Dare to be great, or at least peevish

6/26/96

DARE TO BE GREAT, OR AT LEAST PEEVISH
When I sit down to write, I think of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who turned the Soviet Empire upside down with his courageous books. Here was a single man, armed only with his mind and spirit, sick and freezing and worked half to death in Siberian concentration camps, who composed the great novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in his head and memorized his text because he didn't even have pen and paper to record it.

Am I inspired by the greatness of Solzhenitsyn's courage and vision? Am I encouraged by this demonstration of the primacy of the imagination and the power of the written word?

Hell no! I'm completely DIScouraged! Why should I bother to write? I don't have a great subject! I didn't survive a concentration camp. I'm not an oppressed minority. I'm a person of privilege, notorious in my own mind for my underachievement. I've been given every advantage and what have I done with them? I've been like Jack in the Beanstalk, and traded my cow, my intellectual and emotional gifts, for three beans. And what are my three beans? Why, they are my hunger to write, of course! I don't have my heart in becoming anything else because I desperately want to write. So I remain forever on the precipice of life---a writer who does not write.

I'm aware of the great and small subjects of other writers, and as far as I can tell, I have no subject of my own. When I sit down to write, I can detect nothing of value in my head. I'm a living flatliner, a human cerebral test pattern. And I am haunted by the example of greats like Solzhenitsyn, whose writing was fueled by subjects far greater than their petty lives and ambitions. I'm like a seed trying to germinate and grow under the shade of a giant redwood. I don't get enough sunlight to sprout, much less grow into a tree.

Of course, it isn't really Solzhenitsyn who is blocking the birth of my words. It's me. I talk myself out of having anything to say. Solzhenitsyn, or Steinbeck, or Melville, or Arthur Miller, or even P.G. Wodehouse, the "trained flea of English literature," are merely the instruments of my own literary suicide. They are the poison pills I administer to myself, the excuses I use not to write.

Solzhenitsyn, afflicted by the best kind of survivor's guilt, was admirably devoted to the proposition that he must do something to memorialize all those who didn't escape and survive the Gulag. In that sense, Solzenitsyn has never left the Gulag, just as Eli Weisel has never left Auschwitz. Not every writer has that kind of imperative behind his writing.

Sophocles, for example. And Shakespeare. They didn't write to memorialize or somehow redeem the victims of the Gulag or the Holocaust. And God knows Proust didn't.

Can you imagine Proust talking himself out of writing Remembrance of Things Past because he didn't write agitprop like Emile Zola? Fortunately, Proust's head was teeming with the sensuous memories of his youth and of French society. He didn't gag himself because he couldn't imagine a precedent for the kind of book he was setting out to write. In fact, he wrote because there existed nothing quite like what he wanted to read, so he had to write it himself.

A writer must first of all feel, in his gut and heart, that his own point of view is valid enough to set down on paper. If he can talk himself out of writing because he doesn't feel, for whatever reason, he has something sufficiently worthwhile to say, then he'll never be a writer. Now here's the kicker. Many writers do not KNOW what it is they have to say until they've said it!

So if they talk themselves out of writing because they do not feel like they have something worth writing, how is it that they KNOW it's not worthwhile when they don't even know what it is until they've written it?!

Hypothesis: Much good writing is born in the hunger to write, and in the pure joy of invention, not in the knowledge that the writer ALREADY has something worthwhile to say. The writer doesn't always have the SECURITY of having, in advance, something worthwhile to say!! He makes it up as he goes along. He surprises himself even more than he surprises his readers.

There are writers and writers. There are writer-journalists like John Steinbeck, who did a series of newspaper articles on the Okies and then went on to memorialize and fictionalize them in The Grapes of Wrath. Alexander Solzhenitsyn's head was full of facts, and his heart was full of rage and compassion, about the enslavement of the millions in the Gulag Archipelago. Clearly Solzhenitsyn knew he had a powerful subject, a subject he was passionate about, before he actually wrote.

But what about Lewis Carroll? Was he passionate about talking caterpillars and disappearing Cheshire cats before he wrote Alice in Wonderland? Or was he simply writing in order to seductively amuse the half-dressed nymphets he liked to photograph? Who would advocate that the only wouldbe writers who should write are the ones who know in advance what they're going to write, and who take up the cudgel for the underdog and against the oppressors' wrongdoing? Who would advocate that only writers who already know they are brilliant plot-designers, or psycho-dramatists, or wits, or poets, or describers of landscapes or battle-scenes or parlors or horse races or whaling vessels should be the ones to write? What about the wouldbe writers who don't know what they can do or what they know? What about the writers who only know how they have thus far failed, yet still hunger to succeed in some way that they cannot yet imagine and predict? The biggest mistake any wouldbe writer can make is to decide that he doesn't have anything worthwhile to say, is to decide that what he has to say isn't worth taking the trouble to try to uncover, discover, and recover.

The first, and second, and millionth thing a wouldbe writer may have to do is write one, or two, or millions of words not worth saving. They may be words whose very clumsiness seems to argue against the writer actually having something worthwhile to say, and the talent and craft to say it. The writer must have the courage to throw off, or plow through, all the naysaying on his way to yaysaying, in order to express something of value. What's hard and painful and discouraging is not writing something worthwhile, something beautiful. What's really hard is writing something seemingly worthless and/or dispensable and/or unreadable on the way to writing something worthwhile. That is where the struggle takes place, that is the crucible where the writer's mettle is tested.

What the writer is struggling to do is to make something valuable out of something apparently worthless, out of the buzzing confusion and nihilism in his brain. And finally, what does the writer have to go on? A hunch. A yearning. A burning. A desire to say something worthwhile even though he doesn't really know what it is.

The writer discovers what he has to say as he writes. He may discover that much of what he has to say is not worth showing to anyone else. He may discover that what he has to say is not saleable in any market. He may discover that what he is writing has no plot, nor characters, nor clever dialogue. He may discover that what he is writing is not an action-adventure script which will make an ideal vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sly Stallone. He may discover that it will not be possible to auction the movie rights to his piece for millions of dollars. He may discover that what he is writing is not even a pleasurable reading experience for himself and his closest friends, and certainly nothing that the rest of humanity will want to read.

But the writer can't know in advance that what he is going to write will be worthless. For all the writer knows, some very valuable purpose may be served simply by writing, thousands and thousands of times: All work and no play makes the writer a dull boy.

OK, so that's the route that turned the character in THE SHINING into a homicidal maniac. And it may be that the next time you try to write you'll get so frustrated that you'll jump up from your typewriter and axe-murder your family. But will that be so terrible? Will that be worse than never daring to try to write at all?


After all, before you sit down to write, all you are being is a wouldbe writer who doesn't have the courage to actually try to write. But after you axe-murder your family, you're not just a wannabe. You've axe-tualized yourself. Instead of being freefloating potential, you ARE something. You're an axe murderer. And in this country that's nothing to sniff at. Consider Lizzie Borden.

Now it may be that your failure to write what you wanted to write will enrage you but not make you murderously furious. In that case, you may jump up from your word processor and grab your axe and run down to the nearest bar and smash it to kindling. Don't be disappointed in yourself because you haven't chopped to the heights of a Lizzie Borden or a Jeffrey Daumer. Remember Carrie Nation? She, too, was probably a wouldbe writer, before she started smashing up bars. And whether you think of her as famous or infamous, you think of her. And why? Because she tried to write, that's why.

If she had just sat on her settee and continued to do needlework, she never would have enraged herself enough to chop up all those saloons. It was only when she took pen in hand and tried, really tried, and then FAILED, to write something worth a damn that she tapped into her own powers of volcanic rage. How could Carrie Nation have known IN ADVANCE that she was going to be the most savage of the mother-founders of the Temperance Movement? It was only by having the courage to try to write, and by failing abysmally, that she got in touch with her own best and worst self, transforming herself into the terrifying battleaxe we celebrate today.

So even failing can lead to grand things. But to what can wanting, but not daring to try, lead? You'll become a human bomb or a human dud. You'll walk around choking on your own bile, leaking discouragement and dashed expectations upon everyone you brush up against. You'll either explode like a pinata, or roam the Earth like Typhoid Mary, spreading the contagion of your suppressed aspirations.

By suppressing your desire to create you do more than simply crush yourself. You crush others, as well. Because what you present to others is the model of the muted self, who does not dare to express himself because he does not feel he has anything of value to express. He points to others and says that they are valuable, so valuable that he is valueless. He imagines that he is inspiring by pointing to the example of others' inspirations. But the example he is setting with his own life is far more vivid than anything he points to outside himself. And what is he? He is a person who lives by the credo that he dare not begin to create because others are greater creators than he could ever be.
--FIN--

Frankenstein's Mother

6/7/96


FRANKENSTEIN'S MOTHER

It's so weird, really. I am a man. But I was once part of a woman. That is to say, I was an egg in my mother's ovary. And I was also once part of my dad. I was a sperm in his balls. Jesus Christ! I used to be in two pieces. And one of the pieces, which looked and wriggled like an ittybitty tadpole, lived in my dad's balls, for Christ's sake! Was it the left ball or the right ball?

Then the pollywog half of me that came from Pop joined up with the ovoid half that came from Mom and started to split and multiply in my mother's uterus, of all places. Oh, did I mention that my father literally had to insert his erect penis in my mother's vagina and move it in and out a bunch of times before shooting sperm into her? And that they probably both enjoyed doing this?

For Christ's sake! It's unbelievable, just unbelievable. It probably didn't happen that way in my case. I believe I was the exception. I'm probably the result of artificial insemination. Did they HAVE articial insemination in 1947? Who the hell knows? I'll bet they artificially inseminated farm animals----cattle, race horses, that sort of thing---so who's to say they didn't have the technology to articially inseminate my mother?

Because Mom would never have permitted my dad to do a crazy thing such as I just described. Maybe they had intercourse to make my BROTHER; he's just weird enough, bloody minded enough, to have resulted from such an ungodly act. But I couldn't possibly have resulted from intercourse. I must have been the first test tube baby. Yes, that's it! Long before anyone thought it possible, I was conceived in a test tube by a mad scientist who kept his methods secret!

Or maybe he assembled me from parts dug up in a graveyard, and then tied me down on his laboratory and hooked me up to electrodes so that when the next lightning storm blew over, I took a bolt right in the heart and came alive! This must have happened very early. I deduce I was assembled from baby parts because I have seen photos of myself as a very young baby in my mother's arms.

So what probably happened was, the villagers angrily attacked Dr. Frankenstein's castle, and just before they set it on fire, Dr. Frankenstein UPS'd me to my foster parents, those people who raised me and claim to be my genetic forebears.

A skeptic might wonder, if I were truly Frankenstein's monster, why don't I have big bolts in my neck, and where are the seams where my extremities were sewn onto my torso? But the Frankenstein's Monsters we see in the movies are from the early 19th Century. Mad scientists' technology, including cosmetic surgery, was very crude then---about what you can expect from a Cub Scout vying for a leathercraft merit badge.

A mad scientist from the mid-20th Century probably could stick the head on the neck without those big bolts. And he can sew mico-sutures invisible to the unaided human eye. He can rip off a fly's wings and doublestitch 'em back on so they're twice as secure as God made them.

In sum, I've pretty well established, to my own satisfaction, that I'm made of other people's parts. That would explain a lot. But it also raises a few questions. How long was my brain sitting underground before those body snatchers dug it up and delivered it to my Maker, the good doctor? And whose brain WAS it? And how much of it died before doc got some blood pumping through it? All of it? Is that why I didn't make National Merit Scholar?

I've always felt like a mess of illfitting parts of unknown origin, and now I know why. I've always felt like a guest in my own family. I knew and loved these people, yet I was alien to them, and them to me.

More questions: Are there other Frankenstein's Monsters out there? And if there are, should I be trying to get in touch with them? If I walked into a Las Vegas convention for Frankenstein's Monsters, would I suddenly feel at home? Would I suddenly understand why I am the way I am, and why the world looks the way it does to me? Would I feel powerful sibling bonds with the other monsters, and would I meet and fall for a pretty lady monster? ARE there any pretty lady monsters? Do I deserve no better mate than a nob-necked monstrosity because that's all I am?

A further reflection: Even if I was conceived, heaven forfend!, in the traditional fashion in which 1947 babies were conceived, which is to say, gulp!, through the sexual congress of my putative parents, aren't I still, in that case, a kind of Frankenstein's Monster?

After all, if I am indeed the consequence of intercourse, the result of the joining of a sperm-part from my dad with an egg-part from my mom, then I, like the literary Monster, was manufactured from the separate body parts of other people. I also have something in common with Venus flytraps, chrysanthemums, and God and the Devil only know what other plants, because I am the product of pollination.

So I am not only a Frankenstein's Monster, with my parents collaborating as Frankenstein, I am also a Swamp Thing. I'm a big ol' tree with hair for leaves, torso for trunk, arms for branches, and legs for roots.

So my parents are not only Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein, they are also a honey bee and a daisy, a pollinator and a blossom, a pistil and a stamen. What does that make me? Confused? Or merely a vegetable?

Another grotesquerie in my life: After my conception, I was a zygote, splitting and resplitting, my cells growing at an exponential rate. My mother was kind enough to share her nutrients and oxygen with me, or I never would have made it. So that means I'm impossibly obligated, umbilically ligated, to her. How can I possibly thank her enough for the very breath that kept me alive while I was underwater for 9 months, squirming around in that amniotic sea?

It's as if everyone who was ever of woman born was issued a huge student loan at the moment of conception, of matriculation, a loan so great it's impossible to pay it off. But I've got to give moms, or at least gentile moms, credit. They're rather big about the whole thing. They don't always hammer their offspring for re-payment of the unpayable.

I can imagine one way for female hatchlings to pay off this obligation. They can have babies themselves. That way, by themselves playing the role of mother, they can pump oxygen and nutrients into little their tadpoles, or zygotes, or fetuses, or monsters, and pass the obligation on to them! But how can males pay off their maternal loans? Even if they get sex change operations, they can't conceive. At least, I've never heard of a pregnant transexual.

There's another, more convenient, way to look at this gift-of-life conumdrum. That is, Mom and Dad conceive, gestate, and nurture Baby, and that's just the way it is. Baby doesn't owe them a thing. It's Mom and Dad's business if they want to have and raise kids, and there's no obligation incurred on the part of their offspring and no need to repay them.

It's easy to say that. And Mom and Dad may be magnanimous enough not to exploit their child's sense of obligation or gratitude for the gift of life. But the fact remains that Dr. and Mrs. Frankenstein made and raised the Monster. And a part of every monster's make-up is to be aware that he got the gift of life from something outside himself.

You get a gift, somebody's nice enough to give you a gift, and you thank them for it. Isn't that the way it goes? So must you thank and thank and thank your parents, every moment of your life, even when they're fucking with your mind? Must you even thank your parents for their mindfucks? Or do you make a distinction between the bad stuff they gave you and the good stuff? Do you thank them and appreciate them only for the good stuff? What if you can't remember all the things, good and bad, that they gave you?

What if Dr. or Mrs. Frankenstein violated you when you were three months old, and you can't remember it but you're carrying the damage around in your unconscious? Are you supposed to be grateful for that? How do you sort it out from the good stuff, when it's part of what you are? What if part of your genetic inheritance is a tendency toward acute rheumatoid arthritis, including crippling pain and dreadful deformity? Should you be grateful for that?

What if one of your parents teaches you to be a musician, and you go to Julliard, and you find that you've inherited just enough talent to be bested by the very best, and there's nothing you can do to overcome that, but you've also inherited a character which won't allow you to settle for anything less than the best and so you kill yourself? Do you thank Mom and Pop Frankenstein for that heritage just before blowing your brains all over your dorm room wall?

And there are all the Frankensteins that came before your mommy and daddy Frankensteins. There are grandpappy Frankensteins, and great great grandmammy Frankensteins, stretching back untold thousands of years and generations to the original Eve Frankenstein, who, we are are told by genetic researchers, was a woman living in Africa 200,000 years ago. We are assembled from body parts from a boneyard as big as the globe. We inherit a genetic and cultural legacy, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, till death do we die, from all those thousands and millions of mothers and motherfuckers. Are we obligated to them all? Should we resent them all for the parts of the inheritance that went sour?

And what if you have inherited some goddawful genetic mutation, such as growing an index finger out of the middle of our forehead, which is the result of a cosmic ray zapping one of the sperms, YOUR sperm, in your dad's left ball. Suppose this cosmic ray came from the sun. Should you therefore resent the hell out of the sun for making you look like a goddamn unicorn for the rest of your life?

Maybe you get tired of trying to figure out which of your forebears you ought to be kicking in the ass for your genetic and cultural inheritance. Maybe you begin to realize that your cultural inheritance is even more complicated and mysterious than your genetic legacy. Maybe you realize that you are influenced by the history of all nations and tribes, by music written by a half-mad German in Vienna in 1805, by scripture written by religious fanatics in the Sinai Desert 3000 years ago, by the way a slaveowner laid the lash on his slave's back in the Louisiana Delta in 1737. Maybe you're influenced by the way a Mongol sewed his yurt. Maybe you're in the death grip, or life grip, of the influence of some genius cave painter, some guy who made Picasso look like a piker, some guy who lived in the Rift Valley of East Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. You finally come to admit you don't really know who to be mad at or grateful to, or how it is you came to be so wonderful, and so fucked up.

So you take a shortcut. You say, "Sure, Ma and Pa Frankenstein made me, conceived me with the act of darkness and love, raised me, for better or worse, in the only way they knew how, trying hard or hardly trying. But I'm cutting through all the bullshit and I'm viewing my life as a gift from God. He or She or It, not Mom and Dad, is my real maker and inventor."

Then you can blame or thank God for how you're doing, how sick or healthy you are, how poor or rich you are, how sad or happy you are. And if you're sick and sad one day, you resent the heck out of God that day. And if the next day you win the lottery and recover from the flu, then you fall down on your knees and thank He/She/It.

Sooner or later though, that vexed question comes around again. "How did God make me? Tinkering in a garage? Mixing spare body parts and a lightning storm? Or did he, just for laughs, cause Dad to jump Mom's bones so that I might be conceived. And what if this union was an act of darkness as well as an act of light? Does that mean that God and the Devil conspired together to conceive me?"

Suppose God and the Devil were one entity, one Dr. Frankenstein, and you were the monster they made, through the instrument of your parents? Suppose you, Frankenstein's Monster, roamed the Earth, gibbering and moaning and feeling sorry for yourself, blunderingly murthering innocent tykes, being loved only by those too blind to see who you really were.

Would you get yourself a nice wardrobe and try to pose as a human? Would you wear a high collar to hide your neck nobs? Would you seek employment and hope nobody looked too hard at your claptrap-filled resume? Would you find yourself a lady Frankenstein's Monster, and would the two of you get married and pass your legacy onto the next generation of monstrosities?

Or would you habor a savage grudge for being the way you were, and would you go looking for revenge? Would you track down your Maker, your God-and-Devil, your own private Dr. Frankenstein, in his castle and kick his skinny ass? Would you fry him in his lightning bolt machine and take him apart limb from limb and take those parts to the nearest boneyard and bury them in separate graves? Would you, if you could, undo all that had been done to you? Or will you, Frankenstein, just pass the buck on down the line?
--FIN--

The Enemy Within

6/3/96


THE ENEMY WITHIN

I love you but I hate you. Ouch. Was there ever a mother who simply said: I love you but I love you, and there's no hate or anger there? You're my son, you're my daughter, you're a gift from God. I loved having you and raising you and I don't own you and I won't presume to judge you and I wish you the very best.

How about a mother who, in the stealthiest fashion, the whole time she was raising her son, said: I'm pretending to love you. But I'm super super angry at your Dad because of our savage ego battles. Your Dad's a man, but he's too strong for me to counterattack. So I'm going to dump my anger and frustration off on you, because you're a man, too, or at least, a manchild. And you're young and tender and don't have a clue how to defend yourself from me. You're just looking to me for love and reinforcement, so you're wide open to any kind of frustration/castration I might care to cast your way.

Here's an idea. How's about I rig it so that you're constantly striving to accomplish something to win my love, but nothing you can do is enough? And I'll give you a living implant, a permanent brain-graft, so this struggle can be with you every moment of every day. It will be with you if I am a continent away. It will be with you even after I die. And it'll be there at night, in your dreams and in your insomnia, as well.

This way, you'll constantly be at war with yourself. I'll try to adjust the mixture so that you don't hate yourself so much that you actually kill yourself. What good would that be? If you kill yourself, I might be gnawed by intimations of remorse, I might have to question the way I raised you, I might have to come to grips with what I have done to you.

But if you are in knots, struggling struggling struggling to succeed but failing failing failing, then you provide a distraction, for me, from dealing with myself. I can spend my time wringing my hands over what a fuckup you are instead of dealing with my own compulsive, neurotic, acting out. Because I would rather fuck up someone near and dear to me, someone whom I dearly love and cherish, than be forced to wrestle with my own demons. I would rather be driven by my demons than stand and face them, because my demons have been chasing me for 70 years, and they're in fantastic condition.

And I'm old now, I'm feeble and brittle. Confronting my demons at this late date would shatter me.

Another part of the beauty of this arrangement is that you, my son, are not likely to figure out what is tearing you apart because you truly do love and respect me. You're a good boy, even if you are an abysmal failure. And because you're a good boy, you feel as it you must take responsibility for your own fuckups. How can you possibly blame your dear MOTHER for what has gone wrong with your life?! You're a responsible adult, aren't you?

All your mother did was give you life and nurture you. Without her, you wouldn't exist. But you're such a scumbag that you somehow want to blame her for your present inadequacies, failures, and misery! It's outrageous! It's bad enough that you're an abysmal failure, but for you to then point a finger for your failure at anyone other than yourself is unconscionable! And I'm not just anyone, for Christ's sake, I'm your mother! It's the ultimate betrayal and heresy and blasphemy! It's another sign of how weak and worthless you are. You don't even have the guts to take responsibility for your own failure!

You are a massive disappointment, not only to yourself, but to your mother. Of course, I would never explicitly admit that, but I communicate it to you more powerfully with a thousand silent gestures. And it's so much easier to focus on your failure than it is to focus on mine.

As to my own failure. I can demonstrate, through a feminist revisionist interpretation of my own psycho-history, that my personal failure is not my fault, but the fault of the men around me. For example, I wouldn't have lost so many years from my career if I hadn't funneled so much energy into raising you and your brother.

Now your brother was a wily, slippery rascal. He openly rebelled against my regime when he could, and covertly schemed against it when that was the only alternative. You, on the other hand, had more what I call the chump personality. You bought this mother/son routine lock stock and barrel. You saw me feed you and clean up after you and take care of you when you fell ill, and you figured you were obligated to take to heart whatever poison I served you along with my mother's milk.

Hear that? Mother's milk? It sounds ambiguous. Was I serving you my milk or my mother's---your grandmother's---milk? I was passing the same poison and nourishment I got at my mother's breast down to you.

I know, I know. You thought your grandmother was a dear, sweet old sugarpop of a woman. And to you she was. But to me she was hell on wheels. And I took that to heart. What was I supposed to do? Say the buck stops here? Say that I was going to detox, go cold turkey and filter all past generations' neuroses out of my system so that I wouldn't pass any on to you?

Let me tell you something, buster. If I had taken the time to try to sort out all the demons your grandmother.....and grandfather....implanted in me I would have been paralyzed! You would never have been born! Because I would have been in a cave somewhere, sorting out negative headtrips, slaying soul-demons, rinsing out nightmares. I would not have been able to function! I would have been like you! You sterile, childless, self-involved, Narcissistic, curmudgeonly, self-justifying, parasitic, solipsistic, terminally underachieving, sad sack, milquetoast, barnacle!

Also, when I was a young woman there were not a lot of your beloved analysts around to assist me in demon chasing. I would have had to do it, to psychologically detox, all on my own. I was an Army wife, for Christ's sake. I was president of a Mizzou sorority. Do you think I had intensive psycho-analysis on my mind?!

This country was fighting World War Two! I was intent on hooking a solid husband and building a family and helping him with his career and doing my bit to defeat the Japs and the Huns! Sure I was sore when I began to realize that raising you and your brother was distracting me from the journalism career I trained for in college. But I swept that anger under the floorboards, where it smoldered like an underground coalfire to the present day.

Sure I was ticked off when the collective, hyper-male, Philistine atmosphere of all those Army posts we lived on began to crush my own capacity to express myself as a woman and an artist and a separate person with her own career. And it wasn't always easy to cope with your father, either. He believed what he believed, and that was all there was to it? Don't you think I would have loved to spend some time with a more sensitive, thoughtful, artistic man?

But how could I do that without becoming a hussy? That's where YOU came in, my boy. Your brother became a jock. I couldn't express myself through him. Oh, he had his musical side, but it was you who was the true artist. I could see that from the moment you popped out. What a dreamy babe you were!

It was YOU who was going to realize all the writing ambitions that were crushed in me by the dispiriting poison of my ancestors, by your powerful Dad's overbearing will and needs, and by the crushing atmosphere of America and the U.S. Army! Of course, if you really managed to clear the superfluities out of your soul and dared to home in on the subject matter of your heart's heart, you would inevitably craft an indictment of your dear old mother. And that would not do, that simply would not do.

So I had to create a son who both strove to become and FAILED to become an artist. As I said, if you failed TOO much, you would kill yourself because the suffering would be too great and your spirit would be crushed. But if you and your demon were of exactly equal strength, you two could be locked in a titanic struggle for a lifetime and not budge an inch!

What I perfected was a kind of Chinese torture which exacted maximum suffering from my victim without shortening that tormented soul's life by so much as a minute.

Now I haven't forgotten for a moment that you, my own son, whom I love, whom I nurtured, whom I gave BIRTH to for Christ's sake, I haven't forgotten that it's you, you blackhearted bastard, who is writing this, who is putting these obscene words in your mother's mouth.

How dare you! You don't actually contemplate publishing hateful, libelous, slanderous drivel like this, do you? What if I read it somewhere? Can you imagine how terrible it would make me feel to read something like this?

So I triumph once again! Even when you write something powerful, something worth publishing, something that could turn your seemingly irredeemable existence from a resounding failure into a kind of success, you express yourself in a form that you cannot share with the public until I am gone! And I promise you I'll live another 20 years, just because I sense you're dying to get out from under the demons we both share, the demons that are our heritage, the demons I passed on to you in your mother's milk, the demons which my mother passed on to me in HER mother's milk!

Do you think that the mere act of expressing this in words will somehow deliver you from your suffering!? You know your own sense of decency and discretion, your genuine love for me, will make it impossible for you to publicly express your sense of betrayal by me! And you'll always be a coward and a failure if you don't declare yourself, if you don't have the courage to disseminate your art.

What a pathetic roach you are! Your own best self, the artistic expression that is most heartfelt, is shame based and fear based. You're like a shadow Solzhenitsyn. A real Solzhenitsyn not only writes the great novels that help bring down the intimidating, the overbearing "Father," the Soviet Government, he also dares to publish those novels. If he can disseminate his courageous literature no other way in a totalitarian regime, he will use "samizdat." That is, he will share his works with the underground, with fellow subversives. Or he will publish outside the borders, in the Free World.

But look at you, you bug, you shrew, you shrike! Do you have the courage to tackle truly frightening political issues? Hell no! Mr. Big Britches dares to write impossibly cruel things about your own dear, loving, nurturing, lifegiving mother!

What kind of monster could you possibly be? As if your failure and childlessness weren't enough of a hideous disappointment for me to bear, now you contemplate launching an unimaginably vicious personal attack on me!

You know who you remind me of? Norman Bates, the freak from Hitchcock's "Psycho." You're possessed by the banshee spirit of your own mother. But not your real mother. This spirit who is speaking through you, you mother's boy, you pantywaist, is none other than a figment of your own ungrateful, perverted, imagination! All I can say is, it's a good thing you're not a motelkeeper or you'd be skewering your lady guests in their showers like shishkabobs!

No wonder your relationships with women are so problematic! No wonder your only marriage ended in divorce! You're possessed by a female demon you imagine to be your mother! What do you do in your leisure time? Dress up in dresses from the 1940's? You'd probably look good in them, with those broad shoulders of yours. Big shoulders were all the rage in the '40's in men's and women's wear.

You say that only last week you were experiencing waves of volcanic rage against me. Let me ask you something. Which mother were you angry at? The real one or that crazed marionette that dances in your barren head? And if there is any overlap between your real mother and me, the demon, then I say how DARE you! How dare you feel the least rage or loathing toward your real mother, the woman who gave you life, who nurtured you, who loves you more than anyone on earth!

I'll tell you something. You're such a sick, twisted, puppy, that it's impossible that I, this demon in your head, this Medusa, this Gorgon, this Lucretia Borgia of imaginary mothers, could in any way shape or form describe your real mother. Your real mother is a delicate, feminine, loving, well-liked, well-bred, well-read creature. Without her, you wouldn't even exist. And without her encouragement of you, without her aspirations for you, you wouldn't be writing these very words.

So I forgive you for feeling volcanic rage against me, the mother of your nightmares. Because I am a blood leech in your brain and soul. I am not your real mother. Who knows how or why or from what material you manufactured me?

Your real mother loves you, and you love her. It is I who hates you and wants you to roast on a skewer in excruciating agony for the rest of your born days. It is I who plans to wreak havoc with your every future waking and sleeping moment, just as I have tornadoed through your past, and just as I sear this present.

Do you think that you can truly exorcise me from your soul for so much as a second? Don't make me laugh! I AM you! And let me remind you that while you are taking the time and the energy to write this, to speak for me, you are diverting energy away from accomplishing all the truly constructive activities of this life, such as making a living, finding a wife, and even cleaning your home!

You think that by giving me voice you are somehow delivering yourself of a burden! But I assure you you are only sinking yourself deeper into debt, and failure, and loneliness, and squalor, and despair!

As long as breath remains in your body, I'll always have the last laugh. I promise you I'll use your final exhalation to laugh at you. You can mock me, you can force me to spew unflattering tirades in which I mock myself, but it's really only you who will look ridiculous. And when the world reads what you have written, when the world reads your best effort to express yourself through the mask which is me, it will gasp in disgust. You won't be given fame, or the love of beautiful women, or money. You will be a pariah! And don't come to me when you're crying in your beer. I won't forgive or console you. You tried to advance your career by making a fool of me! And of course you failed! How dare you run your dirty linen up the rigging of the topmost mast and call it a victory pennant! What do you call those shit streaks on your "pennant"? Your coat of arms?

What will become of you? What WILL become of you? I warned and warned you when you were a boy that you would come to no good unless you got to knocking, turned over a new leaf, got serious, put some gas in your engine, got down to brass tacks, got right down to the real nitty gritty. But noooooo, you thought you knew better than to listen to me.

Well, here's your comeuppance. You're alone, you're broke, you're a middleaged failure, your looks are gone and nubile fillies avoid you like the plague, and things are only going downhill from here. I'd suggest you end it all now, do the world a favor and blow out your brains Hemingway-style---but Hemingway without the Nobel Prize!---but if you offed yourself, you'd kill me as well. And I really dig ripping your guts out! It's what I live for!

I know you're such a namby pamby that you would rather stand and let me gut you daily than let me drive you out into the world where you could gut others. And I hate you for that! You're so fucking self righteous and sterile and unproductive. With me fueling your volcanic rage, you could have become a great warrior, slaying ten thousand of the enemy with the jawbone of an ass. And I could have been that ass!

But no! You thought you'd turn and face and fight your own mother! Here's what I say to you. I condemn you to be at your best, and your worst, when you speak the most shameful truths you know, truths which I say are damnable lies!

Sure. Go ahead and share your ugly words with the rest of the world. I'll tell you what you're going to find out. That the rest of the world doesn't give a fuck. The rest of the world doesn't want to hear your squeakings and gibberings! The rest of the world has a LIFE for Christ's sake!

Don't kid yourself! You aren't expressing anything here that will speak for the torment in others' hearts! You're just vomiting bile and calling it ambrosia! No one else is sick enough, crazy enough, twisted enough to have demons like yours. And if they do have demons, they're so unlike yours that they couldn't possibly recognize theirs in your expression of yours. And even if your demon did somehow resemble theirs, you wouldn't have the craft to recognizably portray that resemblance.

And if you did happen to speak the painful truth, the awful truth that would help deliver others' from their personal misery-making mothers and/or assorted introjected ghouls, from their house of horrors inscapes, no one would ever admit that you had spoken for them because it would be too shameful, too embarrassing, to confess that they had such voices within them. They could not and would not own up. You would stand completely alone in this wide, wonderful, fine upstanding world of ours, and you would live to regret with your whole body and soul that you had ever had the effrontery to open your big yap and bray like the jackass you are.

--FIN--