BEEDEE.

BEEDEE. 060701 My mother´s name was Helen Beatrice, called Beedee. One of life´s great delights is not having to fight vs one´s mother, perhaps due to her being dead. One of the benefits of the deaths of parents is not having to pretend to feel grateful. Note: many of our bad feelings are pretended, but that does not mean they do not harm us.

Beedee resembled USSR in her implied threat to have me put into a nuthouse. Parents pretend to minimize the value of children, this due to cowardly dodging the fact that children are of prime importance to them, and in time have great power.

One lesson taught by parents expresses nationalism as egotism.

One has to sort and try to keep clear the bad input vis a vis the good: cf the wonderful French film with Jean Gabin as social worker to Alain Delon.

Where is that great film about the girl with 16 personalities, Sally Field stars?

Without a moral position one cannot survive childhood (Piaget take note).

With regard to that, the key mode is loyalty relationship: but its perversion is disastrous.

(I will develop some of these thoughts at length below)

In USA, I experienced a notional” saving witness” in the form of the culture of USA, my parents linked to the ethnicity of their immigrant parents.

Indeed, much therapy resides in finding the remote foreign source of parents´ behavior patterns and obsessive indoctrination and programming of one´s life. After all, parents generally lack self-image as parents, and merely derive forgiveness for presuming to procreate. I wonder how many mothers were proud to feel the foetus inside.

And sibling rivalry is mixed with this war against the individual, forcing competition in self - denying self denial.

090701 19:18 My mother (Beedee) prevented a relationship between me and my father, but he was in fact unrelationable.

120701 18:31 Of course one loves one´s genetic parents; but that does not mean one likes them---and the real objects of such love are the abstract parents: I compassionate with my parents, especially now they are dead, but what they could have been,in a better world, is abstract, while what they actually did was monstrous. And of course they did much that was good---but it is the bad that defines monstrousness.

130701 17:32 Keeping clear this distinction between one´s actual parents and the abstract parents is essential to sanity, and without such discrimination insanity approaches skulking about in the woods with foul nets of longing.

250701 16:50 How come it was a friend when I was about fifteen that taught me how to talk and write?

260701 01:06 TWO MOTHERS DIVERGED IN A WOOD...

180801 22:54 The actuality of the relationships within families is a paradigm for paradox: my mother did some good, but too much bad. There is also the interesting problem that my mother was of the generation that redd women´s weeklies, and figured she could do better than her mother or my father´s mother in raising children, since she was able to be American---whereas, my father´s parents knew they knew next to nothing and so stayed out of the way, generally, it seems: a little knowledge can be worse than none, especially when combined with arrogant native intelligence and cultural frustration, like being prevented from professional fulfillment.

290801 0445 Maybe my mother felt threatened by my intelligence; she being of the first generation of Americans, and i having certain advantages (quite apart from those particularly provided by her and my father) beyond hers. i mean she was a frustrated smart person who counted points of smartness against everyone, including me (and certainly my father) --- too bad she lacked a career. But maybe that was better than Betty, who promoted her son Harold (my childhood friend) like a greyhound, visciously setting us kids off against each other at age six years, as to who knew the states and capitals best (it was of course her kid) --- Harold suffered from this, altho it may have helped him in some way I do not understand, by his capitulation in her use of him as an intellectual gladiator, including the sense of subordination, disturbing his motivation; whereas I rebelled constantly, Harold seemed supinely docile even into adult years.

120901 1927 There were many occasions I remember now, wherein I now feel I would have liked to tell my parents where to get off --- but it would have been counterproductive, by the age when I could have at all done so. Much better to be spy, and saboteur: after all, it was clear that they were my enemies, so my best play was to use their own strength against them, over the years --- in this I was quite successful, even exemplarily so. I will be telling you a lot about that, with a view of helping the young, and admonishing the elders. But, dont get me wrong: I do not mean every parent is rotten --- far from it!

2024 During WW2, my father not being in the military, but with so many other males absent, I (like so many others) being deprived of role models etc, needed all the more the active presence and participation in my youth by my him, but he avoided me. I do not dedicate a page to him, as he is subsumed under my mother´s category --- altho she was insane, she was at least a human being; whereas he was (by his own choice, as I have finally concluded) not: his responses were not the responses of a human being, in the sense of the human potential of human beings (not that that is uncommon among human beings, e g, Malosevich) --- it is too bad that Hitler made it politically incorrect to designate some people as not human --- we should remember that Hitler and his tribe were best described by Goering, saying they were merely a bunch of thugs who got away with it for a while (they were not even racists, in any reasonable understanding of the word: they (like Malosevich) merely exploited that coocoo nostrum as an excuse to kill people). It is folly to take seriously any such rationalizations by so-called people talking with no more intelligence than mynah birds when using concepts to defend their mere thuggery. They simply do not have any idea why they do what they do --- that is a factor of their not being human. If we take seriously what they say by way of explanation, and then associate that with their behavior, we stigmatize by association the concepts they bandy about. And one trick they like is to turn things upside-down: Hitler exemplified the type common in the history of Europe who felt inferior to the Jews, and accordingly defended themselves from this imagined threat by attacking Jews as inferior (a ploy common to early childhood). (The Chinese have the same morbid fear of the culture of the Tibetans (the “ Jews” of Asia) --- or is it merely a clique of thugs in Beijing, in that nation too big to sustain democracy?) Of course, it was the recognition by some powerful thoughtful people, that Europeans could not deal with their pervasive anti-Jewish psychosis (as amply demonstrated through 2 milennia) which prompted them to support the creation of The State of Israel. It is the consequence of the defect in European character which occasionally breaks out in plagues of violence against fancifully focussed-on groups, e g “witches”. Thoughtful Europeans just after WW2 had had enough of that embarrassment in their culture; they wanted to expunge the shame blotting the escutcheon, and establish that they were not the same as their mortal enemy Nazi Germany. This was also a way to disassociate post -war Germans from the Nazis (post-war Germans being included in the notion that the Jews were owed something very big). (It was generally felt that the natives of Palestine owed the Europeans, who had freed them from The Turkish Empire, etc.)

130901 2311 Erik Eriksen (sp?) the eminent psychologist was wrong writing that when we get older we see our parents with compassion and understanding and forgive them: my own feelings have increased in hostility.

061001 1947 My parents did not keep the piano tuned, when I was less than ten years old. There was no limit to their evil.

1949 Beedee, being dead, does not interrupt me when I work the computer; in fact, paradoxically (due to the existence of posterity) she is now grist for my mill.

søndag 18. november 2001 03:52 One who is attacked by a parent must learn how to use the other´s strength against him/her --- my mother attacked me, when i was a helpless child, but I knew time was on my side. Accordingly I plotted against her. I succeeded quite well eventually. So I also learned about using time, over a long period; and evaluating the balance of powers thru time. I learned as time progressed in my favor, from such Mentors as Sam Adams, Macchiavelli, Lincoln, FDR, Freud, and certain Hindu mavins who taught extreme patience and bottomless deviousness. I further learned that without such compassionate acceptance of the inferiority of those opposing one at all points, the great could not have prevailed over the bad. Lincoln insidiously waited until the cotton had been bought at normal prices in the Autumn of 1860 before opposing The Confederacy even by word. Sam Adams said of London: “Get´m in the wrong, and keep´m in the wrong”. Once one knows someone opposes one, that person is one´s absolute enemy and subject to merciless manipulation, especially when it is a person who should be nice to me, and believes I cannot resist, as being a child. Memory is the weapon. My cause includes mobilizing children in this way. Jesus did also. I offer eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt respect thy child.

mandag 21. januar 2002 14:38 My mother for some strange reason stood there turning off the radio when I was listening to a Charles Munch concert when I was about eighteen years old in my room (such as it was) preventing me from listening. So I got my bicycle and rode to the YMCA where my mother´s brother Aleck had a cubicle (a room such as it was) and listened there. He was very nice about it, he being the nice guy who when I was little told me about his adventures as a bread roll (bulkie) and as a fish, thus allowing my imagination to live in spite of my evil parents. Aleck used to go about selling from door to door what were called “notions”, i e, needles, combs stuff like that. Aleck had a twitch and was not quite reasonable. He used to listen to the news and I think eventually he had short wave and got BBC, but during the war, i e, WW2, he was it seemed to my young mind constantly obsessed with the news, more even than other people. I saw him regularly as he used to visit at least once a week for dinner, and as he left would remind my mother to turn off the gas. This was an improvement over my mother´s brother Sol, who used to remind her to polish the doorknobs and remind me to clean behind my ears (his wife, my Aunt Rae, explained that otherwise girls would not like me). When I was in my thirties, I resided sometimes at a Salvation Army hotel in New York City, in a cubicle listening to all night classical music with ear-phones --- Watson was the great host of that show, and a strong influence on me, as later in Norway I hosted a classical all-night radio show weekly for many months. Now that area of NYC is called Soho, and is fashionable --- the flop-houses gone, and all the myriad tenants moved to Scandinavia to live happily ever after. In my teens my mother sent me to a prominent doctor at Harvard , formerly at Andover, his name was Dr Gallagher, and he explained to me that of course my father would side with my mother against me with regard to my girlfriend, as he wanted peace with his wife. Several weeks later he sent me a letter which I have unclear recollections of; did I ever see it surreptitiously? My parents redd (my new spelling) it, and asked me if they could destroy it without my seeing it, and evidently I acquiesced (according to what my father said after my mother died years later) --- I think that is correct, as I was like a spy in their home, and knew I could easily contact Dr Gallagher anyway. The point was obvious: my parents convicting themselves yet again of being bad. You may well wonder why they so disapproved of that letter. I did not contact Dr Gallagher, and the question amuses me. The point was that I knew all along what I eventually learned from reading about Sam Adams, whose great dictum (re London) is “Get´m in the wrong, and keep´m in the wrong”. As years went by I got money from my parents, instead of putting them in jail or decapitating them, as I would have done were I emperor. Once I was in a convertible driven by the truly lovely lady who had a slight Germanic accent and whose name was Mrs Katz and was the mother of Lorraine Katz who was the very beautiful girl of my earliest puberty who of course rejected me I suppose, and my mother was in the front seat and I was in the back seat with a pal, and redd from the life of Nero the part where his mother says baring her womb strike here, and my mother asked to see the little book, and summarily tossed it out of the moving car. This was the same mother, Beedee, who threw out my extensive collection of Dr Bradey articles I clipped from the newspaper when I opened a handkerchief improperly in front of her friend Mrs Shapiro while as I recall also for some reason angling for a gift, being then about ten years old. No wonder I relished catching beetles in the oven and then turning it on. But I still wonder why I occasionally put kittens in bureau-drawers when I was four years old. Or drove gun-barrel holes all over the plaster of my room or threw over standing radios. Maybe it was because my mother was all day on the phone. Now psychologists have theories about the need for playing. But my mother´s brother Sol did give me a radio when I was four, with a wonderful “Z” on the speaker, bakelite probably, brown, marvellous. He was always a radio buff, being a crystal-set guy, and then a salesman of radios before selling home furnishings and after the war kitchens and then Whirlpool stuff, when my father was his accountant and helped him sell the outfit for a good profit to retire to his all-American home with an American Flag on a pole in the yard, in Springfield , Massachusetts --- but my daughter detested him and Rae as racists.