I think it's a paradox, an ironic paradox. It came to my mind that the response to Postmodernism, and the demystified version of Existentialism can be somewhere around the corner. Incidentally I laugh because it was Communist painture what made me think about this idea. I thought endlessly about the concept of minimalism, which I inherited not from philosophy or 20th century painting but from linguistics, mathematics and theory of chaos in particular. There are people out there doing some sort of minimalist (existentialist sort of) poetry but it doesn't come out too well, the message seems cut off. Probably Nietzsche was right, we're not ready for it. The world is still too civilized for minimalism. At least in poetry. My answer to Postmodernisn is by no means non-perennial rational philosophy and late Aristotelianism. My response to Postmodernism is ANTI-KITSCH. A new kind of realism or modernism. A non-kitsch realism. A non-French realism. Perhaps an American realist school. A non-pragmatic American realist school. Funny, Communism, love (for a guy) and kitsch made me think about it. Thanks Stalin, Thanks Vitaly, Thanks Sabina, Thanks Jabotinsky.
Addendum (5 minutes later): Perhaps I'm wrong. Ever read Eccclesiastes? A movement, like any other movement will disappear. Only one thing shall remain out of all this: our natural tendence for kitsch, which is even more powerful than reality itself. That's why I'm in love, that's why I can't tolerate this country, that's why I can't tolerate any country. That's why I'm an invisible man. But belief and hope is something you can't steal from man. Ask Anna Frank for particulars.
"You're the eternal leit-motif and raison-d'etre behind my paintings. Is there anything nobler than that? I doubt whether Wilde could have figured it out himself back then. The leit-motif behind my artistic betrayals, the portrait of your frustrations and of self-destruction. You're the eternal leit-motif and raison-d'etre of behind my paintings. Is there anything nobler than that? Yes. Only the kitsch we share. Otherwise, you're the eternal leit-motif behind my paintings".
Friday, August 05, 2005
Thursday, August 04, 2005
Fear, laughter, lightness.
I think I should start my note with a big laughter, with some painful, cynical and deceiving laughter; but it's pretty hard when you're sitting before a screen. But I wish.
Today could be one of those happy days of my life, one of those days of finding myself, or rather losing myself. Nietzsche challenged most of the western philosophers of the last two centuries with the idea of the eternal return, which was wonderfully surveyed by Heidegger and Sartre, two of my favourites. I believe the poetry of Holderin came much closer to understand the idea behind the eternal return, although it was written during the German Romanticism. Right before the Sturm and Drang, right before the word kitsch came into being. Right before German pathos would reach its highest peak, right before people like Nietzsche would be no more than heretic dreams. I wonder what people like Kant would have thought about it in their own times, "What's the Enlightenment?" is a question just as metaphysically dense and meaningless as the question of the eternal return. To some extent I hesitate on whether it is the same question. Similar questions were posed by Parmenides and by many others even behind parmenides. The question itself was posed by man himself after having eaten from the tree of knowledge that brought him to spiritual death. The Jewish god questioned it himself. Heraclited said once "If you haven't heard me but the Logos it is wise to ascertain by means of the senses that all the things are but one very same thing". Until this very day I didn't stop from running away from the Logos, yet I didn't stop from hearing in each and every instance of my life. Those are my memories, my memories of Giorgia Kaltsidou. That Pontiac, told and caring woman who loved me as only a philosopher can love, who loved each and every part of my brain and who yielded it for so many years.
Georgia reminds me of the poetess Zelda, and somehow everyday I remember her. I remember her when I look at myself in the mirror, when I speak and even when I cry and dream. I remember her when I kiss him, I remember her when I crave for him. Years have passed since I last heard her voice, like coming from a far, from within the womb of an Arcadian hill. I can still remember that voice such as a swift touch beneath the skin. Does Georgia know herself how much of the architect of my life she was? I doubt it. She will die one day, maybe she's dead now and all this will become kitsch, how much we abhorred it! And then years later I will become kitsch myself, ugh! and I know I will become big kitsch. Ha!
Now I've broken my last tie to the past. I turned my back on the State of Israel, in full awareness of my betrayal. I rejected my career with a non-return point breakthrough, took each and every one of my house belongings and placed them in the streets saving only my clothes, my music and my books. My books are going to be sold within a week, except for those I would be unable to acquire once again. I avenged to myself to most of my past, including Auschwitz. I am a free man today and more willing than ever for the eternal return. I'm not afraid, ironically enough thanks to a little man who is more afraid of himself than anything else. He set me free, with more kitsch that his communist upbringing and his massive body can contain. His awful lot.
It wasn't very difficult to trace him, the internet does wonders. I hesitate know whether to send flowers for his birthday. No, that's too conventional. Interesting books I sent already twice so it doesn't make sense no more, too early for a surprise. Hummmm.... poetry of Zelda? He hasn't been in Israel enough as to understand it. I don't know for how long I'll be able to endure the silence diet, probably next week I'll call. Postcards I sent already and I actually showed my contemptuous lack of originality, so should I falter at this point? My fidelity to his soul (not to him, to his soul) is still unmovable, such as is my self-loathing. I'll think about something, that's way too far into the future as to worry with that right now. Eternal return, once again. No fear, whatsoever. It's interesting to discover that the highest level of freedom man can acquire is the realization that he hasn't got any.
A little disappointment though (but just a little). It was too simple to trace his steps. I think there should be in the world more people like Sabina and me. People that never existed anywhere but in the memories and diaries of other people. People who never left traces anywhere, who no one knows where they live or how they go through the day. Invisible so to speak, most likely. But then again I wouldn't fall in love with invisible people, our secret brotherhood. Invisible people cause me aversion. There's a mad fascination about them. They come, steal your life and then fade away, just like Georgia. My master. Invisible yet living in the same house and sitting in the same old armchair for over thrity years, invisible yet. I think there's something invisible about every person and every eye, something invisible about everyone of us just like there's eternal return for everyone, such as there's faith, such as there's love. Such as there're several shadows. There's something invisible about the heart. About poetry, about art, and even about communism and homosexuals, in spite of the anachronism. The universe is invisible itself, read about steady-wave theory?. Universe, unity, invisibility, return, unicity. It starts to make sense. I loosen.
No fear.
Just laughter and lightness.
Alanis released a new version of "Ironic". Now it goes like "Meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband". How pathetically ironic and full of kitsch.. This world is definitely going nowhere, and we know it and we stumble, then die. Not so easy though. Eyes watching me, thousands of eyes. The eyes of Georgia, my father, my aunt, Asher, Yuval, Oren, Ofer, even Vitaly watching me. I owe to behave.
No fear tonight.
Just laughter and lightness.
And insofar as you're concerned, don't worry. Bitterness and heaviness until you'll understand. Then after the heavy weight of lightness you'll desperate crave for vertigo as you craved for a desire to wail and you'll fall. In laughter and lightness.
Ari
Today could be one of those happy days of my life, one of those days of finding myself, or rather losing myself. Nietzsche challenged most of the western philosophers of the last two centuries with the idea of the eternal return, which was wonderfully surveyed by Heidegger and Sartre, two of my favourites. I believe the poetry of Holderin came much closer to understand the idea behind the eternal return, although it was written during the German Romanticism. Right before the Sturm and Drang, right before the word kitsch came into being. Right before German pathos would reach its highest peak, right before people like Nietzsche would be no more than heretic dreams. I wonder what people like Kant would have thought about it in their own times, "What's the Enlightenment?" is a question just as metaphysically dense and meaningless as the question of the eternal return. To some extent I hesitate on whether it is the same question. Similar questions were posed by Parmenides and by many others even behind parmenides. The question itself was posed by man himself after having eaten from the tree of knowledge that brought him to spiritual death. The Jewish god questioned it himself. Heraclited said once "If you haven't heard me but the Logos it is wise to ascertain by means of the senses that all the things are but one very same thing". Until this very day I didn't stop from running away from the Logos, yet I didn't stop from hearing in each and every instance of my life. Those are my memories, my memories of Giorgia Kaltsidou. That Pontiac, told and caring woman who loved me as only a philosopher can love, who loved each and every part of my brain and who yielded it for so many years.
Georgia reminds me of the poetess Zelda, and somehow everyday I remember her. I remember her when I look at myself in the mirror, when I speak and even when I cry and dream. I remember her when I kiss him, I remember her when I crave for him. Years have passed since I last heard her voice, like coming from a far, from within the womb of an Arcadian hill. I can still remember that voice such as a swift touch beneath the skin. Does Georgia know herself how much of the architect of my life she was? I doubt it. She will die one day, maybe she's dead now and all this will become kitsch, how much we abhorred it! And then years later I will become kitsch myself, ugh! and I know I will become big kitsch. Ha!
Now I've broken my last tie to the past. I turned my back on the State of Israel, in full awareness of my betrayal. I rejected my career with a non-return point breakthrough, took each and every one of my house belongings and placed them in the streets saving only my clothes, my music and my books. My books are going to be sold within a week, except for those I would be unable to acquire once again. I avenged to myself to most of my past, including Auschwitz. I am a free man today and more willing than ever for the eternal return. I'm not afraid, ironically enough thanks to a little man who is more afraid of himself than anything else. He set me free, with more kitsch that his communist upbringing and his massive body can contain. His awful lot.
It wasn't very difficult to trace him, the internet does wonders. I hesitate know whether to send flowers for his birthday. No, that's too conventional. Interesting books I sent already twice so it doesn't make sense no more, too early for a surprise. Hummmm.... poetry of Zelda? He hasn't been in Israel enough as to understand it. I don't know for how long I'll be able to endure the silence diet, probably next week I'll call. Postcards I sent already and I actually showed my contemptuous lack of originality, so should I falter at this point? My fidelity to his soul (not to him, to his soul) is still unmovable, such as is my self-loathing. I'll think about something, that's way too far into the future as to worry with that right now. Eternal return, once again. No fear, whatsoever. It's interesting to discover that the highest level of freedom man can acquire is the realization that he hasn't got any.
A little disappointment though (but just a little). It was too simple to trace his steps. I think there should be in the world more people like Sabina and me. People that never existed anywhere but in the memories and diaries of other people. People who never left traces anywhere, who no one knows where they live or how they go through the day. Invisible so to speak, most likely. But then again I wouldn't fall in love with invisible people, our secret brotherhood. Invisible people cause me aversion. There's a mad fascination about them. They come, steal your life and then fade away, just like Georgia. My master. Invisible yet living in the same house and sitting in the same old armchair for over thrity years, invisible yet. I think there's something invisible about every person and every eye, something invisible about everyone of us just like there's eternal return for everyone, such as there's faith, such as there's love. Such as there're several shadows. There's something invisible about the heart. About poetry, about art, and even about communism and homosexuals, in spite of the anachronism. The universe is invisible itself, read about steady-wave theory?. Universe, unity, invisibility, return, unicity. It starts to make sense. I loosen.
No fear.
Just laughter and lightness.
Alanis released a new version of "Ironic". Now it goes like "Meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband". How pathetically ironic and full of kitsch.. This world is definitely going nowhere, and we know it and we stumble, then die. Not so easy though. Eyes watching me, thousands of eyes. The eyes of Georgia, my father, my aunt, Asher, Yuval, Oren, Ofer, even Vitaly watching me. I owe to behave.
No fear tonight.
Just laughter and lightness.
And insofar as you're concerned, don't worry. Bitterness and heaviness until you'll understand. Then after the heavy weight of lightness you'll desperate crave for vertigo as you craved for a desire to wail and you'll fall. In laughter and lightness.
Ari
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
More of the same
Well, how naive of me. When I come to think about it many times I held myself from saying things I wholeheartedly wanted to express in my blog fearing that some of the people concerned with my words would be ever able to read them and find themselves portrayed, I was always afraid of embarrassing them, of betraying me. That's one of the reasons why I haven't written anything about Vitaly to be honest, I can justify myself on account that the feeling of emptiness and estrangement plus strangeness that stems from the whole idyll precludes me from the natural ability of writing. I was naive enough to think that people would be ever interesting in reading the dreams and fables of a 21 years old idiot, but maybe I'm wrong. Who is to know these things? If most of these people have actually read it I think I should start feeling naked, woed and exposed to their imaginary eyes, that follow me all through my life as an endless sequence of betrayals.
But there're a few things I can say, despite myself. I definitely love this guy, not with a desperate love that breaks all the rules of cognition and understanding, but rather full with a void of understanding. Sure. I know it doesn't make sense at all. He achieved quite a few purposes in my life, unknowingly. It's funny to think the role other peoples play in our lives, it's almost uncanny. Through Vitaly I avenged my honour for once at all, I avenged myself and destroyed that irrational myth the journalist and me built together with his crueltly on my very own pain for all this time. He's hurting now and I know it, and I wonder if he'll ever address me again because I know I've broken a chain of events that led us through it, a broken of events that exposed my weaknesses in their highest pathos and portrayed me as a 21st century Antigone. In the other hand it's funny because V. loves me too, but his problem is that he doesn't want to, me in the other want so desperately want to love him, oh well! It's so pathetic for someone like me writing this shit. But after all I still go to meetings of Zionist political groups, engage myself in philosophical conversations lasting for hours and hours with my grandma Chaya and send used books with long dedicatory explanations to someone who despite himself refuses to address me. But I no longer care, I'm contemptuously loyal, my fidelity to him is unmovable, and it is not the kind of fidelity between husband and wife or between boyfriend and boyfriend, because I can feel him and I feel him fall too, I feel him guilty too. He is just too young to understand that fidelity isn't counted by the number of erotic endeavour that postmodern men engage themselves with anonymous men. The flesh and the soul have different needs, and I just don't need to know more about this. He's beautiful, young, appealing. I'm in the other hand no less beautiful, yet dark and sometimes irreversibly dreadful, and I ain't no longer young at least in that respect. I'm not the kind of look-for-a-type-of-man-your-dreams-told-you-about. But then again I'm an intellectual, one of those already forlorn and forgotten intellectuals of Jerusalem. He could never understand that, yet it doesn't help my feeling for wanting him even when knowing he already might want others, simpler ones, heavier ones... to inflate his ego and his self-loathing pity. As if I weren't there ever. The pain doesn't subdue these days but I find ways around it, around his silence, around my own silence. My soul-to-soul fidelity is still unmovable.
He can hide in the other end of the screen, but he can't hide from my soul. That poisonous bitch that has damaged so many unknowledgeable souls in her endeavours. After all there's nothing I have to fear. I betrayed my country several times, my parents and my wealth. Betrayed the academy and turned my back on those friends I had for a lifetime. Each and every one of them remembers me possibly quite often, and they remember those books and those poems, those place and those careers I pushed them into. The unbearable ode. Perhaps suffering is the real nature of men. It's his fault after all, he causes himself to suffer, and makes me suffer too. And the world is content. In any case it's irrelevant at this very point, how long does it take to forget a friend? To really forget? Maybe three or four lives, the mind is a strange apparatus. I read in the news last week a guy age 18 and another guy age 19 were hung publicly in Iran, after being held in prison for a year and having been given 228 whippings. That shouldn't surprise a western reader. The only difference is that they were killed for being homosexuals, for loving each other and for letting it continue up to the point of sexual intercourse. Yet here we're, V. in America, A. in Israel. Busy with metaphysical issues to be or not to be. Ha! In someway I wish many people would die, so we could learn a lesson. But as history takes its course our memory grows shorter and shorter. No one cares about anything but himself, and that includes god. Funny, I avenged myself to one of the persons I love the most with a person who loves me but doesn't want to, therefore prefers to ignore me because it's easier yet being unsmart enough to leave traces of his steps as for me to realize the sad state of affairs. Well, one thing is clear. I won't sit home and wait for a lifetime, no one will. And no one dies of love, except in Russian novels.
Who will regret all this? NO ONE.
My sleeping pills are working just fine, sleeping at least twelve hours a day, but my mind doesn't sleep, my cravings never stop and my desires just grow stronger. Coward, that's the word. Coward. I know this is an electronic blog, but it's MY electronic blog, and I'm constitutionally entitled to write anything I want, you like it or not. Coward.
But there're a few things I can say, despite myself. I definitely love this guy, not with a desperate love that breaks all the rules of cognition and understanding, but rather full with a void of understanding. Sure. I know it doesn't make sense at all. He achieved quite a few purposes in my life, unknowingly. It's funny to think the role other peoples play in our lives, it's almost uncanny. Through Vitaly I avenged my honour for once at all, I avenged myself and destroyed that irrational myth the journalist and me built together with his crueltly on my very own pain for all this time. He's hurting now and I know it, and I wonder if he'll ever address me again because I know I've broken a chain of events that led us through it, a broken of events that exposed my weaknesses in their highest pathos and portrayed me as a 21st century Antigone. In the other hand it's funny because V. loves me too, but his problem is that he doesn't want to, me in the other want so desperately want to love him, oh well! It's so pathetic for someone like me writing this shit. But after all I still go to meetings of Zionist political groups, engage myself in philosophical conversations lasting for hours and hours with my grandma Chaya and send used books with long dedicatory explanations to someone who despite himself refuses to address me. But I no longer care, I'm contemptuously loyal, my fidelity to him is unmovable, and it is not the kind of fidelity between husband and wife or between boyfriend and boyfriend, because I can feel him and I feel him fall too, I feel him guilty too. He is just too young to understand that fidelity isn't counted by the number of erotic endeavour that postmodern men engage themselves with anonymous men. The flesh and the soul have different needs, and I just don't need to know more about this. He's beautiful, young, appealing. I'm in the other hand no less beautiful, yet dark and sometimes irreversibly dreadful, and I ain't no longer young at least in that respect. I'm not the kind of look-for-a-type-of-man-your-dreams-told-you-about. But then again I'm an intellectual, one of those already forlorn and forgotten intellectuals of Jerusalem. He could never understand that, yet it doesn't help my feeling for wanting him even when knowing he already might want others, simpler ones, heavier ones... to inflate his ego and his self-loathing pity. As if I weren't there ever. The pain doesn't subdue these days but I find ways around it, around his silence, around my own silence. My soul-to-soul fidelity is still unmovable.
He can hide in the other end of the screen, but he can't hide from my soul. That poisonous bitch that has damaged so many unknowledgeable souls in her endeavours. After all there's nothing I have to fear. I betrayed my country several times, my parents and my wealth. Betrayed the academy and turned my back on those friends I had for a lifetime. Each and every one of them remembers me possibly quite often, and they remember those books and those poems, those place and those careers I pushed them into. The unbearable ode. Perhaps suffering is the real nature of men. It's his fault after all, he causes himself to suffer, and makes me suffer too. And the world is content. In any case it's irrelevant at this very point, how long does it take to forget a friend? To really forget? Maybe three or four lives, the mind is a strange apparatus. I read in the news last week a guy age 18 and another guy age 19 were hung publicly in Iran, after being held in prison for a year and having been given 228 whippings. That shouldn't surprise a western reader. The only difference is that they were killed for being homosexuals, for loving each other and for letting it continue up to the point of sexual intercourse. Yet here we're, V. in America, A. in Israel. Busy with metaphysical issues to be or not to be. Ha! In someway I wish many people would die, so we could learn a lesson. But as history takes its course our memory grows shorter and shorter. No one cares about anything but himself, and that includes god. Funny, I avenged myself to one of the persons I love the most with a person who loves me but doesn't want to, therefore prefers to ignore me because it's easier yet being unsmart enough to leave traces of his steps as for me to realize the sad state of affairs. Well, one thing is clear. I won't sit home and wait for a lifetime, no one will. And no one dies of love, except in Russian novels.
Who will regret all this? NO ONE.
My sleeping pills are working just fine, sleeping at least twelve hours a day, but my mind doesn't sleep, my cravings never stop and my desires just grow stronger. Coward, that's the word. Coward. I know this is an electronic blog, but it's MY electronic blog, and I'm constitutionally entitled to write anything I want, you like it or not. Coward.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Better now
Well.... a mood swing for a change. I'm just too lazy to sit and write a journal and I always feel more comfortable with typing, after all it's easier to remember those thoughts I've been thinking even in those days when I'm not thinking any thoughts. Last evening and this morning I awoke to those horrible pangs of pain, of deep emotional pain, irrational and irreversible. Those feelings that make you regret being alive at all, being yourself at all.
Things turn out exactly the way you didn't expect, and that's one of the greatest highlights of human lives, you can't plan anything in advance, you can't promise a good deal of things and whenever you've got the chance to make an "educated" decision on whether to go on this trip or to buy that present for such-and-such there's no way to establish comparisons, because you live only one life, and as such there's no way how you can know whether such is right or wrong. Yesterday it all seemed like a beautiful day, didn't write any letters and didn't hold any thoughts in my mind, basically concerned about nothing.
I heard the following story from my adoptive grandmother, Chaya Liberman. Her father was born in a shteytl in Russia, I can't remember exactly where, but it was some god forsaken place that started with an "O". Her mother was born in Russia too and thanks to her provincial life she didn't speak a word of Russian, but rather a broken Slavic Yiddisch and then a broken Yiddisch German. They were raised up in a generation about a hundred years ago and because they were poorer than a rat, their only motivation in life was their ideologies, Zionism and Bundism after all. Mr.Such-and-Such was a Jewish atheist communist. With the turmoils of early 20th century Russia he and his wife immigrated to the Argentine where they settled in a small village even smaller and more pathetic than their shteytl in Russia. My grandmother grew up there, in the Argentinean countryside, she attended catholic schools like most of her fellow correligionaries and although there was not any attempt to teach them about the Jewish religion she knew from the earliest childhood that she was a Jew, that it was a bad thing and that her father hated contemptuously the religiously-observant Jew who lived next door. The story is beyond all mermerizing fascination but I'm unable to make of it a literary piece at this very moment.
Then we had a conversation about how people lived and loved before the IT era, before television and the internet. For a state-of-the-art sucker like me it is impossible to think about a world without television, airplanes and internet. Then she told me a beautiful story, that reminds me of all those small and meaningless deeds that bring people together in this world, you can call it god (and if so he's a real fuck up) or coincidences, or faith or anything you want. When she was a little girl in that god-forsaken village there was nothing to do, basically other than working in the fields in order to send their children to the "big city" to become doctors and lawyers, from what she tells all the doctors and lawyers in the village were Jewish. But she was a woman, her duties were to graduate from school (whenever they had the means to pay for it) and then later on find a "fine" husband (preferably one who owns a store, for doctors and lawyers were out of the questions, they were to marry off women from the aristocracy, not miserable girls from villages that couldn't afford long stockings in the winter) and bring offspring, someone's got to get the work done.
It took my grandmother at least forty years to realize what she wanted to do in her life, and me her adoptive grandson here in the Land of Israel feel as someone entitled the honor to continue her pursuances. She became a poet, although she wrote only in Spanish as she never really learnt any other language, and spite of more than half a century in the land of Israel her Hebrew can hardly compete with mine, and same goes for her yiddisch. Well, that's another story. She published a few books of poetry with her own money, books that I've been translating into English and Hebrew over the last twelve months, together we founded a literary group based in Tel Aviv whose members were never more than a bunch of frustrated intellectuals and dilettantes, but it's still running. It's been two years. I'm leaving them in two months, she's decided to finish with it for good. It's my fault, I'm the one to blame. I don't care. My grandmother is a poet, and me? I'm just a shadow of one of the greatest women that saw and lived the birth of the State of Israel.
When she was a teenager the Jewish community in the country had a pen-pal club founded by the Youth League of the Zionist Movement in Buenos Aires. There boys and girls from all over the country exchanged letters and built friendships, it was a different world. No one had any money, no one had any education, any aspiration. But nevertheless they all yearned for that "higher something" that couldn't be found anywhere, life was just too real and cold as to be taken as it was. The only thing they had were ideologies, dreams and more dreams. My grandma joined this club and for a couple of years she exchanged letters with a boy from Buenos Aires, the big city, almost twelve hours ride from her village in the valleys. Years went by until she was able to travel to Buenos Aires with her father and there finally she met this boy in a meeting of the Zionist Youth League. They had a community in which they trained (mostly ideologically) a large group of boys and girls that were to be sent to Eretz Yisrael to settle down in the land and join the recently formed (and even not as yet formed) kibbutzim. Chaya at the time was too young to be accepted in the group and she had to return to her village and at age sixteen left her parents (and knowing the conditions of the time it was very unlikely they would see each other ever again) to join the Zionist League. Back then there were two big Zionist movements, Shomer HaTzair and Dror. In other fronts in Europe the Revisionism of Jabotinsky and the movement Chivat Tzion were growing stronger and stronger. Chaya was a member of Dror (the movement disappeared many many years ago and the only remnant of those glorious days are a few settlements of the Shomer HaTzair movement). And because of this boy and those letters anxiously sent and received over the years she became a Zionist herself and during this time she met Shimon, her husband for more than five decades.
They embarked to Eretz Yisrael shortly after the establishment of the State, boarding a ship filled with poor Italian immigrants and a bunch of Jewish youngsters whose only desire was to return to that Land of the Ancestors. She came to Israel and witnessed the growth of the state as a founding member of a kibbutz located in the Negev. Years later she returned to the Argentine, resided in Buenos Aires and her children were born and raised up between Israel and Argentine. Today she's a mother of five children, grandmother of some fourteen children, greatgrandmother of one and adoptive grandmother of a gay kid. Me. One day I need to write this story down, to remember who we are, not to forget ever, all those chapters of history that have been deleted by the internet, by casual sex, by infatuations and mobile phones. Of those days that will never be again. Of those days that no one remembers.
All that made me think of how Vitaly and me met, and how we forget each about, how we forgive each other. Life is made up by an endless number of meaningless events that determine the course of our lives and there's not much freedom of choice. Not even in the United States of America, and certainly not in the Middle East. It seems we're condemned to live our lives, and there's nothing you can do other than gathering little details just in the case that we may be right one day, perhaps after we will day. Yesterday I wrote a poem with the title Vitaly, ironically the poem is in Hebrew, I thought about publishing it here but I don't know if it makes sense at all because maybe sometimes he might be popping up here reading my stuff, seeing my naked. Perhaps it's just my ego that makes me think that he thinks about me sometimes and this interests him at all, but it's always healthy to keep some hope. Hope is the only thing that separated the skeptical and the disbeliever from death. It was a while since I last managed to write anything in Hebrew at all, although I must confessed my poem wasn't influenced only by that dreadful memory of him and those pangs of emptiness that stem from sleeping alone without his snoring and his arms around my delicate body as if it were a protective endeavour. It was also influenced by Chaya's story and by a poem of Rachel. I feel a bit unworthy today, but it all will pass as that will pass.
I will take my unhappiness and my sadness anywhere I go, but so do the rest of the humans. I've got nothing to worry about. I've got other worries in anycase, my health deteriorating over time and my willingness to feed myself, questioning by the police because of old and forgotten debts, relatives dying, a frustrated father, a contemptuousness for my very own god and a desperate hate for my very own country, for my hometown. A thousand regrets and those faces I wish I never had to see again. But his memory lingers... and doesn't seem to fade, makes me feel somebody else, somebody special, important. Just like I felt as Chaya made of me a continuation of her 100-years-long story, of her poetry, of her dying Zionism, of her liberalism almost edging on hedonism. I state at his picture sometimes, out of stupidness and it makes me feel loving and loved. It really makes me feel something else beyond the cold minded intellectual, the cruel and cynical survivors that lives within me, makes me feel human and innocent and that feeling is priceless. I have my regrets and my dreams also in regard to him, I'm not a pessimist and maybe I'm more romantic and dreaming than most people, in my very own way. I yearn for his smile, yet I'm feeling just fine. Musical almost.
The day before yesterday I found myself back home, in good old Tel Aviv. I despised it. I found myself being "that" I can no longer be, "that" for whom death is a secure road, wasted way behind his time. But I learnt a lesson from Eyal, my journalist friend who desperately wanted me sexually for such a long time. He told me, "You're too precious to waste yourself with a guy like me, you need someone that will love you like children do, someone who cries, who walks off in the middle of the night and who knows how to say I'm sorry". I don't think I'm "that" worthy and life has proven it so, but worthier now more than ever. I love Chaya, that woman I'll never forget, that woman who taught me the value of ideologies, of beliefs, of creating an image of yourself as chief ruler of your own world, who taught me the meaning of art. I doubt whether she'll live much longer after I'll leave and I wonder if I'll ever remember it as my unhappiness and my sadness will be walking with me past my shadow in the streets of New York.
I'm wondering.... "someone who will make me feel as if I'm living an extraordinary life". Oh hell, my life is just too extraordinary at times. They say alcohol is just like life, it must be drunk in small sips. But I'm stubborn. Life and alcohol altogether I drink in long and deep sips, and my drunkenness never leaves me, fortunately. This autumn will come, next will too. Life's gotta be extraordinary after all. Don't you think? (That's not something I'm asking myself, rather....). I've got to finish a book today, find some park (got enough cigarettes) and a bottle of cola maybe. Then I gotta mail the book to America tomorrow. Maybe it'll get estranged on the way, someone will steal it, he'll never read it, maybe the neighbor will or the garbage man. It's interesting to think about it without being able to answer at all. I wish you would realize how extraordinary it is.
A.
Things turn out exactly the way you didn't expect, and that's one of the greatest highlights of human lives, you can't plan anything in advance, you can't promise a good deal of things and whenever you've got the chance to make an "educated" decision on whether to go on this trip or to buy that present for such-and-such there's no way to establish comparisons, because you live only one life, and as such there's no way how you can know whether such is right or wrong. Yesterday it all seemed like a beautiful day, didn't write any letters and didn't hold any thoughts in my mind, basically concerned about nothing.
I heard the following story from my adoptive grandmother, Chaya Liberman. Her father was born in a shteytl in Russia, I can't remember exactly where, but it was some god forsaken place that started with an "O". Her mother was born in Russia too and thanks to her provincial life she didn't speak a word of Russian, but rather a broken Slavic Yiddisch and then a broken Yiddisch German. They were raised up in a generation about a hundred years ago and because they were poorer than a rat, their only motivation in life was their ideologies, Zionism and Bundism after all. Mr.Such-and-Such was a Jewish atheist communist. With the turmoils of early 20th century Russia he and his wife immigrated to the Argentine where they settled in a small village even smaller and more pathetic than their shteytl in Russia. My grandmother grew up there, in the Argentinean countryside, she attended catholic schools like most of her fellow correligionaries and although there was not any attempt to teach them about the Jewish religion she knew from the earliest childhood that she was a Jew, that it was a bad thing and that her father hated contemptuously the religiously-observant Jew who lived next door. The story is beyond all mermerizing fascination but I'm unable to make of it a literary piece at this very moment.
Then we had a conversation about how people lived and loved before the IT era, before television and the internet. For a state-of-the-art sucker like me it is impossible to think about a world without television, airplanes and internet. Then she told me a beautiful story, that reminds me of all those small and meaningless deeds that bring people together in this world, you can call it god (and if so he's a real fuck up) or coincidences, or faith or anything you want. When she was a little girl in that god-forsaken village there was nothing to do, basically other than working in the fields in order to send their children to the "big city" to become doctors and lawyers, from what she tells all the doctors and lawyers in the village were Jewish. But she was a woman, her duties were to graduate from school (whenever they had the means to pay for it) and then later on find a "fine" husband (preferably one who owns a store, for doctors and lawyers were out of the questions, they were to marry off women from the aristocracy, not miserable girls from villages that couldn't afford long stockings in the winter) and bring offspring, someone's got to get the work done.
It took my grandmother at least forty years to realize what she wanted to do in her life, and me her adoptive grandson here in the Land of Israel feel as someone entitled the honor to continue her pursuances. She became a poet, although she wrote only in Spanish as she never really learnt any other language, and spite of more than half a century in the land of Israel her Hebrew can hardly compete with mine, and same goes for her yiddisch. Well, that's another story. She published a few books of poetry with her own money, books that I've been translating into English and Hebrew over the last twelve months, together we founded a literary group based in Tel Aviv whose members were never more than a bunch of frustrated intellectuals and dilettantes, but it's still running. It's been two years. I'm leaving them in two months, she's decided to finish with it for good. It's my fault, I'm the one to blame. I don't care. My grandmother is a poet, and me? I'm just a shadow of one of the greatest women that saw and lived the birth of the State of Israel.
When she was a teenager the Jewish community in the country had a pen-pal club founded by the Youth League of the Zionist Movement in Buenos Aires. There boys and girls from all over the country exchanged letters and built friendships, it was a different world. No one had any money, no one had any education, any aspiration. But nevertheless they all yearned for that "higher something" that couldn't be found anywhere, life was just too real and cold as to be taken as it was. The only thing they had were ideologies, dreams and more dreams. My grandma joined this club and for a couple of years she exchanged letters with a boy from Buenos Aires, the big city, almost twelve hours ride from her village in the valleys. Years went by until she was able to travel to Buenos Aires with her father and there finally she met this boy in a meeting of the Zionist Youth League. They had a community in which they trained (mostly ideologically) a large group of boys and girls that were to be sent to Eretz Yisrael to settle down in the land and join the recently formed (and even not as yet formed) kibbutzim. Chaya at the time was too young to be accepted in the group and she had to return to her village and at age sixteen left her parents (and knowing the conditions of the time it was very unlikely they would see each other ever again) to join the Zionist League. Back then there were two big Zionist movements, Shomer HaTzair and Dror. In other fronts in Europe the Revisionism of Jabotinsky and the movement Chivat Tzion were growing stronger and stronger. Chaya was a member of Dror (the movement disappeared many many years ago and the only remnant of those glorious days are a few settlements of the Shomer HaTzair movement). And because of this boy and those letters anxiously sent and received over the years she became a Zionist herself and during this time she met Shimon, her husband for more than five decades.
They embarked to Eretz Yisrael shortly after the establishment of the State, boarding a ship filled with poor Italian immigrants and a bunch of Jewish youngsters whose only desire was to return to that Land of the Ancestors. She came to Israel and witnessed the growth of the state as a founding member of a kibbutz located in the Negev. Years later she returned to the Argentine, resided in Buenos Aires and her children were born and raised up between Israel and Argentine. Today she's a mother of five children, grandmother of some fourteen children, greatgrandmother of one and adoptive grandmother of a gay kid. Me. One day I need to write this story down, to remember who we are, not to forget ever, all those chapters of history that have been deleted by the internet, by casual sex, by infatuations and mobile phones. Of those days that will never be again. Of those days that no one remembers.
All that made me think of how Vitaly and me met, and how we forget each about, how we forgive each other. Life is made up by an endless number of meaningless events that determine the course of our lives and there's not much freedom of choice. Not even in the United States of America, and certainly not in the Middle East. It seems we're condemned to live our lives, and there's nothing you can do other than gathering little details just in the case that we may be right one day, perhaps after we will day. Yesterday I wrote a poem with the title Vitaly, ironically the poem is in Hebrew, I thought about publishing it here but I don't know if it makes sense at all because maybe sometimes he might be popping up here reading my stuff, seeing my naked. Perhaps it's just my ego that makes me think that he thinks about me sometimes and this interests him at all, but it's always healthy to keep some hope. Hope is the only thing that separated the skeptical and the disbeliever from death. It was a while since I last managed to write anything in Hebrew at all, although I must confessed my poem wasn't influenced only by that dreadful memory of him and those pangs of emptiness that stem from sleeping alone without his snoring and his arms around my delicate body as if it were a protective endeavour. It was also influenced by Chaya's story and by a poem of Rachel. I feel a bit unworthy today, but it all will pass as that will pass.
I will take my unhappiness and my sadness anywhere I go, but so do the rest of the humans. I've got nothing to worry about. I've got other worries in anycase, my health deteriorating over time and my willingness to feed myself, questioning by the police because of old and forgotten debts, relatives dying, a frustrated father, a contemptuousness for my very own god and a desperate hate for my very own country, for my hometown. A thousand regrets and those faces I wish I never had to see again. But his memory lingers... and doesn't seem to fade, makes me feel somebody else, somebody special, important. Just like I felt as Chaya made of me a continuation of her 100-years-long story, of her poetry, of her dying Zionism, of her liberalism almost edging on hedonism. I state at his picture sometimes, out of stupidness and it makes me feel loving and loved. It really makes me feel something else beyond the cold minded intellectual, the cruel and cynical survivors that lives within me, makes me feel human and innocent and that feeling is priceless. I have my regrets and my dreams also in regard to him, I'm not a pessimist and maybe I'm more romantic and dreaming than most people, in my very own way. I yearn for his smile, yet I'm feeling just fine. Musical almost.
The day before yesterday I found myself back home, in good old Tel Aviv. I despised it. I found myself being "that" I can no longer be, "that" for whom death is a secure road, wasted way behind his time. But I learnt a lesson from Eyal, my journalist friend who desperately wanted me sexually for such a long time. He told me, "You're too precious to waste yourself with a guy like me, you need someone that will love you like children do, someone who cries, who walks off in the middle of the night and who knows how to say I'm sorry". I don't think I'm "that" worthy and life has proven it so, but worthier now more than ever. I love Chaya, that woman I'll never forget, that woman who taught me the value of ideologies, of beliefs, of creating an image of yourself as chief ruler of your own world, who taught me the meaning of art. I doubt whether she'll live much longer after I'll leave and I wonder if I'll ever remember it as my unhappiness and my sadness will be walking with me past my shadow in the streets of New York.
I'm wondering.... "someone who will make me feel as if I'm living an extraordinary life". Oh hell, my life is just too extraordinary at times. They say alcohol is just like life, it must be drunk in small sips. But I'm stubborn. Life and alcohol altogether I drink in long and deep sips, and my drunkenness never leaves me, fortunately. This autumn will come, next will too. Life's gotta be extraordinary after all. Don't you think? (That's not something I'm asking myself, rather....). I've got to finish a book today, find some park (got enough cigarettes) and a bottle of cola maybe. Then I gotta mail the book to America tomorrow. Maybe it'll get estranged on the way, someone will steal it, he'll never read it, maybe the neighbor will or the garbage man. It's interesting to think about it without being able to answer at all. I wish you would realize how extraordinary it is.
A.
Silence
No poetry today
Perhaps not ever again
Wasteful
Wasted
On sleeping pills
These summer days
Dreaming of that autumn
That will never come
Crying deep inside
But never shed a tear
He writes me no longer
A vacuum
An emptiness
That is most certainly physical
A clouded sight
I miss him
But who seems to care?
Not even me
Punishment
Punishment
And more punishment
A physical pain that precludes sleep
That is all what is left
No memories
No hopes in store
Nothing can change this
My prison
This city
My penalty
These people
And my silences
No sleep at night
Even with sleeping pills
Maybe they will kill me one day
Despite themselves
Despite myself
And no one will have missed out
My fault
After all
Who am I to judge?
God up in heavens
All alone
Unlike him
Alone but with himself
Riding in the train
Looking out the window
Choosing to ignore
Choosing to blind
Choosing to deflect
I remain unchanged
I remain in pain
I yearn for silence
I yield some silences
And from death
I feel close
Not such death of the body
When the soul is then bygone
A death that is human
That is kind
A death that is endless
In its very own time
And he is the murderer
His silence is
Again
It's all overemphasized
I have other troubles
Other sorrows
I can barely stand myself
Devoid of anything
No guilt for today
More sleeping pills maybe
Till this all will end
My prison
Down here
My head
My thoughts
A chain
A mistake
That's what it is
More sleeping pills
And procrastinations
Adieu
Perhaps not ever again
Wasteful
Wasted
On sleeping pills
These summer days
Dreaming of that autumn
That will never come
Crying deep inside
But never shed a tear
He writes me no longer
A vacuum
An emptiness
That is most certainly physical
A clouded sight
I miss him
But who seems to care?
Not even me
Punishment
Punishment
And more punishment
A physical pain that precludes sleep
That is all what is left
No memories
No hopes in store
Nothing can change this
My prison
This city
My penalty
These people
And my silences
No sleep at night
Even with sleeping pills
Maybe they will kill me one day
Despite themselves
Despite myself
And no one will have missed out
My fault
After all
Who am I to judge?
God up in heavens
All alone
Unlike him
Alone but with himself
Riding in the train
Looking out the window
Choosing to ignore
Choosing to blind
Choosing to deflect
I remain unchanged
I remain in pain
I yearn for silence
I yield some silences
And from death
I feel close
Not such death of the body
When the soul is then bygone
A death that is human
That is kind
A death that is endless
In its very own time
And he is the murderer
His silence is
Again
It's all overemphasized
I have other troubles
Other sorrows
I can barely stand myself
Devoid of anything
No guilt for today
More sleeping pills maybe
Till this all will end
My prison
Down here
My head
My thoughts
A chain
A mistake
That's what it is
More sleeping pills
And procrastinations
Adieu
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Juliana
12.06.05
Kfar Masaryk
Israel
I do no longer remember the last time when I heard you, or when I stopped hearing you... and the same goes for David.. such intense friendships, a young endeavour lost in time as if it did no longer matter. I guess it should have been some time near the beginning of the century, as meaningless as it should sound. The trees were standing anew in the courtyard of your house and we used to wander beneath their cold shade in those procrastinating days of April not having any other concerns; we were both in the middle of our teens and back then it seemed as if time was never going to run away, as if time was never going to escape from our hands and sew itself in an endless thread that would conduct us exactly to the same places where we're standing upon right now, to our current beings.
I wonder endlessly if you will ever read these lines and whether it has any meaning at all, whether it matters at all or it just does not. As meaningful as those clear days and their skies seemed to us back then nowadays they tell me how worth it was living them back then, and how precious of a memory they constitute in these darkening times, although summer sprang and the shades of melancholly and sweet divagation have abandoned us already in a bygone murmur. Those days tell me nowadays how afraid we were and how happy we were, how innocent were our lies and how careful were our attempts to make our lives better, to make of our world a better place and how well-constructed we were, such radicals! It also seems as if of today those odes would be long bygone, and lost in the precarious senses of adulthood that have stolen from us the light we struggled for in those precious days that back then seemed to have been in store for ever, waiting to be taken over for a million years, daring to be taken and yet waiting.
It was your birthday and we were both nervous, I arrived to your house as we had agreed and the portico welcomed us with a river of smiles and contemptuous faces that would lead us into impersonal conversations, that kind of conversations you can hold only with those long forgotten buddies that have been in the most recondit and hidden thorough places of your mind, of your soulless thinking, of your radicalism, of your existentialist constructs. No more philosophies were needed and we escaped the noise produced by the social conventions and the friendly conversations of your friends and relatives. The sweet smiles of your girlfriends avoided us and led us altogether into that long and cold conversation beneath the tree, we both had just started smoking and the filthy smell of the wet wood combined with our breath and those clouds of smoke seemed to become one with ourselves and give place to the most intimate conversation we could have ever had. A conversation about nothing, a conversation without meaning. A conversation that was rather a dual monolog, each one of us seemed to have learned his lines thoroughly.
Until then we had been separated by screens of purples and greens, by a superimposed modernism and a sad teenage longing for a more interesting life, for some lost meaning, for some never found meaning. The streets always seemed familiar to me ever since although I was never to return and lay in the darkness beneath the trees, whose species I no longer remember. I do remember your mother and your father though, even though I cannot tell what they looked like, probably it's only your mother's voice on the phone calling you to the line what I remember. It was late already and we burnt the pop corn trying to avoid the radiation of the microwave before that movie we never watched, before that intimate conversation we simply never had. Your were slightly taller than I was, and back then much more prettier... and I doubt if nowadays you're still as happy and insecure as you were in those days. I'm myself pretty different so that you know, more beautiful and less happy, more tranquil and less idealistic, devoid of constructs.
With difficulty I remember the country itself, although the road to your house and the adjacent streets are clear to me as if I had seen them yesterday. They were of some candid ochre and the walls of the golf court surrounded the opposite side... all the houses in the neighborhood were of some refined country antique and we could barely see the cars passing by. After all I was a man, a grown up man for my age and hence I was allowed to cross roads and avenues until I made it to the pharmacy so as to buy cigarettes as I had promised you. We returned to the trees and smoked beneath'em. One day many months later I returned there with my aunt, I believe there was some famous patisserie, to which I do not wish I had invited you once... it seemed not as the most appropriate place for a un unkindred heart like yours and mine. We preferred to stand up smoking and dressed in leather beneath bridges or in noisy shopping centres where our intelligence would enable us to criticize the provincial manners of our country, after all we both belonged to a different social class, in despite of your having a problem to accept it. Oh! the home country, I wish I could remember it any longer.
Not remembering how or when I am simply somewhere else, somehow else... and paradoxically beneath the hideous summers I remember those streets, I hear the rain as it falls in my cap, as it pours some sense of intellectual burgueois on my sights; you know... I used to be always dreaming, now I'm trying very hard, very hard... to dream, to fall asleep and to daydream. It doesn't mean I'm bitter, I'm just different, I'm just someone else. In the middle of the most meaningful of lives, in the most interesting of lifes, in the most paradoxical and anacronistic chapters of history; amidst all of those I can think of those days, can't I? It isn't precisely longing, but more of a sweet memory. One of those meaningless moments of your childhood suddenly turned into precious chapters of memory when you're far away, when you're cold inside, when you're in need of some justification, of some redemption. Specially when you're done, when you've grown.
The TV is on tonight, American series, endless glasses of waters and nicotinamide, I'm not particularly depressed, nor thoughtful you could say, this isn't what once was, this is not. It's just me trying to find a way not to forget that there were some days, when we were happier than today, that there were some days, when the sun shone, when the night ended, when the Aurora came. Unlike these days, mid the summer, in the Land of Israel, as yet we haven't seen the sun, not even in the Galilee, have we as yet seen the sun. I wonder if you've ever been to a place like the Galilee, like the Land of Israel. I wonder if it even interests you or if you're really a student of history as you promised. Maybe you just became a businesswoman, like your mother, like all of them, like those "them" of your stories.
I did keep my promises though, and strived barely as to live a reckless life, like those Tolstoian lives that made up the whole range of intellectual aspirations springing from the frustration of our upper-middle class sense of boredom. I became a philologist or rather never stopped being one, until I became postmodern, awfully. Then became a linguist and on my own right a writer, being more of a writer than anything else, a writer that barely writed but undoubtedly a writer. I wasn't so happy though, hope you were, I so much do. It's not a big concern, for we're still as young as time, but unfortunately not younger than we were, back then, oh no. It's all beautiful here though, just strange, I wouldn't even want to discuss it. I guess it's my private secret, a secret I kept even from those days, an unfaulty companion, a default companion. I wish I had written these lines before, but oh well you know what it boils down to, guilt. Your favourite word.
I haven't forgotten myself these days, quite the opposite. Home is still far, and late is tonight. The endless lines that were written between those days and now form an invisible thread that only my suitcases can see, for thus I left, so henceforth I came. A certain winter day, I denied those pasts, I denied those presents, I denied everything. In a bag I packed my sort of memories, and those letters you never wrote me, for after all we had never been in love and letters you had never written me, or I think once you did, but it was stranged on the way. I remember how it happened and I'm not going to tell it to you now for it's not pertinent, my life hangs on a wire and how unsorted I am, oh girl! You go and get yourself some benzedrine tonight.
I never called you again, I never wrote you a line because I didn't remember your address, because I never remembered you up to this very day. Back then everything was forbidden, feelings were forbidden, the world of existence within itself contained in itself. It was all so poetic and philosophical, so well-mannered and idealistic, so well constructed. I don't know about you, but at this side of the ocean it doesn't exist no more, and even with the clear blue sky we still yearn for some light, we look forward to a day, when it'll be indeed day. I don't want to attack you with questions from those days, for silence was beautiful and was sacred, such as those faces we no longer remember, you obviously shouldn't remember me at all.
But I do have something to say, how are you? And I'm sorry I hung the phone on you that day. You could never imagine it would be the last time, not at age fifteen. Could you?
Kfar Masaryk
Israel
I do no longer remember the last time when I heard you, or when I stopped hearing you... and the same goes for David.. such intense friendships, a young endeavour lost in time as if it did no longer matter. I guess it should have been some time near the beginning of the century, as meaningless as it should sound. The trees were standing anew in the courtyard of your house and we used to wander beneath their cold shade in those procrastinating days of April not having any other concerns; we were both in the middle of our teens and back then it seemed as if time was never going to run away, as if time was never going to escape from our hands and sew itself in an endless thread that would conduct us exactly to the same places where we're standing upon right now, to our current beings.
I wonder endlessly if you will ever read these lines and whether it has any meaning at all, whether it matters at all or it just does not. As meaningful as those clear days and their skies seemed to us back then nowadays they tell me how worth it was living them back then, and how precious of a memory they constitute in these darkening times, although summer sprang and the shades of melancholly and sweet divagation have abandoned us already in a bygone murmur. Those days tell me nowadays how afraid we were and how happy we were, how innocent were our lies and how careful were our attempts to make our lives better, to make of our world a better place and how well-constructed we were, such radicals! It also seems as if of today those odes would be long bygone, and lost in the precarious senses of adulthood that have stolen from us the light we struggled for in those precious days that back then seemed to have been in store for ever, waiting to be taken over for a million years, daring to be taken and yet waiting.
It was your birthday and we were both nervous, I arrived to your house as we had agreed and the portico welcomed us with a river of smiles and contemptuous faces that would lead us into impersonal conversations, that kind of conversations you can hold only with those long forgotten buddies that have been in the most recondit and hidden thorough places of your mind, of your soulless thinking, of your radicalism, of your existentialist constructs. No more philosophies were needed and we escaped the noise produced by the social conventions and the friendly conversations of your friends and relatives. The sweet smiles of your girlfriends avoided us and led us altogether into that long and cold conversation beneath the tree, we both had just started smoking and the filthy smell of the wet wood combined with our breath and those clouds of smoke seemed to become one with ourselves and give place to the most intimate conversation we could have ever had. A conversation about nothing, a conversation without meaning. A conversation that was rather a dual monolog, each one of us seemed to have learned his lines thoroughly.
Until then we had been separated by screens of purples and greens, by a superimposed modernism and a sad teenage longing for a more interesting life, for some lost meaning, for some never found meaning. The streets always seemed familiar to me ever since although I was never to return and lay in the darkness beneath the trees, whose species I no longer remember. I do remember your mother and your father though, even though I cannot tell what they looked like, probably it's only your mother's voice on the phone calling you to the line what I remember. It was late already and we burnt the pop corn trying to avoid the radiation of the microwave before that movie we never watched, before that intimate conversation we simply never had. Your were slightly taller than I was, and back then much more prettier... and I doubt if nowadays you're still as happy and insecure as you were in those days. I'm myself pretty different so that you know, more beautiful and less happy, more tranquil and less idealistic, devoid of constructs.
With difficulty I remember the country itself, although the road to your house and the adjacent streets are clear to me as if I had seen them yesterday. They were of some candid ochre and the walls of the golf court surrounded the opposite side... all the houses in the neighborhood were of some refined country antique and we could barely see the cars passing by. After all I was a man, a grown up man for my age and hence I was allowed to cross roads and avenues until I made it to the pharmacy so as to buy cigarettes as I had promised you. We returned to the trees and smoked beneath'em. One day many months later I returned there with my aunt, I believe there was some famous patisserie, to which I do not wish I had invited you once... it seemed not as the most appropriate place for a un unkindred heart like yours and mine. We preferred to stand up smoking and dressed in leather beneath bridges or in noisy shopping centres where our intelligence would enable us to criticize the provincial manners of our country, after all we both belonged to a different social class, in despite of your having a problem to accept it. Oh! the home country, I wish I could remember it any longer.
Not remembering how or when I am simply somewhere else, somehow else... and paradoxically beneath the hideous summers I remember those streets, I hear the rain as it falls in my cap, as it pours some sense of intellectual burgueois on my sights; you know... I used to be always dreaming, now I'm trying very hard, very hard... to dream, to fall asleep and to daydream. It doesn't mean I'm bitter, I'm just different, I'm just someone else. In the middle of the most meaningful of lives, in the most interesting of lifes, in the most paradoxical and anacronistic chapters of history; amidst all of those I can think of those days, can't I? It isn't precisely longing, but more of a sweet memory. One of those meaningless moments of your childhood suddenly turned into precious chapters of memory when you're far away, when you're cold inside, when you're in need of some justification, of some redemption. Specially when you're done, when you've grown.
The TV is on tonight, American series, endless glasses of waters and nicotinamide, I'm not particularly depressed, nor thoughtful you could say, this isn't what once was, this is not. It's just me trying to find a way not to forget that there were some days, when we were happier than today, that there were some days, when the sun shone, when the night ended, when the Aurora came. Unlike these days, mid the summer, in the Land of Israel, as yet we haven't seen the sun, not even in the Galilee, have we as yet seen the sun. I wonder if you've ever been to a place like the Galilee, like the Land of Israel. I wonder if it even interests you or if you're really a student of history as you promised. Maybe you just became a businesswoman, like your mother, like all of them, like those "them" of your stories.
I did keep my promises though, and strived barely as to live a reckless life, like those Tolstoian lives that made up the whole range of intellectual aspirations springing from the frustration of our upper-middle class sense of boredom. I became a philologist or rather never stopped being one, until I became postmodern, awfully. Then became a linguist and on my own right a writer, being more of a writer than anything else, a writer that barely writed but undoubtedly a writer. I wasn't so happy though, hope you were, I so much do. It's not a big concern, for we're still as young as time, but unfortunately not younger than we were, back then, oh no. It's all beautiful here though, just strange, I wouldn't even want to discuss it. I guess it's my private secret, a secret I kept even from those days, an unfaulty companion, a default companion. I wish I had written these lines before, but oh well you know what it boils down to, guilt. Your favourite word.
I haven't forgotten myself these days, quite the opposite. Home is still far, and late is tonight. The endless lines that were written between those days and now form an invisible thread that only my suitcases can see, for thus I left, so henceforth I came. A certain winter day, I denied those pasts, I denied those presents, I denied everything. In a bag I packed my sort of memories, and those letters you never wrote me, for after all we had never been in love and letters you had never written me, or I think once you did, but it was stranged on the way. I remember how it happened and I'm not going to tell it to you now for it's not pertinent, my life hangs on a wire and how unsorted I am, oh girl! You go and get yourself some benzedrine tonight.
I never called you again, I never wrote you a line because I didn't remember your address, because I never remembered you up to this very day. Back then everything was forbidden, feelings were forbidden, the world of existence within itself contained in itself. It was all so poetic and philosophical, so well-mannered and idealistic, so well constructed. I don't know about you, but at this side of the ocean it doesn't exist no more, and even with the clear blue sky we still yearn for some light, we look forward to a day, when it'll be indeed day. I don't want to attack you with questions from those days, for silence was beautiful and was sacred, such as those faces we no longer remember, you obviously shouldn't remember me at all.
But I do have something to say, how are you? And I'm sorry I hung the phone on you that day. You could never imagine it would be the last time, not at age fifteen. Could you?
Saturday, May 14, 2005
12 minutes
As if 12 minutes would matter
No difference does it make
The thin line between soul and thought
That makes us different
From our deadly counterparts
Our consciences
And those hails, to other odes
To forsaken lords
To those ties I've worn
To those ties I've formed
As if it would make no difference no more
We no longer count the minutes
For our roads are largely exposed
And its end biffucates no more
In those colours
That smelt like lust
That smelt like dust
From a youthful idealization
That he no longer enthralls
But those minutes did make a difference
Between the East and my soul
Between colours of other peoples
Between their faces and thier sores
Making one very picture
A vane piece of thought
Those minutes did matter
And separated us from death
Separated us from life
For death is only a spiritual toll
Those minutes did make a difference
For all what it counts
If at all
My dreams kept me alive
And my life surrounded their voice
As to hear a little murmur
That would encourage us to carry on
To live through a next day
Where watches would not run
Where needles would not knock
And our roads would end
In electronic procrastinations
And in deserts he longer himself saw
Those minutes did count
My dreams did count
My last spark of life
My last drops of blood
My last drops of soul
A solider stopped on the way
And questions asked not
For in my eyes he saw
We were drowning all the same
In the same sand
Such as water
That contained many souls
With his dreams and theirs
Also mine, not as yet forlorn
He also dreamt those dreams that I had dreamt
When I was awake
When I breathe
When I lived
It was the pull of life
What no one could take away from us
It will never drift
It will never weaken
Even in the Middle East
Our dreams will never be like sand
And the minutes actually did count
For love they counted
For life they counted
For lies they counted
And the dreamer is alone
But nevertheless a song
And the minutes always counted
For the needles to clock
For the death to partake
In this lively carnival of souls
No difference does it make
The thin line between soul and thought
That makes us different
From our deadly counterparts
Our consciences
And those hails, to other odes
To forsaken lords
To those ties I've worn
To those ties I've formed
As if it would make no difference no more
We no longer count the minutes
For our roads are largely exposed
And its end biffucates no more
In those colours
That smelt like lust
That smelt like dust
From a youthful idealization
That he no longer enthralls
But those minutes did make a difference
Between the East and my soul
Between colours of other peoples
Between their faces and thier sores
Making one very picture
A vane piece of thought
Those minutes did matter
And separated us from death
Separated us from life
For death is only a spiritual toll
Those minutes did make a difference
For all what it counts
If at all
My dreams kept me alive
And my life surrounded their voice
As to hear a little murmur
That would encourage us to carry on
To live through a next day
Where watches would not run
Where needles would not knock
And our roads would end
In electronic procrastinations
And in deserts he longer himself saw
Those minutes did count
My dreams did count
My last spark of life
My last drops of blood
My last drops of soul
A solider stopped on the way
And questions asked not
For in my eyes he saw
We were drowning all the same
In the same sand
Such as water
That contained many souls
With his dreams and theirs
Also mine, not as yet forlorn
He also dreamt those dreams that I had dreamt
When I was awake
When I breathe
When I lived
It was the pull of life
What no one could take away from us
It will never drift
It will never weaken
Even in the Middle East
Our dreams will never be like sand
And the minutes actually did count
For love they counted
For life they counted
For lies they counted
And the dreamer is alone
But nevertheless a song
And the minutes always counted
For the needles to clock
For the death to partake
In this lively carnival of souls
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Asaf
... And that morning, God didn't knock on your door nor the newspaper came, and you hadn't realized it wasn't morning as yet in spite of those long blue lines that were making up the manifold faces of heavens, giving you an intoxating and banal impression that morning had strucken with a swift smell of aether, such as there was in the days of the creation; even before men knew sorrow or pain of any kind. You again didn't pray, for it was just too late, and unresoluted in regard to your faith, you were resoluted to follow your fate, so the many-coloured home of your father you left, and even wanted to forsake. Your last cigarette poisoned you enough, nevertheless too late. You had made the decision, a child you would become, and you would do any of those things that he would love.
The streets were deserted, but far from being a desert... and the large streets of town seemed to shorten themselves and form threads in front of you as if they were complices of your sinful deeds, of your history; and aiding your escape, your way out of reality, your dream-for-a-day. Different machines of the modern western world were resoluted to halt your march but the leather-coated paviments of the earliest of mornings prevented them from wrongdoing, henceforth as once was, before the creation and recreation of men you were the only living creature on earth and the chemically knot-tight structures of the urban metropolis joined forces together so that you would reach your destination, a first-class flight, well-booked in advance. Maybe some god in heavens was your ally, or probably the dew was coming late that day and didn't notice the beats of your heart. No automobiles halted your way, no second thoughts diverted you, no remebrances would haunt you, not now.
The particularly vertical lines that joined the urban milieu in an instant decomposed themselves to form a thin and well-iluminated highway for which your instincts would make the only passenger, such as a lonely book waiting for the tram, trying to catch a writer in the station or some love story in a bar, as its pages were empty and its heart thirsty of savage lust. There you were, in the middle of the street, whereby your phone would never ring and being far from your home, then no letters would come, no lovers of the past would address you and no intimate momenta would be there in store. Had you not remembered that song you heard last, you could have gone astray and perished; for that's how afraid you were, you are. At that very moment history you didn't have, you were perhaps a little story, a song is all what you had. You were a Schliemann in Troja, or maybe like one of those gods of the Genesis; a word would be your guide through life, you would be a word yourself.
Then the creation spotaneously took place, giving birth to the urbis of the 21st century; machines started to awake as morning approached and other human beings joined your demeanour, unconsciously, probably just running patiently to some unskilled job or returning from a licentious night with a whore. Everything had changed by now, save Selene, who kept watching you in her mortal motherly pain that would condemn her to disappear in the streams of light as her husband would approach, and him Helios, you were unwilling to face; for the Aurora would flow in between his fingers and since early morning play the lyre without a cord with the simple intention of shaping human fate, in musical conspirations of duration, connotation and augment. Only her sounds you wouldn't hear. You were an Argive on caffeine, or maybe just on adrenaline.
But treacherous Selene was to ail your sores, having worked a business deal with Cronos, the ruler of time, so that the watch would halt its march for a little while, and her husband would delay some more. The march of the needles would seemingly stop for a while, at least until you would be on your way in a cab, and although the first rays of the sun filtered through the carbon prismas of your glasses, you were assured... there you would be before sunrise. Not that we know what Cronos would get in exchange for the treachery before the sun, maybe a good set of selected bonds and stocks. The kind of things that are planned before the average man wakes up, just perhaps.
The driver in the cab couldn't notice your Eastern nervosity, as you were closing a promise with the help of treacherous gods and their deals in stocks; for why would you, young handsome man, want to drive to the sea just a few minutes before the morning broke? You certainly didn't look like one of those overromanticized Eastern European ladies who would undoubtedly commit suicide, what would be then? You had to invent a story, one of those stories that only a cab driver would be prone to believe. The truth should be withheld, as a maximum security diplomatic affair, poorly diplomatic but certainly an affair. Your thoughts were fixed in long series of letters exchanged over a couple of years, letters that didn't come handwritten by some old lover, or by some one-time friend left once in a little and meaningless Scandinavian town; but were letters written by a man you didn't know, never more than a few lines, never nothing you would recall in your books, or in your lectures. Nothing sympathetically meaningful, screens of mist, undecipherable scripts in the overcomplicated semiotics of an Oxford classicist, or was it Cambridge? I didn't mean to offend, that in the case I mistook by chance.
And there you are, closing what was probably the only gap left in between from your St. Anne's days to the wunthering echoes of the Middle East. The sun still didn't trace your steps and Selene expired slowly into the Mediterranean, you were still free. The beautiful and mortal lapislazuli of Helice was still visible as the night covered herself in those white shawls that uncovered the sun, ruler of men. Aurora Borealis kissed you good-bye, and asked you for coffee, of course some other time, when you would borne again.
Yes, there you were and a gentlemen handshake would be followed by a meaningless conversation, as those of old pals who have been to the navy together; there's no corner in their souls they hadn't crossed together manifold times, nevertheless adding a real face, wearing a skin of silk showing the first traces of adulthood, skin such as that that only young gentleman can wear. Slightly toasted by the inclement sun of the East, who must be a different deity though, for in the plains of Kent and Canterburry our young men look significantly different, with that touch of pale mellancholy and mischief, that anyone who has been a reader in St. Anne's could distinguish perfectly.
The conversation still revolved about nothingness, and it's not clear whether had you remembered Parmenides statement that "there's no nothing" it would have been so different. Helios decided to take revenge on your insignificant human condition, so that the light would blind your sights, and the Boreal winds wouldn't reach your forehead, not to mention that the needles would now knock faster, leaving you in your helplessness as your mother Selene, your protector, was drowning in her sleep. Your time was over, and your coffee still undrunk, you owed to return.
Your tie was waiting for you, and also was your mobile phone and your portable computer, everything remained immobile until your well foreseen return, for it wasn't your day to reach Aurora. You had certainly closed a chapter, of an unwritten book and you were so glad you did, I know it since I saw your reflections and the traces of your steps in the sand, for no other young men would wear English shoes before morning, just to wander about in the sand. The ritual was complete, but now all the gods had noticed your games; now it isn't up to you to decide, although many of them did take pity on you and invested you with that permanent feeling of glory and supreme joy that man experienced after he reached the moon, or in simple words after a 45-minutes sand affair, next to the Mediterranean at 5 am and just right before Aurora, in between blues and greens of jaded tones.
The newfound Phoebus remains as yet a mystery, or perhaps a simple childish idealization, you don't know and probably don't think about it much. You obeyed the laws above the laws, such as an Antigone of the 21st century, an Antigone post-Auschwitz, an unconventional man, a fatalist. The next morning you woke up, swallowed your coffee and daydreamt for a while. The joy of the morning didn't return, neither did the Phoebus and no longer wrote you long letters, it doesn't matter no more. She turns about in the same spot and watches for Orion(*)... and yes, you! you were there, you saw her and she bid you good night, even in the morning, even before your coffee. You didn't see Orion though, but it doesn't matter, next time perhaps, just perhaps.
Ari
(*) Homer, Od. 5.274
The streets were deserted, but far from being a desert... and the large streets of town seemed to shorten themselves and form threads in front of you as if they were complices of your sinful deeds, of your history; and aiding your escape, your way out of reality, your dream-for-a-day. Different machines of the modern western world were resoluted to halt your march but the leather-coated paviments of the earliest of mornings prevented them from wrongdoing, henceforth as once was, before the creation and recreation of men you were the only living creature on earth and the chemically knot-tight structures of the urban metropolis joined forces together so that you would reach your destination, a first-class flight, well-booked in advance. Maybe some god in heavens was your ally, or probably the dew was coming late that day and didn't notice the beats of your heart. No automobiles halted your way, no second thoughts diverted you, no remebrances would haunt you, not now.
The particularly vertical lines that joined the urban milieu in an instant decomposed themselves to form a thin and well-iluminated highway for which your instincts would make the only passenger, such as a lonely book waiting for the tram, trying to catch a writer in the station or some love story in a bar, as its pages were empty and its heart thirsty of savage lust. There you were, in the middle of the street, whereby your phone would never ring and being far from your home, then no letters would come, no lovers of the past would address you and no intimate momenta would be there in store. Had you not remembered that song you heard last, you could have gone astray and perished; for that's how afraid you were, you are. At that very moment history you didn't have, you were perhaps a little story, a song is all what you had. You were a Schliemann in Troja, or maybe like one of those gods of the Genesis; a word would be your guide through life, you would be a word yourself.
Then the creation spotaneously took place, giving birth to the urbis of the 21st century; machines started to awake as morning approached and other human beings joined your demeanour, unconsciously, probably just running patiently to some unskilled job or returning from a licentious night with a whore. Everything had changed by now, save Selene, who kept watching you in her mortal motherly pain that would condemn her to disappear in the streams of light as her husband would approach, and him Helios, you were unwilling to face; for the Aurora would flow in between his fingers and since early morning play the lyre without a cord with the simple intention of shaping human fate, in musical conspirations of duration, connotation and augment. Only her sounds you wouldn't hear. You were an Argive on caffeine, or maybe just on adrenaline.
But treacherous Selene was to ail your sores, having worked a business deal with Cronos, the ruler of time, so that the watch would halt its march for a little while, and her husband would delay some more. The march of the needles would seemingly stop for a while, at least until you would be on your way in a cab, and although the first rays of the sun filtered through the carbon prismas of your glasses, you were assured... there you would be before sunrise. Not that we know what Cronos would get in exchange for the treachery before the sun, maybe a good set of selected bonds and stocks. The kind of things that are planned before the average man wakes up, just perhaps.
The driver in the cab couldn't notice your Eastern nervosity, as you were closing a promise with the help of treacherous gods and their deals in stocks; for why would you, young handsome man, want to drive to the sea just a few minutes before the morning broke? You certainly didn't look like one of those overromanticized Eastern European ladies who would undoubtedly commit suicide, what would be then? You had to invent a story, one of those stories that only a cab driver would be prone to believe. The truth should be withheld, as a maximum security diplomatic affair, poorly diplomatic but certainly an affair. Your thoughts were fixed in long series of letters exchanged over a couple of years, letters that didn't come handwritten by some old lover, or by some one-time friend left once in a little and meaningless Scandinavian town; but were letters written by a man you didn't know, never more than a few lines, never nothing you would recall in your books, or in your lectures. Nothing sympathetically meaningful, screens of mist, undecipherable scripts in the overcomplicated semiotics of an Oxford classicist, or was it Cambridge? I didn't mean to offend, that in the case I mistook by chance.
And there you are, closing what was probably the only gap left in between from your St. Anne's days to the wunthering echoes of the Middle East. The sun still didn't trace your steps and Selene expired slowly into the Mediterranean, you were still free. The beautiful and mortal lapislazuli of Helice was still visible as the night covered herself in those white shawls that uncovered the sun, ruler of men. Aurora Borealis kissed you good-bye, and asked you for coffee, of course some other time, when you would borne again.
Yes, there you were and a gentlemen handshake would be followed by a meaningless conversation, as those of old pals who have been to the navy together; there's no corner in their souls they hadn't crossed together manifold times, nevertheless adding a real face, wearing a skin of silk showing the first traces of adulthood, skin such as that that only young gentleman can wear. Slightly toasted by the inclement sun of the East, who must be a different deity though, for in the plains of Kent and Canterburry our young men look significantly different, with that touch of pale mellancholy and mischief, that anyone who has been a reader in St. Anne's could distinguish perfectly.
The conversation still revolved about nothingness, and it's not clear whether had you remembered Parmenides statement that "there's no nothing" it would have been so different. Helios decided to take revenge on your insignificant human condition, so that the light would blind your sights, and the Boreal winds wouldn't reach your forehead, not to mention that the needles would now knock faster, leaving you in your helplessness as your mother Selene, your protector, was drowning in her sleep. Your time was over, and your coffee still undrunk, you owed to return.
Your tie was waiting for you, and also was your mobile phone and your portable computer, everything remained immobile until your well foreseen return, for it wasn't your day to reach Aurora. You had certainly closed a chapter, of an unwritten book and you were so glad you did, I know it since I saw your reflections and the traces of your steps in the sand, for no other young men would wear English shoes before morning, just to wander about in the sand. The ritual was complete, but now all the gods had noticed your games; now it isn't up to you to decide, although many of them did take pity on you and invested you with that permanent feeling of glory and supreme joy that man experienced after he reached the moon, or in simple words after a 45-minutes sand affair, next to the Mediterranean at 5 am and just right before Aurora, in between blues and greens of jaded tones.
The newfound Phoebus remains as yet a mystery, or perhaps a simple childish idealization, you don't know and probably don't think about it much. You obeyed the laws above the laws, such as an Antigone of the 21st century, an Antigone post-Auschwitz, an unconventional man, a fatalist. The next morning you woke up, swallowed your coffee and daydreamt for a while. The joy of the morning didn't return, neither did the Phoebus and no longer wrote you long letters, it doesn't matter no more. She turns about in the same spot and watches for Orion(*)... and yes, you! you were there, you saw her and she bid you good night, even in the morning, even before your coffee. You didn't see Orion though, but it doesn't matter, next time perhaps, just perhaps.
Ari
(*) Homer, Od. 5.274
נגב - נגד
הגעת, אבל איחרת קצת
אני כבר לא הייתי שם
ולעולם לא ישבתי כאן
אותי, לא ראית אף פעם
ביכית, מעבר לקיר
מעבר לנשמה
ולא שמעתי אותך
הרי ברחתי ממך
מצאתי ירח אי-שם
בליעדיו
בליעדיך
בעולם
אין לי הסבר מסובך
עברו ימים
גם אחרת שנים
ולא הרגשתי קוליך אף פעם
לא היינו בן אדם אחד
שניים גם לא, אף פעם
אמא שלך מספרת
שאני לא אהבתי אותך, אבל
איך הייתי יודע?
לא אמרת לי שום מילה
אפילו לו מול הים
וגם כוכבים עדים
שלא היה בינינו דבר
ומה תגיד מחר?
אולי כל אשר אמרת היום?
כמה שאני אוהב אותך?
כבר לא רלוונטי
כבר לא מעשי
כבר לא אתה, עדיין לא אני
ספר שלא נכתב
סיפור לא מסופר
אירחת קצת, אדוני
ביכית כבר,
התעלבת פעם
למה זה עזר אבל?
אני כבר לא אצלך
גם לא חלק ממך
והאם קר לך בלילה
הייתי רוצה לדעת
לפחות בישיל לחשוב
לא בדיוק עליך
אלא על מחר
ההוא שלנו לא היה
הרי ברחתי ממך
אבל עצוב לא כדאי לך
אהבתי אותך נורא
ואני הבחור של העצב
לא אתה
אני המחכה
הנודד
המדבר
הבן אדם קטן, חלש
תהיה חזק גם היום
הרי אני לא אהיה כאן
דבר אם אלוקיך
אולי הוא יידע
למה מתישהו זרמו
חיים למוות
לפנות בוקר לערב
ים כחול לאדמה
לעולם ועד
נגדך
עם ירח מלא
כבגולן
כיום הזה
כיום ההוא
שלא אמרת לי מילה
עזוב כבר
הקפה נהיה קר
תשתה ילד
תשתה כבר
במקום לבכות
שממש לא יפה לך
בן אדם גברי
חייל
תקרא
תקרא אולי עיתונים
כדי שתדע לך
הסיפור הזה
קרה להרבה אחרים
וגם הם לא היבינו
מה אל רצה
ואם הוא רצה
אולי יווני אחד
הוא השולט של העולם
ואתה פשוט יהודי אחד
לא כדאי לך לבכות אבל
תמיד במדבר אני נמנצא
כשנהיה קר
כדי לחבק אותך
הרי...
she turns about in the same spot
and watched for Orion
Monday, April 25, 2005
Orion dies in the Ocean
The many lives that I've lived
And their manifold faces
The lives I've left behind
The lies I've told, still unkind
The children
That child that I was
Or that maybe never was
That child who I am
That pain I bear
No longer in still
Silenced, still
Even in those days
Ever like today
When it rains
As it thwarts
Only in your mind
A piece of demeanour
An endeavour
For human redemption
For procrastination
For a new TV set
And I wished that he would love me
Like I loved yesterday
Before my eyes went pale
Before we were too jaded
Before this morning stroke
As if it left my life
Without knowing where to go
Hovering on my foes
Wound in the road
Such as the winds
Helice, Orion
The Pleiades
Zephyrus
Eternum
And as if we didn't know
How the world came to unrest
How the word came to undress
Those minimalist odes
Should you be a mariner
Could you understand this song
Which is more of a sorrow
But it will be mellow tomorrow
In a coffee shop smile
In some forlorn morrow
Such as human-like
Unsaid, nonetheless
Those many lives that I've lived
The ones that are haunting me
And they haunt you as well
A heirloom of fools
A thought
An ode
How odd
It's to wake up tomorrow
If we're living just today
As my suitcase is unready
And not willing to go
Such as my hands
Naked in the flow of stories
Coated in the fire
A soul that doens't cloud
Sometimes
When I'm to uphold
When the child is to claim
When the day is to live
And the moon is meant to die
Release this woe sometimes
Drink your coffee in the morning
The Ocean can now die
As you watch for Orion
As the Pleiades say your pledge
One day when you'll rise
The day when he'll smile
A perfect day for a ride
And then hide
The Ocean can now die
And their manifold faces
The lives I've left behind
The lies I've told, still unkind
The children
That child that I was
Or that maybe never was
That child who I am
That pain I bear
No longer in still
Silenced, still
Even in those days
Ever like today
When it rains
As it thwarts
Only in your mind
A piece of demeanour
An endeavour
For human redemption
For procrastination
For a new TV set
And I wished that he would love me
Like I loved yesterday
Before my eyes went pale
Before we were too jaded
Before this morning stroke
As if it left my life
Without knowing where to go
Hovering on my foes
Wound in the road
Such as the winds
Helice, Orion
The Pleiades
Zephyrus
Eternum
And as if we didn't know
How the world came to unrest
How the word came to undress
Those minimalist odes
Should you be a mariner
Could you understand this song
Which is more of a sorrow
But it will be mellow tomorrow
In a coffee shop smile
In some forlorn morrow
Such as human-like
Unsaid, nonetheless
Those many lives that I've lived
The ones that are haunting me
And they haunt you as well
A heirloom of fools
A thought
An ode
How odd
It's to wake up tomorrow
If we're living just today
As my suitcase is unready
And not willing to go
Such as my hands
Naked in the flow of stories
Coated in the fire
A soul that doens't cloud
Sometimes
When I'm to uphold
When the child is to claim
When the day is to live
And the moon is meant to die
Release this woe sometimes
Drink your coffee in the morning
The Ocean can now die
As you watch for Orion
As the Pleiades say your pledge
One day when you'll rise
The day when he'll smile
A perfect day for a ride
And then hide
The Ocean can now die
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Homer of the 21st Century
A generation, in-generation, in generation
In need of some education
The nature of secular knowledge
The curse of a premature existence
Man and god
Both overwritten, overriden
By themselves
At the foundation of the word
In the transmision of their history
Transmutation of souls
Your mental nakedness, and mine
Precious vulnerability
A souvenir of postmodernism
The ignorance of the end of times
Maneouvres of men
Demeanours
And then
She turns about in the same spot
And watches for Orion*
The child of the end of times
Cries out to keep his eyes shut
Born into the light
Blind from the bright
A first-time stellar navigation
The map had been once lost
Altogether with humanity
Now you are on your own
Looking for Orion
In the ethereal
In the eternal
....Iternum
In the end of times
Born with your eyes open
History takes pity on you
On your silver-coated face
On your imagination
On your idealizations
For man is nothing
And Orion is not visible tonight
How will your find your direction?
Should you not be a Phoenician
But rather an educated New Yorker
Who will find your direction?
Orion is not visible tonight
Once more she turns about in the same spot
An wide open sea of information
In an era of contemptuous humanization
Harmonization
The concrete
The idealization
You have lost your way back home tonight
And so has all this generation
You also turn about in the same spot
And look for Orion
As three thousand years went by
You are still looking for Orion
(*)Homer; Odyssey Line 5.274. Thanks to M. Finkelberg for the ancient exegesis and criticism on her 2004 paper published in Greek, Roman & Byzantine Studies 44.
In need of some education
The nature of secular knowledge
The curse of a premature existence
Man and god
Both overwritten, overriden
By themselves
At the foundation of the word
In the transmision of their history
Transmutation of souls
Your mental nakedness, and mine
Precious vulnerability
A souvenir of postmodernism
The ignorance of the end of times
Maneouvres of men
Demeanours
And then
She turns about in the same spot
And watches for Orion*
The child of the end of times
Cries out to keep his eyes shut
Born into the light
Blind from the bright
A first-time stellar navigation
The map had been once lost
Altogether with humanity
Now you are on your own
Looking for Orion
In the ethereal
In the eternal
....Iternum
In the end of times
Born with your eyes open
History takes pity on you
On your silver-coated face
On your imagination
On your idealizations
For man is nothing
And Orion is not visible tonight
How will your find your direction?
Should you not be a Phoenician
But rather an educated New Yorker
Who will find your direction?
Orion is not visible tonight
Once more she turns about in the same spot
An wide open sea of information
In an era of contemptuous humanization
Harmonization
The concrete
The idealization
You have lost your way back home tonight
And so has all this generation
You also turn about in the same spot
And look for Orion
As three thousand years went by
You are still looking for Orion
(*)Homer; Odyssey Line 5.274. Thanks to M. Finkelberg for the ancient exegesis and criticism on her 2004 paper published in Greek, Roman & Byzantine Studies 44.
Thursday, April 07, 2005
David
You patiently stared at my odes
You didn't understand though
Patiently you tolerated my words
Reverie of my endless graves
As if tomorrow
All this were to change
Thus, you vowed
You owed
In your silence
You craved, you stumbled
You didn't understand though
Patiently you tolerated my words
Reverie of my endless graves
As if tomorrow
All this were to change
Thus, you vowed
You owed
In your silence
You craved, you stumbled
Monday, February 14, 2005
The morning and God
To Roy Shmaryahu
A certain morning I woke up, it wasn't a strange day actually.... just one of those days you've been told about in stories, in all kind of stories, love stories, thrillers and even in meaningless stories. I woke up in a hotel room, lousy morning, cups of coffee, nicotine, telephones. Somehow in its lack of particularity it might have been the first morning to which I matter-of-factly woke up. I didn't find myself strange or extremely kind, neither devoid of violence or embroidered. Practically efficient, uninfatuated, shaved, drunk up, thought-of. Beyond that it wasn't weird waking up such morning, I woke up to old friends, to old stories, to old roots, to odd roots. Nothing could have been particular about such morning, for there were others in which I woke up to different things and to particularly evident reasons, to different battles and endless boxes of thoughts, to love songs, to sad songs, to unwritten songs, to odes. I could have even woken up to friends, to lovers and to disdainful remarks excerpted delicately from a careful conversation, from a stranger, from a letter that was never written, from a conversation with the wise, with the poor, with the smart, with the dumb, or simply with no one else but myself and my own inner desire for daily redemption, for justification, for something that matters beyond my addictions and TV-made procrastinations, beyond the news, beyond a future that was never lived.
That morning was so different, for I didn't wake up to any particular reason and to any particular person and I didn't dream anything profetic, I didn't understand anything better about life, I didn't change, I didn't wear, I didn't predict, I didn't unwind. The air found me unthinkable and I found the smoke unnecessary, yet both of us didn't delay our continued encounters all through the minutes and the hours that mercilessly decorate the days. It wasn't any philosophical and wouldn't allegedly change the course of history; it wouldn't be a morning of gods and statemen, a morning of interpretations. It would rather be the best morning my life awoke to; a morning of friends and silly faces, a morning of sugarless coffee and laughs, a morning of meanings, unspoken of. A morning of childish friendships that soon would be over, a morning of unwelcoming pleasures and simple cakes. A morning of endless brotherhood and simple conversations, it was.... a morning.
And with all its smells and people, no longer dwells among us... for we've returned, or better say we've been returned; and probably sooner than one can count will have forgotten the names and the faces and the echoes of those souls that wandered together throughout the winter cold of Jerusalem moons. So full of hate, so full of hatred, so full of ego, so simply and basically humans. But it was beautiful to wake up one day, one morning.... to be oneself.
But above all, twenty-one years and 3 boxes of cigarettes and an imaginary friendship were necessary to talk to God, to realize he exists and that there's a bit of him about everywhere. To think life again once more and then get some rest, to dream about the future and build a better world, to imagine that we're more than this flesh and this oversexualized nature, that we're more than casual sex, that we're more than our salaries, that we're not a career or a diploma on a wall, that we're more than wallets and credit cards, that we're people and that life doesn't end up in life. That one must be good and do good to anothers, respect the others and fulfill a life. That a career builds up for the rain, but a human being builds even the rain.
It was great to feel someone, to feel oneself being such.
The days keep on running and we keep on counting, but that's not what really matters. What matters is that we don't really know anything, and that still everything can be just so beautiful, that friendship can be so real, that promises can be kept, and that we can talk to God. There's always a way, there's always a second time. I guess that for the first time in many years I'm quite complete, being so damn uncomplete, and I'm happy being so damn unkind. But I can always remember, I can always return, I can always smile. Maybe tomorrow or some other day all this will just turn real.
A certain morning I woke up, it wasn't a strange day actually.... just one of those days you've been told about in stories, in all kind of stories, love stories, thrillers and even in meaningless stories. I woke up in a hotel room, lousy morning, cups of coffee, nicotine, telephones. Somehow in its lack of particularity it might have been the first morning to which I matter-of-factly woke up. I didn't find myself strange or extremely kind, neither devoid of violence or embroidered. Practically efficient, uninfatuated, shaved, drunk up, thought-of. Beyond that it wasn't weird waking up such morning, I woke up to old friends, to old stories, to old roots, to odd roots. Nothing could have been particular about such morning, for there were others in which I woke up to different things and to particularly evident reasons, to different battles and endless boxes of thoughts, to love songs, to sad songs, to unwritten songs, to odes. I could have even woken up to friends, to lovers and to disdainful remarks excerpted delicately from a careful conversation, from a stranger, from a letter that was never written, from a conversation with the wise, with the poor, with the smart, with the dumb, or simply with no one else but myself and my own inner desire for daily redemption, for justification, for something that matters beyond my addictions and TV-made procrastinations, beyond the news, beyond a future that was never lived.
That morning was so different, for I didn't wake up to any particular reason and to any particular person and I didn't dream anything profetic, I didn't understand anything better about life, I didn't change, I didn't wear, I didn't predict, I didn't unwind. The air found me unthinkable and I found the smoke unnecessary, yet both of us didn't delay our continued encounters all through the minutes and the hours that mercilessly decorate the days. It wasn't any philosophical and wouldn't allegedly change the course of history; it wouldn't be a morning of gods and statemen, a morning of interpretations. It would rather be the best morning my life awoke to; a morning of friends and silly faces, a morning of sugarless coffee and laughs, a morning of meanings, unspoken of. A morning of childish friendships that soon would be over, a morning of unwelcoming pleasures and simple cakes. A morning of endless brotherhood and simple conversations, it was.... a morning.
And with all its smells and people, no longer dwells among us... for we've returned, or better say we've been returned; and probably sooner than one can count will have forgotten the names and the faces and the echoes of those souls that wandered together throughout the winter cold of Jerusalem moons. So full of hate, so full of hatred, so full of ego, so simply and basically humans. But it was beautiful to wake up one day, one morning.... to be oneself.
But above all, twenty-one years and 3 boxes of cigarettes and an imaginary friendship were necessary to talk to God, to realize he exists and that there's a bit of him about everywhere. To think life again once more and then get some rest, to dream about the future and build a better world, to imagine that we're more than this flesh and this oversexualized nature, that we're more than casual sex, that we're more than our salaries, that we're not a career or a diploma on a wall, that we're more than wallets and credit cards, that we're people and that life doesn't end up in life. That one must be good and do good to anothers, respect the others and fulfill a life. That a career builds up for the rain, but a human being builds even the rain.
It was great to feel someone, to feel oneself being such.
The days keep on running and we keep on counting, but that's not what really matters. What matters is that we don't really know anything, and that still everything can be just so beautiful, that friendship can be so real, that promises can be kept, and that we can talk to God. There's always a way, there's always a second time. I guess that for the first time in many years I'm quite complete, being so damn uncomplete, and I'm happy being so damn unkind. But I can always remember, I can always return, I can always smile. Maybe tomorrow or some other day all this will just turn real.
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Days
I used to remember those days with a decadent longing, as if there was nothing standing in history in between those days and the cronic selection of past reviews and faces that had crossed my sight and that had endeavoured themselves concomittantly in my newfound skin. I wouldn't be sure about the title I'd give to those encounters, to those cold blocks of feelings and mountains of agony that succeeded in intoxicated the sweeping veins of my intellect; nothing necessarily magnificent, never superfluous and far from contemptuous. The burning smoke that separated our convalescent postmodern and young humanities with a screen of biffurcating fogs that would never disappear, or at least not until the morning stroke with endless reminders of what had been a licentiously successful life and the odes of a modernity that we could have foregone, had we wished to do that. Sweet mellodies and queerly infatuated voices surrounded the piles of newspapers and unpaid bills until they reached our ears and found me just too young and unwise, remarkably beautiful and bitterly happy. That's how those days found me, older than I am now, older than I'll ever be. Wearing incesantly the moral burdens of a dreamer, abstracted in the deathly anatomy of unfathomable smells, of pathetic smiles, of unavoidable redemption, an assassination of the intellect.
Days that were just like today, preposterously inserted in the agenda of a political man, of an activist, of a freedom seeker, of a man in search of moral adjustment. And those days in their shape were no different than those that I've lived since there ever until today. I had read the newspapers in the morning and had been busy on the phone, giving myself the proper importance that a grown up man deserved, disinformated enough as not to notice the helplessness of modernity and the emptiness a man causes to himself, when he doesn't stare at the sky, when he doesn't meet up with stars, when he forgets his anomalous condition. I had planned life a few too many times that day and had criminally chosen to control my life, despite myself, despite lusting for higher pleasures, for a stoppover along the way, for the comfort of the fool. I had carelessly made sure not to seem just too happy, not to look through all the glasses, made sure to undrink my coffee, to soak my job in a dream, to control my words. Problematically efficient, ineffeciently progressive. That's how I found it.
I still don't forget that day, not the trousers I wore and the dreams I thought, the strikes I endured. The different loves I hoped and kept in store, the discurssive maneouvres I led through, the songs I drank, the glass of wine I thought. My dream would live itself through my flesh, and then disappear one day, just like morning comes when twilight knocks. I wish no longer that life, when I was all so grown up. I lust no longer for the opinions I seeked to uphold, for the endless sets of practical knowledge I stored, for the books I read or the men I loved. I think no longer of the days when I touched the sky with my hands.
I just dwell on those delicate pieces of self that I left untold. I dwell on the room where I never lived through, on those dreams that never came, on the words that were never words, on the futures he refused and no longer spoke. I'm not sorry of having loved that filthy touch of silk, and those vulgar glasses of wine, those movies I understood, those uncovered bodies I never touch. I'm not sorry for myself, I'm younger these days. I've kept it all held in store, for maybe one day I'll need those yearnings when in the highway or when painting the walls of a new home. The saddest skin I ever touched, the books I never wrote, the days when I never came home.
I'm happy I wore those years, as to enjoy adult love. Opinionated enough, infatuated at all. I'm glad tonight I'm home, finally alone, maybe the world will not last until tomorrow, but the TV is on.
Ari
Days that were just like today, preposterously inserted in the agenda of a political man, of an activist, of a freedom seeker, of a man in search of moral adjustment. And those days in their shape were no different than those that I've lived since there ever until today. I had read the newspapers in the morning and had been busy on the phone, giving myself the proper importance that a grown up man deserved, disinformated enough as not to notice the helplessness of modernity and the emptiness a man causes to himself, when he doesn't stare at the sky, when he doesn't meet up with stars, when he forgets his anomalous condition. I had planned life a few too many times that day and had criminally chosen to control my life, despite myself, despite lusting for higher pleasures, for a stoppover along the way, for the comfort of the fool. I had carelessly made sure not to seem just too happy, not to look through all the glasses, made sure to undrink my coffee, to soak my job in a dream, to control my words. Problematically efficient, ineffeciently progressive. That's how I found it.
I still don't forget that day, not the trousers I wore and the dreams I thought, the strikes I endured. The different loves I hoped and kept in store, the discurssive maneouvres I led through, the songs I drank, the glass of wine I thought. My dream would live itself through my flesh, and then disappear one day, just like morning comes when twilight knocks. I wish no longer that life, when I was all so grown up. I lust no longer for the opinions I seeked to uphold, for the endless sets of practical knowledge I stored, for the books I read or the men I loved. I think no longer of the days when I touched the sky with my hands.
I just dwell on those delicate pieces of self that I left untold. I dwell on the room where I never lived through, on those dreams that never came, on the words that were never words, on the futures he refused and no longer spoke. I'm not sorry of having loved that filthy touch of silk, and those vulgar glasses of wine, those movies I understood, those uncovered bodies I never touch. I'm not sorry for myself, I'm younger these days. I've kept it all held in store, for maybe one day I'll need those yearnings when in the highway or when painting the walls of a new home. The saddest skin I ever touched, the books I never wrote, the days when I never came home.
I'm happy I wore those years, as to enjoy adult love. Opinionated enough, infatuated at all. I'm glad tonight I'm home, finally alone, maybe the world will not last until tomorrow, but the TV is on.
Ari
Monday, February 07, 2005
Life and its magnificent grandeur - a dilettante's manifesto
The internet procrastinates in electronic heart beats and I'm still unkind, almost ready to unwind; the winter strikes with the largest curtains of rainfall seen in this small and unsignificant country all through the year, yet I can't put myself to quit smoking for more than a couple of hours and I'm uninfatuated just for a change. Finding myself simply stressed and never getting enough hours of sleep, out an endlessly-motivating-and-unreasonable excuse, maybe the weather channel, world politics or children's welfare, one can never get enough disinformation in the information era, just as waterless towns in Etiopia can never get enough cans of powder milk, with all the cynical irony it implies. Nearing 3 am in the morning I sit in front of the same cold screen to which I awoke in the morning, next to the same empty cup and empty ashtrey, only the news has changed.
A highly imaginative day, after the masochist pleasure of the world current events and sorrowful remarks on the way the world is being led, being left with nothing but the weapons that freedom of speech and grammatical accuracy granted me, yet feeling uninterested enough as to make any profitable use of them. Sleeps at 3 am and wakes up at 4, drinks some coffee, coughs and then right thereafter smokes, writes a couple of lines in a foreign language, erases, writes again and after a couple of hours the morning strikes with unmeasurable quantities of self-imagined violence and action, all of that happening just right there in front of me, outside the window, but I'm just not in the mood to go out, so I rather stay home, stay home alone. Play with the cat a little bit until he's tired of me or until I tire myself out, and then I return to the world news, to the State of Israel, and to the endless well-known topic of Religion and Democracy; having never enough of it. Swallowing every small piece of information and trying to become an objectively educated man, as far as that be possible for a Jewish gay man to accomplish.
A guy that is nothing in particular, not an average Joey neither an average Jew. Not an average queer and not a religious man, not a right wing conservative or a left wing crony, not a soldier, not an academician, not a pious person, not an atheist, not a sexist neither a feminist. Nothing in particular, unwound enough as to choose anything at all. That's who actually sits in front of this screen in control of the world affairs through the paraplexic powers of online media, not even getting to see the sun for a minute; not living down, not in the underground, not living up, not leaving, simply living. An average citizen with no name, an attractive man with no face, a smart ass with no title, a Zionist without faith.
Those facts actually used to trouble me deeply, my endless yearnings before the loving eyes of the Rabbanit and the smell of the cholent in Shabbat, the manly echoes of the evening chants and the beauty of the little children, that stubborn faith in an everlasting God, and the enlightening purpose of holiness by which those men and women of the heavenly army subjugate themselves to the laws given by the Eternal Blessed Be His Name. My endless yearnings for Zion and the verses of Rachel, the promises of a country built in the land of Israel, the glorifying past of our young nation and the stories of the pioneers, that the children no longer know by heart, neither do I... but I strive to remember those little popular stories I never heard, when sitting in cafes I never visited before, among friends I never used to know. Such as my yearnings... deep and mellow, made of yellow and almost disappearing in the greys of my clouded thoughts, smearing my regrets with a sweet and transparent feeling of comfort, a feeling that hardly ever disappears, not even when it rains, not even when the smoke is sad.
Yearnings of better days, and of worse days, a younger age and an older soul, yielding a soul in between skybreakers, handwritten pages and the smells from an old love affair; not necessarily hurt and not unnecessarily happy. Simply yearning for, maybe for the things I didn't know, for the loves I never had, for the futures I never lived, for that past that will never be. And just right here next to my screen and my pallmall filter box I can think all that over, I can think myself over, without needlessly talking about myself, decidedly preoccupied with the latest world affairs and not really giving a damn about them, in the end the philosophies are all over, and subdued to the irrationality of human understanding that we can blame for the most beautiful things that are to be found in the world, happiness, motivation, love; the little things.... the inexpensive thing... the meaningless memories and mental images of a young aunt, a car trip or maybe a childhood friend.
Yeah sure... it doesn't really get anywhere, but anyway should it? Must it be then? What should you expect? Where should the world go these days? Those questions probably trouble you when reading this hideous non-sense, but oh well... I haven't got your answers, I became a media man and therefore disinformation is my only quality, my only weapon, my only knowledge. No philosophies involved, no opinions to uphold. I forgot what I would be, what I could ever be and instead just tried to be it. I became a writer, and at this very moment I don't owe to myself anything, hence neither to you, silly reader. You who always expected from me the most intellectual and highly challenging accuracies, even provocative you liked it. But I tired myself out of it, I grew up, and I simply discovered that it's a meaningless search, it's an emptiness that never ends, it's a human quest. Hence, I'm giving you nothing today, and I haven't discovered anything that would interest you, other than having found a very attractive chin to kiss at night and a small baby to play with when I've got some free time; when I'm not frying my brains next to a almost suicidal screen that pours parallel realities through my reticular tissue and causes my brain to process informations based on the chemical reactions that your collective violence causes, that your personal violence inflicts on me.
On my busy hours I imagine beautiful landscapes and children, written letters and interesting conversations with all those women and men that live in my daydream, I find it quite close to redemption, slightly wasteful and contemptuously enjoyable. Poorly political, poorly interesting, poorly constructive... but all too enjoyable, and that's probably what I came to this world for, not in order to serve the sake of your education, which you must have pursued much better than this, in which case you wouldn't waste yourself reading the procrastinations of an educated man who actually ran out of what to say, of any opinion at all. My absolutes today fled away to Paris, they must be drunk somewhere in the rain, there must be a party downstairs. And it wouldn't really help to grab the books right now, it's a bit too late for us, for each and every one of us. It's a bit too late to educate yourself, let the morning hover on you and drink you up.
It's a bit too late to give up on hope, to give up on love. I understand it now, hence I'm unaffiliated. I don't strive to understand this country so late at night, I don't strive to understand the man of my dreams by day, he's by definition a misunderstanding and there's some awful beauty to that, an awful lot. I don't strive to understand myself for I'm a pessimist, and my only way back to primitive survival is simply living out my life, yielding up. No one of you has got any answers and you won't get them from me, that's for sure... for no less than I know you all know, I guess you even believe in anything at all, privilege which has been stolen from me as a writer, my only purpose is to remind you those things you already know, and to tell you those beautiful stories you never understood, those chapters of your life you already lived through, of those men and women who never loved you, of that God who never paid you attention, of that country where you never lived, of a milieu you actually never saw, and that's how you remember it, for a beautiful woman is not as beautiful in a frame as she was in a story.
So let me do my job as I should, and don't hasten me with questions of life, for that's the last thing I'm interested about, let me be an observer and misunderstand Israel, deconstruct the Jewish people as I please and misconceive the world. That's how you like me, in wrongdoings and faltering standards, crossing my own limits of moral circumscription only in order to satisfy your desire, always incomplete, always in your search, you need me as much as I need you to save myself from my own life, from my own endlessness, from my own loneliness. Just say you understand me, even when you don't, that's your only obligation actually.
Write critical books and interpret my sayings as you please and invest yourself with a knowledge that never existed, claim your rights and stand up for the world. Just claim you understand anything at all, so that I can feel less cold tonight. It's not so hard to be a brilliant young guy and you don't really need six years of classics, just get out of the house and look up. Realize how small you are and how little you know, trust me... it gives you a feeling of happiness that nothing can overcome.
Today, not being particularly anything at all, I'm a complete man, an objective journalist who doesn't look forward to be upright, it's easier to be happy. It's great fun to be a writer, you just need a few too many lives to kill as many women as the public wished, not my case though... with one life's being enough and I killed rather grown up men, for those were the ones I loved, the ones who loved me, my unconsiderate objects of pleasure, the criminals on whose account I wrote all those many diaries, which are nonetheless blank pages, thus for regrets I still found no words at all, I didn't write many songs.
And so early in the morning is still late enough as not to be conscious about anything at all; but of one thing I'm sure, tomorrow I'll wake up late enough as to miss the train and curse God, then an hour late to work and 50 bucks less on my account, I'll blame you for everything though, then at night you'll attack me with your life questions and I'll follow up. By tomorrow night we'll be believing there's reason in this world, that we're serious men at all. Deal?
PS: Talk this over with God, I'm dating out someone in the meantime. Leave a message after the tone, but don't leave your name or phone number at all.
A highly imaginative day, after the masochist pleasure of the world current events and sorrowful remarks on the way the world is being led, being left with nothing but the weapons that freedom of speech and grammatical accuracy granted me, yet feeling uninterested enough as to make any profitable use of them. Sleeps at 3 am and wakes up at 4, drinks some coffee, coughs and then right thereafter smokes, writes a couple of lines in a foreign language, erases, writes again and after a couple of hours the morning strikes with unmeasurable quantities of self-imagined violence and action, all of that happening just right there in front of me, outside the window, but I'm just not in the mood to go out, so I rather stay home, stay home alone. Play with the cat a little bit until he's tired of me or until I tire myself out, and then I return to the world news, to the State of Israel, and to the endless well-known topic of Religion and Democracy; having never enough of it. Swallowing every small piece of information and trying to become an objectively educated man, as far as that be possible for a Jewish gay man to accomplish.
A guy that is nothing in particular, not an average Joey neither an average Jew. Not an average queer and not a religious man, not a right wing conservative or a left wing crony, not a soldier, not an academician, not a pious person, not an atheist, not a sexist neither a feminist. Nothing in particular, unwound enough as to choose anything at all. That's who actually sits in front of this screen in control of the world affairs through the paraplexic powers of online media, not even getting to see the sun for a minute; not living down, not in the underground, not living up, not leaving, simply living. An average citizen with no name, an attractive man with no face, a smart ass with no title, a Zionist without faith.
Those facts actually used to trouble me deeply, my endless yearnings before the loving eyes of the Rabbanit and the smell of the cholent in Shabbat, the manly echoes of the evening chants and the beauty of the little children, that stubborn faith in an everlasting God, and the enlightening purpose of holiness by which those men and women of the heavenly army subjugate themselves to the laws given by the Eternal Blessed Be His Name. My endless yearnings for Zion and the verses of Rachel, the promises of a country built in the land of Israel, the glorifying past of our young nation and the stories of the pioneers, that the children no longer know by heart, neither do I... but I strive to remember those little popular stories I never heard, when sitting in cafes I never visited before, among friends I never used to know. Such as my yearnings... deep and mellow, made of yellow and almost disappearing in the greys of my clouded thoughts, smearing my regrets with a sweet and transparent feeling of comfort, a feeling that hardly ever disappears, not even when it rains, not even when the smoke is sad.
Yearnings of better days, and of worse days, a younger age and an older soul, yielding a soul in between skybreakers, handwritten pages and the smells from an old love affair; not necessarily hurt and not unnecessarily happy. Simply yearning for, maybe for the things I didn't know, for the loves I never had, for the futures I never lived, for that past that will never be. And just right here next to my screen and my pallmall filter box I can think all that over, I can think myself over, without needlessly talking about myself, decidedly preoccupied with the latest world affairs and not really giving a damn about them, in the end the philosophies are all over, and subdued to the irrationality of human understanding that we can blame for the most beautiful things that are to be found in the world, happiness, motivation, love; the little things.... the inexpensive thing... the meaningless memories and mental images of a young aunt, a car trip or maybe a childhood friend.
Yeah sure... it doesn't really get anywhere, but anyway should it? Must it be then? What should you expect? Where should the world go these days? Those questions probably trouble you when reading this hideous non-sense, but oh well... I haven't got your answers, I became a media man and therefore disinformation is my only quality, my only weapon, my only knowledge. No philosophies involved, no opinions to uphold. I forgot what I would be, what I could ever be and instead just tried to be it. I became a writer, and at this very moment I don't owe to myself anything, hence neither to you, silly reader. You who always expected from me the most intellectual and highly challenging accuracies, even provocative you liked it. But I tired myself out of it, I grew up, and I simply discovered that it's a meaningless search, it's an emptiness that never ends, it's a human quest. Hence, I'm giving you nothing today, and I haven't discovered anything that would interest you, other than having found a very attractive chin to kiss at night and a small baby to play with when I've got some free time; when I'm not frying my brains next to a almost suicidal screen that pours parallel realities through my reticular tissue and causes my brain to process informations based on the chemical reactions that your collective violence causes, that your personal violence inflicts on me.
On my busy hours I imagine beautiful landscapes and children, written letters and interesting conversations with all those women and men that live in my daydream, I find it quite close to redemption, slightly wasteful and contemptuously enjoyable. Poorly political, poorly interesting, poorly constructive... but all too enjoyable, and that's probably what I came to this world for, not in order to serve the sake of your education, which you must have pursued much better than this, in which case you wouldn't waste yourself reading the procrastinations of an educated man who actually ran out of what to say, of any opinion at all. My absolutes today fled away to Paris, they must be drunk somewhere in the rain, there must be a party downstairs. And it wouldn't really help to grab the books right now, it's a bit too late for us, for each and every one of us. It's a bit too late to educate yourself, let the morning hover on you and drink you up.
It's a bit too late to give up on hope, to give up on love. I understand it now, hence I'm unaffiliated. I don't strive to understand this country so late at night, I don't strive to understand the man of my dreams by day, he's by definition a misunderstanding and there's some awful beauty to that, an awful lot. I don't strive to understand myself for I'm a pessimist, and my only way back to primitive survival is simply living out my life, yielding up. No one of you has got any answers and you won't get them from me, that's for sure... for no less than I know you all know, I guess you even believe in anything at all, privilege which has been stolen from me as a writer, my only purpose is to remind you those things you already know, and to tell you those beautiful stories you never understood, those chapters of your life you already lived through, of those men and women who never loved you, of that God who never paid you attention, of that country where you never lived, of a milieu you actually never saw, and that's how you remember it, for a beautiful woman is not as beautiful in a frame as she was in a story.
So let me do my job as I should, and don't hasten me with questions of life, for that's the last thing I'm interested about, let me be an observer and misunderstand Israel, deconstruct the Jewish people as I please and misconceive the world. That's how you like me, in wrongdoings and faltering standards, crossing my own limits of moral circumscription only in order to satisfy your desire, always incomplete, always in your search, you need me as much as I need you to save myself from my own life, from my own endlessness, from my own loneliness. Just say you understand me, even when you don't, that's your only obligation actually.
Write critical books and interpret my sayings as you please and invest yourself with a knowledge that never existed, claim your rights and stand up for the world. Just claim you understand anything at all, so that I can feel less cold tonight. It's not so hard to be a brilliant young guy and you don't really need six years of classics, just get out of the house and look up. Realize how small you are and how little you know, trust me... it gives you a feeling of happiness that nothing can overcome.
Today, not being particularly anything at all, I'm a complete man, an objective journalist who doesn't look forward to be upright, it's easier to be happy. It's great fun to be a writer, you just need a few too many lives to kill as many women as the public wished, not my case though... with one life's being enough and I killed rather grown up men, for those were the ones I loved, the ones who loved me, my unconsiderate objects of pleasure, the criminals on whose account I wrote all those many diaries, which are nonetheless blank pages, thus for regrets I still found no words at all, I didn't write many songs.
And so early in the morning is still late enough as not to be conscious about anything at all; but of one thing I'm sure, tomorrow I'll wake up late enough as to miss the train and curse God, then an hour late to work and 50 bucks less on my account, I'll blame you for everything though, then at night you'll attack me with your life questions and I'll follow up. By tomorrow night we'll be believing there's reason in this world, that we're serious men at all. Deal?
PS: Talk this over with God, I'm dating out someone in the meantime. Leave a message after the tone, but don't leave your name or phone number at all.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
אין לנו ארץ אחרת
"אין לנו ארץ אחרת" - we haven't got any other country.
That's how an unsual TV programme finished this evening just right before the midnight news, and I guess most Israelis, Jews and Philo-semites have heard this sentence several times, from left rallies in North Tel Aviv to religious zionist speeches to the explanation of a cab driver of why he's still living in the country, despite its thousand and one reasons to ascertain it's impossible to make it here; it doesn't surprise me anymore to find out most of my fellow citizens can't really find reasons to explain why they actually chose to live in the country, but only to justify why they couldn't live anywhere else. I'm one of them, and beyond that I dare to publicize my opinions on the matter to a public that is partly unable to understand me, the English-speaking community; but not having any better language to write in, I strive in between the English phonemes and understatements.
After having heard such sentence by Nana Sheirer, one of our Israeli crazies, I thought it was a good moment to write something about "we haven't got any other country". Right after playing the devil's advocate in my last article and the conservative Jew during my daily arguments about Zionism, I prefer to play a different role tonight, to reduce the already small extension of Israel to the ghetto-like and cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv; the independent republic I've decidedly become a citizen ever since 2002. I'm not wearing the heavy burdens of Jewish history neither the shortcomings of Israeli society. You must think I'm pretty obsessed with the topic in particular and in general with anything that hides under the Jewish world, and I wouldn't dare to contradict you. It's such a waste of time, a prominent Classics scholar in the make who refuses a first hand entry to St. Anne's College and instead wanders around the world for a couple of years to end up finally the streets of Tel Aviv, falling in love with every crazie I found and worst of all, writing about it. Almost 2 in the morning, in front of a screen, unreasonably excited and reasonably confused... nevertheless writing and written, not to mention unread. It gives me some kind of masochistic satisfaction though, and it's interesting above all. For most people would secretly expect to face down here in these pages the procrastinations of a well-bred Dutch citizen about a country to which is linked only by an ancient and despisable religion practiced by his ancestors and discontinued in the family for some 200 years. We chose to be Dutch, and I chose to be Israeli. An eternal paradox, a 21st century paradox, an anachronism. Past the Enlightenment and the closure of the ghettos, a new generation of highly educated Jewish secular society whose achievements could be hardly overwritten by any Christian family of our same social standing. Yet I'm here, in front of this screen being a damn Israeli, and writing about it in a language that doesn't necessarily fit the conventions of my experience. But not even that bothers me, and I permanently wonder if there's anything at all that does, not even the fact of belonging to a not-so-intellectually-reputable generation of faceless internet dating and SMS shopping.
Having cleared those points out then I can get to work, and play a bit of Carry Bradshaw, a bit of Ofer Mayer, a bit of God, and inclusive a bit of myself. Contemptuously uninterested in world affairs and political arteriosclerosis, above all given to the echoes of a noisy city, of an underground world at the sea level, to the mysteries of the largest Jewish city in the world, to its addictive ugliness and cosmopolitan nature. That wouldn't really describe Tel Aviv, endless nights spent in front of a dating website, or simply hitting the roads finding a suitable nitch to rest my acheing nature from over-politicized articles, breaking news and historical determinism. That's somehow what you might find in a largest Jewish settlement of the world in a summer night, in a winter night. A Middle Eastern enclave that doesn't belong to any country, that doesn't belong to any religion or to any political party, a city that doesn't belong to anyone but all. An independent city-state that might be somewhere in New York, Moscow or Poone, yet being nowhere; a contemtuous example of civil liberties, yet a ghetto crowded with wealthy suburbs and self-governed consciences.
A unique example of collective self destruction, of chosen self destruction and deconstructivism. A city whose history is recreated and re-created in each and every single corner, in every bar, in every poetry book, in each and every love story and in the memories of innocent tourists that look forward not only a good time but a taste of Israel, that there actually is in the city, but isn't there. Yes indeed an Israeli city, hastening, crowdy and Middle Eastern, messy, filthy; but at times not an Israeli city, at times just nothing in particular, nothing other than a city. Maybe that was our only purpose, just to be like anyone else, just a people, just a city, just a country, not particularly Jewish and not particularly anything else. Wandering bodies in search of identity and pleasure, in search of comfort and action, in search of freedom, in search of understanding; and still being unsure that we achieved anything of that, we didn't even succeed in being just anything else, an average Joey and neither an average Jew.
My generation made of this city an independent republic, a Jewish secular anarchy, a city of the size of Geneva with enough violence as to populate the whole of Switzerland tenifold times; yet a city where hardly anyone gets killed, where hardly anyone is a stranger, where hardly anyone is unkind. You'd be asking how can I explain that, well I simply can't and that's why I wrote this, maybe to get some relief, or just to make some justice to my newfound country; the most violent and hastening I ever visited, and probably one of the smallest.
It's not a surprise in anyway, Jews always make everything complicated and nihilism is not their kind of thing; everyone here is a bit of God, and if not at least of him a son. The philosophies have been deserted and replaced by the uncomfortable faltering of real life, even for the philosophers. I guess Tel Avivian Zionism can just be reduced to a very simple stratagema: We wanted a country of our own, but they overpopulated just too fast so we found a nitch inside; and we formed an unofficial republic that is particulaly disconnected from national reality but peculiarly connected to it, devoid of personality but too personal to be called a city, a nervous axe of our problematic identity yet not having any need to have it dealt with, a particularly remarkable example of civil liberties, the Greek model, yet subject to 2000-years-old laws.
That's actually the country I chose to live in, and as a Dutch Jew it simply helped to relieve the historical weight of my position as a Jew by determinism. I didn't have to strive in order to make of success an only way to prove a point, and therefore I could just sit next to a computer, with an useless degree in the Classics, and write about it all night long... not exactly preoccupied. Being objective I don't know if this is exactly a dreamland, or if it'll last for all that long. But from a personal perspective, well.... we haven't got any other, and as far as I'm aware of that fact I think we've just been left with the chance to make the best out of it, that's what matters I guess. These days I just bore the feeling I've been here for a few decades, more than my own age could count, but this thought doesn't really trouble me, I somehow enjoy it. A Jew that simply relaxes and stays home? I guess that's some progress already. I've tricked history, and as much as I strive to see the negative side on that, I just don't.
Some might hate it, some others might love it. I personally fall in love with it everyday, even when the loneliness of the big city strikes me. Indeed, this place wasn't made for everyone, but one thing is clear, you can hate it or love or maybe both, depending on the mood, but you just can't ignore it. Some say it's far better off in Amsterdam, I doubt it... but I'm a Dutch citizen so I'm allowed to hate that too. Jews with their opinions, in the end they never really mean it. I guess it's time for a more serious stream, stop smoking and hit the bed. Tomorrow will be another story, and God bless the newspapers. They succeed to remind me that this is just a ghetto, but don't tell them as for now. I love their optimism, it makes me think all this was worth it, despite God, despite myself, despite my survivor mentality. It's always great to think that tomorrow history starts off again, and that you won't even understand it.
We wanted a place to live, we wanted a common ground, we wanted a society. Actually now we have it, just ignore how to deal it with, but it doesn't matter. We've already given up reason - the only alternative for the pessimist to save himself from himself, to choose life instead.
A nut.
That's how an unsual TV programme finished this evening just right before the midnight news, and I guess most Israelis, Jews and Philo-semites have heard this sentence several times, from left rallies in North Tel Aviv to religious zionist speeches to the explanation of a cab driver of why he's still living in the country, despite its thousand and one reasons to ascertain it's impossible to make it here; it doesn't surprise me anymore to find out most of my fellow citizens can't really find reasons to explain why they actually chose to live in the country, but only to justify why they couldn't live anywhere else. I'm one of them, and beyond that I dare to publicize my opinions on the matter to a public that is partly unable to understand me, the English-speaking community; but not having any better language to write in, I strive in between the English phonemes and understatements.
After having heard such sentence by Nana Sheirer, one of our Israeli crazies, I thought it was a good moment to write something about "we haven't got any other country". Right after playing the devil's advocate in my last article and the conservative Jew during my daily arguments about Zionism, I prefer to play a different role tonight, to reduce the already small extension of Israel to the ghetto-like and cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv; the independent republic I've decidedly become a citizen ever since 2002. I'm not wearing the heavy burdens of Jewish history neither the shortcomings of Israeli society. You must think I'm pretty obsessed with the topic in particular and in general with anything that hides under the Jewish world, and I wouldn't dare to contradict you. It's such a waste of time, a prominent Classics scholar in the make who refuses a first hand entry to St. Anne's College and instead wanders around the world for a couple of years to end up finally the streets of Tel Aviv, falling in love with every crazie I found and worst of all, writing about it. Almost 2 in the morning, in front of a screen, unreasonably excited and reasonably confused... nevertheless writing and written, not to mention unread. It gives me some kind of masochistic satisfaction though, and it's interesting above all. For most people would secretly expect to face down here in these pages the procrastinations of a well-bred Dutch citizen about a country to which is linked only by an ancient and despisable religion practiced by his ancestors and discontinued in the family for some 200 years. We chose to be Dutch, and I chose to be Israeli. An eternal paradox, a 21st century paradox, an anachronism. Past the Enlightenment and the closure of the ghettos, a new generation of highly educated Jewish secular society whose achievements could be hardly overwritten by any Christian family of our same social standing. Yet I'm here, in front of this screen being a damn Israeli, and writing about it in a language that doesn't necessarily fit the conventions of my experience. But not even that bothers me, and I permanently wonder if there's anything at all that does, not even the fact of belonging to a not-so-intellectually-reputable generation of faceless internet dating and SMS shopping.
Having cleared those points out then I can get to work, and play a bit of Carry Bradshaw, a bit of Ofer Mayer, a bit of God, and inclusive a bit of myself. Contemptuously uninterested in world affairs and political arteriosclerosis, above all given to the echoes of a noisy city, of an underground world at the sea level, to the mysteries of the largest Jewish city in the world, to its addictive ugliness and cosmopolitan nature. That wouldn't really describe Tel Aviv, endless nights spent in front of a dating website, or simply hitting the roads finding a suitable nitch to rest my acheing nature from over-politicized articles, breaking news and historical determinism. That's somehow what you might find in a largest Jewish settlement of the world in a summer night, in a winter night. A Middle Eastern enclave that doesn't belong to any country, that doesn't belong to any religion or to any political party, a city that doesn't belong to anyone but all. An independent city-state that might be somewhere in New York, Moscow or Poone, yet being nowhere; a contemtuous example of civil liberties, yet a ghetto crowded with wealthy suburbs and self-governed consciences.
A unique example of collective self destruction, of chosen self destruction and deconstructivism. A city whose history is recreated and re-created in each and every single corner, in every bar, in every poetry book, in each and every love story and in the memories of innocent tourists that look forward not only a good time but a taste of Israel, that there actually is in the city, but isn't there. Yes indeed an Israeli city, hastening, crowdy and Middle Eastern, messy, filthy; but at times not an Israeli city, at times just nothing in particular, nothing other than a city. Maybe that was our only purpose, just to be like anyone else, just a people, just a city, just a country, not particularly Jewish and not particularly anything else. Wandering bodies in search of identity and pleasure, in search of comfort and action, in search of freedom, in search of understanding; and still being unsure that we achieved anything of that, we didn't even succeed in being just anything else, an average Joey and neither an average Jew.
My generation made of this city an independent republic, a Jewish secular anarchy, a city of the size of Geneva with enough violence as to populate the whole of Switzerland tenifold times; yet a city where hardly anyone gets killed, where hardly anyone is a stranger, where hardly anyone is unkind. You'd be asking how can I explain that, well I simply can't and that's why I wrote this, maybe to get some relief, or just to make some justice to my newfound country; the most violent and hastening I ever visited, and probably one of the smallest.
It's not a surprise in anyway, Jews always make everything complicated and nihilism is not their kind of thing; everyone here is a bit of God, and if not at least of him a son. The philosophies have been deserted and replaced by the uncomfortable faltering of real life, even for the philosophers. I guess Tel Avivian Zionism can just be reduced to a very simple stratagema: We wanted a country of our own, but they overpopulated just too fast so we found a nitch inside; and we formed an unofficial republic that is particulaly disconnected from national reality but peculiarly connected to it, devoid of personality but too personal to be called a city, a nervous axe of our problematic identity yet not having any need to have it dealt with, a particularly remarkable example of civil liberties, the Greek model, yet subject to 2000-years-old laws.
That's actually the country I chose to live in, and as a Dutch Jew it simply helped to relieve the historical weight of my position as a Jew by determinism. I didn't have to strive in order to make of success an only way to prove a point, and therefore I could just sit next to a computer, with an useless degree in the Classics, and write about it all night long... not exactly preoccupied. Being objective I don't know if this is exactly a dreamland, or if it'll last for all that long. But from a personal perspective, well.... we haven't got any other, and as far as I'm aware of that fact I think we've just been left with the chance to make the best out of it, that's what matters I guess. These days I just bore the feeling I've been here for a few decades, more than my own age could count, but this thought doesn't really trouble me, I somehow enjoy it. A Jew that simply relaxes and stays home? I guess that's some progress already. I've tricked history, and as much as I strive to see the negative side on that, I just don't.
Some might hate it, some others might love it. I personally fall in love with it everyday, even when the loneliness of the big city strikes me. Indeed, this place wasn't made for everyone, but one thing is clear, you can hate it or love or maybe both, depending on the mood, but you just can't ignore it. Some say it's far better off in Amsterdam, I doubt it... but I'm a Dutch citizen so I'm allowed to hate that too. Jews with their opinions, in the end they never really mean it. I guess it's time for a more serious stream, stop smoking and hit the bed. Tomorrow will be another story, and God bless the newspapers. They succeed to remind me that this is just a ghetto, but don't tell them as for now. I love their optimism, it makes me think all this was worth it, despite God, despite myself, despite my survivor mentality. It's always great to think that tomorrow history starts off again, and that you won't even understand it.
We wanted a place to live, we wanted a common ground, we wanted a society. Actually now we have it, just ignore how to deal it with, but it doesn't matter. We've already given up reason - the only alternative for the pessimist to save himself from himself, to choose life instead.
A nut.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Tel Aviv and my own personal ghetto
Once again, I wake up in as early as possible in the morning yet finding it difficult, being a well-known night creature; fact that doesn't surprise anyone for such is the life of a writer, of a journalist and of an academician. Three positions which without any conviction I withhold but mediocrely and as an expert generalist I can't claim being an specialist on any topic at all but rather a dilettante with a rich background of well-known phrases and quotations from the least known authors. That shouldn't preclude me from writing at all, grabbing a few cigarettes and a cup of bad coffee and remembering the dreams to which I woke up, awful lot of memories and hyperrealistic impressions that remind me of my preoccupations and anxiety the day before. Religion in glasses of wine and old love stories in empty bottles, without messages, without answers and even without questions.
By this natural order everyone would agree that there's nothing sympathetically peculiar about me, for such is the life of many others citizens of this overpolluted planet, many of them who write as a morning hobby before work, others who do it as a profession or just because there's nothing else to do. And indeed there's nothing sympathetically peculiar, I myself agree, except for the fact of living in an experimental country, whose shortcomings might be understood by the empirical sociologist as the consequence of years of hatred, painful standings and a long decadent history. My country is a sociological laboratory in which an old Semitic cult which became the most influential world religion, with its legal codex and Holy books unaltered for over 2000 years attempts unsuccessfully to conciliate with the highest values of democracy, freedom of speech and liberalism. Yes, it sounds like a big contradiction and I myself doubt whether such conciliation is any possible, even in my own wishful thinking, even in my apathy. Those facts are largely ignored by most people, including my fellow citizens. The State of Israel is actually that, the State of Israel. Far from being a democratic country, far from being a tyranny, far from being a Jewish state, far from being an halachically-correct state, leave asides politically correct; far from being anything at all other than a country.
As a convinced Zionist ideologist this bunch of ideas terribly pains me, for I'm unable to find under the present circumstances a logical reason in the eyes of Jewish history for why this country should exist at all, other than the definitions of a Jew that the world of Christianity and heathenism have given. And after almost 60 years of existence I believe we the Jewish people have lost the enduring battle of our own existence and of our own conservation, not implying in any level that there's no Jewish people but rather no reasonable ground to justify its existence other than the bias of the good old Semitic cult that I have myself foregone ever since my childhood; outside the world of the Bible and the Talmudic sages I find it hard to explain why this people should exist at all, why this people could have managed to survived their tragic history and why this people should have a country at all. This is of course all in theoretical ground, and it's not actually reasonable to write an objective article on the matter being myself a Jew, or rather a proud Jew, yet lacking most Jewish identity, other than a language and a culture that originated in the freedom of the State of Israel, in the streets of Tel Aviv and the German-founded universities.
In reality, despite the failures of our Zionist principles the such country actually does exist, a chaotic milieu, half post-modern and half medieval, enclaved in the Middle East striving between the values of the ancient religion and the quest for modernity and equality. The country constitutes a brilliant example of Biblical promises, of how the Jews escaped the teeth of the wolves and landed on boats and returned to the land of their ancestors to reclaim their throne as the descendants of King David. This experiment, as full of historical dramatism as it sounds, was relatively successful and emotionally overwhelming for the people that lived in the western world at the time, and even for those who live there today; not so much for most of us who populate the country itself. Facing the surprising fact that after almost 60 years we've almost entirely forgot the principles that initially brought us here and that had been keeping us under terrible yearnings and fondness over a long period of human history; we simply became another country, another "people", and earned for ourselves that recognition that had been stripped away from us several centuries ago, we strived for legitimacy and eventually outreached our enemies, our friends and our own history. At what price? This is the question that troubles me, we seem to have forgotten history, we seem to have chosen legitimacy and democracy over identity and conservation.
And probably as many American Jews would put it, we seem to be using success as our only way to prove a point, in order to grant ourselves the legitimacy of "we made it", we succeeded in our struggle for equality in a somewhat painful way, by foregoing most of our original values and creating new ones that would give some ethical ground to our struggles; and mostly I can say we simply became another country, the Israelis, just like the Germans or the Americans, because "we made it here", and we probably left the "Jews" (and in a semantic context the word "Jew") out of this picture, and we don't seem to care much about them unless it's convenient for us, for our geo-political struggles or in order to justify our existence when our quasi-democratic values weaken and tremble and then nothing else could be sufficiently powerful as to grant ourselves redemption other than finding comfort in our long history and the troubles of our brothers in the diaspora, without forgetting that this country might well be the only safe and "official" shelter for Jews in distress, without mentioning the complicated issue of who is a Jew. Unfortunately our daily life is well different, is well less meaningful. In the day-to-day life of Tel Aviv sometimes history commenced in 1948, sometimes commenced yesterday, probably right after a long love affair or an old exhausting job. And only when death hovers on us with its delicate and unavoidable breath we are prone to remember the 2000 years that came down on us before all this happened, before the internet age, the mobile phones and the gay life of Tel Aviv. Short memory I'd call it, our own way of self-denial, for we find no other way to deal with the heavy weight of our own history, of our own historical identity, of our own troubles. Somehow else we just endure the same moral and social troubles of any other western country, just not exactly being one and not dealing with them as one.
In the bottom line we "needed" to build a country of our own, because it was a Biblical promise; but the reasons that brought it into existence seem to be far from the Biblical promise to the Jewish people. Maybe we built a country because after the jewels of European Jewry were wiped out in the concentration camps there was nowhere else to go? Because not us, but the enemies set up the ground on which someone would be considered a Jew or not? Maybe because the Hitlers and the Arafats of the world are the ones granted the right to say who is a Jew and who is not? I'm not intending to turn my back to this country for I'm this country, in each and every single aspect of my life; but maybe I'd like to review the theoretical grounds on which we granted ourselves the rights to settle down here and not just to settle down, but to build a society, not that we don't have them, but how do we understand them? How do we determine them at all? Of course I'd the the first one to agree that after hundreds of years trapped in the ghetto I feel just comforted to walk around this country and feel free, it's our own personal and collective struggle for freedom and lack of determinism, our dreaming and wandering souls and the longing of a tragic past. I just feel these days that even when the ghetto is not there anymore, we keep thinking our lives so. In our survivors mentalities after so many hundreds of years I'm not so sure that we've left the ghetto at all, and that we're not trapped in our own dynamic reality without much regard for the outside world.
These winter days, although I don't get depressed, I do contemplate with a certain longing the practices of Orthodox Judaism and somehow it touches me deeply, but nevertheless I feel like standing on a point several thousands of kilometers far away from it, and in despite that nothing can just strip off my connection to the Jewish people, my feeling of being a son of a king and my ideal of social action for the Jewish people, probably my only personal way to live Zionism and Judaism by itself. I feel somehow denying our origins and our legitimacy as a people just in order to be like "everybody else". I don't know if others noticed already, but we didn't really succeed. We're not like anyone else, even in Tel Aviv and next to the Mediterranean Sea I can feel as if the ghetto has just shifted the colours of the buildings and the income bracketts.
Despite of the internet era, casual sex at ease and our skybreakers, our minds are still in the shteytelach of the good old times, for we can't close 2000 years of history in one go, and I don't think we even want. Despite postmodernism and equality and freedom I don't think we made it all through, we might be justified, but understood? I certainly doubt it. Maybe we'll be a democracy, maybe we're, maybe this is just a crazy dream; but we're paying a very high price for it. Wars, internal divisions, a growing despise for our religion and cultural heritage, deep identity conflicts and an apathy that nothing can cure, not even death. I'm not calling up anyone to turn to the other side, I wouldn't do it myself. Just like yesterday after my daily Talmud study group travelling back home on a bus I hear a program in the radio led by a prominent Ultra-Orthodox figure. During the 10 minutes intervention I heard the most awful discourse on the Jewish religion. According to the halachic view there's no democracy in the Torah, there's only a king that rules mercilessly over his people and subjects them to his will as he wishes, the Torah is a heavenly dictatorship. I wonder if that's how I want to raise up my children like, and doubt whether I want them raised up as I myself was.
Heavenly or not, I prefer actually our half broken identity and half granted legitimacy within the boundaries of democracy. You can say I'm a traitor, you can say I'm a Greek. But as a Jew after 2000 years and a a long personal history in the search of this Judaism I only want to make peace with the world, to grant myself the right to exist, to think that it's right to be a Jew, that it's not an issue anymore. I don't think I or anyone else is succeeding, specially if you're an intellectual. But we might just try, we might just get another chance. We were given the choice too, even by the merciless king that rules over our faith. I know most of our Jewish theory might be just tears and non sense, overdramatizations and extrapolarizations, but it's just too late in history to regret all that, it's just too late to give up, it's just too late to give up our identity, it's just too late to leave the ghetto, to leave Auschwitz. Maybe at this point we just need to go on with life, legitimate or not. Messiah is not coming, said Marx and even Wiesel, but we're still waiting for redemption.
Even in Tel Aviv, I can't claim I know that many people who wouldn't take a seat back when hearing the word Jew anywhere in the world. My freedom is a bit of an understatement, I believe myself being free and legitimate in this country, hence I can deny everything my own life was built in and for, at least according to historical determinism. Yet overseas I'm not who defines what or who is a Jew, and somehow I'm not that self secured that I really want to leave the ghetto at this point. A bit of denial every day, cups of coffee, cigarettes, a trip to Paris, a good partner, all that... maybe will do the trick. I still think I need to succeed in order to prove a point. I'm not sure I want to be a doctor in anything at all, but I do know I "have" to get a Ph.D, because I have to "make it", ironic no? Not even inside the land of Israel I give up on the thought that I actually have to make it. As D. Wang would put it, our collective ghetto, and my own personal ghetto; even in Tel Aviv.
Good morning State of Israel. Are you also "making it" today?
By this natural order everyone would agree that there's nothing sympathetically peculiar about me, for such is the life of many others citizens of this overpolluted planet, many of them who write as a morning hobby before work, others who do it as a profession or just because there's nothing else to do. And indeed there's nothing sympathetically peculiar, I myself agree, except for the fact of living in an experimental country, whose shortcomings might be understood by the empirical sociologist as the consequence of years of hatred, painful standings and a long decadent history. My country is a sociological laboratory in which an old Semitic cult which became the most influential world religion, with its legal codex and Holy books unaltered for over 2000 years attempts unsuccessfully to conciliate with the highest values of democracy, freedom of speech and liberalism. Yes, it sounds like a big contradiction and I myself doubt whether such conciliation is any possible, even in my own wishful thinking, even in my apathy. Those facts are largely ignored by most people, including my fellow citizens. The State of Israel is actually that, the State of Israel. Far from being a democratic country, far from being a tyranny, far from being a Jewish state, far from being an halachically-correct state, leave asides politically correct; far from being anything at all other than a country.
As a convinced Zionist ideologist this bunch of ideas terribly pains me, for I'm unable to find under the present circumstances a logical reason in the eyes of Jewish history for why this country should exist at all, other than the definitions of a Jew that the world of Christianity and heathenism have given. And after almost 60 years of existence I believe we the Jewish people have lost the enduring battle of our own existence and of our own conservation, not implying in any level that there's no Jewish people but rather no reasonable ground to justify its existence other than the bias of the good old Semitic cult that I have myself foregone ever since my childhood; outside the world of the Bible and the Talmudic sages I find it hard to explain why this people should exist at all, why this people could have managed to survived their tragic history and why this people should have a country at all. This is of course all in theoretical ground, and it's not actually reasonable to write an objective article on the matter being myself a Jew, or rather a proud Jew, yet lacking most Jewish identity, other than a language and a culture that originated in the freedom of the State of Israel, in the streets of Tel Aviv and the German-founded universities.
In reality, despite the failures of our Zionist principles the such country actually does exist, a chaotic milieu, half post-modern and half medieval, enclaved in the Middle East striving between the values of the ancient religion and the quest for modernity and equality. The country constitutes a brilliant example of Biblical promises, of how the Jews escaped the teeth of the wolves and landed on boats and returned to the land of their ancestors to reclaim their throne as the descendants of King David. This experiment, as full of historical dramatism as it sounds, was relatively successful and emotionally overwhelming for the people that lived in the western world at the time, and even for those who live there today; not so much for most of us who populate the country itself. Facing the surprising fact that after almost 60 years we've almost entirely forgot the principles that initially brought us here and that had been keeping us under terrible yearnings and fondness over a long period of human history; we simply became another country, another "people", and earned for ourselves that recognition that had been stripped away from us several centuries ago, we strived for legitimacy and eventually outreached our enemies, our friends and our own history. At what price? This is the question that troubles me, we seem to have forgotten history, we seem to have chosen legitimacy and democracy over identity and conservation.
And probably as many American Jews would put it, we seem to be using success as our only way to prove a point, in order to grant ourselves the legitimacy of "we made it", we succeeded in our struggle for equality in a somewhat painful way, by foregoing most of our original values and creating new ones that would give some ethical ground to our struggles; and mostly I can say we simply became another country, the Israelis, just like the Germans or the Americans, because "we made it here", and we probably left the "Jews" (and in a semantic context the word "Jew") out of this picture, and we don't seem to care much about them unless it's convenient for us, for our geo-political struggles or in order to justify our existence when our quasi-democratic values weaken and tremble and then nothing else could be sufficiently powerful as to grant ourselves redemption other than finding comfort in our long history and the troubles of our brothers in the diaspora, without forgetting that this country might well be the only safe and "official" shelter for Jews in distress, without mentioning the complicated issue of who is a Jew. Unfortunately our daily life is well different, is well less meaningful. In the day-to-day life of Tel Aviv sometimes history commenced in 1948, sometimes commenced yesterday, probably right after a long love affair or an old exhausting job. And only when death hovers on us with its delicate and unavoidable breath we are prone to remember the 2000 years that came down on us before all this happened, before the internet age, the mobile phones and the gay life of Tel Aviv. Short memory I'd call it, our own way of self-denial, for we find no other way to deal with the heavy weight of our own history, of our own historical identity, of our own troubles. Somehow else we just endure the same moral and social troubles of any other western country, just not exactly being one and not dealing with them as one.
In the bottom line we "needed" to build a country of our own, because it was a Biblical promise; but the reasons that brought it into existence seem to be far from the Biblical promise to the Jewish people. Maybe we built a country because after the jewels of European Jewry were wiped out in the concentration camps there was nowhere else to go? Because not us, but the enemies set up the ground on which someone would be considered a Jew or not? Maybe because the Hitlers and the Arafats of the world are the ones granted the right to say who is a Jew and who is not? I'm not intending to turn my back to this country for I'm this country, in each and every single aspect of my life; but maybe I'd like to review the theoretical grounds on which we granted ourselves the rights to settle down here and not just to settle down, but to build a society, not that we don't have them, but how do we understand them? How do we determine them at all? Of course I'd the the first one to agree that after hundreds of years trapped in the ghetto I feel just comforted to walk around this country and feel free, it's our own personal and collective struggle for freedom and lack of determinism, our dreaming and wandering souls and the longing of a tragic past. I just feel these days that even when the ghetto is not there anymore, we keep thinking our lives so. In our survivors mentalities after so many hundreds of years I'm not so sure that we've left the ghetto at all, and that we're not trapped in our own dynamic reality without much regard for the outside world.
These winter days, although I don't get depressed, I do contemplate with a certain longing the practices of Orthodox Judaism and somehow it touches me deeply, but nevertheless I feel like standing on a point several thousands of kilometers far away from it, and in despite that nothing can just strip off my connection to the Jewish people, my feeling of being a son of a king and my ideal of social action for the Jewish people, probably my only personal way to live Zionism and Judaism by itself. I feel somehow denying our origins and our legitimacy as a people just in order to be like "everybody else". I don't know if others noticed already, but we didn't really succeed. We're not like anyone else, even in Tel Aviv and next to the Mediterranean Sea I can feel as if the ghetto has just shifted the colours of the buildings and the income bracketts.
Despite of the internet era, casual sex at ease and our skybreakers, our minds are still in the shteytelach of the good old times, for we can't close 2000 years of history in one go, and I don't think we even want. Despite postmodernism and equality and freedom I don't think we made it all through, we might be justified, but understood? I certainly doubt it. Maybe we'll be a democracy, maybe we're, maybe this is just a crazy dream; but we're paying a very high price for it. Wars, internal divisions, a growing despise for our religion and cultural heritage, deep identity conflicts and an apathy that nothing can cure, not even death. I'm not calling up anyone to turn to the other side, I wouldn't do it myself. Just like yesterday after my daily Talmud study group travelling back home on a bus I hear a program in the radio led by a prominent Ultra-Orthodox figure. During the 10 minutes intervention I heard the most awful discourse on the Jewish religion. According to the halachic view there's no democracy in the Torah, there's only a king that rules mercilessly over his people and subjects them to his will as he wishes, the Torah is a heavenly dictatorship. I wonder if that's how I want to raise up my children like, and doubt whether I want them raised up as I myself was.
Heavenly or not, I prefer actually our half broken identity and half granted legitimacy within the boundaries of democracy. You can say I'm a traitor, you can say I'm a Greek. But as a Jew after 2000 years and a a long personal history in the search of this Judaism I only want to make peace with the world, to grant myself the right to exist, to think that it's right to be a Jew, that it's not an issue anymore. I don't think I or anyone else is succeeding, specially if you're an intellectual. But we might just try, we might just get another chance. We were given the choice too, even by the merciless king that rules over our faith. I know most of our Jewish theory might be just tears and non sense, overdramatizations and extrapolarizations, but it's just too late in history to regret all that, it's just too late to give up, it's just too late to give up our identity, it's just too late to leave the ghetto, to leave Auschwitz. Maybe at this point we just need to go on with life, legitimate or not. Messiah is not coming, said Marx and even Wiesel, but we're still waiting for redemption.
Even in Tel Aviv, I can't claim I know that many people who wouldn't take a seat back when hearing the word Jew anywhere in the world. My freedom is a bit of an understatement, I believe myself being free and legitimate in this country, hence I can deny everything my own life was built in and for, at least according to historical determinism. Yet overseas I'm not who defines what or who is a Jew, and somehow I'm not that self secured that I really want to leave the ghetto at this point. A bit of denial every day, cups of coffee, cigarettes, a trip to Paris, a good partner, all that... maybe will do the trick. I still think I need to succeed in order to prove a point. I'm not sure I want to be a doctor in anything at all, but I do know I "have" to get a Ph.D, because I have to "make it", ironic no? Not even inside the land of Israel I give up on the thought that I actually have to make it. As D. Wang would put it, our collective ghetto, and my own personal ghetto; even in Tel Aviv.
Good morning State of Israel. Are you also "making it" today?
No answer
We thought an idealized world
In your living room
Somewhat dark, somewhat bright
Under the infatuation of heat
Your world failed on me
I failed myself
Devoid of repair
Succeeding everyday
Proving a point
That's how we made it
Until you tore off
Until you walked off
Until I turned in
A glass of water
2:23 am
Cigarettes
Newspapers
Old thoughts
Still proving your points
Wearing blue shirts
Worn out in Blues
Nothing to remember
Nothing to recall
Somewhere to run
Sky, that's all above
Waiting for an answer
That will never come
Foregoing the truths
Embracing the clouds
Conversations never held
A life was never lived
A dream of few hours
In glasses of wine
In films, captured
The essence of being
Potato chips and TV
Waiting for an answer
For someone to deflect
For withstanding blame
The next day didn't come
And I swallowed your promises
That I myself invented
Your faces and your stories
That life, you never told me
Forlorn this time
This youth
This mind
Absent within
You never gave it in
I wish I didn't write
I wish I just swallowed and didn't cry
But honest truth is
I still yield on better days
On the futures that I buried
On the futures that you carved
I'm just not being fair
I know
But next time
Maybe
Next summer
Perhaps
We'll talk it over
When you'll be older
When you'll be a loner
Drink coffee in the morning
And just chat about life
Proving your points for a life
Those well-constructed philosophies
The truths you never found
An ill-covered veil
Smaller your eyes
And your skin sadder
I guess I know it all by now
For I hasten no longer
I simply drink coffee
Waste my mornings
While you prove your points
While you make it
And there's always paper
A man is always patient
Even the newspaper
In your living room
Somewhat dark, somewhat bright
Under the infatuation of heat
Your world failed on me
I failed myself
Devoid of repair
Succeeding everyday
Proving a point
That's how we made it
Until you tore off
Until you walked off
Until I turned in
A glass of water
2:23 am
Cigarettes
Newspapers
Old thoughts
Still proving your points
Wearing blue shirts
Worn out in Blues
Nothing to remember
Nothing to recall
Somewhere to run
Sky, that's all above
Waiting for an answer
That will never come
Foregoing the truths
Embracing the clouds
Conversations never held
A life was never lived
A dream of few hours
In glasses of wine
In films, captured
The essence of being
Potato chips and TV
Waiting for an answer
For someone to deflect
For withstanding blame
The next day didn't come
And I swallowed your promises
That I myself invented
Your faces and your stories
That life, you never told me
Forlorn this time
This youth
This mind
Absent within
You never gave it in
I wish I didn't write
I wish I just swallowed and didn't cry
But honest truth is
I still yield on better days
On the futures that I buried
On the futures that you carved
I'm just not being fair
I know
But next time
Maybe
Next summer
Perhaps
We'll talk it over
When you'll be older
When you'll be a loner
Drink coffee in the morning
And just chat about life
Proving your points for a life
Those well-constructed philosophies
The truths you never found
An ill-covered veil
Smaller your eyes
And your skin sadder
I guess I know it all by now
For I hasten no longer
I simply drink coffee
Waste my mornings
While you prove your points
While you make it
And there's always paper
A man is always patient
Even the newspaper
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