Reading Freud of late has reawakened, I suppose, the dormant analytic tools I used as a psychotherapist. It has me thinking along intentions, conscious and unconscious, motives, illusions and delusions, guilt and conscience or superego. In that light it dawned on me that most of the stories I’ve been writing of late for my next book are told from the first person. As I have said in earlier blogs, one of which was published online by David Herrle, editor of subtletea.com I favor the immediacy of that point of view. However, as I look at it again perhaps, without being self-serving, we humans spend an inordinate amount of psychic time deceiving ourselves (Perhaps a good definiton of psychotherapy might be to help the client to be less deceptive with himself and the world at large: to tell the truth!) And so, given I am as slippery as you are, I do think that when I go about writing these stories about the Holocaust part of me wants to become that character or that experience, to dwell there for a time and by writing it from the first person, I can taste terror, abandonment, loneliness, suffering, torture, the whole panoply of the Holocaust catastrophe. In that way my stories no doubt suffer for I am too engaged in this linear perspective of the “I.” I don’t care, is my response. I will tell the story for it is cathartic for me as well, perhaps rounding out and shapening my interior psychic walls as a serendipitous response to what I have created in prose. I enlarge me, in short, Freud’s principle of secondary gain — or in layman terms, what’s the payoff for doing something?
I have also realized that the book will not come together as if it is resisting my attempts to bring it to an end. I can’t get the steers into the corral. One idea is that I suffer from the writer’s angst about whether or not the collective effort has merit, although two stories will be published in the coming months; I also worry that the stories reveal my limitations as a writer which I know intimately and will not share here, but they exist and it is hard to go around them. I guess I am too old or too stubborn as an old dog to learn new tricks. Another option banging off the interiors of my skull is the fear that if I complete this latest effort I have run dry, shot my load and no more will issue from me except reworkings of old stories and novels in lieu of creating new efforts, freshly hewn. Clearly all these concerns are variations of fear.
I feel all my writing has been a working out and a working through of all the neuroses which pinioned me to the ground much like Gulliver in Lilliput. As I look through my work over the decades I see the issues, only known to me — perseverations, passive-aggressiveness, stubornness, a wee touch of grandiosity and gradations of anger into rage. Some I have managed to stabilize, others are free floating viruses and others will be with me to the end of days. That I work on a second book dealing with the Holocaust at least tells me consciously that everything I need to know about others, man, friends, relationships, love, cruelty and everything I could ever learn and know about myself has coalesced into that abyssmal event, a time in which mankind fractured forever. It is my convenient paint box, I suppose, for in it dwells everything a decent writer could ever imagine. One friend has asked me why I want to torture myself. It is not torture; it is my own small quest into the beyond, a way of determining who I am and who you are. Serendipitously over the decades what it meant for me to be a Jew in this world, in America has for a variety of reasons, some discernible, others undiscoverable to my own eyes, absorbed my interest; I was not consumed nor driven by it. What I did was enter all that I observed into the well of my being, that depository we all carry with us — call it memory or the junk drawer in the kitchen, or the seething cauldron. It suits my psychic purposes, I believe, to write about the Holocaust as a way of defending against it or sublimating my feelings about it, for my mind is like a long snout — I want to sniff about and see.
I want to push myself a bit more. It is apparently something characterologically about your writer that he has always wanted to know or to learn, thwarted as I was a child by parents who did not own that desire or encouraged it in more direct ways as I grew up; they did not know any better and ignorance held them back as it must. I had to self-preen myself, hold myself in my arms and with long strokes across my back as a cat soothe me or make me feel felt. And so I make the extrapolation that my need to write has been, only in part, a self-definition of who I am but also a way of soothing andpreening myself, rubbing my fur in the proper direction so that I feel less fearful and stressed. It is in the telling; it is the culminative impact of the words that I set into motion across the printed page that I determine who I was, and who I am now and how best to deal with dying in the days ahead. And all ofthis means nothing. Meaning is not in this equation. What all this does is to help me seize the day, squeeze its pips until they squeak, make me more cognizant of my awareness and not to expect anything, not to hope for anything, not to fear anything and in so doing become free. I cannot think of anything grander other than the birth of my own child than to be free before I perish — and the grander hope is to show my children without conditioning, dogma, or teaching, what it is to strive toward freedom. Civilization, this decadernt soup of a culture we presently live in, this digitalized state rooted, grounded in materialistic pursuits and marketing, no longer has me as chattel. I am relatively free of all that — consequently dangerous, consequently someone who needs to be punished (catch me if you can).
In short, can you see the matrix?
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