Thursday, October 21, 2004

Personal note

Well... here I'm, beneath the shades of Jerusalem, somewhere in Rechavia actually - not in Sokolov though, and having some time off for myself with some kind of procrastination. Ever since the final version of Sylvia's story I didn't write anything neither pretended too; I worked on the continuation of her story, but before I do that I owe to change the title of the story for its not really thrilling or representative and following the remarks of Manuel Vider, there's a necessity for some kind of marketing; for literary marketing... as bad as it sounds. I owe to re-title the story and give it some more shape; I have a long list of a few grammatical changes I want to make in it but I've really got no time left to do so. Lately the hours just slip by and I feel as if my time is just running out without me being able to do anything about it.

I've worked on several different ideas, but have spent nothing but little time writing and actually I'm inclined to believe Sylvia is one of the best things I ever wrote; as I claimed before my writing starts to fall in place with more concrete ideas and highly developed metaphors and figures; still my knowledge of literature and literary theory in general is very poor and I yearn for some improvement over the next few years; I guess I simply should be easier on myself, it's quite pointless to over-criticize myself to the extent I do. In the other hand there're a couple of letters I owe to write for a few months already, government offices, newspapers, lawyers, a hand-written letter to Georgia.....

[the note continues half a day later]

I hit the roads during the day in the inclement sun of Jerusalem, finding the city extremely appealing, some kind of European procrastination, it's funny to say this... but somehow Jerusalem reminds me of Germany, of Switzerland... to such an extent, it's almost an analogy or a continuum let's say. Yet there's some dreadful fascination that makes it Jerusalem, the confusion in between the spoken lines of people, an undeniable fusion between the echoes of modern life and the Mediterranean twentieth century with those long abandoned waves of ancient religions, languages and cultures of other days, of brighter days. Maybe that's just in the eyes of the philologist, you can't really ask me how I gathered those conclusions, it's just some kind of banal intuition, beyond the scope of my science, or of the science I'm attempting to discover, temporarily called simply historical ontology or historical phenomenology, it basically comes down to the same axe; being Husserl and Hegel the very first phenomenologists and other such as Heidegger, having completed and extended their work, in almost existentialist preclusive fashion, into the science that would be called "ontology".

Interestingly enough this "science" of let's say branch of knowledge stems from certain darkened layers of the thought sprung in those days of the antiquity; myself a follower of Heidegger find a rendez-vous between his works, the philolosophy (it's inaccurate to call it philosophy) of greatest antique men such as Heraclitus and Parmenides, thereafter complemented by other classical authors such as Plato and Aristotle (not a fan of Aristotle myself, perhaps for having laid out the grounds of pre-Medieval christianity... oh well that's for another posting). The pre-socratic philosophers (better said: thinkers) take me back in a journey through more than two thousand years of human history, but they bring me back and forth, from the antiquity into the modernity and the other way around. That somehow justifies my groundless claim of the non-linear character of history, inasmuch of the mathematical science and other precious gifts of the humanity such as evolutionary molecular biology and diachronic linguistics.

What does Jerusalem have to do with all this? I really don't know and I'm not that involved in the exhausting task of finding out; there's just some little charm to this discourse, to this "continuum of ideas", it's almost semiotic. Looking up into the linguistic interfaces of the most ancient languages we might be able to elucidate this much better; but our answers are somehow lost on the way, the modern science fails to tackle the matter with enough accuracy.

I'm still in Jerusalem, writing some little poetry and trying to gather together some scholars to see if there's anything more vivifying I could learn in the holiest of cities of Judaism. I might just continue pursuing the idea to start my journey once again from the beginning, as a good Celtic scholar would be prone to do; journeying between different instances of life in little deconstructions of deliverance and thought. I owe to continue my day, live through the annoying confusion of unpredictable feelings, storms and less factual imagination; well... I'll try to revert to this point at some other time, maybe I do have a few things to say still... I just fear they might not be pleasant for some readers. It's just too banally cruel, it's mean. I'm mean, yet I mean.

Tomorrow will be another day, back to Givat Ram, then to French Hill, probably a shopping mall, lunch outside, laundry, computer problems, interesting conversations, grey-hued imagination, wash away the sadness from my silk-weary skin with some little inconclusive thought and continue the wandering.

I'm extremely tired, yet I accomplished nothing. Science and life escape my hands and in my simple humanity I can just stare at them from a far; maybe that's the real meaning of all this. It reminds me of my favourite metaphor, "walking on water". Just like Aurora, the child and the Phoebus.

Are you still, Phoebus?
Are you still Phoebes?

Ari




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