Chapter 4

Pre-Denis Diary
The first few months here, he suffered almost a nausea concerning things Soviet and Russian, feeling superior as a Westerner.

May 3-4, 1989

My current nausea is the old syndrome of choking up due to my u self-hatred: now that I've got what 'I' wanted, I feel a reaction rejecting everything Russian - the crude, tasteless Soviet reality with its heavy, painful Stellionate features defacing the people and city, the rudeness of the sales people. The victims everywhere. Life has little gloss here.

My Freudian reflections told me to make peace with society, to make a positive resolution of the demands of the c and u. For the Wolf Man, releasing his repressed homosexual feelings led him to social involvement. This is certainly how I saw myself for the past 10 years, with the peace movement and Canada-USSR Society, but with the death of my father, things unraveled - the fear of my mother erupted and my terror of seeing life rushing past, oblivious to me, has taken hold. I'm definitely running to keep ahead of the ghosts of the past, with no dope to dull the pain, and no one close to distract me.

Maybe to make peace with myself, I have to junk my sex life. Does one have to renounce one's masculinity to be happy? Is too much (neurotic) masculinity the cause of the world's horrible problems? Is my role in life to help show the way away from neurotic masculinity?

Dream: Mother is a hairdresser, cutting my hair, which has large patches of gray.
Meaning: Say no more.

May Day Blues

Part of the May Day TV programming was a performance of Erdman's black comedy from the 20s, The Suicide, currently in the repertoire of the Soviet Army and the Satire Theaters. It makes a desperate plea for keeping a crack open in the growing monolith of state socialism. I watched it with a group of MGU students in their dorm.

The unemployed hero threatens to commit suicide, and all the dispossessed flock around him, trying to convince him to sacrifice his life for their cause: an intellectual for the intelligentsia, various ladies for their love, a priest for the church, and a Russian aristocrat for Russia. He refuses in the end, asserting the sacredness of each human (especially himself), and asks only that we be allowed to whisper to each other that life is hard, to make life less hard.

An odd way to celebrate the day of international solidarity of the working class. In fact, it is a rejection of class morality, an assertion of human values above class values, an idea now solidly behind the spiritual reformation that is taking hold of Soviet society, even supported by quotes from early Lenin ("From the viewpoint of the basic ideas of Marxism, the interests of society are higher than those of the working class." v4, p220).

Suddenly, charity and religion are OK. It's as if the party is admitting defeat - that it has created a moral vacuum that needs filling before nationalism tears the country apart. "Marxism-Leninism is the religion," said Sasha. "The problem is, there aren't any believers anymore," he added with a smile and without a trace of malice. But you can't order a patient to get well. Either you allow moral regeneration or you don't.

Erdman pokes fun at Marxism to great effect. One character describes how he can control his passion for a pretty girl on the street. "I just look at her from a Marxist point of view. That makes everything its opposite." The students roared along with the television audience, which clapped loudly in support. Of course, Erdman soon disappeared into the growing Gulag.

We listened to the Soviet Greenpeace rock album recently issued here to support the creation of a local GP (the ideological struggle is up for grabs now), and some country-and-western style musical clips on TV - catharsis for the dark Russian (Soviet?) soul. In spite of the mix of ennui and foreboding hanging over this official celebration, there was a sense of relief. Being able to say that life is hard does seem to make it a little less hard. As for the future, no one wanted to gaze too deeply into the crystal ball.

May 20, 1989

The work ethic must be very strong in me - what can account for the terror I feel during my weeks off? Getting up is like a reverse resurrection - entering a living death from a lively world of dreams full of emotion [my ego dying, the id taking control?] I've always been secretly attracted to the view that conscious life (waking hours) are merely to nourish the unconscious (sleep). The simple equations - conscious = awake, unconscious = sleep - are not completely true, but the unconscious at least has more control when you're asleep, and feelings seem more natural, uncensored, though if you believe Freud, there are the dream tricks of inflation and repression often obscuring the real intent of the dreams. The water is muddy, but rich in plankton.

Back to the weeks off. Work is the only pacifier now, making me feel significant, wanted. It must be the fear of death - in a sense I'm dead when I'm not in the office being productive. No one needs me here in my room, especially here in Moscow. I'm a parasite in an alien society. At home in Canada, being a parasite was not so bad - dope was a great pacifier and time-filler. If the terror arose, dope always soothed it, but like any mother substitute, it saps your strength in the process of comforting you, and dependence on it reinforces society's condemnation of you as a parasite.

I've come very close to deciding to throw in the towel and try to return to mother or to the comfortable if boring womb of the library. The former would mean spiritual death. The latter means a return to dope and my rut, I'm sure, which I don't think I can do now. Coming here was the ultimate act of patricide. Just as the child must repeat the forbidden action (support for the SU) once to give him the illusion that he quit of his own accord, I have to bury my father myself, which the others (unconsciously?) refused to let me do, paying for the funeral themselves and taking care of mother in the aftermath of his death, as if I didn't exist (which was not far from the truth, working part-time, being stoned a lot of the rest of the time, trying to avoid them, and finally, in a state of collapse after dad died).

And what I do here is in no way a gift to him (having his child). The situation I have put myself in confronts me with the fundamental meaninglessness of life and conscious activity. My angst is raw, gut existential, and while the subtitles I translate for Russian existential films are cathartic, they're also very depressing and rub my nose in the false consciousness about the SU which I managed to maintain in the face of monstrous evidence. Again, just as the child will crawl back to his tormentor-parental love object. Crawling back to mother would put the finishing touch on this whole upheaval.

Do most people never break the umbilical cord? Do they do it more smoothly, or does it shrivel of its own accord? Is it wrong to break it, or does it depend on how poisonous the exchange of energy is through it? So many seemingly firm views of mine are dropping away like scales. I can't denounce the bourgeois family anymore as evil in itself - I know I envy happy families for their security, love, and mutual support. There certainly is not so much terror there, though there are lots of unhappy unions, and many people suffer marriage breakdowns that leave them without support. My own journey is a variation on this theme of personal breakdown.

Cutting the cord is an act of revolution. Destructive without replacing it with anything else. The immediate danger is unconsciously trying to replace it with another cord - the neurotic's way. Reliving the past trauma unconsciously, and regressing. My intellectual and political wanderlust has suffered from this unconscious pattern - searching for approval of parents even in the act of rebelling against them. Thus my angry phone conversation after a trip to the Grindstone peace camp. There was an unwritten rule to phone Sunday evening to speak with my parents which I less and less willingly followed. Mother phoned and immediately launched into an editorial on settling down. I became quite angry, subconsciously knowing I was breaking their code of behaviour and yet secretly wanting their approval for this peace work.

I have felt close to breaking down, and have visualized myself living in a childish spiritual dependence on mother, not having any independent existence outside the family - the '1 in 10' schizophrenic of the subway ads (just as Carole is the '1 in 3' failed marriage), though the '1 in 10' is really '2 in 10' by definition. Suicide definitely becomes an alternative to this morbid scenario. But then, life is too interesting (or possibly so as long as I have friends somewhere), so the upshot seems to be the trite 'There's no way back - only forward'. But maybe this is too egocentric. Maybe I need the humility to admit defeat and return consciously along the long and tortuous path that brought me to the abyss that I feel I'm falling into here. I have been torturing myself with translating the subtitles for Chingiz Aitmatov's "Sandstorm", which portrays the Stalinist leader as just such a maniac, leading his people along the one-way path to oblivion, too proud and self-centered to admit his tragic mistake. My dreams of mother recognize the need to make peace (sic) with my past. Whether or not I have a sex life is perhaps becoming less important than whether or not I'm happy, or rather at peace with myself. Bringing peace to the world is not too likely if I am imploding from hate. The road must return to its source, completing the circle.

Will I someday be able to wake up and get up on my days off without that knot of terror in the pit of my stomach? This morning was wonderful, talking with Sergei, a casual MGU acquaintance who I invited to stay the night to fill the void for a few hours. This diary entry is the result.

May 24, 1989

The changes here and in China signal the emptiness of the institution of the state when it is compromised by totalitarianism and cynicism. The Russian and Chinese revolutions took what lurks in the back of western institutions to its logical or perhaps illogical conclusion. As a result, people in both countries seem to have lost all faith in their established states. The empty pomp of the mighty state has become the emperor's new clothes. This leaves a serious moral vacuum since religion and the tradition of the feudal emperor/tsar have been destroyed. The cries for democracy and the adopting of western appearances are filling the void spontaneously, as are ecological and religious movements, and 'nonformal' countercultural currents. The family of course has proved to be a resilient element in culture, and will no doubt continue to shape morals. Stalin and Mao made their nations pass through the same hoops, though at different heights and for different lengths of time, and left them with the same anger and apathy. It's not even a question of economic systems anymore, but of politics and culture.

Meeting with some Canadian peace tourists who dropped in to MN over the last 2 days provided many moments of deja vu. The vague fascination with the exotic enemy, the basking in the unsolicited attention of sometimes charming street hawkers outside their hotel. The tough and sharp Jewish-mother group leader with her prematurely wrinkled face who told Armenians suffering emotionally after the recent earthquake to "go to the hills and howl" and who said a local hands-on healer there made her wrinkles disappear, though the effect lasted only a few days. Her plastic Waspy peacenik side-kick. They made up a good cop - bad cop duo, and were fed up with 3 weeks of Soviet bureaucracy and full of 'peace'. On their way back to the cozy safety of families in Canada, or their lonely but familiar (ie, familial) routines. Me at that age. Ouch! Now I stay behind, wade back into the looking-glass human stream, a fish out of water, but somehow still breathing.
***
It occurred to me that the lack of services here - the endless 'sanitary days', 'repairs', lunch hours anywhere from 12:00 - 3:00, etc., reflects the lack of quality on all levels of life - poor wages, rampant deficits of the most ordinary goods (batteries and salt, the latest). Any service at all is like the granting of a favour.

I saw 2 rather mediocre films this evening for which I have agreed to write subtitles - The Gypsy Aza, and Goodbye My Street Gang. The former's hero defected from gypsy life to try to be a peasant, but was rejected, causing everyone great distress, and was eventually buried alive by his stepmother. The latter's hero is marked from childhood as the son of an 'enemy of the people', and has a smothering mother. Ironically, the trendy retro film was even more of a potboiler than the former, providing less catharsis, and I can hear the snickers now when people see the goofy father return from the camps, apparently none the worse for wear. At least the gypsy had the decency to let himself be buried in the well he was digging, presumably to atone for his sins.

May 25, 1989

The hungry search for soulmates. A review of a book by Philip Larkin, a bachelor librarian, in the International Herald Tribune (IHT). In "Church Going" a wayward cyclist stops at a church:

Once I an sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

His loneliness, fear and inability to make sensual connection makes him a soulmate, if an existential one, for me. The enforced community of the family and all earlier societies has been undermined by capitalism and 'socialism'. Many still cling to it; some of us are not able to. Coming here forces me to confront this truth about myself, though I probably wanted to smother it by basking in my superficial appeal to West-starved Soviets. Or is there a forced existential maturity that I'm hoping to tap here? If we really are alone in essence, then religion and God take their ultimate, though charitable, revenge.

Everything I read or do, everyone I meet I measure against 'my predicament', and in fact find lots of parallels. Articles about DH Lawrence's The Rainbow, now a picture by Ken Russell (girl leaves the bleak local life of a teacher, experiments with sex, leaves to be an independent feminist), TE Lawrence's self-imposed ascetic exile, reminiscences of a mountain-climber (Feeding the Rat by A Alvarez) about those who feel compelled to abandon their horizontal comforts for vertical 'no-return' perils. I've intuitively felt that the SU is like a 'last frontier', though at the same time a kind of escape. The question remains though, is it a dead-end?

Perhaps the strongest parallels, I tend to 'overlook', i.e., suppress. Last night, I had a graphic dream that I was translating the same article as a decrepit, almost toothless alcoholic, Nicolai Ivanovich, who is notorious for doing terrible translations after working hours while tippling away at some cognac. He's a walking wreck though clearly intelligent, devouring English mysteries, sci fi, and especially soft porn which I bring from the Canadian Embassy library. After he told me his tastes, I can't help but see him masturbating to a particularly juicy passage in one of the cheap paperbacks.

In fact, he is another casualty of the Soviet tragedy. The son of diplomats, he learned English as a child in Japan, but ended up falling between the cracks during Stalin's many campaigns of terror. He refuses to tell all the horrific details, though it seems his parents were killed and he spent ruinous years in the Gulag, all for no apparent reason. I seemed to be taking his place in the dream, and we argued about the word 'joinage', a word he used and which I insisted doesn't exist. Everyone took offence at my effrontery, but the other stylist and the dictionary supported me. Still, I felt burdened by their distrust. So is N.I. a vision of a future me, another wasted intellectual? When I woke up from the dream, I remembered it but figured it wasn't particularly interesting, just a re-enactment of the regular office nit-picking and backbiting. It only occurred to me as significant as I write this diary entry.

Reading Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report, I am comforted by the accidents, deaths, and tragedies, and inspired and worried by people's discoveries. What can I contribute, as long as I escape the tragedy of unexpected death?

Reading in Moscow an article about how unimportant ads are in determining consumer behaviour makes me think of how unimportant, even negative, propaganda here is in determining people's attitude towards the government. The negative criticism of Yeltsin in the press before the election merely increased his support and confirmed people's belief that he is someone to be trusted. Advertisers now acknowledge that emotional manipulation is more important than straightforward rational arguments or gimmicks, and that ads act more like cheerleaders, urging existing supporters on to even more happy consuming experiences. Soviet obtuseness with regard to people's psychology dooms their propaganda efforts to play a reverse role if any. Now the system seems to be hovering on the brink of no return. The refusal of the new congress to suspend the recent draconian law against unsanctioned meetings and demos, and the refusal to allow even a token candidate to run against Gorbachev for president shows the latent fear that loosening control in any meaningful way will lead to the deluge. All the advertising in the world will not save the system, though it's hard to imagine a peaceful transition to something more rational and just. The place is just too big, the black market and unofficial economy too complex and powerful, the maze of privileges too extensive, to envision a dismantling and restructuring without a massive and unpredictable upheaval. No doubt inflation and democracy will serve as weapons or surgical instruments in the process.

May 28, 1989

The ice is really cracking with this thaw. The obvious timidity of the Congress voting has radicalized the people - today's 'meeting' at Luzhniki will no doubt be a watershed. Parties are sprouting up. The Democratic Union has been the organizer of the main demos so far (Th and Fri in Pushkin Square, last night in Luzhniki). The Russian National Front and Moscow National Front have representatives speaking, and now the Russian Socialist Party. The 'Moscow fraction' was criticized at the Congress for being too radical and Yeltsin was not elected. Political currents are swirling uncontrolled.

June 3,1989

A phone call from home. My alter ego and fellow neurotic lefty Eric finally broke 4+ months of silence. It was like being transported back to TO for 5 minutes instead of spinning fantasies of home around in my head in a mental masturbation with no release. Such a relief to feel a part of someone else's life, to know that you're not just an isolated atom moving aimlessly in a void, occasionally bumping into other atoms at random. It's a long road still to my return. There's no point in going back if there's no meaning in return.

I was just finishing the subtitles of The Gypsy Aza when Eric phoned, and after his call, I sat down to translate the scene where the hero returns to the tribal mother from his failed life as a peasant. "I've returned, mama. Forgive me, mama." "You have come back to me," she answers. Is that my journey - back to mother's 'all-forgiving womb', to be buried alive? I dreamed not long ago that I was looking at a beautiful woman's cunt which opened like a mouth, black inside. All the time, mother was standing beside me, rigid and with a tense smile. The feeling was horrible - I wanted her to leave but she wouldn't. Will I ever leave poor Oedipus behind? The errant gypsy is buried alive in the well he is digging to atone for his sins. Human experience, at least in art, does not have a very cheery prognosis here.
***
Freud is great - penetrating and ruthlessly honest. My neurosis has firm roots in childhood sexuality. I have been running away from repressed feelings and experiences ever since.

Still, while re-reading and enjoying the Freud case studies, I was plagued by a tiny voice saying "So what?" Analyse your childhood and dreams all you like, it won't help you get up in the morning. After his 'cure', the Wolfman lived out a very modest existence, minus his nightmares. The 'tolerably unhappy compromise' which Freud promised them was just that. No really "hepi end" as they say in Russian.

Zhenia, a basketball-runner jock I met by chance at MGU, teaches psychology at MGU and recently translated some of Frankl's existential psychoanalytic writings for publication in Russian. He lent me his precious copy. My loss of faith in the bright Future, my general apathy (saved only by guilt?, work ethic?, survival instinct?), Frankl hits on with deadly accuracy. I'm not alone! It's not a question of 'wanting to be happy' but of 'wanting to be worthy of happiness'. And it just may be that today's society is meaningless, even if I reached this conclusion neurotically. Sick=/wrong, Healthy=/right. Whew!

The little voice discounting Freud is silent, at least for the moment. Furthermore it seems that my sexual neurosis is running its course, and has had the positive outcome of undermining my collective neurosis as Frankl puts it, bringing me to an existential neurosis, i.e., 'What is the meaning of (my) life?' Terribly banal, but real and truly human.

For several weeks now, I've been procrastinating putting down my reflections about my unfinished magnum opus on the psychology and politics of the Soviet threat, which I laboured over during my final years at YorkU. Zhenia wants me to give his psych students an English lesson cum seminar, so I thought 'what better topic than the Frankfurt Institute's and fellow travelers' studies of the authoritarian personality which is the basis for my study of the Soviet threat and at the same time is a critique of Soviet society.

I was rather relieved. Incipient in it is a critique of my own authoritarian characteristics (the psychology of the group, the need for an enemy (in my case, my own society) as an archetype. My analysis of Russia itself is childish. My belief that Lenin's planned revolution marked a turning point similar to Freud's psychoanalysis, allowing the unconscious to be made conscious and controlled rationally, seems to be height of folly in retrospect. But then greater minds (including Lenin's and Freud's, not to mention Lukacs's) have suffered this tragic error. Clearly both Lenin and Freud were reductionsists. At least Freud offered only accommodation with a flawed reality. Since then, I can say I've moved on to the extent that I can see that there's much more to life than politics and sex. In particular, meaning and spirituality.

Both politics and sex here have been so primitve up to now. Even the Congress seems pitiful - a lumbering, groaning giant. The sex I've experienced here at the baths and back in Tashkent in 1979 is crude and one-sided. This fits in with my perennial inability to connect for long, politically or sexually, which has its roots in my sexual neurosis. Having tried to be a sexual and political militant and failed, I must not fall into apathy, but push on to find meaning.

What strikes me in my former searchings? The Institutes's critique of the Enlightenment, and their synthesis of Marx and Freud are the ideas which are still percolating within me.

The consolidation of a rigid patriarchy, the dominance of the production principle, and the 'separation of word and deed' as Glen Gould puts it (which I interpret as value and use value) are at the roots of my (and society's) neurosis. The authoritarian personality is the natural outcome of the Enlightenment. The 'fatherless sons' syndrome of the interwar period consolidates the weakening of the father's role in raising the child at the same time as the child is being raised in a patriarchal setting. The state and commodity fetishism takes his place.

Marcuse's Eros and Thanatos, I reacted to as a justification of my own increasing lethargy and sexual hang-ups. Maybe I'm giving him short shrift, but I think he's a reductionist a la Freud. Is his meaning 'peace' (ie, polymorphous perverse lethargy)? As for surplus repression and repressive desublimation, I agree. Western culture thrives on screen violence and sex to make up for the emptiness and boredom of everyday life. The poorly resolved Oedipal complex of the fatherless sons contributes to the authoritarian personality underlying society.

As for my fetish with the value/ use value distinction (to the disadvantage of value), that was naive. The state plan takes the place of value as a fetish, and a much less efficient one. The production principle is alive and well (i.e., sick) in the SU.

My claim that Soviet society is less one-dimensional than the West, I think is true. The state never was able to defuse its critics; thus the mass terror and the post-Stalin dissidents. Interestingly, these dissidents are for the time being absorbed by Gorbachev's glasnost. I have the suspicion that this won't follow the smooth repressive desublimation of capitalism. The pressure for a legal opposition party will no doubt keep another 'dimension' alive.

Overcoming the gap between private and public (including group) morality, dismantling the nation state, and greater sexual freedom seem to be my rather vague praxes. Fornari's psychoanalytic study of war still reads well - the collective psychotic anxieties resulting from Oedipal repression require some kind of focus - the mobilization of the death instinct in the service of Eros, in the words of Marcuse. The threat of total destruction is like Melanie Klein's 'depressive position' - we must reactivate our guilt as we regress to our oral destructive stage. Groups must find love relations of the type which occur between individuals. So we have the nuclear threat vs the peace and environmental movements. A return to tribal symbolic interactions to defuse subconscious complexes (potlatch, token killings, 'narcissism of small difference'). These possibilities open up as the Soviet threat defuses and Soviet society opens up.

Nicaragua, and of course Cuba, have been constant reinforcements of my belief in the positive role of revolution. I still see the positive side of both revolutions, although the negative side is much clearer to me now. I.e., the promise of a better society for everyone without the means and cultural level to attain that. The manipulation of a collective neurosis among the people to justify the regime, as opposed to encouraging people to seek out meaning themselves, and to use the market and social welfare policies to facilitate this.

Marx's 'behind the backs of the producers' is to social science, what Freud's conscious/ unconscious is to man. This I'll swear by even if it is reductionist.

Moscow Ghosts

At times I've had an acid-flash that I'm in a gigantic film set for 1984. I feel a shiver going down my spine when I walk through an outsized Roman archway in a Stalinoid palace. It's as if the cool draft sweeping through the passageway is the spirit of some previous resident, years ago sucked into the mindless pit of the revolution turned upon itself. Moscow's prison-tower-like 7 sisters take on an eeriness surrounded by snaking lines for milk or booze, with the queuers' gray, worried complexions set off by garish posters in harsh red, black and white, exhorting them to believe, work or struggle for peace. May Day witnessed tired monster Lenins hung from office towers, and official anti-bureaucratic slogans complete with spider webs.

My own ghosts are brought to life here as well. The suffering smothering mother is everywhere. My next-door neighbour, Zhenia, introduced himself with "Hi, I'm a drunk." "Yes," I said politely, "but what is your name?" Kicked out by his wife, he lives with his morose, ugly mother, my immediate neighbour. I've given up phoning my old friend Vitalik since his mother invariably answers and says he's too drunk to come to the phone. My friend Denis is also terrorized by Svetlana, his attractive and aggressive mother who pesters him with calls when he visits me. Once she phoned just after he lit up a forbidden cigarette, touching the remote-control guilt button. A maudlin play popular now in Moscow, Intergirls, is the story of a Russian nurse who lands a Swede, Edik, and emigrates. Her only real love is for her (guess who?) mother, and they die, separated and in despair.

The suffering mother, of course, keeps her flock from maturing. The sudden passion that you can be swamped by when you befriend a Soviet, the lure of the inaccessible foreigner, is a neurosis forced on them by their maternal state. A Soviet is a classic puer eterna, an unresolved Oedipal citizen, obedient in public and privately rebelling, longing guiltily for the forbidden West. All a bit like me not rebelling against my God-like parent imagos in order to develop an independent superego, resulting in my immature self-hate and guilty desire for forbidden love.

June 9, 1989

Ira Gaidarova, the office 'bull in a china shop' is a rather pathetic, garrulous translator, bow-legged and overly made-up with cheap Soviet lipstick. Her father was a professional actor, and she inherited the declamatory style, though she looks more like a clown than an actor. She put her finger on my own personal dilemma, quite unwittingly. She let loose about N.I., the office lush, to Suzanna and myself, complaining about his terrible translations. "It's all the same to him. He doesn't care about anything - his wife, granddaughter, or where he lives, his work... What he cares about is a bottle and some drinks everyday."

He's an extreme, though not unusual, product of this society. The lack of care here, the uncut grass, the slipshod work activity, the unpackaged, roughly handled food, were things that appealed to me originally. I liked the lack of pretense, the excess wrapping, the psychological manipulation. However, they subconsciously were appealing to my own lack of self-respect. It's not that people are freer of materialist concerns (it may well be the contrary). It's that there is a general disdain for anything that is not personal and intimate. The public/ private dichotomy reaches its apogee here.

It's interesting that MN lies slightly outside this dilemma, though not far. Founded in 1930 as a daily by Anna Louise Strong with the participation of quite a few foreigners, people worked in it with great enthusiasm and ignored the hardships. The enthusiasm dried up as Stalin's poison permeated even MN's walls, purging many of its workers, including some from abroad. It was reduced to a weekly by the late '30s and finally ceased publication in 1949 when Strong was expelled as a spy. Its editor in chief was executed in 1951. After a 5-year hiatus, it reopened, and even reprinted Solzhenytsin's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich before the relapse into Brezhnev's comfortable rule of stagnation, as the period is now called. The quality of journalism and translation is not great, but at least some of the translators tell me they came here because of the honesty and courage of the paper, and find their work fulfilling. Even N.I. can rise to the occasion if the subject matter condemns the hypocrisy of the past. Ironically, in light of my neurotic attraction to the SU, I came here only after the paper became relatively honest.

For whatever reason, I became obsessed by the market as the source of all evil - uniting Hegel, Marx, and Freud into a dialectic idol with magic (evil) power. Chalk that up to my studies at YorkU with Sekini, with his Asian-inscrutable dialectic of capital. I managed to box myself into a corner on that one, as there seems to be no alternative to the market that works for industrial society. Time for a commune?

Dreams April/ May 1989
3/4/89 In restaurant alone. Waitress gives me French bread and Camembert cheese. Holding tiny baby in palm. It pulls at my face.
Meaning: Eating alone - loss of family; bread - life experience; tiny baby - new life; pulling - trying to uncover u

5/4/89 Paul B phones. I think it's him but he won't tell. I say to phone back, that I have to clean up shit. At 113E dumping watermelon rinds in garbage. I wanted to take them to Estonia but scared by guards. New minister comes. Walks past to backyard (I greet him) where his son is working. Minister starts to chew out son for letting Benjie, a truant, into backyard. Son says he is paying for lock on door and was trying to help Benjie while B's older brother was away. I go into backrm where mother and dad and Sharon sleep (mother on floor with pink blanket) to check Russian TV guide. I tell them about minister though say I shouldn't (I think mother will tell).
Meaning: PB is my m mother figure and I must deal with shame, aggression, sex (shit), which begins at 113E. I'm afraid my c/ superego (guards) will repress this process. The new minister must represent spiritual awakening delving into my u (backyard) where there's a bad boy (repressed shadow). The minister's son defends him and explains he is acting as mentor. Mother, dad and Sharon are buried in my u unaware. I wake them with my Russian trip and tell them of my change, though I know mother will betray me (not accept me?).
113E and Xmas dominated my dreams during this period:
-Pissing long time with half-erection at 113E in front of Phil Roslin. He flushes.
-Dumping watermelon rinds at 113E
-Bob/Fred come to 113E. Happy for me. "Start of new life". Ask fellow where I can get student card. Complicated directions. I ask "Is it the Church of Mary Mind Your Own Business?"
-Explain to Orma that going from E to W is easier. Mother there but I ignore. She has Xmas present for me.
-Remember seeing play of White Xmas of 1968 with Alec Adam. Song "I've Got Rhythm". Cry.
-In Meadowcroft-like apt. Got Xmas tree and decorated. Mother comes. I close door but no latch and she comes in. Move tree to corridor for other old folks.
-Xmas trip on fast houseboat to Florida with LarryL and friends. Georgian bread. Accident.
-Preparing early Xmas gathering. Need scythe to cut grass because many will come, including Sinclairs and Walbergs. Danielle wants to play. I'm too busy and say it's cold. Jewish and Christian religious statues "Sacrifice of Lamb". Jews greater sacrifice.
-Back to family for Xmas. Dinner with Jim. Asks for list of difficult words. Said tried to phone. "Since on my own, try not to stay home alone." Reluctantly offers me ride home. I say better ignore mother. Phone call from Carole and mother. Tell of co-ops and economic mess.
-Talking with mother in kitchen at 113E. She says I was to go to Los Angeles to study math and 1 wk in Jamaica. Steve Miller at military college. I tell her math and piano make me want to vomit. I have to fall in love. Sad not to go to Jamaica. I loved Steve Miller. Carlos comes to visit...
-Home for Xmas... Take mother to Massey Hall for Mendelssohn Choir concert and rehearsal in bowels of MH. Grab wrong purple-gloved hand to help her over chairs. Help young girl, but realize must help mother. Girl falls and I help mother over to her seat. There's dirt near my seat which I had only partly swept up...
-Xmas. STL staff party at Hart House men's locker room. Can't find lock. Forgot bathing suit. Can't find locker. Running because 5:55. Too late.
-go to 113E to change for dentist. Strip and put on underwear that's too tight. Rip it. Still not fit. Paul S there.
-For solidarity, Xmas more private, intimate, and other days took on religious significance because of communist marshall law.
Meaning: Our ritual celebrations, especially Xmas, are buried deep in us, and now that the tight social organisation of traditional society has been lost, dreams take on the role of guiding the individual in his attempts to reconcile his instincts and emotions with the social fabric. These recurring themes of Xmas and mother, almost always at my childhood home 113E, after 3 months of isolation from my social roots shows their importance to me, my longing for the comfort of being cared for and loved, and no doubt shows that they failed to do this as time went on and left me scarred and alone. The fact that they lessened in urgency later suggests that there is at least some healing going on.

9/4/89 "Stop or I'll shoot" in play "For tis not the body alone that walks but the mind thinking itself which reveals and in so doing dies."
Meaning: I presume the "stop..." is my line in the play, or my c or u. The play suggests my intellectual path and its conclusion that once the meaning of life is attained, you reach Nirvana and cease to exist.

29/4/96 ...Pichugin given photocopies of Red Cross Star material aid to Russia and his/my outline of book. I'll take and write book: Aid to Russia and the purges. Go through purse (before they arrive). Take out pics of travel to take with me. I'm in one with beard. Miss bus. Can drive if necessary. Most are women. Earlier 5 kittens climbing all over me.
Meaning: There's still a book in me, though not the Aid to Russia book I had originally in mind (repressing the horrible truth underlying Russia at the time). The purse suggests I'm furtively getting sex while I can, as does the beard. I can't count on outside help (bus) but can drive. The women are my anima which I must take back, the kittens are me as a child, 5 suggesting man (appendages) and wholeness, 2 (mf) + 3 (spirit).

17/5/89 Traveling. Stop at lakeside. A boat taxi pulls up. Family gets in and I'm with them. Ask for a boat ride. I say I'll pay. Father says OK but boat sinks. I swim back with copy of Shakespeare which I'm memorizing "Beauty lies so deep upon her brow". PB stops for a while but disappears. I must hurry back to town for his class. It's lunch time. Look for bus stop. Counting cigs I've had (6?). Should I have another?
Meaning: Looking for my destiny, I stop at the edge of u. The taxi suggests collective u or that I'm not in control, but surrender to the u and my family history. Sinking means entering the realm of u but here this would be fatal. I cling to art. Beauty here is incongruously both deep and superficial, and on HER BROW - my anima and intellect. I look for another collective ride (I seldom drive). Cigarettes being phallic and SIX implying bisexuality (m/f triangles together) and creation.