Mathias B. Freese

In the back of my mind, now forwarded to the front optics, has been a long term fantasy. I intend to read many of the world classics I either avoided, chose not to read or delayed reading until I reached this dramatically telling age. Recently I spotted and then bought a mint copy in 8 volumes of Edward Gibbon’sThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read volume I enduring, rather, suffering that arch latinized English style of the 18th Century. It was grinding but I endured. I was going to read the entire work over a period of months, I imagine. In any case in volume II I came across his famous 15th and 16th chapters in which he examines the role of Christianity in Rome. I had heard that as a rationalist and man of the Enlightenment, I suppose, he would set about dissecting the deleterious effects of Christianity on Rome, if you choose to see it that way. In any case the Jews got in his way.

As he wrote about the beginnings of Christianity as a religion or sect, I came across that same severe tongue-lashing that Judaism gets from historians, old and new (Toynbee viewed Judaism as a “fossil” religion). It was annoying to put up with his aspersions and “critique” of judaism, with the implicit assumption that regardless of how you see the impact on Rome, Christianity was a significant improvement over the people of the mountain god, Yahweh. I stopped reading the book and it will be put up on Ebay. (I will give this series away FREE if you pay postage.) The anti-Semitism of Dickens, Shakespeare, Pound, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Chaucer, Eliot runs like a clear stream through the western Canon as it does through Christianity itself. Here I am ready to read one of history’s classics and I am hit with this crap. I recall in college that the four term course in contemporary civilization only had two selections from Jews — Spinoza and Freud, as if to say that in 2,000 years it was the best Jews could do.

It wouldn’t be so bad but this week I had a participant in a writer’s class speak of a Jewess. Well, for those of you who don’t know, there’s no such thing except that expressed by the unlearned, ignoramuses and racists. Negress is equally unacceptable. Both terms denigrate minority women just as squaw does. When was the last time you came across a Catholicness or Protestantness — point made.

In the same group this participant went on to tell me that Freud had purchased a painting by Hitler in the early years of the 20th Century. It depends on what level you want to listen; I generally listen to levels equivalent to the basement and sub-basement, as I have been trained to do. Is this clown informing me about a piece of historical curiosa, if such an event did occur? Is he telling me that Freud was a variant of the self-hating Jew? Is he also telling me that Jews have no boundaries and they do whatever pleases them? In any case he thought he was sharing a tantalizing fact with me. I think not. Was I to shake my head at Freud’s indiscretion? Is it an indirect and not subtle way of telling me that Jews are this and that? And if I would take him on he could easily and comfortably say that I was reading too much into this. I think not. Human beings are like bowls of slopping gravy — they drip wherever they go.

Of course, this off-centered gent said that he had a Jewish ancestor which always makes me feel that this is an excuse for vile behavior or that it is a kind of fashionista thing to claim. Three years ago in a trip to Spain I sensed more than once that Spaniards could not talk openly about Jews or having Jewish ancestors (conversos) but that it was also an “in” thing to be connected — the ambivalence was strident. It reminded me of Planet of the Apes in which Chuck Heston is caged as a sample of his species.

Since I’m living in the Silver State now, whose listing in terms of education is extremely low, worse than Mississippi, to wit, a state made up of transients, much like Arizona, knowledge about other ethnic groups is dismal, I believe. The one religion that sticks in the craw of Christianity is grossly misunderstood and grossly misperceived which makes total sense. After all, Jews are one percent of the population of this country. Nevertheless, the assumptioms and hearsday about Jews borders on the appalling. I listen as some group members talk about what it is to be kosher, assuming all Jews are kosher and all such drivel. It is a naive to expect Jews to be humanized if they serve better purposes to be demonized. I sometimes feel as if I am a member of a rare species, to be spoken of, to be looked at, to be examined. I know more about Christianity than Christianity knows about me. And the black slave knew more about his white master than the master cared to know about him.

I step back and observe this appalling ignorance about a remarkable people who have made a monumental contribution to western civilization. . . So what else is new?

Groups are fascinating, infinite whorls of personalities spinning off and away. I sit in on two groups with Jane, one which she leads and I make contributions when I can and the other Jane and I are participants without teaching responsibilities. The groups combined are mostly women, three men including me. The issues that arise are compelling at times as I participate and while I observe as the “retired” therapist I am. That good old hovering attention that Freud advocated has never left me. I listen and I listen and I listen. Believe this or not, I listen while I speak, while I contribute, while I pontificate. It comes into my pores, under my fuselage, beneath my antennas. I am not the eternal fly on the wall; I am the fly at the table and in the chair. I listen with the third ear (Reik).

I observe that everyone has something to say and something to write, that the writing groups serve a plethora of reasons — hear me; succor me; applaud me; extol me; find me remarkable; rescue me; teach me and all the varied human wants you can imagine. Some individuals express their lifelong wounds into writing, some good, some gargled, some horrifyingly graphic. I see that some individuals have very little inhibitions — they would share the hour of their latest dump if they could; boundaries for them do not exist — they have rarely been around healthy human beings for them to internalize reasonable limitations for behavior. One woman gets upset with a man and throws a pen and book across the table in anger followed by the sticking out of her tongue which is a delicious regression in action and rather primitive. One man constantly belabors his personal misogyny in front of these women totally insensitive to what he is saying and often advocating his objectifying women, oblivious to suggestions that he somewhat modify his point of view; he is much like the man who yells fire in the middle of a crowded movie theater and the Supreme Cout has ruled on that. He is adamant about his point of view, granitic in his opinions, stubborn and one can read the tinny worth he derives from his obstinance. Yet he comes each week for all kinds of reasons. I can speculate easily on that but I will not. So complex layers of personal climates of opinion sally forth in these writing classes and I find them annoying, yet fascinating, stupid and stubborn and self-limiting; but in observing them I am slightly to the right and above the fray, for I am not intensely involved. I am the proverbial stranger in a strange land and I am doing my Marco Polo schtick — observing, bartering, learning, acquiring, sewing jewels into the hems of my cloak and vestments.

I realize the self I present, only part of a self that I am and only last night I was labeled a “curmudgeon,” which I find telling but quite accurate. The humor I use, the acid undertow of that, the outrageous puns I play with, the Jewish kibbitzing which is second nature; the outlook I have on human beings — outrageous little children out of control, all comes into play by individuals who are perhaps more guarded than I, more restrictive, less open. I observe how I often am a tabula rasa for some individuals and for others who preen their feathers for they have a “handle” on me,” they “know” me. I laugh to myself — who is so simple to be so comprehended by another who is so simple and grandiose? Often the critiquing itself plays a secondary role as I view the kinetic behavior between and among others. Often I feel like shouting that they should put their neuroses into their writing only to realize they have done so but simply lack the skill to make them real and viable and ultimately valuable. I want to share with them that they are style, not the words by themselves; that the voice of their writing is who they are if only they would hear themselves. Critique groups are not therapy but they are group behaviors and people do not want to be therapized; but they sure want undertstanding, knowledge, self-knowledge and learning which is therapy in and of itself.

Relationships are forming — these two women dislike this woman; that woman turns many people off but that is not a reason to ask her to leave. One woman behaves as if she could run the group and decidedly informs us of her background and the courses she is presently running; she is so defended that I see mammoth skin on her carcass. One woman is deeply Christian which is enough to turn me off, but I observe her for she can be encouraging and humorous and that is enough for me to relent on my prejudice and allow her “in.” In this group, like others, individuals are like neutrinos striking the earth and passing through it. What residues they leave is for each individual to evaluate. We have only met for 4 sessions and groups within groups are forming and I am wondering how that will reveal itself in group discussion. Personally I inhibit my written evaluations of work submitted so as not  to hurt, rather to instruct, although some memoirs, journals and short stories are irritatingly annoying to me for they fully reveal the pain-in-the-ass who wrote it. Ambition reveals ambition, hubris reveals hubris. and stupidity reveals itself manifestly. If you are a constipated self, your work is inevitably constipated.

Because both groups are given free this is misused, often on unconscious levels. People bring all kinds of assumptions to that — I can show up deep into the meeting; I don’t submit work to be read; I can just sit and watch;it’s a slow night on TV and I want to be with people; I want to be heard so here I am, doo dah, doo dah. All the reasons people who are not serious give themselves for joining a criitque group. So Jane and I have resolved that the next group we run will have a small fee attached to it. People do not value free — they abuse it, much like freedom in any country, an abused child. In about 20 minutes we are off to our next meeting which is fairly structured and has an inherent order to it– we could not survive teaching a group that dealt with us like revolving doors. The saga goes on.

I am presently involved in two writing groups which are of interest to me on several levels. Both groups involve writing — critiquing stories, journaling. The variety and mix of men and women, mostly women, is revealing. Some come into the group tooting their own horns, revealing their writer’s resume as if a testament to their talent; others, latently, “know” they can run the group better than the leader but keep it to themselves, although their discontent exudes from them like musk. Some participants really want to learn, others crave adulation or applause; some are so needy that they attack others rather than accepting criticism kindly given. Some want to excel in their writing as a personal attainment, others don’t want to hear anything about their writing except trivial evaluations.  Anxiously, some wet their panties waiting for their “turn” to read .Many do not know how to listen and if they struggle to do so it is on the manifest level, for they do not listen with the third ear. And not a few come to be with people, to socialize, to interact, to palpate what others might say about their efforts. It is a gallimaufry of feelings, needs, sometimes latent anger, seeking, and wanting to be emotionally and psychologically stroked. Some persons are damaged and want the group to hear their woe, their angst. The leader has to be careful here for sometimes a meeting turns into triage.

If the leader attempts to structure the group in order to more effectively meet the group’s needs, everyone puts in their two cents worth. To make that clearer, when a group is ongoing, free, revolving, there is no real constancy for the leader and this proves to be, in my mind, a critical defect.  Given that these groups are free, individuals abuse this — no shows, failure to submit work on time to be evaluated, failure to email the leader in case of potential absence; in short, if the group is free, I observe that it is abused. Such is human nature. Place a price on a shirt and it might be purchased or not, but the free shirt will be met with skepticism — it was previously worn by a corpse, etc. I would never give treatment on the cuff; pay me a nickel, give me a book, an orange in payment. Treatment without cost is not taken seriously on unconscious levels. Lay down resonable and fair structure, fair limits, and one gets Tea Bagger thinking. However, I have also observed that reasonable order for conducting these groups is met by some with pleasure, for there is constancy and regularity to attain set purposes. I think that any group has a resistance to it and the leader must meet that resistance not with disdain, but first must see it, realize it and ultimately join it if an attachment or connection is to be made with each individual. How to do that? Offer me a nickel, an orange or a book and I might give you an “answer.”

As a secondary teacher I realized after years of working at the craft that students wanted order and structure as opposed to the teacher who was their “friend,” disorganized, whose whole lesson was a planned digression.To put it in an arch way, where there is id one must put ego.

The other day a “writer” who Jane had to reject from the group for she did not send in work to be evaluated, who failed to show up after much hoopla on her part had a hissy fit and wrote Jane that it was ridiculous to be excluded from the group. In the context of her snippy email she once again spoke of her past credits, her knowledge, her credentials, all tangential to the issue at hand. Jane had reasonably imposed conditions which were clearly identified in memos to all involved. One of the “defects” of Jane’s civility is that her kindness is met with abuse. Additionally, within one paragraph the “writer” had misspelled two key words, a clue to her anger. I responded by informing her that Jane had no time for her petulance and I took a couple of shots at her arrogance. What is key here is that she devalued the other work of the group as “amateurish.” So I have observed once again the personal agendas of these aggrieved souls as purely self-serving and very needy, to say the least.

Several individuals from both groups make me think about their motives. Apparently they are critique or writing goupies. A writer, in my way of thinking, can energize his spirits and writing by being with other writers or in writing groups. After a time, he or she must leave and do his daily work in the arable fields of his mind. Other motives are involved when one spends so much time in groups. The hissy fit gal was such a person and she used all that “learning” to belabor Jane with her background. The question here is: why don’t you start your own group? Why isn’t your writing group world-wide famous? Who is knocking on your door for your writing wisdom? I call these folk, for lack of a better term, menu writers: they have sampled everything but have produced nothing

When I am pretty fed up with the shenanigans of a person who I am in contact with, when I find them disordered or mean-spirited, or empty, I say this to them which is often met with glazed over eyes: “You are not a serious human being.” I walk off.  If the groups do not extend for the span of 10 weeks, or if people drop out for sundry reasons, if we are left with about three people willing to learn, teach and share, Jane and I will persevere. What is sad, perhaps because it is free and willingly given, is the distrust about us, for we are serious (ah, there’s the rub!) about what we are doing. And if the course ends, so be it. Jane and I go on writing. And if we need or wish to start up again, this time we will meet human nature where it is — we will charge for our services and it won’t be a nickel, an orange or book.

When the dentist labeled the marked gap between my two front teeth as “diastema,” I didn’t quite get it, thinking that he had said diaspora. After the confusion lifted, we both chuckled as I explained to this 38- year-old Mormon dentist what the diaspora was, it too, in its way, a marked gap. Here I am correcting at 69 the diastema between my front top two teeth that I have lived with for decades. My parents never did see to that or perhaps, to be fair, they had  been told that it was non repairable — dentristy in the 40s being in the Stone Age. (When was the last time you heard a dentist say, “rinse.”) In any case I said to the dentist that I didn’t want a chiclet for my two front teeth, they having begun to chip off at the bottom from decades of wear and gnaw. I asked that some space be left in between and the artist he was, the good dentist crafted and carved and sculpted the temporary pair I am wearing today. In fact I will be going to a lab to get a custom shade so that all looks well. Yes, I did use the line from “Marathon Man,” some place during the procedure — “Is it safe?” Of course, the assistant had no idea what we were giggling about, just the usual generation gap — I don’t use all the gizmos thrown at us and she doesn’t watch all the old movies –we are even.

My sense of self required a space between my teeth although for years I personally disliked the gap. So after six decades necessity makes me take care of myself and install two crowns, leaving a slight space to remind me that I am who I am. All those family photographs with my guarded smile is now “rescinded.” I will go to my grave newly reshaped. The earliest photograph of me as a prepubescent was taken by a professonal photographer. And in the smile the front two teeth are missing. I don’t remember if they had fallen out and new growth was coming in. I do dimly recall, very dimly, that I had cut or damaged my two teeth while jumping up and down on a bed with a baby bottle in my right hand; perhaps then. In any case I grew up with a diasthema. Would anything have changed if I had no space between my teeth? Perhaps. However, my father had a space between the same teeth and my son has one as well, but not as marked as was mine. In chatting with the dentist I shared that in classic Freudian dream analysis, the tooth is a penile symbol. He retorted, “Are you telling me I am a homosexual?” I had in no way meant that, but hmmm to his response. And so what?

I have about a week or so to determine if I like the look of these new temporary teeth before I go to the more permanent porcelain set. The space has been reduced and I may ask the good dentist to tinker here and there before the final choice is made. All this is humorous at this point in time and age. It is as if I am entering a new period of life, emerging into newer decades of life, all of which is a delusion. Remarkable, is it not? to keep working on or restoring body parts or even ways of thinking as we move into decline — is this American? is it cultural? And is it a kind of amusing human foible? Reminds me of the old cockers who exercise in the local gym as if they want to be in top condition when they come to die, the unstated mentality of their efforts. I exercise for now and not then, knowing all is wisp and wind. Surely I associate to Dickens, for these are the best of times and the worst of times for me.

So I chose to repair these chipping teeth which were calving like glaciers and endured those infamous shots to the mouth and the grinding away of the teeth I had, enduring the odor of bone being reduced and shaped and configured into stubs which would hold new replacements. Bone gives way to porcelain and I am crowned cosmetically, cautioned not to chew corn or eat taffy, ridiculous admonitions to me in any case. Taffy? I can’t make head or tail of this peculiar event, for I have been repaired and I cannot dole out the consequences of this after so many decades of being who I am. I had to put myself into a painful situation in order to get along dentally. Since I have the early makings of a cataract and the beginning of macular degeneration I wonder what other procedures are in the future. Another definition of the future might be the anxiety one feels in the present and a definition of the past might be the anxiety we live with in the present, like the arithmetical carrying over of a number, for surely life is a seamless flow and flux and change its engine. I end here.

March and April have been good months for my writing. David Herrle, editor of Subtletea magazine, accepted a blog, which I revised, on first person writing (see it below). And when I sent him a copy of “Archipelago,” a perverse fantasy story, he accepted that as well. The story is one of a collection I am working on now. Jane suggested that I “field test” my stories by sending them out to literary magazines. Resisting at first, I had a chat with myself. Down to a Sunless Sea,  my first collection, took me over 25 years to get published. I felt I had no time to “field test” these stories as I near my end. However, a good suggestion is a good suggestion. And so Herrle will publish the first sent out. Duff Brenna, whose site can be accessed here, is a novelist of worth and a reviewer of my books; he just initiated a new online magazine, servinghousejournal.com — I urge you to take a look — and I submitted “Soap,” a bizarre story about a Holocaust revisionist. In fact, it is quite kinky, so kinky that Duff didn’t know if it was fiction, creative non-fiction or an essay. All this was to my delight. It is suigeneris, and what big ears you have grandmother. Flattering to me, I admit.

Characterologically, I have spent my life avoiding being pocket-holed or labeled. Let me define myself — if I can, if I choose to, but not by you, the other!

And so I go about “sandpapering” each story, burnishing it and all the while careful not to squeeze out the cholesterol that is needed like fat on a pastrami to give it taste. I have also recast a blog, “Freud in Auschwitz (see that below) into a one page story and submitted that as well to an online mag called Ginosko. Perhaps these events will move you if you are a writer to gently remove the chicken from the bone and submit work in progress. I can share with you how delighted I was at small paragraph in the opening pages of Down to a Sunless Sea citing the magazines that published the stories prior to the collection itself. Such small pleasures are my sweets, not money, not whoopla about my work.

Related to all this are the early months of this year in which I diligently formed a database of email addresses to advertise the new version of The i Tetralogy, which is my magnum opus. Anally, I composed a mailing list of over 4300 synagogues, book stores, museum shops, institutes, associations, organizations all related in some fashion to the Holocaust — Jewish studies, yeshivas, Yad Yashem, et al. After that, I tried to forward them and I was blocked by Hotmail because I was now a “spammer.’ After managing this adversity and delay, I tediously finished off the list (1500 addresses) by posting only 5-15 per day. And I just received my quarterly report of books sold, and I managed to sell 7. A newpaper editor requested a copy for review and the Jewish Council requested another for consideration.  I knew I was blowin’ in the wind but I went on in any case. I believe in this book because I believe in me and  the individual who wrote  and composed it with all the passion I could muster. Unlike other writers on the Holocaust, I am not into Shoah business. The book reflects a lifetime of thinking, being, considering, self-revealing, self-examining myself as a post Holocaust, second generation American Jew. I will not capitulate to hustling this book in ways that are American, or degrading. If it sells, wonderful, if it does not sell, wonderful — I gave birth to it; I own it. It is me declaring myself to the world.

The new book, tentatively titled “Working Through the Holocaust,” referencing the psychoanalytic term for processing issues in treatment, contains roughly 3 or 4 poems and the rest are short stories, not one more than 10 pages. I find that interesting. It isn’t that I can’t write more than that, but it is as if the muse has restrained me, made me say so much more with so many fewer words, the old saw that less is more. I work the stories over on an almost daily basis, deleting, rephrasing, sharpening, restructuring; but the die is cast. Major revisions are not on the horizon. I have shot my load. I just cannot bear to redo significant parts of these stories. I feel as if I have lain down cement and I don’t want to repave again. That could be a mistake, a writerly one, but I am a very stubborn cuss.

An analogy about me might be apt at this point: imagine a mustang or steed in a gated pasture; if you want to stroke his mane or rub his nose, you can’t call out to him or demand that he obey. What would be best is to place some sugar or an apple on a post, go away and wait to he comes over to inspect the offering. It is at that point he may listen or obey or tender his self to your touch. That is me. Understand this about me and I am easy to access — I do not abide authority, I question it continually; I will not obey anyone, any dogma or doctrine, except what I give to myself as personal injunctions. And I gravitate to those of a like mind. I loathe slaves and conditoned human beings.

All my writing contains an expression of that special passion to be free, to demand justice in all things and to make the mind work better by asking it to be above all things — fair! This is my writer’s credo.

Jane suggested that I write about Freud’s possible take on the Holocaust. Exemplary idea! So I came up with the title you see above. I have not come up with a story. The self-fantasy is that it would make an avant garde or modernistic short story but the reality is that I may lack the craft to do so. I tried to jot down some thoughts about the story to be, if that. I thought of his cases — Dora, the Wolfman; I thought of his colleagues, Adler, Rank, Jung, Brill, Abraham, Ferenci: the concepts of transference and counter-transference, the repetition compulsion, dream contents, dream distortion, condensation, overdetermination, symbolism and all the rest; I considered the books he wrote, especially Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism. All that he had done crossed my mind. As great as Darwin and Einstein, he entered the world of the unconscious like a conquistadore — he once compared his studies and his intent to that of the Spanish conquerors.

Freud lost his sisters to Auschwitz, I believe. And I tried to imagine what a mind like his might make of the railroad station he might have been dropped off at, facing Mengele and German dogs, and being selected. I imagined what it might be like for a sondercommando to remove his jaw prosthesis that smelled so terribly his favorite dogs would leave the room and his faithful Anna would remove it. Here is the kernel of a story that drives me to distraction because I am frozen at the very beginning What would Freud make of camp life? What would he make of mankind as he saw arbeit und frei?  The opening word for the story that I cannot write at this point — not even an awkward rough draft — is “So!”

In that word may be the entire story. I wonder if I should just have the title of the story and then write “So!” from the mouth of Freud. A one word story. In that word and the exclamation point may be a summation of everying. “Why!” doesn’t do it for me. For there is no why in Auschwitz. Never was. “So”! comes after the act, not before it. “How” is irrelevant, just scheduling trains, building crematoria, organizing, ruling, digging trenches, using Zyklon B gas. And then my mind took flight: Suppose I just listed five names, to wit: Einstein, Faulkner, Proust, Joyce, Socrates; and imagine I gave each creative giant a one word comment or assessment ab0ut Auschwitz.

I give you Proust: “Remember!” Joyce: “Bloom!” Faulkner: “Past!” Einstein: “Time”! Socrates: “Unexamined”! Of course, I have failed here just as I have failed to get at Freud in Auschwitz. I may very well give up trying. But the idea of crawling behind Freud’s eyes and seeing the world and this horrific event in his mind’s eye intrigues me.

I don’t think the task is unimaginable but terrifically difficult to accomplish. The only way it can be accomplished, perhaps, is to turn it into a fantasy so that the impossible becomes the norm. And what can I attain with an atheistic and stoic Jew seeing the attempted eradication of his people? Here words should fail everyone. Kane said Rosebud on his death bed, summing up  his life in the remarkable Freudian symbol of the sleigh so overdetermined by a multiplicity of meanings that Freud would have had a field day with it. I wonder what Freud’s last mental memory trace flashed in his mind after being given that final does of morphine, upon his request, from his family physician. — Was it nothing? Was it something irrelevant? Well, let me grandiosely try a few words that come to my mind as I try to creep into his last thoughts: Anna…Martin, his son…the death of his daughter…Breuer…Fleiss…his elementary school in Moravia…the cover of his The Interpretation of Dreams… or one of his favorite Greco-Roman statuettes that had strewn his office…Better yet, he remembers for a moment how he stood before Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome and first began to contemplate his essay about it which would create psychoanalytic art history.

Does Freud at the Auschwitz station raise his hands to the sky like a patriarchal prophet, this man who took only aspirin for his cancer pains, and declare to a god who does not exist and therefore cannot hear, that the choice will be his to make. Walking into the “showers” stripped of all clothes, his whitish beard, his cane gone, his prosthesis to become a sondercommando’s “find,” he stands stoically straight as best a man of his age can, and says to all those around him: “Work and love; that is all there is. I hope you have had at least one of these in your time. If not, I am with you now, a friend of mankind.”

“So’!

Should my story begin with “So”! and end with with the last paragraph. Is this enough for Freud in Auschwitz?”

I await your responses.

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.

I’ve read Wakefield’s book twice, for I “grew up” in the Fifties. I purposely did so to refresh my memory of the times. In 1950 I was 10 and by 1960 I was 20, when I first saw La Dolce Vita. I can go many different ways with this blog but I will simply immerse myself into my associations and remembrances. In 1957 I went with Stan Edelman, both of us about 17,  to Greenwich Village. I recall that I picked up Finnegan’s Wake in a book store and was put off by the gibberish, it seemed to me, that ran for pages — who knew I was interrupting a dream? We roamed the village and I especially recall going into an artist’s quarters who had posted a sign at the door that he was having a showing of his photographs. To go upstairs, to have cheese and a cracker, to browse, sublimely innocent and feeling sublimely safe, reflects upon a time in which riding the subway and being invited into  an artist’s home was not unnatural. It is a very pleasant memory of a different time and sensibility.

When I was in the village we caught a performance by an eccentric monologist called Brother Theodore; he was strange, bizarre and ranted and raved about Quadrupedism if I recall correctly — that man should go on all fours. Much later, very much later I learned he had been ransomed from Dachau for about one dollar for giving up the rights to the family fortune which was in the millions. Years later he got the public’s attention with visits to David Letterman — imagine Lenny Bruce doing standup in a death camp and you have Brother Theodore. At 17 I imagined he represented the offbeat and eccentric part of the village. In 1957 he was way out there. It was a good day to see him — just on a lark, my first adolescent outing to Greenwich Village.

I was too young, naive and immature to haunt the streets and crooked byways of the village at a time in which psychoanalyis was the predominant treatment for artists and painters, when jazz was laying down its New York roots, Mailer was writing about the “white negro” and Salinger’s stories were avidly looked forward to in the New Yorker. I missed Ginsberg and Kerouac, the Beats and Leroi Jones, later Imamu Biraku, writing his poetry and plays. I was in a dream state, emerging from but not engaging my world. It was the period of Eisenhower, panty raids, the 1955 Chevrolet Impala, the astounding Studebaker Golden Hawk — priceless styling to my eyes; it was a period in which there was silent passing in hallways in high school (!) and a white stripe down the corridors that you could not cross over. Air raid sirens warned us to crawl beneath our wooden desks and protestors were arrested in Times Square for not taking cover in assigned shelters. All this was around me but I was not a participant. It was a period in which people refused to sign petitions lest they be thought of as agitators or Commies — it was the McCarthy period.

Conditioning and conformity were all about and I was saturated in it.  The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit  spoke to that period. It wasn’t until the rapturous Sixties that I roused myself from slumber. Each one of us must know what it is to be asleep in life and then what it is to become aware. We are amazed at how we slumbered while fully awake, whatever that is. I went to a highly stratified high school, Jamaica High School, in fact. You knew your place in that school; we had tracks such as academic, commercial and general and in subtle and overt ways were reminded of that. Grades above all. The gifted were fawned over and coddled, principal and teacher pets.You just knew you were less or lesser than. I only recently discovered that Stephen Jay Gould and Michael Savage (he had another name, then)  were there between 1955 to 1958.

For me it was the golden age of cars — the DeSoto, the heavy beetle-like Hudson, the Nash Rambler, the wraparound windshields and fins, the 1954 Pontiac Bonneville that I drooled over,  the sleek and futuristic Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy; the Chrysler Imperial and the early Ford Thunderbird; the movies of the Fifties had the latent undercurrent of doom — “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “Them!” — ants changed into monsters by A-bomb blasts, “The Forbidden Planet,” “Ivanhoe,” “Demetrius and the Gladiator,” “East of Eden,” “Giant,” “The Ten Commandments,” “It Came from Outer Space,” “The Searchers,” “The Unforgiven,” and so on. In movie houses at the time Duncan yo-yo contests were held;  maestros performed amazing feats with this ancient toy. Duncan was the best yo yo, Cheerio came in a close second. Jeans were called dungarees and crew cuts were in. If you saw a rare instance of a black man and a white woman on the street one gawked. Mother-of-pearl cufflinks were fashionable as well as charcoal gray suits ( the Windsor knot  was for ties)  and one always wore leather shoes — Regal or Florsheim, to wit – London Character if you had the bucks. I recall leather shoes for $18 in a shoe store window and I couldn’t afford them. We wore “sneakers,” then, either Converse or Keds. One resoled shoes and did not throw them out.Taps on the heels and tips prevented wear and made a melodious sound on pavement. Choices were limited, which as I look back, was a good thing: in reasonable doses, abstinence creates character.

As I recall, I sensed a kind of ennui, a kind of boring stasis was in the air. That is why Kennedy was met with such pleasure for he was one of the first “pop” presidents, although very much of the Fifties himself. The story goes that Mr. Clean was modeled after Eisenhower — I found him terminally dull. Sputnik in 1957 announced a new age and I recall seeing it in the afternoon skies after school with my friends.   At 4 p.m. I’d go into the house and see Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and envied the young people of my age who were not shy enough to have girlfriends and knew how to dance. On Saturdays I stayed in bed watching cowboy flics from the thirties — Buck Jones, Bob Steele, Hopalong Cassidy, Tex Ritter, Ken and Kermit Maynard filled airspace on TV; The Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials held me enraptured — the Clay People, Emperor Ming, the Merciless. Films saturated my frontal lobes — forever.  Amid the constancy, conformity, regularity of that world the seeds of the Sixties were being sown. Ferment was in the Village, that was for sure; psychoanalysis was on its wane, giving way to the Primal Screams of the Sixties.

Wakefield was in his mid-twenties, living and working in the Village while I was emerging — he had 10 years on me. I awoke in the Sixties and acted out as well. So I was a transitional young man who could not or who was not aware enough to see the world about me; it takes a long time to grow up and we often end our years still immature, still yearning, still wishing, wanting and often still unaware of ourselves first, and of course, by definition, unaware of those close to us. No man goes to his grave fully aware. We couldn’t handle that. It is not valued. Not in this culture in any case.