Mathias B. Freese's Blog, page 10

Listening with the Third Ear

Psychoanalyst Theodore Reik, a disciple of Freud, titled his book in this way. What he was teaching the reader or student was that listening, Freud called it, “hovering attention,” was critical in any relationship with a client; if dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, dramatic listening to the highest degree gave access  to both conscious and unconscious dynamics. No one listens in the way therapists are trained to listen in their offices. Listening is different, and much interrupted, in daily life. However, the person who can listen with the third ear can deepen his relationships with those around him, especially family. By this time in my life, after 12 years of not practicing. I mostly in daily interactions try to listen on levels beneath the manifest level. I cannot give up nor do I choose to dispose of a skill I spent years developing — and it is much good fun, too. Almost all good therapists can supply incidences in which they really listened to their clients and responded with what they heard. Often the client is taken aback because he or she is being listened to in ways rarely ever experienced. When a client has ended therapy, he or she probably will have acquired this skill as well, to shut up and listen. An interpretation given by the therapist is based on several listening experiences which are then reflected upon and given to the client to assist him to see into his behavior.

“So, Fred, apparently you want it both ways. You want to be heard at the office but you also do not hear others. It is as if you want to be first. Your relationships are based on competitiveness.” Such might be an interpretation based on several or more sessions with Fred. At this point I will segue to my teaching experience at OLLI, a program here in Nevada and elsewhere, in which retirees matriculate as well as teach courses they feel confident in. One woman teaches about Star Trek, another the Holocaust, or line dancing. For several reasons, one to stave off death, perhaps another to meet other human beings of like interests (not yet), I offered a course in written expression. It is in my nature to be thorough, very prepared, over prepared, and to present not so much content which is easy for me, but to present myself as well, as a person, as a professional writer, as a giver, as someone who wishes at this stage in life, to quote Erik Erikson,  to be generative. I choose not to stagnate. I vampirically thrive on the interaction between students. All teachers do. Yet this has not been my experience; there are spatters of interest here and there in my class.

Five Wednesdays have come and gone as I am trying to palpate the soul of this class. Unfortunately in OLLI one can float in and out of a course, that is, sample another course, which is fine with me. I have done that. As an instructor, however, the experience is a labile one; excuses for not showing up abound, and at the age of sixty or more sometimes illness is a reason. I never ask for the reason. Consequently I can never count on a stable class to teach. I started with about 20 students and I am now down to perhaps seven or eight.  And I ask myself, as is my way, whether or not I am teaching over theirs heads, or I have bad breath or I am not teaching what they want if they really know what they want — I doubt that. I am at the point in which I will ask them if I am doing anything that has retarded their continuing the course. I open myself up to criticism, but I can handle that. The irony is that I don’t get paid for all this personal stress and course preparation. At times I walk out of class somewhat disheartened, but I catch myself.

While all this is going on I am listening to some of these retirees with a third ear and if some of them are onto me, the exercises provoke them into sharing who they are, I believe, in safe ways. If I ask them, to wit,  what city they are, and someone says Paris, I am on to that person. And I log that. The difficulty is that I struggle to listen while teaching, but I manage here and there with Tom, Ruth and Harry. I have some inklings of how they see me, often not in a flattering way, but strong ego that I am I go on for my credo is simple: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” In short, I can walk away from this course as well as I walked into this course, freely. I know that I do not conform to the usual instructor. I am not the usual instructor. I am hitting them with everything I know from my armamentarium and this may be intimidating or frightening. I have sat in other classes and some are poorly taught and others aimless because the instructor knows nothing about presenting material.  Classes are taught from vanity, mine too.

And what I have also observed is that a few courses are rooted in entertainment. I don’t entertain. I also won’t tap dance. Stubborn, un-American me. Mea culpa, maybe I am too serious (I am not a somber personality) for a large majority of these retirees. Or, perhaps I don’t have the magic for this age group, from late fifties into the nineties . In any case the dwindling class population has made me resolve to ask them about this, those who show up next time, and to tell them that if the class falls below 7 students I will end it. Rule 32 for clients: Never put yourself in a punishing position. I will not endure a lack of interest and attendance.

One woman, bless her heart, after class last week expressed her warm satisfaction with how I was teaching the course, how she found it varied or different in a good way and it was the kind of remark you expect at the end of a term if you have done your job well. Another dropped out of the course because she wanted her way in presenting writing to the class and was not prepared for that when the day came. That I did not allow her to wing it and present her effort, for she had mucked up my teaching sequence, she left the class forever. Ah, boundaries. You can’t use boundaries with me. Oh, yes I can. She was a child. Another student presented a tender and sterling piece, the best so far. If only more students were there to have encouraged him!

By next Wednesday I will know if the course goes on or not.

 

 

Kato

No, not the “faithful valet” of the Green Hornet, a radio series in the mid-thirties, before my time. The humorous  reminiscence of this is that after December 7, 1941, Kato, who was previously of Japanese lineage now became the Hornet’s “faithful valet,” and later on morphed into being Korean. Kato is a Japanese model train set, in this case n scale, a size smaller than HO. Lionel and the German Marklin are standard bearers of model trains. I have had a romance with trains since I was a young child. I “owned,” or thought I owned my Lionel train set in the early fifties. My two uncles, Bernie and Seymour, would buy me a milk car, caboose, a different car each Christmas. Eventually I had a lovely set to play with. If I had “owned” it I am sure I would have kept it up to this day and it would be a collectable, for the Lionel cast iron engine had a gravitas to it, the passenger trains delightful and substantial to the eye. The trains had “heft.”

Unfortunately my father asked, most likely with my mother’s knowledge, to give up the train set so that he could sell it and have additional monies to pay for my bar mitzvah. I acquiesced, although I had no idea what was being asked of me, stone that I was at the time. I imagine today that the set went for fifty or sixty dollars and I imagine if my father had asked my two uncles for help it all could have been avoided. The trains are no longer unfinished business of my childhood. They are a memory and so after six decades I have decided to buy a small set for my old age. Trains have emotional freight (pun intended) for me.

If I had that old Lionel set, I would leave it to my son as a memento; he might get some pleasure as to having this Kato set from my dotage given to him after I am gone. Yet I have given him over the years two 35mm cameras that I used while photographing the family as he grew up. In my eyes, they are more of a dramatic importance, considering all those familial images through the metaphoric eye of the camera. At 73 I often think of what I will leave behind of material importance for loved ones, although what I leave in terms of memories is of so much more worth. I can control somewhat the tangible, but not the ephemeral memories in another’s mind.

For weeks I perused model railroad magazines, which was fun, condensed it all down to a different train set, Atlas, and at the last moment went for a Kato train set that was brand new, a starter set, a simple oval, with a Santa Fe engine, passenger cars and an observation deck car. While I was honing in on this set, searching through ebay for kits to populate my new choice – a silo, a barn, cars, all in n scale, I came across a standing modular bench of plywood and pine for the train set. It was 2 by 4, for n-scale is diminutive and I wanted a set in a corner of one room. The kit had to be assembled and all I had to do was buy foam board (4 by 8) and have it cut into four top pieces of 2 by 4. I have yet to glue one board to the table top with what they call “foam friendly”glue and then I lay the tracks, mount the trains and off I go.

When the table arrived I saw it was beyond my capacity. My mind was confused by the instructions, my skills were lessened by what I perceived was way over my head. I experienced fear.However, my wife is a diy person of a high order. And she put together the table to my pleasure, and I was taken by her capacities. I enjoyed watching her use a power drill with quickness and skill. All beyond me. While doing this she disarmed me by asking if she could play with these trains as well. Of course. Join me, my kindred spirit. Let us do this together. Kato had won her over. Recently on a plane trip to Chicago, up high, the sunlight came through her window and faceted upon her bracelets which were laced with Swarovksi faux rhinestones. The plastic ceiling above and the area about her seat lit up into starry constellations and Jane reveled in all this.  She is delighted about little pleasures in life and there is the wondrous child in this, and so I sensed all this in her wanting to play with these moving cameos we call trains.

Psychologically there is a degree of dominance, power and control when you sit down with a train set. And as one imagines all kinds of events and happenings as these diminutive trains do their elliptical orbit, I feel the train set provides the child in all of us the rare, the very rare sense of dominion, of control of something in our lives and perhaps that is why we adore them so. And they never question our control, they either fall off the track, stop suddenly or fail to brake. We are their deities, who set things straight.

What excited Jane was the realization after she went to You Tube and  rail fan sites, that trains sets could have themes. When I was growing up the train set was put on the floor, lovingly  appareled with what devices one had and with a built-in whistle and a white tablet the size of an aspirin put into the engine’s top funnel, smoke was given off. I can still smell that deliciously acrid odor, like the oil on wheels moving on tracks. Nowadays much time is devoted to the scenes that incorporate the trains — Southwest, maritime locations, urban, northern tier of the States and so on. I have chosen to create a Southwest theme, a barn, a mesa, a bridge, here and there a mountain range, all of this to be done slowly, leisurely, for one never completes a train set, one only goes along for the ride, imagination the engineer.  The repetitiveness of a simple Kato train doing its elliptical orbit will suffice for me, for it is soothing in a peculiar way, at least to me. Round and Round.

Cantor Matyas Balogh

I don’t have much to work with. There is a torn photograph and a business card, both over a hundred years old. The card has faded and is foxed much like an old book or print. In the photograph my great grandfather is wearing his cantorial hat and has strong eyes, quite possibly hazel. He was a hazan, Hebrew for cantor. The card is written in Hungarian such as Boldog Ujevet Kivan (in boldface), fokantor beneath his name, Hebrew letters at the bottom left and what I believe is the town of Monor, which is in Hungary, at bottom right. (Anyone who can translate these words?)

I was named after him, Mathas Balogh Freese, which has been a bane for much of my life. Often mispronounced, I grew up detesting it. Bob or Dick would have been better. My mother caved  to my grandma Flora who always extolled her father and most likely pressured her to name me after him. The name looks good in print but I wasn’t in print for all my childhood and young adulthood. Who calls a kid “Mathias”? Even today if a nurse calls me in to see the doctor she often mispronounces the name, often in a Spanish lilt, or struggles through the three phonemes. So it is MAYtheeuss, MUHthias, or Monotonous. (Try to mispronounce Steve.) In Hebrew school I became Mordecai, not too bad. In Spanish class I was called Mateo. Mathias and Mathew are closely related linguistically, for they mean “gift of god” in Hebrew. That I can handle. For years I was called Matty, much a girl’s name and one classmate was called Mathew which made me jealous. Odd to think, that Matty kept me immature in my own self. When I was teaching in my mid twenties an older teacher and friend told me he couldn’t call me Matty and told me to go by Matt, which I did. I liked that. I renamed myself, how unusual, as I look back.

So Shakespeare’s line about what’s in a name is poetically clever, but not psychologically true, not for me. We are defined by our names. Naming is a critical issue, for it is also labeling. So in 2014 Sidney, Sylvester and Beatrice don’t make it, they are punitive to the children who are dubbed in such a tone deaf manner. Kirk Douglas is much more mellifluous than Isadore Demsky Danielovich, and Tony Curtis wears better than Bernie Schwartz. We named our daughter Brett after a character in The Sun Also Rises, only to discover years later that the Navy wanted to recruit her as a seaman.

About a year ago I wrote, “Cantor Matyas Balogh,” a love story from my new collection of stories about the Holocaust, in “I Truly Lament,” soon to be edited for publication in 2015 by Dzanc. I cannot explain why this love story of a cantor with the backdrop of the Holocaust for context arose in my mind. I am curious about my great grandfather. I know that he supposedly spoke many languages, as grandma bragged, some fourteen it was said (really? I don’t think so, but maybe). I heard as a child that he flirted or “fooled” around with some of the women in the congregation. Why not? Hungarian woman are scrumptious — think Ilona Massey. And the Hungarians are renown for being superior mathematicians and physicists.

He died before the Nazis and was not part of the Holocaust, but I wonder if his tombstone was turned over by the Hun. I believe he is interred in Hungary which does not explain why Grandma Flora came over and he remained. All not known to me. I have few details about him that could not fill a thimble, yet he remains in my mind. I would like to go to Monor, only if I research his ancestry and have more to go on before I depart. I wonder how many, many decades have passed without a stone being placed on his coldly unfriended marker. I would do that and in some peculiar way I would make peace with myself. And I would be moved and I would weep a little, for I am of his line. It does give me satisfaction that I had an ancestor of some brilliance.

I stop here to tell the unvarnished truth. I pay homage to him because it confirms that I ,too, am intelligent and smart; that I had a relative who flowed intellectually; that my father was a dunce and I have struggled all my life, in a way, to become Matyas Balogh;  his intelligence, his gifts sustain me so metaphorically it hurts. As a retired shrink, so much is latent and manifest here, like a juicy pomegranate, so much to tease out and to reconcile with and to draw much sustenance from.

I am, I am  so very much– Mathias Balogh Freese

When Grandma assimilated here, she went into vaudeville and was known as Flo Balogh (pronouncing it Barlow). I once asked a Hungarian woman if she could tell me something about the name. Chuckling, she said it was very common in Hungary and  was the equivalent of Joe Smith. So much for exceptionalism.

Americanized, assimilated, Flo always urged me to become a rabbi! And she would give me lunch to encourage that. Often it was a Swiss cheese and ham sandwich with a strawberry milk drink shot with seltzer, which I loved.  Ham, milk and cheese, leads to becoming a rabbi — or a goy.  Meschuge! And at Christmas time I once discovered a small Christmas tree on top of the television set, probably a residue when she was in vaudeville and everybody was everybody else. I was offended at that, for my conditioning as a Jew had been set in place and the old battleax was a violator. Feed her bulbous ass to Moloch. I wonder if she was a handful for my great grandfather, for as a young woman she was a real beauty. I have a few pictures of her which are portraits from the hand of Mucha, Art Nouveau all the way.

Grandma had the gauche panache of Zsa Zsa Gabor and one hell of a father.

 

 

Flossing Uncle Sidney and Aunt Rose

When you floss and get into the apse between opposite teeth, snapping the dental tape, you remove detritus. Reminiscences are like that, they need to be dislodged from crevices if you  have a mind to.Thinking of Sidney and Rose is like removing something that has lodged someplace in me. And it needs telling. It has been slightly over 60 years since I last saw them. I am sure no one goes to their gravesites.They were both harmless and good people, doing their earthly business here until they died. I have no idea when they died, or who went first, or where they are buried. I come from that kind of “family.” I was not alienated from them but simply did not keep up any contact and eventually all of us were out of mind of the other. Disparate matter. As my aunt and uncle they were shadow people; they came and went in my childhood and left some benign deposits in me.

It is of note that both of them were born in the 19th century. My father, who was born in 1915, remembered when fire engines were drawn by horses. So they were alive before and during the turn of the century before WW I. I can only speculate what they observed and absorbed during their childhood and how very different it was. I know no one extant now who was born before 1915. Time most assuredly moved much more slowly for Sidney and Rose as they grew up. Art Nouveau was flowering and Art Deco was yet to be.

Sidney was deaf and used a hearing aid; Rose was more deaf and far from “dumb,” and sometimes I remember she would sign with him. (What an interesting phenomena to observe as a child, a mild wonderment.) They had no children and I wonder if they feared they would inflict their disability upon them; or, perhaps Rose or Sidney could not have children. I don’t know. All is projection. In the late forties and early fifties these things were not discussed.  Only thought about, only imagined, but never expressed. When the family was together and my grandmother, Flo, had her next heart attack, Sidney would play the ukulele by her bedside and make jokes, for he was an alive human being; this was his mother from her marriage to an earlier husband, Gross was his name.  His brother from that marriage was Nat, for it was a blended family from two different husbands. I never felt any distinction between all the children, such as a step-brother, et al. That was very good to experience. I can say that the Grosses were more intelligent than the Freeses, much more so. Just more IQ, simple as that.

Sidney was deft with his hands and things electric before the digital age; indeed, he had wired up a bulb next to the house phone so that an incoming call revealed itself as a blinking light so that Rose would become alerted to that. (I never visited with him and Rose at their home. How strange.)I associate  to a lady’s veil to Aunt Rose, for veils in the 40s were still being worn, and I believe she wore one, once. How curious if you think about it. Rose would sit on a chair and take in and not participate except for now and then becoming animated enough to say a few words and these words were said as if she had glue on her tongue, for she gave out  the special ruminant sound of someone trying to emulate normal speaking. Her words had an undercurrent of aural paste to them. Dim is my memory of her except to note she was inoffensive, never was harsh or demeaning to me, nor was she affectionate or engaging. She must have thought to herself about how much her mother-in-law was a blustering and powerful person. I have a sneaking impression that she was a powerhouse of feelings behind that disability. How deafness must have frustrated her, inordinately so. Sidney, in many different ways, spoke for her. Whoever died first must have left the other self twice-devastated, truly struck dumb.

If Rose was mutely reserved, silently monumental, Sidney was alive and vibrant, his DNA ever percolating. I have an ancient sepia photo of him during the forties in which he is standing and holding a comb over the top of his lip and beneath his nose , his right hand outstretched in a Nazi salute, his hair draped across his brow in a wicked imitation of Hitler. This is Sidney. I liked Uncle Sidney, he was a kibitzer, as all uncles should be; he once went with me to Coney Island and I enjoyed going into a funhouse with him, gripping his thumbs out of expectation as he guided me from behind.

That photo will disappear when I disappear, for my son will have no use for it or even know who his great Uncle Sidney was.

For Sidney she was his compass rose. Apparently they were well matched. Aunt Rose’s purse probably concealed a box of Chiclets in the yellow box, like teeth to dispense, for she would give gum to those about her, meaning me; she probably had rouge in her purse for that was common for women to use; a glass case for she wore metal spectacles, and tissues, of course. Perhaps a handkerchief doused in a light perfume, for she, in retrospect, seemed to take care of her presentation of self. And I imagine her having a matchbook size of, Sen-Sen, those tiny licorice-tasting black tabs for bad breath or to conceal smoking. I dimly recall she wore dresses that had florals upon them, often black. Aunt Rose wore no hearing-aid unlike Sidney, for she was profoundly deaf and one could watch her with fervor read the lips of others. Sidney wore jackets or suits and I believe he did so because he could slip his hearing-aid pack into a side pocket and from there bring his wire up to his ear. As a child I never viewed him as deaf regardless of this contraption, for he was attuned to me, heard me at all times. He piqued my interest with his ukulele  playing and I began to fumble and struggle with a baritone uke my father brought home from his work at a pawnshop. I could never master that damn thing.

In the ninth grade he helped me put together a science project, those horrific assignments we all detest. He took me to a shop where he either worked or knew the owner, and here were all things hearing. (Given his disability, I have no idea what he did for a living. How uninformed we are as children –how uninformed are we are as adults.) He cannibalized hearing aids and earplugs and helped me put together more of a display than a science project; but as I look back it was informative and although not a “science project” as wanted by my teacher, it was different and well executed. Thank you, Uncle Sidney. It isn’t every day that a young boy has an uncle and aunt who are hard of hearing. Did they sign to one another during sex? Did they really have to? What words are necessary in any case. I must note that I have had a significant loss of hearing this past year or so. I will probably be fitted with a device. I can say that I sense the lacunae between sounds to be more pronounced than ever. I am still metabolizing what this loss of hearing means for me.

For the past month or so I have gone over in my mind all the scant reminiscences I have of this quiet couple. I know why. It is the last roundup and I want to have everything neat and tidy, foolish me. But this homage is for them, for they are forgotten except by their  73 year old nephew. Epicurus’s epitaph reads: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.” While I live, I remember!

 

 

I Had a Dream Last Night

“I have a dream, a fabulous dream, babe” — “Gypsy.”

Rosalind Russell with high heels stomping on stage, in deep swagger, blaring out her song, like Ethel Merman on steroids, it is a self proclamation. I associate to Martin Luther, anti-Semite par excellence, who majestically told eternal Rome and her pope: “Here I stand.” All that in this theme which somehow and in some way, like the tail on a kite, flutters over my dream as if, I,too, have something to shout out in a stentorian way.

Essentially as only a dream can present itself, I see before me a series of two sets or stages, as if constructed for a play. To my left there is a small room apparently enclosed by metal as if a cage and shelving runs across all four walls. In the room there is an amanuensis or secretary that I cannot see but I feel he is a librarian, or a keeper of the books.  The books are unusual in that they are all vividly bound paperbacks, reds, royal blues and so on. I am taken by the beauty of shelves so densely lined with books. One book vaguely opens before my eyes but I cannot decipher it except to realize it is of paper. And then it is gone after my very cursory inspection.

Next to the book cage, what appears beneath me is some kind of lateral bin. I shuffle some papers or folders aside and I come upon four books. They are sheathed in leather, perhaps some metal as well and they are hardbacks, all together as if a series. I have four of them. As I think about them, they have covers like accountant ledgers (am I being taken into account?).

As I pull them from the bin, each book discloses a blue, thin paperback, a delightfully handsome blue. It is as if each of these books is a kind of primer or Cliff’s Notes to the hardback books. Somehow I am taken by them although I do not open any of the books, hardback or paperback. The dreams ends here although I feel there was a third portion I cannot recall, as happens in dreams, and a few other dream “strings” that evanesced and became unretrievable to my conscious mind.

As I remember the manifest content of the dream, three words come to mind: worth, capacity and accomplishment. I felt in the dream a welling up of accomplishment and that made me feel buoyant, afloat with good feeling. Secondly, “capacity” is an offbeat word — capable, capacious, etc –as if I was enlarged so that within my self I had the capacity to do more or produce more. Worthy was a feeling as well, but not as strong a resonance as the other two feeling states.

And so the dream ended, a few lines from “Gypsy” as if an undercurrent soundtrack; three words issuing up as I recollected my dream while awake; and a feeling of empowerment in terms of some personal achievement or other.

I don’t believe this dream is too difficult to interpret, but I will share it with my therapist for her input. Clearly I feel it is important enough to write it out in detail upon awakening.

A major association to all of this was the recollection of a dream I had more than thirty years ago. At the time, if I recall correctly, I was in a psychoanalytic institute. The dream I give here puzzled me for days before I “nailed” it. I mention it here because it came back to me while thinking about the dream I had last night.

In the old dream I was at a high altitude and situated on a mountain tarn. The lake was ringed by mountains. The lake was solemnly calm, too much so, eerie, nary a ripple on its surface. And I was on the beach, one of volcanic pebbles, not sand. As I stood at the shore I observed in the half foot or so of water before me three manta rays, or so I imagined them to be. They were flat  fish, one next to another and at rest, no movement at all.

For some reason I ventured to step upon one ray, which I did; it did not move or slip away. And then I stepped off. I was doing this with one foot. I stepped on each manta ray in such fashion, one foot on its back and then off. The fish did not move. And that was the entirety of the dream which annoyingly perplexed me for days.

I sought out symbols — mountains as breasts; water as the amniotic sac, et al. After much frustration I began to go over each part of the dream as if I was doling out the mathematical intricacies of an algebraic equation. Finally I came upon it in a happenstance. After all, what was the action in this arcane dream? I stepped onto and off a fish and that was it.

I wrote that I stand off and then on a fish. At last that morphed into “standoffish.” And there it was. It was an aha moment. I am standoffish as a person, no doubt about that. In a very primal and nonverbal way, the dream — if we accept this interpretation — was telling me something about myself. It is a stellar dream in that it reminded me of the cathedral entrances in which stories such as Adam and Eve for those who could not read. are carved in stone. The primitiveness of my dream appealed to0 me in its concrete simplicity.

And now what is the connection between the two dreams, one fresh and new, one ancient? That is to be determined in my next therapeutic session, hopefully.

Manta rays do not exist in mountain tarns. They are, in this dream, fish out of water, they don’t belong, I may say. And I wonder if my standoffishness is somehow related to a fish out of water, out of its element. Or, in both instances I am an outlier; something to ponder.

 

 

 

 

 

Sleep Deprived

 

In the past 90 days or so I have had difficulties getting a good night’s sleep. For me that means at least about 5 to 6 hours uninterrupted by bathroom visits. As time went on the amount of sleep was gradually reduced to about one or two hours and then 45 minutes of restlessness — watching TV, reading, feeling anxious and unsettled emotionally. Eventually I was feeling sleep deprived during the day. I greeted too many dawns fully awake.

One night was an insomniac’s fare — sleeplessness only moderated by tossing and turning, walking about the house, worrying about what this experience was and what it meant. I tried to survey what had happened or what was happening to me and these factors loomed large. Of course, I am the last to know.

I had been sitting in on a course on grief which I felt was creeping into my mind in a way that, apparently, was not healthy for me. I was struggling with a second reading of Becker’s The Denial of Death whose implications were unnerving intellectually and psychologically. I don’t deny death, that each day is adieu to who I am and more so that at 73 I am nearing my end.

I had recently retuned to psychotherapy after four decades with the express self-purpose of attaining support for all kinds of issues, one of which was to find solace or comfort as I stumbled forward into oblivion. My own obsessing over the years left for me and how was I to use them without resorting to a panicked filled bucket list, Americana at its most strident. In this nation we don’t relate to one another. What we do is sell a part of ourselves like so much dry goods to one another, each moment of the day. I was living with fear, drenched in it.

All of these concerns combined, I believe, served to keep me up through the night. One day I expressed all this to my wife, Jane, and I felt some relief later that day as if something had lifted or eased, but not too much so. Nevertheless, after checking with a pharmacist I settled upon an over the counter supplement, Melatonin, as something that might ease my nightly insomnia. It didn’t work. Thinking about all this, I called my physician’s assistant and made clear to her that my sleeplessness had an undercurrent to it of anxiety and could she ask the doctor for  a non habit-forming and non-additive medication. I am glad I fully expressed the anxiety part of it and did not hold back.

He prescribed Trazodone, “an antidepressant used to treat depression. It may also be used for relief of an anxiety disorder (e.g. sleeplessness, tension), chronic pain or to treat other conditions….” (It is the first time in my life I have ever had to take such a drug.) So the medication seemed on target. I’ve been on it for fewer than three days and some relief has been given but not a full night’s sleep. The prescription information says: “It may take 1 to 4 weeks to work.” Well, it hasn’t kicked in as yet, but I hope it does. I must wait.

As I think over and reconsider the cumulative weight of worry all these past weeks wreaked upon me by myself, I observe how fog creeping into me like Sandburg’s cat paws gnawed at my inner self, shrouding me, making me unclear to my own self. I was self-depressing myself. I was making myself anxious. Somewhere most unconsciously I chose to show these mental tensions through the symptoms of sleeplessness. As if the latent stresses were telling my unknowledgeable self that I was not awake, not aware of what was occurring in me. To be asleep is not to  be aware. So sleeplessness was a telegram to myself — it is a symptom. What is keeping me awake? If you stay awake, you might defer and delay dying, at least for this one night, so morbidly amusing.

About a year ago in a different medical situation, a nurse practitioner asked me if I was generally an anxious person. I quickly said no defensively, as if it implied an imperfection in my self. I lied to her. I am an anxious person, and a worrier. The fear is that the personal idiosyncracies of my very own special death and dying will not be controlled in any way — that high anxiety will win out and flood over me. as I lay dying, serving doubly to compound the process itself.

To  die is the final loss of control, as if we have ever controlled anything in life. I imagine my fear is that I will be blown apart, disparate selves, unglued and unhinged when I “allow” death to have its way with me. That is the great fear in me, the loss of control. And that, I think, creates a large measure of anxiety in me. I don’t want to lost my grips on things, I have been that way all my life.

For me it is a great fear to die explosively, to burst asunder and to be no more. I suffer from dread.

I cannot say more. I am stuck with this last thought. I don’t want to hear an observation or asked a question or given an answer or proffered a therapeutically  astute interpretation. Primally, I want to be held by my mother, in her arms, like a young child, as I pass through. This might ease my cowardice.

A Self Surprising Synchronicity

Gifting a friend with a copy of Down to a Sunless Sea, I browsed through the book until I came to “Echo,” a story about the relationship between two men, David and Jonathan, and for the first time I realized that it was a hearkening back to ancient Israel. And then I came across a section of dialogue from Citizen Kane which I had used to further a theme of the story. I found this to be an example of synchronicity because I recently drafted a syllabus for a course in writing in which Kane  would be screened. I wanted to focus on the issues of loss, separation and abandonment which run latently and manifestly throughout that great film.

I have never been quite able to nail down the hold that film has on me, regardless of how much analysis I give it. It is like losing a great love in one’s life, for the questions of separation are never resolved and finally fall into the bag of reason, which is always insufficient. What is left is a “nag,” the kettle of fish of what could have been, the ifs and perhaps. For some of us the “nag” remains forever, although rolled about in the mind like a gumdrop on the tongue, refashioning and  reshaping it., reformulating the original experiences. The

“nag” becomes a worry bead of memory.

And here in a story I wrote perhaps more than a decade ago I was still wrestling with that movie and using it to good use in the story’s construction. I had seen Kane before the age of 10, for sure, and I was affected by it in ways I did not comprehend until I came to analyze it as a writer many years later. The film is part and parcel of my psychological duffle bag.

And when I saw the passage in “Echo” I was slightly taken aback as how it has resonated down through my writing years. Here is the extended quotation from “Echo.”

“I always remember Bernstein’s speech fromCitizen Kane.

‘A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1986, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.’”

“But that is an old man speaking.”

“David! No. It is all of us speaking; it is the gravity of relationship within us, the ebb and flow — the heartbreak, of time misused and unlived. It is life moving into death.”

I did not quite fathom that, granted that it was achingly rueful and tender, of an opportunity lost. And there was something ineffable to it all.”

And here is Bernstein’s “nag,” unresolved, unconsummated.

I find it of interest that I come upon Kane repeatedly. It is a kind of longing I experience of lost memories, of lost acquaintances, of ephemeral friendships as a child that leaves a mnemonic patina in my mind. Indeed, it is a haunting, almost uterine in nature, in that it speaks of a place and time when all was safe and secure in the world, in which attachment was close and strong, a given. Memories are like Gumpian box of chocolates, some sweet, some tart and only a few superbly piquant, so that the taste remains in mind and somewhere a mental note is made to seek out that pleasure once more, for human beings desire repetition. But all real pleasures of mind and soul are evanescent, never to be repeated. In such a light our very lives are a metaphor for that pleasure that will never come this way again.

Wouldn’t it be stimulating to have Kane narrated by his cherished Rosebud? What did Rosebud make of her/his devoted childhood playmate? What was it like to glide on the compacted snow with the young Charles urging more distance and more speed from his intrepid glider? And then after all those decades in storage, like Kane’s other misbegotten treasures, to be dismissively cast into a roaring furnace, incinerated without Kane shedding a tear or two, from memory, for Rosebud in a way had mothered him by being attached to him, never thinking once to separate out from Kane or abandoning him.

I wonder if material and inanimate objects ever keep memories of their users, their owners, their adoring fans. Is a kite mindful of who flies it? Wouldn’t it be a different world if an object or cherished thing remembered?

And so Rosebud ends the long period of neglect and is immolated in the furnace, for only does the audience grasp who Rosebud is and what haunted feelings it possesses. And Charles Foster Kane’s last words are of his only companion, his own mother as a child.

 

 

 

 

Taliban Thinking

I think there is much truth to the idea that when you deal with a Nazi, an unregenerate Nazi, reasoning, persuasion, common sense and pleading count for nothing. After all the movies you and I have seen, all the documentaries about the Holocaust over the decades you realize that the Nazi mind is unrecoverable, for it is forever lethally conditioned. That man can be psychologically eviscerated and be implanted by the state’s doctrine and dogma has been seen throughout world history. Men voluntary at times choose to be slaves, for freedom is frightening and one has to be responsible –and accountable. Fromm called it “escape from freedom.”

In Schindler’s List there is an indelible moment in which a Jewish woman architect tells the Commandant that with his permission she could erect a better structure in the camp. With that he pulls out his Luger and kills her. In Auschwitz there was a saying: “Here there is no why.” And so the proper construction of the building was irrelevant, for the real task was to work each person to death. The architect, a reasoning individual, could not grasp that. No reasonable human being can. Implicit in this was that no Jew could improve anything a German had constructed.

So Recently a 100-year old Nazi died while under home arrest; he was involved in one of the most significant massacres of civilians during World War II in Italy. Until he died he found nothing wrong with his participation in the massacre for he was following orders from Hitler, the banal cliché that came out of World War II. Men of this ilk just need to die off. And a big kerfuffle was made about his funeral and where he was to be buried, all the factions on both sides fighting over his internment. [Drop his corpse in the alligator pond at a local zoo, for that would be fitting.]

And recently I have been reading about the Tea Party and its adamantine resistance to anything governmental, as if the Articles of Confederation was the best kind of government. It was not. And the pundits have offered all kinds of interpretations of the Taliban thinking of the Tea Party. Most of these clowns come from the old Southern confederate states, especially Texas. I am of a different mind about these people who often deny evolution, climate change, same-sex marriage, the age of the planet, and abortion. I don’t believe that reason works with these people, for they have the same mental rigidity of the Nazis as well as the Taliban.

They are nihilists. In that is the political doctrine  that all governing institutions must be done away with. I contend that the species is made up of these kind of minds and states of being, this malignant mentation. And like Nazis and like the Taliban they must be dealt with by force if need be. In a sense the Tea Party is a kind of terrorist party. I see them as terrorists.  To savage rationality and reason is to crucify civilization upon a cross of insanity.

Not since that horrible year of 1968 in which we lost Martin L. King and Robert Kennedy, had the cop riot in the Chicago Democratic convention and riots in some of our cities  in which I and others felt that the country was coming apart did I experience such demoralizing disarray as the two week shut down of the country and the defunding debacle. And the chief Taliban was Ted Cruz. I’ve seen his like before in the guise of McCarthy, that megalomaniac alcoholic who set about destroying lives with his charges about Communists lurking in our government. I am old enough to remember the fear of communists, the blacklist and all that.

As a side note, Jane told me she was feeling out of sorts or disoriented, for a miasma of a kind had enveloped her. And since we watch a lot of news we both concluded that what was happening out there, in Washington, DC, had entered our home and had poisoned the atmosphere. It was as if we were experiencing PTSD. At moments it is helpful to shut down the media, turn off the smartphones and experience sheer silence, that experience which Americans dread. We are living in and experiencing shabby times.

A few words about oily Cruz — observe his body language, that lanky yet clumsy presentation of self, that smarmy innocence he gives off while presenting the most horrid of propositions; he is a greasy Elmer Gantry; his laissez-faire nonchalance which conceals a viper and the thinking of a nihilist, a Taliban. I am amused how often his Harvard degree and his brilliance is cited by others as if in awe. Goebbels had a PH.D. I an underwhelmed by degrees — Bush from Yale; O’Reilly from Harvard; the racist Woodrow Wilson and so on. Most of world history was the actions of people without a college degree. I am underwhelmed by Cruz’s education, for I heard recently his father, who is a pastor, I believe, alluded to his son in term of “end times,” you know that apocryphal nonsense of the rapture and all that evangelical Christian crap.

So here is a father who believes his son will be handy and about for the apocalypse; what a childhood Cruz has had! That is the “education” that has to be examined. Of course, all this came in a week in which Supreme Court Justice Scalia seriously spoke of an alive devil who was wily. I can now see him operating a rack with a woman accused of lust, while he comes under his frock.

Cruz will not change; he will be around until his term ends in several years. He needs to be taken on at each corner, for his is the block bully; he needs to be stymied, outwitted by those who didn’t go to Harvard and Yale. He is a Taliban within our government. He needs to be isolated and shunned until he can be excised. The greater threat  and calamity are those tens of thousands of supporters who are the dregs each country has in it, the forces of darkness. The Tea Party is the historical eruption not only in our country but in others of those primal and ignorant expressions of retrograde thinking, again something that must be met with force and not only with reasoning. I have little faith in reason when I deal with human beings. We are driven by nether forces that we are mostly not in contact with and if we were in contact, we’d most likely run like hell from ourselves. However, reason is all we have that separates us from the wolves at the door. Cruz would cannibalize his young to prove a point, the mind of a self-immolator.

So Jane and I were despairing this past week as we once again saw the reoccurrence of witches in Salem.

 

He Just Writes

After forty-two years I decided to return to psychotherapy. It was not a decision that was easily arrived at is the cliché. I can share, which is my nature, some of what motivated me to do so. Some feelings I will keep to myself where they mostly belong. Last year was one of medical awareness, pronounced at risk by one doctor which was not sensitively rendered.  A series of physical maladies befell me, a bone spur impinging on my spine was the severest and required a cortisone shot into the spinal area for relief; the agony was bordering 8 on the Richter scale. So one essential reason for therapy was the need for outside assistance for emotional support; I felt the hound of heaven nipping at my heels and at 73 everything related to death and dying is imminent, more so, of course if I were just a mere youngster of 55. I also had issues in my marriage which made me consider treatment as well.

What I am writing here is my first experience as a potential client after four decades and one year. I scanned the internet for male therapists, and I realized that Henderson, Nevada and exurbs are predominantly saturated with women social workers, psychologists, et al. My last treatment was with a woman therapist who ultimately proved to be disastrous and had serious disturbances of her own. Treatment was poor. In fact, in my book of essays This Mobius Strip of Ifs I thoroughly explore what that experience was like in the chapter called “A Spousal Interview.”

Consequently I found a therapist who listed “books, movies and travel” as his interests which are mine as well. And he was 63 which meant he knew who Milton Berle was. I could not work with a young shrink; the cultural backstory would be too much to bridge in my eyes. I spoke to him for a few minutes on the phone and he seemed friendly enough, open, and sharing if not talkative. I set up an appointment with some high hopes for the first session.

As I prepared myself for that first session I considered what he needed to hear from me, for this time around I would know what I wanted to work on and I knew who I was as opposed to the dolt who entered treatment at 28, a product of benign neglect and thoroughly unknown to his self. What I am about to share here are three touchstones I felt the new therapist needed to hear, listening with the third ear (Reik) is the operant phrase. I thought that these three touchstones would give him a pathway to some of the issues in my life. It is important to note that I did state them to the therapist and I will return to what he made of them — nothing verbal, I can say that.

A mentor of mind who I hold in high esteem and the most intelligent man I have ever met, an emotional genius, if you will, supervised me in a psychotherapy center he managed. We became close friends. In passing he once said to me that my life had been a holocaust of a kind and his evaluation was accurate — loss of a mother at 20, loss of a daughter by suicide at 34,  loss of a wife, a divorce, loss of another daughter’s boyfriend in an accident that also killed my wife of 29 years, and so on. Much has befallen me, including a childhood often bereft of real, demonstrative affection.

The second touchstone was a comment my mentor made to someone who asked how should she access who I am, as she found it difficult. He replied tersely, “Matt, needs to be felt.” That comment has reverberated in me for years and I find it  dead on. I have cogitated over that  as I would a biblical commandment. Growing up under benign neglect, being felt was a parental omission. I was never read to. It is not an exaggeration. Rarely embraced or hugged. So whatever self I had was so regressively sequestered into a nether cavernous recess I never made my own acquaintance.

The final touchstone occurred in 1970. I was seeing Rochelle who was to become my wife. We were preparing to go out for the evening and I was trying to make a Windsor knot out of an unruly tie, one of those blaring ties out of the sixties. I asked Rochelle what she made of it. “It’s beautiful, Matt,” she said. Given who I was at the time, I challenged her with some sarcasm, comments such as, “C’mon, cut it out, what do you really think?” Rochelle stepped closer. “Matt, it’s a beautiful tie,” she whispered. And with that the thorn was removed from the lion’s paw, I dropped my lance, and I was disarmed. It was to be the beginning of many firsts with her, for she was teaching me to trust, one of the significant issues I had.

By the time I was in the session three touchstones in addition to the need for support for my aging carcass were in place. I was handing over some of the keys to the kingdom. I was ready to hear any therapeutic reflection if not interpretation about any or all of them. I was prepared not to be smartass retired shrink showing off what he knew. I wanted to be a client. I came for help.

What I am reporting here did, in fact, happen. What I made of it I will offer for your purview.

I was on time, of course, and I was greeted by the therapist who worked for a therapy agency. He brought me into his office, asked me to take a seat on a small couch. Across my way on a somewhat canted angle was what I thought was a therapist’s seat. The therapist who I will call Mr. O (for oblivious) sat at a desk which had a monitor on it and at a 45 degree angle from my seat. He proceeded to work on the computer filling in data about me. The computer had a glitch he could not resolve. He got up and invited a woman in to help him with that. She then left. (As a therapist I would have never allowed that intrusion!)

He continued on the computer for a while longer and then shifted to asking me questions, specific questions, for apparently he was doing an intake on me. Note that he did not make eye contact with me, just asked questions and wrote down my answers. This went on for a few minutes and I was perturbed by this approach if not rudeness. I thought I should get up and leave but I did not want to act out, but I waited to see if there would be a turn of events.

I was keenly aware that I did not like what was happening. I was being objectified. I will explain later on what technical and relational errors he was making with me as a therapist. I recall saying to him words to the effect that I was miffed with what was going on. He replied that he was good at “multitasking.” Now that is chutzpah! He told me that things have changed and that these are requirements for him to do in that agency. I empathize with future and unknowing clients who might experience this and remain silent and eat therapeutic shit. He did at last turn to me for the rest of the session, continued to write down data for the intake which was all right with me, now that  he sustained eye contact.

Somewhere in the session I quoted a line from Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman’s wife says to one of her sons with reference to her husband, “Attention must be paid.” A listening, a hearing therapist would pick that up and reflect back to me something like, “So, Matt, here is our first session and you believe or feel that I am not listening to you.” A good therapist decodes. And here I will go off on a pertinent tangent.

If I were supervising Mr. O I’d ask him to tell me about the session, and to read his process notes. He probably would say that Freese said something from Miller’s play about attention being paid. The supervisor would ask him to clarify what that meant. Mr. O would say that upon second thought Freese thought I was not listening to him. Is that all? the supervisor might proffer. I think so, Mr. O says. The supervisor might say this: You are also missing the latent message as well. The client is supervising you. All clients supervise unconsciously so. He, in effect, is telling you to pay close attention now and in the future to what he is telling you; that you are too busy with gadgets and taking notes without focusing on what he has said. Indeed, he begins the session with three touchstones which you never attend to. These are powerful assessments by the client which he gives to you for your input, reflection or interpretation.Where were you, Mr. O? Think about why you were absent to these momentous themes.

I don’t believe I heard anything of interest from Mr. O except for a comment that I may have attachment issues. I followed up on that and he added some thoughts. What I found disconcerting, to say the least, is that you don’t say to a client that he has oedipal issues or attachment issues without much more information to arrive at that assessment and then if you do have the facts, you use it in a way that is meaningful, oh, such as, “Matt, did you find your mother unwilling to be close to you?” Otherwise labeling my “disorder” is useless to me and that is exactly what I felt when he said I have attachment issues. Mr. O may be eclectic, or have a panoply of approaches in his quiver, but for my money being minimally analytic is not one of them, but I am prejudiced at this point. And I decided after a few days to cancel our next appointment. I sensed he knew he had blown it as we went on to discuss the possibility of a second session for by that time he had heard my misgivings.

One other observation. Mr. O disclosed information about himself and his family of origin; that he is the child of Holocaust survivors; that he went to see a Freudian psychiatrist at the age of eighteen; that he had difficulties with his father; that he experienced guilt in that setting. I felt that this intense self-disclosure was not appropriate in the first session, to say the least. When I practiced I was cautious about self-disclosing and when I did so, I tried to make it pertinent to the client’s situation. After all, I could tell my supervising therapist that I felt a need to blab this or that. Self-disclosing has always been a contentious issue among therapists and in the literature, at least when I was practicing. The session should have focused solely on what I was bringing to it. Clearly what I had to say about my own touchstones was never engaged. If Mr. O wanted to relate to me it should not have been through his own self-disclosure but through the content I was offering up for his consideration. I agree this is all debatable.

I will share something of my training so that you can sense what I was expecting, not inordinately so. When I was training in the mid seventies the first thing I learned was that you welcomed a new client to your office as if you were welcoming him or her to your home, asking him to sit, greeting him amiably (he is probably scared shitless, anxious or very nervous; it is the unknown – the new can paralyze) situating everyone comfortably. I learned that the very first client sentences in a therapy session often foretell the theme of the session and to be very alert to that. If the client was quiet, I might say “What has brought you here at this time in your life?” or “Is there something going on that you need talk to someone?” The critical point here is once the client is in your office the entire focus is on him, no working the computer, no taking notes without eye contact, no distractions and no third party allowed to enter. It is sacrosanct territory. If you are feeling compelled to share some intimacy with the client, save that for your shrink. Who’s treatment is it? I am not rigid, as I said about this, but keep yourself out of the first session, for it sends a message: someone finds me of worth to listen to for 50 minutes.

When I worked in an agency or clinic I was required to do intakes and when I did these clinical tasks I tried to put the client at ease. I might say this: I need to gather information from you. The clinic requires this. I will take notes as you speak but know that I am listening very hard to you (which was true) and what you are telling me are issues that are making you uncomfortable in life. Afterwards I will write up these impressions and the therapist assigned to you will now have a head start of a kind. I hope you will allow me to do this. I hope you understand. (I have never had anyone say no to my earnest plea.)

In private practice I chose not to do intakes. Many therapists do away with them completely. What I did was write out notes, my countertransferential feelings, impressions and possibly theories after session. I discovered that over the weeks a full picture of the client emerged and what I needed to know came out in any case in session. I trained myself to listen with the third ear, to decode manifest messages or themes for their latent value or meaning. I trusted myself and that took a long time as it must for any therapist. Mr. O seemed slightly obsessed with note-taking and while doing that he lost me because he was not attending to what I was saying or the feelings crossing my face for I experienced the way he was doing his intake as insensitive. I am here. Listen. Fuck your notes for now.

When Mr. O said he was capable of multitasking, what he said, in effect, was that he could do two or more things at a time and at my expense. Good for him. However, I am a human being and I want your attention, in part, because you are now a paid friend.  I am sure other individuals would not have minded any of this at all. I felt I could not be treated in ways that I did not treat my clients, basic civility, concentrated attention, undivided attention, I say, focused and putting on elephant ears to hear as much as I could. That I have had a bone spur, macular degeneration, et al (by the way he commented on his own recently diagnosed issue when I spoke of my malady, giving me a flyer describing his meds for that — sociability has its place, but not now, not here). All these issues in my life are not to be divulged in the very first session, rule numero uno for this once practicing therapist.

I sensed that he was trying to share which is human and reasonable, but in analytic psychotherapy he broke the “hold.” In short, the therapist’s task is to contain and hold the client so that he feels safe and secure and when that is established the client will feel secure enough to speak of pressing issues and life long struggles. So you are a good guy and you want the client to know that you have had similar issue in your life; well, we do that all the time in social discourse; my child has the flu and yours too, what did you do to medicate her? Shared suffering is not therapy in my experience. Disclose when it advances the client’s treatment! A good therapist should be quiet for a fair part of the session, assessing, turning what he hears into postulates or hypotheses; reflecting back to the client when he is stuck; or to put it another way, to cite Carl Rogers, one should be client-centered.

I suppose I could go on and on. The point is that Mr. O put me off. I bring him three or four major themes I was thinking about for a week as grist for the mill and he did not touch upon any one of them. He may have written all of them down, but he did not engage me at all. If a client had ever said to me that a significant issue in his life was that he did not feel felt, I would become instantaneously laser focused; pounce like a lion on a zebra’s hindquarters, ask him to put it into others words if he could; to cite a past example in which he experienced that; how did he feel about that self-conclusion? is it really valid?And I would know that in that piece of kryptonite that was slowly killing him in life that I had weeks ahead teasing out, grasping, reflecting, perhaps interpreting what he was telling me. Poor, Mr. O, he lost what could have been a very good client. And lucky Matt, I escaped wasted sessions leading nowhere.

On Teaching Writing

If all goes well, I will be teaching a course in writing in spring 2014. Through some self-promoting and hustling what I can offer as a writer, I got the go ahead from an administrator. If there are enough registrants for the course, it is on. So I have been giving it a good deal of thought, looking through old workshop formats I had conducted many years ago; exercises I have used in these workshops; essays I might use as formats or models for writing, et al. The prior post on this log, Why I Write, was an attempt to clear my throat as to what I want to accomplish with any workshop. And I will tinker with that blog as new thoughts arise.

The OLLI program is for retirees or semi-retires from 55 and up. I sat in for two sessions in two different courses on writing and was disenchanted with the teaching, structure and philosophy. My intended workshop would be geared to help individuals to express themselves, seek clarity if not awareness, and would be rooted in feelings as well as intellect. I was bored and stultified with what I had experienced and withdrew from both classes. The instructors were not really writers in my eyes. The less said the better.

The essential difficulty here with many of these instructors, I assume, is that they have no experience in teaching. Lecture is the weakest part of teaching unless you can do stand up well. The other problem here is that some if not all of the courses are much too long, which is especially onerous if you are teaching writing. And one course I was in fed into the neediness of people who just want to read their work without critique. The other course was a mélange, and rudderless. Good intentions do not a writing course make.

I also sensed that some individuals just wanted to ventilate without any criticism at all. I may be just blowin in the wind in the belief that students might want to learn the craft and the seriousness of purpose it requires. I may be offering something that might involve much more than they are getting in these two writing courses. I will find out, and if I cannot relate to their needs, so be it.

After decades of writing I really don’t know how to present this course. I sense, rather, the way I want to go, is to work on questions of feeling, of expressing oneself, leaving grammar, syntax, style and all the rest out of it for quite some time. I’d rather motivate and encourage which I believe I am good at. I really don’t know how to go about teaching writing. I do know what is bad teaching about writing which I experienced at OLLI.

I recall an experience I had with another English teacher decades ago. We were talking about teaching an idea or concept and he volunteered that he liked to take parts and pieces and synthesize them for his students, bring them together, conceptualize. I said that I preferred to throw an idea into the air and see what happened, not concerned in arriving at a final question or principle. For me the excitement was in observing what was before me, like a firework display. I could handle the discomfort, the dissonance and I was not in a hurry to reach conclusions, for it was much too much fun to be amid the confusion.

So in my possible workshop I would throw a lot of things at the class, see where it goes, think on my feet, be me, in short. All the while the latent drumbeat would be to get them to produce, to feel, to think, to become somewhat inwardly free, to resist the shoulds and oughts about writing, to work on helping them to decondition themselves, at least for a little while. It is no secret that to fly as an instructor, to soar in the classroom is to have been grounded in that subject.

The core truth of the course is to be free.

I would ask that they all read Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things. I would not teach the book but cite one or two passages, here and there, the hope being that they might draw something from his writings and apply it in class or in their writings. In other words I would throw a lot of things at them:  movies; books; plays; psychology and sociology; Rosebud; I would give to them the workings of my mind for them to consider and respond to; my biases; my prejudices; why this short story is fabulous and this not so; I want to create tumult and turmoil at least for ninety minutes. I want to Jerry Lewis them.

The semester has ten sessions to it and presently the classes are about two and a half hours, much too long unless it is pottery or painting. I am concerned about the amount of preparation required and how to sustain interest through variety and diversification. A lot of work has to be done in class as homework is not assigned as a policy so that students would be free of all the appurtenances of grades, attendance, et al which I fine rewarding. At this early time I am sketching in ideas of what to present and how to present it which is no easy task. It is not in my nature to “wing” all this or to pass the time by by having students read this or that to fill up time. Reading one’s work is essential but I don’t want to use this as filler. Consequently I keep asking the gnawing questions of what I want to teach and how to go about that with some craft.

I also fully recognize that the course is me. Every teacher’s course is about the teacher. The old cliché is that you remember the teacher and not what he taught and that is the way it should be. It is in the relationship, as it is in psychotherapy, that learning is created. I will give fully of who I am and that is not a problem for me. I have a strong self. It is through this self I hope to teach my writing course.

I know I have more to say but I’ll stop here.