Saturday, October 15, 2016

THE OLD TESTICLE: A Mini-Bible

                  by  Helen Borel

     (written in 15 minutes in 2015)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, THE VOID, appeared a male entity. (Later on they called him God, so then you could only refer to him as HIM.)  So Him created the heavens and the earth and complimented HimSelf that It was good and Him was Great; in fact, Him turned out to be THE PRIME MOVER UNMOVED.
The Old Testicle feature

Anyway, Him did all that (yes, all that) in just 6 days because it was Shabas on the 7th day and even Him
got fatigued.  So Him rested on Saturday.  But Him didn't go to shul at that time, a Gazillion years ago, because there were no synagogues then, in fact there was NO ONE GOD...like HIM...before then.

Someway or another, HIM fashioned darkness, the night, out of THE VOID.  And also HIM squeezed light onto the earth from the heavens (to which no human 
is privy...until, of course, we die...then a select some are allowed in).

Next thing you know, there's these two naked beings in what we'd nowadays call "paradise"
(or a "nudist camp") living it up by the names Adam and Eve (which nowadays is a brand of
Apple Juice).  They never minded their nudity because "awareness" awaited their meeting
with a sly, slithery type...a Serpent.  

(Me?  I always thought the serpent meant a penis, symbolically, you know.)  All that Edenic
life...hmm...minus sex...was about to be ruptured by that snake in the grass.  The reptile
tempted them and they clung to each other sexually, so HIM exiled them forever from their
paradise.

Personally, I think it was because of jealously.  HIM is really asexual, like a Eunuch.
A Unique Eunuch to be sure, but, listen, what can you expect from a "sublime" entity
which is ephemeral, ghostly, sometimes ghastly?  I don't think such an entity has genitals,
frankly. (Oops, I didn't mean the allusion to frankfurters leading to serpents leading to
penises.)  Which doesn't mean HIM can't harbor the Sin of Envy.  (But the Seven Sins
are yet another story...an Apocrypha, so to speak.)  And, since this is a condensed
version of the original BOOK, I can't get into all those other sins people love to indulge
in and/or love to regret.

Ergo, once HIM tossed them on their derrieres out of Eden, someone wrote a book East 
of Eden and they, who now put cloth on their loins, started making babies.  So that's how
our World began.  Then came eons, centuries, decades of complicated stuff...disease, wars,
blood, sweat, tears...and here we are.

And HIM doesn't seem, usually, to give a damn.

(c) Copyright 2015 by Helen Borel    All rights reserved.

I welcome commentaries.  You can reach me directly at revieweb@earthlink.net

Thursday, August 20, 2015

Some Poems

    (          )
by Helen Borel

HIPS ARE ARMS.

[circa 1999 (c) Copyright Helen Borel. All rights reserved.]



Him       by Helen Borel

His face
Shines at mine 
like a burning sun
Wet with incipient 
love-making
My mouth waters
My lips drip with
the dew of expectation
The hips of  my soul
ache with longing
to enfold his gems
between the thighs 
of my heart.

Composed August 19, 2015 
(c) Copyright 2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

DOES SEXUALITY AFFECT CREATIVITY?

By Helen Borel

[Nota bene: This piece of writing was also published at my companion site
My PsychoTherapy Zone which you can access here:
PsychDocNYC.blogspot.com  There, my same words will appear to
emphasize the mental health aspects of sexuality/creativity.  Here, I felt it also
valuable for readers of fiction, poetry, opinion, satire, etc...and, of course,
for writers and other artists who access AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST, to
emphasize the imperativeness of Creativity in and of itSelf.]

I take the word “sex” to connote “life force.”  In other words, our sexual being encompasses
considerably more than attraction to another, intimacy with that other, and the sex act.  Instead  I view the Sexual Self as an undiscovered infiniteness yearning to be found..  As the life force of the individual which is sadly hidden, suppressed by the taboos of society, parents, teachers, peers and the individual him- or herself.

The Sexual Self is the fullness of being; it is the complete Self.  When an awareness of this totalness is blocked, mental distress ensues in the various forms of psychiatric illnesses.  Depression, for example, is generally accepted as the norm of daily life without the masses of depressed individuals being aware they are depressed.  They believe they are simply normally subdued and well-mannered.  It is the price people pay  for the widely-conditioned massive
shut-down of enthusiasm, curiosity, self-esteem, enjoyment of work, creativity, and empathy for others.  So the crushed life force, the diluted Sexual Self, is deluded by false beliefs into disappearing from consciousness.  Which absence produces anger, anxiety, insomnia and depression.

It’s true that there are various causes of depression.  And that a good many depressive illnesses are  known to arise  genetically - such as the depression of bipolar disorder.  While a good many others  can be attributed to, possibly reversible, biochemical imbalances; upsets in our biochemistry which affect our immune system functioning and our brain chemical activity.  And these alterations affect our mood states.

So very many variables can upset the delicate balance of our neuroimmune system.  And one or more of these will directly impact our physiologic feeling states and will produce unpleasant moods.  These can include family and work stresses; chronic health problems; nutritional deficits; inhaled and ingested pollutants and pesticides in our air, water and food; ingrained negative belief systems; learned hatreds; physical abuse; emotional abuse; and alcohol and other substance abuse.  I would add to these causative factors for depression Unexpressed Creativity.

Sexuality, thus, encompasses lifeforceness.  It is Selfness fully expanded and expressed, thoroughly permeating one’s existence and infusing the very Self and the world beyond the Self with the full awareness of expansive, vibrant energy.  It is creativity expressed by the Expressor,
the creative one, you.

Unfortunately, most people think of their Sexual selves through the narrowest of definitions,
which seem to pivot around the quantity and quality of orgasm.  I  postulate, however, that orgiastic capacity includes those experiences not usually thought of as genital or erotically titillating.  For example, the ecstasy of creative work, scientific investigation, and social activism that achieve exciting results.  In other words, what Abraham Maslow called “self-actualization.”

We know, of course, that the psychoneuroimmune system of neuroimmune transmitters (chemical messengers) is replete with signals that bring us either distress or satisfaction.  We know that activity, like running, can relieve some levels of depression.  And, I have learned that action binds anxiety.  These alleviations resulting from behaviors are undoubtedly due to cerebral enkephalins and specifically the brain’s own opioids,  the endorphins.  So too with self-actualization, the reaching for the fullest of one’s being, for the widest expression of one’s sensient Sexual Self.

Self-actualization is actually Self-growth, Self-expansion to one’s fullest possibilities. Therefore,
genital sexualness can only be a small smidgeon of that vastness of being.  The creative process unexpressed or dampened down injures a person and progressively traumatizes the individual to the point of shrinking the active psyche, crushing inventive thought, and probably damaging
love and genital sex in the process.  This is because a fully engaged artist is happy, content and therefore more capable of sharing positive emotions with loved ones.  While a covert or wannabe artist is slouching toward grief and depression due to the buriedness of the true Sexual Self.

So, the process of creativity liberates one’s life force...or Sexual Self...progressively pressing
that Self toward further liberation, further creativity, further total sexual beingness.  This process, and the higher and higher levels of self-achievement with its ultimate capture of one’s Real Self
moves far beyond ordinary genital sexual needs.  The resulting ever-expanding life force ripples of creative evolution thereby generate an ecstasy that lasts much longer and is much more dependable for steady human satisfaction than are a few minutes of genital orgasm.

© Copyright 2000-2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.

For permissions and purchases, please contact AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST
here:  helenborel@earthlink.net
and in the Subject line, type: SEXUALITY AND CREATIVITY

Dear Story Lover: Please read the very first post (below), “OUR READING ROOM...”
for the AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST “Mission Statement”...and that all publications here
are FREE TO PRINT AND KEEP.
   Some readers may, however, desire to help this daring self-publishing concept grow and spread
so other writers will be encouraged to bring their works directly to readers, bypassing long delays
by entrenched publishers, editors and agents who often sideline important creative works.
   Only if you can, $1.00 or more will be so very helpful..please mail to:
Helen Borel - Apt. 9L, 200 West 79th Street, New York, N.Y. 10024
...and if you want notice of upcoming stories, feel free to send along your email address.
Thank you so much for participating in this “experiment in writer emancipation”.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

GOODBYE COLUMBUS AVENUE by HELEN BOREL

[This short story, written during the "gentrification" of the Upper
 West Side of Manhattan, appeared in the December 1985 issue
  of the New York City newspaper the New Common Good.]
****************************************************************************

Fiction by HELEN BOREL

GOODBYE  COLUMBUS  AVENUE

It used to be that a person could traverse the avenue Columbus on a Saturday evening, or yet
night, with whole blocks looming empty in front – an open invitation to walk with leisure. All
right, so it was not spruced like Park Avenue.  No fashion costumes. No cockatoo hairdos.

A fruit market was the quiet invasion. Came in the late seventies. Such then multiplied like green
plastic baskets with frozen “fresh” strawberries they sold them to you December.  Now, also the
fruit market – they get frozen out of this Avenue Columbus renaissance with plastic buildings that
scrape the once-upon-a-time open sky a Westside person used easily to see above the mostly
three-story, five-story and not often maybe ten-story houses. Character.  A character each his
own. Instead those look-the-same high residentials gang up on old locals like you and myself,
blocking every wisp of light God’s sun tries in vain it should squeeze onto the avenue where such
as us used to enjoy to stroll.

Try now, you should see what I mean, to stroll, you should live and be well, from we’ll say
Eighty-third Street Columbus down to Seventy-second Columbus. Right away you can forget
this project. There’s no such thing as to stroll anymore down Columbus Avenue.

First of all, you run into a crowd such as I always got caught lunchtime on Lexington Fifty-ninth
when I worked in a tiny squeezed building in between Alexander’s and the IRT for Horowitz
Linowitz and Tzimitz, a small company country cousins, came from a shtetl line. Their business
was to make point-of-purchase pop-ups for cemetery monument sales. You should excuse the
expression, they weren’t exactly buried with orders. Customers you should know weren’t
breaking down the door. Could be said anything to do with the subject was an underground
business. People don’t like to talk about such things. Not even to think of such. There’s plenty of
time to be dead, they say. What’s to think about now, they say.

Some argumentative type with philosophy lips said some words to Murray Linowitz once about
time is running away with his life. Tempus fugit. So he wouldn’t have to discuss such a cold
matter of fact like the advertisement, the marketing, to promote I shall say the idea of efficiently,
with a flair, a touch – you should pardon the disrespect for the dead – of the Madison Avenue so
he could sell better his marble stones with Hebrew inscribings.

This I don’t want to get anymore into now. You see already the spilkes I had churning the
chicken fat in my stomach from lunch at Bubba’s Kosher Kitchen on the Second Avenue under
the Queens Bridge. For me, death is a thing holy. Is a religion in itself. It shouldn’t allow to be
desecrated by no one. It’s something you can believe in for sure. Sure as you can take serious
when Mr. Tzimitz himself says to me it’s on account of dead bodies laying in hospital beds up to
their noses in air hoses, and tubes, you should excuse, coming out every hole a body ever had
and more put there by doctors wishing should keep beating the heart in spite absent the brain
signals. It is on such accounts that I, Beryl Ringler, after forty-two years a messenger boy for
the Z cousins, I call for short, must be let go. Not enough bodies for the graves. They call it a
word such like statistics. A fancy way of telling when people don’t die I got me no more job.

Now, there’s only myself and my Annala. All the years we hand-in-hand went on Columbus.
Slowly  we went by the Star Cleaners on Seventy-sixth Street dropping off my yontif suit before
the High Holidays. We talked in Yiddish the weather with Sam Rothberg, the owner, and
whether it was time yet we should go to live Eretz Yisroel. All such discussions we made slow.
What was to rush? Now you can kiss goodbye Columbus Avenue. Not only is there no one slow
with who to talk. Now there is no Star Cleaners no more. Stands instead a store, all glass, filled up
with such as who could anyway afford so why did they put it on our Columbus Avenue I asked
Annala when it came.

It just happened so when I made this a question she should tell me what she thinks, it was the
minute she dropped in her glass by the bed her uppers. Annala is very stubborn when she
remembers what a beautiful girl I met her as. All black hair, green eyes, high cheeks and pure
as snow skin. She does not let I should see her lip flaps with no controls when her dentures are
not holding her mouth to her words. She never answered me the question of why should such
prices arrive in our neighborhood and swallow up a good orthodox man like Sam Rothberg.
And why more clothing keeps coming in ungepatched trucks. Who’s going to wear it all?
Another question she would not answer – I seem to attract always a conversation with her when
her teeth are on the night table – is with so many new dresses and coats and sweaters and suits,
where will a Westside person go to have cleaned, along with of course a slow conversation?

Instead everyone is rush rush rush. On the sidewalk they push if you do not travel on foot on
Shabbas down Columbus quick like lunch-rushing middle the week down the Eastside.

As you heard, Annala can’t hear good for many Rosh Hashanas. So pulling her across Columbus
with her aluminum walk-helper to escape automobiles honking in angry rushing, she blissfully it
looks ignores, is no picnic for my already, don’t pity, bone-chilling arthritis. You can imagine in
your head the picture. A Columbus Avenue invasion by car drivers and hair styles whizzing by like
arrows fast shot from a fake time and place which it manufactures such a world without how it to
be a being what is human.

We get finally to the other side Columbus and out from nowhere shoots an Asian fella on a
bicycle rushing his brown unkosher package up somewhere across from the Natural History.
But not before he gives an elder gentleman in a thin blue suit with a fine pipe aroma a chance at a
heart attack. This he accomplishes by keeping going even his own light is red and even he wasn’t
legal taking his machine uptown on Columbus. Since the cowardly bicycle attacker did not stop,
I picked up, it turned out, Luftman, a former judge who because of this profession could now
afford many suits. It was a good thing too because this one had now dirt rubbed in from the
ground he was knocked off his feet onto. Judge Ariel Luftman turned into a friend with whom a
person like myself, Beryl the once messenger boy, could complain when it came to comparing
Columbus Avenue, the real one, with the imitation one they recently imported over the Park
from uptown Third Avenue where the fancies live with their high investments and low profiles.

Restaurants. Restaurants. Chatchke shops. Pastries. Ice cream stores with long lines of yet
grownups. Tutti Fruities. Tofutties. Chairs, tables all over the street where a slow person couldn’t
pass to go by. Noise from a banjo something these fakirs in wide clothes call music, drowns out
the silence we used to hear so well. A thought now is a thing of the past. Everything now is no
more inside the head and heart. Everything instead glistens on hangers in glass stores.
Commercial windows some who-cares builder made should hold up penthouse residentials with
no heart for the ethnics, the artists buried under.

To me such a thing is a tragedy to mourn. Each condo house which uprises from the kishkes
of the neighborhood is really a tomb saying, “Goodbye Columbus Avenue.”

© Copyright 1985-2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.

For permissions and purchases, please contact
AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST here:  helenborel@earthlink.net 
and in the Subject line, type: GOODBYE COLUMBUS AVENUE

Dear Story Lover: Please read the very first post (below), “OUR READING ROOM”
for the AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST “Mission Statement”...and that all publications
here are FREE TO PRINT AND KEEP.
   Some readers may, however, desire to help this daring self-publishing concept grow
and spread so other writers will be encouraged to bring their works directly to readers,
bypassing long delays by entrenched publishers, editors and agents who often sideline
important creative works.
   Only if you can, $1.00 or more will be so very helpful..please mail to:
Helen Borel - Apt. 9L, 200 West 79th Street, New York, N.Y. 10024
...and if you want notice of upcoming stories, feel free to send along your email address.
Thank you so much for participating in this “experiment in writer emancipation”.

Monday, June 8, 2015

UNCANNY

AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

[conceived and written on May 5, 2014]

By Helen Borel

[Prologue: This concept and its execution arose one day in my 
 mind <-still permeated by my 18 years as an Advertising Senior 
 Writer.  
 Although my Copywriting Career was primarily in Prescription 
 Pharmaceuticals and covered the gamut of medical, surgical and 
 psychiatric conditions and the drugs that treat them (and was why
 I'd, then, told people I worked on "Medicine Avenue"), always 
 I'd been a poet from 11 years of age and had a history of
 nonmedical published works...book review columns...and other 
 writings...short stories, essays, opinion pieces, drama, satire...
 which gives me the broad ability to invent advertising concepts
 outside the fields of medicine and pharmacology.  Ergo...Enjoy!]
                             ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Advertising concept and execution by copywriter Helen Borel for
XYZ Packaged Tuna Co., Inc. (fictional corporation)  5/5/2014

(headline)   UNCANNY

(pix: enticing portrait of XYZ Packaged Tuna...maybe a family
        enjoying eating it)

Introducing
REAL-TASTING TUNA

Now YOU CAN ENJOY THE PRISTINE FLAVOR
                   OF DELICIOUS FISH
FREE OF THAT GHASTLY METALLIC AFTERTASTE

(logo line) Farewell to the haunted tongue of your canned tuna past

[note also: my concept can be adapted to TV and radio commercials
 exploiting the idea of ghosts and eeriness before the "aah" of the
 packaged tuna taste disperses the "ghosts of metallic flavor"]

©  Copyright 2014, 2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.

Nota bene: I'm open to selling this original campaign to an ad agency
handling such a product and/or to the manufacturer of such a product.

For purchasing and permissions and rights, email me:
helenborel@earthlink.net

Friday, June 5, 2015

POETRY April 19, 1990 12 a.m.

UNTITLED

By Helen Borel

I do not seek to write a poem
The poem seeks to write me.

There is a loneliness unmirrored 
       by the bustling life around
Abounding, strangely, in a world
       that echoes sound on sound.

It crouches in a corner place.
It haunts the halls of seminars.
It never leaves the ambience.
It whispers in the corridors....

© Copyright 1990-2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.

For permissions and purchases, please contact AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST
here:  helenborel@earthlink.net and in the Subject line, type: POETRY

  Dear Story Lover: Please read the very first post (below), “OUR READING ROOM...”
for the AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST “Mission Statement”...and that all publications here
are FREE TO PRINT AND KEEP. 
   Some readers may, however, desire to help this daring self-publishing concept grow and spread
so other writers will be encouraged to bring their works directly to readers, bypassing long delays
by entrenched publishers, editors and agents who often sideline important creative works.
   Only if you can, $1.00 or more will be so very helpful..please mail to:
Helen Borel - Apt. 9L, 200 West 79th Street, New York, N.Y. 10024
...and if you want notice of upcoming stories, poems, creative stuff, feel free to send along your
email address. Thank you so much for participating in this “experiment in writer emancipation”.

Thursday, June 4, 2015

COMING SOON...BY WRITER HELEN BOREL...-->

1. a short story published in a local NYC
    newspaper GOODBYE COLUMBUS AVENUE

2. a piece about DOCTOR ZHIVAGO

3.  "The Writing Process is Both Complex
      and Simple"

4.  a piece on Peter O'Toole (actor in a
     terrific film, The Ruling Class)

5.  ...and much more