SUBTLETEA (POUR IN SPIRIT)

(This is an excerpt from the 2016 SubtleTea interview about Megan Volpert’s 1976. The full interview can be accessed here.)

David: A fascinating passage in 1976 reveals an unflattering assessment of Marilyn Monroe:

The other day, I found myself embroiled in an argument with my father-in-law concerning the intellectual abilities of Marilyn Monroe. He said she was above average in the smarts department and I said she probably wasn’t. At first, his main warrant for this absurd claim was that we should take a look at her husband because Arthur Miller wouldn’t marry a dummy.

Though I’m a Garbolator rather than a Monroebot, I think both underestimation and overestimation of Marilyn are bad. Sure, Saul Bellow said she “conduct[ed] herself like a philosopher,” but undermining terms such as “childlike sex goddess” (Gloria Steinem), “child-girl” (Norman Mailer), “beautiful child” (Capote) and even “baby whore” (Pauline Kael) have been dominant since her demise. Not that Marilyn was a deferred Atwood or Streep, but I trust Sarah Churchwell when she calls her “a greater Gatsby” and pierces the Dumb Blonde perception: “The biggest myth is that she was dumb. The second is that she was fragile. The third is that she couldn’t act.” Contrarily, you perceptively ask: “[I]f she was the total package and couldn’t maintain, what chance do the rest of us schmucks have?” This happens to echo Steinem on Marilyn: “How dare she be just as vulnerable and unconfident as I felt?” Basically, Marilyn offends you for not taking advantage of her advantage:

So if I give her the benefit of the doubt, I’m trapped with a version of history where a woman who was empowered by both her body and her mind could’ve had all the success of which she dreamed so ambitiously, but instead allowed herself to be subjugated to the position of sex symbol until coping with the emptiness inside herself required so many drugs that she torched her own rise to stardom and died in the weakest way at the least opportune moment…I’d rather believe she was a little too dumb to handle it and she just lost control over her own trajectory. I don’t want to believe that Marilyn Monroe was a picture of the consummate professional, full of intellect and common sense, who nevertheless cracked.

Might both “greater Gatsby” and Dumb Blonde be true? As for Marilyn’s (questionable) suicide, Sexton and Plath also killed themselves, so were they “too dumb” to deal?

Megan: I really like Churchwell’s metatextual projects, and though I ultimately didn’t read most of her book on Marilyn Monroe, the way she went at the subject – the nature of apocrypha itself – was very inspirational to me when I was waist-deep in Warhol research. Monroe died long before I was born, so all I ever have to work with will be under or overestimation, even out of the mouths of people who did actually know her. But I enjoy the second-handedness of most information, the way it mutates over time. We’re left with a kind of Pascal’s wager, where I prefer to gamble that she was sort of dumb so that I don’t live in fear of the implications for myself. Because I’m not dumb.

Nor do I think Plath or Sexton were dumb. I admire Sexton’s work particularly. You might argue that they were rather too smart to deal, not too dumb. That’s a perk of being a writer instead of an actor: you’re writing your own history in your own words. There is a cornucopia of archival material for both writers to convey with constancy and consistency how they felt about life, whereas there is comparatively little material directly out of Monroe’s own mouth, and she is not as articulate as those two writers. The chapter on Monroe doesn’t argue that you’d simply have to be dumb to kill yourself. There are some suicides that I would condone, though they tend to be more in the line of euthanization for physical pain than solely for emotional suffering, for example Hunter Thompson’s suicide.

David: In Making Tracks Debbie Harry said that she “always thought [she] was Marilyn Monroe’s kid.” Even dubbed the “punk Marilyn” (Mick Rock saw more Marilyn than punk), Debbie brought “the whole Hollywood/Marilyn sensibility to [rock],” according to Chris Stein (the Lindsay Buckingham to her Stevie Nicks), and she wanted to be “a mysterious figure that’ll never be able to be truly defined,” echoing Marilyn’s stated desire “to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman.” 1976 presents a fundamental contrast between Marilyn and Debbie: the latter is “in charge of herself” and “campily capitaliz[ing] on her own sex appeal to drive [Blondie’s] image into record sales,” has “actual brains” and excels at puckish duping of fawning males. Later in life Debbie stated the obvious: “Certainly, 50% of my success is based on my looks, maybe more, and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.” Well, duh. As Janet Radcliffe Richards wrote, “Beauty is not a matter of what you are, it is a matter of what you look like.” Might physical beauty be its own sort of genius, as Wilde said? Isn’t love of foxiness more than acumen understandable?

Megan: I’ve wanted to talk about Monroe and Harry side by side since the Warhol book, where I could not find a way to do it to my own satisfaction. So much of that chapter of 1976 is a kind of deleted scene from that other project. In fact, the surplus of thoughts and residual understandings I had during that Warhol project in some sense made 1976 easy pickings among all the other years I could have chosen. It’s no secret that I’m working on a book about Bruce Springsteen right now, and in many ways these books are three of a kind, though they are in no way a proper trilogy.

But you asked me about physical beauty. Warhol, having none himself, sought ceaselessly to collect and then reproduce the foxiness he found in others. Where 1976 openly discusses physical beauty, it’s often as an absence, for example in the chapter on Richard Avedon’s political portraits. I understand that many people think of Springsteen as super hot, but I’m not one of them, and most of those people would likely agree with me anyway that his unusual voice has an ugliness that is the real seat of his rise to celebrity. It’s easy to agree with Wilde because physical beauty on a natural level can be a straightforwardly evolutionary prospect. I also admire people working in fashion, photography, or other arts fields where one is expected to be gorgeous, for the upkeep that maintaining gorgeousness obviously requires – foxiness as a kind of acumen. It’s a skill set, and I do love drag queens. But then eating disorders, expensive cosmetic surgery, and so on. I get through life mainly by displaying acumen, but I’d be foolish and not very feminist to disapprove of Debbie Harry’s good looks or how she used them.


more information on Volpert’s book here

Several years ago, the great late poet and Faulkner scholar Louis Daniel Brodsky wrote this piece for me after some particularly intense and creative correspondence between us. This is one of a few dedicated poems. He assured me that any published or unpublished work that he sent to me would be fair game for sharing. I’m deeply honored by his sentiments, and I miss him even more deeply. Thank you, L.D.

The Burden of the Unwritten
For David Herrle

Often, I obsess over all that I’ve missed — not written,
Not heated in inscrutable oblivion’s scalding cauldron,
Not forged in molds formed out of the origins of my poetry,

Not wrought into shapes every bit as exquisite, in their simplicity,
As Grecian urns, Egyptian amphoras, Chinese vases,
Not harvested, to nourish appetites of the starving mind.

Whenever my thoughts compel me in this demoralizing direction,
I sense my veins rise to the surface of my flesh,
Like silken spider webs rippling in silence’s quivering breeze,

As if I were a fragile, gasping creature trying to catch my breath,
Revitalize my slowing blood flow,
And I realize that the stress created by all I’ve not composed

Is an infinitely inordinate burden on my psyche,
For my failure to connect with the source of my life-force,
Derive, from it, the dialogue between my body and my soul.

That’s why, every opportunity I’m given or can grasp,
I transmute ideas, images, metaphors, symbols, rhymes
Into concrete linkages with the world that embodies my spirit,

Maniacally fighting off the demons who’d silence my yearnings
To transcend my heart’s inarticulateness,
Annihilate my craving to quest for the secrets of the ineffable.

Several years ago, the great late poet and Faulkner scholar Louis Daniel Brodsky wrote this piece for me after some particularly intense and creative correspondence between us. He assured me that any published or unpublished work that he sent to me would be fair game for sharing. I’m deeply honored by his sentiments, and I miss him even more deeply. Thank you, L.D.

Suspended
For David Herrle

Nothing much escapes you,
Nothing much, that is, but escape itself —
A void where you’ve been colluding with time, your entire life.

How is it that everyone else who knows you,
Even those who don’t,
Know what you don’t: that escape is your only reason for being,

The great justification for your purblind existence,
In which each awakening is a disappearance
Into the cave that’s warm enough to support your fetal sleep,

Each sleep an awakening into the nowhere you’ve just vacated,
At the far end of the same changeless day
That sustains your obliviousness to the death you’ve been living?

Nothing much escapes you,
Nothing much, that is, but escape itself,
That womb in which you’re suspended in inescapable darkness.

LD showing off a typewriter that used too belong to William Faulkner

(This interview also is featured at Bookolage.)

According to the late dictator Fidel Castro, the Revolución Cubana’s legacy was almost blameless, constructive, justifiably defiant and positively epochal rather than dystopian and fated for failure. However, besides ever-intrusive government, the quest for mass social justice requires drastic actions, so it’s easy to find Fidel’s denials of civil-rights abuses, executions and intolerance incredible. 

On the other hand, adopting an either/or take on the man is lazy, since we’re all susceptible to armchair diagnoses and essentializations. One mustn’t doubt that Fidel was an impressive, suave, profound and smart person. Also, he cannot be considered without considering Cuba itself, since for more than half a century his personality (real, perceived and fabricated) has “spoken” for the nation he wrested from Batista, a ruler who shared more similarities than differences with the more gregarious rival. 

An astute handler of this subject and equipped with some worthy first-hand knowledge of Cuban life (previously told in depth in an excellent Harper’s Magazine article called “Thirty Days as a Cuban”), Patrick Symmes has achieved in The Day Fidel Castro Died: Cuba in the Age of Raúl, Obama, and the Rolling Stones, an intellectually/politically honest portrayal: fair enough to admit favorable points and not to demonize irresponsibly, yet wise enough to resist belief in the regime’s careful charade.

When Viking proposed an interview between me and the author, I accepted with some apprehension, fearing yet another fawning take on Fidel Castro and romanticization of collectivist dictatorships in general. I needn’t have hesitated. Smoothly written and of perfect compact length, The Day Fidel Castro Died has earned my appreciation, respect and endorsement. Please enjoy our exchange.

For fifty-seven years every blown lightbulb was the work of the Americans.
– The Day Fidel Castro Died

DAVID: In Castro: A Graphic Novel Volker Skierka observes that Fidel’s story is “so true that one couldn’t invent it without it seeming implausible.” Despite the inconvenient truths of Fidel, his heyday rattling of history is remarkable, even cinematic. In your book you aptly quote Hamlet’s Hamlet: “He was a man. Take him for all in all. I shall not look upon his like again.” (Think Touch of Evil’s Tanya: “He was some kind of a man.”) How do Fidel’s attractive style, intellect and articulation strike you? Why are eclectic, clever rogues so compelling? Tell us about your preparative approach to, as you put it, “the singularity that is Fidel.” 

PATRICK: He was transgressive, in the beginning. A young lawyer from the best schools, married into a top family, yet he grew a beard and risked his life in battle rather than accommodate himself to that system. The kids who grew up with him actually feared him, because he was so strong-willed, so devoted to his own exceptionalism. It was easy to hope and believe he would usher in a new era of freedom; the vast majority of Cubans and even many Americans supported him by January 1, 1958. But over time the transgressive appeal faded: he cracked down on dissent, long hair, rock and roll, private stores, one thing after another that alienated people. Yet, by constantly flowing and adapting – Soviet when he needed to be, champion of Africa, denunciatory environmentalist – he always had a new way to captivate, justify, and even thrill. But you can’t sustain faith for decades, and whole generations disappeared while nothing ever changed. The uniforms, slogans, and even names are mostly the same today as in 1959. What was once captivating to millions became tired and hypocritical long ago. I was stunned – almost no one important showed up for his funeral! 

DAVID: You think Fidel “should have died young and left a beautiful corpse” in order to be “purified by distance” rather than grow old gracelessly. Meanwhile unctuous Ignacio Ramonet includes him in “the pantheon of world figures who have struggled most fiercely for social justice and with greatest solidarity came to the aid of the oppressed.” Yet you (rightly) write that “he became the dictator he’d rebelled against, the problem to his own solution.” Did Fidel make any significant difference against social injustice and oppression? Is Cuba worse or better off because of the Castro regime?

PATRICK: Certainly the social programs of the Revolution had a broad impact: mass literacy, access to a doctor even in rural hamlets, the promotion of black and brown Cubans to sectors of education and social acceptance that were closed. But of course, many countries achieved mass education without mass surveillance. Many countries today have universal health care, but also elections. And in the meantime, so many other sectors of life simply degraded. Havana is a disaster, physically – at least two houses a day fall down in the city, and whole neighborhoods are abandoned due to collapsed roofs and hurricane damage that isn’t fixed even a decade later. The system is paralysis. You can’t even get basic medicines anymore. I still don’t know how to weigh one against the other: the declared intent to help the poor and disadvantaged was valuable, but it didn’t have to come at this cost, where more than 10% of the population fled. The United States exacerbated the problem, but I think it is clear now that the problem began in Cuba, with Fidel’s conflation of himself with the nation. 

DAVID: Fidel likened his social vision to Christ’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes, which is laughable, given the food shortages/rationing exemplified by your passage about a Cuban family’s monthly seafood allotment being “only one fish each – usually a dried, oily mackerel.” Yet, you do admit some promising relaxation effected by less orthodox Raoul Castro. What is your prediction for Cuba? Is sincere amity between it and the U.S. possible? Mustn’t communism be eschewed to launch and maintain a Cuban renaissance?

PATRICK: Prediction is a dark art, but here goes. I think they can and will lose the communism, but keep the Castro. What I mean by that is that, once Raúl passes, the Revolution is just another movement, a political party. Communism is not central to its survival in the future. That’s why Raúl, with the greatest reluctance and constant retrenchment, has relaxed economic controls, allowed widespread self-employment, and facilitated an unprecedented business boom. The core doctrine is not communism, but Fidelism, the idea of the Revolution as a historic mandate. Survival is all. Remember that experiments with privatizing food production began in 1961 – just one year after the nationalization of all farms!

Fidel was always the ideologue, while from the beginning Raúl actually organized the army and ran the machinery of state, seeing the numbers. He’s pragmatic. As long as it doesn’t conflict with his ability to control society, he tolerates economic changes. I think that’s the model for the future. After he dies, the party will continue to rule, but slowly, eventually, I expect them to let go of the economy. The U.S. won’t be able to resist that for long, and I expect the embargo will be forgotten as soon as American companies sense they are losing big opportunities there. As Fidel always feared, that will lead to an independent population, demands for increased pluralism, and even elections. This could take many, many years, but I fully expect to see a member of the Castro family leading a revolutionary party in elections for president of Cuba someday – once all the old crimes are forgotten. Raúl’s daughter Mariela, highly educated, and his grandson, a dimwitted security goon, are both likely candidates. And of course Fidel had five acknowledged sons and illegitimate offspring all over the island. 

DAVID: At the Bay of Pigs the men of doomed Brigade 2506, blindly trusting the CIA and American military might, paid dearly for the flinching White House’s abandonment. This created disillusionment that, I think, helped eventuate “Pepe” San Roman’s 1989 suicide. Tell us about your claim that “the fundamental failure at the Bay of Pigs was not tactical, it was moral.”

PATRICK: I meant that as an accusation against my country, America. The moral failure was believing that America had the right to invade Cuba, to decide things by bombs and sabotage. The Kennedy brothers knew it was wrong; that’s why they tried to hide the American hand, and abandoned the 2506 Brigade rather than launch a US invasion. Among the exiles themselves, the moral failure was more complex: they were blind to the popular support the Revolution had attained, but at least it was their own country they were invading.

DAVID: In extreme contrast to their music having been banned in Cuba in the 1960s, the Rolling Stones (who certainly won’t leave beautiful corpses) first performed in Havana in 2016, which was seen by many attendees as fruit from President Obama’s historic outreach. Far from gushing over brave rapprochement, you say that Obama wielded an ultimate weapon: “treat[ing] the island as normal.” Please explain.

PATRICK: Fidel always claimed the mantle of history and used a kind of histrionic style that placed Cuba at the center of world events. That was true in 1959, 1961, and 1963, but no matter how much the propaganda repeats it still today, Cubans know that the island is weak and left behind. Obama called the Castro bluff. He bypassed their central symbol – no handshake or meeting with Fidel –while showing he was utterly unafraid or unimpressed by the Revolution. He spoke directly to the Cuban people about the value of democracy and human rights, live on national television. Without actually lifting the embargo, he sent an incredibly strong signal to Cubans about the future, telling them to bet on economic changes and a welcoming U.S. Now Trump has renewed the exchange of hostilities and accusations, which I fear has shattered that clear vision of where the two countries were going. 

DAVID: I know of some Americans packing giveaway items (travel-size shampoo, toothpaste, etc.) to be doled out to people they’d encounter on their Cuban vacation. Is this a tactless fad of “slumming” interlopers – and, if so, is such condescension noticed by the folks down there? By the way, why is Cuba such a novelty for many Americans?

PATRICK: Back in the 1990s, a woman burst into tears when I gave her bar of soap. I have never once had a Cuban complain that it was condescending! I find only well-fed Westerners feel guilty about this kind of thing. Nowadays soap is widely available, but only in the dollar stores, at hard-currency prices that few Cubans can afford. So give, and give freely – even a pair of old shoes will find a use. As to the second question, one novelty for Americans can be how American it feels. You can still see the old American brand names on 60-year old signs, the cars are famously American, Havana is full of old American-built hotels, and Cubans themselves have longstanding ties to us, from long before 1958. And of course, the veil of hostility and politics makes all of that seem more exotic and unknown. I feel like I’m a blockade runner when I’m in Cuba. The Canadians are just feeling regular. 

DAVID: Another novelty is Che Guevara, whom Fidel called “an indestructible moral force,” neglecting the man’s atrocious, hypocritical, Stalinist ways. Alberto Korda’s famous merchandized Che image still delights the ignorant or enthralled, though he would’ve had them silenced or executed at La Cabana prison – and he certainly was anti-Rolling Stones. How do you view popular lionization of Che?

PATRICK: The more I learned about his real actions, the more disturbed I became. But eventually I burst out the other side of my cynicism and said, dammit, there is something really important at work here. His image is vastly more influential than the Cuban Revolution itself. I’ve seen peasants in Peru cry as they discussed “the Che” and what he did for them. The historic inaccuracy of that is one thing, but the yawning need for a hero impressed me. People had to reinvent Che, because Latin America has produced so few real champions for the poor. He was the one who actually had the good sense to die young and leave a beautiful corpse. 

DAVID: I compare Che to Saint-Just, the bloodthirstiest devil of the French Revolution, which, like the later major “egalitarian” revolutions, involved social-justice warfare, bitter secularization, property theft and belief in extreme remaking of humanity. Only the American Revolution avoided reprisals, atrocity, police statehood and denial of human nature – and it still hasn’t been duplicated. Why is this? Are potential Nazi Germanies or Jonestowns lurking in all utopians’ genes?

PATRICK: I think that DNA is lurking in all of us. We’re a social species, but I’m impressed with how violent we can become, so quickly. The utopians are convinced they can act on the world. The American founders were afraid of that; they hemmed us in with divided powers and checks and balances. I’m afraid I’ll have to subscribe to the traditional Burkean view that gradual change that reforms institutions works better than radical overthrow of the whole orders. I hope Cuba has careful, steady change over many years, but most Cubans will tell you they are ardiente, or fiery. They may come think they can change everything at once. 

DAVID: Perhaps the most important thing you learned during your Havana residence was Cubans’ fortitude in spite of a police-state environment and deprivation: “In the midst of this suffering, the dignity and pathos of ordinary Cubans struck me deeply.” Tell us more about this. And what do you think of the long trend of defection and the recent spike in emigration to the U.S.?

PATRICK: I’ve learned that the best people live in the worst places. It creates solidarity and fellow feeling even amid deprivation and struggle. But Cubans are smart enough to read the wind, and many rushed to America just before the open immigration policy ended. Enormous numbers are still leaving the island for Central America and really anywhere they can get, because they think they will live better abroad than at home. It’s going to continue.

Visit Patrick’s official site here.
David Herrle is a freelance writer and founder of SubtleTea.

Marsha works as a freelance illustrator and digital painter in South Australia. Visit her site here. 

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Elliott and the travel bug from Elliott Catches a Bug by David Danks




Moo and Ginger from Moo and the Sleepy Secret by Catherine Clarke

I saw him again today. I’m afraid of him. There’s just something about that man, the way he looks at people, the way he looks at me. I know he wants to hurt me. I can’t let him.

I peel back the curtains and take a look out the window. I can’t see him now, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there. I hope he isn’t.

I close the curtains again, shutting out the blinding white-gold rays of sunlight, shutting out the world outside my window. I remember how I used to love this window. It was the reason I chose this room for my studio when we first moved in.

I think back often to those first days here in this house. I didn’t expect to like it here at all. I never wanted to move here, that was Doug’s idea. He grew up out in the country, he said it would be good for the kids, they would have room to play, they’d be out of the city, away from all the predators and pitfalls that came along with city life.

I still don’t like it. I’ve tried to, I really have. I think I managed to convince Doug that I like it here, and for a while I managed to convince myself, but that was before our new neighbor moved in. After I saw him, the spaces seemed a lot wider, the dusty roads more desolate, and the quiet air even eerier.

I close the curtains and sit back down at my easel and try to focus on the canvas in front of It’s not finished, not even close. All it looks like now is a series of shapes and lines. That’s my favorite part of the creative process, the early stages when I can see something starting to take shape but no one else but me knows what it will be. It’s like my little secret, at least for a while.

My project at the moment is a close-up of a lemon, sliced in half, seeds and all. Why a lemon? Why not? That’s the beauty of modern art, it can be random and not make any sense. Just like life.

I squint harder and hold the picture I took in the kitchen closer to my face. I try to study the finer points of the fruit, the lines, the pores of the skin, the pointy off-white seeds, the varying shades of yellow.

All of a sudden, a loud crash sounds from outside. Startled, I looked up and arise from my chair. I don’t want to look out the window, but I have to. I ease back over to the window and slowly slip my fingers underneath the curtain. I peek out the window but I don’t see anything. Not at first, anyway. I look closer and that’s when I see it.

Relieved, I see the tree in our yard. That’s all it was, nothing more, nothing less. It’s been windy out today, the wind must have knocked it over. I suppose I’ll have to go out and pick it up, or I could just wait until Doug gets home. If I did that, he’d probably want to know why, and if I told him he’d just laugh at me and tell me I’m being silly. Or, he would take me seriously and ask me if I took my medication today.

He does that, sometimes, whenever I seemed a little bit off. He doesn’t come out and say it, of course. He’ll say things like “Are you feeling all right, Gemma?” or “Did you take care of things?” That’s the one that really gets under my skin. Of course, he doesn’t mean it to, he never does. He means well, I know that. He just wants what’s best for me.

I hold my head up. I’m going to be brave. I’m going to go out there and clean up the yard. If I see him, I’ll just go back inside, lock the door, and put a chair in front of the door.

I grab my green hoodie from the back of my chair and settle myself into it. I shut the door to my studio and I head to the garage to grab a rake and a trash bag.

Outside, I can see the tree branches strewn haphazardly throughout the front yard. It’s a mess, but I’m sure it won’t take long to clean up. Like many things, it looks much worse than it is.

Just as I bend down to start cleaning the branches, a voice calls out behind me. “Gemma?”

My heart skips a beat. I turned around. It’s him. He knows my name. How does he know my name? Then it occurs to me. I don’t even know his name.

“W-what are you doing here?” I manage to stammer.

He laughs and his face settles into a complacent smirk. “What do you mean, what I’m doing here? I’m your neighbor. I’m just trying to get acquainted, you know, be neighborly.” He starts pacing towards me.

I shake my head, but I can’t speak. My throat feels like it is closing up more and more with each step he takes.

“Come on, Gemma, let’s be neighborly.” He grinned. He moves closer, his hands outstretched and spread apart. Sweat drips down his ruddy face, and his beady eyes gleam with wicked delight.

“No…” I feel the word slip past my lips, but I can’t hear my own voice. I back away from him, but he is still coming closer to me. I turn around, I try to run, and I feel his hands grip my waist. He tries to pull me to the ground, but just as I’m about to fall, I grab hold of the rake.

“Yes, Gemma, you and me…” He whispers, in a low, menacing purr.

“No!” I shout, this time so loud I hear the echo of my voice.

I pick up the rake, and I swing at him. The edge of the rake strikes his temple. He smiles at me, as though he hadn’t felt the blow at all. He tries to lunge at me, but I hit him again, I hit him harder and harder, over and over. He screams, he cries, he tries to fight back, but it is no use. I’m the powerful one now. I watch him grow weaker and weaker until he finally collapses to the ground, never to get up again.

It takes a few moments for me to realize what I’ve done. His battered lifeless form lies sprawled on the ground, his reddish blonde curls streaked with blood, his face left barely recognizable by the rake. I’m shocked. I’m horrified. I just wanted him to leave me alone. I never wanted this.

As I look at the scene in front of me, I start to tremble. I’ve killed him, I realize. Now what do I do? It was self-defense, I tell myself. It was, wasn’t it? I hit him so that he would leave me alone, so that he couldn’t hurt me.

I stare down at my hands, then at his bloodied body, and back at my hands. There is not a scratch on me. I’m not injured, there’s not even any blood on me, no evidence of what he tried to. It’s my word against his. And he’s not talking. He’ll never talk again.

Overkill. That’s what they’ll call it. I can’t go to the police. They wouldn’t believe me. I could end up in prison, or even sentenced to death. A chill runs through my body. I can’t let that happen. My kids can’t grow up without a mother. I can’t handle prison. I don’t want to die.

I’ll have to get rid of the body. There isn’t any other way. I don’t know how I’ll do it, but I know I have to. The trash bag. Of course. That’s where I’ll put him.

I stoop down, gather up the bag and pull the crinkly black plastic around him. I carefully stuff him into the bag, and next I do what I came out here to do in the first place. I finish picking up the leaves and branches, now bloodstained, and toss them into the trash bag as well.

I notice how tidy the yard looks, once I’m done cleaning up. If someone were to drive by right now, they would have no idea what just happened. Of course, people seldom ever drive by here. There’s only two houses on this stretch of road, our house and his house. Well, it was his house. I suppose now it’s nobody’s house.

I drag the plastic bag into the garage. Oddly enough, it’s not as heavy as I feared it would be. I don’t know where I’m going to hide the body, somewhere out in the desert, maybe. But I can’t right now. I can hardly think, and the kids will be home soon. I’ll do it tomorrow, when I have more time, once I figure out where I can put him so no one will ever find him. For the time being, I place him in the trunk of my car.

As I turn to go back inside the house, I pause and take one more look at my car. It’s hard for me to believe that there’s a dead man in there, and that I killed him. Maybe I’ll never fully believe it. Or maybe it will sink in when I have to bury him. I don’t know. All I know is if that I want to get through this, I have to keep going. And going.

“This is delicious, Gemma. Nice job,” Doug remarked, later that night at the dinner table.

“Thank you,” I respond in a quiet voice.

Somehow I managed to pull myself together long enough to make dinner. Actually, it served as a comfort to me, something to focus on, to keep my mind off of what I’ve done. I still can’t believe that the same hands that made dinner for my family tonight killed a man just hours before. But I don’t regret it.

Doug looks up from his plate. “Did you hear we might be getting a new neighbor soon?”

I drop my fork, and I can feel my pulse race. But, how? No one knows who’s dead yet. Do they?

Doug chuckles. “Don’t look so surprised, that house has sat empty for almost a year. I didn’t think it would be long before they found a buyer.”

“But –” I manage to say. “That man…”

“No, it’s not a man who bought it,” Doug continued. “She’s a single mom, with two kids about the ages of ours.” He looks over at our two children and said, “You’ll finally have someone else to play with out here.”

“No,” I say. “I met the man who was living there. He moved in a few days ago, he used to walk by here all the time. Haven’t you seen him?”

He stares at me, puzzled. “No. There’s been no one living there.” He paused. “Gemma, have you…?”

I shake my head. I don’t know what to say.

“Excuse me.” I bolt from the table, and hurry out to the kitchen. I dig into my purse and grab my keys. Trembling, I head to the garage and pop the trunk lid open. I hoist the trunk lid up. Inside, I see the plastic garbage bag, with weeds sticking out the side of the bag. I tear open the bag and sift through the weeds, leaves and branches.

No dead body.  And no body at all. No blood, either.

I look around the garage and I see the rake, clean and also free of blood. As if it never happened. I turn around and race out of the garage, back into the house, past my family still seated at the table, so accustomed my unpredictable ways that they barely notice. I run to the bedroom and open my dresser drawer.

I smile, as I pick up my pill box and take a look inside. Today is Wednesday, I remember that much. I notice today’s dose is still there. I see M, T, F, S and S are still there, too. I haven’t taken my medicine in nearly a week.

I breathe a sigh of relief. Things happen when I don’t take my medicine. Or, rather, they don’t happen. Things don’t happen, but I think that they do.

I reach for a water bottle, toss a pill in my mouth, and take a huge gulp of water before the acidic taste of the pill can burn my tongue. I feel the tablet slide down my throat, and I take another gulp of water for good measure.

“Hello, reality,” I murmur aloud. “I’m on my way back…”

(This is an excerpt from Freese’s new memoir, And Then I Am Gone: A Walk with Thoreau.)

I am disappointed to find that most that I am and value
for myself is lost, or worst than lost, on my audience. I
fail to get even attention of the mass. I should suit them
better if I suited myself less. I feel that the public demand
an average man,—average thoughts and manners,—not
originality, nor even absolute excellence.
—Thoreau, Journal

Whenever I am under considerable stress, my gums become impacted and decay sets in. Having found a dentist, I discovered that I needed root-canal work and four crowns put in. Disheartening. Stress goes straight to my mouth. I have endured gum disease and bone loss.

I was not in good spirits for my recent dental treatment, and restoration required me to lie on my back for over an hour. At the checkout desk, two women sat at their stations as I approached to pay part of my bill. Jenny, the office manager, ended up revealing that she enjoys traveling and has been to New York. Michelle, the other woman, joined in, and in the three-way conversation I regaled them with my love for the Big Apple, how digestible food is not to be found in Alabama – which Jenny agreed with wholeheartedly – and how I missed my hometown dearly. I am an urban man in the boonies.

The conversation became animated, had me babbling and made me feel alive. It brightened my day and erased my former low spirits. Good conversation with others can do that. I shared my background as a New York City cab driver, an English teacher, a shrink, and an author of several books, promising each woman a copy by next appointment.

I also spoke of the Viking cruise down a French river Nina and I took in August of 2016. We docked at several French towns, and most of our navigation was done at night. One town guide was a young man, maybe in his late twenties. I engaged him as he showed us the sights, and when I discovered a synagogue, he was more than willing to bring the group in and make the arrangements to get access. Across the way from the synagogue’s door, high up on a wall, was a marker citing the capture of Jews in the area back in the Nazi era. Eventually, as we strolled I learned that the guide was a singer, but not an ordinary one. He revealed that he had a high falsetto voice and that he was studied in music. With encouragement by me and others who had learned of his other talent, he agreed to sing for us in a nearby courtyard. He settled down, he settled in, he clasped his face in his hands, and when he was ready his astonishing voice adorned the area like melancholic roses spread across a wall. Passersby and cyclists stopped, a woman curiously looked out her window. Later on, when we were about to embark on our ship, he sang a farewell song. It was an entirely blissful way to experience not only France but one another, our shared humanity.

We met another French guide named Pierre Brunel. When I returned to America, I sent him a copy of I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust. He has never replied to me. Perhaps my book was not to his liking.

Pierre was leading a group of us through a French town when he spontaneously addressed everyone about his family’s history in the area. His mother’s family had rescued a Jewish doctor and his wife, but the wife was captured and gassed in Auschwitz. The doctor survived with the dogged help of Brunel’s family, though some family members were killed. After the war the doctor continued to treat the Brunels for over forty years. Brunel was inordinately proud of what his family had done. I drew him aside to see if I could engage him, garner more details, since I had written two books on the Holocaust.

After some talk, he reached into his shirt and removed a necklace with a large silver Jewish star on it, which he said was a constant reminder of the event. I was stunned and moved. I shared with him my admiration for his brave family and told him of my background, followed by a promise to send him a copy of my book when I returned to the States.

I revealed this riveting story to Jenny and Michelle, and they were quite taken by it, as I had been. Leaving the office, I felt renewed by having shared some tales of fascinating human beings and brightened by those who were willing to listen to me. I am thinking now of the trademark line of the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski: “The Dude abides.”

When readers explain to me why they will not review my book, I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust, I have noticed, in some instances, that the two stories they do like are what I call “Anne Frank” efforts. That is, the stories are safe and give humanity a free pass, playing on the cello strings of the human heart. Most of my stories are idiosyncratic, gritty, graphic, savage, caustic, and satirical.

They take no prisoners. When the head of a Jewish studies program wrote to me that she “shuddered” upon reading my other stories, I found that schizoid. In a world in which we now have beheadings, her dainty perspective and head-up-her-ass attitude are hard to take. She is an intellectual wuss.

Films are much more graphic than books, but books incise into the mind in a different way. So, here is a Holocaust educator who has circumscribed what she reads, to admit and accept only what is safe. In Terrence Des Pres’s book The Survivor, about the concentration camp experience, he graphically describes how camp guards made some Jews eat their own shit. It happened. Learn from it. As a writer, use it. Don’t flinch. Or get out of the Holocaust experience as a writer.

If I were to write a story in which an inmate has to eat his own shit, I wonder if it would be rejected immediately. Of course it would. It would make her “shudder.” My literary imaginings bother her more than beheadings.

Another writer and educator, barely containing her rage, complained to me that she had no time for fiction about the Holocaust, that we should spend more time taking down the stories of survivors, become memoir recorders, assisting them in encapsulating their experiences.

I have no problem with that at all, but in the same breath she castigated Holocaust fiction as a waste of time at this time in history. Holocaust as memoir, Holocaust as remembrance—is that all there is? So no more Primo Levi, no more Elie Wiesel, no more Olga Lengyel. No time for explication and exploration, or interpretation. (I am a staunch Jew. I make trouble. I wear no Star of David on my neck, but I have always dreamed of having a question mark fashioned to take its place.)

I must say judgmentally that I experience such responses as a kind of moral cowardice. I have no need to defend my book or explain its contents. When you mine for gold, digging produces slag, detritus. When you explore the heart of darkness, you make things messy and muddied, conflictual, and, for these days’ weak-minded readers, aggravating and annoying. However, it is the search that always counts. My mind wanders back to 1958 to a Contemporary Civilization course at Queens College. The instructor began to speak about Karl Marx, and one of the undergrad women got upset with the mere mention of his name. The teacher went up to her seat and said, “Karl Marx … Karl Marx … Karl Marx … Karl Marx” in an attempt to desensitize the student, I imagine, to the very sound of the name. And so it is with mentioning the Holocaust.

When I receive these responses, I feel soiled by human beings who want the Holocaust neatly wrapped up, literally ended or tidied up – or just not written about at all. Underneath is a need to be safe. And my Jewish brethren are as guilty as anyone else. It is the dark and nether consequence of resistance to put out of conscious mind what is nettlesome, frightening, scary, and personally repulsive to bear under the scrutiny of awareness.

In short, it comes down to fear. I wrote in another context that fearlessness leads to authenticity in writing. I stand by that. I am so old that authenticity in living is still a vital principle to live by or struggle to attain. And when I come across prissy responses to my book I don’t relate to them well, for they are foreign to me. I’m naïvely taken aback that people don’t want to see, and yet I spent years dealing with the unsaid in my clients. So, I have determined that if my book is to be read I must give it away, which I am doing in certain cases: to Holocaust museums and centers, Holocaust studies programs, instructors, and the like. After all, I am into sharing what I own and what I feel and what I can write about without an inordinate concern about marketing and making royalties.

Apparently, any book on the Holocaust nowadays, like the Jews in the 1940s, is met with indifference. Ho-hum is the response. An ennui has settled in and, like a miasmic swamp, occludes efforts to understand again and again what the Holocaust is. One of my lifelong learnings is that human beings are a shabby lot. I have no expectations of man because my own fellow man lacks the slightest realistic expectation of himself, except to make money and fuck. Kazantzakis said it well on his epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”

I may like to get bruised or kicked in the ass, to perseverate in this agony, or I don’t really give a damn. I do have a measure of hope. I hand out my book for free, like a business card, just to share: “Hey, brother, I can spare a dime.” To be read is all that I require; to be asked a question is a wonderful chakra, something to behold. It is the teacher in me. At my age I experience what Erickson called “generativity,” the need to give what wisdom one has attained to the young or to those who are willing listeners.

And there is also the asbestos-like silence. I have mailed out over one thousand queries, and more than a handful to reviewers who have read my earlier works. And they don’t nibble at all. In my imagination they feel not to reply is not to be involved with a foul subject, or one that makes them shudder, equivocate, or flee; whatever, the motivation what I am left with is silence from previous supporters.

It is deafening. You might label this “Holocaust aversion.” Human beings rarely ever face what they are capable of, something evident in the long-lingering dislike of Freud. Some “well-meant” individuals want to protect survivors from the very horrors they have experienced. How self-servingly odd.

In education, reading readiness, if I recall correctly, has to do with the child’s ability at a certain age and grade to be introduced to reading or to another level of reading. I suspect Holocaustphobes are not “ready.” Many of us cannot advance beyond Anne Frank’s outside-the-concentration-camp experience. (More than a few historians feel that Anne Frank’s diary is not part of Holocaust literature.)

Psychologically, many human beings suffer, with regard to the Holocaust, from arrested development. I have let out the genie from my powder keg. A writer can never control the consequences of what he says in print, the misinterpretations, the misunderstandings, or the lack of nuanced reading. Henry Thoreau, when Margaret Fuller read your “The Service” for The Dial, she complained, “I cannot read it through without pain.”

I also sense that I have touched upon several taboos. I am well aware that I rarely censor myself or hold back what I have to say. That is, I don’t send my work out to the cleaners. I am not a safe person to be around, in any case. Some people cover holes with stones; I unearth them for a look-see, call it characterological.

Ansell lives and works in the UK. Visit her site here.

Georgie




The Bones of You




Solstice II




Shadow of the Seventh




Ocelli




Treasury of Souls




A Question of Balance




Liberty Sleeping

Read Aronson’s SubtleTea interview here.
Visit his official website here.

Benefactor




Gaia





Moon Goddess




Hoochie




The Book




Womb




Black & White 2






Housewife




Penis Envy




Gothic Romance

Carvalho lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Visit his site here.

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