One of Freud's contributions to
his new science was that of the association. When this comes to mind, what
other ideation or mental construct pops into mind as well... thus sprach the
shrink. I think the human mind is a nexus of past and present associations
in Faulknerian time, all circling about one another like molecules about
atoms past as present and present as past. From associations one can
arrive at an interpretation, which is a realistic pattern based upon the
evidence given.
For me the greatest cinematic
association is Kane's mental thoughts as he says "Rosebud." One can
only imagine the condensation of his life into that one sled, so overwrought and
overwhelmed by feelings for his mother and his separation from her, of having
been sold to Thatcher, the banker. Study Rosebud and unrelenting loss is
expressed which is an experience hard to share and harder to metabolize within
one self.
I open with this
analytic morsel to present my case about an enthusiasm for life. For a
night or two an association has taken hold of me, doing its ellipsoid orbits. I
am close to an interpretation of that. However, allow me to offer the
association itself for your consideration. At this moment I just had an
association to Rod Serling. Near the end of his introduction for the Twilight
Zone show he was presenting that night, Serling always made some continuing
comment about how it was up to the audience's "consideration."
Associations are forever fascinating to me, for they are intuitive
insights. As I age they become more and more omnipresent and more intense.
For your
"consideration": It was the mid Fifties and I was in high
school, that dreadful and gloomy pile of stones and brick of Jamaica
High School that made me depressed as a young adolescent, although Stephen
J. Gould roamed its halls with me, that soon to be great evolutionist.
There was a late March snowfall; the kind that vanished within days, for the
snow was quickly melted by the coming spring's sun's rays which also
made it good packing for snowball fights. I recall I had an old Kodak
Hawkeye box camera, so simple, a lens, a viewfinder and a roll of film, nothing
fancy but efficient. For whatever reason, and this is critical for this entire
essay, I took the camera with me and went to a local undeveloped field, gnarled
trees, stumps, aberrant grass growing wildly and began to take pictures of the
flora, here a shot, there a shot. I was just snapping at what I felt [I didn't
feel at that time, I was dead to life] was pretty, the snow and the plants, the
snow and the field itself, the soon to vanish drifts. When I had the
film developed in the murky black and white photos of the time, I showed them
to my father. (I feel now I wanted his approval.) I associate so clearly to
what he said, no malice at all, just his usual obtuseness, for he, too, was
dead to life. And he said to me, "Where are the people?"
I was taken aback. I hadn't
thought about that. I didn't realize. In a queer way, I felt guiltily
remiss. I was not aware of their absence. I had simply gone out to photograph
nature. The poor, dumb bastard of a boy I was then was primitively croaking to
dimly exhort himself to feel, I imagine. I was just having pleasure with
beauty, and I was shot down by "reality." "Where are the
people?"
I swallowed my father's reality.
Who knew there were other realities? I was with incorporating life rather than
projecting upon it. Or, to put it daintily, I ate shit. Hmm, good.
He missed the boat with me. He
always missed the boat with me. I was offering up to him my new joy at what I
had observed and how it made me feel good, even elated, as I think back on it.
I was acting in some fashion, however feebly, upon the world and it would take
centuries of psychic time before I did that as part and parcel of my daily
being. To act upon the world, to be in the world is a wonderful thing to come
upon. I was somewhat open to nature, he was not. I didn't even know that I
was trying to be open to life. It was as if I was a frog making just one
feeble croak and never more that night.
As I look back upon it, I see
myself on very dull levels trying to engage the world -- at 16 --to find an
enthusiasm for life. It was not something I learned; it was something innate
that did not have the willpower to exhibit itself. Again I associate to how a
tulip bulb, at times, has to be "forced," that is, made to bloom
earlier than the season says it is time to do so. I have forced many bulbs in
my life, a few still not in bloom. My enthusiasm for life was there, but it was
nether and very much a surprise to me when it occurred. I was a sublimely
repressed young boy.
As I ramble down memory lane
with you, I need to clarify the difference between repression and suppression.
Although I was a profoundly repressed child and adolescent, closed off to
myself, to others, to the world, a dolt, a block, a stone -- dialogue from
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar comes to mind:
"You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things," the
tribune scolds the mob. Let me pause here and say, trust your
associations, for they always have meaning for you. In associations you
come across yourself, you stumble into you.
A repressed person is shut down
unconsciously, for he is unaware of that which he denies himself; he is closed
off and he is profoundly removed from awareness. I have had a carotid
artery close off completely and I was totally unaware of that. I could have had
a stroke and died. I was lucky. It was discovered and then nothing could be
done about it. Using this as an example, repression is like my carotid
artery -- unknown to me even as harmful and malicious results could be the
consequence, and often are. Repression is you do not know your liver, although
it is your organ.
Evil in the world, malignant and maleficent
evil, is often so repressed that glacial aspects of self are unaware
of other regions of the self. When you look at Dick Cheney, (I just mistakenly
wrote Chaney as in Lon Chaney here; associate to that reader) as he tilts to
his left side (his only liberal tendency) and speaks in his sepulchral voice,
we can detect repression that has closed off his human circulation much as his
ailing, old heart cut off his oxygen. He has died many times as a young
boy and young adult; he probably didn't take a chance with his camera, for the
world was a threatening place to him. I often associate to Cheney as the iconic
example of death in life.
Suppression is more of a
subliminal conscious experience or a conscious experience; to be earthy, what
would be the consequence for me in 1956 to touch a girl’s teenage breasts when
sanitary napkins were wrapped in brown paper wrap without the name Kotex or
Modess on it, when women were embarrassed to purchase these necessities in
supermarkets and drugstores? So, suppression is something that you sometimes
consciously work on, like trying to have that erection calm down because
the girl on the bus has a voluptuous figure. Suppression stymies. It is a
ten-foot psychological and emotional styptic pencil, like the one dad used to
staunch a cut while shaving. Yes, suppression was a staunch styptic pencil of
feelings. But, at least, you were aware or dimly awakened to libidinous and psychological
forces worming their way in and out of you. To have unexpressed feelings
welling up in you that go unsaid and unexpressed is monumentally frustrating,
rigidly Victorian.
I associate again to a wintry
night standing on an elevated train, the wind blowing fiercely. I recall that I
felt a kind of emotional paralysis in my right arm as I so dearly wanted to
drape it across the young female classmate to keep her warm, myself as
well, but I was frozen, fear held me back. My past, my culture, my time all condensed
into that arm and left it inert. If I could return to that night as I am now,
she would have to fend off a male invasion, done with charm and finesse. And so
we repair the past with knowledge of who we are today, enjoyable fantasies if
we forget the ruefulness that bears what could have beens.
And as I reflect on this I think
of all the losses in life, the small and often tender moments that we did not
avail ourselves of. All of life is loss.
I spent most of my youth
suppressing feelings and sexual urges. I could not say this to myself then but
what I wanted to let out was my need to feel and my need, in turn, to be
felt. Early and consistent hugs and embraces would have made a
significant impact upon me as I reflect back. I wanted to express, to be expressive.
I wanted a great deal as a youth that had nothing to do with school, career,
ambition, and all the surface concerns of the Fifties. Combining that which was
repressed in me, and the struggle to suppress according to societal needs and
cultural mores, I was pretty fucked up by eighteen.
I was shut down as a young man. By
decade's end, after a divorce, an affair, therapy which was not wholesome because
the therapist was incompetent, I merged into the Sixties. Slowly I began
to explore what it was to feel, to surrender to the impulses within without
judgment, to go with the flow, to experiment with others, to be expressive,
write, feel, smell, touch, for the Sixties, if not anything else, was a
romantic movement much like the one that revealed Keats and Shelley. (All of
the Sixties can be felt by listening
to the music!) I sloughed off my earlier conditioning. I am much
indebted to the Sixties for releasing me from the repressive thoughts and
ideation of the Fifties. I risked! I broke out, unfettered myself. I began to
become creative and ultimately subversive in how I dealt with society and its
conditioning.
An enthusiasm for life has been
with me for decades now. At a high school reunion, I imagine, the new Matt
would not be recognizable by others, for I have molted many times. I look back
and see in reminiscence the thwarted, the very thwarted, feelings and
expressivities I could not say or try out; how I was dumb to the world, dumb to
myself, a product of rearing no doubt, and I shake my head as I realize
how far I have come so that my continuous enthusiasm for life stills
abides. However, as I near my end, I still struggle with the choices I make so
that I sustain my own life force. I awoke about age 30. And you,
reader, in what condition is your enthusiasm for life?
Reproduced from http://www.mathiasbfreese.com/, with permission from the author Mathias B. Freese.
