Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 15

Just who is this Jesse, this guy who is asking these things, and writing and thinking up these questions from the inception of thought, unwilling to bare himself, hiding inside, while he cried for his lost son, the finite one, the child inside, the wordsmith, the programmed writing style, the poet deep within, the Rilke look-alike inside Western shoes, the Miami connection, illicit Hispanic traditionalist circumventing the government in patriotic fervor. There is this transition compulsion to avoid the pain and to run, shifting winds, confusing the mind and de-focusing what the psyche/mind wants to forget and face the music. You know what I mean, Bunkie. Jesse boy . . . don’t call me “man” . . . the arrogant rebellious younger son.

The grandfather from Odessa, not Texas, the socialist, freemason, postmaster, speaker of seven languages including Yiddish, English, Russian, Spanish. This mandolin player, Yiddish theater actor, clothes designer, gentle one. The roots are there for the artist not to despair.

Doing tai chi so far away from “home,” wherever that is, piecing together the cobwebs, the spider-made silk threads across the oceans from Jerusalem to Rome, Bombay, Calcutta — let ’em rip, let out those true confessions.

I wish for the insight to become the new contemporary man, in touch with the dreams, the wild one inside, the feminine and masculine sides, balanced brain polarities, the holistic hemispheres. We play at wordplay, the dice are loaded, and they’re coming up cat’s-eyes. Tell the truth, Jesse, about who you are.

Weave a story of romance and trance, sex and no violence, the host of avenues open to today’s man, the “spaceship Earth” and its inhabitants. The “Global Village,” as McLuhan called it (talking with him once in Toronto) and the immediate hook-ups connecting and sometimes disconnecting the less wealthy, the Third and Fourth Worlds, the pre-literate and starving, the children and women, the oppressed inhabitants fighting in wars, whether they be just or unjust wars, wars sanctioned by governments or of the terrorist/guerilla/freedom fighter/peoples’ war orientation. Billions are made in trying to win the economic gravy train of the “arms trade.” We continue to “create to destroy and destroy to create,” as someone well known in one of the larger cults may have said.

My brother Harris, though, is the exact opposite. He is about making money, or the whole family is geared to that, as in the great American Dream, the simple gift of making money. Printing your own? Must be hard work! Harris is older and wiser and more mature, responsible, successful in fulfilling the promise of the working man, the Horatio Alger story, the self-made man, running, on the run and not knowing this, caught in the fast lane, on the fast track, eating the Big Mac. The idealistic dreams were what we were taught, at whose expense? And Mother Earth feels all and knows all, can’t fool around with our mother. The egalitarian politics, the so-called upper classes of people looking down onto the huddled masses with false compassion, and this is a little of Harris. I have a sweet sister, Sarah, who is the oldest, and lives with her family near Boston.

The father was stern and serious, a former businessman adrift in the scheme, the Shalom Aleichem stories, the army makes men and discipline and time and motion study, the following of orders, the military fitness, the inner discipline, the lust for life, the former drill sergeant, the immigrant parents, the story takes a turn and what is truth and fiction, who is to discern? Daddy is adrift in the story line, in the seas of the capitalistic success dogma in America, the Promised Land, the daily dinner table propaganda party line, as I recall. Business and only business as usual.

Momma came from the Midwest and was the antithesis of the solemn father. She provided stories and jokes, a counterpoint to the ever ups and downs of life’s more serious side, a little respite for the young tin-soldier boy. There was a certain melancholy that life’s circumstances can’t often hide in the romances and friendships formed over the years, and now cultivated into old age. She tried to smooth it over, fix it all, life’s nooks and crannies.