To quote Chesterton: “I am cultivating the faculty of patient expectancy.” In other words I am trying to deal with anxiety over the hassles that are occurring on getting out of this sealed tomb in the land of the dead. The moving men are here today to move Jane’s belongings into my garage so that we may leave as a couple in mid June. I have not seen the land of Canaan. Jane bought the house in Nevada after I searched homes in the area, a suburb of Vegas. She is quite the capable woman and I am relenting or giving up control to her which is all to the good since it is one of my major defenses and a wasteful one at that.
Yesterday I had dinner with my sister and her husband and it is hard to see her as 65 or me as almost 69. We celebrated her birthday and anniversary. She has had a hard life. I remember in the 40s when she was diapered on a bed. Sadly, she said to me at the table that she does not remember ever having a birthday cake. I hope that was not so but it probably was the truth, whatever that is when we deal with memories. She and my mother did not hit it off, in part because my mother put too many of her casino chips on her firstborn, me. It was a remark from out of the blue and thus very telling. I feel that these sadnesses we all have are just a condition of living imperfect lives as if there are perfect lives.
In the last few weeks Jane and her family have separated out completely; they are a group of grotesques, childish, narrow, low functioning, mean spirited and dimly aware of anything but themselves. Oh, just plain stupid. Get the drift? I am also that Jew that has taken Jane away from them. Here, at 51, the separation, on one level, is done. I wrote a blistering — savage — email to her sister after the family ganged up on her, diagnosing how I see all of them in harsh language; ideally I wish I had the chance to have said it in person. Jane is a fighter and we are both glad to be out of here, god-willing. In fact, I had urged Jane after a recent blow-up to go to Vegas for relief and to scout out a house as well. All impulsive, spontaneous and serendipitously splendid — look at where we are today.
At moments I feel drawn back to working on my new collection of short stories, but I do not pressure myself knowing full well that my unconscious is editing, emending and drafting new sentences and producing new ideas. i just channel my work. I would like to have 2 or 3 more works done before I plummet into that black hole. I feel I am as creative now as I ever was and with a facility I have that I never did have and with a style that is solely mine which I let Jane tell me about because it can become eely and repetitive as a writer. The new stories are free as I am allowing myself to be bizarre and fantastical; some stories are in the traditional mode and others are a kind of magical realism. I am having fun. I hope to come in at about 175 to 200 pages. I want to feel the thickness of that book in my hands; Jordan does the cover once more and the title is: “Working Through the Holocaust.” The stories deal with Holocaust deniers, Hitler’s underwear, Eva Braun and her sexual response to Der Fuhrer, and a caring Jew from the future visiting a concentration camp prisoner with dinner. My imagination is unleashed!
Until a truth commission is formed and all documents are laid bare about our response in the Bush administration after 9/11 and there is no whitewash but convictions as high and as low the totem pole of responsibility, this country will deserve to be damned as a democracy. I do not have faith in Obama. He is a politician. On our cultural scene which is as barren as an Arizonan desert, there are very few voices that speak to our moral response for what we have done these past 8 years. We are a lost people. Parenthetically, this is a depression, denial will get you no where, and capitalism has revealed itself as imperfect as any other system. Oh, what foolish trust we place in ideas, people and things.
Watch us as a culture with banks, mortgages, Wall Street, real estate sharks and you watch the repetition compulsion alive and well, twitching spasmodically in gay abandon. We will not learn much from all this except to tighten our sphincter muscles, for as Americans, as a culture, we are into bling; everything is temporary, an aberration, a wrinkle in time, and progress is ever ahead, a one-way street sign. Show Americans a vortex, an eddy and they shriek. I suppose that old saw that defines cynicism as the last refuge of an idealist might apply here — but not entirely. I am not an idealist, far be it. Can’t we get it into our heads that the Constitution was written by slave-holders? That historically presidents are generally a mediocre lot; that we are purveyors of poison as well as other nations; that when this nation makes a shit it stinks like every other nation; that we are not the democracy we think we are; that we lie and cheat and maim with the best of them. What is fascinating and scary about this democracy is that we have turned it into a Hollywood production. If you think that Ronald Reagan was a good or great president, you are as delusional as he was. In fact, he scripted his role. In fact, are you now scripting your own? After all, this democracy requires subliminally that one lives a role in a movie. “The Matrix” was a wonderful metaphor if you grasped what it was saying about all of us.
No more.
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