To Katharina and Juli, with whom I gained the inspiration to write down these days through absurd conversations.
"I have a blue piano at home
And yet I know, not one note.
It stands in the darkness of the cellar's door
Since then, when the world turned mad.
Four hands of the stars play it
- And the Lady Mood sang once from a boat -
Nowadays only the rats dance with the tune.
Oy! The keyboard is broken....
And I mourn the dead blue....
Ah! A beloved angel opens
- I ate from bitter bread -
Opens for me the heavenly door of life -
Even against all prohibitions."
-Else Lasker-Schüler,
"My Blue Piano", transl. by Leo.
Once, when I had been to Paris at the tender age of fourteen I had been flabergasted in my disappointment regarding the lack of accordeonists in the street, so that I found one of my own in a little alley of Jerusalem almost ten years later; he wouldn't play so swiftly and in fact he wouldn't play at all... but the accordeonist was a figure as necessary in the writing of one's life as a flaneur could ever be. And after my timely discovery I realized through reading some old journals, that I had perhaps seen that accordeonist before and that Plato could be eventually right in one thing. Of course listening to an accordeonist that can't play one single note, is doubtless an act of love, but so were the sufferings of the Lord on the Cross and Abraham's murder attempt against his own son. In the case of Cain, I'm not so sure of what the legal opinions could be, but I'm inclined to rely on more lust than love... it's almost a pagan ritual like that in which Pentheus is sensually devoured by his mother - yet this sounds too easy, for extremes, as Lessing said, are just too easy to represent... so that the painting of the tragedy could be only achieved if one were to draw it the second before the murder, when the eyes of the mother are still loving and graceful. It is not altogether feasible to sketch a painting before the moment of love, but no less, it is impossible to restrain oneself from puncturing the canvas in the fleeting hereafter of love but right before the hero is dead. Otherwise one would indulge in too much compassion, not in the nature of the artist and allegedly a devise antagonistic in essence to the demands of aesthetics.
This can also remind me of what a certain Hebrew writer said (and perhaps the only thing she ever said about her own writing) about narration, that the richness of details often manages to murder a good story, it is only in the talent of the narrator to make the characters come real with the least amount of information necessary, one isn't too much concerned with the 'biography' so to speak, than with the essence of a moment. For a philosopher of history, this is perhaps the only possible solution out of the problem of not telling history as though it were philosophy of history. So that my story starts when reading a certain book called "The Land of the Hebrews", and what a lame rhaetorical devise is to start a story with the reading of a book, but for me holds truer than anything else; in that book there's a certain faintly story about Jerusalem and its people, about the age of God that allowed me to play wistfully in Hebrew with the name of a beloved foe, a Hebrew poet himself, the devise is impossible in any other language, so that I must warn in advance that this is in fact a story written in Hebrew, therefore it cannot be translated into any language but that. In the little book one kind of sees Jerusalem from the eyes of heaven, and not even that... from the vantage of the heaven before heaven, so that somehow one would never really want to make it there. The writer sees the city from a little window in a hotel around Shekh Jarra, nowadays a wealthy Arab neighbourhood where the local parvenus often visit to let themselves treated to the indiscreet eyes of diplomats and Christian old-aristocracy as to gain a confirmation of their own ability to live in respectable society if only for the sake of metaphysical clarity, for such is nowhere to be found in the greater perimeter of the city.
I saw the city from higher up, looking out a window in Mt. Scopus wherefrom I could catch a glimpse of the whole of the little Arab houses that I could only imagine from the accordeonist's little home nearby, however, outside his kitchen there was (perhaps also imagined) a laundry thread and that was already part of the Arab house. I sat opposite that window many hours, realizing my loss... being inside the cleanest building in the whole of East Jerusalem, gazing into the tiny Arab houses with their green lighthouses, admiring the beauty of the whole landscape - such an unnatural one! Disjuncted houses, crumbled with each other and following the movement of the sand in the deep Judean desert, at the same time despising the Oriental reality just so much! Thinking it could at best make a great painting, but never a good theology or a political ideology. I also gazed into the houses at night and from much closer during my walks with the young Christians and then returned into the city via the Mt. Olives, visiting some well-known graves of anonymous people, stopping at a certain restaurant forbidding myself to fear, after all it all looked so natural, the houses, the children, the cars, the misery. In the night I could hear the green lights of the mosques, and felt less love than mere aesthetic "acts of contrition" before the fading sights.
That certain day when the tale of love and politics broke free, I had not expressed or experienced any disappointments, in fact I had felt quite happy about myself, spending long hours in a library looking out toward the opposite direction of the city, the mumbling of the few tall buildings and the invisible individuality of remaining houses, their dead... From the library a great part of the city-sight was occupied by a very large cemetery and I mused to myself that in a city like this there's really no place for one if he's alive, one must be dead to become a citizen... In another location, returning from Tel Aviv the day before I stare in amazement at the entrance to the city... only the endless graves greet us! Not one voice is heard, lest it comes from an Arab house or from the murder of a death, the laughter of life or anything else that has been forbidden by the imperial laws unknown to all the residents. But that time, in the late afternoon, I did hear noises, from the bodies of people - nothing connected to their souls, their lips moved orgiastically and I could find no solace in such madness of speech, I spent the long half of the day musing on whether I should move in one direction or the other... it is difficult to move when you recognize yourself just being one stone more in the city, a stone that any tourist can pick up and that any concern of the wind can place in one neighbourhood or the other. Then friends, or in fact a friend and such wonderful present that would throw me into the blackest mood of a German forest for an entire weekend, oh those letters, they're so true! They can never be read more than once. Following, all were known faces that distanced from the imperial buildings with disdain and me in particular with the hypocrisy of reluctance, at the end of a very brief walk the Arab houses were visible again, but particularly unnoticed until we reached the car and started to find our way into the greater hospital - the city center, where the Messiah comes across a few times a day, but he's reocgnized to be a false Messiah because he's not Jerusalemite at all, moreover he's come either too early or too late. While turning around the corner we, the Hebrew conquerors of this land (me less than the others, a strangely familiar attitude I adopted, perhaps because every Hebrew is in essence a Catholic so that I manifest my preference for the latter and for long have acquired a distaste for the word 'Jew') spot the most innocent of all natural spectacles: Two Arab children ride their bikes, coming from their little village and surrounding our imperial building, and one of the two falls in a side of the street and his foot is unable to find release from the engine.. the second child is helpless watching.
Obviously, being the young imperialists that we're, we halt the motion of the car in the middle of the road nonwithstanding the danger and step out of the car at once, advancing towards the troubled villagers. "Social concerns cannot be too tainted by politics, they're acts of love", I thought to myself, in the second while this movement took place, only to be replaced by an innate disappointment before the facts of our 'reality'. The Arab children, no older than 10, immediately fell upon themselves in the most natural fear, the fear of violence and death, the fear of danger, before four Hebrew conquerors, one more pathetic then the other, worn from smoke and books, poorer than the graves of Mamilla and each one less convinced of their collonial might, than the others. Of course it is an awkward situation, because rationally speaking there's a slight barrier of imagery between two homosexuals and two women coming out of a car more worn out than God's pocket and the already sexually violent attitude of a bunch of oriental negroids, members of the chosen people either by passport or by the orders of a white woman sitting idly in Tel Aviv, coming out of a green truck to arrest deliberately passers-by in Tulkarem. J. was the closest to be in touch with this reality, a former policewoman (and by chance of fate and curse, a political scientist) who could remember a word or two in the language of Maimonides, and we could make ourselves understood as being 'non-enemies' instead of 'friends', a position even lower than that of peace activist who attempt to save the world out of a resolute impossibility to save themselves, a long-established tradition since the Jew Marx, and once that has come not without a lot of terror and manipulation. I for one have given up salvation and truth, in a Roman fashion, if only for the sake of the world. We're then speedily understood and in our despair, return to the car after having indulged in such 'graceful overcoming of nationalist prejudices on the part of children twice as young as we're'. Our speech turns away from the philosophers of the political into the politics of illness. It's difficult to make oneself so much at home in a world like this, whereby children remember that of course we are an imperialist power doubtless ready to murder and destroy by any means. They remember things that we never knew, and that of course are never taught inside our imperial buildings where instead, we're instructed in the much necessary skill of coffee-triggered self-murder and political 'talking'. Really, it is a pleasure to realize how close we're to take the necessary steps to redeem the Middle East from the most futile war, which is in fact the most important of all.
But I forgot the incident too quickly, I had been asked to join the accordeonist to unlisten music in our conversations, sitting idly but not without thrill in one of those big restaurants that I wouldn't visit too often myself, quite boring and lacking in charm... nothing similar to be said about my companion though, and once again we would have such pained discussions about the nature of things, returning back and forth to discuss ourselves, and then project onto things once again.. those conversations about something that you want to escape from the start but are so unable to. Quite different from the ways my life's spent nightly, but no less vivid. I had a letter to read and some quasi-hyeroglyphic journal to plunder into with the violence of a voyeurist philosopher. The idea that children were afraid of me only slightly touched me, the memory did come in some conversation about politics, but it wasn't anything of theological ever-lasting value, mere pegs in an already lost world. That restaurant would be the last place I'd visit with my companion before the lights turned dark in between me and myself, so that often I'd just make a great effort to avoid such pleasures. But weeks later we found each other in the presence of a certain respectable host destroying a conversation about a certain dead woman philosopher into a political rant of sorts, the kind of talk that only Jews that have never moved a bed from one end of the room to the other, might be able to have. Of course a heated debate about the Mideast peace process, what should one do in Gaza, and what about the refugees... do we give back this or that? As though peace were something that had to do at all with rationality. I disagreed with his views that I even attacked as naive, but perhaps he's right in so many accounts... that I refuse to acknowledge reality as it is and therefore have never taken responsibility for much else but my own craziness and life (and who could acknowledge reality so much in a place like this where there's so little space not just for air, but also for death?) and secondly that I come from 'somewhere else', and that the apocalypse of German history of the 19th and 20th century is but the same period of the greatest glory of the so-called Israeli history. Yeah, we should work for the sake of peace, we should give them this and that, odds are that no matter what we do, we'll always be wrong... like we were that day months ago when the rain caused a flood in the Gaza strip, for which obviously we were held responsible by our cousins and the whole of the 'free' world.
I was to be a convinced Zionist at the age of 16 already when I had thought about coming here, and that for me meant of course some religious values and the unconditional support of the State that soon turned into a very rightish position to be in, like most people that have never been in this wonderful land. Then being a part of the intelligentsia forced me by decree to turn to the left, and only after a short trip to the whole of the West Bank with a French engineer, I understood that no positions could be taken here at all, that one had to make up his mind everyday on all possible accounts. Yes, it's pretty postmodern, the age of absolute doubt and of untruth... reality lies shattered generations before our own, we're just confronted with the puzzle much better than them. What I didn't think during this discussion, and that I don't think on a daily basis, is that social concerns as acts of love are deliberately political here, so that one cannot dare loving without hating and receiving the same feelings from others. I read extensively on this subject, and even have treated the issue of love as one secondary to none in importance as a political scientist of disreputable intellectual background. Then this past week I discussed this for a whole day with J., and did my homework, read some essays and started to ponder on how seriously could one take the relationship between sex and love in one hand, with politics and thought in the other. Isn't this some kind of Postmodern reflection out of the sources of meaningless despair? Sure it is. I found my answer during the weekend, a real, naked and happy answer. The theoretical answer is of course that Arendt was right, when everything is political, nothing really is political at all, but this isn't all what there's to it. I have a story to tell.
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