Mathias B. Freese

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I know, rather, I believe, how my writing mind works, which really means I know shit about it. In any case it goes like this: sink into books about the Holocaust or just this one and let it all percolate and seep through my unconscious filters until it fills up the acquifer. I had read Clendinnen’s book several years back and included a few terms into The i Tetralogy and returned to it for a second read. An Australian historian whose books mostly deal with the Aztec experience in the Americas, for her own reasons she began to study the Holocaust and in so doing brought an “outsider’s” (her own words) take to the leviathan which is Shoah. She is rigorous when she examines ideas, like a garlic press getting at the clove. And does not humor fools, calling Bruno Bettelheim “fatuous” in one instance, which he was. She honors Gitta Sereny who did remarkable interviews with Albert Speer and SS Unterscharfuhrer Franz Suchomel. Her bibliography is expansive, acute and recommendations for further reading very apt.

Presently I am sweating out the final selection of short stories for my new book on the Holocaust, “Working Through the Holocaust,” with its analytic allusion to the therapeutic process. Again I am wrestling with issues, trying like a fool to get at the “why.” A telling comment about that is in the off-hand comment by an Auschwitz guard to a prisoner when asked about an ugly incident in the camp: “Here there is no why.” I accept that, but I plow ahead trying to get at the victim’s mind-set, although I have had the experience of imagining seeing things through the eyes of the killers. Clendinnen argues well that we need to understand both. At length she writes of Primo Levi and others who have explored profoundly the victim’s experience, very well indeed; what has nourished and nurtured me while my book exists in the deserts of mind and matter, an isolate stuck on a stylite, is that on unconscious levels I was emboldened to work through the eyes of the murderer. (Goddam it! my fellow writers, trust your gut.) And Clendinnen makes her case that Nazis were not aliens, but variants of each of us. Again it is rewarding, alone with my own book, on my mental lap, in my own time, that I have struggled with this. And so in my new stories I try to see it both ways, the victim, and the victimizer. I seek no why. When I was a history major I enjoyed and relished reading the bibliographical essays of major historians who gave us the sources of their themes or motifs and generously commented on the idiosyncracies of their fellow colleagues; often the essay at the back was better than the book itself. I mention this because it is my belief it is in the accrual of detail, in the miniscule accretion of detail that we come upon insight and substance. Clendinnen’s book is such an example.

And so for a book I hope to have out in late spring, I am assiduously going line after line, tightening up sentences, providing intricate detail, using my own garlic press to get the most out of the fewest words possible, for as I hone my stories like a razor on a strop, I become clearer about what it is I need to attain or  say. Style is me, who I am, so I just go about my business in sentence-making, using images, which I tend to favor very much, to make my prosecutor’s case. I must share with you the joy or personal pleasure to have one’s own manuscript before one’s eyes — the collection of detail, thought and image. And my task is to “simply” order the stories so that the reader is taken in, massaged and then amazed or struck dumb by my intellectual tinker toys, my orientation and prejudices. I sit before the manuscript and revise and revise and revise and then will all this to stop. I give it to Jane who hopefully I will marry this weekend and she uses her acute eye to excise my often tendency to reiterate, to perseverate all in a sentence. I think my need to say things three different ways is probably my own arrogance that the reader will not get it unless I write it three different ways or it is my own sense of not being heard or being underestimated. In any case she takes the lawn mower to it and my vanity about words has relatively eased so I can take it. Wasn’t it the editor, I forgot his name (Gordon Lish?), who made James Carver the writer he is; he pruned the hell out of his works and now his heirs are barking unfair. Perplexing, is it not? However, don’t each of us need an editor for our own living, other than death who is the grim and final reaper?

Perhaps we should consider perennially revising our existence, less is more, says the cliche; but I favor that common scold, Thoreau: “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!” I sit with a text of stories trying to imagine what it is to be the victim and several stories of what it is to be the victimizer. At times I go into surreal fantasies as my attempt to say indirectly but very concretely the unheard scream I feel. In my legerdemain I write of golems, a retarded child destined to be gassed, a doomed cantor in love, survivors, Holocaust deniers, lovers of quirky Nazi memorabilia, cannibalism, an interview with a camp “doctor,” and Jane’s personal delight, an interview with the nondescript Eva Braun who revels in Hitler’s defecating on her firm abs. I take risks. Whenever I take a risk, I give up that internal censor that mottles amd brutalizes our very safe and corseted lives.

At this juncture let me say that a new version of The i Tetralogy is at the printer. New cover, the first few pages with commentary about the book by bloggers, reviewers and the like and internal tweaking here and there. The book stands as it is. If you want a free book for teaching purposes or the Holocaust is of significance to you, you can reach at ifreese@hotmail.com. And since I will be e-mailing hundreds informing them of the book’s availability, if you have a suggestion and e-mail address of a librarian, scholar, college instructor, or rabbi, let me know — that would be a kindness.

I will be spending our honeymoon at CityCenter in Vegas — the Aria: New York in the desert.