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Poet, Editor, Alyce Wilson of Wild Violet Magazine, Reviews My Book

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Review: “This Mobius Strip of Ifs”

December 5, 2012 at 2:40 pm , by Alyce Wilson

This Mobius Strip of Ifs by Mathias B. Freese

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How does one summarize an entire life of more than 60 years? When faced with this ominous task, too many self-published writers produce rambling, episodic narratives that fail to capture the true drama and beauty of their lives. Fortunately for author Mathias B. Freese, he is a gifted essayist who has been writing essays for decades. By collecting his favorite pieces, he gives readers insights into both his personal life (which is, sadly, full of tragedy) and his views on such topics as education, psychotherapy, blogging, and, of course, writing. The book, as a result, is one part personal memoir and one part intellectual analysis.

This combination elevates the book, but it also means it is a book best read slowly. Readers are likely to find themselves pausing to contemplate the message behind each essay. Freese is direct and opinionated, and he often takes an opinion counter to popular thinking. Take, for example, the essay “Teachers Have No Chance to Give Their Best,” where he begins by railing against students for their “puerile minds” and “vacuity.” But while these words are harsh, he lays the blame squarely on teachers. As a former teacher himself, he strongly suggests that schools need to do more to encourage creativity and self-reliance.

Just when it seems he has given up, labeling the educational system as “a great Arctic mammoth wandering aimlessly,” he offers up a glimmer of hope: “Take any five decent, well-intended, creative and committed teachers and administrators, people who care, people in passion, free men and women, and one could wreak a reformation in weeks.”

Such is the power of these essays: he sets up problems in stark language, but he also points to the possible positives that we, as a society, could reach for. Whether writing about the challenges of the current publishing scene or the historical record of the Holocaust, he shows readers both the ugliness and the beauty of each topic. He shares valuable insights from his time as a psychotherapist, and he waxes eloquent on some of his favorite movies and classic film actors.

The personal essays in the back of the book provide a look at his family’s trials and grief. From the tragic loss of both his first wife and his daughter, to coping with memories of a neglected childhood, he writes powerfully when he is at his most personal. In many ways, these essays might have been a better way to begin this collection, since it would have helped to provide a real sense of the writer, in a personal way, before the denser, academic pieces.

This is a book that will stay with the reader, that will occasionally pop up as an undercurrent to conversations. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his fiction masterpiece, The i Tetralogy, it is a thoughtful, compelling read.

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by Mathias B. Freese

On December 6, 2012 at 11:55 am

 

Thank you for capturing my stance: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” — Kazantzakis (epitaph).

Interview: Mathias B. Freese by Vibha Sharma

Interview : Mathias B. Freese

fiction

by Vibha Sharma | on April 30th, 2012 | 1 comment

Mathias B. Freese is a multifaceted personality who is a teacher, a psychotherapist and an author. I got a chance to read and review(here) one of his books – ’This Mobius Strip of Ifs’ and was quite impressed by his writing style and the sincere way in which he has shared his life with his readers.


It was a pleasure to conduct an e-interview with him for our readers here.


1. When did you start writing your experiences in the book form ? How has been the writing experience so far?


I have been writing since 1968, although at age eighteen my high school yearbook published a poem by me which was so misunderstood and so savagely edited that I didn’t recognize it when it was in print. An English teacher got carried away and omitted the underlying theme of depression which I was experiencing when I wrote it. Unknowingly she compounded my resentment. It was the repressed Fifties, so what else is new? The next effort was ten years later in a short piece for an education journal which revealed or uncorked my disenchantment with teaching content in the classroom. After that my full-blown neurosis composed of despair, depression and rage revealed itself in 1974 when I had “Herbie” published, my first major short story. (See my first short story collection, Down to a Sunless See.) As you know the first essay in This Mobius Strip of Ifs , explores my serendipitous and synchronous adventure with that particular story. In any case after being listed with Mailer, Oates, Singer and other greats, I felt very encouraged and continued to write.
Rejections cooled my ardor but I never quit. Indeed, I promised myself that I would set out to write the best stories I could and at a later date have them published. This self-promise took thirty or so years. Characterologically this effort says so much more about me than as a writer. So as Spencer Tracy once said about Kathryn Hepburn in one of their collaborations, what there is of her is “cherce.” Consequently I don’t quit. I persevere. The only audience I write for is me and if you like what I have written, so be it.

My writing experience can be extracted in a sense from Kazantzakis’s epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

2. What has this literary journey taught you and enriched you with?

Vibha, this question is the equivalent, as I think about it, of assessing my very life which by the way is what I have done on a regular basis over the years and decades, in short, pungent, I hope, open and feeling essays. We are all born to be done away with. Again I go to an epitaph to help reflect, this time Epicurus: “I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind.” Much wisdom and therapy in that remark, for Epicurus, rightly so, believed that philosophy should be a kind of therapy.

But readers of this interview want something else, don’t they, Vibha? (Happy talk?) An aspect of myself is not to please others but that while I write I share my experience with you, with me first. I have enriched my literary journey, not the other way around. I give to my writing and I learn in that way to write better. Krishnamurti famously said in one of his dialogues, “The word is not the thing itself.” So all my writing is just an approximation of what turmoil, tumult and insight I have about my human condition. As we all should know, to cite Christopher Hitchens, we are only partially rational, animal, and often savage at that, and our human genome controls the robot that we are.

3. Which has been your most satisfying writing experience so far?

The i Tetralogy, my extensive take on the Holocaust, represented much of who I am as a Jew and human being, of my growing up Jewish in America. In that novel I put all the skills, imagination and heartfelt renderings I could about man. I have gone beyond Wiesel’s affirmation that indifference is not tolerable any longer. I have arrived at a different assessment based on my reading, psychotherapeutic experience, my atheism – free of religious conditioning, the bane of civilization, and I have gone into the unexplored country. Man is out of control, always has been, genetically so! In a few years we all will be reading about evolutionary psychology, the additional scientific work based on Darwin’s theories which have emerged in the 90s. Dawkins, Dennett, Ridley, Wright will become well-known names, and what they have to report based on immense scientific studies can be summed up in Richard Dawkins words: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecule known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment.” The Selfish Gene Consequently writing about the Holocaust allowed me to examine the nature of man so genetically far beyond Hobbes’s “short, nasty and brutish” assessment.

This Mobius Strip of Ifs, I believe, has given me the most pleasure because I was freewheeling in my approach and many essays were written over four decades and reflected the thinking I had at different stages of my adult life. Upon reflection, the book is about the emergence of a self. It was an assessment of myself and now at 71 I see where I had trod and what lay before me. Ironically it was you or someone else who wrote that the book was a profound self help one which, I feel, is an oxymoron.

Nevertheless, this made me think and if it is so, that I have made others go back to my book, chew and digest it, that is a delightful gift to this writer’s life. My working hypothesis is that this book is from an inner directed person, and that is uncommon. Recently the American Psychiatric Association deleted Narcissism from its manual of disorders, DSM IV or V. That is, most Americans are now narcissistic and what was formerly a disorder is now the norm. All those learned interventions I had acquired for dealing with this disorder goes out the window. So when an American goes overseas and wants a house and insists that it have an American bathroom, that kitchentop counters be made of granite, that all appliances be stainless steel only testifies to our lunacy, not our so-called normalcy. By the way, the essential trait of a narcissist is his or her emptiness, the rest is all bluff.

4. Are all the essays in ‘Mobius Strip of Ifs’ taken truthfully from your own life or do they have some fictional elements

too? How comfortable do you feel opening your feelings in front of the world?

Easy to answer. My life is non-fiction. I will not play shrink here, but I gather individuals are uncomfortable with my openness. An English Academic, who I have 50 years on, cited this difference between English and American writers. Americans are into Whitman, Thoreau, Ginsburg and British writers, except for Hitchens and a few others, are constipated, to be blunt. Brits, unlike Ginsburg, cannot howl. I can’t think of an English equivalent to Hart Crane. To make my point, this academic was displeased with my plumage. Oh I couldn’t care less because she cannot see through her own conditioning.

Having spent years in treatment and working on myself by reading Krishnamurti, I have no qualms about expressing my feelings openly, not disguised as in novels and short stories. The personal essay fits my personality and I use it as best I

can. Think about this: the real task of a good shrink is to make the unconscious conscious and human beings have a terrible time arriving at revealing themselves. We really do not communicate well as a species. We are gelatinous vats of suppressed and repressed feelings and awarenesses. When you can break through, you are free.

I struggle to be psychologically free. I can say that all my writing is about my need to be psychologically free, of myself, especially you, and of the world which conditions 24/7. And the worst felon in all this is the monolithic and mammoth conditioning of religion which is the dragon at the gate. Freud argued (The Future of an Illusion) that to become free of this conditioning brings you into full adult maturity as a human being. Religion is man -made. (Pause.) Consequently it is corruptive.

5. What do you intend to write next? When is it expected to be published?

The next book is already finished and I am thinking of how to go about getting it published. I have submitted it to several online magazine contests, but most likely I will have to self-publish it myself.I will not engage agents on this because it is so time intensive to acquire one I’d rather go the other alternative routes. After all, I do not have a vast readership nor do I devote many hours to promoting the book. I try to do what I can but I refuse to be sucked into rampaging capitalism which is all the rage across the internet, the hustling, self-promoting, the slobber at some writers’ mouths as they urge you to read this or that.

So here is a synopsis of my next book. No one who encounters the Holocaust seriously is ever done with it.

I Truly Lament, is a varied collection of stories, inmates in death camps, survivors of these camps, disenchanted Golems complaining about their tasks, Holocaust deniers and their ravings, and collectors of Hitler curiosa (only recently a few linens from Hitler’s bedroom suite went up for sale!) as well as an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the bunker. The intent is to perceive the Holocaust from several points of view.

An astute historian of the Holocaust has observed that it is much like a train wreck, survivors wandering about in a daze, sense and understanding, for the moment, absent. No comprehensive rational order in sight.

In my award-winning Holocaust novel, The i Tetralogy, considered by some an important contribution to Holocaust literature as well as a work of “undying artistic integrity” (Arizona Daily Sun) I could not imagine it all, and this book of

stories completes my personal struggle. Within the past year 10 stories have been published online and in print from this collection, the most recent “Slave” published in Del Sol Review in December 2011.
I will promote my present book and by year’s end publish the new one.

6. What were your thoughts when you started writing iTetralogy ? What unique thing did you want to convey on the Holocaust that has not been done before?

Allow me to depart a little from the question and express my thoughts in this fashion To have survived the Holocaust is to have been gutted as a human being. The inner self is ravished. Whether or not one recovers from that is beyond comprehension.

All literary depictions of the Holocaust end as failures, perhaps revealing shards of understanding. And is understanding ever enough? Writing about the Holocaust is a ghastly grandiosity.The enduring mystery of the Holocaust is that memory must metabolize it endlessly and so we must try to describe it, for it goes beyond all imaginable boundaries. One soon realizes the fundamental understanding that the species is wildly damaged, for only a damaged species could have committed the Holocaust.
No great piece of art, no technological achievement or other historical creation of mankind can ever expunge the Holocaust.

Human beings are so much less than we give them credit for. If we begin here perhaps books can be written about the Holocaust – without blinders or eyelids, although by definition they will fail. Every artist who struggles with the Holocaust must begin with an acceptance of failure and that must be worked through before art begins.
I have come up short here. I must say what I have to say as a man, as a Jew, and be done with it. I feel deeply the flaw within as part of this species. I am ashamed.

By name and nomenclature, the Holocaust is but an approximation of what happened. The species cannot grasp its nature. The artist will only succeed marginally if he or she manages to drive that home.

The eternal perseveration of the species has become the Holocaust. We will never be done with it. We will never work it through.

7. You are a teacher and a psychotherapist – which of these two vocations excite you more or is more satisfying, other than writing. While working in the capacity of a psychotherapist, which do you think are the most common human frailties and strengths?

As a psychotherapist I can engage human beings, at times, at very profound levels, not in the classroom. Most schools condition human beings, that is their real task – to indoctrinate, to be an American or to be French. By working with my fellow human beings I began to grow as well, and as you know, Vibha, in This Mobius Strip of ifs I write about the telling

consequences of being a client and a practitioner. For me treatment helped this soul to become much more free, more open, more expressive, although I still work on those potholes we all have.

I am not an expert on human happiness, frailties and strengths. No one is an expert. As I age I realize I know shit. Perhaps other than techniques, therapists should keep that in mind, all “professionals.” Look at the world about – it is in chaos, those in charge are not in charge themselves, think of Clinton’s errant penis, Cheney’s need to devour human beings by sending them off to war, Sarah Palin who did not know that there was a North Korea and a South Korea.

I’d pose your question another way. What can I do to become aware, and what can I do to decondition myself so that I can see clearly”? In that is hope.

8. Could you please give suggestions to budding authors on how to make their writing more effective and meaningful?

Advice sucks. Whatever advice I have received I had to process through my own machinery. So if you want to lick at the waters of advice-givers, make sure that your machinery is working real well and that you can discern good from bad.

Let me specify. It is an old cliché to writers that they should write between 500 to 1000 words a day over years. And what if you cannot?
Well, I had to work and feed the family. I wrote in study halls while I taught; I wrote late into the night when I could. I fought off despair all those years through sheer grit and bullheadedness. I just wanted to write to exorcise my dybbuks. I never thought of myself as a writer. I was an auto-didact. What I have concluded is that you do your best, learn what you can, use what seems useful and forget all the bullshit – you know, 10 ways to have your book reviewed, how to write a query letter to a blogger, how to get an editor, and how to promote you work before you even write it (book as package). I don’t know about you but I am fatigued. We do all this fussing as each day we move closer to our end. Ecce Homo.

Guest Blog by Jane Freese: A Fine Line

Last month I was fortunate to witness a movie being made by Jordan Freese, assisted by Brendan Jamieson and featuring my husband Matt.  It took all day Saturday and most of Sunday to film (or rather digitally record) a teleplay that will probably end up running less than 15 minutes.

I now have a greater appreciation for all the preparation and time that is required to create something of quality.  As with all movies, much of what was recorded will end up on the proverbial cutting room floor.  As Jordan explained, “Even if you think you shot it perfectly, you never know. There could be a tiny glitch in the picture or audio and then you’re screwed if you don’t have a backup.”  Dialogue and scenes must be recorded multiple times.

The film entitled “Non-fiction” is, from what I gather, an exploration of what is real and what is not real in film making and how the viewer viscerally responds to what is presented.  Jordan is treading on treacherous ground in the sense that he creates a character, Old Ornery Prick (played by Matt), who both challenges and insults the viewer.

I asked Jordan about the premise and purpose of the film and I am still struggling with why he wants to confront his viewers in this way.  Asking an artist why he or she does something is often folly since what the artist is trying to say can only be expressed through the work itself.

In another short film Jordan created in 2009 entitled “Casting,” he directs an audition.  He placed an ad on Craigslist calling for actors to audition for a movie.  The actors are not informed until later that the audition is the movie itself. No future movie is scheduled.  There are uncomfortable moments as the actors struggle to make sense of a non-sensible script.  The describes the film as: “A behind the scenes look at a casting call where the fine line between acting and reality blur.”

I asked Jordan if he is interested in confusion.  “Dead Man,” “American Psycho,” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop” are some of the films he recommended Matt and I watch and they seem to challenge the audience’s preconceptions about traditional story structure and the questionable reliability of the protagonists.  He explained later that it isn’t confusion that interests him so much as throwing the viewing experience off balance and making the viewer question his or her own expectations and emotional responses.

This hit home to me yesterday as I was driving and listening to Neal Boortz.  I enjoy listening to conservative talk radio from time to time because the viewpoints expressed are antithetical to my opinion on the issues. We all have a tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe.  Maybe I enjoy being annoyed, but I try to keep an open mind. On this particular program Boortz stated emphatically that people who are undereducated and ill-informed tend to support Barak Obama. Over and over again he repeated in the most insulting way imaginable that Democrats are essentially stupid.  I found myself getting angry and feeling insulted.  Then I remembered that this is what Jordan is pointing out: Our illogical response to the media. It is absurd to allow someone who doesn’t know me to insult me.

In “Non-fiction,” Matt’s character, Old Ornery Prick, makes a point of looking straight into the camera and saying, “I’m insulting you specifically.”  Of course, this is absurd.  He can only insult the viewer if he or she allows it.  Who is in control?  If it is Old Ornery Prick, why does the viewer allow him that control?  Why do any of us allow our feelings to be manipulated?

Though I had some understanding from my conversations with Jordan what he was going for, I must admit, while watching the monologue being recorded, I felt uneasy and at times insulted.  Why is Old Ornery Prick calling the viewer repugnant, a moron, ugly, shitbag, etc.?

Brendan Jamieson, Jordan’s colleague and friend assisted in photographing “Non-fiction.”  He articulated some of my concerns.  He said in essence, there is a fine line between being provocative and simply annoying.  This is the risk Jordan is taking and the fine line he is drawing.

Matt took to the project with gusto projecting the sarcasm and contempt that Jordan was looking for. He ceded control to the director like a pro. Using a teleprompter, Matt was able to look directly into the camera. The teleprompter is an ingenious tool of illusion used by politicians and news casters, allowing them to personalize their message as only the appearance of eye contact can accomplish.  This is another example of what is unreal.  Old Ornery Prick even states, “I’m trying to make this a bit interactive.” But how can the viewer possibly interact with pixels on a screen?

Being a child of the digital age, Jordan is exploring media intimacy in ways that would not occur to me.  I come from a generation that grew up with movies and TV shows as a social activity.  At least to me they are more enjoyable when shared with others. We are, after all, social animals.  Perhaps we need others to reinforce how we are supposed to react. Laugh tracks indicate where the jokes are and when we are supposed to laugh.  Sad music accompanies the hero’s death, just in case we aren’t sure how to feel.

Visual media, however, is something that more and more people are consuming alone on a laptop.  Social media, in this case, is a contradiction.  It is both personal and yet solitary.  The internet is where “Non-fiction” will most likely air. How independent are our reactions? Ornery Old Prick asks, “Are you going to tell your friends about this later? Have them watch, just to see how they react and then know how you should have reacted instead?”  Good question.

“Non-fiction” has no obvious agenda and offers no solutions. That is what makes it so fascinating and exasperating.   I have no doubt that Jordan’s career as a film maker will be exciting to witness.

As a father and son collaboration, the filming of “Non-fiction” was a joy to watch.  Matt wanted Jordan to use his skills to record his father and Jordan cast his Matt in a role where he could be the director and at the same time have his father be the star. This will be a warm and hilarious memory for everyone involved.

 Having these two delightful young men in our home for the weekend was the best part of the project.  They are both at a time in their lives when the future is full of promise.  They have the skills and means to pursue their art and do so with vigor.  They are healthy, handsome, and free of encumbering dependents and mortgages. After filming at Red Rock Canyon Sunday, I confess to feeling a slight twinge of envy as a watched Jordan and Brendan walk back to the car with their camera gear, side by side in the sunlight.

Guest Blog by Jane Freese: Dare to Examine Romney’s Mormonism

At the Las Vegas Book Festival (Nov. 2), Sally Denton, author of American Massacre and Faith and Betrayal said that she was puzzled by the lack of scrutiny about Mitt Romney’s Mormonism

Like Denton, I am a woman of Mormon ancestry, and I too am troubled by this lack of religious scrutiny. Being a Mormon is not the same as being a Presbyterian or a Methodist.  Being a Mormon is closer to being a Scientologist.  Anyone who has been a Mormon knows that being Mormon is integral to one’s character and belief system. As a Mormon friend of mine said, being a Mormon is “who you are.” It is not a religion.  It is a cult.

 He is Better Than You

To put it bluntly, Mitt Romney is not one of us.  I would not be surprised if Mitt has never tasted a beer, coffee, Coca-Cola, said a swear word, or had sex with any woman other than Ann outside of the marital bedroom. Is this an indictment? Not necessarily, but it does tell us that he cannot relate to the non-Mormon population without feeling self-righteous and superior.  To Mormons, all non-Mormons are “Gentiles.”

As a young man, Mitt participated in a rally supporting the draft, yet he was excused from it because he went on a religious mission to France.  That’s right, France. I have no problem with him avoiding the draft (who wants to go to war?), but to demonstrate in favor of the draft for others who might go to their deaths when you know you will not be put in that position is cruel and disgusting  Apparently, standard rules don’t apply to Mormon elders or the sons of governors.

Mitt has always known he was better than others. This knowledge gives him license to behave badly.  When he was in high school, a classmate’s flamboyant haircut offended his masculine sensibilities so much he recruited his posse of fellow gay bashers to assist him in a physical assault on the boy, tackling him to the floor and cutting off his blond locks with scissors, terrifying and humiliating him in the process. There were no repercussions.  Mitt claims to have no memory of the “hijinks,” but I do not believe him.  The young man came out as gay years later, but Mitt claims that people “didn’t think in those terms back then.”  Bull shit.  Homosexuality is a sin in the Mormon faith, one that invites excommunication. In other words, it will send the gay person straight to Hell. The defeat of Prop. 8 (marriage equality) was largely due to the millions of dollars the Mormon Church invested in its defeat.  Good work, bigots.

How many French people did Mitt convert to the faith?  There is no clear answer.  For a numbers guy, he cannot definitively take credit for a single conversion.  Apparently the French are not keen on abstention from wine, sex, colorful language, and the pleasures of being a little naughty from time to time. Good for them. But Mormon missionary work is not really about converting non-believers as much as it is about indoctrinating the missionaries themselves; the future patriarchy of the church.

Mormons are constantly told and encouraged to declare as part of their testimony that they belong to the “true church.” Other religions are not simply misguided. According to the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, God considers other faiths to be an “abomination.” Pretty strong word, wouldn’t you say? Abomination.

Prepare for the Apocalypse

Mormons stockpile food and water for the upcoming Apocalypse.  According to Mormon belief, Mormons will be notified first of a coming disaster through the church hierarchy. It isn’t enough to be a Latter-day Saint to qualify for the “run to your bomb shelter” phone call. You have to be on the bishop’s “Mormon in good standing” speed-dial.  The rest of the population, the Gentiles, will be doomed to extinction.  Poor bastards. They should have put down their Starbucks and listened to the missionaries who had only their best interests at heart.

Do we really want a president who believes that the end of the world is likely, soon?  Push the button, Mr. President; after all it is God’s will. Wouldn’t want all those cans of evaporated milk to go to waste now would we?  It’s all good.  Heavenly Father is purging the Earth for the Second Coming of Jesus.

Not only do Mitt Romney and other Mormons believe that they will be assigned to rebuild the Earth, they will be gods of their own worlds in the hereafter.  Sorry women, only males will be gods.  Females cannot gain entry into the penthouse of heaven (the Celestial Kingdom) on their own, they must be escorted “though the veil.” Without a priesthood holder (man) to escort them into the Celestial Kingdom, she will be relegated to the lower levels, doomed to dwell for eternity with the dreaded Gentiles.

The Celestial Kingdom is for Mormons

Other than Mormons, I can think of no other religion besides Muslims that envision the afterlife more concretely with their lakes of fire and harems of virgins. All is to be sacrificed for the ultimate reward—Heaven.  Romney knew that focusing as much as possible on “the Creator” in his closing statements at the debates he would win the hearts of Christians.  What they don’t know is that Mormons don’t consider other Christians equal to Mormons. Mormons believe themselves to be closer to Jews than to Christians.  The Hebrew Bible states that Jews are “the chosen.”  The Book of Mormon states that the Latter-day Saints are “the chosen.” How lovely it is to be a little bit better than everybody else.

If you are raised in a Mormon family, this fabulous position is yours, and just as the Jews were persecuted, so were Mormons.  The Mormons were driven into the desert to establish a promised land—Zion. I was raised hearing great tales or deprivation, sacrifice, pioneer heroics, and miracles. There is no doubt that the Mormons did astounding things with very little resources.  There is nothing quite like religious zeal with its promise of celestial reward or eternal hell fire to stimulate construction and agriculture.

How this applies to Mitt Romney is simple.  As a former Mormon from a long line of Mormon pioneers I know that there is a sense of obligation to the sacrifices made by our ancestors. Like Romney, I too, am a descendant of Mormon polygamist Mexican expatriates.  When the federal government outlawed polygamy many families decided to flee the laws of this country and settle in Mexico.  Although polygamy was against Mexican law, President Diaz turned a blind eye to the domestic practices of the Mormon colonists in exchange for the commercial enhancement that Mormons brought to a desolate area.

Whites Only

I must point out that the Mormons colonists, although friendly with their Mexican neighbors, never integrated.  They still celebrated the Fourth of July and flew American flags.  According to the Book of Mormon, dark skinned people are Lamanites.  The light skinned people, the Nephites, were good and dark skinned people were inferior.

I was taught, as a child, that the reason blacks could not hold the Mormon priesthood was that Africans, and therefore African American blacks, were marked by Cain’s ancient curse for killing his brother Abel and lying to God.

How can people living thousands of years after an event (if you believe it ever happened at all) be blamed for it?  Here is another dimension of the Mormon religion that few know about.  Mormons believe that our souls exist before we are born and that we are assigned a family to be raised by.  So, souls assigned a Mormon home are just a tiny bit better than those who are not. Souls assigned an African American family (mark of Cain) must have done something to deserve it. How any person of color can be a Mormon is beyond my understanding.

Although Mormons pride themselves for being early abolitionists, they didn’t believe that black people were their equals. God apparently changed his mind in 1978.  Now African Americans can hold the Mormon priesthood. Oh goodie!

 “You People”

I was also taught that wealth is endorsed by God.  My grandparents worked hard to establish a successful mink business. They amassed a small fortune.  They made it clear and it is dangerous to let others know how much money you have because they will try to take it away from you.  Romney’s refusal to reveal his tax returns reminds me of this paranoia.  In an interview, Ann Romney was asked about their refusal to divulge more than two years of income tax returns.  She used the phrase, “you people.”  As in “you people don’t need to know.” “You people” indeed.

I’ve worked for the Obama campaign. I hope he wins.  However, there is another part of me that knows that if Romney wins his presidency and he is unsuccessful in fulfilling his excessive promises it could be detrimental to the Mormon cause.  The great Mormon patriarch, bully boss, High Priest and god in the making, could bring about the downfall of the middleclass.  Mormonism is the religion of misogyny, racism, self-righteousness, and oppression.

Political correctness cripples free speech and an honest examination of ideas and beliefs. Saying that Mitt Romney has contempt for 47% of the population is generous.  If only about 2% of the US population is Mormon, then I would assert that he has contempt, or at least pity, for 98%.  He said he cares about 100% of us.  I seriously doubt it.

 

Commentary on Fathers and Sons

Studying the movie script.

Some time back I had suggested to my son, Jordan, that he do a videotape interview with me. I had recognized that I was an old man and I wanted to leave a remembrance of myself with my son by engaging in a father/son dialogue. After all, what is life but distilled memories, a lozenge on the mind’s tongue to savor in reverie? I knew that it would be a record of a kind of our shared lineage, ancestry, background, of my parenting and rearing, of his perceptions of me as I morphed  and evolved through different stages of my own maturation as a man and father and how all that affected him. The nagging infirmity of all that is that children only grasp one image of the parent forever and often are stuck in that, a kind of template they hold securely to like pacifiers until maturity when life gives them other options and perceptions.

It would be the whole ball of wax, fathers and sons, how he saw me interact with his mother and how that might have affected his own perception of how to relate to women, and so on. It would cover “everything,” but it did not come to pass. (We may yet do that). At conscious levels of awareness I wanted to have him ask me all kinds of nitty gritty questions and I was interested in how well I could talk straight with him. I wanted to share and express to him where I had gone wrong and what I had omitted as a father in dealing with him which still nags me to this day. I was not adverse, at all, to hearing good news. Doubtless, regrets would be expressed. I wanted to dwell in nether land with him. I left it at that, expressed at least.

In the interim I had written and published two essays about him in my latest book, trying to assess him as well as myself, critically, realistically, one essay as a child of five and one as a man in his thirties. I was and I am trying to prepare as I have done all my life for my departure from this flash of existence given me, quite randomly I must say. Here live, life commanded, without a manual in the glove box to reach for. Kazantzakis writes in Report to Greco, “Our lifetime is a brief flash, but sufficient.”

And so early in the year, it need not matter when, Jordan told me he was working on a screenplay called “Non-fiction,” that he felt would be a good way to have us interact as father and son; that he would fly into Las Vegas with  his friend, Brendan Jamieson, a cinematographer and that over a period of two days we would direct the screenplay. In fact, he paid for his friend’s airfare and rented a teleprompter, at quite a financial cost.  He sent me the screenplay and I read it very carefully, highlighting sentences, commenting in the margins, initially finding it too verbose or knotted. I began to coalesce several concerns about its efficacy. I was unsure of my own ability to act this out. Jordan over the phone and in an e-mail tried to assuage my concerns, my anxieties that I would not get through it, that I need not memorize everything and here I need to cite his cover letter that arrived with the screenplay:

…We, of course, will have you ad lib a lot as well and integrate it into the film in different ways, not just linearly. I’m sending you the script so that you have time to get really comfortable with it before the shoot. Don’t worry about memorizing too much. I can hook up a laptop to a monitor and “teleprompt” with teleprompting software. In that way you will be basically reading the script, but with emotion and at your own pace. Of course we will break it up into manageable chunks so it’s not overwhelming. Brendan will be shooting and tech support for the piece and he is a pro at my studio so you will be in good hands. Don’t be surprised if the shoot lasts many hours or half the day on Saturday (that would be on October 20). It always takes longer than you think, between setting up the cameras and equipment for each framing of a shot, to getting the read right to x factors like horns honking outside at the wrong time. But most important of all, I wrote this for us to have fun with it. And after what you just went through (a medical condition throughout the summer of 2012) I hope that in more than one way it may be therapeutic for you. Filming is for me.”

I was to play an “old ornery prick.”  Clearly cast perfectly for this role, I was to “feel” free to ad-lib personal insults anywhere I felt it warranted. In essence, I realized the screenplay seemed a riff on Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which I had enjoyed reading in college decades ago. Jordan did not know of this play, but it was my association to what he had written. I read the screenplay through several times and not with pleasure. I was growing increasingly anxious about memorizing the lines but a phone call between us resolved that as he told me it would be fun, don’t worry, don’t fret, calm down, he’ll take charge of it all. (Son allays father’s anxieties.) And if it collapsed into nothingness at least we had a good time setting fire to all our efforts. At that time I had no idea of what that really meant until the day of the shoot, which was about a month off.

After several readings I sent off an email to Jordan telling him that I had an “epiphany,” I had grasped what he was after, that I had my hand on the pulse of the screenplay and now I could manage the performance. Jordan, like me, is not too much a fan of our society, of western medicine and of politics and politicians in general. He does not suffer fools. The manifest level of the play is an old curmudgeon directly speaking to a “person” behind the camera, everyman, or every conditioned dolt. He is the prick’s target.

The monologue is scornful, derisive, sarcastically snide, arrogant as the old ornery prick excoriates the subject behind the camera, debriding him like dead skin. The curmudgeon puts him down emotionally, psychologically and intellectually for he represents the common man of our time, the one whose wife wants a stainless steel kitchen, an open floor plan and granite countertops because it matches her “lifestyle.” The common man is a male version of Teresa Giudice of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” — empty, thoughtless, primal, and dumb, IQ 89, a Dr. Moreau hybridization of Trump and Palin.

The screenplay is called “Non-Fiction,” and here we move to the latent level of the play, its subtext. Jordan is attempting to contrast fiction with non-fiction in life, reality and illusion, as if he is using the play to examine the common man as a demented and twisted Don Quixote in jeans. He accomplishes this in several places and in several ways and the artifice of it all is that one or more lies are told about the Lumiere brothers, very early filmmakers. I present it as a true anecdote and much later I go about destroying the anecdote as just an urban legend, leaving the observer, our jean hero, confused, battered and dumped on. Movies are a perfect example of illusion portraying itself as reality. On the other hand, the movie is an artifact of reality. Consider the confusion.

As an example I offered my ad-lib input which may end up on the cutting floor or not, although a cutting floor is much the misnomer nowadays. In 1924 Robert Flaherty filmed a famous documentary about an Inuit called “Nanook of the North.” It is now considered an early classic for its realism and all the adjectives associated with filming “natives” anthropologically. However, one scene is staged! Nanook comes across a phonograph and is stunned to hear the music coming from the steel record used in those times. So what is real, what is not real? Welles’ did this ingeniously in his documentary called “F is for Fake.”

Indeed, I ad-libbed about Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” because it begins with a lie, either we believe or we do not believe that Gregor Samas has morphed into a cockroach. Or, fiction is a lie well told.  (I think of the master, Poe.) But what is non-fiction and how do you determine this? The screenplay had these tones to it, but it was to be played by me, as directed by my son, as a kind of scathing frolic and so it was.

I cannot recreate the two days before the camera, he pompously says, because I believe it is beyond my ken; however, what I can do is give snippets and my associations as well as feelings about what was happening. Essentially I was given the Alfred Hitchcock pose, speaking to the camera straight on in that old series of his in the 60s. I was placed at the head of our dining room table and it was propped with books, a magnifying glass, and a small Inuit statuette of a man, giving a rough and whiskered sense of atmospheric intellect, a few books piled up next to me to substantiate my presence.

Brendan Jamieson (left), Matt Freese (center), and Jordan Freese (right)

At the other end of the dining table two cameras were set up as well as a third for angle shots. I was asked to speak to the camera directly in front of me which had a teleprompter next to it with the screenplay’s dialogue in large letters, easy for me to read, almost as if I was in an optometrist’s office calling out letters from five or six feet away. Jordan could control the pace of the scrolling which made it very easy for me to read. It came to pass, as he said, that what I needed to do was not memorize but simply perform as the words came up and I took to that easily.

I had spent decades as a teacher of English so I had a general sense of what to emphasize in a line of poetry or in prose, although I knew I was no actor but only a ham, for teachers are essentially standup comics in any case. What comforted me no end is that Jordan gave me line readings which I really took to. He would say read it this way, or try to stress this word, and then he read the line with the inflection he wanted. Parenthetically, I felt proud that as the writer he knew what he wanted as the director. In this way I felt assured and I could easily mimic what he wanted for I am much the ham and ebullient self — I love to perform. My life is a performance, so is yours if you get into it — think Zorba the Greek!

My wife, Jane, had been asked by me to photograph as much as she could behind the scenes because I wanted a record of Jordan and Brendan, staging the “set,” setting up cameras for special shots, and Jordan directing his father as a remembrance of this event, for I am much into remembering. For me memory is a kind of everpresent resurrection of the past, the only authentic thing we have after the event itself. In this way I sustain the memory of all the losses I have had in my life. And, in effect, as I will discuss later, Jordan was fully aware of the subterranean meaning of this entire event, for as an artist, and he is the artist, he was churning out a mutual lifelong relationship into some kind of art, making it more telling and compelling than just a taped interview with his father, something that we could do down the line in any case.

Jordan Freese adjusting teleprompter

The shooting began well. After one reading by me, Jordan said, “Awesome.” Well, that was very reassuring to me, for he doesn’t say “awesome” frequently. To put it another way, dad had nailed it. In short a kind of subterranean river of mutual respect was forming. I was nailing it and he was not totally surprised that I was capable of doing that. We don’t underestimate one another. Brendan shared that many people freeze up before a teleprompter, something I did not know or should know. Brendan and Jordan, I suppose, first thought that it would be a hurdle and when it proved not to be a hurdle the shoot went on with speed, to everyone’s delight. “Awesome” was said several more times during the Saturday shoot. Coming from my son, that was very sweet. “Now, Dona Lisa, move you head a little to the right side.” “Of course, Signor DaVinci.”

After a shot or sequence of lines sometimes I would not get confirmation, but Brendan, off to the side and where Jordan could not see, put both thumbs up. He was affirming his own “awesome.” I later asked him why he signaled instead of saying something and he responded that he did not want to disturb the director but he needed to tell me that I was performing up to snuff. So I looked for his Ebert thumbs up as well as to “awesome.” We all need to be stroked.

As required by the script I had to “moon” everyman, the conditioned slob, the outer-directed mental muffin this entire screed was addressed to. I did not equivocate. I had heard but I had chosen not to hear or obey that it was optional. I wanted to “moon,” which proved to be hilarious to all. I was into performing. Four times I responded to the director’s instruction because he couldn’t just get the right shot. My ass was akilter or out of the frame here and there. I recall how I waited for him to say cut so I could pull my pants up. Earlier in the shoot he had told me to wait at least three seconds after I finished a line or a bit of dialogue while looking directly at the camera. Here I thought three seconds had passed with my exposed ass completely out there. In any case by the fourth shot we were all hysterical about my compulsive need to get the ass shot just right for my son. I had no shame. They thought I would have shame. And so my son was instructed in the ways of the father. We had to stop shooting for we were all wildly laughing from what happened. It would prove to be memorable.

The second eventful sequence occurred while Jane went off on an errand. (I hope that an outtake might be saved just for her viewing.) And here is what happened. I needed to vent a scream, a real scream, a harrowing scream, a Wolfman shriek. Brendan and Jordan mounted the camera on a tripod on the table itself up close and personal, about a foot away from my face. I imagine if I kept my mouth open for a few seconds the camera would capture my uvula moving like a tuning fork. Action was called and I let go with a scream that I again doubled up on midway so as if I completely spit out a dybbuk from my body –perhaps it was all the pent up anxiety of the day. I surprised myself, for it was a very piercing and evocative scream, much to the director’s pleasure. What else am I capable of, I thought. In my son’s safe directorial hands, I had no fear. I trusted him, and apparently he trusted me, father as actor. With that done we resumed the rest of the shoot and day one came to a close.

Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area

Jordan and Brendan were very pleased that we had so much footage in the can, so to speak, for everything was done digitally on memory cards. And so on Sunday we got up early and took a small trek out to Red Rock Canyon, a national  conservation area which is set in a canyon of magnificent strata with red striations boldly set into the hills. We took the scenic route which was about 13 miles, here and there, stations set aside for parking. Jordan had visited here with his girlfriend, Liz, a year ago, obviously it left an impact, for it was now a setting in his screenplay. The vistas within the park were breathtaking. The canyon was pristine and one sensed Native Americans had lived here in the past, too wonderful to overlook. We spotted a gravel road littered with rocks, stones, and scree. While moving slowly up the road I spotted an indentation by the side and Jordan felt here was a good place to set up the cameras and finish the rest of the script. Across the way from this area was a hill that served as the backdrop and it was dramatic in its color and size.

Red Rock was to serve as the non-fiction part of the screenplay, for here the everyman was to be confronted with what was real, tactile and was not a green screen for some kind of projection. The dialogue I had to say went after that in short bursts of acute lines. I had trouble with that for I had not memorized it well. Jordan took me under his control, he read a line and then I repeated it to his satisfaction. With that going well I heard once again “awesome,” and was emboldened for the final piece de resistance.

The final scene requires me to do a kind of dance, perhaps one not so much of joy as one of an abrasive sneer to everyman, a finger gouging his eye. I was wearing my blue blazer over a gray t shirt with white shorts and tennis shoes. I assume they were filming above my waist which they had done at the dining table on Saturday. Today it was a full shot. I had a red balloon attached to my wrist, for some symbolic note, I imagine. In any case I referenced in mind an early film of the 30s with Irene Dunne, who could do it all, in “Showboat.” In one scene which I remembered she did a shuffle to music which was evocative and sinuous and so very charming that it took up a few pixels in my memory. I emulated her. Going into the shuffle, to the left, to the right, pushing my pelvis out and then back again, opening my blazer to the left and to right as if exposing breasts, and then punching the balloon as if smacking viciously everyman’s face because he could not grasp anything we did in this script. “Awesome” pealed out and the shoot was over. Jane saw the dance in slo-mo on a laptop later on and in essence just said, “Just you wait, Enry Iggins, just you wait.”

When we came to say goodbye at the airport, I said to Jordan that he was a very good director. In his response and in his voice I knew that meant something to him. (Jane will be a guest blogger here and will give her take on what occurred between all of us and between father and son in late October 2012.) But here are a few thoughts of my own. Unfortunately in the swish of events, I recall saying something very quickly to Jordan to the effect that this was turning out to be something special between all of us and particularly between us. I seem to recall that he said something to the effect that it had been part of his plan to begin with but this does not do justice to what I felt in a bodily way what he communicated to me in that quick moment.

As for me, over two days I realized how serious a commitment I gave to this screenplay, to do well, my own sense of responsibility, something crucial to my own character. I realized almost subliminally that I did not need control here; rather it was to surrender control to the safe and secure directorial hands of my son. I had no problem here. He need not rise up and slay the father. I saw the emotional ham in myself, who as a young man wanted to be an actor but allowed my own self-impediments impede me as well as those of my society that said no; you wouldn’t be good at that. The movie can be cut dozens of ways, but the final product will only be one version of what we all shared over that weekend. It doesn’t matter, for it is in the can, something to reminisce about in the future when I have gone off with Billy Bitzer, Welles and Gregg Toland to the cinematic heaven in the sky. “Ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.”

“Horrible Mistake”

Jacques Tourneur directed some cult classics under the producer tutelage of Val Lewton in the early 40s, “The Cat People” and “I Walked With a Zombie.” And in 1957 he did   “Night of the Demon”/ “Curse of the Demon,” (UK) which I saw with my parents. My father was surprised and let down that Dana Andrews was in this horror picture as if had chosen to be mired in B movies. Amazing what one dredges up from childhood.

Andrews had been in “The Best Years of our lIves,”1946,  ”Laura,” 1944, ”The Ox-Bow Incident,”1943,  and “A Walk in the Sun,” 1946, most of these A films. Tourneur and Andrews also worked together in “Canyon Passage,”made in 1946 with Susan Hayward, Brian Donlevy (memorable in “Beau Geste” as a vicious sergeant, 1939)  Ward Bond and a very young Lloyd Bridges. It was a standard B flic in which Hoagy Carmichael introduced “Ole Buttermilk Sky,” a rather homely man who often tinkled the ivories in several movies and was the composer of the classic “Stardust,”and “In the Cool Cool Cool of the Evening.”

“Canyon Passage” was nothing much as a film but directorially it did have one or two nuances, especially the executing of a convicted murderer off screen, subtle for an oater. Why I recall this film which I have seen off and on within the last few years is a memorable line spoken in a bar by Onslow Stevens, a dry and durable actor of the 30s and 40s. It is delivered off hand which makes it more telling and while the actor’s back is to the camera, thus even more effective.

When Andrews confronts the gambler Stevens about all the loses his friend Donlevy has incurred at his poker table, Stevens is also upset at that also but as he rises he says, “Mankind is a horrible mistake.” I don’t recall a memorable line from “Ben Hur,” “Spartacus,” “El Cid,” or ”The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I wonder how the writer and director in 1946 got away with this noirish comment. In fact after the war up to the mid 50s were the years of film noir, much of it was a response to what the war had taught us about humanity. Tourneur directed the classic film noir “Out of the Past.” And Welles made the greatest noirish B movie, “Touch of Evil,” in which there are several memorable lines by Marlene Dietrich (Welles’ friend and assistant in the magic act he used to entertain troops during the war) in a cameo as a madam.

In some way, in some fashion, the line about “horrible mistake” resonates in me, fits suitably into my general frame of mind. I relish that the suits at the front office missed that one acidic if not brilliant accusation about the species – its innate failings. As I look at the debates and observe how one is condemned for showing feelings (Biden vs. Boy Scout), I see how nauseating and politically correct we are. Watching that blustering grotesquerie, Russ Limbaugh, blame and castigate Martha Raddatz, as the moderator for limiting Ryan’s performance, I conclude that we are indeed a horrible mistake.

If a truth is accepted after denial, projection and other psychological human defenses are let down or worked through, we come upon a realization or an awareness that we give large measure of credence to. For me mankind is not as much a species, very much the animal. For me it is as profound a truth as it is for a die-in-the-wool Catholic that Christ was the son of God–but he wasn’t, nor did he rise, fitting mottled mythological musings for an animal.

Recently I was labeled, in essence, by some old cocker about my age, a curmudgeon. He could not grasp my comments about authority or rules and regulations, for they spoke of disgruntlement, which is not allowed. For me it was my ongoing battle with authority. As I walked out of the place in which he was a volunteer, he muttered words, in effect, wondering how I could exist as a person and how my wife could endure the bleakness of my soul. Ah, to be judged by a volunteer.

He went so far as to show me a plaque on his desk ostensibly to be used with misfits such as myself. It had a homily about accepting old age which was an Irish proverb and I had the temerity to tell him that of all the proverbs he could give me, Irish ones were near the bottom, and I also felt but did not say that if your insight came down to a Hallmark sentiment how pathetic you were. It is the misbegotten belief  that if you shove a bible into one’s hands you will find the truth. Hogwash! Books are not life. Words are not life. Learn how to live moment to moment free of other people’s convictions and musings and then you will be free.

Jane and I looked at one another. He didn’t get it, never did, never would, for his life, if I may judge, was spent as an adherent. And because he didn’t get it, he labeled me. I became a “horrible mistake” as a person.

Again I am nauseated by culture, any culture, and especially sickened by this one, in which a political wife speaks of her husband in an attempt to “humanize” him to the populous. Now that is real resurrection of the dead! If he ain’t a human being, why run this cadaver for office and why must we endure such a pathetic plea. And little Sarah that Todd knocked up in the backseat in his truck as her fanny wriggled uncomfortably on a spent Coke can, this vagina on stilts, is off to the side yelling at Romney to pull the trigger.

What is one to do if one sees all this cant? It is the perennial question — rush off like Thoreau to the woods for a respite, not bad if you are single and have the time for it; go out and try to change the system (never works, only leads to reform which leads to more structured recalcitrance until the next reform is required — the history of revolutions teaches us this; start with Condorcet and end with Robespierre and then Napoleon.) Human stupidity is a repetition compulsion.

After decades of living I have reached some insight and thus some concluding propositions. I conclude that all I can do is be free of the bullshit, to cleanse myself on a daily basis; that I am surrounded by human frailities, gross behaviors and lunacies that assault me on all sides. It is a struggle to be free of religion, of others in particular, of parents, of the state, the government and of one’s own blindednesses. By the by, isn’t that the curriculum of a meaningful education?

I have also concluded that it is a losing proposition to sustain, yet I continue to do so, for in a way I too, for others,  am a “horrible mistake.”

 

 

 

By Fran Lewis, Reviewer, on Amazon

5.0 out of 5 stars Self Awareness,October 3, 2012


By
Samfreene – See all my reviews

 

This review is from: This Möbius Strip of Ifs (Paperback)

This Mobius Strip of Ifs

Author: Mathias Freese

What if everyone lived within the inside of a box so thick that they could not see what was behind the corners or upper lid and never realizing what lies behind the confines of this box? What if you world was so fragile and breakable that all you see is what is right in front of you and not what is around you? What if you lived inside the shell an uncooked egg and each time you moved around just a little bit of the shell came apart and what you begin to see is not what others want you to see but what is really there? For the first time you view the world, slowly at first and then when the entire shell cracks and is no longer protecting you within its shell you begin to see, question, listen and explore the amazing world that has been hidden from you for so long? What if students were encouraged to asked questions and received more than just the expected or canned answers written in the teacher’s edition of a textbook? What if students were actually taught not spoon-fed and required to seek what is deeper than what appears on the printed page of a textbook that is outdated as soon as it is printed. New information is recorded daily on the net, new research is done everyday and textbooks are only current until a new one is written and more information added which outdates the first but soon that one too.

Personal awareness just how much value do we place on it. Just how do we deal with disappointment? This Mobius Strip of Ifs refers to an essay the author wrote titled “Herbie,” chosen to appear in an anthology in a magazine. But, sometimes misprints and mistakes are made and are corrected. Other times some go unnoticed or just left the way they are because fate you might say steps in a plays its own hand. The editor of Graffiti informed the author that his short story titled “Herbie,” published in that magazine was listed in Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories of 1975. It was placed in the section “Distinctive Short Stories of 1974.” Thinking about which authors whose company he would be in the author then realized something else upon closer look. Excited and living in his own world of personal blind ambition and like some self-absorbed he states he soon realizes that the name the article listed as the author was not his but that of H.T. Kirby Smith. Writing the Martha Foley he received a reply. She was the founder of the magazine and apologized for her error, penned a formal note but passed away before rectifying the error. Regardless of the error in authorship it does not negate the fact that he wrote it and it was acknowledged for its excellence. The author instead of dwelling on this decided to continue writing, learned from it and used it as a valuable validation of his writing ability. What if they never made the mistake? Would he have come to the same revelations he reveals in this book? “A Mobius Strip is essentially a ribbon with a twist,” as, stated in the foreword of this book. Life does not provide us with a clear path without its on snags, twists and turns and the definition certainly fits the many situations and experiences the author shares with the reader. Imagine if we explored life and allowed ourselves to find out more about the “possibilities outside of our perception.”

What if teachers were allowed to teach without the constraints of curriculum guides, paperwork and text? What if students were encouraged to become more aware of whom they are and what they want to be rather than what is expected of them? What if students were not consumed with grades, getting ahead, money and become their own person without being victims of the world created for them by their parents and friends. What if teachers like our author did not become frustrated by having to tell his students rather than have them inquire? What if he could actually engage them and not watch them take notes or hang on his every word? What if educators actually challenged their students and allowed them to master things on their own? Teachers as he relates seen confined, distrusted and are not empowered.

Aging has taken its toll in the author as it does with most people. Defining and observing the changes within his physical appearance, his attitude and perspective is shared with the reader in Chapter 2. No one asks to age or get older. You hope to but the changes we see are not always what we want to accept but we have no choice. Two books published is definitely a great accomplishment. Making something of his life he certainly did. Sharing with the reader that he overcame obstacles, adversity and life’s difficulties might encourage more to take on his way of thinking and understand the meaning of his What ifs. Chapter 3 he shares his view on how he lives his life untidy and a great email from a student. The Unheard Scream is a letter that he addresses to all of his students trying to explain what they should be looking of in life, searching for their own answers, not taking just what we give them as gospel and learning to think about ” what they will do here on earth?” Have you ever asked a young person what or where they see themselves in ten years? You might be surprised of not so surprised at the answers you will get.

An artist creates a picture or painting defining his work through his art. A therapist the author states should be well read in art, music and literature. The many definitions and references to his vocation are interesting as he sates as a therapist he is an outsider. I often get the feeling as I read each essay that the author places a different part of him within the framework or structure of the theme presented. Throughout this chapter he allows the reader to share his profession, explain his role and how the therapist uses himself as an instrument. As the layers unfold you begin to feel that each part is a separate scene in a movie or special documentary dealing with each aspect of this thinking, vocation and perspective on life. As he tells the reader about the impact a client has on him and how the client is the best facilitator of information helping the therapist understand not only the needs of the client but the therapist too. The Ten Canons explained on pages 36-38 are almost ten ways to deal with pain, remorse, lies and self-esteem.

Mr. Freese includes some well written, straightforward essays that express his viewpoints and thoughts on many topics. I don’t think he is trying to sway the reader into thinking his way or convincing you that you have to agree with his point of view. Frustrated with the teaching profession he airs his views and explains in many chapters that students were primarily concerned with grades, when and if they will graduate and what monetary value can they attribute to the careers that their parents might have chosen or someone at the school might have suggested. He included essays on Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre, Orson Welles and Kazantzakis. For lovers of movies and books you might want to read “Babbling Books and Motion Pictures.” What if what you were taught as a child was wrong and has no bearing on what you need to help you in life as an adult? Simply stated in one sentence: The task of each one of us is to be free of the other and ultimately free of one’s own inner constraints.” Self-awareness and thinking for yourself without being programmed by the schools, parents and your friends would be quite compelling and interesting to see how students would handle being able to think more critically and intuitively on their own.

Essays about his family discusses his early life, his childhood, his middle years and an aging grandparent, a daughter with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Syndrome and essays that reflect the many stages of his life. Uncle Seymour who had a powerful impact on him and who allowed him to finally learn to accept and express his own thoughts and emotions guiding him to become a therapist. Added in we learn about his divorce, his thoughts about Freud, experienced as a therapist and how he came to find and learn his own personal truths.

The second half of the book Metaphorical Noodles includes the work of many actors and filmmakers who strived for the same things students should in school artistic or educational freedom. In the movie business directors and producers strive to create movies as they see it or the writer sees and often the actor’s thoughts and creative input are pushed aside. Within the third section we learn more about his daughter Caryn her struggle with Chronic Fatigue Immune Syndrome and taking her own life. Losing his wife in 1999 in a car accident and his Grandmother Fanny whose story you need to read and his Uncle Seymour whose many actions described will definitely surprise the reader. In I Had A Daughter Once the author shares his raw and inner emotions about losing his daughter. “Cameras as Remembrances of Things Past,” allows the reader to understand the power of the lens and how taking pictures can recreate moments in your life, family history and allow you to relive them everyday you look at them. To me it keeps the person alive in your heart and mind giving you your history. What if the cameras and reels of film that you have in your home could speak for you and create their own movie of your life? This final section called Seawall allows the reader to hear the author’s thoughts and share his feelings about his children, losing his wife and his own personal losses allowing the reader to reflect on their own.

But, there are positives in his life and his son Jordan brings the light out in the author’s eyes as he is watching him write a screenplay, decide on who is and is watching him find his way as an artist. The final chapter I would like to reflect on is I Really Don’t Know Me and I Really Don’t Know You as the author in this chapter reflects on his life, his downward spiral toward extinction as she says and realizing that he and is son are blind toward each other. Relating how he walked with his Uncle Seymour to the Jewish bakery to get a rye bread reminded me of sharing a rye bread as a child with my grandfather. What happens to the rye that his uncle bought was traumatic for the author and the total incident will explain why when you read it. He was also the cause of destroying his sense of trust when he tried to teach him how to swim and what happens will surprise you as he thought he was going to have swim lessons but instead he almost drown. Reflections on Rummaging rounds out the book and is the final essay is a final accounting of everything he reflects on in this book while sitting in his garage facing many boxes filled with his life’s history. But, this book allows you to rummage through the mind of this therapist, father, complex man and try and understand your own Mobius Strip If’s? What if we all thought the same way? What do you think would happen?

Reviewer Lisa Taylor at Writer’s Block Party

This Möbius Strip of Ifs by Matthias Freese

This book was provided to me free of charge by the author or publisher in exchange for an honest review. This review or parts of this review may be used elsewhere without my express permission as long as “Writer’s Block Party” or “Lisa Taylor” is credited, with a link back to this post.

First, I just want to share with you a sample of the description given for this book on amazon:

“In this impressive and varied collection of creative essays, Mathias B. Freese jousts with American culture. A mixture of the author’s reminiscences, insights, observations, and criticism, the book examines the use and misuse of psychotherapy, childhood trauma, complicated family relationships, his frustration as a teacher, and the enduring value of tenaciously writing through it all. Freese scathingly describes the conditioning society imposes upon artists and awakened souls. Whether writing about the spiritual teacher, Krishnamurti, poet and novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, or film giants such as Orson Welles and Buster Keaton, the author skewers where he can and applauds those who refuse to compromise and conform.”

When I first read about this book, I got the impression that it would either be wonderful or terrible. Either the author would be intelligent enough that he could effectively and from solid ground “joust with American culture,” or he couldn’t and the book would read as a giant whine-fest that lacked credibility. As you can tell by my rating, he clearly has the brains to back this book up.

Now, I didn’t agree with all of his essays, but agreeing isn’t the point. Where would the world be if we all only read or listened to things we agreed with? Other times I agreed so strongly that I slapped the book down on the table in the break room at work and cried “Thank you,” or laughed at the accuracy of his sometimes extremely entertaining name calling. As I read I often wished Mr. Freese were sitting there next to me so that I could make counter points and discuss his views further. What better kind of non-fiction is there?

This book doesn’t have a specific genre. The author discusses everything from generational problems in education, to human nature and living in the moment, to the horrid hypocrisy of book bloggers (and yes, I quite enjoyed that one!) Growing up, I spent many hours in philosophical, scientific and logical conversations about many of the same topics with my father. As an adult, often in conversation with others I will mention a concept, like the purpose and illusion of religion or the horror of a teacher who says “Don’t worry about that, it won’t be on the test,” just to draw confounded stares. I often forget that most people did not spend their childhood philosophizing late into the night, and I feel like many of the ideas in this book will be novel to them. If you’re one that likes to contemplate the world around you and question even the most basic assumptions…this book will spark all kinds of things for you to think about. But if you are one who DOES NOT take time to contemplate the world you live in…you NEED to read this book. It may very well plant a seed to help you grow in ways you never imagined.

Let me caution you though – this is not a book to CONVINCE anyone. There are no lists of facts to support views, there are no step by step logical arguments. I honestly got the impression that Mr. Freese couldn’t care less if I believed him, and that is partially what made his book so compelling. His essays use emotion as much as reason to make his point, which at times annoyed me; not necessarily because emotion is bad, but because one must always be vigilant to ensure their emotions aren’t manipulated to a view point that does not actually make sense to them. (think of any politician’s speech…ever.) That distrust of emotional appeal may be as much a flaw in myself as much as the book, though. Most people LIKE emotion, and this will be a positive for them and help them relate to otherwise abstract concepts.

The book reads like a piece of art. His writing is complex and tiered so that meaning upon meaning can hide inside the words for you to explore, and yet it reads smoothly. I generally take a long time to read non-fiction because every chapter or so I have to stop, process, take notes, think and otherwise LEARN what I have just read. I think I read This Mobius Strip of Ifs faster than any other non fiction book I have tackled, because it read artistically; not like a science book. It drew me in as any good fiction novel does. Was the grammar perfect? No. Were there misspellings? Probably, although usually it was hard to tell if a word was misspelled or just invented. These things didn’t matter though – it reads like a conversation, and he is very well-spoken.

This book deserves more than one reading. I’m certain that in one pass I haven’t gleaned all or even most of what Mr. Freese has stored there for me. But instead of it being a chore, I am already looking forward to the time I read this book again…I’m willing to bet you will too.

As a side note, a möbius strip is basically a ribbon or strip of paper that is twisted once and then glued together at the ends. It is a simple thing to do, but a very interesting mathematical concept in that a line drawn from one end to the other will go around the ribbon twice before meeting its beginning. It is a concept often used in higher mathematics, chaos theory, and fractals and it is startlingly relevant to this collection of essays. Attempting to understand the world around one’s self is a bit like trying to understand chaos. Our lives and who we are is a culmination of an infinite number of details and exact circumstances at every instant. Any alteration in these could have yielded unrecognizable current circumstances. As his title suggests, we cannot truly come to understand how and why the world is how it is, (the culmination of a möbius strip of ifs) but only approach understanding through constant growth and analysis of our life and ourselves.

Sisyphus on a Slippery Slope

You can suggest a better title for this post if you choose to. However, for now it is a temporary tag. Only in the past two weeks have I “returned” to my normal self, whatever that really is. I can walk bi-pedally now, most if not all the pain is gone, I’m off a muscle relaxant and an opiod, Ativan as well, and an anxiety attack has not returned but like distant thunder the thought of it rattles me at moments. As Chesterton so incisively and wittily said, “I am cultivating the faculty of patient expectancy.”

Quite frankly I have been humbled, hopefully have become more sensitive to the varieties of human pain we all can experience. If I had to choose between the excruciating and riveting pain I have had and the discombulating and estrangement one experiences with a panic attack, which I experienced of late, I would choose physical pain. I knew this as a therapist so many years ago, it now seems. However, to feel unreal to yourself, to feel you have surrendered self to anomie, to feel claustrophic within your own body, to feel incorrigibly restless and sleepless, alien to reason and rational courses, to feel a lack of remedies available, to sense that there is no where to flee to because you will only bring your self with it, is to feel enormous anxiety, dread, angst and existential despair.

I can only imagine how out of hand I will be when I come to die and those unfortunate dear ones trying to allay my fears, insurmountable for me, insurmountable for them. To cede control, in my life, is to lose who I am, although I am a defended personality but I would not say one who is poured in concrete. As I think and associate to all this I feel, in a way, I have had a near death experience, not the one we read about with shining lights and Jesus figures. I think I have tasted in a very secular way the shape of things to come — for me, that is; you are another matter. I have been humbled these past weeks. I think of the old mortar and pestle in drugstores of old in which compounds were made by the energetic arm of the pharmacist. I have been crushed and compounded and I didn’t like it one bit. I had no skills to resist, except for one night I tried to incoherently write coherently of the demons assaulting my mind and self, much the same ball of wax.

In short, dear reader, an anouncement was made: Mortal man prepare for mortal death and dying.

I broke off writing this blog about two or three days ago. Today, on the 18th of September, Tuesday, Jane away to see her sons, I have had intimations of an anxiety attack, an unsettling feeling which moves me to prowl about the house, try to nap, eat a bit, read a little, all in that annoying and aggravating brilliant sun of the Nevada sky, a relentless optic above. Nevada suffers from a lack of diversity — in everything. As I am alone for about 12 days and missing my bride, I discovered a Carvel custard store within an Italian restaurant which serves thin New York slices. I said slices. Out here, in the boonies, one of the first mild culture shocks was that you had to buy a full pie, for slices were not sold individually. Try that in the Big Apple and the toppings for your pie will be your own  gonads.

I am in a mental rehab frame of mind — I feel shaky! trying to design my day in this relentlessly boring town to find things to do and it is something of a hardship. I cannot write except for this blog as the faucet has been turned off. I am still trying to metabolize what has happened to me this cruel summer. Again I have to have blood taken by my insistent internist, but the cardiologist said he’ll see me in six months time which is a probation of a kind. A few days back I had root canal work which is  nothing compared to what I have experienced physically. From here on, dentisty is easy, he says boldly.

Clearly the blog serves a purpose, to ease some of my anxieties, to spill the beans about my present situation, to satisfy my needs and not that of the reader. It is my diary, how I have handled an onslaught, if that is the right word, of medical issues, their consequences, the emotional and psychological long range anguish they hold for me.

I will end here with an anecdote that has more meaning for me now. Going to a restaurant with Jane, I saw a couple, she in a wheel chair and looking very frail, and he suspended on aluminum crutches, wearing a cap that said Marines on it. He had a van and a door was dropped so his wife could wheel herself in. Given what my own ordeal had been, I asked what I would not have done before. I asked out of a humbled self if they needed some assistance. In the chit chat he revealed he had back problems that made mine pale. The other old man said thanks but all was fine and what I sensed was a sense of independence and that he would take care of his bride and that he appreciated the offer as well. I was moved by the soft fire in his eyes and what cards had been dealt to both of them. We almost always forget how fragile we are as creatures.

And damn you Romney, for here was the 47 percent, not asking for a dime, and kindly refusing help.

 

 

Dzanc Publishing House Contacted Me After This Review By Lisa McTague

An Interview with Mathias B. Freese
 

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
This Mobius Strip of Ifs is a collection of essays written over four decades and published here and there as I pursued writing in the late hours of the night and weekends as I worked as an English teacher and later as a psychotherapist. So these essays as I look over them at the autumnal part of my life have some essential themes.
 
It is a kind of Bilsdungromanof my psychological life as a writer, spiritual seeker, teacher and curmudgeon, one of the perks of getting old. It is a mixture of memoir and essay, with me breaking the rules again. Reviewers in England have difficulty handling my honesty. Well, that’s the land of the politically correct, dysfunctional and constipated Queen Elizabeth and Philip the Extraneous.In short, it must be a dreary existence if as a writer you constantly struggle to write a message.
 
Here it is summed up, without messages: a compilation, hopefully compelling, of observations, psychological insights, and reminiscences for those possessing the requisite courage to feel and think, to struggle against cultural conditioning which I despise, and to create artistically in spite of an environment that impedes the awakening of intelligence. I wrote: “Although we are passing ephemera, human lint on this planet in transit, it is a powerful and nourishing feeling for me to have paused long enough to have observed the passage of time and my place in it.”
 
Is there any special method to your writing?
I don’t think there is a method to my madness. I write when a feeling comes through to me or a sense of awareness. I do not schedule the hours that I will write and I have always written when feelings made me write. Rules about writing, to my mind, are written in sand. I weary of all the injunctions other writers give to writers. It’s like brushing your teeth at least twice a day; sometimes life gets in the way and once suffices. The heavy hand of tradition often crushes. Obedience is not in my vocabulary as an author.
 
How many hours a day do you spend reading /writing?
Since I’ve been retired I have read more but I read as if I were sampling food from a buffet, this and some of that, and oh boy, a whole lot of that. I go back to old favorites, books by Freud, books about Freud (Freud’s Vienna & Other Essays, Bruno Bettelheim), Krishnamurti’s vast array of works on seeing, for he has profoundly affected the way I go about being in life (reading at present Krishnamurti to Himself). In my book I devote a chapter to what books and films impacted upon my life, my cinematic and literary gene base.
 
I write a blog once a week (www.mathiasbfreese.com). I need time for the aquifer to fill up. I am under no pressure during this autumn season, just observing the leaves falling. I have written a book of short stories on the Holocaust and will begin very shortly to send out queries to publishers. If no success, I’ll self-publish it. This past year 10 out of 24 stories have been published. Indeed, Leapfrog Press’s fiction contest saw me come in as one of three finalists out of 424 submissions. So I know I sitting on gold bullion.
 
What books have most influenced your life?
Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Krishnamurti’s The Flight of the Eagle.
 
If you could be the author of any novel, which would it be and why?
To be the author of The Last Temptation of Christ or Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus is to have a profound understanding, in both cases, of man. I write about Conrad in my book:”When I first read it, I knew I was in a room with a genius, not only a literary one, for this was no mere writer of sea yarns. He knew men, and he understood their minds. The book, if it had Freud’s name under the title, might very well serve as the master’s statement about group psychology.” As to Kazantzakis, “Above all he makes you feel! He wrote most of his novels in his seventies and long before that he wrote two volumes in verse describing the further adventures of Ulysses and by all accounts, he equaled Homer. I am indebted to him as a writer.”
 
Do you think you will ever change audiences?
I have no audience. I write solely for me and a few others. I am not into grossly marketing my books. I have learned in life that writing is simply my perfume, the essence I give off, and it is not for sale in that I am pushing it upon you. Exuding who I am in print is much the same for me as engaging another human being and sharing who I am. Why merchandise who I am? Now and then I receive an award and that pleasures me but I don’t go crazy shouting from the rooftops what I have attained. I know that inwardly.



What are your current projects?
At this time my next effort is at the starting fate. I Truly Lament – Working Through the Holocaust is a varied collection of stories: inmates in death camps; survivors of these camps; disenchanted Golems complaining about their designated rounds; holocaust deniers and their ravings; collectors of Hitler curiosa; an imagined interview with Eva Braun during her last days in the Berlin Bunker; a nazi camp doctor subtly denying his complicity.The intent is to perceive the Holocaust from several points of view. An astute historian of the Holocaust has observed that it is much like a train wreck, survivors wandering about in a daze, sense and understanding, for the moment, absent. No comprehensive rational order in sight