Mathias B. Freese

Anything about Welles I am attracted to, perversely so. His treatment at the clammy hands of the boors and philistines of his time continues to this day. The twin morons of his time, Hedda Hopper and especially Louella Parsons, gossip columnists, went after him —often at the behest of Hearst and his caged canary, Marion Davies –and savaged Welles. Their malign influence went on for decades. What I find perverse in me is the satisfaction knowing full well how this culture goes after its artists, how we always fear and dread intelligence of a high order. It has been so for centuries; it is in the fabric of Homo sapiens. Watching “Me and Orson” brought back all the movie trivia and mental memorabilia I have about Welles. Interestingly, the movie is based on a fiction by a New Jersey English teacher, “Me and Orson.” I imagine it to be a delightful conceit.

One scene that touched me was Welles reading Tarkington’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” while riding in a New York cab. Reading passages that touched him, for Welles lost both his father and mother before he was sixteen, foreshadowed the movie that was to be made. What is little known was that Welles read two books a day, or so the legend says; wrote theater reviews in England by age 16 and was proclaimed a genius very early on, his alcoholic father and artistic mother not imposing reasonable parental controls on him. In an interview he once said that he was so used to being adulated as a genius while growing up that it was normal for him to assume so. In the movie his petulance and arrogance is brought out all the while we esteem his genius, an interesting dilemma for any individuals in relationship with him. In a memoir by his daughter Christopher Welles, just released, she mentions that he decided to call her Christopher because he liked the name; she describes his frequent absences which she resented but when he appeared he charmed her socks off and what a charmer he was. On a long ago TV show talk show he told the exceedingly overweight Oliver Reed words to the effect that as an actor he filled  space in film, meant as a compliment. It depends on how you take that. Outlandish and endearing in the same moment, I have a sweet tooth for the man. I firmly believe he had the purest integrity as an artist and for that I admire him. After all, how many times do you need to write “Hamlet”? His achievements continued long after his early masterpiece. I run to his defense. I need not.

I went to Google and discovered his daughter’s recent book, and  I came across a real fascinating fact. He had an older brother, Richard, diagnosed as a schizophrenic and institutionalized; Welles sent him a stipend for as long as he lived. Ten years older than Orson, he was released years later and seemed to get his life in order. So here is the Welles family, one son a genius and one diagnosed as schizophrenic, a mother who was a pianist with artistic leanings and a father who was an inventor and alcoholic. The conundrum of two sons so vastly different must have been not only puzzling but demoralizing for the parents and one wonders if the “other” played a subliminal part in Welles’ cinematic and theatrical productions. I wonder what it might be like to write about Orson from the point of view of Richard — Welles would put him to work at the back of the theater at times. What are brothers except our other selves in different semblances, our doppelgangers. It is the same womb. I wonder if he had the same deep voice as Orson. I am now wondering a lot about Richard.

The movie reveals fictionally the manipulative and cunning Welles, a prick, exactly, but it also captures that which is redeemable and majestic about the man. Part enfant terrible, genius, how is one to deal with that? How do we all deal with geniuses or the exquisiitely gifted in this culture? I am pondering that as I write. I believe we tear them down for they represent on many levels what we have not allowed ourselves to become or what we resent for not having — or just human envy and spite. Teachers do this regularly in schools; religious “leaders” shut down the dissenters like stepping on a biblical snake’s head. I really do feel that it goes beyond the artistic to something deeper which is only an intuitive conviction based on no known empirical facts and consequently I believe it to be true — human beings are fearful of the light, preferring the dark and shadows; human beings are threatened by that which is gifted or exquisitely intelligent for it creates an unwanted awe. Rather than sheltering one self beneath the overhead leaves of the tree next to an annointed one, we dread to sidle up to genius and we flee instead. I have sidled up to one or two great minds in my life and I found the human ambrosia wonderful — I actually grew as a person. Adopt an artist and bathe in the juices.

That’s the title of this blog; now let’s get on with it. The Hanukah candles are lit by this atheist who respects the immense Jewish contribution to humanity. I can even say the prayers in Hebrew, 56 years after my bar mtzvah. Oh, the power of conditioning and how sweet it is and can be in certain instances. I am also writing a few paragraphs about snow for my Homage to K, a riff on Kafka trying his hand on writing about the Holocaust. (Oh, the grandiosity.) Can you just imagine what he’d have to say about the Holocaust, but I refer you to my last blog about him. I am entering emails of European scholars into a database, quite diligently, quite laboriously, for the next edition of the tetralogy which has been sent off to the printer. At least 3000 individuals will get a gander at my PR email which goes out in January. Hopefully the cover will appear here and other goodies as Jane is quite well versed in this cybershit I humor and hope never to master — why allow it to creep into my brain cells?

Jane Elizabeth Holt has decided that we will wed very early in January. Realizing that as a Jewish man and a future Jewish husband my ancestral instincts, an inflamed sciatic nerve, genetically tell me to take care of my new bride. She will now be covered by my medical plan. Given that she will pay in 2010 almost $300 monthly for her anemic plan, one without a prescription plan (!) at all but just a plan for dire circumstances, she will now be protected by my teachers’ plan which will provide ample coverage. (What altruism on my part.) I remove from her brow the burden of being poorly insured not to say that she finds the payments burdensome. And what do I get for all this? I get Jane, poor girl. She is my built-in hospice, literary editor, amanuensis, pragmatist, lover, jack Mormon who adores all things Jewish, especially Jewish men. She is delighted to find out that this actor or that writer is Jewish for she is one of the few people I have come across who are not darkly inhabited by prejudice.

She is studying to be a librarian which she recently acted upon and while  engrossed in her studies I “meekly” prowl about the house unattended to, unloved, uncared for, doing my Larry David impressions. Jewish men need care: water us, feed us, schtoop us occasionally and we are contented cats. With a first class mind, I enjoy that at 51 she is cutting through her studies like a hot knife through butter. Our mutual dream is that she gets work so that we can finance a tour to Israel before I croak, visit the Wall where I will weep and collapse into terminal ethnicity. I enjoy these quaint atavistic traits I own. In any case we will pick one of those sleazy Vegas chapels and have some clerk in sleazoid fashion pronounce whatever jargon makes us a couple. We have been together three years and in effect, we are married, heart and soul — poor girl. What I keep telling Jane, although she has two masters, is that she should think beyond being a librarian, because in spirit she is a writer who will become a librarian. However, my sense of her is that she would make a very sharp therapist — sensitive, excellent memory, huge plasma webs of feeling, the ability to thread together random thoughts into a tapestry of a kind. Like a very good therapist, she would provide a superlative “hold” for her clients. And the best trait of all — a cosmic ability to laugh at herself. I enjoy the tinkling laughter she has.

And so this potpourri of daily living comes to a close.

The new book of short stories lies fallow while I wait for jane to finish up her first course in librarianship. All the stories are spanking new, therefore, I am suspect of their quality but once again Jane will read the manuscript, make comments and suggestions and I will acquiesce or not. The other day, influenced by reading Kakfa, I wrote a story called “Homage to K” which reflects the insane density of his writings which are often like repetition compulsions to me written in swirls of deep, rich chocolate. Sometimes I think he is putting on the reader, spinning out cosmic jokes. I remember how many years ago I was mightily impressed by “The Burrow” and “In the Penal Colony.” Reading them made me feel trapped, especially “The Burrow” as if I were a neurotic creature burrowing beneath, perhaps  a metaphor for each of us as we move toward our insignificant ends. “In the Penal Colony,” which is exquisitely harrowing, made me think of what Kafka would make of the Holocaust and how he might write about it. (I have learned that two sisters died in the camps.) With that for inspiration I wrote “Homage to K.” I refer to the Great Wall of China in the story, referencing his strange story “The Great Wall of China,” just recently read by me, a perplexing, riddling whirl of prose.

I will go back to “Homage” for I am working on making it more dense, a la Kafka. I want to write about snow falling in the camp, the old symbol for dying and death in literature. I will try to make the reader feel the volume and depth of the snow which is a significant feature in the story. I can only try. I really don’t read other writers, lesser or greater lights, although the conventional wisdom has always been that this is the way to learn. I agree, I suppose, but I go my own way. All my writing is self-taught and given my being an autodidact in the field, I go my merry — and miserable — way. In an introduction to a collection of Kafka’s stories, John Updike writes that he only produced six slim volumes. But what stories! What intrigues me, in fantasy, is what a book by Kafka might say about the Holocaust. I cannot imagine the crazed intensity and riveting sentences he might have written. So like a puny putz, I wrote my homage to the master. By the way here is a piece of amazing trivia. Kafka invented, yes, invented, the safety helmet and had it patented and when he came to be buried people from another world came to pay their respects and they had no idea about what he was doing in literature.

I have about 20-25 stories in the manuscript and not a few, I imagine, will be deleted. Hoping to put it out in the spring, I am suffering from a lull, a post-natal depression after having given birth to this child. I am in a lull, the time between then and now and what will be. I fish around in mind about what is next, combing through old stories and old files, seeking out fragments of aborted stories. I enjoy this browsing because it is meditative. I know full well this cannot be expedited. I will know when the next book is upon me. I do know I am “done” with the Holocaust. My unconscious knows full well what will be while my conscious mind is a tabula rasa. What surprises most of us, if we are open to it, is that the real engine that drives us, no pun intended, we are unaware of;  it hurts our vanity to not feel in control or sensible to our intentions. It reminds me of the push of genes, how we are controlled profoundly by them, how our breathing  and cardiovascular systems are purely autonomic. We are unknown to ourselves which makes me trust in the unconscious as a writer, for I do believe what is written has already been written in large degree by our inner self. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if we could learn how to nurture our unconscious in order to make better literature, and other things as well.

Perhaps Kafka’s unconscious took over completely when he wrote and what an unconscious that was. Perhaps that occurs to other writers who can write for six to eight hours in one flow, channeling the voice within. I wrote The i Tetralogy  largely by tapping into what I felt, mostly, without censoring what I wrote, by just putting down the words as if I was being moved by a Ouija Board. I do most of my writing in this manner, trusting myself, knowing I can always throw it out. I don’t secrete language but allow it to be a cataract. The lull at this time, I believe, is the unconscious replenishing itself, for it is never, never empty.

So Tiger wants his privacy; indeed, he called his yacht, Privacy. I don’t follow golf because I generally don’t follow anything. The latest tempest in the teapot is the conflict between Tiger’s “image” and his right to keep his mouth shut about what happened in his suv. The media vultures are all over him. Legally he doesn’t have to do anything. The police are investigating a fender bender as if Tiger and his wife crashed Obama’s state dinner. The lunacy of this culture is appalling. Earlier in the week the local  newspaper carried an item about a demented woman who saw the image of Jesus on her iron, replaced it with a new one and put the anointed one away in the closet. I tore out the article, if that is what it is, from the paper as a classic example of what is crazed about religious conditioning and how easily the dumb, demented and dumbfounded believe in anything. I’d retrieve the item and quote from it but it is downstairs and is not worth my effort as I blog along. They carried a picture of this cretinous human being — and the iron, a reminder of how ridiculous the species is. Imagine this modern relic moved to some church next to the thumb, ulna, or finger of a saint, objects for the faithful to bow to, to revere and to pray to. Imagine praying to a starch stain looking like a dim and faded portrait of Jesus surrounded by 10 or 15 nozzle holes, like an apse-aura, about his head, a Romanesque arch at that.

I go to my death a free man, free of heaven and hell.

I am suffering a sweetly mild depression as my latest blood test is a mixed result, forebodings are all about. And tomorrow I go to a urologist for my yearly digital exam, the intimacy brought about by an inserted digit, a press of the prostate and the doctor’s assessment of its glandular condition. The PSA is very low which is good, given that I had a prostate procedure in 2003 after enduring years of PSA tests, a very inexact measurement of the  gland’s state of health. Since coming to Nevada, I had to find new doctors — a dentist, an internist, a urologist and a lab. I am through my third barber who used a metaphorical bowl about my head and sheared me like a bound lamb. The last “stylist” was a Glenn Beck fanatic who hated Obama. I had to move on because I tasted her metallic hatred in my mouth. When you move to a new state or neighborhood, roots are cut. I am unimpressed by the doctors in Nevada — too much time playing the slots.

Which brings me back to privacy. I share what I can with Jane. Essentially I am a very private person but when you write the irony is that you have to expose your feelings and how curious all that is. Blogging is not privacy. I don’t worry. There is an essential secret self to us all which we keep in abeyance unless like Kathy Griffin you are an inverted personality gathering your jollies and shekels by revealing all that you contain within, giving emptiness a poor name. What is hilarious to me is that what is revealed is often so bereft of content and meaning. I associate this culture to the empty coke bottles on a curb. What if I revealed to you that I never went to a rock concert or never attended a football game in my life. What revelations! Please judge them, make of them what you will. Using a cliche I have been hearing of late, at the end of the day, you know nothing about me but you know a great deal about you if you look inward for the first time.

Perhaps the secrets we have about ourselves are condemnations we feel about what we have done or “committed” in the past. What is a secret, after all? And why is it a private thing? Being a Jewish Wikipedia, I will attempt a definition: — a secret is a judgment of self, a lie with some truth about it; it is a measure of self-disgust. Allow me to squeeze this lemon a bit more: - a secret defines our distance from the next person; it is a self-difference we cherish while all along feeling the uncomfortableness of it. To give away a secret, I think, may make the person feel less or inadequate, all over again. By keeping private, we retain what little this world gives us before it gnaws and tears away at our being. I will work on my definition.

Americans, this culture, apparently, detest secrets, especially by celebrities; after all, we humor them and we cater to them because we want them to cavort before us like seals; we want to judge their human errors and we want them to globally reveal all so we can have a measure of parental tsk-tsking. Privacy is anathema in this culture and it is as insensitive as walking into a child’s room without knocking. A person who does not have a private self is an empty self. The inner-directed individual is becoming as rare as certain desert tortoises. I am waiting for the next Kathy Griffin special in which she picks up the lid of her toilet bowl to show America her inner workings.

What is it to be a spiritual human being in a grossly materialistic world?

Well, historically, most spiritual teachers urged us to surrender the things of the world. I suggest, if it is at all possible, to expunge the following from your mind.

The Book of Mormon (”Chloroform in print ” — Mark Twain); the Gospel of John; the Koran; the chapter on Ruth and Naomi and especially the tale of Abraham and Isaac, the binding. All thoughts about politicians, especially Sarah Palin; all memories of George Bush, the Texan putz; the I phone; all movies with Sandra Bullock and her twin, Jennifer Anniston; McDonald’s golden arches; and Christopher Colombus.

If you can attain this which admittedly is impossible, you might reach a point where real spiritual work can be done. At this level you would have to free yourself of the following:

Patriotism of any kind; nationalism of any kind; that Jesus Christ ever existed — of course not; that capitalism is the best of all systems; that any flag of any nation is worth dying for; that parenting does not involve separating out; that all ideas are healthy human constructs, not dangerous, ultimately effectual –to wit, religion; that  belief systems do not condition and create divisions; that God is not a man-made construct that enables the slavery of others; that we are better than other animals on this planet.

I go to my demise semi-conscious, perhaps less so, to be honest; but others are comatose which makes them effective as senators, surgeons, real estate agents, entrepreneurs, all the rest. The non-spiritual person masters his environment, makes it work for him. To be an observer is anathema — foreign and strange to this individual. The best of the lot comes right off the headlines. Palin. Beck. Limbaugh. Think of how well they manipulate existence and make things materialize right before our eyes. Admirable, is it not?

The quasi-spiritual person such as myself, the semi, the quasi-seeker just bumbles along. I am so removed from the daily catastrophes here in the USA and overseas that I imagine walking into a post-apocalyptic world — if I survive — just musing at all the destruction brought about by a species with an anus.

Personally, I have not “realized” myself. After decades I am much the same man — Americanized, homogenized, ism-driven, conditioned, routinized, ghetto-ized and polluted daily by media. I have been well instructed to hate, to be prejudiced, to value this part of the globe above all other parts. I have been taught to school myself in the “choices” given me; to regulate my behavior according to laws long extant before  my birth; to prepare for life, to prepare for retirement, to  prepare for death in very customized ways. I eat foods manufactured for me. I have been trained not to think of the daily holocaust of fowl just to make McNuggets and to feed our carnivorous ways. Above all, I have been conditioned to be expert at mastering all kinds of contradictions as a way to get through the day and to get on with it.

Given that the situation is unremittedly hopeless, if not schizoid, I still have manged to eke out some spiritual meaning in this society, call it what you will.

Here are some thoughts based on my conditioned existence, some suggestions that you may covertly put into place so as to keep some semblance of freedom as you waddle through the shit we call America.

Never teach school, any school. In this is the V8 of conditioning, polluting our minds and selves. Teachers are house slaves. Realize that the “Grind” in this country is that we do not enjoy our work, we are separated from meaning in what we do. So just make a living and live after five. The old therapeutic truth is that the neurotic is a failed artist. The artist lives his life!

We are not governed, we are lobbied as a people and this will go on far into the future. Politics is the charade we observe until we die. Religion is a carcinoma of the mind. God has the pitchfork. The ministry macerates ideas into dogma and doctrine in between pedophilia (see the 750 page report on priestly pedophila in Ireland). Give up tenses, past and future; stick to the present, awful as it can be. All you can do, given the wisdom of the East, is to be here now!

Hell is now as well as other people, so forget going to hell because you are in it. Happy holidays! Optimistically, the only thing we have as a species is nature and one another, but we are too busy killing one another off. I suggest that you only have relationship; stick to that; make of it what you can.  Invest in yourself first, then take that IRA and invest it in a relationship. Revere no one so that you are lost; honor no one unless moved by their humanity; stay away from old men and women on exercise machines, for they are searching for immortality.

Question all authority! Realize that all societies are essentially corrupt! See what is which is basically reality. Keep your wallet in your right hand pocket. Embrace no theology, no ideology, no ism, constantly be in insurrection and you may come to see clearly. And when you do get a glimpse of the matrix, your troubles first begin. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Use language as a whipsaw. Be crude and vulgar when dealing with cant and confusion and Bill O’Reilly. Fuck clears the air, always has, always will. Challenge those nearest and dearest to you so that you do not enable or collude with them, but free them up. With friends decondition if you’re not weary. Above all, be true to what few molecules of honesty and sincerity and all those good core values you have managed after all these years to secrete , like acorns, in a ball of leaves in a crook of a tree’s  branches.

And to all a very good night.

I am convinced more than ever that we all need to turn off our TV sets. At the gym this old fart works out in, I get angry voices if I choose not to watch ESPN; after all, sports are the thing in a gymnasium, not news. I have to courteously ask if I can put on CNN instead of Fox News(?). Glen Beck rules. The dumbing down and deadening of the American populous is a done deed. As I watch snippets of Palin being interviewed from the right and left, I catch her holding her special needs child (what jargon we use) in one arm and not closely at that, as if he were a thing. Her body language reveals a sleek bullet of low caliber, the arrogance that if she can run Alaska she can negotiate with the Iranian leadership. Hubris leaks from her like diaper crap. The women I speak with view her as an embarrassment, a gender anomaly. Her husband, the Alaskan sphinx, stands ready, harpoon in hand. She pushes a book that she did not write but in the world of Oprah this is of no issue. Palin is the physical grease that makes this country a laughingstock. I believe she really is the best we can offer — I see a Palin/Beck ticket down the line for the yahoos of this nation. I must say we have become very shabby as a country.

Krishnamurti in several places in several lectures over his years of teaching made it very clear that all societies are essentially corrupt. It is one of my abiding principles when I look about me and about the world. How does one stay morally clean and principled when society is brown shoe polish, the color of shit? How does one endure in a society that has seen the failure of capitalism? Isms are the bane of civilizations throughout the millenia. When and if a person deconditions himself of beliefs, institutions, parental injunctions, of unconscious and conscious shackles, of moribund religions in which celibacy is a value, with jihads and fatwas as threats rooted in religious violence, then, perhaps, one may become free. And if you do become free the existential threat to self is monumental, truly a stranger in a strange land. As best as I can say it, the free man or woman is in a state of continual insurrection. (I find that terrific.) No where in the public school system of this country are we taught to question authority or how to go about deconditioning one self. After all, teachers are bureaucratic dullards and slaves. For many of us we come to our deaths as rigid and stone-frozen as the giant statues of Easter Island.

When I worked with clients, I struggled to have them see. It takes balls rubbed in grit and baked in the deserts of the Southwest to divest oneself of the shellac this culture lays on us with giant rollers. I really believe, deeply so, that the greatest gift you can give children or clients is to assist them to see, to realize they have been steamrolled over, that they will live lives of deflated balloons unless there is an awakening of intelligence. I pose a question to you: if you have seen or if you are willing to see Citizen Kane, answer this question: — What is your rosebud? Begin here.

Too hard. OK. When was the last time you markedly, significantly changed an aspect of your character or personality?

And why are you most often an amalgam of the thoughts and ideas of all your teachers, spouses, colleges, bosses, politicians, and especially religious “leaders”? By the by, what makes you think you need a leader of any kind? Why do you need a church to expedite your prayers ritualistically to God? And why in the world do you need a God unless you are shaky and need the belief that there is an after life? Oh, I see, if I am good in this life which I will piss away being a conditioned slob and slave, I will have pomagrantes and whores in the next one. And have you ever examined, moment to moment, why you resist a new idea or a new way, that is, what idols of the mind step in front and ward off these changes? Why do you believe in anything? What makes you think that beliefs improve you, make you better, improve your lot? Beliefs only provide security, and brother, you should go into that and examine why you need such security to begin with.

I think a lot — excuuuuse me. I suppose, as I have been labeled, that I am a seeker. Well, that is a load of shit to begin with. I can seek inside a hall pantry closet. I deserve a sharp answer, I don’t know you so that is a non issue. I speak to myself when I write. You are welcome to grab hold of the kite’s tail. I seek to end my life, rather, I seek to understand my life, moment to moment, not with a method or some how-to or ism. I am free of that malarkey, many will never be. I used to remind clients that their task after treatment was over was to first be free of me because whether or not they realized it, I had used methods to assist them in an imperfect world to decondition themselves. And part of that freedom was to be rid of me. To be a disciple of anything sucks — look at Jesus’ crippled twelve.

For me an epiphany would be to see what is, reality, moment to moment, to die to the past and die to the future, to be here now as Eastern thought describes it. I have had glimmers of the promised land. I may never enter, but I know pollution when I see it. And Palin is the very worst kind, unawakened, narcissistic, ignorant, and stupid; for her heaven and hell is the good and plenty of life. It is beyond sadness.

I see the years ahead of me, the shadows, the pinhole of light at the end and I endeavor on almost a daily basis to discover what it means to understand, to grasp, and to observe what I need to do as the days, weeks and years puddle together — how does any one of us keep focused on what needs to be done with our existence? Is that not the essential task before us? (!) Everything else is persiflage.  I write, I think, and I consider and no answers are apparent except to pose another question; answers are eunuchs. I don’t believe we need to go around like crypto-Hamlets asking our to bes or not to bes. Cleary, I know that my peristent inner dialogue with my self comes up dry almost every time. I am not interested in living the good life. I am concerned with living life, moment to moment.  The bibles of the three major religions are fairy tales, often poetically expressed. I need no codified wisdom. Heaven and hell are human constructs to make other human beings obedient. The only readings that have guided me are the works of the Existentialists and the “teachings” of Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti is an eternal intellectual nag and I find him useful in my journey. I am not a disciple of his work, for that is slavery and conditioning. He keeps me awake and in that way I will not become the mental sludge of a Hannity, Rove, Coulter, Beck, O’Reilly and Cheney. All of whom are really dead human beings. I try to avoid the daily pollution of this culture — the media, the press of technology, religion, political parties, all are institutional cages.

This rattles me on a daily basis — what is my intent, my purpose as the globe spins. I don’t believe I am cursed or bedeviled; I believe I am asking the right questions perhaps incorrectly or not clearly. I seek not to transcend nor to be spiritual, forms of narcissism. As soon as one accepts the dogma and doctrine of church or of the culture, one is lost. To ask a serious question is to shake the world. I cannot explain why I do what I do except that it is one of the many built-ins of my character, to wit, my ethnicity encourages questioning. The other explanation is that I am a fluke — or a writer — or an intellectual.  I don’t need to know. I ask in order to embody my life in some fashion so that the time ahead is used creatively, structurally, not so much to attain an epiphany but to come to my end with satisfaction and sensibility. You all know how empowering it is to do something well and to continue to do that for some time on. I associate to my efforts trying to master the yo-yo, which I never did, but in that purposeful play, the frustration and the inability to attain some motions in space, in a way calmed the young self. To be on the way to master or to own a purpose is to feel congruent with the world. I think I want to do more than that but the words to describe that seem, tonight, beyond my grasp. I associate to Krishnamurt’s astute observation that the word is not the thing itself. So all writing, in this sense, is only an approximation of what is.

A fellow therapist might opine that it is all characterological on my part — so what else is new. It is part of my character and I own all of it and I feel fortunate to have this gnawing worm that seeks to penetrate the soil above to get to light. I am inarticulate here, and I have struggled and do struggle with this all the time — no, not the meaning of life, or truth, no, no. I seek, as analogy, to lift my Grecian spear and hurl it toward the target, whatever that may be; I aim not to arrive at the target; I aim so that the path of the missile I have cast is straight and true, and has directionality to it. Oh, don’t we all have that feeling that if we were truly unfied or “together” as individual human beings how different we would be and act in the world, engaging the world from a clearly defined self. That would be thrilling, but not all. I’d rather work from moment to moment, in choiceless awareness, as Krishnamurti, termed it, in observation of the world, listening with the third ear, to be within the ground of every and each moment — for me, that would be helpful as I make my way to my end. Give me one hour of that majestic self-understanding and I need not live the rest of my days as lint.

As I try to bring order once again to my life, I return to my writing. The second book of short stories, almost all new stories written these past few months, may go untested. That is, I may not send them out individually to online magazines for possible publication which would give them a kind of gravitas. I’ll take the risk of coughing them up on the reader as new efforts. Only one story will be taken from The i Tetralogy. “Unanswerable” was also taken from the tetralogy for Down to a Sunless Sea as a kind of good luck talisman.

What is very freeing by being off the grid as a writer is that I go my own way. The hunger — the lust and envy — associated with getting published is crushed by my writer’s heel. I’ve been so removed from that. I cherish the freedom not to be conditioned; that to write a book and not have it published by a name-brand publishing house is a failure of a kind. When you and I are ash what difference does it make? I will not play the culture game that I swim in, the rules and regs of society, the musts and shoulds that are essentially corruption of every kind imaginable. If you think that I write out of sour grapes, fuck you. I don’t! I write as a free man who will have his say and be done with it.

By being off the grid I am sufficient and call upon my own natural and innate resources. I fuel me. The latest book on the Holocaust has made me feel two things: a sense of discrepancy and the ache of misgivings. To write about the Holocaust is to begin with failure, the inability to describe the ineffable, the unknowable, the unfathomed. I begin with a sense of failure; of not being able to get from here to there; I feel a disconnect as I try to write my stuff. The misgivings are a porridge of why bother, give it up, it can’t be done, it’s over your head, it’s beyond your reach — it is most assuredly beyond your puny writing talent.

The Jew perseveres. The New York Jew doesn’t quit on himself. The drive in me is very strong. I cannot account for that and analysis of any kind is a dry oasis well, the bucket banging against the cobwebbed walls. I go on. Chalk it up to my DNA — and my value system, cut from a different time and culture. I always associate to the tortoise and the hare and you know which one I am.

As I write or rewrite these stories I feel I am not even close but I must go on. The latent reward, I believe, is that I improve my skills, improve my abilities, that the struggle in and of itself strengthens me. I have always been tested, and like an orangutan swinging from one sword of Damocles to another, I just get by, all the while cutting and nicking myself on blade edges. I will do my best, publish the book, announce its existence and get on to the next effort. My “Before I Croak” goal is to have at least 5 or more books as a gift to my own ego and self, and to Jane and to my son and daughter. Posterity can go fuck itself, what I call “Future Fuck,” that is, doing a number on your head before it happens. I try to live in that pompous existential moment of now or what Krishnamurti has called “what is.”

For the time being, I’ll end here.

I see myself disenthralled by angst and anxiety; things are going ahead; Mondays seem, of late, to be the days I get up and act on my fears, putting actions into place, engaging committed strangers, now becoming acquaintances. Hopefully in another two or three weeks all this might be an active but dormant personal volcano. Admissions to self are the hardest and I write these blogs mostly for myself, a diary of a kind, in which I express openly, at times covertly or subtly, the state of my union. While this tornado blows through, I still work on the revisions of my novel and the editor has almost completed her task; I tediously copy out e-mail addresses of indy booksellers so that I can make a massive mailing; and today I went back to one of the Holocaust stories I am fashioning and worked on that; planning to give my son a birthday gift, he’ll be 33 years old, his mother now dead for ten years. Recently I sent him a photo of himself and his mother when he was about 11 or so; she looked weary if not haggard and he was in full bloom of his childhood. And so it goes. So the admission that comes first is a plangent and melancholic one: I need to soothe myself for most of my childhood was bereft of touch, of being engaged as a person. To soothe oneself is triage, for it never can contain that mother’s milk one originally needed as a child. These last few weeks of personal assault on myself revealed many fissures in who I am — and I accept that.

The second self-admission is that I am as ignorant of myself as I have ever been, for I believe we are unknown to ourselves until we die. That is why men like Limbaugh and Beck are ignorant beyond comparison, for they dwell in certainty, like the inflammatory Inquisitors they are. I can handle very well not knowing, for I find that, curiously enough, my own Pacific isle. What I must admit to myself is that I will be rattled from time to time and have no recourse but to experience it, for knowledge from the past fails very often in the present. I just sampled that. I was mugged by my old and ancient response to a blow of heavy-duty anxiety; I registered that profoundly — and weakly. I do not judge myself. I just wish I had a better response — at first. Afterwards I get off the mat, and I can get at it. The initial blow to self often leaves me crushed like an old bent TV antenna on a 50’s splanch roof. I rarely condemn or judge myself, being a shrink helps you see through the inanity of those self-recriminatory gestures. I experience a kind of ennui with my inner self as if I should do better, that ancient need to reach what I cannot. Transcending is a motherfucker of a character trait; just the strain of it.

I have generally always been dissatisfied with myself is the next admission. I always like or want to do a good job of things, to do an excellent job, to be diligent if not expert — and we all know how hard that is to achieve. So in recent years I have almost laid that neuriosis to bed, but weeds do come back. I try to be less demanding of myself. I’m beginning to like that. As I near my end which is at any moment, let us say 40 years ago or maybe 10 or 11 years to come, realizing that life can cease and that all is in imminent jeopardy, I still thrive, live, revel, and make merry; all my ghetto humor is a defense against dying; we all are in a denial of death. I associate to Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green who spends his last few minutes alive watching a screen which displays the majesties of nature all accompanied by Beethoven’s joyous airs. Perhaps moment to moment is all we have and all we will ever have, for nothing endures for long, everything changes, all is flux and we mortals are carried away in the flow — lint. Each of us has to deal with this realization in his or her own way. Some never realize. Some never understand. Some, as Thoreau said, fritter away their lives in detail. I get stuck on the petard of anxiety. What a schmuck!

Dear Harry:

I cannot commit to you if you continue to hide, like the Klingons, behind a cloaking device. You allude to a possible connection we may have had years ago — or perhaps not. Choose to read my blog or not, that’s up to you; write comments if you want — I can’t protect myself from that;  or play Edmund Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo with me. In any case I have no patience for anonymity. The door is opened to you.