At 71 Freese sets out in these thirty-six essays written over several decades, some fairly recent, some penned in the 80′s and 90s, to assess his own life as he looks back. Something of a maverick, something of a malnurtured critter, he reveals here and there, as if crags embedded in his prose, a meandering river of rage. Cognizant of this, knowing how it has tainted and tortured himself as well as having hurt his own  children, he tries to make amends, but to no avail,  realizing the dead cannot accept apologies. So what does he do with his cup of bile?

He writes about what he can remember, which he declares is a poor substitute to what he still feels inwardly about a whole host of things — his own rearing,  one of benign neglect; his poor parenting as a father with his first child who later committed suicide; his embittered feelings about teaching because quite frankly he didn’t have the gumption or the brass balls to quit and go on to something else. Restrained by the inability or the wherewithall to risk, by his own passive-aggressive nature – quite frankly, of not having known any better, given his background,  he stayed in teaching far too long. And some of his essays on education are structured rage-lets, if you will.

Freese feels cheated as if awareness escaped his grasp for much of the first third of his life. This is the key to many of the essays, having not only fallen short but having lacked the requisite insight and inner-directedness that might have led him to all kinds of awareness. The early part of his life was folly. For him insight is not awareness, for awareness is much more expansive an experience. Insight is not an epiphany, awareness is just that. Consequently we read of his encounters with Krishnamurti, a spiritual thinker, who inspired him to free himself of societal conditioning, so that he might experience the awakening of intelligence. There is much truth to the observation we often do not awake to about our early thirties, if then.  The mass of men and women are asleep in life. You might say that his book is about awakening and staying awake.

One can imagine him, like Hamlet, walking the battlements beset by all kinds of musings, thoughts, guilt-ridden and mortifying associations of behaviors long since done away with. Ruefulness and regret all encumbered in remorse are  Freese’s broth. One wonders if all his essays are really a cri de coeur, a cataract of long suppressed and repressed feelings, ideas and thoughts.  As one grazes through his essays they reflect different times in his life — teacher, father, student, therapy client, middle-aged and old man, and child. In all his essays the forlorn child cries, sticks his tongue out or simply turns his behind to you and flatulates.

Very aware of his child but, unfortunately, at times Freese cannot be kind to it, although he would assert that inside of his very self is an immense mother flagellating him to perform or do better. And he would reprimand me for bringing up the tired cliche of the inner child, for he has a considerable amount of contempt for that kind of psychobabble. In fact one reads the book and senses a latent if not manifest expression of contempt for most things most of us esteem in our lives and culture. He would say good! Perhaps we all should read something like his screed to just get the scales out of our eyes.To sneer, to be snide are minor arts he has attained, he is a Henny Youngman of smartass despair.

 And upon closer reading we may intuit the following: an endearing need on his part to stave off death for purposes of pursuing the final searches he has posed for himself  — to know, to learn, mostly to become aware; a significant sense of loss twists through this man, of relatives and very close ones who died much too soon, the Kennedys’s of his mind; the unrequited and never again to be attained need to have been held, favored, told of his own worth; a fervent wish which he refused all his life to admit to which is to surrender his rage, to let go of his armored plate, to relent; the human regret of each of us to have led a better existence although he did catch on to that horse’s tail much later in life, therefore even more bittersweet. Freese might say that the odds are against you if you feel diminished as a child.

 I detect his need to transcend or at least be better than he is as something he struggled all his life to attain or if we wish to look at it psychologically, something put into him very early as a child by a very conditional mother. In any case it is there, like one’s eye color. He so much as says directly that his life has been exceedingly contentious and bumpy and so it has.  And again Freese uses these essays as gauze to drape about his wounds. Like a Jewish golem during late night stalking, he does his deadly rounds. Words assuage this man, for little else has given him the capacity to express himself; if he  was a musician he would have been a drummer for that is subterranean and profound, the beat goes on.

Several of the negative reviews of this man’s effort choose one or two essays to dwell on without stepping back and looking at his life spectacle. Freese struggles for the totality of his expression, for the sweep of who he is, by linking these essays together in some kind of sequence, not pattern, for he sees no pattern himself except for a few psychotherapeutic insights he has about the warp and woof of his life. It is truly a mobius strip of ifs. He refuses to become a reductive diagnosis. As the child he is at times, he is saddened at being misunderstood — aren’t we all? Criticized by a few reviewers because his essays seem too personal or that he shaves too close, he cannot imagine not writing in that way because that is who he is. Reservations are for restaurants in his eyes.

In one or two places in his book he candidly declares that he has worked at expressing his unheard scream. An aware reader will identify with that, for the species itself has failed at that as well.

Since I am on the receiving end, I think there is another way. Stay with the content and try not to make a bridge to the writer’s personality because you will often be in error. Each of us is unbelievably complex, so save your best salvos for your own characterological faults. To say it differently, if the writer chooses not to change his character, or grow as a human being, or reassess who he or she is, it is not your task as a blogger to urge anything upon him or her. Review the book, not the person.

In my own mind I hold that the artist is not separated from what he or she has created. I hold Wagner responsible for his anti-Semitism. And consequently I choose not to listen to his music, and the same goes for T. S. Eliot. Label it any way you wish in your own mind. As the writer of my book I am totally responsible for what I have written and I stand by it. However, there is that grayish area in which assumptions are drawn (is that the reviewer’s task?) that lead reviewers to assess me as a man, to wit, one ninny writes, “he has a superiority complex.” A term that I believe is outdated among psychotherapists. . Grandiose, that I can accept. Slightly pompous as well and  arrogant on occasion. Mea culpa. In short, I don’t need a blogger to massage my psyche, for I have been doing a much better job of it for decades.

After all, what is a review? We are back to definitions. And is a blogger a literary critic. By definition, I think not. Is he a book reviewer? Yes, in the most primitive sense of the word. So what is he? Perhaps he shares more with a coffee taster — sip, taste, swallow, rinse, all over again.

And blogger, what is it that triggers your response, what part of your ox is being gored? Never to be answered queries. I have chosen not to comment on reviews that I find errant, distasteful or just plain scathing. What is to be achieved? Since most self-published books need to be reviewed by bloggers who have become a kind of powerful force on the internet, if I bite the hand that feeds me which I have been accused of doing, all I can utter is wwwwwwwooof!  wwwwoof! Every writer should abolish that crude shibboleth; go ahead and bite the hand that feeds you, for very often it is a condescending, paternalistic, capitalistic hand that ultimately takes its toll.

Some bloggers suffer from their youth, oh do they, others cannot write a clear sentence and others show an array of other dysfunctions, sloth, anger, poor social skills, all the petty foibles we encounter on a daily basis — inordinate lateness in responding, failure to contact the author that a review is up, not keeping promises or commitments, offering excuses — my dog has herpes, being snide and presumptuous. Ah, the species! 

Distancing myself from some of the sharply pointed comments about myself and the book, I fully realize that if many of my essays pick on human scabs (my self-imposed task as a writer) I cannot expect roses and perfume laid on my doorstep. Imagine if you will that I am a trampoline and high above each blogger with his or her review crosses the bar. When they dismount and flop into the trapoline which is me, composed of my many years, personality, my softness, my hardness, everything that I am, they make their  impressions. I can only say as I am struck against the fabric of self that I experience pain, sensitivity and hurt. I choose to take it all personally, for if it is high praise I surely bathe in that. But can I endure a bath of acid ? I cannot have it both ways, I believe.

I non-grandiosely relate to Freud’s comment that his books or his psychoanalytic findings had disturbed the sleep of mankind and he was quite prepared to take the heat. Rightly so. I am also protective of who I am, although I “foolishly” expose myself in my writings. I seek fairness — are you serious? and balanced judgement and when I do not experience that I cave in somewhat like a squeezed marshmallow, dimples here and there. There I go again expecting (expectations!) the world to comform to my desires and when it doesn’t do so I turn away and seek out a shadowed apse to hide in. Another neurotic vein in my self, I await a blogger to assuage my malady.

Pretty well defended as a personality, when you go after my scribblings it is truly as if you go after my self. I choose not to take advice and counsel on this by well-intended friends or other writers because they will not be lowered into my casket. I have to answer all this by myself.

Please consider what follows as perhaps a joke, something the “guys” in the office might find humorous, even to tacking up over the water cooler where the never used suggestion box hangs.

I promise not to mention in the telling here the plays of Mamet and Miller and their scathing indictments of American capitalism — is there any better kind?

Having cleared my throat, let me get on with the task. I am writing this letter not for my wife, but about her. She needs a job. I know, I know, she has met all the requirements and parameters for someone in today’s economy for getting out and looking for work. What work she does find is essentially sales, especially insurance companies who give her a battery of tests to see if she “fits” into the corporate culture, which is an oxymoron in any case.

Behavioral  psychologists compose these horror tests at the behest of companies who want only piranhas and sharks. As a retired therapist I can say that behavioral psychologists could not do person to person psychotherapy for they are technicians, the very antithesis of what it requires to be engaged in dialogue with another human being who is hurting. Yet they design barrier tests that savage and screen out people seeking out work.To her credit and to my delight, she never passes! A humanistic shout to the heavens, I say. Yet she needs to be consoled, for she is being kept out, shut out regardless of her talents — and her age. Oh, the aching damage wreaked upon good souls. 

Jane is highly gifted: plays the piano, a little violin, has a great memory which would have served her ably as a therapist, but that would involve another degree and more college loans.  She has several graduate degrees, has sold retail, owned an art store, can mat and frame prints, et al, is more than computer savvy, taught herself  auto-didactedly  how to set up websites, can speak knowledgeably about art across the centuries; indeed, she has exquisite taste in most things artful, has the ability to express openly and freely her joy in life and living of which many businessmen have no comprehension. Open, playful, a master at the minor arts — cooking, sewing, raising her sons (not a minor art!), maintaining her home, her only strident deficit as I can see it — and it is monumental in this culture — is that she is a  ”failure” at not finding work.

Brother, can you spare a job?

Jane is an information specialist, an inflated term for librarian and there is no or next to little work for librarians in the job market. Yet librarian schools and most schools of education churn out graduates, counting on a mass delusion that work exists, the downside of being “humanistic.” As I list her qualities and skills, I would hope you would refrain from judging her, especially from the perspective of the market economy, you know, from the perspective of a Trump or Romney, stalwart mannikins all.

Capitalism from its start in a secular manger has always, I mean always, equated work with human character, work with meaning and purpose, work with freedom, and the chilling Nazi slogan, “Work sets you free,” that famous ode to Nazi capitalism at Auschwitz.

I have observed that my dear wife, at times, until I set her straight or she listens carefully to me, is in pain, anguish and suffers from American despair. Unlike despair anywhere else in this world, she turns her American rage inward, eviscerates herself for not getting a job in this economy, equally laid waste by Republicans and Democrats.

How clever of capitalism which is really each one of us, high and low, to indoctrinate, insinuate, and infiltrate our sense of self by equating the inability to get work an indictment of our moral character and fiber as human beings. Nothing more Calvinistic exists. Nothing more Mormon, a cult soused in religious marketing. If I squirt sideways at other groups, I must say it is unavoidable, for we are all part of the problem.

The cruelest toxin in all this is that many tens of thousands damn themselves as being inferior or less than because they cannot get a job. It is the brilliant and Machiavellian aspect of capitalism that shifts the blame because of its inadequacies and collective failure to take care of its own brethren on to the backs of those who are most eager to try, work and  contribute. And the most vicious part of it all is that it has given many of us a slave mentality, feeling that even if we were set free we wouldn’t be up to the job. Indeed, if raised in slavery one is not up to the job. Freedom has to be learned.

So, what say you, oh chum? Do you have some work in the office, something not demeaning, but constructive? Can you offer my wife some work?

Nothing at this time. Come back some time later. Give us your resume. It will work out for you. Keep the faith. The screening test says you don’t have the aptitude for the job.Try again down the line with us. Make do.  Chin up. After all, you have a husband who cares about you.

Yes, I care about her very much. And fuck you!

Sincerely,

The Dispossessed. The Displaced. The Demoralized.

The writings of evolutionary psychology are difficult for me to grasp as my mind is not a scientific one. In  short, I can’t access the conceptual double helix. However, I can write about what I don’t know, writers do it all the time. I can comment on the path and the brush and briars without having reached home; perhaps it is a Sisyphaean task. Neverthess, allow me to share what I am sensing, feeling about all this, throwing in here and there a shard or two of what I recall from all this reading while spending more time on the consequences for us all as I dimly see and sense it.

As I continue to write here, perhaps I will be clearer about my own feelings and share them with you. And here is the quotation from Dawkins which about says it all for me in Genome by Matt Ridley who has written several books on the new science:   ”We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment.” Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

What I write here requires an imaginative response on your part, with you relinquishing that part which judges. Suspend that part if you will. I am not asking for empathy. I am asking that you go with it, at first.

So I am a body, a canister if you will. As you well understand  you have very little control over your internal bodily mechanism. Pumping blood through your heart is out of your hands. And so I conclude we are a sack holding life-giving processes. In that is amazement if we just pause,but like many things we take it for granted, part and parcel of life itself, like breathing oxygen or getting wet by rain. However, let us register something new. We have enough evidence clearly to say that our genes and chromosomes, our complete human genome determines all of our being, from eye color to sex and completely run the human show. And these tiny bits of matter, our genes, molecular dots and dats, determine everything that we are, from consciousness to unconsciousness, that genes replicate us over and over into what is known as a human being regardless of our century or place in the world — ontogeny recapitualates phylogeny.

What the new science teaches us goes beyond Darwin himself;  that genes are continually seeking sex in the sense of trying to replicate themselves or adapting to newer situations; they are often at odds with one another, antagonistic, but don’t confuse this with survival of the fittest. And they are not aware nor cognizant of their own existence, and this is critical to grasp — and mind-boggling as well. There is no determinism here nor free will, which are contributions of the conscious mind, or the cultural existence we liv, as I see it. It is as if we are shadow puppets, controlled by forces (genes) that we are unaware of. What is also difficult to grasp or mentally metabolize is that these genetic shakers and makers of our existence are not aware of their controlling attributes nor of their existence. Does a microbe think? So we spin through space in ellipsod orbits, billions of planets doing the same meandering without design, and most definitely without meaning.

Freud introduced us to the unconscious mind which millions still do not subscribe to or choose not to grasp in its consequences, to wit, that consciousness, to use the old cliche, is but the tip of the iceberg; that much of what we do is already decided for us unconsciously. Darwin made the case that we are a product of adaptations over millenia, that we are closer to the chimp than one wants to imagine, that we are animal life continually mutating and adapting. Consequently the greatest revolution of the existence of man has emerged. I am arguing, based upon what I have read , the genetic studies of the last 30 years have created a monumental revolution still unknown to most of us and is no doubt the greatest scientific revelation since man became present on this planet. Yes, that profound!

Essentially genes drive us. The world we live in within our bodies is gene driven, and we have no control over that at all; that there is no fate, no destiny if you will, no free will — a philosophic and often religious canard. When I think about all this I find myself in a reel, trying to conceptualize what it might mean  50 years from now for a student reading a science text explaining the new learnings, what he  might make of all this. That we are programmed; that we out of the loop, what sentience we have we know we have as we go through life is only a blade of grass on an elephant’s ass. If there is a change in a worldview, what might that be? I have no idea except thoughts about it now as I read about evolutionary psychology.

We are puppets controlled by other puppets. What do you make of that? What happens to “meaning,” “salvation,” “God,” “religion,” and “intention”? What can we make of our world in which we are not in control, and never have been? Can we give up the illusion and now delusion that we are in charge? It is critical, I think,  to attempt to philosophize or to conceptualize such a topsy turvy existence. I am reading more and more of this new science essentially by science reporters of the highest skill, Matt Ridley, for one, and Robert Wright, for another. I have questions about free will, but more importantly what happens if we were to accept these learnings as facts, where does it leave us? To be continued as I learn more.

I associate to Ezra Pound who edited Eliot’s The Wasteland  and who advised a young and aspiring poet that he must learn Sanskrit and Latin before he began his apprenticeship; yet it is this Pound who broadcast anti-Semitic diatribes for the Axis during World War II. And Eliot was an anti-Semite as well. So much for Sanskrit and Latin for turning you into a good human being. The naivete of bloggers is mind-blowing, of most human beings. In a recent review of This Mobius Strip of Ifs from a young and highly educated blogger in England with a website on beauty as well, two essays from the book were chosen to harp on, one highly critical of bloggers (I expected heat on that one) and the other on education, to lambaste me, for I had chosen not to be an adherent.

Clearly her ox had been gored, and she was blinded to the rest of the book that went far beyond blogging and issues of education. Her callowness and very youth contributed to her omissions. I can say that. I was young as well, but she has not as yet reached full maturity, if she ever will, for her education apparently has done a very good job at conditioning her. Her commitment is to academe, for she actually used the term “regime” in speaking of the educational system. How revealing a word that is! Equally revealing was her adherence to the status quo in England, and her review does reveal her native biases which she was open enough to comment upon (stiff-upper lip and all that rot).

She experienced my kind of American writing as too loose or open , too Whitmanesque, personal and real, in-your-face essays. She did Annie Hall on schools, lah-did-dah, and accused me of biting the hand that feeds me. I just love that accusation — dear plantation owner, thank you for only giving me 15 lashes.

The Israelites Leaving Egypt

In this way I can still continue to pick cotton. Ah, the slave Dathan who chastises Moses for leading the people of Israel from out of Egypt, arguing that what they left they knew better than what lay ahead. Moses walked the Jews in the desert for 40 years so that generation or mind-set would die out. Only a non-slave mind could enter Canaan.

Her review smarted and touched me in what I feel is part and parcel of my outlook, a willingness to be fair. She did not have to agree with my views, many reviewers have mentioned their disagreements with me on issues but have gone past that to review what they felt was essentially nourishing. The most startling sense I am getting from all these views is a serendipitous discovery. Many are saying that it is a profound self-help book, the very last thing I would ever set out to do. And I am beginning to be charmed by all that.

Writers debate endlessly over whether or not to respond to negative views. (I chose not to respond to that English blogger.) You write a well-thought out letter to the editor and the magazine has weeks to compose a rejoinder which often strips your letter of logic and nails your limbs to the wall. How can you argue with their battery of in-house writers. So I only respond when I am favored in a review or have a soupcon to add. The backlash from a negative comment on the part of a writer echoes through the halls of the internet. One blogger refused to review me because I had commented on what she had written about a previously reviewed book. I believe, if memory serves me right, I just had the audacity to disagree with one observation or another, but the review by itself stood.

What I have observed as I scour through directories and blogrolls on websites is something new: the Review Policy. Clearly bloggers have ushered in a new age, for they have become the source of reviews for the self-published authors. And they have become inundated with books and now screen them whereas only four short years ago they were more open to a wider array of books. Consequently when I open up the review policy page I see the acceptable genres they review which Is fine with me as it saves time. However, some of the review policy pages also supply a rating page, stars, numbers or some other merit system, which is vexing in its simplicity or know-nothingness. I’m from the old school. The review itself should have latently or inherently a “rating.” Stars are for the elementary mind, that says size-place is the best way to line up at the school door. What simpleton devised that, what teacher!

So with the amount of books being published we now have the review policy. The screw is turned. I, for one, am taken about the amount of reading some bloggers do to keep up and now some bloggers list the schedule for completion of reviews; some even close down because they cannot keep up with the influx of new authors asking for reviews. Some reviews are no more than a sentence or two which I find personally repugnant. I wrote 164 pages, don’t give me 75 words or less. And I struggle to worm myself in.

Additionally, some reviewers will not review self-published books. I can see that as I have read some of these and the editing can be atrocious; however, from my admitted narrow perspective I reasonably edit my books and repeatedly go over them for errors before I submit to be published. I am torn here. Not every writer who wants to be self-published is diligent about his or her work. However, one blogger said it best. She wrote that she can overcome that rash of poor editing if the content or intent is well expressed. So the content of my character, as Martin said, should be a guiding principle. There is a bias here about not accepting self-published books, but not an aberrant one. I suggest for every non self-published book the fair and honest blogger should try a self-published book — Thoreau was a wondrous exception and so was Whitman.

Additionally, I have observed that some bloggers give reviews that remind me of my own public school days, the ones in which you wrote a book report and titled it “My Book Report,” and gave a “Summary” of the plot and finally gave your “Opinion.” (There are reviews which  are blocked out that way with boldface to show the segments of the review itself.) With that out of the way the teacher took the best of these and using colored paper as a back matting, tacked it to the rear closet doors that had cork composite on their facing.

Bloggers really do not, in many cases, know how to review and often they apparently do not want to learn although there are very good books out there on how to review on the Web (see Maya Calvani’s book). I must say that I ‘ve been offered the opportunity to review books and I did that for about two times before I experienced the fatigue of doing it well, getting it in on time, checking the grammar and syntax and all the rest. I began to see how burdensome it is to be a blogger if you really do a good job. Bloggers admit, here and there, to burn out.

In fantasy if I were a responsible blogger, I would limit myself to no more than a book a month, knowing that I would devote time to that. I would choose carefully what I reviewed based on who I am and quite possibly with non-marketing conversations with the author, to feel him out about his work. On the basis of all that I may in fantasy attract a better clientele, knowing that I do not rush through my reading but take it quite seriously. Of course, just a fantasy.

With all this competition to get a blogger to review my book,  I have resolved, and that capacity to resolve is almost mercurial on a day to day basis, to get a review wherever the possibility exists: so my book has been sent to India, China, Bangalore, Assam, several to Canada (less postage), Australia, England, New Zealand, etc. I have come to terms that this book will take a year of my sending it out for reviews, as I am not into blog “touring,” something akin to a roadshow. I am averse to YouTube stuff, as I have a “fear” of the new technology. Quite frankly, I choose not to learn it as I find it intimidating and I rather stick my head up my ass for at least it is not unknown to me. In short, some of the marketing required to make the book known does unsettle me. I do the best I can, the rest are demands made upon me and I bristle at conditions.

I just want to share with you a sample of the description given for this book on amazon:

“In this impressive and varied collection of creative essays, Mathias B. Freese jousts with American culture. A mixture of the author’s reminiscences, insights, observations, and criticism, the book examines the use and misuse of psychotherapy, childhood trauma, complicated family relationships, his frustration as a teacher, and the enduring value of tenaciously writing through it all. Freese scathingly describes the conditioning society imposes upon artists and awakened souls. Whether writing about the spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, poet and novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, or film giants such as Orson Welles and Buster Keaton, the author skewers where he can and applauds those who refuse to compromise and conform.”

When I first read about this book, I got the impression that it would either be wonderful or terrible. Either the author would be intelligent enough that he could effectively and from solid ground “joust with American culture,” or he couldn’t and the book would read as a giant whine-fest that lacked credibility. As you can tell by my rating, he clearly has the brains to back this book up.

Now, I didn’t agree with all of his essays, but agreeing isn’t the point. Where would the world be if we all only read or listened to things we agreed with? Other times I agreed so strongly that I slapped the book down on the table in the break room at work and cried “Thank you,” or laughed at the accuracy of his sometimes extremely entertaining name calling. As I read I often wished Mr. Freese were sitting there next to me so that I could make counter points and discuss his views further. What better kind of non-fiction is there?

This book doesn’t have a specific genre. The author discusses everything from generational problems in education, to human nature and living in the moment, to the horrid hypocrisy of book bloggers (and yes, I quite enjoyed that one!) Growing up, I spent many hours in philosophical, scientific and logical conversations about many of the same topics with my father. As an adult, often in conversation with others I will mention a concept, like the purpose and illusion of religion or the horror of a teacher who says “Don’t worry about that, it won’t be on the test,” just to draw confounded stares. I often forget that most people did not spend their childhood philosophizing late into the night, and I feel like many of the ideas in this book will be novel to them. If you’re one that likes to contemplate the world around you and question even the most basic assumptions…this book will spark all kinds of things for you to think about. But if you are one who DOES NOT take time to contemplate the world you live in…you NEED to read this book. It may very well plant a seed to help you grow in ways you never imagined.

Let me caution you though – this is not a book to CONVINCE anyone. There are no lists of facts to support views, there are no step by step logical arguments. I honestly got the impression that Mr. Freese couldn’t care less if I believed him, and that is partially what made his book so compelling. His essays use emotion as much as reason to make his point, which at times annoyed me; not necessarily because emotion is bad, but because one must always be vigilant to ensure their emotions aren’t manipulated to a view point that does not actually make sense to them. (think of any politician’s speech…ever.) That distrust of emotional appeal may be as much a flaw in myself as much as the book, though. Most people LIKE emotion, and this will be a positive for them and help them relate to otherwise abstract concepts.

The book reads like a piece of art. His writing is complex and tiered so that meaning upon meaning can hide inside the words for you to explore, and yet it reads smoothly. I generally take a long time to read non-fiction because every chapter or so I have to stop, process, take notes, think and otherwise LEARN what I have just read. I think I read This Mobius Strip of Ifs faster than any other non fiction book I have tackled, because it read artistically; not like a science book. It drew me in as any good fiction novel does. Was the grammar perfect? No. Were there misspellings? Probably, although usually it was hard to tell if a word was misspelled or just invented. These things didn’t matter though – it reads like a conversation, and he is very well-spoken.

This book deserves more than one reading. I’m certain that in one pass I haven’t gleaned all or even most of what Mr. Freese has stored there for me. But instead of it being a chore, I am already looking forward to the time I read this book again…I’m willing to bet you will too.

As a side note, a möbius strip is basically a ribbon or strip of paper that is twisted once and then glued together at the ends. It is a simple thing to do, but a very interesting mathematical concept in that a line drawn from one end to the other will go around the ribbon twice before meeting its beginning. It is a concept often used in higher mathematics, chaos theory, and fractals and it is startlingly relevant to this collection of essays. Attempting to understand the world around one’s self is a bit like trying to understand chaos. Our lives and who we are is a culmination of an infinite number of details and exact circumstances at every instant. Any alteration in these could have yielded unrecognizable current circumstances. As his title suggests, we cannot truly come to understand how and why the world is how it is, (the culmination of a möbius strip of ifs) but only approach understanding through constant growth and analysis of our life and ourselves.

2 Responses to Book Review – This Möbius Strip of Ifs

1. Mathias B. Freese says:

    

   March 29, 2012 at 1:00 AM

    

   Lisa — It is a rare for an author to be reviewed with such insight. It really is more than that — it is an empathetic and knowing response. I am thinking of Dickens — “What larks, Pip, what larks.”
   Matt Freese

A few moments ago I looked up an old classmate from 1958 (!) and found her and hubby with grandchildren in  a Florida town. I did this because of a welter of motives, not to be shared, but redolent of poignancy and adolescent suffering still with me.What age has done to that remarkable beautiful face she had in the spring of 1958. Growing old and aging sadly creases us into leathery cocoons but I am sure that the young woman I knew then has something of the fire within, although I had admired her from afar.  In fantasy  I want to rescue that maiden from all the years, slap her heart-shaped tush onto the back of my snorting black steed bedecked in medieval armor and garb, and spur away like Lochinvar:

O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, /Through all the wide Border his steed was the best; /And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none, /He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone. /So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, /There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

 If she were to gaze upon my now baggy face, if she tried, she might see the young man who asked her — in fear, in fright – out to the prom which she refused. This kind of rejection  is never forgotten, just filed under miscellany. Computers ping one another. Humans pang one another. All of this is amusing or poignant for me, like the dusk on a pastoral summer’s day which ends and is forever gone. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may….

 As I said before, where am I  in this marsh? I just associated to something and it quickly dissolved out of mind, perhaps because it was too painful to express. The remembrance of things past  oftentimes are like piercing arrows to the heart, Oh Christendom flee my mind, too many pictorial icons come to mind from Western Civilization. Christ figures with torture scars, impalements, brows with thorns seeping blood. The morbidity of it all makes me  move on. Jews say, “To Life,” when they toast; Christians are into Lazarus.

To look back to my senior year in 1958 speaks more of poignancy, shyness, male ineptitude, adolescence, the abyssmal lack of social skills, the inhibitions and the fears — of intimacy, of touch, of sweet opportunities missed because of the failed internal assessment of who I was and what I could do or be. Freud somewhere wrote that nothing is forgotten, and that is a telling observation. We often lie to ourselves in such ways to deny that maxim. On some levels we choose not to recall. We camouflage ourselves like the hunter in the blind and “blind” is so apt.

As I look back, as I think of 1958, I am a child in a young man’s body.  Retrospectively I cringe at who I was; retrospectively I have compassion for who he was. If I had him in treatment with the therapist I became, I would have helped him visit who he was, to mature, to enter the world. I also have learned that if I were not who I was, I would not have had the compassion I hopefully evinced as a therapist.The cliche is not a cliche – as we come closer to our end the beginnings of our life loom large,  become sharper and sharper, each living crystal so very telling, like Kane’s snow orb — “Rosebud.”

The romantic and unfulfilled yearning within that went unexpressed and clearly not expressed to myself was immense, an immense reservoir, for I had no one to speak of this.  I swam in a huge aquifer of my own making. I had no  measure of  who I was, of being, of some kind of personal self-knowledge from which to act. Frightening — unsettling –to recollect this, I feel saddened about the youth who would not awake until he was about 34. To rue what was or what was not, to experience regrets, to suck like a child on its thumb when a moment comes to mind,  moments  ache or reverberate with what could have been if I had done otherwise — if I had been otherwise. I do not allow it to cling like Saran wrap about my sensibilities.

I enter the mood, I feel the anguish and I resolve to come out of it, for life would be onerous, would it not? if we spent our days repairing old brick work. A strong measure of fantasy comes to mind, the what ifs, in which I construct little scenarios if I had married this one or that one, if I had at least dated this one or that; that I might have grown up sooner if I was in a relationship of any kind. But it was not to be. Those years are beyond indelible. The sexual, emotional and psychological frustration cannot be expressed by words, although I can feel them even now.

As I look back, rather as I reconnoiter the old land I lived in, who I am has changed so much that distortion is the rule and illusion the telescope. I had a friend all through high school and into college and then we just faded away from one another as often happens. His life was fairly regular if not routine; he may or may not be dead. However, the fantasy of it is that he lived the bell jar curve and probably is retired someplace, perhaps in Florida. In my imagination I don’t think he has cheated on this wife ; nor has he expressed much discontent in his life; I don’t think he has questioned authority profoundly in his life; I think he has been contented with being an elementary school teacher, perhaps going on to be an administrator (whoopee!). I hear the envy in these words. All this is an unfair put down of him. For I have led a life of disarray and discontentment. No need to compare. I just feel I have had the more arduous task and I have paid the highest costs in terms of relationships and deaths of loved ones, too soon in their lives, and in my own. I have made a significant contribution to my own misfortunes.

If the prisoner flees his cell, it is always with him. My days  of yore are always with me. I can only say  that I have grown comfortable with my cell and I would not exchange it for anyone else’s. That’s a happy closing which doesn’t make me too happy, but there it is.

The peculiar aspect of these essays is that they cover this  and that inner and outer event in my life which is really a rigged writerly effort of paragraphs, assuming order, whatever that is, for each life experience worth retelling. It really is quite shaky, as I think of it. Configure all you want — configuration does not mean essence, nor the “truth.”  Much like memory, an essay is a lie well told by a well-intended and very honest liar, oxymoronic.

By my age, as I reflect upon it, any story of the past, any reliable old memory is suspect, for if I am very honest with myself it refracts before me and here and there I have embellished it — lied to myself because of embarrassment, shame, vanity, and other nether  and self-deceptive feelings. At uncomfortable moments I have caught myself in a self-made lie and it is personally unsettling.  We configure memory to soothe ourselves, or to justify our acts. Any knowledgeable client in psychotherapy can easily tell you how he or she are soaked in the lather of fabricated memories. Sometimes shrinks become squeegees, “Do you want your windshield cleaned, mister?” So the book is a lie, honestly told. I imagine that is also a good definition of fiction.

Of the six reviews I have received four were most flattering and not too critical, but the last two shone a sharp eye on this and that detail so that I clenched my mental teeth and accepted that which was true (in need of more editing, to wit) or rejected that which I felt was narrow because the reviewer had her needs to slake. As Jane has told me repeatedly (my resistance is obdurate) if you write a book that you know consciously is controversial, especially my take on religion, bloggers, teachers and teaching don’t expect roses cast at your feet. Nevertheless, I have or I am still awash in self-delusion, having expectations which is a no no, especially when dealing with human beings, much less with bloggers. My capacity to feel wounded [see previous blog, March 8] has not been assuaged. And I give a knowing nod to that ancient quirk I have to expect goodness to follow because I have simply told the truth as best I can, to foolishly believe that being “naughty” is received with understanding. Somewhat wise, sophisticated, I believe, cosmopolitan, I know, I am also naive at moments and aint that quaint.

Solace is found in evolutionary psychology which is my latest reading fancy. How can I best say it: human beings, human expression is simply the response of genes attempting to replicate themselves in the most favorable conditions and they themselves are ordained — without consciousness or any determinism –to go on their merry way in our bodies like a rotating, revolving orb in the voids of space. In short we control nothing. And if that is so we each have to sort out the threads for our own existence — some of us will seek meaning, others religion to placate our psychic pain.  I am just amused.

Epicurus who felt that philosophy was a kind of psychotherapy said it best in his epitaph. “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.” Here is a man who could ride the carousel of genes forever and not take umbrage. Oh, to hear him speak under the Greek sky.

And the next scathing review I will receive I’ll recall Kazantzakis’s epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

When you are 71, besides reading the obit page, epitaphs take on a sad and yet satisfactory meaning.

I feel at moments a little distressed when, in one instance, the book and I are fused and I am assessed as being cynical. I have often heard this throughout my life and perhaps there is a measure of that in myself; if so, I can see the roots of that, but I also feel that part of this cynicism, if you will, is grounded in reality, and that (and here I hope this is not a rationalization) what I have to say or write which reads “cynically,” may in reality be what is, rather than a splash of my own characterological faults. An old quotation that I walk about with is: “Cynicism is the last refuge of an idealist.” I believe that is so. The cynic wishes that it were better, and since he often cannot change it to better, he falls back on sniping with his embitterment or venom.

Apparently a protective device from further hurt and disappointment — much like the fox and the grapes, I subscribe to that, feeling that I have done so in the past and in the present. However, no man and no woman can be easily summed up into a word, the “art” form of media and this culture. When I am called a cynic, part of me gently withers, as if to say that it is so and it is not so and how come you cannot see what I see.  Aren’t I more than my cynicism?  I feel I have been wounded since a child and it is a childlike self that says that. The feeling is very ancient in me.

A very close friend who had read the book, or I hope most of it, for he is on in years and ailing, tried to sum up my effort in a therapeutic way, as a kind of “defensive suffering.” He viewed it through his eyes and for that he cannot be faulted. But I bridled, for I dislike being summed up, assessed, or therapeutically “analyzed.” He did not do that, but in his own loving way it was his “picture” of who I am, his “truth.” Perhaps I should put everything in this little essay in quotation marks, as if to say it is all suspect. As I know, as I have written, we don’t know ourselves at all, much less others, for the blind cannot see the blind. We are forces controlled beyond the unconscious of Freud; for now evolutionary psychology has shown us that genes rule our roost and most of what we do as individuals and as cultures are driven by genes trying to survive or replicate better aspects of themselves — and what is maddeningly to grasp is that the genes themselves are just evolution doing its number, like an orbiting planet.

I just finished reading The Moral Animal  by Robert Wright which is a discussion of Darwinism  in present day science and how more advanced it has become. I walked away from the book, which I found disturbing and difficult to read (resistance?) because it confirms a natural and deterministic fact. In short, we are sacks of fats, fluids, bone and tissue, completely, totally gene driven.  We are collections of genes and that which is the whipped cream and cherry on top, our consciousness, our supposed awareness, our free will and nature, all the philosophical doodads is a monstrous deception we sustain. It is below and nether that we are controlled and truly inhabited by molecular bits and bytes. Humorously, I can see myself becoming even more cynical.

And even more humorous is the complete irrelevancy of God and myth. I see that as just living mold on the human mind. I have no more to say, ran out of gas.