Mathias B. Freese

I am working on a short work, “The Optimist’s Rag, which just percolated up into consciousness. No such thing, reader. It was working itself out in the unconscious. Human beings, as I see it, are just skin and bone envelopes that contain volcanic resources. I will not go into whether or not we have “will,” at this point. In any case, the book is a parody — perhaps not –of what it is to be empty. I spend significant time arguing that it is a better statre than awareness. The entire book is a riff on emptiness and awareness, with emptiness proving the winner. I offer it to the reader as a self-help book. I take after the self-help models of Dyer, Dr. Phil, Chopak, assholes three, or what I call Emersonian bullies. I have little patience with their blend of can-do, spiritualism and a whiff of Krishnamurti. As for Chopak, I like my gurus thin.

When I’ve written and the writing has slowed down, I stop and come back later. The old trick writers use is to write the next sentence or paragraph as a prompt for the next day’s work. I have come to a halt several times with the “rag” and I feel as if I am gnawing at an empty space. What I generally do is to fixate on my feelings, to dig and dig deeper and then to excavate a bit more and then scratch at it and then put a spade to it. In this pamphlet/book on emptiness I am trying to capture what it is to be empty, what it is to think within a vacuum and often my responses are to humorous and very dry. I try quizzes, sentence stubs, quotations, et al to move myself and the reader into an awareness of emptiness. I play tricks. See the next paragraph.

I have written some intense essays on awareness. See the talk I gave at Stony Brook in 1990 on this site. I enter the article and then tear it down from an “empty” point of view. I write a newer and more improved “empty” version, all the while laughing at myself and seeing myself better. Sometimes I begin to think, begin to waver, as emptiness does have its appeal — so much less angst. I go after my own assumptions and beliefs and share them with the read while I speak with forked tongue. The book is taking me down the road in little steps. So what is the gnaw?

At times the gnaw is basic to what I am doing as a writer. How do I express emptiness or acute emptiness? How do I get down to that part of me as a person so that I can access what it is I want to say, although knowing full well that what I have to say is still forming, nebulous, a galaxy in the making? I am with nuclei.

i can’t push, oh I know that; impatient, I will not wait for UPS. I can’t lunge at it. Spear it. What I can do is gnaw at until the marrow is revealed. At least I go within and gnaw, dwell here for any repast set before me. Words cannot express what it is but I am struggling with it now, while I try to share it with you. I grab at it with my mental hands but the moth eludes me as I snatch at it. I have nothing more to say on this until I can understand it and when I do, you will be the second to know.