fetid. Hatred pours in large quantities from each of the stars in our flag.

I have observed that Newton Minow’s comment about television decades ago is still of worth, that it was “a vast wasteland.” It still is. Anyone watching American television abroad might conclude that we are a fairly polluted people, reeking of materialism, the fat cats of the world; we find it hard as a nation to look at ourselves closely or in any other perspective except positive. I feel we are a society in decline. Years ago, many years ago, the historical bromide was that the American people eventually catch their wind and do the right thing; that this was a remarkable trait of us as a people. Well, that is over. The American people have acted as dullards for decades now and if you have observed this empire of ours, yes, it is an empire, we  have been in continual wars up to this date. Sssshh! Don’t tell anyone. In fact, we easily feel free about labeling war criminals in other nations but there is no doubt in my mind that George Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals and that no one will ever bring charges against them; that in 25 years we will have revealed historical knowledge about how our dear Constitution was sullied by their behaviors. Our textbooks most likely will expunge any mention about the cultural genocide we wreaked against the American Indians, for we must sell textbooks and the grand state of Texas, because of its buying power, tells publishers what they want in their social studies textbooks. The publishers capitulate.Talk about corruption.

In a side note: when I began to teach social studies more than 30 years ago, I came to the classroom constipated with a lot of historical knowledge, weighted with all the historical works of note I could manage to read and absorb, for I had majored in American History. In a book by Carl Becker, one of our most eminent historians, about the Declaration of Independence, he made the very capable case that it was essentially a piece of propaganda meant for the digestion of the American colonies; that some of the charges against King george were meretricious, and so on. He had done the historian’s task — he told the truth dispassionately. In class, in my naivete, I had mentioned that it was propaganda and before the week was out one family asked that their child be allowed to transfer out. I told the unvarnished truth and for that I was not punished, but a child was denied what I feel is still a very valid truth. Read his book! We don’t want to hear, we don’t want to know — ask any witness to the cattle cars heading to Auschwitz.

All societies are essentially corrupt, Krishnamurti said a long time ago. And his generalization is spot on, all countries except the United States, that is. Only in this country might we say that such and such is “unAmerican.” Do they say in Europe something is “unFrench” or unGerman”? It is as if the very language we employ reveals our obstinancy and blindness. However, let me be gracious — since all societies are essentially corrupt because all societies are composed of human beings and human beings are a very dark species, indeed. What is insufferable in this nation is the traditional trait of our feeling superior, as if we are the coming of the lord, our messianic impulse if you will. The same old shit that the Catholic Church has used to declare itself as the successor to Judaism (super succession or replacement theology), that for me to be better you must get worse, for me to succeed you must fail, all emblematic of human nature and society, all societies, at large. You know it is really damn hard to get off this planet in one piece, intact and whole. I imagine this is the “up” side of dying, for this living lunacy dies — the thought of heaven with others of my ilk is just too much a fantasy for me to entertain for even a moment.

About a year ago Jane and I met a Holocaust survivor whose name, for my purposes, will be Josef Vekkony. An author of a ghost-written book about his experiences during the Holocaust, he lectures around Henderson, Nevada and elsewhere. He is probably past seventy and is a retired businessman. Something of a celebrity here, I now view him as the Holocaust “expert,” used by jewish agencies when next faced with an oubreak of anti-Semitism. All this back story is necessary as I was readily repelled when he gave me his business card which listed him as a Holocaust survivor — that was a new one on me. In fact, shortly after I wrote an extended short story called “Shoah Business,” exploring in fiction the correspondence he and I might have over this issue. I was really annoyed by his aggrandisement. I never published it. I believe Josef Vekkony is oblivious to what he is and what he does — welcome to the world.

I recall giving him my book and receiving his which I read. I never heard from him again, although I expected he might read my book and get back to me on it; but that was not to be and I soon gave up on that wish. During the year there was a scene in a local high school in which a gym teacher made remarks that essentially denied that the Holocaust had ever occurred. Local jewish groups got involved;  Mr. Vekkony was called in to talk to a large group and gave what I imagine is his silver bullet speech. I caught that talk on YouTube and was appalled in how he dealt with the students. After all, he is not a teacher but some of his techniques were ridiculous and more than ineffective — more on that later on. (I was so aggravated by his performance that I spent time drafting a letter to a local newspaper about it; it went unpublished.) Apparently he is the local Jewish fireman on call to put out anti -Jewish blazes. If you want to read my take on the Holocaust, see “On the Holocaust,” in Pages on this site; I gave it to a group of survivors and military personnel at an air force base in Arizona, about three years ago.

I am offended by Shoah business, the subtle and blatant kind. Enough said! On Sunday 27 June I received this e-mail from LinkedIn.

Matt,

I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.

-Josef

All the latent anger emerged. Jane and I chatted. She knew my anger and suggested that I may want to play the game, that is, connect up with him, that my book on the Holocaust might get some readership and whatever else the politically correct way might do for me. Jane  presented an option, but she knew that was not the way I would go. I sent this e-mail.

Mr. Vekkony: I read your book; you did not read mine or you did not respond; in any case, I have significant differences in how you go about presenting yourself. A Holocaust survivor is not an occupation which you apparently feel it is. Here we part. I will not become part of your network which only serves to advance your own narrow needs.

There is a curious synchronicity here; the other day I really considered to dispose of Vekkony’s book as I had enough of him as well (in trash now). The book reminded me of his narcissism if not grandiosity. in any case, after a year or more, he writes me so that we can link up professionally, ah the world of the business mind. Clearly he was scouring through business cards to extend his network — but not one word to another author about the Holocaust. Or to even say hello.

Vekkony answered the e-mail within minutes: here it is as it appeared with spelling errors, etc.

You are Right Holoasust Survivor is not an occupation. Under choices opf occupation, Retired or Lectuer was not listed. I did not list myself as a Holocaust survivor, but as a Phylantropist. “As to serve my narrow needs.” World wide there are around 140,000 people, who have listened, to my 560 lectures. At home I’ve around 7,000Letters, from my followers. You will have a hard time to convince these people. You are entitled to your opinion. By the way what was the title of your book? I’m getting a lot oof b ooks to read. May be I’ve not yours. No hard feeling on my side. god bless you and have a great life. Sincerely Josef Vekkony.

When I met him a year back, he made special note to Jane and I of how many lectures he had given! Tragic. I thought less is more applies not only to architecture but to life, to writing especially.

I wrote back:

You condemn yourself by your own words — you have “followers”; I have your business card given to me by you which lists you as a Holocaust survivor; yes, I am angry at you because you are into Shoah business and have very little insight into your own behaviors. I also watched you with young people at a recent school event and you simply have no idea how to deal with these kind of children — “Repeat after me, Never again!” {Jane finds that “refrain” personally distasteful.} Are you so simple that you believe people will change because of your exhortations? You are the one with the narrow mind; as an English teacher and psychotherapist I know what I am speaking about. You don’t. Any further correspondence will be deleted.

I had so much more to say but I left it at that.

I have no grand conclusion to come up with. It’s not the first nor last time that Jews will differ over the meaning(s) of the Holocaust; but I will not have it merchandised, especially by a dim-witted Jew who hasn’t the foggiest notion of what he is about. Survivors are human beings not immortals — I direct you, once again, to “On the Holocaust” at this site for further clarification of my point of view.

I am perplexed why I keep on writing.

I associate to Krishnamurti who was asked by a disciple, if you will, why he continued his teaching after so many decades, given that most people had heard his message and did not change. He answered that a rose has to give off its essence. I like that. I write because I write, no more, no less.

It may be that there is nothing else for me, or for me to do as I look about the world.  I am not materiallyrewarded. I have no fans or fame to speak of. I see something of my intent in the great final words by Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. “It is  a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known, ” an eloquent mixture of ennui, resignation and self-evaluation. And then off with his head!

I wonder as I look at my fellow creatures what it is that they do to sustain themselves in this world of the fascist Taliban, the BP spill, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the psychotic Michele Bachmann, the Jew hatred of the world at large – the same old eternal shit giving; the inability to depict cartoons of Mohammed, the stupidity of the Kaaba and the Vatican, priests ejaculating all over the place, a denying Pope, a President who dost think too much; Fox News (you should pardon the expression), a school that expels a child for wearing a cap with toy pistols on it, the morons of Scientology and Mormonism, and the true believers who follow, the damage being done to the environment, the Japanese who, kamikazi-like, still slaughter whales; the corporations that rule this world, the digitalization of almost everything — genomes, books, the workplace and the slavish esteem  which we give gadgets rather than individuals, for all this is endless in a rather corruptive environment. I had someone say to me that hope and faith will get us through;  besides restraining myself from throwing up,  I felt like saying that ghouls, vampires, ghosts, miracles, Catholic relics, probably in some demented way make more sense than the idiocies of conditioned religious thinking. We are a doomed species — please hurry up with extinction.

We are all handicapped — pick your disability. From the barbecueing American dad with his bumper stickered SUV and his need for a “man cave,” to the aimless and drab lives of American housewives, to the ideologues — Anne Coulter, Laura Ingraham — she with the inch high and wide gold cross on her conditioned neck, to the inane and fat cat sensibility of a Jay Leno and the snide David Letterman; Wolf Blitzer boring us out of our minds as he drones out the news and Chris Wallace, he with the incised smirk in his face, to geriatric gym rats who try to stay alive longer but have nothing between their ears to make it meaningful, to Joan Rivers, slathered in plastic surgery, a living marionette, to the sycophantic writers who kiss ass to get published, to the writers who write fluff and attend dozens of critique courses in order to get their vanity published, to the fat little kids who don’t know what play is as they are absorbed into the digitalization of their world, to the parents who have no idea how to parent for they are bereft of an inner life and their own children simply extension cords of ignorance plugged into their collective assholes.

I am still curious how we defend not only against death from day one — “Mommy, are you going to die?” but how we manage our daily lives in order to give it meaning of some kind — football, soccer, the sport stations which are terminally boring,the players who are essentially moronic; the celebrities of stage and screen; the sleaze of the Madonnas and Lady GaGa and their ilk; the Roman games we abide in on a daily basis. The media who thrives on the decomposing bodies of the body politic, scavengers all. The reptilian politicians are a minor travesty given that we as a country are fast going down the tubes. So here I am scribbling stories to defend against the lunacies of my time, the culture I am immersed in.

Curious, is it not? that on one level the Tea Partyers represent a kind of psychological resistance to the state of affairs in our country and are oblivious to that except for the political aspect of it.  Unfortunately,  historically true,  a good rebellion is usually twisted and perverted — I give you Robespierre, Lenin and Trotsky. The discrepancy between what is and what could be is vast and often our rebellion about it comes out skewed.  I associate to The Great Awakening in the 19th Century in which religious leaders tapped into the ferment bubbling beneath the surface, but it  got screwed up, essentially because it is religious in nature; belief systems savagely destroy anything alive and fresh.

The one telling piece of advice to give an attentive child moving into young adulthood is to encourage him or her to be in constant insurrection (!) against society and everything that may serve to conform and condition  in that culture, including his or her parents. In fact, the task of parenthood, for me, is to help the child be free of his parents in a loving way if at all possible. Ultimately it may lead to isolation of a kind but I weigh that against the capacity to be free or to quote Kazantzakis’s, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Life is an existential crisis and the sooner we understand that the sooner we may determine whatever meaning we can make of it, although I do not vest too much in meaning. There is no external meaning, for we make it, and we place it out there. I’ll take the crisp and cold solitude on the mountaintop, knowing I am indeterminate rather than the plush pomp of certainty in the lowlands of every culture and the Huxleyan Soma we imbibe each day.

I favor discontent, intellectual unruliness, disgruntlement rather than the KY gel we live in. The soporific platitudes we derive from religion and politics, from the general daily interactions we have with other human beings make me stand back and evaluate. It is essential, for me, not to become part of this society although I am stuck up to my ears in terms of its daily demands. I know I have chosen to write or to become a writer for it is in that task that I define who I am and make clear to myself what the matrix is. The artist,  poet and  writer must be in rebellion for his or her own sanity is at stake. History is an avalanche of human nonsense presenting itself as “progress,” whatever.

One never becomes completely free but sometimes it is excitingly emancipating to wipe one’s feet free of human shit.

Reading Freud of late has reawakened, I suppose, the dormant analytic tools I used as a psychotherapist. It has me thinking along intentions, conscious and unconscious, motives, illusions and delusions, guilt and conscience or superego. In that light it dawned on me that most of the stories I’ve been writing of late for my next book are told from the first person. As I have said in earlier blogs, one of which was published online by David Herrle, editor of subtletea.com I favor  the immediacy of that point of view. However, as I look at it again perhaps, without being self-serving,  we humans spend an inordinate amount of psychic time deceiving ourselves (Perhaps a good definiton of psychotherapy might be to help the client to be less deceptive with himself and the world at large: to tell the truth!) And so, given I am as slippery as you are, I do think that when I go about writing these stories about the Holocaust part of me wants to become that character or that experience, to dwell there for a time and by writing it from the first person, I can taste terror, abandonment, loneliness, suffering, torture, the whole panoply of the Holocaust catastrophe. In that way my stories no doubt suffer for I am too engaged in this linear perspective of the “I.” I don’t care, is my response. I will tell the story for it is cathartic for me as well, perhaps rounding out and shapening my interior psychic walls as a serendipitous response to what I have created in prose. I enlarge me, in short, Freud’s principle of secondary gain — or in layman terms, what’s the payoff for doing something?

I have also realized that the book will not come together as if it is resisting my attempts to bring it to an end. I can’t get the steers into the corral. One idea is that I suffer from the writer’s angst about whether or not the collective effort has merit, although two stories will be published in the coming months; I also worry that the stories reveal my limitations as a writer which I know intimately and will not share here, but they exist and it is hard to go around them. I guess I am too old or too stubborn as an old dog to learn new tricks. Another option banging off the interiors of my skull is the fear that if I complete this latest effort I have run dry, shot my load and no more will issue from me except reworkings of old stories and novels in lieu of creating new efforts, freshly hewn. Clearly all these concerns are variations of fear.

I feel all my writing has been a working out and a working through of all the neuroses which pinioned me to the ground much like Gulliver in Lilliput. As I look through my work over the decades I see the issues, only known to me – perseverations, passive-aggressiveness, stubornness, a wee touch of grandiosity and gradations of anger into rage. Some I have managed to stabilize, others are free floating viruses and others will be with me to the end of days. That I work on a second book dealing with the Holocaust at least tells me consciously that everything I need to know about others, man, friends, relationships, love, cruelty and everything I could ever learn and know about myself has coalesced into that abyssmal event, a time in which mankind fractured forever. It is my convenient paint box, I suppose, for in it dwells everything a decent writer could ever imagine. One friend has asked me why I want to torture myself. It is not torture; it is my own small quest into the beyond, a way of determining who I am and who you are. Serendipitously over the decades what it meant for me to be a Jew in this world, in America has for a variety of reasons, some discernible, others undiscoverable to my own eyes, absorbed my interest; I was not consumed nor driven by it. What I did was enter all that I observed into the well of my being, that depository we all carry with us — call it memory or the junk drawer in the kitchen, or the seething cauldron. It suits my psychic purposes, I believe, to write about the Holocaust as a way of defending against it or sublimating my feelings about it, for my mind is like a long snout — I want to sniff about and see.

I want to push myself a bit more. It is apparently something characterologically about your writer that he has always wanted to know or to learn, thwarted as I was a child by parents who did not own that desire or encouraged it in more direct ways as I grew up; they did not know any better and ignorance held them back as it must. I had to self-preen myself, hold myself in my arms and with long strokes across my back as a cat soothe me or make me feel felt. And so I make the extrapolation that my need to write has been, only in part, a self-definition of who I am but also a way of soothing andpreening myself, rubbing my fur in the proper direction so that I feel less fearful and stressed. It is in the telling; it is the culminative impact of the words that I set into motion across the printed page that I determine who I was, and who I am now and how best to deal with dying in the days ahead. And all ofthis means nothing. Meaning is not in this equation. What all this does is to help me seize the day, squeeze its pips until they squeak, make me more cognizant of my awareness and not to expect anything, not to hope for anything, not to fear anything and in so doing become free. I cannot think of anything grander other than the birth of my own child than to be free before I perish — and the grander hope is to show my children without conditioning, dogma, or teaching, what it is to strive toward freedom. Civilization, this decadernt soup of a culture we presently live in, this digitalized state rooted, grounded in materialistic pursuits and marketing, no longer has me as chattel. I am relatively free of all that — consequently dangerous, consequently someone who needs to be punished (catch me if you can).

In short, can you see the matrix?

Usually one blog a week is enough for me as I need the aquifer to refresh itself; however, today’s adventure has proven otherwise. I took Jane to an auction which is relatively new to her. It was advertised as an auction brought about by the divorce of a “prominent” attorney. In past years the auctions I went to usually sold job lots — a box of tools in which one might find one good tool; dishes; ceramics; odds and ends, an occasional print and so forth.  We spent a hot Nevada Sunday indoors. We went there for the experience and not so much to spend — but we did. This auction turned out to be  a high-end venture — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Asian carpets of large and small dimensions, some made with the fleece from newly slain baby sheep, bleated the auctioner, he with the refurbished pate of new hair “plugs” and off-putting way of dealing with his “help.” He had the businessman’s capitalistic petulance with his employees.

About the large room which was in a golf course clubhouse were originals by Renoir, Picasso, Erte, Klimt, Max, Pisarro and Chagall; additionally, off to one side were tables with cases showing off the many rings, diamonds, unset stones and jewelry of the attorney’s wife. Clearly they were collectors or just filty rich, or acquisitive, and in some cases I surmised bought art for investment. (Jane made the telling observation that most of their art work was “safe,” in that it was a traditional investment with nothing artistically daring.) Up front there were security guards and clerks registering people who attended. Essentially, we discovered, the strength of the auction was in jewelry and rugs although one Picasso went for $21,000.

As the auction progressed I could see the auctioneer’s annoyance at the small turnout — he had his costs, advertising, security, assistants and the “help” to pay.  Unbearably hot outside as it was, I had considered that factor as an opportunity to get a better buy, but it  was not to play out that way. As buyers were exceedingly frugal with their bids he was vexed because he was “giving” away items that clearly were worth so very, very more. This was true. Carpets that easily were in the $20,000 to $30,000 range went for ridiculously low numbers — one carpet went for $3100 and clearly was worth five times as much. The attorney was not doing that well nor his wife and neither was the auctioner. Jane and I easily snatched up a $2500 rug for $350 plus tax and auction fee, 15%. Prior to the sale at 2 PM, we had time to examine all the lots.  Jane caught sight of this Pakastan rug which was much to her liking and it was one of the early pieces put on sale. It was a steal and we were pleased. And we had no more  discretionary money for anything after that. But we stayed for the experience and an experience it turned out to be.

As I go on let me declare openly that I have a complex, personal, historical response to the affluent, quite frankly, sum it up as a strong awareness of class difference, compounded of envy, disgust, annoyance, jealousy and resentment for the display, ostentatious or not, of money. An offbeat anecdote will serve well here. A colleague of Orson Welles, who clearly was not well-heeled at the time, revealed his annoyance with Welles in an interview many decades later. I mention the years because it still rankled this man. Apparently Welles would have a meal and tip the waiter an exorbitant amount beyond the worth of the service (a hundred dollar bill in this instance; consider that it was during the Depression). Of course, Welles could very well argue that his largesse moved money about, that no one was harmed, probably helping the waiter with his own income and that is capitalism. And yes it is. The interviewee felt that Welles’ gratuity was unnecessary, grandiose in ways, unrealistic and not needed. I see the case for that. In fact, I side with the interviewee over the unnecessary expenditure for, perhaps, show. In short, I detect not that the man would have wanted the cash for himself, or drooled over it, or envied Welles. I feel he thought that kind of cash could have been used elsewhere, perhaps in a better way. I share that as well. At this auction I saw glut and I loathed it, triggering all the “old” feelings from storming the Bastille to waiting until the Revolution. What asshole thinks capitalism socialism, communism are ways to run the world — they are all deeply flawed isms with a plethora of perverse permutations.

So here we were in an auction brought about by a rich couple in a divorce who clearly could not get together on how to sell their treasures and in their legal animosity left it to a judge to decide; and here at this auction were other very well-to-do individuals reaping a rich whirlwind, good capitalists as they are. It was a feeding frenzy of a kind. Glut and loathing came together and here it is specifically. At the end of a long row two women, dressed fashionably, bejeweled, especially the younger one, were apparently mother and daughter on a spending spree. Before I blather on, let me say that I crudely estimated that within four hours they spent at least $60,000 on jewelry, carpets and several Peter Max paintings, the “artist” from the 60s, whose paintings are in a  Caesar’s Palace gallery selling in ordinate amounts — between you and me, absolute dreck! The  criticism I use for any artist is how has he or she grown over the years. Max is in reversal, each year he becomes more and more of a dwarf, right up there with the decadent smeary  works of Thomas Kinkade.

The mother and daughter team bid so often that I remember their auction number — #377 and so did the auctioneer; for in this dismal sale of his they were his hope to salvage the day. The couple were not insufferable, nor smug, but they did joke among themselves that they apparently were the only ones, in effect, at the auction, or that it came to be that they hit it right and with their money things were going their way. I felt I was at Bloomie’s with these women on a spree. They had taste in jewels, and carpets, shrewd buyers both. Years from now when the market is up they may treble their investments if they choose to sell them, good capitalists all. I looked about and saw the day workers struggling for the pittance they would get for toting the rugs about, displaying heavily framed pictures; the auctioner who was parasitically living off this couple, his favs, and his lousy attitude to his workers; I looked at myself, middle-class, and I looked at the well-to-do, pissing away money in this recession – Nevada is particularly hard hit. And in that microcosm was everything I needed to know about the pigs in Animal Farm.  We were all alike and the diferences were not of character, nor intellect, nor family but of random good fortune or random rotten luck. And I was galled, I must admit, that $60,000 went for things. (I know a family that “lives” on $35,000.) The glut and the gluttons I found appalling. I don’t want to hear about the way it is — I know what the way is: I can think of immeasurable takes on this event and my gut-level response to it all, skewed as it is in places. But I also know what is abominable. And please don’t tell me about the million dollar auctions for art works or that I should have gone to a less expensive auction ( a ridiculous proposal, given that I was here!) — the saddle applies to any number of steeds you ride. I saw gluttony and it appalled. It rankles.

I experienced “pin” money by the affluent being used; no they did not flaunt it to their credit, for that would have been overbearing and too much to endure; but in their very nonchalance I felt they revealed all about money, the world, others and themselves. I could banter and say that being rich doesn’t make them bad people; that poverty builds character and so on. Perhaps it all comes down to me, doesn’t it always? with my express need for modesty, reserve, thoughfulness – and tact. I call it class — with no differences, poor or rich.

Here in Henderson, Nevada the summer heat has arrived with a vengeance, 106 to be exact and it will be like that on and off, I imagine, for weeks. When I open the front door I am met by a blast of air straight from a kiln. Luckily I am often indoors writing and editing stories, trying to make a book happen.  Usually I work out for about an hour at a local community gym and return quickly. The autumn leaves for this blog allude to the days I am spending, sometimes or most times not living, for writing is not living, it is a mere displacement of concerns I have about myself. I see each day pass into a kind of regular monotony which has not escaped my notice. The heat, the monotonous and variable dullness jane and I come across here in Henderson makes me fantasize of ending the rest of my days in Florence — and why not? At least in Florence my inability to speak Italian might make me feel isolation is caused by a language barrier; here in Henderson speaking English doesn’t much help for this is a transient state with a transient population, exceedingly conservative, numb-skulled and Palinesque. ( A confederacy of dunces.) I miss the vitality and exchange of a New York street.

The next door neighbor is a fellow New Yorker (Italian) and we share our ethnicities as we would in New York City, blowing oxygen into each other’s mouths while we mutually moan the loss of the spice and vigor of urban living. We speak in code, rather we speak in tongues and those who listen only grasp a glimmer of what we are saying — the shrugs, the attitudes, the perceptions, the street smarts, the prejudices — the smell of a subway, the good-natured rudeness, the savvy, the kibitizing, what a good bagel should taste like, what good lox, onion and cream cheese give to that holy bagel, the beauty of a bialy, breakfast in a Greek Diner, a Carvel custard, a malted if you can find it, laced with Horlick’s powder (the secret ingredient), an egg cream which has no egg or cream in it except the chilled seltzer hitting into milk and chocolate syrup. We share experiences and we both become animated here in this dessicated desert fit for Gabby Hayes. Recently Jane and I went to the Carnegie deli on the strip and had a corned beef and pastrami sandwich which is called a Woody Allen, nothing like having a sandwich named after a molester. However, the knish we ordered came cold. (Jane has yet to eat a kasha knish.) Freud argued that hysterics suffer from reminiscences — you bet we do! It is 5:14 AM and I just noticed it is light outside while I ramble on about loss — and intent.

I have morbid thoughts about time, death and dying, the famous last words, the rosebuds I could whisper and the orneriness of my self – my stone reading: “Get your rocks off here,” or “Thank god, it’s over,”  nothing so splendid as Kazantzakis’ epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” What a mensch! I reminisce in a non-nostalgic, unsentimental way of the days lived, those to come, the irregularities of living, its inconsistencies, the repetitive patterns, the losses, the sorrows, things I can never change and my failures as a father — mostly. That is the thing I would do much better. The race is nearly over, no cheering crowds, no encouraging waves, just the loneliness of the long distance runner. Realizing that over all these years I could have died at any moment and the only life I have is today and no more, I think on these things, struggling, always struggling, the metaphor of my personal life, to attain some completion, some sense of order or meaning but realizing that there is probably no such thing and that the most I can do is to emulate the fly or the cat or the donkey — be in the moment, for really that is all there is. I think not of heaven nor hell, human constructs and insidious dead ends; I think of the eons of evolution and ejaculation that led to my momentary spurt and this slivver of time I have been given by nature. I will be gone, guillotined and no longer ever be. When I see my son for my 70th birthday which is dramatically hard to conceive but it is coming soon, I will gently remind him to see me more often as this may be the last decade I may be given.  I need not have eternity. I would like to be some few cells in his cortex, a memory if that, of someone who bumped into his life and will bump out. Oh, what a grand game of billiards we unwillingly are part of!

I suppose I am better in mind and feeling than in reality for a cancer scare would mightily rattle my bones. But it will end, kindly or in agony, but it will end. I think I fear the dying process more than death itself. All this could be a bowl of fluff for we cannot predict our behaviors; we are not that consistent. And ultimately it is just words forming together, coalescing like white corpuscles to stave off infection, which I rally here — so bravely written! Who am I kidding? When death looms, all bets are off. On that merry note, feeling neither despair or depression, just seeking clarity as dawn is here, I leave you, reader to ponder your own mortality, for I do it on a daily basis — and you?

About six stories from “Working Through the Holocaust” have been cyberspaced and two of them have been accepted for publication. Always exciting, is it not? to have stories published by online magazines, in this instance, before publication as a collection — I am much pleased. I still need to be testified, recognized, attested to — that kid can write. Oh, how I love that little boy within. Both accepted stories are my foray into the bizarre but apparently they do work. When my unconscious breaks through and grabs my hands and directs them to compose I know I am writing very good stuff. And when my unconscious speaks, writing simply flows; channeling, I suppose. As I work through the approximately twenty-four stories and poems I continually find errors which I filter out until I once more go through the whole lot again. Alas, the stories, et al are frozen now and it would take a hammer and chisel for me to rewrite them. That is not good, for it is structural arthritis, but a part of me wearies of it all. And I am an ornery cuss, wanting things my way and since I will self-publish all this it is mine to mess with. I have long since removed myself from the fray, the commercial slaughterhouse. I work real hard on not partaking of the nonsense, of this polluted world. I will soon enough be gone and as avidly remembered as a French peasant from 1389. Not so much as a monsieur before my name.

FLASH: A few minutes ago I came across a comment on a writer’s site by the poet and writer of all things diverse, Richard Kostelanetz. Apparently he was cleaning out his garage and came across a booklet of poems and sayings written by teenagers that I edited and produced as the head of an alternative school in the mid 70s. I sent him a copy because I felt, I imagine, as a poet he would be receptive. Wondering at the mention of my name after I had commented on something, he wrote if I had forwarded that small mag to him. He said that it was “very special.” He remembered, how thoughtful. We’ve both aged after 33 years but what a curious yet wonderful sentiment in all that. At that time he was an accomplished writer and I was a struggling pipsqueak; over the years I was quite taken by how much he created and produced, quite fecund as an artist.

All these years have passed by, years in which I struggled to learn my craft auto-didadactedly; painful years. And what I have learned, that heel end of a good Jewish rye with the union label on its butt, is really not much. Awareness is like a fine watch’s oil; it’s there but unseen, makes the timepiece run, that’s all. So now I write to stave off dementia, to solely please my sense of what it is or is not important to say, first, to myself and then to the reader. I surely believe that all I really need is about 10-15 people who have read my efforts and who appreciate them to make me relatively content. (And where are you?) I am so lucky to have worked on myself many decades ago so that I would not spend my writing “career” sucking up. This kind of narcissism, this variant of grandiosity is to my liking. Writing is not the most important thing in my life, for it is essentially my philosophical dialoguing with my inner self in an ongoing journey into some kind of self-awareness, some kind of authenticity. It is my I AMness, to be existential about it.

Essentially, as I reflect, my life has been the gradual and often very slow and inarticulate emergence of a self. I was behiind the tortoise in that race. I am still in recovery from having lived these years and the insights allowed me and the remorse and regrets I feel, especially about a deceased daughter, a personal sciatica that I will never recover from; however, I am deconditioned enough, having worked on that for decades, through therapy, reading ( Krishnamurti), awakening and writing to myself by myself and for myself to have attained a measure of sanity, if that is the word. And, although I like the company of good people for good conversation, enjoy laughter and making others laugh, I am still leery of my fellow man, quite the destructive beast. I have no expectations of others for they cannot ever meet them. What solace I arrive at is in my writing, for it is here that I console myself, express myself, see the world only through my eyes free of mercantile interests. To wit, Sarah Palin represents the very best of America — seriously! Ain’t that the truth. Betcha!

By the time I croak and return to carbon and other detritus, perhaps I’ll have 3 to 4 books on the shelf. Perhaps my children will read them or keep them or pay no mind to them, for I will have been remaindered like most books in a local library. It is all for nought; that is its destiny; what is not for nought is the elan vital that brings literature about. I ask my children not to come to the grave but to carry me in memory and what I have or have not achieved, first, as a father, secondly, as a writer. The rest is bullshit.

There are times in reading Freud’s grimly pessimistic assessment that I come up against a personal stonewall.  His grasp of his own metaphysics and mastery of psychoanalysis can be stupefying especially when he applies his learnings about the individual analysand to the community at large, culture, civilzation, society, whatever term you decide to use.  Freud needs to be parsed sentence by sentence for the meat within the nut. I’ve had to read a few pages at a time, stopping thereafter because of the perplexity and depth of what I have read. Here and there I gather a mere morsel of sanity or truth and am grateful for it. This particular book was finished, I believe, shortly after the Nazis were duly democratically elected to office. It reflects Freud’s pessimism about the species which I largely share.

Imagine if he had lived on and had experienced the Holocaust — what tomes would he have written about that?

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is a scientific thought I’ve come across in college and ever after; essentially, the idea is that the individual evolutionarily develops along the course of the  group’s evolutionary development. It reminds me of those drawings of the early fetus developing gills and then losing them as it progresses to the final human shape; that the species must undergo the same genetic shape shifting that  evolution has given it. So Freud takes his experiences over the years dealing with a wide variety of patients and discovers the causes of their maladies and reaches conclusions about neuroses of all kinds and by the end of his long life he feels he can then apply that clinical wisdom to  society at large. Apparently he feels and argues that society  repeats or recapitulates the individual neuroses which is an amazing hypothesis with much truth to it, I believe. In The Future of an Illusion and especially in Totem and Taboo Freud applies his analytic strengths to hypothesizing about how society reflects these same truths as a whole.

If I read him halfway right, society represents psychological issues that equate to inhibition, repression, restraints against aggressiveness and eros that the individual faces by himself; not only do we work on ourselves to be free of illusions (religion) and conditioning as well as indoctrination but also face the immensely powerful and crushing wheels of culture that require and demand a plethora of things from us — a psychological toll. I associate to a title of a great science fiction story by Harlan Ellison called “I Have No Mouth and Must Scream.” Squelched, shut off, shut in, skewered and screwed by society, we are lucky to get off this planet dead. Man is discontented.

I wonder aloud about the task of any artist, how he or she must wage war against the culture at large which really prefers to grind slowly as a universal millstone about, around and over his neck. My son calls this the “Grind.” Many of us will go to our graves having lived incomplete lives; however, what is a complete life? In his book Freud devotes time to what it is to be happy, and what gets in our way; he goes after some of Christianity’s concepts about loving thy neighbor and literally shreds them apart in terms of logic, reason and its incoherent folly about the nature of man. Madison had a good handle on our species when he said “Men are not angels.” Our entire Constitution is the Enlightenment’s bulwark against what Hobbes called man’s life, “short, nasty and brutish.” If we divide and separate powers, perhaps we can defend against man’s inherent ugliness.

I feel exhausted when reading Freud, sometimes frustrated, often frustrated by my inability to grasp his metaphysics and his jargon — something akin to the head bone connected to the thigh bone kind of writing. Yet I glean, like Ruth and Naomi, what I can after he has felled the wheat. And what I glean is his unremitting stand on human beings; that they are destructive and aggressiveness creatures; that it is best not to have many if any expectations of our fellow man; that no behavior is beyond man — that the Father in Christianity has its phylogenetic roots in the primal father and the primal horde; that the communion smacks and is closely related to savage or primal ritual sacrifices; that religion itself is an immense illusion based on the premise of the Father and that once this is discarded, Freud believed, man can first be free. Think of Kazantzakis’ Cretan Glance which served as his epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

Alas, for many of us, by the time we wake up we are  much too close to our end. I feel and I imagine that my work on the Holocaust has given me the opportunity to press in close or to shave close as Thoreau wrote, the very issues of societal power and destructiveness, of the innate brutality of man, the exquisite insanity of the species when it is on a tear (war) for it allows me to define how to act as best I can if I were to confront this which I do in milder adaptations on a daily basis. Every time a child stands up in a school room, as an example, and pledges to an inanimate object, the flag, he is a slave. Perhaps neurotics at large envy the artist and his artist ways because they are, indeed, failed artists. To a degree, the artist is a free man. Ironically, the stylite who perched on a stone pillar centuries ago, the hermit, who denied and “escaped” from society did not realize how closely he had his nose right up society’s ass…chew on that as I did the first time I heard it.

Adieu.