The Czech is in The Montenegren

 

 

I've given myself a time out. I'm being treated for Gout and for Psoriasis. The Gout is now somewhat under control with a standard medication; name of which I'll have to get up from my chair here to get the spelling of....Colchicine, not that you care. The Psoriasis is only the last in a series of diagnoses by a series of doctors for a rash on my back that's about five years old. Haven't you had enough of this? 

Yes. Now for the Czech. When I visited the town in Montenegro where my father was born about twenty years ago, I found a cousin, Ivan, with whom I had trouble conversing because I wasn't able to find an available translator and I don't speak what is now called Montenegrin but was then called Serbo-Croatian. But with a small group of people who each knew a few words of English we struggled along, and my cousin, Ivan, who has since passed away, showed me numerous photos of his family.  

From what I could discern, it seemed, from a picture of his mother and his description of her, that she was my father's aunt and Godmother, Baba Jana. Another picture was of an Austro-Hungarian Army Officer, and I've come to the conclusion that he was my father's father's father. My great grandfather. I've forgotten his name now. (That's part of the problem of waiting until you're old to get interested in you genealogy.)  This officer, everyone agreed, looked just like me. 

I don't know for sure, but I think he was born in Czech Bohemia. I believe the Empire's Army sent him to Montenegro, where he married, I'm assuming a Croat, which would have been considered in the family, of the same tribe and race as it were, (Roman Catholic), which allowed him to settle in and become part of the landscape. His son Sima, though, (Simon in Americanese, and my Gramps, who I never met,) married a Montenegren Serb, and was therefore disowned and so had to flee to the U.S., in much the same manner as my mother's maternal grandmother and grandfather, who were Catholic and Protestant and lived in Northern Ireland and came here for the same reason. (This is a story I've told before, so I must think it's interesting.) My Czech part is in the male. My Irish, Scots-Irish part is in the female, with the Catholic being the Grandmother and the Protestant being the male. 

I suppose there is a good case for mine being a bastardized as well as balkanized genealogy, all of which could make a lesser man slide toward an identity crisis.  I, however, for those of you who are along for the ride, must tell you that I am well beyond that. I've been transformed, (I did EST), I've become transcendant, (I did T.M.), I'm sober, (I did that thing), and I've delved into General Semantics, by which I mean I'm on page 206 reading Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. And on that page, or near it, I've come across some interesting information about infinity, which, and I'll end with this, is formulated symbolically as an eight, on its side, which I thought to myself, perhaps channeling my late brother-in-law Burt Glinn, famous photographer, and compulsive punster, can be written as ate lying down.  Badump bump.    

 

 

 

Obituary for a Lost Blog Post

 

 

May it rest in peace!  And may I find peace, about IT.  I lost a blog post in the electronic maze and it won't stop annoying me.  I don't feel I can entirely blame myself. It seems to me that some devil had first off messed with the post.  I was looking through the various posts and noticed this one that seemed to have had several, in fact many sentences removed, including some that were cut with seemingly no selectivity.  I tried to find an original copy and then I noticed that the post was in draft form. Anyway, in the process of trying to retrieve the original, I erased the draft form and all was lost. Of course, I could say it's no big deal. I mean it's only me, mine, and who the F. am I?  But I refuse to think that way.  First off, it was important to me; and second of all it's probably of some interest to someone, I have that much faith in myself.  

 

The post, as usual with me, was about a couple of books I'd read recently, one being a biography of Wilhelm Reich, Fury on Earth, by Myron Sharaf, and the other being the well known book about the Merry Pranksters; Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  The tie-in between the two books, for me was that one of the primary characters in the story of the Merry Pranksters was a woman who's house was the gathering place for the people, the social crowd, which evolved into the Pranksters.  Her name was Chloe Scott, and she had some relationship to Stanford University, which I've forgotten now, and she lived in Palo Alto. She had studied Buddhism and Dance, she was a dance instructor, and she was attractive and kind of a hipster.  She had also, in her earlier days, lived in my hometown, East Hampton, NY, and had been part of the artist's and writer's community there, which included my own parents.  At that time she was married to a guy named Pete Scott, who's best friend was a young writer who would later become famous, by the name of Peter Mathiessen. The two guys had been part of the summer social set as kids, and as adults, after WWll, had come back and gone native.  Mathiessen wrote a great book about that part of his and Pete Scott's life, Men's Lives, a book that describes the world of off-the- beach haulseining fishermen, with whom they worked for some years. I also wrote about the two in relation to another part of their social life at that time which centered around the dynamic, cyclonic life of the artist Jackson Pollock who became world famous almost moments before he killed himself and another person and injured a third in a drunken driving accident.  

The tie-in, if there is one, is based on a rumor that existed at that time, that one of the two couples, Scott and his wife Chloe, or Peter and his wife Patsy, had a Reichian Orgone Box. The rumor was never substantiated though years later Chloe did admit to having "Basted" herself in one such contraption. The reason for the lack of candor no doubt had to do with the fact that all Reichian devices were illegal, owing to the fact that the powers that be had convicted Reich as a fraud, and he had died in prison. Reich, though, had in death retained a loyal following which grew slowly during the fifties, and was greatly helped by his inclusion in The Whole Earth Catalogue, arguably the Holy Bible of the Hippy movement, which was conceived and edited by another of Chloe's friends and part of that same social set, Stewart Brand. There it is, a re-hash, a memory of a lost blog; feel better, me.