Wending her way through my collection of short stories on the Holocaust, Jane is formulating, in mind, what she intends to write in her introduction to the new book, hopefully published in Spring 2010. What I discovered when writing these stories is that as I crept toward an understanding that I could translate into writer’s words, that very understanding backed off and off, like receding waters. I just couldn’t grasp it and had to settle for approximations of what I thought I knew or had fathomed. Consequently I am dissatisfied with my efforts except for one or two stories. I associate to breaking off a piece of peanut brittle, messy, awkward, angular and shattering better stuff off the hand than on.
So as a defense mechanism, I have “deceived” myself — accepting what I have written as the best shard I can make. Most if not all the stories have been written within six months or so and I am suspicious that they do not have the gravitas they should carry if I had written them over a period of years which I did with my last collection — thirty years of gravitas. However, I must write and I will not torture myself over how well or not time saturates a writer’s efforts. The grim reaper is using his sickle at my rear and I am running as fast as I can to complete the loose ends we all have if we are aware of time’s guillotine. Look, some of us need golf; I need to write. I am on my last eight holes, really the last four. I’ll take a birdy, an eagle is beyond me. I have always maintained that I write not for my children so much — you don’t count — as for myself. Writing mirrors who I am and I’d like to get a non-distorted image of myself before I croak. Why, you may ask? Can you handle the truth? My taproot is in Judaism and I am a secular atheist who admires the ethos I emanate from. The answer is: I am a Jew. I have to know. Ridiculous quest, is it not? Oh, but the side dishes are wonderful — crinkle-cut fries, round potato knish, sour tomatoes and pickles and the New York waiter’s thumb in your glass as he gives you water.
Some of the stories, perhaps most, are surreal for in that heightened awareness, I believe, I can assess or paint in the characteristics of the Holocaust that I need to get to, rather, that concern me. For instance, terror is hard to write about; it is worst to experience, of course. I find it hard to describe terror and so I try to approach it indirectly, to slyly hint at it. Film directors have that issue as well. Although they show pictures in motion, only a few directors can make you feel the atmosphere. Just today I had to turn off “Schindler’s List” because it began to creep into me, especially the early scenes when ther Jews are moving into the Warsaw Ghetto, having been evicted from their homes which would now be taken over by the Germans. I felt something in me, the feeling of having been selected, of having been picked out, of having been geeked out of the matrix of a society and I quickly associated to present events in this country and the latent menace in events — the fears of Obama speaking to children; Birthers; the dangerous lunacies of a Glen Beck; the adamant polarization in this nation and the scariest thing of all to me — the abyssmal knowledge of Americans about their founding documents and their own history. I believe that in my community for perhaps 50 miles in any direction there is not one American who can name a socialist of the 19th century or the 20th , for that matter.The last twenty years must have produced a bumper crop of moronic teachers. In my mind a great teacher takes on the PTA, the principal and the community if need be. OK, go down in flames but what a war story to tell your own children decades from now. I once told a group of kids in an eighth grade class that the Declaration of Independence was progaganda; of course, it was and being a history major I had really a significant amount of essays and papers on that subject, especially by the great historian Carl Becker (look him up). Well, I did get shit; a few parents took their kids out of my class. I guess I was an early socialist in Elmont, Long Island, a Progressive, as Beck terms it. Naive and new at my “profession,” I quickly learned that the truth does not set you free. Awareness sets you free. As I look back on my desperate years as a teacher, I am glad I made waves but blood pressure is not a happy consequence nor suppressing rage and anger at the buffoons who run our schools for the buffoons who procreate conditioned little creatures called “students.” I do digress.
Things are not that dire in this nation but we do have one man carnivorously biting off the tip of another man’s pinky at a town hall meeting. However, you may know that canaries were used in English mines in the 19th century for the purposes of alerting miners of methane gas in the tunnels. If the canary died, get out. I am going out here on a limb but if there is a spate of swastikas across synagogue walls, for civilized dialoguing this summer of ’09 seems to be disappearing, it is symptomatic of the hatreds being spawn at this moment. Cooler heads are not winning the moment. I sense a rage that is primal without censorship or inhibition which to me connotes the thin pie crust we term civilization, the basic rules we need to get by with. I give you a dollar and ask for change. You give me a quart of the milk; the response is disturbing and psychotic. The Jew is society’s canary; kill him and it is time to emigrate.
All this colors revisiting my little book of stories, crosshatching my characters with feelings and ideas, motives, fears and quirks. I sally forth against Holocaust deniers or revisionists, the same hater, writing satirically, scathingly about the mind and its mind set that denies such an event. I excavate, I eviscerate, I plumb, I leap into that slime pit and try to return to the surface world with some insight of what makes a fellow human being deny such facts; but wait a minute. Did you ever speak to someone who looks just like you, shops, eats, farts, dates, sees the movies and is completely psychotic? Not a few therapists adhere to the thesis that most of the world’s population is psychotic if we examine the criteria we use to diagnose clients (see the DSM IV).
I tried my hand writing about such a revisionist and sadly enough my reach exceeds my grasp. I may not have written a good story, but a well-intended one. I’ll let Jane correct and emend that and if it does not work, I will dispense with. However, the search inward brought me some personal insights. Tell me, when was the last time a golfer walked off a course with an insight other than he did or did not play the ninth hole well? Don’t you get it, reader, I don’t have much time and while I search and seek and attempt to determine my life’s course of action the sands pour through the glass. And what did you do today? I personally have no time to be lint in eternity’s pocket. Ultimately I will be an iota, but while here, while alive and kicking, while aware to the best I can be, I am kicking ass.
Adieu.
I’ve Been Working On The Railroad
Wending her way through my collection of short stories on the Holocaust, Jane is formulating, in mind, what she intends to write in her introduction to the new book, hopefully published in Spring 2010. What I discovered when writing these stories is that as I crept toward an understanding that I could translate into writer’s words, that very understanding backed off and off, like receding waters. I just couldn’t grasp it and had to settle for approximations of what I thought I knew or had fathomed. Consequently I am dissatisfied with my efforts except for one or two stories. I associate to breaking off a piece of peanut brittle, messy, awkward, angular and shattering better stuff off the hand than on.
So as a defense mechanism, I have “deceived” myself — accepting what I have written as the best shard I can make. Most if not all the stories have been written within six months or so and I am suspicious that they do not have the gravitas they should carry if I had written them over a period of years which I did with my last collection — thirty years of gravitas. However, I must write and I will not torture myself over how well or not time saturates a writer’s efforts. The grim reaper is using his sickle at my rear and I am running as fast as I can to complete the loose ends we all have if we are aware of time’s guillotine. Look, some of us need golf; I need to write. I am on my last eight holes, really the last four. I’ll take a birdy, an eagle is beyond me. I have always maintained that I write not for my children so much — you don’t count — as for myself. Writing mirrors who I am and I’d like to get a non-distorted image of myself before I croak. Why, you may ask? Can you handle the truth? My taproot is in Judaism and I am a secular atheist who admires the ethos I emanate from. The answer is: I am a Jew. I have to know. Ridiculous quest, is it not? Oh, but the side dishes are wonderful — crinkle-cut fries, round potato knish, sour tomatoes and pickles and the New York waiter’s thumb in your glass as he gives you water.
Some of the stories, perhaps most, are surreal for in that heightened awareness, I believe, I can assess or paint in the characteristics of the Holocaust that I need to get to, rather, that concern me. For instance, terror is hard to write about; it is worst to experience, of course. I find it hard to describe terror and so I try to approach it indirectly, to slyly hint at it. Film directors have that issue as well. Although they show pictures in motion, only a few directors can make you feel the atmosphere. Just today I had to turn off “Schindler’s List” because it began to creep into me, especially the early scenes when ther Jews are moving into the Warsaw Ghetto, having been evicted from their homes which would now be taken over by the Germans. I felt something in me, the feeling of having been selected, of having been picked out, of having been geeked out of the matrix of a society and I quickly associated to present events in this country and the latent menace in events — the fears of Obama speaking to children; Birthers; the dangerous lunacies of a Glen Beck; the adamant polarization in this nation and the scariest thing of all to me — the abyssmal knowledge of Americans about their founding documents and their own history. I believe that in my community for perhaps 50 miles in any direction there is not one American who can name a socialist of the 19th century or the 20th , for that matter.The last twenty years must have produced a bumper crop of moronic teachers. In my mind a great teacher takes on the PTA, the principal and the community if need be. OK, go down in flames but what a war story to tell your own children decades from now. I once told a group of kids in an eighth grade class that the Declaration of Independence was progaganda; of course, it was and being a history major I had really a significant amount of essays and papers on that subject, especially by the great historian Carl Becker (look him up). Well, I did get shit; a few parents took their kids out of my class. I guess I was an early socialist in Elmont, Long Island, a Progressive, as Beck terms it. Naive and new at my “profession,” I quickly learned that the truth does not set you free. Awareness sets you free. As I look back on my desperate years as a teacher, I am glad I made waves but blood pressure is not a happy consequence nor suppressing rage and anger at the buffoons who run our schools for the buffoons who procreate conditioned little creatures called “students.” I do digress.
Things are not that dire in this nation but we do have one man carnivorously biting off the tip of another man’s pinky at a town hall meeting. However, you may know that canaries were used in English mines in the 19th century for the purposes of alerting miners of methane gas in the tunnels. If the canary died, get out. I am going out here on a limb but if there is a spate of swastikas across synagogue walls, for civilized dialoguing this summer of ’09 seems to be disappearing, it is symptomatic of the hatreds being spawn at this moment. Cooler heads are not winning the moment. I sense a rage that is primal without censorship or inhibition which to me connotes the thin pie crust we term civilization, the basic rules we need to get by with. I give you a dollar and ask for change. You give me a quart of the milk; the response is disturbing and psychotic. The Jew is society’s canary; kill him and it is time to emigrate.
All this colors revisiting my little book of stories, crosshatching my characters with feelings and ideas, motives, fears and quirks. I sally forth against Holocaust deniers or revisionists, the same hater, writing satirically, scathingly about the mind and its mind set that denies such an event. I excavate, I eviscerate, I plumb, I leap into that slime pit and try to return to the surface world with some insight of what makes a fellow human being deny such facts; but wait a minute. Did you ever speak to someone who looks just like you, shops, eats, farts, dates, sees the movies and is completely psychotic? Not a few therapists adhere to the thesis that most of the world’s population is psychotic if we examine the criteria we use to diagnose clients (see the DSM IV).
I tried my hand writing about such a revisionist and sadly enough my reach exceeds my grasp. I may not have written a good story, but a well-intended one. I’ll let Jane correct and emend that and if it does not work, I will dispense with. However, the search inward brought me some personal insights. Tell me, when was the last time a golfer walked off a course with an insight other than he did or did not play the ninth hole well? Don’t you get it, reader, I don’t have much time and while I search and seek and attempt to determine my life’s course of action the sands pour through the glass. And what did you do today? I personally have no time to be lint in eternity’s pocket. Ultimately I will be an iota, but while here, while alive and kicking, while aware to the best I can be, I am kicking ass.
Adieu.