Tag Archives: “The Parable of the Seawall

As I close down my latest work, “Working Through the Holocaust,” and waiting for a read through by Jane as to what to save and what to delete, I received a message from David Herrle, Subtletea.com editor, in which he suggested he wanted to publish my blog, “Glut and Loathing in Las Vegas.” At the end of his e-mail he asked if I would consider publishing my blogs and that started me thinking. Additionally, all along, Jane had urged me to consider the many essays I had written and had  published as a possible book. And so it came to pass as they say in fairy tales, that I began to put everything on hold in terms of my present book and I began to gather from files and storage boxes essays that I had been proud of. The blogs are another story as I am perusing them to see if they hold up and while doing so considering if they might serve as the salt and pepper of this new book of essays.

The essays are short, some not so, and most of them represent the workings of my mind over 40 years. As to marketability, I couldn’t care less. No one reads essays these days, much less sells them; however, this is my summing up and my gift to that share of posterity I may have within my family. The essays will be given to friends and others, a few to reviewers who favor my efforts and may possibly review the book. Again I go against the grain and swim upriver, but my essays deal with that in spades. I look at what I have in hand, dusty, musty xerox copies, magazine copies, typed copies and I may well near 250-300 pages. That feels good. I’ve accomplished something for me, meaningful for me, perhaps to you, in a meaningless existence, for life is a blank slate and we must assert ourselves to leave writ, for what it is. I always get a emotional kick by holding my manuscripts in hand, to see visibly the outpourings of a mind I just steward  for it is way beyond my control.

Having read Erik Hoffer’s The True Believer, Jane is now perusing Montaigne’s collected essays, for Hoffer learned to write by studying this master. I mention this here because this new collection has much to say obviously, about me, but it reveals no arc or parabola, but “doglegs.” I believe Montaige’s essays are focused yet discursive and as he writes in a short introduction it tells a great deal about him if you were to peek beneath the bedspread. And so with that in mind, I will share with you right off some of the topics in this book quickly assembling itself.

I intend to break it up into themes — family, musings, movies, on being a therapist and therapy, childhood, growing up, teachers and the taught, perhaps memoir. All this is in flux. But I can share with you as I freely recollect what issues, concerns and relationships made me write over the years. I wrote two articles, one short, one extended, for the New York Times about my experience as a teacher in suburban Dix Hills, Long Island; they were published in the Sunday edition so the articles were widely circulated. They were both met with silence and a quiet venom. Published 10 years apart, the first one was artfully composed, may I say so, but needle sharp; the second was savagely presented, calling teachers “capons,” and so you get the drift. They represent my frustration, resentment and anger at schools and teachers, the worst of the blind leading the worst of the blind, turning all of us into “soylent green” crackers.

One article won a prize as I was completing studies at an analytic school and entered a contest; the article was on a schizophrenic and was well-written and I was lambasted during the peer review but somehow it won. Other articles were on my daughter Caryn who had CFIDS and was wheeling toward her own suicide in 1998 (I wrote a short story about her as well which was published); a recent article about my remembrances of Rochelle who died in 1999. I wrote essays about my Grandpa Charlie, my Grandma Fanny, a bag lady, my son Jordan, about my sister Harriet, about my “father” and other kith and kin. I wrote an  extended article on Otto Rank who had grabbed my analytic interest at the time. So several essays were very good and sometimes hard hitting and they were published.

And in the 80s I struck gold and had several long essays published in Classic Images, a zine dedicated to movies. Years later it became quite well known by aficionados which pleased me no end. I wrote loving  prose-poems about the movies that marinaded my young heart as a young boy growing up in the late forties and fifties, the years in which movies were that and not cinema! I wrote about Sabu, Kane, Ivanhoe, Brando, Conrad Veidt, Disney’s “Song of the South,” and endlessly on. Recent reviews are on Daniel Day-Lewis in “Last of the Mohicans,” simply unreal. Movies have made an indelible impression upon me until this day.

As I think over all that I have written I see my depression, my neuroses, my rage and resentment: I also see my inability to surrender but to persevere, to work out all this through writing for the rage was not inconsiderable, given my upbringing.

Rightfully so, I begin the collection with an essay on my early years before 10 and my experience with my mother and the sea wall. It sets the tone for all to come. (It was published in Europe, of all places.) I see how unclear and messed up and lathered and confused I was in my 20s, 30s, and 40s; it was not until my 50s that I began to see a horizon and headed for the light; however, all this muddling through, although sad to reread also paved the way for the newer skin I took on. I am the same self with all my distortions and contortions and torturous thinking processes, but I have a sharper clarity now and not a little comprehension of what I went through, experienced and have somewhat tamed.

As I said earlier, my life has been a series of doglegs, golf course traps veering off to the right and left. I will wait until Jane reads all this and can tell me what she sees, what she makes of all this blather of a somewhat tortured soul. I always believe that the reader owns the book she or he reads; that we are vastly unknown to ourselves until they day we are no more; that we are never in charge of ourselves — a myth, a delusion, Americana; that we are channels of many selves, for as we never will see or touch our inner organs so we shall never completely see who we are as individuals. It is all a mess, is it not? Writing, for me, apparently, is an attempt to dip the popsicle stick into the yogurt and pull it out hoping that something adheres — or at least takes shape. I write to adhere, to cohere. I “stick” it to me.