Past Life (Regression)

OK, so, having stumbled upon this page, I bet you are wondering what I am going to write. Well, I guess I will begin by demanding your full attention; very much the way that Italo Calvino did in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Turn off the TV set. Do you hear me?

TURN OFF THE TV. Turn off the radio, sit down and begin to read. If someone calls you, say, 'I am trying to read the new, important, past life regression writings of Bert Gold, please leave me alone until I am done,' If they say, what, what are you doing, then answer "I am trying to understand my past, I mean his past, I mean... I don't know what I mean, just leave me alone...." Then go back to reading.

OK, is the room all quiet now? That is, except for the noise of the heating or air conditioning, or the noise of birds chirping out in the garden, and cars whizzing by several blocks away? Now, now you are ready to read, and now I can begin.

I don't remember as much as my friends think I do about the house that I began my conscious life in. I remember, vaguely, as if in a dream, crawling through the fireplace into the living room (from the kitchen), and I have some memory of watching through the big panes of picture window the Hurricane of 1958, and then very dimly, the fire that took our first washing machine; me yelling 'smoke' in the kitchen, to my mother in the bedroom, only it came out '...moke'; and watching the neighborhood women mopping our floor after the volunteer firemen used all their efforts to put out the washing machine fire. I remember the house burning across the street, next to Lani's; where the children died, and I remember someone choking -- and the volunteers trying everything to save him/her to no avail. So, I don't remember everything in the first six years of my life: But, I remember a lot!

Maybe that is my curse; that I can still recall the dancing in the street at the corner on Saturday or Sunday mornings, with Karen Delucie, my sweetheart when I was three, pulling her pajama bottoms down as a flaunt against her parents, our neighborhood: a viva to our independence! Or, experimenting by playing 'Indian Princess' with Sarah Langer in her bedroom (this was when I was about 5); remembering how good it felt to get her leotard off. I still hear the echoes of Sarah's chemist-father's high hoarse voice: 'He must leave...', he said, when he discovered us in flagrante delicto. And, yet, now, 45 years later, I still shudder to think of his opprobrium.

One of my teachers in college, William Gass, points out that what motivates us to read, or did at least for the readers of novels, is the divulging of secrets. Remembering that the playwright, Steven Sater, is a friend and a fellow traveler with me so far as writing is concerned, and that he might someday stumble on these pages, reminds me that the divulging of secrets is what writing is all about. And, on these pages you will read many secrets divulged. My reward is that my actions may liberate you to divulge your own.

Now, Freud had a different idea about divulging secrets: He thought at first that these were the keys to our unconscious and that by communicating them, at least to our impartial analyst, we would be free. Later, Freud disavowed this earlier idea, realizing that secrets were what provided some barrier between ourselves, our ego, and our id. Without secrets, the margins of the conscious world blur. And, so I will keep some secrets to myself: Allowing to pass here only those that would not or minimally offend others (sorry Sarah); and yet give enough away so that my readers will be inspired to carry out their own self-plunder.

Some might suggest that this is a blog. But, it is not. It is the beginning of a book. An autobiography that I am not yet consequential enough, nor refelective enough. to write.

When I was six years old, a little more than half-way through an awful first-grade experience with Mrs. Taylor at Abbey Lane School, my family moved from Levittown to Hollis, Queens. It was there that I first met Mrs. O'Rourke, Mark Keller, Jody Blanke, Peter Michaelson, and Joan Schneier and the forces that would shape me for many years to come.