Thinking

I’ve put Freud away for a while — Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism , his trilogy swan song at the end of his life, but not for too long. In their place I am rounding up the cattle in my new work, trying to incorporate major changes, which are always difficult, you know, spreading the width between paragraphs to inset new revisions as if a dentist asking to say open wide; it is my recalcitrance to revise with new material or better material, when I feel it is all over with. I may have about 20 or more stories, all new, all untried; however,”Archipelago,” was reviewed by David Herrle, editor of Subtle Tea, to his pleasure, so I feel I still have the chops. Probably by mid March I will hustle up the dough to send it out for publication by Wheatmark, my self-publisher. Jordan will do the cover and I will have completed my  third book in five years; after that, I haven’t the slightest notion of what I will write, not even glimmers on the horizon. I have a plethora of short essays that are very good but who reads books of essays any longer; for me to publish such a collection would truly be vanity publishing. I may go back to science fiction fantasy, or I may try my hand on a kind of Siddharha variation in which I spew “wisdom.” I may buddha myself.

The i Tetralogy is now in my hands with its spanking new white cover with a profile of a German officer on it which my son designed to the pleasure of the publisher editorial staff and to father freese. It is terrific. All white and sparkling severe. Jane and I have worked on the publicity release for the book which has been edited again, a preface deleted and endorsements now included. Working over several months I have come up with my own database which is over 4,000 e-mail addresses here in the the U.S. and overseas. I expect about 1,000 to kickback dead and perhaps maybe 20-30 possible purchases to be made. I am resigned to the book’s fate; I am pleased that it is my own statement of indignation about the Holocaust. I live not for posterity; I live for now and for what pleasures I rake in from what creativity I can muster for kith and kin. The second book, “Working Through the Holocaust,” will build on the same database, I hope. The ironic fact, but not dispiriting to me, is that I cannot give the book away, although I and others consider it a powerful novel. In a very grandiose way I’m in the company of Whitman, Thoreau and a host of others who had to invest in themselves for publication and who sold few copies;  Freud only sold 300 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
What is criticial for me, what is dead on crucial, is that I write as best as I can and to remove myself from the fray. In fact, the fray doesn’t know me, nor does it need me. In this remarkably decadent culture in which lines wait in the rain for the ghost-written effort of Sarah Palin, in which fewer than 10 people were at the tacky funeral of Orson Welles, the writer-artist must be more than brave — he should revel in that he is not corrupted. Sam Goldwyn once offered Freud a sum for a script to be made in Hollywood; Freud’s answer was brief and direct — a stoic’s response. No, I won’t share what he said. After all, why buy into publishing for the all, the rest, for them, as opposed for writing for oneself in an attempt, admittedly useless, to adumbrate the major themes of one’s life, to lay bare the skeletal anatomy of one’s experience on this species-sad planet. Recent visits to my doctor have made clear that incipient threats to my well-being are active and waiting and my rush to dissect who I am is my defense against the dimming of the light. I write not an awful lot, but what I do I write with the feverish attempt to do as much as I can, mortal soul that I am, before the scythe cuts through my navel.

As I struggle within this mortal coil, beset with new health concerns, anxieties, fears, much the same, worries, I persevere, for I only feel alive when I write and when I make love, both libidinous intensities which are up there with wonderful vistas, perfumes, breezes off the sea and pleasures of being a father. I doubt I will have grandchildren which has never been a concern; I have a son and a daughter and that is all that matters, having lost one daughter, Caryn, at 34, by her own hand. I grab for the testicles of living, I squeeze the orange until the pips squeak. I struggle with age-old neuroses which are the shadows of one’s self, and hopefully dwarfed in later years by my shrinking size. Serenity is not in my future; who wants serenity? I don’t. I like pauses. Stays at oases. Give me existential acts — life spurts, life spasms in which I define myself rather than mystical curlicues wafting up my ass. I am always better in mind than I am in fact. And that is why I write, I think: To excel in my own living, to record the experiences and then to be done with them.