Mathias B. Freese

I am perplexed why I keep on writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adieu.

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.