Combine Apocalytpo, Gibson’s continuing fascination with sadism and the Coen brothers A Serious Man , into a mortar and pestle and grind vigorously and you may have a taste of what I thought I had passed through when a glimmer of good news came through. However, tomorrow is the day in which I am finally tested; I’m being cryptic about the situation but that is my private side. All this Sunday I wrote and edited and diddled around at the computer but frying on my brainpan was the egg of misery. Tomorrow I must hunker in and make two or three phone calls that will either assuage the anxiety or increase it immeasurably. I tire of the stress, I weary of the roller coaster. We never really master our feelings, do we? At most we go for a bronco ride and most often are thrown. I am trying to get up and remount, but it is arduous, given what I’ve been through these past six decades.
Self-sufficiency, which I have in spades, can isolate you as well. I told Jane some time yesterday that I feel I want to scream; it would have been an “excellent” idea, especially since I was in the middle of a Vegas casino. I imagine if I had done that I would have been seen as a loser. All is context or situational, I suppose. And now I have to struggle with words to get at that Job and his arbitrary god constellation of feelings I am enduring. Some of you have commented on the last blog and I appreciate your concern. What is fascinating to me is that my health is reasonably good, Jane and I are doing very well, my son is doing well, my estranged daughter apparently is alive and well, but all the good is being weighed against all the misery that may yet befall me. I always ask myself what the worst scenario could be and the answer comes back that all this stress is really nothing compared to what I have experienced — death, death and more death. However, this is the ridiculousness of my situation and who I am. Knowing does not, at least in my case, make me act with balance and composure. The syrup of past living and childhood comes up my gullet and threatens to disable me. It is as if I live the repetition compulsion when I face certain difficulties — I most probably do.
The earliest memory I had of overt stress was when I was in seventh grade and trying to complete a wood lamp in shop. In short I had difficulty in wiring the lamp and felt very stressed; I believe I went to the teacher with my problem and I can almost taste now the tears I expressed at not being able to complete the task. I imagine as I look back that it is in my nature to be anxious. (My book of short stories is congested with anxiety.) I can give you all the analytic reasons for it but that doesn’t amount to Bogie’s hill of beans when it comes to explaining or describing what I feel this evening. As I write now I feel that in expressing myself to myself and to you I feel some relief. I have to reassure myself that by tomorrow evening I will still be alive, whether or not I enter the evening free of stress or with a compounding of that stress. The answer is in the question, I am convinced. I must find the werewithal to face the adversity which is mostly money, significantly so. I cannot change anything but what I can do is change how I deal with all this. I feel that I need to be soothed, but I was never soothed as a child, so I feel in the quick of my psychological makeup it is a schism that will never heal — but perhaps I can step over it.
Earlier this week I experienced relief when a good part of the news was good but the other shoe dropped and so recovery was interrupted. Interesting, as I self-observe myself, how the future seems dark or unfathomable because of a situation that ultimately will be remedied. Consequently I declare I have little respect for reason. I cannot console myself with reason. I seek a more profound scrip for the anxiety. I am wrestling now with feelings and reason is not the whole story, only part. Have you experienced that good and sound reason sometimes washes off you? I believe that it is in the delivery of reason, in the person who gives it to you, that we have relief. If I were in front of Ben, my old mentor, I think I would walk away more than comforted. I know that. After all, he is the wonderful soul that said Matt needs to be felt.
I just tripped over an insight. Perhaps most of my writings, especially the recent stories about the Holocaust, are my way of consoling myself, as I struggle miserably to approach the horror of that event.
Lately as I go over these stories there is the nagging feeling that what I must say is eluding me and is beyond my grasp but that I need go on. It all is in the struggle. I believe when we arrive we are about physically or metaphorically ready to die. I am so weary of the dings and pings on me. I do not call upon god to remedy that; I do not call upon philosophy to ease my discontent. I call upon myself, as I personally should, given who I am. But I am not made of sterner stuff. These words do not approach what I am feeling but I gave it a shot partly because you needed a response to my last blog and I needed to respond to myself. I end here.
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