Free Associations

I have no particular theme to write about. I have no jawbone of an ass as Samson had to fight off the Philistines. A series of mental quarks come to mind and why fight them off. I saw Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” last evening surrounded by a gray-haired audience, including me, who laughed at all the one-liners in the script, often throwaway lines. I felt as if I was on the conveyor belt of soylent green, except the person next to me was a living cracker. Clintwood is an icon, I suppose, and his performance here was good. His direction is precise and lean, leathery like him, and each shot is composed very well. He began his directorial career with “Play Misty for Me,” with Jessica Walters as the demon from a Greek hell.  Eastwood had been shaped, in part, by Don Siegel who directed him in several roles; Eastwood has said he learned a great deal from him. As I was watching the movie I realized on a very subliminal level that Eastwood, probably on conscious levels, was paying a homage to Siegel. If you recall Wayne’s last movie, “The Shootist,” with Lauren Bacall, Hugh O’Brian, Richard Boone, and Ron Howard (Don Siegel directed), Wayne has cancer and is dying (James Stewart played his doctor). He prepares for his last shoot-out by having his clothes dry-cleaned, new at the time, has a barber shave him, makes out his will with the undertaker (John Carradine) and orders a headstone. And then he is off to meet his maker. In “Gran Torino” this occurs with slight variations as well. If you see movies long enough, one begins to make these kinds of associations which only lend pleasure to the experience. Here it is done so slyly that young audiences have no idea what is coming off. I have lived long enough to tell the tale.

As I work on Sojourner, my Chinese tale of becoming and being, I began to use contractions: “Ah did not think of that,” altered to “Ah didn’t think of that.” By doing this, taking in the seams if you will, the prose began to gallop rather than graze through the pages. Something had shifted in me. Before I saw little to edit and now a whole new vista makes it way. The bones are good, and I am trying to stick close to the ribs, excessing fat. Of course, after writing my first two books I am leery of what I have before me. I have raised the bar perhaps too high for myself which may be a self-canard, if you will. I am in the resurrection business, a nice Jewish boy like me. I am trying to bring life to a book I wrote more than two decades ago. What gives me momentum and at times a case of the slows, call it ambivalence, is that who I  was two decades ago has shifted, different fault lines now. I still think the book is worthwhile so I persevere with all those monkeys on my back. Clearly the themes here are the ones I wrote about in “Young Man” in Down to a Sunless Sea, a story I wrote while depressed with teaching and my life. I felt mired and stuck in an occupation, it will never be a profession, that rewarded mediocrity, sloth and self-delusions above real excellence. Sojourner  reflects that self-quest which I projected upon the lead character Ah. When i wrote it back then it quaked and screamed with discontent and at this time of my life I can fine tune it to reflect as I look backwards what was learned, how did I prevail and what has life taught me. Come with me as I move into the next paragraph.

As I tinker with an old self who wrote an old book very much valid for me at the time, I see how I struggled to become a therapist, to seek intellectual and psychological rewards; how I struggled to teach myself a craft as a way to venting depression, rage and anger; how I did not quit on myself; how I persevered with very little support or external affirmation; how I have in my sixties the same old streaks of paint on the same old furniture that is so much prized on Antiques Roadshow, a good metaphor for many of us. Eastwood is Eastwood and he can play creatively with his persona; Freese is Freese and I can do as well with my writing. I am convinced that the themes in my life are punctuations made very early and that will stay for ever, themes replayed and reworked. After all, how many Hamlets do you have to write? So as I see it here are a few themes that run so true through my life: personal discontent; questioning authority; pain; the questions of existence; stumbling and recovery, then stumbling again; the ability to persevere; and to pay homage to these thoughts: “Reach what you cannot,” and “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” both by Nikos Kazantzakis.

I  am passing on as there are other recurrent motifs in my life — financial insecurity, et al. Most of what we believe in are mental constructs — how we view death, how we see life, how we are with feelings, how we handle stress and anxiety. I feel that we spend an awful amount of time being untrue to ourselves; that what we present to the world and what we present mostly to ourselves is magical thinking, a magician’s sleight-of-hand, playing with self delusions that we feel are realites, often not. We live lies. I live lies.  It is not a question of telling the truth, vastly more complex. We are jugglers of self-delusions because they are facile, easy, what we know, what we are comfortable with, the old slippers, the favorite camera, the favorite jeans. I believe we go to our deaths unknown to ourselves even as we consciously struggle to see through to ourselves. What is known to you is very little, I argue. Insights here and there, seed broadcast to the wind. I associate to our behavior as human beings across the span of thr world, from Israel and Hamas to Cheney and Bush, from China and North Korea as a play of human beings so out of control, so aberrant that some boast that committing suicide brings them martyrdom — the conditioning is mind numbing. Not only is it the task, in my mind, to decondition ourselves from our very culture, our religion and our isms, but then we need to work on our own conditioning of ourselves — I choose to be shy, I choose not to be assertive, I choose to be an enabler, I choose to parentify my children, I choose to merge with my children, and so on. You can see that schools are just a cemeteries. By definition, to school is to condition. At least give the bastard your name so that schools can deal with human issues and not Manifest Destiny.

When the history of this species is written by aliens hence or by cockroaches grown intelligent, it will be abysmal. Give me that good ole existentialism!

I weary of associating. How about this. You associate to what I have written.

Adieu!