Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Lolitta, and I remember. Wyoming yesterday, Beit Shemesh tomorrow.

Well time for kitschy note. The sleeplessness and the tiredness make you think interesting thoughts and are particularly useful for the long forgotten memory; or so it was two days ago when my whole reverie paid a visit and I lived through chapters of my childhood and my adolescence in the foreig country, in "that" foreign country. After all at this point all the countries are foreign. I remembered not just school days and wonderful momenta, but rather painful and distracting, disturbing motifs, I remembered how little value is at this point attached to those people, to those days and years, to that life. I disregard myself entirely, if not out of contempt probably out of unknowing wit. It's hard to explain how I felt that early morning as the Jerusalemite breeze kissed my cold chest with its breathe, walking partly naked and partly undressed in the corridor next to my room watching those Orthodox woman walking towards the Wall for the first prayers at 4 a.m.; for an hour or probably even more I lived all through my childhood and my adolesncence, that made me thought the thought of having lived a good life, accidented, wounded, impertinent, irrational, but certainly well lived, wasted even, well. I thought about Lolitta, that volputuous Italian chicksa, and the woman I would have probably married had she been better educated. I thought about her with despise and contempt (not the contempt of familiarity Vitaly, the contempt of heaviness) but looking back I can see in her probably the only honest friendship I had, or one of the only. A friendship built on dreams, built on ideologies, built on anarchism, built on existentialist novels and Chassidic tales. I admired Lolitta's strength to fight against life and to lead her own life, qualities I would love in somebody else but again, God always gives bread only to the teethless. She admired my Jewish outlook, she loved my face, envied my lips and above all we shared a dreadful sense of fatality, a "fatus categoricus" that made of that friendship something so valuable and memorable. The day when I left her I didn't say good bye and I didn't call on the phone, the day I left the country she didn't come to the airport, she cried in the line, I smoked a cigarette, hung the phone.

I've thought about Lolitta and Edgar for the last years of my life much more than I thought for example of Ari and Yuval or whoever else it was. I thought about the poetic elements of their failure and all the beauty of their violence; unfortunately I'm unable to see this through the prism of dogma, product of my uncurable moral relativism which I have to accept is rather deadening and pathetic. And it's another form of kitsch. I still think about them, how they tried to make me so happy, how they tried to make me feel more Jewish than I did, how they tried to make me feel more drunk than I was. Eyal Golan, ha! Nothing could be more kitsch than that. Edgar tried to make me happy by letting me listen to Eyal Golan while we drank the cheap wine. We stared at the mountains. That's probably why once in Israel I thoroughly hated Eyal Golan. Because I loved the mountains, and perhaps also because of kitsch.

I kept loving the mountains, there I was born. I'm living in a country where I had to build my own mountains to feel like home, I built them in my room and also in my bookshelves. You wonder how could I build my own mountains. Well, this is a strange country. If you can create a god every other millenium, why couldn't you build your own mountains? The only mountain that there was ever in this country remains only as a memory, a memory is all what remains. The mountain no longer exists, only the Prophets do. And they know where the mountain was. I doubt whether I'll ever see mountains again. New York is not that close to be the mountains where I used to live, and Vermont... oh well I've got some disappointments with Frost, worthwhile mentioning. By the way, New York is a synonym of "suicide attempt". Ask Yehuda Amichai, I think he's one of the illuminati of this generation, isn't there an opposite word for illuminati? Like "oscurati"? Well, if there's, that's what he is. Lolitta, I wouldn't forget you, I wouldn't forget your cynical beauty, your poorly fluent English, your gitano gipsy tales and the drug trafficker of your father.

I wish I had the inner-power to write down everything I felt and everything I saw. Cafeteria at the Sociology Faculty with the Marxist Jews and the Nazi gays, being lost in the charm of the night, driving to the airport with three drunk women, making love to the night without closing your eyes, my black maid at the cheap hostel, Jewish New Year with Uncle Pavlos and Auntie Miriam, the magic of La Candelaria with those tales of Giorgia Kaltsidou, Alex's house and mine, Angela, the little French movies (how could you call a movie "little"?), that handsome and decent policeman laying asleep in my bed while I write in a diary about my utter desires to die. Me lusting for that sickly bastard, marlboro light, L&M sometimes, the pizza-making neighbours and their esmerald dealings. The nausea. Somehow it seems as if that was part of a life I already lived before, a life that before me is not. Yet I'm happy to realize it's actually the same life, I haven't betrayed myself, I haven't forgotten anything. Lolitta, I remember. I know you remember more than I do, but should it suffice to say I've been around the fountain for a while. It smells like your voluptuous beauty, it smells like your sensitive fascination with death, your schizophrenia.

Last time I thought about her, the kitsch was gone. I remember the 20 dollars she never paid me, and the birthday present she never gave me, she didn't even call. Bitch.

I wonder if it would be worthwhile making a list of all these people I thought of and overtime start writing about them. One day I'll turn them into stories, I'll pickpocket them like Amos Oz said, I'll hijack them in the middle of the night, abuse them, rape them. They will struggle, but none of us will live enough as to avenge enough. And it's all meaningless anyway (well not all). My new neighbour in Jerusalem was a most pleasant surprise, so pleasant that I forgave him for his rudeness (I obviously meant somebody else) and bought him a birthday present he will never forget (and about which he will never forgive me). My neighbours knows the mountain sister too, brought up in Wyoming. A German brought up in Wyoming! That's like bringing up a Norwegian in Thailand. The results weren't so terrible after all. Yesterday we spent most of the day touring the Jerusalem only Zelda and me know. The Jerusalem of Shatz St. hidden beneath the water level and even beneath the corposes level. The Jerusalem of the books, probably the real Jerusalem. A note: Jerusalem is also synonym of suicide. Look up Yehuda Amichai for references. Thank goodness my neighbour isn't American, he doesn't have any nationality. He ain't no Zionist. The real Zion is still in our minds, still in the Psalms, still in Bialik and yet so still in Russia. Not in the State of Israel, the only place we ever had to steal from, even the non-Jews. I don't even know why I mentioned this awful topic, perhaps I'm hurting? Oh no! God forbids. Enough people is hurting in the world today and I refuse to become a stat. I refuse to become a story, to be so much into kitsch of life that someone would like to write stories about me. God, I'm afraid. God save the Queen. Even if a size queen.

It's a terrible day. My books selling out, Arabs praying in the mosques for our deaths, thank goodness our god hears not even their prayers. The hangover of beer and vodka, a smokeless day, less money for rides. Beautiful memories and pangs of kitsch. On top of everything I remember how my last story started: He wrote "Cum in my mouth" as his epiteth, the other replied "I want to fuck your mouth like a whore". And there their love started, and they still hate each other to this very day. Life with its strange ways. They just didn't get used to the hatred, but most people do. Actually most love stories never start with kitsch, for which we should thank the Almighty; but kitsch develops overtime as a natural tendence to obscure the facts of reality. It's an utter need, like governments. I like anarchy no more, to whom would we complain? To god?

If you would like to have a taste of the place from where I write these lines, please read what my friend Jan said [Jan is a German media-sort-something guy who came to Israel to play being Japanese, isn't it ironic? He stayed in my house the very same night a Russian guy fell in love with me, and the three of us slept in the same bed. The Russian used to stink to alcohol, Jan didn't talk to me, I sleep didn't. But he stayed in my house and brought me expensive books which I sold. That must mean we're friends] about Jerusalem.

"When I think about Jerusalem I can't even imagine living a normal life there! The buses from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea went via Jerusalem and I remember thinking: Whan an ancient town! (Hello, Jan!) Not only the Orthodox Jews with their hats and the women with the scarves but all the sand and the dust and these rough houses. To me it seems as if it was 2000 years ago and the origin of many things. It wasn't tangible, that feeling... the atmosphere. Fun is the last thing I could have there. But it's good to hear your completely different view. I don't want to draw a picture of my world from images I get from bus windows after all :-) Am I Japanese, or what"

To this letter, I still didn't reply. I wonder how people can live in this city. And this cafe is just so filthy, it makes you think there's something private in the internet you would like to see. No one can live in Jerusalem, actually no one lives there. I saw the last breezes returning home near the Dead Sea. Only people live there, but then again we don't count them. The concept of time in Jerusalem is abstract and so is the number for bus lines, and that again makes me think of kitsch, sex and love. Think about it, most of us say that the average for a New Yorker or Tel Avivian to find sex on the internet is the clichish "5 minutes" but it usually takes two hours or three, to find love it takes you an instant. There's a downside though. After the three hours the sex is usually good but you're not entirely satisfied plus you've got some pangs of consciousness, of awareness of your situation and you know it. The love is much more complex, you get it in a second, the sex is usually always good but it takes you years to kick him out of your bed, and sometimes of your bank account and most important, of your life. That's how it works.

I feel like a victim of all this sometimes, and I cry out and proclaim my martyrdom to the world. An Antigone of the 21st century, but then when I come to think about it I say, "Well, I love reality, I love it so much that I will always struggle to live in truth" and yet in awareness of my sick condition I don't achieve my goal at times and most likely live in lies, delicious lies. But I never stop running from them and never stop trying to live in truth. It doesn't make me better than anyone, see... I was looking at "meeting site" while writing this note. Not because I need porn to survive, just to make sure beautiful men and women didn't disappear from this world. Vitaly and Lolitta have something in common, they've never lived in Wyoming. Ha! how easy to find how similar people are, no? Just like New York and Jerusalem. Both of them are cities of kitsch, cities where it's hardly possible to live in truth, and where nobody lives, save people. Seriousness please. Vitaly & Lolitta? Oh yeah! Volulptuous exaggerate beauty. That's they share, besides kitsch and me.

Funny, the roles people have in somebody else's life. Maybe I'm moving to New York only in order to host a guy from Wyoming who lives in Jerusalem and has no chemistry with a Dutch girl who comes from a town caused my mom dread. All those hairy, ugly and unprovoking men and women approaching me on the net. I think their role in my life is to remind me that I've spent 24 shekels already and that there's voluptuous exaggerate beauty you can love from one second to the other.

Dictionary of Misunderstandings:

Vitaly & Lolitta: Voluptuous and exaggerate beauty.

Jerusalem & New York: suicide, ghost town. v. Yehuda Amichai.

Tel Aviv: Biblical town located in Manhattan.

Israel: A country that existed in the 2 BCE and still survives as a main theme and drive force for western poetry.

The State of Israel: A place where Lolitta never lived, a place where Vitaly visited. A place whereby Ari was buried. Remember that in Jerusalem the level of water is beneath the level of the corpses.

Time: 3-hours to find sex and 1-second to find love. 1 minute to get rid of the sex and only 1 life to get rid of the lover.





Good afternoon gentlemen.


Ari

PS: Yeah I know, I promised the poems 2 weeks ago. Tomorrow perhaps

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