#my education finally made me understand that The Church was only >1000 years old | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

janiklandre-blog · 8 years

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Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Ash Wednesday - 10:35 cloudy, warm, just took long walk and saw that Neptune is no more, another Pilish restaurant closed, on first avenue and 11th street - I loved their garden, their generous servings - no more - a pastry place open since I was born, closed, Lanza closed - I don't think I ever went there - the ethnic places - they are going. Big renovations on PS 122 - an art center - to be made fancy and exxpensive - then passing the theater of the New City I saw an offer for free meditation at St.Mark's church on Thursdays at 8 a.m. - I might check that out - I'm not the only whom Catholic Masses have stopped interesting - one priest talking endlessless about the virginity of Mary and how wonderful it is for women to be vergins - I am against promiscuity, I too am against abortion, a good essay on the op-ed page, saying women deserve better than getting abortions.

Education, education. I just wrote to a wonderful friend about the fight a number of us have been fighting against the pharma industry that would like every last person declared mentally ill - there is no one as far as they are concerned who wouldn't do much better in life with medications - and many of us, myself included, have suffered and do suffer from the ignorance of all the lay shrinks thast abound and ready to diagnose every one as mentally ill and then stop speaking to people - to me! - because I don't have the decency to call myself mentally ill and refuse the wonderful meds that would make me a so much nicer person.

Anger, anger - yes, my anger is directed against the pharma industry - and I should learn to channel my anger directly against them - I try to by writing - and not against all thoser whom the millions they make are "educating" how wonderful and necessary their products are - and how they deserve every because after all they are doing wonderful research and if one pill costs $1000 or more - do find ways to raise the money, that pill will save you. Even Trump in his speech last night that I did end up listening to said something about the overpricing that must stop.

Yes that speech - in German we would say "sich die Haende wund klatschen" - to applaud hard until your hands are sore - I've necver seen so much applause and so many standing ovations - by uneducated people. Yes, they may have Harvard degrees - I myself sadly learned how little I learned getting my Mount Holyoke B.A. in 20 months, my UCLA M.A. straight A's in little over 7 months - finally got halted at Columbia by the fascist Bauke - putting my phd exams off, the failing me, finally passing me and then I got a letter: you did not take middle high German one - of course I had in California - and middle high German two at Columbia where I met Ari Salant - long story - and Gothic - for that course I bought my first bible because those Goth had translated the bible into their language - and all you had to do is get a bible to translate Gothic into Englissh.

Yes, I wasted my young years on obscure German lit, on obscure languages - I wish when I arrived in 1951 I had had the guts to stay with my sweet boyfriend Arno, who truly loved me and I was 19 then and he 22 - no longer a virgin! as required by this priest, Charlie - and just beginning to explore our bodies - in what is now the East Village and then was the lower East Side we could have shared with artists an apartment for 20 dollars a month - Brooklyn College where he was studying - statistics as suggested by his father and he later did use that in his job at the census bureau where he created a division Poverty Statistics, destroyed by Reagan, he got pancreatic cancer and died. His love was sociology and he did get at the New School later close to a Ph.D. - the New School notorious for keeping students forever - his later wife threatened to leave him if he didn't get a job - the census bureau was a summer job, they loved him, offered him full time work - all the perks of a govt job - she suggested he take it - he called me often at government expense and I remember his mantra: No one to taslk to. He got very involved in the civil rights fight, later in sort of universal church - they had three children - his daughter went to the u of Chicago and married a Boston Irish, I was invited to the wedding, felt odd about going. His middle son, a philosophy student and musician committed suicide after he had died and his older son never married and now lives I velieve in Cambodia. I have remained in touch with his wife who always geneerously hosted me and friends when we came for demos to Washington - didn't want to join his church while he was alive, Unitarian, now the name comes to me - after he died became the pillar of the church - not far from the house that they had bought - in a neighborhood that has become gentrified.

His father - a survivor, his mothere was torn away from him at Auswitz, he was the only child, he was 15, she perished. My mother met his father at was was a "requisitioned hotel" - this was 1947 we lived in Munich - Jews were offered free stays in these hotels in the Alps - he shared a table with my mother - my father had refused to go there - I was extremely lonely then and so was his son - his father came to our house to check me out, approved, said he had a bottle of cooking oil I could pick up at his house - and that is where I met Arno. Both my mother and his father firmly believed young women should remain virgins - believed this should be platonic and my mother called me a whore when I kissed him a year after we had met. I told him I would "go all the way" after I had graduated high school in 1950 - three years after we had met. By then we both were plotting how to get to America - he left in early 1951, I followed him in the fall. I had scored the fancy scholarship - totally unthinkeable to give it up to stay in New York - where he had wonderful and intgeresting friends that I met when I spent vacations with him - firmly convinced that I was the only woman at Mount Holyoke College sleeping with her boyfriend - and in those days virtuous young women did what was called then: everything but. When I met my later husband and was willing "to go all the way" - I shocked him deeply and his mother had given him dire warnings of "lose women" who were out to snatch her trophy by getting pregnant - after the first time he told me he was too tired - and because I had a Mount Holyoke B.A. and he was about to enter his thrird and final year at Harvard law school we were convinced we knew EVERTHING - and we were as dumb as all those people clapping their hands sore last night - all those people who admire the speech Trump gave last night - and putting all of us into terrible danger. More military spending - that will save us. The military believes it.

Oh well. It took me alas many years to begin to understand - Arno's father had bought him a Leica (Arno's father knew how to make money) - perhaps some of the photographs are still in the basement of his house - I've been waiting for somebody to take me - so far no one has - and his widow is also growing old. Arno had gotten a driver's licence before he left Germany. His father would have given us money and we could have set out on a trip across America as the Swiss photographer Frank did who put together a book by the titlle something "of Men" - he had photographed America with the eyes of a European - he did have training in photography - but Arno happily would have taken courses - I began writing voluminously in 1946, I was 13 and we had to leave Prague where I had met in the fall of 1945 Dana, a beautiful Czech women - and as girls that age do, we loved each other - I had told I was Dutch and leaving for Holland - in the park we had played being Partisans and killing Germans - then I wrote to her from Germany that alas I was a German (still stateless until West Germany came into being and passports were issued and I got German passport number 456 - it burned in 2000) and we began a lively correspondence - one day in 1987 I was in Prague (after 1957 I travelled a lot to Prague, the city I love most) - she reached up and gave me bundled my letters in Czech to her. Much burned in the 2000 fire - all my photographs, as my letters, much of my writing.

Writing was my early passion - alas - only one teacher realized it, Frau Eckstein - her husband had become involved with the art teacher, Frau Eckstein had stomach problems and died on the operating table. She was the only who saw a writer in me. And only in 1958 in Geneva I sat down to write my first two novels - in English - one about my year in Paris, the other about my years with Arno, from 1947 until 1953 - when our so different lives, he in Brooklyn with the poor, I in Massacusetts with the rich - no longer able to find places where we could sleep together - alas my physical interest in him had waned - none of all that did we understand - and while I've read thousands of pages of obscure German literature - never did I learn anything about my body.

Almost all the displaced persons on the boat taking me to America ended up working in factories, many never learning English. Spending life at unviversities and in libraries has been a privilege - I am happy for it - even though it hasn't taken me to this day where I wanted to be - a recognized writer. The clock is ticking - in June I'll be 85.

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