Slave

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Matt| Leave a comment

Published in The Del Sol Review

Winter 2012 #18   The “Everlasting Delays” Issue

From “I Truly Lament” a collection of short stories to be published 2012

by Mathias Freese

The most appalling defeat in the camps was the absence of beauty. Regimentation was all, an artist without a palette.

Animal life had fled. Occasionally an errant bird chirped its creed and flew away. Butterflies stayed away, no flora to cling to. If you think rats, vermin, maggots and roaches are beautiful, it was Eden. Uniformity in everything was the rule. Barracks laid out in grids, barbed wire in rectangular enclosures. Even the circle was barred from the camp, for it was elusive to the German mind. Everything was squared off, nothing rounded. We lined up for morning roll call, the Appell. The guttural voices of the German guards barked out the same repetitive orders. Geometry was god, diversity Satan’s whore, opinion a mother’s bastard, and questions a whore’s tease. Order above all. To my ears, the German gutturals obeyed in aural allegiance the mind set of their speakers. When I fill the ice cube tray, I pause, knowing how well the Germans viewed us, frozen cubes all lined up.

I remember well digging a two—foot—wide trench, supposedly as a latrine. The Germans had us constantly digging as if the work itself was useful, in some perverse way a contribution to hygiene. It was a lie. It took some time after being freed to grasp the subtle cruelty behind our orders.

As we dug we were sapped of energy. Many of us died on the spot, guards either flailing us with whips, kicking us, whipping their rifle butts about our backs. It was as if we had failed them, as if Jews couldn’t do hard labor. No use reminding them we were good at pyramid building or putting up the Coliseum in Rome. No Jew could speak to a German — ever.

Many of us viewed the trenches as a necessary evil. The intent was to work us to death, as the Germans weren’t concerned about our hygiene. The task was, in effect, to wear us out to a point that we evolved into Muselmanner, the stage before the ovens. We weren’t being harvested. We weren’t contributing to a greater Germany. We were expendable. In the very routinization of our efforts was the very plan for our extinction.

“Work makes you free” was the carrot and the stick, but no prisoner ever really believed that after a few weeks in the camp. After a while, none of us could think clearly, for we lacked the necessary proteins in our body to make tissues connect and channel clear thinking.
For some of us, the trench—digging became compartmentalized. We split ourselves right down the middle. Each shovel of dirt fed personal dreams or delusions — hopes and aspirations while the next shovelful served the Reich. If we were casual or slow in our efforts, we were beaten. The real task was to focus on another thought — perhaps feeling — as we slaved away.

I used to think about slavery in the trenches, of slaves throughout the centuries:  Greek and Roman slaves, Spartacus, and Jewish slaves in Egypt. How did they manage their daily sufferings? As I pondered all this in the trenches, I worked on being hyper—vigilant, for if I fell too deeply into reflection my pace might falter. I’d bear terrible risk. And so I lived on the razor’s edge.

I reached no great conclusion as the months went by. Digging in the trenches, leveling their earthen floors, patting down with shovel this side or another, taught me nothing of use — except  despair. What I concluded above slaves and slavery stayed with me during the nights in my barrack bed. . .

One reaches such levels of depression and despondency as a slave that death becomes an essential aspiration, an ambitious and greedy need. If one leans in this direction, a proclivity which may have been in one’s personality before enslavement, all is lost. One can crave death and yet one’s body refuses to yield and one just stumbles about, denied rest . This is a very cruel existence. I lived it.
A few heroically fight back inwardly, psychologically. And how rare these men were! We could tell them apart from us because as fellow slaves we detected nuances. When we went along with abuse and punishment, they went along, but in their eyes roared defiance. Rare, but in a way, holy and majestic, their liberation was before the camps fell. And, at times, without their knowledge, they provided inspiration — but mind you, just for a moment, and not for too long.

And there are exotic or strange feelings as a slave, for at times we fawned before our masters, merged with them, craved their attention, wished them personal happiness. And I know of one prisoner who desired to be beaten to death by one particular guard, as if his choice might please this guard, give him one less prisoner to watch over. And so this inmate directed his limited existence toward that end.

The “affairs” between slave and enslaver are notoriously complex, riddling. I couldn’t grasp that then, nor do I now. I understand that under peculiar circumstances. We enslave ourselves in repeatedly different instances, giving up ourselves to be slaves is just the surface of things. It was not for nothing that slavery in this country was called the “peculiar institution.”

In our slavery is the wish to please the taskmaster, encouraging him in his brutality for we take him away from the good things of his life, for instance. As we move more profoundly into our slavery, freedom becomes irrelevant, or a whimsy. There is for some of us the perverse charm of enslavement for within we discover levels of personal pleasure, in fact, the most enslaved of us all, the ones who gave over to the taskmaster their complete selves, find in that surrender a kind of desperate freedom.

No longer do they have to care or tend to themselves, they are back in their cribs. No anxiety befalls them. All needs are met. Freedom from the unknown soothes them — the sad fools! But I should not judge. Humans are like children’s marbles, all sizes and colors, pure, dark and variegated, heavy, lightweight — it is a matter of taste, of what is suitable for playing this or that marble game. It’s what you want as a personal collectible.

The wandering of the Jews after Egypt for forty years is the Bible’s brilliant insight into the need to have the slave mentality extinguished, for only those free of internal slavery could enter Canaan. The critical conflict in my life as an “ex—slave” is whether or not my dark nature was there before or did camp life stamp that indelibly upon my brow.

In any case, it is my dark nature that determines how I feel and think. At moments I’m perforated as if essential pieces are missing. I still don’t know if I am still a slave. The camp mothered me in my adolescence, breastfed its malignant metallic tasting milk in more powerful ways than my own mother. What evil proteins passed by my lips from that witch’s teat?

I know my life after the camp has been, in a fashion, a second slavery. I have struggled to be free of the horrific icons placed inside me, emotionally and psychologically. The cruel realization is that I have to work once more on staying free. I’ve lived an appalling existence. I know. I live it still. I’m left with the stale choices only an old man has as I function day to day. My youth is gone. It was chiseled away. I am mere cloying chunks of being, trying to reclaim myself once more — and at such a late time in life. Life has been unfair is a cavalier statement for me. Life has not been for me. So what is to be done? The Jew in me has been taught to ask. Oh, reason, the Jew’s sweet river Jordan.

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Posted in I Truly Lament, Stories/Articles

Conversations with Writers

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Matt| Leave a comment

[Interview] Mathias B. Freese

reprinted from: http://conversationswithwriters.blogspot.com/2012/01/interview-mathias-b-freese.html

Mathias B. Freese lives in Henderson, Nevada in the United States. He has worked as a teacher and a psychotherapist and has been writing for over 42 years.

His books include a Holocaust novel, The i Tetralogy(Wheatmark, 2005); a collection of short stories, Down to a Sunless Sea (Wheatmark, 2008); the mixture of memoir and essay, This Mobius Strip of Ifs (Wheatmark, forthcoming) and a second collection of short stories, I Truly Lament (___, forthcoming).

In this interview, Freese talks about his writing:

When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

In 1968 I wrote a short article, “Is Content Enough?” for an education journal of some note. It was my first publication, but not a literary one, although I devoted a few months to perfecting the article. I had no idea that I would become a writer, much like I had no idea that I would become a psychotherapist, or have children, or lose my wife in an accident. Often such happenings are made randomly or we just walk into them. Much of life is a wild run through a corn field like Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

By 1974 I was listed in The Best American Stories of 1974, with such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Hawkes, etc.

Me?

Martha Foley, who had edited Hemingway, among others, was the editor and through a series of errors my name was mixed up with H. T. Kirby Smith, a poet. To make a long story very short, Mensa Bulletin, 2011, just published my award-winning essay, “To Miss Foley, With Gratitude,” which is the tale behind “Herbie,” the first story of note that I ever had published, and credit given to Kirby-Smith. That’ll show you.

As I look back, it was a terrific gift to a new writer. To know you’re good at something doesn’t mean you have to hear it from others. The inner-directed writer needs no acclaim.

As an English teacher I wrote stories during lunch breaks, study halls, during the evenings late into the night and over the week-ends; my trusty second-hand Smith-Corona was repaired several times as the letter “e” got an intense battering. Rejections were rife, but as an autodidact I continued to self-learn. I had to feed my family and had no time for “conferences”, and all that folderol.

I made a promise to myself during these difficult years as a husband, father and as a teacher who loathed the mediocrity in high schools, that whatever stories I could not get published I would publish someday. I waited about 30 years for that to happen. In 2008, I self-published Down to a Sunless Sea and won the Finalist Indie Excellence Award. I persevered. I am the turtle behind the turtle racing against the hare. Think on this for a moment and you can get a handle on me!

How would you describe your writing?

All my writing is visceral and passionate. I favor the passion of the mind as well as that of the soul.

As to my “target audience”, that is part of the marketing world and I do not respond to that at all. I have always written for myself, believing that if I do it well the person reading it will connect to me. I have a conversation always with myself. Apparently some people like that.

All literature is an internet among people. To understand this about me is to understand why I take risks and dare in my writing. What I really do know is that fearlessness makes for authenticity in writing. I do not write to be remembered. I write in the now and for the interaction and discussion it might bring about. I have my close ones to remember me. In short, I write to give off my scent.

Which authors have influenced you the most?

Authors have not influenced me. I read to be moved.

Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ and his Saint Francis are intensely, vividly splendored works; his Report to Greco is one of the great confessionals of the last century. His existential epitaph has served as a guiding light for me: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” He wrote a two volume sequel to The Odyssey in verse and by all accounts he equalled Homer.

Have your own personal experiences influenced your writing in any way?

In all my writing I try to make the reader feel – as a psychotherapist with over two decades experience, in this culture we are conditioned not to feel.

Having lost a wife in a horrific automobile accident, my daughter being terribly wounded but surviving, her boyfriend dead, and the early death of an older daughter by her own hand have devastated my life and all of this has impacted upon my writing. What is that impact? To weigh carpe diem with tempus fugit on a moment to moment basis, to live in the moment, right now, to deprogram myself of this rather decadent society’s need to swallow us up through conditioning. I step aside and askance of the writer’s world, for often new writers sell their souls very early on. Older writers as well. I revel in being a stranger in a strange land; in America I am an ex-pat.

What are your main concerns as a writer?

I really don’t have main concerns as a writer. I don’t view myself as a “writer”. I am Matt who happens to write. Being a writer is a role and with that comes all kinds of delusions and mischief. I am not my occupation! I do my best at what I am doing, no more, no less. I strive not to write a glorious sentence. If anything, I struggle to engage you, the reader, to shake you, turn you upside down, rub your face in my own grit. I teach you nothing. I observe.

In my graphic and violent Holocaust novel, The i Tetralogy, the work of a lifetime, I engage the inherent violence of this species-devastating event, the lens through which we all can observe man. As a psychotherapist, writer and human being I struggle for two things:

  1. to see
  2. to struggle to be psychologically free.

The triumvirate for me is – Krishnamurti, a remarkable spiritual teacher, Kazantzakis, and Freud.

Do you write everyday?

There are no rules for me as a writer. I think in fractals. I write when I am moved to do so. I spent years learning the craft and am still a novice. The serendipitous consequences of being self-taught is that one may venture into areas loaded with landmines and emerge safely, perhaps wisely so. To write 500 words a day or more does not a writer make. Ask Homer, ask Joyce, ask Dickens. Thank god they never went off to schools to learn how to write.

I believe with conviction that the very next book I will write is already being assembled in my unconscious. My unconscious has rarely failed me; indeed, I get really excited when it makes its appearance in my writing and I go on for pages. When I teach writing, I urge students to tap into that, to not censor it.

I wrote an early version of i in about one week; it entirely poured out of me. It was a remarkable event and changed everything in how I approach writing. In short, I channel it all.

How many books have you written so far?

As to the books I have written, The i Tetralogy (Wheatmark, 2005) explores the relationship between victim and perpetrator during the Holocaust in great depth as well as the relationship between the perpetrator and his own family in the States after the war, where he fled to. Very intense and graphic, it has been described as both “pornographic and holy.” High praise in my eyes since it was reviewed by a survivor.

Down to a Sunless Sea (Wheatmark, 2008) is a collection of stories dealing with the deviant and damaged. Duff Brenna, novelist and editor, considered it Proustian.

At this time I have two books readied for publication:

I Truly Lament is a collection of short stories about the Holocaust, ten of them published last year to my joy. I can never let go of the Holocaust, although I am not a survivor.

This Mobius Strip of Ifs will be published in early January 2012 and is a series of related essays over the past four decades of my life, a kind of Bilsdungroman of my psychological life as a writer, spiritual seeker, teacher and curmudgeon. It is a mixture of memoir and essay, with me breaking the rules again. It is my happiest effort in years. Not bad for this 71 year old.

To come full circle, the essay on Miss Foley leads off the collection for it is emblematic of my experience as a writer. I self-published the book and I find Wheatmark more than capable of producing a fine product. Working with the editor is for me a growing experience, not something to resist. After all, the whole art of writing, for me, comes down to revising. When you revise, you sharpen who you are.

The Mobius Strip of Ifs is a compelling compilation of observations, psychological insights, and reminiscences for those possessing the requisite courage to feel and think, to struggle against cultural conditioning, and to create artistically inspite of an environment that impedes the awakening of intelligence. I summed it up: “Although we are passing ephemera, human lint on this planet in transit, it is a powerful and nourishing feeling for me to have paused long enough to have observed the passage of time and my place in it.”

What will your next book be about?

At this time my next effort is at the starting gate.

I Truly Lament is a varied collection of stories, inmates in death camps, survivors of these camps, disenchanted Golems complaining about their tasks, Holocaust deniers and their ravings, and collectors of Hitler curiosa (only recently a few linens from Hitler’s bedroom suite went up for sale!) as well as an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the bunker.

The intent is to perceive the Holocaust from several points of view. An astute historian of the Holocaust has observed that it is much like a train wreck, survivors wandering about in a daze, sense and understanding, for the moment, absent. No comprehensive rational order in sight.

I am seeking to find a publisher for this.

In the meanwhile, I will be entering contests.

What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer?

The most significant achievement as a writer, you ask, makes me reply: It is in the totality of who I am. I work on myself to hope for nothing, to fear nothing, so that I can be free.

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Posted in Interviews

The Wound

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Matt| 1 Comment

Sometime during the day, at odd and peculiar moments, I experience memories and reminiscences. I associate to the old blinds with “pulls.” As I pull down the blind one more day is gone. And in the morning I raise the blind as if I have another day given to me as I inexorably march off to my end.  At 71 I am saturated with all kinds of reflections of my childhood and all the concomitant cliches that come with that. I am drawn back in time like a receding tide and reminisce mostly of my dull relationship with my mother, a classic depressive. While I ponder about our interactons, I am drawn to a series of observations of myself as a child, unpleasant, unhappy ones. And then I extrapolate from who I was then and cast this pall over all the decades since and consider how the cards given me then have turned into the hands I’ve played. In short, for a large measure of my beginning years as a child, toddler and teenager I was incorporative as a human being. I had not acquired, nor was I shown, the tools of exchange, of embrace and engagement. I was not open to the world. Subterranean, I was all aquifer.

I will get to it quickly for after that it is mostly commentary. I feel I was not cared for by my mother nor did she engage me as  her son. I could say I was abandoned by her but caring holds a greater valence for me. You need not consider my father, who virtually did not exist, either for himself or for me. The real measure of my humanity would be tied up with my mother and it is here that she failed me miserably.  This is the wound.

I will cut deeper into the feeling. I experience myself then as devoid of emotional supplies, self-nutrients, the classic givens from which to thrive as a young human being. She never read to me, a childplacid and gentle in nature. I do so see myself as I look back. I was unobtrusive, a mother’s dream, especially for a depressive. I babysat myself. I had nothing to incorporate from my world with my mother, she was my moon, not my sun. I incorporated my environmental world as a child from friends and neighborhood, but I really cannot feel or sense that I received much in terms of parental affection, love or caring from my mother.

Only of late as I reconsider my life and the travail I have endured do I examine a little more deeply the lack of impact my mother had on me, and that very lack of impact has made all the diference in my life. After all, to age, by definition, is to recollect. Lucky is the mature human being who does this moment to moment, for he or she is express and in the world, an awakening of intelligence.

I will digress for a moment. The kind of wound I speak of here is the kind that defines us for the rest of our lives. [Have you asked that of yourself?]  A wound that by definition changes everything that follows in our life. It is beyond being indelible, for it becomes the matrix from which the fabrics of your life are woven. To understand the wound intelligibly, thoroughly and with intense empathy and feeling is to give you a measure of understanding that explains most of the calamitous misfortunes of your experience. The wound is forever; however, it does become much less inflamed and after a while, amenable to consideration and thought. Growing old can help somewhat. I cannot imagine a human being extant who has not been wounded in such a way. Unfortunately we often come to our end avoiding the wound and its circumstances. I choose not to do so. As Nietzsche said, “knowledge is death.” It also sets you psychologically free. And in a special way, it may give you a compassionate stoicism to get on with the rest of your days.

In fact, as I see how I have lived as a passive-aggressive in my life, not sustaining relationships with men and women, too self-contained, private and self-sufficient if you will, not reaching out to others in communicable and feeling ways I realize that I was protecting what little nutrients I had for myself. It was an enforced self-sufficiency and that has proven most fatiguing as a human being. And the psychological and emotional costs are significant. And that is why I write, and that is why I became a therapist and teacher (unconsciously so) – to know,  learn,  reap and garner so as too fill in the gaping holes, the empty aquifer. I dreaded engaging the other, for the responses were unknown to me. I dared not risk, for I had no inner resolve for that. My negative perceptions of my fellow man and of others close to me have been shaped and configured by my first impressions and experiences of how I was related to by my mother, a maternal indifference. I have self-crucified myself on a cross of distrust. Benign neglect is ultimately malignant.

I imagine that I am in a morgue, an apt metaphor, and the doctor has spread open my rib cage with retractors, delving into my organs for a look see. The clamps attached to bone, sinew and flesh expose a gaping wound. It is here that he takes, in my mind, a measuring cup and dips it into my abdominal cavity and ladles out what liquids he can access. I associate to these liquids as an immense splash across my existence as I paraded through the decades. Ain’t much there to spread about and not wholesome at all.

As I age all is pattern. I am not into blame at this point. It is a special sadness for what could have been and what was not done. I see all the lost opportunities between myself and my mother, of books, ideas, understandings between parent and child that were not openly said and not surmised or thought of, guesswork that is not good for the young person. A child needs to know through word and touch that he is seen, that a measure of who he is becomes important to mother and child; that an exchange of affection creates that irritant from which a pearl is formed. I lacked such an irritant, and what is grievous here is that I sought it out at some primitive level or need. And when I look back which is my task as a human being at 71, when I assess my pilgrimage to nowhere in particular, for I am not on a mission , I am intensely saddened. I am just merely engaging and experiencing as the blinds go up and down every day.

I believe my mother to have been vastly deprived as a child herself, for she could not engage me as her son, nor read to me, or play board games with me, or discuss my daily life with me. Although she never did go to work throughout my childhood and youth, I was home with her and played alone, as I recall. The more I reflect about it the more it exhausts and appalls me, the waste, the lack of attention to a child who would have touched the stars with the palms of his hands if he had been encouraged. I know now I was a gifted child left outdoors to rust. And I did rust well. I feel that I had so much more in me throughout my life that had gone  unexpressed. I had been stymied early and being stymied is an unusually agonizing, frustrating feeling — at least it is so for me. I remember years in adolescence afraid to initiate or touch young girls of my age as if I was a crystal that might shatter. All my rearing led to an immature adulthood. The larger part of my life has been in restoration, planting trees in the forest, grading the soil, weeding, breaking new paths, using quarried stones for walks.

A few unexplained and nagging doubts, perplexities, come to mind when I remember the years from birth to about 10 years old, 1950, to be exact, on Brighton Second Street, in Brooklyn, Brighton Beach Avenue and the cranky el at the end of the block. I could go back to that place tomorrow and trace out the courtyards, lanes and hidden places I frequented as a young boy. On the avenue was the Lakeland movie house, a run down and seedy theater we all called the “Dumps.” Often I was sent to the movies here, admission a mere $.18 cents. When I recollect the pictures I saw on the screen, really conscious dreams, if you think about it, I wonder why my mother so often  sent me to the movies. It was safe back then for a young boy to go to the movies alone. She didn’t have to work. I wonder today what she did with all her time. Was she having an affair? And that is a loaded supposition, is it not? That thought comes before the regret — the resentment of this moment – that she could have spent more time with me.

I recall seeing Citizen Kane and The Search, both films dealing with mothers essentially. In one the mother sells the son, in the other a GI helps a waif try to find his mother after the war has separated them. Of special note is a scene involving a park and swings. The camera comes behind the boy when he sees his mother but the swings, moved by the wind, befuddle him, he can’t get to her. The children swings moved sideways as the boy moved longitudinally, struggling to get at the mother who is awaiting him after all these weeks and months. A caring mother seeking her son, a despairing mother abandoning him for money, I had neither. In one a mother is invested in her child, and in the other the mother sees her son as an investment for  twisted capitalistic needs, unthought out actions on her part. Perhaps his middle name, “Foster,” was more than apt.

My wound is one of indifference, a failure of my mother to mirror back my very existence. We all need to be mirrored. A horror of a kind as I think of it, quite chilling if I allow myself, after all these decades, to feel it. I was shut down so early. And I still feel it all now.

Mothers. It is here within the uterine, incorporative recesses of the maternal “hold” that the child is formed. Blame, anger, rage, resentment, surly, and incendiary  feelings at 71 come  nowhere near to what I feel. Allow me a reversal to get at what I am dimly feeling but wish to see so vividly in the light, blinds pulled up. I lost a daughter at age 34 by her own hand. Doubtless, what she felt from me was an absence of caring. And she would have been correct. I didn’t have the werewithal to express that, to give it, understand what she needed at the time. I know that. And so she experienced loss as I experience her loss today, for a suicide really kills two. No, I don’t blame my mother for that! I am responsible for my own grave limitations. And so I am beyond giving blame. And I am not in the psychobabble game of coming to terms, reconciliation or redemption. What I need I cannot even say, but I feel. I struggle with that inexact feeling each and every day, whether tomorrow sees the blinds never pulled up or not. I go to my demise troubled, hurting and beyond sadness. That is enough for one life.

I find solace in Epicurus’s epitaph: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.”

 

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Revamped Website, Same Old Writer

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Matt| Leave a comment

Welcome to a completely rethought site, courtesy of my wife, Jane, who has diligently and peristently dealt with the assumptions that Yahoo and BlueHost have about the average human being and his or her capacity to navigate the systems. Insular, to say the least, reminding me of monks whittling their quills to illuminate parchments created only for themselves and royalty, immensely self-regarding. To transfer from one to the other “host” involved more than a week of tedious question and answer through the impersonal world of the chat room. However, Jane acquired the inane lingo in a short time and she is, I repeat, an information specialist and  librarian well versed in databases and all that claptrap. And she had a hard time of it! And how about me, having grown up with model airplanes with propellers? You have to be a ninny not to see where we are headed, a world without critical thinking for it is no longer a requisite for daily functioning. We are in a transistional period and all such times, historically, involve a giving up and a taking in, followed by a brushing down with a comb to settle all the dander.

Looking for bloggers to forward my new book for a review, I have seen literally more than a hundred sites, all of varying quality. However, one knows when a site is lucid. I am seeking that here. I am very much open to suggestions as to how to make it easier for you, the reader, to find your way around. That’s the teacher and therapist in me.

Observe that I have grouped together reviews for you to peruse my three books, The i Tetralogy, Down to a Sunless Sea, and This Mobius Strip of Ifs. Using the Tags section or Cloud, as the jargon goes, you can get access to any topic discussed in any of the blogs, not all subjects having been tagged by me out of innocence. Or lack of knowing. Or not wanting to bother with what is expected of me.

If you go to the Category Section, scroll down and select a subject or topic I have written about; that might save you time to get at the heart of my work. In the sidebar is a title called Interviews with links to writers and bloggers who have interviewed me over the years. This provides needed insight into how I go about writing and living. Additionally on the sidebar are links to literary ezines that I have either been reviewed in, published or appeal to my sensibilities as a writer. Also in the masthead is a category called Stories/Articles which provides you with a wide range of essays that I ‘ve written over the years. Under the tab called Books you will find access to my published books with the usual promotional trumpeting. Buy the Book gives you Amazon for purchasing any of my books.

In 2007 Jane and I went to Spain and Portugal. In Barcelona we saw several sites in which Gaudi situated his masterpieces, private residences, parks and churches, uniquely his, uniquely Barcelona.  We were swept away by his vision, imaginative technique,  quirkiness and  efforts to make the organic world become alive in stone, tile and wood. Like Wright, he did it all, except Wright was mightily impressive while Gaudi indigenously overwhelming. Apples and oranges these two, but while one evinced grandeur the other evinced glory. So, the masthead has a tight exterior shot of one of Gaudi’s private residential homes for your pleasure. I hope to show more of his work here.

A final note and wholly self-serving which is the mud of any blog, except I won’t show pictures of a child’s birthday cake, unicorns from my fantasy world, or applaud the fact that I have a spouse of unearthly skills and talents.  Jane is an information specialist and a highly skilled librarian with other degrees as well. If like me your site has dated and in need of renovation, Jane can construct a site just like this one or a variation thereof. She has  mastered WordPress with all its widgets and witchery. Go to the sidebar and access her site, Telling About Yourself. You can make arrangements with Jane there.

Finally, if you are interested in reviewing my new book of personal essays and memoir, This Mobius Strip of Ifs, contact me with your address.

 

 

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Posted in Blog

Anne Baxter in DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”: “Moses…Moses.”

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Matt| 3 Comments

I just finished Freud’s Moses and Monotheism for about the third or fourth time in my life. At times it is like cracking walnuts in your mouth; it is the kind of book that tells you how uninformed you are are about most things, including yourself; of course, that is the part of us we know the least. The skinny on the book is that considering it was written about 72 years ago –it was published in 1939, Freud having published sections earlier – is that the archaeological and sociological information Freud drew upon is no longer valid as good science. However, it is a fabulous psychoanalytic ride. Even with my background, there are paragraphs beyond my brainpan’s capacity to fathom, or else I am drawing very old and my cerebrum has puckered here and there. Instinctual renunciation, return of the repressed, latency, obsessional neurosis are but a few of the concepts Freud delves into with the hand of the master trying to express what is second nature to him but conceptually difficult to us mere students. It is a most challenging book but worth each page. You don’t read Freud, you examine each sentence as if part of the Talmud.

Essentially he writes in his last years in a comprehensive way about how behaviors in each of us can be applied to the species collectively. He applies his psychoanalytic processes to society at large and it is fascinating to observe how a significant amount of what he shares does seem applicable if not basically true. I am always injudicious with my “idol,” giving him a wide berth to do his thing, enjoying how he messes with our minds. I root for Siggy. I was trained in analytic psychotherapy but my personality was ill-equipped to deal with or master the Newtonian concepts of Freud, the 19th century model of how energy, drive (instinct), and cathexis (attachment) work. I moved more into an expressive and interpersonal way of dealing with clients; however, the training was in analytic thinking and that has proven very worthwhile. In fact, centuries hence Freud might be remembered more for his critique and observation(s) about mankind as a whole, and  perhaps being honored more as a philosopher than a healer. Indeed, most of his cases were not successful. Like or dislike him, like Darwin, he will not go away. His Moses book guts religion, Judaism and Christianity, for what it is– illusion. Man needs his myths, his gods, for he is damaged in that way. Freud thought that a man or woman were not fully developed or matured until they had given up the obsessional neurosis of a god in the sky (see his The Future of an Illusion).

I am  psychologically free in ways I can not even describe as an atheist. The believers of late smack their smarmy lips as they go on to prattle about how poor Christopher Hitchens will now see their reality. Garbage in, garbage out!

Buy it or don’t buy it, Freud occasionally stops to patiently inform the reader, urging him to go along for a while with his suppositions and hypotheticals and before you know it he has surrounded you with his wagons. He posits, to wit, that there were two Moses’ and that one was murdered by the early tribes under his control; he argues that this primordial deed was repressed, an unconscious act, for suppression is a conscious choice; that centuries later that which was denied returned, much as each of us for several years after age five or so experience a latency period which later erupts as we move into our adolescence. In short, sexual features and feelings are repressed and reemerge years later. So an analytic concept long verified by therapists with clients and over the decades is applied to an entire Jewish people’s traditional history. It works. And if it does not work, at least you begin to fathom an important analytic concept or two about each one of us. Freud’s ability to apply individual behavior to the species at large is most telling, instructive and makes you think in global terms.

In the last few weeks or months, I can not say, I have had reminiscences about the years before I was ten, places I played in, streets I rode my bike on, early childhood chums, neighborhoods I prowled about, very dim and early relationships with young people who came and went, flitted about me and then were gone — in one case, a young girl I played with and then I realized she had moved away. Some of these memories can not be confirmed by the person who experienced them. I am simply not sure they were events. I am sure that my level of awareness was dim as I could not survey all about me in ways that ended in conclusions or observations, as if I was some primordial sea creature swimming onto the beach, looking about, sensing, but not realizing or seeing in a profound way. I could not explain my world. I was in it but not fully aware. I mildly experienced who I was. I take that back. I did not experience myself. I only sensed, as if I was being jabbed by the needles of everyday occurrences. You understand, don’t you? Think back.

When Kane on his deathbed says “Rosebud,” I can grasp that so much better now at this age. The sled had so much meaning for him, condensed meaning — the time in which he enjoyed his sled, the time in which he is sold by his mother; his ineffective father and the capitalistic banker Thatcher, all conspiring to bring about a personal abandonment he would he feel all his life. In one of the most often misheard lines in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander mentions her mother and Kane responds in so many words, sotto voce, that he knows about mothers. I gag when I write that, for I remembr seeing the movie as a young child, all alone in the local theater, and I wonder today if I was not touched by my own feelings of being abandoned on levels I could not possibly articulate but that I felt. I must have incorporated the lonelinesss and the abandonment of Kane for there were such feelings, I hesitate here, in my own family, especially from my mother. In all my childhood my mother never read a fairy tale to me, any book at all. A puzzlement. Why? That is the rub, and the “enchantment” about the memory.

And so of late I am reflecting and trying to re-empathize with a host of significant memories, trying to string them on a necklace of affect and effect. I am imagining and reimagining the meanings they have for me, for it is an old cliche that as we near our end we turn back to our beginnings — what observation might Freud interject here! And so of late I have come up with a few sentences that might begin my very next book.

I was fucking abandoned when born. So what! And who cares? I am unfinished man…Dive Delve Descend.

And a happy Hanukah to my brethren.

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Third Book

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Matt| 3 Comments

Working with the editors at Wheatmark we have finally reached the point after some 50 minor emendations and corrections and rephrasings and deletions and capitalizations and word choice that
“This Mobius Strip of Ifs” is close to publication — perhaps the third week of January. In the meantime I am compiling lists of bloggers, personal friends and acquaintances, Amazon reviewers, and giveaways just for the heck of it in preparation for the birth of my third book in five years. The cover (a mobius strip) is striking and we have the rights to this stunning drawing of a mobius strip, using the mathematical model as a thematic motif throughout the book and the binding itself. I’m already vaingloriously thinking of a Mobius Redux.

While this is proceeding according to plan, I’ve submitted the manuscript to a major contest in document form. I usually do this with all my work. In fact, “I Truly Lament,” a collection of short stories about the Holocaust is up and running as well and has also been submitted to a major contest. This book needs coddling which essentially means that I will try to have it published rather than self-published, spending the next year submitting it to publishers; if there is no luck, I will self-publish it as well. I am saturated with merriment because ten stories from the collection have already been published in fairly respectable magazines.

So it is a good moment this 14th day of December. The idea that I will have four books published during the latter decades of my life gives me pleasure; like a rolling stone I get no satisfaction, for that is always delayed in life, but I do feel something akin to the young boy who turns with his thumb on his nose and his tongue sticking out at all the waste of time, misdirection, pitfalls, gross errors, miscalculations of my own life, for having accomplished personal wants or needs rather than being demolished by self and society. Who knew that “Matty, I was called that for most of my young life, would grow up to become a writer of a kind; the horizons in my life, given my lower middle class upbringing and surroundings (housing projects) and quite ignorant father and mother, were dark. Very low flying scud devoured whatever awareness I could attain for myself, for I was asleep in life, conditioned, as we all are. I had no goals nor a sense of determination, dead to my self, inordinately shy and inhibited with girls, out of touch, unknown and I shudder at what I was, much like that foot that falls asleep in the movie theater, totally unrecognizable or sensed or even felt by the rest of one’s body. In the Fifties numb was good.

If I met a fellow alum from 1958 from Jamaica High School in Queens he or she would not recognize me, for the change in personality has been enormous. I am much, much more out there, in the open, scouting out the next day’s camp site, talkative, flashy, annoyingly vital, testy, alive and letting you know that it is great to be vitally alive and not dead. In the opening scenes of “Spartacus,” Kirk Douglas gets himself a good beating because he grabs his overseer and bites ferociously into his ankle; I associate to that when I think of how I learned to take a big juicy bite out of life’s ass in the best ways I could, that is, to live and add elan vital to my  life, to write as it counts and it does to me, not so much in perfecting my craft as to shouting out what I have to say, craft being a secondary thing with me.

So here I am Jewboy in Nevada, sterling silver mogen david stars for spurs, a saddle horn made out of ram’s horn, a palominsky for a horse, riding into the Vegas strip in search of kreplach or pirogi. Out of place, wondering if this is the right state to croak in, a decidedly non-kosher environment, even the Jews here reek of assimilation. I miss a bagel and shmear and a good argument with brethren. It is a winding down, I see it, so I feel it. I wake up grateful for that one more day in which I can write or do something in that direction. I see it in the distance, I hear the knell of the bell, and what wisdom my years have given me amounts only to a pinch of salt — even the end is new. Or better still, even the end is: nu?

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Posted in Blog

Pastiche and that Mormon Thing

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

Since my last blog I’ve been preoccupied with editing This Mobius Strip of Ifs, which is a mixture of essays and memoirs on education, Existentialism, writing, family, movies, death, living, separation, attachment and psychological abandonment as  well as societal conditioning. Whew! After pretty well “scrubbing” the text, Jane and I still found about 50 corrections to make, some requiring re-phrasing, others making the text more felicitous. All tedious and necessary. It is a sturdy book; if better than that, I leave it to reviewers. I have sent out a copy to a contest as well as other work as well. I am a believer in contests, all so Darwinian. Concomitant with all this, I’ve made lists of literary bloggers and have posted queries to about 150 sites and I expect to get a small sampling back. You just have to keep scouring directories, Yahoo, New Pages, etc for sites that suit your genre, in this case memoir/essay. Although not a joiner, I did sign up at bookblogs.ning.com which deals with all kinds of variations, including non-fiction work.

While all this is going on my next book is at the starting gate, “I Truly Lament,” a collection of short stories on various aspects of the Holocaust, a follow up to The i Tetralogy.” It has been edited very well, quite spiffy, and except for a few final touches it will go out to a major contest within a week or so as a word document or PDF, as some reviewers are willing to do that — the writing world is changing as I write. I will coddle this book, hopefully acquiring a publisher rather than self-publishing. It has stainless steel balls, for 10 stories have been published in 2010-2011 from the collection. As usual I go out on the limb in this book.

I lurch daily from editing, seeking out bloggers for possible reviews, making lists of potential things to do to push the book, worrying about deadlines for this and that and squeaking in here and there a book to read, which in this case is American Massacre by Sally Denton, the sordid tale of the Mountain Meadows Massacre committed by the theocratic state of the Mormons. Let me be clear here: it was the most significant atrocity ever committed on American soil until the bombing by Mcvey in Oklahoma. I have read at least three able books about the Mormons, one on the massacre itself and it wasn’t until I read Denton’s work that I got a more complete understanding of what had happened. A previous blog on Fanny Stenhouse will bring  you up up to date, for I’d rather give my emotional response to what I read without giving all the details — that is your task if interested.

Observations: Brigham Young was a crypto-fascist, wrong word to use, but in all aspects he was; he did not collude in the massacre of an emigrant wagon train of settlers from Arkansas. He was directly responsible as much as Hitler was responsible for Dachau. One does not have to turn on the gas to be responsible for the act. The Mormon “church,” if that is what it is, has spent over a century in a cover up, in one fashion or another for the killing of at least 140 men and women, the rape of one girl if not two by R. D. Lee, the enrapt and obeisant follower of Young. What I am about to say is the crux of it all. The mental conditioning, the cult-like behavior within the church’s own doctrines and the theocracy which ruled Utah  was so despotic and corrosively and psychologically invasive of its people it led to the classic “in” group versus the “out” group, in this case Mormons versus the Federal government. When you read about this group you sense that it is like reading about Jim Jones, except in this instance, the Mormons externalized their rage and fears on an innocent group. I conclude it is a church of followers; consequently I doubt in the forseeable future any great art emanating from this insular group.

I am at the point when I was first learned about the Holocaust — appalled, enraged, furious, angered, hateful, disgusted, seeking some punishment for the perpetrators. Until very recently the Mormons stonewalled any efforts to reveal the total truth, these so-called people of the book. The worst hypocrites are religious people, for they are ruled and dominated by a doctrine and they are in no way free of their conditioning. They revel in their blindness. When unearthing fragments of bones, skulls, and the like, archaeologists were pressured by the Mormon church to cease and desist, an old tradition in that church; the scientists were furious and rightfully so, for their preliminary results pointed directly at white men and not Indians responsible for the killing. In short, historically the church has taken miniscule steps to allow true inquiry into its role in that massacre. And historically, like all good white men of the day, they blamed the local Indians for the deed, although in fact Mormon men dressed and painted up as the Indians controlled and carried out the act, and that act was deliberately carried out through a chain of command going back directly to Brigham Young who used what we would today call, “plausible deniability.” Corrupt, venal, cut-throat, base, coarse, rude and vulgar, he wrapped himself in the relgious cloak of infallibility and let his henchmen take the rap. Years later after two trials only one man, R.D. Lee, was executed. By the way, the U. S. government did collude in not pursuing the case for all kinds of political reasons. A few very honorable human beings did protest, crypto-Schindlers. Ah, the repetition compulsion of the human race.

Like the Nazis, who collected the luggage, shoes, hair and gold teeth from their victims at the extermination camps, after the massacre wagons were loaded up with the dresses of the slain women, their earrings, personal items, their shoes, undergarments, and the clothing of the men as well as the stock they had driven from Arkansas, their wagons — the bodies were left stripped and nude and observers saw wolves feasting on their carcasses for weeks after.  In short, all the paraphernalia was collected and driven back to Salt Lake City in wagons where women were employed to wash out the blood from the garments, press and iron them.  I associated to how the Germans cleansed human hair and  wove them  into blankets for their troops on the eastern front. The few very young children who were eight or younger were allowed to live because of some decrepit Mormon doctrine and often assigned to the homes of the very slayers of their parents!The personal trauma was astounding, haunting them for the rest of their lives and their descendants as well. In one grotesque and horrific incident, R. D. Lee heard his young “adopted” girl see his wife and say that it was the dress her mother had and so were the earrings; with that Lee got up and cut her throat. So she was psychologically killed once and now he killed her forever. I give you one of the high officers of the church.

Denton writes in a measured voice, for she is an investigative journalist; it all sneaked up on me, the culminatively arraying of facts so that conclusions are more powerful because they are not driven home. I’m at that point that I am ready to debate any Mormon I find in Nevada about the hideousness of his past, for I do believe that we all have to metabolize our personal and collective pasts if we are to move ahead in some way toward a better life or existence. The Mormons, I believe, are a frozen collective, and in many aspects are a cult much like Scientology. It is brain control of a significant kind. Jane is not a “Jack Mormon,” which according to a definition is a Mormon who does not follow the church but has a measure of devotion to it. Jane is an apostate, thank ”god,”a tried and blue atheist and she sees through her Mormon upbringing with a laser eye. I will only say, perennial shrink that I am, here and there, like a stone on the road I catch Jane’s conditioning , which I point out to her. It often takes the shape of obeisance. And sometimes with love and sometimes with anger, I go after that, for I detest enslavement of any kind, especially mind conrol from a church.

Only recently Jane received a call from a Mormon elder asking if she was interested in…You can fill it in. Jane thought about it and said no. She informedme that they never let go, or stop trying. In any case I think to test her mettle she thought it might be very interesting if she invited the elder back to discuss her reentry into the church. I questioned her about her motives, but she wanted this and saw through to herself. In any case two men arrived, one older than the other, dressed in black, and I was informed by Jane they come in twos. After two hours with them, I returned home because she had requested I leave, knowing that I would have gone at them fast and furious about other things. What had happened? The same old crap, but this time she argued evolution and gave them her considerable knowledge about this and that and as she told me this her eyes rolled up because it was all so useless. I could have saved her the time. When you are a zombie, aspirin doesn’t help and sweet reason does not stay the hand at the oven’s door. A few days letter a note on yellow foolscap, folded in four, was at my doorstep, addressed to Sister Holt, her maiden name, asking her if she would like to attend the next church meeting, etc. Note that Jane tells the story while in a temple in Utah she asked one of the tour guides what was her first name as they were addressing one another as sister. Jane was told this was natural and normal; however, when asked what was the first name of her companion guide, she could not(!) give it because she did not know it. I give you a slave.

Probably the most hated, the most loathed symbol to a Mormon is the question mark.

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Dear Mr. Brooks

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.I answered his request in his column, “The Life Report.” I am quoting from his opening remarks.

“If you are over 70, I’d like to ask for a gift. I’d like you to write a brief report on your life so far, an evaluation of what you did well, of what you did not so well and what you learned along the way. You can write this as a brief essay or divide your life into categories — career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge –and give yourself a grade in each area.

” If you send these life reports to me at dabrooks@nytimes.com, I’ll write a few columns about them around Thanksgiving and post as many essays as possible online.

“I ask for this gift for two reasons.

“First, we have few formal moments of self-appraisal in our culture. Occasionally, on a big birthday people will take a step back and try to form a complete pciture of their lives, but we have no regular rite of passage prompting them to do so.

“More important, these essays will be useful to the young. Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relativelty little help in undersanding how a life devbelops, how careers and familes ev olve, what are are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.”

Dear Mr. Brooks:

I was a teacher for thirty-two years.It was the equivalent of having urine running down your leg. In this culture teaching, as presently constituted, is a significant agent of conditioning the young, making them dupes for the American dream, whatever that is. If you don’t know, it is marketing.

Since the Conant Report in 1957 about our secondary school system reported on its gross deficiencies, some decades later nothing really has significantly changed.

Was I a good teacher, which is sufficient in any case, or just a cranky discontent? I was one of the best. I lived a devastating split. It took the awakening of intelligence; Krishnamurti called it that, for me to realize that I was like Dathan on the way to Mt. Sinai, hectoring Moses to return to Egypt. No wonder it took forty years for that generation to die out so that metaphorically an unenslaved Jewish mentality could enter Canaan.

I trained to be a psychotherapist, so that I could come to my death knowing that I could be something other than an American teacher. It is not the occupation that is dreadful; it is the reality of it. So I wasted a third of my life a surly discontent in a mind-numbing occupation where to be excellent threatened the lives of others.I once told a group of parents that I was a writer who happened to be a teacher and because of that I could help their children in ways that an English teacher could not. On the morrow a guidance counselor tried to reprimand me for that “provocative” statement, for the tax-paying parents wanted me to be a teacher who happened to be a writer.

I have always been subversive, often surreptitiously. Call it passive-aggressive if the diagnosis helps you.And what a split that is. Allow me to brag: I see through crap, I see through large swaths of this rather decadent culture –just look at the array of pinheads running as Republicans. The fact that, except for one, they all believe in creationism attests to the failure of the school system in this country. Nothing wrong in being in decline, a natural historical process for empires. Just see it.

As a therapist I grew immeasurably so. I worked with clients to decondition themselves and finally to be free of me. I don’t brew disciples. Working with a school-phobic teenager, the school pressured the mother because they had not seen any results. They told her I was not a good therapist. Get this – school teachers commenting with their amazing erudition and expertise about another professional in an entirely different career. Aside: if more teachers went into treatment before becoming “educators,” we would see better teaching. Better still, if they went into treatment they might realize teaching is not the way to behave maturely

In short, I urged the mother to stand fast. I told her I was not an agent of the school system. It was not my task to make her son be good, nice, conform and all the delightful ways that schools want the herd to behave. Years later I met the now adult man who was my client. He was at college and all was well. He won. The school was defeated. Yippee!

All my life I have written. It kept me emotionally alive all during those dread years as a teacher. I have written three books, all favorably reviewed, not bad for someone in the last decades of his life. I will never play golf!

All this is career information, is it not? But there is more to every one of us. I have been reading and learning from that great spiritual genius, Krishnamurti, for more than three decades. Between him and Kazantzakis I almost have it down. The Freese motto is an epitaph from Kazantzakis’s: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” I am not dependent on either man. I just catch their rays for a good mental tan.

Teacher, shrink, writer, and all this does not assuage the griefs I have experienced in my life. A daughter who committed suicide because I was an inept and often not understanding father who lived far away. Closure is a moronic American cliché. It never closes. I don’t bathe in retrospective guilt. I just have regrets I did not see more deeply as a father into her pain. I lost a wife in a car accident and a daughter who was terribly mangled but survived, her boyfriend dying in the crash. I remember all this and I can do no more than to be a living sconce for each, for if I remember them they are “alive.”

This society considers me superannuated.In response, I just don’t consider this society. Krishnamurti said that all societies are essentially corrupt. I would tell anyone reading this essay that is all an aware human being needs to know. The rest is his or her struggle.

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Posted in Commentary, Reminiscence

Superannuated, My Ass

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

According to my dictionary, it is to be obsolete, old-fashioned or outdated. None of this applies to me and yet it does. Because this particular culture says so. This culture has an implicit statement to make about age and purpose. There are manifest and subtle latent cut-offs for people. In fact we have perfected retirement in its various manifestations. Careers are made for those creating pensions and benefits; retirement homes are an extraordinary business. You can fill in the rest. At a certain age you automatically become old or of “retirement age.” The whole construct of retirement is a product of a capitalistic system. We do not value the wise, the accrued smarts of those older than ourselves. Americans generally dwell in the new, the temporary, riding the crest of the wave; the association comes to mind of a surfer connecting to his Ipad while on his board. We adore the temporary, the facile, the evanescent. All this is the seemingly banal complaint or observation by the old of the young.

What do the superannuated do or feel when they realize they have reached the age of superfluousness. Many engage retirement all that more, digging deeper into their golf game or doing line dancing (argh!) at the local gym, or taking courses as hamburger helper for their minds as they speed toward death and dying. No superannuated person considers occupying Aetna’s offices, especially the benefits office. Admittedly, to face what this culture mandates in a thousand subtle ways, like licking the bronze shoe of a sculpture in Rome, the infinite licking producing a centuries old patina, is to realize that resistance is futile — the Borg have won. Awareness, personal self-awareness, is a rare commodity in all populations throughout the world. To be awake is not a good thing for one who is “over the hill.” It is not even a good thing for one who is young.  Imagine America as an immense human head with a Trump combover, silly, vain, unreal, narcissistic and completely out of touch with some commonly held verities throughout human history, oh, such as integrity.

The only movie that I can recall over all these decades that sent out a disturbing message about the conditioned and unconditioned was “The Matrix.” I read it for what it was. A metaphor for the aware and unaware, one world induced a living coma in life, while the other fought off the narcolepsy, the hypnotic trance the so-called “real” world was in. I argue that all the nonsense sent to us by satellites and cable are pollution, for they create and have created a kind of blade runner world. I wonder, at moments, if there are any  young adults who see through all this dangerous cant; and if they do, are they suicidal? If you have not learned who you are by your young adulthood, this world will indoctrinate you so well that you can watch a child being raped and not intervene. Oh, no, I don’t mean call the cops — that comes later. I mean actually intervene. In this case 911 is the second choice. May McQueary never find solace in his “God.”

A few months ago, coming home one night my wife and I watched a neighbor who we only had a few interactions with, a mother, in this case, approach her son who was seated on the lawn with his buddies. Then, she slapped him heartily about the head for some misdeed only known to her. Standing next to her was another neighbor who was “involved” with his cellphone and acted as if he had heard nothing, which he definitely did, because I shouted to the mother to stop what she was doing. I tore into her verbally. At first she thought I was kidding her. I told her if she continued I would call child protective services. With that she took her child and left. So I had an aberrant mother and an  uninvolved cop who heard nothing. Yes, a cop! Yes, he denied he heard anything although the event occurred on his lawn no more than four steps away from him. When the next cattle car chugs across the landscape to Auschwitz, he will hear nothing as well.

I feel very superannuated in this world, for my values are considered outre or retro. I feel they have been tested by my decades of living. I have lived from hearing Superman on radio to having a woman sell me a pound of coffee at a farmer’s market the other day and use her smartphone to connect to my bank, after I used the tip of my finger to sign my name on the glass screen as well as forward a receipt to my computer. I am the same man, the same continuing person all these decades. You can mix me up, scramble me like three eggs on a griddle, and I will still be me. You would think this might be appreciated. No. It is not. The scary thing is that we are all so enmeshed in anomie that the only validation we have is the validation we may give to ourselves (many are unaware of that personal attribute)– and that is a centuries old verity, believe me.

Superannuated as I am, I dwell in the somewhat smug and self-satisfied notion that I own something you don’t have and it is worth millions. However, i see that you have a somewhat smug and self-satisfied notion that my time is over and you are declared the winner. I had a good run. And as Harlan Ellison once ended one of his short stories, “Fuck you!”

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Tell It All The Tyranny of Mormonism, Mrs. T.B.H. Stenhouse

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Matt| 1 Comment

Recently I read Fawn Brodie’s biography of the charismatic charlatan and all around creep, Joseph Smith, founder of the cult religion, Mormonism. The book came out in the early seventies and is a bit stodgy; however, it is backed up with solid historical matter, for Brodie was a historian of some note, a Pulitzer Prize winner. Jane who is an apostate Mormon (which means she is psychologically free), to use their jargon, cued me into the book. What I came away with are some generalization about Smith and the abominations he created from his so-called “revelations.” As an atheist I just wagged my head continually as I read about this mouse that roared across America. As Brodie says somewhere, these early religions in America were mostly a combination of piety and avarice (Anabaptists, Methodists, Shakers, et al). Associate to Elmer Gantry.

Materialism runs rampant throughout Smith’s life, the attaining of riches, the grifter seeking ways to accumulate riches, telling others that his dicta was “divinely” inspired. It continues with Brigham Young, a cretinous, vicious man who increasingly foisted polygamy upon Mormon women for his own sexual needs, and for the sexual needs of Mormon men basted in a sauce of religiosity, all man-made, of course, to serve their purposes. I define Mormonism as a man-made religion (aren’t they all?) that is rooted in misogyny and materialism. Some caustic Catholic wit of the Renaissance said that English Protestantism came from the testicles of Henry VIII. Mormonism flowed from the demented, self-acquisitive mind of a delusional grifter who composed a hodge-podge of Old and New testaments, Egyptian hieroglyphics, racism, into a potpourri of self-justifications we now call the Book of Mormon, or as Twain said about its prose and content, “Chloroform in print.” The only other book so made up of babble is the Koran.

Reading Brodie’s book I was appalled as each self-serving idea that Smith came upon or thought of was then justified or rationalized by a concomitant “revelation” to support it. Smith would later on walk about with scribes as if anything that emerged from his mind to his lips was holy writ. Often he would go into a room and compose his revelation and return to his congregation with this newly minted canon. Charlatan supreme! Remarkable to read about. After years he had pages rife with all kinds of revelations, so many, I imagine, in contradiction to others; so he made up his junk theology as he went along. At one time he had a seer stone that he “consulted” privately and which supposedly he could get divine inspiration or revelation for after all, he was a “prophet.” What is appalling, what is achingly mysterious, what is frightening is the immense gullibility of his followers. I could argue that about Christianity — Magi, Star of Bethelem, ascension and resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, many rooted in Greek myths, Apollo, to wit. For edification and support for my contentions see Homer Smith’s Man and His Gods, with an introduction by Albert Einstein.

The blackest deed of all with respect to Joseph Smith was to foist his inner delusions as conscious theology, grounded in his gamboling narcissism, upon abject believers, many of whom, seemed feral in their worldview. Others knew he was corrupt; others did not want to believe so. The whole fabricated story of golden plates, how he constructed a box to contain them, and how he very often refused even his closest friends or followers to see his seer stone, and his “visions” et al strains one’s idea of rationality. C’mon, fo/ks, he came from upstate New York and was one of the locals! His early life was as a scam artist ( all of his family had visions as well) and a he grew to learn that the greatest scam game of all was religion and how improving upon this street alley shell game, he realized as the years went along that he had a very good thing going here. We all have our Pauls, the fabricator of Christianity. Rather, Smith was an imposter, and the DSM III, used by psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers lists this as a character disorder. He was more than a narcissist. There is not a religious leader alive, in my opinion, who is not in some aspect paranoid. After all, they speak for god, tell us what god would feel about social issues and so on. The megalomania is manifest. If you hear voices, if god speaks to you, if you listen to a burning bush, that is there, I contend.  There is a body of psychological  thought that maintains it is so, that most human beings are psychotic. Think about it before you dismiss it.

Human beings are capable of gross stupidities. Their eternal need to go on in an after life drives almost all religions and especially Mormonism which, in fact, justified polygamy as a way to continue on well-heeled and with one’s life and wives! – as any Egyptian pharaoh in eternal life. In fact, the more wives you had here in the present the better your reign with your “celestial queens” would be in the after life. And do not be deceived to think that only the ignorant and illiterate swallowed up this canard; the Puritans were well-educated in many cases and they wallowed in their Salem witch trials. The Mormons also went through inquisitorial periods, the “Reformation”, as it was called and the hideous deformation called “Blood Atonement,” really justifications by the Mormon “priestly” class to sustain, reinvirgorate or to maintain the status quo. All religions purge heresies and exercise cruel ways to deal with apostates. This week the US Congress voted to reaffirm the motto “In God We Trust,” because we had nothing else to do but essentially slap Obama for some misquote he made about it. The ridiculousness to affirm a deity while Joe Blow can’t get work next store is just a monument to the unpleasant assholes we are as a species.

Ironically, a few basic tenets of Mormonism which reflect Christianity’s belief in the goodness of a kind god, of redemption, of charity and forgiveness, and all the rest circulate about the core of Mormonism, but in my eyes, they are and have been only minor moons to this Leviathan of repression, suppression and often times hate and vengeance, the notorious Mountain Meadows Massacre, to wit. I go to a Mormon dentist and we chat now and then. I brought up this historical heinous deed in which Mormon men and some Indians attacked a wagon train of men, women and children, or Gentiles,  essentially on a hideous errand by Brigham Young, who washed his hands of it as he always did, to staunch this supposed threat to Mormonism. The pioneers were savagely cut down after being told they would have an armed escort for their protection; children were slain, one raped by a Mormon elder, Mr. Lee. All children were purposely killed who might remember any of this. Infants were given up to adoption in some cases. All in all, similar, to some degree, to what the Nazis did in WW II at Lidice, in retaliation for the killing of Heydrich. I would argue that in Mormonism over 150 years ago their was a fascism of a kind that emanated from the priestly class.

Parenthetically, the dentist told me that essentially the religion was good but that men do evil deeds. Ah, an apologist, for he is so conditioned he cannot allow his mind to consider from whence he originated or to challenge the source of his belief system. Stick to teeth, doc

And now I can speak of Stenhouse who wrote Tell It All. As I said, I read Brodie’s biography and prior to that a fairly objective acount of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. A quick tangent. For over a 100 years the Mormons have twisted and lied about that event once it got around; they have excused it, and of course, rationalized it and mostly denied it. Historical reasons given for its occurrence. All bullshit. Only very recently was a monument set up at the sight and Jane who went to visit it, shared with me how there was a dearth of signs to lead the way. In short, it is an embarrassment and because of that  you have to get lost before you can find the memorial. Even in their death, these people can’t get their due. Oh why speak about injustice. If you were to define humanity, part of the definiton would have to ascribe to our species its capacity for inhumanity and injustice.

So with two books behind me I was given this book by Stenhouse, a Mormon believer, who decided to reveal all of her experience as a Mormon and Mormon wife, as the wife of a polygamist, of her internalizing absolute rage toward this practice and having to keep her own counsel and wits about her, lest she would be punished in some way. Brilliant in the writing, it is also brilliant in her capacity to touch upon the slights and psychological insults done to her — and all women she would remark –by polygamy. Polygamy was added on while Smith still lived and exquisitely developed by Young. I have to say that her writing strikes me as something composed by Jane Austen or the Brontes, rather a merger of both.  The book is riveting, tremendously insightful not into Mormonism alone but of the terrible havoc wrought upon women. Her insights into women far outweigh her insights into men, for I have concluded there is not much to men to begin with when compared to the sensitivites and sensibilites of women. One can make the case that this is also a forerunner of feminism.

I relish each page as I am reading it now, the prose of the Nineteenth Century, Latinate in expression, but once you get the pattern it is a go. I respect her love for what is good in any religion and here, as an atheist, I can readily accept that in her as she might accept, perhaps, my atheism. We disagree on first causes; however, after that she is the sharp scythe of death as she examines how what she believed in from her youth is slowly eviscerated, corrupted and abused for all kinds of reasons by a priestly class run on testosterone. I have come to like this woman for an  oxymoronic feeling of being stern and soft, caring and compassionate and yet using that steely mind of hers to see through cant. I struggle with her need to overthrow the tyranny of an abyssmal religion with abyssmal consequences especially for women, and yet she retain her humanity and  goodness. An acute reader of men and women, I will quote only one line that got me chuckling for its aptness and acuity. She says of polygamy and the men who installed it for their own sexual needs:”She little knew, poor girl, when she married, that a Mormon’s heart is like a honeycomb — there is always a vacant cell wherein another may nestle.”

The most powerful theme here is that a woman with a first class mind, with acute sensibilities, with a rigorous mind that considers reason a way out of and a way into, had to squelch and stifle her not inconsiderable abilites for decades, abiding with polygamy, with her becoming a second wife, of dealing with a stranger in her midst of equal weight to herself, almost, as a first wife. The intricacies of that kind of life are explored, but given the times she alludes to or hints at the sexual intimacies that are also involved, for instance, that Mormon men far past their middle age, seek out young wives in their teens because it is written or it is revealed that the more children they have  now the more their estate will be in the hereafter. Mormonism rests upon a gland. She leaves the machinations of sex to our minds which lets us fill in the spaces. Stenhouse does free herself, but that is for another blog. Sister Stenhouse is Sysyphus revealed and her slog through the moral turpitude which was Mormonism at that time is something to behold. The costs were immeasurable to her sense of self-respect, dignity and integrity, constantly under assault while she kept her own counsel. I can only imagine what her blood pressure was like.

If I knew  where she was buried and if somehow in  that locale, I would pay her grave a visit. A great woman!

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