This Mobius Strip of Ifs, a collection of essays by Mathias B. Freese, will be published later this year. Below is the book’s introduction written by Jane Holt Freese. We encourage reader comments and reactions. Happy New Year!
Although we are passing ephemera, human lint on this planet in transit, it is a powerful and nourishing feeling for me to have passed long enough to have observed the passage of time and my place in it. Mathias B. Freese in “Spousal Interview.”
This Möbius Strip of Ifs refers to a line in, “To Ms. Foley, with Gratitude.”The essay examines the value of personal awareness especially when confronting disappointment and just plain bad luck. In 1974, a short story, “Herbie,” by Freese was chosen to appear in a prestigious anthology.Unfortunately, the book was published crediting another author for writing his story. The editor was notified about the mistake but died before the error could be corrected.This series of misfortunes could not detract from the fact that the story had been selected for its excellence. Freese chose not only to view the situation philosophically, as a valuable endorsement of his writing ability, but to learn from it. After all, life is random happenstance; a long line of “ifs” that we strive to make sense of for ourselves.
A Möbius strip is essentially a ribbon with a twist.A mathematical model, it is used as a metaphor by physicists to describe why we, living within four dimensions, are unable to perceive other dimensions outside of the single boundary of time.To Freese it is a metaphor for unknown opportunities—possibilities outside of our perception. We can only remember the past and how we thought our future might have been.
This collection of essays begins with a quotation by Nietzsche, “Knowledge is death.”To know who we are requires that we “die” to many ideas we have of ourselves.Paradoxically, this “death” quickens awareness, makes us more alive and sensitive. No one wants regrets, but if we live long enough, they are inevitable.Freese not only accepts this but explores the paths taken and not taken.Why delve into the “ifs?”It is certainly not the comfortable choice.
Despite his strong conviction that his 33 years working as a school teacher was a waste of his time and talent, he nevertheless had a strong impact on his students.His problem was not with students, but rather with the deadening environment and structure in which he was forced to work and his students forced to adapt.Regimentation, conditioning, and authority are anathema to Freese’s sense of autonomy.In his own personal self-discovery through therapy and later as a therapist himself, Freese insists that each of us must find the truth for ourselves in order to be free of society, conditioning, and self-imposed constraints.
During his teaching career he also wrote articles and short stories for literary magazines, and published in the New York Times. None of his literary accomplishments, however, were acknowledged much less valued by his colleagues in the school.At a presentation to parents, Freese declared that he considered himself a writer who happened to be a teacher.He was telling parents that his expertise as a writer was an additional skill, a bonus that he was able to offer their children.This disregard for institutionally-imposed limits by a teacher, however, rankled some.Schools want professional instruction performed by staff who know their place.Freese was not one of these and finally was able to make his escape after years of struggle.“Teachers Have No Chance to Give Their Best,” “15,000 Hours,” and “The Unheard Scream” articulate his frustration.
His recollections of personal suffering are kept immediate in his writing about his daughter Caryn, his mother, grandmother, and his wife Rochelle. For Freese, memory is not a means of preservation, but rather a way of metabolizing events.Life is a series of losses and change. Reminiscence is the “glue” that keeps the fragments together.“Cameras as Remembrance of Things Past,” explores the power of photography to preserve glimpses of loved ones in the past.
Freese’s vivid childhood memories reveal a bright, sensitive child, ill-nurtured by his parents, but fortunate to have grown up during the tactile, pre-computer era of the 1950s. A keen observer, his relatives were unaware of the huge space they occupied in this little boy’s mind.Only in his remembrances do they at last speak their colorful, fierce and fleeting dramas.His grandmother, described in “Grandma Fanny,” and his uncle “Uncle Seymour” are powerful figures depicted emotionally, but with candid acceptance.Freese balances a therapeutic maturity with sorrow in “Parable of the Seawall,” an account of his traumatic childhood experience at the hands of his mother.
His love of movies stems from his early childhood when he was touched by the spectacle of the large screen in the other-worldliness of grand movie palaces. The thrill of motion pictures did not diminish as he grew older, but rather became more complex as he learned about how and who created them.Watching movies is, for him, a rich, multi-faceted experience. In the section, “Metaphorical Noodles,” he explores the genius of Buster Keaton, Orson Welles, Peter Lorre and others and how their search for artistic autonomy was sabotaged by the envious and less talented.
Another “metaphorical noodle” is “Things Kazantzakis.” Freese’s novel, The i Tetralogy, published in 2005, is a series of four novellas about the Holocaust.Gifting it to me he inscribed: To Jane: “Overdraw me, Lord and who cares if I break!” — Kazantzakis. Later, he explained that the quotation was part of a prayer—the third part of three choices on how life can be lived (“Overdraw,” refers to a bow being pulled).“Things Kazantzakis” begins with the full three part prayer from Nikos Kazantzakis’s confessional, Report to Greco.It articulates Freese’s philosophy about personal attainment—choosing between “reaching what you can” and “reaching what you cannot.”
A child of working class, Depression era parents, Freese is unencumbered by the sense of entitlement that infects so many of us Baby Boomers. As Christopher Lasch writes in The Culture of Narcissism, “We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.” Kazantzakis articulates in the third prayer the opposite position, to expect a great deal from oneself, “Overdraw me, Lord,” and then nothing from the world, “Who cares if I break!”Freese points out that the prayer ends in an exclamation point not a question mark—therein lies its power.
In “To Ms. Foley, With Gratitude,” Freese refers to Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”Traveling the Möbius strip, Sisyphus will never come to a resolution; it is all in his struggle.There is no ultimate finish line. Life is an endless series of open-ended questions, an endless loop curving in and out from which we are free to move ahead with no assurance of success, only continual struggle until we die.
In “Spousal Interview,” Freese reveals deeply how his therapy, his experience as a therapist, and his working on himself throughout the years have given him a telling sense of what it is to be in the world and to be in transit, his “Möbius strip of ifs.” He would have it no other way.
