mathiasbfreese.com

Often I go to blog and the damn essay vanishes, often because I don’t save it or whatever Gates has perversely devised. The last few days I have not felt the urge to write, for whatever reasons. I wrote a short piece which you can read in Pages called “The Artist Is Never Poor.” The upshot is that the well of the artist is continually flushed with writing water. So it isn’t that I have “dried” up. It is something else, a disinclination, if you will. I just associated to my birthday which is tomorrow. I will be 68. What is fire? What is love? What in the hell is 68? In Our Town Wilder talks about the passage of time in his homely and earthen way. I recall a line in which he says that the person across you in the morning at breakfast has eaten with you for about 50,000 times. Suddenly, you are there; suddenly you are old; “suddenly” which has taken years to manifest itself.

Well, I just saved that paragraph. I hope it doesn’t vanish. Of late I have been querying bloggers and reviewers about review copies often sent many months ago. Some of the responses are empty, unkind or insensitive, some dramatic or some odd. To wit:

“I decided not to write a review since it would have been mostly negative. It’s subjective I know, and I’ve seen several positive reviews and note that you have won several awards for your stories. But for me they read more like a pyschologists [sic] case notes than stories. I’m sure it’s just me and not the stories, since as I’ve noted it appears I’m alone in my disappointment.”

Go figure. As I said in my announcement that I will review books, I don’t buy into a non-review. I can take the heat. Life is short, nasty and brutish, good old Hobbes opined.

And then I receive this response.

“Matt,

“I am so sorry. I have fallen extremelly ill over the increasing months and have had to move home to be taken care of. Sadly it is more serious than I would have liked and I am not sure of my status. I hope that you can forgive me.

“I will try to rewrite a review soon but just to warn you I may be hospitalized in the near future. I apologize for my lack of professionlaism in this matter.”

It tears your heart out, doesn’t it. I sent him a few kind words; perhaps if he writes back I will direct him to my blogs on the colonoscopy. In this case fuck the review and take care of yourself, Doug.

It all comes down to priorities; that is why I am no longer bent out of shape by the weird responses I get to my work. Some bloggers, I sneakily detect, pile up books like Don Quixote so that they can admire them on their shelves, show others how “learned” they are. The job of a reader is to give the book away to another. I’ve become aware of blog “challenges,” in which — and I may have this altogether wrong –  bloggers try to read as many books as possible under the challenge of a set amount of time. I resented that when my book was part of a reading challenge. So it isn’t what you read so much as it is how many books you read under the gun. Americana. Good old capitalistic competition. Nauseating.

Sixty eight years ago, a few months before Pearl Harbor, my mother in a hospital ward spread her thighs and a random presence was born. In August 1945 I dimly remember her getting excited about Japan’s surrender. And so time adds up.

At Harry’s Bar & American Grill, Papa said, an epiphany comes late to each man and best of all in a clean, well-lighted place and best before dawn before the heat of day is best gone and the shadows stretch long and far into the night, la noche misterioso.

“Hombre, nada mucho,” Papa said.

He sat there under the light and the heat of the bulb was weak but it gave off a burnished glow much too weak.

“The light is good and bright and pleasant but the bar floor goes unwaxed,” the waiter said.

Papa sat off in a corner in the shade by the side on a bentwood beneath the bulb that gave light and a shot glass left its ring on the tablecloth. Across the way and through the wooden beads the hills looked like white rhinoceri. Papa brought the glass to his lips.

The waiter looked with despair at the unwaxed floor, and he thought of how Papa of late, now barrel-chested, grown gray, had looked in the shade off in a corner by the side on the chair beneath the bulb that gave no light.

Our papa who art in papa as it is in papa. Give us this papa our daily papa and papa us our papa as we papa our papa and papa us not into nada but deliver us from papa; pues papa. Hail nada full of nada, nada is with thee.

The waiter’s reflection was caught in the expresso machine.

All is well. The biopsy was benign. I need to see the doctor next year for another scope. I am being watched, I suppose. Otto Rank, a disciple of Freud, and a kind of genius — bedmate of Anais Nin — tells a story of his youth. Planning to shoot himself during a bout with Sturm und Drang, at the last moment he moved the weapon away from his head. He later observed, later that same day, that he felt so remarkably alive and vital; that he was again engaged with the world, and that the experience was more than relief, but ecstatic. I do not do the anecdote justice, but when I read it years ago I chose to remember it. I later incorporated it into a long article that was published about Rank in Pilgrimage.

I have been given a reprieve — until next time. Like trying to gather up a small bead of mercury on the floor, I cannot wrap my mind about this experience. Threat comes to self, threat is removed — all by chance and happenstance. I am left spinning like a skewed dreidel. I did not pray to god, irrelevant, immaterial, non-existent, a fraud perpetrated upon man and woman. I thought more of Rochelle and asked for her assistance. A prayer to an immortal which only made me feel better. Better a prayer to a passed loved one than a prayer to an idol of the mind.

I fall back upon myself in such dreadful instances and the few loving people about me, my son, Jane, she of the compassionate and practical mind. I believe I could blog about this all day, giving threads of associations, philosophical disquistions. But it all comes down to fear. It is fear that must be dealt with for it cripples and weakens resolve. Oh, one more thing, to those of you younger than I — the more a situation is repeated such as the one I just had, the less prior experience can help you with it. The past is dead in these cases. The answer is in the moment or, better still, the question is better posed in the present. So, when dire news comes again I just hope that I can handle it freshly, new, and look upon it as if it were for the first time. In this instance prior learning is useless. The event is too new, too pressing, too threatening. My appreciation to Cinderkeys for her thoughtfulness.

On 7 July I had my second colonoscopy within 8 years. Supposedly I could have waited 10 years; however, the PA and I decided after a few words about the necessity of having it at all, to go ahead since I had initiated the doctor’s visit. I had no symptoms. I was being vigilant. After all, I want to be in the best possible health when I come to die.

The procedure went well, the nurses attended to me more than competently, things explained along the way. I associated to Soylent Green as I was being readied and “processed.”  I had a choice of doctors and I went with a gastro man who had interned at Mount Sinai in the Bronx. Anyone trained there or in a New York hospital pays his or her dues. We chatted before the scoping about how he enjoyed New York pizza and he remarked that his 10 years in Manhattan was an experience he thought invaluable. And then the sand man put me to sleep.

I was roused from a sleep that was much like I imagine death to be like, complete non-existence. Ain’t bad. It is the leaving that is painful. The nurse said, to my displeasure, that 2 or 3 polyps were discovered and removed and that they would be biopsied. The doctor came by to tell me much the same and to call back on Thursday for the results. He did tell Jane that they looked benign but that if I had not attended to them they most likely would have turned cancerous. It was the randomness of the event, the circumstances by which I asked for this procedure that quite frankly shook me.

On Thursday i couldn’t get the results and was given a kind of run around which in hindsight was unavoidable; late Thursday the doctor’s assistant called to tell me that there were too many specimens to biopsy but on Friday morning she would call before noon to share the results. The perversity of waiting.

From Monday to Thursday I was unsettled, doing my drama queen material. I am writing this Thursday evening so I still don’t know. If it is not benign, what then? if it is benign, I need to report back next year, I believe the doctor told me. I don’t believe there is anything I can do to stop growing polyps. The nurse told me that some patients have a “farm” in their colon.

Quite frankly, I experienced fear, I am still experiencing fear, and there is nothing I can do except to feel it, which is unpalatable. I am less tense tonight and I don’t know why. I am not resigned to the results whatever they may be. I am not that kind of personality. I dwell in me in such situations. I am of an age that symptons and maladies will soon start showing up. I will be 68 on 23 July. I know a kind of paralysis comes over me –perhaps you, when one discovers such threats to the self. I had this occur when Rochelle was killed in an automobile accident. It is trauma that cannot, for the moment, be absorbed. I am trying to allay my anxiety, but trying to allay my anxiety is much like turning straw to gold, a fairy tale “reality.”

I have not had the will, and that is the word, to sit down to write this blog or any blog. The air of self flew out of me. I don’t know what the morrow will bring, but I do know I will now have to “watch” myself as if that is not what we all do all the time on levels unknown to us. The impending threat to self-existence is crucifying. I am not a person of equanimity; I am a high strung individual and a fighter, or I hope I am. The threat of a malignancy hovers this evening. I can only deal with it with reason and emotion, for there is nothing I can do to change the course of events. I am only a mere rudder. I’ll end here as I have no ending to come up with. I am in a sea of dread.

I have thought about reviewing specific books on these pages. Quite frankly, it is to encourage a give-and -take between readers or writers and this writer, who has expertise in some areas of the human soul.

If you wish to have a book reviewed by me, I will give it the attention it needs. I do not want to be rushed. You take a risk as I have experienced risk with bloggers. I will not be mean-sprited in the reviews although I do not suffer fools. I will not pull my punches. Some book review bloggers give me the option of not reviewing the book if they do not like it. Crapola!

To be a writer requires guts. So, I have my interests — I would like to review books about the Holocaust, historical fiction as well as non-fiction; collections of short stories interest me as well as collections of sci-fi stories such as Harlan Ellison produces. I favor fiction that moves me emotionally and then cerebrally, in that order. I like my writers brave.

I am attentive to detail so that I will get back to you quickly. If you peruse the queries I wrote for The i Tetralogy and Down to a Sunless Sea in these pages, forward a similar query to me. (In this way I get a sense of you). I am new at all this, but I am not new at living. For example, how would I put your review up on Amazon? I haven’t the slightest. So if you would enlighten me I would comply. In this exchange we share a writerly collegiality. No, you need not read my books unless you are inclined to. No, you needn’t pull your punches with me, for I am human as much as you are. It is all in how you express yourself — well, that is your job as a writer, isn’t it?

Finally, I am open to suggested parameters for running this litblog.

I look forward to hearing from you.

If you would go to blogcritics.org/ and read the interview with Mayra Calvani and then to pifmagazine.com for another interview with Derek Alger, editor, you will get a better sense of who I am. Work it out from there, friend.

This blog will twist and turn because I have too much mentation floating about with regard to trains.  Several commentators have observed that the Holocaust is synonymous with the scheduling of trains during the Nazi era. Cattle cars shuffling along track for hundreds of miles and depositing Jews into death camps was a daily fact. In fact, if I have my history correct, Hitler gave these cars rail priority over the shipment of armaments.

Recently, after some consideration, I’ve decided to change the cover of The i Tetralogy. I discussed this with my son who is a graphic designer and artist as well as my fiance, Jane, who wrote the introduction to my book of short stories. At the moment I thought a photo of railroad tracks which my son took some time back, with the help of photoshop and all that jazz, might serve as a new cover.  We would change the color of the cover, perhaps brown, and “skeletonize” the tracks so that they appear to be lethal, mysterious, if not deadly, an abstraction. Jordan will cogitate over all this and surely come up with an original cover; it is becoming a family tradition for him to do the covers of my book.

In the Tetralogy I spend not an inconsiderable time describing the train set that Gunther, the Nazi guard and tormentor, sets up in his home. The train set is a layout of a Nazi camp he once ruled sway in. The trains are HO scale and are Marklin. Marklin trains are a world-class train company based in Germany. They are the American Lionel, if you will. I remember ordering the Marklin catalog in which they described at least five historical periods in which Marklins were produced, the cars, the scenery, the tenders, and all the rest. I teased out what locomotives and what cattle cars –or freight, would be used to carry Jews and other victims to the camps. I found it “amusing” that the years 1939 to 1945 were either not discussed or described. Orwellian, to say the least. Having operated trains as a kid in addition to doing this research for accuracy, I then created a narrative about the trains Gunther used in his dank and despicable train set, a grotesque remembrance of things past. The description of the train set has several pages to it and becomes part and parcel of Gunther’s sons childhoods. No one knew in the family what the real intent of the layout was as he went about disguising it; in short he got off on it.

Looking back at it now, I realize on several levels I was digging as hard as I could, using imagination, whatever skills I had as a writer, to dwell in his heart of darkness. The Marklins allowed me in. As i said at the start, I will twist and turn as this goes along. When I was about to be bar mitzvahed, my mother cooked all the food for the event as we were not well to do and catering was out of the question. Parallel to this is that I had a Lionel train set, the three rail track which always looked unrealistic, the classic figure eight layout with a locomotive and tender and, I believe, it is 54 years ago! three pullman cars. It was the kind of set that you placed a pellet into the smokestack and it did emit an acrid, still sweet to my memory, smoke from the stack. I had some kind of tower with a plastic globe about it, when turned on and warmed up,  consquently turned casting its glow across the tracks. It was a shared train set as my two uncles, Bernie and Seymour, made it a tradition to purchase a new car or freight each holiday season, which in those days for Jews was Christmas. Jews only got their bonuses on Christmas. You had to experience this set with the lights off. If memory serves me right, certain accessories like station crossings, long gone from memory now, alas, had red bulbs that glowed in the dark, bells and whistles, no pun intended. It was thrilling.

Realizing that the cost of the bar mitzvah was shy necessary funds, my father took me aside and asked if would I mind if he sold the set to raise money for the ceremony. It was the 50s, a time of repressed feelings and little straight talk. I acquiesced without a word, so passive was I. As I wrote elsewhere I gave up something that I cared for so much for something else that I did not care for that much. In retrospect my father should have dug ditches to Newark from Brooklyn to raise the cash. Oh, the historic ache. My son Jordan has shared with me how upset he was when his mother disposed of his Hans Solo Millenium Falcon that he had admired as a young boy. Not quite the same thing. The train set of that time, of my time, had signifcant emotions attached to it. I most likely would have kept it until this day and passed it down to my son or daughter, for I am that kind of person. Not nostalgia, not sentimentality, but remembrance, for I was a child who noted the changing of the days by the objects in my environment, the seasons, the unique or not so unique toys, the Spaldeen, the Rawlings mitt and the Raleigh three-speed English racer — I got that for my bar mitzvah.

And now to recrudescence, that which is latent now becomes manifest. Since 2001 when I came upon the n scale American Orient Express  train set put out by the European Arnold/Rivarossi firm, I have been feeling the need to get back into trains once more. In the last month the infection has spread as I am surfing the net about n-scale trains, manufacturers, articles, what are the best trains, what are the best books to read. Decisions and decisions. The funny thing about getting into train sets is that you need to hold your breath and not rush in — very difficult to do. Given my Art Deco and Art Nouveau sensibility, I am taking my time and enjoying the evaluating of this train versus that one; I live on ebay as a break from writing. When I see it, I’ll buy it. In any case, what are we to make of all this — Holocaust and trains, trains of my childhood and now trains of my final childhood? What is the compelling, almost gravitational pull that these moving trinkets hold on me, down through the years. It is not by accident that I write about trains in the Tetralogy, for I describe these demented layouts with a passion. Is it displacement? No psychspeak, please.

It is just curious, oh is it curious, what time, latitudinal time, time that circumnavigates ourselves as we choo choo to our end and here would be the appropriate place to cite a poem, a Nazi poem! that appears in the book.

 Page 221 from Gunther’s Lament

When I hear in mind the choo choo, I call out Jew Jew . . .

Choo-Jew. Choo-Jew. Choo-Jew.

When I see in mind the cattle doors unlock, I hear again

in mind — Moo-Jew. Moo-Jew.

Moo-Jew. Moo-Jew.

As the train wheels clackety-clack away, the fraught engineer

takes a swig of his whiskey, for the trip is filled

with Jew offal and the keening of Jewesses.

I hear once more the sweet mechanics of repetition.

Trains ran on time, trains were time, the mechanical

marvels that rode on rail and gave us all time not on

a dial, but the latitudes and longitudes fo tracks

piercing time, clocking it off station by station.

Choo-choo Jew. Choo-choo Jew.

Time brings everything.

The fires in the Catalinas are better contained now, no new flareups that I can see. Smoke channels upwards here and there, but not the darkened clouds of a week or so ago. Containment, then break-out, then containment again. People began to be disappointed in the language chosen to convey the situation to Tucsonians. Fire is feral — and amoral. The first great blaze of my mind was in Disney’s Bambi. The forest was in flight itself as fire swept through the landscape. The sizzling, the crackling, the virulent hissing of this animated fire brought fear. We don’t know what fire is, like the burning bush in the Hebrew Bible that is aflame but not consumed. It is a mystery. Here I am as close to our ancestors in caves who somehow tamed this beast without understanding what it is; I still don’t get it. Man’s mastery over things, machines and objects in this world is an eely one, for we really do not understand what it is that we have mastered.

No slave owner understands his slave, no lord understands his serf. We run, control and operate machines technically, but we are as ignorant of them as early man was of fire. What shall we call this phenomenon, this process, this happenstance in which human beings run this world in a way far removed from what they actually know? Driving a complex machine as a car can be done with little if any knowledge of the physics and chemistry involved. As a metaphor it bespeaks the way we live our individual lives, for we are far removed from them as well.

In short, we don’t know, we don’t own, we don’t grasp, we don’t understand who we are, much less the objects in oour environment. What a concept to grasp, what a concept to internalize, and what are the consequences of it all? When I reach out to butter toast, so much is involved in this “simple” act that it befuddles the mind. Yes, I will butter toast. I know toast, butter, knife, how to spread butter and how much to spread to satisfy my eyes and taste. All this I know and can do. In reality, I am a technician, a hit man in a way. I practice and live in programmable ways. I am rote. I believe the real meaning of things and our relationship to them is as mysterious as our connections to the concept of a god, or our relationships to our psychological selves as well as our relationship to our bodies. Even if there were no mind-body split, even if we believe both are an undivided, integral wholeness, we still have no idea of what it is all about.

We live in a body that rules us, that masters us, that we really cannot alter — blood pressure, sight, panic attacks. We do not inhabit the reality of who we are because who we really are — bodily, emotionally and so on — runs by itself, without much conscious help by us. We lease our bodies for a life-time. All that we are and all that we do is randomized and run by no one. Turn a rock over. See a worm there. prod it with a twig. No meaning, no why, no reason –just life of a kind. The difference between a worm and man is that the worm has no self-pretensions. The fact that a worm has no awareness does not make it less. Man lives his life pretending that his awareness makes him significant. It is a grandiose self-lie. Awareness make us aware that we are an evolutionary wink in time, if that. No great shakes.

To be aware is to know on some levels that the difference between man and worm is miniscule. Man has pretensions, a worm does not. Perhaps evolution may eventually reverse itself and run backward, from awareness to unawareness like the worm. Perhaps a state of unawareness is preferable, for it is much like death, and we all return to that.

When I see my fellow human being, I feel an unawareness meets an unawareness. We are so blind!

I’ve decided to blog this query written on 19 August 1990. Of course, I will change the credits and tinker here and there; however, other than squeezing it tighter, I like it. Having just completed a major revision of the book, cutting about 12 pages and revising sentence by sentence, I will now let it “rest,”  as they say about steaks on Top Chef. And then with fountain pen, I am a retro kind of man, I ‘ll edit it once more. Jane will compose an introduction to it and I’ll self-publish the book — three books since 2005, not bad. And then I will go on to my science fiction fantasy which is juiced with Freud and Krishnamurti — see “Covenant” under Pages to read the opening chapter which was published in a major science fiction magazine.

SOJOURNER is a completed manuscript of historical fiction. Set in California during the emigration of “coolies” from China ro work on the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century, it reflects a part of America’s ethnic history which is not commonly known; however, such a sojourn for the main character, Ah Ling, becomes more than a litany of atmosphere, event or ethnicity.

Perplexing issues of meaning, risk, change, seeing, “being” as opposed to “becoming” are the essential motifs of this novel — how does one set about to consciously change? how does one see, free of societal conditioning? does choice bring conflict and, if so, is it best to be conflict-free or choice-free? et al.

Beginning in China and ending in the mountain ranges of California, SOJOURNER explores the inner development of a young peasant farmer confronted with issues of self and significant other. As he slowly awakens to the fact that he has been asleep in life, we share his rising expectations as he examines how to be in time, how to live in the here and now, to rejoice in living, free of all internal and external authorities. Consequently the novel attempts to develop how one goes about acquiring meaning.

Interpersonal and philosophical relationships are explored within the novel. No time is spent in disquisition upon life’s problems, but they evolve from the very actions Ah Ling sets into motion. Ah’s inner shifts and slides into newer levels of awareness are depicted as well. All this is within the context of a narrative which involves two cultures, an emigration and existence as a coolie working on a railroad. SOJOURNER is based on documented events and secondary sources. The manuscript is 194 pages.

As to my own expertise and background, I . . .

I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent air, now warmly cool. It is quiet now, a stillness, except for outdoor compressors kicking in to cool the interiors — machine hum. A bird spits across the sky like a thrown lance. Swallows are above, or are they bats? In any case, this Jew is out of here.
Safely ensconced, I’ll continue. I can’t wait to meet up with my first scorpion. Woody Allen, I am not. But why is that Jewish stars never ward off vampire bats, and why did a Hungarian Jew, Bela Lugosi, become the bloodsucker par excellence. What I love about the movies are often unintended subtexts. The bi-sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant, and Tallulah Bankhead are delights. Only in America can a gorilla climb the Empire State Building in search of cross-species sex and have his cock and balls airbrushed out. No wonder he was furious with those bi-planes. And I don’t want to get started on Pinocchio’s nose. Aladdin warming up his lamp, and a tranvestite wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. See Betteleheims’ The Uses of Enchantment to get the low-down.

Most of all, most of everything, reduced to barest essentials are openings, portals, holes or entries — from Alice in Wonderland to Italian arias, to Martin Luther’s thunderous constipation. Shit or sing, that’s what I say. We are primitives, animals –never forget that, and that is all right, just get it! It is reductive, I agree, but so endlessly interesting to contemplate, so on target. Leave it to American science to label the creation of the universe as the Big Bang. Oh, the market economy lives. We even hype creation, tacky, tacky.

Derek Alger, editor, Pifmagazine.com (see links) and Mayra Calvini, author, at Blogcritics.org/ have put up two interviews with me. Alger worked me on the phone and we chatted for about an hour as he endeavored to get a sense of who I was as a person and as a writer, much the same thing. In fact. Calvani reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea for blogcritics and then requested an interview which I did through email; her questions were sharp and I had to keep it under 2,000 words, answering the minimum of eight questions. Later on she attached two questions which she was particularly interested in having me answer.

A significant amount in both reviews are personal feelings about childhood and interests as well as my self that you, reader, may find of interest given all the blogs that have come before this. i find it flattering, of course, to blather about one’s self,  still having that residual left over from teaching which requires performance art, if not hambone.  Given that my relatives on my father’s side were in vaudeville (grade D acts — get the hook!), it all comes easy for me. However, with the armamentarium of teacher, writer and therapist, I am loaded for bear, and at this juncture in my life, I have garnered sufficient knowledge, perhaps some wisdom, to share. One of the perks of getting older.

If you are a writer reading these blogs, you can detect that I go about marketing like mercury rolling across tile, beading up here and there. The interviews can now be used when I do mailings or I need to reference an editor to writerly interactions I have had. And the secondary gain (shrinkspeak) has occurred: two reviewers now are willing to read my earlier work, to wit, The i Tetralogy. And now I am planning to come out with a second edition of the Tetralogy with another cover. I will add two or three pages of quotations in the front of the book; I will delete a preface which has rarely if ever been commented upon, and correct two minor typos. The beauty of a print on demand book is that you can do all this relatively quickly and without signifcant costs. My son will do the new cover which will not have swastikas on it. I agree it is jarring — but that is its intent. Now I’ll have Bambi on the cover, exuding unconditional love for all. Thank god for the stag in that film or Bambi would have been venison.

I have met with my publisher, Wheatmark.com, to discuss how to take my literary efforts which have been reviewed terrifically well and make them more public. I will get back to the writers in blogspace to share what I have learned.