Not an eventless day really.
Thinking deeply about Zelda's words, "hatred lies". In brief I could say that there's a lot more to be learnt from this pious poetry than from complicated text books on ethics and ontology, to be learnt about Torah of course. This really reminds me of Aristotle and his foe Heidegger, for they were very keen in insisting that the spirit of poetry was a lot closer to that essentiality of being than most of arts were. I read this fascinating paper by Heidegger called "Building Dwelling Thinking" in which he recalls how previously he said the nature of poetry is closer to the truth than the spirit of philosophy or the plastic arts is, because there's an unconcealment of thought foreign to the dynamics of other disciplines and forms of expression.
Truth here doesn't mean the "truth" in Aristotelian logic, namely opposed to falsehood. It's rather the "true" as something that equals being and revelation (the latter might be already a Heschelian idea). A truth that doesn't admit of those categories all too often found in Western thought. If this truth is to be found outside history (like the "ultimate mind" of Maimonides... a form of Jewish proto-Idealism obviously rooted in Aristotelianism) it could be part or end of a syllogism in which there're parts to the all. God can't be part of the world in the sense that his being "partial" would shatter his infinite atributes. He's indeed the world, but not in an Spinozistic sense.
It troubles me how in the Orthodox world the strive for truth is understood today; entirely as opposed to the "false". The Orthodox read into the text a sort of dogma whose root is totally a-historical, yet the only way to "access" the importance of engaging in this particular form of discourse is by historical questions firstly, and then by Aristotelian statements of truth and false; logic statements. That's why I'm faithful to Lessing.
I feel how I'm always engaged in human discourse not for the sake of the validity of truth or falsehood in the argument but because those arguments are of relevance in the world. I'm consciously biased and shattered by the darkness of the world. That's how in an almost Socratic fashion I enter all arguments with the only purpose not of expressing my view but of taking a side. Not a symbol of tolerance, in general I'm quite racist and elitist because my experience of the world has shaped me into a conservative thinker, who doesn't think in a conservative fashion. I'm aware of being entirely subjective in my understanding and reading of history, because it's the only possible way of reading history. The Protestant historicism of Biblical scholarship finds me in discomfort, for asking these questions about history is already a denial of history and human freedom. A quest for meaning based on history.
The object has no value other than its value in the world for whoever it is intended. In that sense I'm closer to the source of rabbinic thought (mystery or dogma, "kerygma"") than the Aristotelian forms of contemporary Orthodoxy.
That's precisely why the questions he asked me today found me in discomfort too, one doesn't really ask those questions but out of eschatological fear. A question that is more venomous than any possible deceive or treachery one might receive for an answer. That's why almost desirelessly I played the Sabina in hers and Franz' last encounter... and gave myself entirely knowing that this would be perhaps the last time I would let it happen. There was some tragic about it.
But I'm not sufficiently true to myself, in the sense that I'm still Greek and pagan and free. I can't be that true to myself, it would shatter humanity as I know it. There I return to my never-ending monologue on the nature of sin, in which I remain contemptuously Catholic.
It doesn't hurt that he lies, but it bewilders me. The first steep on the slope that leads to amazement, the most Platonic of all feelings.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Letter to a German acquaintance
Dear one,
Do no think my ideas on emotional pain are particularly wrecked or too much unwise (while they're yet not wise), I'm simply trying to arrive at an understand of the human condition from within itself a lot more honest to nature than contemporary philosophy does. I might as well certainly tell you philosophy has nothing to say about human beings for the most part, it only talks about irrelevant stuff like beings and worlds and philosophers, one quoting the other and so forth.
Then you would ask what I'm trying to do in this lonely profession and I do have an answer for you. It is a lonely profession only in the same that humanity is a very lonely thing and it doesn't necessarily have to do with philosophical discourse. The only reason for which I engaged in this dialogue regarding my views on emotions and human relations isn't because I hold this views to the so totally true, but only because they have a relevance in the world and I'm therefore biased and not worthy of attention by anyone in the academia.
My experiences with pain and guilt are not ordinary experiences, for they're rooted not only in the experiences themselves but in their eidetic value, not their idelogical or sociological value. Things I couldn't be less bothered about. I'm being by no means a maverick, since my assessment of such experiential eidos is also rooted in my contempt for the German philosophical tradition, the only tradition with which I feel there's any point to argue about. That's not because I'm an assimilated Jew or anything such, and in this regard I believe to have cleaned myself of the dangerous "cura posteriore" Hannah Arendt wrote to Mary McCarthy about. It is only because of a notion of pleasure. It's truely a "grey zone" for banal statements, but intellectually because I come from the background of the Classical Studies I could only enter the world of contemporary thinkers through Hoelderlin, Goethe and Schiller.
Had I been trained in the study of history or politics beforehand it's almost certain my thinking space would have shifted somewhere else, but that wasn't the case. In my opinion only the Germans understood the Greeks and valued them for what they truely were (all the way to Hitler), and that's the very reason for which one should drop altogether this silly polis-envy, put away the Classical books (at least all of the philosophers) and draw more from the Hebrew Bible. Not because I'm claiming the Bible is more Western than the Plato or Socrates but because it's a humanist text in the most authentic sense. This is the only reason for which it can become truely anti-humanistic. Not anti-human as was the political and social experiment of the Polis. Once unfruitful in France, it had already by proxy failed everywhere else, yet we are still too keen in founding all our forms of mutual coexistance in democracy rather than in discourse.
This discovery hasn't been the product of religious zeal, but rather of a journeying of 8 long years not unlike Abraham's in the most symbolic sense. I will agree that the plastic world is the most beautiful possible form of representation but it lacks enough depth as to rise itself beyond itself.
When I speak about my feelings and my lust I'm not being sincere in the sense that I haven't embraced so fully the humanity of the Bible myself and remain at the core of things partially a pagan worshipper. This is because my life is one of particularly extreme duality, in which my thinking is simply a struggle in between Hellas and Jerusalem. Do not forget that even though of Jewish birth I had embodied what it meant to be human in a Greek and German sense long before I took a glimpse of Judaism. I was a Greek before I became a Jew. In that sense I'm a truely Western man.
My fascination for the animality of love and intercourse in the pagan sense is only tamed by the guilt product of my humanity. For at the core I want to remain so absolutely human yet it's far from me. Unconsciously I want to be often reminded of the futility inherent to the enterprise, as not to be too confident in a world of security that has been for long shattered by hands of your and mine people.
I'm not a saddist or a masochist or anything like that, but I must confess that the idea of violence is in my opinion one of the most attractive. Simply because it's so contrary to the humanity embodied in Jewish Law and the contradiction often reminds me of my low place in the world, even once my talents have aided my way to enter the world at large. And you being a member of the German nation (regardless of your faith) my engagement (even if theoretical) in the enterprise of sin under your command seems to me as being far from intellectual. As a thinking person I happen to rejoice all the more in the banality of the whole thing, because it is the only reminder I have of the equal inequality per necessitas present in our human condition.
I'm not deliberately breaking the law, not at all. I'm simply entering a dangerous section of the experiential contentiousness... and as you accurately pointed out my only obstacle in between is not that of fear, but the burden of guilt which I so thoroughly enjoy. I've lost my fear a long time ago, but the price has been too dear at my early age, for I'm no longer able to experience the horizontality of youth in its authentic way... being rather outsider to my very own experience in a sense and in a sense not.
My acquaitance with the Midrash has shown me that there's not anything shameful or forbidden about a Platonic relationship between men, yet I'm afraid to say that when it comes to intimacy I'm only afraid of the guilt, not of the fear. Because the guilt reminds me every second that I'm no longer Greek, and that it's no longer an option. I have to strive for ethics that are beyond naturalistic approaches and social sciences. I wish my attractions were different not only in regard to gender but of nation. Yet I can't put myself to really enjoy the company of the natives, not because lack of enlightenment or education... it's simply a matter of political sensibilities and in that sense I'm so totally homeless. Reason for which you'll never really be able to penetrate the darkest corners of my spirit except by reading in between the lines of what I wrote. Just the same way in which I myself read the Bible.
I'm fond of the tragic because even when kitsch-full (something I dread) is honestly human, just like theatre or war. That's why I no longer enjoy myself in the comfort of perfect lovers and ideal relationships. Those do not express the poetic sense of madness present in the creation. Yet I do enjoy the company of the common people not because I can feel any superiority, but only because it can lead me into natural sin by means of innocent thoughtlessness and it is a lot less pained a road than with the artists, most of whom are humanists in the Greek sense. Therefore unprepared for my whole array of revolutionary ethics and freedom denial.
Weren't I to deny freedom this would be a lot easier, because I wouldn't wound up in Calvinist predestination or the atrophy of entropy. My guilt hurts specially because of my awareness, but it doesn't mean in any way that you shouldn't proceed with business as usual. You should read the Bible a little better to understand my mentality, but as far as this is far from feasible please do join me in this Feast of Fools. There's nothing sadder than comedy, and as far as I'm concerned earthliness is a big Eastern joke. I'm drawn to the independence of the foreigner in every place, it's become a helpless feeling. I want to escape being an animal in my private life, reason for which I feel compelled to the observance of Jewish Law. I don't want to make myself free, only unanimal.
If I would make myself free I would rise so high in the sly of experiences and emotions that I would lose my horizontality more than it's already forlorn... the vertigo would drown me in the mighty waters and my selfness would be lost. If I were a free man I would have no necessity to justify my craving for this unbalanced relationshis. I praise my lack of freedom in every step I take, it reminds me of a truth outside history and time. But it isn't so simply, I'm too rooted in Plato and Heidegger to achieve the lack of freedom I yearn for. I'm in a sense free, and that's why all this is possible.
A.
Do no think my ideas on emotional pain are particularly wrecked or too much unwise (while they're yet not wise), I'm simply trying to arrive at an understand of the human condition from within itself a lot more honest to nature than contemporary philosophy does. I might as well certainly tell you philosophy has nothing to say about human beings for the most part, it only talks about irrelevant stuff like beings and worlds and philosophers, one quoting the other and so forth.
Then you would ask what I'm trying to do in this lonely profession and I do have an answer for you. It is a lonely profession only in the same that humanity is a very lonely thing and it doesn't necessarily have to do with philosophical discourse. The only reason for which I engaged in this dialogue regarding my views on emotions and human relations isn't because I hold this views to the so totally true, but only because they have a relevance in the world and I'm therefore biased and not worthy of attention by anyone in the academia.
My experiences with pain and guilt are not ordinary experiences, for they're rooted not only in the experiences themselves but in their eidetic value, not their idelogical or sociological value. Things I couldn't be less bothered about. I'm being by no means a maverick, since my assessment of such experiential eidos is also rooted in my contempt for the German philosophical tradition, the only tradition with which I feel there's any point to argue about. That's not because I'm an assimilated Jew or anything such, and in this regard I believe to have cleaned myself of the dangerous "cura posteriore" Hannah Arendt wrote to Mary McCarthy about. It is only because of a notion of pleasure. It's truely a "grey zone" for banal statements, but intellectually because I come from the background of the Classical Studies I could only enter the world of contemporary thinkers through Hoelderlin, Goethe and Schiller.
Had I been trained in the study of history or politics beforehand it's almost certain my thinking space would have shifted somewhere else, but that wasn't the case. In my opinion only the Germans understood the Greeks and valued them for what they truely were (all the way to Hitler), and that's the very reason for which one should drop altogether this silly polis-envy, put away the Classical books (at least all of the philosophers) and draw more from the Hebrew Bible. Not because I'm claiming the Bible is more Western than the Plato or Socrates but because it's a humanist text in the most authentic sense. This is the only reason for which it can become truely anti-humanistic. Not anti-human as was the political and social experiment of the Polis. Once unfruitful in France, it had already by proxy failed everywhere else, yet we are still too keen in founding all our forms of mutual coexistance in democracy rather than in discourse.
This discovery hasn't been the product of religious zeal, but rather of a journeying of 8 long years not unlike Abraham's in the most symbolic sense. I will agree that the plastic world is the most beautiful possible form of representation but it lacks enough depth as to rise itself beyond itself.
When I speak about my feelings and my lust I'm not being sincere in the sense that I haven't embraced so fully the humanity of the Bible myself and remain at the core of things partially a pagan worshipper. This is because my life is one of particularly extreme duality, in which my thinking is simply a struggle in between Hellas and Jerusalem. Do not forget that even though of Jewish birth I had embodied what it meant to be human in a Greek and German sense long before I took a glimpse of Judaism. I was a Greek before I became a Jew. In that sense I'm a truely Western man.
My fascination for the animality of love and intercourse in the pagan sense is only tamed by the guilt product of my humanity. For at the core I want to remain so absolutely human yet it's far from me. Unconsciously I want to be often reminded of the futility inherent to the enterprise, as not to be too confident in a world of security that has been for long shattered by hands of your and mine people.
I'm not a saddist or a masochist or anything like that, but I must confess that the idea of violence is in my opinion one of the most attractive. Simply because it's so contrary to the humanity embodied in Jewish Law and the contradiction often reminds me of my low place in the world, even once my talents have aided my way to enter the world at large. And you being a member of the German nation (regardless of your faith) my engagement (even if theoretical) in the enterprise of sin under your command seems to me as being far from intellectual. As a thinking person I happen to rejoice all the more in the banality of the whole thing, because it is the only reminder I have of the equal inequality per necessitas present in our human condition.
I'm not deliberately breaking the law, not at all. I'm simply entering a dangerous section of the experiential contentiousness... and as you accurately pointed out my only obstacle in between is not that of fear, but the burden of guilt which I so thoroughly enjoy. I've lost my fear a long time ago, but the price has been too dear at my early age, for I'm no longer able to experience the horizontality of youth in its authentic way... being rather outsider to my very own experience in a sense and in a sense not.
My acquaitance with the Midrash has shown me that there's not anything shameful or forbidden about a Platonic relationship between men, yet I'm afraid to say that when it comes to intimacy I'm only afraid of the guilt, not of the fear. Because the guilt reminds me every second that I'm no longer Greek, and that it's no longer an option. I have to strive for ethics that are beyond naturalistic approaches and social sciences. I wish my attractions were different not only in regard to gender but of nation. Yet I can't put myself to really enjoy the company of the natives, not because lack of enlightenment or education... it's simply a matter of political sensibilities and in that sense I'm so totally homeless. Reason for which you'll never really be able to penetrate the darkest corners of my spirit except by reading in between the lines of what I wrote. Just the same way in which I myself read the Bible.
I'm fond of the tragic because even when kitsch-full (something I dread) is honestly human, just like theatre or war. That's why I no longer enjoy myself in the comfort of perfect lovers and ideal relationships. Those do not express the poetic sense of madness present in the creation. Yet I do enjoy the company of the common people not because I can feel any superiority, but only because it can lead me into natural sin by means of innocent thoughtlessness and it is a lot less pained a road than with the artists, most of whom are humanists in the Greek sense. Therefore unprepared for my whole array of revolutionary ethics and freedom denial.
Weren't I to deny freedom this would be a lot easier, because I wouldn't wound up in Calvinist predestination or the atrophy of entropy. My guilt hurts specially because of my awareness, but it doesn't mean in any way that you shouldn't proceed with business as usual. You should read the Bible a little better to understand my mentality, but as far as this is far from feasible please do join me in this Feast of Fools. There's nothing sadder than comedy, and as far as I'm concerned earthliness is a big Eastern joke. I'm drawn to the independence of the foreigner in every place, it's become a helpless feeling. I want to escape being an animal in my private life, reason for which I feel compelled to the observance of Jewish Law. I don't want to make myself free, only unanimal.
If I would make myself free I would rise so high in the sly of experiences and emotions that I would lose my horizontality more than it's already forlorn... the vertigo would drown me in the mighty waters and my selfness would be lost. If I were a free man I would have no necessity to justify my craving for this unbalanced relationshis. I praise my lack of freedom in every step I take, it reminds me of a truth outside history and time. But it isn't so simply, I'm too rooted in Plato and Heidegger to achieve the lack of freedom I yearn for. I'm in a sense free, and that's why all this is possible.
A.
The Theory of Desire
Suddenly whilst walking down the streets of Jerusalem a day-dream occured to me, a day-dream far les mesmerizing than Rahel's but one all too rich in the imagery of Golden Calves. I suddenly thought that one should say two blessings at the sight of a crippled man: "Blessed are Thou King of the Universe that has in his universe such" and "Blessed be the True Judge". It all came down to time in a green summer tile when thinking that the world can only be a monism when a plurality of forms is admitted to measure itself upon the "res" (an epi-phenomenal thing), and the only acceptable plurality is the one that can flow so manifold within an only channel.
One must bless for the good and for the bad. Because there's a Chassidic teaching explaining that one should never indulge himself in anger, for only after the initial test has been passed the real test come upon us, and so on and on we're tested even in the hour of the ailments. We should strive to come out of that typically modern attitude of thinking alone, therefore blessing for the good and for the bad is the simplest form of recognition. Recognition in the Greek-most amazement before the world, a "turning aside" that wasn't particularly foreign to both Homer and Moses.
And this amazement is the only possible cure for madness, because it is a silent agreement with both justice and war, with both hatred and love. I've been speaking about the world too much lately, perhaps only because I've become so alienated from it that all my thinking is directed towards the un-concealmente of the world in a truth that is in itself existing. But in order to enter the world of this darkmost times one feels ought to make a commitment for this wordly enterprise. The commitment for the genius comes with a natural drive, because he's forced onto the world on account not of his achievements but his naturalmost ability to convey in his thinking anything that is particularly universal about being human.
I drive myself into the world because the alienation product of a "childhood in my times" hurts to the very last bone and bestows upon me an obligation to drive my desire inwardly so that they can burst out externally and instead of being true or false to myself or anybody I'm simply attempting to enter the realm of public discourse. Philosophy itself isn't a form of public discourse, it is only the natural outcome of such. To the same extent that the Biblical accouts (in particular those that involve timeless journeying) are not philosophy itself nor doctrine, but become the foundational source from which man can enter the tradition of thought. This such being no more than the "action" of the wisemen in the world whose heritage to the posterity of the human world (if it's going to have one). Even when by making this statement I'm trapping myself in two reverse courses of metaphysics: Nietzsche and the Social Sciences. Yet being a political man of a highly apolitical nature, and therefore a denier of the worth of all metaphysics in contemporary discourse.
But in order to be driven instinctively into the world I must withdraw from it, risking entering the anti-world instead of the pre-rational world in which all thinking deemed original has taken place. I can't entirely drive myself to this world for there's a risk of losing authenticity and selfness along the way, that's why for so long I've refused to convey my thoughts in these pages. Because denying the human freedom quite cheaply granted to me by technology I'm able to join the ranks of history. Writing down my travails and works from my very own pen in the patience of paper... Because words written by man himself have more weight than statements, and a lot less value than action. In hand-writing I'm (in a modern sense) both acting and thinking. It is my heritage to the posterity... my confussion and vexation.
Every so often though, I feel compelled to face the mighty waters in which my ficititious selfhood spaceness vanishes. I'm become property of the world from within the realm of my foreignness to it as though in the dream of Pharaoh. My dual stance before the nature of freedom isn't in any essentiality original but rather inherited... Not inherited from thinkers and philosophers but from the core of livelihood, namely from a canonic text. For it's in no way unsimilar to the epic of Bilam and Korach. A blessing that curses, a curse that blesses... hence my sudden thought about the two-fold blessing before the crippled man in the street. Without Halacha this such embrace wouldn't be possible, therefore I enter Heschel's flight and light... in which the main destiny of Judaism isn't that of being a civilization, but of rising beyond the civilizing proces once we're either overcome history or obliterated it; not unlike we did with metaphysics.
Korach's role in a tragic sense was that of reminding us that equality is a value as opposed to the nature of being as truth is to opinions and negation to objective reality. Vivre la petit difference!
A kind of thought that strikes me as a form of awe, because for those of us for whom fear is no longer anything but a point in the map of synthesis the only possible access to theodicy and ethics is guilt. In a world for which humanity no longer means much guilt is the only way to do philosophy, is the only way to think in the way necessary in order to overcome those old-school notions of naturalistic spirituality and scientism, that are by no means biblical. Shame and guilt are the channels of despair, "a silent despair" is what Heschel describes being the only tools available to the thinker today. I felt tempted to write "religious thinker", but those of us (without being anything of agnostics and mystics) are well aware that if we want to overcome our fondest foe (ontology) those rational categories to divide the realm of knowledge and experience no longer hold valid. Our "fragmentary" notions of worldness, thingness, whatness and the like are rooted only in existential paths, not in categories of experience and cognition.
"Not having is the beginning of desire". For only in abscence of "thereness" one can exploit his potential to its fullest. In Augustinian terms we must strive to make the will of God our own will, and therefore two-fold bless a world essentially incomplete and un-had. This is the only possible attitude in a world where God the artist is in search of man, who has become so thoroughly alienated. A break-away from ontology is the only possible future of the civilized world, having reached its own crossroad at the threshold of violence and carelessness (Heidegger defined this as "a-temporality", perhaps a form of immortality?). That's why the education of our generation must immediately hearken to the call of anti-humanism, which is certainly not un-humanism and darkness. We must desire again, just as when the Rabbis in the Talmud asked "What can I do?", standing right beyond Halacha and Midrash. This is a call for ANTI-HUMANISM.
One must bless for the good and for the bad. Because there's a Chassidic teaching explaining that one should never indulge himself in anger, for only after the initial test has been passed the real test come upon us, and so on and on we're tested even in the hour of the ailments. We should strive to come out of that typically modern attitude of thinking alone, therefore blessing for the good and for the bad is the simplest form of recognition. Recognition in the Greek-most amazement before the world, a "turning aside" that wasn't particularly foreign to both Homer and Moses.
And this amazement is the only possible cure for madness, because it is a silent agreement with both justice and war, with both hatred and love. I've been speaking about the world too much lately, perhaps only because I've become so alienated from it that all my thinking is directed towards the un-concealmente of the world in a truth that is in itself existing. But in order to enter the world of this darkmost times one feels ought to make a commitment for this wordly enterprise. The commitment for the genius comes with a natural drive, because he's forced onto the world on account not of his achievements but his naturalmost ability to convey in his thinking anything that is particularly universal about being human.
I drive myself into the world because the alienation product of a "childhood in my times" hurts to the very last bone and bestows upon me an obligation to drive my desire inwardly so that they can burst out externally and instead of being true or false to myself or anybody I'm simply attempting to enter the realm of public discourse. Philosophy itself isn't a form of public discourse, it is only the natural outcome of such. To the same extent that the Biblical accouts (in particular those that involve timeless journeying) are not philosophy itself nor doctrine, but become the foundational source from which man can enter the tradition of thought. This such being no more than the "action" of the wisemen in the world whose heritage to the posterity of the human world (if it's going to have one). Even when by making this statement I'm trapping myself in two reverse courses of metaphysics: Nietzsche and the Social Sciences. Yet being a political man of a highly apolitical nature, and therefore a denier of the worth of all metaphysics in contemporary discourse.
But in order to be driven instinctively into the world I must withdraw from it, risking entering the anti-world instead of the pre-rational world in which all thinking deemed original has taken place. I can't entirely drive myself to this world for there's a risk of losing authenticity and selfness along the way, that's why for so long I've refused to convey my thoughts in these pages. Because denying the human freedom quite cheaply granted to me by technology I'm able to join the ranks of history. Writing down my travails and works from my very own pen in the patience of paper... Because words written by man himself have more weight than statements, and a lot less value than action. In hand-writing I'm (in a modern sense) both acting and thinking. It is my heritage to the posterity... my confussion and vexation.
Every so often though, I feel compelled to face the mighty waters in which my ficititious selfhood spaceness vanishes. I'm become property of the world from within the realm of my foreignness to it as though in the dream of Pharaoh. My dual stance before the nature of freedom isn't in any essentiality original but rather inherited... Not inherited from thinkers and philosophers but from the core of livelihood, namely from a canonic text. For it's in no way unsimilar to the epic of Bilam and Korach. A blessing that curses, a curse that blesses... hence my sudden thought about the two-fold blessing before the crippled man in the street. Without Halacha this such embrace wouldn't be possible, therefore I enter Heschel's flight and light... in which the main destiny of Judaism isn't that of being a civilization, but of rising beyond the civilizing proces once we're either overcome history or obliterated it; not unlike we did with metaphysics.
Korach's role in a tragic sense was that of reminding us that equality is a value as opposed to the nature of being as truth is to opinions and negation to objective reality. Vivre la petit difference!
A kind of thought that strikes me as a form of awe, because for those of us for whom fear is no longer anything but a point in the map of synthesis the only possible access to theodicy and ethics is guilt. In a world for which humanity no longer means much guilt is the only way to do philosophy, is the only way to think in the way necessary in order to overcome those old-school notions of naturalistic spirituality and scientism, that are by no means biblical. Shame and guilt are the channels of despair, "a silent despair" is what Heschel describes being the only tools available to the thinker today. I felt tempted to write "religious thinker", but those of us (without being anything of agnostics and mystics) are well aware that if we want to overcome our fondest foe (ontology) those rational categories to divide the realm of knowledge and experience no longer hold valid. Our "fragmentary" notions of worldness, thingness, whatness and the like are rooted only in existential paths, not in categories of experience and cognition.
"Not having is the beginning of desire". For only in abscence of "thereness" one can exploit his potential to its fullest. In Augustinian terms we must strive to make the will of God our own will, and therefore two-fold bless a world essentially incomplete and un-had. This is the only possible attitude in a world where God the artist is in search of man, who has become so thoroughly alienated. A break-away from ontology is the only possible future of the civilized world, having reached its own crossroad at the threshold of violence and carelessness (Heidegger defined this as "a-temporality", perhaps a form of immortality?). That's why the education of our generation must immediately hearken to the call of anti-humanism, which is certainly not un-humanism and darkness. We must desire again, just as when the Rabbis in the Talmud asked "What can I do?", standing right beyond Halacha and Midrash. This is a call for ANTI-HUMANISM.
Repetition and the World of Prayer
Some thoughts are radically unavoidable: As such the idea of repetition doesn't cease to strike me as profoundly troubling, the whole dynamic of life as a mere process of repetition. It does sound indeed strange. That's but an echo of life as a neoclassical portrait, yet so often I've heard the idea springing forth from within the deepmost whimsies of Rosenzweig and Kierkegaard. The denial of this so-called repetition all too common in modern times is nothing but an attempt at the loneliness of absolute freedom, at a naturalistic spirituality and heathen nature of a pagan and plastic world. Obviously the idea couldn't have been foreign to Levinas and Heschel, and most certainly not to Heidegger.
Repetition is the acknowledgement of the world as a gift possessed with necessarily objective existence in a phenomenological sense. It's a self-attachment to the world in order to escape the fatal sense of alienation inherent to our otherness. It seems as though we're but merely imported into this world, yet the physical matter we're made of entirely belongs to it. We also have a physical attachment and "desire" to it that makes us aware of our (even if artificial) belonging to the animal world, one that doesn't necessarily recognize itself as the world in the natural predisposition it derives from itself. The human world is an entirely different mode of creation, one that acknowledges itself precisely insofar as its own otherness is collectively beknown. Repetition is a natural rule (both in theology and biology) and novelty is that particularly human creaving for permanent innovation (worlds being destroyed and constructed but not created all the time, the Midrashic view sees) and re-placement. Synthesis of the process between creative natality and "technical" mortality; therein there's nothing particularly creative or productive about death (in the world of the natural sciences).
The theoretical impossibility (of the synthesis) is what makes the human world liveable to social beings, in the rather anthropomorphic sense of Aristotle. Just as Bergson realized with despair that negation is an impossibility in nature, I would dare to express that in order to remain fully human the world must absolutely reject the linear idea of completeness and its aim towards perfection (in urbanization or civilization), as no human-made artifact has proved itself timeless or totally indispensable for life under normal circumstances more than the nature itself is, and obviously the humanity of humans. No tool or machinery could be defined as perfect, certainly not in 2006. The technical impossibility of perfection is not simply a theological dish-washer, but the loftiest level of awareness available to selfhood as we know it today. Despite the rise of modernity in the technological sense of the word, we're still unable to create life or beings, hence not in vain Shestov mentioned that we're already (and definitely) cut off from the source of life itself (which Heidegger attempts to regain, for once more degenerating into a plastic world), this phenomenally speaking means that there's always a certain category of mystery to the whole enterprise of living, or rather of becoming and being become.
The biblical account teaches how formal covenants, rituals, ordinances and travails (from Noach to Yehoshuah) are necessary in order to set history in motion. It's almost a proto-Humanist moral responsibility. Living itself was a becoming, some sort of textual journeying both from the perspectives of doctrine and identity (we see it in the name-changes of Avraham, Yaakov and Yehoshuah). Here comes in handy Augustine's maxima of "I've become a question to myself" (or I AM become a question to myself). In this process of becoming (that suggests translation of locations) only the routine of repetition (both of organic and inorganic rituals) allows us to create that fictitious space (Merleau-Ponty & Edith Stein) between our physical bodies and our perceptive existence -a Zero point. This is exactly what permits us remember what we're in broadly spiritual terms (spiritual conveyed in the sense of the German "geistlich") and not to lose ourselves in the animal world. Because when a human person becomes animalized, he doesn't become animal but merely inhumane.
Repetition and discourse are the only reminders of a glorious past (or a journey back into divine history) of an allegorical dimension. These activities constitute the most perfect embodiment of humanity in its attempt not to find a human meaning in society and history (the malais of the 19th century), for society is in need of meaning itself and historical meaning is forcibly arbitrary and organically independent from the categories of consciousness at play in the making of modern man. Hence the total elimination of prayer and ritual in the Kantian system had tragically fateful consequences; it turned into the most inhumane form of philosophical discourse (unlike Lessing's). No progress in reason (critical or analytical) can replace the discontent of a society, a human society entirely devoid of symbolism, of the only external manifestation of inner-meaning. It can only mean disattachment and oblivion, that when an obsession (as in contemporary secular education) can be interpreted but as a chronic symptom of alienation. Alienation means not only being alien, but alien to something to which one previously belonged, even in a cultural fashion entirely. With this I'm making a call for a martial court to the whole of Idealistic philosophy and also to the psychologism of modern Theology since Schleiermacher. Both not condemned in their historical contexts but conceptually in an almost post-structural fashioning. The end of symbolism is the most extreme form of functionalist revisionism, and by symbolism I am not meaning necessarily the institutions of modern states. The institutions can be replaced manifold times only to be overthrown there and again, because all human forms of creativity are rooted in discontent; one of the most important messages of the Biblical canon.
By repetition I don't intend to make a political statement of an ideal world whose order must be kept untouched to assure stability or of a chaotic world that needs to be thoroughly reformed. My position is that we define as critical; even when the meaning of the word has been unarguably transformed so very often since Kant. Repetition in my sense is shamelessly ANTI-HUMANISM. Because Humanism in its search for sources of truth within the cultural and critical disciplines that shifted the empasisof the primal question of being (the Greek one of course) to the question of knowledge. As though taking for the granted both life, being and world were free gifts from nowhere. The metaphysical surrendered to epistemology, since it was of little concern to natural philosophy (rubric under which science worked for a rather extended period of time), creating a storm of repression from within the surprising inherent to the question of being and meaning that simply and suddenly burst out in the horrors of the 20th century.
Unarguably following Heidegger, I could blame this horrendous misconceptions on Aristotle, father to the whole Western tradition of metaphysics and logic. Yet it seems to me as though the late Classical world put an ethical (albeit unenligthened) effort in secluding humanity from the extent of its vertiginous freedom. A freedom that chokes, just as the world before having "solid ground" was a totality of "mighty waters" (which God felt ought to separate from heavens and to "speak out" the creation of the dry earth in order to introduce a notion of fragmentation, a separation from "infiniteness" which is a totality and can't be a part of anything, running the risk of automatically becoming "finite"), yet after the sin of Sodom and Gomorra, the cities were thoroughly sunk in mighty waters too, the same waters through which the Israelites crossed into the wilderness. A few hundreds of years ago philosophy was concerned with enlightening man from the clutches of the past. Today our task is to protect him from the abyss of mighty waters; a "Fall" in the sense of Foucault and second to none except the Original Sin, the first "Fall".
The one in which Adam replaced the repetitive routine of Paradise with and for the sake of epistemology. An epistemological query that would remain unfinished to this day and shaky in the most civilized, cruel and violent of all centuries. A century that has replaced the sword with concentration camps and medical experiments. In the aftermath we desperately seek proofs for the existence of man, but we can't find them (not because of a precarious posthuman manisfesto) for tragically modern man dehumanized itself by thinking alone. The Classical men reflected upon things only in the company of friends and the Biblical man did it with God. Anything that couldn't be openly discussed either didn't exist or existed but didn't rise to the ranks of "human things". As Lessing himself, who never discussed things in the sense of being modernly false or true, but simply within the context of their implication in the world. E. Bloch phrased it beautifully when saying "The Church is the community of God tomorrow eternally disatisfied with the present", the "real" man is to be found in a happier future, that doesn't necessarily mean a wealthier or more comfortable world.
The answer to questions human by nature is really in the disguise of questions and conversations. For this very reason the answer is naturally existential, not secular or religious. Respect in which Lessing might have foreshadowed post-secular philosophy in a sense that Schelling, Rosenzweig and Bonhoeffer did not. Nevertheless I wouldn't like to call this philosophy "post-secular", but rather authentically human. The human is the striving, the living, the hope.
The writings of the Prophets show to which extent we would be destroyed by the weight of the answers we demand, being unable to live them or simply to withstand them. It isn't in vain that the Midrash tells us, that Moses of his own accord shattered the first set of Tablets of the Law, for this had been the only set engraved directly by God (all in all the Bible mentions only two occassions when God created things by "acting", Man and the Tablets of the Law. Everything else had been created by acts of speech). The second set (whose maximae are well to known to us as the foundation of moral and legal thinking in the Occident) was engraved by human hands; for a world at whose foundations justice by itself stands, couldn't sustain alone. A world entirely devoid of symbolism (and by detour of dogmas) would be an Auschwitz world, reason for which the particular repetitive nature of prayers, social rituals and study (in any form or style) of the canonical books is necessary for the improvement of our civilization (not solely for its survival, our religion is not civilization alone) for secularly speaking the Biblical message in the context of the Ancient Near Eastern cultures is to rise beyond civilization, like the 20th century expected to rise beyond history through the making of history itself.
Theologically speaking my thesis is that IT IS PRECISELY THE DENIAL OF FREEDOM what makes us so particularly human and civilized. Denial of freedom not in the sense of being unfree in relationship to other humans but to the freedom granted to us as an intellectual virtue, rather than as a capacity. Restraint is the only element in action that makes the social contract possible, even when often times it means no action at all (but not attempting to turn Nietzschean). Repetition is in Kierkegaard the highest virtue worthy of imitation, not only because it demands intellectual responsibilities but because it's the loftiest reminder of an exclusively direct connection to divinity. Praying is renewing a covenant that makes us holy and unheathen even in the most unabstract earthly form.
Just like today, a world both religious and secular devoid of repetition and formalized symbols is the beginning of an anti-world. By this I mean a space between human beings whose collective identity is but alienation. Yet we wonder what's wrong with this phenomenon in the light of homelessness typical of the modern thinker, for we understand it's particularly unhealthy theologically to feel too much at home in the world; yet alienation is particularly estranged from the world in a sense that homelessness is not. Homelessness is a celebration, whereas alienation is a tragedy.
In order to preserve the world as it could potentially be, this species of heathenism must be absolutely erradicated because it's plastic and anti-worldy instead of merely worldless. Repetition and ritual are the only possible strategy. Second only to a philosophy of the human person in which the fleeting moment typical of the thinking activity will run in the direction opposite to traditional philosophy. We must strive to arrive at a certain worldliness from within the very core of Logos, of our wordliness and back to Logos (worldliness and measure as well). Our struggle is to make the world merely unanimal, not perfect or free.
Was the Nazi regime an spotaneous out-burst of freedom? Unfortunately most of us acquainted with the thought of Heiddeger must positively answer to this question. That's why we must step over the ashes of ontology in order to make space for an entirely human philosophy, a philosophy of ethics and action. That is to say a tradition much more biblical and much less concerned with beings that with action, lives and humans. A commitment to a philosophy that isn't religious or secular. We must keep ourselves above all aloof from the mighty waters for as long as we're granted this free earthly existence (or rather not costly). The Hebrew poetess Zelda doesn't offer a recipe for it, but rather an equation:
Repetition is the acknowledgement of the world as a gift possessed with necessarily objective existence in a phenomenological sense. It's a self-attachment to the world in order to escape the fatal sense of alienation inherent to our otherness. It seems as though we're but merely imported into this world, yet the physical matter we're made of entirely belongs to it. We also have a physical attachment and "desire" to it that makes us aware of our (even if artificial) belonging to the animal world, one that doesn't necessarily recognize itself as the world in the natural predisposition it derives from itself. The human world is an entirely different mode of creation, one that acknowledges itself precisely insofar as its own otherness is collectively beknown. Repetition is a natural rule (both in theology and biology) and novelty is that particularly human creaving for permanent innovation (worlds being destroyed and constructed but not created all the time, the Midrashic view sees) and re-placement. Synthesis of the process between creative natality and "technical" mortality; therein there's nothing particularly creative or productive about death (in the world of the natural sciences).
The theoretical impossibility (of the synthesis) is what makes the human world liveable to social beings, in the rather anthropomorphic sense of Aristotle. Just as Bergson realized with despair that negation is an impossibility in nature, I would dare to express that in order to remain fully human the world must absolutely reject the linear idea of completeness and its aim towards perfection (in urbanization or civilization), as no human-made artifact has proved itself timeless or totally indispensable for life under normal circumstances more than the nature itself is, and obviously the humanity of humans. No tool or machinery could be defined as perfect, certainly not in 2006. The technical impossibility of perfection is not simply a theological dish-washer, but the loftiest level of awareness available to selfhood as we know it today. Despite the rise of modernity in the technological sense of the word, we're still unable to create life or beings, hence not in vain Shestov mentioned that we're already (and definitely) cut off from the source of life itself (which Heidegger attempts to regain, for once more degenerating into a plastic world), this phenomenally speaking means that there's always a certain category of mystery to the whole enterprise of living, or rather of becoming and being become.
The biblical account teaches how formal covenants, rituals, ordinances and travails (from Noach to Yehoshuah) are necessary in order to set history in motion. It's almost a proto-Humanist moral responsibility. Living itself was a becoming, some sort of textual journeying both from the perspectives of doctrine and identity (we see it in the name-changes of Avraham, Yaakov and Yehoshuah). Here comes in handy Augustine's maxima of "I've become a question to myself" (or I AM become a question to myself). In this process of becoming (that suggests translation of locations) only the routine of repetition (both of organic and inorganic rituals) allows us to create that fictitious space (Merleau-Ponty & Edith Stein) between our physical bodies and our perceptive existence -a Zero point. This is exactly what permits us remember what we're in broadly spiritual terms (spiritual conveyed in the sense of the German "geistlich") and not to lose ourselves in the animal world. Because when a human person becomes animalized, he doesn't become animal but merely inhumane.
Repetition and discourse are the only reminders of a glorious past (or a journey back into divine history) of an allegorical dimension. These activities constitute the most perfect embodiment of humanity in its attempt not to find a human meaning in society and history (the malais of the 19th century), for society is in need of meaning itself and historical meaning is forcibly arbitrary and organically independent from the categories of consciousness at play in the making of modern man. Hence the total elimination of prayer and ritual in the Kantian system had tragically fateful consequences; it turned into the most inhumane form of philosophical discourse (unlike Lessing's). No progress in reason (critical or analytical) can replace the discontent of a society, a human society entirely devoid of symbolism, of the only external manifestation of inner-meaning. It can only mean disattachment and oblivion, that when an obsession (as in contemporary secular education) can be interpreted but as a chronic symptom of alienation. Alienation means not only being alien, but alien to something to which one previously belonged, even in a cultural fashion entirely. With this I'm making a call for a martial court to the whole of Idealistic philosophy and also to the psychologism of modern Theology since Schleiermacher. Both not condemned in their historical contexts but conceptually in an almost post-structural fashioning. The end of symbolism is the most extreme form of functionalist revisionism, and by symbolism I am not meaning necessarily the institutions of modern states. The institutions can be replaced manifold times only to be overthrown there and again, because all human forms of creativity are rooted in discontent; one of the most important messages of the Biblical canon.
By repetition I don't intend to make a political statement of an ideal world whose order must be kept untouched to assure stability or of a chaotic world that needs to be thoroughly reformed. My position is that we define as critical; even when the meaning of the word has been unarguably transformed so very often since Kant. Repetition in my sense is shamelessly ANTI-HUMANISM. Because Humanism in its search for sources of truth within the cultural and critical disciplines that shifted the empasisof the primal question of being (the Greek one of course) to the question of knowledge. As though taking for the granted both life, being and world were free gifts from nowhere. The metaphysical surrendered to epistemology, since it was of little concern to natural philosophy (rubric under which science worked for a rather extended period of time), creating a storm of repression from within the surprising inherent to the question of being and meaning that simply and suddenly burst out in the horrors of the 20th century.
Unarguably following Heidegger, I could blame this horrendous misconceptions on Aristotle, father to the whole Western tradition of metaphysics and logic. Yet it seems to me as though the late Classical world put an ethical (albeit unenligthened) effort in secluding humanity from the extent of its vertiginous freedom. A freedom that chokes, just as the world before having "solid ground" was a totality of "mighty waters" (which God felt ought to separate from heavens and to "speak out" the creation of the dry earth in order to introduce a notion of fragmentation, a separation from "infiniteness" which is a totality and can't be a part of anything, running the risk of automatically becoming "finite"), yet after the sin of Sodom and Gomorra, the cities were thoroughly sunk in mighty waters too, the same waters through which the Israelites crossed into the wilderness. A few hundreds of years ago philosophy was concerned with enlightening man from the clutches of the past. Today our task is to protect him from the abyss of mighty waters; a "Fall" in the sense of Foucault and second to none except the Original Sin, the first "Fall".
The one in which Adam replaced the repetitive routine of Paradise with and for the sake of epistemology. An epistemological query that would remain unfinished to this day and shaky in the most civilized, cruel and violent of all centuries. A century that has replaced the sword with concentration camps and medical experiments. In the aftermath we desperately seek proofs for the existence of man, but we can't find them (not because of a precarious posthuman manisfesto) for tragically modern man dehumanized itself by thinking alone. The Classical men reflected upon things only in the company of friends and the Biblical man did it with God. Anything that couldn't be openly discussed either didn't exist or existed but didn't rise to the ranks of "human things". As Lessing himself, who never discussed things in the sense of being modernly false or true, but simply within the context of their implication in the world. E. Bloch phrased it beautifully when saying "The Church is the community of God tomorrow eternally disatisfied with the present", the "real" man is to be found in a happier future, that doesn't necessarily mean a wealthier or more comfortable world.
The answer to questions human by nature is really in the disguise of questions and conversations. For this very reason the answer is naturally existential, not secular or religious. Respect in which Lessing might have foreshadowed post-secular philosophy in a sense that Schelling, Rosenzweig and Bonhoeffer did not. Nevertheless I wouldn't like to call this philosophy "post-secular", but rather authentically human. The human is the striving, the living, the hope.
The writings of the Prophets show to which extent we would be destroyed by the weight of the answers we demand, being unable to live them or simply to withstand them. It isn't in vain that the Midrash tells us, that Moses of his own accord shattered the first set of Tablets of the Law, for this had been the only set engraved directly by God (all in all the Bible mentions only two occassions when God created things by "acting", Man and the Tablets of the Law. Everything else had been created by acts of speech). The second set (whose maximae are well to known to us as the foundation of moral and legal thinking in the Occident) was engraved by human hands; for a world at whose foundations justice by itself stands, couldn't sustain alone. A world entirely devoid of symbolism (and by detour of dogmas) would be an Auschwitz world, reason for which the particular repetitive nature of prayers, social rituals and study (in any form or style) of the canonical books is necessary for the improvement of our civilization (not solely for its survival, our religion is not civilization alone) for secularly speaking the Biblical message in the context of the Ancient Near Eastern cultures is to rise beyond civilization, like the 20th century expected to rise beyond history through the making of history itself.
Theologically speaking my thesis is that IT IS PRECISELY THE DENIAL OF FREEDOM what makes us so particularly human and civilized. Denial of freedom not in the sense of being unfree in relationship to other humans but to the freedom granted to us as an intellectual virtue, rather than as a capacity. Restraint is the only element in action that makes the social contract possible, even when often times it means no action at all (but not attempting to turn Nietzschean). Repetition is in Kierkegaard the highest virtue worthy of imitation, not only because it demands intellectual responsibilities but because it's the loftiest reminder of an exclusively direct connection to divinity. Praying is renewing a covenant that makes us holy and unheathen even in the most unabstract earthly form.
Just like today, a world both religious and secular devoid of repetition and formalized symbols is the beginning of an anti-world. By this I mean a space between human beings whose collective identity is but alienation. Yet we wonder what's wrong with this phenomenon in the light of homelessness typical of the modern thinker, for we understand it's particularly unhealthy theologically to feel too much at home in the world; yet alienation is particularly estranged from the world in a sense that homelessness is not. Homelessness is a celebration, whereas alienation is a tragedy.
In order to preserve the world as it could potentially be, this species of heathenism must be absolutely erradicated because it's plastic and anti-worldy instead of merely worldless. Repetition and ritual are the only possible strategy. Second only to a philosophy of the human person in which the fleeting moment typical of the thinking activity will run in the direction opposite to traditional philosophy. We must strive to arrive at a certain worldliness from within the very core of Logos, of our wordliness and back to Logos (worldliness and measure as well). Our struggle is to make the world merely unanimal, not perfect or free.
Was the Nazi regime an spotaneous out-burst of freedom? Unfortunately most of us acquainted with the thought of Heiddeger must positively answer to this question. That's why we must step over the ashes of ontology in order to make space for an entirely human philosophy, a philosophy of ethics and action. That is to say a tradition much more biblical and much less concerned with beings that with action, lives and humans. A commitment to a philosophy that isn't religious or secular. We must keep ourselves above all aloof from the mighty waters for as long as we're granted this free earthly existence (or rather not costly). The Hebrew poetess Zelda doesn't offer a recipe for it, but rather an equation:
"Death will take the spectacular difference
Between fire and water
And cast it to the abyss."
Jerusalem
06.07.07
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Part I on Heidegger
"The Fate of the Faithful: A dreadful love affair"
"To a friend to whom I remain faithful and unfaithful, both in love". This was a dedication of Hannah Arendt found hand-written in one her books and nowadays available at the Hannah Arendt Papers section of the Library of Congress in the United States. Anybody significantly familiar with Hannah -as the young generation often calls her, would know immediately this was a dedication meant for the philosopher Martin Heidegger on one of her books from later years. On the ocassion of my 22nd birthday I've set my mind on the onerous task of writing a "self-concealment" or "journal of travails" in regard to the tragedy of German Judaism and the ontological difficulties of a young Jewish scholar reading Heidegger. With the same words used by Hannah more than 40 years back I begin my task, whether it will be to any degree accomplished is an entirely different question. As a general rule -part of my contempt for the world of aesthetics, I would rule out anybody who would come up to me with such a base as "life as literature", but currently my sinceremost despite for any philosophy-of-the-sorts and particularly continental philosophical language have led me to reconsider my egoistic position. I would run my thread along with Schlegel by saying that "life is writing". Reason for which perhaps I've never appeared as too respectable a figure in the world of the erudites and scholars, because for me the philosophical is unarguably tied to the imagination as much as to the auto-biographical. Any attempt at philosophy in modern times is a form of despair, a way inside-out from the roads of alienation and a desperate outrage in chivalrous disguise. All philosophy is a form of autobiography, that's why I could for example include heretical and ecclecticmost Ernst Bloch in my canoninc list, whereas little could be said about Webber for example, quite from the same generation and a salonniere par excellence.
The philosopher is just any "everyman" engaged in the thinking activity, obviously far from the disciplined and hierarchical "critical thinking" that the youth are spoon-fed with since the earliest childhood in the most Aristotelian form of cruelty. The task of thinking has been one of the most fabuluous journeys of my life since a tender age; I discovered despair to easily, and blessed-be-the-divine-providence it hasn't left me for a second since those days. Being a young Jewish man from an assimilated family and more at home in the Holy Mass than at any kind of "anachronistic" Jewish service, the task of thinking soon acquired vital dimensionality. God had been dead for already a long time and my adolescent familiarity with the Holocaust just made his death a fait-accompli beyond the possibility of grasping Nietzschean ethics that were breast-fed to me by two of my psychologists - One a divorced unhappy man and the second a suicidal Arab woman. In the awareness of God's sorry lack of avant-garde and Republicanism before the ethical Idealism of the New Testament I succumbed to the only timeless seduction that the Western world has produced, -the Western Classics.
One couldn't be no longer at home anywhere, and for a man that didn't own a TV set or for whom no place was home, Greece remained the only homeland... and there at the tender age of 16 I was initiated in the painful study of Classical philology, a tedious and unwound road. Those weren't easy times for those idealistic young men engaged in the enterprise of pursuing a classical education, for most teachers were either too old to teach how to think or too proletarian to think properly by themselves. The locus of our education was a little "Graeca", a group in which students would read Greek texts in the company of the philosophers of the day, our daily stoppover at the Museum before the section with all the most precious Pisarro's and those endless Euripidean nights of wine and cocaine. For all those living in Tel Aviv it's hardly possible to understand our leit-motif. Our only desire was to find a teacher finally, to believe that it was possible to learn how to think again.
That's about the time when I first met Giorgia Kaltsidou, a strong Greek woman of little formality, much smoking and strength. We used to gather around our teacher for the whole of Thursday afternoon beneath the trees in the collonial villa, often passing on cigarettes and small cups of vodka and cheap anice. For sometime I continued my readings of Greek poetry and most fervently loved Sappho and perhaps a little Sophocles; philosophy was something too angst-filled and phenomenal, I was still a young kid. All I wanted was to acquire some "Bildung", or in other words self-improvement through education. Becoming a philologist or maximum a humanist; at the time the idea of being become, of been become rarely crossed my mind. At least until that summer afternoon when our lecture with the greatest of teachers devoted four hours amidst coffee and tobacco to that all-destroying creature by the name of Martin Heidegger. It was murmured that he had re-invented the German language anew since Goethe and Schopenhauer, that he had proclaimed the end of philosophy and de-structured (dialectically opposed to destructed) the whole of the Western tradition. Our entanglement was rather limited, the "Parmenides fragment" and little more, perhaps also some sections from "What is meant by thinking?". Those lectures on Martin Heidegger brought to an end my career as a classical philologist and the happiness of a rarely touched-off childhood. That day without even knowing I had bethroted myself to Heidegger, for a love affair that have lasted until this very day. A fateful affair. Not unlike Avraham in the biblical account, I would wander from place to place in an attempt to reach the verticality of Adam before the original sin, but being too much in love with the horizontality of being the snake.
Soon after twilight the night wrapped us both in. Being "casually" Jewish or rather a very gentile type of Jew some of the fellow students introduced me to "The Origins of Totalitarianism", of H. Arendt. They just thought it comical, she herself had been a Jewess, a philosophy student under Heidegger, and incidentally his mistress. My acquaintance with her didn't become immediately fruitful, too much Heidegger around there I thought, and I could read the master directly anyway. It wasn't that comical after all, Heidegger became equated with words such as "Nazi", "traitor", "villain". "Nazi" didn't have for me at the time the meaning it had today, I had been too busy learning Latin in grammar school to be concerned with European history, after all one only needs to know the Classics and a little bit of Goethe to become a true European, all the rest is just time-management. Nevertheless as I discovered Hannah Arendt I became so truly unenlightened that suddenly words lost their very semantics and turned into personal odes, into offenses, into puzzles and riddles.
My friend Till and me were the only non-Americans in our school, and since we both spoke German a teacher thought it right to make the match; the chemistry was immediate and we would spend more than enough time to know each other well enough, without knowing much about ourselves at all nonetheless. He was a blonde German from a working family in Low Saxony, coming from a town inhabited by 400 people and his father a shoemaker, whereas I had grown up in the cosmopolitan City of God of Harvey Cox, my father an architect and my life polluted by smoke and violence since day one. We looked too different, I was short, with brown hair and sad eyes and foreseeable at a distance as the product of a racial mixture, always laughing and talking loudly, running in between people and all too opinionated.
He had such beautiful white skin and a vivid smile not separated from the happiest bluest eyes on earth. There wasn't a corner in our adolescence we didn't share, our first night out in a restaurant, first bottle of wine, a trip to Venice and even a brothel. Often during the week we would sleep in the company of the other and spend the day in our usual spots. I helped him to improve his command of the local language and he would present me often with books in the most yearned for of all languages; the German language. English had always been a borrowed skin, and one I feared would be collected from me one day. German was different, was the vehicle that would express that one read in the Greek. Till himself was an avowed "Nazi", reason for which Heidegger being one couldn't trouble me too much and he often invited me to camp out with him and his friends from the White Supremacy Youth. I was far from being Aryan-looking, but after all I spoke German and no one could beat me with the Classics; who if not a true Westerner could have such command of the Classics?
Not rarely we slept together under the same blanket, shared our dreams and often sat outside and looked at the stars. While he would explain me the constellation such, I would elucidate the mythology associated with it. At times I would lean my head on his chest and we would plan the future out the whole night long. Often we embraced and sang songs from the boyscouts or kissed thinking two boys could practice well for when girls would come our way. Honestly I never had any other friend like him, who would be a company in silence and in loud voices, a companion, a brother and almost a lover. For a couple of years we were estranged from each other and after years of on-line searches I found his address and immediately sent out a letter. The response returned immediately. I felt as though life had been injected into me anew. We could listen to the same songs together over and over, the green tiles of the spring, bathing in the river, a brotherhood bordering on romance, a romance bordering on brotherhood.
The first and deepest blow came about; Till wanted to find out what I was doing in Israel for what could I be doing in such a place? The violence and the bombs? The oriental lack of civilization and culture? The weather and awful service? And since it had never been an issue to me, I just bluntly replied I went to Israel because I'm Jewish. His happiest blue eyes acquired a pale expression and sank into silence. This time there were no presents and no pleasantries, they all sank like a ship taking away the loveliest pleasures of life.
Never again a word would come from him. At that time I understood that even my German language wasn't mine, but a loan with accrued interest. I understood what Nazi meant, that Till was a Nazi and that I was a Jew. I understood Heidegger was a Nazi. It doesn't mean by any means at all I kept myself willingly from loving both to this very day. Heidegger converted me to the enterprise of philosophy and turned some dead academic discipline to the center of my very universe. One could really think this world, philosophy would be no longer necessary, only the thinking activity in its purest form. A sort of Existential phenomenology that would allow one to penetrate through the very mystery of being, which isn't the mystery but the being itself alone. From Goethe we learnt: "Look for nothing beyond phenomena, they are themselves what is to be learnt". And only my deepest and secret hatred can turn so easily into love, any kind of philosophical discussion is as though he were looking over, and I always return to the very same philosopher whenever I am upon the sciences.
To the extent that in the philosophical circles of Jerusalem I became better-known for my Heideggerianism rather than for my Arendtianism, and both sins entail capital punishments to one's very right of individual morality. Whereas for some people being a Kantian is a personal expression, for me being an Existentialist Phenomenologist turned into a public invasion. At the center of my thought he always remains somewhere reminding me of Logos whenever I lose myself in the hierarchy of the Talmud. Existence can be revealed in manifold ways.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Festival of Fools
The loftiest watery abandonment
One that excludes our very existence
For we're so creatively deaf
To the oral imagery of the morning
In our passions we sojourn
Through the faces of men
Their journeys
Without halting our march
In the vertigo of our timeliness
Forgetting our goodness
With the contempt of animals
Stealing those threads of human-like demeanour
Woven backgrounds with the twilight
We sacrifice them to the night.
One that excludes our very existence
For we're so creatively deaf
To the oral imagery of the morning
In our passions we sojourn
Through the faces of men
Their journeys
Without halting our march
In the vertigo of our timeliness
Forgetting our goodness
With the contempt of animals
Stealing those threads of human-like demeanour
Woven backgrounds with the twilight
We sacrifice them to the night.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
On Karl Barth's Concept of Sin
From Karl Barth: Because of man's sinfulness it's impossible to find the meaning of history in history itself. Man can't find the meaning and purpose of its existence through man himself.
Some after thoughts: Biblical scholarship (secularly speaking) as a bastard son of Protestant theology is faulty as its approach to the historical problem of the West becomes a tautology. Here we return to Fichte znc our most hated contemporary thinkers, the meaning of history has to be found outside history, sd it by itself can't provide any data with which one can work with profit.
Historical questions become pointless, then times becomes irrelevant; a sort of deconstruction of God; the death of the author and the primacy of subjective individual readership. Such as the death-of-God theology, but if this God becomes un-alive (not necessarily dead) what else can justify the meaning sought? Perhaps only ethical Idealism and the Absolute Spirit of Hegel, the God of History.
But wasn't he dead? Wasn't history useless at all? It's bewildering to find out how lonely man is. How beauty, truth and goodness seem so unresponsive these days. The quest for anhistorical Christology loses its aim, then meaning is but within a dialectic or paradox of process. I might agree that it's no longer important whether the snake spoke to Eve or not, rather what was said or even better then human message therein.
If so, wasn't Western consciousness and memory relying entirely upon historical questions? The truth is literally historical, not philosophical! I think about the struggle of Alexandrian and Carthaginese schools of theology; the grammatico-historical method taking over the allegorical. A few questions at this point: The justifies the assassination of Origen, father of all theological activity (systemtically speaking), then the western canon would be to rest upon Augustine, Aristotle and Dyonisos. Were Augustine and Dyonisos so fully grammatico-historical? So undialectic and unallegorical? Then why was rhaetorics so important for Augustine? Wasn't all religious self-understanding in antiquity allegorical? Is history its very own enemy? That's perhaps Hegel's message, a hint to this paradox.
The end of history means the end of consciousness, the starting point of history. At this point systematic philosophy and theology are both problematic; for isn't a system always open-ended? Both cyclical and linear history could be seen as process-driven, non-linear history is then the foundational principle underlying vertigo, but a type of history for which disacknowledgement of God is as useless as his knowledge in the traditional view.
If religion was for the ancients what for us is culture, then culture today and with it modernity are mere self-reflections, but of enormous value. Philosophy or cultural philosophy as modernity itself isn't an imaginary flight on culture; the end of history has forced philosophy to find a refugee status in the earthly world. In that sense modernity is a struggle, a struggle to escape consciousness to begin history anew. A history in which history itself will carry its own meaning.
One in which reason and consciousness will meet not at the end of a syllogism but rather naturally, except for the fact that this natural world for the meeting to take place doesn't necessarily have to exist in the appropriate manner, it doesn't in actuality. Philosophy and the world can no longer separate; any social criticism no matter how scientific is also in a certain way truly and falsely philosophical. A struggle between reason, consciousness and modernity. In an ideal world the organized "modernity" could be solely institutional and leave philosophy to theorize (in the Greek sense) a-la-Socrates. This is really the world of the liberal theologians, but as both the new and the old order have collapsed one can no longer afford to be an Aristophanes or a Heidegger.
This is where my judgement starts, in Socrates and Jesus (my opinion has changed by now though, but this is interesting material).. but it doesn't culminate in Adorno... in ends in the Midrashic modes of Milan Kundera. The task of philosophy today is to show that such an ideal world is no longer possible once an awareness of its necessity is discovered, and that happened as long ago as two millenia in both Athens and Jerusalem. An ideal world can't be an artificial construct resting upon a categorical rejection of the natural order, as in the French Revolution.
At this point perhaps the most heavenly of utopias would be the realization (not awareness) that this unideal world is still liveable, that the ideal world is only a category of hope, a history of human desire and the underlying principle in the background of the Greek tragedy. History appears less causative than it appears arbitrary, "causative" isn't possible without awareness and "arbitrariness" is a mere representation of desperate empathy; an empathy that goes as far as saying that the most supreme knowledge is the awareness on the impossibility of itself. From this point on any epistemological activity is shattered and any metaphysics impossible.
Only reflexion is left, one that becomes most unphilosophical and meaningless when it enters the world. It can profitably enter the world only as political science and social criticism. Philosophy shouldn't be an adolescent sturm und drang to guide correct lives as in the Goethe religion of Rahel. It must remain as a flight, a conscious flight yet a void in consciousness. A reminder of the unideal world, a principle of hope.
Some after thoughts: Biblical scholarship (secularly speaking) as a bastard son of Protestant theology is faulty as its approach to the historical problem of the West becomes a tautology. Here we return to Fichte znc our most hated contemporary thinkers, the meaning of history has to be found outside history, sd it by itself can't provide any data with which one can work with profit.
Historical questions become pointless, then times becomes irrelevant; a sort of deconstruction of God; the death of the author and the primacy of subjective individual readership. Such as the death-of-God theology, but if this God becomes un-alive (not necessarily dead) what else can justify the meaning sought? Perhaps only ethical Idealism and the Absolute Spirit of Hegel, the God of History.
But wasn't he dead? Wasn't history useless at all? It's bewildering to find out how lonely man is. How beauty, truth and goodness seem so unresponsive these days. The quest for anhistorical Christology loses its aim, then meaning is but within a dialectic or paradox of process. I might agree that it's no longer important whether the snake spoke to Eve or not, rather what was said or even better then human message therein.
If so, wasn't Western consciousness and memory relying entirely upon historical questions? The truth is literally historical, not philosophical! I think about the struggle of Alexandrian and Carthaginese schools of theology; the grammatico-historical method taking over the allegorical. A few questions at this point: The justifies the assassination of Origen, father of all theological activity (systemtically speaking), then the western canon would be to rest upon Augustine, Aristotle and Dyonisos. Were Augustine and Dyonisos so fully grammatico-historical? So undialectic and unallegorical? Then why was rhaetorics so important for Augustine? Wasn't all religious self-understanding in antiquity allegorical? Is history its very own enemy? That's perhaps Hegel's message, a hint to this paradox.
The end of history means the end of consciousness, the starting point of history. At this point systematic philosophy and theology are both problematic; for isn't a system always open-ended? Both cyclical and linear history could be seen as process-driven, non-linear history is then the foundational principle underlying vertigo, but a type of history for which disacknowledgement of God is as useless as his knowledge in the traditional view.
If religion was for the ancients what for us is culture, then culture today and with it modernity are mere self-reflections, but of enormous value. Philosophy or cultural philosophy as modernity itself isn't an imaginary flight on culture; the end of history has forced philosophy to find a refugee status in the earthly world. In that sense modernity is a struggle, a struggle to escape consciousness to begin history anew. A history in which history itself will carry its own meaning.
One in which reason and consciousness will meet not at the end of a syllogism but rather naturally, except for the fact that this natural world for the meeting to take place doesn't necessarily have to exist in the appropriate manner, it doesn't in actuality. Philosophy and the world can no longer separate; any social criticism no matter how scientific is also in a certain way truly and falsely philosophical. A struggle between reason, consciousness and modernity. In an ideal world the organized "modernity" could be solely institutional and leave philosophy to theorize (in the Greek sense) a-la-Socrates. This is really the world of the liberal theologians, but as both the new and the old order have collapsed one can no longer afford to be an Aristophanes or a Heidegger.
This is where my judgement starts, in Socrates and Jesus (my opinion has changed by now though, but this is interesting material).. but it doesn't culminate in Adorno... in ends in the Midrashic modes of Milan Kundera. The task of philosophy today is to show that such an ideal world is no longer possible once an awareness of its necessity is discovered, and that happened as long ago as two millenia in both Athens and Jerusalem. An ideal world can't be an artificial construct resting upon a categorical rejection of the natural order, as in the French Revolution.
At this point perhaps the most heavenly of utopias would be the realization (not awareness) that this unideal world is still liveable, that the ideal world is only a category of hope, a history of human desire and the underlying principle in the background of the Greek tragedy. History appears less causative than it appears arbitrary, "causative" isn't possible without awareness and "arbitrariness" is a mere representation of desperate empathy; an empathy that goes as far as saying that the most supreme knowledge is the awareness on the impossibility of itself. From this point on any epistemological activity is shattered and any metaphysics impossible.
Only reflexion is left, one that becomes most unphilosophical and meaningless when it enters the world. It can profitably enter the world only as political science and social criticism. Philosophy shouldn't be an adolescent sturm und drang to guide correct lives as in the Goethe religion of Rahel. It must remain as a flight, a conscious flight yet a void in consciousness. A reminder of the unideal world, a principle of hope.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Epistola Hierosolymis: Ubi est Deus meus? Ubi est regnum tuum?
Potum meum
cum fletu temperabam;
quia elevans allisisti me;
et ego sicut faenum arui;
tu autem, Domine,
in aeternum permanes: ...
(Communion Antiphon for
Wednesday of Passion Week)
[Trans.]
With tears
That add to my drink;
Thou hast elevated me,
but now Thou castest me down,
I whiter like hay
Oh but you, Lord
endureth for ever and ever.
With these lines shall I start these epistle, which is more of a letter without recipient and perhaps an ode to myself. As I have not been writting orderly other than diaries and footnotes these days I am not too conspicuous about the result, whichever that will be. Even though my company through these lines is no other but the Missa Breve of Felix Mendelsohn-Bartoldy, I decided to open with the lines from the Passion Week as they could better than anything else portray not just the state of mind, but the Cross I've carried along these last few months. Do not take me wrong, I am not meaning to sound Christian and at the same time I've discovered that in the love of God there's a Cross for everyone, and that includes the Jews, the Pagans and the Apikores. Those lines belong to Wolfang Rihm's opera "Deus Passus" (The Passion of the Lord according to St. Luke).
The Cross of the Jews is particularly difficult, as all through the ages has been the ultimate proof -whether negative or positive, of the mercifulness of God. The existence of the People of Israel is the only possible way for Christianity to endure, and perhaps for the world to remain as it is. The ancient Midrash explains that God has given man the world, but only with the condition of man following his law -yet a human law, and whenever man forgets his duty the world is taken away from him. In the former case man is elevated to the kingdom of God, in the latter he is forsaken and reminded of his insignificant state. I'm not trying to set the foundations for a Jewish Theology of the Cross, specially because the title suggests something unjewish. Beyond that, my knowledge of this concept of the "Cross" is very limited, perhaps to some modern theologians, the Carmelite teachers and Dr. Edith Stein. It's all about this newfound theological language that elicites my innermost thoughts to kindle as a fire; a type of language lost in between the semiotics of poetry and the linguistics of music. The language of transformation and translocation, and one that brings down to small pieces wonderfully assorted before me, the language of religious phenomenology. Perhaps like the Greek and Russian Orthodox tradition, where their mysticism and their theology often cannot be differentiated, and such is neither attempted.
The birth of this new language has been by no means incidental, but rather the product of a long search beneath the aegis of a dead epistemology and the source of terrible frustration and distress, which I really don't regret. On this point I might be following the Jewish theologian Ernst Bloch, when he says: "The Church is the community of God in the future, eternally disappointed with the present". At the same time I'm all the more convinced that the final point is the process itself, rather than the very bottom end, and that's how usually people are disappointed not only about their knowledge, but their spirituality and their life in general. The last year has thoroughly changed me and shaped me, at times through endurances which I've accepted with joy, as a possibility to outgrow them and develop myself. This hasn't been always easy, but looking at the past that's always the way it is. A great joy, an experience and something that will ultimately define the integrity of the character.
My life in Jerusalem has taken me down roads I thought were absolutely not feasible and opened up opportunities for the exercise of my free will and my ability to rationalize or derationalize phenomena of different sorts. It is as though the city were not anywhere, in any country and that its dwellers would also have lost the notion of beingness.
cum fletu temperabam;
quia elevans allisisti me;
et ego sicut faenum arui;
tu autem, Domine,
in aeternum permanes: ...
(Communion Antiphon for
Wednesday of Passion Week)
[Trans.]
With tears
That add to my drink;
Thou hast elevated me,
but now Thou castest me down,
I whiter like hay
Oh but you, Lord
endureth for ever and ever.
With these lines shall I start these epistle, which is more of a letter without recipient and perhaps an ode to myself. As I have not been writting orderly other than diaries and footnotes these days I am not too conspicuous about the result, whichever that will be. Even though my company through these lines is no other but the Missa Breve of Felix Mendelsohn-Bartoldy, I decided to open with the lines from the Passion Week as they could better than anything else portray not just the state of mind, but the Cross I've carried along these last few months. Do not take me wrong, I am not meaning to sound Christian and at the same time I've discovered that in the love of God there's a Cross for everyone, and that includes the Jews, the Pagans and the Apikores. Those lines belong to Wolfang Rihm's opera "Deus Passus" (The Passion of the Lord according to St. Luke).
The Cross of the Jews is particularly difficult, as all through the ages has been the ultimate proof -whether negative or positive, of the mercifulness of God. The existence of the People of Israel is the only possible way for Christianity to endure, and perhaps for the world to remain as it is. The ancient Midrash explains that God has given man the world, but only with the condition of man following his law -yet a human law, and whenever man forgets his duty the world is taken away from him. In the former case man is elevated to the kingdom of God, in the latter he is forsaken and reminded of his insignificant state. I'm not trying to set the foundations for a Jewish Theology of the Cross, specially because the title suggests something unjewish. Beyond that, my knowledge of this concept of the "Cross" is very limited, perhaps to some modern theologians, the Carmelite teachers and Dr. Edith Stein. It's all about this newfound theological language that elicites my innermost thoughts to kindle as a fire; a type of language lost in between the semiotics of poetry and the linguistics of music. The language of transformation and translocation, and one that brings down to small pieces wonderfully assorted before me, the language of religious phenomenology. Perhaps like the Greek and Russian Orthodox tradition, where their mysticism and their theology often cannot be differentiated, and such is neither attempted.
The birth of this new language has been by no means incidental, but rather the product of a long search beneath the aegis of a dead epistemology and the source of terrible frustration and distress, which I really don't regret. On this point I might be following the Jewish theologian Ernst Bloch, when he says: "The Church is the community of God in the future, eternally disappointed with the present". At the same time I'm all the more convinced that the final point is the process itself, rather than the very bottom end, and that's how usually people are disappointed not only about their knowledge, but their spirituality and their life in general. The last year has thoroughly changed me and shaped me, at times through endurances which I've accepted with joy, as a possibility to outgrow them and develop myself. This hasn't been always easy, but looking at the past that's always the way it is. A great joy, an experience and something that will ultimately define the integrity of the character.
My life in Jerusalem has taken me down roads I thought were absolutely not feasible and opened up opportunities for the exercise of my free will and my ability to rationalize or derationalize phenomena of different sorts. It is as though the city were not anywhere, in any country and that its dwellers would also have lost the notion of beingness.
Monday, October 24, 2005
Darkness
The long spans in between my manifolded lives
Casting shadows on my questions
Of that conspicuous ugliness that to death
Most certainly leads
In inability to dream, by unanimity
Presenting itself in colourless sparks
Spilling from the lightbulb in my room
Smelling his death from a far
And a life, such as a lie
I did not deserve to live it
Quite unrighteous to speak it
Swimming in the darkness of those pangs
The hideousness of fear
Of that fear yet long bygone
As those stories ever but untold
The sights of my father, my aunts
The childhood that I lost
Somewhere in a synagogue
In the death of that silence
Or the silence of that death
As I scream from within outwards
And reinvented my story in easiness
The easiness of truth, of justice
Your ticket to life
As if it meant anything at all
Feeling that guilt
All bathed in golden blood
Blamed on a precarious happiness
Well wasted in a grocery store
Or perhaps in a kiosk
To buy a newspaper
In the Middle East
Or paper to write down a story
Never meant to happen
Never meant to end
Perhaps not meant to die
And as clouds hover on my desire
My lust feels to die
While a life hangs from a cord
Such as those blankets in the morning
Hanging in cheap wires
From the window of an Arab woman
Incongruent and noticeable
And yet I keep desiring
Those demeaneours, by morning
By night
With the bitter conspicuousness
Of their traumatic foreseen end
On which no plays were written
For being by now
Too assimilated in reality
Perhaps a part of the landscape
Like our dead, like our shame
Desiring the dirt of other ports
And dust pouring from the air
Such as a glass of cognac
In the morning Blues of a German woman
Of a woman I never met
Of a woman with a thousand names
Desiring irrational pleasure
And the warmth of those cold bodies
In the living of a stranger
Placing my endlessness
Hidden well inside
A sofa of multiple colours
Or a glass of orange juice
Lusting for that love
For that warmth
That never wished to be found
Among screens and naked bodies
Among survival kits
And personality specials
Only for a day
Perhaps only for today
I will hover on my own shadow
To cast some down on the mellow
Yet a morrow
With another of those
Body of old, sculpture of guilt
Flesh-riping sweat of desire
Only for a day
Perhaps only today
Shall I want some more of that
Of this
That never filled my hunger
Or satiated my cold
Thwarting beneath my eyes
For a fraction of a second
In the eyes of a stranger
I will never see again
With the knowing conviction
He will find out by himself
Without dissecting any words
As matter ceases to exist
When acceleration
Reaches the speed of light
Thus I cease to exist every morning
Prisoner of the smoke
Prisoner of chemical reactions
Victim of earthly justice
I cease to exist every morning
In the eyes of a stranger
I wish I never touched
As I embrace myself
To keep from the cold
In the summer days
In the stagnation of some novel
Perhaps a romance even
Nothing to recall
And on Wednesday mornings
I wake up to some coffee
A bit resentless
With less regret
A walk to work
Perhaps a dog
Even a tie, all the more
I hearken not
I stumble not
And for a few seconds a day
I do take notice of god
With his multiple mercies
The same that killed my mother
Forming the completeness of a cosmological equation
And shifting the dynamics of the universe
Towards infinity
And behold, there I am
Every morning
Remembering those things I did not know
In a body of stone
That remembers no more
The names of those modern men
To whom I erected graves
That I visit every morning
When I open the eyes
And I plant no flowers
Because I am late for work
Not being completely sureIf I am still ill or not
If this street reminds me
Of Jerusalem or New York
Perhaps not
Casting shadows on my questions
Of that conspicuous ugliness that to death
Most certainly leads
In inability to dream, by unanimity
Presenting itself in colourless sparks
Spilling from the lightbulb in my room
Smelling his death from a far
And a life, such as a lie
I did not deserve to live it
Quite unrighteous to speak it
Swimming in the darkness of those pangs
The hideousness of fear
Of that fear yet long bygone
As those stories ever but untold
The sights of my father, my aunts
The childhood that I lost
Somewhere in a synagogue
In the death of that silence
Or the silence of that death
As I scream from within outwards
And reinvented my story in easiness
The easiness of truth, of justice
Your ticket to life
As if it meant anything at all
Feeling that guilt
All bathed in golden blood
Blamed on a precarious happiness
Well wasted in a grocery store
Or perhaps in a kiosk
To buy a newspaper
In the Middle East
Or paper to write down a story
Never meant to happen
Never meant to end
Perhaps not meant to die
And as clouds hover on my desire
My lust feels to die
While a life hangs from a cord
Such as those blankets in the morning
Hanging in cheap wires
From the window of an Arab woman
Incongruent and noticeable
And yet I keep desiring
Those demeaneours, by morning
By night
With the bitter conspicuousness
Of their traumatic foreseen end
On which no plays were written
For being by now
Too assimilated in reality
Perhaps a part of the landscape
Like our dead, like our shame
Desiring the dirt of other ports
And dust pouring from the air
Such as a glass of cognac
In the morning Blues of a German woman
Of a woman I never met
Of a woman with a thousand names
Desiring irrational pleasure
And the warmth of those cold bodies
In the living of a stranger
Placing my endlessness
Hidden well inside
A sofa of multiple colours
Or a glass of orange juice
Lusting for that love
For that warmth
That never wished to be found
Among screens and naked bodies
Among survival kits
And personality specials
Only for a day
Perhaps only for today
I will hover on my own shadow
To cast some down on the mellow
Yet a morrow
With another of those
Body of old, sculpture of guilt
Flesh-riping sweat of desire
Only for a day
Perhaps only today
Shall I want some more of that
Of this
That never filled my hunger
Or satiated my cold
Thwarting beneath my eyes
For a fraction of a second
In the eyes of a stranger
I will never see again
With the knowing conviction
He will find out by himself
Without dissecting any words
As matter ceases to exist
When acceleration
Reaches the speed of light
Thus I cease to exist every morning
Prisoner of the smoke
Prisoner of chemical reactions
Victim of earthly justice
I cease to exist every morning
In the eyes of a stranger
I wish I never touched
As I embrace myself
To keep from the cold
In the summer days
In the stagnation of some novel
Perhaps a romance even
Nothing to recall
And on Wednesday mornings
I wake up to some coffee
A bit resentless
With less regret
A walk to work
Perhaps a dog
Even a tie, all the more
I hearken not
I stumble not
And for a few seconds a day
I do take notice of god
With his multiple mercies
The same that killed my mother
Forming the completeness of a cosmological equation
And shifting the dynamics of the universe
Towards infinity
And behold, there I am
Every morning
Remembering those things I did not know
In a body of stone
That remembers no more
The names of those modern men
To whom I erected graves
That I visit every morning
When I open the eyes
And I plant no flowers
Because I am late for work
Not being completely sureIf I am still ill or not
If this street reminds me
Of Jerusalem or New York
Perhaps not
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Plane
A young writer once spent a short period in jail
For a crime that he didn't commit
And which was not even considered a crime
During that time he didn't write anything
But short pieces of poetry and a mediocre journal
Which in anycase were lost or forgotten somewhere
Yet he promised many a thing to life
Such as not wasting time, a productive life
And back to freedom again there he was
Still writing but nothing at all
In front of a screen, as dead empty the night was
Looking for endeavours, encores and demeaneours
He didn't lust for a night of passion, or a man
Rather for a certain specific night
All too well he remembered that
Yet that night wasn't to be found
Except in memories, or in a blackhole
A night that no one would ever remember
But the four walls of this bedroom
Stagnant with alcohol and smoke
Distractions, aloof, love
The young hormones in his body
Always performed exceedingly their job
Not taking into account
Whatsoever soul or heart
Afterall they were programmed by God
And the intervention of the writer was unnecessary
And disregarded at all
As he scrolled up and down
That night he didn't find
Perhaps an arm looked quite the same
An eye perhaps knowing
And maybe that leg or that sculputured chest
Would resemble someone's death
Or his entanglements
With such other man
But it would never be the same
Their faces would be all the same
Unresponsive to the writer's language
And thoroughly focused on his body though
So young, so kind, unwound
Such would be his days
Completely forgetting themselves
And even that night
While pursuing other things
A life perhaps
A day
With a lover
A book, if not
And the writer was a religious man
Yet unfaithful, treacherous deceiving
Above all to himself
The cosmopolitan liberal
Bastard of the immorality
Dweller of sin
And knowingly so
But out of contempt
He embraced the cult
To make himself feel better
And even at times
Somebody else
Unentangled with those men
Turbulent past, with brilliance
With poise
Deinfatuated
Self-obsessed
Right before each of these pursuances
He would remind himself
What the Bible tells
Not in regard to men laying with men
For he would practice sex standing up
Being as law-abiding as he was
Even sitting
What would mistake?
He was rather concerned with the self
That had been forsaken at night
Or actually that night
And although he would have by now
Entangled at least a dozen of those
The young writer didn't think
He had to behave all the same
Even when he didn't find the behaviour regretful
Yet admirable
For someone who is in love
For someone in need of comfort
He would recite to himself poems
And dream about those days of old
Even perhaps cry
When no one was around
That included the wind
And also God
And would sink in prayers
And other mused mumblings
As to keep himself uptight
Honoured
Devoid of filth
Uncircunvented by sores
Sweating at night
Almost bleeding
That innermost zeal of desire
That same day
The other young man would pick up the phone
And except a religious man in the other end
Someone who would understand
Who could relate
To the cages they would both build
Who would compromise to suffer
But together
The mercilessness of the God
That they themselves chose
And the writer was in need of companion
Or perhaps just physical warmth
A conversation
Anything
A new role
Other than vindication
Other than incredulity
Lack of conviction
Something superficial
Something to flash down the toilet
Both would be disappointed
And soon the conversation
Would turn into a monologue
In which nothing would seize
And no one would redeem
No one would gain anything
As the writer kept talking
The religious man paid attention
Trying to locate his God
Among the blissful speeches of the intellectual
And the writer on his part
Would listen to his silences
Trying to locate in their wounds
An arm or perhaps an elbow of his friend
The one to whom that night belonged
The night he was looking for
"I had different expectations"
They mumbled almost in choir
And decided to end the call
Without knowing their names
Or figuring out their face
Their frustration wasn't only nameless
But also faceless as justice
Or perhaps God
One sank in frustration
Caused more by his inner desire
To possess a body
And the other would claim satisfaction
Because now there were no excuses to sin
Nothing the heart would crave for
The writer had always fantasized about black and white
And those predictable innocent men
With their thighs and their curves
Untouched by fashion or steel
Infatuated in their oblivion of the facts
And the religious man dreamt of that cosmopolitan
Not afraid of sin or love
Defiant and overtly brave
Carressing and strong
How ironic
They thought
Such a moron!
And in oblivion
Once again
Their conversations flank
But twentythree days later
They would sit on a plane
Almost next to each other
Chasing their own eyes
From behind their newspapers
And the nun that stood in between them
And their curiosity would lead them to the toilets
Where the religious man would crave
And the writer would turn him down
Each one had a different version
For the writer it was not only a plane
It was the end of a struggle
And time to unwind, to reveal
For he would retrieve that night
That one he had forgotten
In veils of mystery
The one that would bring him to his destination
And the one that took him out of Jerusalem
Boarding an EL AL plane
For the religious man
It was his only chance
Right before seeing again mom and dad
And meeting his future bride
And mother of kids
And although this man
No longer remembered that call
He hated the young writer
And wept in silence the deceit
Deceive
And his abettor
Returned to his seat
And drowned in sleep
The frustrated man swore hate
But it was his fault after all
Why did he hang up the phone?
The streets of New York City
Would obliterate the story
And no one recalled it no more
It wasn't even a story
But more like a curiosity
Only a writer could benefit from
Twenty years later
The religious man boarded a plane
That would take him back to Jerusalem
And accidentally
He would make love to a man in the toilet
And it wasn't because of newspapers
But because of his daughter
Who made him notice the strange looks of that man
And following the conversation
Both of them entangled their go
The other man turned out to be a Russian doctor
Who was travelling to Jerusalem
To join a mourner's remeberance
Conemorating the five years
Ever since the writer would commit suicide
From a low building in Jerusalem
And the woman sitting in between them
Wouldn't be now a nun
But his own wife
The one that watched the lawyer jumping off from the building
And lost on her way to Staten Island
But the Russian doctor and the wife
Wouldn't remember the phone call.
For a crime that he didn't commit
And which was not even considered a crime
During that time he didn't write anything
But short pieces of poetry and a mediocre journal
Which in anycase were lost or forgotten somewhere
Yet he promised many a thing to life
Such as not wasting time, a productive life
And back to freedom again there he was
Still writing but nothing at all
In front of a screen, as dead empty the night was
Looking for endeavours, encores and demeaneours
He didn't lust for a night of passion, or a man
Rather for a certain specific night
All too well he remembered that
Yet that night wasn't to be found
Except in memories, or in a blackhole
A night that no one would ever remember
But the four walls of this bedroom
Stagnant with alcohol and smoke
Distractions, aloof, love
The young hormones in his body
Always performed exceedingly their job
Not taking into account
Whatsoever soul or heart
Afterall they were programmed by God
And the intervention of the writer was unnecessary
And disregarded at all
As he scrolled up and down
That night he didn't find
Perhaps an arm looked quite the same
An eye perhaps knowing
And maybe that leg or that sculputured chest
Would resemble someone's death
Or his entanglements
With such other man
But it would never be the same
Their faces would be all the same
Unresponsive to the writer's language
And thoroughly focused on his body though
So young, so kind, unwound
Such would be his days
Completely forgetting themselves
And even that night
While pursuing other things
A life perhaps
A day
With a lover
A book, if not
And the writer was a religious man
Yet unfaithful, treacherous deceiving
Above all to himself
The cosmopolitan liberal
Bastard of the immorality
Dweller of sin
And knowingly so
But out of contempt
He embraced the cult
To make himself feel better
And even at times
Somebody else
Unentangled with those men
Turbulent past, with brilliance
With poise
Deinfatuated
Self-obsessed
Right before each of these pursuances
He would remind himself
What the Bible tells
Not in regard to men laying with men
For he would practice sex standing up
Being as law-abiding as he was
Even sitting
What would mistake?
He was rather concerned with the self
That had been forsaken at night
Or actually that night
And although he would have by now
Entangled at least a dozen of those
The young writer didn't think
He had to behave all the same
Even when he didn't find the behaviour regretful
Yet admirable
For someone who is in love
For someone in need of comfort
He would recite to himself poems
And dream about those days of old
Even perhaps cry
When no one was around
That included the wind
And also God
And would sink in prayers
And other mused mumblings
As to keep himself uptight
Honoured
Devoid of filth
Uncircunvented by sores
Sweating at night
Almost bleeding
That innermost zeal of desire
That same day
The other young man would pick up the phone
And except a religious man in the other end
Someone who would understand
Who could relate
To the cages they would both build
Who would compromise to suffer
But together
The mercilessness of the God
That they themselves chose
And the writer was in need of companion
Or perhaps just physical warmth
A conversation
Anything
A new role
Other than vindication
Other than incredulity
Lack of conviction
Something superficial
Something to flash down the toilet
Both would be disappointed
And soon the conversation
Would turn into a monologue
In which nothing would seize
And no one would redeem
No one would gain anything
As the writer kept talking
The religious man paid attention
Trying to locate his God
Among the blissful speeches of the intellectual
And the writer on his part
Would listen to his silences
Trying to locate in their wounds
An arm or perhaps an elbow of his friend
The one to whom that night belonged
The night he was looking for
"I had different expectations"
They mumbled almost in choir
And decided to end the call
Without knowing their names
Or figuring out their face
Their frustration wasn't only nameless
But also faceless as justice
Or perhaps God
One sank in frustration
Caused more by his inner desire
To possess a body
And the other would claim satisfaction
Because now there were no excuses to sin
Nothing the heart would crave for
The writer had always fantasized about black and white
And those predictable innocent men
With their thighs and their curves
Untouched by fashion or steel
Infatuated in their oblivion of the facts
And the religious man dreamt of that cosmopolitan
Not afraid of sin or love
Defiant and overtly brave
Carressing and strong
How ironic
They thought
Such a moron!
And in oblivion
Once again
Their conversations flank
But twentythree days later
They would sit on a plane
Almost next to each other
Chasing their own eyes
From behind their newspapers
And the nun that stood in between them
And their curiosity would lead them to the toilets
Where the religious man would crave
And the writer would turn him down
Each one had a different version
For the writer it was not only a plane
It was the end of a struggle
And time to unwind, to reveal
For he would retrieve that night
That one he had forgotten
In veils of mystery
The one that would bring him to his destination
And the one that took him out of Jerusalem
Boarding an EL AL plane
For the religious man
It was his only chance
Right before seeing again mom and dad
And meeting his future bride
And mother of kids
And although this man
No longer remembered that call
He hated the young writer
And wept in silence the deceit
Deceive
And his abettor
Returned to his seat
And drowned in sleep
The frustrated man swore hate
But it was his fault after all
Why did he hang up the phone?
The streets of New York City
Would obliterate the story
And no one recalled it no more
It wasn't even a story
But more like a curiosity
Only a writer could benefit from
Twenty years later
The religious man boarded a plane
That would take him back to Jerusalem
And accidentally
He would make love to a man in the toilet
And it wasn't because of newspapers
But because of his daughter
Who made him notice the strange looks of that man
And following the conversation
Both of them entangled their go
The other man turned out to be a Russian doctor
Who was travelling to Jerusalem
To join a mourner's remeberance
Conemorating the five years
Ever since the writer would commit suicide
From a low building in Jerusalem
And the woman sitting in between them
Wouldn't be now a nun
But his own wife
The one that watched the lawyer jumping off from the building
And lost on her way to Staten Island
But the Russian doctor and the wife
Wouldn't remember the phone call.
Leave
In my tower of guilt
Deepends the northernmost black forest
Covered with sand, unravelled by time
Bathes in sweat
Of formerly unknown guilt
Reveals smooth secrets
With parafine eyes
Retrieves those mornings
Of pink-fingered lust
Of avowed heathenism
The pleasure of hearths
Drunken from their souls
Embracing their death
Treating her to sweets
Smoothing themselves
In urban ponderings
In resentless infatuations
Motionless procrastinations
As morning hovers on
With mellowing smiles
Product of older sorrows
From far off removed lands
From younger hearts
Pointing in their direction
A fountain of love
Vitaly, imagination
Smelling that maze of momenta
Thwarting beneath glasses of vodka
Sweeping through my veins
Making me feel somehow else
Somebody else
As if telephones wouldn't falter
As if my words would matter
Prisoner in my tower of guilt
I long without belonging
I long for my very own skin
For my filth
For my self-centered obsession
In the eyes of the stranger
In the eyes of those mornings
Embracing myself
Caressing my childhood
Bales of hay
Brooks
As his arms struck by
With some hesitation
Journeying through my pasts
Peacefully tearing apart
Forgetting my name
Forgetting myself
Wound up
In my roads
Yet unwilling to give up
Daydreaming by night
Clinging onto him
Logically excluded
Self-vindicated
It matters no more
Say
When will you smile?
Are the rains over?
I ain't sad
Acheing, it's just that.
Deepends the northernmost black forest
Covered with sand, unravelled by time
Bathes in sweat
Of formerly unknown guilt
Reveals smooth secrets
With parafine eyes
Retrieves those mornings
Of pink-fingered lust
Of avowed heathenism
The pleasure of hearths
Drunken from their souls
Embracing their death
Treating her to sweets
Smoothing themselves
In urban ponderings
In resentless infatuations
Motionless procrastinations
As morning hovers on
With mellowing smiles
Product of older sorrows
From far off removed lands
From younger hearts
Pointing in their direction
A fountain of love
Vitaly, imagination
Smelling that maze of momenta
Thwarting beneath glasses of vodka
Sweeping through my veins
Making me feel somehow else
Somebody else
As if telephones wouldn't falter
As if my words would matter
Prisoner in my tower of guilt
I long without belonging
I long for my very own skin
For my filth
For my self-centered obsession
In the eyes of the stranger
In the eyes of those mornings
Embracing myself
Caressing my childhood
Bales of hay
Brooks
As his arms struck by
With some hesitation
Journeying through my pasts
Peacefully tearing apart
Forgetting my name
Forgetting myself
Wound up
In my roads
Yet unwilling to give up
Daydreaming by night
Clinging onto him
Logically excluded
Self-vindicated
It matters no more
Say
When will you smile?
Are the rains over?
I ain't sad
Acheing, it's just that.
Zelda, comrade
I´m the silver candlestick, the candle, the void in the empty dark(*)
Without the light I seemed to resemble
The winds fetch me waters in the roads
Beneath a sickly bulb, flooding in sad light
Mellowing these words that are feeble
Watering sorrow and disgrace
Watering childhood, even doubt
Falling on my own flesh
Disgrace
Looking outside
Recreating those pasts I never told
Not even to myself
Not even to my soul
In those letters you never sent me
But that I remember as well
Not for their precision of words I longed
But for those gray and mellow papers
Dust-smelling envelopes, souvenirs
My lust, my love, a silent light in the void
In the empty dark
In those eyes of mine that aren´t younger
In those eyes of mine that weren´t happier
Blurred as dew that hinders on the fog
Calm breathless Jewish eyes
Perhaps such as the sight of God
Deaf in their numbness, deliberately
Allegedly
Echoeing in timeless tawdriness
In bitter glasses of history
Drunken from their contempt
Driven out of their lives
Constantly hanging in space
Perhaps it still sparks, too
With a glass of schnapps
And I´m the silver candlestick, the candle and the voidin the empty dark
My dying light is outside
Craving in outrage
In the streets, past an alley
Somewhere in New York, perhaps still in Jerusalem.
(*) Thanks to Amos Oz for his book "A tale of love and darkness" that contains a chapter about the poetess Zelda Shneerson, and to Vitaly Usherenko for the inspiration on this poem.
Without the light I seemed to resemble
The winds fetch me waters in the roads
Beneath a sickly bulb, flooding in sad light
Mellowing these words that are feeble
Watering sorrow and disgrace
Watering childhood, even doubt
Falling on my own flesh
Disgrace
Looking outside
Recreating those pasts I never told
Not even to myself
Not even to my soul
In those letters you never sent me
But that I remember as well
Not for their precision of words I longed
But for those gray and mellow papers
Dust-smelling envelopes, souvenirs
My lust, my love, a silent light in the void
In the empty dark
In those eyes of mine that aren´t younger
In those eyes of mine that weren´t happier
Blurred as dew that hinders on the fog
Calm breathless Jewish eyes
Perhaps such as the sight of God
Deaf in their numbness, deliberately
Allegedly
Echoeing in timeless tawdriness
In bitter glasses of history
Drunken from their contempt
Driven out of their lives
Constantly hanging in space
Perhaps it still sparks, too
With a glass of schnapps
And I´m the silver candlestick, the candle and the voidin the empty dark
My dying light is outside
Craving in outrage
In the streets, past an alley
Somewhere in New York, perhaps still in Jerusalem.
(*) Thanks to Amos Oz for his book "A tale of love and darkness" that contains a chapter about the poetess Zelda Shneerson, and to Vitaly Usherenko for the inspiration on this poem.
Vitaly
בימים ההם
ברחובות של ירושלים
הוא לא נשאר
ואף פעם, אותו
הירח לא
אינו זוכר אותו
אף מילה, לא אפילו
אף פעם
למרות זיו פניו
כאילו הציונות
הוא נדחף מכאן
כבלילה הזה
הקיר בוכה
בוכים ההרים לידיו
בליעדיו
נשמתו השטופה
חיוכו המסקרן
דבריו, המעורבים
רובם, נדחפו מכאן
יצאו הימה
בדידותו, המזמרת
המשוררת
אל תוך הלילה ברחה
כעסה עליו
מהחוף קפצה
אפ מילה, אינה אמרה
דפים שקטים מתחת השמים
עמוקים כאילו ידיו
נכתבו את עצמם ללא מילה
בוכים הקירות, אפילו מחר
פחדני, האור אפילו
בעניו, מעבר הימה
במדינה זרה, מסתור
לבדו עם עצמו
בלילה בוכה, מבלי לבכות
יושן, מבלי לישון
המתבגר
על עצמו לספר ידע
Written on the Swiss National Day. August 1st 2005. Jerusalem.
untitled
האם אראה אותך שוב
איני יודע
אבל אולי כדאי לנו יותר
בדרך זו
למרות עצמנו
ואיך הימים מתגלגלים
ע"י אלהים
אני סלה בהאמתינה
עם החיים
מחכה למכתביך
כאילו פעם הראשונה
אני מתיישב
ומתפלא על עצמי
בעניים קטנות
אל תוך פניך
המדורבות
השתיקה, למרות
מנסה להתמודד עם המרחק
ועדיין איני רואה את יום הבא
שבו אני אתיישב לידך
בחושך אורי
המספר סיפורי חסידים
מתחת עורך
והאם אין מחר
זה לנו לא ידוע
אל תהיה עצוב בכל מצב
אפילו פעם אחד
אני תמיד אכתוב לך
על המקומות הנהדרים
שבהם לא בלנו אף פעם
ואתה בעצמך
תזכור בחיוחך
כל אשר לא היה
המדבר, הירח, צפת
אשר אניך ראית
על פני הקרבים
מלאים חוסר מילים
חוסר אחריות
על חיים
עלינו
תחשוב על זה, ילד
שיהיה טוב כבר
שתעלה עם המצב
באמונתך
המזמרת
הימה
הימה
עוד פעם
תגיע כבר
ונזכר אז כאלה ימים
שבהם על עמתך לספר ידעת
השטוף באור, תמיד אתה
מעל החושך
אני אתעלם מבלי לדעת
האם פעם תראה את הכוכבים
ברחובות של צפת
ואל תשכח
בדיוק כדאמרת פעם
"זכור"
ואף פעם לא להתראות
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
One shall not stumble
I thoroughly live your death
Relive your death
Not the death itself
But those pangs
Of fright
That silently hunt you
Your words I remember
As I find encore in your death
Or your fear of it
Thus the city night empty
As when you took leave of it
Leaving her with her own fears
With all those faces
Well-known as of old
With their entanglements
And their wasteful warmth
As temporary as life
Wiped out by dust
In this world
For life
Were this life at all
Their bodies seem to be very old
As if carved in the stone
One and manifold times
Perhaps just thrice
The body of one man
Always the very same
From distant lands
Recreates your smells
And those clouds of filth
Set beforehand in between
As those bottles yet undrunk
And those ashes of selves
Unfinished conversations
That were never prone to start
Set away with your contempt
With my regret
Deceit
Everything that was in store
I will kill those men one day
Slaughter them on your name
They will be all the same
Names in a memorial
Or perhaps not even names
But lamentations of that life you feared
Even without knowing whether it was all
Life or not
How many names we could count
I no longer recall
Unnamed graved
Turbulent pasts
Those you precisely wanted to hide
The hindering ones
In your lips when wet
In a story, just perhaps
I wish I had different stories
I wish you would not fear
I wish I weren't to die
No longer you will fear
When memory shall wipe it all out
Even my sights
The demeaneouring ones
The object of your content
More like contempt
Product of your passions
A childish endeavour
Not such as a book
Embroidered with faith
Bleedings the signs of your mistakes
Perhaps I may better hush
As I share but the same sins
And procrastinate in my innermost fires
That zeal
Of which you became thief
You make the chains all yours
It's tied to your toe
I am part of your foes
My warfare companion
My nightly comfort
The redeeming one
That I shall never forget
Were I not to see you again
In which case
You should turn the lights on
Before setting on your journey alone
Another strange might steal my vows
My woes
My wooes
That whimsical bastard
May he lead you towards death
In purgatories of different colds
In bodies such as those of old
The faceless and imagined
Such as my thorns
I can feel you unwept tonight
Entangled
Embraced in a stranger
Yearning for those hollows
For those comedies
Whimsies of the young
That you whispered to my delight
Or perhaps even more to your own
As you are still waiting
And some forlon lover in a synagogue prays
While you sleep alone
Or perhaps with a stranger
That will not take you back home
You will find your way in the darkness
Although morning has sprung
Devoid of comfort
And no letters will have been sent
But you will remember alone
Things that resemble no words
That mean a whole world
And while he prays
In uttered mumbles
"Blessed Are Thou King of the Universe,
That has in his universe such"
You remain wet
Unwept
Actively unhappy
With that extraordinary life you yearned for
In those novels that on your behalf he wrote
With the help of his God
One shall not stumble
The Bible says
One shall not stumble
I know
But yet I take pain your youth
And we both stumble
One shall not stumble
Yet one does
Alone
(*) Jewish blessing recited aloud after having seen an outstandingly beautiful person or tree.
Relive your death
Not the death itself
But those pangs
Of fright
That silently hunt you
Your words I remember
As I find encore in your death
Or your fear of it
Thus the city night empty
As when you took leave of it
Leaving her with her own fears
With all those faces
Well-known as of old
With their entanglements
And their wasteful warmth
As temporary as life
Wiped out by dust
In this world
For life
Were this life at all
Their bodies seem to be very old
As if carved in the stone
One and manifold times
Perhaps just thrice
The body of one man
Always the very same
From distant lands
Recreates your smells
And those clouds of filth
Set beforehand in between
As those bottles yet undrunk
And those ashes of selves
Unfinished conversations
That were never prone to start
Set away with your contempt
With my regret
Deceit
Everything that was in store
I will kill those men one day
Slaughter them on your name
They will be all the same
Names in a memorial
Or perhaps not even names
But lamentations of that life you feared
Even without knowing whether it was all
Life or not
How many names we could count
I no longer recall
Unnamed graved
Turbulent pasts
Those you precisely wanted to hide
The hindering ones
In your lips when wet
In a story, just perhaps
I wish I had different stories
I wish you would not fear
I wish I weren't to die
No longer you will fear
When memory shall wipe it all out
Even my sights
The demeaneouring ones
The object of your content
More like contempt
Product of your passions
A childish endeavour
Not such as a book
Embroidered with faith
Bleedings the signs of your mistakes
Perhaps I may better hush
As I share but the same sins
And procrastinate in my innermost fires
That zeal
Of which you became thief
You make the chains all yours
It's tied to your toe
I am part of your foes
My warfare companion
My nightly comfort
The redeeming one
That I shall never forget
Were I not to see you again
In which case
You should turn the lights on
Before setting on your journey alone
Another strange might steal my vows
My woes
My wooes
That whimsical bastard
May he lead you towards death
In purgatories of different colds
In bodies such as those of old
The faceless and imagined
Such as my thorns
I can feel you unwept tonight
Entangled
Embraced in a stranger
Yearning for those hollows
For those comedies
Whimsies of the young
That you whispered to my delight
Or perhaps even more to your own
As you are still waiting
And some forlon lover in a synagogue prays
While you sleep alone
Or perhaps with a stranger
That will not take you back home
You will find your way in the darkness
Although morning has sprung
Devoid of comfort
And no letters will have been sent
But you will remember alone
Things that resemble no words
That mean a whole world
And while he prays
In uttered mumbles
"Blessed Are Thou King of the Universe,
That has in his universe such"
You remain wet
Unwept
Actively unhappy
With that extraordinary life you yearned for
In those novels that on your behalf he wrote
With the help of his God
One shall not stumble
The Bible says
One shall not stumble
I know
But yet I take pain your youth
And we both stumble
One shall not stumble
Yet one does
Alone
(*) Jewish blessing recited aloud after having seen an outstandingly beautiful person or tree.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Strange, Strangers
Introductory note: The first version of this sketch was lost two minutes ago because of a "server failure".
Two strangers share lunch in a cafe
And drink their wine
Sleep away their miseries
And celebrate with a toast
While fifteen minutes away an Arab woman is beaten up by a soldier
While a Russian boy gets up for work
While a Dutch mother yearns for her son
Or perhaps she only yearned for herself while she had a son
Yet they soak their blood in the wine
As the time goes by
They celebrate with wine
Two strangers share lunch in Jerusalem
One remembers the other
And the other does not
For who can a remember a friend?
Not even his name
And one rejoices in the other
One stranger, another stranger
Two good friends
One from Nebraska
The second, a loather of Zion
They celebrate miseries
Contempt of other men
Wise the man who rejoices in misery
Such as the painter
Who refused to draw the naked woman
And insisted on the fly
Hovering on her brest
The bread also shares some contempt
Soaking itself in vinager
To make the mesmer bitter
To utter it sweeter
To remember the table
To dance with the wine
Across the table
Two young men
One man from Nebraska
And a loather of Zion
Conversation:
- "Are you done with it?"
- "Sure we're"
- "But you barely touched them! Oh please forgive me, I'm acting like such a Jewish mother, but you barely touched your food"
- "I think we had enough"
- "But you're so skinny"
- "And you're so Polish"
- "I can't help it, it's in my blood"
The two young men drink their coffee
Or one drinks, and the other imagines coffee
As they leave the cafe, one forgets
One does not
One remembers the place
One does not
And down the streets walking
They're lost among the crowd
They're not part of the stone
One remembers the table
The other remembers the stone
Jerusalem is made of stones
And graves of stones are made
But then again
It's Jerusalem after all
So why couldn't I remember tables
If one does remember temples that he never saw
And remembers suicide attempts
And attempts suicide
Her wrinkles grew older
And she bore too many a son
Who never called her Polish
Who never ate their food
Who never came back home
And she forgot even the stone
Living far from the dead
Anxiously waiting for a son to return
Such as that Dutch woman
That blonde
Perhaps they were friends even
Perhaps not
She no longer remember the two young men
At all
She only remember
The birthday of their friend
On the 9th of Av!
How paradoxical
No?
She never thought about the man from Nebraska
Perhaps her son?
She never thought about her sons
As the two young men walked down the streets
One resembled the other
And rejoiced in one another
The younger man
Would live for a year in Nebraska
And would write a novel about Nebraska
And the man from Nebraska would commit suicide from the top of a high roof
And during her visit to New York she saw him jumping off the building
And she thought about her son
Did he eat enough?
She mumbled to herself as she rode on a bus
And once again helplessly she thought
Wheter than young man had eaten enough
A lawyer from Nebraska
A girl screamed in the dark
And the woman didn't think about Nebraska
But on whether he had eaten enough
And the poetry he read
If at all
He didn't look like a lawyer
When he jumped off that building
He looked more like anyone's son
Was that a metaphysical death?
She thought
Her son
Oh! her country
Beloved Zion
So unlike New York
Where people needed to kill themselves
How boring!
In Zion
You receive your sentence at birth
And no one worries no more
As she rode on the bus
She didn't know where to go
But she remember then
That there's no nothingness
And that there's no nowhere
Or so Parmenides said
And as they approached the ocean
She felt a void of lust
And dropped off
How strange, she thought
This reminds of some other place
And she started to walk
She walked down a street
She picked on a street
Not a beautiful street
But a boring one
Whereby everything looked the same
A street that could be anywhere
She took a glance on the sky
And then she thought
How strange,
The sky is the same everywhere
As she walked
And then once again she said
How strange, this place reminds me
Of some other place
Of a place I don't know
It's strange to think
We can even remember
Things we didn't know
Somewhere down an alley
Just next to a meat shop
Next to a bench
In front of a synagogue
But that wasn't important
On the bench is sitting a Russian man
A drunk Russian man
How strange,
She thought
He reminds me of a man I didn't know
She thought about his life
And imagined her own
In vanity
Tautological
While a Dutch woman mourned her friend
Whose death she was never informed of
And a Dutch mother no longer misses her son
While a writer prays in the synagogue
And she saw the Russian man fall
Not from the chair
But apart
And still he fell not
But in his eyes
She saw it all
A writer?
No, perhaps a waiter
Never a lawyer
No, that no
Lawyers reminded her of people jumping off buildings
A waiter, oh yes
How she lived her past thoroughly in him
Thereby she sat
And shared his pain
And played herself the Russian man
She thought about Jerusalem
For once at all
How strange,
She thought
He reminds me of somebody else's suffering
Until the Russian man disappeared
And she no longer thought about him
But looked into the synagogue
And into the meat shop
Then she ran after the Russian man
But he also disappeared among the crowd
Such as those two young men
Young and skinny
Twenty years back
Although in that street
There was no crowd
He had forgotten a novel
That was dedicated in a language she didn't understand
And then she thought,
How strange
This novel reminds of somebody's death
And she started reading the novel where the Russian man had stopped
A novel about Nebraska
A novel written in Nebraska
She had never been there
But it reminded her of Jerusalem
On the way back to Israel
While in the plane
She suddenly thought:
Now I understand
The Russian man is a mourner
The lawyer suffered a metaphysical death
And the author of the novel is as yet unknown
And in her bed,
At nights
She dreamed about Nebraska
Because she didn't plan to visit New York
And Nebraska reminded her of Jerusalem
Her sister sent her a postcard twelve months later
With a picture of that street
With the meat shop and the synagogue
But she couldn't recognize it
Because she only remembered the bench
And the postcard said:
"It's a pity that you didn't find us in New York
Our house right in front of a synagogue and a meat shop
In a place near the ocean. But it isn't a good time to come.
People are committing suicide in other places too. Etty is in
Wyoming now. Her sons eat well "
Rivka
16th August
Staten Island, NY
Two strangers share lunch in a cafe
And drink their wine
Sleep away their miseries
And celebrate with a toast
While fifteen minutes away an Arab woman is beaten up by a soldier
While a Russian boy gets up for work
While a Dutch mother yearns for her son
Or perhaps she only yearned for herself while she had a son
Yet they soak their blood in the wine
As the time goes by
They celebrate with wine
Two strangers share lunch in Jerusalem
One remembers the other
And the other does not
For who can a remember a friend?
Not even his name
And one rejoices in the other
One stranger, another stranger
Two good friends
One from Nebraska
The second, a loather of Zion
They celebrate miseries
Contempt of other men
Wise the man who rejoices in misery
Such as the painter
Who refused to draw the naked woman
And insisted on the fly
Hovering on her brest
The bread also shares some contempt
Soaking itself in vinager
To make the mesmer bitter
To utter it sweeter
To remember the table
To dance with the wine
Across the table
Two young men
One man from Nebraska
And a loather of Zion
Conversation:
- "Are you done with it?"
- "Sure we're"
- "But you barely touched them! Oh please forgive me, I'm acting like such a Jewish mother, but you barely touched your food"
- "I think we had enough"
- "But you're so skinny"
- "And you're so Polish"
- "I can't help it, it's in my blood"
The two young men drink their coffee
Or one drinks, and the other imagines coffee
As they leave the cafe, one forgets
One does not
One remembers the place
One does not
And down the streets walking
They're lost among the crowd
They're not part of the stone
One remembers the table
The other remembers the stone
Jerusalem is made of stones
And graves of stones are made
But then again
It's Jerusalem after all
So why couldn't I remember tables
If one does remember temples that he never saw
And remembers suicide attempts
And attempts suicide
Her wrinkles grew older
And she bore too many a son
Who never called her Polish
Who never ate their food
Who never came back home
And she forgot even the stone
Living far from the dead
Anxiously waiting for a son to return
Such as that Dutch woman
That blonde
Perhaps they were friends even
Perhaps not
She no longer remember the two young men
At all
She only remember
The birthday of their friend
On the 9th of Av!
How paradoxical
No?
She never thought about the man from Nebraska
Perhaps her son?
She never thought about her sons
As the two young men walked down the streets
One resembled the other
And rejoiced in one another
The younger man
Would live for a year in Nebraska
And would write a novel about Nebraska
And the man from Nebraska would commit suicide from the top of a high roof
And during her visit to New York she saw him jumping off the building
And she thought about her son
Did he eat enough?
She mumbled to herself as she rode on a bus
And once again helplessly she thought
Wheter than young man had eaten enough
A lawyer from Nebraska
A girl screamed in the dark
And the woman didn't think about Nebraska
But on whether he had eaten enough
And the poetry he read
If at all
He didn't look like a lawyer
When he jumped off that building
He looked more like anyone's son
Was that a metaphysical death?
She thought
Her son
Oh! her country
Beloved Zion
So unlike New York
Where people needed to kill themselves
How boring!
In Zion
You receive your sentence at birth
And no one worries no more
As she rode on the bus
She didn't know where to go
But she remember then
That there's no nothingness
And that there's no nowhere
Or so Parmenides said
And as they approached the ocean
She felt a void of lust
And dropped off
How strange, she thought
This reminds of some other place
And she started to walk
She walked down a street
She picked on a street
Not a beautiful street
But a boring one
Whereby everything looked the same
A street that could be anywhere
She took a glance on the sky
And then she thought
How strange,
The sky is the same everywhere
As she walked
And then once again she said
How strange, this place reminds me
Of some other place
Of a place I don't know
It's strange to think
We can even remember
Things we didn't know
Somewhere down an alley
Just next to a meat shop
Next to a bench
In front of a synagogue
But that wasn't important
On the bench is sitting a Russian man
A drunk Russian man
How strange,
She thought
He reminds me of a man I didn't know
She thought about his life
And imagined her own
In vanity
Tautological
While a Dutch woman mourned her friend
Whose death she was never informed of
And a Dutch mother no longer misses her son
While a writer prays in the synagogue
And she saw the Russian man fall
Not from the chair
But apart
And still he fell not
But in his eyes
She saw it all
A writer?
No, perhaps a waiter
Never a lawyer
No, that no
Lawyers reminded her of people jumping off buildings
A waiter, oh yes
How she lived her past thoroughly in him
Thereby she sat
And shared his pain
And played herself the Russian man
She thought about Jerusalem
For once at all
How strange,
She thought
He reminds me of somebody else's suffering
Until the Russian man disappeared
And she no longer thought about him
But looked into the synagogue
And into the meat shop
Then she ran after the Russian man
But he also disappeared among the crowd
Such as those two young men
Young and skinny
Twenty years back
Although in that street
There was no crowd
He had forgotten a novel
That was dedicated in a language she didn't understand
And then she thought,
How strange
This novel reminds of somebody's death
And she started reading the novel where the Russian man had stopped
A novel about Nebraska
A novel written in Nebraska
She had never been there
But it reminded her of Jerusalem
On the way back to Israel
While in the plane
She suddenly thought:
Now I understand
The Russian man is a mourner
The lawyer suffered a metaphysical death
And the author of the novel is as yet unknown
And in her bed,
At nights
She dreamed about Nebraska
Because she didn't plan to visit New York
And Nebraska reminded her of Jerusalem
Her sister sent her a postcard twelve months later
With a picture of that street
With the meat shop and the synagogue
But she couldn't recognize it
Because she only remembered the bench
And the postcard said:
"It's a pity that you didn't find us in New York
Our house right in front of a synagogue and a meat shop
In a place near the ocean. But it isn't a good time to come.
People are committing suicide in other places too. Etty is in
Wyoming now. Her sons eat well "
Rivka
16th August
Staten Island, NY
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
Lolitta, and I remember. Wyoming yesterday, Beit Shemesh tomorrow.
Well time for kitschy note. The sleeplessness and the tiredness make you think interesting thoughts and are particularly useful for the long forgotten memory; or so it was two days ago when my whole reverie paid a visit and I lived through chapters of my childhood and my adolescence in the foreig country, in "that" foreign country. After all at this point all the countries are foreign. I remembered not just school days and wonderful momenta, but rather painful and distracting, disturbing motifs, I remembered how little value is at this point attached to those people, to those days and years, to that life. I disregard myself entirely, if not out of contempt probably out of unknowing wit. It's hard to explain how I felt that early morning as the Jerusalemite breeze kissed my cold chest with its breathe, walking partly naked and partly undressed in the corridor next to my room watching those Orthodox woman walking towards the Wall for the first prayers at 4 a.m.; for an hour or probably even more I lived all through my childhood and my adolesncence, that made me thought the thought of having lived a good life, accidented, wounded, impertinent, irrational, but certainly well lived, wasted even, well. I thought about Lolitta, that volputuous Italian chicksa, and the woman I would have probably married had she been better educated. I thought about her with despise and contempt (not the contempt of familiarity Vitaly, the contempt of heaviness) but looking back I can see in her probably the only honest friendship I had, or one of the only. A friendship built on dreams, built on ideologies, built on anarchism, built on existentialist novels and Chassidic tales. I admired Lolitta's strength to fight against life and to lead her own life, qualities I would love in somebody else but again, God always gives bread only to the teethless. She admired my Jewish outlook, she loved my face, envied my lips and above all we shared a dreadful sense of fatality, a "fatus categoricus" that made of that friendship something so valuable and memorable. The day when I left her I didn't say good bye and I didn't call on the phone, the day I left the country she didn't come to the airport, she cried in the line, I smoked a cigarette, hung the phone.
I've thought about Lolitta and Edgar for the last years of my life much more than I thought for example of Ari and Yuval or whoever else it was. I thought about the poetic elements of their failure and all the beauty of their violence; unfortunately I'm unable to see this through the prism of dogma, product of my uncurable moral relativism which I have to accept is rather deadening and pathetic. And it's another form of kitsch. I still think about them, how they tried to make me so happy, how they tried to make me feel more Jewish than I did, how they tried to make me feel more drunk than I was. Eyal Golan, ha! Nothing could be more kitsch than that. Edgar tried to make me happy by letting me listen to Eyal Golan while we drank the cheap wine. We stared at the mountains. That's probably why once in Israel I thoroughly hated Eyal Golan. Because I loved the mountains, and perhaps also because of kitsch.
I kept loving the mountains, there I was born. I'm living in a country where I had to build my own mountains to feel like home, I built them in my room and also in my bookshelves. You wonder how could I build my own mountains. Well, this is a strange country. If you can create a god every other millenium, why couldn't you build your own mountains? The only mountain that there was ever in this country remains only as a memory, a memory is all what remains. The mountain no longer exists, only the Prophets do. And they know where the mountain was. I doubt whether I'll ever see mountains again. New York is not that close to be the mountains where I used to live, and Vermont... oh well I've got some disappointments with Frost, worthwhile mentioning. By the way, New York is a synonym of "suicide attempt". Ask Yehuda Amichai, I think he's one of the illuminati of this generation, isn't there an opposite word for illuminati? Like "oscurati"? Well, if there's, that's what he is. Lolitta, I wouldn't forget you, I wouldn't forget your cynical beauty, your poorly fluent English, your gitano gipsy tales and the drug trafficker of your father.
I wish I had the inner-power to write down everything I felt and everything I saw. Cafeteria at the Sociology Faculty with the Marxist Jews and the Nazi gays, being lost in the charm of the night, driving to the airport with three drunk women, making love to the night without closing your eyes, my black maid at the cheap hostel, Jewish New Year with Uncle Pavlos and Auntie Miriam, the magic of La Candelaria with those tales of Giorgia Kaltsidou, Alex's house and mine, Angela, the little French movies (how could you call a movie "little"?), that handsome and decent policeman laying asleep in my bed while I write in a diary about my utter desires to die. Me lusting for that sickly bastard, marlboro light, L&M sometimes, the pizza-making neighbours and their esmerald dealings. The nausea. Somehow it seems as if that was part of a life I already lived before, a life that before me is not. Yet I'm happy to realize it's actually the same life, I haven't betrayed myself, I haven't forgotten anything. Lolitta, I remember. I know you remember more than I do, but should it suffice to say I've been around the fountain for a while. It smells like your voluptuous beauty, it smells like your sensitive fascination with death, your schizophrenia.
Last time I thought about her, the kitsch was gone. I remember the 20 dollars she never paid me, and the birthday present she never gave me, she didn't even call. Bitch.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile making a list of all these people I thought of and overtime start writing about them. One day I'll turn them into stories, I'll pickpocket them like Amos Oz said, I'll hijack them in the middle of the night, abuse them, rape them. They will struggle, but none of us will live enough as to avenge enough. And it's all meaningless anyway (well not all). My new neighbour in Jerusalem was a most pleasant surprise, so pleasant that I forgave him for his rudeness (I obviously meant somebody else) and bought him a birthday present he will never forget (and about which he will never forgive me). My neighbours knows the mountain sister too, brought up in Wyoming. A German brought up in Wyoming! That's like bringing up a Norwegian in Thailand. The results weren't so terrible after all. Yesterday we spent most of the day touring the Jerusalem only Zelda and me know. The Jerusalem of Shatz St. hidden beneath the water level and even beneath the corposes level. The Jerusalem of the books, probably the real Jerusalem. A note: Jerusalem is also synonym of suicide. Look up Yehuda Amichai for references. Thank goodness my neighbour isn't American, he doesn't have any nationality. He ain't no Zionist. The real Zion is still in our minds, still in the Psalms, still in Bialik and yet so still in Russia. Not in the State of Israel, the only place we ever had to steal from, even the non-Jews. I don't even know why I mentioned this awful topic, perhaps I'm hurting? Oh no! God forbids. Enough people is hurting in the world today and I refuse to become a stat. I refuse to become a story, to be so much into kitsch of life that someone would like to write stories about me. God, I'm afraid. God save the Queen. Even if a size queen.
It's a terrible day. My books selling out, Arabs praying in the mosques for our deaths, thank goodness our god hears not even their prayers. The hangover of beer and vodka, a smokeless day, less money for rides. Beautiful memories and pangs of kitsch. On top of everything I remember how my last story started: He wrote "Cum in my mouth" as his epiteth, the other replied "I want to fuck your mouth like a whore". And there their love started, and they still hate each other to this very day. Life with its strange ways. They just didn't get used to the hatred, but most people do. Actually most love stories never start with kitsch, for which we should thank the Almighty; but kitsch develops overtime as a natural tendence to obscure the facts of reality. It's an utter need, like governments. I like anarchy no more, to whom would we complain? To god?
If you would like to have a taste of the place from where I write these lines, please read what my friend Jan said [Jan is a German media-sort-something guy who came to Israel to play being Japanese, isn't it ironic? He stayed in my house the very same night a Russian guy fell in love with me, and the three of us slept in the same bed. The Russian used to stink to alcohol, Jan didn't talk to me, I sleep didn't. But he stayed in my house and brought me expensive books which I sold. That must mean we're friends] about Jerusalem.
"When I think about Jerusalem I can't even imagine living a normal life there! The buses from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea went via Jerusalem and I remember thinking: Whan an ancient town! (Hello, Jan!) Not only the Orthodox Jews with their hats and the women with the scarves but all the sand and the dust and these rough houses. To me it seems as if it was 2000 years ago and the origin of many things. It wasn't tangible, that feeling... the atmosphere. Fun is the last thing I could have there. But it's good to hear your completely different view. I don't want to draw a picture of my world from images I get from bus windows after all :-) Am I Japanese, or what"
To this letter, I still didn't reply. I wonder how people can live in this city. And this cafe is just so filthy, it makes you think there's something private in the internet you would like to see. No one can live in Jerusalem, actually no one lives there. I saw the last breezes returning home near the Dead Sea. Only people live there, but then again we don't count them. The concept of time in Jerusalem is abstract and so is the number for bus lines, and that again makes me think of kitsch, sex and love. Think about it, most of us say that the average for a New Yorker or Tel Avivian to find sex on the internet is the clichish "5 minutes" but it usually takes two hours or three, to find love it takes you an instant. There's a downside though. After the three hours the sex is usually good but you're not entirely satisfied plus you've got some pangs of consciousness, of awareness of your situation and you know it. The love is much more complex, you get it in a second, the sex is usually always good but it takes you years to kick him out of your bed, and sometimes of your bank account and most important, of your life. That's how it works.
I feel like a victim of all this sometimes, and I cry out and proclaim my martyrdom to the world. An Antigone of the 21st century, but then when I come to think about it I say, "Well, I love reality, I love it so much that I will always struggle to live in truth" and yet in awareness of my sick condition I don't achieve my goal at times and most likely live in lies, delicious lies. But I never stop running from them and never stop trying to live in truth. It doesn't make me better than anyone, see... I was looking at "meeting site" while writing this note. Not because I need porn to survive, just to make sure beautiful men and women didn't disappear from this world. Vitaly and Lolitta have something in common, they've never lived in Wyoming. Ha! how easy to find how similar people are, no? Just like New York and Jerusalem. Both of them are cities of kitsch, cities where it's hardly possible to live in truth, and where nobody lives, save people. Seriousness please. Vitaly & Lolitta? Oh yeah! Volulptuous exaggerate beauty. That's they share, besides kitsch and me.
Funny, the roles people have in somebody else's life. Maybe I'm moving to New York only in order to host a guy from Wyoming who lives in Jerusalem and has no chemistry with a Dutch girl who comes from a town caused my mom dread. All those hairy, ugly and unprovoking men and women approaching me on the net. I think their role in my life is to remind me that I've spent 24 shekels already and that there's voluptuous exaggerate beauty you can love from one second to the other.
Dictionary of Misunderstandings:
Vitaly & Lolitta: Voluptuous and exaggerate beauty.
Jerusalem & New York: suicide, ghost town. v. Yehuda Amichai.
Tel Aviv: Biblical town located in Manhattan.
Israel: A country that existed in the 2 BCE and still survives as a main theme and drive force for western poetry.
The State of Israel: A place where Lolitta never lived, a place where Vitaly visited. A place whereby Ari was buried. Remember that in Jerusalem the level of water is beneath the level of the corpses.
Time: 3-hours to find sex and 1-second to find love. 1 minute to get rid of the sex and only 1 life to get rid of the lover.
Good afternoon gentlemen.
Ari
PS: Yeah I know, I promised the poems 2 weeks ago. Tomorrow perhaps
I've thought about Lolitta and Edgar for the last years of my life much more than I thought for example of Ari and Yuval or whoever else it was. I thought about the poetic elements of their failure and all the beauty of their violence; unfortunately I'm unable to see this through the prism of dogma, product of my uncurable moral relativism which I have to accept is rather deadening and pathetic. And it's another form of kitsch. I still think about them, how they tried to make me so happy, how they tried to make me feel more Jewish than I did, how they tried to make me feel more drunk than I was. Eyal Golan, ha! Nothing could be more kitsch than that. Edgar tried to make me happy by letting me listen to Eyal Golan while we drank the cheap wine. We stared at the mountains. That's probably why once in Israel I thoroughly hated Eyal Golan. Because I loved the mountains, and perhaps also because of kitsch.
I kept loving the mountains, there I was born. I'm living in a country where I had to build my own mountains to feel like home, I built them in my room and also in my bookshelves. You wonder how could I build my own mountains. Well, this is a strange country. If you can create a god every other millenium, why couldn't you build your own mountains? The only mountain that there was ever in this country remains only as a memory, a memory is all what remains. The mountain no longer exists, only the Prophets do. And they know where the mountain was. I doubt whether I'll ever see mountains again. New York is not that close to be the mountains where I used to live, and Vermont... oh well I've got some disappointments with Frost, worthwhile mentioning. By the way, New York is a synonym of "suicide attempt". Ask Yehuda Amichai, I think he's one of the illuminati of this generation, isn't there an opposite word for illuminati? Like "oscurati"? Well, if there's, that's what he is. Lolitta, I wouldn't forget you, I wouldn't forget your cynical beauty, your poorly fluent English, your gitano gipsy tales and the drug trafficker of your father.
I wish I had the inner-power to write down everything I felt and everything I saw. Cafeteria at the Sociology Faculty with the Marxist Jews and the Nazi gays, being lost in the charm of the night, driving to the airport with three drunk women, making love to the night without closing your eyes, my black maid at the cheap hostel, Jewish New Year with Uncle Pavlos and Auntie Miriam, the magic of La Candelaria with those tales of Giorgia Kaltsidou, Alex's house and mine, Angela, the little French movies (how could you call a movie "little"?), that handsome and decent policeman laying asleep in my bed while I write in a diary about my utter desires to die. Me lusting for that sickly bastard, marlboro light, L&M sometimes, the pizza-making neighbours and their esmerald dealings. The nausea. Somehow it seems as if that was part of a life I already lived before, a life that before me is not. Yet I'm happy to realize it's actually the same life, I haven't betrayed myself, I haven't forgotten anything. Lolitta, I remember. I know you remember more than I do, but should it suffice to say I've been around the fountain for a while. It smells like your voluptuous beauty, it smells like your sensitive fascination with death, your schizophrenia.
Last time I thought about her, the kitsch was gone. I remember the 20 dollars she never paid me, and the birthday present she never gave me, she didn't even call. Bitch.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile making a list of all these people I thought of and overtime start writing about them. One day I'll turn them into stories, I'll pickpocket them like Amos Oz said, I'll hijack them in the middle of the night, abuse them, rape them. They will struggle, but none of us will live enough as to avenge enough. And it's all meaningless anyway (well not all). My new neighbour in Jerusalem was a most pleasant surprise, so pleasant that I forgave him for his rudeness (I obviously meant somebody else) and bought him a birthday present he will never forget (and about which he will never forgive me). My neighbours knows the mountain sister too, brought up in Wyoming. A German brought up in Wyoming! That's like bringing up a Norwegian in Thailand. The results weren't so terrible after all. Yesterday we spent most of the day touring the Jerusalem only Zelda and me know. The Jerusalem of Shatz St. hidden beneath the water level and even beneath the corposes level. The Jerusalem of the books, probably the real Jerusalem. A note: Jerusalem is also synonym of suicide. Look up Yehuda Amichai for references. Thank goodness my neighbour isn't American, he doesn't have any nationality. He ain't no Zionist. The real Zion is still in our minds, still in the Psalms, still in Bialik and yet so still in Russia. Not in the State of Israel, the only place we ever had to steal from, even the non-Jews. I don't even know why I mentioned this awful topic, perhaps I'm hurting? Oh no! God forbids. Enough people is hurting in the world today and I refuse to become a stat. I refuse to become a story, to be so much into kitsch of life that someone would like to write stories about me. God, I'm afraid. God save the Queen. Even if a size queen.
It's a terrible day. My books selling out, Arabs praying in the mosques for our deaths, thank goodness our god hears not even their prayers. The hangover of beer and vodka, a smokeless day, less money for rides. Beautiful memories and pangs of kitsch. On top of everything I remember how my last story started: He wrote "Cum in my mouth" as his epiteth, the other replied "I want to fuck your mouth like a whore". And there their love started, and they still hate each other to this very day. Life with its strange ways. They just didn't get used to the hatred, but most people do. Actually most love stories never start with kitsch, for which we should thank the Almighty; but kitsch develops overtime as a natural tendence to obscure the facts of reality. It's an utter need, like governments. I like anarchy no more, to whom would we complain? To god?
If you would like to have a taste of the place from where I write these lines, please read what my friend Jan said [Jan is a German media-sort-something guy who came to Israel to play being Japanese, isn't it ironic? He stayed in my house the very same night a Russian guy fell in love with me, and the three of us slept in the same bed. The Russian used to stink to alcohol, Jan didn't talk to me, I sleep didn't. But he stayed in my house and brought me expensive books which I sold. That must mean we're friends] about Jerusalem.
"When I think about Jerusalem I can't even imagine living a normal life there! The buses from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea went via Jerusalem and I remember thinking: Whan an ancient town! (Hello, Jan!) Not only the Orthodox Jews with their hats and the women with the scarves but all the sand and the dust and these rough houses. To me it seems as if it was 2000 years ago and the origin of many things. It wasn't tangible, that feeling... the atmosphere. Fun is the last thing I could have there. But it's good to hear your completely different view. I don't want to draw a picture of my world from images I get from bus windows after all :-) Am I Japanese, or what"
To this letter, I still didn't reply. I wonder how people can live in this city. And this cafe is just so filthy, it makes you think there's something private in the internet you would like to see. No one can live in Jerusalem, actually no one lives there. I saw the last breezes returning home near the Dead Sea. Only people live there, but then again we don't count them. The concept of time in Jerusalem is abstract and so is the number for bus lines, and that again makes me think of kitsch, sex and love. Think about it, most of us say that the average for a New Yorker or Tel Avivian to find sex on the internet is the clichish "5 minutes" but it usually takes two hours or three, to find love it takes you an instant. There's a downside though. After the three hours the sex is usually good but you're not entirely satisfied plus you've got some pangs of consciousness, of awareness of your situation and you know it. The love is much more complex, you get it in a second, the sex is usually always good but it takes you years to kick him out of your bed, and sometimes of your bank account and most important, of your life. That's how it works.
I feel like a victim of all this sometimes, and I cry out and proclaim my martyrdom to the world. An Antigone of the 21st century, but then when I come to think about it I say, "Well, I love reality, I love it so much that I will always struggle to live in truth" and yet in awareness of my sick condition I don't achieve my goal at times and most likely live in lies, delicious lies. But I never stop running from them and never stop trying to live in truth. It doesn't make me better than anyone, see... I was looking at "meeting site" while writing this note. Not because I need porn to survive, just to make sure beautiful men and women didn't disappear from this world. Vitaly and Lolitta have something in common, they've never lived in Wyoming. Ha! how easy to find how similar people are, no? Just like New York and Jerusalem. Both of them are cities of kitsch, cities where it's hardly possible to live in truth, and where nobody lives, save people. Seriousness please. Vitaly & Lolitta? Oh yeah! Volulptuous exaggerate beauty. That's they share, besides kitsch and me.
Funny, the roles people have in somebody else's life. Maybe I'm moving to New York only in order to host a guy from Wyoming who lives in Jerusalem and has no chemistry with a Dutch girl who comes from a town caused my mom dread. All those hairy, ugly and unprovoking men and women approaching me on the net. I think their role in my life is to remind me that I've spent 24 shekels already and that there's voluptuous exaggerate beauty you can love from one second to the other.
Dictionary of Misunderstandings:
Vitaly & Lolitta: Voluptuous and exaggerate beauty.
Jerusalem & New York: suicide, ghost town. v. Yehuda Amichai.
Tel Aviv: Biblical town located in Manhattan.
Israel: A country that existed in the 2 BCE and still survives as a main theme and drive force for western poetry.
The State of Israel: A place where Lolitta never lived, a place where Vitaly visited. A place whereby Ari was buried. Remember that in Jerusalem the level of water is beneath the level of the corpses.
Time: 3-hours to find sex and 1-second to find love. 1 minute to get rid of the sex and only 1 life to get rid of the lover.
Good afternoon gentlemen.
Ari
PS: Yeah I know, I promised the poems 2 weeks ago. Tomorrow perhaps
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