Category Archives: Family

It has always been thus

“You seem dismayed at the despicable slowness with which the moral arc of the universe seems to bend toward justice.  I was bitter by the end of my life about that, too, how, for the most part, real change does not seem to happen perceptibly within a human lifetime.  I can tell you from experience, bitterness about the obstinate forces of human nature is not a good play.   It has always been thus.”

“Do you think, when you read about the liberal Napoleonic code spreading the ideals of the French Revolution, the Jews, for the first time in hundreds of years anywhere in Europe given full rights of citizenship, that anyone, beyond a few Jews, perhaps, welcomed Napoleon’s invading armies to their cities?   You’re listening to Howard Zinn’s son read A People’s History of the United States.  An unending series of perfect examples, no?”

Perfect, yes, although ‘perfect’ seems a funny word to use when describing an accurate portrait of hell.  

“Sure ‘A White Man’s Heaven is a Black Man’s Hell’ as the song goes.  ‘Progress’ was hell for the mass-murdered Arawaks, the many other mass-murdered Indian tribes, the mass-murdered Africans, the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, for most poor immigrants.   Take one example though, say the Africans.  Do you know, if you brought say a hundred live Africans for sale in New Amsterdam, or later, New York, how much fucking money you could make?   It was, like I told you at the end about our decades of senseless contention, nothing personal, truly, as far as the fungible Africans were concerned.  One African was worth much the same as the next, if they were roughly the same age, size and strength.   There was nothing personal, on one level, when they inspected the slave’s teeth, lifted the scrotum, examined the asshole.  Strictly business, Elie.  The death of millions of African prisoners during the trans-Atlantic transport blandly called ‘the Middle Passage’ was — what’s that word you love so much?  — an externality.”  

Union Carbide puts a plant in an area in India where they can hire workers for next to nothing.   Tons of additional profit for the corporation.  Some toxic run-off runs off and causes suffering and death to the children of the locals.  An externality; you have your lawyers pay off the families of the dead kids, get your P.R. department to write something nice and write the whole thing off as a business loss.  Net gain for everybody, those Indian children who died would have been fucked in any case.

“Exactly, the cost of doing business.  That’s the genius of capitalism, if you want to call it that.  It has always been thus, those with the most power are never obliged to take seriously the troubles of those with the least.  And the real beauty part, for the rich, every injury can be reduced to a monetary sum, and the poor can always be bought off with pocket change.  In colonial times the wealth gap was probably roughly the same as it is now.  Barons were granted millions of acres of previously unclaimed land in the ‘New World’, the Indians had no concept of ownership of land, and poorly paid armies fought Indians to the death over this right of vast tracts of private property for the obscenely rich.   Poor whites and slaves worked for the baron and it was a new kind of feudalism for the new world.  It has walked a pretty straight line since then.  Take any period you like.  Some, like the present Gilded Age, stand out as worse than others, but for the people who have no power, every period is roughly the same.”  

Except for those brief periods of hope for real social change, like when I was growing up.  

“Yes, there are little windows when a Gandhi or a King can inspire millions to unite in hope and the moral wind is blowing the right way and you can see small changes that at the time look gigantic.  Gandhi, as a Jew in Poland, would not have had such a glorious biography as he did making his name during the active decline of the British Empire when the colonial ruler of India was collapsing anyway.  Timing, as they say, is everything.”

True dat.  

“We are brought up with this myth of the ‘individual’– that’s the basis of our culture here in the West.  Any individual, we are told, can rise, by his or her own efforts, to demonstrate their unique talents and become great.   This is what we are fed, even as millions upon millions have always been born into these societies without any real chance to become ‘individuals’ in the sense that Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates, or your buddies George Steinbrenner and Donald Trump, are.”  

Yah, mon.  You yourself, without World War Two, what would have become of your chance to grow into an actual individual?

 “I would have been sent to sheet metal school, to learn a trade.  Fortunately it would have been a good time to be an American tradesman– although it’s hard to say if the prosperity that followed WW II would have been as great without the war — and I would probably have still been able to afford to buy a home, and I would have had a car.  Economically, I probably would have done about as well, during that historically rare period of widespread economic prosperity, as I did working as an underpaid teacher.  In fact, as a teacher, you’ll recall, I had to work a second job to have the middle class life I aspired to.   American factory workers were well-paid back then, I would possibly have made more as a sheet metal worker than molding the characters of teen-aged social studies students,” the skeleton seemed to be mulling something over.  

“I never would have met and wooed your mother, though,” he said sadly.  

I loved what your brother said at the memorial for mom.  

“Yeah, that was good, a great moment for him.  ‘I was the other one of those two country bumpkins who visited our cousins in Evelyn’s apartment building in the Bronx.’  You know, if not for your grandma’s pushing, your mother would never have given me the time of day.  A beautiful big city girl, living half a block from the glorious Grand Concourse, the Champs Elysees of the Bronx… she regarded me as, how did Brando put it?  ‘She looked at me like a bug.’  You should have seen her disdain the first few times I passed under her first floor window there in the courtyard on Eastburn Avenue.  As a student at FuckMe Sheet Metal Academy I wouldn’t have been able to pry a ‘hi’ out of her.   Once I got the chance, I impressed her with my collegiate brain, and my wit, things I hardly realized I even had growing up the poorest kid in Peekskill. When I became a doctoral candidate at Columbia my stock really went up.”  

What are the odds of a kid from the projects having that kind of chance?  

“Oh, maybe one in five hundred, I’d say.  I was born into historical bad luck and then had a stroke of historical good luck.  There’s no reckoning these things, there’s only working hard to take advantage of the rare moments of good luck that come your way.  I suppose you can think of yourself doing the same thing now.  You had a good idea, an excellent idea, really, for that non-profit art and technology workshop for the children of the doomed.  You had the good luck to be able to focus on it full-time, because of the money we left you.  The bad luck?  We didn’t leave you a fortune so you could have hired a capitalist to run turn it into an actual business.  You are not a born capitalist, Elie, you’re a fucking idealist.   Worse, for you, you live in a supremely materialistic society where branding, spin, marketing, sales, relentless chirping optimism, return on investment, sexiness, etc. rule the world.   Can you sell a program to help the children of the doomed?  You personally?  No.  Some people can, particularly if it works as well as what you designed, but I would say they have to have access to huge sources of funding — and never, ever, use the word ‘doomed’ in any connection to anything they ever imagine doing.”  

You grew up doomed, did you not?  

“I grew up doomed.  We were poor, hopelessly so, my father had no skills, could not earn a living, except briefly doing physical labor for the WPA.   I was like that Babel character Matthew Pavlichenko, the abused serf who comes back to his former master’s estate as a general in the Red Army, and he’s singing to that magical year when the revolution started, that changed him, unimaginably, from one form to the next.  That day that lives in infamy, December 7, 1941, turned out to be my lucky day, the start of my new life.  If not for the war, and the G.I. Bill, there would be no you, your sister would have never been born.”

Well, viva Hirohito, then, dad.  

“Yeah, every villain in history has people who salute him.  I just wanted to finish, I think that what you’re doing now, trying to set down this portrait of me, in the context of the times I lived in, with as much three-dimensionality as you can muster, is trying to put your good luck– inheriting enough to live on for a few years, having the ability to set things out clearly — to the best possible use.  You feel better getting up every day to pound at the heavy bag of this story than if you weren’t telling it, don’t you?”  

Without a doubt.  

“And are you explaining your life to yourself?”  

Yes, in some deep way I feel like I am.  It’s uncanny how I’m discovering things I didn’t realize before, through the process of combing through everything I can remember about growing up the son of a brilliant and adversarial father.

“Then it’s all good.  If you manage to whip the final product into shape as a final product you can sell–  your success will be the sweeter for being so long overdue.  And, as far as the brilliant and adversarial father, you do, of course, dig the contradiction there.  A truly brilliant father cannot be an adversary to his child, except for some perverseness in his nature.  An adversarial father cannot be a brilliant father, otherwise he would support his children, not undermine them by fighting them every step of their way.  Wait, wait, I know what you’ll say– another example of my black and white thinking.  But, hang on a second.  Brilliance includes intelligence and insight both.  And I know you know what I’m talking about,” said the skeleton.  

Obviously, dad.

 

The Actual Book

“The Book” itself, I realize now,  turns out to be something completely different than any of those three hypothetical discrete, daunting book projects I laid out the other day.  

For one thing, it has to draw all three themes together, for lack of time and because of the maddening specificity of the case it must lay out. Hatred, love, slaughter, mercy and play must be interwoven, weighed out chapter by chapter.  In the end you will have to care about it, see the work I am trying to move forward as animated by something very real and pressing, or the book is nothing.

The Book, this The Book of Irv (Book of My Father), pieces together a tricky puzzle, tells each strand of the history to lay out the unifying theory.  It is an attempt to explain the unexplainable, make clear things that are hazy at best.  

You cannot understand hate until you experience it directly, cannot love until you’ve been loved. Simple idea, though complicated to explain well.

Everything we believe has been sold to us. Everything.  

Our world is increasingly based on selling, from everything you can see with your eyes to the deepest beliefs you hold.  If I can’t package and sell I’m basically through, and the thing I must sell is, above all, a compelling story of the theory that moves me.   It’s got to move you, too.

The Book of Irv is equal parts beauty and horror; the fun and invention of play — the first and deepest mammalian bonding and learning– (and Irv was always playful with children and small animals) and the unspeakable horrors of hatred, the despicable civilities committed in the name of our American law.  The devil is, as always, in the details.  These historical strands need to be patiently, clearly set out, in order to give the reader the full context for consideration.

Irv as a unifying figure is ideally situated at the center of this explanation.   His life began in dire poverty, a Jew born in a New York City tenement who moved with his family to a shit hole in Peekskill.   He was an outsider consumed by outrageous injustice.  He fought racism in America after returning from a stint in our occupying army in post-war Germany after that modern nation showed how muscularly racism could be flexed, if insanity actually ruled.  

My father, for all his frailties, fought a fitful fight for social justice across decades, as he fought his kids, dominated his wife, quipped, raged at the inhumanity of the world.  He imparted to his children deep and important values that would influence the course of our lives, to our great detriment.   All this should be explained, the strength of this irresistible force that compels us both to work with the children of the fucked.  

The principle is straightforward:  poverty breeds despair, violence and fear.   Poverty stinks worldwide, kills millions and shortens every life it touches.   You want to heal the world?  Start by working on eliminating poverty.  Start with the kids.

In our modern world of unlimited wealth, poverty is a problem that can finally be ameliorated.  It won’t be, but that’s another story.  I suppose the thing that finally drove Irv to despair was his feeling of hopelessness.  Justice does not prevail, except sometimes incrementally, for moments in certain lifetimes, and without a community of comrades it is impossible to continue the good fight.  

Irv understood that the moral center of a society that can enslave millions solely to amass great wealth is indistinguishable from a culture that sends its believers scrabbling to cut their neighbors’ throats.    The names of the atrocities change over the centuries: impaling, shooting, lynching, drowning, whipping, but the song remains the same.

The Book of Irv must walk the line on this side of rant, unreliable narrator or no. Play must be at the center of it, because play is the only dependable relief from the oppression all around.  A tall order, friend, but while I am taking orders, why not?

“So you’re going to talk about this fascinating, all-explaining, theory unifying book you’re supposedly going to write, Dr. Bronner?  Or are you going to knuckle down and start writing it?”

I’m going to knuckle down and continue to talk about starting to write it, at the moment.  But first to get back to my long-stalled project to make some space in here.

RIP Tawny

My sister loved her dog, a pit bull named Tawny.  My memory of Tawny is as an ageless lioness, limber, strong and perfectly formed.  Sekhnet recalls her as a giant lioness.   She was not small.  She had boundless nervous energy, if you threw her saliva soaked white sock for her once you’d be obliged to do it a hundred more times.  

The wet sock would be on your lap, at your feet, or next to you on the couch, Tawny, head cocked, staring longingly at you, at the sock, at you, making sure you saw her, knew the sock was there.  Whatever else might have been going on, she had one concern, her paw up on you now, to focus your attention to the matter:  throw, run after that sock and bring it back, drop it for throwing,  repeat.  

She was beautiful.  She was gentle, too.  She wouldn’t bite a hamburger, as the phrase goes.  She was not cuddly, had too much energy for that, and her coat was not smooth and silky for petting, she wanted to move, to bring back the sock, a ball, whatever.    

You could picture her on the savanna, with no fear of any creature, sitting under a tree gnawing a bone.  My sister said that is how she died today, at the ripe old pit bull age of more than 13, deaf, unable to use her hind legs any more.  Chewing on a bone, peaceful, as her loved ones sat around her and the vet administered the stuff to knock her out.  Very gentle and very sad.  My sister and her family are all crying tonight.  

To those who have never loved a dog or a cat or other animal, I have to say, I am a little bit sorry for you.   There is no love greater than that shared with a familiar, loyal animal whose life and warmth connect with yours.  We are lucky who have experienced that kind of love with another human.  

This love between humans and animals is not a new thing, either.  The bonds between human and animal go back to earliest prehistory.  The first friendly wolves who ran with humanoids, becoming the first dogs, defending the group, being rewarded with food and affection, a warm place to sleep by the fire.   The pack was as familiar to dogs as to humans.  Cats and other animals long ago joined into this most excellent arrangement.  

 

398

Freedom (and the Unthinkable)

Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written.  We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.

“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.”  This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves.   History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.

Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves.  Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake.  Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.  

Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment.  Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.

We are free and we are in chains.   Your government.  The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want.   Fairness and the world?  A grimly humorous idea.  Good social media skills in 2015?  Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause.  Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.

 

 

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De gustibus

The young musician often played for her father and was always dismayed at his lack of reaction.  He showed no pleasure, no appreciation, nothing.   He sat, politely, and never said anything afterwards.

Many years later, as he was dying, he said to his daughter “I’m sorry, I just never liked music.  Any music.”  

She blinked at him, and he added “it wasn’t you, it was me.”  

A light went on in the room, a glow of important insight illuminated the death chamber for a moment.  In another wink, the old man was gone.

Why My Mother Loved Jon Stewart, but Hated Stephen Colbert (Draft 1)

It’s easy to understand why my mother loved Jon Stewart, what Jewish mother could not love him?   My mother was a secular Jew from the Bronx, raised to believe in equality, human rights and social justice.   I recall her telling me when I was young that she didn’t think much of Howard Fast as a writer, but that the idealistic man who’d been blacklisted as a suspected Communist had his heart in the right place.  As an old woman she was discouraged by the many signs that our country did not always have its heart in the right place.  She would clench her teeth every time President Bush came on TV.  

“How an obvious imbecile like that got to be president… every time I see him it makes me sick.”  

She regarded him as the worst American president, definitely the worst of her lifetime.  One of the last things she said to me on her deathbed at the hospice, and she said it urgently:  “please promise me Sarah Palin will never be president of the United States!”  

I promised her, thinking to myself “certainly not in your lifetime, mom.”  

She watched Jon Stewart every night.  Whenever I was in Florida with her she’d call me in to watch when his show was about to start.  She found him adorable, as, of course, he is.  He made her laugh, with his trenchant insights, facial expressions and overall comic brilliance.  He, almost alone among the media in the years of her widowhood, gave her hope that not everyone in the world was insane.  She was doubly delighted when Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart and the discussion quickly became an intelligent hour long mutual admiration society between two of her favorite media personalities.  

As much as she loved Jon Stewart, she had an almost visceral dislike of his gifted protege Stephen Colbert.  As soon as Stewart’s show ended, even before Colbert’s American eagle swept beak and talons first toward the camera, she had the remote in hand and was looking for something else to watch.  I never understood this.  She couldn’t explain it, she just couldn’t stand him.  

“You realize that the overbearing right wing blowhard persona is parody, he’s playing a character.  He’s hilarious, mom.”  

She shook her head.   “I know.  I don’t know what it is, I can’t watch him.  I know it’s a parody, I just can’t stand him.”

So it wasn’t that she was like President Bush’s team who’d hired Colbert to do the Correspondents’ Club dinner, most likely in the mistaken belief that he was a fellow traveler, a very funny, popular comedian who happened to be patriotic and believe in the unquestionable greatness of America, right or wrong.  In 2006 nobody in the media was saying too much out loud about Bush and Cheney’s muscular excesses.  It was as if they were all afraid of being shot in the face with a blunderbuss full of birdshot or something.

I showed my mother the video of Colbert fearlessly skewering the president at the Correspondents’ Club.  I recall at the time feeling great admiration for him, he was about the first person to publicly suggest the Emperor and those around him were naked.   He showed impressive sang froid by doing it, literally, in the president’s face.  My mother admitted it was a great routine.  He began:

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.  (the rest is here)

Bush is still smiling gamely at this point, but his smile becomes more and more brittle until it falls off his face after a few moments.  Good sport and nice guy that I’ve often heard George W. Bush is, his politics aside, I’m pretty sure he shook Colbert’s hand at the end, told him he’d done a heck of a job.   But he clearly understood in pretty short order that he was being roasted by a merciless chef with a bullet-proof persona.  You can see that watching his reactions on the video.  My mother loved it.

I tried to get her to watch Colbert’s show a few times, but she never lasted through the opening, switching to an in progress re-run of NCIS, CSI or other murder mystery as I left, befuddled.   She loved murder mysteries, particularly NCIS.  Murder mysteries were increasingly all she read as she got older.  No less a mystery than any of these was her intense dislike of the brilliant Mr. Colbert.

One night I was going through a box of black and white family photographs.  I found a photo that made me feel like a great detective from one of her mysteries.   It was a shot of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, as a young man, dressed in a well-fitting suit.  It could have been a photograph of Stephen Colbert, in character as the rooster-like right-wing talk show host.   My mother strongly disliked my uncle.  She found him narcissistic, tyrannical, unreasonable, demanding and petty.   In  a word, Colbert’s character on the show.   She once desperately offered me a huge monetary bribe to spend a week in Florida when my uncle and aunt planned to visit her, after my father died.  She kept upping the dollar amount as I hesitated.

“Please,” she begged over the phone, “you can’t leave me alone with them!  For a week!  A week, Elie!  There will be bloodshed.”  

I rushed into her room with the photograph of my uncle.

“Is this why you hate Colbert?” I asked, handing her the photo.  

“Oh, my God,” she said, staring at the picture, “oh, my God!”  And then she began to laugh.  Another mystery satisfyingly solved.

 

Draft two is here, complete with a couple of moronic editorial improvements.

Childhood Memory (flashback to 1963 or 1964)

My mother, seeking to protect her sensitive, fearful oldest child, urged me not to see the movie scheduled for the hotel ballroom that evening, “Let My People Go”.   I knew nothing about the film, except that all the teenagers at the convention would be seeing it.  I was seven or eight, and curious, and I wanted to see the movie, which was the only thing to do that evening anyway.

“You’re too young to see these things,” my mother told me tensely, “when you had nightmares about Tarzan I could show you pictures of the actors, assure you it wasn’t real.”   Which was true, she’d gone to the library and found books that proved her case.  After her photographic proof that the actors who played the savage cannibals wore regular clothes, drove cars, laughed, played with their own kids, spoke English, the nightmares in which my mother, like Jane, was struck down by a cannibal’s hurled spear, stopped.  

That strategy had also worked a few years earlier when terror of another flood like in the time of Noah, vividly depicted by a children’s book illustrator with an Italian name my mother always recited in connection with this story — ah!  Tony Palazzo!– kept me awake at night.   She drove me past rows of houses on the beach and my fear succumbed to Reason.  

“But these things in the movie really happened, and not that long ago, and they were horrible, and I don’t think you’re ready to see them.”   And she was right, but having been told many times by my childish, blustering father that I was not too young to start acting like a man, goddamn it, I was determined to see the move come hell, high-water or spear throwing cannibals.

The movie started innocuously enough, woodcuts and old paintings, mosaics, pictures of ruins, a narrator detailing the ‘lachrymose history’, as I’d later come to know it, of the tireless persecution of the Jews.  There were the pyramids, built by Hebrew slaves, a familiar story to me, nothing shocking there.  The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians, not a trauma to me, I thought smugly to myself.  The subsequent exile, I was young to grasp how traumatic this might have been.  The Romans destroyed the rebuilt temple, OK, that’s a shame, but I didn’t like going to temple anyway.  

The movie was clearly building to something, I was not too young to miss the terrible foreshadowing as the persecution and exile of ancient times became a steadily heavier drumbeat.  Now some crude depictions of Jews put to the sword during the rise of warlike Islam, pretty bad, but just drawings.  In Christian Europe, meanwhile, the Dark Ages had descended, harsh, brutal lives lived under the pall of monkish ignorance and superstition, and the Jews to blame.  By the Middle Ages the Jews were entrenched in collective Christian consciousness as the crucifiers of Jesus Christ, the son of God and the Christian Messiah.   That we were blamed for killing the Messiah came as a shock to me, I’d always thought the Messiah hadn’t come to earth yet, that once the Messiah arrived the hearts of children would be returned to their parents, forgiveness would be universal and there would be no further violence or cruelty, no death.

The torturers and hooded Klansmen of the Spanish Inquisition stood out to me, the auto de fe, trial by being burned to death, was truly horrible.  Things quickly escalated from there, pogroms, the music got more tense, and soon there were some black and white photographs.  In Russia, blood libels against Jews, claims that Jewish monsters killed Christian children to make matzoh on Passover.  This made no sense to me, even an idiot knew that matzoh was basically flour and water, where did the dead Christian child come into it?  A photograph of a grim French military man, falsely accused of treason against France and executed, though everyone in France, and everywhere else, knew he’d been set up because he was Jewish.  Theodore Herzl’s photograph, with that beard practically begging to be carved in marble, the dream of a Jewish State and now the filmmakers kicked into high gear.  This is what they’d been building up to.

Centuries of persecution of a small, decent people, driven from their homeland, vilified and hated everywhere they settled, expelled from Spain and every place else, murdered with impunity– there was only one solution: a return to our homeland.  This would not be without struggle, in part because those on the land that would be our homeland considered it their homeland, not ours.  Deals were made, land bought, proposals made, unmade, snags hit, navigated, more snags.  Nobody, it was clear by now, was in any hurry to help the Jews.  

Meanwhile, more killing of Jews in Europe, persecutions in the Arab lands.   Suddenly, oh boy, there’s a familiar Jew hater– Adolf Hitler.  I had a feeling he’d show up in this shit show.  There he is, dancing a mad jig after the fall of Poland.  Turns out this ‘jig’ was the creation of Allied propagandists using a technique I myself would use decades later, repeating a sequence of frames over and over and speeding them up to achieve a desired effect.  These propagandists took a one second sequence of Hitler laughing and stamping his jackbooted foot and repeated it enough times to create a convincingly mad, cackling dance.  I knew nothing about this trickery, an insignificant detail in context, as I watched in rising horror.  

The violins on the soundtrack began weeping more emphatically.  Then, as I looked around me at crying teen-aged faces in heavy cigarette smoke, there was the footage, shot by the Nazis themselves, of exactly what my mother had cried to try to stop me from seeing.  A terrified boy my age with his hands up, savage beatings, Jewish corpses lying on the sidewalk.  This was terrifying imagery.  Then there was the guy with the wheelbarrow, on grainy black and white film, moving resolutely forward.  The giant wheelbarrow was filled with jiggly, rubber looking skeletons.  He was wearing a cap and smoking a cigarette.  He came to the edge of a huge pit, upended the wheel barrow and dropped the corpses down a chute.  They wriggled down the ramp, landed on top of hundreds more naked dead skeletons.  

I ran up the aisle through the crying audience, got to the elevator, to the room, saw my little sister’s shocked face as I burst into the room and, a second later, projectile vomited.  My mother hugged me, crying, and said “I told you….”

Deleted insight

this had to wind up on the cutting room floor:

We learn as adults that even people who love us can do us great harm. It’s not strictly their fault. Humans are the product of their genes and how they were handled when they were young. The research is in about the harm of adverse childhood experiences, even the DNA and immune systems are changed by abuse and neglect. Certain things are impossible to truly recover from, though the human capacity for healing is also remarkable.

My Sister and Lady DU, toward the end

I have a snapshot that captures the relationship of my younger sister and my mother, near the end.  They are looking past each other.  The older woman wearing a long skirt, a cane in her hand, looks toward the photographer;  the younger one turned slightly away, her face showing a bit of the exasperation she is fighting off.   They had ongoing battles over the years, as many mothers and daughters do, but as their roles slowly reversed, my sister becoming more and more the caregiver as our mother’s 24 year death from endometrial cancer progressed, some hard edges were rounded off their conflicts.   I could show you the photograph, if not for invading the privacy of the individuals depicted.  A little background, instead.

My sister named our father “The D.U.”, The Dreaded Unit.  The name was apt, my father was able to convey his dreaded aspect with nothing more than a withering facial expression, no words necessary, though he was quick and deadly with a word or phrase too.   My sister once reported an answering machine message from the D.U., the mere tone of his voice making her want to rip her ears off so she could stop hearing it.   Our mother loved and always defended the D.U. and, after his passing, took on the name for herself in her last five years.

“Of the two of them, she’s by far the more dreaded,” my sister always said.  I had the opposite experience, but I knew what she was saying, from her point of view, and watched their struggles with sadness.

My sister lived a mile or two from our mother and looked in on her often, took her to doctors, had her mother take her and the kids out to dinner once in a while. Each resented the other’s ingratitude, and complained of it to me from time to time, swearing me to secrecy.   Any decent mediator could have helped them resolve the most fundamental issues between them, but both refused to consider it, for the same reason: the other was too stubborn and would never agree to it.

“She’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” my sister told me often, citing the most recent example of our mother’s supposed slide into dementia.  My mother had a variation on this for her daughter.  During my visits I never found my mother in the least bit demented, though she sometimes mis-spoke.  

“I can’t stand it in this hotel anymore!” she declared one day from her bedroom in her apartment, not long before she died.  I looked over at the guy who cleaned for her and took her shopping and said “well, we can fire the bellhop,” and he smiled, “but this is your home, mom, it’s not a hotel.”  

“I know, I know,” she said, annoyed “I can’t even talk any more…”  The sad fact was, she didn’t have many friends left to talk with.  When a group of women from the hospice came, days before her death, I heard laughter coming from the bedroom.  “One thing for sure, your mother is not demented,” said one of the women as she came out of the bedroom, a big smile still on her face.

The New York Times published a piece by a woman who went to visit her mother, toward the end of her mother’s life.  The two had always had a very contentious relationship and the daughter set off on the visit with trepidation.  When she arrived she found that her mother, her dementia fairly advanced, did not know who she was.  She was surprised at the happy greeting she received.  As heartbreaking as she found the situation it soon emerged that her mother mistook her for a long lost friend, or maybe a beloved sister, and they had a wonderful weekend together.  It was like old friends meeting for the first time after a forgotten lifetime.  

I gave the lovely piece to my mother to read on the plane as we flew from Florida to New York for her last visit.  My mother liked it very much, and I’m sad that I never got it back from her to pass on to my sister, she might have gleaned some insight from it.  

The piece disappeared like many other things when my mother died, like a life, finally whole, studied, and appreciated, and existing now only as lessons, digested and undigested.

Head in Hands (labored re-creation)

This afternoon, at a loss for anything better to do, and having written that piece referencing Cheney that activated Sekhnet’s PTSD and made her cry one sentence in (where I stopped), I found myself sitting in the universal pose of resigned inaction, head in hands.  My few chores done and a futile attempt at a restorative nap aborted, I sat wearily at my desk near the window overlooking Sekhnet’s farm and my head sank into my hands.  I sat that way for a long moment.  The symbolism of this posture dawning on me, I lifted my head, opened this computer and resolutely tapped out a few hundred words that disentangled some tendrils, put it about as well as I can.  

It was a different kind of post than most of these and it felt like a good day’s work.  Writing it put my thoughts and feelings in order, explained some things I was hard pressed to understand or express and salvaged an otherwise fairly bleak and low-energy day for me.

Sekhnet and I went shopping and after the long trip I opened the blahg to read it to her.  There was no sign of the new piece anywhere, not in drafts, not in the trash.  “Head in Hands” does not exist, I was informed.  I was sure I’d hit publish, I’d definitely selected the categories, which appear below this post now, which I have already saved now three times.  It was hard to believe I had never even once saved the draft.  I hadn’t shut off the computer or logged out of WordPress, yet, no trace of the ninety minutes of writing.  

Seeing it wiped away at the moment I was going to read it to Sekhnet I felt panic and then rage, at once it became the most profound thing I’d ever managed to write, of course, being now irretrievably lost.  In despair I realized how impossible it would be to recreate the integrity of the piece, whatever music it had contained.  It took all I had not to scream or smash something.  Sekhnet was sympathetic, immediately reminded me I should always save my work, no matter what, we’ve both learned the hard way, blah blah blah, helpful advice I couldn’t listen to.  850 something posts on this blahg with no hitch that I can recall, maybe one.   Fitting reward at the end of a day I dragged myself through, to have some of my best work wiped away without a fucking trace and for no explainable reason.  I went outside and stalked for a mile.   

I’d started off wondering if dysthymia had me by the neck lately and posted a link to a wiki describing the condition.   I compared the inevitable hopeless feeling to music, the depressed theme striking a familiar chord, persistent fatigue providing the bass, empty stretches of senseless inaction like a sad string section, the dulled, receding emotions forming amusical harmonies to a background music as pervasive and hideous as the sickeningly effective ad jingle that plays involuntarily in your head.  

I mused about the genetic component of dysthymia and described my mother setting out for work every day, carrying dysphoria on her shoulders, working all day, coming home on the train, cooking us dinner, watching TV, reading, looking forward to the emotional release of the opera Live from the Met that throbbed from the stereo every Sunday (it may have been every Saturday).  She became tearful easily, was often angry, over-ate, reported feeling blue when she was alone, though she was always convivial and had a good sense of humor in company.

I spent hours alone in the basement, listening to blues records, the same sides over and over, playing along on an acoustic guitar, learning the ropes.  Friends came and went, I never questioned their qualifications or motives.  I enjoyed interacting with them, cherish a few of them still, but probably spent much more time by myself than in their company.  When alone I worked in one expressive medium or another, it always seemed important to me to express myself well.  I follow the same practice now.  

This tendency to isolation is quite possibly a symptom of dysthymia, a diagnosis I dismissed, a hazy condition easily waved off because it lacks the sharp drama of a scary depression, or a rising anxious terror, or the wild mania that will land one in the Emergency Room.  The proclivity to oversensitivity and introspection could also be called part of an artistic temperament, I suppose, but that temperament famously comes at a steep price.

I was considering, in far less words than this, that I should probably go off to work every day, or at least several times a week.  Any work, meaningful or not is not important, the main thing is to keep oneself busy.  This is universal therapy practiced by most people in the world and much mischief and violence are the result of enforced idleness, too much time on one’s hands.  Working people have routines and stay busy, the validation they get from doing their jobs well is part of what makes their lives make sense to them, makes them feel productive.  At the end of the day they have a good reason to be tired, to relax and unwind, and they have to be ready to get up for work early the next day so too much emotional heavy lifting is out of the question.  

Unlimited time to ponder and imagine is not a good thing in the long run.  It is difficult, maybe impossible, to sustain vital creativity in isolation anyway.  Creativity is intended to be shared, it’s collaborative by its nature.   You may sometimes create fine work, hone it to a great smoothness and clarity, provoke thoughts and feelings in a unique way, but such work, done primarily for yourself, has an element of madness to it, is not complete as expression until it is received by another.  It is necessary to find a partner or two, it seems to me, if the work is going to have real meaning and resilience.  Things I write here for a small handful of readers, sometimes true things, at times elusive but obvious when pinned down, a good in and of itself.  But in another sense: what the fuck?

I noted that with no warning, today, I find myself again in that hot August night outside Vishnevitz, the tortured little town where we’d been forced to fence ourselves into a crowded quarter six months earlier, using barbed wire, splintered boards, chicken wire, plaster.  They’d forced us to pay for it too, with money we needed for food and medicine, and now had finally marched those of us who survived to the side of the ravine, my tiny nephews and nieces walking at the unnatural pace of the feeble, hobbling elders I’d assisted up the road.  

This forced march was supervised by our neighbors, people who cursed their difficult lives and had for centuries looked with superstitious ignorance for someone to take it out on, to make pay.   These captive fellow citizens of Vishnevitz had been ordered to murder by conscripted German men brainwashed by a madman in a society conditioned by generations of militarism, conformity and war.   The Ukranians collaborated gladly, having the chance to freely pour out the hatred and humiliation that had been boiling in them for generations.  

They made the night stink with their drunken anti-Semitic songs and their infernal banging to cover the groans and cries.  I tried not to look at them, what was the point?  There was nothing to say.  Why give them the satisfaction?  Humans, these were not exactly that.  The deadly play was written in blood and shit by people who hated themselves, murderers.

“Goddamn it Vasily, I hate this fucking life, I curse my goddamned mother for bringing me into this fucking life, Vasily.  Give me the goddamned vodka, Vashke, and we’ll do what we have to do.  Fooh!  It tastes like your stinking spit, Vasily.  That’s OK.  It’s good.  Let us do what we came here to do to these fucking kykes, OK.”

There was no point to run, nowhere to go and the old people and the children couldn’t run anyway, there was nothing to be done, no expression to even have on your face.  Running would only provide a moment of challenge and excitement for these reptiles, and they have excellent depth perception and three dimensional vision, reptiles.  I said nothing, my face two eyes, a nose and a mouth.  I flattened myself into two dimensions, both eyes on one side of my profile, fuck you, reptile.

Why invent the time machine for this particular trip, I cannot say.  Pessimism is wrong, nothing good can come from it.  It is not always right to be optimistic, of course, but hope is a better mistake than hopelessness.  In a world of miracles and atrocities there comes a time to simply sit with your head in your hands sometimes.  It just is what it is, as they say and, as I did not make the world, I just live in it, for whatever time I am given.