First, an announcement: published poet and contributor Tao Yucheng would like to host and judge a poetry contest open to all readers of Synchronized Chaos Magazine.

Synchronized Chaos Poetry Contest

We seek short, powerful, imaginative, and strange poetry. While we welcome all forms of free verse and subject matter, we prefer concise work that makes an impact.

Guidelines: Submit up to five poems per person to taoyucheng921129@proton.me. Each poem should not exceed one page (ideally half a page or less). All styles and themes welcome

Prizes: First Place: $50 Second Place: $10, payable via online transfer. One Honorable Mention. Selected finalists will be published in future issues of Synchronized Chaos

Good luck, if you choose to enter!

Now, for this month’s issue: The Stories We Tell Ourselves. We explore communication, relationships, myth, history, imagination – different ways of making meaning from life.

Dildora Abdullayeva considers the study of phrases as a part of human language and how phrases have changed over the years. Toychiyeva Madinaxon points out how young people are changing global language through Internet slang. Habibullayeva Lalyokhon Zarifjon kizi explores cultural and linguistic features of phrases in the Uzbek language. Rashidova Shohshanam speaks to the rapid changes in the Uzbek language and the challenges and opportunities that poses for educators. Noah Berlatsky reflects with humor on how our brains’ memory for language might shrink with modernity.

Dildora Qobilova suggests common student grammatical errors and ways to correct them in the classroom. Yarmamatova Sevinch Elyor qizi suggests ways to enhance young children’s speech fluency. Suyarova Gulsanam explicates finer points of Uzbek grammar for audiences speaking all languages. Abulqosimova Bahora highlights the intricacies of the phonetic system of the Uzbek language. Muqaddas Islomova highlights the role of multimedia digital technologies in helping language learners enhance their speech skills. Shamsiddinova Maftuna Hamidjon qizi gives an overview of academic studies into the structure and functions of different parts of speech. Adashaliyeva Durdona Akramjon qizi highlights the central role of linguistics in reinforcing the values of a socialist society. Rukhshona Kamolova Turayeva highlights the importance of studying the history and role of the English language to understanding effective communication. Sharifov Sirojiddin Shavkatovich underscores the critical importance of basic math literacy to social functioning. Satimboyeva Risolet outlines educational benefits of AI technologies in education.

Kucharov Bakhodir outlines principles of written and spoken professional communication. Dilnoza Bekmurodovna Navruzbekovna urges people to carefully consider what career would be right for them, and for schools to facilitate that deliberation. Aslidinova O’giloy highlights the potential of a digital economy and the need to prepare students for that world. Sarvar Eshpulatov also highlights the importance of digital literacy for success in today’s society. Niyozova Shakhnoza Farhod qizi elucidates the potential of digital technologies in education. Iroda Sobirova offers suggestions for fostering entrepreneurship in Central Asia and elsewhere. Choliyev Nurbek Rözimbek ogli highlights the importance of local banks in trusting in the creditworthiness of local entrepreneurs. Eshmurodova Sevinch Bahrom qizi outlines steps credit card bureaus can take to ensure consumer security. Urinova Robiyabonu discusses the use of psychology in professional management. Qarshiboyeva Mavluda Azizbek qizi analyzes the role of international assessment exams in world education. Abduvaliyeva Jasmina Jahongir qizi outlines some upsides and downsides of economic and cultural globalization.

Satimboyeva Rizolat discusses how to develop a social culture of reading and literary appreciation that goes beyond the classroom. Aziza Xazamova highlights the joy and creativity and history of the Uzbek mother tongue. Qudratova Nozima Bahromovna outlines the innovative narrative storytelling techniques of Uzbek author Tog’ay Murod.

Lakshmi Kant Mukul shares some of a people’s history of India through the lens of one architectural landmark, the Qutub Minar. Alan Catlin renders the historical, somnolent, stuck atmosphere of the American Rust Belt into poetry. Xudoyberdiyeva Mohiniso delves into the Islamic Turkish Kara-Khanid state, which reached its height in the 700s. Duane Vorhees traces a variety of Jewish mystical influences on Sigmund Freud. Chimezie Ihekuna relates how the modern Nigerian state came together as a result of colonial powers and bears little relation to cultural realities, causing a legacy of trouble. Jacques Fleury reviews Boston Lyric Stage’s production of a mashup of Sherlock Holmes and A Christmas Carol, providing two different lenses through which to interpret Victorian England. Qulliyeva Feruza Qosimova highlights the role of the Uzbek constitution in guiding contemporary society.

Mahbub Alam reflects with nostalgia on his high school days: friends, teachers, the school environment. Mesfakus Salahin revels in the wonder of childhood and memory. Sobirjonova Rayhona expresses gratitude to a dedicated teacher.

Olga Levadnaya speaks to the ‘halo effect’ of memory, where we remember the best parts of what happened to us. Dr. Jernail S. Anand considers his memories to be friends. Taghrid Bou Merhi holds onto the hazy and charming days of childhood and dreams. Mandy Diamantou Pistikou reminds us of the innocence and joyful curiosity of early childhood. Meanwhile, Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal speaks to the feelings, thoughts, and sensations of middle age.

Taro Hokkyo brings to life a moment of deep soul recognition among two different people. Turkan Ergor wonders at the vast diversity of people’s life experiences, given our common humanity. Dr. Kang Byeong-Cheol reminds us of the ingredients of love: wisdom, compassion, and humility. Mrinal Kanti Ghosh reflects on a love that captures his soul and disrupts his consciousness.

Mohan Maharana also writes of compassion, speaking of his work as a healer and social worker coming alongside people living with mental illness. Juana Del Carmen Soria urges people to make wise and caring choices. Asmonur Rajabboyeva, in a piece translated into English by Shuxratova Nilufar, draws on a chamomile flower as a symbol for innocence and compassion. Eva Petropoulou Lianou puts out an urgent call for global peace. Dianne Reeves Angel looks beyond the commercialism of Christmas to seek out spiritual gifts of peace and love and hope. Brajesh Kumar Gupta affirms that goodness is so much stronger than evil. Zuhra Jumanazarova highlights the critical role of the Uzbek constitution in the country’s governance and respect for internationally recognized human rights. Eva Petropoulou Lianou laments the violence and selfishness of humanity, in poetry translated into Mandarin by Yongbo Ma. Pat Doyne mocks corruption in the United States’ federal government. Bill Tope argues against gambling from a social justice perspective. Yongbo Ma also translates a poem from Ahmed Farooq Baidoon on the weary quest of all too many people for justice. Brendan Dawson sketches some of society’s outsiders – immigrants and poets – and reflects on how society has become less welcoming.

Sayani Mukherjee wishes an old lover well with their new love during the holidays, while still acknowledging her sorrow. Abdulhafiz Iduoze speaks to the cycle of life and death in her imagistic poem. Kemal Berk yearns for a lost loved one through verse. Aisha Al-Maharabi evokes the pain of loss and longing in love. Graciela Noemi Villaverde mourns the loss of her husband of many years through poetry. Abigail George renders cautious and loving care for her father with cancer into thoughtful and slow poetry. Farzaneh Dorri pays tribute to a departed human rights lawyer.

Mirta Liliana Ramirez grieves the loss of someone who suffered much and had a difficult life. Sumaiyya Alessmael mourns the passing of her immortal, fanciful beloved. Milana Momcilovic evokes centuries of timeless longing for a lost love. Salimeh Mousavi probes probes a family’s grief to create a complex and layered character sketch and to mourn for parts of individual personhood severed by culture.

Shikdar Mohammed Kibriah speaks to the kind of immortality we find in nature, where one kind of creature lives because of the existence of another. Brian Barbeito relates a late autumn nature walk that left him feeling mystical and thinking of angels and a winter walk with friendly coyotes. Dr. Jernail Singh reminds proud humans of nature’s limits, checks, and balances. Toraqulova Pokiza Sanjarovna highlights the importance of living and working sustainability with nature during climate change. Avazbekova Rayyonakhon outlines some ways young people can work with “nature” close to us, our own bodies, and enhance immunity and stay healthier. Mahmmadjonov Saidjahon Shokirjon ogli and Mirzamansurova Robiya Ahmadjon qizi discuss clinical criteria elucidating when patients need heart valve transplants. Numonova Shohsanam Bahodirjon qizi presents an overview of the causes and effects of genetic mutation. Sejuty Rahman draws on an oyster fashioning an irritating grain of sand into a pearl as part of an extended natural metaphor for love.

Kavi Nielsen poetically expresses a sense of unity and connection with nature and their loved one. Shawn Schooley celebrates the sensual attraction he feels for his lover. Jamal Garougar speaks to the submergence of egos and unity with a broader whole inherent in love.

Petros Kyriakou Veloudas depicts love, grief, and memory feeding into the artistic process. Ana Elisa Medina encourages someone close to her to sing and share his heart’s journey. Kandy Fontaine reflects on how Motorhead frontman Lemmy inspired her artistically and personally.

Dianne Reeves Angel celebrates the joy of intentional female connection and friendship over many years. Priyanka Neogi reminds women and girls to remember their insight and strength. Amirah al-Wassif’s surreal poetry speaks to womanhood and our relationship with our bodies and minds.

J.J. Campbell shrugs and finds himself in a place of dull resignation, even at the holiday season, and renders his feelings into poems. Alan Hardy speaks to the vulnerability of being alone, whether in the wild or in his own mind, and how he protects himself by letting go of regret. Santiago Burdon depicts some misadventures along the road of guiding an emerging writer towards greater originality.

Richard LeDue captures a feeling common to many creators: seasons of wandering through a morass of scanty inspiration. Mykyta Ryzhykh expresses deep inner emotional pain through vivid imagery. Sara Hunt-Flores evokes the limits of the poetic muse for dealing with extreme emotions. Anna Keiko embarks on a tender journey of self-discovery.

Patrick Sweeney captures moments of revealing character development through one-line monostitch poetry. Christina Chin and Jerome Berglund depict small moments when people are captivated by small pleasures. Zebo Zukhriddinova celebrates the fun and the spontaneous organization of a day students spent folding and flying paper airplanes. Christina Chin depicts brief moments of peace and contemplation at Thanksgiving. Taylor Dibbert highlights the culinary creativity evinced by Thanksgiving meals. Asmonur Rajabboyeva’s short story, translated from Uzbek to English by Shuxratova Nilufar, details an imaginative and curious young girl’s travel to Mars.

Mark Young expresses fascination with arbitrary liminality, how we attempt to classify the world. Duane Vorhees reflects on natural and human moments of energy and transition, such as thunderstorms, from a comfortable distance that lets him think and react with wonder.

We hope this issue brings wonder, new thoughts, and empathy to your life.

Someone To Speak For Me

 It is useless knowing a language anymore

when there are computers to know it for you.

I am forgetting the keyboard keys.

I am forgetting my name

and the name of the screen.

I do not need it. I do not need

to know what I do not know.

Query the word for words for my open mouth.

Hello I am leaving hello right

here on the inside of my

—

and thought I would give you an updated bio:

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. You can find info on his poetry collections and chapbooks, as well as his writing on politics and culture, at his newsletter: Everything Is Horrible.

The Promise

Inspired by Wallace Stevens

The unholy frenzy of a three-week shopping spree

In single-minded pursuit of the consummate offering.

Some treasure that captivates my love, if only briefly,

Evoking blithe memories of Christmas past,

When Lionel trains, roller skates, and shiny Schwinn bicycles

Promised unadulterated pleasure.

But in this age of uncertainty and scrutiny,

The perfect gift feels like a seasonal illusion,

A practiced sleight of handThrough which we mime,

Hallmark-style,

The otherwise unspoken stirrings of the heart.

Undaunted, I set out in search of holiday treasure.

If such gifts exist at all, will they captivate again?

Clogged thoroughfares.

Rented Santas, rumpled and feigning cheer.

Perry Como jingles.

Nerves frayed by the discordant rhythms of the mall.

And my own insatiable Yuletide longings,

Coveting glittering bounty fit only for a king.

Seeking solace, solitary on Christmas night,

I retreat outdoors and lift my eyes to the heavens,

A shimmering veil of tears posing ancient questions:

Is it the star in the East that stirs my soul?

What did the traveling Wise Men divine in such stars?

I am reminded of a birth in Bethlehem, long ago,

A squalling mortal child, uniting God and Man,

Offering a glimmer of understanding.

Some Being, however intangible, delivered to us an idea,

An infinitude of love.

A mystery wholly reasoned through an infant form,

And through Him, a promise of divinity.

These are the gifts of the Wise Men:

Bequests of understanding, compassion, and grace,

Left for pagan pilgrims

In this most unholy season.

A spirit that returns each Yuletide,

Quietly, joyously.

As the miracle we call Christmas.

www.diannangel.com

FROM FIRST TO LAST: THE CASE OF THE TURKISH TURNCOAT

The 20th century was born, psychologically speaking, with the 1900 publication of Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Out of this book, psychoanalysis quickly matured into a bold, contentious philosophy, ready and able to challenge the basic tenets of many disciplines. Freud and most of his early followers were Jews, but their precepts and even their mood were so radically different from those of rival schools of thought that the ultimate antecedents of psychoanalysis remain a mystery despite various attempts to trace its genealogy.

Some four decades after “The Interpretation of Dreams” appeared, Immanuel Velikovsky, one of Freud’s professional colleagues, published a comprehensive reinterpretation of  the origins of psychoanalysis. “The Dreams Freud Dreamed” appeared in “Psychoanalytic Review” 28 (Oct. 1941). In Velikovsky’s analysis Freud’s own dreams — the foundation of all that came later — dealt with “his inner struggle for unhampered advancement: In order to get ahead he would have to conclude a Faust-pact: he would have to sell his soul to the Church.”

Velikovsky employed Freud’s own psychoanalytic methods to uncover Freud’s hidden motives. He examined 16 of Freud’s dreams, 10 of them in great detail; in his understanding, all of them contained evidence of the same internal conflict. But one of the dreams included an important element which Velekovsky admitted he could not readily fit into his general scheme, though he should have been able to do so.

Velikovsky called the episode the “Dream About the Woman in the Kitchen and the Stranger.” In Freud’s account the dream ended this way: 

“I want to put on an overcoat; but the first I try on is too long. I take it off, and am somewhat astonished to find that it is trimmed with fur. A second coat has a long strip of cloth with a Turkish design sewn into it. A stranger with a long face and short, pointed beard comes up and prevents me from putting it on, declaring that it belongs to him. I now show him that it is covered all over with Turkish embroideries. He asks: ‘How do the Turkish (drawings, strips of cloth…) concern you?’ But we soon become quite friendly.” [tr. A. A. Brill]

Velikovsky interpreted that section of the dream as follows:

“We know that a stranger in a dream is usually the father…. Likewise the overcoat which is too large (Jews wear long overcoats) is that of the father. He is surprised in the dream ‘that the coat is trimmed with fur’. Eight pages earlier the story of the father’s fur cap which was thrown into the mud by a Christian is told…. He tries on a Jewish coat (trimmed with fur, father’s religion) and afterwards a foreign (Turkish) one. Why ‘Turkish’ was chosen for foreign I can not say definitely without the assitance of the necessary associations. But Viennese history considers the Turk especially as the foreigner.”

Even as Velikovsky was completing the article, Freud was dying, so his own associations with “Turkish” are lost to us forever. In the article itself Velikovsky specifically warned against analysts making arbitrary associations on behalf of analysands. However, an interdisciplinary approach may succeed where a more specialized one lacks sufficiant information to make a proper evaluation.

A year before Velikovsky was examining Freud’s psychic pattern, Gershom G. Scholem, the first professor of Jewish mysticism and the Kabbala at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, (and, incidentally, the husband of a distant relative of Freud) had come to the startling conclusion that the 19th-century process of Jewish enlightenment and assimilation to European society owed its impetus to a 17th-century heresy named after Sabbatai Zevi (1625-1676). A member of the Sephardic community in Smyrna (modern Izmir, Turkey), at an early age he became imbued with the Kabbalistic teachings of Isaac Luria, a prominent mystic of the previous century. However, he transformed Luria’s arcane teachings into a radical popular movement.  As Scholem wrote,

“Sabbatianism represents the first serious revolt in Judaism since the Middle Ages; it was the first case of mystical ideas leading directly to the disintegration of the orthodox Judaism of  ‘the believers’. Its heretical mysticism produced an outburst of more or less veiled nihilistic tendencies among some of its followers. Finally it encouraged a mood of religious anarchism on a mystical basis which, where it coincided with favorable external circumstances, played a highly important part in creating a moral and intellectual atmosphere favorable to the reform movement of the nineteenth century.”

As early as 1648 Zevi publicly uttered God’s mystical full name, an act which many devotees interpreted as revealing himself as the long-awaited Messiah. Driven from Smyrna by the horrified rabbis, he spent several years abroad before he returned home in 1665 to proclaim that the next year would signal the beginning of Jewish redemption. From Smyrna he proceeded to Constantinople in order to “depose” the Osmanli sultan. Mehmed IV’s initial response was to remove a nuisance by imprisoning Zevi at Abydos. However, the prison became transformed into a place of pilgrimage. To head off possible unrest the sultan threatened to execute the Messiah unless he publicly converted to Islam. Thus, as “Mehmet Effendi,” Zevi accepted a sinecure at the Turkish court before being banished to Albania, where he died in obscurity.

Humiliated and degraded by Zevi’s apostasy, his followers sought some sort of rationalization for the act. It thus came to symbolize a radical paradox, a mystical form of redemption. They were supported in their interpretation by the experience of the Maranos, Jews who had “converted” to Christianity in the 15th century as an alternative to expulsion from Spain but who continued to practice their ancient rites in secret.

The movement was revived in an especially radical form a century later by Jakub Frank (c.1726-1791), a rabbi’s son who claimed to be a reincarnation of both Zevi and the patriarch Jacob. The Jewish authorities in Poland expelled him due to his heretical doctrines including the deification of himself as a part of a trinity and his denial of the traditional opposition between good and evil. He incorporated sexual practices into his teachings and advocated “purification through transgression,” regarding participation in all forms of behavior as a means of liberation. The Sabbatians informed  the bishop of Kamenetz-Podolsk that they rejected the Talmud and recognized only the Zohar, the sacred book of Kabbalah, which did not contradict the Christian doctrine of the trinity. Then Frank claimed that he had recieved a heavenly revelation calling on his adherents to adopt the “religion of Edom” (Christianity) as a transition to the true religion (which he called das, “knowledge’) to be revealed later. In 1759 the Frankists were baptized in Lwów, with members of the Polish szlachta (nobility) acting as godparents; the neophytes adopted their  surnames and joined their ranks, and king Augustus III served as Frank’s own godfather. By 1790, 26,000 Jews in Poland converted. (Isaac Bashevis Singer vividly presented a picture of the movement in Poland in his first novel, “Satan in Goray.”) Nevertheless, Frank was arrested for heresy in 1760 and imprisoned in the monastery of Częstochowa, though his influence continued to grow. After the first partition of Poland he was released by the Russian military in 1803 and frequently traveled to Vienna, where empress Maria Theresa regarded him as a disseminator of Christianity among the Jews. Ultimately, Frank and his retinue moved to Germany, where he adopted the title “Baron von Frank” of Offenbach. 

The Frankist leader in Prague, Jonas Wehle (1752-1823), intellectually linked Luria and Zevi with Moses Mendessohn and Immanuel Kant; Aaron Chorin (1766-1844), the founder of Reform Judaism in Hungary, a former member of a Sabbatian group in Prague, ordained his protege Leopold Loew (1811-1875), who the first to deliver his sermons in Magyar;  Loew specifically attributed a large role in rationalist propaganda and encouragement to the Sabbatians.

The defenders of rabbinical orthodoxy did everything they could to ridicule, destroy, and belittle the importance of the heresy, though Scholem pointed out that “various moderate forms” existed “in which orthodox piety and Sabbatian belief existed side by side, and the number of more or less outstanding rabbis who were secret adherents of the new sectarian mysticism was far larger than orthodox apologists have ever been willing to admit.” The belief became particularly influential among traders and manufacturers, who helped promote a mood that led to a basic reorientation of Jewish culture. In this respect, at least, the Sabbatians were like some Christian sectarians, such as the Quakers and Anabaptists, who, according to Scholem, “created an atmosphere in which the rationalist movement, in spite of its very different origins, was enabled to grow and develop, so that in the end both worked in the same direction.”

Scholem also sketched some of the links he saw between Sabbatiansism and more modern aspects of Jewish culture, in particular its relation to the origins of the Jewish Enlightenment and Hasidism (while at the same time denouncing the view that Hasidism was the impetus for emancipation as a “romantic misconception”).  The founder of the Hasidist movement, Israel Ben Eliezer Ba’al Shem Tov (“Besht,” c. 1700-1760) may have been a participant in the disputations between Frank and the Christians, and many of his early followers were probably Sabbatians; he derived much of his own mytical inspiration from moderate Sabbatians such as Joshua Heshel Zoref (1633-1700).

In “The Slayers of Moses,” Susan A Handelman of the University of Maryland noted that Scholem  investigated “what had been consigned to what Scholem calls the ‘cellar’ of Jewish history…. But a cellar is also the foundation of the house….” University of Missouri psychology professor David Bakan had already added a new wing to the house that Scholem built. In “Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition,” he claimed that “Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularized Jewish mysticism; and psychoanalysis can intelligently be viwed as such a secularization… By separating the supernatural elements in mysticism from its other content, Freud succeeded in making a major contribution to science.”

In a general sense, according to Bakan, Jewish mystical thought was “in the air” throughout Eastern Europe, even to the extent of being embodied in “the common oral expressions” of the Jews. But Freud’s biography specifically links him to some expressions of the mystical thought endemic to the middle of the 19th century. He was born in Moravia, one of the Western strongholds of Sabbatianism. (After his imprisonment, Frank had lived in the Moravian town of Brno until 1786.) The other branch of his family had migrated to Romania, another Sabbtian hotbed, but  maintained close communication with Freud’s family; in 1886 one of his sisters married one of her Romanian relatives. Both of Freud’s parents came from areas that were strongly Hasidic; his father was born in Tysmenite, an early asimilationist community which openly espoused the cause of Polish nationalism, and his mother’s family was from Brody, which had been famous as a great anti-Frankist center in the late 18th century before becoming a Hasidic community and a prime area of diffusion in the areas affected by the Berlin Enlightenment. 

Freud’s wife also had an interesting background. At the urging of her brother, who was already married to Freud’s sister, she broke tradition by breaking her engagement to another man she did not love. Her grandfather had been a well-known Hamburg rabbi who was vociferously opposed to the Reformers’ repudiation of messianic beliefs (and had been the object of a polemic written by Noah Mannheim, a Reformist rabbi who had performed the wedding ceremony for Freud’s parents); the grandfather was described by Meyer Waxman as “a queer and eccentric personality and his philosophy of Judaism was full of mystic vagaries, some of which were contrary and foreign to the true Jewish spirit.”  One of his sons, Freud’s wife’s uncle, had converted to Christianity and obtained an important position at the court of Ludwig I of Bavaria.

Given these circumstances, Freud must have grown up and matured in a milieu of Hasidistic and perhaps even crypto-Sabbatianist mysticism. As an adult he exhibited many traits that are associated with Frankist beliefs. He was fiercely proud of his Jewish heritage (for instance in his praise for Hannibal of Carthage as a Semitic hero), even though he completely rejected its religious beliefs and even though he sometimes dissembled about some of his Jewish connections in order to protect his ideas from racially motivated criticism. Like the Sabbatians, he opposed the orthodox creed while elaborating his own rival set of myths; he may have thus regarded himself as a sort of secular messianic figure. He was indefatigable in his search for intimate knowledge of the forbidden areas of behavior, especially those concerning sex, and in his belief that reality may be apprehended by the intellect. 

In a particularly interesting passage, Bakan made an extended comparison of Freud’s presentation of the “dream of Irma’s injection” with the techniques used in the “Zohar.” He also relied heavily on a 1933  Velikovsky article, which traced the seeds of psychoanalytic dream interpretation to very early Jewish texts.

One of the major planks in Bakan’s construction was his interpretation of Freud’s final book, “Moses and Monotheism.” In Velikovsky’s words its theses were “that Moses was an Egyptian prince, a pupil of Akhnaton; that Akhnaton was the founder of montheistic idealism; that when Akhnaton ceased to rule and his schism fell into disfavor, Moses preserved his teachings by bringing them to the slaves, with whom he left Egypt.” Thus its entire purpose was to deprive Jews of Judaism itself. According to Bakan, it was a Kabbalistic work, fearfully written with deliberate obscurity as a book with a double content. “It is, by any of the usual criteria used to evaluate books, incredibly bad. Some of the followers of Freud have tended to dismiss it; and, by some, it is regarded as the product of senility…. If this book had not come from the hand of Sigmund Freud, one would seriously doubt whether it would ever have seen the light of day.” Nevertheless, the book “expresses some of his deepest impulses, impulses which were operative throughout his life. The book is the only one written by Freud which directs itself avowedly to the problem of Judaism and the meaning of being Jewish.”

In an anonymous article, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” written many years earlier, Freud had symbolically transformed the prophet into a gentile by being the subject of a papal funerary statue. This urge was carried to its ultimate expression a quarter century later, in what would in effect be his last will and testament. In Bakan’s analysis, both Zevi and Frank became gentiles; thus, the  “ultimate fulfillment of the theme of Sabbatianism is to have Moses, the most profound Messianic figure of Judaism and the image of all other Messiahs, already be Gentile…. By converting Moses into a Gentile, Freud committed his psychological act of apostasy.”

Bakan shrank from stating baldly that Freud was a secret adept of some esoteric sect. “An image of him poring over Kabbalistic books in the dead of night is not supported by the facts; although to have done this would not have been inconsistent with the patterns of the Jewish mystical leaders.” But Bakan’s contention that Freud may have been motivated by some deep-seated knowledge of Kabbalistic lore, even if that knowledge were second-hand, leads us back to Velikovsky’s efforts to unravel Freud’s psyche.

Many years after “The Dreams Freud Dreamed,” Velikovsky recalled that the catalyst for his own reinterpretation of Jewish (and other) texts as accounts of planetary cataclysmic disruption was in fact “Moses and Monotheism”:

“I disagreed with Freud and saw in the octogenarian a still-unresolved conflict with respect to his Jewish origin and his own father. I turned to his dreams to know  more about him than his books could tell. I found that his own dreams … spoke a language that was very clear but had meaning which Freud did not comprehend — or did not reveal to his readers. All the dreams dealt with the problem of his Jewish origin, the tragic fate of his people, his deliberations on leaving the ranks of the persecuted for the sake of unhampered advancement — or at least in order to free his children from the fate of under-privileged Jews in Christian and anti-Semitic Vienna.”

Although the dream symbolism may have had a Catholic origin because of the local social pressure to convert to that particular faith, the essential struggle was whether or not to become a gentile. The most famous, or infamous, example of becoming a gentile for opportunistic reasons was, of course, Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion, a drama that was of immense importance to Jewish culture. Zevi was widely condemned as a sort of bogey man. (For example, Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, was often called “a new Sabbatai Levi” by his anti-Zionist opponents.) Zevi, of course, achieved his unsavory reputation by publicly donning the coat that “was covered all over with Turkish enbroideries.”

Furthermore, on the basis of the manifest content of the dream, the conflict that Velikovsky described may have been a recurring, familial, one. After all, the father would have grown up in a Hasidistic town at the very time the Jewish Enlightenment was gaining ground. The stranger in the dream (the father, in Velikovsky’s analysis) at first insists that the Turkish coat belongs to him and then rather belligerently wants to know how the Turkish designs concern the dream-Freud. Perhaps it was those very same heretical beliefs that allowed the two, father and son, to become “quite friendly.”

If, as Bakan believed, “Moses and Monotheism” was an essentially Kabbalistic book, some  of the volumes that Velikovsky himself wrote may also be re-illuminated. Velikovsky admitted that he began researching the unfinished “Freud and His Heroes” in response to the “Moses” book; out of that research grew, inadvertantly, all of Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” and “Ages in Chaos” concepts of recurring gloabal catastrophes.

Velikovsky left his medical practice in Palestine to coduct research that would refute the central thesis of Freud’s final production. In his imaginative, painstaking reconstruction of ancient history, Velikovsky fixed the creed of Moses hundreds of years before Akhnaton’s religious innovations rather than some few years afterwards.

But in addition to being an important negative catalyst, “Moses and Monotheism” also proved to be a powerful positive influence on Velikovsky, who applied many of Freud’s conclusions and methods to his own reconstruction. A few examples may suggest the strength of Freud’s work on Velikovsky’s:

1) Imaginative use of philology. Freud made much of his identification of Aten (in Egyptian) with Adonis (in Syrian) and Adonai (in Hebrew). Velikovsky’s uses of phonetic similarity were legion; two instances will suffice: He compared the Maruts (“the terrible ones”) in the Vedas with the terrible one (“Ariz”) in the books of Joel and Isaiah and then proceeded to associate these words with the Romans’ Mars and the Greeks’ Ares; he also made an elaborate comparison between the legendary Chinese god/king Yahou, the Biblical deity Yahweh, the Mexican war god Yao, and the Roman sky god Jove, further linking the sounds of their names with various religious chants around the world.

2) Explanation of the origin of anti-Semitism. Freud suggested that other people were jealous of the Jews’ claim to be “the first-born, favourite child of God the Father;” Velikovsky went somewhat further, insisting that it was not mere jealousy — it was fear and resentment that “the great catastrophe of tribulations, destructions and paroxysms of nature … was caused for the benefit of the sons of Israel.”

3) Existence, cause, and effects of phylogenetic memory. After a period of initial resistance, the Jews eventually accepted monotheism. This is how Freud explained the phenomenon:

“Early trauma — defence — latency — outbreak of neurotic illness — partial return of the repressed. Such is the formula which we have laid down for the development of a neurosis. The reader is now invited to take the step of supposing that something occurred in the life of the human species similar to what occurs in the life of individuals: of supposing, that is, that here too events occurred … which left behind them permanent consequences but were for the most part fended off and forgotten, and which after a long latency came into effect and created  phenomena similar to symptoms on their structure and purpose.” Freud thus insisted that certain experiences are transmitted to one’s descendants. Velikovsky did not emphasize the sexual nature of those experiences but held that repeated, universal catastrophes left their memory traces, particularly in how we interpret the evidence of those catastrophes.

4) Myth as history. Freud synchronized the Homeric epics with the time in which “the return of the religion of Moses was in preparation among the Hebrews” and proposed that the early Greeks had experienced a period of prehistoric “cultural effloresence which had perished in a historical catastrophe and of which an obscure tradition survived.” Apparently he had in mind some sort of local catastrophe, perhaps of a social or economic nature. Velikovsky of course postulated a series of global destructions and correlated Ikhnaton with Oedipus.

5) Universality of historical accounts. Freud predicted that scientists would eventually be able to verify the same factors underlying the national epics of the Germans, the Finns, and other ancient peoples. He also claimed that the cause of these epics had disappeared before the arrival of Alexander the Great, who lamented that he had no Homer to immortalize his deeds. Velikovsky used historical and legendary accounts, as well as mythological motifs and other sources, to reorder the course of world history from the Exodus onwards but accepted that post-Alexandrine chronolgies were correct.

On the face of it, Velikovsky was probably even less likely than Freud to have been a “closet mystic.” However, Velikovsky’s father had been an early Russian Zionist-assimilationist. Velikovsky was apparently rather indifferent about his religious heritage but was extremely interested in and proud of his people’s cultural traditions and history. He had been the author of a very suggestive article on the Talmudists’ use of word play in dream interpretation, and he developed a very sophisticated technique for using word play in his own psychiatric practice. However, it is not my intent to suggest that he was a Kabbalist, only that he, like Freud, may have been influenced by Kabbalist thought more than he was perhaps aware.

murmuration

the delicate thrum, heartbeat through my bound chest,
my palm pressed there like a promise,
every breath stolen from me like a murmuration of living feeling seeing i’m living
in the stars like a superhero. only now.

only now does the murmuration of my heartbeat slow, the murmuration of birds slow their pace. i’ve
been taught to exist without realizing.. the gentle murmurs
of your heart have become a gift.

i didn’t realize i missed you until i stood
under the sky with the world opened up to me and i murmuredation, please come home. we are both home.

if we are both home then why do i feel lost?
when my mom told me it wasn’t a panic attack

all i wanted was you. your delicate murmuration thrumming through my bones. your comfort.
when i picture you i feel safe.
i watch birds and i feel like i’m floating away. i could
take off in search of them but i think you’d notice.

i hope so. i notice every murmuration, we are a murmuration, aren’t we? a flock of birds,
we rise, we fall, i missed you you you
it’s hard to realize i missed you until i see you

and you say you missed me and i say it back and i feel right again,
not just a stolen wish floating away to a star-ling.

Fogbound

The day we laid that cold crust of earth over your body, something in me went missing. I watched the people crying around the grave and couldn’t understand why they mourned someone they saw perhaps once a year. Then I looked at my mother. Silent, glittering in her overdressed elegance, as if she wanted you to envy her for still being alive. Perhaps it was her revenge for all those years spent chasing your approval and failing. After she divorced you, she drifted away from me too. I only wish it had happened sooner; her presence or absence never changed much.

Back home, the smell of grass and that fog-soaked cemetery settled in my mind. Objects lost themselves in that inner fog. I hunted for keys already in my pocket. In the narrow hallway between our two rooms, tasks slipped from my memory, and every cup of coffee went cold. Food tasted dull. I checked the stove, the doors, the water taps over and over. I fought life so hard that numbness wrapped itself around me. I went to bed exhausted and woke even more worn, my body nothing but bruised fatigue.

When the routine finally defeated me, the real battle began: the one inside. First came denial, the refusal to admit the weight of your absence. Then collapse. I cried, but the wound in my soul stayed hollow. And so, I began to write. The very work you never wanted for me. Not for you, who are gone and will remain gone, but for the version of you still living inside me.

I built stories about you, replayed memories. Then I realized the one inside me was not you at all. He was the father I had wanted. His face resembled yours through a softening veil of mist, but he was kind. He didn’t wait for me to fail. He didn’t frown or correct or sigh in disappointment. His small, cutting smiles were gone. I found memories that had never existed. In one, I had made a mistake, and the imagined you placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. You consoled me. Praised me. Forgave me. Touched me with a tenderness I had never known. Father.

Then, as if waking abruptly, another battle began.
The first fight was with you. I pictured your aged body in the garden, the small red trowel in your hand. I sat you across from me on a chair, just as you used to sit in silence tending your flowers. No words, no criticism, no energy for long arguments.

I asked the image of you whether you had ever loved me. I cast you as guilty, myself as righteous. Your head was bowed while I hurled my anger and sorrow at your face. Why had you never praised me, even when I was promoted in the job you had insisted, I pursue? I showed you every wound. The day you left home. My mother clutching the phone, crying as she whispered about your selfishness. Her words sank into me, the same way they had sunk into her years before. And the night someone burned all my childhood photos. I always thought it was you. But no. It was her.

I stared at the cup of cold coffee in my shaking hand. My dry mouth. My reflection glaring back at me from the porcelain. That face was terrifyingly familiar. Yours. You had lived inside me all along. Fear seized the cup and shattered it against the floor. For a moment, time perched on the broken shards. The sound cracked something in me. Shame replaced anger. I felt a sudden tenderness for the old, silent man in my memories. He wasn’t the one who had hurt me. The face that had wounded me was right there in the fragments: the knotted brows, the thin white strands at the temples, that smug, dismissive curl of the lips. It was me. I was you, and you were the small boy who kept his eyes on the ground.

When I could breathe again, the second battle began. The one with myself. Had I ever loved you? Ever understood you? Had I ever been brave enough to ask to be touched, even once?

There was only one way to find an answer. I went through the old photo albums, damp with the smell of mold. Each page a tether to the past. My ninth birthday: my mother cooking your favorite dish, not mine. I still don’t know whether she feared you or wanted to force her way into your heart. My graduation photos from the field you had chosen for me. The New Year’s pictures smiling over a buried argument.

Anger. Then grief. Then contempt. Then something softer. Until I reached thirty-five years back. The winter day I slipped on the ice. My cheeks numb, my hands cracked and burning from the cold. You lifted me up, brushed me off. I searched your eyes for disapproval. Instead, you knelt so I could climb onto your back. I still feel the warmth of your shoulders on my frozen skin. You put a bandage on my scraped palms. You told me growing up always hurts.

I framed that photo of my bandaged hand and placed it where the missing piece of me used to be. The hollow in my chest began to fill, building a fragile bridge of memories and faint smiles. I turned the pages again and looked at the child in those pictures. Why had I never seen all those small smiles before?

Father, I wish you could have freed yourself from the stern man you had chained yourself to.

Gratitude


under the bright tree

in its shadow we sip wine

listening to birdsongs 



not for the presents 

but for the muffled quiet

of fresh fallen snow



I set an extra plate 

the candlelight flickers twice

her presence or draft



grilled eel feast

the stray cat licks 

its empty bowl 



second helping 

on the plate

summer cuisine