Tag: Faust

A Homage to Writer and Rebel Gerry Haslam

Gerry Haslam and I used to huddle in his or my office located in the new gym at Sonoma State College, before it became Sonoma State University. It might have been his first year. I know it was mine. That was 1967. I was overwhelmed. I was the single parent of two little boys, 5 and 2, Markus and Dylan. I was still writing my PhD thesis for the stuffy German Department at UC Berkeley, where Thomas Mann’s son Golo was teaching. Whom I hardly registered and never spoke to. The Vietnam War was raging, and I was trying to find my place, without much success in the Age of Free Love. And so, in this weakened condition, I was susceptible to Gerry Haslam’s satanic whispers that he would write literature rather than be a fussy critic of other people’s creations. To me, this was a daring heresy that I could scarcely take in. I could only see that he was a rebel, and that part stuck. And so, easily influenced, I started to write, little stories here and there in German and English. Without really noticing it, I had joined the creative conspiracy, instigated for me by this kind and clever man. He had taught me the alchemy of S + W = L. storytelling plus work to make literature. One day, twenty years later, in Weimar, East Germany where Goethe and Schiller had written, I asked my mildly Marxist professor of Germanistik (pronounced with a hard g) the Faustian question, “Why analyze literature to death instead of creating literature?” The young woman was speechless and now had another reason to be suspicious of me. At age 70, I published my first novel and, in a month or so , at almost 85, I will have published my fourth novel , plus a collection of short stories—all of it historical fiction set in Mexico where Dianne Romain and I have lived for the last twenty years.

All of this, aside from the Dianne Romain part—who is also a novelist—may not have happened without those early heretical whispers from that kind and loving academic rebel, my friend and fine writer Gerry Haslam.

A Letter from Mephistopheles to His Mother, the Snake

Last night, precisely at the hour that the cucarachas in my house rose from their daylong slumber, I wrote a poem for you, Mother, celebrating my origin, when I slipped past your scaly loins and gave my first half-throttled scream. In spite of what others say, my skin was tender and the edges of your eggs, ragged and unforgiving. I cannot tell you how long it took me to unwind and find my tail. To see it quivering with new strife. I, your young Fliegengott, God of Flies, charged by you to bring war and darkness to all of life. An honest offering, when compared to the promises of the Bearded Fellow in the sky, whose plans you say I am tasked to disrupt. I, Lord of Rats, patron saint of the Long Tails of New York, Southern District, who pressure me with their Rule of Raw and the Triumph of Tooth during this Age of Lies. To whom I respond, Wouldn’t it be too bad if I asked you, my Mother, to drop down into the electric soot beneath Time Square and make lumpy digestive juices of them all. I have tried to tell them they are mistaking me for someone else. That it is not I whose squinty sun rises puffed and orange over Manhattan each morning, breathing in its own self-delighting smells. That we and they and the Old Man in the Sky are the only ones who stand between this bloated Faust and the sweet fifteen-year-old’s of our democracy. And so, Mother, I ask you to hold your snout and approach this high-rise, stale, bedpan stink and enter that chamber where humans purport to think, and swallow his dark pulp, make it your own, so that the status antequam can return to when it was mainly you and I and the Man in the Sky who determined the outcome of the struggle between good and evil, and not this amateur who would supplant us all. Therefore, let us ally ourselves with the Long Tails of the Southern District and, after you have supped, let them finish off what is left in the cup.

Much Love,

from Him who aims to please,

Your Devoted son,

Young Count Mephistopheles.

Where I Confess to Being Mephistopheles

(Take a meditation pose)

Excuse me,

You’ve caught me at the hour of my meditation,

the moment my mantra and I meet each other

halfway.

Diese schwankenden Gestalten

These swaying forms that approach me.

Continue reading “Where I Confess to Being Mephistopheles”