Dreams Dreams Dreams ...

 

 Can you hide from your subliminal feelings and desires? Is Matthew  correct in saying that to fantacize something is the same as doing it ... or ... is the only question whether you ride the Tiger or the Tiger rides you?

 Why I came to Philadelphia ... running a school for some years while I was training psychoanalytically.

Videos

 I've decided to post some videos on this site. They were recorded by a training company in India ... I don't know what they're using them for ... what purpose ... but they represent some spontaneous thoughts I had in response to their questioning and may as well be out there. hhc 

Nevermind Just "What do Women Want" 

but 

What Do We Want in the Last Quarter

COVID-19 has us, as they say, Locked Down. In our homes! Alone or with family. Down to basics? I suppose for some but not for all. Still, most of us have slowed down. There's a scene in the 1950's Thousand Clowns, just as the movie opens. As I recall, Jason Robards is looking down from a very high window or maybe it's the moderator, himself, panning Wall Street with throngs of bug-small people moving about going somewhere. The plot wonders if maybe they're going nowhere. Perhaps, today, we'd call it a Gyph! A graphic trope! Matters little but it goes along with the plot-line centered on a man who is coming against a burgeoning society that was beginning to move in the direction of these earliest -- but pre-COVID -- months of the 21st Century. Madness! Entropic energy! We worry about the parents who bury their kids in music and math and dance and karate and baseball and ... and a neverending and unfolding of hustles and bustles competing only with the TV Adverts that move at five times 78rpm, betimes so quickly that one begins before the previous one has ended.

In my good COVID moments, I think of these seven weeks in the way 19th C. Sampson Raphael Hirsch thought of the practice of restfulness ... of sabbath. He reasoned that the biblical prescription for a day of rest helped humanity recognize that, in spite of their aspirations for greatness and creativity and a Porsche in the driveway, we members of Clan Anthropos are creations, just like the dog under the dining room table and the slug in the garden. We pretend to create. Judy Collins, the Kohelles-like chanteuse of a generation, sang: "Everything comes and goes/Marked by lovers and styles of clothes!" So, too, after some 50 years of labor and writing and building, I get my months -- funny they should come in the Last Quarter -- of reminders that, in some sense, we and I spend our time pretty much just moving one pile into an apparently neater one.

Still, even if we're doing nothing more than being born, rearranging some furniture and dying, we have some good times. We Eat and we Dance and we Sing and we Make Love and some of us choose to reproduce and raise our spawn "in their Good Times and in their Bad." And lest anyone reading this seeks to have me sent off for a Rest Cure for some Deep Depression, let me say that I've had a very Good Ride with lots of fun and occasions for both sadness in saying goodbye and some pretty whacky glee in times that I've been able to play with my fellow travelers. No way I'd choose not to have been born or to live a shorter life. I say: Bring me More of the Same!

Good enough. So, what do I want from this Last Quarter and however much Overtime I get to have. The Biblical character Jacob asked for "some clothing to wear and bread to eat!" In his last hurrah, standing before Egypt's Pharaoh, he whine: I'm an Old Man and my Days have been Just Awful. In the scriptural readings in my Faith Tradition, I always like getting to Chapters 48-50 in Genesis. It means, frankly, that I don't have to read any more, this year, about poor Old Jacob and his self-absorbed misery. Miserable people are, well ... miserable. 

There is essentially one and, perhaps, only thing about which Dennis Prager -- he is a Conservative Trump-and Fracking Supporting thinker who also is a Happiness Speaker -- and I agree (my Sister suggested I listen to Prager on Happiness): 'expressions of happiness are a gift we give and a debt we pay to others. Withholding it is nasty.' I don't think it's something, by the way, that we owe others every moment ... but often. Indeed, one of the greatest gifts I receive is when one of my near and dear or even an actor on stage shares their deep sadness with me. Sadness is not Depression (unless you're Big Pharma selling pills). Depression, like Anger, pushes people away. Sadness welcomes people to come near and hold. And so does Happiness. And Sadness is not Unhappiness and can often commingle with Happiness. I am, let me digress, quite sad that a dear old friend is dying and M and I cannot visit her during COVID. Still, I am quite Happy to hear her on the phone playing cards with her 24 year old grand-daughter who came to help Grandma and Grandpa when Grandma was diagnosed last year. Maybe those are Wedding Tears ... tears of joy. One sees the Bride and Groom celebrating Future and, like Proust, we're sad that we cannot quite ever again experience that transcendent feeling of a Big Sky Future.

So, in my extended Months of Sabbath, I hope for some joys, too, but something else, as well. Interesting how our News Programs often end with this other shared sentiment. I'm referring to Kindness. I'm not certain exactly what Kindness is but as a Justice once said about Pornography: "I know it when I see it." Show me two people interacting with each other and I'll tell you whether there's Kindness, in the mix.

We're not born Kind; we're born Needy. "His Majesty the Baby" (Freud's 1914 way of noting the demanding neediness of the infant and baby) has Needs and Others either fulfill those Needs or FAILS to do so. Somewhere in the first three years, the child begins to realize that Others are not only different than s/he but also very similar. They, too, have Needs. Until that moment, Others are mostly like Chess Pieces manipulated on a Board to the end of satisfying some Pleasure or Need. They have no Subjectivity as Subjects have their own Needs and Wishes and Motivations.

That Moment when the Child recognizes that it's possible to be motivated-to-action by others' needs or wishes moves the child from a narcissistically-hedonistic state of being into one where it is sometimes possible to be motivated to act due to the wishes of this Special Other ... Parent? Sibling? Child? Friend or Homeless Person. The Hairy Little Caterpillar becomes a Butterfly, a being that not only hides itself protectively with its patterned wings but brings Beauty to some Others. The Butterfly's beauty is truly only apparent in the eyes of those who can behold and reflect on what they see. 

I don't know what Kindness is but it is nonetheless what I think I most crave Playing in the Last Quarter. But of some things I feel certain:

• Kindness is about sharing one's beautiful wings with another;
• Kindness is about being motivated to make others Joyful;
• Kindness is about not raining on Others' parades;
• Kindness is not Greedy but seeks to Share; and
• Kindness IS the the stuff that Bonds us Electrons, together in these teaming madness that we think of as life.

Just Another Day in COVID-City

I'm not among those suffering. I am one of those lucky 70+'ers whose likely to be hunkered down for the Summer but I can work from home and we have access to enough victuals to carry us through.

I'm not among those suffering alone ... No Eleanor Rigby, here. I have a partner and a dog ... M for a very long time (some friends wonder if M's suffering being with me?) and Maisie for a couple of years, now. I'd like to think that I rescued M from her Mother in 1965 and Maisie from being euthanized in some W. Virginia Dog Shelter. I think of myself as a decent sort, as old Professor Higgins opined on himself, "an ordinary man ..."

I just read a piece from a psychiatric colleague who noted that our Elected President seems to place no value in the expertise or the health of Medical Staff. I suppose Trump only admires those who don't get caught by the virus and thinks of those who do as weak as Sen. McCain.

His writing certainly hit home. It fascinates me to watch how each segment of the population in an autocratic state becomes targeted due to some narcissistically pragmatic need of the would-be-Despot. Indeed, this administration has shown no respect for any expertise ... nor for any extant structures or organization that predates his rule ... not for the generals, not the heroic soldiers, not the Goldstar parents, not the economists, not the House, not the Meat-Packing workers, not the Judiciary, the Senate, NATO or WHO and now neither OSHA, CDC or ...  quelle surprise! ... the Healthcare World. It brought to mind the prose of a German Post-War cleric who famously wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I tried for many years to write about the administration. I started a FB Group named Free Citizen Therapists more than three years ago to provide a forum for therapists to discuss the need to balance the rights of public figures to their private lives (The Goldwater Rule) with the rights that the electorate has to expect the Mental Health Community to clue them in on when a leader was dangerous ... and dangerous in a way that threatened people. I joined other therapists in writing a book on The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. And while I think those writings may have helped get the word out, it has become rather unavoidable to at least consider that there's nothing more to do with this storm except ride it out.

For the moment ... at least at this moment on the last day of April 2020 ... I've given up. I have little doubt that I will be re-energized sometime soon but, today, I feel helpless to do anything to help the Doctors, Nurses, CNA's and Staff of the Hospitals to stay safe in Trump's America. I don't know what to do for the Meat Packers who are being threatened with intentionally induced poverty (no job? no unemployment, either) if they don't join the active troops in Gen. Trump's Wartime Army, conscripted to Kill or Outlive COVID (TWACKOC).

So, if y'ever wanna find me, I'm here gettin' old and puttin' on the COVID-15 ... those 15 pounds that most of us are gleaning from grazing like the cows and bulls being slaughtered, today, wish they were doing. I'm doing my work and having a snack. Then a little more and another snack, maybe some lunch. I call it the COVID Bovine Diet.

I have nothing really to complain about and, as Thomas Merton wrote some 60 years ago:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself.

This much I know: I've lost a step here and there ... but I'm OK.

DON'T ASK FOR WHOM THE MICROWAVE DINGS; IT DINGS FOR THEE ... & ME!

I saw the skinny black cat, this morning. I don't know it's name but it's the very same cat that struts in front of the french doors in the dining room driving Maisie the Pooch to bark and to do so as if she were tough as "a junkyard dog." My mind, though, didn't turn to the dog but immediately to the street cats of Brooklyn in the early 1950's. Skinny cats waiting for Wednesday -- or was it Thursday -- when the horse-drawn fishcart would ride up W. 5th Street, stopping to disembowel fish for waiting housewives of the Post-War era.

I don't know what to call the Coney Island that I remember -- not the Coney of rides and sideshows and hotdogs that I wasn't permitted to eat but -- the neighborhood peopled with Mr. Goldman the Plumber, Schneider the Painter, the Johnsons and Engles, Perry's bald Dad, Sam, who drove a hack, Stevie's Dad who worked for the NY Subway System and the holocaust survivors next door. 

Coney Island was the neighborhood I was born into -- no choice, there. I was the fourth kid and the only one born after Dad came home pretty angry from Korea. We lived upstairs from Mom's parents, he was a clergyman with a following and a pretty-open-door policy to the poor and scholars, alike;  Grandma cooked and baked and interpreted dreams from a 15th C. dreambook that my brother later would translate.

So, why was I remembering those cats and not the half-dozen furry quadrupedal friends who have agreed to live with M and I during the past 55 years. We have no cat, now, just Maisie the Pooch. Can't rightly say "why." Still, my next thought was of the isolation that I remember first experiencing downstairs in my Grandfather's Waiting-Room/Living-Room/Office where he would greet his visitors and where he would teach me the biblical stories and wisdom of our people. It was a daily thing, learning with him while my older Sibs would be off in school and Mom would be upstairs. I can't say that I know what Mom was doing. The war had been tough for her. Not only was her husband not there to help tend to the three kids born before and during WW2 and not there, now, but off in a factory printing table-cloths and wall paper. More than that, Mom had lost dozens of people in her native Hungary which she had left in the early 1920's. Mom did a lot of sketching. She'd wanted to be an artist -- I'd say that she was -- but Cooper Union wasn't in the cards for the daughter of Rabbi Adolph Klein.

It was in Grandpa's room that I first remember feeling deep sadness. I wrote about that experience in 1998 (1998/2016-Oedipal Paradigms in Collision):

As a child, two to six years of age, I daily visited an aged and bearded scholar whose self-appointed task it was to instruct me in the reading, writing and lore of my forebears. This grandfather of mine would sit at his desk; I would stand at his knee, trying to steal glimpses of the surface of his desk, of the pens, of the books — with their pages crumbling and browned — that laid upon this surface. I felt bathed in a warmth that I cannot articulate. He frequently would say that learning should be sweet; so it was. He seemed to possess the ages, to be one with the past. Perchance, it can be said that the Old have no present or future in the eyes of the Young, only a past. For two hours each day, he would recite stories told to him by his mentors. These stories from the ancient Writ and, possibly, the voice of the old man telling them had the tone and feeling of lullabies that might attend a child being lulled to sleep at mother’s breast, a warm and quiet symbiosis.

Occasionally, a visitor would knock at his door. At times, it was one of his adherents coming for spiritual counseling or advice. Sometimes it was another bearded and precisely-speaking old man, while, at still other times, it was a poor person coming for their dose of warmth and a cup of tea. The scholar would get up responding to this knock on the door, welcome this stranger and appear to thoroughly forget the young fellow not quite tall enough to reach the desk. I was not introduced to the visitor; try as I might to break into these conversations between the old man and his guest, it was not to be. After the interloper left, the grandfather would gather-up his grandson from behind a certain chair in the corner of the room and would proceed with the lesson. My earliest recollections of questions surrounding existence and non-existence, attachment and terror, seem to emanate from behind that chair. These concerns must, in actuality, be more ancient still but the older memories are no more. There was, or so my memory would have it, no doubt in my mind that this man loved me, and yet it was equally obvious to me that the flow of this love ceased in the presence of another. 

The lone cat? Me in Coney Island, I suppose. I'm waiting for the big kids and my Father to come home from wherever big people go so I can go upstairs, away from Grandma's cooking and baking and into Mom's kitchen for quiet nights in the years before television came to our home. Maybe? Feels right that the lone cat and my loneliness as a child are connected somewhere in my psyche.

Corona! Corona! It's been 6 full weeks of M and I and Maisie in the house. We stay in except for a few airings ... drives to nowhere. I remember a bridge in Niagara Falls, Canada. It goes half way into the river just above the Falls ... and stops. Corona, Corona! We're doing OK. We're not among the sufferers. We're comfortable at home ... warm ... well-fed. I get to see the people who before 6 weeks ago would visit my psychoanalytic office. Patients and Supervisees. Nice people. Good people. I see them on a video platform. A name appears in my virtual waiting room and, at the time of our appointment, I welcome them in. I until 6 weeks ago spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the offices I share with my daughter in town. I suppose the plants are all dead there, now. "Where have all the Flowers gone?"

At least one night each week, I attend a Support Group for therapists. I feel angry, there, but don't blow up at my colleagues. I tell them that I am not particularly interested in discussions of Technology or theoretical presentations on patients' traumas. "I've come here to talk about OUR traumas ... People ... Patients ... Psychotherapists." "Our" is the key word. COVID has demonstrated to us how similar we are. COVID isn't a very discerning bloke: He'll kill you or your Mother. Makes no difference to COVID ... though he does seem to have his eyes focused on people over 70 and the vulnerable.

He reminds me of all the despots who see no subjectivity in another. Despots are not racist or agist or sexist. There's them and their adoring sycophants and there's everybody else. Oh, yes, they use race or religion or gender, as it suits their need to split the country into With'me and Agin'me. But they're really so psychically primitive as to have no other alliances ... no tribes to which they belong. They are, that is to say, pre-racist ... pre-Tribal ... pre-Sexual, for that matter ... lost in a sadistic form of Narcissism that knows only Me and Not Me.  I've been living in Trump's Amerika for 3 years ... or is it closer to five years if one considers the Sermon on the Escalator, the one that was satisfied demeaning Hispanics and demonizing the Chinese. Five years of listening to a Little Rich-Boy-who- Would-Be-Emperor. I got really scared when he told an interviewer, after the Khan incident, that he sacrificed a lot by giving thousands of people jobs. What horrified me, you might ask. I suppose it was the idea that someone who thought that paying someone for a day's work, as the Bible demands, was not an exchange ... good labor for good pay ... but a gift that Pharaoh gives to Slaves. Could Amerika fall into this hole? I thought not until election night.

I feel no small amount of shame for not realizing that important constituent parts of our Democracy could well be destroyed by on "Stable Genius" and his minions. Who would've guessed that a McConnell or a Barr would sign on to such an agenda? They were Amerikans. Maybe I disagreed with them but they couldn't possibly -- or so, I thought -- sell the Country that gave my family citizenship Down the River. Who would've thunk it?

M and I, two over-70-year olds, feel hot rage about the administration. M mutters at the TV; I do, too. I find myself writing nasty polemics about the President. I'll close with one:

The Butcher of Queens 

(54,000 deaths into Git-on with Armageddonald)

We're on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Driving at a petty good clip.

The Driver knows the destination

He's told us where he was going all along.

We keep not listening well-enough

And we keep forgetting.

We're driving on the BQE

While people are dying in droves at St. Elizabeth's.

The Driver told us all along.

From the beginning.

He told us where he was headed.

Hearing Aids aren't covered by Medicare.

The Driver told us

That giving people jobs

Was a sacrifice.

He told us, too, that

"Soldiers who get captured?

They're fools.

I am America.

America is First."

We're driving on the BQ Expressway.

The Blaupunkt brings us Jared's voice.

"Nothing is yours anymore.

Nothing is the People's

Not Of. Not by. Not for.

Get your own ventilator!

These are ours, not yours anymore."

We're on the BQE and

We pretend to be surprised.

When the Butcher of Queens is driving

When Aunt Sadie is dying alone

When we're being driven on his BQ Expressway

And we're sitting in the back seat

Together but all alone …

When Jared is singing on the radio

And the Bible thumpers are calling him God.

Hey!

Now is a particularly inopportune time

To begin reflecting or imagining

A Respirator

That's still in China

marked:

Gefahr! Achtung!

PROPERTY OF THE BUTCHER OF QUEENS

Et FILS!

Enough, for today. The Microwave is beeping; musta left something in there.