Category Archives: Reminiscence

Tonsils and the Forties

At the end of W.W. II I was five and by the time of the Korean War I was ten. In that decade I was shaped and configured by my environment for the rest of my days. In the Forties I was most unaware of my self, impassive and passive, a receptacle for what I observed on my own and what was put into me by family and circumstances. Life as dumpster. As I look back, as Freud once said, metaphorically I was an archaeological dig, old and and newer artifacts placed randomly here and there crazily deposited by time and event.  And so I will “excavate” the removal of my tonsils but first background story.

I “lived,” although that is not the right word; I existed unawakened and unaware, a fetus in the world, newly emerged. I was a tabula rasa. All the years in that decade are smeary, a kind of historical and chronological smog clinging to them, unclear in many instances. I lived at 222 Oceanview Avenue, Brighton Second Street in Brooklyn, years before it became known after the Russian influx as “Little Odessa.” Odessan Jews congregated near the ocean. It was in many ways for me a pastoral environment, the seasons constant, the games constant, and regularity ruled the streets. I loved the neighborhood for it gave me not only sustenance but constancy and constancy is most important while growing up. I knew all the alleyways, urban lanes, shortcuts and streets in a two or three block radius, the best stop to play stoopball, where to play marbles, the location of the library, the candy store for a Charlotte Russe, the hardware store to buy Crayolas and oilcloth to cover my schoolbooks and the grocer to ask for a cheesebox to plant seeds in.

Up the block and close to Brighton Beach Avenue which had an el overhead which cast the avenue into shadows for most of the day, or so it seemed to me, was Dr. Henry Mason’s medical practice. One of my earliest memories was seeing large jars, mason jars, pun intended, in which fetuses soaked in formaldehyde floated like the starchild in Kubrick’s 2001. I was not mortified, I was not traumatized, I just took that in. Nowadays that is outre, unheard of. But back then in the sterile office of Mason, with its chrome and metal tables, its antispetic look which I suppose doctors thought de rigeur, I was unaware of how like they  bore a close similarity to the medical labs of the Nazi death camps. Obscenely clinical! And so I took all this in. And after all these decades I have metabolized it pretty well and realize it was part and part of our culture — in retrospect, chilling.

Around 6 or 7 I needed to have my tonsils out or that was what doctors did for extra change in those days, for it is not done any longer except for something my son, Jordan, experienced which was “kissing nostrils,” so close to one another he could not breathe. In the Forties it was a very common procedure, if memory serves me right. And here again I will try to capture the unspoken trauma that I experienced.

Several memories coalesce here. I recall having a woman nurse, I suppose, ask me to drop my underwear and she wanted and proceeded to wrap my genitals in a diaper and a diaper pin. I felt shame, yet I went along. As a child I often went along, not because I trusted the outside world but because I did not know what else to do. Resistance was futile. I was the world’s object, to do with as it wished.  So this fragment deals with shame, embarrassment, a woman undressing me other than my mother. If it was latently eroticising to me, good for me. Manifestly, it was mortifying. Objects have nothing to say in the matter.

I recall two other youngsters dressed similarly on a bench with me, in assembly line fashion, and, indeed it was an assembly line. One boy who had sat with us was wheeled out on a gurney after the tonsil procedure. I cannot say what I felt as an object but as I look back with empathy for my self it must have been unsettling, to say the least. After a while I was next and brought into a room with a table. I recall a rubber device placed over my face and I was put under with the drug of that time, ether. We were all dealt with as objects by the doctors, by the nurses and by our parents. I suppose melodramatically for much of the Forties I was a thing.

As I remember I entered into a dream, in which hundreds of stars circled in a pattern, as if in a wheel. It went on for some time, the moving of the stars in the same round geometic figure. When I awoke I was in a room with other cribs and by my side was a white enameled kidney-shaped pan, I imagine, for spitting up. I was in a slatted jail and no one was there when I woke up, not that I recall. Quite different when my son went in for his tonsillectomy. After that I remember being home for a few days eating large scoops of ice cream which was the prescribed “medication” for the throat.

If we flash-forward to the last few years, I can say that I have undergone several procedures, a colonoscopy and a spinal procedure for spinal sinosis ( a cortisone shot). Earlier colonoscopies over the years usually amounted to having a valium cocktail, if you will, in which I woke up woozy and had to be escorted home. Recently I’ve been administered Propofol, the same drug involved in Michael Jackson’s death. Given the injection by the Sandman, I just went out. After I went out, I woke up. I was not nauseous, I was not woozy, and that is one of the reasons it is being used. During the time I was under, I dreamed nothing. I felt nothing. I was “dead” to this world. And when I woke and after undergoing a few more experiences with this sedative, I began to reflect about death. I just had to, for it was so analogous.

Here I am under sedation,and here I am instantaneously not under sedation, as a line drawn between life and death. And I began to reflect that if death is such a complete absence of self, of hereness, completely absent of sensation, of a dreamworld, I could use this as a mental anodyne for the fear of death. After all, apparently, it is the leaving which is the hardest part of it all. And as I experienced which is not the right word for what I had “felt,” or “sensed” with Propofol, I reentered the world of genomic evolution, dispersed as atoms and molecules to the universes all about us, the massive, titantic cataracts of time and space, of matter. And then I considered once more. Was this state of being, which is not really a state of being, able to be described?  I needed words to express this thought and feeling of what it was like before birth — the absence of absence. Time out, then time in, and finally, much later on in life, time out again, this strange continuum of existence.

Like a woodpecker on a tear on a telephone pole, these ideas have me perseverating. Perhaps I need console myself; perhaps I am seeking some rationalization to deal with the days ahead, this autumnal season of my life. I’d rather have this belief system of how death, once experienced, is over and then existential emptiness forever without the existent aware or awake of the experience. I become less than a gene. I am atom. I’d rather live with this skinny of how to deal with the end than that of the ludicrousness of heaven and hell. Give me the indifferent, cold and chilling science of death and dying, of atom and molecule, than the febrile constructions of fables spun and story told by priests and rabbis, imans and all the rest.

 

 

Commentary on Fathers and Sons

Studying the movie script.

Some time back I had suggested to my son, Jordan, that he do a videotape interview with me. I had recognized that I was an old man and I wanted to leave a remembrance of myself with my son by engaging in a father/son dialogue. After all, what is life but distilled memories, a lozenge on the mind’s tongue to savor in reverie? I knew that it would be a record of a kind of our shared lineage, ancestry, background, of my parenting and rearing, of his perceptions of me as I morphed  and evolved through different stages of my own maturation as a man and father and how all that affected him. The nagging infirmity of all that is that children only grasp one image of the parent forever and often are stuck in that, a kind of template they hold securely to like pacifiers until maturity when life gives them other options and perceptions.

It would be the whole ball of wax, fathers and sons, how he saw me interact with his mother and how that might have affected his own perception of how to relate to women, and so on. It would cover “everything,” but it did not come to pass. (We may yet do that). At conscious levels of awareness I wanted to have him ask me all kinds of nitty gritty questions and I was interested in how well I could talk straight with him. I wanted to share and express to him where I had gone wrong and what I had omitted as a father in dealing with him which still nags me to this day. I was not adverse, at all, to hearing good news. Doubtless, regrets would be expressed. I wanted to dwell in nether land with him. I left it at that, expressed at least.

In the interim I had written and published two essays about him in my latest book, trying to assess him as well as myself, critically, realistically, one essay as a child of five and one as a man in his thirties. I was and I am trying to prepare as I have done all my life for my departure from this flash of existence given me, quite randomly I must say. Here live, life commanded, without a manual in the glove box to reach for. Kazantzakis writes in Report to Greco, “Our lifetime is a brief flash, but sufficient.”

And so early in the year, it need not matter when, Jordan told me he was working on a screenplay called “Non-fiction,” that he felt would be a good way to have us interact as father and son; that he would fly into Las Vegas with  his friend, Brendan Jamieson, a cinematographer and that over a period of two days we would direct the screenplay. In fact, he paid for his friend’s airfare and rented a teleprompter, at quite a financial cost.  He sent me the screenplay and I read it very carefully, highlighting sentences, commenting in the margins, initially finding it too verbose or knotted. I began to coalesce several concerns about its efficacy. I was unsure of my own ability to act this out. Jordan over the phone and in an e-mail tried to assuage my concerns, my anxieties that I would not get through it, that I need not memorize everything and here I need to cite his cover letter that arrived with the screenplay:

We, of course, will have you ad lib a lot as well and integrate it into the film in different ways, not just linearly. I’m sending you the script so that you have time to get really comfortable with it before the shoot. Don’t worry about memorizing too much. I can hook up a laptop to a monitor and “teleprompt” with teleprompting software. In that way you will be basically reading the script, but with emotion and at your own pace. Of course we will break it up into manageable chunks so it’s not overwhelming. Brendan will be shooting and tech support for the piece and he is a pro at my studio so you will be in good hands. Don’t be surprised if the shoot lasts many hours or half the day on Saturday (that would be on October 20). It always takes longer than you think, between setting up the cameras and equipment for each framing of a shot, to getting the read right to x factors like horns honking outside at the wrong time. But most important of all, I wrote this for us to have fun with it. And after what you just went through (a medical condition throughout the summer of 2012) I hope that in more than one way it may be therapeutic for you. Filming is for me.”

I was to play an “old ornery prick.”  Clearly cast perfectly for this role, I was to “feel” free to ad-lib personal insults anywhere I felt it warranted. In essence, I realized the screenplay seemed a riff on Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which I had enjoyed reading in college decades ago. Jordan did not know of this play, but it was my association to what he had written. I read the screenplay through several times and not with pleasure. I was growing increasingly anxious about memorizing the lines but a phone call between us resolved that as he told me it would be fun, don’t worry, don’t fret, calm down, he’ll take charge of it all. (Son allays father’s anxieties.) And if it collapsed into nothingness at least we had a good time setting fire to all our efforts. At that time I had no idea of what that really meant until the day of the shoot, which was about a month off.

After several readings I sent off an email to Jordan telling him that I had an “epiphany,” I had grasped what he was after, that I had my hand on the pulse of the screenplay and now I could manage the performance. Jordan, like me, is not too much a fan of our society, of western medicine and of politics and politicians in general. He does not suffer fools. The manifest level of the play is an old curmudgeon directly speaking to a “person” behind the camera, everyman, or every conditioned dolt. He is the prick’s target.

The monologue is scornful, derisive, sarcastically snide, arrogant as the old ornery prick excoriates the subject behind the camera, debriding him like dead skin. The curmudgeon puts him down emotionally, psychologically and intellectually for he represents the common man of our time, the one whose wife wants a stainless steel kitchen, an open floor plan and granite countertops because it matches her “lifestyle.” The common man is a male version of Teresa Giudice of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” — empty, thoughtless, primal, and dumb, IQ 89, a Dr. Moreau hybridization of Trump and Palin.

The screenplay is called “Non-Fiction,” and here we move to the latent level of the play, its subtext. Jordan is attempting to contrast fiction with non-fiction in life, reality and illusion, as if he is using the play to examine the common man as a demented and twisted Don Quixote in jeans. He accomplishes this in several places and in several ways and the artifice of it all is that one or more lies are told about the Lumiere brothers, very early filmmakers. I present it as a true anecdote and much later I go about destroying the anecdote as just an urban legend, leaving the observer, our jean hero, confused, battered and dumped on. Movies are a perfect example of illusion portraying itself as reality. On the other hand, the movie is an artifact of reality. Consider the confusion.

As an example I offered my ad-lib input which may end up on the cutting floor or not, although a cutting floor is much the misnomer nowadays. In 1924 Robert Flaherty filmed a famous documentary about an Inuit called “Nanook of the North.” It is now considered an early classic for its realism and all the adjectives associated with filming “natives” anthropologically. However, one scene is staged! Nanook comes across a phonograph and is stunned to hear the music coming from the steel record used in those times. So what is real, what is not real? Welles’ did this ingeniously in his documentary called “F is for Fake.”

Indeed, I ad-libbed about Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” because it begins with a lie, either we believe or we do not believe that Gregor Samas has morphed into a cockroach. Or, fiction is a lie well told.  (I think of the master, Poe.) But what is non-fiction and how do you determine this? The screenplay had these tones to it, but it was to be played by me, as directed by my son, as a kind of scathing frolic and so it was.

I cannot recreate the two days before the camera, he pompously says, because I believe it is beyond my ken; however, what I can do is give snippets and my associations as well as feelings about what was happening. Essentially I was given the Alfred Hitchcock pose, speaking to the camera straight on in that old series of his in the 60s. I was placed at the head of our dining room table and it was propped with books, a magnifying glass, and a small Inuit statuette of a man, giving a rough and whiskered sense of atmospheric intellect, a few books piled up next to me to substantiate my presence.

Brendan Jamieson (left), Matt Freese (center), and Jordan Freese (right)

At the other end of the dining table two cameras were set up as well as a third for angle shots. I was asked to speak to the camera directly in front of me which had a teleprompter next to it with the screenplay’s dialogue in large letters, easy for me to read, almost as if I was in an optometrist’s office calling out letters from five or six feet away. Jordan could control the pace of the scrolling which made it very easy for me to read. It came to pass, as he said, that what I needed to do was not memorize but simply perform as the words came up and I took to that easily.

I had spent decades as a teacher of English so I had a general sense of what to emphasize in a line of poetry or in prose, although I knew I was no actor but only a ham, for teachers are essentially standup comics in any case. What comforted me no end is that Jordan gave me line readings which I really took to. He would say read it this way, or try to stress this word, and then he read the line with the inflection he wanted. Parenthetically, I felt proud that as the writer he knew what he wanted as the director. In this way I felt assured and I could easily mimic what he wanted for I am much the ham and ebullient self — I love to perform. My life is a performance, so is yours if you get into it — think Zorba the Greek!

My wife, Jane, had been asked by me to photograph as much as she could behind the scenes because I wanted a record of Jordan and Brendan, staging the “set,” setting up cameras for special shots, and Jordan directing his father as a remembrance of this event, for I am much into remembering. For me memory is a kind of everpresent resurrection of the past, the only authentic thing we have after the event itself. In this way I sustain the memory of all the losses I have had in my life. And, in effect, as I will discuss later, Jordan was fully aware of the subterranean meaning of this entire event, for as an artist, and he is the artist, he was churning out a mutual lifelong relationship into some kind of art, making it more telling and compelling than just a taped interview with his father, something that we could do down the line in any case.

Jordan Freese adjusting teleprompter

The shooting began well. After one reading by me, Jordan said, “Awesome.” Well, that was very reassuring to me, for he doesn’t say “awesome” frequently. To put it another way, dad had nailed it. In short a kind of subterranean river of mutual respect was forming. I was nailing it and he was not totally surprised that I was capable of doing that. We don’t underestimate one another. Brendan shared that many people freeze up before a teleprompter, something I did not know or should know. Brendan and Jordan, I suppose, first thought that it would be a hurdle and when it proved not to be a hurdle the shoot went on with speed, to everyone’s delight. “Awesome” was said several more times during the Saturday shoot. Coming from my son, that was very sweet. “Now, Dona Lisa, move you head a little to the right side.” “Of course, Signor DaVinci.”

After a shot or sequence of lines sometimes I would not get confirmation, but Brendan, off to the side and where Jordan could not see, put both thumbs up. He was affirming his own “awesome.” I later asked him why he signaled instead of saying something and he responded that he did not want to disturb the director but he needed to tell me that I was performing up to snuff. So I looked for his Ebert thumbs up as well as to “awesome.” We all need to be stroked.

As required by the script I had to “moon” everyman, the conditioned slob, the outer-directed mental muffin this entire screed was addressed to. I did not equivocate. I had heard but I had chosen not to hear or obey that it was optional. I wanted to “moon,” which proved to be hilarious to all. I was into performing. Four times I responded to the director’s instruction because he couldn’t just get the right shot. My ass was akilter or out of the frame here and there. I recall how I waited for him to say cut so I could pull my pants up. Earlier in the shoot he had told me to wait at least three seconds after I finished a line or a bit of dialogue while looking directly at the camera. Here I thought three seconds had passed with my exposed ass completely out there. In any case by the fourth shot we were all hysterical about my compulsive need to get the ass shot just right for my son. I had no shame. They thought I would have shame. And so my son was instructed in the ways of the father. We had to stop shooting for we were all wildly laughing from what happened. It would prove to be memorable.

The second eventful sequence occurred while Jane went off on an errand. (I hope that an outtake might be saved just for her viewing.) And here is what happened. I needed to vent a scream, a real scream, a harrowing scream, a Wolfman shriek. Brendan and Jordan mounted the camera on a tripod on the table itself up close and personal, about a foot away from my face. I imagine if I kept my mouth open for a few seconds the camera would capture my uvula moving like a tuning fork. Action was called and I let go with a scream that I again doubled up on midway so as if I completely spit out a dybbuk from my body –perhaps it was all the pent up anxiety of the day. I surprised myself, for it was a very piercing and evocative scream, much to the director’s pleasure. What else am I capable of, I thought. In my son’s safe directorial hands, I had no fear. I trusted him, and apparently he trusted me, father as actor. With that done we resumed the rest of the shoot and day one came to a close.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

Jordan and Brendan were very pleased that we had so much footage in the can, so to speak, for everything was done digitally on memory cards. And so on Sunday we got up early and took a small trek out to Red Rock Canyon, a national  conservation area which is set in a canyon of magnificent strata with red striations boldly set into the hills. We took the scenic route which was about 13 miles, here and there, stations set aside for parking. Jordan had visited here with his girlfriend, Liz, a year ago, obviously it left an impact, for it was now a setting in his screenplay. The vistas within the park were breathtaking. The canyon was pristine and one sensed Native Americans had lived here in the past, too wonderful to overlook. We spotted a gravel road littered with rocks, stones, and scree. While moving slowly up the road I spotted an indentation by the side and Jordan felt here was a good place to set up the cameras and finish the rest of the script. Across the way from this area was a hill that served as the backdrop and it was dramatic in its color and size.

Red Rock was to serve as the non-fiction part of the screenplay, for here the everyman was to be confronted with what was real, tactile and was not a green screen for some kind of projection. The dialogue I had to say went after that in short bursts of acute lines. I had trouble with that for I had not memorized it well. Jordan took me under his control, he read a line and then I repeated it to his satisfaction. With that going well I heard once again “awesome,” and was emboldened for the final piece de resistance.

The final scene requires me to do a kind of dance, perhaps one not so much of joy as one of an abrasive sneer to everyman, a finger gouging his eye. I was wearing my blue blazer over a gray t shirt with white shorts and tennis shoes. I assume they were filming above my waist which they had done at the dining table on Saturday. Today it was a full shot. I had a red balloon attached to my wrist, for some symbolic note, I imagine. In any case I referenced in mind an early film of the 30s with Irene Dunne, who could do it all, in “Showboat.” In one scene which I remembered she did a shuffle to music which was evocative and sinuous and so very charming that it took up a few pixels in my memory. I emulated her. Going into the shuffle, to the left, to the right, pushing my pelvis out and then back again, opening my blazer to the left and to right as if exposing breasts, and then punching the balloon as if smacking viciously everyman’s face because he could not grasp anything we did in this script. “Awesome” pealed out and the shoot was over. Jane saw the dance in slo-mo on a laptop later on and in essence just said, “Just you wait, Enry Iggins, just you wait.”

When we came to say goodbye at the airport, I said to Jordan that he was a very good director. In his response and in his voice I knew that meant something to him. (Jane will be a guest blogger here and will give her take on what occurred between all of us and between father and son in late October 2012.) But here are a few thoughts of my own. Unfortunately in the swish of events, I recall saying something very quickly to Jordan to the effect that this was turning out to be something special between all of us and particularly between us. I seem to recall that he said something to the effect that it had been part of his plan to begin with but this does not do justice to what I felt in a bodily way what he communicated to me in that quick moment.

As for me, over two days I realized how serious a commitment I gave to this screenplay, to do well, my own sense of responsibility, something crucial to my own character. I realized almost subliminally that I did not need control here; rather it was to surrender control to the safe and secure directorial hands of my son. I had no problem here. He need not rise up and slay the father. I saw the emotional ham in myself, who as a young man wanted to be an actor but allowed my own self-impediments impede me as well as those of my society that said no; you wouldn’t be good at that. The movie can be cut dozens of ways, but the final product will only be one version of what we all shared over that weekend. It doesn’t matter, for it is in the can, something to reminisce about in the future when I have gone off with Billy Bitzer, Welles and Gregg Toland to the cinematic heaven in the sky. “Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.”

Alice’s Restaurant

…That once there was a wisp of glory called Camelot...Don’t let it be forgot   That once there was a spot   For one brief shining moment that was known   As Camelot

Director Arthur Penn had the prescience to make a film about the Sixties, Alice’s Restaurant, and in this instance, the waning of that era, 1968 and 1969. (The title came from Arlo Guthrie’s album of the time. Unique in that one whole side was devoted to one song, 18 minutes or so.) And he had the intelligence to make it while the era was going on. In many ways the film is an unintentional documentary of the times. Two other films, A Walk on the Moon and Hair have been able to capture here and there the perfume of those times, but they came after the Sixties had ended.  Alice’s Restaurant, for me, captured the ineffable. I remember little of seeing it in 1969 but as I reflect through what is a dim recollection I was touched by the sadness of the film, or perhaps my own sense of lamentation for what was now ending. I had the serendipitous good fortune to have spent two summers, ’68 and ’69, in Woodstock.  I had lived it.

I  associate easily now to Camelot that I saw in 1968. Deeply moved by Richard Harris’s plangent rendition of what was the last song in that lush musical, King Arthur instructs a page to go tell the world that there was a fleeting moment that was Camelot, if I recall the words. It is a sentiment that roils one’s sensibilities.  That “fleeting moment” also applies to my experiences in upstate New York. I was 28, I was 29 and I was an emotional sponge, absorbing everything about me — the head shops, the flamboyant dress, the beads, the bell bottom jeans, the sideburns and long hair, the middle-aged women getting off city buses in the town square of Woodstock acting as if they were missing something — indeed, they were; the real artists who inhabited lovely homes outside Woodstock, a few that I got to visit and chat with. The Elephant restaurant in which I annoyingly asked for my burger after what I felt was an inordinate time to wait and faced with the immortal answer, “It’s cookin’.” Ah, yes, time.

A little outside Woodstock was a massive church that was built during the Depression, probably a WPA project,with stout timber, overhead rafters, stolid history, heavy doors with ornate wrought iron creatures applied to the wood, arts and crafts style — frogs, bugs, spiders, things like that; it later, much later, became a Buddhist center. And there was an old Catholic priest who lived on a nearby small mountain in a log cabin and church who people had visited for years just to say they had done so, to acquire his “wisdoms”; and he had  old tapestries in the small church that he said were given to him by Marshall Field. I recall a trinket from his conversation with me, that at one time there were bears on that mountain. Was this a scene out of The Razor’s Edge? Many years later I came again to see him but learned he had died, his affairs left unsettled, and I saw his old rooms in the back of the church all gutted by the wind, snow on his desks, scattered testaments and assorted religious paraphernalia on tables as if a scene out of Lost Horizon.

I stayed for two summers at the home of a teacher friend. I remember  two young people voicing their regretful frustration that they couldn’t get to the Woodstock festival which was really in Bethel because the New York Thruway had been shut down because of the traffic — an unheard of event for the time. I remember going swimming in a local pond filled with groups of young people, younger than me — I felt like a voyeur — completely nude, having fun and I began to lose, if only slightly, some of my uptightness as a human being. And the tits weren’t bad at all, nor the voluptuous asses. Ah, Monet on the rocks. Shedding the integument of the cosseted Fifties, I was becoming a human being. Are you, reader, or have you ever been aware of becoming a human being? It grabs you from behind, a delectable pickpocket, except something is given you rather than purloined.

It is beyond my writerly skills to capture the  monarch butterfly that was Woodstock. I am left with shards, like stained glass pieces in my palm. What I remember was a special atmosphere, of a rock band playing in some back room in a house that fronted the street, the coffeehouses that introduced me to cappuccino, the tiny bridge that crossed the stream in the middle of town that coursed into the woods, the complex, varied and interesting stores that catered to tourists with T-shirts, and other accouterments of the era — head shops were antique stores in those days, everything arrayed in whatever assortment you chose.  Given my rearing, I got high on art – for some reason, light boxes were the trend, relationships, sights and scenes and have no regrets for it. I was totally aware of what was happening to me to the extent that I could be. I was limited child trying to become a man. I was now open to experience.

Something had happened. Sounds like Joseph Heller‘s novel. Something had happened to me, was happening to me. For several years deep into the Seventies I would travel upstate, often in winter, leave my wife– she understood my need, and daughter at home and take a pilgrimage to Woodstock. I would buy a hot steaming cup of coffee, a sandwich of cheese and ham slathered with mustard on beautiful home baked slabs of dark raisin bread, the bread loaves slumbering in the store window. I visited a local lake which was frozen over, placed the coffee on the dashboard, the steam misting up the windshield, the sandwich to my right on the passenger seat. Nothing was in my mind except all the memories of that lake. Years later I’d take students up to the lake in the spring and winter to allow them to capture twice-fold only one essence that I had experienced.

 (Look everyone, share with me everyone, it is here that I changed, I grew, began to feel who I was and to put away thinking for a while — what was the slogan then, die to your mind and come to your senses.)

On one visit I saw a man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in black with a black cape and walking his even darker dog through the street. I remembered him from about eight years earlier, wearing the same attire, and probably with the same dog. And what occurred to me was that time had stood still for him, he was repeating a repetition compulsion of his own making. He had become a dinosaur in the La Brea pit of Woodstock. After that, I put away forever my visiting Woodstock for the fleeting moment could not be recaptured. I chose to go on and live. Life as rehab, the spell had been broken..

I had experienced a slo-mo epiphany in Woodstock in 1968 and 1969, and a different one now.

Given all this, I can now write about Alice’s Restaurant.  Seeing it again on TV, quite by accident, I recalled how it had captured, for all time, at least in my mind, the pace, the slowness, the movement of deeply lived and felt time, the casualness, the sharing and bartering, the exploration of how to be in new relationships that I had experienced in Woodstock. Evolving is a heady experience if you can put off the need to arrive.

Essentially Arlo Guthrie in his first record brilliantly satirized the stupidity and the ridiculousness of authority filled with itself, in this case a police officer in Stockbridge, Mass who cites Arlo and friends with a ticket because they dumped garbage in the town dump. The record takes off from there and satirically goes after the draft system and Whitehall Street where Guthrie as well as myself endured the testing, urine samples, and coughing to check for hernias by demented doctors.

The movie has Guthrie’s music played as rich commentary on some of the scenes which are fictionalized and many which are based on fact. Alice’s Restaurant, if I recall, really was a deconsecrated (mumbo jumbo) church bought by Alice, and thanksgiving dinner was served here as a ritual as a kind. It was a gathering place for all kinds during that time, the young huddled masses of the Sixties. What is very moving is the end when we see Alice standing at the church door and the camera moves away from her ever so slowly past a tree and then another and then it stops so one is left with the passage of time, time stopped, and one is, like I was, haunted by this. It was all over, much like our individual lives when it is time to move on.  

The Wound

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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