Читать книгу Hollywood to Vienna - Donald Ellis Rothenberg - Страница 22

Harris has been married all those years. He pretends to be happy in his million dollar plus American house in the suburbs of the well to do, no problems with life circumstances. All the good schools for the kids and playing the American capitalist game that I couldn’t and wouldn’t. All this leads to stability and disappointment. Making it, whatever that is. The good life, whatever that is.

Success! He had married his high school sweetheart, and now the three kids, dog and cat live happily ever after. Besides, I think he really missed the sixties. What a shame. He couldn’t take it on the road. Stability has its costs. The Wandering Jew takes risks and goes with the flow, takes it easy living on the edge, daring, and being scared, and living in a fantasy world, or so it seems to "Them," those others leading that apparent other life, which you have little to do with, except for the customs of shared family to put up with. That is so far away now, and the birds I hear sing not in German, either. It’s the universal language, as are the sounds of the wind, the walking shoes on terra firma, or the sound of a motorcycle off in the distance.

It’s those sub-personalities, I hear myself say. They really bug me. I don’t know which Jesse is talking, and when. Is it adult Jesse, or little child, or inner child, or one of the many emotional, melancholic Jesses’, yakking at the other one and having an inner battle, a conflict of interest? Just whose interest, I can’t say. Roberto Assagioli looked at all of this. He wanted to help us understand ourselves better, and so it’s another way to map-out these sub-personalities. Those creatures that seem to take so much of our attention and control us, and just show us who is in control. Would we be happier in an institution where all these crowds of people are inside us, talking and trying to get our attention, having their day, acting out and feeling OK? Being categorized as this phobia or that neurosis or that paranoia, that dysfunctional #513A of the latest DSM book of charms and diagnoses?

This man, this Jesse, doesn’t like to be categorized, and spends all his time rebelling and fighting authority figures galore, ready for a fight or a flight, a fling perhaps, nothing enduring or permanent, god-forbid. This man is too afraid of the dark, of heights, of forgetting, of getting too close, to really love: either himself or others.

Is this too confessional? Sound like anyone you know? Is this a secret diary of the mind, a road map to planet X, hitchhiker’s guide to which galaxy? In fact, I think man’s dilemma is all too confusing, what with all these cures and healings and solutions.

Why don’t we all just live, and not read into things? Make it simple, stupid. It’s easy for me to say. I seem to be wading in mud and enjoying it. I may be going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I’m enjoying the show. Something like that. What can I say that already hasn’t been said and said enough for a Roger Corman B-movie with a simple plot and one camera angle, a memorized script, no make-up, and a cast of thousands: the real world? Actors on the make in tinseltown, a la Lotusland. It’s all for free as we go through our lives in quiet desperation.

The wine is now bought, and I don’t even remember buying it. I do remember hopping or running up those steps, and asking for three bottles of white wine. It was only about twenty Euros. What’s the password? “Pass!” Old Groucho Marx used to be quite grouchy.

I love this old car, this red Visa with the good gas mileage. I never had a new car like Harris has. Nor have I had a mobile phone before now, either. I wouldn’t want to sell-out, give notice to my so-called radical friends in America sucking off the materialistic tit or red-in-the-face, with fat bellies and big garages and a new remodeling job just completed for that third bedroom that used to be a storeroom. It’s all been bootlegged, man, like, so cool.

We want to fool Uncle Sam and face the fool in the mirror, staring back at thee.