Raymonde

Raymonde

I wonder if there will be a name for what is happening to us – slavery, for example, colonialism, socialism, Marxism which I am well conversant with. Arrested for my political activities and for being a Jew by the Nazis and transported to this camp, I have spent 9 months here. I remember being herded into a rickety rail car and shipped like so much cattle and how all of us had one pail for our offal. It is not the smell of shit that wrecks our minds. No, not that alone. It is the breakdown of social codes, of cultural order, of shitting into a pail with all the splattering that entails, the bowel noises – our most private symphonies, all before others in open sight. It is to experience an abysmal negligence in that we swiftly, out of necessity, overcome personal shame. We try to put out of mind all the shit that came before us in that same hefty pail, remains of the daily self. By the time we disembarked very late at night from the transports, there wasn’t a man or woman, not a child, who had not given up some invaluable measure of intimacy. Privacy had been shattered. So we overlooked (did we really?), not denied, colluded fraternally in what we had seen, what we had experienced. Shit-giving broke us down in ways that I am still experiencing, for it was my first camp tutoring, the primer for what the guards would instruct us about human suffering.

While squatting on the pail, I recall, I saw one young man take a quick look at my splayed legs as if he could catch a glance of my delta of Venus; a much older man saw me shitting and his response was one of enormous ennui, as if he had resigned himself to such a state of affairs. By the time we had arrived, shitting, pissing and farting on the pail was just that – discharge, freed from rules of hygiene and privacy. We had made a surly peace with it.

After days on the rail a circle of fecal matter saturated the hay that surrounded the pail as its fitting corona. When it was filled usually a man, sometimes a woman as if cleansing her house, waited until the train slowed down at a curve or crossing, and threw its contents out. Since we had no toilet paper, we each made choices about how to go about wiping ourselves. I chose not to wipe. Others ripped pieces from the clothing they had on and wiped. I observed our most personal idiosyncrasies. After a while, I imagined each hand in the rail car was inflamed with bacteria. Cleanliness did not prevail at all. Our hands were stigma to be avoided.

I cannot share the unimaginable with anyone, much less you. And why is this so? I cannot convince myself that what is happening to me each and every day is real, as if I could pinch it by its buttocks and it would screech. I feel it is, therefore, unimaginable. This fantasy is brief when I encounter the hard hours when there is little food and constant thirst.

So the unimaginable is as acute as a stabbing needle. It is imaginable. It does exist. I once read Moby Dick translated into German. I could not identify with Ahab, but I found the great white whale profoundly evil, self-contained, unrelenting, like a planet set forth into its orbit by no hand at all. I concluded that the whale was monolithic, a system into himself and absolutely unaccountable to anyone else. Poor Ahab! He thought revenge would do it. In this camp revenge is disavowed, verboten, not permitted – and redemption, which does not exist, is a ridiculous conceptualization to own.

When my mind falls into an irrefutable dither, I will have finally succumbed. My dear, dear mind, what is left of it, at one time was analytic, philosophical, layered in theories and concepts, for I had been a college instructor. My mental thinking processes revealed themselves in such a way that I may be bold to say that they evinced a passion of the mind, much as we can speak of Freud’s body of work. A man who had labeled himself more of a conqueror than a medical doctor, a conquistador, you might say he was a doctor of the soul.

When I can think, which is rare in the camp, for thinking is detritus here, absolutely dreck, I cherish and recall the moments when I had read Freud (I wonder if he has escaped Germany). What I do recall I use as self-armor to help me to get through one more day, but even here Freud would intellectually tremble in sight of systems that man devises to destroy his own species. Like food I savor in Freud his pessimism. He didn’t think much of his fellow man. The camp confirms his prescience.

Although each day brain cells drop from me like dandruff, I try intellectually to cope with this unbearable existence. I do not, ironically, use too much reason, for reason is not the patois of the camp. Randomness is our Esperanto. Hours do not exist. Time is not extant. Fractions of minutes rule and order us. We are chivied, rushed, pushed, kicked along, shoved, brutally whipped and sped from one moment to another. All thinking is left to the guards. We are just a herd.

All I do to keep myself from going mad, to be mentally intact, is to observe.

To allow myself to experience sorrow, fear, the clenched fist is a sweet and lush feeling, a personal pomegranate and very dangerous. To observe is safer, guarded and private, no wordage. No reflection. To observe is just to gather data. To hypothesize, to conceptualize is beyond the pale. I have no time for deep reflection unless late at night in my pallet, and then to think tires me out and I quickly fall asleep. If I see a woman abused which is a daily occurrence, a guard squeezes her ass or knees her in the crotch, for example – although Germans are sickened at the thought of touching a Jewish woman, sometimes their pricks speak for their nether desires. As I say here, I observe this, I do not ascribe values or judgments. I am only a rain barrel here. I collect runoff.

At times I forget my gender. I am not woman. What I am I cannot say. Sometimes I find it peculiar when I shed my womanhood, me, who had several lovers over the years and was much the free spirit. When I observe a “little” murder as a woman, it does color the observation. When I forget or it forgets me – being a woman, the observation is very much neutral, with little or no affect. I prefer to have the same semblance of personal humanity, my I AMness if you will, and that is what happens when I observe through the eyes of a woman. We are all differently dealt with in the camps, we are all dealt in the same

way in the camps, but the woman is the lowest, especially a Jewish woman who births Jews. We are hated because we are mothers, the fluttering Jew moth in the clothes closet.

If I had as a woman the vitality and physical strength of a man with his mind installed in that body, what a person we might have. Ecce Homo! The obverse is repellent to me, a man’s mind in a woman’s body. It would not work at all, for any man is a proto-woman, a pretender. Each time I see a woman inmate die of starvation, die at the hands of a guard’s hands I feel the loss of our womanly species, so different, so maternal, so connected to other women unlike man whose life, as I observe in this camp, consists of physical brutality, sperm, and savagery.

What I will give here now are things and events I observe as a woman. Realize that I do not believe I can be subsumed simply under gender. I am so much more than the bivalve of man. I am no Adam’s rib – horrifying biblical shit. But I stray, although religion created all the camps.

I see that I go about protecting myself from all these horrors. And that Great Wall of China that surrounds me is self-imposed and observation is its name. I see all the women about me. And what I see are relics of humanity. Some women have lost their menstruation cycle, have gone “dry.” The nest cannot be created, to be a potential mother has been driven out of many of us. Without one’s period, brought about I imagine by overt stress, and the lack of proper nutrition, are pushed decades ahead into a kind of early and sterile menopause.

I should add here that I see that observing keeps me safe, for it is passive and non-disruptive. I daresay I resist in this manner of “being.”

Although women in normal life share and want to be connected to other women, an observation I experienced long before internment, I also see that women often do not speak to one another – it is greatly disallowed in any case in camp – but gesture and a woman’s repertoire of gestures and gesticulations has a wide range of nuance and subtlety. A woman’s knitting eyebrows as a response can say much, whereas a man’s eye lace straight eyebrow is just a coverlet for his eyes, not much to be learned here. I know a woman’s gestures contain ore and I observe how I and others need to extract the meaning therein. I can tell when a camp inmate is no more than a day or two away from dying.

Think about it. Even observing one’s self as I do minute to minute keeps my intelligence intact, seeing my place in this hell is fatiguing but not tiresome to my mind. It is a task I give myself to survive. As our shabby ranks are thinned out daily from starvation, penal work and guard brutality. Often chubby and fat, well-fed women guards club us to death if we become immobile (how they hate being women). We are winnowed out and the Nazi state machinery applies its immense scythe to us all in fell swoops. When they are done with us, there will be nothing to glean. I will be gone soon, I know it, I see it. I have overstayed my welcome here.

I observe how I have withered. I dread any mirror or a reflection in a rain puddle, I tried again to count to fifty and just got up to forty when my mind once again disassembled itself and lost content. I trembled. I “felt” fear. For the life of me, after several failed numberings, I distracted myself because

such failure to count to fifty frightened me very much. Much like trying to grab a doorknob with an embalmed hand, it had no idea of what to do. I felt my mind turned to slurry after forty. I observed that.

CRO-MAGNON — TEMPLATE

I sit on this crag overlooking a gentle valley.
I don’t think about the future. I don’t think about the past. One is long gone, the other out there where I don’t live.
I am the only one of our clan that spends early morning time thinking. I think now, in the now. After a hunt I could be left gored by an animal — or dead. When you are dead, time goes away.When I look across the valley, I just begin to think. It happens. It is much like walking, it happens.

During the heat of the day I have no need to think. I just am about what I must do. For some reason it is not enough for me. I could make more arrows or flints, but I save the effort for looking out upon the forest and the small streams that move through the tall grasses.

And when I think, wonderful things come to mind, thoughts really. I tell others about this but they do not see its worth. I think of how long I have lived. I don’t think about how long will I live as that takes away from the now. It is not important to do so. I just am in the now with my thoughts, my inside arrows and flints.

I have observed the sun and the moon, of constant interest to me. I don’t know why they are round. Why can’t they be shaped like an arrowhead or my mate’s breast? It is a puzzle. I know the sun has day and the moon has night, although sometimes, if the light is right and the sky very clear, I can see parts of the moon. At night the sun is forever gone. What makes me think in the now of these two bodies concerns me, for one moves me to hunt, the other to sleep. I make no fires during the day and save all that effort, yet at night I need to cook, eat and have warmth.

I am the only one in the clan who tries to take the measure of his  life. It is a riddle whenever I think about it. Maybe I should spend this morning thinking about doing something, like collecting wood for the evening fire.

As I look about the clan I am much beyond being young. I am an old man, I have lived thirty winters. The old women giggle when I take an ember and scratch upon our cave’s walls, making moons, making suns. I am very good at drawing antlers. I favor horses which roam our valley. Like much of my life, I am not sure why I do this.

In the moments of thinking I realize that in a way it is a doing of a kind, much like scouting for game. I find observing, whatever that is, for I am not sure, but I know it to be stronger than looking. When I look, I find, like an animal track. When I observe, here on my crag, something else happens in my mind. So when I think about observing, I realize other parts of it and I reach conclusions. I see patterns. Quite exciting at times. My looking has become sharper because I observe what I have been doing. The good thing is my hunting is more purposeful. I see a structure to it. Other men start the morning hunt with a basic plan. It has always been this way. I am different. I hunt with more than one plan. In this way I find I have choices, what I call twos or threes. If this works, choose it. If not choose another way.  Other men do this as part of their skills but I am the only one aware of it. Others do not hunt with me.  I confuse them, because for every here they go after, I give another there. The difference is that I observe myself acting. In some way I feel powerful, quite an unusual good feeling.

Only last evening, for the first time, did I try to draw me. The old women told me to stay with the moon and stars. That comforted them. They favor that which is constant. A figure of me was new and not to their liking.

I wonder. I don’t know what that is. It is different from thinking and observing. It has feeling to it. I wake early to observe dawn. I watch as shadows lift from rocks and boulders, like birds set off in flight. And before the blaze of sun has risen in the east, it is the calmest part of day. Birds chatter. Women stir in their beds. Distant grunts are made by animal life and the stomping of hooves. Dawn creeps into bright light like water edging into the river shores, the muddy flats where animals graze and set upon one another. I wonder about time. It is much too confusing for me but I think about it and observe how it rules my life and the clan and all of animal life and the coming of the cold and its leaving and the making of dryness and the wet times when as a clan we shiver in the cavern.

If I were to say what is it with me all day long, what is the noise in my mind, I must say it is confusion about my self and my place in this world. Others do not go that far. They are with the world from moment to moment, trying to get the next kill. I am cursed, I believe, because even while hunting I think, observe and wonder all at once although I complete my hunt. Others seem to have peace of mind, but my mind is split like the veins of an arm chewed on by a wild cat. While I was striking flint to start fire, the sparks that did not fire start disappeared into the stones about them. Each spark vanished and that made the fire less important to my mind. Where did the sparks go? Into the stones and kindling? The simplest things are the most complex to me. Others get on with it. I cannot stop thinking about the shape of things.

I think there is a purpose to the chatter in my mind, but I have not found it as yet. In that is the total of my life. I live, I go on, I exist, and then I face terror and adversity and hard times and then calm, not as frequent, I must say. I suppose it is a struggle. I cannot find the arrow that goes into the heart of an elk, true to its mark. All this mind chatter each day, and then tomorrow, and then the days ahead which I choose not to think about because it creates fear in me, worry. I don’t like to worry for it makes up much of my life — hunting, stalking, being, running, dying, wound healing, children born and all the blood and pain that Mara, mate,  has had with that.

I have observed that beasts do not think like we do. It is a new thought for me. I will not forget it. We may be the only kind that knows worry. Worry contains past and future, a lot of future, and we give much time when we can in the now worrying about the then. No other animal I hunt acts like this. If you worry, you must pause, but animals do not sit down and think, none that I know of of. In fact, after all these years, I have felt that we sit down in an unusual way. I like the way we sit.  I just realized I may be right because if wild beasts sat and paused to worry we would have ample food for winter. The beasts live in the now and so do I but there is a difference which makes us so different. I wonder if worry helps us to survive. My mind says yes.

TEMPLATE TO BE CONTINUED. ANY COMMENTS, READER?

 

 

 

 

 

NMM REDUX

In the back of my mind is what will I write next. I should , like Pilate, wash my hands of writing, but I can’t, not really. It is tied up with my drive as a person which is considerable. A few words here on a pad, a phrase or so, a complete sentence over the days amounting to so much verbal dandruff. I have learned over the decades not to force it. The unconscious will speak in due time. So I sit in my car on Franklin Avenue in Huntsville waiting for noon and a luncheon I am attending for museum docents. And I compose this opening paragraph. A few of my books began as scribbling in my car.

As I look back at the eight books I have written, I realize all that verbiage came from my well of the unsaid. I don’t know what to make of all this scrivening. I am not adamant about posterity. If all of it went up in smoke, I don’t think I would mind as much, for I believe at 79 it was all just an expression of a life’s living, like marbles very much in play in a circle. Can a man who plays the trumpet ever keep, retain or realize songs he once played? It is all temporary and has its important uses at the time.

Books, audios, oiled canvases are the expressions of inner maelstroms — think van Gogh. An art critic, Robert Hughes, considered him an ecstatic. I liked that. Maybe my writings are ecstatic moments and I need not be overly attached to what they produce. They are of the moment.

I think my being old has burnished my feelings so that I am not so much with creating now as I am with letting go. Perhaps we come to realize that the obverse side of attachment is letting go.

The books I’ve written are testament to what I have felt, what I have thought, all disguised by writer’s artifice to make them graceful, readable and understandable. I think it is vomitus, each of us capable of producing this in our own way. So I had eight books of life’s striving and pain to upchuck. Pay it no mind. You have it as well. I feel spent by almost 51 years of writing.

Fires are banked and the ashes glow. I am with respite and gentle reflection. I am passive. A friend who admired my work has said that what I have written should be preserved even if I am not well known, that it should not be lost. She meant well, a gracious thought. I confounded her with the thought that it was of no real importance as my passing itself, is of no importance. I think of slap happy teachers with their erasers in hand and blackboards. Humorously it is of no importance in the cosmic game of evolution. What is important, only for me, is the present moment I inhabit.

Carpe Diem fades out as Tempus Fugit enters to control the outcome of the game.

Time, what I once observed as an elusive vole, vanishes, leaving behind life’s desperation. To commit to print as if to stay Time’s passing is the writer’s quixotic quest. And an impossible dream. Much the same as planting a flag on some far flung away sandy shore and proclaiming it for Spain. Silly creature is man. All is vanity, vanity of vanities.

Kilroy was here says it best.

Someone once said to me that Y is a crooked letter. I cannot answer why I write, given the ridiculousness of it in an indifferent universe,. Perhaps this anecdote from Auschwitz says something.

An inmate surveying the horrors of his existence and the emotional death within the camp, said to a guard: “Why?”

The guard responded.”Here there is no why.”

I have given up asking why, leaving me with a cosmic hole in my fractal self.

A few hours ago I posted the ashes of Nina to her nephew, David, to disperse on her brother’s grave site. It is fitting that they reunite once again. David will read a poem she wrote from NMM and he will say a few words I asked him to read.  I only had her for two years. At this same time my son has become alienated from me. The reasons are complex and perplexing. Nevertheless, he has no idea of my pain…may passion..and my agony as a human being. How can he? He is only a son.

 

 

SUPERANNUATED

At 79 I am superannuated. Sounds like a Wells Fargo APR. I walk into a gas station and ask for directions. “Don’t you have a map on your cell?” I don’t answer, why bother to explain that I have a Jitterbug flip phone for seniors with large numerals. I really bought it because it is 5 star enabled which means I can get help immediately. Such is one concern at 79. Sometimes I am asked if I text. No, and this is met with bewilderment. I feel like responding alliteratively with I do matriculate, masturbate and masticate. An eharmony woman challenges me with why did you block me on the site, as if had sent her family to Dachau. You’re too cerebral, one opines on Zoosk. I did delete that I was a MENSA member (I caved). And I am asked if I have blue tooth. No, only one cavity.

You’re much too old for me as if body and age condemn me to geriatric celibacy. Reach 79 and you are dead. Reach 80 and you don’t know if you are dead or not. If I had a sabot I would conk it on Zuckerberg’s head — expertise without values; techniques without humanity. When Zuckerberg plays with his mouse he ejaculates algorithms.

The computer was devised on a latent level to mandate continual change, the human race runs amok, it has since its inception.

I have been criticized for not wearing a watch — but now people use their cell to tell and to give time. A watch is control. I have been subtly chastised for having a substantial  inner-directed value system. [What’s that?] When I pass the breakfast joint, Waffles, I think yes about the general community at large. Passing by  Luther’s Here I Stand luncheonette is not a good joint for the indecisive, but OK for Lutherans.

I abide in Athens, Alabama. It is the land of grits, football, the Lawd, roadkill and the patron saint of Huntsville, Alabama, Wernher von Braun. He is the original sin of America after the Indian genocide and slavery. All societies are essentially corrupt, Krishnamurti opined. There I go again; a value. In the South your buttermilk soused fried chicken at Cracker barrel comes with au jews.

I don’t feel safe here. I have an extra pair of sneakers (tennis shoes?) in my trunk. I may have to flee at night. In the sixties I did stop my car and got out and started running after hearing for the first time, “Hey, Jude.”

My son sweetly wants to “drag” me into the 21st century, However, like dad, he wears no watch and only by necessity answers his phone. My wife and I did a good job; essentially he doesn’t suffer fools and has a finely tuned crap detector, like dad. By 2050 he will have suffered much for his beliefs and for whom he is.

Often the oldest people I meet are the youngest and often culturally illiterate. Citizen Kane is something they grow in the tropics.   And Rosebud is a variety of cannabis.

In my “dotage” I experience little fears. Can I turn the corner without hitting the mail box which I clipped in 2018? I sense a degradation of my driving skills. I husband my energies leaving ceiling high bulbs for a six foot two handyman. Nothing like life savings at this age to pay for such services. I wander the streets looking for someone to shine my shoes (What are shoes?). And when I ask for sneakers I am met with a ?

One server at Cracker Barrel (isn’t there an unintended pun in that name?)  I asked one forlorn morning for two sunny side eggs. The server ( you mean waitress or waiter?)  was so puzzled the lady behind me explained my order to her, but she was close to my age and knew all about eggs. I took a soft-boiled approach toward all this, which is very complicated to order.

When I was a young boy “dope” was used to glue balsa parts to construct a model plane. So, is “coke” a kind of coal or a drug of choice? I am lost. Pepsi, as we all know, is the safer drink to order — if you can get it.

I am exasperated trying to explain what is idiomatic to my experience, which is now superannuated.

On eharmony, zoosk and match.com I experience ageism, often expressed by women in their 60s and 70s. I call then the immortals.They will not die, or if they do, after you croak! One woman said she had an “aura” about her.  In their minds they imagine anyone older is potentially dead; I get this from widows. They live in what I term the tense of future fuck, that is, doing a number on your head before it happens, also endemic to the average neurotic. The bi-polar person has at least two points of view on this; the schizophrenic is split; and the borderline is relentlessly in search of a Southern wall.

 

 

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...