The Center Holds, He Said, He Thinks

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!

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